Home » Work (Page 36)
Category Archives: Work
Here is All the Invisible World, Caught, Defined, and Calculated!
Here is all the invisible World, caught, defined, and calculated. Some come to do the Devil’s work, but life is God’s most precious gift. No principle, no matter how glorious it may be, may justify the taking of it. Even if great stone may lay upon their chest, Reverend Lawson, like Cotton Mather, thought prayer a more certain cure for the witchcraft that the children of Salem were afflicted by during the Salem Witch trials. They did not believe the magistrates might do any good with their methods, partly because it was so difficult to catch a witch. Martha Corey, who had been accused of witchcraft in 1692, would not sign her pact with Satan on Main Street in broad daylight, nor practice her black arts there. Witchcraft was by its nature secret, and hard to be found out. Yet witches had been caught, and many examples were a matter of record, as were many theories on catching them. There were, to begin with, commonly recognized grounds for investigation. If an apparition was appearing to the citizenry and afflicting them, one would surely want to investigate the person represented in that apparition. One would also look for evidence of malice, since witchcraft was an expression of ultimate malice, the diametrical opposite to Christian charity. And one could hope that an investigation would produce credible confessions. Confessions were often easy to obtain, particularly if one used the technique of “cross and swift questions” recommended by virtually all authorities from Malleus Maleficarum to Cotton Mather, but it was not always easy to judge whether they were credible. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Satan was the Prince of Lies and witches were his servants; the word of confessed witches was therefore suspect in the accusations both of others and themselves. Furthermore, it was known that desperate persons had sometimes confessed to witchcraft as a bizarre means of committing suicide. And the mentally disturbed had also been known to imagine themselves witches and confess. In spite of all these difficulties, however, confession was often the best evidence one could hope for. More concrete evidence was occasionally to be had. A diligent search, for example, might turn up some of the tools of the witch’s trade: images with pins in them, ointments and potions, books of instruction in the magical arts. And one could search the body of the accused for the so-called Devil’s Mark. It was believed that when a pact was made, the Devil placed upon the witch’s body a piece of flesh from which He, in His own person or that of a familiar, might such the blood of the witch. (The blood has traditionally been thought to be the carrier of the spirit; in sucking blood the Devil was feeding on the witch’s soul.) since this “witch’s tit” was created by the Devil, rather than by God, it lacked the warmth of normal flesh (hence the still-current expression about being cold as a witch’s tit). It also lacked sensation, and one could rest for it by running a pin through it to see whether it was a genuinely preternatural excrescence or only a wart or a hemorrhoid. Yet pricking for the Devil’s Mark was most haphazard and uncertain. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
It was common for examiners, physicians included, to disagree over whether an excrescence was natural or preternatural. And it was not unheard of for them to find what they thought to be a Devil’s Mark on one occasion, only to discover that there was nothing left of it but a piece of dried skin on a second examination. The common people believed in a number of tests for witches. The best known was the water-ordeal, in which the suspect was bound and “swum”: thrown into or dragged by a rope thought the nearest body of water. If she floated, she was a witch; the water was rejecting her as she had rejected Christian baptism. If she sank, she was innocent; the mod would try to drag her out before she drowned. If they failed, they professed to be sorry. Guilty until proven innocent, which would often result in the death of innocent people. (It was generally mod-action when a witch was swum; the courts seldom countenanced it, even when the accused requested it as a means of proving her innocence.) Another such test was asking the accused to repeat the Lord’s Prayer. It was believed that a witch could not say it correctly, even after prompting, since she regularly said it backwards at her witches’ Sabbaths. It was also believed that a witch could not weep. Because she had rejected Christian charity in favour of demonic malice, she would remain dry-eyed at the most heart-rending spectacles. Many of the learned, including Increase Mather and Deodat Lawson, rejected such tests outright as superstitions as white magic or both. Others like Cotton Mather, were wiling to countenance experiments with them but refused to accept them as certain evidence. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Rebecca Nurse was accused of witchcraft. Girls who had been afflicted testified that not only was the apparition of Rebecca Nurse tormenting them; they said they had seen it leave her body and return to it. However, Rebecca denied this allegation, and it was at that point that Judge John Hathorne, for the second time prayed that she be cleared if innocent; and if guilty, that be discovered. If he could not doubt that the girls’ afflictions were genuine, neither could he doubt that Rebecca Nurse was telling the truth, at least so far as she knew it. Perhaps, he thought, the Devil had made her a witch without her knowledge. Therefore he said to her “Possibly you may apprehend you are no witch, but have you not been led aside by temptations that way?” “I have not,” she answered, and Judge Hathorne could reply only be reflecting on “what a said thing” it was to see church members accused of such a crime. “What, he asked, did she make of the girls’ behaviour? “hey accuse you of hurting them, and if you think it is not unwillingly, but by design, you must look upon them as murderers.” “I cannot tell what I think of it.” Nothing testifies more to the genuineness of the fits than the fact that Rebecca Nurse, like majority of the accused persons, could not tell what to think of them. Later, when Judge Hathorne asked whether she thought the afflicted persons bewitched, she answered yes, “I do think they are.” So he appealed to her again. “When this witchcraft came upon the stage there was no suspicion of Tituba….She professed much love to that child, Betty Parris, but it was her apparition that did the mischief. And why should not you also be guilty, for your apparition doth hurt also.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
“Would you have belie myself?” said Rebecca Nurse. To repeated testimony that her apparition was tormenting people she replied “I cannot help it. The Devil may appear in my shape.” In the end the magistrates committed her for further examination. Rebecca Nurse’s arrest and examination did more than raise temporary doubts in the mind of John Hathorne; it evoked the first open expression of opposition to the witchcraft proceedings. Mary Warren, one of the afflicted girls, was the servant of a farmer named John Procter. On the morning after Rebecca Nurse’s examination, he came to Salem Village “to fetch home his jade,” as he put it. He expressed his opinion of the afflicted persons’ testimony in no uncertain terms. “If they were let alone,” he said, “we should all be devils and witches quickly. They should rather be had to the whipping post. However, he would fetch his jade home and thrash the Devil out of her. And more to the like purpose, crying ‘Hang them! Hang them!’” He added that when Mary Warren “was first taken with fits he kept her close to the wheel and threatened to thrash her, and then she had no more fits till the next day [when] he was gone forth. And then she must have her fits again, forsooth.” Historians have taken John Procter’s statement as evidence that Mary Warren’s fits were false, and in this they have been quite wrong. The seventeenth-century community took hem as evidence of Procter’s malice and brutality, and they were partly right. However, only partly. Because no matter how brutal it may be to beat the hysterical out of their fits, the fact remains that such treatment often works. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
A fit of uncontrolled laughter can often be stopped with a judiciously timed slap in the face. And we should remember that in the eighteenth century one of the commonest treatments for many forms of insanity was beating the patient. Such treatment was probably motivated in part by the “normal” person’s exasperation with the insane for so conspicuously losing their rationality. However, surely it was also motivated by the fact that it frequently worked. And for that matter, it should be recognized that we are still beating the insane. Even in modern times, people who work in lunatic asylums, on rare occasions, beat the patients because no one will believe them because they have no credibility due to the fact that they have been accused of being “crazy.” Imagine that. Calling someone “crazy” in modern times is just a new form of witch hunting, which allows one to do whatever one wants to a person. Most people no longer administer the blows themselves; it is done through technology, and with more precision than our ancestors. However, this should not disguise the fact that electric shock is just as brutal for the patient as the thrashing John Procter proposed for Mary Warren. Perhaps he did thrash her, and perhaps it did in part work, because Mary Warren was the only person who even temporarily recovered from her affliction. As we moved into the 19th century, more people moved from hunting witch to hunting animals for food and fur. Sarah Winchester inherited a fortune, as she was heiress to the Winchester Repeating Arms company, but unfortunately, and it really may have been unfortunate, she could not take all her wealth with her. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
At the time of Mrs. Winchester’s death in 1922, there were rooms full of ornate treasures still waiting to find a niche in the massive home. And there still may be treasures untold hidden away in the Winchester mansion, even though it took six trucks, working day and night, for six weeks to loot the mansion after her death. However, for some reason, they still left behind enough materials to continue construction on the mansion for another 38 years. At one time Mrs. Winchester enjoyed the finest vintage wines and liqueurs. However, one evening wen she went to the wine cellar to locate a special bottle, she same across a black handprint on the wall. It was most likely a dirt smudge left by a workman, yet she took it as an omen and ordered the cellar boarded up. To this day the wine cellar has not been rediscovered, which means that there might still be spirits in the Winchester Mystery House—if only the intoxicating kind! The late Mrs. Winchester had been a great reader of Shakespeare, at a time when this pursuit implied more freedom of thought than at the present day, and in a community where it required much courage to patronize the drama even in the closet. Mrs. Winchester also had an inordinate love of dress, and the very best tastes in the World. Often she would sit alone, combing out her long hair. When it would get too dark to see, she would light two candles in their sockets, on the frame of her mirror, and then go to the window to draw her curtains. It was a grey September evening; the landscape was bare and bleak, and the sky heavy with cumulonimbus clouds. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Her bedroom door stood ajar, as she could vaguely see in the gathering darkness, and moved slowly to and fro, as if someone were swaying it. She was about to drop her curtain, when she stumbled and fell on her bed. Later Mrs. Winchester would be found dead. She died peacefully in her sleep at the age of 83. Although people in the town gossiped about her, many dreamed of getting their hands on her riches. Mrs. Winchester also had many finery and jewels. Before he passed away, Mr. Winchester had liberality covered her hands with rings, and she had the finest night dresses trimmed with lace ruffles. People coveted Mrs. Winchester’s rings and her laces more than they coveted her home sometimes. Before her untimely death, Mrs. Winchester wanted to leave her rings and laces and silks to Annie. It was a great wardrobe—there was not such another in all of California; it would have been a great inheritance for her daughter, if she had ever grown up into a young woman. There were things that a man never buys twice, and if they are lost you will never again see the like. So she watched the well. It was such a providence that Annie would have been Mrs. Winchester’s colour; and she could wear her gowns; and she had her mother’s eyes. For the same fashion usually come back every twenty years. Annie would have been able to wear Mrs. Winchester’s gowns as they were. They would lie there quietly waiting till Annie grew into them—wrapped in camphor and rose-leaves, and keeping their colours in the sweet-scented darkness. Even though Annie passed six weeks after her birth, Mrs. Winchester still had the gowns in several great chests in the attic of the Winchester mansion. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
After Mrs. Winchester passed away, the house was locked up. Dozens of women waited at the auctions in San Francisco to bid on Mrs. Winchester’s copious wardrobe, but it still lay languishing in thankless gloom in the dusty attic. It was a revolting thought that such exquisite fabrics should be awaiting no one. Was it not a pity that so much finery should be lost?—for lost it would be, what with colours fading, and moth eating it up, and the change of fashion. After the mansion was sold Lewis Dupont and his wife Bianca spent months combing through the items left behind in the mansion. They could not figure out why the mover left so many beautiful and rare items. When they stumbled upon the attic with Mrs. Winchester’s wardrobe, Bianca asked if she could wear them. Her husband told her that he did not want to disturb any ghost and to leave them be. Nine moths went by, however, and brought with them new needs and new visions. Bianca’s thoughts hovered loving about Mrs. Winchester’s relics. She went up and looked at the chests in the attic in which they lay imprisoned. There was a sullen defiance in its three great padlocks and its iron bands which only quickened her cupidity. There was something exasperating in its incorruptible immobility. It was like a grim and grizzled old household servant, who locks his jaws over a family secret. And then there was a look of capacity in its vast extent, and a sound as of dense fullness, when Bianca knocked one chest’s sides with the toe of her little shoe, which caused her to flush with baffled longing. “It’s absurd,” she cried; “it’s improper, it’s wicked”; and she forthwith resolved upon another attack upon her husband. On the following day, after dinner, when he had had his wine, she boldly began it. But he cut her short with great sternness. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
“Once for all, Bianca,” said he, “it’s out of the question. If you return to this matter, I shall be gravely displeased.” “Very good,” said Bianca. “I am glad to learn the esteem in which I am held. Gracious Heaven,” she cried, “I am a very happy woman! It’s an agreeable thing to feel one’s self sacrificed to a caprice!” And her eyes filled with tears of anger and disappointment. Lewis had a good-natured man’s horror of a woman’s sobs, and he attempted—I may say he condescended to explain. “It’s not a caprice, dear, it’s a promise,” he said—“an oath.” “An oath? It’s a pretty matter for oaths! and to whom, pray?” “To Mrs. Winchester,” said the young man, “Everyone knows the clothes were meant for her late baby girl! That’s probably why the movers left them behind. Mrs. Winchester—ah, Mrs. Winchester!” and Bianca’s tears broke forth. Her bosom heaved with stormy sobs—sobs which were the long-deferred sequel of the violent fit of weeping in which she had indulged herself on the night she had discovered Mrs. Winchester’s betrothal. She had hoped, in her better moments, that she had done with her jealousy; but her temper, on that occasion, has take an ineffaceable hold. “And pray, what right had Mrs. Winchester to dispose of my future?” she cried. “What right had she to bind you to meanness and cruelty? Ah, I occupy a dignified place, and I make a very fine figure! I am welcome to what Mrs. Winchester has left! And what has she left? I never knew till now how great it was!” Lewis put his arm around his wife’s waist and tried to kiss her, but she shook him off with magnificent scorn. Poor fellow! he has coveted a “devilish fine woman,” and he had got one. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Bianca’s scorn was intolerable. He walked away with his ear tinging—irresolute, distracted. Before him was his secretary, and in it the scared key which with his own hand he had turned in the triple lock. He marched up and opened it, and tool the key from a secret drawer, wrapped in a little packet which he had sealed with his own honest bit of glazonry. Fe garde, said the motto—“I keep.” However, he was ashamed to put it back. He flung it upon the table beside his wife. “Put it back!” she cried. “I want it not. I hate it!” “I wash my hands of it,” cried her husband. “God forgive me!” Mrs. Dupont hastily took possession of the key. At the habitual supper-hour Lewis Dupont came back from his counting-room. It was the month June, and supper was served by daylight. The meal was placed on the table, but Mrs. Dupont failed to make her appearance. The servant who his master sent to call her came back with the assurance that her room was empty, and that the woman informed him that she had not been seen since dinner. They had, in truth, observed her to have been in tears, and supposing her to be shut up in her chamber, had not disturbed her. Her husband called her name in various parts of the house, but without response. At last it occurred to him that he might find her by taking the way to the attic. The thought gave him a strange feeling of discomfort, and he bade his servants remain behind, wishing no witness in his quest. He reached the foot of the stair case leading to the topmost flat, and stood with his hands on the banisters, pronouncing his wife’s name. His voice trembled. He called again louder and more firmly. The only sound which disturbed the absolute silence was a faint echo of his own tones, repeating his question under the great eaves. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
He nevertheless felt irresistibly move to ascend the staircase. It opened upon a wide hall, westward, and admitted the last rays of run. Before the window stood the great chests of clothes. Before one of the chests, on her knees, the young man saw with amazement and horror the figure of his wife. In an instant he crossed the interval between them, bereft of utterance. The lid of one of the chests stood open, exposing, amid their perfumed napkins, its treasure of stuffs and jewels. Bianca had fallen backward from a kneeling poser, with one hand supporting her on the floor and the other pressed to her heart. On her limbs was the stiffness of death, and on her face, in the fading light of sun, the terror of something more than death. Her lips were parted in entreaty, in dismay, in agony; and on her blanched brow and cheeks there glowed the marks of thirteen hideous wounds from a vengeful ghost. Legend has it that Mr. and Mrs. Dupont were never heard from again and the ghost sealed off this portion of the attic, creating the stairs to the ceiling. Astaroth is a Mighty, Strong Duke, and appears in the form of an hurtful Angel riding on an Infernal Beast like a Dragon, and carrying in his right hand a Viper. Thou must in no wise let him approach too near unto thee, lest he do thee damage by his Noisome Breath. Wherefore the Magician must hold the Magical Ring near his face, and that will defend him. He giveth true answers of things Past, Present, and to Come, and can discover all Secrets. He will declare wittingly how the Spirits fell, if desires, and the reason of his own fall. He can make humans wonderfully knowing in all Liberal Sciences and is said to guard the Winchester. He rules 40 Legions of Spirits. His Seal is this, which wear thou as a Lamen before thee, or else he will not appear not yet obey thee. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Some of the architectural oddities of the Winchester mansion may have practical explanations, others may have supernatural origins. The miles of twisting hallways are made even more intriguing by secret passageways in the walls. Mrs. Winchester traveled through her house in a roundabout fashion, supposedly to confuse any mischievous ghosts that might be following her. This wild and fanciful description of Mrs. Winchester’s nightly stroll to the Séance Room appeared in The American Weekly in 1928, six years after her death. “When Mrs. Winchester set out for her Séance Room, it might well have discouraged the ghost of the Indian or even the bloodhound, to follow her. After traversing an interminable labyrinth of rooms and hallways, suddenly she would push a button, a panel would fly back and she would step quickly from one apartment into another, and unless the pursuing ghost was watchful and quick, he would lose her. Then she opened a window in that apartment and climbed out, not into the open air, but onto the top of a flight of steps that took her down one story only to meet another flight that brought her right back to the same level again, all inside the house. This was supposed to be very discomforting to evil spirits who are said to be naturally suspicious of traps.” We who prayed and wept for liberty from kinds and the yoke of liberty accept the tyranny of things we do not need. In plenitude too free, we have become adept beneath the yoke of greed. Those who will not learn in plenty to keep their place must learn it by their need when they have had their ways and the fields spurn their seed. We have failed Thy grace. Lord, I flinch and pray, please send Thy necessity. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Winchester Mystery House
Oh deer, the weekend is here! What a better way to spend time than strolling through the gardens of the Winchester Mystery House.
🎟️ Link in bio. winchestermysteryhouse.com/recent-links
The Earth Dries Up and Withers, the World Languishes and Withers!
They say what you send around, comes around. Perhaps that is true, even if it takes a thousand years. Everyone is born. Everyone will die. This is the short summary of life. Although it is accurate, the story certainly leaves out a lot, does it not? How might we develop a fuller picture of what happens during a lifetime? Perhaps we can begin by studying interesting lives. We are all affected by the same universal principles that guide human development. Each of us will face problems on the path to healthy development. Some obstacles, such as learning to walk of finding a personal identity, are universal. Others are unusual or specialized. The challenges of development extend far beyond childhood and into old age. There really is no such thing as a “typical person” or a “typical life.” Nevertheless, broad similarities can be found in the life stages of infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle adulthood, and old age. Each stage confronts a person with new developmental tasks that must be mastered for optimal development. The spread of industrialism was dependent upon the synchronization of human behaviour with the rhythms of the machines. Synchronization was one of the guiding principles of Second Wave civilization, and everywhere the people of industrialism appeared to outsiders to be time-obsessed, always glancing nervously as their watches. To bring about this time-consciousness and achieve synchronization, however, people’s basic assumptions about time—their mental images of time—had to be transformed. A new “software of time” was needed. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
Agricultural populations, needing to know when to plant and when to harvest, developed remarkable precision in the measurement of long spans of time. However, because they did not require close synchronization of human labour, peasant peoples seldom developed precise units for measuring short spans. They typically divided time not into fixed units, like hours or minutes, but into loose, imprecise chunks representing the length of time needed to perform some homely task. A farmer might refer to an interval as “a cow milking time.” In Madagascar, an accepted unit of time was called “a rice cooking”; a moment was known as “the frying of a locust.” Englishmen spoke of a “pater noster wyle”—the time needed for a prayer—or, more earthily, of a “pissing while.” Similarly, because there was little exchange between one community or village and the next, and because work did not require it, the units in which time was mentally packaged varied from place to place and season to season. In medieval northern Europe, for example, daylight was divided into equal hours. However, since the interval between dawn and sunset varied from day to day, an “hour” in December was shorter than an “hour” in March or June. Instead of vague intervals like a pater noster wyle, industrial societies needed extremely precise units like hour, minute, or second. And these units had to be standardized, interchangeable from one season or community to the next. Today the entire World is neatly divided into time zones. We speak of “standard” time. Pilots all over the globe refer back to “Zulu” time—id est, Greenwich Mean Time. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
By international convention Greenwich, England, became the point from which all time differences would be measured. Periodically, in unison, as though motivated by a single will, millions of people set their clocks back or forward an hour, and whatever our inner, subjective sense of things may tell us when time is dragging, or conversely when it seems to be whizzing by, and hour is now a single interchangeable, standardized hour. Second Wave civilization did more than cut time up into more precise and standard chunks. It also placed these chunks in a straight line that extended indefinitely back into the past and forward into the future. It made time linear. Indeed, the assumption that time is linelike is so deeply embedded in our thoughts that it is hard for those of us raised in Second Wave societies to conceive of any alternative. Yet many preindustrial societies, and some First Wave societies even today, see time as a circle, not a straight line. From the Mayas to the Buddhists and the Hindus, time was circular and repetitive, history repeating itself endlessly, lives perhaps reliving themselves through reincarnation. The idea that time was like a great circle is fond in the Hindu concept of recurrent kalpas, each one four thousand million years long, each representing but a single Brahma day beginning with re-creation, ending in dissolution, and beginning again. The notion of circular time is found in Plato and Aristotle, one of whose students, Eudemus, pictured himself living through the same moment again and again as the cycle repeated itself. It was taught by Pythagoras. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
In Time and Eastern Man, Joseph Needham tells us that “For the Indo-Hellenic…time is cyclical and eternal.” Moreover, while in China the idea of linear time dominated, according to Needham, “Cyclical time was certainly prominent among the early Taoist speculative philosophers.” In Europe, too, in the centuries preceding industrialization, these alternative views of time coexisted. “Throughout the whole medieval period,” writes mathematician G. J. Whitrow, “the cyclic and linear concepts of time were in conflict. The linear concept was fostered by the mercantile class and the rise of a money economy. For as long as power was concentrated in the ownership of land, time was felt to be plentiful and was associated with the unchanging cycle of soil.” As the Second Wave gathered force this ago-old conflict was settled: liner time triumphed. Linear time became the dominant view in every industrial society, East or West. Time came to be seen as a highway unrolling from a distant past through the present toward the future, and this conception of time, alien to billions of humans who lived before industrial civilization, became the basis of all economic suit of IBM, the Japanese Economic Planning Agency, or the Soviet Academy. It is worth noting, however, that linear time was a precondition for indust-real views of evolution and progress. Liner time made evolution and progress plausible. For if time were circular instead of linelike, if events doubled back on themselves instead of moving in a single direction, it would mean that history repeated itself and the evolution and progress were no more than illusions—shadows on the wall of time. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
Synchronization Standardization. Linearization. They affected the root assumption of civilization and they brought massive changes in the way ordinary people handled time in their loves. However, if time itself was transformed, space, too, had to be repackaged to fit into the new indust-reality. Then suddenly in the 1950s, urban-based intellectual discovered the suburbs. And what they discovered, to their horror, was an aesthetic and social dreamland filled with beautiful, new tract housing with big emerald green lawns, trees, bushes, and flowers, station wagons, sports cars and sedans, and organization men, housewives, and children. However, attention was riveted almost exclusively on the supposed negative consequences of city-oriented intellectuals, particularly those living in New York City, was that the postwar suburbs were an unmitigated aesthetic and social disaster. Suburbia was equated with the emergence of a popular mass culture dominated by the mass media. The neatness and repetitiveness of popular taste was blamed on the suburbs. They became a scapegoat for all that the cosmopolitan critics disliked about modern life. Often, this was accompanied with glorification of the past. In The City History Lewis Mumford bemoaned the growth of middle-class suburbs: “While the suburbs served only a favored minority, it neither spoiled the countryside nor threatened the city. But now that the drift to the outer ring has become a mass movement, it tends to destroy both environments without producing anything but a dreary substitute, devoid of form and even more devoid of the original suburban values.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
Further this mass exodus to suburbia was resulting in: “a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, in uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated food, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold manufacture in the central metropolis (Mumford, 1961, p. 486). Mr. Mumford, like other cosmopolitan critics, seemed particularly offended that suburbia was developing not as planned communities for those of taste, but as mass suburbanization for the common man. Often, as in the above quotation, the characteristics of the housing and the characteristics of the suburban residents were directly linked. And both were clearly found wanting. The critics embraced an extreme form of environmental determinism in which the characteristics of the area determined the character of the inhabitants. According to a 1964 New York Times Magazine article by elitist Ada Louise Huxtable, the long-time New York Times architecture critic, “It is a shocking fact that more than 90 percent of builders’ homes are not designed by architects…and the consequent damage “is social, cultural, psychological, and emotional, as well as aesthetic” (Ada Louise Huxtable, “Clusters Instead of Slurbs,” New York Times Magazine, February 9, 1964, pp. 37-44). #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
Suburbia was thought by some to be a dismal place where mediocrity ruled and about which no intellectual could say anything favourable—even if they lived in one. The same biased criticism of popular tastes and cultural uniformity was delivered with far more humour in Malvina Reynolds’s folksong “Little Boxes.” Sung for decades by Pete Seeger to the point where it has become an American classic, the opening lines to the lyrics are: “Little Boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky tacky, little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same. There’s a green one and pink one and a blue one and a yellow one and they’re all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.” This point that the little boxes and the people who lived in them are all the same was a core belief of the city-based intellectual critics of suburbs. It was a given that suburbs bred conformity. Ironically, the children born in the little boxes would spawn the cultural revolution of the late 1960s and the early 1970s. It was the children of the suburbs who celebrated at Woodstock and Coachella. It should also be noted that this pattern of urban cities detailing the ills of suburbia is not a phenomenon common only to earlier decades. Even in 1993, in The New York Times, one could find a feature article bemoaning the isolation and lack of intellectual and cultural activities in suburbia, As stated in the article, “escapees from Manhattan have found that along with the gains have come unexpected nuisances, even deep feelings of loss. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
“And what is more, the unpleasant surprises are often the flip side of precisely the attractions that drew them to the suburbs in the first place. The emigres discover they can walk virtually anywhere at night without fear. But where to walk? So few places worth walking are open after dark…Some discover that at times their snug home on its separate lot, without a doorman downstairs or neighbor above and below, makes them feel lonely and more vulnerable, not more secure. And when pipes leak and the heat shuts off, they learn that the joys of the suburbs do not include supers” (Joseph Berger, “Emigres in Suburbs Find Life’s Flip Side,” New York Times, January 24, 1993, Metro p.30). Sounds a lot like satire. Nonetheless, there are significant differences between contemporary articles, such as that quoted above, and the typical piece written during earlier decades. While both might decry the absences of all-night take-out, current articles acknowledge that in addition to the opera, the city also has serious problems, such as old buildings with pest, noise, foul smells, a high density of unfriendly people packed into one place, lack of privacy and family values, political tensions are more visible, there are issues with parking and traffic, poor air quality, the menace of muggers and aggressive panhandlers. Contemporary laments are also less likely to be angry diatribes and more likely to be done tongue-in-cheek, with humour. Finally, the authors of contemporary suburban criticisms are more likely to be themselves suburbanites. They miss the city, but they, like most Americans having the choice, have chosen to live elsewhere. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
The writer of the New York Times piece, for example, had moved to Westchester from the West Side of Manhattan some twenty months earlier. Envy impedes our spiritual growth and harms our relationship with others. Yet with hard work and the Lord’s help, it can be overcome. Most of us will experience envy at one time or another. The danger comes when we remain unaware of our envy or do not handle it appropriately; then it has the potential to harm us and may cause us to think or act badly toward others. “For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work,” reports James 3.16. However, by eliminating envy, we can improve our relationships with others and our view of ourselves. When we realize we are not competing with others, we can then rejoice in their accomplishments. The practice of comparing ourselves to others is usually at the root of envy. It causes us to feel that we are not good enough and that in order to be acceptable we have to achieve more, acquire more, or in other ways appear to be “better” than others. It occurs when we do not value ourselves sufficiently as children of God and consequently feel we have to prove our worth by “doing” or “having.” Envy is a form of pride. Pride can create enmity, or hatred, which separates us from our fellow humans. It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone. Part of the reason envy can be so difficult to recognize in ourselves is that it often disguises itself in other feelings and behaviours. One disguise envy wears is the tendency to criticize. Another is the desire to act in a way that will provoke envy in others. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
The good news is, once we unmask envy and begin to eliminate it, we can begin to feel much better about ourselves and others around us. Like layers of accumulated paint, envy covers our true worth, making it difficult to see ourselves accurately and change our beliefs so that we can feel better about ourselves. There are at least five reason why we need to be concerned about envy in ourselves: it blocks us from growing spiritually, it keeps us from having pure motives, it creates an “us against them” mentality, it can make us feel negative toward others, and a desire to be envied can cause others to feel negative toward us. When we grow up feeling that we are not loved for who we are and instead are criticized or are valued for how we compare to others, we can develop the habit of looking outside ourselves to feel good. People who try to pump up their self-worth by gaining the admiration of others for their thought or knowledge in reality may be suffering from a lack of understanding of their worth, and their true relation to God. However, as children of our Heavenly Father, each of us has inherent worth and has been endowed with divine potential. “We are the children of God,” the Apostle Paul declared, “and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ,” reports Romans 8.16-17. Many of us have inner standards of excellence and perfection that are hard or even impossible to meet, often causing emotional pain. We may have a hard time admitting mistake and living with imperfections. If not careful, we can end up envious of those who seem to achieve more or seem more comfortable being imperfect. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
It was once written “To oneself be true.” But who do we know who we are? One must learn to focus one’s assertive aggressive and hostile feelings, so that these do no suffuse too many inappropriate parts of oneself or one’s World. Learn to become less hostile and become more approachable so that better contact can be obtained from those you know and work with. This will allow anxiety to diminish. Self-acceptance is also useful in attacking the inner voices which persecuted oneself at times, denying one right to life and happiness. Having established the right to live, and a channel through which love and care can reach one, one will began to take an interest in the wide and varied World of other people and things. Having established the rudiment of self, mental illness can come to an end and one can be engaged in intellectual activity, accomplishing good work with success and ease. One may not only remain cured, without any recurrences of pathology, but one’s personality may continue to develop and may gain in strength. The basic anxiety-producing conflicts in human beings are no over the “gratification of desires” but over the frightening struggle to maintain themselves in existence at all as genuine individual persons. Of course guilt is a real experience and must be accepted, and there is no therapeutic result unless feelings of guilt are cleared up, but guilt is no at the core of psychological distress. Pathological guilt is a struggle to maintain object-relations, a defence against disintegration, and is a state of mind that is preferred to being undermined by irresistible fears. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
The core of psychological distress is simply elementary fear, however much it gets transformed into guilt: fear carrying with it the feeling of weakness and inability to cope with life, fear possessing the psyche to such an extent that “ego-experience” cannot get started. People are dependent on the opportunities which the environment offers; one’s potentialities flourish best in an environment that understands, supports, and encourages individual growth. If the environment is unsatisfactory, development may be distorted or arrested. The True Self is as yet only potential; it will not be realized in unfavourable circumstances. Vulnerability to separation-anxiety exists when the human being is not ego-related. Ego-relatedness allows the individual to be protected by the presence of others without being impinged on by them. Given this, the vulnerable individual is able to develop in one’s individual way, without fear either of devastating loneliness or of devastating damage. People can begin to experience separateness from others, without losing one’s sense of security. The sense of belonging, of being securely in touch, as it grows in an individual by virtue of having relationships that are reliable, becomes an established property of one’s own psyche. When people feel totally secure and invulnerable, they gain proof that their trust is justified by finding they have experienced stable relationships in life. People who have not had enough of this good experience are excessively vulnerable to even the slightest loss of support. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
Their chronic overdependence is a genuine compulsion which they cannot evade by effort, will-power, or intellectual understanding. Their only hope is to find someone who can understand them and help them grow out of it. That is what psychotherapy is. The need is for a relationship in which people can experience being securely held while they venture to be in touch with thoughts, feelings, or parts of the self from which fear has long kept them estranged. “Love made angry” is what happens when you want love from a person who is not giving it—you become angry with them in an attempt to force the to give what you want. This is called “coercive anger.” Obviously, at some point this anger must lead to worry hat your anger will drive away the very person you need, and for some this will lead on to guilt at having hurt the feelings of someone they care about. Not getting what you want, worrying about losing a loved person, having to live without love and mutual concern, makes you depressed as well as angry. One the bright side, however, you may in your anger turn to another person in the hope that they will love you better and so you have another chance. “Love made hungry” describes the view of the schizoid position. When you cannot get what you want from the person you love and need, it may be that instead of getting angry you simply feel more and more needy, with an ever stronger craving to get total possession of the loved person, to ensure that you will never be left wanting. However, then you may be visited by the terrible fear that your love has become so overwhelming and devouring that it will destroy your loved one, and that then there will be nothing left of them. And indeed, this can happen. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
The depression which comes from this craving brings aloofness with it: you withdraw from loving because loving destroys those you love. In this case, there is no second chance, because if that is what you believe to be the nature of love and this is what you do, you dare not love anyone for fear that it will lead to the destruction either of them or of you. The love-made-angry depressed person looks on one’s loved one as a hateful denier (a Rejecting Object), while the love-made-hungry schizoid person sees one’s beloved as a desirable deserter (an Exciting Frustrating Object) never to be fully possessed. When people reaching out and finding nothing there, the individual’s excitement about life meets with no response in the World of other people and things, so that one must turn back on oneself and be satisfied with one’s phantasies of what one wants, ceasing to look for satisfaction in a World devoid of interest. (In psycho-analytic language, cathexis is withdrawn from the object-World.) This sense of emptiness and void may be experienced where there would normally be connection with people and things, so that the individual feels one has nothing to hang on to and lacks any sense of secure attachment. In this case, one experiences their loved one’s as void and emptiness. At other times, void and emptiness may be experienced as coming from the self, as a frequent experience of hunger, for instance—the individual experiencing oneself as hungry-empty-needy-urgent-demanding-greedy-tearing-emptying in relation to their loved ones. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
Every human must confront the monster within oneself, if one is ever to find peace without. There is always a two-endednes of relationships. This is not the case when one end of the relationship is experienced as not there: the experience that “the World is empty and des not hold anything for me” may be equivalent to “I am empty and cannot hold anything or anyone securely. Similarly “I am empty and will destroy, swallow, overwhelm the World” may be experienced as indistinguishable from “The World is empty and will overwhelm, destroy, swallow me.” People may experience all these possibilities, either simultaneously or in mood-swings up and down consecutively, however mutually contradictory they may seem to common sense (or rather to the “Central Ego”). Some people dread entering personal relationships which demand deep and genuine feeling on both sides. Such people may have felt compelled to withdraw heir consciousness into a relatively small area because, although their need for love is as great as anyone’s, it operates at the emotional level of absolute infantile dependence filled with need and greed and the terror of abandonment. At that level, dimly aware of their enormous need, they feel faced with risk of total loss and destruction, both of themselves and of those they love. It is the form their own love has taken and they have little knowledge of any other. Loving, therefore, seems to present them with a terrifying choice, in which both alternatives lead to loss and destruction for someone. If they let themselves be loved, that means they must let themselves be swallowed up and taken over: they must be totally compliant and cease to be an individual. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
If they let themselves love other people, this means that they themselves will inevitably take them over, insisting on their total compliance and swallowing them whole. Then the loved ones will disappear as real people. In this plight, some people try to comprise. This is called the in/out programme. Driven by their need to love and be with others, they go into a relationship but at once feel driven out again by their fear of exhausting the person they love with the demands they want to make on them, or by their fear of losing themselves through overdependence and compliance. Others escape this painful oscillation by withdrawing from feelings and relationships altogether. They then feel a dreadful meaningless emptiness. Their consciousness is confirmed to the unfeeling Central Ego, which relates only to idealized perfectly good and perfectly bad “inner objects.” Such uncomplicated phantasy-figures are all that they (selectively) perceive of all that the varied World of people and things has to offer. Libidinal relationships are quite disowned, though anti-libidinal ones may be used to keep libidinal strivings down. We can imagine spouses who feel like this being emotionless and unresponsive when their loved one’s tries to relate to them. We can imagine the dependent loved one’ greed for love and their fear of needing it. We can imagine the dependent loved one summoning up all their strength, in turn, to avoid evidence of feeling, and maturing, and becoming independent or single or having to be more of a provider in life. Out of experience in the World, from infancy onward, we form schema—ways of organizing and interpreting reality. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25
Lacking a schema to interpret ambiguous aspects of life, one probably does not form rational ideas about things they do not understand. As one continues to focus on reality, their mind struggles to make sense out of the apparent chaos. With patience one eventually imposes order, by seeing a reality that makes sense to them. Note, that once your mind forms a social construction of reality it controls your perception—so much so that it becomes virtually impossible not to perceive the many things that we take for granted and believe are objective reality are actually socially constructed, and thus, can change as society changes. The theory of social constructionism states that meaning and knowledge are socially created, and our assumptions and expectations may give us a perceptual set—a predisposition to interpret an ambiguous stimulus one way rather than another. Social constructionist believe that things are generally viewed as natural or normal in society, such as understandings of gender, race, class, and disability, are socially constructed, and consequently are not an accurate reflection of reality. Once preliminary hunches are formed based on a certain construction of reality, even if it is badly distorted, they interfere with accurate perceptions. Having formed a wrong idea about reality, people have more difficulty seeing the truth. What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we being to the experience. Social constructs are often created within specific institutions and cultures and come to prominence in certain historical periods. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
Our expectations influence how we see things. To see is to believe, but social constructs’ dependence of historical, political, and economic conditions can lead them to evolve and change. For all these reasons, religious perceptions depend on the state of the perceiver as well as on external reality. Depending on one’s perceptual set, a thought that pops into the mind while meditating may be perceived as a random cognition or as the still small voice of God. Moses perceived his burning bush and mountaintop experiences through the eyes of faith and thus assigned them a profound religious significance that would have been meaningless to someone lacking one’s perceptual sets. Imagine yourself looking with a friend at a clear night sky. Your friend points overhead and says, “Do you see the Little Bear?” Looking at the very same stars, you cannot perceive what your friend so clearly sees. Why? Because your friend, having taken the trouble to study star patterns, has eyes to see what you are not ready to notice. Similarly, people may see the Heavens, which declare the glory of God, yet not see that the Heavens, which declare the glory of God, yet not see that the Heavens are declaring God’s glory. Only the heart that already has faith will see the Heavens in the way. The point has been recognized even by religious skeptics, such as the philosopher Paul Kurtz: “I have wondered at times: Is it I who lacks religious sense, and is this due to a defeat of character? The tone-deaf are unable to fully appreciate the intensity of music, and the color-blind live in the World denuded of brightness and hue.” #RandolphHarrs 18 of 25
To have a religious experience is thus to assign sensory experience spiritual significance. It is to interpret phenomena with an awareness of the presence of God. Those who have a schema for interpreting life through the eyes of faith are like those who have a schema for perceiving the dalmatian: they have difficulty viewing things another way, yet sometimes find I hard to get others to see reality as they do. To refer simply to “religious experiences” as if we all knew exactly what we meant by them and had an agreed-upon definition would be naïve. In different religious traditions and in different historical epochs religious experience has referred to many different things. In the last few decades there has been, within the Christian tradition, a wide resurgence of interest in unusual religious experience. What are we to make of them? In the 1950s, Aldous Huxley invited his readers to take advantage of mind-altering drugs to give them new spiritual experiences. In the 1970s, Timothy Leary was a great advocate of altering consciousness with hallucinogenic drugs. Sadly, today, we are living with the tragic consequences to many of those who followed Leary’s advice and who now suffer. Even so, many of the drug takers longed for better spiritual awareness. However, if religious experience can be induced through drugs, what are we to make of what we believe are normal religious experiences? How can we properly understand them and derive the greatest benefit from them? Furthermore, how do we answer those who set aside all religious experiences on the grounds that we can give them an explanation in terms of psychology or physiology? The great philosopher Bertrand Russell, for example, asked, “What is the difference between a person who drinks alcohol and sees green snakes, and a person who half starves himself to death and sees God?” #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
We know from the use of hallucinogenic drugs, as well as from the agonizing experiences of some mentally ill people, that religious experiences can be a sign of psychopathology. The hardheaded and previously skeptical philosopher Simone Weil did not regard her spontaneous mystical experiences as proof of reality of God or of the truth of Christian doctrines. Rather, she saw the as drawing attention to, or helping to focus upon, a spiritual understanding of the things of this World: “If I light an electric torch at night, I don’t judge its power by looking at the bulb, but by seeing how many objects it lights up. The brightness of a source of light is appreciated by the illumination it projects upon non-luminous. The value of a religious or, more generally, a spiritual way of life is appreciated by the amount of illumination thrown up the things of this World.” It is not the experience that matters but the effects of that experience. The evidences for the reality of a spiritual experience should be seen in the subsequent life of the experiencer. The changed life of apostle Paul is the classic example of this. Spiritual experiences matter, but feelings are not the ultimate criterion for judging spirituality. Rather, “you will know them by their fruits.” With the schema of faith, a whole set of perceptions forcefully takes hold of one’s consciousness. Jesus Christ is perceived not as a psychotic but an incarnation of God. The Universe is seen not as a meaningless material reality, but as God’s creative handiwork—the ultimate miracle that makes little sense without a Creator. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
Life itself takes on purpose in a World where humans are viewed as called to recognize their limits and their value to their Creator, to assume their responsibility for the Earth and for each other’s welfare, and to serve and enjoy God forever. Lord, please open our eyes that we may see. Keep vivid in your memory the many splendid exploits of the Holy Fathers of the desert. In their lives true religious perfection has shone out like a flaming beacon on a hill. Sad to say, what we have been able to accomplish in our own modest lives adds up to a guttering candle. As Saints and friends of Christ, they served the Lord in famine and drought, coldness and nakedness, labour and fatigue, vigils and fasts, holy prayers and meditations, persecutions and derisions. Oh, how they suffered, the Apostles, the Martyrs, the Confessors, the Virgins, and all the rest who followed close upon the footsteps of Christ! They did the evangelical thing, at least as described by John (12.25), dispossessing their souls in this World that they might possess them in the next. Oh, how isolated and dedicated was the life of the Holy Fathers led in the desert! Their temptations were long and lurid, but they managed to endure. The Enemy harassed them suddenly and frequently. Just as sudden and frequent were the prayers they shot to Heaven. Their abstinences were rugged, but they managed to swallow their hunger. Crazed was their desire for spiritual progress! Feverish was their battle against what seemed the overwhelming supremacy of their vices! #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
Through it all they held fast to God. Through the day they worked hard and prayed quietly to survive their harsh life; through the night they prayed, even in their sleep, their snores rising like incense to the Lord. Every hour of work seemed too long; every hour of prayer, too short. Making time to eat was impossible. The sweetness of contemplation was irresistible. All wealth, title, and honour, every friend and relative, they renounced. Nothing that smacked of all the World did they want to have. The necessities of life they scarcely touched. The pangs in their stomachs they begrudgingly satisfied. And so poor were they in the things of this World, but rich, so very rich, in graces and virtues! They were ravaged on the outside, but on the inside they were refreshed with Grace and Divine Consolation. The Fathers of the desert were aliens in their own World, but close family friends with God. In their own eyes self-esteem had no value, and hence they dressed like castaways. However, in the eyes of God they were precious, chosen ones, and further haberdashery was far from their minds. They stood in True Humility; they lived in Simple Obedience; they walked in Charity and Patience. And so daily they progressed in spirit and obtained great grace in God’s presence. They have been given as examples to all Religious and ought to rouse us to more spiritual progress. Standing in opposition to them are the Tepids, milling around every which way, affirming and denying, mummering and murmuring, whispering the rest of the World to a spiritual standstill. Religious orders, when they were founded, were quite remarkable gardens. Hotbeds of fervour they were. Their prayers were awash with devotion. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
Their virtue was pruned and precise. Discipline, sometimes harsh and heavy-handed, took root. Under the rule of their Founder, and indeed under the inspiration of the Founder of Founders, Reverence and Obedience walked hand-in-hand down the garden path. These truly holy and perfect men poured out their lives in the strenuous fight against the World. The footprints they left behind are visible to this day. Odd thing, though. Today’s self-actualized, who is anything but exceptional when compared to the self-actualized of old, seems to be the exception to the rule; that is to say, one is thought to be observant and does no rock the boat, but there is not a great deal else that one does. Ah, the laziness and sloppiness of the religious life today! What Worldly winds could have cooled he fervour of our white-hot forge! Whatever happened to Motivation and Enthusiasm? They are nowhere to be seen! Is it any wonder, then, that the desire to live the religious life has decreased? Once so awake during the nocturnal watch, now you are found snoring on the battlement. Is this any way to live the religious life? And you of all people! You have had the privilege of meeting many of the devout Religious in your own community in the generation just passed. In Earth Prayers, the pain of the Earth is expressed. Knowing that the World is an intricate balance of parts we see that if one of the parts is sick or wounded, its plight and suffering affects us all. Here we humble ourselves before all creation and allow the outcries of despair from around the globe to touch our hearts, opened by the realization of an ecological self. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
Today the ability of the Earth to support life is being deeply eroded. The evidence is everywhere. We are mindlessly destroying the very web of life; millions of people are dying each year as a result of direct ecological collapse. Within the animal and plant kingdoms we are witnessing the greatest holocaust in history. Millions of species are on the verge of extinction. The old forests are being felled, the top soil washed away, and the groundwater contaminated. The air is polluted and the ran is acid. So the litany goes on, as every aspect of life on the planet is profoundly altered by the way our culture has organized the business of its existence. They have lost it, lost it, and their children will never even wish for it—and I am afraid…because the sun keeps rising and these days nobody sings. While many of us are aware of the destruction taking place on our planet, it is difficult to integrate this knowledge into our daily life. What do we do when it is not war that is killing us, but progress? When the problem is not the actions of an evil “other,” but ourselves? We fear the despair such information provokes. We do not want to feel the grief over all that is lost, nor our own complicity in the damage. This denial of feeling takes a heavy toll on us, impoverishing our sensory and emotional life. Ultimately, it puts us out of touch with reality. There is a historical tradition of prayer that foresees the ruination of the World because of human transgression. We find in the Old Testament, we find it again in the prayers of Native Americas as they witness the destruction of their way of life by conquerors. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
We are hearing it again now, as citizens from around the World express their fears and their grief at what is happening to the Earth. We have forgotten who are are. We have sought only our own security, we have exploited simply for our own ends, we have distorted our knowledge, we have abused our power. “The Earth dries up and withers, the World languishes and withers, the Heavens languish together with the Earth. The Earth lies polluted under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed laws, violated the statues, broken the everlasting covenant,” reports Isaiah 24.4-5. We therefore hope in Thee, O Lord our God, that we may soon behold the glory of Thy might, when Thou wilt remove the abominations from the Earth and when all idolatry will be abolished. We hope for the day when the World will be perfected under the Kingdom of the Almighty, and all humankind will call upon Thy name; when Thou wilt turn unto Thyself all the wicked of the Earth. May all the inhabitants of the World perceive and know that unto Thee every knee must bend, every tongue vow loyalty. Before Thee, O Lord our God, may they bow in worship, giving honour unto Thy glorious name. May they all accept the yoke of Thy Kingdom and do Thou rule over them speedily and forevermore. For the Kingdom is Thine and to tall eternity Thou wilt reign in glory; as it is written in Thy Holy Bible: The Lord shall reign for ever and ever. And it has been foretold: The Lord shall be King over all the Earth; on that day the Lord shall be One, and His name One. After some weeks on a healthy diet, the intellectual type of person will find, as I found, that there is greater mental clarity and greater mental drive. In fact, there may even be a tendency to overwork intellectually in reading and writing. A century ago, John Linton, of England, reported the result of a long period on a healthy diet in these words: “I was able to write with an ease and perspicacity and satisfaction which I had never before known, or had any idea of.” #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
Cresleigh Homes
Catch that sliding barn door? Flexible, beautifully designed spaces are waiting for you in the Mills Station Residence 3. 🏡 And we didn’t even mention that floor yet – we’re smitten with the color!
This home offers generous light-filled living spaces, a flex room perfect for an office or study, and even the option to further extend your outdoor living space. A wonderful kitchen and island include plenty of space for get-togethers and to sit down and break fast for a meal. https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-3/
Mr. Cresleigh Builds His Dream House and Please Don’t Eat the Daisies!
An advantage of biologically programmed behaviour is that it prepares terrestrial beings to survive in their natural environments. A disadvantage is that evolution is slow. Natural selection prepares a species only for a future which resembles the biological past. If know is power, and power corrupts, how will humankind ever survive. As Second Wave civilization pushed its tentacles across the planet, transforming everything with which it came in contact, it carried with it more than technology or trade. Colliding with First Wave civilization, the Second Wave created not only a new reality for millions but a new way of thinking about reality. Clashing at a thousand points with the values, concepts, myths, and morals of agricultural society, the Second Wave brought with it a redefinition of God…of justice…of love…of power…of beauty. It stirred up new ideas, attitudes, and analogies. It subverted and superseded ancient assumptions about time, space, matter, and causality. A powerful, coherent World view emerged that not only explained but justified Second Wave reality. This World view of industrial society has not had a name. It might best be termed “indust-reality.” Indust-realty was the overarching set of ideas and assumptions with which the children of industrialism were taught to understand their World. It was the package of premises employed by Second Wave civilization, by its scientists, business leaders, state’s people, philosophers, and propagandists. There were, of course, contervoices, those who challenged the dominant ideas of indust-reality, but we are concerned here not with the side currents but with the mainstream of Second Wave thought. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
On the surface, it seemed, there was no mainstream at all. Rather, it appeared that there were two powerful ideological currents in conflict. By the middle of the nineteenth century every industrial nation has its sharply defined left wing and its right, its advocates of individualism and free enterprise, and its advocates of collectivism and socialism. This battle of ideologies, at first confined to the industrializing nations themselves, soon spread around the globe. With the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the organization of a centrally directed Worldwide propaganda machine, the ideological struggle grew even more intense. And by the end of World War II, as the United States and Russian attempted to reintegrate the World market—or large parts of it—on their own terms, each side was spending huge sums to spread its doctrines to the World’s non-industrial peoples. On one side were totalitarian regimes, on the other the socalled liberal democracies. Guns and bombs stood ready to take up where logical arguments ended. Seldom since the great collision of Catholicism and Protestantism during the Reformation had doctrinal lines been so sharply drawn between two theological camps. What few noticed, however, in the heat of this propaganda war, was that while each side promoted a different ideology, both were essentially hawking the same superideology. Their conclusions—their economic programs and political dogmas—differed radically, but many of their starting assumptions were the same. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
Like Protestant and Catholic missionaries clutching different versions of the Christian Bible, yet both preaching Christ, Marxists and anti-Marxists alike, capitalists and anticapitalists, Americans and Russians marched into Africa, Asia, and Latin America—the non-industrial regions of the World—blindly bearing the same set of fundamental premises. Bothe preached the superiority of industrialism to all other civilization. Both were passionate apostles of indust-reality. The World view they disseminated was based on three deeply intertwined “indust-real” beliefs—three ideas that bound all Second Wave nations together and differentiated them from much of the rest of the World. The first of these core beliefs had to do with nature. While socialists and capitalist might disagree violently about how to share its fruits, both looked upon nature in the same way. For both, nature was an object waiting to be exploited. The idea that humans should hold dominion over nature can be traced at least as far back as Genesis. “And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the Heavens and over every living thing that moves on the Earth,” reports Genesis 1.28. Nevertheless, it was decidedly a minority view until the industrial revolution. Most earlier cultures emphasized instead an acceptance of poverty and the harmony of humankind with its surrounding natural ecology. These earlier cultures were not particularly gentle with nature. They slashed and burned, overgrazed, and stripped the forests for firewood. However, their power to do damage was limited. They had no great impact on the Earth and no need for an explicit ideology to justify the damage they did. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
Perhaps earlier cultures had no idea the damage they were doing? However, not all capitalist did damage, they may have had good intentions. For instance, Oliver Fisher Winchester, November 30, 1810—December 10, 1880. Went from New England farm boy to World-renowned industrialist and entrepreneur. In addition to his role in building the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, he was a generous patron of Yale University and a founder of the Yale National Bank and the New Haven Water Company, and he was elected lieutenant governor of Connecticut in 1866. The New Haven Palladium eulogized him as “an eminent citizen, to whose public spirit and private enterprise [New Haven] is indebted for much of her present property…The great establishment which he organized, and to which he gave his name, stands to-day as a monument to the great ability and enterprise which marked his whole business career.” Many people credit or blame the Winchester’s for creating guns, but they did not. They only revolutionized gun production. Firearms have been major instruments in the course of history since their first primitive appearance in the fourteenth century. However, in all that time no marker of longarms can equal the international image of adventure attached to the Winchester. The historian, collector, or curator who pursues the Holy Grail of Winchester belongs to a select group of devotees of one of the most fascinating marques in Americana. Arguably it is the Winchester that won the West. And the two most glamorous and sought-after blue chips in gun collecting Worldwide are Colt, primarily a handgun maker, and Winchester, primarily a maker of shoulder guns. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
Designed with mechanical ingenuity and made with advanced manufacturing techniques—mass production decades before Henry Ford and the automobile—most Winchester were graceful and handsome in line and form. And for the lover of decorative arts a prized portion of production has the extra merit of hand decoration such as gold-plated engravings of the Goddess of Liberty, inspired engravings on gold plating of deer, and Hiram Powers’s The Greek Slave, and other patterns in silver and gold plating. Increasingly the most prized Winchesters are leaving private hands and becoming permanent exhibits in museums. Some are worth in the range of a nice used car, a mansion, while others are priceless. Among the many guns Mr. Winchester own, two of his prized possessions were a deluxe pair of ivory-gripped Volcanic Navy pistols, which were passed down through the family. Mr. Winchester made magnificent guns like the standard silver-plated and blue navy pistol with rosewood grips, or a pocket pistol with walnut. There were also other guns with hand decorations of checkered or carved select-gain stocks, special finishes, engraving and precious- metal inlaying, and sometimes elegant casings. A few were presentations, even gifts of the state. Tracing its origins back to 1849, Winchester is the oldest maker of lever-action repeating firearms in the World, and at is peak in the twentieth century was the largest gunmaker in the World with over 18,000 employees. As an ammunition manufacturer, Winchester remains the World’s largest. The marque is also possessor of one of history’s most famous brand names. In many respects Winchester is to firearms and ammunition as Ferrari is to automobiles and Tiffany is to silver. Now, you may be wondering why is Winchester so important? Well, there are many reasons. When America did not have law and order, people needed a way to protect themselves. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
For instance, in a July 14, 1863 newspaper report, in the Louisville Journal, written by its editor George D. Prentice, was highly laudatory: “In the days, when rebel outlaws and raids are becoming common in Kentucky, when guerillas are scouring different countries nightly, and practising the most atrocious outrages, when even the central positions of our State are openly threatened, and when it is understood in high quarters that secret companies are on foot for a sudden and general insurrection as some favorable moment, it behooves every loyal citizen to prepare himself upon his own responsibility with the best weapon of defense that can be obtained. And certainly the simplest, surest, and most effective weapon that we know of, the weapon that could be used with the most tremendous results in case of an outbreak or invasion, is one that we have mentioned recently upon two or three occasions, the newly invented rifle of Henry, now on exhibition, and for sale at Messrs. Jas. Low and Co.’s, Sixth street. This rifle, as we have stated, can be loaded in eight or ten seconds with fifteen cartridges, and the whole number can be fired in fifteen seconds or less, so that one man, with the weapon is equal to fifteen armed with ordinary guns…It may lie loaded for a week at the bottom of a river, and, if taken out, will then fire with as much certainty as if it had been kept perfectly dry all the time. It is remarkably simple, not liable to get out of order, and is utterly free from the objection sometimes urged against other repeating rifles that two or more charges are liable to be fired at once.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Benjamin Tyler Henry was a well-known gun engineer, who was eventually employed by Oliver Winchester when Oliver Winchester became one of the investors in “Smith & Wesson Company,” which changed its name to “Volcanic Repeating Arms Company” in 1855. By 1857, Mr. Winchester had positioned himself as the principal stockholder in the company and relocated to New Haven, Connecticut, changing the name to New Haven Arms Company. The Henry rifle was one of the most noteworthy inventions in the Winchester history. With financial backing from O.F. Winchester, the tooled up revolutionary new repeater had to prove itself. The Henry was of .44 caliber, with a 216-grain conical bullet, backed by a 26-grain powder charge. The birth of this gun was fueled by the Civil War market and by 1862, Henrys were in the field. President Lincoln was so intrigued by them that he test-fired a Spencer repeater on the White House lawn. The future of the Henry was likely boosted by special presentations to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, and even a gift to President Lincoln—all guns with single-digit serial numbers, richly engraved and inscribed, and fitted with rosewood stocks. They Henry was even tested at the Washington Navy Yard (conveniently, Secretary Welles was from Connecticut), reported in May of 1862:187 shots were fired in three minutes and thirty-six second (not counting reloading time). and one of full fifteen-shot magazine was fired in only 10.8 second. A total of 1,040 shots were fired, and hits were made from as far away as 348 feet, at 18-inch-square target—quite impressive accuracy with open sights. The report noted, “It is manifest from the above experiment that his gun may be fired with great rapidity, and is not liable to get out of order. The penetration in proportion to the charge used, compared favorably with that of other arms.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
By July of 1692 the Henry was on the market, and it quickly found popularity with both civilian and military purchasers. An extraordinary encounter between seven Confederates and Captain James M. Wilson, commanding officer of Company M of the 12th Kentucky Cavalry, was widely publicized, appearing in various advertisements and journals. This account shows why protection was needed. H.W.S. Cleveland’s Hint to Riflemen gives an account: “Capt. Wilson had fitted up a long crib across the road from his front door as a sort of arsenal, where he had his Henry Rifle, Colt’s Revolver, et cetera. One day, while at home dining with his family seven mounted guerillas rode up, dismounted and burst into his dining room and commenced firing upon him with revolvers. The attack was so sudden that the first shot struck a glass of water his wife was raising to her lips, breaking the glass. Several other shots were fired without effect, when Capt. Wilson sprang to his feet, exclaiming, ‘For God’s sake, gentlemen, if you wish to murder me, do not do it at my own table in the presence of my family.’ This caused a parley, resulting in their consent that he might go out doors he sprang for his cover, and his assailants commenced firing at him. Several shots passed through his hat, and more through his clothing, but none took effect upon his person. He thus reached his cover and seized his Henry Rifle, turned upon his foes, and in five shots killed five of them; the other two sprung for their horses. As the sixth man threw his hand over the pommel of his saddle, the sixth shot took off four of his fingers; notwithstanding this he got into his saddle, but the seventh shot killed him; then start out, Capt. Wilson killed the seventh man with the eighth shot. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
“In consequence of this feat the State of Kentucky armed his Company with the Henry Rifle.” Wilson’s company was not the only one to be armed with the Henry, but the issuing of such arms was counter to War Department policy. Assistant Secretary of War Peter Watson wrote to O.F. Winchester (August 9, 1862) that “companies arming themselves with Henry’s repeating rifle, will [not] be allowed to retain them in the field…as great inconvenience has resulted from promises heretofore given in other cases to furnish companies of troops with special arms. If you choose to arm and equip a whole regiment at your own expense, or the regiment chooses to arm itself, it will be accepted with the condition that it shall be at liberty to use its own arms and equipments exclusively.” Despite the War Department objections, 240 Henrys were purchased by the federal government for the 1st District of Columbia Cavalry. Inspired by that moral victory, O. F. Winchester gleefully wrote to Brigadier General Ripley stating, “If these arms were sued as efficiently by the men who are to receive them as they have been by our Union friends in Kentucky, the country will have no cause to regret the expenditure.” Still another federal government purchase was 800 more Henrys, to equip the eight companies of Maine cavalry assigned to the 1st District of Columbia Cavalry. Armed also with Spencer rifles, the First Maine had ample opportunity to demonstrate the superiority of breech-loading metallic-cartridge repeaters. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
The regimental chaplain, Samuel H. Merrill wrote in his memoir on the First Maine and the 1st District cavalry units: “This regiment was distinguished by the superiority of the carbines with which it was armed. It was the only regiment in the Army of the Potomac armed with ‘Henry’s Repeating Rifle.’ After having witnessed the effectiveness of the weapon, one is not surprised at the remark, said to have been made by the guerilla chief. Mosby, after an encounter with some of our men, that ‘he did not care for the common gun, or for Spencer’s seven shooter, but as for these guns that they could wind up on Sunday, and shoot all the week, it was useless to fight against them.’” Reports of the successful use of Henrys in the Civil War are numerous, both from the Union point of view and from the Confederates who forced the incessant fire. The incredible firepower, especially in comparison to the muzzle-loading single shots, is evident in Major William Ludlow’s account of the Battle of Allatoona Pass: “What saved us that day…was the fact that we had a number of Henry rifles…These were new guns in those days and [the commander] had held in reserve a company of an Illinois Regiment that was armed with them until a final assault should be made. When the artillery reopened…this company of 16-shooters sprang to the parapet and poured out such a multiplied, rapid, and deadly fire that no men could stay in front of it, and no serious effort was thereafter made to take the fort by assault.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Even though it may have not been the most popular firearm used in the Civil War, it was one of the best and most popular firearm used in the Civil War, the Henry rifle found plenty of use among troops in the Union Army. After the Civil War, O.F. Winchester renamed his increasingly successful firearms company yet one more time, to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Winchester’s lever-action repeating rifles became internationally famous for their speed, ease of use, accuracy, and affordability, the latter of which was assisted by the company’s proprietary use of mass manufactured, interchangeable parts. Sales were also propelled by Winchester’s widespread use of romanticized images of the American west in its marketing. Between the paintings of rugged cowboys, frontiersmen, sportsmen, and enthusiastic endorsements by larger-than-life celebrities like “Buffalo Bill” Cody, and Teddy Roosevelt, who said, “ The Winchester…is by all odds the best weapon I ever had, and I now use it almost exclusively…It is as handy to carry, whether on foot or horseback, and comes up to the shoulder as readily as a shotgun; it is absolutely sure, and there is no recoil to jar and disturb the aim, while it carries accurately quite as far as a man can aim with any degree of certainty…The Winchester is the best gun for any game to be found in the United States, for it is deadly, accurate, and handy as any, stands very rough usage, and is unapproachable for the rapidity of its fire and the facility with which it is loaded.” The Winchester repeating rifle earned an international reputation as “the Gun that Won the West.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
With the coming of the Second Wave civilization one found capitalist industrial gouging resources on a massive scale, pumping voluminous poisons into the air, deforesting whole regions in pursuit of profit, without much thought about side effect or long-term consequences. The idea that nature was there to be exploited provided a convenient rationalization for shortsightedness and selfishness. However, the capitalists were scarcely alone. Wherever they took power, Marxist industrializers (despite their conviction that profit was the root of all evil) acted in exactly the same way. Indeed, they built the conflict with nature right into their scriptures. Marxists pictured primitive peoples not as coexisting harmoniously with nature be as engaged in a fierce life-and-death struggle against it. With the emergence of class society, they held, the war of “man against nature” was unfortunately transformed into a war of “man against man.” The achievement of a Communist classless society would permit humanity to get back to its first order of business once again—the war of man against nature. On both sides of the ideological divide, therefore, one found the same image of humanity standing in opposition to nature and dominating it. This image was a key component of indust-reality, the superideology from which Marxist and anti-Marxist alike drew their assumptions. A second, interrelated idea carried the argument a step further. Humans were not merely in charge of nature, they were the pinnacle of a long process of evolution. Earlier theories of evolution existed, but it was Dr. Darwin, in the middle of the nineteenth century, brought up in the most advanced industrial nation of the time, who provided scientific underpinning for this view. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
Dr. Darwin spoke of the bling workings of “natural selection”—an inevitable process that mercilessly weeded out weak and inefficient forms of life. Those species who survived were, by definition, the first. Dr. Darwin was chiefly concerned with biological evolution, but his ideas had distinct social and political overtones that others were quick to recognize. Thus the Social Darwinists argued that the principle of natural selection worked within society as well, and that the wealthiest and most powerful people were, by virtue of that fact, the fittest and the most deserving. It was only a short leap to the idea that whole societies evolve according to the same laws of selection. Following this reasoning, industrialism was a higher stage of evolution than the non-industrial cultures that surrounded it. Second Wave civilization, to put it bluntly, was superior to all the rest. Just as Social Darwinism rationalized capitalism, this cultural arrogance rationalized imperialism. The expanding industrial order needed its lifeline to inexpensive resources, and it created a moral justification for taking them at depressed prices, even at the cost of obliterating agricultural and so-called primitive societies. The idea of social evolution provided intellectual and moral support for the treatment of non-industrial peoples as inferior—and hence unfitted for survival. Dr. Darwin himself wrote unfeelingly of the massacre of the aborigines of Tasmania and, in a burst of genocidal enthusiasm, prophesied that “At some future period…the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the World.” The intellectual front-runners of Second Wave civilization had no doubt about who deserved to survive. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
While Marx bitterly criticizes capitalism and imperialism, he shared the view that industrialism was the most advanced form of society, the stage toward which all other societies would inevitably advance in turn. For the third core belief of indust-reality linked nature and evolution together was the progress principle—the idea that history flows irreversibly toward a better life for humanity. This idea, too, had plenty of preindustrial precedent. However, it was only with the advance of the Second Wave that the idea of Progress with a capital P burst into full flower. Suddenly, as the Second Wave pulsed over Europe a thousand throats began to sing the same hallelujah chorus. Leibniz, Turgot, Condorcet, Kant, Lessing, John Stuart Mill, Hegel, Marx, Darwin, and countless lesser thinkers al found reasons for cosmic optimism. They argued over whether progress was truly inevitable or whether it needed a helping hand from the human race; over what constituted a better life; over whether progress would or could continue ad infinitum. However, they all nodded in agreement at the notion of progress itself. Atheists and divines, students and professors, politicians and scientists preached the new faith. Business people and commissars alike heralded each new factory, each new product, each new housing development, highway, or dam as evidence of this irresistible advance from bad to good or good to better. Poets, playwrights, and painters took progress for granted. Progress justified the degradation of nature and the conquest of “less advanced” civilizations. And once more the same idea ran parallel through the works of both Adam Smith and Karl Marx. As Robert Heilbroner has noted, “Smith was a believer in progress….In The Wealth of Nations progress was no longer an idealistic goal of mankind, but…a destination to which it was driven….a by-product of private economic aims.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
For Marx, of course, these private aims produced only capitalism and the seeds of its own destruction. However, this event in itself was part of the long historical sweep carrying humanity forward to socialism, communism, and an even better beyond. Throughout Second Wave civilization, therefore, three key concepts—the war with nature, the importance of evolution, and the progress principle—provided the ammunition used by the agents of industrialism as they explained and justified it to the World. Beneath these convictions lay still deeper assumptions about reality—a set of unspoken beliefs about the very elementals of human experience. Every human being must deal with these elementals, and every civilization describes them in a different way. Every civilization must teach its children to grapple with time and space. It must explain—whether through myth, metaphour, or scientific theory—how nature words. And it must offer some clue to why things happen as they do. Thus Second Wave civilization, as it matured, created a wholly new image of reality, based on its own distinctive assumptions about time and space, matter and cause. Picking up fragments from the past, piecing them together in new ways, applying experiment and empirical tests, it drastically altered the way human beings came to perceive the World around them and how they behaved in their daily lives. The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into one’s head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe one, was the true founder of society. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes of filled in the ditch and cried out to one’s fellow humans: “Do not listen to this impostor. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the Earth belong to all and the Earth to no one!” However, it is quite likely that by then things had already reached a point where they could no longer continue as they were. For this idea of property, depending on many prior ideas which could only have arisen successively, was not formed all at once in the human mind. It was necessary to make great progress, to acquire much industry and enlightenment, and to transmit and augment them from one age to another, before arriving at this final stage in the state of nature. Let us therefore take things farther back and try to piece together under a single viewpoint that slow succession of events and advances in knowledge in their most natural order. Human’s first sentiment was that of one’s own existence; one’s first concern was that of one’s preservation. The products of the Earth provided one with all the help one needed; instinct led one to make use of them. With hunger and other appetites making one experience by turns various ways of existing, here was one appetites making one experience by turns various ways of existing, there was one appetite that invited one to perpetuate one’s species; and this blind inclination, devoid of any sentiment of the heart, produced a purely terrestrial act. Once this need had been satisfied, the two genders no longer took cognizance of one another, and even the child no longer meant anything to the mother once it could do without her. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Such was the condition of humans in their nascent stage; such was the life of a terrestrial being limited at first to pure sensations, and scarcely profiting from the gifts nature offered one, far from dreaming of extracting anything from her. However, difficulties soon presented themselves to one; it was necessary to learn to overcome them. The height of trees, which kept one from reaching their fruits, the competition of animal that sought to feed themselves on these same fruits, the ferocity of those animals that wanted to take one’s own life: everything obliged one to apply oneself to bodily combat. Natural arms, which are tree branches and stones, were soon found ready at hand. One learned to surmount nature’s obstacles, combat other animals when necessary, fight for one’s subsistence even with humans, or compensate for what one had to yield to those stronger than oneself. In proportion as the human race spread, difficulties multiplied with the humans. Differences in soils, climates and seasons could force them to inculcate these differences in their lifestyles. Barren years, long and hard winters, hot summers that consume everything required new resourcefulness from them. Along the seashore and the riverbanks they invented the fishing line and hook, and became fishermen and fish-eaters. In the forests they made bows and arrows, and became hunters and warriors. In cold countries they covered themselves with the skins of animals they had killed. Lighting, a volcano, or some fortuitous chance happening acquainted them with fire: a new resource against the rigours of Winter. They learned to preserve this element, then to reproduce it, and finally to use it to prepare meats that previously they devoured raw. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
This repeated appropriation of various being to oneself, and of some beings to others, must naturally have engendered in human’s mind the perceptions of certain relations. These relationships which we express by the words “large,” “small,” “strong,” “weak,” “fast,” “slow,” “timorous,” “bold,” and other similar ideas, compared when needed and almost without thinking about it, finally produced in one a kind of reflection, or rather a mechanical prudence which pointed out to one the precautions that were most necessary for one’s safety. Since suburbs during the first half of the century were seen as little more than outlying residential areas, it is perhaps understandable that they attracted minimal literary or scholarly attention. For example, George Babbitt sold real estate in the suburban Glen Oriole development, but he lived in the city of Zenith. Authors and writers in the early decades of the twentieth century largely ignored suburbs while stressing the evils of the city. Typical was Carl Sandburg’s poem “Chicago,” which praised the raw vitality of the city but also noted the city’s wickedness, and brutality. By comparison suburbs were once just a community of beautiful sprawling homes. Overall, it is not an exaggeration to suggest that until the post World War II era, major American writers generally ignored the suburbs. True, Ernest, Hemingway caustically referred to Oak Park, where he had grown up, as a community “of wide lawns and narrow minds,” but he apparently did not think it merited a novel. Sinclair Lewis’s exposure to the meanness of small-midwestern-town life in Main Street (1920) was far more typical of cosmopolitan writers of the first half of the twentieth century. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
In Babbitt (1922) Mr. Lewis, with equal acid, detailed the life of George Babbit, a small-city real estate developer and subdivider. Mr. Lewis’s fictional city of Zenith was a literary twin of the empirical study by Robert and Helen Lynd of Middletown, which was actually Muncie, Indiana. Generally, writes of the era agreed in their viewing small-town and small-city values as fostering full conformity and repression of creativity. Only in the large metropolitan area could one be truly free. Not until the suburban housing boom following World War II were the charges that early-twentieth-century writers had leveled against the small towns and small cities redirected at suburbia and suburban lifestyles. The evils of Sinclair Lewis’ fictional Gopher Prairie became those of Levittown. One major exception to ignoring suburbia as either a literary site a literary metaphour is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 classic, The Great Gatsby. Mr. Fitzgerald places the rootless Gatsby in West Egg, one of the newly developing wealthy suburbs of Long Island. These were places without a background for people who were also reinventing themselves. Although he did not further expand the theme in later works, Mr. Fitzgerald is the first to hint at suburbia as a conscious and artificial creation especially designed to accommodate those possessing shallow roots. Whether it is Gatsby’s wealthy established suburb or the post-World War II mass suburbia of Levittown, suburbia began to be portrayed not as a place of stability, but as a temporary residence for transients. Popular-culture images of suburbia prior to the suburban exodus of the 1950s and 1960s was generally more charitable. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
Images of suburbia tended toward the comfortable and mildly comic, such as Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post cover showing suburban wives, still in their bathrobes, driving their husbands in the family station wagon to the suburban commuter train station. Movie versions of suburbia were also benign and inclined toward the small-town nostalgia of Andy Hardy-type communities. The comic dimension of the upper-middle-class city dweller seeking a semirural retreat was reflected in the success of stories turned into movies such as Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House and Please Don’t Eat the Daisies. Interestingly, the former began as a cautionary article in Fortune on the perils of suburban living. (Eric Hodgins, “Mr. Blandings Builds His Castle,” Fortune Magazine, April 1946, pp. 138-189). On the other hand, Jean Kerr’s Please Don’t Eat the Daisies was a satiric and ironic look at women’s life in the 1950s suburbs (Jean Kerr, please Don’t Eat the Daisies, Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y., 1957). In reality, the suburban backyard barbecue became an American cliché during the 1950s. It symbolized the close national association of suburban life with family values. It also has been said that prior to the 1960s, urban-area scholars were not particularly astute or insightful in examining the phenomenon of suburbanization. Social science’s treatment of suburbs can be described in few words: suburbs essentially were ignored. They were the focus of neither theorizing nor research. Even textbooks in the rapidly developing field of urban sociology went little beyond Earnest Burges’s 1924 description of suburbia as an outer-commuter’s zone. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
No one seemed to think the area, or the process, merited further elaboration. The major scholars of suburbia, Harlan Paul Douglass, in his 1934 article on “Suburbs” in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, portrayed suburbs as limited to the well-to-do. Living in the suburbs, in his words, was “virtually limited to the most highly paid types of labor and o the upper middle classes” (Harlan Paul Douglass, “Suburbs,” Encyclopedia of the social sciences, Vol. XIV, New York, 1934, p.434). Even as late as the 1950, Queen and Carpenter, in the urban sociology text The American City, (McGraw-Hill, 1953), gave only 4 of its 383 ages to even a mention of suburbs. One should send out experimental feelers in one’s mental-emotional World until one recognizes an element that seems different from all the others—subtler, grander, nobler, and more divine than all the others. Then, catching firm hold of it, one should try to trace its course back to its source. The point where the personal ego establishes contact with the Overself is reached and passed only through a momentary lapse of consciousness. However, this lapse is so brief—a mere fraction of a second—that it may be unnoticed. A presence enters one’s consciousness and comes over one, a benign feeling to which one is glad to surrender oneself, a mysterious solvent of one’s egotism and desires. The value of letting oneself pass this point can hardly be overestimated, even though it be done only during the limited sessions of prayer or the casual periods of unexpected visitations. For from them peace, wisdom, sanity can be emanated. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
At this point there is the mysterious division between human normal prayer and divine contemplation, between discursive thinking and its dissolution as the divine self takes over, between mental concentration and release into still, timeless being, between imagery and pure Consciousness. Koestler got his glimpse by working out Euclid’s geometrical proof of the infinitude of the number of primes. That he was able to learn of the reality of the Infinite by purely mathematical and precise method, without becoming a vague emotional mystic, so satisfied his highly intellectual and scientific nature that, in his own words, an “aesthetic enchantment” fell upon him. This developed until he became one with Peace never before known. The experience passed away, as it usually does, but it remained to hunt his memory. It inspired his journey to India and Japan several years later, where he spent a year trying to meet holy people and self-actualized. These meetings did not bring him what he sought, but his faith in the authenticity of that earlier glimpse never left him. He knew what few mystics know, that he did not need to violate the integrity of Reason, nor become lost in generally hazy gushy feelings, to know Infinity, which is truth of Reality. The difference of people is determined by their nature. If it is true some people are aggressors, it may be that one day, this quality may be their undoing. Those who seek communion with the Overself, this sublime glimpse of its hidden face, must make the Quest their chosen path. Few things that grow here poison us. Most of the animals are small. Those big enough to kill us do it in a way easy to understand, easy to defend against. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
The air, here, is just what the blood needs. We do not use helmets or special suits. The Star, here, does not burn you if you stay outside as much as you should. The worst of our winters is bearable. Water, both salt and sweet, is everywhere. The thing that live in it are easily gathered. Mostly, you can eat them raw with safety and pleasure. Yesterday my wife and I brought back shells, driftwood, stones, and other curiosities found on the beach of the immense fresh-water Sea we live by. She was all excited by a slender white stone which: “Exactly fits the hand!” I could not share her wonder: Here, almost everything does. It is for us to praise the Lord of all, to proclaim the greatness of the Creator of the Universe for He hath not made us like the pagans of the World, nor places us like the heathen tribes of the Earth; He hath not made our density as theirs, nor cast out lot with all their multitude. We bend he knee, worship and give thanks unto the King of kings, the Holy One, blessed be He. He stretched forth the Heavens and laid the foundations of the Earth. His glory is revealed in the Heavens above, and His might is manifest in the loftiest heights. He is our God; there is none else. In truth He is our King, there is none besides Him; as it is written in his Holy Bible: Know this say, and consider it in thy heart that the Lord is God in the Heavens above and on the Earth beneath; there is none else. May your mind be so well purified and so strongly concentrated within the Good, the True, and the Beautiful that it is not affected by Worldly disturbances. Do not allow your mind to be muddy and weak like others. A correct example is better for you. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
Cresleigh Homes
The movie set of a delightful rom-com…or your dream home?! Yes, dreamy spaces like these can be your daily reality, too. 😍 The Brighton Station Res 3 model is perfection for entertaining – both indoors and out!
For a real retreat, escape to your primary suite and bathroom on the second floor or further enjoy a more secluded living area in the delightful upstairs loft. It’s life-changing by design. https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/residence-3/
Ten Minutes on the Clock, but a Thousand Centuries in My Heart!
The Greek philosopher Aristotle had a recipe for handling relationships smoothly. You must be able, he said, “to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way.” Psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer call such self-control “emotional intelligence.” Emotional intelligence refers to a combination of skills, such as empathy, self-control, and self-awareness. People who excel in life tend to be emotionally intelligent. Indeed, the costs of poor emotional skills can be high They range from problems in marriage and parenting to poor physical health. A lack of emotional intelligence can ruin careers and sabotage achievement. Perhaps the greatest toll falls on people who are still developing or marginalized members of the community. For them, having poor emotional skills and being subjected to dealing with those who have substandard emotional skills, makes them become victims of depression, substance abuse, eating disorders, unwanted lifestyle choices, aggression, and violent crimes, or they can also become violent criminals. The Devil has a sure foothold in Massachusetts during the Salem Witch Trials in 1692 because many people seemed to be lacking emotional intelligence. People who were skeptical of witchcraft were thought to must undoubtedly be a witch. For instance, that Martha Corey’s skepticism was held against her is clear evidence that by this time the magistrates’ attitudes had hardened into those of the witch hunter. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
It was at Martha Corey’s examination that one typical kind of behaviour first appeared. She bit her lip, and several of the afflicted children complained that they were bitten She was charged with biting her lip, and she quite naturally asked what harm was there in it. The Reverend Mr. Nicolas Noyes of Salem Town explained: “I believe it is apparent she practiseth witchcraft in the congregation; there is no need of images.” That is, instead of tormenting images she was using her own body as an image, biting the children by biting her own lips, and later pinching them by clenching her fingers together. From Martha Corey’s examination on, any motion on the part of the accused was apt to produce a corresponding effect in the afflicted children. It must have been a most convincing spectacle, as though black magic were being worked before the very eyes of the beholders. And as the effects produced on the children were obviously painful, they were that much more convincing. In some cases there were seen to be marks of bites or pinches on the children’s flesh; on other occasions there were pins literally stuck in their flesh. There are at least three explanations for this behaviour. In the first place, hysterics are extremely suggestible, and for hysterics familiar with the idea of image magic, it would be easy to assume that an accused person biting her lip was trying to bit them. A similar phenomenon is the “arctic hysteria” of North American Indians, in which the group imitates the motions of the shaman. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Secondly, hysteric will often try to injure themselves; they will beat their heads on the floor, or run into fire or water. (But they seldom succeed in injuring themselves seriously because they are most apt to make these attempts when other people are present, an able to stop them.) Surely this is the explanation for the pins in their flesh; the afflicted stuck them there themselves. However, this is not to say there was conscious fraud; people in fits are after all not responsible for their actions. Some of the bites and pinches, too, were probably self-inflicted, but it is also probable that some were not. Skin lesions are among the commonest of psychosomatic symptoms, and surely some of these bites and pinches were psychosomatic. Hathorne and Corwin, of course, thought the cause was witchcraft, and they committed Martha Corey to jail for further examination and eventually trial. And with her commitment to jail, Salem had very nearly committed itself to a witch hunt. Yet there would be moments during the succeeding month when the course of events would seem to hesitate and waver; moments wen the slightest change of circumstances might have averted the final catastrophe. On Saturday, March 19, two days before the examination of Martha Corey, the Reverend Deodat Lawson arrived in Salem Village. He has been its minister from 1684 to 1688 and had now returned as a visiting preacher and for personal reasons as well; the afflicted girls were saying that his wife and daughter, whom he had buried there, had been killed by witchcraft. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Reverend Deodat Lawson tells us that there were at that time ten afflicted persons—three girls from nine to twelve years old: Elizabeth Parris, Abagail Williams, and Ann Putnam; three adolescent girls: Mary Walcott, Mercy Lewis, and Elizabeth Hubbard; and for married women: Goodwives Putnam, Pope, Bibber, and Goodall. He conducted both the morning and the afternoon services on Sunday, but without incident. Several of the afflicted persons were present. This was not Lawson’s first introduction to the behavior of the afflicted. He had lodged the night before at Ingersoll’s Tavern, and there had seen Mary Walcott, who, “as she stood by the door was bitten, so that she cried out of her wrist, and looked on it with a candle we saw apparently the marks of teeth, both upper and lower set, on each side of her wrist.” He had also visited the parsonage, where Abigail Williams “had a grievous fit.” He would see more on Monday, at Martha Corey’s examination, and on Wednesday, when he went to Thomas Putnam’s to see his wife, Ann Putnam, Senior. “I found her lying on the bed, having had a sore fit a little before. She spake to me and said she was glad to see me. Her husband and she both desired me to pray with her while she was sensible, which I did, though the apparition said [id est, to Ann Putnam, Senior] I should not go to prayer. At first beginning she attended but after a little time was taken with a fit, yet continued silent and seemed to be sleep. When prayer was done, her husband going to her found her in a fit. He took her off the bed to set her on his knees, but at first she was so stiff she could not be bended. But she afterwards set down, but quickly began to strive violently with her arms and legs.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Shortly afterward she began to argue with an apparition, and she thought that telling it a passage from the Christian Bible would make it vanish. She said, “I am sure you cannot stand before that text!” Then she was sorely afflicted, her mouth drawn on one side and her body strained for about a minute, and then said “I will tell, I will tell; it is, it is, it is!” three or four times, and then was afflicted to hinder her telling. At last she broke forth and said “It is the third chapter of the Revelations.” I did something scruple the reading it. [Reverend Lawson was reluctant because in this case reading the Bible might be construed as using it as a charm.] However, thought not versed she opened her eyes and was well. This fit [had] continued near half an hour. Her husband and the spectators told me she had often been so relieved by reading texts that she named, something pertinent to her case. The next day was Lecture Day at Salem Village and Reverend Lawson preached the sermon, which he published shortly thereafter under the title Christ’s Fidelity the Only Shield Against Satan’s Malignity. Historians have consistently represented it as an attempt to sir up the emotions of the community, but in fact it was nothing of the sort. To be sure, Reverend Lawson did reaffirm that the girl’s afflictions were the “effects of Diabolical malice and operations, and that it cannot rationally be imagined to proceed from any other cause whatsoever.” Reverend Lawson was far from depending on the magistrates to cure the country of its troubles. In fact he warned the community that there was ultimately no legitimate secular defense against witchcraft. There was, for example, no legitimate means of testing to see whether an accused person was a witch: “we find no means instituted of God to make trial of witches.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Nor could one rightly defend oneself against witchcraft with white magic, such as boiling one’s urine or nailing a horseshoe over the door, because such charms were in themselves, “a kind of witchcraft,” and might well give a more secure foothold to the Devil. Careless accusations of suspected persons might also backfire, Reverend Lawson warned. “Rash censuring of others, without sufficient grounds, or false accusing any willingly…is indeed to be like the Devil, who is a calumniator, of false accuser.” Most important, he warned his listeners that the Devil might appear in the shape of an innocent person. Indeed, he suspected this was precisely what had happened when church members saw the apparitions of other church members afflicting them. The Devil had taken “some visible subjects of our Lord Jesus and [used] at least their shapes and appearances…to afflict and torture other visible subjects of that same Kingdom. Surely his design is that Christ’s Kingdom may be divided against itself.” Given all these difficulties the only sure protection against witchcraft, the “Only Shield Against Satan’s Malignity,” was faith in Christ, and the application of that faith in prayer. And such prayer would be answered, particularly if it came from a people bound to the worship of God, like those of New England, by their church covenants: “whensoever God hath declared a person or people to be in covenant with Him, as the objects of His special mercy and favour, He will assuredly and shortly suppress the malice of Satan, however violently engaged against them.” In the late 19th century, it seemed that San Jose, California had come under a spell. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
Mrs. Sarah Winchester moved to San Jose, California after the tragic loss of her baby daughter and husband and began to construct one of the most unique and elaborate Queen Anne Victorian mansions the World had ever witnessed. According to legend, Mrs. Winchester enacted a nightly séance to help with her building plans and for protection from “bad” spirits. While she sometimes drew up simple sketches of the building ideas, there were never any blueprints! In the morning, she would meet with Mr. John Hansen, her dutiful foreman, and go over new changes and additions. During the early years of construction, this resulted in some unusual and impractical concepts such as columns being installed upside down—though some suggest this was done deliberately to confuse the evil spirits. However, this is how the Winchester Mystery House became known as “the house built by the spirits.” Mr. John Hansen stayed with Mrs. Winchester for many years, redoing scores of rooms, remodeling the in one week and tearing them apart the next. It is doubtful whether Mr. Hansen ever questioned his boss. Mrs. Winchester may have been trying to confuse evil spirits, or simply unsure if she was pleased with aspects of traditional designs, but there was so budget ceilings or deadlines to meet. This resulted in many features being dismantled, built around, or sealed over. Some rooms were remolded many times. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
It is estimated that the Winchester mansion once contained 500 to 600 rooms, but because so many were redone, only 160 remains (110 open for touring). This naturally resulted in some peculiar effects, such as stairs that lead to the ceiling, door that go nowhere and that open onto walls, and chimneys that stop just short of the roof! Once a room was completed, and most importantly, not targeted for further alterations, it was adored with some of the best furnishings money could buy. Mrs. Winchester appreciated beauty, and she was a woman with exquisite taste. Freight cars loaded with gold- and silver-plated chandeliers, imported Tiffany art glass windows then valued at up to $1,500 ($39,587.50 in 2021 dollars), German silver and bronze inlaid doors at twice that amount, Swiss molded bathtubs, rare precious woods like mahogany and rosewood, and countless other items were docked onto a side track at San Jose. Everything was then transported to the house, where much of the material was never even installed. However, the employees often times seem to be bewitched by the Devil. “Oh, how I wish I were out of this dreadful, dreadful house!” said Stella the maid. “Please do not think me very ungrateful for saying this, after taking such pains to provide us with a Heaven upon Earth, as you thought, Mrs. Winchester.” What happened could, of course, have been neither foretold, nor guarded against, by any human being. Stella, Mrs. Winchester’s maid came to her with a very long face, and said, “If you please, Mistress, did you know that this house was haunted? #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Mrs. Winchester was so startled. She replied, “Good Heavens! No! is it?” Stella then explained, “Well, Mistress, I’m pretty nigh sure it is,” and the expression of her countenance was about as lively as an undertaker’s; and then she told Mrs. Winchester that cook had been that morning to order in groceries from a shop in the neighbourhood, and on her giving the man the direction where to send the things to, he had said, with a very peculiar smile, “The Winchester mansion–, eh? H’m! I wonder how long you’ll stand it; last cook held out just a fortnight.” He looked so odd that she asked him what be meant, but he only said, “Oh! nothing; only that help never did long at the Winchester mansion. He had known staff go in one day, and out the next, and during the last four years he had never known any remain over a month.” Feeling a good deal alarmed by this information, the cook naturally enquired the reason; but he declined to give it, saying that if se had not found out herself, she had much better leave it alone, as it would only frighten her out of her wits; and on her insisting and urging him, she could only extract from him, that the house has such a mysterious history. “You know, Mrs. Winchester, how firmly I believe in apparitions, and what an unutterable fear I have of them; anything material, tangible, that I can lay hold of—anything of the same fibre, blood, and bone as myself, I could, I think, confront bravely enough; but the mere thought of being brought face to face with the ‘bodiless dead,’ makes my brain unsteady.” Mrs. Winchester had the prettiest mansion in California. She told Setlla, “Most good things that had ever been in the World had had a bad name in their day; and moreover, the grocer probably a motive for taking away the house’s character.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
Mrs. Winchester derided Stella’s “babyish fears,” to such an extent that she felt half ashamed, and yet not quite comfortable, either and then came the usual rush of the mansion’s engagements, during which one has no time to think of anything but how to speak, and act, and look for the moment then present. Marriam Marriot, Mrs. Winchester’s niece was to arrive the previous day and, in the morning, the weekly hamper of flowers, fruit, and vegetables arrived. Stella always dressed the flower-vase, while other servants ate so tasteless; and as she was arranging them, it occurred to her—you know Stella’s passion for flowers—to carry up one particular cornucopia of roses and mignonette and set it on Marriam’s toilet-table, as a pleasant surprise for her. As Stella came downstairs, she had seen Ashely, another maid. Ashely was a fresh round-faced country girl—she went into the room, which was being prepared for Mrs. Marriot, with a pair of sheets that she had been airing over her arm. Stella went upstairs very slowly, as her cornucopia was full of water, and she was afraid of spilling some. She turned the handle of the bedroom-door and entered, keeping her eyes fixed on her flowers, to see how they bore the transit, and whether any of them had fallen out. Suddenly a sort of shiver passed over her; and feeling frighten—she did not know why—she looked up quickly. The girl was standing by the bed, leaning forward a little with her hands clenched in each other, rigid, every nerve tense; her eyes, wide open, starting out of her head and a look of unutterable stony horror in them; her cheeks and mouth not pale, but livid as those of one that died awhile ago in mortal pain. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
As Stella looked at her, her lips moved a little, and an awful hoarse voice, not like hers in the least said, “Oh! my God, have see it!” and then she fell down suddenly, like a log, with a heavy noise. Using Mrs. Winchester’s call system, she alerted Mr. Hansen to what area in the mansion they were in. The message was loudly audible and Mr. Hansen came running in, and between the two of them they managed to lift Ashely on to the bed, and tried to bring her to herself by running her feet and hands, and holding strong salts to her nostrils. And all the while they kept glancing over their shoulders, in a vague cold terror of seeing some awful, shapeless apparition. Two long hours she lay in a state of utter unconsciousness. Meanwhile Mr. Hansen, who had been down to his guest house, returned. At the end of the two hours they succeeded in bringing Ashely back to sensation and life, but only to make the awful discovery that she was raving mad. She became so violent that it required all the combined strength of Mr. Hansen and Walley (the butler) to hold her down in the bed. Of course, the sent off instantly for a doctor, who, on her growing a little calmer towards evening, removed her in a carriage to his own house. The doctor had come later to tell Mrs. Winchester that Ashley was pretty quiet, not from any return to sanity, but from sheer exhaustion. Stella, Mrs. Winchester, Mr. Hansen and Walley were, of course, utterly in the dark as to what she saw, and her ravings were far to disconnected and unintelligible to afford them the slightest clue. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Everyone was so completely shattered and upset by the awful occurrence. No one was allowed to occupy that room again. Mrs. Winchester would shudder and run by quickly as she passed the door. Eventually Mr. Hansen boarded it up. Legend has it this room is one of the 50 not opened to guests on tours. Mrs. Winchester was still unconvinced as to the house being at fault. You know, she felt like the mansion was a godmother, a protector to her, and was responsible for its good behaviour. She thought the girl simply had a fit. Why not? She knew of a man who was subject to seizures of that kind, and immediately on being attacked his whole body became rigid, his eyes glassy and staring, his complexion livid, exactly as in that case. Or it was also possible that, if no a fit, that perhaps the girl was subject to madness? The doctor had to ascertain where there was not insanity in her family. Even allowing the possibility, nay, the actual unquestioned existence of ghost in the abstract, is it likely that there should be anything to be seen so horribly fear-inspiring, as to send a perfectly sane person in one instant raving mad, which, after many years of residence in the house that Mrs. Winchester had never caught a glimpse of? According to this hypothesis, everyone in the mansion should have, by that time, been stark raving mad and in a lunatic asylum. Stella told Mrs. Winchester that she was leaving that “terrible, hateful, fatal house. I wish I had escaped from it sooner! Oh, my dear Mrs. Winchester, I shall never be the same woman again if I live to be a hundred.” After Stella left, Ashley was removed to the lunatic asylum, Agnews State Hospital, where she remained in the same state. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
Ashely had several lucid intervals, she was closely, pressingly questioned as to what it was she saw; but she maintained an absolute, hopeless, silence, and only shuddered, moaned, and would hide her face in her hands when the subject was broached. Stella went to see her, and on her retuned was sitting resting in the drawing-room, before going to dress for dinner, talking to Mrs. Winchester about her visit, when Theophilus Riesinger walked in, he had always been waling in the last ten days, and Mrs. Winchester always flushed up and looked happy, whenever he made his appearance. He looked very handsome, dear fellow, just came in from the park in a coat that fitted like a second skin, black gloves, and a top hat. He seemed in tremendous spirits, and was as sceptical as Mrs. Winchester to the ghostly origins of Ashley’s seizure. “Let me come here tonight and sleep in that room; Mrs. Winchester,” he said, looking very eager and excited, “with the gas lit and a poker, I’ll engage to exorcize every demon that shows his ugly nose; even if I should find seven white ghostisses, sitting on seven white postisses.” “You don’t mean really?” asked Stella, incredulously. “Don’t I? that’s all,” he answered, emphatically. “I should like nothing better. Well, is it a bargain?” Mrs. Winchester turned quite pale. “Oh, don’t,” she said, hurriedly, “Please, don’t; why should you run such a risk, besides the room has been boarded up? How do you know that you might not be sent mad too?” He laughed very heartily, and coloured a little with pleasure at seeing the interest she took in his safety. “Never fear,” he said, “it would take more than a whole squadron of departed ones, with the gentleman at their head, to send me crazy.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
He was so eager, so persistent, so thoroughly in earnest, that Mrs. Winchester yielded at last, though with a certain strong reluctance to his entreaties. Her eyes filled with tears, she had the room opened up and walked away hastily to the conservatory. Nonetheless, Father Riesinger got his wish; it was so difficult to refuse him anything. Mrs. Winchester gave up her engagements for the evening. And at about 10.00pm, she went to bed. Then he went, jumping up the stairs three steps at a time and humming a tune. The human victims of this tragedy should never be forgotten. With a magnitude registering 7.9, high intensity shaking was felt at 5.13am on April 18, 1906. It felt like the most powerful Earthquake on Earth. All of the sudden the whole Earth started shaking like crazy, and the shaking got worse and worse. Devastating fires soon broke out in the San Francisco Bay Area and lasted for several days. More than 3,000 people died and over 80 percent of San Francisco was destroyed. The position of the people in Agnews was critical; a number of insane persons escaped from the demolished asylum, and were running at random about the country. 117 patients and staff were killed and buried in mass graves on the site. The main building and some others were irreparably damaged. The ground just opened up. Back at her mansion, Mrs. Winchester was in her Daisy Bed Room, when she was awakened by the jolt, “Every time I took a step,” she said, “I fell. I heard an awful sound. The seven-story town went flying up and crashed down onto the house, trappimg me in my bedroom and destroying most of the fourth floor along with it.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
People were running, but the valley just opened up and swallowed them. Dozens of people sank into the Earth. “The house seemed to shake forever and ever. I felt a lump in my throat, a gasping for breath—ten minutes on the clock, but a thousand centuries in my heart. Then again, loud, sudden, a violent banging on the door! I made a simultaneous rush to the door. My servants came and saved me. They said I had been trapped in my room for days. As we walked down the hall, there was Father Riesinger, standing in the middle of the floor of the room we had boarded up, rigid, petrified, with that same look—that look that is burnt into my heart in letters of fire—of awful, unspeakable, stony fear on his brave young face. For one instant he stood thus; then stretching out his arms stiffly before him, he groaned in a terrible husky voice, ‘Oh, my God, I have seen it!’ and fell down dead. Yes, dead. Not in a swoon or in a fit, but dead. Vainly we tried to bring back the life to that strong young heart; it will never come back again till that day when the Earth and the sea give up the dead are therein. I cannot see for the tears that are blinging me; he was such a dear fellow.” Then an omnipresent, malevolent voice, said, “Can you feel that? Drowning deep in my sea of loathing, broken your servant I kneel. Will you give it to me? There is no turning back now. You’ve woken up the demon in me.” This is a true story. The Winchester mansion is a 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester rifle. The study of theology also tells us that a distinction between spirit and soul has remained obtuse till present day. As a result, the learned theologians of the most advanced organized religions take one for the other, keeping the identities and so interrelationship between the two hazy. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
This obtuse relationship has been trickling down for the millenniums, from when humans lived in caves in the Mesolithic era, around 14,000 years BC. Sorcery is also visible in burial rites and construction of monuments. Belief in a deity or an afterlife could be an evolutionarily advantageous by-product of people’s ability to reason about the minds of others. The Victorian period was an era of deep and sustained religious belief in the supernatural. People have a bias for believing in the supernatural. Yet people think there is a dark force behind many of the tragic events that are happening today. A force that has a significant impact on Society. Repeatedly we see cases involving law-breaking, or violence on the rise, and in many cases people believe it proceeds from an unknown dark force. Perhaps the Victorian belief in the spiritual and occult was not too farfetched. And God say everything He had made, and found it very good. And He said: This is a beautiful World that I have given you. Take good care of it; do not ruin it. It is said: Before the World was created, the Holy One kept creating Worlds and destroying them. Finally He created this one, and was satisfied. He said to Adam: This is the last World I shall make. I place it in your hands: hold it in trust. May His great name be blessed for ever and ever. Exalted and honoured be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, whose glory transcends, yea, is beyond all praises, hymns and blessings that humans can render unto Him; and say ye, Amen. May the prayers and supplications of the House of America be acceptable unto their Father in Heaven; and say ye, Amen. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Winchester Mystery House
The most expensive window was built on the north side of the house with a room built over it. Ever wonder why? Come learn about this beautiful story at the Winchester Mystery House.
Now open for GUIDED Mansion Tours!
🎟️ Link in bio. winchestermysteryhouse.com/recent-links
If Brooklyn Had Jet Bombers, Would it be a Nation?
Scientists declare laguage is a human quality that separates humans from all other species. Perhaps it is the same quality that can link us to the beyond, but only if we are willing to listen. Abaco is an island. It has a population of seventeen thousand, two hundred, and twenty-five and forms part of the Bahamas lying off the coast of Florida. Several decades ago, a group of American businessmen, arms merchants, free enterprise ideologues, an intelligence agent of African descent, and a member of the British House of Lords determined that it was time for Abaco to declare its independence. Their plan was to take over the island and break it away from the Bahamian government by promising each of the native residents of the island a free acre of land after the revolution. (This would have left over a quarter of a million acres for use by the real estate developers and investors behind the project.) The ultimate dream was the establishment on Abaco of a taxless utopia to which wealthy businessmen, dreading the Socialist apocalypse, might flee. Alas for free enterprise, the native Abaconians showed little inclination to throw off their chains, and the proposed new nation was stillborn. Nevertheless, in a World in which nationalist movements battle for power, and in which some 152 state claim membership in that trade association of nations, the United Nations, such parodic gestures serve a useful purpose. They force us to challenge the very notion of nationhood. At the time of the revolution in the 1970s, the population was sixty-five hundred and the question was if the sixty-five hundred people of Abaco, whether financed by oddball businessmen or not, constitute a nation? #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
If Singapore with its 2.3 million people (5.9 million in 2021) is a nation, why not New York City with its 8 million (18.8 million in 2021)? If Brooklyn had jet bombers, would it be a nation? Absurd as they sound, such questions will take on new significance as the Third Wave batters at the very foundations of Second Wave civilization. For one of those foundations was, and is, the nation-state. Until we cut through the foggy rhetoric that surrounds the issue of nationalism, we cannot make sense of the headlines and we cannot understand the conflict between First and Second Wave civilizations as the Third Wave strikes them both. Before the Second Wave began rolling across Europe most regions of the World were not yet consolidated into nations but were organized, rather, into a mishmash of tribes, clans, duchies, principalities, kingdoms, and other more or less local units. “Kings and princes,” write the political scientists S. E. Finer, “held powers in bits and blobs.” Borders were ill-defined, governmental rights fuzzy. The power of the state was not yet standardized. In one village, Professor Finer tells us, it amounted only to the right to collect tolls on a windmill, in another to tax the peasant, elsewhere to appoint an abbot. An individual with property in several different regions might owe allegiance to several lords. Even the greatest of emperors typically ruled over a patchwork of tiny locally-governed communities. Political control was not yet uniform. Voltaire summed it all up: In traveling across Europe, he complained, he had to change laws as frequently as horses. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24
There was more to this quip than met the eye, of course, for the frequent need to change horses reflected the primitive level of transport and communications—which, in turn, reduced the distance over which even the most powerful monarch could impose effective control. The farther from the capital, the weaker the authority of the state. Yet without political integration, economic integration was impossible. Only if they produced goods for larger-than-local markets, could costly new Second Wave technologies be amortized. However, if outside their own communities, they ran into a maze of different duties, taxes, labour regulations, and currencies, how could businessmen buy and sell over a larger territory? For the new technologies to pay off, local economies had to be consolidated into a single national economy. This meant a national division of labour and a national market for commodities and capital. All this, in turn, required national political consolidation as well. Put simply, a Second Wave political unit was needed to match the growth of Second Wave economic units. Not surprisingly, as Second Wave societies began to build national economies, a basic shift in public consciousness became evident. The small-scale local production in First Wave societies had bred a race of highly provincial people—most of whom concerned themselves exclusively with their own neighbourhoods or villages. Only a tiny handful—a few nobles and churchmen, a scattering of merchants, and a social fringe of artists, scholars, and mercenaries—had interests beyond the village. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
The Second Wave swiftly multiplied the number of people with a stake in the larger World. With steam- and coal-based technologies, and later with the advert of electricity, it became possible for a manufacturer of clothing in Frankfurt, watches in Geneva, or textiles in Manchester to produce far more units than the local market could absorb. He also needed raw materials from afar. The factory worker, too, was affected by financial event occurring thousands of miles away: jobs depended on distant markets. Bit by bit, therefore, psychological horizons expanded. The new mass media increased the amount of information and imagery from far away. Under the impact of these changes, localism faded. National consciousness stirred. Starting with the American and French revolutions and continuing through the nineteenth century, a frenzy of nationalism swept across the industrializing parts of the World. Germany’s three hundred and fifty marginal, diverse, quarreling mini-states needed to be combined into a single national market—das Vaterland. Italy—broken into pieces and ruled variously by the House of Savoy, the Vatican, the Austrian Hapsburgs, and the Spanish Bourbons—had to be united. Hungarians, Serbs, Croats, Frenchmen, and others all suddenly developed mystical affinities for their fellows. Poets exalted the national spirit. Historians discovered long-lost heroes, literature, and folklore. Composers wrote hymns to nationhood. All at precisely the moment when industrialization made it necessary. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24
Once we understand the industrial need for integration, the meaning of the national state becomes clear. Nations are not “spiritual unities” as Spengler termed them, or “mental communities” or “social souls.” Noor is a nation “a rich heritage of memories,” to use Renan’s phrase, or a “shared image of the future,” as Ortega insisted. What we call the modern nation is a Second Wave phenomenon: a single integrated political authority superimposed on or fused with a single integrated economy. A ragbag collection of locally self-sufficient, sparsely connected economies cannot, and does not, give rise to a nation. If it sits atop a loose conglomeration of local economies, nor is a tightly unified political system a modern nation. Nationalist uprisings triggered by the industrial revolution in the United States of America, in France, in Germany and the rest of Europe, can be seen as efforts to bring the level of political integration up to the fast-rising level of economic integration that accompanied the Second Wave. And it was these efforts, not poetry or mystical influences, that led to the division of the World into distinct national units. As each government sought to extend its market and its political authority, it came up again outer limits—language differences, cultural, social, geographic, and strategic barriers. The available transport, communication, and energy supplies, the productivity of its technology, all set limits on how large an area could be effectively ruled by a single political structure. The sophistication of accounting procedures, budgetary controls, and management techniques also determined how far political integration could reach. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24
Within these limits, the integrational elites, corporate and governmental alike, fought for expansion. The broader the territory under their control and the bigger the economic market area, the greater their wealth and power became. As each nation stretched its economic and political frontiers to the utmost, it ran up not merely against these inherent limits but also against rival nations. To break out of these confines the integrational elites used advanced technology. They hurled themselves, for example, into the “space race” of the nineteenth century—the building of railroads. In September 1825 a rail line was established that linked Stockton to Darlington in Britain. In May 1835, on the continent, Brussels was tied to Malines. That September in Bavaria the Nuremberg-Furth line was laid. Next were Paris and St. Germain. Far to the east, in April 1838, Tsarkoe Selo was connected to St. Petersburg. For the next three decades or more, railroad workers stitched one region to another. The French historian Charles Moraze explains: “The countries which were already almost united in 1830 were consolidated by the coming of the railway…those still unprepared saw new bands of steel…tightening around them…It was as if every possible nation was hastening to proclaim its right to exist before the railways were built, so that it might be acknowledged as a nation by transport system which defined the political boundaries of Europe for over a century.” In the United States of America the government awarded vast land grants to the private railroad companies, inspired, as historian Bruce Mazlish has written, by “the conviction that transcontinental roads would strengthen the ties of union between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 24
Hammering in the golden spike that completed the first transcontinental rail line opened the door to a truly national market—integrated on a continental scale. And it extended the actual, as distinct from nominal, control of the national government. Washington could now move troops quickly all across the continent to enforce its authority. What one saw, therefore, in one country after another, was the rise of this powerful new entity—the nation. In this way the World map came to be divided into a set of neat, nonoverlapping patches of red, pink, orange, yellow, or green, and the nation-state system became one of the key structures of Second Wave civilization. Beneath the nation lay the familiar imperative of industrialism: the drive toward integration. However, the drive for integration did not end at the borders of each nation-state. For all its strengths, industrial civilization had to be fed from without. It could not survive unless it integrated the rest of the World into money system and controlled that system for its own benefit. How it did so is crucial to any understanding of the World the Third Wave will create. In examining America’s postwar transformation of rural farm tracts into instant suburbs we must keep in mind several factors. First, without doubt, by far the most important factor in making possible the postwar suburban exodus was the liberalization of loan leading polices by federal government agencies. As noted earlier, prior to the war, mortgages would commonly only be given for a five-year period with a balloon payment at the end. A borrower would have to hope one could get a new mortgage when the note became due. Moreover, the mortgage would cover only half to at most two-thirds the value of the property. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
The new Veterans Administration loads radically changed all this. The new Veteran Administration (VA) loan guarantees made loans available to veterans at low interest rates, below conventional mortgages, with no money down with a twenty-five- or thirty-year repayment schedule. The Federal Housing Authority (FHA) similarly liberalized its lending policies for nonveterans. The government, in effect, guaranteed the lending institutions profits by agreeing to make good any leans on which the borrower defaulted. This was a truly radical change. Bank suddenly wanted to make loans to millions of middle- and lower-middle-class families who they previously would have spurned. Families with a steady breadwinner could, for the first time, realistically expect to get mortgages to purchase their own homes. Moreover, it was easy to do. The whole process was streamlined by developers such as the Levitt brothers so that all the paperwork could be completed in a few hours. In an era when closing costs run thousands of dollars, it is worth noting that the total closing cost as of 1954 at the second Levittown outside Philadelphia, in New Jersey, was $10 ($100.07 in 2021 dollars). Following World War II, developers rushed to build acres of new suburban subdivisions. The were modest story book houses, and especially designed to be marketed to ex-GIs and their brides. For instance, Argo Homes offered detached brick and stucco bungalows for veterans only for $7,900.00 full price ($79,057.27 in 2021 dollars) for $53 monthly ($530.38 in 2021 dollars), which paid all carrying charges (total principle and interest payment of $636 a year, with a 4 percent mortgage for twenty-five years). Given such terms, veterans could hardly afford not to move to the suburbs. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24
In this particular subdivision, the landscaped plots were 40×100, the houses had 4 rooms, automatic gas heat, fully insulated, large closets, scientific kitchen with built-in cabinets, modern gas range and inlaid linoleum floor, poured concrete foundation, steel lally columns, copper piping, unique balance double hung windows. Government lending policies—whether by design or accident—actively fostered purchasing suburban over city homes. Following World War II, VA and FHA government-guaranteed loans were readily available for new homes in the suburbs. Young veterans could and did purchase new—sometimes still-to-be-built VA and FHA approved suburban subdivision homes with nothing down and mortgage rates below the conventional amount. The above-mentioned Levittown in New Jersey sold homes in the mid-1950s for $8,990 ($89,965.17 in 2021 dollars). Veterans were required only to place a $100 ($1,000.72 in 2021 dollars) good-faith deposit, which was returned at the time of closing. Nonveterans needed only $450 ($4,503.26 in 2021 dollars) down. To purchase existing city homes required far larger down payment. The low housing prices, and particularly the availability of a long-term, no-money-down mortgage, was a crucial factor for new families just becoming economically established. By 1972, the FHA alone had made some 11 million new-home loans. Also important was the fact that purchasing in the city took time. To see if they met FHA standards, existing older homes in the city would have to be inspected, and this took weeks or months. By contrast, once a developer’s plans were approved, all the standardized models of that home he built automatically qualified. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
By contrast, once a developer’s plans were approved, all the standardized models of that home he built automatically qualified. A family could drive out to a new subdivision, pick a lot, put down a $100 ($644.01 in 2021 dollars from 1972 figures) deposit, and do the majority of the paperwork in a Sunday afternoon. Conventional mortgages were also easier to obtain in suburban locations. Two wars later, this was still the case. The author, a Vietnam-ear veteran with three young children and barely enough for a down payment, found mortgage funds readily available on suburban homes. For homes across the line in the city the funds were harder to obtain, and came with higher interest rates. Second, the Federal government further subsidized out-movement from the cities by initiating, in the 1950s, the construction of a federally financed metropolitan freeway system. Secretary of Commerce Weeks described the building of the national freeway system as, “the greatest public works program in the history of the World.” Without the newly built freeways, many of the new suburban subdivisions would have been all but impossible to reach. Automobile commuting would have been out of the question. The freeways meant distance from the city was now measure in time rather than mileage. Developers often put up billboards advertising their tract development as being, “Only 25 minutes from here.” Ironically, the very freeways that speed commuters from the city were originally pushed to be built by downtown business interests and city mayors. They mistakenly expected that new road would bring more shoppers and businesses downtown. They forgot that the roads could be used to go out rather than in. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24
Third, Following World War II, open land for buildings was almost by definition suburban land. By the 1950s cities had largely developed all the land within their legal boundaries. This was particularly true of the cities in the eastern and middle-western sections of the country. Without annexation, additional growth in urban areas would thus, by definition, have to be suburban growth. By the end of the way, there was an extreme need for new housing. As noted earlier, for over a decade and a half little had been built. The 1930s were the years of the Great Depression, and during the first half of the 1940s, there was World War II. Thus, by the 1950s there was a tremendous pent-up demand for housing, and this demand could only be met in the suburbs. It was not so much that families were fleeing the city; rather, it was that mot of he land available for development was, by definition, suburban. Forth, for decades following World War II, young families bought homes in the suburbs not so much for “togetherness” or to escape the supposed ills of the city, but because houses in suburban subdevelopment were both more available and more affordable with larger lots than those in the city. However, in communities like Pocket/Greenhaven in Sacramento, California USA; families did want to be close to each other and not live together, so many of the bought homes in the same community to have a sense of a true community, but with separation and privacy. In attempts to analyze he postwar move to the suburbs, this basic economic motivation is often given less weight than it deserves. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
Economic, more than social-psychological needs for togetherness, propelled young could to the suburbs. In many cases it was more economical and safer to buy in the suburbs than to rent in the city. Safety concerns is why, before becoming President, Governor of California (1967-1975) Ronald Reagan’s wife, Nancy Reagan decided to move out of the Governor’s Mansion, and left in to the California State Parks to be managed as Governor’s Mansion State Historic Park. The mansion was built in 1877, and after the First Lady of California felt it was not a safe community, it sat vacant until 2015 and again is unoccupied since 2019. A family with a mortgage on a tract house in the suburbs found that monthly principal and financing costs usually were lower than on available housing in the city. Moreover, taxes were almost always lower than in the central city. This was in part because developers rarely put in the “extras,” such as city water, sewers, parks, sidewalks, curbs, street lighting, and, of course, schools that were taken as givens in the city. In time the demand for services and the assessments to pay for them increased in new suburbs. However, the initial front-end costs were ow and in a rough fashion met the needs of those at the beginning of their work careers who expected their incomes to increase with time. The 1950 and 1960 constituted a period in which unionization had brought even blue-collar workers high wages and benefits. Fifth, survey data consistently show that Americans have a strong preference for single-family home on their own lots. This is the type of housing that was most commonly built in the suburbs in the decades following the war. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24
The homes in the original Levittown in Long Island were modestly beautiful Cape Cod houses. The architectural characteristics denoted a home that was generally with a steep roof, shingled exterior, symmetrical façade, with a large chimney in the middle, and built on a slab. The Cape Cod architecture was considered all-American, as fresh as grandmother’s apple pie, and people stood in line for days waiting to get one. Planners and architects decried these subdivisions of little boxes, “all made out of ticky-tack and all in a row,” but they were vastly popular with the buying public. Lewis Mumford and other critics might rail about the problems of poor design and one-social-class communities, but people literally lined up to buy houses in the newly opened Levittown and other suburban developments. Actually, even if buyers wanted one, there was not a choice. Apartments were not covered by GI loans, and town houses were not being built. Still, even if people are given a choice between high-rise units, town houses, or single-family homes, suburban sprawl will win every time! This is true even for those without children. Research indicates that most families living in apartment buildings view their residency as temporary location before moving to a single-family house. If a suburban home is too expensive, a suburban town house, or even a garden apartment, may be temporarily substituted. Even those academics holding neo-Marxian views, which see suburban sprawl as a product of conscious decisions made by powerful economic interests, still acknowledges that people want single-family homes on separate lots. Imagine that, even socialists and communists like private property. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
Suburban critics may feel that such housing is a blight on the landscape, but others believe when it is tastefully done and includes nature and the neighbourhood does not look like a parking lot, there is no question suburban sprawl looks like a glimpse of Heaven and is what the masses of the population wanted after the war and still want as we approve the half century mark. Postwar suburbia was “caused” by demographic changes. The return of both the veterans and of economic prosperity created a marriage boom that was followed in short order by the famous “baby boom.” The latter lasted from 1947 to 1964. Existing housing in cities and towns was simply not adequate for absorbing the exploding number of new families. Some 10 million new households were created in the decade after the war. In the tight postwar market, they were not welcome as renter. The result was that young couples with children were more or less forced from the overcrowded cities toward the new built standard-format suburb. And anyway, many families did not feel safe with their children living in cities because of the traffic and the rift raft the jails attracted. They needed space to grow families—a need that suburban developers were delighted to fill. “As a rule, the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling,” (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1891-92). #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
At the core of the religious impulse is a sense of awe, an attitude of bewilderment, a feeling that reality is more amazing than everyday scientific reasoning can comprehend. Wonder-struck, we humbly acknowledge our limits and accept that which we cannot explain. For many religious people the ultimate threat of science is therefore that it will demystify life, destroying our sense of wonder and with it our readiness to believe in and worship an unseen reality. Once we regarded flashes of lightening and explosions of thunder as supernatural magic. Now we understand the natural and humanmade process at work. Once we viewed certain mental disorders as demon possession. Now we are coming to discern genetic, biochemical, and stress-linked causes. Once we prayed that God would spare children from COVID-19. Now we vaccinate them. Understandably, some Christians might get the idea that science is elbowing out religion. We can also understand why such people therefore grasp at hints of the supernatural—at bizarre phenomena that science cannot explain. Browse your neighbourhood religious bookstore and you will find books that describe happenings that defy natural explanation—people reading minds or foretelling the future, levitating objects or influencing the roll of a die, discerning the contents of sealed envelopes or solving cases that dumbfounded detective. Whether viewed as a divine gift or as demonic activity, such a phenomena are said to refute a mechanistic Worldview that has no room for supernatural mysteries. Most research psychologist and professional magicians (who are wary of the exploitation of their arts in the name of psychic powers) are skeptical, for several reasons. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
They are skeptical because in the study of ESP and the paranormal there has been a distressing history of fraud and deception; most people’s beliefs in ESP are now understandable as a by-product of the efficient but occasionally misleading ways in which our minds process information; the accumulating evidence regarding the brain-mind connection more and more weighs against the theory that the human mind can function or travel separately from the brain; and, more important, there has never been demonstrated a reproducible ESP phenomenon, nor has there been found any individual who could defy chance when carefully rested. One National Research Council investigation of ESP concluded that “the best available evidence does not support the contention that these phenomena exist.” And in 1995, a CIA-commissioned report evaluated ten years of military testing of psychic spies, in which $20 million ($35, 327, 427.82 in 2021 dollars) had been invested. The result? The program produced nothing, and the psychic spy program was scrapped. After one hundred and twenty-five years of research, and after hundreds of failed attempts to claim a $1-million prize that has for two decades been offered to the first person who can demonstrate “any paranormal ability,” many parapsychologists conceded that what they need to give their field credibility is a single reproducible phenomenon and a theory to explain it. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
We Christians can side with scientific skeptics on the ESP issue. We can heed not only the repeated biblical warnings against being misled by self-professed psychics who practice “divination” or “magic spells and charms,” but also the scientific spirit of Deuteronomy: “If a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord and what He does not come true, then it is not the Lord’s message.” We believe that humans are finite creature made by the one who declares, “I am God, and there is no one like me.” We are aware of how cult leaders have seduced people with pseudopsychic tricks. And we affirm that God alone is omniscient (the able to read minds and know the future), omnipresent (thus able to be in two places a once), and omnipotent (the capable of altering—or, better yet, creating—nature with divine power). In the biblical view, humans, loved by God, have dignity but not deity. If our senses of mystery is not to be found in the realm of the pseudosciences and the occult, then where? Having cleared he decks of false mysteries, where shall we find the genuine mysteries of life? We can take our clue from Sherlock Holmes, who was fond of telling people: “It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery. The most commonplace crime is often the most mysterious. Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence.” The more scientists learn about sensation, the more convinced they are that what is truly extraordinary is not extrasensory perception, claims for which inevitably dissolve upon investigation, but rather our very ordinary moment-to-moment sensory experiences of organizing formless neural impulses into colourful sights and meaningful sounds. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
As you read this sentence, particles of light energy are being absorbed by the receptor cells of your eyes, converted into neural signal that activate neighbouring cells, which process the information for a third layer of cells, which converge to form a nerve tract that transmits a million electrochemical message per moment up to the brain. There, step by step, the page you are viewing is reassembled into its component features and finally—in some as yet mysterious way—composed into a consciously perceived image, which is instantly compared with previously stored images and recognized as words you know. The whole process is rather like taking a house apart, splinter by splinter, transporting it to a different location, and then, through the work of millions of specialized workers, putting it back together. All of this transpires in a fraction of a second. Moreover, it is continuously transpiring in motion, in three dimensions, and in colour. Twenty-five years of research on computer vision has no yet begun to duplicate this very ordinary, taken-for-granted part of our current experience. Further, unlike virtually all computers, which process information one step at a time, the human brain carries out countless other operations simultaneously, enabling us all at once to sense the environment, use common sense, converse, experience emotion, and consciously reflect on the meaning of our existence or even to wonder about our brain activity while wondering. The deeper one explores these very ordinary things of life, the more one empathizes with Job: “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 24
To be sure, sometimes we use the word mystery not in its deep sense, as when the mind seeks to fathom it brain, but rather to refer to unsolved scientific puzzles. When wonder is based merely on ignorance, it will fade in the growing light of understanding. Science is a puzzle-solving activity. Among the still unsolved puzzles of psychology are questions such as, Why do we dream? Why do some of us become heterosexual, others homosexual? How does the brain store memories? The scientific detectives are at work on these “mysteries,” and they may eventually offer us convincing solutions. Already, new ideas are emerging and progress is occurring. Often, however, the process of answering one question exposes more and sometimes deeper questions. A new understanding may lead to a new, more impenetrable sense of wonder regarding phenomena that seem further than ever from explanation or that now seems more beautifully intricate than previously imagined. Not long ago scientists wondered how individual nerve cell communicated with one another. The answer—that they communicated through chemical messengers called neurotransmitters—raised new questions: How many neurotransmitters exist? What are the functions of each? Do abnormalities in neurotransmitter functioning predispose disorders such as schizophrenia and depression? If so, how might such problems be remedied? And how, from the electrochemical activity of the brain, do experienced emotions and thoughts arise: How does a material brain give rise to consciousness? #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
Deeper and deeper go to the questions, the deepest one of all being the impenetrable mystery behind the origin of the Universe: Why is there something and not nothing? (If a miracle is something that cannot be explained in terms of something else, then the existence of the Universe is a miracle that dwarfs any other our minds can conceive.) Human consciousness has long been a thing of wonder. More recently, wonder has also grown regarding the things our minds do subconsciously, automatically, out of sight. Our minds detect and process information without awareness. They automatically organize our perceptions and interpretations. They respond intelligently, via the brain’s right hemisphere, in ways that we can explain only if our left hemisphere is informed of what is going on. They effortlessly encode incoming information about the place, timing, and frequency of events we experience, about words meanings, about unattended stimuli. They ponder problems we are stumped with, and they occasionally spew forth a spontaneous creative insight. With the assistance of hypnosis, they may even, on orders, eliminate warts on one side of the body but not on others. There is, we now know, more to our minds than we are away of. And how fortunate that it should be so. For the more that routine functions (including well-learned activities such as walking, biking, or gymnastics) are delegated to control systems outside of awareness, the more our consciousness is freed to function like an executive—by focusing on the more important problems at hand. Our brains operate rather like BMW, with a few important matters decided by chair of the board, and everything else, thankfully, handled automatically, effortlessly, and usually competently be amazingly intricate native infotainment system. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24
Language researchers, too, have been awestruck by an amazing phenomenon: the ease with which children acquire language. Before children can add two and two they are creating their own grammatically intelligible sentences and comprehending the even more complex sentences spoke to them. Most parents cannot state the intricate rules of grammar. Yet before being able to tie their shoes, preschoolers are soaking up the complexities of language by learning several new words a day and the rules for how to combine them. They do so with a facility that puts to shame many college students who struggle to learn a new language with correct accents and many computer scientists who are struggling to simulate natural language on computers. Moreover, they, and we, do so with minimal comprehensions of how we do it—how we, when speaking, monitor our muscles, order our syntax, watch out for semantic catastrophes risked by the slightest change in word order, continuously adjust our tone of voice, facial expression, and gestures, and manage to say something meaningful when it would be so easy to speak gibberish. Our womb-to-tomb individual development is equally remarkable. What is more ordinary than humans reproducing themselves, and what is more wonder-full? Consider the incredible god fortune that brought each one of us into existence. The process began as a mature egg was released by the ovary and as some 300 million sperm began heir upstream race toward it. Against all odds, you—or, more exactly, the very sperm cell together with the very egg it would take to make you—won this one-in-300 million lottery (actually one in billions, considering that your conception had to occur from particular unions involving pleasures of the flesh). #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
What is more, a chain of equally improbable events, beginning with the conception of your parents and their discovery of one another, had to have extended backward in time for the possibility of your moment to have arrived. Indeed, when one considers the improbable sequence of unnumerable events that led to your conception, from the birth of the Universe onward, one cannot escape the conclusion that your birth and your death anchor the two ends of a continuum of probabilities. What is more improbable than that you, rather than one of your infinite alternatives, should exist? What is more certain than that you will not live on Earth endlessly? Most beings of life fail to survive the first week of existence. However, again, for you, good fortune prevailed. Your one cell became two, which became four; and then by the end of your first week even more astonishing thing happened: brain cells began forming and within weeks were multiplying at a rate of about one-quarter million per minute. The scientist-physician Lewis Thomas explains the wonder of that single cell, which had as its descendant all the cells of the human brain. The mere existence of that cell should be one of the greatest astonishments of Earth. People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hour, calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell. If you like being surprised, there is the source. One cell is switched on to become the whole trillion-cell, massive apparatus for thinking and imagining and, for that matter, being surprised. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
All the information needed for learning to read and write, playing the piano, arguing before senatorial subcommittees, walking across a street through traffic, or the marvelous human act of putting out one hand and leaning against a tree, is contained in the first cell. All of grammar, all syntax, all arithmetic, all music. No one has the ghost of an idea how this works, and nothing else in life can ever be do puzzling. If anyone doe succeed in explaining, it, within my lifetime I will charter a skywriting airplane, maybe a whole fleet of them and send them aloft to write one great exclamation point after another, around the whole sky, until all my money runs out. Human life—so ordinary, so familiar, so natural, and yet so extraordinary. Looking for mystery in things bizarre, we feel cheated when later we learn that a hoax or a simple process explains it away. All the while we miss the awesome events occurring before, or even within, our very eyes. The extraordinary within the ordinary. So it was on that Christmas morning two millennia ago. The most extraordinary event of history—the Lord of the Universe coming to the spaceship Earth in human form—occurred in so ordinary a way as hardly to be noticed. On a mundane winter day at an undistinguished inn in an average little town the extraordinary one was born of an ordinary peasant woman. Like our human kin at Bethlehem and Nazareth long ago, we, too, are often blind to the mystery within things ordinary. We look for wonders and for the unseen reality—the hand of God—in things extraordinary, when more often His presence is to be found in the unheralded, familiar, everyday, events of which life is woven. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
O Lord, Thou art on the sandbanks as well as in the midst of the current; I bow to Thee. Thou art in the little pebbles as well as in the calm expanse of the sea; I bow to Thee. O all-pervading Lord, Thou art in the barren soil and in crowded places; I bow to Thee. We thankfully acknowledge that Thou art the Lord our God and God of our fathers, the God of all that lives, our Creator and Creator of the Universe. We offer blessings and thanksgiving to Thy great and holy name because Thou hast kept us in the life and sustained us; so mayest Thou continue to keep us in life and sustain us. O gather our exiles into the courts of Thy holy sanctuary to observe Thy statues, to do Thy will, and to serve Thee with a perfect heart. We give thanks unto Thee. Blessed be God to whom we are ever grateful. For all this, Thy name, O our King, shall be blessed and exalted for ever and ever. May all the living do homage unto Thee forever and praise Thy name in truth, O God, who art our salvation and our help. Blessed be Thou, O Lord, Beneficent One, unto whim our thanks are due. Our God and God of our fathers, bless us with the threefold blessing written in the Book of Mormon and Holy Bible, and in the Torah of Moses, Thy servant, and spoken by Aaron and his sons, Thy consecrated priests: May the Lord bless thee and keep thee; so may it His will. May the Lord make His countenance to shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee; so may it be His will. May the Lord turn His countenance unto thee and give thee peace. So may it be His will. Please grant peace, well-being and blessing unto the World, with grace, lovingkindness and mercy for us and for all America, Thy people. To love and win is the best thing. To love and lose is the next best. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24
Cresleigh Homes
Imagine entertaining in a space with so many seating options! It’s a dream. 🙌 Riverside Residence 2 is approximately 2,600 square feet, and designed to maximize every bit of space, in a one story home. Special features in this home designed to maximize comfort include a centralized great room.
Extend the living environment outdoors with a corner sliding glass door in the great room for easy indoor-outdoor entertaining. Implement an executive gourmet kitchen perfect for cooking up holiday meals in. The more, the merrier! https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-riverside-at-plumas-ranch/residence-2/
Many People Feel Alone in the World in a Very Painful Way!
As machines grow more human, we must be weary that we do not become less so. The businessmen, intellectuals, and revolutionaries of the early industrial period were virtually mesmerized by machinery. They were fascinated by steam engines, clocks, looms, pumps, and pistons, and they constructed endless analogies based on the simple mechanistic technologies of their time. It was no accident that man like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were scientists and inventors as well as political revolutionaries. They grew up in the churning culture wake of Sir Isaac Newton’s great discoveries. Newton had searched the Heavens and concluded the entire Universe was a giant clockwork operating with exact mechanical regularity. La Mettrie, the French physician and philosopher, in 1748 declared man himself to be a machine. Adam Smith later extended the analogy of the machine to economic, arguing that the economy is a system and that system “in many respects resembles machines.” James Madison, in describing the debates that led to the United States Constitution, spoke of the need to “remodel” the “system,” to change the “structure” of political power, and to choose officials through “successive filtrations.” The Constitution itself was filled with “checks and balances” like the inner work of a giant clock. Jefferson spoke of the “machinery of government.” American political thinking continued to reverberate with the sound of flywheels, chains, gears, check and balances. Thus Martin Van Buren invented the “political machine” and eventually New York City has its Tweed machine, Tennessee it Crump machines, New Jersey its Hague machine. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Generations of American politicians, right down to the present, prepared political “blueprints,” “engineered elections,” “steam-rollered” or “railroaded” bills through Congress and the state legislatures. In the nineteenth century in Britain, Lord Cromer conceived of an imperial government that would “ensure the harmonious working of the different parts of the machine.” Nor was this mechanistic mentality a produce of capitalism. Lenin, for example, described the state as “nothing more than a machine used by the capitalist to suppress the workers.” Trotsky spoke of “all the wheels and screws of the bourgeois social mechanism” and went on to describe the function of a revolutionary party in similarly mechanical phrases. Terming it a powerful “apparatus,” he pointed out that “as with any mechanism this is in itself static…the movement of the masses has…to overcome dead inertia…Thus, the living force of steam has to overcome the inertia of the machine before it can set the flywheel in motion.” Drenched in such mechanistic thinking, imbued with an almost blind faith in the power and efficiency of machines, the revolutionary founds of Second Wave societies, whether capitalist or socialist, not surprisingly invented political institutions that shared many of the characteristics of early industrial machines. The structures they hammered and bolted together were based on the elemental notion of representation. And in every country they made use of certain standard parts. These components came out of what might be called, only half facetiously, a universal represento-kit. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
The components were: Individuals armed with the vote, parties for collecting votes, candidates who, by winning votes, were instantly transformed into “representatives” of the voters, legislatures (parliaments, diets, congress, bundestages, or assemblies) in which, by voting, representatives manufactured laws, executives (presidents, prime ministers, party secretaries) who fed raw materials into the lawmaking machine in the form of policies, and then enforced the resulting laws. Votes were the “atom” of Newtonian mechanism. Votes were aggregated by parties, which served as the “manifold” of the system. They gathered votes from many sources and fed the into the electoral adding machine, which blended them in proportion to party strength or mixture, producing as its output the “will of the people”—the basic fuel that supposedly powered the machinery of government. The parts of this kit were combined and manipulated in different ways in different places. In some places everyone over the age of twenty-one was permitted to vote; elsewhere only Caucasian males were enfranchised; in one country the entire process was merely a façade for control by a dictator; in another the elected officials actually wielded considerable power. Here there were two parties, there a multiplicity of parties, elsewhere only one. Nevertheless, the historical pattern is clear. However the parts might be modified or configured, this same basic kit was used in constructing the formal political machinery of all industrial nations. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Even though Communists frequently attacked “bourgeois democracy” and “parliamentarianism” as a mask for privilege, arguing that the mechanisms were usually manipulated by the capitalist class for its own private gain, all socialist industrial nations installed similar representational machines as soon as possible. While holding forth a promise of “direct democracy” in some far-off post-representational era, they relied heavily in the meantime on “socialist representative institutions.” The Hungarian Communist Otto Bihari, in a study of these institutions, writes, “in the course of election the will of the working people makes its influence felt in the governmental organs called to life by voting.” The editor of Pravada, V.G. Afanasyev, in his book The Scientific Management of Society defines “democratic centralism” as including “the sovereign power of the working people…the election of governing bodies and leaders and their accountability to the people.” Just as the factory came to symbolize the entire industrial techno-sphere, representative government (no matter how denatured) became the status symbol of every “advanced” nation. Indeed, even many non-industrial nations—under pressure from colonizers or through blind imitation—rushed to install the same formal mechanisms and used the same universal represento-kit. Nor were these “democracy machines” restricted to the national level. They were installed at state, provincial, and local levels as well, right down to the town or village council. Today in the United States of America alone there are at least some five-hundred thousand elected public officials and 85,000 local governmental units in metropolitan areas, each with its own elections, representative bodies, and election procedures. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Thousands of these representational machines are creaking and grinding away in nonmetropolitan regions, and tens of thousands more around the World. In Swiss cantons and French departments, in the counties of Britain and the provinces of Canada, in the vivodships of Poland and the republics of Russia, in Singapore and Haifa, Osaka, and Oslo, candidates run for office and are magically transmuted into “representatives.” It is safe to say that more than one-hundred thousand of these machines are now manufacturing laws, decrees, regulations, and rules in Second Wave countries alone. Apart from governments as such, virtually all the political parties of industrialism, from extreme right to extreme left, routinely went through the traditional motions of choosing their own leaders by vote. Even contests for precinct-level or local cell leadership typically required some form of election, if only for the ratification of choices made from above. And in many countries the ritual of election became a standard part of the life of all sorts of other organizations, from trade unions and churches to Cub Scout packs. Voting became part of the industrial way of life. In theory, just as each huma being and each vote was a discrete, atomic unit, each of these political units—national, provincial, and local—was also regarded as discrete and atomic. Each had its own carefully defined jurisdiction, its own powers, its own rights and duties. The units were wired together in hierarchical arrangements, from top to bottom, from nation to state or region or local authority. However, as industrialism matured and the economy grew increasingly integrated, decisions taken by each of these political units touched off effects outside its own jurisdiction, thereby causing other political bodies to act in response. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
A decision by the Diet regarded the Japanese textile industry could influence employment in North Carolina and welfare services in Chicago. A congressional vote to put quotas on foreign automobiles could make additional work for local governments in Nagoya or Turin. Thus while at one time politicians could make a decision without upsetting conditions outside their own neatly defined jurisdiction, this became less and less possible. By the mid-twentieth century, tens of thousands of ostensibly sovereign or independent political authorities, stretching around the planet, were connected to one another through the circuits of the economy, through vastly increased travel, migration, and communication, so that they continually activated and excited one another. The thousands of representational mechanisms built out of components of the represento-kit thus increasingly came to form a single invisible supermachine: a global law factory. Now it remains only for us to see how the levers and control wheels of this global system were manipulated—and by whom. Born of the liberating dreams of Second Wave revolutionaries, representative government was stunning advance over earlier power systems, a technological triumph more striking in its own way than the steam engine or the airplane. Representative government made possible orderly succession without hereditary dynasty. It opened feedback channels between top and bottom in society. It provided an arena in which the differences among various groups could be reconciled peacefully. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Tied to majority rule and the idea of one-man/one-vote, it helped the poor and weak to squeeze benefits from the technicians of power who ran the integrational engines of society. For these reasons, the spread of representative governments was, on the whole, a humanizing breakthrough in history. Yet from the very beginning it fell far short of its promise. By no stretch of the imagination was it ever controlled by the people, however defined. Nowhere did it actually change the underlying structure of power in industrial nations—the structure of sub-elites, elites, and super-elites. Indeed, far from weakening control by the managerial elites, the formal machinery of representations became one of the key means of integration by which they maintained themselves in power. Thus elections, quite apart from who won them, performed a powerful cultural function for the elites. To the degree that everyone had a right to vote, elections fostered the illusion of equality. Voting provided a mass ritual of reassurance, conveying to the people the idea that choices were being made systematically, with machine-like regularity, and hence, by implication, rationally. Elections symbolically assured citizens that they were still in command—that they could, in theory at least, dis-elect as well as elect leaders. In both capitalist and socialist countries, these ritual reassurances often proved more important than the actual outcomes of many elections. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Integrational elites programmed the political machinery differently in place, controlling the number of parties or manipulating voting eligibility. Yet the electoral ritual—some might say farce—was employed everywhere. The fact that Russia and Eastern European elections routinely produced magical majorities of 99 to 100 percent suggested that the need for reassurance remained at least as strong in the centrally planned societies as in the “free World.” Elections took the steam out of protests from below. Furthermore, despite the efforts of democratic reformers and radicals, the integrational elites retained virtually permanent control of the systems of representative government. Many theories have been advanced to explain why. Most, however, overlook the mechanical nature of the system. If we look at Second Wave political systems with the eyes of an engineer rather than a political scientist, we suddenly are struck by a key factor that generally goes unobserved. Industrial engineers routinely distinguish between two fundamentally different classes of machine: those that function intermittently, otherwise known as “batch-processing” machines, and those that function uninterruptedly, called “continuous-flow” machines. An example of the first is the commonplace punch press. The worker brings a batch of metal plates and feeds them into the machine, one or a few at a time, to stamp them into desired shapes. When the batch is finished the machine stops until a new batch is brought. An example of the second is the oil refinery which, once started up, never stops running. Twenty-four hours a day, oil flows through its pies and tubes and chambers. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
If we look at the global law factory, with its intermittent voting, we find ourselves face to face with a classical batch processor. The public is allowed to choose between candidates at stipulated times, after which the formal “democracy machine” is switched off again. Contrast this with the continuous flow of influence from various organized interests, pressure groups, and power peddlers. Swarms of lobbyists from corporations and from government agencies, departments, and ministries testify before committees, serve on blue-ribbon panels, attend the receptions and banquets, toast each other with cocktails in Washington or vodka in Moscow, carry information and influence back and forth, and thus affect the decision-making process on a round-the-clock basis. The elites, in short, created a powerful continuous-flow machines to operate alongside (and often at cross purposes with) the democratic batch processor. Only when we see these two machines side by side can we begin to understand how state power was really exercised in the global law factory. So long as they played the representational game, people had at best only intermittent opportunities, through voting, to feed back their approval or disapproval of the government and its actions. The technicians of power, by contrast, influenced those actions continuously. Finally, an even more potent tool for social control was engineered into the very principle of representation. For the mere selection of some people to represent others created new members of the elite. When workers, for example, first fought for the right to organize unions, they were harassed, prosecuted for conspiracy, followed by company spies, or beaten up by police and goon squads. They were outsiders, unrepresented or inadequately represented in the system. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Once unions established themselves, they gave rise to a new group of integrators—the labour establishment—whose members rather than simply representing the workers, mediated between them and the elites in business and government. The George Meanys and Georges Seguys of the World, despite their rhetoric, became themselves key members of the integrational elite. The fake union leaders in Russia and Eastern Europe never were anything but technicians of power. In theory, they need to stand for re-election guaranteed that representatives would stay honest and would continue to speak for those they represented. Nowhere, however, did this prevent the absorption of representatives into the architecture of power. Everywhere the gap widened between the representative and the represented. Representative government—what we have been taught to call democracy—was, in short, an industrial technology for assuring inequality. Representative government was pseudorepresentative. What we see, then, glancing backward for a moment summary, is a civilization heavily dependent on fossil fuels, factory production, the nuclear family, the corporation, mass education, and the mass media, all based on a widening cleavage between production and consumption—and all managed by a set of elites whose task it was to integrate the whole. In this system, representative government was the political equivalent of the factory. Indeed, it was a factory for the manufacture of collective integrational decisions. Like most factories, it was managed from above. And like most factories, it is now increasingly obsolete, a victim of the advancing Third Wave. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
If Second Wave political structures are increasingly out of date, unable to cope with today’s complexities—part of the trouble, as we shall see, lies in another crucial Second Wave institution: the nation-state. The World War II ex-GIs, and their brides who moved to the new suburban subdevelopments after the war represented the beginnings of the mass suburbanization of North America. This postwar era was a period of economic boom and intense optimism. After all, the Depression was over, and America’s productivity had won the war. That productivity meant that by the mid-1950s America, with 6 percent of the World’s population, was producing half the World’s goods. The postwar prosperity showed in the 1950 census, which indicated that the United States of America now had become a nation of homeowners, with 55 percent of American householders now owning rather than renting. At the end of World War II, the average American family was renting. New housing starts in 1949 went over a million a year—a pace that would be maintained for forty years. The veterans moving to the new suburbs were not only great in number, they also differed from earlier suburbanites insofar as they represented a wide swath of American society. Not all of the veterans obtaining VA loans were middle-class, and many were not WASPs. Suburbia was not only being enlarged, it was also ethically, economically, and religiously being democratized. The newcomers were Catholics and Jews as well as mainline Protestants; they were Irish, Italian, and Polish as well as English or northwest European; they were high paid educated professionals and factory workers as well as professionals and managers. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
While advertisements still stressed that moving out was moving up, the fact was that suburbs were coming to mirror mainstream America. A few boundaries however, remained—those of race, religion, language, and culture. Racially, postwar suburbs looked Art of Thanksgiving by Norman Rockwell. Virtually all the newcomers were Christian, from Europe, spoke English, and kept their homes, inside and out, picture perfect. People who did not fit these standards were not welcomed. There is no question that the new metropolitan-area housing, and lots of it, was needed by the late 1940s. During the Depression new buildings starts for the nation had dropped to as low as 92,000 in 1933. During the war millions of people had been encouraged to migrate into the cities to take jobs in the expanding war industries. However, except for a limited amount of “temporary” housing, little new housing was built for the war workers. This was due in good part to the lobbying of banking and real estate interests such as the National Association of Homebuilders, who strenuously fought the government building defense housing. Real estate builders and sellers felt such housing would be a glut on the market after the war ended. As a result, by 1946 there were hardly any homes for ale or, for that matter, apartments for rent. Some 6 million families, unable to get their own housing, were doubling up with relatives. Something had to happen. What occurred was a government-subsidized mass exodus to new tract suburbs of standardized single-family homes. With city landlords raising rents and landlords not wanting to rent to couples with young children, it is not surprising that middle-class and even working-class families flooded out from the cities to the greener opportunities of the suburbs. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
During the 1950s and 1960, the suburban population of the United States of America dramatically increased from 35 million to 84 million suburbanites. This was a growth rate of 144 percent. By 1970, 37 percent of Americans lived in the suburbs. The 2020 census figure increased to 52 percent. Currently, half the United States of America’s population lives in the suburbs. However, rural communities are also seeing 16 percent growth, especially as people want to get back to nature and keep their families socially distant and out of crowded cities. Many of the new postwar suburbanites settled in the subdivision tract suburbs being erected on the periphery of urban areas. They moved there because that is where new housing was available. Only in the suburbs could the goal of every family having its own home (and mortgage) be realized. “I have not yet reached perfection, but I press on, hoping to take hold of that for which Christ once took hold me of. My friends, I do not reckon myself to have got hold of it yet. All I can say is this: forgetting what is behind me, and reaching out for that which lies ahead, I press towards the goal to win the prize which is God’s call to the life above, in Christ Jesus,” reports Phil. 3.12-14. For we are always traveling, and must leave behind us what we know and possess, and seek for that which we do not yet know and possess. All of us are on a journey along the road of life. It is a journey across time, as we move through childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. However, it is also a journey of discovery, as each new being in the road helps us learn more about ourselves, our World, and perhaps the purpose of our journey. Where are you on the road of life? How much progress have you made in your spiritual journey? #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Developmental psychology has given us some tools to help us think about the journey. For example, Erik Erikson describes eight stages or eras in the human life span, and identifies a specific challenge that must be mastered at each stage. The first four stages cover infancy and childhood, as the infant first forms a special bond with the parents, and then spends the childhood years gradually disengaging from the parents, building a sense of individual competence, and preparing for an independent life in adulthood. The journey begins in earnest during adolescence, as each of us struggles to achieve a sense of identity. Who am I? What is important to me? Where am I headed in life? Yogi Berra’s lighthearted approach to life decisions is well known: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” However, most of us recognized as adolescents that there is more wisdom in Robert Frost’s view—that the “road not taken” steadily diverges from the path we chose, leading inevitably to different life outcomes. In part, the identity crisis of the teen years is produced by new ways of thinking, a set of new intellectual tools that Jean Piaget calls formal operational thought. The adolescent can now think much more clearly about abstract ideas and hypothetical possibilities, including options for future careers and relationships. For most of us, career choices flows out of identity formation—and for Christians, part of our identity is our place in God’s plan. The theologian Walter Brueggemann states, “As we move from the question ‘Who am I?’ to the question ‘Whose am I?’, eventually all questions of identity become questions of vocation…Vocation is finding a purpose for being in the World that is related to the purpose of God.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
The related question of intimacy soon arises: With whom do I wan to share my life? The theologian Henri Nouwen echoes Erikson’s emphasis on intimacy, arguing that the search for intimacy is a “desire to experience a sense of inner completeness, a sense of inner unity, because many people feel alone in the World in a very painful way.” It is natural and normal to want a partner in the journey of life. However, even the choice of a mate is built on the successful resolution of earlier challenges. Specially, a mature capacity for intimacy is built on the foundation of a secure sense of identity. Dr. Nouwen claims, “For real intimacy to be possible, both husband and wife need to be fully developed human beings…This means that intimacy is only possible for people who have found identity.” What is the next step for the adult who has achieved identity and intimacy? Dr. Erikson claims that mature adults struggle to express their generativity—a concern for the next generation and for the future of society. Those who focus on their own needs and achievements will eventually stagnate, while those who turn outward to make a difference in other people’s lives will find their own lives renewed with vigour and a new sense of purpose. Individual generativity spreads outward like ripples expanding in circles from a stone dropped in a pond, combining with generative impulses from other adults, to foster societal generativity, which enhances the next generation’s development. Finally, as we approach the end of our journey, Dr. Erikson sees a final challenge: to develop a sense of ego integrity—to be able to look back on our life and see that the various pieces and phases of the journey actually fit together to form a meaningful and worthwhile whole. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Ideally, we will be able to acknowledge our mistakes, yet still feel that we did our best with the gifts that God gave us; we will be able to express our regrets about the wrong turns and blind alleys, yet still see the hand of God guiding our path. The metaphour of life as a journey is helpful image, but it is not the only way we can think about the life span or our own development as individuals. The psychologist Dan McAdams prefers the metaphour of life as a story—a personal narrative in which each chapter represents a phase of our life, complete with heroes and villains, unfolding with high drama. From this perspective, each of us constructs the meaning and purpose of our story—initially in adolescence and young adulthood—and this in turn shapes the events in the next chapter of our life. Which of these metaphours do you prefer? Both metaphours have rich connections with biblical themes, but the journey metaphour perhaps captures more of the flavour of the Christian’s walk with God and the sense of movement through the life span. The journey metaphour also echoes in one of the earliest names for Christianity in Greek (as reported in Acts 9.2; 19.23; 24.14, 22): hodos—“the way.” Each of us is “on the way” along the road of life. As Dr. Luther describes it, “we are always traveling, and must leave behind us what we know and possess, and seek for that which we do not yet know and possess.” Each sage of our journey involves leaving behind the baggage of the previous phase, and equipping ourselves for the next phase by realigning ourselves with the compass setting as it points toward our destination, the end point in the journey. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
In the words of St. Paul, “forgetting what is behind me, and reaching out for that which lies ahead, I press towards the goal to win he prize which is God’s call to the life above, in Christ Jesus.” If the vision of Light brought union with God, intimacy with God, it did not and could not enabled one to know God as God knows Himself. He could not penetrate His inmost nature and substance. This, the ultimate beyond the Light, is called “the Divine Darkness” by the Fathers of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Seeing the Light in front of one is one state; being merged into it is another, and superior. This is the penultimate experience, the last but one of the mystic’s way. One finds oneself totally lost indeed but lost in the most dazzling Light. The ego seems to have vanished: infinity and universality of being have replaced it. Ecstatic rapture fills one. Is it any wonder that the Greek Orthodox Church mystics of the first few centuries believe this was the ultimate experience of pure Spirit, the final union with God? Yet it may not last, cannot last, must come to an end. It may have held one for one or two minutes only or it may have done so for a longer period. It may never recur again in one’s whole lifetime—this is so in most cases—or it may come several times more. However, it stands as a landmark until the end of one’s years. Where the Greek Orthodox Church regards the Light experience as the highest point reachable by humans, the Indian Philosophic Teaching regards it as the highest point reachable by humans, the Indian Philosophic Teaching regards is as the last stage before the highest. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
For anything which is “seen” implies the existence of a “seer” as separate from it. This is not less so even in the case of the Holy Light. Not seeing but be-ing is the final experience according to his Teaching. “You have to go beyond seeing and find out who is ‘I’ who experiences this light,” said Ramana Maharshi to a disciple. Turn your eyes on yourself. Stop judging the faults of others. Why? You snoop about long and hard in the lives of others, and all you come up with is a thimbleful. In the process you leave much wreckage behind even where you found no fault. Make an inventory of your own faults and negligences, and you will come up with a basketful. Yes, it is a matter of the heart, our heart, and we are always in a terrible judgmental state. However, have you noticed? When others commit faults, we harden our hearts against them, excusing little because they should know better. However, when we commit the very same faults, we soften our hearts, excusing much because of the wonderfulness of ourselves. It is a matter of common sense. Resist the rush to judgment. You know it is wrong, and it would not happen so often if God were truly the sole object of your gaze. However, there is no doubt we suffer damage. Something lurks on the inside. Something trips us up on the outside. Unbeknownst to themselves, many people are self-seekers; that is to say, it is themselves they are chasing, and they do not even know it. They seem happy enough when things are going their own way. However, they are not, they run and sit in a corner and cry big tears. How can his happen? Well, with so many of us thinking and holding so many different opinions, there is bound o be a disagreement now and then; and no one, not even the friendly and the civil, the religious and the devout, are exempt from hurt feelings. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Old habits die hard. That is practical wisdom, and so is this: Nobody trusts farther than one can see. Here is some spiritual wisdom. Rely on Jesus Christ as your Lord and Master. If you do no, but rely rather on your own ability to logick your way through life, then you will not be nominated for the Homo Illuminatus award. God sees Himself as creator and sees us as creatures. To the end He wants us to climb above mere human reason. He wans to light our love with the Divine Torch. Both common sense and practical experience inform us that some sicknesses come solely from physical causes. The proper way to treat them is to use physical methods, that is, to find those causes and remove them, and to apply physical remedies. Those who transgress against the body’s law of being and suffer the penalty in ill health, cannot reasonably blame God’s will when they ought to blame their own abuse, neglect, or ignorance. The penalties of violating hygienic laws may in some cases be escaped by spiritual means, but the penalties of continuing to violate them may not. The cause which engenders a malady must be itself removed, or else the removal of the symptoms which are merely its effects will be followed eventually by their reappearance or by those of a different malady. Wisdom here tells us to obey the laws and to regard disease as a warning of our transgression of them. Those who seek healing only to be restored to sensual courses and selfish designs, may commit further errors and be worse off in the end. In protecting the Earth, we found good pine needles and harsh dried wood along with rocks helpful. When you begin to examine our Earth, you find tiny flowers and small grass blades, Ornamented by the chatter of ground squirrels. You find your soil is soft and rocky; it does not permit artificial soil topping. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Our pine trees are diligent, dedicated and graceful; in either life of death they will always perform their duty of pinetreeness, equipped with sap and bark. We find our World of wilderness so refreshing. Along with Summer’s drum, we produce occasional thundershowers, wet and dry messages; we cannot miss the point, since this Earth is so bending and open to us, along with the rocks, we are not shy, we are so proud—we can make a wound in a pine tree and it bleeds sap, and courts us, in spite of the setting-sun shadow; they bend and serve so graciously, whether dead or alive. We love our pines and rocks; they are not covered with the superstitious setting-sun chemical manure of this and that. We are so proud of the sky that we produce on our horizon. Our stars twinkle and wink as if they know us; we have no problem of recognition. Our rocks and pine trees speak for us. O Lord our God, be gracious unto Thy people of America and accept their prayer. Please restore the worship to Thy Sanctuary and receive in love and favour the supplication of America. May the worship of Thy people be ever acceptable unto Thee. O may our eyes witness Thy return to America. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who restores Thy divine presence unto America. We thankfully acknowledge Thee, O Lord our God, our fathers’ God to all eternity. Our Rock art Thou, our Shield that saves through every generation. We give Thee thanks and we declare Thy praise for all Thy tender care. Our lives we trust into Thy loving hand. Our souls are ever in Thy charge; Thy wonders and Thy miracles are daily with us, evening, morn, and noon. O Thou who art all-good, whose mercies never fail us, Compassionate One, whose lovingkindness never cease, we ever hope in Thee. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Cresleigh Homes
“Open concept” means the freedom to design an interior according to your needs, taste, and style. We love showcasing unfurnished homes, like these pictures of Mills Station Residence 1, so that you can create a mental picture of how it will look when it’s YOURS. https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-1/
Where there is No Love, What Use is Beauty?
The most powerful thing we pass along to our children, may not reside in the jeans, but in the soul. Nothing is more confusing to an international business person than the spectacle of an American presidential campaign: the hot-dog gulping, backslapping, and baby kissing, the coy refusal to cast hat in ring, the primaries, the conventions, followed by the manic frenzy of fund raising, whistle-stopping, speechmaking, television commercials—all in the name of democracy. By contrast, Americans find it hard to make sense of the way the French choose their leaders. Still less do they understand the tame British elections, the Dutch free-for-all with two dozen parties, the Australian preferential voting system, or the Japanese wheeling and dealing among factions. All these political systems seem frightfully different from one another. Even more incomprehensible are the one-party elections or pseudo-elections that take place in Russia and Eastern Europe. When it comes to politics, no two industrial nations look the same. Yet once we tear away our provincial blinders, we suddenly discover that a set of powerful parallels lies beneath the surface differences. In fact, it is almost as if the political systems of all Second Wave nations were built from the same hidden blueprint. When Second Wave revolutionaries managed to topple First Wave elites in Franc, in the United States, in Russian, Japan and other nations, they were faces with the need to write constitutions, set up new governments, and deign almost from scratch new political institutions. In the excitement of creation, they debated new ideas, new structures. Everywhere they fought over the nature of representation. Who should represent whom? Should representatives be instructed how to vote by the people—or use their own judgement? Should terms of office be long or short? What role should parties play? #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
In each country a new political architecture emerged from these conflicts and debates. A close look at these structures reveals that they are built on a combination of Old First Wave assumptions and newer ideas swept in by the industrial age. After millennia of agriculture, it was hard for the founders of Second Wave political systems to imagine an economy based on labour, capital, energy, and raw materials, rather tan land. Land had always been at the very center of life itself. No surprisingly, therefore, geography was deeply embedded in our various voting systems. Senator and congress members in America—and their counterparts in Britain and many other industrial nations—are still elected not as representatives of some social class or occupational, ethnic, desirability, or lifestyle grouping, but as representatives of the inhabitants of a particular piece of land: a geographical district. First Wave people were typically immobile, and it was therefore natural for the architects of industrial-era political systems to assume that people would remain in one locality all their lives. Hence the prevalence, even today of residency requirement in voting regulations. The pace of First Wave life was slow. Communications were so primitive that it might take a week for a message from the Continental Congress in Philadelphia to reach New York. A speech by George Washington took weeks or months to filter through to the hinterland. As late as 1865 it still took twelve days for London to Learn that President Lincoln had been assassinated. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24
On the unspoken assumption that things moved slowly, representative bodies like Congress or the British Parliament were regarded as “deliberative”—having the time and taking the time to think through their problems. Most First Wave people were illiterate and unenlightened. Thus, if drawn from the educated classes, it was widely assumed that the representatives would inevitably make more intelligent decisions than the mass of voters. However, even as they built these First Wave assumptions into our political institutions, the revolutionaries of the Second Wave also cast their eyes on the future. Thus the architecture they constructed reflected some of the latest technological notions of their time. Other fluctuations in American society were reflected in suburban living. By the 1930 housing styles were changing and bungalows were out of fashion as the preferred modest home choice. The term “bungalow” had become a pejorative usage among some housing writers in the same way the term “Levittown” did in the 1960s and 1970s. When he dismissed the plebeian Warren Harding as possessing only “a bungalow mind,” President Woodrow Wilson, who was a cultural patrician, was one of the first to use the term in this way. During the 1930s bungalow styles were replaced by modest “Williamsburg Colonials,” which owed their popularity to the publicity John Davison Rockefeller Sr.’s restoration of Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. Following World War II, the charming colonials were largely replaced as the most popular unassuming homes design by Cape Codes. These, in turn, gave way to low-profile ranch homes and, in the 1960s, their successor, the split-levels. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
Postwar one-story ranch houses were built more for economy and utility than style. Since economy of construction was a major factor and space was at a premium, rooms often had multiple functions, such as a living room with a dining room or a combined kitchen and dining area. If the house had a study, it almost certainly doubled as a guest bedroom. Ranch-style homes, with their open floor plans and “family friendly rooms,” were even more informal than the bungalows. The simple one-story design with low-pitched eaves and the picture window suggested a casual and comfortable lifestyle. To make the house seem larger, a sliding glass door commonly opened onto a patio so that the outside seemed an extension of the house. Millions of such ranch-styles homes and their variations were built in the postwar years, as even a cursory viewing of suburban housing demonstrates. Currently, ranch styles are less popular on the east coast, where colonial styles are back in favour. However, modified ranch California styles remain popular on the west coast. Regardless of the preferred housing style, across the country a relaxed family-oriented lifestyle with an emphasis on outdoor activities has become the norm. Today in contemporary homes the emphasis on multiple-use space has resulted in the family room and living room often being replaced by a “great room,” while the dining room has gone the way of the parlour. In recent years master bedrooms and bathrooms have grown far larger, while sun rooms, Florida rooms, California rooms, and decks have become more common. However, in terms of sheer size, in many homes, the largest room is invariably the garage. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24
Thus, by the onset of World War II, the patterns for mass suburbanization had been set. Suburbs had already lost their exclusivity as being communities containing homes of only the well-to-do. Suburbs also housed those who were comfortably middle-class. However, in the prewar era, when most Americans were still renters rather than homeowners, and when a typical mortgage was for only half the value of the house and could only be obtained for a period of five years, living in the suburbs was still beyond the hope of the “average” American. No until the coming of the liberal mortgage terms of postwar Veterans’ Administration loads would mass suburbanization of average Americans become a practical reality. Among the passions that agitate the heart of humans, there is an ardent, impetuous one that renders intimate relationships necessary to the other; a terrible passion which braves all dangers, overcomes all obstacles, and which, in its fury, seems fitted to destroy the human race it is destined to preserve. What would become of humans, victimized by this unrestrained and brutal rage, without modesty and self-control, fighting everyday over the object of their passion at the price of their blood? There must first be agreement that the more violent the passions are, the more necessary the laws are to contain them. However, over an above the fact that the disorders and the crimes these passions cause daily in our midst show quite well the insufficiency of the laws in this regard, it would still be good to examine whether these disorders did not come into being with the laws themselves; for then, even if they were capable of repressing them, the least one should expect of them would be that they call a halt to an evil that would not exist without them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24
Let us begin by distinguishing between the moral and the physical aspects of the sentiment of love. The physical aspect is that general desire which clines one gender to unite with another. The moral aspect is what determines this desire and fixes it exclusively on one single object, or which at least gives it a greater degree of energy for this preferred object. Now it is easy to se that the moral aspect of love is an artificial sentiment born of social custom, and extolled by women with so much skill and care in order to establish their hegemony and make dominant the general that ought to obey. Since this feeling is founded on certain notions of merit or beauty that a savage is not in a position to have, and on comparisons one is incapable of making, it must be almost non-existent for one. For since one’s mind could not form abstract ideas of regularity and proportion, one’s heart is not susceptible to sentiments of admiration and love, which, even without its being observed come into being from the application of these ideas. One pays exclusive attention to the temperament one has received from nature, and not the taste [aversion] one has been unable to acquire; any women suits one’s purpose. Limited merely to the physical aspect of love, and fortunate enough to be unaware of those preferences which stir up the feeling and increase the difficulties in satisfying it, humans must feel the ardours of the temperament less frequently and less vividly, and consequently have fewer and less cruel conflicts among themselves. Imagination, which wreaks so much havoc among us, does not speak to savage hearts; each human peacefully awaits the impetus of nature, gives oneself over to it without choice, and with more pleasures than frenzy; and once the need is satisfied, all desire is snuffed out. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24
Hence it is incontestable that love itself, like all other passions, had acquired only in society that impetuous ardour which so often makes it lethal to humans. And it is all the more ridiculous to represent savages as continually slaughtering each other in order to satisfy their brutality, since this opinion is directly contrary to experience; and since the Caribs, of all existing peoples, are the people that until now has wandered least from the state of nature, they are the people least subject to jealousy, even though they live in a hot climate which always seems to occasion greater activity in these passions. As to any inferences that could be drawn, in the case of several species of animals, from he clashes between males that bloody our poultry yards throughout the year, ad which makes our forests resound in the spring with their cries as they quarrel over a female, it is necessary to begin by excluding all species in which nature has manifestly establish, in the relative power of the genders, relations other than those that exist among us. Hence cockfights do not form the basis for an inference regarding he human species. In species where the proportion is more closely observed, these fights can have for their cause only the scarcity of females in relation to the number of males, or the exclusive intervals during which the female continually rejects the advances of the male, which adds up to the cause just cited. For if each female receives the male for only two months a year, in this respect it is as if the number of females were reduced by five-sixths. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
Now neither of these two cases is applicable to the human species where the number of females generally surpasses the number of males, and where human females, unlike those of other species, have never been observed to have period of heat and exclusion, even among savages. Moreover, among several of these animal species, where the entire species goes into heat simultaneously, there comes a terrible moment that of common ardour, tumult, disorder and combat: a moment that does not happen in the human species where love is never periodic. Therefore one cannot conclude from these combats of certain animals for the possession of female that the same thing would happen to a man in the state of nature. And even if one could draw that conclusion, given that these conflicts do not destroy the other species, one should conclude that they would not be any more lethal for ours. And it is quite apparent that they would wreak less havoc in the state of nature than in society, especially in countries where mores still count for something and where the jealousy of lovers and the vengeance of husbands every day give rise to duels, murders and still worse things; where they duty of eternal fidelity serves merely to create adulterers; and where even the laws of continence and honour necessarily spread debauchery and multiply the number of abortions. Let us conclude that, wandering in the forests, without industry, without speech, without dwelling, with war, without relationships, with no need for one’s fellow humans, and correspondingly with no desire to do them hard, perhaps ever even recognizes any of them individually, savage humans, subject to few passions and self-sufficient, had only the sentiments and enlightenment appropriate to the state; one felt only one’s true needs, took notice of only what one believed one had an interest in seeing; and that one’s intelligence made no more progress than one’s vanity. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24
If by chance one made some discovery, one was all the less able to communicate it to others because one did not even know one’s own children. Art perished with its inventor. There was neither education nor progress; generations were multiplied to no purpose. Since each one always began from the same point, centuries went by with all the crudeness of the first ages; the species was already old, and humans remained ever a child. If I have gone on at such length about the supposition of hat primitive condition, it is because, having ancient errors and inveterate prejudices to the true state of nature, how far even natural inequality is from having as much reality and influence in that state as our writer claim. In fact, it is easy to see that, among the differences that distinguish humans, several of the pass for natural ones which are exclusively the work of habit and of the various sorts of life that humans adopt in society. Thus a robust or delicate temperament, and the strength of weakness that depend on it, frequently derive more from the harsh or effeminate way in which one has been raised than from the primitive constitution of bodies. The same holds for mental powers; and not only does education make a difference between cultivated minds and those that are not, it also augments the differences among he former in proportion to their culture; for were a giant and a dwarf walking on the same road, each step they both would give a fresh advantage to the gain. Now if one compares the prodigious diversity of educations and lifestyles in the different orders of the civil state with the simplicity and uniformity of animal and savage life, where all nourish themselves from the same foods live in the same manner, and do exactly the same things, it will be understood how much less the difference between one human and another must be in the state of nature than in that of society, and how much natural inequality must increase in the human species through inequality occasioned by social institutions. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
However, even if nature were to affect, in the affect, in the distribution of her gifts, as many preferences as is claimed, what advantage would the most favoured humans derive from them, to the detriment of others, in a state of things that allowed practically no sort of relationships among them? Where there is no love, what use is beauty? What use is wit for people who do not speak, and ruse to those who have no dealing with others? I always hear it repeated that the stronger will oppress the weaker. However, let me have an explanation of the meaning “oppression.” Some will dominate with violence; others will groan, enslaved to all their caprices. That is precisely what I observe among us; but I do not see how this could be said of savage humans, to whom it would be difficult even to explain what servitude and domination are. A human could well lay hold of the fruit of another has of savage humans, to whom it would be difficult even to explain what servitude and domination are. A human could well lay hold of the fruit another has gathered, the game one has killed, the cave that served as one’s shelter. However, how will he ever succeed in making oneself be obeyed? And what can be the chains of dependence among humans who possess nothing? If someone chases me from one tree, I am free to go to another; if someone torments me in once place, who will prevent me from going elsewhere? Is there a human with strength sufficiently superior to mine and who is, moreover, sufficiently depraved, sufficiently lazy and sufficiently ferocious to force me to provide for one’s subsistence while one remains idle? One must resolve not to take one’s eyes off me for a single instant, to keep me carefully tied down while one sleeps, for fear that I may escape or that I would kill one. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24
In other words, one is obliged to expose oneself voluntarily to a much greater hardship than the one he or she wants to avoid and gives me. After all that, were one’s vigilance to relax for an instant, were an unforeseen noise to make one turn one’s head, I take twenty steps into the forest; my chains are broken, and one never see me again for the rest of one’s life’ Without needlessly prolonging these details, anyone should see that, since the bonds of servitude are formed merely from the mutual dependence of human and the reciprocal needs that unite them, it is impossible to enslave a human without having first put one in the position of being incapable of doing without another. This being a situation that did not exist in the state of nature, it leaves each person free of he yoke, and renders pointless the law of the strongest. After having proved that inequality is hardly observable in the state of nature, and that is influence there is almost nonexistent, it remains for me to show is origin and progress in the successive developments of the human mind. After having shown that perfectibility, social virtues, and the other faculties that natural humans had received in a state of potentiality could never develop by themselves, that to achieve this development they required the chance coming together of several unconnected causes that might never have come into being and without which one would have remained eternally in one’s primitive constitution, it remains for me to consider and to bring together the various chance happenings that were able to perfect human reason while deteriorating the species, make a being evil while rendering it habituated to the ways of society, and, from so distant a beginning, finally bring humans and the World to the point where we see them now. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
I admit that, since the events I have to describe could have taken place in several ways, I cannot make a determination among them except on the basis of conjecture. However, over and above the fact that these conjectures become reasons when they are the most probable ones that a person can draw from the nature of things and the sole means that a person can have discovering the truth, the consequences I wish to deduce from mine will not thereby be conjectural, since, on the basis of the principles I have just established, no other system is conceivable that would not furnish me with the same results, and from which I could not draw the same conclusions. This will excuse me from expanding my reflections on the way in which the lapse of time compensates for the slight probability of events; concerning the surprising power that quite negligible causes may have when they ac without interruption; concerning the impossibility, on the one hand, of a person’s destroying certain hypotheses, even though, on the other hand, of a person’s destroying certain hypotheses, even though, on the other hand, one is not in a position to accord them the level of factual certitude; concerning a situation in which two facts given as real are to be connected by a series of intermediate facts that are unknown or regarded as such, it belongs to history, when it exists, to provide the facts that connect them; it belongs to philosophy, when history is unavailable, to determine similar facts that can connect them; finally, concerning how, with respect to events, similarity reduces the facts to a much smaller number of a different class than one might imagine. It is enough for me to offer these objects to the consideration of my judges; it is enough for me to have seen to it that ordinary readers would have no need to consider them. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24
We have been concerned with thought and imagination, but not with language. I had to picture Euston Station, but I did no need to mention it; the child thought that poison was Horrid Red Things, but she could talk about poison without saying so. However, very often when we are talking about something which is not perceptible by the five senses we use words which, in one of their meanings, refer to things or actions that are. When a human says that one grasps an argument one is using a verb (grasp) which literally means to take something in the hands, but one is certainly not thinking that one’s mind has hands or that an argument can be seized like a Winchester rifle. To avoid the word grasp one may change the form of expression and say, “I see your point,” but one does not mean that a pointe object has appeared in one’s visual field. One may have a third shot and say, “I follow you,” but one does not mean that one is walking behind you along a road. Everyone is familiar with this linguistic phenomenon and the grammarians call it a metaphour. However, it is a serious mistake to think that metaphour is an optional thing which poets and orators may put into their work as a decoration and plain speakers can do without. The truth is that if we are going to talk at all about things which are not perceived by the senses, we are forced to use language metaphorically. Books on psychology or economics or politics are as continuously metaphorical as books of poetry or devotion. There is no other way of talking, as every philologist is aware. Those who wish can satisfy themselves on the point by reading the books I have already mentioned in the past and the other books to which those will lead them on. It is a study for a lifetime and I must here content myself with the mere statement; all speech about supersensible is, and must be, metaphorical in the highest degree. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
We have now three guiding principles before us. First, that thought is distinct from the imagination which it accompanies it. Second, that thought may be in the main sound even when the false images that accompany it are mistaken by the thinker for true ones. Third, that anyone who talks about things that cannot be seen, or touched, or heard, or the like, must inevitably talk as if they could be seen or touched or heard (exempli gratia must talk of “complexes” and “repressions” as if desires could really be tied up in bundles or shoved back; of “growth” and “development” as if institutions could really grow like trees or unfold like flowers; of energy being “released” as if it were an animal let out of a cage). Let us now apply this to the “savage” or “primitive” articles of the Christian creed. And let use admit at once that many Christians (though by no means all) when they make these assertions do have in mind just those crude mental pictures which so horrify the sceptic. When they say that Christ “came down from Heaven” they do have a vague image of something shooing or floating downwards out of the sky. When they say that Christ is the “Son” of “the Father” they may have a picture of two human forms, the one looking rather more mature than the other. However, we now know that the mere presence of these mental pictures does not, of itself, tell us anything about the reasonableness or absurdity of the thoughts they accompany. If absurd images meant absurd thought, then we should all be thinking nonsense all the time. And the Christians themselves make it clear that the images are not to be identified with the thing believed. They may picture the Father as a human form, but they also maintain that He has no body. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
They may picture Him older than the Son, but they also maintain the one did not exist before the other, both having existed from all eternity. I am speaking, of course, about Christian adults. Christianity is not to be judged from the fancies of children any more than medicine from the ideas of the little girl who believed in horrid red things. Although disentangling the effects of genes and experience is no easy matter, it more and more seems that the genetic influence is considerable. The range of genetically influences traits is impressive—from physical traits (such as handedness and obesity-proneness), to intelligence, to aggressiveness, to our vulnerability to depression and schizophrenia. In one study of 850 twin pairs, John Loehlin and Robert Nichols found that, compared with fraternal twins whose parents treated them very similarly were not more alike than those who were treated less similarly. Even twins who are reared apart exhibit amazing similarities of tastes, personalities, and abilities. “In some domains it looks as though our identical twins reared apart are…just as similar as identical twins reared together,” reports the investigator Thomas Bouchard. We must be careful not to oversimply genetic effects. Our genes issue orders for our bodies, but our humanity also embodies nurturance provided or withheld, education given effectively or poorly, love sustained or withdrawn. Moreover, as every student of psychology knows, our personality reflects the interactions of our genes, past experience, and present situation. If a slow-witted, frail, uncoordinated boy experiences failure in the classroom, on the athletic field, and in his relations with intimacy, shall we say his low self-image is due to his genes or his environment? It is due to both, because his environment reacts to his genetically influenced traits. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
Studies of adoptive families further restrain our belief in the unilateral power of parenting. The astonishing result of these studies is that the personalities of people who grew up together do not much resemble one another, whether they are biologically related or not. To be sure adoption has some wonderful consequences: it transmits values and attitudes, and it provides a nurturing environment for children who might otherwise be hindered by neglect or abuse. Nevertheless, some dimensions of personality, such as temperamental reactivity, seem not to be greatly affected by normal variations in parenting. The developmental psychologist Sandra Scarr puts it more shockingly: “Our studies suggest that there is virtually no family environment effect on personality. These data say that in any reasonable environment, people will become what they will become.” Although the evidence of parental power tempers Dr. Scarr’s sweeping generalization, there are additional influences over which parents have little voluntary control. In The Nurture Assumption, the psychologist Judith Rich Harris argues that for many aspects of development, direct parental influence is minimal. And it is not just genes, she argues; peer influences are also quite strong. Consider: Preschoolers who, despite parents’ urgings, disdain a certain food will often eat the food if they are put at a table with a group of children who like it. Children exposed to one language accent at home and another in the neighbourhood will invariably end up speaking like their peers, not their parents. To predict whether a teen smokes, ask first not whether a parent smokes but whether the teen has friends who model smoking, who suggest its pleasure, and who offer cigarettes or other tobacco products. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
If genes and peer influences shape children more than direct parent influence, what does this imply? First, it tells us to agonize less about our in-home parenting style and more about the cultural vapours seeping into our children’s lives. To nurture our children well, we must care about the social environment that nurtures all children, and care about all who influence that social environment. As teachers, youth workers, and media producers and artist we must appreciate the significance of our influence upon youth culture. As the psychologist Mary Pipher has said, “Children are much more socialized by the culture than even the most conscious parents realizes.” Second, it cautions us to be less judgmental. Parents typically feel pride in their children’s successes, and guilt or shame over their failures. They beam when folks offer congratulations for the child who wins an award. They wonder where they went wrong with the child who repeatedly is called into the principal’s office Psychiatry and Freudian psychology have at times been the source of such ideas, by blaming problems from asthma to schizophrenia on “bad mothering.” Society reinforces such parent blaming: believing that parents shape their children’s virtues and blame them for their children’s vices. In many communities, parents can now be fined for their child’s misbehaviour (as if parents of troubled children were not already suffering enough). Should we really castigate the parents of Kip Kinkel (and of an accomplished order sister) following his 1998 murder of them and two fellow students in the cafeteria of his Springfield, Oregon, high school? “Good parents usually have god kids. Bad parents usually have bad kids,” explained one Detroit Free Press letter writer. “Do you really think those killer kids came from healthy homes? When parents fail, shame should follow them.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
The well-being of American’s youth rapidly declined after 1960. By the early 1990s, when youth problems had peaked (before beginning to subside), rates of teen suicide, teen violence, and unmarried teen pregnancy all multiple several times over. Human genetics do not explain this swift social recession. What had changed was the social ecology. Family breakdown, parental abandonment, abuse, and neglect were big-bang factors. These macroparenting factors, along with changes in peer and media influences, mattered. The social-science verdicts bears repeating, because it is so important and so little known: normal variations in well-meaning parenting matters less than most people suppose. The social ecology matters more than many suppose. It may be discomforting to realize that having and raising children is a risky business; in procreation a man and a woman shuffle their gene decks and deal a life-forming hand to their children-to-be, who thereafter are subjected to countless influences beyond their parents’ control. However, perhaps we may also take comfort in knowing that we are therefore responsible not for our children’s behaviour, but for having given them our best. “Training up a child in the way one should go,” and then love the person that results. When thinking about particular families, we also do well to remember that the proverbial admonition is complemented by Jesus’ admonition “Judge not.” Remembering that lives are formed by influences under parents’ control and by influences beyond parents’ control, let us be slow to credit parents for their children’s achievements and slower still to blame them for their children’s problems. #RandolphHarris 18 of 24
Likewise, let us restrain our vanity when our children succeed and our feelings of guilt when they fail. As parents, let us train up our children in the way they should go, and let us be slow to judge one another. The need to take care of the nature of our thoughts was illustrated by the life-story of Eugene O’Neill. The gloomy themes of his plays, the guant tragedy and overhanging doom with which he deliberately permeated them, brough him down in his later years with an incurable disease. His palsied hand could not write, and dictated material always dissatisfied him. Those who deny the line of relevant connection between his grim thinking and his sickness ignore that fact that he was an ultrasensitive man—so sensitive that a large part of his life was occupied with the search for a solitary place where no people could interrupt him and where he could live entirely with himself. Why is it that in the stage of heavy sleeping trance a hypnotic subject’s nervous system fails to make the usual reactions to a burning match applied to the hand or a pointed pin stuck into the flesh? Why does the usual sensitivity to pain vanish so largely, often completely? If consciousness really lay in the nerves themselves it could never really be divorces from them. It is because consciousness does not arise out of the material body, but out of deeper principle of the immaterial, that it can function or fail to function as the bodily though-series. Hence when the consciousness is turned away from the body, when it is induced to cease holding the nerve system in its embrace, it will naturally cease holding the pleasurable or painful changes within that system too. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
Fear delays digestion; anger hurt the spleen; excessive lust leads to inflammations, infections, or impotence; jealousy creates excessive bile; a shock caused by bad news may turn hair white. The person who holds such negative feelings as chronic gloom and constant fault-finding, who worries self and nags others, is walking the direct path to either a disordered liver or high blood pressure. Vicious mental and speech habits injure the person’s own body and demoralize other people’s feeling. How much is a person’s bitter, rancorous mind, as expressed in one’s bitter, epitheical speeches, responsible for the malady of dyspepsia which afflicts one for so many years? Anger brings liver’s function to a standstill; this throws its bile back into the system, and bilious indigestion follows. The tears which well up in the eyes are physical, yet the self-pity which causes them in plainly mental. The connection between breathing and thinking has been noted by the yoga of physical control. The connection between breathing and feeling also exists. Apoplexy—a fit of chocking, the inability to breathe caches and almost ceases when bad news is suddenly heard. There is a direct line between emotional shocks, fears, or worries, and stomach ulcers. Saliva may become poisonous in anger. Gastric juice may stop flowing in shock of bad news. A Berlin opera singer went to the United States of America on a visit. While there she received the unexpected news of her husband’s death. The shock severely affected her feelings. That same week she became afflicted with an aliment and suffered greatly from it for several years until she died. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24
A last medical science is coming to recognize the power of feeling to make disease in the flesh, the contribution of mind and mood to the body’s sickness. You have some other implements, rarely used. Patience and Endurance Paul would include in that number, as he did in Colossians (1.11). It may take a little while, but with these and the help of God, you will triumph amid the tulips. Callousness and Petulance, broken tools both. What is the common wisdom? Impatience cannot be hurried by impatience! In times of temptation, and if you are the tempted, accept all the advice you can get. If someone else is the tempted, do not deal harshly with one. Give one all the consolation one can handle. Like a ship unmoored, the soul is set a drift by temptation. Like a ship without a tiller, the soul is tossed about the waves. Like a mariner without a chart, the soul is tempted every which way. Like a seaman who has a chart but cannot make head or tail out of it, the soul is at the mercy of the sea. Fire proves iron—that is the kind of point Jesus son of Sirach liked to make (31.26)—and temptation fires the just human. Often we do not know what we can do until temptation opens us up to what we are. Stand sentinel in the intellect we must before temptation strikes. Engage the Enemy at the earliest possible moment. In the chapel. In the dining hall. At the gate. On the road. In the field. To his very point a certain ancient Roman writer, Ovid, the amatory poet, had this wheeze: “If you want stop, stop at the start. Have the antidote ready before you drink the poison. Otherwise you will be dead before the saving draft can reach the lips” (Remedies for Love 2.91-92). #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
That is how temptation works. A simple thought enters the mind. A vivid imagination goes to work. After that it is a nudge, a wink, and a nod. Right from the start you should resist strongly. When you do not, the Enemy bearing evils tiptoes in unawares and wins the day. And so it is everyday. The slower your response, the quicker the Devil’s step. The temptations you have to undergo are graver at the beginning of your spiritual life than at then end. However you look at it, they are all mud. For one person it is a wallow all one’s life. For another, it is just an occasional splatter. Whatever the grand total, we notice one thing. Our temptations have been customized. No two are alike. That explains why each one fits perfectly. The Divine Designer, in association with Weights & Measures Supernatural, has seen to that. That explain also why we can shed each temptation that is laid upon us. The Designer fully expects us to. Another garment awaits the Elect. Therefore we should not despair when we are tempted. We should pray more fervently to God. After all, He thinks us worthy of help in every tribulation. According to Paul in First Corinthians, who should know, “God will give us resources enough” (10.13) so that we can overcome. Therefore, let us humble our souls, huddle ourselves, under the hand of God in every trial and tribulation, as the story of Judith encourages us to do (8.17). Why? “He will help the humble in spirit,” the Evangelist Luke has promised (1.51). And at every temptation that is overcome, He will sound the trumpet. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
In trial and tribulations the perfection of Humankind is hammered out. I give you one example—Virtue. The better it is hidden, the more light it gives off, or so the common spiritual wisdom goes. However, if the virtuous cannot recognize a temptation when it kisses them on the cheek, what good is all the devotion and fervour? For these poor souls, though, there is still hope. If they patiently sustain themselves in time of adversity, then they will continue to inch along the spiritual path. Some seem to be protected from the great temptations of life and yet are overwhelmed by the nit-picking of daily routine. However, there is another way of looking at it. They are humbled, hobbled, by their poor, shabby response to the small temptations. Hence, they are no so overconfident about their ability to handle the large ones. How wonderful, O Lord, are the works of your hands! The Heavens declare Your glory, the arch of sky displays Your handiwork. In Your love You have given us the power to behold the beauty of Your World robed in all its splendour. The sun and the stars, and the valleys and hills, the rivers and lakes all disclose Your presence. The roaring breakers of the sea tell of Your awesome might; the beats of the field and the birds of the air bespeak Your wondrous will. In Your goodness You have made us able to hear the music of the World. The voices of loved ones reveal to us that You are in our midst. A divine voice sings through all creation. Our God and God of our fathers, merciful King, have compassion upon us; O Thou good and beneficent One, please inspire us with the desire to seek Thee. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
In Thine abundant compassion return unto us for the sake of our forefathers who did Thy will; please rebuild Thy Temple as of old, and establish Thy Sanctuary upon its ancient site. Please grant that we may see it rebuilt and make us rejoice in its re-establishment. Please restore America to its service of pronouncing the Priestly Blessing, Americans to their song and psalmody, and America to her habitations. There we will make our pilgrimages to Church, and at the Festivals, as it is writing in Thy Scriptures: Every day of the year shall all human appear in prayer before the Lord, your God, in the place where He shall choose; everyone shall appear before the Lord with some offering, each according to one’s means, according to the bounty with which the Lord hath blessed one. O Lord our God, please bestow upon us the blessing of Thy Festivals for life and peace, for joy and gladness, even as Thou hast graciously promised to bless. [Our God and God of our fathers, accept our rest.] Please sanctify us through Thy commandments, and please grant our portion in Thy Scripture; please give us abundantly of Thy goodness and please make us rejoice in Thy salvation. Please purify our hearts to serve Thee in truth. In Thy loving favour, O Lord God, please let us inherit with joy and gladness Thy holy [Sabbath and] festivals and may America, who sanctifies Thy name, rejoice in Thee. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who hallowest [the Sabbath and] America and the Festivals. God’s reality is the overwhelming fact of existence. This vision is a gift, a grace, so it may come suddenly, unexpectedly, but more often it comes to someone who has prepared oneself for it by purification and contemplation. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24
Cresleigh Homes
Have you ever tried a wall mural in your home? We love how owning your own home allows you to express your unique style and creativity – whether it’s a mountain mural ⛰ or a unique chandelier. Both are looking fab in our Brighton Station Res 3 model! https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/residence-3/
Learn more about this stunning new residence from Cresleigh Homes!
O Wicked Wit and Gifts that Have the Power So to Seduce!
I have always noticed a prevalent want of courage, even among persons of superior intelligence and culture, as to imparting their own psychological experiences when those have been of a strange story. Almost all humans are afraid that what they could relate in such wise would find no parallel or response in a lister’s internal life, and might be suspected or laughed at. A truthful traveller who should have seen some extraordinary creature in the likeness of a devil, would have no fear mentioning it; but the same traveller having had some singular presentiment, impulse, vagary of thought, vision (so-called), dream, or other remarkable mental impression, would hesitate considerably before one would own to it. To this reticence I attribute much of the obscurity in which subjects are involved. We do not habitually communicate our experiences of these subjective things, as we do our experiences of objective creation. The consequences is, that the general stock of experiences in this regard appears exceptional, and really is so, in respect of being miserably imperfect. The Devil had been raised among us, and his rage was vehement and terrible; and, when he shall be silenced, the Lord only knows. It does not signify how many years ago, or how few, a certain Murder was committed in Boston in 1688, which attracted great attention. We hear more than enough of Murders as they rise in succession to their atrocious eminence, and if I could, I would bury the memory this this atrocious eminence, as hi body was buried, in the Witch House’s basement. When the murder was first discovered, no suspicion fell—or I ought rather to say, for I cannot be too precise in my facts, it was nowhere publicly hinted that any suspicious fell—on the man who was afterwards brought to trial. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
As no reference was at the time made to him in the newspapers, it is obviously impossible that any description of him at that time have been given in the newspapers. It is essential that this fact be remembered. Unfolding at breakfast my morning paper, containing the account of that first discovery, I found it to be deeply interesting, and I read it with close attention. I read it twice, if not three times. The discovery had been made in a bedroom, and, when I laid down the paper, I was aware of a flash—rush—flow—I do not know what to call it—no word I can find is satisfactorily descriptive—in which I seemed to see that bedroom passing through my room, like a picture impossibly painted on a running river. Though almost instantaneous in its passing, it was perfectly clear; so clear that I distinctly, and with a sense of relief observed the absence of the dead body from the bed. As the circumstances of the Murder, gradually unravelling, took stronger and stronger posses of the public mind, I kept them away from mine, by knowing as little about them as was possible in the midst of the universal excitement. John Hathorne asked most of the questions and established the judicial attitude that was to prevail throughout most of the examinations and the trials. Many people suspected that the devil killed this man and he had been summoned by Sarah Good because she had also been accused of bewitching a few girls in the town. Mr. Hathorne asked the children to look at Sarah God and say whether she was one who afflicted them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
They accused her to her face, “upon which they were all dreadfully tortured and tormented for a short space of time.” When they recovered from their fits, they charged her with causing them, saying that her specter had come and tormented them although her body remained “at a considerable distance from them.” This was spectral evidence, that is, evidence concerning a specter or apparition of the accused, rather than her bodily person. It was eventually to become the central legal issue of the trials, but at the moment we need only see why it seemed initially so convincing to the examining magistrates. Here were girls afflicted with violent physical symptoms which had no known physical cause, but which a physician had attributed to witchcraft. There was a malicious old woman accused of causing them. When the sufferers accused her they were immediately thrown into convulsions. What could be more plausible than that the convulsions were inflicted as revenge for the accusation? Yet such behaviour was still unfamiliar enough in Salem so that one of the recorders noted that “none here see the [specters of the] witches but the afflicted and themselves.” However, the change was so startling that I fully believed the girls derived their impression in some occult manner. For instance, we knew there was something occult going on because the throat of the murdered man had been cut straight across. In the opening speech for the defense, it was suggested that the deceased might have cut his own throat in the dreadful condition referred to. Yet, it would have been impossible for such a wound to be self-inflicted by either hand. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Certainly, Mr. Hathorne was convinced; when the children had recovered and repeated their accusation he turned to the accused woman. “Sarah Good, do you not see now what you have done? Why do you not tell us the truth? Why do you this torment these people children?” Certainly many of her neighbours though her malicious, since they attributed to her a number of inexplicable events, including the death of a cow which perished in a “sudden, terrible and strange unusual manner.” Such testimony was common in witchcraft cases, and it has caused much unseemly hilarity among the modern historians. It is likely, they have asked, that His Satanic Majesty the Devil or any of his minions would stop to concern themselves with the fate of a New England cow? The answer is that nothing is more likely. What else would a fertility god concern himself with but the health or sickness of crops, of animals, and of humans? From the standpoint of a society that still remembered who the Devil was, no testimony could be more relevant. As a matter of fact, the village witches who still exist in rural England are often expert in folk medicines, human and animal, as well as charms, and until recently many of them were midwives. Sarah Osburn also denied that she had hurt anyone, but the girls feel again into fits. Mr. Hathorne asked her how this happened. Perhaps, she said, the Devil went about in her likeness doing harm, but she knew nothing about it. Sarah Osburn was the first at Salem to assert the principle that the Devil can impersonate an innocent person. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Whether the devil could or not was a matter of debate in the seventeenth century, but most Protestant authorities agreed with Goodwife Obsurn that, as Hamlet put it, “The Devil hath power/ to assume a pleasing shape.” However, the principle was not discussed at this hearing, since Sarah Osburn was a likely a suspect as Sarah Good, if for no other reason than her lying. Lying was still considered a serious sin in the seventeenth century, and a crime as well, legally punishable by the courts. Nine of us had not the smallest doubt about those passages, neither, I believed, had any one in Court. When Mr. Hathorne tried to find out how well Sarah Osburn knew Sarah Good she said she did not know her by name. Mr. Hathorne asked if Sarah Osburn had been tempted by the devil, and she said no. Why then, he asked, had not she been at church? She had been sick, she said, and unable to go. However, her husband and others contradicted her. “She had not been at meeting,” they said, “this year and two months.” To understand why the matter of church attendance was considered so significant one must remember that the seventeenth century saw witchcraft as literal Devil worship, and therefore as a rival religion to Christianity. This is why the magistrates sometimes asked accused persons, as they asked Sarah Good, what God they served. And if the accused person avoided speaking the name of God (as Sarah Good did), they had reason to think it a suspicious circumstance. The murdered man at that time stood directly opposite the judge, on the other side of the court. He slowly shook a great grey veil, which he carried on his arm for the first time, over his head and whole form. Then he collapsed, all was gone, and his place was empty. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The examinations of Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn afford grounds for suspicion and for further examination. However, the major event of that first day of March was the examination of Tituba. It began like the others, but it changed very quickly: “Tituba, what evil spirit have you familiarity with?” “None.” “Why do you hurt these children?” “I do not hurt them.” “Who is it then?” “The Devil, for aught I know.” “Did you never see the Devil?” “The Devil,” said Tituba, “came to me and bid me serve him.” She went on, with a minimum of judicia prodding, to provide a detailed confession of witchcraft, the first of approximately fifty that were made during the Salem trials. On March first and second, in her examination, Tituba said that the Devil had come to her in the shape of a man—a tall man in black, with white hair. Other times he had come in the shape of an animal. He had told her he was God, that she must believe him and serve him six years, and he would give her many fine things. He had shown her a book and she had made a mark in it, a mark that was “red like blood.” Many people thought this to be a revelation. “Then I saw another beast, coming out of the Earth. He had two horns like a lamb, but he spoke like a dragon. He exercised all authority of the first beast on his behalf, and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose fatal wound had been healed. And he performed great and miraculous signs, even causing fire to comedown from Heaven to Earth in full view of men. Because of the signs he was given power to do on behalf of the first beast, he deceived the inhabitants of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
“He ordered them to set up an image in honour of the beast who was wounded by the sword and yet lived. He was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that it could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed. He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless one had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name,” reports Revelation 13.11-17. Sarah Osburn was to die there on the tenth of May. Tituba, like later confessors, was never brought to trial. She lay in jail until she was sold to pay the jailer’s fees, her master refusing to pay them. Sarah Good was brought to trial. Another reaction to Tituba’s confession was to confirm the community in its fear of witchcraft, and particularly its fear of the three accused women. The night of March First William Allen and John Hughes heard a strange noise; it continued frightening them, but the approached and “saw a strange and unusual beast lying on the ground. Going up to it, the said beast vanished away and in the said place started up two or three women fled, not after the manner of other women but swiftly vanished out of sight, which women we took to be Sarah Good, Sarah Osburn, and Tituba.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The next night William Allen again had hallucinations: “Sarah Good visibly appeared to him in his chamber, said Allen being in bed, and brought an unusual light with her. The said Sarah came and sat upon his foot. The said Allen went to kick at her, upon which she vanished and the light with her.” Notice that in this hallucination as in many others the hallucination stops as soon as the subject is able to move or speak. A curse is any expressed wish that some form of adversity or misfortune will befall or attach to one or more persons, a place, or an object. In particular, “curse” may refer to such a wish or pronouncement made effective by a supernatural or spiritual power, such as a god, or gods, a spirit, or natural force, or else as a kind of spell by magic or witchcraft. The Winchester rifle is a handsome gun that legend has it was forged in Hell. Whoever possesses the cursed rife either suffers disaster or fortune. Oliver Fisher Winchester was an American businessman and politician, best known as being the founder of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Oliver Winchester was born November 30, 1810 and dead December 10, 1880. Oliver Winchester was known for manufacturing and marketing the Winchester repeating rifle, which was a much re-designed descendant of the Volcanic rifle of some years earlier. Mr. Winchester was more learned than his kind in the mysteries of a deep and thrilling lore of peculiar fascination. He was a man highly honoured for his natural gifts and knowledge of learned books which nobody else could read, that was when he took his second orders the bishop gave him a mantle of scarlet silk to wear upon his shoulders in which, and his lordship had put such power into it that, when the parson has it rightly on, he could govern any ghost or evil spirit, and even stop an Earthquake. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Such a powerful man, in combat with supernatural visitations discovered that a division of Smith & Wesson firearms was failing financially with one of their newly patented arms. Having an eye for opportunity, Mr. Winchester assembled venture capital together with other stockholders and acquired the Smith & Wesson division, better known as the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company, in 1855. By 1857, Mr. Winchester had positioned himself as the principle stockholder in the company and relocated to New Haven, Connecticut, and changed the name to New Haven Arms Company. After experiencing a slow start, and then a booming success with the Henry rifle, the company reorganized once again and the first Winchester rifle was the Model 1866, which had been nicknamed the Yellow Boy. The gun was called Yellow Boy because it should be remembered that, howsoever strange and singular it may sound to us that a mere lad should formally solicit such a performance at his own hands. Gradually Mr. Winchester amassed a considerable fortune. When Mr. Oliver Winchester died on December 10, 1880, his ownership in the company passed to his son, William Wirt Winchester (who married Sarah Lockwood Pardee in 1862), and died March 7 1881 at the young age of 43. The couple has also had a child, Annie Pardee Winchester, born June 15, 1866, and died 6 weeks later on July 25, 1866. Mrs. Winchester was deeply troubled by the loss of her daughter. In the course of her daily walk, she had to pass a certain heath or down where the road wound along through tall blocks of granite with open spaces of grassy sward between them. #RandpolphHarris 9 of 13
There in a certain spot, and always in the same place, she declared that she encountered, every day, a baby with a pale and troubled face, clothed in a little dress of white pique, made with two skirts. The pique was cut slightly Gabriele, and rounded off in the front with scallops, bound with white braid, with a button in each scallop, and ribbon-sash, tied at the left side, with one hand always stretched forth, and the other pressed against her side. “She is my baby,” Mrs. Winchester would say, and she often used to come to her parents house in New Haven; but that which troubled her was, that she had now been dead three years, and she had seen her body laid in the grave at her burial, this that she saw every day must needs be her soul or ghost. The hair of the appearance, sayth Mrs. Winchester, is not like anything alive, but it is so soft and light that it seemth to melt away while you look; but her eyes are set, and never blink—no, not when the sun shineth full upon her face. She maketh no steps, but seemth to swim along the top of the grass; and her hand, which is stretched out alway, seemth to point to something far away, out of sight. It is her continual coming; for she never failth to meet Mrs. Winchester, and to pass on, that hath quenched her spirits; and although she never seeth her by night, yet cannot she get her natural rest. Mrs. Winchester went to see a doctor who told her, “The case is strange but by no means impossible. It is one that I will study, and fear not to handle, if you will be free with me, and fulfill all that I desire.” Mrs. Winchester was overjoyed, but she perceived that the doctor turned pale, and was downcast with some thought which, however, he did not express. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
The doctor knew that this might be a doemonium meridianum, the most stubborn spirit to govern and guide that any human can meet, and the most perilous withal. He made an appointment to go with Mrs. Winchester to the spot where she had these encounters. They had hardly reached the accustomed spot, when they both saw her at once gliding towards them; punctually as the ancient writers describe their “lemures, which swoon along the ground, neither marking the sand nor bending the herbage.” The aspect of the baby girl was exactly that which had been related by Mrs. Winchester. There was a pale and stony face, the strange misty hair, the eyes firm and fixed, that gazed, yet not on them, but on something that they saw far, far away; one hand and arm stretched out, and the other grasping the girdle of her waist. She floated along the field like upon a stream, and glided past the spot where they stood, pausingly. But so deep was the awe that came over the doctor, as he stood there in the light of day, face to face with a human soul separate from her bones and flesh, that his heart and purpose both failed him. He had resolved to speak to the spectre in the appointed form of words, but he did not. He stood like one amazed and speechless, until she had passed clean of out sight. When they returned to the house, and after he had said all he could to pacify Mrs. Winchester, he took leave for that time, with a promise that when he had fulfilled certain business elsewhere, when then he alleged, he would return and take orders to assuage these disturbances and their cause. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The doctor later told Mrs. Winchester that he thought it was best that they try an exorcism, but his Church, as is well known, hath abjured certain branches of her ancient powers, on grounds of perversion and abuse. So he referred her to a medium. The medium told Mrs. Winchesters, “There is a danger from the demons, but so there is in the surrounding air every day.” There was a kind of trouble in the air, a soft rippling sound, and all at once the shape appeared, and came towards the medium gradually. She opened her parchment scroll, and read aloud the command. The spirit paused, and seemed to waver and doubt; stood still; then she rehearsed the sentence again, sounding out every syllable like a chant. The spirit then swam into the midst of the circle, and there stood still, suddenly. Her knees shook under her, and the drops of sweat ran down her flesh like rain. But, although face to face with the spirit, the medium’s heart grew calm, and her mind was composed. The spirit then commanded Mrs. Winchester to move West and build a mansion in honour of the spirit killed by the Winchester rifle and “as long as the hammer keep pounding, her heart would continue to beat.” The medium dismissed the troubled ghost, until she peacefully withdrew, gliding towards the west. Mrs. Winchester moved to San Jose, which was near her family Member, Enoch Pardee, an occultist, prominent physician, free mason, and Mayor of Oakland, California USA, had built his family’s mansion in 1868, which is now known as the Pardee House Museum. Masonry has influenced more the modern witchcraft; it has influenced dozens of occult orders. Mrs. Winchester bought a farm house and built a massive mansion. There was something very painful and peculiar in the position of the Winchester mansion through the nineteenth century. The estate in those days was in a transitory state, and Mrs. Winchester, like her formularies, embodied a strange mixture of the old belief with the new interpretation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
However, the mansion is now flanked by a pleasantness, a beautiful garden and lawn, and it is surrounded by a sole grove of palm trees. It has also the aspect of age and of solitude, and looks the very scene of harmony and supernatural events. A legend might well belong to every beautiful glade of grass around, and there must surely be a haunted room somewhere within its walls. The incredible mansion, scenery of the legend still survives, and, like the field of the forty footsteps in another history, the place is still visited by those who take interests in the supernatural tales of old and new. Freemasons supposedly conducted a séance in the mansion in August of 2019. A phantom made an answer willingly. It stated, “before the next Yule-tide, a fearful pestilence will lay waste the land, and myriads of souls will be loosened from the flesh, until our valleys will be full.” The general facts stated in this diary are to these matters of belief accounted a strong proof of the veracity of the Ghost that the plague, fatal to so many millions, did break out in the global village at the close of the year. How sorely must the infidels and heretics of this generation be dismayed when they know that this Black Death, which is now swallowing its thousands in the streets of the great city, was foretold several months before the outbreak, under the séance of a freemason, by a visible and suppliant ghost! And what pleasure and improvements do such deny themselves who scorn and avoid all opportunity of intercourse with souls separate, and the spirits, glad and sorrowful, which inhabit the unseen World! May they who observe the Sabbath and call it a delight, rejoice in Thy Kingdom. May the people who sanctify the seventh day be sated and delighted with Thy bounty. For Thou didst find pleasure in the seventh day, and didst sanctify it, calling it the most desirable of the days, in remembrance of creation. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Winchester Mystery House
Today is the return of our guided Mansion Tour! The tour guide-led experience allows guests to access areas of the mansion that have been closed since March 2020. Click the link in our bio for more information. winchestermysteryhouse.com/recent-links
Not Even Houdini Could Dismantle it Without Serious and Harmful Consequences!
We rely on others to inform us, but we still cannot be taught, and must decide the truths for ourselves. We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the World we inherit. The question “Who runs things?” is a typically Second Wave question. For until the industrial revolution there was little reason to ask it. Whether ruled by kinds of shamans, warlords, sun gods, or saints, people were seldom in doubt as to who held power over them. The ragged peasant, looking up from the fields, saw the palace or monastery looming in splendor on the horizon. One needed no political scientist or newspaper pundit to sole the riddle of power. Everyone knew who was in charge. Wherever the Second Wave swept in, however, a new kind of power emerged, diffused and faceless. Those in power became the anonymous “they.” Who were “they”? Industrialism, as we have seen, broke society into thousands of interlocking parts—factories, churches, schools, trade unions, prisons, hospitals, and the like. It broke the line of command between church, state, and individual. It fractured knowledge into specialize discipline. It dissembled jobs into fragments. It divided families into smaller units. It doing so, it shattered community life and culture. Somebody had to put things back together in a different form. This need gave rise to many new kinds of specialists whose basic task was integration. Calling themselves executives or administrators, commissars, coordinators, presidents, vice-presidents, bureaucrats, or managers, they cropped up in every business, in every government, and at every level of society. And they proved indispensable. They were the integrators. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
They defined roles and allocated jobs. They decided who got what rewards. They made plans, set criteria, and gave or withheld credentials. They linked production, distribution, transport, and communications. They set the rules under which organizations interacted. Essentially, they fitted the pieces of society together. Without them the Second Wave system could never have run. Karl Marx, in the mid-nineteenth century, thought that whoever owned the tools and technology—the “means of production”—would control society. He argued that, because work was interdependent, workers could disrupt production and seize the tools from their bosses. Once they owned the tools, they would rule society. Yet history played a trick on them. For the very same interdependency gave even greater leverage to a new group—those who orchestrated or integrated the system. In the end it was neither the owners nor the workers who came to power. In both capitalist and socialists nations, it was the integrators who rose to the op. It was not ownership of the “means of production” that gave power. It was control of the “means of integration.” Let us see what that has meant. In business the earliest integrators were the factory proprietors, the business entrepreneurs, the mill owner and ironmasters. The owner and a few assistants were usually able to coordinate the labour of a large number of unskilled “hands” and to integrate the firm into the larger economy. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Since, in that period, owner and integrator were one and the same, it is not surprising that Dr. Marx confused the two and laid so heavy an emphasis on ownership. As production grew more complex, however, and the division of labour more specialized, business witnessed an incredible proliferation of executives and experts who came between the boss and his workers. Paperwork mushroomed. Soon in the larger firms no individual, including the owner or dominant shareholder, could even begin to understand the whole operation. The owner’s decisions were shaped, and ultimately controlled, by the specialists brought in to coordinate the system. Thus a new executive elite arose whose power rested no longer on ownership but rather on control of the integration process. As the manager grew in power, the stockholder grew less important. As companies grew bigger, family owners sold out to larger and larger groups of dispersed shareholders, few of whom knew anything about the actual operations of the business. Increasingly, shareholders had to rely on hired managers not merely to run the day-to-day affairs of the company but even to set its long-range goals and strategies. Boards of directors, theoretically representing the owners, were themselves increasingly remote and ill-informed about the operations they were supposed to direct. And as more and more private investment was made not by individuals but indirectly through institutions like pension funds, mutual funds, and the trust departments of banks, the actual “owners” of industry were still further removed from control. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
The new power of the integrators was, perhaps, most clearly expressed by W. Michael Blumenhal, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. Before entering government Mr. Blumenthal headed the Bendix Corporation. Once asked if he would some day like to own Bendix, Mr. Blumenthal replied: “It’s not ownership that counts—it’s control. And as Chief Executive that is what I’ve got! We have a shareholders’ meeting next week, and I’ve got ninety-seven percent of the vote. I only own eight thousand shares. Control is what’s important to me….To have the control over this large animal and to use it in a constructive way, that is what I want, rather than doing silly things that others want me to do.” Business policies were thus increasingly fixed by the hired managers of the firm or by money managers placing other people’s money, but in neither case by the actual owners, let alone by the workers. The integrators took charge. All this had certain parallels in the socialist nations. As early as 1921 Dr. Lenin felt called upon to denounce his own Soviet bureaucracy. Leon Trotsky, in exile by 1930, charged that there were already five to six million managers in a class that “does not engage directly in productive labour, but administers, orders, commands, pardons and punishes.” The means of production might belong to the state, he charged, “But the state… ‘belongs’ to the bureaucracy.” In the 1950’s Milovan Djilas, in The New Class, attacked the growing power of the managerial elites in Yugoslavia. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Josip Broz Tito, who imprisoned Mr. Djilas, himself complained about “technocracy, bureaucracy, the class enemy.” And fear of managerialism was the central theme in Mr. Mao’s China. Mr. Mao, leading the World’s biggest First Wave nation, repeatedly warned against the rise of managerial elites and saw this as a dangerous concomitant of traditional industrialism. Under socialism as well as capitalism, therefore, the integrators took effective power. For without them the parts of the system could not work together. The “machine” would not run. Integrating a single business, or even a whole industry, was only a small part of what had to be done. Modern industrial society, as we have seen, developed a host of organizations, from labour unions and trade associations to churches, school, health clinics, and recreational groups, all of which had to work within a framework of predictable rules. Laws were needed. Above all, the info-sphere, socio-sphere, and techno-sphere had to be brought into alignment with one another. Out of this driving need for the integration of Second Wave civilization came the biggest coordinator of all—the integrational engine of the system: big government. It is the system’s hunger for integration that explains the relentless rise of big government in every Second Wave society. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Again and again political demagogues arose to call for smaller government. Yet, once in office, they very same leaders expanded rather then contracted the size of government. This contradiction between rhetoric and real life becomes understandable the moment we recognize that the transcendent aim of all Second Wave governments has been to construct and maintain industrial civilization. Against this commitment, all lesser differences faded. Parties and politicians might squabble over other issues, but on this they were in tacit agreement. And big government was part of their unspoken program regardless of the tune they snag, because industrial societies depend on government to preform essential integrational tasks. In the words of political columnist Clayton Fritchey, the United State of America’s federal government never ceased to grow, even under three recent Republican administrations, “for the simple reason that not even Houdini could dismantle it without serious and harmful consequences.” Free marketeers have argued that governments interfere with business. However, left to private enterprise alone, industrialization would have come much more slowly—if, indeed, it could have come at all. Governments quickened the development of the railroad. They built harbours, roads, canals, and highways. They operated postal services and build or regulated telegraph, telephone, and broadcast systems. They wrote commercial codes and standardized markets. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Governments applied foreign policy pressures and tariffs to assist industry. They drove farmers off the land and into the industrial labour supply. They subsidized energy and advanced technology, often through military channels. At a thousand levels, governments assumed the integrative tasks that others could not, or would not, perform. For government was the great accelerator. Because of its coercive power and tax revenues, it could do things that private enterprise could not afford to undertake. Government could “hot up” the industrialization process by stepping in to fill emerging gaps in the system—before it became possible or profitable for private companies to do so. Governments could perform “anticipatory integration.” By setting up mass education systems, governments not only helped to machine youngsters for their future roles in the industrial work force (hence, in effect, subsidizing industry) but also simultaneously encouraged the spread of the nuclear family form. By relieving the family of educational and other traditional functions, governments accelerated the adaptation of family structure to the needs of the factory system. At many different levels, therefore, governments orchestrated the complexity of Second Wave civilization. Not surprisingly, as integration grew in importance both the substance and style of government changed. Presidents and prime ministers, for example, came to see themselves primarily as managers rather than as creative social and political leaders. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
In personality and manner, they became almost interchangeable with the men who ran the large companies and production enterprises. While offering the obligatory lip service to democracy and social justice, the Nixons, Carters, Thatchers, Brezhnevs, Giscards, and Ohiras of the industrial World rode into office by promising little more than efficient management. These technicians of power were themselves organized into hierarchies of elites and sub-elites. Every industry and branch of government soon gave birth to its own establishment, its own powerful “They.” Sports…religion…education…each had its own pyramid of power. A science establishment, a defense establishment, a cultural establishment sprang up. Power in Second Wave civilization was parceled out to scores, hundreds, even thousands of such specialized elites. In turn, these specialized elites were themselves integrated by generalist elites whose membership cut across all the specializations. For example, in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe the Communist party had members in every field from aviation to music and steel manufacture. Communist party members served as a crucial grapevine carrying messages from one sub-elite to another. Because it has access to all information, it has enormous power to regulate the specialist sub-elites. In the capitalist countries, leading business people and lawyers, serving on civic committees or boards, performed similar functions in a less formal way. What we see, therefore, in all Second Wave nations are specialized groups of integrators, bureaucrats, or executives, themselves integrated by generalist integrators. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
A yet a higher level, integration was imposed by the “super-elites” in charge of investment allocation. Whether in finance or industry, in the Pentagon or in the Russian planning bureaucracy, those who made the major investment allocations in industrial society set the limits within which the integrators themselves were compelled to function. Once a truly large-scale investment decision had been made, whether in Minneapolis or Moscow, it limited future options. Given a scarcity of resources, one could not casually tear out Bessemer furnaces or cracking plants or assembly lines until their cost had been amortized. Once in place, therefore, this capital stock fixed the parameters within which future managers or integrators were confined. These groups of faceless decision-makers, controlling the levers of investment, formed the super-elite in all industrial societies. In every Second Wave society, consequently, a parallel architecture of elites sprang up. And—with local variation—this hidden hierarchy of power was born again after every crisis or political upheaval. Names, slogans, party labels, and candidates might change; revolutions might come and go. New faces might appear behind the big mahogany desks. However, the basic architecture of power remained. Time and again during the past three hundred and seventy years, in one country after another, rebels and reformers have attempted to storm the walls of power, to build a new society based on social justice and political equality. Temporarily, such movements have seized the emotions of millions with promises of freedom. Revolutionists have even managed, now and then, to topple a regime. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Yet each time the ultimate outcomes was the same. Every time the rebels re-created, under their own flag, a similar structure of sub-elites, elites, and super-elites. For this integrational structure and the technicians of power who ruled it were as necessary to Second Wave civilization as factories, fossil fuels, or nuclear families. Industrialism and the full democracy it promised were, in fact, in compatible. Industrial nations could be forced, through revolutionary action or otherwise, to move back and forth across the spectrum from free market o centrally planned. They could go from capitalist to socialist and vice versa. However, like the much-cited leopard, they could not change their sports. They could not function without a powerful hierarchy of integrator. Today, as the Third Wave of change is being implemented in this fortress of managerial power, the first fleeting cracks have appeared in the power system. Demands for participation in management, for shared decision-making, for worker, consumer, and citizen, and for anticipatory democracy are welling up in nation after nation. New ways of organizing along less hierarchical and more ad-hocratic lines are springing up in the most advanced industries. Pressures for decentralization of power intensify. And managers become more and more dependent upon information from below. Elites themselves, therefore, are becoming less permanent and secure. All these were merely early warnings—indicators of the upheaval we are experiencing in the political systems. The Third Wave, already has been battering at these industrial structures, opening fantastic opportunities for social and political renovation. In these times, startling new institutions are replacing our unworkable, oppressive, and obsolete integrational structures. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
It is not just a matter of getting comfortable in the role we have as people with special responsibilities, so far as our personal adequacies are concerned, but rather of accepting the reality of our role, even though we know our inadequacies. Housing styles reflect the social values of particular eras. The planned suburbs of the nineteenth century had been deigned for the affluent railroad commuter. However, by the turn of the century, the elaborate Victorian social customs and housing styles had gone “out of fashion” (became unaffordable). By World War I, the once popular Victorian- and Queen-Anne-style homes, Americana places of great worth were too expensive to recreate because of machines manufacturing replacing human labour and the first taxes were enacted in 1913. Not only that, but the gold rush and force free labour had come to an end, so people were not as affluent and could not afford to build such grand homes. Therefore, the ornateness and flourishes of the late-nineteenth century were supplanted by simpler and more efficient architectural designs. The prototype of this modern form would be the suburban bungalow design. The informality and more relaxed nature of this design could be seen immediately upon entering the front door. The elaborate entrance halls and parlors of the Victorian era were replaced by a simple doorway opening immediately into a less-formal general-purpose living room. Bungalows were built not for the affluent, but for the comfortable middle-class family. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Early in the twentieth century many new suburbs sprang up filled with utilitarian bungalow and other frame models. Rather than being individually designed, these homes were often mass-produced from simple sets of plans. Homes would be individualized by small variations n ornamentation or material. Thus, first the streetcar and then the automobile opened up suburbia as a place of residence for the comfortable middle class. Such simple, moderate-priced, and informal style homes were needed to house this growing suburban population. Most common among these budget-friendly, less exotic designs were the American Foursquare and the bungalow, but there is still a lot to appreciate. The foursquare, as its name suggests, was a basic four-sided, cubed-shape model sometimes knows as the box, the cube, or the classic box. It was an efficient two-and-one-half story high model set on a raised basement with a wide porch across the front reached by raised steps. The foursquare had its two stories caped by a low pyramidal roof containing generally a front, and sometimes a side, dormer. Inside was often incorporated handcrafted “honest” woodwork (unless purchased from a mail-order catalog. The rooms were generally of equal size, wit the stairwell on the side wall near the front door. The foursquare was a solid and stable, in unexcited, style. The basement generally contained a large natural convection furnace or boiler. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
The bungalow-style homes, by contrast, looked more “suburban” and was more versatile, permitting greater variation in the arrangement of interior space. External on this house is either single-story or second story built into a sloping roof (usually with dormer windows), and may be surrounded by wide verandas. The external ornamentation could give the bungalow a low colonial, shingle, Tudor, or even Spanish appearance. Often, essentially identical homes on the same street were given different external styles. The bungalow house was relatively little known in 1900s, but by World War I it had become common in the outer reaches of the cities and the developing middle-class suburbs. The bungalow was very much an American creation, combining practicality, economy, and comfort. Bungalows, as noted, also suggested a more informal life-style than the earlier Victorian housing. Over time the term “bungalow” became virtually a generic name for any smaller, cozy, and comfortable home. While Victorian homes had parlors, libraries, and sitting rooms, the bungalows were more modest and utilitarian. Large entrance halls and vestibules were replaced with front doors that entered directly into the living space. In the bungalow, “a pleasant living room with a cozy fireplace, built in bookcases, and an cupboard or two would serve the combined functions of a library, parlor, and sitting room. The bungalow cottage, most often simply called a bungalow, characteristically had a porch, living room, dining room, and kitchen downstairs and three bedrooms and bathrooms upstairs. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
In the bungalow, the front upstairs windows typically were in a dormer extending out from the front roof. The style had limited space but used it very effectively. There were numerous regional variations of the standard bungalow. California bungalows often had only one floor, and in Los Angeles the term “bungalow” came to be used for any low suburban house. In the Midwest the “Chicago bungalows” that covered much of that city’s outlying northerwest suburbs were uniformly single storied (with a room that could be finished upstairs), and all were brick faced. Bungalow homes were well suited for starter homes (some selected them as forever homes) insofar as they were reasonably priced, and they seemed to exude a mood of solid middle-class comfort. For many new families, they suggested upward mobility. Suburban bungalows were efficiently laid out and cold easily be managed by a middle-class housewife without the servants that had been part of the large Victorian houses. Bungalows, many of which are still occupied today, substituted technology for hand power. Bungalows had all the modern convenience of central heating, water heaters, indoor plumbing, and gas ovens and stoves. Bungalows also invariably had residential electric service. This made them very up-to-date residence. Electricity, for example was by no means universally found in homes at the time of World War I. As of 1917 only one-quarter (24.3 percent) of all homes in the United States of America were electrified. Even many city homes were still lit by gas or, if the family was poor, by kerosene. Following the war electric service quickly became the norm. By 1920 the proportion of homes having electric service had jumped to almost half (47.7 percent), and by 1930 it was 85 percent. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
The northwest side of Chicago still has miles and miles of virtually identical well-maintained “Chicago bungalows” built in the 1920s. The Chicago bungalows had an unfinished second floor which was reached by entering from the kitchen. Over the years many owners converted the second floors into children’s bedrooms. Suburban bungalows were smaller than earlier Victorian homes, partially because of smaller families and no live-in servants. However, most important in reducing floors space were he rising construction costs of building “modern” homes with built-in central heating, indoor plumbing, and electric sockets for plugging in lamps and modern labor-saving devices such as electric Hoover vacuum cleaners. In the east and Midwest, bungalows commonly had concrete-floored basements with washtubs having running hot and cold water. This was a major advance. Some earlier houses had not had semifinished basements entered from the house, but dirt-floored cellars entered by external lift-up cellar doors. Also, these basements differed from those of earlier years in that they were designed not as much for storage as to be electrically lighted and centrally heated places where the new electric washing machine with ringer could be kept, where the washed clothes could be hung to dry in winter, and where the husband could have a workroom. Following World War II, it became the fad for homeowners to enclose a “family room” in the basement. Often the new television set would be kept in this family room. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Among the “modern” features in some bungalows were faux fireplaces with gas-fired logs. These went out of fashion in the 1940s, and many of the gas systems were disconnected for safety reasons. Ironically, as of the 1900s gas-fired logs are again in style among affluent baby boomers who want a fireplace but do not want the bother of real wood. However, some still enjoy the scent of a burning log in the winter as it is nostalgic of wonderful times. The post-World War housing boom is usually blamed for identical housing styles, but the suburban bungalow had perfected the art of mass-producing suburban homes far before the postwar look-alike subdivisions. Even complete homes with all building material included could be purchased from catalogs. The most long-lived of the mail-order builders was the Aladdin Company, but Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward also were major sellers of prefabricated bungalows. Between 1908 and 1937, Sears sold roughly 100,000 mail-order houses, primarily in the Midwest and the East. Sears, in their catalog, offered several prefabricated homes and all the precut parts. Everything from plans to lumber to doors to fixtures was dropped off at the nearest railway station. Both Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward also pushed appliances and furniture to those purchasing homes, figuring that those who were buying a new house were excellent customers for purchasing household goods. The retailer thus not only sold the home but everything that wen into it. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Sears did not leave the mail-order business until 1937, when the Depression forced them out. Sears had made the mistake of not only selling the homes, but also financing them. Sears made too many installment loans to buyers who lost their jobs and thus could not pay their mortgages. “Train children in the right way, and when old they will not stray,” reports Proverbs 22.6. Everyone believes it: by instruction, by discipline, and by example parents shape their children. To be convinced, most of us need look no further than our families. We see ourselves reacting to situations much as our mothers or fathers did. We hear their admonitions echoing in our minds. We relish their approval. We carry forward many of their values. And we see ourselves not only reaching backward into our children, chips off ourselves. Countless research studies seem to confirm the potency of parenting. The extremes of parenting provide the clearest evidence: the abused children who later become abusive, the unloved who become unloving. Orphanage-reared infants who are given minimal custodial care—ample food and a warm bed, but not much else—often become withdrawn, frightened, even speech. By contrast, children who develop an optimistic self-image and a happy, self-reliant manner tend to have been reared by caring parents who are neither permissive nor autocratic, parents who maintain firm standards without depriving their children of a sense of control over their own lives. In many ways we can see the parent in the child. By ten mothers of age, our babbling mirrors the sounds ad intonations of our parents’ language. In childhood, our attitudes, our play, and our ambitions usually look suspiciously like those of our same-gender parent. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
As adolescents, most of us still express the social, political, and religious views of our parents; the generation gap typically involves nothing more than difference in the strength with which we and our parents hold our shared values. So we know both from experience and from the accumulating evidence the parental power that was understood by the writer of Proverbs. How one trains up a child affects how the child relates, talks, dresses, thinks, and believes. Our assumptions about the power of positive parenting lead us to credit parents for their children’s achievements and blame them for their shortcoming. We may think about how we would have handled that troubled child—surely with better results. Some have therefore sought to hold parents responsible for their children’s criminal activities. Likewise, parents take personal pride in their children’s successes and feel guilt over their failures. Parents accept congratulations for the child who is elected class president and feel ashamed by the child who repeatedly is called to the principal’s office. Parents second-guess themselves: Where did we go wrong with him? How should we have handled her? It all makes perfect sense: if parents from children as a potter molds clay, then parents can indeed be praised for their children’s virtues and blamed for their children’s vices. Given our readiness to praise or blame, to feel pride or shame, we had best also to understand the limits of parental influence. For the accumulating evidence further testifies to the ways in which children are shaped by forces over which parents have little control. Once such force lies hidden within our genes, the architectural codes directing biochemical events that, down the line, design our bodies and influence our behaviours. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
By selective breeding of animals, by comparing the similarity of genetically identical twins with that of fraternal twins, and by asking whether adopted children more closely resemble their biological or adoptive parents, psychologist are discovering how our heredity forms us. There is religion in everything around us, a calm and holy religion in the unbreathing things in Nature. It is a meek and blessed influence, stealing in as it were unaware upon the hear; it comes quickly, and without excitement; it has no terror, no gloom; it does not rouse up the passions; I is untrammelled by creeds…it is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star; it is on the sailing could and in the invisible wind; it is among the hills and valleys of the Earth where the shrubless mountain-top pierces the thin atmosphere of eternal winter, or where the mighty forest fluctuates before the strong wind, with its dark waves of green foliage; it spreads out like a legible language upon the broad face of an unsleeping ocean; it is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us….and which opens to our imagination a World of spiritual beauty and holiness. Our Father, our King, do Thou soon make manifest to us the glory of Thy kingdom; please reveal Thyself and establish Thy exalted rule over us in the sight of all living. Assemble our scattered brethren from among that nations, and please gather our dispersed from the ends of the Earth. Please lead us with joyous song unto America Thy city, and with everlasting joy unto the United States of America, the home of Thy Sanctuary, where our forefather prepared unto Thee daily offerings. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19 We rely on others to inform us, but we still cannot be taught, and must de
Plumas Ranch offers three distinct communities to choose from: Riverside, Meadows, and Bluffs. Home sizes range from 1,740 to over 3,400 square feet.
These spacious floorplan, thoughtfully designed to enhance individual living spaces. Plus, take indoor/outdoor living to a whole new level with accessibility from both the dining room and great room, and an abundance of patio/deck options, included extended and covered patios/decks.
Room options include: a pass through pantry from the kitchen to the flex space, bedroom 5 in lieu of loft and upto three and one half bathrooms, and three-car garages available. Like all Cresleigh floorplans, their layouts are creative, versatile, and envisioned to maximize every available foot of space. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-plumas-ranch/
Nature, in Giving Humans Tears, Bears Witness She Gave Humans the Softest Hearts!
Last year was not all that bad. We led the league in flu shots. Becoming number one is easier than remaining number one. The split-up of production and consumption also created, in all Second Wave societies, a case of obsessive “macrophilia”—a kind of Texas infatuation with bigness and growth. If it were true that long production runs in the factory would produce lower unit costs, then, by analogy, increases in scale would produce economies in other activities as well. “Big” became synonymous with “efficient,” and maximization became the fifth key principle. Cities and nations would boast of having the tallest skyscraper, the largest damn, or the World’s biggest miniature golf course. Since bigness, moreover, was the result of growth, most industrial governments, corporations, and other organizations pursued the ideal of growth frenetically. Japanese workers and managers at the Matsushita Electric Company would jointly chorus each day: “Doing our best to promote production, sending our goods to the people of the World, endlessly and continuously, like water gushing from a fountain. Grow, industry, Grow, Grow, Grow! Harmony and sincerity! Matsushita Electric!” In 1960, as the United States of America completed the stage of traditional industrialism and began to feel the first effects of the Third Wave of change, its fifty largest industrial corporations had grown to employ an average of 80,000 workers each. General Motors alone employed 595,000, and one utility, Vail’s AT&T, employed 736,000 women and men. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
This meant, at an average household size of 3.3 that year, that well over 2,000,000 people were dependent upon paychecks from this one company alone—a group equal to one half the population of the entire country when Hamilton and Washington were stitching it into a nation. (Since then AT&T has swollen to even more gargantuan proportions. By 1970 it employed 956,000—having added 136,000 employees to its work force in a single twelve mother period. By 2020, because of diversification and advanced technology in telecommunications, the company AT&T had 230,000 employees, but is still the largest employer in the U.S. telecommunications industry today, ahead of Verizon, T-Mobile U.S. and Sprint. AT&T was a special case and, of course, Americans were peculiarly addicted to bigness. However, macrophilia was no monopoly of the Americans. In France in 1963 fourteen hundred firms—a mere .0025 percent of all companies—employed fully 38 percent of the work force. Governments in Germany, Britain, and other countries actively encouraged mergers to create even larger companies, in the belief that larger scale would help them compete against the American giants. Nor was this scale maximization simply a reflection of profit maximization. Karl Marx had associated the “increasing scale of industrial establishments” with the “wider development of their material power.” Dr. Lenin, turn, argued that “huge enterprises, trusts and syndicates had brought the mass production technique to its highest level of development.” His first order of business after the Soviet revolution was to consolidate Russian economic life into smallest possible number of the largest possible units. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24
Mr. Stalin pushed even harder for maximum scale and built vast new projects—the steel complex at Magnitogorsk, another at Zaporozhstal, the Balkhash copper smelting plant, the tractor plants at Kharkov and Stalingrad. He would ask how large a given American installation was, then order construction of an even larger one. In The Cult of Bigness in Soviet Economic Planning, Dr. Leon M. Herman writes: “In various parts of the USSR, in fact, local politicians became involved in a race for attracting the ‘World’s larges projects.’” By 1938 the Communist party warned against “gigantomania,” but with little effect. Even today Russian and East European communist leaders are victims of what Dr. Herman calls “the addiction to bigness.” Such faith in sheer scale derived from narrow Second Wave assumptions about the nature of “efficiency.” However, the macrophilia of industrialism went beyond mere plants. It was reflected in the aggregation of many different kinds of data into the statistical tool known as Gross National Product (GNP), which measured the “scale” of an economy by totting up the value of goods and services produced in it. This tool of the Second Wave economists had many failings. From the point of view of GNP it did not matter whether the output was in the form of food, education and health services, or munitions. The hiring crew to build a home or to demolish one both added to GNP, even though one activity added to the stock of housing and the other subtracted from it. GNP also, because it measured only market activity or exchanges, relegated to insignificance a whole vital sector of the economy based on unpaid production—child-rearing and housework, for example. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
Despite these shortcomings, Second Wave governments around the World entered into a blind race to increase GNP at all costs, maximizing “growth” even at the risk of ecological and social disaster. The macrophiliac principle was built so deeply into the industrial mentality that nothing seemed more reasonable. Maximization went along with standardization, specialization, and the other industrial ground rules. Finally, all industrial nations developed centralization into a fine art. While the Church and many First Wave rulers knew perfectly well how to centralize power, they dealt with far les complex societies and were crude amateurs by contrast with the men and women who centralized industrial societies from the group floor up. All complicated societies require a mixture of both centralized and decentralized operations. However, the shift from a basically decentralized First Wave economy, with each locality largely responsible for producing its own necessities, to the integrated national economies of the Second Wave led to totally new methods for centralizing power. These came into play at the level of individual companies, industries, and the economy as a whole. The early railroads provide a classic illustration. Compared with other business they were the giants of their day. In the United States of America in 1850 only forty-one factories had a capitalization of $250,000.00 USD ($8,740,097.40 USD in 2021 dollars) or more. By contrast, the New York Central Railroad as early as 1860 boasted a capitalization of $30,000,000.00 USD ($972,993,975.90 USD in 2021 dollars). To run such a gargantuan enterprise, new management methods were needed. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24
The early railroad managers, therefore, like the managers of the space program in our own era, had to invent new techniques. They standardized technologies, fares, and schedules. They synchronized operations over hundreds of miles. They created specialized new occupations and departments. They concentrated capital, energy, and people. They fought to maximize the scale of their networks. And to accomplish all this they created new forms of organization based on centralization of information and command. Employees were divided into “line” and “staff.” Daily reports were initiated to provide data on car movements, loadings, damages, lost freight, repairs, engine miles, et cetera. All this information flowed up a centralized chain of command until it reached the general superintendent who made the decisions and sent orders down the line. The railroads, as business historian Alfred D. Chandler Jr., has shown, soon became a model for other large organizations, and centralized management came to be regarded as an advanced, sophisticated tool in all the Second Wave nations. In politics, too, the Second Wave encouraged centralization. In the United States of America, as early as the late 1780’s, this was illustrated by the battle to replace the loose, decentralist Articles of Confederation with a more centralist Constitution. Generally the First Wave rural interests resisted the concentration of power in the national government, while Second Wave commercial interest led by Hamilton argued, in The Federalist and elsewhere, that a strong central government was essential not only for military and foreign policy reasons but for economic growth. The resultant Constitution of 1787 was an ingenious comprise. Because First Wave forces were still strong, the Constitution reserved important powers to the states rather than the central government. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24
To prevent overly strong central power it also called for a unique separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers. However, the Constitution also contained elastic language that would eventually permit the federal government to extend its reach drastically. As industrialization pushed the political system toward greater centralization, the government in Washington took on an increasing number of powers and responsibilities and monopolized more and more decision-making at the center. Within the federal government, meanwhile, power shifted from Congress and the courts to the most centralist of the three branches—the Executive. By the Nixon years, historian Arthur Schlesinger (himself once an ardent centralizer) was attacking the “imperial presidency.” The pressures toward political centralization were even stronger outside the United States of America. A quick look at Sweden, Japan, Britain, or France is enough to make the United States of America’s system seem decentralized by comparison. Jean-Francois Revel, author of Without Marx or Jesus, makes this point in describing how governments respond to political protest: “When a demonstration is forbidden in France, there is never any doubt about the source of the prohibition. If it is a question of a major political demonstration, it is the [central] government,” he says. “In the United States of America, however, when a demonstration is forbidden, the first question everyone asks is, ‘By whom?’” Dr. Revel points out that it is usually some local authority operating autonomously. The extremes of political centralization were found, of course, in the Marxist industrial nations. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24
In 1850 Mr. Marx called for a “decisive centralization of power in the hands of the state.” Mr. Engels, like Mr. Hamilton before him, attacked decentralized confederations as “an enormous step backward.” Latter on the Soviets, eager to accelerate industrialization, proceeded to construct the most highly centralized political and economic structure of all, submitting even the smallest of production decisions to the control of central planners. The gradual centralization of a once decentralization economy was assisted, moreover, by a crucial invention whose very name reveals its purpose: the central bank. In 1694, at the very dawn of the industrial age, while Newcomen was still tinkering with the steam engine, William Paterson organized the Bank of England—which became a template for similar centralist institutions in all Second Wave phase without constructing its own equivalent of this machine for the central control of money and credit. Paterson’s bank sold government bonds; it issued government back currency; it later began to regulate the lending practices of other banks. Eventually it took on the primary function of all central banks today: central control of the money supply. In 1800 the Banque de France was formed for similar purposes. This was followed by the formation of the Reichsbank in 1875. In the United States of America, the collision between First and Second Wave forces led to a major battle over central banking shortly after the adoption of the Constitution. Mr. Hamilton, the most brilliant advocate of the Second Wave policies, argued for a national bank on the English Model. The South and the frontier West, still wedded to agriculture, opposed him. Nevertheless, with the support of the industrializing Northeast, he succeeded in forcing through legislation that created the Bank of the United State—forerunner of today’s Federal Reserve System. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
Employed by government to regulate the level and rate of market activity, central banks introduced—by the back door, as it were—a degree of unofficial short-range planning into capitalist economies. Money flowed through every artery in Second Wave societies, both capitalist and socialist. Both needed, and therefore created, a centralized money pumping station. Central banking and centralized government marches hand in hand. Centralization was another dominating principle of Second Wave civilization. What we see, therefore, is a set of six guiding principles, a “program” that operated to one degree or another in all the Second Wave countries. These half-dozen principles—standardization, specialization—were applied in both the capitalist and socialist wings of industrial society because they grew, inescapably, out of the basic cleavage between producer and consumer and the ever-expanding role of the market. These principles in turn, each reinforcing the other, led relentlessly to the rise of bureaucracy. They produced some of the biggest, most rigid, most powerful bureaucratic organizations the World had ever seen, leaving the individual to wander in a Kafka-like World of looming mega-organizations. If today we feel oppressed and overpowered by them, we can trace our problems to the hidden code that programmed the civilization of the Second Wave. This six principles that formed this code lent a distinctive stamp to Second Wave civilization. Today, as we shall shortly see, every one of these fundamental principles is under attack by the forces of the Third Wave. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24
So, indeed, are the Second Wave elites who are still applying these rules—in business, in banking, in labour relations, in government, in education, in the media. For the rise of a new civilization challenges all the vested interests of the old one. In the upheavals that lie immediately ahead, the elites of all industrial societies—so accustomed to setting the rules—will in all likelihood go the way of the feudal lords of the past. Some will be by-passed. Others will be dethroned. Many will be reduced to impotence or shabby gentility. Several—the most intelligent and adaptive—will be transformed and emerge as leaders of the Third Wave civilization. To understand who will run things tomorrow as the Third Wave is becoming dominant, we must first know exactly who is running things today. Modern suburbia is the period of the twentieth century prior to the second World War was one of momentous changes in the volume of suburbanization. This was the era in which the city reached is zenith and suburbs fully came into their own. Cities were booming. The year 1920 was a watershed insofar as it marked the first time the nation was more than half (51.7 percent) urban. The Roaring Twenties exemplified the urban adolescence of a country that was now explicitly being shaped by urban goals and values. As stated during the Depression of the 1930s by the Report of the Urbanization Committee to the National Resources Committee: “The faults of out cities are not those of decadence and impending decline, but of exuberant vitality crowding its way forward under tremendous pressure—the flood rather than the drought. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
“The city is both the great playground and the great battleground of the Nation…An unprecedented mobility arising from the harnessing of stream, electricity, and internal-combustion engine to humans and materials are responsible for this phenomenal urban development. Swifter forms of urban and interurban transportation have further led to suburban migration and caused the emergence of metropolitan districts instead of individual cities as the actual areas of urban life.” Thus, in the period before the second World War, the cities appeared robust and growing in economic and social dominance, not in decline and decay. Suburbs were part of the growth of the urban area, no longer simply a footnote. With some 17 million residents in 1930 (the total American population was 123.1 million), suburbs were becoming a majority component of metropolitan population. Suburban population was already 45 percent as large as the central-city population. Suburbs built between the first and second World Wars (1918-1942) represented the first steps toward mass suburbanization. Elite suburbs of the nineteenth-century model—that is large, large architecturally designed homes—continued to be built. However, such suburbs, as for example, Shaker Heights, east of Cleveland, Ohio; were now more oriented to streetcar lines than railroads. Moreover, the growing upper-middle class use of automobiles for commuting now put a premium on living in a quality suburb not too distant from downtown offices. Thus, across the country, upper-status inner-ring suburbs on the “good side” of the city saw fine homes constructed during the 1920s. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24
These pre-World War II suburbs were built to have the best of both Worlds. They could appeal to the long standing antiurbanism of many Americans. They also appealed to those seeking to remove themselves from heavy concentration of new immigrant populations in the central cities. The suburbs could also boas that with their greenery they were closer to nature and thus better places to raise children. All this could be enjoyed while residents remained within a short commute of the city and kept all urban advantages. This meant not only the city’s cultural life and nightlife, but more importantly, the advantages of the city’s gas, electric, and telephone utilities. Inner-ring suburbs might have their own government, run their own schools, and collect their own lower taxes, but they were connected to city gas mains, electric lines, water and sewer systems, and telephones. Affluent suburban residents thus obtained all the practical advantages of living in the city while escaping the costs and problems. No wonder the popular middle-class women’s magazine such as Ladies’ Home Journal, Redbook, and Good Housekeeping extolled the benefits of suburban living. You could have the mythical American Pie Life with a beautiful house with the gorgeous roses surrounded by the pristine white picket fence while surrendering none of the urban comforts and advantages. Housing styles in affluent lace curtain between-war suburbs reflected the privileged positions of their owners. Depending on one’s preference, the homeowner could build an ideal home in a Colonial New England style while next door a Grand Queen Anne Victorian and next to an English half-timbered Tutor, and across the Street from a center-entrance Georgian and at the corner a Spanish-Moorish style villa. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
The last style reflected the importance of the expanding Southern California movie industry. Films such as The Sheik created a fad for all things thought to be Moorish Arab, which, when combined with the Spanish influences in Southern California, produced an ersatz Spanish-Moorish style found in places as far from the ocean and sun as Milwaukee, Wisconsin. An excellent example of the ersatz style then called Spanish is expensive Palos Verdes, Estates outside of Los Angeles. The style has come to be known as Californian style; that is, low hacienda-style stucco-sided and red-tiled-roofed homes with terraces and verandas. Overall, if not exciting, Palos Verdes produced a very pleasant and harmonious physical perspective. Architectural styles during the 1920s and early 1930 were often mixed in occasionally bizarre and electric fashions. For example, for a number of years I lived in the suburb of Shorewood, just north of Milwaukee, in a marvelous 1930 Dutch Colonial home that had a living room done in Spanish-Moorish style complete with rounded arches and rough Spanish plaster. The builders of such homes created for themselves far more than housing; they created the romantic idealization of earlier eras. “A man’s home was his castle,” where he could life if not as a lord, at least as a latter-day country gentleman. And all this could be had while benefiting from twentieth-century urban technology of indoor plumbing, central heating, and electricity. In the words of President Herbert Hoover, “To own one’s home is a physical expression of individualism, of enterprise, of independence, and of the freedom of spirit” (Speech quoted in American Home, February 1932, p. 253). #RandolphHarris 12 of 24
It should be remembered that most of the communities in which these “expressions of individualism” were located were deliberately racially, religiously, ethnically, and economically restricted In Palos Verdes, for example, cost restrictions mandated minimum lot sizes, set back requirements, and minimum construction costs. Residential covenants attached to the deeds excluded most groups and religions. An exception was made for live-in servants. The irony of such exclusive housing is that the heritage for the architecture that was so popular came from a community development designed to copy Mexican-style hacienda architecture apparently never occurred to the developers or residents. The feeling of being accepted by someone we love is a basic human need. In the pas 100 years, the United States of America has changed significantly and become far more loving and accepting. Being accepted by good people motivates us. It increases our sense of self-worth and self-confidence. Those who cannot find acceptance from desirable sources often seek it elsewhere. They may look to people who are not interested in their well-being. They may attach themselves to false friends and do questionable things to try to receive the acknowledgement they are seeking. They may seek acceptance by wearing a particular brand of clothing to generate a feeling of belonging or status. For some, striving for a role or a position of prominence can also be a way of seeking acceptance. They define their worth by a position they hold or status they obtain. Even in the Church we are not always free from this type of thinking. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
Seeking acceptance from the wrong sources or for incorrect reasons puts us on a dangerous path—one that is likely to lead us astray and even to destruction. Instead of feeling cherished and self-confident, we will eventually feel abandoned and inferior. However, see that you look to God and live. The ultimate source of empowerment and lasting acceptance is our Heavenly Father and His Son, Jesus Christ. They know us. They love us. They do not accept us because of our title or position. They do not look at our status. They look into our hearts. They accept us for who we are and what we are striving to become. Seeking and receiving acceptance from Them will always lift and encourage us. As we look into our hearts, we screen ourselves. What no one around us knows, we surely know. We know our motives and desires. When we engage in sincere, honest reflection, we do not rationalize or deceive ourselves. As we sincerely and prayerfully ponder he extent to which our hearts are hones and broken, we will be taught by the Holy Ghost. We will receive a sweet confirmation or gentle correction, inviting us to act. At first it would seem that humans in the World, having among themselves no type of moral relations or acknowledged duties, could be neither good nor evil, and had neither vices nor virtues, unless, if we take these words in a physical sense, we call those qualities that can harm an individual’s preservation “vices” in one, and those that can contribute to it “virtues.” In that case it would be necessary to call the one who least resists the simple impulses of nature the most virtuous. However, without departing from the standard meaning of these words, it is appropriate to suspend the judgment we could make regarding such a situation and to be on our guard against our prejudices, until we have examined with scale in hand whether there are more virtues than vices among civilized humans. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
Or whether all things considered they would not be in a happier set of circumstances if they had neither evil to fear nor good to hope for from anyone, rather than subjecting themselves to a universal dependence and obliging themselves to receive everything from those who do not oblige themselves to give them anything. Above all, let us not conclude with Dr. Hobbes that because humans have no idea of goodness one is naturally evil; that one is vicious because one does not know virtue; that one always refuses to preform service for one’s fellow humans which one reasonably attributes to oneself, to those things one needs, one foolishly imagines oneself to be the sole proprietor of the entire Universe. Dr. Hobbes has very clearly seen the defect of all modern definitions of natural right, but the consequences one draws from one’s own definition show that one takes it in a sense that is no less false. Were he to have reasoned on the basis of the principles he established, Dr. Hobbes should have said that since the state of nature is in the state in which the concern for our self-preservation is the least prejudicial to that of others, that state was consequently the most appropriate for the peace and the best suited for the human race. Dr. Hobbes says precisely the opposite, because he had wrongly injected into the savage human’s concern for self-preservation the need to satisfy a multitude of passions which are the product of society and which have made laws necessary. The evil human, he says, is a robust child. It remains to be seen whether savage humans are a robust child. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
Were we to grant Dr. Hobbes this, what would we conclude from it? That is this human were as dependent on others when one is robust as one is when one is weak, there is no type of excess to which one would not tend: one would not tend: if she was too slow in offering one nourishment, one would disrespect one’s mother; should one find one’s younger brother annoying, one would harm him; should one be assaulted or aggravated by an individual, one would bite that person’s leg. However, being robust and being dependent are two contradictory suppositions in the state of nature. When they are dependent, humans are weak, and when one is emancipated from that dependence before one is robust. Dr. Hobbes did not see that the same cause prevents them at the same time from abusing their faculties, as one oneself maintains. Hence we could say that savages are not evil precisely because hey do not know what it is to be good; for it is neither the development of enlightenment nor the restraint imposed by the law, but the clam of the passions and the ignorance of vices which prevents the from doing evil. So much more profitable to these is the ignorance of vice than the knowledges of virtue is to those. Moreover, there is another principle that Dr. Hobbes failed to notice, and which, having been given to humans in order to mitigate, in certain circumstances, the ferocity of one’s egocentrism or the desire for self-preservation before this egocentrism of one came into being, tempers the ardor one has for one’s own well-being by an innate repugnance o seeing one’s fellow humans suffer. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
I do not believe I have any contradiction to fear in grating the only natural virtue that the most excessive detractor of human virtues was forced to recognize. I am referring to pity, a disposition that is fitting for beings that are as weak and as subject to ills as we are; a virtue all the more universal and the more useful to humans in that it precedes in one any kind of reflection, and so natural that even animals sometimes show noticeable signs of it. Without speaking of the tenderness of mothers for their young and of the perils hey have to brave in order to protect them, one daily observes the repugnance that horses have for trampling a living body with their hooves. An animal does not go undisturbed past a dead animal of its own species. There are even some animals that give them a kind of sepulchre; and the mournful lowing of the cattle entering a slaughterhouse voices the impression they received of the horrible spectable that strikes them. One notes with pleasure the author of The Fable of the Bees, having been forced to acknowledge humans as a compassionate and sensitive being, departing from one’s cold and subtle style in the example one gives, to offer us the pathetic image of an imprisoned human who sees outside one’s cell a ferocious animal tearing a child from its mother’s arms and nourishment, mashing its frail limbs with its murderous teeth, and ripping with its claws the child’s quivering entrails. What horrible agitation must be felt by this witness of an event in which one has no personal interest! What anguish must one suffer at this sigh, being unable to be of any help to the fainting mother or to the dying child. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
Such is the pure movement of nature prior to all reflection. Such is the force of natural pity, which the most depraved mores still have difficulty destroy, since everyday one sees in our theaters someone affected and weeping at the ills of some unfortunate person, and who, were one in the tyrant’s place, would intensify the torments of one’s enemy still more; [like the bloodthirsty Sulla, so sensitive to ills he had not caused, or like Alexander of Pherae, who did not dare attend the performance of any tragedy, for fear of being seen weeping with Andromache and Priam, and yet who listened impassively to the cries of so many citizens who were killed every day on his orders. Nature, in giving humans tears, bears witness that she gave the human race the softest hearts.] If nature have not given humans pity to assist their reason, there is a clear awareness that, with all their mores, humans would have never been anything but monsters; but one has not seen that from this quality alone flow all the social virtues that one wants to deny in humans. In fact, what are generosity, mercy, and humanity, if not pity applied to the weak, to the guilty, or to the human species in general. Benevolence and even friendship are, properly understood, the products of a constant pity fixed on a particular object; for is desiring that someone not suffer anything but desiring that one be happy? Were it true that the commiseration were merely a sentiment that puts us in the position of the one who suffers, a sentiment that is obscure and power in savage humans, develop but weak in humans dwelling in civil society, what importance would this idea have to the truth of what I say, expect to give it more force? #RandolphHarris 18 of 24
In fact, commiseration will be all the more energetic as the witnessing animal identifies itself more intimately with the suffering animal. Now it is evident that this identification must have been infinitely close in the state of nature than in the state of reasoning. Reason is what engenders egocentrism, and reflection strengthens it. Reason is what engenders egocentrism, and reflection strengthens it. Reason is what turns humans in upon oneself. Reason is what separates one from all that troubles one and afflicts one. For centuries, philosophers have debated what it means to be human. However, the answer has eluded us. Perhaps it is because it is so simple. To be human means to choose. Philosophy is what isolated one and what moves one to say in secret, at the sight of a suffering human, “Perish if you will; I am safe and sound.” No longer can anything but danger to the entire society trouble the tranquil slumber of the philosopher and yank one from one’s bed. One’s fellow humans can be killed with impunity underneath one’s window. One has merely to place one’s hands over one’s ears and argue with oneself a little in order to prevent nature, which rebels within one, from identifying one with the human being assassinated. Savage humans do not have this admirable talent, and for lack of wisdom and reason one is always seen thoughtlessly talent, and for lack of wisdom and reason one is always seen thoughtlessly giving in to the first sentiment of humanity. When there is a riot or a street brawl, the populace gathers together; the prudent human withdraws from the scene. It is the rabble, the women of the marketplace, who separate the combatants and prevent decent people from killing one another. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
It is therefore quite certain that pity is a natural sentiment, which, by moderate in each individual the activity of the love of oneself, contributes to the mutual of the entire species. Pity is what carries us without reflection to the assistance of those we see suffering. Pity is what, in the state of nature, takes the place of laws, mores, and virtue, with the advantage that no one is tempted to disobey its sweet voice. Pity is what will prevent every robust savage from robbing a weak child or an infirm old man of one’s hard-earned subsistence, if one oneself expects to be able to find one’s own someplace else. Instead of the sublime maxim of reasoned justice, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, pity inspires all humans with another maxim of natural goodness, much less perfect but perhaps more useful than the preceding one: Do what is good for you with as little hard as possible to others. In a word, it is in this natural sentiment, rather than in subtle arguments, that one must search for the cause of the repugnance at doing evil that every human would experience, even independently of the maxims of education. Although it might be appropriate for Socrates and minds of his stature to acquire virtue through reason, the human race would long ago have ceased to exist, if its preservation had depended solely on the reasoning of its members. With passions so minimally active and such a salutary restraint, being more wild than evil, and more attentive to protecting themselves from the harm they could receive than tempted to do harm to others, humans were not so subject to very dangerous conflicts. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24
Since they had no sort of intercourse among themselves; since, as a consequence, they knew neither vanity, nor deference, nor esteem, nor contempt; since they had not the slightest notion of mine and thine, nor any true idea of justice; since they regarded the acts of violence that could befall them as an easily redressed evil and not as an offense that must be punished; and since they did not even dream of vengeance except perhaps as a knee-jerk response right then and there, like the dog that bites the stone that is thrown at one, their disputes would rarely have had bloody consequences, if their subject had been no more sensitive than food. Likewise, a mother who is overwhelmed by power negative emotions, like anger or grief, while nursing her infant, could be the cause of its spasms and convulsions. Even medical science admits that a depressive kind of emotionalism contributes towards causing hardening of the arteries and hence earlier old age. Whenever Gandhi had an important decision to make, and went through protected self-wrangling in the process, the physician who attended him noted that his blood pressure rose considerably. Once Gandhi went to sleep in such a condition. Next morning the pressure had fallen to normal. During the night he had ended the mental pressure and arrived at a decision! Angina pectoris is recognized by many physicians now as a very serious disease, often fatal and always painful, mostly brought on by extreme nervous tension. The power of the mind over flesh is proved convincingly even by such simple, everyday experiences as the vomiting caused by a horrible sigh, the weeping caused by a tragic one, the loss of appetite of positive indigestion caused by bad news, and the headache caused by quarreling. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
As long as we live in this World, trails and tribulations will dog our steps. Job has it right. “Human life on Earth is just one unending trudge” (7.1). Each one of us, therefore, ought to take care. Do not underestimate the power of a temptation. Do no overestimate your own power of a temptation. Do not overestimate your power to resist a temptation. After all, we do not want the Devil to take us by surprise. He never sleeps. He goes about seeking whom he may devour, as Peter wrote in his First Letter (5.8). What is the moral? No one’s so honied and wholesome that one cannot be deviled for dinner. And at dinner, or so the Gospels would have us believe, the Devil’s the guest from Hell. Yes, temptations are often useful to the human race, whether they come n small packages or large. However, how can this be? They bring us low, purge, scourge, and school us in the fire; that is to say, they scare the living daylights out of us. All the Saints have passed barefoot over the coals and in the process still made some spiritual progress. Alas, those who cannot withstand temptations become the shipwrecked, cast adrift forever. Yes, there is a moral. There is no religious order so lofty or monastery so remote that the Unwanted Visitor cannot slip in and make some mischief. Over time Humankind has not been able to defend itself successfully from the assaults of all temptations. Our common experience tells us that. And the reason why? The source of our temptations has already invaded us; that is to say, we were born in concupiscence, and in concupiscence we thrive. Sad to say, we did not need the Letter of James to remind us that (1.14). #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
We do have some success in the fight. However, as one temptation or tribulations is dispatched, another will soon take its place. We will always have something to whack away at, it seems, for are no we still paying the price for pummeling our Primal Felicity? Many seek to flee he temptations altogether. Alas, the escape route is clogged, and the refugee is destined to succumb! Advancing to the rear, then, is not the answer. We cannot hope to conquer that way. However, through spiritual cunning—that is to say, through Patience and True Humility—we become the stronger, and the tempters have to try harder. If a wildly successful plant—that is to say, a temptation—causes you pain, you will probably take the pruning knife and trim it back. Do that, and it will return the hardier. Pull out its root, however, and it is gone forever. You will feel better, and your spiritual garden will recover its charm. The way we stand, you can see we have grown up this way together, out of the same soil, with the same rains, leaning in the same way toward the Sun. See how we lean together in the same direction. How the dead limbs of one of us rest in the branches of another. How those branches have grown around the limbs. How the two are inseparable. And if you look you can see the different ways we have taken this place into us. Magnolia, loblolly bay, sweet gum, Southern bayberry, Pacific bayberry; whenever we grow there are many of us; Monterey pine, sugar pine, white-bark pine, four-lead pine, single-leaf pine, bristle-cone pine, foxtail pine, Torrey pine, Western red pine, Jeffrey pine, bishop pine. And we are various, and amazing in our variety, and our differences multiply, so that edge after edge of the endlessness of possibility is exposed. You know we have grown this way for years. And to no purpose you can understand. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
Yet what you fail to know we know, and the knowing is in us, how we have grown this way, why these years were not one of them heedless, why we are shaped the way we are, not all straight to your purpose, but to ours. And how we are each purpose, how each cell, how light and soil are in us, how we are in the soil, how we are in the air, how we are both infinitesimal and great and how we are infinitely without any purpose you can see, in the way we stand, each alone, yet none of us separable none of us beautiful when separate but all exquisite as we stand, each moment heeded in this cycle, no detail unlovely. Our God and God of our father and mothers, please remember the merit of our ancestors who, from year to year, appeared before Thee in America, Thy Holy City. How deep was their rejoicing as they brought their offerings before Thee! We pray Thee, imbue us, O Lord our God, with their faith in Thee and their joy in Thy World, their love for Thy Scripture and their yearning for freedom and justice. May we, in their spirit of sacrificial devotion, fulfill our duty toward the rebuilding of Thy Holy Land, the fountain of our life, that we may ever serve Thee in reverence as in days of yore. Because of our sins we were exiled from the Holy Land and removed far away from its sacred soil We cannot therefore make our festival pilgrimages before Tee nor can we fulfill our obligations in Thy chosen House, the great and holy Temple which was called by Thy name, because of the destruction that has come upon Thy Sanctuary. May it be Thy will, O Lord our God and God of our fathers and mothers, merciful King, in Thine abundant compassion, again to have mercy upon us and upon Thy Sanctuary. O rebuild it speedily and please enhance its glory. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24
Cresleigh Homes
What’s better than the most priceless art in the world? A view like this! The incredible wall of windows in the Mills Station Res 3 model is worth checking out; a home with everything you need, including truly remarkable outdoor living space. It’s truly breathtaking! https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-3/
Randolph Harris II International Institute 