Spencer Heath Archive

Item 184

Pencil by Heath on notepad paper. This essay could be made complete by adding some writing from Heath at the end showing how the services of the citadel can be made contractual and thereby peaceful — serving the inhabitants as in the case of the security force in a hotel, which is a community even if small. How about amending Items 188 and 189 for this purpose?

October 31, 1944

 

 

 

     We alternate between war and peace.

 

     War is as primordial as death. Nothing ante-dates violence.

 

     Peace is not a condition but the practice of a different process — a going on in a new direction.

 

     It is not an absence of war but an outdistancing of war.

 

     A cessation of war is no practice of peace. It is only an interlude heavy with slavery, depression and death.

 

     But a cessation of peace — of its process and practice — is a relapse into war.

 

     Let us not look, then, to …

 

______________________________

 

                                     

                                      /Fresh start:/

 

C. Immunity

M. Energy

A. Direction

 

     We alternate between war and peace. On the one hand we kill; on the other we serve. There is no neutral ground.

Clash and strife were long before life, violence long before men, barbarism long before the Great Community — Society. As darkness to light, so is war primordial to peace. Nothing can antedate violence.

A cessation of war is no practice of peace. It is only an interlude heavy with depression, slavery and death. But a cessation of peace — of its process and practice — is a relapse into violence — war.

Peace is not a condition but the practice of a process — a new process, in a different direction and by a kind of force different from violence, from government and war.

Let us look, then, not to the cessation of war but to the process and practice of peace.

But what is peace? Is it a void in which there is no war? Who knows? Who shall know, unless he turn his eyes from darkness toward the light, from collisions and coercions to the process and practice of peace.

     People who occupy communities are called societies. Every community is a place where men abide in peace to create and no longer roam ravening to destroy. To do this it must, first of all, afford protection to all — shelter from force. That is what the word means — com–munitas, a place of common defense, of defense against force from without or from within, from the violence of wild animals or of wild men. Its Citadel must be manned by officers of war and officers of peace, soldiers and police, the one to defend, the other to protect. Thus and thus only can the inhabitants emerge out of the merely tribal bonds of nomadism into a wider and higher communion than that of family or blood. This new relationship is impersonal. It is the trading, exchanging, the widely-serving relationship unbounded by affections, unlimited by hates and fears. It is a relationship into which the social nature of men invites them, regardless of religion or race, whenever their own or other violence is not interposed. It is the relationship of peace, the antidote to coercion, force and war.

     The practice of this new and wide relationship, transcending all distinctions of family, feeling or belief, is all that pushes back the frontiers of predacious nomadism and widens the realm of the creative as against the destroying spirit of mankind. This new relationship — the practice of it — is civilization: — the interfunctioning of citizens (Latin cives) under the protection of a citadel. Civilization, then, is the active practice of peace — of peace that is not merely a state or condition but a process, a new kind of inter-activity between man and man that springs up and enables them to create more than they destroy, in any place depending on what immunity from coercion their community affords. Peace, then, is freedom in action — in action without violence and under protection from violence.

The technique of this practice of peace under freedom is called contract. This is the drawing of men together (Latin, con and tractus) in a unity of obligation by consent and a mutuality of service by exchange. The business of making contracts is called the Market and the place where they are publicly made is called the Market-place. Primitively, this is an open place in the midst of the community — the small open space as opposed to the great mark or unenclosed space beyond the confines or enclosures of the community. Just as the Citadel is the place of protection and power, so is the Market, in its physical sense, the place of service by exchange. Just as protection is the prerequisite of peace so the Market is the practice of it. In the Market properties, services and goods are not held apart from others but are contributed and pooled or communized into the general service of the community, social-ized under the non-coercive contractual jurisdiction of their authorized or accepted owners. This practice of contractual instead of coercive relations with respect to property and services is what constitutes the inhabitants of a community into a Society or social organism.

     These social-ized properties come into the Market by being offered for use or sale; they pass from hand to hand in the Market by contracts for their use or sale; and they pass out of the social jurisdiction by being no longer publicly offered to others and exposed for use or sale. The social jurisdiction is voluntary and it does not extend beyond the Market and its contractual technique.

     In the degree that the Market can freely function the Society is well sustained. It favorably modifies, reshapes and rebuilds its environment; its members, being well fed, well clothed and well housed, live longer lives. In fact, it no sooner begins to function than its members enjoy such leisure and freedom as never before. And this new leisure, this released energy takes spontaneous and non-necessitous forms. Hands draw pictures and mold images, lips tell tales, minds wonder at the world and seek the secrets of its good and ill. A pale or stone is set up and becomes the center of religion, intellect and art. The Market makes possible the

Altar as the center and the realm of all that is non-necessitous and spontaneous in the life of community-ized or civilized men. The Altar, and all that it symbolizes, is the third and highest essential of the functioning organic Society.

     This brief outline of a societal entity in terms of its three essential structures, Citadel, Market and Altar, and their respective functions indicates the manner of their functioning but has made no assumptions as to the extent or completeness with which their respective functions are carried out. If it assumes that the Citadel, Market and Altar are each of them 100 per cent efficient, it assumes no disharmony among them and thus infers a perfect, normal Society. But the societal life form does not fully function. It is in process of development. Its essential parts are in process of slow differentiation one from another. They cannot interfunction adequately until their differentiation is more complete. Until then the Society cannot freely perform its own and over-all function of serving its members by amelioration and recreation of their environment and thereby advancing the abundance and the beauty of their lives and days.

     Coercion and control, impinging on the Market, limits the freedom of contract on whose __________ alone can independent intellect and the arts advance and the free spirit bloom.

     The Market functions more by sufferance than protection of the Citadel, and thus the Altar and its arts, instead of being free, must be largely slaves and sycophants of Caesar when not sold or sacrificed to Mars. Owing to this only partial and incomplete development of the societal life form it does not fully function.

As in all forms of organization, only two types of relationship are possible between its members and parts — the negative, which is its disintegration, and the positive by which it develops and grows. In the one the parts are in conflict or collision. This is a carry-over from the primordial and pre-social — all the coercive relationships of masters and slaves, victors and vanquished, rulers and ruled. In all of these physical force or its equivalent, and ultimately war, is involved. The relationship is unstable and cannot endure. The alternative relationship is that of contract, consent and voluntary exchange — service without servitude — the relationship in which alone peace can be practiced and preserved. And this is capable of indefinite expansion for it strengthens and lengthens and does not weaken or shorten lives. Increasing numbers can engage in it and continue to do so indefinitely.

These two relationships are antithetical. The more there is of one the less there is of the other.

Very small numbers of people can assume non-coercive relationships by emotional affinity without the formal technique of contract and measured exchange, but whole populations practicing highly specialized occupations and services can be integrated without coercion only by the democracy of the Market, through practice of the universal and impersonal relationship of contract and of equivalence in exchange. The Market so far as it is free is the only institution in which large numbers can cooperate without any coercion one upon another, without any dissident minority and with universal peace and accord.

     The Market, the system of exchange, does not suffer or decline by any practice of its own technique, but only by the breach of it. It has no power of its own but to exchange and serve, no place for force or fraud. Coercion and restraint can come only from without and has no sanction but from the Citadel, the state, whose powers and fundamental processes have not essentially changed in all the time of man. The sovereign political state, in its impact on subjects or citizens, has been drastic or mild but never contractual and free. Whether established by conquest or consent, it has always the dominant role. Officers of state, even the least of them, deal with those whom they rule, whether by law or by caprice, as superiors to inferiors. Only in this relationship can there be seizure of properties, rulership and restraint upon the liberties of a citizenry, upon the functioning of a Society or social organism.¹⁸⁴

     [So far as the community services are purchasable from the community owner (or owners) /as in a hotel,/ so far and no farther can its inhabitants be free. Only so far does contract supersede coercion. Only so far can exchange supersede taxation and exploitation.¹⁷⁶]