XIII
The Secret of Progress
I Have said that the essence of the social process is the creating of ever new values through the interplay of all the forces of life. But I have also tried to show that these forces must be organized; from confusion nothing is born. The spiritual order grows up within us as fast as we make new correlations. Chaos, disorder, destruction, come everywhere from refusing the syntheses of life.
The task of coadaptation is unending, whether it means getting on with a difficult member of my family, playing the game at school or college, doing my part in my business, my city, or whether it means Germany and the Allies living together on the same planet.
Nietzsche thought that the man who showed the most force was the most virtuous. Now we say that all this brute energy is merely the given, that the life-process is the unifying of the given—he who shows the unifying power in greatest degree is the superman. Progress is not determined then by economic conditions, by physical conditions nor by biological factors solely, but more especially by our capacity for genuine cooperation.
This idea of progress clear-cuts some long-established notions. We see now the truth and the fallacy in the assertions (1) that social evolution depends upon individual progress with imitation by the crowd, (2) that evolution means struggle and the survival of the fittest.
For some years the generally accepted theory of the social process was that the individual invents, society spreads. We have already examined one half of this theory; let us look at the other half—the idea that the individual originates.
If a man comes forward with an idea, what do we mean by saying that he is more “original” than his fellows? So far as the quality of originality can be described, do we not mean that his capacity for saturation is greater, his connection with the psychic reservoir more direct, so that some group finds in him its most complete interpreter? Or even if it is quite evident that in a particular instance a particular individual has not derived his idea from the group of which he is at the moment a member, but has brought it to the group, none of us believes that that idea arose spontaneously in his mind independent of all previous association. This individual has belonged to many other groups, has discussed with many men, or even if he has lived his life apart he has read newspapers and magazines, books and letters, and has mingled his ideas with those he has found there. Thus the “individual” idea he brings to a group is not really an “individual” idea; it is the result of the process of interpenetration, but by bringing it to a new group and soaking it in that the interpenetration becomes more complex. The group idea he takes away is now his individual idea so far as any new group is concerned, and in fact it becomes an active agent in his progress and the progress of society only by meeting a new group. Our life is more and more stagnant in proportion as we refuse the group life.
According to the old theory, the individual proposes, society accepts or rejects; the individual is forever walking up to society to be embraced or rejected—it sounds like some game but is hardly life.
There is an interesting theory current which is the direct outcome of the fallacy that the individual originates and society imitates, namely, the great man theory. While it seems absurd in this age to be combating the idea of special creation, yet it is something very like this that one comes up against sometimes in the discussion of this theory. The question is often asked, “Does the great man produce his environment or is he the product of his environment?” Although for my purpose I may seem to emphasize the other side of things, not for a moment do I wish to belittle the inestimable value of genius. But the fact of course is that great men make their environment and are made by their environment. There wells up in the individual a fountain of power, but this fountain has risen underground and is richly fed by all the streams of the common life.30
I have spoken of fallacies in the individual invention theory and in the struggle theory. But I am using the word struggle as synonymous with strife, opposition, war; effort, striving, the ceaseless labor of adjustment will always be ours, but these two ideas represent opposite poles of existence. In the true theory of evolution struggle has indeed always been adaptation. For many years the “strongest” man has been to science the being with the greatest number of points of union, the “fittest” has been the one with the greatest power of cooperation. Darwin we all know believed that the cause of the advance of civilization was in the social habits of man. Our latest biologists tell us that “mutual aid” has from the first been a strong factor in evolution, that the animal species in which the practice of “mutual aid”31 has attained the greatest development are invariably the most numerous and the most prosperous. We no longer think of the animal world as necessarily a world of strife; in many of its forms we find not strife but coordinated activities.
But to too many people struggle suggests conquest and domination; it implies necessarily victors and vanquished. Some sociologists
