The Next Step: A Plan for Economic World Federation Part 14

The practice of such ideas render an effective organization of society virtually impossible, and it renders social catastrophe almost inevitable. Bankruptcy breeds bankruptcy. Impoverishment is a contagious economic plague. Injury leads to bitterness, hatred and further injury.

These logical fruits of compet.i.tion once admitted into the economic body, threaten its very life.

The tenets upon which capitalism is founded have already been abandoned in part by their sponsors as unworkable. But at best they represent a standard of social morality that is essentially destructive of social well-being.

The human race has no guarantee of the success of any experiment, and recent experiences with the war, and with the present post-war plight of Europe suggest that the capitalist experiment will fail disastrously unless some extraordinarily successful efforts are made to put things to rights.

Society experiments, trying first one means of advancement and then another. A certain number of these new ventures, which prove to be of social advantage, are adopted and incorporated into the social structure. The vast majority are rejected as inadequate to meet the social need. Capitalism is apparently in this latter cla.s.s.

3. _The Cost of Experience_

Experiment is the necessary road to new experience, and the cost of experiment is written in the immense wastes that it involves. Experience gained through experiment is sometimes very costly. It is never cheap.

Frequently these costs, measured in terms of misery, are so great as to overbalance the advantages gained through the experiment. If, therefore, there were another way to gain knowledge except through the processes of experiment, it would result in an immense saving for mankind.

4. _Education_

There is a way, other than experiment, in which knowledge may be gained.

Instead of relying on experiment (direct experience) for the spreading of knowledge, it is possible to utilize the indirect channel called education. If this method is followed, and the results of the race experiment and experience are made available to the young of each generation, the need for experiment will be limited to a narrow field, since most of the necessary knowledge will be communicated through education.

The individual need not repeat all of the experiments of his ancestors with animal breeding, harvesting, weaving, smelting, writing, house-building, etc. One by one these arts and crafts were built up--each generation adding its quota to the total of knowledge. These results of past experience, which were first pa.s.sed from hand to hand, then from mouth to mouth, and finally written down, and which have been handed from generation to generation through the processes of education, are among the most important of all social a.s.sets.

The farther the race goes in its acc.u.mulation of knowledge, the more important does education become, since there is more to transmit from one generation to the next. Among primitive people the educational process is completed at a very early age. With the emergence of arts and crafts, the apprenticeship to life becomes longer. At the present time, the individual may continue his education as long as he is capable of acquiring new ideas. Under the present society, therefore, the educational processes are the chief reliance for the transmission of new ideas.

5. _Facing the Future_

The acc.u.mulated knowledge of the ages, handed on from one generation to the next, enables the scientist to suggest the direction in which new experiments should be made as well as to predict their probable outcome.

His work ceases to be haphazard. It has a well-understood policy and common problems.

Particularly in the realm of natural science, has there been a vast acc.u.mulation of verified knowledge, from which there have been deduced principles and laws which enable the electrician or the astronomer to predict the action of the electric current or the course of the stars with almost unerring accuracy. To be sure, these predictions do sometimes go wrong, but for the most part they are founded on verified and tested hypotheses.

The past thus advises the present, which, from the vantage ground so gained, prepares its contribution to the future. If each generation were compelled to learn how to build fires, to employ language, to shape pottery, to weave, to print and to harness electricity all over again, it would seldom get farther than the rudiments of what is now called civilization.

The new knowledge that is gained in each generation is obtained through experiment, but many costly errors are avoided in these experiments through the wisdom that is based on the acc.u.mulated knowledge of the past.

Thus each generation of scientists accepts from its predecessors a trust for the future. Not only must it preserve the body of knowledge, but it must verify, amplify and enrich it. This is as true of the social scientist as it is of the natural scientist. The difference between them is that the natural scientist has worked out his technique and established his field, while the social scientist has reached only the threshold.

6. _Acc.u.mulating Social Knowledge_

Social knowledge is yet in its infancy. It is only within the century that Comte, Buckle, Marx, Spencer and other historians and sociologists have made an attempt to place the acc.u.mulations of social knowledge on a par with the acc.u.mulations of mathematical or chemical knowledge.

Until some effort was made to study society in a scientific spirit, there was no reason for supposing that men might be able to cope with social ills or to prevent social disaster. Even to-day, while there is no longer any question as to the possibility of cla.s.sifying social facts, and while sociology is regarded as a science of great promise, the feeling lingers that social events are fore-ordained. Many people feel to-day about social disaster as the men of the middle ages felt about the plague--that it is outside the field of man's preventive power. Another fatalistic school of thought holds that men learn their social lessons only through failure and disaster. According to the first line of thought it is useless to interfere with social processes because they are in the hands of the G.o.ds; according to the second, men will not interfere until they have been whipped into rebellion by the adverse conditions surrounding them.

Men in the past have modified the course of human events in the most profound way. The first smelter of iron and the first constructor of a wheel began a series of events that is still molding social life. It is quite possible to say that these events were fore-ordained, but it is at least equally possible to reply that the same process of fore-ordination is still busy, and that the changes that it will make through the present generation will be at least as important as those which it has made in the preceding ages.

Those who believe that the race learns only through hardships and suffering should bear in mind: first, that most of the knowledge communicated to the individuals of each generation is communicated indirectly through some process of education; second, that society is composed of those individuals; third, that modern communities have built a vast machine whose sole purpose it is to influence opinion by teaching (indirectly) in the school, in the church, through the printed page and the film. In j.a.pan this machine is employed to teach the people the sanct.i.ty of the emperor; in Britain it is used to convince the ma.s.ses of the sanct.i.ty of business-as-usual; in France it is used to proclaim the sanct.i.ty of property; in Russia it is used to inculcate the sanct.i.ty of the revolution. If people learned only through first hand experience, these propaganda machines would be failures. In practice, they are highly successful.

Social disaster is not the only path to social knowledge. It is not necessary for a generation to suffer from typhus or to be ruined by war in order to be convinced that these dread diseases are menaces. The desire to prevent famine is felt by millions who have never come any nearer to it than the stories in the papers. Society learns, indirectly, through education--slowly of course, but none the less surely.

The average man is convinced of the desirability of trying to avoid disease, hunger and the other ills that effect him personally and immediately. He is not yet convinced of the efficacy of a similar att.i.tude toward war, revolution and other disasters which inevitably destroy some portion of society, and which, in the end will prove as preventable as disease and famine. Social disaster seems more inevitable because it strikes more people at one time, while individual disaster has been more carefully studied, is better understood and is more localized.

Grave dangers menace present-day society. Economic breakdown, war and social dissolution with their terrible scourges--pestilence and famine--have already overtaken millions. It is plain that some new course of social action must be planned; that some social experiment must be inaugurated that will ward off the impending disasters.

Social experiments should be made, as chemical and electrical experiments are made, after all of the available facts have been carefully considered and digested. The results of such wisely planned experiments in the social field may be just as dramatic as the results of similarly planned experiments in the field of natural science.

Never in the history of social change has there been an intelligent direction of social processes. Many men in many ages have had ideals and aspirations, coupled, in some cases, with a limited knowledge of social practice, but social changes have come upon mankind for the most part, as a meteor comes upon the earth's atmosphere--unexpected and unheralded, startling those who have seen it by the suddenness of its appearance. Nor has there been any attempt on the part of the ruling powers to instill a different point of view with regard to these matters. On the contrary, there has been a determined effort to convince men that social changes were beyond their ken. The air of mystery has been blown away from natural phenomena, but it is encouraged and permitted to surround social changes. While it endures, an intelligent direction of social life is, of course, quite out of the question.

This att.i.tude is being broken down, however. The past hundred years of experiment and experience with a compet.i.tive order have convinced mult.i.tudes that such an order is unworkable. During the same period, the development of economic organization on ever broader lines has emphasized the need of common purposes and common activities.

Recent social experience teaches plainly that an injury to one is an injury to all; that a benefit to one is a benefit to all; that men rise in the scale of well-being with their fellows and not from them, and that a co-operative social life is the only one that will prove livable and workable. These four propositions include the best thinking of the modern world on the fundamentals of a social structure that will prove livable and workable.

The acceptance of any such standards of social life involves a right-about-face in the basic social philosophy of the world.

1. _The doctrine of laissez-faire must be accepted for what it is--an exploded theory that has promoted, not social well-being, but the interests of favored cla.s.ses._

2. _Catastrophe must be recognized as the most costly avenue to progress._

3. _Social science must be made at least as effective, in guiding the life of the world as is physical science._

Social science alone will not protect men from the dangers that surround them. Every social group is dependent for its effectiveness upon the kind of individuals of which it is composed, and their ideas and ideals limit the ideas and ideals of the group. At the same time, a carefully thought out course of social action, like a carefully thought out course of individual action presents a standard toward which society may work.

A plan for social organization is like the blue-print with which the mechanic works. Science comprises his rules and methods of procedure, but the driving power comes, not from the blue-print and not from the formulas, but from the man himself. This holds equally true of society.

7. _Conscious Social Improvement_

Conscious social improvement is the improvement made by society in pursuance of plans that are prepared and carried out with the knowledge and approval of the ma.s.s of the community. It is the product of community intelligence directed to public affairs.

The individual can make conscious improvements in his condition only through observation, a.n.a.lysis, conclusion and experiment. The community is under the same limitations. Its progress will be intelligent only when it works rationally and purposefully upon the problems with which it is confronted.

The individual faced with a perplexing situation in his business or in his private life, sits down and goes over the matter, examining it point by point, until he thinks that he has a solution for his difficulties.

Society, under similar circ.u.mstances, must follow a like course of action. People must ponder and discuss the issues before them until there is some consensus of opinion as to what course should be followed.

It is only under such conditions of intelligently directed social action that conscious social improvement is made.

Conscious social improvement is therefore practicable when the available knowledge about social problems has been socialized or popularized to a degree that renders the community intelligent concerning its own affairs. The task of popularizing any form of knowledge falls primarily to the educator, the journalist and the other moulders of public opinion.

8. _The Barriers to Progress_

There are two important barriers to intelligent social progress. One is the lack of organized knowledge concerning social matters. The other is the restriction of this knowledge to a tiny fraction of the population.

Social science, still in its infancy, has ahead of it decades of advancement before it attains a position corresponding with that of the physical sciences. Even at that its progress must be slower, first because of the intricate nature of social phenomena, and second because of the herculean efforts that the vested interests make to destroy any form of social experiment that threatens their privileges.

Equally serious, as a limitation on the efficacy of social knowledge, is its restriction to a very small fraction of the community. Progress in the physical sciences is initiated in the laboratory, without any considerable partic.i.p.ation by outsiders, but progress in social science depends on the att.i.tude if not on the consent of the community, and therefore the socialization of social knowledge becomes one of the indispensable elements in social progress.