Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1282

Carbons of a form letter sent out October 30 (see Item 995) and follow up to response (missing) from Samuel Chugerman, 29 Broadway, 19th Floor, New York

November 13, 1939

Dear Mr. Chugerman:

     Thanks for your acknowledgment and comments on my letter and articles enclosed.

     All men of good will have the same ultimate desires for the welfare and happiness of mankind. Their only divergences are as to the manner and the means and not the object or the end. Before the nineteenth century the theologians prescribed the manner and means for the salvation of mankind and, as an arm of the state, compelled the masses of men to its acceptance and to its (and their) financial support.

 

     During the eighteenth century the more literate and intellectually influential men lost confidence in the sincerity and sagacity of the political theologians and got them gradually divested of their political authority and tossed out of the capitol building, the court house and the city hall. The secular politicians stepped in. Their rulership directly under divine right and appointment differed but little from that of their clerical predecessors. There arose great demand for coercive government (none other was known) under popular forms. Vox populi would surely be the real vox Dei and all would be well. But it was not. God’s trustees (trusties) in general, all wore the same venal stripes, and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century an all but universal demand arose for a new salvation — for something to make democracy work. The theologians were called back again to give salvation by faith and compulsion — and extortion.

 

     But this time it was not faith in a creed, an iron creed, but in a wooden “education” that would slowly turn to iron as it became more compulsive and more extortionate under political auspices. The state now imposes a vast hierarchical educational machine that reaches deep into the pockets of its credulous victims and threatens the independence of every private college and school by undermining the sources of their financial support. And the public, even at its most literate levels, continues avid for this new theology, for this educational pedagology, all organized and enforced and supported as was the theology of two hundred years ago.

     Auguste Compte offered up his intellectual sacrifices to this idol. Herbert Spencer refused to bow down to it, but he was not seeking the keys to salvation for mankind. But the vastly learned (and educated) Lester F. Ward embraced the new theology, the new doctrine of salvation for the masses through scientific (?) education of the masses at the hands of the coercive and compulsive political authority. Education for democracy! As though people could be regimented into free and voluntary relationships!

     The tragic error in all this lies in the assumption that the ultimate peace and happiness of mankind must come from a dispensation from some higher powers than they — instead of by the processes of structural organization and growth /of society/ and the coming into adequate functioning of /its/ organized parts. Social organization is not any exception; it is fundamentally the same as any other organization in nature. As soon as wandering tribes discontinue their customary practice of raiding one another and by establishing property in land settle down to peaceful pursuits in the performing of services by mutual consent and exchange, then there is a going society, just as a new-born babe is a going human being. The parts are not all fully developed and grown but the organization is there. The parts are properly organized; it only remains for them to come into adequate performance of the functions to which they are adapted and carry on to completion their structural growth.

     It is not the proper business of the sociologist to look upon that portion of nature which manifests itself as human society as though it were shot through with some kind of diabolism that must be overcome — a vexatious problem that must be met and some means sought for escape. The wonder-waking adjustments, processes and functional relationships operating in this field of phenomena should be of no less dispassionate interest and esthetic appeal than the marching of the molecules into crystals, colloids and cells or the evolution of nebulae into galaxies and world-attended sun.

     When the searching spirit of science, of exploration and high discovery, shall enter this social field then the seeming confusion and complexities of the structures, of the institutions and customs, will be resolved in the discovery of the simple and invariable functions that these very diverse structures are found to carry on. When these social structures are understood from the standpoint of the functions they carry on, then what is now of necessity wholly empirical will become rational and a rational technique of social transformation will be as quietly and voluntarily accepted and applied as the corresponding technique of the natural sciences (so called) has been applied to the transformation of the natural and physical world.

     All of man’s creative capacity through dominance over his natural world comes from his esthetic motivation, rational analysis and voluntary application of the general principles thus happily brought to light. It must be the same in his discovery and utilization of the social world. Knowledge of the physical sciences belongs only to a few; it is not a mass possession, but its successful application is always by a voluntary and never by any compulsive social technique.

     All the discredited techniques of human betterment from animism and demonology, through all the formal superstitions of religion and of democratic forms, so-called, to the current naive faith in mass education, all have the one fatal vice in common — they are compulsively applied, and social functions cannot be performed in that way.

     Professor Ward, for example, discovers no natural technique and writes no prescription for social growth and improvement but that of mass education — scientific education of the masses of men under compulsive political organization and control. It is certainly fair to presume that masses of men learned in science just as he was would then be able to prescribe mass education just as he did. If education of the masses was all he had to offer for the hope of mankind, how could they be expected to offer more? Despite the popular superstition, especially in academic and professional circles, as to the magic powers and properties of mass education, I, for one, have no confidence that a thousand men all learning the same things could thereby possess any greater knowledge or wisdom than one man who had learned it. A thousand men believing the same thing are certainly no wiser than one man believing it. To expect more of formal education or of any education, so-called, under compulsive authority is to look on it with superstition and impute to it some magic power.

     Many people are persuaded with Ward that matter rather than energy is the fundamental of nature and that this materialistic conception provides an escape from the logical morasses of a metaphysical absolutism. We must remember that Ward was of the time and in the thick of the scientific reaction against the theological conceptions of the nineteenth century, and a near bystander if no great participant in all that controversy. It would be a wonder indeed if he had not lined up philosophically with the scientific materialists of that time. It was then only being learned that the various forms of energy were quantitatively equivalent and inter-convertible. The current doctrine of modern physics that matter and energy are inter-convertible was then only a remote hypothesis, and the transmutation of elements by changes in their energy content was not then believed in at all.

     However all this may be, I am quite sure we can find no escape from our metaphysical difficulties in connection with conceiving energy as the absolute by rejecting it in favor of matter. If in our alternative conception we endow matter with universal attributes to the exclusion of energy we have then only transferred our metaphysical difficulty from the one to the other. Whichever term is used, it would seem that we must broaden it to include the other if we would treat it as a universal or absolute.

I am very glad to have made your acquaintance and I certainly hope your valuable and exhaustive study of “The American Aristotle” will be favorably received and widely acclaimed.

                            Sincerely yours,

I expect to be at my New York address, Kings Crown Hotel, 420 West 116^th Street, Sunday the nineteenth and for two or three days thereafter.