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

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СКАЧАТЬ the like elements of habitual conduct are carried over from one community or one culture to another, leading to further complications. Cumulatively, therefore, habit creates usages, customs, conventions, preconceptions, composite principles of conduct that run back only indirectly to the native predispositions of the race, but that may affect the working-out of any given line of endeavour in much the same way as if these habitual elements were of the nature of a native bias.

      Along with this body of derivative standards and canons of conduct, and handed on by the same discipline of habituation, goes a cumulative body of knowledge, made up in part of matter-of-fact acquaintance with phenomena and in greater part of conventional wisdom embodying certain acquired predilections and preconceptions current in the community. Workmanship proceeds on the accumulated knowledge so received and current, and turns it to account in dealing with the material means of life. Whatever passes current in this way as knowledge of facts is turned to account as far as may be, and so it is worked into a customary scheme of ways and means, a system of technology, into which new elements of information or acquaintance with the nature and use of things are incorporated, assimilated as they come.

      The scheme of technology so worked out and carried along in the routine of getting a living will be serviceable for current use and have a substantial value for a further advance in technological efficiency somewhat in proportion as the knowledge so embodied in technological prac-tice is effectually of the nature of matter-of-fact. Much of the information derived from experience in industry is likely to be of this matter-of-fact nature; but much of the knowledge made use of for the technological purpose is also of the nature of convention, inference and authentic opinion, arrived at on quite other grounds than workmanlike experience. This alien body of information, or pseudo-information, goes into the grand total of human knowledge quite as freely as any matter of fact, and it is therefore also necessarily taken up and assimilated in that technological equipment of knowledge and proficiency by use of which the work in hand is to be done.

      But the experience which yields this useful and pseudo-useful knowledge is got under the impulsion and guidance of one and another of the instincts with which man is endowed, and takes the shape and color given it by the instinctive bias in whose service it is acquired. At the same time, whatever its derivation, the knowledge acquired goes into the aggregate of information drawn on for the ways and means of workmanship. Therefore the habits formed in any line of experience, under the guidance of any given instinctive disposition, will have their effect on the conduct and aims of the workman in all his work and play; so that progress in technological matters is by no means an outcome of the sense of workmanship alone.

      It follows that in all their working the human instincts are in this way incessantly subject to mutual “contamination,” whereby the working of any one is incidentally affected by the bias and proclivities inherent in all the rest; and in so far as these current habits and customs in this way come to reënforce the predispositions comprised under any one instinct or any given group of instincts, the bias so accentuated comes to pervade the habits of thought of all the members of the community and gives a corresponding obliquity to the technological groundwork of the community.

      So, for instance, addiction to magical, superstitious or religious conceptions will necessarily have its effect on the conceptions and logic employed in technological theory and practice, and will impair its efficiency by that much. A people much given to punctilios of rank and respect of persons will in some degree carry these habitual predilections over into the field of workmanship and will allow considerations of authenticity, of personal weight and consequence, to decide questions of technological expediency; so that ideas which have none but a putative efficiency may in this way come in for a large share in the state of the industrial arts. A people whose culture has for any reason taken on a pronounced coercive (predatory) character, with rigorous class distinctions, an arbitrary governmental control, formidable gods and an authoritative priesthood, will have its industrial organisation and its industrial arts fashioned to meet the demands and the logic of these institutions. Such an institutional situation exerts a great and pervasive constraint on the technological scheme in which workmanship takes effect under its rule, both directly by prescribing the things to do and the time, place and circumstance of doing them, and indirectly through the habits of thought induced in the working population living under its rule.

      Innovation, the utilisation of newly acquired technological insight, is greatly hindered by such institutional requirements that are enforced by other impulses than the sense of workmanship.

      In the known lower cultures such institutional complications as might be expected greatly to hinder or deflect the sense of workmanship are commonly neither large, rigorous nor obvious. Something of the kind there apparently always is, in the way, for instance, of the customary prerogatives and perquisites of the older men, as well as their tutelary oversight of the younger generation and of the common interests of the group.¹⁸ When this rule of seniority is elaborated into such set forms as the men’s (secret) societies, with exacting initiatory ceremonies and class tabus,¹⁹ its effect on workday life is often very considerable, even though the community may show little that can fairly be classed as autocracy, chieftainship, or even aristocratic government. In many or all of these naive and early developments of authority, and perhaps especially in those cultures where the control takes this inchoate form of a customary “gerontocracy,”²⁰ its immediate effect is that an abiding sense of authenticity comes to pervade the routine of daily life, such as effectually to obstruct all innovation, whether in the ways and means of work or in the conduct of life more at large. Control by a gerontocracy appears to reach its best development and to run with the fullest consistency and effect in communities where an appreciable degree of predatory exploit is habitual, and the inference is ready, and at least plausible, that this institution is sub-stantially of a predatory origin, that the principles (habits of thought) on which it rests are an outgrowth of pugnacity, self-aggrandisement and fear. Under favouring conditions of friction and jealousy between groups these propensities will settle into institutional habits of authority and deference, and so long as the resultant exercise of control is vested by custom in the class of elders the direct consequence is a marked abatement of initiative throughout the community and a consequent appearance of conservatism and stagnation in its technological scheme as well as in the customary usages under whose guidance the community lives.²¹ So these instinctive propensities which have no primary significance in the way of workmanship may come to count very materially in shaping the group’s technological equipment of ideas and in deflecting the sense of workmanship from the naive pursuit of material efficiency.

      The rule of the elders appears to have been extremely prevalent in the earlier phases of culture. So much so that it may even be set down as the most characteristic trait of the upper savagery and of the lower barbarism; whether it takes the elaborately institutionalised form of a settled gerontocracy, as among the Australian blacks, with sharply defined class divisions and perquisites and a consistent subjection of women and children; or the looser customary rule of the Elders, with a degree of deference and circumspection on the part of the younger generation and an uncertain conventional inferiority of women and children, as seen among the pagans of the

      Malay peninsula,²² the Eskimo of the Arctic seaboard,²³ the Mincopies of the Andamans,²⁴ or, on a somewhat higher level, the Pueblo Indians of the American Southwest.²⁵ Illustrative instances of such an inchoate organisation of authority are very widely distributed, but the communities that follow such a naive scheme of life are commonly neither large, powerful, wealthy, nor much in the public eye. The presumption is that the sense of authenticity which pervades these and similar cultures, amounting to a degree of tabu on innovation, has had much to do with the notably slow advance of technology among savage peoples. Such appears presumably to have been the prevalent run of the facts throughout the stone age in all quarters of the Earth.

      It is not altogether plain just what are the innate predispositions chiefly involved in this primitive social control which at its untroubled best develops into a “gerontocracy.” There can apparently be little question but that its prime motive force is the parental bent, expressing СКАЧАТЬ