Spencer Heath Archive

Item 356

Pencil notes by Heath for a letter to Russell Kirk from Sewanee, Tennessee. Fall 1954?

 

 

     …the Golden Rule of reciprocal service without coercion among men and is, I think, not unlike the Christian Gospel vision of a diviner outer and objective organization among men no less than the spiritual transformation of their individual lives; where property and authority, other than political, are never condemned but always assumed in parable and in precept even when not extolled. To me there was truly a divine intuition of a distant earthly peace and glory in the outer and larger lives of men no less than in their individual and immediate hearts and souls.

 

    For some years it has been a calm delight and inspiration to me to seek out the root of man’s potential to rise above his animal creaturehood into his regenerate divinity through achievement of creative power — how he can learn to dream his ideals and, like God in Genesis, create them out of the relative yet ever receding chaos (organic reverse of physical entropy) of his material and his human world.

     I seem to see this in his aspiration and his usually unconscious response to the element of order and beauty that is implicit in the evolving Cosmos that surrounds him and sustains him often rudely but with everlasting arms.

     Under this inspiration, whether hidden or acknowledged, men, out of their freedom above the mere necessities of animal existence and out of their capacity to idealize and dream, practice spontaneous activities in the form of devotions towards an Absolute and in pursuit of Beauty in its finite aspects which they often dimly yet sometimes clearly conceive. Intuitively they compose it as proportion, rhythm, harmony, in concrete works of art. And also intuitively, for reasons they feel but cannot explain they seek patiently and with long fortitude the modes of procedure, the rationale of the structures and the happenings or events in which the Cosmos subsists and proceeds. Thus the sciences arise and these bits of understanding of the Cosmic Mind, these at-one-ments of the human with the divine confer mighty powers to shape (or destroy) the material world in the image of the dream.

     But the practice of these powers requires not conflict and coercion but contract and cooperation, the Golden Rule, among men. Under this Rule of exchange alone can men vastly specialize their functions and perfect their several processes and products to unite in vast lasting accomplishments. All others are with Nineveh and Tyre. Under the coercive dominion of political powers, the fruits of technology are seized, high talents perverted. Such is the nature of political as against proprietary administration. The ages of the past are strewn with the crumbling monuments of political decay.

     This new dispensation of the man owning himself and thus competent to own property and practice the Golden Rule of contract and exchange beyond all conflict and coercion with his fellow men constitutes a new basis for the social as against the ancient political organization and enslavement of mankind. In less than a half-millennium, it has on the one hand so enriched life in Christian lands as to more than double its span; while on the other it has afforded such richness of spoil to the Archaic Destroying Powers that they now menace the continued constitution even of the physical world. /On reverse of page: “And all this beyond affording the Destroying Powers such richness of knowledge and of spoil as to menace, as many seem to think, the very foundations even of our physical world.”/

     Turning aside from these old-time agencies of violence and war we can find order and beauty and vast spiritual potentiality in the modern social integration that has come to bless mankind with richer lives and length of days, despite the monstrous burdens it sustains. It is an ever present beneficence. And its rationality is more than analogous, it is identical with that of the natural, even the physical world — only that it is really /?/ more advanced, elaborated and evolved. To learn to know and to understand it with the mind as well as in the heart is high wisdom and delight. Its values and ideals shining in precept and parable down from the past, though all unnoticed in the world of peaceful trade and exchange, have prospered and ennobled all but our political affairs. It is lack of understanding alone that delays this Golden Rule in public realms.

 

     From its foundation in the human aspiration for order and beauty and the inspiration of the Absolute and divine, I have examined the social integration of mankind with some diligence and delight. I have found its fundamental processes more than analogous, quite identical, only vastly more evolved and elaborated than those of the physical or natural world.

     I have found that organization is life, that life itself /is/ dominant and divine, that it is the ever-living, the always evolving, the All-in-All; that we can enjoy more organization or suffer disintegration into lesser organization but life has no zero, no negative side or scale (except in the sense of a diminishing positive). In the wide perspective life goes ever onward into diviner events and ever more real and enduring forms. Evil, with all its mighty power, is, in this view, only the negative trend, the transitory that must pass, that cannot indefinitely prevail.

     These broad concepts I have set out briefly as introduction to a book-length manuscript reporting the findings of my research in the integrative, the non-political and hence non-collisional or social organization of men.

     The first part is mainly inductive — the relevant factual material in the present day and in the historical view. The second is operative or functional. Textually and by diagram it discloses in principle how the now-current contractual processes by their free development under normal profit motivation will realize in fact and without force or opposition all that is best in the best of humanitarian dreams. The third consists chiefly of evaluations from the spiritual and psychological point of view of the blessings of an adult free society.

     I anticipate that in this manuscript you would find much that is pertinent to a dynamic conservatism — the historical references to abortive social origins, the part played by the Church in fostering the development of contractual capacity among men of all degrees, and most especially the operational analysis of private property in land as the basic social institution. Here the potentialities for a high type of proprietary administration are too obvious to be denied.

     This last is most congenial to your project of a 5,000-acre reforested community under the like proprietary ownership and administration. Also Dr. Edward McCrady^’s growing proprietary jurisdiction over 10,000 acres including villages at the University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn.

     When first reading the second paragraph of your letter I was a bit tempted to send a copy of this manuscript (entitled, Citadel, Market and Altar) to you unasked, but I hesitated lest this might seem to impose on you an unsought obligation to read and examine it.

     When I began this I had not thought of writing more than two or three pages at most. Now I am perturbed lest you find it too tedious and perhaps obscure from my too great attempt at condensation. Yet before closing I must further signify to you the great delight I have found in reading and re-reading and discussing your The Conservative Mind. It is most outstanding in its probity and fine scholarship and most beautifully done. I am looking into Quinton Hogg’s The Case for Conservatism. It seems, perhaps by contrast, rather flatly pedestrian to me.

                        Sincerely,