“VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY”

Henry Thoreau was not the first person to embrace a life ofvoluntary simplicity, that honor going perhaps to Diogenes ofSinope, the cynic who lived in a tub in Athens, or to one Hippias(the original hippie?) who had attended an Olympic Games attiredentirely, down to the ring on his finger, in clothing of his ownfabrication made from materials which he had himself produced.–Nor had Thoreau originated the terminology “voluntarysimplicity,” which as we will see here would wait to be createdin a much more recent timeframe.

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project “Voluntary Simplicity”

“VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY” RICHARD BARTLETT GREGG

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RICHARD BARTLETT GREGG “VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY”

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February 13, Friday: Richard Bartlett Gregg was born at Colorado Springs, Colorado, a son of the Reverend James B. Gregg, a Congregational minister, and Mary N. Gregg. He would prepare for college at Cutler Academy there. He, like his father and three brothers, would be a Harvard man. At first he would take courses in mathematics and science and plan a career as an electrical engineer, but then at some point he would change direction and eventually he would study for a law degree at the Harvard Law School.

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

1885

“Voluntary Simplicity” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

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Richard Bartlett Gregg graduated from Harvard University. He was his class’s Treasurer, had rowed, had been in the glee club, and had like Henry Thoreau been a member of the Institute of 1770. During the summer after graduation he would tutor several boys at Cohasset, Massachusetts. Then he would teach mathematics and chemistry at Milton Academy for one year, and then he would return to tutoring in Cohasset before going on into the Harvard Law School.

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD?— NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES.

LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

1907

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project “Voluntary Simplicity”

RICHARD BARTLETT GREGG “VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY”

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Fall: Richard Bartlett Gregg entered the Harvard Law School.

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

1908

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project “Voluntary Simplicity”

“VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY” RICHARD BARTLETT GREGG

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Summer: Richard Bartlett Gregg received the LL.B. from the Harvard Law School and went on a tour of Scotland, England, Germany, and France.

September: Richard Bartlett Gregg began work at the law office of Gaston, Snow & Saltonstall in Boston.

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

1911

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project “Voluntary Simplicity”

RICHARD BARTLETT GREGG “VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY”

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Richard Bartlett Gregg, with Robert G. Valentine and Ordway Tead, specialists in personnel management and industrial psychology, opened an office in Chicago. In this office Gregg would practice labor law until, disheartened by our government’s failure to protect workers and by the often violent tactics of both capital and labor, he would begin to “think outside the box” and seek alternatives to this mode of being.

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

1915

“Voluntary Simplicity” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

“VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY” RICHARD BARTLETT GREGG

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When the draft came to America in preparation for the Great War, Richard Bartlett Gregg, age 32, escaped by being slightly over the age limit.

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

1917

“Voluntary Simplicity” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

RICHARD BARTLETT GREGG “VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY”

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January 1, Thursday: Richard Bartlett Gregg had been a labor lawyer under contract with a railway union in Chicago when he had come across a book about a former lawyer, an anticolonial leader named Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. The approach to social conflict sponsored in this literature so fascinated him that on this day he embarked for India. He would teach school in an Indian village, and would spend months at Gandhi’s ashram in Sabarmati, making himself one of the mahatma’s 1st American disciples. He would author “The Economics of Khaddar.” He would spend some time also at the school of the poet Rabindranath Tagore.

At some point during this month Joseph Goebbels would first encounter Adolf Hitler (although he would not be joining the Nazi Party until 1928), and wrote of Der Führer in his dear diary in the following manner:

“Shakes my hand. Like an old friend. And those big blue eyes.Like stars. He is glad to see me. I am in heaven. That man haseverything to be king.”

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MINDYOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

1925

“Voluntary Simplicity” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

“VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY” RICHARD BARTLETT GREGG

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RICHARD BARTLETT GREGG “VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY”

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Richard Bartlett Gregg’s A PREPARATION FOR SCIENCE (Gujarat Vidyapith) and ECONOMICS OF KHADDAR (S. Ganesan).

1928

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The Japanese American Citizens League was organized in the face of rising discrimination.

During the “Salt March,” Richard Bartlett Gregg returned to India as an observer and authored “Gandhiji’s Satyagraha or Non-Violent Resistance.”

1930

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

RICHARD BARTLETT GREGG “VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY”

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Richard Bartlett Gregg’s GANDHISM VERSUS SOCIALISM (New York: John Day Co.).

1932

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Richard Bartlett Gregg’s “The Power Of Non Violence,” which in 1960 would be revised as “The Power of Non-Violence” and republished with a foreword by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

George Mills Houser matriculated at the University of Denver.

1934

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

RICHARD BARTLETT GREGG “VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY”

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During this year and the following one, Richard Bartlett Gregg would be serving as the acting director for Pendle Hill at Wallingford, Pennsylvania. Many would infer from this that he was a Quaker, but in fact, by inclination like Henry Thoreau a non-joiner, he would never formally affiliate with a particular monthly meeting of the Religious Society of Friends.

“I’d rather work from the outside.”

1935

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Richard Bartlett Gregg’s Pendle Hill Pamphlet (#3), “The Value of Voluntary Simplicity.”

1936

VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY

RICHARD BARTLETT GREGG “VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY”

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Richard Bartlett Gregg’s “Training for Peace: A Programme for Peace Workers” (London: introduction by Aldous Huxley).

1937

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Richard Bartlett Gregg moved from Pendle Hill at Wallingford in Pennsylvania to Putney Commons, an intentional community of six families in Putney, Vermont.

1938

RICHARD BARTLETT GREGG “VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY”

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Richard Bartlett Gregg determined to go into organic farming.

1941

“VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY” RICHARD BARTLETT GREGG

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W.E. Burghardt Du Bois debated against Ralph Templin, of the Harlem Ashram and the Kristagraha movement, about the launching of a Gandhi-style mass action in America. Templin’s argument was to the effect that actually Gandhian protest derived from Henry Thoreau and William Lloyd Garrison and thus definitely amounted to a part of the American tradition. Du Bois rejected this, alleging that such austerities as fasting, prayer, self-sacrifice, and personal abnegation, although they made sense within the Indian cultural tradition, would not come across as well in the materialistic USA. Richard Bartlett Gregg was simply mistaken about the applicability of such strategies here — they would probably be regarded at best as attention-getting pranks, while the protesters would risk coming across to the general public as fools: “Our culture patterns in East and West differ so vastly that what is sense in one world may be nonsense in the other.” Thoreauvian civil disobedience and Garrisonian absolutism had made no permanent dent in the characteristic American go-ahead mentality.

1943

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Richard Bartlett Gregg began to farm organically on part of the 65 acres of the authors Helen and Scott Nearing at the foot of Stratton Mountain in Vermont (in a few years, however, the Nearings would move away, to the coast of Maine).

1948

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The American consumer was introduced to freeze-dried chives.

Richard Bartlett Gregg insisted, in “The Structure of a Non-violent Society” that Non-Violence and Voluntary Simplicity would merely “leave most people hanging in mid-air,” leaving people without meaning and purpose in their lives, and that what we must do in order to restore meaning and purpose to modern existence is construct an “entirely new civilization” stressing cooperative arrangements and considering agriculture to constitute “the most important part of the life of the nation.”

1953

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Late in the year: A bus boycott began in Montgomery, Alabama. Soon after the boycott began its leader, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., received a copy of Richard Bartlett Gregg’s “The Power Of Non Violence.” “I don’t know when I have read anything,” he wrote to the author of this literature, “that has given the idea of non-violence a more realistic and depthful interpretation.”

1955

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

“VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY” RICHARD BARTLETT GREGG

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Richard Bartlett Gregg’s A COMPASS FOR CIVILIZATION (Ahmedabad, India: Navajivan Publishing House) and SPIRIT THROUGH BODY (Boston: UP of Cambridge).

1956

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Richard Bartlett Gregg’s A PHILOSOPHY OF INDIAN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT (Ahmedabad, India: Navajivan Publishing House). Although the author sent along a copy to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the racial-justice leader evidently didn’t consider that sort of thinking to be of much relevance in America.

1958

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Richard Bartlett Gregg’s “The Power Of Non Violence” of 1934 was revised and reissued as “The Power of Non-Violence,” with a foreword by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

1960

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

RICHARD BARTLETT GREGG “VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY”

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Richard Bartlett Gregg died at the age of 89 (refer to Mildred B. Young’s “Richard B. Gregg, In Memoriam,” Friends Journal, May 15, 1974, page 303).

1974

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March: Joseph Kip Kosek’s “Richard Gregg, Mohandas Gandhi, and the Strategy of Nonviolence,” The Journal of American History 91.

Excerpts are presented below:

Shortly after the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott of 1955/1956established Martin Luther King Jr. as the nation’s leadingpractitioner of nonviolent direct action, an official from theNational Association for the Advancement of Colored People(NAACP) asked him to name the books that had most influenced histhinking. King chose five texts. Four of them seem unsurprising:Mohandas Gandhi’s autobiography, Louis Fischer’s 1950 biographyof the Indian leader, Henry David Thoreau’s essay on civildisobedience, and Walter Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel classic,CHRISTIANITY AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS. The fifth book on the list,however, was Richard Bartlett Gregg’s 1934 THE POWER OF NON-VIOLENCE, a text virtually unknown today among historians ofmodern America. Even major biographies of King, such as thoseby Taylor Branch and David Garrow, largely ignore Gregg. Yet hewas the first American to develop a substantial theory ofnonviolent resistance. Militant nonviolence did not emerge inthe United States as a response to racial segregation in the1950s. Its central characteristics appeared during the interwarperiod, amid a worldwide crisis of democracy fomented byindustrial conflict, economic instability, an increasinglyprecarious colonial system, and the ascendant threats of fascismand Communism. In this context, Richard Gregg became part of asmall radical pacifist vanguard that went beyond mere oppositionto international war to insist that the future of democraticsocieties depended on their members’ absolute renunciation ofviolence as a means of social change or conflict resolution. Asan alternative, members of pacifist organizations such as theFellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and the War Resisters League(WRL) began to experiment with social and political practicesthat they came to call nonviolent direct action, nonviolentresistance, militant nonviolence, or simply nonviolence. Then,during World War II, a new generation of pacifists and theirallies took the project further, particularly through their workin the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). By the time that Kingread Gregg’s writings in 1956, the method of nonviolence hadundergone decades of elaboration, revision, and occasionalpractical application. The recovery of Richard Bartlett Gregg’scareer opens a window on the early trajectory of nonviolentaction as an intellectual, theoretical, and political project....

2005

RICHARD GREGG AND GANDHI

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More than any other single figure, Gregg taught Americanpacifists and social reformers that nonviolence was more thanan ethical or religious principle; it was also a self-consciousmethod of social action with its own logic and strategy.Specifically, he argued that the method, particularly when itinvolved suffering, became a dramatic performance that wouldelicit guilt and shame from opponents and sympathy fromonlookers....The railway shopmen’s strike of 1922 probably did more to shapeRichard Bartlett Gregg’s ideas about violence than did themilitary slaughter of the Great War. A total of 1.6 millionworkers went on strike that year, including not only railwayshopmen but also miners and textile workers. For many Americans,the labor battles that ensued posed a far more immediate threatto their way of life than the bloodshed across the Atlantic Oceanhad. Soldiers had not occupied American cities in 1918, as theyhad in Europe, but federal troops did march through the streetsof many industrial communities in the United States during thesummer of 1922. In addition, local marshals and company guardspatrolled major railroad shops in Chicago, where Gregg worked,and in cities across the nation. Guards occasionally fired onstrikers, who fought back by kidnapping and assaultingreplacement workers, sabotaging trains, and dynamiting tracks.In this desperate climate, the Harding administration becameincreasingly intent on ending the conflict, and in September afederal judge issued an injunction against the rail strike as aconspiracy in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Over thenext few months, the shopmen reached separate agreements withthe railway companies and returned to work. Federal law hadgiven the railroad owners almost total victory....

Neither Mohandas Gandhi nor Richard Gregg invented the practiceof nonviolent resistance. People lacking power have probablyemployed what the anthropologist James C. Scott has called“weapons of the weak” as long as social inequalities haveexisted in human societies. In the American context, blackslaves in particular used forms of sabotage and subterfuge shortof open revolt to assert their autonomy and improve theirmaterial conditions. Yet by its nature such “everydayresistance” renounced any attempt at systematic social change.Closer to Gregg’s own theories was the approach of thenonresistant followers of William Lloyd Garrison in the 1830sand 1840s. Those radical pacifists, while promising to“repudiate all human politics, worldly honors, and stations ofauthority,” placed great faith in the power of public opinion.An 1839 article in one of their journals described the peculiaradvantage that nonresistants held over attackers: “The aggressorof a nonresistant will be placed in the wrong; he will becondemned by himself, by byestanders, by the public.” Yet,although Garrison and his associates certainly knew how todeploy public spectacle, they ultimately saw their stance as an

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inner conviction to do right regardless of politicalconsequences. For Garrison, the strategic advantages ofnonviolence were incidental to its religious superiority;Gregg’s writing made nonviolent strategy itself a subject ofcareful analysis and conscious manipulation. Gregg’sinnovations in nonviolent action developed alongside, and laterwithin, the new radical pacifism that revitalized andtransformed the Garrisonian tradition in the decades after WorldWar I. The devastating effects of the conflict in Europe and thejingoistic and reactionary climate of the home front led a fewAmericans, most of them left-leaning ministers and reformers,to embrace absolute pacifism. The most important organizationfor the dissemination of their views in the interwar period wasthe Fellowship of Reconciliation, which had been founded in1914. The FOR’s roots in the Social Gospel showed in itsnonsectarian Christian orientation and in its wide-rangingattempts to infuse pacifist principles into diverse arenas ofsocial life, such as industry, education, and race relations.The War Resisters League, begun in 1923 as a secular offshootof the Fellowship of Reconciliation, focused more narrowly oninternational war but shared its parent’s radicalism. In the1930s, Gregg would become a member of the WRL and a leader inthe FOR....He thought of his books as a way to extricate pacifism “from theprofitless atmosphere of emotional adjectives and of vaguemysticism, futile protests and sentimentalism combined withconfused thinking.” For this project, he cultivated a diffidentwriting style marked by constant hedging; he frequentlyacknowledged to his readers that he might be “mistaken” or even“wrong.” The reservations were an organic part of his argument,for he believed that a practitioner of nonviolence (like atheorist of it) “recognizes that no matter what his beliefs andconvictions are, he may possibly be mistaken or at fault.” Inpart Gregg borrowed this tone from Gandhi himself, who becameboth legendary and notorious for his public confessions ofuncertainty and his nearly obsessive self-examination. Greggtried to move pacifists beyond allegiance to moral truisms andtoward a more pragmatic politics....Earlier religious pacifists (and before the twentieth century,virtually all American pacifism was grounded in religious faith)tended to view their condemnation of violence as an internalconviction. Its effect on others, though sometimes profound, wasultimately irrelevant in comparison with the believer’s owndetermination to follow the divine will. Gregg, in contrast,said little about the nonviolent resister’s own beliefs,focusing instead on the reactions of both violent attackers anddisinterested spectators. By doing so, he helped makenonviolence a technique for social change. “Let us ... try,”Gregg suggested, “to understand first how non-violent resistanceworks.” In each of the three books, he presented a pair of

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dramatic scenes. First, he asked readers to imagine two men, onewho attacks violently and another who defends himself by thesame method. Such combatants, he explained, implicitly consentto a common set of moral values, despite their apparentopposition. Both believe in the efficacy and appropriateness ofusing physical force to settle disputes. Then Gregg changed thescene, portraying a violent attacker who faces a nonviolentresister. In failing to defend himself, the second personintentionally disrupts the attacker’s value system. He employs“a sort of moral jiu-jitsu” that causes his attacker to “losehis moral balance.” This was a psychological game, and Greggcounted on the violent attacker to cave in from sympathy, pity,or sheer bewilderment. He suggested that the nonviolentconversion of an opponent was “analogous to ... religiousconversion, though in this case the change is moral rather thanreligious.” More often, however, he drew on modern psychologicalmodels to explain how it happened. Gregg’s use of psychologicaltheories was opportunistic and eclectic; he was equally likelyto employ Freudianism, the early behaviorism of John B. Watson,or the theory of emotion formulated by William James and CarlGeorg Lange to make his case. The larger point was thatscientific authority could validate the methods that Gandhiexplained in moral and spiritual terms. Just as modern economicshad shown the unlikely rationality of hand spinning, so modernpsychology proved the effectiveness of standing defenselessbefore an enemy’s assault. The nonviolent method, though asincere expression of principle, was also a public performanceintended to persuade an audience. Gregg’s construction ofnonviolent action rested on the power of sympathy.“Undoubtedly,” he wrote, “the sight of another personvoluntarily undergoing suffering for a belief or ideal moves theassailant and beholders alike and tends to change their heartsand make them all feel kin-ship with the sufferer.” He proposedtwo reasons for this phenomenon. One was physiological: humanshad evolved to react to one another’s pain. “Hence the sight ofsuffering, in all probability, causes an involuntary sympatheticresponse in the nervous system of the beholder, especially inthe autonomic nervous system,” Gregg wrote. The other reasonstemmed from a psychological desire for vicarious experience.Gregg noted that “everyone wants, in his heart, to be strong andbrave.” At the sight of a nonviolent resister, “we wonder if wecould do so well, and perhaps we even unconsciously identifyourselves with him.” That potential for identification made“beholders” into a potent force in Gregg’s scheme. Spectatorsplayed an important role in the victory of the nonviolentresister. Gregg, who was fundamentally optimistic about humannature, believed that a violent attacker would indeed convert,but he argued that third parties could assist the process. “Ifthere are onlookers,” he wrote, “the assailant soon loses stillmore poise. Instinctively he dramatizes himself before them andbecomes more aware of his position.” The “audience,” Greggthought, became “a sort of mirror,” reflecting back to the

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attacker his egregious violation of moral standards. Greggbelieved that mass media had created a global audience, for bothnonviolent resisters and their violent opponents. Under modernconditions, he explained, “ruthless deeds tend to become knownto the world at large.” He acknowledged the existence of statecensorship but maintained that the power of mass media wouldeventually overcome it. “Newspaper reporters are always keen forscenting a ‘story,’” Gregg opined, “and as soon as they learnof a censorship anywhere they are still more eager.” Whateverits moral import, the scene of defenseless men and womenvoluntarily succumbing to vicious assaults made a fascinating“story.” Nonviolent resistance “makes wonderful news,” Gregginsisted. “It is so unusual and dramatic.” He even compared thepower of the nonviolent resister’s appeals to the persuasiveeffects of “commercial advertising.” He concluded, with bothprescience and unwarranted optimism, that the threat of badpublicity would give the practitioners of nonviolence a decisiveadvantage over their violent opponents. Gregg’s pragmatictheories led him to the daring argument that “non-violentresistance is perhaps ... more like war than we had imagined.”...Nonviolent resistance became a kind of war without killing, forGregg thought that killing was unnecessary to achieve war’sgoals. “Though war uses violence,” he explained, “the effect itaims at is psychological. Non-violent resistance also aims atand secures psychological effects, though by different means.”If nonviolent action was a kind of conflict and not a retreatfrom the world, it needed to draw on the “truths and virtues ofmilitarism.” Following Gandhi, Gregg’s work suggested thatnonviolent action had many of the characteristics of war: Itrelied on courage, loyalty, and other martial qualities; itrequired attention to strategy; and it depended on moral,emotional, and psychological advantages, not solely physicalones....THE POWER OF NON-VIOLENCE garnered enthusiastic reviews in radicalpacifist and liberal Protestant circles. It became, in the wordsof one FOR leader, “the ‘Bible’ of non-violence.” It was thefirst of Gregg’s books to be published in America, rather thanIndia. The FOR promoted it in its journal FELLOWSHIP, while Gregghimself led study groups across the Northeast and promoted hisviews during a short stint as director of Pendle Hill, a Quakerschool. (“Calm yourself,” he wrote a friend, “because I have notbecome a Quaker.”)...King came to understand the boycott, in part, as a dramaticspectacle designed to elicit the sympathy of opponents andonlookers, just as Gregg’s theories had posited. “I tell you,”he warned black Montgomerians in a November 1956 speech, “if wehit back ... we will be shamed before the world.” To preventsuch humiliation, the MIA adopted the CORE technique of thesociodrama. After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled segregation on

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buses unconstitutional, the prevention of violence between whiteand black riders remained a daunting task. To smooth thetransition, the boycott leaders rehearsed scenarios that theywould encounter on the buses. In the churches where MIA meetingswere held, King recalled, boycott leaders “lined up chairs infront of the altar to resemble a bus, with a driver’s seat outfront.” Then “actors” from the audience came forward to fill theroles of driver and white and black passengers, some pretendingto be “hostile” and others “courteous.” These “actors played outa scene of insult or violence,” and a general discussion amongthe performers and the audience followed. The participantsplayed their parts with the utmost conviction. “Sometimes,” Kingadmitted, “the person playing a white man put so much zeal intohis performance that he had to be gently reproved from thesidelines.” In other sessions, an actor playing a blackpassenger would return insults or blows; “whenever this happenedwe worked to channel his words and deeds in a nonviolentdirection.” The MIA sociodramas brought together the religiousand performative elements of nonviolence. In the sacred spaceof a church, black Montgomerians became “actors” practicing fora real-life show of Christian nonviolence before a worldaudience. Indeed, the tension in Gregg’s work between thereligious principle of nonviolence and its strategic spectaclesproved a great resource. Niebuhr had faulted Gregg for refusingto choose between moral idealism and political realism; King toorefused to choose. This ambiguity may have made the civil rightsmovement logically inconsistent, but it also gave that movementa unique potency. The gaps in Gregg’s theories let religious andsecular proponents of nonviolence coexist and allowed its moraland strategic elements to reinforce each other....Gregg’s relationship to the method of nonviolent direct actionwas, finally, a paradox. In his wide-ranging studies andinterpretations of Gandhi and India, he had aimed to set out thecharacteristics of a new civilization, not simply to write ahandbook for a new political technology. Gregg cared deeplyabout nonviolent action and racial justice, but his broader goalwas to create a countermodernity that would use modern knowledgeto foster a more humane, less artificial society....Whether he was seeking to mediate industrial disputes duringWorld War I, defending Gandhi’s plans for a decentralizedagrarian economy, or farming his way through World War II,Gregg’s life was a long search for spheres of authentic,meaningful work under conditions of modern alienation andregimentation....[In a footnote] Civil disobedience against the state, and theanarchist spirit of protest it represented, was also a departurefrom the Gandhian concept. Civil disobedience as proposed byThoreau and practiced by anarchists depended on individual acts.Mass action was suspect because participants might not share the

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same conviction or some might feel coerced into action.... InGandhian protest, civil disobedience could begin with individualacts, but only for the purpose of mobilizing mass protest.Otherwise, civil disobedience was an ego trip, not a moralaction.

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project “Voluntary Simplicity”

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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others,such as extensive quotations and reproductions ofimages, this “read-only” computer file contains a greatdeal of special work product of Austin Meredith,copyright 2014. Access to these interim materials willeventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup someof the costs of preparation. My hypercontext buttoninvention which, instead of creating a hypertext leapthrough hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems—allows for an utter alteration of the context withinwhich one is experiencing a specific content alreadybeing viewed, is claimed as proprietary to AustinMeredith — and therefore freely available for use byall. Limited permission to copy such files, or anymaterial from such files, must be obtained in advancein writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo”Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Pleasecontact the project at <Kouroo@kouroo.info>.

Prepared: October 31, 2014

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over untiltomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.”

– Remark by character “Garin Stevens”in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by ahuman. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested thatwe pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of theshoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What thesechronological lists are: they are research reports compiled byARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term theKouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such arequest for information we merely push a button.

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Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obviousdeficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored inthe contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then weneed to punch that button again and recompile the chronology —but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary“writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of thisoriginating contexture improve, and as the programming improves,and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whateverhas been needed in the creation of this facility, the entireoperation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminishedneed to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expectto achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring roboticresearch librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge.Place requests with <Kouroo@kouroo.info>. Arrgh.