WHAT DISTINGUISHES human from other beings is that they are endowed with a spiritual and creative power that gives them dominion over the whole earth and makes them the “children of God.” This power has lifted them into a new mode of life, a social organization, in which each member finds his enrichment indirectly through specialized service to others and, by a system of measured exchanges called business or trade, enjoys the products and services of others in vast variety, con­venience and abundance. The growth of this mighty mutuality of service is the divine pathway to that transcendent state, visioned in poets’ dreams, in which the highest being is attained through each becoming, in effect, the servant of all.

 

   In their un-socialized state Nature lays heavy restrictions alike upon animals and men. Without the power to create and exchange, their subsistence is only what Nature provides, and this they cannot employ to rebuild their world but only to multiply their kind. They cannot bend the forces of Nature to their needs and desires. But social-ized men, by their technique of trade and exchange, can raise their subsistence to vastly higher levels than their increasing numbers can require. So it comes about that in the animal and un-social-ized world even the existence of an individual or group is inimical to every other, and the necessary technique is to seize, violate or destroy. This crude rela­tionship among men is the heritage of their animal past. All creativeness, all the sci­ences and arts, all social culture and growth, is the product of the distinctively human — the divine — technique of creation through exchange of service. However little we are aware of it, this is the divine symbiosis, the living with God through living divinely with men.

 

   Evil is atavistic, reversion to actions no longer adaptive, and hence not enduring. When the sum total of human energy shall flow outward in functional and creative modes, then evil can no longer exist. All activity either for or against evil is creative energy misdirected, perverted and lost. But the putting out of the divine, the crea­tive power transcends all evil, resolving it into the beauty of the divine. This is the cosmic pageant of evolving nature, for only the positive can prevail, only the creative can abide. It brings into being relation­ships that endure through being synthe­sized into higher relationships. It is the divine business of universal life, the abid­ing reality. The character of evil, as such, lies in its impermanency.

 

   Salvation from evil is not any advance but only a salvage at the best, for it does not enter into the progression of the divine. Life manifests itself in creation by growth into higher relationships. Its real business is to flow forward in forms transcending all its past. The enduring office of religion and of all the esthetic arts she has nur­tured and brought forth is not to destroy nor yet to save. It is to inspire. It is to qualify the crude energy of life with the divine beauty of its creative expression.

 

   Amid the vicissitudes of life and above all merely negative gratification or relief, there are certain relationships, receptivities and appreciations that suffuse with a sense of unity, integrity and creative power. This is the sensing of beauty, the veritable inspiration, the authentic revelation of the truly divine. It is expressed outwardly in the uplifted eyes, the parted lips, the in­ward breath, the outstretched arms, the heightened muscular tone and the sense of being fully alive. Its recipient is at once, and for the moment, however brief, perfect and whole; a “child of God” in whom there is no guile. To cherish and cultivate this receptivity is the true “spiritual disci­pline,” for the inspired mind cannot destroy; it is the seer, it is illumined, it alone understands. The deep and secret beauties and potencies of nature and of human nature are revealed to it. It is “at one with God” in the joyous putting forth of divine power, for it has emerged into the per­petual spring-time of infinite creation.

 

   In every age, so far as men have prac­ticed the golden rule of service by mutual exchange, the creative “power of God” has blessed them with a measure of freedom; and with freedom, abundance; and with abundance, peace and length of days. The energies so liberated from conflict and wars on wings of inspiration divinely rise, not in flight from death, but in an eternal seeking after light and life. Touched by this esthetic perception, the children of men’s lifted vision spring from their hearts and hands as works of art, evangels of the Universal Beauty whose mark and sign they bear. Under this inspiration men cre­ate objects as symbols, devise actions as ritual, weave words into melody, and sounds into symphony and song. Thus through the esthetic arts do they worship and commune with Beauty, and by their works pay homage to this, their Source divine. As its inspiration descends they clothe it in color and form, in rhythmic motion and melodic sound, and in the magic of story, poesy and song. These rouse the sense of wonder and awe, feed the awakened aspirations and release in ecsta­sies the potential powers of man. Thus through the esthetic arts does religion speak and move, and in ever-flowing con­cord bind men’s hearts to Creative Beauty — to the divine.

 

   Yet more: the awakened and uplifted eye traces the heavens for beauty, and the swinging constellations make music in the rational and reflective mind of man. The world is traversed in its breadth, its summits scaled, its depths explored, its history revealed; and there also man finds order and process native to his emancipated mind. In the joy of this new light he learns the sure way of knowing and of doing that is called science, and by its employment widens all his limitations of space and time. The vision of the intellect, of the eye of the mind, gives the hand of man its grasp upon eternal power — the power wherewith to mould to heart’s desire his physical and, no less, his social and thereby his spiritual world.

 

   Those who respond to the persuasions of beauty are, so far, exempt from the rude compulsions of animal life. They enter the positive phase of existence where they strive not for less pain but for highest exaltation — where they love not possession but to be possessed. Such persons alone can clearly distinguish the integrative and creative modes of action either in the social organism or in the individual life. The ecstatic vision alone can limn to seekers and seers the patterns of living beauty that lie in the social institutions of men no less than in their essential selves. Transcending all expedience and quickening creative power, is the inspiration — the very spirit of religion — that consecrates the esthetic and the abstract arts and endows with visions that transform the world.

 

   The uninspired will protest that degrad­ing conditions of life dim the minds and dull the hearts of men against creative inspiration, casting down the weak and rousing in the strong a wrathful fury to destroy. But the appeal of the spirit is not to victims nor is it to avengers. It is to those unpretending servants and redeemers of mankind who thrill to the rationally understandable beauty that inheres in all the life-ward ways of peace however mean or commonplace they seem. For they of all men are sufficiently detached from the rigors of mere animal existence and from the sweet seductions of organized brute force to discern the creative harmonies in free human relationships no less than in the singing of the stars.

 

   When private persons put others under compulsion of force or deceit and thus get without giving, such actions are forbidden and punished as crimes. But precisely similar acts, systematized under govern­mental power, we morally approve and applaud or blindly accept and endure. Men acting as government, supposedly as serv­ants of all, have no code of pro-social con­duct such as there is for plain and private men, for those who are limited to the voluntary relationships of consent and ex­change. We have not apprehended the divine beauty, the Golden-Rule character, the spiritual quality of the exchange process and so have scarcely yet dreamed of its potentiality, its awaiting beneficence, when extended into those territorial or com­munity services that men must have not separately but in common and are essential to community life.

 

   And so in our blindness to the beauty of the voluntary relationships of contract and exchange, in which our creative and thus our spiritual power dwells, we have all too little enjoyed the blessings of this divine technology in the production and distribution of community services and goods. The miracle of social organization lately evolved out of ancient tyranny is the highest form of organic life; but it is very young, hardly adolescent, not yet sufficiently evolved.

 

   The modern free society employing the process of contract and exchange took over from the ruling classes, from the govern­ments of ancient and mediaeval times, agriculture and most of the services then performed by serfs and tax-ridden “free” men under domination of their ruling pow­ers. Only a century or so ago it separated the administration of land, of community sites and resources, out of the power of government by bringing this basic prop­erty under the noncoercive jurisdiction of ownership or possession determined by free contracts sanctioned by common con­sent. But society has not yet so far evolved as to bring within this non-coercive admin­istration the providing of general com­munity services (other than the mere distribution of them) which are appurtenant to the sites and lands and available to the public only through its occupancy or use of them. Under this evolutionary lag an­cient political power now so moves forward as to threaten complete reversion to the slave technique. In this adventure mountainous public debt mortgages future pro­duction to past dissipation while advancing seizures of property and curtailments of freedom prevent the productive employ­ment of lands, of capital and of men. Thus stalks the warning shadow of a completely political or “socialized” society which, of course, would be no society at all.

 

   All of the social and spiritual energies of men spring from their divine sublima­tion of otherwise destructive and undiffer­entiated brute force. This energy cannot be destroyed. When blocked in its creative flow it finds expression in public and pri­vate violence and crime. Every social per­version, every business depression and the downward trend of production and ex­change that marks the social decline can be traced to cumulative repressions of the social process by political authority. This dries the very springs of public revenue, bankrupts the productive economy and de­stroys all the values that society creates. Yet a higher public technology waits and it must evolve. Just as the whole organiza­tion of private enterprise can serve its myriad customers with no need to enslave them so must society evolve the like system of public enterprise through the organiza­tion of community owners to provide com­mon services to their habitants without ruling or enslaving them.

 

   Public services are those conferred pub­licly on a territory through portions set apart as rights of way for communication and for other common purposes or needs. These services enable wealth to be pro­duced and exchanged within the territory served. The portion of this wealth that by contract and consent of all is rendered up to the territorial owners as location rent is the public revenue given in exchange for the owners’ services in making contractual and thereby peaceable and productive allo­cations of the varying advantages apper­taining to the sites and resources, including any balance of services above the dis­services of the political regime — if such balance there be. And as in all other trans­actions in which property or its use is transferred, the market is the real arbiter of the terms. For the free market, by its consensus of many minds, gauges the recompense according to the social advantages of contract above the alternative of political administration by force. And in this it is governed by all the circumstances as to present demand and the alternatives available, and not merely by the physical properties or advantages possessed by the property rented or sold.

 

   Society can do no act otherwise than through its public officers. The owners of the land are officers of society established by custom and consent and constituting the membership of its basic institution, Prop­erty in Land. The functioning of this insti­tution provides the society with the vital service of a contractual allocation of its sites and resources with security of pos­session on equal terms for all. For perform­ing this necessary service of merchandising socially, by free contracts and without coercion or discrimination, the society vol­untarily awards to these proprietary offi­cers a recompense out of its resulting pro­ductivity that is called land value or ground rent. Like the owners of a lesser community such as a hotel, it is also their func­tion, as yet undiscovered and unperformed, to supervise their community services, protect their tenants against violence at the hands of the community servants and to meet the costs of the public business out of the enormous revenues thus to be created and freely obtained. For the public business when so administered will yield rents far exceeding all present rents and present taxation combined, and the high revenues remaining above all other costs will be the earned recompense of the owners for their administrative services. Unlike mere elected officials, such owner-administrators will have everything to lose by force or fraud or any inhibitions of the social process and everything to gain, in fortune and in honors, by their fruitful and effi­cient administration of the public affairs in the communities they own.

 

   The social-ization of government into a contractual agency of public services, by transforming the present practice of seiz­ures, compulsions and restraints into one of protection and assistance to men’s em­ployment of and services to many others through their voluntary relations, will re­sult in almost unimaginable improvement in the material and the spiritual condition of mankind. The abundance of goods can be like that of light and air, and the energy that now wastes in strife and war can flow into creative services and sublimest artistries. Fear and hate will be transformed, under inspiration, into the ministrations of love. Through loyalty and devotion to Beauty men will find abundance and peace; and even those who sought only security and ease will awaken, God-like in the lib­erty of free spirits, to the majesty of crea­tive labor and to the grandeur and the glory of the Cosmic Dream.

 

 

This essay conveys the author’s

salutation to all kindred minds.

Response is invited.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 waking spirit risen from the sod —

Beyond all impulse to destroy or purge,

Her inspiration lifts the earth-born clod

From creature, as creator, to upsurge

Enrapt — symphonic in the Song of God.

 

 

                            Spencer Heath

           Elkridge, Maryland

               August 1960