Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2180

Verbatim pencil notes by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath at Elkridge, Maryland, about Amaury De Riencourt’s The Coming Caesars, Coward-McCann, 1957.

March 26, 1958

 

 

 

Nearly all, even the most ________ writers on public affairs, treat of population in the mass not from the standpoint of their practices and processes with respect to one another, but from a psychological point of view, as though masses of people had mind and emotions functioning like those of an individual. They make these the subject matter of their analysis and synthesis and supposed evolution from the past and current change. It is not precisely that the social organization has a consciousness and mental and emotional processes, but it is as though mankind were an inchoate mass through which emotions and ideas sweep as entities in themselves — what the Germans call zeitgeist.

 

 The fault with this kind of interpretation is its inutility. Practical technology does not arise from vague generalizations about ghostly entities, but from an objective study of the events that transpire with regularity within the field of observation. This psychological involvement is something like a shadow of medieval mysticism in which man is a characteristically passive element instead of becoming a creator through understanding the processes involved in the events with which he is concerned — men in small numbers looking at the mass as in a mirror and observing its behavior, its actions both tending toward death and extinction and those tending towards the elevation of and greater durability of human life.

 

 It is something like studying the waves of the sea, how they spread over its surface, and treating this as the essential phenomenon rather than the sun and winds which set them going. Ideas and emotions do spread in this manner.

 

 Perhaps I’ve not seen this broadly enough; there may be some virtue in these ghostly generalizations. It may be that it is the virtual absence of any objective content that makes them inadequate to any practical or progressive ends. Or perhaps it is a very nice wonderland for Alices to wander in.

 

The vital thing about a population organized as a Society is its function. The way to be inspired by it is to examine its structure in the light of that function and take account of the kind of behavior, both individual and collective, as regards its performance of that function. The mind when acting under aesthetic inspiration is the instrument for understanding the events which constitute the life of a population. It is the instrument, not the subject matter of examination. Even when the mind is examined as such, it must be known basically in the structure from which it proceeds and of which it is a function.

 

 We’re studying life. When we study human life in the large, we must study the functioning of the organization and not think we’re studying this organization or its functioning when we’re only examining some metaphysical element which we read into it. Not but what there is such an aspect, but that such does not constitute any objective actuality.