Spencer Heath Archive

Item 893

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum of conversation with Heath about Ohmann’s letter in reply.

 

Original is in item 892.

 

We ought to recognize that creativity of industrial technology is a kind of low level creativity. It enables us to make terms with necessity through high efficiency so that we release human energy for non-necessitous creativity. We can be little above the animal in our necessitous life, but when this has been reduced to the least consumption of energy, then more and more of the human spirit is released to spontaneous creativity. I think /Ohmann/ is thinking about physical, materialistic creativity. You see, what we create out of our necessities is a much lower order than what we create out of our spontaneity — out of the flowering of the human spirit.

“He’s trying to center man’s spiritual life right in his working on the assembly line, instead of trying to make that more efficient and get it out of the way so that men can make the flower of their life in some other field.”

Exactly. He doesn’t seem to look upon it as a liberating technology, but as something that has to be dolled up, sugar-coated like a pill, with some kind of “skyhooks” of spirituality at the low level of activity — the mere maintenance level. Don’t you agree with me that he seems to have no vision outside that, to sugar-coat or doll-up the industrial processes — and he has no dream beyond that.

/Continuing to read from the letter:/  “In other words, it is primarily through the medium of work that every individual must justify his existence and his maturity.”

 

Huhuh. No It’s through play, through the things that are not work. Nothing is work unless you want to do something else.

/Reading further/

He really owns up that he got off to a bad expression and didn’t do himself justice.

/Reading still further, about the cockiness in the 1920s which would have substituted scientific findings for intuitive values:/

That’s right, but I think he dates it too late. They had that more in the second half of the nineteenth century than they have had it in the twentieth. That was a human weakness, a human failure. That wasn’t science itself. Science itself never hurts anybody, and it never had any narrowness about it. The narrowness was imported by the scientists themselves when they undertook to pinch it down the way the Catholics would /hold/ their God in a box. … I think the humanists did a lot of that.