THE COLLECTED WORKS OF THORSTEIN VEBLEN: Business Theories, Economic Articles & Essays. Thorstein Veblen

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СКАЧАТЬ and the natural increase of the soldiery is perceptibly lowered. The service in the low latitudes, as contrasted with Europe, for instance, is an extrahazardous occupation. The death rate, indeed, exceeds the birth rate. But in the more advanced industrial communities, of which the English and American are typical, the service is a volunteer service; which means that those who go to the wars seek this employment by their own choice. That is to say, the human material so drawn off is automatically selected on the basis of a peculiar spiritual fitness for this predatory employment; they are, on the whole, of a more malevolent and vagabond temper, have more of the ancient barbarian animus, than those who are left at home to carry on the work of the home community and propagate the home population. And since the troops and ships are officered by the younger sons of the conservative leisure class and by the buccaneering scions of the class of professional politicians, a natural election of the same character takes effect also as regards the officers. There results a gradual selective elimination of that old-fashioned element of the population that is by temperament best suited for the old-fashioned institutional system of status and servile organization.¹⁶⁸

This selective elimination of conservative elements would in the long run leave each succeeding generation of the community less predatory and less emulative in temper, less well endowed for carrying on its life under the servile institutions proper to a militant regime. But, for the present and the nearer future, there can be little doubt but that this selective shaping of the community's animus is greatly outweighed by the contrary trend given by the discipline of warlike preoccupations. What helps to keep the balance in favor of the reversional trend is the cultural leaven carried back into the home community by the veterans. These presumptive past masters in the archaic virtues keep themselves well in the public eye and serve as exemplars to the impressionable members of the community, particularly to the less mature.¹⁶⁹

      The net outcome of the latter-day return to warlike enterprise is, no doubt, securely to be rated as fostering a reversion to national ideals of servile status and to institutions of a despotic character. On the whole and for the present, it makes for conservatism, ultimately for reversion.

      The quest of profits leads to a predatory national policy. The resulting large fortunes call for a massive government apparatus to secure the accumulations, on the one hand, and for large and conspicuous opportunities to spend the resulting income, on the other hand; which means a militant, coercive home administration and something in the way of an imperial court life a dynastic fountain of honor and a courtly bureau of ceremonial amenities. Such an ideal is not simply a moralist's day-dream; it is a sound business proposition, in that it lies on the line of policy along which the business interests are moving in their own behalf. If national (that is to say dynastic) ambitions and warlike aims, achievements, spectacles, and discipline be given a large place in the community's life, together with the concomitant coercive police surveillance, then there is a fair hope that the disintegrating trend of the machine discipline may be corrected. The regime of status, fealty, prerogative, and arbitrary command would guide the institutional growth back into the archaic conventional ways and give the cultural structure something of that secure dignity and stability which it had before the times, not only of socialistic vapors, but of natural rights as well. Then, too, the rest of the spiritual furniture of the ancient regime shall presumably he reinstated; materialistic scepticism may yield the ground to a romantic philosophy, and the populace and the scientists alike may regain something of that devoutness and faith in preternatural agencies which they have recently been losing. As the discipline of prowess again comes to its own, conviction and contentment with whatever is authentic may return to distracted Christendom, and may once more give something of a sacramental serenity to men's outlook on the present and the future.

But authenticity and sacramental dignity belong neither with the machine technology, nor with modern science, nor with business traffic. In so far as the aggressive politics and the aristocratic ideals currently furthered by the business community are worked out freely, their logical outcome is an abatement of those cultural features that distinguish modern times from what went before, including a decline of business enterprise itself.¹⁷⁰

      How imminent such a consummation is to be accounted is a question of how far the unbusinesslike and unscientific discipline brought in by aggressive politics may be expected to prevail over the discipline of the machine industry. It is difficult to believe that the machine technology and the pursuit of the material sciences will be definitively superseded, for the reason, among others, that any community which loses these elements of its culture thereby loses that brute material force that gives it strength against its rivals. And it is equally difficult to imagine how any one of the communities of Christendom can avoid entering the funnel of business and dynastic politics, and so running through the process whereby the materialistic animus is eliminated. Which of the two antagonistic factors may prove the stronger in the long run is something of a blind guess; but the calculable future seems to belong to the one or the other. It seems possible to say this much, that the full dominion of business enterprise is necessarily a transitory dominion. It stands to lose in the end whether the one or the other of the two divergent cultural tendencies wins, because it is incompatible with the ascendancy of either.

       Footnotes:

1Cf. Cooke Taylor, Modern Factory System, pp. 74-77.

2Even in work that lies so near the fortuities of animate nature as dairying, stock-breeding, and the improvement of crop plants, a determinate, reasoned routine replaces the rule of thumb. By mechanical control of his materials the dairyman, e.g., selectively determines the rate and kind of the biological processes that change his raw material into finished product. The stock-breeder's aim is to reduce the details of the laws of heredity, as they apply within his field, to such definite terms as will afford him a technologically accurate routine of breeding, and then to apply this technological breeding process to the production of such varieties of stock as will, with the nearest approach to mechanical exactness and expedition, turn the raw materials of field and meadow into certain specified kinds and grades of finished product. The like is true of the plant-breeders. Agricultural experiment stations and bureaus, in all civilized countries, are laboratories working toward an effective technological control of biological factors, with a view to eliminating fortuitous, disserviceable, and useless elements from the processes of agricultural production, and so reducing these processes to a calculable, expeditious, and wasteless routine.

3Cf. Sombart, Moderne Kapitalismus, vol. II, ch. III.

4Twelfth Census (U.S.): "Manufactures," pt. I, p. xxxvi.

5 E.g., lumber, coal, paper, wool and cotton, grain, leather, cattle for the packing houses. All these and many others are to an increasing extent spoken for, delivered, and disposed of under well-defined staple grades as to quality and dimensions, weight and efficiency.

6Well shown in the case of wheat and flour; but the like is true as regards the stocks of other commodities carried by producers, jobbers, retailers, and consumers.

7Well illustrated by the interdependence of the various branches of iron and steel production.

8As seen, e.g., in the dependence of oil production or oil refining on the pipe lines and their management, or in the dependence of the prairie farmers on the railway lines, etc.

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