The Evolution of a Social Standard¹

American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Jul., 1914): 10-17.

Lester F. Ward was by occupation a biologist, by conviction an evolutionist, and by achievement the founder of American sociology. In a paper read before the Metaphysical Club of Johns Hopkins University in 1884, Dr. Ward incidentally elaborated the proposition that it is impossible to locate the precise boundary between an earlier and a later evolutionary stage. He said:

"While it is true that nature makes no leaps…while…all the great steps in evolution are due to minute increments repeated through vast periods, still when we survey the whole field…and contrast the extremes, we find that nature has been making a series of enormous strides, and reaching from one plane of development to another…And although, in no single one of these cases can it be said at what exact point the new essence commenced to exist,…it is not a whit less true that each of these grand products of evolution, when at length fully formed, constituted a new cosmic energy, and proceeded to stamp all future products and processes with a character hitherto wholly unknown upon the globe."

The sociologists who are studying the short span of historic social evolution in the spirit of Ward's survey believe that we have already crossed the boundary line between two periods which men some time in the future will recognize as occupying contrasted moral levels. How many centuries must pass before the distinctive trait of social rules observed hitherto will become subordinate to the trait which is now beginning expressly to strive for mastery, we need not try to guess. There has been a species of social control in the past, which some men already perceive to be as rudimentary in the scale of moral possibilities as dependence upon manual arts alone was in the physical realm before other forces were made to move machines.

Accordingly, from the sociological point of view, there are two cardinal questions concerning the nature of social rules. The first is, Of what sort have social rules been in the past? The second is, Of what sort are social rules to be in the future? Of course it is impossible to think sanely of the future as independent of the past. The marine engineer today is dealing with the same physical conditions that had to be met by the crews of triremes and caravels. His rules can never ignore these persistent conditions. The rules themselves changed radically, however, from the time when navigation ceased to be chiefly a problem of oars and sails, and became chiefly a problem of steam.

To speak summarily of the familiar facts about the past, social rules began by being the bullyings of the stronger over the weaker. The limitations of these dominations were not in anything external to the dominant party. They were merely in his instinctive economy of selfishness. The he-savage did not as a rule kill the she-savage. On the other hand, he did not limit his brutality toward her by any considerations for her. Instinctive procuring for his own sex-wants and food-wants was the program which made him allow her to live so long as she served his purposes.

Substantially the same thing is true of the rules laid down by early conquerors to govern the conquered. They were rules which reflected the superior party's best calculations of expediency, his own desires being the standard. If the vanquished could not be controlled to the victor's advantage, they were killed. If they were allowed to live, their status was that of more or less complete servitude, according to the conditions found to be necessary in order to make the tributaries most profitable to their masters.

In principle there is no "differentiation of species' in what Montesquieu called "the spirit of the laws," during the earlier stages of the period in which the dominant have had less than absolute power over the dominated. When the subjugated had strength enough left, if pushed to extremes, to make things uncomfortable and costly for the subjugators, the latter prudently counted the costs in a rough way, and the tendency set in to temper social rules by regard for the difficulties of enforcing them. Dictation, on the one hand, and obedience, on the other, were still the spirit of the rules, even after they verged toward the form of treaties or compacts, as in the comparatively late type of Magna Charta.

In spite of all ameliorations in the temper of social rules, due to specializations in selfishness, and to partially paralyzing cross-purposes between different phases of selfishness, both in typical individuals and in typical groups; and in spite of the consequent rarity of unequivocal linings-up between the principally dominating and the principally dominated, all the subsequent codes of mishpat or justitia were simply reflections of the ratio of fighting ability, between combinations of interests which surveyed social proportions from the standpoint of one alliance of selfishnesses, and antagonistic combinations of interests which surveyed social proportions from the standpoint of another alliance of selfishnesses. That is, the kind and degree of social superiority and subordination preordained by each mishpat or justitia registers the margin by which the aggressive efficiency of the one set of interests exceeded the aggressive efficiency of the other set of interests. Stripped of all glorifying pretense, each mishpat or justitia is merely the code of rules which the more aggressive selfishness succeeded in imposing upon the less aggressive selfishnesses. This ceased to be invariably and entirely the case, according to the degree and frequency in which Christianity exerted a suffcient political force to project into the conflict of classes the extenuating factor of respect for fellow-men as values in themselves. This factor presently figured in the Kantian philosophy as the precept to respect the individual "as an end in himself. We need not commit ourselves either to the credulous or to the cynical extreme, in estimating the relative efficiency of this factor. There is little room for contention, however, over the proposition that, at the very least, this factor has assisted in disciplining modern controlling selfishness into increasing circumspection in framing the rules which it forces upon more passive selfishness.

Not always with the same naked sordidness, but with identity of spirit, modern social rules have taken shape through variations of the process—"I will vote to spend some of the people's money for a post-office in your town, if you will vote to spend some of the people's money for dredging on my water front." On the whole, therefore, with mollifying factors which have tended to make the practice somewhat less offensive than the principle, our social rules have remained in each case the modus vivendi forced upon all concerned by the balance of power between many conflicting interests, each of which interests, if it had been able, would have made the terms more favorable to itself. During the hundred and fifty years just past, the capitalistic interest has become paramount among these factors, by a superinduced law of accelerated motion.

The distinguishing thing then about the social rules of the evolutionary stage now culminating is that they are the resultant of heterogeneous conflict between interests, each of which has been trying to realize itself to the utmost, and neither of which would reduce its claims very much, except under resistless pressure from some or all of the rest. This pressure from the interests, at a given time forming either the working majority or the minority, has never been organized in accordance with a valid universal principle. It has been merely a varying of opportunistic combinations, as for example in the political sphere, the dissolving pictures of interestalliances in European diplomacy. That is, our social rules, up to date, represent the points scored by each special interest in the handicap tournament between all special interests.

It requires some courage to intimate that traces have been observed of a new social force which is working for differentiation of a more highly evolved species of social rule. It would require even more imagination to declare that this new force has appeared in sufficient quantity to be a factor in practical politics, or that in a very immediate future it will have transformed society. I hazard the judgment, nevertheless, that, if historians two or three thousand years hence succeed in doing justice to all concerned, they will have to go well back into the nineteenth century for the earliest conscious expressions of this new creative force. Without adopting any technical jargon which anyone may have used in this connection before, I may first appraise this factor as a conception of the human lot likely sometime to prove as revolutionary in the social sphere as the Copernican substitute for the Ptolemaic cosmology was in the physical sphere. The idea that the human lot is essentially an anarchy of hostile interests has been deliberately challenged. Many men have been bold enough to declare their belief, and to expand their confession into impressive details, that the human lot is essentially a concurrence of reciprocating interests, making for something more important than either of the antagonistic interests that has thus far figured in the social struggle. Along with this conception—whether more cause or more effect of it does not matter now—we have been gradually coming under what I may call a recognized categorical imperative of objectivity. We realize more and more that we are bound to adjust ourselves, not to a version of life which someone has reasoned out to suit his subjective convenience, but to the accumulating and self-interpreting body of men's experiences as to how life actually works. In pursuance of this obligation and policy of objectivity, we are coming into a view of life in which satisfaction of the wants of men as individuals, or as specialized groups, appears merely as a casual phase of the realization of man as a species. Not what men want now, but what they will be wanting after innumerable nows have co-operated in working out the possibilities of men as they are becoming, is the indicated standard of what men meanwhile ought to do. Consequently, the type of social rule which will fit the moral judgments of the era we are entering will not be a compromise dictated by the relative fighting force of antagonistic interests. It will be a formula of the indicated function of each constituent interest in the economy of the composite whole.

In the effort to keep within the allotted time, I have probably become unintelligibly mystical and cryptic. Having reduced my brief to propositions which still mean something to me, I ask leave to use the rest of my time trying to translate the substance of that meaning to the court.

In plain English, the thing that is going on in the social struggle today is mostly the same old selfish tug-of-war between interests—the interests merely averaging a little less crudely selfish than they were among nature-men; but out of it all there is emerging the beginning of a social consciousness which judges each of these interests to be unsocial in its present temper, and which is searching for an arbiter between and over the interests, that shall be above and beyond complicity with either of them in preference to the rest. Something approaching this was in Adam Smith's mind when, in his moral philosophy, he made his recurrent appeal to the "impartial spectator." It turns out that an "impartial spectator" of the things involved in the social process is a psychological impossibility. Each individual is so implicated, at some point or other, that he cannot be wholly impartial. The process is too big and complicated to be reflected by a single mind with reliable objectivity. We find ourselves obliged to appeal therefore from the most dispassionate observer possible to the stark reality observed. What account does this whole developing scheme of human relations give of itself? And we must acknowledge that it has a suspicious look of the vicious circle, when we are obliged to answer that the final version of that disclosure accessible to human beings is the consensus of all observers as to what they discern in the reality. There is not, and there never has been, and there probably never will be a unanimous consensus of the observers. The circle then is not vicious, but it is discontinuous. Yet it is the best we have. The last and best we have to go by in deciding what the reality of human experience is, must necessarily be that reading of reality which is made out by that portion of the observers which seems to us worthy of credence, with incessant reference back from their reading to the things read, and to succession after succession of critics of the readings. Now the observers who are establishing the solidest credit in our era, those who are convincing the most open-minded people, are those who declare, in some terms or other, that separate human interests get their value, not from some sort of supposed self-sufficiency, but from the part which they perform in promoting the whole social process, whatever that social process may turn out to be. With wide variations in detail, the idea that is taking shape in our minds today is that the content of the social process is promotion of the evolution of a cumulatively capable and capacious human type. Accordingly, the genus of social rule upon which we are likely to agree in the next stage of civilization may be hinted at in the formula: There are no rights, except rights of way in the performance of social functions. In the course of time, the coming social consciousness may add a codicil granting, to each one using these rights of way for their proper purpose, permission incidentally to enjoy the scenery along the route. This, however, will be accidental, not substantial.

The social rules that are most in doubt in our time are those that pertain to property. It would be a man spookily detached from the social process who could believe that if society were wrecked, and if all traces of titles to property were irrecoverably lost, the wisest policy of reconstruction would be a re-enactment of our present property laws. While it is not true that our present property rules respect only the status of possession, and ignore the functions of production and conservation, it is true that status in the social order bulks relatively large, and partnership in social functions bulks relatively small, in determining our rules of property. The standards of the coming era will tend to invert that proportion.

For a long time to come, the radical task and the most humanly profitable employment, for men of social mind, will be the work of installing the conviction that life will be raised to its highest power when it ceases to be a struggle for dominance among interests, and becomes a co-operative enterprise between men committed to team work between their interests. Not much systematic progress will be made toward a code calculated to realize this conception, until the majority are convinced that it is a conception worth realizing. On the present level of civilization, the prevalent moral type is symbolized by the form, ${}^{66}\mathbf{I}$ will do the thing that will get the most votes in my district. The type which is the appropriate product and producer of authentic social consciousness is symbolized by the form, "I will do that which functions best in the big human process."

Meanwhile we are not reduced to inaction, pending discovery of the undiscoverable, viz., plans and specifications of absolutely intelligent human functionings. A majority of Americans might agree on enough specifications of goods good for all men, and only partially assured by our social rules to an uncertain fraction of men, to keep us busy furnishing exercise for our faith through an indefinite future. Security of occupation, influence upon and income from the occupation, not as determined by the rules of obsolescent interest-politics, but as indicated by performance of function within the occupation—these are achievements to be realized in a high degree in the course of the next two or three generations. The readjustment will certainly pull down certain types, whose tenure of their present status is by grace of the arbitrariness of traditional social rules. It will correspondingly lift up certain other types, whose lot now is not in accordance with the relative worth of their functions. The details involved in the course of these achievements will keep both socially inventive and socially obstructive men busy, on the aggressive or the defensive, until demand for more advanced types of adjustment becomes the center of attention.

Meanwhile, whenever their points of personal touch with this process, and whatever their specific programs of action, men of the foreward look will more and more reinforce one another in dissipating the mirage that life is doomed to be an endless campaign of warring interests. They will concentrate their labors upon the aim to realize life as a community of reciprocating functions.

Notes

1. This paper was read under the title "The Nature of Social Rules," at the Conference of Legal and Social Philosophy held in Chicago, April, 1914. ↩