Saving the world and the paradox of urgency

[Edward Schreiber]

What would JL have to say?



POLITICAL SOCIOMETRY by J.L. Moreno

Sociometric revolutions do not promise violent and rapid results.  
They dig deep and their success depends upon a new learning process  
applied to small groups. Similar to the infant, mankind will mature  
only step by step and to the degree to which sociometric  
consciousness will refashion our social institutions, the structural  
readiness of mankind for a world society will ripen.  Many wars and  
social upheavals will torture its sick body. In this transition the  
doctor may be more important than the engineer.
(pp 167)

Sociometric Thesis

Human society has a structure of its own which is not identical with  
the social order or the form of government currently in power. Its  
structure is influenced but never entirely determined by the  
instrument in charge of its affairs, for instance the state. The  
state may “vanish” but the underlying sociodynamic structure of  
society persists in one form or another. It is into the structure of  
the socius therefore, that a revolutionary effort has to put its  
teeth if a lasting and true cure of social ills is to be effected.


Sociometry has developed two types of instruments, instruments for  
diagnosing social structures and instruments for changing them. The  
sociometric test, psychodrama, sociodrama and axiodrama among others  
can be used for diagnosis as well as for social revolution.

The oldest and most numerous proletariat of human society is the  
sociometric proletariat. It consists of all the people who suffer  
from one form of misery or other, psychological misery, social  
misery, economic misery, political misery, racial misery, religious  
misery. There are numerous individuals and groups whose volume of  
attractions, or role expansion, of spontaneity and productivity are  
far beneath their needs and their ability to consummate them. The  
world is full of isolated, rejected, rejecting, unreciprocated and  
neglected individuals and groups.

The sociometric proletariat cannot be “saved” by economic  
revolutions. It existed in primitive and precapitalistic society, it  
exists in democratic societies, and in socialist Russia.

Sociometry is the sociology of the people, by the people and for the  
people.  It teaches that human society cannot be changed by indirect,  
mechanical manipulation or by the arbiter of force. Whatever the type  
of government or social institutions coerced upon the people, whether  
they are cooperative communities, communistic, democratic, autocratic  
or anarchistic types of government, sooner or later they lose their  
hold upon the people. The people discard them, if they do not root in  
the productive will of the people and if they are not created with  
the full participation of every individual member.

In order to change the social world social experiments have to be so  
designed that they can produce change; in order to produce change the  
people themselves have to be included in its operation. You cannot  
change the world ex-post-facto,  you must do it now and here, with  
and through the people.  Marx had not the slightest intention of  
developing an experimental method for the social sciences but he has  
been the only pre-sociometric sociologist who came close to solving  
the problem. It is true that the social revolutions which he  
instigated ended in failure –in their major aims—but this does not  
contradict the fact that his revolutionary theory was the nearest to  
an experimental method in the social sciences before the advent of  
the sociometric method in our own time. How could governments and  
responsible statesmen ever take the world of social scientists  
seriously, considering the triviality of their findings and the  
aimlessness of their experimental designs. They took Marx, Engels,  
and Lenin seriously because they tried to change the world.

The dilemma of Marxism can be summed up in one phrase: its ignorance  
of the dynamic social structure of human society. It ascribes the  
deep resistance to change and revolution to the property owners, the  
capitalistic class. It is not aware that this deep resistance comes  
directly from the social structure and if the true cause for it  
simmers in the mind of some of the flowers of Marx, they do not make  
an adequate effort to take it into account.

Sociometric investigations suggest the existence of residual social  
structures which are traceable to the following phenomena: a) an  
embryonic social structure which can already be noticed in subhuman  
societies; b) every social order, after it has had its reign, does  
not disappear entirely but leaves its mark upon the social structures  
which it has shaped. The cumulative effects of these “hangovers” plus  
the above-described embryonic development produce a total impact  
which explains the resistance against change.

The social experimenter cannot know all the factors entering the  
situation nor all the changes in these factors which may take place  
between the time he considers the experiment up to the time he  
executes it, and he cannot know of new factors which may enter the  
situation in the course of the experiment itself.  The sociometric  
experiments escape this dilemma, they are the experimenter and the  
experimental subject in one.  Even if they do not know of all the  
factors entering their situation it is inherent in their feelings,  
their actions and interaction-actions and it must come out in their  
experimental designs and revolutionary transaction.  It may be at  
times imperfect and unprecise but it is an experiment in vivo,  
consciously and systematically carried out by the whole group.

Social nature has a sociometric character, that is why sociomtery  
works. The solution is to replace the experimental method of Bacon  
and Mill which was constructed to meet the requirements of physics,  
by an experimental method which is able to cross examine the reality  
of social change.  The idea of setting up control group in the realm  
of social action is pregnant with artificiality and abnormality and  
bound to distort the results or make them trivial.  Spontaneous  
control groups are possible, but never outside, only within a  
sociometric atmosphere. The replacement is accomplished of reversal.  
Mankind itself, in a literal and concrete sense of the word becomes  
experimenter and the former autocratic experimenter becomes one of  
its two billion co-thinking participants.

(pp 167-169)



Sociometry, Experimental Method and the Science of Society

J.L. Moreno

1951

Beacon House, Inc.










  
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