Book X:
"The Law of Human Progress"

Chapter 1: "The Current Theory of Human Progress—
Its Insufficiency"
Chapter 2: "Difference in Civilization—To What Due"
Chapter 3: "The Law of Human Progress"
Chapter 4: "How Modern Civilization May Decline"
Chapter 5: "The Central Truth"

Chapter 1:
"The Current Theory of Human Progress—Its Insufficiency"

1. What is the difference of kind that distinguishes the lowest societies of mankind from the highest animals? 476

The power of improvement, which makes man the progressive animal.

2. Why do some groups of men show this power more than others? 477

Neither race, nor location and climate, are consistently associated with superior achievement. "All these differences are evidently connected with social development."

3. Where does George depart from Darwin, Spencer, and the social evolutionists? 478

George does not see gradual race improvement through natural selection as a significant force compared with social development. George also objects to the fatalism, materialism and predestinarianism of evolutionists like Darwin, Huxley, Spencer and Marx.
George's position was greatly strengthened by his alliance with Alfred Russell Wallace who had discovered and published the theory of natural selection simultaneously with Darwin.

4. What does natural selection fail to explain? 485

The petrifaction and decline of civilizations. "The earth is the tomb of dead empires, no less than of dead men." Arnold Toynbee devoted his life to illustrating that theme in his many-volume A Study of History. (Toynbee's father, ironically, had died of a stroke suffered while delivering a lecture attacking George.)

Top

******************

Chapter 2:
"Difference in Civilization—To What Due"

1. What determines national character? 494

"Now, it is this body of traditions, beliefs, customs, laws, habits, and association, which arise in every community and which surround every individual—this 'super-organic environment,' as Herbert Spencer calls it, that, as I take it, is the great element in determining national character. It is this, rather than hereditary transmission …." This holds for the mental even more than for the physical constitution of man (495).

2. Through all this nature/nurture controversy, what is "the great fact with which we are concerned"? 504

"That differences in civilization are not differences which inhere in the individuals, but differences which inhere in the society." I.e., its "web of knowledge, beliefs, customs, language, tastes, institutions, and laws."
"Though it is this that often offers the most serious obstacles to progress, it is this that makes progress possible. … This is to the race what memory is to the individual. … Human progress goes on as the advances made by one generation are in this way secured as the common property of the next, and made the starting point for new advances."

Top

*******************

Chapter 3:
"The Law of Human Progress"

1. What causes progress? 507

"Mental power is ... the motor of progress, and men tend to advance in proportion to the mental power expended in progression ... (which is) what is left after what is required for non-progressive purposes ... (which are) maintenance and conflict.
Equality (meaning equal opportunity, or justice), is necessary to minimize conflict. (Cf. today's slogan "If you want peace, work for justice.")
Filling out tax forms, lobbying in Albany and Washington, protecting turf, bureaucratic infighting that wastes so much professorial time, applying for grants, all these silly zero-sum games we play by choice or necessity, these waste our powers while life slips by and we miss our destinies.

2. How does George sum it up? What is the law of progress? 508

Association in equality is the law of progress.

Top

*******************

Chapter 4:
"How Modern Civilization May Decline"

1. How may modern civilization decline? 528

From unequal distribution of wealth and power, causing corruption of political democracy with demagogues serving the rich while catering to the masses. The nouveaux riches have all the power of an aristocracy, with none of its virtues (534).
Whence shall come the new barbarians? From the slums. How shall learning perish? Men will cease to read (538). Art will become decadent; crime and suicide increase; religion will die, and nothing arise to take its place. Shall we put that into an econometric model? Not likely, but we know those are more important matters than most of what does go into the models, and all of what comes out.

Top

*******************

Chapter 5:
"The Central Truth"

1. Why does the reform George proposes qualify as a 'true reform'? (545)

“It will make all other reforms easier.”

*******************