Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1444

Carbon of a letter from Heath at 11 Waverly Place, New York City 3, to Roy Chapman Andrews, Pondwood Farm, Colebrook, Connecticut, regarding the latter’s book, Meet Your Ancestors.

April 15, 1956

Dear Dr. Andrews:

     I have been almost spellbound reading your Meet Your Ancestors — science lighted up with humor and romance.

     It is a book of “looking backward” towards less and less, humanly speaking, and this is inspiring, for it shows man, in the long view, always advancing, always gaining more power to kill and destroy. This, as your closing chapter shows, has made him his own greatest enemy. Primitively, he maintained his own by destroying other life; yet this, when carried far, destroys that on which his own depends. Like all crude creatures, primi­tive man tends to make his habitat less habitable and, without the emergence of some new and still higher and wider amenity than that of family or consanguinity, his hand is against all other men and all theirs against him.

     Yet I would like to find relief from the avowed pessimism of your closing paragraph. While men have none but family or tribal amenities they remain merely creatures, as they are products, of their environment. As they con­sume and destroy, nature drives them, like cattle, to seek what more they can devour or, if unable to consume or destroy it all, they either multiply themselves into an insufficiency or vegetate unprogressively in some enervating tropic safety and luxuriance. But when the transition is made into the general community mode of association and organization, transcending the tribal and biological, then men take on, even though slowly, some measure of the golden rule of mutual covenant, contract and exchange. Then there is nascent a social organism in which the members are functionally united not by accidental bonds of birth but by the social process of voluntary contract, consent, and service by inter-mutual and reciprocal ex­change.

     Under this relationship and so far as they have developed it, men so organized have become less and less creatures and more and more the creators of their environment — of the world — in which they live. Becoming actual creators, they practice the divinity that is essential in mankind alone and in no other kind. For man, in his social, as distinguished from his political, relationship, is the only form of life that has the power not only to destroy but continuously to create, and re-create its own environment, who can transform his world into the supply of his needs, the realization of his conceptions and plans, his aspirations and dreams.

     And in the practice and extension of this organic creative relationship and its therefore spiritual and divine technology, whether done empirically and haltingly as up to now or rationally and certainly, as science has extended men’s other powers, mankind, through its social and contractual and therefore non-political and non-coercive functioning, confers upon itself the means to an ever-expanding abundance and ever- extending term of its individual lives. Witness the more than doubling of the average life span under the enormously expanding contractual relationships that nineteenth century liberalism made possible to the Western World.

     Mankind, in its social and organic (non-coercive) form of life, despite all its political divagations, has already shown itself intrinsically potent to maintain itself in a world of its own, even though gradual, re­-creation, but indefinitely to broaden and immortalize its individual lives.

     Confessedly, all this too, like its opposite as cited in your closing, is only speculation. But it is a specu­lation logically based upon those facts as well as those structures which in anthropology and in history have shown their genetic dominance — their vital capacity and creative power. And, I submit, it is by their dominant and not their recessive characters that any form of organ­ization is to be rightly understood and its future appraised.

     Very truly and appreciatively yours,