Page:The Kingdom of Man - Ralph Vary Chamberlin 1938.djvu/30

24 suppression of all divergencies in ideas and efforts of individuals. It is precisely from these divergencies, however, that progress and new objectives arise. Better continue to muddle along somewhat uncertainly and slowly, where the future in knowledge and needs and objectives themselves are necessarily uncertain, than to close the gate to progress and adaptation. The ideal of democracy which would seem to rise naturally from the scientific spirit and attitude is one that aims to foster the full and free development of men and their ideas with the concession of relatively great scope to the best men interpreted in terms of the interests of the race as a whole. Advance in the past has come from the energy and personal ambition of innumerable men and women. We must not halt progress by taking away their freedom and their incentives.

John Dewey has said that we may justly attribute most of humanity's sorrows and defeats of the past to the futile and destructive oscillation between authoritative power and unregulated individual freedom. People have preferred authority and stability to freedom, on the whole; but an unchanging stabilized situation in this world of flux is always an illusion. "In spite of possession of power, and in spite of the persecution of heretics and radicals, no institution has in fact had the power to succeed in preventing great changes from taking place." Authoritative damming up of the forces of social change has merely meant that the forces so accumulated have later manifested themselves in more violent eruptions.

The remedy does not lie in abolishing either freedom or authority, but in establishing a rational basis for interrelating them. It cannot lie in more drastic doses of old remedies; and we certainly cannot expect relief from the same sources—industrialists, capitalists, politicians, and others—who have so clearly demonstrated their ineffectiveness.. What we need is not a superman or a greater concentration of power in individuals or bureaus or planning bodies of the old sort, but the thorough-going application of the method that has been used with such remarkable success in science. We must somehow find a way to apply this method to economics, government, international relations and human affairs in general. Today science, rather than legalism, offers the means of triumph in the future.

The great weakness of the historic movement in behalf of liberalism has been, Dewey says, "its failure to recognize that the true and final source of change has been, and now is, the corporate intelligence embodied in science." All the economic changes of recent centuries have been the fruit of science, a perfectly operating democratic institution in which both the power and the authority rest in the collective, cooperative intelligence.

The extension of this method to the political, economic and ethical relations of men is fraught with great difficulties and has thus far been depressingly slight, because in these fields the human reason is still largely enslaved by prejudices.