Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1511

Letter to Russell Kirk, Michigan State College, Lansing, Michigan.

March 10, 1954

 

 

 

Dear Mr. Kirk:

I cannot overstate the gratification I have found in your very cordial letter of January 26th. And worth waiting for were your reprints from the two Reviews. I have much enjoyed your further insight into the color and influence of Lord Acton’ s most remarkable mind. And there is pathos in your pictures of the country towns in Britain being smothered under graceless labor barracks much as noxious jungle parasites flourish for the while upon the living bodies they destroy. Many thanks for these reprints.

It is indeed heartening to be in communication with a really first class mind dedicated to understanding the real social heritage and its autonomous operation in the natural and non-coercive relationships among men in which services and duties, mutual and reciprocal, raise the quality and the continuity of the individual lives. To safeguard such heritage — no less noble for its being often dishonored and despised — against the envious assaults of purely political “principalities and powers” is a constant high mission of the Conservative Mind. To hold these undeniable social gains that among men have imperfectly yet no less divinely evolved seems the prime requisite to further social and contractual, not to say spiritual, advance. Yet this being done it still remains for conservatism to do more than yield here and there and now and again to the pressures generated by its own deficiencies and imperfections. In order to build as well as guard and protect it must achieve more than a mere Fabian expediency in face of hostile strategies and counter with a positive dynamism, with a creative conservatism conscious of the divine organic process if not the final goal. The hidden beneficence needs to be made plain, the mind of God that moves in our midst beyond the present ken.

As Conservatism humbly seeks out more and more the rationale of social life and growth it will encourage and promote the community-wide organization of real estate for the performance of self-sustaining community-wide services to its inhabitants for automatic income and profit commensurate with the protection afforded and benefits conferred. As this non-political alternative expands there will come less and less need to yield to the dubious and ultimately destructive political expedients and all that they entail. Such Conservatism will nurture and advance the organic social growth much as men combine and cultivate and promote the organic growth of gardens and fields, and in like manner as scientific technology, in its non-political applications, employs in the service and advancement of mankind processes long established in nature though but recently revealed.

This Golden Rule relationship in the proprietary, the contractual and non-coercive, organizations of men is based and conditioned upon one and only one kind of freedom and equality among them. That one essential equality is equality of authority — the possession by each of equal authority first, over his own person and secondly, over his own property and legitimate possessions. In this divine relationship they rise above unregenerate conflict into the harmony of creative even if impersonal cooperation that knows no necessary bounds. And not alone the services and goods that are assigned to particular persons but also the general or common services that are attached and appurtenant to the corpus, to the real estate of the community. These also are capable of being provided and purveyed by the proprietors of the community – when suitably organized (as are the numerous owners of a hotel) — in the same manner as the owners of other forms of property purvey the use and service of it, limited or unlimited, by lease or sale, under their acknowledged authority of ownership to do so.

Thus the way is open wide for the traditional conservative affection for community-wide non-coercive proprietary administration to realize itself with high and mighty efficacy in this functional development of the dynamic potentialities now almost dormant in the modern non-political institution of private property in land. And as this Golden Rule regime of proprietary administration advances, serving and enriching all, it will profit perhaps most of all from its protective services against the forced levies and other infringements of the then automatically receding and declining political power. And yet further, the protected, well served and prospered inhabitants, seeing the profits and affluence of the proprietary organization, eventually will buy into it and, in proportion as they thus contribute, will exercise an effective counsel and control in their public affairs. Thus can the aristocratic and the democratic ideals and aspirations converge, — the democratic through the popular yet qualified franchises of the myriad holders of undivided ownerships in other corporate enterprises, other than the community sites and resources, and the aristocratic by the merging of large holdings of the basic realty of the community for effective corporate administration of the public properties, projects and services, both protective and constructive, that are appurtenant to it; — all this to the magnificent profit and advantage of the inhabitants and to those who become legitimately organized so to be, and thus freely accepted as the public servants of all.

 

Dear Dr. Kirk, I’m afraid I may have given you too much of an apocalyptic vision of a wholly new dispensation in public affairs — too much for, shall I say, conservative incredulity to see but askance. Yet it invokes no rule but the Golden Rule of reciprocal service without coercion among men and is, I think, not unlike the Christian Gospel vision of a diviner outer and objective organization among men no less than the spiritual growth and transformation of their inner and their individual lives, the Christian vision in which, moreover, property and authority, other than political, are never condemned but always assumed in parable and in precept whether or not expressly sanctioned or extolled. To me this Gospel Vision was a truly divine intuition of a distant earthly peace and glory in the outer and larger, the universal lives of men no less than in their immediate and individual hearts and minds.

For some years I have found pleasure in seeking out the root of man’s potential to rise above his animal creature-hood into his regenerate divinity through achievement of creative power; how it is that he can learn to dream his ideals and then, within his finite yet widening range, objectify them, like God in Genesis, in a relative but ever receding chaos (the organic reverse of inorganic entropy), and thus impress them on the structure of his material world; and, above all, how he can move forward into the more creative and hence diviner relationships among men that the organic society is destined to achieve. I seem to see it spring rather more out of his esthetic than from his moral nature, from his generally but not always unconscious reactions to the growing order and beauty that is dominant in the Cosmos whence he came and is sustained — often rudely, yet on everlasting arms.

Under this inspiration, out of their capacity to idealize and dream, and in what respite they gain beyond the necessities of animal survival, men turn to spontaneous activities in devotions to an Absolute and in pursuit of Beauty in its finite aspects which they often dimly yet sometimes clearly conceive. Intuitively, as proportion, rhythm, harmony, as color shape and sound, they compose it into concrete works of art. And also intuitively, for reasons they feel but cannot explain, they seek with long patience and zeal the rationale of the happenings or events, of the action, in which the Cosmos subsists and proceeds. Thus the sciences arise, and these bits of understanding of the Cosmic Mind, these at-one-ments of the human mind with the divine, confer a mighty power to shape the natural world in the image of the dream.

But the fruitful exercise of these powers requires not conflict and coercion but contract and cooperation, the Golden-Rule process among men. Under this alone and not otherwise can men vastly specialize, divide and reunite in the consummation of works that abide. All else is one with Nineveh and Tyre. The ages are strewn with the crumbling monuments of political administration and decay.

This New Dispensation of the man owning himself and thus competent to own property and practice the Golden Rule of contract and exchange beyond all conflict and coercion with his fellow man constitutes the modern basis for a social as against the ancient political organization for the administration of public services and community affairs. Its application in the production and distribution of private and individual services and goods alone has in less than a half millennium so enriched life in Christian lands as to more than double its span, — and all this in addition to affording the Destroying Powers such richness of knowledge and of spoil as to menace, as many now seem to think, the very foundations even of our physical world. Turning aside from these old-time agencies of violence and war, we can find order and beauty and vast spiritual potentialities in its present-day social integration that has come to bless mankind with richer lives and length of days despite the monstrous burdens it sustains. It is an ever-present beneficence, and its rationality is more than analogous, it is identical with that of the natural, even the physical world, — only that even in its beginnings it is vastly more advanced, elaborated and evolved. To learn to know and to understand it with the mind as well as in the heart is high wisdom and delight. Its values and ideals shining in precept and parable down from the past, though but ill or little considered in the free relations of contract and exchange, has yet prospered all, — save our public and political affairs. Lack of understanding alone is what delays the Golden Rule in public realms.

I seem clearly to have learned that organization is life, that life itself is dominant and divine, that it is the ever-living and everlasting, the All-in-All. We can achieve more organization or suffer disintegration into its lesser forms, but life itself has no zero, no negative side or scale (except in the sense of lesser positives). In the wide perspective, life goes ever forward into diviner events, ever more enduring forms. Evil, with all its mighty power is, in this view, only a negative trend, the transitory that must pass, that cannot indefinitely prevail.

These broad concepts I have set out briefly as introduction to a book-length manuscript, the findings of my research on the integrative, the social and non-coercive and hence non-political organization of men.

The first part is mainly inductive — the relevant factual material in the light of history and as of the present day. The second is operative or functional. Textually and by diagram it discloses how the now current contractual processes by their free development under normal profit motivation will realize in fact and without force or opposition all that is best in the humanitarian dream. The third consists chiefly of evaluations of the blessings of an adult free society from the spiritual, the artistic and the idealistic point of view.

I anticipate that in this manuscript you would find much that is at least pertinent, not to say fundamental to a dynamic conservatism — the historical references to abortive social origins, the influence of the Church in fostering the development of contractual capacity among men of all degrees and, most especially, the operational analysis of property in land as the foundation of all free contractual relationships — of the social as against the political process. Here the potentialities for a high type of proprietary public administration are too obvious to be denied. And this should be most congenial to your own project of a five thousand acre reforested community under this kind of ownership and administration — as it is also to Dr. Edward McCrady in his non-political jurisdiction over ten thousand acres, including one or more villages, of the University of the South at Sewanee, Tenn.

Upon first reading the second paragraph of your letter I was a little tempted to send you a copy of this manuscript bearing the symbolic title of Citadel, Market and Altar but hesitated lest it might seem to impose on you an unsought obligation to read and examine it.

When beginning this letter in answer to yours I had no thought of writing more than two or three pages at the most. Now I am perturbed lest you find it too tedious and perhaps also obscure because of attempt at too much condensation. Yet before closing I must tell you again of the delight I find in reading and re-reading and discussing with others your The Conservative Mind. It is most outstanding in its probity and fine scholarship and most beautifully done. I am looking into Quintin Hogg’s The Case for Conservatism. It seems to me, by contrast perhaps, as rather flatly pedestrian, more labored than inspired.

 

Sincerely,

 

Spencer Heath