Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2778..

Typed pages, incomplete, by Heath with penciled corrections. Especially notable for its one-page preface, suggesting that this might have been intended as the beginning of a book. Compare with Item 2044.

Early 1950s?

 

 

 

 

This manuscript postulates the transcendent Reality, absolute as all-Action, all happenings — the Infinite Event — without beginning and without end, in the Unity of which there are three elements or persons, of infinite Substance, Power and Eternity.

 

 In, of and from this absolute Reality exist and proceed all lesser realities within the infinite complex of inter-acting finite events, there being, in the unity of each, three measurable elements or aspects, mass, motion and time, wherein each event is comprised, as to its quantity of action,* by their over-all amount; as to its quality, by their respective proportions.

 

 The individual earthly lives of men are successive unitary events, each composite of myriad lesser events and itself consisting of its portions and proportions of mass, motion and time, in the image of its Infinite and Absolute.

 

 The present writing reflects an objective examination of the successive generations of individual lives, freely interfunctioning, and thereby constituting the Organic Society — the creative life-form uniquely qualified to transform its environment and thereby to raise indefinitely the quality and the continuity of its members’ lives — towards the ever-transcending Absolute.

 

 Not only its inter-personal foundation in the Christian Golden Rule but also the evolving proprietary — and thereby contractual and objective — technology of the Creative Society is delineated in large detail.

 

 

 

THE CHRISTIAN AND THE PAGAN

WAY OF LIFE

 

 

During the many long millennia, before that last near-thousand years that led to Bethlehem, with Asia still in slumber and Europe yet unborn, the Afro-Asian Fertile Crescent was both the seed bed and the battle ground of huge populations of Semitic and related strains who were the then most virile races, even though most en­slaved, of any in the world. In teeming numbers they were but the pawns of empire crushed under monolithic states of conquering dynas­ties and kings derived from harsh and ruder lands whose lust for spoil and fame consumed in wars and costly public works the transient generations that spawned short-lived upon the slowly fading richness of the soil, till human vigor so declined that seats of empire moved north and westward to shores and islands of the Cretan Seas.

 Then southward came alien races bred in the hardihood of harsher lands who at last enslaved the island empires and through well nigh another thousand years built out of their own barbaric vigor the glory that was Greece and that reached its deadly grandeur in the united nations that was Rome — beneath the stars that shone also on Bethlehem.

 

 Jesus was born in the geographical center of the united nations of his day, free from international wars under the cen­tralized tyranny of the then Imperial Rome. He brought a new light into the world. With matchless divination of the human heart and mind, he called to the unborn grace and beauty unawakened yet poten­tial within. And he proclaimed a new dispensation of freedom and peace, a new kind of kingdom — a Kingdom of Heaven on the earth. He showed the way, the truth and the life for the attainment of peace and joy within and for the creation of the Kingdom outwardly in the lives of every race and creed and clime.

 

 There was Hebrew tradition of a better day to come, of a Messiah who would bring victory over all their enemies and reign in righteous judgment over them alone. But here was promise of a different and unheard of kind that would bless and serve not one family, tribe or race alone but all the nations of mankind. It was transcendent, unique in history, beyond the minds of those in local power. If it meant merely the tribal Messiah then perhaps well; but if more, then it might jeopardize their local revenue and rule. Hence, out of jealousy and fear, it must be resisted as subversive against the united worldly powers, the political governments, of that day. In such circumstance and among a people where the use of metaphor and imagery was the common habit as it is today, we need not wonder that the deeper meaning was clothed often in speech that even to the most devoted could at times be only pri­vately explained. The full true meaning, consistent with the place and time and consistent with itself throughout, was hidden from the politically minded, the hard of heart and blind, and even more so today; for its magnificence was of necessity obscured in the narratives and com­mentaries of those who long afterwards re-told and wrote them down, and again by the dogmatic pre-conceptions of the official translators into modern tongues.

 

 This new and unique Kingdom of God was to spring from a new kind of action — co-operation without coercion, in place of contra-operation among men — that would not only serve their present need but in the fullness of time would lead them out from the bondage of political powers into a life abundant and eventually immortal in this new kind of world and in the timeless Great Beyond whence all life comes. He was the Poet who dreamed, the seer who foresaw the vast creative and thereby spiritual power that lay within his Golden Rule Commandment of the contractual, the non-political and non-coercive process among men for the transformation of their material world to the service of their bodily lives and for the transfiguration of their souls. His dream was for a solace in His day and for the healing of the nations in times far away. He heralded for mankind the transcendent civilization that was to sleep in darkness for more than a thousand years and in just the last few centuries has only half begun, whose birth pangs, amid the wars and violences that self-destroy the worldly powers, disturb and terrify the soul of modern man.

 

 In that age of world dominion by the violence of political powers, as in our own, this vision of world-wide reciprocal and non-coercive relationships among men, much feared or despised by many of the great and wise, yet quietly growing and eventually displacing the political, was too strange and distant from the conscious thoughts of men. Only simple and unlearned minds, and of these but few, could conceive so great a marvel. So it had to be told in allegories, tales that would challenge and instruct and also entertain; but for those who had eyes to see and ears to hear they carried a profounder meaning than was ever known or dreamed before. The cherished sentiments of sympathy and love would no longer be confined to family, tribe or race but would extend, in effect, to all the children of men. And in that larger realm, under the Golden Rule of contract in lieu of coercion; once men could own even so much as themselves, love reaching-outwardly and objectified in reciprocal services would become impersonal and all-embracing, thereby spiritual and divine throughout the nations of mankind. This divine relationship among men would regenerate them, even though unconsciously, from dependents and destroyers into creators and thus loose the bonds of death in the freedom and abundance of a new form of life, — of mankind, to be redeemed and fulfilled in a social organism that may well be symbolized as the living body of the Risen Christ. —  For the Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence now and the violent take it by force.

 The vision was too magnificent, too prophetic for the times. It had its metaphysical aspect of present salvation for as many as could be, as it were, born anew. This was the new life of faith and serenity and peace for the individual, the Kingdom within, abiding in his certain hope of a like Kingdom potential in the midst of all and yet to come.

 

 And for all men to grow into and achieve also the glory of this outer Kingdom as well as the one within, but one single simple Rule need be observed. There was the old rule of peace by covenants or treaties to refrain from trespass or aggression; the penalty for breach was war, retaliation in kind. And the old rule — that of mere survival — was not to be destroyed but a higher purpose fulfilled. It was to be outgrown by the practice of the New Rule, the higher law, “that ye love one another” by doing unto, by serving one another. This was no rule of resistance against evil, nor was it any rule of avoidance like the Buddhist rule to refrain. The Golden Rule was positive, balanced, dynamic: That ye do each unto others in the new manner — as ye would that all others should do unto you — that each should love others by serving them as he would have others love and serve him. To live in this new Kingdom it was necessary to act to­wards one another with only one kind of equality, the equal freedom to own oneself and one’s property, the equality of equal authority over one’s person and one’s rightful possessions. It was the divine command to develop the technology of property, proprietorship and freedom as against either personal or political coercion and ex-propriation by force. Mere covenant to refrain from mutual evil, with its sanc­tions of retaliation, was to be superseded and transcended by the rule of con-tract — of drawing together in mutual agreement and accord to perform mutual good. In so far as any practiced this new Rule they would be, thus far, in the Kingdom of Heaven, for they would become creators of good and thereby spiritual and divine, whether they understood it or not, — and irrespective of any conscious virtue or good intentions. For, like the laws of God in all His living and His physical realm, even an unwitting obedience brings its blessings no less than their defiance brings the undoing of mankind.

 

 Under this new and golden rule of contract in place of coercion, when faithfully performed, there could be no domination by force, only service in the freedom of mutual accord; and any departure would be punished; for it would be a loss and privation of the good. And just so far as any men failed to practice that Rule they remained unregenerate, — lost in the evil of their evil doing, whether aggressive or non-resistant, given over to the dominance of destructive powers, force and war.

 

 To the early Christian leaders this was all too simple, and too inclusive of others. They rejoiced in its magic transformation of chosen souls by faith redeemed and in the narrow communion of those thus elect and eligible, as they thought, for the Kingdom soon to come to them alone. In growing numbers they brought hope and promise to a weary world. But they formed membership societies conditioned on tests, professions of faith, adherence to metaphysical doctrines. The coming of the Kingdom was for the elect. And it was to come quickly as by a miracle with great acclaim; not by slow and quiet development as the little lump leavens the mass and the small seed grows. So, as the generations passed and no signs in the heavens came, leaders lost faith in the quick coming of a last judgment day and a literal separation of the sheep from the goats. Nor did they permit men to hear and freely do the living word. East and West, they organized churches militant and coercive, assuming full authority to interpret the living word and to rule the bodies and the thoughts of men. In Rome, Byzantium, Alexandria, they thus postponed the “second coming” into distant place and time and to save their iron rule of politics and war decreed, as their successors do today, that the Kingdom of the Golden Rule on earth, so far as affairs of this world were concerned, could have no such objective reality as the gospels taught. It was only for the future practice of men soon to die conforming to their churchly decrees and conditions for the gracious gift of immortal life beyond. The Golden Rule relationship was reduced to a mystic subjectivity in prepar­ation for the final end and a ghostly brotherhood of the elect in worlds to Come. So it was that the Christian doctrine of a Kingdom of Peace on earth through the practice of services — of objective love — in creative, non-political relationships was lost for a thousand years in tyrannies, persecutions and wars amid promises of eternal bliss beyond the grave.

 

 Yet the vision of the Gospel Kingdom was not wholly lost. From age to age arose dissident societies and brotherhood groups usually opposed to the normal practice of contractual freedom and vainly seeking or at least promising, by incompetent, inadequate and often unjustifiable means, achievement of their artificial Utopian dreams. From these, as heedless of the Gospel Rule as is the Christian Right, has grown the Christian “Liberal” Left, as it is known today. Obliv­ious of the beautiful operation of the Golden Rule in the far and wide contractual engagements among men, they are prone to social­istic schemes and to the false Utopian lures of the Communist con­testants for world supremacy while cultivating easy tolerance of their subversive and conspiratorial ways — even their savage brutal­ities as in ancient days when or where they have the power.

 

 As Imperial Rome impoverished to her own decline her tribute-burdened world, confusion and disorder displaced the workings of her codes and rules. Her tax-exhausted populations abandoned their cities and towns for the lesser insecurities of the barbarian mode of life and of primitive subsistence directly from the soil, while the Church, softened by its ethical traditions, grew into the “garments of the Empire” in a milder and a less predacious rule. For the Church took authority not merely of the sword alone; she made acknowledgement of a higher law and proclaimed unfailingly the sacredness of the individual soul — that the human will must be free and no man wholly slave.

 

 In the widespread general insecurity smaller holders of lands sought the protection of their more powerful neighbors. The prac­tice of enfeoffment to a lord, usually under religious sanctions and vows and often to the heads of religious orders, was for many generations extended far and wide throughout all rural lands. In these voluntary engagements to give rent or rent-service in ex­change for a common protection and defense, began the system of proprietary public administration. This developed in form, but not in freedom and, except in the remoteness of Saxon England, degenerated into a servile feudalism through a thousand years. Yet this natural pattern of free community organization — the lord of the manor owning the land and protecting and otherwise serving its in­habitants as free men in exchange for customary (contractual) rent — is the historic foundation to which all the laws of real property in the western world refer even until today. It had its best and furthest development accordingly as it was most remote from seats of empire and least corrupted by Mediterranean and still more ancient traditions of political sovereignties and imperial power. In regions rugged and remote it kept local freedom long alive, while in distant England for five centuries it grew to blossom in the Age of Alfred ere the Norman Duke and his barons imposed their total tyranny of a servile feudalism on the land. But on the Continent it was perverted long before. The large land owners went political almost from the beginning and but little developed their proprietary public service power. They breached their covenants of protection and of “quiet possession,” waged wars against one another, and in place of free and customary rents con­fiscated property and lives and turned their erstwhile freemen into serfs and slaves. Out of the chronic warfare great barons, dukes and counts arose and, often sanctioned by the Church, grew into kings to take their crowns from Papal hands as sovereigns above the lesser barons who ruled the servile populations on the land, while robber barons and pirate navies ruled the highways and the seas.

 In any organization of men in very large numbers there are two opposite kinds of relationships among them with respect to those portions or things of their material environment upon which their welfare and happiness — even their very lives — depend. And these absolutely necessary portions or things themselves are of two kinds: natural, unmodified by any positive human action upon them, and artificial, having been purposefully modified by human action and design. The first consist of sites and natural resources and are called land. The second consist of human improvements in or on the land and the artificial products thereof or therefrom that are called wealth.

 When by the social convention or common will and the at least tacit consent of all, portions of land or of wealth are appropriated to and are thus held or possessed by particular persons, then such persons have ownership therein and title thereto. Whatever be their origin, the lands and the wealth thus peaceably appropri­ated become and are called property and such particular persons are called proprietors. Property may be defined as that which is or may rightfully become, under the social convention of ownership and title, the subject-matter of contract. This social convention of property and proprietorship is the divine relationship of service without coercion, of non-aggression among men with respect to one another and to their environment. In this relationship and its extension and in none other can they have equal rights or jurisdic­tion — perfect equality of authority — over their persons and over their respective properties, — under which rights alone they can practice the Golden Rule of contract, of creative services in the mutual freedom of contract without coercion, and thus establish, slowly if need be, a Free Society, a Kingdom of Heaven on the earth.

 

 The other and opposite kind of relationship among men with respect to themselves and to their environment is not proprietary or social. It is political, — the sovereign or imperial power. It is rudely primitive; for its authority rests not on a social or volun­tary convention of right and title to oneself and to one’s property, but upon the physical power and “right” of coercion and of ex-propriation. Its jurisdiction over persons and property is not social but political and coercive. This jurisdiction is not freely evolved; it is imposed. And it is arbitrary over populations who have been conquered despite their resistance or who, being over-awed or deceived, capitulate without resistance or war. Because of its very nature it cannot practice the Golden Rule of contract and exchange. A political power is bound to the Iron Rule of ex-propriation and destruction, both in peace and in war, for it has no natural or voluntary source of support. The juridical terms for these two kinds of relationships among men with respect to their persons and to their environment — self ownership and property right by common consent, and coer­cion and ex-propriation by organized force blanket-wise imposed, are: “The Proprium” and “The Imperium;” and the evolution of Society is the evolution of the Proprium out of the Imperium, the emergence of freedom out of slavery, the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven through the spiritual birth of mankind into the use and beauty of creative relationships and thereby towards its immortality through security and peace.

 At last, a thousand years and more from Calvary, came silent stirrings of the Heavenly kind of Kingdom in the works and ways of ruthless men. Like a thief in the night came the long neglected spirit of the Golden Rule into their practical and secular lives, but not the conscious minds and hearts of men. The old device of treaties, oath-bound covenants to refrain from aggression or for a common defense, was left to the sovereign powers that had by now succeeded Rome. There was a new kind of compact that had no respect of persons but had the power to unite in mutual service all the sons of men. The right of all men, the small as well as the great, to enter into the freedom of contractual relationships began to be acknowledged, for the Church was teaching her Western world that all were created to be free. From this it followed that they could own property in themselves and in their products from land or sea. An almost universal right to own property, as against the old sovereign rights of ex-propriation and enslavement by the few, came all unnoticed, and the Golden Rule of reciprocal services through contract without coercion could be practiced widely in the Western World.

 

 Nor could all the robbers on the lands and seas withstand this call to better ways. Finding richer gains in trade, many ceased to raid. Pirates became merchants and, becoming opulent from trade, built and defended their coastal cities and developed alike their own free system of common law of property and contract — the “Law Merchant” — free alike from dependence on political en­forcement and from kingly or legislative limitations and decrees.

 

 This new kind of jurisdiction was limited and confined, except in Saxon England, to properties and services that could be had sep­arately from and exclusively of others. It did not, nor has it yet evolved to include such properties and services as cannot be enjoyed individually and separately but must be had in common as public properties and services. Nevertheless, this limited practice of contract among persons who granted each to the other full and equal authority over his person and his possessions was marvelously and increasingly productive and of profit for all. It weakened and finally destroyed the political power of all the lesser barons by drawing population to the cities and towns that had won or purchased degrees of freedom from their territorial lords. Successors to the lesser and the local lords, when all their power to tax or seize was gone, became at last the modern non-coercive institution of private property in land, while by might of sword the most powerful barons, dukes and counts attained the sovereign power of kings. These laid their former fellows under tribute, such as was partly checked at Runnymede, and from towns and cities exacted “gifts”  that became extortion and the parent ground of modern taxation after the manner of ancient and self-destroying Rome.

 

 Despite persisting pirates on the seas and increasing tribute to the growing sovereignties and kings, the new world of free relationships on sea and land created vast new wealth and values for mankind. In the new enlargement of the right of the generality of men to own themselves and therewith of their right to own property, as against the political prerogatives of compulsion and expropria­tion, a new and truly Christian kind of kingdom, all unperceived, began and became the hidden genius of creative power on which to build the civilization of the modern world. But its jurisdiction did not extend to the properties and services of common use and participation. These properties continued as of old under the dom­inance of political persons who, being not proprietors but ex-propriators, could not make them the subject-matter of contract, but only of arbitrary or coercive administration. So the nationalistic states continued growing on increasing tribute from the towns and trade. And in the unchanging logic of alliances as of conquests, they became fewer and larger and grew into rival colonial and imper­ial powers until property and contract became what now it is, largely outlaw on land and sea. The powers of the world take out of its markets without having contributed thereto. As lamented long ago, the kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence and the violent take it by force.

 

 It was after a thousand years of darkness under declining imperial and rising churchly power that the renaissance of freedom, not unlike that of Saxon England under Alfred, came into the Western world. But to repeat, this wider freedom pertained only to the ownership of goods and products instead of communities and lands. For yet another half-millennium land holding was to remain a governmental and coercive instead of the social institution that it is today. Yet the rise of trading between the towns and on the seas brought revival of learning, new degrees of intellectual free­dom and the spirit for adventure into the unknown. Whole conti­nents called to the spirit of freedom quickened in the hearts of men. They fled their tribute taking tyrannies and planted seeds of the Golden Rule of property without ex-propriation, contract without coercion, far and wide. Intuitively, in the New World they formed proprietary communities but had lost all knowledge, or all Anglo-Saxon tra­dition, of how to operate or practice them. So they established political government closely modeled after Republican Rome. Free contract was permitted only as to such properties and values as would remain above taxation. In the administration of the local communities free contract was not remembered or provided for at all

 

/Text breaks off here, half-way through page 13, and is followed by two more pages numbered 12 and 13, the first of which is crossed out until the paragraph beginning, “But even so limited…”/

 

… but no restoration of non-political (allodial) ownership and administration of sites and lands. For yet another half-millennium, land-holding was to re­main a governmental and coercive instead of a social institution, as in the most backward and least advanced of lands today.

 

 Yet the revival of trading between the towns and on the seas brought revival of learning, new degrees of intellectual freedom and the spirit of adventure among men. There was widening of all horizons, artistic, scientific, geograph­ic into the unknown. Whole continents called to the spirit in the quickened hearts of men. In large numbers they fled their tribute-taking tyrannies and planted seeds of the Gol­den Rule of property without expropriation, contract without coercion, far and wide. Intuitively, in the West they founded proprietary communities but had no knowledge or traditions of how to practice them. The truly Christian polity of property was only dimly and partially conceived, for the Anglo-Saxon tradition of land lords and free men as the basis of free com­munity organization had been wholly lost. So they established a political gov­ernment on the model of Republican Rome, hedging it about with constitutional re­strictions that they hoped would hold it within the powers assigned — the minimum of the Imperium and maximum of the Proprium that they could conceive. Yet, free contract was permitted only as to such private and personal property as would remain above taxation, and, in the administration of the local community and of the public property and services, free contract was not remembered or provided for at all. All this was left to political administration resting on coercive taxation, instead of to proprietary administration based on rents freely negotiated and fixed by the market value of the public benefits received.

 

 But even so limited in the nineteenth and notwithstanding the vast exten­sion of twentieth-century political powers, the system of contractual free enter­prise has been the marvel of mankind. Aided by science and discoveries, it has yielded to society so much of good, and to government such power of harm, as never existed in all the ages of the world; for the self-same science that serves the needs of men is no less powerful, under political administration to destroy their lives.  

 

 In the hands of the Proprium — of the sys­tem of ownership and property and thereby of free contract and exchange — all property, knowledge and power must be employed directly and primarily for the service of others. On this all profit, all recompense to the owner, depends; for he, as owner, has no power to tax or seize. The process is creative and therefore spiritual on both sides for, irrespective of sentiments or of further aims, each does unto many others in the /same/ manner as he would have others do unto him, and each becomes the more creative in return. It is as false in reason as it is ungenerous in spirit to decry the essential virtue of good works by imputation of base or ignoble motives whether false or true.

 

 But under the Imperium there is no practice of the Golden Rule; none but the Iron Rule of force. Property is de-social-ized, seized out of the social amenities of contract and consent and of equivalence in exchange. It ceases to produce, even to maintain itself. It is consumed or destroyed and can be replaced only by the violence of further seizures. All that the Imperium,  the political process, provides for anyone it must first seize from others to supply its subsidies and doles and to be destroyed as wantonly in peace as from necessity in war. The Imperium is of the powers of “the world” in the New Testament sense, destructive therefore anti-spiritual now as it was then, notwithstanding its early adoption by the militant-meta­physical Church and ages of indoctrination of the divine rights of governments and kings.

 

 The Christian alternative is the Proprium, the system of property and services administered by their owners under the Golden Rule of Society — objectification of the Christian dream of a Kingdom of Heaven on the earth. As in the past, there is escape from imperial rule, under whatever forms, only as Society evolves and extends its proprietary and thereby Golden Rule kind of administration into the field of community protection and over the properties appurtenant to the community as a whole and requisite for the conduct of the public and community affairs. For it is the incompleteness of this social

 

 

/Breaks off/