Spencer Heath Archive

Item 199

Pencil by Heath on notepad paper.

No date

     There can be no doubt that in all lands tribal nomadism was the antecedent whence emerged all civic and settled-community life. Within the roving tribe all amenities and mutual aid rested on belief in common ancestry and the common worship or propitiation of ancestral gods. With neither productivity nor permanency, possessions were primitive and portable. There were possessions but no properties, goods but no merchandise, for land and the gifts of nature were taken only to be depleted or consumed and never to be administered or exchanged. Between tribe and tribe there was strife to possess and rivalry not to produce but only to lay waste and consume. With no ownership and permanent possession, no system of peaceable productivity and voluntary services by the contractual process of consent and measured exchange, having no method but depredation and no external relations but diplomacy and war, the nomadic tribe is the organizational prototype of both the ancient and the modern political state.

     And, like the state, it was a system of physical force sanctioned (or upheld) by powerful religious, racial and patriotic fetishes and taboos. It thus afforded ideal conditions for the development and selection of those narrow personal virtues and powers that are exemplified in gang loyalties, shrewd stratagems, wide conquest and the degeneration that follows ruthless rule.

     Yet the tribal organization, unlike the political, was no anachronism. Within itself and among its members it maintained the rude customs of comity, cooperation and mutual aid that follow common ancestry and exclusive race. With only a wandering existence, no settled or productive territory, it was predacious only on nature and on other tribes until after settled communities and village life began to appear.

     It was of a certainty that migrant tribes would tend to linger longest in places otherwise favorable and having also greatest plant and animal fertility and hence longest lasting supply of food and other requisites. Here men could most witness and thus learn to emulate nature in the bringing forth of plant and animal products. But under a merely tribal organization there could be no sufficient security of person or possession for the practice of productive arts. There must be a fundamental specialization and division of labor into services by a reciprocal system of exchange. First of all there must be a differentiation between the services of defense and that of supply and subsistence, for the same hands cannot well guide the plow and wield the sword. And there must be some enduring, some self-sustaining and thereby equitable division and exchange of these two kinds of services — a just participation in the one for a just participation in the other. This is the logical, as it has been the empirical requisite to any free or permanent community life.

     There are many signs of the mode and steps in which this transition from the nomad tribe to the settled and secure community organization takes place. It is well exemplified, among others, in the scholarly researches that have been made on the early transformation in England of Anglo-Saxon nomad tribes into village societies

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