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I Was a Pagan. By V. C. Kitchen. Originally published in 1934 by Harper & Brothers. This electronic edition distributed by
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1 I Was a Pagan By V. C. Kitchen Originally published in 1934 by Harper & Brothers This electronic edition distributed by
4 CHAPTER I THIS BUSINESS OF CHASING FALSE GODS PAGANISM At twenty, life looked like a high adventure intriguing and indecorous. At thirty, it looked like a high endeavor socially and economically important. By forty, however, I grew highly dubious. Life seemed to have lost flavor on both counts. It was then that I met the Oxford Group. At this time, I think, I would have described myself as white, married and a Christian. Actually I was somewhat tarnished and discolored, married in name only, and very much of a pagan. A pagan is a man who spends his time chasing false gods. And I had spent forty years of my time in chasing Pleasure, Possessions, Power, Position and Applause. I now call these pagan goals my unfortunate five P s. One or more of them seems to have played a part in my life for as long as I am able to remember. My very first ambition, for example, was to be the captain of a tug boat. This, I believed, would enable me to cruise about the harbor much as my fancy pleased me and it would bring not only pleasure but applause from all my friends. Being a New Yorker, the tug-boat idol formulated in a Hudson River ferry which noble craft, in turn, gave birth to my next ambition. Tending the ferry-boat engines, I thought, must be rather an heroic and exciting job, and I decided to become an engineer. How I ever passed examinations for an engineering institute I do not know. Once there, however, I discovered that engineering was less a matter of heroics than of mathematics, for which I happened to possess a singular distaste. Long hours over the drafting board were equally tedious. A draught of beer was much more to my liking so that, when Christmas vacation came around, I found myself some fiftyeight hours behind in mechanical drawing. From then on I became more intimate with bar-keepers than with my professors, and cheerfully flunked out with seven conditions out of a possible eight. After several months, futilely spent at a business college, my father grew impatient and faced me with the question of what I really wanted to do in life. I thought it all over, trying to be honest, and decided that I really wanted to write. My next misadventure was to attend a leading School of Journalism then in its first year. They offered a most liberal education covering a wide range of subjects, on the theory, I believe, that a newspaper man should know a little bit of everything. This scattering of knowledge eventually scattered me all over the lot. There was no course in college to weave these strands together in a new and connected philosophy 4
5 of life. I came to the conclusion then that life was going to be nothing but a jolly struggle for existence a survival of the fittest and devil take the hindmost. Very well, I thought, if life is going to be a struggle, I will show them how to struggle. I will land on the top of a pile of money with a bigger and better home than my neighbors, with membership in more exclusive golf clubs and ownership of more resplendent automobiles. Possessions thus hooked up with pleasure, applause, power and position and became one of my five pagan gods. To clinch my decision, the editor of one of the New York dailies came up and made the student journalists a speech. Boys, he said, if I had to do it again I would go into the business end of a newspaper. Outside of Arthur Brisbane, who makes more money than the President of the United States, we of the editorial staff are lucky to draw $5,000 or $6,000 a year. To my recently acquired eyes of avarice these meager figures held no lure. I let go my former aim for a position in the literary world and sought a position in an advertising agency. That was twenty years ago. I have been an advertising agent ever since and have spent many weary hours writing what people paid me to write instead of what I wanted to say. I hope I may be forgiven for some of the things that I wrote for the girls I led to believe that a lost lover could be recaptured through a drop of judiciously placed perfume for the bad bargains I pressed on unsuspecting people as good buys for forcing on the public countless non-essential articles that have helped to swamp their lives and for many other forms of shoddy thinking and shabby writing which I considered just part of the game. At the time, however, I regarded all of this as high adventure as part of life s exciting contest to outwit the other fellow and come out on top of the heap. I came out on top fast enough in fact, a little bit too fast for my own good. I had held my first job for scarcely two weeks when the boss offered me a contract at a rising scale of salary which turned old-timers in the office green with envy. That rather turned my head. I was showing them how to struggle from the very first gun, and I soon too soon had all the possessions most any single man could want. This early rise in fortune turned me early to possession of a wife. A wife, I felt, should prove a great convenience around the house. I had been much annoyed by the fact that my parents went away for the summer. Having become a working man I could no longer accompany them and found it most irritating in their absence to run out of soap. I also wanted to be able to throw wide open cocktail parties in my own home instead of having to sneak out for a drink. At one and the same time I was tired of seeing too much of women I could not respect and not enough of girls I really liked. Besides, for the sixth or seventh time in my philandering existence, I fell seriously in love. Marriage thus became a new adventure to me an adventure in devising and demanding comforts that I had not found in the midst of a somewhat strait-laced and old-fashioned family an adventure in the freedom of doing what I jolly well 5
6 pleased behind the doors of my own home. Drinking also seemed like an adventure at that time. Playing the drums or leading the orchestra at a cabaret, delivering a drunken lecture on temperance from the bar of a night club, arguing with the doorman who didn t want you to carry off the box trees from in front of his establishment, waking up the neighbors as you came home with the milkman these somehow seemed to make up for the slightly flat flavor I was beginning to find in the adventure of business and the growing lack of zest I experienced in the new adventure of the home. Where once, however, alcohol appeared to make lights brighter, music sweeter, colors fairer, women more beautiful and men more companionable, I began to find that I had to drink not simply to heighten the pleasure of lights and music and the companionship of men and women but in order to stand for them at all. I began to get my first suspicions that something must be out of gear in the commonly accepted scheme of things. A friend of mine recalls that when he and his family stood up in church and sang Like a mighty army moves the church of God, he even as a child could see that there was something wrong with that picture. And I, even as a tyro among business men, benedicts and drunks, began to feel there might be something wrong with plunging along year after year simply to pile up as many possessions as possible, to possess a wife of whom I was growing steadily more neglectful, and to possess a thirst which gradually was ripening into insatiability. Was there going to be nothing to look forward to except, perhaps, the making of still more money, the acquisition of still more wives perhaps some other fellow s or, perhaps, another of my own the whole engulfed in the drinking of still more liquor? I began to feel, in short, that the pagan aims and purposes did not and could not represent complete success in life. I tried to figure out that really to succeed in life a man should succeed not only in business not only in marriage not only in holding his liquor but in doing something with himself. He should, let us say, develop in character. I felt that my character possessed many negative attributes such as fear, anger, revenge and pride, and that it also held many positive potentialities such as poise, good nature, sympathy and understanding. I tried to make a chart of these things, showing which qualities fell on the positive side and which on the negative. This was accompanied by a scoring system through which one could measure progress in developing the positive side of personality. As an old tutor of mine once said, however, My boy, never try to write anything till after you are forty. You won t know what life is all about till then. He was right. I soon gave up my effort and I turned to see if, in actual practice, there was not something more worth while I could do with my business, my home, and my drinking. I began, for instance, to look upon the advertising business not just in its selfish aspects as a jolly racket through which one could make a rather large amount of money rather easily but in its social aspects as a necessary link in the mighty 6
7 chain of American merchandising. The industrial machine tool, I could see, had multiplied the efforts of the individual worker and given rise to mass production. Advertising, I declared, was the machine tool necessary to multiply the efforts of the modern salesman and enable him to move this mass of goods through the modern channels of distribution. It did not occur to me, however, just why it was necessary either to make or to move this mass of goods or what, if anything, that did for human beings? The home I began to look upon not simply as a comfortable, free-drinking and legalized love nest but as an institution a bulwark in the eddies of a freethinking society. I began to think it a duty that we of the better and more intelligent classes should bear larger quantities of children to offset the influx of uneducated immigrants. It did not occur to me that a self-centered snob might prove no safer for the future of civilization and my particular brand of society than a self-centered communist. Even drinking I began to socialize, idealize and ennoble. Life, I argued, is unnaturally strained at best. Like an over trained football team we go stale in sticking to the same old round and we become emotionally repressed and nervously over stimulated. To relieve this strain we need to go on a good party, dance on some restaurant table or kick a policeman who isn t looking. I elevated my periodic debauches to the status of a social safety valve and more. The approach to a man s inner and finer thoughts, I declared, comes only with the breaking through of his reserve, and five or six slugs of whisky are necessary to release his flow of soul. I represented alcohol in other words, as necessary not only to the stability of society but to its uplift. Unless one is a hopeless moron, however, one cannot live long under a pretence like this. One cannot go on indefinitely gilding the cabbages of life and pretending they are lilies. Another ten years or so and I was ready to admit that the home was nothing but an overstuffed barracks, representing a great waste and duplication of effort in its support, pandering to a man s pride and little else, and enslaving him all day in the struggle for money so that he might sleep there at night and paint it at least as frequently as his next-door neighbor. Then, too, despite my early rise in business, I also went through early losses, and the business prospect soon dwindled into the certainty that I was not going to be able to accumulate a fortune enabling me to retire within twenty years. As for the social and economic value of the advertising profession, I could see that it had degenerated into nothing but an effort to stretch markets and to stretch them again and again in the utterly selfish, utterly childish and utterly hopeless belief that we could make and keep them big enough to soak up all the junk our manufacturers wanted to pour into them. My work, in other words, lost all color as a gay and exciting adventure in the romantic struggle of life. It was stripped of all false pretence as a valuable and necessary instrument of modern distribution. It became rather an unpleasant means of keeping myself in golf clubs and cars and an occupation in which I might 7
8 escape from other thoughts and obligations. Religion has been called an escape. So has alcohol. But make no mistake. They are nothing as compared with work. Work especially in those countless needless hours is the universal escape from thought and from facing the reality of living. Drink too, of course, is an escape an escape from work or lack of it and I finally was ready to admit it. My home, in other words, became something to escape from. My office became something to escape into. My alcohol became the alley of escape I chose when both home and office got so unspeakably upon my nerves that I turned to cocktails as knock-out drops in order to forget the whole sorry business. I had reached that crisis in life when we question the value of all human effort. John Stuart Mill once said, Suppose all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you? And with John Stuart Mill I had to answer No! As far as my selfish interests were concerned all of the pleasures, possessions, powers, positions and applause I ever achieved had turned to dust in my fingers. Looking into the lives of other selfruined successes -men who had pushed along these avenues much farther than I had I could still see nothing to want. Gilding these efforts and achievements with the pretext that I was reviving American industry, upholding the American home or drinking to withstand the onslaughts on American freedom, added nothing to my satisfaction. And, if the truth must be known, it added nothing to the satisfaction of the other fellow. In the modern world, in short, I had found and could find no sign whatever of a satisfying answer to the question Is this all there is to living? And I found no greater satisfaction in the social, political or economic ideas and ideals of modern thinkers. In an impressive symposium entitled Living Philosophies, for example, Theodore Dreiser wrote that, I catch no meaning at all from all I have seen and I pass quite as I came, confused and dismayed. James Truslow Adams admitted that he was floundering in a dismal swamp. Albert Einstein was certain only that Man is here for the sake of other men. And, in a book of his own, so keen an analyst as Walter Lippmann could offer no better prescription than the advice of Confucius to follow what the heart desires without transgressing what is right. This inability to see what we were living for this lack of knowledge and confusion on the part of individuals was clearly reflected in the confusion of the larger world. I looked not only into my own life and into the lives of other men but into life as a whole and saw that many lives as blind and selfish as my own had fused to make up a self-ruined world. It was a world inflexible in the face of fact. Parents in that world were wondering what lay ahead for their children. Children, as they looked at the fruitless and befuddled lives of their parents, wondered what lay ahead for themselves. Husbands and wives, poisoned by the live-your-own-life theory and an exaggerated sense of self, were drawing ever more sharply apart and it seemed 8
9 almost as if half the married couples that we knew were either in the throes, or on the verge, of a divorce. Business relationships were based on the principle, not of earning one s daily bread, but of snatching as much bread as possible out of the mouth of some other fellow. And it was a shocking mess that business men had made of business. Newspaper editors, politicians, reformers and trouble makers of all types hurled in thousands of crack-potted schemes to make the confusion worse. We were led every way by the destructive cross currents of idealism, and men, torn by internal conflict to a point of hair-trigger temper, took vindictive potshots at almost everything in sight. All of this, I felt, was because so many self-made men actually self-ruined like myself had spent their lives as I had in chasing false gods. And when, in 1929 the stock market went down and all five of my false gods rose up and deserted in one body, I determined to seek the real meaning and purpose of life before I again took up the business of living. If my old aims of pleasure, possessions, power, position and applause could be won and permanently held by no man if all of these supposed friends could so easily be put to rout by a mere business panic if all desire for these aims ended with their fulfillment and they became no longer desirable if their pursuit by hundreds of other men for hundreds of years had resulted only in chaos come again what gods of a more faithful nature and enduring value could one live for? What are we here for? Where do we go from here? I determined to answer these perplexing questions once for all and I sat down to think it through and write a book. 9
10 CHAPTER II THIS BUSINESS OF THINKING THINGS OUT PHILOSOPHY There must, I figured, as I wrote my book, be some purpose in living. But why? as a man once asked me. Why can t we just live along without any purpose? Maybe you can, I replied, but I couldn t. If I thought that never again could I possibly squeeze any kind of fun or satisfaction out of life for myself if I thought that never again could I be of any help whatever to my family or to any other people if, failing fun for myself or help for others, I thought that I could in no way serve some process of nature or some God that stands above self and society, I would lose no time in jumping out of the window. If I live for any of these things in the hope of getting a little more fun in the hope of being a little more help or in the hope of serving some higher purpose which I do not understand I would, whether I admitted it or not, be living for a purpose. If I guessed at the wrong purpose, as I had in my own life, I would, of course, miss most of the fun, prove of mighty little use in the world and, probably, fail entirely to render any higher service. And, if men as a whole were equally bad guessers, the world as a whole would miss out in exactly the same way. Education, as I wrote, for instance, is or should be a preparation for the business of living. And if nobody knows what that business really is, none of us have a chance either to give or get a worth-while education. If, again, we do not know what we are living for when we get married, we cannot be expected to make a very wise choice of our life partner. In choosing or pursuing a business or vocation we are likely to make just as serious mistakes while, in the larger affairs of economy, politics, sociology and religion, people must continue in a complex muddle unless some definite idea of what they are living for can be found and applied to give these various affairs a purpose and direction. Belief in and desire for the five unfortunate P s, for instance, was the plan which I and most of the world had been following. It is a plan a design for living in which, as Jay Franklin suggests, Our job is to have as pleasant a time as possible, to enjoy life to the full, to experience as much as we can, and to take our pleasure as we find it, because trouble will find us anyhow. With no further purpose or aim this plan must be described as Egoism. And since egoism had left me and most other people that I know with a great big unfilled gap in our lives since century after century and generation after generation it had brought the world to recurring states of chaos was it not likely that some other untried or less-tried plan would prove to be the right one? Was it not possible, for instance, that as Einstein suggests man is here only to help other men? Was it not possible that I, as an individual, was headed nowhere 10
11 but that the human race was going to work out? If so, nothing that I did mattered except as it contributed to the progress of society. Here was a plan with some sort of socialism or communism as its goal a plan where the individual sacrifices selfinterest for the good of the whole a plan which, reduced to one word, I will refer to as Humanism. Again it seemed possible that the ecclesiastics might be right and that there might be some kind of an all-powerful God Who created man for some purpose of His own. In that case our only real purpose in life would be to obey the will of God wherever that might lead and for whatever known or unknown purpose. At the age of fifteen I had acknowledged this sort of a belief in God. I had done so because my Sunday school teacher was a successful Wall Street man whom I admired and I was ready to say that I subscribed to anything that he did. I enjoyed thereafter a sort of pink glow of self-approval which lasted for about three days and which formed the total of my religious experience. I was willing to admit, however, that there might be something in this plan which, from now on, I will describe as Theism. There might, of course, be other ways to live and other things to live for. But these three seemed most likely and, in my book, I decided that the third or Theistic scheme seemed most likely of all. We were living to serve God. So far, I had read no reference books on these or related subjects. I did not want either past or current opinion to intrude on what I thought was an original line of research. At this stage, however, I decided to check up and I found my reasoning supported at almost every turn by philosophical thought. I found, in fact, that, through out the ages, philosophy followed far enough had led and could lead only to God. Plato with his speculative theory of ideas, Aristotle with his logic, Descartes with his ontology, Spinoza with his world of eternal verities, Berkeley with his idealism, Hegel with his trinity and the great V. C. Kitchen with his neo-pragmatism had but come to the same ultimate conclusion. And so had modern thought, following a break from God found only in the early socialistic and scientific philosophies. In the evolutionary theory of my college days, for instance, nature had been cruel, and blind and red of tooth and claw. I found, however, that to-day such beliefs had largely given way to the emergent evolution of Alexander, the creative evolution of Bergson or the cosmic evolution of Boodin. All admitted or presupposed the likelihood of the creative work of God. Even in pure science, among leaders such as Millikan, Eddington and Jeans, I found acceptance of such likelihood. Millikan, for instance, said that scientists were now almost universally agreed that nature was, at bottom, benevolent. And he added that the practical teaching of modem science was extraordinarily like the preaching of Jesus. This view certainly would set up soul growth as the prime objective of existence. The trend was reaffirmed by biologists who, in the person of Dr. Henry Fairfield Osborn, stated that evolution was unquestionably proceeding in moral directions. Still other scientists stated that there was unquestionably a force in the universe working to produce or modify human 11
12 personality and many did not hesitate to call this force the power of God. Philosophy both past and present, in short, seemed to support my finding that we were living primarily to develop a personality or soul in the life school God provides for such a purpose. And this being so, I had not only been bungling life but had made an even worse guess about it than I first supposed. Life was intended to grow souls, not fortunes to make character, not whoopee to gain depth of understanding, not eminence in business or social circles to seek the will of God, not the praise of the public. I certainly had been living the wrong way to accomplish these results. Well, it would be different now. Knowing what I was living for, I at last could begin to do something about it. And I, at last, could begin to do something for other people. After reading my book, in fact, I was sure that the burdened world could immediately arise from its ashes. Proudly, therefore, I wrapped my manuscript up and carried it to a publisher. This publisher, happily for me, was a personal friend. He broke the news to me quite gently. This part this Life and Why, he said, is fine as far as it goes. Now write the second part and call it Life and How. But Life and Why is the whole book, I protested. What more does anyone need to know when he has learned what he is living for? What, he replied, is the use of telling anyone why they are living, if you cannot tell them how to live that way! With indignation I carried the manuscript home again and sought consolation by taking the matter up with my chief drinking pal and with my business partner. They, however, gave me small comfort. What, said one, do you mean by growing a soul? And, said the other, how do you grow it? Impatient with such petty minds I laid the book at last before my old professor of philosophy. He furnished some balm for my wounds. In your own mind, he said, you have been thinking along the lines of some half-dozen of the leading living philosophers. But, to sharpen up your thought, try taking the high spots and boiling them down into short, helpful articles with particular attention to the application of your philosophy as a guide to self-management in business, at home and in all other departments of practical everyday living. I followed his advice but nothing happened. I wrote, in fact, a whole series of short articles on What Else Can We Do in Education? ; What Else Can We Do for Business? ; What Else Can We Do about Marriage? ; What Else Can We Do to Snap Out of the Depression? and, finally, What Else Can We Do to be Happy? I tried, as I wrote, to show just how the knowledge that we are living to grow souls could and should affect our happiness. I tried to show how such a viewpoint should and would affect our relations at home, revise the conduct of our business, revolutionize the methods and aims of education, solve the world s economic problems, straighten out our crooked politics, give new direction to ineffective forms of social service and put new life into dying religion. But still nothing happened. My articles came back from the magazines just as my book came back from the publisher. People, apparently, did 12
13 not appreciate this sort of work or and a horrible suspicion began to dawn perhaps my writing did not really help them. Then the full truth burst upon me. My new philosophy not only failed to help others but failed to help me. Despite my new assurance that I was living to grow a soul, I continued to live much as I had always lived much as in the days when, in my ignorance, I believed that I was living to grow a fortune, a family and a thirst. There was actually no difference in my daily conduct. And I wasn t any different as a man. Despite my fine article on What Else Can We Do to be Happy? I myself was actually no happier than I had been before. I was, if any-thing, even more discontented. Despite the recognition that marriage was a relationship for helping men, women and their children grow in soul, no new growth (excepting out of last year s clothes) could be noted in any member of my family. I found no new attitude and obtained no new results in business. I began to read no different type of book and made no change in my self-prescribed and somewhat casual course in late-life education. I voted the Republican ticket and hoped for the best as usual. I was just as helpless about helping other people as I always had been. This living for God s service should, finally, have somehow awakened a new interest in church but I found myself continuing to play golf or sleeping off a Saturday-night hangover on Sunday morning. There was no stirring in my soul. My new philosophy of life, in short, did not seem to show itself at all in any new way of living. I then looked back once more at Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza and the rest. They had held a somewhat similar philosophy. Yet they too had failed to produce any real change in themselves. And, while they were vastly more successful in presenting their philosophies to the whole of mankind, they too had somehow failed to change the world. Men always, it seemed, had been frustrated in their aims whether they believed they were living to grow a soul and planned to promote that end or whether, as in my case, they had simply given way to self-indulgence. Regardless of its various philosophies, moreover, the world had continued to run into wars, vice crusades, business depressions, dictatorships and disarmament conferences. Had I then known what I now know, I might have seen that my entire philosophical fiasco was, at bottom, nothing but a further assertion of egoism parading under a mask of altruism. It was just another form of self-service disguised as a sort of a religious social-service a desire to show off a pretence that I was living and thinking nobly used to hide the ignoble way that I really thought and lived an attempt to convert the world to my way of thinking in order that I, unperturbed and undisturbed, might continue with my own way of living. My philosophical allegiance to God and consideration for society, in short was nothing but a subtle form of self-protection. I might also have seen that, even if it were possible to think and reason disinterestedly, philosophy, at best, could be nothing more than a point of view about life. And a point of view does not, never has, and never can substitute for a point of contact with the power that makes philosophy applicable to living. 13
14 CHAPTER III THIS BUSINESS OF MEANING WELL AND DOING BADLY MORALS There comes a time to almost every man when he seems to die inside, and that time came to me, I think, when I found that this my best guess about life served neither me nor the other fellow any better than my first guess. I want to tell you that things looked pretty black to me right then. There seemed nothing much to do but go back to my dreary round of escapes from the home into the office and from the office into the speakeasy. I intended, of course, to go right on living. I would eat breakfast every morning as usual, suffering, also as usual, from my regular hangover. I would go to the office, as usual, play bridge when sober enough in the evenings, or interested enough, and let off steam between times on a party with the boys. I might even try an occasional but unenthusiastic fling at revising my book, though I felt that anything I wrote now would be just a lot of clap-trap just a juggling of words a building of illusions which had no place in the drab reality of life. Then, through reading Herbert F. Standing s book Spirit in Evolution a wholly new idea occurred to me. I had figured out three plans the egoistic, humanistic, and theistic. I had thought that, in deciding on the third of these in deciding to do good and devote a larger portion of my life to service I actually was following that plan and serving God. Standing s book, however, suggested that to be spiritual one had to be far more than just well-meaning and intelligent. I had always thought that serving God meant doing the best I knew in using the talents God gave me. And that was what I called being creative in life. My talents, I believed, were analytical, philosophical and literary. As I read through Standing s book, however, it occurred to me that soul qualities are not, after all, mental qualities. They are moral qualities. A big man spiritually is not made up, like a big man materially, of bank presidencies, directorships, influence, dominance and social prestige. He is not made up, like an intellectual giant, of doctors degrees and learned societies. He is made up of the simple moral qualities of honesty, purity, unselfishness and love. And he does not grow more honest or more pure through increasing knowledge of what is honest and pure. He does not get that way through his intellect at all. Nor through his physical prowess and achievements. All the material possessions I had ever acquired, for example, and all the intellectual knowledge I had ever gathered had not added a single cubit to my stature morally. In fact, if anything, I had grown through the years more dishonest, more impure, 14
15 more selfish and more unloving than ever. The more I thought about it, therefore, the more I began to suspect that, before I could do anything to help other people something would have to be done about it inside of me. But what? I recalled the words of my publisher Write that second part called Life and How. And I recalled the words of my partner How do you grow a soul? Well how? It was here that Standing s book helped me again. We grow physically, as he suggested, by response to a physical environment. And as the body adapts itself to use or survive its surroundings it grows not only in size, but evolves or changes in general character and quality. The mind, I could see, would grow and evolve not in response to its physical surroundings, but in response to an altogether different kind of environment the environment of ideas in which it would find a sort of intellectual food, air and exercise. And since this physical environment and this intellectual or psychological environment seemed to have no effect whatever on the growth of morality, I figured that to grow morally I would have to get in touch with some kind of moral environment, some set of conditions, some atmosphere of goodness, or some moral force which would feed, stimulate and exercise the honesty, purity, love and unselfishness in a man. These qualities, as I well know, did not grow through self-indulgence. They did not grow through thinking. I could neither learn them nor teach them. But somehow, if they grew in me and became a part of me, I might pass them along to others by example, or a sort of a contagion as one gives the measles. They would not grow, as I now realized, however, unless I could lay hold of some kind of spiritual environment or moral form of food, air and exercise. And I did not know where to turn. While I was all too familiar with my physical environment or world of comforts, and was becoming more and more familiar with my psychological environment or world of ideas, I had never in all my life bumped up against any spiritual environment or world of goodness. If such a thing existed, it had never come within my ken. I had never sensed it in any way. I knew, of course, that there may be the sudden emergence of something altogether new, novel and unique in nature some species of plant or animal, let us say, which is not a hybrid of past forms which did not grow, but just emerged. It just pops into existence, as Professor Lovejoy explains, who then goes on to say he has abundant reason to believe that there have occurred genuine new births in time, a sheer increase, diversification and enrichment of the sum of things already there. This emergence or new birth has unquestionably taken place, not only in physical form but in the realm of man s consciousness. I, in my own career, seemed to have passed through two stages. First, I was conscious only of self and self-desire reaching out instinctively for whatever I 15
16 wanted in my physical environment, and not caring what that did to other people and the world. Then I began to think of what I ought to do for myself and others. Progressing from a sense of instinct to a sense of duty, I had reached, in my book, the intellectual or socially-conscious stage. I then found myself reaching for a still higher stage of consciousness. And since the emergent evolutionist, Alexander, says that Deity is the next quality to the highest we know, I believed that the thing I was reaching for might be no less than a consciousness of God. But how was I to achieve this consciousness and form contact with the force that might help me grow a soul? Becoming aware of a spiritual environment, if any such thing existed, and getting in touch with God as a means of growing in soul, should, I felt, fall within the province of the Church. And, although I had never gained anything from the Church but that brief glow of self-approval the time I was baptized, I thought I might find something in religious literature. Here and there, as in the writings of G. A. Studdert Kennedy, I did run across passages which made me feel that the writer was in touch with some moral-creating force, inspiration or environment I did not know. But nowhere did I find any understandable suggestion which told me how I, too, might get in touch with this same force and experience the things that these occasionally inspired writers wrote of. I could, of course, understand, as Edward S. Woods suggested, that a man might be no more able to create his own spiritual or moral life than he is able to bring himself into the world at will. I could see, as Drummond wrote, that, just as it is something outside the thermometer which produces a change in the thermometer, so it must be something outside the soul of man that produces a moral change upon him. I began, in other words, to see where the humanists might be wrong. Professor Irving Babbitt, for example, had said that man is vile by nature and must make himself behave. But my excursion into religious literature, not to mention my experience with broken New Year resolutions, began to show me that selfmanagement as a corrective of behavior was entirely inadequate. There must indeed be some other environment or force, and I must find it if I wanted to gain any real and lasting satisfaction for myself in life or do anything creative in the world. Still, however, these books did not say just what I was to do to form contact with that power and, much as I disliked and mistrusted them as a class, I decided at last to have it out in person with some intelligent minister. I selected one I believed to be spiritual by nature and who was, I felt, entirely sincere. What, I asked this preacher, do you think that we are living for? To my pleased surprise he said he believed that we are living to grow a soul. There seemed to be real promise here. But when I put the question my professor, my partner, my pal and my publisher had thrown back at me when I asked how you grow a soul he, too, threw back the question. Well, he said, How do you? If you could write a book on How to Grow a Soul, it would be snapped up by every minister I know. I had, 16
17 therefore, to add another P the pastor to the publisher, professor, partner and pal who had failed to furnish a solution to my problem. And I felt as though I had run against still another blockade of Five P s. With my groping unanswered, I decided that the Church, with all its protest of modern knowledge and method, had not really risen from its ashes in the Dark Ages. The answer it held, if answer there be, might lie buried somewhere in the foundation of the Church, but, to me, it certainly did not appear in the twentieth century superstructure. I decided, therefore, to go back in history, and back, not simply to the beginnings of the Christian Church, but back to the beginnings of morality. I wanted to see if, throughout the ages, I could find any moralist, religious or otherwise, who had known, used and could convey to me the secret of applying his philosophy in the actual business of living. A professor of philosophy from England once told me that for years he lectured upon morals to people all of whom were going to pieces morally under his very nose. His were moral words which brought no moral action. He was lecturing to people who, however well they might mean, were still doing badly. That fitted my own case exactly and, in fact, it seemed to characterize my entire age. Where then could I find a religion or philosophy that worked and what was the secret of its workings? Beginning with one Ptah-hotep, an Egyptian moralist who lived some five thousand years before Christ and whose precepts appear in what is known as the Oldest Book in the World, I found a knowledge of right and wrong and a set of rules for moral conduct practically as complete as any that we know to-day. But I found no record that any of the ancient Egyptians, including Ptah-hotep himself, were practicing these precepts. His words, as far as I could judge, had no more effect on his hearers than those of the lecturer on morals mentioned above, and no more consequences in the course of world events than my own unpublished articles. People in those days, as now, were meaning well and doing badly. Through the history of all the moralists, in fact, I found a singular lack of moral application. J. N. Larned seemed to sum up the whole story when he said, the knowledge of good and evil has been complete in the world from the beginnings of history, and mankind has had nothing to learn since but the application of it. Here and there in history, of course, I could trace a partial application of morality. This was true, for instance, in the case of Abraham, Moses, Confucius, Buddha, Mohammed, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Among them all, however, as I was now obliged to admit, there was but one Jesus of Nazareth who had lived out His philosophy perfectly and completely. Lie alone meant well and did well in all departments of living. He alone sowed moral seed which had a universal rather than a limited spread. He alone was able to impart to His disciples the secret of application and the same power that He Himself possessed. But still I could not quite make out just what this secret or this power was. Was it the God-consciousness or contact 17
18 with a spiritual environment that I had now begun to grope for? Or was it simply a tremendous Personality coupled with an applied psychology beyond any known to-day? In either case, how did Jesus develop this personality or psychology? And how did He give His disciples the same command of power? Commentaries on the New Testament failed to say. Tracing back the moralists, in short, I found a few partial appliers and one perfect and complete Applier. Yet nowhere could I seem to find just how this application was performed. If the Christian Church anywhere had preserved Christ s secret of forming contact with God as a source of developing moral qualities of soul, they had by now pretty well concealed it, so far as I was concerned. I was not, however, ready to admit that the state of consciousness I sought did not exist just because nobody had shown me how to find it. Christ Himself had stated that it was not an easy way to find, and I began to cast about for other means of seeking. 18
19 CHAPTER IV THIS BUSINESS OF MAKING CHARACTER SCIENCE Finding that schools of philosophy offered nothing but an endless merry-goround of sterile thinking and futile debate, feeling that the Church had either ceased to have an effective message or had lost the art of passing it on, I like so many of this age turned to the school of science. Scientifically, I knew that, on the physical level, the body has to absorb violet rays in order to grow. On the psychological level the growing mind has to take m rays, let us say, from a student s reading-lamp. To grow morally and thus really begin to live in my third, or theistic, scheme of life, I felt that I needed some kind of a spiritual ray to stimulate my dormant soul. It was clear that this spiritual light was not shining into my soul. Science, I thought, might show me why. It occurred to me, for instance, that sunlight could not penetrate a dense body that the rays from a student s light could not penetrate a dense mind and that, perhaps, a spiritual light (if any such thing existed) could not penetrate a dense character. My pagan nature was, perhaps, too coarse too sullied, selfish and sinful to be sensitive to any spiritual environment or to let the light of truth shine through. I could see more, I believed, if, somehow, I could clear myself up, much as I would clean a dirty window. And even though, like Drummond s thermometer, I might have to rely on some outside force to send my moral mercury up to the new level, I would still, I thought, have to undertake a course in self-improvement I would still have to clean the glass before those rays of outside force could reach me. Here, I was sure, science could be of great help to me, for scientific books on self-improvement could be counted by the score. The first step in clearing oneself up, I thought, and especially in clearing up society, was to clean up one s physical surroundings. If a man were born into an atmosphere of cleanliness, fresh air and loving, intelligent care, all other things being equal, he should have a better chance to develop refinement and clear moral vision than if his seed had fallen in the filth, neglect and darkness of the slums. Sociological control of the environment supplemented, if possible, by eugenic control of the seed itself, would be the first requirements in my scientific course of soul-culture. The growing principle as well, I believed, should be strongly stimulated, and this stimulation, I decided, could come through the inspiration received from good books, good schools, good churches and good men. Especially essential seemed the inspiration of example the example of some full-grown soul we could look and work towards as we move along the line of growth. As the books on How to Succeed would say, Set a goal desire it with all your heart work towards it 19
20 with all your energy, I would have to have a definite goal to desire and work for, and, despite my previous disdain for churchmen, I felt that the moral-scientists could well borrow their example and set up the goal of Jesus Christ. I next considered the separate steps by which I must refine my nature in order to grow in the direction of a Christ-like character. This called, as I could see, for a very considerable stride from a nature ruled to a large degree, as mine was, by lusts, and selfishness, and jealousies and hates, to a nature lighted up by love and charity and kindness. Despite the emergent possibilities of evolution this new character, I felt, represented too big a jump to pop into existence full-born. It called rather for an evolution by slow and gradual stages. I had heard, of course, of overnight conversions, but I did not think that such sudden leaps from slime to the sublime were likely to endure. And even if they did, I was quite sure that transformations of this kind must be the result of a long warming up before the boiling-point was reached. This whole process, I believed, could be greatly aided and speeded up by our modern knowledge of psychology. The laws of association would help us to catch a Christ-like character while sublimation of the libido into higher and more creative activities elimination of my baser desires through the expulsive power of a higher affection these and other methods of applied psychology would aid in the climb from mere selfish consciousness, through the stage of social-consciousness, and up to the sublime God-consciousness of a man in the Spirit, which might prove to be the most real one of all. My whole scheme, in short, reduced itself to the following formula: I was to raise myself, and the rest of the world with me, from the existing and chaotic state of (1) egoism, through the higher but equally futile plan of (2) humanism, and into the highest and only creative plan of (3) theism, passing, as we went, through the three evolutionary stages of (1) self-consciousness, (2) social-consciousness, and (3) Godconsciousness. This clarification, evolution or growth would be accomplished by: (1) preparation through eugenic control of stock and social control of environment; (2) stimulation through books, schools, churches, men, and especially through the high example of Jesus of Nazareth; (3) progress from present stages through gradual evolutionary steps; (4) acceleration through the methods of applied psychology. It seemed, on the whole a sensible and effective programme. The great mind of a certain V. C. Kitchen, advertising man, I thought, was now attaining something where the comparatively feeble minds of philosophers, ecelesiasts and scientists had failed. After a little reflection, however, the plan did not seem quite so excellent. It would take many years and far more than my paltry powers to convince the world that it should adopt eugenic and sociological control. Such remote control might benefit my great-great-grandchildren, but could scarcely be used to help me apply my philosophy of life. 20
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On March 21, a caller to 911 operators in Cleveland, Ohio pleaded for emergency services to save the life of a woman dying from a botched abortion at a local abortion clinic, but rescuers did not arrive in time and the woman soon died.
LifeNews.com reports that public records show that a woman undergoing an abortion procedure at Cleveland's Preterm Clinic became non-responsive before clinic employees called paramedics. The records were obtained by Operation Rescue.
Over the phone, the clinic worker told 911 operators that the woman was unconscious and was receiving CPR at the time of the call but efforts to resuscitate the woman were not working.
Records of the incident show that it took emergency responders only three minutes to reach the clinic. The ambulance got the patient to a hospital just over 20 minutes later, but notes in the records say that the patient was "not breathing at all," indicating that the women never responded to attempts to revive her.
Video from the hospital also indicated that the woman was dead before she reached the hospital. EMTs were not performing any treatment on the woman as they wheeled her into the ER. It also appeared that a towel had been placed over her face.
"The lack of a sense of urgency really struck me as I was listening to the 911 recording," said Troy Newman, President of Operation Rescue. "A woman was dying or dead, and there just seemed to be no real hurry to respond to the dispatcher."
Pastor Henkel, also of Operation Rescue, was on the scene as the ambulance left and alleged that after the vehicle left the clinic a car with who he claimed to appear to be abortionist Mohammad Rezaee inside followed along behind.
In 2013, Rezaee was sued for malpractice by a patient from Akron's Medical Group, another clinic where Rezaee performs abortions. The woman charged that her abortion was botched. She later delivered a child she called her "miracle baby."
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at firstname.lastname@example.com.

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The concept of "too much information" is not part of Kevin Smith's vocabulary. During the onstage interview the 36-year-old writer-director gave last month at the Edinburgh film festival, a week before his new film Clerks II won the Audience Award, the topics under discussion included: the regularity of his and his wife's bowel movements; the cut he sustained on his penis moments before they first had sex, and his decision to forge ahead despite that open wound; the time his wife was rushed to the emergency room with compacted faecal matter; and the pros and cons of "snowballing". As anyone who has seen the original Clerks will tell you, snowballing is an unsavoury practice that has nothing to do with Christmas.
Candour was one of the elements that made Clerks, Smith's 1994 debut, feel so zesty. Its behind-the-scenes story was also part of the fun. Smith used credit cards and his parents' savings to raise the $27,000 budget for the day-in-the-life comedy about Dante and Randal, two bored, potty-mouthed cashiers, which he shot at the same New Jersey convenience store where he was also a bored, potty-mouthed cashier. Smith would work in the store in the morning, sleep in the afternoon, work the evening shift, then shoot Clerks from the moment the shutters came down at 10.30pm until his shift began again at 6am.
Clerks benefited from riding the 1990s New Wave of US independent cinema: Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi had opened two years earlier, while Quentin Tarantino and Richard Linklater had recently left the starting blocks. But Clerks had something all its own - a looseness and informality, epitomised by Smith's profanely funny dialogue and primitive technique. It may have been the world's first good-hearted bad-taste comedy.
In the 12 years since Clerks, Smith has been no slacker. He has founded his own production company (View Askew), published a book of his witty magazine columns, released stand-up DVDs, written for Marvel's Spider-Man and Daredevil comics, opened two comic-book stores, been a Hollywood script doctor and polished off screenplays including the unproduced Superman Lives. But as a director he has made only infinitesimal progress. "I'm not a very original or creative person," he shrugs. "I just crib from my life."
Not that this has bothered Smith's loyal fanbase, or wiped the smile from the face of his regular backer, Harvey Weinstein, who cannot fail to make a profit on such low-budget productions. There remains great affection for Smith's most accomplished film, Chasing Amy (1997), about a man who falls in love with a lesbian, while Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001), steeped in scatology and in-jokes, is beloved by devotees of the "View Askewniverse" - Smith's name for the self-referential world he has created.
But there have been a few hair-raising experiences for the easy-going director. After Clerks, he made Mallrats (1995) for a major studio, and saw his idiosyncratic humour diluted, his edges sanded down. In 1999, Smith's satire Dogma attracted the ire of most of America's religious groups. And two years ago, he directed the romantic comedy Jersey Girl, which became a casualty of the general hostility toward two of its stars, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, even though the latter was killed off in the picture's first 10 minutes. "We paid her $4m," Smith fumes quietly. "She should have paid us."
After that experience, Smith might have hoped that Clerks II, a return to his roots, would be something of a comfort blanket. But the prospect of making a sequel to this cherished indie phenomenon brought its own risks. "People love that movie," says Smith. "So if the sequel sucked, it could have gone cancerous in two ways - it could have undermined the affection for the first Clerks." We are sitting in his Edinburgh hotel room, but he has yet to remove either of the raincoats he's wearing over his stained shirt and cut-off jeans. He pushes a restless hand through his spiky black hair. In his movies, he plays the near-mute Silent Bob, but in person, the words come flooding out: Smith is like a tap you can't turn off.
"You'd think right away that the fans would have been pleased when Clerks II was announced," he continues. "But there was more trepidation than joy. I got a bunch of people going, 'Don't fuck it up, dude.' Clerks gets called a cult classic, or the seminal indie film of the 1990s. But I didn't set out to make that. I wanted to do a film in which the characters sat around talking about sex and Star Wars, just like my friends and I did, and made people laugh. For it to become what it did, and have all these cool but daunting labels attached to it, really clouded its original purpose. I watched Clerks the night before we started shooting Clerks II, and seeing it again demythologised it for me. I was, like, 'Oh yeah - we didn't make the seminal indie movie of the 1990s. It was just dudes talking about sex and Star Wars.' It brought me back to what it was, and it cleared my head to do the sequel. My goal was never to make a film that was better than the original. I just wanted the two movies to stand shoulder-to-shoulder."
The differences between the Clerks movies are revealing. The sequel replaces the original's grainy monochrome with colour, and follows Dante and Randal in their careers at the fast-food chain Mooby's. There is even an ambitious musical number with crane shots and choreographed hoofers. As with the first Clerks, there is gross-out humour galore, including the worst case of donkey abuse in the cinema since Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar - though, in Smith's defence, the animal does rather appear to be enjoying itself. That was what prompted the US film critic Joel Siegel to storm out of a screening, ranting noisily as he went. A public slanging match ensued, with Smith calling the critic a "rude-ass prick".
But Siegel missed the point. Once you get beyond the bestiality, vomiting and masturbation, Clerks II is a sentimental comedy about growing up. In the first movie, Dante had little to worry about other than the finer points of Return of the Jedi, and his girlfriend's confession that she had administered 37 blow jobs. This time he is having commitment issues on the eve of uprooting to Florida with his fiancee. Throw in infidelity, an unplanned pregnancy and a rift in the Dante-Randal friendship, and it's a long way from the salad days of the first film.
"I wanted to tell a story about what it's like to be in my thirties," explains Smith, who has a nine-year-old daughter by his wife, Jennifer Schwalbach Smith (who appears in Clerks II as a woman with an enlarged clitoris). "As Dante and Randal expressed how I felt in my twenties, I thought they'd be a good gateway for articulating how I am now. When Randal says he feels the world has passed him by, that's me talking. I see The Wedding Crashers or The 40-Year Old Virgin and it's like these dudes are making movies like I made. But they're doing them with famous people and making shitloads of money. I feel like I invented the wheel and forgot how to use it - or didn't use it the way other people learned to."
Remarkably, this is delivered without a trace of bitterness, corroborating Smith's claim that he is happy with what he's got. Sure enough, when he had the chance to direct a $70m blockbuster (The Green Hornet), he politely declined. He has found his niche, making modest pictures for an audience of fans, and he displays no desire to expand upon that.
"Richard [Linklater] went off and did School of Rock, Robert [Rodriguez] did the Spy Kids movies. But I never had that sense of forward motion. I was just content to have any audience; I didn't care if it got bigger."
Smith's lack of ambition, which is reflected in Dante and Randal's desire to simply stay put, can be traced back to his late father, who was employed for 30 years as a postal worker in Red Bank, New Jersey. "He wasn't even delivering mail, he was cancelling stamps. He was the prime example of a guy who never felt he needed to make his mark professionally. He had that job so he could afford his real dreams - to get married and raise a family - and I always respected that. I think career and ambition are prized too much in our culture. Your job can't be your whole life; your life has to be your family."
There's no doubt Smith means this. But even his cultivated artlessness, his ordinary Joe persona, has a whiff of strategy about it. He admits as much: "I'm a dude who likes to set the bar real low," he says. "I like to put it on the floor and step over it. I like to have people regard me as the retarded kid who just learned to tie his shoes. That way people will always be pleasantly surprised."
Smith is an endearing fellow, and his sweet-natured films are easy to like. But it's hard not to wonder how long audiences will applaud him for tying his laces before they start asking what else he can do.
· Clerks II is released next Friday


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We forget, often enough, that most of what we learn happens when we're young. The important things, like manners, values, morals, and core skills like speech and toilet training are all done while our brains are still mailable and building connections and pathways. This slows down as we get older, and learning new skills and behaviours becomes harder (although not impossible, it turns out you CAN teach and old dog new tricks) and so it's important that we teach children everything they need to know about the world to stay safe and comfortable at a young age. But we all too often forget consent, and bodily integrity, and desperately try to teach those to older children and teens who often don't care to hear what their oh-so-out of touch parents have to say. Before people freak out, I'm not talking about having the S-E-X talk with your two year old, I think in the grand scheme of things to do so would be a bit of a reach intellectually, but you can teach children about consent without ever talking about sex, and in turn we can grow a generation of children that understand that someones body is their own, and no-one else has a right to touch it without consent. We can have a generation that doesn't see pinging bra straps and grabbing buttocks as acceptable, a generation who will never brag about grabbing women "by the pussy", a generation where 'kissing pranks' are not a thing, a generation that knows that to respect someone is to respect ALL of them, body as well as mind.
The Mighty Cross-Post: I Have a Mental Illness, But I Am Not A Damsel in Distress.
Alcoholism and Alcohol-Centric Societies.
We live in a society were drinking is pushed as the ultimate way to relax, unwind, and have fun. From adverts, products, banter between friends, to memes you can't turn around for someone telling you how much fun you could be having if only you had an alcoholic beverage in hand. If you've heard it once, you've heard it a thousand times, you're out with friends and want to leave early and you get a chorus of "Pussy!" or "Old man!", insults and cajoling to try and get you to stay, keep drinking, and get crosseyed drunk. This is most prevalent amongst men, where your ability to drink and the amount you can consume somehow equate to how much of a man you are. Strength, virility, and masculinity all wrapped up in how many beers and shots you can drink in an hour.


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Turkey / Politics /
Turgut Özal
Özal's entry into Turkish politics came much by chance. He met Demirel during his years as student, and Demirel made him his advisor when he formed government.
Özal was active in opening up Turkish economy, orienting it towards Western patterns. He worked for Turkish membership in the European Union in th 1980's, but didn't succeed. Özal also worked for increased rights for the Kurdish population. Özal is also accredited for smoothing the military's disengagement from day-to-day politics.
But his politics didn't lead to the expected results, as Turkey was struck hard by high inflation and increasing unemployment. His regime also allowed continued breaches to human rights.
During his presidency, Özal tried to increase the power of the president which to a large degree was a non-political position. This lead to clashes between him and prime minister Demirel.


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Related Information for Bad City Rollers The Bay City Rollers were a Scottish pop/rock band of the 1970s. Their youthful, clean-cut image, distinct styling featuring tartan-trimmed outfits, and cheery, sing-along pop hits helped the group become among the most popular musical acts of their time. For a relatively brief but fervent period (nicknamed "Rollermania"), they were a worldwide sensation.Bassist Alan Longmuir, his younger brother Derek Longmuir, a drummer, along with school mate, lead singer Gordon "Nobby" Cl.. read more


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Two University of the Cumberlands Patriot athletes completely exemplify this as recently, they were announced as award winners on the highest stage of the NAIA.
Junior Danielle Hoop, a graduate of Owen County High School, and senior Darcy Mascotti of Bellbrook, Ohio were announced as the NAIA Collegiate Student-Athletes of the Year Award winners.
This is one of the highest honors that an individual athlete can receive while competing in the NAIA.
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