Complete control over the physical and psychical and social structure of the individual or the group.
— Charles Merriam, Social Science Research Council
Charles Merriam of the Social Science Research Council was a proponent of social control and social engineering to direct human development and evolution. He envisioned a brave new world overseen by social scientists, who would form a new humanity. He redefined politics in terms of social science, ‘the new politics which is to emerge in the new world: that of the conscious control of human evolution…’126 Technology would create ‘international obligations’, and ‘the ancient idea of the state’ would be destroyed or modified.127 A ‘new world of science’ would allow ‘a new race of beings’ to ‘master nature’ on a universal scale.
Merriam announced the dogmatic breach between the social and biological sciences, stating that ‘social training and the environment’ can transcend any superficial differences. If genetics shows otherwise, then eugenics can eliminate undesirable traits,128 while psychoanalysis has a large role to play in ‘intelligent social control’,129 and in the future the understanding of biochemistry might enable the bio-engineering of individuals and populations (aided by social psychology).130 The study of chromosomes might allow for induced variations by conditioning; ‘this is the key to social training’.131 The study of child behaviour will enable the social scientist to determine the ‘political attitudes and interests of the later citizen’.132 Foreshadowing The Authoritarian Personality and other studies of the Frankfurt School et al, Merriam suggested that one’s politics might be predicted by charting one’s ‘traits, habits, responses, behavior’, and allow for the possibilities of being ‘controlled or modified’.133
These gains in science will replace the laws and customs of tradition. This is the new ‘democratic’ science that replaces the former questions as to whether a group is an ‘organism’, or has a ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’,134 with the study of humanity as ‘units of measure and comparison’.135 The counting-house mentality came to dominate science; English utilitarianism and materialism had overthrown the few remaining vestiges of tradition. It is here that the dichotomy between Tradition and Modernism becomes most apparent; between Right and Left, organic community versus civil society.
Darwinian evolution would eventually destroy whatever vestiges remained of traditional societies. Because evolution is based on ‘variation and adaptation’ as part of a ‘ceaseless process’,136 humanity will be placed in a continual state of flux, without the roots that tradition maintains. The world is one of ‘unceasing reorganization and readjustment’.137 This requires the elimination of cultural heritages and customs that are a hindrance to the ‘new world’. The maintenance of institutions in the past and the present has ‘depended on a backward look, upon an assiduous cultivation of traditions and habits transmitted to each new generation by the old as the accumulated wisdom of the group… Perhaps some magic was necessary to produce social and political cohesiveness, and prevent perpetual turmoil’. However, with the new social sciences it is possible to quickly ‘create customs’. It is possible to ‘materially modify the whole attitude of the group’ within about twenty years. If necessary ‘new values, interests and attitudes’ can be created ‘by the educational and social process’.138 God is just a type of ‘magic’, and is now displaced by the new faith in science.139
It might be discovered ‘what type of environment’ is required to produce a ‘specific type of man’.140 The new social science transcends time and place and universalises all in the name of ‘democracy’, a word used often by Merriam, even when he is discussing ways in which humans can be modified. A ‘calamity of the first order’ awaits should the new insights of science fall into the ‘hands of medievalists’, ‘with the tremendous possibilities in the way of thoroughgoing social and political control of individuals’. The urgent task is for ‘the social and political education of the next generation’, forming ‘a new majority with an entirely new political education, with new political values, attitudes, interests, capacities. We would re-create the world politically within some twenty years, were we minded and equipped to do so’.141 It is up to social science to determine what constitutes a good citizen in this new world.142 The new world will be one that goes beyond the League of Nations [precursor to the United Nations Organisation] and results in the ‘interpenetration of national cultures’,143 or globalisation as it is now called, in a ‘new world’, ‘governed under a system of social and political control’,144 sustained by a ‘trained electorate’, a government of technocrats, and ‘the science of social control’,145 ‘co-ordinating, class, races and groups of human beings’ across the world.146
The question Merriam asked of his fellow social scientists and financial patrons was as to ‘what use’ shall be made of this ‘complete control over the physical and psychical and social structure of the individual or the group..?’147
It does not matter whether any of this is called a ‘conspiracy’. The facts are that the oligarchic foundations launched and promoted the social sciences under the auspices of Merriam, and others, whose doctrine was that of world-wide control through social engineering. That this doctrine accords with the policies and outlook of the foundations that backed these academics can be readily ascertained by perusing their publicly available annual reports. There was and remains a convergence of aims and ideologies, and the social sciences continue to receive the funding to promote these.
In 1954 the social sciences came under critical scrutiny by the congressional investigation of the tax-exempt foundations chaired by Congressman B. Carroll Reece. Several dissident sociologists testified before the committee and others submitted letters, as to the dubious methods being used by social scientists. The most famous of these was the sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, who was at the time of the Reece hearings president of Harvard University. Reece committee counsel Rene Wormser paraphrased in his book Foundations: Their Power and Influence Sorokin’s written testimony:
Professor Sorokin, in his Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology, puts it this way: ‘Most of the defects of modem psychosocial science are due to a clumsy imitation of the physical sciences. Most of the numerous ‘experimental’ studies in sociology and psychology are pseudo-experimental, and have a very remote relationship, if any, to real experimental method. We should by all means use a real experimental method in our studies wherever it can be applied, and the more it is used the better. But we should not fool ourselves and others. They do not and cannot contribute to the real knowledge of psychosocial phenomena. If anything, they corrode the real experimental method and psychosocial science itself”. …
Professor Sorokin ridicules the wide use of the poll-taking method of operation, calling it unscientific, vague, indeterminate and, more often than not, ‘hearsay’ in its product.
Even their ‘hearsay’ material is ordinarily collected not by the investigators themselves, but by their assistants and hired pollsters. Imagine physicists or chemists operating in this fashion and then tabulating the collected opinions and giving the results in the form of various statistical tables and other paraphernalia to point to the ‘objectivity’ of their ‘scientific’ and ‘operational’ techniques. Moreover, says Professor Sorokin, ‘what is true or false cannot be decided by majority vote’.
‘The tidal wave’ of the quantitative, empirical method of research is now so high, says Professor Sorokin, ‘that the contemporary stage of the psychosocial sciences can be properly called the age of quantophobia and numerology’.
The ‘comptometer compulsion’, the ‘fact-finding mania’ of these foundation-supported ‘social scientists’ induce them to accept the principle of moral relativity — that moral laws are only relative — ‘the facts’ speak for themselves and must dictate moral law; whatever ‘the facts’ disclose is right.
As with the vilification of Senator Joseph McCarthy during this era, Reece and his witnesses also endured much. Congressman Reece stated before Congress the year following the conclusion of his investigations that ‘the number of interruptions and the intensity of the vituperations heaped upon these witnesses’, and on members of the committee, by Congressman Wayne Hays, who had stymied the committee’s investigations into the funding of sexologist Dr. Alfred Kinsey, ‘was without precedent in the history of Congressional investigations’.148 For a time the oligarchy went into a panic and still recall the era with anxiety.