Is Mankind Cohesive?

by CARYL P. HASKINS

1

ONLY two great groups of animals, men and ants, indulge in highly organized mass warfare — warfare on so wide a scale that the geographic configuration of the earth becomes a factor in their operations. When the little “harvesting” ant Pheidole megacephala, for instance, spread out from its original home in the equatorial deserts of the Old World on a campaign of world conquest, it soon reached Bermuda, traveling as an unbidden guest on the trading ships of man. In Bermuda its plan to exterminate the native ants would have done credit to Pizarro or Cortes. Confining itself at first to the salt-sprayed regions of the coral beaches, where any native ant would have perished, Pheidole built up a solid ring of occupation about the island. Then, foot by foot and year by year, it narrowed the circle, battling its way into the cedar groves and the upland swarded hills, exterminating community after community of the native ants until its particular enemy, the large but primitive Odontomachus, has now’ all but disappeared and Pheidole is to be found everywhere the conqueror.

Somewhat earlier, in t he middle of the last century, this same Pheidole invaded and conquered Madeira; and there, in every house, on every pavement, in every tree, its foraging files were to be seen. But Pheidole met its match on Madeira at the hands of another invasive horde—the apparently harmless New World genus Iridomyrmex. For Iridomyrmex too had plans of world conquest, and was better fitted than Pheidole to carry them out. Traveling northward from its original home on the west coast of southern South America, Iridomyrmex invaded Central America and Mexico, then spread eastward along our Gull Coast and entered Florida, whence it is now slowly advancing up our eastern shoreline. In due time it reached Europe, invaded Portugal, spread to Spain and southern France, and hits been reported more recently from South Africa.

Madeira appears to have been its steppingstone to Portugal, but first it had to overcome Pheidole, which was dominant on the island. Far better coordinated than Pheidole, Iridomyrmex stretches out its victims and then attacks their exposed nerves with a poisonous secretion. Today it is the files of iridomyrmex, not Pheidole, which course in endless processions up and down the pink-plastered houses of Funchal.

Only men and ants keep slaves, but the institution of slavery has been much more highly developed by ants than by men. Among the slave-makers of the genus Polyergus, for example, the mistresses are no longer able even to feed themselves without the assistance of the slaves, and will starve in the midst of plenty if the slaves are removed. The excavation and architecture of the nest, the care of the young, all the essential activities of colonial life, are left entirely to the slaves. The mistresses confine themselves to warfare and plunder, and in these functions they have become highly accomplished.

Only men and ants domesticate other animals on a wide scale and keep them for practical purposes or even, so far as we can judge, for the mere at tractiveness of the association. Aphids or plant lice, plant scales, leaf-hoppers and brownie-bugs, the caterpillars of certain butterflies — all are nourished and assiduously tended by ants for the secretions whieh they produce, and certain of them are as carefully and widely cultivated as are our own cattle. More than two thousand other species of insects and related invertebrates are known to live habitually in the nests of various ants — some purely as parasites, like rats in human communities; some as indifferent cohabitants, tike the street pigeons of our great cities; and some as carefully tended “pets.”

Only certain social ants and bees, wasps, and termites exhibit the devotion to particular groups within the community that the people of absolute monarchies have characteristically bestowed upon their royalty. The queen honeybee, the queen Army ant, and the kings and queens of termite colonies are alike surrounded by hordes of attendants during every moment of their long lives, and are fed, cleaned, and guarded without cessation. At first glance there appear to be striking similarities between the communal life of highly social insects and that of man.

2

YET in an evolutionary sense man can be only very remotely related to the social insects. The creatures which in evolution were to give rise to the mammals and finally to man must have parted from the ancestral stem of all the insects long before the first primitive vertebrate appeared on earth, in ancient geological times. Even among the social insects — the bees, the wasps, and the ants — the relationship is not a close one, for the ancestral stocks of these creatures and those of the termites must have gone their separate ways before anything that we should recognize as an insect had been evolved.

In consequence of this long separation of the insects and our own ancestors, the very ground-plan of the insect body and brain is fundamentally different from that of man. In place of the closed circulatory system and the warm, red blood of man, the insect has an open body cavity through which courses a stream of colorless blood, pumped by a tubular heart and bathing the vital organs more or less haphazardly in its sluggish flow. In place of the internal supporting skeleton of man, the insects have a hard outer shell to which the muscles are attached, sensitive to the outside world only where it is pierced by special nerveconnected hairs.

In place of man’s two eyes, the social insects have from two to five, but they are rigid structures, incapable of focusing, incapable of movement except as the head or body itself is moved also. Three of the five eyes operate on substantially the same principle as the vertebrate organ, but the remaining two, the large compound eyes which are the most important, operate quite differently. It is exceedingly doubtful if any of them, at least among the social insects, are capable of producing on the retina an image comparable with that produced by the eye of man. Yet, among the bees and the ants at least, the retinas appear to be sensitive to a range of wave lengths which we see as red and perhaps as orange.

In place of our largely degenerated olfactory sense, ants appear to have the most exquisite sense of smell, apparently combined and fused with a sense of touch through an intimate admixture of these sense organs on the antennae, to give a sort of “contact-odor” sensation of which we can have little conception.

The impressions which the senses of a social insect convey, so different from those of a man, must be made even more different by the brain that receives them. For the “thought processes” of the social insects, like those of insects in general, are clearly dominated by instinct patterns of a variety and richness which it is difficult to imagine. A digger wasp requires no training to duplicate the exact and intricate form of brood cell which its mother made before it, or to find the prey to store in it, or to paralyze this prey, or to attach an egg to it safe from harm.

A honeybee requires no training to build a perfect comb, or to participate in the complex social activities of the nest. Not only does the bee instinctively function without training, but it is incapable of assimilating training in more than a limited sense. The ultimate action which the insect takes may be as complex as that of a man, but it is done in response to a psychical pattern of great stability which is not easily modified or readily lost.

It would be hard to imagine creatures more different in basic bodily structure, in senses, in quality of mentality, in background of experience, than man and the social insects. How could such different organisms fail to erect vastly divergent societies, especially when some of the consequences of these differences are borne in mind? How could the societies of man the mechanic, skilled in the use of tools, approach in any respect the communities of insects, only one of which, the solitary wasp Ammophila, is known customarily to use a tool at all, and this but a simple pebble to tamp the loose earth about a newly excavated burrow?

How could societies with no resources for the accumulation of experience through the generations except the slow processes of instinct, with only the most rudimentary and the most inflexible modes of communication, approach in any way the communities of man, close-knit by the spoken and the written word? The very difference in size of man and his communities, relative to the earth, would seem to make his situation not comparable with that of the social insects.

Yet the striking similarities are there, extending sometimes even to minute details of behavior. The communication systems of ants, for example, are remarkably like some of the simpler forms of sign language among men. The roadways which many harvesting ants build in radiating patterns from the mouths of their nests look so like a miniature edition of the footpaths about primitive villages that one can almost imagine oneself in a Lilliputian human community. Some ants even construct little clay way stations along these roads, in which they rest.

The solicitude of many ants for their “cattle” earns them the title of true shepherds. The insect charges are carried to new pastures as the old ones are depleted. They are taken underground in the fall and given winter protection, and brought out again to be pastured on fresh shoots in the spring. And when some of them unexpectedly develop wings, it is usual for the attendants to clip these wings off to prevent undue straying.

It is clearly fallacious to assume that such close parallels in such fundamentally different societies will allow of reasoning from direct analogy. Rather, they are of great significance as indicators of the much deeper underlying common features characteristic of earthly life per se — potentialities for development which are common to men and bees and ants and termites, and which were common, too, to the simpler life-forms that in ancient times connected them in evolution. These similarities between animals that are merely the end-points of divergent evolutionary paths are the indicators — the tips of the floating iceberg, so to speak from which we may guess at the hidden, binding bulk beneath. In order to get at the heart of the question, we must seek further, must search for our material in those characteristics common to all life.

3

IN MY observation of social living among the creatures of the earth, whether at the level of the single cell, like a bacterium, or of the colony of cells, like an elephant, or of a society of many-celled animals, like a colony of ants, I have been profoundly impressed with one thing above all: that life appears to be under constant pressure from two quite different and often opposing forces which largely determine the tortuous course of its evolution.

The first of these forces is manifest in a continuing tendency of life to evolve from simpler to more complex forms. I speak of it as a “force” or a “trend” simply for lack of anything better to call it or any clearer understanding of its nature. I have traced this trend, as we find it m bacteria, cellular colonies, and animal societies, in my article “The Social Animal" which appeared in the February Atlantic. It is difficult to see that this widespread evolutionary trend to complexity is governed in any way by the need of survival of the species exhibiting it.

The second influence which has molded the course of the evolution of societies is the trend to form wellintegrated, highly coördinated, streamlined individuals from the primitive loose associations that are characteristic of early societies. This pressure to streamlining, to internal integration, would seem to follow from the action of conventional natural selection which tends to weed out the inept, the illcoördinated, the unlit.

Examples of the first trend are of course legion, as I showed in some detail last month. The evolution of bacteria and protozoa, the evolution of the colonial green flagellates, the evolution of the social insects, are all vivid examples of the trend to complexity.

The second tendency is illustrated with equal clarity in the relative perfection of coördination of a Volvox colony compared with one of Spondylomonnn, or in the integration of a community of fungusgrowing ants compared with the “half-societies" of primitive Ponerines. This second tendency is worth further consideration.

As societies such as those develop in nature, there is inevitably very great loss of the individual independence of the components. Consider, for instance, the loss of individual independence and the immense advance in social specialization involved in the transition from a cell in a sixteen-celled, loosely organized Spondylomorum colony to the white bloodcell of an elephant. Or think of the decrease in individuality typified by the transition from a daughter of the semisocial bee Allodape, free at any time to leave its colony and to found a newcommunity of its own, to the trammeled worker of the honeybee. Everywhere the trend seems to have been toward order and regimentation of the individual in the newly formed society, toward specialization and suppression of the part to the whole, of the individual to the state, until the state has become so streamlined and efficient in its operation that it can compete as an operating unit with the solitary creatures from which it sprang.

In the case of colonies of cells, that regimentation and suppression has been so complete that we have no hesitation in calling the resultant cell-state, such as an elephant or a man, an individual. In the case of societies of a higher order, composed of individual units which are themselves multicellular, the fusion is usually not so complete, although in some cases, such as the Portuguese Man-of-War, it may be. But everywhere the trend is unmistakable. Dominance of the whole over the part, suppression of the individual for the community, regimentation for all time, these are the keynotes.

It is a disturbing picture upon which to reflect in relation to man. For this, of course, is precisely the ideology of the totalitarian state; and for the totalitarian philosopher the picture I have drawn is ammunition of the most plausible and the most valuable kind. Throughout Nature, there is marked evidence that all social organizations at the beginning of their evolution were loose associations of individuals of a democratic character, and that such associations clearly fared badly in evolution and tended to change over into the highly regimented form which is the successful type today. It is logical to conclude that people of democratic ideals are merely trying to halt the social evolution of man early on its road, and at a particularly unfavorable point, while 1 he totalitarians are trying to speed it on to its natural and obviously happy conclusion. This is a serious reflection, indeed, for the biological evidence is weighty, and it must be answered.

4

ONE of the most interesting criteria for the classification of animal societies, and perhaps one of the most significant, involves the manner in which such societies arise. On this basis, all the societies which we have so far considered belong to a single class. All of them are formed at the start by one or more parents, and the society is actually a hugely enlarged family, composed of generation after generation of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren which accumulate around the parents in a dependent status, instead of leading independent lives.

In the case of ants or bumblebees, for example, a solitary mother isolates herself and lays a small packet of eggs, which she rears to maturity with painstaking care. The resultant daughters remain with the mother as dependent workers. As the season advances, more and more workers accumulate and the community grows accordingly.

Similarly in the case of termites, a paired male and female, the “royal couple,” found the community, and it is their dependent sons and daughters that build up the colony, which may ultimately number hundreds of thousands of individuals. We may call communities of this sort, in which all the members are closely related, family societies. The trend of evolution in family societies, as we have seen, is unmistakably toward the goal of high integration, with regimentation and suppression of the individual to the advantage of the state. If we except man, family societies include the most striking social organizations of the world.

We sometimes forget, however, that there is another great class of societies in the world, quite as important, in which the members, though bound together by ties often as close as those uniting the members of the family society, need not be in any way related to one another. They have not necessarily grown up from infancy in association, but are more likely to have come together after they were fully mature. For purposes of convenience, we may call these societies associative.

A school of minnows or of mackerel, a ball of hibernating snakes among the rocks of a mountaintop, a wheeling flock of pigeons, the migrating hordes of European lemmings, the great winter herds of barrenground caribou, the vast waves of migrating bison of former years, are all examples of this kind. So are the tropical communal spiders which spin webs sometimes twenty feet across, the masses of ladybird beetles which one may discover in December under stones or the bark of trees, the flocks of southward-migrating Monarch butterflies that are often so conspicuous in autumn, or the devastating hordes of locusts that plagued the Mormons.

Perhaps the most striking example of this kind of society, and of the close and universal social bondage to which it can lead, is to be found at the level of the single cell, among the curious slime molds, or Mycetozoa. The slime molds lie so nearly on the dividing line between the plant and animal kingdoms, and have so many characteristics of both great groups, that a satisfactory decision has never been readied as to whether they belong to the plants or the animals. Like true molds, they begin life as resting spores which may remain alive in the inert dried condition for a long time. On falling into a pool of water which offers it a suitable environment, however, the spore germinates, to produce what is to all intents and purposes an amoeba.

Like an amoeba this germling is active and predatory, and it begins at once to “flow” through its watery world in search of food particles to ingest.

After several days in this form, the new-hatched organism goes through a change in shape and emerges as a typical flagellate. Like them, it now has a rigid body wall and is equipped with a rapidly flailing flagellum-whip for mobility. Like them, it leads a purely solitary existence and hunts its prey actively. It divides longitudinally to produce daughter cells which wander away as solitary organisms also, and it may go through one or more sexual phases.

Eventually, however, the solitary flagellate becomes gregarious. By twos and threes and fours the cells come together and adhere, until little knots are formed throughout the watery medium. Bit by bit these knots grow, and, as with coalescing water droplets on a rainy windshield, one “pool” finally dominates and the other groups flow into it. The “pool" may measure many inches in diameter. As each cell enters the collection of cells, its own body-wall is broken down and it is fused completely into the community, only its nucleus remaining intact.

Ultimately this body comes to consist of an immense, streaming mass of protoplasm, studded with many nuclei. Then the “pool” comes to life, as it were, and flows off as an individual on its own, looking like a Brobdingnagian amoeba. There is no stranger spectacle in the woods than one of these giant plasmodia of the Mycetozoa creeping along the damp soil or over decayed logs, still in incessant search of food, and looking and behaving once again like a single cell, but a cell of unbelievably large proportions.

The Mycetozoan plasmodium may have a relatively long life in its amoeba-like form, and may even enter periods of inactivity in a dried condition, from which it will revive to resume its wandering life. But in the end the nomad comes to rest, attaches itself to some spot, and proceeds to turn into a sort of puffball. The free nuclei of the constituent cells are once again surrounded by walls, spore cases are formed, and the nuclei migrate into them, there to mature as true spores and finally to be broken off from the parent organism, to drift away on the winds and repeat ihe cycle of growth.

Viewed as a colony, the Mycetozoan plasmodium has all the characteristics which we consider typical of an associative society. Its members come together after much of their lives has already been spent, in a “voluntary” association of previously independent organisms. The constituent cells are not necessarih closely related in a genetic sense. During the time that they are in association, some evidence of their previously independent, existence is preserved in their discrete nuclei. The communal bonds uniting them are strong but are not permanent.

5

WE CAN, I think, make certain generalizations about associative societies. In sharp contrast to the situation among family societies, there are no highly spocialized, highly integrated associative communities. All of them are primitive, flexible, generalized. In all of them the individual is important and is not very strictly regimented. In all of them, the endowment and the potentialities for independent living of the individual have remained at a high level. There is no specialization to leadership or to domination comparable to the development of a brain cell or of a king or queen termite, nothing more unalterable than the feeble leadership of the point-bird of a flying flock of Canada geese or the sentry of a flock of crows on vigilant watch against the farmer’s gun.

Rarely if ever is the separation of an individual from an association of this sort fatal to the individual in the sense that it would be to the individual bodycell of a plant or animal or to a worker honeybee. In fact, there are no associative societies known to me in which such a dissolution of the society does not normally occur periodically, releasing the individuals for periods of independent existence in greater or lesser degree before they are reunited.

At the same time, associative societies, in contrast to family ones, are both immortal and highly amorphous. They are immortal in the sense that t hey may persist year after year or decade after decade, forming, dividing, dissolying, reuniting again, without any signs of senescence. A flock of migrating robins may vary from year to year in size and form and composition, but in its essential elements the same robin flock will be traveling the same routes a generation or twenty generations from now as it did twenty generations ago. This continuity contrasts sharply with the senescence and death of a colony of wasps or bumblebees in the fall of the season in which it was founded, or with the dissolution of a colony of the harvesting ant Pogonomyrmex at the death of its queen.

Associative societies are amorphous in the sense that they can readily be divided into parts and later be reunited, or as readily combine with other associative aggregates to form larger communities. The Mycetozoan plasmodium, while it is developing, will accept additional members into its organization with the utmost tolerance, regardless of whether they are immediately related or not. A flock of birds or of Monarch butterflies, traveling southward, will freely augment its numbers with additions from day to day, and will welcome these newcomers into its midst with complete tolerance if they are of the same or even of different species, whether or not the new arrivals are known to it as individuals.

Contrast this with the utter intolerance of the members of a bee or an ant colony to individuals which are not by birth members of the same group, even though they are of the same species and so alike that the human eye has difficulty in distinguishing them. Contrast the impossibility of uniting two Volvox colonies with the ease of joining two Mycetozoan plasmodia at the appropriate time. The family society tends to build strong and impermeable walls about itself, whether those walls are the bark of a sequoia trunk or the intolerance of an ant colony to strangers. The associative society, by contrast, exhibits the capacity to divide, and, more important, to unite into larger groups. We shall have occasion later to recall this capacity.

So far as I know, there has never been a case of organized warfare recorded between animal communities of the associative type. Indeed, the loose and ill-defined organization characteristic of such societies would make such organized warfare a virtual impossibility. Among family societies, on the other hand, highly organized warfare is not at all uncommon.

Associative societies are probably as common in Nature as family ones. There is certainly nothing to indicate that they are less ancient. We must therefore regard them as successful in evolution — quite as successful, presumably, as family societies. Yet they exhibit none of the trend toward specialization, none of the subordination of the component to the whole, none of the regimentation of the individual to the need of the state, characteristic of the family society. On the contrary, because of its loose organization, I he continued existence of the associative society appears to depend upon the alertness, the independence, the individual competence in survival, of its members.

It, would seem fair to conclude, then, that the maintenance of a very loose form of colonial organization, the retention of a high degree of individual flexibility and independence, can be as effective in the survival of communal life in natural selection as is the totalitarian-like road of the family societies.

6

So different arc the family and the associative types of society in their general structure and in the manner of their operation that we should hardly expect to find them combined in Nature. Yet actually such combinations are not at all uncommon. They are well illustrated at the level of the community of single cells by certain of the Mycetozoan slime molds in which the plasmodia are built up partly by the inclusion of new cells and partly by the division of those already present.

Among communities of many-celled animals, mixtures of this sort are much more striking and better known and consist, usually, of collections of families of individuals, closely related within each group but virtually unrelated outside it, all more or less loosely fused together. Such mixtures are beautifully illustrated by various of the colony-nesting birds. The vast rookeries of noddies and terns, of albatrosses and frigate birds, on the sandy atolls of tropical seas, the colonies of gulls and cormorants, guillemots and puffins and gannets on the rocky isles and shores of more northerly oceans, the strange nesting “herds" of king and emperor penguins in Antarctica, are all examples of this sort of relationship.

It reaches the height of its expression among the birds, perhaps, in the African sociable grosbeak Philetaerus, where as many as two hundred pairs of the species may fuse their nests together into one gigantic mass which is protected from the rain by a communal roof-like structure.

Many similar examples are to be found among the mammals. The colonies of prairie dogs and ground squirrels, the permanent herds of wild horses and zebras, of musk oxen and antelopes, of giraffes and elephants, the communal flocks of flying foxes and of smaller bats, of the gibbons and perhaps of other primates not far away from the line of human descent, all exhibit this same combination of types, and seem to be composed of an amorphous mixture of closely related and essentially unrelated individuals.

Even among the semisocial wasps and bees, which are primarily family colonies, examples of mixtures of family and associative living can be found. Females of the wasp genus Bembix, for example, excavate individual earthen burrows, each terminated by a cell which is provisioned with paralyzed insect prey, on which an egg is placed. After the egg has hatched, the mother continues to bring food to the larva. This, of course, is the typical behavior-pattern of a solitary insect just, entering the first stage of evolution to the family society.

Yet at the same time Bembix females show a strong proclivity to congregate as adults and to build their burrows in close proximity, occasionally even constructing a single communal entrance for them, though they resent actual intrusion on their privacy by their neighbors. This is the typical behavior of solitary creatures in the first stage of forming an associative union, and the colony-like collection of individual burrows which results is neither a purely family nor a purely associative society, but a most intimate mixture of the two.

Can we not consider human society as in essence a similar mixture of the family and the associative social forms, at base somewhat like a colony of sociable grosbeaks or a community-dwelling of Bembix? The family-society portion of this mixture will then be the family itself, and it will conform, in large measure, to the specifications which we laid down earlier to distinguish family-type societies among other animals. All members of the family are closely related. Even within the primitive family group there is some specialization of function, as between father and mother and offspring.

Within both the primitive and the modern family group the ties of family loyalty are direct and strong and are not readily to be extended outside of it. This loyalty is well indicated by the persistent cohesiveness of the human family as a unit at every social level, and by the rarity with which alien adult members are adopted into families in all civilizations, unless powerful external motivations lead to such adoptions as a social custom, as was the case, for instance, among various distinguished families of ancient China. Even infants are comparatively rarely adopted into families in modern society.

This situation is indicative, too, of the existence of a rudimentary bounding “membrane,” as it were, about the family society, walling it off to some extent from the similar social groups around it. It corresponds, perhaps, to the mutual hostility, the “territorial instinct,” of pairs of even relatively highly socialized birds at nesting time.

In all these respects, the family society of man is comparable to the more primitive family-social organizations the world over. It seems vaguely to foreshadow most of the trends that are so well developed among the higher social insects, but it is incomparably primitive beside such structures.

It is notable that this human family unit has not advanced greatly in complexity, in degree of organization, or in subordination of the parts to the whole, since the time of earliest man, so far as we can tell. Furthermore, there seems no reason to suppose that the family of Piltdown or Java or Peking or Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon man was essentially different, or much more primitive, in structure than that of the modern human. It is not in this area of his communal fixing that the great social changes characteristic of modern man have come. This is perhaps the most cogent reason why the parallels between man and the social insects that we have drawn should not be looked upon as direct analogies.

7

ON THE other side, the picture is vastly different, and here man as a social organism is unique in the world. I know of no other animals living through a mixture of the family and the associative social forms in which the associative type of social evolution can compare in advancement to the family type. The colony of the grosbeak Philetaerus is a feeble social structure compared with that of the individual grosbeak family. The nesting associations of Bembix are amorphous and evanescent indeed beside the closeknit entity that is the individual female and her developing brood. Even the Mycetozoan plasmodium is a temporary, shifting thing compared to the permanency of form of the single-cell nuclei which it contains and which will persist as recognizable entities into the spore and the resulting amoeboid organism and its flagellate successor, on into a new plasmodium, long after the older associative structure has vanished.

In man alone the associative social structure has become dominant in evolution over the familial form, and its evolution, totally unlike that of the family, is proceeding dynamically today. In man alone it is the associative society, the village or the tribe, the state or the nation, that is relatively more permanent and outlives the birth and the death of many of its component families. In man alone this larger social aggregate offers serious and often successful competition to the family society for the attention of the individual.

It is a common trick of primitive peoples to transplant, as it were, many of the forms and the ties which give coherence to the family to the larger associative tribal or village or national structure which they are ambitious to make a stable social entity. Again and again we are confronted with the highly personalized character of tribal rule, with the extent to which the bond between tribe leader and tribesman is really that between father and son.

The leadership of Massasoit and Osceola, of Red Jacket and Sees-the-Living Bull, of Chaka the Zulu, of the Tokugawas and earlier Japanese Shoguns, of the Inca Viracocha, of countless European feudal lords, of Clovis and Charlemagne and Robert the Bruce, all had many elements of this relationship. It has persisted into modern times in absolute monarchies with remarkably little change. What else can have inspired the significant comment, “L’etat, c’est moi,” which epitomizes the relation so well?

The associative social structure of man shows definite evidence of a number of qualities normally characteristic of the family form. They are intimately mingled in varying proportions with the opposite qualities which normally characterize the associative social form in other animals. Thus in man alone there is definite evidence of regimentation in the associative sphere, confining the individual to particular tasks with varying degrees of severity, restricting his normal radius of action. In man alone, moreover, the individual has developed well-marked specializations to fit him for undertaking certain special tasks in the associative society.

There is little doubt that mental specialization is already occurring, manifested by the specialized sorts of talents which arise among us and which we count, our most valuable social asset. The whole history of the development of human genius emphasizes how marked this biological mental specialization may be. And the pathetic obverse of the medal —the millions who have been tempted by evanescent social fashion and fleeting social rewards into types of activity for which they were not inherently psychically fitted — gives evidence quite as poignant.

In man alone the degree of internal organization of an associative society has progressed far enough to make highly organized warfare the nightmare that it is. And concomitantly, in man alone, the rigid “envelope” typical of the family society has often made its appearance, wrapping the associative society in the cloak of intensified nationalism and tribal or national or racial intolerance.

But the society of man is nevertheless still basically an associative one. The instincts of man are still deeply rooted in the basic characteristics of the associative structure — in relative freedom of the individual in the social fabric, in a low degree of internal organization, in low specialization of the component parts, in tolerance of other groups and a readiness to include them in the commonweal. On this basic philosophy, however, has been superposed a whole gamut of opposite qualities and trends. As a result, human society is characterized by the most delicate, the most labile, equilibrium between a whole range of essentially contradictory characteristics. Not only is the point of balance between these opposing forces easily upset, but it varies in every group and nation of men. Opposite trends and the building material for opposite philosophies have been retained in the very fabric of our society.

These variations, however, cannot stray too far from a mean. It is precisely because the basic instincts of individual man are rooted in the associative form, that the totalitarian form of government which we have just fought a war to suppress was unacceptable to so many men. The totalitarian philosophy assumes that the instinctive nature of man is attuned wholly to the familial pattern of living, that the proper course of human evolution lies in an ever intensified drive toward the degree of regimentation and specialization of the brain cell or the leaf cell of an animal or a plant. Had that philosophy been correct, man would surely have lost no time, ages ago, in developing into a vertebrate ant as soon as his physiology and his mental endowment permitted it. But that development has certainly failed to occur in evolution, and the failure is deeply significant.

It is not easy to set intermediate goals — goals that must flow and change, that cannot be defined simply, in which good must be balanced against evil. Yet it is clear that, in virtue of the basic biological nature of man, in view of the course which was apparently set from the very beginning of his social evolution, this goal of balance between two very different social evolutions is the only one through which, in the long run, he can achieve happiness — perhaps the only goal by which he can ultimately survive.

The lability of his situation is his greatest peril, but it is also his greatest asset, in the flexibility which it gives him, in the multiplicity of solutions which it may make possible within the limits that his basic nature will permit. For our own people, of course, the finding of this point of equilibrium, the testing of it, the constant redetermination of its nature, must be the tasks of an eternally inquiring, eternally vigilant, eternally democratic body politic.

The maintenance of this point of equilibrium, however vital it may be, is not now the most important task before us. We have fought a war which, while it has undoubtedly failed to solve the problems of totalitarian ideology in a permanent way, has certainly laid the danger for a time. Now we are called upon to face a problem even larger and more vital, one which is even more significant in the social evolution of man. Is mankind cohesive? If so, can we evolve an entirely new level of human associative living — the world organization? This is truly the greatest evolutionary step which has faced mankind since the emergence of the modern nation.