Progress and Poverty

The current theory “which attributes social progress to changes wrought in the nature of man” is erroneous (487). There is some validity to certain hereditary differences between humans. However, “the great differences between men in different states of society cannot be explained in this way” (487). In the question of nature versus nurture, it is “the influences which mold the man after he comes into the world” that are more important (486). Environmental influence includes language and education. For example, it is common to claim that there is a hereditary transmission of criminality in the underprivileged classes. In reality, criminality is a matter of environment: “Paupers will raise paupers” (490).

There are also historical examples. For the Jewish people who lived in many different countries, it was the power of their religion and intermarriage that allowed them to “have much in common” with the people of those countries (495). At the same time, they “preserved their individuality” (495). The Chinese who immigrated to California “acquire American modes of working, trading, the use of machinery” and show that they, too, are a flexible group (496). In short, significant human differences are not hereditary, but environmental, as that “which we call differences of civilization, are not differences which inhere in the individuals, but differences which inhere in the society” (502, emphasis added).

The law of human progress must account for civilizational differences, historically and today. By doing so, it will reveal the “essential conditions of progress, and what social adjustments advance and what retard it” (503). Physical and intellectual wants that are part of human nature are “incentives to progress” (503).

The law of progress is simple. It is based on association: “Men tend to progress just as they come closer together” (505). It is a moral law. After all, humans are social creatures. Society starts with families, then tribes, then nations. Different natural conditions lead to “diversities in social development” (507). As countries grow larger, “differences arise in language, custom, tradition, religion,” and with such differences, “animosities spring up” (507).

As civilization progresses, without the necessary social adjustments, inequalities may grow. One of the key causes of inequality “is in the natural monopoly which is given by the possession of land” (514). As societies become more complex, power and wealth are not distributed equally. As inequality grows, improvements slow down and stop.

Western civilization, starting from Europe, “owes its superiority to the growth of equality with the growth of association” (519). Two key factors are responsible for this development: European fragmentation and Christianity. Christianity contains an essential idea of human equality. Overall, societal progress and innovation arise from freedom.

According to the law of human progress, Western civilization must advance or regress. In previous civilizations, the decline came with “the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power” (525). Social progress depends on “association and equality” (526). In the original American Republic, “political and legal rights are absolutely equal,” bureaucracy does not grow, and “every religious belief or non-belief stands on the same footing” (526).

It may be difficult to imagine how a civilization with railroads, telegraphs, and newspapers may decline. However, the growing social inequalities show a turn toward barbarism: “One of the characteristics of barbarism is the low regard for the rights of persons and of property” (532). Social inequality is also linked to the failure of justice and corruption. Industrial depressions “are like twinges and shocks which precede paralysis” (537). No one knows what the future may hold. However, civilization may make “a leap upward, which will open the way to advances yet undreamed of, or it must be a plunge downward” (540).

Liberty and justice are the forces that may make the dangers that threaten civilization disappear. The “unjust and unequal distribution of wealth” leads to various evils (541). The proposed land reform is in line with the Declaration of Independence: “That all men are created equal” (542). It is Liberty that is responsible for all social progress in different cultures, from leading the slaves out of Egypt and shedding “a partial light” in ancient Greece, to abolishing hereditary privilege in some Western countries (544). 

Liberty must be trusted fully to propel civilization forward, as “Unless its foundations be laid in justice the social structure cannot stand” (545). A civilization in which the plight of the disadvantaged gets worse as they live in squalor, while material progress and wealth grow, cannot continue. In both the United States and in Europe, “Between democratic ideas and the aristocratic adjustments of society there is an irreconcilable conflict” (548). Instead, by fully following Justice and Liberty, people can attain the Golden Age.