Spencer Heath Archive

Item 634

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath.

December, 1955

/THE GOLDEN RULE AS SOCIAL TECHNOLOGY/

     It may be doubted if the idea of the Golden Rule is ever associated in people’s minds with industrial tech­nology. We have a whole industrial science which is doing wonders in the world and which is valued and appreciated and discussed by a great many people as though that of it­self gave men the blessings of long life, length of days and freer self-expression and all of those things, the ideal human values. We scarcely at all realize that no scientific technology could be practiced practically in any degree except for the technology of contract, by means of which this technology can be practiced for other persons. If the practitioners of chemical, electrical or similar technologies had to practice it for their own immediate use and not for the use of the public in general, there could be only the most primitive, if any technology, at all.

     So the key to our present civilization, the key to our material civilization, is a spiritual key, a psychological process that men have to learn to practice — of serving one another in the same manner that they would have others serve them. Through the practice of this psychological technology, then scientific knowledge and an industrial technology comes into being; and without this first necessary thing, after which all other things are added, without that Golden Rule technology, there could be none of the things which we seem to value and regard so much.

     The greatest idea that ever came into the world, and which has been employed substantially only in the Western World, is the idea of doing things for others in the same manner we would have others do things for us. And in the application of this idea, there has been a gradual transi­tion through the whole Christian era from government administration to social, or contractual, administration. In ancient times, under all the totalitarian governments, the arts and industries were government-owned and government-controlled, beginning with agriculture. All works, practi­cally, were public works in the sense that they were administered by the political process, that is, under the iron rule, which culminated under Caesar and destroyed what civilization there had been up to that time.

     The Golden Rule was the alternative. It is the one thing that lifts us out of the limitations of barbarism and political civilizations of the past. It brought contract into the world.

 

     I don’t think it is too much to say that Jesus Christ brought the idea of contract into the world. At any rate, it cannot be denied that the practice of contract has grown up in what we call the Christian part of the world, and in the non-Christian part of the world, the practice of con­tract has not grown up. That, at least, cannot be denied, and that is why Christians eat and live while heathens starve.

 

/MacCallum’s suggestion for amending last paragraph:/

 

I don’t think it is too much to say that Jesus Christ brought the idea of contract into the world. At any rate, it cannot be denied that the practice of contract first grew up in what we call the Christian part of the world. In the non-Christian part of the world, the practice has only lately caught on. That, at least, cannot be denied.