Spencer Heath Archive

Item 508

No date

 

The original is in item 505.

THE ADVANCED SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCE

The Advanced School of Social Science is an educational institution incorporated under the laws of the State of New York for the objective study of Social Organization as a natural phenomenon manifesting itself in modes consistent with all that science reveals in other fields of phenomena and capable of being brought under hypotheses leading to general principles conformable with those upon which all the ‘natural’ sciences stand.

The Founders of this School do not pause to review the widespread academic skepticism (and even dogmatic nega­tion) as to there being any unifying principles in social phenomena by the formulation of which an objective science of society can be built, more than to remark the identity of this with the dogmatic skepticism and opposition of all traditional learning and scholastic authority whenever any rational science was about to be born. This School grants the complexity of the factual data of human association with­out finding therein any ground for attributing special com­plexity to the unitary principles that must underlie the variant manifestation; unless, indeed, the Universal Nature has summarily banished man from all her systems and economies and left him to wriggle blindly in hopeless chaos. Indeed, having in view the finiteness of all knowledge, it is not even assumed that the field of nature, excluding men need be or is any more simple in principle or in structure than the methods and institutions of associated men. It is a character of all science that it escapes dead formalism only as it extends the scope of its generalizations to widening fields of phenomena. Science itself can be saved to life and significance only as it enters the field of human relations.

This Advanced School aspires, therefore, to justify its name by taking the factual and descriptive data of his­tory and of the other “social sciences,” so far as they des­cribe societal and associative phenomena, and to take the broadest generalizations of the ‘natural’ sciences as hypothe­ses for the interpretation of social data. To the extent that social data can be placed within the diagrams of these hypotheses, and only to that extent, can any true or rational science of society be born. It is the faith of this School that the principles of authentic science, and particularly the theory of organic development, can be found applicable to the social structures formed by and the processes taking place through the associative relationships of men.

The lower life forms survive in a changing world only as they modify their own structures (and habits) to meet environmental change. It is one distinguishing character of man that he is a stable life form, that in their social and symbiotic relationships men respond to the rigors of their environments by no essential change in themselves but by modifying the immediate surroundings in which they live. In their savage, unsocial-ized, state they can do this but rudely, much as the animals do, but as they take on associa­tive relationships crude sciences are born and by tradition preserved until authentic science arrives with a rationale of nature and a technique of design to execute desire and rebuild man’s physical and material world to the patterns of his dreams. Such are the physical and material instruments now at his hand, but so unexamined and so crude, so wholly empirical, does his social and political organization remain that it forbids the garnering of all that abundance which the technical sciences lay at his feet, and it even gravely threatens to employ the instruments of his physical power and creativeness against him and for his tragic annihilation.

It must be clear that the potential mastery ‘natural’ science has gained over the physical environment of man must be paralleled in the societal world. Here the structures nature has formed and custom and tradition preserved and the processes taking place in these structures in the associative relation­ships of men must be classified objectively and analyzed with a view to their inclusion within the broad hypotheses whence science has derived its power to subdue the material world.

If the task seems difficult, it must appear less so when we remember the scope and potency of the methods that science has employed in relatively narrow fields where most of the data was meager, obscure to the senses, and could be per­ceived only indirectly and by aid of delicate instruments, where in the societal realm there is utmost abundance of data all of it being directly perceived as to its present existence and operation and abundantly recorded as to its past. Like astronomy, but more openly and impinging from every direction, it is going on before all our eyes. We do not need to perform any experiments, but only to observe and interpret them. If there are many variables we shall find them in the particulars, not in the universals; in the struc­tures and not in the modes. If we find general processes we can express them as constants and principles that will account for variables and particulars but remain unshaken by them.

Whatever temerity may be imputed, the School will yet not be timorous. In seeking to arrange the data of society into the generalizations of physical science it will be frankly deductive; and in rejecting no social data that does not seem at once to fall within the diagram of its chosen hypotheses it will be completely inductive. It will not seek to controvert any error or any authority nor will it seek for its formulations any authority or validity beyond that of their obvious correspondence with the invariables of history and other social data.

The formulations of their invariables are the foundations of the physical sciences, the unities that pervade all their diversities. In these sciences the phenomena are relatively stable, with few if any variables. In the organic realm the structures in a particular class are less fixed, less complete, and their functions less adequately and more variably performed. But the continuity of organic structures is due to the successful performance of such functions and processes as keep the structures intact. Therefore, to understand society (or other developing organization of organic units) we need examine only those structures whose functions and processes maintain their stability and promote their growth. Accordingly it will be the aim of the School to give prime attention to such social structures, processes and relationships as fall within the generalizations of the ‘natural’ sciences and also maintain and give growth to the group-structures being observed and to the whole society.