Spencer Heath Archive

Item 140

Penciled by Heath on 8½ x 11 sheets folded lengthwise, at Elkridge, Maryland.

August 5, 1951

Notes on

Nature and Man,

Environment and Tribes

 

     All nature is dis-crete, not concrete. All things tend to fall apart, decay, into their ultimate units, yet all these units seek relatedness, not concrete but organic, combinative, not aggregative. Each cell, molecule, atom, electron, nucleon, photon (quantum) seeks not union but organization. But organization is an event. One of its three elements is its period or time. And every organization of events is itself an event, a complex of continuing lesser events having its own period of duration or time. And complex events, too, are the lesser events in still greater complexes of organized events.

     Every complex of events is an organic unit and, in its higher form, a living unit. Its single period is the integration of the continuing or successive periods of the lesser events of which it is composed. Its duration or length of life is in the repetitional continuity of its constituent events — the functioning, as units, of its organizational parts.

Every individual and discrete organization of life tends to re-enact at its level of complexity such integration as that to which its own organization is due — every individual to associate with its own or similar kind towards the establishment of its own repetitions /?/ into still more complex and longer-enduring organizational forms. It is only in such greater organizations with their longer duration that the organisms that constitute them can gain longer periods of their own organization.

Thus:

A man has two tendencies. One is to reach the end of his period — to die; the other, is to organize into a society. In this societal life-form having a period of organization far longer than his he achieves his desire of a greater period for his own. The more developed and complete his social organization the longer his own organization can survive.

Man is primarily a creature, a creation out of his environment, dependent on it not alone for his creation but also for his continuity in it, the continuity of his life. He has only so much of life as it thrusts upon him (as God gives him) and until he so acts that he is more than a creature he can do nothing to extend his term. Only by what he does for himself can he make himself less dependent and more secure, and man can do nothing for himself except by what he does to his environment.

As separate individuals men cannot create; they can only consume. Nor in any combination or group can they do otherwise than consume and destroy, unless organized in a very distinct and peculiar way. As primitive groups or tribes, their organic bond is brotherhood of blood. In this they still can only consume and destroy but they develop within the tribe some material, some accumulation of weapons and of food and thus gain greater power to roam. Until they exercise that power they can only deplete and destroy what their immediate environment affords and suffer both diminished numbers and shortened lives. Having as yet no power to produce or create in any place they must ever wander forth to pastures new and to other tribes to be despoiled. Tribe must vie with tribe for the choicer places of the earth and its richer gifts and so be perpetually or intermittently at war. Not until they begin to create can they make any place so fruitful that they can remain in it continuously and defend against attack and live longer lives.

 

(To be continued)