Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1614

Tape recording by Spencer MacCallum of conversation with Heath about O.A. Ohmann’s article, “Skyhooks” (Harvard Business Review, May-June 1955).

May 1957

 

 

 

 

     It takes today a thousand man-hours to make a ton of steel. It is highly to be desired that the steel business could be so improved in its organization that only five hundred man-hours would make a ton of steel. The spiritual office of those who have invested their and other people’s money in the steel business, and who have applied their genius to the administering of this capital property … the spiritual office of them is to so conduct the steel-making organization that the men in it will come to their highest material efficiency in their function of making steel.

To do that, they must avail themselves of the spiritual principles which are necessary in all good productive organization. Men at the top must enter into a spiritual relationship, not necessarily one that is so signalized, or characterized, but a relationship that brings about the esprit de corps, sense of belonging, triumph of creativity, the comradeship, the team-play, all of those things which conspire to the highest morale in a humble occupation. That is the spiritual role of the owners and managers of a materialistic enterprise. They employ the powers of the spirit to make it more and more serviceable to man, to diminish the labor, the routine, the uninspiring parts of it, by lifting them out of their commonplaceness in an organization in which men feel a brotherhood in production, and brotherhood in creativity.

     This being done, then it leads to the employment of less and less labor, less and less of these routine and these assembly-line tasks — requires less and less of human energy, and all the time human energy is being released to rise above its necessities and enter into the creative — artistically, scientifically, recreationally, religiously creative side of life which is its end and crown. Not to be bound to the necessities, and not to try to invest the humble physical things with the supreme spirituality, but to employ spiritual principles to make the humble and necessitous things more serviceable to human life and thereby to releasing of the human spirit into its potential creative powers — into the flowering of its potential powers.

Let us have spirituality in the foundry. Let us have the fine things of the spirit in the machine shop, if we will. But do not let us think that in these humble things the human spirit can ever be satisfied. It is to be released from those things into its true heritage and creative life. Tie ribbons on the coal scuttle, if you will. But let that coal scuttle be better and better organized so that human nature will not be tied to coal scuttlery but can be emancipated into its diviner and more creative powers.

I wish I had the skill of some people to find words, apt words., find nice clean terse words that hit the nail right on the head. It is easier for me to think of fine relationships than it is to characterize them aptly.

/Well Popdaddy, when you bring this down to a program of what management shall do, do you say that their spiritual function is to ../

It is right in their business — to so administer their business, so exercise their authority, their responsibilities, as to employ the powers of the spirit at the level of the flesh. But do not think that we must have no powers outside of the foundry or the quarry. Spirituality can be employed to diminish that part of our lives which is taken up in the foundry and in the quarry, to liberate us into more creative, less necessitous things, spontaneous things.

/So it is not as though management had to adopt a spiritual role to sort of atone or make up for its physical. Sure the flesh comes first; but in doing this, they can employ the spirit and the golden rule to do as good a job as they can of it./

.. To employ all the resources of the spirit that are applicable in this humble situation and in ministering to the flesh. But do not let us delude ourselves into thinking that is the whole spiritual life of man, and that we must have something extraneous, like breaking up a sound organization by letting the people who are employed as wage workers, having them take responsibilities out of the hands of the more capable management and spreading authority. As I mentioned in my letter, /authority/ must be concen­trated, not scattered.

/Competition/ puts the best people in command. And then these best will not be best unless they use spiritual relationships between themselves and their employes, with one another and with the public whom they serve. When they enter into that spiritual relationship, then everybody grows, in grace, and then all things are added these material things. We do not have to then be bound unto these material things, because they come spontaneously through the higher productivity of good organization — employing spiritual principles within the organization. And that lets them out of the bondage to the flesh. That is the big thing, that we should be liberated.

The Children of Israel had to be led out of bondage before they could set up any altar in the wilderness. Modern technology leads labor out of bondage to toil. And leading them out of that bondage, then they can build up their temple in a new promised land of freedom. Otherwise, what Ohmann seems to want is that Moses should have found some way to make spiritual people out of those slaves who were making bricks without straw. They had to be released from that bondage before they could become spiri­tual people.

/Or that in the process of leading them out of Egypt, Moses should have encamped, called off the trekking, had everybody sit down in a circle and made life as happy as he could for them — in that, giving up the leading out of Egypt./

He should have foresworn his vision of a promised land and said, “This is the place here, now; we shall patch this up. We shall let you men do some voting and decide on how much straw will be put in the bricks — and have you take some part in the management of this brick business that you are slave to.” Of course they would have sunk deeper in their slavery. Moses had a vision above and beyond the slavery. And we are slaves to our bodily neces­sities. The thing to do is to emancipate us from that, lead us out of that. That is what modern technology does. We do not have to grub for feed and some protection from the weather and all that. We are making that come flowing to us. And then with that we are liberated to enter into the Promised Land of the spirit.

Not but what Moses should use spiritual means in the process of the liberation — because the spirit gives men the creative power, and teaches men how to become masters of their environment and creators of their environment, and not subject to it. That is what modern industry and its technology does do. And that means that they must relate themselves to one another on a spiritual basis in order to be materially efficient. And they can do wonders in that, and have done: marvels of productivity, which has been the envy of the modern world. But we do not have to settle, or set, in the flesh pots of Egypt and try to glorify them. — Glorify them, yes; but not make that our dependence. That is not an ideal. Where is Dr. Ohmann’s ideal outside of industry?

If we could let Walter Reuther and his minions sit down and carry on a sit-down strike in the automobile industry, as they did do at one time, a la the Kohler business, then we would not get any automobiles to speak of, nor the plumbing fixtures either. If we made that general, then we would all go hungry, ill-clad.

You know, behind Ohmann is that notion that there is something wrong about people having authority, authority of ownership, having more than others. It is a notion that wealth is something that you eat, consume, not something that you administer on behalf of mankind. So they want to take the control out of the hands of those who are competent, and scatter it to the slaves, and then expect the slaves to be happy. They call that a spiritual thing; it is an anti-spiritual thing. The idea of scattering the management among the personnel is an anti-spiritual thing, because it makes /men/ less and less productive, less creative, and thereby less spiritual, less free, and more enslaved to their necessities. You see, Ohmann is barking up the wrong tree. His notion of spirituality is not any such thing as my notion of spirituality. Spirituality consists in the have-nots getting some edge on the haves. He got that in his sociology courses at Princeton, or wherever it was.

/Of course free enterprise has not developed so far, but what it has a lot of rough edges./

God, look how young it is!

/Maybe Ohmann and his group do not realize that that is where the rough edges come from./

It is hardly over two hundred years old. What they call the “Industrial Revolution,” when is that supposed to be?  Not quite two hundred years back, isn’t it? A hundred and fifty?

/So then the idea is to try to forget about relieving the pains and so on of the workers and try to set your sights higher, to try to make everybody be honest and be an honest worker, do well to one another and just go back to the old morality instead of trying to make the situation of the workers more comfortable? Get everybody to go back to the ‘old time religion?/

God picks out leaders at various levels of life. He picks out a man to run the stone quarry — a man who can get the most stone out of there with the least effort, and with the best morale of his men and all that. That is his job. Another man, like Dr. Ohmann, is to get on public platforms and write in the public prints and lift people out of their lower selves into their higher selves. Let him be a specialist in that. And let men employ spiritual powers wherever they are. But not try to mess and mix up the incompatibles and return us back to that state of chaotic condition from which all evolution flows, from which God made the world.

/What do you mean by the term spiritual powers?/

Creative powers. Powers, first, of creating the things to liberate ourselves from the bondage of the flesh. And second, that we should accept the inspiration that comes from all the works of nature, and above all, the things that lift men out of themselves…accept that inspiration, and those who are adept at it among us should capture those things, capture that beauty, capture that inspiration and pass it on to millions of men. And those who are inspired with the rationality of God and God’s works /can/ discover them and the joy of discovering them, and the joy of disseminating them, and the principles, the scientific laws, clear up to the essentials of philosophy and religion.

In the past, before Christ came, there was no religion for the poor. They did not pretend to have any in early Rome. Only patricians had a religion. And there was no place in Greece for any slave to be a philosopher. Philosophy was the prerogative only of the elite. Our modern, mass-production technology is making it possible for everybody to have a religion and for everybody to be a philosopher, and for everybody to be an artist, as they were not in Rome, or in Greece, or even in old, benighted Egypt.

/That ties in with what you were saying about Walt Whitman, that he sensed or intuited that the coming renaissance was going to be a “dispersive renaissance,” not of the few but of all of mankind, and that when it comes it will be like nothing that ever was before./

You know, you do not have to remember one thing and another — if you have basic principles that are sound and comprehensive, highly generalized, you do not have to try to be consistent. Every part will fit into every other part without any effort to squeeze it in. That is what Emerson was hitting at when he said /approximately,/ “consistency should be the hobgoblin of little minds. We /need/ have no fear but, of everything done sincerely and with highest inspirational motivation, no matter how diverse the parts may be, never fear but the fabric will be fair. Consistency will take care of itself.” In other words, at a simple level, there has been a crime or something, and a man is on the witness stand. He tells an honest story. He does not have to worry about whether the parts are consistent or not; all he has to do is to tell it honestly. And a man in dealings with his fellow man, if he deals honestly with them, he doesn’t have to consider whether what he does with Jones is exactly the same, consistent with what he does with Smith. If he is honest with Jones and honest with Smith, consistency will take care of itself, whatever may be the detailed circumstances or appearances.

/Say, could you summarize it this way — I don’t know whether this is fair or not — would you say that Spiritual Mobilization has kind of missed its function and got onto the wrong tracks, that it has mistakenly got into a salvation or a relief program, where…/

Yes, that is a good point. I didn’t think about that — that these men that they are so sympathetic about, these crocodile tears for the poor laborer that has to put on the nut all the time until he goes nutty, that those crocodile tears do not belong there. He is not to be sympa­thized with because he has to work; he has got to be inspired to what things he can do as he is becoming more and more released from that work.

/That is why I asked you if management should not give the workers a glimpse of the world of art and literature./

You know, we have the medicine man in the tribe who is to carry their ideas to things more metaphysical, not to the hunting, the chase or the war.

 

/So we have the minister here in our society, and that is his function. Then the function of Spiritual Mobilization in the whole thing should be to the ministers, should be teaching the ministers…/

And to all persons, including management: the lesson I tried to give management, on how to use the golden rule within the organization and all that.

/Yes, but then to complement it, the worker has to be shown some glimpse of literature and art; so Spiritual Mobilization should encourage management to set some cultural programs./

TRANSITION DURING CHANGE OF TAPE APPROXIMATED FROM MEMORY

/Of course Spiritual Mobilization could teach manage­ment how to set up club rooms with the workers and all learn to rub noses and drink beer together, but to prevent it bogging down into that, into that commonplaceness, we need men like Ohmann or like Spiritual Mobilization people to show men what lies beyond the land of darkness, the land of Egypt, to inspire them with a vision of something beyond, so that they will not only get the satisfaction of good work done, and enjoy the teamwork and so on, but /so/ they /will/ have a goal, a transcendent goal, not just getting out so many more tons of steel a month. That is good enough in itself, but there is something way above and beyond that for them to be inspired by. And if not, when you cut  it down until they work only three hours a day, what are you going to do with the other seven — when they have been working ten? If they have not been inspired, they won’t do anything but bog down and decay. Like an active businessman who hasn’t any interest in anything but a normal /?/ interest in his affairs, and he goes to retire and he rots. There is a good parallel. Shall these people in the foundries and all be emancipated from their long hours and be given a lot of leisure they do not know what to do with? Spiritual Mobilization had better be getting busy; we see their hours are getting shortened down all the time. They had better be getting busy so that they will not rot down like an executive who retires at sixty years old and then rots for another five until he drops into his grave.

/Then, considering the kind of organization that Spiritual Mobilization is, it cannot specialize in one or the other. It has to teach both business and ministers./

And learn from Christ. He did it. There wasn’t anything too humble for Him /to carry His/ spirituality into it.

/What’s that?/

There was nothing too humble for Christ to give his attention to, to put a spiritual glow upon. He taught fishermen, and so on. He also taught Nicodemus.

/Yes, but what I was saying is that Spiritual Mobilization, setting out to help the whole cosmic pageant go forward, cannot specialize in teaching ministers or just in teaching management, but it has to do both, because both are necessary. Management has to know something of the spirit in order to help it be efficient and release the energy of its workers for what, on the other hand, Spiritual Mobilization through the ministers has to teach the workers to use./

 

Its specialty is the mobilization of spiritual power at all levels — not specializing as to place here and there, but specializing as to quality of their service to mankind. Spiritual quality.

 

/And this breaks down into two areas. Actually, they have hit the two categories of people that they have to reach: the ministers and management. They are the two important categories./

Of course it goes all the way through — the teachers and the artists and scientists. They all come into the picture. But the ministers /are/ presumably most highly specialized toward the things of the spirit, and the management is most highly specialized towards the things of the necessitous life, the things of the flesh — the bondage of the body. And we want to be /freed from/ …what Saint Paul said, “Who shall deliver me from the body of death?” — this slavery to animal necessities? Industry does it. For what? So men can sit on the side­lines then while automation does the job, they sit on the sidelines and drink beer and rot? Spiritual Mobilization should bring the ministers into this to inspire these people.

/Well, we have pretty well covered the subject I think. Enough for this afternoon, anyhow./