Lester Frank Ward: Godfather of American Central Planning
Remnant Review
[For footnotes and a bibliography, scroll to the end.]
Lester Frank Ward wrote Dynamic Sociology (1883), the first comprehensive sociological treatise written in the United States. He has been described as the father of the American concept of the planned society.
He was born in Illinois in 1841. His father was an itinerant mechanic and his mother the daughter of a clergyman. He was poor as a youth, but he still found time to teach himself Latin, French, German, biology, and physiology. He was self-disciplined. He joined the U. S. Treasury Department in 1865. He continued his studies at night school, and within five years he had earned degrees in medicine, law, and the arts. In the mid-1870's he worked for the Bureau of Statistics, and it was at this time that he concluded that a study of statistics could lead to the formulation of laws of society, which in turn could be used in a program of social planning. He continued his self-education in the field of paleontology, and in 1883, the year Dynamic Sociology appeared, he was appointed chief paleontologist of the U.S. Geological Survey. Finally, after publishing five books in sociology, he was appointed to the chair of sociology in 1906 at Brown University, the same year that he was elected the first president of the newly formed American Sociological Society.
Ward’s Dynamic Sociology was ignored for a decade after its publication, selling only 500 copies. In 1897, a second edition was issued, and within three years he was considered one of the leaders in the field. After his death in 1913, his reputation faded rapidly. He had laid the groundwork for American collectivism in the name of progressive evolution, but he was forgotten by the next and subsequent generations.
Ward broke radically with Spencer and Sumner, the leading social scientists of his day. He had two great enemies, intellectually speaking: the social Darwinist movement and all supernatural religion. It is difficult to say which he hated more, although religion received the more vitriolic attacks. Dynamic Sociology stands as the first and perhaps the most comprehensive defense of government planning in American intellectual history. It was published about 15 years too early, but when his ideas caught on, they spread like wildfire. In fact, they became the “coin of the realm” in planning circles so rapidly that the source of these ideas was forgotten.
Because the book is almost unknown today, and because Ward’s concepts and language are so graphic, I am providing an extended summary and analysis of his thought. In Dynamic Sociology, we have the heart and soul of modern, post-Darwin social evolutionist philosophy. Ward did not pull any punches. He did not try to evade the full implications of his position. Modern thinkers may not be so blatant and forthright, but if they hold to the modern version of evolution—man-directed evolution—then they are unlikely to reject the basic ideas that Ward set forth. If you want to follow through the logic of man-directed evolution, you must start with Ward’s Dynamic Sociology.
1. SUPERNATURALLY REVEALED RELIGION
Ward was forthright. He made it clear that the enemy is revealed religion, which in the United States in the early 1880's meant Christianity. In the 82-page introduction to the book, in which he outlined his thesis, Ward announced that those people claiming to have received divine inspiration, and those who have founded religious systems, have been found by modern medicine to be not only “pathological” but to be burdened by “an actually deranged condition of their minds.” Because of the power these religious leaders have wielded historically, “we can only deplore the vast waste of energy which their failure to accomplish their end shows them to have made.” (Waste, above all, was what Ward said his system of social planning would avoid.)
There is no evidence, he wrote in volume II, that religion provides any moral sanctions whatever. As a matter of fact, we find in the advanced countries that individuals who avow no religion are the true moral leaders. “The greater part of them are found among the devotees of the exact sciences. Yet there is no more exemplary class of citizens in society than scientific men. . .” Furthermore, the “criminals and the dangerous classes of society are generally believers in the prevailing faith of the country which they infest. . . .” In any case, morals precede religion. “It is morality which has saved religion, and not religion which has saved morality.” Prayer is a social evil, because it is “inconsistent with that independence and originality of mind which accompany all progressive movements.” It deters effective action.
He then devoted several pages to a demonstration of the anti-progressive influences of all religion, but he provided examples primarily from paganism and animism. He said religion leads to a retreat from this world and a divorce between man and nature. There are two methods for modifying the external world to make it conform to man’s needs: science and religion. There is a perpetual conflict between these two methods, and religion will lose this war.
2. RIGHT-WING SOCIAL DARWINISM
Ward’s second intellectual enemy was right-wing Social Darwinism. They misunderstood evolution, he argued. Nature’s ways are not man’s way. The progress of nature is too slow, and it is so inefficient that earth’s resources will not be able to support such slow progress forever. What is needed is “something swifter and more certain than natural selection,” and this means man.
We need a new teleology, he argued—the crucial argument of all post-Darwin social and even biological evolutionists. The evolutionary process needs a sure hand to guide it. We must adopt, he said at the end of the second volume, “the teleological method.” We must reject Social Darwinism (although he never used this phrase to designate his opponents). Here is the familiar and central argument of modern evolution, predictably formulated first by a social scientist rather than a natural scientist:
Again, it becomes necessary to combat the views of those scientists who, having probed deep enough to perceive how nature works, think they have found the key to the way man should work, thus ignoring the great distinguishing characteristic of intellectual labor. Having found the claims of those who believe that nature is a product of design and outside contrivance to be unsound, they conclude that there is no design or contrivance, and having seen that results in the organic world are produced through rhythmic differentiations, they infer that results in the superorganic world should be left to the same influences. Nothing could be more false or more pernicious. Scientists of this school, from the weight which their opinions must have, are really doing more to counteract the true tendencies of social progress than those who openly oppose them. All social progress is artificial. It is the consequence of teleological foresight, design, and intellectual labor, which are processes diametrically opposed in principle to the processes of nature. If in learning the law of evolution we must apply it to society, it would have been better to have remained ignorant of that law.
Because the chief opponents of Social Darwinism were orthodox Christians, this statement indicates that Ward hated the right-wing social Darwinists’ ideas more than he hated Christian orthodoxy.
Who was he challenging? Spencer and Sumner. He was attacking Sumner’s whole methodology of investigating the conflicts found in nature and then transferring this conflict principle to human society. After all, it was Sumner who wrote in What Social Classes Owe to Each Other that “We cannot get a revision of the laws of human life. We are absolutely shut up to the need and duty, if we would learn how to live happily, of investigating the laws of Nature, and deducing the rules of right living in the world as it is.” Not so, announced Ward. “Civilization consists in the wholesale and ruthless trampling down of natural laws, the complete subordination of the cosmical point of view to the human point of view. Man revolutionizes the universe. . . . The essential function of Knowledge is to aid him in accomplishing this revolution.” Man must exercise dominion.
Ward set forth the basic conflict between the two forms of evolutionary thought. It is a question of properly interpreting the concept of adaptation, the central idea in Darwinian evolution. No one has made the issues any clearer.
All progress is brought about by adaptation. Whatever view we may take of the cause of progress, it must be the result of correspondence between the organism and the changed environment. This, in its widest sense, is adaptation. But adaptation is of two kinds: One form of adaptation is passive or consensual, the other form is active or provisional. The former represents natural progress, the latter artificial progress. The former results in a growth, the latter in a manufacture. The one is the genetic process, the other a teleological process.
Ward was clearly a proponent of activism.
3. REDUCING WASTE BY CENTRAL PLANNING
How did Ward refute the “passive” evolutionists (Social Darwinists) in the name of Darwin? Ward came up with this fundamental idea: Nature’s processes are wasteful. This is completely in accord with Darwin and Wallace. It was their recognition of the enormous pressure of multiplying populations—a multiplication which pressed upon the limits of the environment—which leads to the survival of certain genetically advantaged members of any given species. The failure to survive caught their attention: the millions of extinct species that did not gain the advantage of random genetic changes that would have enabled them to compete successfully in the slowly changing environment, as well as the enormous number of non-survivors in each generation. The idea began with Malthus: the assertion that populations multiply far more rapidly than the food supply necessary to ensure the survival of all members of the multiplying species. Darwin cited Malthus’ observation in the first paragraph of Darwin’s 1858 essay, which appeared in the Linnean Society’s Journal.
Waste is nature’s way, and waste was Ward’s sworn enemy. “The prodigality of nature is now a well-understood truth in biology, and one that every sociologist and every statesman should not only understand but be able to apply to society, which is still under the complete dominion of these same wasteful laws. No true economy is ever attained until intellectual foresight is brought to bear upon social phenomena. Teleological adaptation is the only economical adaptation.” Here was Ward’s battle cry against right-wing social Darwinism: The civil government alone is capable of stamping out unplanned, natural, non-teleological waste.
Where do we find waste? In natural processes and in the free market. Free trade is enormously wasteful. “Free trade is the impersonation of the genetic or developmental process in nature.” He also understood that free trade is the archetype of all free market processes, and that defenders of the free market, from David Hume and Adam Smith to Spencer and Sumner, had used free trade to defend the idea of market freedom. Therefore, Ward concluded, market freedom is a great social evil.
Do people establish private schools to educate children? Stop this waste of educational resources; the state alone should educate children, for the state alone is teleological, truly teleological. Better no education than private education, because “no system of education not exclusively intrusted to the highest social authority is worthy of the name.” Here is a key phrase: the highest social authority. If true foresight, true design, and true planning are to be brought into the wasteful world of nature and free markets, then the state, as the highest social authority, must bring them. Therefore, “education must be exclusively intrusted to the state. . . .” The state is the highest social authority in Ward’s system.
There are other forms of economic waste. Take the example of the railroads. “That unrestricted private enterprise can not be trusted to conduct the railroad system of a rapidly growing country, may now be safely said to be demonstrated.” The state should operate them, as is done in Europe. Ward was America’s first sociologist—though hardly the last—who called for the total sovereignty of the state in economic affairs. Here is his reasoning. His reasoning is shared, to one extent or another, by modern evolutionists. “While the railroad problem is just now the most prominent before the world, and best exemplifies both the incapacity of private individuals to undertake vast enterprises like this, and the superior aggregate wisdom of the state in such matters, it is by no means the only one that could be held up in a similar manner and made to conform to the same truth.” Ward’s next paragraph presents his basic conclusion: “Competition is to industry what ‘free trade’ is to commerce. They both represent the wasteful genetic method, destroying a large proportion of what is produced, and progressing only by rhythmic waves whose ebb is but just less extensive than their flow.”
The question arises: Is the state truly economical? Ward’s answer: Unquestionably! “Now, of all the enterprises which the state has thus appropriated to itself, there is not one which it has not managed better and more wisely than it had been managed before by private parties.” These include transportation, communications, and education. The greater the profitability of any private enterprise, the more need there is for state control, he concluded. In fact, the legitimate purpose of state interference is to make business unprofitable! For instance, the state-operated railroads offer lower rates than private firms did, “which, from the standpoint of the public, is the kernel of the whole matter. The people should look with suspicion upon extremely lucrative industries, since their very sound financial condition proves that they are conducted too much in the interests of the directors and stockholders and too little in that of the public.”
Ward then set forth the guiding principle of government bureaucrats and state-operated businesses from his day to ours: Losses testify to efficiency. “The failure of the state to make them lucrative should also be construed as an evidence of the integrity and proper sense of duty of the officers of the state.” (Yes, he really wrote this. I am not quoting it out of context. It is the end of the paragraph, and he stated in the next paragraph that it is a fact “that whatever the state does is usually better, if not more economically, done than what is done by individuals.” Then, to make sure his readers got the picture, he wrote on the same page: “It might similarly be shown that all the functions of government are usually performed with far greater thoroughness and fidelity than similar functions intrusted to private individuals.”)
Despite his praise of the state, he admitted that, in his day, the state had not advanced sufficiently to become truly scientific. In the introduction to his book, he freely admitted that governments have always avowed that they were working for the benefit of mankind, but government “has almost without exception failed to realize the results claimed. . . .” In fact, Ward went so far as to write this amazing paragraph: “Let us admit, however, as candor dictates, that almost everything that has been said by the advocates of laissez faire about the evils of government is true, and there is much more that has not been said which should be said on the same subject. Let us only take care not to admit the principle in its abstract essence, which is the only hope there is for the ultimate establishment of a teleological progress in society.” Why this failure in practice (in volume I, anyway)? Answer: the failure of legislators to understand the laws of society, which are “so deep and occult that the present political rulers have only the vaguest conception of them. . . .”
The practical answer is to train legislators in the laws of sociological science. “Before progressive legislation can become a success, every legislature must become, as it were, a polytechnic school, a laboratory of philosophical research into the laws of society and of human nature (vol. II, p. 249). No legislator is qualified to propose or vote on measures designed to affect the destinies of millions of social units until he masters all that is known of the science of society. Every true legislator must be a sociologist, and have his knowledge of that most intricate of all sciences founded upon organic and inorganic science.” Not the philosopher-king, as Plato had hoped for, but the sociologist-legislator, will bring true teleology into the affairs of man.
4. THE ELITE VS. THE MASSES
This brings us to the question of elites. Ward’s conception of teleology requires scientific planning and scientific legislation. There must be experts who provide the necessary teleological leadership. We find in Ward’s book a characteristic dualism between the capacities of the elite and the capacities of the masses. The elite are unquestionably superior. Ward did not say that they are genetically superior, but they are nevertheless superior. Yet the masses outnumber the elite. What the elite must do, then, to gain the confidence of the masses, whose lives will be directed by the elite, is to proclaim their devotion to the needs of the masses. What statists of all shades of opinion have proclaimed as their ultimate goal, Ward set forth in Dynamic Sociology. Ward’s commitment to the elite as a class is also their commitment.
The first step is to assert the beneficence of the elite. They are working for us all. They are the true altruists. “It is only within a few centuries that such [altruistic] sentiments can be said to have had an existence in the world. They now exist in the breasts of a comparatively few, but it is remarkable how much power these few have been able to wield.” You see, “The normal condition of the great mass of mankind, even in the most enlightened states, is one of complete indifference to the sufferings of all beyond the circle of their own immediate experience. In moral progress, almost as much as in material progress, it is a relatively insignificant number of minds that must be credited with the accomplishment of all the results attained.” This is the grim reality: “A very few minds have furnished the world with all its knowledge, the general mass contributing nothing at all.”
However, we need not worry about this problem today. Public education is overcoming this uneven distribution of knowledge. In fact, public education is making this distribution of knowledge far easier, since this process is “a comparatively simple and easy one.” In other words, the elitist planners, best represented by scientists and teachers, are raising the level of knowledge and consciousness possessed by the masses. The elite planners are really working to produce a new evolution, and the masses will be allowed to participate in this elevation of humanity. They will not perish in a non-teleological, natural evolutionary leap. There are two ways of elevating man: (1) scientific propagation of human beings (artificial selection) and (2) rational change of environment, which means an increase of human knowledge. “The amount of useful knowledge possessed by the average mind is far below its intellectual capacity. . . .” This is a key to evolutionary advance: “That the actual amount of such knowledge originated by man, though doubtless still below his ability to utilize it, is sufficient, if equally distributed, to elevate him to a relatively high position, and to awaken society to complete consciousness.”
5. STATE-RUN EDUCATION
The public schools are therefore fundamental in the teleological evolutionary process. They are the change agents of the new evolution. Competitive private schools are evil. The state must have an educational monopoly. “The system of private education, all things considered, is not only a very bad one, but, properly viewed, it is absolutely worse than none, since it tends still further to increase the inequality in the existing intelligence, which is a worse evil than a general state of intelligence would be.” Fortunately for society, he argued, private education has no academic standards, since parents control or at least heavily influence private education. Therefore, with respect to private education, “The less society has of it the better, and therefore its very inefficiency must be set down as a blessing.” The radical elitism here should be obvious, but Ward was kind enough to spell out the implications (something later elitist evolutionists have not always been willing to do).
Lastly, public education is immeasurably better for society. It is so because it accomplishes the object of education, which private education does not. What society most needs is the distribution of the knowledge in its possession. This is a work which can not be trusted to individuals. It can neither be left to the discretion of children, of parents, nor of teachers. It is not for any of these to say what knowledge is most useful to society. No tribunal short of that which society in its own sovereign capacity shall appoint is competent to decide this question.
Are there to be teachers? Yes, but very special kinds of teachers, namely, teachers totally independent from “parents, guardians, and pupils. Of the latter he is happily independent. This independence renders him practically free. His own ideas of method naturally harmonize more or less completely with those of the state.” True freedom, true independence, is defined as being in harmony with the state. This, of course, is the definition of freedom that Christianity uses with respect to a man’s relation to God.
Was Ward a true egalitarian, a true democrat? Did he really believe that the masses would at long last reach the pinnacle of knowledge, to become equal with the scientific elite? Of course not. Here is the perennial ambivalence of the modern evolutionists’ social theory. Society needs planning and direction, and “society” is mostly made up of individuals, or “the masses.” So, they need direction. They need guidance. They cannot effectively make their own plans and execute them on a free market. Teleology is too important to be left to the incompetent masses, acting as individuals on a free market. The masses simply are not intelligent enough. “Mediocrity is the normal state of the human intellect; brilliancy of genius and weight of talent are exceptional. . . . This mass can not be expected to reach the excessive standards of excellence which society sets up. The real need is to devise the means necessary to render mediocrity, such as it is, more comfortable.” (Aldous Huxley, brother of Sir Julian Huxley, and grandson of Thomas Huxley, saw this clearly. He wrote Brave New World to describe the techniques usable by some future state to “render mediocrity, such as it is, more comfortable”: drugs, orgiastic religion, and total central control.) The goal of total educational equality is really a myth. Then why such emphasis on public education? Control! Teachers are to serve as the new predestinators. “One of the most important objects of education, thus systematically conducted, should be to determine the natural characteristics of individual minds. The real work of human progress should be doubled with the same outlay of energy if every member of society could be assigned with certainty to the duty for whose performance he is best adapted. . . . Most men are out of place because there has been no systematic direction to the inherent intellectual energies, and the force of circumstances and time-honored custom have arbitrarily chalked out the field of labor for each.” Ward’s next paragraph tells us how we can overcome this lack of external directions. “The system of education here described affords a means of regulating this important condition on strictly natural principles. . . . A school should be conducted on scientific principles.” Teachers can discover “the true character of any particular mind,” and then a safe conclusion can be drawn “as to what mode of life will be most successful, from the point of view of the interest both of the individual and of society.”
6. EDUCATION AS CENSORSHIP
There is another important function of public education and all other tax-funded information services: the total control over information and its distribution. We cannot make progress compulsory, Ward said. “No law, no physical coercion, from whichever code or from whatever source, can compel the mind to discover principles or invent machines. . . . To influence such action, other means must be employed.” Men act in terms of their opinions, “and without changing those opinions it is wholly impossible perceptibly to change such conduct.” Here is the planner’s task: “Instill progressive principles, no matter how, into the mind, and progressive actions will result.”
There are political pitfalls to overcome. “The attempt to change opinions by direct efforts has frequently been made. No one will now deny that coercion applied to this end has been a signal failure.” Is there some answer to this dilemma? Can the planner find a way to alter men’s opinions without using coercion? Yes. The planner must restrict access to competing ideas—another form of evil competition. “There is one way, however, in which force may and does secure, not a change of existing opinion, but the acceptance of approved beliefs; but this, so far from weakening the position here taken, affords a capital defense of it. The forcible suppression of the utterance or publication in any form of unwelcome opinions is equivalent to withholding from all undetermined minds the evidence upon which such views rest; and, since opinions are rigidly the products of the data previously furnished the mind, such opinions cannot exist, because no data for them have ever been received.” In short, another crucial key to social progress is systematic censorship. He called this the “method of exclusion.” He wrote:
It is simply that true views may as easily be created by this method of exclusion as false ones, which latter is the point of view from which the fact is usually regarded. The more or less arbitrary exclusion of error, i. e., of false data, is to a great degree justifiable, especially where the true data supplied consist of verified experiences, and all the means of reverifying them are left free. But the same end is practically attained by the intentional supply, on a large scale and systematically carried out, of true data without effort to exclude the false. This, however, is the essence of what is here meant by education, which may be regarded as a systematic process for the manufacture of correct opinions. As such, it is of course highly inventive in its character, and the same may be said of all modes of producing desired belief by the method of exclusion.
The government’s schools guarantee that competing data are excluded. “Assume an adequate system of education to be in force, and the question of the quantity and quality of knowledge in society is no longer an open one.” What about the freedom of the teacher? Basically, there is none. “To the teacher duly trained for his work may be left certain questions of method, especially of detail; but even the method must be in its main features unified with a view to the greatest economy in its application. This must necessarily also be the duty of the supreme authority.” As Ward said, “The state education implied in the foregoing remarks is, of course, the ideal state education.” Of course it is, if you are a teleological evolutionist.
The elites who control the government’s education system are the agents of social change and progress. “The knowledge which enables a very few to introduce all the progressive agencies into civilization tends not in the least to render the mass of mankind, though possessing equal average capacity for such service, capable of contributing any thing to that result.” Then what are the masses, really?
In contrast to this small, earnest class, we behold the great swarming mass of thoughtless humanity, filled with highly derivative ideas vaguely and confusedly held together; eagerly devouring the light gossip, current rumor, and daily events of society which are intensely dwelt upon, each in itself, and wholly disconnected from all others; entertaining the most positive opinions on the most doubtful questions; never looking down upon a pebble, a flower, or a butterfly, or up at a star, a planet, or a cloud; wholly unacquainted with any of the direct manifestations of nature, . . . passing through a half-unconscious existence with which they keep no account, and leaving the world in all respects the same as they found it.
Ward understood quite well that the self-proclaimed scientist and change agent would anger the masses—at least the masses in 1883— and they would ridicule his pretensions. “The unscientific man looks upon the scientific man as a sort of anomaly or curiosity. . . . The man of science is deemed whimsical or eccentric. The advanced views which he always holds are apt to be imputed to internal depravity, though his conduct is generally confessed to be exemplary.” How does the man of science, the elite determiner of the next evolutionary social advance, rid himself of guilt about his feelings? Perhaps even more important, how should he deflect the suspicion concerning his intentions among these masses of emotional incompetents? One very good way is to tell them that the elite is on their side! Ward did. “It will be a long time before the world will recognize the fundamental truth that it is not to apotheosize a few exceptional intellects, but to render the great proletariat comfortable, that true civilization should aim.” It was the self-imposed task of the believers in statist planning by elites to buy off the proletariat by making proletarians comfortable, or at least by promising to make them comfortable soon, just as soon as the evolutionary leap of social being takes place.
7. SALVATION BY KNOWLEDGE
Ward, as with all evolutionists, believed in the dominion covenant, or rather a dominion covenant. This covenant rests on elite knowledge. Man elevates himself through knowledge. Man is therefore saved by knowledge. This is Satan’s temptation: Ye shall be as gods, if ye eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Ward wrote: “We see in this brief sketch what a dominion man exercises over all departments of nature, and we may safely conclude that he has not yet reached the maximum limit of his power in this direction. But that power is wholly due to his intellectual faculty, which has guided his act in devising indirect means of accomplishing ends otherwise unattainable.” Men are not innately evil. “Mankind, as a whole, are honest.” Man’s problem is not sin; it is ignorance. “If all the people knew what course of action was for their best interest, they would certainly pursue that course.” It would be possible, through education, to eliminate crime. “The inmates of our prisons are but the victims of untoward circumstances. The murderer has but acted out his education. Would you change his conduct, change his education.”
What we must do, then, is to raise society’s consciousness. Consciousness, not conscience, is the problem.
After dynamic opinions of the universe, of life, and of man have been formed, it is easy to rise to the position from which society can be contemplated as progressive and subject to a central control. The duties of society toward itself are manifest enough so soon as its true character can be understood. . . . The great problem remains how to bring society to consciousness. Assuming it to have been brought to consciousness, the dynamic truths with which it must deal are comparatively plain. The mouthpiece of a conscious society is the legislature.
In short, the visible symbol of a fully conscious society is the self-conscious divinity of the state. Society must agree about any particular course of action, but once unanimity of opinion is reached—and it is the function of public education to promote it—then debate ends. “Let there be no excuse for anyone to debate a question which has at any time or place, or in any manner, been once definitively answered.” Like the laws of the Medes and the Persians, once the divine ruler has made a law, it must not be broken (Dan. 6:8,12).
Does this mean that democracy will allow all men to have a veto power over the decisions of the rulers? Of course not. The elite must continue to rule.
Deliberative bodies rarely enact any measures which involve the indirect method. If individual members who have worked such schemes out by themselves propose them in such bodies, the confusion of discordant minds, coupled with the usual preponderance of inferior ones, almost always defeats their adoption. Such bodies, miscalled deliberative, afford the most ineffective means possible of reaching the maximum wisdom of their individual members. A radical change should be inaugurated in the entire method of legislation. By the present system, not even an average expression of the intelligence of the body is obtainable. The uniform product of such deliberations falls far below this average. True deliberation can never be reached until all partisanship is laid aside, and each member is enabled to work out every problem on strictly scientific principles and by scientific methods, and until the sum total of truth actually obtained is embodied in the enactment. The real work can not be done in open session. The confusion of such assemblies is fatal to all mental application. There need be no open sessions. The labor and thought should be performed in private seclusion, the results reached by others should in this way be calmly compared by each with those reached by himself, and in a general and voluntary acquiescence by at least a majority in that which really conforms with the truth in each case should be deliberately embodied as law. The nature of political bodies should be made to conform as nearly as possible with that of scientific bodies. . . .
What, then, becomes of unanimity, of open covenants openly arrived at (to cite President Woodrow Wilson’s unheeded principle of diplomacy)? It should be obvious. When Ward said that he wanted unanimity, he really meant scientific planning without opposition. “The legislature must, therefore, as before maintained, be compared with the workshop of the inventor.” There is no opposition to the inventor in his workshop, it should be pointed out.
Scientists must lead the legislators. Men of informed opinion must tell them what needs to be done. Then the legislators can pass laws that will compel the masses to follow the lead of the scientists into a new realm of “comfort.” Ward was quite explicit about this.
The problem is a difficult and complicated one. While legislators as a class are far behind the few progressive individuals by whose dynamic actions social progress is secured, it is also true that, as a general rule, they are somewhat in advance of the average constituent, sometimes considerably so. This is seen in many quasi-scientific enterprises that they quietly continue, which their constituents, could they know of them, would promptly condemn. The question, therefore, arises whether the legislators may not find means, as a work of supererogation, to place their constituents upon the highway to a condition of intelligence which, when attained, will in turn work out the problem of inaugurating a scientific legislature and a system of scientific legislation.
With these words, he ended chapter XI, “Action.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines “supererogation” as “The performance of good works beyond what God commands or requires, which are held to constitute a state of merit which the Church may dispense to others to make up for their deficiencies.” Ward may have known what he was writing; the state, as the dispenser of salvation, needs saints to build up merit to pass along to the proletariat, who can do nothing by themselves. Scientists and legislators are the saints.
8. THE STATE AS SOCIETY
When Ward wrote “society,” he meant the state. “When we speak of society, therefore, we must, for all practical purposes, confine the conception to some single automatic nation or state or, at the widest, to those few leading nations whose commercial relations have to a considerable extent cemented their material interests and unified their habits of thought and modes of life.” Yet even this is too loose a definition, he wrote. “Only where actual legislation is conducted can there be said to exist a complete social organism. Wherever any such complete social organism exists, it is possible to conceive of true scientific legislation.” Where there is no scientific legislation, therefore, there is no true society
There was one, and only one, area of life where laissez faire was said to be legitimate. That was the area we call morality. Morality “is a code which enforces itself, and therefore requires no priesthood and no manual. And strangely enough, here, where alone laissez-faire is sound doctrine, we find the laissez faire school calling loudly for ‘regulation.’” For example (we could easily have predicted this example), “It is a remarkable fact that loose conduct between the sexes, which is commonly regarded as the worst form of immorality, seems to have no influence whatever upon the essential moral condition of those races among whom it prevails.” (When J. D. Unwin’s studies showing the conflict between polygamy and cultural progress were published in 1920's and 1930's, they were systematically ignored. The fornicators and adulterers who are the self-proclaimed scientific elite prefer not to have this dogma of the irrelevance of adultery shattered by historical research.)
Ward rejected the non-teleological (personal and individual teleology) Darwinism of the right-wing Social Darwinists. He rejected entirely their thesis that social progress must involve personal misery and competition. That is the way of nature, not mankind, Ward argued. A proper society, meaning state, “aims to create conditions under which no suffering can exist.” This may involve the coercive redistribution of wealth by the state, for a good social order “is ready even to sacrifice temporary enjoyment for greater future enjoyment—the pleasure of a few for that of the masses.” Sumner was correct when he described this sort of social policy: “The agents who are to direct the State action are, of course, the reformers and philanthropists. Their schemes, therefore, may always be reduced to this type—that A and B decide what C shall do for D. . . . I call C the Forgotten Man, because I have never seen that any notice was taken of him in any of the discussions.” Ward called citizen C “the rich,” and let it go at that. His intellectual heirs have not improved much on this strategy, especially when they run for public office.
We must understand precisely what Ward was trying to create: a totalitarian state. As he wrote, “the present empirical, anti-progressive institution, miscalled the art of government, must be transformed into a central academy of social science, which shall stand in the same relation to the control of men in which a polytechnic institute stands to the control of nature.” He was a defender of despotism.
9. POPULATION CONTROL
There is one final feature of his system which bears mentioning. The basis of Darwin’s analysis of evolution through natural selection was Malthus’ observation that species reproduce too fast for their environments. Then only a few will survive, concluded Darwin and Wallace. Ward accepted this as it pertained to nature. But man is a new evolutionary life form, and man’s ways are not nature’s ways. Man’s successful heirs are not supposed to be those individuals who by special genetic advantages or inherited wealth will be able to multiply their numbers. Man, unlike the animals, advances by means of state planning. If society is to prevent suffering, as Ward said is necessary, then the multiplication of those who receive charity must be prohibited. (This was the same problem that baffled Spencer.) “This fact points to the importance of all means which tend to prevent this result.” Three children are probably the maximum allowable number. “In an ignorant community this could not be enforced, but in a sufficiently enlightened one it could and would be.” In short, “What society needs is restriction of population, especially among the classes and at the points where it now increases most rapidly.” But who are these classes? The masses, of course, since the present moral code (1883) of having large families “is tacitly violated by intelligent people, but enforced by the ignorant and the poor, a state of things which powerfully counteracts all efforts to enlighten the masses.” The state needs to provide universal education to the masses to uplift them, but there are so many that the state’s resources are strained to the limit. The answer: population control. In short, in Ward’s version of the dominion covenant, “be fruitful and multiply” must be abolished, and the state, not individuals acting in voluntary cooperation, is to exercise dominion over nature. The rise of the family planning movement in Ward’s era, and the appearance of zero population growth advocates in the mid-1960's, can be explained by means of the same arguments used in understanding Ward’s humanistic version of the dominion covenant.
THE SOCIETY OF SATAN
Ward proclaimed in the name of man-directed evolution that which Rushdoony described as the society of Satan. R. J. Rushdoony’s four points apply quite well to the outline of the society sketched by Ward.
First, it is held that man is not guilty of his sin, not responsible for his lawlessness, for the sources of his guilt are not personal but social and natural. . . . Second, a society is demanded in which it is unnecessary for man to be good. Everything is to be provided so that man may attain true blessedness, a problem-free life. . . . Third, a society is demanded in which it is impossible for men to be bad. This is a logical concomitant of the second demand. It is a demand that there be no testing. . . . Fourth, a society is demanded in which it is impossible for men to fail. There must be no failure in heaven or on earth. All men must be saved, all students must pass, all men are employable, all men are entitled to rights. As Satan stated it baldly in the wilderness, giving in short form the program for the “good” State, “If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread.” Make it unnecessary for man to work, unnecessary for man to be good, impossible for man to be bad. Provide man with such a cushion of social planning, the temptations asserted, that man might neither hunger nor thirst, work or suffer, believe or disbelieve, succeed or fail, be good or evil. Let his every need be met and his world ordered in terms of his wishes. Let it be a trouble-free world, cradle-to-grave security; let there be no failure. No failure is tolerable, and none recognized, save one, God’s, for having dared to create a world in which we can suffer for our sins, in which we can be tried and tested, in which we can be good or evil, in which we can and must be men. Let us through communism, socialism or our welfare state construct a world better than God’s, a world in which failure is impossible and man is beyond good and evil.
What are some of the basic themes of the society of Satan, the evolutionist’s new paradise, as described by Ward? What are the principles—cosmological principles—by which such a society is deduced? Here is a brief summary:
No teleology (purpose) in the natural realm (I, 57; II, 32).
Human consciousness is teleological (II, 9).
Human teleology is opposed to laissez faire (I, 55).
Man now directs nature and evolution (I, 29; II, 89).
The state directs social evolution (I, 37).
The state is a society (II, 397).
Science is the basis of progress (II, 497, 507).
A scientific elite directs progress (II, 504, 535).
The masses are thoughtless (II, 506, 600).
The masses can be taught (II, 598, 602).
The state must monopolize education (II, 572, 589, 602).
Censorship is mandatory (II, 547).
Nature wastes; man should not (II, 494).
Competition is wasteful (I, 74; II, 576, 584).
Competition is laissez faire (I, 74).
Mankind is honest (II, 508).
Man’s problem is lack of knowledge (II, 238).
Ignorance produces crime (II, 241).
Dominion is by means of the intellect (II, 385).
Government is to be founded on secrecy (II, 395).
Dissent can be illegitimate (II, 407).
Morality is strictly an individual matter (II, 373).
Scientists are selfless (II, 583).
Believers in God’s teleology are immoral (II, 508).
State administration is almost always better (II, 579).
Profitless management is honest management (II, 582).
Population control is mandatory (II, 307, 465).
The masses must be made comfortable (II, 368).
The social goal is zero suffering (II, 468).
The society of Satan is the kingdom of autonomous man. This is the continuing theme of post-Darwin evolutionists. Again, let us see what Ward had to say.
In his pursuit of information with regard to the nature of the universe and his position in it, he must be deterred by no fears. If he can evade the action of natural laws, he has no other source of apprehension. Nature has neither feeling nor will, neither consciousness nor intelligence. He can lay open her bowels and study her most delicate tissues with entire impunity. Except as the great creative mother of all things, she is absolutely passive toward all sentient beings. Man’s right to probe and penetrate the deepest secrets of the universe is absolute and unchallenged. It is only he himself who has ever ventured to question it. . . . He has been the servant of Nature too long. All true progress has been measured by his growing mastery over her, which has in turn been strictly proportional to his knowledge of her truths.
Man is autonomous, the rightful master over nature. Here is autonomous man’s self-assigned dominion covenant: “This is why, in the second place, man should assume toward Nature the attitude of a master, or ruler.” Man can seek exhaustive knowledge and therefore total power. He can claim the right to attain the attributes of God.
Here is the evolutionist’s creed. The universe was not created by God. It was not designed for man. Man must be thrown into the mud of insignificance only for a moment—to sever him from the idea of a personal God—and then he can become master of the earth. Satan also tempted Jesus along these same lines: Worship me, and all this world shall be yours (Luke 4:7). Ward allowed man only one brief paragraph to grovel in the mud of insignificance:
Anthropocentric ideas are essentially immoral. They puff their holders with conceit and arrogance, and lead to base, selfish abuses of power, warped by interest and passion. The old geocentric theory had the same tendency. All narrow views about nature not only contract in the mind, but dwarf and disfigure the moral nature of man. It is only when the eyes commence to open to the true vastness of the universe and the relative insignificance of human achievements, that it begins to be thought not worth while to boast, to oppress, or to persecute.
Once freed of God and meaning—personal significance that is established in terms of the decree of God and man’s status as God’s image-bearer—then it is up, out of the mud, and on to the stars.
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This article was published as Section N of Appendix A, "From Cosmic Purposelessness to Humanistic Sovereignty." It appears in my book, Sovereignty and Dominion: An Economic Commentary on Genesis (Point Five Press, 2012), Volume II. The appendix was first published in the hardback edition, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (Institute for Christian Economics, 1982). For the text with footnotes, go here: http://bit.ly/gngenv2.A basic bibliography is here.