"The utmost abstractions are the true weapons
with which to control our thought of concrete fact."
-Alfred North Whitehead
"What we fear comes to pass more speedily than
what we hope."
-Publilius Syrus
"When men are ruled by fear, they strive to prevent
the very changes that will abate it."
-Alan Paton
"Every man thinks that god is on his side.
The rich and powerful know he is."
-Jean Anouilh
"The efficacy of the truly national leader
consists primarily in preventing the division
of the attention of the people, and always in
concentrating it on a single enemy."
-Adolph Hitler
"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind,
and won't change the subject."
-Winston Churchill
"The price of eternal vigilance is indifference."
-Marshall McLuhan
A title is the acknowledgement of others that one has been the winner of a particular game. Titles are public. They are for others to notice.
Since titles are timeless, but exist only so far as they are acknowledged, we must find means to guarantee the memory of them.
It is a principal function of society to validate titles and to assure their perpetual recognition.
Finite players play to live; they do not live their playing. Life is therefore deserved, bestowed, possessed, won. It is not lived. "Life itself appears only as a means to life" (Marx).
If life is a means to life, we must abstract ourselves, but only for the sake of winning an abstraction. Immortality, therefore, is the triumph of such abstraction. It is a state of unrelieved theatricality.
... all finite play is play against itself.
Immortality is ... the supreme example of the contradictoriness of finite play: It is a life one cannot live.
The contradiction of finite play is that the players desire to bring play to an end for themselves.
Titles ... point backwards in time. They have their origin in an unrepeatable past. Titles are theatrical. Each title has a specified ceremonial form of address and behavior.
The mode and content of the address and the manner of behavior are recognitions of the areas in which titled persons are no longer in competition.
The titled are powerful. Those around them are expected to yield, to withdraw their opposition, and to conform to their will - in the arena in which the title was won. The exercise of power always presupposes resistance. Power is never evident until two or more elements are in opposition. Whichever element can move another is the more powerful.
Power is always measured in units of comparison. In fact, it is a term of competition: How much resistance can I overcome relative to others?
... power is not properly measurable until the game is completed - until the designated period of time has run out.
To speak meaningfully of a person's power is to speak of what that person has already completed in one or another closed field. To see power is to look backward in time.
Inasmuch as power is determined by the outcome of a game, one does not win by being powerful; one wins to be powerful. If one has sufficient power to win before the game has begun, what follows is not a game at all.
One can be powerful only through the possession of an acknowledged title - that is, only by the deference of others. Power is never one's own, and in that respect it shows the contradiction inherent in all finite play. I can be powerful only by not playing, by showing that the game is over. I can therefore have only what powers others give me. Power is bestowed by an audience after the play is complete.
Power is contradictory and theatrical.
Whoever must play cannot play. The intuitive idea in that principle is that no one can engage us competitively unless we fully cooperate, unless we join the game and join it to win. Because power is measurable only in comparative - that is, competitive - terms, it presupposes some kind of cooperation. If we defer to titled winners, it is only because we regard ourselves as losers. To do so is to freely take part in the theater of power.
Evil is not the attempt to eliminate the play of another according to published and accepted rules, but to eliminate the play of another regardless of the rules.
Evil is not the acquisition of power, but the expression of power. It is the forced recognition of a title - and therein lies the contradiction of evil, for recognition cannot be forced.
Evil is never intended as evil. Indeed, the contradiction inherent in all evil is that it originates in the desire to eliminate evil.
Evil arises in the honored belief that history can be tidied, brought to a sensible conclusion. It is evil to act as though the past is bringing us to a specifiable end. It is evil to assume that the past will make sense only if we bring it to an issue we have clearly in view. It is evil for a nation to believe that it is "the last, best hope on earth." It is evil to think history is to end with a return to Zion, or with the classless society, or with the Islamicization of all living infidels.
Your history does not belong to me. We live with each other in a common history.
... society is a species of culture that persists in contradicting itself, a freely organized attempt to conceal the freedom of the organizers and the organized, an attempt to forget that we have willfully forgotten our decision to enter this or that contest and to continue in it.
If we think of society as all that a people does under the veil of necessity, we must also think of it as a single finite game that includes any number of smaller games within its boundaries.
Like a finite game, a society is numerically, spatially, and temporally limited. Its citizenship is precisely defined, its boundaries are inviolable, and its past is enshrined.
The power of a society is determined by its victory over other societies in still larger finite games. Its most treasured memories are those of the heroes fallen in victorious battles with other societies. Heroes of lost battles are almost never memorialized.
The power in a society is guaranteed and enhanced by the power of a society.
The prizes won by its citizens can be protected only if the society as a whole remains powerful in relation to other societies. Those who desire the permanence of their prizes will work to sustain the permanence of the whole. Patriotism in one or several of its many forms (chauvinism, racism, sexism, nationalism, regionalism) is an ingredient in all societal play.
Because power is inherently patriotic, it is characteristic of finite players to seek a growth of power in a society as a way of increasing the power of a society. It is in the interest of a society therefore to encourage competition within itself, to establish the largest possible number of prizes, for the holders of prizes will be those most likely to defend the society as a whole against its competitors.
Society is a manifestation of power. It is theatrical, having an established script. Deviations from the script are evident at once. Deviation is antisocietal and therefore forbidden by society under a variety of sanctions.
It is a highly valued function of society to prevent changes in the rules of the many games it embraces.
It is essential to the identity of a society to forget that it has forgotten that society is always a species of culture. Its citizens must find ways of persuading themselves that their own particular boundaries have been imposed on them, and were not freely chosen by them.
One of the most effective means of self-persuasion available to a citizenry is the bestowal of property. Who actually owns a society's property, and how it is distributed, are far less important than the fact that property exists at all.
What the winner of a finite game wins is a title. A title is the acknowledgement of others that one has been the winner of a particular game. I cannot entitle myself. Titles are theatrical, requiring an audience to bestow and respect them. Power attaches to titles inasmuch as those who acknowledge them accept the fact that the struggle in which the titles were won cannot be taken up again. Possession of the title signifies an agreement that competition is forever closed in that particular game.
It is therefore essential to the effectiveness of every title that it be visible and that in its visibility it point back at the contest at which it was won. The purpose of property is to make our titles visible. Property is emblematic. It recalls to others those areas in which our victories are beyond challenge.
When we ask precisely how a society will go about preserving its citizens' property, we can expect the reply that it will do so by the use of force. ... There is no effective pattern of entitlement in a society short of the free agreement of all opponents that the titles to property are in the hands of the actual winners. No force will establish this agreement. Indeed, the opposite is the case: It is agreement that establishes force. Only those who consent to a society's constraints see them as constraints - that is, as guides to action and not as actions to be opposed.
... a particular burden falls on property owners. Since the laws protecting their property will be effective only when they are able to persuade others to obey those laws, they must introduce a theatricality into their ownership sufficiently engaging that their opponents will live by its script.
The theatricality of property has, in fact, an elaborate structure that property owners must be at considerable labor to sustain.
Property is an attempt to recover the past. It returns one to precompetitive status. One is compensated for the amount of time spent (and thus lost) in competition. This attempt to recover the past is, however, a theatrical attempt which can succeed only to the degree that it is conspicuous to the audience.
What is at stake here for owners is not the amount of property as such, but its ability to draw an audience for whom it will be appropriately emblematic; that is, and audience who will see it as just compensation for the effort and skill used in acquiring it.
It is apparent to infinite players that wealth is not so much possessed as it is performed.
... if property is to be protected less by power as such than by theater, then societies become acutely dependent on their artists - what Plato called poietai: the storytellers, the inventors, sculptors, poets, any original thinkers whatsoever.
Some societies develop the belief that they can eliminate thievery by guaranteeing all their members, including thieves, a certain amount of property - the impulse behind much social welfare legislation. ... The more effective policy is to find ways of persuading its thieves to abandon their role as competitors for property for the sake of becoming audience to the theater of wealth. It is for this reason that societies fall back on the skill of those poietai who can theatricalize the property relations, and indeed, all the inner structures of each society.
Societal theorists of any subtlety know that such theatricalization must be taken with great seriousness. Without it, there is no culture at all, and a society without culture would be too drab and lifeless to be endured.
If wealth and might are to be performed, great wealth and great might must be performed brilliantly.
While societal thinkers may not overlook the importance of poiesis, or creative activity, neither may they underestimate its danger, for the poietai are the ones most likely to remember what has been forgotten - that society is a species of culture.
The deepest and most consequent struggle of each society is therefore not with other societies, but with the culture that exists within itself - the culture that is itself. Conflict with other societies is, in fact, an effective way for society to restrain its own culture. Powerful societies do not silence their poietai in order that they may go to war; they go to war as a way of silencing their poietai. Original thinkers can be suppressed through execution and exile, or they can be encouraged through subsidy and flattery to praise the society's heroes.
What confounds a society is not a serious opposition, but the lack of seriousness altogether. Generals can more easily suffer attempts to oppose their warfare with poiesis than attempts to show warfare as poiesis.
... poets do not "fit" into society, not because a place is denied them but because they do not take their "places" seriously. They openly see its roles as theatrical, its styles as poses, its clothing costumes, its rules conventional, its crises arranged, its conflicts performed, and its metaphysics ideological.
To regard society as a species of culture is not to overthrow or even alter society, but only to eliminate its perceived necessity.
No sooner did the Renaissance begin than it began to change. Indeed, the Renaissance was not something apart from its change; it was itself a certain persistent and congruent evolution. For this reason it can be said that where a society is defined by its boundaries, a culture is defined by its horizon.
A boundary is a phenomenon of opposition. It is the meeting place of hostile forces. Where nothing opposes there can be no boundary. One cannot move beyond a boundary without being resisted.
This is why patriotism - that is, the desire to protect the power in a society by way of increasing the power of a society - is inherently belligerent. Since there can be no prizes without a society, no society without opponents, patriots must create enemies before we can require protection from them. Patriots can flourish only where boundaries are well-defined, hostile, and dangerous. The spirit of patriotism is therefore characteristically associate with the military or other modes of international conflict.
Because patriotism is the desire to contain all other finite games within itself - that is, to embrace all horizons within a single boundary - it is inherently evil.
A horizon is a phenomena of vision. One cannot look at the horizon; it is simply the point beyond which we can see. There is nothing in the horizon itself, however, that limits vision, for the horizon opens onto all that lies beyond itself. What limits vision is rather the incompleteness of that vision.
We are never somewhere in relation to the horizon since the horizon moves with our vision. We can only be somewhere by turning away from the horizon, by replacing vision with opposition, by declaring the place on which we stand to be timeless - a sacred region, a holy land, a body of truth, a code of inviolable commandments. To be somewhere is to absolutize time, space, and number.
Societies characteristically separate the ideas from their thinkers, the poiema from its poietes. A society abstracts its thought and grants power to certain ideas as though they had an existence of their own independent from those who think them, even those who first produced them. In fact, a society is likely to have an idea of itself that no thinker may challenge or revise. Abstracted thought - thought without a thinker - is metaphysics. A society's metaphysics is its ideology: theories that present themselves as the product of these people or those. The Renaissance had no ideology.
A people, as a people, has nothing to defend. In the same way a people has nothing and no one to attack. One cannot be free by opposing another. My freedom does not depend on your loss of freedom. On the contrary, since freedom is from society, but freedom for it, my freedom inherently affirms yours. A people has no enemies.
For a bounded, metaphysically veiled, and destined society, enemies are necessary, conflict inevitable, and war likely. ... If a state has no enemies it has no boundaries. To keep its definitions clear a state must stimulate danger to itself. Under the constant danger of war the people of a state are far more attentive and obedient to the finite structures of their society.
War presents itself as necessary for self-protection, when in fact it is necessary for self-identification.
Winning a war can be as destructive as losing one, for if boundaries lose their clarity, as they do in a decisive victory, the state loses its identity. Just as Alexander wept upon learning that he had no more enemies to conquer, finite players come to rue their victories unless they see them quickly challenged by new danger. A war fought to end all wars, in the strategy of finite play, only breeds universal warfare.
What will undo any boundary is the awareness that it is our vision, and not what we are viewing, that is limited.
Poets who have no metaphysics, and therefore no political line, make war impossible because they have the irresistible ability to show the guardians that what seems necessary is only possible.
Metaphysics is about the real but is abstract. Poetry is the making (poiesis) of the real and is concrete. Whenever what is made (poiema) is separated from the maker (poietes), it becomes metaphysical. ... To separate the poiema from poiesis, the created object from the creative act, is the essence of the theatrical.
Poets cannot kill; they die. Metaphysics cannot die; it kills.
It is the genius in us who knows that the past is most definitely past, and therefore not forever sealed but forever open to creative reinterpretation.
Just as the titles of winners are worthless unless they are visible to others, there is a kind of antititle that attaches to invisibility. To the degree that we are invisible we have a past that has condemned us to oblivion. It is as though we have somehow been overlooked, even forgotten, by our chosen audience. If it is the winners who are presently visible, it is the losers who are invisibly past.
As we enter into finite play - not playfully, but seriously - we come before an audience conscious that we bear the antititles of invisibility. We feel the need, therefore, to prove to them that we are not what we think they think we are, or more precisely, that we were not who we think the audience thinks we are. ... unless we believe we actually are the losers the audience sees us to be, we will not have the necessary desire to win. The more negatively we assess ourselves, the more we strive to reverse the negative judgment of others. The outcome brings the contradiction to perfection: by proving to the audience that they were wrong, we prove to ourselves that the audience was right.
The more we are recognized as winners, the more we know ourselves to be losers. ... Titles must be defended by new contests. ... the visibility of our victories only tightens the grip of the failures in our invisible past.
So crucial is the power of the past to finite play that we must find ways of remembering that we have been forgotten to sustain our interest in the struggle. There is a humiliating memory at the bottom of all serious conflicts. "Remember the Alamo!", "Remember the Maine!", "Remember Pearl Harbor!".
Indeed, it is only [in] remembering what we have forgotten that we can enter into competition with sufficient intensity to be able to forget we have forgotten the character of all play: Whoever must play cannot play.
Occuring before a world, theatrically, a finite game occurs within time. ... A finite game does not have its own time. It exists in a world's time. An audience allows players only so much time to win their titles.
The passage of time is always relative to that which does not pass, to the timeless. Victories occur in time, but the titles won in them are timeless. Titles neither age nor die.
Time divided into periods is theatrical time. ... It is not a time lived, but a time viewed - by both players and audience. The periodization of time presupposes a viewer existing outside the boundaries of play, able to see the beginning and the end simultaneously.
The outcome of a finite game is the past waiting to happen. Whoever plays toward a certain outcome desires an particular past. By competing for a future prize, finite players compete for a prized past.
What we have done to show that certain events repeat themselves according to known laws is to explain them. Explanation is the mode of discourse in which we show why matters must be as they are. All laws made use of in explanation look backward in time from the conclusion or the completion of a sequence. It is implicit in all explanatory discourse that just as there is a discoverable necessity in the outcome of past events, there is a discoverable necessity in future events. What can be explained can also be predicted , if one knows the initial events and the laws governing their succession. A prediction is but an explanation in advance.
... it is sometimes thought that the grandest discovery of the human genius is the perfect compatibility between the structure of the natural order and the structure of the mind, thereby making a complete understanding of nature possible. "One may say 'the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility'" (Einstein). This is as much to say that nature does have a voice, and its voice is no different from our own. We can then presume to speak for the unspeakable.
There is an irony in our silencing of the gods. By presuming to speak for the unspeakable, by hearing our own voice as the voice of nature, we have had to step outside the circle of nature. ... If speaking about a process is itself part of the process, there is something that must remain permanently hidden from the speaker. To be intelligible at all, we must claim that we can step aside from the process and comment on it "objectively" and "dispassionately", without anything obstructing our view of these matters.
Here lies the irony: By way of this perfectly reasonable claim the gods have stolen back into our struggle with nature. By depriving the gods of their own voices, the gods have taken ours. It is we who speak as supernatural intelligences and powers, masters of the forces of nature.
This irony passes unnoticed only so long as we continue to veil ourselves against what we can otherwise plainly see: nature allows no master over itself. ... What we thought we read in nature we discover we have read into nature. "We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning" (Heisenberg).
Explanations succeed only by convincing resistant hearers of their error. If you will not hear my explanations until you are suspicious of your own truths, you will not accept my explanations until you are convinced of your error. Explanation is an antagonistic encounter that succeeds by defeating an opponent. It possesses the same dynamics of resentment found in other finite play. I will press my explanations on you because I need to show that I do not live in the error that I think others think I do.
Whoever wins this struggle is privileged with the claim to true knowledge. Knowkledge has been arrived at, and it is the outcome of this engagement. Its winners have the uncontested power to make certain statements of fact. They are to be listened to. In those areas appropriate to the contests now concluded, winners possess a knowledge that no longer can be challenged.
Knowledge, therefore, is like property. It must be published, declared, or in some other way so displayed that others cannot but take account of it. It must stand in their way. It must be emblematic, pointing backward at its possessor's competitive skill.
So close are knowledge and property that they are often thought to be continuous. Those who are entitled to knowledge feel they should be granted property as well, and those who are entitled to property believe a certain knowledge goes with it. Scholars demand higher salaries for their publishable successes; industrialists sit on university boards.
If explanation, to be successful, must be oblivious to the silence of nature, it must also in its success impose silence upon its listeners. Imposed silence is the first consequence of the Master Player's triumph.
What one wins in a title is the privilege of magisterial speech. The privilege of magisterial speech is the highest honor attaching to any title. We expect the first act of a winner to be a speech. The first act of a loser may also be a speech, but it will be a speech to concede victory, to declare there will be no further challenge to the winner. It is a speech that promises to silence the loser's voice.
The silence to which losers pledge themselves is a silence of obedience. Losers have nothing to say, nor have they any audience who would listen. ... The victorious do not speak with the defeated; they speak for the defeated. ... Indeed, the titled, as titled, cannot speak with anyone.
It is chiefly in magisterial speech that the power of the winner resides. To be powerful is to have one's words obeyed. It is only by magisterial speech that the emblematic property of winners can be safeguarded. Those entitled to their possessions have the privilege of calling the police, calling up an army, to force the recognition of their emblems.
One is speechless before a god, or silent before a winner, because it no longer matters to others what one has to say. To lose a contest is to become obedient; to become obedient is to lose one's listeners. The silence of obedience is an unheard silence. It is the silence of death. For this reason the demand for obedience is inherently evil.
Infinite speech is that mode of discourse that consistently reminds us of the unspeakability of nature. It bears no claim to truth, originating from nothing but the genius of the speaker. Infinite speech is therefore not about anything; it is always to something. It is not command, but address. It belongs entirely to the speakable.
That language is not about anything gives it its status as metaphor. Metaphor does not point at something there. ... It is not the role of metaphor to draw our sight to what is there, but to draw our vision toward what is not there and, indeed, cannot be anywhere. Metaphor is horizontal, reminding us that it is one's vision that is limited, and not what one is viewing.
Finite language exists complete before it is spoken. ... Infinite language exists only as it is spoken.
The meaning of an infinite speaker's discourse lies in what comes of its utterance - that is, whatever is the case because it is spoken.
Finite speakers come to speech with their voices already trained and rehearsed. ... Infinite speakers must wait to see what is done with their language by their listeners before they can know what they have said.
Speaker and listener understand each other not because they have the same knowledge about something, and not because they have established a likeness of mind, but because they know "how to go on" with each other (Wittgenstein).
Were the gods to address us it would not be to bring us to silence through their speech, but to bring us to speech through their silence.
The contradiction of finite speech is that it must end by being heard. The paradox of infinite speech is that it continues only because it is a way of listening. Finite speech ends with a silence of closure. Infinite speech begins with a disclosure of silence.
We control nature for societal reasons. The control of nature advances with our ability to predict the outcome of natural processes. Inasmuch as predictions are but explanations in reverse, it is possible that they will be quite as combative as explanations. Indeed, prediction is the most highly developed skill of the Master Player, for without it control of an opponent is all the more difficult. It follows that our domination of nature is meant to achieve not certain natural outcomes, but certain societal outcomes.
The contradiction in our relation to nature is that the more vigorously we attempt to force its agreement with our own designs the more subject we are to its indifference, the more vulnerable to its unseeing forces. The more power we exercise over natural process the more powerless we become before it.
The paradox in our relation to nature is that the more deeply a culture respects the indifference of nature, the more creatively it will call upon its own spontaneity in response. ... Human freedom is not a freedom over nature; it is the freedom to be natural, that is, to answer to the spontaneity of nature within our own spontaneity.
When society is unveiled, when we see that it is whatever we want it to be, that it is a species of culture with nothing necessary in it, by no means a phenomenon of nature or a manifestation of instinct, nature is no longer shaped and fitted into one or another set of societal goals. Unveiled, we stand before a nature whose face is its hidden self-origination: its genius.
We abandon all attempts at explanation of nature when we see that we cannot be explained, when our own self-origination cannot be stated as fact. We behold the irreducible otherness of nature when we behold ourselves as its other.
... responsibility for the garden does not mean that we can make a garden of nature, as though it were a poiema of which we could take possession. A garden is not something we have, over which we stand as gods. A garden is a poiesis, a receptivity to variety, a vision of differences that leads always to a making of differences. The poet joyously suffers the unlike, reduces nothing, explains nothing, posesses nothing.
We stand before genius in silence. We cannot speak it, we can only speak as it. Yet, though I speak as genius, I cannot speak for genius. I cannot give nature a voice in my script - without denying their own source, their originality. To do so is to cease responding to the other, to cease being responsible. No one and nothing belong in my script.
The homelessness of nature, its utter indifference to human existence, disclose to the infinite player that nature is the genius of the dramatic.
Myth provokes explanation but accepts none of it. Where explanation absorbs the unspeakable into the speakable, myth reintroduces the silence that makes original discourse possible.
A story attains the status of myth when it is retold, and persistently retold, solely for its own sake. ... However seriously we might regard them as so much inert poiema, and attach metaphysical meanings to them, they spring back out of their own vitality. When we look into a story to find its meaning, it is always a meaning we have brought with us to look at. ... Myths, told for their own sake, are not stories that have meanings, but stories that give meanings.
Storytellers become metaphysicians, or ideologists, when they believe that they know the entire story of a people. This is a history theatricalized, with the beginning and end in plain sight. ... We resonate with myth when it resounds in us. A myth resounds in me when its voice is heard in mine but not heard as mine. ... The resonance of myth collapses the apparent distinction between the story told by one person to another and the story of their telling and listening. ... As myths are told, and continue to resound in the telling, they come to us already richly resonant. The stories they are sound deeply with the stories of their telling.
The opposite of resonance is amplification. A choir is the unified expression of voices resonating with each other; a loudspeaker is the amplification of a single voice, excluding all others. A bell resonates, a cannon amplifies. We listen to the bell, we are silenced by the cannon. ... Magisterial speech is amplified speech; it is speech that silences. Loudspeaking is a mode of command, and therefore a speech designed to bring itself to and end as completely and swiftly as possible. The amplified voice seeks obedient action on the part of its hearers and an immediate end to their speech. There is no possibility of conversation with a loudspeaker.
Ideology is the amplification of myth. It is the assumption that since the beginning and end of history are known there is nothing more to say. History is therefore to be obediently lived out according to the ideology. ... What ideologists are concerned to hide is the choral nature of history, the sense that it is a symphony of very different, even opposed, voices, each nonetheless making the other possible.
If it is true that myth provokes explanation, then it is also true that explanation's ultimate design is to eliminate myth. ... The loudspeaker, successfully muting all other voices and therefore all possibility of conversation, is not listened to at all, and for that reason loses its own voice and becomes mere noise. Whenever we succeed in being the only speaker, there is no speaker at all.
If we are to say that all explanation is meant to silence myth itself, then it will follow that whenever we find people deeply committed to explanation and ideology, whenever play takes on the seriousness of warfare, we will find persons troubled by myths they cannot forget they have forgotten. The myths that cannot be forgotten are those so resonant with the paradox of silence they become the source of our thinking, even our culture, and our civilization.
All three of the West's major religions consider themselves children of Abraham, though each has often understood to be itself the only and final family of the patriarch, an understanding always threatened by the resounding phrase: numbered as the stars of the heavens. This is a myth of the future that always has a future; there is no closure in it. It is a myth of horizon.
Those Christians who deafened themselves to the resonance of their own myth have driven their killing machines through the garden of history, but they did not kill the myth. The emptied divinity whom they have made into an Instrument of Vengeance continues to return as the Man of Sorrows bringing with him his unfinished story, and restoring the voices of the silenced.
James P Carse, in "Finite and Infinite Games" (Ballantine, 1986) speaks timeless volumes within his profound text which are quite relevant to the vernacular of the social conscience in the USA today, blinded and rotting from within with a self-serving moral leprosy championed by the dimmest and darkest "illuminati" in our history. Certain (brief) excerpts from Carse's text appear above.
