Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3073

Claremont Men’s College Correspondence – to, from and about the College, President George C.S. Benson, and Assistant to the President John M. Payne

1957-1961

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2589

Letter to Heath from John M. Payne,

Claremont Men’s College, Pitzer Hall, Claremont, CA

June 10, 1957

 

 

Dear Mr. Heath:

 

Thank you for your kind invitation to join you on the occasion of the publication of your new book. I should indeed like to have been able to be in New York. I would like to see the book when the copies are available.

 

     The current issue of Faith and Freedom contains a note about my leaving the organization. I have joined the staff of Claremont Men’s College, and since it is so much in your line of interest as well as mine, I would like you to know something more about it. I am enclosing a copy of a recent statement by our President, and I shall put you on our mailing list.

 

 With best personal regards. Thank you again for remembering me.

 

Yours sincerely

/s/ John M. Payne

Assistant to the President

JMP:kl Encl.

 

P.S. Although I did not reply to your comments about Mr. Ohmann’s Chicago talk, I do agree with you that he seemed at times a bit apologetic about the free market. It’s one of these modern clichés, but I think he is nevertheless heading in the right direction.

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3073

Letter from Heath to John M. Payne,

Claremont Men’s College, Pitzer Hall, Claremont, CA

June 18, 1957

 

 

Dear John Payne:                       June 18, 1957

 

Thanks ever so much for your nice letter of June 10th, and congratulations on your new connection, which I imagine will be one of fine opportunity both for yourself and the libertarian cause. I say this last all the more from having just read Dr. Benson’s little brochure, “WASHINGTON CALLING….”. Hurrah for Dr. Benson!

 

     For a coincidence, Dr. Felix Morley writes me very flatteringly about some of my writings, and I look forward to making his ac­quaintance when he returns from visiting Clare­mont Men’s College during the remainder of this month. I have sent him a copy of my “CITADEL, MARKET AND ALTAR” and am hopeful he may call Dr. Benson’s attention to it. I am sure Dr. Benson will find it compatible with the point of view of his “WASHINGTON CALLING.”

 

My paper, “THE PRACTICE OF CHRISTIAN FREEDOM”, read at the recent Annual Meeting of The Christian Freedom Foundation, was very cor­dially received. It seems to me I may have sent you one of these in a previous letter, but per­haps that was only an intention and did not materialize. So here is a second copy (if it is a second).

 

Again my congratulations on your new connection, which I feel sure will be a happy one.

 

Cordially yours,

 

 

SH/m

Encl: “The Practice of Christian Freedom”

 

 

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2845

An 18-page Transcription by Spencer MacCallum of tape recording of an interview with Heath at Claremont Men’s College on the life sciences. Present were Heath, Spencer MacCallum, and Professors Blaustone, Guliserian, and Mangum.

No date

 

Blaustone:  I’ll stay out of this conversation as much as possible, because the only thing I know about biology is, well, Henry’s collection of shells.

SH:  Are we off?

 

Blaustone:  We’re off. And running.

 

SH:  About all I know about it is, it’s a live topic. (Laughter)

 

Mangum:  Do you have quite an interest in life science?

 

SH:  Yes. Science itself is extremely interesting, being in modern times a more and more significant part of life, and being somewhat segregated from life in general, in the minds of most people.

 

Mangum:  The physical sciences perhaps are more segregated than the life sciences.

 

SH:  The interest, of course, is at the present time centering on the physical sciences. But over time generally, we are always more interested in life than in anything else.

 

Guliserian:  But we depend so much upon the physical sciences for our life sciences..

 

SH:  Yes, and I think that’s a very wonderful dependence, because physical science is dealing with simpler data. Less complex data are susceptible of philosophic understanding — not merely knowledge, /but/ deep understanding of elements, the essentials — the a prioris, I might call it — of the physical sciences. That gives us more authentic data, probably, for understanding the universe — or the cosmos, I prefer to call it — in its other aspects. And particularly in that aspect called life, which is so dear to ourselves.

 

Guliserian:  Such a complex thing, life is.

 

SH:  Yes.

 

Guliserian:  It’s unbelievable, I think, that Mr. Mangum and myself, the more we study about life, the more we realize that it’s just so compli­cated.

 

SH:  Well of course, anything that we don’t understand is complicated. Like the multiplication table. It would be utter mystery to a person first introduced to it. Yet it becomes perfectly simple /as we come to understand it,/ no matter how complex.

 

[Interruption in the tape]

 

SH:  The life sciences are of paramount interest because if there is anything that we can take for primary data — or I might even say datum — it is life: we are alive.

 

Mangum:  Of course this is really the hard thing to describe.

 

SH:  There has been a new approach, I think it’s fairly new, in modern times anyway. The name of Percy Bridgman is associated with it: the operative test. Not what a thing is, but how it acts. That’s what tells the story; by their works ye shall know them. And science, since Darwin especially, has been examining different aspects of the cosmos in terms of how they operate — of how they work.

 

Mangum:  Yes, in fact I would say it has only been in the last twenty years, perhaps, that there has really been any emphasis on this, and just recently in certain parts of it.

 

SH:  Of course we are very much committed to the pathological view of things, always trying to find out how things don’t work — giving us a great deal of information on how not to do it. But the real progress that science has made, it seems to me has come exclusively from finding out how nature operates at the different levels, and then finding out our capacity to take a part in that operation. To take a part in that operation, the first necessity is not to experience it, merely, not merely to perceive events, but to conceive them — to consider them. What Emerson calls, “give intelligent consideration.” That intelligent consideration, then, incorporates us in a part of the cosmos in an understanding way so that we can work with it — as we can work with one another when we make contracts, engagements with one another, and fulfill them — the bringing about new events, new cosmic order, order in the universe that wouldn’t be there but for our so relating ourselves to one another as to create order — which, of course, means to create life. Because that’s one proper definition, I think, of life, that it’s order — more and more order.

 

The more and more abundant life can be taken as poetic expression of more and more of the cosmic order. Some have generalized that up to the point of thinking it’s the Divinity, realizing Himself, by the increasing order throughout the — what is it Tennyson says, “Throughout the ages one increasing purpose runs, the minds of men are broadened by the process of the suns?” That can be coupled up with the philosophic ideal of individual self-realization as a special department of the Cosmic realization of Itself.

 

Blaustone:  The problem here, then, as far as we’re concerned as teachers, is trying to get a point like this across to students that many times cannot be stimulated other than to think of life as being something to have a good time or get through as easily as you can.

 

SH:  That’s the _______ of life. You see, there are two departments of life. In biology of course you are familiar with the phenomenon of mutation, which broadly speaking means that life has evolved up to a certain species, perhaps has evolved up to a certain level of internal organization, which enables it to make better terms with its external environment, and suddenly, as though it had been accumulating for a long, long time, it bursts out into new potentialities, new functions it had never exhibited before. And there is a fresh start in nature, representing the discontinuity principle, perhaps, not only in physics but in biology as well. A mutation might be called discontinuity. To me, the most interesting discontinuity, and the most significant to us all, is the discontinuity between the highest animal form and the lowest human form. There must have been a tremendous mutation there, because as the legend says, the later form has new characteristics. A divine breath was blown into him and he became a living soul, and was invested with dominion over all other things — especially all other living things. So I sometimes think that the evolutionists started at the _____ physical evolution, and animal evolution, but at a certain level, which has been worked out very minutely by the natural scientists. But they have tried to make a continuum, from there across into the human world, when the legend says that there was a distinct break at that point — new powers and potentialities.

 

Mangum:  Well did they mean a distinct break — it depends on how you interpret this — a distinct break in structure, or a distinct break in the fact that it received a soul?

 

SH:  I was about to say, in potentialities..

 

Mangum:  Oh.

 

SH:  Because this new form, this new mutation, had powers and functions not possessed by the old. The animal world, the world of creatures, conditioned by their environment, absolutely, have no power to improve their environment but only power to deteriorate it, diminish its usefulness to them. And so all forms of life below man are under sentence of death, exhibited by the fact that they must prey upon one another in order to subsist. They don’t create anything. All they can eat, then, is eat each other, or eat each other’s food, which according to Malthus is the same thing.

 

Mangum:  Sure, the purpose there is to stay alive and reproduce.

 

Guliserian:  And keep the balance of nature.

 

SH:  To eat without being eaten. I think that’s the way it’s often phrased. So I, if I might call myself a biologist, which I’m not of course in any technical sense, my special interest is in that phase of evolution which begins with man as man, distinguished from less than man, following Pope’s essay, I think it was, “The proper study of mankind, is man” — not the anthropoids, not those who are on the way to becoming man perhaps, and perhaps never arriving. But there is a distinct species, known as man, in the biological world, and some say that he enters into the spiritual world, that is, the world of a creator, because he has the power of understanding things — not merely perceptions but also conceptions, and through giving intelligent consideration to his perceptions, he can reverse the process and put his impact upon the environment itself. He is a creator. So I like to think that in biology man belongs in a special class, the only creative power — and thereby the only spiritual power, because the characteristic of all the divinities of course is that they are the creators of things. So when man conceives some­thing, has a dream of it, he can make it in his own image — as he images it. So modern man, man whom I think we can most fruitfully study, would be man in his capacity as a creator — and so I might say in his spiritual capacity, to emulate his own creator. If we could draw that distinction more clearly and more frequently we would be doing well at following Plato’s maxim, “He shall be as a god to me who can rightly define and divide.” So if we can define and divide man from the lessor orders of creation — make that our beginning point — we’ll find out more about man. We might not find out as much about the anthropoids and still lower forms, but if we are interested — as biologists — in the human form of life, I think we should begin at where life took the human form, and the human potentialities which are so remarkable.

 

Guliserian to MacCallum:  With that statement, he kind of lets you out, doesn’t he?

 

MacCallum:  I was just going to say: let the anthropologists take this particular interest in man.

 

SH:  I think that’s very hopeful, that anthropology is giving more and more attention…

 

Mangum:  I was just wondering, what do you mean by different class from the other animals? Do you mean divorce him from the other animals just in study, or…

 

SH:  Just as a mutant is different from its predecessors, so man can be regarded as a mutant in the world of creation.

MacCallum:  Of course there remains the physical side of man to be studied in biology, and I think physical anthropology in some places is coming to be called human biology.

 

Blaustone:  You mean the evolution of the physical frame per se.

 

MacCallum:  Physical anthropology is getting much more sophisticated than it used to be. It is largely interested in genetics just now and a good many things.

 

SH:  This grandson is stealing some of my thunder, of course. (Laughter) Which is a happy thing. Grandparents are always happy to have their grandchildren follow in their footsteps. It’s quite a compliment for them to do that. They’re not always so ready to do it. But I’m very serious in my interest that anthropology is becoming more and more concerned with man per se, even contemporary man, and especially contemporary man. And of course when anthro­pologists pursue that field, they are trenching on the field of the sociologist.

 

Mangum:  They certainly are.

 

SH:  But what I like about them is that whereas sociologists are so much concerned with what’s wrong with us, and trying to find out so much about our social diseases, and our inadequacies and our dangers and terrors, out of which I don’t think we can get any technology — and I mean that — the anthropologists are beginning not only to gather data and factual material, but they are beginning to interpret it. They’re beginning not only to know, but to understand. And all things to be understood have to be understood in terms of their function, how they act; as in all things, “By their works, shall ye know them.” And until we understand life and all things that science concerns itself with, any science, we must understand how it works. Until we learn the function of the thing, its structure and all its other peculiarities we may observe can have no significance for us, no worthwhile significance — till we know the function.

 

Blaustone:  Mr. Mangum mentioned here a minute ago about how the more study is made of life itself, the more complicated it seems to become. What is the ultimate goal here, though?

 

Mangum:  To answer what is life.

 

SH:  Let’s think in the contrary direction for a moment. The more we understand anything, the less complicated it seems. We only call things complicated when we don’t understand them.

 

Blaustone:  That is true to a certain extent, but..

 

SH:  If we take the Biblical injunction, “With all thy gettings,

get understanding,” then when we understand things, we can

become creative participants in them. As when we understand our

fellow man, we can make contracts with him and do each other mutual good — through understanding and serving him, have a meeting of our minds, as in all ordinary business transactions.

 

Guliserian:  That’s very true.

 

SH:  The principle applies throughout all nature, I believe.

 

Guliserian:  We found that in the initial stages of any investigation, let’s say of a simple thing like the cell, it all looks very simple. It’s the basic unit of structure and what have you. Now many, many years later after the nineteen-hundreds when they first observed this, we find it is so intricate and that in the last three years, let’s say, they /find/ with the advent of electron microscopy that things are so intricate, so involved, so biochemically involved, we realize that we know a lot about the cell but we haven’t even scratched the surface.

 SH: So in the nineteenth century we knew all about the cell and we built upon it. We learned all the higher forms of complexity. We didn’t begin with the cell and go downward into it.

 Mangum:  That’s right. Of course at that time they couldn’t too well.

 

 Guliserian:  No, they didn’t have the techniques we have now. Our techniques today may be archaic — well, they will be — in the next ten or fifteen years. Everything has just improved so significantly.

 

SH:  It’s interesting to speculate. And it’s not vain to speculate, because all speculation is hypothesis you know, and without that you can’t proceed at all, in any science. So we have to hypothesize, if that’s the right way to say it, the things about the cell and find its constitution, its ingredients and so on. At the beginning of this century we discovered to our amazement that even the atom itself was a composite affair, made up of the most innumerable subunits within itself.

 

Guliserian:  Yes it’s just not electron and proton anymore!

 

SH:  And then at the very beginning of this century comes that amazing discovery that even these compositional ingredients of atoms were complex, complicated of a still more simple unit, called Planck’s constant, the building blocks of the universe — all quantitatively precisely alike in quantity, but of infinite variety in their composition. The Planckian unit of course is only an almost infinitely small subdivision of an erg second, any quantity of energy or action. And being composed of the same three elements, like the gram, centimeter and the second, it has the same constitution as the erg second, this tiny fraction has. And so it gives us a quantitative unit as a building block, but the shape, composition or quality of these units are in infinite variety, based upon some lesser unit still. Of course there has to be an end to that..

 

Blaustone:  Where is it? (Laughter)

 

SH:  Well, I think we are getting close to it, but that’s for physicists to tell us more about — finding an absolute unit, less than which will not unite with the other two to form a quantum of action or energy. When we discover those basic units, we will then have the fundamental of the cosmos. — An obscure statement, I know.

 

MacCallum:  Mightn’t it not be the fundamental of that part of the cosmos that comes within the range of our experience?

 

SH:  Thank you for the correction; I approve of it.

 

MacCallum:  As my grandfather has said sometimes, it is an interesting idea that, just as we have a range in the spectrum of light waves that we can perceive with our eye, we being finite beings, we might hypothesize that there is a range to our experience, as finite beings in the totality.

 

Mangum:  This is true.

 

SH:  So we can only expect to understand that which is within our range..

 

Mangum:  That’s right.

 

SH: Our finite range, because we ourselves are finite.

 

MacCallum:  So it’s getting down to the building block of that range.

 

SH:  Of that part of nature. Yes. The smallest brick — although of many kinds and shapes — the smallest brick that can enter into that part of the cosmos which impresses itself upon our sensory system. Or perhaps upon our psychic system as well, all of which are limited. They can’t know anything beyond their own inherent capacities.

 

Mangum:  That’s right.

 

SH:  So with all our study of the life sciences, or the physical, the range of our possible discovery is limited as we are, physically and otherwise, are all less than infinite. We can hardly speculate beyond that. But __________________ to find out about things there. And if what we exhibit there is life, as we agree, then the more we understand about life, the better lives we can live. And the better lives we can live means the longer lives we can live.

 

Guliserian:  That’s true.

 

SH:  Man alone can do that, because he has been endowed with a power to change his environment, make his habitat more and more habitable instead of less so, as other animals have to do. Man’s peculiar in that. He is divine in that sense as a creator. But there’s a curious catch about that; if he’s going to be a creator, he has to do what the biological cells have to do. If they want to have higher potentialities than the single cell, they have to combine with one another. They have a kind of a valence, as we used to call it, by which they make contracts, engagements to benefit, do good to each other — not promises not to harm one another, like treaties, covenants, but positive engagements to do good reciprocally to each other. And so just as the biological cells engage themselves to one another to make the higher, more complex forms of life, with higher powers and potentialities as in us, so.. /Long pause/

 

Guliserian:  Some time ago a noted physiologist, the name passes me at the time, made a statement that the human body is built on a plan to last in the vicinity of 165 years — assuming of course there was no stress involved.

 

SH:  Sometimes they say 120, don’t they?

 

Guliserian:  Well, no, this is more — without stress.

 

SH:  Isn’t this curious. In the sixth chapter of the Bible and I think sixth verse, in that neighborhood, if I can quote it —

“Saith the Lord, my spirit shall not always strive with man, for he also is flesh. Yet the number of his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.” Quite close to biology, isn’t it?

 

Mangum:  That’s right. I had seen this 120 quoted before, and I’ve forgotten how they based it now, but something upon the lives of other animals and the size of bones and so forth, they came out with 120. I’m probably wrong on how they did this.

 

SH:  It’s sometimes given as six times the period from birth to maturity. Now man would be about six times twenty, it would be 120. That’s been suggested, and verified to some extent.

 

Mangum:  Well it’s possible. It’s been well proven for 110 or 115, because there have been actual cases of this. In fact, I read in the paper the other day where some population of mountain people — did you read that?

 

Guliserian:  Yes.

 

Mangum:  ..all live to be about 110. That seems to be the age. I don’t know how true it is, but I read that.

 

Guliserian:  They’re isolated, and they are…

 

SH:  Not forgetting Old Parr, in England, the Shropshire lad who is supposed to have lived to 158 when the physicians and so on examined him in London? The London air wasn’t good for him, and he passed out at 158. (Laughter)

 

Mangum:  From what I’ve heard of that air, I can believe it.

 

Guliserian:  What about, based on the standard from, oh say from the turn of the century till now, how they have prolonged man’s life?

 

SH:  That’s the most remarkable phenomenon of modern times, and the most significant.

 

Guliserian:  It’s true.

 

Blaustone:  During the last fifty years this has happened. What about the sixties? Are there any records in ancient times — Rome, Greece and the Golden Age — where man was living beyond..didn’t Socrates live to be 86 or something like this?

 

SH:  I’ve seen some tabulations about this..

 

Mangum:  Yes, there are examples. When they usually quote ages, it’s always average, and they’ll say that they averaged 40 years or something like that.

 

SH:  I’ve seen some figures lately, and I don’t remember the source, but they tabulate in Roman times, early Empire perhaps, the time of galley slaves and so on, that the population as a whole — not picking out galley slaves or peculiar individuals — that it was way down in the low twenties.

 

Guliserian:  Yes, they had a very high mortality rate.

 

SH:  And the average life span or expectancy has trebled

probably — more than trebled — since those days.

 

Mangum:  Well you still have countries such as India and the Orient and Africa where all the ­­­_______ say that 30 and 35 would be an average.

 

SH:  That figure has been increasing somewhat lately.

 

Mangum:  It has lately, yes.

 

SH:  You know, they’ve been importing something from us that the

headlines don’t tell us about. Slowly, and almost imperceptibly,

they have been doing what /Sir Henry Sumner/ Maine called emerging from status into contract. And so far as they have been emulating us — and I don’t mean living on us by our charity — so far as they have been following in our footsteps, without realizing it perhaps, they have been practicing more of the free enterprise technique and making contracts with one another. Contracts, of course, benefit both parties — that’s why they keep on making them — and that gives them the power of division of labor and all that, which gives us our physical technology, and this physical technology is then employed in the technology of relating ourselves contractually to one another — without which we couldn’t make any use of our physical technology. And so I think that the glory of man today is in his practice of the reciprocal interfunctioning, to mutual benefit, one with another, which characterizes all of our economic system as distinguished from our political system. The political system I think could be fairly said to be precisely the opposite, in which the public authority and its officers are constantly and characteristically doing to others exactly what they wouldn’t wish others to do unto them (laughter), including taxation and war and all such things. Whereas our economic system, which has been getting less attention, perhaps frightening us less, and being less frightening goes on without any headlines supplying the power for all the good that we do — and for all the evil that we do. I would like to see our allegiance concentrating more upon our creative side of life, rather than upon the political side which is so terribly destructive, generally — and especially at certain times, called war. Chronically destructive when it prevents men practicing the creative relationship, which was prescribed for them in certain, more or less revered, legends, that they should do unto each other as they would have the other do unto them — and in a manner that satisfies both parties and lifts both to a higher and more secure level. So all the security we have, it seems to me, certainly is not political security. We don’t feel much political security. But what we have is really social security. And by that I mean the security we get by social as distinguished from political relationships — social relationships being reciprocal. And in all biological success, the elements involved practice reciprocal relationships. When the relationships are other than reciprocal like our contracts, even the uranium atom, by reason of the particles contained within it colliding with one another, is disintegrating, disappearing into the lesser order of things, in fact by the process called entropy — failing back into the homogeneity, the lesser differentiated, the reverse of evolution, the reverse of growth and development. So we have a vast opportunity now, and we are practicing it so far, that it is becoming more and more signifi­cant every day how important it is that we should preserve our social organization, and not concentrate too much of our attention, and especially our fears — and even our resistance — to evil.

 

But rather we should try to overcome the evil in our lives by the practice of the good. And so if we can cultivate and expand our economic system, our voluntary system and our creative system or side of life, as we expand that side of life, necessarily that draws the energy away from politics and war. Because we can’t use the same horsepower for two purposes. Our vital powers have to go into creation or into destruction, we can’t extirpate or annihilate it. So what we do not use creatively necessarily remains in the primitive form, of the animal limitations — disintegration.

 

I’m happy to see that our economic system today is expanding in the direction of great organizations of vast wealth in the form of real estate, concentrating in corporate forms much as other forms of capital have concentrated with so much fruitful results, as you know. And this now, this new concentration, has been in the womb of time of course forever; but it is combining real estate into great communities, administered by the owners, related to the inhabitants only through the contract relationship. Nothing like taxation or violence. The administration of a volun­tary community — like a hotel, or a shopping center, or any large or small area under one dominion, one ownership, corporate or otherwise..

 

MacCallum:  The new industrial parks and real estate complexes are..

 

SH:  Great varieties. It’s burgeoning now. It’s the great phenomenon of the present time. Not too many perhaps realize that when we extend these communities, far and wide, and they all make money — otherwise they pass out; they have to make money to survive. Political communities don’t have to make any money except to counterfeit money, or print what they call money, to survive.

These new communities are making money by giving services, through the contractual process. And they are bringing us into a new order of public life. Because as they become more and more widespread, these self-sustaining communities, operating under the golden rule instead of the iron rule, they will gradually — through the profit motive, if we must say it — will gradually be introducing the golden rule into our public affairs. So we can envision the day, and it may not be far away — as aviation wasn’t far away when I was crazy for dreaming of it even. It may not be many decades away. It is rising on all sides. These profit-making communities are performing municipal services successfully — in the way that the inhabitants enjoy them and value them so much so that they give, in the form of rent, the equivalent of what they are getting. And this provides, as in all such communities, it provides a natural fund for performing these services which are in this manner requited.

 

Mangum:  It is certainly true. I had never thought of that.

 

SH:  In my view, we are getting into a new biological age. I might almost dare to call it Utopian. Because if we consider its basic principle, the rationale of it, it has the potential capacity to eliminate violence from all our public affairs — because it will eliminate the violent seizing of property in order to maintain the services. The hotel corporation doesn’t seize anybody’s property in order to maintain the hotel services. Nor does the shopping center seize anybody’s property or infringe anybody’s liberty in order to maintain the services of the shopping center. Those services are so good that more and more people are being attracted there, giving us a self-sustaining type of community. And these run out, as my grandson says, into industrial parks, and oh, I think warehousing, even the humble places where mobile homes stop are supplied with municipal services — police and fire protection, water and electricity and all that sort of thing — and I’m told that, I think it’s tens, or possibly scores of billions of dollars have gone to be invested just in those places — which are communities because they have a common defense. You know your Latin? Communito, which means, a common defense, and a common protection. That protection that these temporary-home people get is so invaluable to them that what they pay for it capitalizes into many billions of dollars at the present day. Well that little humble example, not mentioning these hundreds and even thousands of acres in some shopping centers and general communities and housing communities operated by the life insurance companies providing streets and water and all those things — not counting these more elaborate things, just this little humble thing of a safe place for a mobile home to spend a day or a night, or a year, and I think they average between one and two years, the principle is so all-pervading, and it’s rising around us as I see it, and I’m trying to be a prophet now as I was in aviation, seeing things in terms of their function, no matter how humble they may be. When they function in a creative manner, then we know we have potentiality there. So I’m really envisioning a growing brand-new civilization which will not be a house divided against itself, one side of it creating wealth and the other side, certainly not creating any because it does not practice the contract relationship, and destroying a great deal of the wealth that is created.

 

Guliserian:  This being true, Mr. Heath, in a material sense how do you suppose this could be brought about in a quicker fashion?

 

SH:  The mills of the gods are said to grind slowly. But the only reason I ever saw them grinding slowly was because we didn’t understand how they were grinding.

 

Mangum:  Yes, that’s true.

 

Blaustone:  That’s true.

 

SH:  As fast as we understand such matters as I have just been

adverting to, they’ll grind faster and faster, of course. We proceed empirically, feeling our way, not understanding until after we’ve done it. We don’t act as we think, altogether. We have to act successfully and understand that, and then we can think successfully. But if we try to think out an economic system or any kind of a machine or anything de novo, I might say, why, we haven’t anything to base it on. The inductive approach is: “What’s already working? Let’s get its rationale.” And then we can take that rationale in hand and become creators and then we can really speed things up. Aviation and the automobile got speeded up that way. Chemistry got that way after Dalton and Mendeleev. They got the rationale and the arithmetic of it. And when they got this rationale, why then we could go ahead and practice those things which nature had been doing on her own, under our eyes unseeingly. When we opened our eyes to the rationale, then we could become creators. Take the hand; now we can synthesize anything that nature..

 

Blaustone:  I was pointing, sir. Creation. As you know in our last discus­sion, with physics, we entered into a realm of differences of opinion. I really don’t think it was so much that as it was defining of terms again. How do you feel about this element of creation? Is there nothing new on earth, or do you feel there is? [Addressing M or G?]

 

SH:  May I answer that question?

 

Blaustone:  Sure! Anybody. I just threw it out for…

 

SH:  _________ is the basis of our cosmos, be it Planck’s quantum or any subdivision of that, it is susceptible of probably limitless different kinds and forms of composition, organization. It is the new relationship between things. That is the new thing under the sun, always more and more, newer and newer. The basic physical ingre­dient, as you might say, or objective ingredient, just considered as something in being, and not as process..

 

Blaustone:  Then it’s a case of organization.

 

SH:  It’s a case of organization. Life is organization.

 

Blaustone:  Then creation, not in the sense that we are creating a new chemical element so much as taking this chemical element in relation to something more..

 

SH:  The wood in this table, and the elements in it and all, are absolutely old, probably as Fred Hoyle says, with no beginning and no end, ________. But the composition in this table is unique, and susceptible of infinite variation. So the new things in the world are the new types in which things are organized. And so the new thing among men is the new types in which they are organized. Primitive man is organized on the basis of violence, cannibalism, or war, principally, outside of the kinship bond; and modern man has learned the contractual relationship, the golden rule relationship. And he has to a large extent outgrown the primitive iron-rule relationship.

 

Guliserian:  so.

 

SH:  And so the relationship of contract was a new thing under the sun. But the men, the ingredients, the capital that was employed — physical things — were as old as nature herself. But nature is always, as Nietzsche said, “Saith Life, I am that which must always transcend itself.” So by higher and higher organization, cells transcend themselves by associating themselves with other cells. You have a new composition. All this composition, all this organiza­tion into higher functioning, that is new under the sun. And what characterizes that is that one of the ingredients of the events which we are talking about — and of course all organization /is?/ of events. It seems to me that ontology has to recede and give way to process, as according to Whitehead, which is events. And the, I was going to say, “prime,” but the ultimate ingredient in any event is the time element — how long does it continue. Plato and Saint Paul said that is most real which is most enduring. And so with all this change in organization, those organizational forms which most endure are the most real. And nature is always giving us novelty in that way. And modern biologists are characterizing life now as that which is not under absolute physical determinism. It always has variety; no two cells are exactly alike. And in this variety, we have opportunity to choose. If we didn’t have any variety in nature, there would be no choice — by us or anybody else. But by reason of living things, as distinguished from the non-living things, and especially man, the variety in life gives scope for the free will in man to exercise itself creatively and to approach the same potentialities and powers of his Creator, and himself become a creator.

 

/Breaks off here/

 

______________________________________________________________________

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1676

Carbon of a letter to Dr. George C.S. Benson,

President, Claremont Men’s College, Claremont, California

September 30, 1959

 

Dear Dr. Benson:

 

Returning from a visit to the Virginias and the South, I was happy to find your kind letter proposing a series of discussions with you and your four associate members of the Institute for Studies in Federalism during February in the coming year. For that month or even earlier dates made in advance will be entirely convenient for me. My present expectations are to leave here by air early in November and, after some stop-overs en route, to arrive in California about November 20th. I will wait for your confirmation of specific dates.

 

Your proposal is very appealing to me, for I am hoping that we can widen the Classical concept of federalism, as the insuring of “good faith” among a number of sovereign corporate entities exercising a political jurisdiction, so as to include the joint undertakings of proprietary organizations with respect to services that are common and general throughout their respective communities. This “good faith” (federe) is of course essential in either case; in the one for the true observance of covenants — agreements of non-aggression, express or implied — and in the other for the faithful performance of contracts which are not negative and thus can be and nearly always are fully performed. The vice or virtue of federalism would seem to depend on the nature, on the ultima res or subject-matter of the compact or agreement — whether it is the accepting and respecting of a status or the performing of actions that lead to mutual advance.

 

I should have been happy had you proposed to discuss these principles in a general way, apart from the interest of any single author or publication. I am thus and therefore all the more gratified that you propose my Citadel, Market and Altar as pointing up four different aspects or approaches. The first, I would suggest, is that of the natural scientist whose methods of research and discovery have revealed so much and have been so marvelous in their results. The second could be that of the humanist and historian, whose allegiance to values and recordings of achievement afford rich vantage-ground for ever higher adventurings in the realms of spirit and mind. The third approach would be that of the man of business who, though but dimly knowing it and for golden gain, brings to the practical use and services of millions of men what can be first seen and dreamed by only a gifted few. A fourth approach may well be that of philosophy and art, of sages and singers who aspire to the universal, whose systems and precepts, signs and symbols, give intimations of immortality and waken the divine.

 

For your convenience and that of the Institute members, four copies of Citadel, Market and Altar went forward to you yesterday by post prepaid.

 

I look forward to the pleasure of visiting you again and of meeting your associates in a common seeking of the knowledge that gives power — of deeper understandings of the human heritage and all that it implies.

    

With cordial good wishes to you and also to Mr. Payne,

 

Sincerely yours,

 

SM/m

Enc:  Christian Doctrine of Man

 

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­_____________________________________________________________________________

 

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2982

Carbon of letter from Heath to Ludwig von Mises

February 8, 1960

 

 

Dear Margit and Ludwig:

 

Your telegram of best wishes was very kind indeed and did help to make my last birthday the happiest I have had. For I seem able, here in the West, to attract quite ready attention to the cultural and spiritual developments that are profoundly inherent in our free-enterprise economy.

 

     Out here I have found presidents and faculties of colleges and heads of business and religious organizations and newspapers in some ways far more hospitable than I could have thought. Among others, President Benson of Claremont Men’s College has scheduled me for this month to lead four two-hour seminars attended by him and a group of faculty members of his personal selection. Plans of a similar character are under discussion among other of the associated Colleges in Claremont and some of the smaller colleges near here, especially Chapman, at Orange where President John L. Davis is most enthusiastic.

 

     The topics in all cases are pertinent to the printed purposes for which my modest and hopefully tax-free Corporation was formed. But it seems necessary for me to come East next month for a hearing on April 5 in Washington on my tax exemption application once denied. It seems they want statements from recognized authority on the worthiness of the work done and being done — such as the free-enterprise Suez solution, book and pamphlet publications and my own personal presentations to organizations and key individuals. Could you possibly help? Enlargement of activities and personnel depends somewhat on tax-free status.

 

     My wonderful friend here, H.C. Hoiles, Sr., publisher of The Register and all the chain of Hoiles papers is a bulwark of libertarian thought. Besides quoting your work extensively on his editorial pages, he keeps on a table in the entrance lobby of his huge new publishing plant, I am happy to say, a fine collection of your smaller writings for free distribution to all.

 

     Besides my place in the country near Baltimore and Washington, I still keep my apartment at 11 Waverly Place in New York. But it does seem that many of my coming days are going to be spent in Southern California, not only because of the seemingly wider opportunities for me here but the favorable winter climate.

 

     Many, many thanks again to both of you, for your kind wishes, and with continued admiration for your mighty works in the Libertarian Cause, I am,

 

Cordially yours,

 

Encl:

   “Claremont Trustees Reject Federal Aid,” Register, 2-4-60

   Editorial: “Not on social Security Taxation” Register 2-3-60

   Birthday party clippings (To follow)

   Purposes of Foundation

   Report on weekly series by S.H. on

 Free Enterprise station KWIZ (To follow)

 

____________________________________________________________________________ 

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2987

Letter from from George C.S. Benson, president of Claremont Men’s College, Claremont, California, to the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, Washington, D.C., supportive of Heath’s effort to obtain tax exemption for the Science of Society Foundation. Included in the Originals envelope is correspondence relating to the possibility of Heath merging his Science of Society Foundation with Claremont Men’s College, which never happened.

March 2, 1960

 

Claremont Men’s College

Claremont, California

The Commissioner of Internal Revenue

Washington, D.C.

March 2, 1960

 

Dear Sir:

 

Mr. Spencer Heath, President of the Science of Society Foundation, has asked me to write a note indicating my evaluation of the work of the Foundation.

 

     I am not acquainted with all of its activities but I have read carefully the book Citadel, Market and Altar. I have also arranged for a series of seminars with the members of the Claremont Men’s College faculty to discuss this book with its author, Mr., Heath.

 

     I would certainly characterize the book as a thought­ful, scholarly document. I could not characterize it as “propaganda” for any specified cause. Mr. Heath, in his dis­cussions with us, was much more interested in the process of philosophical exploration than in conversion of anyone to his views.

 

     I am not sure that I would agree with every statement in the book. But I am sure that I respect it as a very thoughtful analysis of some of the problems of society. I should like very much to see further research into the problems suggested by the book.

                            Sincerely yours,

                            George C.S. Benson

GCSB:eb

_____________________________________________________________________________

 

Spencer Heath

312 Halesworth Street

Santa Ana, California

March 15, 1960

 

Dear Spencer:

 

Last night I had the pleasure of reading Judge Medina’s book which you very thoughtfully sent me. I was very interesting and in some parts — thrilling. I am most grateful to you for the opportunity to look at it.

 

We hope that you are in good shape now and are glad to know that you will stay with us for a while!

 

Cordially,

/s/ George C.S. Benson

George C.S. Benson

GCSB:eb

 

____________________________________________________________________

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1704

Tape recording of a 10-minute radio program on Station KWIZ, Santa Ana, California, featuring a discussion between Dr. George C. S. Benson, president, Claremont Men’s College, Claremont, California, and Spencer Heath, president, The Science of Society Foundation, Inc.

March 28, 1960, 8:15pm

 

HEATH    I was very happy to hear that speech of yours on free enterprise giving something of the history of our country in that relationship.

 

BENSON   The main point I was trying to make was that economic liberty, or free enterprise, is very necessary to political liberty. A lot of people think that they can have the Government doing more and more things, and yet keep the pleasant system of ordered liberty which we now enjoy in the United States. I have the feeling, however, that if they have the government entering into more and more phases and controls of economic life, that political liberty is likely to disappear. I suspect liberty is kind of an indivisible thing. What do you think about that point?

 

HEATH    I think you are entirely right about that, and that perhaps a tragedy of our time is that we put so much belief in the iron-rule administration characteristic of all political governments.

 

BENSON   The problem is one that’s of course /of/ very real importance for our own society today, because many of the people who advocate some degree of collective action are good friends of ours who really don’t want to lose political liberty at all, and if they realized they were endangering political liberty, would be much less likely to advocate the actions they do for governmental interference with the economy. Now I’m perfectly willing to grant there are some things which the government has to enter into, but I think those things should be kept pretty limited. I believe you have some points of view as to ways in which the economy could furnish a number of services without governmental interference.

 

HEATH    Yes. I think that we have in our free-enterprise system the potentiality of not only developing it as we know it now, but of extending its operations into newer and wider fields. I feel that it is a spiritual power — that it works on the golden-rule plan as all honest business does — and, that if we learn to understand it better and better, that we will extend it more widely and more widely until it will undertake our common services which are now relegated so largely to government. So that instead of having the coercive arm of our society getting more and more of our power, and losing more and more of our freedom thereby, we will have our free economy reaching out further and further and taking over fields now occupied by the government economy. I believe that’s entirely possible. I believe it is inherent in our free-enterprise system.

 

BENSON   I’d like to hear a little more from you, Mr. Heath, about what you called the spiritual values of the free-enterprise system. I take it you mean by that the opportunities for the individual to develop himself and his own ideas and his own moral values, and the fact that he can do these more freely in a free economy. Is that what you were referring to?

 

HEATH    Yes, Dr. Benson, that is really the objective ideal. But when it comes to the means, we will discover, more and more, that we have to practice the golden rule rather than the iron rule. And if we practice the ordinary ethics of free enterprise, and extend its money-making capacities until we can make money — even fortunes, and vast fortunes — out of the administration of community services, corresponding to the fortunes that have been made out of the administration of private services, then we’ll be on the positive road towards realizing the dreams of our civilization.

 

BENSON   The making of community services as a matter of individual enterprise is an interesting point, and I’m sure one with which not all of our listeners will be familiar. So in a moment I’m going to ask you to expand on that. But I take it that the point you have in mind — as I understand it — is that many of the services which are now furnished by government could be better furnished to individuals by private enterprise of a non-compulsory nature, and that corporations could be set up which furnished such services as — I think you would go as far as much police work, and construction of roads, and transportation — and even schooling too? Are these all part of the community service which you believe would be better handled through corporate or individual enterprise?

 

HEATH    Yes. We must remind ourselves that individual free enterprise is recessive now. Our enterprise is becoming more and more corporate. We are doing things on a larger and more inclusive scale. And when it comes to communities — we have communities like hotel communities, and like shopping centers, which are organized as corporations, owned and administered by them under the golden rule by which men make money. And those things are creative. There are just two kinds of administration, you know. There is the administration by the process of contract, which creates values, and creates all of the things that we have, both material and spiritual values in our civilization. There is the other rule, sometimes called the iron rule, by which things are operated coercively and without the rationality of free contract. Now in order that we may carry the private type of enterprise into the public field, the communities must be organized on a larger scale, just as all properties are organized in the large corporation, and then that large organization gives these services over a wide-spread clientele. So in a community. The hotel is a sort of pilot plant, the shopping center is a sort of pilot plant, showing us how it is possible for us to so organize our properties and our administration of them that we can give services in a positive way — not in a negative way, alone, like protection. So in these communities we are giving police and many kinds of services — transportation and parks and drainage and all that sort of thing — as hotels do. And that is something we can expand. It can grow. It can grow upon what it feeds on; it can grow upon the profits which it creates. The spiritual aspect of it is this: there are two relationships between men. In one they are able to create; in the other they are able to destroy. One is in freedom, and the other is under government. As Edmund Burke so poignantly pointed out in his wonderful little book called The Vindication of Natural Society, governments have been responsible for nearly all the tragedies and all the destruction in the world. The condition of freedom, the contract relationship, practiced in our corporate forms, gives us wider and wider-spread community services. That’s where our hope lies.

 

BENSON   Would you feel that even the work done, say, by the federal government, for example the work that is done in defense activities and some of the economic activities of the federal government, could also be handled through this type of community-service, private corporation, which I take it is basically the thing of which you speaking?

 

HEATH    Yes. Eventually, yes. But, meantime, all our military defense and everything of that kind depends upon our economy. It’s only by advancing our economy that we can advance that which depends upon it. To promulgate these ideas, I have formed a modest, free-enterprise corporation, called the Science of Society Foundation, and it is on behalf of the society that I am speaking now.

 

BENSON   Have you published any statements of this position of yours, Mr. Heath? This is quite interesting to political economists, many of whom have, I think, not encountered exactly this point of view of yours.

 

HEATH    Yes, the basic principle of it has been filed in the New York City Public Library some 15 years or more ago, and of course the Library of Congress has a great deal of material of the same character. It had been drawn from history, and from the sciences, and pointing out the basic principle of organization by which people under the contractual type, or golden-rule type, of organization, can become spiritual through becoming more and more creative. Spirituality, of course, is the hall-mark of divinity in every religion. So when men become creative, they are spiritual. So we need to learn that the resources of mankind rest in his spiritual nature; and his spiritual nature is the nature that rests upon his freedom.

 

BENSON   There certainly can be no doubt about that, and the real problem in my mind when I see proposals for collectivizing the economy is how the collectivizers expect men to continue to be free and to develop themselves under their own incentives. But you didn’t quite answer a part of my question, Mr. Heath. Whereabouts are your ideas published? What’s the name of the book, and how can it be found?

 

HEATH    There are various pamphlets and the like that are supplied by the Science of Society Foundation, 1502 Montgomery Road, Elkridge, Maryland, the most significant one of which is a volume entitled, Citadel. Market and Altar, which was published by this Foundation some two years ago and is available from booksellers generally, although it has not had any very wide circulation except among selected circles.

 

BENSON   I have read the book myself, and know how interesting it is, and that’s why I wanted to be sure that you brought it out so that interested readers could follow it up. It’s a very interesting, thoughtful effort to see if these problems — which do involve common action — could not be met by a non-compulsory instrument. We have thought in recent years that we had to solve almost all of our problems through the compulsory instrument of government. But you have proposed a way in which this could be done through collective endeavor on an individual or corporate commercial basis, and this would certainly be very happy for many of us if this could be put into effect. Of course there are more than hotels /that/ follow this principle. We in colleges, for example, do it. We furnish a lease and other protection for our student body, and a whole variety of activities, and we don’t seem to have any very overwhelming problems in connection with this; and really we could be a whole complete community, a group of colleges like the Associated Colleges at Claremont, with relatively little trouble. In fact I think there might even be less trouble if we were a community /laughing/ rather than a part of a public body which tells us what to do and what not to do. There would be problems to work out, however; there would be times when some one corporation would be adopting a policy antithetical to other corporations, and men would have to exercise their ingenuity to some extent. But I think they could do that quite well. We have only a short time left in this broadcast; do you have anything else you would like to say about this?

 

HEATH    Well Dr. Benson, I’m very happy to have had this opportunity of letting the world know that I pioneered in several different things — in the automobile field and in the airplane field — and I’ve never pioneered in anything so beautiful and so wonderful and so potential for the welfare of mankind as this new view of the potentialities of our free-enterprise system.

 

BENSON   That is an inspiring note on which to end.

 

HEATH    And if we had more educational institutions following in the pattern of the Claremont Men’s College, I am sure our future would be very, very bright.

 

______________________________________________________________

 

April 13, 1960

 

Dear Spencer:

 

Just a note to wish you a successful and pleasant trip to Washington.

 

We will be looking forward to seeing you when you return.

 

Cordially yours,

/s/ George

George C.S. Benson

GCSB:mm

 

________________________________________________________________

 

April 13, 1960

 

Dear Spencer:

 

Happy Landings! And best wishes for success at the hearing on May 9^th.

 

 

I’ll look forward to a visit when you return.

 

Cordially yours,

/s/ John

John M. Payne

Assistant to the President

JMP:mm

 

________________________________________________________________

 

April 27, 1960

 

Dear Spencer:

 

We are still excited at the possibility of working out some arrangement under which the Science of Society foundation can become part of our Claremont College program.

 

In that connection one other thought has occurred to me that neither John Payne nor I thought to mention to you earlier. You might set up the Foundation at Claremont Men’s College with a gift of funds which are themselves subject to life income for you and we could so invest them that the income would be tax exempt. This would guarantee you control of the project during your lifetime, and at the same time would assure the College that the project would be permanent, so we could feel able to plan on a long-term basis.

 

This is just another plan we thought you might want to consider.

 

With best personal regards always,

 

Cordially yours,

/s/ George C.S. Benson

George C.S. Benson

GCSB:mm

 

________________________________________________________________

 

Carbon

April 30, 1960

Transcribed May 12

 

Dear Dr. Benson:

 

Thank you for your letter of the 27th, calling to my mind further possibilities in a plan of endowment under which the Science of Society Foundation would become a part of the Claremont Men’s College program.

 

The matter of tax exempt status for the Foundation comes for oral discussion in Washington on May 9th, and we hope for favorable action. I will stand by here in the East for a few weeks at least before returning to California. Meantime, much will depend on what happens in Washington.

 

Hoping to see you again before many moons,

 

Cordially,

/Spencer Heath/

 

I hope soon to see yours and John Payne’s latest on education, national style.

 

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­________________________________________________________________

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3085

Letter to Heath from John M. Payne, Assistant to the President,

Claremont Men’s College, Pitzer Hall, Claremont, California

March 16, 1961

 

Dear Spencer:

 

I have just talked on the telephone with Felix Morley, who will be on our campus next week and addressing our convocation, Founders’ Day, Thursday, March 23, at 11 o’clock in McKenna Auditorium. Mr. Morley asked me to let you know especially hat he hoped to see you during his stay here.

 

After convocation, he will be having lunch with Dr. Benson and guests at the Faculty House and we shall be very pleased to have you join us then.

 

With best personal regards,

Cordially yours,

/s/ John

John M. Payne

Assistant to the President

 

Mr. Spencer Heath

Harvey Mudd College

Pitzer North

 

JMP:mm

 

________________________________________________________________

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1692

Extract from letter to Dr. George C.S. Benson,

Claremont Men’s College, Claremont, California

June 23, 196l

 

I might become greatly interested in this /program of research in political economy/ as perhaps leading towards a much-to-be-desired congruency or working synthesis between economics and the other sciences, even possibly including some of the practical aspects of religion and its related inspirational arts. For economics as a science is deserving of vastly more than generally it has had at the hands of its often narrowly specialized or close-focused professionals.

 

______________________________________________________________

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2803

In March, 1962 several undergraduate divinity students from Pepperdine College made two visits to Claremont Men’s College to interview Heath on his philosophy. This was the first visit and Item 2804 was the second. Spencer MacCallum recorded most of the discussion on both occasions.

March 1962

 

FIRST CLAREMONT TALK WITH PEPPERDINE STUDENTS

March 1962

 

MacCallum: That would be a good question to start off with here: “What is your philosophy?”

 

Heath: It’s a pretty tall question, it seems. But the more simple, the more fundamental it is — the closer it is to the heart of God — the less words it should take to describe it. So I’ll do my best to tell you what is my philosophy.

 

     Physically speaking, we are animals. We have an animal past and all that. But humanly and spiritually speaking, we are a wholly different order of being. We live in a world called the subjective world, a world of dreams, a world of imagination. Not the world of sensation. We have percepts; we perceive things, as animals do. But they don’t conceive them. We embrace things within the realm of our imagination, and there we examine them in their spiritual aspect, not in their material aspect.

 

     So man is a living thing that has transcendent powers, a form of life vastly beyond any other form of life that we know of — a true child of God — and as such he has powers that no other form of life could ever imagine. They can’t even dream of possessing it; they haven’t got the dreaming faculty. They can’t image things in their minds and then create them, as an artist does, or as God did in His artistry of the cosmos. So my philosophy is that, as I quoted before, the proper study of mankind is man — as a distinct order of nature, a divine order of nature, having imaginative capa­cities and through the imaging capacity being a creative power, individually and all the more so when two or more are gathered together in Thy name. And that means the contract. We have drawn together, contraho, in Thy name, to do Thy will, which is so simply stated, to practice contract with one another, enter into business if you will, each serving all others in the same manner he would be served and thereby loved, in return. That last is necessary because the cosmos must stay in balance; it can’t get off its rocker. If some do much giving and get little, it doesn’t last long — that’s a high frequency wave, and vice versa. So this golden rule automatically takes care of the reciprocal relationship. In fact the very language itself signifies it — all men do unto all others. Well then it means that the other fellow must do it too. Without that God’s will would become chaos, and God isn’t built on the chaotic plan. God is a thing of mathematics if you like, artistry, beauty, balance, evenness, and on-goingness. And I haven’t told you very much about the on-goingness.

 

     All the events that illustrate God’s work in this cosmos have three elements in them, which we measure by the gram, the centimeter, and the second; the pound, the foot, and the minute. And as events merge and diverge, and crisscross and commingle, new events are always coming out. That’s the process of nature. That’s what makes the cosmos a process — as Whitehead called his book, Process and Reality. I think he had better said, Process is, or as, Reality. Not and. Reality is the ongoing of things. Well now as these events mingle and commingle and diverge and all, some events will be organized so that they can last longer than others. Some of our bodies can last longer than others. And those that can last longer than others will be in the next generation or the next species, and those that have the shorter lives will have disappeared. So progress is built into God’s cosmos, because it is the will of God that the best things should last the longest. And so the better we obey His will, the longer we last. So the cosmos, as a work of God, is always on the up and up, into elements and aspects, or events, of greater time content. And that great event which is supposed to include all eternity is one aspect of God, because it lasts forever. If it only lasted half of forever, it would be half God. And God has the three aspects, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost — Substance, Power and Eternity. And in those three aspects, God manifests Himself. And so far as we can gather into ourselves, in our bodies which are substance, and in motion, and duration, or time, as we can so organize our substance and motion so that it can last longer — the time element is relatively larger — then we are in progress, in process, as reality. We then fulfill Whitehead’s dream of the universe as a progressive universe. And God doesn’t need to be separated from the universe; he wouldn’t be God if there was anything left out. Nor would it be a universe if there were something besides. God is universal.

 

     And so we shouldn’t be afraid to think of God impersonally. He has all the human attri­butes; we wouldn’t have gotten them from Him if He didn’t have them. But besides having all the human attributes which we know in finite form, and sometimes in all too limited form, besides having all those attributes, God has infinite attributes. God is always as Nietzsche said of life, “Saith Life, ‘I am that which must always transcend itself’” — always have an ongoingness, always a process. So we should not be afraid of thinking of God, as some people do — perhaps Spinoza did — as impersonal. Many scientists grant a God, but He has to be impersonal. God can be both personal and impersonal. With respect to our finite lives, He can be very personal. But with respect to the larger content of lives, if we keep Him personal, we are limiting His powers, His capacities, down to something like ours. We’re not giving Him scope. We’re cabining Him and cribbing Him, or something like that. So in our minds, we shouldn’t try to bring God down to our size by personalizing Him. He’s there, as much as anywhere; I don’t mean to dismiss Him from our personal, finite lives, or to imagine such a thing. But to say that is God and nothing else is God, is to say God is all that and that’s all God is. If God is anything more, He transcends the limits of personality, even in the limits of our rather poor imagination as compared with His. Perhaps I’ve said enough to start you thinking on what I would say is my philosophy. You may have some comments.

 

Questioner:  You mentioned the imagination of God and the way that we should not personalize Him and bring him down to our level in this and that..

 

Heath: Remembering that He is at our level, but that isn’t all.

He_______________ Himself beyond and above.

 

Q: Well what I should have said is, rather than bringing Him

to our level, is trying to put ourselves on His level, to elevate ourselves.

 

Heath: Now that is our pride and joy. We have been endowed with that — that divine breath that came into the first man. That is our pride and joy, and that is our opportunity to become like God. And as we act in that manner, we can dream dreams and have visions, and we can build worlds. And we can explore worlds beyond this world even, of late. All of which things are based upon the creative power that comes from men practicing the golden rule. Every atom of energy used in any of these great phenomenal events — human energy I mean by that, with which we exchange services with one another by accountancy — money we often call it — every ounce or atom of it is created, organized, by the practice of men acting under the golden rule, the contrac­tual relation which I mentioned a moment ago, which is the divine command that we do Gods will, become creators like Him through being contracting parties, not covenanting parties. Perhaps I didn’t say then (I may repeat if I did) that contracts are always agreements to do God’s will, to do good to each other, both ways, two-way street. But covenants and treaties are always agreements not to do harm, or not to do evil, and it isn’t in the nature of God that we can do “not things.” God contains no negatives. God contains all things, and they’re all positive; there are no nega­tives. We can at any given stage reverse and have less positive and less life, but we can never have no life. Even material scientists deny the destructibility of matter. Energy can be divided up into more and more bits; Planck’s quantum says there’s a basic unit which you can’t divide up any more, as they used to say of the atom. We’ll see later on whether you can or not. However, you can never reach the absolute, whatever way you go. How did I happen to say that?

 

Q:  Well the question I was going to ask, how are we supposed to love God, since we are supposed to fear Him so much? Part of Christian maturity is learning to love and fear, or to respect and reverence .. but for people who are not really mature Christians, which I’m not one and I hope some day to make that, but I’ve often wondered and would like to know from you as to how can you love someone that you fear, or fear someone that you love?

 

Heath: We must never say we are not Christians ..

 

Q: No I said “mature” ..

 

Heath:  ..or mature Christians. We may say we are not complete or perfect Christians. But so far as we act like Christ, we are Christians. Now the other aspect of what you asked me … You know the very primitive man had very little understanding. I don’t imagine that Adam ever went to Harvard Graduate School or anything corresponding to it. And so he had at first very little apprehension of God. He was afraid of everything around him. And so he built up demons in his mind, primitive gods, so-called. He had such little understanding of God in the beginning. It had to grow in him. And in his early period, he thought of God as something of wrath, and something of destruction, some­thing to fear. In course of generations, he learned better. So instead of being demon-like, as nearly all primitive gods are, not creators but destroyers, his god became more Godly — as he understood Him better. So the New Testament tells of the divine, creative God, much more distinctly and definitely a God of love, whereas the early Old Testament tells of a god relatively demon-like and of wrath, and He would destroy His people. He would flood the world and drown them all nearly. And then put a contract in the sky not to do it again? A covenant. As nations do, a promise not to do harm. He made a covenant. And so some people like the Russians today make covenants, lots and lots of them. Can they keep them? Can they do anything about a covenant? Promises not to harm, not to aggress? If they do anything, what must they do, if they do anything about a covenant? They must break it. There’s nothing else you can do, if you do anything about a covenant. And so with our treaties and covenants, the virtue that they have, if any, is that we don’t do anything about it. Because if we did anything about an agreement not to do harm, we would simply have to break the covenant itself. Or do nothing. We mustn’t ask of ourselves the impossible, but we must learn to love and practice that which is possible, the creative powers of God as manifested in men when they love one another through trading with one another. A primitive people couldn’t trade very much in very early history because they had monarchies and monarchs and kings and emperors and Pharaohs and things that didn’t allow trading. And when the sovereign powers, the war-making powers, the tribute-taking powers, consolidated by warring on one another and accumulated enough, they had the whole known world in one empire, the Roman Empire. And it had one function — to keep order by the sword and not let any nations fight one another. That would impair the tribute-collecting. Not let any rioting go on in Jerusalem or in any other place where the local authorities have got local wars, or among nations. Rome kept the Pax Romanum, the peace of the world. Pretty ruthlessly too, for the one purpose of seizing people’s property and keeping them in order for that purpose. At least that’s how it functioned, whatever men might have in­tended at the time. And so today, whatever men intend, it is to be deplored that they would think that by repeating the Roman experience of putting all the military power in one organization, that that organization would keep any different kind of peace in the world from the Roman organiza­tion. Of course the result of the Roman United Nations was that it pulled all the nations down, just as taxation is pull­ing us down today. It pulled them all down. While it was doing it, it kept order, the iron order, the slave order. And do you think it allowed any pirates to roam the seas? It hunted them down and rooted them out. But when it consumed its own substance — consumed the people over whom it ruled — the pirates had a chance to learn how to trade. They found they lived better and longer lives that way. And so it didn’t take them long to practice it, and so they became traders, because they lived better and longer lives that way. And that’s the foundation of all the trade we have in the world today — mostly maritime trade. Similar things happened on land — we can’t talk about all the details in a moment. But we had a United Nations, and we were pretty sorry for it. Now we have a United Nations under God, which is a United Nations under the golden rule. All international trade, so far as it is permitted by the sovereign powers, the political powers of the world, whether they are consolidated in one or many, trade can only go on, the divine relationship of serving one another can only go on, within the scope and permission of the political powers of the world, the principalities and powers. And Christ never had a good word for them; they keep men from loving one another by serv­ing one another. Insofar as this trading spirit established itself far and wide, men live longer and better lives.

 

     Now, how to have less government? A lot of people would like to know that answer, wouldn’t they. Well how to have less of any deficiency — government is a deficiency of the golden rule, isn’t it? It’s archaic, it’s animal-like. It’s not idealistic, not divine — although some claim to be. So the way to get rid of animal practices is to practice the human and the divine. Therefore, resist not evil, but overcome evil by doing good. So the escape, the way out of all of our modern troubles is to find the royal road to goodness, to divine creativeness — to find the depth and breadth and potentialities of this loving rule of serving one another as we would be served. And as we extend that, then we are moving into the kingdom of heaven.

 

     Now the most conspicuous place, the vital center of the golden rule is in the performing of services that we have to have in common. Between smaller numbers of people, they can practice trading relations and get along very nicely with it. They don’t have to shoot one another to trade with one another, you know. Or anything of that kind. But when it comes to things that we have to have in common, widespread, like police protection, fire protection and thousands of other things, we’ve been carrying them on under the iron rule, and none too successfully. We haven’t been very proud of that. And none too prosperously, either, except in some exceptional cases where we got away from the Old World governments and got a chance to function freely with one another — for a while at least. Now there’s our dilemma today. What we need is to learn how to practice our public services under the golden rule, which profits everybody, streng­thens and lengthens the lives of everybody wherever it’s prac­ticed. And for lack of that golden rule, that’s the only trouble why we have wars and taxation and that sort of thing. It’s a lack, it’s a deficiency, it’s a primitiveness, govern­ment is, force is. When men learn to do things by contract and consent, then they don’t have that same deficiency. They trans­cend it. We have to outgrow the organizations that carry on wars and collect taxes and perform pretended services, which always serve in reverse however much we may deceive ourselves in thinking that public authority can hand back to us more than it takes, that is political public authority, can hand back to us more of our goods than it takes away from us — more benefits than that of which it deprives us

 

Civilization is founded on the Bible. It can’t rest on anything else. We’ve got to get back to the Bible and the pre­cepts of the Bible and do the will of God as so fre­quently and sometimes so clearly expressed there. So when we learn to conduct our public affairs for a profit — because all contracts make profits, nobody makes a contract without profit, or he doesn’t make it a second time. And if he makes it with a loss, one party has lost something, he has lost his power to serve other persons. Profit must become accumulated, so it can become an instrument in our hands as the world is an instru­ment in the hands of God. To create things. And if my neighbor loses property, loses his wealth, how is he going to trade advantageously with me? How much can he do for me out of his losses? But if he makes gains, then he can use his gains under the golden rule, and benefit me. So to lose money is a sin. You are reducing your spiritual power to love, benefit, your fellow men in the same way you’d have him benefit you. We shouldn’t degrade, denigrate the instruments that God uses to carry out His will among men, nor the instruments that men use in carrying out God’s will towards one another. We must learn to understand them. When we understand these relation­ships, how they’ve given us all the civilization we’ve ever had, certainly all modern civilization, and how they supply all of the energy, all of the wealth and all of the means — tools, capital — for going to the moon or for blasting other nations with atomic energy or preparing the means for so doing, all the energy comes out of the practice of the golden rule, and is seized by the practitioners by the political power who uses the iron rule. It doesn’t make contracts, can’t perform them. It doesn’t own anything, because everything it has it hasn’t created. When man creates things, God has created them, whether

man is the agent of God____________________________ . And those things are divine things. And those things can be used to divine purposes. But those same things can be seized by organizations, the same as any organizations of bad men can seize other people’s property. Bad-acting men I mean; I don’t mean bad men. Bad-acting men. Iron-rule men. The way is all provided for men to redeem themselves into their divinity. When they stray back into the animal world, as they do whenever they rob or steal or make war, when they stray back into the animal world they suffer for it. And we are suffering for it today, but only to the extent that we have strayed back into the limitations of the animal world, failed to practice our potential divinity. The remedy? Learn what our potential divinity is. How it operates. Appraise, examine our gifts. Look the gift horse in the mouth if you wish; God won’t mind. Understand the gifts of God. Don’t solve problems — embrace opportunities. Because God didn’t create this world as a problem; He created this world as an opportunity. Anybody disagree with that? And how do we prac­tice God’s will then in this world? By conjuring up problems, sinking back into the animal limitations and acting like animals? Cannibals on each other as animals are necessarily? Or do we practice God’s will by doing the things that enhance the lives of each other and carry us further and further in joy towards immortality — never arriving, but always approaching. Asymptotically, don’t they call it? Always room to go and to grow. And since life is always going, going, and growing, and all joy comes from life, then we get our joys measured out to us to the extent that we enhance our lives through loving and thereby serv­ing one another. Not sentimentally, but by doing the will. Not sentimentally alone, because when we do God’s will when we build a great material world, we become free in it

 

                                      /Recording failure?/

________________________________________________________________

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2804

Several undergraduate divinity students from Pepperdine College met informally on two different days in March, 1962 at Claremont Men’s College for discussion with Heath, who was seriously ill. This was the second of two such visits (for the first see the preceding Item 2803) and proved to be the last occasion on which Heath discussed his ideas. Spencer Heath MacCallum, who had joined his grandfather in California because of his illness, taped the sessions and later transcribed and very slightly edited them. The recording on this, the second occasion, was poor, as shown by the many penciled corrections in the transcription. Because of this, use judgment when quoting from this material. Note: Words stressed by Heath are marked in the transcript with a dot, which is helpful when reading aloud.

March 1962

 

SECOND CLAREMONT TALK WITH PEPPERDINE STUDENTS

March 1962

 

Heath: Now I can see everybody’s faces. I like to see the expression on your faces; it’s stimulating and inspiring to me.

/Lengthy tape lapse/

        _____________________________________

       

        … more than anybody else I’ve ever known, the creative opportunity, especially in his retirement of having intimate discussions with everybody, but especially the young bodies and minds. I never had that opportunity. My career such as it has been has been partly in law and partly in engineering, partly in aeronautics and then a considerable period of vacation, which was filled up with the study of all the sciences on my own, with considerable satisfaction to me and with considerable, or so it seemed, creative results. Because I was always studying the fundamentals, the a-prioris, the basis of things. The superstructures are confusing; they have many and varied forms. But the foundations of things are simpler and simpler as you go deeper and deeper. I like to emphasize that — in all life. The foundations of things are simpler and easier to understand as you go deeper and deeper. It is only as you go higher up into the complexities that you get confused ________________. Also, we give a great deal of attention to what we call evil in the world, notwithstanding the command that we should resist not evil but overcome the evil with good. History is replete with evil. Happy is that people whose annals are uninteresting, have little evil in them, don’t make the headlines in history as elsewhere. And I made it my particular interest to discover the life in history and exhume some of it. Not what we died by, like armies and governments and plagues of all kinds, but what we lived by in the past. When we discover what we live by, then we are getting at the secrets of life. Not the secrets of death and decay, but the secrets of the continuity of life than which there is nothing more obvious. Life is always like energy or action in the physical world, always changing its proportions and kinds and modes of manifestation, but like the rest of the universe, it is infinite. We have no grounds for supposing that there are any limits to anything in the universe. If so, there would have to be more than one universe. So it is these infinite things that are the simplest, most easy to understand. The difficult things are the ones that we call evil, so complicated that we can’t make much of anything out of them.

       

             Today we are working at two ends of our lives. The current end which seems to be, in this time, filled with terror for almost everybody. The original ends, the beginning ends, or the farther back since there is no beginning, we are giving comparatively little attention to. As one of the Gospel writers says, the things which are eternal, that never perish, are the simplest. And the things that are transitory – dissolving and decaying and disintegrating and going into higher frequency waves and rays are going back towards homogeneity, what the scientists call entropy — going back towards nothingness, but of course never getting to nothing, because there isn’t any such thing as a nothing. It’s like the absolute zero temperature; you can get closer and closer forever [laughing], but you can’t ever get to it. So it is with everything, all the fundamentals of this cosmos of ours. We can know it only in part because we are parts. If we were the whole it would know itself as the whole, as God knows Himself as the whole. But since we are only parts – we know our­selves to be parts – then the knowledge which we get of the whole has to be part knowledge. But this part knowledge can go on and on indefinitely without ever reaching any end, any infinitude, any Ultimate Reality, final or finished Reality. To do so would be to catch up with God, and while it is a very happy pursuit, it is a rather unattainable one in any absolute sense for finite beings.

       

             So in our sciences we are trying to get into the knowledge of man’s mind, the rationale of how God carries on. How God does his work. The first thing we find about Him is that it’s rational. It goes by units and numbers. Pounds, feet, minutes; grams, centimeters, seconds. And there is always a proportion, or a ratio, between these numbers which constitute an act, or an event. And the whole cosmos is a cosmos of acts and events, some of very high frequency and correspondingly low duration — short wave — and some of very low frequency, perhaps a million light years would be its term, and one-millionth of a million life-years would be the period of the wave. /Check this sentence./ So the cosmos is always moving, as well as perhaps expanding. It is always moving from higher frequency events into lower frequency events. And when we, as events, live longer lives we are coming into lower and lower replacements, through longer lives. And as we approach that Ultimate indefinitely, we approach the limit of immortality, simply by doubling our lives as we did in the 19th century. Which of course we can do again — perhaps not at the same rate, but the mere matter of progressively and geometrically multiplying our lives is an absolute promise of not quite absolute immortality, but for finite beings, something just as good. — The Irishman said that if Shakespeare didn’t write those plays it was another fella by the same name, and it would be just as good.

 

 Questioner:  Mr. Heath would you explain to some of us who don’t quite understand your expression of higher and lower frequencies?

 

 Heath:  Nothing happens but events. Particles are only one aspect – structures and bodies. There has to be a time element – a motion or velocity element and a duration or time element. Now a wave has those three aspects. A high frequency wave has a very small mass aspect and a relatively high motion aspect. So it repeats itself with great frequency. And you have to multiply that frequency by the number of units of time through which it continues, to get the total energy involved in the whole series of waves. Now our bodies, our generations of men, are masses of material — bodies. They average out statistically all the same of course. They have a lot of motion which averages out statistically all the same. A man-year, or a life-year on an average statistically are all the same. They average out that way. But the generation of people who has the greatest number of life years lives the longest, is the most enduring, most near to God, most resembling Him. Whereas in Asiatic populations in which children are born to die almost as soon as they are born, in which the race doesn’t live more than perhaps 25 or 30 years on the average, they must multiply frequently to maintain the race. Whereas a more Christian nation, living under the golden rule instead of the iron rule characteristic of all primitive people and all coercive people, war making people, that gives men a longer hold on life. They replace themselves less frequently. The same quantity of life, which is the product of the three elements, can be made up in a large amount of time which is low frequency — time for each one — or, a small amount of time for each one which requires a high frequency of birth to replacement.

 

     So as we look about the world today we find that the Christian peoples replace them­selves less than half as frequently as the non-Christian people do — which is another way of saying they live more than twice as long. And that isn’t any accident. Because the Christian people of the world, and practically none other, practice a rule with relation to one another which is called the golden rule, in which each treats the others – all others – in the same manner he would have them treat him. And that’s the only rule, the only fundamental rule of free enterprise, which characterizes Western civilization. We have been doing God’s will. And the reward for doing God’s will has been more and more of that promised eternal life. As we do God’s will more and more, the more that eternal life is given to us. And it’s obvious throughout the world today, those people that don’t practice it live short lives – perish. We need to practice it. So far as we practice it, we have greater and greater measure of the dream of immortality realized in this world as well as in worlds to come. In fact the Christian philosophy doesn’t have to wait for worlds to come. “Thy kingdom come on earth” was the prayer. And that by the way was a prayer to be uttered in secret, by the individual to his Maker. “Thy kingdom come on earth”. It implied a promise that this was the place for it. Not that it could not go on on other earths and other worlds as well. But the Lords Prayer, or model of a prayer as it is, prays that Thy Kingdom shall come right here and now. And, so far as people practice that golden rule which gives us the passport to longer life, it does enter right here and now, and has done so throughout history. That’s why I’m telling you, that the Christian nations are the nations who live long because they live better, they live by the golden rule and justice, and mercy and peace and mutual service. They live long, whereas the rest of the world is suffering the sins of disobedience, following the iron rule of doing unto others as you would not have others do unto you.

 

     Now in all of our societies, these two rules more or less prevail. In the Western world, the golden rule is the only rule by which men relate themselves in large numbers on the basis of peace and service which is love in action: Service. In the Eastern world, broadly speaking, the people relate themselves largely by government authority. Statuses, as Sir Henry Maine called it. They are fixed where they have to be, they are compelled to do what they have to do. So they live short lives. The peasant has barely enough left from the tax collectors to produce another peasant. So nature responds to this danger of extinction by increasing the reproductivity — stimulating the reproductive functions. As she does for a weed; if you cut it down, it puts up many seeds and many stems and so on. You let it grow to maturity, it has broad thick stems, few flowers, few seeds. So it with all life. Where the life is precarious, God preserves it by making a lot of them. And where life is secure, God preserves it by making longer ones. The security is in the higher mode of life, because the higher mode of life endows us with greater measures of immortality. The best lives are the longest lives. And they are longest lives because they are the best lives, the most real lives. Not the transitory and passing away. As Plato and St. Paul agreed, reality consists in enduringness. That which most endures is most real.

 

     There are many points of departure from where I am now. If I could feel your pulse and know just where your minds are reaching out in which direction, I’d like to follow that direction. I’ve said enough I think to form a basis for some inquiries or further suggestions.

 

 Q: The last time we talked to you, you mentioned something about a Utopia here on earth. Do you think that this is really possible?

 

 Heath: God promised it didn’t He? — Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven?

 

Q: This is something people don’t think about very much.

 

Heath: They are thinking too much about war and the iron rule. And they are thinking too much about evil, and planning how to resist evil, or hide from it and escape it and so on. Good only exists through the doing of it. Not through the being of it or thinking of it. It is the doing of it. Doing Thy will is what gives man his measure of likeness to his Creator, his measure of immortality. Now science supports all this. Science when looked at profoundly, fundamentally, supports all this. It shows us how even atoms are held together — which is their function, to hold themselves together…it used to be thought their ultimate function to hold themselves together and intact. They have been found to be highly complicated, highly complex. But some of them have the units of which they are composed in collision with one another, not doing unto each other as they would be done by, but colliding. And that radium atom is scattering its energies out into its environment in higher frequency and less durational waves. You can go all through the realm of biology and astronomy. You can go through the realm of history, and find that those people who were most cooperative, most loving each other by serving each other and doing it in return … the universe wouldn’t be in balance if it were not done in return. If everybody did unto others as he would wish them to do to him, and they didn’t reciprocate, it would throw the cosmos out of balance. God would be, what shall we say — off His trolley (laughing). The cosmos is in balance, and it is only kept in balance by these things that do balance. So in men’s relations to one another, the trading relationship, as accountancy shows us, wherever it succeeds, is one that keeps accounts in balance, keeps the cosmos on an even keel. But a relationship by coercive, involuntary — servitude, taxation, war, violence of any kind — between men and men or nation and nation or nations and men — all that is putting the universe out of balance. And that balance has to be corrected; that imbalance brings less life. So men become less immortal and increase rather in numbers than in the goodness and lengthiness of their lives.

 

Q:  Mr. Heath, in correcting this balance that has been thrown off, what would be the procedure of this nation now, do you feel?

 

Heath: Now, when you say this nation, you’re speaking probably of two modes of organization among men which are quite in contrast with one another. There’s the golden rule organization by which we live. All that we spend or waste or use, waste on war or whatnot, is created by the golden Rule relationship. That’s the foundation for it. Taxation makes the munitions. Seizures make the compulsions. And so the political arm, which is based upon the iron rule, is always drawing life downward. Diminishing life. It is not to be blamed, but that is the way it is organized. But our economic life is organized on the golden rule of each doing unto others as they would be done by. And this is the source of all our strength, all our life, and all our power. However much of it we may utilize and however much we may destroy, that’s where it comes from. This divine relationship between men called contract. Contract re­member. I didn’t say covenant, purposely. Because there is a vast difference. The contract that binds men together in economic systems of trade and creates the wealth of the world, whether it is to be destroyed by governments or used for the uplift of men, the instrument of contract is an agreement on both sides to do good, and never to do harm. But a covenant, or a treaty, is always an agreement not to do harm. Promise not to aggress, not to steal, not to violate the Ten Commandments in any way. The peculiar difference between the engagements that are made by free men in a free economy – in a golden-rule economy — and engagements that are made by men who are either suffering from coercion or practicing it upon others, which is to say our field of taxation and war – so called public services — the great difference is that in one field men create life, enjoy life, in the other they destroy life. And in the one field we are commanded to perform it; in the other, we are forbidden. The golden rule is commanded — to do unto all others. The iron rule is not only forbidden, but we are forbidden to resist it. Resist not evil, because the only way you can overcome evil is by doing good. There is no such thing as nothing in nature. God is always there. “Standeth God behind the shadows, keeping watch above His own.”

 

     So today we are in great terror, lest our organization of arms — taxation, coercion, compulsions, regulations and pseudo charities which always have to take away more than they can give (laughing). Notwithstanding all those, we have a golden rule creating everything for us. And we haven’t had our eyes opened enough, we have been too blind to it, and because we have not noticed that, we have noticed the evil and not noticed the blessings and the opportunities that lie all around us. For that reason we are terrorized by the activities of men who are organized under the iron rule of taxation and war. And we have so accepted it that we think it is natural and we think we must always have it. Not because it shows any merit in itself, but because we don’t remember any time when we didn’t have it. And therefore it is taken as necessary evil and inevitable.

 

Q: Trent and I were speaking the other evening about a right and a left, an extreme one way or the other. And our conclusion, after we had spoken with you the other afternoon, we thought that either we are for Christ, or for the devil. Now then, these are strong viewpoints. Do you feel in your mind that there is any median, any between-place that you can still stand and be effective?

 

Heath: The question would be a little more significant to me if we could find Christ on either side, on the right and left, of politics or war. Christ proposed that we overcome evil by doing good. That automatically displaces it, eliminates it, doing good. You don’t stop going down by stopping; nature never stands still. Events always have motion in them; things that happen always have motion in them. So when we try to think of something as stationary, as holding back evil, resisting evil, we are not getting anywhere. We are out of God’s order. God’s order always has force, motion, and time in it. Those are the three ingredients of the Christian Trinity. In our official articles

of belief they are called Substance, Power and Eternity, the correlates of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, symbolizing these things stated more, shall I say, scientifically. Find this in your prayer books: Substance, Power, and Eternity. So what was I saying about it, if someone will prompt me?

 

Phyllis: You were saying that if we could find Christ on either side.

 

Heath: So where we have conflict. Political party arrayed against political party. Armies arrayed against armies to defeat on one side and win on the other side. Wherever we have them, we are ignoring the .. what you call the middle ground. Let’s take right and left: those which believe in more force applied to human beings by other human beings. Is that fair for left? — And those who believe in less governmental force applied by human beings to one another — the right. Must we choose between either the left or the right? Must we really make that choice? Has the race given us no higher choice than that? Aren’t there three dimensions? Isn’t there an up dimension? Which of our political leaders are leading us upward into the kingdom of heaven, which is the modern word for Utopia .. or rather the more ancient word for Utopia. Let us think awhile about this third dimension, and cast our eyes upward toward that third dimension and discover there that that is the transcendent side of life. That’s what gives us more and more measures of immortality. So while we depend upon the rule of force, whether it may be called left hand or right hand, liberal or conser­vative or whatnot, the rule of force, it shifts from one side to the other, but it can never take us up. On the contrary, it always takes us down. And history is replete with examples of how the rule of force and sovereignties has always pulled mankind down. Men have never risen by the use of the sword, or the club, or the tax system, or any kind of an instrument of force. All their rising has come from the men practicing, perhaps unknowingly many times, the golden rule of doing unto others in the same manner you would have them do unto you. That creates all the values in civilization, including the values which are spoiled in war, and in such things as scattering our resources over the surface of the earth for people to enjoy who do not create them — holding ourselves down to a lower standard of living by so doing, thinking that it is our duty to uplift other people who are not
making any corresponding effort to lift up themselves. And
of course that doesn’t strengthen them. We had no one to
give us foreign aid; we found the secret of serving one
another and doing God’s will, and we got the reward. And so we
got the longer and longer life. Did I cover the question
that was asked? I cover so much territory sometimes that I forget my bearings. Somebody has to tell me which way I was going.

 

Q:  In other words don’t go right or left but go up.

Heath:  And some say, “Where is this up you are talking about? I don’t see it.” Eyes that are blind, eyes that don’t see, how much keener our sight seems to be for what hurts us, scares us, than for what blesses us.

 

     I and my grandson, Mr. MacCallum here, have been advocating in small and narrow ways for some years a discovery of an alternative. It’s in history, it’s in nature, and it’s all around us — an alternative way of doing the necessary things that we have to have in common with one another, such as police and fire protection and multitudes of other things that we can’t have each one for himself. We have been doing them by relegating it to the authority of what we sometimes call the “man on horseback,” and he is authorized to seize our property so that he can do us good with it — the vain idea that good can come out of evil. And we practiced it for centuries, that strange belief, that strange but almost all-pervading belief, that force can relieve force, and men by more or less enslaving one another can serve one another the most important services, perhaps, that they have, which are the services they have to have in common with one another.

 

     Prehistory — Mr. MacCallum is an anthropologist, by the way, and knows something about that — affords a great many examples of communities whose head man looked after the common services and distributed them by the will of the tribe, perhaps, and when that will got regulated and custom confirmed it, by a process called contract, that I referred to, the only free relationship that can exist between men in large numbers. I am not speaking now of persons intimately related by kinship or some other emotional bonds, even religious bonds; I mean people who are related by contract. The head man functions — and function by the way is the only way to truly describe anything; if you want to describe me, don’t describe me by how much I weigh, or how tall I am, but by how I act. And so with all of us. And the function of this head man is to dis­tribute the territory, the area, of the tribe. If it were not so distributed, then everything would be everybody’s and nobody could have any peaceable possession. That man came to be known among northern European tribes as the landlord because he was the giver of the land. Lord in that language means giver, and the landlord is the landgiver. And in those, what Sir Henry and many others call village communities, there was growing and becoming almost dominant by the time of the Norman Conquest, a system of village life in which the principal parties were the landlord and the free men. And these men were free because no violence was practiced upon them by the public authority. The only authority practiced was that of contract and consent. No landlord ever makes war upon his tenant, unless it might be to get rid of a tenant who has forfeited all of his rights and would be imposing slavery on somebody else if he weren’t gotten rid of. No landlord takes any rent by force — unless he may be collecting it through some political organization for the collection of debts by government. Now gamblers don’t have government to collect their debts, and if devils don’t need it, why should saints need it (laughing)? Why should humans need it? Accountancy — which we usually call money and which we properly should call accountancy — keeps account of what everybody does for everybody else, and any time they want to see how they stand with reference to one another, they just balance the books. As soon as the books are balanced, nobody thinks of resisting it. If he is, he’s out of the kingdom of heaven; he’s playing the iron rule somewhere. He’s a government, or he may be some gangsters or pirates or something like that.

 

     So we have a device called accountancy, even in prehistory — anthropology tells us of it — and in pretty much all of pre-conquest Anglo-Saxon England, with respect to our public services which were conducted under the golden rule of contract. And that golden rule is an eternal rule. It just wasn’t invented by somebody or legislated. As I asked some faculty members here one time, a year or so ago, talking about government by laws instead of government by men, “Well gentlemen, that’s very good, but what do you mean? What kind of laws are you talking about? Are you speaking of laws that have to be discovered in nature, or the mind of God, or are you just talking about laws that men have to enact by legislative measures and enforce by the sword, as it were?” Well nobody seemed to know the answer to that question, and so the discussion ended at that point. And so the discussion frequently ends when bishops, let us say, — just to give an example of good people — when they hear someone present to them the thought that Christian people live better and thereby longer lives than anybody else in the world. Well that usually stalls them. Is it an accident, Bishop? No, they are practicing the golden Rule, which we call an economic system — free, so far as it can be free, from our political system. Just as trade practices on the seas, so far as it can be free from piracy. And the functioning of piracy,

of course, is exactly the same functioning as _______. I am not speaking about the goodness or badness of the people; piracy functions in exactly in the same manner that taxation functions. Is that not correct? And this incubus of iron rule is something that we must outgrow to be spiritual beings. And we are outgrowing it. Mysterious are the ways of God His wonders to perform, and His wonders are always mysterious until we understand them. So we don’t understand today how underneath are the everlasting arms. We don’t understand today how God is bringing us out of all of this terror. So far as we discover and heed this single, simple golden rule.

 

     This must be mysterious to you, because it is so unusual. If you had never seen a multiplication table, and we all had it done up on the blackboard there, would it look simple to you? Maybe a terribly complicated affair? Or any other simple thing. Once you have gotten accustomed to the form of a complex thing, as fast as you get the rationale of it it’s perfectly simple. You wonder why you didn’t know all about it before. And so we have in recent centuries, and especially since the Norman Conquest in the West, we have been operating our public services under the iron rule of William the Conqueror. I’m too delicate to mention his formal, historical, official title. We have conducted our public affairs on the political method carried on for centuries by the Roman and other empires, the political method of seizing and forcing people, depriving them of their properties and their liberties without their consent. But on the other hand we have in our midst, drawn from Saxon sources, the landlord-tenant relationship. And in this we have the public affairs appertaining to the land, especially if it is wide-spread land and includes police and fire protection and other things, provided by the owner of the property. And he, owner, or lord, or giver, distributor, dis­tributes it by the golden rule of contract. And that is springing up today in the wake of a huge economic development that did not include public services. It included private capital as we call them, private goods and services. This is the real estate business now aggregating itself in huge communities providing the municipal services on the landlord-tenant basis. Insurance companies are doing it and hundreds of billions of capital – isn’t it hundreds, Spencer, in total? And in a single one like having little places for mobile homes to stand and have water and police and fire protection, there are some dozen more billions as I think the trade papers tell us_, of capital invested in those communities, to give services to all and sundry and not to any particular one. So this practice of assembling real estate as other forms of capital have been during the last century or so assembled in large corporate forms is making them extremely productive. Real estate is now coming to be a capitalized business gathered together in large communities and operated for income — doing things for which others would like to pay, instead of being held for capital gain, just waiting for other people to do things so that your real estate appreciates because it becomes more in demand because of things that other people do requiring the use of it. So instead of burying our real estate talent, leaving it in the ground where it is now, we are putting it together in vast organizations. You may not have seen it. it is not in the headlines, but it is in the trade papers plenty. It is the most striking phenomenon of present-day business. Probably as much written about it as any other business that’s known, perhaps more, and coming to be ever more rapidly known.

 

Spencer: You might give some examples as to what these communities are you’re talking about.

 

Heath:  An example would be .. the simplest would be a hotel, where they do everything for the guests, and the guests pay what it is worth. They get police and fire /protection/ chapels, kindergartens, art galleries, outside recreation in some hotels, and the people pay for these things gladly. All these things are necessary to have in common. The shopping center is another example of one, that lies mostly out of doors. It has buildings on it, it has all of its departments of any other town. It may be in hundreds of acres, some of them are, very large. And they have diversified industries going on in them. They provide their municipal services by the landlord, same as in the hotel. And everybody is happy there, or he doesn’t have to stay. If he wasn’t happy he wouldn’t stay, the landlord wouldn’t want him. And the landlord himself provides such magisterial services, all on the basis of free arbitration and free consent, to keep the peace and harmony among all his inhabitants upon his property. No taxes on anybody, no force applied on anybody. The lease itself specifies how people shall behave, or they don’t belong and must be cast out by violence if necessary, because self preservation is the first law of nature. That’s the only case where violence has any occasion. Where it is a case of live or die, self preservation is the first law. And that’s because men are not animals. I speak as one who is familiar with the fundamentals of the physical sciences and the biological sciences. Men are animals plus. The process leading to the development of animals from single cells up to the next thing to man, is called evolution, and the earth is replete with evidences that that took place. But man wasn’t created at that point. Man didn’t become man until he had a divine breath breathed into him and he became a living soul. Now the evolution of man begins when man became man. Animals have no imagination. They have no conceptual lives; there is small evidence of it. They have instincts, a program printed into them and so on. Those who followed a certain rule live more or less without understanding what they are doing, and those who more or less accidently fall into other ways are lost — and they are all losing because they have no golden rule. They don’t need any imagination without the golden rule; they are always cannibals on one another because they are all preying on one another or eating up the substance of one another, which comes to the same thing. Animals have no creative spirit. It was not breathed into them as it was in man. The first man had the divine spirit, the creative power, breathed — inspired — into him. And he became like his Maker with ability to conceive things and then create the things, to image them and then to create them in the image of them which he held, as any artist or architect does. The image must be there before he can create, otherwise things just happen by a chaotic fashion at a lower level like animals.

 

     So the evolution of man begins where man as such begins. Not where man as an animal begins, because there is no such things as an animal man, unless we want to consider his physical part alone and consider that the whole man. But what makes man a man is by how he differs from the lesser forms. If he didn’t differ in one particle in respect to his physical constitution, he wouldn’t be man. If he did not differ a particle. But if he differed as God made him different when He breathed His divine breath into him, now that’s a man. That’s the beginning of a man. That’s the finishing off of the lower order and the beginning of the higher order. And this order of evolution is a marvelous thing to behold. It’s the story of anthropology. The proper study of man is man, not animals. Men are not subject to all the limitations, they are not on the way to the grave all the time, they are not going extinct all the time. Paleontology is not full of extinct men; it’s full of extinct forms of every other kind, because every other kind of living thing except man is marching to the grave, marching to extinction. But because man has this vision, this mind of God in his own mind, this power to conceive, to dream and to create, man is building his environment, and making it ever more and more habitable for him — as against the less than man, who is always depleting and toxifying and destroying their environment, making it less and less habitable for them and thereby making their extinction inevitable. But because man is the creator, under the divine rule of serving one another, and only under that rule, man creates the world in which he lives. He lives a better life and thereby lives a longer life. That’s the distinction which we’ve been all too slow to appreciate. It’s plain in Holy Writ, but we just gloss it over, pay no attention to it. And the only blessings that there are in the Holy Writ are those we give attention to. Except that God won’t let us perish altogether, and so there is the lesson, Underneath are the everlasting arms. If all the men perished from the earth today — atom-wise or otherwise — there is some of the divine breath left to be breathed into some higher form of animal that would create him into being a man, into being a creator instead of a destroyer as all other living forms are.

 

     I’m fascinated by the supposed conflict between the materialist theory of man, which relates only to animals — because animals are material. Their evolutionary rules are all right if they are talking about animals, but if they would take Pope’s essay and learn that the proper study of mankind is man, then they would begin with man. And then we’re on our march to understanding ourselves. When we understand our intrinsic selves, we’re understanding the God who made us. That’s His work. How do you know anybody’s nature except by how he works, the results of his work? By their works shall ye know them, and that applies to God as well as to anybody else. By His works ye shall know Him.

 

     Maybe I’ve wandered far from what your present interest might be.

 

Q: What do you think of Ayn Rand?

 

Heath: Ayn Rand? She’s a very vigorous personality. She was when I knew her in 1930..somewhere along..31. A very vigorous personality.

 

Q: She feels sort of like you do on this government stealing, when they take from the people.

 

Heath: Yes, well the Bible doesn’t say anything about who does it.

 

Q: Pardon?

 

Heath: The Bible doesn’t say anything about there being any difference — stealing is stealing whether it is done by one person or somebody else, or some group of persons. And so to that extent she’s following the Bible, although I think she chooses to call herself an atheist, or something like that. Which I think is one way of getting a lot of people not to listen to her.

 

Q: What do you think of her writings as a whole?

 

Heath: She has a very fine technique, of a rough and ready kind. A very powerful technique.

 

Q: I found them real good, real interesting. But then it seemed like she needed one more step, like the recognition of God and she’d just have it right there.

 

Heath: Many of us do come up somewhere near to the top, and don’t quite make the high grade.

 

Q: Have you ever had this trouble of maybe thinking that there

wasn’t a God, somewhere along in your studying?

 

Heath: Oh plenty in my youth! And the reason of that was that those who taught me about what they said was God, taught me about monsters and demons, to a large extent. And I said, if that’s God, then I’ll have none of it. But as I approached middle life, I began to find out that God is what the New Testament said God is: God is love. What is love? Service. Doing for one another. And doing it systematically, we live systematically and approach immortality in a systematic manner, doubling our average lives in a single century.

 

     I think we’ve run a little bit off of our main theme, haven’t

we?

 

Q: I think we’re all involved in this to a certain extent. What is you concept, mainly between time and Eternity? What is your thinking of this?  What is the distinction between the two?

 

Heath: Everything is to be understood by how it acts, functions. And when power is put out, it acts rhythmically, or with what they call discontinuity, and so on. And so the rhythm that you can count, you can feel it in your breath, in your heart, in your blood and so on, the rhythm of nature is time. And because nature has rhythm and the units of the rhythm can be segregated in our minds and largely in our experience also, then we can practice time. The time is the third element in the Christian Trinity. It’s the discontinuity, it’s the repetition of things, it’s the ongoing of things one after another. It can be counted, because if there were nothing there to be counted, we’d be back into utter homogeneity, utter chaos, and no organization, no possible numbers, no rationality. Time is that which goes on and thereby accumulates, makes energy or action larger and larger — builds it up. But matter and motion are organized in different proportions, and they are the first two elements of an event. They qualify the event. It is a certain kind of event, because matter, or force, and motion are in a certain proportion in numbers. And in some proportions they can go on in greater and greater repetitions, they continue for longer times. And those we call creative organizations, which among men we call it love, or mutual service — because love has no way of demonstrating itself except through serving one another. It isn’t just a matter of the mind, it’s a matter of functioning: how you function with respect to your fellow man?  If you function under the golden rule, then that’s a spiritual relationship because it’s a creative relationship. I wish I had time to take that alone as a theme. What is spirituality? Whatever advances the purposes of God is spiritual, isn’t it?

 

Q: Maybe you can dwell on this a while.

 

Heath: What is the purpose — I’ll  try to do it for a moment. What are the purposes of God? Life or death? More life, more abundant life, or less abundant life? I won’t pause to talk about no life, because there are no nothings, they’re just a figment of imagination. So the will of God is that men should have more abundant life.

 

     Now what was the question exactly? How was it framed?

 

Q: The difference between time and Eternity.

 

Heath: Well then, how abundant a life is, other things being equal of course, is how long it endures. A life one year long, a life of two years long is twice as much, other things being equal of course. So time is the quantifying /qualifying?/ element in nature. This is quite an abstract, a philosophical conception, but any conception, philosophic, scientific or otherwise, if it is simple enough, can be understood by relatively simple minds. I was illustrating a day or two ago, chess isn’t anything but complicated checkers, is it? And three-dimensional chess is still more complicated checkers. What principle is involved in any of the higher complications that is not involved in the checkers themselves? They merely complicated the thing; no fundamentally new relationship is introduced. And so with all of nature when we get down to the simplest. And this great Book that we revere in the Western world has so many simple illustrations in it that it makes it understandable by simple people. You don’t have to be a high scientist and learn to understand higher mathematics and all that sort of thing —fine as they are in their places and do wonderful things. But to understand the funda­mentals is the main objective, and we get that by simple parables, simple metaphores. Simple words like Father, Son and Holy Ghost, representing the universal Substance, the universal Power, and the Universal Time, which is Eternity.

 

And you were asking me what was time? Was that the question?

 

Q: No, would you connect time with Eternity, or how would you conceive the relationship between the two?

 

Heath: Well eternity is something like the star that guides the mariner. It gives him direction, but he doesn’t expect to drop his anchor there. And all our ideals, all the perfection that we’re commanded to exhibit in our lives, our counsels of perfection, direction towards it, never arriving. Finite beings can’t be infinite in any respect or absolute in any respect. If we were all of God, the we could attribute those things to ourselves as God can to Himself. Since we are only part of God, God’s creation and especially given His own gift of imagination to imagine things and create them, since we are only part of God, then we can never experience the whole of God. We’d have to be equal to God to do that. Is that plain enough? We mustn’t expect _____________. Our whole lives are in a spectrum of action or events, or energy if you want to call it. There are things below which our senses don’t tell us anything, small magnitudes, and others above which they don’t register, as the ear only takes a certain range of sound, or the eye a certain octave. We don’t know what goes above and below these limits. We don’t have any direct knowledge. But we can reason a lot about it, because we find that what we do experience and understand is rational and reasonable and can be reasoned about and understood. So we can reason about the whole spectrum of nature, not only what is experienced but what is in its nature experienceable, capable of being at some future time understood. And as we expand this octave of our objective lives, we can

reach towards zero on the one hand, or towards higher frequencies of action . . .

(tape ran out)

________________________________________________________________

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3085

Letter to Heath at 312 Halesworth, Santa Ana, California, from George C. S. Benson, President, Claremont Men’s College, Pitzer Hall, Claremont, California

June 14, 1961

 

Dear Spencer:

 

Pursuant to our visits this Spring, here is a proposal for definite action that will advance your ideas as well as the College’s purposes which parallel yours. Here is our idea.

 

1. That we institute a Science of Society research foundation within Claremont Men’s College. This foundation would be launched by your major contribution, but would invite help from the many other sources who are familiar with your ideas and would wish to help advance them.

 

2. That you establish a headquarters on the Claremont Men’s College campus, probably in our Stoughton Courts, which provide apartment facilities, that you take your meals at Collins Hall refectory and have the privileges of the Faculty Club.

 

3. That you become the Director of Research for the Science of Society Foundation of Claremont Men’s College.

 

4. That work of the foundation be primarily along the lines suggested by your book. Citadel, Market and Altar and that it involve research and publication encouraging the use of proprietary institutions as a means of solving social problems. The foundation’s emphasis would definitely be on finding solutions rather than pointing out the disadvantages of government solutions, or exposing present evils.

 

5. It would be expected that you would bear the expense of your own living accommodations on campus, but the college would provide office space, and library facilities. Research, publication and perhaps some teaching of the Science of Society Foundation would be carried on by funds made available through your initial gift and other gifts as they develop. One function of the Foundation would be to enlarge the fund and here the College could be of substantial help.

 

6. Should your active participation in the Foundation activities diminish in time, the program could be taken up by someone wholly conversant with your views and who is trustworthy and competent. I think immediately of Spencer Heath MacCallum. In that case much of the research would be directed toward social anthropology and its modern application in proprietary communities.

 

In short, the College would play the role of mother ship, sponsoring and providing an academic base for the foundation’s activities, and in working out financing by which the program could continue on a permanent basis. A relationship as close as this between donor and the Institute is unusual in colleges. It is possible here because Claremont Men’s College’s program of research in political economy already so closely parallels many of your pur­poses and activities. Your interest and extensive knowledge in this field make you ideally suited for this purpose. Our lawyers see no reason why it cannot be done provided there is no direct reimbursement to you that covers your living costs; and provided that you make a definite gift to the College to put the research on a permanent basis.

 

I hope very much, Spencer, that this proposal may help fulfill your lifelong goal of providing a fountainhead of ideas about voluntarism. I am sure you can see the opportunity offered here of contact with a first rate college. I cannot emphasize too strongly however, that this must be a single package and that there must be a substantial pledge from you so that the work we under­take can go forward.

 

I look forward to pursuing the idea further at your earliest convenience.

 

With best personal regards.

Cordially yours,

/s/ George

George C. S. Benson

GCSB:mm

_____________________________________________________________________________________

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3085

Draft, marked “Preliminary Copy,” of letter from Heath to George C. S. Benson, President, Claremont Men’s College, Claremont, California

June 23, 1961

 

 

Dear George:

 

 During the year now coming to a close that I have been a guest of Harvey Mudd College, I have had opportunity to make some personal appraisements of its methods and aims.

 

 Especially in the department of physics, I have found going on some research and instruction on the interaction of light quanta in collision with atoms of various vapor­ized metals under spectroscopic observation.

 

 This research being already definitely in progress and seeming of very great probable value, I have been happy to provide (very modestly as a beginning) for the purchase of some auxiliary apparatus necessary for its more effective carrying on.

 

 It occurs to me that with similar opportunity to observe what has already been undertaken in Claremont Men’s College — especially any forward work, beyond the customary and conventional, in the somewhat neglected field of economics and public affairs — I would be happy, in like manner, to be of increasing aid, materially and otherwise, in such advanced research and instruction.

 

 The above suggestion is strongly prompted by your letter of June 14th which was delayed in reaching me by way of Santa Ana — especially that portion of it in which you refer to a program of research in political economy now existing with­in Men’s College and which, as you say, so closely parallels many of my own purposes and activities.

 

 With a first-hand further acquaintance, I might become greatly interested in this as perhaps leading towards a much-to-be-desired congruency or working synthesis between economics and the other sciences — even possibly including some of the practical aspects of religion and its inspirational arts.

 

    Soon or late, some college or university or established

research organization — conceivably in Claremont — will

achieve world-wide distinction as the first to discover the proprietary foundation of our modern life-serving and uniquely Christian free-enterprise society and especially its now

 

    Soon or late, some college or university or established

research organization — conceivably in Claremont — will achieve world-wide distinction as the first to discover the non-political, proprietary foundations of our modern life-serving and, in its practice specifically, uniquely Christian free-enter­prise society, and especially its now broadly advanc­ing development of value-creating and thereby self-sustaining proprietary (in place of tax-supported) community administration.

 

 In the quoted words of the sage and politically skeptical Benjamin Franklin, “He who shall first in­troduce into public affairs the principles of prim­itive Christianity will revolutionize the world.”

 

Cordially,

Spencer Heath

 

Soon or late, some college, university or established research organization — conceivably in Claremont — will achieve world-wide distinction as the first to discover the non-political proprietary foundations of our modern life-serving and in all its normal practices, specifically Christian, Free Enter­prise Society; and especially its now broadly advanc­ing development of value creating and thereby self-sustaining proprietary (instead of tax-supported) community administration.

 

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