A good heredity is something very different from hereditary goodness, in
the sense of good conduct. The latter does not exist, while the former
is simply an inheritance of lines of capacity corresponding to the chief
lines of human function; a good raw material for social influence to
work up, just as sound timber is good for houses, ships, or what-not.
And this sort of heredity is a condition of biological survival because
it alone makes possible the education of individuals and their
organization into those plastic social wholes, with innumerable special
functions, upon which the life and power of man is based.
Along with this plastic heredity and inseparable from it we have the
social process, which does not antagonize the biological process, or
supplant it, but utilizes the change in its character to add a new world
of psychical interaction and growth. Like the older process it is
continuous through the ages, and builds up vast organic wholes, of which
the individual may seem only an insignificant detail. As we have
biological types, on the one hand, so, on the other, we now have types
of culture and institutions.
Thus the life of humanity comes to be a single vital process having two
parallel and interdependent subprocesses, the hereditary and the social.
Each of these has a sphere of its own, that of heredity being, in
general, the production of physical and mental aptitude, and that of
society the creation, by the aid of this aptitude, of a progressing
social order.
Each system acts selectively upon the other, determining what will work
and what will not. Hereditary types must in some way fit into the social
conditions or they cannot propagate themselves and must disappear. If a
man cannot, by hook or crook, manage to raise a family, that part of the
hereditary stream which flows in him is lost, and the type he represents
declines. In like manner, if a race, or a national stock, does not
succeed in developing such forms of personality and social organization
as to enable it to keep a footing and multiply its kind in the actual
conditions of life, it must diminish. The social organization sets
standards of fitness which the biological process must meet.
It is equally true, on the other hand, that the biological type acts
selectively in determining what social ideas and institutions will work,
and how. You may give the same lecture to a hundred students, but what
each one makes of it will depend, in part, on his natural gifts. Or you
may plant the same ideas of free government among the Americans, the
Swiss, the French, the people of the Argentine, and the Liberian
Negroes; but their growth will be very different, partly, again, because
of a difference in hereditary capacity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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