Evolution Social and OrganicLewis, Arthur M. (Arthur Morrow)
Philosophy
Evolution Social and Organic
Lewis, Arthur M. (Arthur Morrow)
Evolution; Socialism; Sociology
If, with a society more highly organized than any known to history, we
still have anarchy in the production and distribution of our wealth,
the remedy is, not less social organization, but more. If with all our
dental science toothache still exists, the cure is not fewer dentists,
but more dentistry. The need of to-day is not less society, but more
social organization. There is no hope in going back to the small
production of sixty years ago as Hearst and Bryan desire. Increasing
the number of bandits in any society is not the concern of their
victims. The golden age of labor is not in the past but in the future.
The labor problem cannot be solved by going back to the scramble of the
hog-pen or the methods of the jungle. There is no succour in flying at
each other’s throats in the name of business.
Freedom cannot live in a society rent by class wars. Her conquests are
only possible with a humanity united to subdue the cosmic world by
which it is interprenetrated and surrounded.
Happily for us, society evolves independently of anybody’s opinion.
Our opinions follow blindly and gropingly in the rear. The opinions of
individualists do not manufacture social laws, according to certain
ethical requirements; they interpret and explain those laws which
they discover in operation. The fundamental question is not, “is
Individualism better than Socialism?” but “Is society moving in the
direction of the one or the other?”
To answer this question it is only necessary to compare the world of
to-day with that of ten or even five years ago. America moves steadily
toward Socialism, while Europe advances in great leaps. Every civilized
country tells the same story, and the recent development of Finland and
Austria astonished the world.
Society moves forward, as irresistibly as the ocean tides, and it
moves in a direction predicted by those greatest thinkers of this or
any age--the men who linked their lives with the blood and the tears
and the struggles of half a century in the greatest cause that ever
throbbed in the brain of man--the cause of Socialism.
X.
CIVILIZATION--WARD AND DIETZGEN
One of the darkest curses that has fallen on the working class is its
being shut out of the wondrous world of modern thought. The great
gates of the Temple of Science are clanged in its face, and its mind
is fed on the theological garbage of the Middle Ages. In the school,
the press, and especially the pulpit, ideas are gravely presented as
serious truths, which are known by all university men to be thoroughly
exploded lies.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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