Ship Evolution and Social Evolution

Abstract

The first step requisite for a perception of the truth of all this is to note the mutual independence and contrast which always has prevailed between individual evolution, on the one hand, and social evolution, on the other. Individual evolution ended before history began. What history records is the active evolution of the form of society, while the form of the individual remained unchanged. Certain it is that, whenever we seek the highest type of human individual, whether in bodily, mental, or spiritual perfection, we by no means look to the latest product of the hour, but rather do we turn back through the centuries. However opinion may differ as to just which model to select, it is plain at a glance that, whereas the history of social evolution presents a series of the most violent wholesale contrasts, as between war and peace, between poverty and prosperity, between stability and revolution, and between decimation by war or pestilence and expansive social life, yet the evolution of the individual, if indeed any at all has occurred, has proceeded, relatively thereto, with glacierlike slowness. Since individual evolution has been so slow that one can barely discern any evolution of mind or body at all since the ancient Greeks, or of the spirit since Confucius, Brahma, Jesus, or Mohammed, how can we assume to explain all this myriad of rapid and violent contrasts in social conformation that have occurred meanwhile, during the last dozen or twenty centuries, except by a frank recognition of what is really the one most basic fact underlying all history, namely: that social evolution has proceeded entirely independently of any parallel evolution of the individual, whether nationally or racially averaged.