Spencer Heath Archive

Item 864

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath about freedom on the road between Baltimore and New York.

December 1, 1955

Original is in item 860.

… we don’t have to be concerned at all about the other. The other will be merely incidental to that, and that will take precedence over it because it will contribute to men’s lives, whereas this thing we are protesting against shortens men’s lives. And that which extends men’s lives is bound to prevail over that which shortens them.

“So when people ask you what you mean by freedom, you tell them…”

Yes. I know what I mean by freedom.

“Would you say it over again?”

Freedom does not mean merely negation of prisons or jails, or taxation; it means the carrying on of the divine command to enter into and to extend impersonal, contractual relationships in a universal brotherhood to the ends of the earth. That is what freedom is. More fundamentally, perhaps, than that is freedom to live — and the only way men can live other than as animals live is to live in society. Society may be defined as the functioning of those actions which are commanded by the will of God, that men should love one another through serving one another, through doing unto one another as they would have others do unto them.

“I think that more fundamental freedom to live is what Dr. Harper is talking about. He hasn’t extended it further as yet.”

Freedom to live — yes. But how to execute that freedom, or how to implement that freedom, he has little or no idea. He will say, yes, he is in favor of free enterprise, but he does not connect that with being able to live.

“I think he has a faith that there is such a technology in the cards for us, and that men have been growing into the practice of it empirically and, if given freedom, will continue to evolve it empirically (if not rationally), even though men have not yet rationally explained it, or quantified it. But I don^’t think he would advocate this freedom from interference if he did not think there would be some empirical, continuing development of the alternative technology.”

Some use to make of it — some function of the social relationship, of the society. _________ is life, and life must be ever lord of death, as Whittier puts it. He adds the line, “Life is ever lord of death, and love must ever find its own.” He was thinking of subjective love. It is just as true if you mean love as service must ever find its own, because service always finds its own self served. That last line of Whittier’s is perfectly accurate applied objectively as well as subjectively.