Evolution Social and Organic

by Arthur M. Lewis

Here is the great contradiction. Spencer, the great biologist, says the brain is to the animal what the Government is to a society. (1) The more effectively and completely the brain controls the members composing the animal body, the higher its place in the organic scale. (2) The less effectively and completely the Government controls the members of the body politic the better will be the society.

Sociological literature has failed to produce any individualist champion able to reconcile this astonishing contradiction. And so there it stands plainly before the eyes of Mr. Spencer’s readers.

“Suppose,” says Professor Huxley, “that, in accordance with this view, each muscle were to maintain that the nervous system had no right to interfere with its contraction except to prevent it from hindering the contraction of another muscle; or each gland, that it had a right to secrete, so long as its secretion interfered with no other; suppose every separate cell were left free to follow its own “interest” and laissez-faire lord of all, what would come of the body physiological? The fact is that the sovereign power of the body thinks for the physiological organism, acts for it, and rules the individual components with a rod of iron. Even the blood corpuscles can’t hold a public meeting without being accused of “congestion”—and the brain, like other despots whom we have known, calls out at once for the use of sharp steel against them.”

This is the rock upon which Spencerian Individualism struck and went to pieces, independently of those great forces, which I shall point out, that made for its disintegration.

These two contradictory positions are the upper and nether millstones between which the individualistic philosophy of Anarchism is ground to powder. Socialists are not stupid enough to argue that because society can get along without a king therefore an orchestra should have “no head.” We are also able to distinguish between “the state” which Socialism will abolish, and the “administration of industry” which it will establish.

Every step forward in modern thought has emphasized the importance of that factor called “environment.” The evolution philosophy is an environment philosophy. Lamarck, the greatest pioneer of modern science, makes a change of environment the prime necessity of organic development. Darwin makes environment the selective factor in “Natural Selection” and in this he is supported by every living biologist of note. Karl Marx paralleled these great advances by discovering that every political philosophy takes its origin in some particular economic environment. This is true of Socialism and Individualism alike.

And so if we wish to understand the historic significance of Individualism we must go back to the period of its birth and examine the social processes of production of that day. This takes us back to the early years of the 19th century.

In the closing half of the 18th century, laborers individually owned the small and crude tools by which they made their living. In this stage of social development the laborer owning the tools he used, appropriated the result. There was here no contradiction and whatever notion of justice is supposed to inhere in the “individual ownership of the means of production” derives its whole force from the economic status of the worker of this period. If that status had remained unchanged, Socialism would never have been heard of. But in the process of evolution the truth and justice of the 18th century became a lie and a social wrong in the 19th.

This transformation was wrought by the development of machinery. It was impossible for every individual worker to own a large machine, and so some men became toolless wage laborers employed by the owners of machinery. This is the beginning of the present labor problem and here arises the struggle in the world of ideas between the philosophy of Individualism and that of Socialism.

Let us examine the vital change which had taken place even before we reach the middle of the last century. Now, one man uses the tools, but another owns them and appropriates the result. And this is the economic foundation of the class war between the exploited wage worker and the exploiting capitalist.