Order Of Men Research Articles

The Existential, Social, and Cosmic Significance of the Upanayana Rite

For the Hindu as depicted in the Grhyasittras, life moves along in a succession of periods. For each of these periods there are proper rites to perform. The most critical periods of life are birth, puberty, marriage, and death. These crucial times in the life of religious man are periods of transition. They are times of great danger. In order for man to pass over the danger, he must occasionally take a leap. The anthropologist Mary Douglas cogently expresses the situation, as she writes:

Miners, Labourers and Officials on the Lakekamu Goldfield of Papua

Before 1910 more white men came to Papua to look for gold than any other material or spiritual reward.1 Gold was the reason most of them were prepared to leave the beaches, more Papuans had worked for miners than any other employers, and the miners and their labourers were in advance of representatives of Western governments and Christian missions as the bearers of a foreign culture to many peoples in Papua. After the importance of the alluvial miners declined in Papua, prospec tors crossed the Mandated Territory of New Guinea from the Markham Valley to the Dutch border, and they opened the Morobe field which in the late 1930s produced up to six million dollars worth of gold in a year. One group of miners?Frank Pryke, George Arnold, William (Shark eye) Park, Les Joubert and Joe Sloane?first mined in British New Guinea, stayed on to work in Australian Papua, and were in Morobe to open the rich deposits on Koranga, Edie and Bul?lo in the 1920s. Between 1888 and 1910 the diggers worked alluvial fields in the islands of the south-east, and on the mainland at Milne Bay, Keveri, and in the Northern Division. They accepted Queensland mining law only slightly modified since the miners at Sudest Island had asked Dr William MacGregor for its introduction in 1888 and they used techniques learnt on Australian fields to recover the gold. But by 1910 the white miners in Papua behaved in ways unknown to the Australian alluvial miners. The Papuan miners were employers. They had come to believe that no white man could travel in the interior of Papua or work a claim without a 'team of boys'. On the early fields of Sudest and Woodlark Island some miners had argued that a man who used 'boys' to work a claim had an unfair advantage over other diggers, but by the early 1900s equality among white miners had been established on another level. The miners might still be independent battlers and bushmen, often in debt to store keepers, but to the ten or twelve men they had recruited as indentured labourers they were the tauhada or 'boss'.2 In fact, on Goodenough Island, the main recruiting ground for miners' labourers in Papua, time-expired men imposed the new order of men and masters on the old, and the normal word for a village leader became 'bossman'. Little has been written on the alluvial miners and their relations with the people they encountered and employed in Papua New Guinea. H. J. Gibbney has recounted the events of the goldrush of 1878 when no gold was found, and A. M. Healy in his work on the Morobe goldfields has a brief survey of events before the 1920s and has chapters on Bul?lo

The Sun's Work in a Cornfield

After extensive field experiments, we developed SPAM, a comprehensive mathematical model that simulates energy and material exchange in the plantair layer at the earth's interface. The model is based upon the conservation of energy, where the sun is the driving force. Our understanding and deficiencies were gauged initially by testing model predictions against actual experience with a relatively simple system-a cornfield. Climatic predictions are physically and biologically good enough for many applications, but they reveal inadequacies in our understanding of the fluid dynamics of airflow within the plant stand. Our present inability to measure or predict the degree of wetness of the soil surface hampers correct prediction of evaporation. Probably the most difficult problem to resolve is that of predicting how stomates open and close under drought stress, thus affecting both evaporation and photosynthesis in leaves. Along with resolution of these problems, the basic framework of the model can be adapted to more complex systems in nature, where variability is much greater than in an agricultural crop. The model in its present form can be used, with caution, as a powerful tool to help man order his priorities of plant community traits for whatever outcome he desires, be it food production, nature and water conservation, climate modification, or esthetic enjoyment.

Justice and Friendship

JUSTICE AND FRIENDSHIP1 By GERALD B. PHELAN IT is a commonplace of social and political history that European civilization has come down to us as a heritage from classical antiquity. Everybody repeats, whether to rejoice in the fact or to regret it, that culturally we are Greeks.2 Not everybody, however, is conscious of the vast difference between the Graeco-Roman culture, to which we owe so much, and the Christian culture of Western Europe, from which we have inherited the most and best of what we still possess of civilized existence. Before Professor Etienne Gilson published those epochmaking Gifford Lectures on the Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy, how few, even among the learned, were actually aware of the extent to which Christian thought, especially the fully developed Christian philosophy and theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, had transformed, nay, literally transfigured, the legacy of Greece and Rome! Few as they were who realized at all vividly the gulf that separated the pagan from the Christian culture of Europe, fewer still were those who had any clear conception of how utterly we moderns have broken with our own traditions and how definitely our contemporaries (not among totalitarian nations alone, be they Fascist, Nazi, or Communist, but among our own people, and in our own lands, as well) have cut their moorings in the Christian past and drifted from the course which classical antiquity and Christian tradition, combined, had set. When the same Professor Gilson published his James 1 This paper, the substance of which was given as the St. Thomas Aquinas Lecture , 194!t, at the College of the Sacred Heart, Manhattanville, was written at the suggestion of M. Jacques Maritain after a long conversation about justice and friendship in the teachings of Aristotle and St. Thomas. "' " . . . a chorus from Euripides," said Stanley Baldwin, " awakens an echo in our souls, reviving memories which are ancestral." Presidential Address, The Classical Association, London, 19!t6. 158 154 GERALD B. PHELAN Lectures on the Unity of Philosophical Experience and Professor Maritain wrote those penetrating and provocative studies, The Three Reformers and Integral Humanism, many of their readers began to recognize for the first time that our modern conceptions of human life, human thought, and human culture had thoroughly abandoned the high ideals of civilization which had been laboriously acquired through long centuries of Christian reflection, Christian practice, and Christian prayer. In this paper I propose briefly to discuss two· of these basic concepts, which modern men have either completely lost or distorted beyond all recognition, viz., the concepts of justice and friendship - those two virtues which pagan Greece and pagan Rome regarded as essential to sound social life and which the sublime teachings of Christian revelation, particularly as expressed in the philosophy and theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, transformed into forces of incredible beneficence and elevated to a realm of efficacy transcending,. while preserving intact, the whole order of man's temporal social and political llie. Our Holy Father the Pope has sadly noted the fact that men no longer understand the true meaning of the words justice, charity, and friendship. The consequence is that our leaders, thinkers, responsible guides, and legitimate rulers are at a loss to find a stable basis upon which the upbuilding of a just and peaceful human order of society could even be envisaged, much less actually accomplished. It would carry us far afield were we to pause to consider and criticize the aberrations of modern thought upon the subject of these virtues or even to pass in review the various distortions which modern ethicians and social philosophers have wrought upon those fundamental notions of social morality. Rather, I shall attempt briefly to indicate what justice and friendship meant to the Greeks and to point out how St. Thomas Aquinas carried the thought of those great pagan thinkers to heights beyond their loftiest speculation. Read, if you will, the praise of justice which Socrates pronounces in Plato's dialogue Gorgias and in those eloquent dis- JUSTICE AND FRIENDSHIP 155 cussions in the first, second, and fourth books of the Republic, where Socrates extols justice as the essential virtue of the state, the bond of union among all members of society...

A Difficulty in Weismannism

THE contributions of Mr. Trow and Dr. Poulton to this discussion render necessary an explanation that should, perhaps, have accompanied my first letter. After rough-drafting this, I felt misgivings lest I might have misconceived Weismann's meaning, and set up a man of straw to knock down. Accordingly, I wrote to Prof Weismann to ask if I rightly understood his meaning, explaining my object in doing so; and he answered my queries with great kindness, courtesy, and fulness. As I wrote back to him, I then thought it better, relieved from my misgivings, to state the point without reference to his letter. But Mr. Trow and Dr. Poulton have both blamed my use of the word shuffling, and appear to think that my hypothesis A is a purely imaginary conception of the straw man order. I hope, therefore, I shall not be accused of having wilfully kept a trump card up my sleeve if I now quote the two essential passages of Prof. Weismann's letter, which were written in definition of the points at issue.