Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2010

F.A. Harper, of the Institute for Humane Studies, and George Resch interviewing Spencer Heath about his intellectual development, by whom he was influenced, and so forth, in the living room of Heath’s apartment #11C, 11 Waverly Place, New York City. Spencer Heath MacCallum was present and taped and much later transcribed the interview. Note that in the transcription, wherever Heath stressed a word or syllable is indicated by Italics. The opening of the interview was lost, including the date, which may have been about 1955.

 

/Include here, as additional and important biographical material, Item 2133. I intend to edit all of this as an article entitled, “A Visit with Spencer Heath./

 

… Yes, I’m inclined to think that’s so. If we look through the history of thought and we find emergence of new broad ideas that take possession of the world from time to time, we don’t find them originating in any society or legislative body or any committee. We find some one man — or possibly one who is the fountainhead of that. — The theme of Ayn Rand’s greatest book, I think. So I look back, myself, I was born with a predilection for non-violence — or rather a predilection for self-realization; I don’t like the non part of anything. And I like to see people practice their lives creatively and under the impulse of their own design for living, of their own ideal of what constitutes the good life or the means of attaining it.

So my first recollection in this field of libertarian thought is of a magazine called THE YOUTH’S COMPANION that I read when I was a boy, and I read many adventure stories in it — suitable for engaging the attention of adolescents. A good deal of it was about the moonshiners in Tennessee and West Virginia who were running their stills up in the moun­tains. I read these with great interest and rabidity. In the exciting part of any tale I always got on edge, you know; I could hardly sit still. I never felt so good as when the “Revenuer bit the dust!” That was the grandest part of the whole story. /Chuckling/

I didn’t get this from anything in my environment. I never heard any discussion of moonshining or government or liberty or anything like that. My three uncles were on dairy farms, and my mother was the postmistress. My aunt was a poet, and a very artistic temperament she had, among other things, and I did hear something about her emotional attitude towards public affairs. They were always very heated and very dynamic /chuckling/. But she never taught me anything about liberty or anything of that kind. Just the same, I gloated when the Revenuer bit the dust. That’s my earliest recollection of my libertarian tendencies.

So with that predisposition as I advanced in wisdom and in stature /chuckling/, I came to look upon things as either confining and restricting and holding you down, or as giving you scope to take your wings and fly..to go up. That may have something to do with my early interest in aviation /chuckle/. My economic status was about as low as could be had, throughout my whole childhood and adolescence. I used to have for most of my young life, I had held before me marvelous alternatives. I either had to be a good boy, and go to the poorhouse, or be a bad boy and go to the reform school /chuckling/. /interruption of the tape/

So the imaginative scope wasn’t terribly wide. Nevertheless, I had dreamed of people looking at the sun, rather than peering into caves. It seemed as though there ought to be some way out of the gloom. So as I was casting about to find some way out of the gloom, I ran across a very beautiful picture, so it seemed at first, of a Utopian life. It was called Looking Backward — and it had great fascination for me, so much so that I went around telling people about it. Pretty soon I found that my story didn’t hold out; certain questions arose in my own mind. Somehow the ghost of that Revenuer was working around in that book! — and I would like to see him bite the dust! /chuckling/ So that brought me in contact with the Henry George type of land communists. I say Henry George type, because they were not avowed communists; they didn’t realize that what they called land reform would actually turn us into a totalitarian community. They meant well, and moreover, they were in favor of free trade — not only free trade in general, but they were specifi­cally in favor of free trade in liquor, in spirits, as I was. /chuckling/ Henry George was definitely opposed to any restrictions on the liquor trade, as you know. That appealed to me very much. The only trade he wanted to oppose was trading in land. So I thought he was a pretty good guy, and I got onto his wagon, and I spent a lot of thought reading and studying and contributing my services. I became for a couple of years the recording secretary of the Chicago Single Tax Club and was very enthusiastic about the whole matter.

QUESTION:  “About what date was this?”

Just the turn of the century, when I was 24 years old. I meant to say something about that; I’ll try to do it a moment later. About my age. And so I was very much prepossessed and enthusiastic about it, until I began to ask about this again. And these questions were not as easy to answer as the questions were about Bellamy’s Looking Backward. It took me years and years and years. I had to entertain a kind of a void in my mind. Suppose we got this single tax theory, and the politicians took over the administration of our community resources and all. What shape would it take, and how would it work out, and so on. And the answers were vague for most of the time. Every time I went up .. it came to a blind alley. I couldn’t find any way out. But early one morning about 1930, I woke up with a picture in my mind, remembering what Henry George had said about millionaires perhaps coming to New York City and taking over the entire expenses of the City and operating it — that then there wouldn’t have to be any taxation. And people could be free. And I thought that was a very pretty picture, if somebody could do that for them. Well now these people who collect the rent, suppose they would .. oh no, George pointed out that if they did that, that the value of living in New York City would go skying, and rents would rise, and the wicked landlord would make off with the whole loot! /Chuckling/ All the benefit would accrue to him — and more, as Henry George puts it. So that didn’t sound sensible. How could it be that benefiting the people like that would only benefit a single class, the land owners. It occurred to me suddenly that, why don’t these land owners do that for themselves? Why don’t they take on the expenses of running the city? The landlord in a hotel does /chuckling/, and he gets rich that way. Maybe these land owners in New York, all they need to do would be to get together and run this city, and run it as well as these millionaires presumably would do — for a profit for the benefit of their customers — and we’d have the Utopia right now — one that would be a self-sustaining Utopia and wouldn’t depend on anybody’s humanitarian instincts, /chuckling/ and good intentions, and generosity, and all that sort of thing. No “do-gooder” complex about it. And I got up out of bed and got pencil and paper, saying to myself that this thought was too important for me to go to sleep over and perhaps forget it again. /chuckling/ I^’ve got to put it down in black and white. /chuckling/ And I think that was the first discovery I made that gave me any satisfaction, any great satisfaction, in the realm of the social activities, the social organization.

 

/QUESTION: That was 1930, about?/

It could have been as late as ’32. From somewhere between ^‘30 and ^‘32.

From that time on, I was called by Oscar Geiger to assist him in the Henry George School of Social Science. I came up from Baltimore, where I lived, to New York, and I assisted him, and commuted a little bit. I found that difficult and awkward, and finally I took an apartment up here, in order to be near the School. Geiger welcomed my somewhat … desirability in the School, from the fact that the figures showed that my classes, about the third session, would be about 40 left out of 60, instead of 20. /chuckling/ And although Geiger asked me not to discuss certain topics — leave that part to him — that is, the topics in which I appraised the opportunities of the land owners and how much they could do for other people and for themselves, and he asked me to leave off on that and let him handle that part of the book, which I did so far as was possible, and so Oscar and I got along very nicely. There were things about my way of teaching that he liked very much, and of course there was something screwy about me /probably an old pun referring back to his early work on airplane propellers/ but it was worth it even at that! /chuckling/ Especially since I took the habit of telling about a banker in Baltimore who had been of great assistance to me, and who had various ideas about economics and land ownership and that sort of thing, and whose arguments I was unable to resist! /chuckling/ So I put my own ideas in the mouth of my banker friend in Baltimore, and worked that for awhile among the Henry Georgists, until somebody was clever enough or I was clumsy enough to expose that it was a kind of hoax on my part. /chuckling/ I didn’t want to speak with my own authority. This was very wonder­ful, and he had many wise ideas, in many ways. He was wise enough to cancel my requirement for collateral on one occa­sion when I was in default and technically I was an embezzler. And I rushed to him to show him the situation before somebody else told him about it, and he looked at me quizzically, and he said, “Well what do you say if we don’t bother about collateral anymore, anyhow. Credit’s mostly personal, you know,” he said. So he seemed a wise man! (chuckle) And as tribute to his wisdom like that, I like to credit him with a good deal, the way Plato credited Socrates with a lot of things that more likely belonged to Plato than it did to Socrates! /chuckling/ At least, they sounded like it.

So then I spent some time trying to persuade my colleagues in the Henry George School that there was a dif­ferent way of looking at this thing, a non-political way — that we had people who functioned in the market place and did not function in the citadel — in the city hall — and who in the market place always had to serve other persons in order to get a revenue, instead of rule other persons in order to take a revenue away from them. And so I tried to ingratiate myself and the landlords’ capacity with my associates, the other teachers on the faculty and the Trustees of the Henry George School, and I had a great many exciting discussions with them. But the upshot of it was, that I got a great many compliments for my urbanity and my forbearance_, in not getting angry when other people did, /chuckling/ and that’s about as far as I got. On one of these occasions, when I had some of the elder members present, I told them about an operation that I had had. I’d had a mastoid infection, and I’d had to have my skull opened up and some of the bone taken out of my head. I said that before that, I was very much confused in many ideas; I confused the social technique of the market place with the political technique of city hall and so on. I had many confusions. And I pointed to some of the, what I thought were confusions in the Henry George philosophy, and said that I had to have something done, something pretty drastic done; so I went to the hospital and had an operation — had a good deal of bone taken out. I said I can show you the place where it was, if you want to see /chuckling/ — and that since then, I said that I’d had much clearer ideas /chuckling/. For my age, of course you have to be .. something drastic has to be done to you when you get to be past 50 or 60 years old, in order to really get any clear ideas. So I had something drastically done to me, and since that time, I felt as though I ought to communicate the joy I had in seeing things more clearly than I had ever done before. And that’s why I want you folks to listen to me. Now don’t mistake me and think I would recommend a surgical operation on your heads in the same way, because once is enough. And now l can communicate to you the things I was able to discover! /chuckling/

So I went on and off humorously that way with them, and always without getting angry, especially when the other fellow got angry. The result of it all was that, I was eventually eased out. I had persons planted in my classrooms to find out how unorthodox I was and to report to the Trustees, and things of that sort, and finally I wasn’t invited to come back. Chodorov was there, and …

HARPER:  “When you were invited to go there for these lectures, was /it/ after you had acquired this .. you had solved the dilemma you thought he was in, even before you were invited to lecture at the School. Is that right?”

That’s true. Yes. I meant to say that Oscar Geiger appreciated my activity at the School very very highly, and just the spring before he died — I think he died in the late summer — he had me go up to the top floor of the building and showed me where we were going to have our desks, and the library, and his desk and my desk and all, and he was going to take one branch of the work and I was going to take some other part, and we were going to have some wonderful times. And I went down to Virginia for a vacation that summer, and I wrote quite a lot about this. I’ve forgotten just what it was, but it was lent to some of the folks in the School, and it was lost. Nobody could ever discover the manuscript again /chuckling/. So when I finally broke with the School and would go back there, I still conducted some writing — I’d got a little inertia. Ideas had come to me through the contact, or the clash of different opinions.

 

HARPER:  “When was it you left the School?”

Oh, about three and a half years after it started — I forget now. Without quite so much stimulation, I wasn’t called so much to go out to speak to different colleges or business men’s groups and things like that, which I had done to some small extent before, always with a great exhilaration and with a great deal of warmth of reception, because — I say because; I^’m vain enough to say because — I gave them the constructive side of land ownership, and its possibilities, and what it held in the future for us. And that was very, very well received, sometimes with smart contrast in their reaction, in what they told me about the negative side of things that they had been hearing before from the Manhattan Single Tax Club. /chuckle/

HARPER:  “Did you have some question, Spencer, you were going to ask here about a minute ago, before it gets too far down the road?”

 

MACCALLUM:  I was going to ask if the Georgists were the only people at this time that were pretty much going down the road of classical liberalism, with the exception of course of land. Weren’t there other pockets or schools of people who also had the idea of freedom?”

HARPER:  “Say, from way back there when you started, about the turn of the century, were there any other groups …”

When I got a belly full of Bellamy?

HARPER:  “Yes, after that, say, between there and 1930. Were you conscious of any individuals or groups of individuals that were pursuing any other line of leadership of thought in …”

I heard a few individuals speak against socialism emotionally, not analytically.

 

HARPER: “Who were some of those? Do you remember some outstanding ones?”

Well, there was a lady named Jennie Thompson, who was a friend of my aunt’s. And, oh yes, a man named … well, there’s private individuals, government employes, who had a skeptical attitude towards the socialism stuff.

HARPER: “There were none of them that you remember that since

became famous or developed conspicuous leadership in later years,

that started way back then?”

No, there was Broadus Mitchell, a socialist then, and he still is — he was very cordial with me, I addressed his classes quite a number of times, and made fun of him before his class and he took it. /Chuckling/ He’s the only professional man I can think of now. See, I saw Dr. Walsh at the Georgetown University on one of those occasions to go out and talk, and made a fine anti-communist hit, there, and was invited cordially to come back, first opportunity, to talk some more to them. But when I went back, they looked up my record and found that I was sent by the Manhattan Single Tax Club, and they didn’t have any time to listen to me any more. /Chuckling/ That was rather a bad record. But the only person I heard say anything against the socialistic point of view, so far as I can recall, were unprofessional people, and people who just exhibited a prejudice against socialism.

HARPER:  “Were they mostly business people, business executives, or …”

No. So far as I remember, no business executive ever did enough thinking to object.

MACCALLUM:  “What kind of people were they, then?”

Well, sort of muck-rakers. They were going on like moles underground, grubbing away, to make a competence, doing the Lord’s work and not knowing it. /chuckling/

HARPER:  “Were they professional speakers, people who tried to make a living giving speeches around, or what …”

MACCALLUM:  “How did they make their livelihood, some of them?”

In my years between 15 and 20, I attended innumerable

lectures, mostly free lectures, in Washington D.C., on all kinds of subjects, spiritualism, and theosophy, and sometimes science, and travelogues, and metaphysics, and yes, and the later part of that period I sat at the feet of some Oriental bigwigs dressed in turbans and colored gowns who taught mainly metaphysics of the East — how to live the good life and the spiritual life a la Mahatma — and I paid them good money to take their course of lessons and so on. Yes, and we had socialist speakers, I almost remember the names of one or two of them, who came from different places on the circuit to preach socialism — under usually a different name, like the Union for Practical Progress, like these fellow-traveler movements that they have now. And oh yes, I got acquainted with a very wonderful lady, a sculptress, who was a friend of Ana Besant and who entertained Ana Besant in her home all draped in white full of Oriental symbolisms and things like that. And Cora L.V. Richmond, who was a cross between a spiritualist and a theosophist. And I listened to their lectures, read their books, and had occasional conversations on topics of broad interest like that. But I never came across anybody who could talk turkey.

HARPER:  “In that whole period, were there any books …”

In religion? Well, I became a Monist, a reader of Dr. Paul Carus in his magazine called The Monist, published in Chicago, an anti-Trinitarian, and I became a great deal of a Herbert Spencer, except I couldn’t swallow his knowing so much about the unknowable. I had ranged around all the things that were being talked about. And now here’s where I want to say something about two periods. I lived in two worlds. I spent 24 years of my life — 25 years, to be exact, lacking three days — in the 19th century. And during all this time I knew that things were not right with the world. I knew they weren’t any too good in my world /chuckling/— but there wasn’t anything but light in the future. Wars were gone by, we weren’t going to have wars any more, we were scrapping the battle ships and so on. God was in His heaven, all was right with the world. Only thing, we hadn’t just eventuated enough; we were coming out of everything, and everybody felt great hope and confidence in the future. Everything was

written, that I read. The brave new world, and oh yes, Minot

Savage, with the brave new woman or something in the brave new world when she got the vote. And everything was on the up and up. And so I spent 25 years, just a quarter of a century, in that kind of environment. When I crossed that, I commenced to read Edwin Markham^’s “Man with the Hoe” — the first poem that I ever could take any interest in, because my taste for poetry had been ruined in high school. /Chuckling/ And so between high school and that year, 1900 I think it was it was published, I couldn’t read a poem through. It revolted me. /chuckling/ Although I had learned a few things that had been dinned into me, I still remember them, from Longfellow and a few simple things like that, which I could stomach. But any poetry that took any length of time to read was too much. Well I began to take an interest in poetry, and especially in this negative poem of Markham’s, and got quite excited about it, and then came — that was in 1900 — in 1898, when was it they had the Spanish-American War? There the world commenced to be having some more wars, but we only thought that was an episode; that would be passing before very long, and everybody was so confident of the future that nobody felt that they had to make any shelters for bombs or refugees or anything like that. We felt a sense of biological security, and our poetry, and our plays, our literature, all reflected that confidence in the future. So I think perhaps I entered the 20th century with a less neurotic tendency than a great many people would have, oh, 25 years afterwards. The next 25 years was full somewhat of “excursions and alarums,” but up to that time the sense of security had been so great that people didn’t have ulcers as much as they had later. We had something that they called dyspepsia, but you take a few pills and there wasn’t anything too much about it. They didn’t have the ulcers. You see, the insecurity hadn’t caused so much anxiety in the race that nature had to step in and do something about it.

 

More notably, nature had suspended the reproductive process, because we were so confident of our future that it wasn’t necessary to multiply like flies in order that a few might survive. And so nature proved what was her wisdom, by cutting down the reproductivity and letting our energies go into the, what we might call the higher forms, more abstract forms of life, into the arts and sciences and so on. So we had a great development of science in the first quarter of the 20th century, notably in physics — and a real development, too. So then, the great hue and cry and the great anxiety was “race suicide.” We were not having enough babies. So the Roosevelt the First got up in arms about it, and the men in the pulpits, and the professors and all, they wrote their books and they shouted the alarm everywhere, that people who are reasonably well off have got to have more children. /chuckling/ There was just as much talk .. as I remember it, it seems to me it was more, agitation for more babies then than there is for less babies now. /chuckling/ Which of course is due to the fact that in this third quarter, of the 20^th century, we’re all scared out of our shoes. And so like any dumb animals, why, our fears through our nervous system prompt our reproductive faculties, and we’re just manufacturing babies as fast as we can and hope that there will be such a large amount of them that a few will survive. /chuckling/

                              

HARPER:  “That’s a strange thing, isn’t it, that there does seem to be a mischievous response in the birth rate to these conditions which — if you think of an individual, not any individual you know, it doesn’t seem to be a fairly conscious or reasoned response; it seems to work, however. I mean, in this evidence of the response of the birth rate to the uncertainties and so on, whoever sits down in the living room and discusses this all out, of an evening, before the conception …

MACCALLUM: “With his wife ..”

HARPER:  “Yes, and says, well it looks as if something is going to happen to the world unless we have the sixth child instead of the fifth. It’s nothing of that sort. But it still seems to come out in the birth rate.”

Rarely premeditated. And when Spencer^’s mother wanted

another child, she just felt that way. She had no reasoning about it, she didn’t say the world needs more children or less children or anything of the kind; she said, “I just want another child.” I said, “Well, go to it.” So I happened to be his economic progenitor. /chuckling/

 

HARPER:  “Were there any other pieces of literature, articles, books, or so on that you recall that had a profound influence on you in roughly this period we’re talking about, any part of this period, up to the 1930 or ’32 or ‘35 period?”

When I was 10 and 12 years old, along there, I was given The Story of the Gospel, a garbled account of the New Testament, after reading which I checked up in the New Testament itself and was disgusted. They then gave me another book, much larger, called The Story of the Bible, which gave the Old Testament as well. I read that through, painfully and slowly because reading wasn’t any too easy for me at that early age. I read it through thoughtfully, then I looked into the Bible. I didn’t have to go through the whole Old Testament to find out that it was also garbled. So I said, in effect, “To hell with all this stuff.” /chuckling/ “And if this thing that they call God is anything like what they describe Him to be, well, to hell with Him too.” /chuckling/ And so I constituted myself an atheist for a brief period, during which time I concluded that there were only … there/was a lot of evangelism goings on, and I concluded that the only people who didn’t believe in the plan of salvation and the proper escapement from hell — to be sure we hadn’t invented the bomb at that time — were the people who … there were only three of us, and that was Robert J. Ingersoll, one or two of whose lectures I heard — I was reading atheistic stuff; I read Tom Paine, of course, and his supposed atheism which wasn’t anything but Deism, /chuckle/ and … /pause/

HARPER:  “You were raised in a traditional religious-community environment …”

Yes, with experience meetings and salvation meetings, you know, evangelist — save-your-soul, hit-the-sawdust-trail. And so I concluded on that whole matter, that there were only three people in the world who didn’t believe in this plan of salvation through vicarious atonement and so on, namely Robert J. Ingersoll, His Satanic Majesty, and myself. We were the three that held out against all the popular belief. /chuckling/ Of course, it caused me a lot of heart searchings, and a lot of anxiety, too; I didn’t like the idea of burning in hell. But somehow I couldn’t quite take it, and so I lined up with the devil and Ingersoll. /chuckling/ And I say, I became a Monist. It was not until 30 years or so afterwards, that I discovered through the progress that had been made in physical science, that physical science itself was trinitarian — and that there was a tremendous analogy between the two. The concept of the Trinity, gotten at intuitively by the early bishops and the like — when they weren’t butchering one another. /chuckling/ As somebody said, Kennedy said, weren’t they going to do something in the Congo? And somebody else, I think it was Goldwater, said, “when they stop eating each other.” /chuckling/ So, a marve­lous correspondence between that and what I was learning from the new physics, that was just about ripening in 1930 and hadn’t gone off on its wild escapades into mathematical conceptions unrelated to sensory experience. /chuckle/

So I then turned my attention, as I had done at the very beginning of the century, to Henry George. I had become recording secretary for the Chicago Single Tax Club in the year 1900, and saw many debates and discussions there. Of course, I had read Bellamy’s Looking Backward with great interest, and then I read Henry George’s Progress and Poverty with great relief — because here was an alternative now; we didn’t have to go Bellamy-wise. The politicians, once they got their hand on the rent, were going to become evangels of light and leading, /chuckling/ and give us a Utopian world.

HARPER?  “Did you know Henry George personally?”

No. I knew many of his people who did know him personally, but I didn’t contact him personally. So my reading was in Henry George. Well then it took me the best part of 30 years to outgrow that. And I didn’t outgrow it by giving up anything, but by getting some new knowledge, some new point of view, a new understanding of things more penetrating, more in accordance with history and more positive, instead of crying down the evil things in the world, rather seeking the light, and instead of wallowing in problems, in rather trying to embrace at least our intellectual if not our economic opportunities. And I conceived that the greatest economic opportunity that ever happened in the world was the economic opportunity lying in front of land owners to turn their speculative trade into administrating business for income and profit, and thereby build the great values of the world. And so that he who becomes the greatest among you, would be so by becoming the servants of all.

HARPER:  “Did you sense a feeling of great indebtedness to the ideas of Henry George in other ways that you retain, like the exchange analysis and all of that, that was very important, do you feel, in your thought development at that time?”

Yes. I felt, and still feel, profoundly grateful to Henry George. We see things through a glass darkly, but you know, you don’t see at all if you don’t have light — even darkly. Henry George brought us a whole flood of light. Rather he highlighted the glimmerings that his predecessors had had. Many persons had seen dimly the relation between land owning and performing of municipal services. A man named Chalmers, a Reverend Hugh Chalmers, I think was his name, in Scotland, /not Thomas Spence?/ had written a book urging the landlords to take over the entire operation of the government at their own expense — as John Locke had urged the landlords at the time of Wal ________ when they were refinancing the 30 Years War. And John Locke had urged the House of Lords people to take on the expenses of the government — not put it on trade, not put the bonds that had to be supported by taxation on trade — telling them that their lords would find that if they saved pence out of the one pocket by not paying the expenses of government, they would find themselves worse off by pounds at the end of the year out of the other pocket! /chuckling/ They were killing their own land values by imposing on trade, which is the source of rent. By taxing trade. Now these glimmerings had been around, and especially the idea that there was something healthy and normal about rent being used for public purposes — to support the necessary common services and costs, and so on. And George himself played that up at great extent, great elaboration, showing how nature pro­vided this natural fund, as she provided milk for the new-born babe and all that, and all that great prevision in advance, that rent was the normal thing and taxation was abnormal — going so far in his case as to say that the ingenuity of statesmen has been exhausted in devising schemes of taxation to “suck the life-blood of labor and capital as the vampire bat is said to suck the life-blood of its victims.” He characterized and stigmatized taxation in such language as that. And yet he proposed to use that very same instrument of taxation to do God’s will on earth./chuckling/ So he had gone so far, though, as to elaborate more convincingly than anyone I’d ever read before, that nature had provided the remedy. All we had to know was how to take it. How to administer it. The administration would have to come by the land owners themselves, and not by somebody elected by the mass electorate. /chuckle/ Also, we owe a great deal to Henry George for his idealism. He assumed that if we could have this coercive administration of the rent in cities and other communities, that we would have a great proliferation of the arts and a great purification of religion, and a great cultural advance on all lines, and he played it up beautifully and he ascribed that all to what he called liberty, and he wrote in the back part of that book, Progress & Poverty, a paean, as some have called it, to liberty — a beautiful, rather grandiose literary tribute, with historical references, to liberty. So we owe it to him that he put his finger on the very key to social redemption, the proper use of the rent of land — but not how to use it — that it was there, and that we had to use it in a proper way, and he thought the proper way was using it politically, instead of economically and socially. So I was greatly inspired. Next to Emerson, I think Henry George — during that period at any rate — inspired me more than anybody else.

HARPER:  “Emerson was …”

Oh he was my demi-god, from the time I first was able to read him.

 

HARPER:  “When did you discover him? In what period was
that that he strongly influenced your _________  ?”

Oh, I would say beginning about fourteen, or something

like that. He had tremendous influence on me. I made notes and memorized some of the stuff that he said and carried notes of his excerpts in my pocket around and told them to people. But next to him, Henry George, through his idealism, captured my imagination, with the belief for a long time that he had the answer to how to practice that idealism. Then came Santayana, more in the philosophy .. see in my, between the ages of , say, 18 and 24, something like that, I had very little employment. It was very hard times, and jobs almost impossible to get, and I spent a good deal of time reading the Encyclopedia Britannica, Herbert Spencer and Josiah Royce and Dr. McCosh, and the side, the current side, and the William James, and Henry James, scientists of that day, and Ruskin and Carlyle, of course, and Herbert Spencer and all that, and…

HARPER:  “The tragedy of your learning and practicing self-education was one of the tragic by-products of the depression of the 90s, then.”

 

Yes. You see, I never went to college, except law college. I never went beyond the high school — and it was a three-year term at that.

 

RESCH:  “These were books that you got through public libraries, or …”

Yes.

 

RESCH:  “.. or cheap volumes you …”

 

They didn’t have much cheap volumes, but you could buy /compared/ to today, you could buy classical books, full size books well bound in cloth, for 50 cents apiece. Like Kingsley’s novels, like Hypatia — that was another book that impressed me profoundly. I read that when I was about, oh about 25 again, just about that time, his philosophic novel, an apology for Christianity in contrast with the neo-Platonism of Hypatia’s day. It was a thrilling book. And I’d recommend it to anybody who wants to see the ideas expressed. But whereas Kingsley — Bishop Kingsley as he was, you know — he wrote it as an apology for Christianity to show the superiority of Christianity above the paganism that Hypatia so beautifully represented — and it worked good the other way; /laughing/ it converted me to Hypatia’s neo-Platonism. He overshot the mark in my case! Then Mrs. Humphrey Ward was writing novels, and George Eliot. One of the greatest philosophic novels I know of was her Romula. A tremendous thing. So you see, science was just then catching up, or rather, giving a lot of trouble to theology, and a great many young curates were terribly torn — yielding to the blandishments of science pulling them away from their dogmatic formulations and getting into trouble with their bishops and their other authori­ties. And so there was a great deal of soul-searching and a great deal of agonizing during that period. Mrs. Humphrey Ward wrote a series of novels on that theme, the terrible psychological dilemma of the sincere, earnest, religious person who was drawn towards scientific conceptions and yet who couldn’t relinquish, without great hazard, his theological dogmas. Of course, I read fairly widely in all that time, and I had conceived that I wanted to read all the sciences. And so after I had had a bit of a career chiefly as draftsman, in the Middle West, and went back about 1901 or ’02 to Washington where I had been brought up, and having by that time one child and not long after that a couple more, I conceived that I should study law, because it looked to me as though I could get through with that and get to practice and making some money, more readily than I could become a scientist or anything — it would take less long period of training — so I entered a law school in time to become a member of the bar in 1906. That means about six years before; it must have been close around the turn of the century I left Chicago and went down there. And before doing that, I ordered a set of books, which was the latest thing by Lord Kelvin and the men who were the top performers in the scientific world at that time and had discovered the electron. I had a smallish library that I had allowed to be sent to me for inspection, and would cost quite a lot of money it seemed to me at the time — a little bit of money was a lot then. Then I decided to study law. That was the most practical thing to do, although I was only getting 1200 dollars a year and had a family of five counting myself. As soon as I made up my mind to study law, I called the book agent when he came around and told him that I was sorry, but I had changed my whole outlook and I knew I couldn’t read law if I had those science books in the house. /chuckling/ So I had to send them back. It was a good many years before I was able to gratify my taste in that field, during which time it took a lot of application to qualify for membership in the bar and to practice it for some years. My practice led me back into engineering work, though, because I got engineering clients, notably the Lake father and son who were eminent in the submarine field at that time, and Emile Berliner who was eminent in the telephone field and in the field of the flat disk record and become a millionaire both times, a multi-millionaire, and I took them on as clients and had that association.

MACCALLUM: “You were president of the debating society when you were in Law School ..”

Just one year, yes.

MACCALLUM: “Did you draw any analogy or parallels between parliamentary procedure and the organization of society?”

No, I don’t think I did. I didn’t see far enough at the time. I took a practical interest in parliamentary law because the boys were pretty keen, you know, to fight each other down in the meeting, parliamentary procedures, and I found that I was fumbling Roberts’ Rules of Order and Cushing’s Rules of Order about a good half the time I was trying to preside, and having an awful time to unravel the stuff. And so finally I made a diagram. I’d been a draftsman, you know, an engineering draftsman, and made tables of many kinds. I made a table of parliamentary law from which I could draw out instantly the answer to any question of procedure. I say of procedure, only. There are other things about organization and so on of parliamentary bodies and things of that sort. When it came to the active procedure going on at a meeting, where they make motions and argue for and against them and so on, I made a table which was exceedingly comprehensive, and I believe to this day that it answers within seconds any question of procedure that can arise in a parliamentary body. It was published by a John Byrne and Company, from whom I bought my law books, and it was commended by a good many people at the time, and especially by Chairman Jenkins of the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives. I had some copies of it made and used it very effectively, and at different times since then I have given it or loaned it to people who needed something of that kind. But I must say that from the time I became an attorney — I’d left the Law School and didn’t need this — it was seldom that I came into any organization where they used strict parliamentary procedure. They kind of go as you please, you know, and everybody talk at once and nobody talk at all, or the stuffiest stuffed shirt wants to take over; /chuckling/ and so for most of the time until the communists commenced to get conspicuous, and with their rather rigid adherence to those laws, to their own purposes, not many people took any interest in it. But now I’ve noticed a revival of interest. If people have got anything that will facilitate the conduct of a meeting, they like to know about it. So I’ve been giving out some copies of that lately, especially out in California, where they seem to appreciate it very much.

 

MACCALLUM: “But it didn’t advance your thinking about voluntary organization?”

No. From 1900, when I was in the Chicago Single Tax Club, until about 1930, half of that time, say fifteen years of that time, I was an advocate of the Single Tax. But the other fifteen I was a skeptic, not letting go of the single tax, because I didn’t know anything else to grab hold of, but becoming more and more skeptical about it all the time. It was in that period of skepticism that I commenced to read the physical sciences. Well, I commenced to read them about the late ’20 s. And it was there that I discovered something about the unity of nature — that it’s a Trinitarian unity. And I discovered that when you understand any one thing in nature, you in principle under­stand all. That this is a cosmos, and not a chaos. If it were, if you couldn’t understand things, and if there were not a logical consistency between this thing in nature and that other thing in nature, then it wouldn’t be anything but a chaos. I began to grasp the idea of the unity of principle running through the whole universe. And then I began to think that if I could understand things in little, the smallest, most detailed, minute manifestations, the most close to my physical senses, the more thoroughly I could understand the simplest things, that then I’d get the key to the great proliferation of details in complexities. So I followed that principle, and for a time — let me see, just after 1912, this was — I formulated a principle about legislation. I hadn’t arrived at the idea that legislation was always injurious, although I had read in Buckle how the only virtue of parliaments consisted in the undoing of the acts of their predecessors. I hadn’t quite realized how true that was. So I began to, as I say, to study the thing in detail, in any field, thinking whatever knowledge I gain here is going to give me a key to knowledge in some other field. And I began to use analogies a great deal. I became a convert to the process of analogy, slowly realizing what few people have realized as yet, that all our scientific and natural science development has been by analogy — finding something that fits on to the grow­ing edge of knowledge. If it fits on, it’s an analogy. And where it breaks down, that’s its glory; because then you find you’ve entered a new field, in unity, integrated with the old field. The analogy breaks down. /chuckling/

And so whatever I have read, I’ve read the natural sciences very broadly, if not deeply — I’d better say it the other way around, deeply if not broadly — I always read to the philosophic part of it most. The details, and the carrying out, and that sort of thing were always secondary with me. I didn’t have that opportunity until 1929 came along and I had an opportunity of disposing of all my engineering works which I was engaged in then. I had moved out of the practice of law back into aeronautical engineering and manufacturing, specializing in propellers, and I had an opportunity of liquidating all that in late 1929, a very propitious time to do it. And so from 1930 on, after I had a couple of years with the Bendix Company as a research engineer and did some traveling and so on, I found myself with some funds on hand and opportunity to have leisure, and I commenced to play with horticulture.

I got me 110 acres of land outside Baltimore towards Washington, ten miles out, and commenced to landscape the whole thing. First I tried to farm it, but my farming turned out to be agriculturism, because I found out, which I’ve learned less poignantly since then, that the farmer is a man who makes his money in the country and spends it in the city, but when you make your money in the city and spend it in the country, then you’re an agriculturist. I found I was an agriculturist, and so I abandoned all these agricultural activities, and resisted the efforts of the New Dealers to pay me for not having anything in my fields, and after pro­pagating a whole lot of fine specimens and so on, began to landscape the whole thing for just a little fun — like making a painting on the ground you know, like instead of on a canvas, going to make a beautiful painting on 110 acres of terra firma instead of fabric. But that was broken up by a power company getting a couple of big, ungainly steel towers over me. But not until after I had done a lot of propagating and some partial landscaping, had a lot of fun with it and sending a couple of young people to the University nearby to study landscape gardening. So they brought home their botany books, and their chemistry books and their biology books and all that sort of thing, and I read them with them. And I didn’t stop. Now I had an opportunity to do what I had started to do before I studied law — what I wanted to do. So I didn’t stop until I’d run through .. I’d got a smattering of the general principles, at least, of all the sciences I knew anything about, had heard about at all. And I had the advice of some of the professors at the University in matters I wanted to discuss with them, and with these two young people, we had a good deal of talk together about these things.

So I found out something about the natural sciences that I was curious to know. How does it happen that they nearly always have a working technology that blesses mankind — if it doesn’t curse them by being mis-used? I thought there must be something peculiar about these natural sciences there, because they always work, whereas the social sciences, they always work in reverse. Like prohibition: you want to get sobriety, and you get drunkenness. And whenever you want to get one thing, you go at it in the political way, as the social scientists propose, and you get the very contrary of what you aimed at. And I wanted to find the reason. So I first said that there must be something in common among all these scientists. There must be something about their method of doing things that enables them to distinguish themselves from the social scientists by being practical people. Well let me see what the unifying principle is. So I read the philosophical part, as I say, as much as I could, the fundamentals  —  not memorizing …

HARPER:  “Who did you read on that philosophical part, mainly? Do you recall?”

Well, I read Huxley and Tyndall, especially. And Haeckel, and Humboldt, and Darwin, and Bell, and Henry, in this country — I can’t remember them so well now. And looking for the fundamentals all the time. And finally I found what they were trying to do, that they were examining things that happened, not particles or bodies, or structures; they were examining a thing called action, that happens. And that they had access to any event ..  Events was their subject matter. That was another great conception that I had. All this talk about particles, they were ignoring the fact that no particle exists apart from motion and time. And until the three are integrated, we haven’t got anything that happens, anything that /can/ apply to your senses.

So I found out that that was the rationale. Whether they were conscious of it or not, they were trying to take the measurement of events. And they could measure them, because they had measuring units. They could measure the quantity of mass in an event, in grams; they could measure the amount of motion in centimeters; they could measure the amount of time in seconds. When those three came together in an integration, you had a happening, or an event. And you found it was three-dimensional. I don’t mean three of the same dimensions, like a cube — three linear dimensions — I mean three different kinds of dimensions: the mass dimension, the motion dimension, and the time dimension, all of which you can experience, in your own body. Your senses tell you the force, or mass — pressure, or tension. You feel it in your physical sense, in your muscles and so on. In the same way you can feel it from here to there, in your body: from your head to your toe, or from your right hand to your left; you can feel motion. And in the same way, you can have a sense of time within you. You notice your physiological processes going on. /They/ tell you: your heart beats, and your respiration. Everything goes by a rhythm, or time, a discontinuity, which of course is all that time is, but it’s very important at that. So I saw then that that was their procedure.

I drew this conclusion, then, that if we have a field where science has not been successful, we haven’t understood things so well that we can make use of that knowledge. Perhaps if we’d enter that field trying to discover there a certain mass element in it, and a certain amount of motion in it, and a certain amount of time, and take the measurements of those three, then maybe we could recombine, create conditions under which the three would combine in a different proportion. We’d have an event that came out of our conceptions, out of our imagination. That was why physical science was creative, because they could imagine things happening that didn’t happen, but they had the rationale how the things that did happen did happen, and then they could transfer that to the field of the never-was-before, and become predictors. And being predictors, they could create what they predicted, and make it come to pass. Not by ruling nature, but by cooperating with nature. Because nature is like your neighbor, always ready to do business with you, but always on her terms, as your neighbor is: on his terms as well as your own. /chuckle/

With that happy thought in mind, I began to look in the social field where I had been so much interested before, through Bellamy and Henry George and all that, and see if we have any mass there. So I took in my mind a concept of a million people somewhere, maybe on an island, and we know that their mass is fairly constant through any ordinary length of time. They might get bigger or taller or heavier, or lighter, over many many centuries, but for any ordinary practical space of time we could take that as a constant thing. They had a certain amount of activity, or energy, or action as we call it, and that likewise wouldn’t change in a short time — although it might change over a long time. But they had the third element, of time, which is represented by their average longevity, or life expectancy, and that was highly variable. We began the 19th century around in the thirties, the low thirties perhaps, and wound up at about the sixties or something like that, in the 19th century. Sixty-five, or something like that. And there was a tremendous variant. Now how did that come about? What we wanted to do was to transform our society into a larger amount of time. We were dreaming of immortality. And we realized that much immortality in the 19th century — the difference between the average of thirty and, say, sixty years. We doubled it, in fact, in that length of time. Well how did we do it? If we could find out how that was done, then we’d have an approach to what we should do to become masters of our own destiny and to realize our immortal dream. And so I thought there was something that holds things together, causes them to operate and so on. And let us look into the physical sciences and see. I always want to get the simplest first. Now I hold a great brief for physics; it’s the one science that gets nearest to the units, to the very fundamentals of the cosmos, than any other. It approaches it in its simplest and most obvious forms of behavior and action, events. Simplest events. That’s why they deal in waves, and in the movement of bodies, like Galileo’s laws of force and motion, and so on.

So I resorted to physics to find out how organizations, events, like an atom, a long event .. we don’t know when it was organized or how long it’s going to last, but we do know it’s going to pieces. All atoms are known to be disintegrating, and some of them very rapidly. The most conspicuous one at that time was radium, and I looked in the books to see how they accounted for radium disintegrating and sending its energy out into the environment instead of holding it within itself. And I found that the units, the elementary units of which the radium atom is composed, were colliding with one another. And you know it’s collision between these things that causes the explosion in the atomic bomb, the des­truction of the atom. So, finding that it was the collisional relationship that caused it to disintegrate, it must have been the reciprocal relationship between the parts that kept them together like two stars that revolve around one another instead of colliding, each influencing the other in the way that gives it continuity, and perpetuity.

So it came to my mind that we must look for reciprocal relations among men. And that brought my mind to the market place. And there I found that we had to use the technique of the market if we were going to hold the social organization together.

 

MACCALLUM:  “And Henry George’s ideas then all began fitting in to your larger conceptual scheme of things.”

Social science and physical science all made a complete continuum.

 

HARPER:  “Then I have one question here, that I think maybe comes in at about this point. I believe it does. Somewhere along the line here, you had earlier said that relative to religion, that you’d said, “^“To hell with it.” And then eventually, sometime, apparently you went down to hell and picked it up again. Were there any clergymen or religious leaders and so on that came into the picture here that, as you saw it, that somehow you got this all related to a religious orientation again, somewhere along the line. Was there any literature or persons or …”

From 1912 on, I attended the Unitarian Church, took my children there and taught in the Sunday School, and discussed frequently with the Unitarian minister, and told him something about the virtues of the Trinitarian conception — that scientists had it, theologians had it, and that I was perfectly agreed that the whole universe was a unity, to be sure; that’s why we call it a universe. But it also had three aspects, the same as a tripod has that holds up a camera. /chuckling/ It’s just one tripod or one stool, just the same. But I didn’t make any headway with him! They had dogmatized their negative; and so I decided that the Unitarians were the last frontier of negativism on Christianity.

HARPER:  “About when was it that you arrived at more or less that conclusion?”

     About 19 …  Let’s see, when I read the sciences. No, I’m anticipating; I didn’t have that at that time. I was a Unitarian. Now I did formulate this, however, that any proposed legislation, does it enlarge or does it restrict the area of human liberty? And I couldn’t understand all these complicated things like anti-child-labor laws and women’s suffrage and everything like that, but my prejudice was going to be in favor of anything that looked like enlarging human liberty and against anything that looked like restricting it. /chuckle/ That was as near as I could formulate it.

MACCALLUM:  “About what year do you think that you got this idea, and who gave it to you?”

     Well I got that from Albert Ritchie, I think, just before World War I. He provoked it at any rate. He was governor of Maryland at that time, and he was being terribly pilloried and excoriated — is that the word? — by a lot of “do-gooders” and right-thinking people, because he showed no enthusiasm for anti-child-labor laws, or women’s suffrage laws, and all these reform laws and so on. He said that they made us no better off. He didn’t seem to explain how or why; so he drew the fire. And when I see a lot of shooting going on in somebody’s direction, I want to see how it comes he deserves so much attention. /chuckling/ So I lined up with Ritchie on that, that the laws that enlarge human liberty, if there are any such laws, those are the ones I’m for. And laws that restrict human liberty, and we know there are a lot of such laws, well now they’re the ones I’m against. /chuckling/ That’s as far as I got.

 

MACCALLUM:  “You mentioned Ingersoll back a bit. Was that the same Ingersoll that you corresponded with a lot over Single Tax matters later on?”

       No, no relation. This Ingersoll was a politician. I think he’d been a senator or a representative or something. He was the gold-tongued orator of his day, professional speaker; he drew great audiences in opera houses just by his oratory, flowery language and so on. The Ingersoll I’ve been referring to in connection with Single Tax matters was a follower of Henry George who often professed that he’d never read Progress & Poverty. He believed in it just the same. He was a public man; he had made quite a fortune in the Ingersoll watch, the dollar watch. It had been very popular in my young life, and thousands or millions of them were sold, he and his brother working at it together. He was a New Jersey man too. And so he became clear up into his eighties, a platform speaker to business men’s groups and so on. But he never could understand this thing of mine. And one of those who really seemed to like Chodorov. He said, “Now we’ll take a weekend and we’ll talk about it all night. We’ll get it straightened out.” He never got the right time to do that. And Ingersoll on one of those occasions, he said, “Well what’s the reason why I can’t understand this thing of yours?” I’d gotten it into manuscript by that time. I went up to his desk, and I took a piece of paper, and I said, “Charlie, can you see through this paper?” And he said, “No.”  “Well, it has ‘Single Tax’ written on it. You can see that, can’t you?” “Yeah.” “You see the paper on your desk, underneath here, that’s got ‘Proprietary Administration’ written on it? Now as long as I hold this Single Tax paper in front of your eyes, how are you going to see that other? I hold the paper there and you can’t see anything but it, primarily, because you’ve got this Single Tax blotting everything else out of your mind.” /chuckling/

HARPER:  “It’s been observed by some that the Single Tax concept had a very, very strong hold on the people who became, shall we say, converts to it — and a permanent hold, some have said. Did you every know of many who defected from that belief once they were infected?”

Not in the sense that I did. They just got tired of it. I think that describes it. It was a complaint among the Single Tax gatherings for years — all the time that I was working with it. “We’re getting older and we’re not getting enough young converts.” That’s why they got the School. “— And we’re talking to one another, and we can’t get up any enthusiasm. We’re just tired of it.

HARPER:  “How do you explain, if that’s true — and others have observed it — that hardly any persons defected from it in the sense of experiencing a displacement of the Single Tax belief? How do you explain the tenacity of that belief if it be ‘untrue,’ or ‘unsound?’”

People are not looking for soundness or unsoundness, they’re looking for devils for the most part. I mean the lower grade of people, and the largest number of people, because it has to be so; because nature can’t raise the whole level of landscape to mountaintops at once, you know. There have to be some predecessors; some have to go up high before the others. So the lowest common denominator of human nature, and especially if they’re do-gooders and motivated by humanitarian instincts, is to want to do something to put Satan back where he belongs, and to give him hell, /chuckling/ and make him stay there. And so they seized upon a dragon. Something was causing all this poverty in the world, and now the faster we ran the slower we /went/, like Alice in Wonderland; the more we progressed, the less progress we made. /chuckling/ So Henry George, by a very ingenious set of arguments, took the curse off of the vampire of taxation, as he characterized it, and put it on the landlord, who never taxed anybody — as a landlord. And he worked up such an ingenious argument, that I almost think I’m the first person who ever saw through it.

HARPER:  “Now that’s the point, you see. Others have observed that these persons who believe in the Single Tax are not the scum of the earth intellectually. By and large they have a capacity for abstract thought and concerns of a complicated nature.”

They’re a cut above the communists, all right! /chuckling/

HARPER:  “And yet, as you say, there have been very few defectors, almost none.”

They did get tired, though.

HARPER:  “Yes, that’s a little different. There are very few other beliefs that have not had large numbers of defectors, and the interesting question that has been raised … I would like to hear your observation of it. These people are highly intelligent, those I have known. What is the reason why, as compared with almost any other comparable movement, they do not in considerable numbers come around from what to you seems to be an untruth or an illusion, and say, “Now I see?”

They had thoroughly imbibed the free trade idea from Henry George in everything except land. And land seemed so different from everything else (it isn’t). It couldn’t be capital — and I used to argue it so completely. And so they were thoroughly disaffected with the idea of socialism. They wanted free trade. They believed in freedom, and he played up the freedom note. He didn’t see the fallacy of this proposition, this trap that he’d fallen into, and enslaving us. And not seeing that trap, there was nothing else they could defect to. They couldn’t defect to socialism, or communism, or Republicans with their high tariff, and Democrats … I don’t know what was the matter with them — oh yes, their free silver. /chuckling/ So they didn’t have any place to go. They just had to entertain each other, and save each other’s souls, /chuckling/ and that sort of thing. And it was a reaction to that sort of situation that caused Oscar Geiger to start this School — in which I joined him, and we had a lot of fun with it.

HARPER:  “You were living through the period, then, perhaps that was before you had discovered Henry George — you were a very young person — but you know the story of the influence of Henry George in his speaking tours of England, which has been said by Hershaw /spelling?/ to have been perhaps the key factor in the revival of socialist thought in Europe. Do you have any observations on that? Do you feel that’s correct?”

Henry George was a high-class rabble rouser. I don’t mean to say that in complete disparagement of him, but he did know how to appeal to the sympathies of an audience. He was a high-pressure emotionalist. He was a little man, with a big message, as he conceived it, and it was a big message, too — although it was bigger than he thought, so it seemed to me — and he was a spell-binder. He didn’t get much of any attention in San Francisco, where he wrote this book, and he wrote it in a state of misery. He tells in his autobiography — his son tells us, quoting his father, that while his wife was about to have a child and he had no food in the house or something like that, he went out on the streets of San Francisco to get some money from the first man he met. Luckily the first man gave him five dollars, and so he didn’t have to slug him. And in that state of mind, he was in revolt against anything that he could conceive as causing all this trouble. Now in San Francisco, he could see the tremendous land speculation that went up. He could see fortunes being made by the millions there by people who apparently didn’t do anything for it. So he decided that somebody was getting something he wasn’t entitled to, and he was going to run him down. Now to run him down, he goes to see Malthus, and J.S. Mill, and Ricardo, and he gets a good bunch of fallacies which he puts together very effectively and very entertainingly, and very convincingly to people who wouldn’t analyze them thoroughly.

HARPER:  “You didn’t name Marx in this background of thought.”

No, because Marx was anathema to George. They didn’t know they were working on the same alley. /chuckling/

HARPER:  “As a person, yes. But …”

I mean as a doctrine. His doctrines were, his philosophy was anathema to George. George believed in mankind. He believed in the spiritual man. Marx didn’t. Man was only an animal as far as he was concerned.

HARPER:  “I didn’t mean an exact disciple, but there were elements of thought that were common to both positions.”

Well this is common …

MACCALLUM: “With respect to anything besides land?”

HARPER:  “No, just land, but I mean how he reasons on land.”

Well, George’s followers, and I think George himself, frequently called attention that in the last chapters of Marx’s DAS KAPITAL, he identifies the whole thing with land ownership and proposes that they begin, as the “Communist Mani­festo” did begin, with the proposition to get rid of landlords first, and the capitalists next.

RESCH:  “Would you class the present-day Georgists as primarily persons interested in economics, or as moralists?”

 

Moralists. They are not analytical people. They study this formula in the School, and it’s taught to them the way you would teach the Apostles Creed in church, or something like that, or any formulation of any religious dogma. It’s taught to them as formula. They claim that they are scientifically investigating and so on, but you read all their literature and their lessons and answer the questions the right way, if you want to get the credits in the School. /chuckling/ You don’t answer the questions the wrong way — what they think is the wrong way. You give the orthodox answer, and the answer is that the landlord is the whole devil in society — and that the politicians may have some bad points about them, but then any good that ever happens, the landlord grabs it off anyhow. So it’s no use to…  Henry George wrote a marvelous book on PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE. And he converted me, too. In high school, I sat in the middle because I wouldn’t take sides on protection or free trade. I’d heard a lot of talk both ways. When the teacher asked me which side I sat on, I said “I’ve got to find out which side I’m on. We’re going to have this discussion here, let’s find out.” And when I read his PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE, I found out. I found out when I got a little more than half way or two thirds of the way through the book; that’s where I found out all about it, and I’m still that found-it-out. He gave the most tremendous arguments in favor of free trade. In that last part, though, he said, well what’s the use of it all, because if we had free trade, and we made billions of fortunes and that sort of thing, why the landlord would grab it all anyhow; so there’s no use. /chuckling/ That’s what marred the book.

MACCALLUM:  “Where was this and what year was it that you you were asked to sit on one side or the other?”

In high school. I don’t remember what year.

MACCALLUM:  “What year was it when you found out?”

I didn’t read Henry George until almost about the turn of the century, about 1898, something like that. In high school I would be, say, 16 years old, that would be 1888, ten years before that.

It ramifies out in a great many different directions, but the result of it all was that by using Plato’s admonition above everything else — and I had that at an early date — he who wishes to have dominion over his environment, as gods have dominion over the world .. “He shall be as a god to me who can rightly define and divide.” Get the thing down to the lowest simplicity, and then compare the different parts there. Dis­tinguish one part from another. Define mass, and define motion, and define time. And then divide them. See how they’re different from one another. Now you’ve got the basis for an integration, for an organization of elements towards the end which you desire, towards ________ your ineffable dreaming of immortality, towards the image that God had in His mind when He made things. I take this as allegory, as I take the parables in the New Testament. We don’t have to take them literally. The sure way to ruin the sense of anything is to take it literally.

HARPER:  “Going back to Henry George and the Single Tax beliefs and so on, whereas as you have said you know of almost no defectors except yourself …”

And those who got tired.

HARPER:  “That’s really, I take it, a vacation and not a defection. That is, they just weren’t going to work at it, but they didn’t show evidence of displacing it with a totally different concept.”

No. They never had any grounds for whatever defecting

they did.

 

HARPER:  “There still were some rather acute differences, I take it. They chose up sides within the fraternity, so to speak.”

 

Oh they had a lot of fights among themselves. Some veered towards socialism, and some veered towards economic orthodoxy. And they had all kinds of rows, the way the Quakers and other non-resistors have terrible scraps among themselves.

 

HARPER:  “And those scraps were mainly over whether to extend this principle of the single tax beyond the land, is that it?”

 

There was an element in them that would tolerate socialism, to some extent, and out of the old-liners of the Henry George people, socialism was anathema. And so we had men like Harold Buttenheim, who was editor of The American City for many years. He always believed in the income tax. Well that was completely out with George, and so they couldn’t agree on that. And there were several other ideological …

RESCH:  “I take it there was some considerable divergence of viewpoints between Francis Nielson on one hand, who was something of a patron of the movement, and Nock, and to a lesser extent Chodorov, who while they adhered to the Single Tax wished it to be collected on a local level rather than on the national level that George speaks of.”

Yes. Nock of course was a nihilist. He didn’t believe in anything — except literary style, which he was adept at. Isn’t that right? I never knew anything Nock believed in. I liked him, he was a fine man, a genial man and all that, but he had no philosophy.

 

RESCH:  “At least I’ve never been able to find one to my satisfaction.”

HARPER:  “Many of Nock’s very close admirers and careful students have been asked. I have a long list of things that he was eloquently against, but what is it that he was for? That seems to be where the discussion pretty well stops. He came close to a magnificent, positive attitude in one sense, in his little essay, ‘Isaiah’s Job,’ but actually it was a frame of mind and not of content. You knew Nock personally?”

Personally, yes. And Chodorov knew him — they were very good friends. I admire Nock as a literary artist. Unbounded admiration for him. But he never had any ideation. He and Logan Pearsall Smith were a pair. Logan Pearsall Smith was an essayist, about contemporary, and about the same style of outlook on life and all. Beautiful English they both wrote. I was telling somebody a little anecdote about Philistinism in the arts. Logan Pearsall Smith tells about how a company of tourists went to see the Parthenon, men and women teachers and what all, and as they approached, one of the women was so overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of the thing at a distance that she dropped down on a stone bench and breathed and took it all in, and was so affected that she didn’t stir until the rest of the party had gone and seen the Parthenon and come back, bearing their souvenirs and other things they picked up. /chuckling/ And as one of the other women saw her sitting there, she said, “0h there you are. We know just how you feel, dearie. Because our feet hurt too.”  /general laughter/

HARPER:  “How do you feel about the Georgists, as a group, as effective leaders for the intellectual movement toward liberty which I think unquestionably there has been over the last quarter century? Do you feel that some of these Henry George advocates, despite what you say about the Single Tax, have been in some way highly influential, or do you feel it was all sort of a negative show?”

No. They’ve sloughed off their interest in Single Tax,

got tired, and Churchill’s an example of it. Theodore Roosevelt’s another — at least he sloughed off free trade; I think he was inclined towards Single Tax too. And..  it’s hard to think of who they are. Newton Baker became Secretary of War and ceased any active participation in the Single Tax movement which he’d had when he was mayor of Cleveland. I visited him there, and there was a very happy reception with him and his City Hall crew./chuckling/ When men have gotten any degree of eminence or perhaps success, they have rather forgotten their juvenile or adolescent fascination for the Single Tax idea. And the Single Taxers have complained, deplored it and condemned them for losing their enthusiasm when they met with some success somewhere. It’s uninspiring, though, in the end, in the long run, because the Single Tax program calls for the forcible expropriation of owners of their property, on the theory that they perform no services to society. It’s the same motivation exactly as the attitude towards the Bourbons in the French Revolution. Even the Bourbons performed a service; they didn’t know it, of course. People don’t go into the market place and hand you money just for the fun of it; /chuckling/ whether you think you’re doing anything for them or not, the fact that they give you money for some act that they wish you to perform is proof positive that you’re benefiting them. Can’t be anything else.

RESCH:  “In the early part of the century, was Clarence Darrow quite an active Georgist?”

Yes, but he was tainted with socialism pretty heavily. He came at the Club when I was there — we met every Friday at Handel Hall in Chicago — and he spoke for them occasionally. He was always eloquent, interesting, but he was never analytical. The most analytical fellow we had, by all odds, was John Z. White, who was just a plain printer, widely read, philosophic mind, completely imbued with the Henry George dogma and could draw everything in to support that thesis, and do it in a very trenchant and convincing style. He was a very powerful speaker. He never wrote but one book, called PUBLIC AND PRIVATE PROPERTY. The thesis of the book was that land should always be public property, and the products of land should be private property.

Henry George, for all his spiritual discussions and general point of view, economically was an out and out materialist. His dogma,

iterated and reiterated throughout all his writings, is that all wealth consists in the products of labor applied to land. And they had a physical aspect. He reads on that basis all the time. He does unbend far enough in one place to say that exchange is a factor in production. And in his very last and uncompleted work, he … /tape  interruption/

 

HARPER:  “Henry George was a materialist, you were saying there.”

 

He made great professions of spirituality. But his notion of spirituality was something like pie in the sky, by and by, or something that’s not of this world, or something that nobody can either touch, taste or handle /chuckling/ or anything of that sort. And if it wasn’t material, then it was spiritual. Negative, kind of. You’ve seen whole books on that subject, where anything that doesn’t have the smell of the earth about it must be spiritual. /chuckling/ So all through his writings runs the theme that the only thing that the economic system is concerned with is the thing called wealth, and especially that portion of wealth which is called capital because it’s in the course of exchange, and is being used for the benefit of other persons, rather than the owner himself. And that’s . . I’m trying to state it as clearly or a little more so than George himself did. In all this, the implication is, and he often makes the assertion, that all wealth consists — add all produce consists, he used the terms interchangeably — in the product of labor applied to land. Therefore, the only title to any wealth is the title which one has by reason of having produced it, by his labor — and the labor theory of value, you know. In some few places, in the early part of PROGRESS & POVERTY, he makes some reference to the exchange values — things get valuable by exchange — very vaguely. And then he mixes that with the transportation and exchange. By mixing those two things — transportation, which is physical, and exchange, which is metaphysical as you know, conceptual — mixing those two things, he admits that there is a way to get value other than by digging something out of the ground or producing it in that way. But he passes that all over, doesn’t enlarge upon it at all or argue about it, but in his last book, called THE SCIENCE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY, he writes a whole chapter, or at least a part chapter, in which he announces with great éclat, /chuckling/ if that’s the right word, a new discovery — a discovery in the realm of nature, as he puts it, or words to that effect, I forget the phrasing — the productivity of exchange: that value is created by the mere act of exchanging things. It’s a new idea that he’s had, he’s announcing it to the world, and just at that point there appeared on his manuscript, according to his biographers, a note at the bottom that said, “Leave six blank pages.” The next chapter takes a different topic altogether. It doesn’t take that. Now his biographer, in commenting on that, says that this was evidently intended to be continued in the next chapter, which also was uncom­pleted. By reason of the fact that the next chapter hadn’t been finished, was proof to the biographer that this note referred to the next chapter. /chuckling/ Can you beat that? And I have understood from other sources that he frequently did leave some blank pages where he wanted to round out a chapter and complete it; it wasn’t an unusual thing for him to do. But what amused me, or struck me so forcibly, was that he has made a . . here’s a big hurrah!, he’s found out something he didn’t know before, and he’s going to tell the world about it. He’s found out that it isn’t true that all wealth consists in the product of labor applied to land. /chuckling/ But without that, his whole theory of a rightful title is gone, you know: that the land owner doesn’t own the land because he doesn’t make the land.

HARPER:  “He was very close to disproving his whole premise, there.”

Well he did that on other occasions, too. He did a beautiful job of laying the low of Malthus. He laid that ghost good and plenty.

HARPER:  “Which one?”

Malthus, the Malthusian Doctrine. It’s a marvel it hasn’t been reprinted. I can contemplate having my organiza­tion reprint the thing, republish it. He had an uncanny foresight into biological principles, not so well known at his time, if at all. And so he showed with a marvelous thoroughness the utter absurdity of Malthus’ doctrine. Then he takes up . . he’s talking all the time about how you must analyze, ask questions, and don’t take anything for granted. Be a severe critic and don’t believe anything until you know it, till you prove it first. So he wouldn’t believe Malthus, and he wouldn’t believe the wage fund theory. He goes into that, and tells how it’s wrong. He’s not accepting any of this, what he called the accepted doctrines of political economy; he wouldn’t accept them. But when he comes to the Ricardian one, he said, now here’s something that we can accept: Ricardo is the real McCoy, and so much  so that even J.S. Mill recognized that. And he quotes Mill then, as having said that Ricardo’s law was as plain as any geometrical demonstration, or words to that effect, and is irrefutable. So he calls Mill to back up Ricardo, and he follows Ricardo hook, line and sinker without one single word of questioning, of criti­cism of any kind, of Ricardo. /Heath had been saying Malthus instead of Ricardo, and at this point caught his mistake./

 

HARPER:  “You meant to say Ricardo all along here instead of Malthus, did you not?”

 

Yes. Malthus, he excoriated him, and trounced him.

And when it came to Ricardo, he said, now here’s the thing we can take uncritically. At least, he doesn’t make the slightest adverse criticism or examination of it. But to support Ricardo’s law of rent, he calls back to Mill, and Mill says that Ricardo’s law is just like a geometrical demonstration. That’s all the questioning he did of Ricardo. And then we get over further in the book, and he credits landlords with having perceived that Ricardo’s law was only a “special application of the more general principle enunciated by Malthus.” /chuckling/ Talk about contradictions and so on.

When we were talking at the table, I felt like making the observation that anything is true that does not contradict itself. You can’t state a false thing without it embodying, expressly or implied, a paradox. And this is not a paradoxical cosmos. /chuckling/ What makes a thing true is that it is uncontradictable. When the thing contradicts itself, it’s a self-confessed error. And the truth of something isn’t whether it’s true or not in some ontological sense of truth being some kind an entity. It isn’t whether it’s true or not, it’s does it work? The pragmatic test, if you like, or as Bridgman calls it, the operational test. Does it advance our lives towards our dreams? Towards our ideals? Then it’s far better than truth. Even Shakespeare says, “Here’s truth, ’tis a bitter pill, but it’s good physic.” What about truth? — bitter truth, the solemn truth, the expedient truth and so on?  There are all kinds of qualifications. But when it comes to beauty, how many different kinds of beauty are there?

HARPER:  “How do you unravel the question of whether it’s true because it works or works because it’s true?”

That’s the pragmatic test again. When they have a

hypothesis in the sciences, they base it upon the inductive relevancy, you know, rather the rationality of something you have come to through your senses. It makes sense. Experience makes sense, if you examine it at all. Not to animals, they react to it tropically, or what you call conditioned reflexes. But man can react otherwise, and he can see that it makes sense. It hangs together.

So you discover things through your senses, and then you think about them. You perceive, and then you conceive. You discover a rationality there. And in that process you know not just through your senses, intuitively, it stands to reason that this thing advances me towards my immortal dream of immortality — and it takes my fellow man along with me. This kind of thing, we call it morals in some cruder circles. So your test in science is whether this data is verified by further experiences. You put it to the pragmatic test, or the scientific verification. And it’s verified in the same field of experience that the data came from, not some other field. Now the question, how do we know whether Ricardo’s law is true or not? Well we don’t care whether it’s true or not, at least I don’t — but does it work or not? Does it advance people’s lives? And when you look into it, you find that it does not. It works the reverse. It retards people’s living. And that’s the test that I’m interested in, the operational test. And that’s the scientific verification.

We have a hierarchy of conceptions. Beauty is higher than truth. Truth is higher than goodness. Goodness is anything that you like; if it’s good, the baby stuffs it further in its mouth, if it’s bad, it goes out the other way. It’s just how it appeals to your senses, your indiscriminate, unintelligent senses, that’s good or bad. There’s no intelligence in the conception of good or bad. But when it comes to truth, now you begin to have some standards. Does it work or not? And now beyond that, as to whether it’s true or not, whether it works or not, is it worthwhile working? Is this something for me to give my life, if need be, to fall down and worship before? Is it beautiful? That’s the third element in the hierarchy. That little thing of Olive Schreiner’s, that little allegory /reading/:

 

“God took the traveler to the edge of the world, and the gulf, it seemed fathomless, and on the other side were the portals of heaven, and the pillars rose up so high, they couldn’t see the top if there were any top. And he said to God, “Which is larger, heaven or hell?” And God said, “Hell is as wide, but heaven is deeper. All hell could be swallowed up in heaven, but all heaven cannot be swallowed up in hell.” And I saw two bridges over the abyss, and footsteps as of persons traveling over. The one nearest me had many footsteps of many people going across it, and the one next and a little higher had fewer, still a good many, but some were set so of people returning, and I asked God how it was. God said, “Some, when they go over this second bridge, fear that there is no land beyond, and they return. Fearing there is no truth beyond. /chuckling/ And so I said to God, what are the names of the bridges? And God said they’re called the Good and the True. Then why is it that I can’t see the third?, says the traveler. “It rises straight upward, far from here, and is seen only by those who climb it.” And we crossed the bridge and went in to Heaven.”

 

There’s a lot more to it, but I wanted to bring out that that was the order of its value, the good and the true and the beautiful. And the idea can be expanded wonderfully.

MACCALLUM:  “When did you first come across Olive Schreiner’s writing?”

When I was 17 years old, in a paper-covered little volume, and I haven’t been without it since. I must have bought scores of copies of it and given to people, most of whom didn’t seem to think much of it, one way or another. /chuckling/ No single little book has ever impressed me as much as that did, despite the fact that it has some Fabian socialism in the long dream at the end, called “The Sunlight.”

MACCALLUM:  “Do you remember who gave it to you?”

I don’t know where I got it. No.

MACCALLUM:  “I was thinking a moment ago of asking you if you would think back to the time and to the person, perhaps, who gave you the idea of correlating the words spiritual and creative.”

I don’t seem to have any recollection of when that began, but it must have been pretty well into middle life. It wasn’t any juvenile or adolescent notion that I had. But I very firmly came to that, that when man exercises his human power, distinctively human powers, which are divine, having received it through the divine inspiration that distinguished him from the lesser breeds . . that in all religions above diabolism, or demonism — which some primitive people have — above all the more respectable religions, in every case the divine principle or the divinity is the creator.  In everything that pretends to be spiritual, the head god of it all is the creator of it all. And nearly all religions profess that men should become like their creator. They should emulate their creator, and do his will, and act as he acted, and so on. And that means that man was given the likeness of his creator, in that he was to act like him and create in the same manner that he did, namely, by entertaining a vision in his mind, an image in his mind, and then proceeding to create that image in his objective world, as God created man in His objective world. In so doing, he would be becoming more and more like his Maker. That is the spiritual activity of man, to create — create in all his relationships. And when you create, you’re making things more real than they were before, and the more real things are more real because they don’t pass away. /chuckling/ They’re enduring, and in the degree that they’re more enduring, they’re more real. It fits in perfectly with the philosophy of self-realization used by the systemic philosophers generally from Kant and Hegel and Schopenhauer . . not Schopenhauer, maybe, /chuckling/ but in general, all the way through the line, and it identifies humanity with its origin — its special prerogatives of practicing the divinity which was created within it. Potentially within it.

 

HARPER:  “You have more or less spelled it out in a chronological sense up to roughly 1940. In the more recent period, do you have any observations on a lot of the efforts that have been going on? To pick an illustration, two people in the last two days have told me that they thought National Review as a vehicle for thought and stimulation was perhaps doing the outstanding job now, and all these things have been going on in the last 20 years. I’d like to hear you discuss those people and ideas and vehicles. You’d pretty well left the Georgist movement by that time, and you’ve seen a lot of the show going on in other places.”

 

I’ve seen two wars, and all the hurrah and bluff and

blunder and obscurities — obscurantism — that goes along with

that. And I’ve seen people put their faith in different kinds

of things. In the 19th century, there was a tendency to put

our faith in our ideals, to believe that somehow they were

ineluctable and bound to eventuate in some way. But in this

century, possibly due to the effect of the wars, the mind of the literate and thoughtful public has been going rather to take its notice of its animal limitations.

We commence to accept the low place in which the theologians place man with his total depravity and so on. We’ve commenced to lose faith in human nature. It’s been acting so badly in these couple of wars that we don’t think so much of it anymore. We don’t hear any talk about the divinity of man anymore. Man’s got to be a good deal of a worm, but he has to grow some hoofs and horns and fangs and things in order to subsist at that animal level, and so we’re all believers in war. So much so /that/ between the two wars, Dr. Limbert entertained a graduate class at Columbia University with the statistics of a questionnaire that had been sent out to some 9,000 ministers questioning them about their attitude towards war, a various lot of questions. And when he got through collect­ing these statistics of the different reactions, it turned out, upon my asking him, that there wasn’t one among them who wasn’t in favor of his kind of war! /chuckle/

 

HARPER:  “This was between World War I and II.”

 

Yes.

 

HARPER:  “Not a single one.”

 

Not a one. They were all in favor of some kind of war.

 

HARPER:  “’Thou shalt not kill’ was a modified commandment to them.”

 

Yes. /chuckling/ And I think it was a little bit of a

shock that . . .

HARPER:  “Is that published?”

No, I doubt it. It was just a class, you know. So we have taken on . . generally we are still wallowing in that psychology that, like the Irishman, we’re going to have peace if we have to fight for it, and the way to get peace is to fight for it.

HARPER:  “Pax Romana”

Now that means that we have reverted to more of our animal propensities and limitations since the 19th century. I don’t mean it was a perfect century, I don’t mean we didn’t have it full of hypocrisies and vanities, and a lot of the things that these caustic-tongued people would think it so smart to criticize /chuckling/ and level at in the Victorian Age and so on. Nevertheless, it was the creative century par excellence. Men did more in the way of raising the level, the quality of their lives, and in consequence raised the length of their lives, because a good life is a guarantee of a long life, just as a bad life is a guarantee of a short one. /chuckling/ So in consequence of the breaking loose of the political monster, we have abandoned our belief in man and gone to believing in the animal part of him only. And so today, you can take any situation that is being reacted to by the public, or by a single individual, and you can tell in which part of his behavior he is acting as an animal, and in which part he is acting as a man — doing something that animals can’t do. Now publicly, and by in large, the herd instinct has got us all scared, and we want to do what herds do — huddle ourselves up together in some place of hiding, or else we want to march out and attack, /chuckling/ fang and claw. So we have lost the idealism of the nineteenth century, temporarily at least, because of the environment. And there^’s no doubt but what, taking it in its universal aspect, every organism issues out of its environment. Every atom in me was in my environment not long ago. Some of them not very long ago — that lunch we ate. /chuckling/ And we are what our environment made us. But our environment made us something beyond animals. It gave us a power to think and to dream, to conceive, and then to create in the pattern in which we dream. And now those persons who are practicing that are not very vocal. They’re working at it instinctively, intuitively, and the great mass of people in public life and affairs, and the great Demos himself, is blundering along on all fours, instead of looking up into the eyes of his Maker, so to speak. /chuckling/ Instead of seeing the beauty, they’re acting in response to their fears. We are self-enslaved, today, because we’re not looking for any opportunities to be human. We’re only looking to save our animal lives, our necessitous lives, not realizing that so far as we live the animal life, we’re slaves. We’re victims of the direst necessity. Animals are under the impress, under the dominance, of circumstances; and they respond to circumstances by making the best adjustment that they can, and they never change circumstances except automatically they make their habitat less and less habitable. Now men can do either one of those things. But as men, they can do the human side, which is to make the habitat more and more habitable, more and more livable, and thereby have more life in it.

HARPER:  “One of our friends who is here, has remarked on occasion lately that the very disturbing, alarming thing is the extent to which we see people that we had thought of as rather thought leaders and pioneers of thought in the cause of liberty some time back, becoming more and more engrossed in their thought and their writing and their interests, in what can only end up in becoming very flagrant in advocating overt war to clean the world up so that it will be proper to live in. That is, he sees this whirlpool of saber-rattling pulling people in that we thought five or ten years ago were philosophically pretty well immune to it.”

     Speaking of beauty, from that little sonnet of mine:

 

Beyond all impulse to destroy, or purge,

    Her inspiration lifts the self-bound clod

From creature, as creator, to upsurge

    Enraptured in the song — the work — of God.

 

We need some inspiration, we need something light, some dream, some ideal, some vision, something that will get us going, make us feel that it’s worth doing something. What do we want to live for? Just to save our measly skins like Earl Russell? /chuckling/

HARPER:  “Do you see that on the horizon anywhere now — where that may come from to grab the imagination of people and pull them away from the muskets?”

I wish I could say yes, but I don’t see how I can. But there’s a curious thing, that in the province of nature, or God if you like, that men are impelled to do things the right way just by blundering into it, and because so far as they do wrong they die, and so far as they do right they live, whether they know anything about it or not, like animals, and so we are now doing things, have been doing things for a century, that are full of life for us. But we have been blind to it. We haven’t seen free enterprise in operation for the whole 19th century. A few people saw it in some of its outlines — some of its beautiful outlines — like Adam Smith. Not many saw that. Adam Smith is in the doghouse now, with the popular mind. He saw too much beauty and beneficence in nature, and animals don’t know anything about that. They don’t believe in it. They don’t experience it, and they can’t conceive it, and they can’t believe it.

So what we need is a reawakening of the spirit; but how to

get full awake I don’t know, except that some people come along and proclaim it, as happened of old. The kingdom of heaven is at hand, and you haven’t seen it, you haven’t perceived it, haven’t understood it. It’s working for you all the time; you would have been dead long ago if it hadn’t.

 

We’ve got to get some enthusiasm for understanding. And when we understand anything, we experience beauty. You can’t under­stand anything, but what you get a thrill out of it. The driest mathematicians will pour over their equations for months and years, perhaps, in pursuit of squaring the circle or something like that. Now if they ever attain that goal, don’t you know what they’re going to do?

 

RESCH:  “What is that?”

 

They’re going to have a great big meeting, and they’re going to have big speeches, and a big lot of sound and hoorah and toss their hats in the air. That’s what they’ll do. /chuckling/ Why? They’re pursuing beauty. To understand the relationship between the circle and the square is something desirable, beyond all kinds of beautiful things — just understanding it. It’s beautiful to understand it. A demonstration in Euclid is a beautiful thing. It captivates the mind. And so many things like that, I don’t care how dry they are; once one gets the spirit of it and discovers the beauty that’s there, the beauty that they knew all the time was there and that’s why they’re pursuing it. They’d drop it long ago if they didn’t believe there was some beauty there. It’s that spirit of believing that this is a cosmos that has two sides. One side, perhaps the great side, and perhaps the essential of the whole thing, is what we call rationality and beauty. They’re like Mary and Martha. Rationality serves us, puts the food on the table; that’s Martha. And beauty pays her devotion to us and makes gods out of us. So that we can . . some of us can discover, and can enjoy, and our joy become manifest to others. The ineffable beauty in which we are submerged, so to speak, and out of which we can emerge into our humanness, into our godness, into our divinity. Get something like that to worship, something to work for and if need be to die for. When we get that, then the commonest ideology or psychology of the wolf, bloodlust of the wolf, and the pirates’ ambition to rule other men and destroy them, that all goes by the board. It’s a powerful motivation, the animal motivation, but it always comes to naught. It doesn’t lift people above their animal disposi­tions at all. Pursuit of safety, pursuit of dominance of others, and submitting oneself, like the fawning dog, none of that is anything that animals don’t do. We’ve got to get on the human side of things. When we get to be human, then we’ll be gods. And then we can have the joy that God experienced when the morning stars sang together.

 

RESCH:  “I notice that you’ve not mentioned anything about political action as a means of improvement of our circumstances.”

That would be self-contradictory; that’s what error is. To speak about political action as a means to any good end, is self-contradiction. Political action itself means an evil thing. Emerson has laid it down so succinctly that, so far from the end justifying the means, the end is always implicit in the means. And you’re going to get the same kind of ends that belong to the means which you employ — no matter what you may impute to it, in your vanity and stupidity. /chuckling/

HARPER:  “In what way would you answer this kind of an observation? Some say that you have to start in any situation where you are, and where we are is with the political shackles around our necks. And therefore the only way out of the plight is the process of the enslavement, that is, the political route out of political enslavement. See what I mean?

Precisely. That’s a very common line of reasoning which on the surface has a lot of plausibility to people.

 

HARPER:  “Yes. What do you do with that kind of an argument?”

 

We’ve got to start — at least I think I’m quoting you correctly — we have to start where we are. And if we’re in a jungle, we start where we are with tooth and claw. And in the course of that tooth and claw technology, some will survive. Those who are most efficient in the circumstances will be the survivors, whether they intend it or not. Whether they mean to do that or even whether they mean to survive or not. Their psychology will have little or nothing to do with it, because they are not yet dreamers. So as you say, when we’re in a situation, we must meet the situation as it is and where it is.

 

Now, since antiquity, men have gained a great deal, relatively, of freedom. We still have the huge political organizations, the huge bureaucracies and that sort of thing, getting worse and worse all the time. But something else has been happening. Men are beginning to get freer all the time, because they don’t get their freedom from bureaucracy as they often think they do. They get their freedom from their practice of the divine relationship of exchanging with one another in mutual aid, mutual service to one another, as creators. Which animals never do. Men not only do it instinctively, they do it rationally. They learned how by accounting and measuring everything they do for each other. So they don’t have to fight any more. All they’ve got to do is to check up their accounts and settle their accounts peaceably, and everybody’s happy about it. If they didn’t have accountancy, how would they ever know what they owed to one another? The only way they could do would be to fight it out. So we’re in a situation and have been for at least two or three centuries, where there is a large area of self-determination as to our reactions to our environment. A large portion of that is what you have described. We are all fettered, imprisoned, in some kind of political restrictionism, and so we can only work in certain areas that are still uncorrupted by it. One of those areas has been free enterprise. It has worked to a large degree. Not the whole field was open, but it worked to a large degree in the field. So the thing for us to do now is to discover what’s left, where free enterprise can most profitably and most easily move in and take over. And it’s by the doing of the word that we shall know them, and not by complaining about the other. The other that you speak of looks so plausible to so many people that you either want to be like Earl Russell, and like a spaniel, and fawn and lie down and turn up your belly to be stabbed, /chuckling/ or else you want to be a hero in the strife. You want to then embrace the opportunities that we have left. That’s the only place where we can work creatively. If you’re in prison, we’ll have to do what we can, but if you’re only in prison one day a week, well, take the other six days to do something that you can’t do in prison. /chuckling/ And if you’re in prison for six days of the week, do something on the seventh that you can’t do in the prison, that is to avail yourself of the greater opportunity that you have when you are out of the prison — not that you can’t do anything in prison either, as proved by the Bedford Tinker, John Bunyan and a good many people, including Marco Polo and I think Galileo himself. I don’t know how it happened that Isaac Newton wasn’t ever put in jail. Strange accidents do happen, though. /chuckle/

HARPER:  “Well, here is the political machine, here are the laws that thou shalt not do these things of freedom. There seem to be just two ways to deal with that: either grasp the power and repeal the law, or ignore the law. Or — live with it. There are three alternatives. Isn’t that right?”

 If the beast is on your trail, you’ve either got to turn and

fight him, or you’ve got to run away from him. In the one case, you’re a carnivorous animal with claws, and in the other case you’re a herbivorous animal with hooves. /long pause/

 

     But we have a third alternative. We don’t have to either fight or fly. We don’t have to either stand up and fight — most of the time — or bury our heads in the sand, or try to hide away. As I said a moment ago, we have large areas in which we can put forth our ingenuity in learning how to self-serve our fellow man. And we do it intuitively, and successfully. The hint of free enterprise has been an example of that. It grew up like Topsy. It didn’t have any ancestry, and nobody sponsored it. Nobody believed in it, in fact. Adam Smith came nearer to believing in it than anybody else, in the early period. Nobody else believed in it the way he did. The men who practice it don’t believe in it. They’re always trying to run to the government to get some special privileges and one thing or another. They don’t believe in being free. So we must get the beauty of the thing, the picture that Adam Smith drew, and enlarge upon it, paint it in brighter colors than he painted it. I tried to do that in my book. With that vision of beauty in our mind, then we have a third alternative. That is to dream dreams — and so far as we have any power left, to create those dreams. And do it, not blindly, as we have built free enterprise, not blindly as the medieval chemists did with their fine dyeing and brewing and tanning and that sort of thing, beautiful work though they did, in a very restricted way . . that’s the way we’re doing free enterprise today. We don’t understand it. But let us get the vision of beauty, and find that divine rationality that runs through the whole thing, including the whole cosmos — you become a religious person at the same time, and you become a practical person. And by a practical . . .

HARPER:  “That’s what you can do often, but there still is the area these people raised the question about. Take for instance, the income tax. We can say, well, we have some very fine things that we want to do with the time left over, but insofar as this problem is concerned, they say, you either pay your income tax, or you become a congressman and repeal it, or you refuse to pay it, as some sort of rebellion process or revolution or something or other. Do you have anything to observe on those three methods of dealing, not with the area that we have left of freedom, but any given specific area of enslavement?”

All the scourges of mankind have exhausted themselves. We hardly have any left in the physical world now. Bubonic plague and all that. Slavery, chattel slavery, it’s been exhausted but we still have some more refined methods. So this scourge of income tax, for instance, is one of the worst features of our present social pathology. It’s more destructive and so on — I don’t need to enlarge upon that — and it would be a very happy thing if we could get emancipated from it. It is tending now to do what prohibition did, to cause a complete public revulsion against it. And it may be that that will save us from it. I can at least hope for that. And so as long as we can hope for that, it’s well that at least some of us should enlist our energies in seeking its repeal — condemning it and creating public sentiment against it and all that, and we have some fine work being done, like people in the libertarian movement, and so on. But if we are going to call that our philosophy, and get it all done, what are we going to do, be simply where we are, stuck like a stick in the mud, waiting for somebody to knock us over again? /chuckling/

It’s only by going forward . . . So when Roosevelt the Second sent some engineers to try to steal my way of doing business, my way of making propellers, because he thought I was a wicked monopolist because I was the only one who could make them, nobody else could /chuckling/ — that’s literally true, you know, I had the only machinery there was to make them, the only system. One of these engineers so admired what he saw, he said, “Don’t your competitors follow you in all this?” I said, “Of course they do; that’s what keeps them behind — where they belong!” Now, so it is with us. We need to push back the tide, so far as we can. We need specialists to do that. We had to have Indian fighters, you know, to keep the Indians off the plantation; Lord Fairfax had to send George Washington out to Winchester, to hold the Indians back. But that wasn’t planting a crop, that wasn’t engaging in free enterprise or anything like that, it wasn’t building a civilization. That was one of the elements of necessity. That was an animal function. And so holding the bureaucracy back now is an animal function: resisting the thing. But the human function is overcoming evil with good. We need to move into the human side of things.

 

HARPER:  “I’m thinking of running you for Congress, you know. /Heath chuckling/ In order that we may later have more energies released for the human function, I think we need you in Congress to repeal the Income Tax law. I can find a lot of support, and maybe we can get you elected. Do you want to be a candidate?”

 

No thank you. Remember what Christ said when he was offered to be the king of the world, head politician of all? It was called his first temptation. Satan took him up on a high place, you know, and showed him all the nations and said, “You can be the ruler of all this, all you’ve got to do is to give your loyalty to me.” So if I happened to get elected to Congress, I’d take my oath of office and give my loyalty to the devil — to Caesar. /chuckling/ And then I could go ahead and practice in the devil’s own work. Of course I might be a bad actor there, but I’d be still in the devil’s house, doing the devil’s commands, having already committed myself to do so.

HARPER:  “That’s true, but I think you’d be a nicer devil than any alternative.”

I’d be the devil of a devil. I think your Goldwater would make a better devil of a devil than I would, by far. /chuckling/ He’d get more fun out of it. Because I don’t see any fun in that sort of thing.

HARPER:  “Well, what kind of a devil should we put in there?”

 

I think nature takes care of that, and she gives us some bad enough ones that we’ll be thoroughly fed up with them. She gave us the devil of a prohibition scourge, and everybody got drunk!

HARPER:  “Then we ought to run not the best man for the political office, but the worst one we can think of.”

Right you are, absolutely! So when I see a play on Broadway, the kind of devilish plays that they’re writing nowadays, like Henry Miller and Eugene O’Neill and all that, I want to see it played by the rottenest players they can get! Because the better it’s played, the worse it is. If a play’s a bad play, the better it’s played, the worse it is. Now that’s a bad play in Washington. I’d rather see bad actors there than good ones. /chuckling/

MACCALLUM:  “I sometimes feel that with the atom bomb now, I’d rather not have some clumsy people around who might trip over each other’s feet, but the skillful players who can keep each other contained for a while.”

The atom bomb game is the game that we die by, like all the war games. Nobody ever lived by war, nobody lived by throwing bombs, ever. If we want to live, we live by playing another game. That atom game and war games are played in Washington. Other games are played in the fish market, and in the stock market, and in the grain market, and so on — so far as the market is free to be a market — and we have got to play on the creative side of the house of life. Playing on the negative side . . Defend ourselves against extinction if we can. The first law of nature is self-preservation. But beyond preserving ourselves, then we’re only human, we’re only creative, we’re only divine, to the extent that we avail ourselves of our spiritual powers which is to create, and work at that. Now free enterprise is the technology of creation, at the materialist level . . .

HARPER:  “I submit that we go below the animal kingdom in the general area of defense.”

I think you’re right.

HARPER:  “As I understand, the animals do not kill each other except for the necessity of food.”

No, they’re under a great handicap: they don’t have such highly intelligent tools as we have for killing one another. /chuckling/ That’s how rationality will work as well for the devil as it will for God. The powers of darkness have borrowed the rational tools of God to turn against God.

RESCH:  ”Blasphemy — the highest form.”

     Yes, blasphemy to be sure. Animals can’t be wicked, because they can’t conceive of a wicked purpose. So they can’t be wicked in their hearts. But man can. And man conceiving a wicked purpose can take the technology of science and so turn it against the life of mankind. That’s what makes men, when they become animals, they’re really super animals — in the most opprobrious sense. /chuckling/

HARPER:  “Well then I’ll not run you for Congress, but I’d

kind of like to have you be the United States Representative on the United Nations. That’s an outfit that stands for peace, and .. .”

That’s a fine outfit. A lady paid me such a fine compli­ment only the Sunday before last. I was holding a United Nations circular in my hand. The Unitarian Church is promoting the thing, you know, with a great big circular printed in the United Nations and all. She spoke up to me as I was talking to Arthur Holden, and she said, “You ought to be running this.” I said, “I’d be most happy to. I’d like to run it right into oblivion.” /chuckling/ The good lady, she thought it was a wonderful thing, you know, a good thing, the United Nations. And I was a very hard man. I was a believer in war. The United Nations, of course, is not going to have any war.

RESCH:  “No — unless everyone will participate.”

 

Just think. There they stand ready to grab the power, the planes, the guns, the bombs and everything, just reaching out to get them.

HARPER:  “They have them, and they sent them to Africa.”

Yes. So far as they get them, they use them right away. What are they trying to do? Just what Rome did with its legions — destroy civilization. It’s too obvious for comment. It’s only the animal part of people that can fail to see such things as that.

RESCH:  “You mention that one of the by-products of the two wars we’ve witnessed in the past several decades is that somewhat grotesque concept of man, of human nature, which has developed. It seems in some regards to be synonymous with certain forms of conservatism, a belief in the at least semi-depravity of man — conservatism in the old sense of the late feudalism and the Tory Government, and authoritarian rule generally. Do you see any connections in this regard?”

Well, we take Gladstone and Carlyle. Gladstone believed

in the common man, and that the common man was essentially virtuous, whereas Carlyle believed in the super man, the man who was naturally a hero and a leader. And they clashed on it ideologically. Carlyle represented, in a certain sense, the Tory attitude — that there are betters, and that’s obvious, just as the white race is better than the black race, judged by their fruits and so on, beyond all possible dispute. /chuckling/ And so Carlyle, in his rather narrow apperception of the whole thing, thought that the superior man ought to rule the other men. Gladstone turns around and says that the common man is the superior man — the lowest is the highest, by some kind of legerdemain that he might understand. I don’t, and never could. Every good and perfect gift cometh from above. It never rises from below. The sunshine revivifies the earth from above; it doesn’t come out of the swamp and the miasma and all that sort of thing. Life doesn’t come out of that. Life comes from the sun. The sun takes the inorganic, and turns it into organic materials. Without the sun, it would remain inorganic. So it’s from above that everything comes — from God above, if you like. So all this talk about democracy, and common man, and all that, it’s all Demos — demonology — demosology, you might call it. And in principle, Carlyle was right. I didn’t use to think so. I abhorred it in my youth. I was brought up on the more or less idea of democracy, you know, and I was taught something like Walt Whitman. One of his rather longish poems is called “Salut au Monde,” or however the French might pro­nounce that. He goes around the world, his hands across the sea, and he greets the Englishman, “Oh you’re a fine fellow, you’re just as good as I am.” And the Frenchman, “You’re a little different, but you’re just as good as I am too.” And he goes all around Europe and Africa and America and every place, saluting everybody, “Hurray for you, you’re just as good as I am.” /chuckling/ He gets down to Patagonia, and he gets across the Straits into Tierra del Fuego, and he sees the Del Fuegans, and he says, “And you, you’re just as good as I am too…well, almost as good!” he said. /chuckling/ You’ve got to take that with a grain of salt, maybe a whole lot of salt. There’s no denying the fact, as I said a while ago, nature raises her mountain peaks in single, small, few places. She raises humanity in tall peaks. She leaves the common level very low, some of it below sea level, /chuckling/ the submerged tenth or something like that. And why fly in the face of the facts? Nature works that way. She doesn’t pick out the worst for survival, she picks out the best. And why shouldn’t the fittest survive? Why not? Who is the fittest? An animal which consumes only and is on his way to death, is that more fit than a human, who creates, and is on his way to immortality? Already in it and getting further and further? You take men collectively, they^’re already in immortality. There’s no animal that isn’t on the way to extinction, judging by everything in the testimony of the rocks. The fossils and all show how they run their course — finished up. And that’s all they have ahead of them. Why not come into some of our humanness, and come into our godhood, come and appreciate our divine heritage and make some practice of it, not lie down like swine and wallow in our fears, in our terrors, our limitations and so on. And every time we resort to the kind of reaction to circumstance that is characteristic of animals, we run, or we fight. We hide. Every time we do like the animals, why then we’re just reverting to our animal basis, animal limitations, and we’re cutting off all the power that we have from above; we can’t receive any great and perfect gifts that come from above, any more than the animals can.

 

HARPER:  “This brings us back to the Herbert Spencer idea, that the political institutions, and the infringements on liberty which we have today, are almost the inevitable result of the fears that we have today from the things that happened yesterday. In other words, the genesis of the giving away of our liberties lies in the foolish acts which then lead to the fears which then lead to the giving up of the liberties.”

As Job said, “The thing I feared has come upon me.” And as the Christian Scientists say, if you fear disease, you’ll catch it. There’s a whole lot in that, too.

 

HARPER:  “No, if he’s right, and there certainly seems to be a lot of history on his side, and then we think of what can I do about this today, if I can discipline my intellect to quit being afraid, then my acts will discontinue being acts of fear, and that’s the best we can do, maybe.”

 

Precisely. If there’s a knife at your throat, why, kill the other man if you can, and survive. But beyond that extreme condition, which is very uncharacteristic of our life today, very much so — beyond that, then we can only be human by acting humanly, and we can only be divine by acting divinely, which is the same thing. And that’s the only technology that’s left for us.

 

HARPER:  “There’s the difficulty of detecting when the man is at my throat and inevitably going to kill me if I do not kill him. There’s where a big debate rages now which involves a lot of people who have been classed as leading libertarians, who hold the view that the bear is at my throat, and therefore I ought to throw the bomb first.”

 

What does the animal say? Hit him first before he hits you. Do him first before he does you. /chuckling/

 

RESCH:  “Do unto others as they would do unto you, but do it first.”

 

That’s the theory of it. Animals all have that. But look what fruits have animals reaped from that kind of a crop .. from that kind of a plantation. They reap nothing but death that way. When we want to do the same thing, we can do it the same way. But all our human instincts tell us the other way. It’s the animal instinct that says, “Do it first.” No human instinct prompts us that way. That is to say, nothing that animals don’t have. But we have something they don’t have, and that prompts us to draw a circle that “drew him in,” as Edwin Markham put it, or something like that.

 

HARPER:  “So what we’re really up against, it seems to me,

primarily at the moment, is this terrific problem of fear of ourselves and our fellow men, and as long as we fear, we will act fearfully.

 

     And I wouldn’t recommend that we stop fearing. I’d recommend that we do the word, do the will of God, that we should act towards our fellow man in the same /way/ we would have him act towards us. It isn’t anything that we stop doing that gets us anywhere. It’s what we start doing. I don’t mean to say we shouldn’t have a policeman to guard us in the block if the Capone crowd is besieging us. I don’t say that we shouldn’t have the necessary defenses. Of course we have to use our fallible human judgment on that. But we should get away from the idea that we can gain anything by resisting evil, overcoming evil by means directed at that end. It’s by the indirect way; if you want to make money, don’t get around other people’s money and try to grab some of it. If you want to make money, create money, by loving your fellow man by serving him. Then money comes. So if we want peace, create peace by living, moving, walking in the ways of peace, which means doing the things we were commanded to do if we would have immortal life.

 

HARPER:  “I’d like to hear you develop that thought a little further. When one says “Resist not evil,” it seems to me almost like saying that evil is a good thing; don’t resist it. Do you want to develop that thought?”

 

     “. . But overcome evil with good” — which rather reverses the idea that there’s any virtue in evil. But I would like to develop that idea. I’d like very much to develop it. I revert to that scene in the Bible where Christ is offered the dominion of the world. Now if he had been attacked by Satan, he very properly would have smacked him in the jaw , to save his own life. But he wasn’t being attacked, he was only being tempted, and so he told him very properly where to go: as the King James scholars put it, “Get thee behind me” as we would say today, “Go to hell.” That’s what he in effect said to him. That’s the proper free transla­tion of it. So he told him to go to hell. Now if the bureau­crat gets after you, if he’s not attacking you, do all you can to resist his activities. But don’t rest on that, tell him to go to hell. What did Christ tell him to go to hell for? He said, “Why I’ve got my father’s business to look after. I haven’t got any time for having any truck with you. There’s no percentage in you. This is all loss and death. This is a false promise you’re making me, like any politician.” /chuckling/ So Christ said, “I’ve got something more important to do than resisting you, or making any war upon you, so long as you keep your hands off me.” /chuckling/ So far as the bureaucrats keep their hands off of us, let us be doing something, and not idling around belly-aching about it. That’s what is meant by “Resist not evil, but overcome evil with good” by doing good. Doing good is cumulative. The more you do, the more you can do. You get strength from your activity. Your labor brings you not only rest, it gives you more and more strength. You cultivate the strength by it. There’s nothing more fatal that we could do, than to succumb to the so-called, supposedly inevitable. It’s not inevitable at all, except by our default. I don’t know if that makes my position any plainer to you or not.

 

HARPER:  “Well that’s what I wanted you to bring out. It seems to me that it relates to many, many of these problems.”

 

That’s vivid in my mind: the bureaucrat is not attacking me at this moment. So why should I cry down the bureaucrat to you, and make you hate him? That doesn’t get anywhere. What I’d better be doing is to be serving you or anyone else that I can, and that is transcending the bureaucrat, because the the more we serve one another, the less energy we’ll have left wherewith to fight one another. Suppose right today, we were using 50/50, or half of our national energy, which is measured by our GNP principally, I think. But any measure you want to take, we have a 100 per cent of it today, and we’re using 50 per cent of it for purposes of bureaucracy and war and that sort of thing, and the other 50 per cent of it we’re using to serve our fellow man. That’s a fair imaginary division, isn’t it?

HARPER:  “It isn’t too far from the truth.”

Well now somebody might be listening to me today, and so in consequence of that, tomorrow 51 per cent of our energy would be going into serving and creating, and acting humanly. How much is left for the bureaucrat? 49, isn’t it? There’s a two-unit gap in there already. Now we don’t have to go very far with that until we get the jump on the bureaucrat.

 

HARPER:  “Except somebody will say, ‘You do not have the option of shifting that one per cent.’”

Well I’m assuming, my premise is, that we have half of our energy for each other, and half of our energy for the bureaucrat. Now if we can do something that enables us to put 51 per cent on the side of the angels, then the bureaucrat’s got to get along on 49. Or I sometimes put it, if we spend half of our energy for peace and the other half for war, today fifty-fifty, and tomorrow we spend 51 per cent of our energy through the ways of peace, then Mr. Mars will have to get along on 49, that’s all there is to it; that’s what will kill him.

HARPER:  “Of course I can see this point, that if we start with 50-50, fifty per cent of the time for the bureaucrat and so on by compulsion, and fifty per cent left for productive activities of our own . .

 

. . and do it.

HARPER:  “ . . and if I then decide to spend one per cent of my time

merely cussing the bureaucrat, then I have lost one per cent of productive effort.

Exactly. Go back the other way.

HARPER:  “It really isn’t productive unless it’s educational in some way that will reduce the 50 per cent of bureaucracy. If you can pick out a way to do that, then . .

MACCALLUM:  “By picking up this one point, then you have a two-point gap, because the negative is now 51.”

Our negative is overwhelming you just because you resisted it.

HARPER:  “By your own choice. And that’s where this “resist-not-evil” analysis comes in. It’s a waste of your good talent.”

They’ve got the edge on you now because you resisted them, forsooth, and not because you didn’t resist them. Because you did resist them, that’s why they got the edge on you.

 

HARPER:  “Maybe I won’t run you for Congress after all. I’ll give that another thought.”

 

/chuckling/ That’s very kind of you.

 

HARPER:  /laughing/  “ Thank you.” 

 

I think I’ve monopolized this whole occasion. Somebody else better deliver themselves of their philosophy.

 

MACCALLUM:  “You’ve thought well of Kahlil Gibran for a long

time.”

 

And how.

MACCALLUM:  “What can you say of him as a libertarian, and can you remember the circumstances under which you first found out about him or became acquainted with THE PROPHET?”

     I remember about the time, about 1938 or somewhere along there, but I can’t think who drew my attention to it. I was talking to some groups in the Roerich Museum, Master Institute, on Creative Social Change. They made me a guest there. At least in the summer time they gave me free rent, and I was on their staff. They had nothing but the cultural subjects, didn’t teach any practical arts. They offered dancing and music and Oriental philosophy and so on. So in some of those discussion groups there, I was telling people about Olive Schreiner’s DREAMS, and someone in the group told me of this book, THE PROPHET. I got it. It was written right here on 10th street, around the corner a little distance, and it’s a wonderful book of its kind. It’s comparable to Olive Schreiner’s DREAMS in many respects. Why were you thinking about it, Spencer, in what way? Do you know the book, either of you?

 

HARPER:  “Do you know, George?”

 

RESCH:  “I know of it. There’s a picture of some Eastern yogi or something on the cover.”

He was an artist, like William Blake. He made his own art work.

MACCALLUM:  “I was wondering if you could say anything about Gibran as a libertarian.”

No. Only in a very broad sense, a very broad sense. He represents that subjectivism, that side of man which is purely conceptual and unrelated to the senses, that dwells in itself for its own sake, that sort of hypnotizes itself into spirituality by turning its back pretty much on the things of this world, or at least looking upon things of this world as pale simulacra of the actualities of life. And in his field, he is the most penetrating and the most keenly observing, and most accurate thinking, of anything I’ve ever seen. I told you that I had sat at the feet of some of these turbaned gentry. I didn’t tell you what became my final reaction, did I? My final reaction was to tell these Orientalists, these Indians and so on, that “It’s very kind of you to come over here and teach us the good spiritual life, the way you practice it in India, but we have a little maxim that by their fruits ye shall know them. And whenever you get so that your high spiritual philosophy endows you with twice as much life as we have, it will be very nice for you to come over here and tell us how you do it. But in the meantime, while we’re living three times as long as you do, we think you better sit at our feet, instead.” /chuckling/

 

MACCALLUM:  “Ouch.”

 

How’s that for an answer, my general conclusion from

the whole business? Now Kahlil Gibran, there’s value there because, you know, our self-realization isn’t anything that happens exactly to our bodies alone, anyhow. The body may have a hand in it, like the old colored man. We children, a couple of cousins and I, were quizzing the old darky — we were very young and we had just been finding out about how babies get born, and what happens as prerequisite — so we asked the old colored man, we said, he had children, didn’t he . . did God make them? He said yes. Well didn’t you? Anyhow, he replied, “Well, I had a hand in it.” /chuckling/ So the Oriental philosophy, and it’s in its finest and purest form in this volume, I don’t dismiss it out of hand as not having anything to it; it just doesn’t compare with us. And we’d be the richer if we’d take it on without sloughing our own off and realize the identity of the functional reciprocity, so to speak, between the matters of the subjective spirit and the matters of the objective, physical life. They play back and forth. We ought to worship the body, develop it to its highest level, and get the most sensory satisfaction out of it, enjoy the most sensuous music, the most sensuous food and indulgences, sex and everything else, at the highest level of organization — the same as you want to have a good stable foundation to your house. That doesn’t mean you should want to live in it all the time. It might be very refreshing to go there occasionally and all that, but it underlies you; it underpins you all the time. So this Gibran’s PROPHET is a little bit of a book, but when you have read that, you have the cream, the very flower, of everything that Asia has to give us. It’s a beautiful little thing, beautiful. For instance, he says, “I will not take wages, only gifts. What I have is not to be measured. It’s immeasurable. Let me have the token of your gifts, if you will, and I’ll accept them, but if you try to tell me what my gifts are worth, and pay me the equivalent, I won’t have anything to do with that.” /chuckling/ He takes a higher point of view in almost everything, like that. May I read you a little short essay on Beauty?

HARPER  “I really would like to finish this tape first.. because we’re running out, aren’t we?”

 

MACCALLUM:  “Yes”

HEATH:    It wouldn’t be bad, in this, but . .

 

MACCALLUM:  “Well, shall we put it in?”

HARPER:  “How much of it will it take? I just don’t want to run out on these other points that we want to cover.

 

RESCH:  “Could you make some remarks about the status of

philosophy in our culture?

 

I attended some of their meetings in Harvard in 1938 and ‘39. I know something about the rise of existentialism — I substitute creativism, if I must put anything in opposition to it.

I read extensively among the philosophers in my adolescence, and what I saw then and revolted against, was a worship of the absolute. Like the Bible: you’d read the Bible from cover to cover, and the covers too, or you don’t read any of it. And so you had to have absolute free will, or you didn’t have any free will, at all. You had to have absolute self-determination, you had to have absolute this and that and the other, everything was in absolutes and infinitudes. And they were wallowing around about how you could reconcile these absolutes and infinitudes — none of which could ever come into human experience. So philosophy was cursed with what I called the absolutism, as politics is cursed by the same thing, /chuckling/ called absolutism. And they had to be outgrown. Well we outgrew it through what they call, in this country, pragmatism, and utilitarianism in England, and things like that, a good deal of the blind leading the blind and never coming out any place. A good deal like Omar Khayyám when he says, “In my youth I did frequent doctor and saint and heard much argument, but ever and anon came out the door wherein I went.” /chuckling/ Well these people were always coming out the door wherein they went.

Now then came along the psychological approach a whole lot, bringing so much psychology into philosophy, and the result of all this is something that I mentioned at the table. They were using ideas to play with ideas. And that gets them nowhere, either; it just leads them in blind alleys, all around and around and around, a merry-go-round, and so they’re stalemated in midseas in a kind of a Sargasso Sea in doldrums. They may be turning around a lot, but not getting anywhere.

Now we are coming upon the time when the physical scientists are beginning to realize that philosophy is their meat too, and they’re making some more or less crude attempts to break into that field. I don’t need to tell you the people, perhaps Schroedinger and Whitehead, and Count deBroglie in France, and so on. And in doing this, they’re taking their metaphysical conceptions, like mathematical and geometrical conceptions, which are purely idealistic and don’t have any more than an analogical relationship to physical events, and they are trying to start with hypotheses, like Von Mises.

 

I want to say, in all friendliness, that if I had any dispute with Von Mises, it would not be upon any practical grounds, but upon the origin of his ideas. His ideas appear, as he expresses them himself in his introductory works and so on — I never had time to read his ponderous volumes — that he has a theory which is divine or perfect somehow, and that he has to find in the economic system facts that are in accordance with that theory, and we have to act in that manner because that is the manner prescribed by the theory. He seems to take that stand, in the same way that Heisenberg takes the uncertainty principle as a point of departure to argue from. Now I couldn’t find out where Von Mises got his theory from. It looks as though he got it either from Olympus or Mount Sinai, or right out of the horse’s mouth, so to speak. /chuckle/ But wherever he got it from, that’s his point of departure. Luckily, he has a theory that is sound — it corresponds with Adam Smith and with other constructive thinkers — and so I’m all for Von Mises. But on the philosophic foundation, I’m off of him.

 

I mention this as an illustration of the road that philosophy and science both have taken in this second quarter of the 20th century. They’ve both gone metaphysical. They’ve departed out of this world, and they’re looking at pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by and playing pretty games with it. They’re not basing their conclusions on anything that originates in experience. They’re basing their conclusions upon things that they imagine, without having any inductive basis for so imagining. Therefore they’re conceiving of nothing as space and giving it shapes like doughnuts and saddles and things like that, /chuckling/ and all the time putting up the fundamental formulas that this and that equals zero — as though a zero being equal to zero was a too foolish thing for anybody to entertain. /chuckling/

RESCH:  “You’re referring largely, I take it, to Mises’ basic epistemology, which is neo-Kantian, I believe. So far as his political philosophy goes, disregarding the specific content of it, there’s no doubt that David Hume and Bentham are his heroes, and that he’s completely Utilitarian. I wonder if you’d care to comment on this; I’m not a connoisseur.

 

     I’m not enough versed to be sure about that, but I’m inclined to take that view as you are expressing it now, very much so. Very much so.

Have I said enough about the philosophy? We’re wandering in the wilderness of metaphysics, both in science and philosophy today. And that’s a very bad wilderness. Luckily, Von Mises has found sound principles there, whether he got them from God or from Olympus or Mount Sinai, I don’t know, but he’s got perfectly good, sound principles there.

     For my part, I’m analytical. I begin from the ground up, take bit by bit the simplest manifestations of nature — of the mind of God in the works of God — and build up, up, and up. Von Mises is something like the Irishman who criticized the mason who was building a chimney. You know, Irishmen are kind of metaphysical anyhow. He said, “What do ye want to be diggin’ all that big hole in the ground fer, an’ burying all them bricks down there? Don’t ye know where ye want the top of the chimney to be? And if ye do, can’t ye put a brick up there? And if it doesn’t stay, put another’n under it to hold it up?”

 

MACCALLUM:  “Wonderful. But, Popdaddy, isn’t that what you’ve been doing? Didn’t you get your proprietary principle first, a priori, and then work down to the ground from it?”

HEATH:  /chuckling/  Did I?

MACCALLUM:  “Didn’t you?”

 

HEATH:  I thought I got it from experience — observation, that is, experience of others observing it — and I got it partly from Henry George’s suggestion of what would happen if the services were performed by somebody. It would raise the values in land. Well, the people who are going to get that value should perform the services, naturally. That wasn’t any theory, it was an observation.

 

HARPER:  “The question raised about Mises in relation to utilitarianism may be important. One extremely competent observer has recently pointed out that for some reason, practically every one of the older students of Mises have defected from his strictly libertarian economics and become semi-socialists. He went over the list of the European students of Von Mises.

     “Now the interesting question here is why did that happen? It may be very fundamental here. You raised a question, you see, about his philosophical base. It’s just barely possible that the structure you build on it without a solid philosophical base may be a brick suspended in mid air that may happen to look all right there at the moment, but will fall the first time it meets a challenge of a practical problem, and the fellow comes out a Keynesian economist.”

Well I hadn’t heard about that. I’m sorry to hear it if it’s true. But I would like to give less credit to Von Mises. As Beethoven and as great creators in the world have intuited something, and then found out that their intuitions were sound, we’ve gotten great gifts of knowledge and understanding of nature from that. Now, I’d like to think that Von Mises has had a sound intuition, and got his proper theories in that way, and if he did, I am perfectly well satisfied . . not as well either; I think I’d prefer the method of getting it from the ground up, building it up bit by bit, from the ground.

 

HARPER:  “See, that may be adequate to find an answer to a problem. This other problem relates to the training of another mind; this intuitive origin does not hold for the second person.”

 

HEATH:  It’s not so reliable; it can’t be demonstrated to anybody else. The man who composes the Ninth Symphony can’t tell anybody how he did it; he doesn’t understand, himself, how he did it.

 

RESCH:  “At one conference, there was an exchange between a professor and Prof. Mises, in which the other professor challenged Mises, saying that, ‘According to your belief, if I were to show you that socialism would produce more goods than the market economy, you would have to be a socialist.’ And Mises said, ‘Yes, that is correct. When you can show me that the socialist or communist organization of society results in more goods, then I’ll be in favor of that.’ To my knowledge, that is a position that he retains to this day. To that extent, I think utilitarianism in this context becomes an issue and something of a problem.”

 

HEATH:  If somebody would say, “If prison labor produces more shoes than the free labor does, you believe in prison labor.

 

HARPER:  “That’s it. That’s where that does bring you out. Because the test he has put is not the test of the right of a free man, but is the test of the pile of potatoes that’s being produced.”

 

HEATH:  Yes, well that’s Henry George over again: products of labor applied to land is all there is to consider in economics. Culturally, it ends up with materialistic considerations. I’ve got to have the spiritual considerations; a man has got to be a creator, to suit me. Whether he creates much or little, he’d better create one ounce than to be a . . .

RESCH:  “There’s more creativeness in a free dolt than in a working slave, I expect.”

HEATH:  I should say so. Besides . . there’s no end of philosophic argument against slavery, slave conditions, and so on. Now you make me want to read together, Kahlil Gibran on freedom. That’s one of his topics.

 

HARPER:  “I think there’s about time left, isn’t there?”

HEATH:  This little essay from Kahlil Gibran’s little volume, The Prophet, is one of the most beautiful of his meditations on spiritual life, from the subjective point of view. Of its kind, I think it is supreme. While I primarily believe in the analytical and scientific approach to things, on the intuitive side this is sheer beauty, and the type beauty is the title of the essay, which I am to read.

“And a poet said, speak to us of beauty.

The answer: Where shall ye seek beauty, and how shall ye find her unless she herself be your way and your guide; And how shall you speak of her, except she be the weaver of your speech. The aggrieved and the injured say, beauty is kind, and gentle like a young mother, half shy of her own glory, she walks among us. And the passionate say, nay, beauty is a thing of might and dread, like the tempest, she shakes the earth beneath us and the sky above us. The tired and the weary say, beauty is of soft whisperings. She speaks in our spirit. Her voice yields to our silences like a faint light that quivers in fear of the shadow. But the restless say, we have heard her shouting among the mountains, and with her cries came the sound of hooves and the beating of wings, and the roaring of lions. At night, the watchmen of the city say, beauty shall rise with the dawn from the east. And at noontide, the toilers and the wayfarers say, we have seen her leaning over the earth from the window of the sunset. In winter, say the snowbound, she shall come with the spring, leaping upon the hills. And in the summer heat, the reapers say, we have seen her dancing with the autumn leaves, and we saw a drift of snow in her hair. All these things have you said of beauty. Yet in truth you spoke not of her, but of needs unsatisfied. And beauty is not a need, she is an ecstasy. It is not a mouth thirsting, nor an empty hand stretched forth, but rather a heart inflamed and a soul enchanted. It is not the image you would see, or the song you would hear, but rather an image you see though you close your eyes, and a song you hear though you shut your ears. It is not the sap within the furrowed bark, nor a wing attached to a claw; but rather a garden ever opening in bloom, and a flock of angels forever in flight. Oh, people of Ortholese, beauty is life, when life unveils her holy face. But you are life, and you are the veil. Beauty is eternity gathering at itself in a mirror. But you are eternity, and you are the mirror, and the veil.

 

     It’s hard to choose among the things here, it’s so wonderful. But I think it would be a fitting climax if I would tell you that little sonnet of mine, “The Inspiration of Beauty,” since we’ve been talking about beauty right now. How did it begin?

 

MACCALLUM:  “… the rhythmic heart of time.” 

 

HEATH:      Deep from the rhythmic heart of Time, ‘mid all

The Cosmic Process, and the rise or wane

Of human hopes and dreams, comes the refrain,

Betimes, of Beauty’s rapture-raising call.

She led that hand on carven cavern wall,

Those eyes of shepherds skyward on the plain;

Inspired by her and scorning mortal pain,

Artist and seekers glory in her thrall.

For she endows with vast Creative urge

The wayward spirit risen from the sod —

Beyond all impulse to destroy or purge,

Her inspiration lifts the earth-bound clod

From creature, as creator, to upsurge

Enrapt — symphonic in the Song of God.

 

MACCALLUM:  “Popdaddy, would you like to make any concluding remarks?”

 

RESCH:  “There haven’t been any remarks incorporated on this tape about custodianship.”

 

HARPER:  “Do you want to make any statement about custodianship and use, and so on, that we could put right on the tape?”

 

HEATH:  Christ throughout his parables taught leadership. There must be a proprietor. Not a servant of men, but a servant of the Spirit, and in serving the Spirit, serving men, as commanded to do by him — doing unto others in the same manner you would have others do unto you. And so far as we practice that, like free enterprise, in freedom with one another and no dominance, no subservience, so far do we enter into the kingdom of heaven, which gives us further and further leases on immortal life. Christ said, “I am the way, the light, and the truth,” and he was. His teaching was. He didn’t mean his body or his mind, he meant what he taught to people. That’s the way and the light and the truth.

 

     The New Testament is the charter for immortal life in this world, here and now, today, and ever has been. All we need to do is to understand its practical application here and now, and know that we are already potentially in the kingdom and have made considerable progress towards its full realization. And when we come to understand our situation, particularly in reference to free enterprise, which predicates a proprietor at the head of every enterprise whose interest is first in his customers, and they in turn look after him. There’s where it’s so much more blessed to give than it is to receive, to give to your clientele, never mind about what you get; God will take care of that. And they will act as the agents of God, and they will fully requite you, more abundantly than you could ever dream by simply trying to think of what you are going to get from them. Think of what you are going to do for them, above all else. Love your fellow men by serving them.

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