|
|
It has been said that the way people lived 1900 was more similar to the style of life in Biblical times than to life in the present day. To substantiate this assertion, several examples have been offered: the fact that the common conveyance was the donkey in Christ’s time and the horse in 1900, as compared with the automobile today. Again, most major advances in medicine have been made since 1900: the Salk vaccine, insulin, tranquillisers, antibiotics, chemical contraception, to name but a few.
Our technological progress in the twentieth century has indeed been astounding, but we have failed to achieve a similar degree of social progress. When we compare the social problems of today with those in Biblical times, we find that they still are much the same and we still are trying to cope with them in the same basic ways. Some of our solutions are more systematic and perhaps more humanitarian, but otherwise not very different, certainly not very different in comparison to the great leaps in scientific technology in the same time.
Other social problems today testify to the need for social inventions. Our approach to unemployment is still largely to blame the unemployed for being without jobs. We know that our correctional institutions do not reform, but we do not know what to do about them. We have no answer to marriage breakdown, except separation and divorce.
We know we that we need research centres to find cures for medical ailments; but we do not see that we need experimental stations to invent new ways of dealing with our social ailments. We need research stations to create new ways of alleviating poverty, creating jobs, teaching languages, achieving interracial accord, reducing crime, increasing family harmony, over-coming addiction, curing mental illness, providing adequate housing, and settling labour disputes.
This is not to say we have made no progress in these areas in the past 2,000 years or 2,000,000 years. We have made some progress, thanks to the limited number of social inventions that we have made over the years, with little or no social support for the research activity.
We tend to see social problems like poverty, unemployment, crime and poor housing as resulting from failings in human nature that should be addressed educationally, moralistically, punitively or tolerantly, rather than ailments in need of more effective techniques of treatment.
We have vested interests in the way things are done now, and are apprehensive about the implications of any tampering with society. The disturbances in the courts and in the streets confirm in our minds that the people demanding changes in our social institutions are more intent on destroying our way of life than on constructively developing it. We do not see these disturbances as signs of the need to invent improvements for society.
Social scientists are wary of attempting to create social inventions and generally prefer to analyse change rather than invent ways to bring it about. Consequently, social science has contributed relatively few social institutions to the community. Over the past 70 years new social institutions have come from a wide variety of sources: the Boy Scouts were invented by a soldier and Alcoholics Anonymous by an alcoholic.