Now is the time for us to awaken to a new world, one of technological advancement and their possible applications for our own destruction! A portion of  Quest of the Spirit concerns a theory which I call The Principle of Privation and Ethical Proportion. Einstein hints at the concept in his autobiography when he suggests that men's ethical choices should at all cost stay abreast of their nation's technological innovations. Today the Free World stands at the crossroads. Atheistic nations governed by senseless creeds that have never served the needs of the common people are threatening the freedom of the Western World! Creeds that demand the suffering of one generation in the name of an illusive, nonexistent progress in the next deprive citizens of the freedom  to pursue a meaningful existence. Society should never be built on senseless suffering!  Einstein's concern revolved around the moral choice of dropping the atom bomb during World War II, and its potential for destruction in the future. It is the obligation of a country's leaders and writers to suggest that the scientific community value the virtues of mercy and understanding more than progress and vested interest. Writing in Dreams and Delusions (1987), Fritz Stern says, "Einstein had been horrified at the beginning of the war, but I doubt that even he could have imagined the full measure of disaster; the senseless killing, and maiming of millions, the starving of children, the mortgaging of Europe's future the tearing of a civilization that appeared ever more fragile. For what? Why?  Einstein blamed it on an epidemic of madness and of greed that had suddenly overwhelmed Europe--and Germany most especially. The old German of greatness had turned into a nightmare of blind and brutal greed" (Stern 36-37).  Never would he have dreamed of the magnitude of this threat had he lived witnessed the thoughtless brutality of  Russian aggression in the Ukraine today. Physicist  Max Born echoed a similar sentiment in his autobiography. Never should one community denigrate the other. The role of government should be to address the social needs of all classes. Policies formed in the name of progress should never supersede the public well-being. Now is the time for Americans to once again take a long hard look at democracy , its goals, and its shortcoming--to re-assess the values its embodies and attempt a re-establishment of those original principles that have long been corrupted by vested interest and corporate dehumanization. In the words of Robert S. Lynd in Knowledge for What? The Place of the Social Sciences in American Culture (1939), "There is no other agency in our culture whose role is to ask long-range and, if need be, abruptly irreverent questions of our democratic institutions; and to follow those questions with research and the systematic charting of the way ahead. "  Although this text precedes World War II, the issues remain the same in the twenty-first century, and perhaps even worse.  As Max Lerner suggests in Ideas are Weapons (1939), "Today research and planning of this sort are left to the foundations to organize, that is, to men whose  thought-processes have already been shaped in the image of the power  formations of the day. If our democracy were worth its salt, it would create a Research and Planning Commission to take over the functions of the foundations. And on it would be men like Robert Lynd" (Lerner 279). Unfortunately, even in the twenty-first century that Planning Commission has never materialized. In his book A Theology for the Social Gospel (1917), Walter Rauschenbusch suggests a  Christian sociological approach to  international relations by viewing countries whose sicknesses are caused by the ill of their citizens.In essence, it is the nations who are sick from the evils within. According to Rauschenbusch, "The social gospel registers the fact that for the first time in history the spirit of Christianity has had a chance to form a working partnership with real social and psychological science. It is the religious reaction on the historic advent of democracy. It seeks to put the democratic spirit, which the Church inherited from Jesus and the prophets, once more in control of the institutions and teachings of the Church" (Rauschenbusch 5). The choice is ours. As Emma Goldman avers, "Liberty will not descend to a people . A people must raise themselves to liberty." In another passage, Goldman affirms, "People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take." In the Ukraine today, it the not the courage to take, but the courage to defend against Russian aggression. Man must first fight for freedom, and only then, after it it won, can we, in essence, give, love, and forgive; no other standard is necessary save faith and courage.

2.         The principle of privation and ethical proportion equally applies on an international level. Just as those in Third World countries may suffer from policies that neglect their social needs, so should leaders of nations apply their ethical stands to remedy the ills of suffering people throughout the world. Bertrand Russell also suggests the need for compassion and wise moral choices during periods of the nuclear conflict. Much of  Quest of the Spirit addresses technological progress that neglects the social and spiritual needs of its subjects. For that reason, much of the text examines 1) the harms of a growing materialism and 2) the moral and social ramifications of man's spiritual apostasy associated with it. The law of privation and ethical proportion also serves as a type of counterbalance for unfair legislation. When a nation or class experiences privation, it is the moral obligation of its citizens to expose those ills, and present methods of mitigating those circumstances in a more than proportionately ethical manner. In one respect, this concept serves as a form of loss and redemption; otherwise, nations could easily become embittered and retaliate. This negative response to separation could easily result in acts of revenge or war. In political terms, neurosis on a national level can prove far more insidious. As Viktor Frankl suggests, illness of this nature is not only for the collective neuroses and for neuroses in general, but also for all suffering humanity (Frankl 127). As Isabel Paterson observes in  her book The God of the Machine  (1943), "A philosophy of materialism can admit no rights whatever; hence he most grinding despotism ever known resulted at once from the  "experiment" of Marxist communism, which could posit nothing but a mechanistic process for its validation" (Paterson 70). Kurt Vonnegut, in Player Piano (Dial 1980), expresses a similar sentiment  when he expresses his fear that, like the effects of two world wars, the rise of the computer age in the early 1950's also denigrates and demoralizes man by robbing him of whatever dignity and purpose he possesses. In the words of one of Vonnegut's characters, "If you convert the horsepower ofone of the bigger steel-mill motors into terms of manpower, you'ss find that the motor does more work than the entire slave population  of the United States at the time of the Civil War could do--and do it for twenty-fours a day. Another character responded by saying, "And that , of course, applies to the First Industrial Revolution, where machines devalued muscle work. The second revolution, the one we're now completing, is a little tougher to express in terms of work saved. If there were some measure like horsepower in which we could express annoyance or boredom that people used to experience in routine jobs--but there isn't" (Vonnegut 52). Sadly, if one accepts Vonnegut's  definition of the period of revolutions, the third would probably be age of the internet, which unfortnately, demeans and denies man  direction in life even more. In a subsequent portion of the novel, a minister named Lasher 'lashes" out against the machine-based society that robs man of his sense of worth and self-esteem when he tells Paul, the protagonist: "When I had a congregation before the war, I used to tell them that the liife of their spirit in relation to God was the biggest thing in their lives, and that their part in the economy was nothing by comparison. Now, you people have engineered them out of their part in the economy, in tghe marketplace, and they're finding out--most of them--that's what's left is just about zero." Lash goes on to say, "These  displaced people need something, and the clergy can't give it to them--or it's impossible for them to take what the clergy offers. The clergy says it's enough, and so does the Bible. The people says it isn't enough, and I suspect they're right"  (Vonnegut 90-91). A generation earlier, psychologist  William James also criticizes those who follow the tenets of determinism and place  a cold and fatalistic view of life  which denies free-will and the right to make one's own moral choices. In his book The Will to Believe (1899), James stresses that determinism "professes that those parts of the universe already laid down absolutely appoint and decree what the other parts shall be. The future has no ambiguous possibilities hidden  in its womb: the part we call the present is compatible with only one totality. Any other future complement than the one fixed from eternity is impossible. The whole is in each and every part, and welds it with the rest into an absolute unity, an iron block, in which there can be no equivocation or shadow of turning" (James 150). Instead of offering a vast array of possibilities, life according to determinism suggests that these opportunities are nowhere to be found, and never have been.  "Possibilities that fail to get realized are, for determinism, pure illusions: they never were possibilities at all," says James (151). Although written almost a century ago,  the words of former President Franklin Roosevelt express the challenge that faced democracy today, as they did then. In Roosevelt's Looking Forward (1933), the President said, "We heard a great deal during the Great War about the challenge to democracy and I think it was a good thing for our complacency to learn that democracy was being challenged. But democracy is being challenged today just as forcibly if not clamorously" (Roosevelt 86-87). Ironically, similar challenges face twenty-first century America in terms of leadership, corruption, and corporate dominance. In Roosevelt's words, "The challenge is from all who complain about the inefficiency, the stupidity and the expense of government. It may be read in the statistics of crime and in the ugliness of many of our communities. It is expressed in all the newspaper accounts of official graft and blundering. It is written in our tax rules and even in the patriotic-seeming textbooks that our children study in the schools . . . The men who addressed themselves to the task of laying the framework of our national government after freedom had been won, wrote down the enduring words that their aim was to form 'a more perfect union.'. . . They were forming a new government suited, as they believed, to the conditions of their day, but they were wise enough to look into the future and to recognize that the conditions of life and the demands upon government were bound to change as they had been changing through ages past, and so the plan of government that they had prepared was made, knot rigid but flexible--adapted to change and progress.  We cannot call ourselves either wise or patriotic if we seek to escape the responsibility of remolding government to make it more serviceable to all the people and more responsive to modern needs" (Roosevelt 87-88). Thomas Mann warns Americans and Europeans In The Coming Victory of Democracy (1938) that they must not be disillusioned into believing that fascism and democracy are similar. According to Mann, "Democracy and fascism live, so to speak, on different planets, or to put it more accurately, they live in different epochs. The fascist interpretation of the world and history is one of absolute force, wholly free of morality and reason, and having no relation to them. Its demands cannot be satisfied and quieted with concessions, but are thoroughly vague, indefinable, and boundless. The thoughts of democracy and fascism cannot meet because the latter is deeply and unqualifiedly involved in the concept of power and hegemony as the aim and substance of politics, at a period in which democracy is no longer interested in power and hegemony, nor in politics as a means toward gaining them, but is interested only in peace" (Mann 52-53). Although Mann wrote these words in 1938, during the rise of Mussolini and Hitler, the same principle holds true today for communism and fascism throughout the world. Saul Alinsky goes so far as to say that man today must  ensure the benefits of his brothers fin every clime, not from the perspective of traditional  morality, but of expedience ,, for the survival of all mankind. According to Alinsky, "The fact that it is not in man's 'better nature' but his self-interest that demands that he be his brother's keeper. We now live in a world where no man can have  a loaf of bread while his neighbor has none. If he does not share his bread, he dare not sleep, for his neighbor will kill him. To eat and sleep in safety man must do the right thing, if for seemingly the wrong reasons, and be in practice his brother's keeper" (Alinsky 23). In essence, expediency trumps morality in the modern political world.

 3.               Certainly, there is room to adapt changes in the current application of these democratic principles today, especially in the public schools and colleges.  As Max Lerner posits in Ideas are Weapons, the American school system is designed to produce professionals who serve the needs of the state,  not those of the collective good, as democracy requires. Lerner suggests that after the Civil War,  the corporate world and legislators designed the goals of American education  to correspond with the rising demands of industrialization, not minority rights or egalitarianism. In Lerner's words, "If education is ever to be swung from capitalism to democracy, it must be moved by a process that will at the same time make it a releasing rather than a standardizing force. The schools as standardizers create robots for the existing power groups. Schools that will take the mass energies that are pent up in them and give those energies release and direction will be freeing themselves--and the social system as well" (Lerner 516).

 4.              In Red Star Over China (1938), Edgar Snow suggests how the communist ideology emphasizes the collective good over individualism as well. In his description of Chairman Mao, Snow writes, "Mao Tse-tung's account [of his life] had begun to pass out of the category of 'personal history,' and to sublimate itself somehow intangibly in the career of a great movement in which, though he retained a dominant role, you could not see him clearly as a personality. It was no longer 'I' but 'we'; no longer Mao Tse-tung but the Red Army; no longer a subjective impression of the experiences of a single life, but an objective record by a bystander concerned with the mutations of collective human destiny as the material of history" (Snow 172).  In essence, the institutions, like all collectives, whether racial, ethnic,  social, or national, minimize the democratic principles of equality under the law, at the expense of the individual . In essence, the democratic principles are the guiding light for all  free societies.  As Eleanor Roosevelt affirms in The Moral Basis of Democracy (1940), "The motivating force in the theory of a Democratic way of life is still a belief that as individuals we live cooperatively, and, to the best of our ability, serve the community in which we live, and that our own success, to be real, must contribute tot he success of others" (Roosevelt 8). Another courageous ethical leader during a time of war was President Harry S. Truman. In The Crosswinds of Freedom (1989) by James MacGregor Burns (1989), the author describes what became known as the Truman Doctrine which "supported free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures"  (Burns 232). Truman also felt keen sense of compassion for the underprivileged. In Burns' words, "In the face of conservative opposition to his Fair Deal economic measures, he [ President Truman] inflamed southern Democrats even further with his sweeping civil rights message . . . which called for a permanent federal commission on civil rights, a permanent fair employment practices commission, the outlawing of segregation in schools and transportation and other public facilities, and a federal anti-lynching law "  (Burns 236). Regarded by some critics as a weak President, Truman displayed courage and compassion which he promoted through ethical legislation.  The ideas from Truman's Doctrine, according to Burns, later supplemented with the ideas of General Marshall, evolved into Marshall Plan, which called for U.S. economic assistance in the rebuilding of a war-torn Europe (Burns  233). As Walter Rauschenbusch avers, "Genuine political democracy will evidence its existence by the social, economic, and educational condition of the people. Generally speaking, city slums, a spiritless and drunken peasantry, and a large emigration are  corollaries of class government. If the people were free, they would stop exploitation. If they cannot stop exploitation, the parasitic interests are presumably in control of legislation, the courts, and the powers of coercion. parasitic government is sin on a high scale" (Rauschenbusch 75). Unfortunately, the closeness of his comparisons with modern America and its legislative-corporate associations is extremely disturbing.

 5.          The law of privation and ethical proportion applies both on an individual as well as a collective level. This unique aspect shows how it differs from Kant's Moral Imperative or Carlyle's Clothing Metaphor. In fiction, characters that experience loss through death or neglect manifest tendencies resulting in abnormal behavior. In tragedy, the heroes never reap the ethical benefit of love or understanding, although at times their isolation results from their own hubris or tragic nature. In this way, they justify their actions against what they feel perceive as a cruel and malignant fate. This attitude prevails both in fact and fiction today. In romance, the hero and heroine consummate their love as an ethical consequence of their overcoming all odds, whether in this life or the next. A similar reward occurs for those who rediscover the ancient archetypal symbols deeply embedded in their unconscious. Psychologically, a subject's suffering, however, intense, must be overwhelmed by love and forgiveness, qualities that purge and renew.

 6.        The concept of ethical proportion derives its essence from the concept of death-and-rebirth. Christ's miracle of raising Lazarus suggests the need for compassion and faith to ensure the character's transformation. In the same way, man must accept his moral responsibility for the physical and emotional rebirth of communities throughout the world. Only then can the victims of terrorism, internal strife, starvation, disease, and natural disasters emerge from their psychological trauma. As global communication systems continue to enhance the level of man's technological expertise, so must nations recognize that now, more than ever, the human capacity for self-destruction cast a dark cloud upon the future of our planet.