Imperial Germany & the Industrial Revolution. Thorstein Veblen

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СКАЧАТЬ and of the consequent rise, dominance and decay of successive systems of knowledge and belief. This is, of course, in its own right, a department of the arts of life that is full of polemical asperities and charged with frictional heat. Yet it lies sufficiently aside from the main line of interest involved in the present inquiry to admit of its being drawn on for illustrative material without its engendering heat in the main argument.

      In the successful departures in the domain of faith, as well as in those enterprises of devotion that have run a troubled course to an inglorious end, it will be seen that any such novel or aberrant scheme of habits of thought touching the supernatural, uniformly takes its rise as an affection of a certain small number of individuals, who, it may be presumed, have been thrown into a frame of mind propitious to this new fashion of thinking by some line of discipline, physical or spiritual, or rather both, that is not congruous with the previously accepted views on these matters. It will ordinarily be admitted by all but the converts that such pioneers in the domain of the supernatural are exceptional or erratic individuals, specially gifted personalities, perhaps even affected with pathological idiosyncrasies or subject to magical or prćternatural influences; that is to say, in any case, erratic variants of the commonplace racial type, whose aberrant temperamental bent has been reënforced by some peculiar discipline or exceptional experience, and so does not fall in with the currently received habits of thought in these premises. The resulting variant of the cult will then presently find a wider acceptance, in case the discipline exercised by current conditions is such as to bend the habits of thought of some appreciable number of persons with a bias that conforms to this novel drift of religious conceit. And if the new variant of the faith is fortunate enough to coincide passably with the current drift of workday habituation, the band of proselytes will presently multiply into such a formidable popular religious movement as to acquire general credibility and become an authentic formulation of the faith. Quid ab omnibus, quid ubique creditur, credendum est. Many will so come into line with the new religious conceit who could not conceivably have spun the same yarn out of their own wool under any provocation; and the variant may then even come to supplant the parent type of cult from which it first sprang.

      If it should be fortunate enough, again, to fit neatly into the scheme of use and wont in secular matters, as that scheme is being shaped by the current exigencies, the new cult may then become the only true faith, and so may become mandatory on all alike; particularly is this likely to happen if at the same time it lends itself to the ends of a ruling class who possess or can find the means of enforcing its observance. This last proposition may also be turned about; if the animus embodied in the new cult is effectually borne up by the discipline of current workday experience at large, persons strongly imbued with the bias of the cult are likely to be thrown up by popular acclaim into responsible offices of discretion, and so come to combine the promptings of their own interest with their pious convictions in its support and bring it to the mature phase of a self-evident and intolerant infallibility.

      In the engendering and growth of habitual ideals and convictions touching matters of use and wont at large, or in any given connection, the run of events is not of a character essentially different from the circumstances that surround the inception and spread of these religious verities. The changes that alter the face of national life have small beginnings; the traceable initial process having commonly set in with some overt act on the part of a small and distinctive group of persons, who will then presently be credited with insight and initiative in case the move proves itself by success. Should the movement fail of acceptance and consequent effect, these spokesmen of its propaganda would then prove to have been fanciful project-makers, perhaps of unsound mind.

      To describe the course of such a matter by analogy, the symptoms of the new frame of mind will first come in evidence in the attitude of some one individual, who, by congenital proclivity and through an exceptional degree of exposure, is peculiarly liable to its infection. In so far as the like susceptibility is prevalent among the rest of the population, and so far as circumstances of habituation favor the new conceit, it will then presently find lodgment in the habits of thought of an increasing number of persons, - particularly among those whom the excursive play of a hybrid heredity has thrown up as temperamental variants peculiarly apt for its reception, or whom the discipline of life bends with exceptional rigor in the direction of its bias.

      Should the new idea also come to have the countenance of those in authority or in a position to claim popular deference, its vogue will be greatly helped out by imitation, and perhaps by compulsory observance, and so it may in a relatively short time become a matter of course and of common sense. But the reservation always stands over, that in such a hybrid population the same prevalent variability of temperament that so favors the infiltration and establishment of new ideas will at the same time render their tenure correspondingly precarious.

      The point may be illustrated by the rise and decline of warlike ideals from time to time among modern nations; though it is the rise and rule of these ideals, rather than their decline, that will best illustrate the point. The decline of such ideals, and of the patriotic animosity in which they find outward expression, would appear to be a matter of reversion through neglect rather than of aggressive indoctrination through propaganda and suitable discipline. The cause of peace and amity appears not to be served by polemical propaganda, any more than by a strenuous warlike preparation for “keeping the peace.”

      There is always an appreciable warlike animus present in these modern nations; necessarily so, since their governmental establishments are necessarily of a coercive character and their ruling classes are animated with dynastic ambitions. In this matter the republican states uncritically imitate the dynastic ones so effectually as to make no grave exception from the rule. The historical tradition and precedents run that way. So that the ferment is always at hand. But in the absence of special provocation the commonplace body of the population, being occupied with other interests and having no natural bent for fighting in order to fight, will by easy neglect drift into peaceable habits of thought, and so come habitually to think of human relations, even of international relations, in terms of peace, if not of amity.

      Temperamentally erratic individuals, however, and such as are schooled by special class traditions or predisposed by special class interest, will readily see the merits of warlike enterprise and keep alive the tradition of national animosity. Patriotism, piracy and prerogative converge to a common issue. Where it happens that an individual gifted with an extravagant congenital bias of this character is at the same time exposed to circumstances favoring the development of a truculent megalomania and is placed in such a position of irresponsible authority and authentic prerogative as will lend countenance to his idiosyncrasies, his bent may easily gather vogue, become fashionable, and with due persistence and shrewd management come so ubiquitously into habitual acceptance as in effect to throw the population at large into an enthusiastically bellicose frame of mind. Such is particularly apt to be the consequence in case of a people whose historical traditions run in terms of dynastic strategy and whose workday scheme of institutions is drawn on lines of coercion, prerogative and loyalty.

       It is only with the new departure of 1870 that Germany has come to take its place in the general apprehension as a singularly striking, not to say unique, instance of exuberant growth. The history of its unfolding power, of course, is not contained in this brief interval that lies within the memory of men still living; but the new departure by force of which the life-history of the German nation has come to diverge so notably from the commonplace run of events in modern Europe can after all not be pushed back far beyond that epoch. Anyone who seeks a precise period from which to date this epoch of German history will have difficulty in deciding on any given point earlier than the year named. And what had taken place in the way of an unfolding of national forces before that date is of great significance only for its bearing on what has taken place since then.

      The visible achievements of the German people during this historical period, so far as they are amenable to statistical statement, are a gain in population, in industrial efficiency, and in military force. Other gains are claimed, perhaps even of greater moment in the apprehension of the spokesmen, and there is no inclination here to discount or minimise their achievements СКАЧАТЬ