Garnered sheaves Book

He's not a "social reformer" he says, but a "new former". What this means is that he swore at some point in the 1920s that he would do some thing practical instead of taking what he saw as a theoretical political position. This book is his homage to his avoidance strategy.

He imagines in this short work that if all people are educated then no one would do the wrong thing. We would do the right thing, the technically and scientifically correct thing, because we would know what to do. He endeavours to posit this as his answer to socialism, Marxism and Communism.

You have to step back and realize this is the cold war when he is writing. To be safe, mentioning communism or socialism meant in the USA you had to condemn it. This safety though stood in the way of making some technical progress just in case it seemed too socialist, which for a practical guy such as Fuller he had to find a way around the ideological blockade on progressively scientific and technical advanced development.

So he dispenses with ideology, planning and anything that seems to say we need to work together instead of being rugged individualists. So he says we will naturally want to do the right thing with each other if we had a good education. No particular ideology would be necessary.

If you have heard the argument before its not surprising. Dickens made the argument almost exactly the same in his numerous sentimental novels. If people were just nicer to each other, more considerate and understood each other better, then we wouldn't need any more social reform than that.

All the good will and education in the world will not make Fuller's argument hold water. We need to be better organized and recognize that some advanced planning processes on a mass even global scale are necessary to modern life. Call it what you will it is more than mere good will and education can provide.

Still Fuller was a genius and his visions of technical advance and the future possibilities of science are both poetic and practical. Its hard not to find his optimism charming.