Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2091

Printed piece published in Land & Liberty, July-August 1935

A THOUGHTFUL COMMENT

A mode of thinking that regards the very structure of society as a wicked or vicious contrivance put together and maintained by the malevolence of nature or the wickedness of certain selfish men and fails to take into account the long development of society, leading to its present organic structure, cannot be expected to discover the nature of its present maladjustments or to promote effective means for the setting right of its present functional derangements.

    I believe that our social organization, like our individual bodies, is endowed by its long inheritance with a marvelous and beautiful organic structure that is fully capable, so far as structure is con­cerned, of performing every function of which the organism as a whole has need, and, again, like the individual body, it is subject to functional disorders which put its various parts in great need of read­justment one to another and to the whole, rather than any destruc­tion or general reconstruction. With readjustments, the evolution and organic growth of society will continue, but this can be only by the method which nature employs in all those forms or organization which survive, and that is not by discarding existing structures and forms, but by combining them into ever higher and more complex relationships out of which new functions and new attainments emerge. This is known as Emergent Evolution. It is perhaps the deepest conception and the most significant intellectual development of the present age. —Spencer Heath.²⁰⁹¹