(1) Although most of the varieties of government that the nations of the world have inherited miraculously "work," through an empirically derived realism that makes them immune to much individual irrationality, yet they work extremely inefficiently in comparison with conceivable machinery which modern social science could suggest.
Five conditions are necessary to effect changes if need be, of revolutionary magnitudes, by evolutionary methods: (a) A democratic basis for evaluating "wants" broadly, but a machinery to satisfy them by technical means decided by a democracy of specialists. (b) The setting up of a "'ministry of evolution," directing change from the top instead of the bottom of society. (c) An abolition of the archaic stereotypes (under terms like left, right, liberal, fascist) which now catch affiliates to particular parties under the conception that an individual must be "radical" or "reactionary" in his allegiances. (d) The psychological selection and social science training of political leaders. (e) The acceptance of evolutionary ethics values in place of dogmatic religious values in social legislation.
The impact of Beyondist ethics upon existing socio-political practices can take place partly through what have been called "the policy sciences" (Lerner and Lasswell, 1951) which may be defined here as the applied social sciences such as economics, city planning, education, in which value judgments are necessarily implied by every decision. Economic laws, "natural" and legal, illustrate this, though they embrace only a part of the principles governing the life of a society. Nevertheless they are geared to biological and psychological realities which govern group survival and can be flouted only at peril of loss of adjustment. This needs to be heeded particularly in international politics where one vote to one country is a travesty of democratic principles.
(2) A major change which Beyondism calls for in the function of government is an extension of moral concern to the genetic quality of the population. It is as democratically appropriate for a nation to define its ideals in genetics as in education - in eugenics as in euthenics. Although psychology and medicine will gradually move toward a capability of making a direct evaluation of mental and physical traits, in respect to both creative and restrictive eugenics, yet today a reasonably efficient, self-acting machinery, based on total adaptation and contribution to culture, exists in economics. If earnings are allowed to be the index of social demand, a wise government will need to adjust earnings of the small set of occupations (in teaching, religion and research) not directly evaluable by supply and demand on the market. Under these conditions, instituting a positive relation of family size to earnings, throughout society, would suffice to bring about a positive eugenic trend.
A new moral goal always creates new legislation and new possibilities of dereliction and delinquency, and in the genetic field these defaults are constituted by failure of the able and well-to-do to have children and of those on public welfare irresponsibility to multiply. Legislation must support morality here as in any other field, and we should have the courage to face the need for sterilization (when social work attempting to introduce contraception completely fails). In the case of the well-off who decline to raise children, heavy taxation (or large child allowances in income tax) should help the situation. However, the failures of reproduction in the upper income group at least act as natural selection automatically eliminating those of low superego sensitivity.
(3) Natural, inherent economic laws, i.e., those not depending on government manipulation, must be respected in evaluating adaptation, since they reflect realities in a group's adjustment to its cosmic and human environment. Economists have recognized in general that the best functioning system is one with certain group regulations superimposed on a basically free enterprise, self-adjusting market (see also Bagehot, 1873). But they have variously hesitated, on account of traditional or Communistic moral values, to follow Ricardo in the implication that a man of a particular ability and education is also in the economic sense a commodity. A theory of human supply and demand distributions suggests that this law is nevertheless operative, and that it should be respected as a guide for genetic and educational policies.
(4) Although the greater taxing of those who earn more is recent, it has become uncritically widely accepted. As far as temporary misfortune or inadequacy of Type A is concerned (childhood, accident, old age) this is a defensible "charity," but the argument from envy and threat is wrong. Those societies will be most successful whose morale and purposefulness is such that optimum differentials can be tolerated. These differentials motivate educational improvement, spread of more effective values, and a eugenic balance in family size differentials. Within the central range of earning the differential income tax, upsetting the ratio of reward to effort, may seem a minor burden, but in biological groups even a small handicap, over a few generations, can bring extinction to the sub-group subjected to it.
The equal tax for all, required by the fact that all essentially get the same services from society, cannot be rejected on any sound principle but only on the expediency that it is assumed impossible to collect from all. The inability to meet this debt should be one criterion of assignment to the perhaps one-tenth of the population considered dependent or "'hospitalized." An enormous bureaucratic saving would in any case be made by a uniform tax. Other economic customs which need to be considered in terms of ethical value implications are insurance, migration for employment and upset of the natural market for workers, managers, goods and capital by political power. But these are realized and discussed whereas the income tax question has some features of being under a taboo. It is not asserted here that the equal tax in its simplest sense is a proven desideratum, but only that it deserves serious study in the light of new principles.
(5) Current discussions of ideal population size have (a) neglected the arguments earlier (page 366) for the greater survival and evolutionary value of larger populations, (b) extrapolated in too simple a fashion from present cultures and populations, neglecting what scientific invention is likely to do in radically changing problems of food supply and pollution, (c) completely ignored the question of population quality. A monster population could be a healthy and vigorous organism. The beaming of hysterical calls for population reduction on the advanced societies, and specifically on the middle classes, is, most unfortunately, calculated to convert world society into a headless monster.
(6) As to the structure of society Beyondism indicates no extreme position such as the abolition of classes or the institution of elites. As far as evidence can at present be read, fractionation of society into cultural and genetic sub-classes has some valuable functions, provided it is on an underlying basis of political and spiritual democracy. Such groups lessen genetic regression to the mean and permit try-outs of diversified sub-cultures, but if carried too far seem to impair morale. Research urgently needs directing to the problem of optimal within-group diversity.
(7) The type of scientific inference from evolutionary goals that may be needed in the aspects of ethical decision that depend on psychological dynamics can be illustrated by the presently much debated field of sexual morals. Here the discrepancy between genetic endowment, in this case in the sex erg, and its realistic adaptive value - the CAG discrepancy - is extremely great, highlighting the problem in all such discrepancies. Rationalism, in the form of modern Humanism, has taken altogether too limited a view of the "'effect on others" involved in sex behavior. The need for restriction on sexual freedom is complexly determined, but is indicated especially by the economics of psychological energy, and the dependence of cultural creativity upon ergic sublimation. Though our emotional imagination is inadequate to conceiving that a change could occur in our preoccupation with romantic love it is likely that, in terms of millennia, comparatively rapid transformations will be brought about here, perhaps with initial aid of biochemical reduction of sex drive, opening up new spectra of cultural-emotional expression to replace this domain of expression.
(8) Apart from the technical advances which learning theory and psychological testing are likely to bring to education, Beyondism needs to emphasize three things: (i) the need for a far more comprehensive and realistic biological education giving perspective on man's place in the universe; (ii) a training essentially in emotional balance and character, ensuring a fair-mindedness and objectivity, without which advances in reasoning are merely dangerous, and at the same time a capacity to defend oneself against the emotional arts of psychological warfare. (Especially, education should avoid a negative correlation of intelligence and character.) And (iii) the extension of the technical development of education toward defining what is ideally needed in the "raw material," i.e., euthenics and eugenics, need to be geared into more positive mutual connection.
(9) Mass media of communication have been allowed to grow up haphazardly apparently with no other principle than that they are free to say what they like and to cater to whatever public tastes are profitable to them. No other institution in organized civilized societies has been allowed to grow without internal and external controls, and it is only by their mesmerizing popular opinion with the obsolete slogan of complete freedom to comment on policies that they have persisted in this immature structure. Granting the mass media complete political freedom should not be construed as granting them absolute license to undo education and to vulgarize and trivialize the minds of young people. Their unregulated power to put out information selectively, to make more educated viewpoints invisible, e.g., in the interests of advertising, and to destroy reputations, is an anachronism in societies otherwise supplied with the necessary checks and balances of a complex organism. In the recent action of the British, American and other governments on tobacco advertisements, and in some other ways a beginning of the necessary control by social conscience and non-party government has appeared. Until something akin to the accountability in the parallel "information service" of educationnappears, however, no remedy is visible to the more subtle problem of transmitting mere noise.
(10) Injunctions from Beyondism for practical social action studied in this chapter are to be taken more as illustrative of the kind of steps of inference possible from this approach than as final suggestions. The chief differences of the innovations suggested by Beyondism from the well-entrenched habits and positions which it opposes reside in the fact that it begins with doubts, with a search for more explicit basic principles and with systematic (statistical) factual investigation. However, since it takes the duty and the ultimate goals of investigation seriously it does not propose to remain lost in doubts. For it follows the scientific philosophy of Bacon that "If a man begins in certainties he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties."
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