Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1967

Letter to John Chamberlain

March 1, 1957

Original is missing.

Thanks a big lot for your foreword copy delivered on time. I appreciate it and like it very much — for what it is. But would it be smart to spark the land communists into any hot controversy at the present time?

In the first place, the most that any mere contro­versy can do is to employ some of the cunning powers of the mind to expose nothing but the intellectual emptiness of the other side; and no knowledge or understanding can be extended or enlarged in that way. To give an impres­sion that the book goes in for polemical pastime, however brilliantly, would be unfair to its true nature and purpose — to the only kind of value that it has.

It is true that, in a controversy, the communist arguments would be only wooden guns, unable to withstand real fire; but the general and sincere opposition so far is merely instinctive, practically unarmed, without any intellectual fire (a very small company excepted), and meanwhile the wooden ones are almost certain to prevail — so far as the public mind is concerned.

The book invites the reader to pursue (or peruse) an orderly setting out of much hitherto greatly neglected data concerning the human society, its organization and mode of operation, without taking account of any previous conceptions or beliefs. It is thus strictly objective to its subject matter and precisely the opposite from all that is critical or controversial — depending solely on its own rationality and esthetic appeal. If in doing this it gives grounds for opposition to its predecessors in the field, that was not its intended purpose and can be only incidental to it. The purpose here is to set out wherein the true and practical is true; not to identify wherein the false is false. It seems that its first impression on the prospective reader should be that it offers substance, which it does, rather than controversy, which it does not. What do you think about this?