ESSAYS TO READ FOR

QUIZ (1)

Dina Ingber

COMPUTER ADDICTS
Dina Ingber (b. 1948-), a freelance author and editor, spent three years in Jerusalem, where she
worked for the Jerusalem Post. Her articles have appeared in Science Digest, Cosmopolitan, and
America's Health. In the following essay from a 1981 issue of Science Digest, she looks at the
what was then a relatively new phenomenon: computer hackers, speculating that they may
represent the wave of the future.

t is 3 a.m. Everything on the university campus seems ghostlike in the quiet, misty
darknesseverything except the computer I center. Here, twenty students, rumpled
and bleary-eyed, sit transfixed at their consoles, tapping away on the terminal keys. With eyes
glued to the video screen, they tap on for hours. For the rest of the world, it might be the middle
of the night, but here time does not exist. As in the gambling casinos of Las Vegas, there are no
windows or clocks. This is a world unto itself. Like gamblers, these young computer hackers
are pursuing a kind of compulsion, a drive so consuming it overshadows nearly every other part
of their lives and forms the focal point of their existence. They are compulsive computer
programmers. Some of these students have been at the: console for thirty hours or more without
a break for meals or sleep. Some have fallen asleep on sofas and lounge chairs in the computer
center, trying to catch a few winks but loath to get too far away from their beloved machines.
Most of these students dont have to be at the computer center in the middle of the night.
They aren't working on assignments. They are there because they want to bethey are
irresistibly drawn there.
And they are not alone. There are hackers at computer centers, all across the country. In
their extreme form, they focus on nothing else. They flunk out of school and lose contact with
friends; they might have difficulty finding jobs, choosing instead to wander from one computer
center to another, latching on to other hacker group. They may even forgo personal hygiene.
I remember one hacker. We literally had to carry him off his chair to feed him and put
him to sleep. We really feared for his health, says a computer-science professor at MIT.
Of course, such extreme cases are very rare. But modified versions are common. There
are thousands of themat universities, highschools, even on the elementary school level
wherever young people have access to computers. One computer-science teacher spoke of his
three-year-old daughter who already likes to play endlessly with his home computer.
What do they do at the computer at all hours of the day or night? They design and play
complex games; they delve into the computers memory bank for obscure tidbits of information;
like ham radio operators, they communicate with hackers in other areas who are plugged into the
same system. They even do their everyday chores by computer, typing term papers and getting
neat printouts. One hacker takes his terminal home with him every school vacation so he can
keep in touch with other hackers. And at Stanford University, even the candy machine is hooked
up to a computer, programmed by the students to dispense candy on credit to those who know
the password.
At the high-school level, students have been known to break into the computer room after
school and spend hours decoding other systems. By breaking the code, they can cut into other
programs, discovering the computerized grading system of their school or making mischievous
(and often costly) changes to other peoples programs.

Computer-science teachers are now more aware of the implications of this hacker
phenomenon and are on the lookout for potential hackers and cases of computer addiction that
are already severe. They know that the case of the hackers is not just the story of one person's
relationship with a machine. It is the story of a societys relationship to the so-called thinking
machines, which are becoming almost ubiquitous.
Many feel we are now on the verge of a computer revolution that will change our lives as
drastically as the invention of the printing press and the Industrial Revolution changed society in
the past. By the most conservative estimates, one out of three American homes will have
computers or terminals within the next five to ten years. Electronic toys and games, which came
on the market in 1976, already comprise a more than half-billion-dollar business. And though
300,000 Americans now work full time programming computers, at least another 1.2 million will
be needed by 1990. Many of them are likely to come from todays young hackers.
The computer hackers who hang out at university and high school computer centers are,
for the most part, very bright students. They are good at problem solving and usually good in
mathematics and technical subjects. And they are almost always male.
There is a strong camaraderie and sense of belonging among hackers. They have their
own subculture, with the usual in jokes and even a whole vocabulary based on computer
terminology (there is even a hacker's dictionary). But to outsiders, they are a strange breed. In
high schools, the hackers are called nerds or the brain trust. They spend most of their free time
in the computer room and don't socialize much. And many have trouble with interpersonal
relationships.
Bob Shaw, a 15-year-old high-school student, is a case in point. Bob was temporarily
pulled off the computers at school when he began failing his other courses. But instead of hitting
the books, he continues to sulk outside the computer center, peering longingly through the glass
door at the consoles within.
Pale and drawn, his brown hair unkempt, Bob speaks only in monosyllables, avoiding eye
contact. In answer to questions about friends, hobbies, school, he merely shrugs or mumbles a
few words aimed at his sneakered feet. But when the conversation turns to the subject of
computers, he brightensand blurts out a few full sentences about the computer hes building
and the projects he plans.
Apparently there is a class of people who would rather use the computer than watch TV,
go bowling, or even go out on a date, says Ralph Gorin, Director of Computer Facilities at
Stanford University. They find that the computer has a large number of desirable properties.
Its not terribly demanding, and it does what its told, which is much nicer than human beings. I
mean, when was the last time someone did what you told him to do?
People are afraid inside, explains Lizzy, a 16-year-old high-school computer-science
student. Sometimes its easier to be a friend to a computer that wont make fun of you. It's
easier than the pressures of a peer group.
The computer will never insult you, says another youngster.
Everyone has problems socially to some degree, and the computer can act as just
another escape mechanism, Gorin explains. The youngster feels like I just can't stand it
anymore, so he runs down to the computer room. The computer doesn't care what time it is or
what you look like or what you may have been doing lately. The computer doesn't scold you or
talk back.
Are the hackers just a group of social outcasts who hook up with machines because they
can't make it with people? That would probably be a gross exaggerationand yet, Most hackers

do have problems adjusting socially, admits J.Q. Johnson, a graduate student at Stanford.
Perhaps because they don't have much social life, they spend more time at the computer center.
Joel Bion, a sophomore at Stanford, explains how he got hooked: I've been working
with computers since I was eight. I grew up in Minnesota and I didn't have many friends. I wasn't
into sports and couldn't participate in gym class because I had asthma. Then I found a computer
terminal at school. I bought some books and taught myself. Pretty soon I was spending a few
hours on it every day. Then I was there during vacations. Sure, I lost some friends, but when I
first started I was so fascinated. Here was a field I could really feel superior in. I had a giant
program, and I kept adding and adding to it. And I could use the computer to talk to people all
over the state. I thought that was great social interaction. But, of course, it wasn't, because I
never came into face-to-face contact.
Joel managed to break his addiction after a few years and is now a peer counselor at
Stanford. But his lack of interpersonal relationships during the hacker period is common and
this problem has led Stanford psychologist Dr. Philip Zimbardo to take a closer look at the
hacker phenomenon.
Hackers at Stanford have what is known as an electronic bulletin board that allows them
to send each other messages on the computer. What struck Zimbardo was that the programmers
could be sitting right next to each other at adjacent consoles, but rather than talking directly, they
communicated via computer.
Zimbardo also noticed that the messages left on the bulletin board lacked emotion, and
the thoughts were expressed in formula like terms similar to programming language. It could
be, says Zimbardo, that people who become hackers already have social deficiencies and
becoming a hacker is a way of copping out of having intimate relationships.
Ive known some hackers whose addiction to playing with the computer and thinking
exclusively in terms of information transmission makes it impossible for them to relate to anyone
who's not a hacker, Zimbardo continues. The danger is that they can come to think about
people in much the same way that they think about computers. Computers are always consistent,
so they begin to expect that consistency from people, which by virtue of human nature is not
possible or even desirable.
Zimbardo describes the case of a computer student who was working with him on a
special assignment. The student interacted with excessive formality. He couldnt deal with small
talk, and all his conversations were task-oriented: You will do this. This must be done. He
gave commands rather than making requests or suggestions. And he couldn't deal with the
fickleness of human nature. All this, according to Zimbardo, was a reflection of the way the
student interacted with the computer. Ultimately the student was dismissed because of his
inability to get along with others.
In some extreme cases, hackers exhibit elements of paranoid because people can't be
trusted the way computers can, says Zimbardo. When people dont do just what he orders them
to do, the hacker begins to perceive hostile motives and personal antagonism.
It would be absurd to label all hackers paranoid or even deviant. But it would also be
naive to shrug off the hacker phenomenon as meaningless. Perhaps this attachment to a machine
could be viewed as just another side of man, the technological animal, who has always been
obsessed with tools, machines, gadgets and gimmicks.
There used to be a time when the term hacker referred to someone who was just
enthusiastic about computers. It wasnt pejorative. Some people feel that way about cars or
music to some degree, says Ralph Gorin.

Certainly the outstanding members of any creative field the Picassos and the
Beethovens spent extraordinary amounts of time at their craft and were considered somewhat
odd. And as Gorin points out, the computer, by its very nature, has an even stronger pull.
Computers are attractive because, to a higher degree than any other object, they are
interesting and malleable.
Interesting and malleable: two key words if you want to understand the hacker's addiction
and the increasing allure of the computer for all segments of our society.
The computer can be almost as interesting as a human being. Like people, it is
interactive. When you ask it a question, it gives you an answer. And because it stores great
quantities of information, it can often answer more questions, more accurately, than human
friends.
This interaction has led some to attribute human characteristics to the machine. Such
anthropomorphizing of inanimate objects is not unusual. Ships, trains and planes, for example,
are often given human names.
But humanizing the computer seems much more natural because the machine does appear
to think and talk like a person. As a result, some students form strong emotional
attachments to their computers. Some kids probably think the computer likes them, says
George Truscott, a math and computer teacher in Palo Alto, California.
Hackers are not the only ones interacting with the computer on a personal level. The
amazing powers of the machine have enticed even the most sophisticated scientists into
wondering just how human it can become. The newly developing science of artificial intelligence
aims at programming the computer to think, reason and react in much the same way that people
do. Computers can diagnose a patients ailments and recommend treatments. They can mimic the
dialogue of a psychotherapist or the reasoning of a lawyer.
If computers can replace our most admired humans, the professionals, then why shouldn't
the hackers feel close to them and invest emotional energy in them? After all, the computer
seems to have unlimited potential. Already, with todays technology, tens of thousands of words
can be stored on a tiny silicon chip measuring less than a centimeter square and millimeter thick.
And any item of information on the chip can be called up and displayed on a TV screen in a
fraction of a second. So the computer user has access to worlds of information within reach,
literally, of his fingertips. And the computer can rearrange that information and interrelate facts
or draw conclusions at the programmers command. It is, as Gorin points out, extremely
malleable.
By programming a computer, a youngster can create a world of his own. That is, he feeds
a set of rules in, and it acts according to those rules only. It is bent to the will of the programmer.
A favorite hacker pastime is playing computer games; these are not the games you see in
pinball parlors but much more complex versions that hackers invent. At Stanford, for example,
hackers stay up into the wee hours playing Adventure. The object is to find various pieces of
treasure hidden in different parts of a cave. To do this, you must instruct the computer (that is,
type instructions into the console) as to what direction to take North, south, east, west, up, down,
jump, run, etc.). After each command, the computer describes the area you have reached and
what lies around you. You encounter obstacles along the waysnakes, dragons, darkness, slimy
pitsbut you also encounter magical objects that can help you overcome the obstacles.
With a computer, the possibilities are limited only by your imagination, Gorin explains.
You can be a spaceship pilot, a great explorer or a treasure hunter. It can lead you into the world
of fantasy all of your own making.

Joseph Weizenbaum, professor of computer science at MIT, thinks that the sense of
power over the machine ultimately corrupts the hacker and makes him into a not-very-desirable
sort of programmer. The hackers are so involved with designing their program, making it more
and more complex and bending it to their will, that they don't bother trying to make it
understandable to other users. They rarely keep records of their programs for the benefit of
others, and they rarely take time to understand why a problem occurred.
Computer-science teachers say they can usually pick out the prospective hackers in their
courses because these students make their homework assignments more complex than they need
to be. Rather than using the simplest and most direct method, they take joy in adding extra steps
just to prove their ingenuity.
But perhaps those hackers know something that we don't about the shape of things to
come. That hacker who had to be literally dragged off his chair at MIT is now a
multimillionaire of the computer industry, says MIT professor Michael Dertouzos. And two
former hackers became the founders of the highly successful Apple home-computer company.
When seen in this light, the hacker phenomenon may not be so strange after all. If, as
many psychiatrists say, play is really the basis for all human activity, then the hacker games are
really the preparation for future developments.
Sherry Turkle, a professor of sociology at MIT, has for years been studying the way
computers fit into people's lives. She points out that the computer, because it seems to us to be so
intelligent, so capable, so . . . human, affects the way we think about ourselves and our
ideas about what we are. She says that computers and computer toys already play an important
role in children's efforts to develop an identity by allowing them to test ideas about what is alive
and what is not.
The youngsters can form as many subtle nuances and textured relationships with the
computers as they can with people, Turkle points out.
Computers are not just becoming more and more a part of our world. To a great degree,
they are our world. It is therefore not unlikely that our relationship with them will become as
subjective as that of the hackers. So perhaps hackers are, after all, harbingers of the world to
come.

Diction

Look up the definitions for the following words: delve, ubiquitous, paranoia, pejorative,
malleable, anthropomorphizing, nuances, and harbingers

Suggestions for Writing:

1. What kinds of people use computers today? Know any hackers?

2. What do you know about addiction to anything (drugs, alcohol, TV soap operas)? Is computer
addiction a real addiction, like alcoholism, or is that word a bit too sensational?
3. What kinds of really new, innovative things can computers do these days?
*4. Computer theft: what are the real, hard core hackers doing these days?
*5. Computer chess champions: how do the programs really work? How were they developed?
*6. Microsoft versus Netscape: whats the story? What are the issues?
*Note: these topics, especially, will involve some research.

Gilbert Highet

DIOGENES AND
ALEXANDER
Gilbert Highet (1906-78) was born in Scotland and educated at the Universities of Glasgow and
Oxford. In 1951 he became an American citizen. Among his best-known works are The
Classical Tradition (1949) and The Art of Teaching (1950). The following essay originally
appeared in a 1963 issue of American Heritage Magazine, which Highet edited. Here, he finds a
point of profound similarity between the lowly Cynic, Diogenes, and Alexander the Great, the
lordly ruler of the Greek empire.

ying on the bare earth, shoeless, bearded, half-naked, he looked like a beggar or a
lunatic. He was one, but not the other. He had opened his eyes with the sun at dawn,
scratched, done his business like a dog at the roadside, washed at the public fountain, begged a
piece of breakfast bread and a few olives, eaten them squatting on the ground, and washed them
down with a few handfuls of water scooped from the spring. (Long ago he had owned a rough
wooden cup, but he threw it away when he saw a boy drinking out of his hollowed hands.)
Having no work to go to and no family to provide for, he was free. As the market place filled up
with shoppers and merchants and gossipers and sharpers and slaves and foreigners, he had
strolled through it for an hour or two. Everybody knew him, or knew of him. They would throw
sharp questions at him and get sharper answers. Sometimes they threw jeers, and got jibes;
sometimes bits of food, and got scant thanks; sometimes a mischievous pebble, and got a shower
of stones and abuse. They were not quite sure whether he was mad or not. He knew they were
mad, each in a different way; they amused him. Now he was back at his home.
It was not a house, not even a squatter's hut. He thought everybody lived far too
elaborately, expensively, anxiously. What good is a house? No one needs privacy; natural acts
are not shameful; we all do the same things, and need not hide them. No one needs beds and
chairs and such furniture: the animals live healthy lives and sleep on the ground. All we require,
since nature did not dress us properly, is one garment to keep us warm, and some shelter from
rain and wind. So he had one blanketto dress him in the daytime and cover him at nightand
he slept in a cask. His name was Diogenes. He was the founder of the creed called Cynicism the
word means doggishness; he spent much of his life in the rich, lazy, corrupt Greek city of
Corinth, mocking and satirizing its people, and occasionally converting one of them.
His home was not a barrel made of wood: too expensive. It was a storage jar made of
earthenware, something like a modern fuel tankno doubt discarded because a break had made
it useless. He was not the first to inhabit such a thing: the refugees driven into Athens by the
Spartan invasion had been forced to sleep in casks. But he was the first who ever did so by
choice, out of principle.
Diogenes was not a degenerate or a maniac. He was a philosopher who wrote plays and
poems and essays expounding his doctrine; he talked to those who cared to listen; he had pupils
who admired him. But he taught chiefly by example. All should live naturally, he said, for what

is natural is normal and cannot possibly be evil or shameful. Live without conventions, which are
artificial and false; escape complexities and superfluities and extravagances: only so can you live
a free life. The rich man believes he possesses his big house with its many rooms and its
elaborate furniture, his pictures and his expensive clothes, his horses and his servants and his
bank accounts. He does not. He depends on them, he worries about them, he spends most of his
life's energy looking after them; the thought of losing them makes him sick with anxiety. They
possess him. He is their slave. In order to procure a quantity of false, perishable goods he has
sold the only true, lasting good, his own independence.
There have been many men who grew tired of human society with its complications, and
went away to live simplyon a small farm, in a quiet village, in a hermits cave, or in the
darkness of anonymity. Not so Diogenes. He was not a recluse, or a stylite, or a beatnik. He was
a missionary. His life's aim was clear to him: it was to restamp the currency. (He and his father
had once been convicted for counterfeiting, long before he turned to philosophy, and this phrase
was Diogenes bold, unembarrassed joke on the subject. To restamp the currency: to take the
clean metal of human life, to erase the old false conventional markings, and to imprint it with its
true values.
The other great philosophers of the fourth century before Christ taught mainly their own
private pupils. In the shady groves and cool sanctuaries of the Academy, Plato discoursed to a
chosen few on the unreality of this contingent existence. Aristotle, among the books and
instruments and specimens and archives and research-workers of his Lyceum, pursued
investigations and gave lectures that were rightly named esoteric for those within the walls.
But for Diogenes, laboratory and specimens and lecture halls and pupils were all to be found in a
crowd of ordinary people. Therefore he chose to live in Athens or in the rich city of Corinth,
where travelers from all over the Mediterranean world constantly came and went. And, by
design, he publicly behaved in such ways as to show people what real life was. He would
constantly take up this spiritual coin, ring it on a stone, and laugh at its false superscription.
He thought most people were only half-alive, most men only half-men. At bright
noonday he walked through the market place carrying a lighted lamp and inspecting the face of
everyone he met. They asked him why. Diogenes answered, I am trying to find a man.
To a gentleman whose servant was putting on his shoes for him, Diogenes said, You
wont be really happy until he wipes your nose for you: that will come after you lose the use of
your hands.
Once there was a war scare so serious that it stirred even the lazy, profit-happy
Corinthians. They began to drill, clean their weapons, and rebuild their neglected fortifications.
Diogenes took his old cask and began to roll it up and down, back and forward. When you are
all so busy, he said, I felt I ought to do something!
And so he livedlike a dog, some said, because he cared nothing for privacy and other
human conventions, and because he showed his teeth and barked at those whom he disliked.
Now he was lying in the sunlight, as contented as a dog on the warm ground, happier (he himself
used to boast) than the Shah of Persia. Although he knew he was going to have an important
visitor, he would not move.
The little square began to fill with people. Page boys elegantly dressed, spearmen
speaking a rough foreign dialect, discreet secretaries, hard-browed officers, suave diplomats,
they all gradually formed a circle centered on Diogenes. He looked them over, as a sober man
looks at a crowd of tottering drunks, and shook his head. He knew who they were. They were

the attendants of the conqueror of Greece, the servants of Alexander, the Macedonian king, who
was visiting his newly subdued realm.
Only twenty, Alexander was far older and wiser than his years. Like all Macedonians he
loved drinking, but he could usually handle it; and toward women he was nobly restrained and
chivalrous. Like all Macedonians he loved fighting; he was a magnificent commander, but he
was not merely a military automaton. He could think. At thirteen he had become a pupil of the
greatest mind in Greece, Aristotle. No exact record of his schooling survives. It is clear, though,
that Aristotle took the passionate, half-barbarous boy and gave him the best of Greek culture. He
taught Alexander poetry: the young prince slept with the Iliad under his pillow and longed to
emulate Achilles, who brought the mighty power of Asia to ruin. He taught him philosophy, in
particular the shapes and uses of political power: a few years later Alexander was to create a
supranational empire that was not merely a power system but a vehicle for the exchange of
Greek and Middle Eastern cultures.
Aristotle taught him the principles of scientific research: during his invasion of the
Persian domains Alexander took with him a large corps of scientists, and shipped hundreds of
zoological specimens back to Greece for study. Indeed, it was from Aristotle that Alexander
learned to seek out everything strange which might be instructive. Jugglers and stunt artists and
virtuosos of the absurd he dismissed with a shrug; but on reaching India he was to spend hours
discussing the problems of life and death with naked Hindu mystics, and later to see one
demonstrate Yoga self-command by burning himself impassively to death.
Now, Alexander was in Corinth to take command of the League of Greek States which,
after conquering them, his father Philip had created as a disguise for the New Macedonian Order.
He was welcomed and honored and flattered. He was the man of the hour, of the century: he was
unanimously appointed commander-in-chief of a new expedition against old, rich, corrupt Asia.
Nearly everyone crowded to Corinth in order to congratulate him, to seek employment with him,
even simply to see him: soldiers and statesmen, artists and merchants, poets and philosophers.
He received their compliments graciously. Only Diogenes, although he lived in Corinth, did not
visit the new monarch. With that generosity which Aristotle had taught him was a quality of the
truly magnanimous man, Alexander determined to call upon Diogenes. Surely Diogenes, the
God-born, would acknowledge the conqueror's power by some gift of hoarded wisdom.
With his handsome face, his fiery glance, his strong supple body, his purple and gold
cloak, and his air of destiny, he moved through the parting crowd, toward the Dogs kennel.
When a king approaches, all rise in respect. Diogenes did not rise, he merely sat up on one
elbow. When a monarch enters a precinct, all greet him with a bow or an acclamation. Diogenes
said nothing.
There was a silence. Some years later Alexander speared his best friend to the wall, for
objecting to the exaggerated honors paid to His Majesty; but now he was still young and civil.
He spoke first, with a kindly greeting. Looking at the poor broken cask, the single ragged
garment, and the rough figure lying on the ground, he said: Is there anything I can do for you,
Diogenes?
Yes, said the Dog, Stand to one side. Youre blocking the sunlight.
There was silence, not the ominous silence preceding a burst of fury, but a hush of
amazement. Slowly, Alexander turned away. A titter broke out from the elegant Greeks, who
were already beginning to make jokes about the Cur that looked at the King. The Macedonian
officers, after deciding that Diogenes was not worth the trouble of kicking, were starting to
guffaw and nudge one another. Alexander was still silent. To those nearest him he said quietly,

If I were not Alexander, I should be Diogenes. They took it as a paradox, designed to close the
awkward little scene with a polite curtain line. But Alexander meant it. He understood Cynicism
as the others could not. Later he took one of Diogenes pupils with him to India as a
philosophical interpreter (it was he who spoke to the naked saddhus). He was what Diogenes
called himself, a cosmopolites, citizen of the world. Like Diogenes, he admired the heroic
figure of Hercules, the mighty conqueror who labors to help mankind while all others toil and
sweat only for themselves. He knew that of all men then alive in the world only Alexander the
conqueror and Diogenes the beggar were truly free.

Diction

Look up the definitions for the following words: jibes, degenerate, recluse, contingent, esoteric,
superscription, supranational, virtuoso, impassively, and magnanimous.

Suggestions for Writing:

1. Have you known anybody who, like Diogenes, looks & acts like something other than what
he/she is?
2. Do opposites attract? Describe the most unlikely couple you ever saw?
3. Who was your most unusual teacher?
*4. How and why did the word cynic change its meaning over time?
*5. Are some wealthy people really free or are they, in fact, burdened with their possessions, as
some American romantic philosophers have argued?

Jerry Mander

THE WALLING OF
AWARENESS
Jerry Mander (b. 1936- ) was President of Freeman, Mander and Gossage Advertising Agency
from 1965 to 1972. He has contributed articles to numerous periodicals, including Mother
Jones, Ramparts, Scanlan's Monthly, and Penthouse. In the following excerpt from a chapter of
his book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), Mander assesses some of the
ways in which human-made environments have alienated us from our world.
During a six-month period in 1973, The New York Times reported the following scientific
findings:
A major research institute spent more than $50,000 to discover that the best bait for mice
is cheese.
Another study found that mother's milk was better balanced nutritionally for infants than
commercial formulas. That study also proved that mother's milk was better for human infants
than cow's milk or goat's milk.

A third study established that a walk is considerably healthier for the human respiratory
and circulatory systems, in fact for overall health and vitality, than a ride in a car. Bicycling was
also found to be beneficial.
A fourth project demonstrated that the juice of fresh oranges has more nutritional value
than either canned or frozen orange juice.
A fifth study proved conclusively that infants who are touched a lot frequently grow into
adults with greater self-confidence and have a more integrated relationship with the world than
those who are not touched. This study found that touching, not merely sexual touching, but any
touching of one person by another, seemed to aid general health and even mental development
among adults as well as children.
The remarkable thing about these five studies, of course, is that anyone should have
found it necessary to undertake them. That some people did find them necessary can only mean
that they felt there was some uncertainty about how the answers would turn out.
And yet, anyone who has seen a mouse eating cheese or who has been touched by the
hand of another person already knows a great deal about these things, assuming he or she gives
credence to personal observation.
Similarly, anyone who has ever considered the question of artificial milk versus human
milk is unlikely to assume that Nestles or Similac will improve on a feeding arrangement that
accounted for the growth of every human infant before modern times.
That any people retain doubts on these questions is symptomatic of two unfortunate
conditions of modern existence: Human beings no longer trust personal observation, even of the
self-evident, until it is confirmed by scientific or technological institutions; human beings have
lost insight into natural processes-how the world works, the human role as one of the many
interlocking parts of the worldwide ecosystem-because natural processes are now exceedingly
difficult to observe.
These two conditions combine to limit our knowledge and understanding to what we are
told. They also leave us unable to judge the reliability or unreliability of the information we go
by.
The problem begins with the physical environment in which we live.

Mediated Environments
Most Americans spend their lives within environments created by human beings. This is
less the case if you live in Montana than if you live in Manhattan, but it is true to some extent all
over the country. Natural environments have largely given way to human-created environments.
What we see, hear, touch, taste, smell, feel and understand about the world has been
processed for us. Our experiences of the world can no longer be called direct, or primary. They
are secondary, mediated experiences.
When we are walking in a forest, we can see and feel what the planet produces directly.
Forests grow on their own without human intervention. When we see a forest, or experience it in
other ways, we can count on the experience being directly between us and the planet. It is not
mediated, interpreted or altered.
On the other hand, when we live in cities, no experience is directly between us and the
planet. Virtually all experience is mediated in some way. Concrete covers whatever would grow
from the ground. Buildings block the natural vistas. The water we drink comes from a faucet,
not from a stream or the sky. All foliage has been confined by human considerations and

redesigned according to human tastes. There are no wild animals, there are no rocky terrains,
there is no cycle of bloom and decline. There is not even night and day. No food grows
anywhere.
Most of us give little importance to this change in human experience of the world, if we
notice it at all. We are so surrounded by a reconstructed world that it is difficult to grasp how
astonishingly different it is from the world of only one hundred years ago, and that it bears
virtually no resemblance to the world in which human beings lived for four million years before
that. That this might affect the way we think, including our understanding of how our lives are
connected to any nonhuman system, is rarely considered.
In fact, most of us assume that human understanding is now more thorough than before,
that we know more than we ever did. This is because we have such faith in our rational,
intellectual processes and the institutions we have created that we fail to observe their limits.
I have heard small children ask whether apples and oranges grow in stores, Of course
not,we tell them. Fruit grows from the ground somewhere out in the countryside, and then it's
put into trucks and brought to the stores.
But is is true? Have you seen that? Do you have a sense that what you are eating was
once alive, growing on its own?
We learn in schools that fruit grows from the ground. We see pictures of fruit growing.
But when we live in cities, confined to the walls and floors of our concrete environments, we
don't actually see the slow process of a blossom appearing on a tree, then becoming a bud that
grows into an apple tree. We learn this, but we can't really "know" what it means, or that a whole
cycle is operating: sky to ground to root through tree to bud ripening into fruit that we can eat.
Nor do we see particular value in this knowledge. It remains to us an abstraction that is difficult
to integrate into our consciousness without direct experience of the process. Therefore we don't
develop a feeling about it, a caring. In the end how can our children or we really grasp that fruit
growing from trees has anything to do with humans growing from eating the fruit?
We have learned that water does not really originate in the pipes where we get it. We are
educated to understand that it comes from sky (we have seen that, it is true!), lands in some
faraway mountains, flows into rivers, which flow into little reservoirs, and then somehow it all
goes through pipes into the sinks in our homes and then back out towhere? The ocean.
We learn there is something called evaporation that takes the water we dont need up to
the sky. But is this true? Is there a pattern to it? How does it collect in the sky? Is it okay to
rearrange the cycle with cloud seeding? Is it okay to collect the water in dams? Does anyone
else need water? Do plants drink it? How do they get it? Does water go into the ground? In
cities it rolls around on concrete and then pours into sewers. Since we are unable to observe most
of the cycle, we learn about it in knowledge museums: schools, textbooks. We study to know.
What we know is what we have studied. We know what the books say. What the books say is
what the authors of the books learned from experts who, from time to time, turn out to be
wrong.
Everyone knows about night and day. Half the time its dark, half the time its light.
However, it doesnt work that way in our homes or outside in the streets. There is always light,
and it is always the same, controlled by an automatic switch downtown. The stars are obscured
by the city glow. The moon is washed out by a filter of light. It becomes a semimoon and our
awareness of it inevitably dims. We say it is night, but darkness moods and feelings lie dormant

in us. Faced with real darkness, we become frightened, overreact, like a child whose parents
have always left the light on. In three generations since Edison, we have become creatures of
light alone. . . .

Sensory-Deprivation Environments
The modern office building is the archetypal example of the mediated environment. It
contains nothing that did not first exist as a design plan in a human mind. The spaces are square,
flat and small, eliminating a sense of height, depth and irregularity. The decor is rigidly
controlled to a bland uniformity from room to room and floor to floor. The effect is to dampen
all interest in the space one inhabits.
Most modern office buildings have hermetically sealed windows. The air is processed,
the temperature regulated. It is always the same. The bodys largest sense organ, the skin, feels
no wind, no changes in temperature, and is dulled.
Muzak homogenizes the sound environment. Some buildings even use white noise, a
deliberate mix of electronic sounds that merge into a hum. Seemingly innocuous, it fills the ears
with an even background tone, obscuring random noises or passing conversations which might
arouse interest or create a diversion.
The light remains constant from morning through night, from room to room until our
awareness of light is as dull as our awareness of temperature, and we are not aware of the
passage of time. We are told that a constant level of light is good for our eyes, that it relieves
strain. Is this true? What about the loss of a range of focus and the many changes in direction
and intensity of light that our flexible eyes are designed to accommodate?
Those who build artificial environments view the senses as single, monolithic things, rather than
abilities that have a range of capacity for a reason. We know, for example, that our eyes can see
from the extremely dark to the extremely bright, from far to near, from distinct to indistinct, from
obvious to subtle. They perceive objects moving quickly and those that are still. The eye is a
wonderfully flexible organ, able to adjust instantly to a dazzling array of information, constantly
changing, multi-leveled, perceiving objects far and near moving at different speeds
simultaneously. A fully functioning visual capacity is equal to everything the natural
environment offers as visual information. This would have to be so, since the interaction
between the senses and the natural environment created the ranges of abilities that we needed to
have. Sight did not just arrive one day, like Adam's rib; it coevolved with the ingredients around
it which it was designed to see. When our eyes are continually exercised, when flexibility and
dynamism are encouraged, then they are equal to the variety of stimuli that night and day have to
offer. It is probably not wise always to have good light or to be for very long at fixed
distances from anything. The result will be lack of exercise and eventual atrophy of the eyes'
abilities.
When we reduce an aspect of environment from varied and multidimensional to fixed, we
also change the human being who lives within it. Humans give up the capacity to adjust, just as
the person who only walks cannot so easily handle the experience of running. The lungs, the
heart and other muscles have not been exercised. The human being then becomes a creature with
a narrower range of abilities and fewer feelings about the loss. We become grosser, simpler,
less varied, like the environment.

The common response to this is that if we lose wide-spectrum sensory experience, we

gain a deeper mental experience. This is not true. We only have less nonmental experience so
the mental life seems richer by comparison. In fact, mental life is more enriched by a fully
functioning sensory life.
In recent years, researchers have discovered some amazing things about the connections
between mental and physical life by doing sensory-deprivation experiments. In such
experiments, a human subject is cut off from as much sensory information as possible. This can
be accomplished, for example, by a totally blank environment-white walls, no furniture, no
sounds, constant temperature, constant light, no food and no windows. A more thorough method
is to put the blindfolded subject inside a temperature-controlled suit floating in a water tank with
only tubes to provide air and water, which are also at body temperature. This sensorydeprivation tank eliminates the tactile sense as well as an awareness of up and down.
Researchers have found that when sensory stimuli are suppressed this way, the subject at
first lives a mental life because mental images are the only stimulation. But after a while, these
images become disoriented and can be frightening. Disconnected from the world outside the
mind, the subject is rootless and un-grounded.
If the experience goes on long enough, a kind of madness develops which can be allayed
only by reintroducing sensory stimuli, direct contact with the world outside the subject's mind.
Before total disorientation occurs, a second effect takes place. That is a dramatic increase
in focus on any stimulus at all that is introduced. In such a deprived environment, one single
stimulus acquires extraordinary power and importance. In the most literal sense, the subject
loses perspective and cannot put the stimulus in context. Such experiments have proven to be
effective in halting heavy smoking habits, for example, when the experimenter speaks
instructions to stop smoking or describes to the subject through a microphone the harmful,
unpleasant aspects of smoking.
These experiments have shown that volunteers can be programmed to believe and do
things they would not have done in a fully functional condition. The technique could be called
brain-washing.
It would be going too far to call our modern offices sensory-deprivation chambers, but they
are most certainly sensory- reduction chambers. They may not brainwash, but the elimination of
sensory stimuli definitely increases focus on the task at hand, the work to be done, to the
exclusion of all else. Modern offices were designed for that very purpose by people who knew
what they were doing.
If people's senses were stimulated to experience anything approaching their potential
range, it would be highly unlikely that people would sit for eight long hours at desks, reading
memoranda, typing documents, studying columns of figures or pondering sales strategies. If
birds were flying through the room, and wind were blowing the papers about, if the sun were
shining in there, or people were lolling about on chaise lounges or taking baths while listening to
various musical presentations, this would certainly divert the office worker from the mental work
he or she is there to do. In fact, if offices were so arranged, little business would get done. This
is why they are not so arranged. Any awareness of the senses, aside from their singular uses in
reading and sometimes talking and listening, would be disastrous for office environments that
require people to stay focused within narrow and specific functional modes.
Feeling is also discouraged by these environments. Reducing sensual variations is one
good way of reducing feeling since the one stimulates the other. But there is also a hierarchy of

values which further the process. Objectivity is the highest value that can be exhibited by an
executive in an office. Orderliness is the highest value for a subordinate office worker. Both of
these are most easily achieved if the human is effectively disconnected from the distractions of
her or his senses, feelings and intuitions.
With the field of experience so drastically reduced for office workers, the stimuli which
remain-paper work, mental work, business-loom larger and obtain an importance they would not
have in a wider, more varied, more stimulating environment. The worker gets interested in them
largely because that is what is available to get interested in.
Curiously, however, while eschewing feeling and intuition, business people often cannot
resist using them. They come out as aberrations-fierce competitive drive, rage at small
inconveniences, decisions that do not fit the models of objectivity. Such behavior in business
sometimes makes me think of blades of grass growing upward through the pavement.
A more poignant example, perhaps, is that modern offices have proven to be such hot
sexual environments. Aside from the occasional potted plant, the only creatures in offices with
which it is able to experience anything are other humans. With all other organic life absent and
with the senses deprived of most possibilities for human experience, the occasional body which
passes the desk becomes an especially potent sensual event, the only way out of the condition of
suspended experience, and the only way to experience oneself as alive. In fact, the confinement
of human beings within artificial environments may be a partial explanation of our new culturewide obsession with and focus on sex. . . .

Rooms inside Rooms

There are differences of opinion about what the critical moments were that led human beings
away from the primary forms of experience-between person and planet-into secondary, mediated
environments. Some go back as far as the control of fire, the domestication of animals, the
invention of agriculture or the imposition of monotheism and patriarchy.
In my opinion, however, the most significant recent moment came with the control of
electricity for power, about four generations ago. This made it possible to begin moving nearly
all human functions indoors, and made the outdoors more like indoors.
In less than four generations out of an estimated one hundred thousand, we have
fundamentally changed the nature of our interaction with the planet.
Our environment no longer grows on its own, by its own design, in its own time. The
environment in which we live has been totally reconstructed solely by human intentions and
creation.
We find ourselves living inside a kind of nationwide room. We look around and see only
our own creations.
We go through life believing we are experiencing the world when actually our
experiences are confined within entirely human conceptions. Our world has been thought up.
Our environment itself is the manifestation of the mental processes of other humans. Of
all the species of the planet, and all the cultures of the human species, we twentieth-century
Americans have become the first in history to live predominantly inside projections of our own
minds.
We live in a kind of maelstrom, going ever deeper into our own thought processes, into
subterranean caverns, where non-human reality is up, up, away somewhere. We are within a

system of ever smaller, ever deeper concentric circles, and we consider each new depth that we
reach greater progress and greater knowledge.
Our environment itself becomes an editor, filter and medium between ourselves and an
alternative nonhuman, unedited, organic planetary reality.
We ask the child to understand nature and care about it, to know the difference between
what humans create and what the planet does, but how can the child know these things? The
child lives with us in a room inside a room inside another room. The child sees an apple in a
store and assumes that the apple and the store are organically connected. The child sees streets,
buildings and a mountain and assumes it was all put there by humans. How can the child assume
otherwise? That is the obvious conclusion in a world in which all reality is created by humans.
As adults, we assume we are not so vulnerable to this mistake, that we are educated and
our minds can save us. We know the difference between natural and artificial. And yet, we
have no greater contact with the wider world than the child has.
Most people still give little importance to any of this. Those who take note of these
changes usually speak of them in esoteric, aesthetic or philosophical terms. It makes good
discussion at parties and in philosophy classes.
As we go, however, I hope it will become apparent that the most compelling outcome of
these sudden changes in the way we experience life is the inevitable political one.
Living within artificial, reconstructed, arbitrary environments that are strictly the
products of human conception, we have no way to be sure that we know what is true and what is
not. We have lost context and perspective. What we know is what other humans tell us.
Therefore, whoever controls the processes of re-creation, effectively redefines reality for
everyone else, and creates the entire world of human experience, our field of knowledge. We
become subject to them. The confinement of our experience becomes the basis of their control
of us. The role of the media in all this is to confirm the validity of the arbitrary world in which
we live. The role of television is to project that world, via images, into our heads, all of us at the
same time.

Diction

Look up the definitions for the following words: credence, mediated, archetypal, decor, bland,
monolithic, atrophy, allayed, eschewing, aberration, maelstrom, and esoteric.

Suggestions for Writing:

1. Were you ever in a less-than-mediated environment when the lights went out, or you got
lost in the wilderness, for instance?
2. Can some mediated environments stimulate your senses? How about virtual reality?
How does it work? Who uses it and for what?
3. *How do TV programs or commercials change our expectations about the world?
4. *Does TV really cause more violent behavior in small children?
5. *What is sick building syndrome and what causes it? Or does anyone know?

*Note: these topics, especially, will involve some research.

Jessica Mitford

REPOSING IN THE
PREPARATION ROOM
Jessica Mitford (b. 1917- d. 1996), an Englishwoman who became an American citizen in 1944,
has written about the American funeral industry, the Nixon presidency, and about the art of
muckraking in general. In the following excerpt from The American Way of Death (1963),
Mitford describes, in grisly and satiric terms, the process of embalming and restoring the
human body in preparation for burial. The passage gives us insight not only into this procedure,
but also into our own attitudes toward death.

mbalming is indeed a most extraordinary procedure, and one must wonder at the
docility of Americans who each year pay hundreds of millions of dollars for its
perpetuation, blissfully ignorant of what it is all about, what is done, how it is done. Not one in
ten thousand has any idea of what actually takes place. Books on the subject are extremely hard
to come by. They are not to be found in most libraries or bookshops.
In an era when huge television audiences watch surgical operations in the comfort of their
living rooms, when, thanks to the animated cartoon, the geography of the digestive system has
become familiar territory even to the nursery school set, in a land where the satisfaction of
curiosity about almost all matters is a national pastime, the secrecy surrounding embalming can,
surely, hardly be attributed to the inherent gruesomeness of the subject. Custom in this regard
has within this century suffered a complete reversal. In the early days of American embalming,
when it was performed in the home of the deceased, it was almost mandatory for some relative to
stay by the embalmers side and witness the procedure. Today, family members who might wish
to be in attendance would certainly be dissuaded by the funeral director. All others, except
apprentices, are excluded by law from the preparation room.
A close look at what does actually take place may explain in large measure the
undertakers intractable reticence concerning a procedure that has become his major raison
dtre. It is possible he fears that public information about embalming might lead patrons to
wonder if they really want this service? If the funeral men are loath to discuss the subject outside
the trade, the reader may, understandably, be equally loath to go on reading at this point. For
those who have the stomach for it, let us part the formaldehyde curtain....
The body is first laid out in the undertakers morgue or rather, Mr. Jones is reposing in
the preparation room to be readied to bid the world farewell.
The preparation room in any of the better funeral establishments has the tiled and sterile look of
a surgery, and indeed the embalmer-restorative artist who does his chores there is beginning to
adopt the term "dermasurgeon" (appropriately corrupted by some mortician-writers as
''demisurgeon'') to describe his calling. His equipment, consisting of scalpels, scissors, augers,
forceps, clamps, needles, pumps, tubes, bowls and basins, is crudely imitative of the surgeon's as
is his technique, acquired in a nine- or twelve-month post-high-school course in an embalming
school. He is supplied by an advanced chemical industry with a bewildering array of fluids,
sprays, pastes, oils, powders, creams, to fix or soften tissue, shrink or distend it as needed, dry it
here, restore the moisture there. There are cosmetics, waxes and paints to fill the cover features,

even plaster of Paris to replace entire limbs. There are ingenious aids to prop and stabilize the
cadaver: A Vari-Pose Head Rest, the Edwards Arm and Hand Positioner, the Repose Block (to
support the shoulders during the embalming), and the Throop Foot Positioner, which resembles
an old-fashioned stocks.
Mr. John H. Eckels, president of the Eckels College of Mortuary Science, thus describes
the first part of the embalming procedure: In the hands of a skilled practitioner, this work may
be done in a comparatively short time and without mutilating the body other than by slight
incisionso slight that it scarcely would cause serious inconvenience if made upon a living
person. It is necessary to remove the blood, and doing this not only helps in the disinfecting, but
removes the principal cause of disfigurements due to discoloration.
Another textbook discusses the all-important time element: The earlier this is done, the
better, for every hour that elapses between death and embalming will add to the problems and
complications encountered.... Just how soon should one get going on the embalming? The
author tells us, On the basis of such scanty information made available to this profession
through its rudimentary and haphazard system of technical research, we must conclude that the
best results are to be obtained if the subject is embalmed before life is completely extinct that
is, before cellular death has occurred. In the average case, this would mean within an hour after
somatic death. For those who feel that there is something a little rudimentary, not to say
haphazard, about this advice, a comforting thought is offered by another writer. Speaking of
fears entertained in early days of premature burial, he points out, One of the effects of
embalming by chemical injection, however, has been to dispel fears of live burial. How true;
once the blood is removed, chances of live burial are indeed remote.
To return to Mr. Jones, the blood is drained out through the veins and replaced by
embalming fluid pumped in through the arteries. As noted in The Principles and Practices of
Embalming, Every operator has a favorite injection and drainage point a fact which becomes
a handicap only if he fails or refuses to forsake his favorites when conditions demand it. Typical
favorites are the carotid artery, femoral artery, jugular vein, subclavian vein. There are various
choices of embalming fluid. If Flextone is used, it will produce a "mild, flexible rigidity. The
skin retains a velvety softness, the tissues are rubbery and pliable. Ideal for women and
children. It may be blended with B. and G. Products Company's Lyf-Lyk tint, which is
guaranteed to reproduce "nature's own skin texture . . . the velvety appearance of living tissue.
Suntone comes in three separate tints: Suntan; Special Cosmetic Tint, a pink shade especially
indicated for young female subjects; and Regular Cosmetic Tint, moderately pink.
About three to six gallons of dyed and perfumed solution of formaldehyde, glycerin,
borax, phenol, alcohol and water are soon circulating through Mr. Jones, whose mouth has been
sewn together with a needle directed upward between the upper lip and gum and brought out
through the left nostril," with the corners raised slightly "for a more pleasant expression. If he
should be bucktoothed, his teeth are cleaned with Bon Ami and coated with colorless nail polish.
His eyes, meanwhile, are closed with flesh-tinted eye caps and eye cement.
The next step is to have at Mr. Jones with a thing called a trocar. This is a long, hollow
needle attached to a tube. It is jabbed into the abdomen, poked around the entrails and chest
cavity, the contents of which are pumped out and replaced with cavity fluid. This done, and
the hole in the abdomen sewn up, Mr. Jones's face is heavily creamed to protect the skin from
burns which may be caused by leakage of the chemicals), and he is covered with a sheet and left
unmolested for a while. But not for long--there is more, much more, in store for him. He has

been embalmed, but not yet restored, and the best time to start the restorative work is eight to ten
hours after embalming, when the tissues have become firm and dry.
The object of all this attention to the corpse, it must be remembered, is to make it
presentable for viewing in an attitude of healthy repose. Our customs require the presentation of
our dead in the semblance of normality . . . unmarred by the ravages of illness, disease or
mutilation, says Mr. J. Sheridan Mayer in his Restorative Art. This is rather a large order since
few people die in the full bloom of health, unravaged by illness and unmarked by some
disfigurement. The funeral industry is equal to the challenge: In some cases the gruesome
appearance of a mutilated or disease-ridden subject may be quite discouraging. The task of
restoration may seem impossible and shake the confidence of the embalmer. This is the time for
intestinal fortitude and determination. Once the formative work is begun and affected tissues are
cleaned or removed, all doubts of success vanish. It is surprising and gratifying to discover the
results which may be obtained.
The embalmer, having allowed an appropriate interval to elapse, returns to the attack, but
now he brings into play the skill and equipment of sculptor and cosmetician. Is a hand missing?
Casting one in plaster of Paris is a simple matter. For replacement purposes, only a cast of the
back of the hand is necessary; this is within the ability of the average operator and is quite
adequate. If a lip or two, a nose or an ear should be missing, the embalmer has at hand a variety
of restorative waxes with which to model replacements. Pores and skin texture are simulated by
stippling with a little brush, and over this cosmetics are laid on. Head off? Decapitation cases
are rather routinely handled. Ragged edges are trimmed, and head joined to torso with a series of
splints, wires and sutures. It is a good idea to have a little something at the neck a scarf or
high collar when time for viewing comes. Swollen mouth? Cut out tissue as needed from
inside the lips. If too much is removed, the surface contour can easily be restored by removing
tissue through vertical incisions made down each side of the neck. When the deceased is
casketed, the pillow will hide the suture incisions . . . as an extra precaution against leakage, the
suture may be painted with liquid sealer.
The opposite condition is more likely to present itself that of emaciation. His
hypodermic syringe now loaded with massage cream, the embalmer seeks out and fills the
hollowed and sunken areas by injection. In this procedure the backs of the hands and fingers and
the under-chin area should not be neglected.
Positioning the lips is a problem that recurrently challenges the ingenuity of the
embalmer. Closed too tightly, they tend to give a stern, even disapproving expression. Ideally,
embalmers feel, the lips should give the impression of being ever so slightly parted, the upper lip
protruding slightly for a more youthful appearance. This takes some engineering, however, as the
lips tend to drift apart. Lip drift can sometimes be remedied by pushing one or two straight pins
through the inner margin of the lower lip and then inserting them between the two front upper
teeth. If Mr. Jones happens to have no teeth, the pins can just as easily be anchored in his
Armstrong Face Former and Denture Replacer. Another method to maintain lip closure is to
dislocate the lower jaw, which is then held in its new position by a wire run through holes which
have been drilled through the upper and lower jaws at the midline. As the French are fond of
saying, il faut souffrir pour etre belle.1
If Mr. Jones has died of jaundice, the embalming fluid will very likely turn him green.
Does this deter the embalmer? Not if he has intestinal fortitude. Masking pastes and cosmetics
1

One must suffer to be beautiful.

are heavily laid on, burial garments and casket interiors are color-correlated with particular care,
and Jones is displayed beneath rose-colored lights. Friends will say, How well he looks. Death
by carbon monoxide, on the other hand, can be rather a good thing from the embalmer's
viewpoint: One advantage is the fact that this type of discoloration is an exaggerated form of a
natural pink coloration. This is nice because the healthy glow is already present and needs but
little attention.
The patching and filling completed, Mr. Jones is now shaved, washed and dressed.
Cream-based cosmetic, available in pink, flesh, suntan, brunette and blond, is applied to his
hands and face, his hair is shampooed and combed (and, in the case of Mrs. Jones, set), his hands
manicured. For the horny-handed son of toil special care must be taken; cream should be applied
to remove ingrained grime, and the nails cleaned. If he were not in the habit of having them
manicured in life, trimming and shaping is advised for better appearancenever questioned by
kin.
Jones is now ready for casketing (this is the present participle of the verb to casket). In
this operation, his right shoulder should be depressed slightly to turn the body a bit to the right
and soften the appearance of lying flat on the back. Positioning the hands is a matter of
importance, and special rubber positioning blocks may be used. The hands should be cupped
slightly for a more lifelike, relaxed appearance. Proper placement of the body requires a delicate
sense of balance. It should lie as high as possible in the casket, yet not so high that the lid, when
lowered, will hit the nose. On the other hand, we are cautioned, placing the body too low
creates the impression that the body is in a box.
Jones is next wheeled into the appointed slumber room where a few last touches may be
addedhis favorite pipe placed in his hand or, if he was a great reader, a book propped into
position. (In the case of little Master Jones a Teddy bear may be clutched.) Here he will hold
open house for a few days, visiting hours 10 A.M. to 9 P.M.

Diction

Look up the definitions for the following words: docility, intractable, reticence, rudimentary,
somatic, stippling, loath, and raison dtre.

Suggestions for Writing:

1. Have you ever been to an open-casket funeral? Perhaps youve been to more than one kind?
Do you have any preferences, based on what youve seen?
2. Are there any other products we buy out of fear or hope, but that we might not really need?
3. How (if at all) and why has Mitfords essay changed your mind about anything?
*4. What was the publics reaction to Mitfords book when it first came out? Do you agree?
*5. The way a society treats its dead says a lot about that society. What can we learn about our
own society by comparing our funeral practices to those of some other culture?
*6. Compare the level of violence and gore depicted in Mitfords essay with what we see on TV
and in movies these days.
*Note: these topics, especially, will involve some research.

James Harvey Robinson

ON VARIOUS KINDS OF
THINKING
James Harvey Robinson (1863-1936) was an American historian and university professor who
helped found the New School for Social Research in New York City. In the following selection
from The Mind in the Making (1921), he defines four kinds of thinking and analyzes their
relative frequency and importance in human life.
We do not think enough about thinking, and much of our confusion is the result of current
illusions in regard to it. Let us forget for the moment any impressions we may have derived
from the philosophers, and see what seems to happen in ourselves. The first thing that we notice
is that our thought moves with such incredible rapidity that it is almost impossible to arrest any
specimen of it long enough to have a look at it. When we are offered a penny for our thoughts
we always find that we have recently had so many things in mind that we can easily make a
selection which will not compromise us too nakedly. On inspection we shall find that even if we
are not downright ashamed of a great part of our spontaneous thinking it is far too intimate,
personal, ignoble or trivial to permit us to reveal more than a small part of it. I believe this must
be true of everyone. We do not, of course, know what goes on in other people's heads. They tell
us very little and we tell them very little. The spigot of speech, rarely fully opened, could never
emit more than driblets of the ever renewed hogshead of thought noch grsser wie's
Heidelberger Fass. We find it hard to believe that other people's thoughts are as silly as our
own, but they probably are.
We all appear to ourselves to be thinking all the time during our waking hours, and most
of us are aware that we go on thinking while we are asleep, even more foolishly than when
awake. When uninterrupted by some practical issue we are engaged in what is now known as a
reverie. This is our spontaneous and favorite kind of thinking. We allow our ideas to take their
own course and this course is determined by our hopes and fears, our spontaneous desires, their
fulfillment or frustration; by our likes and dislikes, our loves and hates and resentments. There is
nothing else anything like so interesting to ourselves as ourselves. All thought that is not more
or less laboriously controlled and directed will inevitably circle about the beloved ego. It is
amusing and pathetic to observe this tendency in ourselves and in others. We learn politely and
generously to overlook this truth, but if we dare to think of it, it blazes forth like the noontide
sun.
The reverie of free association of ideas has of late become the subject of scientific
research. While investigators are not yet agreed on the results, or at least on the proper
interpretation to be given to them, there can be no doubt that our reveries form the chief index to
our fundamental character. They are a reflection of our nature as modified by often hidden and
forgotten experiences. We need not go into the matter further here, for it is only necessary to
observe that the reverie is at all times a potent and in many cases an omnipotent rival to every
other kind of thinking. It doubtless influences all our speculations in its persistent tendency to
self-magnification and self-justification, which are its chief preoccupations, but it is the last thing
to make directly or indirectly for honest increase of knowledge. Philosophers usually talk as if
such thinking did not exist or were in some way negligible. This is what makes their
speculations so unreal and often worthless.

The reverie, as any of us can see for himself, is frequently broken and interrupted by the
necessity of a second kind of thinking. We have to make practical decisions. Shall we write a
letter or no? Shall we take the subway or a bus? Shall we have dinner at seven or half past?
Shall we buy U.S. Rubber or a Liberty Bond? Decisions are easily distinguishable from the free
flow of the reverie. Sometimes they demand a good deal of careful pondering and the recollection of pertinent facts; often, however, they are made impulsively. They are a more difficult and
laborious thing than the reverie, and we resent having to make up our mind when we are tired,
or absorbed in a congenial reverie. Weighing a decision, it should be noted, does not necessarily
add anything to our knowledge, although we may, of course, seek further information before
making it.
A third kind of thinking is stimulated when anyone questions s our beliefs and opinions.
We sometimes find ourselves changing our minds without any resistance or heavy emotion, but
if we are told that we are wrong we resent the imputation and harden our hearts. We are
incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion
for them when anyone proposes to rob us of their companionship. It is obviously not the ideas
themselves that are dear to us, but our self-esteem, which is threatened. We are by nature
stubbornly pledged to defend our own from attack, whether it be our person, our family, our
property, or our opinion. A United States Senator once remarked to a friend of mine that God
Almighty could not make him change his mind on our Latin-American policy. We may
surrender, but rarely confess ourselves vanquished. In the intellectual world at least peace is
without victory.
Few of us take the pains to study the origin of our cherished convictions; indeed, we have
a natural repugnance to so doing. We like to continue to believe what we have been accustomed
to accept as true, and the resentment aroused when doubt is cast upon any of our assumptions
leads us to seek every manner of excuse for clinging to them. The result is that most of our socalled reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.
I remember years ago attending a public dinner to which the Governor of the state was
bidden. The Chairman explained that His Excellency could not be present for certain good
reasons; what the real reasons were the presiding officer said he would leave us to conjecture.
This distinction between good and real reasons is one of the most clarifying and essential in
the whole realm of thought. We can readily give what seem to us good reasons for being a
Catholic or a Mason, a Republican or a Democrat, an adherent or opponent of the League of
Nations. But the real reasons are usually on quite a different plane. Of course the importance
of this distinction is popularly, if somewhat obscurely, recognized. The Baptist missionary is
ready enough to see that the Buddhist is not such because his doctrines would bear careful
inspection, but because he happened to be born in a Buddhist family in Tokyo. But it would be
treason to his faith to acknowledge that his own partiality for certain doctrines is due to the fact
that his mother was a member of the First Baptist church of Oak Ridge. A savage can give all
sorts of reasons for his belief that it is dangerous to step on a man's shadow, and a newspaper
editor can advance plenty of arguments against the Bolsheviki. But neither of them may realize
why he happens to be defending his particular opinion.
The real reasons for our beliefs are concealed from ourselves as well as from others.
As we grow up we simply adopt the ideas presented to us in regard to such matters as religion,
family relations, property, business, our country, and the state. We unconsciously absorb them
from our environment. They are persistently whispered in our ear by the group in which we

happen to live. Moreover, as Mr. Trotter has pointed out, these judgments, being the product of
suggestion and not of reasoning, have the quality of perfect obviousness, so that to question them
. . . is to the believer to carry skepticism to an insane degree, and will be met by contempt,
disapproval, or condemnation, according to the nature of the belief in question. When,
therefore, we find ourselves entertaining an opinion about the basis of feeling which tells us
that to inquire into it would be absurd, obviously unnecessary, unprofitable, undesirable,
bad form, or wicked, we may know that that opinion is a nonrational one, and probably,
therefore, founded upon inadequate evidence.
Opinions, on the other hand, which are the result of experience or of honest reasoning do
not have this quality of "primary certitude." I remember when as a youth I heard a group of
businessmen discussing the question of the immortality of the soul, I was outraged by the
sentiment of doubt expressed by one of the party As I look back now I see that I had at the time
no interest in the matter, and certainly no least argument to urge in favor of the belief in which I
had been reared. But neither my personal indifference to the issue, nor the fact that I had
previously given it no attention, served to prevent an angry resentment when I heard my ideas
questioned.
This spontaneous and loyal support of our preconceptions this process of finding
good reasons to justify our routine beliefs-is known to modern psychologists as rationalizing
clearly only a new name for a very ancient thing. Our good reasons ordinarily have no
value in promoting honest enlightenment, because, no matter how solemnly they may be
marshaled, they are at bottom the result of personal preference or prejudice, and not of an honest
desire to seek or accept new knowledge.
In our reveries we are frequently engaged in self-justification, for we cannot bear to think
ourselves wrong, and yet have constant illustrations of our weaknesses and mistakes. So we
spend much time finding fault with circumstances and the conduct of others, and shifting on to
them with great ingenuity the onus of our own failures and disappointments. Rationalizing is the
self-exculpation which occurs when we feel ourselves, or our group, accused of misapprehension
or error.
The little word my is the most important one in all human affairs, and properly to reckon
with it is the beginning of wisdom. It has the same force whether it is my dinner, my dog, and
my house, or my faith, my country, and my God. We not only resent the imputation that our
watch is wrong, or our car shabby, but that our conception of the canals of Mars, the
pronunciation of Epictetus, the medicinal value of salicin, or the [birth] date of Sargon I, are
subject to revision.
Philosophers, scholars, and men of science exhibit a common sensitiveness in all
decisions in which their amour propre is involved. Thousands of argumentative works have been
written to vent a grudge. However stately their reasoning, it may be nothing but rationalizing,
stimulated by the most commonplace of all motives. A history of philosophy and theology could
be written in terms of grouches, wounded pride, and aversions, and it would be far more
instructive than the usual treatments of these themes. Sometimes, under Providence, the lowly
impulse of resentment leads to great achievements. Milton wrote his treatise on divorce as a
result of his troubles with his seventeen-year-old wife, and when he was accused of being the
leading spirit in a new sect, the Divorcers, he wrote his noble Areopagitica to prove his right to

say what he thought fit, and incidentally to establish the advantage of a free press in the
promotion of Truth.
All mankind, high and low, thinks in all the ways which have been described. The reverie
goes on all the time not only in the mind of the mill hand and the Broadway flapper, but equally
in weighty judges and godly bishops. It has gone on in all the philosophers, scientists, poets, and
theologians that have ever lived. Aristotle's most abstruse speculations were doubtless tempered
by highly irrelevant reflections. He is reported to have had very thin legs and small eyes, for
which he doubtless had to find excuses, and he was wont to indulge in very conspicuous dress
and rings and was accustomed to arrange his hair carefully. Diogenes the Cynic exhibited the
impudence of a touchy soul. His tub was his distinction. Tennyson in beginning his "Maud"
could not forget his chagrin over losing his patrimony years before as the result of an unhappy
investment in the Patent Decorative Carving Company. These facts are not recalled here as a
gratuitous disparagement of the truly great, but to insure a full realization of the tremendous
competition which all really exacting thought has to face, even in the minds of the most highly
endowed mortals.
And now the astonishing and perturbing suspicion emerges that perhaps almost all that had
passed for social science, political economy, politics, and ethics in the past may be brushed aside
by future generations as mainly rationalizing. John Dewey has already reached this conclusion in
regard to philosophy. Veblen and other writers have revealed the various unperceived
presuppositions of the traditional political economy, and now comes an Italian sociologist,
Vilfredo Pareto, who, in his huge treatise on general sociology, devotes hundreds of pages to
substantiating a similar thesis affecting all the social sciences. This conclusion may be ranked by
students of a hundred years hence as one of the several great discoveries of our age. It is by no
means fully worked out, and it is so opposed to nature that it will be very slowly accepted by the
great mass of those who consider themselves thoughtful. As a historical student I am personally
fully reconciled to this newer view. Indeed, it seems to me inevitable that just as the various
sciences of nature were, before the opening of the Seventeenth Century/ largely Masses Of
rationalizations to suit the religious sentiments of the period, so the social Sciences have
Continued even to Our Own day to be rationalizations Of uncritically accepted beliefs and
customs. It will become apparent as we proceed that the fact than an idea is ancient and that it
has been widely received is no argument in its favor, but should immediately suggest the
necessity of carefully testing it as a probable instance of rationalization.
This brings us to another kind of thought which can fairly easily be distinguished from
the three kinds described above. it has not the usual qualities of the reverie, for it does not hover
about our personal complacencies and humiliations. It is not made up of the homely decisions
forced upon us by everyday needs, when we review our little stock of existing information,
consult our conventional preferences and obligations, and make a choice of action. It is not the
defense of our own cherished beliefs and prejudices just because they are our own mere
plausible excuses for remaining of the same mind. On the contrary, it is that peculiar species of
thought which leads us to change our mind.
It is this kind of thought that has raised man from his pristine, subsavage ignorance and
squalor to the degree of knowledge and comfort which he now possesses. On his capacity to
continue and greatly extend this kind of thinking depends his chance of groping his way out of
the plight in which the most highly civilized peoples of the world now find themselves. In the
past this type of thinking has been called Reason. But so many misapprehensions have grown up
around the word that some of us have become very suspicious of it. I suggest, therefore, that we

substitute a recent name and speak of creative thought rather than of Reason. For this kind of
meditation begets knowledge, and knowledge is really creative inasmuch as it makes things look
different from what they seemed before and may indeed work for their reconstruction.
In certain moods some of us realize that we are observing things or making reflections
with a seeming disregard of our personal preoccupations. We are not preening or defending
ourselves; we are not faced by the necessity of any practical decision, nor are we apologizing for
believing this or that. We are just wondering and looking and mayhap seeing what we never
perceived before.
Curiosity is as clear and definite as any of our urges. We wonder what is in a sealed
telegram or in a letter in which someone else is absorbed, or what is being said in the telephone
booth or in low conversation. This inquisitiveness is vastly stimulated by jealousy, Suspicion, or
any hint that we ourselves are directly or indirectly involved. But there appears to be a fair
amount of personal interest in other people's affairs even when they do not concern us except as
a mystery to be unraveled or a tale to be told. The reports of a divorce suit will have "news
value" for many weeks. They constitute a story, like a novel or play or moving picture. This is
not an example of pure curiosity, however, since we readily identify ourselves with others, and
their joys and despair then become our own.
We also take note of, or observe, as Sherlock Holmes says, things which have nothing
to do with our personal interests and make no personal appeal either direct or by way of
sympathy. This is what Veblen so well calls idle curiosity. And it is usually idle enough. Some
of us when we face the line of people opposite us in a subway train impulsively consider them in
detail and engage in rapid inferences and form theories in regard to them. on entering a room
there are those who will perceive at a glance the degree of preciousness of the rugs, the character
of the pictures, and the personality revealed by the books. But there are many, it would seem,
who are so absorbed in their personal reverie or in some definite purpose that they have no
bright-eyed energy for idle curiosity. The tendency to miscellaneous observation we come by
honestly enough, for we note it in many of our animal relatives.
Veblen, however, uses the term idle curiosity somewhat ironically, as is his wont. It is
idle only to those who fail to realize that it may be a very rare and indispensable thing from
which almost all distinguished human achievement proceeds, since it may lead to systematic
examination and seeking for things hitherto undiscovered. For research is but diligent search
which enjoys the high flavor of primitive hunting. Occasionally and fitfully idle curiosity thus
leads to creative thought, which alters and broadens our own views and aspirations and may in
turn, under highly favorable circumstances, affect the views and lives of others, even for
generations to follow. An example or two will make this unique human process clear.
Galileo was a thoughtful youth and doubtless carried on a rich and varied reverie. He had
artistic ability and might have turned out to be a musician or painter. When he had dwelt among
the monks at Valambrosa he had been tempted to lead the life of a religious. As a boy he busied
himself with toy machines and he inherited a fondness for mathematics. All these facts are of
record. We may safely assume also that, along with many other subjects of contemplation, the
Pisan maidens found a vivid place in his thoughts.
One day when seventeen years old, he wandered into the cathedral of his native town. In
the midst of his reverie he looked up at the lamps hanging by long chains from the high ceiling
of the church. Then something very difficult to explain occurred. He found himself no longer
thinking of the building, worshipers, or the services; of his artistic or religious interests; of his
reluctance to become a physician as his father wished. He forgot the question of a craeer and

even the graziosissirne donne. As he watched the swinging lamps he was suddenly wondering
if mayhap their oscillations whether long or short, did not occupy the same time. Then he tested
this hypothesis by counting his Pulse, for that was the only timepiece he had with him.
This observation, however remarkable in itself, was not enough to produce a really
ceative thought. Others may have noticed the same thing and yet nothing came of it. Most of
our observations have no assignable results. Galileo may have seen that the warts on a peasants
face formed a perfect isosceles triangle, or he may have noticed with boyish glee that just as the
officiating priest was uttering the solemn words ecce agnus Dei, a fly lit on the end of his nose.
To be really creative, ideas have to be worked u p and then put over, so that they become a part
of a mans social heritage. The highly accurate pendulum clock was one of the later results of
Galileos discovery. He himself was let to reconsider and successfully to refute the old notions
of falling bodies. It remained for Newton to prove that the moon was falling, and presumably all
the heavenly bodies. This quite upset all the consecrated views of the heavens as managed by
angelic engineers. The universality of the laws of gravitation stimulated the attempt to seek
other and equally important natural laws and cast grave doubts on the miracles in which mankind
had hitherto believed. In short, those who dared to include in their thought the discoveries of
Galileo and his successors found themselves in a new earth surrounded by new heavens.
On the twenty-eighth of October, 1831, two hundred and fifty years after Galileo had
noticed the isochronous vibrations of the lamps, creative thought and its currency had so far
increased that Faraday was wondering what would happen if he mounted a disk of copper
between the poles of a horseshoe magnet. As the disk revolved an electric current was produced.
This would doubtless have seemed the idlest kind of an experiment to the stanch businessmen of
the time, who, it happened, were just then denouncing the child labor bills in their anxiety to
avail themselves to the full of the results of earlier idle curiosity. But should the dynamos and
motors which have come into being as the outcome of Faradays experiment be stopped this
evening, the businessmen of today, agitated over labor troubles, might, as he trudged home past
lines of dead cars, through dark streets to an unlighted house, engage in a little creative thought
of his own and perceive that he and his laborers would have no modern factories and mines to
quarrel about had it not been for the strange practical effects of the idle curiosity of scientists,
inventors, and engineers.
The examples of creative intelligence given above belong to the realm of modern
scientific achievement, which furnishes the most striking instances of the effects of scrupulous,
objective thinking. But there are, of course, other great realms in which the recording and
embodiment of acute observation and insight have wrought themselves into the higher life of
man. The great poets and dramatists and our modern storytellers have found themselves engaged
in productive reveries, noting and artistically presenting their discoveries for the delight and
instruction of those who have the ability to appreciate them.
The process by which a fresh and original poem or drama comes into being is doubtless
analogous to that which originates and elaborates so-called scientific discoveries; but there is
clearly a temperamental difference. The genesis and advance of painting, sculpture, and music
offer still other problems. We really as yet know shockingly little about these matters, and indeed
very few people have the least curiosity about them. Nevertheless, creative intelligence in its
various forms and activities is what makes man. Were it not for its slow, painful, and constantly
discouraged operations through the ages man would be no more than a species of primate living
on seeds, fruit, roots, and uncooked flesh, and wandering naked through the woods and over the
plains like a chimpanzee.

The origin and progress and future promotion of civilization are ill understood and
misconceived. These should be made the chief theme of education, but much hard work is
necessary before we can reconstruct our ideas of man and his capacities and free ourselves from
innumerable persistent misapprehensions. There have been obstructionists in all times, not
merely the lethargic masses, but the moralists, the rationalizing theologians, and most of the
philosophers, all busily if unconsciously engaged in ratifying existing ignorance and mistakes
and discouraging creative thought. Naturally, those who reassure us seem worthy of honor and
respect. Equally naturally those who puzzle us with disturbing criticisms and invite us to change
our ways are objects of suspicion and readily discredited. Our personal discontent does not
ordinarily extend to any critical questioning of the general situation in which we find ourselves.
In every age the prevailing conditions of civilization have appeared quite natural and inevitable
to those who grew up in them. The cow asks no questions as to how it happens to have a dry
stall and a supply of hay. The kitten laps its warm milk from a china saucer, without knowing
anything about porcelain; the dog nestles in the corner of a divan with no sense of obligation to
the inventors of upholstery and the manufacturers of down pillows. So we humans accept our
breakfasts, our trains and telephones and orchestras and movies, our national Constitution, our
moral code and standards of manners, with the simplicity and innocence of a pet rabbit. We
have absolutely inexhaustible capacities for appropriating what others do for us with no thought
of a thank you. We do not feel called upon to make any least contributions to the merry game
ourselves. Indeed, we are usually quite unaware that a game is being played at all.

Diction

Look up the definitions for the following words: negligible, pertinent, imputation, onus and
exculpation, abstruse and gratuitous, pristine and squalor, stanch, and lethargic.

Suggestions for Writing :

1. Have you taken any class or read a book that made you change your mind about something
you always assumed was true?
2. What were some of the best excuses you ever came up with for doing or not doing something?
*3. Who, today, is the most creative thinker you know?
*Note: this topic, especially, may involve some research.

Jonathan Schell

A REPUBLIC OF INSECTS
AND GRASS
Jonathan Schell (b. 1943- ) was born in New York City and educated at Harvard University. He
has written about the Viet Nam war and the Nixon presidency. In the following selection from
his book The Fate of the Earth (1982), Schell describes some of the social and environmental
effects of a nuclear holocaust. His title implies the extent of the destruction.

he strategic forces of the Soviet Union those that can deliver nuclear warheads
to the United States are so far capable of carrying seven thousand warheads with
an estimated maximum yield of more than seventeen thousand megatons of explosive power,
and, barring unexpected developments in arms-control talks, the number of warheads is expected
to rise in the coming years. The actual megatonnage of the Soviet strategic forces is not known,
and, for a number of reasons, including the fact that smaller warheads can be delivered more
accurately, it is very likely that the actual megatonnage is lower than the maximum possible;
however, it is reasonable to suppose that the actual megatonnage is as much as two-thirds of the
maximum, which would be about eleven and a half thousand megatons. If we assume that in a
first strike the Soviets held back about a thousand megatons (itself an immense force), then the
attack would amount to about ten thousand megatons, or the equivalent of eight hundred
thousand Hiroshima bombs. American strategic forces comprise about nine thousand warheads
with a yield of some three thousand five hundred megatons. The total yield of these American
forces was made comparatively low for strategic reasons. American planners discovered that
smaller warheads can be delivered more accurately than larger ones, and are therefore more
useful for attacking strategic forces on the other side. And, in fact, American missiles are
substantially more accurate than Soviet ones. However, in the last year or so, in spite of this
advantage in numbers of warheads and in accuracy, American leaders have come to believe that
the American forces are inadequate, and, again barring unexpected developments in arms-control
talks, both the yield of the American arsenal and the number of warheads in it are likely to rise
dramatically. (Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union reveals the total explosive yield of
its own forces. The public is left to turn to private organizations, which, by making use of
hundreds of pieces of information that have been released by the two governments, piece
together an over-all picture. The figures I have used to estimate the maximum capacities of the
two sides are taken for the most part from tables provided in the latest edition of The Military
Balance, a standard yearly reference work on the strength of military forces around the world,
which is published by a research institute in London called the International Institute for
Strategic Studies.) The territory of the United States, including Alaska and Hawaii, is three
million six hundred and fifteen thousand one hundred and twenty-two square miles. It contains
approximately two hundred and twenty-five million people, of whom sixty per cent, or about a
hundred and thirty-five million, live in various urban centers with a total area of only eighteen
thousand square miles. I asked Dr. Kendall, who has done considerable research on the
consequences of nuclear attacks, to sketch out in rough terms what the actual distribution of
bombs might be in a ten-thousand-megaton Soviet attack in the early nineteen-eighties on all
targets in the United States, military and civilian.
Without serious distortion, he said, we can begin by imagining that we would be
dealing with ten thousand weapons of one megaton each, although in fact the yields would, of
course, vary considerably. Let us also make the assumption, based on common knowledge of
weapons design, that on average the yield would be one-half fission and one-half fusion. This
proportion is important, because it is the fission products a virtual museum of about three
hundred radioactive isotopes, decaying at different rates that give off radioactivity in fallout.
Fusion can add to the total in ground bursts by radio activation of ground material by neutrons,
but the quantity added is comparatively small. Targets can be divided into two categories hard
and soft. Hard targets, of which there are about a thousand in the United States, are mostly

missile silos. The majority of them can be destroyed only by huge, blunt overpressures, ranging
anywhere from many hundreds to a few thousand pounds per square inch, and we can expect that
two weapons might be devoted to each one to assure destruction. That would use up two
thousand megatons. Because other strategic military targets such as Strategic Air Command
bases are near centers of population, an attack on them as well, perhaps using another couple
of hundred megatons, could cause a total of more than twenty million casualties, according to
studies by the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. If the nearly eight thousand weapons
remaining were then devoted to the cities and towns of the United States in order of population,
every community down to the level of fifteen hundred inhabitants would be hit with a megaton
bomb which is, of course, many, many times what would be necessary to annihilate a town
that size. For obvious reasons, industry is highly correlated with population density, so an attack
on the one necessarily hits the other, especially when an attack of this magnitude is considered.
Ten thousand targets would include everything worth hitting in the country and much more; it
would simply be the United States. The targeters would run out of targets and victims long
before they ran out of bombs. If you imagine that the bombs were distributed according to
population, then, allowing for the fact that the attack on the military installations would have
already killed about twenty million people, you would have about forty megatons to devote to
each remaining million people in the country. For the seven and a half million people in New
York City, that would come to three hundred megatons. Bearing in mind what one megaton can
do, you can see that this would be preposterous overkill. In practice, one might expect the New
York metropolitan area to be hit with some dozens of one-megaton weapons.
In the first moments of a ten-thousand-megaton attack on the United States, I learned
from Dr. Kendall and from other sources, flashes of white light would suddenly illumine large
areas of the country as thousands of suns, each one brighter than the sun itself, blossomed over
cities, suburbs, and towns. In those same moments, when the first wave of missiles arrived, the
vast majority of the people in the regions first targeted would be irradiated, crushed, or burned to
death. The thermal pulses could subject more than six hundred thousand square miles, or onesixth of the total land mass of the nation, to a minimum level of forty calories per centimeter
squared a level of heat that chars human beings. (At Hiroshima, charred remains in the rough
shape of human beings were a common sight.) Tens of millions of people would go up in smoke.
As the attack proceeded, as much as three-quarters of the country could be subjected to
incendiary levels of heat, and so, wherever there was inflammable material, could be set ablaze.
In the ten seconds or so after each bomb hit, as blast waves swept outward from thousands of
ground zeros, the physical plant of the United States would be swept away like leaves in a gust
of wind. The six hundred thousand square miles already scorched by the forty or more calories of
heat per centimeter squared would now be hit by blast waves of a minimum of five pounds per
square inch, and virtually all the habitations, places of work, and other man-made things there
substantially the whole human construct in the United States would be vaporized, blasted, or
otherwise pulverized out of existence. Then, as clouds of dust rose from the earth, and mushroom
clouds spread overhead, often linking to form vast canopies, day would turn to night. (These
clouds could blanket as much as a third of the nation.) Shortly, fires would spring up in the
debris of the cities and in every forest dry enough to burn. These fires would simply burn down
the United States. When one pictures a full-scale attack on the United States, or on any other
country, therefore, the picture of a single city being flattened by a single bomb an image
firmly engraved in the public imagination, probably because of the bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki must give way to a picture of substantial sections of the country being turned by a

sort of nuclear carpet-bombing into immense infernal regions, literally tens of thousands of
square miles in area, from which escape is impossible. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, those who
had not been killed or injured so severely that they could not move were able to flee to the
undevastated world around them, where they found help, but in any city where three or four
bombs had been used not to mention fifty, or a hundred flight from one blast would only
be flight toward another, and no one could escape alive. Within these regions, each of three of
the immediate effects of nuclear weapons initial radiation, thermal pulse, and blast waves
would alone be enough to kill most people: the initial nuclear radiation would subject tens of
thousands of square miles to lethal doses; the blast waves, coming from all sides, would nowhere
fall below the overpressure necessary to destroy almost all buildings; and the thermal pulses, also
coming from all sides, would always be great enough to kill exposed people and, in addition, to
set on fire everything that would burn., The ease with which virtually the whole population of the
country could be trapped in these zones of universal death is suggested by the fact that the sixty
per cent of the population that lives in an area of eighteen thousand square miles could be
annihilated with only three hundred one-megaton bombs the number necessary to cover the
area with a minimum of five pounds per square inch of overpressure and forty calories per
centimeter squared of heat. That would leave nine thousand seven hundred megatons, or ninetyseven per cent of the megatonnage in the attacking force, available for other targets. (It is hard to
imagine what a targeter would do with all his bombs in these circumstances. Above several
thousand megatons, it would almost become a matter of trying to hunt down individual people
with nuclear warheads.)
The statistics on the initial nuclear radiation, the thermal pulses, and the blast waves in a
nuclear holocaust can be presented in any number of ways, but all of them would be only
variations on a simple theme the annihilation of the United States and its people. Yet while
the immediate nuclear effects are great enough in a ten-thousand-megaton attack to destroy the
country many times over, they are not the most powerfully lethal of the local effects of nuclear
weapons. The killing power of the local fallout is far greater. Therefore, if the Soviet Union was
bent on producing the maximum overkill if, that is, its surviving leaders, whether out of
calculation, rage, or madness, decided to eliminate the United States not merely as a political and
social entity but as a biological one they would burst their bombs on the ground rather than in
the air. Although the scope of severe blast damage would then be reduced, the blast waves,
fireballs, and thermal pulses would still be far more than enough to destroy the country, and, in
addition, provided only that the bombs were dispersed widely enough, lethal fallout would
spread throughout the nation. The amount of radiation delivered by the fallout from a ground
burst of a given size is still uncertain not least because, as Glasstone notes, there has never
been a true land surface burst of a bomb with a yield of over one kiloton. (The Bikini burst
was in part over the ocean.) Many factors make for uncertainty. To mention just a few: the
relative amounts of the fallout that rises into the stratosphere and the fallout that descends to the
ground near the blast are dependent on, among other things, the yield of the weapon, and, in any
case, can be only guessed at; the composition of the fallout will vary with the composition of the
material on the ground that is sucked up into the mushroom cloud; prediction of the distribution
of fallout by winds of various speeds at various altitudes depends on a choice of several
models; and the calculation of the arrival time of the fallout an important calculation, since
fallout cannot harm living things until it lands near them is subject to similar speculative
doubts. However, calculations on the basis of figures for a one-megaton ground burst which are
given in the Office of Technology Assessment's report show that ten thousand megatons would

yield one-week doses around the country averaging more than ten thousand rems. In actuality, of
course, the bombs would almost certainly not be evenly spaced around the country but, rather,
would be concentrated in populated areas and in missile fields; and the likelihood is that in most
places where people lived or worked the doses would be many times the average, commonly
reaching several tens of thousands of rems for the first week, while in remote areas they would
be less, or, conceivably, even nonexistent. (The United States contains large tracts of empty
desert, and to target them would be virtually meaningless from any point of view.)
These figures provide a context for judging the question of civil defense. With
overwhelming immediate local effects striking the vast majority of the population, and with oneweek doses of radiation then rising into the tens of thousands of rems, evacuation and shelters
are a vain hope. Needless to say, in these circumstances evacuation before an attack would be an
exercise in transporting people from one death to another. In some depictions of a holocaust,
various rescue operations are described, with unafflicted survivors bringing food, clothes, and
medical care to the afflicted, and the afflicted making their way to thriving, untouched
communities, where churches, school auditoriums, and the like would have been set up for their
care as often happens after a bad snowstorm, say. Obviously, none of this could come about.
In the first place, in a full-scale attack there would in all likelihood be no surviving communities,
and, in the second place, everyone who failed to seal himself off from the outside environment
for as long as several months would soon die of radiation sickness. Hence, in the months after a
holocaust there would be no activity of any sort, as, in a reversal of the normal state of things, the
dead would lie on the surface and the living, if there were any, would be buried underground.
To this description of radiation levels around the country, an addition remains to be
made. This is the fact that attacks on the seventy-six nuclear power plants in the United States
would produce fallout whose radiation had much greater longevity than that of the weapons
alone. The physicist Dr. Kosta Tsipis, of M.I.T., and one of his students, Steven Fetter, recently
published an article in Scientific American called Catastrophic Releases of Radioactivity, in
which they calculate the damage from a one-megaton thermonuclear ground burst on a onegigawatt nuclear power plant. In such a ground burst, the facility's radioactive contents would be
vaporized along with everything nearby, and the remains would be carried up into the mushroom
cloud, from which they would descend to the earth with the rest of the fallout. But whereas the
fission products of the weapon were newly made, and contained many isotopes that would decay
to insignificant levels very swiftly, the fission products in a reactor would be a collection of
longer-lived isotopes (and this applies even more strongly to the spent fuel in the reactors
holding pond), since the short-lived ones would, for the most part, have had enough time to
reduce themselves to harmless levels. The intense but comparatively short-lived radiation from
the weapon would kill people in the first few weeks and months, but the long-lived radiation that
was produced both by the weapon and by the power plant could prevent anyone from living on a
vast area of land for decades after it fell. For example, after a year an area of some seventeen
hundred square miles downwind of a power plant on which a one-megaton bomb had been
ground-burst (again assuming a fifteen-mile-an-hour wind) would still be delivering more than
fifty rems per year to anyone who tried to live there, and that is two hundred and fifty times the
safe dose established by the E.P.A. The bomb by itself would produce this effect over an area
of only twenty-six square miles. (In addition to offering an enemy a way of redoubling the
effectiveness of his attacks in a full-scale holocaust, reactors provide targets of unparalleled
danger in possible terrorist nuclear attacks. In an earlier paper, Tsipis and Fetter observe that the
destruction of a reactor with a nuclear weapon, even of relatively small yield, such as a crude

terrorist nuclear device, would represent a national catastrophe of lasting consequences. It can
be put down as one further alarming oddity of life in a nuclear world that in building nuclear
power plants nations have opened themselves to catastrophic devastation and long-term
contamination of their territories by enemies who manage to get hold of only a few nuclear
weapons.)
If, in a nuclear holocaust, anyone hid himself deep enough under the earth and stayed
there long enough to survive, he would emerge into a dying natural environment. The
vulnerability of the environment is the last word in the argument against the usefulness of
shelters: there is no hole big enough to hide all of nature in. Radioactivity penetrates the
environment in many ways. The two most important components of radiation from fallout are
gamma rays, which are electromagnetic radiation of the highest intensity, and beta particles,
which are electrons fired at high speed from decaying nuclei. Gamma rays subject organisms to
penetrating whole-body doses, and are responsible for most of the ill effects of radiation from
fallout. Beta particles, which are less penetrating than gamma rays, act at short range, doing
harm when they collect on the skin, or on the surface of a leaf. They are harmful to plants on
whose foliage the fallout descends producing beta burn and to grazing animals, which
can suffer burns as well as gastrointestinal damage from eating the foliage. Two of the most
harmful radioactive isotopes present in fallout are strontium-90 (with a half-life of twenty-eight
years) and cesium-137 (with a half-life of thirty years). They are taken up into the food chain
through the roots of plants or through direct ingestion by animals, and contaminate the
environment from within. Strontium-90 happens to resemble calcium in its chemical
composition, and therefore finds its way into the human diet through dairy products and is
eventually deposited by the body in the bones, where it is thought to cause bone cancer. (Every
person in the world now has in his bones a measurable deposit of strontium-90 traceable to the
fallout from atmospheric nuclear testing.)
Over the years, agencies and departments of the government have sponsored numerous
research projects in which a large variety of plants and animals were irradiated in order to
ascertain the lethal or sterilizing dose for each. These findings permit the prediction of many
gross ecological consequences of a nuclear attack. According to Survival of Food Crops and
Livestock in the Event of Nuclear War, the proceedings of the 1970 symposium at Brookhaven
National Laboratory, the lethal doses for most mammals lie between a few hundred rads and a
thousand rads of gamma radiation; a rad for roentgen absorbed dose is a roentgen of
radiation that has been absorbed by an organism, and is roughly equal to a rem. For example, the
lethal doses of gamma radiation for animals in pasture, where fallout would be descending on
them directly and they would be eating fallout that had fallen on the grass, and would thus suffer
from doses of beta radiation as well, would be one hundred and eighty rads for cattle; two
hundred and forty rads for sheep; five hundred and fifty rads for swine; three hundred and fifty
rads for horses; and eight hundred rads for poultry. In a ten-thousand-megaton attack, which
would create levels of radiation around the country averaging more than ten thousand rads, most
of the mammals of the United States would be killed off. The lethal doses for birds are in
roughly the same range as those for mammals, and birds, too, would be killed off. Fish are killed
at doses of between one thousand one hundred rads and about five thousand six hundred rads,
but their fate is less predictable. On the one hand, water is a shield from radiation, and would
afford some protection; on the other hand, fallout might concentrate in bodies of water as it ran
off from the land. (Because radiation causes no pain, animals, wandering at will through the
environment, would not avoid it.) The one class of animals containing a number of species quite

likely to survive, at least in the short run, is the insect class, for which in most known cases the
lethal doses lie between about two thousand rads and about a hundred thousand rads. Insects,
therefore, would be destroyed selectively. Unfortunately for the rest of the environment, many of
the phytophagous species insects that feed directly on vegetation which include some of
the most ravaging species on earth (according to Dr. Vernon M. Stern, an entomologist at the
University of California at Riverside, writing in Survival of Food Crops), have very high
tolerances, and so could be expected to survive disproportionately, and then to multiply greatly
in the aftermath of an attack. The demise of their natural predators the birds would enhance their
success.
Plants in general have a higher tolerance to radioactivity than animals do. Nevertheless,
according to Dr. George M. Woodwell, who supervised the irradiation with gamma rays, over
several years, of a small forest at Brookhaven Laboratory, a gamma-ray dose of ten thousand
rads would devastate most vegetation in the United States, and, as in the case of the pastured
animals, when one figures in the beta radiation that would also be delivered by fallout the
estimates for the lethal doses of gamma rays must be reduced in this case, cut in half. As a
general rule, Dr. Woodwell and his colleagues at Brookhaven discovered, large plants are more
vulnerable to radiation than small ones. Trees are among the first to die, grasses among the last.
The most sensitive trees are pines and the other conifers, for which lethal doses are in roughly
the same range as those for mammals. Any survivors coming out of their shelters a few months
after the attack would find that all the pine trees that were still standing were already dead. The
lethal doses for most deciduous trees range from about two thousand rads of gamma-ray
radiation to about ten thousand rads, with the lethal doses for eighty per cent of deciduous
species falling between two thousand and eight thousand rads. Since the addition of the beta-ray
burden could lower these lethal doses for gamma rays by as much as fifty per cent, the actual
lethal doses in gamma rays for these trees during an attack could be from one thousand to four
thousand rads, and in a full-scale attack they would die. Then, after the trees had died, forest fires
would break out around the United States. (Because as much as three-quarters of the country
could be subjected to incendiary levels of the thermal pulses, the sheer scorching of the land
could have killed off a substantial part of the plant life in the country in the first few seconds
after the detonations, before radioactive poisoning set in.) Lethal doses for grasses on which tests
have been done range between six thousand and thirty-three thousand rads, and a good deal of
grass would therefore survive, except where the attacks had been heaviest. Most crops, on the
other hand, are killed by doses below five thousands rads, and would be eliminated. (The lethal
dose for spring barley seedlings, for example, is one thousand nine hundred and ninety rads, and
that for spring wheat seedlings is three thousand and ninety rads.)
When vegetation is killed off, the land on which it grew is degraded. And as the land
eroded after an attack life in lakes, rivers, and estuaries, already hard hit by radiation directly,
would be further damaged by minerals flowing into the watercourses, causing eutrophication
a process in which an oversupply of nutrients in the water encourages the growth of algae and
microscopic organisms, which, in turn, deplete the oxygen content of the water. When the soil
loses its nutrients, it loses its ability to sustain a mature community (in Dr. Woodwell's words),
and gross simplification of the environment occurs, in which hardy species, such as moss
and grass, replace vulnerable ones, such as trees; and succession the process by which
ecosystems recover lost diversity is then delayed or even arrested. In sum, a full-scale
nuclear attack on the United States would devastate the natural environment on a scale unknown
since early geological times, when, in response to natural catastrophes whose nature has not been

determined, sudden mass extinctions of species and whole ecosystems occurred all over the
earth. How far this gross simplification of the environment would go once virtually all animal
life and the greater part of plant life had been destroyed and what patterns the surviving remnants
of life would arrange themselves into over the long run are imponderables; but it appears that at
the outset the United States would be a republic of insects and grass.

Diction

1. Look up the definitions for the following words: incendiary, ingestion, ascertain, ecological,
predator, and estuary.
2. Look up the etymology (the historical origins) of the following words: pulverized, annihilated,
holocaust, catastrophic, vulnerability.

Suggestions for Writing :

1. If the threat of nuclear war has lessened, what else, if anything, seems to have taken its place?
2. How have your ideas about nuclear war changed over the years?
*3. Plutonium for the first atom bomb was manufactured secretly in Hanford, Washington,
which is now one of the most toxic places on earth.
a. What, generally, is being done to clean it up?
b. What environmental dangers does the site really pose?
c. What specific solutions have been offered?
(Note: any of these three suggestions a, b, or c would be big enough for a whole paper.)
*4. Schell is not the only author who has tried to convince us of the folly of nuclear war. What
other, earlier sources can you find for this argument, and what evidence do they present?
*5. Nuclear power plants have been the topic of controversy for many years
a. What happened in the Soviet Chernoble plant, and what effects are still being felt
today?
b. How does Hanford compare with Chernoble, and what, if anything, has been done to
make it safe.
*Recently, the Brookings Institute published on the internet a lengthy document titled The U.S.
Nuclear Weapons Cost Study Project. (You can find a link to this site on my web site.)
a. Focusing on just one project i.e., the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) or
the Manhattan Project write a report that examines the costs of that project. Was the
expense justifiable?
b. The above web site also provides a link to the Office of Technology Assessments
1997 report titled The Effects of Nuclear War. Compare and contrast this reports
description of the effects of one bomb over Detroit or Leningrad with Schells
description of the general effects. Did Schell leave out any gruesome details? Does he
foresee any effects that the government report leaves out?
*Note: these topics, especially, will involve some research.