Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2997

Fragment of taping of conversation between Heath and Alvin Lowi, Jr. when invited to dinner at the latter’s home in Los Angeles. Somewhat edited. Note that in the original, syllables stressed by Heath are marked by a dot.

No date

 

 

Heath:  I find these college professors out here, they’re not scared of something that they’ve never seen before. They’re not scared of an unusual, an uncommon idea.

 

Lowi: Is that a generalization you’re making?

 

H:  Well it may be that the people who arranged these matters here inclined that way and picked their own kind. That could be. There’s one instance, however, in which I know, a professor who had a pink streak in him was invited — deliberately — thinking maybe I could fade a little of it out, and he was the most appreciative and responsive member of the group.

 

L:  You never can tell what people mean by “pink,” or aspersions of ..

 

H:  Well I mean hot for taxation and government and get-good-out-of-evil.

 

L:  Umm. They may just be deluded.

 

H:  Oh yes, and I think that possibly the majority of them were. I know I was, when I had a streak of that — for about eleven months.

 

L:  How long ago was that?

 

H:  When I was about twenty years old.

 

L:  Well you get impatient, I think. I must confess that I went through this too, where I used to think that (sigh) by some mysterious means the “expert” could decide better with the people’s property what the people wanted, and I guess I went through this for a couple of years. But I more or less figured it out for myself, and I tended towards anarchy for a while I think, for the thought that after that, that maybe there shouldn’t be any central government, that there shouldn’t be anything but small communities, or something like this.

 

H:  One of my earliest generalizations, before I got many broad conceptions about public affairs, was that our federal government was a very fine thing. Of course /patriotism was?/ strong in me, the Constitution was dictated by God to men who were just like the Old Testament men (Chuckle), inspired men. Very devout teachers — the principal of the school and the history teacher were very devout orthodox Christians. They taught us about the inspiration of the Bible, how actually the whole of it had been dictated by God to inspired men. .. (But I was talking about an early spell of socialism.) It wasn’t so very long after that I came in contact with socialists, and they handed me Bellamy’s Looking Backward. If you know that book, you’ve got to hand it to it, for a job, of its kind.

 

L:  I haven’t read it, I just know of it.

 

H:  It’s the cleverest and most effective propaganda for socialism . . plenty of people in middle life say that’s what made them socialist, and they never got over it. Well I had an attack, for about eleven months, I’d say (laughing)— don’t like to make it a whole year! Then I found that I didn’t believe my own stuff. Of course I went around telling it to people. After while I found that I couldn’t reconcile it myself. And then I began to think harder, and I fell into the Henry George camp — land communists. They wanted to turn the land over to the politicians, you know.

 

L:  I never did go through that stage.

 

H:  Well I had a long attack on that, because they were absolute free traders in everything but land. Nobody else was a free trader, practically. And Henry George was a very rhetorical fellow. He was an orator and a spellbinder.

 

L:  Had you heard him speak?

 

H:  No. I almost heard him speak one time. He lived only four or five years after I was in my twenties. But I knew many people who did know him. Well, I became a thorough convert; the Bellamys had completely won.

 

L:  How long of a book is this, Progress and Poverty?

 

H:  About three-hundred pages. He was a little man, very intolerant of everybody else’s opinion, and he got irascible when he was questioned or contradicted in any way. But his book is full of poetical stuff, idealistic stuff.

 

L:  His basic flaw was the nationalization of all land.

 

H:  Well he didn’t call it that. He had a weird idea that taxation could squeeze the value right out of a land title, or rather out of the land itself, and not have the politician take it over. Some people hang onto that idea today; they have a fantasy that a thing can be taken over by the political and still function in the market — so that everybody would rent land from the politicians as they did from the landlords, assuming that the politicians would appraise the land according to its market value. And yet they claimed that it wouldn’t be bought and sold; you would only buy and sell the improvements, which of course you can do to some extent separately.

 

L:  Well I think what leads him to this, I would say, from having read Von Mises, is that because temporarily it can be done that way, they think it will continue to be available in the market, sort of like having a TVA along with privately owned utilities. They coexist for a while. But you see, once in a while or periodically we get an administration like we’ve got now, and they’re embarrassed by the comparison between TVA and privately owned utilities as far as their operating records are concerned, the service, so they want another inroad.

 

H:  Did they ever think that TVA .. do they claim that it makes a profit?

 

L:  Oh yes!

 

H:  Hmm. Easily exposed.

 

/Parts of negligible interest deleted/

 

H:  .. free will, and it gives him his immortality. I won’t insist that he has absolute immortality, any more than I can insist that you divide a line in half, absolutely, forever.

But I’ll say this, that if a man can live thirty years this century, and sixty years the next century, and ninety years the next century, or anything resembling that, it won’t take very many centuries for him to get practical immortality.

 

L:  In succeeding generations increasing his life span. Well I’m thinking of immortality in different terms.

 

H:  It’s a negative term, you should know at first anyway. It’s a negative of a negative, a double negative. Mortis means death.

 

L:  So immortal means deathless.

 

H:  It means not death. It means the negative of something. Now since death itself is merely less life, it’s a negative of a negative.

 

L:  Would you agree that the memory of a man can be equivalent to this kind of immortality we’re talking about? Like, say, the memory of Isaac Newton, or Johann Sebastian Bach. These men will never die, because of the ideas that they left behind.

 

H:  The organization could be established. (pause) Nothing stays as it is. The pattern, the species pattern, may be like a system of light waves _______________ unit, the individual forming another. But we know, we have good reason to know, that no two light waves are exactly alike. Nothing that can be integrated into a reciprocal relationship .. or anything that can do that, must have units, and these units must be enough different that they can be reciprocal. Because if they are not enough different, there can be no reciprocal. You take a fraction with a 4 in the numerator and a 4 in the denominator, and there’s no differentiation. Put a 3 in the numerator and a 4 in the denominator, and that makes a difference whether you turn it upside down or not. It has a reciprocal ..

 

L:  This gives strength to the notion of parity, in a way.

 

H:  Parity?

 

L:  Opposites attract, you know? The notion of .. you can’t have a single pole? Things occur in nature in pairs, like plus and minus, north and south pole, positive and negative charges, and so forth.

 

H:  Two things can’t be exactly the same size, because if they could there’d be no ratio between them, no possible differentiation in the relationship. In an evolving universe, a universe in which events are multiplying themselves, both in number and intricacy or whatever /ratios?/ they have, there can be no absolute similarities. Things can’t be organized if they’re exactly alike. They couldn’t cooperate in any possible way, for any possible purpose. Take the bottle and the stopper, or the two parts to the railway coupling, and so on. In any mechanical thing, their two parts can only function by interacting with one another, and if they were just alike they would have to act just alike, and then there wouldn’t be any interacting. Anything that happened would be quantitative for us — as an accumulation or an additive result.

 

L:  Then you have to come to the notion that some things just don’t cooperate in that sense.

 

H:  Well sometimes it is so much that the structure of an object as part of an event is so little, so much differentiated, that they clash. Collision. But if they have a certain peculiarity which .. they used to call it valency .. they tend to go together. And in reciprocal relations process continues now, as the process of two single stars continues after they double. And yet there’s a new process there, a new structure, having two units in it. Events of that sort tend to perpetuate themselves in perpetuity. Events of lesser duration tend to fall apart .. the elements of the composition tend to fall apart. A process called entropy takes hold. A life seems to be something mysterious about events, that enables them to repeat themselves so that each succession of lives _________________on the average, statistically. It has more durational time in it. It is more enduring. That’s the opposite of entropy. A physicist, Erwin Schroedinger, has written a book on that theme, showing

 

                                      /breaks off/