BIOLOGY IN HUMAN AFFAIRS 



of liberty with authority; the economist, the merits of 

 individualism versus socialism and communism; the ethical 

 philosopher, the limits of egocentrism and of ethnocen- 

 trism, of pacificism and of patriotism; the psychologist, the 

 impulses of self-assertion versus the impulses of self- 

 abnegation and gregariousness. Similarly, the sociologist 

 contrasts the phenomena of individual ascendancy w^ith 

 those of group ascendancy, and dreams of that perfect 

 society in which that social progress, which is so obviously 

 rooted in individual variability and men of genius, shall 

 be as rapid as possible without destroying the delicately 

 balanced and finely integrated relationships among socii 

 which give to society the verisimilitude of an organic 

 unity. 



Nothing illustrates this integrated character of a society 

 better than the disaster that attends any disruption, dis- 

 integration, or unbalance of social solidarity. In our own 

 society we are familiar with the demoralizing consequences 

 of industrial depression for the welfare of millions of citi- 

 zens. Crime, poverty, physical and moral degradation stalk 

 in the wake of such imperfections of social adjustment. 

 In Russia, a decade ago, the collapse of the established 

 order, in consequence of war and revolution, led to the 

 deaths of millions through disease and starvation. Trans- 

 portation and communication were upset, unitary control 

 disappeared, and there was a reversion to primitivism and 

 localism unparalleled in modern times. In Spencerian terms, 

 the sustaining, circulatory, and regulatory systems broke 

 up, with the result that the elaborate cooperation necessary 

 to the life of the people as a whole collapsed, destroying 

 the delicate web of relationships that bound city to city and 

 city to village and forcing local units back to a basis of self- 

 dependence. While such extreme cataclysms are convincing 

 evidence that orderly continuous variation in social evolu- 

 tion must be — in terms of life values — enormously superior 



[34] 



