First Class With Distinction Quotes

In case you haven't noticed, as the result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war-lovers with appalling powerful weaponry - who stand unopposed. In case you haven't noticed, we are now as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazi's once were. And with good reason. In case you haven't noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanized millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound 'em and kill 'em and torture 'em and imprison 'em all we want. Piece of cake. In case you haven't noticed, we also dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class. Send 'em anywhere. Make 'em do anything. Piece of cake. The O'Reilly Factor. So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and a Chicago paper called "In These Times." Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic "New York Times" guaranteed there were weapons of destruction there. Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn't even seen the First World War. War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the First World War so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun. Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you? Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now give up on people too. I am a veteran of the Second World War and I have to say this is the not the first time I surrendered to a pitiless war machine. My last words? "Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse." Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas! Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler. What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations and made it all their own?

An important distinction is that rich people buy luxuries last, while the poor and middle class tend to buy luxuries first.

I had never met a lord before, nor had I ever expected to meet one. It didn't matter what he looked like: he was a lord first, and a human being, with a face and limbs and body, long, long after.

At the end of that class Demian said to me thoughtfully: "There’s something I don’t like about this story, Sinclair. Why don’t you read it once more and give it the acid test? There’s something about it that doesn’t taste right. I mean the business with the two thieves. The three crosses standing next to each other on the hill are almost impressive, to be sure. But now comes this sentimental little treatise about the good thief. At first he was a thorough scoundrel, had committed all those awful things and God knows what else, and now he dissolves in tears and celebrates such a tearful feast of self-improvement and remorse! What’s the sense of repenting if you’re two steps from the grave? I ask you. Once again, it’s nothing but a priest’s fairy tale, saccharine and dishonest, touched up with sentimentality and given a high edifying background. If you had to pick a friend from between the two thieves or decide which one you’d rather trust, you most certainly wouldn’t choose the sniveling convert. No, the other fellow, he’s a man of character. He doesn’t give a hoot for ‘conversion’, which to a man in his position can’t be anything but a pretty speech. He follows his destiny to it’s appointed end and does not turn coward and forswear the devil, who has aided and abetted him until then. He has character, and people with character tend to receive the short end of the stick in biblical stories. Perhaps he’s even a descendant of Cain. Don’t you agree?" I was dismayed. Until now I had felt completely at home in the story of the Crucifixion. Now I saw for the first time with how little individuality, with how little power of imagination I had listened to it and read it. Still, Demian’s new concept seemed vaguely sinister and threatened to topple beliefs on whose continued existence I felt I simply had to insist. No, one could not make light of everything, especially not of the most Sacred matters. As usual he noticed my resistance even before I had said anything. "I know," he said in a resigned tone of voice, "it’s the same old story: don’t take these stories seriously! But I have to tell you something: this is one of the very places that reveals the poverty of this religion most distinctly. The point is that this God of both Old and New Testaments is certainly an extraordinary figure but not what he purports to represent. He is all that is good, noble, fatherly, beautiful, elevated, sentimental—true! But the world consists of something else besides. And what is left over is ascribed to the devil, this entire slice of world, this entire half is hushed up. In exactly the same way they praise God as the father of all life but simply refuse to say a word about our sexual life on which it’s all based, describing it whenever possible as sinful, the work of the devil. I have no objection to worshiping this God Jehovah, far from it. But I mean we ought to consider everything sacred, the entire world, not merely this artificially separated half! Thus alongside the divine service we should also have a service for the devil. I feel that would be right. Otherwise you must create for yourself a God that contains the devil too and in front of which you needn’t close your eyes when the most natural things in the world take place.

Life is like the big wheel at Luna Park. You pay five francs and go into a room with tiers of seats all around, and in the centre the floor is made of a great disc of polished wood that revolves quickly. At first you sit down and watch the others. They are all trying to sit in the wheel, and they keep getting flung off, and that makes them laugh too. It's great fun. You see, the nearer you can get to the hub of the wheel the slower it is moving and the easier it is to stay on. There's generally someone in the centre who stands up and sometimes does a sort of dance. Often he's paid by the management, though, or, at any rate, he's allowed in free. Of course at the very centre there's a point completely at rest, if one could only find it; I'm not very near that point myself. Of course the professional men get in the way. Lots of people just enjoy scrambling on and being whisked off and scrambling on again. How they all shriek and giggle! Then there are others, like Margot, who sit as far out as they can and hold on for dear life and enjoy that. But the whole point about the wheel is that you needn't get on it at all, if you don't want to. People get hold of ideas about life, and that makes them think they've got to join in the game, even if they don't enjoy it. It doesn't suit everyone. People don't see that when they say "life" they mean two different things. They can mean simply existence, with its physiological implications of growth and organic change. They can't escape that - even by death, but because that's inevitable they think the other idea of life is too - the scrambling and excitement and bumps and the effort to get to the middle, and when we do get to the middle, it's just as if we never started. It's so odd. Now you're a person who was clearly meant to stay in the seats and sit still and if you get bored watch the others. Somehow you got on to the wheel, and you got thrown off again at once with a hard bump. It's all right for Margot, who can cling on, and for me, at the centre, but you're static. Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic. There's a real distinction there, though I can't tell you how it comes. I think we're probably two quite different species spiritually.

There are two social classes in Pakistan," Professor Superb said to his unsuspecting audience, gripping the podium with both hands as he spoke. "The first group, large and sweaty, contains those referred to as the masses. The second group is much smaller, but its members exercise vastly greater control over their immediate environment and are collectively termed the elite. The distinction between members of these two groups is made on the basis of control of an important resource:air-conditioning. You see, the elite have managed to re-create for themselves the living standards of say, Sweden without leaving the dusty plains of the subcontinent. They're a mixed lot - Punjabi and Pathans, Sindhis and Baluchis, smugglers , mullahs, soldiers, industrialists - united by their residence in an artificially cooled world. They wake up in air-conditioned houses, drive air-conditioned cars to air-conditioned offices, grab lunch in air-conditioned restaurants (rights of admission reserved), and at the end of the day go home to an air-conditioned lounges to relax in front of their wide-screen TVs. And if they should think about the rest of the people, the great uncooled, and become uneasy as they lie under their blankets in the middle of the summer, there is always prayer, five times a day, which they hope will gain them admittance to an air-conditioned heaven, or at the very least, a long, cool drink during a fiery day in hell.

I must say that I have always felt that, in the deepest sense, we are all brothers. Class distinctions have never meant anything to me; and hatred of tyranny is in my blood. Even as a small child I could never bear injustice of any kind. It offends my sense of the beautiful. It is so stupid and unaesthetic. I remember my feelings when I was first unjustly punished by my nurse. It wasn't the punishment itself which I resented; it was the clumsiness, the lack of imagination behind it. That, I remember, pained me very deeply.

I am not sure whether I can make you understand it. It was something more than a prudent desire to avoid creatures alien in kind, very powerful, and very intelligent. The truth was that all I heard about them served to connect two things which one's mind tends to keep separate, and that connecting gave one sort of a shock. We tend to think about non-human intelligences in two distinct categories which we label "scientific" and "supernatural" respectively. We think, in one mood, of Mr. Wells' Martians (very unlike the real Malacandrians, by the bye), or his Selenites. In quite a different mood we let our minds loose on the possibility of angels, ghosts, fairies, and the like. But the very moment we are compelled to recognise a creature in either class as real, the distinction begins to get blurred: and when it is a creature like an eldil the distinction vanishes altogether. These things were not animals-to that extent one had to classify them with the second group; but they had some kind of material vehicle whose presence could (in principle) be scientifically verified. To that extent they belonged to the first group. The distinction between natural and supernatural, in fact, broke down; and when it had done so, one realised how great a comfort it had been-how it had eased the burden of intolerable strangeness which this universe imposes on us by dividing it into two halves and encouraging the mind never to think of both in the same context.

From earliest days I wanted to be someone else. The injunction nosce te ipsum had an ashen taste on my tongue from the first time a teacher enjoined me to repeat it after him. I knew myself, all too well, and did not like what I knew. Again, I must qualify. It was not what I was that I disliked, I mean the singular, essential me—although I grant that even the notion of an essential, singular self is problematic—but the congeries of affects, inclinations, received ideas, class tics, that my birth and upbringing had bestowed on me in place of a personality. In place of, yes. I never had a personality, not in the way that others have, or think they have. I was always a distinct no-one, whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct someone, I know what I mean.

The most realistic distinction between the investor and the speculator is found in their attitude toward stock-market movements. The speculator’s primary interest lies in anticipating and profiting from market fluctuations. The investor’s primary interest lies in acquiring and holding suitable securities at suitable prices. Market movements are important to him in a practical sense, because they alternately create low price levels at which he would be wise to buy and high price levels at which he certainly should refrain from buying and probably would be wise to sell. It is far from certain that the typical investor should regularly hold off buying until low market levels appear, because this may involve a long wait, very likely the loss of income, and the possible missing of investment opportunities. On the whole it may be better for the investor to do his stock buying whenever he has money to put in stocks, except when the general market level is much higher than can be justified by well-established standards of value. If he wants to be shrewd he can look for the ever-present bargain opportunities in individual securities. Aside from forecasting the movements of the general market, much effort and ability are directed on Wall Street toward selecting stocks or industrial groups that in matter of price will “do better” than the rest over a fairly short period in the future. Logical as this endeavor may seem, we do not believe it is suited to the needs or temperament of the true investor—particularly since he would be competing with a large number of stock-market traders and first-class financial analysts who are trying to do the same thing. As in all other activities that emphasize price movements first and underlying values second, the work of many intelligent minds constantly engaged in this field tends to be self-neutralizing and self-defeating over the years. The investor with a portfolio of sound stocks should expect their prices to fluctuate and should neither be concerned by sizable declines nor become excited by sizable advances. He should always remember that market quotations are there for his convenience, either to be taken advantage of or to be ignored. He should never buy a stock because it has gone up or sell one because it has gone down. He would not be far wrong if this motto read more simply: “Never buy a stock immediately after a substantial rise or sell one immediately after a substantial drop.” An

At Childerstown High School and at college he had never led his class nor taken prizes; but, without being aware that he did, he really blamed this on his failure to work hard, or any harder than he needed to. . . . What he did not know, what Paul Bonbright, among others, showed him, was that those abilities of his that got him, without distinction but also without much exertion, through all previous lessons and examinations, were not first rate abilities handicapped by laziness, but second rate, by no degree of effort or assiduity to be made the equal of abilities like Bonbright's.

I turn to another class [...] in whose eyes whatever is unusual is wrong: whose ears detect in each protest against bigotry--that parent of crime--an insult to piety, that regent of God on earth. I would suggest to such doubters certain obvious distinctions; I would remind them of certain simple truths. Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.

The first instinct that he indulged was his passion for design. The name he chose for his new company was rather straightforward: Next. In order to make it more distinctive, he decided he needed a world-class logo. So he courted the dean

There are four classes of Idols which beset men's minds. To these for distinction's sake I have assigned names, calling the first class Idols of the Tribe; the second, Idols of the Cave; the third, Idols of the Market Place; the fourth, Idols of the Theater.

Aiden was the whole world stretched out beneath him. Aiden’s hair spread out on the sheets, Aiden moaning in his ear. The magnitude of his certainty tipped Harvard over the edge into terrifying and unwelcome knowledge. Terrible realization dawned, remorseless illumination shed on a whole landscape. Harvard found himself looking at his entire life in a new light. Aiden on their first day of school, on their first day of fencing class, on their last day in the hospital, on their first day at Kings Row. Inextricably part of every important moment in Harvard’s life. The bright and shining center of Harvard’s life, ever since he’d turned around and seen Aiden and thought, That boy looks sad, and wanted nothing but to give Aiden everything. Finding Aiden and being too young to understand what he’d found. Only knowing Aiden was necessary to him and wanting Aiden there always. Of course he loved his best friend, of course he did. That was always such an absolute truth that Harvard could never question it. Harvard gasped against Aiden’s mouth. He should have questioned it before now. He should have asked himself what he was feeling. Only he’d been afraid. Dating someone else hadn’t been Harvard’s idea, and with this new clarity he realized he didn’t actually want to do it. He hadn’t wanted to be alone, hadn’t wanted to be left behind, but it was impossible and distinctly horrible to think of being like this with anyone but Aiden. Only very recently, as Aiden dated more and more people and the potential for distance between them started to feel far more real, had Harvard started to feel lonely. If it hadn’t been for Coach suggesting dating, it might never have occurred to him. Why would he go out and look for a partner when he had one at home? Why would he go searching for a lightning strike when there was all the brightness and all the pain he could wish for, always with him? He’d never cared about dating, never really felt the need to find someone, because he’d been otherwise emotionally committed all along. Apparently, Harvard’s subconscious was insane, bent on his own ruin. Somewhere in the back of his mind he’d just decided he was Aiden’s boyfriend, without consulting Aiden. Without even consulting himself. He’d been in love with Aiden the whole time.

All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct permanent share in the government. . . . Can a democratic assembly who annually revolve in the mass of the people be supposed steadily to pursue the public good? Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy. . . .

There are two distinct threads in the history of American secularism—the first descending from the humanism and egalitarianism of Paine and the second from nineteenth-century social Darwinism through the twentieth-century every-man-for-himself “objectivism” of Ayn Rand. A true intellectual descendant of Paine, Ingersoll linked reason and science to the success and survival of democracy, as the Enlightenment deists among the founders did, and contended that the capacity for rational thought existed among all races and social classes.

Of course, differences in natural abilities also play a role in the formation of social distinctions. But such diversities of aptitudes and character are usually mediated through imagined hierarchies. This happens in two important ways. First and foremost, most abilities have to be nurtured and developed. Even if somebody is born with a particular talent, that talent will usually remain latent if it is not fostered, honed and exercised. Not all people get the same chance to cultivate and refine their abilities. Whether or not they have such an opportunity will usually depend on their place within their society's imagined hierarchy. Harry Potter is a good example. Removed from his distinguished wizard family and brought up by ignorant muggles, he arrives at Hogwarts without any experience in magic. It takes him seven books to gain a firm command of his powers and knowledge of his unique abilities. Second, even if people belonging to different classes develop exactly the same abilities, they are unlikely to enjoy equal success because they will have to play the game by different rules. If, in British-ruled India, an Untouchable, a Brahmin, a Catholic Irishman and a Protestant Englishman had somehow developed exactly the same business acumen, they still would not have had the same chance of becoming rich. The economic game was rigged by legal restrictions and unofficial glass ceilings. (p. 154)

The first distinction that we make is between public and private anger. Much research treats the two as equivalent, but in fact they are opposites. Public anger is often worn like a badge of honour. Icelanders protesting against a corrupt political class are emboldened by virtue. They railed against corruption and sought moral redress. Extinction Rebellion is fueled by the anger of righteousness. When people are publicly angry, because they are wronged, or they witness wrong-doing, they want it to be recognized and addressed. This is moral outrage. Private anger resembles its opposite. It is often characterized by shame. People who are angry in their private lives, often seek counseling, rather than retribution. An angry colleague, a stressed parent, or an enraged driver – these are people in need of help, not deserving of redress. But public anger itself is also two-sided.

The Impression that Pakistan being an Islamic State is thereby a Theocratic State is being sedulously fostered in certain quarters with the sole object of discrediting her in the eyes of the world. To anyone conversant with the basic principles of Islam, it should be obvious that in the fields of civics, Islam has always stood on complete social democracy and social justice, as the history of the early Caliphs will show, and has not sanctioned government by a sacerdotal class deriving its authority from God. The ruler and the ruled alike are #equal before Islamic Law, and the ruler, far from being a vicegerent of God on earth, is but a representative of people who have chosen him to serve them...Islam has not recognized any distinction between man and man based on sex, race or worldly possessions..." ---Fazul Rahman, First Education Minister of Pakistan, All Pakistan Educational Conference, Karachi, Nov 1947

How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people—first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving. I am strongly drawn to a frugal life and am often oppressively aware that I am engrossing an undue amount of the labor of my fellow-men. I regard class distinctions as unjustified and, in the last resort, based on force. I also believe that a simple and unassuming life is good for everybody, physically and mentally.

For I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents. Formerly bodily powers gave place among the aristoi. But since the invention of gunpowder has armed the weak as well as the strong with missile death, bodily strength, like beauty, good humor, politeness and other accomplishments, has become but an auxiliary ground of distinction. There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents; for with these it would belong to the first class. The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society. And indeed it would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed man for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of the society. May we not even say that that form of government is the best which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government? The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy.

Early on it is clear that Addie has a rebellious streak, joining the library group and running away to Rockport Lodge. Is Addie right to disobey her parents? Where does she get her courage? 2. Addie’s mother refuses to see Celia’s death as anything but an accident, and Addie comments that “whenever I heard my mother’s version of what happened, I felt sick to my stomach.” Did Celia commit suicide? How might the guilt that Addie feels differ from the guilt her mother feels? 3. When Addie tries on pants for the first time, she feels emotionally as well as physically liberated, and confesses that she would like to go to college (page 108). How does the social significance of clothing and hairstyle differ for Addie, Gussie, and Filomena in the book? 4. Diamant fills her narrative with a number of historical events and figures, from the psychological effects of World War I and the pandemic outbreak of influenza in 1918 to child labor laws to the cultural impact of Betty Friedan. How do real-life people and events affect how we read Addie’s fictional story? 5. Gussie is one of the most forward-thinking characters in the novel; however, despite her law degree she has trouble finding a job as an attorney because “no one would hire a lady lawyer.” What other limitations do Addie and her friends face in the workforce? What limitations do women and minorities face today? 6. After distancing herself from Ernie when he suffers a nervous episode brought on by combat stress, Addie sees a community of war veterans come forward to assist him (page 155). What does the remorse that Addie later feels suggest about the challenges American soldiers face as they reintegrate into society? Do you think soldiers today face similar challenges? 7. Addie notices that the Rockport locals seem related to one another, and the cook Mrs. Morse confides in her sister that, although she is usually suspicious of immigrant boarders, “some of them are nicer than Americans.” How does tolerance of the immigrant population vary between city and town in the novel? For whom might Mrs. Morse reserve the term Americans? 8. Addie is initially drawn to Tessa Thorndike because she is a Boston Brahmin who isn’t afraid to poke fun at her own class on the women’s page of the newspaper. What strengths and weaknesses does Tessa’s character represent for educated women of the time? How does Addie’s description of Tessa bring her reliability into question? 9. Addie’s parents frequently admonish her for being ungrateful, but Addie feels she has earned her freedom to move into a boardinghouse when her parents move to Roxbury, in part because she contributed to the family income (page 185). How does the Baum family’s move to Roxbury show the ways Betty and Addie think differently from their parents about household roles? Why does their father take such offense at Herman Levine’s offer to house the family? 10. The last meaningful conversation between Addie and her mother turns out to be an apology her mother meant for Celia, and for a moment during her mother’s funeral Addie thinks, “She won’t be able to make me feel like there’s something wrong with me anymore.” Does Addie find any closure from her mother’s death? 11. Filomena draws a distinction between love and marriage when she spends time catching up with Addie before her wedding, but Addie disagrees with the assertion that “you only get one great love in a lifetime.” In what ways do the different romantic experiences of each woman inform the ideas each has about love? 12. Filomena and Addie share a deep friendship. Addie tells Ada that “sometimes friends grow apart. . . . But sometimes, it doesn’t matter how far apart you live or how little you talk—it’s still there.” What qualities do you think friends must share in order to have that kind of connection? Discuss your relationship with a best friend. Enhance

As the following pages deal with the practising life, they lead - in accordance with their topic - to an expedition into the little-explored universe of human vertical tensions. The Platonic Socrates had opened up the phenomenon for occidental culture when he stated expressis verbis that man is a being potentially 'superior to himself'. I translate this remark into the observation that all 'cultures', 'subcultures' or 'scenes' are based on central distinctions by which the field of human behavioural possibilities is subdivided into polarized classes. Thus the ascetic 'cultures' know the central distinction of complete versus incomplete, the religious 'cultures' that of sacred versus profane, the aristocratic 'cultures' that of noble versus common, the military 'cultures' that of brave versus cowardly, the political 'cultures' that of powerful versus powerless, the administrative 'cultures' that of superior versus subordinate, the athletic 'cultures' that of excellence versus mediocrity, the economic 'cultures' that of wealth versus lack, the cognitive 'cultures' that of knowledge versus ignorance, and the sapiental 'cultures' that of illumination versus blindness. What all these differentiations have in common is the espousal of the first value, which is considered the attractor in the respective field, while the second pole consistently functions as a factor of repulsion or object of avoidance.

In the field of education, it seems ‘normal’ to run stories about class sizes, teachers’ pay, the country’s performance in international league tables and the right balance between the roles of the private and state sectors. But we would risk seeming distinctly odd, even demented, if we asked whether the curriculum actually made sense; whether it really equipped students with the emotional and psychological resources that are central to the pursuit of good lives. When it comes to housing, the news urges us to worry about how to get construction companies working, how to make purchasing a home easier for first-time buyers and how to balance the claims of nature against those of jobs and businesses. But it doesn’t tend to find time to ask primordial, eccentric-sounding questions like: ‘Why are our cities so ugly?’ In discussions of economics, our energy is channelled towards pondering what the right level of taxation should be and how best to combat inflation. But we are discouraged by mainstream news from posing the more peculiar, outlying questions about the ends of labour, the nature of justice and the proper role of markets. News stories tend to frame issues in such a way as to reduce our will or even capacity to imagine them in profoundly other ways. Through its intimidating power, news numbs. Without anyone particularly rooting for this outcome, more tentative but potentially important private thoughts get crushed.

Negative images of emigration were transformed into positive ones, not by Wakefield in 1830, but by a much broader trans-Atlantic ideological transition around 1815. Its semiotic shape was the partial displacement of the word “emigrant” by more positively loaded words. According to David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly, “before 1790, Americans thought of themselves as emigrants, not immigrants. The word immigrant was an Americanism probably invented in that year. It had entered common usage by 1820.” Related terms also emerged in the 1810s. “Pioneer in the western sense first appeared in 1817”; “Words such as mover (1810), moving wagons (1817), relocate (1814), even the verb to move in its present migratory sense, date from this period.” This was indeed a “radical transformation . . . a new language of migration.”72 But Fischer and Kelly fail to note that it was not solely American and that settler, not immigrant or pioneer, was its main manifestation. In Britain, settler was used in its current meaning at least as far back as the seventeenth century, but it was used infre- quently. By the early nineteenth century, it had connotations of a higher status than “emigrant.” Settlers were distinct from sojourners, slaves, or convict emigrants, and initially even from lower-class free emigrants. In Australia, “‘Settlers’ were men of capital and, in the 1820s, regarded as the true colonists, to be distinguished from mere laboring ‘immigrant’ . . . though eventually all Australia’s immigrants were termed ‘settlers.

Naturally, at first, one is inclined to regard such differences as mere individual idiosyncrasies. But anyone with the opportunity of gaining a fundamental knowledge of many men will soon discover that such a far-reaching contrast does not merely concern the individual case, but is a question of typical attitudes, with a universality far greater than a limited psychological experience would at first assume. In reality, as the preceding chapters will have shown, it is a question of a fundamental opposition; at times clear and at times obscure, but always emerging whenever we are dealing with individuals whose personality is in any way pronounced. Such men are found not only among the educated classes, but in every rank of society; with equal distinctness, therefore, our types can be demonstrated among labourers and peasants as among the most differentiated members of a nation. Furthermore, these types over-ride the distinctions of sex, since one finds the same contrasts amongst women of all classes. Such a universal distribution could hardly arise at the instigation of consciousness, ie. as the result of a conscious and deliberate choice of attitude. If this were the case, a definite level of society, linked together by a similar education and environment and, therefore, correspondingly localized, would surely have a majority representation of such an attitude. But the actual facts are just the reverse, for the types have, apparently, quite a random distribution. In the same family one child is introverted, and another extraverted.

As to my intense wish never to come into contact with the eldila myself, I am not sure whether I can make you understand it. It was something more than a prudent desire to avoid creatures alien in kind, very powerful and very intelligent. The truth was that all I heard about them served to connect two things which one’s mind tends to keep separate, and that connecting gave one a sort of shock. We tend to think about non-human intelligences in two distinct categories which we label “scientific” and “supernatural” respectively. We think, in one mood, of Mr. Wells’ Martians…In quite a different mood we let our minds loose on the possibility of angels, ghosts, fairies, and the like. But the very moment we are compelled to recognize a creature in either class as real the distinction begins to get blurred: and when it is a creature like and eldil the distinction vanishes altogether. These things were not animals—to that extent one had to classify them with the second group; but they had some kind of material vehicle whose presence could (in principle) be scientifically verified. To that extent they belonged to the first group. The distinction between natural and supernatural, in fact, broke down; and when it had done so, one realised how great a comfort it had been—how it has eased the burden of tolerable strangeness which this universe imposes on us by dividing it into two halves and encouraging the mind never to think of both in the same context. What price we may have paid for this comfort in the way of false security and accepted confusion of thought is another matter.

Yet, the advantages of civilization bring their own contradictions, one beginning in a loosely defined "core" the other on the "periphery". These contradictions then tended to break down the geographical distinction between the two. The core contradiction was between the development of more complex, centrally coordinated armies and the conditions that first allowed the civilizations to withstand their foes. Infantry defenses had initially presupposed a cohesive social base, in Sumer provided by similarity of experience and membership in the community. The city-states had either been democracies or relatively benign oligarchies, and this showed in their military tactics. Cohesion and morale, faith in the man next to you, was essential for infantry. Yet an increase in costs, in professionalism, and in diversity of forces, weakened the contribution of the ordinary member of the community. Either the state turned to mercanaries or foreign auxiliaries or it turned to the rich, able to turn out heavily armed soldiers. This weakened social cohesion. The state became less embedded in the military and economic lives of the masses, more differentiated as an authoritarian center, and more associated with steep social stratification between classes. The state was more vulnerable to capture. One swift campaign to capture the capital, and kill the ruler but spare part his staff, and the conquest was complete. The masses did not require pacification for they were not involved in the turn of events. The state was more dependent upon professional soldiers, on both central praetorian guards and on provincial lords-more vulnerable to their ambitions and therefore to endemic civil war.

Sociologist Barry Glassner (1999) has documented many of the biases introduced by “If it bleeds, it leads” news reporting, and by the strategic efforts of special interest groups to control the agenda of public fear of crime, disease, and other hazards. Is an increase of approximately 700 incidents in 50 states over 7 years an “epidemic” of road rage? Is it conceivable that there is (or ever was) a crisis in children’s day care stemming from predatory satanic cults? In 1994, a research team funded by the U.S. government spent 4 years and $750,000 to reach the conclusion that the myth of satanic conspiracies in day care centers was totally unfounded; not a single verified instance was found (Goodman, Qin, Bottoms, & Shaver, 1994; Nathan & Snedeker, 1995). Are automatic-weapon-toting high school students really the first priority in youth safety? (In 1999, approximately 2,000 school-aged children were identified as murder victims; only 26 of those died in school settings, 14 of them in one tragic incident at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.) The anthropologist Mary Douglas (Douglas & Wildavsky, 1982) pointed out that every culture has a store of exaggerated horrors, many of them promoted by special interest factions or to defend cultural ideologies. For example, impure water had been a hazard in 14th-century Europe, but only after Jews were accused of poisoning wells did the citizenry become preoccupied with it as a major problem. But the original news reports are not always ill-motivated. We all tend to code and mention characteristics that are unusual (that occur infrequently). [...] The result is that the frequencies of these distinctive characteristics, among the class of people considered, tend to be overestimated.

ever and again we find some leader or some tribe amidst the disorder of free and independent nomads, powerful enough to force a sort of unity upon its kindred tribes, and then woe betide the nearest civilization. Down pour the united nomads on the unwarlike, unarmed plains, and there ensues a war of conquest. Instead of carrying off the booty, the conquerors settle down on the conquered land, which becomes all booty for them; the villagers and townsmen are reduced to servitude and tribute paying, they become hewers of wood and drawers of water, and the leaders of the nomads become kings and princes, masters and aristocrats. They, too, settle down, they learn many of the arts and refinements of the conquered, they cease to be lean and hungry, but for many generations they retain traces of their old nomadic habits, they hunt and indulge in open-air sports, they drive and race chariots, they regard work, especially agricultural work, as the lot of an inferior race and class. This in a thousand variations has been one of the main stories in history for the last seventy centuries or more. In the first history that we can clearly decipher we find already in all the civilized regions a distinction between a non-working ruler class and the working mass of the population. And we find, too, that after some generations, the aristocrat, having settled down, begins to respect the arts and refinements and law-abidingness, of settlement, and to lose something of his original hardihood. He intermarries, he patches up a sort of toleration between conqueror and conquered; he exchanges religious ideas and learns the lessons upon which soil and climate insist. He becomes a part of the civilization he has captured; and as he does so, events gather towards a, fresh invasion by the free adventurers of the outer world. Early

Popularity does not guarantee literary quality, as everybody knows, but it never comes about for no reason. Nor are those reasons always and necessarily feeble or meretricious ones, though there has long been a tendency among the literary and educational elite to think so. To give just one example, in my youth Charles Dickens was not regarded as a suitable author for those reading English Studies at university, because for all his commercial popularity (or perhaps because of his commercial popularity) he had been downgraded from being ‘a novelist’ to being ‘an entertainer’. The opinion was reversed as critics developed broader interests and better tools; but although critical interest has stretched to include Dickens, it has not for the most part stretched to include Tolkien, and is still uneasy about the whole area of fantasy and the fantastic – though this includes, as has been said, many of the most serious and influential works of the whole of the later twentieth century, and its most characteristic, novel and distinctive genres (such as science fiction). The qualitative case for these genres, including the fantasy genre, needs to be made, and the qualitative case for Tolkien must be a major part of it. It is not a particularly difficult case to make, but it does require a certain open-mindedness as to what people are allowed to get from their reading. Too many critics have defined ‘quality’ in such a way as to exclude anything other than what they have been taught to like. To use the modern jargon, they ‘privilege’ their own assumptions and prejudices, often class-prejudices, against the reading choices of their fellowmen and fellow-women, often without thinking twice about it. But many people have been deeply and lastingly moved by Tolkien’s works, and even if one does not share the feeling, one should be able to understand why. In the following sections, I consider further the first two arguments outlined above, and set out the plan and scope of the chapters which follow, which form in their entirety my expansion of the third argument, about literary quality; and my answer to the question about what Tolkien felt he had to say.

Am I mistaken to think that even back then, in the vivid present, the fullness of life stirred our emotions to an extraordinary extent? Has anywhere since so engrossed you in its ocean of details? The detail, the immensity of the detail, the force of the detail, the weight of the detail—the rich endlessness of detail surrounding you in your young life like the six feet of dirt that’ll be packed on your grave when you’re dead. Perhaps by definition a neighborhood is the place to which a child spontaneously gives undivided attention; that’s the unfiltered way meaning comes to children, just flowing off the surface of things. Nonetheless, fifty years later, I ask you: has the immersion ever again been so complete as it was in those streets, where every block, every backyard, every house, every floor of every house—the walls, ceilings, doors, and windows of every last friend’s family apartment—came to be so absolutely individualized? Were we ever again to be such keen recording instruments of the microscopic surface of things close at hand, of the minutest gradations of social position conveyed by linoleum and oilcloth, by yahrzeit candles and cooking smells, by Ronson table lighters and Venetian blinds? About one another, we knew who had what kind of lunch in the bag in his locker and who ordered what on his hot dog at Syd’s; we knew one another’s every physical attribute—who walked pigeon-toed and who had breasts, who smelled of hair oil and who oversalivated when he spoke; we knew who among us was belligerent and who was friendly, who was smart and who was dumb; we knew whose mother had the accent and whose father had the mustache, whose mother worked and whose father was dead; somehow we even dimly grasped how every family’s different set of circumstances set each family a distinctive difficult human problem. And, of course, there was the mandatory turbulence born of need, appetite, fantasy, longing, and the fear of disgrace. With only adolescent introspection to light the way, each of us, hopelessly pubescent, alone and in secret, attempted to regulate it—and in an era when chastity was still ascendant, a national cause to be embraced by the young like freedom and democracy. It’s astonishing that everything so immediately visible in our lives as classmates we still remember so precisely. The intensity of feeling that we have seeing one another today is also astonishing. But most astonishing is that we are nearing the age that our grandparents were when we first went off to be freshmen at the annex on February 1, 1946. What is astonishing is that we, who had no idea how anything was going to turn out, now know exactly what happened. That the results are in for the class of January 1950—the unanswerable questions answered, the future revealed—is that not astonishing? To have lived—and in this country, and in our time, and as who we were. Astonishing.

move a little faster than we originally planned, it is true, but we could rise to the challenge. We have been very successful during our first year.” “Rebecca,” he said, turning to face her, “I must tell you now once and for all that the school will never include girls. The idea is ridiculous. Why should we waste our time on educating females? What possible use could there be in our doing so?” She flushed. “I am a female, Philip,” she said, “and I happen to feel that my life is a little more complete for my ability to read and write and compute and for my knowledge of history and of French and music.” He made an impatient gesture. “You are not a member of the lower classes,” he said. “Of course it is necessary for ladies to have some smattering of knowledge so that they can participate to some small degree in social conversation. For these girls, Rebecca, an education would serve no purpose at all.” “Are we really such inferior creatures?” Rebecca asked very quietly. “And tell me, Philip, do I successfully participate to some small degree in social conversation? Do I save the gentlemen from the boredom of having to listen to an utter ninnyhammer all the time?” “You are becoming angry, Rebecca,” Philip said calmly, “and speaking unreasonably. You know that you are twisting my words. I am not saying that these girls are useless. They have infinite value. They are God’s creatures, fashioned to be a help and a comfort to their menfolk. We would spoil them by educating them, spoil their God-given beauty.” “Woman achieves worth and beauty only through the service she renders her menfolk,” Rebecca said. Philip almost smiled. “I could not have said it better,” he said. “I must try to remember those exact words.” “I will reach final fulfillment as a woman and as a person when I become your helpmeet,” she said. This time he did smile. “What a beautiful idea,” he said. “You will be a good wife, Rebecca. I am a fortunate man.” “Poppycock!” was all Rebecca said. “I beg your pardon?” “I said, ‘Poppycock!’ ” she repeated very distinctly. Philip frowned. “Yes, I heard you the first time,” he said, “but thought I must have mistaken. I have never heard such an inelegant word on your lips.” “It comes from having an education,” she said. “I have read the word somewhere. I am already one of the spoiled, Philip. You know, there has always been something about you that has made me somewhat uneasy. I have never

It is not only Frances Moore Lappé whose mind is changing as new evidence comes in from protein research; the most rigorous scientific journals are likewise convinced. An editorial in the medical journal Lancet reports: Formerly, vegetable proteins were classified as second-class, and regarded as inferior to first-class proteins of animal origin, but this distinction has now been generally discarded.

As your cash flow grows, you can indulge in some luxuries. An important distinction is that rich people buy luxuries last, while the poor and middle class tend to buy luxuries first. The poor and the middle class often buy luxury items like big houses, diamonds, furs, jewelry, or boats because they want to look rich. They look rich, but in reality they just get deeper in debt on credit. The old-money people, the long-term rich, build their asset column first. Then the income generated from the asset column buys their luxuries. The poor and middle class buy luxuries with their own sweat, blood, and children’s inheritance.

An important distinction is that rich people buy luxuries last, while the poor and middle class tend to buy luxuries first.

It interests me that there is no end of fictions, and facts made over in the forms of fictions. Because we class them under so many different rubrics, and media, and means of delivery, we don't recognize the sheer proliferation and seamlessness of them. I think at some level of scale or perspective, the police drama in which a criminal is shot, the hospital in which the doctors massage a heart back to life, the news video in which jihadists behead a hostage, and the human-interest story of a child who gets his fondest wish (a tourist trip somewhere) become the same sorts of drama. They are representations of strong experience, which, as they multiply, began to dedifferentiate in our uptake of them, despite our names and categories and distinctions... I say I watch the news to "know". But I don't really know anything. Certainly I can't do anything. I know that there is a war in Iraq, but I knew that already. I know that there are fires and car accidents in my state and in my country, but that, too, I knew already. With each particular piece of footage, I know nothing more than I did before. I feel something, or I don't feel something. One way I am likely to feel is virtuous and "responsible" for knowing more of these things that I can do nothing about. Surely this feeling is wrong, even contemptible. I am not sure anymore what I feel. What is it like to watch a human being's beheading? The first showing of the video is bad. The second, fifth, tenth, hundredth are—like one's own experiences—retained, recountable, real, and yet dreamlike. Some describe the repetition as "numbing". "Numbing" is very imprecise. I think the feeling, finally, is of something like envelopment and even satisfaction at having endured the worst without quite caring or being tormented. It is the paradoxically calm satisfaction of having been enveloped in a weak or placid "real" that another person endured as the worst experience imaginable, in his personal frenzy, fear, and desperation, which we view from the outside as the simple occurrence of a death... I see: Severed heads. The Extra Value Meal. Kohl-gray eyelids. A holiday sale at Kohl's. Red seeping between the fingers of the gloved hand that presses the wound. "Doctor, can you save him?" "We'll do our best." The dining room of the newly renovated house, done in red. Often a bold color is best. The kids are grateful for their playroom. The bad guy falls down, shot. The detectives get shot. The new Lexus is now available for lease. On CNN, with a downed helicopter in the background, a peaceful field of reeds waves in the foreground. One after another the reeds are bent, broken, by boot treads advancing with the camera. The cameraman, as savior, locates the surviving American airman. He shoots him dead. It was a terrorist video. They run it again. Scenes from ads: sales, roads, ordinary calm shopping, daily life. Tarpaulined bodies in the street. The blue of the sky advertises the new car's color. Whatever you could suffer will have been recorded in the suffering of someone else. Red Lobster holds a shrimp festival. Clorox gets out blood. Advil stops pain fast. Some of us are going to need something stronger.

The first distinction is that millionaires think long-term while the middle class thinks short-term. Shifting this mindset is the starting point for achieving success.

and prominent intellectual and political elites leaves the playing field open for others to step in and present themselves as advocates for the entire working or middle class or other distinct underrepresented groups. Indeed, politics since 2000 has been marked by the rise of populists—politicians who spurn “out-of-touch experts” and who claim to speak on behalf of millions of people with whom they in fact have no authentic connection, and in whom they have no genuine interest beyond securing votes to support their own often very personal agendas. In America, the first sign of things to come was during the Great Recession, with the emergence of the Tea Party movement in the Republican Party, inside and outside Congress. The movement formed in reaction to the efforts by the administration of Barack Obama to bail out the U.S. financial sector in the midst of the economic crisis. Its members initially presented themselves as fiscal conservatives, calling for the kind of lower taxes and limited government spending espoused by Ronald Reagan. They quickly moved on to oppose the administration’s promotion of universal health care and other social policies, and soon morphed into an activist protest movement supporting new candidates for office with a mixture of conservative, libertarian, and right-wing populist credentials. Many of these Tea Party candidates would later support Donald Trump’s election in 2016.

He repeats two times, as if for emphasis, that he was either in the body or out of the body, making it all sound like something akin to an out-of-body experience. It is also worth noting that Paul makes a reference to being “caught up to the third heaven.” This distinction is important because in Jewish tradition the third heaven is the abode of God. In the Hebrew Bible, there are different categories or classes of heaven. The first heaven is up in the clouds, or in other words, the Earth’s atmosphere. The second heaven would be beyond the Earth’s immediate atmosphere, or as we would call it today, outer space. This is the place where the celestial bodies, such as the sun, moon, other planets, and stars reside. The third heaven is said to be a spiritual realm, or another dimension completely outside of space and time.

As your cash flow grows, you can indulge in some luxuries. An important distinction is that rich people buy luxuries last, while the poor and middle class tend to buy luxuries first. The poor and the middle class often buy luxury items like big houses, diamonds, furs, jewelry, or boats because they want to look rich. They look rich, but in reality they just get deeper in debt on credit. The old-money people, the long-term rich, build their asset column first. Then the income generated from the asset column buys their luxuries. The poor and middle class buy luxuries with their own sweat, blood, and children’s inheritance

Conservative elites first turned to populism as a political strategy thanks to Richard Nixon. His festering resentment of the Establishment’s clubby exclusivity prepared him emotionally to reach out to the “silent majority,” with whom he shared that hostility. Nixon excoriated “our leadership class, the ministers, the college professors, and other teachers… the business leadership class… they have all really let down and become soft.” He looked forward to a new party of independent conservatism resting on a defense of traditional cultural and social norms governing race and religion and the family. It would include elements of blue-collar America estranged from their customary home in the Democratic Party. Proceeding in fits and starts, this strategic experiment proved its viability during the Reagan era, just when the businessman as populist hero was first flexing his spiritual muscles. Claiming common ground with the folkways of the “good ole boy” working class fell within the comfort zone of a rising milieu of movers and shakers and their political enablers. It was a “politics of recognition”—a rediscovery of the “forgotten man”—or what might be termed identity politics from above. Soon enough, Bill Clinton perfected the art of the faux Bubba. By that time we were living in the age of the Bubba wannabe—Ross Perot as the “simple country billionaire.” The most improbable members of the “new tycoonery” by then had mastered the art of pandering to populist sentiment. Citibank’s chairman Walter Wriston, who did yeoman work to eviscerate public oversight of the financial sector, proclaimed, “Markets are voting machines; they function by taking referenda” and gave “power to the people.” His bank plastered New York City with clever broadsides linking finance to every material craving, while simultaneously implying that such seductions were unworthy of the people and that the bank knew it. Its $1 billion “Live Richly” ad campaign included folksy homilies: what was then the world’s largest bank invited us to “open a craving account” and pointed out that “money can’t buy you happiness. But it can buy you marshmallows, which are kinda the same thing.” Cuter still and brimming with down-home family values, Citibank’s ads also reminded everybody, “He who dies with the most toys is still dead,” and that “the best table in the city is still the one with your family around it.” Yale preppie George W. Bush, in real life a man with distinctly subpar instincts for the life of the daredevil businessman, was “eating pork rinds and playing horseshoes.” His friends, maverick capitalists all, drove Range Rovers and pickup trucks, donning bib overalls as a kind of political camouflage.

39. There are four classes of idols that beset men’s minds. To these for distinction’s sake I have assigned names, calling the first class idols of the tribe; the second, idols of the cave; the third, idols of the market place; the fourth, idols of the theater.

Rules for the Use and Arrangement of Words The following rules for the use and arrangement of words will be found helpful in securing clearness and force. 1. Use words in their proper sense. 2. Avoid useless circumlocution and "fine writing." 3. Avoid exaggerations. 4. Be careful in the use of not ... and, any, but, only, not ... or, that. 5. Be careful in the use of ambiguous words, e. g., certain. 6. Be careful in the use of he, it, they, these, etc. 7. Report a speech in the first person where necessary to avoid ambiguity. 8. Use the third person where the exact words of the speaker are not intended to be given. 9. When you use a participle implying when, while, though, or that, show clearly by the context what is implied. 10. When using the relative pronoun, use who or which, if the meaning is and he or and it, for he or for it. 11. Do not use and which for which. 12. Repeat the antecedent before the relative where the non-repetition causes any ambiguity. 13. Use particular for general terms. Avoid abstract nouns. 14. Avoid verbal nouns where verbs can be used. 15. Use particular persons instead of a class. 16. Do not confuse metaphor. 17. Do not mix metaphor with literal statement. 18. Do not use poetic metaphor to illustrate a prosaic subject. 19. Emphatic words must stand in emphatic positions; i. e., for the most part, at the beginning or the end of the sentence. 20. Unemphatic words must, as a rule, be kept from the end. 21. The Subject, if unusually emphatic, should often be transferred from the beginning of the sentence. 22. The object is sometimes placed before the verb for emphasis. 23. Where several words are emphatic make it clear which is the most emphatic. Emphasis can sometimes be given by adding an epithet, or an intensifying word. 24. Words should be as near as possible to the words with which they are grammatically connected. 25. Adverbs should be placed next to the words they are intended to qualify. 26. Only; the strict rule is that only should be placed before the word it affects. 27. When not only precedes but also see that each is followed by the same part of speech. 28. At least, always, and other adverbial adjuncts sometimes produce ambiguity. 29. Nouns should be placed near the nouns that they define. 30. Pronouns should follow the nouns to which they refer without the intervention of any other noun. 31. Clauses that are grammatically connected should be kept as close together as possible. Avoid parentheses. 32. In conditional sentences the antecedent or "if-clauses" must be kept distinct from the consequent clauses. 33. Dependent clauses preceded by that should be kept distinct from those that are independent. 34. Where there are several infinitives those that are dependent on the same word must be kept distinct from those that are not. 35. In a sentence with if, when, though, etc. put the "if-clause" first. 36. Repeat the subject where its omission would cause obscurity or ambiguity. 37. Repeat a preposition after an intervening conjunction especially if a verb and an object also intervene. 38. Repeat conjunctions, auxiliary verbs, and pronominal adjectives. 39. Repeat verbs after the conjunctions than, as, etc. 40. Repeat the subject, or some other emphatic word, or a summary of what has been said, if the sentence is so long that it is difficult to keep the thread of meaning unbroken. 41. Clearness is increased when the beginning of the sentence prepares the way for the middle and the middle for the end, the whole forming a kind of ascent. This ascent is called "climax." 42. When the thought is expected to ascend but descends, feebleness, and sometimes confusion, is the result. The descent is called "bathos." 43. A new construction should not be introduced unexpectedly.

The term ‘gender’ itself is problematic. It was first used in a sense that was not simply about grammar by sexologists – the scientists of sex such as John Money in the 1950s and 1960s – who were involved in normalising intersex infants.They used the term to mean the behavioural characteristics they considered most appropriate for persons of one or other biological sex. They applied the concept of gender when deciding upon the sex category into which those infants who did not have clear physical indications of one biological sex or another should be placed (Hausman, 1995).Their purpose was not progressive.These were conservative men who believed that there should be clear differences between the sexes and sought to create distinct sex categories through their projects of social engineering. Unfortunately, the term was adopted by some feminist theorists in the 1970s, and by the late 1970s was commonly used in academic feminism to indicate the difference between biological sex and those characteristics that derived from politics and not biology, which they called ‘gender’ (Haig, 2004). Before the term ‘gender’ was adopted, the term more usually used to describe these socially constructed characteristics was ‘sex roles’. The word ‘role’ connotes a social construction and was not susceptible to the degeneration that has a afflicted the term ‘gender’ and enabled it to be wielded so effectively by transgender activists. As the term ‘gender’ was adopted more extensively by feminists, its meaning was transformed to mean not just the socially constructed behaviour associated with biological sex, but the system of male power and women’s subordination itself, which became known as the ‘gender hierarchy’ or ‘gender order’ (Connell, 2005; Mackinnon, 1989). Gradually, older terms to describe this system, such as male domination, sex class and sex caste went out of fashion, with the effect that direct identification of the agents responsible for the subordination of women – men – could no longer be named. Gender, as a euphemism, disappeared men as agents in male violence against women, which is now commonly referred to as ‘gender violence’. Increasingly, the term ‘gender’ is used, in official forms and legislation, for instance, to stand in for the term ‘sex’ as if ‘gender’ itself is biological, and this usage has overwhelmed the feminist understanding of gender.

Finding that to be a slightly peculiar conversation to be holding with a horse, especially when Storm kept tossing his head as if he was in perfect agreement with Bram, Lucetta steered Sweet Pea toward them, unable to help but notice that when Bram finally did catch sight of her, he stopped speaking at once even as he took to looking slightly . . . guilty. “Lucetta!” he exclaimed, as his guilty look was replaced with a charming smile when she brought Sweet Pea to a stop. “What in the world are you doing out here, and . . . are you in your wrapper?” Not waiting for her to reply, he shrugged out of his top coat and moved close enough to her to draw the coat around her shoulders. Lovely warmth seeped into her every pore as the scent of sandalwood, lime, and something distinctly male tickled her nose. When she realized he was waiting for some type of reply, she pulled herself from thoughts of warmth and manly smells. “I got locked out of the castle, and when I saw you leaving, I thought I’d try to catch up with you.” Bram frowned. “What do you mean you got locked out of the castle? And what were you doing wandering around the castle at this hour of the night anyway?” “I wasn’t planning on wandering around the castle,” she said with a bit of an edge to her tone. “In all honesty, I’m sure I’d still be fast asleep if a suit of armor hadn’t decided to take a nighttime stroll through the tower.” “What?” “A suit of armor . . .” “Yes, I heard you, but . . . why would a suit of armor be walking through the tower? Or better yet, how would it have gotten up there in the first place?” “Probably the same way Geoffrey did, although why they were in the tower room, well, that’s fairly obvious.” “Not to me.” “Someone wants me gone from Ravenwood.” “Surely not.” “Why else would someone don a suit of armor and try to scare me half to death?” Bram

I don’t appreciate your attitude, Mr. Mulberry,” Miss Longfellow said before she took a seat in an uncomfortable-looking chair. “Nor do I appreciate the idea that you think this situation we’re currently in is my fault. If you would have simply considered hiring me when you first learned I was a nanny, you would not now be in a desperate frame of mind.” “Only because I probably wouldn’t still have the responsibility of my wards if I’d hired you. You might have lost them by now or—” “It would not be in your best interest to finish that sentence, sir,” Miss Longfellow interrupted. “I have never—and I repeat, never—caused any of the children in my care to come to any harm.” “What about that little Billy? I distinctly remember you telling me you almost drowned him.” “You’re forgetting the story. It is true that I was a little misinformed about how children can learn to swim, but if you’ll recall, after tossing little Billy into the water, I had second thoughts and jumped in after him. He proved that I wasn’t completely off the mark, since he immediately paddled to shore—whereas I promptly sank.” “I’m certainly glad you cleared that up for me. I now feel so much more confident in your abilities.” “Honestly,

When Jayne Juvan, a partner at the law firm Roetzel & Andress in Cleveland, Ohio, started using social media, very, very few lawyers used these tools. Because her profession is so conservative, many of the attorneys she interacted with didn't see the opportunity. After only a few months of blogging, Crain's Cleveland Business interviewed Juvan on the use of social media by lawyers. In her first year of practice, she landed a client via social media. That was a game changer, because her colleagues began to see her as an owner, not just an employee. When she started to land wins, it became harder to navigate her profession because the legal industry was quite competitive. But, as she shares, "I didn't back off, because I now knew how powerful social media was." Good thing. When she was a third- and fourth-year associate, in 2007 to 2008, the economy collapsed. Her class experienced deep layoffs across the industry, which she sidestepped, in part because of her social media efforts. Most of the accolades she has received can be traced to social media. When she was considered for promotion to partner, the fact that she was being followed by prominent professionals on Twitter bolstered her case in a major way, as the CEO saw the potential of these relationships. According to Catalyst, only 20 percent of partners in law firms are women, and only 16 percent of them have $500,000 worth of business or more.6 Jayne Juvan made partner at age thirty-two, and at thirty-four, her billing reports placed her in the small percentage of women with $500,000-plus of business. Once Juvan had acquired the basic competencies involved in practicing law, social media became her distinctive strength, propelling her into the partnership ranks at her law firm.

Sub-Christian? Some read the Old Testament as so much primitive groping and guesswork, which the New Testament sweeps away. But “God . . . spoke through the prophets” (Hebrews 1:1), of whom Moses was the greatest (see Deuteronomy 34:10-12); and his Commandments, given through Moses, set a moral and spiritual standard for living which is not superseded, but carries God’s authority forever. Note that Jesus’ twofold law of love, summarizing the Commandments, comes from Moses’ own God-taught elaboration of them (for that is what the Pentateuchal law-codes are). “Love your God” is from Deuteronomy 6:5, “love your neighbor” from Leviticus 19:18. It cannot be too much stressed that Old Testament moral teaching (as distinct from the Old Testament revelation of grace) is not inferior to that of the New Testament, let alone the conventional standards of our time. The barbarities of lawless sex, violence, and exploitation, cutthroat business methods, class warfare, disregard for one’s family, and the like are sanctioned only by our modern secular society. The supposedly primitive Old Testament, and the 3000-year-old Commandments in particular, are bulwarks against all these things. But (you say) doesn’t this sort of talk set the Old Testament above Christ? Can that be right? Surely teaching that antedates him by a millennium and a quarter must be inferior to his? Surely the Commandments are too negative, always and only saying “don’t . . .”? Surely we must look elsewhere for full Christian standards? Fair queries; but there is a twofold answer. First, Christ said in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:17) that he came not to destroy the law but to fulfill it; that is, to be, and help others to be, all that God in the Commandments had required. What Jesus destroyed was inadequate expositions of the law, not the law itself (Matthew 5:21-48; 15:1-9; etc.). By giving truer expositions, he actually republished the law. The Sermon on the Mount itself consists of themes from the Decalogue developed in a Christian context. Second, the negative form of the Commandments has positive implications. “Where a sin is forbidden, the contrary duty is commanded” (Westminster Larger Catechism, question 99). The negative form was needed at Sinai (as in the West today) to curb current lawlessness which threatened both godliness and national life. But the positive content pointed up by Christ—loving God with all one’s powers, and one’s neighbor as oneself—is very clearly there, as we shall see.

Above all, you must not expect them to take more than a passing interest in your brain. Your best course is to avoid all reference to that topic. 'The brain' is seldom, if ever, mentioned in the best circles of the spiritual world—to which circles, I assume, your leading Ideas belong. You must never forget that in the realm of Ideas class distinctions are rigidly observed; there is an aristocracy and a proletariat, with all the intermediate grades; and many topics which may be safely mentioned among the commons are an offence when introduced to the nobility. 'The brain' is one of these. Its use, among the ghosts, is confined exclusively to the working class; and you will commit a breach of good manners by flaunting its functions in the presence of august society. Were you, for example, in the course of some conversation with a noble Principle, to offer him the use of your own brain, or to suggest that he was in need of such an implement, or in the habit of using it, you would commit an indiscretion of the first magnitude; and it is certain the offended spirit would strike you off his visiting list and decline to haunt you any more.

Sometimes the strength will be less obvious. Consider Charles Darwin's finches, a subject you may vaguely remember from high school biology class. When Darwin first encountered these birds on the Galapagos Islands, he gathered numerous specimens, not quite realizing what he had discovered. Upon his return, he presented these specimens to the famous English ornithologist John Gould for identification. Gould's analysis revealed that the specimens Darwin had submitted were in fact highly variable. What at first glance were all just "finches" turned out to be twelve different species. There were similarities, but evolution had allowed each to develop a distinctive strength. Each species had a novel beak structure that allowed it to exploit a specific food resource. Some evolved to eat seeds, others fruit, others insects, and others grubs. In business terms, they all had similar core competencies (feathers, wings, feet, beak), but it was a distinctive, seemingly subtle strength—the type of beak—that allowed the finches to effectively compete for a specific type of food.

In July 1945, B.R. Ambedkar published a book called "What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables". This argued that Gandhi’s campaign to lift the Depressed Classes had failed, and for three reasons. First, ‘Gandhi’s sermons on Untouchability have completely failed to move the Hindus’, who ‘hear his after-prayer sermons for few minutes and then go to the comic opera’. Second, that while Gandhi claimed to be against untouchability, he had himself never launched a concerted political (as distinct from social) campaign for its abolition. Third, that (as Ambedkar saw it) ‘Gandhi does not want the Untouchables to organize and be strong. For he fears that they might thereby become independent of the Hindus and weaken the ranks of Hindus.’ Ambedkar argued that ‘it is to kill this spirit of independence among the Untouchables that Mr. Gandhi started the Harijan Sevak Sangh’. He claimed that ‘the whole object of the sangh is to create a slave mentality among the untouchables towards their Hindu masters. Examine the Sangh from any angle one may like and the creation of slave mentality will appear to be its dominant purpose.’ When asked why there were no Harijans in the governing body of the Harijan Sewak Sangh, Gandhi had answered that it was an institution that asked caste Hindus to make reparations for the sins of the past. The exploiters had to make amends themselves. Ambedkar saw this as a cunning ploy to keep the ‘untouchables’ forever subservient. He claimed that ‘if the Sangh was handed over to the Untouchables Mr. Gandhi and the Congress will have no means of control over the Untouchables. The Untouchables will cease to be dependent on the Hindus.... [T]he Untouchables having become independent will cease to be grateful to the Hindus'.

All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct permanent share in the government. . . . Can a democratic assembly who annually revolve in the mass of the people be supposed steadily to pursue the public good? Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy. . . .

The Spark, the animating spirit of the early warrior caste, is distinct from the religion that comes to predominate and maintain the later multiethnic empire, which I will call The Imperial Altar. Civilisational successes—such as conquest, wealth, and education—generate their own loss conditions. The Barbarism of Reflection destroys the foundations of the Imperial Altar and successfully kills any last remnants of The Spark. The castes of the lion archetype (warriors and peasants) have mutual antagonisms with the castes of the fox archetype (priests or intellectuals and merchants). Where the lion archetype predominates either as monarchism (warriors) or as Caesarism (peasants) ‘civilisational successes’ can be held in check for a period. They tend to create strong regimes through ruthlessness but such strength, ironically, leads to the managerial need for administration generated by growth and complexity, which in turn leads to the rise of elites of the fox archetype taking over. When the fox archetype predominates, either as theocracy (priests/intellectuals) or plutarchy (merchants), ‘civilisational success’ may accelerate but, in the process, the very foundations that facilitated such success in the first place (i.e. the strong regime maintained by the lion’s ruthlessness) are eroded, eventually leading to collapse. Quantity has a quality all of its own, which manifests as all that is ‘mass’: democracy, utilitarianism, standardisation, and the destruction of quality and distinction. This is a feature of the late, pre-collapse cycle. Individuals of one civilisational season cannot embody the spirit of another: the Children of Winter, for example, cannot embody the Spring. Civilisation is incommunicable. The ‘world-feeling’ of a people as Spengler says is ‘not transferable’. ‘What one people takes over from another—in “conversion” or in admiring feeling—is a name, dress, and mask for its own feeling, never the feeling of that other.’[1] Ethnicity is a constant reality which promotes ingroup solidarity in the early cycle and becomes a problem for the ruling class to manage in the late cycle.

Back to School As surreal as being a grown adult in high school was, it was also brief: in only one semester I had completed enough credits to obtain my diploma. From there I went directly to the “Adult Entry Program” at my local university and enrolled. I would spend one semester in remedial classes to catch up on missing prerequisites and then college would begin in earnest. One might imagine that by now I would have learned that being a good student takes significant effort, but I continued to coast my first semester, missing classes, and skipping homework. Then, one time after missing a few days in a row, I returned to discover the professor handing back a midterm exam –– one that I had not written! Apparently, I had skipped class that day. Although it would not lead to me failing the class (and as a remedial class it would not affect my overall grade,) it did require a “mercy pass” on the part of the instructor to get me through. The approach I’d been following all along simply wasn’t working. I had the right goals now but evidently I still lacked the right approach. As I think it might be for many people, the fundamental shift in how I went about things came with the realization that I was not going to school because I had to. No one was making me go. I was there of my own accord, for my own purposes and reasons. This understanding completely transformed the way I went about school; from that point forward, I treated it as something I wanted for myself, and I worked accordingly. By the end of my next semester, I was on the academic Dean’s List, and I would graduate with Great Distinction from the Honors program four years later.

And is that all there is to it?’ Nekhlyudov cried as he read these words. And the inner voice of his whole being said, ‘Yes, that’s all there is to it.’ And then something happened to Nekhlyudov, the kind of thing that often occurs with people living a spiritual life. What happened was that an idea that at first had seemed weird paradoxical, maybe even ridiculous, after being confirmed time after time by the process of living, suddenly presented itself as a simple, incontrovertible truth. In this way it became clear to him that the only sure way of salvation from the terrible evil whereby so many were made to suffer was for people to acknowledge that they are guilty before God and therefore disqualified from punishing or correcting other people. He now saw clearly that the terrible evil he had witnessed in the prisons and at the halting-stations, and the smug complacency of those who were committing it, all stemmed from one thing: people were trying to do something that was impossible – to correct evil while being evil. Sinful people tried to correct sinful people and thought this could be achieved mechanically. The only result was that people needing and wanting money have a profession out of the imaginary punishment and correction of others, and they have become corrupt themselves even as they have gone on ceaselessly corrupting their victims. Now he could clearly see the origin of all the horrors he had witnessed, and what had to be done to eliminate them. The answer he had been unable to discover was the one given by Christ to Peter: always forgive, forgive everyone an infinite number of times, because there are no guiltless people who might be qualified to punish or correct. ‘No, it can’t be as simple as that,‘ Nekhlyudov said to himself, yet he could see beyond doubt that, however outlandish this had seemed to him at first, because he was so used to the opposite, it was the one sure way to solve the problem, both in theory and emphatically in practice. The age-old objection that evil-doers had to be dealt with – we can’t let them go unpunished, can we? – no longer bothered him. As an objection it might have been valid if there was any proof that punishment reduces crime and reforms criminals; but when the proof is entirely in the opposite direction, and it is clear that it is not within our power for some men to punish others, the only natural and reasonable thing is to stop doing what is not only useless but pernicious, as well as callous and immoral. ‘For centuries you have been executing people classed by you as criminals. Have they been eliminated? They have not, their numbers have only increased, added to by criminals corrupted by punishment and by other criminals – the judges, prosecutors, magistrates and gaolers who sit in judgement and dole out punishment.’ Nekhlyudov could now see that society and good order in general exist not because of the legalized criminals who judge and punish others, but because, despite all the forces of corruption, people do in fact pity and love one another. Hoping to find confirmation of this idea in the Bible, Nekhlyudov started reading from the beginning of St Matthew’s Gospel. After reading the Sermon on the Mount, which had always moved him, he discovered in it now for the first time not just abstract ideas of great beauty that imposed hyperbolical and impossible demands, but a series of simple, clear-cut, pragmatic commands, which, if followed (a distinct possibility), would establish a totally new order of human society, in which the violence that incensed Nekhlyudov would fall away of its own accord, and the greatest blessing for humanity, the kingdom of God on earth, would be achieved.

Even in worship, the distinction of classes was observed on the Titanic; assistant purser Reginald Barker conducted the service for second-class passengers in their dining saloon, and a Catholic mass was held in the second-class lounge by Father Thomas Byles, followed by one for those in third class. (There was no Sabbath observance for the significant number of Jews on board, though kosher food was available in all classes.)

When we put our foot down, I think they got a little bit nervous,” Solo says. “They said, Okay, what will it take to get you guys at all the NWSL games this weekend?” In the end, the federation treated it as an appearance fee of sorts. The players would get $10,000 each to attend their NWSL games, and they would be flown first-class, a distinct upgrade from their usual travel. It was a relatively small victory, but it set the stage for the players to stand up for themselves more assertively. The women of the national team proved they were the best in the world, they captured the country’s attention, and now they had leverage. “It was really the first time where we were like, Okay, we are worth something to the federation and we know it, so now we have to keep this going,” Solo says. “That’s what really empowered us. All of a sudden, we got a $10,000 fee, first-class tickets to fly to our NWSL games, and it was right before we were going to negotiate our new contract.” But things didn’t get better just because the federation paid the players a $10,000 fee. In less than a month, the players had to set out on the road again for a 10-game victory tour as World Cup champions and, as it turned out, the venues weren’t exactly befitting of a World Cup–winning national team. Eight of the 10 victory-tour games in 2015 were scheduled on artificial turf. Over the course of that year, U.S. Soccer scheduled the women to play 57 percent of their home games on artificial turf but scheduled zero of the men’s games on artificial turf. In fact, the men played at five venues that had artificial-turf surfaces, and in all five cases, the federation paid to have temporary grass installed.

The whole setup was based on distinctions that separated groups from one another and restricted access to the mercy seat. But something happened. The veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. In the moment that Jesus died on the Cross, distinctions came to an end. There was no longer any separation between the godly and the ungodly. There was no longer any curtain separating first class from second class.

And it was the end of class distinction in filling the boats. The White Star Line always denied anything of the kind—and the investigators backed them up—yet there’s overwhelming evidence that the steerage took a beating: Daniel Buckley kept from going into First Class … Olaus Abelseth released from the poop deck as the last boat pulled away … Steward Hart convoying two little groups of women topside, while hundreds were kept below … steerage passengers crawling along the crane from the well deck aft … others climbing vertical ladders to escape the well deck forward.

Then there was the recurring problem of class distinction. At least some of the crew, and passengers too, believed that the boats were reserved for the class where they were located. When two Second Class ladies asked an officer if they could pass to the forward boats in First Class space, passenger Lawrence Beesley heard the officer reply, “No, madam, your boats are down on your deck.

but the entirety of human existence. Artificial intelligence is, after all, a mirroring and mimicry machine: we feed in the cumulative words, ideas, and images that our species has managed to amass (and digitize) over its history and these programs mirror back to us something that feels uncannily lifelike. A golem world. “I’d rather see an ad for cute shoes that I am going to like than see ads for a bunch of ugly stuff I don’t want,” one student said in an early class. In our discussions, we came to call this the “cute shoes problem” because it encapsulates one of the main reasons why surveillance capitalism and the AI revolution were able to sneak up on us with so little debate. Many of us do appreciate a certain level of automated customization, especially algorithms that suggest music, books, and people who might interest us. And at first, the stakes seemed low: Is it really a big deal if we see ads and suggestions based on our interests and tastes? Or if chatbots help clear our email backlogs? Yet now we find ourselves neck-deep in a system where, as with my own real-life doppelganger, the stakes are distinctly higher. Personal data, extracted without full knowledge or understanding, is sold to third parties and can influence everything from what loans we are eligible for to what job postings we see—to whether our jobs are replaced by deep learning bots that have gotten shockingly good at impersonating us. And those helpful recommendations and eerie impersonations come from the same

The “elite” themselves of course don’t believe any such thing, never professing such ideas publicly, nor in private, nor, I would say, is it in their minds, consciously or not, as their true motivation. Their motivation is humanitarian and egalitarian, just as they claim: to temper the excesses of the free market, to protect the weak, the minorities—especially blacks—and the poor from traditional oppressors; to fight everywhere emanations of distinction or “privilege,” to uplift the meek and the weak, to “make the last be the first.” To the extent they appear to be antidemocratic, it is in the name of a purer democracy and a more pure humanitariaism: thus they feel justified in crushing now the Dutch farmers who rise up against “climate restrictions” because they believe by doing so they are helping the far larger masses of poor in the Third World. It’s the same for all their behavior, the promotion of transsexualism, of the gays—it is part of protecting the weak. If they are cruel, authoritarian to some it’s because they believe they’re fighting bullies. If they often engage in corrupt behavior, hypocrisy and so on, well, that’s just human frailty and you can look the other way: “I still think I’m trying to do good, and that’s what matters.” In other words, they’re acting like almost any other ideological mandarin Party incompetent class in history, but, I would say, with less, far less self-conscious cynicism or nihilism than what you’d find among East Bloc apparatchiks. Not one embraces amoralism, Nietzscheanism, eugenicism, or any of the vampiric dark traits attributed to them by their political opponents. They are not gangsters or mad scientists. They are genuine moralists, and without that egalitarian moralism no one would accept their rule and none of their insanity would be possible.

The “elite” themselves of course don’t believe any such thing [amoral aristocratic radicalism], never professing such ideas publicly, nor in private, nor, I would say, is it in their minds, consciously or not, as their true motivation. Their motivation is humanitarian and egalitarian, just as they claim: to temper the excesses of the free market, to protect the weak, the minorities—especially blacks—and the poor from traditional oppressors; to fight everywhere emanations of distinction or “privilege,” to uplift the meek and the weak, to “make the last be the first.” To the extent they appear to be antidemocratic, it is in the name of a purer democracy and a more pure humanitariaism: thus they feel justified in crushing now the Dutch farmers who rise up against “climate restrictions” because they believe by doing so they are helping the far larger masses of poor in the Third World. It’s the same for all their behavior, the promotion of transsexualism, of the gays—it is part of protecting the weak. If they are cruel, authoritarian to some it’s because they believe they’re fighting bullies. If they often engage in corrupt behavior, hypocrisy and so on, well, that’s just human frailty and you can look the other way: “I still think I’m trying to do good, and that’s what matters.” In other words, they’re acting like almost any other ideological mandarin Party incompetent class in history, but, I would say, with less, far less self-conscious cynicism or nihilism than what you’d find among East Bloc apparatchiks. Not one embraces amoralism, Nietzscheanism, eugenicism, or any of the vampiric dark traits attributed to them by their political opponents. They are not gangsters or mad scientists. They are genuine moralists, and without that egalitarian moralism no one would accept their rule and none of their insanity would be possible.

The whole set of stylizations that are known as 'camp' (a word that I was hearing then for the first time) was, in 1926, self-explanatory. Women moved and gesticulated in this way. Homosexuals wished for obvious reasons to copy them. The strange thing about 'camp' is that it has become fossilized. The mannerisms have never changed. If I were now to see a woman sitting with her knees clamped together, one hand on her hip and the other lightly touching her back hair, I should think, 'Either she scored her last social triumph in 1926 or it is a man in drag.' Perhaps 'camp' is set in the 'twenties because after that differences between the sexes—especially visible differences—began to fade. This, of course, has never mattered to women in the least. They know they are women. To homosexuals, who must, with every breath they draw, with every step they take, demonstrate that they are feminine, it is frustrating. They look back in sorrow to that more formal era and try to re-live it. The whole structure of society was at that time much more rigid than it has ever been since, and in two main ways. The first of these was sexual. The short skirts, bobbed hair and flat chests that were in fashion were in fact symbols of immaturity. No one ever drew attention to this, presumably out of politeness. The word 'boyish' was used to describe the girls of that era. This epithet they accepted graciously. They knew that they looked nothing like boys. They also realized that it was meant to be a compliment. Manliness was all the rage. The men of the 'twenties searched themselves for vestiges of effeminacy as though for lice. They did not worry about their characters but about their hair and their clothes. Their predicament was that they must never be caught worrying about either. I once heard a slightly dandified friend of my brother say, 'People are always accusing me of taking care over my appearance.' The sexual meaning of behaviour was only sketchily understood, but the symbolism of clothes was recognized by everyone. To wear suede shoes was to be under suspicion. Anyone who had hair rather than bristle at the back of his neck was thought to be an artist, a foreigner or worse. A friend of mine who was young in the same decade as I says that, when he was introduced to an elderly gentleman as an artist, the gentleman said, 'Oh, I know this young man is an artist. The other day I saw him in the street in a brown jacket.' The other way in which society in the 'twenties was rigid was in its class distinctions. Doubtless to a sociologist there were many different strata merging here and there but, among the people that I was now getting to know, there were only two classes. They never mingled except in bed. There was 'them', who acted refined and spoke nice and whose people had pots of money, and there was 'us', who were the salt of the earth.

And is that all there is to it?’ Nekhlyudov cried out as he read these words. And the inner voice of his whole being said, ‘Yes, that’s all there is to it. ’ And then something happened to Nekhlyudov, the kind of thing that often occurs with people living a spiritual life. What happened was that an idea that at first seemed weird, paradoxical, maybe even ridiculous, after being confirmed time after time by the process of living, suddenly presented it as a simple, incontrovertible truth. In this way it became clear to him that the only sure way of salvation from the terrible evil whereby so many were made to suffer was for people to acknowledge that they are guilty before God and therefore disqualified from punishing or correcting other people. He now saw clearly that the terrible evil he had witnessed in prisons and the halting-stations, and the smug complacency of those who were committing it, all stemmed from one thing: people were trying to do something that is impossible – to correct evil while being evil. Sinful people tried to correct sinful people and thought this could be achieved mechanically. The only result was that people needing and wanting money have made a profession out of the imaginary punishment and correction of others, and they have become corrupt themselves even as they have gone on ceaselessly corrupting their victims. Now he could clearly see the origin of all the horrors he had witnessed, and what had to be done to eliminate them. The answer he had been unable to discover was the one given by Christ to Peter: always forgive, forgive everyone an infinite number of times, because there are no guiltless people who might be qualified to punish or correct. ‘No, it can’t be as simple as that,’ Nekhlyudov said to himself, yet he could see beyond doubt that, however outlandish this had seemed to him at first, because he was so used to the opposite, it was the one sure way to solve the problem, both in theory and emphatically in practice. The age-old objection that evil-doers had to be dealt with – we can’t just let them go unpunished can we? – no longer bothered him. As an objection it might have been valid if there was any proof that punishment reduces crime and reforms criminals; but when the proof is entirely in the opposite direction, and it is clear that it is not within our power for some men to punish others, the only natural and reasonable thing is to stop doing what is not only useless but pernicious, as well as callous and immoral. ‘For centuries you have been executing people classed by you as criminals. Have they been eliminated? They have not, their numbers have only increased, added to by criminals corrupted by punishment and by other criminals – the judges, prosecutors, magistrates and gaolers who sit in in judgement and dole out punishment.’ Nekhlyudov could now see that society and good order in general exist not because of the legalized criminals who judge and punish others, but because, despite all the forces of corruption, people do in fact pity and love one another. Hoping to find confirmation of this idea in the Bible, Nekhlyudov started reading from the beginning of St Matthew’s Gospel. After reading the Sermon on the Mount, which had always moved him, he discovered in it now for the first time not just abstract ideas of great beauty that imposed hyperbolical and impossible demands, but a series of simple, clear-cut, pragmatic commands, which, if followed, (a distinct possibility), would establish a totally new order of human society, in which the violence that incensed Nekhlyudov would fall away of its own accord, and the greatest blessing for humanity, the kingdom of God on earth, would be achieved. There were five of these commandments.

For the Athenians, he says boldly, are so envious that they would reject what is manifestly the best advice for the city if they suspected a speaker of giving this good advice for the sake of gain. A speaker, therefore, who wants to lead the city for its good must first overcome its suspicions of him, and this task is apparently impossible by straightforward means alone. For Diodotus concludes that even a speaker who wants to say what is better must lie to the multitude in order to be trusted, and that it is impossible to benefit the city—and the city alone—without deceiving it (III 42–43). With remarkable frankness, Diodotus tells the Athenians that he will deceive them. And this admission leaves us with the following questions. Why is it impossible to earn the city’s trust without lying to it? And how, precisely, does Diodotus lie? Diodotus’ lie would appear to be his claim that he will not even consider the question of justice, i.e., whether the Mytileneans were unjust, but only that of whether it is in Athens’s interest to kill them all. It is true that the bulk of his argument against these killings is a hard-headed analysis in terms of Athenian self-interest; yet one feels that he is not so simply heartless as he pretends. Moreover, he does not, as we shall see, wholly disregard considerations of justice. Diodotus begins by claiming that even the most severe punishments cannot deter all rebellions, and that Athens should therefore be prepared to try to end any rebellion that does occur with as little cost as possible. Athens can do this, he says, by exploiting the division of classes among the rebels and by giving the multitude the prospect of leniency for themselves if they should willingly hand over the city, as the multitude within Mytilene had done, more or less, once they had received heavy arms. But then, surprisingly, Diodotus adds that it would now be unjust to kill the multitude, as distinct from the oligarchs, at Mytilene, since they had been the Athenians’ benefactors. So in spite of his original claim, Diodotus does argue explicitly in terms of justice. Moreover, there is much in his speech that has subtly been leading up to this argument from justice.

The word communism, coined in Paris in the 1840s, refers to three related but distinct phenomena: an ideal, a program, and a regime set up to realize the ideal.*1 The ideal is one of full social equality that in its most extreme form (as in some of Plato’s writings) calls for the dissolution of the individual in the community. Inasmuch as social and economic inequalities derive primarily from inequalities of possession, its attainment requires that there be no “mine” and “thine”—in other words, no private property. This ideal has an ancient heritage, reappearing time and again in the history of Western thought from the seventh century b.c. to the present. The program dates back to the middle of the nineteenth century and is most closely associated with the names of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In their Communist Manifesto of 1848 Marx and Engels wrote that “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in a single sentence: Abolition of private property.” Engels claimed that his friend had formulated a scientific theory that demonstrated the inevitable collapse of societies based on class distinctions. Although throughout history there had been sporadic attempts to realize the communist ideal, the first determined effort to this effect by using the full power of the state occurred in Russia between 1917 and 1991. The founder of this regime, Vladimir Lenin, saw a propertyless and egalitarian society emerging from the “dictatorship of the proletariat” that would eliminate private property and pave the way for Communism.

While that term “middle classes” may be inaccurate for first-century realities, the distinction between “declined” or “born” into poverty is crucial for understanding Jesus and his first companions. I accept, therefore, Theissen’s proposal and Stegemann’s emphasis that the kingdom-of-God movement began by making “an ethical virtue out of social necessity”—that is, by refusing to accept the injustice they were experiencing as normal and acceptable to God. Those first itinerants were, like Jesus himself, primarily dispossessed peasant freeholders, tenants, or sharecroppers. They were not invited to give up everything but to accept their loss of everything as judging not them but the system that had done it to them. It was ethical to accept the abandonment of such a system and no longer to participate in its exploitative normalcy.

But the proto-democracy he had envisaged would devolve into a succession of ruling dynasties. Class distinctions grew, and with them—as had happened before in both Judaism and Christianity—a rapidly rising all-male clerical elite. These men became the gatekeepers of faith, elaborating the principles of islam into the institution of Islam, often by projecting their own conservatism onto the Quran itself.

Hitler’s notions of a social ‘new order’ have to be placed in this setting of conquest, ruthless exploitation, the right of the powerful, racial dominance, and more or less permanent war in a world where life was cheap and readily expendable. His ideas often had their roots in the resentment that still smouldered at the way his own ‘talents’ had been left unrecognized or the disadvantages of his own social status compared with the privileges of the high-born and well-to-do. Thus he advocated free education, funded by the state, for all talented youngsters. Workers would have annual holidays and could expect once or twice in their lives to go on a sea-cruise. He criticized the distinctions between different classes of passengers on such cruise ships. And he approved of the introduction of the same food for both officers and men in the army. Hitler might appear to have been promoting ideas of a modern, mobile, classless society, abolishing privilege and resting solely upon achievement. But the central tenet remained race, to which all else was subordinated. Thus, in the east, he said, all Germans would travel in the upholstered first- or second-class railway carriages – to separate them from the native population. It was a social vision which could have obvious attractions for many members of the would-be master-race. The image was of a cornucopia of wealth flowing into the Reich from the east. The Reich would be linked to the new frontiers by motor-ways cutting through the endless steppes and the enormous Russian spaces. Prosperity and power would be secured through the new breed of supermen who lorded it over the downtrodden Slav masses.

But Gehrig reported in later life that they weren’t very nice to him. He was a brother all right, but he wasn’t quite as much of a brother as some of the other lads whose mothers weren’t cooks. The boys managed somehow to convey that fine distinction to him. It was the first time that the big, rough, dumb Dutchman butted into the wall reared by the so-called upper classes. It bled a little where he hit, and left a scar. In fact, the brothers never did warm up to him until he became the famous Yankee first baseman and heir to the throne of Babe Ruth. Then they would come around and give him the grip and remember the good old days in the frat house and how jolly it all was.

...When I tell someone that I used to be male, they are often dumbfounded at first, as if they have difficulty reconciling that someone who seems so naturally female to them could have once been something they consider to be so completely different. The fact that a single individual can be both female and male, or ugly and beautiful, at different points in their life challenges the commonly held belief that these classes are mutually exclusive and naturally distinct from one another.

From the introduction by Arthur Livingston Page xxv: What is the secret of the amazing subordination of the armies of the West? Mosca finds the answer in the aristocratic character, so to say, of the army, first in the fact that there is a wide and absolute social distinction between private and officer, and second that the corps of officers, which comes from the ruling class, reflects the balance of multiple and varied social forces which are recognized by and within that class. The logical implications of this theory are well worth pondering. If the theory be regarded as sound, steps toward the democratization of armies—the policy of Mr. Hore-Belisha, for instance—are mistaken steps which in the end lead toward military dictatorships; for any considerable democratization of armies would make them active social forces reflecting all the vicissitudes of social conflict and, therefore, preponderant social forces. On the other hand, army officers have to be completely eliminated from political life proper. When army officers figure actively and ex officio in political councils, they are certain eventually to dominate those councils and replace the civil authority—the seemingly incurable cancer of the Spanish world, for an example.

BARGAIN-ISSUE PATTERN IN SECONDARY COMPANIES. We have defined a secondary company as one that is not a leader in a fairly important industry. Thus it is usually one of the smaller concerns in its field, but it may equally well be the chief unit in an unimportant line. By way of exception, any company that has established itself as a growth stock is not ordinarily considered “secondary.” In the great bull market of the 1920s relatively little distinction was drawn between industry leaders and other listed issues, provided the latter were of respectable size. The public felt that a middle-sized company was strong enough to weather storms and that it had a better chance for really spectacular expansion than one that was already of major dimensions. The depression years 1931–32, however, had a particularly devastating impact on the companies below the first rank either in size or in inherent stability. As a result of that experience investors have since developed a pronounced preference for industry leaders and a corresponding lack of interest most of the time in the ordinary company of secondary importance. This has meant that the latter group have usually sold at much lower prices in relation to earnings and assets than have the former. It has meant further that in many instances the price has fallen so low as to establish the issue in the bargain class. When investors rejected the stocks of secondary companies, even though these sold at relatively low prices, they were expressing a belief or fear that such companies faced a dismal future. In fact, at least subconsciously, they calculated that any price was too high for them because they were heading for extinction—just as in 1929 the companion theory for the “blue chips” was that no price was too high for them because their future possibilities were limitless. Both of these views were exaggerations and were productive of serious investment errors. Actually, the typical middle-sized listed company is a large one when compared with the average privately owned business. There is no sound reason why such companies should not continue indefinitely in operation, undergoing the vicissitudes characteristic of our economy but earning on the whole a fair return on their invested capital.

It is not that Pueblo Indians hate modern America, especially since they find our modest cultural wants much easier to live with than colonial Spanish ones. Indeed, they don’t hate us at all—many have volunteered and served with distinction in our armed forces, and a number of Pueblo homes fly the American flag daily. Others, such as the famed Jemez Eagle smoke jumpers, serve as first responders throughout the American West. As forest fire teams go, the Jemez men are among the world’s best, and they will hold a dangerous but critical fire line with stunning resolve. No, it’s not about hatred, it is just that our unchecked growth, lack of social cohesion, and flamboyant use of resources—especially water—worries them as being unsustainable. They expect to outlast us. A few years ago, a local tribal elder appeared in an educational film about the Anasazi and commented that his people had to hold on to traditional Pueblo land, culture, and values because some day his descendants would look out across the Rio Grande Valley and modern Albuquerque would be gone.50 He is in the mainstream of opinion among traditional Pueblo leaders. Given our wasteful ways, weak communities, reemerging regional cultural conflicts, and rapidly diverging economics-based class system, we may in fact not be a sure bet for long-term survival.

The structure of de Prony’s computing office cannot be easily seen in Smith’s example. His computing staff had two distinct classes of workers. The larger of these was a staff of nearly ninety computers. These workers were quite different from Smith’s pin makers or even from the computers at the British Nautical Almanac and the Connaissance des Temps. Many of de Prony’s computers were former servants or wig dressers, who had lost their jobs when the Revolution rendered the elegant styles of Louis XVI unfashionable or even treasonous.35 They were not trained in mathematics and held no special interest in science. De Prony reported that most of them “had no knowledge of arithmetic beyond the two first rules [of addition and subtraction].”36 They were little different from manual workers and could not discern whether they were computing trigonometric functions, logarithms, or the orbit of Halley’s comet. One labor historian has described them as intellectual machines, “grasping and releasing a single piece of ‘data’ over and over again.”37 The second class of workers prepared instructions for the computation and oversaw the actual calculations. De Prony had no special title for this group of workers, but subsequent computing organizations came to use the term “planning committee” or merely “planners,” as they were the ones who actually planned the calculations. There were eight planners in de Prony’s organization. Most of them were experienced computers who had worked for either the Bureau du Cadastre or the Paris Observatory. A few had made interesting contributions to mathematical theory, but the majority had dealt only with the problems of practical mathematics.38 They took the basic equations for the trigonometric functions and reduced them to the fundamental operations of addition and subtraction. From this reduction, they prepared worksheets for the computers. Unlike Nevil Maskelyne’s worksheets, which gave general equations to the computers, these sheets identified every operation of the calculation and left nothing for the workers to interpret. Each step of the calculation was followed by a blank space for the computers to fill with a number. Each table required hundreds of these sheets, all identical except for a single unique starting value at the top of the page. Once the computers had completed their sheets, they returned their results to the planners. The planners assembled the tables and checked the final values. The task of checking the results was a substantial burden in itself. The group did not double-compute, as that would have obviously doubled the workload. Instead the planners checked the final values by taking differences between adjacent values in order to identify miscalculated numbers. This procedure, known as “differencing,” was an important innovation for human computers. As one observer noted, differencing removed the “necessity of repeating, or even of examining, the whole of the work done by the [computing] section.”39 The entire operation was overseen by a handful of accomplished scientists, who “had little or nothing to do with the actual numerical work.” This group included some of France’s most accomplished mathematicians, such as Adrien-Marie Legendre (1752–1833) and Lazare-Nicolas-Marguerite Carnot (1753–1823).40 These scientists researched the appropriate formulas for the calculations and identified potential problems. Each formula was an approximation, as no trigonometric function can be written as an exact combination of additions and subtractions. The mathematicians analyzed the quality of the approximations and verified that all the formulas produced values adequately close to the true values of the trigonometric functions.

In our race-conscious society, our vocabulary often extends no further than the color of someone’s skin—“black people,” “Asians,” “white privilege.” Sometimes these broad categories are useful, but to understand my story, you have to delve into the details. I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs of the Northeast. Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree. To these folks, poverty is the family tradition—their ancestors were day laborers in the Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers during more recent times. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family. The Scots-Irish are one of the most distinctive subgroups in America. As one observer noted, “In traveling across America, the Scots-Irish have consistently blown my mind as far and away the most persistent and unchanging regional subculture in the country. Their family structures, religion and politics, and social lives all remain unchanged compared to the wholesale abandonment of tradition that’s occurred nearly everywhere else.” This distinctive embrace of cultural tradition comes along with many good traits—an intense sense of loyalty, a fierce dedication to family and country—but also many bad ones. We do not like outsiders or people who are different from us, whether the difference lies in how they look, how they act, or, most important, how they talk. To understand me, you must understand that I am a Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart. If ethnicity is one side of the coin, then geography is the other. When the first wave of Scots-Irish immigrants landed in the New World in the eighteenth century, they were deeply attracted to the Appalachian Mountains. This region is admittedly huge—stretching from Alabama to Georgia in the South to Ohio to parts of New York in the North—but the culture of Greater Appalachia is remarkably cohesive.