The Science Of Social Adjustment

THE SCIENCE OF SOCIAL ADJUSTMENT BY SIR JOSIAH STAMP G. C. B., G. B. E., P. B. A. MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTINS STREET, LONDON 1937 PKEFACE I HAVE recently made several studies in the relations between Science and Society, in discourses and addresses to the British Association for the Advance ment of Science, to the British Science Guild, and the Eugenics Society, and these, with much rearrange ment, omission, and new matter including the whole of Chapter IV, are now published under this general title, The Science of Social Adjustment, as a small con tribution to a new emphasis or area of scientific study which the times so urgently demand if we are to stave off Emersons verdict The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilisation . There is a growing literature upon the direction of economic society written, if not expressly, certainly in effect, from the point of view of totalitarian control. If we make the assumption, usual to the writers, that such a scheme can retain all the present benefits and potentialities of the existing scheme, and can add all its own virtues, it is not really a very difficult in tellectual exercise to create the Utopias of universal technological plenty, scientific bounty, and every other boon except liberty. But I do not think it is really profitable, for I doubt whether this country Vi THE SCIENCE OF SOCIAL ADJUSTMENT wishes to go that way. It is a more difficult task to point to the next practical steps in the evolution of regulated individualism, which endeavours to pre serve as much of the cardinal spirit of our present order, with social direction and limitation in the common good. But some preliminary steps in a studyfor this science of social adjustment are attempted in a fragmentary way in this volume. J. C. S. CONTENTS CHAPTER I PAGE THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE UPON SOCIETY ... 1 CHAPTEK II EUGENIC INFLUENCES IN ECONOMICS . . .71 CHAPTEE III THE CALCULUS OF PLENTY ..... 105 CHAPTER IV SOME PROJECTS OF RESEARCH .... 147 INDEX OF NAMES . . . . . .173 vu CHAPTER I THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE UPON SOCIETY Wherever and whenever new science touches society it creates a disturbance which has hitherto been mostly accepted as inevitable, but is often a high price for progress. The study and control of this impact constitutes the science of social adjustment. THE reactions of society to science have haunted the minds of scientists themselves, as well as philosophers, statesmen, and preachers, with various misgivings for some years past. In his great centenary address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, General Smuts, answering the question What sort of a world picture is science leading to, declared that one of the great tasks before the human race is to link up science with ethical values and thus remove grave dangers threatening our future. For rapid scientific advance confronts a stationary ethical development, and science itself must find its most difficult task in closing a gap which threatens disruption of our civiliza tion, and must become the most effective drive towards ethical values. In the following year a great engineer spoke as a disillusioned man, who watched the sweep- Presidential Address delivered to the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Blackpool, 1936, with modifications and additions, especially from the Hibbert Journal, 1934. 1 2 THE SCIENCE OF SOCIALADJUSTMENT OH. ing pageant of discovery and invention in which he used to take unbounded delight, and concluded by deploring the risk of losing that inestimable blessing, the necessity of toil and the joy of craftsmanship, declaring that spiritual betterment was necessary to balance the world. Then came the president of the Royal Society, a supreme biochemist, on the perils of a leisure made by science for a world unready for it, and the necessity for planning future adjustment in social reconstructions...