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The Medium is the Message–You Know a Rolex Don’t Tick
The modern officer building is the archetypal example of the mediated environment. It contains nothing that did nit first exist as a design plan in a human mind. The spaces are square, flat and small, eliminating a sense of height, depth and irregularity. The décor is rigidly controlled to a bland uniformity from room to room and floor to floor. The effect is to dampen all interest in the space one inhabits. Most modern office buildings have hermetically sealed windows. The air is processed, the temperature regulated. It is always the same. The body’s largest sense organ, the skin, feels no wind, no changes in temperature, and is dulled. Muzak homogenizes the sound of the environment. Some buildings even use “white noise,” a deliberate mix of electronic sounds that merge into a hum. Seemingly innocuous, it fills the ears with an even background tone, obscuring random noises or passing conversations which might arouse interest or create a diversion. The light remains constant from morning through not, from room to room until our awareness of light is as dulled as our awareness of temperature, and we are not aware of the passage of time. We are told that a constant level of light is good for our eyes, that it relieves strain. Is this true? What about the loss of a range of focus and the many changes in direction and intensity of light that our flexible eyes are designed to accommodate? Those who build artificial environments view the sense as single, monolithic things, rather than abilities that have a range of capacity for a reason. We know, for example, that out eyes can see from the extremely dark to the extremely bright, from far to near, from distinct to indistinct, from obvious to subtle. They perceive objects moving quickly and those that are still. They eye is a wonderfully flexible organ, able to adjust instantly to a dazzling array of information, constantly changing, multileveled, perceiving objects far and near moving at different speeds simultaneously. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
A fully functioning visual capacity is equal to everything the natural environment offers as visual information. This would have to be so, since the interaction between the senses and the natural environment created the ranges of abilities that we needed to have. Sight did not just arrive one day, like Adam’s rib; it coevolved with the ingredients around it which it was designed to see. When our eyes are continually exercised, when flexibility and dynamism are encouraged, then they are equal to the variety of stimuli that night and day have to offer. It is probably not wise always to have “good light” or to be for very long at fixed distances from anything. The result will be lack of exercise and eventually atrophy of the eyes’ abilities. When we reduce an aspect of environment from varied and multidimensional to fixed, we also change the human being who lives within it. Humans give up the capacity to adjust, just as the person who walks cannot so easily handle the experience of running. The lungs, the heart and other muscles have not been exercised. The human being then becomes a creature with a narrower range of abilities and fewer feelings about the loss. We become grosser, simpler, less varied, like the environment. If we lose wide-spectrum sensory experience, the common response to this is that we gain a deeper mental experience. This is not true. We only have less nonmental experience so the mental life seems richer by comparison. In fact, mental life is more enriched by a fully functioning sensory life. In recent years, researchers have discovered some amazing things about the connections between mental and physical life by doing sensory-deprivation experiments. In such experiments, a human subject is cut off from as much sensory information as possible. This can be accomplished, for example, by a totally black environment—white walls, no furniture, no sounds, constant temperate, constant light, no food and no windows. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
A more thorough method is to put the blindfolded subject inside a temperature, constant light, no food and no windows. A more thorough method is to put the blindfolded subject inside a temperature-controlled suit floating in a water tank with only tubes to provide air and water, which are lost at body temperature. This sensory-deprivation tank eliminates the tactile sense as well as an awareness of up and down. Researchers have found that when sensory stimuli are suppressed this way, the subject at first lives a mental life because mental images are the only stimulation. However, after a while, these images become disoriented and can be frightening. Disconnected from the World outside the mind, the subject is rootless and ungrounded. If the experience goes on long enough, a kind of madness develops which can be allayed only by reintroducing sensory stimuli, direct contact with the World outside the subject’s mind. Before total disorientation occurs, a second effect takes place. That is a dramatic increase in focus on any stimulus at all that is introduced. In such a deprived environment, one single stimulus acquires extraordinary power and importance. In the most literal sense, the subject loses perspective and cannot put the stimulus in context. Such experiments have proven to be effective in halting heavy smoking habits, for example, when the experimenter speaks instructions to stop smoking or describes to the subject through a microphone the harmful, unpleasant aspects of smoking. These experiments have shown that volunteers can be programmed to believe and do things they would not have done in a fully functional condition. The technique could be called brainwashing. It would be going too far to call our modern offices sensory deprivation chambers, but they are most certainly sensory-reduction chambers. They may not brainwash, but the eliminating of sensory stimuli definitely increases focus on the task at hand, the work to be done, to the exclusion of all else. Modern offices were designed for that very purpose by people who knew what they were doing. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
If people’s senses were stimulated to experience anything approaching their potential range, it would be highly unlikely that people would sit for eight long hours at desks, reading memoranda, typing documents, studying columns of figures or pondering sales strategies. If birds were flying through the room, and wind were blowing the papers about, if the sun were shinning in there, or people were lolling about on chaise lounges or taking baths while listening to various musical presentations, this would certainly divert the office worker from the mental work he or she is there to do. In fact, if offices were so arranged, little business would get done. This is why they are not so arranged. Any awareness of the senses, aside from their singular uses in reading and sometimes talking and listening, would be disastrous for office environments that require people to stay focused within narrow and specific functional modes. Feeling is also discouraged by these environments. Reducing sensual variations is one good way of reducing feelings since the one stimulates the other. However, there is also a hierarchy of values which further the process. Objectivity is the highest value that can be exhibited by an executive in an office. Orderliness is the highest value for a subordinate office worker. If the human is effectively disconnected from the distractions of one’s senses, feelings, and intuitions, both of these are most easily achieved. With the field of experience so drastically reduced for office workers, the stimuli which remain—paper work, mental work, business—loom larger and obtain an importance they would not have in a wider, more varied, more stimulating environment. The worker gets interested in them largely because that is what is available to get interested in. Curiously, however, while eschewing feeling and intuition, business people often cannot resist using them. They come out as aberrations—fierce competitive drive, rage at small inconveniences, decisions that do not fit the models of objectivity. Such behavior in business sometimes makes me think of blades of grass growing upward through pavement. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
A more poignant example, perhaps, is that modern offices have proven to be such hot environment of pleasures of the flesh. Aside from the occasional potted plant, the only creatures in offices with which it is possible to experience anything are other humans. With all other organic life absent and with the senses deprived of most possibilities for human experience, the occasional body which passes the desk becomes an especially potent sensual event, the only way out of the condition of suspended experience, and the only way to experience oneself as alive. In fact, the confinement of human beings within artificial environments may be a partial explanation of our new culture-wide obsession with and focus on pleasures of the flesh. We have been mainly speaking of cities. This has only been because their effects are most obvious. I do not want to create the impression that suburbs, retirement communities, recreational communities and the like offer any greater access to a wider range of experience. Those places do have large trees, for example, and more small animals. They sky is more visible, without giant buildings to alter the view. However, in most ways, suburban-type environments reveal less of natural processes than cities do. Cities, at least, offer a critical ingredient of the natural World, diversity albeit a diversity that is confined to only human life forms. It does not nearly approach the complexity of any acre of an ordinary forest. In suburbs the totality of experience is plotted in advance and then marketed on the basis of the plan. “We will have everything to serve the recreational needs of your family: playgrounds, ball fields, golf course, tennis courts, bowling alleys and picnic grounds.” This, plus a front lawn, a back lawn, two large trees, and an attentive police force makes up the total package. Human beings then live inside that package. Places formerly as diverse as forest, desert, marsh, plain and mountain have been unified into suburban tracts. The human sense, seeking outward for knowledge and stimulation, find only what has been prearranged by other humans. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
In many ways the same can be said of rural environments. Land which once supported hundreds of varieties of plant and animal life has been transformed by agribusinesses. Insect life has been largely eliminated by massive spraying. For hundreds of square miles, the only living things are artichokes or tomatoes laid out in straight rows. The child seeking to know how nature works finds only spray planes, automated threshers, and miles of rows of a single crop. There are differences of opinion about what the critical moments were that led human beings away from the primary form of experience—between person and planet—into secondary mediated environments. Some go back as far as the control of fire, the domestication of animals, the invention of agriculture or the imposition of monotheism and patriarchy. In my opinion, however, the most significant recent moment came with the control of electricity for power, about seven generations ago. This made it possible to begin moving nearly all human functions indoors, and made the outdoors more like indoors. In less than seven generations out of an estimated one hundred thousand, we have fundamentally changed the nature of our interaction with the planet. Our environment no longer grows on its own, by its own design, in its own time. The environment in which we live has been totally reconstructed solely by human intention and creation. We find ourselves living inside a kind of nationwide room. We look around it and see only our own creations. We go through life believing we are experiencing the World when actually our experiences are confined within entirely human conceptions. Our World has been thought up. Our environment itself is the manifestation of the mental processes of other humans. Of all the species of the planet, and all the cultures of the human species, we twenty first century Americans have become the first in history to live predominantly inside projections of our own minds. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
We live in a kind of maelstrom, going ever deeper into our own thought processes, into subterranean caverns, where nonhuman reality is up, up, away somewhere. We are within a system of ever smaller, ever deeper concentric circles, and we consider each new depth that we reach greater progress and greater knowledge. Our environment itself becomes an editor, filter and medium between ourselves and an alternative nonhuman, unedited, organic planetary reality. We ask the child to understand nature and care about it, to know the difference between what humans create and what the planet does, but how can the child know these things? The child lives with us in a room inside a room inside another room. The child sees an apple in a store and assumes that the apple and the store are organically connected. The child sees streets, buildings and a mountain and assumes it was all put there by humans. How can the child assume otherwise? That is the obvious conclusion in a World in which all reality is created by other humans. As adults, we assume we are not so vulnerable to this mistake, that we are educated and our minds can save us. We “know” the differences between natural and artificial. And yet, we have no greater contact with the wider World than the child has. Most people still give little importance to any of this. Those who take note of these changes usually speak of them in esoteric, aesthetic or philosophical terms. It makes good discussion at parties and in philosophy classes. As we go, however, I hope it will become apparent that the most compelling outcome of these sudden changes in the way we experience life is the inevitable political one. Living within artificial, reconstructed, arbitrary environments that are strictly the products of human conception, we have no way to be sure that we know what is true and what is not. We have lost context and perspective. What we know is what other humans tell us. Therefore, whoever controls the processes of re-creation, effectively redefines reality for everyone else, and creates the entire World of human experience, our field of knowledge. We become subject to them. The confinement of our experience becomes the basis of their control of us. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
The role of the media in all this is to confirm the validity of the arbitrary World in which we live. The role of television is to project that World, via images, into our heads, all of us at the same time. A child takes a crayon from a box and scribbles a yellow circle in the corner of a sheet of paper: this is the sun. She takes another crayon and draws a green squiggle through the center of the page: this is the horizon. Cutting through the horizon she draws two brown lines that come together in a jagged peak: this is a mountain. Next to the mountain, she draws a lopsided black rectangle topped by a red triangle: this is her house. The child gets older, goes to school, and in her classroom she traces on a page, from memory, and outline of the shape of her country. She divides it, roughly, into a set of shapes that represent the states. And inside one of the states she draws a five-pointed star to mark the town she lives. The child grows up. She trains to be a surveyor. She buys a set of fine instruments and uses them to measure the boundaries and contours of a property. With the information, she draws a precise plot of the land, which is then made into a blueprint for others to use. Our intellectual maturation as individuals can be traced through the way we draw pictures, or maps, of our surroundings. We begin with primitive, literal renderings of the features of the land we see around us, and we advance to ever more accurate, and more abstract, representations of geographic and topographic space. We progress, in other words, from drawing what we see to drawing what we know. Vincent Virga, an expert on cartography affiliated with the Library of Congress, has observed that the stages in the development of our mapmaking skills closely parallel the general stages of childhood cognitive development delineated by the twentieth-century Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. We progress from the infant’s egocentric, purely sensory perception of the World to the young adult’s more abstract and objective analysis. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
“First,” writes Virga, in describing how children’s drawings of maps advance, “perceptions and representational abilities are not matched; only the simplest topographical relationships are presented, without regard for perspective or distances. Then an intellectual ‘realism’ evolves, one that depicts everything known with burgeoning proportional relationships. And finally, a visual ‘realism’ appears, [employing] scientific calculations to achieve it.” As we go through this process of intellectual maturation, we are also acting out of the entire history of mapmaking. Humankind’s first maps, scratched in the dirt with a stick or carved into a stone with another stone, were as rudimentary as the scribbles of toddlers. Eventually the drawings became more realistic, outlining the actual proportions of a space, a space that often extended well beyond what could be seen with the eye. As more time passed, the realism became scientific in both its precision and its abstraction. The mapmaker began to use sophisticated tool like the direction-finding compass and the angel-measuring theodolite and to rely on mathematical reckonings and formulas. Eventually, in a further intellectual leap, maps came to be used not only to represent vast regions of the Earth or Heavens in minute detail, but to express ideas—a plan of battle, an analysis of the spread of an epidemic, a forecast of population growth. “The intellectual process of transforming experience in space to abstraction of space is a revolution in modes of thinking,” writes Virga. The historical advances in cartography did not simply mirror the development of the human mind. They helped propel and guide the very intellectual advances that they documented. The map is a medium that not only stores and transmits information but also embodies a particular mode of seeing and thinking. As mapmaking progressed, the spread of maps also disseminated the mapmaker’s distinctive way of perceiving and making sense of the World. The more frequently and intensively people used maps, the more their minds came to understand reality in the maps’ terms. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
The influence of maps went far beyond their practical employment in establishing property boundaries and charting routes. The use of a reduced, substitute space for reality is an impressive act in itself. However, what is even more impressive is how the map advances the evolution of abstract thinking throughout society. The combination of the reduction of reality and the construct of an analogical space is an attainment in abstract thinking of a very high order indeed for it enables one to discover structures that the World remain unknown if not mapped. The technology of the map gave to humans a new and more comprehending mind, better able to understand the unseen forces that shape his surroundings and his existence. What the map did for space—translate a natural phenomenon into an artificial and intellectual conception of that phenomenon—another technology, the mechanical clock did for time. For most of human history, people experienced time as a continuous, cyclical flow. To the extent that time was “kept,” the keeping was done by instruments that emphasized this natural process: sundials around which shadows would move, hourglasses down which sand would pour, clepsydras through which water would stream. There was no particular need to measure time with precision or to break a day up into little pieces. For most people, the movements of the sun, the moon, and the stars provided the only clocks they needed. Life was, in the words of the French medievalist Jacques Le Goff, “dominated by agrarian rhythms, free of haste, careless of exactitude, unconcerned by productivity.” That began to change in the latter half of the Middle Ages. The first people to demand a more precise measurement of time were Christian monks, whose lives revolved around a rigorous schedule of prayer. In the sixth century, Saint Benedict had ordered his followers to hold seven prayer services at specified times during day. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Six hundred years later, the Cistercians gave new emphasis to punctuality, dividing the day into a regimented sequence of activities and viewing any tardiness or other waste of time to be an affront to God. Spurred by the need for temporal exactitude, monks took the lead in pushing forward the technologies of timekeeping. It was in the monastery that the first mechanical clocks were assembled, their movements governed by the swinging of weights, and it was the bells in the church tower that first sounded the hours by which people would come to parcel out their lives. The desire for accurate timekeeping spread outward from the monastery. The royal and princely courts of Europe, brimming with riches and prizing the latest and most ingenious devices, began to cover clocks and invest in their refinement and manufacture. As people moved from the countryside to the town and started working in markets, mills, and factories rather than fields, their days came to be carved into ever more finely sliced segments, each announced by the tolling of a bell. Bells sounded for start of work, meal breaks, end of work, closing of gates, start of market, close of market, assembly, emergencies, council meetings, end of drink service, time for street cleaning, curfew, and so on through an extraordinary variety of special peals in individual towns and cities. The need for tighter scheduling and synchronization of work, transportation, devotion, and even leisure provided the impetus for rapid progress in clock technology. It was no longer enough for every town or parish to follow its own clock. Now, time had to be the same everywhere—or else commerce and industry would falter. Units of time became standardized—seconds, minutes, hours—and clock mechanisms were fine-tuned to measure those units with much greater accuracy. By the fourteenth century, the mechanical clock had become a commonplace, near-universal tool for coordinating the intricate workings of the new urban society. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Cities vied with one another to install the most elaborate clocks in the towers of their town halls, churches, or palaces. No European community felt able to hold up its head unless in its midst the planets wheeled in cycles and epicycles, while angels in its midst the planets wheeled in cycles and epicycle, while angels trumped, cocks crew, and apostles, kings and prophets marched and countermarched at the booming of the hours. Clocks did not just become more accurate and more ornate. They got smaller and less expensive. Advances in miniaturization led to the development of affordable timepieces that could fit into the rooms of people’s houses or even be carried on their person. If the proliferation of public clocks changed the way people worked, shopped, played, and otherwise behaved as members of an ever more regulated society, the spread of more personal tools for tracking time—chamber clocks, pocket watches, and, a little later, wristwatches—had more intimate consequences. The personal clock became an ever-visible, ever-audible companion and monitor. By continually reminding its owner of time used, times spent, time wasted, time lost, it became both prod and key to personal achievement and productivity. The personalization of precisely measured time was a major stimulus to the individualism that was an ever more salient aspect of Western civilization. The mechanical clock changed the way we saw ourselves. And like the map, it changed the way we thought. Once the clock had redefined time as a series of units of equal duration, our minds began to stress the methodical mental work of division and measurement. We began to see, in all things and phenomena, the pieces that composed the whole, and then we began to see the pieces of which the pieces were made. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Our thinking became Aristotelian in its emphasis on discerning abstract patterns behind the visible surfaces of the material World. The clock played a crucial role in propelling us out of the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment. The clock helped create the belief in an independent World of mathematically measurable sequences. The abstract framework of divided time became the point of reference for both action and thought. Independent of the practical concerns that inspire the timekeeping machine’s creation and governed its day-to-day use, the clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. Which gets me to another concept, what is called reification. Reification means confusing words with things. It is a thinking error with multiple manifestations, some merely amusing, other extremely dangerous. This past summer in the sweltering New York heat, a student of mine looked at a thermometer in our classroom. “It is ninety-six degrees,” he said. “No wonder it is so hot!” He had it the wrong way around, of course, as many people do who have never learned or cannot remember these three simple notions: that there are things in the World and then there are our names for them; that there is no such thing as a real name; and that a name may or may not suggest the nature of the things named—as, for example, when the United States of America’s government called its South Pacific hydrogen-bomb experiments Operation Sunshine. What I am trying to say here is what Shakespeare said more eloquently in his life “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” However, Shakespeare was only half right, in that for many people a rose would not smell as sweet if it were called a “stinkweed.” And because this is so, because people confuse names with things, advertising is among the most consistently successful enterprises in the World today. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
If it is called the “Lumbering Elephant,” advertisers know that no matter how excellent an automobile may be, it will not sell. Moreover, if it is called a “Vista Cruiser” or a “Phoenix” or “Grand Prix,” no matter how rotten a car may be, you can sell it. Politicians know this as well, and, sad to say, so do scholars, who far too often obscure the emptiness of what they are talking and writing about by affixing alluring names to what is not there. I suggest, therefore, that reification be given a prominent place in our studies, so that our students will know how it both knows. Furthermore, some attention must be given to the style and tone of language. Each Universe of discourse has its own special way of addressing its subject matter and its audience. Each subject in a curriculum is a special manner of speaking and writing, with its own rhetoric of knowledge, a characteristic way in which arguments, proofs, speculations, experiments, polemics, even humor, are expressed. Speaking and writing are, after all, performing arts, and each subject requires a somewhat different kind of performance. Historians, for example, do not speak or write history in the same way biologists speak or write biology. The differences have to do with the degree of precision their generalization permit, the types of facts they marshal, the traditions of their subject, and the nature of their training. It is worth remembering that many scholars have exerted influence as much through their manner as their matter—one thinks Veblen in sociology, Dr. Freud in psychology, Galbraith in economics. The point is that knowledge is a form of literature, and the various styles of knowledge ought to be studied and discussed, all the more because the language found in typical school textbooks tends to obscure this. Textbook language, which is apt to be the same from subject to subject, creates the false impression that systematic knowledge is always expressed in a dull, uninspired monotone. I have read recipes on the back of cereal boxes that were written with more style and conviction than textbook descriptions of the causes of the American Revolution. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Of the language of grammar books I will not even speak, for, to borrow from Shakespeare, it is unfit for a Christian ear to endure. However, the problem is not insurmountable. Teachers who are willing to take the time can find material that convey ideas in a form characteristic of their discipline. And while they are at it, they can help their students to see that what we call a prayer, a political speech, and an advertisement differ from each other now only in their content but in their styles and tone; one might say mostly in their style and tone and manners of address. Which brings us to another significant concept—what we shall call the principle of the non-neutrality of media. I mean by this what Marshall McLuhan meant to suggest when he said, “The medium is the message”: that the form in which information is coded has, itself, an inescapable bias. In a certain sense, this is an entirely familiar idea. We recognize, for example, that the World is somewhat different when we speak about it in English and when we speak about it in German. We might even say that the grammar of a language is an organ of perception and accounts for the variances in the World view that we find among different peoples. However, we have been slow to acknowledge that every extension of speech—from painting hieroglyphics to the alphabet to the printing press to television—also generates unique ways of apprehending the World, amplifying or obscuring different features of reality. Each medium, like language itself, classifies the World for us, sequences it, frames it, enlarges it, reduced it, argues a case for what the World is like. In the United States of America, for example, it is no longer possible for Republicans to be elected to high political office—not because our Constitution forbids it but because television forbids it, since television exalts the attractive visual image and has little patience with or love for the subtle or logical World. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Our students must understand two essential points about all this. Just as language itself creates culture in its own image, each new medium of communication re-creates or modifies culture in its image; and it is extreme naivete to believe that a medium of communication or, indeed, any technology is merely a tool, a way of doing. Each is also a way of seeing. To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a man with a pencil, everything looks like a picture; and to a man with a computer, the whole World looks like data. To put it another way, and to paraphrase the philosopher Wittgenstein, a medium of communication may be a vehicle of thought but we must not forget that it is also the driver. A consideration of how the printing press of the telegraph or television or the computer does its driving and where it takes us must be included in our students’ education or else they will be disarmed and extremely vulnerable. There is one principle about language that is probably occurring to many of you right about now: namely, that one ought not to put up with any lecturer who takes more of your time than he has been allotted. And so I will conclude with three points. First, I trust you understand that the suggestions I have made are not directed exclusively or even primarily at language teachers, English or otherwise. This is a task for everyone. Second, I want to reiterate that to provide our students with a defense against the indefensible, it is neither necessary nor desirable to focus exclusively on political language. Whenever this is attempted, it is apt to be shallow and limited. The best defense is one with a wider reach, which has implications for all language transactions. And finally, I do not claim that my proposals will solve all our problems, or even provide full protection from indefensible discourse. They are only a reasonable beginning, and there is much more to be done. However, we have to start somewhere and, as Ray Bradbury once wrote, somewhere lies between the right ear and the left one. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Many people think youth is not a strong position and it can hardly work out well. The individual young man is threatened either with retreating back to the organized system or breaking down and sinking into the lumpen proletariat. Nevertheless, culturally there is a lot of strength here; let us try to see where it is. Consider directly, their politics are unimpressive. They could not be otherwise since they are so hip and sure that society cannot be different. Explicitly, they are pacifists, being especially vocal about the atom bomb. The Bomb is often mentioned by themselves and other commentators as an explanation of their religious crisis; but it is not convincing. Their own diatribes seem to be mostly polemical self-defense, as if to say: “You squares dropped the atom bombs, do not criticize my blasting music on top of Trump Tower.” In the play The Connection this is openly stated as a defense for a barbiturate. On the whole one does not observe that the youths are so concerned about nuclear weapons as many mothers of families or squares who have common sense. One of the youth spokesmen wrote a long dithyramb about the Bomb, of which the critic George Dennison remarked: “He seems miffed that people pay attention to the atom bomb instead of him.” At the same time, their peacefulness is genuine and their tolerance of differences is admirable, extending also to the squares, except for loathsome class enemies like Time, Housing, or gouging employment agencies. Their ability to occupy themselves in poverty on a high level or cultural and animal satisfaction is remarkable, with per-back books, odd records, and pleasures of the flesh. Their inventing of community creativity is unique. If we consider these achievements, we see that they are factual evidence for a political proposition of capital importance: People can go it on their own, without resentment, hostility, delinquency, or stupidity, better than when they move in the organized system and are subject to authority. (To be sure, the youth are not among the underprivileged to being with; they have some useful education and their poverty is in part voluntary; bit these are not circumstances unavailable to others.) They do not go far, they invite degeneration, they seem hard put to assume responsibility; but they do exist interestingly and peacefully. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
In one important respect, their community culture could be made far more effective. I am referring to the Rap and Hip Hop in a community setting. They have chosen too primitive a model, exempli gratia, Haiti. If they would ponder on the Balinese dances, they might learn something—not the Bali dances on a stage on Broadway, but as they exist in their home villages where, to the music of the gamelan, the onlookers suddenly become entranced and fall down or become possessed and would do violence to themselves, except that they are rescued one and all by their friends of the community. Like prostitution, robbery, murder, and other crimes, castration was illegal in both Christian theology and Roman law. In the sixth century, the Byzantine emperor Justinian, who ruled from 527 to 565, decreed harsh punishment for the crime—if the surgery did not kill them, perpetrators could themselves be castrated, be sent to work in the mines, as well as have their property confiscated. However, such dire risks only helped drive up the value of eunuchs so that, also like prostitution, robbery, and murder, castration flourished, to the point where one writer descries the Byzantine empire as a “eunuch’s paradise.” In modern times, to deal with these increasingly complex and novel problems, economists have belatedly begun to call on psychologists, anthropologist, and sociologists—whose work they once disdained as insufficiently “hard” or quantitative. Whole new branches of economics have opened up—for instance, behavioral economics, neuroeconomics—and various sub-subspecialties. Economist are also working on many of the issues attending the rise of revolutionary wealth. For example, according to Eisenach, the cost-of-living index is now statistically corrected to take account of improved quality in successive versions of the same product. Economists have turned out a substantial literature on the cost of acquiring the information needed to make intelligent choices. And they are trying to cope with complex intellectual-property issues, asymmetric information and other aspects of revolutionary wealth. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Yet gaping holes still exist. For all the attention it receives, intellectual property remains inadequately understood, as does the non-rival and essentially inexhaustible character of knowledge. Other glaring questions cry out for answers. The last—and sometimes the first—word has not been written about the value of knowledge that proves valuable only when combined with other knowledge, or about the de-synchronization effect, or about what happens to trade patterns when wealth waves collide. For all the effort of individual economists or teams, the profession as a whole has yet to fully appreciate the enormousness of today’s runaway, revolutionary change. There is no systematic effort to map interdependent changes in our relationships to time, space and knowledge—let alone to the larger, full set of the deep fundamentals—all of which, as we have seen, are occurring at high speed. Half a century since the revolution began, they have yet to formulate the coherent, overarching theories about this historical stage of economic development to help us understand who we are and where we are going. “O Lord, to us belong confusion and shame of face—to our kings, to our princes, and to our fathers—because we have sinned against You. To the Lord our God belongs mercy and lovingkindness and forgiveness, for we have rebelled against Him; and we have not obeyed the voice of the Lord our God by walking in His laws which He set before us through His servants the prophets,” reports Daniel 9.8-10. Dear Lord in Heaven, in our arms take it, making good thoughts. House-God, be enchanted, that our children may grow into successful adults, happy, contented; beautifully walking the trail to old age. Having good thoughts of the Earth its mother, that she may give it the fruits of her being. Combine all the woes that temporal and ecclesiastical tyrannies have ever inflicted on men or nations, and you will not have reached the full measure of suffering with this martyr people was called upon to endure century upon century. If was as if all the powers of Earth had conspired—and they did so conspire—to exterminate the American people, or at least to transform it into a brutalized horde. History dare not pass over in silence these scenes of well nigh unutterable misery. It is her duty to give a true and vivid account of them, to evoke due admiration for the superhuman endurance of this suffering people, and to testify that American has striven with gods and men, and has prevailed. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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America Should Proceed at Once with Our Star Wars Project
With the exception of the much misunderstood Machiavelli, no one ever said politics is a pretty profession, and if anyone thought it could be otherwise, one was an optimist. I, too, an am optimist. However, not because I look for any improvement in the purposes of political discourse. I am an optimist because I think it might just be possible for people to learn how to recognize empty, false, self-serving, or inhumane language, and therefore to protect themselves from at least some of its spiritually debasing consequences. Civilization is in a race between education and disaster, and that although education is far behind, it is not yet out of the running. In other words, while one may not think we can count on any relaxation in the defense of the indefensible, one may also believe that we may mount a practical counteroffensive by better preparing the minds of those for whom such language is intended. Thus, our attention inevitably turns to the subject of schools and to the possibility of their actually doing something that would help our youth acquire the semantic sophistication that we associate with minds unburdened by prejudice and provinciality. Furthermore, we are fortunate to have available an alternative tradition that gives us the authority to educate our students to disbelieve or at least to be skeptical of the prejudices of their elders. The purpose of education is to free the student from the tyranny of the present. The assumption that critical intelligence has wide applicability is, we believe, what the medieval Schoolmen had in mind in creating the Trivium, which in their version consisted of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. These arts of language were assumed to be what may be called “meta-subjects,” subjects about subjects. Their rules, guidelines, principles, and insights were thought to be useful in thinking about anything. Our ancestors understood well something we seem to have forgotten, namely, that all subjects are forms of discourse—indeed, forms of literature—and therefore that almost all education is language education. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Knowledge of a subject mostly means knowledge of a language of that subject. Biology, after all, is not plants and animals; it is language about plants and animals. History is not events that once occurred; it is language describing and interpreting events. And astronomy is not planets and stars but special ways of talking about planets and stars. And so a student must know the language of a subject, but that is only the beginning. For it is not sufficient to know the right answers. One must also know what a question is, for not every sentence that ends with a rising intonation or begins with an interrogative is necessarily a question. There are sentences that look like questions but cannot generate any meaningful answers, and if they linger in our minds, they become obstruction to clear thinking. One must also know what a metaphor is and what is the relationship between words and the things they describe. In short, one must have some knowledge of a meta-language—a language about language. Without such knowledge, a student can be as easily tyrannized by a subject as by a politician. That is to say, the enemy here is not, in the end, indefensible discourse but our ignorance of how to proceed against it. Now, what we must recommend to you is not so systematic or profound as the Trivium. We do not even propose a new subject—only seven ideas or insights or principles (call them what you will) that are essential to the workings of the critical intelligence and that are in the jurisdiction of every teacher at every level of school. A major research institute spent more than $319,500 to discover that the best bait for mice is cheese. Another study found that mother’s milk was better balanced nutritionally for infants than commercial formulas. That study also proved that mother’s milk was better for human infants than cow’s milk or goat’s milk. A third student established that a walk is considerably healthier for the human respiratory and circulatory systems, in fact for overall health and vitality, than a ride in a car. Bicycling was also found to be beneficial. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
A fourth study proved conclusively that infants who are held and cuddled a lot frequently grow into adults with greater self-confidence and have more integrated relationships with the World than those who are not held. Additionally, adults and child also benefit from being hugged, it seems to assist general health and even mental development. The remarkable thing about these five studies, of course, is that anyone should have found it necessary to undertake them. That some people did find them necessary can only mean that they felt there was some uncertainty about how the answers would turn out. And yet, anyone who has seen a mouse eating cheese or who has been hugged by another person already knows a great deal about these things, assuming one gives credence to personal observation. Similarly, anyone who has ever considered the question of artificial milk versus human milk is unlikely to assume that Nestle’s or Similac will improve on a feeding arrangement that account for the growth of every human infant before modern times. However, some studies have shown that artificial milk can be more conducive to the health of a baby, than mother’s milk because it sometimes is more nutritious and does not have many of the chemicals in it that a mother may be ingesting. That any people retain doubts on these questions is symptomatic of two unfortunate conditions of modern existence: Human beings no longer trust personal observation, even of the self-evident, until it is confirmed by scientific or technological institutions; human beings have lost insight into natural processes—how the World works, the human role as one of many interlocking parts of the Worldwide ecosystem—because natural processes are now exceedingly difficult to observe. These two conditions combine to limit our knowledge and understanding to what we are told. They also leave us unable to judge the reliability or unreliability of the information we go by. The problem beings with the physical environment in which we live. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Most Americans spend their lives within environments created by human beings. If you live in Montana this is less the case than if you live in Manhattan, but it is true to some extent all over the country. Natural environments have largely given way to human-created environments. What we see, hear, touch, taste, smell, feel and understand about the World has been processed for us. Our experiences of the World can no longer be called direct, or primary. They are secondary, mediated experience. When we are walking in a forest, we can see and feel what the planet produces directly. Forests grow on their own without human intervention. When we see a forest, or experience it in other ways, we can count on the experience being directly between us and the planet. It is not mediated, interpreted or altered. On the other hand, when we live in cities, no experience is directly between us and the planet. Virtually all experience is mediated in some way. Concrete covers whatever would grow from the ground. Buildings block the natural vistas. The water we drink comes from a faucet, not from a stream or the sky. All foliage has been confined by human considerations and redesigned according to human tastes. There are no wild animals, there are no rocky terrains, there is no cycle of bloom and decline. There is not even night and day. No food grown anywhere. If we notice at all, most of us give little importance to this change in human experience of the World. We are so surrounded by a reconstructed World that it is difficult to grasp how astonishingly different it is from the World of only one hundred and fifty years ago, and that it bears virtually no resemblance to the World in which human beings lived for four million years before that. That this might affect the way we think including our understanding of how our lives are connected to any nonhuman system, is rarely considered. In fact, most of us assume that human understanding is now more thorough than before, that we know more than we ever did. This is because we have such faith in our rational, intellectual processes and the institutions we have created that we fail to observe their limits. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Do you sense that what you are eating was once alive, growing on its own? We learn in schools that fruit grows from the ground. We see pictures of fruit growing. However, when we live in cities, confined to the walls and floors of our concrete environments, we do not actually see the slow process of a blossom appearing on a tree, then becoming a bud that grows into an apple. We learn this, but we cannot really “know” what it means, or that a whole cycle is operating: sky to ground to root through three to bud ripening into fruit that we can eat. Nor do we see particular value in this knowledge. It remains an idea to us, an abstraction that is difficult to integrate into our consciousness without direct experience of the process. Therefore we do not develop a feeling about it, a caring. In the end how can our children or we really grasp that fruit growing from trees has anything to do with humans growing from eating the fruit? We have learned that water does not really originate in the pipes where we get it. We are educated to understand that it comes from sky (we have seen that, it is true!), lands in some faraway mountains, flows into rivers, which flow into little reservoirs, and then somehow it all goes through pipes into the sinks in our homes and then back out to—where? The ocean. We learn there is something called evaporation that takes the water we do not need up to the sky. However, is this true? Is there a pattern to it? How does it collect in the sky? Is it okay to rearrange the cycle with cloud seeding? Is it okay to collect the water in dams? Does anyone else need water? Do plants drink it? How do they get it? Does water go into the ground? In cities it rolls around on concrete and then pours into sewers. Since we are unable to observe most of the cycle, we learn about it in knowledge museums: school, textbooks. We study to know. What we know is what we have studied. We know what the books report. What the books report is what the authors of the books learned from “experts” who, from time to time, turn out to be wrong. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Everyone knows about night and day. Half the time it is dark, half the time it is light. However, it does not work that way in our homes or outside in the streets. There is always light, and it is always the same, controlled by an automatic switch downtown. The stars are obscured by the city glow. The moon is washed out by a filter of light. It becomes a semimoon and our awareness of it inevitably dims. We say it is night, but darkness moods and feelings lie dormant in us. Faced with real darkness, we become frightened, overreact, like a child whose parents have always left the light on. In six generations since Edison, we have become creatures of light alone. Most people are overcome by a sort of intellectual paralysis when confronted by a definition, whether offered by a politician or by a teacher. They fail to grasp that a definition is not a manifestation of nature but merely and always an instrument for helping us to achieve our purposes. We want to do something, and a definition is a means of doing it. If we want certain results, then we must use certain definitions. However, no definition has any authority apart from a purpose, or any authority to bar us from other purposes. That is liberating, but not many have ever heard a student ask of a teacher, “Whose definition is that and what purposes are served by it?” It is more than likely that a teacher would be puzzled by such a question, for most of us have been as tyrannized by definitions as have our students. However, I do know of one instance where a student refused to accept a definition provided by an entire school. The student applied to Columbia University for admissions and was rejected. In response, he sent the following letter to the admissions officer: “Dear Sir: I am in receipt of your rejection of my application. As much as I would like to accommodate you, I find I cannot. I have already received four rejections from other colleges, which is, in fact, my limit. Your rejection puts me over this limit. Therefore, I must reject your rejection, and as much as this might inconvenience you, I expect to appear for classes on September 18…” #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Even if the student cannot do much about it, Columbia would have been well advised to reconsider this student’s application, not because it does not have a right to define for its own purposes what it means by an adequate student, but because here is a student who understands what some of Columbia’s professors probably do not—that there is a measure of arbitrariness in every definition and that in any case intelligent persons is not required to accept another’s definition. What students need to be taught, then, is that definitions are not given to us by God; that we may depart from them without risking our immortal souls; that the authority of a definition rests entirely on its usefulness, not on its correctness (whatever that means); and that it is a form of stupidity to accept without reflection someone else’s definition of a word, a problem, or a situation. All of this applies as much to a definition of a verb or a molecule as it does to a definition of art, God, freedom, or democracy. I can think of no better method of helping students to defend themselves than to provide them with alternative definitions for every important concept and term they must deal with in school. It is essential that they understand that definitions are hypotheses and that embedded in each is a particular philosophical or political or epistemological point of view. It is certainly true that one who holds the power to define is our master, but it is also true that one who holds in mind an alternative definition can never quite be one’s slave. All the knowledge we ever have is a result of questions. Indeed, it is a commonplace among scientists that they do not see nature as it is, but only through the questions they put to it. We do not see anything as it is except through the questions we put to it. Since questions are the most important intellectual tool we have, is it not incredible that the art and science of question-asking is not systematically taught? If we do not know the questions that produced answers—whether in biology, grammar, politics, or history–it is meaningless to have answers. If the question had been posed different, to have answers without knowing the question, without knowing you might have been given a different answer may be more than meaningless; it may be exceedingly dangerous. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
There are many Americans who carry in their heads such answers as “America should proceed at once with our Star Wars project,” or “We should send Marines to Nicaragua.” However, if they do not know the questions to which these are the answers, their opinions are quite literally thoughtless. And so we suggest two things. First, we should teach our students something about question-asking in general. For example, that a vaguely formed question produces a vaguely formed answer; that every question has a point of view embedded in it; that for any question that is posed, there is almost always an alternative question that will generate an alternative answer; that even if we are unaware of it, every action we take is an answer to a question; that ineffective actions may be the result of badly formed questions; and most of all, that a question is language, and therefore susceptible to all the errors to which an unsophisticated understanding of language can leas. There arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind. This is a great definition of stupidity: a bad and unapt formation of words. However, we must also focus on the specific details of asking questions in different subjects. What, for example, are the sorts of questions that obstruct the mind, or free it, in the study of history? How are these questions different from those one might ask of a mathematical proof, or a literary work, or a biological theory? The principles and rules of asking questions obviously differ as we move from one system of knowledge to another, and this ought not to be ignored. There is evidence that the cells of our brains literally develop and grow bigger with use, and atrophy or waste away with disuse. It may be therefore that every action leaves some permanent print upon the nervous tissue. Reality has a material side, which was the realm of science, but it also has a spiritual side, which was the realm of theology—and never the twain shall meet. Thought, memory, and emotion, rather than being the emanations of a spirit World, came to be seen as the logical and predetermined outputs of the physical operations of the brain. Consciousness is simply a by-product of those operations. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Because a sense of treatment for many brain problems is ineffective or unwarranted, it leaves those with mental illnesses or brain injuries little hope of treatment, much less a cure. And as the idea spreads through our culture, it ends up stunting our overall view of human nature. However, the brain’s plasticity is not limited to the somatosensory cortex, the area that governs our sense of touch. It is universal. Virtually all of our neural circuits—whether they are involved in feeling, seeing, hearing, moving, thinking, learning, perceiving, or remembering—are subject to change. The received wisdom is cast aside. The brain is very plastic. Massively plastic. The plasticity diminishes as we get older—brains do get stuck in their ways—but it never goes away. Our neurons are always breaking old connections and forming new ones, and brand-new nerve cells are always being created. The brain has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions. We do not yet know all the details of how the brain reprograms itself, but it has become clear, as Dr. Freud proposed, the secret lies mainly in the rich chemical brother of our synapses. What does on in the microscopic spaces between our neurons is exceedingly complicated, but in simple terms it involves various chemical reactions that register and record experiences in neural pathways. Every time we perform a task or experience a sensation, whether physical or mental, a set of neurons in our brains is activated. If they are in proximity, these neurons join together through the exchange of synaptic neurotransmitters like the amino acid glutamate. As the same experience is repeated, the synaptic links between the neurons grows stronger and more plentiful through both physiological changes, such as the release of higher concentrations of neurotransmitters, and anatomical ones, such as the generation of new neurons or the growth of new synaptic terminals on existing axons and dendrites. Synaptic links can also weaken in response to experiences, again as a result of physiological and anatomical alterations. What we learn as we live is embedded in the ever-changing cellular connections inside our heads. The chains of linked neurons form our minds’ true “vital paths.” Cells that fire together wire together. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
The brain is not the machine we once though it to be. Though different regions are associated with different mental functions, the cellular components do not form permanent structures or play rigid roles. They are flexible. They change with experience, circumstance, and need. Some of the most extensive and remarkable changes take place in response to damage to the nervous system. Experiments show, for instance, that is a person is struck blind, the part of the brain that has been dedicated to processing visual stimuli—the visual cortex—does not just go dark. It is quickly taken over by circuits used for audio processing. And if the person learns to read Braille, the visual cortex will be redeployed for processing information delivered through the sense of touch. Neurons seem to want to receive input. When their usual input disappears, they start responding to the next best thing. Thanks to the ready adaptability of neurons, the sense of hearing and touch can grow sharer to mitigate the effects of the loss of sight. Similar alterations happen in the brains of people who go deaf: their other senses strengthen to help make up for the loss of hearing. The area in the brain that processes peripheral vision, for example, grows larger, enabling them to see what they once would have heard. We have learned that neuroplasticity is not only possible but that it is constantly in action. That is the way we adapt to changing conditions, the way we learn new facts, and the way we develop new skills. Plasticity is the normal ongoing state of the nervous system throughout the life span. Our brains are constantly changing in response to our experiences and our behaviour, reworking their circuitry with each sensory input, motor act, association, reward signal, action plan, or shift of awareness. Neuroplasticity is one of the most important products of evolution, a trait that enables the nervous system to escape the restrictions of its own genome and thus adapt to the environmental pressures, physiological changes, and experiences. The genius of our brain’s construction is not that it contains a lot of hardwiring but that it does not. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
The brain is made to adapt to local environmental demands through the lifetime of an individual, and sometimes within a period of days, by forming specialized structures to deal with those demands. Evolution has given us a brain that can literally change its mind—over and over again. Our ways of thinking, perceiving, and acting, we now know, are not entirely determined by our genes. Nor are they entirely determined by our childhood experiences. We change them through the way we live and through the tools we need. Playing a violin, a musical tool, has resulted in substantial physical changes in the brain. That is even true for musicians who have first taken up their instruments as adults. Throughout the course of training, there can be found significant growth in the visual and motor areas. Furthermore, our thoughts can exert a physical influence on, or at least cause a physical reaction in, our brains. We become, neurologically, what we think. There are many reasons to be so grateful that our mental hardware is able to adapt so readily to experience, that even old brains can be taught new tricks. The brain’s adaptability has not just led to new treatments, and new hope, for those suffering from brain injury or illness. It provides all of us with a mental flexibility, an intellectual litheness, that allows us to adapt to new situations, learn new skills, and in general expand our horizons. If we stop exercising our mental skills, we do not just forget them: the brain map space for those skills is turned over to the skills we practice instead. The mental skills we sacrifice may be as valuable, or even more valuable, than the ones we gain. When it comes to the quality of thought, our neurons and synapses are entirely indifferent. The possibility of intellectual decay is inherent in the malleability of our brains. That does not mean that we cannot, with concerted effort, once again redirect our neural signals and rebuilt the skills we have lost. What is does mean is that the vital paths in our brains become the pasts of least resistance. They are the paths that most of us will take most of the time, and the farther we proceed down them, the more difficult it becomes to turn back. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
I used to think that young Americas began whatever education they were to get at the age of eighteen, that their early lives were spiritually empty and that they arrived at the university clean slates unaware of their deeper selves and the World beyond their superficial experience. The contrast between them and their European counterparts was set in high relief in the European novels and movies into which we were initiated at the university. The Europeans got most of the culture they were going to get from their homes and their public schools, lycées, or gymnasiums, where their souls were incorporated into their specific literary traditions, which in turn expressed, and even founded, their traditions as peoples. It was not simply or primarily that these European schoolchildren had a vastly more sophisticated knowledge of the human heart than we were accustomed to in the young or, for that matter, the old. It was that their self-knowledge was mediated by their books learning and that their ambitions were formed as much by models first experienced in books as in everyday life. Their books had a substantial existence in everyday life and constituted much of what their society as a whole looked up to. It was commonplace for children of what they called good families to fill their imaginations with hopes of serious literary or philosophic careers, as do ours with hopes of careers in entertainment of business. All this was given to them early on, and by the time they were in their late tends it was part of the equipment of their souls, a lens through which they saw everything and which would affect all their later learning experience. They went to the university to specialize. Many young Americans seemed, in comparison, to be natural savages when they came to the university. They had hardly head the names of the writers who were the daily fare of their counterparts across the Atlantic, let alone took it into their heads that they could have a relationship to them. “What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba?” They all belonged to the whole World, using their reason to see the things all men have in common, to solve the problems of survival, all the time innocently and unaware trampling on the altars sacred to the diverse peoples and nations of the Earth who believe themselves constituted by their particular gods and heroes rather than by the common currency of the body. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
This American intellectual obtuseness could seem horrifying and barbarous, a stunting of full humanity, an incapacity to experience the beautiful, an utter lack of engagement in the civilization’s ongoing discourse. However, for me, and for many better observers, this constituted a large part of the charm of American students. Very often natural curiosity and love of knowing appeared to come into their own in the first flush of maturity. Without traditional constraints or encouragements, without society’s rewards and punishments, without snobbism or exclusivity, some awareness, that their souls had spaces of which they were unaware and which cried out for furnishing. European students whom I taught always knew all about Rousseau and Kant, but such writers had been drummed into them from childhood and, in the New World, after the way, they had become routine, as much as part of childhood’s limitations as short pants, no longer a source of inspiration. So these students became suckers for the new, the experimental. However, for America the works of the great writers could be the bright sunlit uplands where they could find the outside, the authentic liberation for which this report is a plea. The old was new for these American students, and in that they were right, for every important old insight is perennially fresh. It is possible that Americans would always lack the immediate, rooted link to the philosophic and artistic achievements that appear to be part of the growth of particular cultures. However, their approach to these works bespoke a free choice and the potential for humans as humans, regardless of time, place, station, or wealth, to participate in what is highest. If the brotherhood of man is founded on what is lowest in him, while the higher cultivation required unbridgeable separate “cultures,” t would be a sad commentary on the human condition. The American disposition gave witness to an optimistic belief that the two universalities, of the body and of the soul, are possible, that access to the best is not dependent on chance. Young Americans, that is, some young Americans, gave promise of a continuing vitality for the tradition because they did not take it to be tradition. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
The current generation of students is unique and very different in outlook from its teachers. I am referring to the good students in the better colleges and universities, those to whom liberal education is primarily directed and who are the objects of a training which presupposed the best possible material. Because of the pandemic, these young people have now experienced the anxieties about simple physical well-being that their grandparents and great grandparents experienced during the depression. They have been raised with comfort, but now have had that stripped away from them. They have become largely thankful for the luxuries their parents’ wealth provided them and do not necessarily have the expectation of ever-increasing comfort anymore. They are proud of the opportunities they have been given, and for the law protecting them, because these are not rights all people have. The looming recession has made more of them come down to Earth and they have become more frugal, responsible, and mature. It has allowed them so see how hard some marginalized groups have had it in life, and makes them want to reach for higher calling so they can provide for their families and also help others in society who cannot or no one will not help. The broken prosperity of the last two years has given them as shaken confidence in always being able to make a living. So they are ready to undertake any career and broaden their fields of study to make themselves more marketable. The ties of tradition, family, and financial responsibility are growing stronger because they see how hard their ancestors had it in building these companies and privileges so they could want for nothing. And, along with this all, comes a more closed, private character. They tend to be excellent students and extremely grateful for anything they learn. A look at this special ground tends to favor a hopeful prognosis for the country’s moral and intellectual health. There is a spiritual yearning, a powerful tension of the soul which made the university atmosphere electric. There seems to be no time for nonsense, but of course, some have yet to figure that out. Even some senior citizens are clueless. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Survival itself depends on better education for the best people. External necessity injected into the necessary educational World the urgency that should always be there. Money and standards emerged in the twinkling of an eye. The goal was to produce scientific technicians who would save us from being at the mercy of tyrants. The high schools concentrated on math and physics, and there was honor and the promise of great futures for those who excelled in them. The Scholastic Aptitude Test is authoritative. Intellectual effort has become a national pastime. The mere exercise of unused and flabby muscle is salutary, and the national effort both trained and inspired the mind. The students are now better, more highly motivated. An awkward consequence of heightening experience when one is inexperienced, of self-transcendence when one has not much World to lose, is that afterward one cannot be sure that one was somewhere or had newly experienced anything. If you are not much in the World, how do you know you are “out of the World”? This problem has been fateful for youth literature. (The classical mystic who loses this World knows well, on returning to it, that it is a poor thing; and also that it is pointless to try to describe the Reality in terms of this World.) The youth novelist does not say, “Like when we left Chicago, we went to New York.” (Samuel Beckett does, of course, do just this in principle, and mighty strange and dull his novels are.) The youth novelist wants to say that we did leave Chicago and did go to New York. However, how would one know? When there is not much structure for the experience—no cause to leave Chicago, no motive to go to New York—these things become very doubtful and it is hard to make the narrative solid. So incidents are multiplied without adding up to a plot; factual details are multiplied that do not add up to interpretation or characterization; and there are purple passages and exclamations. The point of the preservation is to insist that something happened. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
(This narrative difficulty of more or less articulate grownups is important in reminding us of what might otherwise be dark about the juvenile delinquents: that in the immense multiplicity of their exploits and kicks, including horrifying deeds, it is not necessarily the case that they experienced what they were doing. It is therefore beside the point to judge or treat them as if they were performing acts.) Similarly the youth make social ritual of reminiscing and retelling. Meeting in a group, they retell exactly what happened, each of adding his details, with the aim of providing that something indeed happened, and if indeed anything was experienced, perhaps they can recapture the experience of it; just as at a later date, this meeting at which the retelling is occurring will be retold. It is like a man who dreams in exact detail of the fight he had with the boss; what could be the wish in such a dream? It is that when the event occurred he failed to get angry, but dreaming it he is angry. Except that in the youth retelling, they are not angry this time either. In such circumstances, it seems to me inevitable that heightened experience too will pall, for they do not transform enough natural and social World to create experience and new experience. They do not accumulate knowledge, establish better habits, make hypotheses probable, and suggest further projects, all the things that constitute seasoned experience. A youth will tell you a remarkable vision that he had under some barbiturate, but you do not feel that it was a vision for him; it is as useless as the usual experience of extrasensory perception that is irrelevant to anybody’s practical affairs. So in their creative activity youngsters compile thick notebooks of poems and drawings, to a body of work. What might then occur, unfortunately, is that, when the flesh is not better nourished, the spirit fails. Since better habits are not developed, the young men simply succumb to bad ones, relying more and more on the barbiturates and becoming careless about the meaning anything. Then other young fellows who chose this way of life because it is suited and solved a problem, quite it because of the bad company. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
The word “Angry,” we saw, was a misnomer for “bitter and waspish.” The word “Beat,” which many mean when they say “youth,” is exquisitely accurate for describing deviants of any age, is exquisitely accurate, meaning “defeated and resigned.” Public spokesmen of the Beats have, as the result of various visions, assured us that the word means Beatus, blessed; but this too soon comes to the same thing, “punchy.” In the Old World, castration was an act of purification, endowing men with the innocence of virgins and children because only the chaste could perform certain rites. Relatively rare was the self-castrated, and they were utterly pure and possessed far more spiritual power than voluntary celibates, who could err at any moment. By taking matters into their own hands, as it were, eunuchs rejected Worldliness and attained instant superiority. If one does not want children, the best thing to do is control your body, and there are many ways to do that. One way, most churches recommend is abstinence. But it is your body, you can do what you want, right…so deal with the consequences of your actions. So many people forget they have free will. Even if the corrupt law enforcement did dump barbiturates in your community, they did not force you to take them. However, it is sad to victimize people like that because it ruined generations of lives, and ended many as well. The goal is not to be crass and uncaring. “For he has oppressed and forsaken the poor; he has violently taken away a house which he did not build. Because his desire and greed knew no quietness within him, he will not save anything of that in which he delights. There was nothing left that he did not devour; therefore his prosperity will not endure. In the fullness of his sufficiency [in the time of his great abundance] he shall be poor and in straits; every hand of everyone who is in misery shall come upon him [he is but a wretch on every side.] When he is about to fill his belly [as in the wilderness when God sent the quails], God will cast the fierceness of His wrath upon him and will rain it upon him while he is eating,” reports Job 20.19-23. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
So many people of the past will never forget this tragedy because it ripped apart their lives and communities much like the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and tsunami did Japan, and they want to learn about the lessons from the past and move forward so they can heal and protect their families. A lot of addiction has to do with the stresses of poverty and people wanting to feel good and others who see an opportunity to make money. When dealing with unplanned families, keep in mind what you are committing to and the fact that it will cost nearly $200,000 to raise a child until age 18. People also issue prophylactics in their communities and even groups that help them deal with their urges, but they ignore them because the experience is not instantly gratifying. These animal desires belong to the body. What are we? Are we that or a mind using a body? Or a Mind using a mind and a body? This last is indeed the truth. When we find it our for ourselves, and hold to it through the years, how long can these desires keep their strength? We may be assured that they dwindle and go. Misdirection of pleasures of the flesh turns into an evil; but until humans slowly evolve into awareness of one’s true self, it will continue to provide one—along with Art and Nature—with feelings of happiness which relieve the gloom of Earthly life. Yet, in contrast to the happiness gained from Art and Nature, and much more to that gained from spiritual awareness, there are heavy penalties for the abuse, misdirection, or lack of control of pleasures of the flesh. How greatly maturity develops the power of will. This co-operation of mind, will, and humanity to redirect the energy of pleasures of the flesh into a more useful kind of energy. Focus on arts, nature, sports, education, physical exercise may reduce the urges for pleasures of the flesh, or diminish their frequency, or cause them to vanish altogether. The aim here is not mere repression, not deceptive pseudo-sublimation, but full mastery. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
When thinking about economics, it is, of course, unfairly easy to take potshots at economics. As long as chance plays a role in human affairs, no one can know the future with the kind of certainty decision-makers want. Economists themselves are right when they complain about the unrealistic expectations of the public, the politicians and the media, each with their demands for partisan interpretations or sound-bite simplifications of complex data. Economists are plenty smart and hardworking. And they have legitimate reasons for many of their predictive failures. For example, much of the government and business data on which they are forces to rely is incomplete, misleading or flawed. On such issues as technological change, geopolitical upheaval, energy use and oil prices, the data are often preliminary, leaving analysts to grapple with estimates of estimates of estimates. However, this is hardly new. Economists of the past had even less data and information to go on. However, these shortcomings hardly explain the deeper reasons why so much of conventional economics seems irrelevant or misleading today. First, the economy that economists are trying to understand is enormously more complex than tht faced by the great economists of the past. Neither Adam Smith nor Karl Marx, David Ricardo nor Leon Walras, not even John Maynard Keynes or Joseph Schumpeter confronted anything like the density of confusing relationships, interactions and feedback links involved in today’s wealth creation and distribution, let alone its global extent. Second, and more important, is the unprecedented speed of transactions and transformations in the system under study. No sooner do economists map some aspects of the economy or come up with a relevant insight than it changes. Useful numbers and findings—and their interconnections—have the half-life of a firefly. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Third, there is an even bigger problem. Just as economists in the early years of the industrial revolution had to go beyond agrarian thinking and leave behind what was no longer applicable, economists today face a similar challenge. They have to reach beyond industrial thinking to understand the transformatory impact of the latest revolutionary wealth wave. They confront a wealth system that, in a few decades, has gone from dependence on scarce resources to one in which the main growth factor, knowledge, is essentially inexhaustible; from rival to non-rival input and outputs; from predominately local and national to predominately national and global production and distribution; from low-skill to high-kill requirements; from homogeneous mass production to demassified heterogeneous production. And the list goes on. In addition, economist face changes in the degrees of integration needed in different parts of the economy. They need to factor in changing levels of complexity, rates of innovation and dozens of other variables, not to mention the multiple rhythms of economic activity and their interactions. Many of the great advances in economic thinking during the last century came with the application of every-more-sophisticated mathematics to the problems of the time. That meant measuring things. And here the accent was, appropriately enough, on things, in the sense of tangibles. However, to understand revolutionary wealth, which increasingly derives from, and produces, intangibles, we are compelled to cope with the slipperiest and hardest-to-measure of all resources—knowledge. The leading economists of yesterday were hardly unaware of the importance of intangibles. However, economies were never as knowledge-intensive as they are today. Let us rejoice in the spirit of the Lord and thank God and Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost for our blessings. Sun, Moon, Stars, all that move in the Heaven, I bid you hear me! Please speak to the heart and conscience of all humans, not merely to their curious mind. Secure respect for the silvery hair people, a people of thinkers and sufferers. It is our firm conviction that time is approaching in which the second half of our history will be to the noblest part of thinking humanity what its first half has long been believing to humanity, a source of sublime moral truths. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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One Side’s Abundant Eden is the Other’s Vast Wasteland
The real community of humans, in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers of all humans to the extent they desire to know. The face of various claims to truth and various ways of life and kinds of human beings—is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger. The study of history and of culture teaches that all the World was mad in the past; humans always though they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all. Many students, of course, cannot defend their opinion. It is something with which they have been indoctrinated. The best they can do is point out all the opinions and cultures there are and have been. What right, they ask, do I or anyone else have to say one is better than the others? Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being. This intention is more of less explicit, more or less a result of reflection; but even the neutral subjects, like reading and writing and arithmetic, take their place in a vision of the educated person. In some nations the goal was the pious person, in others, the warlike, in others industrious. As a nation, we began with the model of the rational and industrious human, who was honest, respected the laws, and dedicated to the family. Above all one was to know the rights doctrine; the Constitution, which embodies it; and American history, which presented and celebrated the founding of a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all humans are created equal.” A powerful attachment to the letter and the spirit of the Declaration of Independence gently conveyed, appealing to each humans’ reason, was the goal of the education of democratic humans. This called for something very different from the kinds of attachment required for traditional communities where myth and passion as well as severe discipline, authority, and the extended family produced an instinctive, unqualified, even fanatic patriotism, unlike the reflected, rational, calm, even self-interested loyalty—not so much to the country but to the form of government and its rational principles—required in the United State of America. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
There is no enemy other than the human who is not opened to everything. However, when there are no shared goals or visions of the public good, is the social contract any longer possible? Hobbes and Locke, and the American Founders following them, intended to palliate extreme beliefs, particularly religious beliefs, which lead to civil strife. The members of sects had to obey the laws and be loyal to the United States of America’s Constitution; if they did so, other had to leave them alone, however distasteful their beliefs might be. The insatiable appetite for freedom to live as one pleases thrives on this aspect of modern democratic thought. In the end it begins to appear that full freedom can be attained only when there is no such knowledge at all. The effective way to defang the oppressors is to persuade them they are ignorant of the good. History and social science are used in a variety of ways to overcome prejudice. We should not be ethnocentric, a term drawn from anthropology, which tells us more about the meaning of openness. We should not think our way is better than others. Then intention is not so much to teach the students about other times and places as to make them away of the fact that their preferences are only that—accidents of their time and place. Their beliefs do not entitle them as individuals, or collectively as a nation, to think they are superior to anyone else. Instinct and intellect must be suppressed by education. The natural soul is to be replaced with an artificial one. The dominant majority gave the country a dominant culture with its traditions, its literature, its tastes, its special claim to know and supervise the language, and its Protestant religions. The reactionaries did not like the suppression of class privilege and religious establishment. For a variety of reasons, they simply did not accept equality. Critics knew full well that the Constitution’s heart was a moral commitment to equality and hence condemned segregation. The Constitution was not just a set of rules of government but implied a moral order that was to be enforced throughout the entire country. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
The Americans who were demanding civil rights, were the true Americans because they understood that equality belongs to them as human beings by natural and political right. It was a demand for American identity. However, with history, nothing has taken place except a smattering of facts learned about other nations or cultures and a few social science formulas. None of this means much, partly because little attention has been paid to what is required in order truly to convey the spirit of other places and other times to young people, or for that matter to anyone of other places and other times to young people, or for that matter to anyone, partly because the students see no relevance in any of it to the lives they are going to lead or to their prevailing passion. No longer is there a hope that there are great wise humans in other places and times who can reveal the truth about life—except for the few remaining young people who look for a quick fix from a guru. Gone is the real historical sense of a Machiavelli who wrested a few hour from each busy day in which “to don regal and courtly garments, enter the courts of the ancients and speak with them.” Some critics of the United States of America’s Constitution, which provided rights for all citizens, truly believed that some people were inferior to them, and they thought that Jim Crow was necessary, as it was part of their unique way of life. Different strokes for different folks. Like said before, the only way to defang them is not with hate, but to show them the beauty of equality. The point is to persuade students to recognize that there are other ways of thinking and that Western ways are not always better. It is again not the content that counts but the lesson to be drawn. Such requirements are part of the effort to establish a World community and train its members—the person devoid of prejudice. However, if the students were really to learn something of the minds of any of these non-Western cultures—which they do not—they would find that each and every one of these cultures is ethnocentric. All of them think their way is the best way, and all others are inferior. Western phenomenon, and in its origin is obviously connected with the search for new and better ways, or at least for validation of the hope that our own culture really is the better way, a validation for which there is no felt need in other cultures. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
The reason for the non-Wester closedness, or ethnocentrism, is clear. Humans must love and be loyal to their families and their peoples in order to preserve them. Only if they think their own things are good can they rest content with them. A father must prefer his child to other children, a citizen his country to others. That is why there are myths—to justify these attachments. And a man needs a place and opinions by which to orient oneself. This is strongly asserted by those who talk about the importance of roots. The problems of getting along with outsiders is secondary to, and sometimes in conflict with, having an inside, a people, a culture, a way of life. A very great narrowness is not incompatible with the health of an individual or a people, whereas with great openness it is hard to avoid decomposition. When people take on the good from another culture, this may be considered a dangerous business because it tends to weaken wholehearted attachment to their own, hence to weaken their peoples as well as to expose themselves to the anger of the family, friends, and countrymen. Loyalty versus quest for the good introduced an unresolvable tension into life. However, the awareness of the good as such and the desire to possess it are priceless humanizing acquisitions. Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason’s power. The unrestrained and thoughtless pursuit of openness, without recognizing the inherent political, social, or cultural problem of openness as the goal of nature, has rendered openness meaningless. Cultural relativism destroys both one’s own and the good. True openness is the accompaniment of the desire to know, hence of the awareness of ignorance. To deny the possibility of knowing good and bad is to suppress true openness. A proper historical attitude would lead one to doubt the truth of historicism (the view that all thought is essentially related to and cannot transcend its own time) and treat it as peculiarity of contemporary history. Historicism and cultural relativism actually are a means to avoid testing our own prejudices and asking, for example, whether humans are really equal or whether that opinion is merely a democratic prejudice. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
One has to have the experience of really believing before one can have the thrill of liberation. Prejudices, strong prejudices, are visions about the way things are. They are divinations of the order of the whole of things, and hence the road to a knowledge of that whole is by way of erroneous opinions about it. Error is indeed our enemy, it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment. The mind that has no prejudices at outset is empty. It can only have been constituted by a method that is unaware of how difficult it is to recognize that a prejudice is a prejudice. Without getting misty-eyed about it, I think we can fairly say that universities have a sacred responsibility to define for their society what is worthwhile knowledge. These definitions are most clearly visible in university catalogues, where you will find lists of courses, subjects, and “fields” of study. Taken together, they amount to a certified statement of what the university thinks a serious student ought to think about. In what is omitted from a catalogue, you may also learn what a serious student need not think about. However, these are bad times for scrupulous efforts at gatekeeping, and, happily, many universities are now busily engaged in rewriting their catalogues. Some tend to think that living in California; Florida, and other warm climates tends to shrivel the brain and makes people dumber than those living in colder climates, such as New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Iowa. There was a study by two doctoral students at Texas Technical University who found that the ten states with the highest average SAT scores all had cold winters. Indeed, every state with an average of 540 or higher on both the verbal and quantitative parts of the SAT had an average higher temperature in January of less than 42 degrees Fahrenheit. At the other end, five of the ten states with the lowest SAT scores were warm-weather states. Moreover, temperature has a significant relationship to SAT scores even when the researchers took into account such factors as per-pupil expenditures on schooling. So there! Now, there is also an important reason to keep authority figures on the right side of the law. Not only will it accord them more respect, but also more compliance. In the face of what they construe to be legitimate authority, most people will do what they are told. Or, to put it in another way, the social context in which people find themselves will be a controlling factor in how they behave. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Many people who consider themselves scientists, are not. Dr. Freud’s work is exemplary—indeed, monumental—but scarcely anyone believes today that Dr. Freud was doing science, any more than educated people believe that Marx was doing science, or Max Webber or Lewis Mumford or Bruno Bettelheim or Carl Jung or Margret Mead or Arnold Toynbee. What these people were doing was weaving narratives about human behavior. Their work is a form of storytelling, not unlike conventional imaginative literature although different from it in several important ways. The work of these people is called storytelling because this suggest that an author has given a unique interpretation to a set of human events, that one has supported one’s interpretation with examples in various forms, and that one’s interpretation cannot be proved or disproved but draws its appeal from the power of its language, the depth of its explanations, the relevance of its examples, and the credibility of its theme. And all of this has an identifiable moral purpose. The words “true” and “false” do not apply here in the sense that they are used in mathematics or science. For there is nothing universally and irrevocably true or false about these interpretations. There are no critical tests to confirm or falsify them. There are no postulates in which they are embedded. They are bound by time, by situation, and above all by the cultural prejudices of the researchers. Quite like a piece of fiction. There is more hypocrisy in Heaven and Earth than is dreamt of in some of our philosophies. What we know about ourselves—can be more terrifying than what we do not know. Most of us generate piles of junk—unconvincing stores without credible documentation, sound logic, or persuasive argument. Books are, in many cases, written by men and women who are concerned not to improve scholarship but to improve social life. Thus, the purpose of doing this kind of work is essentially didactic and moralistic. The purpose of social research is to rediscover the truths of social life; to comment on and criticize the moral behavior of people; and finally, to put forward metaphors, images, and ideas that can help people live with some measure of understanding and dignity. Specifically, the purpose of media ecology is to tell stores about the consequences of technology; to tell how media environments create contexts that may change the way we think or organize our social life, or make us better or worse, or smarter or dumber, or freer or more enslaved. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Sometimes the stories media ecologists have to tell are rather more important than those of other academic storytellers—because the power of communication technology to give shape to people’s lives is not a matter that comes easily to the forefront of people’s consciousness, though we life in an age when our lives—whether we like it or not—have been submitted to the demanding sovereignty of new media. And so we are obligated, in the interest of humane survival, to tell tales about what sort of paradise may be gained, and what sort lost. We will not have been the first to tell such tales. However, unless our stories ring true, we may be the last. Now the TV tends to be a beast, too, as so many people know. The TV news media is usually there to frame certain stories they way they feel will be more entertaining, and they will also suppress or ignore others when they are involved in the corruption or paid to cover it up. To fight corruption, people need to learn the legal system, its tactics, and their means of manipulating media. To learn these, individuals have to restructure their mind and conceptions. And so to stand against the enemy, many engage of the process of self-destroying what remained of their own culture. When news television crews learn of a struggle they want to profit from, reporters are flown out from Hollywood and other areas to shoot images following the networks news guidelines for “good television” and “balanced reporting.” When it comes to the people, they often juxtapose with the people, others in suits and ties, who are responsible government officials concerned about jobs, and a lot of savage-looking types in funny clothes, speaking jive about their land, which does not seem credible because they way the people are dress and the emotions of their language. People are most likely to believe a professional in a suit, than someone who is wearing regular clothes and has been a victim of crime. After 40 million viewers see a Caucasian, modishly dressed TV newsman explain the crosscurrents in the struggle, and plaintively ask whether something of an earlier culture could not be permitted to remain, he finishes his report by saying, “From Sacramento, California, this is John Doe reporting.” This is followed by a commercial for the need to build affordable housing, how it creates jobs, and how green energy will be used to power the buildings during this energy crisis. The next is a story talking about gas prices and the need to suspend the gas tax. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Surely this story and the advertisements did not help the people concerned about their land. It was certain that they did not come through as well as the businessmen, the government officials and the reporter’s objective, practical analysis. They were attempting to convey something subtle, complex, foreign and ancient through a medium which did not seem able to handle any of that and which is better suited to objective data, conflict and fast, packaged information. When a struggle is revealed, usually the people become fixed into the model of artifact. The medium cannot be stretched to encompass their message. On the other hand, what if one had four minutes, or even one minute, to convey the essence of a product? A BMW? A stereo set? A toy? Could one accomplish that efficiently? One certainly could. It is obvious that a product is a lot easier to get across on television than a several acres of land or a cultural mind-set. Understanding cultural ways enough to care about them requires understanding a variety of dimensions of nuance and philosophy. You do not need any of that to understand a product, you do not have problems of subtlety, detail, time and space, historical context or organic form. Products are inherently communicable on television because of their static quality, sharp, clear, highly visible lines, and because they carry no informational meaning beyond what they themselves are. They contain no life at all and are therefore no capable of dimension. Nothing works better as telecommunication that images of products. Might television itself have no higher purpose? Most Americas, whether on the political left, center, or right, will argue that technology is neutral, that any technology is merely a benign instrument, a tool, and depending upon the hands into which it falls, it may be used one way or another. There is nothing that prevents a technology from being used well or badly; nothing intrinsic in the technology itself or the circumstances of its emergence which can predetermine its use, its control or its effects upon individual human lives of the social and political forms around us. The argument goes that television is merely a window or a conduit through which any perception, any argument or reality may pass. It therefore has the potential to be enlightening to people who watch it and is potentially useful to democratic process. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
If you accept mass production, you accept that a small number of people will supervise the daily existence of a much larger number of people. You have to accept that human beings will spend long hours, every day, engaged in repetitive work, while suppressing any desires for experience or activity beyond this work. The workers’ behavior becomes subject to the machine. With mass production, you also accept that huge numbers of identical items will need to be efficiently distributed to huge numbers of people and that institutions such as advertising will arise to do this. Once technological process cannot exist without the other, creating symbolic relationships among technologies themselves. If you accept the existence of advertising, you accept a system designed to persuade and to dominate minds by interfering in people’s thinking patterns. You also accept that the system will be used by the sorts of people who like to influence people and are good at it. No person who did not wish to dominate others would choose to use advertising and all technologies created to serve it will be consistent with this purpose, will encourage this behavior in society, and will tend to push social evolution in this direction. In all of these instances, the basic form of the institution and the technology determines its interaction with the World, the way it will be used, the kind of people who use it, and to what ends. And so it is with television. Far from being “neutral,” television itself predetermines who shall use it, how they use it, what effects it will have on individual lives, and, if it continues to be widely used, what sorts of political forms will inevitably emerge. Television is not reformable. If our society is to return to something like sane and democratic functioning, it must be gotten rid of totally. This is not about the television itself. It is about a process, already long underway, which has successfully redirected and confined human experience and therefore knowledge and perceived reality. We have all been moved into such a narrow and deprived channel of experience that a dangerous instrument like television can come along and seem useful, interesting, sane and worthwhile at the same time it further boxes people into a physical and mental condition appropriate for the emergence of autocratic control. Television has been used and expanded by the present powers-that-be, and that was inevitable, and it should have been predictable at the outset. The technology permits of no other controllers. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
One also has to worry about the effects of television upon individual human bodies and minds, the effects which fit the purposes of the people who control the medium. Furthermore, television has no democratic potential. The technology itself places absolute limits on what may pass through it. The medium, in effect, chooses its own content from a very narrow field of possibilities. The effect is to drastically confine all humans understanding within a rigid channel. And as mentioned before, these aspects of television are reformable. What is revealed, however, is that there is ideology in the technology itself. To speak of television as “neutral” and therefore subject to change is as absurd as speaking of the reform of a technology such as social media. The medium is the message. Many do not recognize the transformative power of new communication technologies. They need to come with a warning about the threat the power poses—and the risk of being oblivious to that threat. The electric technology is within the gates, and we are numb, deaf, blind, and mute about its encounter with on and through which the American way of life was formed and is changing. When people start debating (as they always do) whether the medium’s effects are good or bad, it is the content they wrestle over. Skeptics, with equally good reason, condemn the crassness of the content, viewing it as signaling a “dumb down” of culture. One side’s abundant Eden is the other’s vast wasteland. The Internet is the latest medium to spur this debate. In the long run a medium’s content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act. As our window onto the World, and onto ourselves, a popular medium molds what we see and how we see it—and eventually, if we us it enough, it changes who we are, as individuals and as a society. The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts. Rather, they alter patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance. Media work their magic, or their mischief, on the nervous system. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Our focus on a medium’s content can blind us to these deep effects. We are too busy being dazzled or distributed by the programming to notice what is going on inside our heads. In the end, we come to pretend that the technology itself does not matter. It is how we use it that matters, we tell ourselves. The technology is just a tool, inert until we pick it up and inert again once we set it aside. We are too prone to make technological instruments, like guns, scapegoats for the sin of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value. However, it is also our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that count, which is the numb stance of the technological idiot. People have been replacing God with false idols and that is the problem. So many people say they believe in God, but so few read the Bible or pray daily. They are too busying watching TV and using the Internet to. Many people are essentially being sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine because is it calmly, coldly, discounting their memory circuits that control their brains. Many people can feel it, too. They have an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with their brains, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. Their minds are not going—so far as they can tell—but it is changing. They do not think the way they used to think, and it can be felt most strongly when they are reading. Several people are no longer able to immerse themselves into a book or a lengthy article. Their minds used to get caught up in the twists of the narrative or the turns of the argument, and they spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. For many, that is rarely the case anymore. Now their concentration starts to drift after a page or two. They get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. They feel like they are always dragging their wayward brains back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. The Net has become the all-purpose medium, the conduit for most information that flows through one’s eyes and ears and into their mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich and easily searched store of data are many, and they have widely described and duly applauded. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
While the Inter is an astonishing boom to humanity, gathering up and concentrating information and idea that were once scattered so broadly around that World that anyone could profit from them, now all this information is at your fingertips. When one is writing a report for school and using mostly book sources, some of the information may be outdated, and now what they can do it go online, find a reputable site and supplement the new information. It is better than gathering all your information from the silicon memory system. The more people use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some worry they will become chronic scatterbrains. Because of the Internet, some people have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a long article on the web or in print. Even electronic Web pages that are more than three or four paragraphs is too much for some to absorb. They just skim it. There are people that think the Internet is the most creative thing that was invented. One could hardly meet anyone who says it has not been helpful. Many individuals like to go online because they love the ability to review and scan tons of information on the web. It is believed that reading lots of short, linked snippets online is a more efficient way to expand one’s mind than reading a 250-page book. These technopagans also believe in superiority of the Internet and think others have not been able to recognize it yet because they are measuring it against our old linear thought process. In many ways, the Internet is making people less patient readers, but could possible be making them smarter. They have more connections to documents, artifacts, and people, which means more external influences on their thinking and thus on their writing. Regardless, more people know they have sacrificed something important, but they will not go back to the way things used to be. For some people, the very idea of reading a book has come to seem old-fashioned, maybe even a little silly—like driving your own car when you can just schedule a ride share service. This generation thinks thing sitting down and reading a book from cover to cover does not make sense. It is not a good use of their time, as they can get the information they need faster through the Internet. These skilled Internet hunters think books are superfluous. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
The digital immersion has even affected the way people absorb information. They do not necessarily read from left to right and from top to bottom. They might instead skip around, scanning for pertinent information of interest. The Net has become essential to their work, school, or social lives, and often to all three. Some log on only a few times a day—to check their e-mail, follow a story in the news, research a topic of interest, or do some shopping. And there are, of course, many people who do not use the Internet at all, either because they cannot afford to or because they do not want to. What is clear, though, is that for society as a whole the Net has become, in just the thirty years since software programmer Tim Berners-Lee wrote the code for the World Wide Web, the communication and information medium of choice. The score of its use is unprecedented, even by the standards of the mass media of the twenty-first century. We seem to have arrived, at an important juncture in our intellectual and cultural history, a moment of transition between two very different types of thinking. What we are trading away for the riches of the Internet is our old linear thought process. Calm, focused, undistracted, the liner mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole our information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts—the faster, the better. When people go online, they feel their brains light up, and feel like they are getting smarter. The feelings are intoxicating—so much so that they can distract people from the Net’s deeper cognitive consequences. Many people miss the days of the old box TV with rabbit ears sitting on the floor, and the bulky avocado telephone fixed to the wall in the kitchen with its rotary dial and long, coiled cord. And the den filled with books on the bookshelves—lot of books—with their many-colored spines, each bearing a title and the name of a writer. There was something calming in the reticence of all those books, their willingness to wait, years, decades, our centuries even, for the right reader to come along and pull them from their appointed slots. Take your time, the books whisper. We are not going anywhere. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
The computer, however, is more than just a simple tool that does what one tells it to do. It is a machine that, in subtle but unmistakable ways, exerts an influence over you. The more one uses it, the more it alters the way one works. Reading lone feels new and liberating because for many kids who did not like reading books because of the lack of pictures, not have hyperlinks and search engines which deliver an endless supply of words to their screen, alongside pictures, sounds, and videos. People have started letting their newspaper and magazine subscriptions lapse. Who needed them? By the time the print editions arrived, dew-dampened or otherwise, the felt like that have already seen all the stories. The Internet is exerting a much stronger and broader influence over any one than their old stand-alone personal computer ever could. Their way their very brains work is changing. And this when most start worrying about their inability to pay attention to one thing for more than a couple of minutes. It is not just a symptom of middle-age mind rot. One’s brain is not just drifting. It is hungry. It is demanding to be fed the way the Internet feeds it—and the more it is fed, the hungrier it becomes. Should I check another e-mail, clink another link, look at another web page. Cause I am falling on the floor. I am climbing up the walls and everytime I get a grip, I seem to lose myself just a little more. Cause I am here and it eats me up, but I love the way it feels. I really should not stay online, but I cannot give up. The more it hurts, the more I need it more. It is like an addiction. I want to be connected. Just as Microsoft Word had turned me into a flesh-and-blood word processor, the Internet, one may sense, is turning one into something like a high-speed data-processing machine. Maybe that is a good thing because today more than every we are governed, all over the World, by the students of economics professors. Presidents and politicians, treasury secretaries or ministers of finance and chancellors of the exchequer, central bankers, investment bankers and senior officials of the World’s biggest and more powerful corporations have all dutifully sat in their classrooms listening to them, pouring over their key ideas. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
The same goes for brokers, financial advisers and newspaper and television pundits who take these ideas to the public. Unfortunately, many ideas remembered from college days belong in the “obsoledge attic,” or better yet, in the cemetery of ideas. The media is sometimes behind big bloopers. In February of 2004 U.S. president George W. Bush stiff-armed his own Council of Economic Advisers, refusing to publicly back its forecast that the economy would provide 2.6 million new jobs that year. But as The Washington Post reported, That forecast, derided as wildly optimistic, was one of the more modest predictions the administration has made about the economy over the past three years. Two years ago, the administration forecast that there would be 3.4 million more jobs in 2003 than there were in 2000. And it predicted a budget deficit for discal 2004 of $14 billion. The economy ended up losing 1.7 million jobs over that period, and the budget deficit [for 2004]…is on course to be $521 billion. No doubt, some of this is political exaggeration. Any statistic can be tortured into submission. Nor are the torturers jut Republicans. The discrepancies between the forecast and subsequent results began to widen under the previous Democratic administration. It was clear that, even allowing for political fact manipulation, something was seriously amiss. In the words of a Republican White House press spokesman, “The old theories…proved themselves wildly wrong…Nobody saw this happening—not on Wall Street, not Vegas, not Poor Richard, not Nostradamus.” Economists have failed to anticipate more than job numbers and deficits. They have contributed to some of the most publicized, embarrassing financial debacles in recent decades. In the last two months of 2022, inflation has averaged 0.85 percent. If these hikes continue over the next three months, the headline inflation rate would approach 9 percent by spring. If they persist for a year, it would surpass 10 percent—the first time the United States of America would have a double-digit inflation since the early 1980s. President Biden’s entire economic team has consistently played down inflation’s threat all year. They lied about helping the American people through the pandemic and ignored the warnings from former treasury secretary Lawrence H. Summers that the American Rescue Plans massive size would reduce inflation. Then said initial upticks in prices were simply statistical glitches caused by the dramatic price drops during the pandemic’s initial phase and would fade away once that glitch dropped out of the calculations. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
When that did not happen, they started blaming supply chain woes for the problem, even though that cannot possible explain things such as the fast and steady rise in housing costs. When consumers are fast losing purchasing power during two-digit inflation, consumers’ goods industries suffer symptoms of contraction and recession, especially unemployment of capital labor. Two-digit inflation only comes to an end with the advent of three-digit inflation which signals the approaching demise of the paper currency. In the final convulsion of inflation fever, millions of men and women will be in a panic rush to exchange their rapidly depreciating money for real goods. When there are mistakes made during a financial crisis by macroeconomists of the International Monetary Fund—errors can trigger ethnic clashes. Experts also occasionally miss anticipating major changes like the industrial slowdown in 1995, as we have seen with the 2020 pandemic. Along with the hyperinflation of the late 1980s, which we are also starting to see happening now and more so in late 2022-2023. The Fed does not know if it wants to raise interest prices because that will hurt human capital and businesses, while this war is going on and gas prices are skyrocketing, as well as consumer goods and services, and home prices. So we turn to our crucial problem: What to do that is self-justifying when the great social World is pretty unavailable? The essential Hipster problem is: to heighten experience, and get out of one’s usual self. To heighten experience is a common principle of Hipster and Delinquent, but the difference are marked. Among the Hipsters, the craving for excitement and self-transcendence is darkly colored with violence and death wish, and they therefore dread flipping, which they interpret as weakness, castration, and death. Among the younger delinquents, we shall see, it is fatalism, the wish is to get caught and be brought back into society. However, for some others, it is a religious hope that something new will happen, a revival. Not everyone gets self-destructive. The risks of delinquency, criminality, and injury rouse some in a normal apprehension, and they express a human amazement at the brutality and cruelty of some with whom they keep company. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
In taking drugs for the new experience, many largely steer clear of being hooked by an addiction. On the other hand, if the aim is to get out of the World, one can hardly play it safe. So if they push their stimulants, sleeplessness, and rhythmic and hallucinatory exercises to the point of having temporary psychotic fugues, or flipping, it is not surprising. For some people, going to the municipal psychiatric hospital is an expected and regular occurrence. The young actualized Christians seek enlightenment, and the city hospital succors them when they break down. Let us now go back to the jargon. The supreme words are “crazy,” “far out,” “gone,” ‘high,” “gas,” “sent.” These mean not in this World but somewhere, not rational but something. “Flip” is generally used with enthusiastic self-deprecation. When the crazy or far-out moment can be maintained for long enough to be considered a something and somewhere, it is “groovy,” that is, one is like somebody else’s phonograph record. One is “with it” or falls in.” The “it” or the understanding “where” is not, of course, definite, for the pure being has no genus and differentia. “Swinging with it” is the condition of passing from here and now to the heightened experience of “it.” Contrariwise, it is bad and painful to be “nowhere,” to “fall out” (take an overdose), or to be “drug” (dragging). The way of being-in-the-World, that is, is to be either cool and mask-faced, experiencing little; or to be sent far out, experiencing something. However, since the cool behavior of these usually gentle middle-class boy looks like adolescent embarrassment and awkwardness rather growth in experience would not be a more profitable enterprise and ultimately get them much further out. A possibility that has interestingly dropped from popular culture as the exploitation of shared athletic or wildly physical agitation, which belonged grandly to the old jazz-for-dancing and revival meetings. This is certainly an important truth that jive is energetic, in words like “go” and “dig.” (To the jazz-for-listening one is not supposed to respond overtly by more than a quietly tapped toe. It can be hypnotic and speak to the listener like a crustal ball or a foundation or a hearth fire. As it is remarkably thin gruel (no doubt I am tone deaf). For the performer, of course, it provides the deepening absorption of any simple improvised variations, plus the solidarity of the group.) #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
I can think of two reasons why the overtly shared crazy physical rhythms are spurned. First is that this motion is in fact too much in the extremities of the body rather than in the solar plexus, it is too superficial an excitement and more fit for teenagers. The difference is between the lostness in juvenile jitterbugging and the “central” experience of an Eastern Dance or Mary Wigman. Some young men have taken to the Eastern dance, but most who love popular culture do not practice physiological yoga either, just as their Zen is without breathing-exercises or correction of posture. So perhaps another reason for their dropping the old physical jazz and revival is just the opposite, that the display of energy would upset their coolness, it would be embarrassing and make them feel too young. I would wonder if this is not the simple explanation of their disdain social dancing as “dry” pleasures of the flesh; for certainly one of the reasonable uses of social dancing is body contact and sometimes foreplay involving pleasures of the flesh. However, these boys are embarrassed to get excited, to betray feeling, in public, though they are more than willing to get into their birthday suits and exhibit themselves, or to beat a drum wildly in public as an exhibition for others, but not as contact with them. Celibacy necessitated by castration—the excision of the private parts—sends shudders through our modern sensibilities. Yet for more than four thousand years, millions of males have endured this mutilation. The Persians were perhaps its first authors. As an eighteenth-century scholar noted, “The Latin word spade, which comprehended several sorts of eunuchs, was taken from a village of Persia called Spada, where…the first execution of this nature was made…The first eunuch mentioned in the holy scriptures was Patiphor…who brought Joseph from the Midianites…and it is observed…that Nebuchadnezzar caused all the Jewish people, and other prisoners of war, to be gelt or cut.” Throughout the centuries, a large percentage of eunuchs have been youngsters from families whose poverty precipitated the decision to castrate the child. In these cases, parents expected to advance their son’s career in areas closed to all but eunuchs: certain types of domestic service in aristocratic homes or royal courts, or as castrati opera singers. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Other boys were neutered after their enslavement by enemies victorious in wars: Nebuchadnezzar’s policy of castrating male prisoners of war that he might have none to attend him in his private service but eunuchs is a case in point. Sometimes older males voluntarily sought out the surgery, almost always as a means of earning a living as an entertainer or court functionary. Occasionally, men gelded themselves in full adulthood for religious reasons—the Church Father Origen; the obscure Valesii, a heretical Christian scet of the third century about whom little is known; and the nineteenth-century Russian Skopts are examples of these self-determined celibates. Much closer to home and closer in time is California’s Heaven’s Gate celibate computer cult, the members of which committed mass suicide in 1997 and whose leader, Marshall Applewhite, had turned to castration as a desperate measure to obliterate his uncertain sexuality. Hundreds of thousands of people have also been subjected to castration as punishment for imagined or real crimes ranging from “self-love” to nonconsensual pleasures of the flesh. The mentally or physically disabled have been neutered to prevent them from reproducing. African-American men have been brutally desexed by lynch mobs, which some say are starting to pop up again in a different form, terrified of their sexuality. We shudder at castration for a host of reasons. It assaults the private core of human existence. It has almost always been a butchery, performed inexpertly by unqualified quacks and costing the lives of a majority of its victims. Its consequences are lifelong, visible, and far-reaching, affecting appearance, stance, and above all, psychological development and adjustment. We know now how important, perhaps crucial, the male organ is to psychosexual development. However, some men are now choosing to castrate themselves and keep their manly appears, which creating another gender’s private part in its place. Lessons harshly learned from routine circumcisions gone wrong have hardly taught us that gender is not an amorphous variable physicians can successfully alter simply by radical surgery. When we read about eunuchs, whether in medieval China or the Ottoman empire, or as victims of Nazi eugenics, our growing knowledge of the effects of castration colors our perceptions. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
The issues surrounding castration are complex and as fascinating as they are disturbing. Eunuchs who have left written records reported that they reflected deeply and incessantly on their mutilation. Though a dearth of such documents prevents a thorough study of eunuchs’ reactions, all anecdotal evidence suggests that most of them brooded bitterly about the physical effects of castration and about the contempt and ostracism that mainstream society directed at them, including the mightiest military commanders of the Byzantine empire. However, eunuchs often simultaneously understood and valued another dimension of their condition, seeing it as a means—their only means—of gaining access to certain positions. They or their parents neutralized poverty by trading their sexuality for opportunity, often nit not always realized. Afterwards, eunuchs had lifetimes of confronting the other, less desirable consequences of the procedure. In particular, they had to deal with incessant humiliation and enforced celibacy, though much evidence exists that they experienced longings for intimate passions their ravaged bodies could not satisfy. And these were the luckier men who could at least rationalize about their situation. Others, victims of brute force alone, had not even that consolation. “Search me [thoroughly], O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there is any wicked or hurtful way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting,” Psalm 139.23-24. A light exists in Spring, not present in the Year at any other period when March is scarcely here. A color stands abroad on Solitary Fields that Science cannot overtake but human nature feels. When you pass through waters, God will be with you, and through the rivers, they shall not overflow you; when you walk through the fire, you shall not be burned, neither shall the flame kindle upon you. I shall strengthen you, yea, I shall help you, yea, I shall uphold you with the power of righteousness. Behold, all they that contend with you shall be ashamed and confounded; they say that strive with you shall be as naught and shall perish. In righteousness shall you be established; you shall not fear. You who have been forsaken, shunned and hated, now will I make you an eternal pride, a joy to all ages. Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God. Every weapon that is formed against you shall fail, and every tongue that shall rise against you, shall disprove. This is the inheritance of the Lord’s servants, and their salvation from Me, saith the Lord. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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The Problem with America it is Submerged in Old Atlantis
The problem with America it is submerged in old Atlantis. It has become like a refugee camp where all the geniuses have been driven out of their jobs and country by unfriendly regimes that are idling. The World of streets are so seductive that a person can ask you where you are from, then tell you what you are and you will believe them. People are too dependent on history and culture. However, the World belongs to those who understand it. Still, countless individuals bring their broken hearts and shattered dreams to the altar and hope they will be accepted, and they pray that rejection will not throw them into a rage and turn them into a Cain. Perhaps a vast number of those in society naively produced their favorite treasures and piled them in an indiscriminate heap. Those who do not recognize their value now may do so later. However, while some may be flattered by being tested, others resent it. People reserve their best thinking for their professional specialties, and next in line, for serious matters confronting the alert citizen—economic, politics, the disposal of nuclear waste, etcetera. When the day’s work is done, they want to be entertained. They cannot see why their entertainment should not simply be entertaining. Yet, it is not amusing to send oneself back to high school. Higher education must offer the individual much more than it does. For in the end, several people realize that they have no education in the conduct of life, at the university who was there to teach the students that drinking is not fun, and how to deal with their erotic needs, with other genders, and with family matters, and one graduates to some primal point of balance. In this great confusion, there is still an open channel to the soul. In many be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. However, the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves—to that part of us which is conscious of a higher consciousness, by means of which we make final judgments and put everything together. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
The independence of this consciousness, which has the strength to be immune to the noise of history and the distractions of our immediate surroundings, is what the struggle is all about. The soul has to hold its ground against hostile forces, sometimes embodied in ideas which frequently deny its very existence, and which indeed often seem to be trying to annual it altogether. What makes the journey through life singularly difficult is the disheartening expansion of trained ignorance and bad thought. For to put the matter at its baddest, we live in a thought-World, and the thinking has gone very bad. Thinking alone will never cure what ails humanity, and so many should be grateful for a naïve grace which puts them beyond the need to reason elaborately. It is time for people to shed superfluities so that their mental bodies can recover its ability to breathe, and protect the root-simplicities of being. The University has never been a sanctuary or shelter from “the outer World.” It can be the place where megalomaniacs, heretics, tyrants, and illiterate athletes get the training and documents they need to make the cities turbulent, and torment humanity. The odor of their egos now is no more pleasant than they were 400 years ago. The heat of the dispute between the Left and Right has grown so fierce in the last decade that the habits of civilized discourse have suffered a scorching. Antagonists seem no longer to listen to one another. The World is so ready for an anti-hero that almost anyone can get voted into office or steal an election. Even criminals are being voted in to run cities like Sacramento, California—one after the next. Preoccupied with quests of Health, Pleasures of the Flesh, Race, War, academics make their reputations and their fortunes and the university has become society’s conceptual warehouse of often harmful influences. It makes an important statement and deserves careful study. For instance, it is interesting how sweetheart Lori Loughlin was sentenced for what she allegedly did, but Kevin Johnson was allowed to become mayor of Sacramento, and displayed more criminal behavior, never was prosecuted for what he actually did and was even invited to the White House. I guess we have to keep the cook book witches in check, but let dangerous felons go free. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
What each generation is can be best discovered in its relation to the permanent concerns of humankind. This in turn can best be discovered in each generation’s tastes, amusements, and especially angers (this is above al true in an age that prides itself on clam self-awareness). Particularly revealing are the various impostors whose business it is to appeal to the young. These culture peddlers have the strongest of motives for finding out the appetites of the young—so they are useful guides into the labyrinths of the spirit of the times. However, there is a human nature, it is guided by awareness. Humans are not just creatures of accident, chained to and formed by the particular cave in which they are born. One with a joy, and pleasure for life is far more effective in motivating others than anyone who is disinterested in what their moral duty is. The youth need to be helped to recognize and avoid deforming forces of convention and prejudice. The vision of what that nature is may be clouded by the fake news media. The soul may at the outset require extrinsic rewards and punishments to motivate its activity; but in the end that activity is its own reward and is self-sufficient. Fascinations with the youth leads to an awareness of the various kinds of soul and their various capacities for truth and error as well as learning. Every age has its problems, and things in the past may not have been wonderful. Society needs to be taught to be highly intelligent, materially, and spiritually free. So many are confused by the emerging perception of what needs to be done. Every time there is a disaster, people are told to “donate money,” so the youth are brought up in a consumer driven economy and taught that money can solve all problems. This makes it harder for people to learn what truly matters. Since in any specific struggle we might be outspent by several hundred times, we need to be more clever, more creative. The population is being inundated with conflicting versions of increasingly complex events. People are giving up on understanding anything. The glut of untreated sewage spewing from the TV news media is dulling awareness, not assisting it. Overload. It encourages passivity, not involvement. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Specific victories are possible, but overall understanding of the forces that are moving society seem to be diminishing. People’s minds seem to be running in dogged, one-dimensional channels which are reminiscent of the freeways during rush hour. As mass media has grown to become a kind of environment, it is not really contributing to any pool of useful knowledge. The real community of humans, in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers, of all humans to the extent they desire to know. Television has become the major mental and physical experiential field for most of the people in the country, and the confusion of television information with a wider, direct mode of experience is advancing rapidly. Become so many are confusing television experience with direct experience of the World, we are not noticing that the experience itself is being unified to the single behavior of watching television. Switching from channel to channel, believing that a sports program was a significantly different experience from a police program or news of a Russian war, all 121 million viewers are sitting separately in dark rooms engaged in exactly the same activity at the same time: watching television. It is as if the whole nation has gathered at a gigantic three-ring circus. It has become possible for a nation of 325 million people to be spoken to as individuals, one to one, the television set to the person or family, all at once. So many should be chilled at the thought, realizing that these conditions of television viewing—confusion, unification, isolation, especially when combined with passivity and the effects of implanted imagery—are ideal preconditions for the imposition of autocracy. President Trump have uncovered, through an exhaustive investigation by law enforcement agencies, that the TV news media is involved in a massive conspiracy to destroy our democracy, a conspiracy which enjoys at least the tacit support of thousands of students, journalist, attorneys and even certain judges and elected officials. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Television is the perfect instrument to help bring tyrannical control. We can all be spoken to at the same time, night or day, from a centralized information source. In fact, we are. Every day, a handful of people speak, the rest listen. In many ways, as we saw with the recent Presidential Election, television makes the military coup and mass arrests of the imagination unnecessary. People thought that these subtle coups would make brutal and heavy-handed means of confining awareness unnecessary, but it seems to be making it worse. The riots, violence, kidnappings, hijacking, bombings—the sole purpose of these actions is often no more than media exposure. Sensing that the television is now the country’s main transmitter or reality, individuals began to take person action to affect it. Something in the nature of television imagery allows form to supersede content. However, the gravest mistake that can be made by a media creature is to assault the machine. The machine does not care about its fantasies. A new one will do. Bringing down Trump was just as good for ratings as supporting him. Better. More action. The only goals of the machine are to contribute to be the real power behind the throne, no matter who is king, and to remain the primary factor in all public perception. Television has the power to create presidents, and it has the power to destroy them. Most people do not raise complaint against a machine doing what it is designed to do. After all, who expects a machine to notice its own side effects? To care about the social and psychic consequences of its own presence? Machines asks no questions, have no peripheral vision or depth perception. They see the future through the fixed eye of their technical possibilities. However, it is well said that in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is kind. In America, and increasingly in the rest of the World, technology is a one-eyed king ruling unopposed amidst idiot cheering. Globally, there are 5.36 billion people Worldwide who are TV users, and that number is expected to reach 5.7 billion by 2026. Humans cannot live by electric wiring alone, and this obvious fact must be part of any plans we make for the future. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Power, utility, and prestige of the word have significantly diminished. All most all of the presidential candidates found their vote-getting power in their images and left content out as confusing and irrelevant. They were correct to do this. As we know, a campaign run on content could not possibly work on television. During the years that television was coming into its own as the central factor in American personal and political life, its basic nature and the effects it had on human beings and their institutions were rarely examined The problems that people did discuss were concentrated in three main areas: commercialism, access and programming. The speed, range, and impersonality of modern media undermine the oral tradition and therefore weaken the possibility of a nourishing community life. And in these days when lying is called misspeaking or disinformation, Newspeak becomes the normal mode of discourse. Psychologist, parents’ groups and educators lobbied against the dominance of sensational, superficial, irrelevant and violent programs. They sought programs with “prosocial values.” They especially wanted new emphasis on humanistic and educational shows for children. These groups saw no reason why such values as cooperation, loving and caring could not be as appropriate for television programming as violence and competition, but yet, no one still has censored the news nor warned readers that the informational may be fiction and not necessarily scholarly. Historians lobbied for more documentaries, believing that television has no greater inherent limits to its ability to present historical truth than the media that had preceded it. They succeeded in getting legislation requiring that TV networks permanently store their news and documentary footage. Now we can look to a future in which the present era will be understood in terms of the television treatment of it. Ecologist assumed television could be a potentially useful tool in expanding knowledge of how our species interacts with natural forces. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Political radicals believed television could stimulate deeper understanding of complex issues. Some groups believe there is a possibility to build sensitivity to their culture and philosophy through TV. Listen, everybody is watching TV. If we handle this the right way, we can reach everyone. Because of this, the decline of language may have proceeded so far that most people no longer perceive it as a problem. An analogy here might clarify this. It is said that the brain in the only organ of our body that feels no pain and therefore does not know when it is injured. The brain does not regard brain damage as a problem. If we think of language as the brain of a civilization, the it is possible that severe language-damage may not be perceived by the social body as a problem. It is possible that we have adapted ourselves to disinformation, to Newspeak, to public-relations hype, to imagery disguised as thought, to picture newspapers and magazines, to religion revealed in the form of entertainment, to politics in the form of a thirty-second television commercial. In adapting ourselves, we come to accept the present situation as the only available standard and conclude that this is the best of all possible Worlds. However, perhaps this is not the case. There does appear to be a national concern about illiteracy, aliteracy, and the persisting decline in our young people’s analytic ability. There is even a movement that wants to give the highest priority to teaching critical thinking in schools. Education, a subject never far from the issues raised by technology and language, attempts to understand and resolve new conditions of culture. Nonetheless, sometimes it is great fun to complain and, in America, it can even be profitable. However, unless one’s complaints are grounded in a sense of duty to one’s country or to a recognizable humane tradition, they are not worthy of serious attention. Everybody engages in creative arts and is likely to carry a sketchbook, proving when the psychologists and progressive educators have always claimed, that every child is creative if not blocked. Resigning from the rat race, they have removed the block. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
They work at these arts honestly, with earnest absorption, and even if they do continually subject one another and passers-by to listening to readings, and encourage the community by exclaiming, “It is the greatest!” Such creative activity sharpens the perceptions, releases and refines feelings, and is a powerful community bond. In itself it has no relation to the production of art works or the miserable life of sacrifice that an artist leads. It is personal cultivation, not much different from finger paintings. Like the conversation just described, its aim is action and self-expression and not the creation of culture and value or making a difference in further World. There is, of course, no reason why it should be. All men are creative but few are artists. Art making requires a peculiar psychotic disposition. Let me formulate the artistic disposition as following: it is reacting with one’s ideal to the flaw in oneself and in the World, and somehow making that reaction formation solid enough in the medium so that it indeed becomes an improved bit of real World for others. This is an unusual combination of psychological machinery and talents, and those who, having it, go on to appoint themselves to such a thankless vocation, are rarer still. These few are not themselves Hipsters, for they have a vocation, they are not resigned. (My observation is that is artists are blocked in their vocation, they cannot resign themselves to seeking other experiences, and certainly they do not do finger painting, for if they can do finger painting they can make art.) Nevertheless, living among the Hipsters, there will be a disproportionate number of artists, for the same reason that artists gravitate to any bohemia. Also, some of these genuine undersigned artists will make works that speak for the Hipster community that they live among. That is, the “Hipster” artists are not themselves Hipsters, for they are artists; but their art work tell us about the Hipster. This situation rises interesting questions about the relation of an artist and his immediate audience, and it is worth exploring. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
It is both an advantage and a disadvantage for an artist to have around him an intensely creative gang of friends who are not rival artists. They provide him an immediate audience that helps assuage the sufferings of art loneliness and art guilt. On the other hand, it is a somewhat sickening audience because it has no objective cultural standard, it is not in the stream of ancient and international tradition. So its exclamations, “It is the greatest!” or, “Go, man, go!” do not give much security. The artists finds that he is a parochial group hero, when the culture hero for the immortal World. Let me tell a few anecdotes to illustrate this fascinating dilemma of the relation of the “Hipster” artist both to the Hipster and the objective culture in which he must finally exist. An incident at a party for Patchen. Patchen is a poet of the “previous” generation, of long-proven integrity, with an immense body of work, some of which is obviously good, and the importance of the whole of it (may much still be added!) not yet clear. The point of our anecdote is that Patchen has the respect of writers but has received no public acclaim, no money, no easy publication. Now at this party, one of the best “Hipster” writers, a genuine young artist, came demanding that the older poet give some recognition to the tribe of Hipster poets, to “give them a chance.” This was ironical since, riding on the Madison Avenue notoriety that we have mentioned, they had all got far more public acclaim, invitations to universities, night-club readings, than all of us put together. However, Patchen asked for the names. The Hipster spokesman reeled off twenty, and Patchen unerringly pointed out the two who were worthwhile. This threw the younger poet into a passion, for he needed, evidently, to win artistic recognition also for his parochial audience, among who he was a hero, in order to reassure himself that he was a poet, which he was and as Patchen would at once have said. So he insulted the older man. Patchen rose to his height, called him a young punk, and left. The young man was crushed, burst into tears (he was drunk), and also left. At this, a young woman who often accompanied him, came up to me and clutched me by the knees, pleading with me to help him grow up, for nobody, she said paid him any attention. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
That is, the Hipster audience, having resigned, is not in the World; yet being an eager creative audience, it wins the love and loyalty of its poet who becomes its hero and spokesman. However, he too, then, doubts that he is in the World and has a vocation. As a Hipster spokesman he receives notoriety and the chance of the wide public that every poet wants and needs; but he cannot help feeling that he is getting it as a pawn of the organized system. Here is a simpler illustration of the relation of the spokesman-artist to the objective culture. This fellow is a much weaker poet, more nearly Hipster himself, and quite conceited. At a reading of some other poet who is not a Hipster spokesman, he tries to stop the reading by shouting, “Do not listen to this crap! let us hear from X.” His maneuver is to make the parochial the only existing culture; then, by definition, he himself is an artist. And here is an illustration of the most elementary response. A Hipster spokesman, not ungifted but probably too immature to accomplish much, gives a reading in a theater. During the intermission, he asks a rather formidable and respected critic what he thinks of a particular poem, and the critic says frankly that it is childish. At this the outraged poet, very drunk, stands in the lobby screaming, “I hope you die! I hope art dies! I hope all artists die!” These illustrations and the analysis of the Hipster conversation brings out the same point: In a milieu of resignation, where the young men think of society as a closed room in which there are no values but the rejected rat race or what they can produce out of their own guts, it is extremely hard to aim at objective truth or World culture. One’s own products are likely to be personal or parochial. Shared creative expression has a therapeutic effect, and so results in transference, unconscious attachment. The striking, and often amusing, example of this is the young ladies who take modern dancing, with its beautiful exercises that release tense muscles; they are all head over ears in love with Paris and Beyonce, and fiercely loyal and sectarian. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
The same occurs among the young Hipster, except that, since there is no “leader,” the emerging love attaches either to the community or to each one’s self-image narcissistically. This makes for a powerful warmth of life—“the warmth of assembled animal bodies,” as Kafka said—but it makes even harder to get into the World. It gives the young men a daily interpersonal excitement, more satisfactory than the empty belonging or conformity of the organization, and happier than the loneliness of art. However, it does not give them “something to do.” The wretchedness of a widow’s life was, however, perhaps not the worst consequence of her husband’s death. After all, she was still alive, in a manner of speaking. Many Hindus, mostly men, considered this intolerably lenient. They believed that if a woman’s husband was happy, so should she be. If he was said, so should she be. And if he was dead, so should she be. So even creeping miserably around a relative’s or spiteful in-law’s home was too soft an existence. Any good widow (a Hindu oxymoron) would know better than to impose her tainted self on this World. That was what suttee—immolation on the husband’s funeral pyre—was for. The “paramountcy of a woman’s chastity” was the most compelling reason for suttee, although financial and property considerations also cost many an inconvenient widow her life. One anti-suttee crusader explained that relatives and in-laws feared that “if there was no cremation, widows may go astray; if they burn, this fear is removed. Their family and relations are freed from apprehension.” From this perspective, suttee becomes “the ultimate chastity belt.” The widow who willingly clutches her husband’s sandals and climbs up unaided to lie beside his corpse as the fagots are fired is truly reverenced. Once they are safely crisped, such widows are lauded and mythologized much like Muslim suicide bombers who eagerly launch themselves as human explosives to ascend directly to paradise. The great difference is, huge numbers of suttees have not gone willingly to their incineration. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Those who did were driven either by religious conviction or, more probably, by despair at their lot. Though suttee was legally banned in 1829, it has flourished until well into the twentieth century—a mere three and a half decades ago—when teenaged Roop Kanwar shared her husband’s cremation in September 1987. For centuries, witnesses have reported force in supposedly voluntary suttees. In the seventeenth century at Lahore, Frenchman Francois Bernier watched as a few Brahmins and an old woman immobilized a shivering and sobering twelve-year-old widow with ropes, then forced her onto the pyre. He saw another suttee prevented from escaping the billowing flames by men carrying long poles. In the eighteenth century, a Western observer saw a widow tied down beside her dead husband on heaped logs that were then set ablaze. However, in the dark and rainy night, the widow managed to free herself from the scorching flames and hid nearby. Soon, however, her relatives noticed only one body on the pyre. They raised the alarm and quickly found the wretched woman cowering under some brushwood. Her son hauled her back and ordered her to either hurl herself back onto the funeral pyre or at least to drown or hang herself. If she refused, he warned, she would cause him to lose his caste. Such stories abound. Widows were drugged, beaten, bound, terrorized, and tied down beside their dead husbands. Often, they were bound with slow burning shots of green bamboo that would hold them until the died. In 1835, despite livid protests by the British agent, the fives queens of a deceased ruler were hauled, screaming and protecting, to their death of his pyre. In the 1950s, a suttee who escaped from the flames lay charred and dying for two days under a tree, and nobody offered her the slightest assistance. Roop Kanwar was eighteen when her husband of eight months died of gastroenteritis in Deorala, a village in Rajasthan. Hours later, still on September 4, 1987, stern men armed with waving swords escorted her to her husband’s hastily contrived funeral pyre. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Some eyewitnesses thought she walked unsteadily and foamed at the mouth, while to others she was cheerful and composed. (Statements were impossible to corroborate, with participants understandably reluctant to admit they had attended the illegal event.) “Mummy! Papa!” Roop cried, thrashing her hands as the flames, ignited by her conveniently unindictable, underage brother-in-law, licked at her body. Neither Mummy nor Papa were there, of course; the were informed of the daughter’s “courageous decision” only after the fact. Roop Kanwar was the (hopefully) las victim of centuries of tradition, her death facilitated by authorities who civic-mindedly seized upon this fortuitous opportunity to bring some pilgrimage business into their little village. As Roop’s in-laws swaggered about, proclaiming their honor, Deorala suddenly became a shiny new dot on the religious map. The heat of passion is ice-cold compared to the inferno of a suttee’s sad ending. Millions of suttees have undoubtedly quavered to their terrible deaths, secure in their righteousness and proud of, or at least grateful for, the honor the flames will soon reflect on their entire family. Millions more have been forced onto the flames by relatives and in-laws. These latter are determined to eliminate the unwanted presence of the widows, and above all, to guarantee they will never disgrace themselves or their loved (even if unloving) ones by an unchaste thought, much less a deed. Suttee is, after all, a preemptive stive against potential unchastity. Thinking matters. However, many of the facts we think about are false. And much of what we believe not always the most enlightened perspective. Despite the tidal waves of data, information and knowledge crashing over us today, a greater and greater percentage of what we know is, in fact, less and less true. Even if we could believe the media, even if every advertiser were truthful, every lawyer honest, every politician sealed one’s lips, every adulterer confessed and every fast-talking telemarketer went straight, much of the information we consume, as we will see, would still not be truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
If this is the case, how should individuals—or, for that matter, companies or countries—turn the deep fundamental of knowledge into wealth? Some knowledge has always been needed to produce wealth. Hunter-gatherers had to know the migratory patterns of the animals they pursued. Peasants came to know a lot about soil. Normally, however, once learned the same knowledge remained useful generation after generation. Factory workers had to know how to operate their machines quickly and safely for as long as they had the job. Today work-relevant knowledge changes so rapidly that more and more new knowledge has to be learned both on and off the job. Learning becomes a continuous-flow process. However, we cannot learn everything fast enough. And if some of what we think is stupid, that helps explain why there is no need to be embarrassed. We are not alone in believing stupidities. The reason is that every chunk of knowledge has a limited shelf life. At some point it becomes obsolete knowledge—what might more appropriately be called “obsoledge.” Does Plato’s Republic or Aristotle’s Poetics constitute “knowledge”? Or the ideas of Confucius or Kant? We can, of course, describe their ideas as wisdom. However, the wisdom of these authors or philosophers was based on what they knew—their own knowledge base—and much of what they knew was, in fact, false. Aristotle, whose views held sway across Europe for almost two thousand years, believed that eels were asexual and “originated in…the entrails of the Earth.” He also believed that the Indian Ocean was a landlocked sea—a geographical error that was still shared centuries later by Ptolemy and other European and Islamic scholars. In the third century AD, Porphyry, the biographer of Pythagoras, assured his readers that is you took park of a bean plant, put it into an earthenware pot, buried it for three months, then dug it up, you would surely find either the head of a child or female private parts. In the seventh century, Saint Isadore of Seville assured contemporaries that “bees are generated from decomposed veal.” Half a millennium later no less a genius than Leonardo da Vinci declared that beavers knew the private parts where being used by humans for medicinal purposes. When trapped, he asserted, a beaver bites them off “and leaves them to its enemies.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
When tomatoes, native to South America, first reached Europe in the sixteenth century, perfectly intelligent people knew that they were toxic to humans. It was two hundred years before Linnaeus declared otherwise. And as late as 1820 when he risked eating two tomatoes to prove Linnaeus was right, a particular daring fellow attracted a large crowed. However, obsoledge is not always assuming. As late as 1892 it was common knowledge—and scientifically accepted since the time of Galileo—that the planet Jupiter had four satellites. That knowledge became obsolete, however, on September 9 of that years, when astronomer E.E. Barnard of the Lick Observatory discovered a fifth moon. By 2003, astronomers had counted six. Similarly, scientists for decades had assumed that there were only nine planets in our solar system. However, in 2005, a California Institute of Technology astronomer discovered an object he named Xena, which he and other scientists believed may be a tenth planet orbiting our sun. Then there was London physiologist L. Erskine Hill, who reported in 1912 that experimental evidence showed the “purity of air is of no importance.” If, over the last few decades, we have not learned otherwise, how many more people around the World would have died of pollution related caused? And how many patients will die today because somewhere an otherwise intelligent doctor is manipulating information or relying on outdated “fact,” learned or manufactured years ago in medical school or by junk scientists? How many companies will go belly-up because of a marketing strategy based on yesterday’s fad? How many investments are doomed because of out-of-date financial data? What if your employer decided to manipulate your personal information so he could reinvest your earnings into his shell corporation? And what about tomorrow’s deaths or disaster just waiting to happen? #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Look, for example, at the minutes of the September 2002 meeting of the Advisory Committee of CERN users. (CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research.) Tucked away among references to decisions about providing ashtrays “close to the outside doors of major buildings for smokers” and notifications of “changes in mail delivery service” is the following item: “The names of persons to be contacted in case of accidents should be restored in the Human Resource database.” Why on Earth, one might ask, should the list of persons to be contacted in case of a nuclear accident be missing? The answer: Because “for the majority of people the information became obsolete” and the administration “did not have the resources to ensure systematic updating.” It took the chairman of the users’ group to point out that “the potential human cost in case of a serious accident is immense, and a solution should be found.” What is clear is that wherever knowledge is stored, whether in digital databases or inside our brains, there is the equivalent of Aunt Emily’s attic overstuffed with obsoledge—facts, ideas, theories, image, and insights that have been outrun by change or replaced by later, presumably more accurate, truths. Obsoledge is a big part of the knowledge base of every person, business, institution and society. By accelerating change, we also speed up the rate at which knowledge becomes obsoledge. Unless constantly and ruthlessly updated, experience on the job becomes less valuable. Databases are out of date by the time they are published. With every passing semi-second, the accuracy of our knowledge about our investments, our markets, our competition, our technology and out customers’ needs diminishes. As a result, whether they are aware of it or not, companies, governments and individual today base more of their daily decisions on obsoledge—on ideas and assumptions that have been falsified by change—than ever before. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Occasionally, of course, some antique bit of obsoledge comes back to life, as it were, and proves useful today because the context around it has changed and given it powerful new meaning. However, more often than not, the reverse is true. Ironically, in advanced economies, companies brag about “knowledge management,” “knowledge assets” and “intellectual property.” Yet with all the numbers crunched by financial quants, economists, companies and governments, no one knows what obsoledge costs us in the form of degraded decision-making. What, one might ask, is the drag placed on individual investments, corporate profits, economic development, poverty-reduction programs and wealth creation in general? Beneath all of this, moreover, lies an even more important, hidden epistemological change. It affects not merely what we regard as knowledge but the tools we use to acquire it. Among these instruments of thought, few are remotely as important as analogy, in which we identify similarities in two or more phenomena and then draw conclusions from one to apply to the other. Humans can barely think or talk without making analogies. The Irish golfer Padraig Harrington tells a sports reports that “ A U.S. Open is one that really tests your ability to hit….you sort of want to be like a machine.” Which takes us back to the followers of Newton who said the entire cosmos was “like” a machine. Then there are all the people described has having “a mind like a computer,” or who “sleep like a baby,” or who are told to invest “like a pro” or think “like a genius.” Implicit analogies are built into language itself. Thus we still rate cars in terms of their “horsepower”—a leftover from the day when they were seen as analogs of horse-drawn coaches and were know as “horseless carriages.” However, the thought-tool we call analogy is growing harder to use. Analogies, always tricky, are growing trickier. For as the World changes, old similarities can turn into dissimilarities. Once-legitimate comparisons become strained. As parallels with the past break down, often unnoticed, conclusions based on them become misleading. And the faster the rate of change, the shorter the useful life span of analogies. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
In this way, a change in one deep fundamental—time—affects a basic tool we use in the pursuit of another—knowledge. In sum, then, as we have seen, even among experts on the knowledge economy, few have thought much about what might be called the law of obsoledge: As change accelerates, so does the speed at which still more obsoledge accumulates. All of us carry with us a far bigger burden of obsolete knowledge than our ancestors did in the slower-moving societies of yesterday. And that is why so many of our most cherished ideas will set our descendants roaring with laughter. “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Keep your loins girded and your lamps burning, and be like people who are waiting for their master to return home from the marriage feast, so that when one returns from the wedding and comes and knocks, they may open to one immediately,” reports Luke 12.34-36. Behold, my people, the spring has come; the Earth has received the embraces of the sun. And we shall soon see the results of that love. One may have never seen fiercer wonders—past the wit of any spirit to tell, but one of those who, when this planet’s sphering time doth close, will be its high remembrancers: who are they? The mighty ones have an eternal day. All souls are of equal importance before God. The soul, in the sense of the true self, is only spiritual. Of great importance are the evolutionary changes through which humankind in general has been passing during recent centuries. In the coming age, balance will be restored for people of both genders and all races, and everyone will take their rightful place alongside the dominant groups in the leadership of the whole race. Evolutionary trend of things are being the human race closer and closer to enlightenment and thus making it possible for everyone to claim and receive what is best for them in life. Fear not, neither be dismayed, O America; for lo, God will save you from afar, and your children from the lands of captivity. O America, you shall again be quiet and at ease, and none shall make you afraid. For a brief moment God has forsaken us, but with great compassion will He gather us. For even if the mountains depart and the hills move, God’s kindness will not depart from us. Nor His covenant of peace be removed. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
Cresleigh Homes
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A Devil Who Has Unity Will be a God
Behind the accepted history of our civilization—of great leaders and mass movements, of politics and progress—there is an alternative history, a shadow tradition. It is an oft-neglected World full of villains and vice, scoundrels and sorcerers, with an impact upon our culture out of proportion with the numbers of people involved. Almost everything about magic, including the forms it takes and the customs associated with it, gives one the impression that it is a religion of the devil. It everywhere seeks to mimic the World of faith as we find it revealed in the Christian Bible. There is a dark side of Western culture: the Satanic tradition. Even the serpent in the Garden of Eden—who tempts Adam and Eve to “Original Sin”—does not become a manifestation of evil (“that Ancient Serpent,” as Satan is sometimes know) until later. This change occurs with the advent of Christianity, which promotes Satan from a mischievous servant of God to His implacable opponent. The Roman Empire had thrived by absorbing, rather than destroying, the cultures they conquered, welcoming foreign gods into their temples as part of policy of conquest by integration. The Christians could not stomach this. Their God was supreme, and all other deities—initially regarded as hollow superstitions—began to be portrayed by their theologians as actively evil, demonic. This doctrine, demonization, defined the totalitarian nature of the Christian creed. These demons required a leader, and so Satan was reborn not just as an adversary, but as the Adversary. Myths began to grow up around this new Prince of Darkness, cribbed from fanciful reinterpretations of existing doctrine and the ravings of Christian hermits driven half-mad by isolation in the desert. Satan’s power is first suggested in the New Testament, when He tempts Jesus Christ with mastery of the kingdoms of the World—implying He has them all in His possession. The Old and New Testaments claim that the Devil was once the leader of the Watcher angels. These angels were commanded by God to watch over humankind, but they pitied moral men and lusted after mortal women. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
For teaching forbidden knowledge and copulating with their charges (in theological terms, the equivalent of a shepherd disgracing himself with his flock) these disobedient angels were cast from Heaven to become the denizens of Hell, whilst their children became demons and monsters. Satan—or Semjaza, as He is known here—is the leader of these disobedient angels. Another more widely-accepted version of the same story has Satan trying to claim God’s throne before loyal angels cast Him and his co-conspirators into darkness. Traditionally, the question of whether one personally regards Satan’s act as one of treachery or bravery is the definition of an individual’s loyalties in the war between darkness and light. Significantly, however, many traditions state that, before His fall from grace, Satan was known as Lucifer: derived from the Latin “Light bringer.” As an act of worship is composed of certain elements, so too is an act of magic. There are basically four constituents that are necessary. Invoking, charming, a symbolic action, and the use of a fetish. One may invoke either Satan or even the Trinity, and it is this that decides whether the magic is to be black or white. Such invoking is a counterpart to our addressing of God in prayer, as for example, when we say “Our Father.” The charm or spell that then follows brings the force of magic into play. This imitates our use of the Scriptures and our reference to the promises of the Christian Bible. The symbolic action underlies and supports the charm and mimics such scriptural actions as, for instance, the laying on of hands or kneeling in prayer. The use of a fetish, that is a magically charged object, corresponds perhaps to the use of water in baptism or bread and spirits in the case of the Lord’s supper. Though Christians never got their Apocalypse, they did win their spiritual war when, in the fourth century, an embattled Roman Empire adopted Christianity as the state religion. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
The short-term benefits were obvious: Christianity appealed to the oppressed, promising them great reward in the afterlife; it also appealed to the oppressor, demanding the downtrodden obeyed their obeyed their superiors if they wished to enjoy rewards. The glories of a classical World built on pagan pragmatism were eroded, then destroyed, by Christian intolerance. As the Roman Empire fell in one of history’s many dark ironies the Catholic Church set itself up in its place. Imperial purple was the uniform of colour for the Church leaders’ new robes, Latin their sacred tongue, Rome their headquarters. However, while this new Roman Catholic Church could steal the superficial glories of the empire they had destroyed, they could begin to emulate the culture, comfort or security that Imperial Rome had provided to its citizens. The end of the World had failed to arrive on schedule, but the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—War, Death, Famine and Plagued—still characterized the medieval era, when the Christian creed held Europe in its thrall. The Middle Ages had arrived, and with them an era of cultural depression, a millennium of darkness, squalor and misery. The Gnostics believed that there were two equally-powerful gods—one “good,” the other “evil.” Some though the evil God was the one described in the Old Testament, the creator of this World, while the benevolent God described in the New Testament was His foe. In Gnostic doctrine, only pure spirit was “good.” All matter, including the human body, was “evil,” and humankind was made up of spirits trapped in prions of flesh. Widely suppressed with increasing severity, Gnosticism began to take on a variety of increasingly dark and erotic forms. Some Gnostics believed that, as all flesh was evil, it did not matter what use it was put to—in this sense, carnal excess could even be seen as redemptive, as with cults like the third-century Carpocratians, who indulged in ritualized pleasures of the flesh. Widely suppressed with increasing severity, Gnosticism began to take on a variety of increasingly dark and exotic forms. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Others, like the Cainite sect of the fourth century, reasoned that if the Old Testament God was evil, then His opponents must be good—therefore revering Old Testament villains like Cain, who proved his virtue in combat by murdering his brother, Abel. It is tempting to regard these early movements as the first Satanic sects, but the attitude of most Gnostics—that the flesh was inherently evil—was just as pathological as that of their pleasure-hating Catholic oppressors. This is perhaps best demonstrated by the Cathar sects. The first of these, the Bogomils, was formed in the Balkans during the tenth century. The Bogomils believed that Man was created when Satan vomited into an empty human vessel—a vivid illustration of their unhealthy attitude to their own bodies. Some have suggested Gnostic roots for the mysterious Luciferian cult that appears to have thrived secretly in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Germany thought Lucifer was a curious, cadaverous figure whose body glowed during their subterranean rites—has been unjustly cast from Heaven by a treacherous God, and honoured Him in orgiastic ceremonies that also featured cats as objects of worship. One other medieval cult has generated more fanciful theories than the Cathars and Luciferians combined. The Order of the Knights Templar was founded in 1118 to protect Christian pilgrims visiting Jerusalem, combining the military skills of a trained warrior with the pious dedication of a monk. Feared by their heathen foe and revered by their Christian brethren, the Templars rose from poverty-stricken obscurity to become one of the wealthiest, most powerful institutions in Europe. Their fall from grace was just as dramatic when, in 1314, King Philip of France smashed the Order with a campaign of mass arrests. King Philip claimed that, beneath their pious exteriors, these warrior monks were in fact an international Devil-worshipping cult and many of their number, including their Grand Master Jacques de Molay, were burnt alive for their alleged crimes. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
The blood lust of the medieval Church was far from sated by the persecution of such heretics. In the 1480s, with full papal backing, two monks named Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer issued a practical witch-hunting manual entitled Malleus Maleficarum (“The Hammer of the Witches’), describing how to identify witches and force confessions from them under torture before consigning them to the flames. Previously, witchcraft was officially regarded as a delusion, but Malleus Maleficarum helped trigger an international campaign of witch-hunts that lasted over two centuries and claimed upwards of 250,000 lives in the most brutal circumstances. The history of witchcraft is swathed in controversy. Did the witch-cult truly exist? And, if it did, did it consist of isolated, eccentric old women, or was it a coherent international movement? Some modern theorists maintain that the witch-cult was a benevolent religion that worshipped ancient nature gods, ancestor of the modern Wiccans. However, several more substantial historical accounts refer to Satan as “the God od the Serfs”: the Middle Ages were desperate times for the peasantry, and, if the Christian clergy supported the nobility, where else could the desperate and downtrodden turn but to the Devil? The witch-cult, therefore, many have been a creed of social rebellion based upon orgiastic revels, drug abuse and the deliberate adoption of heretical symbols. Certainly, the medieval peasantry regarded the Devil in a very different way to the medieval Church. The grinning gargoyles that leered from church roofs, the slapstick demons that peopled the “mystery” plays put on by rural villagers, and the Devil who appears in the folk tales of the day—all suggest a view of Satan among ordinary working folk that was sympathetic to Christianity’s supposedly terrifying, hateful anti-hero. It was not only the peasantry who made resort to the demonic in times of need. In 1440 the French Baron Gilles de Rais, once one of the most wealthy and powerful men in Europe, was executed for conjuring devils. There were also other charges laid against this licentious warlord. In fact, de Rais was a medieval serial killer, and was also a fervent Christian. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
However, Gilles de Rais was certainly involved in black magic, but this was largely separate from his recreational crimes. On the one occasion he made use of the remains of a victim in a magical rite, the Baron was seized by remorse and, uniquely for him, gave the corpse a Christian burial. Like all good Christians, Gilles de Rais was more concerned with his own immortal soul than the actual physical suffering of those around him. De Rais employed sorcerers as part of his staff when his extravagant lifestyle threatened to bankrupt him. Sorcery and science were, as that time, close bedfellows. In fact, as recently as the eighteenth century, such black arts as alchemy, necromancy and astrology were regarded by many intellectuals as valid areas of scientific study. Then, just as now, many involved in pioneering research were motivated by avarice, with fast-buck schemes a favourite occupation among the scholars and sorcerers of the Middle Ages and Reminiscence. Gilles de Rais employed a number of such characters to discover the alchemical secret of creating gold from base metal. It was generally believed that the darker the magic, the higher the risk—and the higher the risk, the higher the potential reward. The most Satanic sciences was therefore the invocation of devils, the most dangerous and rewarding of all the dark arts. Medieval serial killer Gilles De Rais have a castle in Machecoul, France. Sorcerers employed by Gilles de Rais were part of a loose underground of travelling scholars who piled their wares secretly across medieval and Renaissance Europe. Operating outside the authority of the Church-controlled universities, these maverick academics were equally at home translating Greek, brewing strange medicines or confounding their clients with conjuring tricks. As far as the Church was concerned these men had made pacts with Satan, and, in many cases, they were right. Christian authorities forbade research into the mysteries of the Universe as blasphemy. Anybody whose greed or curiosity led them to ignore these warnings had knowingly or not, throw in their lot with the dark forces. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Of all the rituals of black magic none are as notorious as the Black Mass. At its most basic level, the Black Mass is a mockery of the orthodox Catholic Mass that substitutes the erotic and profane for its sacred elements. Black Mass priest, the French cleric Father Guiborg, who stood trial in 1678 alongside a notorious sorceress named Catherine Monvoisin, accused of the attempted murder of Louis XIV by magic. The case was a scandal of epic proportions, involving allegations of illicit abortions, child sacrifice and poisoning, all implicating people within Louis’ court. When it became clear that the King’s beautiful mistress, the Marquise de Montespan, was so heavily involved (perhaps even serving as the naked altar in once ceremony), Louis decided to draw a veil over events and proceedings were halted. Nevertheless, the macabre episode is dramatic evidence not only that the Black Mass was more than a myth, but that it was employed secretly at the highest levels of European society. Other groups existed at this time whose parodies of holy rites were if no less heartfelt, were more satirical. An informational network of Hellfire Club thrived in Britain during the eighteenth century, dedicated to debauchery and blasphemy. With members drawn from the cream of the political, artistic and literary establishments, they became sufficiently scandalous to inspire a number of Acts of Parliament aimed at their suppression. Historians have been inclined to dismiss the Hellfire Clubs as nothing more than riotous drinking societies, but the significance of many of the nation’s most powerful and brilliant men dedicating themselves to Satan is difficult to ignore. That they did so with laughter on their lips, and a drink in their hand does not dimmish the gestures so much as place them more firmly in the Satanic tradition. The inspiration for the Hellfire Clubs did not come exclusively from sorcerous sources, but also drew heavily from profane literature—such as Gargantua, an unusual work combining folklore, satire, coarse humour and light-hearted philosophy, written in the sixteenth century by a renegade monk named Francois Rabelais. Like any monastic abbey it is a place of seclusion, but in other respects it is an “anti-abbey,” dedicated to the pleasures of the flesh. Only the brightest, most beautiful and best are permitted within its walks, and its motto is “Fait Ce Que Vouldras” (“Do What You Will”). #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
One of the last and best known of the Hellfire Clubs was founded in emulation of the Abbey of Thelema, taking on its distinctive motto. The club was known as the order of Saint Francis, with headquarters in Medmenham Abbey near London and on its founder Sir Francis Dashwood’s estate in Buckinghamshire. The Order finally collapsed in the 1760s due to internal conflicts between members over the pressing political issues of the day, the demand for increasing independence by Britain’s American colonies. It is a measure of the club’s distinguished membership, however, that it contained prominent politicians from both sides of the debate. Sir (Saint) Francis was a close personal friend of Benjamin Franklin, the leading spokesman for the colonists in London, and one of the most important figures in founding the independent United States of America. Franklin was a frequent guest at Dashwood’s home, and it is tempting to image the fate of the American colonies—destined to become the World’s most powerful nation—being discussed at a smoky Hellfire Club meeting over fine spirits and harlots. (This may explain why the American Constitution, partially written by Franklin, made such a revolutionary separation between Church and State.) Anton LaVey, the twenty-first century’s foremost Satanist, claimed in typically bombastic fashion: “If people knew the role the Hell Fire Club played in Benjamin Franklin’s structuring of America, it could suggest changes like: One Nation Under Satan, or United Satanic America.” Many historically famous people were true Poets and of the Devil’s party without knowing it. For instance, this applies to William Blake and John Milton, as well as others. It also seems strange that the author (William Blake) of “Jerusalem,” still one of the most popular hymns sung in English churches, should belong to the Satanic tradition. But belong he does. Blake is often regarded as a pioneer of the Romantic movement. Today the term conjures images of willowy fops pressing flowers in flowing, loose-sleeved shirts, but in reality these young men were wild-eye radicals whose antics led a more restrained poet of the day to label them “the Satanic School.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Pleasures of the flesh and barbiturates and poetry were the fuel that inspired the fashionable rebel of the early nineteenth century. “I feel confident that I should have been a rebel Angel had the opportunity been mine, opined the poet, John Keats. Percy Bysshe Shelley, in many ways the most thoughtful of the romantics, was expelled from Oxford University in 1811 for his anti-Christian beliefs. He also had a strong demonic vein running through much of his own works. While the Romantics flirted with Satan, by the end of the nineteenth century a literary movement appeared that absolutely adored Him. The Decadents were poets, painters and authors who championed extremes of sensation over common sense or convention, their quest taking them to the brothels, opium dens and morgues of the World’s most fashionable and exotic cities. Inevitably, Satanism is a prominent them in the work of these artists. Most notorious among them is the foppish Isidore Ducasses, better know under his pennanme of the Comte de Lautreamont. De Lutreamont was absorbed by strongly Satanic idea about religion and human existence, potently expressed in his masterpiece, the bizarre 1868 epic The Songs of Maldoror, which combines nauseating horror and delirious absurdity in a surreal story of a war with God. The most significant figure of the nineteenth century maintained a burgeoning interest in the occult that also centered on Paris, capital city of decadence. The most significant figure of nineteenth-century sorcery was Eliphas Levin, whose shadow still falls across the history of the occult. In 1856, he published his magnum opus Dogme et ritual de la haute magie, (translated as Transcendental Magic), quickly building a reputation as Europe’s foremost authority on the magical arts. While outwardly a devoted Christian, a more careful reading of Levi’s works implies he thought Christianity was all well and good for the masses, but that more enlightened souls were entitled to probe deeper. There is a definite ambivalence about Levi’s relationship with Satan—sometimes he roundly denounced the Prince of Darkness, at others he suggests that Satan is potentially a useful or even beneficial force. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Another important anti-Christian figure of the late nineteenth century was the American writer Samuel L. Clemens, better known by his penname of Mark Twain. Many would be surprised to find Twain—author of the wholesome, much-loved Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn—credited as a Satanic thinker, but his own sentiments bear it out. As Twain once wrote in an essay, “I have always felt friendly towards Satan. Of course that is ancestral; it must be in the blood.” As his life progressed, Twain became increasingly bitter towards Christianity and its brutal, unenlightened God. Mark Twain also a chapter called 2006 A.D., which he feared if it was published at the time, he would be burnt alive for writing it. His final thoughts were issued in 1995, entitled The Bible According to Mark Twain. It appeared at the end of a century when American had come to dominate the World. It would be nice to believe, however fanciful the idea, that America’s best-loved writer was somehow hovering around taking notice, as the World entered a new Satanic era. To mark this new era, a couple global events happened back-to-back. On 25 August 2001, after filming Queen of the Damned and release a hugely successful self-titled Album, one of the most beautiful pop stars, Aaliyah Haughton was killed in a plane crash. Then there was an attack on the nation on 11 September 2001, when the Twin Towers were destroyed, as well as other American sites and over 3,500 people were killed. Since then, the Satanic spirit has been in a persistent state of conflict with the Universe—it constantly seeks knowledge and experience, in order to imprint itself upon its surroundings. It is the same spiritual rough edges that Eastern mystics wish to file off, in order to reach “enlightenment.” As many can see with Church doctrines being destroyed, God being removed from the government and buildings, national monuments being snatched down and relocated to someone’s basement, and some people no longer seeing themselves as men or women, loss of law and order, God’s vision Earth is being taken over by Satanic Libertinism, as people are indoctrinated by the media to “Live out Loud,” and “discover the true self,” as the TV new media sees it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
America is becoming a nightmarish laboratory for spiritual experimentation and mind-control games. A Devil who has unity will be a God. Sunday newspapers will always find it easier to print headlines of child murder than discuss masturbation. If you recall Dennis Wheatley’s stories of Satanic cultus and suburban Devil-worshippers—in satisfying the appetite, he helped create the popular image of Satanism. Wheatly dabbled with magic and was terribly dangerous, he lost touch with his friends after he slipped up in a ceremony and failed to master a demon, who has caused all his teeth to fall out. Wheatley prefaced his Satanic thrillers with dire warnings on the Devil and all His works—just thinking too long on Satan was dangerous enough, let alone his engaging in a Black Mass. Many people believed that Wheatly’s stories were more than just fiction, that the Satanic forces described in his novels were a real threat to the civilized World. It has been hinted at in popular culture, but is also believed that the Germans did use black magic during World War Two. Some truly believed that the power lurking behinds it eyes was literally Satanic. Sarah Winchester, heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune, was also known to be under attack by demonic forces, which is why many believe she built her beautiful, but bizarre mansion in San Jose, California with hidden rooms, secret passageways, and trap doors. The house was furnished with the finest materials and was a showcase of Victorian elegance and taste. However, prior to moving to San Jose, William Wirt Winchester and Sarah Winchester gave birth to a daughter named Anne. While enjoying Christian fellowship in their home in New Haven, they were disturbed when they prayed by the screaming of their newborn daughter. This happened consistently for two weeks. Mr. and Mrs. Winchester assured the prayer group that their child was all right, but they were as concerned as their guest were. One of the members in the prayer group started to think about the situation in connection with demons. However, he kept telling himself that surely such a small child could not be an object of demonic spirits. Nevertheless, they decided to experiment. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
During the usual time, of fellowship after service, the group leaders asked that everyone pray. They knew that the baby, who was busying sleeping, would have a hard time hearing the prayer. To their amazement, at the very first words of Mr. Merrill’s prayer, the baby began to scream and cry frantically for her mother, Mrs. Winchester. Mr. Merrill was convinced then that this was some kind of demon demonstration. To make sure, they did the same thing the next night, and again the child screamed hysterically. He decided the Holy Spirit was speaking to him to do something. He could not stand to see the child so tormented. So Mr. Merrill audibly cried to God to rebuke the demon powers and give the child complete deliverance with the Holy Spirit and angelic protection. Instantly she stopped sobbing and seemed quite normal. Mr. Winchester and Mr. Merrill spent much time in prayer that night. After another week, Mr. and Mrs. Winchester told Mr. Merrill that their child appeared completely delivered from the demonic assaults. However, less than a month later in July 1866, Annie Pardee Winchester died, ironically the same year the Winchester Repeating Arms Company was established. In March of 1881, William Winchester also died. It is easy to imagine how the combined grief of losing both a child and a spouse could be very crippling. However, if you have $20,000,000 and all the time in the World to help you cope, can you imagine what you would do? Mrs. Sarah L. Winchester’s response to the deaths of her child and husband left a beautiful, mysterious, and impressive architectural reflection of her psyche. The fascinating story of the Winchester Mystery House has its roots in the personal tragedies suffered by Mrs. Winchester and in the legacy of the Winchester rifle, “The Gun that Won the West.” According to some sources, the Boston medium consulted by Mrs. Winchester explained that her family and her fortune were being haunted by spirits—in fact, by the spirits of American Indians, Civil War soldiers, and others killed by the Winchester rifles. Supposedly the untimely deaths of her daughter and husbands were caused by these spirits, and it was implied that Mrs. Winchester might the next victim. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
However, the medium also claimed that there was an alternative. Mrs. Winchester was instructed to move west and appease these spirits by building a great house for them. As long as construction of the house never ceased, Mrs. Winchester could rest assured that her life was not in danger. Building such a house was even supposed to bring her eternal life. On a more practical note, maybe a change of scenery and a never-ending hobby were just what Mrs. Winchester needed to distract her from her grief. Whatever her actual motivations, Mrs. Winchester packed her bags and left New Haven, Connecticut to visit a niece who lived in Menlo Park, California. While there she discovered the perfect spot for her new home in the Satan Clara Valley. In 1884, she purchased an estate just three miles west of San Jose. Soon after the construction started, the architects discovered that the site was characteristic of an Irish ruin. Standing on a slight elevation, in the midst of a flat country, the castle lifted its turreted walls as proudly as when its ramparts were fringed with banners and glittered helmets and shields. In olden times it was a citadel of the town, and although it was fortified by a strong wall, protecting it alike from predatory assault and organized attack, it was clear that by treachery, surprise, or regular and long-continued siege that the castle had been taken. The central portion was a large square structure, this central fort was connected by double walls, the remains of which covered passages, with smaller fortresses, little castles built into the wall surrounding the citadel; and over these connecting walls, over the little castles, and over the piles of loose stones where once the strong outer walls had stood, the ivy grew in luxuriant profusion, throwing its dark green curtain on the unsightly masses, rounding the sharp edge of the masonry, hiding the rough corners as through ashamed of their roughness, and climbing the battlements of the central castle to spread nature’s mantle of charity over the remains of barbarous age, and forever conceal from human view the stony reminders of battle and blood. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
The success of the ivy was not complete. Here and there the corner of the battlement stood out in sharp relief, as though it had pushed back the struggling plant, and, by main force, had risen above the leaves, while on one side a round tower lifted itself as if to show that a stone tower could stand for six hundred years without permitting itself to become ivy-grown; that there could be individuality in towers as among humans. The great arched gateway too was not entirely subjugated, though the climbing tendrils and velvet leaves dressed the pillars and encroached on the arch. The keystone bore a rudely carved, crowned heard, and ivy vines, coming up underneath the arch, to take the old king by surprise, climbed the bearded chin, crossed the lips, and were playing before the nose as if to give it a sportive tweak, while the stern brow frowned in anger at the plant’s presumption. However, only a few surly crags of the citadel refused to go gracefully into the retirement furnished by the ivy, and the loving plant softened every outline, filled up ever crevice, bridged the gaps in the walls, toned down the rudeness of projecting stones, and did everything that an ivy-plant could do to make the rugged old castle as presentable as were the high round mounds without the city, cast up by the besiegers when the enemy last encamped against it. The old castle had fallen on evil days—and over the next thirty-eight years Mrs. Winchester produced the sprawling complex we know today as the Winchester Mystery House. One day while on the estate, the sun had barely cleared away the thick, heavy mist, which was still slowly rising here and there, and the birds were majestically in search of their breakfast. While the famers were out tilling the fields, a long, lanky figure was draw to its full height, the white eyeballs and jagged teeth had a red glow about them, and he waved his hand triumphantly in the direction of the vanishing cloud of birds. Then there came a loud gun shot, then next thing anyone say was the quivering body of this of a man on the ground, and wild eyes staring open in the agony of death. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
The farmers ran over and glanced at the body of this man. They figured they better hide him in the long grass and come back after dinner to bury him. After dinner, they walked slowly at first, gradually increasing their pace as they became more distant from the mansion, and they never spoke a word. Then suddenly the, as they drew closer, the man clutched one of the farmer’s arms. It he pleading for help, so they hit him with a shovel and began to dig its grave. For more than an hour they worked desperately with the chopper and hunting-knife, being greatly assisted in their task by a rift in the ground where the soil had been softened by water running from the creek, and they stood up with sweat pouring from their faces, and stamped down the Earth to cover all traces of the man. They had filled the grave with some large stones that were lying about (remnants of some ancient temple, long ago deserted and forgotten), thus feeling secure that it could not easily be disturbed by animals. From the night on, a wolf would come howling around their cottages on the estate, which would make their blood run cold. They swore they were being haunted by the spirit of that man they murdered and that he some how much have entered this animal’s body, bent on obtaining vengeance. One of the farmers grew ill, he was thin, very pale, and haunted by a ghastly expression. He was a married man who had carried on an adulterous relationship with one of the maids the took care of Mrs. Winchester’s house. The maid was reputed to indulge in black magic. They day of the murder, the man had tried to end his illicit affair. He told the woman that he wanted to break off his relationship with her. She was very upset and threatened him, saying that if he did then his wife and children would suffer in the process. The man however, was determined to break it off and stuck to his decision. Later that day is when they suspected one of their fellow famers was a demon and shot and buried him. Two days later, the adulterous farmer’s son became ill. They rushed him to the hospital and he died there. The doctors were unable to diagnose the disease. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Later still, the adulterous famer’s wife and daughter fell ill. The man was by now quite frightened and remembered the threats of the woman with whom he had had the affair. He went to her and begged her not to use black magic against his family. She softened and said that she would stop. Thereupon his wife and daughter recovered quickly, but he died. During Aleister Crowley’s visit to the Winchester Mansion, He spoke to a farmer about his saw being stolen. Crowley, as you may know was a black magician, and called “the Great Beast 666,” after the devilish monster of the Book of Revelations. The farmer paid Crowley a considerable amount of money, and in returned he promised his immediate help, stating that the thief would die. The farmer and Crowley walked around the grounds of the mansion, and within three hours of his interview with Crowley, the thief had a fatal heart attack. At the Winchester mansion, Crowley claimed that black magic was very literally invoked against him. In 1898 Crowley was initiated into the Golden Dawn by its founder, the influential occultist S.L. MacGregor Mathers while at the Winchester mansion. Mathers was one of the “the Masters.” They were believed t be benevolent supermen, or demigods, who has spokes women on Earth. Mather become the “Supreme Magus,” and all members of the Golden Dawn signed an oath of obedience to him. It was unclear if Mrs. Winchester was part of the Golden Dawn, but some of these sorcerous rituals which were supposedly aimed toward gaining power and enlightenment, supposedly took place in her home. After a few séances at the Winchester mansion, Crowley fell out him Mathers. He alleged that Mather summoned a middle-aged vampiress Called “Mrs. M,” who confronted Crowley while they were at Mrs. Winchester’s mansion, where the vampiress transformed into a beautiful young woman. She subjected him to a near-fatal seduction. According to Crowley’s account, he repelled her with his mystic forces, whereupon: “She writhed back from me, and again approached me even more beautiful than she had been before. She was battling for her life now, and no longer for the blood of her victim. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
“The odour of man seemed to fill her whole subtle form with feline agility. One step nearer and then she sprang at me with an obscene word sought to press her scarlet lips to mine. As she did so I caught and held her at arm’s length and then smote the sorceress with her own current of evil. A bluish-green light seemed to play round the head of the vampire, and then the flaxen hair turned the colour of muddy snow, and the fair skin wrinkled, and her eyes dulled and became pewter dappled with the dregs of blood. The girl of twenty had gone; before me stook a hag of 60. With dribbling curses, she hobbled from the room.” If spiritism pertained only to pagan religions and had never affected the people in so-called Christian lands, then a careful study of its practices and phenomena might not be imperative. Interest in the occult is reaching alarming proportions and even some professing Christians are being duped into complicity with spiritistic traffic. This was true of the late Bishop James A. Pike. Worldwide spiritism is conservatively estimated to have at least seventy million adherents. Kurt E. Koch, a German evangelist and student of the occult for thirty years, enumerates sixteen different varieties of spiritistic practices. If spiritism is to be accurately evaluated and its somber relation to human experience comprehended, all of these must be carefully understood. Spiritistic phenomena may be conveniently divided into the following categories: physical phenomena (levitations, apports, and telekinesis); psychic phenomena (spiritistic visions, automatic writing, speaking in a trance, materialization, table lifting, tumbler moving, excursions of the psyche); metaphysical phenomena (apparitions, ghost); magic phenomena (magic persecution, magic defense); cultic phenomena (spiritistic cults, spiritism among Christians.) There are very scarce published accounts of Daisy, Mrs. Winchester’s niece, being haunted while staying at the Winchester mansion. However, she was reportedly strangely molested by spirits and witches; also the aforesaid Winchester Mystery House is still being haunted by spirits. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
While staying in Mrs. Winchester’s house, Daisy also suffered great annoyance every night from some invisible object, which threw stones and turf at her bed, the force of the blow often causing the curtains to open, and even drawing them from one end of the bed to the other. About the same time, also, the pillows were taken from under her head, and the clothes pulled off; and though a strict search was made, nothing could be discovered. Continuing to be annoyed in this way she removed to another room, being afraid to remain any long. Then about the 11th of December 1898, she was sitting in the twilight at the kitchen fire, a little body came in and sat down beside her. He appeared to be about eleven or twelve years old, with short black hair, having an old black bonnet on his head, a half-worn blanket about him trailing on the floor, and a torn vest under it, and kept his face covered with the blanket held before it. Daisy asked him several questions: Where he came from? Where he was going? Was he cold or hungry? and so on; but instead of answering her he got up and danced very nimbly rough the kitchen, and then ran out of the house and disappeared in the cow-shed. The servants ran after him, but he was nowhere to be seen; when they returned to the house, however, there he was beside them. They tried to catch him, but every time they attempted it, he ran off and could not be found. At lest one of the servants, seeing the master’s dog Zip coming in, cried out that her master was retuning home, and that she would soon catch the troublesome creature, upon which he immediately vanished, nor were they troubled by him again till February 1899. On the 11th of that month, which happened to be a Saturday, Mrs. Winchester was reading Dr. Wedderburn’s Sermons on the Covenant, when, laying the book aside for a little while, nobody being in the room all the time, it was suddenly taken away. She looked for it everywhere, but could not find it. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
On the following day the apparition already referred to came to the house, and breaking a pane of glass in one of the windows, thrust in his hand with the missing volume in it. He began to talk with one of the servants, Angus Spear, and told her that the kitchen, and that her mistress would never get it again. The girl asked him if he could read it, to which he replied that he could, adding that the Devil had taught him. Upon hearing this extraordinary confession she exclaimed, “The Lord bless me from thee! Thou hast got ill lear (learning).” He told her she might bless herself as often as she liked, but tht it could not save her; whereupon he produced a sword, and threatened to kill everybody in the mansion. This frightened her so much that she ran into the parlour and fastened the door, but the apparition laughed at her, and declared that he could come in by the smallest hole in the house like a cat or mouse, as the Devil could make him anything he pleased. He then took up a large stone, and hurled it through the parlour window, which, upon trial, could not be put out at the same place. A little after the servant and child looked out, and saw the apparition catching the turkey-cock, which he threw over his shoulder, holding him by the tail; and the bird making a great sputter with his feet, the stolen book was spurred out of the loop in the blanket where the boy had put it. He then leaped over a wall with the turkey-cock on his back. Presently the girl saw him endeavouring to draw his sword to kill the bird, but it escaped. Missing the book out of his blanket he ran nimbly up and down in search of it, and then with a club came and broke the glass of the parlour window. The girl again peeped out through the kitchen window, and saw him digging with his sword. She summoned up courage to ask him what he was doing, and he answered, “Making a grave for a corpse which will come out of this house very soon.” He refused, however, to say who it would be, but having delivered himself of this enlivening piece of information, flew over the hedge as if he had been a bird. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
For a day or two following nothing happened, but on the morning of the 15th the close where mysteriously taken off Daisy’s bed, and laid in a bundle behind it. Being put back by some of the servants they were gain removed, and this time folded up and placed under a large table which happened to be in the room. Again they were laid in order on the bed, and again they were taken off, and this third time made up in the shape of a corpse, or something that very closely resembled it. When this strange news spread through the neighbourhood many persons came to the house, and, after a thorough investigation lest there might be a trick in the matter, where obligated to acknowledge that there was something invisible at work. Reverend N. P. Wallgren and Reverend Osborn of the Swedish Evangelical Mission Church of San Jose stayed the whole of that day and the following night with that distressed family, spending much time in prayer. At night Daisy went to bd as usual in the haunted room, but got very little rest, and at about twelve o’ clock she cried out suddenly as if in great pain. Upon Mr. Sinclair asking her what was the matter, she said she felt a knife had been struck into her back. Next morning she quitted the haunted room and went to another; but the violent pain never left her back, on the 22nd of February, she almost died. During her illness the clothes were frequently taken off the bed which she occupied, and made up like a corpse, and even when a table and chairs were laid upon them to keep them on, they were mysteriously removed without any noise, and made up as before; but this never happened when anyone was in the room. The evening before she almost died, they were taken off as usual; but this time, instead of being made up in the customary way, they were folded with great care, and laid in a chest upstairs, where they were only found after a great deal of searching. At it height the Winchester Mansion encompassed 761 acres, was 9 stories high, approximately 125,000 square feet, and possessed as many as 500 to 600 rooms. Because so many changes were made, the mansion now stands 4 stories over 4 acres, is about 25,000 square feet, and has an impressive 160 remain. It is still a beautiful, rambling mansion and sure is worth a visit. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Winchester Mystery House
Watch your step in Sarah’s Séance Room! There are three exits in this room and only one entrance 😳 Those exits include the main door, a secret passageway leading into an unfinished closet, and this door that opens to an 8-foot drop into a kitchen sink below. https://www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/
🎟 link in bio. A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
I’m on to Your Game, You Can’t Make Me Flip
Leaders are people who do the right thing. They have a significant role in creating wisdom, and the know how and skill to do it all. So truly inspirational leadership is that it makes a way for the dream to be obtained. Amazing as it may seem, fully half a century after the knowledge economy began, we know embarrassingly little about the “knowledge” that lies behind it. If, for example, knowledge is the oil of tomorrow’s economy, as many have suggested, then how much of this intangible “oil” exists? Petroleum companies, armies, Wall Street traders and Middle East sheikhs spend fortunes trying to estimate the real—as distinct from claimed—size of global oil reserves. However, does anyone know how much the World knows? Or how the World’s knowledge supply is changing? How much of it is worth knowing? And what is it worth? To answer questions like these, we will need to blaze some surprising pathways, exploring bizarre beliefs about everything from the Christian Bible and the Holy Koran to science, the behavior of beavers and toxic tomatoes. The more we use…? Our starting point is a single critical fact: Knowledge—another of the deep fundamentals of revolutionary wealth—has become one of the fastest changing components of our economic and social environment. This is why any comparisons of knowledge to oil is misleading. The ways in which we store and deliver petroleum have changed only modestly in the past century—we still rely on pipes, tanks and tankers. By contrast, with the spread of computers, satellites, mobile phones, the Internet and other digital technologies, we are drastically altering the ways in which we create and store knowledge, the speed at which it decays, how we judge its validity, the tools we use to make more of it, the languages in which it is expressed, the degree of specialization and abstraction in which it is organized, the analogies we rely on, the amount that is quantified and the media that disseminate it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
Moreover, all these dimensions of knowledge are changing simultaneously, at speeds never before encountered—and opening up countless new ways to create wealth. Another basic difference between oil and knowledge is that the more oil we use, the less we have left. By contrast, as we have suggested, the more knowledge we use, the more we create. This difference alone makes of mainstream economics obsolete. Economics can no longer be defined—as it often was—as the science of the allocation of scarce resources. Knowledge is essentially inexhaustible. These changes in the way we relate to knowledge have powerful effects on real-World wealth—who gets it and how. They send lawyers, accountants and legislators scurrying to rewrite existing rules about taxes, accounting, privacy and intellectual property. They intensify competition and accelerate innovation. They make old regulatory rules obsolete. They create continuous turbulence and turnover in methods, markets, and management. They allow whole industries and sectors to move beyond mass production and mass consumption to higher-value-added, more personalized products, services and experiences. Above all, these changes in knowledge demand much faster, smarter decision-making under more and more complex, if not chaotic, conditions. Yet, for all the thousands of analyses and studies of emerging knowledge economies, the impact of knowledge on creating wealth has been, and remains, misleading undervalued. Though the United States of America is still a great manufacturing power, fewer than 20 percent of its labor force works in this sector. Fully 56 percent performs work that is managerial, financial, sales-related, clerical or professional. The category growing most rapidly of all is professional—the most knowledge-intensive. Such much-quoted numbers, however, underestimate the new reality. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Far more than 56 percent are engaged in knowledge work. That is because today many machine operators, whether in leading-edge American steel mills or, for that matter, South Korea consumer-product plants, spend at least part of their time monitoring computers, much like pilots in a 747 cockpit. Cars have computers in the windows, in the cockpit, on the grill and on the bumper. Truck drivers rely on computers in their cabs. They may not be categorized as knowledge workers, but they, too, are generating, processing and transmitting knowledge or the data and information that underlie it. They are, in effect, part-time knowledge workers, but are not counted as such. And that is not all that goes uncounted. The knowledge we all use to create wealth includes hard-to-measure tacit or implicit knowledge stored inside our heads. What makes us knowledgeable,” for example, is an everyday understanding of the people around us. It includes knowing whom to trust, how a boss will react to bad news, how teams work. It includes job skills and behavior we may have learned by simply watching others. It includes knowing about our own bodies and brains, how they perform and when they let us do our best work. Some of this tacit knowledge is trivial. However, some is vital to everyday life and to productive endeavors. It is that back-of-the-mind knowledge on which we all depend—knowledge we may not even know we have. And precisely because it is so varied, and so far in the background, it, too, is often ignored by economists. In short, for these and other reasons, knowledge has long been shortchanged by economists—and today more than ever. To peer into the heart of tomorrow’s economy, therefore, we need to compensate for this lack of knowledge about knowledge. Every one of us, at any given moment, has an individualized inventory of work- and wealth-related knowledge. Authors presumably know something about the craft of writing and about the book-publishing industry. Dentists know about teeth. Gas station attendants know about steering fluids. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
However, not all knowledge belongs to individuals. Work teams, companies, industries, institutions and whole economies each, at any given moment, develop their own collective knowledge supply. The same might be said of societies and nations. All this knowledge is stored in two fundamentally different ways. One part of the knowledge supply is found inside our skulls. In each of us there is a crowded, invisible warehouse full of knowledge and its precursor data and information. However, unlike a warehouse, it is also a workshop in which we—or, more accurately, the electrochemicals in our brains—continually shift, add, subtract, combine and rearrange numbers, symbols, words, images and memories, combining them with emotiosn to form new thoughts. As they by, these thoguts may include everything from Wall Street stats, ideas about our customers, a friend’s trip about our golf swing, images of our mother’s face, worries about a sick child or a technical formula for improving a product, all interspersed with flashes of last night’s baseball game on TV, fragments of an advertising jingle from a car commercial and a half-finished outline for an overdue memo. Individually, such disparate items may mean little. However rearranged, they take on shape and larger meaning. They often turn into action that alters important decisions about our personal life, work and wealth. Concern for the sick child may make it hard to concentrate on the memo, or to keep tomorrow’s golf date with a customer, while the drop in stock-market prices may lead us to defer buying that new BMW. Let us inspect that knowledge warehouse and workshop. If we could shrink ourselves down to nanosize and walk around this constantly changing mental space, we would find endless rows and piles of facts and supposed facts. We would find concepts jumbled together or neatly piled atop other concepts, and linked to still others. Somewhere we would find all of our assumptions, plausible or not, about people, love, pleasures of the flesh, nature, time, space, religion, politics, life, death and causation. Hidden in some dark, remote corner we would find grammar the very languages we use and the logic and rules we apply to arrive at and manage our collection of meanings. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
It is a busy, churning place, operating without stop, even when we sleep. Whole some knowledge is continually lost, forgotten, mutated or rendered pointless, new, wealth-relevant knowledge is continually added. We can call all of this put together our personal knowledge supply. We all have one. There are more than seven and a half billion of these personal knowledge supplies currently walking around the planet—more than at any time in human history. However, by far most of the World’s knowledge is stored outside the brains of living humans. It is the accumulated knowledge of the ages—and of the moment—stored externally on everything from ancient cave walls to the latest hard drives and DVDs. For millennia humans had extremely limited ways to pass knowledge from one generation to the next. Apart from oral narratives (told and retold with accumulating inaccuracy), most knowledge died with each dying person and each dying generation. The rate of social and technological change in these early human societies was so slow, therefore, that even accurate accounts mainly told the same stories over and over again. A giant breakthrough occurred thirty-five thousand years ago when some unremembered genius drew the first pictograph or ideograph on a stone or a cave wall to memorialize an event, person or thing—and, in so doing, began storing non-oral memories outside the human brain. Another great advance followed the invention of various forms of writing. Millennia later came additional huge leaps with the successive invention of libraries, indexing and printing, all of which increased the rate at which knowledge grew from generation to generation. It is sobering to think that without this one factor—growth in our ability to generate and accumulate knowledge—we might still be living little better than our ancestors did more than thirty-five thousand years ago. Today, with the arrival of every-more-powerful computers, ever-more Web sites and ever-more new media, we are generating—and accumulating—data, information and knowledge at unprecedented speeds. To accommodate them, we have in recent decades been building what is, in effect, an immense megabrain outside, and in addition to, our six and a half billion individual human brains. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
This global megabrain is still that of a baby, incomplete, with adult connections not yet in place. Yet at some unknow, crucial tipping point in human history, the amount of knowledge stored outside our brains became larger than the amount stored inside. If anything proves our ignorance about knowledge, it is the fact that this truly momentous change in the history of our species is either unknow or unnoticed by humanity. The “outside brain” is expanding at unbelievable speed. The amount of data, information and knowledge stored in print, film, magnetic or optical form in one year alone is equivalent to that which is contained in a million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress. It is equal to every word ever uttered by a human being since the dawn of time. Today, we can assume, the pace is even faster. It is only when we add this exploding external storage to what is inside our human brains that we arrive at our human species’ total supply of knowledge—what might be called the Aggregate Supply of Knowledge, or ASK. This becomes the immense wellspring on which revolutionary wealth can draw. We are not merely expanding the ASK, but altering the way it is organized, accessed and distributed. Internet search engines permit more and more relate contents. Moreover, systems that have until now been dominated by Western approaches to logic and thinking will soon be enriched by alternative epistemologies and more diverse ways to organize thought as we move toward a global knowledge meta-system. We are, therefore, transforming the entire relationship of wealth, in all forms, to the deep fundamental of knowledge—even as we similarly transform its links to time and space. Only by recognizing this can we appreciate, for the first time, why revolutionary wealth today is so qualitatively different from wealth in any previous era. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
When computer scientist Michael E. Lesk of the U.S. National Science Foundation cast light on the emerging global brain, he took a different track. Beginning with our seven and a half billion-plus brains, and based on the rates at which they absorb information and how fast we forget it, Mr. Lesk roughly calculated that the “total memory of all people now alive” is the equivalent of 1,200 petabytes of data. Since a petabyte is equal to 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes, 1,200 sounds like a lot. However, Mr. Lesk nonchalantly assures us, “We can store digitally everything that everyone remembers. For any single person, this isn’t even hard.” After all, he continues, “the average American spends 3,304 hours per year with one or another kind of media.” Some 1,578 hours are spent watching TV, another 12 in front of movie screens—which adds up to about 11 million words. Another 354 hours are devoted to newspapers, magazines, and books. The result, he suggested, is that “in 70 years of life you would be exposed to around six gigabytes of ASCII.” Today you can buy a 20-terabyte disk drive for your personal computer. The amount of data in the World was estimated to be 44 zettabytes at the dawn of 2020. By 2025, the amount of data generated each day is expected to reach 463 exabytes globally. Also, the World spends almost $1 million per minute on commodities on the Internet. By 2025, there will be 75 billion Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices in the World. By 2030, 90 percent of every person age six and above will be digitally active. There should be around 175 zettabytes of data by 2025. It is a number that is hard to envision! However, with the countless advanced technological devices available now, processing these massive amounts of data is not impossible. The day is not far off when pupils will need to memorize nothing—they will wear a gadget that stores everything for them. And that raises fascinating questions. Might that gadget also help Alzheimer’s patients? It seems with the advancement of technology and information, to keep up humans have to start turning themselves into partial androids. Yet, everything that has, can, or ever will exist, in this or any other World may be fully described by the complete collection of relevant facts and the corresponding set of logical interconnections. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
No attempt comes close to telling us how much meaningful knowledge there is in all this storage. Or what it is worth. However, all of them support our contention that revolutionary changes are taking place in the deep fundamental of knowledge—changes for which the term revolution is an understatement. We are, in fact, living through the deepest upheaval in the World knowledge system since our species started to think. Until we digest this point, our best-laid plans for the future will misfire. And that takes us to those toxic tomatoes and…the buried head of a child. The Hipster Generation, in our model, are those who have resigned from the organized system of production and sales and its culture, and yet who are too hip to be attracted to independent work. They are a phenomenon of the after of 911. Their number is swelled by youths whose careers, hesitant at best, have been interrupted by the pandemic. This group is socially important out of proportion to its numbers, and it has deservedly and undeservedly attracted attention and influenced many young people. The importance of the Hipster is twofold: first, they act out a critique of the organized system that everybody in some sense agrees with. However, second—and more important in the long run—they are a kind of major pilot study of the use of leisure in an economy of abundance. They are not, as such, underprivileged and disqualified for the system; nor are they, as such, emotionally disturbed or delinquent. Some young men might be driven to this position by personality disturbances, but the subculture they have formed has made sense and proved attractive to others without those disturbances, but who have the identical relation to the organized society. In many ways the Hipster subculture is not merely a reaction to the middle class or to the organized system. It is natural. Merging with the underprivileged, the Hipsters do not make a poor go of it. Their homes are often more livable than middle-class homes; they often eat better, have good vinyl records, etcetera. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Some of their habits, like being scheduled, sloppy, communitarian, easy-going with pleasures of the flesh, and careless of reputation, go against the traditional grain of the middle class, but they are motivated by good sense rather than resentment: if they got wise to themselves, they are probably natural ways that most people would choose—at least so artist and the less affluent have always urged. Their rejection of the popular culture, Broadway theater, status commodities, bespeaks robust mental health. (It is, oddly, just these reasonable and natural ways that have won underserved attention as outrageous. For Madison Avenue boys are miffed and fascinated that Hipster get away with it, and so they keep writing them up.) The Hipster culture share specific traits of the “outside” class to which they have appointed themselves. Some of these are accidental, belonging to the particular marginalized groups who from the present-day poor—just as in France, it is the North Africans who set the tone. Others are essential, pertaining to being “outside” of society, such as being outcast and objects of prejudice; defying convention rather than just disregarding it; in-group loyalty; fear of the police; job uselessness. Besides these natural traits and present-day poor traits, Hipster culture is strongly suffused with the hipsterism that belongs to the middle status of the organized system. This appears in some of the Hipster economic behavior that can be a defensive ignorance of the academic culture; and in a cynicism and neglect of ethical and political goals. Balked in their normal patriotism and religious tradition, the Hipsters seek pretty far afield for substitutes, in the Silicon Valley or on Wall Street. As a typical genesis for a Hipster Generation, we have suggested attachment to middle-class home but withdrawing from its values, without growing into other worthwhile values. They are on speaking terms with their families but dissent from all their ways. They experience the University, for instance, as part of the worthless organized system rather than as Newton and Musk. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
Finally, we see that Hipsters regard themselves as in a metaphysical crisis: they have to choose between the system and eternal life; and therefore their more philosophic utterances are religious and strewn with references to the apocalypse and saints of yore as when President Trump calls the TV News media “Fake News,” and for that he was censored and forced out of office. This is not, on the whole, a strong position: to be resigned and still attached, and therefore to have recourse to apocalyptic means. However, let us see what can be made of it, and turn first to the jargon, a variant of urban culture jargon of English, jive. In this talk there is a phrase “make it,” meaning “to establish oneself in some accepted relation to something.” One can make it as a writer, as a counter boy, with girl. The word comes from the common English “make it against difficulties,” as, “They kept shooting at him but he made it across the field.” It is akin to “make good as a lawyer, a writer,” but it is not so strong and positive. (We should not say “Make good as a counter boy.”) The difficulties overcome are those that confront anyone who has dropped “out” of the ordinary social functions when he tries to establish himself as anything at all, to be a something, a something or other. The usage is an acceptance of withdrawal. The Hipster is an enfant terrible turned inside out. In character with his time, he is trying to get back at the conformist by lying low. One cannot interview a hipster because his main goal is to keep out of a society which, he thinks, is trying to use the fake news media and television programs to make everyone over into a preprogramed image. The hipster may be a jazz musician; rarely an artist, almost never a writer. He may earn his living as a petty criminal, a hobo, a carnival roustabout, a coffee shop employee, or a free-lance moving man in Greenwich, Connecticut, but some hipsters have found a safe refuge in the upper income brackets as engineers, computer programmers or movie actors. He is considered infantile, but his infantilism is a sign that he is not aggressive or a tyrant. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
As the only extreme nonconformist of his generation, he exercises a powerful if not underground appeal as a social media influencer. Establishing an acceptable social relation against obstacles, draws from the Role Playing that is the chief function of the middle status of the organized system. One can says, “He made it, I made it in the Silicon Valley,” indicating no specific job, for that is unimportant, but usually means you work at a tech company and can afford a $2 million house, at the least, and a brand-new luxury Hybrid. Now a more general withdrawal, from experiencing altogether, is expressed by the omnicapable word “like.” Exempli gratia, “Like I’m sleepy,” meaning “if I experienced anything, it would be feeling sleepy.” Like if I go to like New Yor, I’ll look for up,” indicating that in this definite and friendly promise, there is no felt purpose in that trip or any trip. Technically, “like” is here a particle expression a tonality or attitude of utterance, like the Greek verily, or now look. “Like” expresses adolescent embarrassment or difference. Thus, if I talk to a young fellow and give him the security of continued attention, the “like” at once vanishes and is replaced by “You know,” “I mean,” “you know what I mean,” similarly interposed in every sentence. The vocative expletive “Man,” however, has different nuances in different groups. Among the Hipster it is used differently and means, “We are not small children, man, and anyway like we are playing together as like grownups.” Among some others, it is often more aggressive and mean, “Man, now don’t you call me boy, buddy or inferior.” And still to others “Man” means, “That is ‘the Man,’ the government or a man of another race who cannot be trusted.” Among proper hipsters it means, “We are not impotent.” So far as I can hear, it never means acceptance of the speakers as adult males, nor does it have the ring of respect or admiration (Mensch), as a woman or hero-worshipping boys might use it. When the interlocutor is in fact respected or feared, he would not be called “man.” (Perhaps “boss”?) #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
“Cool,” being unruffled and alert, has the same nuances. In standard English a man “keeps cool in an emergency.” If there is always an emergency, it must imply that the danger is internal as well as external: the environment is dangerous and feeling is dangerous. As spoken and enacted by a young Hipster, maintain a mask-face and tapping his toe quietly to the jazz, it means, “I do not feel out of place, I am not abandoned and afraid, I am not going to burst into tears.” In the original gangster (O.G.) the nuance is rather, “I’ll stay unruffled and keep out of trouble around here; I won’t let on what I feel, these folk are dangerous.” With the hipster, the jaw is more set and the eyes more calculating, and it means, “I’m on to your game, you can’t make me flip.” In general, coolness and mask-face are remaining immobile in order to conceal embarrassment, temper, or uncontrollable anxiety. To make a remark about language as a whole as used by the Hipsters: Its O.G. base is, I think, culturally accidental; but the paucity of its vocabulary and syntax is for the Beats essentially expressive of withdrawal from the standard civilization and its learning. On the other hand this paucity gives, instead of opportunities for thought and problem solving, considerable satisfaction in the act and energy of speaking itself, as is true of any simple adopted language, such as pig Latin. However, this can have disadvantages. One learns to one’s frustrations that they regard talk as an end in itself, as a means of self-expression, without subject matter. In a Hipster group it is bad form to assert or deny a proposition as true or false, probable or improbable, or to want to explore its meaning. The aim of conversation is for each one to be able, by speech, to know that he is existing and belonging. So among perfectly intelligent and literate young men, some movie or movie star will be discussed for an hour, giving each one a chance to protect his own fantasies; but if someone, in despair, tries to asset something about the truth or worth of the movie, the others will at once sign off. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
(Among all American adolescents and even fellows in their late twenties, however, there is an embarrassment about “what to say”—“I never have anything to say to a girl,” or “They keep talking about painting and I have nothing to contribute.” Speaking, that is, is take as a role. If they are interested in the subject, they do not have confidence, they will say something, and if they are not interested, why bother? Here too the Hipsters have helped formalize and make tolerable a common difficulty; one contributes just by saying, “Like,” “Cool,” and “Man.”) Now, celibacy can creep up in myriad unexpected ways. Skewed gender ratios, a global fact of life, often produces unwilling celibates. The ratios are distorted by any number of phenomena. Wars are a major contributor, killing off enormous numbers of men in a narrow age range. Female infanticide, the consequence of the World’s preference for male children, warps populations so that women become much rarer—modern China, with 118.5 males for every hundred females, is now experiencing this disconcerting reality. Celibacy is one important response to these skewed rations, especially in light of predications by Chinses officials, who estimate that “the number of hopeless bachelors could mushroom to 80 million. (Polyandry would also be a solution, but globalization may help also as more females go to China for business.) Old age also creates celibates, usually women. Many are married to men who have become impotent, a common problem in older males. Unless these women turn to extramarital affairs, they are forced into celibacy. So are the millions of wives who outlive their husbands, another common phenomenon. Their situation garners little understanding or support. Society assumes these old women and the few men also in their category have become asexual and ridicule them as absence if they show interest in pursuing a relationship which involves pleasures of the flesh. North American nursing homes, for example, usually enforce celibacy. At the end of their lives, even women and some men who are interested in pleasures of the flesh are obliged to retire into a chaste existence they neither seek nor enjoy. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Their unwanted lifestyle is reinforced by adult children who are often deeply distressed or disgusted at any hint of activity involving pleasures of the flesh or even desire in their mothers. They find such eroticism inappropriate and threatening, even selfish—they believe good mothers live for others, whereas intimate passions satisfy deeply personal needs. In old age, women are expected to revert to the undefiled state of early childhood when they were genderless, virginal, and pure. As a result, many respond by stifling their sensuality. They are made to feel guilty and inadequate and accept the celibate role they are expected to play. In any case, the death of suitable partners effectively imposes celibacy on even the most amorous older women. On the beneficial side, they are forced into it relatively late in life, unlike other coerced celibates. Today, widowhood connotes sadness, seniority, whitened hair, and the fragility of aging bones. Young widows exist, but because they may remarry, they are not strikingly sadder than divorcees of the same age. To a great extent, our image corresponds to the reality. This was not always so. Until medical advances became widely available, at different times in different places, widows and widowers could be any age. Death respected neither youth nor maturity, carrying off its victims in childbirth, plagues, epidemics, drought, famine, and a host of other natural catastrophes. Widows, in those times, could be teenaged, middle-aged, or very old. From our perspective of celibacy, what really mattered was the future as either perpetual widows or remarried wives. (Widowers, of course, are much rarer and are much more likely to be encouraged to remarry.) All societies have policies about widow remarriage, with many permitting it, some to the extent of making specific provisions for them to marry brothers-in-law, who will be fully invested in parenting any children and in caring for the now single woman. Other societies are—or were—neutral or hostile to widow remarriage. Early Christianity falls into the latter category. Marrying another man, even after the first one was dead, sounded far too much like a license for pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
It was, therefore, severely frowned on to remarry after becoming a widow. The assumption was that widows would/should remain perpetually chaste. Once a woman had been married, society recognized her husband’s right to exclusive ownership in any intimate passions, which continued in force even after his death. The general view was that a widow’s remarriage violated that ownership by transferring it to a new man, which was widely regarded as a betrayal of her first husband. Hinduism’s take on widowhood incorporates elements of this fundamental revulsion for female pleasures of the flesh with reincarnation, producing a conclusion that is a merciless condemnation of widows. Basically, Hinduism understands the husband’s death—especially from an accident, disease, or chronic condition, as opposed to old age—as caused by his wife’s sinful behavior in a previous life. How to challenge such an interpretation, which is at the core of the religion’s Worldview? And so instead of sympathy for her bereavement, concern for her economic plight, anxiety about her fatherless children, Hinduism turns accusingly on the widow and consigns her to, at best, a living hell and, at worst, to an agonizing death. Until recently in the Hindu World, widows of any age were reviled and cursed. “Some day that child marriages cause early widowhood,” wrote a Brahmin. “I say that widowhood is not caused by child marriages, but by those child widows having acted against their husbands in previous births. Adultery, teasing, etcetera, might have been the cause…Child widowhood is horrible, no doubt, but it is the effect of the wrath of God upon man.” In other words, widows were criminals, virtual murderers. What sort of life does such an evil creature deserve? The most brutish possible, and the most chaste. Manu, the Hindu lawgiver, decreed a widow should starve herself by eating only herbs, roots, and fruits, and so a widow traditionally ate once a day, only the plainest foods, and was always hungry. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
To ensure her chastity and her family’s honor, she had to remain in her family’s home, was made ugly, and was condemned to emotional and physical torment. Her hair was shaved and she no longer wore the red dot of marriage—the tilaka—on her forehead. She was stripped of all her jewelry, her earrings, nose-ring, bangles, chains, and bracelets. She wore only a white sari without a blouse underneath and went barefoot. Expect to do chores everybody else rejected, she could no longer leave her home, but worked there as a drudge, reviled and cursed. At night she slept on the floor, sometimes on a hard mat. In ancient times, she had to cake her head with mud and sleep on a bed of stones. She could join in no family outings, ceremonies, or celebrations. Despite every privation, a widow’s chastity was always suspect. In a folk song, a widow moaned to her mother-in-law, “I shall be alone in my bed, O mother-in-law, and not just for a few days; immature before marriage, I was totally inexperienced; now, how will I spend my nights and days alone?” Of course, a widow was easy prey, and the predator was often a male relative. If a pregnancy occurred, because the double standard in India thrives as solidly as elsewhere, the widow was shunned and could expect no pity from any quarter. Her seducer, however, being a man, escaped all consequences of the affair. Even if he wanted to, he could not marry her. A widow was forever her husband’s and remarriage was absolutely forbidden. Millions of widows suffered grievously. Many were children who had never even lived with their husbands. Often they were toddlers. Not surprisingly, throughout Indian history the number of child widows has been enormous. The last census of the nineteenth century recorded that Calcutta alone had ten thousand widows under four years of age, and over fifty thousand between five and nine. Between 1921 and 1931, in all of India, the number of child wives rose from 8,565,357 to 12,271,595, creating the potential for millions of future child widows. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
The Hindu religion taught that before marriage and childbearing, boys and girls should spend years as chaste brachinines. Gandhi, too, hated child marriage. “Where,” he demanded in 1926, “are the brave women who will work among the girl-wives and girl-widows, and who will take no rest and leave none for men until girl-marriage becomes an impossibility?” He lamented as well “the inhuman treatment often accorded to our widows.” Inhuman, indeed, and based solidly on traditional teachings about women. These do not make lovely reading. How, for instance, to digest this ancient wisdom: “even if he were to do nothing else throughout a long life of a hundred years, a man with a hundred tongues would die before finishing the task of lecturing upon the vices and defects of women.” And, continues this litany of condemnation, “women combine the wickedness of a razor’s edge, poison, snake and fire,” and their natural faults are “falsehood, thoughtless action, trickery, folly, great greed, impurity and cruelty.” They are “lascivious, fickle-minded and falsehood incarnate” and “have the hearts of Hyaenas.” Manu the lawgiver expressed it pithily: “Stealing grain or cattle, having pleasure of the flesh with a woman who drinks liquor, or laying a woman, are all minor offences.” Manu’s views are tremendously important because they influenced two thousand years of legislation and custom. Women had no rights and lived only to serve their husbands, who could abuse, discard, or sell them with impunity. Above all, woman had to be chaste. The greatest calamity that could befall a woman was to compromise her chastity. Widowhood was, therefore, doubly incriminating, as incontrovertible evidence of previous sin and as vulnerable states win which weak, lascivious, fickle women were more than ever tempted to stray. The merciless treatment of widows was therefore perfectly logical. It punished them for killing their husbands and, like the best military offenses, struck out and incapacitated them before they could so much as fantasize about resistance. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
That Nature put the hunger instinct into man and animal alike primarily to preserve the life of the physical body and not to satisfy the palate, nobody could rightly deny. The enjoyment of food is subordinate to, and intended to make more inescapable, the instinct required for this highly important necessity of sustenance. Nature is not interested in the human individual’s pleasure so much as in the continuance of his species. She has given him the one for the sake of the latter. Man has in thought, belief, and practice today reversed this order of importance. The result is a totally wrong view about the possibility and the value of continence. From this view stem a hot of moral, nervous, and physical maladies which are plunging one’s life into confusion and disaster. Nature has her rights, it is true, but before we can justly grant them we need to inquire as to what they really are. With you, O my people, my kin-folk, my mother, source of my life, with you I soar the wide spaces of the World; in your eternity I have life eternal. In your glory I am honored, in your sorrow I am grieved, in your affliction, I suffer anguish, in your knowledge and understanding, behold, I am filled with knowledge and understanding. Every footstep, wherever you have trod, is a treasure of life. Your land, the land of your hope, is sacred to me; its Heavens a source of beauty, of eternal splendor; its Carmel and Sharon are the spring of hope, the fountain of blessing, the source of life’s joy. Even its thorns and thistles are garbed in glory, in deathless beauty! These prayers, old and stained with tear, I take into my heart. And unto the God of my fathers, who from the ages past has been their Rock and Refuge, I call in my distress. In ancient words, seared with the pain of generations, I pour out my woe. May these words that know the Heavenly paths, ascend aloft unto God in high, to convey to Him that which my tongue cannot express—all that lies deep hidden within my heart. May these words, simple and true, speak for me before God, entreating His mercy. Perchance the Heavenly God who hearkened to my fathers’ prayers, who gave them courage and strength to bear all their sorrow and degradation, yet ever to hope for redemption—perchance He will also hear my prayer and hearken to my cry, and be to me a protecting shield, for there is none to help or sustain me, but God in Heaven. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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Learn to Have a Stainless Mind
Life is an adventure; it is one journey where one does not want to compromise one’s self. Enjoy laughter, beauty, and love. Success is finding and doing the best of your ability in each moment of your life. Our is the first civilization to plant human-made objects far beyond the surface of our home planet and use them to help us create wealth. That by itself would mark our time as a revolutionary moment in history. Yet little is known about the impact of this fact in our daily lives and our economy. Few are aware that every time they use an ATM or a telephone, they are relying on technology twelve thousand miles from Earth. Or that every patient receiving dialysis or wearing a peacemaker owes some thanks to technologies and, in some cases, people who have left the surface of the planet we call home. Communication satellites, the Global Positioning System (GPS)—developed by the U.S. Defense Department over six decades at a cost estimated at $14 billion—and commercial remote imaging are parts of an emerging space infrastructure that will be greatly elaborated over the decades and centuries to come, with increasing impact on how we create economic value. Nothing more clearly symbolizes today’s changes in the relationship of wealth to the deep fundamental. In its present, still-primitive form—often myopically derided as a wasteful luxury—the drive into space has already transformed many aspects of daily life. One result is a $100 billion Worldwide satellite industry composed of manufacturers such as Boeing, EADS/Astrium and Alcatel Space; launch firms like China Great Wall Industry Corporation; operators and coordinators such as Intersputnik in Russia; plus myriad service firms, space-image distributors and ground-equipment suppliers. And now a second space race is just getting underway. Commercial companies are being formed. These private commercial aerospace companies like Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, are all building and testing their own reusable rockets and spacecrafts. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
In fact, Virgin Orbit successfully sent 10 small satellites into orbit, utilizing its unique approach to the task. This mission saw LauncherOne, a heavily modified Boeing 747, fly up to an altitude of 35,000 feet (10,500 meters) before releasing a rocket mounted beneath the plane. The rocket then lit its own engines and lasted off to space, deploying the satellites into low Earth orbit. However, many are left wondering how far the government will allow private industries to go. They believe that private companies could outpace the government and actually established life on a new planet and then start colonizing on that planet, creating their own government, and constructing roads, houses, businesses, and parks in the next 25 years, and that many people, mostly the extremely wealth, will leave Earth in live in these tax havens where corporations have control. This is a vastly different picture than the one we had just a few decades ago. During the 1990s, business pages reported that investors had lost billions in space-industry stocks and that many space firms were in terminal trouble. However, a recent survey by the Satellite Industry Association tells a quite different story—a steady, year-after-year revenue growth rate of 15 percent from the mid-1990s on. What is more, despite temporary overcapacity, now more and more commercial start-ups, and countries are racing to join the space “club.” In addition to the companies we listed above, Brazil and Ukraine, for example, are partnering to launch Ukrainian Cyclone-4 rockets from Brazil’s Alcantara Launch Center—regarded as one of the World’s best launch sites. And, as of 2005, equity firms were buying up stakes in such satellite operators as Intelsat, PanAmSat and New Skies. Similarly, while $100 billion many seem trivial in a multi-trillion-dollar World economy, that number does not begin to tell the whole story. It does not include the hidden increases in value generated by the many industries that directly or indirectly reply on space—big television networks, medical technology, sports teams, advertising agencies, telephone and Internet companies and financial-data suppliers, to cite a few. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
People in the Arab World have also been gazing at the starts with genius and curiosity for a legion of years. In 2021, the Middle Eastern World built a Mars orbit of the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) Hope (al-Amal) probe. This ambition is their new space exploration adventure. The Arab governments today have developed a fully 21st century view of space, by using algebra and spherical trigonometry which are both essential mathematical tools for understanding the motions of Heavenly bodies, with intentions rooted in the quest for profit, saving lives, power, image, and control. The United Arab Emirates’ program is very auspicious. The country has established its national space agency in 2014 and has set amazingly ambitious goals for the future. The UAE space program has about $5.4 billion in public-private support, compared to NASA’s FY21 budget of $23.3 billion. The Mars mission itself was expensive at a cost of $200 million. However, it appears certain that given the success and acclaim accorded the Amal probe, more is on the way. This is why some many people are concerned about the fate of the United States of America and looking for other options as a future home for Rome did once fall, too. Afterall, the theory of convergence, states that poor or developing economies with a higher per capita income can gradually reach similar high levels of per capita income. Thus, all economies, over time, may converge in terms of income per head. However, these developing countries will not be using old infrastructure. Because high technology already exists, they do not have an initial investment to stake to build new roads, architecture, and electric or other technologies. They can use new methods to build high tech cities and homes and leave already developed nations with their antiquated systems, and replace them as a World Super Power. Therefore, the poorer nations grow much faster because of the higher possibilities of growth and over time catch up, and even surpass the richer countries in terms of per capita income such that the divide between the two gets minimized. This theory of convergence of incomes is based on the logic of better opportunities of growth available for developing economics like access to technological know how from the developed World and increasing returns to capital. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
However, empirical evidence suggests that while some developing economics have been able to effectively tap the available advantages to grow faster and catch up with robust economies, this has not always been true for a large part of the developing World. The limitations of the theory are based on grounds of social, institutional or political differences, which simultaneously influence growth. Yet developed nations have to keep in mind that they are sovereign entities and they need to help their people and businesses succeed to remain successful nations. Because any risk arising of chances of a government failing to make debt repayments or not honouring a loan agreement is a sovereign risk. Such practices can be resorted to by a government in times of economic or political uncertainty or even to portray an assertive stance misusing its independence. A government can restore to such practices by easily altering any of its laws, thereby causing adverse losses to investors. For example, countries like Argentina and Mexico had defaulted on their loan payments in 1970s to a big extent after the oil shock. A little-known consortium of commercial space firms called the Mapping Alliance Program now offers remote sensing, images from space and software for use in computer-aided design, surveying, automated mapping and other services. MAP customers include oil and gas companies, water, gas, and electric utilities, agriculture, mining, and transportation, as well as natural-resource managers. Knowledge derived from space operations is also helping companies anticipate, reduce and hedge their risks. Thus space data play a key role in financial markets in which “weather futures” are traded. Variations in weather can have a major impact on productivity, turnover and overall profitability in fields as diverse as insurance and agriculture as well as [for] the manufacturers and retailers of everything from soft drinks to cold remedies, not to mention the organizers of pop festivals and package holidays. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
In the United States of America, 3.2 percent ($768 billion) of the entire $24.01 trillion economy was spent on defense. This is example will show how much things change in just a few decades. Now back on subject, according to the Department of Commerce, one seventh of the entire $10 trillion economy in 2001 was subject to weather risk. (Look how much the economy grew in just 20 years and compare the amount spent on defense to what was put at risk by the weather.) Whether futures, traded on LIFFE and other exchanges, offer a way of hedging against that risk. The health industry is another largely unacknowledged beneficiary of space activity. The 750,000 U.S. victims of kidney failure who today survive because of dialysis owe their treatment, in some measure, to NASA and its astronauts. A chemical process developed by the space agency to remove toxic waste from dialysis fluids is not helping patients stay alive. Meanwhile, a company called StelSys, using technology or ideas licensed from the U.S. space agency, is working to develop the equivalent of a dialysis system for patients with liver failure. One of the specialized functions of the human liver is to break down drugs or toxins into less harmful and more water-soluble substances that are more easily excreted from the body. The StelSys experiment—a joint study by NASA and Baltimore-based biotechnology research company StelSys, LLC—will test this function of human liver cells in the microgravity environment aboard the International Space Station, comparing the results to the typical function of supplicate cells on Earth. The findings of this experiment will provide unprecedented information about the effects of microgravity on the proper function of human liver cells, offering new insight into maintaining the health of humans living and working in space. Cells are transported from Earth to the International Space Station using Commercial Refrigerator/Incubator Module (CRIM). One on orbit, the cells are nurtured and grown in the CBOSS Biotechnology Specimen Temperature Controller (BSTC), which has flown continuously abroad the International Space Station since Expedition Thee. Once the cells are gown, they are frozen and stored in the ARCTIC single-locker freezer, a Space Station facility capable of lowering temperatures to -20 degrees Celsius. The frozen cells are then transported back to Earth for study. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
These scientists are studying liver and kidney cell growth, disease and replacement, using ground-based bioreactor labs, as well as commercial NASA bioreactors. To date, the company has made great strides in developing long-term cell culture techniques, and has created a prototype of a proposed “bio-artificial” liver. StelSys research abroad the Space Station is conducted under agreement with NASA’s Office of Biological and Physical Research in Washington, D.C. Research in this are could lead to earlier and more reliable drug-candidate screening for patients in need of liver and kidney treatments prior to transplant. It could also accelerate development of new life-saving drugs by pharmaceutical companies. StelSys LLC, in cooperation with NASA, is exploring specific research areas that benefit from liver cell research abroad the Space Station. They are: Development of a liver-assist device: Research based on NASA biotechnology could help develop a machine to sustain the life of a patient with advanced liver disease—similar to dialysis machines for persons with kidney disease. National production of the vitamin D3: Individuals on kidney dialysis require D3, which has beneficial effects on the immune system, helps fight various forms of cancer, and appears to be tied closely to hormones that control cellular proliferation and differentiation. Vitamin D3 remains expensive and difficult to properly manufacture, however. Stelsys seeks an alternative method of producing D3 via cultured kidney cells. Natural production of metabolites: StelSys is researching metabolites, or chemical by-products formed by the breakdown of parent compounds, which accelerates development of new drugs. Additional space research holds promise for improving the treatment of brain tumors, blindness, osteoporosis and other diseases responsible for megabillions of dollars in the ever-swelling healthcare budget. Today Europeans are clinically testing a heart pump based on space shuttle fuel-pump technology. With the annual cost of heart disease and stroke in the United States of America alone exceeding $108 billion a year, how much might such a heart pump save? Americans suffer 1.5 million heart attacks and strokes each year. A conservative estimate of these costs for just one person is $121,200 over twenty years. For those needing surgery or procedures and ongoing care, the cost can be more than $4.8 million over a lifetime. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Therefore, how much economic value should be assigned to the “bioreactor” designed for growing cells in space—a tool now used by tissue engineering labs developing methods to grow human hearts? NASA’s rotating bioreactor allows cells to be grown in a microgravity environment that eliminates almost all shear forces placed upon a cell culture system while entering space. NASA’s bioreactor has allowed various labs to culture cells and even viruses previously impossible to grow using traditional methods. These successes are attributed to the bioreactor’s ability to provide a unique environment that closely resembles tissue differentiation during embryogenesis, and thus allowing cellular expression of surface epitopes similar to that of intact tissues. It also appears that cells grown in microgravity, low-shear environment allow for greater chemical signaling, probably as a result of more surface contact between cells. Realizing the bioreactor’s commercial potential, Santa Monica, California-based VivoRx Licensed exclusive rights from NASA for both therapeutic and diagnostic commercial applications. VivoRX has, in the past, successfully transplanted encapsulated islet cells from cadavers and porcine pancreas into insulin-dependent diabetics, perhaps a major breakthrough in the treatment of diabetes. However, pancreas from cadavers are in very short supply. The bioreactor may be the answer; VivoRx hopes the bioreactor will allow them to propagate enough human islet cells to use their cell-based approach to treat a large diabetic population. The company has already successfully grown islet cells generated from the bioreactors, and is beginning FDA-approved Phase I/II clinical trials. We could also ask parallel question about economic blindness, limb loss and kidney failure associated with diabetes—a disease that has risen to $350 billion in America. People with diagnosed diabetes incur average medical expenditures of $16,752 per year, of which about $,601 is attributed to diabetes. On average, people with diagnosed diabetes have medical expenditures approximately 2.3 times higher than what expenditures would be in the absence of diabetes. In direct costs also include increased absenteeism ($3.3 billion), reduced productivity while at work ($26.9 billion) for the employed, in ability to work as a result of disease-related disability ($37.5 billion), lost productive capacity due to early mortality ($19.9 billion). Costs are forecast to soar as the population ages. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Meanwhile, space plays a crucial role in environmental monitoring as well. France’s SPOT-4 spacecraft, for example, carries an American POAM III instrument for measuring polar ozone and aerosol. According to the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory’s Review, “Every year huge tracts of forest in Alaska, Northern Canada, Scandinavia Russia and China are racked by forest fires from may through October, and in California, fire season is generally from March to December. Enormous quantities of smoke billow into the atmosphere, where high-altitude winds sometimes carry the smoke thousands of kilometers from the original fires.” SPOT-4/POAM III tracks it. Similarly, a joint Brazil-NASA space project is studying the global effects of ecological changes in the Amazon region. A NASA “bird” measures the rate at which ice is melting at the North and South Poles. Other space-based environmental projects focus on everything from water utilization and fisheries to the ecology of estuaries and El Nino weather effects. Never before has the human race had as detailed and accurate an image of the Earth’s surface. Space shuttles such as Endeavor have produced massive data needed for making high-resolution images of desolate tundras and deserts, of jungles where endangered gorillas live and of ancient ruins such as Angkor Wat and Ubar. The same amazingly precise data can, among many other uses, help us locate cell-phone towers, identify flight hazards for aircraft and forecast floods. Twenty-four hours a day, at Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado, a handful of U.S. Air Force men and women—some little more than eighteen or nineteen years old—sit at computer consoles and control satellites orbiting the Earth twelve thousand nautical miles away. They operate more than twenty satellites that together form the NAVSTAR Global Positioning System (GPS) that can tell anyone with a small, inexpensive receiver one’s precise location on Earth. Used by online services, hikers, drivers, truckers, boaters, ships and shippers, banks, and telecom companies, not to mention the military, GSP is one of the marvels of our era. So far-reaching are its implications for both security and business that Europe lunched its own Galileo. Galileo is a GPS system that went live in 2016. It was created by the European Union through the European Space Agency. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Galileo cost $13.2 billion and has 28 satellites. It provides Europe accurate and reliable positioning and timing information, used for example in your mobile phones, your cars (and in the future autonomous and connected cars), railways, aviation and other sectors. As many know, GPS helps us locate time as well as space. Thus, in addition to positioning us spatially, the system also operates as a key synchronizer. In the words of Glen Gibbons of Advanstar Communications, “Every time we get cash from an ATM or make a phone call (whether wireless or wire-line), the synchronization of the voice and data streams in those…communications networks is almost certainly based on GPS timing…it has made nanosecond-level timing readily available throughout the World, courtesy of the cesium and rubidium atomic clocks on board the GPS satellites.” The productive benefit of precision timing and synchronization in the economy has yet to be calculated. And more is on the way. Since the attack on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001, anti-terror experts have devoted increasing attention the 226 million container boxes that move by sea each year. Although losing one box seems like it is not a big deal, containers piled high on giant vessels carrying everything from car tries to smartphones are toppling over at an alarming rate, sending millions of dollars of cargo skinning to the bottom of the ocean as pressure to speed deliveries raises the risk of safety errors. This shipping industry saw the biggest increase in lost containers in 2020. More than 3,000 boxes dropped into the sea last year, and more than 1,000 fell overboard in 2021. The accidents are disrupting supply chains for hundreds of American retailers and giving pirates a new treasure to search for, but even more than that, it creates danger. Any one of these containers can contain a hidden biological weapon, a smuggled terrorist, illegal drugs or arms or other dangerous prophylactics, barbiturates, and contraband. Today only about 2 percent are inspected as they enter the United States of America. Add to that the additional containers that arrive by land and air are another reason people are demanding border security. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
GPS satellites, in principle, can track the coordinates of these containers as they move from place to place. In the future, not just the containers but every product in them will be continually followed as it moves through the supply chain from the plant to the wholesaler, the retailer, onto the shelves and into the customer’s home. Prototype tracking systems are already being studied or tested by such companies as Wal-Mart, Target, Sears, and Kmart. Furthermore, the day will come when many packages carrying food, for example, will have embedded chips that continuously report to the shipper the changing condition of the food as it moves. Other “smart” packages will actually process their contents en route. Linking these to GPS or similar satellite systems will transform large sectors of both the transportation and the food industry, ensure fresher and higher quality packed food and other products, change the economics of both production and distribution in these and many other fields—and improve security. In Japan, to prevent theft of packages, couriers are now given a key to a digital customers car so they can leave a package in the trunk to prevent theft. If the car is then left unlocked, a failsafe system will arm the car after one minute. Because they have low crime rates, this is a great idea for Japan. However, like all technologies, of course, GPS has both beneficial and negative potentials. It can make our lives far more secure. It can track a car full of Good Day and Al Qaeda terrorists. It can also make a visit to a bordello or a Swiss bank less private than it might once have been. However, then, so can “cookies” in a computer, rouge medical professionals, scandalous lawyers—or a gossipy neighbor who steals your mail, watches your house and car, and accepts packages for you. Benefits and sacrifices need to be weighed against one another. One of the biggest economic payoffs from GPS, will come when today’s ground-based World air traffic control system becomes essentially a backup to a space-based alternative. Today flight plans require most aircrafts to fly from one ground-based radio beacon to the next over heavily congested airways. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Capacity near many big cities is limited. A GPS control system can increase capacity along with precision. It can also permit landings under conditions now regarded as prohibitive, including at remote and small airports, and improve over-the-ocean navigation. All at far less cost than the ground-based system. Also, corporations may start to open warehouses in suburban locations with locked storage units and some refrigerated where consumers can have any courier drop off your package because we all know thieves think just because packages are insured they can steal them, and when you are getting orders from companies like Omaha Steaks, they start to watch your order habits so they can intercept your packages. However, even if they are not involved in it. theft is embarrassing to many people, because it speaks poorly of you and the people in your community. High-end stores often share their “theft and loss” information with other corporations and couriers so it may secretly make them think less of you and the community you live in. Also, there are applications track and report crimes such as loss and theft and vandalism and this can make your home less appealing to prospective buyers and lower the property value of your community, while making it less desirable. Even more remarkable about the future of technology, NASA’s Global Differential GPS, recently developed at its Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in Pasadena, California, has been tested in Greenland and the United States of America. It is now capable of positioning aircraft to within 3.9 inches horizontally and 7.9 inches vertically anywhere in the World. JPL proudly boasts that this is a “factor of ten impowerment” over the accuracy of current systems. Across the board, then, space activity is paying off for the emergent economy—often in unseen ways—and promises even more in days to come. A Midwest Research Institute study has estimated that every dollar invested in NASA adds nine dollars to U.S. gross domestic product. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Another analysis, by Chase Econometrics, has suggested that space-related research yields productivity increases that translate into a 43 percent return on investment. All such numbers are relatively old, shaky, and incomplete. Nevertheless, even if we arbitrarily slash them, they would still strongly suggest that space activity already pays off handsomely for the economy. And we are still using only a tiny fraction of its potential. Looming on the horizon are thousands upon thousands more satellites in the Heavens. Algeria, Pakistan and Nigeria have already purchased microsatellites weighing little more than a hundred pounds, capable of carrying cameras and being propelled into orbit for a fraction of what it now costs for conventional satellites. Professors Martian Sweeting of the company supplying them, Surrey Satellite Technology in Britain, claims that within a decade we will launch satellites no bigger than a credit card. As size and cost plumet they will become less expensive, making it possible for medium-sized businesses, NGOs, private groups and even individuals—good and bad alike—to afford them. It is time, in short, to recognize that even in purely economic terms the drive into space is anything but trivial. Humanity’s baby steps into space are already creating significant value on Earth in ways about which earlier civilizations could only fantasize. And it is only the beginning. Today more than fifty nations claim to have space programs. However, governments are not alone in space, as we discussed earlier. Private companies are modifying planes to take hundreds of people into space at once, as well as smaller sized planes to carry two or three people. The purpose: To hasten the development of commercial space tourism and colonization of other planets. Even if we are making no other changes in the “where” of wealth—if we were not shifting it toward Asia and forming region-states, if there were no search for higher-value-added placed, if we were not re-globalizing and de-globalizing the World economy, the leap beyond our planet would, by itself, mark a revolutionary turning point in wealth creation. #RandolphHarrs 12 of 18
The combined evidence, therefore, is overwhelming. We are simultaneously transforming the relationship of wealth to both time and space—two of the deep fundamentals that have underpinned all economic activity since we were hunter-gathers. Wealth today is not merely revolutionary but is becoming more so. Nor is this just a matter of technology. It is, as we will next time make clear, a revolution of the mind as well. Balked, not taken seriously, deprived of great objects and available opportunities, and in an atmosphere that does not encourage service—it is had to have faith, to feel justified, to have a calling, or win honour. However, what then fills the places of these? for every experience that a human being has is a whole way-of-being-in-the-World. First, necessity gives justification. Having something that you must do, solves the problem of having something to do. Necessary behaviour may or may not be honoruable. To wrest subsistence is necessary and honourable. If a young man falls in love, a temporary psychosis, his entire day is under the iron rule of necessity, foolishly and honourably; if it is only to watch under a window, he has something to do. When the class struggle against exploitation was lively, it was something necessary and honourable to engage in. Indeed, it is a major defect of our present organized system and the economy of abundance that, without providing great goals, it has taken away some of the important real necessities, leaving people with nothing to do. The void is soon filled. Behaviour like going into debt on the installment plan, gives an artificial but then real necessity, something to do, paying up. This is the Rat Race, but if people did not need its justifying necessity, for the commodities themselves are not that attractive, I doubt that it would be a run. Young fellows drift into narcotics, and then find that they have something they must do all day, looking for a connection and a fix, and how to get the loot. Compulsive hunting for pleasures of the flesh is something to do. By dividing into rival gangs, as Clausewitz pointed out long ago, it is possible to create a sate of uncertainty of what the enemy is up to, that keeps you constantly on your toes. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
This is a condition, also, apt to raise the ante, for no matter how you have planned to stay within limits, you can never be sure that the others will not take advantage. Many of the apparently pointless repeated risks that juveniles take, where there cannot be any kick left in the exploit itself, make a little sense when we learn that there is a competition: Ty has stolen twenty-six cars, Steve has stolen twenty-three cars, and each is driven by necessity not to be worsted, especially since the others come along for the rides (However, TY has an unfair advantage because he had gone as a punishment to a “Vocational High School” where he took auto mechanics). And poor Pedro and Carlos who worked while in high school to pay for their cars were cheated by not only Ty and Steve, but also the insurance companies because of their names and the colour of their skin. The system is just not always fair for men of colour who are doing the right thing. When psychologist like Linder speak of the aimless, unconcentrated, unsequential behavior of “psychopathic personalities,” I wonder whether they enough take into account that it requires a real object and an interest in it to take a good actualized Christian of experience and growth. To structure the behaviour of long hours and weeks requires a goal that, from some point of view at least, is pretty worthwhile. Our society is not abounding in highly worth-whole goals available to average gifts and underprivileged attainments. Many goals that are busily and perseveringly pursued by some might reasonably seem not worth the trouble to others who have more animal spirits or plain sense. These really might have “nothing to do,” and their aimless and sensation-seeking killing time might indicate nothing but chronic boredom. Yet they will be judged psychopathic personalities. However, once they have hit on a necessitous and important activity like finding their dose of barbiturates and contraband or stealing twenty-six joy rides (in the teeth of two arrests), they become models of purposiveness and perseverance. Such are the justifications and callings. The honour is to protect one’s masculinity and normalcy, yet to prove by notoriety that one is superior. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
More interesting and likely is the religious effort of the Hipster Generation, to which we shall turn to focus on at a future time, they are older and are not willing to have given up one Rat Race to fall into another. Can they solve the problem of the nagging unanswerable questions of justification and vocation? Their principle is the traditional one of classical mysticism: by “experience” (= kicks) to transcend the nagged and nagging self altogether and get out of one’s skin, to where no questions are asked—nor is there any articulate speech to ask them in. Resigning from society, they form peaceful brotherhoods of pure experience, with voluntary poverty, devotional readings, and a good deal of hashish. In Communist China in 1974, seventeen-year-old schoolgirl Anchee Min was carted away to Red Fire Farm in a convoy of eleven trucks. She was excited because it was an honour to be chosen for such a prestigious assignment. However, during her time at the collective farm, Anchee Min’s emotional moral, and ideological Worlds were turned topsy-turvy when her friend Shao Ching’s young lover was executed after the couple have been caught in passionate intimacy. Shao Ching, also seventeen, was breathtakingly lovely, slender as a willow, and rebellious. She copied out forbidden literature and shared it with her special friend Anchee Min. Instead of tying her brains with brown rubber bands like the other girls, Shao Ching bound hers with coloured strings. She scrounged tiny remnants of cloth and designed elegant unmentionables that she embroidered with flowers, leaves, and lovebirds. In the stark dormitory, her drying laundry hung like artwork. Shao Ching also altered the standard-issue clothes so that her shirts tapered in, nipping her tiny waist, and her trousers emphasized her long legs. She enjoyed her full bosoms and sometimes, in warm weather, shucked off her undergarment. One admiring soldier reportedly wept when he heard she had fallen ill. During Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, a good female comrade was supposed to reserve all her energy and thoughts for the revolution. Until she was in her late twenties, she was not so much as to contemplate men or marriage. “Learn to have a stainless mind!” people recited. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
The girls at Red Fire Farm tried to model themselves on the heroines in revolutionary operas, paragons of virtue who never had men, either husbands or intimate friends. No wonder, then, that Shao Ching expressed no interest in men, even to Anchee Min, her closets friend. She was already suspect enough for her fine unmentionables, which has been criticized at a Party meeting. One night, Anchee Min and her companion in a military training program were called out to a “midnight emergency search.” With loaded pistols they were led through the reeds and toward a wheat field, silent and watchful. The order came to drop to their bellies, and they began to crawl through the night. Mosquitoes buzzed and stung, but tht was the only sound. Suddenly, Anchee Min heard the murmur of two voices, a man’s and a woman’s. “I heard a soft, muted cry. And then my shock: I recognized the voice as Shao Ching’s.” Anchee Min’s first thought was to warn her friend—the consequences of being caught with a man were unthinkable. Shao Ching had never even hinted that she was romantically involved, but why would she? At Red Fire Farm, such an admission would be shameful. The brigade acted in unison, flashing thirty flashlights at once, exposing Shao Ching’s rear end and a skinny, spectacled, bookish young man. They took Shao Ching away, leaving a group of soldiers to beat her man. “Make him understand that today, lustful men can no longer force themselves on women,” Anchee Min heard Yan, their leader, instruct. Shao Ching’s studious young beloved displayed no sign that he felt guilty. As the soldiers began to beat and whip him, he made a visible effort not to cry out. Four day later, a public trial was held in the mess hall. Shao Ching had undergone “intensive mind rebushing” and testified in a quavering voice, reading from a paper she held in hands that shook so much, she twice dropped her statement. “He raped me,” she said. Her words convicted her lover and he was executed. (At least she could have just played hard to get since she knew it was wrong to have pleasures of the flesh.) #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
The fastidious Shao Ching stopped bathing and cut up her pretty unmentionables. After months, other girls complained that she stank. She was sent to a hospital in Shanghai and treated for psychosis. She returned to the farm, fat as a bursting sausage from medication, hair matted, eyes vacant. Later she was found dead, drowned among a tangle of weeds. At a special memorial service, Shao Ching was honored as an “outstanding comrade” and was admitted posthumously into the Youth League of the Community Party. Her grandmother was given money in condolence. Celibacy at Red Fire Farm was so strictly enforced that violators were executed. Shao Ching had been saved only because Yan had insisted she recant and blame her lover. Shao Ching had done so, but the mental stress destroyed her mind and she never recovered—do doubt haunted by memories of how her teenage love affair had condemned a young mand to torture and death. “But concerning brotherly love [for all other Christians], you have n need to have anyone write you, for you yourselves have been [personally] taught by God to love one another,” reports 1 Thessalonians 4.9. The second grade counsel is almost monastic in its disciplinary demand for it bids one refrain from the pleasures of the flesh altogether, save for the purpose of having children, whose number must be limited and proportioned strictly. In the case of the unmarried, there will then be a complete chastity. May we move beyond viewing this life only through a frame, but touch it and be touched by it. May our bodies, our minds, our spirits, learn a new rhythm paced by the rhythmic pulse of the whole created order. May spring come to us, be in us, and recreate life in us. May we forge a new friendship with the natural World and discover a new affinity with beauty, with life, and with the Cosmic Christ in whom all things were created in Heaven and on Earth, visible or invisible, whether thrones or dominions pr principalities or authorities for all things were created through Him and for Him. In His name. Amen. Lord of springtime, Father of flower, field and fruit, smile on us in these earnest days when the work is heavy and the toil wearisome; lift up our hearts, O God, to the things worthwhile—sunshine and night, the dripping rain, the song of the birds, books and music, and the voice of our friends. Left up our hearts to these this night and grant us Thy peace. Amen. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
All things that live shall praise Thy name, the spirits of all flesh proclaim Thy sovereignty, O Lord our God. From everlasting Thou art God, to everlasting Thou shalt be; we have no other God but Thee. Thy goodness and Thy holiness support us in all times of stress, Redeemer, Lord, and King. Thou art the God of first and last, in every age Thy children raise their voices in eternal praise. With tender love Thy World dost guide, and for our needs dost Thou provide; Thou keepest watch eternally. Thou takest slumber from our eyes, and to the speechless givest voice; through Thy great mercy all rejoice. Thou raisest those whose heads are bent, sustaining all the weak and spent; to Thee alone we render thanks. If like the sea our mouths could sing, our tongues like murmuring waves implore, our lips like spacious skies adore; and were our eyes like moon or son, our hands like eagles’ wings upon the Heavens, to spread and reach to Thee; and if our feet were swift as hinds, yet would we still unable be to thank Thee, God, sufficiently; to thank Thee for one-thousandth share of all thy kind and loving care which Thou in every age hast shown. From Egypt didst Thou lead us forth, from bondage didst Thou set us free, redeeming us from slavery. In famine, food didst Thou provide, in plenty Thou wast at our side, to keep and guide us, Lord or God. From pestilence and sword didst save, and when we were by ills assailed, Thy love and mercy never failed. O Lord, Thy wondrous deeds we praise, forsake us not throughout our days; be Thou our help forevermore. Therefore, O Lord, our limbs, our breath, our soul, our tongue, shall all proclaim Thy praise, and glorify Thy name, and every month and every tongue declare allegiance without end; and every knee to Thee shall bend. The mighty ones shall humble be, yea, every heart revere but Thee, and sing the glory of Thy name. Hearken, O my people! From the very depths of my soul I speak unto you; from the core of life where lies the tie that binds us one to the other, with devotion, deep and profound, I declare unto you that you, each one of you, all of you, the whole of you, your very souls, our generations—only you are the essence of my life. I live in you, in each of you, in all of you; in your life, my life has deeper, truer meaning; without you I am as not. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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Battle Against the Laws of Nature—With God Comes Worlds without End
This Earth will eventually pass away, but not to worry, through God we will have a new Earth and Eternal Life. We want to see humanity in pursuit of knowledge for the mind is fascinating, for it looks on things with the hidden generosity in the soul. Few words in recent years have fueled as much hatred and controversy around the World as globalization—and few have been used more hypocritically—and naively—by all sides. For many anti-globalists, the real target of their wrath is the United States of America, World headquarters of free-market economics. The U.S. drive over past decades to globalize (or, more accurately, to reglobalize) the World economy also flew a false flag. Successive administrations, especially that of former President Bill Clinton and currently President Joe Biden, have preached a mantra to the World. The so-called Washington Consensus held that globalization plus liberalization in the form of privatization, deregulation and free trade would alleviate poverty and create democracy and a batter World for all. Both pro- and anti-globalist ideologues typically lump globalization with liberalization, as though they were inseparable. Yet countries can integrate economics without liberalizing. Liberalizing countries, by contrast, can sell off their state enterprises, deregulate and privatize their economies, without necessarily globalizing. None of this guarantees that long-term benefits will flow from the macroeconomy to the microeconomy in which people actually live. And none of it guarantees democracy. It is now perfectly clear that both sides in the ideological war over reglobalization have been perfectly and deliberately unclear. Thus the Web site of a protest movement that has waged a ceaseless campaign against globalism listed “actions” in Hyderabad, India; Davos, Switzerland; Porto Alegre, Brazil; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Washington, D.C.; and Barcelona, Spain, as well as others in New Zealand, Greece, Mexico and France. Demonstrators surrounded World leaders in their luxury hotels at numerous international meetings from Seattle to Genoa or forced them to seek refuge in remote locations—and to call up security forces to maintain the peace. Now protestors are invited to meet these leaders and much of the fizz has gone out of the movement. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
It hardly escapes notice, however, that much of this purportedly anti-globalist activity is coordinated by interlinked Web sites on the Internet, itself an inherently global technology. The political impact of the movements comes largely from television coverage delivered by global satellite systems. Many of the demands of these groups—for lower-cost medications, for example—can be met only by global corporations the protesters could not fly to their demonstrations without globally linked airlines dependent on global reservation systems. And the goal of many of the protesters is to create a movement with global impact. In fact, the movement has split into many different, often short-lived groups with dizzyingly diverse goals, from eliminating child labor to outlawing tobacco to protecting the rights of all inmates. A few are dewy-eyed anarcho-localists, glorifying the supposed authenticity of face-to-face life in pre-industrial villages—conveniently forgetting the lack of privacy, gender discrimination, and the narrow-minded local tyrants and bigots so often found in real villages. Others are back-to-nature romantics. Still others are United States—and European Union—hating supernationalists identified with neofascist anti-immigrant political movements. However, many others are, in fact, not “anti-global” at all but “counter-global.” These counter-globalists, for example, strongly support the United Nations and other international agencies. Many long to see something approximating a single World government, or at least better, stronger global governance financed, perhaps, by a global tax. What many of them do want, however, is a World crackdown on global corporations and global finance, which they blame for exploiting workers, damaging the environment, supporting undemocratic governments and an infinity of other ills. The antis make the most noise. However, even if all the chanting, marching anti- and counter-globalization protesters were to steal away in the night, the advance of economic re-globalization might still slow or stop in the years immediately ahead. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Powerful factors now loom before us that could halt the continued extension of spatial reach and make even the anti-globalists sorry to see that happen. The re-globalization period has seen the World economy suffer one devastating regional or national crisis after another—in Asia, in Russia, in Mexico, in Argentina. In each case, investors, business decision-makers and governments all over the World worried about financial “contagion.” Would Argentina’s collapse destroy the Brazilian economy? Could the COVID pandemic cause a Worldwide meltdown? (It is still coming close to.) Because economic integration today is far more dense, multilayered and complicated, linking so many diverse economies at so many different levels, it requires systemically designed fail-safes, redundancies and other safety devices. Unfortunately, overenthusiastic re-globalizers are constructing a gigantic financial cruise ship lacking the watertight compartments that even the Titanic had. U.S. stock markets have “circuit breakers” intended to stop a crash in its tracks. For example, if the Dow Jones index falls 10 percent before 2.00 p.m. on a trading day, the New York Stock Exchange will call a one-hour halt in trading. If prices move too far above or below a preset limit, so-called collars are imposed on certain trades. Similar measures are in place or under discussion in many countries from India to Taiwan. These may or may not be adequate locally or nationally. However, trade, currency and capital markets at the global level lack equivalents of even these cautionary measures, let alone a comprehensive system of firewalls, compartments, backups and the like. By integrating faster than we are inoculating ourselves against contagion, two processes are out of sync—setting us up for a global epidemic that could send individual nations rushing back, head over heels, into their protective financial shells. Their frenzied responses could include yanking foreign investments back home, restoring trade barriers, drastically reshuffling import-export patterns and relocating businesses, jobs and capital around the planet—in short, reversing the recent direction of change. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
What other events or conditions could limit or reverse re-globalization? Plenty. If not the age, we have entered the age of export overload—or, at least the interval. Starting in the 1970s, Japan soared to prosperity by combining computerized design and manufacture, relatively closed domestic markets and aggressive exports. That strategy was soon emulated by South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and later by Malaysia and Indonesia. All pumped their products into American and European markets, and more “things” that ever in history moved across the Pacific by containership, tanker and cargo planes. Exports—a spatial phenomenon by definition—came to be regarded as the magic bullet for development. In all these Asian countries, exports grew faster than domestic demand—another example of large-scale de-synchronization. At that point, China roared into the fray, cramming even cheaper products into the crowded global market and especially into the United States of America. Suddenly America was awash with Chinese hair dryers, hoses, handbags, clocks and calculators, tools, and toys. Overcapacity and rapacity marched hand-in-hand. If the United States of America’s economy, which alone accounts for more than 30 percent of World demand, were at any time to lurch into a free fall, it hardly needs to be noted that the relocations of wealth in the World would be shattering for many other countries—including some of the poorest. Among those hardest hit would be countries whose governments are dangerously overdependent on a single export for their day-to-day revenue. This could be copper, as in Zambia. It could be bauxite, sugar, coffee, cocoa or cobalt. Or it could be oil. With crude-oil prices at record highs, it may seem unlikely. Yet the unlikely happens again and again, and a severe slowdown in the United States of America or a crash in China could, despite producers’ efforts to control supply, send oil prices plummeting again. Even if the decline is temporary, the results could shake many governments out of power. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Fully 80 percent of Nigeria’s government revenue comes from oil, as does 75 percent of Saudi Arabia’s. Much the same can be said of Kuwait, Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Angola. For Venezuela the number is 50 percent, for Russia close to 30 percent. Unstable or politically fragile at best, oil-funded governments could be forced to cut domestic subsidies and social benefits at the risk of triggering upheaval in their streets. More bad news for re-globalization. The war between Russia and Ukraine is increasing pressure on the global system and increasing oil prices higher than they have ever been. The cost of a barrel of oil is currently $115 and is expected to reach $150 a barrel. That could send gas prices from $6.00 a gallon to around $9.60 a gallon, which would cause a supply shock. The average American could end up paying $1250 a month for gas. Canceling the Key Stone Pipeline may have been Joe Biden’s biggest mistake. However, he says all Americans need to do is buy electric car. Yet let us forget that we are still in a pandemic and many people have been spending money just to get through it, and with inflation and rising gas prices, no one has money to go out and buy electric cars and a lot of people have already bought new vehicles. In fact, in 2021, sales of light trucks accounted for about 78 percent of the approximately 15 million light vehicles sold in the United States of America. So currently gas prices are really hurting Americans and if they continue to state at this rate and increase, that will be a significant bill. Therefore, people will spend less money dining out, shopping, and traveling. The decades ahead may also see a further formation of supranational blocs and trade groups following the wake of the European Union (EU). The is the World’s largest trading bloc, and second largest economy, after the United States of America. In 2014 the value of the EU’s output totaled $18.5 trillion. The five largest Economies, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain, account for around 70 percent of the 28-country trading bloc. Ranging from Mercosur in South America to emergent groupings in Asia, these blocs, since they create larger-than-national markets, can be seen as half steps toward global integration and more open trade. That is how they are usually portrayed. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
However, despite protestations to the contrary, they can also, under extreme pressures, flip the protectionist switch and become large-scale deterrents to further openness and globalization. With respect to global integration, area-wide supranational blocs could prove to be a double-edged switchblade. And so could the next explosion of scientific and technological breakthroughs. Propelled by the fusion of information and biological technologies, it could reduce the need for some previously imported raw materials and other goods. Radical miniaturization, customization and the partial substitution of knowledge content for raw material means that tomorrow’s economies may no longer need as many of the bulk commodities that now form so large a part of the global market. Teaspoons of a nanoproduct tomorrow could replace tons of material that today needs to be shipped across the World. This may be long in coming, but its impact will be felt in major port cities around the World, from Qingdao to Los Angeles to Rotterdam. Again, all this points to more do-it-at-home processes and less reliance on a globalized marketplace. Furthermore, we cannot rule out war and its partner, terror, the most obvious de-globalizers. Both, as we are currently seeing, can physically destroy energy and transportation infrastructures needed for the movement or relocation of oil, gas, raw materials, finished products and other goods. Both can also unleash capital flight and unstoppable tidal waves of cross-border refugees. Bother will target critical information infrastructures in knowledge-intensive economies. Unfortunately, the period ahead is likely to see high geopolitical instability and frequent outbreaks of military conflict—leaving not only dead and wounded on the field but, as in the past, the disintegration of what has already been integrated. Beyond these potential de-globalizers are what futurist call wild cards, scenarios that, though highly improbable, cannot be ruled out: strange new pandemics and quarantines, asteroid strikes and ecological catastrophes that could knock the entire economic firmament off its current course and reduce it to Mad Max conditions. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
It is useful to reserve at least a speck of mind space for thinking the unthinkable, for history is little more than a sequence of high-impact events that began as utterly improbable and exploded into actuality. We cannot know with certainty which of these thrust-reversers might come into play, or how they might converge. However, any one of them could prove a far more potent force for turning back re-globalization than all the headline-grabbing protest movements put together. Moreover, it is easy to imagine two or more of these de-globalizing events coming into play simultaneously—and in the not-so-far-off future. It is a lot harder to imagine a future in which none of them occurs. The most likely scenario is a split—a possible slowdown in further economic integration as such, even as World pressures rise for globally coordinated action on such issues as terror, crime, environmental issues, human rights, slavery, and genocide. This should put to bed any dream of linear progress toward a fully integrated, truly global economy—and any illusions about a World government in the foreseeable decades. It points, instead, to more not fewer, faster not slower, bigger not smaller, spatial jolts to job markets, technologies, money and people around the planet. It points to an age of accelerating spatial turbulence. What we have seen so far, therefore, is not only a massive shift of wealth toward Asia, a growing importance of region-states and a change in spatial criteria in advanced economies, but a gigantic—though reversible—process of re-globalization. Any of these, by itself, represents an important change in the way revolutionary wealth is related to the deep fundamental of space. Yet, as we will soon see, one final spatial change may, some distant day, dwarf all these put together. Now, one striking characteristic of modern education is the unanimous disapproval of exploiting the powerful feeling of shame, the hot blush and wanting to sink into the ground out of sight. It is claimed that this injures personal dignity and either makes a child vengeful and not belonging, or breaks his spirit. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Youth workers with delinquents make a fetish of protecting self-esteem, as contrasted with the polices’ “You young Punk!” Yet in ancient education, exempli gratia, in the Socratic dialogues, this very arousal of shame is a chief device; the teacher greets the hot flush as a capital sign that the youth is educable, he has noble aims. Such a youth has dignity in his very shame. The difference seems to be that we cannot offer available opportunities of honor, we do not have them; and therefore we must protect what shreds of dignity the youth has. If we make him ashamed of his past, since he has no future, he is reduced to nothing. In other ages, the community had plenty of chances of honor, and to belong to the community itself was honor. (Let me make an analogy from psychotherapeutic practice: when a patient is schizoid, you give reassurance, protect the weak ego; when he is neurotic and can take care of himself, you attack the character resistances.) Now shame is the only direct attack on conceit, the defensive image of oneself. Conceit is the common denominator of the Organization Man, the hipster, and the juvenile delinquent—this is why I have been lumping them together. The conceited image of the self is usually not quite conscious, but it is instantly woundable; and people protect it with a conformity to their peers (oneself is superior). However, the conceited groups differ in their methods of confirming and enhancing conceit: the juvenile delinquent by surly and mischievous destructiveness of the insulting privileged outgroup; the hipster by making fools of them with token performances; the Organization Man by status and salary. To this inner idol, they sacrifice the ingenuous exhibition and self-expression that could make them great, effective, or loved in the World; but if it is mistaken, out of place, or disproportionate, that can also be shamed. Being ashamed ought to mean that a youth gives up some cherished error or conceited image of himself, and goes on, without loss of dignity, to achieve an ideal that is real; this is honor. Only the community can bestow honor, on those who enhance the community, who follow the useful callings, or bring new culture. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
In New York, those who have kept out of jail for a generation are not made much of by a grateful and admiring citizenry. It is hard achievement but, like other public gods, it is not esteemed. Among cities, Venice had magnificence; but it is Florence that knew how to pay honor to her sons. She made it hard for them, with neglect and exile, to be themselves and serve her; but when nevertheless they achieved their ideals, her praise was loud. Boys today hardly aspire to immortal honor, the honor of self-fulfilling achievement. It is highly disapproved of in the code of the organized system. Instead, they devote themselves to protecting their “personal honor” against insults; and conversely they dream of the transient notoriety which will prove that they are “somebody,” which they doubt. The personal honor that they protect does not include truthfulness, honesty, public usefulness, integrity, independence, or virtues like that. A reputation for these things does not win respect, it has no publicity value; it is believed to be phony anyway, and if it is true, the person is hard to get along with. A British disaffected young man, an Angry Young Man, can make his protest by simply being a Cad, like Osborne’s George Dillion; but that would not much distinguish him on this side of the sea. A bad reputation naturally makes people prudent in their personal dealings, but it generally does not do much hard in the press or on TV, even to a public official, for the plugs is more important than the content of it. On the other hand, any official bad mark that gets on an IBM card, like being arrested and fingerprinted—and even if her was exonerated it–no matter what the charge, it can be disastrous to a young man, for his name can thereby drop out of the system. Nobody, but nobody, may disesteem a man for something, or he may even get wished for notoriety for something, that at the same time makes him unemployable. Just try to imagine nowadays the administrator of old-fashioned juvenile fiction who says, “You man, I do not care what Personnel reports, you have an honest face and we will give you a chance!” #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
Rather, a good man will be asked to resign for the sake of Public Relations. And correspondingly, suburban “good families” increasingly shun “bad families” that have had troubles, such as divorces or delinquency or even death of a parent (!), for that makes the family untypical. (A few years ago an editorial in Life complained that our novels always contain alcoholics, jailbirds, addicts, crazy people, perverts, etcetera, and do not portray average families who have none such. James Farrell, pointing out that the combined numbers of these deviants come to much more than the number of families, drily offered that the editor of Life probably did not have a material family, a very abnormal case.) There is an organized system of reputation that is calculated statistically to minimize risk and eliminate the unsafe; likely it succeeds in this. It may make the enterprise as a whole less efficient, for it guarantees excluding the best, but be that as it may; the important thing is that there has ceased to be any relation whatever between “personal honor” and community or vocational service. Conversely, the way in which our society does do honor to its indubitably great and serviceable men—say, Schweitzer, Einstein, Picasso, Buber—is a study in immunizing people against their virus; it would be a remarkable and melancholy subject for a sociologist. They are transformed into striking images and personalities, and we assign to them the Role of being great men. We pay respectful attention to their birthday sayings. They are the menagerie of Very Important People who exist only for ceremonial occasions and to sponsor funds and drives for enterprises in which they will have no further function. This effectually prevents the two practical uses that we could make of them. We neither take seriously the simple, direct, fearless souls that they invariably are, whether humble or arrogant, to model ourselves after them because they make more sense as human beings; nor do we have recourse to them please to help us when we have need of exceptional purity, magnanimity, profundity, or imagination, giving them a free hand on the assumption that their action is really better. Though we publicize the image, we do not behave as though we really believed that there were great men, a risky fact in the World. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
They are likely to be and do the damnedest things: Picasso is a communist; Einstein sponsored the atom bomb; Bernard Shaw was arrogant and peculiarly celibate; Frank Lloyd Wright was wildly arrogant and immoral when it came to pleasures of the flesh; Bertrand Russell was a convicted pacifist and has practically advocated free love; etcetera. Few great men could pass Personnel. Or, as if we believed that the affairs of our World were alternatively significant enough for the intervention of great men. For instance, no one would think of looking for actualized Christians to intervene in our racial troubles—that is not their “field of competence” (though we did have the sense to get some good sociology on the subject from Gunner Myrdal). We would not officially ask a man of letters, as the British used Bernard Shaw, to criticize the penal system. When it comes to improving the high schools, we choose a well-licensed administrator, we do not try to persuade some extraordinary scholar or natural philosopher, a man who has actually learned something and therefore perhaps knows how it is done; naturally we come out with an excellent administrative report, but no ideas. John Dewey was called on, by passionately interested people, to make an impartial inquiry into the death of Trotsky; that seems a reasonable use of a judicious and incorruptible man; but we do not much imitate it. However, even when there is no doubt of the field of competence, when we choose a man to beautify our towns, we do not automatically call on the major artists of the World; for instance, we now lavishly praise Frank Lloyd Wright, but we never made any community use of him, though he longed for the chance and kept badgering the country with community projects. My belief is that one can easily put great men to work, even against their own freedom and advantage, for they allow themselves to be imposed on, noblesse oblige; but one must, of course, then take the consequences. As if they were a useful public resource, I understand that to consider powerful souls is quite foreign to our customs. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
In a small sense it is undemocratic to consider powerful souls as a public resource, for it assumes that some people really know better in a way that must seem arbitrary to most. In a large sense it is certainly democratic, it that it makes the great man serve as a man. Either of these choices, to eschew them or to use them, however, is preferable to creating glamorous images with empty roles. Now, schoolteaching in Tsarist Russia was little different from anywhere else. The profession was undervalued, underpaid, and overworked, and subject to unutterably petty rules and regulations spewed forth by a strangulating educational bureaucracy. Russia’s legal code granted government officials the right to deny any soldier or civil servant permission to marry, but by the late nineteenth century, only schoolteachers who married lost their rent-free lodgings, seniority, even their jobs. In fact, women teachers were the real target and were routinely fired for marrying, while men seldom were. In 1897, the St. Petersburg Duma (the name for elective municipal councils) formalized this discrimination, passing a law that banned the hiring of married women teachers and terminated those who married after their appointment. The reasons? With fewer employment opportunities than men, single, well-educated young women were grateful for teaching positions. Since they needed less money to live (so the authorities reasoned), they demanded lower salaries. Teaching youngsters was natural for them and prepared them or marriage, at which time they would be dismissed. Off they went to their husbands, at a net saving to St. Petersburg because they were given no pension benefits and were replaced by another contingent of eager, hardworking, docile young spinsters. Why were women singled out for singleness? Married men, after all, were permitted to teach. The reasoning was that a man merely provided his family’s living, but a mother had much heavier responsibilities. She might, for example, have to nurse a baby during school hours or stay at home to nurse a sick child or husband. She might even transfer to her family some of the interminable hours previously dedicated to her teaching. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Elementary-school teaching in St. Petersburg paid better than elsewhere in Russian, and the city’s rich cultural life, with concerts, ballets, and lectures, was an additional lure for eager young minds. School conditions, on the other hand, were less delightful. Classes were held in the teachers’ rented apartment, dark and cramped, unequipped and noisy, and scattered throughout the city, preventing camaraderie with other teachers. Their often cold, hungry, desperately poor, and sometimes abused pupils were divided into three grades, for which one teacher alone was responsible. To ease the children’s suffering, teachers were supposed to dip into their own meager purses and provide after-hours food, clothing, and lodging. When teachers dared complain, it was of overwork and nervous exhaustion. This, however, was not the end of their employer’s demands. Teachers had to provide certificates of political reliability, and in some areas (but not St. Petersburg), the women had to submit medical proof of virginity. In Moscow, female but not male teachers had to abide by a strict 11 P.M. curfew and were monitored to ensure they did so. Clearly, women teachers were expected to be more than just unmarried. Virtue and virginity were of the highest importance. Frightened teachers dared protect only collectively, through the women’s movement and teachers’ mutual-aid societies. A 1903 survey revealed their conflicting views on the issue of celibacy as a prerequisite to teaching, which many abhorred but practiced for wants of alternatives. As one liberal legislator expressed it, “This situation weighs heavily upon city teachers and is tantamount to serfdom. Women teachers are primarily poor girls, needing a scrap of bread; the city administration gives them the chance to work and not die of hunger, but under conditions which cripple their natures, condemning them to eternal celibacy.” Thirty-five teachers reported financial insecurity as their motivation for remaining single and celibate; twenty-nine were afraid of losing their jobs; seven were too exhausted by their teaching responsibilities to lead a personal life; and seven worked too long hours to meet potential husbands. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
A minority of women teachers readily accepted the celibacy imposed on them. Two did not want to marry anyway, one to avoid wedding an unsuitable man, as she noticed so often happened. A few believed teaching was emotional reward enough: “THEY DO NOT NEED A FAMILY. They have found their family among those whom the Lord called His pupils.” Others argued that teaching provided them with independence and a satisfying profession without the constraints of marriage or parental authority, and they defended both their celibacy and their right to reject marriage. The vast majority, however, would have loved to marry and raise families and believed married women were better teachers than spinsters. One anonymous writer agreed: “The Duma’s vestal virgins! How sad and pitiful that sounds…What intelligent woman would give up her right to be a mother? What educated young woman, having known the soul of a small child, would give up the right to bring up her own children and give the motherland useful citizens?!” Some blamed a host of physical and emotion problems on their legislated celibacy: “Celibacy has a harmful effect on everything—on health and on character: it causes selfishness, irritability, nervousness, and a formal relationship to the children,” one woman declared. To avoid all this, a tiny number of defiant women teachers simply had secret love affairs or married and hid the fact. If discovered, they were summarily fired. The simmering discontent boiled over late in 1905, when the Duma voted, by majority of one, to maintain the marriage ban. The authorities had won, just barely, their “battle against the laws of nature.” Eight years later, the “laws of nature” were reestablished, when in a nearly unanimous vote, the marriage ban was repealed. Celibacy was not longer a requirement for St. Petersburg’s women teachers. This episode, replanted in variations through the Western World, including Canada, was a telling indictment of coercive celibacy. Most teachers observed it, reluctantly and even bitterly, simply to keep their jobs. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
The professional and economic risks were too great, and the news of cheaters caught and fired maintained the ambience of fear. Far from finding it rewarding, these unwilling teachers attributed a multitude of ailments to their unnatural celibacy. The few who embraced it voluntarily, on the other hand, respected it as a means to an independent and respected profession and adopted it as a desirable and fruitful way of life. Several revelations were given at Kirtland during the Winter months of 1831-1832. After Oliver Cowdery and John Whitmer left Kirtland for Independence with the revelations, Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon returned to their work on the Inspired Version of the Scriptures. While they were thus engaged, a revelation came to them in which the Lord gave them these instructions: “Open your mouth in proclaiming my gospel, the things of the kingdom, expounding the mysteries thereof out of the Scriptures. Call upon the inhabitants of the Earth, and bear record, and prepare the way for the commandments and revelations which are to come.” Newell K. Whitney was called to the office of bishop in Kirtland. He was to be an assistant to the bishop in America. It was his duty to receive the funds of the church in Kirtland, to keep that part of the Lord’s storehouse, and to administer to the wants of those who were in need. The Lord said: “It is required of the Lord, at the hand of every steward, to render an account of his stewardship, both in time and in eternity. For he who is faithful and wise in time is accounted worthy to inherit the mansions prepared for them of my Father.” After Joseph and Sidney Rigdon had preached about two months in Kirtland and in neighboring towns, God revealed that they should resume their work on the Scriptures. The Lord said: “It is expedient to translate again, and, inasmuch as it is practicable, to preach in the regions round about until Conference, and after that it is expedient to continue the work of translation until it be finished.” As Joseph and Sidney Rigdon read and studied the Bible, God helped them understand the Scriptures by His Holy Spirit. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Sometimes the Lord gave them direct revelations about things which puzzled them, as he did when He said: “And it came to pass that the children being brought up in subjection to the Law of Moses…believed not the gospel of Christ. Wherefore this cause the apostle wrote unto the church that a believer should not be united to an unbelieve, expect the Law of Moses should be done away among them. And that the tradition might be done away, which saith that little children are unholy. However, little children are holy, being sanctified through the atonement of Jesus Christ; and this is what the Scriptures mean.” The elders were instructed that it was their duty to provide for their own families, to find places for them to live, and then perform their work for the church. The Lord promised his elders: “Let my servants proclaim the things which I have commanded them: and inasmuch as they are faithful, lo, I will be with them even unto the end. Let every human be diligent in all things. And the idler shall not have place in the church, except one repents and mends one’s ways.” On February 10, 1832, Joseph and Sidney Rigdon received a vision in which they saw and talked with Jesus Christ. They saw Jesus Christ sitting at the right hand of God. They saw the holy angels and all those who were pure in heart bow, worshiping God and His Son. Because of this vision they were able to say concerning Jesus Christ: “And, now, after the many testimonies which have been given of him, that he lives; for we saw him, even on the right hand of God. And we heard the voice bearing record that He is the only Begotten of the Father; that by Him, and through Him, and of Him, the World are and were created; and the inhabitants thereof are begotten sons and daughters unto God.” In this vision they saw that before the World was created, one of the angels, Lucifer, was evil, having rebelled against the Son of God. As a result he was thrust from the presence of God and he fell from Heaven, and became Satan. Of this part of their vision, Joseph writes: “We beheld Satan, that old serpent, even the Devil, who rebelled against God, and sought to take the kingdom of our God and His Christ. Wherefore he maketh war with the saints of God…And we saw a vision of the sufferings of those with whom he made war and overcame, for thus came the voice of the Lord unto us.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Then the Lord revealed to Joseph and Sidney Rigdon how men should live after death in places that are called “glories.” The glory of a human is to occupy depends upon one’s works while one lives on the Earth. In vision Joseph and Sidney Rigdon saw these three glories and they wrote of what they saw: First, the celestial glory, or the glory as of the sun. Those who will inherit the celestial glory: “They are they who received the testimony of Jesus, and believed on His name, and were baptized. And received the Holy Spirit by the laying on of the hands of one who is ordained and sealed unto this power. And who overcome by faith. They are they who are priests of the Most High after the order of Melchisedec. These shall dwell in the presence of God and His Christ for ever and ever: these are they whom He shall bring with Him, when He shall come in the clouds of Heaven, to reign on the Earth over His people. These are they who shall have part in the first resurrection who shall come forth in the resurrection of the just. Second, the terrestrial glory, or the glory as of the moon. Those who will inherit the terrestrial glory: These are they who died without law…who received not the testimony of Jesus in the flesh, but afterwards received it. These are they who are honorable humans of the Earther, who were blinded by the craftiness of humans. These are they who are not valiant in the testimony of Jesus. These are they who receive of His glory, but not of His fullness. These are they who receive of the presence of the Son, but not of the fullness of the Father. Third, the telestial glory, or the glory as of the stars. Of this glory, and those who would inherit this glory, Joseph wrote: These are they who received not the gospel of Christ, neither the testimony of Jesus Christ. These are they who deny not the Holy Spirit; these are they who are thrust down to hell. These are they who shall not be redeemed from the Devil, until the last resurrection, until the Lord, even Christ the Lamb, shall have finished His work. These are they who are liars, and whosever loves and makes a lie; these are they who suffer the wrath of God. These are they who receive not of his fullness in the eternal World, but of the Holy Spirit through the ministration of the terrestrial and also the telestial receive it of the administering of angels. As one star differs from another star in glory, even so differs one from another in glory in the telestial World. Last of all, these all are they who will not be gathered with the saints, to be caught up unto the church of the Firstborn, and received into the cloud. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
God made it known that eventually all will acknowledge Him as the Lord, for Jesus Christ said of those who inherit telestial glory: These are all shall bow the knee, and every tongue shall confess to him who sits upon the throne for ever and ever; for they shall be judged according to their works; and every human shall receive according to one’s own works, but where God and Christ dwell they can not come, Worlds without end. Many wonderful things were shown to Joseph and Sidney Rigdon in this vision. Many of them were so glorious that God commanded they should not write about them. In March four revelations were given. One gave further information on the storehouse and how to care for the poor. In others some of the elders were sent to different parts of the country to preach the gospel. Good advice was given to Frederick G. Williams when the Lord said: Be faithful, stand in the office which I have appointed unto you, succor the weak, lift up the hands of which hang down, and strengthen the feeble knees. And if thou art faithful unto the end, thou shalt have a crown of immortality and eternal life in the mansions which I have prepared in the House of My Father. “Only fear the Lord and serve Him faithfully with all your heart; for consider how great are the things He has done for you,” I Samuel 12.24. An Angel inclines the will as something loveable, and as manifesting some created good ordered God’s goodness. And thus one can incline the will to the love of the creator of God, by way of persuasion. Everywhere is the green of new growth, the amazing sight of the renewal of the Earth. We watch the grass once again emerging from the ground. O Lord, may we today be touched by grace, fascinated and moved by this your creation, energized by the power of new growth at work in your World. Prayer is an invitation to God to intervene in our lives, to let His will prevail in our affairs; it is an effort to make Him the Lord of your soul. If it does not add to the glory of God, what is pride worth? We forfeit our dignity when we abandon loyalty to what is sacred; our existence dwindles to trifles. We barter life for oblivion, and pay the price of toil and pain in the pursuit of aimlessness. Through prayer we sanctify ourselves, our feelings, our ideas. In prayer we establish a living contact with God, between our concern and His will, between despair and promise, want and abundance. Life is fashioned by prayer, and prayer is the quintessence of life. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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We are Globalizing Our Vices More Quickly than We are Globalizing Our Virtues
You cannot do a kindness too soon, and never be too ruined by praise than saved by criticism. In 1900 the turn of a new century was celebrated in Paris with a Grand Exhibition devoted to progress, and the newspaper Le Figaro, barely able to contain itself, crowed: “How fortunate we are to be living on this first day of the 20th century!” One source of enthusiasm was the World’s advance, as the rich nations saw it, toward global economic integration—a rational process that, by changing spatial and political relationships, would make economies flourish. Sounding much like the true believers in economic globalization today, economists spoke enthusiastically of how more and more of the World was being stitched or bolted together. Foreign trade as percentage of World output had risen nearly ninefold between 1800 and 1900—some of it going into colonies in Asia and Africa. Anyone projecting these trends forward could have concluded that the process of economic globalization would complete itself long before the year 2000. However, trends do not continue indefinitely, the future does not arrive in straight lines, and the World was not ready for what happened next. Within fourteen years of the Grand Exhibition, the “stitches” or “bolts” broke and the slaughter of World War 1 violently disrupted flows of trade and capital. The Bolshevik Revolution followed in 1917, the Great Depression in the 1930s, World War II in 1939-45, the Communist takeover of China in 1949 and from the 1940s and into the ‘60s, and successive decolonizations in India, Africa, and Asia. Together, these events and countless smaller, less visible ones shattered long-established trade arrangements, encouraged tit-for-tat protectionism and touched off violence and instability—all discouraging border-crossing trade, investment and economic integration. In short, the World went through half a century of de-globalization. In the post-World War II years, America, its industrial base intact and if anything, strengthened by the war, needed export markets for its goods and, above all, its capital. The World was hungry for American products, often the only products available. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Moreover, advancing technology made it cheaper and easier to serve larger-than-national markets. Thus, convinced that global economic reintegration would serve their own purposes while generally advancing World economic growth, American elites undertook to create cross-border markets through which goods, capital, information and skills could once more flow with minimal friction. This, then, took on the form of an ideological crusade for re-globalization. As late as 1990, vast areas of the World were still essentially closed to the trouble-free exchange of goods, currencies, people and information. Only a billion people lived in any form of open economy. However, by the year 2000, that number had, by some counts, leaped to four billion. China alone, with well over a billion people, became committed to “market socialism,” perhaps better described as “social capitalism,” and opened its doors to foreign plants, products and money. Postcommunist Russian invited investment from outside. Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics in the Caucasus and Central Asia followed suit. Much of South America, urged on by the United States and led by Chile and Argentina, deregulated, privatized, invited Wall Street capital and became for a time “more capitalist than thou.” Currencies, too, as we have seen, were increasingly unleashed from their countries of origin. We expanded the spatial reach not only of a giant, globe girdling corporations but of tiny firms, even Internet-connected, microfinanced village enterprises in remote regions, encouraging once more the dream of a fully integrated World economy—one in which no part of the 510 million square meters of the Earth’s surface is beyond reach. The re-globalizers were on a roll. It is true this drive toward re-globalization has not gone quite as far as many of its friends and enemies assume. Even within the financial sector the lose term globalization masks sharply different rates of change. While currency markets are truly global, bond markets lag, and stock markets, in the main, continue to list largely domestic securities. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
In Europe, where intense pressures for economic integration have led to a single currency and central bank, equity markets remain highly fragmented, with a mosaic of different rules and regulations. Despite hundreds of frequently questionable new laws and regulations intended to produce uniformity is not exactly working due to things like cost of living and shipping costs. Far more significant on a global scale, only 18 developing countries have regular access to private capital, even if more countries did, it would not mean that a unified global capital market existed. At yet another level, accounting methods still differ around the World, despite a drive to adopt a universal standard. Nonetheless, as early as the 1990s, thirty-five to forty thousand multinational corporations operated two hundred thousand subsidiaries or affiliates around the World. Worldwide foreign-currency deposits soared from $1 billion in 1961 to $1.5 trillion by the end of the century. World foreign direct investment had grown to $1.3 trillion. Cross-border debt reached $1.7 trillion by 2001. And World trade had hit $6.3 trillion. One of the most comprehensive recent attempts to determine the extent of globalization today is an index developed by A.T. Kearney and Foreign Policy. It measures such things as trade, foreign embassies a country maintains and the number of intergovernmental agencies to which it belongs. On the basis of all these, the 2003 Kearney study ranked sixty-two countries and found that small ones topped the list of the most globalized—Ireland, Switzerland, Sweden, Singapore and Netherlands. The United States of America was number 11, France 12, Germany 17, and South Korea 28, ahead of Japan at 35. The level of cross-border economic integration actually declined in 2002 because of a slowdown in the United States of America’s economy a drop in FDI in 2001. However, the total amount was still above that for any year before 1999. In spite of these figures, Foreign Policy expressed little doubt that re-globalization would continue. And if to these measures we add the growing cross-fertilization of currencies already described, the reasons for that optimism are strengthened. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Ironically, still another reason lies hidden in the remark of Harriet Babbitt, former deputy administrator of the U. S. Agency for International Development, who has noted, “We are globalizing our vices more quickly than we are globalizing our virtues. Illegal drugs, for example, are a $500 billion business Worldwide, and adds up to about 5.3 percent of the World economy. The narco industry, using the latest technologies, forms a giant unter-economy that actually overshadows the aboveground or formal economy in many countries and reaches from one end of the Earth to the other. From Afghanistan and Colombia to the schoolrooms and slums of Rio de Janeiro to the sidewalks of Chicago, narco-traffickers operate one of the most globalized industries in the World. Even if it has the will to do it, no one government can, nor wants to control the drug trade. For instance, California’s revenue from marijuana taxes alone is soaring. The state collected about $817 million in adult-use marijuana tax revenue during the 2020-2021 fiscal years. That is 55 percent more cannabis earnings for state coffers than was generated in the prior fiscal year. The business of pleasures of the flesh is similarly global. In an Albanian refugee camp, young women kidnapped in Romania await shipment to Italy to serve as slaves for pleasures of the flesh. In Bucharest so-called “agencies” peddle “dancers” to the trade of pleasures of the flesh in Greece, Turkey, Israel, and as far away as Japan. According to UNICEF, an estimated one million impoverished young people, most girls, and are up in the trade of pleasures of the flesh each year. Drugs, arms, intellectual property, people and money are not the only commodities traded illegally for huge profits by international networks. They also trade in human organs, identification, hair, endangered species, stolen art, blood, medical records, photographs, and toxic waste. Precisely because these activities are illegal and need to escape detection, traffickers constantly change the routes they take to deliver their “products.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Smugglers, armed with fake papers and aided by bribed officials, slip easily past frontier guards. However, police in hot pursuit of them are often stopped at the border. Governments will huffily protect their “sovereign” space from one another. Yet that same spatial sovereignty is compromised daily, not by nation-states, but by stateless networks that break laws and cross borders in pursuit of trade. Venezuela, for example, would not allow U.S plans in its airspace to hunt for drug traffickers from Colombia—who regularly violate the same so-called sovereignty with impunity. Our efforts to control these illegal and antisocial activities in the under-economy will fail because government strategies are rooted in wrong ideas, false assumptions and obsolete institutions. It will take a global—or at least a multilateral—effort to stop them. Then there is the rain of dust from China’s deserts that periodically blankets Seoul, Korea. And there are the fires in Indonesia that unleash choking smog that sends thousands gasping and coughing in Malaysia and Singapore. And the cyanide spill in Romania that poisoned rivers in Hungary and Serbia. Global warming, air pollution, ozone depletion, desertification and water-supply shortages, like the drug trade and slavery in pleasures of the flesh, are all problems that demand organized regional or even global effort. Whether anyone wants it or not. Today a widespread—indeed, global—controversy rages over the benefits and costs of further cross-border integration. One thing is clear. Life is unfair. Economic integration and its spatial consequences do not deliver anything like a “level playing field”—a metaphysical concept with no existence in reality. We need not replay all the arguments about the benefits and costs of extending spatial reach and globalizing economies. Even identifying the pros and cons accurately is more complex than it seems. Thus the Hungarian economist Andras Inotia, director-general of the Institute for World Economics in Budapest, has analyzed the pluses and minuses for countries joining the European Union. His words apply to economic integration at the global level as well. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Referring to the two deep fundamentals so far discussed in these pages, benefits and losses do not spread evenly in space, and results differ in time as well. Short-term gains or losses can turn into their opposites in the long term. Some payoffs or losses are here and now. Others are spatially here but not now. Still others are now but not here. Both sides reduce these complexities to bumper-sticker slogans. Pro- and anti-globalization literature threatens to swamp us, with Google’s search engine alone pointing to over 1.5 million relevant documents. However, some good things have happened. Since opening and economic reforms in 1978 Chinese GDP (GDP per capita) experienced a period of unprecedented growth, increasing from 367.9 billion Yuan (386 Yuan) in 1978 to over 90 trillion Yuan (64,644 Yuan) in 2018. During the same period, over 850 million Chinese were lifted out of poverty Many attribute this impressive achievement to the successful implementation of the globalization. Globalization being given all the attention make it easy to point out it’s evils—though many of them have more to do with corruption, environmental degradation and brute enforcement than with economic integration as such. Nevertheless, reality shouts. China has been—and still is—guilty of all those evils—corruption up to the nostrils, massive ecological damage, unashamed suppression of social unrest. Yet these negatives must be weighed against the facts that China has systematically integrated itself into the global economy and is on its way to become the World’s Superpower, taking America’s place. Pro-globalization forces, their enthusiasm slightly dimmed by criticism and by the current weakness of the World economy, nevertheless remain optimistic for the long term. Some religiously believe that complete globalization is our destiny—that whatever the backward steps and stumbles, it will triumph in the end, linking not only every person but every place. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
These true believers argue that no country will indefinitely turn its back on globalization’s “breathtaking” potential for raising living standards; we face new problems that cannot be solved without it; and new technologies will increasingly facilitate it. To which skeptics might replay that the benefits of peace could also be breathtaking, yet they have been passed up repeatedly; not all problems get solved; and history is full of counter-technologies developed to infacilitate what earlier technologies facilitated. If oil prices continue to soar as reserves decline and are restricted, re-globalization could also screech to a halt at some point. We could see gasoline in California increase to $8 a gallon by this summer, mortgage rates hit 11 percent in the near future, and the median home price in America increasing to $630,000.00. And you notice financial instutions are reducing their hours and opening at 10am? That is not a good sign. When things get that bad, consider how much it will cost to rent an apartment in America and what will happen to those who are not making nearly $200,000 a year, who have not bought a home yet. So the real question looming over us is this: Is the decades-long drive toward re-globalization pausing briefly for a breath? Or is it about to suddenly go into reverse once more? Are we, in fact—despite the increased mobility of factories and FDI, despite the Internet and cyberspace, and despite the massive movements of people—about to undergo another historic shift from re-globalization to de-globalization. However, that is not the whole—or real—story. The early Protestants made a profoundly happy connection between Justification and a man’s Calling or Vocation in Worldly society. Max Webber famously drew attention to this, in his book on the Protestant Ethic, as an explanation of the acceptance of ascetic self-righteous capitalist enterprise and the modern rationalized “specialized division of labor” which he equated with calling. I think that he missed the simple meaning of the connection and has thereby taken sociologists off on a wrong track. (Modern sociology can hardly stand much poor theology since it has so little at all.) #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
In the Christian Bible, there are two kinds of prescription about callings. First, the simple proverbial wisdom: “Modestly attend to your business and you will do all right.” Second, the apocalyptic gospel advice that a man should carry on in his station in a damned World for the few years till the Second Coming, because he would be lacking in faith to make long plans. However, the point of the Protestant connection was that, in a religious community, the various occupations in fact justify by giving people the right ongoing activity. This idea was accompanied by a whole spectrum of radical and sometimes violent programs to make the community religious, from anarchies and communities of love, to congregational churches, to puritanical theocracies. (A modern enterprise with the identical philosophy is the Zionist kibbutz. There is no need of a particular “supernatural” sanction.) Vocation is the way a man recognizes himself as belonging, or appoints himself, in the community life and work. We saw, in Jespersen, how a child takes on the languages of the peer groups that he chooses because they are his ideals as he grows up. So his occupations. A good community has, for the most part, positions and calling that facilitate a man’s activity and achievement. It is a World for him. A man might have the vocation, know it, in various ways: by childhood and family traditions; through a teacher who brings him out; by inspiration; or even by recognizing that a certain job must be done and responsibly accepting the necessity as his own, because it is his community and various jobs may be equivalent to him (his real vocation is being a citizen). A man may do a job because he can, noblesse oblige. Sometimes the community does not offer the needed opportunity, but had to make a place for it when it is wrested by the man: this is the case of original creative persons who appoint themselves to an ideal new for the community, a vocation not provided by the community tries to provide every youth with his right calling, understanding, however, that its providence is not a Providence. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Vocation, therefore, is a solid means of finding one’s opportunities, things worthwhile, useful, and honorable to do and be justified by. As such, vocations are neither traditional nor rationalistic in some system, but whatever happens to be the ongoing work of the particular community of human interests. The religious point is that a man can work hard, as every man wants to do; can do it boldly and “lose himself,” because his community supports him; and he can thereby miraculously satisfy the stringent demands of conscience. Such a man is in a state of grace. On this interpretation, the “Protestant Ethic” is correct; and when our society now turns against it, it is admitting that it has lost a saving grace. If this is what Luther had in mind when he spoke of “callings,” I do not know. Presumably he was referring mainly to farmers and guild craftsmen, who did have a community in their unquestionable callings, and the knights who were essential in the World as he saw it. Such callings are earnest; I fail to see why they should be ascetic, self-denying or self-abasing, though hopefully they are self-transcending. However, by the time (1905) that Max Weber came to write, the notion of a human-centered community had so faded into the modern system of alienated production and distribution that he could think of calling only as an imposed discipline, more mild in the “traditional” Luther, more severe in the “rationalistic” Calvin. They irony is that in our decades, the combination of rationalism, asceticism, and individualism (the so-called Protestant Ethic) had produced precisely the system of boondoggling, luxury-consumption, and statuses (and rejection of the Protestant Ethic)! As the elders were preparing the revelations for publication, they expressed a desire to know more concerning the Gathering and the preaching of the gospel. Joseph Smith made this a matter of prayer, and on November 3, 1831, a revelation was given which has become knowns as the appendix to the Doctrine and Covenants. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
In this revelation the Lord said: “Hearken, O ye people of my church, saith the Lord your God, and hear the word of the Lord concerning you; the Lord who shall suddenly come to His temple. Wherefore prepare ye, prepare ye, O my people; sanctify yourselves; gather ye together, O ye people of my church, upon the land of America. Be ye clean that bear the vessels of the Lord. Call your solemn assemblies, and speak often one to another. And let every man call upon the name of the Lord. Send forth the elders of my church unto the nations which are afar off; unto the islands of the sea; send forth unto foreign lands; call upon all nations. And, behold, and lo, this shall be their cry, and the voice of the Lord unto all people: Go ye forth unto the land of America, that the borders of my people may be enlarged. Let the cry go forth among all people: Awake and arise and go forth to meet the Bridegroom. Behold, and lo, the Bridegroom cometh, go ye out to meet him. Prepare yourselves for the great day of the Lord. Watch, therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour. Go ye out from among the nations, even from Babylon, from the midst of wickedness, which is spiritual Babylon. Behold, the Lord God hath sent forth the Angel, crying through the midst of Heaven, saying: Prepare ye the way of the Lord, and make his paths strait, for the hour of His coming is nigh, when the Lamb shall stand upon Mount America. I have sent forth mine Angel, flying through the midst of Heaven, having the everlasting gospel. And this gospel shall be preached unto every nation and the servants of God shall go forth, saying Fear God and give glory to Him; for the hour of His judgment is come: and worship him calling upon the name of the Lord day and night.” The conference decided that after the revelations were ready for printing Oliver Cowdery should take them to Independence, Missouri, to be published in W. W. Phelps’s printing office. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
However, at this time a revelation was received through Joseph Smith in which the Lord said: “For my servant Oliver Cowdery’s sake: it is not wisdom in me that He should be intrusted with the commandments and the money which he shall carry unto the land of America, except one go with him who will be true and faithful; wherefore I, the Lord, will that my servant John Whitmer should go with my servant Oliver Cowdery. And also that he shall continue in writing and making a history of all the important things which he shall observe and know concerning my church.” By revelation Jesus Christ proclaimed that every human is a steward and that the laws of the storehouse should be in operation in America. He gave a commandment to the people of His church concerning their money in which He said: “Inasmuch as they receive more than is needful for their necessities and their wants, it shall be given into my storehouse, and the benefits shall be consecrated unto the inhabitants of America. Behold this is what the Lord requires of every human in His stewardship. And behold, none are exempt from this law who belong to the church of the living God.” About the middle of November, 1831, Oliver Cowdery and John Whitmer left Kirtland with the precious bundle of papers containing the revelations, and they began the journey to Missouri to have them printed. Upon their arrival in Missouri, they began the work of printing them. However, circumstances prevented their completing the work in Missouri, and they were not printed and published until 1835 in Kirtland, Ohio. On August 17, 1835, a General Assembly of the church met to hear testimonies by various men and groups in the church concerning the truth of the revelations to be published in the Doctrine and Covenants. The twelve apostles prepared a written testimony in which they wrote, “We are willing to bear testimony to all the World, to every creature on the face of the whole Earth, that the Lord has made it known in our souls through the Holy Spirit, that these commandments were given by inspiration of God, and are good for all humans, and are true. We rejoice exceedingly, and pray that the children of humans may profit by them.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
All those present at the meeting voted unanimously to accept this as a “doctrine and covenants,” for the church. The minutes of that meeting have been included in the Doctrine and Covenants as Section 108 A. The Doctrine and Covenants contains the revelations of God’s will given through His prophets to His church in the latter day. It is a growing book. Each time God gives a revelation to his church through His prophet, and after it has been accepted by the vote of the people of the church, it is added to the book. The Doctrine and Covenants testifies of Jesus Christ—that He lives; that He loves His people; that He will bless with the greatest blessing from Heaven those who love Him, obey Him, and serve Him. In the litany of deprivations in a male prison, the absence of available women probably heads the list. Indeed, an inmate sees almost no women save a few guards and classification officers and perhaps a chaplain, nurse, or librarian and the occasional visitor. Mainstream correction thinking endorses this—womanlessness or celibacy, it is argued, is part of the punishment. A few institutions, concerned about widespread same gendered activity in the primarily heterosexual population, have instituted conjugal visiting programs. Many others permit contact visits so that, under the vigilant eye of the visiting-room guards, a prisoner may embrace family and friends, even hold hands or cuddle children. The biggest issue in single-gendered prisons—at least, what should be the biggest issue—is non-consensual pleasures of the flesh among inmates. Ever since Fortune and Men’s Eyes, the 1971 movie based on John Herbert’s play, which treated the subject with sensitivity and compassion while portraying several non-consensual acts in all their terrible brutality, the public has known what happens “inside.” If he is attractive and has an alluring rear-end, a vulnerable, terrified, inexperienced young inmate so much the better, is targeted from the moment he meets his colleagues. Whether he likes it or not, he has become a “punk” and will probably not sleep that night without being physically forced into pleasures of the flesh by wither a special “daddy” or a gang of inmates who will hold him down, pull off his breeches, and spread his legs and then violate him one after the other in an assembly line of abuse. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Quite apart from the physical pain and injury, the psychic trauma, unending shame, and terror of realizing this is just the beginning, the punk and his assailants have just played out the penal system’s most common nightly drama. Quite likely his assailants, too, are heterosexual and somewhere, deeply buried, wish they were not doing this, know they should not be doing this, not the physically forces activity on another man. The destruction of esteem is as intense as in any violated woman. The helplessness, the horrifying knowledge that authority stands idly by and does not intervene, of actually condones the behavior, the glimpse of the hell of his future life in prison, are just part of it. With ever-rising, uncurable and potentially deadly virus that infect inmates, as well as those living with that potentially deadly virus, the chances of contracting the deadly virus are enormous. The inmate predators and their victims by no means represent the majority of the population. Many men look away or frown at non-consensual pleasures of the flesh, understanding it as the violence it is. They may themselves, however, engage in pleasures of the flesh with a special partner and rationalize this unaccustomed same gendered activity as “jailhouse love.” This can vary from the tough-master/submissive-“mistress” relationship to mutual affection expressed not only in constant companionship, protection, and other assistance but physically, with hugging and kissing as preliminaries to mutual “self-love” or other activities. Other inmates—roughly half or more, depending on the institution—engage in no pleasures of the flesh other than “self-love.” These men accept and endure their celibacy as part of the overall prison experience. Some have wives or girlfriends on the outside, others are merely able to maintain the values that most of them shared before incarceration—on the street, men do not attack and indulge in non-consensual gang pleasures of the flesh with other men. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
These celibates are the prison system’s excuse for permitting what is, in fact, an intolerable status quo; not every inmate goes in for same gendered relations, correctional apologists say. In fact, much of “jailhouse love” and non-consensual pleasures of the flesh in prison is only peripherally based on being the same gender. Rather, both are responses to coerced celibacy in a system inmates hate and defy, a system solidly maintained by the outside World against which they have also rebelled. That these episode of pleasures of the flesh take place between men is pure necessity and has nothing to do with essence of the acts. If prisons were started in Greece, a lot would be explained. Men who assault and injure and humiliate are, among other things, protesting their incarceration with its attendant womanlessness. They are proving to themselves, their peers, and their guards that they are still powerful, that although they, too, are humiliated daily, they can instill terror and dominate others. They create solidarity with other men with the same needs. They protect their reputations—in prison, a reputation that includes toughness is crucial for survival—and ensure that they themselves will never be victimized. What they say they are doing is quite different, and many are probably unaware of their true motivation. The excuse or explanation they articulate—to themselves as much as to each other—is that they need some outlet to release their intimate energy. In fact, the violence and harassment are far more integral to the act than the climax and even serves as titillation. Much the same is true of men who strong-arm a weaker inmate into serving as their man. They are not as violent, but develop unequal relationships based on their dominance—which requires constant reasserting—over the submissive and defenseless but resentful and sometimes rebellious young inmate. The cost, of course, is enormous, especially to the vulnerable man, whose loss of self-esteem is incalculable, but also to the daddy. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
If he is heterosexual—and the great majority are—he has to deal with his own internal conflicts, his basic contempt for what he is doing versus his urgent need to prove he has resisted the total disempowerment of prison. Even if he does sleep with the same gender, he now admits, excite him, he is, he tells himself, not really into his same gender. He is, he says, just goofing around with jailhouse love, just sticking it to “the system,” whose henchmen, the detested guards or screw, ridicule what they call his same gendered attractedness but—oh, so complicit in this travesty of life—do absolutely nothing. The rare man acknowledges as well his need for affection. “Can you imagine not being able to touch another human being (adult) for twenty-three…years?” demands inmate Carl Bowles in the maximum-security Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kanas. Because he has resorted to jailhouse love, Mr. Bowles scorns the celibates who manage without partners. “Why? Because they are scared of becoming homosexuals,” he sneers. And “‘Oh my God, am I turning day because I want someone to hold, to touch, to love me?’” they wonder. Prison authorities may call him a predator, Mr. Bowles says, but like most jailhouse daddies, Mr. Bowles portrays himself as a misunderstood, caring guy, impoverished as best he can in an inhuman system. Prisoners respond differently to their coerced celibacy. Typically, some accept it for want of an alternative. Others rebel, sublimating their rage against the authorities and presumably life itself—for rage is what drives so many of them inside the first place—into physical assault on other, vulnerable men. There are certain parallels to unwilling nuns in medieval convents, namely overt resistance to celibacy and the collective creation of a tolerable way of life, despite their grievous circumstances. The more brutal the coercion, the more determined and audacious the opposition. Celibacy is seen as part and parcel of an alien lifestyle and brings no rewards at all. Without any stake in respecting it, the captive is usually an unwilling collaborator in his celibate condition. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
To give up the religious community of work is a great loss. However, even more terrible is that our society weakens the growing youth’s conviction that there is a Creation of the Six Days, a real World rather than a system of social rules that indeed are often arbitrary. Many things conspire to weaken this conviction. The trouble occurs, for instance, when the city life turns into Urbanism; and when the use of our machines is submerged in the Industrial System. Airplanes and their engines are beautiful, but consider how the ancient dream of man to fly among the stars and go through the clouds and look down on the lands and seas has degenerated in its realization to the socialized and apathetic behaviour of passengers who hardly look out the windows. City life is one of the great human conditions but in Urbanism, no one gives birth, or is gravely ill, or dies. Seasons are only weather, for in the Supermarket there is no sequence of food and flowers. We have seen just how with the maturity of the Industrial System, children cease to learn mechanical aptitudes. When the sciences are supreme, average people lose their feeling of causality. And all different timbres of music come from one loud-speaker (an earnest musician, therefore resignedly composes with the tapes). However, this same socialized weakening of the sense that there is a nature of things corrupts the social nature itself. For instance, in the newspapers you will rarely read the words envy, spite, generosity, service, embarrassment, confusion, recklessness, timidity, compassion, etcetera—the actual motives of life. As if the doings of politicians and financiers happened otherwise, they might occur, typically, in little items of “human interests.” However, the doings of financiers, etcetera, do happen otherwise, by rational accommodations in the system; there is little room for “motives” in making decisions. The question is, What is occurring with the social animals who are, with other hats, the agents of the rational accommodations? This fascinating question used to be the great realistic subject of Balzac, Zola, Dreiser. Later it came to be treated “weirdly” by Kafka and Musil; and then not at all. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
The big stories of crime and divorce are treated in stereotypes of “passions,” as if people were characters in movies. However, nature soon imitates art, and people imitate the stereotypes and produce further big stories. So with the workaday occupations of people. There are standards and categories of employment, certificates and union cards, that may have little relation to the concrete tasks and capacities required; but they do make it easier for the tabulators, and they more or less guarantee that the ones chosen to fill the Roles will not be the ones peculiarly able to do the jobs; and they will initiate nothing. The work is determined not by the nature of the task but by the role, the rules, the status, and salary; and these are, then what a man is. Typically, a man cannot accept a position at a lower salary and status, even though he may want that task and does not care about money; it would give an altogether wrong notion of him and jeopardize this whole career. Or again: A well-known magazine asks a man how they should refer to him, as Psychologist X, as Author X? He suggests man of letters, for that is what he is, in the eighteenth-century meaning. However, they cannot buy that because the word does not exist in Time-style; he cannot be that, and presumably the old function of letters cannot exist. However, Time-style, alas, exists. If its members have diplomas and “accreditation,” an organization has High Standards. If it is sponsored or carried out by an Institute with a Regents license, a piece of research is important. In such cases these organizations and enterprises can get substantial tax-dodge Foundation grants and perhaps public money. However, often these licenses have no relation to reality whatever. Exempli gratia, can you imagine that a chap who at thirty-five would make a splendid leader of youth or adult recreation, experienced in life and having decided to serve in this field, could possibly have majored at twenty in physical education? #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Dr. Freud pointed out long ago, in his Problem of Lay-Analysis, that it is extremely unlikely that a young man who would throw the best years of his life into the cloistered drudgery of getting an M.D. degree, could possibly make a good psychoanalyst; so he preferred to look for analysts among the writers, the lawyers, the mothers of families, those who had chosen human contacts. However, in their economic wisdom, the Psychoanalytic Institute of Vienna (and New York) overruled him. The notion that colleges are the right sponsors for creative research is quite disastrous. It both corrupts the right function of the school, to teach, and it guarantees that the research will be incestuously staffed by academics. The cynical pork-barreling of these “projects” is a scandal; but the damage is not that the worthless makes a good things of it, but that those who have been absorbed in real nature and creative thought, and therefore out of this World, are the least likely to know the arts or have the connections to get any support at all. They cannot possibly be “safe”—how could they be? They will rarely have a smoothly continuous career resume; years at a stretch might be lacking, or there might be a couple of years of working as a house painter, a taxi driver, a piano tuner—all wrong. (Let me mention an episode that made me see red when I heard of it: A young fellow, needing to eat, applied for a job as stock boy at a self-reputed and very successful Advance-Guard publisher in New York. He was hired and told to report; but the president, seeing his name, said, “Isn’t that the poet whose book we rejected last year? We can’t have a literary man as a stock boy, it would not be fitting. Phone and tell him not to come in.”!!) There is, of course, a real and hard question: how to find these creative people and give the means and encouragement? However, that is the task, and not processing certified and affidavited applications. In order to make good bets on the best leader and the inspired research, somebody has got to take the risk of making concrete unablated judgments, and perhaps even using his legs. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
However, it is the essence of the organized system to sit on its behind and take no risks, and let the tabulator do the work, and strengthen its own position by incestuously staffing itself, and then fostering the lie that outside of the system nothing exists. We are so out of touch with the real work in the field that, in America, a dean is superior to a professor and a board of trustees or regents is superior to a faculty. The editor knows better than the author what should be in a book, and the publisher knows better than either. Naturally everything sounds alike. And top managers and generals map out the lines of basic research. Think of it. If the university is controlled by a board of trustees, the student, the pick of the youth in the final period of his training, is left high and dry with no contact with responsible men. Or think of this: an important executive of a very large publishing house has carefully explained to me that the criterion of their printing books, and of the books they choose to print, is the need to keep their several huge printing-press occupied. That is, will the book promise enough sales (200,000) to warrant setting one of these presses going? and on the other hand, they must manufacture some books or other to keep all their presses going. As an author, I think this example is remarkable; one can turn it like a beryl and examine its prismatic lights. In the elementary schools, children are tested by yes-and-no and multiple-choice questions because these are convenient to tabulate; then there is complaint later that they do not know how to articulate their thoughts. Now Dr. Skinner of Harvard has invented us a machine that does away with the creative relation of pupil, teacher, and developing subject matter. It feeds the child questions “at his own pace” to teach him to add, read, write, and “other factual tasks,” so that the teacher can apply oneself to teaching “the refinements of education, the social aspects of learning, the philosophy of it, and advance thinking.” However, who, then, will watch the puzzlement on a child’s face and suddenly guess what it is that he really does not understand, that has apparently nothing to do with the present problem, nor even the present subject matter? and who will notice the light in his eyes and seize the opportunity to spread glorious clarity over the whole range of knowledge; for instance, the nature of succession and series, or what grammar really is; the insightful moments that are worth years of ordinary teaching. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
I wonder how Dr. Skinner’s machine would compare in efficiency with the method of Socrates in the Meno? Dr. Skinner proposes to organize the collections of “facts” by big-idea lecture of the type of the New School for Social Research. This appallingly fails to understand that philosophy and science occur in scrutinizing the concrete. However, the worst effect of losing the created World is that a young man no longer knows that he is a creature, and so are his friend creatures. This has three fatal consequences. He feels that the social roles are entirely learned and artificial; he cannot begin to belong and play a part just being himself and following the promptings of nature and ordinary human associations. Conversely, his own creaturely feelings then seem to him to be private and freakish. Instead of being a course of strength, they become a cause of guilt and of feeling worthless and excluded. Most important of all, not being a creature, with its awe and humility, he does not dare to be open to the creator spirit, to become himself on occasion a creator. If, by exception, he does create something, he is conceited about it and contemptuous of others, as if it were his; and conversely, he is gnawed by fear that he will lose the power, as if it were something he had. A society that so discourages its young has nothing to recount it. Nor does our present society foster the noble need of Honor. I am filled with joy when the day dawns quietly over the roof of the sky. Life was wonderful in Winter, but did Winter make me happy? Yes, life is wonderful. Life is wonderful and I still feel joy each time the day-break whitens the dark sky, each time the sun climbs over the roof of the sky. Prayer makes visible the right, and reveals the false. In its radiance we behold the worth of our efforts, the range of our hopes, and the meanings of our deeds. Envy and fear, despair and resentment, anguish and grief, which lie heavily upon the heart, are dispelled like shadows by its light. The purpose of prayer is to be brought to God’s attention, to be listened to, to be understood by Him; not to know Him but to be known to Him; not to form judgments about God but to be judged by Him. To pray is to behold life not only as a result of His power, but as a concern of His will, or to strive to make it divine. When discarded by man, God is not alone. However, man is alone when one discards God. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Let Us Never Forget the True Heroes of Society
Let us never forget that the true heroes of society quietly get the job done, and do so with incredible dedication, perseverance, and dignity in an environment of steadily diminishing resources. When the 2002 World soccer championships were held jointly in Japan and South Korea, Hugo Enciso, a Los Angeles marketing executive, decided to take his son to Tokyo. Mr. Enciso, Mexican by birth, American by education and lifestyle, worked for La Opinion, the biggest Spanish-language daily in the United States of America. In Japan they met members of the tiny community of Latin Americans who lived there and were introduced to Japanese food, manners and its mania for sports. For Mr. Enciso it was an experience he would long remember. Hundreds of thousands of other foreigners, from all parts of the globe, poured into Korea and Japan to attend the games. We later met Mr. Enciso in California at the wedding of two young software executive—he born in Pakistan, she in India. His family was Muslim, hers Hindu. When the speaker system blared Pashtun music, Mr. Enciso joined the crowd of frenetic, happy dancers, most of whom had never heard a note of Pashtun before that night. Among them where WASP executives, Asian students, American Jewish people, and many with still other ethnic, religious or geographical backgrounds. It was not merely a mixed marriage but a mixed celebration. And it was truly symbolic. We are not only still shifting the center of World economic gravity toward Asia, including South Asia, where the married couple have their ancestral roots. We are not only altering the criteria that will determine where tomorrow’s jobs will be found, where new factories, offices and homes will be built, and where revolutionary wealth will be created. We are expanding something we might call our personal “spatial reach.” Twenty-four hundred years ago in ancient China, where the less affluent were rooted to the soil, the Chinese philosopher Chuang-tzu declared that people who travel are apt to be “troublesome, false, restless, and engaged in secret plots.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Today an estimated 8 percent of the human race—roughly 640 million people—travel across some national boundary in the course of the year. This number is larger than the entire population of the Earth in the year 1700, which was 603 million, right after the dawn of the industrial age. Troublesome or not, engaging in secret plots or not, searching for a job or just flying to Milwaukee to visit a customer, we are a species on the move. Americans on average drive fifteen thousand miles per year. However, most car trips are back and forth to one’s workplace—an average round-trip journey of twenty-three miles, or to destinations closer to home, like the supermarket or the bank. Vacation travel may take the family father. We could easily track our car travel on a map. A business traveler can also pinpoint the cities to which one has journeyed in the course of the year and the trips within those places. The results would be a map showing one’s “travel reach.” However, we could also show on the map all the locations to and from which we have sent or received e-mail, post office mail, phone calls, text messages, faxes, plus the physical addressed of all the people in our electronic Rolodex and sites visited online. With considerably more difficulty, we could even track the geographical origin of the products we buy and the destinations of the waste matter and pollution we create. Even these do not exhaust all the geographical locations with which we have, or wish to have, some relationship. However, they would give us a rich image of our spatial reach—a continually changing map of our personal geography. Compare our individual spatial reach today with that of the average less affluent European in, say, the twelfth century, who in the course of an entire lifetime was unlikely to ever have traveled more than fifteen miles from one’s village. Except, perhaps, for religious ideas that came over the centuries all the way from Rome, fifteen miles largely bounded in one’s life. That was the less affluent personal footprint on the planet. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
If we apply this kind of mapping to companies, industries or nations, we promptly discover that the spatial reach of each varies and continually changes. Similarly, different segments of each economy require a different “reach.” A country may need to import raw materials or components from many countries in order to sell exports to only a few. Or vice versa. Hollywood uses equipment from Japan and acting talent from Britain, but its films are exported all over the World. However, that is just a simple example. Your personal digital assistant (PDA) or camera phone may include a processor from America, a circuit board from China, chips designed in Taiwan, Austria, Ireland, or India, a color display from South Korea and a lens from Germany. It is the combination of these spatial relationships that together define each company’s spatial reach. The Japanese, for example, have had a decades-long debate over whether to focus their economy on ties with Asia or spread them around globally. During Japan’s momentary triumphalism in 1980s and ‘90s, flag-waving politicians like former governor Shintaro Ishihara, urged Japan to replace the United States of America as the dominant power in Asia. That, however, was before Japan’s economic slowdown and China’s simultaneous rocketlike rise, not to mention its big military buildup and recent explosions of anti-Japanese sentiment. However, Mr. Ishihara new Japan had new vulnerabilities in the region, and called for stronger relations with the United States of America. Today, Japan is one of the World’s most successful democracies and largest economies. The U.S.-Japan Alliance is the cornerstone of the United States of America’s security interests in Asia and is fundamental to regional stability and prosperity. The Alliance is based on shared vital interests and values, including: the maintenance of stability in the Indo-Pacific region: the preservation and promotion of political and economic freedoms; support for human rights and democratic institutions; and, the expansion of prosperity for the people of both countries and the international community as a whole. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
In fact, 2020 marked the 60th anniversary of the signing of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. Both countries need each other, and they collaborate closely on international diplomatic initiatives. The countries are also cooperating on a broad range of global issues, including development assistance, global health, environmental and resource protection, and women’s empowerment. Other common goals are also the promotion integrity in Information and Communications Technology supply chains and to ensure a secure transition to 5G networks. There are also common objectives in the fields of science and technology in such areas as brain science, gaining, infectious disease, personalized medicine, and international space exploration. Japan and America are also working towards intensively expanding already strong people-to-people ties in education, science, and other areas. However, the real question has to do with the spatial reach of Japan’s economy. Is Japan a regional or a global player? What is its economic and cultural foot-print on the World? At a time of rising populism and authoritarianism around the World, Japan stands out as a relative island of social and economic stability. And though it owes its current situation to unique economic and geopolitical circumstances, it might still have something to teach other developed countries. By and large, Japan feels relatively stable and peaceful when compared to other advanced economies. Moreover, the Japanese government has been publicizing its efforts to attract certain foreign-born workers having recognized that immigration will be necessary for future growth. Japan is also the third largest source of foreign direct investment (FDI) into the United States of America, behind the United Kingdom, and Canada, with a total stock of FDI in 2020 at $647.72 billion U.S dollars (the total foreign direct investments in the United States of America were valued at approximately 4.63 trillion U.S. dollars in that year). Japan’s FDI positions in the United States on a historical cost basis has grown every year for the past several years from $238 billion in 2009. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Japan’s influence on culture—the Japanese influence on America culture has expanded beyond Sushi, Bento Boxes, and Japanese cars. The Japanese have fully integrated in American culture and are actually starting to leave a lot of their traditional culture behind and are embracing American ways and lifestyles. Although they may still embrace customs inside of the home such as a clean minimal design layout, no shoes in the house, and family dinners, outside of the home, Japanese have started buying American and Germany cars, have desegregated their housing choices, are opening up technology businesses, and working in traditional corporations, and are even marrying other Americans who may not be of the same ethnic background. They have moved outside of the niche as being see as “exotic,” and have become red blooded Americans. They like the American flag, take their kids to baseball games, basketball games, and football games. With American being such a huge melting pot, it is hard to find any traditional cultures still around. Every culture is some blend of American culture and that is generally accepted. Many people love the diversity. America has become like one big international city. And while Japanese are expanding their horizons in fashion and automobiles, many Americans have fallen in love with Japanese cars, food, and clothing. So, that little island has had a tremendous impact on America and the globe. Japan is flourishing as a regional economic power. Its output of cars, SUVs, Sony Play Stations, flat-panel TVs, and computers are marketed around the World. Japanese companies operate plants on virtually every continent. Whether anyone likes it or not, Japan needs resources, markets opportunities, energy, ideas and information from all over the globe, not just from its nearby neighbors. Japan’s global influence is real. The spatial reach or footprint of every person, company and country is undergoing major change. And it is not just people and products that are on the move. Money, too, has spatial reach. And that, too, is changing rapidly, with deep implications for the global economy. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
It is common knowledge that trillions of dollars are continually zapping across electronic channels at phenomenal speeds, from nation to nation, bank to bank, and person to person, in a grand unending monetary tango. Most people also know—or should by now know—that international currency trading is a global casino. What most people do not know, however, is that the dollar is not just an American currency. It is popularly believed that Americans use dollars, Germans use euros, Japanese use yen, and Argentineans use pesos. In fact, according to economist Benjamin J. Cohen of the University of California/Santa Barbara, “nothing could be further from the truth.” This idea had become “an outmoded and misleading caricature” because competition has “greatly altered the spatial organization of monetary relations,” and more people are switching to Crypto currencies. Put differently, each currency, like each person, has its own, continually changing spatial reach. At present the dollar, despite its recent plunge, has the longest reach, some countries actually forgoing a currency of their own in favor of “dollarization.” They make the U.S. dollar legal tender, and it becomes their own official currency. In other countries, the dollar unofficially supplants local money for many purposes. The American dollar was introduced as the official currency of the United States of America in 1785 and is used as official currency in 16 countries ranging from Panama and Ecuador to East Timor. In addition, there are numerous countries where the U.S. dollar is readily accepted even in regular retail transactions. Internationally, it has established itself as a reserve currency and is the most traded currency in the World. In fact, according to the Federal Reserve, more U.S. dollars are held by foreigners than by Americans—somewhere between 55 and 70 percent, mostly in hundred-dollar bills. The dollar is not the only currency that has supplemented or supplanted another. For all practical purposes, before the introduction of the euro, one could use the German mark in the Balkans, the French franc in parts of Africa, the Swiss franc in Liechtenstein, the Indian rupee in Bhutan, the Danish krone in Greenland. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
In all, a study by the International Monetary Fund found eighteen countries in which foreign currency makes up more than 30 percent of the money supply and another thirty-four in which it averages 16.4 percent or more. According to Dr. Cohen, currencies “increasingly are employed outside their country of origin, penetrating other national monetary spaces. The rapid acceleration of cross-border currency competition has transformed the spatial organization of global monetary relations. National currency domains are more interpenetrated today than at any time since the dawn of the era of territorial money.” In short, money had been unleashed from its former spatial limits. This shift carries important power consequences. An “invading” currency (our term) does not always benefit the nation from which it comes. Many factors play a role, and it can sometimes prove costly. The “invaded” country’s government usually loses a degree of control over its domestic monetary policy and is weakened in the eyes of its citizens. It loses a part of what economists call “seigniorage”—the money it makes for its own money, that is, printing and issuing it. And if it ranks low in the World pecking order of currencies, it can, as a rule, be more easily whipsawed by the action of other economies. The much bigger change, however, according to Dr. Cohen, is not in the relationship of nations to one another but in the relationship between governments and markets. Thus the use of more than one currency in a country opens more options for companies and financial institutions doing business there. It may offer choices with respect to currency risk, taxes, regulations, accounting rules, transaction and conversion costs, financial instruments and the like. Conversely, it reduces the local government’s influence or control. Finally, it also makes the “invaded” country more sensitive to, and potentially responsive to, World financial markets. Which is why the first stop of many a new president or prime minister is a de rigueur visit to Wall Street to perform a reassurance ritual promising financial prudence during the ensuing term of office. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
What we have seen so far—the great wealth shift toward Asian, the creation of cyberspace, the change in criteria by which locations are appraised, the expansion of global reach, and the geographical spread of the currently shaky dollar—are only some of the changes taking place in our relationship to the deep fundamental space. The public spokesman asks for new inspiration to give us a “more meaningful existence.” However, other public spokesmen say that the juvenile delinquents get that way because they do not attend the churches we have. One explanation of this contradiction, of course, is that we are human and have new problems, but the boys are hardly human and ought to be better socialized to the appropriate institutions. This is not serious. What is the actual religious plight of a young man growing up in our society? Let us discuss it theologically, though I am aware that this vocabulary is at present puzzling. If a person asks “How am I justified? What is the meaning of my life?” he will surely find no rational answer. The bother is that the question has arisen and begun to plague one. If the question arises, as an important question, something is wrong; he will feel unworthy and damned, and wasted. Historically, appeal has then been had to psychological techniques of revivalism or physical techniques of sacramental magic. (Dr. Douglass’ intellectual approach cannot work.) However, if the question, as that question, never gets to be asked—if the matter is mentioned, if at all, as a moment of reflection in an ongoing process of life, it is possible to avoid the imputation of being damned. This non-asking can happen in two ways. First, if certain life behavior is necessary, no questions are asked. (We shall return to this first alternative.) However, secondly, if a man’s developing needs and purposes do indeed keep meeting with real opportunities and duties, no “final” questions are asked. You do not need to finish the task, and neither are you free to leave it off. The opportunities need not be such as to satisfy a human and make one happy—tht would be paradise; the duties must not be such that he must succeed in performing them—that would be hell; if he is earnest, if there are simply possible ways for his activity and achievement, so that he knows the World is a World for him, it is sufficient. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
This condition of meeting the World is called being in a state of grace. In such a case the questions that are really asked are practical and specific to the task in hand. The question, “How am I justified? what is the meaning of my life?” is answered by naming the enterprise that one is engaged in, and by the fact that it is going on. As Kafka said, “The fact of our living is in itself inexhaustible in its proof of faith.” (By analogy, if a young couple has had a good dinner without external or internal interruptions, they do not feel guilty for indulging and are fortified against criticism. The behavior justifies itself. However, if the dinner had worked out badly, they are disappointed, resentful of one another, and vulnerable to being made guilty by others for eating such rich food.) The sense that life is going on and the confidence that the World will continue to support the next step of it, is called Faith. It is hard to grow up without Faith. For then one is subject to these nagging unanswerable questions: Am I worthless? How can I prove myself? What chance is there for me? Did I ever have a chance? (These will be recognized as “questions of a juvenile delinquent to his soul.”) Children, if we observe then, seem normally to be abounding in simple faith. They rush headlong and there is ground underfoot. They ask for information and are told. They cry for something and get it or are refused, but they are not disregarded. They go exploring and see something interesting. It is the evil genius of our society to blight, more or less disastrously, this faith of its young as they grow up; for our society does not, for most, continue to provide enough worth-while opportunities and relevant duties, and soon it ceases to take them seriously as existing. Desperately, then, people may try to fill the void of worthlessness-and-abandonment by seeking money or status, or by busy work, or by self-proving exploits, both to silence critics and to silence own doubts. They substitute role playing, conforming, and belonging for the grace of meeting objective opportunity. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
However, there is no justification in such “works,” for they are not really the man’s own works, nor God’s providence for him. As the theologians have said, Real works are the natural products of faith taking its next step. Or alternately, people may spurn the false roles that are available and try for formless mystical experiences. This seems to be the aim of the Beat Generation, which is a kind of brotherhood of Quietism plus stimulants. Or alternatively, again, where the despair of abandonment is acute, as with many juveniles, they rush fatalistically to punishment, to have it over with and be received back. Finding a new ethics or esthetics, as Dr. Douglass asks, will not put us in a state of grace. Existence is not given meaning by importing into it a revelation from outside. The meaning is there, in more closely contacting the actual situation, the only situation that there is, whatever it is. As our situation is, closely contacting it would surely result in plenty of trouble and perhaps in terrible social conflicts, terrible opportunities and duties, during which we might learn something and at the end of which we might know something, even a new ethics; for it is in such conflicts that new ethics are discovered. However, it is just these conflicts that we do not observe happening. Everybody talks nice. At most there is some unruliness and dumb protest, and some withdrawal. So urging the juveniles to go to church is not serious, for how will the church give them faith? What opportunity will it open? Often, celibacy is an unbidden state, imposed by circumstances—a lack of available partners, for instance, as in modern China with its skewed gender ratio, or in apartheid-bound South African, where rigid work and travel permits could confine one marriage partner to the white city, the other to a black township. The American Civil War, which killed a generation of young men, also doomed their sisters to spinsterhood as maiden aunts burdensome family charges, and underpaid schoolmarms. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
In societies with strict social and moral standards, financial constraints may also necessitate celibacy. In Victorian England, middle-class spinsters were expected to abstain from pleasures of the flesh until marriage, and most brides sashayed chastely up the aisle. However, they often took an inordinately long time to do so because before the final vows were exchanged, the bridegroom was supposed to accumulate enough money to buy a proper house in an approved neighborhood: “Virtue is good, but a house in Belgravia is better,” as the aphorism went. As the young men waited out their long courtships and engagements, they practiced frugality but not always celibacy; thanks to the license the double standard permitted English males, the percentage of women of the evening in England was higher than in anywhere else in Europe. In the twentieth century, the Great Depression squeezed more than pockets and stomachs as it pushed millions into unemployment and underemployment. This relentless poverty forced the postponement of thousands of marriages, and it convinced the unmarries to remain celibate or face the unmentionable—another mouth to feed when their own were flapping with unsated hunger. Country folks who lacked access to reliable birth control or who had religious or moral concerns about it simply waited it out. Social values may produce the same effect. In Asian societies that bar young women from marrying before their older sisters are suitably disposed of, unwelcome premarital celibacy may be extended indefinitely by the impossibility of marrying off a homely, disabled, or disagreeable sibling. In India, even if they were widowed as children and were forced into lifelong celibacy, Hindu widows could not remarry. Even today, this has changed only slightly. In some societies, lack of dowries has also doomed women to celibacy, and as we have seen, medieval convents expanded their numbers and their coffers by accepting dowries far too modest for a mortal husband. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Other times, celibacy is directly coerced. A man or a woman is tossed into prison, where pleasures of the flesh is forbidden Until this century, European domestic servitude entailed celibacy for life. In England, some male servants could marry, but women could not because employers refused to inconveniences themselves by dealing with the pregnancies and babies their domestics’ marriages would produce. The countries of Carlisle aggressively monitored her female servants, instructing her head housemaid to tattle on any underlings not regularly washing their monthly-napkins which proved they were not having a baby. Many women lived out their lives in chaste service, fending off advances of their domineering employers. Bachelorhood or celibacy was also mandated for certain trades and professions. Apprentices could not marry even when they became journeymen, but had to wait for years until they were masters. Often their delayed marriages followed either resentful chastity or cheap solicitation. In the Middle Ages, male serfs were often lifetime bachelors. Educators on all levels faced a traditional ban on marriage—celibacy or your job was a common choice. Quite unlike brahmacharya, the orthodox learning tool for Indian students and scholars, celibacy was often inflicted on reluctant Western academics. Until 1882, when the requirement was relaxed, Oxford and Cambridge dons accepted their positions on condition of celibate bachelorhood. Some observed it cynically, in the breach, keeping mistresses or frequenting women of the evening, but many dons were conscientious men who lived in scholarly celibacy in the comfortable, well-catered, and companionable digs of their ivory towers. Until the twentieth century, throughout Europe and North America, female teachers faced the same stricture from rigid, misogynist, educational bureaucracies that cringed at the thought of women with child being active in pleasures of the flesh while forming tender young minds. Instances of coerced or de facto celibacy are legion, and those mentioned above represent a tiny sampling. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
Nonetheless, any kind of celibacy unwillingly embraced is substantively different from committed celibacy. The hormonal young women pledged to chastity because it will guarantee her a suitable marriage or the athlete striving for greatness in the next competition is motivated in ways the coerced or happenstance celibate is not. A look at five cases of such unwilling celibacy confirms this. A special conference was held in November, 1831, at Hiram, Ohio. At this time it was decided to print the revelations which the church had received through the prophet Joseph Smith. Up to this time the revelations of Joseph had received from the Lord had been written on paper by hand. The priesthood in preaching could quote them only from memory. Now that W.W. Phelps had a printing shop in Independence, it was thought the revelation could now be printed so all could read them. Joseph met with a group of elders to get the material ready for the new book of revelations, which Oliver Cowdery was to take to Independence for printing. The preface to the Doctrine and Covenants was given at this time, and it was placed in the beginning of the book and numbered, “One.” In this preface, given November 1, 1831, the Lord said: “Hearken, O ye people of my church….Hearken ye people from afar, and ye that are upon the islands of the sea, listen together. The voice of the Lord is unto all humans, and there is none to escape, and the voice of warning shall be unto all people, by the mouths of my disciples, whom I have chosen in these last days, for I the Lord have commanded them. Wherefore I the Lord, knowing the calamity which should come upon the inhabitants of the Earth, called upon my servant Joseph Smith, Jr., and spake unto him from Heaven, and gave him commandments, and also gave commandments to others, that they should proclaim these things unto the World; and all this that it might be fulfilled, which was written by the prophets; that faith also might increase in the Earth; that mine everlasting covenant might be established; that the fullness of my gospel might be proclaimed unto the ends of the World, and before kings and rulers.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The Lord proclaimed that He had given Joseph Smith, Jr., the power to translate the Book of Mormon, and had given his latter-day disciples power to lay the foundation of this church—“To bring it forth out of obscurity, and out of darkness, the only true living church upon the face of the whole Earth, with which I the Lord am well pleased, speaking unto the church collectively and not individually. For I the Lord can not look upon sin with the least degree of allowance; nevertheless, one that repents and does the commandments of the Lord shall be forgiven. And one that repents not, from one shall be taken even the light which one has received, for my Spirit shall not always strive with humans, saith the Lord of Hosts. O inhabitants of the Earth, I, the Lord, am willing to make these things known unto all flesh, for I am not respecter of persons, and will that all humans shall know that the day speedily cometh when peace shall be taken from the Earth, and the Devil shall have power over his own dominion. And also the Lord shall have power over his saints, and shall reign in their midst. Search these commandments, for they are true and faithful, and the prophecies and promises which are in them shall all be fulfilled. And though the Heavens and the Earth pass away, my word shall not pass away. For behold, and lo, the Lord is God, and the Spirit beareth record, and the record is true, and the truth abideth for ever and ever. Amen.” As the elders were preparing the revelations for publication, some of them objected to the language of some of the revelations and wanted Joseph to change them. Because of this the Lord gave a revelation in which he said: “I, the Lord, give unto you a testimony of the truth of these commandments.” Then the Lord suggested that they choose the wisest man among them to try to write one which would compare with any of the revelations which had been given through Joseph. William E. McLellin made an effort to imitate one of the revelations, and all the elders realized that the best he could write was far inferior to the revelations. This renewed the faith of these man in truth of the revelations the Lord had given to his church through his prophet, Joseph Smith. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Another revelation given at this time contained instructions for parents concerning their children. The Lord, Jesus Christ, said: “Inasmuch as parents have children in Zion, or in any of her stakes which are organized, that teach them not to understand the doctrine of repentance; faith in Christ the Son of the Living God; and of baptism and the gift of the Holy Ghost by the laying on of the hands when eight years old, the sin be upon the head of the parents. For this shall be a law…and their children shall be baptized for the remission of their sins when eight years old, and receive the laying on the hands. And they shall also teach their children to pray, and to walk uprightly before the Lord.” One Angel enlightens another. To make this clear, we must observe that intellectual light is nothing else than a manifestation of truth. All that is made manifest is light. Hence, to enlighten means nothing else but to communicate to others the manifestation of the known truth. “To me the least of all the saints is given this grace to enlighten all humans, that they may see what is the dispensation of the mystery which hath been hidden from eternity in God,” reports Ephesians 3.8. Therefore one Angel is said to enlightened another by manifesting the truth which one knows oneself. Theologians plainly show that the orders of the Heavenly beings are taught Divine science by the higher minds. Now since two things concur in the intellectual operation, as we have said, namely, the intellectual power, and the likeness of the thing understood; in both of these one Angel can notify to another the known truth to another. First, by strengthening one’s intellectual power; for just as the power of an imperfect body is strengthened by the neighbourhood in corporeal things. Secondly, one angel manifests the truth to another as regards the likeness of the thing understood. For the superior Angel receives the knowledge of truth by a kind of universal conception, to receive which the inferior Angel’s intellect is not sufficiently powerful, for it is natural to one to receive truth in a more particular manner. Therefore the superior Angel distinguishes, in a way, the truth which one conceives universally, so that it can be gasped by the inferior Angel; and thus one proposes it to one’s knowledge. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
Thus it is with us that the teacher, in order to adapt oneself to others, divides into many points the knowledge which one possesses in the universal. Every intellectual substance with provident power divides and multiples the uniform knowledge bestowed on it by one nearer to God, so as to lead its inferiors upwards by analogy. All Angels see the Essence of God immediately, and in this respect one does not teach another. It Is of this truth that the prophet speaks; wherefor one adds: “They shall teach no more every man his brother, saying: ‘Know the Lord’: for all shall know Me, from the least of them even to the greatest.” However, all the types of the Divine works, which are known in God as their cause, God knows in Himself, because he comprehends Himself; but of others who see God, each one knows the more types, the more perfectly one sees God. Hence a superior Angel knows more about the types of the Divine works than an inferior Angel, and concerning these the former enlightens the latter; and as to this, the Angels are enlightened by the types of existing things. An Angel does not enlighten another by giving one the light of nature, grace, or glory; but by strengthening one’s natural light, and by manifesting to one the truth concerning the state of nature, of grace, and of glory, as explained above. The rational mind is formed immediately by God, either as the image from the exemplar, forasmuch as it is made to the image of God alone; or as the subject by the ultimate perfecting form: for the created mind is always considered to be uniform, except it adhere to the first disposition to this ultimate form. Within the circles of our lives, we dance the circles of the year and undergo a moderate discipline for this purpose. This is a time for the more advanced quester who seek to attain the highest possible standard and who is willing to pay in self-denial and self-training the corresponding price. Prayer teaches us what to aspire for. So often we do now know what to cling to. Prayer implants in us the ideals we ought to cherish. Prayer is no panacea, no substitute for action. It is, rather, like a beam thrown from a flashlight before us into the darkness. It is in this light that we who grope, stumble and climb, discover where we stand, what surrounds us, and the course which we should choose. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Cresleigh Homes
Cresleigh Homes features living spaces with an open airy design which keeps the whole home filled with sunlight.
Cresleigh Homes feature chef’s dream kitchens, which come complete with quartz or granite countertops, stainless appliances, a gas cooktop, upgraded cabinets with door hardware, and tile backsplash.
The casual dining area is adjacent to the kitchen, some homes also come with formal dining rooms or a dedicated dining, which provides for a convenient and intimate setting.
The great room with a sliding glass door is the perfect setting for relaxation and enjoying your private yard.
The Primary Suite is complete with a luxurious bath, featuring a spacious walk-in closet, and dual vanities.
Enjoy the serenity and seclusion offered by a Cresleigh Home.
Randolph Harris II International Institute 