Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1649

Carbon of a letter ostensibly, it would seem, by someone other than Heath, on reading the review in question, to Wayne C. Rohrer, Assistant Professor,

Department of Sociology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD. (Composed in Spencer MacCallum’s absence either at the University of Washington or Chicago.)

November 4, 1957

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Dr. Rohrer:

     My thanks to you for copy of your review of Citadel, Market and Altar for the Journal of Social Studies.

     The author appreciates the reviewer’s recognition of his wide generalization which is of course prere­quisite to any meaningful understanding of particular data in any field. He examines and reports, however, only upon a specific subject-matter, namely, that inter­acting among men wherein lies the distinctive and unique functioning of their social organization — whence  arises its creative (and thereby spiritual) powers to transform environment, both natural and social, in the image of their common and their individual desires and dreams.

     His analysis of this interfunctioning — of his specific subject-matter — rests on the same three measurable as­pects of objective reality, mass, motion and time, that underlie all rational (scientific) analysis of objective events. His method is not new; the only novelty is in his employment of it in his examination of the basic social phenomena as the key to a rational technology in the social the same as in the natural realm.

     Any analysis of this specific subject-matter — this voluntary interfunctioning among men — automatically includes all the substance of any “researches and comments” that are similarly based. And it necessarily excludes all that is not relevant to this, whether or not the author is ignorant of the same. His concern is with the functioning itself — a rational understand­ing of its modus operandi and thereby the key to a wider extension of the social realm.

     The author proposes no system of his own; only a greater understanding and thereby a spontaneous wider extension of the process that serves and preserves and does not destroy — of the system that is ever in our midst, however little it be seen and distinguished from its negative and reverse.

     As to specific recommendations for application, the entire Part II of Citadel, Market and Altar is a much detailed recommendation to the owners of public communities that they unify their ownership in corpor­ate or similar form and thereby supply their inhabitants with community services to the great profit of them­selves and of all concerned, the same as the owners of lesser community corporations / — such as hotels, shopping centers and all other multi-tenant income properties — / prosper themselves and all their inhabitants whom they unitedly and yet non-coercively serve.

     The extension in practice of any sound principle, once it is understood, is automatic, so far as all parties are mutually and progressively served. Its adequacy in practice can be only pro tanto, commensurate with the extent to which it is applied. Any expression of doubts on this score must be premised on some assump­tion of the principle being inadequately or insufficiently applied. Such objection of course has reference to some continuation of its contrary and has no proper reference to the sound principle itself.

     The writer greatly appreciates your perceptive reference to The Altar as the non-necessitous field of action in which alone the potential divinity of man can fully bloom and come into its own.

Sincerely yours,

SH/ams