Abstract
IN a paper “What is Social Progress?” contributed to a symposium on social progress in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (73, 457–472; 1940) Prof. L. J. Henderson points out that terms like justice and social progress are useless for clear thinking because they have no accepted fairly clear meaning and can only be given an arbitrary definition at the cost of strong persistent emotional opposition. Social change, however, is a fact, but there is no logical or scientific test of the desirability of social changes except in relation to an end or purpose for which the test is utility. Prof. Henderson suggests that, in a given place, at a given time, for a given end, there may be an optimum rate of change of a given thing and some day this will be a subject ripe for careful study. The conditioned reflexes of men, as they are at any given tune and in any given place, will be seldom negligible. More often than not, when the end is survival they will be again, as they have so often been, in the forms we name loyalty, the bonds of family, the sense of kinship, love of country and religious devotion, powerful social forces, and dangerously lacking when in default. Prof. Henderson suggests that among the innumerable effects of science on society, some must be harmful, according to any definition, now or hereafter, to many individuals and to some societies. Moreover, the effects of science upon society may well be only implicit functions of the state of science, but explicit functions of the rate of scientific development. The same scientific development proceeding rapidly may have one effect, proceeding slowly another quite different effect.
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Social Progress. Nature 146, 742–743 (1940). https://doi.org/10.1038/146742c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/146742c0