Spencer Heath Archive

Item 937

Pencilings in a notebook — for “The Tale of One City,” a planned story about the assembling of land titles in New York City.

August 6, 1950

Original -> 912

RULE OF MIND AND RULE OF THUMB

When the mind of modern man seeks objectively the rationale of any certain kinds of events, and thereby discovers the basic ratios in which their fundamental energy flows and into which it is transformed, they lay the foundation for a new kind of technology, rational and scientific, to take the place in most cases of a former narrow and empirical one. In the chemical and the mechanic arts, for example, there was a practical technology, irrational and empirical, yet in many respects effective within its blind and narrow limitations.

     So the modern social, the non-political, non-coercive human technology of today, the widening practice of free contract, has been a wholly empirical and irrational art; it employs no dependable criteria, can make no safe predictions, for it has developed no general rationale. It depends on precedent, custom and tradition, suffers unaccountable reverses and, for all its miraculous accomplishments, advances only by gropings or adventures, by changes and processes, that in most cases are no more welcomed than they are understood.

     Because empiricism does not cease until the general principles are understood and widely applied, it is not to be expected that the social evolvement will come to a standstill until the generalizations of its science have become so widely known that they will be voluntarily and rationally applied. Meantime, it is more to be expected that empiricism will rule, that particular men will adventure tentatively in new ways and new directions with practices the like of which they have found profitable and good, while most men look upon these advances with scorn or askance.

     With this probability in mind, the story of a single enterprising, adventurous and previously successful individual undertaking to apply the techniques of free enterprise in the production and distribution of community services to the inhabitants of a singly-owned assemblage of real properties has been written to illustrate perhaps the last great empirical step in the evolution of society. It is only a “preliminary view” — a picture of men learning through doing and of the underlying principles thereby coming slowly into view.

     It shows how energetic, enterprising men seeking their own legitimate advancement can profitably extend into the community field the fundamental processes of social advance — processes that for most of them are beyond their care or, it may be, their capacity to understand. A great city is the chosen scene; for the organic society rises like a tree; upon its last matured and topmost parts it sets its further growth and bloom.