Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1536

Carbon of a letter from Heath on Science of Society Foundation letterhead, 11 Waverly Place East, New York 3, New York, to John O’Neil, 299 N. Long Beach Avenue, Freeport, L.I., New York. No reply because deceased.

September 1954

 

 

Dear Mr. O’Neil:

 

     I have read your books and other writings and know that your mind is alert for significant advances in understanding the world and towards understanding the evolving organic society of man. New steps or stages are heralded often in least likely places. They come “like the thief in the night” and often long unheeded or cried down, most of all by the traditional authorities in the field.

     Human understanding advances not evenly but in great surges after long sleeps. The sciences — mechan­ical, biological, atomic — took vast leaps in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries after long periods sterile or inert. It was by a new objectivity in its field that each broke its earlier limitations and bonds. Thought, understanding, came to be found in and extracted out of the objective field, no longer sought to be imposed upon or injected into it. Thought founded in events gave light for subsequent action, and vast practical techno­logies arose — working partnerships between nature and man — above the limitations of merely empirical advance. The environment of man was put more and more in order, his habitat made more and more habitable for men. The order of nature in the environment was discovered, then vastly extended in the environment of man to meet the human needs and dreams.

     With all this came new understandings of the indi­vidual man, his bodily structures and their functioning, physiological and psychological, its autonomous inter­actions within itself and its reactions to outer influences.

     And, too, somewhat came to be known of group organi­zations of men under the bonds of common blood or ancestry, in which the tribal or family-group functions in ways that no one alone nor all together can function, except they be so organized.

     All this knowledge — or at least all of it that has been usefully employed — is knowledge of how substances and structures actually behave, how events actually take place in the way that they do. It has not been concerned with how or why they do not act or happen in some other or different manner that we might prefer or think that they ought. The rational mind of science takes the operational point of view and learns how events happen, not how they fail to happen; how structures and organisms function, not how or why they function otherwise than they do, or fail to function as we might desire.

     But when we come to examine what it is that holds and keeps in mutuality the indefinite numbers of indi­viduals in human society irrespective of racial, religious or any other natural diversity — what it is that effects and maintains the social integration — we do not draw our thinking from the phenomenon itself. Rather we think of how men ought not or how they ought to behave towards one another. We seek not to under­stand men’s peaceable and mutually advantageous behavior. We impute evil to that which is peaceable, productive and voluntary on both sides, and prescribe punishments, prohibitions and penalties upon the voluntary processes that constitute the societal interfunctioning of men.

     Being, in our thinking, prepossessed with the existence of evil, we impute ill to that which is essentially good and find all virtue in the political and compulsory organization of men to ration, rule and regulate what is, in itself, uplifting and free. In this mistaken morality we ignore the beauty of voluntary and creative relationships and vainly rely upon the com­pulsive and destructive. Instead of understanding and extending the blessings of the voluntary and creative — the spiritual — relationships of men, we invoke poli­tical action and laws to force them in contrary patterns and ways.

     Knowing your sympathy for and appreciation of the foregoing points of view, I am sending you the key chapter of a proposed study of the social organization along these lines. Frankly we are anticipating your interest in this novel approach to understanding society and look forward to further correspondence with you.

Sincerely yours,

           /s/ Spencer Heath

               Director      

 

SH:m

Enc:  “The Energy Concept of Population”