Spencer Heath Archive

Item 141.

Typing presumably by Heath on a half sheet of paper. This wording is almost identical to that on page 9 under “Thoughts written down around August 1933,” in Item 2051, Politics versus Proprietorship. Also Item 209.

     Any mode of thinking that blindly regards the very structure of society as a chance contrivance put together or maintained by the malevolence of nature or by the wicked­ness of 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 that put its various parts in great need of readjustment one to another and to the whole, rather than any destruction or general reconstruction.

     With readjustment the organic growth and evolution of society will continue, but this can be only by the method which nature employs in all those forms which survive, and that is not by destroying or 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 a conception of universal phenomena that is most significant and probably destined to be the most fruitful intellectual development of the present age.¹⁴¹