A history of social thought

by Emory S. Bogardus

Then there is consanguineal love, which according to Ward includes paternal and fraternal affections. It becomes the blood bond or feeling of attachment that exists among the members of a primitive kinship group, and it leads to feelings of race and world solidarity and attachment.

Ward also pointed out that for each of these forms of love there is a correlative hate. This force of repulsion is often greater than the correlative love. Jealousy often leads to violent and destructive actions. Race hatred frequently becomes a vicious, brutal, and widespread sentiment that paralyzes all tendencies toward world progress.

Marriage institutions have developed from the operation of the reproductive forces. Polygamy, polyandry, and a score of other types of marriage have arisen, although monogamy has demonstrated itself to be the superior type of marriage institution.

The reproductive forces have led to numerous sexuo-social inequalities. Men and women have come to occupy separate spheres of activity, and to represent distinct social conditions.[XVII-30] Although the two sexes live together and appear to be companions, they are in fact dwelling in separate worlds and on different planes. There are several principal inequalities. (1) There is an inequality of dress, which has loaded woman with ornaments and caused her an enormous amount of disease and suffering. (2) There is an inequality of duties, which has kept woman confined to the house, and made a slave or a pampered pet of her. (3) There is an inequality of education. Society has shut woman in the past from all opportunities for gaining knowledge by experience. Moreover, society has seen fit to debar women from the knowledge that is acquired by instruction. (4) An inequality of rights has meant that women have been discriminated against before the law. Without direct representation in legislatures, women have suffered in proprietary matters. (5) A general sex inequality has at times made woman the property or the slave of man. In short, women have been denied, until with recent years, entrance to the higher intellectual forms of activity and at the same time denied social and political rights.

Reverting to Ward’s classification of desires, we may now proceed to a discussion of the third set of forces, the sociogenetic. In contradistinction to the nutritive and the reproductive desires, or to the ontogenetic and the phylogenetic forces, respectively, the sociogenetic forces lead directly to race, or social, improvement. The ontogenetic forces guarantee individual preservation; the phylogenetic, race preservation; and the sociogenetic, race and social progress. Ward classified the sociogenetic forces as moral, esthetic, and intellectual.[XVII-31]

Morality is either racial or individual. Race morality is largely an outgrowth of custom. Duty, according to Ward, is conduct favorable to race safety, while virtue is “an attitude of life and character consistent with the preservation and continuance of man on earth.”[XVII-32] Individual morality on the other hand, is based on altruism. Altruism is the expenditure of energy in behalf of other individuals, and involves the power of representing the psychic states of others to one’s self. Morality leads to humanitarianism, whose aim is meliorism. Meliorism aims to reorganize society so that the minimum pain and the maximum enjoyment may be insured. Meliorism is a non-sentimental improvement or amelioration of the human or social state.[XVII-33]

Ward holds that the esthetic forces consist of a desire for open or deep-seated symmetrical forms. Behind a landscape which at first appears irregular and jagged, there is a fundamental symmetry and balance. Sculpture, painting, and landscape-gardening are largely imitations of nature. Architecture, however, emphasizes straight lines, regular curves, and other symmetrical and geometrical figures.[XVII-34] Because of the invention of popular musical instruments, music is open to and enjoyed by the common people. No such invention, unfortunately, has taken place in the fields of painting and sculpture. These realms are limited to the highest geniuses and “their choicest productions appropriated by the few who combine wealth with taste.”[XVII-35]

The intellectual forces are chiefly the desires to know. These desires are three-fold: (1) to acquire knowledge, (2) to discover truth, and (3) to impart information.[XVII-36] The desire to acquire knowledge is perhaps strongest in the young. Youth will often learn anything, without exercising any powers of discrimination. The gratification of the desire to discover new truth yields almost divine thrills of satisfaction. There are four methods of imparting information to others, viz., (1) by conversing, (2) by teaching, (3) by lecturing, and (4) by writing.

In addition to the dynamic forces there is the directive agent in society, namely, the intellect. Ward makes a precarious distinction between the feelings and thought, or between intellect as a seat of emotion, appetite and motive power, and intellect as the organ or source of thought and ideas.[XVII-37] Ward’s psychology is admittedly unscientific. The thought or ideational phase of the intellect Ward divorced almost absolutely from the affective aspects of consciousness. He failed to perceive the dynamic character of thought and ideas. He made thought simply the directive agent in society.

In thought, Ward found the hope of the race. Thought can restrain and control social energy. It can produce telic methods of progress which are immeasurably superior to the blind, ruthless methods of nature. The procedure of nature with unlimited resources is “to produce an enormously redundant supply, and to trust the environment to select the best.”[XVII-38] Nature secures success through “the indefinite multiplication of chances.” Hence the survival of the fittest results in a sacrifice of a great majority—a highly wasteful method. The method of mind is the reverse. Though prevision, mind utilizes all the dynamic forces of society, that is the human desires, in constructive, orderly ways. Social waste may be reduced, by telic methods, to a minimum. Mind can perceive the best social ends and pursue them, whereas nature works blindly. Thought has in its power the possibility of subjugating natural forces and turning them into contributors to human needs.