An extensive response to Pope Benedict's University of Regensburg speech can be read at:

LOGOS I
http://authorsden.com/visit/viewarticle.asp?id=24532
Prologue
The Light of Reason & The Fractious Fault
Hereclitean Structuralism
Doomed & Redoomed
The Goddess of Margins
Virgin Sacrifice on the Margin
Paul of Ephesus
The Science of Mysteries
Dividing the Spoils

LOGOS II
http://authorsden.com/visit/viewarticle.asp?id=24792
The Relatively Absolute God
Historical Criticism
All Systems Are Doomed by God
Germanic Historicism
Absolutely Speaking

LOGOS III
http://authorsden.com/visit/viewarticle.asp?id=24904
Works of Good Faith
Nothing is Perfect
The Papal Jihad
The Golden Days of Reason
The Sticking Point
The Decline of Logos
The Constrasting Crusade
The Ambiguous Balance


LOGOS IV
http://authorsden.com/visit/viewarticle.asp?id=25235
Violent Verbal Intercourse
The Egyptian Logos
Spelling the End of War
Lovespell
Poetic Love
Speaking of Ignorance
Forged by Enmity
Merely Academic Love
The Universal Love of Mo Ti

LOGOS V
http://authorsden.com/visit/viewarticle.asp?id=25637
The Social Psychology of Reasonable Love
The Fine Art of Loving
The Actual Practice of Love
The Battle of the Sexes
The Difference Between Faith & Love
Turkey Talks

LOGOS VI
http://authorsden.com/visit/viewarticle.asp?id=26021
God's Virgin
The Greek Way
That Woman

LOGOS VII
http://authorsden.com/visit/viewarticle.asp?id=26546
Mother of God!
Twelve Anathematisms
A Hypatian Excursus
An Aside On Three Historians

LOGOS VIII
http://authorsden.com/visit/viewarticle.asp?id=26755
The Infernal Quibbling
Back to the Nestorian Controversy

LOGOS IX
http://authorsden.com/visit/viewarticle.asp?id=26947
The Assumption
Mary's House of Love
The Quiddity of Love
Having Sex and Violence
Note on Oral Intercourse
Genitalia et Rationalis

The Sacred Power of Innovation
by David Arthur Walters

"Theory without practice and practice without theory are of no avail." Pythoagoras

For Gary Forsee

Harvard professor Michael Porter worships the idol Competition with his book, Competition, a popular self-help business-success book designed for members of the dominant minority who lack the innovative powers of the active creative minority who established private capitalism. Professor Porter's collaboration with businessmen on practical projects has been fruitful; however, given the disjunction between words and deeds that plagues the race, it is doubtful whether Porter's book will have many positive results.

The founding fathers of the first great businesses in America were men of deeds, not words. They certainly were not university professors. One or two of them had college degrees and a few were illiterate. Those who can, do; those who can't, teach. That is not to say that teachers are useless - quite to the contrary. But innovative businessmen who created the myth of self-help and competition seldom listened to business professors. Since then, the growth of large commercial modes of action has fostered the rise of the masters of business administration cult. The MBA cult is derived from the Jesuit order of self-examination and -denial and blind obedience to the system; the Jesuit regimen was abstracted and adopted by European military academies and was eventually passed on to today's highly regarded business schools.

Our general form of learning is, as Thorstein B. Veblen explained in The Higher Learning As An Expression of the Pecuniary Culture, a development of the early learning which "consisted in an acquisition of knowledge and facility in the service of a supernatural agent. It was therefore closely analogous in character to the training required for the domestic service of a temporal master.... What was learned was how to make one indispensable to these powers.... Propitiation was the end, and this end was sought, in great part, by acquiring facility in subservience...."

The fundamental function of today's pragmatic professor is to reinforce the current myth of reality in vogue, in marked contrast to the professor of liberal education, whose modern obligation was, at least prior to the installation of the mathematics tripod, to buck systems, under protection of his tenure. The current myth: Students are solitary, autonomous individuals who can succeed providing they take the hardheaded, realistic approach, and compete to fit into the system. Conforming to the "reality" of "how things actually work" as defined by received authority is the practical thing to do. The illusion of democratic individuality divides the mass into units, conquering them while conforming them to mass production and consumption of standard products. Competition organizes the mass into a few winners and many losers, creating the illusion that only winning and losing count and not the persons themselves. Furthermore, the competition cult fosters the fear of failure and provokes guilt feelings, further reinforcing conformity to external quantitative standards, rendering useless qualitative concepts of internal integrity and human dignity.

The professional system is in fact a trap or box that encourages adjustment to its parameters as professed by "impartial" or "value-neutral" civic leaders, who are in fact political ideologues hence exemplars of bad faith. The "objective" system preached tends to stifle human creativity and innovation. Therefore it is not surprising that people inside the box are anxious, including the human engineers who have lost their ability to innovate because they too have been engineered. Individuals inside the system exhibit the sort of behavior we see in crabs when put into a basket without a lid to restrain them. They compete with each other, try to tear each other apart, instead of simply climbing out of the basket; the wasteful competition creates a great deal of wealth for the crabmasters. A few crabby individuals sense something is profoundly wrong with the system; they proceed to point out the fact that the cage has no lid. Others begin to question the symbols embedded in the trap. The challenge must be met lest everyone crawls out of the box and production falters.

The zoological philosophers know how to respond to the challenge: they learned a very important lesson during their hog-farming days. Piglets tend to bite each others tails and ears off and otherwise damage the stock. A hog farmer found a diversionary occupation. He picked up some discarded broken bowling balls and put them in the pens for the piglets to play with - the problem was solved. In human society, books help to allay the anxiety and reinforce the current myth of reality, especially self-help books - help-others books are unpopular in our self-help culture for that would contradict the illusion.

Now if business leaders would write down two or three of Professor Porter's suggestions and practice them, his book might be influential. If only they would innovate by first disillusioning themselves of the trap they are in!

Professor Porter's ideology, or rather the pragmatic anti-ideology he professes, is exceedingly familiar. Ideology does not matter, he says, when it comes to seizing competitive advantage. What matters is What Works; those who want to succeed must find out what works, then do it. The right information is crucial to success and can be found by those who are not blinded by conventional thinking. The professor looked around and discovered what really works if one wants to take advantage of competition: innovation. Who would have guessed it in our regressive neoconservative state? Thank you!

Professor Porter's notion reminds us of the advice from people in cubicles to "think outside of the box." That is very difficult thing to do when one has been boxed-up all one's life, especially if the box is comfortable. After all, a CEO who rises to the office on the top of the box and who is paid multi-million dollar salaries often gets a high grade for conformity - there are exceptions. Innovation is a product of curiosity, and too much curiosity killed the cat. The chief role of institutional leaders is to provide symbolic reassurance that all is well with the institution; to that end they appear to be working very hard, to be on top of things or in control. That process is not conducive to productive innovation although a leader might develop excellent acting skills and apply them innovatively.

In any case, a coffin plushly lined with conventional thinking might be very cozy indeed. Success makes many "winners" arrogant and dismissive, makes them believe they are invincible geniuses lording it over a superior civilization. They are mistaken; their once glorious civilization has become exceedingly superficial and one-dimensional; their shallow personalities do not compare favorably with the average personality of "undeveloped" countries. In America, an innovative self-educated man who ran away from home at an early age and grew up on the streets because he did not want live in the trap might do a better and more innovative job than the highly paid CEO and the university professor. Of course he might wind up in jail if he believed and practiced the innovation preached but not practiced by those conservatives who would conserve at least the vestiges of good old principles of piracy on the high seas and the innovation required for those ventures.

However that may be, Porter's thinking is hardly innovative. But neither are the ideas of many of today's business, political, and education leaders. That is the very problem alleged. They are apparently in sore need of a reminder to innovate in order to take advantage of their competitors, even if they already have an enormous advantage. No matter how big the fish are, they should not rest on their oars in shark-infested waters, but should upgrade, upgrade, upgrade.... Apparently the upgrading should take place no matter whether the user wants the upgrade handed down from the engineers or not; for without the upgrades, there is no turnover; without turnover, the water stagnates; - wherefore let customers welcome change, let them be the door mat for other people's changes, or else lose their jobs producing things they do not really need so they can pay rent and interest. Heaven forbid that they produce and distribute plenty of what everyone needs and only work twenty hours a week for other people.

No, ma'am, I do not believe Porter's book boosting the competitive myth will help much in itself; but some of its suggestions might be reinforced with good effect. Paralyzed executives might hang the sign INNOVATE! all over the place. Of course that commonplace sign, just like the Ten Commandments posted on the walls, will eventual be completely ignored. Therefore leaders should take advantage of subliminal techniques, and have inaudible positive suggestions to innovate pumped over the corporate PA systems. Self-suggestions to innovate should be chanted before having sex and once again before going to sleep, and again in the morning, and again before lunch. An innovative man used a constantly flushing toilet and a relatively inexpensive recorder to record suggestions whispered over the gurgling water - he reproduced the recordings and sold thousands of them.

Professor Porter's anti-ideology ideology of What Works smacks of the old jungle-law maxim of zoological ethics based on the mistaken identification of man as an animal. Might makes right. So let's fight. Let us admit that the success formulas are all platitudes. The author, Porter, a highly credentialed authority and spokesman for the ruling minority, has decked out the platitudes in fashionable clothes and is replicating them for emulation below. Other than his special spin, his book, like all such books, is plagiary pure and simple. But he is clever enough. His borrowed anti-ideological ideology makes the whole affair more appealing since it allows an intellectual to make the most absurd anti-intellectual claims with impunity while prevaricating for the ruling side - long live the plutocracy!

In fact, the anti-ideological authority can promise something for everybody no matter what their ideology might be. Hitler was a genius at prevarication and ambiguity; he admired not only Luther's nationalism but his genius for ambiguity and his resort to "god's mysteries" to justify absurdities. A good bible can be used to justify or condemn anything, or so I was advised by a prominent Moody Bible School graduate.

Porter repudiates commercial catholicism in favor of parochial nationalism, but he lacks Hitler's and Luther's vulgar powers of persuasion. I do not mean to imply that Michael Porter is a neo-Nazi or a neoconservative 'fascist' ( loosely speaking, someone who believes in right-wing authoritarian government). Fascism and Red Communism in my opinion was a phase of the modern scientific-industrial revolution. The prevailing myth of the old order was no longer suitable; the lag resulted in a tectonic shift, to revolution and war. No doubt Professor Porter, proponent of competition for the sake of progress, knows that his good empire has much to thank the evil empires for. The modern tools and techniques resorted to grew out of technological advances, hence were not "fascist" instruments per se. It is not fair to associate today's corporate executives with the evil doers of historical death-camp fascism. Still, the similarities should be at least alluded lest liberal promises are broken and the train of thought winds up in a concentration camp.

Like Professor Porter, Italian Fascists. German Nazis, Russian Reds and American Pragmatists renounced metaphysical ideology for the sake of what positively works at the time in quantitative, productive terms. Hitler laughed at the pessimists in 1942, and said, Where would we be now if we had listened to them? An attempt was made by Giovani Gentile, an Italian philosopher and educator, to formulate a suitable fascist philosophy of action. Machiavelli was favored by German professors. Professor Max Weber, whose sociology is lauded today, popularized the notion of the world-power-state a few years after Bismark unified Germany. Machiavelli of course wanted a final peace: he believed that devious and brutal means to the final end are justifiable only when necessary; if not, one should at least maintain the appearance of ethical propriety.

Napoleon, German National Socialists, Nazis, Italian Fascists and others believed that national competition would lead to world domination by the best nation after the people of the world were freed to submit. Germany was out to save the world for the best culture in the world. Leftist professors familiar with fascism at the time observed that fascism is the perfection of capitalism - fascism did not renounce the profit principle or private property - provided that big corporations produced both profit and property to bolster the nation.

General staffs and boards of directors alike take advantage of technological innovations to compete with and smash the competition. Of course good generals and CEOs would like the competition to surrender short of all-out war, for what is wanted is victory, not the costly destruction of resources. But Professor Porter seems to want perpetual economic conflict rather than a final solution of perpetual peace. What? Is not the final cause of competition the eliminattion of competition? Competition is a great thing when we feel we want a piece of the action, but when competitors move in next door after our store is established, we might not care for competition very much.

In any event, Professor Porter advocates "ruthless improvement", "unusual effort", "dogged determination in the face of harsh criticism" - many of his devotees adhere to the 'Ignore Naysayers Doctrine.' Improvement requires a challenge, adversity, pressure, he writes, and if none of the above are at hand, a strong competitor must be found to compete with, a fight must be picked, a pre-emptive strike made which will make innovative competition necessary, and so on, because that is what really works. Parochial differences must be exploited and sustained locally. National differences are the most important of all differences to be exploited.

Again we find nothing new, novel, or innovative in the concepts dished up by Porter. Ruthless fanaticism is nothing new, and it tends to stifle creativity and cultivate ignorance by ignoring questions and criticism: curiosity, the drive to question, is the source of innovation. Indeed, the professor's model is the parochial European model. European civilization is Faustian in its attempt to manipulate nature, isolate and atomize individuals under the pretext of freedom, foster local loyalties and rivalries via parochial nationalism. Anti-cosmopolitan, anti-catholic, anti-humanist, parochial European civilization takes violence for granted, even relishes it to resolve "moral log jams", and resists international functional alliance - for instance, international labor organization. However, each nation is an empire frustrated: nationalism would substitute a particular nation for the empire, the best nation being, of course, a culture; namely the anglo-saxon culture which is the mythical culture of many of Professor Porter's symbols.

For Professor Porter, competition, not cooperation, is the key word. Vice poses as virtue. Cooperation in the form of corporate mergers, strategic alliances, collaborations and the like, no matter what their rational end might be, are anathema. We have just cause to sympathize with his apparent antipathy, but we suspect his motives as we hear politicians advocate small business while providing contracts, incentives, and handouts to huge corporations. Allegedly, supranational cooperation, cosmopolitanism, globalization are the worst of all cooperative evils. Cooperation, according to Professor Porter, is simply a pervasive global fad, something to be "sharply limited" by government. Competition should be deregulated, but there must be stringent anti-cooperation or anti-trust laws in place. It is a mistake to think competition is wasteful and that efficient cooperation creates economies of scale.

Compete! Do not cooperate! If you do cooperate, strictly limit your cooperation to relatively unimportant matters and do not assign your top talent to cooperative tasks.

Professor Porter's antipathy for cooperation renders him leary of Totalitaria as the end-all of political and economic competition. After all, the end of competition would end the cause of innovation and the obsession with the growth of gross national production. We recall that President Clinton's Surgeon General defined mental illness as the failure to lead a productive life. Well, if production does not increase exponentially and even faster than population growth, people will go mad and run amuk if not starve to death - never mind the fact that much of America's productive powers are wasted on wants rather than fulfilling needs.

The vested interests want compound growth ad infinitum. Their executives and other power elite must always strive for dynamic, "innovative productiveness", or "sustained productive growth", and not static products. Forget the durable product that lasts a life time, the 'Union Made' or 'Made in the USA' product. Upgrade, upgrade, and upgrade to the nth power. The constant struggle for "competitive advantage" must be the moving end in itself. Well, then, we hope that the geometric progression is in those intangibles which are conducive to mental health, lest people run amuk or the world becomes buried in garbage, trash and junk.

Professor Porter does advocate the maintenance of environmental standards as he defines them. But he does not regard infrastructure, general education, and health care as the crucial factors for the realization of competitive advantage. Of course special technical education, apprenticeship programs, university research connected to trade and industry, trade associations, and private investment are important factors.

We see nothing innovative in Professor Porter's education department. Universities are now led by persons who promote the myth of tools and techniques, that the culture may be structured to suit the wants of the political-economic system of the military industrial complex, not the complex internal needs of the human being. Thanks to Harvard, education is now seen as an outside-in process. The university is a sort of brain, and the brain is a general tool which, in humans, grew large through the invention and constant use of tools. The university is an economic tool. All students must be linked to the machine. And they should not mind that, for money speaks louder than words: they are interested in material success, hence economic institutions have a higher immediate influence on the young than do educational institutions. Students therefore are education to adjust to the system; which means to specialize, to mirror the analytical activities and skills needed for science, technology, industry, and for that the educational discipline, designed to preclude whatever might disturb the process, dulls the faculties Porter allegedly promotes: innovation, creativity, crucial activities rooted in curiosity, dissent, skepticism, questioning, fantasy and the like. In the holy name of objectivity, the student must ignore inner experience: subjectivity, soul, spirit, romance, myth, contemplation, daydreaming and the like. Yet, corporate recruiters insist that these recruits, trained to competitive obedience are "the brightest, most creative and talented people." Many of them care less about their courses of study, and got their credentials just to be a success. The credential proves they can obey long enough to "get it." Of course competitive sports spectacles and heavy drinking relieves the stress, therefore plenty of entertainment must be provided once they are hired - entertainment districts with sports bars, restaurants, preferably next to a sports arena, lofts and office buildings.

So much for specialization. We need it, but we go overboard with it, and stifle innovation. Nevertheless, we can safely leave the general thinking cultivated by general education up to the vested interests and their executives, politicians, business professors, newspaper editors and the like. Incidentally, when it comes to innovative productiveness, Professor Porter has a low regard for the importance of such factors as national endowments, relative currency valuations, interest rates, and, of course, at last, the labor pool. The government, he says, should know that both the hands-off and the hands-on approaches are mistaken; yet when we examine the specifics he provides, he obviously favors the hands-off approach. Generally speaking, the government should serve as a catalyst and challenger, he says. How? Do not intervene in factors such as currency and markets. Reject managed trade. Deregulate. Promote sustained investment in business. Promote specialization. Enforce strict product safety, environment standards, and anti-trust laws.

What should business leaders do? Innovate and upgrade, seek rivals and strong competition, believe in change, and locate the best home base for your Diamond of National Advantages.

What? diamond? Every pragmatic business book must have some sort of geometric figure drawn around a few simple points. In fine, the business leader should discover what his resources are, what the demand for his product is, what industries are related to and might support his business, who is rivals are, and he should know how is business is structured and what his strategy is.

Of course that is not all. That only scratches the surface. I leave the rest up to the innovative student of the American Way who can make some productive use of it.

I recently opined that 'time' is not a substance or thing, but is effectually an adverb signifying a kind of changing. My muse objected with, "Are we then to reduce this subject to mere semantics?"

A Polish engineer and professor by the name of Alfred Korzybski (1879-1950) founded the art of General Semantics in America - his notions are elaborated at length in his tome, Science and Sanity. Professor Korzybski believed habitual thinking was lagging behind the logic and language of modern science, hence he drew on relativity theory, quantum mechanics, colloidal chemistry, neurology, and mathematics for his reform program. Linguistic reform would, in his view, restore sanity to society. He is best known for his notion that language is a map, not the territory itself - of course an accurate map is necessary to arrive at the destinations desired; and the "indexing" notion, that we should keep in mind that a general term denotes multiple particulars; for instance, all men are not the same: there is man-1, man-2, man-3, man-4, et cetera. Of course a particular man differ in time, hence Hitler-1930, Hitler-1942, et cetera.

The study of meanings, or the relation between language and things, and how those meanings influence behavior, enjoyed a burst of popularity. People were fed up with the metaphysical vagaries that fostered ignorance and signified excuses for economic and political exploitation leading to depression and war. Scientific management tempered by social justice was posited by the experts. If only the social relations of individuals were scientifically engineered by enlightened technicians, the miserable history of humankind would stop repeating itself.

Absurd political religions justifying exploitation by irrational power elites, particularly the "vested interests" or "parasites" who live "to get something for nothing" under the cloak of "monarchy", "republic", or "democracy" would be replaced by a technocracy led by sociologists; the technocrats would apply the lessons of natural science to human society so that humankind might realize its social ideals; wherefore "utopia" would no longer mean a good place that was really no place, but would be engineered and realized.

To accomplish that scientific objective, precise scientific language would have to be employed. Of course mathematical language, so valuable to mechanical engineering, would be the model language for social engineers. It is essential to know what one is talking about if particular objectives are to be obtained. Language has largely evolved into so much nonsense. Inceessant chit-chat provides human beings with the feeling of society, the feeling that they belong, the feeling that they are in touch with one another and not thoroughly alienated by their individuality, but it is otherwise not very useful except to those who use it to manipulate people in order to subjugate the many in favor of the few. If humankind is to progress, if liberty and justice is really for all people, scientists and engineers must know, first of all, the nature of the beast they are dealing with. In other words, What is Man? The answer must not only be meaningful but must have the correct meaning if it is to be useful. That is, the language must reflect the reality.

Human beings repeat their lamentable history despite their good intentions, not because the race was deliberately doomed by an evil spirit but because they are confused. Humans have native intelligence without thinking. Yet it is the facility for symbolic action or thinking that distinguishes man from intelligent animals - pigs, dolphins, apes and the like. He can learn from mistakes and think things out before he acts. He is, more often than not, confused by muddy thinking, therefore he must strive to think clearly and correctly, at least where vital interests are concerned. Thinking correctly is a scientific project, a social project. Thinking and linguistic communication are inextricably bound: we must think and speak correctly. The meaning of language, the relation of language-thought and reality is crucial if the human race is to achieve positive goals.

The need for meaningful scientific discourse is felt most acutely during troubled times. Semantics was hardly an obscure and boring province for experts during the Great Depression and world wars: the word spread among the students, was taken up by the general populace and became almost as fashionable as psychoanalysis. Like all fashions, it fell out of vogue. Just as people grew tired of being psychoanalyzed by the man and woman on the street, popular semantics became so much boring talk about talk, and the province was returned to those pedants who are customarily obsessed with systems.

Professor Korzybski founded the modern course of study called "General Semantics", but he did not invent general semantics. During troubled times, the Warring Period in the ancient East, Confucius took up the study of Rectification of Language. People were so confused, he said, that they no longer knew what the names of family members meant. Since people did not know what was meant by 'father' and 'mother' and 'son' and 'daughter' and so on, they were neglecting the familial duties of their roles. Confucius helped straighten things out for quite awhile, but eventually innovators grew bored with the traditional pedantry of their Great Teacher, and revolted.

Protagoras expounded on Correct Speech during troubled times in the ancient West. He believed correct speech had healing power. He was concerned with tenses, moods, and word endings; for example, with the fact that the word for helmet was feminine instead of masculine. At one point Plato ridiculed his pedantry and obsession with systematic thinking. Only 20 lines written by Protagoras are extant. Ironically, Plato gave Protagoras a bad name by attaching his name to the secret doctrine of subjective relativity. However Protagoras was not an objective idealist or a phenomenalist: he was an agnostic empiricist who knew and admired Pericles, wrote a constitution, and said, "Man is the measure of all things, those which are, that they are, those which are not, that they are not." By 'man' he meant Man or humankind, not individual men. By 'that' he recognized the objective existence of things, that they are, not 'how' they are - or how they are not, which would be ridiculous. His concern with correct language and objective verification gives the lie to the unprincipled subjectivity put in his mouth by Plato.

Socrates, who lived about the time of Confucius, had good reason to repeat the Delphic maxim, "Know thyself," during troubled times. His research led him to conclude that he was the only person who knew that he did not know himself. People thought they knew themselves, but careful questioning revealed they were confused and did not have the faintest idea of who they were. Certainly, if we want to know what we can effectively and efficiently do with ourselves or anything else for that matter, we should what that something is.

What is Man? Well, some say, "Man is an animal."

"Wrong," insisted Alfred Korzybski. Man is not an animal. Confusing him with animals by linguistically identifying him with animals is a grave mistake; to posit that he is part natural animal and part supernatural entity compounds the error. There is nothing supernatural about man: man is within nature, not outside of nature. His higher ideals are not supernatural, they are natural to him; the linguistic effort to divorce him from his ideals and to entrust his welfare to ignorant people or to criminals is wrong and dangerous - we add that the threat to moral progress is even worse given the ability of high technology to destroy entire populations if not the human race. References to supernatural agencies are expressions for or signs for ignorance. The dogma and casuistry, the worship of power and the theological rationalizations of power have served to justify all sorts of crimes against humanity.

Figuratively speaking, man at present is a juvenile delinquent who justifies his economic and political crimes by absurd reference to arbitrary supernatural agencies including states, the deities of political religions, and by reference to the mistaken and unethical tenets of zoological ethics - the jungle law of might is right, the will to power, the territorial imperative and the like. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, for instance, bases wealth not on the objective principles of the phenomena of wealth but rather on subjective observations of the phenomenal of selfishness, adhering to the assumption of zoological ethics, that man is an animal.

Smith's theory, says Korzybski, is false, and its stringent application would be disastrous in the long run. The same can be said of the related neo-Darwinian interpretations of the "survival of the fittest," yet another confusion of man with beast. Those who bark "survival of the fittest" bark an animal language.

"Where there is 'survival' there must be victims, there has been fighting," said Korzybski. "Survival of the fittest" justifies crimes including murder. Of course killing is not a crime for animals, but murder is a crime for man. The repeated suggestion that man is an animal serves to promote and perpetuate such crimes.

Korzybski will soon say what man is, but first he would rid man of his identification with brutes. In fact, one of the pet peeves of his General Semantics is the 'is' of equality or identity, a relation reinforced by the static either/or logic, that A is either A or not-A, hence cannot be both A and not-A at once. Such an identification in the moral sphere is a gross oversimplification of reality, and promotes knee-jerk reactions, leaps to faith, jumps to conclusions by ignorant and fearful persons with low tolerance for ambiguity, often with vicious results. Unfortunately, the constantly repeated statement that man is an animal suggests that man belongs to the animal class and all that implies. The repeated suggestion serves as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Spiritually inclined people found an alternative in notions of divinity, yet when they failed to advance from religion to science, they wound up on thornier paths than Brother Rabbit.

Now it might be said by atheists that Korzybski's notion of what man is not, is not very scientific, and that his divorce of man from animal and god is "merely semantic." Materialists laid claim to the unified view that matter is at the bottom of everything, and that the forms of nature are the result of complex relations of elements. Julien la Mettrie (1709-1751), author of the once scandalous Man a Machine, reiterated the ancient materialistic prejudice that nature is a unity and is due to the chance interaction of matter and motion. Nature is not the creation of an intelligent and moral agent, but is a product of blind forces.

There is no natural "plan" for man, averred Dr. La Mettrie. Nature's laws are arbitrary; society needs rational laws to subsist and arrest return to the nature state of animals. "Truth" does not lead to virtue; philosophy does not result in morality; but philosophy does show the necessity of conforming to the state's rules. Man is, by chance, a thinking machine enslaved by passions. In essence, contrary to what the quacks say, there is no difference between man and brute. Further, man is an anti-social and amoral animal who is naturally determined to commit "crimes" and "sins" because crimes and sins are necessary for his well-being. Happiness is organic and is disturbed by inculcated "remorse," a symptom of disease. The criminal is not free to choose his course of action.

The well-constituted individual whose natural passions are not too anti-social and who is aware that his selfishness can be realized in society is no problem for civilized society. Criminals should be pitied by the fortunate intellectual elite who are naturally liberated. The intellectual elite accepts the truth, that man is an amoral animal, a relativist machine, not as a matter of conscience but because it is true. The conduct of vulgar imbeciles, on the other hand, is regulated by religious and moral guilt, remorse, and physical coercion. Criminals should be harshly punished for good social effect - they should not be condemned for their natural determination. Ordinary persons are excluded from intellectual liberation by their own mutual fear and contempt; fear-religion, until unleashed in violent episodes, may restrain the natural inclination to crime - challenges to religion and conventions terrify ordinary people and might result in violence. Anti-social populations need legal coercion and despotism to keep them in good order.

Sages should retreat to epicurean quarters; philosophers, however, should be activists and do what they can to improve society. The man who does not philosophize, Dr. Le Mettrie said, is no better than a donkey. And Dr. La Mettrie was contemned for his views, called a crude mechanist and an anarchist, but he was in fact more concerned with psychology than physiology, and he was in fact an advocate of altruistic projects. As a doctor he adhered to the views of Hippocrates, including the perspective that nature, when left alone, often has a healing power far superior to the doctor's power - especially the ivory-tower quacks Hippocrates and La Mettrie liked to ridicule.

Another pioneer of modern materialism, Baron Paul Heinrich Dietrich von Holbach (1725-1789), by discrediting man's contrived illusions gave, conversely, more credit to man's ability to improve himself. Holbach was confident in nature's healing power. Material particles circulated among plant and animal and "dead" kingdoms of nature; the elements are naturally combined into forms and dissolved, hence the apparent transformations observed - this is an instance of the classical "elemental" theory rejected by Korzybski. Baron Holbach's ultimate element was the "fiery particle." Now man can help remedy his ills by returning to nature's laws, taking care not to personify nature or its properties as if nature had a will of its own.

If only man understands nature, he will be a lot better off. Although man is part of nature, apparently his portion of nature includes unwarranted defiance against nature, much to his ruin. Therefore we have a sort of romantic return to nature as an antidote to religion, upon which much of the blame can be placed for the disastrous divorce from nature. Religion is corruption, disease; part of the cure requires the very names of god to be surgically removed from thought and language. The theological definition of 'god', the Baron said, forgetting his previous statement that man needs mysteries, is the definition of Nothing. Morality is to be deduced from the rational recognition of the means to happiness; in other words, we may reason out how we can become happy by examining the causes of misery and happiness. For instance, we might proceed to study ritual, a form of the religious disease, by conducting statistical studies of hysterics in mental hospitalss.

"Man is unhappy merely because he misunderstands nature," Baron Holbach indited. "His mind is so infected by prejudices that one must almost believe him to be forever doomed to error; the chains of illusion in which he is so entangled from childhood have so grown upon him, that he can only with the utmost trouble be set free from them. Man disdained the study of nature to pursue after phantoms, that, like will-of-the-wisps, dazzled him and drew him from the plain path of truth, away from which he cannot attain happiness. It is therefore time to seek in nature remedies against the evils which fanaticism has plunged us."

"We only see so many crimes on earth, because everything conspires to make men criminal and vicious. Their religions, their governments, their education, the examples before their eyes drive them irresistibly to evil in vain; then, does morality preach virtue which would only be a painful sacrifice of happiness in societies where vice and crime are perpetually crowned, honored, and rewarded, and where the frightful disorders are only punished in them who are too weak to have the right to commit them with impunity. Society chastises in the small the excesses that it respects in the great, and often is unjust enough to condemn to death those whom the prejudices that it maintains have rendered criminal."

Baron Holbach gives us cause to hope that correct thinking and speaking - in alignment with natural law - will save humankind from itself. We expect him to quote Pythagoras, and say that theory without practice and practice without theory are in vain. But he does not say that. Man tends to act in accord with his feelings, he says, and not in accord with what he thinks, if those thoughts are at variance with his passions; hence thoughts themselves, no converted into action, are harmless. Let men think what they will; the truth or error of their thinking is not dangerous in itself. Judge men by their actions.

Not only does Baron Holbach leave us with muddled thinking, his discourse gives us cause to suspect that man's portion of nature might be naturally perverse. Yet surely the recognition of that perversity and how it leads to misery, and an understanding of natural forces and a correct definition of man's nature, communicated by correct thinking and clear language, will set humankind on the right path to an agreeable salvation. If we can scientifically manipulate or engineer the conditions in just the right way, the unnecessary "excesses" can be avoided, and we can be, at least, generally prosperous and happy to boot. Man might be a member of the animal kingdom, but he is the king of the kingdom and might become the loving god he wants to be, as can be seen by his projection of the god of love on an ideal man, who, when he returns to men, will have no further cause to suffer their foolishness.

Yes, man might be classed with the animals, but he is a peculiar subclass of his own, and Professor Korzybski was right to make a semantic distinction, and given the proper procedures man shall now go where no man has gone before, to the realization of ever higher and higher collective ideals.

Not so, claimed Robert Ardrey in African Genesis, for man is an animal. Here we go again. The ideal of human engineering, to use science and applied technology to eradicate evil from human society, is the "romantic scientific fallacy." Man is not a god who can manipulate conditions in order to realize his innate goodness, argues Ardrey, but he is an animal whose nature dooms him to miserable viciousness.

Yes, animals can learn from their environment, therefore human animals can be conditioned by the manipulation of economic and political factors. However, crime, war, economic exploitation cannot be eradicated by resort to environmental manipulation. Aggression is inherited. Animals will compete not because they want to compete, but because they must compete over something. If there is nothing to compete over, they will compete anyway: they will compete like the cuckoos: cuckoos do not nest and are polyandrous; they do not compete over mates or territory; they just compete. And that reminds us of the frustrated scholar who observed that there is no justification or reasonable explanation for human warfare: war just is, period, end of sentence.

As for competition over things, Freud was wrong to limit human competition to family and sex, claims Ardrey. Territorial proprietors, for instance, are universally hostile towards neighbors; for example, hierarchically ordered baboon societies of one-hundred members compete for status and territory.

In the final analysis, the social factor, the Oedipus Complex, and the so-called emotional or internal causes of aggression do not explain aggression. After all, prehistorical fish were organized into societies. Systems of dominance are characteristic of most animal species; animals are "patriotic" and are devoted to each other in self-defense. "The mentality of the single Germanic tribe under Hitler differed in no way from that of early man or late baboon," Ardrey opines. We add that recent studies indicate that certain animal species engage in "wars." Tyrants are rare in societies, Ardrey claimed, and they are usually dealt with by their own, aristocratic class, by means of "palace revolutions." The lower classes remain below. The ideal that sons established law to replace a murdered father's tyranny is improbable and is sheer bunk. As for sex, a bird views a snake with horror but has no penis.

Taking up evolution, Huxley, Darwin's propagandist or "bulldog", believed that competition was between individuals organized into gangs. Darwin himself posited sex as the sole cause of male competition. Darwin recognized amity and altruism in animals, yet said he could find no fixed principle in the evolutionary process to explain the altruistic principle, yet he observed in Descent of Man that, "No tribe could hold together if murder, robbery, or treachery were common.... (A tribe) superior in patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, sympathy, mutual aid and readiness to sacrifice for the common good" would naturally be selected over a tribe without those qualities.

The question as to whether or not the amicable qualities are inherited, making for a dual, amity-enmity nature, remains unanswered. Spencer suggested an ethic of external enmity in contrast to an ethic of internal amity; in other words, hate-based group-love.

In any case, the evidence shows that man reacts more to the environment than he shapes it; that he is not originally good, but is a carnivore who uses weapons to wage war. He is obsessed with acquisition of wealth and status, yet given wealth and status he will still fight like an animal over trivialities or over nothing if need be.

In fine, man is an animal, not a god. Science and applied technology, economic and political systems will never uproot and destroy the cause of his misery or his original sin: he is an animal condemned to fight for his living whether he likes it or not.

Well, then, we might suppose that man would not be virtuous without his viciousness, or that his vice is his virtue. Let us then raise the idol of competition on the altar above the bloody arena and let the best man win.

Was not Korzybski correct? Men have confused man with animal. You can take the man out of the animal, but you can't take the animal out of man. Whom is to blame for the confusion? According to Plato's Protagoras, the gods fashioned mortals out of the elements and ordered Prometheus (forethought) and Epimetheus (afterthought) to equip them with the properties appropriate for life on Earth. Epimetheus begged Prometheus: "Let me distribute and you inspect." Okay. Epimetheus distributed among the brute animals various magnitudes of strength, swiftness, and size, along with equipment for burrowing, flying, swimming, and such. He clothed the creatures with different kinds of skins, hairy and bare, making sure the hooves and calloused skins were under their feet. He distributed all sorts corresponding environments including appropriate foods. In short, he distributed everything to animals.

"Prometheus came to inspect the distribution, and he found that the other animals were suitably furnished, but that man alone was naked and shoeless, and had neither bed nor arms of defense.... Prometheus, not knowing how he could devise man's preservation, stole the wisdom of practicing the arts of Hephaestus and Athene, and fire with it (it could neither have been acquired nor used without fire), and gave them to man. Thus man had the wisdom necessary to the support of life, but political wisdom he had not, for that was in the keeping of Zeus."

So man is an other animal. Generally speaking, human beings are initially endowed with the manly and feminine arts, wisdom of course being a feminine attribute. Hephaestus, originally an Asian fire-god, was popular in Athens as divine smith and god of craftsmen. He fashioned ornaments, shields, and weapons among other things. He took to wife Aphrodite, goddess of love, who made a fool of him. He was a comic figure: had a powerful upper body, but was lamed because he allegedly offended Zeus. Athene spring from the head of Zeus. Supreme goddess of Athens and goddess of cites, Athena was necessarily a virgin because no man was good enough for her. She was goddess of wisdom, peaceful pursuits, spinning, weaving, prudent and defensive warfare, and the like. Incidentally, Athene invented the flute but threw it away because playing it distorted her face.

As we can see, not only is man confused with animals, he is confused with supernatural or immortal gods - another pet semantic peeve of Korzybski. "Now man," writes Plato, "having a share in divinity, was at first one of the animals who had any gods, because he alone was of their kindred, and he would raise altars and images of them."

Absent the political arts including the art of last resort, the art of war, the primitive humans had a serious problem; namely the wild animals who wanted to eat them. Wherefore the gathered together in self-defense, learned to make war on animals, and eventually founded cities. They did not yet have the higher political art, of good government, hence they dealt injustly with one another in the cities and began to destroy each other.

"Zeus feared that our entire race would be exterminated, and so he sent Hermes of mankind, bearing reverence and justice to be the ordering principles of cities and the uniting bonds of friendship." Hermes asked how reverence and justice should be distributed, to a few skilled experts, as other crafts are distributed, or to everyone?

"To all," answered Zeus, "I should like them to have a share; for cities cannot exist if a few only share in justice in reverence, as in the arts. And further, make a law by my order that he who has no part in reverence and justice shall be put to death, for he is a plague of the state."

Plato supports the truth expressed by myth, explaining that "all men actually do regard every man as having a share of justice and of every other political virtue.... They say that all men ought to profess justice whether they are just or not, and that a man is out of his mind who says anything else. Their notion is that a man must have some degree of justice, and that if he has none at all he ought not to be in human society.... And I will now endeavor to show further that they do not conceive this virtue to be given by nature, or to grow spontaneously, but to be a thing which is taught, and which comes to man by taking pains. No one would instruct, no one would rebuke or be angry with those whose calamities they suppose to be due to nature or chance; they do not try to punish or to prevent them from being what they are; they do but pity them. Who, for example, is so foolish as to chastise or instruct the ugly, the diminutive, or the feeble?"

Plato speaks of justice, reverence, piety, self-control - ideal behavior, collective or social ideals. Reward good deeds, punish evil deeds; praise wrong, blame right. The lessons are available to all, that they might learn self-control. And they fail to do so under pain of exile or death. Reverence is "to fear" - to fear gods or persons, including the ideal representative of the community: the god, the leader. All that must be performed sincerely and with great respect, with piety.

After reviewing Plato's Protagoras' Great Speech, how would we clearly distinguish man from "other animals"? By the moral (mental) faculty that enables him to learn arts and crafts, including the art of living together peacefully, and the ability to pass the information and lessons on to succeeding generations. The sciences purpose to know what nature is and how it works, and are prerequisite to technical applications of acquired knowledge; they are best known by experts, pursuant to an efficient division of labor. As for getting along together peacefully, the art of harmonious living must be learned by all. And it is fair to say that there will not be much progress in that practice without scientific knowledge of the nature of the beast - excuse me, I mean the distinctive nature of man.

Alfred Korzybski believed the faculty for continuous improvement is not derived from a supernatural source but is innate to man. Since the origin of the race is rather remote and obscure, to say the least, we hopefully have no good cause to quibble over myths today. When the Greeks said, "Know thyself," they referred to man's limits, his definition. Since then many men and women have pushed the envelope, sometimes to far with disastrous results: reality melted the waxen wings fashioned by Daedelus; he and his son Icarus wanted to escape from the labyrinthine laboratory inhabited by the half-animal, half-bull Minotaur - Daedelus' only genetic engineering experiment.

Korzybski said that "Know thyself" does not command man to know (feel) himself intuitively, the way a fish "knows" itself, but instructs man to reflect and reconsider himself objectively, to analyze human nature in order to arrive at a realistic synthesis of what man really is. He did just that, and concluded that man is not an animal but is a "time-binding" being; that is, he can accumulate, store, and communicate knowledge. Animals can move but do not have man's reasoning power; they are space-binding creatures. Plants, unlike animals, cannot move, but are energy-binding.

"This stupendous fact is the definition of the mark of humanity - the power to roll up continuously the ever-increasing achievements of generation after generation endlessly," quoth Korzybski. "We have seen that this time-binding power is an exponential power or function of time. Time flows on, increasing in arithmetical progression, adding generation unto generation; but the results of human energies working in time do not go on arithmetically; they pile up or roll up more and more rapidly, augmenting in accordance with the law of a more and more rapidly increasing geometric progression."

Comparative disparities in the progression of science and culture result in "jumps" - violent readjustments - economic swings, revolutions and wars, etc. No doubt the traditional resort to space-binding, zoological ethics, the wasteful fights for territory according to jungle law, especially evident in the lawless international arena today, can be attributed to the cultural lag. "Time binders can not use 'animal' logic without degrading themselves from their proper status as human beings - their status as established by nature. 'Animal' logic leads to 'animal' ethics and 'animal' ethics and 'animal' economics; it leads inevitably to a brutalized industrial system in which cunning contrives to rob the living of the fruit of the dead." And, we reiterate, brute violence.

The "free" press, unfortunately, holds out a promise of freedom that it does not advance because it sells out to vampires (my term). "Unfortunately, the press is often controlled by exploiters of the living powers of the dead.... The press, which is itself the product in the main of the dead, is made a means for the deception and exploitation of the living." Indeed.

Despite the fact that the free press has sold its freedom, there is a remedy: "The only remedy is enlightenment - not revolution." Professor Korzybski envisions general seminars for everyone - doctors, artists, professors, laborers, businessmen, etc. Man must not only be intelligent and skilled, he must understand himself in context, understand that the true man is of a higher dimension than space-binding animals and energy-binding plants. Humankind has a natural capacity for perpetual progress, a heritage of collective ideals inherited from the efforts of previous generations, men and women who persevered despite cultural lag and whose class-motive certainly was not the selfish motive put forward by regressive political and economic thinkers who rely on pig-philosophy, wolf-politics, dog-psychology (my hyphenated terms) et cetera. Just as we can see the dead alive in our own faces, we may observe that our progress is based on the living powers of the dead.

"The wealth of the world is in the main the free gift of the past - the fruit of the labor of the dead." This capital belongs to the race; it is, like the earth, a treasure to be employed by engineers for the public benefit. A patent is not something to be held by the inventor forever, and neither are the benefits of the invention to be hoarded and inherited by a few that they may lord it over the many. Mind you that humankind has three fundamental powers: sun-power; the power of the living; the power of the dead. Human engineers using these powers must be held accountable and subjected to the same severity as would bridge engineers.

Korzybski certainly did not intend to turn human beings into machines. He would free laborers not only from slavery to their passions but from physical slavery. We do not want control of the laborer, he said, we want control of his muscular power, but almost all mechanical work can be replaced by machines, while man cannot be replaced. To use men as tools or instruments is "repugnant, stupid and short-sighted," he said. Tools do not have the autonomy of their maker. The power of all men to produce wealth for all under wise direction must be released. "Much more is to be gained in exploiting nature aimfully... than exploiting man all the time and nature occasionally."

Like all engineers who want predictable results, Korzybski has faith in the precise language of mathematics, and in what Ardrey rightly or wrongly identified as the "romantic scientific fallacy."

"Human logic - mathematic logic, the logic natural for man - this will show us that 'good' and 'just' and 'right' are to have their significance defined and understood entire in terms of human nature.... Human Engineering will eliminate 'wild-cat schemes, 'gamblers and politicians.' It will put an end to industrial violence, strikes, insurrections, war and revolutions." Thorstein Veblen might add that it will put an end to the enormous waste generated by capitalists and entrepreneurs who profit by impeding production: holding out, creating false scarcities, cornering markets, etc.

Human Engineering to just ends would naturally require a just definition of justice, and just how that might be calculated to the general satisfaction of humankind in accord the nature of the race remains to be seen. If we take up zoological ethics and hold that justice is the greatest happiness of the greatest number, we encounter the usual problems with quantification, particularly with how to quantify qualities. If we take human nature as derived from sensibility and assume that happiness is pleasurable, we might not discover in our nature a universal basis or general laws that might be employed to please everyone or "make" them happy.

Indeed, that was the problem encountered by another great reformer, Destutt de Tracy, the French Ideologist whose influence in America was felt through Thomas Jefferson. The natural premise, that morality (mentality) is rooted in sensations, as per Locke, Condillac et al, depends on the truth of the Sensational Premise: that everyone has the same sensation of the same object. Tracy was eventually forced by his studies to conclude that language is generally qualitative, rather than quantitative like algebra, hence inherently imprecise. Said imprecision wrecked Tracy's reform project; he wanted to rid humankind of its bad habits of thinking and metaphysical rubbish by reducing language to its simplest terms and making the relations between them more certain, that they might be employed correctly. Human language would then serve its natural function, of satisfying human needs. The virtue of algebraic languagge is that is symbols are sufficiently precise for operations to arrive at definite conclusions. Alas, grammatical operations are qualitative and its signs will not and can not arrive at quantitative precision; attempts to do so leads to even more complex, vague feelings. Even so, some beneficial reform is possible - complete reform is impossible:

"A complete reform is almost impossible," wrote Tracy, "for too many habits resist it. To change completely a usage... would require a unanimous consent which... would be a real revolution in society."

Nevertheless, notwithstanding the improbability of arriving at a mathematic definition of 'good, just, and right', perhaps general rules of healthy social behavior can be induced and applied experimentally after the collection and analysis of relevant data. But Korzybski seems to reject the possibility of the mathematical definition of social terms, and contradicts the possibility of defining 'good, just, and right', for he tells us that nature does not know 'capital' or 'capitalism', 'labor' or 'communism' etc., but only knows 'space', 'time', 'energy', etc.

"Human logic points to human ethics and human economics; it will lead to a humanized industrial system in which competition will be competition in science, in art, in justice: a competition and struggle for the attainment of excellence in human life," wrote Professor Korzybski. Although he struggled to free man semantically from the constant self-demeaning suggestion, that man is an animal, the professor cannot quite cleanse his language of terms such as 'competition' and 'struggle', terms that suggest that man is in fact an animal. A better choice of words might be 'cooperative effort', but that smacks of 'communism; our current myth includes the Idol of Competition and requires us to compete to do good, howsoever good might be defined by received authority. Alas, there will be arguments over the definition of good; the pressure to win the competition will result in guilt feelings, jealous feelings, hard feelings, etc. Wars might be waged to save humankind from bad manners, and to save the world for the best culture.

Human logics - there are several - can save us from making many mistakes if properly employed. The static logic of either/or has its drawbacks in certain contexts, and can pave the road to hell when people insist on doing one thing or the other. We might dismiss Alfred Korzybski's course in general semantics as "mere semantics," but that would be a mistake. If man is a member of the animal kingdom, say, a glorified ape, or if man is partly divine, or X , and his X is temporarily imprisoned in an animal body, we should take both his animal and divine nature, as we might understand it at the time into account. We should know what "time" is if man's unique faculty is "time-binding" - we are not wholly satisifed with Newton's definition of mathematical time, for time is not something that "flows", but we know what "subjective time" and "objective time" means. And we know what Professor Korbynski means when he insists that man is not a brute animal or a supernatural god or a combination of the two. There is something special about the idea signified by 'man', although we cannot precisely say what that is. And for Alfred Korbynski's intangible capital contribution to the dialectic we thank him very much.

Quoted Sources:

The History of Materialism by Frederick Albert Lange, transl. Ernest Chester Thomas, New York: Harcourt Brace 1925

Materialism and Society in the Mid-Eighteenth Century: La Mettrie's Discours Preliminaire, by Ann Thomson, Geneva: Libraire Droz 1981

Manhood of Humanity by Alfred Korzybski

African Genesis by Robert Ardrey

First Toynbeean Meditation

Life goes on. I am still working on Vol. VIII of My Suicide Note - an Elaboration of My Favorite Theme: Nothing, Something, Nothing. I paused over coffee this morning to revisit Arnold Toynbee's Study of History - in ten volumes plus Reconsiderations.

Toynbee's Study might appear to some students as a labyrinthine maze of incongruous tapestries, yet his theme is quite simple. Indeed, the most cutting criticism is that Toynbee knew where he was going and how he would get there before he started his arduous trek, then continued on that course over the years as if he had learned nothing new along the way.

First of all, we have the Beginning, or the Source, and we continue on from there to the End, or the Goal. And during the course of his universal history, Toynbee did learn a major lesson: he encountered a Crisis in the Middle, whereupon he turned from Civilization to Religion as the proper unit of historical study. Now the Source and Goal is God, and the middle is History. According to Toynbee's Study, "History is a vision of God's creation on the move, from God its source towards God its goal." Therefore let us begin our meditation with the end in mind, In the Name of the Past, the Present, and the Future, as ONE.

As Toynbee flies over History in his Platonic Chariot of the Gods, he resorts to his own Platonic myth, that of the Ledge: Humankind is climbing God's mountain from ledge to ledge; the ledges above and below are invisible except from the advantageous vantage of the universal historian who serves therefore as our guide and prophet.

"In earlier volumes of this book, I have compared the situation of mankind in the present age to a climber's pitch. Below us lies the ledge that our pre- human ancestors reached in the act of becoming human. In the Age of the Civilizations mankind has been making a number of attempts to scale the cliff-face that towers up from the ledge reached by Primitive Man. The next ledge above, unlike the ledge below, is invisible to climbers who are striving to reach it. All that they know is that they feel compelled to risk their necks in the hope of gaining the next ledge and in the faith that the endeavor is worth while."

We proceed to the Goal for its own sake, yet we have a utilitarian motive, the fear of death: the "wages of sin is death." And the original sin is the sin of pride in self or the self-love identified by the holy fathers as the ultimate adultery or cheating on God. Thus the law or reasoning of human nature is contrary to genuine self-discipline: the power of the human mind is therefore antithetical to the power of the spiritual soul. Since the emergence of self-will and -consciousness, our progress (some would call it regress) towards merger (unity) with the In-Dwelling God that (not who) is our ultimate Goal has be minimal:

The human power that has increased is not a human soul's power over itself. There is no evidence of any increase in that within the time over which our records extend. So far as one can guess, human beings are no better, and saints are no more frequent in the present-day world than they will have been in, let us say, the Lower Paleaolithic Age. The power that has been accumulating and increasing in collective power over both human souls and non-human nature. Now that mankind's collective power is within sight of becoming able to extinguish all human life, and perhaps all life of any kind on the face of the planet, the works of righteousness are being demanded of us urgently, not only for their own sake, but by our concern for self-preservation."

It would be amazing if Toynbee had not meditated on the ambiguity of his position that, on the one hand, his "higher" religion is one of direct individual revelation whereby, in his quest for freedom from human authority, the individual has in fact rebelled against the collective and its representative men. That very rebellion is based on the sin of individual pride or self-love; the Devil hates socially conditioned humans, loving only Nobody in Nowhere. Of course the contradiction can be smoothed over by the objective reference to God deplored yet utilized by Toynbee as, apparently, a rhetorical device - he referred to himself as an "ex-Christian" and an "ex-believer."

God's mountain is Within - God is "In-Dwelling." Toynbee was influence by Jung, hence the mountain's Jungian aspects such as the collective unconscious and primordial archetypes, are noticeable. Man has gone from the worship of Nature to the worship of Man and is now getting in touch with the spiritual Reality "behind" all phenomena by means of a "higher" religion. Humans emerged from sub-humans into self-consciousness and self-will, where they are tormented by intellectual and moral relativity. In 'The Next Ledge' of his Reconsiderations, Toynbee declares that:

"(human nature's goal is) to transcend the intellectual and moral limitations that it's relativity imposes on it. Its intellectual goal is to see the Universe as it is in the sight of God, instead of seeing it with the distorted vision of one of God's self-centered creatures. Human nature's moral goal is to make the self's will coincide with God's will, instead of pursuing self-regarding purposes on its own."

In my own words: After our necks get stuck out, our job is to prepare our heads for the axe. As for the Beginning and End of progress, I am unable to make heads or tails of it as everywhere the tail is in the mouth of the Snake; mind you, Toynbee says it is a Wheel rolling forward. Whether the Unknown is "behind" or "ahead" of the Universe, I cannot say. Nor do I know whether we are ascending to a summit of omniscience or descending to a subconscious hypostasis of blissful ignorance: in the interim, I for one shall climb up the triangle of induction and climb down the triangle of deduction at once with the double-triangle, the "Star of David" as my guide. Toynbee was on the right track, the rolling track of poetic fiction, I think, so let us proceed In the Name of the Beginning, the Middle, and the End, as ONE.

No doubt Toynbee's materialistic affection for structural complexity can be perplexing. And his fact-laden, empirical method can be rather boring not only because of his prolixity but because of his abstract elevation from the scene. Nevertheless, the layout of his metaphysical airplane is assuredly familiar. As we have seen, the passenger who has conducted preliminary investigations has comfort in knowing his flight plan despite the complexity of the dirty details passing by below. The flight from Reality to Reality might take each passenger over eighty years; therefore, rather than rush to his destination, he is advised to keep the world tour in mind as he takes little jaunts into chapters having subjects which might interest him from time to time. There is plenty in store for him at History's bar. To slake the passenger's thirst, Toynbee pours facts into a prefabricated glass through which the world is observed; and at times, according to the best pessimistic tradition, it is observed very darkly. In the final volume of the Study, under the heading 'The Quest For A Meaning Behind The Facts of History', he quotes Gibbon's famous phrase that History is "little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of Mankind," and he cites the "All is vanity" of Ecclesiastes. And here is something from Herman Melville's epic of the monumental struggle between the forces of good and evil, Moby Dick:

"The Sun hides not Virginia's Dismal Swamp, nor Rome's accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the Moon. The Sun hides not the Ocean, which is the dark side of this Earth, and which is two-thirds of this Earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true - not true, or undeveloped.... The Gods themselves are not forever glad."

Philosophy, who is still Queen of the sciences, notwithstanding the scientific contempt for her divine graces, is poetry. Toynbee above all spins a philosophy of history. He views the facts of history poetically - his passion for poetry is obvious although, when stated in his own words, it is prosaically posed and done so in a whale of a history with a moral lesson coursing the deep. In his reflective Reconsiderations, he confides his mystical experiences as an historian: he is miraculously transported to certain scenes entirely obscure and trivial to the layman, but of magnificent import to the mystic historian.

In any event, for those of us who would embark on the universal voyage, whether by land, sea or air, Toynbee reveals our destination and warns us of the dangers along the way; for example, in the leading paragraph to "The Quest..."

"The meaning behind the facts of History towards which the poetry in the facts is leading us is a revelation of God, and a hope of communion with Him; but in this quest for a Beatific Vision that is visible to a Communion of Saints we are ever in danger of being diverted from our search for God to a glorification of Man; and this sin of associating the creature with the Creator precipitates the man-worshipper into a continuing fall from idolatry through disillusionment to an eventual depreciation of Man which almost as excessive as the adulation to which it is the inevitable sequel here."

We are in familiar monotheistic Space here, a fictitious enterprise which will surely alienate people who need to worship something in particular: indeed, Toynbee, the religious historian of our age, alienated many pious people. Ironically, Toynbee, the subtle iconoclast, like the great encyclopedia pioneer Pierre Bayle, found fewer logical obstacles in Dualism than in monotheistic religion; but Toynbee objected to Zoroastrianism's conclusion, that good is finally triumphant over its evil twin. As Bayle fearlessly said, Reason is an acid that eventually eats through its own foundation; therefore I ask, How can the dialectic cease short of dropping into Nothing?

Nevertheless, I must pause to agree in the opinion that life requires a contest between two distinguished forces, portrayed by the imagination as good and evil entities, say, God and Devil - that the dichotomy along the continuum is fictitious is neither here nor there, but is conducive to leading a creative life. There must be some mistake in the translations and interpretations of the old texts taken from the cowhides. Indeed, why would Zarathustra take back his greatest gift to humankind, the clear distinction between God and the slanderous Liar? Finally, Evil had been identified not as some shortage or vacancy of positive Good, but as a real entity in itself. Zurvanism, the Zoroastrian cult which made Time or Zurvan father of both Good and Evil, was a Greek corruption rightly put down in Persia as a most pernicious heresy. But the Devil had his way with the Parsis in India who, under monotheistic pressure of the Mogul Muslims, allowed the Devil to be whisked away and confused with God again, hence now they consider themselves along with Christians as monotheists. But are they really monotheists? Is not Satan the only true monotheist, the Evil One who loves only God therefore hates Man? Therefore must not Satan be contested? We leave the cavilling to the litigating theologians with this maxim in mind: He who ignores evil is good for nothing.

However that may be, Toynbee believed higher religion is the only means to achieve a peaceful universal order. As we know, by "higher" religion he meant a direct, individual relation to God. Toynbee himself was an agnostic who believed in an unrestricted spiritual Reality. He had no faith in idolized churches or nations or, for that matter, in idolized Man. Man is his own worst enemy. He tends to exalt himself over God because he was apparently exalted by God to lord it over the creation; and in the lordly process man begins to idolize Man as God incarnate; he eventually forgets God and thinks Man is self-created - which is another way of saying the same thing. Either way, Man falls short of the Absolute Power he worships, then despises himself for what he is, even if he is a humanist who professes love for abstract humanity - yet another sin of pride, albeit perhaps not as grave as the love for humanity crucified: since agnostic Toynbee does not own an anthropomorphic god, it is hardly surprising he also disowns humanism; it seems hypocritical for those who worship God in human form to despise humanists altogether.

In any case, whether we study History with a short or a long attention span, we understandably seek a Cause for what has transpired in hopes that knowing the Cause will be useful if not entertaining. Even professors with inflated minds will confess in weighty tomes that brevity and simplicity are the essence of science if not of life. And what could be more simple than a single Cause for all effects? If "God" does not exist, at least "God" is a favorite symbol for optimistic pessimists who unconsciously want to exist ad infinitum. Idealists want an ideal reason or Cause for complexity, an ideal meaning of life. Humane idealists want human ideals to be real, with human superiority given to the Ideal of ideals which allegedly informs and encompasses the material details, In the Name of the Cause, the Force, and the Effect, as ONE.

As we have seen, Toynbee has much more going for him than his voluble volumes of facts followed by his afterthoughts. He has the Cause of volume in mind; to wit: God. Toynbee's personal, unrestricted and seemingly impersonal spiritual Reality is, nevertheless, for many believers the Eternal Almighty-I, Omniscient Unity of Consciousness, the Universal-I of "i think therefore i am"; the Capital-I who does not have to think the Universe in order to be Being, in order to be I AM WHO I AM. Be that as it may, can we justly blame the historian of a universal history for coming up with God? for coming up with avowed order instead of disavowed chaotic disorder? with God instead of the unruly Devil? Surely the individual relation to God demanded by Toynbee is something besides his relation to unrestricted Reality, which methinks would be total disorder or chaos; to wit, Nothing. Well, never mind that; even the devout atheist can reflect on his own psychology of memory, discover he has perceptions or intuitions of things upon which he makes judgements concerning their respective relations, similarities and differences; ranks things according to his preferences; and with his generalizations of particulars in mind, with his memory on hand, he faces the future and conducts his experiments.

Again, can we justifiably castigage Toynbee for taking the process of generalization to its logical conclusion: the unprovable absolute presupposition it proceeded with as its Leading Principle? After all, the leading principle of a line is its non-dimensional point, and the point is found throughout the line. Can we blame him for being a theologian instead of a historian because he comes up with an indefinite spiritual God instead of the decadent materialistic Devil who constantly leads us on to deceive us yet again and again, proving in his unmitigated hate for humankind that he the Devil is the only true monotheist in his unadulterated love for God? The Devil divides us for war with slander; since Nothing is perfect, it seems the perfect religion would be the worship of Nothing, which is finally achieved in the utopian State of Absolute Rest - as the homely Utopians say, cognizant of the ambiguous etymology of Utopia: There is no place like a good place."

Speaking of the monotheistic Devil, does not that Devil give us diabolical cause to wonder at the prophecies of Toynbee and holy men who ambiguously warn us about the human brand of love which is based on self-love? who admonish us to love indefinite God only, not the individual who is to be saved by direct revelation? Nor are we to love collective human society to be saved by contractual socialism, But is not all love self-love at its root? Even altruism is self-love. As Swedenborg said: "Love is your life." Do we fear death therefore instinctively love death to appease death and thereby save ourselves from destruction: do we call death "God"? Do we, like Faust, contract with the Devil that we may have some little happiness in the life between deaths? Well, then, if death be God, we should not love God too much. Maybe we should take the one and only God with a grain of life.

As they employ their mallets rational or irrational to destroy every particular definition asserted as a universal, the destructive pessimist and the iconoclastic prophet say the simple, unitary explanation is for Nought. In the final analysis, there is a perverse truth to their mutual assertion of Nothing under illusory, variegated veils, a Nothing which in negation has rebellious power over All. For what is the difference between Being stripped of all we can say about it, and Nothing, about which only silence suffices? Hardly anything at all, except faith. Faith is a great feeling. Life demands feeling.The faithful have a vague, incomprehensible feeling that God or Nothing really exists. True faith needs no herd-gathering defense. But since faith is usually mingled with fear for its loss, what often follows in the wake of faithful feelings are various, unsatisfactory ethical definitions, theistic and atheistic, all supported by a generalized feeling, an oceanic feeling sometimes called Love.

Some say God is love; others insist Love is god: there is a serious dispute between the two parties to that difference, and for very good reason. In any event, there is nothing more pleasing than a feeling of security based on Love, in contradistinction to the fragile security of the political contract made in response to hate, to the war of all against all which might unexpectedly break out in a nuclear blast through a breach in uncertain etiquette at any moment. If humankind were only to love itself in a love of all for all, Law would be superflous. Yet this may be an impossible dream given the very human nature Toynbee reminds us of: it is our nature to make differences, to be different. What? Are we to give up our humanity, are we to die in order to live free of ourselves?

Neverthless, Toynbee's arid abstractions bring him to favor universal Love as the felt Goal of humankind. For Toynbee, Love is "the only god that we know from human experience." Regardless of the consequences, we should devote ourselves to "that" (not who) without which there is no God. "I believe that the dweller in the innermost sanctum of a human being is identical with the spiritual presence behind and beyond the Universe, and I believe that this ultimate spiritual reality is love," quoth Toynbee.

If we boil off the theosophies, then the essential experience of many modern religions might be described as a pleasant, almost mindless, cosmic feeling. Psychologically, Toynbee's universal history of civilizations culminating in higher religion appears to be a recapitulation of his psychic genesis from the oceanic womb towards the painful realization of his inevitable demise as such. He provides his justifications for the inevitable extinction of the human burden ("I think and will therefore I am") by subconsciously reasserting the original cosmic feeling of oneness with the womb and the postpartum vestiges of motherly love.

In Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud reluctantly admits there is an "unusual" non-pathological state called "love" wherein there is no apparent demarcation between ego and id, nor between "I" and "you", when, "against all the evidence of the senses" we believe we are "one" and are prepared to act on it. But this personal love, which should not be "stigmatized", is, again, peculiar and momentary, and obviously not to be universally realized. Freud, as we know, made much of the "illusory nature of religion."

As for the discontentedness of civilization, Freud's sympathies are with Toynbee and the rest of our anxious lot. Yet Freud says he personally had no experience of the "sensation of eternity, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded - as it were, 'oceanic' feeling", mentioned by a self-proclaimed friend of Freud's who agreed religion is an illusion as Freud had defined it. Yet the friend insisted everyone who feels this "energy", which is the subjective basis of religion, has a right to call himself religious. Freud did not deny that others felt what he did not feel, but as a scientist he was rather worried about the scientific or objective interpretations of same, that they be scientific rather than subjective delusions or common illusions. Interestingly enough, he says of the illusory ego:

"Normally, there is nothing of which we are more certain than the feeling of our self, of our own ego. This ego appears to us as something autonomous and unitary, marked off distinctly from everything else. That such an experience is deceptive, and on the contrary the ego is continued inwards, without any sharp delimitation, into an unconscious mental entitywhich we designate as the id and for which it serves as a kind of facade - this was a discovery first made by psycho-analytic research...." Emphasis added In the Name of the Superego, the Id, and the Ego, as ONE.