PROGRESS AND THE CONSTRUCTIVE INSTINCTS G. R. DAVIES Modern psychology does not recognize any clear boundary line between instinct and intelligence. Each is an expression of the same life-energy seeking an adaptation to environment. It is true that the power of making and imitating reasoned adaptations is the unique characteristic of human evolution, yet this power is but a gradual flowering of the instinctive urge displayed throughout the animal kingdom. Through intelligence man has satisfied more abundantly his primal wants, and has learned new wants. His systematized reactions to his natural surroundings and his institutional co-operations with his fellows are, then, evolutionary outgrowths from the instinctive and intuitional core of the common heredity. It follows that civilizations, though mediated by intelligence, are as much natural products as the forests. It was not due to whim, but to an innate necessity, that when man outgrew mentally his tribal communism he created property civilizations. Given the addition of intelligence to the urge of instinct, and the result was as inevitable as the maturing of the brooded egg. Because of its organic nature there was a typical structural symmetry about the social whole that the law of property and status reared. Hereditary rights to wealth served as a basis upon which to grow the balanced gradations of power from serf to noble and king. The social organism may be said to have acquired a vertebrate form and a brain. The protoplasmic mass of tribal life was speedily swallowed by the new order, and the ancient empires came into being. Admittedly the biological analogy may be overworked, yet the figure graphically sets forth the facts. Similarly every conspicuous advance of civilization is a consequence of instinctive energies thrown into new channels by increasing mentality. Just what, in a primary sense, is respon sible for the awakening powers is a baffling problem. Various writers have professed to see the cause in physiographic environment, race, religion, political principles, and so on. Yet the natural environment seems an occasion rather than a cause, and the social factors are manifestations of the more elemental force. Without attempting to pass upon so elusive a problem, it may be sufficient for present purposes simply to observe that certain environmental conditions of resources and communication serve to stimulate the latent racial capacities. A constructive instinct, radiating into invention and managerial ability is aroused. The awakening spreads by a process of crowd suggestion from individual to individual, until a tidal movement of humanity is initiated. Such an activity of the social mind is the creative agent in cultural evolution. It sweeps from its path the cobwebs of exploitation and superstition as it creates freer and more productive institutions. Into the inner nature of this collective spirit it is useless for us to attempt to penetrate, but its economic consequences and the obstacles it encounters may be worthy of our attention. A primary condition upon which the organic relationships of society depend is the wide natural diversity and inequality of human nature. It is this inequality that makes possible and advantageous the division of labor, and the subordination of the masses to leadership. Biologists have shown that innate characteristics and abilities vary in somewhat pyramidal proportions, so that there is at all times the natural basis for a kind of feudal gradation of classes. Rivalry creates the pressure which masses men into the hierarchical form. Natural differences are still further accentuated by the inevitable fact that to him that hath shall be given. The artificial gradations of society follow upon the natural gradations. When a dynamic advance of society is nascent, men of superior natural ability in the groups affected are developed to give direction to the movement. These leaders may assume a variety of aspects, according to their individual capacities and the tendencies of the times. In so far as the movement demands idealistic impulse, they may be preachers or philosophers, such as the early Protestant clergy, and the classical economists. In so far as the demand is for political readjustment, they may be soldiers and statesmen, such as the founders of the American nation. But such leadership is ephemeral. Though vital to a movement and expressive of its intensest energies, the work is quickly done, and the phrases that stirred men's souls degenerate into formalism. The substantial work is done by economic leaders, such as the commercial and landed aristocracy which rose from the middle class in England as a consequence of the Reformation, and the capitalistic classes which have secured an, as yet somewhat precarious, ascendancy during the past century or two. Since man organizes his everyday world about the supremacy of capital, it is in the economic field that the tissues of the social organism are created. In this respect there is an identity of process in social growth since the disappearance of the tribal communisms. No social element is more wilfully misunderstood than capital. It is certainly not to be apprehended by the mere statement of figures in a ledger, for it is essentially an expression of human organization. It means that those men who have developed practical intelligence in business management have secured authority over those who are less matured and those who have specialized more narrowly. The administration of capital is the government of men in their industrial life. The frontier, where men disperse over a new area, brings a temporary disintegration and equality, but integration sooner or later sets in, and a new leadership is elevated to a height commensurate with the widened base of the social pyramid. In the large scale banking and business connections of the present day the world is experiencing the inevitable reaction following the vast territorial expansions, both commerical and racial, of the Industrial Revolution. The basic fact is not, however, the centralization of wealth, but the growing interdependence of industrial organization. We may see in the concrete the administrative function of capital if we consider the methods by which wealth is attained. Fortunes are not accumulated by the penurious saver of money, but by the dynamic organizer of business. The apparent exceptions, where wealth is derived purely from speculative chance, do not invalidate the rule. The business leader who has acquired through experience the requisite standing throws his energies into some promising undertaking that will serve the public needs, as the manufacture of a staple commodity or the building of a railroad. He pays interest on borrowed capital and builds up his own fortune through his skill in putting men effectively at work. His invested capital, stated in terms of stock and bond quotations, rests in fact upon the organized energies of busy workers in factories, or of construction gangs wrestling to bring the wilderness under control. The movement of capital into this or that industry is in reality the movement of laborers and the products of labor. The active capitalist marshals the industrial host. Small investors turn over to the abler man the minor industrial control they have acquired. So, as trade relations ramify, requiring ever finer co-ordinations in manufacture and distribution, leaders of higher potentiality are produced. It is only in abstraction that the dynamic fact of leadership becomes the static fact of property rights. A nation in which a spirit of intelligent enterprise rules may be called a functional society. The term implies that each individual subordinates himself to the attainment of some common object, that he serves others as he also is served through the processes of trade and through the development of his productive estate. In economic terms the completely functional society would be one in which each citizen was either training for or practicing the productive arts best suited to his capacity. It would be a society that fostered leadership, so as to secure for its own direction and for the control of its departments and subdepartments the best executive talent it afforded. Thus it would exemplify co-ordinated team work throughout. It would have weight and momentum in its directed movements because of the complete employment of each able-bodied citizen. By such employment it would also utilize all available capital power, for waste would be eliminated and surplus wealth reinvested. In picturing the functional society thus at its utopian fulfilment, we need not impute to it any undue Spartan severity. Relaxation, amusement, and aesthetic joy in work are elements of social art. They therefore would be suitably provided for. Indeed, a functional ordering of society would indirectly fulfil the requirements of a pure hedonistic philosophy, since it would satisfy to the greatest possible degree the instincts of mankind, the deepest of which are the inventive and organizing faculties of intelligent construction. Man is happiest when he spends himself in endeavors that link him in a common enthusiasm with his fellows and with the future of the race. To be used by the creative social mind is to have lived. Hence, the more functional a nation becomes, the more it succeeds in the pursuit of happiness. It must be admitted that a state of society in which men are consciously members one of another in a living social organism is something seldom attained. Only rarely, in vital moments, is any considerable volume of population so fused. Perhaps a state of war, so far as the situation within a belligerent country is concerned, approximates the most closely such an ideal, but it is a negation of the ideal in its rupture of the wider social relations. More satisfactory as a suggestion of an ideal social organization, though lacking somewhat in systematic leadership, is an expanding democracy such as that which America has typified to the world. Here the joy of building a nation has been intensified by the escape from old-world conventionalities, and by the effectiveness of accumulated knowledge in the face of rich natural resources. Similarly every great forward movement of society has been democratic and functional. Witness the social spirit of the Greeks and the constitutionalism of the English. Inherent in the very nature of social growth, particularly in the economic aspects, there may be discovered from the first, certain subtle forces which eventually may mature into paralysis or conflict. The social organism might almost be said to be subject to a structural cycle corresponding to the aging process in the individual. Superficially there may appear no such fatality attaching to the grouping of men as to the grouping of the body cells, yet in the past the fatality has proved almost as binding. The easy optimism which scorns the danger is based upon an ignorance of the intricacies of economic law. The difficulty is not merely that economic law is inherent in human nature, in the vulgar sense that each man seeks his own |