Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2595

Letter from Mercer H. Parks, 3030 Locke Lane, Houston 19, Texas

(Note some pencil annotations by Heath on the original letter.)

June 13, 1957

 

Dear Mr. Heath:

It is always good to hear from one of Baldy’s friends, and I trust that sometime we may have the opportunity to sit down and have a good visit. It is a great pity that there are few people like you who realize that they were not ordained to preach. One of the people I interviewed on a recent trip said, “The pain of thinking makes golfers,” and I am inclined to think that he might have added, “or preachers.” There seems to be something about thinking that frightens people. Perhaps it is because thinking eventually confronts them with the “no now” sensation that they are hurtling through time and space without knowing where they are, where they have been and where they are going. They had rather stay anchored in an apparently secure world of sense which is at least partly false concept than to get into a world of reality with its apparent lack of directly perceived values and the consequent appearance of insecurity.

 Only when we sense the things which appear to be of our own magnitude and traveling at our speed do we get the feeling that there is a “now.” We say we “look at the stars” out in space in one breath and in the next that the light — whatever that is — has been traveling thousands or millions of light years. Actually we then don’t know but what the stars have been gone since before we were born. And on the scale smaller than ourselves the problem of “now” as a definite point at a definite time has us definitely stymied. So we pass insensibly and without consciousness of any compartmentation from the material to the non-material concepts. But I also am “preaching” instead of speculating.   

 I wonder if the problem of freedom is so simple as “private enterprises” for every­thing including the “widely generalized common services” you mention as the matter upon which all consideration of political government eventually swings. How are these widely generalized common services to be rendered without organization and institutionalization with the consequent delegation of authority but without any means to insure that responsibility (which freedom requires remain inseparable from authority) carries on with the delegation of authority? And if there is exercise of delegated collective authority without the corresponding totality of responsibility, does it make any difference whether the abuse of authority or power is political or what we have called private? Maybe we shall eventually be forced to alter our concepts of the “good life” in “society” so that we shall not need these services; or perhaps I should wait for your book.

 Somehow I have to look for my “unclouded assurance” as Lecky put it somewhere other than faith that we may eventually change human nature to the point we can live physically without coercion. As the Harpers and I recently discussed it, someone can forcibly take my few dollars. They then have them and I do not. By cunning they can steal my ideas but they can’t deprive me of them. They and I both then possess the ideas. But they can’t steal or take by force my understanding. That is a matter of a free spirit — understanding — and at that level there are no thieves. Everyone operating there must get there on his own efforts — and many would add by the grace of God. It is hard to forget the words of Jesus in the sixth chapter of John, “No man can come to me, except the Father which sent me draw him.”

 

 In the realm of spirit — where resides understanding according to my brand of “preaching” — it is impossible that there be any poaching on the other fellow’s territory — and it is there that we should find without exception that freedom “of exercise of options” in “a positive (life serving) relationship, reciprocal on both sides, involving no coercion on the part of either” which you visualize. This would hardly mean that we should all reside in a continuous state of blissful ecstasy with never a dip into the mere mental and physical areas of existence. From several viewpoints I am unable to visualize such a utopia.

 Does it not appear to be the aches and pains of such dips, the great sorrows, which furnish the stimuli for thought and makes us appreciate a few moments of soaring into what appears to be understanding? By what alchemy of human nature is to be made even the small nucleus of people required for an operation “involving no coercion” in the physical area? Would not such freedom in the physical area require a funda­mental and universal rupturing of the “membrane” of unique personality which surrounds each and everyone of us and actually cuts off any chances of real communication and understanding among massed individuals (required for such reciprocal relationship) through its very function of making each and every one of us a unique individual? Would it be worth the price of destroying the uniqueness of personality to give us the power of “making people really understand what we are talking about” if we by some stroke of magic could sunder this “membrane?” Haven’t we all yearned to chop someone to pieces, to grab them and choke some understanding into them when we failed to make them see something that appeared obviously obvious to us? If we could so produce a substantial unanimity of understanding would we not have defeated our very purpose and created a herd of quietly grazing animals.

 Yet I cannot visualize our going on forever at the point of universal failure completely to understand the nature of reality or life. That would be to deny any virtue to Providence at all. And so I am inclined to see some individuals always beating at barriers, seeking to pass critical points in the understanding of life which might perhaps be likened to the sound barrier in air flight or the sudden change in Reynold’s number in fluid flow. We can know little or nothing of the details of the previous breakthroughs in thinking which gave us the position to belabor this barrier of, let us call it unexamined false concepts for lack of something better, in which you seek to blast a hole with your new book. What must have been the anxieties of multitudes of individuals (your primitive prototypes) as the barrier of pure animal instinct was breached and men found that they could look at themselves as individuals at least a little different from the animals with objectives only to eat, to be comfortable and to reproduce? And what must have been the struggles of individuals to breach the barrier of their own immediate physical surroundings — including themselves — and get out into the area explorable by the imagination? Certainly the price paid for this freedom afterward in terms of superstitions was high, but would anyone say that it was too high? Imagination raised a barrier of its own conflicting ideas and for perhaps thousands of years men pounded painfully at it to break through into the era of what we call logical thought and a faith that at last men might fulfill their high aims. But we find ourselves blocked off and battering at still another barrier which is not nearly so definable as were the ones through which thousands of restless, continuously moving individuals have thrust us in the past by their intuitive stubbornness. Or perhaps those past barriers appear more definable to us than to those who “battered them down.

 At any rate we find ourselves fluttering to pass the critical Mach number into perhaps another mode of thought and understanding whose nature we feel intuitively must “be far superior to the self-conscious, imaginative and logical modes of thought we have come to possess without conquering. Could it “be that what I have called “feel intuitively” or perhaps that which Poincare called “sudden illumination” is the mode of thought and understanding into which we are attempting to “break as a sort of transition from our present turbulent flow of thought to a viscous flow — at higher thought velocity. Of such understanding, suddenly acquired of mathematic entities Poincare writes, “They are those whose elements harmoniously disposed so that the mind without effort can embrace their totality while realizing the details.” Isn^’t that a real concept?

 And may I inflict another string of illusions upon you? Do I not see developing through the whole “no now” process a quickening perception and growing concept of individuals for themselves as individuals. Albright, the Johns Hopkins professor of Semitic languages, says that primitive men had no consciousness of themselves as separate from the onflowing race except in the concrete relations of the life, otherwise sharing the feelings and reactions of the group whose distinctions “between men, animals, plants and even inanimate objects were extremely fluid. Yet in the negative confessions of the Egyptians, the Mesopotamian seals of private property, the individual’s spiritual torment or satisfaction manifest in many of the psalms, in Jeremiah and finally in the teaching of Jesus, do we not find increasing recognition of self as the final and indivisible unit of human worth? And does not that growing recognition make increasingly secure ground in the realm of spirit. Has the growth not been reflected in political entities, the things about which we started to think? From primitive communism of the tribe we find development through feudalism ultimately around the individual personality of the absolute monarch. Later subjects become recognized as individuals with souls as well as the monarch; and there is the limited monarchy. From the fall of the last absolute monarch in the west we have acquired a mood of atomistic democracy, a highly warped concept of the individual which promises to relapse into complete collectivism. But I wonder if that collectivism is not merely formal — nonetheless painful — in which individuals have not really given up being individuals but instead are being forced to study some of the hard lessons imposed by their poor judgments of what individualism actually involves. The most usual evaluation of individualism has been to regard it as a license to impose self upon anyone unable to resist; and may it not be possible that there lies latent in our present collectivistic mess, the high type of individualism I suspect you would characterize in a sentence in your letter of May 27 I have already quoted: “freedom, the exercise of options only in a positive (life serving) relationship, reciprocal on both sides, involving no coercion on the part of either.”

 I should not expect such a high quality of individualism to emerge in a preponderant number of people, but it does not appear impossible to me that one day many may embrace Jesus’ admonition to Nicodemus and be “born again into a life of understanding and “unclouded assurance” not of unquestioning faith in concepts but one of faith tempered by the unscratchable “itch” to improve — “to grow in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and men.” Then those who doggedly hack and hew at the barriers which prior erroneous concepts have set for them may have some co-workers.

 Or would even the partial relief of the loneliness of the task of hewing at barriers in itself defeat the purpose of being?

Sincerely,

/s/ Mercer H. Parks

MHP:be

CC Dr. Harper