Spencer Heath Archive

Item 618

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum when Heath was reading a book at “Warwick,” home of Ian Crawford MacCallum and Ada Lynes MacCallum, Beachwood Road, Ellicott City, Maryland

Fall 1955?

 

Original is in item 617.

… but that’s not the place I’m looking for where

Aristotle pulls his worst boner.

Ada Lynes MacCallum: “You mean

Aristotle did things like that?”

Yes, here’s one of his boners as reflected by Acton. “It is not enough to act” (this is Acton himself speaking), “It is not enough to act up to the written law or to give all men their due. We ought to give them more than their due, to be generous and beneficent, to devote ourselves for the good of others, seeking our reward in self-denial and sacrifice, acting from the motive of sympathy and not of personal advantage.”  I put a note here, “Then some must have less, must be robbed of their due.” If some are going to have more than their due, others must be robbed of some of their due. It’s strange men like Acton didn’t see that. That’s the whole burden of Ruskin’s so-called political economy, which is trash, emotional hogwash, all about how you have to sympathize with somebody who has only one dollar provided you have two. Then you must give him one of your dollars because he hasn’t any — or as much as you have. It’s a good way to pauperize him or make him a dictator over you. The golden rule doesn’t call for any such thing. I don’t want other men to support me in idleness. If I would be charitable to other men because they want to live on me, I am not treating them in the same manner I would have them treat me.

Spencer MacCallum: “It’s interesting though, that that idea of charitableness did apply in the ancient world where they didn’t have a market where everyone could support themselves.”

Yes, and it was because loans in general were for distress loans to help somebody out of his difficulties that the Church forbade taking interest — because if he took the equivalent of the loan, you were not lending anything, that is to say, you were not benefiting anybody else at your expense. The Church was justified in opposing loans so far as they were shark loans. Of course, no one knew how to distinguish one from the other at that time. Not very many people know now. But lending has become so productive, it has brought itself into our customs, our habits and business practices, whatever the Church said about it. If something feeds you bread, as these productive loans do, and the Church only feeds you homilies, the Church’s loan has to go.

“Did you say hominy or homily?!”

Homilies. /laughing/ It’s terrible to think how many hominy-homilies people have to endure for moralistic services.

“What do you mean?”

Just making a pun. That idea he has here /that/ morality consists in doing what is bad for yourself in order to do what is good for somebody else. They never grasp the idea that the divine economy doesn’t provide for anybody to lose.

“Well it boils down to your restraining yourself from trying to improve your own estate because, in the ancient world, the only way to improve your own estate was to pauperize other people.”

Right. So that in the ancient world that was the way of virtue:  Everybody should refrain from trying to improve their estate in any way. In the Orient that is expressed very clearly. People should abstain from even desiring — from everything. Abstain from being customers of one another, patrons of one another.

One of the Buddha’s disciples has reported that Sir Edwin Arnold in his The Light of Asia said to the Master, “Oh, Siddhartha Buddha, when all men are beggars, from whom shall we beg?”

“And what did Siddhartha Buddha

say to that?”

I don’t remember.

“He must have taken it as a joke.”

He did, eventually, because he gave up all those notions of asceticism and became a worldling again. But his followers regarded him as a backslider. They would have nothing to do with it, and they persisted in their ascetic doctrine and practice. It really makes me feel sad to think that a mind like Lord Acton’s could have such a big blind spot — so clear in everything else, so clear all around the edges of his blind spot.

“If it were just his blind spot it

would seem more of a shame, but…”

So many men like him. A few men …