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+Project Gutenberg's The Theory of the Leisure Class, by Thorstein Veblen
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Theory of the Leisure Class
+
+Author: Thorstein Veblen
+
+Posting Date: August 6, 2008 [EBook #833]
+Release Date: March, 1997
+Last updated: January 21, 2011
+Last updated: November 14, 2012
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Reed
+
+
+
+
+
+THE THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS
+
+by Thorstein Veblen
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter One ~~ Introductory
+
+
+The institution of a leisure class is found in its best development at
+the higher stages of the barbarian culture; as, for instance, in feudal
+Europe or feudal Japan. In such communities the distinction between
+classes is very rigorously observed; and the feature of most striking
+economic significance in these class differences is the distinction
+maintained between the employments proper to the several classes.
+The upper classes are by custom exempt or excluded from industrial
+occupations, and are reserved for certain employments to which a degree
+of honour attaches. Chief among the honourable employments in any
+feudal community is warfare; and priestly service is commonly second to
+warfare. If the barbarian community is not notably warlike, the priestly
+office may take the precedence, with that of the warrior second. But the
+rule holds with but slight exceptions that, whether warriors or priests,
+the upper classes are exempt from industrial employments, and this
+exemption is the economic expression of their superior rank. Brahmin
+India affords a fair illustration of the industrial exemption of both
+these classes. In the communities belonging to the higher barbarian
+culture there is a considerable differentiation of sub-classes within
+what may be comprehensively called the leisure class; and there is a
+corresponding differentiation of employments between these sub-classes.
+The leisure class as a whole comprises the noble and the priestly
+classes, together with much of their retinue. The occupations of the
+class are correspondingly diversified; but they have the common economic
+characteristic of being non-industrial. These non-industrial upper-class
+occupations may be roughly comprised under government, warfare,
+religious observances, and sports.
+
+At an earlier, but not the earliest, stage of barbarism, the leisure
+class is found in a less differentiated form. Neither the class
+distinctions nor the distinctions between leisure-class occupations are
+so minute and intricate. The Polynesian islanders generally show this
+stage of the development in good form, with the exception that, owing
+to the absence of large game, hunting does not hold the usual place of
+honour in their scheme of life. The Icelandic community in the time of
+the Sagas also affords a fair instance. In such a community there is
+a rigorous distinction between classes and between the occupations
+peculiar to each class. Manual labour, industry, whatever has to
+do directly with the everyday work of getting a livelihood, is the
+exclusive occupation of the inferior class. This inferior class includes
+slaves and other dependents, and ordinarily also all the women. If there
+are several grades of aristocracy, the women of high rank are commonly
+exempt from industrial employment, or at least from the more vulgar
+kinds of manual labour. The men of the upper classes are not only
+exempt, but by prescriptive custom they are debarred, from all
+industrial occupations. The range of employments open to them is rigidly
+defined. As on the higher plane already spoken of, these employments are
+government, warfare, religious observances, and sports. These four lines
+of activity govern the scheme of life of the upper classes, and for
+the highest rank--the kings or chieftains--these are the only kinds of
+activity that custom or the common sense of the community will allow.
+Indeed, where the scheme is well developed even sports are accounted
+doubtfully legitimate for the members of the highest rank. To the lower
+grades of the leisure class certain other employments are open, but they
+are employments that are subsidiary to one or another of these typical
+leisure-class occupations. Such are, for instance, the manufacture
+and care of arms and accoutrements and of war canoes, the dressing
+and handling of horses, dogs, and hawks, the preparation of sacred
+apparatus, etc. The lower classes are excluded from these secondary
+honourable employments, except from such as are plainly of an industrial
+character and are only remotely related to the typical leisure-class
+occupations.
+
+If we go a step back of this exemplary barbarian culture, into the
+lower stages of barbarism, we no longer find the leisure class in fully
+developed form. But this lower barbarism shows the usages, motives,
+and circumstances out of which the institution of a leisure class has
+arisen, and indicates the steps of its early growth. Nomadic hunting
+tribes in various parts of the world illustrate these more primitive
+phases of the differentiation. Any one of the North American hunting
+tribes may be taken as a convenient illustration. These tribes
+can scarcely be said to have a defined leisure class. There is a
+differentiation of function, and there is a distinction between classes
+on the basis of this difference of function, but the exemption of the
+superior class from work has not gone far enough to make the designation
+"leisure class" altogether applicable. The tribes belonging on this
+economic level have carried the economic differentiation to the point
+at which a marked distinction is made between the occupations of men and
+women, and this distinction is of an invidious character. In nearly
+all these tribes the women are, by prescriptive custom, held to those
+employments out of which the industrial occupations proper develop at
+the next advance. The men are exempt from these vulgar employments and
+are reserved for war, hunting, sports, and devout observances. A very
+nice discrimination is ordinarily shown in this matter.
+
+This division of labour coincides with the distinction between the
+working and the leisure class as it appears in the higher barbarian
+culture. As the diversification and specialisation of employments
+proceed, the line of demarcation so drawn comes to divide the industrial
+from the non-industrial employments. The man's occupation as it stands
+at the earlier barbarian stage is not the original out of which any
+appreciable portion of later industry has developed. In the later
+development it survives only in employments that are not classed as
+industrial,--war, politics, sports, learning, and the priestly office.
+The only notable exceptions are a portion of the fishery industry
+and certain slight employments that are doubtfully to be classed as
+industry; such as the manufacture of arms, toys, and sporting goods.
+Virtually the whole range of industrial employments is an outgrowth of
+what is classed as woman's work in the primitive barbarian community.
+
+The work of the men in the lower barbarian culture is no less
+indispensable to the life of the group than the work done by the women.
+It may even be that the men's work contributes as much to the food
+supply and the other necessary consumption of the group. Indeed, so
+obvious is this "productive" character of the men's work that in the
+conventional economic writings the hunter's work is taken as the type of
+primitive industry. But such is not the barbarian's sense of the matter.
+In his own eyes he is not a labourer, and he is not to be classed with
+the women in this respect; nor is his effort to be classed with the
+women's drudgery, as labour or industry, in such a sense as to admit
+of its being confounded with the latter. There is in all barbarian
+communities a profound sense of the disparity between man's and woman's
+work. His work may conduce to the maintenance of the group, but it is
+felt that it does so through an excellence and an efficacy of a kind
+that cannot without derogation be compared with the uneventful diligence
+of the women.
+
+At a farther step backward in the cultural scale--among savage
+groups--the differentiation of employments is still less elaborate
+and the invidious distinction between classes and employments is less
+consistent and less rigorous. Unequivocal instances of a primitive
+savage culture are hard to find. Few of these groups or communities
+that are classed as "savage" show no traces of regression from a more
+advanced cultural stage. But there are groups--some of them apparently
+not the result of retrogression--which show the traits of primitive
+savagery with some fidelity. Their culture differs from that of the
+barbarian communities in the absence of a leisure class and the absence,
+in great measure, of the animus or spiritual attitude on which the
+institution of a leisure class rests. These communities of primitive
+savages in which there is no hierarchy of economic classes make up but a
+small and inconspicuous fraction of the human race. As good an instance
+of this phase of culture as may be had is afforded by the tribes of the
+Andamans, or by the Todas of the Nilgiri Hills. The scheme of life of
+these groups at the time of their earliest contact with Europeans seems
+to have been nearly typical, so far as regards the absence of a leisure
+class. As a further instance might be cited the Ainu of Yezo, and, more
+doubtfully, also some Bushman and Eskimo groups. Some Pueblo communities
+are less confidently to be included in the same class. Most, if not all,
+of the communities here cited may well be cases of degeneration from a
+higher barbarism, rather than bearers of a culture that has never risen
+above its present level. If so, they are for the present purpose to be
+taken with the allowance, but they may serve none the less as evidence
+to the same effect as if they were really "primitive" populations.
+
+These communities that are without a defined leisure class resemble one
+another also in certain other features of their social structure
+and manner of life. They are small groups and of a simple (archaic)
+structure; they are commonly peaceable and sedentary; they are poor; and
+individual ownership is not a dominant feature of their economic system.
+At the same time it does not follow that these are the smallest of
+existing communities, or that their social structure is in all respects
+the least differentiated; nor does the class necessarily include
+all primitive communities which have no defined system of individual
+ownership. But it is to be noted that the class seems to include the
+most peaceable--perhaps all the characteristically peaceable--primitive
+groups of men. Indeed, the most notable trait common to members of such
+communities is a certain amiable inefficiency when confronted with force
+or fraud.
+
+The evidence afforded by the usages and cultural traits of communities
+at a low stage of development indicates that the institution of a
+leisure class has emerged gradually during the transition from primitive
+savagery to barbarism; or more precisely, during the transition from
+a peaceable to a consistently warlike habit of life. The conditions
+apparently necessary to its emergence in a consistent form are: (1) the
+community must be of a predatory habit of life (war or the hunting
+of large game or both); that is to say, the men, who constitute the
+inchoate leisure class in these cases, must be habituated to the
+infliction of injury by force and stratagem; (2) subsistence must be
+obtainable on sufficiently easy terms to admit of the exemption of
+a considerable portion of the community from steady application to a
+routine of labour. The institution of leisure class is the outgrowth
+of an early discrimination between employments, according to which
+some employments are worthy and others unworthy. Under this ancient
+distinction the worthy employments are those which may be classed as
+exploit; unworthy are those necessary everyday employments into which no
+appreciable element of exploit enters.
+
+This distinction has but little obvious significance in a modern
+industrial community, and it has, therefore, received but slight
+attention at the hands of economic writers. When viewed in the light of
+that modern common sense which has guided economic discussion, it seems
+formal and insubstantial. But it persists with great tenacity as
+a commonplace preconception even in modern life, as is shown, for
+instance, by our habitual aversion to menial employments. It is a
+distinction of a personal kind--of superiority and inferiority. In the
+earlier stages of culture, when the personal force of the individual
+counted more immediately and obviously in shaping the course of events,
+the element of exploit counted for more in the everyday scheme of life.
+Interest centred about this fact to a greater degree. Consequently a
+distinction proceeding on this ground seemed more imperative and more
+definitive then than is the case to-day. As a fact in the sequence of
+development, therefore, the distinction is a substantial one and rests
+on sufficiently valid and cogent grounds.
+
+The ground on which a discrimination between facts is habitually made
+changes as the interest from which the facts are habitually viewed
+changes. Those features of the facts at hand are salient and substantial
+upon which the dominant interest of the time throws its light. Any given
+ground of distinction will seem insubstantial to any one who habitually
+apprehends the facts in question from a different point of view and
+values them for a different purpose. The habit of distinguishing and
+classifying the various purposes and directions of activity prevails of
+necessity always and everywhere; for it is indispensable in reaching a
+working theory or scheme of life. The particular point of view, or the
+particular characteristic that is pitched upon as definitive in the
+classification of the facts of life depends upon the interest from which
+a discrimination of the facts is sought. The grounds of discrimination,
+and the norm of procedure in classifying the facts, therefore,
+progressively change as the growth of culture proceeds; for the end for
+which the facts of life are apprehended changes, and the point of view
+consequently changes also. So that what are recognised as the salient
+and decisive features of a class of activities or of a social class at
+one stage of culture will not retain the same relative importance for
+the purposes of classification at any subsequent stage.
+
+But the change of standards and points of view is gradual only, and it
+seldom results in the subversion or entire suppression of a standpoint
+once accepted. A distinction is still habitually made between industrial
+and non-industrial occupations; and this modern distinction is a
+transmuted form of the barbarian distinction between exploit and
+drudgery. Such employments as warfare, politics, public worship, and
+public merrymaking, are felt, in the popular apprehension, to differ
+intrinsically from the labour that has to do with elaborating the
+material means of life. The precise line of demarcation is not the same
+as it was in the early barbarian scheme, but the broad distinction has
+not fallen into disuse.
+
+The tacit, common-sense distinction to-day is, in effect, that any
+effort is to be accounted industrial only so far as its ultimate purpose
+is the utilisation of non-human things. The coercive utilisation of man
+by man is not felt to be an industrial function; but all effort directed
+to enhance human life by taking advantage of the non-human environment
+is classed together as industrial activity. By the economists who have
+best retained and adapted the classical tradition, man's "power over
+nature" is currently postulated as the characteristic fact of industrial
+productivity. This industrial power over nature is taken to include
+man's power over the life of the beasts and over all the elemental
+forces. A line is in this way drawn between mankind and brute creation.
+
+In other times and among men imbued with a different body of
+preconceptions this line is not drawn precisely as we draw it to-day.
+In the savage or the barbarian scheme of life it is drawn in a different
+place and in another way. In all communities under the barbarian
+culture there is an alert and pervading sense of antithesis between
+two comprehensive groups of phenomena, in one of which barbarian
+man includes himself, and in the other, his victual. There is a felt
+antithesis between economic and non-economic phenomena, but it is not
+conceived in the modern fashion; it lies not between man and brute
+creation, but between animate and inert things.
+
+It may be an excess of caution at this day to explain that the barbarian
+notion which it is here intended to convey by the term "animate" is not
+the same as would be conveyed by the word "living". The term does not
+cover all living things, and it does cover a great many others. Such
+a striking natural phenomenon as a storm, a disease, a waterfall, are
+recognised as "animate"; while fruits and herbs, and even inconspicuous
+animals, such as house-flies, maggots, lemmings, sheep, are not
+ordinarily apprehended as "animate" except when taken collectively.
+As here used the term does not necessarily imply an indwelling soul or
+spirit. The concept includes such things as in the apprehension of the
+animistic savage or barbarian are formidable by virtue of a real or
+imputed habit of initiating action. This category comprises a large
+number and range of natural objects and phenomena. Such a distinction
+between the inert and the active is still present in the habits of
+thought of unreflecting persons, and it still profoundly affects the
+prevalent theory of human life and of natural processes; but it does not
+pervade our daily life to the extent or with the far-reaching practical
+consequences that are apparent at earlier stages of culture and belief.
+
+To the mind of the barbarian, the elaboration and utilisation of what is
+afforded by inert nature is activity on quite a different plane from his
+dealings with "animate" things and forces. The line of demarcation may
+be vague and shifting, but the broad distinction is sufficiently real
+and cogent to influence the barbarian scheme of life. To the class of
+things apprehended as animate, the barbarian fancy imputes an unfolding
+of activity directed to some end. It is this teleological unfolding of
+activity that constitutes any object or phenomenon an "animate" fact.
+Wherever the unsophisticated savage or barbarian meets with activity
+that is at all obtrusive, he construes it in the only terms that are
+ready to hand--the terms immediately given in his consciousness of his
+own actions. Activity is, therefore, assimilated to human action, and
+active objects are in so far assimilated to the human agent. Phenomena
+of this character--especially those whose behaviour is notably
+formidable or baffling--have to be met in a different spirit and with
+proficiency of a different kind from what is required in dealing with
+inert things. To deal successfully with such phenomena is a work of
+exploit rather than of industry. It is an assertion of prowess, not of
+diligence.
+
+Under the guidance of this naive discrimination between the inert and
+the animate, the activities of the primitive social group tend to fall
+into two classes, which would in modern phrase be called exploit and
+industry. Industry is effort that goes to create a new thing, with a
+new purpose given it by the fashioning hand of its maker out of passive
+("brute") material; while exploit, so far as it results in an outcome
+useful to the agent, is the conversion to his own ends of energies
+previously directed to some other end by an other agent. We still speak
+of "brute matter" with something of the barbarian's realisation of a
+profound significance in the term.
+
+The distinction between exploit and drudgery coincides with a difference
+between the sexes. The sexes differ, not only in stature and muscular
+force, but perhaps even more decisively in temperament, and this must
+early have given rise to a corresponding division of labour. The general
+range of activities that come under the head of exploit falls to the
+males as being the stouter, more massive, better capable of a sudden
+and violent strain, and more readily inclined to self assertion, active
+emulation, and aggression. The difference in mass, in physiological
+character, and in temperament may be slight among the members of the
+primitive group; it appears, in fact, to be relatively slight and
+inconsequential in some of the more archaic communities with which we
+are acquainted--as for instance the tribes of the Andamans. But so soon
+as a differentiation of function has well begun on the lines marked
+out by this difference in physique and animus, the original difference
+between the sexes will itself widen. A cumulative process of selective
+adaptation to the new distribution of employments will set in,
+especially if the habitat or the fauna with which the group is in
+contact is such as to call for a considerable exercise of the sturdier
+virtues. The habitual pursuit of large game requires more of the manly
+qualities of massiveness, agility, and ferocity, and it can therefore
+scarcely fail to hasten and widen the differentiation of functions
+between the sexes. And so soon as the group comes into hostile contact
+with other groups, the divergence of function will take on the developed
+form of a distinction between exploit and industry.
+
+In such a predatory group of hunters it comes to be the able-bodied
+men's office to fight and hunt. The women do what other work there is
+to do--other members who are unfit for man's work being for this purpose
+classed with women. But the men's hunting and fighting are both of the
+same general character. Both are of a predatory nature; the warrior
+and the hunter alike reap where they have not strewn. Their aggressive
+assertion of force and sagacity differs obviously from the women's
+assiduous and uneventful shaping of materials; it is not to be accounted
+productive labour but rather an acquisition of substance by seizure.
+Such being the barbarian man's work, in its best development and widest
+divergence from women's work, any effort that does not involve an
+assertion of prowess comes to be unworthy of the man. As the tradition
+gains consistency, the common sense of the community erects it into a
+canon of conduct; so that no employment and no acquisition is morally
+possible to the self respecting man at this cultural stage, except such
+as proceeds on the basis of prowess--force or fraud. When the predatory
+habit of life has been settled upon the group by long habituation, it
+becomes the able-bodied man's accredited office in the social economy
+to kill, to destroy such competitors in the struggle for existence as
+attempt to resist or elude him, to overcome and reduce to subservience
+those alien forces that assert themselves refractorily in the
+environment. So tenaciously and with such nicety is this theoretical
+distinction between exploit and drudgery adhered to that in many hunting
+tribes the man must not bring home the game which he has killed, but
+must send his woman to perform that baser office.
+
+As has already been indicated, the distinction between exploit and
+drudgery is an invidious distinction between employments. Those
+employments which are to be classed as exploit are worthy, honourable,
+noble; other employments, which do not contain this element of exploit,
+and especially those which imply subservience or submission, are
+unworthy, debasing, ignoble. The concept of dignity, worth, or honour,
+as applied either to persons or conduct, is of first-rate consequence
+in the development of classes and of class distinctions, and it is
+therefore necessary to say something of its derivation and meaning. Its
+psychological ground may be indicated in outline as follows.
+
+As a matter of selective necessity, man is an agent. He is, in his own
+apprehension, a centre of unfolding impulsive activity--"teleological"
+activity. He is an agent seeking in every act the accomplishment of some
+concrete, objective, impersonal end. By force of his being such an agent
+he is possessed of a taste for effective work, and a distaste for futile
+effort. He has a sense of the merit of serviceability or efficiency
+and of the demerit of futility, waste, or incapacity. This aptitude
+or propensity may be called the instinct of workmanship. Wherever the
+circumstances or traditions of life lead to an habitual comparison
+of one person with another in point of efficiency, the instinct of
+workmanship works out in an emulative or invidious comparison of
+persons. The extent to which this result follows depends in some
+considerable degree on the temperament of the population. In any
+community where such an invidious comparison of persons is habitually
+made, visible success becomes an end sought for its own utility as a
+basis of esteem. Esteem is gained and dispraise is avoided by putting
+one's efficiency in evidence. The result is that the instinct of
+workmanship works out in an emulative demonstration of force.
+
+During that primitive phase of social development, when the community is
+still habitually peaceable, perhaps sedentary, and without a developed
+system of individual ownership, the efficiency of the individual can
+be shown chiefly and most consistently in some employment that goes to
+further the life of the group. What emulation of an economic kind there
+is between the members of such a group will be chiefly emulation in
+industrial serviceability. At the same time the incentive to emulation
+is not strong, nor is the scope for emulation large.
+
+When the community passes from peaceable savagery to a predatory phase
+of life, the conditions of emulation change. The opportunity and the
+incentive to emulate increase greatly in scope and urgency. The activity
+of the men more and more takes on the character of exploit; and an
+invidious comparison of one hunter or warrior with another grows
+continually easier and more habitual. Tangible evidences of
+prowess--trophies--find a place in men's habits of thought as an
+essential feature of the paraphernalia of life. Booty, trophies of
+the chase or of the raid, come to be prized as evidence of pre-eminent
+force. Aggression becomes the accredited form of action, and booty
+serves as prima facie evidence of successful aggression. As accepted at
+this cultural stage, the accredited, worthy form of self-assertion
+is contest; and useful articles or services obtained by seizure or
+compulsion, serve as a conventional evidence of successful contest.
+Therefore, by contrast, the obtaining of goods by other methods than
+seizure comes to be accounted unworthy of man in his best estate. The
+performance of productive work, or employment in personal service, falls
+under the same odium for the same reason. An invidious distinction
+in this way arises between exploit and acquisition on the other hand.
+Labour acquires a character of irksomeness by virtue of the indignity
+imputed to it.
+
+With the primitive barbarian, before the simple content of the notion
+has been obscured by its own ramifications and by a secondary growth of
+cognate ideas, "honourable" seems to connote nothing else than
+assertion of superior force. "Honourable" is "formidable"; "worthy" is
+"prepotent". A honorific act is in the last analysis little if
+anything else than a recognised successful act of aggression; and where
+aggression means conflict with men and beasts, the activity which comes
+to be especially and primarily honourable is the assertion of the strong
+hand. The naive, archaic habit of construing all manifestations of
+force in terms of personality or "will power" greatly fortifies this
+conventional exaltation of the strong hand. Honorific epithets, in
+vogue among barbarian tribes as well as among peoples of a more advance
+culture, commonly bear the stamp of this unsophisticated sense of
+honour. Epithets and titles used in addressing chieftains, and in the
+propitiation of kings and gods, very commonly impute a propensity for
+overbearing violence and an irresistible devastating force to the person
+who is to be propitiated. This holds true to an extent also in the more
+civilised communities of the present day. The predilection shown in
+heraldic devices for the more rapacious beasts and birds of prey goes to
+enforce the same view.
+
+Under this common-sense barbarian appreciation of worth or honour, the
+taking of life--the killing of formidable competitors, whether brute
+or human--is honourable in the highest degree. And this high office of
+slaughter, as an expression of the slayer's prepotence, casts a
+glamour of worth over every act of slaughter and over all the tools and
+accessories of the act. Arms are honourable, and the use of them, even
+in seeking the life of the meanest creatures of the fields, becomes a
+honorific employment. At the same time, employment in industry becomes
+correspondingly odious, and, in the common-sense apprehension, the
+handling of the tools and implements of industry falls beneath the
+dignity of able-bodied men. Labour becomes irksome.
+
+It is here assumed that in the sequence of cultural evolution primitive
+groups of men have passed from an initial peaceable stage to a
+subsequent stage at which fighting is the avowed and characteristic
+employment of the group. But it is not implied that there has been an
+abrupt transition from unbroken peace and good-will to a later or higher
+phase of life in which the fact of combat occurs for the first time.
+Neither is it implied that all peaceful industry disappears on the
+transition to the predatory phase of culture. Some fighting, it is safe
+to say, would be met with at any early stage of social development.
+Fights would occur with more or less frequency through sexual
+competition. The known habits of primitive groups, as well as the habits
+of the anthropoid apes, argue to that effect, and the evidence from the
+well-known promptings of human nature enforces the same view.
+
+It may therefore be objected that there can have been no such initial
+stage of peaceable life as is here assumed. There is no point in
+cultural evolution prior to which fighting does not occur. But the
+point in question is not as to the occurrence of combat, occasional or
+sporadic, or even more or less frequent and habitual; it is a question
+as to the occurrence of an habitual; it is a question as to the
+occurrence of an habitual bellicose frame of mind--a prevalent habit
+of judging facts and events from the point of view of the fight. The
+predatory phase of culture is attained only when the predatory attitude
+has become the habitual and accredited spiritual attitude for the
+members of the group; when the fight has become the dominant note in the
+current theory of life; when the common-sense appreciation of men and
+things has come to be an appreciation with a view to combat.
+
+The substantial difference between the peaceable and the predatory phase
+of culture, therefore, is a spiritual difference, not a mechanical one.
+The change in spiritual attitude is the outgrowth of a change in the
+material facts of the life of the group, and it comes on gradually as
+the material circumstances favourable to a predatory attitude supervene.
+The inferior limit of the predatory culture is an industrial limit.
+Predation can not become the habitual, conventional resource of any
+group or any class until industrial methods have been developed to such
+a degree of efficiency as to leave a margin worth fighting for, above
+the subsistence of those engaged in getting a living. The transition
+from peace to predation therefore depends on the growth of technical
+knowledge and the use of tools. A predatory culture is similarly
+impracticable in early times, until weapons have been developed to such
+a point as to make man a formidable animal. The early development of
+tools and of weapons is of course the same fact seen from two different
+points of view.
+
+The life of a given group would be characterised as peaceable so long
+as habitual recourse to combat has not brought the fight into the
+foreground in men's every day thoughts, as a dominant feature of the
+life of man. A group may evidently attain such a predatory attitude with
+a greater or less degree of completeness, so that its scheme of life and
+canons of conduct may be controlled to a greater or less extent by the
+predatory animus. The predatory phase of culture is therefore conceived
+to come on gradually, through a cumulative growth of predatory aptitudes
+habits, and traditions this growth being due to a change in the
+circumstances of the group's life, of such a kind as to develop and
+conserve those traits of human nature and those traditions and norms of
+conduct that make for a predatory rather than a peaceable life.
+
+The evidence for the hypothesis that there has been such a peaceable
+stage of primitive culture is in great part drawn from psychology rather
+than from ethnology, and cannot be detailed here. It will be recited in
+part in a later chapter, in discussing the survival of archaic traits of
+human nature under the modern culture.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Two ~~ Pecuniary Emulation
+
+In the sequence of cultural evolution the emergence of a leisure class
+coincides with the beginning of ownership. This is necessarily the case,
+for these two institutions result from the same set of economic forces.
+In the inchoate phase of their development they are but different
+aspects of the same general facts of social structure.
+
+It is as elements of social structure--conventional facts--that leisure
+and ownership are matters of interest for the purpose in hand. An
+habitual neglect of work does not constitute a leisure class; neither
+does the mechanical fact of use and consumption constitute ownership.
+The present inquiry, therefore, is not concerned with the beginning
+of indolence, nor with the beginning of the appropriation of useful
+articles to individual consumption. The point in question is the origin
+and nature of a conventional leisure class on the one hand and the
+beginnings of individual ownership as a conventional right or equitable
+claim on the other hand.
+
+The early differentiation out of which the distinction between a leisure
+and a working class arises is a division maintained between men's and
+women's work in the lower stages of barbarism. Likewise the earliest
+form of ownership is an ownership of the women by the able bodied men
+of the community. The facts may be expressed in more general terms, and
+truer to the import of the barbarian theory of life, by saying that it
+is an ownership of the woman by the man.
+
+There was undoubtedly some appropriation of useful articles before the
+custom of appropriating women arose. The usages of existing archaic
+communities in which there is no ownership of women is warrant for such
+a view. In all communities the members, both male and female, habitually
+appropriate to their individual use a variety of useful things; but
+these useful things are not thought of as owned by the person who
+appropriates and consumes them. The habitual appropriation and
+consumption of certain slight personal effects goes on without
+raising the question of ownership; that is to say, the question of a
+conventional, equitable claim to extraneous things.
+
+The ownership of women begins in the lower barbarian stages of culture,
+apparently with the seizure of female captives. The original reason
+for the seizure and appropriation of women seems to have been their
+usefulness as trophies. The practice of seizing women from the enemy
+as trophies, gave rise to a form of ownership-marriage, resulting in a
+household with a male head. This was followed by an extension of slavery
+to other captives and inferiors, besides women, and by an extension of
+ownership-marriage to other women than those seized from the enemy.
+The outcome of emulation under the circumstances of a predatory life,
+therefore, has been on the one hand a form of marriage resting on
+coercion, and on the other hand the custom of ownership. The two
+institutions are not distinguishable in the initial phase of their
+development; both arise from the desire of the successful men to put
+their prowess in evidence by exhibiting some durable result of their
+exploits. Both also minister to that propensity for mastery which
+pervades all predatory communities. From the ownership of women the
+concept of ownership extends itself to include the products of their
+industry, and so there arises the ownership of things as well as of
+persons.
+
+In this way a consistent system of property in goods is gradually
+installed. And although in the latest stages of the development,
+the serviceability of goods for consumption has come to be the most
+obtrusive element of their value, still, wealth has by no means yet lost
+its utility as a honorific evidence of the owner's prepotence.
+
+Wherever the institution of private property is found, even in a
+slightly developed form, the economic process bears the character of a
+struggle between men for the possession of goods. It has been customary
+in economic theory, and especially among those economists who adhere
+with least faltering to the body of modernised classical doctrines, to
+construe this struggle for wealth as being substantially a struggle for
+subsistence. Such is, no doubt, its character in large part during
+the earlier and less efficient phases of industry. Such is also its
+character in all cases where the "niggardliness of nature" is so strict
+as to afford but a scanty livelihood to the community in return for
+strenuous and unremitting application to the business of getting the
+means of subsistence. But in all progressing communities an advance is
+presently made beyond this early stage of technological development.
+Industrial efficiency is presently carried to such a pitch as to afford
+something appreciably more than a bare livelihood to those engaged in
+the industrial process. It has not been unusual for economic theory to
+speak of the further struggle for wealth on this new industrial basis as
+a competition for an increase of the comforts of life,--primarily for
+an increase of the physical comforts which the consumption of goods
+affords.
+
+The end of acquisition and accumulation is conventionally held to be the
+consumption of the goods accumulated--whether it is consumption directly
+by the owner of the goods or by the household attached to him and for
+this purpose identified with him in theory. This is at least felt to
+be the economically legitimate end of acquisition, which alone it is
+incumbent on the theory to take account of. Such consumption may of
+course be conceived to serve the consumer's physical wants--his
+physical comfort--or his so-called higher wants--spiritual, aesthetic,
+intellectual, or what not; the latter class of wants being served
+indirectly by an expenditure of goods, after the fashion familiar to all
+economic readers.
+
+But it is only when taken in a sense far removed from its naive meaning
+that consumption of goods can be said to afford the incentive from which
+accumulation invariably proceeds. The motive that lies at the root
+of ownership is emulation; and the same motive of emulation continues
+active in the further development of the institution to which it has
+given rise and in the development of all those features of the social
+structure which this institution of ownership touches. The possession of
+wealth confers honour; it is an invidious distinction. Nothing equally
+cogent can be said for the consumption of goods, nor for any other
+conceivable incentive to acquisition, and especially not for any
+incentive to accumulation of wealth.
+
+It is of course not to be overlooked that in a community where nearly
+all goods are private property the necessity of earning a livelihood
+is a powerful and ever present incentive for the poorer members of
+the community. The need of subsistence and of an increase of physical
+comfort may for a time be the dominant motive of acquisition for those
+classes who are habitually employed at manual labour, whose subsistence
+is on a precarious footing, who possess little and ordinarily accumulate
+little; but it will appear in the course of the discussion that even in
+the case of these impecunious classes the predominance of the motive of
+physical want is not so decided as has sometimes been assumed. On the
+other hand, so far as regards those members and classes of the community
+who are chiefly concerned in the accumulation of wealth, the incentive
+of subsistence or of physical comfort never plays a considerable part.
+Ownership began and grew into a human institution on grounds unrelated
+to the subsistence minimum. The dominant incentive was from the outset
+the invidious distinction attaching to wealth, and, save temporarily and
+by exception, no other motive has usurped the primacy at any later stage
+of the development.
+
+Property set out with being booty held as trophies of the successful
+raid. So long as the group had departed and so long as it still stood
+in close contact with other hostile groups, the utility of things or
+persons owned lay chiefly in an invidious comparison between their
+possessor and the enemy from whom they were taken. The habit of
+distinguishing between the interests of the individual and those of
+the group to which he belongs is apparently a later growth. Invidious
+comparison between the possessor of the honorific booty and his less
+successful neighbours within the group was no doubt present early as an
+element of the utility of the things possessed, though this was not at
+the outset the chief element of their value. The man's prowess was
+still primarily the group's prowess, and the possessor of the booty
+felt himself to be primarily the keeper of the honour of his group. This
+appreciation of exploit from the communal point of view is met with also
+at later stages of social growth, especially as regards the laurels of
+war.
+
+But as soon as the custom of individual ownership begins to gain
+consistency, the point of view taken in making the invidious comparison
+on which private property rests will begin to change. Indeed, the one
+change is but the reflex of the other. The initial phase of ownership,
+the phase of acquisition by naive seizure and conversion, begins to pass
+into the subsequent stage of an incipient organization of industry on
+the basis of private property (in slaves); the horde develops into a
+more or less self-sufficing industrial community; possessions then come
+to be valued not so much as evidence of successful foray, but rather as
+evidence of the prepotence of the possessor of these goods over other
+individuals within the community. The invidious comparison now becomes
+primarily a comparison of the owner with the other members of the
+group. Property is still of the nature of trophy, but, with the cultural
+advance, it becomes more and more a trophy of successes scored in the
+game of ownership carried on between the members of the group under the
+quasi-peaceable methods of nomadic life.
+
+Gradually, as industrial activity further displaced predatory activity
+in the community's everyday life and in men's habits of thought,
+accumulated property more and more replaces trophies of predatory
+exploit as the conventional exponent of prepotence and success. With the
+growth of settled industry, therefore, the possession of wealth gains in
+relative importance and effectiveness as a customary basis of repute and
+esteem. Not that esteem ceases to be awarded on the basis of other, more
+direct evidence of prowess; not that successful predatory aggression or
+warlike exploit ceases to call out the approval and admiration of the
+crowd, or to stir the envy of the less successful competitors; but
+the opportunities for gaining distinction by means of this direct
+manifestation of superior force grow less available both in scope and
+frequency. At the same time opportunities for industrial aggression, and
+for the accumulation of property, increase in scope and availability.
+And it is even more to the point that property now becomes the
+most easily recognised evidence of a reputable degree of success as
+distinguished from heroic or signal achievement. It therefore becomes
+the conventional basis of esteem. Its possession in some amount becomes
+necessary in order to any reputable standing in the community. It
+becomes indispensable to accumulate, to acquire property, in order to
+retain one's good name. When accumulated goods have in this way once
+become the accepted badge of efficiency, the possession of wealth
+presently assumes the character of an independent and definitive basis
+of esteem. The possession of goods, whether acquired aggressively by
+one's own exertion or passively by transmission through inheritance from
+others, becomes a conventional basis of reputability. The possession
+of wealth, which was at the outset valued simply as an evidence of
+efficiency, becomes, in popular apprehension, itself a meritorious act.
+Wealth is now itself intrinsically honourable and confers honour on
+its possessor. By a further refinement, wealth acquired passively by
+transmission from ancestors or other antecedents presently becomes even
+more honorific than wealth acquired by the possessor's own effort;
+but this distinction belongs at a later stage in the evolution of the
+pecuniary culture and will be spoken of in its place.
+
+Prowess and exploit may still remain the basis of award of the highest
+popular esteem, although the possession of wealth has become the basis
+of common place reputability and of a blameless social standing.
+The predatory instinct and the consequent approbation of predatory
+efficiency are deeply ingrained in the habits of thought of those
+peoples who have passed under the discipline of a protracted predatory
+culture. According to popular award, the highest honours within human
+reach may, even yet, be those gained by an unfolding of extraordinary
+predatory efficiency in war, or by a quasi-predatory efficiency in
+statecraft; but for the purposes of a commonplace decent standing in the
+community these means of repute have been replaced by the acquisition
+and accumulation of goods. In order to stand well in the eyes of the
+community, it is necessary to come up to a certain, somewhat indefinite,
+conventional standard of wealth; just as in the earlier predatory stage
+it is necessary for the barbarian man to come up to the tribe's standard
+of physical endurance, cunning, and skill at arms. A certain standard
+of wealth in the one case, and of prowess in the other, is a necessary
+condition of reputability, and anything in excess of this normal amount
+is meritorious.
+
+Those members of the community who fall short of this, somewhat
+indefinite, normal degree of prowess or of property suffer in the esteem
+of their fellow-men; and consequently they suffer also in their own
+esteem, since the usual basis of self-respect is the respect accorded by
+one's neighbours. Only individuals with an aberrant temperament can in
+the long run retain their self-esteem in the face of the disesteem of
+their fellows. Apparent exceptions to the rule are met with, especially
+among people with strong religious convictions. But these apparent
+exceptions are scarcely real exceptions, since such persons commonly
+fall back on the putative approbation of some supernatural witness of
+their deeds.
+
+So soon as the possession of property becomes the basis of popular
+esteem, therefore, it becomes also a requisite to the complacency which
+we call self-respect. In any community where goods are held in severalty
+it is necessary, in order to his own peace of mind, that an individual
+should possess as large a portion of goods as others with whom he is
+accustomed to class himself; and it is extremely gratifying to
+possess something more than others. But as fast as a person makes new
+acquisitions, and becomes accustomed to the resulting new standard of
+wealth, the new standard forthwith ceases to afford appreciably greater
+satisfaction than the earlier standard did. The tendency in any case is
+constantly to make the present pecuniary standard the point of departure
+for a fresh increase of wealth; and this in turn gives rise to a new
+standard of sufficiency and a new pecuniary classification of one's
+self as compared with one's neighbours. So far as concerns the present
+question, the end sought by accumulation is to rank high in comparison
+with the rest of the community in point of pecuniary strength. So long
+as the comparison is distinctly unfavourable to himself, the normal,
+average individual will live in chronic dissatisfaction with his present
+lot; and when he has reached what may be called the normal pecuniary
+standard of the community, or of his class in the community, this
+chronic dissatisfaction will give place to a restless straining to place
+a wider and ever-widening pecuniary interval between himself and
+this average standard. The invidious comparison can never become so
+favourable to the individual making it that he would not gladly rate
+himself still higher relatively to his competitors in the struggle for
+pecuniary reputability.
+
+In the nature of the case, the desire for wealth can scarcely be
+satiated in any individual instance, and evidently a satiation of the
+average or general desire for wealth is out of the question. However
+widely, or equally, or "fairly", it may be distributed, no general
+increase of the community's wealth can make any approach to satiating
+this need, the ground of which is the desire of every one to excel every
+one else in the accumulation of goods. If, as is sometimes assumed, the
+incentive to accumulation were the want of subsistence or of physical
+comfort, then the aggregate economic wants of a community might
+conceivably be satisfied at some point in the advance of industrial
+efficiency; but since the struggle is substantially a race for
+reputability on the basis of an invidious comparison, no approach to
+a definitive attainment is possible.
+
+What has just been said must not be taken to mean that there are no
+other incentives to acquisition and accumulation than this desire to
+excel in pecuniary standing and so gain the esteem and envy of one's
+fellow-men. The desire for added comfort and security from want is
+present as a motive at every stage of the process of accumulation in
+a modern industrial community; although the standard of sufficiency in
+these respects is in turn greatly affected by the habit of pecuniary
+emulation. To a great extent this emulation shapes the methods and
+selects the objects of expenditure for personal comfort and decent
+livelihood.
+
+Besides this, the power conferred by wealth also affords a motive
+to accumulation. That propensity for purposeful activity and that
+repugnance to all futility of effort which belong to man by virtue of
+his character as an agent do not desert him when he emerges from the
+naive communal culture where the dominant note of life is the unanalysed
+and undifferentiated solidarity of the individual with the group with
+which his life is bound up. When he enters upon the predatory stage,
+where self-seeking in the narrower sense becomes the dominant note, this
+propensity goes with him still, as the pervasive trait that shapes his
+scheme of life. The propensity for achievement and the repugnance to
+futility remain the underlying economic motive. The propensity changes
+only in the form of its expression and in the proximate objects to which
+it directs the man's activity. Under the regime of individual ownership
+the most available means of visibly achieving a purpose is that afforded
+by the acquisition and accumulation of goods; and as the self-regarding
+antithesis between man and man reaches fuller consciousness, the
+propensity for achievement--the instinct of workmanship--tends more
+and more to shape itself into a straining to excel others in pecuniary
+achievement. Relative success, tested by an invidious pecuniary
+comparison with other men, becomes the conventional end of action. The
+currently accepted legitimate end of effort becomes the achievement of
+a favourable comparison with other men; and therefore the repugnance to
+futility to a good extent coalesces with the incentive of emulation. It
+acts to accentuate the struggle for pecuniary reputability by visiting
+with a sharper disapproval all shortcoming and all evidence of
+shortcoming in point of pecuniary success. Purposeful effort comes to
+mean, primarily, effort directed to or resulting in a more creditable
+showing of accumulated wealth. Among the motives which lead men to
+accumulate wealth, the primacy, both in scope and intensity, therefore,
+continues to belong to this motive of pecuniary emulation.
+
+In making use of the term "invidious", it may perhaps be unnecessary to
+remark, there is no intention to extol or depreciate, or to commend or
+deplore any of the phenomena which the word is used to characterise. The
+term is used in a technical sense as describing a comparison of persons
+with a view to rating and grading them in respect of relative worth or
+value--in an aesthetic or moral sense--and so awarding and defining
+the relative degrees of complacency with which they may legitimately be
+contemplated by themselves and by others. An invidious comparison is a
+process of valuation of persons in respect of worth.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Three ~~ Conspicuous Leisure
+
+If its working were not disturbed by other economic forces or other
+features of the emulative process, the immediate effect of such a
+pecuniary struggle as has just been described in outline would be to
+make men industrious and frugal. This result actually follows, in some
+measure, so far as regards the lower classes, whose ordinary means of
+acquiring goods is productive labour. This is more especially true
+of the labouring classes in a sedentary community which is at an
+agricultural stage of industry, in which there is a considerable
+subdivision of industry, and whose laws and customs secure to these
+classes a more or less definite share of the product of their industry.
+These lower classes can in any case not avoid labour, and the imputation
+of labour is therefore not greatly derogatory to them, at least not
+within their class. Rather, since labour is their recognised and
+accepted mode of life, they take some emulative pride in a reputation
+for efficiency in their work, this being often the only line of
+emulation that is open to them. For those for whom acquisition and
+emulation is possible only within the field of productive efficiency
+and thrift, the struggle for pecuniary reputability will in some
+measure work out in an increase of diligence and parsimony. But certain
+secondary features of the emulative process, yet to be spoken of,
+come in to very materially circumscribe and modify emulation in these
+directions among the pecuniary inferior classes as well as among the
+superior class.
+
+But it is otherwise with the superior pecuniary class, with which we
+are here immediately concerned. For this class also the incentive
+to diligence and thrift is not absent; but its action is so greatly
+qualified by the secondary demands of pecuniary emulation, that any
+inclination in this direction is practically overborne and any incentive
+to diligence tends to be of no effect. The most imperative of these
+secondary demands of emulation, as well as the one of widest scope, is
+the requirement of abstention from productive work. This is true in an
+especial degree for the barbarian stage of culture. During the predatory
+culture labour comes to be associated in men's habits of thought
+with weakness and subjection to a master. It is therefore a mark of
+inferiority, and therefore comes to be accounted unworthy of man in his
+best estate. By virtue of this tradition labour is felt to be debasing,
+and this tradition has never died out. On the contrary, with the advance
+of social differentiation it has acquired the axiomatic force due to
+ancient and unquestioned prescription.
+
+In order to gain and to hold the esteem of men it is not sufficient
+merely to possess wealth or power. The wealth or power must be put in
+evidence, for esteem is awarded only on evidence. And not only does the
+evidence of wealth serve to impress one's importance on others and
+to keep their sense of his importance alive and alert, but it is of
+scarcely less use in building up and preserving one's self-complacency.
+In all but the lowest stages of culture the normally constituted man is
+comforted and upheld in his self-respect by "decent surroundings" and
+by exemption from "menial offices". Enforced departure from his habitual
+standard of decency, either in the paraphernalia of life or in the kind
+and amount of his everyday activity, is felt to be a slight upon his
+human dignity, even apart from all conscious consideration of the
+approval or disapproval of his fellows.
+
+The archaic theoretical distinction between the base and the honourable
+in the manner of a man's life retains very much of its ancient force
+even today. So much so that there are few of the better class who are not
+possessed of an instinctive repugnance for the vulgar forms of labour.
+We have a realising sense of ceremonial uncleanness attaching in an
+especial degree to the occupations which are associated in our habits of
+thought with menial service. It is felt by all persons of refined taste
+that a spiritual contamination is inseparable from certain offices that
+are conventionally required of servants. Vulgar surroundings, mean (that
+is to say, inexpensive) habitations, and vulgarly productive occupations
+are unhesitatingly condemned and avoided. They are incompatible with
+life on a satisfactory spiritual plane __ with "high thinking". From the
+days of the Greek philosophers to the present, a degree of leisure and
+of exemption from contact with such industrial processes as serve the
+immediate everyday purposes of human life has ever been recognised by
+thoughtful men as a prerequisite to a worthy or beautiful, or even a
+blameless, human life. In itself and in its consequences the life of
+leisure is beautiful and ennobling in all civilised men's eyes.
+
+This direct, subjective value of leisure and of other evidences of
+wealth is no doubt in great part secondary and derivative. It is in part
+a reflex of the utility of leisure as a means of gaining the respect
+of others, and in part it is the result of a mental substitution. The
+performance of labour has been accepted as a conventional evidence of
+inferior force; therefore it comes itself, by a mental short-cut, to be
+regarded as intrinsically base.
+
+During the predatory stage proper, and especially during the earlier
+stages of the quasi-peaceable development of industry that follows the
+predatory stage, a life of leisure is the readiest and most conclusive
+evidence of pecuniary strength, and therefore of superior force;
+provided always that the gentleman of leisure can live in manifest ease
+and comfort. At this stage wealth consists chiefly of slaves, and the
+benefits accruing from the possession of riches and power take the
+form chiefly of personal service and the immediate products of personal
+service. Conspicuous abstention from labour therefore becomes the
+conventional mark of superior pecuniary achievement and the conventional
+index of reputability; and conversely, since application to productive
+labour is a mark of poverty and subjection, it becomes inconsistent with
+a reputable standing in the community. Habits of industry and thrift,
+therefore, are not uniformly furthered by a prevailing pecuniary
+emulation. On the contrary, this kind of emulation indirectly
+discountenances participation in productive labour. Labour would
+unavoidably become dishonourable, as being an evidence indecorous under
+the ancient tradition handed down from an earlier cultural stage. The
+ancient tradition of the predatory culture is that productive effort is
+to be shunned as being unworthy of able-bodied men, and this tradition
+is reinforced rather than set aside in the passage from the predatory to
+the quasi-peaceable manner of life.
+
+Even if the institution of a leisure class had not come in with the
+first emergence of individual ownership, by force of the dishonour
+attaching to productive employment, it would in any case have come in
+as one of the early consequences of ownership. And it is to be remarked
+that while the leisure class existed in theory from the beginning of
+predatory culture, the institution takes on a new and fuller meaning
+with the transition from the predatory to the next succeeding pecuniary
+stage of culture. It is from this time forth a "leisure class" in fact
+as well as in theory. From this point dates the institution of the
+leisure class in its consummate form.
+
+During the predatory stage proper the distinction between the leisure
+and the labouring class is in some degree a ceremonial distinction only.
+The able bodied men jealously stand aloof from whatever is in their
+apprehension, menial drudgery; but their activity in fact contributes
+appreciably to the sustenance of the group. The subsequent stage of
+quasi-peaceable industry is usually characterised by an established
+chattel slavery, herds of cattle, and a servile class of herdsmen and
+shepherds; industry has advanced so far that the community is no longer
+dependent for its livelihood on the chase or on any other form of
+activity that can fairly be classed as exploit. From this point on, the
+characteristic feature of leisure class life is a conspicuous exemption
+from all useful employment.
+
+The normal and characteristic occupations of the class in this mature
+phase of its life history are in form very much the same as in its
+earlier days. These occupations are government, war, sports, and devout
+observances. Persons unduly given to difficult theoretical niceties
+may hold that these occupations are still incidentally and indirectly
+"productive"; but it is to be noted as decisive of the question in hand
+that the ordinary and ostensible motive of the leisure class in
+engaging in these occupations is assuredly not an increase of wealth by
+productive effort. At this as at any other cultural stage, government
+and war are, at least in part, carried on for the pecuniary gain of
+those who engage in them; but it is gain obtained by the honourable
+method of seizure and conversion. These occupations are of the nature of
+predatory, not of productive, employment. Something similar may be said
+of the chase, but with a difference. As the community passes out of the
+hunting stage proper, hunting gradually becomes differentiated into two
+distinct employments. On the one hand it is a trade, carried on chiefly
+for gain; and from this the element of exploit is virtually absent,
+or it is at any rate not present in a sufficient degree to clear the
+pursuit of the imputation of gainful industry. On the other hand, the
+chase is also a sport--an exercise of the predatory impulse simply.
+As such it does not afford any appreciable pecuniary incentive, but it
+contains a more or less obvious element of exploit. It is this latter
+development of the chase--purged of all imputation of handicraft--that
+alone is meritorious and fairly belongs in the scheme of life of the
+developed leisure class.
+
+Abstention from labour is not only a honorific or meritorious act,
+but it presently comes to be a requisite of decency. The insistence on
+property as the basis of reputability is very naive and very imperious
+during the early stages of the accumulation of wealth. Abstention
+from labour is the convenient evidence of wealth and is therefore
+the conventional mark of social standing; and this insistence on the
+meritoriousness of wealth leads to a more strenuous insistence on
+leisure. Nota notae est nota rei ipsius. According to well established
+laws of human nature, prescription presently seizes upon this
+conventional evidence of wealth and fixes it in men's habits of thought
+as something that is in itself substantially meritorious and ennobling;
+while productive labour at the same time and by a like process becomes
+in a double sense intrinsically unworthy. Prescription ends by making
+labour not only disreputable in the eyes of the community, but morally
+impossible to the noble, freeborn man, and incompatible with a worthy
+life.
+
+This tabu on labour has a further consequence in the industrial
+differentiation of classes. As the population increases in density
+and the predatory group grows into a settled industrial community, the
+constituted authorities and the customs governing ownership gain in
+scope and consistency. It then presently becomes impracticable to
+accumulate wealth by simple seizure, and, in logical consistency,
+acquisition by industry is equally impossible for high minded and
+impecunious men. The alternative open to them is beggary or privation.
+Wherever the canon of conspicuous leisure has a chance undisturbed to
+work out its tendency, there will therefore emerge a secondary, and in a
+sense spurious, leisure class--abjectly poor and living in a precarious
+life of want and discomfort, but morally unable to stoop to gainful
+pursuits. The decayed gentleman and the lady who has seen better days
+are by no means unfamiliar phenomena even now. This pervading sense
+of the indignity of the slightest manual labour is familiar to all
+civilized peoples, as well as to peoples of a less advanced pecuniary
+culture. In persons of a delicate sensibility who have long been
+habituated to gentle manners, the sense of the shamefulness of manual
+labour may become so strong that, at a critical juncture, it will even
+set aside the instinct of self-preservation. So, for instance, we are
+told of certain Polynesian chiefs, who, under the stress of good form,
+preferred to starve rather than carry their food to their mouths with
+their own hands. It is true, this conduct may have been due, at least in
+part, to an excessive sanctity or tabu attaching to the chief's person.
+The tabu would have been communicated by the contact of his hands, and
+so would have made anything touched by him unfit for human food. But the
+tabu is itself a derivative of the unworthiness or moral incompatibility
+of labour; so that even when construed in this sense the conduct of the
+Polynesian chiefs is truer to the canon of honorific leisure than would
+at first appear. A better illustration, or at least a more unmistakable
+one, is afforded by a certain king of France, who is said to have lost
+his life through an excess of moral stamina in the observance of good
+form. In the absence of the functionary whose office it was to shift his
+master's seat, the king sat uncomplaining before the fire and suffered
+his royal person to be toasted beyond recovery. But in so doing he saved
+his Most Christian Majesty from menial contamination. Summum crede nefas
+animam praeferre pudori, Et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas.
+
+It has already been remarked that the term "leisure", as here used, does
+not connote indolence or quiescence. What it connotes is non-productive
+consumption of time. Time is consumed non-productively (1) from a
+sense of the unworthiness of productive work, and (2) as an evidence
+of pecuniary ability to afford a life of idleness. But the whole of the
+life of the gentleman of leisure is not spent before the eyes of the
+spectators who are to be impressed with that spectacle of honorific
+leisure which in the ideal scheme makes up his life. For some part of
+the time his life is perforce withdrawn from the public eye, and of this
+portion which is spent in private the gentleman of leisure should, for
+the sake of his good name, be able to give a convincing account. He
+should find some means of putting in evidence the leisure that is not
+spent in the sight of the spectators. This can be done only indirectly,
+through the exhibition of some tangible, lasting results of the leisure
+so spent--in a manner analogous to the familiar exhibition of tangible,
+lasting products of the labour performed for the gentleman of leisure by
+handicraftsmen and servants in his employ.
+
+The lasting evidence of productive labour is its material
+product--commonly some article of consumption. In the case of exploit it
+is similarly possible and usual to procure some tangible result that may
+serve for exhibition in the way of trophy or booty. At a later phase
+of the development it is customary to assume some badge of insignia of
+honour that will serve as a conventionally accepted mark of exploit, and
+which at the same time indicates the quantity or degree of exploit of
+which it is the symbol. As the population increases in density, and as
+human relations grow more complex and numerous, all the details of life
+undergo a process of elaboration and selection; and in this process of
+elaboration the use of trophies develops into a system of rank, titles,
+degrees and insignia, typical examples of which are heraldic devices,
+medals, and honorary decorations.
+
+As seen from the economic point of view, leisure, considered as an
+employment, is closely allied in kind with the life of exploit; and the
+achievements which characterise a life of leisure, and which remain as
+its decorous criteria, have much in common with the trophies of exploit.
+But leisure in the narrower sense, as distinct from exploit and from any
+ostensibly productive employment of effort on objects which are of no
+intrinsic use, does not commonly leave a material product. The criteria
+of a past performance of leisure therefore commonly take the form
+of "immaterial" goods. Such immaterial evidences of past leisure are
+quasi-scholarly or quasi-artistic accomplishments and a knowledge of
+processes and incidents which do not conduce directly to the furtherance
+of human life. So, for instance, in our time there is the knowledge
+of the dead languages and the occult sciences; of correct spelling; of
+syntax and prosody; of the various forms of domestic music and other
+household art; of the latest properties of dress, furniture, and
+equipage; of games, sports, and fancy-bred animals, such as dogs and
+race-horses. In all these branches of knowledge the initial motive from
+which their acquisition proceeded at the outset, and through which they
+first came into vogue, may have been something quite different from
+the wish to show that one's time had not been spent in industrial
+employment; but unless these accomplishments had approved themselves as
+serviceable evidence of an unproductive expenditure of time, they would
+not have survived and held their place as conventional accomplishments
+of the leisure class.
+
+These accomplishments may, in some sense, be classed as branches of
+learning. Beside and beyond these there is a further range of social
+facts which shade off from the region of learning into that of physical
+habit and dexterity. Such are what is known as manners and breeding,
+polite usage, decorum, and formal and ceremonial observances generally.
+This class of facts are even more immediately and obtrusively presented
+to the observation, and they therefore more widely and more imperatively
+insisted on as required evidences of a reputable degree of leisure. It
+is worth while to remark that all that class of ceremonial observances
+which are classed under the general head of manners hold a more
+important place in the esteem of men during the stage of culture
+at which conspicuous leisure has the greatest vogue as a mark of
+reputability, than at later stages of the cultural development. The
+barbarian of the quasi-peaceable stage of industry is notoriously a more
+high-bred gentleman, in all that concerns decorum, than any but the very
+exquisite among the men of a later age. Indeed, it is well known, or
+at least it is currently believed, that manners have progressively
+deteriorated as society has receded from the patriarchal stage. Many a
+gentleman of the old school has been provoked to remark regretfully upon
+the under-bred manners and bearing of even the better classes in the
+modern industrial communities; and the decay of the ceremonial code--or
+as it is otherwise called, the vulgarisation of life--among the
+industrial classes proper has become one of the chief enormities
+of latter-day civilisation in the eyes of all persons of delicate
+sensibilities. The decay which the code has suffered at the hands of a
+busy people testifies--all depreciation apart--to the fact that decorum
+is a product and an exponent of leisure class life and thrives in full
+measure only under a regime of status.
+
+The origin, or better the derivation, of manners is no doubt, to
+be sought elsewhere than in a conscious effort on the part of the
+well-mannered to show that much time has been spent in acquiring them.
+The proximate end of innovation and elaboration has been the
+higher effectiveness of the new departure in point of beauty or of
+expressiveness. In great part the ceremonial code of decorous usages
+owes its beginning and its growth to the desire to conciliate or to
+show good-will, as anthropologists and sociologists are in the habit
+of assuming, and this initial motive is rarely if ever absent from the
+conduct of well-mannered persons at any stage of the later development.
+Manners, we are told, are in part an elaboration of gesture, and in part
+they are symbolical and conventionalised survivals representing former
+acts of dominance or of personal service or of personal contact. In
+large part they are an expression of the relation of status,--a symbolic
+pantomime of mastery on the one hand and of subservience on the other.
+Wherever at the present time the predatory habit of mind, and the
+consequent attitude of mastery and of subservience, gives its character
+to the accredited scheme of life, there the importance of all punctilios
+of conduct is extreme, and the assiduity with which the ceremonial
+observance of rank and titles is attended to approaches closely to the
+ideal set by the barbarian of the quasi-peaceable nomadic culture. Some
+of the Continental countries afford good illustrations of this spiritual
+survival. In these communities the archaic ideal is similarly approached
+as regards the esteem accorded to manners as a fact of intrinsic worth.
+
+Decorum set out with being symbol and pantomime and with having utility
+only as an exponent of the facts and qualities symbolised; but it
+presently suffered the transmutation which commonly passes over
+symbolical facts in human intercourse. Manners presently came, in
+popular apprehension, to be possessed of a substantial utility in
+themselves; they acquired a sacramental character, in great measure
+independent of the facts which they originally prefigured. Deviations
+from the code of decorum have become intrinsically odious to all
+men, and good breeding is, in everyday apprehension, not simply an
+adventitious mark of human excellence, but an integral feature of
+the worthy human soul. There are few things that so touch us with
+instinctive revulsion as a breach of decorum; and so far have we
+progressed in the direction of imputing intrinsic utility to the
+ceremonial observances of etiquette that few of us, if any, can
+dissociate an offence against etiquette from a sense of the substantial
+unworthiness of the offender. A breach of faith may be condoned, but a
+breach of decorum can not. "Manners maketh man."
+
+None the less, while manners have this intrinsic utility, in the
+apprehension of the performer and the beholder alike, this sense of the
+intrinsic rightness of decorum is only the proximate ground of the vogue
+of manners and breeding. Their ulterior, economic ground is to be sought
+in the honorific character of that leisure or non-productive employment
+of time and effort without which good manners are not acquired. The
+knowledge and habit of good form come only by long-continued use.
+Refined tastes, manners, habits of life are a useful evidence of
+gentility, because good breeding requires time, application and expense,
+and can therefore not be compassed by those whose time and energy are
+taken up with work. A knowledge of good form is prima facie evidence
+that that portion of the well-bred person's life which is not spent
+under the observation of the spectator has been worthily spent in
+acquiring accomplishments that are of no lucrative effect. In the last
+analysis the value of manners lies in the fact that they are the voucher
+of a life of leisure. Therefore, conversely, since leisure is the
+conventional means of pecuniary repute, the acquisition of some
+proficiency in decorum is incumbent on all who aspire to a modicum of
+pecuniary decency.
+
+So much of the honourable life of leisure as is not spent in the sight
+of spectators can serve the purposes of reputability only in so far as
+it leaves a tangible, visible result that can be put in evidence and can
+be measured and compared with products of the same class exhibited
+by competing aspirants for repute. Some such effect, in the way of
+leisurely manners and carriage, etc., follows from simple persistent
+abstention from work, even where the subject does not take thought
+of the matter and studiously acquire an air of leisurely opulence and
+mastery. Especially does it seem to be true that a life of leisure
+in this way persisted in through several generations will leave a
+persistent, ascertainable effect in the conformation of the person,
+and still more in his habitual bearing and demeanour. But all the
+suggestions of a cumulative life of leisure, and all the proficiency
+in decorum that comes by the way of passive habituation, may be further
+improved upon by taking thought and assiduously acquiring the marks
+of honourable leisure, and then carrying the exhibition of these
+adventitious marks of exemption from employment out in a strenuous and
+systematic discipline. Plainly, this is a point at which a diligent
+application of effort and expenditure may materially further the
+attainment of a decent proficiency in the leisure-class properties.
+Conversely, the greater the degree of proficiency and the more patent
+the evidence of a high degree of habituation to observances which
+serve no lucrative or other directly useful purpose, the greater
+the consumption of time and substance impliedly involved in their
+acquisition, and the greater the resultant good repute. Hence under the
+competitive struggle for proficiency in good manners, it comes about
+that much pains in taken with the cultivation of habits of decorum; and
+hence the details of decorum develop into a comprehensive discipline,
+conformity to which is required of all who would be held blameless in
+point of repute. And hence, on the other hand, this conspicuous leisure
+of which decorum is a ramification grows gradually into a laborious
+drill in deportment and an education in taste and discrimination as
+to what articles of consumption are decorous and what are the decorous
+methods of consuming them.
+
+In this connection it is worthy of notice that the possibility of
+producing pathological and other idiosyncrasies of person and manner by
+shrewd mimicry and a systematic drill have been turned to account in
+the deliberate production of a cultured class--often with a very happy
+effect. In this way, by the process vulgarly known as snobbery, a
+syncopated evolution of gentle birth and breeding is achieved in
+the case of a goodly number of families and lines of descent. This
+syncopated gentle birth gives results which, in point of serviceability
+as a leisure-class factor in the population, are in no wise
+substantially inferior to others who may have had a longer but less
+arduous training in the pecuniary properties.
+
+There are, moreover, measureable degrees of conformity to the latest
+accredited code of the punctilios as regards decorous means and methods
+of consumption. Differences between one person and another in the
+degree of conformity to the ideal in these respects can be compared,
+and persons may be graded and scheduled with some accuracy and effect
+according to a progressive scale of manners and breeding. The award
+of reputability in this regard is commonly made in good faith, on
+the ground of conformity to accepted canons of taste in the matters
+concerned, and without conscious regard to the pecuniary standing or the
+degree of leisure practised by any given candidate for reputability; but
+the canons of taste according to which the award is made are constantly
+under the surveillance of the law of conspicuous leisure, and are indeed
+constantly undergoing change and revision to bring them into closer
+conformity with its requirements. So that while the proximate ground of
+discrimination may be of another kind, still the pervading principle and
+abiding test of good breeding is the requirement of a substantial and
+patent waste of time. There may be some considerable range of variation
+in detail within the scope of this principle, but they are variations of
+form and expression, not of substance.
+
+Much of the courtesy of everyday intercourse is of course a direct
+expression of consideration and kindly good-will, and this element
+of conduct has for the most part no need of being traced back to any
+underlying ground of reputability to explain either its presence or the
+approval with which it is regarded; but the same is not true of the code
+of properties. These latter are expressions of status. It is of course
+sufficiently plain, to any one who cares to see, that our bearing
+towards menials and other pecuniary dependent inferiors is the bearing
+of the superior member in a relation of status, though its manifestation
+is often greatly modified and softened from the original expression of
+crude dominance. Similarly, our bearing towards superiors, and in
+great measure towards equals, expresses a more or less conventionalised
+attitude of subservience. Witness the masterful presence of the
+high-minded gentleman or lady, which testifies to so much of dominance
+and independence of economic circumstances, and which at the same time
+appeals with such convincing force to our sense of what is right and
+gracious. It is among this highest leisure class, who have no superiors
+and few peers, that decorum finds its fullest and maturest expression;
+and it is this highest class also that gives decorum that definite
+formulation which serves as a canon of conduct for the classes beneath.
+And there also the code is most obviously a code of status and shows
+most plainly its incompatibility with all vulgarly productive work. A
+divine assurance and an imperious complaisance, as of one habituated
+to require subservience and to take no thought for the morrow, is the
+birthright and the criterion of the gentleman at his best; and it is in
+popular apprehension even more than that, for this demeanour is accepted
+as an intrinsic attribute of superior worth, before which the base-born
+commoner delights to stoop and yield.
+
+As has been indicated in an earlier chapter, there is reason to believe
+that the institution of ownership has begun with the ownership of
+persons, primarily women. The incentives to acquiring such property have
+apparently been: (1) a propensity for dominance and coercion; (2) the
+utility of these persons as evidence of the prowess of the owner; (3)
+the utility of their services.
+
+Personal service holds a peculiar place in the economic development.
+During the stage of quasi-peaceable industry, and especially during the
+earlier development of industry within the limits of this general stage,
+the utility of their services seems commonly to be the dominant motive
+to the acquisition of property in persons. Servants are valued for their
+services. But the dominance of this motive is not due to a decline
+in the absolute importance of the other two utilities possessed by
+servants. It is rather that the altered circumstance of life accentuate
+the utility of servants for this last-named purpose. Women and other
+slaves are highly valued, both as an evidence of wealth and as a means
+of accumulating wealth. Together with cattle, if the tribe is a pastoral
+one, they are the usual form of investment for a profit. To such an
+extent may female slavery give its character to the economic life under
+the quasi-peaceable culture that the women even comes to serve as a unit
+of value among peoples occupying this cultural stage--as for instance in
+Homeric times. Where this is the case there need be little question but
+that the basis of the industrial system is chattel slavery and that the
+women are commonly slaves. The great, pervading human relation in such a
+system is that of master and servant. The accepted evidence of wealth is
+the possession of many women, and presently also of other slaves engaged
+in attendance on their master's person and in producing goods for him.
+
+A division of labour presently sets in, whereby personal service and
+attendance on the master becomes the special office of a portion of the
+servants, while those who are wholly employed in industrial occupations
+proper are removed more and more from all immediate relation to the
+person of their owner. At the same time those servants whose office
+is personal service, including domestic duties, come gradually to be
+exempted from productive industry carried on for gain.
+
+This process of progressive exemption from the common run of industrial
+employment will commonly begin with the exemption of the wife, or the
+chief wife. After the community has advanced to settled habits of life,
+wife-capture from hostile tribes becomes impracticable as a customary
+source of supply. Where this cultural advance has been achieved, the
+chief wife is ordinarily of gentle blood, and the fact of her being so
+will hasten her exemption from vulgar employment. The manner in which
+the concept of gentle blood originates, as well as the place which it
+occupies in the development of marriage, cannot be discussed in this
+place. For the purpose in hand it will be sufficient to say that gentle
+blood is blood which has been ennobled by protracted contact with
+accumulated wealth or unbroken prerogative. The women with these
+antecedents is preferred in marriage, both for the sake of a resulting
+alliance with her powerful relatives and because a superior worth is
+felt to inhere in blood which has been associated with many goods and
+great power. She will still be her husband's chattel, as she was her
+father's chattel before her purchase, but she is at the same time of
+her father's gentle blood; and hence there is a moral incongruity in her
+occupying herself with the debasing employments of her fellow-servants.
+However completely she may be subject to her master, and however
+inferior to the male members of the social stratum in which her birth
+has placed her, the principle that gentility is transmissible will act
+to place her above the common slave; and so soon as this principle has
+acquired a prescriptive authority it will act to invest her in some
+measure with that prerogative of leisure which is the chief mark of
+gentility. Furthered by this principle of transmissible gentility the
+wife's exemption gains in scope, if the wealth of her owner permits it,
+until it includes exemption from debasing menial service as well as from
+handicraft. As the industrial development goes on and property becomes
+massed in relatively fewer hands, the conventional standard of wealth of
+the upper class rises. The same tendency to exemption from handicraft,
+and in the course of time from menial domestic employments, will then
+assert itself as regards the other wives, if such there are, and also as
+regards other servants in immediate attendance upon the person of their
+master. The exemption comes more tardily the remoter the relation in
+which the servant stands to the person of the master.
+
+If the pecuniary situation of the master permits it, the development of
+a special class of personal or body servants is also furthered by the
+very grave importance which comes to attach to this personal service.
+The master's person, being the embodiment of worth and honour, is of
+the most serious consequence. Both for his reputable standing in the
+community and for his self-respect, it is a matter of moment that he
+should have at his call efficient specialised servants, whose attendance
+upon his person is not diverted from this their chief office by any
+by-occupation. These specialised servants are useful more for show
+than for service actually performed. In so far as they are not kept for
+exhibition simply, they afford gratification to their master chiefly in
+allowing scope to his propensity for dominance. It is true, the care of
+the continually increasing household apparatus may require added labour;
+but since the apparatus is commonly increased in order to serve as
+a means of good repute rather than as a means of comfort, this
+qualification is not of great weight. All these lines of utility are
+better served by a larger number of more highly specialised servants.
+There results, therefore, a constantly increasing differentiation and
+multiplication of domestic and body servants, along with a concomitant
+progressive exemption of such servants from productive labour. By virtue
+of their serving as evidence of ability to pay, the office of such
+domestics regularly tends to include continually fewer duties, and their
+service tends in the end to become nominal only. This is especially true
+of those servants who are in most immediate and obvious attendance upon
+their master. So that the utility of these comes to consist, in great
+part, in their conspicuous exemption from productive labour and in
+the evidence which this exemption affords of their master's wealth and
+power.
+
+After some considerable advance has been made in the practice of
+employing a special corps of servants for the performance of a
+conspicuous leisure in this manner, men begin to be preferred above
+women for services that bring them obtrusively into view. Men,
+especially lusty, personable fellows, such as footmen and other menials
+should be, are obviously more powerful and more expensive than women.
+They are better fitted for this work, as showing a larger waste of time
+and of human energy. Hence it comes about that in the economy of the
+leisure class the busy housewife of the early patriarchal days, with her
+retinue of hard-working handmaidens, presently gives place to the lady
+and the lackey.
+
+In all grades and walks of life, and at any stage of the economic
+development, the leisure of the lady and of the lackey differs from the
+leisure of the gentleman in his own right in that it is an occupation of
+an ostensibly laborious kind. It takes the form, in large measure, of
+a painstaking attention to the service of the master, or to the
+maintenance and elaboration of the household paraphernalia; so that
+it is leisure only in the sense that little or no productive work is
+performed by this class, not in the sense that all appearance of
+labour is avoided by them. The duties performed by the lady, or by the
+household or domestic servants, are frequently arduous enough, and they
+are also frequently directed to ends which are considered extremely
+necessary to the comfort of the entire household. So far as these
+services conduce to the physical efficiency or comfort of the master
+or the rest of the household, they are to be accounted productive work.
+Only the residue of employment left after deduction of this effective
+work is to be classed as a performance of leisure.
+
+But much of the services classed as household cares in modern everyday
+life, and many of the "utilities" required for a comfortable existence
+by civilised man, are of a ceremonial character. They are, therefore,
+properly to be classed as a performance of leisure in the sense in which
+the term is here used. They may be none the less imperatively necessary
+from the point of view of decent existence: they may be none the less
+requisite for personal comfort even, although they may be chiefly or
+wholly of a ceremonial character. But in so far as they partake of this
+character they are imperative and requisite because we have been taught
+to require them under pain of ceremonial uncleanness or unworthiness. We
+feel discomfort in their absence, but not because their absence results
+directly in physical discomfort; nor would a taste not trained to
+discriminate between the conventionally good and the conventionally bad
+take offence at their omission. In so far as this is true the labour
+spent in these services is to be classed as leisure; and when performed
+by others than the economically free and self-directed head of the
+establishment, they are to be classed as vicarious leisure.
+
+The vicarious leisure performed by housewives and menials, under
+the head of household cares, may frequently develop into drudgery,
+especially where the competition for reputability is close and
+strenuous. This is frequently the case in modern life. Where this
+happens, the domestic service which comprises the duties of this
+servant class might aptly be designated as wasted effort, rather than as
+vicarious leisure. But the latter term has the advantage of indicating
+the line of derivation of these domestic offices, as well as of neatly
+suggesting the substantial economic ground of their utility; for
+these occupations are chiefly useful as a method of imputing pecuniary
+reputability to the master or to the household on the ground that a
+given amount of time and effort is conspicuously wasted in that behalf.
+
+In this way, then, there arises a subsidiary or derivative leisure
+class, whose office is the performance of a vicarious leisure for the
+behoof of the reputability of the primary or legitimate leisure class.
+This vicarious leisure class is distinguished from the leisure class
+proper by a characteristic feature of its habitual mode of life. The
+leisure of the master class is, at least ostensibly, an indulgence of
+a proclivity for the avoidance of labour and is presumed to enhance
+the master's own well-being and fulness of life; but the leisure of
+the servant class exempt from productive labour is in some sort a
+performance exacted from them, and is not normally or primarily directed
+to their own comfort. The leisure of the servant is not his own leisure.
+So far as he is a servant in the full sense, and not at the same time
+a member of a lower order of the leisure class proper, his leisure
+normally passes under the guise of specialised service directed to the
+furtherance of his master's fulness of life. Evidence of this relation
+of subservience is obviously present in the servant's carriage and
+manner of life. The like is often true of the wife throughout the
+protracted economic stage during which she is still primarily a
+servant--that is to say, so long as the household with a male head
+remains in force. In order to satisfy the requirements of the leisure
+class scheme of life, the servant should show not only an attitude of
+subservience, but also the effects of special training and practice
+in subservience. The servant or wife should not only perform certain
+offices and show a servile disposition, but it is quite as imperative
+that they should show an acquired facility in the tactics of
+subservience--a trained conformity to the canons of effectual and
+conspicuous subservience. Even today it is this aptitude and acquired
+skill in the formal manifestation of the servile relation that
+constitutes the chief element of utility in our highly paid servants, as
+well as one of the chief ornaments of the well-bred housewife.
+
+The first requisite of a good servant is that he should conspicuously
+know his place. It is not enough that he knows how to effect certain
+desired mechanical results; he must above all, know how to effect these
+results in due form. Domestic service might be said to be a spiritual
+rather than a mechanical function. Gradually there grows up an elaborate
+system of good form, specifically regulating the manner in which this
+vicarious leisure of the servant class is to be performed. Any departure
+from these canons of form is to be depreciated, not so much because it
+evinces a shortcoming in mechanical efficiency, or even that it shows
+an absence of the servile attitude and temperament, but because, in
+the last analysis, it shows the absence of special training. Special
+training in personal service costs time and effort, and where it is
+obviously present in a high degree, it argues that the servant who
+possesses it, neither is nor has been habitually engaged in any
+productive occupation. It is prima facie evidence of a vicarious leisure
+extending far back in the past. So that trained service has utility, not
+only as gratifying the master's instinctive liking for good and skilful
+workmanship and his propensity for conspicuous dominance over those
+whose lives are subservient to his own, but it has utility also as
+putting in evidence a much larger consumption of human service than
+would be shown by the mere present conspicuous leisure performed by an
+untrained person. It is a serious grievance if a gentleman's butler or
+footman performs his duties about his master's table or carriage in
+such unformed style as to suggest that his habitual occupation may be
+ploughing or sheepherding. Such bungling work would imply inability on
+the master's part to procure the service of specially trained servants;
+that is to say, it would imply inability to pay for the consumption
+of time, effort, and instruction required to fit a trained servant for
+special service under the exacting code of forms. If the performance of
+the servant argues lack of means on the part of his master, it defeats
+its chief substantial end; for the chief use of servants is the evidence
+they afford of the master's ability to pay.
+
+What has just been said might be taken to imply that the offence of an
+under-trained servant lies in a direct suggestion of inexpensiveness or
+of usefulness. Such, of course, is not the case. The connection is much
+less immediate. What happens here is what happens generally. Whatever
+approves itself to us on any ground at the outset, presently comes to
+appeal to us as a gratifying thing in itself; it comes to rest in our
+habits of though as substantially right. But in order that any specific
+canon of deportment shall maintain itself in favour, it must continue to
+have the support of, or at least not be incompatible with, the habit
+or aptitude which constitutes the norm of its development. The need of
+vicarious leisure, or conspicuous consumption of service, is a dominant
+incentive to the keeping of servants. So long as this remains true it
+may be set down without much discussion that any such departure from
+accepted usage as would suggest an abridged apprenticeship in service
+would presently be found insufferable. The requirement of an expensive
+vicarious leisure acts indirectly, selectively, by guiding the formation
+of our taste,--of our sense of what is right in these matters,--and so
+weeds out unconformable departures by withholding approval of them.
+
+As the standard of wealth recognized by common consent advances,
+the possession and exploitation of servants as a means of showing
+superfluity undergoes a refinement. The possession and maintenance of
+slaves employed in the production of goods argues wealth and prowess,
+but the maintenance of servants who produce nothing argues still higher
+wealth and position. Under this principle there arises a class of
+servants, the more numerous the better, whose sole office is fatuously
+to wait upon the person of their owner, and so to put in evidence his
+ability unproductively to consume a large amount of service. There
+supervenes a division of labour among the servants or dependents whose
+life is spent in maintaining the honour of the gentleman of leisure.
+So that, while one group produces goods for him, another group, usually
+headed by the wife, or chief, consumes for him in conspicuous leisure;
+thereby putting in evidence his ability to sustain large pecuniary
+damage without impairing his superior opulence.
+
+This somewhat idealized and diagrammatic outline of the development and
+nature of domestic service comes nearest being true for that cultural
+stage which was here been named the "quasi-peaceable" stage of industry.
+At this stage personal service first rises to the position of an
+economic institution, and it is at this stage that it occupies the
+largest place in the community's scheme of life. In the cultural
+sequence, the quasi-peaceable stage follows the predatory stage proper,
+the two being successive phases of barbarian life. Its characteristic
+feature is a formal observance of peace and order, at the same time that
+life at this stage still has too much of coercion and class antagonism
+to be called peaceable in the full sense of the word. For many purposes,
+and from another point of view than the economic one, it might as well
+be named the stage of status. The method of human relation during this
+stage, and the spiritual attitude of men at this level of culture, is
+well summed up under the term. But as a descriptive term to characterise
+the prevailing methods of industry, as well as to indicate the trend
+of industrial development at this point in economic evolution, the term
+"quasi-peaceable" seems preferable. So far as concerns the communities
+of the Western culture, this phase of economic development probably
+lies in the past; except for a numerically small though very conspicuous
+fraction of the community in whom the habits of thought peculiar to the
+barbarian culture have suffered but a relatively slight disintegration.
+
+Personal service is still an element of great economic importance,
+especially as regards the distribution and consumption of goods; but its
+relative importance even in this direction is no doubt less than it once
+was. The best development of this vicarious leisure lies in the past
+rather than in the present; and its best expression in the present is to
+be found in the scheme of life of the upper leisure class. To this
+class the modern culture owes much in the way of the conservation of
+traditions, usages, and habits of thought which belong on a more archaic
+cultural plane, so far as regards their widest acceptance and their most
+effective development.
+
+In the modern industrial communities the mechanical contrivances
+available for the comfort and convenience of everyday life are highly
+developed. So much so that body servants, or, indeed, domestic servants
+of any kind, would now scarcely be employed by anybody except on the
+ground of a canon of reputability carried over by tradition from earlier
+usage. The only exception would be servants employed to attend on the
+persons of the infirm and the feeble-minded. But such servants properly
+come under the head of trained nurses rather than under that of domestic
+servants, and they are, therefore, an apparent rather than a real
+exception to the rule.
+
+The proximate reason for keeping domestic servants, for instance, in
+the moderately well-to-do household of to-day, is (ostensibly) that the
+members of the household are unable without discomfort to compass the
+work required by such a modern establishment. And the reason for their
+being unable to accomplish it is (1) that they have too many "social
+duties", and (2) that the work to be done is too severe and that there
+is too much of it. These two reasons may be restated as follows: (1)
+Under the mandatory code of decency, the time and effort of the members
+of such a household are required to be ostensibly all spent in a
+performance of conspicuous leisure, in the way of calls, drives, clubs,
+sewing-circles, sports, charity organisations, and other like social
+functions. Those persons whose time and energy are employed in these
+matters privately avow that all these observances, as well as the
+incidental attention to dress and other conspicuous consumption, are
+very irksome but altogether unavoidable. (2) Under the requirement of
+conspicuous consumption of goods, the apparatus of living has grown so
+elaborate and cumbrous, in the way of dwellings, furniture, bric-a-brac,
+wardrobe and meals, that the consumers of these things cannot make way
+with them in the required manner without help. Personal contact with the
+hired persons whose aid is called in to fulfil the routine of decency is
+commonly distasteful to the occupants of the house, but their presence
+is endured and paid for, in order to delegate to them a share in
+this onerous consumption of household goods. The presence of domestic
+servants, and of the special class of body servants in an eminent
+degree, is a concession of physical comfort to the moral need of
+pecuniary decency.
+
+The largest manifestation of vicarious leisure in modern life is made
+up of what are called domestic duties. These duties are fast becoming a
+species of services performed, not so much for the individual behoof of
+the head of the household as for the reputability of the household taken
+as a corporate unit--a group of which the housewife is a member on a
+footing of ostensible equality. As fast as the household for which they
+are performed departs from its archaic basis of ownership-marriage,
+these household duties of course tend to fall out of the category of
+vicarious leisure in the original sense; except so far as they are
+performed by hired servants. That is to say, since vicarious leisure
+is possible only on a basis of status or of hired service, the
+disappearance of the relation of status from human intercourse at any
+point carries with it the disappearance of vicarious leisure so far as
+regards that much of life. But it is to be added, in qualification of
+this qualification, that so long as the household subsists, even with a
+divided head, this class of non-productive labour performed for the
+sake of the household reputability must still be classed as vicarious
+leisure, although in a slightly altered sense. It is now leisure
+performed for the quasi-personal corporate household, instead of, as
+formerly, for the proprietary head of the household.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Four ~~ Conspicuous Consumption
+
+In what has been said of the evolution of the vicarious leisure class
+and its differentiation from the general body of the working classes,
+reference has been made to a further division of labour,--that between
+the different servant classes. One portion of the servant class, chiefly
+those persons whose occupation is vicarious leisure, come to undertake a
+new, subsidiary range of duties--the vicarious consumption of goods.
+The most obvious form in which this consumption occurs is seen in the
+wearing of liveries and the occupation of spacious servants' quarters.
+Another, scarcely less obtrusive or less effective form of vicarious
+consumption, and a much more widely prevalent one, is the consumption of
+food, clothing, dwelling, and furniture by the lady and the rest of the
+domestic establishment.
+
+But already at a point in economic evolution far antedating the
+emergence of the lady, specialised consumption of goods as an evidence
+of pecuniary strength had begun to work out in a more or less elaborate
+system. The beginning of a differentiation in consumption even antedates
+the appearance of anything that can fairly be called pecuniary strength.
+It is traceable back to the initial phase of predatory culture, and
+there is even a suggestion that an incipient differentiation in this
+respect lies back of the beginnings of the predatory life. This most
+primitive differentiation in the consumption of goods is like the later
+differentiation with which we are all so intimately familiar, in that it
+is largely of a ceremonial character, but unlike the latter it does not
+rest on a difference in accumulated wealth. The utility of consumption
+as an evidence of wealth is to be classed as a derivative growth. It
+is an adaption to a new end, by a selective process, of a distinction
+previously existing and well established in men's habits of thought.
+
+In the earlier phases of the predatory culture the only economic
+differentiation is a broad distinction between an honourable superior
+class made up of the able-bodied men on the one side, and a base
+inferior class of labouring women on the other. According to the ideal
+scheme of life in force at the time it is the office of the men to
+consume what the women produce. Such consumption as falls to the women
+is merely incidental to their work; it is a means to their continued
+labour, and not a consumption directed to their own comfort and fulness
+of life. Unproductive consumption of goods is honourable, primarily as
+a mark of prowess and a perquisite of human dignity; secondarily it
+becomes substantially honourable to itself, especially the consumption
+of the more desirable things. The consumption of choice articles of
+food, and frequently also of rare articles of adornment, becomes tabu to
+the women and children; and if there is a base (servile) class of men,
+the tabu holds also for them. With a further advance in culture this
+tabu may change into simple custom of a more or less rigorous character;
+but whatever be the theoretical basis of the distinction which is
+maintained, whether it be a tabu or a larger conventionality, the
+features of the conventional scheme of consumption do not change
+easily. When the quasi-peaceable stage of industry is reached, with its
+fundamental institution of chattel slavery, the general principle, more
+or less rigorously applied, is that the base, industrious class should
+consume only what may be necessary to their subsistence. In the nature
+of things, luxuries and the comforts of life belong to the leisure
+class. Under the tabu, certain victuals, and more particularly certain
+beverages, are strictly reserved for the use of the superior class.
+
+The ceremonial differentiation of the dietary is best seen in the use of
+intoxicating beverages and narcotics. If these articles of consumption
+are costly, they are felt to be noble and honorific. Therefore the
+base classes, primarily the women, practice an enforced continence
+with respect to these stimulants, except in countries where they are
+obtainable at a very low cost. From archaic times down through all the
+length of the patriarchal regime it has been the office of the women to
+prepare and administer these luxuries, and it has been the perquisite
+of the men of gentle birth and breeding to consume them. Drunkenness
+and the other pathological consequences of the free use of stimulants
+therefore tend in their turn to become honorific, as being a mark,
+at the second remove, of the superior status of those who are able to
+afford the indulgence. Infirmities induced by over-indulgence are among
+some peoples freely recognised as manly attributes. It has even happened
+that the name for certain diseased conditions of the body arising from
+such an origin has passed into everyday speech as a synonym for "noble"
+or "gentle". It is only at a relatively early stage of culture that the
+symptoms of expensive vice are conventionally accepted as marks of a
+superior status, and so tend to become virtues and command the deference
+of the community; but the reputability that attaches to certain
+expensive vices long retains so much of its force as to appreciably
+lesson the disapprobation visited upon the men of the wealthy or noble
+class for any excessive indulgence. The same invidious distinction adds
+force to the current disapproval of any indulgence of this kind on
+the part of women, minors, and inferiors. This invidious traditional
+distinction has not lost its force even among the more advanced peoples
+of today. Where the example set by the leisure class retains its
+imperative force in the regulation of the conventionalities, it is
+observable that the women still in great measure practise the same
+traditional continence with regard to stimulants.
+
+This characterisation of the greater continence in the use of stimulants
+practised by the women of the reputable classes may seem an excessive
+refinement of logic at the expense of common sense. But facts within
+easy reach of any one who cares to know them go to say that the
+greater abstinence of women is in some part due to an imperative
+conventionality; and this conventionality is, in a general way,
+strongest where the patriarchal tradition--the tradition that the woman
+is a chattel--has retained its hold in greatest vigour. In a sense which
+has been greatly qualified in scope and rigour, but which has by no
+means lost its meaning even yet, this tradition says that the
+woman, being a chattel, should consume only what is necessary to her
+sustenance,--except so far as her further consumption contributes to the
+comfort or the good repute of her master. The consumption of luxuries,
+in the true sense, is a consumption directed to the comfort of the
+consumer himself, and is, therefore, a mark of the master. Any such
+consumption by others can take place only on a basis of sufferance. In
+communities where the popular habits of thought have been profoundly
+shaped by the patriarchal tradition we may accordingly look for
+survivals of the tabu on luxuries at least to the extent of a
+conventional deprecation of their use by the unfree and dependent class.
+This is more particularly true as regards certain luxuries, the use of
+which by the dependent class would detract sensibly from the comfort
+or pleasure of their masters, or which are held to be of doubtful
+legitimacy on other grounds. In the apprehension of the great
+conservative middle class of Western civilisation the use of these
+various stimulants is obnoxious to at least one, if not both, of these
+objections; and it is a fact too significant to be passed over that it
+is precisely among these middle classes of the Germanic culture, with
+their strong surviving sense of the patriarchal proprieties, that
+the women are to the greatest extent subject to a qualified tabu on
+narcotics and alcoholic beverages. With many qualifications--with more
+qualifications as the patriarchal tradition has gradually weakened--the
+general rule is felt to be right and binding that women should consume
+only for the benefit of their masters. The objection of course presents
+itself that expenditure on women's dress and household paraphernalia is
+an obvious exception to this rule; but it will appear in the sequel that
+this exception is much more obvious than substantial. During the earlier
+stages of economic development, consumption of goods without stint,
+especially consumption of the better grades of goods,--ideally all
+consumption in excess of the subsistence minimum,--pertains normally
+to the leisure class. This restriction tends to disappear, at least
+formally, after the later peaceable stage has been reached, with private
+ownership of goods and an industrial system based on wage labour or
+on the petty household economy. But during the earlier quasi-peaceable
+stage, when so many of the traditions through which the institution of a
+leisure class has affected the economic life of later times were taking
+form and consistency, this principle has had the force of a conventional
+law. It has served as the norm to which consumption has tended to
+conform, and any appreciable departure from it is to be regarded as
+an aberrant form, sure to be eliminated sooner or later in the further
+course of development.
+
+The quasi-peaceable gentleman of leisure, then, not only consumes of the
+staff of life beyond the minimum required for subsistence and physical
+efficiency, but his consumption also undergoes a specialisation as
+regards the quality of the goods consumed. He consumes freely and of the
+best, in food, drink, narcotics, shelter, services, ornaments, apparel,
+weapons and accoutrements, amusements, amulets, and idols or divinities.
+In the process of gradual amelioration which takes place in the articles
+of his consumption, the motive principle and proximate aim of innovation
+is no doubt the higher efficiency of the improved and more elaborate
+products for personal comfort and well-being. But that does not remain
+the sole purpose of their consumption. The canon of reputability is at
+hand and seizes upon such innovations as are, according to its standard,
+fit to survive. Since the consumption of these more excellent goods is
+an evidence of wealth, it becomes honorific; and conversely, the failure
+to consume in due quantity and quality becomes a mark of inferiority and
+demerit.
+
+This growth of punctilious discrimination as to qualitative excellence
+in eating, drinking, etc. presently affects not only the manner of life,
+but also the training and intellectual activity of the gentleman of
+leisure. He is no longer simply the successful, aggressive male,--the
+man of strength, resource, and intrepidity. In order to avoid
+stultification he must also cultivate his tastes, for it now becomes
+incumbent on him to discriminate with some nicety between the noble and
+the ignoble in consumable goods. He becomes a connoisseur in creditable
+viands of various degrees of merit, in manly beverages and trinkets,
+in seemly apparel and architecture, in weapons, games, dancers, and
+the narcotics. This cultivation of aesthetic faculty requires time and
+application, and the demands made upon the gentleman in this direction
+therefore tend to change his life of leisure into a more or less arduous
+application to the business of learning how to live a life of ostensible
+leisure in a becoming way. Closely related to the requirement that the
+gentleman must consume freely and of the right kind of goods, there
+is the requirement that he must know how to consume them in a seemly
+manner. His life of leisure must be conducted in due form. Hence arise
+good manners in the way pointed out in an earlier chapter. High-bred
+manners and ways of living are items of conformity to the norm of
+conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption.
+
+Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to
+the gentleman of leisure. As wealth accumulates on his hands, his
+own unaided effort will not avail to sufficiently put his opulence in
+evidence by this method. The aid of friends and competitors is therefore
+brought in by resorting to the giving of valuable presents and expensive
+feasts and entertainments. Presents and feasts had probably another
+origin than that of naive ostentation, but they required their utility
+for this purpose very early, and they have retained that character to
+the present; so that their utility in this respect has now long been the
+substantial ground on which these usages rest. Costly entertainments,
+such as the potlatch or the ball, are peculiarly adapted to serve this
+end. The competitor with whom the entertainer wishes to institute a
+comparison is, by this method, made to serve as a means to the end. He
+consumes vicariously for his host at the same time that he is witness to
+the consumption of that excess of good things which his host is unable
+to dispose of single-handed, and he is also made to witness his host's
+facility in etiquette.
+
+In the giving of costly entertainments other motives, of more genial
+kind, are of course also present. The custom of festive gatherings
+probably originated in motives of conviviality and religion; these
+motives are also present in the later development, but they do
+not continue to be the sole motives. The latter-day leisure-class
+festivities and entertainments may continue in some slight degree to
+serve the religious need and in a higher degree the needs of recreation
+and conviviality, but they also serve an invidious purpose; and they
+serve it none the less effectually for having a colorable non-invidious
+ground in these more avowable motives. But the economic effect of these
+social amenities is not therefore lessened, either in the vicarious
+consumption of goods or in the exhibition of difficult and costly
+achievements in etiquette.
+
+As wealth accumulates, the leisure class develops further in function
+and structure, and there arises a differentiation within the class.
+There is a more or less elaborate system of rank and grades. This
+differentiation is furthered by the inheritance of wealth and the
+consequent inheritance of gentility. With the inheritance of gentility
+goes the inheritance of obligatory leisure; and gentility of a
+sufficient potency to entail a life of leisure may be inherited without
+the complement of wealth required to maintain a dignified leisure.
+Gentle blood may be transmitted without goods enough to afford a
+reputably free consumption at one's ease. Hence results a class of
+impecunious gentlemen of leisure, incidentally referred to already.
+These half-caste gentlemen of leisure fall into a system of hierarchical
+gradations. Those who stand near the higher and the highest grades of
+the wealthy leisure class, in point of birth, or in point of wealth, or
+both, outrank the remoter-born and the pecuniarily weaker. These lower
+grades, especially the impecunious, or marginal, gentlemen of leisure,
+affiliate themselves by a system of dependence or fealty to the great
+ones; by so doing they gain an increment of repute, or of the means
+with which to lead a life of leisure, from their patron. They become
+his courtiers or retainers, servants; and being fed and countenanced by
+their patron they are indices of his rank and vicarious consumer of his
+superfluous wealth. Many of these affiliated gentlemen of leisure are at
+the same time lesser men of substance in their own right; so that some
+of them are scarcely at all, others only partially, to be rated as
+vicarious consumers. So many of them, however, as make up the retainer
+and hangers-on of the patron may be classed as vicarious consumer
+without qualification. Many of these again, and also many of the other
+aristocracy of less degree, have in turn attached to their persons a
+more or less comprehensive group of vicarious consumer in the persons of
+their wives and children, their servants, retainers, etc.
+
+Throughout this graduated scheme of vicarious leisure and vicarious
+consumption the rule holds that these offices must be performed in some
+such manner, or under some such circumstance or insignia, as shall point
+plainly to the master to whom this leisure or consumption pertains,
+and to whom therefore the resulting increment of good repute of right
+inures. The consumption and leisure executed by these persons for their
+master or patron represents an investment on his part with a view to an
+increase of good fame. As regards feasts and largesses this is obvious
+enough, and the imputation of repute to the host or patron here takes
+place immediately, on the ground of common notoriety. Where leisure
+and consumption is performed vicariously by henchmen and retainers,
+imputation of the resulting repute to the patron is effected by their
+residing near his person so that it may be plain to all men from what
+source they draw. As the group whose good esteem is to be secured in
+this way grows larger, more patent means are required to indicate the
+imputation of merit for the leisure performed, and to this end uniforms,
+badges, and liveries come into vogue. The wearing of uniforms or
+liveries implies a considerable degree of dependence, and may even
+be said to be a mark of servitude, real or ostensible. The wearers of
+uniforms and liveries may be roughly divided into two classes-the free
+and the servile, or the noble and the ignoble. The services performed
+by them are likewise divisible into noble and ignoble. Of course the
+distinction is not observed with strict consistency in practice; the
+less debasing of the base services and the less honorific of the noble
+functions are not infrequently merged in the same person. But the
+general distinction is not on that account to be overlooked. What
+may add some perplexity is the fact that this fundamental distinction
+between noble and ignoble, which rests on the nature of the ostensible
+service performed, is traversed by a secondary distinction into
+honorific and humiliating, resting on the rank of the person for whom
+the service is performed or whose livery is worn. So, those offices
+which are by right the proper employment of the leisure class are
+noble; such as government, fighting, hunting, the care of arms and
+accoutrements, and the like--in short, those which may be classed as
+ostensibly predatory employments. On the other hand, those employments
+which properly fall to the industrious class are ignoble; such as
+handicraft or other productive labor, menial services and the like. But
+a base service performed for a person of very high degree may become a
+very honorific office; as for instance the office of a Maid of Honor or
+of a Lady in Waiting to the Queen, or the King's Master of the Horse or
+his Keeper of the Hounds. The two offices last named suggest a principle
+of some general bearing. Whenever, as in these cases, the menial service
+in question has to do directly with the primary leisure employments
+of fighting and hunting, it easily acquires a reflected honorific
+character. In this way great honor may come to attach to an employment
+which in its own nature belongs to the baser sort. In the later
+development of peaceable industry, the usage of employing an idle corps
+of uniformed men-at-arms gradually lapses. Vicarious consumption by
+dependents bearing the insignia of their patron or master narrows down
+to a corps of liveried menials. In a heightened degree, therefore, the
+livery comes to be a badge of servitude, or rather servility. Something
+of a honorific character always attached to the livery of the armed
+retainer, but this honorific character disappears when the livery
+becomes the exclusive badge of the menial. The livery becomes obnoxious
+to nearly all who are required to wear it. We are yet so little removed
+from a state of effective slavery as still to be fully sensitive to the
+sting of any imputation of servility. This antipathy asserts itself
+even in the case of the liveries or uniforms which some corporations
+prescribe as the distinctive dress of their employees. In this country
+the aversion even goes the length of discrediting--in a mild and
+uncertain way--those government employments, military and civil, which
+require the wearing of a livery or uniform.
+
+With the disappearance of servitude, the number of vicarious consumers
+attached to any one gentleman tends, on the whole, to decrease. The like
+is of course true, and perhaps in a still higher degree, of the number
+of dependents who perform vicarious leisure for him. In a general way,
+though not wholly nor consistently, these two groups coincide. The
+dependent who was first delegated for these duties was the wife, or the
+chief wife; and, as would be expected, in the later development of
+the institution, when the number of persons by whom these duties are
+customarily performed gradually narrows, the wife remains the last.
+In the higher grades of society a large volume of both these kinds of
+service is required; and here the wife is of course still assisted in
+the work by a more or less numerous corps of menials. But as we descend
+the social scale, the point is presently reached where the duties of
+vicarious leisure and consumption devolve upon the wife alone. In the
+communities of the Western culture, this point is at present found among
+the lower middle class.
+
+And here occurs a curious inversion. It is a fact of common observance
+that in this lower middle class there is no pretense of leisure on the
+part of the head of the household. Through force of circumstances it
+has fallen into disuse. But the middle-class wife still carries on the
+business of vicarious leisure, for the good name of the household and
+its master. In descending the social scale in any modern industrial
+community, the primary fact-the conspicuous leisure of the master of
+the household-disappears at a relatively high point. The head of the
+middle-class household has been reduced by economic circumstances to
+turn his hand to gaining a livelihood by occupations which often partake
+largely of the character of industry, as in the case of the ordinary
+business man of today. But the derivative fact-the vicarious leisure
+and consumption rendered by the wife, and the auxiliary vicarious
+performance of leisure by menials-remains in vogue as a conventionality
+which the demands of reputability will not suffer to be slighted. It is
+by no means an uncommon spectacle to find a man applying himself to work
+with the utmost assiduity, in order that his wife may in due form render
+for him that degree of vicarious leisure which the common sense of the
+time demands.
+
+The leisure rendered by the wife in such cases is, of course, not a
+simple manifestation of idleness or indolence. It almost invariably
+occurs disguised under some form of work or household duties or social
+amenities, which prove on analysis to serve little or no ulterior end
+beyond showing that she does not occupy herself with anything that is
+gainful or that is of substantial use. As has already been noticed under
+the head of manners, the greater part of the customary round of domestic
+cares to which the middle-class housewife gives her time and effort is
+of this character. Not that the results of her attention to household
+matters, of a decorative and mundificatory character, are not pleasing
+to the sense of men trained in middle-class proprieties; but the taste
+to which these effects of household adornment and tidiness appeal is a
+taste which has been formed under the selective guidance of a canon
+of propriety that demands just these evidences of wasted effort. The
+effects are pleasing to us chiefly because we have been taught to find
+them pleasing. There goes into these domestic duties much solicitude for
+a proper combination of form and color, and for other ends that are to
+be classed as aesthetic in the proper sense of the term; and it is
+not denied that effects having some substantial aesthetic value are
+sometimes attained. Pretty much all that is here insisted on is that, as
+regards these amenities of life, the housewife's efforts are under the
+guidance of traditions that have been shaped by the law of conspicuously
+wasteful expenditure of time and substance. If beauty or comfort is
+achieved-and it is a more or less fortuitous circumstance if they
+are-they must be achieved by means and methods that commend themselves
+to the great economic law of wasted effort. The more reputable,
+"presentable" portion of middle-class household paraphernalia are, on
+the one hand, items of conspicuous consumption, and on the other hand,
+apparatus for putting in evidence the vicarious leisure rendered by the
+housewife.
+
+The requirement of vicarious consumption at the hands of the wife
+continues in force even at a lower point in the pecuniary scale than the
+requirement of vicarious leisure. At a point below which little if any
+pretense of wasted effort, in ceremonial cleanness and the like,
+is observable, and where there is assuredly no conscious attempt at
+ostensible leisure, decency still requires the wife to consume some
+goods conspicuously for the reputability of the household and its head.
+So that, as the latter-day outcome of this evolution of an archaic
+institution, the wife, who was at the outset the drudge and chattel of
+the man, both in fact and in theory--the producer of goods for him to
+consume--has become the ceremonial consumer of goods which he produces.
+But she still quite unmistakably remains his chattel in theory; for the
+habitual rendering of vicarious leisure and consumption is the abiding
+mark of the unfree servant.
+
+This vicarious consumption practiced by the household of the middle
+and lower classes can not be counted as a direct expression of the
+leisure-class scheme of life, since the household of this pecuniary
+grade does not belong within the leisure class. It is rather that the
+leisure-class scheme of life here comes to an expression at the second
+remove. The leisure class stands at the head of the social structure in
+point of reputability; and its manner of life and its standards of
+worth therefore afford the norm of reputability for the community. The
+observance of these standards, in some degree of approximation, becomes
+incumbent upon all classes lower in the scale. In modern civilized
+communities the lines of demarcation between social classes have grown
+vague and transient, and wherever this happens the norm of reputability
+imposed by the upper class extends its coercive influence with but
+slight hindrance down through the social structure to the lowest strata.
+The result is that the members of each stratum accept as their ideal of
+decency the scheme of life in vogue in the next higher stratum, and bend
+their energies to live up to that ideal. On pain of forfeiting their
+good name and their self-respect in case of failure, they must conform
+to the accepted code, at least in appearance. The basis on which good
+repute in any highly organized industrial community ultimately rests is
+pecuniary strength; and the means of showing pecuniary strength, and
+so of gaining or retaining a good name, are leisure and a conspicuous
+consumption of goods. Accordingly, both of these methods are in vogue
+as far down the scale as it remains possible; and in the lower strata
+in which the two methods are employed, both offices are in great part
+delegated to the wife and children of the household. Lower still, where
+any degree of leisure, even ostensible, has become impracticable for the
+wife, the conspicuous consumption of goods remains and is carried on by
+the wife and children. The man of the household also can do something
+in this direction, and indeed, he commonly does; but with a still lower
+descent into the levels of indigence--along the margin of the slums--the
+man, and presently also the children, virtually cease to consume
+valuable goods for appearances, and the woman remains virtually the sole
+exponent of the household's pecuniary decency. No class of society,
+not even the most abjectly poor, forgoes all customary conspicuous
+consumption. The last items of this category of consumption are not
+given up except under stress of the direst necessity. Very much of
+squalor and discomfort will be endured before the last trinket or the
+last pretense of pecuniary decency is put away. There is no class and
+no country that has yielded so abjectly before the pressure of physical
+want as to deny themselves all gratification of this higher or spiritual
+need.
+
+From the foregoing survey of the growth of conspicuous leisure and
+consumption, it appears that the utility of both alike for the purposes
+of reputability lies in the element of waste that is common to both.
+In the one case it is a waste of time and effort, in the other it is
+a waste of goods. Both are methods of demonstrating the possession of
+wealth, and the two are conventionally accepted as equivalents. The
+choice between them is a question of advertising expediency simply,
+except so far as it may be affected by other standards of propriety,
+springing from a different source. On grounds of expediency the
+preference may be given to the one or the other at different stages of
+the economic development. The question is, which of the two methods will
+most effectively reach the persons whose convictions it is desired
+to affect. Usage has answered this question in different ways under
+different circumstances.
+
+So long as the community or social group is small enough and compact
+enough to be effectually reached by common notoriety alone that is
+to say, so long as the human environment to which the individual is
+required to adapt himself in respect of reputability is comprised within
+his sphere of personal acquaintance and neighborhood gossip--so long the
+one method is about as effective as the other. Each will therefore serve
+about equally well during the earlier stages of social growth. But when
+the differentiation has gone farther and it becomes necessary to reach
+a wider human environment, consumption begins to hold over leisure as
+an ordinary means of decency. This is especially true during the later,
+peaceable economic stage. The means of communication and the mobility
+of the population now expose the individual to the observation of many
+persons who have no other means of judging of his reputability than
+the display of goods (and perhaps of breeding) which he is able to make
+while he is under their direct observation.
+
+The modern organization of industry works in the same direction also by
+another line. The exigencies of the modern industrial system frequently
+place individuals and households in juxtaposition between whom there
+is little contact in any other sense than that of juxtaposition.
+One's neighbors, mechanically speaking, often are socially not one's
+neighbors, or even acquaintances; and still their transient good opinion
+has a high degree of utility. The only practicable means of impressing
+one's pecuniary ability on these unsympathetic observers of one's
+everyday life is an unremitting demonstration of ability to pay. In
+the modern community there is also a more frequent attendance at large
+gatherings of people to whom one's everyday life is unknown; in such
+places as churches, theaters, ballrooms, hotels, parks, shops, and the
+like. In order to impress these transient observers, and to retain
+one's self-complacency under their observation, the signature of one's
+pecuniary strength should be written in characters which he who runs
+may read. It is evident, therefore, that the present trend of
+the development is in the direction of heightening the utility of
+conspicuous consumption as compared with leisure.
+
+It is also noticeable that the serviceability of consumption as a means
+of repute, as well as the insistence on it as an element of decency, is
+at its best in those portions of the community where the human contact
+of the individual is widest and the mobility of the population is
+greatest. Conspicuous consumption claims a relatively larger portion of
+the income of the urban than of the rural population, and the claim is
+also more imperative. The result is that, in order to keep up a decent
+appearance, the former habitually live hand-to-mouth to a greater extent
+than the latter. So it comes, for instance, that the American farmer and
+his wife and daughters are notoriously less modish in their dress, as
+well as less urbane in their manners, than the city artisan's family
+with an equal income. It is not that the city population is by nature
+much more eager for the peculiar complacency that comes of a conspicuous
+consumption, nor has the rural population less regard for pecuniary
+decency. But the provocation to this line of evidence, as well as its
+transient effectiveness, is more decided in the city. This method is
+therefore more readily resorted to, and in the struggle to outdo one
+another the city population push their normal standard of conspicuous
+consumption to a higher point, with the result that a relatively greater
+expenditure in this direction is required to indicate a given degree
+of pecuniary decency in the city. The requirement of conformity to this
+higher conventional standard becomes mandatory. The standard of decency
+is higher, class for class, and this requirement of decent appearance
+must be lived up to on pain of losing caste.
+
+Consumption becomes a larger element in the standard of living in the
+city than in the country. Among the country population its place is to
+some extent taken by savings and home comforts known through the medium
+of neighborhood gossip sufficiently to serve the like general purpose of
+Pecuniary repute. These home comforts and the leisure indulged in--where
+the indulgence is found--are of course also in great part to be classed
+as items of conspicuous consumption; and much the same is to be said of
+the savings. The smaller amount of the savings laid by by the artisan
+class is no doubt due, in some measure, to the fact that in the case
+of the artisan the savings are a less effective means of advertisement,
+relative to the environment in which he is placed, than are the savings
+of the people living on farms and in the small villages. Among the
+latter, everybody's affairs, especially everybody's pecuniary status,
+are known to everybody else. Considered by itself simply--taken in the
+first degree--this added provocation to which the artisan and the urban
+laboring classes are exposed may not very seriously decrease the amount
+of savings; but in its cumulative action, through raising the standard
+of decent expenditure, its deterrent effect on the tendency to save
+cannot but be very great.
+
+A felicitous illustration of the manner in which this canon of
+reputability works out its results is seen in the practice of
+dram-drinking, "treating," and smoking in public places, which is
+customary among the laborers and handicraftsmen of the towns, and among
+the lower middle class of the urban population generally Journeymen
+printers may be named as a class among whom this form of conspicuous
+consumption has a great vogue, and among whom it carries with it certain
+well-marked consequences that are often deprecated. The peculiar habits
+of the class in this respect are commonly set down to some kind of an
+ill-defined moral deficiency with which this class is credited, or to
+a morally deleterious influence which their occupation is supposed to
+exert, in some unascertainable way, upon the men employed in it. The
+state of the case for the men who work in the composition and press
+rooms of the common run of printing-houses may be summed up as follows.
+Skill acquired in any printing-house or any city is easily turned to
+account in almost any other house or city; that is to say, the inertia
+due to special training is slight. Also, this occupation requires more
+than the average of intelligence and general information, and the men
+employed in it are therefore ordinarily more ready than many others to
+take advantage of any slight variation in the demand for their labor
+from one place to another. The inertia due to the home feeling is
+consequently also slight. At the same time the wages in the trade are
+high enough to make movement from place to place relatively easy. The
+result is a great mobility of the labor employed in printing; perhaps
+greater than in any other equally well-defined and considerable body of
+workmen. These men are constantly thrown in contact with new groups
+of acquaintances, with whom the relations established are transient or
+ephemeral, but whose good opinion is valued none the less for the time
+being. The human proclivity to ostentation, reenforced by sentiments of
+good-fellowship, leads them to spend freely in those directions which
+will best serve these needs. Here as elsewhere prescription seizes
+upon the custom as soon as it gains a vogue, and incorporates it in the
+accredited standard of decency. The next step is to make this standard
+of decency the point of departure for a new move in advance in the same
+direction--for there is no merit in simple spiritless conformity to a
+standard of dissipation that is lived up to as a matter of course by
+everyone in the trade.
+
+The greater prevalence of dissipation among printers than among the
+average of workmen is accordingly attributable, at least in some
+measure, to the greater ease of movement and the more transient
+character of acquaintance and human contact in this trade. But the
+substantial ground of this high requirement in dissipation is in the
+last analysis no other than that same propensity for a manifestation
+of dominance and pecuniary decency which makes the French
+peasant-proprietor parsimonious and frugal, and induces the American
+millionaire to found colleges, hospitals and museums. If the canon of
+conspicuous consumption were not offset to a considerable extent by
+other features of human nature, alien to it, any saving should logically
+be impossible for a population situated as the artisan and laboring
+classes of the cities are at present, however high their wages or their
+income might be.
+
+But there are other standards of repute and other, more or less
+imperative, canons of conduct, besides wealth and its manifestation, and
+some of these come in to accentuate or to qualify the broad, fundamental
+canon of conspicuous waste. Under the simple test of effectiveness
+for advertising, we should expect to find leisure and the conspicuous
+consumption of goods dividing the field of pecuniary emulation pretty
+evenly between them at the outset. Leisure might then be expected
+gradually to yield ground and tend to obsolescence as the economic
+development goes forward, and the community increases in size; while the
+conspicuous consumption of goods should gradually gain in importance,
+both absolutely and relatively, until it had absorbed all the available
+product, leaving nothing over beyond a bare livelihood. But the actual
+course of development has been somewhat different from this ideal
+scheme. Leisure held the first place at the start, and came to hold a
+rank very much above wasteful consumption of goods, both as a direct
+exponent of wealth and as an element in the standard of decency, during
+the quasi-peaceable culture. From that point onward, consumption has
+gained ground, until, at present, it unquestionably holds the primacy,
+though it is still far from absorbing the entire margin of production
+above the subsistence minimum.
+
+The early ascendency of leisure as a means of reputability is traceable
+to the archaic distinction between noble and ignoble employments.
+Leisure is honorable and becomes imperative partly because it shows
+exemption from ignoble labor. The archaic differentiation into noble and
+ignoble classes is based on an invidious distinction between employments
+as honorific or debasing; and this traditional distinction grows into an
+imperative canon of decency during the early quasi-peaceable stage.
+Its ascendency is furthered by the fact that leisure is still fully as
+effective an evidence of wealth as consumption. Indeed, so effective
+is it in the relatively small and stable human environment to which the
+individual is exposed at that cultural stage, that, with the aid of the
+archaic tradition which deprecates all productive labor, it gives rise
+to a large impecunious leisure class, and it even tends to limit the
+production of the community's industry to the subsistence minimum. This
+extreme inhibition of industry is avoided because slave labor, working
+under a compulsion more vigorous than that of reputability, is forced to
+turn out a product in excess of the subsistence minimum of the working
+class. The subsequent relative decline in the use of conspicuous
+leisure as a basis of repute is due partly to an increasing relative
+effectiveness of consumption as an evidence of wealth; but in part it is
+traceable to another force, alien, and in some degree antagonistic, to
+the usage of conspicuous waste.
+
+This alien factor is the instinct of workmanship. Other circumstances
+permitting, that instinct disposes men to look with favor upon
+productive efficiency and on whatever is of human use. It disposes them
+to deprecate waste of substance or effort. The instinct of workmanship
+is present in all men, and asserts itself even under very adverse
+circumstances. So that however wasteful a given expenditure may be in
+reality, it must at least have some colorable excuse in the way of an
+ostensible purpose. The manner in which, under special circumstances,
+the instinct eventuates in a taste for exploit and an invidious
+discrimination between noble and ignoble classes has been indicated in
+an earlier chapter. In so far as it comes into conflict with the law of
+conspicuous waste, the instinct of workmanship expresses itself not so
+much in insistence on substantial usefulness as in an abiding sense of
+the odiousness and aesthetic impossibility of what is obviously futile.
+Being of the nature of an instinctive affection, its guidance touches
+chiefly and immediately the obvious and apparent violations of its
+requirements. It is only less promptly and with less constraining force
+that it reaches such substantial violations of its requirements as are
+appreciated only upon reflection.
+
+So long as all labor continues to be performed exclusively or usually
+by slaves, the baseness of all productive effort is too constantly
+and deterrently present in the mind of men to allow the instinct of
+workmanship seriously to take effect in the direction of industrial
+usefulness; but when the quasi-peaceable stage (with slavery and status)
+passes into the peaceable stage of industry (with wage labor and cash
+payment) the instinct comes more effectively into play. It then begins
+aggressively to shape men's views of what is meritorious, and asserts
+itself at least as an auxiliary canon of self-complacency. All
+extraneous considerations apart, those persons (adult) are but a
+vanishing minority today who harbor no inclination to the accomplishment
+of some end, or who are not impelled of their own motion to shape some
+object or fact or relation for human use. The propensity may in large
+measure be overborne by the more immediately constraining incentive to a
+reputable leisure and an avoidance of indecorous usefulness, and it
+may therefore work itself out in make-believe only; as for instance
+in "social duties," and in quasi-artistic or quasi-scholarly
+accomplishments, in the care and decoration of the house, in
+sewing-circle activity or dress reform, in proficiency at dress, cards,
+yachting, golf, and various sports. But the fact that it may under
+stress of circumstances eventuate in inanities no more disproves the
+presence of the instinct than the reality of the brooding instinct is
+disproved by inducing a hen to sit on a nestful of china eggs.
+
+This latter-day uneasy reaching-out for some form of purposeful activity
+that shall at the same time not be indecorously productive of either
+individual or collective gain marks a difference of attitude between
+the modern leisure class and that of the quasi-peaceable stage. At the
+earlier stage, as was said above, the all-dominating institution
+of slavery and status acted resistlessly to discountenance exertion
+directed to other than naively predatory ends. It was still possible to
+find some habitual employment for the inclination to action in the way
+of forcible aggression or repression directed against hostile groups or
+against the subject classes within the group; and this served to relieve
+the pressure and draw off the energy of the leisure class without a
+resort to actually useful, or even ostensibly useful employments. The
+practice of hunting also served the same purpose in some degree. When the
+community developed into a peaceful industrial organization, and when
+fuller occupation of the land had reduced the opportunities for the hunt
+to an inconsiderable residue, the pressure of energy seeking purposeful
+employment was left to find an outlet in some other direction. The
+ignominy which attaches to useful effort also entered upon a less acute
+phase with the disappearance of compulsory labor; and the instinct
+of workmanship then came to assert itself with more persistence and
+consistency.
+
+The line of least resistance has changed in some measure, and the energy
+which formerly found a vent in predatory activity, now in part takes the
+direction of some ostensibly useful end. Ostensibly purposeless leisure
+has come to be deprecated, especially among that large portion of the
+leisure class whose plebeian origin acts to set them at variance with
+the tradition of the otium cum dignitate. But that canon of reputability
+which discountenances all employment that is of the nature of productive
+effort is still at hand, and will permit nothing beyond the most
+transient vogue to any employment that is substantially useful or
+productive. The consequence is that a change has been wrought in the
+conspicuous leisure practiced by the leisure class; not so much in
+substance as in form. A reconciliation between the two conflicting
+requirements is effected by a resort to make-believe. Many and intricate
+polite observances and social duties of a ceremonial nature are
+developed; many organizations are founded, with some specious object of
+amelioration embodied in their official style and title; there is much
+coming and going, and a deal of talk, to the end that the talkers may
+not have occasion to reflect on what is the effectual economic value of
+their traffic. And along with the make-believe of purposeful employment,
+and woven inextricably into its texture, there is commonly, if not
+invariably, a more or less appreciable element of purposeful effort
+directed to some serious end.
+
+In the narrower sphere of vicarious leisure a similar change has gone
+forward. Instead of simply passing her time in visible idleness, as in
+the best days of the patriarchal regime, the housewife of the advanced
+peaceable stage applies herself assiduously to household cares. The
+salient features of this development of domestic service have already
+been indicated. Throughout the entire evolution of conspicuous
+expenditure, whether of goods or of services or human life, runs the
+obvious implication that in order to effectually mend the consumer's
+good fame it must be an expenditure of superfluities. In order to
+be reputable it must be wasteful. No merit would accrue from the
+consumption of the bare necessaries of life, except by comparison with
+the abjectly poor who fall short even of the subsistence minimum; and no
+standard of expenditure could result from such a comparison, except the
+most prosaic and unattractive level of decency. A standard of life would
+still be possible which should admit of invidious comparison in other
+respects than that of opulence; as, for instance, a comparison
+in various directions in the manifestation of moral, physical,
+intellectual, or aesthetic force. Comparison in all these directions is
+in vogue today; and the comparison made in these respects is commonly
+so inextricably bound up with the pecuniary comparison as to be scarcely
+distinguishable from the latter. This is especially true as regards the
+current rating of expressions of intellectual and aesthetic force
+or proficiency' so that we frequently interpret as aesthetic or
+intellectual a difference which in substance is pecuniary only.
+
+The use of the term "waste" is in one respect an unfortunate one. As
+used in the speech of everyday life the word carries an undertone
+of deprecation. It is here used for want of a better term that will
+adequately describe the same range of motives and of phenomena, and
+it is not to be taken in an odious sense, as implying an illegitimate
+expenditure of human products or of human life. In the view of economic
+theory the expenditure in question is no more and no less legitimate
+than any other expenditure. It is here called "waste" because this
+expenditure does not serve human life or human well-being on the whole,
+not because it is waste or misdirection of effort or expenditure as
+viewed from the standpoint of the individual consumer who chooses it. If
+he chooses it, that disposes of the question of its relative utility
+to him, as compared with other forms of consumption that would not
+be deprecated on account of their wastefulness. Whatever form of
+expenditure the consumer chooses, or whatever end he seeks in making his
+choice, has utility to him by virtue of his preference. As seen from the
+point of view of the individual consumer, the question of wastefulness
+does not arise within the scope of economic theory proper. The use of
+the word "waste" as a technical term, therefore, implies no deprecation
+of the motives or of the ends sought by the consumer under this canon of
+conspicuous waste.
+
+But it is, on other grounds, worth noting that the term "waste" in the
+language of everyday life implies deprecation of what is characterized
+as wasteful. This common-sense implication is itself an outcropping of
+the instinct of workmanship. The popular reprobation of waste goes to
+say that in order to be at peace with himself the common man must
+be able to see in any and all human effort and human enjoyment an
+enhancement of life and well-being on the whole. In order to meet with
+unqualified approval, any economic fact must approve itself under the
+test of impersonal usefulness--usefulness as seen from the point of
+view of the generically human. Relative or competitive advantage of
+one individual in comparison with another does not satisfy the economic
+conscience, and therefore competitive expenditure has not the approval
+of this conscience.
+
+In strict accuracy nothing should be included under the head of
+conspicuous waste but such expenditure as is incurred on the ground of
+an invidious pecuniary comparison. But in order to bring any given item
+or element in under this head it is not necessary that it should
+be recognized as waste in this sense by the person incurring the
+expenditure. It frequently happens that an element of the standard of
+living which set out with being primarily wasteful, ends with becoming,
+in the apprehension of the consumer, a necessary of life; and it may
+in this way become as indispensable as any other item of the consumer's
+habitual expenditure. As items which sometimes fall under this head,
+and are therefore available as illustrations of the manner in which this
+principle applies, may be cited carpets and tapestries, silver table
+service, waiter's services, silk hats, starched linen, many articles
+of jewelry and of dress. The indispensability of these things after the
+habit and the convention have been formed, however, has little to say
+in the classification of expenditures as waste or not waste in the
+technical meaning of the word. The test to which all expenditure must
+be brought in an attempt to decide that point is the question whether it
+serves directly to enhance human life on the whole-whether it furthers
+the life process taken impersonally. For this is the basis of award of
+the instinct of workmanship, and that instinct is the court of final
+appeal in any question of economic truth or adequacy. It is a question
+as to the award rendered by a dispassionate common sense. The question
+is, therefore, not whether, under the existing circumstances of
+individual habit and social custom, a given expenditure conduces to the
+particular consumer's gratification or peace of mind; but whether,
+aside from acquired tastes and from the canons of usage and conventional
+decency, its result is a net gain in comfort or in the fullness of life.
+Customary expenditure must be classed under the head of waste in so far
+as the custom on which it rests is traceable to the habit of making
+an invidious pecuniary comparison-in so far as it is conceived that it
+could not have become customary and prescriptive without the backing of
+this principle of pecuniary reputability or relative economic success.
+It is obviously not necessary that a given object of expenditure should
+be exclusively wasteful in order to come in under the category of
+conspicuous waste. An article may be useful and wasteful both, and its
+utility to the consumer may be made up of use and waste in the most
+varying proportions. Consumable goods, and even productive goods,
+generally show the two elements in combination, as constituents of
+their utility; although, in a general way, the element of waste tends
+to predominate in articles of consumption, while the contrary is true of
+articles designed for productive use. Even in articles which appear at
+first glance to serve for pure ostentation only, it is always possible
+to detect the presence of some, at least ostensible, useful purpose;
+and on the other hand, even in special machinery and tools contrived for
+some particular industrial process, as well as in the rudest appliances
+of human industry, the traces of conspicuous waste, or at least of the
+habit of ostentation, usually become evident on a close scrutiny. It
+would be hazardous to assert that a useful purpose is ever absent from
+the utility of any article or of any service, however obviously its
+prime purpose and chief element is conspicuous waste; and it would be
+only less hazardous to assert of any primarily useful product that the
+element of waste is in no way concerned in its value, immediately or
+remotely.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Five ~~ The Pecuniary Standard of Living
+
+For the great body of the people in any modern community, the proximate
+ground of expenditure in excess of what is required for physical comfort
+is not a conscious effort to excel in the expensiveness of their visible
+consumption, so much as it is a desire to live up to the conventional
+standard of decency in the amount and grade of goods consumed. This
+desire is not guided by a rigidly invariable standard, which must be
+lived up to, and beyond which there is no incentive to go. The standard
+is flexible; and especially it is indefinitely extensible, if only time
+is allowed for habituation to any increase in pecuniary ability and
+for acquiring facility in the new and larger scale of expenditure that
+follows such an increase. It is much more difficult to recede from a
+scale of expenditure once adopted than it is to extend the accustomed
+scale in response to an accession of wealth. Many items of customary
+expenditure prove on analysis to be almost purely wasteful, and they
+are therefore honorific only, but after they have once been incorporated
+into the scale of decent consumption, and so have become an integral
+part of one's scheme of life, it is quite as hard to give up these as
+it is to give up many items that conduce directly to one's physical
+comfort, or even that may be necessary to life and health. That is
+to say, the conspicuously wasteful honorific expenditure that confers
+spiritual well-being may become more indispensable than much of that
+expenditure which ministers to the "lower" wants of physical well-being
+or sustenance only. It is notoriously just as difficult to recede from a
+"high" standard of living as it is to lower a standard which is already
+relatively low; although in the former case the difficulty is a moral
+one, while in the latter it may involve a material deduction from the
+physical comforts of life.
+
+But while retrogression is difficult, a fresh advance in conspicuous
+expenditure is relatively easy; indeed, it takes place almost as a
+matter of course. In the rare cases where it occurs, a failure to
+increase one's visible consumption when the means for an increase are
+at hand is felt in popular apprehension to call for explanation, and
+unworthy motives of miserliness are imputed to those who fall short in
+this respect. A prompt response to the stimulus, on the other hand,
+is accepted as the normal effect. This suggests that the standard
+of expenditure which commonly guides our efforts is not the average,
+ordinary expenditure already achieved; it is an ideal of consumption
+that lies just beyond our reach, or to reach which requires some strain.
+The motive is emulation--the stimulus of an invidious comparison which
+prompts us to outdo those with whom we are in the habit of classing
+ourselves. Substantially the same proposition is expressed in the
+commonplace remark that each class envies and emulates the class next
+above it in the social scale, while it rarely compares itself with those
+below or with those who are considerably in advance. That is to say, in
+other words, our standard of decency in expenditure, as in other ends of
+emulation, is set by the usage of those next above us in reputability;
+until, in this way, especially in any community where class distinctions
+are somewhat vague, all canons of reputability and decency, and all
+standards of consumption, are traced back by insensible gradations to
+the usages and habits of thought of the highest social and pecuniary
+class--the wealthy leisure class.
+
+It is for this class to determine, in general outline, what scheme of
+Life the community shall accept as decent or honorific; and it is
+their office by precept and example to set forth this scheme of social
+salvation in its highest, ideal form. But the higher leisure class
+can exercise this quasi-sacerdotal office only under certain material
+limitations. The class cannot at discretion effect a sudden revolution
+or reversal of the popular habits of thought with respect to any of
+these ceremonial requirements. It takes time for any change to permeate
+the mass and change the habitual attitude of the people; and especially
+it takes time to change the habits of those classes that are socially
+more remote from the radiant body. The process is slower where the
+mobility of the population is less or where the intervals between the
+several classes are wider and more abrupt. But if time be allowed, the
+scope of the discretion of the leisure class as regards questions of
+form and detail in the community's scheme of life is large; while as
+regards the substantial principles of reputability, the changes which
+it can effect lie within a narrow margin of tolerance. Its example and
+precept carries the force of prescription for all classes below it; but
+in working out the precepts which are handed down as governing the form
+and method of reputability--in shaping the usages and the spiritual
+attitude of the lower classes--this authoritative prescription
+constantly works under the selective guidance of the canon of
+conspicuous waste, tempered in varying degree by the instinct of
+workmanship. To those norms is to be added another broad principle of
+human nature--the predatory animus--which in point of generality and of
+psychological content lies between the two just named. The effect of the
+latter in shaping the accepted scheme of life is yet to be discussed.
+The canon of reputability, then, must adapt itself to the economic
+circumstances, the traditions, and the degree of spiritual maturity
+of the particular class whose scheme of life it is to regulate. It is
+especially to be noted that however high its authority and however true
+to the fundamental requirements of reputability it may have been at
+its inception, a specific formal observance can under no circumstances
+maintain itself in force if with the lapse of time or on its
+transmission to a lower pecuniary class it is found to run counter
+to the ultimate ground of decency among civilized peoples, namely,
+serviceability for the purpose of an invidious comparison in pecuniary
+success. It is evident that these canons of expenditure have much to
+say in determining the standard of living for any community and for any
+class. It is no less evident that the standard of living which prevails
+at any time or at any given social altitude will in its turn have much
+to say as to the forms which honorific expenditure will take, and as
+to the degree to which this "higher" need will dominate a people's
+consumption. In this respect the control exerted by the accepted
+standard of living is chiefly of a negative character; it acts almost
+solely to prevent recession from a scale of conspicuous expenditure that
+has once become habitual.
+
+A standard of living is of the nature of habit. It is an habitual scale
+and method of responding to given stimuli. The difficulty in the way
+of receding from an accustomed standard is the difficulty of breaking
+a habit that has once been formed. The relative facility with which an
+advance in the standard is made means that the life process is a process
+of unfolding activity and that it will readily unfold in a new direction
+whenever and wherever the resistance to self-expression decreases. But
+when the habit of expression along such a given line of low resistance
+has once been formed, the discharge will seek the accustomed outlet even
+after a change has taken place in the environment whereby the external
+resistance has appreciably risen. That heightened facility of expression
+in a given direction which is called habit may offset a considerable
+increase in the resistance offered by external circumstances to the
+unfolding of life in the given direction. As between the various habits,
+or habitual modes and directions of expression, which go to make up an
+individual's standard of living, there is an appreciable difference in
+point of persistence under counteracting circumstances and in point
+of the degree of imperativeness with which the discharge seeks a given
+direction.
+
+That is to say, in the language of current economic theory, while men
+are reluctant to retrench their expenditures in any direction, they are
+more reluctant to retrench in some directions than in others; so that
+while any accustomed consumption is reluctantly given up, there are
+certain lines of consumption which are given up with relatively extreme
+reluctance. The articles or forms of consumption to which the consumer
+clings with the greatest tenacity are commonly the so-called necessaries
+of life, or the subsistence minimum. The subsistence minimum is of
+course not a rigidly determined allowance of goods, definite and
+invariable in kind and quantity; but for the purpose in hand it may
+be taken to comprise a certain, more or less definite, aggregate of
+consumption required for the maintenance of life. This minimum, it
+may be assumed, is ordinarily given up last in case of a progressive
+retrenchment of expenditure. That is to say, in a general way, the
+most ancient and ingrained of the habits which govern the individual's
+life--those habits that touch his existence as an organism--are the
+most persistent and imperative. Beyond these come the higher
+wants--later-formed habits of the individual or the race--in a somewhat
+irregular and by no means invariable gradation. Some of these higher
+wants, as for instance the habitual use of certain stimulants, or the
+need of salvation (in the eschatological sense), or of good repute, may
+in some cases take precedence of the lower or more elementary wants. In
+general, the longer the habituation, the more unbroken the habit, and
+the more nearly it coincides with previous habitual forms of the life
+process, the more persistently will the given habit assert itself. The
+habit will be stronger if the particular traits of human nature which
+its action involves, or the particular aptitudes that find exercise
+in it, are traits or aptitudes that are already largely and profoundly
+concerned in the life process or that are intimately bound up with the
+life history of the particular racial stock. The varying degrees of ease
+with which different habits are formed by different persons, as well as
+the varying degrees of reluctance with which different habits are given
+up, goes to say that the formation of specific habits is not a matter
+of length of habituation simply. Inherited aptitudes and traits of
+temperament count for quite as much as length of habituation in deciding
+what range of habits will come to dominate any individual's scheme of
+life. And the prevalent type of transmitted aptitudes, or in other words
+the type of temperament belonging to the dominant ethnic element in
+any community, will go far to decide what will be the scope and form
+of expression of the community's habitual life process. How greatly the
+transmitted idiosyncrasies of aptitude may count in the way of a rapid
+and definitive formation of habit in individuals is illustrated by the
+extreme facility with which an all-dominating habit of alcoholism
+is sometimes formed; or in the similar facility and the similarly
+inevitable formation of a habit of devout observances in the case of
+persons gifted with a special aptitude in that direction. Much the same
+meaning attaches to that peculiar facility of habituation to a specific
+human environment that is called romantic love.
+
+Men differ in respect of transmitted aptitudes, or in respect of
+the relative facility with which they unfold their life activity in
+particular directions; and the habits which coincide with or proceed
+upon a relatively strong specific aptitude or a relatively great
+specific facility of expression become of great consequence to the man's
+well-being. The part played by this element of aptitude in determining
+the relative tenacity of the several habits which constitute the
+standard of living goes to explain the extreme reluctance with which men
+give up any habitual expenditure in the way of conspicuous consumption.
+The aptitudes or propensities to which a habit of this kind is to be
+referred as its ground are those aptitudes whose exercise is comprised
+in emulation; and the propensity for emulation--for invidious
+comparison--is of ancient growth and is a pervading trait of human
+nature. It is easily called into vigorous activity in any new form, and
+it asserts itself with great insistence under any form under which it
+has once found habitual expression. When the individual has once
+formed the habit of seeking expression in a given line of honorific
+expenditure--when a given set of stimuli have come to be habitually
+responded to in activity of a given kind and direction under the
+guidance of these alert and deep-reaching propensities of emulation--it
+is with extreme reluctance that such an habitual expenditure is given
+up. And on the other hand, whenever an accession of pecuniary strength
+puts the individual in a position to unfold his life process in larger
+scope and with additional reach, the ancient propensities of the race
+will assert themselves in determining the direction which the new
+unfolding of life is to take. And those propensities which are already
+actively in the field under some related form of expression, which are
+aided by the pointed suggestions afforded by a current accredited
+scheme of life, and for the exercise of which the material means and
+opportunities are readily available--these will especially have much to
+say in shaping the form and direction in which the new accession to
+the individual's aggregate force will assert itself. That is to say,
+in concrete terms, in any community where conspicuous consumption is an
+element of the scheme of life, an increase in an individual's ability
+to pay is likely to take the form of an expenditure for some accredited
+line of conspicuous consumption.
+
+With the exception of the instinct of self-preservation, the propensity
+for emulation is probably the strongest and most alert and persistent of
+the economic motives proper. In an industrial community this propensity
+for emulation expresses itself in pecuniary emulation; and this, so
+far as regards the Western civilized communities of the present, is
+virtually equivalent to saying that it expresses itself in some form
+of conspicuous waste. The need of conspicuous waste, therefore, stands
+ready to absorb any increase in the community's industrial efficiency
+or output of goods, after the most elementary physical wants have
+been provided for. Where this result does not follow, under modern
+conditions, the reason for the discrepancy is commonly to be sought in
+a rate of increase in the individual's wealth too rapid for the habit of
+expenditure to keep abreast of it; or it may be that the individual in
+question defers the conspicuous consumption of the increment to a later
+date--ordinarily with a view to heightening the spectacular effect
+of the aggregate expenditure contemplated. As increased industrial
+efficiency makes it possible to procure the means of livelihood with
+less labor, the energies of the industrious members of the community are
+bent to the compassing of a higher result in conspicuous expenditure,
+rather than slackened to a more comfortable pace. The strain is not
+lightened as industrial efficiency increases and makes a lighter strain
+possible, but the increment of output is turned to use to meet this
+want, which is indefinitely expansible, after the manner commonly
+imputed in economic theory to higher or spiritual wants. It is owing
+chiefly to the presence of this element in the standard of living that
+J. S. Mill was able to say that "hitherto it is questionable if all
+the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any
+human being." The accepted standard of expenditure in the community
+or in the class to which a person belongs largely determines what his
+standard of living will be. It does this directly by commending
+itself to his common sense as right and good, through his habitually
+contemplating it and assimilating the scheme of life in which it
+belongs; but it does so also indirectly through popular insistence
+on conformity to the accepted scale of expenditure as a matter of
+propriety, under pain of disesteem and ostracism. To accept and
+practice the standard of living which is in vogue is both agreeable
+and expedient, commonly to the point of being indispensable to personal
+comfort and to success in life. The standard of living of any class, so
+far as concerns the element of conspicuous waste, is commonly as high as
+the earning capacity of the class will permit--with a constant tendency
+to go higher. The effect upon the serious activities of men is therefore
+to direct them with great singleness of purpose to the largest possible
+acquisition of wealth, and to discountenance work that brings no
+pecuniary gain. At the same time the effect on consumption is to
+concentrate it upon the lines which are most patent to the observers
+whose good opinion is sought; while the inclinations and aptitudes whose
+exercise does not involve a honorific expenditure of time or substance
+tend to fall into abeyance through disuse.
+
+Through this discrimination in favor of visible consumption it has come
+about that the domestic life of most classes is relatively shabby, as
+compared with the éclat of that overt portion of their life that is
+carried on before the eyes of observers. As a secondary consequence of
+the same discrimination, people habitually screen their private life
+from observation. So far as concerns that portion of their consumption
+that may without blame be carried on in secret, they withdraw from all
+contact with their neighbors, hence the exclusiveness of people, as
+regards their domestic life, in most of the industrially developed
+communities; and hence, by remoter derivation, the habit of privacy and
+reserve that is so large a feature in the code of proprieties of the
+better class in all communities. The low birthrate of the classes upon
+whom the requirements of reputable expenditure fall with great urgency
+is likewise traceable to the exigencies of a standard of living based
+on conspicuous waste. The conspicuous consumption, and the consequent
+increased expense, required in the reputable maintenance of a child is
+very considerable and acts as a powerful deterrent. It is probably the
+most effectual of the Malthusian prudential checks.
+
+The effect of this factor of the standard of living, both in the way of
+retrenchment in the obscurer elements of consumption that go to physical
+comfort and maintenance, and also in the paucity or absence of children,
+is perhaps seen at its best among the classes given to scholarly
+pursuits. Because of a presumed superiority and scarcity of the gifts
+and attainments that characterize their life, these classes are by
+convention subsumed under a higher social grade than their pecuniary
+grade should warrant. The scale of decent expenditure in their case
+is pitched correspondingly high, and it consequently leaves an
+exceptionally narrow margin disposable for the other ends of life. By
+force of circumstances, their habitual sense of what is good and right
+in these matters, as well as the expectations of the community in the
+way of pecuniary decency among the learned, are excessively high--as
+measured by the prevalent degree of opulence and earning capacity of the
+class, relatively to the non-scholarly classes whose social equals
+they nominally are. In any modern community where there is no priestly
+monopoly of these occupations, the people of scholarly pursuits are
+unavoidably thrown into contact with classes that are pecuniarily their
+superiors. The high standard of pecuniary decency in force among these
+superior classes is transfused among the scholarly classes with but
+little mitigation of its rigor; and as a consequence there is no class
+of the community that spends a larger proportion of its substance in
+conspicuous waste than these.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Six ~~ Pecuniary Canons of Taste
+
+The caution has already been repeated more than once, that while the
+regulating norm of consumption is in large part the requirement of
+conspicuous waste, it must not be understood that the motive on which
+the consumer acts in any given case is this principle in its bald,
+unsophisticated form. Ordinarily his motive is a wish to conform to
+established usage, to avoid unfavorable notice and comment, to live
+up to the accepted canons of decency in the kind, amount, and grade of
+goods consumed, as well as in the decorous employment of his time and
+effort. In the common run of cases this sense of prescriptive usage is
+present in the motives of the consumer and exerts a direct constraining
+force, especially as regards consumption carried on under the eyes of
+observers. But a considerable element of prescriptive expensiveness is
+observable also in consumption that does not in any appreciable degree
+become known to outsiders--as, for instance, articles of underclothing,
+some articles of food, kitchen utensils, and other household apparatus
+designed for service rather than for evidence. In all such useful
+articles a close scrutiny will discover certain features which add to
+the cost and enhance the commercial value of the goods in question, but
+do not proportionately increase the serviceability of these articles for
+the material purposes which alone they ostensibly are designed to serve.
+
+Under the selective surveillance of the law of conspicuous waste there
+grows up a code of accredited canons of consumption, the effect of
+which is to hold the consumer up to a standard of expensiveness and
+wastefulness in his consumption of goods and in his employment of time
+and effort. This growth of prescriptive usage has an immediate effect
+upon economic life, but it has also an indirect and remoter effect upon
+conduct in other respects as well. Habits of thought with respect to
+the expression of life in any given direction unavoidably affect the
+habitual view of what is good and right in life in other directions
+also. In the organic complex of habits of thought which make up the
+substance of an individual's conscious life the economic interest does
+not lie isolated and distinct from all other interests. Something,
+for instance, has already been said of its relation to the canons of
+reputability.
+
+The principle of conspicuous waste guides the formation of habits of
+thought as to what is honest and reputable in life and in commodities.
+In so doing, this principle will traverse other norms of conduct which
+do not primarily have to do with the code of pecuniary honor, but
+which have, directly or incidentally, an economic significance of some
+magnitude. So the canon of honorific waste may, immediately or remotely,
+influence the sense of duty, the sense of beauty, the sense of utility,
+the sense of devotional or ritualistic fitness, and the scientific sense
+of truth.
+
+It is scarcely necessary to go into a discussion here of the particular
+points at which, or the particular manner in which, the canon of
+honorific expenditure habitually traverses the canons of moral conduct.
+The matter is one which has received large attention and illustration at
+the hands of those whose office it is to watch and admonish with
+respect to any departures from the accepted code of morals. In modern
+communities, where the dominant economic and legal feature of the
+community's life is the institution of private property, one of the
+salient features of the code of morals is the sacredness of property.
+There needs no insistence or illustration to gain assent to the
+proposition that the habit of holding private property inviolate is
+traversed by the other habit of seeking wealth for the sake of the good
+repute to be gained through its conspicuous consumption. Most offenses
+against property, especially offenses of an appreciable magnitude, come
+under this head. It is also a matter of common notoriety and byword
+that in offenses which result in a large accession of property to the
+offender he does not ordinarily incur the extreme penalty or the extreme
+obloquy with which his offenses would be visited on the ground of the
+naive moral code alone. The thief or swindler who has gained great
+wealth by his delinquency has a better chance than the small thief of
+escaping the rigorous penalty of the law and some good repute accrues
+to him from his increased wealth and from his spending the irregularly
+acquired possessions in a seemly manner. A well-bred expenditure of his
+booty especially appeals with great effect to persons of a cultivated
+sense of the proprieties, and goes far to mitigate the sense of moral
+turpitude with which his dereliction is viewed by them. It may be noted
+also--and it is more immediately to the point--that we are all inclined
+to condone an offense against property in the case of a man whose motive
+is the worthy one of providing the means of a "decent" manner of
+life for his wife and children. If it is added that the wife has been
+"nurtured in the lap of luxury," that is accepted as an additional
+extenuating circumstance. That is to say, we are prone to condone such
+an offense where its aim is the honorific one of enabling the offender's
+wife to perform for him such an amount of vicarious consumption of time
+and substance as is demanded by the standard of pecuniary decency. In
+such a case the habit of approving the accustomed degree of conspicuous
+waste traverses the habit of deprecating violations of ownership, to the
+extent even of sometimes leaving the award of praise or blame uncertain.
+This is peculiarly true where the dereliction involves an appreciable
+predatory or piratical element.
+
+This topic need scarcely be pursued further here; but the remark may not
+be out of place that all that considerable body of morals that clusters
+about the concept of an inviolable ownership is itself a psychological
+precipitate of the traditional meritoriousness of wealth. And it should
+be added that this wealth which is held sacred is valued primarily
+for the sake of the good repute to be got through its conspicuous
+consumption. The bearing of pecuniary decency upon the scientific spirit
+or the quest of knowledge will be taken up in some detail in a separate
+chapter. Also as regards the sense of devout or ritual merit and
+adequacy in this connection, little need be said in this place. That
+topic will also come up incidentally in a later chapter. Still, this
+usage of honorific expenditure has much to say in shaping popular tastes
+as to what is right and meritorious in sacred matters, and the bearing
+of the principle of conspicuous waste upon some of the commonplace
+devout observances and conceits may therefore be pointed out.
+
+Obviously, the canon of conspicuous waste is accountable for a great
+portion of what may be called devout consumption; as, e.g., the
+consumption of sacred edifices, vestments, and other goods of the same
+class. Even in those modern cults to whose divinities is imputed a
+predilection for temples not built with hands, the sacred buildings and
+the other properties of the cult are constructed and decorated with some
+view to a reputable degree of wasteful expenditure. And it needs but
+little either of observation or introspection--and either will serve the
+turn--to assure us that the expensive splendor of the house of worship
+has an appreciable uplifting and mellowing effect upon the worshipper's
+frame of mind. It will serve to enforce the same fact if we reflect upon
+the sense of abject shamefulness with which any evidence of indigence or
+squalor about the sacred place affects all beholders. The accessories
+of any devout observance should be pecuniarily above reproach. This
+requirement is imperative, whatever latitude may be allowed with regard
+to these accessories in point of aesthetic or other serviceability. It
+may also be in place to notice that in all communities, especially in
+neighborhoods where the standard of pecuniary decency for dwellings
+is not high, the local sanctuary is more ornate, more conspicuously
+wasteful in its architecture and decoration, than the dwelling houses
+of the congregation. This is true of nearly all denominations and cults,
+whether Christian or Pagan, but it is true in a peculiar degree of
+the older and maturer cults. At the same time the sanctuary commonly
+contributes little if anything to the physical comfort of the members.
+Indeed, the sacred structure not only serves the physical well-being
+of the members to but a slight extent, as compared with their humbler
+dwelling-houses; but it is felt by all men that a right and enlightened
+sense of the true, the beautiful, and the good demands that in all
+expenditure on the sanctuary anything that might serve the comfort of
+the worshipper should be conspicuously absent. If any element of comfort
+is admitted in the fittings of the sanctuary, it should be at least
+scrupulously screened and masked under an ostensible austerity. In the
+most reputable latter-day houses of worship, where no expense is spared,
+the principle of austerity is carried to the length of making the
+fittings of the place a means of mortifying the flesh, especially in
+appearance. There are few persons of delicate tastes, in the matter of
+devout consumption to whom this austerely wasteful discomfort does not
+appeal as intrinsically right and good. Devout consumption is of the
+nature of vicarious consumption. This canon of devout austerity is based
+on the pecuniary reputability of conspicuously wasteful consumption,
+backed by the principle that vicarious consumption should conspicuously
+not conduce to the comfort of the vicarious consumer.
+
+The sanctuary and its fittings have something of this austerity in all
+the cults in which the saint or divinity to whom the sanctuary pertains
+is not conceived to be present and make personal use of the property for
+the gratification of luxurious tastes imputed to him. The character of
+the sacred paraphernalia is somewhat different in this respect in those
+cults where the habits of life imputed to the divinity more nearly
+approach those of an earthly patriarchal potentate--where he is
+conceived to make use of these consumable goods in person. In the latter
+case the sanctuary and its fittings take on more of the fashion given to
+goods destined for the conspicuous consumption of a temporal master or
+owner. On the other hand, where the sacred apparatus is simply employed
+in the divinity's service, that is to say, where it is consumed
+vicariously on his account by his servants, there the sacred properties
+take the character suited to goods that are destined for vicarious
+consumption only.
+
+In the latter case the sanctuary and the sacred apparatus are so
+contrived as not to enhance the comfort or fullness of life of the
+vicarious consumer, or at any rate not to convey the impression that
+the end of their consumption is the consumer's comfort. For the end of
+vicarious consumption is to enhance, not the fullness of life of the
+consumer, but the pecuniary repute of the master for whose behoof the
+consumption takes place. Therefore priestly vestments are notoriously
+expensive, ornate, and inconvenient; and in the cults where the priestly
+servitor of the divinity is not conceived to serve him in the capacity
+of consort, they are of an austere, comfortless fashion. And such it is
+felt that they should be.
+
+It is not only in establishing a devout standard of decent expensiveness
+that the principle of waste invades the domain of the canons of ritual
+serviceability. It touches the ways as well as the means, and draws on
+vicarious leisure as well as on vicarious consumption. Priestly demeanor
+at its best is aloof, leisurely, perfunctory, and uncontaminated with
+suggestions of sensuous pleasure. This holds true, in different degrees
+of course, for the different cults and denominations; but in the
+priestly life of all anthropomorphic cults the marks of a vicarious
+consumption of time are visible.
+
+The same pervading canon of vicarious leisure is also visibly present in
+the exterior details of devout observances and need only be pointed out
+in order to become obvious to all beholders. All ritual has a notable
+tendency to reduce itself to a rehearsal of formulas. This development
+of formula is most noticeable in the maturer cults, which have at the
+same time a more austere, ornate, and severe priestly life and garb; but
+it is perceptible also in the forms and methods of worship of the newer
+and fresher sects, whose tastes in respect of priests, vestments, and
+sanctuaries are less exacting. The rehearsal of the service (the term
+"service" carries a suggestion significant for the point in question)
+grows more perfunctory as the cult gains in age and consistency, and
+this perfunctoriness of the rehearsal is very pleasing to the correct
+devout taste. And with a good reason, for the fact of its being
+perfunctory goes to say pointedly that the master for whom it is
+performed is exalted above the vulgar need of actually proficuous
+service on the part of his servants. They are unprofitable servants, and
+there is an honorific implication for their master in their remaining
+unprofitable. It is needless to point out the close analogy at this
+point between the priestly office and the office of the footman. It is
+pleasing to our sense of what is fitting in these matters, in either
+case, to recognize in the obvious perfunctoriness of the service that it
+is a pro forma execution only. There should be no show of agility or of
+dexterous manipulation in the execution of the priestly office, such as
+might suggest a capacity for turning off the work.
+
+In all this there is of course an obvious implication as to the
+temperament, tastes, propensities, and habits of life imputed to the
+divinity by worshippers who live under the tradition of these pecuniary
+canons of reputability. Through its pervading men's habits of thought,
+the principle of conspicuous waste has colored the worshippers' notions
+of the divinity and of the relation in which the human subject stands
+to him. It is of course in the more naive cults that this suffusion
+of pecuniary beauty is most patent, but it is visible throughout. All
+peoples, at whatever stage of culture or degree of enlightenment, are
+fain to eke out a sensibly scant degree of authentic formation regarding
+the personality and habitual surroundings of their divinities. In so
+calling in the aid of fancy to enrich and fill in their picture of the
+divinity's presence and manner of life they habitually impute to him
+such traits as go to make up their ideal of a worthy man. And in
+seeking communion with the divinity the ways and means of approach are
+assimilated as nearly as may be to the divine ideal that is in men's
+minds at the time. It is felt that the divine presence is entered with
+the best grace, and with the best effect, according to certain accepted
+methods and with the accompaniment of certain material circumstances
+which in popular apprehension are peculiarly consonant with the divine
+nature. This popularly accepted ideal of the bearing and paraphernalia
+adequate to such occasions of communion is, of course, to a good extent
+shaped by the popular apprehension of what is intrinsically worthy
+and beautiful in human carriage and surroundings on all occasions of
+dignified intercourse. It would on this account be misleading to
+attempt an analysis of devout demeanor by referring all evidences of
+the presence of a pecuniary standard of reputability back directly and
+baldly to the underlying norm of pecuniary emulation. So it would also
+be misleading to ascribe to the divinity, as popularly conceived, a
+jealous regard for his pecuniary standing and a habit of avoiding and
+condemning squalid situations and surroundings simply because they are
+under grade in the pecuniary respect.
+
+And still, after all allowance has been made, it appears that the canons
+of pecuniary reputability do, directly or indirectly, materially affect
+our notions of the attributes of divinity, as well as our notions
+of what are the fit and adequate manner and circumstances of divine
+communion. It is felt that the divinity must be of a peculiarly serene
+and leisurely habit of life. And whenever his local habitation is
+pictured in poetic imagery, for edification or in appeal to the devout
+fancy, the devout word-painter, as a matter of course, brings out before
+his auditors' imagination a throne with a profusion of the insignia of
+opulence and power, and surrounded by a great number of servitors. In
+the common run of such presentations of the celestial abodes, the office
+of this corps of servants is a vicarious leisure, their time and efforts
+being in great measure taken up with an industrially unproductive
+rehearsal of the meritorious characteristics and exploits of the
+divinity; while the background of the presentation is filled with the
+shimmer of the precious metals and of the more expensive varieties of
+precious stones. It is only in the crasser expressions of devout fancy
+that this intrusion of pecuniary canons into the devout ideals reaches
+such an extreme. An extreme case occurs in the devout imagery of the
+Negro population of the South. Their word-painters are unable to descend
+to anything cheaper than gold; so that in this case the insistence on
+pecuniary beauty gives a startling effect in yellow--such as would be
+unbearable to a soberer taste. Still, there is probably no cult in which
+ideals of pecuniary merit have not been called in to supplement the
+ideals of ceremonial adequacy that guide men's conception of what is
+right in the matter of sacred apparatus.
+
+Similarly it is felt--and the sentiment is acted upon--that the priestly
+servitors of the divinity should not engage in industrially productive
+work; that work of any kind--any employment which is of tangible human
+use--must not be carried on in the divine presence, or within the
+precincts of the sanctuary; that whoever comes into the presence should
+come cleansed of all profane industrial features in his apparel
+or person, and should come clad in garments of more than everyday
+expensiveness; that on holidays set apart in honor of or for communion
+with the divinity no work that is of human use should be performed by
+any one. Even the remoter, lay dependents should render a vicarious
+leisure to the extent of one day in seven. In all these deliverances of
+men's uninstructed sense of what is fit and proper in devout observance
+and in the relations of the divinity, the effectual presence of the
+canons of pecuniary reputability is obvious enough, whether these canons
+have had their effect on the devout judgment in this respect immediately
+or at the second remove.
+
+These canons of reputability have had a similar, but more far-reaching
+and more specifically determinable, effect upon the popular sense
+of beauty or serviceability in consumable goods. The requirements of
+pecuniary decency have, to a very appreciable extent, influenced the
+sense of beauty and of utility in articles of use or beauty.
+Articles are to an extent preferred for use on account of their being
+conspicuously wasteful; they are felt to be serviceable somewhat in
+proportion as they are wasteful and ill adapted to their ostensible use.
+
+The utility of articles valued for their beauty depends closely upon the
+expensiveness of the articles. A homely illustration will bring out this
+dependence. A hand-wrought silver spoon, of a commercial value of some
+ten to twenty dollars, is not ordinarily more serviceable--in the first
+sense of the word--than a machine-made spoon of the same material.
+It may not even be more serviceable than a machine-made spoon of some
+"base" metal, such as aluminum, the value of which may be no more than
+some ten to twenty cents. The former of the two utensils is, in fact,
+commonly a less effective contrivance for its ostensible purpose than
+the latter. The objection is of course ready to hand that, in taking
+this view of the matter, one of the chief uses, if not the chief use,
+of the costlier spoon is ignored; the hand-wrought spoon gratifies our
+taste, our sense of the beautiful, while that made by machinery out of
+the base metal has no useful office beyond a brute efficiency. The facts
+are no doubt as the objection states them, but it will be evident
+on rejection that the objection is after all more plausible than
+conclusive. It appears (1) that while the different materials of which
+the two spoons are made each possesses beauty and serviceability for the
+purpose for which it is used, the material of the hand-wrought spoon is
+some one hundred times more valuable than the baser metal, without very
+greatly excelling the latter in intrinsic beauty of grain or color, and
+without being in any appreciable degree superior in point of mechanical
+serviceability; (2) if a close inspection should show that the supposed
+hand-wrought spoon were in reality only a very clever citation of
+hand-wrought goods, but an imitation so cleverly wrought as to give the
+same impression of line and surface to any but a minute examination by
+a trained eye, the utility of the article, including the gratification
+which the user derives from its contemplation as an object of beauty,
+would immediately decline by some eighty or ninety per cent, or even
+more; (3) if the two spoons are, to a fairly close observer, so nearly
+identical in appearance that the lighter weight of the spurious article
+alone betrays it, this identity of form and color will scarcely add
+to the value of the machine-made spoon, nor appreciably enhance the
+gratification of the user's "sense of beauty" in contemplating it, so
+long as the cheaper spoon is not a novelty, ad so long as it can be
+procured at a nominal cost. The case of the spoons is typical. The
+superior gratification derived from the use and contemplation of costly
+and supposedly beautiful products is, commonly, in great measure a
+gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name
+of beauty. Our higher appreciation of the superior article is an
+appreciation of its superior honorific character, much more frequently
+than it is an unsophisticated appreciation of its beauty. The
+requirement of conspicuous wastefulness is not commonly present,
+consciously, in our canons of taste, but it is none the less present as
+a constraining norm selectively shaping and sustaining our sense of what
+is beautiful, and guiding our discrimination with respect to what may
+legitimately be approved as beautiful and what may not.
+
+It is at this point, where the beautiful and the honorific meet and
+blend, that a discrimination between serviceability and wastefulness
+is most difficult in any concrete case. It frequently happens that an
+article which serves the honorific purpose of conspicuous waste is at
+the same time a beautiful object; and the same application of labor to
+which it owes its utility for the former purpose may, and often does,
+give beauty of form and color to the article. The question is further
+complicated by the fact that many objects, as, for instance, the
+precious stones and the metals and some other materials used for
+adornment and decoration, owe their utility as items of conspicuous
+waste to an antecedent utility as objects of beauty. Gold, for instance,
+has a high degree of sensuous beauty very many if not most of the highly
+prized works of art are intrinsically beautiful, though often with
+material qualification; the like is true of some stuffs used for
+clothing, of some landscapes, and of many other things in less degree.
+Except for this intrinsic beauty which they possess, these objects
+would scarcely have been coveted as they are, or have become monopolized
+objects of pride to their possessors and users. But the utility of these
+things to the possessor is commonly due less to their intrinsic beauty
+than to the honor which their possession and consumption confers, or to
+the obloquy which it wards off.
+
+Apart from their serviceability in other respects, these objects are
+beautiful and have a utility as such; they are valuable on this account
+if they can be appropriated or monopolized; they are, therefore, coveted
+as valuable possessions, and their exclusive enjoyment gratifies the
+possessor's sense of pecuniary superiority at the same time that their
+contemplation gratifies his sense of beauty. But their beauty, in the
+naive sense of the word, is the occasion rather than the ground of their
+monopolization or of their commercial value. "Great as is the sensuous
+beauty of gems, their rarity and price adds an expression of distinction
+to them, which they would never have if they were cheap." There is,
+indeed, in the common run of cases under this head, relatively little
+incentive to the exclusive possession and use of these beautiful
+things, except on the ground of their honorific character as items of
+conspicuous waste. Most objects of this general class, with the partial
+exception of articles of personal adornment, would serve all other
+purposes than the honorific one equally well, whether owned by the
+person viewing them or not; and even as regards personal ornaments it is
+to be added that their chief purpose is to lend éclat to the person
+of their wearer (or owner) by comparison with other persons who are
+compelled to do without. The aesthetic serviceability of objects of
+beauty is not greatly nor universally heightened by possession.
+
+The generalization for which the discussion so far affords ground is
+that any valuable object in order to appeal to our sense of beauty must
+conform to the requirements of beauty and of expensiveness both. But
+this is not all. Beyond this the canon of expensiveness also affects
+our tastes in such a way as to inextricably blend the marks of
+expensiveness, in our appreciation, with the beautiful features of
+the object, and to subsume the resultant effect under the head of an
+appreciation of beauty simply. The marks of expensiveness come to be
+accepted as beautiful features of the expensive articles. They are
+pleasing as being marks of honorific costliness, and the pleasure which
+they afford on this score blends with that afforded by the beautiful
+form and color of the object; so that we often declare that an article
+of apparel, for instance, is "perfectly lovely," when pretty much all
+that an analysis of the aesthetic value of the article would leave
+ground for is the declaration that it is pecuniarily honorific.
+
+This blending and confusion of the elements of expensiveness and
+of beauty is, perhaps, best exemplified in articles of dress and of
+household furniture. The code of reputability in matters of dress
+decides what shapes, colors, materials, and general effects in human
+apparel are for the time to be accepted as suitable; and departures from
+the code are offensive to our taste, supposedly as being departures from
+aesthetic truth. The approval with which we look upon fashionable attire
+is by no means to be accounted pure make-believe. We readily, and for
+the most part with utter sincerity, find those things pleasing that
+are in vogue. Shaggy dress-stuffs and pronounced color effects, for
+instance, offend us at times when the vogue is goods of a high,
+glossy finish and neutral colors. A fancy bonnet of this year's model
+unquestionably appeals to our sensibilities today much more forcibly
+than an equally fancy bonnet of the model of last year; although
+when viewed in the perspective of a quarter of a century, it would, I
+apprehend, be a matter of the utmost difficulty to award the palm
+for intrinsic beauty to the one rather than to the other of these
+structures. So, again, it may be remarked that, considered simply in
+their physical juxtaposition with the human form, the high gloss of a
+gentleman's hat or of a patent-leather shoe has no more of intrinsic
+beauty than a similarly high gloss on a threadbare sleeve; and yet
+there is no question but that all well-bred people (in the Occidental
+civilized communities) instinctively and unaffectedly cleave to the one
+as a phenomenon of great beauty, and eschew the other as offensive to
+every sense to which it can appeal. It is extremely doubtful if any one
+could be induced to wear such a contrivance as the high hat of civilized
+society, except for some urgent reason based on other than aesthetic
+grounds.
+
+By further habituation to an appreciative perception of the marks
+of expensiveness in goods, and by habitually identifying beauty with
+reputability, it comes about that a beautiful article which is not
+expensive is accounted not beautiful. In this way it has happened, for
+instance, that some beautiful flowers pass conventionally for offensive
+weeds; others that can be cultivated with relative ease are accepted
+and admired by the lower middle class, who can afford no more expensive
+luxuries of this kind; but these varieties are rejected as vulgar by
+those people who are better able to pay for expensive flowers and who
+are educated to a higher schedule of pecuniary beauty in the florist's
+products; while still other flowers, of no greater intrinsic beauty than
+these, are cultivated at great cost and call out much admiration from
+flower-lovers whose tastes have been matured under the critical guidance
+of a polite environment.
+
+The same variation in matters of taste, from one class of society to
+another, is visible also as regards many other kinds of consumable
+goods, as, for example, is the case with furniture, houses, parks,
+and gardens. This diversity of views as to what is beautiful in these
+various classes of goods is not a diversity of the norm according to
+which the unsophisticated sense of the beautiful works. It is not a
+constitutional difference of endowments in the aesthetic respect, but
+rather a difference in the code of reputability which specifies what
+objects properly lie within the scope of honorific consumption for the
+class to which the critic belongs. It is a difference in the traditions
+of propriety with respect to the kinds of things which may, without
+derogation to the consumer, be consumed under the head of objects of
+taste and art. With a certain allowance for variations to be accounted
+for on other grounds, these traditions are determined, more or less
+rigidly, by the pecuniary plane of life of the class.
+
+Everyday life affords many curious illustrations of the way in which the
+code of pecuniary beauty in articles of use varies from class to class,
+as well as of the way in which the conventional sense of beauty departs
+in its deliverances from the sense untutored by the requirements of
+pecuniary repute. Such a fact is the lawn, or the close-cropped yard or
+park, which appeals so unaffectedly to the taste of the Western peoples.
+It appears especially to appeal to the tastes of the well-to-do classes
+in those communities in which the dolicho-blond element predominates
+in an appreciable degree. The lawn unquestionably has an element of
+sensuous beauty, simply as an object of apperception, and as such no
+doubt it appeals pretty directly to the eye of nearly all races and all
+classes; but it is, perhaps, more unquestionably beautiful to the eye
+of the dolicho-blond than to most other varieties of men. This higher
+appreciation of a stretch of greensward in this ethnic element than
+in the other elements of the population, goes along with certain other
+features of the dolicho-blond temperament that indicate that this racial
+element had once been for a long time a pastoral people inhabiting a
+region with a humid climate. The close-cropped lawn is beautiful in the
+eyes of a people whose inherited bent it is to readily find pleasure in
+contemplating a well-preserved pasture or grazing land.
+
+For the aesthetic purpose the lawn is a cow pasture; and in some cases
+today--where the expensiveness of the attendant circumstances bars out
+any imputation of thrift--the idyl of the dolicho-blond is rehabilitated
+in the introduction of a cow into a lawn or private ground. In such
+cases the cow made use of is commonly of an expensive breed. The vulgar
+suggestion of thrift, which is nearly inseparable from the cow, is a
+standing objection to the decorative use of this animal. So that in all
+cases, except where luxurious surroundings negate this suggestion,
+the use of the cow as an object of taste must be avoided. Where the
+predilection for some grazing animal to fill out the suggestion of the
+pasture is too strong to be suppressed, the cow's place is often given
+to some more or less inadequate substitute, such as deer, antelopes, or
+some such exotic beast. These substitutes, although less beautiful
+to the pastoral eye of Western man than the cow, are in such cases
+preferred because of their superior expensiveness or futility, and their
+consequent repute. They are not vulgarly lucrative either in fact or in
+suggestion.
+
+Public parks of course fall in the same category with the lawn; they
+too, at their best, are imitations of the pasture. Such a park is of
+course best kept by grazing, and the cattle on the grass are themselves
+no mean addition to the beauty of the thing, as need scarcely be
+insisted on with anyone who has once seen a well-kept pasture. But it
+is worth noting, as an expression of the pecuniary element in popular
+taste, that such a method of keeping public grounds is seldom resorted
+to. The best that is done by skilled workmen under the supervision of a
+trained keeper is a more or less close imitation of a pasture, but
+the result invariably falls somewhat short of the artistic effect of
+grazing. But to the average popular apprehension a herd of cattle so
+pointedly suggests thrift and usefulness that their presence in the
+public pleasure ground would be intolerably cheap. This method
+of keeping grounds is comparatively inexpensive, therefore it is
+indecorous.
+
+Of the same general bearing is another feature of public grounds. There
+is a studious exhibition of expensiveness coupled with a make-believe of
+simplicity and crude serviceability. Private grounds also show the same
+physiognomy wherever they are in the management or ownership of persons
+whose tastes have been formed under middle-class habits of life or under
+the upper-class traditions of no later a date than the childhood of the
+generation that is now passing. Grounds which conform to the instructed
+tastes of the latter-day upper class do not show these features in so
+marked a degree. The reason for this difference in tastes between the
+past and the incoming generation of the well-bred lies in the changing
+economic situation. A similar difference is perceptible in other
+respects, as well as in the accepted ideals of pleasure grounds. In this
+country as in most others, until the last half century but a very small
+proportion of the population were possessed of such wealth as would
+exempt them from thrift. Owing to imperfect means of communication,
+this small fraction were scattered and out of effective touch with one
+another. There was therefore no basis for a growth of taste in disregard
+of expensiveness. The revolt of the well-bred taste against vulgar
+thrift was unchecked. Wherever the unsophisticated sense of beauty
+might show itself sporadically in an approval of inexpensive or thrifty
+surroundings, it would lack the "social confirmation" which nothing
+but a considerable body of like-minded people can give. There was,
+therefore, no effective upper-class opinion that would overlook
+evidences of possible inexpensiveness in the management of grounds;
+and there was consequently no appreciable divergence between the
+leisure-class and the lower middle-class ideal in the physiognomy of
+pleasure grounds. Both classes equally constructed their ideals with the
+fear of pecuniary disrepute before their eyes.
+
+Today a divergence in ideals is beginning to be apparent. The portion of
+the leisure class that has been consistently exempt from work and from
+pecuniary cares for a generation or more is now large enough to form and
+sustain opinion in matters of taste. Increased mobility of the members
+has also added to the facility with which a "social confirmation" can be
+attained within the class. Within this select class the exemption from
+thrift is a matter so commonplace as to have lost much of its utility
+as a basis of pecuniary decency. Therefore the latter-day upper-class
+canons of taste do not so consistently insist on an unremitting
+demonstration of expensiveness and a strict exclusion of the appearance
+of thrift. So, a predilection for the rustic and the "natural" in parks
+and grounds makes its appearance on these higher social and intellectual
+levels. This predilection is in large part an outcropping of the
+instinct of workmanship; and it works out its results with varying
+degrees of consistency. It is seldom altogether unaffected, and at times
+it shades off into something not widely different from that make-believe
+of rusticity which has been referred to above.
+
+A weakness for crudely serviceable contrivances that pointedly suggest
+immediate and wasteless use is present even in the middle-class tastes;
+but it is there kept well in hand under the unbroken dominance of the
+canon of reputable futility. Consequently it works out in a variety
+of ways and means for shamming serviceability--in such contrivances
+as rustic fences, bridges, bowers, pavilions, and the like decorative
+features. An expression of this affectation of serviceability, at what
+is perhaps its widest divergence from the first promptings of the
+sense of economic beauty, is afforded by the cast-iron rustic fence and
+trellis or by a circuitous drive laid across level ground.
+
+The select leisure class has outgrown the use of these
+pseudo-serviceable variants of pecuniary beauty, at least at some
+points. But the taste of the more recent accessions to the leisure class
+proper and of the middle and lower classes still requires a pecuniary
+beauty to supplement the aesthetic beauty, even in those objects which
+are primarily admired for the beauty that belongs to them as natural
+growths.
+
+The popular taste in these matters is to be seen in the prevalent high
+appreciation of topiary work and of the conventional flower-beds of
+public grounds. Perhaps as happy an illustration as may be had of this
+dominance of pecuniary beauty over aesthetic beauty in middle-class
+tastes is seen in the reconstruction of the grounds lately occupied by
+the Columbian Exposition. The evidence goes to show that the requirement
+of reputable expensiveness is still present in good vigor even where
+all ostensibly lavish display is avoided. The artistic effects actually
+wrought in this work of reconstruction diverge somewhat widely from
+the effect to which the same ground would have lent itself in hands not
+guided by pecuniary canons of taste. And even the better class of the
+city's population view the progress of the work with an unreserved
+approval which suggests that there is in this case little if any
+discrepancy between the tastes of the upper and the lower or middle
+classes of the city. The sense of beauty in the population of this
+representative city of the advanced pecuniary culture is very chary of
+any departure from its great cultural principle of conspicuous waste.
+
+The love of nature, perhaps itself borrowed from a higher-class code of
+taste, sometimes expresses itself in unexpected ways under the guidance
+of this canon of pecuniary beauty, and leads to results that may seem
+incongruous to an unreflecting beholder. The well-accepted practice of
+planting trees in the treeless areas of this country, for instance, has
+been carried over as an item of honorific expenditure into the heavily
+wooded areas; so that it is by no means unusual for a village or a
+farmer in the wooded country to clear the land of its native trees and
+immediately replant saplings of certain introduced varieties about the
+farmyard or along the streets. In this way a forest growth of oak, elm,
+beech, butternut, hemlock, basswood, and birch is cleared off to give
+room for saplings of soft maple, cottonwood, and brittle willow. It is
+felt that the inexpensiveness of leaving the forest trees standing
+would derogate from the dignity that should invest an article which is
+intended to serve a decorative and honorific end.
+
+The like pervading guidance of taste by pecuniary repute is traceable
+in the prevalent standards of beauty in animals. The part played by this
+canon of taste in assigning her place in the popular aesthetic scale to
+the cow has already been spokes of. Something to the same effect is
+true of the other domestic animals, so far as they are in an appreciable
+degree industrially useful to the community--as, for instance, barnyard
+fowl, hogs, cattle, sheep, goats, draught-horses. They are of the
+nature of productive goods, and serve a useful, often a lucrative end;
+therefore beauty is not readily imputed to them. The case is different
+with those domestic animals which ordinarily serve no industrial end;
+such as pigeons, parrots and other cage-birds, cats, dogs, and fast
+horses. These commonly are items of conspicuous consumption, and are
+therefore honorific in their nature and may legitimately be accounted
+beautiful. This class of animals are conventionally admired by the body
+of the upper classes, while the pecuniarily lower classes--and that
+select minority of the leisure class among whom the rigorous canon that
+abjures thrift is in a measure obsolescent--find beauty in one class of
+animals as in another, without drawing a hard and fast line of pecuniary
+demarcation between the beautiful and the ugly. In the case of those
+domestic animals which are honorific and are reputed beautiful, there
+is a subsidiary basis of merit that should be spokes of. Apart from the
+birds which belong in the honorific class of domestic animals, and which
+owe their place in this class to their non-lucrative character alone,
+the animals which merit particular attention are cats, dogs, and fast
+horses. The cat is less reputable than the other two just named, because
+she is less wasteful; she may even serve a useful end. At the same time
+the cat's temperament does not fit her for the honorific purpose. She
+lives with man on terms of equality, knows nothing of that relation of
+status which is the ancient basis of all distinctions of worth, honor,
+and repute, and she does not lend herself with facility to an invidious
+comparison between her owner and his neighbors. The exception to this
+last rule occurs in the case of such scarce and fanciful products as
+the Angora cat, which have some slight honorific value on the ground
+of expensiveness, and have, therefore, some special claim to beauty on
+pecuniary grounds.
+
+The dog has advantages in the way of uselessness as well as in special
+gifts of temperament. He is often spoken of, in an eminent sense, as
+the friend of man, and his intelligence and fidelity are praised. The
+meaning of this is that the dog is man's servant and that he has
+the gift of an unquestioning subservience and a slave's quickness in
+guessing his master's mood. Coupled with these traits, which fit him
+well for the relation of status--and which must for the present purpose
+be set down as serviceable traits--the dog has some characteristics
+which are of a more equivocal aesthetic value. He is the filthiest of
+the domestic animals in his person and the nastiest in his habits. For
+this he makes up is a servile, fawning attitude towards his master, and
+a readiness to inflict damage and discomfort on all else. The dog, then,
+commends himself to our favor by affording play to our propensity for
+mastery, and as he is also an item of expense, and commonly serves no
+industrial purpose, he holds a well-assured place in men's regard as
+a thing of good repute. The dog is at the same time associated in our
+imagination with the chase--a meritorious employment and an expression
+of the honorable predatory impulse. Standing on this vantage ground,
+whatever beauty of form and motion and whatever commendable mental
+traits he may possess are conventionally acknowledged and magnified.
+And even those varieties of the dog which have been bred into grotesque
+deformity by the dog-fancier are in good faith accounted beautiful by
+many. These varieties of dogs--and the like is true of other fancy-bred
+animals--are rated and graded in aesthetic value somewhat in proportion
+to the degree of grotesqueness and instability of the particular fashion
+which the deformity takes in the given case. For the purpose in hand,
+this differential utility on the ground of grotesqueness and instability
+of structure is reducible to terms of a greater scarcity and consequent
+expense. The commercial value of canine monstrosities, such as the
+prevailing styles of pet dogs both for men's and women's use, rests
+on their high cost of production, and their value to their owners
+lies chiefly in their utility as items of conspicuous consumption.
+Indirectly, through reflection upon their honorific expensiveness,
+a social worth is imputed to them; and so, by an easy substitution of
+words and ideas, they come to be admired and reputed beautiful. Since
+any attention bestowed upon these animals is in no sense gainful
+or useful, it is also reputable; and since the habit of giving them
+attention is consequently not deprecated, it may grow into an habitual
+attachment of great tenacity and of a most benevolent character. So that
+in the affection bestowed on pet animals the canon of expensiveness
+is present more or less remotely as a norm which guides and shapes the
+sentiment and the selection of its object. The like is true, as will be
+noticed presently, with respect to affection for persons also; although
+the manner in which the norm acts in that case is somewhat different.
+
+The case of the fast horse is much like that of the dog. He is on the
+whole expensive, or wasteful and useless--for the industrial purpose.
+What productive use he may possess, in the way of enhancing the
+well-being of the community or making the way of life easier for men,
+takes the form of exhibitions of force and facility of motion that
+gratify the popular aesthetic sense. This is of course a substantial
+serviceability. The horse is not endowed with the spiritual aptitude
+for servile dependence in the same measure as the dog; but he ministers
+effectually to his master's impulse to convert the "animate" forces of
+the environment to his own use and discretion and so express his own
+dominating individuality through them. The fast horse is at least
+potentially a race-horse, of high or low degree; and it is as such that
+he is peculiarly serviceable to his owner. The utility of the fast horse
+lies largely in his efficiency as a means of emulation; it gratifies the
+owner's sense of aggression and dominance to have his own horse outstrip
+his neighbor's. This use being not lucrative, but on the whole pretty
+consistently wasteful, and quite conspicuously so, it is honorific,
+and therefore gives the fast horse a strong presumptive position of
+reputability. Beyond this, the race-horse proper has also a similarly
+non-industrial but honorific use as a gambling instrument.
+
+The fast horse, then, is aesthetically fortunate, in that the canon of
+pecuniary good repute legitimates a free appreciation of whatever beauty
+or serviceability he may possess. His pretensions have the countenance
+of the principle of conspicuous waste and the backing of the predatory
+aptitude for dominance and emulation. The horse is, moreover, a
+beautiful animal, although the race-horse is so in no peculiar degree to
+the uninstructed taste of those persons who belong neither in the class
+of race-horse fanciers nor in the class whose sense of beauty is held in
+abeyance by the moral constraint of the horse fancier's award. To this
+untutored taste the most beautiful horse seems to be a form which has
+suffered less radical alteration than the race-horse under the
+breeder's selective development of the animal. Still, when a writer
+or speaker--especially of those whose eloquence is most consistently
+commonplace wants an illustration of animal grace and serviceability,
+for rhetorical use, he habitually turns to the horse; and he commonly
+makes it plain before he is done that what he has in mind is the
+race-horse.
+
+It should be noted that in the graduated appreciation of varieties
+of horses and of dogs, such as one meets with among people of even
+moderately cultivated tastes in these matters, there is also discernible
+another and more direct line of influence of the leisure-class canons of
+reputability. In this country, for instance, leisure-class tastes are
+to some extent shaped on usages and habits which prevail, or which are
+apprehended to prevail, among the leisure class of Great Britain. In
+dogs this is true to a less extent than in horses. In horses, more
+particularly in saddle horses--which at their best serve the purpose of
+wasteful display simply--it will hold true in a general way that a
+horse is more beautiful in proportion as he is more English; the English
+leisure class being, for purposes of reputable usage, the upper leisure
+class of this country, and so the exemplar for the lower grades. This
+mimicry in the methods of the apperception of beauty and in the forming
+of judgments of taste need not result in a spurious, or at any rate not
+a hypocritical or affected, predilection. The predilection is as serious
+and as substantial an award of taste when it rests on this basis as
+when it rests on any other, the difference is that this taste is and
+as substantial an award of taste when it rests on this basis as when it
+rests on any other; the difference is that this taste is a taste for the
+reputably correct, not for the aesthetically true.
+
+The mimicry, it should be said, extends further than to the sense of
+beauty in horseflesh simply. It includes trappings and horsemanship as
+well, so that the correct or reputably beautiful seat or posture is also
+decided by English usage, as well as the equestrian gait. To show how
+fortuitous may sometimes be the circumstances which decide what shall
+be becoming and what not under the pecuniary canon of beauty, it may be
+noted that this English seat, and the peculiarly distressing gait which
+has made an awkward seat necessary, are a survival from the time when
+the English roads were so bad with mire and mud as to be virtually
+impassable for a horse travelling at a more comfortable gait; so that
+a person of decorous tastes in horsemanship today rides a punch with
+docked tail, in an uncomfortable posture and at a distressing gait,
+because the English roads during a great part of the last century were
+impassable for a horse travelling at a more horse-like gait, or for
+an animal built for moving with ease over the firm and open country to
+which the horse is indigenous. It is not only with respect to consumable
+goods--including domestic animals--that the canons of taste have been
+colored by the canons of pecuniary reputability. Something to the like
+effect is to be said for beauty in persons. In order to avoid whatever
+may be matter of controversy, no weight will be given in this connection
+to such popular predilection as there may be for the dignified
+(leisurely) bearing and poly presence that are by vulgar tradition
+associated with opulence in mature men. These traits are in some measure
+accepted as elements of personal beauty. But there are certain elements
+of feminine beauty, on the other hand, which come in under this head,
+and which are of so concrete and specific a character as to admit of
+itemized appreciation. It is more or less a rule that in communities
+which are at the stage of economic development at which women are valued
+by the upper class for their service, the ideal of female beauty is a
+robust, large-limbed woman. The ground of appreciation is the physique,
+while the conformation of the face is of secondary weight only. A
+well-known instance of this ideal of the early predatory culture is that
+of the maidens of the Homeric poems.
+
+This ideal suffers a change in the succeeding development, when, in the
+conventional scheme, the office of the high-class wife comes to be a
+vicarious leisure simply. The ideal then includes the characteristics
+which are supposed to result from or to go with a life of leisure
+consistently enforced. The ideal accepted under these circumstances may
+be gathered from descriptions of beautiful women by poets and writers of
+the chivalric times. In the conventional scheme of those days ladies
+of high degree were conceived to be in perpetual tutelage, and to be
+scrupulously exempt from all useful work. The resulting chivalric or
+romantic ideal of beauty takes cognizance chiefly of the face, and
+dwells on its delicacy, and on the delicacy of the hands and feet,
+the slender figure, and especially the slender waist. In the pictured
+representations of the women of that time, and in modern romantic
+imitators of the chivalric thought and feeling, the waist is attenuated
+to a degree that implies extreme debility. The same ideal is still
+extant among a considerable portion of the population of modern
+industrial communities; but it is to be said that it has retained
+its hold most tenaciously in those modern communities which are least
+advanced in point of economic and civil development, and which show the
+most considerable survivals of status and of predatory institutions.
+That is to say, the chivalric ideal is best preserved in those existing
+communities which are substantially least modern. Survivals of this
+lackadaisical or romantic ideal occur freely in the tastes of the
+well-to-do classes of Continental countries. In modern communities which
+have reached the higher levels of industrial development, the upper
+leisure class has accumulated so great a mass of wealth as to place its
+women above all imputation of vulgarly productive labor. Here the status
+of women as vicarious consumers is beginning to lose its place in the
+sections of the body of the people; and as a consequence the ideal of
+feminine beauty is beginning to change back again from the infirmly
+delicate, translucent, and hazardously slender, to a woman of the
+archaic type that does not disown her hands and feet, nor, indeed, the
+other gross material facts of her person. In the course of economic
+development the ideal of beauty among the peoples of the Western culture
+has shifted from the woman of physical presence to the lady, and it is
+beginning to shift back again to the woman; and all in obedience to the
+changing conditions of pecuniary emulation. The exigencies of emulation
+at one time required lusty slaves; at another time they required a
+conspicuous performance of vicarious leisure and consequently an obvious
+disability; but the situation is now beginning to outgrow this last
+requirement, since, under the higher efficiency of modern industry,
+leisure in women is possible so far down the scale of reputability that
+it will no longer serve as a definitive mark of the highest pecuniary
+grade.
+
+Apart from this general control exercised by the norm of conspicuous
+waste over the ideal of feminine beauty, there are one or two details
+which merit specific mention as showing how it may exercise an extreme
+constraint in detail over men's sense of beauty in women. It has
+already been noticed that at the stages of economic evolution at which
+conspicuous leisure is much regarded as a means of good repute, the
+ideal requires delicate and diminutive hands and feet and a slender
+waist. These features, together with the other, related faults of
+structure that commonly go with them, go to show that the person so
+affected is incapable of useful effort and must therefore be supported
+in idleness by her owner. She is useless and expensive, and she is
+consequently valuable as evidence of pecuniary strength. It results that
+at this cultural stage women take thought to alter their persons, so as
+to conform more nearly to the requirements of the instructed taste of
+the time; and under the guidance of the canon of pecuniary decency,
+the men find the resulting artificially induced pathological features
+attractive. So, for instance, the constricted waist which has had so
+wide and persistent a vogue in the communities of the Western culture,
+and so also the deformed foot of the Chinese. Both of these are
+mutilations of unquestioned repulsiveness to the untrained sense. It
+requires habituation to become reconciled to them. Yet there is no room
+to question their attractiveness to men into whose scheme of life they
+fit as honorific items sanctioned by the requirements of pecuniary
+reputability. They are items of pecuniary and cultural beauty which have
+come to do duty as elements of the ideal of womanliness.
+
+The connection here indicated between the aesthetic value and the
+invidious pecuniary value of things is of course not present in the
+consciousness of the valuer. So far as a person, in forming a judgment
+of taste, takes thought and reflects that the object of beauty under
+consideration is wasteful and reputable, and therefore may legitimately
+be accounted beautiful; so far the judgment is not a bona fide judgment
+of taste and does not come up for consideration in this connection. The
+connection which is here insisted on between the reputability and the
+apprehended beauty of objects lies through the effect which the fact of
+reputability has upon the valuer's habits of thought. He is in the
+habit of forming judgments of value of various kinds-economic, moral,
+aesthetic, or reputable concerning the objects with which he has to do,
+and his attitude of commendation towards a given object on any other
+ground will affect the degree of his appreciation of the object when he
+comes to value it for the aesthetic purpose. This is more particularly
+true as regards valuation on grounds so closely related to the aesthetic
+ground as that of reputability. The valuation for the aesthetic purpose
+and for the purpose of repute are not held apart as distinctly as might
+be. Confusion is especially apt to arise between these two kinds of
+valuation, because the value of objects for repute is not habitually
+distinguished in speech by the use of a special descriptive term. The
+result is that the terms in familiar use to designate categories
+or elements of beauty are applied to cover this unnamed element of
+pecuniary merit, and the corresponding confusion of ideas follows by
+easy consequence. The demands of reputability in this way coalesce in
+the popular apprehension with the demands of the sense of beauty, and
+beauty which is not accompanied by the accredited marks of good repute
+is not accepted. But the requirements of pecuniary reputability and
+those of beauty in the naive sense do not in any appreciable degree
+coincide. The elimination from our surroundings of the pecuniarily
+unfit, therefore, results in a more or less thorough elimination of that
+considerable range of elements of beauty which do not happen to conform
+to the pecuniary requirement. The underlying norms of taste are of very
+ancient growth, probably far antedating the advent of the pecuniary
+institutions that are here under discussion. Consequently, by force of
+the past selective adaptation of men's habits of thought, it happens
+that the requirements of beauty, simply, are for the most part best
+satisfied by inexpensive contrivances and structures which in a
+straightforward manner suggest both the office which they are to perform
+and the method of serving their end. It may be in place to recall the
+modern psychological position. Beauty of form seems to be a question of
+facility of apperception. The proposition could perhaps safely be made
+broader than this. If abstraction is made from association, suggestion,
+and "expression," classed as elements of beauty, then beauty in any
+perceived object means that the mind readily unfolds its apperceptive
+activity in the directions which the object in question affords. But the
+directions in which activity readily unfolds or expresses itself are the
+directions to which long and close habituation has made the mind prone.
+So far as concerns the essential elements of beauty, this habituation
+is an habituation so close and long as to have induced not only a
+proclivity to the apperceptive form in question, but an adaptation of
+physiological structure and function as well. So far as the economic
+interest enters into the constitution of beauty, it enters as a
+suggestion or expression of adequacy to a purpose, a manifest and
+readily inferable subservience to the life process. This expression of
+economic facility or economic serviceability in any object--what may
+be called the economic beauty of the object-is best served by neat and
+unambiguous suggestion of its office and its efficiency for the material
+ends of life.
+
+On this ground, among objects of use the simple and unadorned article
+is aesthetically the best. But since the pecuniary canon of reputability
+rejects the inexpensive in articles appropriated to individual
+consumption, the satisfaction of our craving for beautiful things
+must be sought by way of compromise. The canons of beauty must be
+circumvented by some contrivance which will give evidence of a reputably
+wasteful expenditure, at the same time that it meets the demands of our
+critical sense of the useful and the beautiful, or at least meets the
+demand of some habit which has come to do duty in place of that sense.
+Such an auxiliary sense of taste is the sense of novelty; and this
+latter is helped out in its surrogateship by the curiosity with which
+men view ingenious and puzzling contrivances. Hence it comes that
+most objects alleged to be beautiful, and doing duty as such, show
+considerable ingenuity of design and are calculated to puzzle the
+beholder--to bewilder him with irrelevant suggestions and hints of the
+improbable--at the same time that they give evidence of an expenditure
+of labor in excess of what would give them their fullest efficency for
+their ostensible economic end.
+
+This may be shown by an illustration taken from outside the range of our
+everyday habits and everyday contact, and so outside the range of
+our bias. Such are the remarkable feather mantles of Hawaii, or the
+well-known cawed handles of the ceremonial adzes of several Polynesian
+islands. These are undeniably beautiful, both in the sense that they
+offer a pleasing composition of form, lines, and color, and in the sense
+that they evince great skill and ingenuity in design and construction.
+At the same time the articles are manifestly ill fitted to serve any
+other economic purpose. But it is not always that the evolution of
+ingenious and puzzling contrivances under the guidance of the canon of
+wasted effort works out so happy a result. The result is quite as
+often a virtually complete suppression of all elements that would
+bear scrutiny as expressions of beauty, or of serviceability, and the
+substitution of evidences of misspent ingenuity and labor, backed by a
+conspicuous ineptitude; until many of the objects with which we surround
+ourselves in everyday life, and even many articles of everyday dress and
+ornament, are such as would not be tolerated except under the stress of
+prescriptive tradition. Illustrations of this substitution of ingenuity
+and expense in place of beauty and serviceability are to be seen, for
+instance, in domestic architecture, in domestic art or fancy work,
+in various articles of apparel, especially of feminine and priestly
+apparel.
+
+The canon of beauty requires expression of the generic. The "novelty"
+due to the demands of conspicuous waste traverses this canon of beauty,
+in that it results in making the physiognomy of our objects of taste a
+congeries of idiosyncrasies; and the idiosyncrasies are, moreover, under
+the selective surveillance of the canon of expensiveness.
+
+This process of selective adaptation of designs to the end of
+conspicuous waste, and the substitution of pecuniary beauty for
+aesthetic beauty, has been especially effective in the development of
+architecture. It would be extremely difficult to find a modern civilized
+residence or public building which can claim anything better than
+relative inoffensiveness in the eyes of anyone who will dissociate the
+elements of beauty from those of honorific waste. The endless variety of
+fronts presented by the better class of tenements and apartment houses
+in our cities is an endless variety of architectural distress and of
+suggestions of expensive discomfort. Considered as objects of beauty,
+the dead walls of the sides and back of these structures, left untouched
+by the hands of the artist, are commonly the best feature of the
+building.
+
+What has been said of the influence of the law of conspicuous waste upon
+the canons of taste will hold true, with but a slight change of terms,
+of its influence upon our notions of the serviceability of goods for
+other ends than the aesthetic one. Goods are produced and consumed as a
+means to the fuller unfolding of human life; and their utility consists,
+in the first instance, in their efficiency as means to this end. The end
+is, in the first instance, the fullness of life of the individual, taken
+in absolute terms. But the human proclivity to emulation has seized upon
+the consumption of goods as a means to an invidious comparison, and has
+thereby invested consumable goods with a secondary utility as evidence
+of relative ability to pay. This indirect or secondary use of consumable
+goods lends an honorific character to consumption and presently also
+to the goods which best serve the emulative end of consumption. The
+consumption of expensive goods is meritorious, and the goods which
+contain an appreciable element of cost in excess of what goes to
+give them serviceability for their ostensible mechanical purpose
+are honorific. The marks of superfluous costliness in the goods are
+therefore marks of worth--of high efficency for the indirect, invidious
+end to be served by their consumption; and conversely, goods are
+humilific, and therefore unattractive, if they show too thrifty an
+adaptation to the mechanical end sought and do not include a margin of
+expensiveness on which to rest a complacent invidious comparison. This
+indirect utility gives much of their value to the "better" grades of
+goods. In order to appeal to the cultivated sense of utility, an article
+must contain a modicum of this indirect utility.
+
+While men may have set out with disapproving an inexpensive manner of
+living because it indicated inability to spend much, and so indicated
+a lack of pecuniary success, they end by falling into the habit of
+disapproving cheap things as being intrinsically dishonorable or
+unworthy because they are cheap. As time has gone on, each succeeding
+generation has received this tradition of meritorious expenditure from
+the generation before it, and has in its turn further elaborated and
+fortified the traditional canon of pecuniary reputability in goods
+consumed; until we have finally reached such a degree of conviction as
+to the unworthiness of all inexpensive things, that we have no
+longer any misgivings in formulating the maxim, "Cheap and nasty." So
+thoroughly has the habit of approving the expensive and disapproving
+the inexpensive been ingrained into our thinking that we instinctively
+insist upon at least some measure of wasteful expensiveness in all our
+consumption, even in the case of goods which are consumed in strict
+privacy and without the slightest thought of display. We all feel,
+sincerely and without misgiving, that we are the more lifted up in
+spirit for having, even in the privacy of our own household, eaten
+our daily meal by the help of hand-wrought silver utensils, from
+hand-painted china (often of dubious artistic value) laid on high-priced
+table linen. Any retrogression from the standard of living which we are
+accustomed to regard as worthy in this respect is felt to be a grievous
+violation of our human dignity. So, also, for the last dozen years
+candles have been a more pleasing source of light at dinner than any
+other. Candlelight is now softer, less distressing to well-bred eyes,
+than oil, gas, or electric light. The same could not have been said
+thirty years ago, when candles were, or recently had been, the cheapest
+available light for domestic use. Nor are candles even now found to
+give an acceptable or effective light for any other than a ceremonial
+illumination.
+
+A political sage still living has summed up the conclusion of this whole
+matter in the dictum: "A cheap coat makes a cheap man," and there is
+probably no one who does not feel the convincing force of the maxim.
+
+The habit of looking for the marks of superfluous expensiveness in
+goods, and of requiring that all goods should afford some utility of the
+indirect or invidious sort, leads to a change in the standards by which
+the utility of goods is gauged. The honorific element and the element
+of brute efficiency are not held apart in the consumer's appreciation of
+commodities, and the two together go to make up the unanalyzed
+aggregate serviceability of the goods. Under the resulting standard of
+serviceability, no article will pass muster on the strength of material
+sufficiency alone. In order to completeness and full acceptability to
+the consumer it must also show the honorific element. It results that
+the producers of articles of consumption direct their efforts to the
+production of goods that shall meet this demand for the honorific
+element. They will do this with all the more alacrity and effect, since
+they are themselves under the dominance of the same standard of worth in
+goods, and would be sincerely grieved at the sight of goods which lack
+the proper honorific finish. Hence it has come about that there are
+today no goods supplied in any trade which do not contain the
+honorific element in greater or less degree. Any consumer who might,
+Diogenes-like, insist on the elimination of all honorific or wasteful
+elements from his consumption, would be unable to supply his most
+trivial wants in the modern market. Indeed, even if he resorted to
+supplying his wants directly by his own efforts, he would find it
+difficult if not impossible to divest himself of the current habits of
+thought on this head; so that he could scarcely compass a supply of the
+necessaries of life for a day's consumption without instinctively and
+by oversight incorporating in his home-made product something of this
+honorific, quasi-decorative element of wasted labor.
+
+It is notorious that in their selection of serviceable goods in the
+retail market purchasers are guided more by the finish and workmanship
+of the goods than by any marks of substantial serviceability. Goods,
+in order to sell, must have some appreciable amount of labor spent in
+giving them the marks of decent expensiveness, in addition to what goes
+to give them efficiency for the material use which they are to serve.
+This habit of making obvious costliness a canon of serviceability of
+course acts to enhance the aggregate cost of articles of consumption.
+It puts us on our guard against cheapness by identifying merit in some
+degree with cost. There is ordinarily a consistent effort on the part
+of the consumer to obtain goods of the required serviceability at as
+advantageous a bargain as may be; but the conventional requirement of
+obvious costliness, as a voucher and a constituent of the serviceability
+of the goods, leads him to reject as under grade such goods as do not
+contain a large element of conspicuous waste.
+
+It is to be added that a large share of those features of consumable
+goods which figure in popular apprehension as marks of serviceability,
+and to which reference is here had as elements of conspicuous waste,
+commend themselves to the consumer also on other grounds than that of
+expensiveness alone. They usually give evidence of skill and effective
+workmanship, even if they do not contribute to the substantial
+serviceability of the goods; and it is no doubt largely on some such
+ground that any particular mark of honorific serviceability first comes
+into vogue and afterward maintains its footing as a normal constituent
+element of the worth of an article. A display of efficient workmanship
+is pleasing simply as such, even where its remoter, for the time
+unconsidered, outcome is futile. There is a gratification of the
+artistic sense in the contemplation of skillful work. But it is also to
+be added that no such evidence of skillful workmanship, or of ingenious
+and effective adaptation of means to an end, will, in the long run,
+enjoy the approbation of the modern civilized consumer unless it has the
+sanction of the Canon of conspicuous waste.
+
+The position here taken is enforced in a felicitous manner by the place
+assigned in the economy of consumption to machine products. The point
+of material difference between machine-made goods and the hand-wrought
+goods which serve the same purposes is, ordinarily, that the former
+serve their primary purpose more adequately. They are a more perfect
+product--show a more perfect adaptation of means to end. This does not
+save them from disesteem and deprecation, for they fall short under
+the test of honorific waste. Hand labor is a more wasteful method
+of production; hence the goods turned out by this method are more
+serviceable for the purpose of pecuniary reputability; hence the marks
+of hand labor come to be honorific, and the goods which exhibit these
+marks take rank as of higher grade than the corresponding machine
+product. Commonly, if not invariably, the honorific marks of hand
+labor are certain imperfections and irregularities in the lines of the
+hand-wrought article, showing where the workman has fallen short in the
+execution of the design. The ground of the superiority of hand-wrought
+goods, therefore, is a certain margin of crudeness. This margin must
+never be so wide as to show bungling workmanship, since that would be
+evidence of low cost, nor so narrow as to suggest the ideal precision
+attained only by the machine, for that would be evidence of low cost.
+
+The appreciation of those evidences of honorific crudeness to which
+hand-wrought goods owe their superior worth and charm in the eyes
+of well-bred people is a matter of nice discrimination. It requires
+training and the formation of right habits of thought with respect to
+what may be called the physiognomy of goods. Machine-made goods of
+daily use are often admired and preferred precisely on account of their
+excessive perfection by the vulgar and the underbred who have not given
+due thought to the punctilios of elegant consumption. The ceremonial
+inferiority of machine products goes to show that the perfection of
+skill and workmanship embodied in any costly innovations in the finish
+of goods is not sufficient of itself to secure them acceptance and
+permanent favor. The innovation must have the support of the canon of
+conspicuous waste. Any feature in the physiognomy of goods, however
+pleasing in itself, and however well it may approve itself to the taste
+for effective work, will not be tolerated if it proves obnoxious to this
+norm of pecuniary reputability.
+
+The ceremonial inferiority or uncleanness in consumable goods due to
+"commonness," or in other words to their slight cost of production,
+has been taken very seriously by many persons. The objection to machine
+products is often formulated as an objection to the commonness of such
+goods. What is common is within the (pecuniary) reach of many people.
+Its consumption is therefore not honorific, since it does not serve the
+purpose of a favorable invidious comparison with other consumers. Hence
+the consumption, or even the sight of such goods, is inseparable from an
+odious suggestion of the lower levels of human life, and one comes away
+from their contemplation with a pervading sense of meanness that is
+extremely distasteful and depressing to a person of sensibility. In
+persons whose tastes assert themselves imperiously, and who have not the
+gift, habit, or incentive to discriminate between the grounds of
+their various judgments of taste, the deliverances of the sense of the
+honorific coalesce with those of the sense of beauty and of the sense of
+serviceability--in the manner already spoken of; the resulting
+composite valuation serves as a judgment of the object's beauty or its
+serviceability, according as the valuer's bias or interest inclines him
+to apprehend the object in the one or the other of these aspects. It
+follows not infrequently that the marks of cheapness or commonness
+are accepted as definitive marks of artistic unfitness, and a code or
+schedule of aesthetic proprieties on the one hand, and of aesthetic
+abominations on the other, is constructed on this basis for guidance in
+questions of taste.
+
+As has already been pointed out, the cheap, and therefore indecorous,
+articles of daily consumption in modern industrial communities are
+commonly machine products; and the generic feature of the physiognomy
+of machine-made goods as compared with the hand-wrought article is their
+greater perfection in workmanship and greater accuracy in the detail
+execution of the design. Hence it comes about that the visible
+imperfections of the hand-wrought goods, being honorific, are accounted
+marks of superiority in point of beauty, or serviceability, or both.
+Hence has arisen that exaltation of the defective, of which John Ruskin
+and William Morris were such eager spokesmen in their time; and on this
+ground their propaganda of crudity and wasted effort has been taken up
+and carried forward since their time. And hence also the propaganda for
+a return to handicraft and household industry. So much of the work
+and speculations of this group of men as fairly comes under the
+characterization here given would have been impossible at a time when
+the visibly more perfect goods were not the cheaper.
+
+It is of course only as to the economic value of this school of
+aesthetic teaching that anything is intended to be said or can be said
+here. What is said is not to be taken in the sense of depreciation, but
+chiefly as a characterization of the tendency of this teaching in its
+effect on consumption and on the production of consumable goods.
+
+The manner in which the bias of this growth of taste has worked itself
+out in production is perhaps most cogently exemplified in the book
+manufacture with which Morris busied himself during the later years of
+his life; but what holds true of the work of the Kelmscott Press in an
+eminent degree, holds true with but slightly abated force when applied
+to latter-day artistic book-making generally--as to type, paper,
+illustration, binding materials, and binder's work. The claims to
+excellence put forward by the later products of the bookmaker's industry
+rest in some measure on the degree of its approximation to the crudities
+of the time when the work of book-making was a doubtful struggle with
+refractory materials carried on by means of insufficient appliances.
+These products, since they require hand labor, are more expensive; they
+are also less convenient for use than the books turned out with a view
+to serviceability alone; they therefore argue ability on the part of
+the purchaser to consume freely, as well as ability to waste time and
+effort. It is on this basis that the printers of today are returning to
+"old-style," and other more or less obsolete styles of type which are
+less legible and give a cruder appearance to the page than the "modern."
+Even a scientific periodical, with ostensibly no purpose but the most
+effective presentation of matter with which its science is concerned,
+will concede so much to the demands of this pecuniary beauty as to
+publish its scientific discussions in oldstyle type, on laid paper, and
+with uncut edges. But books which are not ostensibly concerned with the
+effective presentation of their contents alone, of course go farther
+in this direction. Here we have a somewhat cruder type, printed on
+hand-laid, deckel-edged paper, with excessive margins and uncut leaves,
+with bindings of a painstaking crudeness and elaborate ineptitude. The
+Kelmscott Press reduced the matter to an absurdity--as seen from the
+point of view of brute serviceability alone--by issuing books for modern
+use, edited with the obsolete spelling, printed in black-letter, and
+bound in limp vellum fitted with thongs. As a further characteristic
+feature which fixes the economic place of artistic book-making, there
+is the fact that these more elegant books are, at their best, printed in
+limited editions. A limited edition is in effect a guarantee--somewhat
+crude, it is true--that this book is scarce and that it therefore is
+costly and lends pecuniary distinction to its consumer.
+
+The special attractiveness of these book-products to the book-buyer of
+cultivated taste lies, of course, not in a conscious, naive recognition
+of their costliness and superior clumsiness. Here, as in the parallel
+case of the superiority of hand-wrought articles over machine products,
+the conscious ground of preference is an intrinsic excellence imputed to
+the costlier and more awkward article. The superior excellence imputed
+to the book which imitates the products of antique and obsolete
+processes is conceived to be chiefly a superior utility in the aesthetic
+respect; but it is not unusual to find a well-bred book-lover insisting
+that the clumsier product is also more serviceable as a vehicle of
+printed speech. So far as regards the superior aesthetic value of the
+decadent book, the chances are that the book-lover's contention has some
+ground. The book is designed with an eye single to its beauty, and the
+result is commonly some measure of success on the part of the designer.
+What is insisted on here, however, is that the canon of taste under
+which the designer works is a canon formed under the surveillance of
+the law of conspicuous waste, and that this law acts selectively to
+eliminate any canon of taste that does not conform to its demands. That
+is to say, while the decadent book may be beautiful, the limits within
+which the designer may work are fixed by requirements of a non-aesthetic
+kind. The product, if it is beautiful, must also at the same time be
+costly and ill adapted to its ostensible use. This mandatory canon of
+taste in the case of the book-designer, however, is not shaped entirely
+by the law of waste in its first form; the canon is to some extent
+shaped in conformity to that secondary expression of the predatory
+temperament, veneration for the archaic or obsolete, which in one of its
+special developments is called classicism. In aesthetic theory it might
+be extremely difficult, if not quite impracticable, to draw a line
+between the canon of classicism, or regard for the archaic, and the
+canon of beauty. For the aesthetic purpose such a distinction need
+scarcely be drawn, and indeed it need not exist. For a theory of taste
+the expression of an accepted ideal of archaism, on whatever basis it
+may have been accepted, is perhaps best rated as an element of beauty;
+there need be no question of its legitimation. But for the present
+purpose--for the purpose of determining what economic grounds are
+present in the accepted canons of taste and what is their significance
+for the distribution and consumption of goods--the distinction is not
+similarly beside the point. The position of machine products in the
+civilized scheme of consumption serves to point out the nature of the
+relation which subsists between the canon of conspicuous waste and the
+code of proprieties in consumption. Neither in matters of art and taste
+proper, nor as regards the current sense of the serviceability of goods,
+does this canon act as a principle of innovation or initiative. It does
+not go into the future as a creative principle which makes innovations
+and adds new items of consumption and new elements of cost. The
+principle in question is, in a certain sense, a negative rather than a
+positive law. It is a regulative rather than a creative principle. It
+very rarely initiates or originates any usage or custom directly. Its
+action is selective only. Conspicuous wastefulness does not directly
+afford ground for variation and growth, but conformity to its
+requirements is a condition to the survival of such innovations as may
+be made on other grounds. In whatever way usages and customs and methods
+of expenditure arise, they are all subject to the selective action of
+this norm of reputability; and the degree in which they conform to its
+requirements is a test of their fitness to survive in the competition
+with other similar usages and customs. Other thing being equal, the more
+obviously wasteful usage or method stands the better chance of survival
+under this law. The law of conspicuous waste does not account for the
+origin of variations, but only for the persistence of such forms as are
+fit to survive under its dominance. It acts to conserve the fit, not to
+originate the acceptable. Its office is to prove all things and to hold
+fast that which is good for its purpose.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Seven ~~ Dress as an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture
+
+It will in place, by way of illustration, to show in some detail how the
+economic principles so far set forth apply to everyday facts in some one
+direction of the life process. For this purpose no line of consumption
+affords a more apt illustration than expenditure on dress. It is
+especially the rule of the conspicuous waste of goods that finds
+expression in dress, although the other, related principles of pecuniary
+repute are also exemplified in the same contrivances. Other methods
+of putting one's pecuniary standing in evidence serve their end
+effectually, and other methods are in vogue always and everywhere; but
+expenditure on dress has this advantage over most other methods, that
+our apparel is always in evidence and affords an indication of our
+pecuniary standing to all observers at the first glance. It is also true
+that admitted expenditure for display is more obviously present, and is,
+perhaps, more universally practiced in the matter of dress than in any
+other line of consumption. No one finds difficulty in assenting to the
+commonplace that the greater part of the expenditure incurred by all
+classes for apparel is incurred for the sake of a respectable appearance
+rather than for the protection of the person. And probably at no other
+point is the sense of shabbiness so keenly felt as it is if we fall
+short of the standard set by social usage in this matter of dress. It
+is true of dress in even a higher degree than of most other items of
+consumption, that people will undergo a very considerable degree of
+privation in the comforts or the necessaries of life in order to afford
+what is considered a decent amount of wasteful consumption; so that
+it is by no means an uncommon occurrence, in an inclement climate,
+for people to go ill clad in order to appear well dressed. And the
+commercial value of the goods used for clotting in any modern community
+is made up to a much larger extent of the fashionableness, the
+reputability of the goods than of the mechanical service which they
+render in clothing the person of the wearer. The need of dress is
+eminently a "higher" or spiritual need.
+
+This spiritual need of dress is not wholly, nor even chiefly, a naive
+propensity for display of expenditure. The law of conspicuous waste
+guides consumption in apparel, as in other things, chiefly at the second
+remove, by shaping the canons of taste and decency. In the common run of
+cases the conscious motive of the wearer or purchaser of conspicuously
+wasteful apparel is the need of conforming to established usage, and of
+living up to the accredited standard of taste and reputability. It is
+not only that one must be guided by the code of proprieties in dress in
+order to avoid the mortification that comes of unfavorable notice and
+comment, though that motive in itself counts for a great deal; but
+besides that, the requirement of expensiveness is so ingrained into
+our habits of thought in matters of dress that any other than expensive
+apparel is instinctively odious to us. Without reflection or analysis,
+we feel that what is inexpensive is unworthy. "A cheap coat makes a
+cheap man." "Cheap and nasty" is recognized to hold true in dress with
+even less mitigation than in other lines of consumption. On the ground
+both of taste and of serviceability, an inexpensive article of apparel
+is held to be inferior, under the maxim "cheap and nasty." We find
+things beautiful, as well as serviceable, somewhat in proportion as
+they are costly. With few and inconsequential exceptions, we all find
+a costly hand-wrought article of apparel much preferable, in point
+of beauty and of serviceability, to a less expensive imitation of it,
+however cleverly the spurious article may imitate the costly original;
+and what offends our sensibilities in the spurious article is not that
+it falls short in form or color, or, indeed, in visual effect in any
+way. The offensive object may be so close an imitation as to defy
+any but the closest scrutiny; and yet so soon as the counterfeit
+is detected, its aesthetic value, and its commercial value as well,
+declines precipitately. Not only that, but it may be asserted with
+but small risk of contradiction that the aesthetic value of a detected
+counterfeit in dress declines somewhat in the same proportion as the
+counterfeit is cheaper than its original. It loses caste aesthetically
+because it falls to a lower pecuniary grade.
+
+But the function of dress as an evidence of ability to pay does not end
+with simply showing that the wearer consumes valuable goods in excess of
+what is required for physical comfort. Simple conspicuous waste of goods
+is effective and gratifying as far as it goes; it is good prima facie
+evidence of pecuniary success, and consequently prima facie evidence of
+social worth. But dress has subtler and more far-reaching possibilities
+than this crude, first-hand evidence of wasteful consumption only. If,
+in addition to showing that the wearer can afford to consume freely and
+uneconomically, it can also be shown in the same stroke that he or she
+is not under the necessity of earning a livelihood, the evidence of
+social worth is enhanced in a very considerable degree. Our dress,
+therefore, in order to serve its purpose effectually, should not only
+he expensive, but it should also make plain to all observers that
+the wearer is not engaged in any kind of productive labor. In the
+evolutionary process by which our system of dress has been elaborated
+into its present admirably perfect adaptation to its purpose, this
+subsidiary line of evidence has received due attention. A detailed
+examination of what passes in popular apprehension for elegant apparel
+will show that it is contrived at every point to convey the impression
+that the wearer does not habitually put forth any useful effort. It
+goes without saying that no apparel can be considered elegant, or
+even decent, if it shows the effect of manual labor on the part of the
+wearer, in the way of soil or wear. The pleasing effect of neat and
+spotless garments is chiefly, if not altogether, due to their carrying
+the suggestion of leisure-exemption from personal contact with
+industrial processes of any kind. Much of the charm that invests the
+patent-leather shoe, the stainless linen, the lustrous cylindrical hat,
+and the walking-stick, which so greatly enhance the native dignity of
+a gentleman, comes of their pointedly suggesting that the wearer cannot
+when so attired bear a hand in any employment that is directly and
+immediately of any human use. Elegant dress serves its purpose of
+elegance not only in that it is expensive, but also because it is
+the insignia of leisure. It not only shows that the wearer is able to
+consume a relatively large value, but it argues at the same time that he
+consumes without producing.
+
+The dress of women goes even farther than that of men in the way of
+demonstrating the wearer's abstinence from productive employment. It
+needs no argument to enforce the generalization that the more elegant
+styles of feminine bonnets go even farther towards making work
+impossible than does the man's high hat. The woman's shoe adds the
+so-called French heel to the evidence of enforced leisure afforded
+by its polish; because this high heel obviously makes any, even the
+simplest and most necessary manual work extremely difficult. The like
+is true even in a higher degree of the skirt and the rest of the drapery
+which characterizes woman's dress. The substantial reason for our
+tenacious attachment to the skirt is just this; it is expensive and it
+hampers the wearer at every turn and incapacitates her for all useful
+exertion. The like is true of the feminine custom of wearing the hair
+excessively long.
+
+But the woman's apparel not only goes beyond that of the modern man
+in the degree in which it argues exemption from labor; it also adds a
+peculiar and highly characteristic feature which differs in kind from
+anything habitually practiced by the men. This feature is the class of
+contrivances of which the corset is the typical example. The corset
+is, in economic theory, substantially a mutilation, undergone for the
+purpose of lowering the subject's vitality and rendering her permanently
+and obviously unfit for work. It is true, the corset impairs the
+personal attractions of the wearer, but the loss suffered on that
+score is offset by the gain in reputability which comes of her visibly
+increased expensiveness and infirmity. It may broadly be set down
+that the womanliness of woman's apparel resolves itself, in point of
+substantial fact, into the more effective hindrance to useful exertion
+offered by the garments peculiar to women. This difference between
+masculine and feminine apparel is here simply pointed out as a
+characteristic feature. The ground of its occurrence will be discussed
+presently.
+
+So far, then, we have, as the great and dominant norm of dress, the
+broad principle of conspicuous waste. Subsidiary to this principle,
+and as a corollary under it, we get as a second norm the principle of
+conspicuous leisure. In dress construction this norm works out in the
+shape of divers contrivances going to show that the wearer does not and,
+as far as it may conveniently be shown, can not engage in productive
+labor. Beyond these two principles there is a third of scarcely less
+constraining force, which will occur to any one who reflects at all
+on the subject. Dress must not only be conspicuously expensive and
+inconvenient, it must at the same time be up to date. No explanation at
+all satisfactory has hitherto been offered of the phenomenon of
+changing fashions. The imperative requirement of dressing in the latest
+accredited manner, as well as the fact that this accredited fashion
+constantly changes from season to season, is sufficiently familiar to
+every one, but the theory of this flux and change has not been worked
+out. We may of course say, with perfect consistency and truthfulness,
+that this principle of novelty is another corollary under the law of
+conspicuous waste. Obviously, if each garment is permitted to serve for
+but a brief term, and if none of last season's apparel is carried
+over and made further use of during the present season, the wasteful
+expenditure on dress is greatly increased. This is good as far as it
+goes, but it is negative only. Pretty much all that this consideration
+warrants us in saying is that the norm of conspicuous waste exercises a
+controlling surveillance in all matters of dress, so that any change in
+the fashions must conspicuous waste exercises a controlling surveillance
+in all matters of dress, so that any change in the fashions must conform
+to the requirement of wastefulness; it leaves unanswered the question
+as to the motive for making and accepting a change in the prevailing
+styles, and it also fails to explain why conformity to a given style at
+a given time is so imperatively necessary as we know it to be.
+
+For a creative principle, capable of serving as motive to invention
+and innovation in fashions, we shall have to go back to the primitive,
+non-economic motive with which apparel originated--the motive of
+adornment. Without going into an extended discussion of how and why this
+motive asserts itself under the guidance of the law of expensiveness, it
+may be stated broadly that each successive innovation in the fashions is
+an effort to reach some form of display which shall be more acceptable
+to our sense of form and color or of effectiveness, than that which it
+displaces. The changing styles are the expression of a restless search
+for something which shall commend itself to our aesthetic sense; but
+as each innovation is subject to the selective action of the norm of
+conspicuous waste, the range within which innovation can take place is
+somewhat restricted. The innovation must not only be more beautiful,
+or perhaps oftener less offensive, than that which it displaces, but it
+must also come up to the accepted standard of expensiveness.
+
+It would seem at first sight that the result of such an unremitting
+struggle to attain the beautiful in dress should be a gradual approach
+to artistic perfection. We might naturally expect that the fashions
+should show a well-marked trend in the direction of some one or more
+types of apparel eminently becoming to the human form; and we might even
+feel that we have substantial ground for the hope that today, after
+all the ingenuity and effort which have been spent on dress these many
+years, the fashions should have achieved a relative perfection and
+a relative stability, closely approximating to a permanently tenable
+artistic ideal. But such is not the case. It would be very hazardous
+indeed to assert that the styles of today are intrinsically more
+becoming than those of ten years ago, or than those of twenty, or fifty,
+or one hundred years ago. On the other hand, the assertion freely goes
+uncontradicted that styles in vogue two thousand years ago are more
+becoming than the most elaborate and painstaking constructions of today.
+
+The explanation of the fashions just offered, then, does not fully
+explain, and we shall have to look farther. It is well known that
+certain relatively stable styles and types of costume have been worked
+out in various parts of the world; as, for instance, among the Japanese,
+Chinese, and other Oriental nations; likewise among the Greeks, Romans,
+and other Eastern peoples of antiquity so also, in later times, among
+the peasants of nearly every country of Europe. These national or
+popular costumes are in most cases adjudged by competent critics to
+be more becoming, more artistic, than the fluctuating styles of modern
+civilized apparel. At the same time they are also, at least usually,
+less obviously wasteful; that is to say, other elements than that of a
+display of expense are more readily detected in their structure.
+
+These relatively stable costumes are, commonly, pretty strictly and
+narrowly localized, and they vary by slight and systematic gradations
+from place to place. They have in every case been worked out by peoples
+or classes which are poorer than we, and especially they belong in
+countries and localities and times where the population, or at least
+the class to which the costume in question belongs, is relatively
+homogeneous, stable, and immobile. That is to say, stable costumes
+which will bear the test of time and perspective are worked out under
+circumstances where the norm of conspicuous waste asserts itself less
+imperatively than it does in the large modern civilized cities, whose
+relatively mobile wealthy population today sets the pace in matters of
+fashion. The countries and classes which have in this way worked out
+stable and artistic costumes have been so placed that the pecuniary
+emulation among them has taken the direction of a competition in
+conspicuous leisure rather than in conspicuous consumption of goods. So
+that it will hold true in a general way that fashions are least stable
+and least becoming in those communities where the principle of a
+conspicuous waste of goods asserts itself most imperatively, as among
+ourselves. All this points to an antagonism between expensiveness and
+artistic apparel. In point of practical fact, the norm of conspicuous
+waste is incompatible with the requirement that dress should be
+beautiful or becoming. And this antagonism offers an explanation of that
+restless change in fashion which neither the canon of expensiveness nor
+that of beauty alone can account for.
+
+The standard of reputability requires that dress should show wasteful
+expenditure; but all wastefulness is offensive to native taste. The
+psychological law has already been pointed out that all men--and women
+perhaps even in a higher degree abhor futility, whether of effort or
+of expenditure--much as Nature was once said to abhor a vacuum. But the
+principle of conspicuous waste requires an obviously futile expenditure;
+and the resulting conspicuous expensiveness of dress is therefore
+intrinsically ugly. Hence we find that in all innovations in dress, each
+added or altered detail strives to avoid condemnation by showing some
+ostensible purpose, at the same time that the requirement of conspicuous
+waste prevents the purposefulness of these innovations from becoming
+anything more than a somewhat transparent pretense. Even in its freest
+flights, fashion rarely if ever gets away from a simulation of some
+ostensible use. The ostensible usefulness of the fashionable details
+of dress, however, is always so transparent a make-believe, and
+their substantial futility presently forces itself so baldly upon our
+attention as to become unbearable, and then we take refuge in a new
+style. But the new style must conform to the requirement of reputable
+wastefulness and futility. Its futility presently becomes as odious
+as that of its predecessor; and the only remedy which the law of waste
+allows us is to seek relief in some new construction, equally futile and
+equally untenable. Hence the essential ugliness and the unceasing change
+of fashionable attire.
+
+Having so explained the phenomenon of shifting fashions, the next
+thing is to make the explanation tally with everyday facts. Among these
+everyday facts is the well-known liking which all men have for the
+styles that are in vogue at any given time. A new style comes into vogue
+and remains in favor for a season, and, at least so long as it is
+a novelty, people very generally find the new style attractive. The
+prevailing fashion is felt to be beautiful. This is due partly to the
+relief it affords in being different from what went before it, partly
+to its being reputable. As indicated in the last chapter, the canon
+of reputability to some extent shapes our tastes, so that under its
+guidance anything will be accepted as becoming until its novelty wears
+off, or until the warrant of reputability is transferred to a new and
+novel structure serving the same general purpose. That the alleged
+beauty, or "loveliness," of the styles in vogue at any given time is
+transient and spurious only is attested by the fact that none of the
+many shifting fashions will bear the test of time. When seen in the
+perspective of half-a-dozen years or more, the best of our fashions
+strike us as grotesque, if not unsightly. Our transient attachment to
+whatever happens to be the latest rests on other than aesthetic grounds,
+and lasts only until our abiding aesthetic sense has had time to assert
+itself and reject this latest indigestible contrivance.
+
+The process of developing an aesthetic nausea takes more or less time;
+the length of time required in any given case being inversely as the
+degree of intrinsic odiousness of the style in question. This time
+relation between odiousness and instability in fashions affords ground
+for the inference that the more rapidly the styles succeed and
+displace one another, the more offensive they are to sound taste. The
+presumption, therefore, is that the farther the community, especially
+the wealthy classes of the community, develop in wealth and mobility and
+in the range of their human contact, the more imperatively will the law
+of conspicuous waste assert itself in matters of dress, the more will
+the sense of beauty tend to fall into abeyance or be overborne by the
+canon of pecuniary reputability, the more rapidly will fashions shift
+and change, and the more grotesque and intolerable will be the varying
+styles that successively come into vogue.
+
+There remains at least one point in this theory of dress yet to be
+discussed. Most of what has been said applies to men's attire as well
+as to that of women; although in modern times it applies at nearly all
+points with greater force to that of women. But at one point the dress
+of women differs substantially from that of men. In woman's dress there
+is obviously greater insistence on such features as testify to the
+wearer's exemption from or incapacity for all vulgarly productive
+employment. This characteristic of woman's apparel is of interest, not
+only as completing the theory of dress, but also as confirming what has
+already been said of the economic status of women, both in the past and
+in the present.
+
+As has been seen in the discussion of woman's status under the heads
+of Vicarious Leisure and Vicarious Consumption, it has in the course
+of economic development become the office of the woman to consume
+vicariously for the head of the household; and her apparel is contrived
+with this object in view. It has come about that obviously productive
+labor is in a peculiar degree derogatory to respectable women, and
+therefore special pains should be taken in the construction of women's
+dress, to impress upon the beholder the fact (often indeed a fiction)
+that the wearer does not and can not habitually engage in useful work.
+Propriety requires respectable women to abstain more consistently from
+useful effort and to make more of a show of leisure than the men of the
+same social classes. It grates painfully on our nerves to contemplate
+the necessity of any well-bred woman's earning a livelihood by useful
+work. It is not "woman's sphere." Her sphere is within the household,
+which she should "beautify," and of which she should be the "chief
+ornament." The male head of the household is not currently spoken of as
+its ornament. This feature taken in conjunction with the other fact that
+propriety requires more unremitting attention to expensive display in
+the dress and other paraphernalia of women, goes to enforce the view
+already implied in what has gone before. By virtue of its descent from a
+patriarchal past, our social system makes it the woman's function in
+an especial degree to put in evidence her household's ability to pay.
+According to the modern civilized scheme of life, the good name of the
+household to which she belongs should be the special care of the woman;
+and the system of honorific expenditure and conspicuous leisure by which
+this good name is chiefly sustained is therefore the woman's sphere.
+In the ideal scheme, as it tends to realize itself in the life of
+the higher pecuniary classes, this attention to conspicuous waste of
+substance and effort should normally be the sole economic function of
+the woman.
+
+At the stage of economic development at which the women were still in
+the full sense the property of the men, the performance of conspicuous
+leisure and consumption came to be part of the services required of
+them. The women being not their own masters, obvious expenditure and
+leisure on their part would redound to the credit of their master rather
+than to their own credit; and therefore the more expensive and the
+more obviously unproductive the women of the household are, the more
+creditable and more effective for the purpose of reputability of the
+household or its head will their life be. So much so that the women have
+been required not only to afford evidence of a life of leisure, but even
+to disable themselves for useful activity.
+
+It is at this point that the dress of men falls short of that of women,
+and for sufficient reason. Conspicuous waste and conspicuous leisure
+are reputable because they are evidence of pecuniary strength; pecuniary
+strength is reputable or honorific because, in the last analysis, it
+argues success and superior force; therefore the evidence of waste
+and leisure put forth by any individual in his own behalf cannot
+consistently take such a form or be carried to such a pitch as to argue
+incapacity or marked discomfort on his part; as the exhibition would in
+that case show not superior force, but inferiority, and so defeat its
+own purpose. So, then, wherever wasteful expenditure and the show of
+abstention from effort is normally, or on an average, carried to the
+extent of showing obvious discomfort or voluntarily induced physical
+disability. There the immediate inference is that the individual in
+question does not perform this wasteful expenditure and undergo this
+disability for her own personal gain in pecuniary repute, but in
+behalf of some one else to whom she stands in a relation of economic
+dependence; a relation which in the last analysis must, in economic
+theory, reduce itself to a relation of servitude.
+
+To apply this generalization to women's dress, and put the matter in
+concrete terms: the high heel, the skirt, the impracticable bonnet, the
+corset, and the general disregard of the wearer's comfort which is an
+obvious feature of all civilized women's apparel, are so many items of
+evidence to the effect that in the modern civilized scheme of life the
+woman is still, in theory, the economic dependent of the man--that,
+perhaps in a highly idealized sense, she still is the man's chattel. The
+homely reason for all this conspicuous leisure and attire on the part
+of women lies in the fact that they are servants to whom, in the
+differentiation of economic functions, has been delegated the office
+of putting in evidence their master's ability to pay. There is a marked
+similarity in these respects between the apparel of women and that of
+domestic servants, especially liveried servants. In both there is a very
+elaborate show of unnecessary expensiveness, and in both cases there is
+also a notable disregard of the physical comfort of the wearer. But
+the attire of the lady goes farther in its elaborate insistence on the
+idleness, if not on the physical infirmity of the wearer, than does that
+of the domestic. And this is as it should be; for in theory, according
+to the ideal scheme of the pecuniary culture, the lady of the house is
+the chief menial of the household.
+
+Besides servants, currently recognized as such, there is at least one
+other class of persons whose garb assimilates them to the class
+of servants and shows many of the features that go to make up the
+womanliness of woman's dress. This is the priestly class. Priestly
+vestments show, in accentuated form, all the features that have been
+shown to be evidence of a servile status and a vicarious life. Even
+more strikingly than the everyday habit of the priest, the vestments,
+properly so called, are ornate, grotesque, inconvenient, and, at least
+ostensibly, comfortless to the point of distress. The priest is at the
+same time expected to refrain from useful effort and, when before the
+public eye, to present an impassively disconsolate countenance, very
+much after the manner of a well-trained domestic servant. The
+shaven face of the priest is a further item to the same effect. This
+assimilation of the priestly class to the class of body servants, in
+demeanor and apparel, is due to the similarity of the two classes as
+regards economic function. In economic theory, the priest is a body
+servant, constructively in attendance upon the person of the divinity
+whose livery he wears. His livery is of a very expensive character, as
+it should be in order to set forth in a beseeming manner the dignity of
+his exalted master; but it is contrived to show that the wearing of it
+contributes little or nothing to the physical comfort of the wearer,
+for it is an item of vicarious consumption, and the repute which accrues
+from its consumption is to be imputed to the absent master, not to the
+servant.
+
+The line of demarcation between the dress of women, priests, and
+servants, on the one hand, and of men, on the other hand, is not always
+consistently observed in practice, but it will scarcely be disputed
+that it is always present in a more or less definite way in the popular
+habits of thought. There are of course also free men, and not a few
+of them, who, in their blind zeal for faultless reputable attire,
+transgress the theoretical line between man's and woman's dress, to the
+extent of arraying themselves in apparel that is obviously designed to
+vex the mortal frame; but everyone recognizes without hesitation that
+such apparel for men is a departure from the normal. We are in the habit
+of saying that such dress is "effeminate"; and one sometimes hears the
+remark that such or such an exquisitely attired gentleman is as well
+dressed as a footman.
+
+Certain apparent discrepancies under this theory of dress merit a more
+detailed examination, especially as they mark a more or less evident
+trend in the later and maturer development of dress. The vogue of the
+corset offers an apparent exception from the rule of which it has here
+been cited as an illustration. A closer examination, however, will show
+that this apparent exception is really a verification of the rule that
+the vogue of any given element or feature in dress rests on its utility
+as an evidence of pecuniary standing. It is well known that in the
+industrially more advanced communities the corset is employed only
+within certain fairly well defined social strata. The women of the
+poorer classes, especially of the rural population, do not habitually
+use it, except as a holiday luxury. Among these classes the women have
+to work hard, and it avails them little in the way of a pretense of
+leisure to so crucify the flesh in everyday life. The holiday use of
+the contrivance is due to imitation of a higher-class canon of decency.
+Upwards from this low level of indigence and manual labor, the corset
+was until within a generation or two nearly indispensable to a socially
+blameless standing for all women, including the wealthiest and most
+reputable. This rule held so long as there still was no large class of
+people wealthy enough to be above the imputation of any necessity
+for manual labor and at the same time large enough to form a
+self-sufficient, isolated social body whose mass would afford a
+foundation for special rules of conduct within the class, enforced by
+the current opinion of the class alone. But now there has grown up a
+large enough leisure class possessed of such wealth that any aspersion
+on the score of enforced manual employment would be idle and harmless
+calumny; and the corset has therefore in large measure fallen into
+disuse within this class. The exceptions under this rule of exemption
+from the corset are more apparent than real. They are the wealthy
+classes of countries with a lower industrial structure--nearer the
+archaic, quasi-industrial type--together with the later accessions of
+the wealthy classes in the more advanced industrial communities. The
+latter have not yet had time to divest themselves of the plebeian canons
+of taste and of reputability carried over from their former, lower
+pecuniary grade. Such survival of the corset is not infrequent among the
+higher social classes of those American cities, for instance, which
+have recently and rapidly risen into opulence. If the word be used as a
+technical term, without any odious implication, it may be said that the
+corset persists in great measure through the period of snobbery--the
+interval of uncertainty and of transition from a lower to the upper
+levels of pecuniary culture. That is to say, in all countries which
+have inherited the corset it continues in use wherever and so long as
+it serves its purpose as an evidence of honorific leisure by arguing
+physical disability in the wearer. The same rule of course applies to
+other mutilations and contrivances for decreasing the visible efficiency
+of the individual.
+
+Something similar should hold true with respect to divers items of
+conspicuous consumption, and indeed something of the kind does seem to
+hold to a slight degree of sundry features of dress, especially if such
+features involve a marked discomfort or appearance of discomfort to
+the wearer. During the past one hundred years there is a tendency
+perceptible, in the development of men's dress especially, to
+discontinue methods of expenditure and the use of symbols of leisure
+which must have been irksome, which may have served a good purpose in
+their time, but the continuation of which among the upper classes today
+would be a work of supererogation; as, for instance, the use of powdered
+wigs and of gold lace, and the practice of constantly shaving the face.
+There has of late years been some slight recrudescence of the shaven
+face in polite society, but this is probably a transient and unadvised
+mimicry of the fashion imposed upon body servants, and it may fairly be
+expected to go the way of the powdered wig of our grandfathers.
+
+These indices and others which resemble them in point of the boldness
+with which they point out to all observers the habitual uselessness
+of those persons who employ them, have been replaced by other, more
+dedicate methods of expressing the same fact; methods which are no less
+evident to the trained eyes of that smaller, select circle whose
+good opinion is chiefly sought. The earlier and cruder method of
+advertisement held its ground so long as the public to which the
+exhibitor had to appeal comprised large portions of the community who
+were not trained to detect delicate variations in the evidences of
+wealth and leisure. The method of advertisement undergoes a refinement
+when a sufficiently large wealthy class has developed, who have the
+leisure for acquiring skill in interpreting the subtler signs of
+expenditure. "Loud" dress becomes offensive to people of taste,
+as evincing an undue desire to reach and impress the untrained
+sensibilities of the vulgar. To the individual of high breeding, it is
+only the more honorific esteem accorded by the cultivated sense of the
+members of his own high class that is of material consequence. Since
+the wealthy leisure class has grown so large, or the contact of the
+leisure-class individual with members of his own class has grown so
+wide, as to constitute a human environment sufficient for the honorific
+purpose, there arises a tendency to exclude the baser elements of
+the population from the scheme even as spectators whose applause or
+mortification should be sought. The result of all this is a refinement
+of methods, a resort to subtler contrivances, and a spiritualization of
+the scheme of symbolism in dress. And as this upper leisure class sets
+the pace in all matters of decency, the result for the rest of society
+also is a gradual amelioration of the scheme of dress. As the community
+advances in wealth and culture, the ability to pay is put in evidence
+by means which require a progressively nicer discrimination in the
+beholder. This nicer discrimination between advertising media is in fact
+a very large element of the higher pecuniary culture.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Eight ~~ Industrial Exemption and Conservatism
+
+The life of man in society, just like the life of other species, is
+a struggle for existence, and therefore it is a process of selective
+adaptation. The evolution of social structure has been a process of
+natural selection of institutions. The progress which has been and is
+being made in human institutions and in human character may be set down,
+broadly, to a natural selection of the fittest habits of thought and to
+a process of enforced adaptation of individuals to an environment which
+has progressively changed with the growth of the community and with the
+changing institutions under which men have lived. Institutions are not
+only themselves the result of a selective and adaptive process which
+shapes the prevailing or dominant types of spiritual attitude and
+aptitudes; they are at the same time special methods of life and of
+human relations, and are therefore in their turn efficient factors of
+selection. So that the changing institutions in their turn make for a
+further selection of individuals endowed with the fittest temperament,
+and a further adaptation of individual temperament and habits to the
+changing environment through the formation of new institutions.
+
+The forces which have shaped the development of human life and of social
+structure are no doubt ultimately reducible to terms of living tissue
+and material environment; but proximately for the purpose in hand, these
+forces may best be stated in terms of an environment, partly human,
+partly non-human, and a human subject with a more or less definite
+physical and intellectual constitution. Taken in the aggregate or
+average, this human subject is more or less variable; chiefly, no doubt,
+under a rule of selective conservation of favorable variations.
+The selection of favorable variations is perhaps in great measure a
+selective conservation of ethnic types. In the life history of any
+community whose population is made up of a mixture of divers ethnic
+elements, one or another of several persistent and relatively stable
+types of body and of temperament rises into dominance at any given
+point. The situation, including the institutions in force at any given
+time, will favor the survival and dominance of one type of character in
+preference to another; and the type of man so selected to continue and
+to further elaborate the institutions handed down from the past will in
+some considerable measure shape these institutions in his own likeness.
+But apart from selection as between relatively stable types of character
+and habits of mind, there is no doubt simultaneously going on a process
+of selective adaptation of habits of thought within the general range of
+aptitudes which is characteristic of the dominant ethnic type or types.
+There may be a variation in the fundamental character of any population
+by selection between relatively stable types; but there is also a
+variation due to adaptation in detail within the range of the type, and
+to selection between specific habitual views regarding any given social
+relation or group of relations.
+
+For the present purpose, however, the question as to the nature of the
+adaptive process--whether it is chiefly a selection between stable types
+of temperament and character, or chiefly an adaptation of men's habits
+of thought to changing circumstances--is of less importance than the
+fact that, by one method or another, institutions change and develop.
+Institutions must change with changing circumstances, since they are
+of the nature of an habitual method of responding to the stimuli
+which these changing circumstances afford. The development of these
+institutions is the development of society. The institutions are,
+in substance, prevalent habits of thought with respect to particular
+relations and particular functions of the individual and of the
+community; and the scheme of life, which is made up of the aggregate
+of institutions in force at a given time or at a given point in the
+development of any society, may, on the psychological side, be broadly
+characterized as a prevalent spiritual attitude or a prevalent theory of
+life. As regards its generic features, this spiritual attitude or theory
+of life is in the last analysis reducible to terms of a prevalent type
+of character.
+
+The situation of today shapes the institutions of tomorrow through
+a selective, coercive process, by acting upon men's habitual view
+of things, and so altering or fortifying a point of view or a mental
+attitude handed down from the past. The institutions--that is to say the
+habits of thought--under the guidance of which men live are in this way
+received from an earlier time; more or less remotely earlier, but in
+any event they have been elaborated in and received from the past.
+Institutions are products of the past process, are adapted to past
+circumstances, and are therefore never in full accord with the
+requirements of the present. In the nature of the case, this process of
+selective adaptation can never catch up with the progressively changing
+situation in which the community finds itself at any given time; for
+the environment, the situation, the exigencies of life which enforce the
+adaptation and exercise the selection, change from day to day; and each
+successive situation of the community in its turn tends to obsolescence
+as soon as it has been established. When a step in the development has
+been taken, this step itself constitutes a change of situation which
+requires a new adaptation; it becomes the point of departure for a new
+step in the adjustment, and so on interminably.
+
+It is to be noted then, although it may be a tedious truism, that the
+institutions of today--the present accepted scheme of life--do not
+entirely fit the situation of today. At the same time, men's present
+habits of thought tend to persist indefinitely, except as circumstances
+enforce a change. These institutions which have thus been handed down,
+these habits of thought, points of view, mental attitudes and aptitudes,
+or what not, are therefore themselves a conservative factor. This is the
+factor of social inertia, psychological inertia, conservatism. Social
+structure changes, develops, adapts itself to an altered situation, only
+through a change in the habits of thought of the several classes of the
+community, or in the last analysis, through a change in the habits of
+thought of the individuals which make up the community. The evolution of
+society is substantially a process of mental adaptation on the part
+of individuals under the stress of circumstances which will no longer
+tolerate habits of thought formed under and conforming to a different
+set of circumstances in the past. For the immediate purpose it need not
+be a question of serious importance whether this adaptive process is
+a process of selection and survival of persistent ethnic types or a
+process of individual adaptation and an inheritance of acquired traits.
+
+Social advance, especially as seen from the point of view of economic
+theory, consists in a continued progressive approach to an approximately
+exact "adjustment of inner relations to outer relations", but this
+adjustment is never definitively established, since the "outer
+relations" are subject to constant change as a consequence of the
+progressive change going on in the "inner relations." But the degree
+of approximation may be greater or less, depending on the facility with
+which an adjustment is made. A readjustment of men's habits of thought
+to conform with the exigencies of an altered situation is in any case
+made only tardily and reluctantly, and only under the coercion exercised
+by a stipulation which has made the accredited views untenable.
+The readjustment of institutions and habitual views to an altered
+environment is made in response to pressure from without; it is of the
+nature of a response to stimulus. Freedom and facility of readjustment,
+that is to say capacity for growth in social structure, therefore
+depends in great measure on the degree of freedom with which the
+situation at any given time acts on the individual members of the
+community-the degree of exposure of the individual members to the
+constraining forces of the environment. If any portion or class of
+society is sheltered from the action of the environment in any essential
+respect, that portion of the community, or that class, will adapt
+its views and its scheme of life more tardily to the altered general
+situation; it will in so far tend to retard the process of social
+transformation. The wealthy leisure class is in such a sheltered
+position with respect to the economic forces that make for change
+and readjustment. And it may be said that the forces which make for
+a readjustment of institutions, especially in the case of a modern
+industrial community, are, in the last analysis, almost entirely of an
+economic nature.
+
+Any community may be viewed as an industrial or economic mechanism,
+the structure of which is made up of what is called its economic
+institutions. These institutions are habitual methods of carrying on the
+life process of the community in contact with the material environment
+in which it lives. When given methods of unfolding human activity in
+this given environment have been elaborated in this way, the life of
+the community will express itself with some facility in these habitual
+directions. The community will make use of the forces of the environment
+for the purposes of its life according to methods learned in the past
+and embodied in these institutions. But as population increases, and as
+men's knowledge and skill in directing the forces of nature widen, the
+habitual methods of relation between the members of the group, and the
+habitual method of carrying on the life process of the group as a
+whole, no longer give the same result as before; nor are the resulting
+conditions of life distributed and apportioned in the same manner or
+with the same effect among the various members as before. If the scheme
+according to which the life process of the group was carried on under
+the earlier conditions gave approximately the highest attainable
+result--under the circumstances--in the way of efficiency or facility
+of the life process of the group; then the same scheme of life unaltered
+will not yield the highest result attainable in this respect under the
+altered conditions. Under the altered conditions of population, skill,
+and knowledge, the facility of life as carried on according to the
+traditional scheme may not be lower than under the earlier conditions;
+but the chances are always that it is less than might be if the scheme
+were altered to suit the altered conditions.
+
+The group is made up of individuals, and the group's life is the life
+of individuals carried on in at least ostensible severalty. The group's
+accepted scheme of life is the consensus of views held by the body of
+these individuals as to what is right, good, expedient, and beautiful in
+the way of human life. In the redistribution of the conditions of life
+that comes of the altered method of dealing with the environment, the
+outcome is not an equable change in the facility of life throughout the
+group. The altered conditions may increase the facility of life for
+the group as a whole, but the redistribution will usually result in a
+decrease of facility or fullness of life for some members of the
+group. An advance in technical methods, in population, or in industrial
+organization will require at least some of the members of the community
+to change their habits of life, if they are to enter with facility and
+effect into the altered industrial methods; and in doing so they will be
+unable to live up to the received notions as to what are the right and
+beautiful habits of life.
+
+Any one who is required to change his habits of life and his habitual
+relations to his fellow men will feel the discrepancy between the
+method of life required of him by the newly arisen exigencies, and
+the traditional scheme of life to which he is accustomed. It is the
+individuals placed in this position who have the liveliest incentive to
+reconstruct the received scheme of life and are most readily persuaded
+to accept new standards; and it is through the need of the means of
+livelihood that men are placed in such a position. The pressure exerted
+by the environment upon the group, and making for a readjustment of the
+group's scheme of life, impinges upon the members of the group in
+the form of pecuniary exigencies; and it is owing to this fact--that
+external forces are in great part translated into the form of pecuniary
+or economic exigencies--it is owing to this fact that we can say that
+the forces which count toward a readjustment of institutions in any
+modern industrial community are chiefly economic forces; or more
+specifically, these forces take the form of pecuniary pressure. Such a
+readjustment as is here contemplated is substantially a change in men's
+views as to what is good and right, and the means through which a change
+is wrought in men's apprehension of what is good and right is in large
+part the pressure of pecuniary exigencies.
+
+Any change in men's views as to what is good and right in human life
+make its way but tardily at the best. Especially is this true of any
+change in the direction of what is called progress; that is to say, in
+the direction of divergence from the archaic position--from the position
+which may be accounted the point of departure at any step in the social
+evolution of the community. Retrogression, reapproach to a standpoint to
+which the race has been long habituated in the past, is easier. This is
+especially true in case the development away from this past standpoint
+has not been due chiefly to a substitution of an ethnic type whose
+temperament is alien to the earlier standpoint. The cultural stage which
+lies immediately back of the present in the life history of Western
+civilization is what has here been called the quasi-peaceable stage. At
+this quasi-peaceable stage the law of status is the dominant feature in
+the scheme of life. There is no need of pointing out how prone the
+men of today are to revert to the spiritual attitude of mastery and of
+personal subservience which characterizes that stage. It may rather be
+said to be held in an uncertain abeyance by the economic exigencies of
+today, than to have been definitely supplanted by a habit of mind that
+is in full accord with these later-developed exigencies. The predatory
+and quasi-peaceable stages of economic evolution seem to have been of
+long duration in life history of all the chief ethnic elements which go
+to make up the populations of the Western culture. The temperament
+and the propensities proper to those cultural stages have, therefore,
+attained such a persistence as to make a speedy reversion to the broad
+features of the corresponding psychological constitution inevitable in
+the case of any class or community which is removed from the action of
+those forces that make for a maintenance of the later-developed habits
+of thought.
+
+It is a matter of common notoriety that when individuals, or even
+considerable groups of men, are segregated from a higher industrial
+culture and exposed to a lower cultural environment, or to an economic
+situation of a more primitive character, they quickly show evidence of
+reversion toward the spiritual features which characterize the predatory
+type; and it seems probable that the dolicho-blond type of European man
+is possessed of a greater facility for such reversion to barbarism than
+the other ethnic elements with which that type is associated in the
+Western culture. Examples of such a reversion on a small scale abound in
+the later history of migration and colonization. Except for the fear
+of offending that chauvinistic patriotism which is so characteristic
+a feature of the predatory culture, and the presence of which is
+frequently the most striking mark of reversion in modern communities,
+the case of the American colonies might be cited as an example of such a
+reversion on an unusually large scale, though it was not a reversion of
+very large scope.
+
+The leisure class is in great measure sheltered from the stress of
+those economic exigencies which prevail in any modern, highly organized
+industrial community. The exigencies of the struggle for the means
+of life are less exacting for this class than for any other; and as a
+consequence of this privileged position we should expect to find it one
+of the least responsive of the classes of society to the demands
+which the situation makes for a further growth of institutions and a
+readjustment to an altered industrial situation. The leisure class is
+the conservative class. The exigencies of the general economic situation
+of the community do not freely or directly impinge upon the members of
+this class. They are not required under penalty of forfeiture to change
+their habits of life and their theoretical views of the external world
+to suit the demands of an altered industrial technique, since they
+are not in the full sense an organic part of the industrial community.
+Therefore these exigencies do not readily produce, in the members of
+this class, that degree of uneasiness with the existing order which
+alone can lead any body of men to give up views and methods of life that
+have become habitual to them. The office of the leisure class in social
+evolution is to retard the movement and to conserve what is obsolescent.
+This proposition is by no means novel; it has long been one of the
+commonplaces of popular opinion.
+
+The prevalent conviction that the wealthy class is by nature
+conservative has been popularly accepted without much aid from any
+theoretical view as to the place and relation of that class in the
+cultural development. When an explanation of this class conservatism is
+offered, it is commonly the invidious one that the wealthy class opposes
+innovation because it has a vested interest, of an unworthy sort, in
+maintaining the present conditions. The explanation here put forward
+imputes no unworthy motive. The opposition of the class to changes in
+the cultural scheme is instinctive, and does not rest primarily on an
+interested calculation of material advantages; it is an instinctive
+revulsion at any departure from the accepted way of doing and of looking
+at things--a revulsion common to all men and only to be overcome by
+stress of circumstances. All change in habits of life and of thought
+is irksome. The difference in this respect between the wealthy and the
+common run of mankind lies not so much in the motive which prompts to
+conservatism as in the degree of exposure to the economic forces that
+urge a change. The members of the wealthy class do not yield to the
+demand for innovation as readily as other men because they are not
+constrained to do so.
+
+This conservatism of the wealthy class is so obvious a feature that
+it has even come to be recognized as a mark of respectability. Since
+conservatism is a characteristic of the wealthier and therefore more
+reputable portion of the community, it has acquired a certain honorific
+or decorative value. It has become prescriptive to such an extent that
+an adherence to conservative views is comprised as a matter of course in
+our notions of respectability; and it is imperatively incumbent on all
+who would lead a blameless life in point of social repute. Conservatism,
+being an upper-class characteristic, is decorous; and conversely,
+innovation, being a lower-class phenomenon, is vulgar. The first and
+most unreflected element in that instinctive revulsion and reprobation
+with which we turn from all social innovators is this sense of the
+essential vulgarity of the thing. So that even in cases where one
+recognizes the substantial merits of the case for which the innovator
+is spokesman--as may easily happen if the evils which he seeks to
+remedy are sufficiently remote in point of time or space or personal
+contact--still one cannot but be sensible of the fact that the innovator
+is a person with whom it is at least distasteful to be associated, and
+from whose social contact one must shrink. Innovation is bad form.
+
+The fact that the usages, actions, and views of the well-to-do leisure
+class acquire the character of a prescriptive canon of conduct for
+the rest of society, gives added weight and reach to the conservative
+influence of that class. It makes it incumbent upon all reputable people
+to follow their lead. So that, by virtue of its high position as the
+avatar of good form, the wealthier class comes to exert a retarding
+influence upon social development far in excess of that which the
+simple numerical strength of the class would assign it. Its prescriptive
+example acts to greatly stiffen the resistance of all other classes
+against any innovation, and to fix men's affections upon the good
+institutions handed down from an earlier generation. There is a second
+way in which the influence of the leisure class acts in the same
+direction, so far as concerns hindrance to the adoption of a
+conventional scheme of life more in accord with the exigencies of
+the time. This second method of upper-class guidance is not in strict
+consistency to be brought under the same category as the instinctive
+conservatism and aversion to new modes of thought just spoken of; but
+it may as well be dealt with here, since it has at least this much
+in common with the conservative habit of mind that it acts to retard
+innovation and the growth of social structure. The code of proprieties,
+conventionalities, and usages in vogue at any given time and among any
+given people has more or less of the character of an organic whole;
+so that any appreciable change in one point of the scheme involves
+something of a change or readjustment at other points also, if not
+a reorganization all along the line. When a change is made which
+immediately touches only a minor point in the scheme, the consequent
+derangement of the structure of conventionalities may be inconspicuous;
+but even in such a case it is safe to say that some derangement of the
+general scheme, more or less far-reaching, will follow. On the
+other hand, when an attempted reform involves the suppression or
+thorough-going remodelling of an institution of first-rate importance
+in the conventional scheme, it is immediately felt that a serious
+derangement of the entire scheme would result; it is felt that a
+readjustment of the structure to the new form taken on by one of
+its chief elements would be a painful and tedious, if not a doubtful
+process.
+
+In order to realize the difficulty which such a radical change in any
+one feature of the conventional scheme of life would involve, it is only
+necessary to suggest the suppression of the monogamic family, or of
+the agnatic system of consanguinity, or of private property, or of the
+theistic faith, in any country of the Western civilization; or suppose
+the suppression of ancestor worship in China, or of the caste system in
+india, or of slavery in Africa, or the establishment of equality of the
+sexes in Mohammedan countries. It needs no argument to show that the
+derangement of the general structure of conventionalities in any of
+these cases would be very considerable. In order to effect such an
+innovation a very far-reaching alteration of men's habits of thought
+would be involved also at other points of the scheme than the one
+immediately in question. The aversion to any such innovation amounts to
+a shrinking from an essentially alien scheme of life.
+
+The revulsion felt by good people at any proposed departure from the
+accepted methods of life is a familiar fact of everyday experience. It
+is not unusual to hear those persons who dispense salutary advice
+and admonition to the community express themselves forcibly upon the
+far-reaching pernicious effects which the community would suffer from
+such relatively slight changes as the disestablishment of the Anglican
+Church, an increased facility of divorce, adoption of female suffrage,
+prohibition of the manufacture and sale of intoxicating beverages,
+abolition or restriction of inheritances, etc. Any one of these
+innovations would, we are told, "shake the social structure to its
+base," "reduce society to chaos," "subvert the foundations of morality,"
+"make life intolerable," "confound the order of nature," etc. These
+various locutions are, no doubt, of the nature of hyperbole; but, at the
+same time, like all overstatement, they are evidence of a lively sense
+of the gravity of the consequences which they are intended to describe.
+The effect of these and like innovations in deranging the accepted
+scheme of life is felt to be of much graver consequence than the simple
+alteration of an isolated item in a series of contrivances for the
+convenience of men in society. What is true in so obvious a degree of
+innovations of first-rate importance is true in a less degree of changes
+of a smaller immediate importance. The aversion to change is in large
+part an aversion to the bother of making the readjustment which any
+given change will necessitate; and this solidarity of the system of
+institutions of any given culture or of any given people strengthens the
+instinctive resistance offered to any change in men's habits of thought,
+even in matters which, taken by themselves, are of minor importance. A
+consequence of this increased reluctance, due to the solidarity of human
+institutions, is that any innovation calls for a greater expenditure of
+nervous energy in making the necessary readjustment than would otherwise
+be the case. It is not only that a change in established habits of
+thought is distasteful. The process of readjustment of the accepted
+theory of life involves a degree of mental effort--a more or less
+protracted and laborious effort to find and to keep one's bearings under
+the altered circumstances. This process requires a certain expenditure
+of energy, and so presumes, for its successful accomplishment, some
+surplus of energy beyond that absorbed in the daily struggle for
+subsistence. Consequently it follows that progress is hindered by
+underfeeding and excessive physical hardship, no less effectually than
+by such a luxurious life as will shut out discontent by cutting off the
+occasion for it. The abjectly poor, and all those persons whose
+energies are entirely absorbed by the struggle for daily sustenance, are
+conservative because they cannot afford the effort of taking thought for
+the day after tomorrow; just as the highly prosperous are conservative
+because they have small occasion to be discontented with the situation
+as it stands today.
+
+From this proposition it follows that the institution of a leisure class
+acts to make the lower classes conservative by withdrawing from them
+as much as it may of the means of sustenance, and so reducing their
+consumption, and consequently their available energy, to such a point
+as to make them incapable of the effort required for the learning and
+adoption of new habits of thought. The accumulation of wealth at the
+upper end of the pecuniary scale implies privation at the lower end of
+the scale. It is a commonplace that, wherever it occurs, a considerable
+degree of privation among the body of the people is a serious obstacle
+to any innovation.
+
+This direct inhibitory effect of the unequal distribution of wealth
+is seconded by an indirect effect tending to the same result. As has
+already been seen, the imperative example set by the upper class in
+fixing the canons of reputability fosters the practice of conspicuous
+consumption. The prevalence of conspicuous consumption as one of the
+main elements in the standard of decency among all classes is of course
+not traceable wholly to the example of the wealthy leisure class, but
+the practice and the insistence on it are no doubt strengthened by the
+example of the leisure class. The requirements of decency in this matter
+are very considerable and very imperative; so that even among classes
+whose pecuniary position is sufficiently strong to admit a consumption
+of goods considerably in excess of the subsistence minimum, the
+disposable surplus left over after the more imperative physical
+needs are satisfied is not infrequently diverted to the purpose of a
+conspicuous decency, rather than to added physical comfort and fullness
+of life. Moreover, such surplus energy as is available is also likely to
+be expended in the acquisition of goods for conspicuous consumption or
+conspicuous boarding. The result is that the requirements of pecuniary
+reputability tend (1) to leave but a scanty subsistence minimum
+available for other than conspicuous consumption, and (2) to absorb
+any surplus energy which may be available after the bare physical
+necessities of life have been provided for. The outcome of the whole is
+a strengthening of the general conservative attitude of the community.
+The institution of a leisure class hinders cultural development
+immediately (1) by the inertia proper to the class itself, (2) through
+its prescriptive example of conspicuous waste and of conservatism, and
+(3) indirectly through that system of unequal distribution of wealth and
+sustenance on which the institution itself rests. To this is to be added
+that the leisure class has also a material interest in leaving things
+as they are. Under the circumstances prevailing at any given time this
+class is in a privileged position, and any departure from the existing
+order may be expected to work to the detriment of the class rather than
+the reverse. The attitude of the class, simply as influenced by its
+class interest, should therefore be to let well-enough alone. This
+interested motive comes in to supplement the strong instinctive bias of
+the class, and so to render it even more consistently conservative than
+it otherwise would be.
+
+All this, of course, has nothing to say in the way of eulogy or
+deprecation of the office of the leisure class as an exponent and
+vehicle of conservatism or reversion in social structure. The inhibition
+which it exercises may be salutary or the reverse. Wether it is the one
+or the other in any given case is a question of casuistry rather than of
+general theory. There may be truth in the view (as a question of policy)
+so often expressed by the spokesmen of the conservative element, that
+without some such substantial and consistent resistance to innovation as
+is offered by the conservative well-to-do classes, social innovation
+and experiment would hurry the community into untenable and intolerable
+situations; the only possible result of which would be discontent and
+disastrous reaction. All this, however, is beside the present argument.
+
+But apart from all deprecation, and aside from all question as to the
+indispensability of some such check on headlong innovation, the leisure
+class, in the nature of things, consistently acts to retard that
+adjustment to the environment which is called social advance or
+development. The characteristic attitude of the class may be summed
+up in the maxim: "Whatever is, is right" whereas the law of natural
+selection, as applied to human institutions, gives the axiom: "Whatever
+is, is wrong." Not that the institutions of today are wholly wrong
+for the purposes of the life of today, but they are, always and in the
+nature of things, wrong to some extent. They are the result of a more or
+less inadequate adjustment of the methods of living to a situation which
+prevailed at some point in the past development; and they are therefore
+wrong by something more than the interval which separates the present
+situation from that of the past. "Right" and "wrong" are of course here
+used without conveying any rejection as to what ought or ought not to
+be. They are applied simply from the (morally colorless) evolutionary
+standpoint, and are intended to designate compatibility or
+incompatibility with the effective evolutionary process. The institution
+of a leisure class, by force or class interest and instinct, and by
+precept and prescriptive example, makes for the perpetuation of the
+existing maladjustment of institutions, and even favors a reversion to
+a somewhat more archaic scheme of life; a scheme which would be still
+farther out of adjustment with the exigencies of life under the existing
+situation even than the accredited, obsolescent scheme that has come
+down from the immediate past.
+
+But after all has been said on the head of conservation of the good old
+ways, it remains true that institutions change and develop. There is
+a cumulative growth of customs and habits of thought; a selective
+adaptation of conventions and methods of life. Something is to be said
+of the office of the leisure class in guiding this growth as well as
+in retarding it; but little can be said here of its relation to
+institutional growth except as it touches the institutions that
+are primarily and immediately of an economic character. These
+institutions--the economic structure--may be roughly distinguished into
+two classes or categories, according as they serve one or the other of
+two divergent purposes of economic life.
+
+To adapt the classical terminology, they are institutions of acquisition
+or of production; or to revert to terms already employed in a different
+connection in earlier chapters, they are pecuniary or industrial
+institutions; or in still other terms, they are institutions serving
+either the invidious or the non-invidious economic interest. The former
+category have to do with "business," the latter with industry, taking
+the latter word in the mechanical sense. The latter class are not
+often recognized as institutions, in great part because they do not
+immediately concern the ruling class, and are, therefore, seldom the
+subject of legislation or of deliberate convention. When they do receive
+attention they are commonly approached from the pecuniary or business
+side; that being the side or phase of economic life that chiefly
+occupies men's deliberations in our time, especially the deliberations
+of the upper classes. These classes have little else than a business
+interest in things economic, and on them at the same time it is chiefly
+incumbent to deliberate upon the community's affairs.
+
+The relation of the leisure (that is, propertied non-industrial)
+class to the economic process is a pecuniary relation--a relation of
+acquisition, not of production; of exploitation, not of serviceability.
+Indirectly their economic office may, of course, be of the utmost
+importance to the economic life process; and it is by no means here
+intended to depreciate the economic function of the propertied class or
+of the captains of industry. The purpose is simply to point out what is
+the nature of the relation of these classes to the industrial process
+and to economic institutions. Their office is of a parasitic character,
+and their interest is to divert what substance they may to their own
+use, and to retain whatever is under their hand. The conventions of the
+business world have grown up under the selective surveillance of this
+principle of predation or parasitism. They are conventions of ownership;
+derivatives, more or less remote, of the ancient predatory culture. But
+these pecuniary institutions do not entirely fit the situation of today,
+for they have grown up under a past situation differing somewhat from
+the present. Even for effectiveness in the pecuniary way, therefore,
+they are not as apt as might be. The changed industrial life requires
+changed methods of acquisition; and the pecuniary classes have some
+interest in so adapting the pecuniary institutions as to give them the
+best effect for acquisition of private gain that is compatible with the
+continuance of the industrial process out of which this gain arises.
+Hence there is a more or less consistent trend in the leisure-class
+guidance of institutional growth, answering to the pecuniary ends which
+shape leisure-class economic life.
+
+The effect of the pecuniary interest and the pecuniary habit of
+mind upon the growth of institutions is seen in those enactments
+and conventions that make for security of property, enforcement of
+contracts, facility of pecuniary transactions, vested interests. Of
+such bearing are changes affecting bankruptcy and receiverships, limited
+liability, banking and currency, coalitions of laborers or employers,
+trusts and pools. The community's institutional furniture of this kind
+is of immediate consequence only to the propertied classes, and in
+proportion as they are propertied; that is to say, in proportion as
+they are to be ranked with the leisure class. But indirectly these
+conventions of business life are of the gravest consequence for the
+industrial process and for the life of the community. And in guiding the
+institutional growth in this respect, the pecuniary classes, therefore,
+serve a purpose of the most serious importance to the community, not
+only in the conservation of the accepted social scheme, but also
+in shaping the industrial process proper. The immediate end of this
+pecuniary institutional structure and of its amelioration is the greater
+facility of peaceable and orderly exploitation; but its remoter effects
+far outrun this immediate object. Not only does the more facile conduct
+of business permit industry and extra-industrial life to go on with
+less perturbation; but the resulting elimination of disturbances and
+complications calling for an exercise of astute discrimination in
+everyday affairs acts to make the pecuniary class itself superfluous.
+As fast as pecuniary transactions are reduced to routine, the captain
+of industry can be dispensed with. This consummation, it is needless
+to say, lies yet in the indefinite future. The ameliorations wrought in
+favor of the pecuniary interest in modern institutions tend, in another
+field, to substitute the "soulless" joint-stock corporation for the
+captain, and so they make also for the dispensability, of the great
+leisure-class function of ownership. Indirectly, therefore, the bent
+given to the growth of economic institutions by the leisure-class
+influence is of very considerable industrial consequence.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Nine ~~ The Conservation of Archaic Traits
+
+The institution of a leisure class has an effect not only upon social
+structure but also upon the individual character of the members of
+society. So soon as a given proclivity or a given point of view has won
+acceptance as an authoritative standard or norm of life it will react
+upon the character of the members of the society which has accepted it
+as a norm. It will to some extent shape their habits of thought and
+will exercise a selective surveillance over the development of men's
+aptitudes and inclinations. This effect is wrought partly by a coercive,
+educational adaptation of the habits of all individuals, partly by a
+selective elimination of the unfit individuals and lines of descent.
+Such human material as does not lend itself to the methods of life
+imposed by the accepted scheme suffers more or less elimination as well
+as repression. The principles of pecuniary emulation and of industrial
+exemption have in this way been erected into canons of life, and have
+become coercive factors of some importance in the situation to which men
+have to adapt themselves.
+
+These two broad principles of conspicuous waste and industrial exemption
+affect the cultural development both by guiding men's habits of thought,
+and so controlling the growth of institutions, and by selectively
+conserving certain traits of human nature that conduce to facility of
+life under the leisure-class scheme, and so controlling the effective
+temper of the community. The proximate tendency of the institution of
+a leisure class in shaping human character runs in the direction of
+spiritual survival and reversion. Its effect upon the temper of a
+community is of the nature of an arrested spiritual development. In
+the later culture especially, the institution has, on the whole, a
+conservative trend. This proposition is familiar enough in substance,
+but it may to many have the appearance of novelty in its present
+application. Therefore a summary review of its logical grounds may
+not be uncalled for, even at the risk of some tedious repetition and
+formulation of commonplaces.
+
+Social evolution is a process of selective adaptation of temperament and
+habits of thought under the stress of the circumstances of associated
+life. The adaptation of habits of thought is the growth of institutions.
+But along with the growth of institutions has gone a change of a more
+substantial character. Not only have the habits of men changed with the
+changing exigencies of the situation, but these changing exigencies
+have also brought about a correlative change in human nature. The human
+material of society itself varies with the changing conditions of life.
+This variation of human nature is held by the later ethnologists to be
+a process of selection between several relatively stable and persistent
+ethnic types or ethnic elements. Men tend to revert or to breed true,
+more or less closely, to one or another of certain types of human nature
+that have in their main features been fixed in approximate conformity
+to a situation in the past which differed from the situation of today.
+There are several of these relatively stable ethnic types of mankind
+comprised in the populations of the Western culture. These ethnic types
+survive in the race inheritance today, not as rigid and invariable
+moulds, each of a single precise and specific pattern, but in the form
+of a greater or smaller number of variants. Some variation of the ethnic
+types has resulted under the protracted selective process to which
+the several types and their hybrids have been subjected during the
+prehistoric and historic growth of culture.
+
+This necessary variation of the types themselves, due to a selective
+process of considerable duration and of a consistent trend, has not been
+sufficiently noticed by the writers who have discussed ethnic survival.
+The argument is here concerned with two main divergent variants of human
+nature resulting from this, relatively late, selective adaptation of
+the ethnic types comprised in the Western culture; the point of interest
+being the probable effect of the situation of today in furthering
+variation along one or the other of these two divergent lines.
+
+The ethnological position may be briefly summed up; and in order to
+avoid any but the most indispensable detail the schedule of types and
+variants and the scheme of reversion and survival in which they
+are concerned are here presented with a diagrammatic meagerness and
+simplicity which would not be admissible for any other purpose. The man
+of our industrial communities tends to breed true to one or the other
+of three main ethic types; the dolichocephalic-blond, the
+brachycephalic-brunette, and the Mediterranean--disregarding minor and
+outlying elements of our culture. But within each of these main ethnic
+types the reversion tends to one or the other of at least two main
+directions of variation; the peaceable or antepredatory variant and the
+predatory variant. The former of these two characteristic variants
+is nearer to the generic type in each case, being the reversional
+representative of its type as it stood at the earliest stage
+of associated life of which there is available evidence, either
+archaeological or psychological. This variant is taken to represent the
+ancestors of existing civilized man at the peaceable, savage phase of
+life which preceded the predatory culture, the regime of status, and the
+growth of pecuniary emulation. The second or predatory variant of the
+types is taken to be a survival of a more recent modification of
+the main ethnic types and their hybrids--of these types as they were
+modified, mainly by a selective adaptation, under the discipline of
+the predatory culture and the latter emulative culture of the
+quasi-peaceable stage, or the pecuniary culture proper.
+
+Under the recognized laws of heredity there may be a survival from a
+more or less remote past phase. In the ordinary, average, or normal
+case, if the type has varied, the traits of the type are transmitted
+approximately as they have stood in the recent past--which may be called
+the hereditary present. For the purpose in hand this hereditary present
+is represented by the later predatory and the quasi-peaceable culture.
+
+It is to the variant of human nature which is characteristic of this
+recent--hereditarily still existing--predatory or quasi-predatory
+culture that the modern civilized man tends to breed true in the common
+run of cases. This proposition requires some qualification so far
+as concerns the descendants of the servile or repressed classes of
+barbarian times, but the qualification necessary is probably not so
+great as might at first thought appear. Taking the population as a
+whole, this predatory, emulative variant does not seem to have attained
+a high degree of consistency or stability. That is to say, the human
+nature inherited by modern Occidental man is not nearly uniform in
+respect of the range or the relative strength of the various aptitudes
+and propensities which go to make it up. The man of the hereditary
+present is slightly archaic as judged for the purposes of the latest
+exigencies of associated life. And the type to which the modern man
+chiefly tends to revert under the law of variation is a somewhat more
+archaic human nature. On the other hand, to judge by the reversional
+traits which show themselves in individuals that vary from the
+prevailing predatory style of temperament, the ante-predatory
+variant seems to have a greater stability and greater symmetry in the
+distribution or relative force of its temperamental elements.
+
+This divergence of inherited human nature, as between an earlier and a
+later variant of the ethnic type to which the individual tends to breed
+true, is traversed and obscured by a similar divergence between the
+two or three main ethnic types that go to make up the Occidental
+populations. The individuals in these communities are conceived to be,
+in virtually every instance, hybrids of the prevailing ethnic elements
+combined in the most varied proportions; with the result that they tend
+to take back to one or the other of the component ethnic types. These
+ethnic types differ in temperament in a way somewhat similar to the
+difference between the predatory and the antepredatory variants of the
+types; the dolicho-blond type showing more of the characteristics of the
+predatory temperament--or at least more of the violent disposition--than
+the brachycephalic-brunette type, and especially more than the
+Mediterranean. When the growth of institutions or of the effective
+sentiment of a given community shows a divergence from the predatory
+human nature, therefore, it is impossible to say with certainty that
+such a divergence indicates a reversion to the ante-predatory variant.
+It may be due to an increasing dominance of the one or the other of the
+"lower" ethnic elements in the population. Still, although the evidence
+is not as conclusive as might be desired, there are indications that
+the variations in the effective temperament of modern communities is not
+altogether due to a selection between stable ethnic types. It seems to
+be to some appreciable extent a selection between the predatory and the
+peaceable variants of the several types. This conception of contemporary
+human evolution is not indispensable to the discussion. The general
+conclusions reached by the use of these concepts of selective
+adaptation would remain substantially true if the earlier, Darwinian
+and Spencerian, terms and concepts were substituted. Under the
+circumstances, some latitude may be admissible in the use of terms. The
+word "type" is used loosely, to denote variations of temperament which
+the ethnologists would perhaps recognize only as trivial variants of
+the type rather than as distinct ethnic types. Wherever a closer
+discrimination seems essential to the argument, the effort to make such
+a closer discrimination will be evident from the context.
+
+The ethnic types of today, then, are variants of the primitive racial
+types. They have suffered some alteration, and have attained some degree
+of fixity in their altered form, under the discipline of the barbarian
+culture. The man of the hereditary present is the barbarian variant,
+servile or aristocratic, of the ethnic elements that constitute him.
+But this barbarian variant has not attained the highest degree of
+homogeneity or of stability. The barbarian culture--the predatory and
+quasi-peaceable cultural stages--though of great absolute duration, has
+been neither protracted enough nor invariable enough in character to
+give an extreme fixity of type. Variations from the barbarian human
+nature occur with some frequency, and these cases of variation are
+becoming more noticeable today, because the conditions of modern life no
+longer act consistently to repress departures from the barbarian normal.
+The predatory temperament does not lead itself to all the purposes of
+modern life, and more especially not to modern industry.
+
+Departures from the human nature of the hereditary present are most
+frequently of the nature of reversions to an earlier variant of the
+type. This earlier variant is represented by the temperament
+which characterizes the primitive phase of peaceable savagery. The
+circumstances of life and the ends of effort that prevailed before the
+advent of the barbarian culture, shaped human nature and fixed it as
+regards certain fundamental traits. And it is to these ancient, generic
+features that modern men are prone to take back in case of variation
+from the human nature of the hereditary present. The conditions under
+which men lived in the most primitive stages of associated life that can
+properly be called human, seem to have been of a peaceful kind; and the
+character--the temperament and spiritual attitude of men under these
+early conditions or environment and institutions seems to have been of
+a peaceful and unaggressive, not to say an indolent, cast. For the
+immediate purpose this peaceable cultural stage may be taken to mark
+the initial phase of social development. So far as concerns the present
+argument, the dominant spiritual feature of this presumptive initial
+phase of culture seems to have been an unreflecting, unformulated sense
+of group solidarity, largely expressing itself in a complacent, but by
+no means strenuous, sympathy with all facility of human life, and an
+uneasy revulsion against apprehended inhibition or futility of life.
+Through its ubiquitous presence in the habits of thought of the
+ante-predatory savage man, this pervading but uneager sense of the
+generically useful seems to have exercised an appreciable constraining
+force upon his life and upon the manner of his habitual contact with
+other members of the group.
+
+The traces of this initial, undifferentiated peaceable phase of culture
+seem faint and doubtful if we look merely to such categorical evidence
+of its existence as is afforded by usages and views in vogue within the
+historical present, whether in civilized or in rude communities; but
+less dubious evidence of its existence is to be found in psychological
+survivals, in the way of persistent and pervading traits of human
+character. These traits survive perhaps in an especial degree among
+those ethic elements which were crowded into the background during the
+predatory culture. Traits that were suited to the earlier habits of life
+then became relatively useless in the individual struggle for existence.
+And those elements of the population, or those ethnic groups, which
+were by temperament less fitted to the predatory life were repressed and
+pushed into the background. On the transition to the predatory culture
+the character of the struggle for existence changed in some degree from
+a struggle of the group against a non-human environment to a struggle
+against a human environment. This change was accompanied by an
+increasing antagonism and consciousness of antagonism between the
+individual members of the group. The conditions of success within the
+group, as well as the conditions of the survival of the group, changed
+in some measure; and the dominant spiritual attitude for the group
+gradually changed, and brought a different range of aptitudes and
+propensities into the position of legitimate dominance in the accepted
+scheme of life. Among these archaic traits that are to be regarded as
+survivals from the peaceable cultural phase, are that instinct of race
+solidarity which we call conscience, including the sense of truthfulness
+and equity, and the instinct of workmanship, in its naive, non-invidious
+expression.
+
+Under the guidance of the later biological and psychological science,
+human nature will have to be restated in terms of habit; and in the
+restatement, this, in outline, appears to be the only assignable place
+and ground of these traits. These habits of life are of too pervading a
+character to be ascribed to the influence of a late or brief discipline.
+The ease with which they are temporarily overborne by the special
+exigencies of recent and modern life argues that these habits are the
+surviving effects of a discipline of extremely ancient date, from the
+teachings of which men have frequently been constrained to depart in
+detail under the altered circumstances of a later time; and the almost
+ubiquitous fashion in which they assert themselves whenever the pressure
+of special exigencies is relieved, argues that the process by which the
+traits were fixed and incorporated into the spiritual make-up of the
+type must have lasted for a relatively very long time and without
+serious intermission. The point is not seriously affected by any
+question as to whether it was a process of habituation in the
+old-fashioned sense of the word or a process of selective adaptation of
+the race.
+
+The character and exigencies of life, under that regime of status and
+of individual and class antithesis which covers the entire interval from
+the beginning of predatory culture to the present, argue that the traits
+of temperament here under discussion could scarcely have arisen and
+acquired fixity during that interval. It is entirely probable that these
+traits have come down from an earlier method of life, and have survived
+through the interval of predatory and quasi-peaceable culture in a
+condition of incipient, or at least imminent, desuetude, rather than
+that they have been brought out and fixed by this later culture.
+They appear to be hereditary characteristics of the race, and to have
+persisted in spite of the altered requirements of success under the
+predatory and the later pecuniary stages of culture. They seem to have
+persisted by force of the tenacity of transmission that belongs to an
+hereditary trait that is present in some degree in every member of the
+species, and which therefore rests on a broad basis of race continuity.
+
+Such a generic feature is not readily eliminated, even under a process
+of selection so severe and protracted as that to which the traits here
+under discussion were subjected during the predatory and quasi-peaceable
+stages. These peaceable traits are in great part alien to the methods
+and the animus of barbarian life. The salient characteristic of the
+barbarian culture is an unremitting emulation and antagonism between
+classes and between individuals. This emulative discipline favors those
+individuals and lines of descent which possess the peaceable savage
+traits in a relatively slight degree. It therefore tends to eliminate
+these traits, and it has apparently weakened them, in an appreciable
+degree, in the populations that have been subject to it. Even where the
+extreme penalty for non-conformity to the barbarian type of temperament
+is not paid, there results at least a more or less consistent repression
+of the non-conforming individuals and lines of descent. Where life is
+largely a struggle between individuals within the group, the possession
+of the ancient peaceable traits in a marked degree would hamper an
+individual in the struggle for life.
+
+Under any known phase of culture, other or later than the presumptive
+initial phase here spoken of, the gifts of good-nature, equity, and
+indiscriminate sympathy do not appreciably further the life of the
+individual. Their possession may serve to protect the individual from
+hard usage at the hands of a majority that insists on a modicum of
+these ingredients in their ideal of a normal man; but apart from their
+indirect and negative effect in this way, the individual fares better
+under the regime of competition in proportion as he has less of these
+gifts. Freedom from scruple, from sympathy, honesty and regard for life,
+may, within fairly wide limits, be said to further the success of the
+individual in the pecuniary culture. The highly successful men of all
+times have commonly been of this type; except those whose success has
+not been scored in terms of either wealth or power. It is only within
+narrow limits, and then only in a Pickwickian sense, that honesty is the
+best policy.
+
+As seen from the point of view of life under modern civilized conditions
+in an enlightened community of the Western culture, the primitive,
+ante-predatory savage, whose character it has been attempted to trace
+in outline above, was not a great success. Even for the purposes of
+that hypothetical culture to which his type of human nature owes what
+stability it has--even for the ends of the peaceable savage group--this
+primitive man has quite as many and as conspicuous economic failings as
+he has economic virtues--as should be plain to any one whose sense of
+the case is not biased by leniency born of a fellow-feeling. At his
+best he is "a clever, good-for-nothing fellow." The shortcomings of this
+presumptively primitive type of character are weakness, inefficiency,
+lack of initiative and ingenuity, and a yielding and indolent
+amiability, together with a lively but inconsequential animistic sense.
+Along with these traits go certain others which have some value for the
+collective life process, in the sense that they further the facility
+of life in the group. These traits are truthfulness, peaceableness,
+good-will, and a non-emulative, non-invidious interest in men and
+things.
+
+With the advent of the predatory stage of life there comes a change in
+the requirements of the successful human character. Men's habits of life
+are required to adapt themselves to new exigencies under a new scheme
+of human relations. The same unfolding of energy, which had previously
+found expression in the traits of savage life recited above, is now
+required to find expression along a new line of action, in a new group
+of habitual responses to altered stimuli. The methods which, as counted
+in terms of facility of life, answered measurably under the earlier
+conditions, are no longer adequate under the new conditions. The earlier
+situation was characterized by a relative absence of antagonism or
+differentiation of interests, the later situation by an emulation
+constantly increasing in relative absence of antagonism or
+differentiation of interests, the later situation by an emulation
+constantly increasing in intensity and narrowing in scope. The traits
+which characterize the predatory and subsequent stages of culture, and
+which indicate the types of man best fitted to survive under the regime
+of status, are (in their primary expression) ferocity, self-seeking,
+clannishness, and disingenuousness--a free resort to force and fraud.
+
+Under the severe and protracted discipline of the regime of competition,
+the selection of ethnic types has acted to give a somewhat pronounced
+dominance to these traits of character, by favoring the survival of
+those ethnic elements which are most richly endowed in these respects.
+At the same time the earlier--acquired, more generic habits of the race
+have never ceased to have some usefulness for the purpose of the life of
+the collectivity and have never fallen into definitive abeyance. It may
+be worth while to point out that the dolicho-blond type of European man
+seems to owe much of its dominating influence and its masterful position
+in the recent culture to its possessing the characteristics of predatory
+man in an exceptional degree. These spiritual traits, together with
+a large endowment of physical energy--itself probably a result of
+selection between groups and between lines of descent--chiefly go to
+place any ethnic element in the position of a leisure or master
+class, especially during the earlier phases of the development of the
+institution of a leisure class. This need not mean that precisely the
+same complement of aptitudes in any individual would insure him an
+eminent personal success. Under the competitive regime, the conditions
+of success for the individual are not necessarily the same as those for
+a class. The success of a class or party presumes a strong element of
+clannishness, or loyalty to a chief, or adherence to a tenet; whereas
+the competitive individual can best achieve his ends if he combines the
+barbarian's energy, initiative, self-seeking and disingenuousness with
+the savage's lack of loyalty or clannishness. It may be remarked by the
+way, that the men who have scored a brilliant (Napoleonic) success on
+the basis of an impartial self-seeking and absence of scruple, have
+not uncommonly shown more of the physical characteristics of the
+brachycephalic-brunette than of the dolicho-blond. The greater
+proportion of moderately successful individuals, in a self-seeking way,
+however, seem, in physique, to belong to the last-named ethnic element.
+
+The temperament induced by the predatory habit of life makes for the
+survival and fullness of life of the individual under a regime of
+emulation; at the same time it makes for the survival and success of the
+group if the group's life as a collectivity is also predominantly a life
+of hostile competition with other groups. But the evolution of economic
+life in the industrially more mature communities has now begun to take
+such a turn that the interest of the community no longer coincides with
+the emulative interests of the individual. In their corporate capacity,
+these advanced industrial communities are ceasing to be competitors
+for the means of life or for the right to live--except in so far as the
+predatory propensities of their ruling classes keep up the tradition of
+war and rapine. These communities are no longer hostile to one another
+by force of circumstances, other than the circumstances of tradition
+and temperament. Their material interests--apart, possibly, from
+the interests of the collective good fame--are not only no longer
+incompatible, but the success of any one of the communities
+unquestionably furthers the fullness of life of any other community in
+the group, for the present and for an incalculable time to come. No one
+of them any longer has any material interest in getting the better
+of any other. The same is not true in the same degree as regards
+individuals and their relations to one another.
+
+The collective interests of any modern community center in industrial
+efficiency. The individual is serviceable for the ends of the community
+somewhat in proportion to his efficiency in the productive employments
+vulgarly so called. This collective interest is best served by honesty,
+diligence, peacefulness, good-will, an absence of self-seeking, and
+an habitual recognition and apprehension of causal sequence, without
+admixture of animistic belief and without a sense of dependence on any
+preternatural intervention in the course of events. Not much is to
+be said for the beauty, moral excellence, or general worthiness and
+reputability of such a prosy human nature as these traits imply; and
+there is little ground of enthusiasm for the manner of collective life
+that would result from the prevalence of these traits in unmitigated
+dominance. But that is beside the point. The successful working of a
+modern industrial community is best secured where these traits concur,
+and it is attained in the degree in which the human material is
+characterized by their possession. Their presence in some measure is
+required in order to have a tolerable adjustment to the circumstances of
+the modern industrial situation. The complex, comprehensive, essentially
+peaceable, and highly organized mechanism of the modern industrial
+community works to the best advantage when these traits, or most of
+them, are present in the highest practicable degree. These traits are
+present in a markedly less degree in the man of the predatory type than
+is useful for the purposes of the modern collective life.
+
+On the other hand, the immediate interest of the individual under the
+competitive regime is best served by shrewd trading and unscrupulous
+management. The characteristics named above as serving the interests
+of the community are disserviceable to the individual, rather than
+otherwise. The presence of these aptitudes in his make-up diverts his
+energies to other ends than those of pecuniary gain; and also in
+his pursuit of gain they lead him to seek gain by the indirect and
+ineffectual channels of industry, rather than by a free and unfaltering
+career of sharp practice. The industrial aptitudes are pretty
+consistently a hindrance to the individual. Under the regime of
+emulation the members of a modern industrial community are rivals, each
+of whom will best attain his individual and immediate advantage if,
+through an exceptional exemption from scruple, he is able serenely to
+overreach and injure his fellows when the chance offers.
+
+It has already been noticed that modern economic institutions fall into
+two roughly distinct categories--the pecuniary and the industrial. The
+like is true of employments. Under the former head are employments that
+have to do with ownership or acquisition; under the latter head, those
+that have to do with workmanship or production. As was found in speaking
+of the growth of institutions, so with regard to employments.
+The economic interests of the leisure class lie in the pecuniary
+employments; those of the working classes lie in both classes of
+employments, but chiefly in the industrial. Entrance to the leisure
+class lies through the pecuniary employments.
+
+These two classes of employment differ materially in respect of the
+aptitudes required for each; and the training which they give similarly
+follows two divergent lines. The discipline of the pecuniary employments
+acts to conserve and to cultivate certain of the predatory aptitudes and
+the predatory animus. It does this both by educating those individuals
+and classes who are occupied with these employments and by selectively
+repressing and eliminating those individuals and lines of descent that
+are unfit in this respect. So far as men's habits of thought are shaped
+by the competitive process of acquisition and tenure; so far as their
+economic functions are comprised within the range of ownership of
+wealth as conceived in terms of exchange value, and its management and
+financiering through a permutation of values; so far their experience
+in economic life favors the survival and accentuation of the predatory
+temperament and habits of thought. Under the modern, peaceable system,
+it is of course the peaceable range of predatory habits and aptitudes
+that is chiefly fostered by a life of acquisition. That is to say, the
+pecuniary employments give proficiency in the general line of practices
+comprised under fraud, rather than in those that belong under the more
+archaic method of forcible seizure.
+
+These pecuniary employments, tending to conserve the predatory
+temperament, are the employments which have to do with ownership--the
+immediate function of the leisure class proper--and the subsidiary
+functions concerned with acquisition and accumulation. These cover the
+class of persons and that range of duties in the economic process which
+have to do with the ownership of enterprises engaged in competitive
+industry; especially those fundamental lines of economic management
+which are classed as financiering operations. To these may be added
+the greater part of mercantile occupations. In their best and clearest
+development these duties make up the economic office of the "captain
+of industry." The captain of industry is an astute man rather than
+an ingenious one, and his captaincy is a pecuniary rather than an
+industrial captaincy. Such administration of industry as he exercises
+is commonly of a permissive kind. The mechanically effective details of
+production and of industrial organization are delegated to subordinates
+of a less "practical" turn of mind--men who are possessed of a gift for
+workmanship rather than administrative ability. So far as regards their
+tendency in shaping human nature by education and selection, the common
+run of non-economic employments are to be classed with the pecuniary
+employments. Such are politics and ecclesiastical and military
+employments.
+
+The pecuniary employments have also the sanction of reputability in
+a much higher degree than the industrial employments. In this way the
+leisure-class standards of good repute come in to sustain the
+prestige of those aptitudes that serve the invidious purpose; and the
+leisure-class scheme of decorous living, therefore, also furthers the
+survival and culture of the predatory traits. Employments fall into
+a hierarchical gradation of reputability. Those which have to do
+immediately with ownership on a large scale are the most reputable of
+economic employments proper. Next to these in good repute come
+those employments that are immediately subservient to ownership and
+financiering--such as banking and the law. Banking employments also
+carry a suggestion of large ownership, and this fact is doubtless
+accountable for a share of the prestige that attaches to the business.
+The profession of the law does not imply large ownership; but since no
+taint of usefulness, for other than the competitive purpose, attaches
+to the lawyer's trade, it grades high in the conventional scheme. The
+lawyer is exclusively occupied with the details of predatory fraud,
+either in achieving or in checkmating chicanery, and success in the
+profession is therefore accepted as marking a large endowment of that
+barbarian astuteness which has always commanded men's respect and fear.
+Mercantile pursuits are only half-way reputable, unless they involve a
+large element of ownership and a small element of usefulness. They grade
+high or low somewhat in proportion as they serve the higher or the lower
+needs; so that the business of retailing the vulgar necessaries of
+life descends to the level of the handicrafts and factory labor. Manual
+labor, or even the work of directing mechanical processes, is of course
+on a precarious footing as regards respectability. A qualification is
+necessary as regards the discipline given by the pecuniary employments.
+As the scale of industrial enterprise grows larger, pecuniary management
+comes to bear less of the character of chicanery and shrewd competition
+in detail. That is to say, for an ever-increasing proportion of the
+persons who come in contact with this phase of economic life, business
+reduces itself to a routine in which there is less immediate suggestion
+of overreaching or exploiting a competitor. The consequent exemption
+from predatory habits extends chiefly to subordinates employed in
+business. The duties of ownership and administration are virtually
+untouched by this qualification. The case is different as regards those
+individuals or classes who are immediately occupied with the technique
+and manual operations of production. Their daily life is not in the same
+degree a course of habituation to the emulative and invidious motives
+and maneuvers of the pecuniary side of industry. They are consistently
+held to the apprehension and coordination of mechanical facts and
+sequences, and to their appreciation and utilization for the purposes
+of human life. So far as concerns this portion of the population, the
+educative and selective action of the industrial process with which they
+are immediately in contact acts to adapt their habits of thought to the
+non-invidious purposes of the collective life. For them, therefore, it
+hastens the obsolescence of the distinctively predatory aptitudes and
+propensities carried over by heredity and tradition from the barbarian
+past of the race.
+
+The educative action of the economic life of the community, therefore,
+is not of a uniform kind throughout all its manifestations. That range
+of economic activities which is concerned immediately with pecuniary
+competition has a tendency to conserve certain predatory traits; while
+those industrial occupations which have to do immediately with the
+production of goods have in the main the contrary tendency. But with
+regard to the latter class of employments it is to be noticed in
+qualification that the persons engaged in them are nearly all to some
+extent also concerned with matters of pecuniary competition (as, for
+instance, in the competitive fixing of wages and salaries, in the
+purchase of goods for consumption, etc.). Therefore the distinction
+here made between classes of employments is by no means a hard and fast
+distinction between classes of persons.
+
+The employments of the leisure classes in modern industry are such as to
+keep alive certain of the predatory habits and aptitudes. So far as
+the members of those classes take part in the industrial process, their
+training tends to conserve in them the barbarian temperament. But there
+is something to be said on the other side. Individuals so placed as to
+be exempt from strain may survive and transmit their characteristics
+even if they differ widely from the average of the species both in
+physique and in spiritual make-up. The chances for a survival and
+transmission of atavistic traits are greatest in those classes that are
+most sheltered from the stress of circumstances. The leisure class is in
+some degree sheltered from the stress of the industrial situation,
+and should, therefore, afford an exceptionally great proportion of
+reversions to the peaceable or savage temperament. It should be possible
+for such aberrant or atavistic individuals to unfold their life activity
+on ante-predatory lines without suffering as prompt a repression or
+elimination as in the lower walks of life.
+
+Something of the sort seems to be true in fact. There is, for instance,
+an appreciable proportion of the upper classes whose inclinations
+lead them into philanthropic work, and there is a considerable body
+of sentiment in the class going to support efforts of reform and
+amelioration. And much of this philanthropic and reformatory effort,
+moreover, bears the marks of that amiable "cleverness" and incoherence
+that is characteristic of the primitive savage. But it may still be
+doubtful whether these facts are evidence of a larger proportion of
+reversions in the higher than in the lower strata, even if the same
+inclinations were present in the impecunious classes, it would not as
+easily find expression there; since those classes lack the means and the
+time and energy to give effect to their inclinations in this respect.
+The prima facie evidence of the facts can scarcely go unquestioned.
+
+In further qualification it is to be noted that the leisure class of
+today is recruited from those who have been successful in a pecuniary
+way, and who, therefore, are presumably endowed with more than an even
+complement of the predatory traits. Entrance into the leisure class lies
+through the pecuniary employments, and these employments, by selection
+and adaptation, act to admit to the upper levels only those lines of
+descent that are pecuniarily fit to survive under the predatory test.
+And so soon as a case of reversion to non-predatory human nature shows
+itself on these upper levels, it is commonly weeded out and thrown back
+to the lower pecuniary levels. In order to hold its place in the class,
+a stock must have the pecuniary temperament; otherwise its fortune would
+be dissipated and it would presently lose caste. Instances of this kind
+are sufficiently frequent. The constituency of the leisure class is kept
+up by a continual selective process, whereby the individuals and
+lines of descent that are eminently fitted for an aggressive pecuniary
+competition are withdrawn from the lower classes. In order to reach the
+upper levels the aspirant must have, not only a fair average complement
+of the pecuniary aptitudes, but he must have these gifts in such an
+eminent degree as to overcome very material difficulties that stand in
+the way of his ascent. Barring accidents, the nouveaux arrivés are a
+picked body.
+
+This process of selective admission has, of course, always been going
+on; ever since the fashion of pecuniary emulation set in--which is much
+the same as saying, ever since the institution of a leisure class was
+first installed. But the precise ground of selection has not always been
+the same, and the selective process has therefore not always given the
+same results. In the early barbarian, or predatory stage proper, the
+test of fitness was prowess, in the naive sense of the word. To gain
+entrance to the class, the candidate had to be gifted with clannishness,
+massiveness, ferocity, unscrupulousness, and tenacity of purpose. These
+were the qualities that counted toward the accumulation and continued
+tenure of wealth. The economic basis of the leisure class, then as
+later, was the possession of wealth; but the methods of accumulating
+wealth, and the gifts required for holding it, have changed in some
+degree since the early days of the predatory culture. In consequence of
+the selective process the dominant traits of the early barbarian leisure
+class were bold aggression, an alert sense of status, and a free
+resort to fraud. The members of the class held their place by tenure of
+prowess. In the later barbarian culture society attained settled methods
+of acquisition and possession under the quasi-peaceable regime of
+status. Simple aggression and unrestrained violence in great measure
+gave place to shrewd practice and chicanery, as the best approved method
+of accumulating wealth. A different range of aptitudes and propensities
+would then be conserved in the leisure class. Masterful aggression, and
+the correlative massiveness, together with a ruthlessly consistent
+sense of status, would still count among the most splendid traits of
+the class. These have remained in our traditions as the typical
+"aristocratic virtues." But with these were associated an increasing
+complement of the less obtrusive pecuniary virtues; such as providence,
+prudence, and chicanery. As time has gone on, and the modern peaceable
+stage of pecuniary culture has been approached, the last-named range of
+aptitudes and habits has gained in relative effectiveness for pecuniary
+ends, and they have counted for relatively more in the selective process
+under which admission is gained and place is held in the leisure class.
+
+The ground of selection has changed, until the aptitudes which now
+qualify for admission to the class are the pecuniary aptitudes only.
+What remains of the predatory barbarian traits is the tenacity of
+purpose or consistency of aim which distinguished the successful
+predatory barbarian from the peaceable savage whom he supplanted.
+But this trait can not be said characteristically to distinguish the
+pecuniarily successful upper-class man from the rank and file of the
+industrial classes. The training and the selection to which the latter
+are exposed in modern industrial life give a similarly decisive weight
+to this trait. Tenacity of purpose may rather be said to distinguish
+both these classes from two others; the shiftless ne'er do-well and the
+lower-class delinquent. In point of natural endowment the pecuniary man
+compares with the delinquent in much the same way as the industrial man
+compares with the good-natured shiftless dependent. The ideal pecuniary
+man is like the ideal delinquent in his unscrupulous conversion of goods
+and persons to his own ends, and in a callous disregard of the feelings
+and wishes of others and of the remoter effects of his actions; but he
+is unlike him in possessing a keener sense of status, and in working
+more consistently and farsightedly to a remoter end. The kinship of the
+two types of temperament is further shown in a proclivity to "sport"
+and gambling, and a relish of aimless emulation. The ideal pecuniary
+man also shows a curious kinship with the delinquent in one of the
+concomitant variations of the predatory human nature. The delinquent is
+very commonly of a superstitious habit of mind; he is a great believer
+in luck, spells, divination and destiny, and in omens and shamanistic
+ceremony. Where circumstances are favorable, this proclivity is apt to
+express itself in a certain servile devotional fervor and a punctilious
+attention to devout observances; it may perhaps be better characterized
+as devoutness than as religion. At this point the temperament of the
+delinquent has more in common with the pecuniary and leisure classes
+than with the industrial man or with the class of shiftless dependents.
+
+Life in a modern industrial community, or in other words life under
+the pecuniary culture, acts by a process of selection to develop and
+conserve a certain range of aptitudes and propensities. The present
+tendency of this selective process is not simply a reversion to a given,
+immutable ethnic type. It tends rather to a modification of human nature
+differing in some respects from any of the types or variants transmitted
+out of the past. The objective point of the evolution is not a single
+one. The temperament which the evolution acts to establish as normal
+differs from any one of the archaic variants of human nature in its
+greater stability of aim--greater singleness of purpose and greater
+persistence in effort. So far as concerns economic theory, the objective
+point of the selective process is on the whole single to this extent;
+although there are minor tendencies of considerable importance diverging
+from this line of development. But apart from this general trend the
+line of development is not single. As concerns economic theory, the
+development in other respects runs on two divergent lines. So far
+as regards the selective conservation of capacities or aptitudes
+in individuals, these two lines may be called the pecuniary and the
+industrial. As regards the conservation of propensities, spiritual
+attitude, or animus, the two may be called the invidious or
+self-regarding and the non-invidious or economical. As regards the
+intellectual or cognitive bent of the two directions of growth, the
+former may be characterized as the personal standpoint, of conation,
+qualitative relation, status, or worth; the latter as the impersonal
+standpoint, of sequence, quantitative relation, mechanical efficiency,
+or use.
+
+The pecuniary employments call into action chiefly the former of
+these two ranges of aptitudes and propensities, and act selectively
+to conserve them in the population. The industrial employments, on the
+other hand, chiefly exercise the latter range, and act to conserve them.
+An exhaustive psychological analysis will show that each of these two
+ranges of aptitudes and propensities is but the multiform expression of
+a given temperamental bent. By force of the unity or singleness of
+the individual, the aptitudes, animus, and interests comprised in the
+first-named range belong together as expressions of a given variant
+of human nature. The like is true of the latter range. The two may be
+conceived as alternative directions of human life, in such a way that
+a given individual inclines more or less consistently to the one or
+the other. The tendency of the pecuniary life is, in a general way, to
+conserve the barbarian temperament, but with the substitution of fraud
+and prudence, or administrative ability, in place of that predilection
+for physical damage that characterizes the early barbarian. This
+substitution of chicanery in place of devastation takes place only in an
+uncertain degree. Within the pecuniary employments the selective action
+runs pretty consistently in this direction, but the discipline of
+pecuniary life, outside the competition for gain, does not work
+consistently to the same effect. The discipline of modern life in the
+consumption of time and goods does not act unequivocally to eliminate
+the aristocratic virtues or to foster the bourgeois virtues. The
+conventional scheme of decent living calls for a considerable exercise
+of the earlier barbarian traits. Some details of this traditional scheme
+of life, bearing on this point, have been noticed in earlier chapters
+under the head of leisure, and further details will be shown in later
+chapters.
+
+From what has been said, it appears that the leisure-class life and
+the leisure-class scheme of life should further the conservation of the
+barbarian temperament; chiefly of the quasi-peaceable, or bourgeois,
+variant, but also in some measure of the predatory variant. In the
+absence of disturbing factors, therefore, it should be possible to
+trace a difference of temperament between the classes of society. The
+aristocratic and the bourgeois virtues--that is to say the destructive
+and pecuniary traits--should be found chiefly among the upper classes,
+and the industrial virtues--that is to say the peaceable traits--chiefly
+among the classes given to mechanical industry.
+
+In a general and uncertain way this holds true, but the test is not so
+readily applied nor so conclusive as might be wished. There are several
+assignable reasons for its partial failure. All classes are in a measure
+engaged in the pecuniary struggle, and in all classes the possession
+of the pecuniary traits counts towards the success and survival of
+the individual. Wherever the pecuniary culture prevails, the selective
+process by which men's habits of thought are shaped, and by which the
+survival of rival lines of descent is decided, proceeds proximately on
+the basis of fitness for acquisition. Consequently, if it were not for
+the fact that pecuniary efficiency is on the whole incompatible with
+industrial efficiency, the selective action of all occupations would
+tend to the unmitigated dominance of the pecuniary temperament. The
+result would be the installation of what has been known as the "economic
+man," as the normal and definitive type of human nature. But the
+"economic man," whose only interest is the self-regarding one and whose
+only human trait is prudence is useless for the purposes of modern
+industry.
+
+The modern industry requires an impersonal, non-invidious interest in
+the work in hand. Without this the elaborate processes of industry
+would be impossible, and would, indeed, never have been conceived. This
+interest in work differentiates the workman from the criminal on the one
+hand, and from the captain of industry on the other. Since work must be
+done in order to the continued life of the community, there results a
+qualified selection favoring the spiritual aptitude for work, within
+a certain range of occupations. This much, however, is to be conceded,
+that even within the industrial occupations the selective elimination
+of the pecuniary traits is an uncertain process, and that there is
+consequently an appreciable survival of the barbarian temperament even
+within these occupations. On this account there is at present no broad
+distinction in this respect between the leisure-class character and the
+character of the common run of the population.
+
+The whole question as to a class distinction in respect to spiritual
+make-up is also obscured by the presence, in all classes of society, of
+acquired habits of life that closely simulate inherited traits and at
+the same time act to develop in the entire body of the population the
+traits which they simulate. These acquired habits, or assumed traits of
+character, are most commonly of an aristocratic cast. The prescriptive
+position of the leisure class as the exemplar of reputability has
+imposed many features of the leisure-class theory of life upon the
+lower classes; with the result that there goes on, always and throughout
+society, a more or less persistent cultivation of these aristocratic
+traits. On this ground also these traits have a better chance of
+survival among the body of the people than would be the case if it were
+not for the precept and example of the leisure class. As one channel,
+and an important one, through which this transfusion of aristocratic
+views of life, and consequently more or less archaic traits of character
+goes on, may be mentioned the class of domestic servants. These have
+their notions of what is good and beautiful shaped by contact with the
+master class and carry the preconceptions so acquired back among their
+low-born equals, and so disseminate the higher ideals abroad through
+the community without the loss of time which this dissemination might
+otherwise suffer. The saying "Like master, like man," has a greater
+significance than is commonly appreciated for the rapid popular
+acceptance of many elements of upper-class culture.
+
+There is also a further range of facts that go to lessen class
+differences as regards the survival of the pecuniary virtues. The
+pecuniary struggle produces an underfed class, of large proportions.
+This underfeeding consists in a deficiency of the necessaries of life or
+of the necessaries of a decent expenditure. In either case the result is
+a closely enforced struggle for the means with which to meet the daily
+needs; whether it be the physical or the higher needs. The strain of
+self-assertion against odds takes up the whole energy of the individual;
+he bends his efforts to compass his own invidious ends alone, and
+becomes continually more narrowly self-seeking. The industrial traits in
+this way tend to obsolescence through disuse. Indirectly, therefore, by
+imposing a scheme of pecuniary decency and by withdrawing as much as
+may be of the means of life from the lower classes, the institution of
+a leisure class acts to conserve the pecuniary traits in the body of the
+population. The result is an assimilation of the lower classes to the
+type of human nature that belongs primarily to the upper classes only.
+It appears, therefore, that there is no wide difference in temperament
+between the upper and the lower classes; but it appears also that the
+absence of such a difference is in good part due to the prescriptive
+example of the leisure class and to the popular acceptance of those
+broad principles of conspicuous waste and pecuniary emulation on which
+the institution of a leisure class rests. The institution acts to lower
+the industrial efficiency of the community and retard the adaptation of
+human nature to the exigencies of modern industrial life. It affects the
+prevalent or effective human nature in a conservative direction, (1) by
+direct transmission of archaic traits, through inheritance within the
+class and wherever the leisure-class blood is transfused outside the
+class, and (2) by conserving and fortifying the traditions of the
+archaic regime, and so making the chances of survival of barbarian
+traits greater also outside the range of transfusion of leisure-class
+blood.
+
+But little if anything has been done towards collecting or digesting
+data that are of special significance for the question of survival or
+elimination of traits in the modern populations. Little of a tangible
+character can therefore be offered in support of the view here taken,
+beyond a discursive review of such everyday facts as lie ready to hand.
+Such a recital can scarcely avoid being commonplace and tedious, but for
+all that it seems necessary to the completeness of the argument, even in
+the meager outline in which it is here attempted. A degree of indulgence
+may therefore fairly be bespoken for the succeeding chapters, which
+offer a fragmentary recital of this kind.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Ten ~~ Modern Survivals of Prowess
+
+The leisure class lives by the industrial community rather than in it.
+Its relations to industry are of a pecuniary rather than an industrial
+kind. Admission to the class is gained by exercise of the pecuniary
+aptitudes--aptitudes for acquisition rather than for serviceability.
+There is, therefore, a continued selective sifting of the human material
+that makes up the leisure class, and this selection proceeds on the
+ground of fitness for pecuniary pursuits. But the scheme of life of the
+class is in large part a heritage from the past, and embodies much of
+the habits and ideals of the earlier barbarian period. This archaic,
+barbarian scheme of life imposes itself also on the lower orders, with
+more or less mitigation. In its turn the scheme of life, of conventions,
+acts selectively and by education to shape the human material, and its
+action runs chiefly in the direction of conserving traits, habits, and
+ideals that belong to the early barbarian age--the age of prowess and
+predatory life.
+
+The most immediate and unequivocal expression of that archaic human
+nature which characterizes man in the predatory stage is the fighting
+propensity proper. In cases where the predatory activity is a collective
+one, this propensity is frequently called the martial spirit, or,
+latterly, patriotism. It needs no insistence to find assent to the
+proposition that in the countries of civilized Europe the hereditary
+leisure class is endowed with this martial spirit in a higher
+degree than the middle classes. Indeed, the leisure class claims the
+distinction as a matter of pride, and no doubt with some grounds. War is
+honorable, and warlike prowess is eminently honorific in the eyes of the
+generality of men; and this admiration of warlike prowess is itself
+the best voucher of a predatory temperament in the admirer of war. The
+enthusiasm for war, and the predatory temper of which it is the index,
+prevail in the largest measure among the upper classes, especially
+among the hereditary leisure class. Moreover, the ostensible serious
+occupation of the upper class is that of government, which, in point of
+origin and developmental content, is also a predatory occupation.
+
+The only class which could at all dispute with the hereditary leisure
+class the honor of an habitual bellicose frame of mind is that of
+the lower-class delinquents. In ordinary times, the large body of the
+industrial classes is relatively apathetic touching warlike interests.
+When unexcited, this body of the common people, which makes up the
+effective force of the industrial community, is rather averse to any
+other than a defensive fight; indeed, it responds a little tardily even
+to a provocation which makes for an attitude of defense. In the more
+civilized communities, or rather in the communities which have reached
+an advanced industrial development, the spirit of warlike aggression
+may be said to be obsolescent among the common people. This does not
+say that there is not an appreciable number of individuals among
+the industrial classes in whom the martial spirit asserts itself
+obtrusively. Nor does it say that the body of the people may not be
+fired with martial ardor for a time under the stimulus of some special
+provocation, such as is seen in operation today in more than one of the
+countries of Europe, and for the time in America. But except for such
+seasons of temporary exaltation, and except for those individuals who
+are endowed with an archaic temperament of the predatory type, together
+with the similarly endowed body of individuals among the higher and
+the lowest classes, the inertness of the mass of any modern civilized
+community in this respect is probably so great as would make war
+impracticable, except against actual invasion. The habits and aptitudes
+of the common run of men make for an unfolding of activity in other,
+less picturesque directions than that of war.
+
+This class difference in temperament may be due in part to a difference
+in the inheritance of acquired traits in the several classes, but it
+seems also, in some measure, to correspond with a difference in ethnic
+derivation. The class difference is in this respect visibly less in
+those countries whose population is relatively homogeneous, ethnically,
+than in the countries where there is a broader divergence between the
+ethnic elements that make up the several classes of the community. In
+the same connection it may be noted that the later accessions to the
+leisure class in the latter countries, in a general way, show less of
+the martial spirit than contemporary representatives of the aristocracy
+of the ancient line. These nouveaux arrivés have recently emerged from
+the commonplace body of the population and owe their emergence into the
+leisure class to the exercise of traits and propensities which are not
+to be classed as prowess in the ancient sense.
+
+Apart from warlike activity proper, the institution of the duel is also
+an expression of the same superior readiness for combat; and the duel
+is a leisure-class institution. The duel is in substance a more or less
+deliberate resort to a fight as a final settlement of a difference of
+opinion. In civilized communities it prevails as a normal phenomenon
+only where there is an hereditary leisure class, and almost exclusively
+among that class. The exceptions are (1) military and naval officers
+who are ordinarily members of the leisure class, and who are at the
+same time specially trained to predatory habits of mind and (2) the
+lower-class delinquents--who are by inheritance, or training, or both,
+of a similarly predatory disposition and habit. It is only the high-bred
+gentleman and the rowdy that normally resort to blows as the universal
+solvent of differences of opinion. The plain man will ordinarily fight
+only when excessive momentary irritation or alcoholic exaltation act to
+inhibit the more complex habits of response to the stimuli that make
+for provocation. He is then thrown back upon the simpler, less
+differentiated forms of the instinct of self-assertion; that is to say,
+he reverts temporarily and without reflection to an archaic habit of
+mind.
+
+This institution of the duel as a mode of finally settling disputes
+and serious questions of precedence shades off into the obligatory,
+unprovoked private fight, as a social obligation due to one's good
+repute. As a leisure-class usage of this kind we have, particularly,
+that bizarre survival of bellicose chivalry, the German student duel. In
+the lower or spurious leisure class of the delinquents there is in all
+countries a similar, though less formal, social obligation incumbent on
+the rowdy to assert his manhood in unprovoked combat with his fellows.
+And spreading through all grades of society, a similar usage prevails
+among the boys of the community. The boy usually knows to nicety, from
+day to day, how he and his associates grade in respect of relative
+fighting capacity; and in the community of boys there is ordinarily no
+secure basis of reputability for any one who, by exception, will not or
+can not fight on invitation.
+
+All this applies especially to boys above a certain somewhat vague limit
+of maturity. The child's temperament does not commonly answer to this
+description during infancy and the years of close tutelage, when the
+child still habitually seeks contact with its mother at every turn of
+its daily life. During this earlier period there is little aggression
+and little propensity for antagonism. The transition from this
+peaceable temper to the predaceous, and in extreme cases malignant,
+mischievousness of the boy is a gradual one, and it is accomplished
+with more completeness, covering a larger range of the individual's
+aptitudes, in some cases than in others. In the earlier stage of his
+growth, the child, whether boy or girl, shows less of initiative and
+aggressive self-assertion and less of an inclination to isolate himself
+and his interests from the domestic group in which he lives, and he
+shows more of sensitiveness to rebuke, bashfulness, timidity, and the
+need of friendly human contact. In the common run of cases this early
+temperament passes, by a gradual but somewhat rapid obsolescence of the
+infantile features, into the temperament of the boy proper; though there
+are also cases where the predaceous futures of boy life do not emerge at
+all, or at the most emerge in but a slight and obscure degree.
+
+In girls the transition to the predaceous stage is seldom accomplished
+with the same degree of completeness as in boys; and in a relatively
+large proportion of cases it is scarcely undergone at all. In such cases
+the transition from infancy to adolescence and maturity is a gradual and
+unbroken process of the shifting of interest from infantile purposes and
+aptitudes to the purposes, functions, and relations of adult life. In
+the girls there is a less general prevalence of a predaceous interval
+in the development; and in the cases where it occurs, the predaceous and
+isolating attitude during the interval is commonly less accentuated.
+
+In the male child the predaceous interval is ordinarily fairly well
+marked and lasts for some time, but it is commonly terminated (if at
+all) with the attainment of maturity. This last statement may need very
+material qualification. The cases are by no means rare in which the
+transition from the boyish to the adult temperament is not made, or
+is made only partially--understanding by the "adult" temperament the
+average temperament of those adult individuals in modern industrial life
+who have some serviceability for the purposes of the collective life
+process, and who may therefore be said to make up the effective average
+of the industrial community.
+
+The ethnic composition of the European populations varies. In some
+cases even the lower classes are in large measure made up of the
+peace-disturbing dolicho-blond; while in others this ethnic element is
+found chiefly among the hereditary leisure class. The fighting habit
+seems to prevail to a less extent among the working-class boys in the
+latter class of populations than among the boys of the upper classes or
+among those of the populations first named.
+
+If this generalization as to the temperament of the boy among the
+working classes should be found true on a fuller and closer scrutiny of
+the field, it would add force to the view that the bellicose temperament
+is in some appreciable degree a race characteristic; it appears to
+enter more largely into the make-up of the dominant, upper-class
+ethnic type--the dolicho-blond--of the European countries than into the
+subservient, lower-class types of man which are conceived to constitute
+the body of the population of the same communities.
+
+The case of the boy may seem not to bear seriously on the question of
+the relative endowment of prowess with which the several classes of
+society are gifted; but it is at least of some value as going to show
+that this fighting impulse belongs to a more archaic temperament than
+that possessed by the average adult man of the industrious classes. In
+this, as in many other features of child life, the child reproduces,
+temporarily and in miniature, some of the earlier phases of the
+development of adult man. Under this interpretation, the boy's
+predilection for exploit and for isolation of his own interest is to be
+taken as a transient reversion to the human nature that is normal to the
+early barbarian culture--the predatory culture proper. In this respect,
+as in much else, the leisure-class and the delinquent-class character
+shows a persistence into adult life of traits that are normal to
+childhood and youth, and that are likewise normal or habitual to the
+earlier stages of culture. Unless the difference is traceable entirely
+to a fundamental difference between persistent ethnic types, the traits
+that distinguish the swaggering delinquent and the punctilious gentleman
+of leisure from the common crowd are, in some measure, marks of an
+arrested spiritual development. They mark an immature phase, as compared
+with the stage of development attained by the average of the adults in
+the modern industrial community. And it will appear presently that the
+puerile spiritual make-up of these representatives of the upper and the
+lowest social strata shows itself also in the presence of other archaic
+traits than this proclivity to ferocious exploit and isolation.
+
+As if to leave no doubt about the essential immaturity of the fighting
+temperament, we have, bridging the interval between legitimate boyhood
+and adult manhood, the aimless and playful, but more or less systematic
+and elaborate, disturbances of the peace in vogue among schoolboys of a
+slightly higher age. In the common run of cases, these disturbances
+are confined to the period of adolescence. They recur with decreasing
+frequency and acuteness as youth merges into adult life, and so they
+reproduce, in a general way, in the life of the individual, the sequence
+by which the group has passed from the predatory to a more settled habit
+of life. In an appreciable number of cases the spiritual growth of the
+individual comes to a close before he emerges from this puerile
+phase; in these cases the fighting temper persists through life. Those
+individuals who in spiritual development eventually reach man's
+estate, therefore, ordinarily pass through a temporary archaic phase
+corresponding to the permanent spiritual level of the fighting and
+sporting men. Different individuals will, of course, achieve spiritual
+maturity and sobriety in this respect in different degrees; and those
+who fail of the average remain as an undissolved residue of crude
+humanity in the modern industrial community and as a foil for that
+selective process of adaptation which makes for a heightened industrial
+efficiency and the fullness of life of the collectivity. This
+arrested spiritual development may express itself not only in a direct
+participation by adults in youthful exploits of ferocity, but also
+indirectly in aiding and abetting disturbances of this kind on the
+part of younger persons. It thereby furthers the formation of habits of
+ferocity which may persist in the later life of the growing generation,
+and so retard any movement in the direction of a more peaceable
+effective temperament on the part of the community. If a person so
+endowed with a proclivity for exploits is in a position to guide the
+development of habits in the adolescent members of the community, the
+influence which he exerts in the direction of conservation and reversion
+to prowess may be very considerable. This is the significance, for
+instance, of the fostering care latterly bestowed by many clergymen
+and other pillars of society upon "boys' brigades" and similar
+pseudo-military organizations. The same is true of the encouragement
+given to the growth of "college spirit," college athletics, and the
+like, in the higher institutions of learning.
+
+These manifestations of the predatory temperament are all to be classed
+under the head of exploit. They are partly simple and unreflected
+expressions of an attitude of emulative ferocity, partly activities
+deliberately entered upon with a view to gaining repute for prowess.
+Sports of all kinds are of the same general character, including
+prize-fights, bull-fights, athletics, shooting, angling, yachting,
+and games of skill, even where the element of destructive physical
+efficiency is not an obtrusive feature. Sports shade off from the basis
+of hostile combat, through skill, to cunning and chicanery, without its
+being possible to draw a line at any point. The ground of an addiction
+to sports is an archaic spiritual constitution--the possession of the
+predatory emulative propensity in a relatively high potency, a strong
+proclivity to adventuresome exploit and to the infliction of damage is
+especially pronounced in those employments which are in colloquial usage
+specifically called sportsmanship.
+
+It is perhaps truer, or at least more evident, as regards sports than as
+regards the other expressions of predatory emulation already spoken of,
+that the temperament which inclines men to them is essentially a boyish
+temperament. The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree
+marks an arrested development of the man's moral nature. This peculiar
+boyishness of temperament in sporting men immediately becomes apparent
+when attention is directed to the large element of make-believe that
+is present in all sporting activity. Sports share this character of
+make-believe with the games and exploits to which children, especially
+boys, are habitually inclined. Make-believe does not enter in the same
+proportion into all sports, but it is present in a very appreciable
+degree in all. It is apparently present in a larger measure in
+sportsmanship proper and in athletic contests than in set games of skill
+of a more sedentary character; although this rule may not be found to
+apply with any great uniformity. It is noticeable, for instance, that
+even very mild-mannered and matter-of-fact men who go out shooting are
+apt to carry an excess of arms and accoutrements in order to impress
+upon their own imagination the seriousness of their undertaking.
+These huntsmen are also prone to a histrionic, prancing gait and to
+an elaborate exaggeration of the motions, whether of stealth or of
+onslaught, involved in their deeds of exploit. Similarly in athletic
+sports there is almost invariably present a good share of rant and
+swagger and ostensible mystification--features which mark the histrionic
+nature of these employments. In all this, of course, the reminder of
+boyish make-believe is plain enough. The slang of athletics, by the way,
+is in great part made up of extremely sanguinary locutions borrowed from
+the terminology of warfare. Except where it is adopted as a necessary
+means of secret communication, the use of a special slang in any
+employment is probably to be accepted as evidence that the occupation in
+question is substantially make-believe.
+
+A further feature in which sports differ from the duel and similar
+disturbances of the peace is the peculiarity that they admit of other
+motives being assigned for them besides the impulses of exploit and
+ferocity. There is probably little if any other motive present in any
+given case, but the fact that other reasons for indulging in sports are
+frequently assigned goes to say that other grounds are sometimes present
+in a subsidiary way. Sportsmen--hunters and anglers--are more or less in
+the habit of assigning a love of nature, the need of recreation, and the
+like, as the incentives to their favorite pastime. These motives are no
+doubt frequently present and make up a part of the attractiveness of
+the sportsman's life; but these can not be the chief incentives. These
+ostensible needs could be more readily and fully satisfied without the
+accompaniment of a systematic effort to take the life of those creatures
+that make up an essential feature of that "nature" that is beloved
+by the sportsman. It is, indeed, the most noticeable effect of the
+sportsman's activity to keep nature in a state of chronic desolation by
+killing off all living thing whose destruction he can compass.
+
+Still, there is ground for the sportsman's claim that under the existing
+conventionalities his need of recreation and of contact with nature can
+best be satisfied by the course which he takes. Certain canons of good
+breeding have been imposed by the prescriptive example of a predatory
+leisure class in the past and have been somewhat painstakingly conserved
+by the usage of the latter-day representatives of that class; and these
+canons will not permit him, without blame, to seek contact with nature
+on other terms. From being an honorable employment handed down from the
+predatory culture as the highest form of everyday leisure, sports have
+come to be the only form of outdoor activity that has the full sanction
+of decorum. Among the proximate incentives to shooting and angling,
+then, may be the need of recreation and outdoor life. The remoter cause
+which imposes the necessity of seeking these objects under the cover of
+systematic slaughter is a prescription that can not be violated except
+at the risk of disrepute and consequent lesion to one's self-respect.
+
+The case of other kinds of sport is somewhat similar. Of these, athletic
+games are the best example. Prescriptive usage with respect to what
+forms of activity, exercise, and recreation are permissible under the
+code of reputable living is of course present here also. Those who are
+addicted to athletic sports, or who admire them, set up the claim that
+these afford the best available means of recreation and of "physical
+culture." And prescriptive usage gives countenance to the claim. The
+canons of reputable living exclude from the scheme of life of the
+leisure class all activity that can not be classed as conspicuous
+leisure. And consequently they tend by prescription to exclude it also
+from the scheme of life of the community generally. At the same
+time purposeless physical exertion is tedious and distasteful beyond
+tolerance. As has been noticed in another connection, recourse is in
+such a case had to some form of activity which shall at least afford
+a colorable pretense of purpose, even if the object assigned be only a
+make-believe. Sports satisfy these requirements of substantial futility
+together with a colorable make-believe of purpose. In addition to
+this they afford scope for emulation, and are attractive also on that
+account. In order to be decorous, an employment must conform to the
+leisure-class canon of reputable waste; at the same time all activity,
+in order to be persisted in as an habitual, even if only partial,
+expression of life, must conform to the generically human canon of
+efficiency for some serviceable objective end. The leisure-class canon
+demands strict and comprehensive futility, the instinct of workmanship
+demands purposeful action. The leisure-class canon of decorum acts
+slowly and pervasively, by a selective elimination of all substantially
+useful or purposeful modes of action from the accredited scheme of
+life; the instinct of workmanship acts impulsively and may be satisfied,
+provisionally, with a proximate purpose. It is only as the apprehended
+ulterior futility of a given line of action enters the reflective
+complex of consciousness as an element essentially alien to the normally
+purposeful trend of the life process that its disquieting and deterrent
+effect on the consciousness of the agent is wrought.
+
+The individual's habits of thought make an organic complex, the trend
+of which is necessarily in the direction of serviceability to the
+life process. When it is attempted to assimilate systematic waste or
+futility, as an end in life, into this organic complex, there presently
+supervenes a revulsion. But this revulsion of the organism may be
+avoided if the attention can be confined to the proximate, unreflected
+purpose of dexterous or emulative exertion. Sports--hunting, angling,
+athletic games, and the like--afford an exercise for dexterity and for
+the emulative ferocity and astuteness characteristic of predatory life.
+So long as the individual is but slightly gifted with reflection or
+with a sense of the ulterior trend of his actions so long as his life
+is substantially a life of naive impulsive action--so long the immediate
+and unreflected purposefulness of sports, in the way of an expression of
+dominance, will measurably satisfy his instinct of workmanship. This is
+especially true if his dominant impulses are the unreflecting emulative
+propensities of the predaceous temperament. At the same time the canons
+of decorum will commend sports to him as expressions of a pecuniarily
+blameless life. It is by meeting these two requirements, of ulterior
+wastefulness and proximate purposefulness, that any given employment
+holds its place as a traditional and habitual mode of decorous
+recreation. In the sense that other forms of recreation and exercise
+are morally impossible to persons of good breeding and delicate
+sensibilities, then, sports are the best available means of recreation
+under existing circumstances.
+
+But those members of respectable society who advocate athletic games
+commonly justify their attitude on this head to themselves and to their
+neighbors on the ground that these games serve as an invaluable means of
+development. They not only improve the contestant's physique, but it
+is commonly added that they also foster a manly spirit, both in the
+participants and in the spectators. Football is the particular game
+which will probably first occur to any one in this community when the
+question of the serviceability of athletic games is raised, as this form
+of athletic contest is at present uppermost in the mind of those who
+plead for or against games as a means of physical or moral salvation.
+This typical athletic sport may, therefore, serve to illustrate the
+bearing of athletics upon the development of the contestant's character
+and physique. It has been said, not inaptly, that the relation of
+football to physical culture is much the same as that of the bull-fight
+to agriculture. Serviceability for these lusory institutions requires
+sedulous training or breeding. The material used, whether brute or
+human, is subjected to careful selection and discipline, in order to
+secure and accentuate certain aptitudes and propensities which are
+characteristic of the ferine state, and which tend to obsolescence under
+domestication. This does not mean that the result in either case is
+an all around and consistent rehabilitation of the ferine or barbarian
+habit of mind and body. The result is rather a one-sided return to
+barbarism or to the feroe natura--a rehabilitation and accentuation
+of those ferine traits which make for damage and desolation, without
+a corresponding development of the traits which would serve the
+individual's self-preservation and fullness of life in a ferine
+environment. The culture bestowed in football gives a product of exotic
+ferocity and cunning. It is a rehabilitation of the early barbarian
+temperament, together with a suppression of those details of
+temperament, which, as seen from the standpoint of the social and
+economic exigencies, are the redeeming features of the savage character.
+
+The physical vigor acquired in the training for athletic games--so far
+as the training may be said to have this effect--is of advantage both
+to the individual and to the collectivity, in that, other things being
+equal, it conduces to economic serviceability. The spiritual traits
+which go with athletic sports are likewise economically advantageous
+to the individual, as contradistinguished from the interests of the
+collectivity. This holds true in any community where these traits are
+present in some degree in the population. Modern competition is in
+large part a process of self-assertion on the basis of these traits of
+predatory human nature. In the sophisticated form in which they enter
+into the modern, peaceable emulation, the possession of these traits
+in some measure is almost a necessary of life to the civilized man. But
+while they are indispensable to the competitive individual, they are
+not directly serviceable to the community. So far as regards the
+serviceability of the individual for the purposes of the collective
+life, emulative efficiency is of use only indirectly if at all. Ferocity
+and cunning are of no use to the community except in its hostile
+dealings with other communities; and they are useful to the individual
+only because there is so large a proportion of the same traits actively
+present in the human environment to which he is exposed. Any individual
+who enters the competitive struggle without the due endowment of these
+traits is at a disadvantage, somewhat as a hornless steer would find
+himself at a disadvantage in a drove of horned cattle.
+
+The possession and the cultivation of the predatory traits of character
+may, of course, be desirable on other than economic grounds. There is a
+prevalent aesthetic or ethical predilection for the barbarian aptitudes,
+and the traits in question minister so effectively to this predilection
+that their serviceability in the aesthetic or ethical respect probably
+offsets any economic unserviceability which they may give. But for the
+present purpose that is beside the point. Therefore nothing is said here
+as to the desirability or advisability of sports on the whole, or as to
+their value on other than economic grounds.
+
+In popular apprehension there is much that is admirable in the type
+of manhood which the life of sport fosters. There is self-reliance and
+good-fellowship, so termed in the somewhat loose colloquial use of
+the words. From a different point of view the qualities currently so
+characterized might be described as truculence and clannishness. The
+reason for the current approval and admiration of these manly qualities,
+as well as for their being called manly, is the same as the reason for
+their usefulness to the individual. The members of the community, and
+especially that class of the community which sets the pace in canons of
+taste, are endowed with this range of propensities in sufficient measure
+to make their absence in others felt as a shortcoming, and to make
+their possession in an exceptional degree appreciated as an attribute of
+superior merit. The traits of predatory man are by no means obsolete in
+the common run of modern populations. They are present and can be called
+out in bold relief at any time by any appeal to the sentiments in
+which they express themselves--unless this appeal should clash with the
+specific activities that make up our habitual occupations and comprise
+the general range of our everyday interests. The common run of the
+population of any industrial community is emancipated from these,
+economically considered, untoward propensities only in the sense
+that, through partial and temporary disuse, they have lapsed into the
+background of sub-conscious motives. With varying degrees of potency in
+different individuals, they remain available for the aggressive shaping
+of men's actions and sentiments whenever a stimulus of more than
+everyday intensity comes in to call them forth. And they assert
+themselves forcibly in any case where no occupation alien to the
+predatory culture has usurped the individual's everyday range of
+interest and sentiment. This is the case among the leisure class and
+among certain portions of the population which are ancillary to that
+class. Hence the facility with which any new accessions to the leisure
+class take to sports; and hence the rapid growth of sports and of
+the sporting sentient in any industrial community where wealth has
+accumulated sufficiently to exempt a considerable part of the population
+from work.
+
+A homely and familiar fact may serve to show that the predaceous impulse
+does not prevail in the same degree in all classes. Taken simply as a
+feature of modern life, the habit of carrying a walking-stick may seem
+at best a trivial detail; but the usage has a significance for the point
+in question. The classes among whom the habit most prevails--the classes
+with whom the walking-stick is associated in popular apprehension--are
+the men of the leisure class proper, sporting men, and the lower-class
+delinquents. To these might perhaps be added the men engaged in the
+pecuniary employments. The same is not true of the common run of men
+engaged in industry and it may be noted by the way that women do not
+carry a stick except in case of infirmity, where it has a use of a
+different kind. The practice is of course in great measure a matter
+of polite usage; but the basis of polite usage is, in turn, the
+proclivities of the class which sets the pace in polite usage. The
+walking-stick serves the purpose of an advertisement that the bearer's
+hands are employed otherwise than in useful effort, and it therefore has
+utility as an evidence of leisure. But it is also a weapon, and it meets
+a felt need of barbarian man on that ground. The handling of so tangible
+and primitive a means of offense is very comforting to any one who is
+gifted with even a moderate share of ferocity. The exigencies of
+the language make it impossible to avoid an apparent implication of
+disapproval of the aptitudes, propensities, and expressions of life here
+under discussion. It is, however, not intended to imply anything in the
+way of deprecation or commendation of any one of these phases of human
+character or of the life process. The various elements of the prevalent
+human nature are taken up from the point of view of economic theory,
+and the traits discussed are gauged and graded with regard to their
+immediate economic bearing on the facility of the collective life
+process. That is to say, these phenomena are here apprehended from
+the economic point of view and are valued with respect to their direct
+action in furtherance or hindrance of a more perfect adjustment of the
+human collectivity to the environment and to the institutional structure
+required by the economic situation of the collectivity for the present
+and for the immediate future. For these purposes the traits handed down
+from the predatory culture are less serviceable than might be. Although
+even in this connection it is not to be overlooked that the energetic
+aggressiveness and pertinacity of predatory man is a heritage of no mean
+value. The economic value--with some regard also to the social value in
+the narrower sense--of these aptitudes and propensities is attempted to
+be passed upon without reflecting on their value as seen from another
+point of view. When contrasted with the prosy mediocrity of the
+latter-day industrial scheme of life, and judged by the accredited
+standards of morality, and more especially by the standards of
+aesthetics and of poetry, these survivals from a more primitive type of
+manhood may have a very different value from that here assigned them.
+But all this being foreign to the purpose in hand, no expression
+of opinion on this latter head would be in place here. All that is
+admissible is to enter the caution that these standards of excellence,
+which are alien to the present purpose, must not be allowed to influence
+our economic appreciation of these traits of human character or of the
+activities which foster their growth. This applies both as regards those
+persons who actively participate in sports and those whose sporting
+experience consists in contemplation only. What is here said of
+the sporting propensity is likewise pertinent to sundry reflections
+presently to be made in this connection on what would colloquially be
+known as the religious life.
+
+The last paragraph incidentally touches upon the fact that everyday
+speech can scarcely be employed in discussing this class of aptitudes
+and activities without implying deprecation or apology. The fact is
+significant as showing the habitual attitude of the dispassionate common
+man toward the propensities which express themselves in sports and in
+exploit generally. And this is perhaps as convenient a place as any
+to discuss that undertone of deprecation which runs through all the
+voluminous discourse in defense or in laudation of athletic sports, as
+well as of other activities of a predominantly predatory character. The
+same apologetic frame of mind is at least beginning to be observable in
+the spokesmen of most other institutions handed down from the barbarian
+phase of life. Among these archaic institutions which are felt to need
+apology are comprised, with others, the entire existing system of the
+distribution of wealth, together with the resulting class distinction of
+status; all or nearly all forms of consumption that come under the head
+of conspicuous waste; the status of women under the patriarchal system;
+and many features of the traditional creeds and devout observances,
+especially the exoteric expressions of the creed and the naive
+apprehension of received observances. What is to be said in this
+connection of the apologetic attitude taken in commending sports and
+the sporting character will therefore apply, with a suitable change in
+phraseology, to the apologies offered in behalf of these other, related
+elements of our social heritage.
+
+There is a feeling--usually vague and not commonly avowed in so many
+words by the apologist himself, but ordinarily perceptible in the manner
+of his discourse--that these sports, as well as the general range of
+predaceous impulses and habits of thought which underlie the sporting
+character, do not altogether commend themselves to common sense. "As
+to the majority of murderers, they are very incorrect characters." This
+aphorism offers a valuation of the predaceous temperament, and of the
+disciplinary effects of its overt expression and exercise, as seen from
+the moralist's point of view. As such it affords an indication of what
+is the deliverance of the sober sense of mature men as to the degree
+of availability of the predatory habit of mind for the purposes of the
+collective life. It is felt that the presumption is against any activity
+which involves habituation to the predatory attitude, and that the
+burden of proof lies with those who speak for the rehabilitation of the
+predaceous temper and for the practices which strengthen it. There is a
+strong body of popular sentiment in favor of diversions and enterprises
+of the kind in question; but there is at the same time present in
+the community a pervading sense that this ground of sentiment wants
+legitimation. The required legitimation is ordinarily sought by
+showing that although sports are substantially of a predatory, socially
+disintegrating effect; although their proximate effect runs in
+the direction of reversion to propensities that are industrially
+disserviceable; yet indirectly and remotely--by some not readily
+comprehensible process of polar induction, or counter-irritation
+perhaps--sports are conceived to foster a habit of mind that is
+serviceable for the social or industrial purpose. That is to say,
+although sports are essentially of the nature of invidious exploit, it
+is presumed that by some remote and obscure effect they result in the
+growth of a temperament conducive to non-invidious work. It is commonly
+attempted to show all this empirically or it is rather assumed that this
+is the empirical generalization which must be obvious to any one who
+cares to see it. In conducting the proof of this thesis the treacherous
+ground of inference from cause to effect is somewhat shrewdly avoided,
+except so far as to show that the "manly virtues" spoken of above
+are fostered by sports. But since it is these manly virtues that are
+(economically) in need of legitimation, the chain of proof breaks
+off where it should begin. In the most general economic terms, these
+apologies are an effort to show that, in spite of the logic of the
+thing, sports do in fact further what may broadly be called workmanship.
+So long as he has not succeeded in persuading himself or others that
+this is their effect the thoughtful apologist for sports will not rest
+content, and commonly, it is to be admitted, he does not rest content.
+His discontent with his own vindication of the practice in question is
+ordinarily shown by his truculent tone and by the eagerness with which
+he heaps up asseverations in support of his position. But why are
+apologies needed? If there prevails a body of popular sentient in
+favor of sports, why is not that fact a sufficient legitimation? The
+protracted discipline of prowess to which the race has been subjected
+under the predatory and quasi-peaceable culture has transmitted to the
+men of today a temperament that finds gratification in these expressions
+of ferocity and cunning. So, why not accept these sports as legitimate
+expressions of a normal and wholesome human nature? What other norm is
+there that is to be lived up to than that given in the aggregate range
+of propensities that express themselves in the sentiments of this
+generation, including the hereditary strain of prowess? The ulterior
+norm to which appeal is taken is the instinct of workmanship, which is
+an instinct more fundamental, of more ancient prescription, than
+the propensity to predatory emulation. The latter is but a special
+development of the instinct of workmanship, a variant, relatively late
+and ephemeral in spite of its great absolute antiquity. The emulative
+predatory impulse--or the instinct of sportsmanship, as it might well
+be called--is essentially unstable in comparison with the primordial
+instinct of workmanship out of which it has been developed and
+differentiated. Tested by this ulterior norm of life, predatory
+emulation, and therefore the life of sports, falls short.
+
+The manner and the measure in which the institution of a leisure class
+conduces to the conservation of sports and invidious exploit can of
+course not be succinctly stated. From the evidence already recited it
+appears that, in sentient and inclinations, the leisure class is more
+favorable to a warlike attitude and animus than the industrial classes.
+Something similar seems to be true as regards sports. But it is chiefly
+in its indirect effects, though the canons of decorous living, that the
+institution has its influence on the prevalent sentiment with respect to
+the sporting life. This indirect effect goes almost unequivocally in
+the direction of furthering a survival of the predatory temperament
+and habits; and this is true even with respect to those variants of
+the sporting life which the higher leisure-class code of proprieties
+proscribes; as, e.g., prize-fighting, cock-fighting, and other
+like vulgar expressions of the sporting temper. Whatever the latest
+authenticated schedule of detail proprieties may say, the accredited
+canons of decency sanctioned by the institution say without equivocation
+that emulation and waste are good and their opposites are disreputable.
+In the crepuscular light of the social nether spaces the details of the
+code are not apprehended with all the facility that might be desired,
+and these broad underlying canons of decency are therefore applied
+somewhat unreflectingly, with little question as to the scope of their
+competence or the exceptions that have been sanctioned in detail.
+
+Addiction to athletic sports, not only in the way of direct
+participation, but also in the way of sentiment and moral support, is,
+in a more or less pronounced degree, a characteristic of the leisure
+class; and it is a trait which that class shares with the lower-class
+delinquents, and with such atavistic elements throughout the body of
+the community as are endowed with a dominant predaceous trend. Few
+individuals among the populations of Western civilized countries are
+so far devoid of the predaceous instinct as to find no diversion in
+contemplating athletic sports and games, but with the common run of
+individuals among the industrial classes the inclination to sports
+does not assert itself to the extent of constituting what may fairly
+be called a sporting habit. With these classes sports are an occasional
+diversion rather than a serious feature of life. This common body of the
+people can therefore not be said to cultivate the sporting propensity.
+Although it is not obsolete in the average of them, or even in any
+appreciable number of individuals, yet the predilection for sports in
+the commonplace industrial classes is of the nature of a reminiscence,
+more or less diverting as an occasional interest, rather than a vital
+and permanent interest that counts as a dominant factor in shaping
+the organic complex of habits of thought into which it enters. As it
+manifests itself in the sporting life of today, this propensity may not
+appear to be an economic factor of grave consequence. Taken simply by
+itself it does not count for a great deal in its direct effects on the
+industrial efficiency or the consumption of any given individual; but
+the prevalence and the growth of the type of human nature of which this
+propensity is a characteristic feature is a matter of some consequence.
+It affects the economic life of the collectivity both as regards the
+rate of economic development and as regards the character of the results
+attained by the development. For better or worse, the fact that the
+popular habits of thought are in any degree dominated by this type of
+character can not but greatly affect the scope, direction, standards,
+and ideals of the collective economic life, as well as the degree of
+adjustment of the collective life to the environment.
+
+Something to a like effect is to be said of other traits that go to make
+up the barbarian character. For the purposes of economic theory, these
+further barbarian traits may be taken as concomitant variations of that
+predaceous temper of which prowess is an expression. In great measure
+they are not primarily of an economic character, nor do they have much
+direct economic bearing. They serve to indicate the stage of economic
+evolution to which the individual possessed of them is adapted. They
+are of importance, therefore, as extraneous tests of the degree of
+adaptation of the character in which they are comprised to the economic
+exigencies of today, but they are also to some extent important as
+being aptitudes which themselves go to increase or diminish the economic
+serviceability of the individual.
+
+As it finds expression in the life of the barbarian, prowess manifests
+itself in two main directions--force and fraud. In varying degrees these
+two forms of expression are similarly present in modern warfare, in the
+pecuniary occupations, and in sports and games. Both lines of aptitudes
+are cultivated and strengthened by the life of sport as well as by the
+more serious forms of emulative life. Strategy or cunning is an element
+invariably present in games, as also in warlike pursuits and in the
+chase. In all of these employments strategy tends to develop into
+finesse and chicanery. Chicanery, falsehood, browbeating, hold a
+well-secured place in the method of procedure of any athletic contest
+and in games generally. The habitual employment of an umpire, and
+the minute technical regulations governing the limits and details of
+permissible fraud and strategic advantage, sufficiently attest the fact
+that fraudulent practices and attempts to overreach one's opponents
+are not adventitious features of the game. In the nature of the case
+habituation to sports should conduce to a fuller development of
+the aptitude for fraud; and the prevalence in the community of that
+predatory temperament which inclines men to sports connotes a prevalence
+of sharp practice and callous disregard of the interests of others,
+individually and collectively. Resort to fraud, in any guise and under
+any legitimation of law or custom, is an expression of a narrowly
+self-regarding habit of mind. It is needless to dwell at any length on
+the economic value of this feature of the sporting character.
+
+In this connection it is to be noted that the most obvious
+characteristic of the physiognomy affected by athletic and other
+sporting men is that of an extreme astuteness. The gifts and exploits
+of Ulysses are scarcely second to those of Achilles, either in their
+substantial furtherance of the game or in the éclat which they give the
+astute sporting man among his associates. The pantomime of astuteness
+is commonly the first step in that assimilation to the professional
+sporting man which a youth undergoes after matriculation in any
+reputable school, of the secondary or the higher education, as the case
+may be. And the physiognomy of astuteness, as a decorative feature,
+never ceases to receive the thoughtful attention of men whose serious
+interest lies in athletic games, races, or other contests of a similar
+emulative nature. As a further indication of their spiritual kinship,
+it may be pointed out that the members of the lower delinquent class
+usually show this physiognomy of astuteness in a marked degree, and that
+they very commonly show the same histrionic exaggeration of it that is
+often seen in the young candidate for athletic honors. This, by the
+way, is the most legible mark of what is vulgarly called "toughness" in
+youthful aspirants for a bad name.
+
+The astute man, it may be remarked, is of no economic value to the
+community--unless it be for the purpose of sharp practice in dealings
+with other communities. His functioning is not a furtherance of the
+generic life process. At its best, in its direct economic bearing, it is
+a conversion of the economic substance of the collectivity to a growth
+alien to the collective life process--very much after the analogy of
+what in medicine would be called a benign tumor, with some tendency to
+transgress the uncertain line that divides the benign from the malign
+growths. The two barbarian traits, ferocity and astuteness, go to make
+up the predaceous temper or spiritual attitude. They are the expressions
+of a narrowly self-regarding habit of mind. Both are highly serviceable
+for individual expediency in a life looking to invidious success. Both
+also have a high aesthetic value. Both are fostered by the pecuniary
+culture. But both alike are of no use for the purposes of the collective
+life.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Eleven ~~ The Belief in Luck
+
+The gambling propensity is another subsidiary trait of the barbarian
+temperament. It is a concomitant variation of character of almost
+universal prevalence among sporting men and among men given to warlike
+and emulative activities generally. This trait also has a direct
+economic value. It is recognized to be a hindrance to the highest
+industrial efficiency of the aggregate in any community where it
+prevails in an appreciable degree. The gambling proclivity is doubtfully
+to be classed as a feature belonging exclusively to the predatory type
+of human nature. The chief factor in the gambling habit is the belief in
+luck; and this belief is apparently traceable, at least in its elements,
+to a stage in human evolution antedating the predatory culture. It may
+well have been under the predatory culture that the belief in luck was
+developed into the form in which it is present, as the chief element of
+the gambling proclivity, in the sporting temperament. It probably owes
+the specific form under which it occurs in the modern culture to the
+predatory discipline. But the belief in luck is in substance a habit
+of more ancient date than the predatory culture. It is one form of the
+artistic apprehension of things. The belief seems to be a trait carried
+over in substance from an earlier phase into the barbarian culture,
+and transmuted and transmitted through that culture to a later stage
+of human development under a specific form imposed by the predatory
+discipline. But in any case, it is to be taken as an archaic trait,
+inherited from a more or less remote past, more or less incompatible
+with the requirements of the modern industrial process, and more or less
+of a hindrance to the fullest efficiency of the collective economic life
+of the present.
+
+While the belief in luck is the basis of the gambling habit, it is not
+the only element that enters into the habit of betting. Betting on the
+issue of contests of strength and skill proceeds on a further motive,
+without which the belief in luck would scarcely come in as a prominent
+feature of sporting life. This further motive is the desire of the
+anticipated winner, or the partisan of the anticipated winning side, to
+heighten his side's ascendency at the cost of the loser. Not only does
+the stronger side score a more signal victory, and the losing side
+suffer a more painful and humiliating defeat, in proportion as the
+pecuniary gain and loss in the wager is large; although this alone is
+a consideration of material weight. But the wager is commonly laid also
+with a view, not avowed in words nor even recognized in set terms in
+petto, to enhancing the chances of success for the contestant on which
+it is laid. It is felt that substance and solicitude expended to
+this end can not go for naught in the issue. There is here a special
+manifestation of the instinct of workmanship, backed by an even more
+manifest sense that the animistic congruity of things must decide for a
+victorious outcome for the side in whose behalf the propensity inherent
+in events has been propitiated and fortified by so much of conative
+and kinetic urging. This incentive to the wager expresses itself freely
+under the form of backing one's favorite in any contest, and it is
+unmistakably a predatory feature. It is as ancillary to the predaceous
+impulse proper that the belief in luck expresses itself in a wager. So
+that it may be set down that in so far as the belief in luck comes
+to expression in the form of laying a wager, it is to be accounted an
+integral element of the predatory type of character. The belief is, in
+its elements, an archaic habit which belongs substantially to early,
+undifferentiated human nature; but when this belief is helped out by the
+predatory emulative impulse, and so is differentiated into the specific
+form of the gambling habit, it is, in this higher-developed and specific
+form, to be classed as a trait of the barbarian character.
+
+The belief in luck is a sense of fortuitous necessity in the sequence
+of phenomena. In its various mutations and expressions, it is of very
+serious importance for the economic efficiency of any community in which
+it prevails to an appreciable extent. So much so as to warrant a more
+detailed discussion of its origin and content and of the bearing of its
+various ramifications upon economic structure and function, as well as
+a discussion of the relation of the leisure class to its growth,
+differentiation, and persistence. In the developed, integrated form
+in which it is most readily observed in the barbarian of the predatory
+culture or in the sporting man of modern communities, the belief
+comprises at least two distinguishable elements--which are to be taken
+as two different phases of the same fundamental habit of thought, or as
+the same psychological factor in two successive phases of its evolution.
+The fact that these two elements are successive phases of the same
+general line of growth of belief does not hinder their coexisting in the
+habits of thought of any given individual. The more primitive form
+(or the more archaic phase) is an incipient animistic belief, or an
+animistic sense of relations and things, that imputes a quasi-personal
+character to facts. To the archaic man all the obtrusive and obviously
+consequential objects and facts in his environment have a quasi-personal
+individuality. They are conceived to be possessed of volition, or rather
+of propensities, which enter into the complex of causes and affect
+events in an inscrutable manner. The sporting man's sense of luck and
+chance, or of fortuitous necessity, is an inarticulate or inchoate
+animism. It applies to objects and situations, often in a very vague
+way; but it is usually so far defined as to imply the possibility of
+propitiating, or of deceiving and cajoling, or otherwise disturbing the
+holding of propensities resident in the objects which constitute the
+apparatus and accessories of any game of skill or chance. There are few
+sporting men who are not in the habit of wearing charms or talismans to
+which more or less of efficacy is felt to belong. And the proportion is
+not much less of those who instinctively dread the "hoodooing" of the
+contestants or the apparatus engaged in any contest on which they lay a
+wager; or who feel that the fact of their backing a given contestant or
+side in the game does and ought to strengthen that side; or to whom the
+"mascot" which they cultivate means something more than a jest.
+
+In its simple form the belief in luck is this instinctive sense of an
+inscrutable teleological propensity in objects or situations. Objects or
+events have a propensity to eventuate in a given end, whether this end
+or objective point of the sequence is conceived to be fortuitously given
+or deliberately sought. From this simple animism the belief shades off
+by insensible gradations into the second, derivative form or phase above
+referred to, which is a more or less articulate belief in an inscrutable
+preternatural agency. The preternatural agency works through the visible
+objects with which it is associated, but is not identified with these
+objects in point of individuality. The use of the term "preternatural
+agency" here carries no further implication as to the nature of the
+agency spoken of as preternatural. This is only a farther development of
+animistic belief. The preternatural agency is not necessarily conceived
+to be a personal agent in the full sense, but it is an agency which
+partakes of the attributes of personality to the extent of somewhat
+arbitrarily influencing the outcome of any enterprise, and especially
+of any contest. The pervading belief in the hamingia or gipta
+(gaefa, authna) which lends so much of color to the Icelandic sagas
+specifically, and to early Germanic folk-legends, is an illustration of
+this sense of an extra-physical propensity in the course of events.
+
+In this expression or form of the belief the propensity is scarcely
+personified although to a varying extent an individuality is imputed to
+it; and this individuated propensity is sometimes conceived to yield to
+circumstances, commonly to circumstances of a spiritual or preternatural
+character. A well-known and striking exemplification of the belief--in
+a fairly advanced stage of differentiation and involving an
+anthropomorphic personification of the preternatural agent appealed
+to--is afforded by the wager of battle. Here the preternatural agent was
+conceived to act on request as umpire, and to shape the outcome of the
+contest in accordance with some stipulated ground of decision, such as
+the equity or legality of the respective contestants' claims. The like
+sense of an inscrutable but spiritually necessary tendency in events
+is still traceable as an obscure element in current popular belief, as
+shown, for instance, by the well-accredited maxim, "Thrice is he
+armed who knows his quarrel just,"--a maxim which retains much of its
+significance for the average unreflecting person even in the civilized
+communities of today. The modern reminiscence of the belief in the
+hamingia, or in the guidance of an unseen hand, which is traceable in
+the acceptance of this maxim is faint and perhaps uncertain; and it
+seems in any case to be blended with other psychological moments that
+are not clearly of an animistic character.
+
+For the purpose in hand it is unnecessary to look more closely into the
+psychological process or the ethnological line of descent by which the
+later of these two animistic apprehensions of propensity is derived
+from the earlier. This question may be of the gravest importance to
+folk-psychology or to the theory of the evolution of creeds and cults.
+The same is true of the more fundamental question whether the two
+are related at all as successive phases in a sequence of development.
+Reference is here made to the existence of these questions only to
+remark that the interest of the present discussion does not lie in that
+direction. So far as concerns economic theory, these two elements or
+phases of the belief in luck, or in an extra-causal trend or propensity
+in things, are of substantially the same character. They have an
+economic significance as habits of thought which affect the individual's
+habitual view of the facts and sequences with which he comes in contact,
+and which thereby affect the individual's serviceability for the
+industrial purpose. Therefore, apart from all question of the beauty,
+worth, or beneficence of any animistic belief, there is place for
+a discussion of their economic bearing on the serviceability of the
+individual as an economic factor, and especially as an industrial agent.
+
+It has already been noted in an earlier connection, that in order to
+have the highest serviceability in the complex industrial processes of
+today, the individual must be endowed with the aptitude and the habit
+of readily apprehending and relating facts in terms of causal sequence.
+Both as a whole and in its details, the industrial process is a process
+of quantitative causation. The "intelligence" demanded of the workman,
+as well as of the director of an industrial process, is little else
+than a degree of facility in the apprehension of and adaptation to a
+quantitatively determined causal sequence. This facility of apprehension
+and adaptation is what is lacking in stupid workmen, and the growth
+of this facility is the end sought in their education--so far as their
+education aims to enhance their industrial efficiency.
+
+In so far as the individual's inherited aptitudes or his training
+incline him to account for facts and sequences in other terms than those
+of causation or matter-of-fact, they lower his productive efficiency or
+industrial usefulness. This lowering of efficiency through a penchant
+for animistic methods of apprehending facts is especially apparent when
+taken in the mass-when a given population with an animistic turn is
+viewed as a whole. The economic drawbacks of animism are more patent and
+its consequences are more far-reaching under the modern system of large
+industry than under any other. In the modern industrial communities,
+industry is, to a constantly increasing extent, being organized in a
+comprehensive system of organs and functions mutually conditioning one
+another; and therefore freedom from all bias in the causal apprehension
+of phenomena grows constantly more requisite to efficiency on the
+part of the men concerned in industry. Under a system of handicraft an
+advantage in dexterity, diligence, muscular force, or endurance may, in
+a very large measure, offset such a bias in the habits of thought of the
+workmen.
+
+Similarly in agricultural industry of the traditional kind, which
+closely resembles handicraft in the nature of the demands made upon
+the workman. In both, the workman is himself the prime mover chiefly
+depended upon, and the natural forces engaged are in large part
+apprehended as inscrutable and fortuitous agencies, whose working lies
+beyond the workman's control or discretion. In popular apprehension
+there is in these forms of industry relatively little of the industrial
+process left to the fateful swing of a comprehensive mechanical sequence
+which must be comprehended in terms of causation and to which the
+operations of industry and the movements of the workmen must be adapted.
+As industrial methods develop, the virtues of the handicraftsman count
+for less and less as an offset to scanty intelligence or a halting
+acceptance of the sequence of cause and effect. The industrial
+organization assumes more and more of the character of a mechanism, in
+which it is man's office to discriminate and select what natural forces
+shall work out their effects in his service. The workman's part in
+industry changes from that of a prime mover to that of discrimination
+and valuation of quantitative sequences and mechanical facts. The
+faculty of a ready apprehension and unbiased appreciation of causes in
+his environment grows in relative economic importance and any element in
+the complex of his habits of thought which intrudes a bias at
+variance with this ready appreciation of matter-of-fact sequence gains
+proportionately in importance as a disturbing element acting to lower
+his industrial usefulness. Through its cumulative effect upon the
+habitual attitude of the population, even a slight or inconspicuous bias
+towards accounting for everyday facts by recourse to other ground than
+that of quantitative causation may work an appreciable lowering of the
+collective industrial efficiency of a community.
+
+The animistic habit of mind may occur in the early, undifferentiated
+form of an inchoate animistic belief, or in the later and more highly
+integrated phase in which there is an anthropomorphic personification of
+the propensity imputed to facts. The industrial value of such a lively
+animistic sense, or of such recourse to a preternatural agency or the
+guidance of an unseen hand, is of course very much the same in either
+case. As affects the industrial serviceability of the individual, the
+effect is of the same kind in either case; but the extent to which
+this habit of thought dominates or shapes the complex of his habits of
+thought varies with the degree of immediacy, urgency, or exclusiveness
+with which the individual habitually applies the animistic or
+anthropomorphic formula in dealing with the facts of his environment.
+The animistic habit acts in all cases to blur the appreciation of causal
+sequence; but the earlier, less reflected, less defined animistic sense
+of propensity may be expected to affect the intellectual processes
+of the individual in a more pervasive way than the higher forms of
+anthropomorphism. Where the animistic habit is present in the naive
+form, its scope and range of application are not defined or limited.
+It will therefore palpably affect his thinking at every turn of the
+person's life--wherever he has to do with the material means of life.
+In the later, maturer development of animism, after it has been defined
+through the process of anthropomorphic elaboration, when its application
+has been limited in a somewhat consistent fashion to the remote and the
+invisible, it comes about that an increasing range of everyday facts are
+provisionally accounted for without recourse to the preternatural agency
+in which a cultivated animism expresses itself. A highly integrated,
+personified preternatural agency is not a convenient means of handling
+the trivial occurrences of life, and a habit is therefore easily fallen
+into of accounting for many trivial or vulgar phenomena in terms of
+sequence. The provisional explanation so arrived at is by neglect
+allowed to stand as definitive, for trivial purposes, until special
+provocation or perplexity recalls the individual to his allegiance. But
+when special exigencies arise, that is to say, when there is peculiar
+need of a full and free recourse to the law of cause and effect, then
+the individual commonly has recourse to the preternatural agency as a
+universal solvent, if he is possessed of an anthropomorphic belief.
+
+The extra-causal propensity or agent has a very high utility as a
+recourse in perplexity, but its utility is altogether of a non-economic
+kind. It is especially a refuge and a fund of comfort where it has
+attained the degree of consistency and specialization that belongs to
+an anthropomorphic divinity. It has much to commend it even on other
+grounds than that of affording the perplexed individual a means of
+escape from the difficulty of accounting for phenomena in terms of
+causal sequence. It would scarcely be in place here to dwell on the
+obvious and well-accepted merits of an anthropomorphic divinity, as seen
+from the point of view of the aesthetic, moral, or spiritual interest,
+or even as seen from the less remote standpoint of political, military,
+or social policy. The question here concerns the less picturesque and
+less urgent economic value of the belief in such a preternatural agency,
+taken as a habit of thought which affects the industrial serviceability
+of the believer. And even within this narrow, economic range, the
+inquiry is perforce confined to the immediate bearing of this habit
+of thought upon the believer's workmanlike serviceability, rather than
+extended to include its remoter economic effects. These remoter effects
+are very difficult to trace. The inquiry into them is so encumbered with
+current preconceptions as to the degree in which life is enhanced by
+spiritual contact with such a divinity, that any attempt to inquire into
+their economic value must for the present be fruitless.
+
+The immediate, direct effect of the animistic habit of thought upon the
+general frame of mind of the believer goes in the direction of lowering
+his effective intelligence in the respect in which intelligence is of
+especial consequence for modern industry. The effect follows, in varying
+degree, whether the preternatural agent or propensity believed in is
+of a higher or a lower cast. This holds true of the barbarian's and
+the sporting man's sense of luck and propensity, and likewise of the
+somewhat higher developed belief in an anthropomorphic divinity, such as
+is commonly possessed by the same class. It must be taken to hold true
+also--though with what relative degree of cogency is not easy to say--of
+the more adequately developed anthropomorphic cults, such as appeal
+to the devout civilized man. The industrial disability entailed by a
+popular adherence to one of the higher anthropomorphic cults may be
+relatively slight, but it is not to be overlooked. And even these
+high-class cults of the Western culture do not represent the last
+dissolving phase of this human sense of extra-causal propensity. Beyond
+these the same animistic sense shows itself also in such attenuations of
+anthropomorphism as the eighteenth-century appeal to an order of nature
+and natural rights, and in their modern representative, the ostensibly
+post-Darwinian concept of a meliorative trend in the process of
+evolution. This animistic explanation of phenomena is a form of the
+fallacy which the logicians knew by the name of ignava ratio. For
+the purposes of industry or of science it counts as a blunder in the
+apprehension and valuation of facts. Apart from its direct industrial
+consequences, the animistic habit has a certain significance for
+economic theory on other grounds. (1) It is a fairly reliable indication
+of the presence, and to some extent even of the degree of potency,
+of certain other archaic traits that accompany it and that are of
+substantial economic consequence; and (2) the material consequences of
+that code of devout proprieties to which the animistic habit gives rise
+in the development of an anthropomorphic cult are of importance both
+(a) as affecting the community's consumption of goods and the prevalent
+canons of taste, as already suggested in an earlier chapter, and (b) by
+inducing and conserving a certain habitual recognition of the relation
+to a superior, and so stiffening the current sense of status and
+allegiance.
+
+As regards the point last named (b), that body of habits of thought
+which makes up the character of any individual is in some sense an
+organic whole. A marked variation in a given direction at any one point
+carries with it, as its correlative, a concomitant variation in the
+habitual expression of life in other directions or other groups of
+activities. These various habits of thought, or habitual expressions
+of life, are all phases of the single life sequence of the individual;
+therefore a habit formed in response to a given stimulus will
+necessarily affect the character of the response made to other stimuli.
+A modification of human nature at any one point is a modification of
+human nature as a whole. On this ground, and perhaps to a still greater
+extent on obscurer grounds that can not be discussed here, there are
+these concomitant variations as between the different traits of human
+nature. So, for instance, barbarian peoples with a well-developed
+predatory scheme of life are commonly also possessed of a strong
+prevailing animistic habit, a well-formed anthropomorphic cult, and
+a lively sense of status. On the other hand, anthropomorphism and
+the realizing sense of an animistic propensity in material are less
+obtrusively present in the life of the peoples at the cultural stages
+which precede and which follow the barbarian culture. The sense of
+status is also feebler; on the whole, in peaceable communities. It is to
+be remarked that a lively, but slightly specialized, animistic belief
+is to be found in most if not all peoples living in the ante-predatory,
+savage stage of culture. The primitive savage takes his animism less
+seriously than the barbarian or the degenerate savage. With him
+it eventuates in fantastic myth-making, rather than in coercive
+superstition. The barbarian culture shows sportsmanship, status, and
+anthropomorphism. There is commonly observable a like concomitance of
+variations in the same respects in the individual temperament of men in
+the civilized communities of today. Those modern representatives of
+the predaceous barbarian temper that make up the sporting element are
+commonly believers in luck; at least they have a strong sense of an
+animistic propensity in things, by force of which they are given to
+gambling. So also as regards anthropomorphism in this class. Such of
+them as give in their adhesion to some creed commonly attach themselves
+to one of the naively and consistently anthropomorphic creeds; there
+are relatively few sporting men who seek spiritual comfort in the less
+anthropomorphic cults, such as the Unitarian or the Universalist.
+
+Closely bound up with this correlation of anthropomorphism and prowess
+is the fact that anthropomorphic cults act to conserve, if not to
+initiate, habits of mind favorable to a regime of status. As regards
+this point, it is quite impossible to say where the disciplinary effect
+of the cult ends and where the evidence of a concomitance of variations
+in inherited traits begins. In their finest development, the predatory
+temperament, the sense of status, and the anthropomorphic cult all
+together belong to the barbarian culture; and something of a mutual
+causal relation subsists between the three phenomena as they come into
+sight in communities on that cultural level. The way in which they recur
+in correlation in the habits and attitudes of individuals and classes
+today goes far to imply a like causal or organic relation between the
+same psychological phenomena considered as traits or habits of the
+individual. It has appeared at an earlier point in the discussion
+that the relation of status, as a feature of social structure, is a
+consequence of the predatory habit of life. As regards its line
+of derivation, it is substantially an elaborated expression of the
+predatory attitude. On the other hand, an anthropomorphic cult is a
+code of detailed relations of status superimposed upon the concept of
+a preternatural, inscrutable propensity in material things. So that, as
+regards the external facts of its derivation, the cult may be taken as
+an outgrowth of archaic man's pervading animistic sense, defined and in
+some degree transformed by the predatory habit of life, the result being
+a personified preternatural agency, which is by imputation endowed with
+a full complement of the habits of thought that characterize the man of
+the predatory culture.
+
+The grosser psychological features in the case, which have an immediate
+bearing on economic theory and are consequently to be taken account
+of here, are therefore: (a) as has appeared in an earlier chapter,
+the predatory, emulative habit of mind here called prowess is but the
+barbarian variant of the generically human instinct of workmanship,
+which has fallen into this specific form under the guidance of a habit
+of invidious comparison of persons; (b) the relation of status is a
+formal expression of such an invidious comparison duly gauged and graded
+according to a sanctioned schedule; (c) an anthropomorphic cult, in the
+days of its early vigor at least, is an institution the characteristic
+element of which is a relation of status between the human subject as
+inferior and the personified preternatural agency as superior. With
+this in mind, there should be no difficulty in recognizing the intimate
+relation which subsists between these three phenomena of human nature
+and of human life; the relation amounts to an identity in some of their
+substantial elements. On the one hand, the system of status and the
+predatory habit of life are an expression of the instinct of workmanship
+as it takes form under a custom of invidious comparison; on the other
+hand, the anthropomorphic cult and the habit of devout observances
+are an expression of men's animistic sense of a propensity in material
+things, elaborated under the guidance of substantially the same general
+habit of invidious comparison. The two categories--the emulative habit
+of life and the habit of devout observances--are therefore to be taken
+as complementary elements of the barbarian type of human nature and of
+its modern barbarian variants. They are expressions of much the same
+range of aptitudes, made in response to different sets of stimuli.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twelve ~~ Devout Observances
+
+A discoursive rehearsal of certain incidents of modern life will show
+the organic relation of the anthropomorphic cults to the barbarian
+culture and temperament. It will likewise serve to show how the survival
+and efficacy of the cults and he prevalence of their schedule of devout
+observances are related to the institution of a leisure class and to the
+springs of action underlying that institution. Without any intention to
+commend or to deprecate the practices to be spoken of under the head of
+devout observances, or the spiritual and intellectual traits of which
+these observances are the expression, the everyday phenomena of current
+anthropomorphic cults may be taken up from the point of view of the
+interest which they have for economic theory. What can properly
+be spoken of here are the tangible, external features of devout
+observances. The moral, as well as the devotional value of the life of
+faith lies outside of the scope of the present inquiry. Of course no
+question is here entertained as to the truth or beauty of the creeds on
+which the cults proceed. And even their remoter economic bearing can not
+be taken up here; the subject is too recondite and of too grave import
+to find a place in so slight a sketch.
+
+Something has been said in an earlier chapter as to the influence which
+pecuniary standards of value exert upon the processes of valuation
+carried out on other bases, not related to the pecuniary interest. The
+relation is not altogether one-sided. The economic standards or canons
+of valuation are in their turn influenced by extra-economic standards of
+value. Our judgments of the economic bearing of facts are to some extent
+shaped by the dominant presence of these weightier interests. There is
+a point of view, indeed, from which the economic interest is of weight
+only as being ancillary to these higher, non-economic interests. For the
+present purpose, therefore, some thought must be taken to isolate
+the economic interest or the economic hearing of these phenomena of
+anthropomorphic cults. It takes some effort to divest oneself of the
+more serious point of view, and to reach an economic appreciation
+of these facts, with as little as may be of the bias due to higher
+interests extraneous to economic theory. In the discussion of the
+sporting temperament, it has appeared that the sense of an animistic
+propensity in material things and events is what affords the spiritual
+basis of the sporting man's gambling habit. For the economic purpose,
+this sense of propensity is substantially the same psychological element
+as expresses itself, under a variety of forms, in animistic beliefs and
+anthropomorphic creeds. So far as concerns those tangible psychological
+features with which economic theory has to deal, the gambling spirit
+which pervades the sporting element shades off by insensible gradations
+into that frame of mind which finds gratification in devout observances.
+As seen from the point of view of economic theory, the sporting
+character shades off into the character of a religious devotee. Where
+the betting man's animistic sense is helped out by a somewhat consistent
+tradition, it has developed into a more or less articulate belief in
+a preternatural or hyperphysical agency, with something of an
+anthropomorphic content. And where this is the case, there is commonly
+a perceptible inclination to make terms with the preternatural agency
+by some approved method of approach and conciliation. This element of
+propitiation and cajoling has much in common with the crasser forms
+of worship--if not in historical derivation, at least in actual
+psychological content. It obviously shades off in unbroken continuity
+into what is recognized as superstitious practice and belief, and so
+asserts its claim to kinship with the grosser anthropomorphic cults.
+
+The sporting or gambling temperament, then, comprises some of the
+substantial psychological elements that go to make a believer in creeds
+and an observer of devout forms, the chief point of coincidence being
+the belief in an inscrutable propensity or a preternatural interposition
+in the sequence of events. For the purpose of the gambling practice the
+belief in preternatural agency may be, and ordinarily is, less closely
+formulated, especially as regards the habits of thought and the scheme
+of life imputed to the preternatural agent; or, in other words, as
+regards his moral character and his purposes in interfering in events.
+With respect to the individuality or personality of the agency whose
+presence as luck, or chance, or hoodoo, or mascot, etc., he feels and
+sometimes dreads and endeavors to evade, the sporting man's views are
+also less specific, less integrated and differentiated. The basis of his
+gambling activity is, in great measure, simply an instinctive sense
+of the presence of a pervasive extraphysical and arbitrary force or
+propensity in things or situations, which is scarcely recognized as a
+personal agent. The betting man is not infrequently both a believer
+in luck, in this naive sense, and at the same time a pretty staunch
+adherent of some form of accepted creed. He is especially prone to
+accept so much of the creed as concerts the inscrutable power and the
+arbitrary habits of the divinity which has won his confidence. In such a
+case he is possessed of two, or sometimes more than two, distinguishable
+phases of animism. Indeed, the complete series of successive phases of
+animistic belief is to be found unbroken in the spiritual furniture
+of any sporting community. Such a chain of animistic conceptions will
+comprise the most elementary form of an instinctive sense of luck and
+chance and fortuitous necessity at one end of the series, together with
+the perfectly developed anthropomorphic divinity at the other end, with
+all intervening stages of integration. Coupled with these beliefs in
+preternatural agency goes an instinctive shaping of conduct to conform
+with the surmised requirements of the lucky chance on the one hand,
+and a more or less devout submission to the inscrutable decrees of the
+divinity on the other hand.
+
+There is a relationship in this respect between the sporting temperament
+and the temperament of the delinquent classes; and the two are related
+to the temperament which inclines to an anthropomorphic cult. Both
+the delinquent and the sporting man are on the average more apt to be
+adherents of some accredited creed, and are also rather more inclined
+to devout observances, than the general average of the community. It is
+also noticeable that unbelieving members of these classes show more of
+a proclivity to become proselytes to some accredited faith than the
+average of unbelievers. This fact of observation is avowed by the
+spokesmen of sports, especially in apologizing for the more naively
+predatory athletic sports. Indeed, it is somewhat insistently claimed as
+a meritorious feature of sporting life that the habitual participants in
+athletic games are in some degree peculiarly given to devout practices.
+And it is observable that the cult to which sporting men and the
+predaceous delinquent classes adhere, or to which proselytes from
+these classes commonly attach themselves, is ordinarily not one of the
+so-called higher faiths, but a cult which has to do with a thoroughly
+anthropomorphic divinity. Archaic, predatory human nature is not
+satisfied with abstruse conceptions of a dissolving personality that
+shades off into the concept of quantitative causal sequence, such as the
+speculative, esoteric creeds of Christendom impute to the First Cause,
+Universal Intelligence, World Soul, or Spiritual Aspect. As an instance
+of a cult of the character which the habits of mind of the athlete and
+the delinquent require, may be cited that branch of the church militant
+known as the Salvation Army. This is to some extent recruited from the
+lower-class delinquents, and it appears to comprise also, among its
+officers especially, a larger proportion of men with a sporting record
+than the proportion of such men in the aggregate population of the
+community.
+
+College athletics afford a case in point. It is contended by exponents
+of the devout element in college life--and there seems to be no ground
+for disputing the claim--that the desirable athletic material afforded
+by any student body in this country is at the same time predominantly
+religious; or that it is at least given to devout observances to a
+greater degree than the average of those students whose interest in
+athletics and other college sports is less. This is what might be
+expected on theoretical grounds. It may be remarked, by the way, that
+from one point of view this is felt to reflect credit on the college
+sporting life, on athletic games, and on those persons who occupy
+themselves with these matters. It happens not frequently that college
+sporting men devote themselves to religious propaganda, either as a
+vocation or as a by-occupation; and it is observable that when this
+happens they are likely to become propagandists of some one of the more
+anthropomorphic cults. In their teaching they are apt to insist
+chiefly on the personal relation of status which subsists between an
+anthropomorphic divinity and the human subject.
+
+This intimate relation between athletics and devout observance among
+college men is a fact of sufficient notoriety; but it has a special
+feature to which attention has not been called, although it is obvious
+enough. The religious zeal which pervades much of the college sporting
+element is especially prone to express itself in an unquestioning
+devoutness and a naive and complacent submission to an inscrutable
+Providence. It therefore by preference seeks affiliation with some one
+of those lay religious organizations which occupy themselves with
+the spread of the exoteric forms of faith--as, e.g., the Young Men's
+Christian Association or the Young People's Society for Christian
+Endeavor. These lay bodies are organized to further "practical"
+religion; and as if to enforce the argument and firmly establish the
+close relationship between the sporting temperament and the archaic
+devoutness, these lay religious bodies commonly devote some appreciable
+portion of their energies to the furtherance of athletic contests and
+similar games of chance and skill. It might even be said that sports
+of this kind are apprehended to have some efficacy as a means of grace.
+They are apparently useful as a means of proselyting, and as a means of
+sustaining the devout attitude in converts once made. That is to
+say, the games which give exercise to the animistic sense and to the
+emulative propensity help to form and to conserve that habit of mind to
+which the more exoteric cults are congenial. Hence, in the hands of
+the lay organizations, these sporting activities come to do duty as a
+novitiate or a means of induction into that fuller unfolding of the
+life of spiritual status which is the privilege of the full communicant
+along.
+
+That the exercise of the emulative and lower animistic proclivities are
+substantially useful for the devout purpose seems to be placed beyond
+question by the fact that the priesthood of many denominations is
+following the lead of the lay organizations in this respect. Those
+ecclesiastical organizations especially which stand nearest the lay
+organizations in their insistence on practical religion have gone some
+way towards adopting these or analogous practices in connection with the
+traditional devout observances. So there are "boys' brigades," and other
+organizations, under clerical sanction, acting to develop the emulative
+proclivity and the sense of status in the youthful members of the
+congregation. These pseudo-military organizations tend to elaborate and
+accentuate the proclivity to emulation and invidious comparison, and so
+strengthen the native facility for discerning and approving the relation
+of personal mastery and subservience. And a believer is eminently a
+person who knows how to obey and accept chastisement with good grace.
+But the habits of thought which these practices foster and conserve
+make up but one half of the substance of the anthropomorphic cults.
+The other, complementary element of devout life--the animistic habit
+of mind--is recruited and conserved by a second range of practices
+organized under clerical sanction. These are the class of gambling
+practices of which the church bazaar or raffle may be taken as the type.
+As indicating the degree of legitimacy of these practices in connection
+with devout observances proper, it is to be remarked that these raffles,
+and the like trivial opportunities for gambling, seem to appeal with
+more effect to the common run of the members of religious organizations
+than they do to persons of a less devout habit of mind.
+
+All this seems to argue, on the one hand, that the same temperament
+inclines people to sports as inclines them to the anthropomorphic cults,
+and on the other hand that the habituation to sports, perhaps especially
+to athletic sports, acts to develop the propensities which find
+satisfaction in devout observances. Conversely; it also appears that
+habituation to these observances favors the growth of a proclivity
+for athletic sports and for all games that give play to the habit of
+invidious comparison and of the appeal to luck. Substantially the same
+range of propensities finds expression in both these directions of
+the spiritual life. That barbarian human nature in which the predatory
+instinct and the animistic standpoint predominate is normally prone
+to both. The predatory habit of mind involves an accentuated sense of
+personal dignity and of the relative standing of individuals. The social
+structure in which the predatory habit has been the dominant factor
+in the shaping of institutions is a structure based on status. The
+pervading norm in the predatory community's scheme of life is the
+relation of superior and inferior, noble and base, dominant and
+subservient persons and classes, master and slave. The anthropomorphic
+cults have come down from that stage of industrial development and
+have been shaped by the same scheme of economic differentiation--a
+differentiation into consumer and producer--and they are pervaded by the
+same dominant principle of mastery and subservience. The cults impute to
+their divinity the habits of thought answering to the stage of economic
+differentiation at which the cults took shape. The anthropomorphic
+divinity is conceived to be punctilious in all questions of precedence
+and is prone to an assertion of mastery and an arbitrary exercise of
+power--an habitual resort to force as the final arbiter.
+
+In the later and maturer formulations of the anthropomorphic creed this
+imputed habit of dominance on the part of a divinity of awful presence
+and inscrutable power is chastened into "the fatherhood of God." The
+spiritual attitude and the aptitudes imputed to the preternatural agent
+are still such as belong under the regime of status, but they now assume
+the patriarchal cast characteristic of the quasi-peaceable stage of
+culture. Still it is to be noted that even in this advanced phase of the
+cult the observances in which devoutness finds expression consistently
+aim to propitiate the divinity by extolling his greatness and glory and
+by professing subservience and fealty. The act of propitiation or
+of worship is designed to appeal to a sense of status imputed to the
+inscrutable power that is thus approached. The propitiatory formulas
+most in vogue are still such as carry or imply an invidious comparison.
+A loyal attachment to the person of an anthropomorphic divinity endowed
+with such an archaic human nature implies the like archaic propensities
+in the devotee. For the purposes of economic theory, the relation of
+fealty, whether to a physical or to an extraphysical person, is to be
+taken as a variant of that personal subservience which makes up so large
+a share of the predatory and the quasi-peaceable scheme of life.
+
+The barbarian conception of the divinity, as a warlike chieftain
+inclined to an overbearing manner of government, has been greatly
+softened through the milder manners and the soberer habits of life that
+characterize those cultural phases which lie between the early predatory
+stage and the present. But even after this chastening of the devout
+fancy, and the consequent mitigation of the harsher traits of conduct
+and character that are currently imputed to the divinity, there still
+remains in the popular apprehension of the divine nature and temperament
+a very substantial residue of the barbarian conception. So it comes
+about, for instance, that in characterizing the divinity and his
+relations to the process of human life, speakers and writers are still
+able to make effective use of similes borrowed from the vocabulary of
+war and of the predatory manner of life, as well as of locutions which
+involve an invidious comparison. Figures of speech of this import
+are used with good effect even in addressing the less warlike modern
+audiences, made up of adherents of the blander variants of the creed.
+This effective use of barbarian epithets and terms of comparison by
+popular speakers argues that the modern generation has retained a lively
+appreciation of the dignity and merit of the barbarian virtues; and
+it argues also that there is a degree of congruity between the devout
+attitude and the predatory habit of mind. It is only on second thought,
+if at all, that the devout fancy of modern worshippers revolts at the
+imputation of ferocious and vengeful emotions and actions to the object
+of their adoration. It is a matter of common observation that sanguinary
+epithets applied to the divinity have a high aesthetic and honorific
+value in the popular apprehension. That is to say, suggestions
+which these epithets carry are very acceptable to our unreflecting
+apprehension.
+
+  Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
+  He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
+  He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword;
+  His truth is marching on.
+
+The guiding habits of thought of a devout person move on the plane of an
+archaic scheme of life which has outlived much of its usefulness for the
+economic exigencies of the collective life of today. In so far as the
+economic organization fits the exigencies of the collective life of
+today, it has outlived the regime of status, and has no use and no place
+for a relation of personal subserviency. So far as concerns the economic
+efficiency of the community, the sentiment of personal fealty, and the
+general habit of mind of which that sentiment is an expression, are
+survivals which cumber the ground and hinder an adequate adjustment of
+human institutions to the existing situation. The habit of mind which
+best lends itself to the purposes of a peaceable, industrial community,
+is that matter-of-fact temper which recognizes the value of material
+facts simply as opaque items in the mechanical sequence. It is
+that frame of mind which does not instinctively impute an animistic
+propensity to things, nor resort to preternatural intervention as an
+explanation of perplexing phenomena, nor depend on an unseen hand to
+shape the course of events to human use. To meet the requirements of the
+highest economic efficiency under modern conditions, the world process
+must habitually be apprehended in terms of quantitative, dispassionate
+force and sequence.
+
+As seen from the point of view of the later economic exigencies,
+devoutness is, perhaps in all cases, to be looked upon as a survival
+from an earlier phase of associated life--a mark of arrested spiritual
+development. Of course it remains true that in a community where the
+economic structure is still substantially a system of status; where
+the attitude of the average of persons in the community is consequently
+shaped by and adapted to the relation of personal dominance and
+personal subservience; or where for any other reason--of tradition or
+of inherited aptitude--the population as a whole is strongly inclined to
+devout observances; there a devout habit of mind in any individual, not
+in excess of the average of the community, must be taken simply as
+a detail of the prevalent habit of life. In this light, a devout
+individual in a devout community can not be called a case of reversion,
+since he is abreast of the average of the community. But as seen from
+the point of view of the modern industrial situation, exceptional
+devoutness--devotional zeal that rises appreciably above the average
+pitch of devoutness in the community--may safely be set down as in all
+cases an atavistic trait.
+
+It is, of course, equally legitimate to consider these phenomena from
+a different point of view. They may be appreciated for a different
+purpose, and the characterization here offered may be turned about.
+In speaking from the point of view of the devotional interest, or the
+interest of devout taste, it may, with equal cogency, be said that
+the spiritual attitude bred in men by the modern industrial life is
+unfavorable to a free development of the life of faith. It might fairly
+be objected to the later development of the industrial process that its
+discipline tends to "materialism," to the elimination of filial piety.
+From the aesthetic point of view, again, something to a similar purport
+might be said. But, however legitimate and valuable these and the like
+reflections may be for their purpose, they would not be in place in the
+present inquiry, which is exclusively concerned with the valuation of
+these phenomena from the economic point of view.
+
+The grave economic significance of the anthropomorphic habit of mind
+and of the addiction to devout observances must serve as apology for
+speaking further on a topic which it can not but be distasteful to
+discuss at all as an economic phenomenon in a community so devout as
+ours. Devout observances are of economic importance as an index of a
+concomitant variation of temperament, accompanying the predatory habit
+of mind and so indicating the presence of industrially disserviceable
+traits. They indicate the presence of a mental attitude which has a
+certain economic value of its own by virtue of its influence upon
+the industrial serviceability of the individual. But they are also of
+importance more directly, in modifying the economic activities of the
+community, especially as regards the distribution and consumption of
+goods.
+
+The most obvious economic bearing of these observances is seen in the
+devout consumption of goods and services. The consumption of ceremonial
+paraphernalia required by any cult, in the way of shrines, temples,
+churches, vestments, sacrifices, sacraments, holiday attire, etc.,
+serves no immediate material end. All this material apparatus may,
+therefore, without implying deprecation, be broadly characterized as
+items of conspicuous waste. The like is true in a general way of the
+personal service consumed under this head; such as priestly education,
+priestly service, pilgrimages, fasts, holidays, household devotions,
+and the like. At the same time the observances in the execution of which
+this consumption takes place serve to extend and protract the vogue of
+those habits of thought on which an anthropomorphic cult rests. That is
+to say, they further the habits of thought characteristic of the regime
+of status. They are in so far an obstruction to the most effective
+organization of industry under modern circumstances; and are, in the
+first instance, antagonistic to the development of economic institutions
+in the direction required by the situation of today. For the present
+purpose, the indirect as well as the direct effects of this consumption
+are of the nature of a curtailment of the community's economic
+efficiency. In economic theory, then, and considered in its proximate
+consequences, the consumption of goods and effort in the service of
+an anthropomorphic divinity means a lowering of the vitality of the
+community. What may be the remoter, indirect, moral effects of this
+class of consumption does not admit of a succinct answer, and it is a
+question which can not be taken up here.
+
+It will be to the point, however, to note the general economic character
+of devout consumption, in comparison with consumption for other
+purposes. An indication of the range of motives and purposes from which
+devout consumption of goods proceeds will help toward an appreciation
+of the value both of this consumption itself and of the general habit of
+mind to which it is congenial. There is a striking parallelism, if not
+rather a substantial identity of motive, between the consumption which
+goes to the service of an anthropomorphic divinity and that which goes
+to the service of a gentleman of leisure chieftain or patriarch--in the
+upper class of society during the barbarian culture. Both in the case of
+the chieftain and in that of the divinity there are expensive edifices
+set apart for the behoof of the person served. These edifices, as well
+as the properties which supplement them in the service, must not be
+common in kind or grade; they always show a large element of conspicuous
+waste. It may also be noted that the devout edifices are invariably of
+an archaic cast in their structure and fittings. So also the servants,
+both of the chieftain and of the divinity, must appear in the presence
+clothed in garments of a special, ornate character. The characteristic
+economic feature of this apparel is a more than ordinarily accentuated
+conspicuous waste, together with the secondary feature--more accentuated
+in the case of the priestly servants than in that of the servants or
+courtiers of the barbarian potentate--that this court dress must always
+be in some degree of an archaic fashion. Also the garments worn by the
+lay members of the community when they come into the presence, should be
+of a more expensive kind than their everyday apparel. Here, again, the
+parallelism between the usage of the chieftain's audience hall and
+that of the sanctuary is fairly well marked. In this respect there
+is required a certain ceremonial "cleanness" of attire, the essential
+feature of which, in the economic respect, is that the garments worn
+on these occasions should carry as little suggestion as may be of any
+industrial occupation or of any habitual addiction to such employments
+as are of material use.
+
+This requirement of conspicuous waste and of ceremonial cleanness from
+the traces of industry extends also to the apparel, and in a less degree
+to the food, which is consumed on sacred holidays; that is to say, on
+days set apart--tabu--for the divinity or for some member of the lower
+ranks of the preternatural leisure class. In economic theory, sacred
+holidays are obviously to be construed as a season of vicarious leisure
+performed for the divinity or saint in whose name the tabu is imposed
+and to whose good repute the abstention from useful effort on these days
+is conceived to inure. The characteristic feature of all such seasons
+of devout vicarious leisure is a more or less rigid tabu on all
+activity that is of human use. In the case of fast-days the conspicuous
+abstention from gainful occupations and from all pursuits that
+(materially) further human life is further accentuated by compulsory
+abstinence from such consumption as would conduce to the comfort or the
+fullness of life of the consumer.
+
+It may be remarked, parenthetically, that secular holidays are of the
+same origin, by slightly remoter derivation. They shade off by degrees
+from the genuinely sacred days, through an intermediate class of
+semi-sacred birthdays of kings and great men who have been in some
+measure canonized, to the deliberately invented holiday set apart to
+further the good repute of some notable event or some striking fact, to
+which it is intended to do honor, or the good fame of which is felt
+to be in need of repair. The remoter refinement in the employment
+of vicarious leisure as a means of augmenting the good repute of a
+phenomenon or datum is seen at its best in its very latest application.
+A day of vicarious leisure has in some communities been set apart as
+Labor Day. This observance is designed to augment the prestige of
+the fact of labor, by the archaic, predatory method of a compulsory
+abstention from useful effort. To this datum of labor-in-general is
+imputed the good repute attributable to the pecuniary strength put
+in evidence by abstaining from labor. Sacred holidays, and holidays
+generally, are of the nature of a tribute levied on the body of the
+people. The tribute is paid in vicarious leisure, and the honorific
+effect which emerges is imputed to the person or the fact for whose
+good repute the holiday has been instituted. Such a tithe of vicarious
+leisure is a perquisite of all members of the preternatural leisure
+class and is indispensable to their good fame. Un saint qu'on ne chôme
+pas is indeed a saint fallen on evil days.
+
+Besides this tithe of vicarious leisure levied on the laity, there
+are also special classes of persons--the various grades of priests and
+hierodules--whose time is wholly set apart for a similar service. It is
+not only incumbent on the priestly class to abstain from vulgar labor,
+especially so far as it is lucrative or is apprehended to contribute to
+the temporal well-being of mankind. The tabu in the case of the priestly
+class goes farther and adds a refinement in the form of an injunction
+against their seeking worldly gain even where it may be had without
+debasing application to industry. It is felt to be unworthy of the
+servant of the divinity, or rather unworthy the dignity of the divinity
+whose servant he is, that he should seek material gain or take thought
+for temporal matters. "Of all contemptible things a man who pretends to
+be a priest of God and is a priest to his own comforts and ambitions
+is the most contemptible." There is a line of discrimination, which a
+cultivated taste in matters of devout observance finds little difficulty
+in drawing, between such actions and conduct as conduce to the
+fullness of human life and such as conduce to the good fame of the
+anthropomorphic divinity; and the activity of the priestly class, in the
+ideal barbarian scheme, falls wholly on the hither side of this line.
+What falls within the range of economics falls below the proper level
+of solicitude of the priesthood in its best estate. Such apparent
+exceptions to this rule as are afforded, for instance, by some of the
+medieval orders of monks (the members of which actually labored to some
+useful end), scarcely impugn the rule. These outlying orders of the
+priestly class are not a sacerdotal element in the full sense of the
+term. And it is noticeable also that these doubtfully sacerdotal
+orders, which countenanced their members in earning a living, fell into
+disrepute through offending the sense of propriety in the communities
+where they existed.
+
+The priest should not put his hand to mechanically productive work; but
+he should consume in large measure. But even as regards his consumption
+it is to be noted that it should take such forms as do not obviously
+conduce to his own comfort or fullness of life; it should conform to the
+rules governing vicarious consumption, as explained under that head in
+an earlier chapter. It is not ordinarily in good form for the priestly
+class to appear well fed or in hilarious spirits. Indeed, in many of
+the more elaborate cults the injunction against other than vicarious
+consumption by this class frequently goes so far as to enjoin
+mortification of the flesh. And even in those modern denominations which
+have been organized under the latest formulations of the creed, in a
+modern industrial community, it is felt that all levity and avowed zest
+in the enjoyment of the good things of this world is alien to the true
+clerical decorum. Whatever suggests that these servants of an invisible
+master are living a life, not of devotion to their master's good fame,
+but of application to their own ends, jars harshly on our sensibilities
+as something fundamentally and eternally wrong. They are a servant
+class, although, being servants of a very exalted master, they rank high
+in the social scale by virtue of this borrowed light. Their consumption
+is vicarious consumption; and since, in the advanced cults, their master
+has no need of material gain, their occupation is vicarious leisure in
+the full sense. "Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye
+do, do all to the glory of God." It may be added that so far as the
+laity is assimilated to the priesthood in the respect that they are
+conceived to be servants of the divinity. So far this imputed vicarious
+character attaches also to the layman's life. The range of application
+of this corollary is somewhat wide. It applies especially to such
+movements for the reform or rehabilitation of the religious life as
+are of an austere, pietistic, ascetic cast--where the human subject is
+conceived to hold his life by a direct servile tenure from his spiritual
+sovereign. That is to say, where the institution of the priesthood
+lapses, or where there is an exceptionally lively sense of the immediate
+and masterful presence of the divinity in the affairs of life, there
+the layman is conceived to stand in an immediate servile relation to
+the divinity, and his life is construed to be a performance of vicarious
+leisure directed to the enhancement of his master's repute. In such
+cases of reversion there is a return to the unmediated relation of
+subservience, as the dominant fact of the devout attitude. The emphasis
+is thereby thrown on an austere and discomforting vicarious leisure, to
+the neglect of conspicuous consumption as a means of grace.
+
+A doubt will present itself as to the full legitimacy of this
+characterization of the sacerdotal scheme of life, on the ground that a
+considerable proportion of the modern priesthood departs from the scheme
+in many details. The scheme does not hold good for the clergy of
+those denominations which have in some measure diverged from the old
+established schedule of beliefs or observances. These take thought, at
+least ostensibly or permissively, for the temporal welfare of the laity,
+as well as for their own. Their manner of life, not only in the privacy
+of their own household, but often even before the public, does not
+differ in an extreme degree from that of secular-minded persons, either
+in its ostensible austerity or in the archaism of its apparatus. This is
+truest for those denominations that have wandered the farthest. To
+this objection it is to be said that we have here to do not with a
+discrepancy in the theory of sacerdotal life, but with an imperfect
+conformity to the scheme on the part of this body of clergy. They are
+but a partial and imperfect representative of the priesthood, and must
+not be taken as exhibiting the sacerdotal scheme of life in an authentic
+and competent manner. The clergy of the sects and denominations might be
+characterized as a half-caste priesthood, or a priesthood in process of
+becoming or of reconstitution. Such a priesthood may be expected to
+show the characteristics of the sacerdotal office only as blended
+and obscured with alien motives and traditions, due to the disturbing
+presence of other factors than those of animism and status in the
+purposes of the organizations to which this non-conforming fraction of
+the priesthood belongs.
+
+Appeal may be taken direct to the taste of any person with a
+discriminating and cultivated sense of the sacerdotal proprieties, or
+to the prevalent sense of what constitutes clerical decorum in any
+community at all accustomed to think or to pass criticism on what a
+clergyman may or may not do without blame. Even in the most extremely
+secularized denominations, there is some sense of a distinction that
+should be observed between the sacerdotal and the lay scheme of life.
+There is no person of sensibility but feels that where the members of
+this denominational or sectarian clergy depart from traditional usage,
+in the direction of a less austere or less archaic demeanor and apparel,
+they are departing from the ideal of priestly decorum. There is probably
+no community and no sect within the range of the Western culture in
+which the bounds of permissible indulgence are not drawn appreciably
+closer for the incumbent of the priestly office than for the common
+layman. If the priest's own sense of sacerdotal propriety does not
+effectually impose a limit, the prevalent sense of the proprieties on
+the part of the community will commonly assert itself so obtrusively as
+to lead to his conformity or his retirement from office.
+
+Few if any members of any body of clergy, it may be added, would
+avowedly seek an increase of salary for gain's sake; and if such avowal
+were openly made by a clergyman, it would be found obnoxious to the
+sense of propriety among his congregation. It may also be noted in this
+connection that no one but the scoffers and the very obtuse are not
+instinctively grieved inwardly at a jest from the pulpit; and that there
+are none whose respect for their pastor does not suffer through any mark
+of levity on his part in any conjuncture of life, except it be levity
+of a palpably histrionic kind--a constrained unbending of dignity. The
+diction proper to the sanctuary and to the priestly office should also
+carry little if any suggestion of effective everyday life, and should
+not draw upon the vocabulary of modern trade or industry. Likewise,
+one's sense of the proprieties is readily offended by too detailed and
+intimate a handling of industrial and other purely human questions at
+the hands of the clergy. There is a certain level of generality below
+which a cultivated sense of the proprieties in homiletical discourse
+will not permit a well-bred clergyman to decline in his discussion
+of temporal interests. These matters that are of human and secular
+consequence simply, should properly be handled with such a degree of
+generality and aloofness as may imply that the speaker represents
+a master whose interest in secular affairs goes only so far as to
+permissively countenance them.
+
+It is further to be noticed that the non-conforming sects and variants
+whose priesthood is here under discussion, vary among themselves in the
+degree of their conformity to the ideal scheme of sacerdotal life. In
+a general way it will be found that the divergence in this respect is
+widest in the case of the relatively young denominations, and especially
+in the case of such of the newer denominations as have chiefly a lower
+middle-class constituency. They commonly show a large admixture of
+humanitarian, philanthropic, or other motives which can not be classed
+as expressions of the devotional attitude; such as the desire of
+learning or of conviviality, which enter largely into the effective
+interest shown by members of these organizations. The non-conforming or
+sectarian movements have commonly proceeded from a mixture of motives,
+some of which are at variance with that sense of status on which the
+priestly office rests. Sometimes, indeed, the motive has been in good
+part a revulsion against a system of status. Where this is the case
+the institution of the priesthood has broken down in the transition, at
+least partially. The spokesman of such an organization is at the outset
+a servant and representative of the organization, rather than a member
+of a special priestly class and the spokesman of a divine master. And
+it is only by a process of gradual specialization that, in succeeding
+generations, this spokesman regains the position of priest, with a full
+investiture of sacerdotal authority, and with its accompanying austere,
+archaic and vicarious manner of life. The like is true of the breakdown
+and redintegration of devout ritual after such a revulsion. The priestly
+office, the scheme of sacerdotal life, and the schedule of devout
+observances are rehabilitated only gradually, insensibly, and with more
+or less variation in details, as a persistent human sense of devout
+propriety reasserts its primacy in questions touching the interest in
+the preternatural--and it may be added, as the organization increases
+in wealth, and so acquires more of the point of view and the habits of
+thought of a leisure class.
+
+Beyond the priestly class, and ranged in an ascending hierarchy,
+ordinarily comes a superhuman vicarious leisure class of saints, angels,
+etc.--or their equivalents in the ethnic cults. These rise in grade, one
+above another, according to elaborate system of status. The principle of
+status runs through the entire hierarchical system, both visible and
+invisible. The good fame of these several orders of the supernatural
+hierarchy also commonly requires a certain tribute of vicarious
+consumption and vicarious leisure. In many cases they accordingly have
+devoted to their service sub-orders of attendants or dependents who
+perform a vicarious leisure for them, after much the same fashion as was
+found in an earlier chapter to be true of the dependent leisure class
+under the patriarchal system.
+
+It may not appear without reflection how these devout observances and
+the peculiarity of temperament which they imply, or the consumption of
+goods and services which is comprised in the cult, stand related to the
+leisure class of a modern community, or to the economic motives of which
+that class is the exponent in the modern scheme of life to this end a
+summary review of certain facts bearing on this relation will be useful.
+It appears from an earlier passage in this discussion that for the
+purpose of the collective life of today, especially so far as concerns
+the industrial efficiency of the modern community, the characteristic
+traits of the devout temperament are a hindrance rather than a help.
+It should accordingly be found that the modern industrial life tends
+selectively to eliminate these traits of human nature from the spiritual
+constitution of the classes that are immediately engaged in the
+industrial process. It should hold true, approximately, that devoutness
+is declining or tending to obsolescence among the members of what may
+be called the effective industrial community. At the same time it should
+appear that this aptitude or habit survives in appreciably greater vigor
+among those classes which do not immediately or primarily enter into the
+community's life process as an industrial factor.
+
+It has already been pointed out that these latter classes, which live
+by, rather than in, the industrial process, are roughly comprised under
+two categories (1) the leisure class proper, which is shielded from
+the stress of the economic situation; and (2) the indigent classes,
+including the lower-class delinquents, which are unduly exposed to
+the stress. In the case of the former class an archaic habit of mind
+persists because no effectual economic pressure constrains this class to
+an adaptation of its habits of thought to the changing situation; while
+in the latter the reason for a failure to adjust their habits of thought
+to the altered requirements of industrial efficiency is innutrition,
+absence of such surplus of energy as is needed in order to make the
+adjustment with facility, together with a lack of opportunity to acquire
+and become habituated to the modern point of view. The trend of the
+selective process runs in much the same direction in both cases.
+
+From the point of view which the modern industrial life inculcates,
+phenomena are habitually subsumed under the quantitative relation of
+mechanical sequence. The indigent classes not only fall short of the
+modicum of leisure necessary in order to appropriate and assimilate
+the more recent generalizations of science which this point of view
+involves, but they also ordinarily stand in such a relation of personal
+dependence or subservience to their pecuniary superiors as materially to
+retard their emancipation from habits of thought proper to the regime
+of status. The result is that these classes in some measure retain that
+general habit of mind the chief expression of which is a strong sense of
+personal status, and of which devoutness is one feature.
+
+In the older communities of the European culture, the hereditary leisure
+class, together with the mass of the indigent population, are given to
+devout observances in an appreciably higher degree than the average
+of the industrious middle class, wherever a considerable class of
+the latter character exists. But in some of these countries, the two
+categories of conservative humanity named above comprise virtually the
+whole population. Where these two classes greatly preponderate, their
+bent shapes popular sentiment to such an extent as to bear down any
+possible divergent tendency in the inconsiderable middle class, and
+imposes a devout attitude upon the whole community.
+
+This must, of course, not be construed to say that such communities or
+such classes as are exceptionally prone to devout observances tend to
+conform in any exceptional degree to the specifications of any code
+of morals that we may be accustomed to associate with this or that
+confession of faith. A large measure of the devout habit of mind
+need not carry with it a strict observance of the injunctions of the
+Decalogue or of the common law. Indeed, it is becoming somewhat of a
+commonplace with observers of criminal life in European communities that
+the criminal and dissolute classes are, if anything, rather more devout,
+and more naively so, than the average of the population. It is among
+those who constitute the pecuniary middle class and the body of
+law-abiding citizens that a relative exemption from the devotional
+attitude is to be looked for. Those who best appreciate the merits of
+the higher creeds and observances would object to all this and say that
+the devoutness of the low-class delinquents is a spurious, or at the
+best a superstitious devoutness; and the point is no doubt well taken
+and goes directly and cogently to the purpose intended. But for the
+purpose of the present inquiry these extra-economic, extra-psychological
+distinctions must perforce be neglected, however valid and however
+decisive they may be for the purpose for which they are made.
+
+What has actually taken place with regard to class emancipation from the
+habit of devout observance is shown by the latter-day complaint of
+the clergy--that the churches are losing the sympathy of the artisan
+classes, and are losing their hold upon them. At the same time it is
+currently believed that the middle class, commonly so called, is also
+falling away in the cordiality of its support of the church, especially
+so far as regards the adult male portion of that class. These are
+currently recognized phenomena, and it might seem that a simple
+reference to these facts should sufficiently substantiate the general
+position outlined. Such an appeal to the general phenomena of popular
+church attendance and church membership may be sufficiently convincing
+for the proposition here advanced. But it will still be to the purpose
+to trace in some detail the course of events and the particular forces
+which have wrought this change in the spiritual attitude of the more
+advanced industrial communities of today. It will serve to illustrate
+the manner in which economic causes work towards a secularization of
+men's habits of thought. In this respect the American community should
+afford an exceptionally convincing illustration, since this community
+has been the least trammelled by external circumstances of any equally
+important industrial aggregate.
+
+After making due allowance for exceptions and sporadic departures from
+the normal, the situation here at the present time may be summarized
+quite briefly. As a general rule the classes that are low in economic
+efficiency, or in intelligence, or both, are peculiarly devout--as, for
+instance, the Negro population of the South, much of the lower-class
+foreign population, much of the rural population, especially in those
+sections which are backward in education, in the stage of development of
+their industry, or in respect of their industrial contact with the rest
+of the community. So also such fragments as we possess of a specialized
+or hereditary indigent class, or of a segregated criminal or dissolute
+class; although among these latter the devout habit of mind is apt to
+take the form of a naive animistic belief in luck and in the efficacy of
+shamanistic practices perhaps more frequently than it takes the form of
+a formal adherence to any accredited creed. The artisan class, on
+the other hand, is notoriously falling away from the accredited
+anthropomorphic creeds and from all devout observances. This class is
+in an especial degree exposed to the characteristic intellectual and
+spiritual stress of modern organized industry, which requires a constant
+recognition of the undisguised phenomena of impersonal, matter-of-fact
+sequence and an unreserved conformity to the law of cause and effect.
+This class is at the same time not underfed nor over-worked to such an
+extent as to leave no margin of energy for the work of adaptation.
+
+The case of the lower or doubtful leisure class in America--the middle
+class commonly so called--is somewhat peculiar. It differs in respect
+of its devotional life from its European counterpart, but it differs in
+degree and method rather than in substance. The churches still have the
+pecuniary support of this class; although the creeds to which the
+class adheres with the greatest facility are relatively poor in
+anthropomorphic content. At the same time the effective middle-class
+congregation tends, in many cases, more or less remotely perhaps, to
+become a congregation of women and minors. There is an appreciable lack
+of devotional fervor among the adult males of the middle class, although
+to a considerable extent there survives among them a certain complacent,
+reputable assent to the outlines of the accredited creed under which
+they were born. Their everyday life is carried on in a more or less
+close contact with the industrial process.
+
+This peculiar sexual differentiation, which tends to delegate devout
+observances to the women and their children, is due, at least in
+part, to the fact that the middle-class women are in great measure a
+(vicarious) leisure class. The same is true in a less degree of the
+women of the lower, artisan classes. They live under a regime of status
+handed down from an earlier stage of industrial development, and thereby
+they preserve a frame of mind and habits of thought which incline them
+to an archaic view of things generally. At the same time they stand in
+no such direct organic relation to the industrial process at large as
+would tend strongly to break down those habits of thought which, for the
+modern industrial purpose, are obsolete. That is to say, the peculiar
+devoutness of women is a particular expression of that conservatism
+which the women of civilized communities owe, in great measure, to their
+economic position. For the modern man the patriarchal relation of status
+is by no means the dominant feature of life; but for the women on the
+other hand, and for the upper middle-class women especially, confined
+as they are by prescription and by economic circumstances to their
+"domestic sphere," this relation is the most real and most formative
+factor of life. Hence a habit of mind favorable to devout observances
+and to the interpretation of the facts of life generally in terms of
+personal status. The logic, and the logical processes, of her everyday
+domestic life are carried over into the realm of the supernatural, and
+the woman finds herself at home and content in a range of ideas which to
+the man are in great measure alien and imbecile.
+
+Still the men of this class are also not devoid of piety, although it
+is commonly not piety of an aggressive or exuberant kind. The men of
+the upper middle class commonly take a more complacent attitude towards
+devout observances than the men of the artisan class. This may perhaps
+be explained in part by saying that what is true of the women of
+the class is true to a less extent also of the men. They are to an
+appreciable extent a sheltered class; and the patriarchal relation of
+status which still persists in their conjugal life and in their habitual
+use of servants, may also act to conserve an archaic habit of mind and
+may exercise a retarding influence upon the process of secularization
+which their habits of thought are undergoing. The relations of the
+American middle-class man to the economic community, however, are
+usually pretty close and exacting; although it may be remarked, by the
+way and in qualification, that their economic activity frequently also
+partakes in some degree of the patriarchal or quasi-predatory character.
+The occupations which are in good repute among this class and which have
+most to do with shaping the class habits of thought, are the pecuniary
+occupations which have been spoken of in a similar connection in an
+earlier chapter. There is a good deal of the relation of arbitrary
+command and submission, and not a little of shrewd practice, remotely
+akin to predatory fraud. All this belongs on the plane of life of the
+predatory barbarian, to whom a devotional attitude is habitual. And in
+addition to this, the devout observances also commend themselves to this
+class on the ground of reputability. But this latter incentive to piety
+deserves treatment by itself and will be spoken of presently. There
+is no hereditary leisure class of any consequence in the American
+community, except in the South. This Southern leisure class is somewhat
+given to devout observances; more so than any class of corresponding
+pecuniary standing in other parts of the country. It is also well known
+that the creeds of the South are of a more old-fashioned cast than their
+counterparts in the North. Corresponding to this more archaic devotional
+life of the South is the lower industrial development of that section.
+The industrial organization of the South is at present, and especially
+it has been until quite recently, of a more primitive character than
+that of the American community taken as a whole. It approaches nearer
+to handicraft, in the paucity and rudeness of its mechanical appliances,
+and there is more of the element of mastery and subservience. It may
+also be noted that, owing to the peculiar economic circumstances of this
+section, the greater devoutness of the Southern population, both white
+and black, is correlated with a scheme of life which in many ways
+recalls the barbarian stages of industrial development. Among this
+population offenses of an archaic character also are and have been
+relatively more prevalent and are less deprecated than they are
+elsewhere; as, for example, duels, brawls, feuds, drunkenness,
+horse-racing, cock-fighting, gambling, male sexual incontinence
+(evidenced by the considerable number of mulattoes). There is also a
+livelier sense of honor--an expression of sportsmanship and a derivative
+of predatory life.
+
+As regards the wealthier class of the North, the American leisure class
+in the best sense of the term, it is, to begin with, scarcely possible
+to speak of an hereditary devotional attitude. This class is of too
+recent growth to be possessed of a well-formed transmitted habit in this
+respect, or even of a special home-grown tradition. Still, it may be
+noted in passing that there is a perceptible tendency among this class
+to give in at least a nominal, and apparently something of a real,
+adherence to some one of the accredited creeds. Also, weddings,
+funerals, and the like honorific events among this class are
+pretty uniformly solemnized with some especial degree of religious
+circumstance. It is impossible to say how far this adherence to a creed
+is a bona fide reversion to a devout habit of mind, and how far it is to
+be classed as a case of protective mimicry assumed for the purpose of
+an outward assimilation to canons of reputability borrowed from foreign
+ideals. Something of a substantial devotional propensity seems to
+be present, to judge especially by the somewhat peculiar degree of
+ritualistic observance which is in process of development in the
+upper-class cults. There is a tendency perceptible among the upper-class
+worshippers to affiliate themselves with those cults which lay
+relatively great stress on ceremonial and on the spectacular accessories
+of worship; and in the churches in which an upper-class membership
+predominates, there is at the same time a tendency to accentuate the
+ritualistic, at the cost of the intellectual features in the service and
+in the apparatus of the devout observances. This holds true even where
+the church in question belongs to a denomination with a relatively
+slight general development of ritual and paraphernalia. This peculiar
+development of the ritualistic element is no doubt due in part to a
+predilection for conspicuously wasteful spectacles, but it probably
+also in part indicates something of the devotional attitude of the
+worshippers. So far as the latter is true, it indicates a relatively
+archaic form of the devotional habit. The predominance of spectacular
+effects in devout observances is noticeable in all devout communities at
+a relatively primitive stage of culture and with a slight intellectual
+development. It is especially characteristic of the barbarian culture.
+Here there is pretty uniformly present in the devout observances a
+direct appeal to the emotions through all the avenues of sense. And
+a tendency to return to this naive, sensational method of appeal is
+unmistakable in the upper-class churches of today. It is perceptible
+in a less degree in the cults which claim the allegiance of the lower
+leisure class and of the middle classes. There is a reversion to the
+use of colored lights and brilliant spectacles, a freer use of symbols,
+orchestral music and incense, and one may even detect in "processionals"
+and "recessionals" and in richly varied genuflexional evolutions, an
+incipient reversion to so antique an accessory of worship as the sacred
+dance. This reversion to spectacular observances is not confined to the
+upper-class cults, although it finds its best exemplification and its
+highest accentuation in the higher pecuniary and social altitudes. The
+cults of the lower-class devout portion of the community, such as the
+Southern Negroes and the backward foreign elements of the population,
+of course also show a strong inclination to ritual, symbolism, and
+spectacular effects; as might be expected from the antecedents and the
+cultural level of those classes. With these classes the prevalence of
+ritual and anthropomorphism are not so much a matter of reversion as of
+continued development out of the past. But the use of ritual and related
+features of devotion are also spreading in other directions. In the
+early days of the American community the prevailing denominations
+started out with a ritual and paraphernalia of an austere simplicity;
+but it is a matter familiar to every one that in the course of time
+these denominations have, in a varying degree, adopted much of the
+spectacular elements which they once renounced. In a general way, this
+development has gone hand in hand with the growth of the wealth and the
+ease of life of the worshippers and has reached its fullest expression
+among those classes which grade highest in wealth and repute.
+
+The causes to which this pecuniary stratification of devoutness is
+due have already been indicated in a general way in speaking of
+class differences in habits of thought. Class differences as regards
+devoutness are but a special expression of a generic fact. The lax
+allegiance of the lower middle class, or what may broadly be called the
+failure of filial piety among this class, is chiefly perceptible among
+the town populations engaged in the mechanical industries. In a general
+way, one does not, at the present time, look for a blameless filial
+piety among those classes whose employment approaches that of the
+engineer and the mechanician. These mechanical employments are in a
+degree a modern fact. The handicraftsmen of earlier times, who served
+an industrial end of a character similar to that now served by the
+mechanician, were not similarly refractory under the discipline of
+devoutness. The habitual activity of the men engaged in these branches
+of industry has greatly changed, as regards its intellectual discipline,
+since the modern industrial processes have come into vogue; and the
+discipline to which the mechanician is exposed in his daily employment
+affects the methods and standards of his thinking also on topics which
+lie outside his everyday work. Familiarity with the highly organized and
+highly impersonal industrial processes of the present acts to derange
+the animistic habits of thought. The workman's office is becoming more
+and more exclusively that of discretion and supervision in a process of
+mechanical, dispassionate sequences. So long as the individual is the
+chief and typical prime mover in the process; so long as the obtrusive
+feature of the industrial process is the dexterity and force of the
+individual handicraftsman; so long the habit of interpreting phenomena
+in terms of personal motive and propensity suffers no such considerable
+and consistent derangement through facts as to lead to its elimination.
+But under the later developed industrial processes, when the prime
+movers and the contrivances through which they work are of an
+impersonal, non-individual character, the grounds of generalization
+habitually present in the workman's mind and the point of view from
+which he habitually apprehends phenomena is an enforced cognizance of
+matter-of-fact sequence. The result, so far as concerts the workman's
+life of faith, is a proclivity to undevout scepticism.
+
+It appears, then, that the devout habit of mind attains its best
+development under a relatively archaic culture; the term "devout" being
+of course here used in its anthropological sense simply, and not
+as implying anything with respect to the spiritual attitude so
+characterized, beyond the fact of a proneness to devout observances.
+It appears also that this devout attitude marks a type of human nature
+which is more in consonance with the predatory mode of life than with
+the later-developed, more consistently and organically industrial life
+process of the community. It is in large measure an expression of the
+archaic habitual sense of personal status--the relation of mastery and
+subservience--and it therefore fits into the industrial scheme of the
+predatory and the quasi-peaceable culture, but does not fit into the
+industrial scheme of the present. It also appears that this habit
+persists with greatest tenacity among those classes in the modern
+communities whose everyday life is most remote from the mechanical
+processes of industry and which are the most conservative also in other
+respects; while for those classes that are habitually in immediate
+contact with modern industrial processes, and whose habits of thought
+are therefore exposed to the constraining force of technological
+necessities, that animistic interpretation of phenomena and that
+respect of persons on which devout observance proceeds are in process
+of obsolescence. And also--as bearing especially on the present
+discussion--it appears that the devout habit to some extent
+progressively gains in scope and elaboration among those classes in
+the modern communities to whom wealth and leisure accrue in the most
+pronounced degree. In this as in other relations, the institution of a
+leisure class acts to conserve, and even to rehabilitate, that archaic
+type of human nature and those elements of the archaic culture which the
+industrial evolution of society in its later stages acts to eliminate.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Thirteen ~~ Survivals of the Non-Invidious Interests
+
+In an increasing proportion as time goes on, the anthropomorphic
+cult, with its code of devout observations, suffers a progressive
+disintegration through the stress of economic exigencies and the decay
+of the system of status. As this disintegration proceeds, there come to
+be associated and blended with the devout attitude certain other motives
+and impulses that are not always of an anthropomorphic origin, nor
+traceable to the habit of personal subservience. Not all of these
+subsidiary impulses that blend with the habit of devoutness in the later
+devotional life are altogether congruous with the devout attitude or
+with the anthropomorphic apprehension of the sequence of phenomena. The
+origin being not the same, their action upon the scheme of devout
+life is also not in the same direction. In many ways they traverse the
+underlying norm of subservience or vicarious life to which the code of
+devout observations and the ecclesiastical and sacerdotal institutions
+are to be traced as their substantial basis. Through the presence of
+these alien motives the social and industrial regime of status gradually
+disintegrates, and the canon of personal subservience loses the support
+derived from an unbroken tradition. Extraneous habits and proclivities
+encroach upon the field of action occupied by this canon, and it
+presently comes about that the ecclesiastical and sacerdotal structures
+are partially converted to other uses, in some measure alien to the
+purposes of the scheme of devout life as it stood in the days of the
+most vigorous and characteristic development of the priesthood.
+
+Among these alien motives which affect the devout scheme in its
+later growth, may be mentioned the motives of charity and of social
+good-fellowship, or conviviality; or, in more general terms, the various
+expressions of the sense of human solidarity and sympathy. It may
+be added that these extraneous uses of the ecclesiastical structure
+contribute materially to its survival in name and form even among
+people who may be ready to give up the substance of it. A still more
+characteristic and more pervasive alien element in the motives
+which have gone to formally uphold the scheme of devout life is that
+non-reverent sense of aesthetic congruity with the environment, which is
+left as a residue of the latter-day act of worship after elimination
+of its anthropomorphic content. This has done good service for the
+maintenance of the sacerdotal institution through blending with the
+motive of subservience. This sense of impulse of aesthetic congruity
+is not primarily of an economic character, but it has a considerable
+indirect effect in shaping the habit of mind of the individual for
+economic purposes in the later stages of industrial development;
+its most perceptible effect in this regard goes in the direction of
+mitigating the somewhat pronounced self-regarding bias that has been
+transmitted by tradition from the earlier, more competent phases of the
+regime of status. The economic bearing of this impulse is therefore seen
+to transverse that of the devout attitude; the former goes to qualify,
+if not eliminate, the self-regarding bias, through sublation of the
+antithesis or antagonism of self and not-self; while the latter, being
+and expression of the sense of personal subservience and mastery, goes
+to accentuate this antithesis and to insist upon the divergence between
+the self-regarding interest and the interests of the generically human
+life process.
+
+This non-invidious residue of the religious life--the sense of communion
+with the environment, or with the generic life process--as well as the
+impulse of charity or of sociability, act in a pervasive way to shape
+men's habits of thought for the economic purpose. But the action of
+all this class of proclivities is somewhat vague, and their effects are
+difficult to trace in detail. So much seems clear, however, as that the
+action of this entire class of motives or aptitudes tends in a direction
+contrary to the underlying principles of the institution of the leisure
+class as already formulated. The basis of that institution, as well
+as of the anthropomorphic cults associated with it in the cultural
+development, is the habit of invidious comparison; and this habit is
+incongruous with the exercise of the aptitudes now in question. The
+substantial canons of the leisure-class scheme of life are a conspicuous
+waste of time and substance and a withdrawal from the industrial
+process; while the particular aptitudes here in question assert
+themselves, on the economic side, in a deprecation of waste and of
+a futile manner of life, and in an impulse to participation in or
+identification with the life process, whether it be on the economic side
+or in any other of its phases or aspects.
+
+It is plain that these aptitudes and habits of life to which they give
+rise where circumstances favor their expression, or where they assert
+themselves in a dominant way, run counter to the leisure-class scheme of
+life; but it is not clear that life under the leisure-class scheme, as
+seen in the later stages of its development, tends consistently to the
+repression of these aptitudes or to exemption from the habits of
+thought in which they express themselves. The positive discipline of the
+leisure-class scheme of life goes pretty much all the other way. In its
+positive discipline, by prescription and by selective elimination, the
+leisure-class scheme favors the all-pervading and all-dominating primacy
+of the canons of waste and invidious comparison at every conjuncture
+of life. But in its negative effects the tendency of the leisure-class
+discipline is not so unequivocally true to the fundamental canons of the
+scheme. In its regulation of human activity for the purpose of
+pecuniary decency the leisure-class canon insists on withdrawal from
+the industrial process. That is to say, it inhibits activity in the
+directions in which the impecunious members of the community habitually
+put forth their efforts. Especially in the case of women, and more
+particularly as regards the upper-class and upper-middle-class women
+of advanced industrial communities, this inhibition goes so far as to
+insist on withdrawal even from the emulative process of accumulation by
+the quasi-predator methods of the pecuniary occupations.
+
+The pecuniary or the leisure-class culture, which set out as an
+emulative variant of the impulse of workmanship, is in its latest
+development beginning to neutralize its own ground, by eliminating
+the habit of invidious comparison in respect of efficiency, or even
+of pecuniary standing. On the other hand, the fact that members of the
+leisure class, both men and women, are to some extent exempt from the
+necessity of finding a livelihood in a competitive struggle with
+their fellows, makes it possible for members of this class not only to
+survive, but even, within bounds, to follow their bent in case they are
+not gifted with the aptitudes which make for success in the competitive
+struggle. That is to say, in the latest and fullest development of the
+institution, the livelihood of members of this class does not depend
+on the possession and the unremitting exercise of those aptitudes are
+therefore greater in the higher grades of the leisure class than in the
+general average of a population living under the competitive system.
+
+In an earlier chapter, in discussing the conditions of survival of
+archaic traits, it has appeared that the peculiar position of the
+leisure class affords exceptionally favorable chances for the survival
+of traits which characterize the type of human nature proper to an
+earlier and obsolete cultural stage. The class is sheltered from the
+stress of economic exigencies, and is in this sense withdrawn from
+the rude impact of forces which make for adaptation to the economic
+situation. The survival in the leisure class, and under the
+leisure-class scheme of life, of traits and types that are reminiscent
+of the predatory culture has already been discussed. These aptitudes
+and habits have an exceptionally favorable chance of survival under the
+leisure-class regime. Not only does the sheltered pecuniary position of
+the leisure class afford a situation favorable to the survival of such
+individuals as are not gifted with the complement of aptitudes
+required for serviceability in the modern industrial process; but
+the leisure-class canons of reputability at the same time enjoin the
+conspicuous exercise of certain predatory aptitudes. The employments
+in which the predatory aptitudes find exercise serve as an evidence of
+wealth, birth, and withdrawal from the industrial process. The survival
+of the predatory traits under the leisure-class culture is furthered
+both negatively, through the industrial exemption of the class, and
+positively, through the sanction of the leisure-class canons of decency.
+
+With respect to the survival of traits characteristic of the
+ante-predatory savage culture the case is in some degree different.
+The sheltered position of the leisure class favors the survival also of
+these traits; but the exercise of the aptitudes for peace and good-will
+does not have the affirmative sanction of the code of proprieties.
+Individuals gifted with a temperament that is reminiscent of the
+ante-predatory culture are placed at something of an advantage within
+the leisure class, as compared with similarly gifted individuals outside
+the class, in that they are not under a pecuniary necessity to
+thwart these aptitudes that make for a non-competitive life; but such
+individuals are still exposed to something of a moral constraint
+which urges them to disregard these inclinations, in that the code of
+proprieties enjoins upon them habits of life based on the predatory
+aptitudes. So long as the system of status remains intact, and so long
+as the leisure class has other lines of non-industrial activity to take
+to than obvious killing of time in aimless and wasteful fatigation,
+so long no considerable departure from the leisure-class scheme of
+reputable life is to be looked for. The occurrence of non-predatory
+temperament with the class at that stage is to be looked upon as a case
+of sporadic reversion. But the reputable non-industrial outlets for
+the human propensity to action presently fail, through the advance of
+economic development, the disappearance of large game, the decline of
+war, the obsolescence of proprietary government, and the decay of the
+priestly office. When this happens, the situation begins to change.
+Human life must seek expression in one direction if it may not in
+another; and if the predatory outlet fails, relief is sought elsewhere.
+
+As indicated above, the exemption from pecuniary stress has been
+carried farther in the case of the leisure-class women of the advanced
+industrial communities than in that of any other considerable group of
+persons. The women may therefore be expected to show a more pronounced
+reversion to a non-invidious temperament than the men. But there is also
+among men of the leisure class a perceptible increase in the range and
+scope of activities that proceed from aptitudes which are not to be
+classed as self-regarding, and the end of which is not an invidious
+distinction. So, for instance, the greater number of men who have to do
+with industry in the way of pecuniarily managing an enterprise take
+some interest and some pride in seeing that the work is well done and
+is industrially effective, and this even apart from the profit which
+may result from any improvement of this kind. The efforts of
+commercial clubs and manufacturers' organizations in this direction of
+non-invidious advancement of industrial efficiency are also well know.
+
+The tendency to some other than an invidious purpose in life has worked
+out in a multitude of organizations, the purpose of which is some work
+of charity or of social amelioration. These organizations are often of
+a quasi-religious or pseudo-religious character, and are participated in
+by both men and women. Examples will present themselves in abundance
+on reflection, but for the purpose of indicating the range of the
+propensities in question and of characterizing them, some of the
+more obvious concrete cases may be cited. Such, for instance, are the
+agitation for temperance and similar social reforms, for prison reform,
+for the spread of education, for the suppression of vice, and for the
+avoidance of war by arbitration, disarmament, or other means; such
+are, in some measure, university settlements, neighborhood guilds, the
+various organizations typified by the Young Men's Christian Association
+and Young People's Society for Christian Endeavor, sewing-clubs, art
+clubs, and even commercial clubs; such are also, in some slight measure,
+the pecuniary foundations of semi-public establishments for charity,
+education, or amusement, whether they are endowed by wealthy individuals
+or by contributions collected from persons of smaller means--in so far
+as these establishments are not of a religious character.
+
+It is of course not intended to say that these efforts proceed entirely
+from other motives than those of a self-regarding kind. What can be
+claimed is that other motives are present in the common run of cases,
+and that the perceptibly greater prevalence of effort of this kind under
+the circumstances of the modern industrial life than under the unbroken
+regime of the principle of status, indicates the presence in modern life
+of an effective scepticism with respect to the full legitimacy of an
+emulative scheme of life. It is a matter of sufficient notoriety to have
+become a commonplace jest that extraneous motives are commonly present
+among the incentives to this class of work--motives of a self-regarding
+kind, and especially the motive of an invidious distinction. To such an
+extent is this true, that many ostensible works of disinterested public
+spirit are no doubt initiated and carried on with a view primarily to
+the enhance repute or even to the pecuniary gain, of their promoters. In
+the case of some considerable groups of organizations or establishments
+of this kind the invidious motive is apparently the dominant motive both
+with the initiators of the work and with their supporters. This last
+remark would hold true especially with respect to such works as lend
+distinction to their doer through large and conspicuous expenditure; as,
+for example, the foundation of a university or of a public library
+or museum; but it is also, and perhaps equally, true of the more
+commonplace work of participation in such organizations. These serve
+to authenticate the pecuniary reputability of their members, as well as
+gratefully to keep them in mind of their superior status by pointing
+the contrast between themselves and the lower-lying humanity in whom the
+work of amelioration is to be wrought; as, for example, the university
+settlement, which now has some vogue. But after all allowances and
+deductions have been made, there is left some remainder of motives of
+a non-emulative kind. The fact itself that distinction or a decent good
+fame is sought by this method is evidence of a prevalent sense of
+the legitimacy, and of the presumptive effectual presence, of a
+non-emulative, non-invidious interest, as a consistent factor in the
+habits of thought of modern communities.
+
+In all this latter-day range of leisure-class activities that proceed
+on the basis of a non-invidious and non-religious interest, it is to
+be noted that the women participate more actively and more persistently
+than the men--except, of course, in the case of such works as require
+a large expenditure of means. The dependent pecuniary position of the
+women disables them for work requiring large expenditure. As regards
+the general range of ameliorative work, the members of the priesthood
+or clergy of the less naively devout sects, or the secularized
+denominations, are associated with the class of women. This is as the
+theory would have it. In other economic relations, also, this clergy
+stands in a somewhat equivocal position between the class of women and
+that of the men engaged in economic pursuits. By tradition and by the
+prevalent sense of the proprieties, both the clergy and the women of
+the well-to-do classes are placed in the position of a vicarious leisure
+class; with both classes the characteristic relation which goes to form
+the habits of thought of the class is a relation of subservience--that
+is to say, an economic relation conceived in personal terms; in both
+classes there is consequently perceptible a special proneness to
+construe phenomena in terms of personal relation rather than of causal
+sequence; both classes are so inhibited by the canons of decency from
+the ceremonially unclean processes of the lucrative or productive
+occupations as to make participation in the industrial life process
+of today a moral impossibility for them. The result of this ceremonial
+exclusion from productive effort of the vulgar sort is to draft a
+relatively large share of the energies of the modern feminine
+and priestly classes into the service of other interests than the
+self-regarding one. The code leaves no alternative direction in which
+the impulse to purposeful action may find expression. The effect of a
+consistent inhibition on industrially useful activity in the case of the
+leisure-class women shows itself in a restless assertion of the impulse
+to workmanship in other directions than that of business activity. As
+has been noticed already, the everyday life of the well-to-do women and
+the clergy contains a larger element of status than that of the average
+of the men, especially than that of the men engaged in the modern
+industrial occupations proper. Hence the devout attitude survives in a
+better state of preservation among these classes than among the common
+run of men in the modern communities. Hence an appreciable share of the
+energy which seeks expression in a non-lucrative employment among these
+members of the vicarious leisure classes may be expected to eventuate in
+devout observances and works of piety. Hence, in part, the excess of
+the devout proclivity in women, spoken of in the last chapter. But it
+is more to the present point to note the effect of this proclivity
+in shaping the action and coloring the purposes of the non-lucrative
+movements and organizations here under discussion. Where this
+devout coloring is present it lowers the immediate efficiency of
+the organizations for any economic end to which their efforts may be
+directed. Many organizations, charitable and ameliorative, divide their
+attention between the devotional and the secular well-being of the
+people whose interests they aim to further. It can scarcely be doubted
+that if they were to give an equally serious attention and effort
+undividedly to the secular interests of these people, the immediate
+economic value of their work should be appreciably higher than it is.
+It might of course similarly be said, if this were the place to say it,
+that the immediate efficiency of these works of amelioration for the
+devout might be greater if it were not hampered with the secular motives
+and aims which are usually present.
+
+Some deduction is to be made from the economic value of this class of
+non-invidious enterprise, on account of the intrusion of the devotional
+interest. But there are also deductions to be made on account of the
+presence of other alien motives which more or less broadly traverse
+the economic trend of this non-emulative expression of the instinct
+of workmanship. To such an extent is this seen to be true on a closer
+scrutiny, that, when all is told, it may even appear that this general
+class of enterprises is of an altogether dubious economic value--as
+measured in terms of the fullness or facility of life of the individuals
+or classes to whose amelioration the enterprise is directed.
+For instance, many of the efforts now in reputable vogue for the
+amelioration of the indigent population of large cities are of the
+nature, in great part, of a mission of culture. It is by this means
+sought to accelerate the rate of speed at which given elements of the
+upper-class culture find acceptance in the everyday scheme of life of
+the lower classes. The solicitude of "settlements," for example, is in
+part directed to enhance the industrial efficiency of the poor and to
+teach them the more adequate utilization of the means at hand; but it
+is also no less consistently directed to the inculcation, by precept and
+example, of certain punctilios of upper-class propriety in manners and
+customs. The economic substance of these proprieties will commonly be
+found on scrutiny to be a conspicuous waste of time and goods. Those
+good people who go out to humanize the poor are commonly, and advisedly,
+extremely scrupulous and silently insistent in matters of decorum and
+the decencies of life. They are commonly persons of an exemplary life
+and gifted with a tenacious insistence on ceremonial cleanness in the
+various items of their daily consumption. The cultural or civilizing
+efficacy of this inculcation of correct habits of thought with respect
+to the consumption of time and commodities is scarcely to be overrated;
+nor is its economic value to the individual who acquires these higher
+and more reputable ideals inconsiderable. Under the circumstances of
+the existing pecuniary culture, the reputability, and consequently
+the success, of the individual is in great measure dependent on his
+proficiency in demeanor and methods of consumption that argue habitual
+waste of time and goods. But as regards the ulterior economic bearing
+of this training in worthier methods of life, it is to be said that
+the effect wrought is in large part a substitution of costlier or
+less efficient methods of accomplishing the same material results, in
+relations where the material result is the fact of substantial economic
+value. The propaganda of culture is in great part an inculcation of
+new tastes, or rather of a new schedule of proprieties, which have been
+adapted to the upper-class scheme of life under the guidance of the
+leisure-class formulation of the principles of status and pecuniary
+decency. This new schedule of proprieties is intruded into the
+lower-class scheme of life from the code elaborated by an element of
+the population whose life lies outside the industrial process; and this
+intrusive schedule can scarcely be expected to fit the exigencies of
+life for these lower classes more adequately than the schedule already
+in vogue among them, and especially not more adequately than the
+schedule which they are themselves working out under the stress of
+modern industrial life.
+
+All this of course does not question the fact that the proprieties
+of the substituted schedule are more decorous than those which they
+displace. The doubt which presents itself is simply a doubt as to the
+economic expediency of this work of regeneration--that is to say, the
+economic expediency in that immediate and material bearing in which the
+effects of the change can be ascertained with some degree of confidence,
+and as viewed from the standpoint not of the individual but of the
+facility of life of the collectivity. For an appreciation of the
+economic expediency of these enterprises of amelioration, therefore,
+their effective work is scarcely to be taken at its face value, even
+where the aim of the enterprise is primarily an economic one and where
+the interest on which it proceeds is in no sense self-regarding or
+invidious. The economic reform wrought is largely of the nature of a
+permutation in the methods of conspicuous waste.
+
+But something further is to be said with respect to the character of the
+disinterested motives and canons of procedure in all work of this
+class that is affected by the habits of thought characteristic of the
+pecuniary culture; and this further consideration may lead to a further
+qualification of the conclusions already reached. As has been seen in
+an earlier chapter, the canons of reputability or decency under the
+pecuniary culture insist on habitual futility of effort as the mark of a
+pecuniarily blameless life. There results not only a habit of disesteem
+of useful occupations, but there results also what is of more decisive
+consequence in guiding the action of any organized body of people that
+lays claim to social good repute. There is a tradition which requires
+that one should not be vulgarly familiar with any of the processes or
+details that have to do with the material necessities of life. One may
+meritoriously show a quantitative interest in the well-being of the
+vulgar, through subscriptions or through work on managing committees and
+the like. One may, perhaps even more meritoriously, show solicitude in
+general and in detail for the cultural welfare of the vulgar, in the
+way of contrivances for elevating their tastes and affording them
+opportunities for spiritual amelioration. But one should not betray an
+intimate knowledge of the material circumstances of vulgar life, or of
+the habits of thought of the vulgar classes, such as would effectually
+direct the efforts of these organizations to a materially useful end.
+This reluctance to avow an unduly intimate knowledge of the lower-class
+conditions of life in detail of course prevails in very different
+degrees in different individuals; but there is commonly enough of
+it present collectively in any organization of the kind in question
+profoundly to influence its course of action. By its cumulative action
+in shaping the usage and precedents of any such body, this shrinking
+from an imputation of unseemly familiarity with vulgar life tends
+gradually to set aside the initial motives of the enterprise, in favor
+of certain guiding principles of good repute, ultimately reducible to
+terms of pecuniary merit. So that in an organization of long standing
+the initial motive of furthering the facility of life in these classes
+comes gradually to be an ostensible motive only, and the vulgarly
+effective work of the organization tends to obsolescence.
+
+What is true of the efficiency of organizations for non-invidious
+work in this respect is true also as regards the work of individuals
+proceeding on the same motives; though it perhaps holds true with more
+qualification for individuals than for organized enterprises. The habit
+of gauging merit by the leisure-class canons of wasteful expenditure and
+unfamiliarity with vulgar life, whether on the side of production or of
+consumption, is necessarily strong in the individuals who aspire to do
+some work of public utility. And if the individual should forget his
+station and turn his efforts to vulgar effectiveness, the common sense
+of the community-the sense of pecuniary decency--would presently
+reject his work and set him right. An example of this is seen in the
+administration of bequests made by public-spirited men for the single
+purpose (at least ostensibly) of furthering the facility of human life
+in some particular respect. The objects for which bequests of this class
+are most frequently made at present are
+are schools, libraries, hospitals, and asylums for the infirm or
+unfortunate. The avowed purpose of the donor in these cases is the
+amelioration of human life in the particular respect which is named
+in the bequest; but it will be found an invariable rule that in
+the execution of the work not a little of other motives, frequency
+incompatible with the initial motive, is present and determines the
+particular disposition eventually made of a good share of the means
+which have been set apart by the bequest. Certain funds, for instance,
+may have been set apart as a foundation for a foundling asylum or a
+retreat for invalids. The diversion of expenditure to honorific waste in
+such cases is not uncommon enough to cause surprise or even to raise a
+smile. An appreciable share of the funds is spent in the construction
+of an edifice faced with some aesthetically objectionable but expensive
+stone, covered with grotesque and incongruous details, and designed, in
+its battlemented walls and turrets and its massive portals and strategic
+approaches, to suggest certain barbaric methods of warfare. The interior
+of the structure shows the same pervasive guidance of the canons of
+conspicuous waste and predatory exploit. The windows, for instance,
+to go no farther into detail, are placed with a view to impress their
+pecuniary excellence upon the chance beholder from the outside, rather
+than with a view to effectiveness for their ostensible end in the
+convenience or comfort of the beneficiaries within; and the detail of
+interior arrangement is required to conform itself as best it may to
+this alien but imperious requirement of pecuniary beauty.
+
+In all this, of course, it is not to be presumed that the donor would
+have found fault, or that he would have done otherwise if he had taken
+control in person; it appears that in those cases where such a personal
+direction is exercised--where the enterprise is conducted by direct
+expenditure and superintendence instead of by bequest--the aims and
+methods of management are not different in this respect. Nor would the
+beneficiaries, or the outside observers whose ease or vanity are not
+immediately touched, be pleased with a different disposition of the
+funds. It would suit no one to have the enterprise conducted with a view
+directly to the most economical and effective use of the means at hand
+for the initial, material end of the foundation. All concerned, whether
+their interest is immediate and self-regarding, or contemplative only,
+agree that some considerable share of the expenditure should go to
+the higher or spiritual needs derived from the habit of an invidious
+comparison in predatory exploit and pecuniary waste. But this only goes
+to say that the canons of emulative and pecuniary reputability so far
+pervade the common sense of the community as to permit no escape or
+evasion, even in the case of an enterprise which ostensibly proceeds
+entirely on the basis of a non-invidious interest.
+
+It may even be that the enterprise owes its honorific virtue, as a means
+of enhancing the donor's good repute, to the imputed presence of this
+non-invidious motive; but that does not hinder the invidious interest
+from guiding the expenditure. The effectual presence of motives of an
+emulative or invidious origin in non-emulative works of this kind
+might be shown at length and with detail, in any one of the classes of
+enterprise spoken of above. Where these honorific details occur, in such
+cases, they commonly masquerade under designations that belong in the
+field of the aesthetic, ethical or economic interest. These special
+motives, derived from the standards and canons of the pecuniary culture,
+act surreptitiously to divert effort of a non-invidious kind from
+effective service, without disturbing the agent's sense of good
+intention or obtruding upon his consciousness the substantial futility
+of his work. Their effect might be traced through the entire range
+of that schedule of non-invidious, meliorative enterprise that is so
+considerable a feature, and especially so conspicuous a feature, in the
+overt scheme of life of the well-to-do. But the theoretical bearing is
+perhaps clear enough and may require no further illustration; especially
+as some detailed attention will be given to one of these lines of
+enterprise--the establishments for the higher learning--in another
+connection.
+
+Under the circumstances of the sheltered situation in which the leisure
+class is placed there seems, therefore, to be something of a reversion
+to the range of non-invidious impulses that characterizes the
+ante-predatory savage culture. The reversion comprises both the sense of
+workmanship and the proclivity to indolence and good-fellowship. But
+in the modern scheme of life canons of conduct based on pecuniary or
+invidious merit stand in the way of a free exercise of these impulses;
+and the dominant presence of these canons of conduct goes far to divert
+such efforts as are made on the basis of the non-invidious interest to
+the service of that invidious interest on which the pecuniary culture
+rests. The canons of pecuniary decency are reducible for the present
+purpose to the principles of waste, futility, and ferocity. The
+requirements of decency are imperiously present in meliorative
+enterprise as in other lines of conduct, and exercise a selective
+surveillance over the details of conduct and management in any
+enterprise. By guiding and adapting the method in detail, these canons
+of decency go far to make all non-invidious aspiration or effort
+nugatory. The pervasive, impersonal, un-eager principle of futility is
+at hand from day to day and works obstructively to hinder the effectual
+expression of so much of the surviving ante-predatory aptitudes as is to
+be classed under the instinct of workmanship; but its presence does not
+preclude the transmission of those aptitudes or the continued recurrence
+of an impulse to find expression for them.
+
+In the later and farther development of the pecuniary culture, the
+requirement of withdrawal from the industrial process in order to
+avoid social odium is carried so far as to comprise abstention from
+the emulative employments. At this advanced stage the pecuniary culture
+negatively favors the assertion of the non-invidious propensities
+by relaxing the stress laid on the merit of emulative, predatory,
+or pecuniary occupations, as compared with those of an industrial
+or productive kind. As was noticed above, the requirement of such
+withdrawal from all employment that is of human use applies more
+rigorously to the upper-class women than to any other class, unless the
+priesthood of certain cults might be cited as an exception, perhaps
+more apparent than real, to this rule. The reason for the more extreme
+insistence on a futile life for this class of women than for the men
+of the same pecuniary and social grade lies in their being not only an
+upper-grade leisure class but also at the same time a vicarious
+leisure class. There is in their case a double ground for a consistent
+withdrawal from useful effort.
+
+It has been well and repeatedly said by popular writers and speakers who
+reflect the common sense of intelligent people on questions of social
+structure and function that the position of woman in any community
+is the most striking index of the level of culture attained by the
+community, and it might be added, by any given class in the community.
+This remark is perhaps truer as regards the stage of economic
+development than as regards development in any other respect. At the
+same time the position assigned to the woman in the accepted scheme of
+life, in any community or under any culture, is in a very great degree
+an expression of traditions which have been shaped by the circumstances
+of an earlier phase of development, and which have been but partially
+adapted to the existing economic circumstances, or to the existing
+exigencies of temperament and habits of mind by which the women living
+under this modern economic situation are actuated.
+
+The fact has already been remarked upon incidentally in the course of
+the discussion of the growth of economic institutions generally, and
+in particular in speaking of vicarious leisure and of dress, that the
+position of women in the modern economic scheme is more widely and
+more consistently at variance with the promptings of the instinct of
+workmanship than is the position of the men of the same classes. It
+is also apparently true that the woman's temperament includes a larger
+share of this instinct that approves peace and disapproves futility.
+It is therefore not a fortuitous circumstance that the women of modern
+industrial communities show a livelier sense of the discrepancy
+between the accepted scheme of life and the exigencies of the economic
+situation.
+
+The several phases of the "woman question" have brought out in
+intelligible form the extent to which the life of women in modern
+society, and in the polite circles especially, is regulated by a body of
+common sense formulated under the economic circumstances of an earlier
+phase of development. It is still felt that woman's life, in its civil,
+economic, and social bearing, is essentially and normally a vicarious
+life, the merit or demerit of which is, in the nature of things, to
+be imputed to some other individual who stands in some relation of
+ownership or tutelage to the woman. So, for instance, any action on the
+part of a woman which traverses an injunction of the accepted schedule
+of proprieties is felt to reflect immediately upon the honor of the man
+whose woman she is. There may of course be some sense of incongruity
+in the mind of any one passing an opinion of this kind on the woman's
+frailty or perversity; but the common-sense judgment of the community in
+such matters is, after all, delivered without much hesitation, and few
+men would question the legitimacy of their sense of an outraged tutelage
+in any case that might arise. On the other hand, relatively little
+discredit attaches to a woman through the evil deeds of the man with
+whom her life is associated.
+
+The good and beautiful scheme of life, then--that is to say the scheme
+to which we are habituated--assigns to the woman a "sphere" ancillary
+to the activity of the man; and it is felt that any departure from the
+traditions of her assigned round of duties is unwomanly. If the
+question is as to civil rights or the suffrage, our common sense in the
+matter--that is to say the logical deliverance of our general scheme
+of life upon the point in question--says that the woman should be
+represented in the body politic and before the law, not immediately in
+her own person, but through the mediation of the head of the
+household to which she belongs. It is unfeminine in her to aspire to a
+self-directing, self-centered life; and our common sense tells us that
+her direct participation in the affairs of the community, civil or
+industrial, is a menace to that social order which expresses our habits
+of thought as they have been formed under the guidance of the traditions
+of the pecuniary culture. "All this fume and froth of 'emancipating
+woman from the slavery of man' and so on, is, to use the chaste and
+expressive language of Elizabeth Cady Stanton inversely, 'utter rot.'
+The social relations of the sexes are fixed by nature. Our entire
+civilization--that is whatever is good in it--is based on the home."
+The "home" is the household with a male head. This view, but commonly
+expressed even more chastely, is the prevailing view of the woman's
+status, not only among the common run of the men of civilized
+communities, but among the women as well. Women have a very alert sense
+of what the scheme of proprieties requires, and while it is true that
+many of them are ill at ease under the details which the code imposes,
+there are few who do not recognize that the existing moral order, of
+necessity and by the divine right of prescription, places the woman in
+a position ancillary to the man. In the last analysis, according to her
+own sense of what is good and beautiful, the woman's life is, and in
+theory must be, an expression of the man's life at the second remove.
+
+But in spite of this pervading sense of what is the good and natural
+place for the woman, there is also perceptible an incipient development
+of sentiment to the effect that this whole arrangement of tutelage and
+vicarious life and imputation of merit and demerit is somehow a mistake.
+Or, at least, that even if it may be a natural growth and a good
+arrangement in its time and place, and in spite of its patent aesthetic
+value, still it does not adequately serve the more everyday ends of life
+in a modern industrial community. Even that large and substantial body
+of well-bred, upper and middle-class women to whose dispassionate,
+matronly sense of the traditional proprieties this relation of status
+commends itself as fundamentally and eternally right-even these, whose
+attitude is conservative, commonly find some slight discrepancy in
+detail between things as they are and things as they should be in this
+respect. But that less manageable body of modern women who, by force of
+youth, education, or temperament, are in some degree out of touch with
+the traditions of status received from the barbarian culture, and
+in whom there is, perhaps, an undue reversion to the impulse of
+self-expression and workmanship--these are touched with a sense of
+grievance too vivid to leave them at rest.
+
+In this "New-Woman" movement--as these blind and incoherent efforts to
+rehabilitate the woman's pre-glacial standing have been named--there
+are at least two elements discernible, both of which are of an economic
+character. These two elements or motives are expressed by the double
+watchword, "Emancipation" and "Work." Each of these words is recognized
+to stand for something in the way of a wide-spread sense of grievance.
+The prevalence of the sentiment is recognized even by people who do not
+see that there is any real ground for a grievance in the situation as
+it stands today. It is among the women of the well-to-do classes, in the
+communities which are farthest advanced in industrial development, that
+this sense of a grievance to be redressed is most alive and finds most
+frequent expression. That is to say, in other words, there is a demand,
+more or less serious, for emancipation from all relation of status,
+tutelage, or vicarious life; and the revulsion asserts itself especially
+among the class of women upon whom the scheme of life handed down from
+the regime of status imposes with least litigation a vicarious life, and
+in those communities whose economic development has departed farthest
+from the circumstances to which this traditional scheme is adapted. The
+demand comes from that portion of womankind which is excluded by the
+canons of good repute from all effectual work, and which is closely
+reserved for a life of leisure and conspicuous consumption.
+
+More than one critic of this new-woman movement has misapprehended its
+motive. The case of the American "new woman" has lately been summed
+up with some warmth by a popular observer of social phenomena: "She is
+petted by her husband, the most devoted and hard-working of husbands in
+the world.... She is the superior of her husband in education, and
+in almost every respect. She is surrounded by the most numerous and
+delicate attentions. Yet she is not satisfied.... The Anglo-Saxon 'new
+woman' is the most ridiculous production of modern times, and destined
+to be the most ghastly failure of the century." Apart from the
+deprecation--perhaps well placed--which is contained in this
+presentment, it adds nothing but obscurity to the woman question. The
+grievance of the new woman is made up of those things which this typical
+characterization of the movement urges as reasons why she should be
+content. She is petted, and is permitted, or even required, to consume
+largely and conspicuously--vicariously for her husband or other
+natural guardian. She is exempted, or debarred, from vulgarly useful
+employment--in order to perform leisure vicariously for the good repute
+of her natural (pecuniary) guardian. These offices are the conventional
+marks of the un-free, at the same time that they are incompatible with
+the human impulse to purposeful activity. But the woman is endowed
+with her share-which there is reason to believe is more than an even
+share--of the instinct of workmanship, to which futility of life or of
+expenditure is obnoxious. She must unfold her life activity in response
+to the direct, unmediated stimuli of the economic environment with which
+she is in contact. The impulse is perhaps stronger upon the woman
+than upon the man to live her own life in her own way and to enter the
+industrial process of the community at something nearer than the second
+remove.
+
+So long as the woman's place is consistently that of a drudge, she is,
+in the average of cases, fairly contented with her lot. She not only
+has something tangible and purposeful to do, but she has also no time or
+thought to spare for a rebellious assertion of such human propensity to
+self-direction as she has inherited. And after the stage of universal
+female drudgery is passed, and a vicarious leisure without strenuous
+application becomes the accredited employment of the women of the
+well-to-do classes, the prescriptive force of the canon of pecuniary
+decency, which requires the observance of ceremonial futility on their
+part, will long preserve high-minded women from any sentimental leaning
+to self-direction and a "sphere of usefulness." This is especially true
+during the earlier phases of the pecuniary culture, while the leisure
+of the leisure class is still in great measure a predatory activity, an
+active assertion of mastery in which there is enough of tangible
+purpose of an invidious kind to admit of its being taken seriously as an
+employment to which one may without shame put one's hand. This condition
+of things has obviously lasted well down into the present in some
+communities. It continues to hold to a different extent for different
+individuals, varying with the vividness of the sense of status and with
+the feebleness of the impulse to workmanship with which the individual
+is endowed. But where the economic structure of the community has so
+far outgrown the scheme of life based on status that the relation of
+personal subservience is no longer felt to be the sole "natural" human
+relation; there the ancient habit of purposeful activity will begin
+to assert itself in the less conformable individuals against the more
+recent, relatively superficial, relatively ephemeral habits and views
+which the predatory and the pecuniary culture have contributed to our
+scheme of life. These habits and views begin to lose their coercive
+force for the community or the class in question so soon as the habit of
+mind and the views of life due to the predatory and the quasi-peaceable
+discipline cease to be in fairly close accord with the later-developed
+economic situation. This is evident in the case of the industrious
+classes of modern communities; for them the leisure-class scheme of life
+has lost much of its binding force, especially as regards the element of
+status. But it is also visibly being verified in the case of the upper
+classes, though not in the same manner.
+
+The habits derived from the predatory and quasi-peaceable culture are
+relatively ephemeral variants of certain underlying propensities and
+mental characteristics of the race; which it owes to the protracted
+discipline of the earlier, proto-anthropoid cultural stage of peaceable,
+relatively undifferentiated economic life carried on in contact with a
+relatively simple and invariable material environment. When the habits
+superinduced by the emulative method of life have ceased to enjoy the
+section of existing economic exigencies, a process of disintegration
+sets in whereby the habits of thought of more recent growth and of a
+less generic character to some extent yield the ground before the more
+ancient and more pervading spiritual characteristics of the race.
+
+In a sense, then, the new-woman movement marks a reversion to a more
+generic type of human character, or to a less differentiated
+expression of human nature. It is a type of human nature which is to be
+characterized as proto-anthropoid, and, as regards the substance if not
+the form of its dominant traits, it belongs to a cultural stage that may
+be classed as possibly sub-human. The particular movement or evolutional
+feature in question of course shares this characterization with the rest
+of the later social development, in so far as this social development
+shows evidence of a reversion to the spiritual attitude that
+characterizes the earlier, undifferentiated stage of economic
+revolution. Such evidence of a general tendency to reversion from the
+dominance of the invidious interest is not entirely wanting, although it
+is neither plentiful nor unquestionably convincing. The general decay
+of the sense of status in modern industrial communities goes some way as
+evidence in this direction; and the perceptible return to a disapproval
+of futility in human life, and a disapproval of such activities as serve
+only the individual gain at the cost of the collectivity or at the
+cost of other social groups, is evidence to a like effect. There is a
+perceptible tendency to deprecate the infliction of pain, as well as to
+discredit all marauding enterprises, even where these expressions of the
+invidious interest do not tangibly work to the material detriment of
+the community or of the individual who passes an opinion on them. It
+may even be said that in the modern industrial communities the average,
+dispassionate sense of men says that the ideal character is a character
+which makes for peace, good-will, and economic efficiency, rather than
+for a life of self-seeking, force, fraud, and mastery.
+
+The influence of the leisure class is not consistently for or against
+the rehabilitation of this proto-anthropoid human nature. So far
+as concerns the chance of survival of individuals endowed with an
+exceptionally large share of the primitive traits, the sheltered
+position of the class favors its members directly by withdrawing them
+from the pecuniary struggle; but indirectly, through the leisure-class
+canons of conspicuous waste of goods and effort, the institution of a
+leisure class lessens the chance of survival of such individuals in the
+entire body of the population. The decent requirements of waste absorb
+the surplus energy of the population in an invidious struggle and leave
+no margin for the non-invidious expression of life. The remoter, less
+tangible, spiritual effects of the discipline of decency go in the same
+direction and work perhaps more effectually to the same end. The
+canons of decent life are an elaboration of the principle of invidious
+comparison, and they accordingly act consistently to inhibit all
+non-invidious effort and to inculcate the self-regarding attitude.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Fourteen ~~ The Higher Learning as an Expression of
+the Pecuniary Culture
+
+To the end that suitable habits of thought on certain heads may be
+conserved in the incoming generation, a scholastic discipline is
+sanctioned by the common sense of the community and incorporated into
+the accredited scheme of life. The habits of thought which are so
+formed under the guidance of teachers and scholastic traditions have
+an economic value--a value as affecting the serviceability of the
+individual--no less real than the similar economic value of the habits
+of thought formed without such guidance under the discipline of everyday
+life. Whatever characteristics of the accredited scholastic scheme and
+discipline are traceable to the predilections of the leisure class or to
+the guidance of the canons of pecuniary merit are to be set down to the
+account of that institution, and whatever economic value these features
+of the educational scheme possess are the expression in detail of the
+value of that institution. It will be in place, therefore, to point out
+any peculiar features of the educational system which are traceable to
+the leisure-class scheme of life, whether as regards the aim and method
+of the discipline, or as regards the compass and character of the body
+of knowledge inculcated. It is in learning proper, and more particularly
+in the higher learning, that the influence of leisure-class ideals is
+most patent; and since the purpose here is not to make an exhaustive
+collation of data showing the effect of the pecuniary culture upon
+education, but rather to illustrate the method and trend of the
+leisure-class influence in education, a survey of certain salient
+features of the higher learning, such as may serve this purpose, is all
+that will be attempted.
+
+In point of derivation and early development, learning is somewhat
+closely related to the devotional function of the community,
+particularly to the body of observances in which the service rendered
+the supernatural leisure class expresses itself. The service by which it
+is sought to conciliate supernatural agencies in the primitive cults is
+not an industrially profitable employment of the community's time and
+effort. It is, therefore, in great part, to be classed as a vicarious
+leisure performed for the supernatural powers with whom negotiations
+are carried on and whose good-will the service and the professions of
+subservience are conceived to procure. In great part, the early learning
+consisted in an acquisition of knowledge and facility in the service of
+a supernatural agent. It was therefore closely analogous in character to
+the training required for the domestic service of a temporal master. To
+a great extent, the knowledge acquired under the priestly teachers of
+the primitive community was knowledge of ritual and ceremonial; that
+is to say, a knowledge of the most proper, most effective, or most
+acceptable manner of approaching and of serving the preternatural
+agents. What was learned was how to make oneself indispensable to these
+powers, and so to put oneself in a position to ask, or even to require,
+their intercession in the course of events or their abstention from
+interference in any given enterprise. Propitiation was the end, and this
+end was sought, in great part, by acquiring facility in subservience.
+It appears to have been only gradually that other elements than those
+of efficient service of the master found their way into the stock of
+priestly or shamanistic instruction.
+
+The priestly servitor of the inscrutable powers that move in the
+external world came to stand in the position of a mediator between these
+powers and the common run of unrestricted humanity; for he was possessed
+of a knowledge of the supernatural etiquette which would admit him into
+the presence. And as commonly happens with mediators between the vulgar
+and their masters, whether the masters be natural or preternatural, he
+found it expedient to have the means at hand tangibly to impress upon
+the vulgar the fact that these inscrutable powers would do what he might
+ask of them. Hence, presently, a knowledge of certain natural processes
+which could be turned to account for spectacular effect, together with
+some sleight of hand, came to be an integral part of priestly lore.
+Knowledge of this kind passes for knowledge of the "unknowable", and
+it owes its serviceability for the sacerdotal purpose to its recondite
+character. It appears to have been from this source that learning, as an
+institution, arose, and its differentiation from this its parent stock
+of magic ritual and shamanistic fraud has been slow and tedious, and is
+scarcely yet complete even in the most advanced of the higher seminaries
+of learning.
+
+The recondite element in learning is still, as it has been in all ages,
+a very attractive and effective element for the purpose of impressing,
+or even imposing upon, the unlearned; and the standing of the savant in
+the mind of the altogether unlettered is in great measure rated in terms
+of intimacy with the occult forces. So, for instance, as a typical case,
+even so late as the middle of this century, the Norwegian peasants have
+instinctively formulated their sense of the superior erudition of such
+doctors of divinity as Luther, Malanchthon, Peder Dass, and even so late
+a scholar in divinity as Grundtvig, in terms of the Black Art. These,
+together with a very comprehensive list of minor celebrities, both
+living and dead, have been reputed masters in all magical arts; and a
+high position in the ecclesiastical personnel has carried with it,
+in the apprehension of these good people, an implication of profound
+familiarity with magical practice and the occult sciences. There is
+a parallel fact nearer home, similarly going to show the close
+relationship, in popular apprehension, between erudition and the
+unknowable; and it will at the same time serve to illustrate, in
+somewhat coarse outline, the bent which leisure-class life gives to
+the cognitive interest. While the belief is by no means confined to the
+leisure class, that class today comprises a disproportionately large
+number of believers in occult sciences of all kinds and shades. By those
+whose habits of thought are not shaped by contact with modern industry,
+the knowledge of the unknowable is still felt to the ultimate if not the
+only true knowledge.
+
+Learning, then, set out by being in some sense a by-product of the
+priestly vicarious leisure class; and, at least until a recent date,
+the higher learning has since remained in some sense a by-product or
+by-occupation of the priestly classes. As the body of systematized
+knowledge increased, there presently arose a distinction, traceable
+very far back in the history of education, between esoteric and exoteric
+knowledge, the former--so far as there is a substantial difference
+between the two--comprising such knowledge as is primarily of no
+economic or industrial effect, and the latter comprising chiefly
+knowledge of industrial processes and of natural phenomena which were
+habitually turned to account for the material purposes of life.
+This line of demarcation has in time become, at least in popular
+apprehension, the normal line between the higher learning and the lower.
+
+It is significant, not only as an evidence of their close affiliation
+with the priestly craft, but also as indicating that their activity to
+a good extent falls under that category of conspicuous leisure known
+as manners and breeding, that the learned class in all primitive
+communities are great sticklers for form, precedent, gradations of rank,
+ritual, ceremonial vestments, and learned paraphernalia generally.
+This is of course to be expected, and it goes to say that the higher
+learning, in its incipient phase, is a leisure-class occupation--more
+specifically an occupation of the vicarious leisure class employed in
+the service of the supernatural leisure class. But this predilection for
+the paraphernalia of learning goes also to indicate a further point of
+contact or of continuity between the priestly office and the office of
+the savant. In point of derivation, learning, as well as the priestly
+office, is largely an outgrowth of sympathetic magic; and this magical
+apparatus of form and ritual therefore finds its place with the learned
+class of the primitive community as a matter of course. The ritual and
+paraphernalia have an occult efficacy for the magical purpose; so
+that their presence as an integral factor in the earlier phases of the
+development of magic and science is a matter of expediency, quite as
+much as of affectionate regard for symbolism simply.
+
+This sense of the efficacy of symbolic ritual, and of sympathetic effect
+to be wrought through dexterous rehearsal of the traditional accessories
+of the act or end to be compassed, is of course present more obviously
+and in larger measure in magical practice than in the discipline of the
+sciences, even of the occult sciences. But there are, I apprehend,
+few persons with a cultivated sense of scholastic merit to whom the
+ritualistic accessories of science are altogether an idle matter. The
+very great tenacity with which these ritualistic paraphernalia persist
+through the later course of the development is evident to any one
+who will reflect on what has been the history of learning in our
+civilization. Even today there are such things in the usage of the
+learned community as the cap and gown, matriculation, initiation,
+and graduation ceremonies, and the conferring of scholastic degrees,
+dignities, and prerogatives in a way which suggests some sort of a
+scholarly apostolic succession. The usage of the priestly orders is
+no doubt the proximate source of all these features of learned ritual,
+vestments, sacramental initiation, the transmission of peculiar
+dignities and virtues by the imposition of hands, and the like; but
+their derivation is traceable back of this point, to the source from
+which the specialized priestly class proper came to be distinguished
+from the sorcerer on the one hand and from the menial servant of
+a temporal master on the other hand. So far as regards both their
+derivation and their psychological content, these usages and the
+conceptions on which they rest belong to a stage in cultural development
+no later than that of the angekok and the rain-maker. Their place in the
+later phases of devout observance, as well as in the higher educational
+system, is that of a survival from a very early animistic phase of the
+development of human nature.
+
+These ritualistic features of the educational system of the present and
+of the recent past, it is quite safe to say, have their place primarily
+in the higher, liberal, and classic institutions and grades of learning,
+rather than in the lower, technological, or practical grades, and
+branches of the system. So far as they possess them, the lower and less
+reputable branches of the educational scheme have evidently borrowed
+these things from the higher grades; and their continued persistence
+among the practical schools, without the sanction of the continued
+example of the higher and classic grades, would be highly improbable,
+to say the least. With the lower and practical schools and scholars, the
+adoption and cultivation of these usages is a case of mimicry--due to
+a desire to conform as far as may be to the standards of scholastic
+reputability maintained by the upper grades and classes, who have
+come by these accessory features legitimately, by the right of lineal
+devolution.
+
+The analysis may even be safely carried a step farther. Ritualistic
+survivals and reversions come out in fullest vigor and with the freest
+air of spontaneity among those seminaries of learning which have to
+do primarily with the education of the priestly and leisure classes.
+Accordingly it should appear, and it does pretty plainly appear, on
+a survey of recent developments in college and university life, that
+wherever schools founded for the instruction of the lower classes in the
+immediately useful branches of knowledge grow into institutions of the
+higher learning, the growth of ritualistic ceremonial and paraphernalia
+and of elaborate scholastic "functions" goes hand in hand with
+the transition of the schools in question from the field of homely
+practicality into the higher, classical sphere. The initial purpose of
+these schools, and the work with which they have chiefly had to do at
+the earlier of these two stages of their evolution, has been that of
+fitting the young of the industrious classes for work. On the higher,
+classical plane of learning to which they commonly tend, their dominant
+aim becomes the preparation of the youth of the priestly and the leisure
+classes--or of an incipient leisure class--for the consumption of
+goods, material and immaterial, according to a conventionally accepted,
+reputable scope and method. This happy issue has commonly been the fate
+of schools founded by "friends of the people" for the aid of struggling
+young men, and where this transition is made in good form there is
+commonly, if not invariably, a coincident change to a more ritualistic
+life in the schools.
+
+In the school life of today, learned ritual is in a general way best at
+home in schools whose chief end is the cultivation of the "humanities".
+This correlation is shown, perhaps more neatly than anywhere else, in
+the life-history of the American colleges and universities of recent
+growth. There may be many exceptions from the rule, especially among
+those schools which have been founded by the typically reputable and
+ritualistic churches, and which, therefore, started on the conservative
+and classical plane or reached the classical position by a short-cut;
+but the general rule as regards the colleges founded in the newer
+American communities during the present century has been that so long
+as the constituency from which the colleges have drawn their pupils
+has been dominated by habits of industry and thrift, so long the
+reminiscences of the medicine-man have found but a scant and precarious
+acceptance in the scheme of college life. But so soon as wealth begins
+appreciably to accumulate in the community, and so soon as a given
+school begins to lean on a leisure-class constituency, there comes
+also a perceptibly increased insistence on scholastic ritual and on
+conformity to the ancient forms as regards vestments and social and
+scholastic solemnities. So, for instance, there has been an approximate
+coincidence between the growth of wealth among the constituency
+which supports any given college of the Middle West and the date of
+acceptance--first into tolerance and then into imperative vogue--of
+evening dress for men and of the décolleté for women, as the scholarly
+vestments proper to occasions of learned solemnity or to the seasons
+of social amenity within the college circle. Apart from the mechanical
+difficulty of so large a task, it would scarcely be a difficult matter
+to trace this correlation. The like is true of the vogue of the cap and
+gown.
+
+Cap and gown have been adopted as learned insignia by many colleges of
+this section within the last few years; and it is safe to say that this
+could scarcely have occurred at a much earlier date, or until there had
+grown up a leisure-class sentiment of sufficient volume in the community
+to support a strong movement of reversion towards an archaic view as to
+the legitimate end of education. This particular item of learned ritual,
+it may be noted, would not only commend itself to the leisure-class
+sense of the fitness of things, as appealing to the archaic propensity
+for spectacular effect and the predilection for antique symbolism;
+but it at the same time fits into the leisure-class scheme of life as
+involving a notable element of conspicuous waste. The precise date at
+which the reversion to cap and gown took place, as well as the fact that
+it affected so large a number of schools at about the same time,
+seems to have been due in some measure to a wave of atavistic sense
+of conformity and reputability that passed over the community at that
+period.
+
+It may not be entirely beside the point to note that in point of time
+this curious reversion seems to coincide with the culmination of a
+certain vogue of atavistic sentiment and tradition in other directions
+also. The wave of reversion seems to have received its initial impulse
+in the psychologically disintegrating effects of the Civil War.
+Habituation to war entails a body of predatory habits of thought,
+whereby clannishness in some measure replaces the sense of solidarity,
+and a sense of invidious distinction supplants the impulse to equitable,
+everyday serviceability. As an outcome of the cumulative action of these
+factors, the generation which follows a season of war is apt to witness
+a rehabilitation of the element of status, both in its social life and
+in its scheme of devout observances and other symbolic or ceremonial
+forms. Throughout the eighties, and less plainly traceable through the
+seventies also, there was perceptible a gradually advancing wave of
+sentiment favoring quasi-predatory business habits, insistence on
+status, anthropomorphism, and conservatism generally. The more direct
+and unmediated of these expressions of the barbarian temperament, such
+as the recrudescence of outlawry and the spectacular quasi-predatory
+careers of fraud run by certain "captains of industry", came to a
+head earlier and were appreciably on the decline by the close of the
+seventies. The recrudescence of anthropomorphic sentiment also seems to
+have passed its most acute stage before the close of the eighties. But
+the learned ritual and paraphernalia here spoken of are a still remoter
+and more recondite expression of the barbarian animistic sense; and
+these, therefore, gained vogue and elaboration more slowly and reached
+their most effective development at a still later date. There is reason
+to believe that the culmination is now already past. Except for the new
+impetus given by a new war experience, and except for the support which
+the growth of a wealthy class affords to all ritual, and especially to
+whatever ceremonial is wasteful and pointedly suggests gradations of
+status, it is probable that the late improvements and augmentation of
+scholastic insignia and ceremonial would gradually decline. But while it
+may be true that the cap and gown, and the more strenuous observance
+of scholastic proprieties which came with them, were floated in on this
+post-bellum tidal wave of reversion to barbarism, it is also no doubt
+true that such a ritualistic reversion could not have been effected in
+the college scheme of life until the accumulation of wealth in the
+hands of a propertied class had gone far enough to afford the requisite
+pecuniary ground for a movement which should bring the colleges of the
+country up to the leisure-class requirements in the higher learning. The
+adoption of the cap and gown is one of the striking atavistic features
+of modern college life, and at the same time it marks the fact that
+these colleges have definitely become leisure-class establishments,
+either in actual achievement or in aspiration.
+
+As further evidence of the close relation between the educational system
+and the cultural standards of the community, it may be remarked that
+there is some tendency latterly to substitute the captain of industry in
+place of the priest, as the head of seminaries of the higher learning.
+The substitution is by no means complete or unequivocal. Those heads of
+institutions are best accepted who combine the sacerdotal office with
+a high degree of pecuniary efficiency. There is a similar but less
+pronounced tendency to intrust the work of instruction in the higher
+learning to men of some pecuniary qualification. Administrative ability
+and skill in advertising the enterprise count for rather more than
+they once did, as qualifications for the work of teaching. This applies
+especially in those sciences that have most to do with the everyday
+facts of life, and it is particularly true of schools in the
+economically single-minded communities. This partial substitution of
+pecuniary for sacerdotal efficiency is a concomitant of the modern
+transition from conspicuous leisure to conspicuous consumption, as
+the chief means of reputability. The correlation of the two facts is
+probably clear without further elaboration.
+
+The attitude of the schools and of the learned class towards the
+education of women serves to show in what manner and to what extent
+learning has departed from its ancient station of priestly and
+leisure-class prerogatives, and it indicates also what approach has
+been made by the truly learned to the modern, economic or industrial,
+matter-of-fact standpoint. The higher schools and the learned
+professions were until recently tabu to the women. These establishments
+were from the outset, and have in great measure continued to be, devoted
+to the education of the priestly and leisure classes.
+
+The women, as has been shown elsewhere, were the original subservient
+class, and to some extent, especially so far as regards their nominal
+or ceremonial position, they have remained in that relation down to the
+present. There has prevailed a strong sense that the admission of
+women to the privileges of the higher learning (as to the Eleusianin
+mysteries) would be derogatory to the dignity of the learned craft. It
+is therefore only very recently, and almost solely in the industrially
+most advanced communities, that the higher grades of schools have
+been freely opened to women. And even under the urgent circumstances
+prevailing in the modern industrial communities, the highest and most
+reputable universities show an extreme reluctance in making the move.
+The sense of class worthiness, that is to say of status, of a honorific
+differentiation of the sexes according to a distinction between superior
+and inferior intellectual dignity, survives in a vigorous form in these
+corporations of the aristocracy of learning. It is felt that the woman
+should, in all propriety, acquire only such knowledge as may be classed
+under one or the other of two heads: (1) such knowledge as conduces
+immediately to a better performance of domestic service--the domestic
+sphere; (2) such accomplishments and dexterity, quasi-scholarly and
+quasi-artistic, as plainly come in under the head of a performance of
+vicarious leisure. Knowledge is felt to be unfeminine if it is knowledge
+which expresses the unfolding of the learner's own life, the acquisition
+of which proceeds on the learner's own cognitive interest, without
+prompting from the canons of propriety, and without reference back to a
+master whose comfort or good repute is to be enhanced by the employment
+or the exhibition of it. So, also, all knowledge which is useful as
+evidence of leisure, other than vicarious leisure, is scarcely feminine.
+
+For an appreciation of the relation which these higher seminaries of
+learning bear to the economic life of the community, the phenomena which
+have been reviewed are of importance rather as indications of a general
+attitude than as being in themselves facts of first-rate economic
+consequence. They go to show what is the instinctive attitude and
+animus of the learned class towards the life process of an industrial
+community. They serve as an exponent of the stage of development, for
+the industrial purpose, attained by the higher learning and by the
+learned class, and so they afford an indication as to what may fairly be
+looked for from this class at points where the learning and the life of
+the class bear more immediately upon the economic life and efficiency
+of the community, and upon the adjustment of its scheme of life to
+the requirements of the time. What these ritualistic survivals go
+to indicate is a prevalence of conservatism, if not of reactionary
+sentiment, especially among the higher schools where the conventional
+learning is cultivated.
+
+To these indications of a conservative attitude is to be added another
+characteristic which goes in the same direction, but which is a symptom
+of graver consequence that this playful inclination to trivialities
+of form and ritual. By far the greater number of American colleges
+and universities, for instance, are affiliated to some religious
+denomination and are somewhat given to devout observances. Their
+putative familiarity with scientific methods and the scientific point
+of view should presumably exempt the faculties of these schools
+from animistic habits of thought; but there is still a considerable
+proportion of them who profess an attachment to the anthropomorphic
+beliefs and observances of an earlier culture. These professions
+of devotional zeal are, no doubt, to a good extent expedient and
+perfunctory, both on the part of the schools in their corporate
+capacity, and on the part of the individual members of the corps of
+instructors; but it can not be doubted that there is after all a very
+appreciable element of anthropomorphic sentiment present in the
+higher schools. So far as this is the case it must be set down as the
+expression of an archaic, animistic habit of mind. This habit of
+mind must necessarily assert itself to some extent in the instruction
+offered, and to this extent its influence in shaping the habits of
+thought of the student makes for conservatism and reversion; it acts
+to hinder his development in the direction of matter-of-fact knowledge,
+such as best serves the ends of industry.
+
+The college sports, which have so great a vogue in the reputable
+seminaries of learning today, tend in a similar direction; and, indeed,
+sports have much in common with the devout attitude of the colleges,
+both as regards their psychological basis and as regards their
+disciplinary effect. But this expression of the barbarian temperament
+is to be credited primarily to the body of students, rather than to the
+temper of the schools as such; except in so far as the colleges or the
+college officials--as sometimes happens--actively countenance and foster
+the growth of sports. The like is true of college fraternities as
+of college sports, but with a difference. The latter are chiefly
+an expression of the predatory impulse simply; the former are more
+specifically an expression of that heritage of clannishness which is
+so large a feature in the temperament of the predatory barbarian. It is
+also noticeable that a close relation subsists between the fraternities
+and the sporting activity of the schools. After what has already been
+said in an earlier chapter on the sporting and gambling habit, it
+is scarcely necessary further to discuss the economic value of this
+training in sports and in factional organization and activity.
+
+But all these features of the scheme of life of the learned class,
+and of the establishments dedicated to the conservation of the higher
+learning, are in a great measure incidental only. They are scarcely
+to be accounted organic elements of the professed work of research and
+instruction for the ostensible pursuit of which the schools exists. But
+these symptomatic indications go to establish a presumption as to the
+character of the work performed--as seen from the economic point of
+view--and as to the bent which the serious work carried on under their
+auspices gives to the youth who resort to the schools. The presumption
+raised by the considerations already offered is that in their work also,
+as well as in their ceremonial, the higher schools may be expected to
+take a conservative position; but this presumption must be checked by a
+comparison of the economic character of the work actually performed, and
+by something of a survey of the learning whose conservation is
+intrusted to the higher schools. On this head, it is well known that
+the accredited seminaries of learning have, until a recent date, held
+a conservative position. They have taken an attitude of depreciation
+towards all innovations. As a general rule a new point of view or a new
+formulation of knowledge have been countenanced and taken up within the
+schools only after these new things have made their way outside of
+the schools. As exceptions from this rule are chiefly to be mentioned
+innovations of an inconspicuous kind and departures which do not bear
+in any tangible way upon the conventional point of view or upon the
+conventional scheme of life; as, for instance, details of fact in the
+mathematico-physical sciences, and new readings and interpretations of
+the classics, especially such as have a philological or literary bearing
+only. Except within the domain of the "humanities", in the narrow sense,
+and except so far as the traditional point of view of the humanities has
+been left intact by the innovators, it has generally held true that the
+accredited learned class and the seminaries of the higher learning
+have looked askance at all innovation. New views, new departures in
+scientific theory, especially in new departures which touch the theory
+of human relations at any point, have found a place in the scheme of
+the university tardily and by a reluctant tolerance, rather than by
+a cordial welcome; and the men who have occupied themselves with such
+efforts to widen the scope of human knowledge have not commonly been
+well received by their learned contemporaries. The higher schools have
+not commonly given their countenance to a serious advance in the methods
+or the content of knowledge until the innovations have outlived their
+youth and much of their usefulness--after they have become commonplaces
+of the intellectual furniture of a new generation which has grown
+up under, and has had its habits of thought shaped by, the new,
+extra-scholastic body of knowledge and the new standpoint. This is true
+of the recent past. How far it may be true of the immediate present it
+would be hazardous to say, for it is impossible to see present-day
+facts in such perspective as to get a fair conception of their relative
+proportions.
+
+So far, nothing has been said of the Maecenas function of the
+well-to-do, which is habitually dwelt on at some length by writers
+and speakers who treat of the development of culture and of social
+structure. This leisure-class function is not without an important
+bearing on the higher and on the spread of knowledge and culture. The
+manner and the degree in which the class furthers learning through
+patronage of this kind is sufficiently familiar. It has been frequently
+presented in affectionate and effective terms by spokesmen whose
+familiarity with the topic fits them to bring home to their hearers the
+profound significance of this cultural factor. These spokesmen, however,
+have presented the matter from the point of view of the cultural
+interest, or of the interest of reputability, rather than from that of
+the economic interest. As apprehended from the economic point of view,
+and valued for the purpose of industrial serviceability, this function
+of the well-to-do, as well as the intellectual attitude of members of
+the well-to-do class, merits some attention and will bear illustration.
+
+By way of characterization of the Maecenas relation, it is to be noted
+that, considered externally, as an economic or industrial relation
+simply, it is a relation of status. The scholar under the patronage
+performs the duties of a learned life vicariously for his patron, to
+whom a certain repute inures after the manner of the good repute imputed
+to a master for whom any form of vicarious leisure is performed. It is
+also to be noted that, in point of historical fact, the furtherance of
+learning or the maintenance of scholarly activity through the Maecenas
+relation has most commonly been a furtherance of proficiency in
+classical lore or in the humanities. The knowledge tends to lower rather
+than to heighten the industrial efficiency of the community.
+
+Further, as regards the direct participation of the members of the
+leisure class in the furtherance of knowledge, the canons of reputable
+living act to throw such intellectual interest as seeks expression among
+the class on the side of classical and formal erudition, rather than
+on the side of the sciences that bear some relation to the community's
+industrial life. The most frequent excursions into other than classical
+fields of knowledge on the part of members of the leisure class are made
+into the discipline of law and the political, and more especially the
+administrative, sciences. These so-called sciences are substantially
+bodies of maxims of expediency for guidance in the leisure-class office
+of government, as conducted on a proprietary basis. The interest with
+which this discipline is approached is therefore not commonly the
+intellectual or cognitive interest simply. It is largely the practical
+interest of the exigencies of that relation of mastery in which the
+members of the class are placed. In point of derivation, the office of
+government is a predatory function, pertaining integrally to the archaic
+leisure-class scheme of life. It is an exercise of control and coercion
+over the population from which the class draws its sustenance. This
+discipline, as well as the incidents of practice which give it its
+content, therefore has some attraction for the class apart from all
+questions of cognition. All this holds true wherever and so long as
+the governmental office continues, in form or in substance, to be a
+proprietary office; and it holds true beyond that limit, in so far as
+the tradition of the more archaic phase of governmental evolution has
+lasted on into the later life of those modern communities for whom
+proprietary government by a leisure class is now beginning to pass away.
+
+For that field of learning within which the cognitive or intellectual
+interest is dominant--the sciences properly so called--the case is
+somewhat different, not only as regards the attitude of the leisure
+class, but as regards the whole drift of the pecuniary culture.
+Knowledge for its own sake, the exercise of the faculty of comprehensive
+without ulterior purpose, should, it might be expected, be sought by
+men whom no urgent material interest diverts from such a quest. The
+sheltered industrial position of the leisure class should give free
+play to the cognitive interest in members of this class, and we should
+consequently have, as many writers confidently find that we do have, a
+very large proportion of scholars, scientists, savants derived from
+this class and deriving their incentive to scientific investigation and
+speculation from the discipline of a life of leisure. Some such result
+is to be looked for, but there are features of the leisure-class
+scheme of life, already sufficiently dwelt upon, which go to divert the
+intellectual interest of this class to other subjects than that causal
+sequence in phenomena which makes the content of the sciences. The
+habits of thought which characterize the life of the class run on
+the personal relation of dominance, and on the derivative, invidious
+concepts of honor, worth, merit, character, and the like. The casual
+sequence which makes up the subject matter of science is not visible
+from this point of view. Neither does good repute attach to knowledge of
+facts that are vulgarly useful. Hence it should appear probable that the
+interest of the invidious comparison with respect to pecuniary or other
+honorific merit should occupy the attention of the leisure class, to the
+neglect of the cognitive interest. Where this latter interest asserts
+itself it should commonly be diverted to fields of speculation or
+investigation which are reputable and futile, rather than to the quest
+of scientific knowledge. Such indeed has been the history of priestly
+and leisure-class learning so long as no considerable body of
+systematized knowledge had been intruded into the scholastic discipline
+from an extra-scholastic source. But since the relation of mastery and
+subservience is ceasing to be the dominant and formative factor in the
+community's life process, other features of the life process and other
+points of view are forcing themselves upon the scholars. The true-bred
+gentleman of leisure should, and does, see the world from the point of
+view of the personal relation; and the cognitive interest, so far as
+it asserts itself in him, should seek to systematize phenomena on this
+basis. Such indeed is the case with the gentleman of the old school, in
+whom the leisure-class ideals have suffered no disintegration; and such
+is the attitude of his latter-day descendant, in so far as he has fallen
+heir to the full complement of upper-class virtues. But the ways of
+heredity are devious, and not every gentleman's son is to the manor
+born. Especially is the transmission of the habits of thought which
+characterize the predatory master somewhat precarious in the case of a
+line of descent in which but one or two of the latest steps have lain
+within the leisure-class discipline. The chances of occurrence of a
+strong congenital or acquired bent towards the exercise of the cognitive
+aptitudes are apparently best in those members of the leisure class who
+are of lower class or middle class antecedents--that is to say, those
+who have inherited the complement of aptitudes proper to the industrious
+classes, and who owe their place in the leisure class to the possession
+of qualities which count for more today than they did in the times when
+the leisure-class scheme of life took shape. But even outside the range
+of these later accessions to the leisure class there are an appreciable
+number of individuals in whom the invidious interest is not sufficiently
+dominant to shape their theoretical views, and in whom the proclivity to
+theory is sufficiently strong to lead them into the scientific quest.
+
+The higher learning owes the intrusion of the sciences in part to these
+aberrant scions of the leisure class, who have come under the dominant
+influence of the latter-day tradition of impersonal relation and who
+have inherited a complement of human aptitudes differing in certain
+salient features from the temperament which is characteristic of
+the regime of status. But it owes the presence of this alien body of
+scientific knowledge also in part, and in a higher degree, to members of
+the industrious classes who have been in sufficiently easy circumstances
+to turn their attention to other interests than that of finding daily
+sustenance, and whose inherited aptitudes and anthropomorphic point of
+view does not dominate their intellectual processes. As between
+these two groups, which approximately comprise the effective force of
+scientific progress, it is the latter that has contributed the most. And
+with respect to both it seems to be true that they are not so much
+the source as the vehicle, or at the most they are the instrument of
+commutation, by which the habits of thought enforced upon the community,
+through contact with its environment under the exigencies of modern
+associated life and the mechanical industries, are turned to account for
+theoretical knowledge.
+
+Science, in the sense of an articulate recognition of causal sequence in
+phenomena, whether physical or social, has been a feature of the Western
+culture only since the industrial process in the Western communities has
+come to be substantially a process of mechanical contrivances in which
+man's office is that of discrimination and valuation of material forces.
+Science has flourished somewhat in the same degree as the industrial
+life of the community has conformed to this pattern, and somewhat in
+the same degree as the industrial interest has dominated the community's
+life. And science, and scientific theory especially, has made headway
+in the several departments of human life and knowledge in proportion
+as each of these several departments has successively come into closer
+contact with the industrial process and the economic interest;
+or perhaps it is truer to say, in proportion as each of them has
+successively escaped from the dominance of the conceptions of personal
+relation or status, and of the derivative canons of anthropomorphic
+fitness and honorific worth.
+
+It is only as the exigencies of modern industrial life have enforced the
+recognition of causal sequence in the practical contact of mankind with
+their environment, that men have come to systematize the phenomena of
+this environment and the facts of their own contact with it in terms
+of causal sequence. So that while the higher learning in its best
+development, as the perfect flower of scholasticism and classicism, was
+a by-product of the priestly office and the life of leisure, so modern
+science may be said to be a by-product of the industrial process.
+Through these groups of men, then--investigators, savants, scientists,
+inventors, speculators--most of whom have done their most telling work
+outside the shelter of the schools, the habits of thought enforced
+by the modern industrial life have found coherent expression and
+elaboration as a body of theoretical science having to do with the
+causal sequence of phenomena. And from this extra-scholastic field of
+scientific speculation, changes of method and purpose have from time to
+time been intruded into the scholastic discipline.
+
+In this connection it is to be remarked that there is a very perceptible
+difference of substance and purpose between the instruction offered in
+the primary and secondary schools, on the one hand, and in the higher
+seminaries of learning, on the other hand. The difference in point
+of immediate practicality of the information imparted and of the
+proficiency acquired may be of some consequence and may merit the
+attention which it has from time to time received; but there is more
+substantial difference in the mental and spiritual bent which is favored
+by the one and the other discipline. This divergent trend in discipline
+between the higher and the lower learning is especially noticeable as
+regards the primary education in its latest development in the advanced
+industrial communities. Here the instruction is directed chiefly to
+proficiency or dexterity, intellectual and manual, in the apprehension
+and employment of impersonal facts, in their casual rather than in their
+honorific incidence. It is true, under the traditions of the earlier
+days, when the primary education was also predominantly a leisure-class
+commodity, a free use is still made of emulation as a spur to diligence
+in the common run of primary schools; but even this use of emulation as
+an expedient is visibly declining in the primary grades of instruction
+in communities where the lower education is not under the guidance
+of the ecclesiastical or military tradition. All this holds true in
+a peculiar degree, and more especially on the spiritual side, of such
+portions of the educational system as have been immediately affected by
+kindergarten methods and ideals.
+
+The peculiarly non-invidious trend of the kindergarten discipline, and
+the similar character of the kindergarten influence in primary education
+beyond the limits of the kindergarten proper, should be taken in
+connection with what has already been said of the peculiar spiritual
+attitude of leisure-class womankind under the circumstances of the
+modern economic situation. The kindergarten discipline is at its
+best--or at its farthest remove from ancient patriarchal and pedagogical
+ideals--in the advanced industrial communities, where there is a
+considerable body of intelligent and idle women, and where the system of
+status has somewhat abated in rigor under the disintegrating influence
+of industrial life and in the absence of a consistent body of
+military and ecclesiastical traditions. It is from these women in easy
+circumstances that it gets its moral support. The aims and methods of
+the kindergarten commend themselves with especial effect to this class
+of women who are ill at ease under the pecuniary code of reputable life.
+The kindergarten, and whatever the kindergarten spirit counts for
+in modern education, therefore, is to be set down, along with the
+"new-woman movement," to the account of that revulsion against futility
+and invidious comparison which the leisure-class life under modern
+circumstances induces in the women most immediately exposed to its
+discipline. In this way it appears that, by indirection, the institution
+of a leisure class here again favors the growth of a non-invidious
+attitude, which may, in the long run, prove a menace to the stability
+of the institution itself, and even to the institution of individual
+ownership on which it rests.
+
+During the recent past some tangible changes have taken place in the
+scope of college and university teaching. These changes have in the main
+consisted in a partial displacement of the humanities--those branches
+of learning which are conceived to make for the traditional "culture",
+character, tastes, and ideals--by those more matter-of-fact branches
+which make for civic and industrial efficiency. To put the same thing
+in other words, those branches of knowledge which make for efficiency
+(ultimately productive efficiency) have gradually been gaining ground
+against those branches which make for a heightened consumption or a
+lowered industrial efficiency and for a type of character suited to the
+regime of status. In this adaptation of the scheme of instruction the
+higher schools have commonly been found on the conservative side; each
+step which they have taken in advance has been to some extent of
+the nature of a concession. The sciences have been intruded into
+the scholar's discipline from without, not to say from below. It is
+noticeable that the humanities which have so reluctantly yielded ground
+to the sciences are pretty uniformly adapted to shape the character
+of the student in accordance with a traditional self-centred scheme of
+consumption; a scheme of contemplation and enjoyment of the true,
+the beautiful, and the good, according to a conventional standard of
+propriety and excellence, the salient feature of which is leisure--otium
+cum dignitate. In language veiled by their own habituation to the
+archaic, decorous point of view, the spokesmen of the humanities have
+insisted upon the ideal embodied in the maxim, fruges consumere nati.
+This attitude should occasion no surprise in the case of schools which
+are shaped by and rest upon a leisure-class culture.
+
+The professed grounds on which it has been sought, as far as might be,
+to maintain the received standards and methods of culture intact
+are likewise characteristic of the archaic temperament and of the
+leisure-class theory of life. The enjoyment and the bent derived from
+habitual contemplation of the life, ideals, speculations, and methods of
+consuming time and goods, in vogue among the leisure class of classical
+antiquity, for instance, is felt to be "higher", "nobler", "worthier",
+than what results in these respects from a like familiarity with the
+everyday life and the knowledge and aspirations of commonplace humanity
+in a modern community, that learning the content of which is an
+unmitigated knowledge of latter-day men and things is by comparison
+"lower", "base", "ignoble"--one even hears the epithet "sub-human"
+applied to this matter-of-fact knowledge of mankind and of everyday
+life.
+
+This contention of the leisure-class spokesmen of the humanities
+seems to be substantially sound. In point of substantial fact, the
+gratification and the culture, or the spiritual attitude or habit of
+mind, resulting from an habitual contemplation of the anthropomorphism,
+clannishness, and leisurely self-complacency of the gentleman of an
+early day, or from a familiarity with the animistic superstitions
+and the exuberant truculence of the Homeric heroes, for instance, is,
+aesthetically considered, more legitimate than the corresponding results
+derived from a matter-of-fact knowledge of things and a contemplation
+of latter-day civic or workmanlike efficiency. There can be but little
+question that the first-named habits have the advantage in respect of
+aesthetic or honorific value, and therefore in respect of the "worth"
+which is made the basis of award in the comparison. The content of the
+canons of taste, and more particularly of the canons of honor, is in the
+nature of things a resultant of the past life and circumstances of
+the race, transmitted to the later generation by inheritance or by
+tradition; and the fact that the protracted dominance of a predatory,
+leisure-class scheme of life has profoundly shaped the habit of mind and
+the point of view of the race in the past, is a sufficient basis for an
+aesthetically legitimate dominance of such a scheme of life in very much
+of what concerns matters of taste in the present. For the purpose in
+hand, canons of taste are race habits, acquired through a more or less
+protracted habituation to the approval or disapproval of the kind
+of things upon which a favorable or unfavorable judgment of taste is
+passed. Other things being equal, the longer and more unbroken the
+habituation, the more legitimate is the canon of taste in question. All
+this seems to be even truer of judgments regarding worth or honor than
+of judgments of taste generally.
+
+But whatever may be the aesthetic legitimacy of the derogatory judgment
+passed on the newer learning by the spokesmen of the humanities, and
+however substantial may be the merits of the contention that the
+classic lore is worthier and results in a more truly human culture and
+character, it does not concern the question in hand. The question in
+hand is as to how far these branches of learning, and the point of
+view for which they stand in the educational system, help or hinder an
+efficient collective life under modern industrial circumstances--how
+far they further a more facile adaptation to the economic situation
+of today. The question is an economic, not an aesthetic one; and
+the leisure-class standards of learning which find expression in the
+deprecatory attitude of the higher schools towards matter-of-fact
+knowledge are, for the present purpose, to be valued from this point of
+view only. For this purpose the use of such epithets as "noble", "base",
+"higher", "lower", etc., is significant only as showing the animus
+and the point of view of the disputants; whether they contend for the
+worthiness of the new or of the old. All these epithets are honorific or
+humilific terms; that is to say, they are terms of invidious comparison,
+which in the last analysis fall under the category of the reputable or
+the disreputable; that is, they belong within the range of ideas that
+characterizes the scheme of life of the regime of status; that is, they
+are in substance an expression of sportsmanship--of the predatory and
+animistic habit of mind; that is, they indicate an archaic point of view
+and theory of life, which may fit the predatory stage of culture and of
+economic organization from which they have sprung, but which are,
+from the point of view of economic efficiency in the broader sense,
+disserviceable anachronisms.
+
+The classics, and their position of prerogative in the scheme of
+education to which the higher seminaries of learning cling with such a
+fond predilection, serve to shape the intellectual attitude and lower
+the economic efficiency of the new learned generation. They do this
+not only by holding up an archaic ideal of manhood, but also by the
+discrimination which they inculcate with respect to the reputable and
+the disreputable in knowledge. This result is accomplished in two ways:
+(1) by inspiring an habitual aversion to what is merely useful, as
+contrasted with what is merely honorific in learning, and so shaping the
+tastes of the novice that he comes in good faith to find gratification
+of his tastes solely, or almost solely, in such exercise of the
+intellect as normally results in no industrial or social gain; and (2)
+by consuming the learner's time and effort in acquiring knowledge which
+is of no use except in so far as this learning has by convention become
+incorporated into the sum of learning required of the scholar, and has
+thereby affected the terminology and diction employed in the useful
+branches of knowledge. Except for this terminological difficulty--which
+is itself a consequence of the vogue of the classics of the past--a
+knowledge of the ancient languages, for instance, would have no
+practical bearing for any scientist or any scholar not engaged on work
+primarily of a linguistic character. Of course, all this has nothing to
+say as to the cultural value of the classics, nor is there any intention
+to disparage the discipline of the classics or the bent which their
+study gives to the student. That bent seems to be of an economically
+disserviceable kind, but this fact--somewhat notorious indeed--need
+disturb no one who has the good fortune to find comfort and strength in
+the classical lore. The fact that classical learning acts to derange
+the learner's workmanlike attitudes should fall lightly upon the
+apprehension of those who hold workmanship of small account in
+comparison with the cultivation of decorous ideals: Iam fides et pax et
+honos pudorque Priscus et neglecta redire virtus Audet.
+
+Owing to the circumstance that this knowledge has become part of the
+elementary requirements in our system of education, the ability to use
+and to understand certain of the dead languages of southern Europe
+is not only gratifying to the person who finds occasion to parade his
+accomplishments in this respect, but the evidence of such knowledge
+serves at the same time to recommend any savant to his audience, both
+lay and learned. It is currently expected that a certain number of
+years shall have been spent in acquiring this substantially useless
+information, and its absence creates a presumption of hasty and
+precarious learning, as well as of a vulgar practicality that is
+equally obnoxious to the conventional standards of sound scholarship and
+intellectual force.
+
+The case is analogous to what happens in the purchase of any article of
+consumption by a purchaser who is not an expert judge of materials or
+of workmanship. He makes his estimate of value of the article chiefly
+on the ground of the apparent expensiveness of the finish of those
+decorative parts and features which have no immediate relation to the
+intrinsic usefulness of the article; the presumption being that some
+sort of ill-defined proportion subsists between the substantial value of
+an article and the expense of adornment added in order to sell it. The
+presumption that there can ordinarily be no sound scholarship where
+a knowledge of the classics and humanities is wanting leads to a
+conspicuous waste of time and labor on the part of the general body of
+students in acquiring such knowledge. The conventional insistence on a
+modicum of conspicuous waste as an incident of all reputable scholarship
+has affected our canons of taste and of serviceability in matters of
+scholarship in much the same way as the same principle has influenced
+our judgment of the serviceability of manufactured goods.
+
+It is true, since conspicuous consumption has gained more and more on
+conspicuous leisure as a means of repute, the acquisition of the dead
+languages is no longer so imperative a requirement as it once was,
+and its talismanic virtue as a voucher of scholarship has suffered a
+concomitant impairment. But while this is true, it is also true that the
+classics have scarcely lost in absolute value as a voucher of scholastic
+respectability, since for this purpose it is only necessary that
+the scholar should be able to put in evidence some learning which is
+conventionally recognized as evidence of wasted time; and the classics
+lend themselves with great facility to this use. Indeed, there can be
+little doubt that it is their utility as evidence of wasted time and
+effort, and hence of the pecuniary strength necessary in order to
+afford this waste, that has secured to the classics their position of
+prerogative in the scheme of higher learning, and has led to their being
+esteemed the most honorific of all learning. They serve the decorative
+ends of leisure-class learning better than any other body of knowledge,
+and hence they are an effective means of reputability.
+
+In this respect the classics have until lately had scarcely a rival.
+They still have no dangerous rival on the continent of Europe, but
+lately, since college athletics have won their way into a recognized
+standing as an accredited field of scholarly accomplishment, this latter
+branch of learning--if athletics may be freely classed as learning--has
+become a rival of the classics for the primacy in leisure-class
+education in American and English schools. Athletics have an obvious
+advantage over the classics for the purpose of leisure-class learning,
+since success as an athlete presumes, not only waste of time, but also
+waste of money, as well as the possession of certain highly unindustrial
+archaic traits of character and temperament. In the German universities
+the place of athletics and Greek-letter fraternities, as a leisure-class
+scholarly occupation, has in some measure been supplied by a skilled and
+graded inebriety and a perfunctory duelling.
+
+The leisure class and its standard of virtue--archaism and waste--can
+scarcely have been concerned in the introduction of the classics into
+the scheme of the higher learning; but the tenacious retention of the
+classics by the higher schools, and the high degree of reputability
+which still attaches to them, are no doubt due to their conforming so
+closely to the requirements of archaism and waste.
+
+"Classic" always carries this connotation of wasteful and archaic,
+whether it is used to denote the dead languages or the obsolete or
+obsolescent forms of thought and diction in the living language, or to
+denote other items of scholarly activity or apparatus to which it is
+applied with less aptness. So the archaic idiom of the English language
+is spoken of as "classic" English. Its use is imperative in all speaking
+and writing upon serious topics, and a facile use of it lends dignity to
+even the most commonplace and trivial string of talk. The newest form
+of English diction is of course never written; the sense of that
+leisure-class propriety which requires archaism in speech is present
+even in the most illiterate or sensational writers in sufficient
+force to prevent such a lapse. On the other hand, the highest and
+most conventionalized style of archaic diction is--quite
+characteristically--properly employed only in communications between an
+anthropomorphic divinity and his subjects. Midway between these extremes
+lies the everyday speech of leisure-class conversation and literature.
+
+Elegant diction, whether in writing or speaking, is an effective means
+of reputability. It is of moment to know with some precision what is
+the degree of archaism conventionally required in speaking on any given
+topic. Usage differs appreciably from the pulpit to the market-place;
+the latter, as might be expected, admits the use of relatively new and
+effective words and turns of expression, even by fastidious persons. A
+discriminative avoidance of neologisms is honorific, not only because it
+argues that time has been wasted in acquiring the obsolescent habit of
+speech, but also as showing that the speaker has from infancy habitually
+associated with persons who have been familiar with the obsolescent
+idiom. It thereby goes to show his leisure-class antecedents. Great
+purity of speech is presumptive evidence of several lives spent in other
+than vulgarly useful occupations; although its evidence is by no means
+entirely conclusive to this point.
+
+As felicitous an instance of futile classicism as can well be found,
+outside of the Far East, is the conventional spelling of the English
+language. A breach of the proprieties in spelling is extremely annoying
+and will discredit any writer in the eyes of all persons who are
+possessed of a developed sense of the true and beautiful. English
+orthography satisfies all the requirements of the canons of reputability
+under the law of conspicuous waste. It is archaic, cumbrous, and
+ineffective; its acquisition consumes much time and effort; failure to
+acquire it is easy of detection. Therefore it is the first and readiest
+test of reputability in learning, and conformity to its ritual is
+indispensable to a blameless scholastic life.
+
+On this head of purity of speech, as at other points where a
+conventional usage rests on the canons of archaism and waste, the
+spokesmen for the usage instinctively take an apologetic attitude. It
+is contended, in substance, that a punctilious use of ancient and
+accredited locutions will serve to convey thought more adequately and
+more precisely than would be the straightforward use of the latest form
+of spoken English; whereas it is notorious that the ideas of today are
+effectively expressed in the slang of today. Classic speech has the
+honorific virtue of dignity; it commands attention and respect as being
+the accredited method of communication under the leisure-class scheme
+of life, because it carries a pointed suggestion of the industrial
+exemption of the speaker. The advantage of the accredited locutions lies
+in their reputability; they are reputable because they are cumbrous and
+out of date, and therefore argue waste of time and exemption from the
+use and the need of direct and forcible speech.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Theory of the Leisure Class, by
+Thorstein Veblen
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+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      The Theory of the Leisure Class, by Thorstein Veblen
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
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+
+Project Gutenberg's The Theory of the Leisure Class, by Thorstein Veblen
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Theory of the Leisure Class
+
+Author: Thorstein Veblen
+
+Release Date: August 6, 2008 [EBook #833]
+Last Updated: February 7, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Reed, and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      by Thorstein Veblen
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      Contents
+    </h2>
+    <table summary="" style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0001"> Chapter One ~~ Introductory </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0002"> Chapter Two ~~ Pecuniary Emulation </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0003"> Chapter Three ~~ Conspicuous Leisure </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0004"> Chapter Four ~~ Conspicuous Consumption
+            </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0005"> Chapter Five ~~ The Pecuniary Standard of
+            Living </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0006"> Chapter Six ~~ Pecuniary Canons of Taste
+            </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0007"> Chapter Seven ~~ Dress as an Expression of
+            the Pecuniary Culture </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0008"> Chapter Eight ~~ Industrial Exemption and
+            Conservatism </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0009"> Chapter Nine ~~ The Conservation of Archaic
+            Traits </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0010"> Chapter Ten ~~ Modern Survivals of Prowess
+            </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0011"> Chapter Eleven ~~ The Belief in Luck </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0012"> Chapter Twelve ~~ Devout Observances </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0013"> Chapter Thirteen ~~ Survivals of the
+            Non-Invidious Interests </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0014"> Chapter Fourteen ~~ The Higher Learning as
+            an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture</a>
+          </p>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter One ~~ Introductory
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The institution of a leisure class is found in its best development at the
+      higher stages of the barbarian culture; as, for instance, in feudal Europe
+      or feudal Japan. In such communities the distinction between classes is
+      very rigorously observed; and the feature of most striking economic
+      significance in these class differences is the distinction maintained
+      between the employments proper to the several classes. The upper classes
+      are by custom exempt or excluded from industrial occupations, and are
+      reserved for certain employments to which a degree of honour attaches.
+      Chief among the honourable employments in any feudal community is warfare;
+      and priestly service is commonly second to warfare. If the barbarian
+      community is not notably warlike, the priestly office may take the
+      precedence, with that of the warrior second. But the rule holds with but
+      slight exceptions that, whether warriors or priests, the upper classes are
+      exempt from industrial employments, and this exemption is the economic
+      expression of their superior rank. Brahmin India affords a fair
+      illustration of the industrial exemption of both these classes. In the
+      communities belonging to the higher barbarian culture there is a
+      considerable differentiation of sub-classes within what may be
+      comprehensively called the leisure class; and there is a corresponding
+      differentiation of employments between these sub-classes. The leisure
+      class as a whole comprises the noble and the priestly classes, together
+      with much of their retinue. The occupations of the class are
+      correspondingly diversified; but they have the common economic
+      characteristic of being non-industrial. These non-industrial upper-class
+      occupations may be roughly comprised under government, warfare, religious
+      observances, and sports.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At an earlier, but not the earliest, stage of barbarism, the leisure class
+      is found in a less differentiated form. Neither the class distinctions nor
+      the distinctions between leisure-class occupations are so minute and
+      intricate. The Polynesian islanders generally show this stage of the
+      development in good form, with the exception that, owing to the absence of
+      large game, hunting does not hold the usual place of honour in their
+      scheme of life. The Icelandic community in the time of the Sagas also
+      affords a fair instance. In such a community there is a rigorous
+      distinction between classes and between the occupations peculiar to each
+      class. Manual labour, industry, whatever has to do directly with the
+      everyday work of getting a livelihood, is the exclusive occupation of the
+      inferior class. This inferior class includes slaves and other dependents,
+      and ordinarily also all the women. If there are several grades of
+      aristocracy, the women of high rank are commonly exempt from industrial
+      employment, or at least from the more vulgar kinds of manual labour. The
+      men of the upper classes are not only exempt, but by prescriptive custom
+      they are debarred, from all industrial occupations. The range of
+      employments open to them is rigidly defined. As on the higher plane
+      already spoken of, these employments are government, warfare, religious
+      observances, and sports. These four lines of activity govern the scheme of
+      life of the upper classes, and for the highest rank&mdash;the kings or
+      chieftains&mdash;these are the only kinds of activity that custom or the
+      common sense of the community will allow. Indeed, where the scheme is well
+      developed even sports are accounted doubtfully legitimate for the members
+      of the highest rank. To the lower grades of the leisure class certain
+      other employments are open, but they are employments that are subsidiary
+      to one or another of these typical leisure-class occupations. Such are,
+      for instance, the manufacture and care of arms and accoutrements and of
+      war canoes, the dressing and handling of horses, dogs, and hawks, the
+      preparation of sacred apparatus, etc. The lower classes are excluded from
+      these secondary honourable employments, except from such as are plainly of
+      an industrial character and are only remotely related to the typical
+      leisure-class occupations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If we go a step back of this exemplary barbarian culture, into the lower
+      stages of barbarism, we no longer find the leisure class in fully
+      developed form. But this lower barbarism shows the usages, motives, and
+      circumstances out of which the institution of a leisure class has arisen,
+      and indicates the steps of its early growth. Nomadic hunting tribes in
+      various parts of the world illustrate these more primitive phases of the
+      differentiation. Any one of the North American hunting tribes may be taken
+      as a convenient illustration. These tribes can scarcely be said to have a
+      defined leisure class. There is a differentiation of function, and there
+      is a distinction between classes on the basis of this difference of
+      function, but the exemption of the superior class from work has not gone
+      far enough to make the designation "leisure class" altogether applicable.
+      The tribes belonging on this economic level have carried the economic
+      differentiation to the point at which a marked distinction is made between
+      the occupations of men and women, and this distinction is of an invidious
+      character. In nearly all these tribes the women are, by prescriptive
+      custom, held to those employments out of which the industrial occupations
+      proper develop at the next advance. The men are exempt from these vulgar
+      employments and are reserved for war, hunting, sports, and devout
+      observances. A very nice discrimination is ordinarily shown in this
+      matter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This division of labour coincides with the distinction between the working
+      and the leisure class as it appears in the higher barbarian culture. As
+      the diversification and specialisation of employments proceed, the line of
+      demarcation so drawn comes to divide the industrial from the
+      non-industrial employments. The man's occupation as it stands at the
+      earlier barbarian stage is not the original out of which any appreciable
+      portion of later industry has developed. In the later development it
+      survives only in employments that are not classed as industrial,&mdash;war,
+      politics, sports, learning, and the priestly office. The only notable
+      exceptions are a portion of the fishery industry and certain slight
+      employments that are doubtfully to be classed as industry; such as the
+      manufacture of arms, toys, and sporting goods. Virtually the whole range
+      of industrial employments is an outgrowth of what is classed as woman's
+      work in the primitive barbarian community.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The work of the men in the lower barbarian culture is no less
+      indispensable to the life of the group than the work done by the women. It
+      may even be that the men's work contributes as much to the food supply and
+      the other necessary consumption of the group. Indeed, so obvious is this
+      "productive" character of the men's work that in the conventional economic
+      writings the hunter's work is taken as the type of primitive industry. But
+      such is not the barbarian's sense of the matter. In his own eyes he is not
+      a labourer, and he is not to be classed with the women in this respect;
+      nor is his effort to be classed with the women's drudgery, as labour or
+      industry, in such a sense as to admit of its being confounded with the
+      latter. There is in all barbarian communities a profound sense of the
+      disparity between man's and woman's work. His work may conduce to the
+      maintenance of the group, but it is felt that it does so through an
+      excellence and an efficacy of a kind that cannot without derogation be
+      compared with the uneventful diligence of the women.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At a farther step backward in the cultural scale&mdash;among savage groups&mdash;the
+      differentiation of employments is still less elaborate and the invidious
+      distinction between classes and employments is less consistent and less
+      rigorous. Unequivocal instances of a primitive savage culture are hard to
+      find. Few of these groups or communities that are classed as "savage" show
+      no traces of regression from a more advanced cultural stage. But there are
+      groups&mdash;some of them apparently not the result of retrogression&mdash;which
+      show the traits of primitive savagery with some fidelity. Their culture
+      differs from that of the barbarian communities in the absence of a leisure
+      class and the absence, in great measure, of the animus or spiritual
+      attitude on which the institution of a leisure class rests. These
+      communities of primitive savages in which there is no hierarchy of
+      economic classes make up but a small and inconspicuous fraction of the
+      human race. As good an instance of this phase of culture as may be had is
+      afforded by the tribes of the Andamans, or by the Todas of the Nilgiri
+      Hills. The scheme of life of these groups at the time of their earliest
+      contact with Europeans seems to have been nearly typical, so far as
+      regards the absence of a leisure class. As a further instance might be
+      cited the Ainu of Yezo, and, more doubtfully, also some Bushman and Eskimo
+      groups. Some Pueblo communities are less confidently to be included in the
+      same class. Most, if not all, of the communities here cited may well be
+      cases of degeneration from a higher barbarism, rather than bearers of a
+      culture that has never risen above its present level. If so, they are for
+      the present purpose to be taken with the allowance, but they may serve
+      none the less as evidence to the same effect as if they were really
+      "primitive" populations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These communities that are without a defined leisure class resemble one
+      another also in certain other features of their social structure and
+      manner of life. They are small groups and of a simple (archaic) structure;
+      they are commonly peaceable and sedentary; they are poor; and individual
+      ownership is not a dominant feature of their economic system. At the same
+      time it does not follow that these are the smallest of existing
+      communities, or that their social structure is in all respects the least
+      differentiated; nor does the class necessarily include all primitive
+      communities which have no defined system of individual ownership. But it
+      is to be noted that the class seems to include the most peaceable&mdash;perhaps
+      all the characteristically peaceable&mdash;primitive groups of men.
+      Indeed, the most notable trait common to members of such communities is a
+      certain amiable inefficiency when confronted with force or fraud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The evidence afforded by the usages and cultural traits of communities at
+      a low stage of development indicates that the institution of a leisure
+      class has emerged gradually during the transition from primitive savagery
+      to barbarism; or more precisely, during the transition from a peaceable to
+      a consistently warlike habit of life. The conditions apparently necessary
+      to its emergence in a consistent form are: (1) the community must be of a
+      predatory habit of life (war or the hunting of large game or both); that
+      is to say, the men, who constitute the inchoate leisure class in these
+      cases, must be habituated to the infliction of injury by force and
+      stratagem; (2) subsistence must be obtainable on sufficiently easy terms
+      to admit of the exemption of a considerable portion of the community from
+      steady application to a routine of labour. The institution of leisure
+      class is the outgrowth of an early discrimination between employments,
+      according to which some employments are worthy and others unworthy. Under
+      this ancient distinction the worthy employments are those which may be
+      classed as exploit; unworthy are those necessary everyday employments into
+      which no appreciable element of exploit enters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This distinction has but little obvious significance in a modern
+      industrial community, and it has, therefore, received but slight attention
+      at the hands of economic writers. When viewed in the light of that modern
+      common sense which has guided economic discussion, it seems formal and
+      insubstantial. But it persists with great tenacity as a commonplace
+      preconception even in modern life, as is shown, for instance, by our
+      habitual aversion to menial employments. It is a distinction of a personal
+      kind&mdash;of superiority and inferiority. In the earlier stages of
+      culture, when the personal force of the individual counted more
+      immediately and obviously in shaping the course of events, the element of
+      exploit counted for more in the everyday scheme of life. Interest centred
+      about this fact to a greater degree. Consequently a distinction proceeding
+      on this ground seemed more imperative and more definitive then than is the
+      case to-day. As a fact in the sequence of development, therefore, the
+      distinction is a substantial one and rests on sufficiently valid and
+      cogent grounds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ground on which a discrimination between facts is habitually made
+      changes as the interest from which the facts are habitually viewed
+      changes. Those features of the facts at hand are salient and substantial
+      upon which the dominant interest of the time throws its light. Any given
+      ground of distinction will seem insubstantial to any one who habitually
+      apprehends the facts in question from a different point of view and values
+      them for a different purpose. The habit of distinguishing and classifying
+      the various purposes and directions of activity prevails of necessity
+      always and everywhere; for it is indispensable in reaching a working
+      theory or scheme of life. The particular point of view, or the particular
+      characteristic that is pitched upon as definitive in the classification of
+      the facts of life depends upon the interest from which a discrimination of
+      the facts is sought. The grounds of discrimination, and the norm of
+      procedure in classifying the facts, therefore, progressively change as the
+      growth of culture proceeds; for the end for which the facts of life are
+      apprehended changes, and the point of view consequently changes also. So
+      that what are recognised as the salient and decisive features of a class
+      of activities or of a social class at one stage of culture will not retain
+      the same relative importance for the purposes of classification at any
+      subsequent stage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the change of standards and points of view is gradual only, and it
+      seldom results in the subversion or entire suppression of a standpoint
+      once accepted. A distinction is still habitually made between industrial
+      and non-industrial occupations; and this modern distinction is a
+      transmuted form of the barbarian distinction between exploit and drudgery.
+      Such employments as warfare, politics, public worship, and public
+      merrymaking, are felt, in the popular apprehension, to differ
+      intrinsically from the labour that has to do with elaborating the material
+      means of life. The precise line of demarcation is not the same as it was
+      in the early barbarian scheme, but the broad distinction has not fallen
+      into disuse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The tacit, common-sense distinction to-day is, in effect, that any effort
+      is to be accounted industrial only so far as its ultimate purpose is the
+      utilisation of non-human things. The coercive utilisation of man by man is
+      not felt to be an industrial function; but all effort directed to enhance
+      human life by taking advantage of the non-human environment is classed
+      together as industrial activity. By the economists who have best retained
+      and adapted the classical tradition, man's "power over nature" is
+      currently postulated as the characteristic fact of industrial
+      productivity. This industrial power over nature is taken to include man's
+      power over the life of the beasts and over all the elemental forces. A
+      line is in this way drawn between mankind and brute creation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In other times and among men imbued with a different body of
+      preconceptions this line is not drawn precisely as we draw it to-day. In
+      the savage or the barbarian scheme of life it is drawn in a different
+      place and in another way. In all communities under the barbarian culture
+      there is an alert and pervading sense of antithesis between two
+      comprehensive groups of phenomena, in one of which barbarian man includes
+      himself, and in the other, his victual. There is a felt antithesis between
+      economic and non-economic phenomena, but it is not conceived in the modern
+      fashion; it lies not between man and brute creation, but between animate
+      and inert things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may be an excess of caution at this day to explain that the barbarian
+      notion which it is here intended to convey by the term "animate" is not
+      the same as would be conveyed by the word "living". The term does not
+      cover all living things, and it does cover a great many others. Such a
+      striking natural phenomenon as a storm, a disease, a waterfall, are
+      recognised as "animate"; while fruits and herbs, and even inconspicuous
+      animals, such as house-flies, maggots, lemmings, sheep, are not ordinarily
+      apprehended as "animate" except when taken collectively. As here used the
+      term does not necessarily imply an indwelling soul or spirit. The concept
+      includes such things as in the apprehension of the animistic savage or
+      barbarian are formidable by virtue of a real or imputed habit of
+      initiating action. This category comprises a large number and range of
+      natural objects and phenomena. Such a distinction between the inert and
+      the active is still present in the habits of thought of unreflecting
+      persons, and it still profoundly affects the prevalent theory of human
+      life and of natural processes; but it does not pervade our daily life to
+      the extent or with the far-reaching practical consequences that are
+      apparent at earlier stages of culture and belief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the mind of the barbarian, the elaboration and utilisation of what is
+      afforded by inert nature is activity on quite a different plane from his
+      dealings with "animate" things and forces. The line of demarcation may be
+      vague and shifting, but the broad distinction is sufficiently real and
+      cogent to influence the barbarian scheme of life. To the class of things
+      apprehended as animate, the barbarian fancy imputes an unfolding of
+      activity directed to some end. It is this teleological unfolding of
+      activity that constitutes any object or phenomenon an "animate" fact.
+      Wherever the unsophisticated savage or barbarian meets with activity that
+      is at all obtrusive, he construes it in the only terms that are ready to
+      hand&mdash;the terms immediately given in his consciousness of his own
+      actions. Activity is, therefore, assimilated to human action, and active
+      objects are in so far assimilated to the human agent. Phenomena of this
+      character&mdash;especially those whose behaviour is notably formidable or
+      baffling&mdash;have to be met in a different spirit and with proficiency
+      of a different kind from what is required in dealing with inert things. To
+      deal successfully with such phenomena is a work of exploit rather than of
+      industry. It is an assertion of prowess, not of diligence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Under the guidance of this naive discrimination between the inert and the
+      animate, the activities of the primitive social group tend to fall into
+      two classes, which would in modern phrase be called exploit and industry.
+      Industry is effort that goes to create a new thing, with a new purpose
+      given it by the fashioning hand of its maker out of passive ("brute")
+      material; while exploit, so far as it results in an outcome useful to the
+      agent, is the conversion to his own ends of energies previously directed
+      to some other end by an other agent. We still speak of "brute matter" with
+      something of the barbarian's realisation of a profound significance in the
+      term.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The distinction between exploit and drudgery coincides with a difference
+      between the sexes. The sexes differ, not only in stature and muscular
+      force, but perhaps even more decisively in temperament, and this must
+      early have given rise to a corresponding division of labour. The general
+      range of activities that come under the head of exploit falls to the males
+      as being the stouter, more massive, better capable of a sudden and violent
+      strain, and more readily inclined to self assertion, active emulation, and
+      aggression. The difference in mass, in physiological character, and in
+      temperament may be slight among the members of the primitive group; it
+      appears, in fact, to be relatively slight and inconsequential in some of
+      the more archaic communities with which we are acquainted&mdash;as for
+      instance the tribes of the Andamans. But so soon as a differentiation of
+      function has well begun on the lines marked out by this difference in
+      physique and animus, the original difference between the sexes will itself
+      widen. A cumulative process of selective adaptation to the new
+      distribution of employments will set in, especially if the habitat or the
+      fauna with which the group is in contact is such as to call for a
+      considerable exercise of the sturdier virtues. The habitual pursuit of
+      large game requires more of the manly qualities of massiveness, agility,
+      and ferocity, and it can therefore scarcely fail to hasten and widen the
+      differentiation of functions between the sexes. And so soon as the group
+      comes into hostile contact with other groups, the divergence of function
+      will take on the developed form of a distinction between exploit and
+      industry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In such a predatory group of hunters it comes to be the able-bodied men's
+      office to fight and hunt. The women do what other work there is to do&mdash;other
+      members who are unfit for man's work being for this purpose classed with
+      women. But the men's hunting and fighting are both of the same general
+      character. Both are of a predatory nature; the warrior and the hunter
+      alike reap where they have not strewn. Their aggressive assertion of force
+      and sagacity differs obviously from the women's assiduous and uneventful
+      shaping of materials; it is not to be accounted productive labour but
+      rather an acquisition of substance by seizure. Such being the barbarian
+      man's work, in its best development and widest divergence from women's
+      work, any effort that does not involve an assertion of prowess comes to be
+      unworthy of the man. As the tradition gains consistency, the common sense
+      of the community erects it into a canon of conduct; so that no employment
+      and no acquisition is morally possible to the self respecting man at this
+      cultural stage, except such as proceeds on the basis of prowess&mdash;force
+      or fraud. When the predatory habit of life has been settled upon the group
+      by long habituation, it becomes the able-bodied man's accredited office in
+      the social economy to kill, to destroy such competitors in the struggle
+      for existence as attempt to resist or elude him, to overcome and reduce to
+      subservience those alien forces that assert themselves refractorily in the
+      environment. So tenaciously and with such nicety is this theoretical
+      distinction between exploit and drudgery adhered to that in many hunting
+      tribes the man must not bring home the game which he has killed, but must
+      send his woman to perform that baser office.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As has already been indicated, the distinction between exploit and
+      drudgery is an invidious distinction between employments. Those
+      employments which are to be classed as exploit are worthy, honourable,
+      noble; other employments, which do not contain this element of exploit,
+      and especially those which imply subservience or submission, are unworthy,
+      debasing, ignoble. The concept of dignity, worth, or honour, as applied
+      either to persons or conduct, is of first-rate consequence in the
+      development of classes and of class distinctions, and it is therefore
+      necessary to say something of its derivation and meaning. Its
+      psychological ground may be indicated in outline as follows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As a matter of selective necessity, man is an agent. He is, in his own
+      apprehension, a centre of unfolding impulsive activity&mdash;"teleological"
+      activity. He is an agent seeking in every act the accomplishment of some
+      concrete, objective, impersonal end. By force of his being such an agent
+      he is possessed of a taste for effective work, and a distaste for futile
+      effort. He has a sense of the merit of serviceability or efficiency and of
+      the demerit of futility, waste, or incapacity. This aptitude or propensity
+      may be called the instinct of workmanship. Wherever the circumstances or
+      traditions of life lead to an habitual comparison of one person with
+      another in point of efficiency, the instinct of workmanship works out in
+      an emulative or invidious comparison of persons. The extent to which this
+      result follows depends in some considerable degree on the temperament of
+      the population. In any community where such an invidious comparison of
+      persons is habitually made, visible success becomes an end sought for its
+      own utility as a basis of esteem. Esteem is gained and dispraise is
+      avoided by putting one's efficiency in evidence. The result is that the
+      instinct of workmanship works out in an emulative demonstration of force.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During that primitive phase of social development, when the community is
+      still habitually peaceable, perhaps sedentary, and without a developed
+      system of individual ownership, the efficiency of the individual can be
+      shown chiefly and most consistently in some employment that goes to
+      further the life of the group. What emulation of an economic kind there is
+      between the members of such a group will be chiefly emulation in
+      industrial serviceability. At the same time the incentive to emulation is
+      not strong, nor is the scope for emulation large.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the community passes from peaceable savagery to a predatory phase of
+      life, the conditions of emulation change. The opportunity and the
+      incentive to emulate increase greatly in scope and urgency. The activity
+      of the men more and more takes on the character of exploit; and an
+      invidious comparison of one hunter or warrior with another grows
+      continually easier and more habitual. Tangible evidences of prowess&mdash;trophies&mdash;find
+      a place in men's habits of thought as an essential feature of the
+      paraphernalia of life. Booty, trophies of the chase or of the raid, come
+      to be prized as evidence of pre-eminent force. Aggression becomes the
+      accredited form of action, and booty serves as prima facie evidence of
+      successful aggression. As accepted at this cultural stage, the accredited,
+      worthy form of self-assertion is contest; and useful articles or services
+      obtained by seizure or compulsion, serve as a conventional evidence of
+      successful contest. Therefore, by contrast, the obtaining of goods by
+      other methods than seizure comes to be accounted unworthy of man in his
+      best estate. The performance of productive work, or employment in personal
+      service, falls under the same odium for the same reason. An invidious
+      distinction in this way arises between exploit and acquisition on the
+      other hand. Labour acquires a character of irksomeness by virtue of the
+      indignity imputed to it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the primitive barbarian, before the simple content of the notion has
+      been obscured by its own ramifications and by a secondary growth of
+      cognate ideas, "honourable" seems to connote nothing else than assertion
+      of superior force. "Honourable" is "formidable"; "worthy" is "prepotent".
+      A honorific act is in the last analysis little if anything else than a
+      recognised successful act of aggression; and where aggression means
+      conflict with men and beasts, the activity which comes to be especially
+      and primarily honourable is the assertion of the strong hand. The naive,
+      archaic habit of construing all manifestations of force in terms of
+      personality or "will power" greatly fortifies this conventional exaltation
+      of the strong hand. Honorific epithets, in vogue among barbarian tribes as
+      well as among peoples of a more advance culture, commonly bear the stamp
+      of this unsophisticated sense of honour. Epithets and titles used in
+      addressing chieftains, and in the propitiation of kings and gods, very
+      commonly impute a propensity for overbearing violence and an irresistible
+      devastating force to the person who is to be propitiated. This holds true
+      to an extent also in the more civilised communities of the present day.
+      The predilection shown in heraldic devices for the more rapacious beasts
+      and birds of prey goes to enforce the same view.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Under this common-sense barbarian appreciation of worth or honour, the
+      taking of life&mdash;the killing of formidable competitors, whether brute
+      or human&mdash;is honourable in the highest degree. And this high office
+      of slaughter, as an expression of the slayer's prepotence, casts a glamour
+      of worth over every act of slaughter and over all the tools and
+      accessories of the act. Arms are honourable, and the use of them, even in
+      seeking the life of the meanest creatures of the fields, becomes a
+      honorific employment. At the same time, employment in industry becomes
+      correspondingly odious, and, in the common-sense apprehension, the
+      handling of the tools and implements of industry falls beneath the dignity
+      of able-bodied men. Labour becomes irksome.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is here assumed that in the sequence of cultural evolution primitive
+      groups of men have passed from an initial peaceable stage to a subsequent
+      stage at which fighting is the avowed and characteristic employment of the
+      group. But it is not implied that there has been an abrupt transition from
+      unbroken peace and good-will to a later or higher phase of life in which
+      the fact of combat occurs for the first time. Neither is it implied that
+      all peaceful industry disappears on the transition to the predatory phase
+      of culture. Some fighting, it is safe to say, would be met with at any
+      early stage of social development. Fights would occur with more or less
+      frequency through sexual competition. The known habits of primitive
+      groups, as well as the habits of the anthropoid apes, argue to that
+      effect, and the evidence from the well-known promptings of human nature
+      enforces the same view.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may therefore be objected that there can have been no such initial
+      stage of peaceable life as is here assumed. There is no point in cultural
+      evolution prior to which fighting does not occur. But the point in
+      question is not as to the occurrence of combat, occasional or sporadic, or
+      even more or less frequent and habitual; it is a question as to the
+      occurrence of an habitual; it is a question as to the occurrence of an
+      habitual bellicose frame of mind&mdash;a prevalent habit of judging facts
+      and events from the point of view of the fight. The predatory phase of
+      culture is attained only when the predatory attitude has become the
+      habitual and accredited spiritual attitude for the members of the group;
+      when the fight has become the dominant note in the current theory of life;
+      when the common-sense appreciation of men and things has come to be an
+      appreciation with a view to combat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The substantial difference between the peaceable and the predatory phase
+      of culture, therefore, is a spiritual difference, not a mechanical one.
+      The change in spiritual attitude is the outgrowth of a change in the
+      material facts of the life of the group, and it comes on gradually as the
+      material circumstances favourable to a predatory attitude supervene. The
+      inferior limit of the predatory culture is an industrial limit. Predation
+      can not become the habitual, conventional resource of any group or any
+      class until industrial methods have been developed to such a degree of
+      efficiency as to leave a margin worth fighting for, above the subsistence
+      of those engaged in getting a living. The transition from peace to
+      predation therefore depends on the growth of technical knowledge and the
+      use of tools. A predatory culture is similarly impracticable in early
+      times, until weapons have been developed to such a point as to make man a
+      formidable animal. The early development of tools and of weapons is of
+      course the same fact seen from two different points of view.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The life of a given group would be characterised as peaceable so long as
+      habitual recourse to combat has not brought the fight into the foreground
+      in men's every day thoughts, as a dominant feature of the life of man. A
+      group may evidently attain such a predatory attitude with a greater or
+      less degree of completeness, so that its scheme of life and canons of
+      conduct may be controlled to a greater or less extent by the predatory
+      animus. The predatory phase of culture is therefore conceived to come on
+      gradually, through a cumulative growth of predatory aptitudes habits, and
+      traditions this growth being due to a change in the circumstances of the
+      group's life, of such a kind as to develop and conserve those traits of
+      human nature and those traditions and norms of conduct that make for a
+      predatory rather than a peaceable life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The evidence for the hypothesis that there has been such a peaceable stage
+      of primitive culture is in great part drawn from psychology rather than
+      from ethnology, and cannot be detailed here. It will be recited in part in
+      a later chapter, in discussing the survival of archaic traits of human
+      nature under the modern culture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Two ~~ Pecuniary Emulation
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In the sequence of cultural evolution the emergence of a leisure class
+      coincides with the beginning of ownership. This is necessarily the case,
+      for these two institutions result from the same set of economic forces. In
+      the inchoate phase of their development they are but different aspects of
+      the same general facts of social structure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is as elements of social structure&mdash;conventional facts&mdash;that
+      leisure and ownership are matters of interest for the purpose in hand. An
+      habitual neglect of work does not constitute a leisure class; neither does
+      the mechanical fact of use and consumption constitute ownership. The
+      present inquiry, therefore, is not concerned with the beginning of
+      indolence, nor with the beginning of the appropriation of useful articles
+      to individual consumption. The point in question is the origin and nature
+      of a conventional leisure class on the one hand and the beginnings of
+      individual ownership as a conventional right or equitable claim on the
+      other hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The early differentiation out of which the distinction between a leisure
+      and a working class arises is a division maintained between men's and
+      women's work in the lower stages of barbarism. Likewise the earliest form
+      of ownership is an ownership of the women by the able bodied men of the
+      community. The facts may be expressed in more general terms, and truer to
+      the import of the barbarian theory of life, by saying that it is an
+      ownership of the woman by the man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was undoubtedly some appropriation of useful articles before the
+      custom of appropriating women arose. The usages of existing archaic
+      communities in which there is no ownership of women is warrant for such a
+      view. In all communities the members, both male and female, habitually
+      appropriate to their individual use a variety of useful things; but these
+      useful things are not thought of as owned by the person who appropriates
+      and consumes them. The habitual appropriation and consumption of certain
+      slight personal effects goes on without raising the question of ownership;
+      that is to say, the question of a conventional, equitable claim to
+      extraneous things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ownership of women begins in the lower barbarian stages of culture,
+      apparently with the seizure of female captives. The original reason for
+      the seizure and appropriation of women seems to have been their usefulness
+      as trophies. The practice of seizing women from the enemy as trophies,
+      gave rise to a form of ownership-marriage, resulting in a household with a
+      male head. This was followed by an extension of slavery to other captives
+      and inferiors, besides women, and by an extension of ownership-marriage to
+      other women than those seized from the enemy. The outcome of emulation
+      under the circumstances of a predatory life, therefore, has been on the
+      one hand a form of marriage resting on coercion, and on the other hand the
+      custom of ownership. The two institutions are not distinguishable in the
+      initial phase of their development; both arise from the desire of the
+      successful men to put their prowess in evidence by exhibiting some durable
+      result of their exploits. Both also minister to that propensity for
+      mastery which pervades all predatory communities. From the ownership of
+      women the concept of ownership extends itself to include the products of
+      their industry, and so there arises the ownership of things as well as of
+      persons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this way a consistent system of property in goods is gradually
+      installed. And although in the latest stages of the development, the
+      serviceability of goods for consumption has come to be the most obtrusive
+      element of their value, still, wealth has by no means yet lost its utility
+      as a honorific evidence of the owner's prepotence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Wherever the institution of private property is found, even in a slightly
+      developed form, the economic process bears the character of a struggle
+      between men for the possession of goods. It has been customary in economic
+      theory, and especially among those economists who adhere with least
+      faltering to the body of modernised classical doctrines, to construe this
+      struggle for wealth as being substantially a struggle for subsistence.
+      Such is, no doubt, its character in large part during the earlier and less
+      efficient phases of industry. Such is also its character in all cases
+      where the "niggardliness of nature" is so strict as to afford but a scanty
+      livelihood to the community in return for strenuous and unremitting
+      application to the business of getting the means of subsistence. But in
+      all progressing communities an advance is presently made beyond this early
+      stage of technological development. Industrial efficiency is presently
+      carried to such a pitch as to afford something appreciably more than a
+      bare livelihood to those engaged in the industrial process. It has not
+      been unusual for economic theory to speak of the further struggle for
+      wealth on this new industrial basis as a competition for an increase of
+      the comforts of life,&mdash;primarily for an increase of the physical
+      comforts which the consumption of goods affords.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The end of acquisition and accumulation is conventionally held to be the
+      consumption of the goods accumulated&mdash;whether it is consumption
+      directly by the owner of the goods or by the household attached to him and
+      for this purpose identified with him in theory. This is at least felt to
+      be the economically legitimate end of acquisition, which alone it is
+      incumbent on the theory to take account of. Such consumption may of course
+      be conceived to serve the consumer's physical wants&mdash;his physical
+      comfort&mdash;or his so-called higher wants&mdash;spiritual, aesthetic,
+      intellectual, or what not; the latter class of wants being served
+      indirectly by an expenditure of goods, after the fashion familiar to all
+      economic readers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it is only when taken in a sense far removed from its naive meaning
+      that consumption of goods can be said to afford the incentive from which
+      accumulation invariably proceeds. The motive that lies at the root of
+      ownership is emulation; and the same motive of emulation continues active
+      in the further development of the institution to which it has given rise
+      and in the development of all those features of the social structure which
+      this institution of ownership touches. The possession of wealth confers
+      honour; it is an invidious distinction. Nothing equally cogent can be said
+      for the consumption of goods, nor for any other conceivable incentive to
+      acquisition, and especially not for any incentive to accumulation of
+      wealth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is of course not to be overlooked that in a community where nearly all
+      goods are private property the necessity of earning a livelihood is a
+      powerful and ever present incentive for the poorer members of the
+      community. The need of subsistence and of an increase of physical comfort
+      may for a time be the dominant motive of acquisition for those classes who
+      are habitually employed at manual labour, whose subsistence is on a
+      precarious footing, who possess little and ordinarily accumulate little;
+      but it will appear in the course of the discussion that even in the case
+      of these impecunious classes the predominance of the motive of physical
+      want is not so decided as has sometimes been assumed. On the other hand,
+      so far as regards those members and classes of the community who are
+      chiefly concerned in the accumulation of wealth, the incentive of
+      subsistence or of physical comfort never plays a considerable part.
+      Ownership began and grew into a human institution on grounds unrelated to
+      the subsistence minimum. The dominant incentive was from the outset the
+      invidious distinction attaching to wealth, and, save temporarily and by
+      exception, no other motive has usurped the primacy at any later stage of
+      the development.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Property set out with being booty held as trophies of the successful raid.
+      So long as the group had departed and so long as it still stood in close
+      contact with other hostile groups, the utility of things or persons owned
+      lay chiefly in an invidious comparison between their possessor and the
+      enemy from whom they were taken. The habit of distinguishing between the
+      interests of the individual and those of the group to which he belongs is
+      apparently a later growth. Invidious comparison between the possessor of
+      the honorific booty and his less successful neighbours within the group
+      was no doubt present early as an element of the utility of the things
+      possessed, though this was not at the outset the chief element of their
+      value. The man's prowess was still primarily the group's prowess, and the
+      possessor of the booty felt himself to be primarily the keeper of the
+      honour of his group. This appreciation of exploit from the communal point
+      of view is met with also at later stages of social growth, especially as
+      regards the laurels of war.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But as soon as the custom of individual ownership begins to gain
+      consistency, the point of view taken in making the invidious comparison on
+      which private property rests will begin to change. Indeed, the one change
+      is but the reflex of the other. The initial phase of ownership, the phase
+      of acquisition by naive seizure and conversion, begins to pass into the
+      subsequent stage of an incipient organization of industry on the basis of
+      private property (in slaves); the horde develops into a more or less
+      self-sufficing industrial community; possessions then come to be valued
+      not so much as evidence of successful foray, but rather as evidence of the
+      prepotence of the possessor of these goods over other individuals within
+      the community. The invidious comparison now becomes primarily a comparison
+      of the owner with the other members of the group. Property is still of the
+      nature of trophy, but, with the cultural advance, it becomes more and more
+      a trophy of successes scored in the game of ownership carried on between
+      the members of the group under the quasi-peaceable methods of nomadic
+      life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gradually, as industrial activity further displaced predatory activity in
+      the community's everyday life and in men's habits of thought, accumulated
+      property more and more replaces trophies of predatory exploit as the
+      conventional exponent of prepotence and success. With the growth of
+      settled industry, therefore, the possession of wealth gains in relative
+      importance and effectiveness as a customary basis of repute and esteem.
+      Not that esteem ceases to be awarded on the basis of other, more direct
+      evidence of prowess; not that successful predatory aggression or warlike
+      exploit ceases to call out the approval and admiration of the crowd, or to
+      stir the envy of the less successful competitors; but the opportunities
+      for gaining distinction by means of this direct manifestation of superior
+      force grow less available both in scope and frequency. At the same time
+      opportunities for industrial aggression, and for the accumulation of
+      property, increase in scope and availability. And it is even more to the
+      point that property now becomes the most easily recognised evidence of a
+      reputable degree of success as distinguished from heroic or signal
+      achievement. It therefore becomes the conventional basis of esteem. Its
+      possession in some amount becomes necessary in order to any reputable
+      standing in the community. It becomes indispensable to accumulate, to
+      acquire property, in order to retain one's good name. When accumulated
+      goods have in this way once become the accepted badge of efficiency, the
+      possession of wealth presently assumes the character of an independent and
+      definitive basis of esteem. The possession of goods, whether acquired
+      aggressively by one's own exertion or passively by transmission through
+      inheritance from others, becomes a conventional basis of reputability. The
+      possession of wealth, which was at the outset valued simply as an evidence
+      of efficiency, becomes, in popular apprehension, itself a meritorious act.
+      Wealth is now itself intrinsically honourable and confers honour on its
+      possessor. By a further refinement, wealth acquired passively by
+      transmission from ancestors or other antecedents presently becomes even
+      more honorific than wealth acquired by the possessor's own effort; but
+      this distinction belongs at a later stage in the evolution of the
+      pecuniary culture and will be spoken of in its place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Prowess and exploit may still remain the basis of award of the highest
+      popular esteem, although the possession of wealth has become the basis of
+      common place reputability and of a blameless social standing. The
+      predatory instinct and the consequent approbation of predatory efficiency
+      are deeply ingrained in the habits of thought of those peoples who have
+      passed under the discipline of a protracted predatory culture. According
+      to popular award, the highest honours within human reach may, even yet, be
+      those gained by an unfolding of extraordinary predatory efficiency in war,
+      or by a quasi-predatory efficiency in statecraft; but for the purposes of
+      a commonplace decent standing in the community these means of repute have
+      been replaced by the acquisition and accumulation of goods. In order to
+      stand well in the eyes of the community, it is necessary to come up to a
+      certain, somewhat indefinite, conventional standard of wealth; just as in
+      the earlier predatory stage it is necessary for the barbarian man to come
+      up to the tribe's standard of physical endurance, cunning, and skill at
+      arms. A certain standard of wealth in the one case, and of prowess in the
+      other, is a necessary condition of reputability, and anything in excess of
+      this normal amount is meritorious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those members of the community who fall short of this, somewhat
+      indefinite, normal degree of prowess or of property suffer in the esteem
+      of their fellow-men; and consequently they suffer also in their own
+      esteem, since the usual basis of self-respect is the respect accorded by
+      one's neighbours. Only individuals with an aberrant temperament can in the
+      long run retain their self-esteem in the face of the disesteem of their
+      fellows. Apparent exceptions to the rule are met with, especially among
+      people with strong religious convictions. But these apparent exceptions
+      are scarcely real exceptions, since such persons commonly fall back on the
+      putative approbation of some supernatural witness of their deeds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So soon as the possession of property becomes the basis of popular esteem,
+      therefore, it becomes also a requisite to the complacency which we call
+      self-respect. In any community where goods are held in severalty it is
+      necessary, in order to his own peace of mind, that an individual should
+      possess as large a portion of goods as others with whom he is accustomed
+      to class himself; and it is extremely gratifying to possess something more
+      than others. But as fast as a person makes new acquisitions, and becomes
+      accustomed to the resulting new standard of wealth, the new standard
+      forthwith ceases to afford appreciably greater satisfaction than the
+      earlier standard did. The tendency in any case is constantly to make the
+      present pecuniary standard the point of departure for a fresh increase of
+      wealth; and this in turn gives rise to a new standard of sufficiency and a
+      new pecuniary classification of one's self as compared with one's
+      neighbours. So far as concerns the present question, the end sought by
+      accumulation is to rank high in comparison with the rest of the community
+      in point of pecuniary strength. So long as the comparison is distinctly
+      unfavourable to himself, the normal, average individual will live in
+      chronic dissatisfaction with his present lot; and when he has reached what
+      may be called the normal pecuniary standard of the community, or of his
+      class in the community, this chronic dissatisfaction will give place to a
+      restless straining to place a wider and ever-widening pecuniary interval
+      between himself and this average standard. The invidious comparison can
+      never become so favourable to the individual making it that he would not
+      gladly rate himself still higher relatively to his competitors in the
+      struggle for pecuniary reputability.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the nature of the case, the desire for wealth can scarcely be satiated
+      in any individual instance, and evidently a satiation of the average or
+      general desire for wealth is out of the question. However widely, or
+      equally, or "fairly", it may be distributed, no general increase of the
+      community's wealth can make any approach to satiating this need, the
+      ground of which is the desire of every one to excel every one else in the
+      accumulation of goods. If, as is sometimes assumed, the incentive to
+      accumulation were the want of subsistence or of physical comfort, then the
+      aggregate economic wants of a community might conceivably be satisfied at
+      some point in the advance of industrial efficiency; but since the struggle
+      is substantially a race for reputability on the basis of an invidious
+      comparison, no approach to a definitive attainment is possible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What has just been said must not be taken to mean that there are no other
+      incentives to acquisition and accumulation than this desire to excel in
+      pecuniary standing and so gain the esteem and envy of one's fellow-men.
+      The desire for added comfort and security from want is present as a motive
+      at every stage of the process of accumulation in a modern industrial
+      community; although the standard of sufficiency in these respects is in
+      turn greatly affected by the habit of pecuniary emulation. To a great
+      extent this emulation shapes the methods and selects the objects of
+      expenditure for personal comfort and decent livelihood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides this, the power conferred by wealth also affords a motive to
+      accumulation. That propensity for purposeful activity and that repugnance
+      to all futility of effort which belong to man by virtue of his character
+      as an agent do not desert him when he emerges from the naive communal
+      culture where the dominant note of life is the unanalysed and
+      undifferentiated solidarity of the individual with the group with which
+      his life is bound up. When he enters upon the predatory stage, where
+      self-seeking in the narrower sense becomes the dominant note, this
+      propensity goes with him still, as the pervasive trait that shapes his
+      scheme of life. The propensity for achievement and the repugnance to
+      futility remain the underlying economic motive. The propensity changes
+      only in the form of its expression and in the proximate objects to which
+      it directs the man's activity. Under the regime of individual ownership
+      the most available means of visibly achieving a purpose is that afforded
+      by the acquisition and accumulation of goods; and as the self-regarding
+      antithesis between man and man reaches fuller consciousness, the
+      propensity for achievement&mdash;the instinct of workmanship&mdash;tends
+      more and more to shape itself into a straining to excel others in
+      pecuniary achievement. Relative success, tested by an invidious pecuniary
+      comparison with other men, becomes the conventional end of action. The
+      currently accepted legitimate end of effort becomes the achievement of a
+      favourable comparison with other men; and therefore the repugnance to
+      futility to a good extent coalesces with the incentive of emulation. It
+      acts to accentuate the struggle for pecuniary reputability by visiting
+      with a sharper disapproval all shortcoming and all evidence of shortcoming
+      in point of pecuniary success. Purposeful effort comes to mean, primarily,
+      effort directed to or resulting in a more creditable showing of
+      accumulated wealth. Among the motives which lead men to accumulate wealth,
+      the primacy, both in scope and intensity, therefore, continues to belong
+      to this motive of pecuniary emulation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In making use of the term "invidious", it may perhaps be unnecessary to
+      remark, there is no intention to extol or depreciate, or to commend or
+      deplore any of the phenomena which the word is used to characterise. The
+      term is used in a technical sense as describing a comparison of persons
+      with a view to rating and grading them in respect of relative worth or
+      value&mdash;in an aesthetic or moral sense&mdash;and so awarding and
+      defining the relative degrees of complacency with which they may
+      legitimately be contemplated by themselves and by others. An invidious
+      comparison is a process of valuation of persons in respect of worth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Three ~~ Conspicuous Leisure
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      If its working were not disturbed by other economic forces or other
+      features of the emulative process, the immediate effect of such a
+      pecuniary struggle as has just been described in outline would be to make
+      men industrious and frugal. This result actually follows, in some measure,
+      so far as regards the lower classes, whose ordinary means of acquiring
+      goods is productive labour. This is more especially true of the labouring
+      classes in a sedentary community which is at an agricultural stage of
+      industry, in which there is a considerable subdivision of industry, and
+      whose laws and customs secure to these classes a more or less definite
+      share of the product of their industry. These lower classes can in any
+      case not avoid labour, and the imputation of labour is therefore not
+      greatly derogatory to them, at least not within their class. Rather, since
+      labour is their recognised and accepted mode of life, they take some
+      emulative pride in a reputation for efficiency in their work, this being
+      often the only line of emulation that is open to them. For those for whom
+      acquisition and emulation is possible only within the field of productive
+      efficiency and thrift, the struggle for pecuniary reputability will in
+      some measure work out in an increase of diligence and parsimony. But
+      certain secondary features of the emulative process, yet to be spoken of,
+      come in to very materially circumscribe and modify emulation in these
+      directions among the pecuniary inferior classes as well as among the
+      superior class.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it is otherwise with the superior pecuniary class, with which we are
+      here immediately concerned. For this class also the incentive to diligence
+      and thrift is not absent; but its action is so greatly qualified by the
+      secondary demands of pecuniary emulation, that any inclination in this
+      direction is practically overborne and any incentive to diligence tends to
+      be of no effect. The most imperative of these secondary demands of
+      emulation, as well as the one of widest scope, is the requirement of
+      abstention from productive work. This is true in an especial degree for
+      the barbarian stage of culture. During the predatory culture labour comes
+      to be associated in men's habits of thought with weakness and subjection
+      to a master. It is therefore a mark of inferiority, and therefore comes to
+      be accounted unworthy of man in his best estate. By virtue of this
+      tradition labour is felt to be debasing, and this tradition has never died
+      out. On the contrary, with the advance of social differentiation it has
+      acquired the axiomatic force due to ancient and unquestioned prescription.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In order to gain and to hold the esteem of men it is not sufficient merely
+      to possess wealth or power. The wealth or power must be put in evidence,
+      for esteem is awarded only on evidence. And not only does the evidence of
+      wealth serve to impress one's importance on others and to keep their sense
+      of his importance alive and alert, but it is of scarcely less use in
+      building up and preserving one's self-complacency. In all but the lowest
+      stages of culture the normally constituted man is comforted and upheld in
+      his self-respect by "decent surroundings" and by exemption from "menial
+      offices". Enforced departure from his habitual standard of decency, either
+      in the paraphernalia of life or in the kind and amount of his everyday
+      activity, is felt to be a slight upon his human dignity, even apart from
+      all conscious consideration of the approval or disapproval of his fellows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The archaic theoretical distinction between the base and the honourable in
+      the manner of a man's life retains very much of its ancient force even
+      today. So much so that there are few of the better class who are not
+      possessed of an instinctive repugnance for the vulgar forms of labour. We
+      have a realising sense of ceremonial uncleanness attaching in an especial
+      degree to the occupations which are associated in our habits of thought
+      with menial service. It is felt by all persons of refined taste that a
+      spiritual contamination is inseparable from certain offices that are
+      conventionally required of servants. Vulgar surroundings, mean (that is to
+      say, inexpensive) habitations, and vulgarly productive occupations are
+      unhesitatingly condemned and avoided. They are incompatible with life on a
+      satisfactory spiritual plane __ with "high thinking". From the days of the
+      Greek philosophers to the present, a degree of leisure and of exemption
+      from contact with such industrial processes as serve the immediate
+      everyday purposes of human life has ever been recognised by thoughtful men
+      as a prerequisite to a worthy or beautiful, or even a blameless, human
+      life. In itself and in its consequences the life of leisure is beautiful
+      and ennobling in all civilised men's eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This direct, subjective value of leisure and of other evidences of wealth
+      is no doubt in great part secondary and derivative. It is in part a reflex
+      of the utility of leisure as a means of gaining the respect of others, and
+      in part it is the result of a mental substitution. The performance of
+      labour has been accepted as a conventional evidence of inferior force;
+      therefore it comes itself, by a mental short-cut, to be regarded as
+      intrinsically base.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the predatory stage proper, and especially during the earlier
+      stages of the quasi-peaceable development of industry that follows the
+      predatory stage, a life of leisure is the readiest and most conclusive
+      evidence of pecuniary strength, and therefore of superior force; provided
+      always that the gentleman of leisure can live in manifest ease and
+      comfort. At this stage wealth consists chiefly of slaves, and the benefits
+      accruing from the possession of riches and power take the form chiefly of
+      personal service and the immediate products of personal service.
+      Conspicuous abstention from labour therefore becomes the conventional mark
+      of superior pecuniary achievement and the conventional index of
+      reputability; and conversely, since application to productive labour is a
+      mark of poverty and subjection, it becomes inconsistent with a reputable
+      standing in the community. Habits of industry and thrift, therefore, are
+      not uniformly furthered by a prevailing pecuniary emulation. On the
+      contrary, this kind of emulation indirectly discountenances participation
+      in productive labour. Labour would unavoidably become dishonourable, as
+      being an evidence indecorous under the ancient tradition handed down from
+      an earlier cultural stage. The ancient tradition of the predatory culture
+      is that productive effort is to be shunned as being unworthy of
+      able-bodied men, and this tradition is reinforced rather than set aside in
+      the passage from the predatory to the quasi-peaceable manner of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even if the institution of a leisure class had not come in with the first
+      emergence of individual ownership, by force of the dishonour attaching to
+      productive employment, it would in any case have come in as one of the
+      early consequences of ownership. And it is to be remarked that while the
+      leisure class existed in theory from the beginning of predatory culture,
+      the institution takes on a new and fuller meaning with the transition from
+      the predatory to the next succeeding pecuniary stage of culture. It is
+      from this time forth a "leisure class" in fact as well as in theory. From
+      this point dates the institution of the leisure class in its consummate
+      form.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the predatory stage proper the distinction between the leisure and
+      the labouring class is in some degree a ceremonial distinction only. The
+      able bodied men jealously stand aloof from whatever is in their
+      apprehension, menial drudgery; but their activity in fact contributes
+      appreciably to the sustenance of the group. The subsequent stage of
+      quasi-peaceable industry is usually characterised by an established
+      chattel slavery, herds of cattle, and a servile class of herdsmen and
+      shepherds; industry has advanced so far that the community is no longer
+      dependent for its livelihood on the chase or on any other form of activity
+      that can fairly be classed as exploit. From this point on, the
+      characteristic feature of leisure class life is a conspicuous exemption
+      from all useful employment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The normal and characteristic occupations of the class in this mature
+      phase of its life history are in form very much the same as in its earlier
+      days. These occupations are government, war, sports, and devout
+      observances. Persons unduly given to difficult theoretical niceties may
+      hold that these occupations are still incidentally and indirectly
+      "productive"; but it is to be noted as decisive of the question in hand
+      that the ordinary and ostensible motive of the leisure class in engaging
+      in these occupations is assuredly not an increase of wealth by productive
+      effort. At this as at any other cultural stage, government and war are, at
+      least in part, carried on for the pecuniary gain of those who engage in
+      them; but it is gain obtained by the honourable method of seizure and
+      conversion. These occupations are of the nature of predatory, not of
+      productive, employment. Something similar may be said of the chase, but
+      with a difference. As the community passes out of the hunting stage
+      proper, hunting gradually becomes differentiated into two distinct
+      employments. On the one hand it is a trade, carried on chiefly for gain;
+      and from this the element of exploit is virtually absent, or it is at any
+      rate not present in a sufficient degree to clear the pursuit of the
+      imputation of gainful industry. On the other hand, the chase is also a
+      sport&mdash;an exercise of the predatory impulse simply. As such it does
+      not afford any appreciable pecuniary incentive, but it contains a more or
+      less obvious element of exploit. It is this latter development of the
+      chase&mdash;purged of all imputation of handicraft&mdash;that alone is
+      meritorious and fairly belongs in the scheme of life of the developed
+      leisure class.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Abstention from labour is not only a honorific or meritorious act, but it
+      presently comes to be a requisite of decency. The insistence on property
+      as the basis of reputability is very naive and very imperious during the
+      early stages of the accumulation of wealth. Abstention from labour is the
+      convenient evidence of wealth and is therefore the conventional mark of
+      social standing; and this insistence on the meritoriousness of wealth
+      leads to a more strenuous insistence on leisure. Nota notae est nota rei
+      ipsius. According to well established laws of human nature, prescription
+      presently seizes upon this conventional evidence of wealth and fixes it in
+      men's habits of thought as something that is in itself substantially
+      meritorious and ennobling; while productive labour at the same time and by
+      a like process becomes in a double sense intrinsically unworthy.
+      Prescription ends by making labour not only disreputable in the eyes of
+      the community, but morally impossible to the noble, freeborn man, and
+      incompatible with a worthy life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This tabu on labour has a further consequence in the industrial
+      differentiation of classes. As the population increases in density and the
+      predatory group grows into a settled industrial community, the constituted
+      authorities and the customs governing ownership gain in scope and
+      consistency. It then presently becomes impracticable to accumulate wealth
+      by simple seizure, and, in logical consistency, acquisition by industry is
+      equally impossible for high minded and impecunious men. The alternative
+      open to them is beggary or privation. Wherever the canon of conspicuous
+      leisure has a chance undisturbed to work out its tendency, there will
+      therefore emerge a secondary, and in a sense spurious, leisure class&mdash;abjectly
+      poor and living in a precarious life of want and discomfort, but morally
+      unable to stoop to gainful pursuits. The decayed gentleman and the lady
+      who has seen better days are by no means unfamiliar phenomena even now.
+      This pervading sense of the indignity of the slightest manual labour is
+      familiar to all civilized peoples, as well as to peoples of a less
+      advanced pecuniary culture. In persons of a delicate sensibility who have
+      long been habituated to gentle manners, the sense of the shamefulness of
+      manual labour may become so strong that, at a critical juncture, it will
+      even set aside the instinct of self-preservation. So, for instance, we are
+      told of certain Polynesian chiefs, who, under the stress of good form,
+      preferred to starve rather than carry their food to their mouths with
+      their own hands. It is true, this conduct may have been due, at least in
+      part, to an excessive sanctity or tabu attaching to the chief's person.
+      The tabu would have been communicated by the contact of his hands, and so
+      would have made anything touched by him unfit for human food. But the tabu
+      is itself a derivative of the unworthiness or moral incompatibility of
+      labour; so that even when construed in this sense the conduct of the
+      Polynesian chiefs is truer to the canon of honorific leisure than would at
+      first appear. A better illustration, or at least a more unmistakable one,
+      is afforded by a certain king of France, who is said to have lost his life
+      through an excess of moral stamina in the observance of good form. In the
+      absence of the functionary whose office it was to shift his master's seat,
+      the king sat uncomplaining before the fire and suffered his royal person
+      to be toasted beyond recovery. But in so doing he saved his Most Christian
+      Majesty from menial contamination. Summum crede nefas animam praeferre
+      pudori, Et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It has already been remarked that the term "leisure", as here used, does
+      not connote indolence or quiescence. What it connotes is non-productive
+      consumption of time. Time is consumed non-productively (1) from a sense of
+      the unworthiness of productive work, and (2) as an evidence of pecuniary
+      ability to afford a life of idleness. But the whole of the life of the
+      gentleman of leisure is not spent before the eyes of the spectators who
+      are to be impressed with that spectacle of honorific leisure which in the
+      ideal scheme makes up his life. For some part of the time his life is
+      perforce withdrawn from the public eye, and of this portion which is spent
+      in private the gentleman of leisure should, for the sake of his good name,
+      be able to give a convincing account. He should find some means of putting
+      in evidence the leisure that is not spent in the sight of the spectators.
+      This can be done only indirectly, through the exhibition of some tangible,
+      lasting results of the leisure so spent&mdash;in a manner analogous to the
+      familiar exhibition of tangible, lasting products of the labour performed
+      for the gentleman of leisure by handicraftsmen and servants in his employ.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lasting evidence of productive labour is its material product&mdash;commonly
+      some article of consumption. In the case of exploit it is similarly
+      possible and usual to procure some tangible result that may serve for
+      exhibition in the way of trophy or booty. At a later phase of the
+      development it is customary to assume some badge of insignia of honour
+      that will serve as a conventionally accepted mark of exploit, and which at
+      the same time indicates the quantity or degree of exploit of which it is
+      the symbol. As the population increases in density, and as human relations
+      grow more complex and numerous, all the details of life undergo a process
+      of elaboration and selection; and in this process of elaboration the use
+      of trophies develops into a system of rank, titles, degrees and insignia,
+      typical examples of which are heraldic devices, medals, and honorary
+      decorations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As seen from the economic point of view, leisure, considered as an
+      employment, is closely allied in kind with the life of exploit; and the
+      achievements which characterise a life of leisure, and which remain as its
+      decorous criteria, have much in common with the trophies of exploit. But
+      leisure in the narrower sense, as distinct from exploit and from any
+      ostensibly productive employment of effort on objects which are of no
+      intrinsic use, does not commonly leave a material product. The criteria of
+      a past performance of leisure therefore commonly take the form of
+      "immaterial" goods. Such immaterial evidences of past leisure are
+      quasi-scholarly or quasi-artistic accomplishments and a knowledge of
+      processes and incidents which do not conduce directly to the furtherance
+      of human life. So, for instance, in our time there is the knowledge of the
+      dead languages and the occult sciences; of correct spelling; of syntax and
+      prosody; of the various forms of domestic music and other household art;
+      of the latest properties of dress, furniture, and equipage; of games,
+      sports, and fancy-bred animals, such as dogs and race-horses. In all these
+      branches of knowledge the initial motive from which their acquisition
+      proceeded at the outset, and through which they first came into vogue, may
+      have been something quite different from the wish to show that one's time
+      had not been spent in industrial employment; but unless these
+      accomplishments had approved themselves as serviceable evidence of an
+      unproductive expenditure of time, they would not have survived and held
+      their place as conventional accomplishments of the leisure class.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These accomplishments may, in some sense, be classed as branches of
+      learning. Beside and beyond these there is a further range of social facts
+      which shade off from the region of learning into that of physical habit
+      and dexterity. Such are what is known as manners and breeding, polite
+      usage, decorum, and formal and ceremonial observances generally. This
+      class of facts are even more immediately and obtrusively presented to the
+      observation, and they therefore more widely and more imperatively insisted
+      on as required evidences of a reputable degree of leisure. It is worth
+      while to remark that all that class of ceremonial observances which are
+      classed under the general head of manners hold a more important place in
+      the esteem of men during the stage of culture at which conspicuous leisure
+      has the greatest vogue as a mark of reputability, than at later stages of
+      the cultural development. The barbarian of the quasi-peaceable stage of
+      industry is notoriously a more high-bred gentleman, in all that concerns
+      decorum, than any but the very exquisite among the men of a later age.
+      Indeed, it is well known, or at least it is currently believed, that
+      manners have progressively deteriorated as society has receded from the
+      patriarchal stage. Many a gentleman of the old school has been provoked to
+      remark regretfully upon the under-bred manners and bearing of even the
+      better classes in the modern industrial communities; and the decay of the
+      ceremonial code&mdash;or as it is otherwise called, the vulgarisation of
+      life&mdash;among the industrial classes proper has become one of the chief
+      enormities of latter-day civilisation in the eyes of all persons of
+      delicate sensibilities. The decay which the code has suffered at the hands
+      of a busy people testifies&mdash;all depreciation apart&mdash;to the fact
+      that decorum is a product and an exponent of leisure class life and
+      thrives in full measure only under a regime of status.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The origin, or better the derivation, of manners is no doubt, to be sought
+      elsewhere than in a conscious effort on the part of the well-mannered to
+      show that much time has been spent in acquiring them. The proximate end of
+      innovation and elaboration has been the higher effectiveness of the new
+      departure in point of beauty or of expressiveness. In great part the
+      ceremonial code of decorous usages owes its beginning and its growth to
+      the desire to conciliate or to show good-will, as anthropologists and
+      sociologists are in the habit of assuming, and this initial motive is
+      rarely if ever absent from the conduct of well-mannered persons at any
+      stage of the later development. Manners, we are told, are in part an
+      elaboration of gesture, and in part they are symbolical and
+      conventionalised survivals representing former acts of dominance or of
+      personal service or of personal contact. In large part they are an
+      expression of the relation of status,&mdash;a symbolic pantomime of
+      mastery on the one hand and of subservience on the other. Wherever at the
+      present time the predatory habit of mind, and the consequent attitude of
+      mastery and of subservience, gives its character to the accredited scheme
+      of life, there the importance of all punctilios of conduct is extreme, and
+      the assiduity with which the ceremonial observance of rank and titles is
+      attended to approaches closely to the ideal set by the barbarian of the
+      quasi-peaceable nomadic culture. Some of the Continental countries afford
+      good illustrations of this spiritual survival. In these communities the
+      archaic ideal is similarly approached as regards the esteem accorded to
+      manners as a fact of intrinsic worth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Decorum set out with being symbol and pantomime and with having utility
+      only as an exponent of the facts and qualities symbolised; but it
+      presently suffered the transmutation which commonly passes over symbolical
+      facts in human intercourse. Manners presently came, in popular
+      apprehension, to be possessed of a substantial utility in themselves; they
+      acquired a sacramental character, in great measure independent of the
+      facts which they originally prefigured. Deviations from the code of
+      decorum have become intrinsically odious to all men, and good breeding is,
+      in everyday apprehension, not simply an adventitious mark of human
+      excellence, but an integral feature of the worthy human soul. There are
+      few things that so touch us with instinctive revulsion as a breach of
+      decorum; and so far have we progressed in the direction of imputing
+      intrinsic utility to the ceremonial observances of etiquette that few of
+      us, if any, can dissociate an offence against etiquette from a sense of
+      the substantial unworthiness of the offender. A breach of faith may be
+      condoned, but a breach of decorum can not. "Manners maketh man."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      None the less, while manners have this intrinsic utility, in the
+      apprehension of the performer and the beholder alike, this sense of the
+      intrinsic rightness of decorum is only the proximate ground of the vogue
+      of manners and breeding. Their ulterior, economic ground is to be sought
+      in the honorific character of that leisure or non-productive employment of
+      time and effort without which good manners are not acquired. The knowledge
+      and habit of good form come only by long-continued use. Refined tastes,
+      manners, habits of life are a useful evidence of gentility, because good
+      breeding requires time, application and expense, and can therefore not be
+      compassed by those whose time and energy are taken up with work. A
+      knowledge of good form is prima facie evidence that that portion of the
+      well-bred person's life which is not spent under the observation of the
+      spectator has been worthily spent in acquiring accomplishments that are of
+      no lucrative effect. In the last analysis the value of manners lies in the
+      fact that they are the voucher of a life of leisure. Therefore,
+      conversely, since leisure is the conventional means of pecuniary repute,
+      the acquisition of some proficiency in decorum is incumbent on all who
+      aspire to a modicum of pecuniary decency.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So much of the honourable life of leisure as is not spent in the sight of
+      spectators can serve the purposes of reputability only in so far as it
+      leaves a tangible, visible result that can be put in evidence and can be
+      measured and compared with products of the same class exhibited by
+      competing aspirants for repute. Some such effect, in the way of leisurely
+      manners and carriage, etc., follows from simple persistent abstention from
+      work, even where the subject does not take thought of the matter and
+      studiously acquire an air of leisurely opulence and mastery. Especially
+      does it seem to be true that a life of leisure in this way persisted in
+      through several generations will leave a persistent, ascertainable effect
+      in the conformation of the person, and still more in his habitual bearing
+      and demeanour. But all the suggestions of a cumulative life of leisure,
+      and all the proficiency in decorum that comes by the way of passive
+      habituation, may be further improved upon by taking thought and
+      assiduously acquiring the marks of honourable leisure, and then carrying
+      the exhibition of these adventitious marks of exemption from employment
+      out in a strenuous and systematic discipline. Plainly, this is a point at
+      which a diligent application of effort and expenditure may materially
+      further the attainment of a decent proficiency in the leisure-class
+      properties. Conversely, the greater the degree of proficiency and the more
+      patent the evidence of a high degree of habituation to observances which
+      serve no lucrative or other directly useful purpose, the greater the
+      consumption of time and substance impliedly involved in their acquisition,
+      and the greater the resultant good repute. Hence under the competitive
+      struggle for proficiency in good manners, it comes about that much pains
+      in taken with the cultivation of habits of decorum; and hence the details
+      of decorum develop into a comprehensive discipline, conformity to which is
+      required of all who would be held blameless in point of repute. And hence,
+      on the other hand, this conspicuous leisure of which decorum is a
+      ramification grows gradually into a laborious drill in deportment and an
+      education in taste and discrimination as to what articles of consumption
+      are decorous and what are the decorous methods of consuming them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this connection it is worthy of notice that the possibility of
+      producing pathological and other idiosyncrasies of person and manner by
+      shrewd mimicry and a systematic drill have been turned to account in the
+      deliberate production of a cultured class&mdash;often with a very happy
+      effect. In this way, by the process vulgarly known as snobbery, a
+      syncopated evolution of gentle birth and breeding is achieved in the case
+      of a goodly number of families and lines of descent. This syncopated
+      gentle birth gives results which, in point of serviceability as a
+      leisure-class factor in the population, are in no wise substantially
+      inferior to others who may have had a longer but less arduous training in
+      the pecuniary properties.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are, moreover, measureable degrees of conformity to the latest
+      accredited code of the punctilios as regards decorous means and methods of
+      consumption. Differences between one person and another in the degree of
+      conformity to the ideal in these respects can be compared, and persons may
+      be graded and scheduled with some accuracy and effect according to a
+      progressive scale of manners and breeding. The award of reputability in
+      this regard is commonly made in good faith, on the ground of conformity to
+      accepted canons of taste in the matters concerned, and without conscious
+      regard to the pecuniary standing or the degree of leisure practised by any
+      given candidate for reputability; but the canons of taste according to
+      which the award is made are constantly under the surveillance of the law
+      of conspicuous leisure, and are indeed constantly undergoing change and
+      revision to bring them into closer conformity with its requirements. So
+      that while the proximate ground of discrimination may be of another kind,
+      still the pervading principle and abiding test of good breeding is the
+      requirement of a substantial and patent waste of time. There may be some
+      considerable range of variation in detail within the scope of this
+      principle, but they are variations of form and expression, not of
+      substance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Much of the courtesy of everyday intercourse is of course a direct
+      expression of consideration and kindly good-will, and this element of
+      conduct has for the most part no need of being traced back to any
+      underlying ground of reputability to explain either its presence or the
+      approval with which it is regarded; but the same is not true of the code
+      of properties. These latter are expressions of status. It is of course
+      sufficiently plain, to any one who cares to see, that our bearing towards
+      menials and other pecuniary dependent inferiors is the bearing of the
+      superior member in a relation of status, though its manifestation is often
+      greatly modified and softened from the original expression of crude
+      dominance. Similarly, our bearing towards superiors, and in great measure
+      towards equals, expresses a more or less conventionalised attitude of
+      subservience. Witness the masterful presence of the high-minded gentleman
+      or lady, which testifies to so much of dominance and independence of
+      economic circumstances, and which at the same time appeals with such
+      convincing force to our sense of what is right and gracious. It is among
+      this highest leisure class, who have no superiors and few peers, that
+      decorum finds its fullest and maturest expression; and it is this highest
+      class also that gives decorum that definite formulation which serves as a
+      canon of conduct for the classes beneath. And there also the code is most
+      obviously a code of status and shows most plainly its incompatibility with
+      all vulgarly productive work. A divine assurance and an imperious
+      complaisance, as of one habituated to require subservience and to take no
+      thought for the morrow, is the birthright and the criterion of the
+      gentleman at his best; and it is in popular apprehension even more than
+      that, for this demeanour is accepted as an intrinsic attribute of superior
+      worth, before which the base-born commoner delights to stoop and yield.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As has been indicated in an earlier chapter, there is reason to believe
+      that the institution of ownership has begun with the ownership of persons,
+      primarily women. The incentives to acquiring such property have apparently
+      been: (1) a propensity for dominance and coercion; (2) the utility of
+      these persons as evidence of the prowess of the owner; (3) the utility of
+      their services.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Personal service holds a peculiar place in the economic development.
+      During the stage of quasi-peaceable industry, and especially during the
+      earlier development of industry within the limits of this general stage,
+      the utility of their services seems commonly to be the dominant motive to
+      the acquisition of property in persons. Servants are valued for their
+      services. But the dominance of this motive is not due to a decline in the
+      absolute importance of the other two utilities possessed by servants. It
+      is rather that the altered circumstance of life accentuate the utility of
+      servants for this last-named purpose. Women and other slaves are highly
+      valued, both as an evidence of wealth and as a means of accumulating
+      wealth. Together with cattle, if the tribe is a pastoral one, they are the
+      usual form of investment for a profit. To such an extent may female
+      slavery give its character to the economic life under the quasi-peaceable
+      culture that the women even comes to serve as a unit of value among
+      peoples occupying this cultural stage&mdash;as for instance in Homeric
+      times. Where this is the case there need be little question but that the
+      basis of the industrial system is chattel slavery and that the women are
+      commonly slaves. The great, pervading human relation in such a system is
+      that of master and servant. The accepted evidence of wealth is the
+      possession of many women, and presently also of other slaves engaged in
+      attendance on their master's person and in producing goods for him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A division of labour presently sets in, whereby personal service and
+      attendance on the master becomes the special office of a portion of the
+      servants, while those who are wholly employed in industrial occupations
+      proper are removed more and more from all immediate relation to the person
+      of their owner. At the same time those servants whose office is personal
+      service, including domestic duties, come gradually to be exempted from
+      productive industry carried on for gain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This process of progressive exemption from the common run of industrial
+      employment will commonly begin with the exemption of the wife, or the
+      chief wife. After the community has advanced to settled habits of life,
+      wife-capture from hostile tribes becomes impracticable as a customary
+      source of supply. Where this cultural advance has been achieved, the chief
+      wife is ordinarily of gentle blood, and the fact of her being so will
+      hasten her exemption from vulgar employment. The manner in which the
+      concept of gentle blood originates, as well as the place which it occupies
+      in the development of marriage, cannot be discussed in this place. For the
+      purpose in hand it will be sufficient to say that gentle blood is blood
+      which has been ennobled by protracted contact with accumulated wealth or
+      unbroken prerogative. The women with these antecedents is preferred in
+      marriage, both for the sake of a resulting alliance with her powerful
+      relatives and because a superior worth is felt to inhere in blood which
+      has been associated with many goods and great power. She will still be her
+      husband's chattel, as she was her father's chattel before her purchase,
+      but she is at the same time of her father's gentle blood; and hence there
+      is a moral incongruity in her occupying herself with the debasing
+      employments of her fellow-servants. However completely she may be subject
+      to her master, and however inferior to the male members of the social
+      stratum in which her birth has placed her, the principle that gentility is
+      transmissible will act to place her above the common slave; and so soon as
+      this principle has acquired a prescriptive authority it will act to invest
+      her in some measure with that prerogative of leisure which is the chief
+      mark of gentility. Furthered by this principle of transmissible gentility
+      the wife's exemption gains in scope, if the wealth of her owner permits
+      it, until it includes exemption from debasing menial service as well as
+      from handicraft. As the industrial development goes on and property
+      becomes massed in relatively fewer hands, the conventional standard of
+      wealth of the upper class rises. The same tendency to exemption from
+      handicraft, and in the course of time from menial domestic employments,
+      will then assert itself as regards the other wives, if such there are, and
+      also as regards other servants in immediate attendance upon the person of
+      their master. The exemption comes more tardily the remoter the relation in
+      which the servant stands to the person of the master.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If the pecuniary situation of the master permits it, the development of a
+      special class of personal or body servants is also furthered by the very
+      grave importance which comes to attach to this personal service. The
+      master's person, being the embodiment of worth and honour, is of the most
+      serious consequence. Both for his reputable standing in the community and
+      for his self-respect, it is a matter of moment that he should have at his
+      call efficient specialised servants, whose attendance upon his person is
+      not diverted from this their chief office by any by-occupation. These
+      specialised servants are useful more for show than for service actually
+      performed. In so far as they are not kept for exhibition simply, they
+      afford gratification to their master chiefly in allowing scope to his
+      propensity for dominance. It is true, the care of the continually
+      increasing household apparatus may require added labour; but since the
+      apparatus is commonly increased in order to serve as a means of good
+      repute rather than as a means of comfort, this qualification is not of
+      great weight. All these lines of utility are better served by a larger
+      number of more highly specialised servants. There results, therefore, a
+      constantly increasing differentiation and multiplication of domestic and
+      body servants, along with a concomitant progressive exemption of such
+      servants from productive labour. By virtue of their serving as evidence of
+      ability to pay, the office of such domestics regularly tends to include
+      continually fewer duties, and their service tends in the end to become
+      nominal only. This is especially true of those servants who are in most
+      immediate and obvious attendance upon their master. So that the utility of
+      these comes to consist, in great part, in their conspicuous exemption from
+      productive labour and in the evidence which this exemption affords of
+      their master's wealth and power.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After some considerable advance has been made in the practice of employing
+      a special corps of servants for the performance of a conspicuous leisure
+      in this manner, men begin to be preferred above women for services that
+      bring them obtrusively into view. Men, especially lusty, personable
+      fellows, such as footmen and other menials should be, are obviously more
+      powerful and more expensive than women. They are better fitted for this
+      work, as showing a larger waste of time and of human energy. Hence it
+      comes about that in the economy of the leisure class the busy housewife of
+      the early patriarchal days, with her retinue of hard-working handmaidens,
+      presently gives place to the lady and the lackey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In all grades and walks of life, and at any stage of the economic
+      development, the leisure of the lady and of the lackey differs from the
+      leisure of the gentleman in his own right in that it is an occupation of
+      an ostensibly laborious kind. It takes the form, in large measure, of a
+      painstaking attention to the service of the master, or to the maintenance
+      and elaboration of the household paraphernalia; so that it is leisure only
+      in the sense that little or no productive work is performed by this class,
+      not in the sense that all appearance of labour is avoided by them. The
+      duties performed by the lady, or by the household or domestic servants,
+      are frequently arduous enough, and they are also frequently directed to
+      ends which are considered extremely necessary to the comfort of the entire
+      household. So far as these services conduce to the physical efficiency or
+      comfort of the master or the rest of the household, they are to be
+      accounted productive work. Only the residue of employment left after
+      deduction of this effective work is to be classed as a performance of
+      leisure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But much of the services classed as household cares in modern everyday
+      life, and many of the "utilities" required for a comfortable existence by
+      civilised man, are of a ceremonial character. They are, therefore,
+      properly to be classed as a performance of leisure in the sense in which
+      the term is here used. They may be none the less imperatively necessary
+      from the point of view of decent existence: they may be none the less
+      requisite for personal comfort even, although they may be chiefly or
+      wholly of a ceremonial character. But in so far as they partake of this
+      character they are imperative and requisite because we have been taught to
+      require them under pain of ceremonial uncleanness or unworthiness. We feel
+      discomfort in their absence, but not because their absence results
+      directly in physical discomfort; nor would a taste not trained to
+      discriminate between the conventionally good and the conventionally bad
+      take offence at their omission. In so far as this is true the labour spent
+      in these services is to be classed as leisure; and when performed by
+      others than the economically free and self-directed head of the
+      establishment, they are to be classed as vicarious leisure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The vicarious leisure performed by housewives and menials, under the head
+      of household cares, may frequently develop into drudgery, especially where
+      the competition for reputability is close and strenuous. This is
+      frequently the case in modern life. Where this happens, the domestic
+      service which comprises the duties of this servant class might aptly be
+      designated as wasted effort, rather than as vicarious leisure. But the
+      latter term has the advantage of indicating the line of derivation of
+      these domestic offices, as well as of neatly suggesting the substantial
+      economic ground of their utility; for these occupations are chiefly useful
+      as a method of imputing pecuniary reputability to the master or to the
+      household on the ground that a given amount of time and effort is
+      conspicuously wasted in that behalf.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this way, then, there arises a subsidiary or derivative leisure class,
+      whose office is the performance of a vicarious leisure for the behoof of
+      the reputability of the primary or legitimate leisure class. This
+      vicarious leisure class is distinguished from the leisure class proper by
+      a characteristic feature of its habitual mode of life. The leisure of the
+      master class is, at least ostensibly, an indulgence of a proclivity for
+      the avoidance of labour and is presumed to enhance the master's own
+      well-being and fulness of life; but the leisure of the servant class
+      exempt from productive labour is in some sort a performance exacted from
+      them, and is not normally or primarily directed to their own comfort. The
+      leisure of the servant is not his own leisure. So far as he is a servant
+      in the full sense, and not at the same time a member of a lower order of
+      the leisure class proper, his leisure normally passes under the guise of
+      specialised service directed to the furtherance of his master's fulness of
+      life. Evidence of this relation of subservience is obviously present in
+      the servant's carriage and manner of life. The like is often true of the
+      wife throughout the protracted economic stage during which she is still
+      primarily a servant&mdash;that is to say, so long as the household with a
+      male head remains in force. In order to satisfy the requirements of the
+      leisure class scheme of life, the servant should show not only an attitude
+      of subservience, but also the effects of special training and practice in
+      subservience. The servant or wife should not only perform certain offices
+      and show a servile disposition, but it is quite as imperative that they
+      should show an acquired facility in the tactics of subservience&mdash;a
+      trained conformity to the canons of effectual and conspicuous
+      subservience. Even today it is this aptitude and acquired skill in the
+      formal manifestation of the servile relation that constitutes the chief
+      element of utility in our highly paid servants, as well as one of the
+      chief ornaments of the well-bred housewife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first requisite of a good servant is that he should conspicuously know
+      his place. It is not enough that he knows how to effect certain desired
+      mechanical results; he must above all, know how to effect these results in
+      due form. Domestic service might be said to be a spiritual rather than a
+      mechanical function. Gradually there grows up an elaborate system of good
+      form, specifically regulating the manner in which this vicarious leisure
+      of the servant class is to be performed. Any departure from these canons
+      of form is to be depreciated, not so much because it evinces a shortcoming
+      in mechanical efficiency, or even that it shows an absence of the servile
+      attitude and temperament, but because, in the last analysis, it shows the
+      absence of special training. Special training in personal service costs
+      time and effort, and where it is obviously present in a high degree, it
+      argues that the servant who possesses it, neither is nor has been
+      habitually engaged in any productive occupation. It is prima facie
+      evidence of a vicarious leisure extending far back in the past. So that
+      trained service has utility, not only as gratifying the master's
+      instinctive liking for good and skilful workmanship and his propensity for
+      conspicuous dominance over those whose lives are subservient to his own,
+      but it has utility also as putting in evidence a much larger consumption
+      of human service than would be shown by the mere present conspicuous
+      leisure performed by an untrained person. It is a serious grievance if a
+      gentleman's butler or footman performs his duties about his master's table
+      or carriage in such unformed style as to suggest that his habitual
+      occupation may be ploughing or sheepherding. Such bungling work would
+      imply inability on the master's part to procure the service of specially
+      trained servants; that is to say, it would imply inability to pay for the
+      consumption of time, effort, and instruction required to fit a trained
+      servant for special service under the exacting code of forms. If the
+      performance of the servant argues lack of means on the part of his master,
+      it defeats its chief substantial end; for the chief use of servants is the
+      evidence they afford of the master's ability to pay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What has just been said might be taken to imply that the offence of an
+      under-trained servant lies in a direct suggestion of inexpensiveness or of
+      usefulness. Such, of course, is not the case. The connection is much less
+      immediate. What happens here is what happens generally. Whatever approves
+      itself to us on any ground at the outset, presently comes to appeal to us
+      as a gratifying thing in itself; it comes to rest in our habits of though
+      as substantially right. But in order that any specific canon of deportment
+      shall maintain itself in favour, it must continue to have the support of,
+      or at least not be incompatible with, the habit or aptitude which
+      constitutes the norm of its development. The need of vicarious leisure, or
+      conspicuous consumption of service, is a dominant incentive to the keeping
+      of servants. So long as this remains true it may be set down without much
+      discussion that any such departure from accepted usage as would suggest an
+      abridged apprenticeship in service would presently be found insufferable.
+      The requirement of an expensive vicarious leisure acts indirectly,
+      selectively, by guiding the formation of our taste,&mdash;of our sense of
+      what is right in these matters,&mdash;and so weeds out unconformable
+      departures by withholding approval of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the standard of wealth recognized by common consent advances, the
+      possession and exploitation of servants as a means of showing superfluity
+      undergoes a refinement. The possession and maintenance of slaves employed
+      in the production of goods argues wealth and prowess, but the maintenance
+      of servants who produce nothing argues still higher wealth and position.
+      Under this principle there arises a class of servants, the more numerous
+      the better, whose sole office is fatuously to wait upon the person of
+      their owner, and so to put in evidence his ability unproductively to
+      consume a large amount of service. There supervenes a division of labour
+      among the servants or dependents whose life is spent in maintaining the
+      honour of the gentleman of leisure. So that, while one group produces
+      goods for him, another group, usually headed by the wife, or chief,
+      consumes for him in conspicuous leisure; thereby putting in evidence his
+      ability to sustain large pecuniary damage without impairing his superior
+      opulence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This somewhat idealized and diagrammatic outline of the development and
+      nature of domestic service comes nearest being true for that cultural
+      stage which was here been named the "quasi-peaceable" stage of industry.
+      At this stage personal service first rises to the position of an economic
+      institution, and it is at this stage that it occupies the largest place in
+      the community's scheme of life. In the cultural sequence, the
+      quasi-peaceable stage follows the predatory stage proper, the two being
+      successive phases of barbarian life. Its characteristic feature is a
+      formal observance of peace and order, at the same time that life at this
+      stage still has too much of coercion and class antagonism to be called
+      peaceable in the full sense of the word. For many purposes, and from
+      another point of view than the economic one, it might as well be named the
+      stage of status. The method of human relation during this stage, and the
+      spiritual attitude of men at this level of culture, is well summed up
+      under the term. But as a descriptive term to characterise the prevailing
+      methods of industry, as well as to indicate the trend of industrial
+      development at this point in economic evolution, the term
+      "quasi-peaceable" seems preferable. So far as concerns the communities of
+      the Western culture, this phase of economic development probably lies in
+      the past; except for a numerically small though very conspicuous fraction
+      of the community in whom the habits of thought peculiar to the barbarian
+      culture have suffered but a relatively slight disintegration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Personal service is still an element of great economic importance,
+      especially as regards the distribution and consumption of goods; but its
+      relative importance even in this direction is no doubt less than it once
+      was. The best development of this vicarious leisure lies in the past
+      rather than in the present; and its best expression in the present is to
+      be found in the scheme of life of the upper leisure class. To this class
+      the modern culture owes much in the way of the conservation of traditions,
+      usages, and habits of thought which belong on a more archaic cultural
+      plane, so far as regards their widest acceptance and their most effective
+      development.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the modern industrial communities the mechanical contrivances available
+      for the comfort and convenience of everyday life are highly developed. So
+      much so that body servants, or, indeed, domestic servants of any kind,
+      would now scarcely be employed by anybody except on the ground of a canon
+      of reputability carried over by tradition from earlier usage. The only
+      exception would be servants employed to attend on the persons of the
+      infirm and the feeble-minded. But such servants properly come under the
+      head of trained nurses rather than under that of domestic servants, and
+      they are, therefore, an apparent rather than a real exception to the rule.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The proximate reason for keeping domestic servants, for instance, in the
+      moderately well-to-do household of to-day, is (ostensibly) that the
+      members of the household are unable without discomfort to compass the work
+      required by such a modern establishment. And the reason for their being
+      unable to accomplish it is (1) that they have too many "social duties",
+      and (2) that the work to be done is too severe and that there is too much
+      of it. These two reasons may be restated as follows: (1) Under the
+      mandatory code of decency, the time and effort of the members of such a
+      household are required to be ostensibly all spent in a performance of
+      conspicuous leisure, in the way of calls, drives, clubs, sewing-circles,
+      sports, charity organisations, and other like social functions. Those
+      persons whose time and energy are employed in these matters privately avow
+      that all these observances, as well as the incidental attention to dress
+      and other conspicuous consumption, are very irksome but altogether
+      unavoidable. (2) Under the requirement of conspicuous consumption of
+      goods, the apparatus of living has grown so elaborate and cumbrous, in the
+      way of dwellings, furniture, bric-a-brac, wardrobe and meals, that the
+      consumers of these things cannot make way with them in the required manner
+      without help. Personal contact with the hired persons whose aid is called
+      in to fulfil the routine of decency is commonly distasteful to the
+      occupants of the house, but their presence is endured and paid for, in
+      order to delegate to them a share in this onerous consumption of household
+      goods. The presence of domestic servants, and of the special class of body
+      servants in an eminent degree, is a concession of physical comfort to the
+      moral need of pecuniary decency.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The largest manifestation of vicarious leisure in modern life is made up
+      of what are called domestic duties. These duties are fast becoming a
+      species of services performed, not so much for the individual behoof of
+      the head of the household as for the reputability of the household taken
+      as a corporate unit&mdash;a group of which the housewife is a member on a
+      footing of ostensible equality. As fast as the household for which they
+      are performed departs from its archaic basis of ownership-marriage, these
+      household duties of course tend to fall out of the category of vicarious
+      leisure in the original sense; except so far as they are performed by
+      hired servants. That is to say, since vicarious leisure is possible only
+      on a basis of status or of hired service, the disappearance of the
+      relation of status from human intercourse at any point carries with it the
+      disappearance of vicarious leisure so far as regards that much of life.
+      But it is to be added, in qualification of this qualification, that so
+      long as the household subsists, even with a divided head, this class of
+      non-productive labour performed for the sake of the household reputability
+      must still be classed as vicarious leisure, although in a slightly altered
+      sense. It is now leisure performed for the quasi-personal corporate
+      household, instead of, as formerly, for the proprietary head of the
+      household.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Four ~~ Conspicuous Consumption
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In what has been said of the evolution of the vicarious leisure class and
+      its differentiation from the general body of the working classes,
+      reference has been made to a further division of labour,&mdash;that
+      between the different servant classes. One portion of the servant class,
+      chiefly those persons whose occupation is vicarious leisure, come to
+      undertake a new, subsidiary range of duties&mdash;the vicarious
+      consumption of goods. The most obvious form in which this consumption
+      occurs is seen in the wearing of liveries and the occupation of spacious
+      servants' quarters. Another, scarcely less obtrusive or less effective
+      form of vicarious consumption, and a much more widely prevalent one, is
+      the consumption of food, clothing, dwelling, and furniture by the lady and
+      the rest of the domestic establishment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But already at a point in economic evolution far antedating the emergence
+      of the lady, specialised consumption of goods as an evidence of pecuniary
+      strength had begun to work out in a more or less elaborate system. The
+      beginning of a differentiation in consumption even antedates the
+      appearance of anything that can fairly be called pecuniary strength. It is
+      traceable back to the initial phase of predatory culture, and there is
+      even a suggestion that an incipient differentiation in this respect lies
+      back of the beginnings of the predatory life. This most primitive
+      differentiation in the consumption of goods is like the later
+      differentiation with which we are all so intimately familiar, in that it
+      is largely of a ceremonial character, but unlike the latter it does not
+      rest on a difference in accumulated wealth. The utility of consumption as
+      an evidence of wealth is to be classed as a derivative growth. It is an
+      adaption to a new end, by a selective process, of a distinction previously
+      existing and well established in men's habits of thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the earlier phases of the predatory culture the only economic
+      differentiation is a broad distinction between an honourable superior
+      class made up of the able-bodied men on the one side, and a base inferior
+      class of labouring women on the other. According to the ideal scheme of
+      life in force at the time it is the office of the men to consume what the
+      women produce. Such consumption as falls to the women is merely incidental
+      to their work; it is a means to their continued labour, and not a
+      consumption directed to their own comfort and fulness of life.
+      Unproductive consumption of goods is honourable, primarily as a mark of
+      prowess and a perquisite of human dignity; secondarily it becomes
+      substantially honourable to itself, especially the consumption of the more
+      desirable things. The consumption of choice articles of food, and
+      frequently also of rare articles of adornment, becomes tabu to the women
+      and children; and if there is a base (servile) class of men, the tabu
+      holds also for them. With a further advance in culture this tabu may
+      change into simple custom of a more or less rigorous character; but
+      whatever be the theoretical basis of the distinction which is maintained,
+      whether it be a tabu or a larger conventionality, the features of the
+      conventional scheme of consumption do not change easily. When the
+      quasi-peaceable stage of industry is reached, with its fundamental
+      institution of chattel slavery, the general principle, more or less
+      rigorously applied, is that the base, industrious class should consume
+      only what may be necessary to their subsistence. In the nature of things,
+      luxuries and the comforts of life belong to the leisure class. Under the
+      tabu, certain victuals, and more particularly certain beverages, are
+      strictly reserved for the use of the superior class.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ceremonial differentiation of the dietary is best seen in the use of
+      intoxicating beverages and narcotics. If these articles of consumption are
+      costly, they are felt to be noble and honorific. Therefore the base
+      classes, primarily the women, practice an enforced continence with respect
+      to these stimulants, except in countries where they are obtainable at a
+      very low cost. From archaic times down through all the length of the
+      patriarchal regime it has been the office of the women to prepare and
+      administer these luxuries, and it has been the perquisite of the men of
+      gentle birth and breeding to consume them. Drunkenness and the other
+      pathological consequences of the free use of stimulants therefore tend in
+      their turn to become honorific, as being a mark, at the second remove, of
+      the superior status of those who are able to afford the indulgence.
+      Infirmities induced by over-indulgence are among some peoples freely
+      recognised as manly attributes. It has even happened that the name for
+      certain diseased conditions of the body arising from such an origin has
+      passed into everyday speech as a synonym for "noble" or "gentle". It is
+      only at a relatively early stage of culture that the symptoms of expensive
+      vice are conventionally accepted as marks of a superior status, and so
+      tend to become virtues and command the deference of the community; but the
+      reputability that attaches to certain expensive vices long retains so much
+      of its force as to appreciably lesson the disapprobation visited upon the
+      men of the wealthy or noble class for any excessive indulgence. The same
+      invidious distinction adds force to the current disapproval of any
+      indulgence of this kind on the part of women, minors, and inferiors. This
+      invidious traditional distinction has not lost its force even among the
+      more advanced peoples of today. Where the example set by the leisure class
+      retains its imperative force in the regulation of the conventionalities,
+      it is observable that the women still in great measure practise the same
+      traditional continence with regard to stimulants.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This characterisation of the greater continence in the use of stimulants
+      practised by the women of the reputable classes may seem an excessive
+      refinement of logic at the expense of common sense. But facts within easy
+      reach of any one who cares to know them go to say that the greater
+      abstinence of women is in some part due to an imperative conventionality;
+      and this conventionality is, in a general way, strongest where the
+      patriarchal tradition&mdash;the tradition that the woman is a chattel&mdash;has
+      retained its hold in greatest vigour. In a sense which has been greatly
+      qualified in scope and rigour, but which has by no means lost its meaning
+      even yet, this tradition says that the woman, being a chattel, should
+      consume only what is necessary to her sustenance,&mdash;except so far as
+      her further consumption contributes to the comfort or the good repute of
+      her master. The consumption of luxuries, in the true sense, is a
+      consumption directed to the comfort of the consumer himself, and is,
+      therefore, a mark of the master. Any such consumption by others can take
+      place only on a basis of sufferance. In communities where the popular
+      habits of thought have been profoundly shaped by the patriarchal tradition
+      we may accordingly look for survivals of the tabu on luxuries at least to
+      the extent of a conventional deprecation of their use by the unfree and
+      dependent class. This is more particularly true as regards certain
+      luxuries, the use of which by the dependent class would detract sensibly
+      from the comfort or pleasure of their masters, or which are held to be of
+      doubtful legitimacy on other grounds. In the apprehension of the great
+      conservative middle class of Western civilisation the use of these various
+      stimulants is obnoxious to at least one, if not both, of these objections;
+      and it is a fact too significant to be passed over that it is precisely
+      among these middle classes of the Germanic culture, with their strong
+      surviving sense of the patriarchal proprieties, that the women are to the
+      greatest extent subject to a qualified tabu on narcotics and alcoholic
+      beverages. With many qualifications&mdash;with more qualifications as the
+      patriarchal tradition has gradually weakened&mdash;the general rule is
+      felt to be right and binding that women should consume only for the
+      benefit of their masters. The objection of course presents itself that
+      expenditure on women's dress and household paraphernalia is an obvious
+      exception to this rule; but it will appear in the sequel that this
+      exception is much more obvious than substantial. During the earlier stages
+      of economic development, consumption of goods without stint, especially
+      consumption of the better grades of goods,&mdash;ideally all consumption
+      in excess of the subsistence minimum,&mdash;pertains normally to the
+      leisure class. This restriction tends to disappear, at least formally,
+      after the later peaceable stage has been reached, with private ownership
+      of goods and an industrial system based on wage labour or on the petty
+      household economy. But during the earlier quasi-peaceable stage, when so
+      many of the traditions through which the institution of a leisure class
+      has affected the economic life of later times were taking form and
+      consistency, this principle has had the force of a conventional law. It
+      has served as the norm to which consumption has tended to conform, and any
+      appreciable departure from it is to be regarded as an aberrant form, sure
+      to be eliminated sooner or later in the further course of development.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The quasi-peaceable gentleman of leisure, then, not only consumes of the
+      staff of life beyond the minimum required for subsistence and physical
+      efficiency, but his consumption also undergoes a specialisation as regards
+      the quality of the goods consumed. He consumes freely and of the best, in
+      food, drink, narcotics, shelter, services, ornaments, apparel, weapons and
+      accoutrements, amusements, amulets, and idols or divinities. In the
+      process of gradual amelioration which takes place in the articles of his
+      consumption, the motive principle and proximate aim of innovation is no
+      doubt the higher efficiency of the improved and more elaborate products
+      for personal comfort and well-being. But that does not remain the sole
+      purpose of their consumption. The canon of reputability is at hand and
+      seizes upon such innovations as are, according to its standard, fit to
+      survive. Since the consumption of these more excellent goods is an
+      evidence of wealth, it becomes honorific; and conversely, the failure to
+      consume in due quantity and quality becomes a mark of inferiority and
+      demerit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This growth of punctilious discrimination as to qualitative excellence in
+      eating, drinking, etc. presently affects not only the manner of life, but
+      also the training and intellectual activity of the gentleman of leisure.
+      He is no longer simply the successful, aggressive male,&mdash;the man of
+      strength, resource, and intrepidity. In order to avoid stultification he
+      must also cultivate his tastes, for it now becomes incumbent on him to
+      discriminate with some nicety between the noble and the ignoble in
+      consumable goods. He becomes a connoisseur in creditable viands of various
+      degrees of merit, in manly beverages and trinkets, in seemly apparel and
+      architecture, in weapons, games, dancers, and the narcotics. This
+      cultivation of aesthetic faculty requires time and application, and the
+      demands made upon the gentleman in this direction therefore tend to change
+      his life of leisure into a more or less arduous application to the
+      business of learning how to live a life of ostensible leisure in a
+      becoming way. Closely related to the requirement that the gentleman must
+      consume freely and of the right kind of goods, there is the requirement
+      that he must know how to consume them in a seemly manner. His life of
+      leisure must be conducted in due form. Hence arise good manners in the way
+      pointed out in an earlier chapter. High-bred manners and ways of living
+      are items of conformity to the norm of conspicuous leisure and conspicuous
+      consumption.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to
+      the gentleman of leisure. As wealth accumulates on his hands, his own
+      unaided effort will not avail to sufficiently put his opulence in evidence
+      by this method. The aid of friends and competitors is therefore brought in
+      by resorting to the giving of valuable presents and expensive feasts and
+      entertainments. Presents and feasts had probably another origin than that
+      of naive ostentation, but they required their utility for this purpose
+      very early, and they have retained that character to the present; so that
+      their utility in this respect has now long been the substantial ground on
+      which these usages rest. Costly entertainments, such as the potlatch or
+      the ball, are peculiarly adapted to serve this end. The competitor with
+      whom the entertainer wishes to institute a comparison is, by this method,
+      made to serve as a means to the end. He consumes vicariously for his host
+      at the same time that he is witness to the consumption of that excess of
+      good things which his host is unable to dispose of single-handed, and he
+      is also made to witness his host's facility in etiquette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the giving of costly entertainments other motives, of more genial kind,
+      are of course also present. The custom of festive gatherings probably
+      originated in motives of conviviality and religion; these motives are also
+      present in the later development, but they do not continue to be the sole
+      motives. The latter-day leisure-class festivities and entertainments may
+      continue in some slight degree to serve the religious need and in a higher
+      degree the needs of recreation and conviviality, but they also serve an
+      invidious purpose; and they serve it none the less effectually for having
+      a colorable non-invidious ground in these more avowable motives. But the
+      economic effect of these social amenities is not therefore lessened,
+      either in the vicarious consumption of goods or in the exhibition of
+      difficult and costly achievements in etiquette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As wealth accumulates, the leisure class develops further in function and
+      structure, and there arises a differentiation within the class. There is a
+      more or less elaborate system of rank and grades. This differentiation is
+      furthered by the inheritance of wealth and the consequent inheritance of
+      gentility. With the inheritance of gentility goes the inheritance of
+      obligatory leisure; and gentility of a sufficient potency to entail a life
+      of leisure may be inherited without the complement of wealth required to
+      maintain a dignified leisure. Gentle blood may be transmitted without
+      goods enough to afford a reputably free consumption at one's ease. Hence
+      results a class of impecunious gentlemen of leisure, incidentally referred
+      to already. These half-caste gentlemen of leisure fall into a system of
+      hierarchical gradations. Those who stand near the higher and the highest
+      grades of the wealthy leisure class, in point of birth, or in point of
+      wealth, or both, outrank the remoter-born and the pecuniarily weaker.
+      These lower grades, especially the impecunious, or marginal, gentlemen of
+      leisure, affiliate themselves by a system of dependence or fealty to the
+      great ones; by so doing they gain an increment of repute, or of the means
+      with which to lead a life of leisure, from their patron. They become his
+      courtiers or retainers, servants; and being fed and countenanced by their
+      patron they are indices of his rank and vicarious consumer of his
+      superfluous wealth. Many of these affiliated gentlemen of leisure are at
+      the same time lesser men of substance in their own right; so that some of
+      them are scarcely at all, others only partially, to be rated as vicarious
+      consumers. So many of them, however, as make up the retainer and
+      hangers-on of the patron may be classed as vicarious consumer without
+      qualification. Many of these again, and also many of the other aristocracy
+      of less degree, have in turn attached to their persons a more or less
+      comprehensive group of vicarious consumer in the persons of their wives
+      and children, their servants, retainers, etc.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Throughout this graduated scheme of vicarious leisure and vicarious
+      consumption the rule holds that these offices must be performed in some
+      such manner, or under some such circumstance or insignia, as shall point
+      plainly to the master to whom this leisure or consumption pertains, and to
+      whom therefore the resulting increment of good repute of right inures. The
+      consumption and leisure executed by these persons for their master or
+      patron represents an investment on his part with a view to an increase of
+      good fame. As regards feasts and largesses this is obvious enough, and the
+      imputation of repute to the host or patron here takes place immediately,
+      on the ground of common notoriety. Where leisure and consumption is
+      performed vicariously by henchmen and retainers, imputation of the
+      resulting repute to the patron is effected by their residing near his
+      person so that it may be plain to all men from what source they draw. As
+      the group whose good esteem is to be secured in this way grows larger,
+      more patent means are required to indicate the imputation of merit for the
+      leisure performed, and to this end uniforms, badges, and liveries come
+      into vogue. The wearing of uniforms or liveries implies a considerable
+      degree of dependence, and may even be said to be a mark of servitude, real
+      or ostensible. The wearers of uniforms and liveries may be roughly divided
+      into two classes-the free and the servile, or the noble and the ignoble.
+      The services performed by them are likewise divisible into noble and
+      ignoble. Of course the distinction is not observed with strict consistency
+      in practice; the less debasing of the base services and the less honorific
+      of the noble functions are not infrequently merged in the same person. But
+      the general distinction is not on that account to be overlooked. What may
+      add some perplexity is the fact that this fundamental distinction between
+      noble and ignoble, which rests on the nature of the ostensible service
+      performed, is traversed by a secondary distinction into honorific and
+      humiliating, resting on the rank of the person for whom the service is
+      performed or whose livery is worn. So, those offices which are by right
+      the proper employment of the leisure class are noble; such as government,
+      fighting, hunting, the care of arms and accoutrements, and the like&mdash;in
+      short, those which may be classed as ostensibly predatory employments. On
+      the other hand, those employments which properly fall to the industrious
+      class are ignoble; such as handicraft or other productive labor, menial
+      services and the like. But a base service performed for a person of very
+      high degree may become a very honorific office; as for instance the office
+      of a Maid of Honor or of a Lady in Waiting to the Queen, or the King's
+      Master of the Horse or his Keeper of the Hounds. The two offices last
+      named suggest a principle of some general bearing. Whenever, as in these
+      cases, the menial service in question has to do directly with the primary
+      leisure employments of fighting and hunting, it easily acquires a
+      reflected honorific character. In this way great honor may come to attach
+      to an employment which in its own nature belongs to the baser sort. In the
+      later development of peaceable industry, the usage of employing an idle
+      corps of uniformed men-at-arms gradually lapses. Vicarious consumption by
+      dependents bearing the insignia of their patron or master narrows down to
+      a corps of liveried menials. In a heightened degree, therefore, the livery
+      comes to be a badge of servitude, or rather servility. Something of a
+      honorific character always attached to the livery of the armed retainer,
+      but this honorific character disappears when the livery becomes the
+      exclusive badge of the menial. The livery becomes obnoxious to nearly all
+      who are required to wear it. We are yet so little removed from a state of
+      effective slavery as still to be fully sensitive to the sting of any
+      imputation of servility. This antipathy asserts itself even in the case of
+      the liveries or uniforms which some corporations prescribe as the
+      distinctive dress of their employees. In this country the aversion even
+      goes the length of discrediting&mdash;in a mild and uncertain way&mdash;those
+      government employments, military and civil, which require the wearing of a
+      livery or uniform.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the disappearance of servitude, the number of vicarious consumers
+      attached to any one gentleman tends, on the whole, to decrease. The like
+      is of course true, and perhaps in a still higher degree, of the number of
+      dependents who perform vicarious leisure for him. In a general way, though
+      not wholly nor consistently, these two groups coincide. The dependent who
+      was first delegated for these duties was the wife, or the chief wife; and,
+      as would be expected, in the later development of the institution, when
+      the number of persons by whom these duties are customarily performed
+      gradually narrows, the wife remains the last. In the higher grades of
+      society a large volume of both these kinds of service is required; and
+      here the wife is of course still assisted in the work by a more or less
+      numerous corps of menials. But as we descend the social scale, the point
+      is presently reached where the duties of vicarious leisure and consumption
+      devolve upon the wife alone. In the communities of the Western culture,
+      this point is at present found among the lower middle class.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And here occurs a curious inversion. It is a fact of common observance
+      that in this lower middle class there is no pretense of leisure on the
+      part of the head of the household. Through force of circumstances it has
+      fallen into disuse. But the middle-class wife still carries on the
+      business of vicarious leisure, for the good name of the household and its
+      master. In descending the social scale in any modern industrial community,
+      the primary fact-the conspicuous leisure of the master of the
+      household-disappears at a relatively high point. The head of the
+      middle-class household has been reduced by economic circumstances to turn
+      his hand to gaining a livelihood by occupations which often partake
+      largely of the character of industry, as in the case of the ordinary
+      business man of today. But the derivative fact-the vicarious leisure and
+      consumption rendered by the wife, and the auxiliary vicarious performance
+      of leisure by menials-remains in vogue as a conventionality which the
+      demands of reputability will not suffer to be slighted. It is by no means
+      an uncommon spectacle to find a man applying himself to work with the
+      utmost assiduity, in order that his wife may in due form render for him
+      that degree of vicarious leisure which the common sense of the time
+      demands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The leisure rendered by the wife in such cases is, of course, not a simple
+      manifestation of idleness or indolence. It almost invariably occurs
+      disguised under some form of work or household duties or social amenities,
+      which prove on analysis to serve little or no ulterior end beyond showing
+      that she does not occupy herself with anything that is gainful or that is
+      of substantial use. As has already been noticed under the head of manners,
+      the greater part of the customary round of domestic cares to which the
+      middle-class housewife gives her time and effort is of this character. Not
+      that the results of her attention to household matters, of a decorative
+      and mundificatory character, are not pleasing to the sense of men trained
+      in middle-class proprieties; but the taste to which these effects of
+      household adornment and tidiness appeal is a taste which has been formed
+      under the selective guidance of a canon of propriety that demands just
+      these evidences of wasted effort. The effects are pleasing to us chiefly
+      because we have been taught to find them pleasing. There goes into these
+      domestic duties much solicitude for a proper combination of form and
+      color, and for other ends that are to be classed as aesthetic in the
+      proper sense of the term; and it is not denied that effects having some
+      substantial aesthetic value are sometimes attained. Pretty much all that
+      is here insisted on is that, as regards these amenities of life, the
+      housewife's efforts are under the guidance of traditions that have been
+      shaped by the law of conspicuously wasteful expenditure of time and
+      substance. If beauty or comfort is achieved-and it is a more or less
+      fortuitous circumstance if they are-they must be achieved by means and
+      methods that commend themselves to the great economic law of wasted
+      effort. The more reputable, "presentable" portion of middle-class
+      household paraphernalia are, on the one hand, items of conspicuous
+      consumption, and on the other hand, apparatus for putting in evidence the
+      vicarious leisure rendered by the housewife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The requirement of vicarious consumption at the hands of the wife
+      continues in force even at a lower point in the pecuniary scale than the
+      requirement of vicarious leisure. At a point below which little if any
+      pretense of wasted effort, in ceremonial cleanness and the like, is
+      observable, and where there is assuredly no conscious attempt at
+      ostensible leisure, decency still requires the wife to consume some goods
+      conspicuously for the reputability of the household and its head. So that,
+      as the latter-day outcome of this evolution of an archaic institution, the
+      wife, who was at the outset the drudge and chattel of the man, both in
+      fact and in theory&mdash;the producer of goods for him to consume&mdash;has
+      become the ceremonial consumer of goods which he produces. But she still
+      quite unmistakably remains his chattel in theory; for the habitual
+      rendering of vicarious leisure and consumption is the abiding mark of the
+      unfree servant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This vicarious consumption practiced by the household of the middle and
+      lower classes can not be counted as a direct expression of the
+      leisure-class scheme of life, since the household of this pecuniary grade
+      does not belong within the leisure class. It is rather that the
+      leisure-class scheme of life here comes to an expression at the second
+      remove. The leisure class stands at the head of the social structure in
+      point of reputability; and its manner of life and its standards of worth
+      therefore afford the norm of reputability for the community. The
+      observance of these standards, in some degree of approximation, becomes
+      incumbent upon all classes lower in the scale. In modern civilized
+      communities the lines of demarcation between social classes have grown
+      vague and transient, and wherever this happens the norm of reputability
+      imposed by the upper class extends its coercive influence with but slight
+      hindrance down through the social structure to the lowest strata. The
+      result is that the members of each stratum accept as their ideal of
+      decency the scheme of life in vogue in the next higher stratum, and bend
+      their energies to live up to that ideal. On pain of forfeiting their good
+      name and their self-respect in case of failure, they must conform to the
+      accepted code, at least in appearance. The basis on which good repute in
+      any highly organized industrial community ultimately rests is pecuniary
+      strength; and the means of showing pecuniary strength, and so of gaining
+      or retaining a good name, are leisure and a conspicuous consumption of
+      goods. Accordingly, both of these methods are in vogue as far down the
+      scale as it remains possible; and in the lower strata in which the two
+      methods are employed, both offices are in great part delegated to the wife
+      and children of the household. Lower still, where any degree of leisure,
+      even ostensible, has become impracticable for the wife, the conspicuous
+      consumption of goods remains and is carried on by the wife and children.
+      The man of the household also can do something in this direction, and
+      indeed, he commonly does; but with a still lower descent into the levels
+      of indigence&mdash;along the margin of the slums&mdash;the man, and
+      presently also the children, virtually cease to consume valuable goods for
+      appearances, and the woman remains virtually the sole exponent of the
+      household's pecuniary decency. No class of society, not even the most
+      abjectly poor, forgoes all customary conspicuous consumption. The last
+      items of this category of consumption are not given up except under stress
+      of the direst necessity. Very much of squalor and discomfort will be
+      endured before the last trinket or the last pretense of pecuniary decency
+      is put away. There is no class and no country that has yielded so abjectly
+      before the pressure of physical want as to deny themselves all
+      gratification of this higher or spiritual need.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the foregoing survey of the growth of conspicuous leisure and
+      consumption, it appears that the utility of both alike for the purposes of
+      reputability lies in the element of waste that is common to both. In the
+      one case it is a waste of time and effort, in the other it is a waste of
+      goods. Both are methods of demonstrating the possession of wealth, and the
+      two are conventionally accepted as equivalents. The choice between them is
+      a question of advertising expediency simply, except so far as it may be
+      affected by other standards of propriety, springing from a different
+      source. On grounds of expediency the preference may be given to the one or
+      the other at different stages of the economic development. The question
+      is, which of the two methods will most effectively reach the persons whose
+      convictions it is desired to affect. Usage has answered this question in
+      different ways under different circumstances.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So long as the community or social group is small enough and compact
+      enough to be effectually reached by common notoriety alone that is to say,
+      so long as the human environment to which the individual is required to
+      adapt himself in respect of reputability is comprised within his sphere of
+      personal acquaintance and neighborhood gossip&mdash;so long the one method
+      is about as effective as the other. Each will therefore serve about
+      equally well during the earlier stages of social growth. But when the
+      differentiation has gone farther and it becomes necessary to reach a wider
+      human environment, consumption begins to hold over leisure as an ordinary
+      means of decency. This is especially true during the later, peaceable
+      economic stage. The means of communication and the mobility of the
+      population now expose the individual to the observation of many persons
+      who have no other means of judging of his reputability than the display of
+      goods (and perhaps of breeding) which he is able to make while he is under
+      their direct observation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The modern organization of industry works in the same direction also by
+      another line. The exigencies of the modern industrial system frequently
+      place individuals and households in juxtaposition between whom there is
+      little contact in any other sense than that of juxtaposition. One's
+      neighbors, mechanically speaking, often are socially not one's neighbors,
+      or even acquaintances; and still their transient good opinion has a high
+      degree of utility. The only practicable means of impressing one's
+      pecuniary ability on these unsympathetic observers of one's everyday life
+      is an unremitting demonstration of ability to pay. In the modern community
+      there is also a more frequent attendance at large gatherings of people to
+      whom one's everyday life is unknown; in such places as churches, theaters,
+      ballrooms, hotels, parks, shops, and the like. In order to impress these
+      transient observers, and to retain one's self-complacency under their
+      observation, the signature of one's pecuniary strength should be written
+      in characters which he who runs may read. It is evident, therefore, that
+      the present trend of the development is in the direction of heightening
+      the utility of conspicuous consumption as compared with leisure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is also noticeable that the serviceability of consumption as a means of
+      repute, as well as the insistence on it as an element of decency, is at
+      its best in those portions of the community where the human contact of the
+      individual is widest and the mobility of the population is greatest.
+      Conspicuous consumption claims a relatively larger portion of the income
+      of the urban than of the rural population, and the claim is also more
+      imperative. The result is that, in order to keep up a decent appearance,
+      the former habitually live hand-to-mouth to a greater extent than the
+      latter. So it comes, for instance, that the American farmer and his wife
+      and daughters are notoriously less modish in their dress, as well as less
+      urbane in their manners, than the city artisan's family with an equal
+      income. It is not that the city population is by nature much more eager
+      for the peculiar complacency that comes of a conspicuous consumption, nor
+      has the rural population less regard for pecuniary decency. But the
+      provocation to this line of evidence, as well as its transient
+      effectiveness, is more decided in the city. This method is therefore more
+      readily resorted to, and in the struggle to outdo one another the city
+      population push their normal standard of conspicuous consumption to a
+      higher point, with the result that a relatively greater expenditure in
+      this direction is required to indicate a given degree of pecuniary decency
+      in the city. The requirement of conformity to this higher conventional
+      standard becomes mandatory. The standard of decency is higher, class for
+      class, and this requirement of decent appearance must be lived up to on
+      pain of losing caste.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Consumption becomes a larger element in the standard of living in the city
+      than in the country. Among the country population its place is to some
+      extent taken by savings and home comforts known through the medium of
+      neighborhood gossip sufficiently to serve the like general purpose of
+      Pecuniary repute. These home comforts and the leisure indulged in&mdash;where
+      the indulgence is found&mdash;are of course also in great part to be
+      classed as items of conspicuous consumption; and much the same is to be
+      said of the savings. The smaller amount of the savings laid by by the
+      artisan class is no doubt due, in some measure, to the fact that in the
+      case of the artisan the savings are a less effective means of
+      advertisement, relative to the environment in which he is placed, than are
+      the savings of the people living on farms and in the small villages. Among
+      the latter, everybody's affairs, especially everybody's pecuniary status,
+      are known to everybody else. Considered by itself simply&mdash;taken in
+      the first degree&mdash;this added provocation to which the artisan and the
+      urban laboring classes are exposed may not very seriously decrease the
+      amount of savings; but in its cumulative action, through raising the
+      standard of decent expenditure, its deterrent effect on the tendency to
+      save cannot but be very great.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A felicitous illustration of the manner in which this canon of
+      reputability works out its results is seen in the practice of
+      dram-drinking, "treating," and smoking in public places, which is
+      customary among the laborers and handicraftsmen of the towns, and among
+      the lower middle class of the urban population generally Journeymen
+      printers may be named as a class among whom this form of conspicuous
+      consumption has a great vogue, and among whom it carries with it certain
+      well-marked consequences that are often deprecated. The peculiar habits of
+      the class in this respect are commonly set down to some kind of an
+      ill-defined moral deficiency with which this class is credited, or to a
+      morally deleterious influence which their occupation is supposed to exert,
+      in some unascertainable way, upon the men employed in it. The state of the
+      case for the men who work in the composition and press rooms of the common
+      run of printing-houses may be summed up as follows. Skill acquired in any
+      printing-house or any city is easily turned to account in almost any other
+      house or city; that is to say, the inertia due to special training is
+      slight. Also, this occupation requires more than the average of
+      intelligence and general information, and the men employed in it are
+      therefore ordinarily more ready than many others to take advantage of any
+      slight variation in the demand for their labor from one place to another.
+      The inertia due to the home feeling is consequently also slight. At the
+      same time the wages in the trade are high enough to make movement from
+      place to place relatively easy. The result is a great mobility of the
+      labor employed in printing; perhaps greater than in any other equally
+      well-defined and considerable body of workmen. These men are constantly
+      thrown in contact with new groups of acquaintances, with whom the
+      relations established are transient or ephemeral, but whose good opinion
+      is valued none the less for the time being. The human proclivity to
+      ostentation, reenforced by sentiments of good-fellowship, leads them to
+      spend freely in those directions which will best serve these needs. Here
+      as elsewhere prescription seizes upon the custom as soon as it gains a
+      vogue, and incorporates it in the accredited standard of decency. The next
+      step is to make this standard of decency the point of departure for a new
+      move in advance in the same direction&mdash;for there is no merit in
+      simple spiritless conformity to a standard of dissipation that is lived up
+      to as a matter of course by everyone in the trade.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The greater prevalence of dissipation among printers than among the
+      average of workmen is accordingly attributable, at least in some measure,
+      to the greater ease of movement and the more transient character of
+      acquaintance and human contact in this trade. But the substantial ground
+      of this high requirement in dissipation is in the last analysis no other
+      than that same propensity for a manifestation of dominance and pecuniary
+      decency which makes the French peasant-proprietor parsimonious and frugal,
+      and induces the American millionaire to found colleges, hospitals and
+      museums. If the canon of conspicuous consumption were not offset to a
+      considerable extent by other features of human nature, alien to it, any
+      saving should logically be impossible for a population situated as the
+      artisan and laboring classes of the cities are at present, however high
+      their wages or their income might be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But there are other standards of repute and other, more or less
+      imperative, canons of conduct, besides wealth and its manifestation, and
+      some of these come in to accentuate or to qualify the broad, fundamental
+      canon of conspicuous waste. Under the simple test of effectiveness for
+      advertising, we should expect to find leisure and the conspicuous
+      consumption of goods dividing the field of pecuniary emulation pretty
+      evenly between them at the outset. Leisure might then be expected
+      gradually to yield ground and tend to obsolescence as the economic
+      development goes forward, and the community increases in size; while the
+      conspicuous consumption of goods should gradually gain in importance, both
+      absolutely and relatively, until it had absorbed all the available
+      product, leaving nothing over beyond a bare livelihood. But the actual
+      course of development has been somewhat different from this ideal scheme.
+      Leisure held the first place at the start, and came to hold a rank very
+      much above wasteful consumption of goods, both as a direct exponent of
+      wealth and as an element in the standard of decency, during the
+      quasi-peaceable culture. From that point onward, consumption has gained
+      ground, until, at present, it unquestionably holds the primacy, though it
+      is still far from absorbing the entire margin of production above the
+      subsistence minimum.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The early ascendency of leisure as a means of reputability is traceable to
+      the archaic distinction between noble and ignoble employments. Leisure is
+      honorable and becomes imperative partly because it shows exemption from
+      ignoble labor. The archaic differentiation into noble and ignoble classes
+      is based on an invidious distinction between employments as honorific or
+      debasing; and this traditional distinction grows into an imperative canon
+      of decency during the early quasi-peaceable stage. Its ascendency is
+      furthered by the fact that leisure is still fully as effective an evidence
+      of wealth as consumption. Indeed, so effective is it in the relatively
+      small and stable human environment to which the individual is exposed at
+      that cultural stage, that, with the aid of the archaic tradition which
+      deprecates all productive labor, it gives rise to a large impecunious
+      leisure class, and it even tends to limit the production of the
+      community's industry to the subsistence minimum. This extreme inhibition
+      of industry is avoided because slave labor, working under a compulsion
+      more vigorous than that of reputability, is forced to turn out a product
+      in excess of the subsistence minimum of the working class. The subsequent
+      relative decline in the use of conspicuous leisure as a basis of repute is
+      due partly to an increasing relative effectiveness of consumption as an
+      evidence of wealth; but in part it is traceable to another force, alien,
+      and in some degree antagonistic, to the usage of conspicuous waste.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This alien factor is the instinct of workmanship. Other circumstances
+      permitting, that instinct disposes men to look with favor upon productive
+      efficiency and on whatever is of human use. It disposes them to deprecate
+      waste of substance or effort. The instinct of workmanship is present in
+      all men, and asserts itself even under very adverse circumstances. So that
+      however wasteful a given expenditure may be in reality, it must at least
+      have some colorable excuse in the way of an ostensible purpose. The manner
+      in which, under special circumstances, the instinct eventuates in a taste
+      for exploit and an invidious discrimination between noble and ignoble
+      classes has been indicated in an earlier chapter. In so far as it comes
+      into conflict with the law of conspicuous waste, the instinct of
+      workmanship expresses itself not so much in insistence on substantial
+      usefulness as in an abiding sense of the odiousness and aesthetic
+      impossibility of what is obviously futile. Being of the nature of an
+      instinctive affection, its guidance touches chiefly and immediately the
+      obvious and apparent violations of its requirements. It is only less
+      promptly and with less constraining force that it reaches such substantial
+      violations of its requirements as are appreciated only upon reflection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So long as all labor continues to be performed exclusively or usually by
+      slaves, the baseness of all productive effort is too constantly and
+      deterrently present in the mind of men to allow the instinct of
+      workmanship seriously to take effect in the direction of industrial
+      usefulness; but when the quasi-peaceable stage (with slavery and status)
+      passes into the peaceable stage of industry (with wage labor and cash
+      payment) the instinct comes more effectively into play. It then begins
+      aggressively to shape men's views of what is meritorious, and asserts
+      itself at least as an auxiliary canon of self-complacency. All extraneous
+      considerations apart, those persons (adult) are but a vanishing minority
+      today who harbor no inclination to the accomplishment of some end, or who
+      are not impelled of their own motion to shape some object or fact or
+      relation for human use. The propensity may in large measure be overborne
+      by the more immediately constraining incentive to a reputable leisure and
+      an avoidance of indecorous usefulness, and it may therefore work itself
+      out in make-believe only; as for instance in "social duties," and in
+      quasi-artistic or quasi-scholarly accomplishments, in the care and
+      decoration of the house, in sewing-circle activity or dress reform, in
+      proficiency at dress, cards, yachting, golf, and various sports. But the
+      fact that it may under stress of circumstances eventuate in inanities no
+      more disproves the presence of the instinct than the reality of the
+      brooding instinct is disproved by inducing a hen to sit on a nestful of
+      china eggs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This latter-day uneasy reaching-out for some form of purposeful activity
+      that shall at the same time not be indecorously productive of either
+      individual or collective gain marks a difference of attitude between the
+      modern leisure class and that of the quasi-peaceable stage. At the earlier
+      stage, as was said above, the all-dominating institution of slavery and
+      status acted resistlessly to discountenance exertion directed to other
+      than naively predatory ends. It was still possible to find some habitual
+      employment for the inclination to action in the way of forcible aggression
+      or repression directed against hostile groups or against the subject
+      classes within the group; and this served to relieve the pressure and draw
+      off the energy of the leisure class without a resort to actually useful,
+      or even ostensibly useful employments. The practice of hunting also served
+      the same purpose in some degree. When the community developed into a
+      peaceful industrial organization, and when fuller occupation of the land
+      had reduced the opportunities for the hunt to an inconsiderable residue,
+      the pressure of energy seeking purposeful employment was left to find an
+      outlet in some other direction. The ignominy which attaches to useful
+      effort also entered upon a less acute phase with the disappearance of
+      compulsory labor; and the instinct of workmanship then came to assert
+      itself with more persistence and consistency.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The line of least resistance has changed in some measure, and the energy
+      which formerly found a vent in predatory activity, now in part takes the
+      direction of some ostensibly useful end. Ostensibly purposeless leisure
+      has come to be deprecated, especially among that large portion of the
+      leisure class whose plebeian origin acts to set them at variance with the
+      tradition of the otium cum dignitate. But that canon of reputability which
+      discountenances all employment that is of the nature of productive effort
+      is still at hand, and will permit nothing beyond the most transient vogue
+      to any employment that is substantially useful or productive. The
+      consequence is that a change has been wrought in the conspicuous leisure
+      practiced by the leisure class; not so much in substance as in form. A
+      reconciliation between the two conflicting requirements is effected by a
+      resort to make-believe. Many and intricate polite observances and social
+      duties of a ceremonial nature are developed; many organizations are
+      founded, with some specious object of amelioration embodied in their
+      official style and title; there is much coming and going, and a deal of
+      talk, to the end that the talkers may not have occasion to reflect on what
+      is the effectual economic value of their traffic. And along with the
+      make-believe of purposeful employment, and woven inextricably into its
+      texture, there is commonly, if not invariably, a more or less appreciable
+      element of purposeful effort directed to some serious end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the narrower sphere of vicarious leisure a similar change has gone
+      forward. Instead of simply passing her time in visible idleness, as in the
+      best days of the patriarchal regime, the housewife of the advanced
+      peaceable stage applies herself assiduously to household cares. The
+      salient features of this development of domestic service have already been
+      indicated. Throughout the entire evolution of conspicuous expenditure,
+      whether of goods or of services or human life, runs the obvious
+      implication that in order to effectually mend the consumer's good fame it
+      must be an expenditure of superfluities. In order to be reputable it must
+      be wasteful. No merit would accrue from the consumption of the bare
+      necessaries of life, except by comparison with the abjectly poor who fall
+      short even of the subsistence minimum; and no standard of expenditure
+      could result from such a comparison, except the most prosaic and
+      unattractive level of decency. A standard of life would still be possible
+      which should admit of invidious comparison in other respects than that of
+      opulence; as, for instance, a comparison in various directions in the
+      manifestation of moral, physical, intellectual, or aesthetic force.
+      Comparison in all these directions is in vogue today; and the comparison
+      made in these respects is commonly so inextricably bound up with the
+      pecuniary comparison as to be scarcely distinguishable from the latter.
+      This is especially true as regards the current rating of expressions of
+      intellectual and aesthetic force or proficiency' so that we frequently
+      interpret as aesthetic or intellectual a difference which in substance is
+      pecuniary only.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The use of the term "waste" is in one respect an unfortunate one. As used
+      in the speech of everyday life the word carries an undertone of
+      deprecation. It is here used for want of a better term that will
+      adequately describe the same range of motives and of phenomena, and it is
+      not to be taken in an odious sense, as implying an illegitimate
+      expenditure of human products or of human life. In the view of economic
+      theory the expenditure in question is no more and no less legitimate than
+      any other expenditure. It is here called "waste" because this expenditure
+      does not serve human life or human well-being on the whole, not because it
+      is waste or misdirection of effort or expenditure as viewed from the
+      standpoint of the individual consumer who chooses it. If he chooses it,
+      that disposes of the question of its relative utility to him, as compared
+      with other forms of consumption that would not be deprecated on account of
+      their wastefulness. Whatever form of expenditure the consumer chooses, or
+      whatever end he seeks in making his choice, has utility to him by virtue
+      of his preference. As seen from the point of view of the individual
+      consumer, the question of wastefulness does not arise within the scope of
+      economic theory proper. The use of the word "waste" as a technical term,
+      therefore, implies no deprecation of the motives or of the ends sought by
+      the consumer under this canon of conspicuous waste.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it is, on other grounds, worth noting that the term "waste" in the
+      language of everyday life implies deprecation of what is characterized as
+      wasteful. This common-sense implication is itself an outcropping of the
+      instinct of workmanship. The popular reprobation of waste goes to say that
+      in order to be at peace with himself the common man must be able to see in
+      any and all human effort and human enjoyment an enhancement of life and
+      well-being on the whole. In order to meet with unqualified approval, any
+      economic fact must approve itself under the test of impersonal usefulness&mdash;usefulness
+      as seen from the point of view of the generically human. Relative or
+      competitive advantage of one individual in comparison with another does
+      not satisfy the economic conscience, and therefore competitive expenditure
+      has not the approval of this conscience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In strict accuracy nothing should be included under the head of
+      conspicuous waste but such expenditure as is incurred on the ground of an
+      invidious pecuniary comparison. But in order to bring any given item or
+      element in under this head it is not necessary that it should be
+      recognized as waste in this sense by the person incurring the expenditure.
+      It frequently happens that an element of the standard of living which set
+      out with being primarily wasteful, ends with becoming, in the apprehension
+      of the consumer, a necessary of life; and it may in this way become as
+      indispensable as any other item of the consumer's habitual expenditure. As
+      items which sometimes fall under this head, and are therefore available as
+      illustrations of the manner in which this principle applies, may be cited
+      carpets and tapestries, silver table service, waiter's services, silk
+      hats, starched linen, many articles of jewelry and of dress. The
+      indispensability of these things after the habit and the convention have
+      been formed, however, has little to say in the classification of
+      expenditures as waste or not waste in the technical meaning of the word.
+      The test to which all expenditure must be brought in an attempt to decide
+      that point is the question whether it serves directly to enhance human
+      life on the whole-whether it furthers the life process taken impersonally.
+      For this is the basis of award of the instinct of workmanship, and that
+      instinct is the court of final appeal in any question of economic truth or
+      adequacy. It is a question as to the award rendered by a dispassionate
+      common sense. The question is, therefore, not whether, under the existing
+      circumstances of individual habit and social custom, a given expenditure
+      conduces to the particular consumer's gratification or peace of mind; but
+      whether, aside from acquired tastes and from the canons of usage and
+      conventional decency, its result is a net gain in comfort or in the
+      fullness of life. Customary expenditure must be classed under the head of
+      waste in so far as the custom on which it rests is traceable to the habit
+      of making an invidious pecuniary comparison-in so far as it is conceived
+      that it could not have become customary and prescriptive without the
+      backing of this principle of pecuniary reputability or relative economic
+      success. It is obviously not necessary that a given object of expenditure
+      should be exclusively wasteful in order to come in under the category of
+      conspicuous waste. An article may be useful and wasteful both, and its
+      utility to the consumer may be made up of use and waste in the most
+      varying proportions. Consumable goods, and even productive goods,
+      generally show the two elements in combination, as constituents of their
+      utility; although, in a general way, the element of waste tends to
+      predominate in articles of consumption, while the contrary is true of
+      articles designed for productive use. Even in articles which appear at
+      first glance to serve for pure ostentation only, it is always possible to
+      detect the presence of some, at least ostensible, useful purpose; and on
+      the other hand, even in special machinery and tools contrived for some
+      particular industrial process, as well as in the rudest appliances of
+      human industry, the traces of conspicuous waste, or at least of the habit
+      of ostentation, usually become evident on a close scrutiny. It would be
+      hazardous to assert that a useful purpose is ever absent from the utility
+      of any article or of any service, however obviously its prime purpose and
+      chief element is conspicuous waste; and it would be only less hazardous to
+      assert of any primarily useful product that the element of waste is in no
+      way concerned in its value, immediately or remotely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Five ~~ The Pecuniary Standard of Living
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      For the great body of the people in any modern community, the proximate
+      ground of expenditure in excess of what is required for physical comfort
+      is not a conscious effort to excel in the expensiveness of their visible
+      consumption, so much as it is a desire to live up to the conventional
+      standard of decency in the amount and grade of goods consumed. This desire
+      is not guided by a rigidly invariable standard, which must be lived up to,
+      and beyond which there is no incentive to go. The standard is flexible;
+      and especially it is indefinitely extensible, if only time is allowed for
+      habituation to any increase in pecuniary ability and for acquiring
+      facility in the new and larger scale of expenditure that follows such an
+      increase. It is much more difficult to recede from a scale of expenditure
+      once adopted than it is to extend the accustomed scale in response to an
+      accession of wealth. Many items of customary expenditure prove on analysis
+      to be almost purely wasteful, and they are therefore honorific only, but
+      after they have once been incorporated into the scale of decent
+      consumption, and so have become an integral part of one's scheme of life,
+      it is quite as hard to give up these as it is to give up many items that
+      conduce directly to one's physical comfort, or even that may be necessary
+      to life and health. That is to say, the conspicuously wasteful honorific
+      expenditure that confers spiritual well-being may become more
+      indispensable than much of that expenditure which ministers to the "lower"
+      wants of physical well-being or sustenance only. It is notoriously just as
+      difficult to recede from a "high" standard of living as it is to lower a
+      standard which is already relatively low; although in the former case the
+      difficulty is a moral one, while in the latter it may involve a material
+      deduction from the physical comforts of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But while retrogression is difficult, a fresh advance in conspicuous
+      expenditure is relatively easy; indeed, it takes place almost as a matter
+      of course. In the rare cases where it occurs, a failure to increase one's
+      visible consumption when the means for an increase are at hand is felt in
+      popular apprehension to call for explanation, and unworthy motives of
+      miserliness are imputed to those who fall short in this respect. A prompt
+      response to the stimulus, on the other hand, is accepted as the normal
+      effect. This suggests that the standard of expenditure which commonly
+      guides our efforts is not the average, ordinary expenditure already
+      achieved; it is an ideal of consumption that lies just beyond our reach,
+      or to reach which requires some strain. The motive is emulation&mdash;the
+      stimulus of an invidious comparison which prompts us to outdo those with
+      whom we are in the habit of classing ourselves. Substantially the same
+      proposition is expressed in the commonplace remark that each class envies
+      and emulates the class next above it in the social scale, while it rarely
+      compares itself with those below or with those who are considerably in
+      advance. That is to say, in other words, our standard of decency in
+      expenditure, as in other ends of emulation, is set by the usage of those
+      next above us in reputability; until, in this way, especially in any
+      community where class distinctions are somewhat vague, all canons of
+      reputability and decency, and all standards of consumption, are traced
+      back by insensible gradations to the usages and habits of thought of the
+      highest social and pecuniary class&mdash;the wealthy leisure class.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is for this class to determine, in general outline, what scheme of Life
+      the community shall accept as decent or honorific; and it is their office
+      by precept and example to set forth this scheme of social salvation in its
+      highest, ideal form. But the higher leisure class can exercise this
+      quasi-sacerdotal office only under certain material limitations. The class
+      cannot at discretion effect a sudden revolution or reversal of the popular
+      habits of thought with respect to any of these ceremonial requirements. It
+      takes time for any change to permeate the mass and change the habitual
+      attitude of the people; and especially it takes time to change the habits
+      of those classes that are socially more remote from the radiant body. The
+      process is slower where the mobility of the population is less or where
+      the intervals between the several classes are wider and more abrupt. But
+      if time be allowed, the scope of the discretion of the leisure class as
+      regards questions of form and detail in the community's scheme of life is
+      large; while as regards the substantial principles of reputability, the
+      changes which it can effect lie within a narrow margin of tolerance. Its
+      example and precept carries the force of prescription for all classes
+      below it; but in working out the precepts which are handed down as
+      governing the form and method of reputability&mdash;in shaping the usages
+      and the spiritual attitude of the lower classes&mdash;this authoritative
+      prescription constantly works under the selective guidance of the canon of
+      conspicuous waste, tempered in varying degree by the instinct of
+      workmanship. To those norms is to be added another broad principle of
+      human nature&mdash;the predatory animus&mdash;which in point of generality
+      and of psychological content lies between the two just named. The effect
+      of the latter in shaping the accepted scheme of life is yet to be
+      discussed. The canon of reputability, then, must adapt itself to the
+      economic circumstances, the traditions, and the degree of spiritual
+      maturity of the particular class whose scheme of life it is to regulate.
+      It is especially to be noted that however high its authority and however
+      true to the fundamental requirements of reputability it may have been at
+      its inception, a specific formal observance can under no circumstances
+      maintain itself in force if with the lapse of time or on its transmission
+      to a lower pecuniary class it is found to run counter to the ultimate
+      ground of decency among civilized peoples, namely, serviceability for the
+      purpose of an invidious comparison in pecuniary success. It is evident
+      that these canons of expenditure have much to say in determining the
+      standard of living for any community and for any class. It is no less
+      evident that the standard of living which prevails at any time or at any
+      given social altitude will in its turn have much to say as to the forms
+      which honorific expenditure will take, and as to the degree to which this
+      "higher" need will dominate a people's consumption. In this respect the
+      control exerted by the accepted standard of living is chiefly of a
+      negative character; it acts almost solely to prevent recession from a
+      scale of conspicuous expenditure that has once become habitual.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A standard of living is of the nature of habit. It is an habitual scale
+      and method of responding to given stimuli. The difficulty in the way of
+      receding from an accustomed standard is the difficulty of breaking a habit
+      that has once been formed. The relative facility with which an advance in
+      the standard is made means that the life process is a process of unfolding
+      activity and that it will readily unfold in a new direction whenever and
+      wherever the resistance to self-expression decreases. But when the habit
+      of expression along such a given line of low resistance has once been
+      formed, the discharge will seek the accustomed outlet even after a change
+      has taken place in the environment whereby the external resistance has
+      appreciably risen. That heightened facility of expression in a given
+      direction which is called habit may offset a considerable increase in the
+      resistance offered by external circumstances to the unfolding of life in
+      the given direction. As between the various habits, or habitual modes and
+      directions of expression, which go to make up an individual's standard of
+      living, there is an appreciable difference in point of persistence under
+      counteracting circumstances and in point of the degree of imperativeness
+      with which the discharge seeks a given direction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That is to say, in the language of current economic theory, while men are
+      reluctant to retrench their expenditures in any direction, they are more
+      reluctant to retrench in some directions than in others; so that while any
+      accustomed consumption is reluctantly given up, there are certain lines of
+      consumption which are given up with relatively extreme reluctance. The
+      articles or forms of consumption to which the consumer clings with the
+      greatest tenacity are commonly the so-called necessaries of life, or the
+      subsistence minimum. The subsistence minimum is of course not a rigidly
+      determined allowance of goods, definite and invariable in kind and
+      quantity; but for the purpose in hand it may be taken to comprise a
+      certain, more or less definite, aggregate of consumption required for the
+      maintenance of life. This minimum, it may be assumed, is ordinarily given
+      up last in case of a progressive retrenchment of expenditure. That is to
+      say, in a general way, the most ancient and ingrained of the habits which
+      govern the individual's life&mdash;those habits that touch his existence
+      as an organism&mdash;are the most persistent and imperative. Beyond these
+      come the higher wants&mdash;later-formed habits of the individual or the
+      race&mdash;in a somewhat irregular and by no means invariable gradation.
+      Some of these higher wants, as for instance the habitual use of certain
+      stimulants, or the need of salvation (in the eschatological sense), or of
+      good repute, may in some cases take precedence of the lower or more
+      elementary wants. In general, the longer the habituation, the more
+      unbroken the habit, and the more nearly it coincides with previous
+      habitual forms of the life process, the more persistently will the given
+      habit assert itself. The habit will be stronger if the particular traits
+      of human nature which its action involves, or the particular aptitudes
+      that find exercise in it, are traits or aptitudes that are already largely
+      and profoundly concerned in the life process or that are intimately bound
+      up with the life history of the particular racial stock. The varying
+      degrees of ease with which different habits are formed by different
+      persons, as well as the varying degrees of reluctance with which different
+      habits are given up, goes to say that the formation of specific habits is
+      not a matter of length of habituation simply. Inherited aptitudes and
+      traits of temperament count for quite as much as length of habituation in
+      deciding what range of habits will come to dominate any individual's
+      scheme of life. And the prevalent type of transmitted aptitudes, or in
+      other words the type of temperament belonging to the dominant ethnic
+      element in any community, will go far to decide what will be the scope and
+      form of expression of the community's habitual life process. How greatly
+      the transmitted idiosyncrasies of aptitude may count in the way of a rapid
+      and definitive formation of habit in individuals is illustrated by the
+      extreme facility with which an all-dominating habit of alcoholism is
+      sometimes formed; or in the similar facility and the similarly inevitable
+      formation of a habit of devout observances in the case of persons gifted
+      with a special aptitude in that direction. Much the same meaning attaches
+      to that peculiar facility of habituation to a specific human environment
+      that is called romantic love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Men differ in respect of transmitted aptitudes, or in respect of the
+      relative facility with which they unfold their life activity in particular
+      directions; and the habits which coincide with or proceed upon a
+      relatively strong specific aptitude or a relatively great specific
+      facility of expression become of great consequence to the man's
+      well-being. The part played by this element of aptitude in determining the
+      relative tenacity of the several habits which constitute the standard of
+      living goes to explain the extreme reluctance with which men give up any
+      habitual expenditure in the way of conspicuous consumption. The aptitudes
+      or propensities to which a habit of this kind is to be referred as its
+      ground are those aptitudes whose exercise is comprised in emulation; and
+      the propensity for emulation&mdash;for invidious comparison&mdash;is of
+      ancient growth and is a pervading trait of human nature. It is easily
+      called into vigorous activity in any new form, and it asserts itself with
+      great insistence under any form under which it has once found habitual
+      expression. When the individual has once formed the habit of seeking
+      expression in a given line of honorific expenditure&mdash;when a given set
+      of stimuli have come to be habitually responded to in activity of a given
+      kind and direction under the guidance of these alert and deep-reaching
+      propensities of emulation&mdash;it is with extreme reluctance that such an
+      habitual expenditure is given up. And on the other hand, whenever an
+      accession of pecuniary strength puts the individual in a position to
+      unfold his life process in larger scope and with additional reach, the
+      ancient propensities of the race will assert themselves in determining the
+      direction which the new unfolding of life is to take. And those
+      propensities which are already actively in the field under some related
+      form of expression, which are aided by the pointed suggestions afforded by
+      a current accredited scheme of life, and for the exercise of which the
+      material means and opportunities are readily available&mdash;these will
+      especially have much to say in shaping the form and direction in which the
+      new accession to the individual's aggregate force will assert itself. That
+      is to say, in concrete terms, in any community where conspicuous
+      consumption is an element of the scheme of life, an increase in an
+      individual's ability to pay is likely to take the form of an expenditure
+      for some accredited line of conspicuous consumption.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the exception of the instinct of self-preservation, the propensity
+      for emulation is probably the strongest and most alert and persistent of
+      the economic motives proper. In an industrial community this propensity
+      for emulation expresses itself in pecuniary emulation; and this, so far as
+      regards the Western civilized communities of the present, is virtually
+      equivalent to saying that it expresses itself in some form of conspicuous
+      waste. The need of conspicuous waste, therefore, stands ready to absorb
+      any increase in the community's industrial efficiency or output of goods,
+      after the most elementary physical wants have been provided for. Where
+      this result does not follow, under modern conditions, the reason for the
+      discrepancy is commonly to be sought in a rate of increase in the
+      individual's wealth too rapid for the habit of expenditure to keep abreast
+      of it; or it may be that the individual in question defers the conspicuous
+      consumption of the increment to a later date&mdash;ordinarily with a view
+      to heightening the spectacular effect of the aggregate expenditure
+      contemplated. As increased industrial efficiency makes it possible to
+      procure the means of livelihood with less labor, the energies of the
+      industrious members of the community are bent to the compassing of a
+      higher result in conspicuous expenditure, rather than slackened to a more
+      comfortable pace. The strain is not lightened as industrial efficiency
+      increases and makes a lighter strain possible, but the increment of output
+      is turned to use to meet this want, which is indefinitely expansible,
+      after the manner commonly imputed in economic theory to higher or
+      spiritual wants. It is owing chiefly to the presence of this element in
+      the standard of living that J. S. Mill was able to say that "hitherto it
+      is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened
+      the day's toil of any human being." The accepted standard of expenditure
+      in the community or in the class to which a person belongs largely
+      determines what his standard of living will be. It does this directly by
+      commending itself to his common sense as right and good, through his
+      habitually contemplating it and assimilating the scheme of life in which
+      it belongs; but it does so also indirectly through popular insistence on
+      conformity to the accepted scale of expenditure as a matter of propriety,
+      under pain of disesteem and ostracism. To accept and practice the standard
+      of living which is in vogue is both agreeable and expedient, commonly to
+      the point of being indispensable to personal comfort and to success in
+      life. The standard of living of any class, so far as concerns the element
+      of conspicuous waste, is commonly as high as the earning capacity of the
+      class will permit&mdash;with a constant tendency to go higher. The effect
+      upon the serious activities of men is therefore to direct them with great
+      singleness of purpose to the largest possible acquisition of wealth, and
+      to discountenance work that brings no pecuniary gain. At the same time the
+      effect on consumption is to concentrate it upon the lines which are most
+      patent to the observers whose good opinion is sought; while the
+      inclinations and aptitudes whose exercise does not involve a honorific
+      expenditure of time or substance tend to fall into abeyance through
+      disuse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through this discrimination in favor of visible consumption it has come
+      about that the domestic life of most classes is relatively shabby, as
+      compared with the éclat of that overt portion of their life that is
+      carried on before the eyes of observers. As a secondary consequence of the
+      same discrimination, people habitually screen their private life from
+      observation. So far as concerns that portion of their consumption that may
+      without blame be carried on in secret, they withdraw from all contact with
+      their neighbors, hence the exclusiveness of people, as regards their
+      domestic life, in most of the industrially developed communities; and
+      hence, by remoter derivation, the habit of privacy and reserve that is so
+      large a feature in the code of proprieties of the better class in all
+      communities. The low birthrate of the classes upon whom the requirements
+      of reputable expenditure fall with great urgency is likewise traceable to
+      the exigencies of a standard of living based on conspicuous waste. The
+      conspicuous consumption, and the consequent increased expense, required in
+      the reputable maintenance of a child is very considerable and acts as a
+      powerful deterrent. It is probably the most effectual of the Malthusian
+      prudential checks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The effect of this factor of the standard of living, both in the way of
+      retrenchment in the obscurer elements of consumption that go to physical
+      comfort and maintenance, and also in the paucity or absence of children,
+      is perhaps seen at its best among the classes given to scholarly pursuits.
+      Because of a presumed superiority and scarcity of the gifts and
+      attainments that characterize their life, these classes are by convention
+      subsumed under a higher social grade than their pecuniary grade should
+      warrant. The scale of decent expenditure in their case is pitched
+      correspondingly high, and it consequently leaves an exceptionally narrow
+      margin disposable for the other ends of life. By force of circumstances,
+      their habitual sense of what is good and right in these matters, as well
+      as the expectations of the community in the way of pecuniary decency among
+      the learned, are excessively high&mdash;as measured by the prevalent
+      degree of opulence and earning capacity of the class, relatively to the
+      non-scholarly classes whose social equals they nominally are. In any
+      modern community where there is no priestly monopoly of these occupations,
+      the people of scholarly pursuits are unavoidably thrown into contact with
+      classes that are pecuniarily their superiors. The high standard of
+      pecuniary decency in force among these superior classes is transfused
+      among the scholarly classes with but little mitigation of its rigor; and
+      as a consequence there is no class of the community that spends a larger
+      proportion of its substance in conspicuous waste than these.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Six ~~ Pecuniary Canons of Taste
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The caution has already been repeated more than once, that while the
+      regulating norm of consumption is in large part the requirement of
+      conspicuous waste, it must not be understood that the motive on which the
+      consumer acts in any given case is this principle in its bald,
+      unsophisticated form. Ordinarily his motive is a wish to conform to
+      established usage, to avoid unfavorable notice and comment, to live up to
+      the accepted canons of decency in the kind, amount, and grade of goods
+      consumed, as well as in the decorous employment of his time and effort. In
+      the common run of cases this sense of prescriptive usage is present in the
+      motives of the consumer and exerts a direct constraining force, especially
+      as regards consumption carried on under the eyes of observers. But a
+      considerable element of prescriptive expensiveness is observable also in
+      consumption that does not in any appreciable degree become known to
+      outsiders&mdash;as, for instance, articles of underclothing, some articles
+      of food, kitchen utensils, and other household apparatus designed for
+      service rather than for evidence. In all such useful articles a close
+      scrutiny will discover certain features which add to the cost and enhance
+      the commercial value of the goods in question, but do not proportionately
+      increase the serviceability of these articles for the material purposes
+      which alone they ostensibly are designed to serve.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Under the selective surveillance of the law of conspicuous waste there
+      grows up a code of accredited canons of consumption, the effect of which
+      is to hold the consumer up to a standard of expensiveness and wastefulness
+      in his consumption of goods and in his employment of time and effort. This
+      growth of prescriptive usage has an immediate effect upon economic life,
+      but it has also an indirect and remoter effect upon conduct in other
+      respects as well. Habits of thought with respect to the expression of life
+      in any given direction unavoidably affect the habitual view of what is
+      good and right in life in other directions also. In the organic complex of
+      habits of thought which make up the substance of an individual's conscious
+      life the economic interest does not lie isolated and distinct from all
+      other interests. Something, for instance, has already been said of its
+      relation to the canons of reputability.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The principle of conspicuous waste guides the formation of habits of
+      thought as to what is honest and reputable in life and in commodities. In
+      so doing, this principle will traverse other norms of conduct which do not
+      primarily have to do with the code of pecuniary honor, but which have,
+      directly or incidentally, an economic significance of some magnitude. So
+      the canon of honorific waste may, immediately or remotely, influence the
+      sense of duty, the sense of beauty, the sense of utility, the sense of
+      devotional or ritualistic fitness, and the scientific sense of truth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is scarcely necessary to go into a discussion here of the particular
+      points at which, or the particular manner in which, the canon of honorific
+      expenditure habitually traverses the canons of moral conduct. The matter
+      is one which has received large attention and illustration at the hands of
+      those whose office it is to watch and admonish with respect to any
+      departures from the accepted code of morals. In modern communities, where
+      the dominant economic and legal feature of the community's life is the
+      institution of private property, one of the salient features of the code
+      of morals is the sacredness of property. There needs no insistence or
+      illustration to gain assent to the proposition that the habit of holding
+      private property inviolate is traversed by the other habit of seeking
+      wealth for the sake of the good repute to be gained through its
+      conspicuous consumption. Most offenses against property, especially
+      offenses of an appreciable magnitude, come under this head. It is also a
+      matter of common notoriety and byword that in offenses which result in a
+      large accession of property to the offender he does not ordinarily incur
+      the extreme penalty or the extreme obloquy with which his offenses would
+      be visited on the ground of the naive moral code alone. The thief or
+      swindler who has gained great wealth by his delinquency has a better
+      chance than the small thief of escaping the rigorous penalty of the law
+      and some good repute accrues to him from his increased wealth and from his
+      spending the irregularly acquired possessions in a seemly manner. A
+      well-bred expenditure of his booty especially appeals with great effect to
+      persons of a cultivated sense of the proprieties, and goes far to mitigate
+      the sense of moral turpitude with which his dereliction is viewed by them.
+      It may be noted also&mdash;and it is more immediately to the point&mdash;that
+      we are all inclined to condone an offense against property in the case of
+      a man whose motive is the worthy one of providing the means of a "decent"
+      manner of life for his wife and children. If it is added that the wife has
+      been "nurtured in the lap of luxury," that is accepted as an additional
+      extenuating circumstance. That is to say, we are prone to condone such an
+      offense where its aim is the honorific one of enabling the offender's wife
+      to perform for him such an amount of vicarious consumption of time and
+      substance as is demanded by the standard of pecuniary decency. In such a
+      case the habit of approving the accustomed degree of conspicuous waste
+      traverses the habit of deprecating violations of ownership, to the extent
+      even of sometimes leaving the award of praise or blame uncertain. This is
+      peculiarly true where the dereliction involves an appreciable predatory or
+      piratical element.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This topic need scarcely be pursued further here; but the remark may not
+      be out of place that all that considerable body of morals that clusters
+      about the concept of an inviolable ownership is itself a psychological
+      precipitate of the traditional meritoriousness of wealth. And it should be
+      added that this wealth which is held sacred is valued primarily for the
+      sake of the good repute to be got through its conspicuous consumption. The
+      bearing of pecuniary decency upon the scientific spirit or the quest of
+      knowledge will be taken up in some detail in a separate chapter. Also as
+      regards the sense of devout or ritual merit and adequacy in this
+      connection, little need be said in this place. That topic will also come
+      up incidentally in a later chapter. Still, this usage of honorific
+      expenditure has much to say in shaping popular tastes as to what is right
+      and meritorious in sacred matters, and the bearing of the principle of
+      conspicuous waste upon some of the commonplace devout observances and
+      conceits may therefore be pointed out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Obviously, the canon of conspicuous waste is accountable for a great
+      portion of what may be called devout consumption; as, e.g., the
+      consumption of sacred edifices, vestments, and other goods of the same
+      class. Even in those modern cults to whose divinities is imputed a
+      predilection for temples not built with hands, the sacred buildings and
+      the other properties of the cult are constructed and decorated with some
+      view to a reputable degree of wasteful expenditure. And it needs but
+      little either of observation or introspection&mdash;and either will serve
+      the turn&mdash;to assure us that the expensive splendor of the house of
+      worship has an appreciable uplifting and mellowing effect upon the
+      worshipper's frame of mind. It will serve to enforce the same fact if we
+      reflect upon the sense of abject shamefulness with which any evidence of
+      indigence or squalor about the sacred place affects all beholders. The
+      accessories of any devout observance should be pecuniarily above reproach.
+      This requirement is imperative, whatever latitude may be allowed with
+      regard to these accessories in point of aesthetic or other serviceability.
+      It may also be in place to notice that in all communities, especially in
+      neighborhoods where the standard of pecuniary decency for dwellings is not
+      high, the local sanctuary is more ornate, more conspicuously wasteful in
+      its architecture and decoration, than the dwelling houses of the
+      congregation. This is true of nearly all denominations and cults, whether
+      Christian or Pagan, but it is true in a peculiar degree of the older and
+      maturer cults. At the same time the sanctuary commonly contributes little
+      if anything to the physical comfort of the members. Indeed, the sacred
+      structure not only serves the physical well-being of the members to but a
+      slight extent, as compared with their humbler dwelling-houses; but it is
+      felt by all men that a right and enlightened sense of the true, the
+      beautiful, and the good demands that in all expenditure on the sanctuary
+      anything that might serve the comfort of the worshipper should be
+      conspicuously absent. If any element of comfort is admitted in the
+      fittings of the sanctuary, it should be at least scrupulously screened and
+      masked under an ostensible austerity. In the most reputable latter-day
+      houses of worship, where no expense is spared, the principle of austerity
+      is carried to the length of making the fittings of the place a means of
+      mortifying the flesh, especially in appearance. There are few persons of
+      delicate tastes, in the matter of devout consumption to whom this
+      austerely wasteful discomfort does not appeal as intrinsically right and
+      good. Devout consumption is of the nature of vicarious consumption. This
+      canon of devout austerity is based on the pecuniary reputability of
+      conspicuously wasteful consumption, backed by the principle that vicarious
+      consumption should conspicuously not conduce to the comfort of the
+      vicarious consumer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sanctuary and its fittings have something of this austerity in all the
+      cults in which the saint or divinity to whom the sanctuary pertains is not
+      conceived to be present and make personal use of the property for the
+      gratification of luxurious tastes imputed to him. The character of the
+      sacred paraphernalia is somewhat different in this respect in those cults
+      where the habits of life imputed to the divinity more nearly approach
+      those of an earthly patriarchal potentate&mdash;where he is conceived to
+      make use of these consumable goods in person. In the latter case the
+      sanctuary and its fittings take on more of the fashion given to goods
+      destined for the conspicuous consumption of a temporal master or owner. On
+      the other hand, where the sacred apparatus is simply employed in the
+      divinity's service, that is to say, where it is consumed vicariously on
+      his account by his servants, there the sacred properties take the
+      character suited to goods that are destined for vicarious consumption
+      only.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the latter case the sanctuary and the sacred apparatus are so contrived
+      as not to enhance the comfort or fullness of life of the vicarious
+      consumer, or at any rate not to convey the impression that the end of
+      their consumption is the consumer's comfort. For the end of vicarious
+      consumption is to enhance, not the fullness of life of the consumer, but
+      the pecuniary repute of the master for whose behoof the consumption takes
+      place. Therefore priestly vestments are notoriously expensive, ornate, and
+      inconvenient; and in the cults where the priestly servitor of the divinity
+      is not conceived to serve him in the capacity of consort, they are of an
+      austere, comfortless fashion. And such it is felt that they should be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not only in establishing a devout standard of decent expensiveness
+      that the principle of waste invades the domain of the canons of ritual
+      serviceability. It touches the ways as well as the means, and draws on
+      vicarious leisure as well as on vicarious consumption. Priestly demeanor
+      at its best is aloof, leisurely, perfunctory, and uncontaminated with
+      suggestions of sensuous pleasure. This holds true, in different degrees of
+      course, for the different cults and denominations; but in the priestly
+      life of all anthropomorphic cults the marks of a vicarious consumption of
+      time are visible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The same pervading canon of vicarious leisure is also visibly present in
+      the exterior details of devout observances and need only be pointed out in
+      order to become obvious to all beholders. All ritual has a notable
+      tendency to reduce itself to a rehearsal of formulas. This development of
+      formula is most noticeable in the maturer cults, which have at the same
+      time a more austere, ornate, and severe priestly life and garb; but it is
+      perceptible also in the forms and methods of worship of the newer and
+      fresher sects, whose tastes in respect of priests, vestments, and
+      sanctuaries are less exacting. The rehearsal of the service (the term
+      "service" carries a suggestion significant for the point in question)
+      grows more perfunctory as the cult gains in age and consistency, and this
+      perfunctoriness of the rehearsal is very pleasing to the correct devout
+      taste. And with a good reason, for the fact of its being perfunctory goes
+      to say pointedly that the master for whom it is performed is exalted above
+      the vulgar need of actually proficuous service on the part of his
+      servants. They are unprofitable servants, and there is an honorific
+      implication for their master in their remaining unprofitable. It is
+      needless to point out the close analogy at this point between the priestly
+      office and the office of the footman. It is pleasing to our sense of what
+      is fitting in these matters, in either case, to recognize in the obvious
+      perfunctoriness of the service that it is a pro forma execution only.
+      There should be no show of agility or of dexterous manipulation in the
+      execution of the priestly office, such as might suggest a capacity for
+      turning off the work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In all this there is of course an obvious implication as to the
+      temperament, tastes, propensities, and habits of life imputed to the
+      divinity by worshippers who live under the tradition of these pecuniary
+      canons of reputability. Through its pervading men's habits of thought, the
+      principle of conspicuous waste has colored the worshippers' notions of the
+      divinity and of the relation in which the human subject stands to him. It
+      is of course in the more naive cults that this suffusion of pecuniary
+      beauty is most patent, but it is visible throughout. All peoples, at
+      whatever stage of culture or degree of enlightenment, are fain to eke out
+      a sensibly scant degree of authentic formation regarding the personality
+      and habitual surroundings of their divinities. In so calling in the aid of
+      fancy to enrich and fill in their picture of the divinity's presence and
+      manner of life they habitually impute to him such traits as go to make up
+      their ideal of a worthy man. And in seeking communion with the divinity
+      the ways and means of approach are assimilated as nearly as may be to the
+      divine ideal that is in men's minds at the time. It is felt that the
+      divine presence is entered with the best grace, and with the best effect,
+      according to certain accepted methods and with the accompaniment of
+      certain material circumstances which in popular apprehension are
+      peculiarly consonant with the divine nature. This popularly accepted ideal
+      of the bearing and paraphernalia adequate to such occasions of communion
+      is, of course, to a good extent shaped by the popular apprehension of what
+      is intrinsically worthy and beautiful in human carriage and surroundings
+      on all occasions of dignified intercourse. It would on this account be
+      misleading to attempt an analysis of devout demeanor by referring all
+      evidences of the presence of a pecuniary standard of reputability back
+      directly and baldly to the underlying norm of pecuniary emulation. So it
+      would also be misleading to ascribe to the divinity, as popularly
+      conceived, a jealous regard for his pecuniary standing and a habit of
+      avoiding and condemning squalid situations and surroundings simply because
+      they are under grade in the pecuniary respect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And still, after all allowance has been made, it appears that the canons
+      of pecuniary reputability do, directly or indirectly, materially affect
+      our notions of the attributes of divinity, as well as our notions of what
+      are the fit and adequate manner and circumstances of divine communion. It
+      is felt that the divinity must be of a peculiarly serene and leisurely
+      habit of life. And whenever his local habitation is pictured in poetic
+      imagery, for edification or in appeal to the devout fancy, the devout
+      word-painter, as a matter of course, brings out before his auditors'
+      imagination a throne with a profusion of the insignia of opulence and
+      power, and surrounded by a great number of servitors. In the common run of
+      such presentations of the celestial abodes, the office of this corps of
+      servants is a vicarious leisure, their time and efforts being in great
+      measure taken up with an industrially unproductive rehearsal of the
+      meritorious characteristics and exploits of the divinity; while the
+      background of the presentation is filled with the shimmer of the precious
+      metals and of the more expensive varieties of precious stones. It is only
+      in the crasser expressions of devout fancy that this intrusion of
+      pecuniary canons into the devout ideals reaches such an extreme. An
+      extreme case occurs in the devout imagery of the Negro population of the
+      South. Their word-painters are unable to descend to anything cheaper than
+      gold; so that in this case the insistence on pecuniary beauty gives a
+      startling effect in yellow&mdash;such as would be unbearable to a soberer
+      taste. Still, there is probably no cult in which ideals of pecuniary merit
+      have not been called in to supplement the ideals of ceremonial adequacy
+      that guide men's conception of what is right in the matter of sacred
+      apparatus.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Similarly it is felt&mdash;and the sentiment is acted upon&mdash;that the
+      priestly servitors of the divinity should not engage in industrially
+      productive work; that work of any kind&mdash;any employment which is of
+      tangible human use&mdash;must not be carried on in the divine presence, or
+      within the precincts of the sanctuary; that whoever comes into the
+      presence should come cleansed of all profane industrial features in his
+      apparel or person, and should come clad in garments of more than everyday
+      expensiveness; that on holidays set apart in honor of or for communion
+      with the divinity no work that is of human use should be performed by any
+      one. Even the remoter, lay dependents should render a vicarious leisure to
+      the extent of one day in seven. In all these deliverances of men's
+      uninstructed sense of what is fit and proper in devout observance and in
+      the relations of the divinity, the effectual presence of the canons of
+      pecuniary reputability is obvious enough, whether these canons have had
+      their effect on the devout judgment in this respect immediately or at the
+      second remove.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These canons of reputability have had a similar, but more far-reaching and
+      more specifically determinable, effect upon the popular sense of beauty or
+      serviceability in consumable goods. The requirements of pecuniary decency
+      have, to a very appreciable extent, influenced the sense of beauty and of
+      utility in articles of use or beauty. Articles are to an extent preferred
+      for use on account of their being conspicuously wasteful; they are felt to
+      be serviceable somewhat in proportion as they are wasteful and ill adapted
+      to their ostensible use.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The utility of articles valued for their beauty depends closely upon the
+      expensiveness of the articles. A homely illustration will bring out this
+      dependence. A hand-wrought silver spoon, of a commercial value of some ten
+      to twenty dollars, is not ordinarily more serviceable&mdash;in the first
+      sense of the word&mdash;than a machine-made spoon of the same material. It
+      may not even be more serviceable than a machine-made spoon of some "base"
+      metal, such as aluminum, the value of which may be no more than some ten
+      to twenty cents. The former of the two utensils is, in fact, commonly a
+      less effective contrivance for its ostensible purpose than the latter. The
+      objection is of course ready to hand that, in taking this view of the
+      matter, one of the chief uses, if not the chief use, of the costlier spoon
+      is ignored; the hand-wrought spoon gratifies our taste, our sense of the
+      beautiful, while that made by machinery out of the base metal has no
+      useful office beyond a brute efficiency. The facts are no doubt as the
+      objection states them, but it will be evident on rejection that the
+      objection is after all more plausible than conclusive. It appears (1) that
+      while the different materials of which the two spoons are made each
+      possesses beauty and serviceability for the purpose for which it is used,
+      the material of the hand-wrought spoon is some one hundred times more
+      valuable than the baser metal, without very greatly excelling the latter
+      in intrinsic beauty of grain or color, and without being in any
+      appreciable degree superior in point of mechanical serviceability; (2) if
+      a close inspection should show that the supposed hand-wrought spoon were
+      in reality only a very clever citation of hand-wrought goods, but an
+      imitation so cleverly wrought as to give the same impression of line and
+      surface to any but a minute examination by a trained eye, the utility of
+      the article, including the gratification which the user derives from its
+      contemplation as an object of beauty, would immediately decline by some
+      eighty or ninety per cent, or even more; (3) if the two spoons are, to a
+      fairly close observer, so nearly identical in appearance that the lighter
+      weight of the spurious article alone betrays it, this identity of form and
+      color will scarcely add to the value of the machine-made spoon, nor
+      appreciably enhance the gratification of the user's "sense of beauty" in
+      contemplating it, so long as the cheaper spoon is not a novelty, ad so
+      long as it can be procured at a nominal cost. The case of the spoons is
+      typical. The superior gratification derived from the use and contemplation
+      of costly and supposedly beautiful products is, commonly, in great measure
+      a gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name of
+      beauty. Our higher appreciation of the superior article is an appreciation
+      of its superior honorific character, much more frequently than it is an
+      unsophisticated appreciation of its beauty. The requirement of conspicuous
+      wastefulness is not commonly present, consciously, in our canons of taste,
+      but it is none the less present as a constraining norm selectively shaping
+      and sustaining our sense of what is beautiful, and guiding our
+      discrimination with respect to what may legitimately be approved as
+      beautiful and what may not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is at this point, where the beautiful and the honorific meet and blend,
+      that a discrimination between serviceability and wastefulness is most
+      difficult in any concrete case. It frequently happens that an article
+      which serves the honorific purpose of conspicuous waste is at the same
+      time a beautiful object; and the same application of labor to which it
+      owes its utility for the former purpose may, and often does, give beauty
+      of form and color to the article. The question is further complicated by
+      the fact that many objects, as, for instance, the precious stones and the
+      metals and some other materials used for adornment and decoration, owe
+      their utility as items of conspicuous waste to an antecedent utility as
+      objects of beauty. Gold, for instance, has a high degree of sensuous
+      beauty very many if not most of the highly prized works of art are
+      intrinsically beautiful, though often with material qualification; the
+      like is true of some stuffs used for clothing, of some landscapes, and of
+      many other things in less degree. Except for this intrinsic beauty which
+      they possess, these objects would scarcely have been coveted as they are,
+      or have become monopolized objects of pride to their possessors and users.
+      But the utility of these things to the possessor is commonly due less to
+      their intrinsic beauty than to the honor which their possession and
+      consumption confers, or to the obloquy which it wards off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Apart from their serviceability in other respects, these objects are
+      beautiful and have a utility as such; they are valuable on this account if
+      they can be appropriated or monopolized; they are, therefore, coveted as
+      valuable possessions, and their exclusive enjoyment gratifies the
+      possessor's sense of pecuniary superiority at the same time that their
+      contemplation gratifies his sense of beauty. But their beauty, in the
+      naive sense of the word, is the occasion rather than the ground of their
+      monopolization or of their commercial value. "Great as is the sensuous
+      beauty of gems, their rarity and price adds an expression of distinction
+      to them, which they would never have if they were cheap." There is,
+      indeed, in the common run of cases under this head, relatively little
+      incentive to the exclusive possession and use of these beautiful things,
+      except on the ground of their honorific character as items of conspicuous
+      waste. Most objects of this general class, with the partial exception of
+      articles of personal adornment, would serve all other purposes than the
+      honorific one equally well, whether owned by the person viewing them or
+      not; and even as regards personal ornaments it is to be added that their
+      chief purpose is to lend éclat to the person of their wearer (or owner) by
+      comparison with other persons who are compelled to do without. The
+      aesthetic serviceability of objects of beauty is not greatly nor
+      universally heightened by possession.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The generalization for which the discussion so far affords ground is that
+      any valuable object in order to appeal to our sense of beauty must conform
+      to the requirements of beauty and of expensiveness both. But this is not
+      all. Beyond this the canon of expensiveness also affects our tastes in
+      such a way as to inextricably blend the marks of expensiveness, in our
+      appreciation, with the beautiful features of the object, and to subsume
+      the resultant effect under the head of an appreciation of beauty simply.
+      The marks of expensiveness come to be accepted as beautiful features of
+      the expensive articles. They are pleasing as being marks of honorific
+      costliness, and the pleasure which they afford on this score blends with
+      that afforded by the beautiful form and color of the object; so that we
+      often declare that an article of apparel, for instance, is "perfectly
+      lovely," when pretty much all that an analysis of the aesthetic value of
+      the article would leave ground for is the declaration that it is
+      pecuniarily honorific.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This blending and confusion of the elements of expensiveness and of beauty
+      is, perhaps, best exemplified in articles of dress and of household
+      furniture. The code of reputability in matters of dress decides what
+      shapes, colors, materials, and general effects in human apparel are for
+      the time to be accepted as suitable; and departures from the code are
+      offensive to our taste, supposedly as being departures from aesthetic
+      truth. The approval with which we look upon fashionable attire is by no
+      means to be accounted pure make-believe. We readily, and for the most part
+      with utter sincerity, find those things pleasing that are in vogue. Shaggy
+      dress-stuffs and pronounced color effects, for instance, offend us at
+      times when the vogue is goods of a high, glossy finish and neutral colors.
+      A fancy bonnet of this year's model unquestionably appeals to our
+      sensibilities today much more forcibly than an equally fancy bonnet of the
+      model of last year; although when viewed in the perspective of a quarter
+      of a century, it would, I apprehend, be a matter of the utmost difficulty
+      to award the palm for intrinsic beauty to the one rather than to the other
+      of these structures. So, again, it may be remarked that, considered simply
+      in their physical juxtaposition with the human form, the high gloss of a
+      gentleman's hat or of a patent-leather shoe has no more of intrinsic
+      beauty than a similarly high gloss on a threadbare sleeve; and yet there
+      is no question but that all well-bred people (in the Occidental civilized
+      communities) instinctively and unaffectedly cleave to the one as a
+      phenomenon of great beauty, and eschew the other as offensive to every
+      sense to which it can appeal. It is extremely doubtful if any one could be
+      induced to wear such a contrivance as the high hat of civilized society,
+      except for some urgent reason based on other than aesthetic grounds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By further habituation to an appreciative perception of the marks of
+      expensiveness in goods, and by habitually identifying beauty with
+      reputability, it comes about that a beautiful article which is not
+      expensive is accounted not beautiful. In this way it has happened, for
+      instance, that some beautiful flowers pass conventionally for offensive
+      weeds; others that can be cultivated with relative ease are accepted and
+      admired by the lower middle class, who can afford no more expensive
+      luxuries of this kind; but these varieties are rejected as vulgar by those
+      people who are better able to pay for expensive flowers and who are
+      educated to a higher schedule of pecuniary beauty in the florist's
+      products; while still other flowers, of no greater intrinsic beauty than
+      these, are cultivated at great cost and call out much admiration from
+      flower-lovers whose tastes have been matured under the critical guidance
+      of a polite environment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The same variation in matters of taste, from one class of society to
+      another, is visible also as regards many other kinds of consumable goods,
+      as, for example, is the case with furniture, houses, parks, and gardens.
+      This diversity of views as to what is beautiful in these various classes
+      of goods is not a diversity of the norm according to which the
+      unsophisticated sense of the beautiful works. It is not a constitutional
+      difference of endowments in the aesthetic respect, but rather a difference
+      in the code of reputability which specifies what objects properly lie
+      within the scope of honorific consumption for the class to which the
+      critic belongs. It is a difference in the traditions of propriety with
+      respect to the kinds of things which may, without derogation to the
+      consumer, be consumed under the head of objects of taste and art. With a
+      certain allowance for variations to be accounted for on other grounds,
+      these traditions are determined, more or less rigidly, by the pecuniary
+      plane of life of the class.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everyday life affords many curious illustrations of the way in which the
+      code of pecuniary beauty in articles of use varies from class to class, as
+      well as of the way in which the conventional sense of beauty departs in
+      its deliverances from the sense untutored by the requirements of pecuniary
+      repute. Such a fact is the lawn, or the close-cropped yard or park, which
+      appeals so unaffectedly to the taste of the Western peoples. It appears
+      especially to appeal to the tastes of the well-to-do classes in those
+      communities in which the dolicho-blond element predominates in an
+      appreciable degree. The lawn unquestionably has an element of sensuous
+      beauty, simply as an object of apperception, and as such no doubt it
+      appeals pretty directly to the eye of nearly all races and all classes;
+      but it is, perhaps, more unquestionably beautiful to the eye of the
+      dolicho-blond than to most other varieties of men. This higher
+      appreciation of a stretch of greensward in this ethnic element than in the
+      other elements of the population, goes along with certain other features
+      of the dolicho-blond temperament that indicate that this racial element
+      had once been for a long time a pastoral people inhabiting a region with a
+      humid climate. The close-cropped lawn is beautiful in the eyes of a people
+      whose inherited bent it is to readily find pleasure in contemplating a
+      well-preserved pasture or grazing land.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the aesthetic purpose the lawn is a cow pasture; and in some cases
+      today&mdash;where the expensiveness of the attendant circumstances bars
+      out any imputation of thrift&mdash;the idyl of the dolicho-blond is
+      rehabilitated in the introduction of a cow into a lawn or private ground.
+      In such cases the cow made use of is commonly of an expensive breed. The
+      vulgar suggestion of thrift, which is nearly inseparable from the cow, is
+      a standing objection to the decorative use of this animal. So that in all
+      cases, except where luxurious surroundings negate this suggestion, the use
+      of the cow as an object of taste must be avoided. Where the predilection
+      for some grazing animal to fill out the suggestion of the pasture is too
+      strong to be suppressed, the cow's place is often given to some more or
+      less inadequate substitute, such as deer, antelopes, or some such exotic
+      beast. These substitutes, although less beautiful to the pastoral eye of
+      Western man than the cow, are in such cases preferred because of their
+      superior expensiveness or futility, and their consequent repute. They are
+      not vulgarly lucrative either in fact or in suggestion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Public parks of course fall in the same category with the lawn; they too,
+      at their best, are imitations of the pasture. Such a park is of course
+      best kept by grazing, and the cattle on the grass are themselves no mean
+      addition to the beauty of the thing, as need scarcely be insisted on with
+      anyone who has once seen a well-kept pasture. But it is worth noting, as
+      an expression of the pecuniary element in popular taste, that such a
+      method of keeping public grounds is seldom resorted to. The best that is
+      done by skilled workmen under the supervision of a trained keeper is a
+      more or less close imitation of a pasture, but the result invariably falls
+      somewhat short of the artistic effect of grazing. But to the average
+      popular apprehension a herd of cattle so pointedly suggests thrift and
+      usefulness that their presence in the public pleasure ground would be
+      intolerably cheap. This method of keeping grounds is comparatively
+      inexpensive, therefore it is indecorous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of the same general bearing is another feature of public grounds. There is
+      a studious exhibition of expensiveness coupled with a make-believe of
+      simplicity and crude serviceability. Private grounds also show the same
+      physiognomy wherever they are in the management or ownership of persons
+      whose tastes have been formed under middle-class habits of life or under
+      the upper-class traditions of no later a date than the childhood of the
+      generation that is now passing. Grounds which conform to the instructed
+      tastes of the latter-day upper class do not show these features in so
+      marked a degree. The reason for this difference in tastes between the past
+      and the incoming generation of the well-bred lies in the changing economic
+      situation. A similar difference is perceptible in other respects, as well
+      as in the accepted ideals of pleasure grounds. In this country as in most
+      others, until the last half century but a very small proportion of the
+      population were possessed of such wealth as would exempt them from thrift.
+      Owing to imperfect means of communication, this small fraction were
+      scattered and out of effective touch with one another. There was therefore
+      no basis for a growth of taste in disregard of expensiveness. The revolt
+      of the well-bred taste against vulgar thrift was unchecked. Wherever the
+      unsophisticated sense of beauty might show itself sporadically in an
+      approval of inexpensive or thrifty surroundings, it would lack the "social
+      confirmation" which nothing but a considerable body of like-minded people
+      can give. There was, therefore, no effective upper-class opinion that
+      would overlook evidences of possible inexpensiveness in the management of
+      grounds; and there was consequently no appreciable divergence between the
+      leisure-class and the lower middle-class ideal in the physiognomy of
+      pleasure grounds. Both classes equally constructed their ideals with the
+      fear of pecuniary disrepute before their eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Today a divergence in ideals is beginning to be apparent. The portion of
+      the leisure class that has been consistently exempt from work and from
+      pecuniary cares for a generation or more is now large enough to form and
+      sustain opinion in matters of taste. Increased mobility of the members has
+      also added to the facility with which a "social confirmation" can be
+      attained within the class. Within this select class the exemption from
+      thrift is a matter so commonplace as to have lost much of its utility as a
+      basis of pecuniary decency. Therefore the latter-day upper-class canons of
+      taste do not so consistently insist on an unremitting demonstration of
+      expensiveness and a strict exclusion of the appearance of thrift. So, a
+      predilection for the rustic and the "natural" in parks and grounds makes
+      its appearance on these higher social and intellectual levels. This
+      predilection is in large part an outcropping of the instinct of
+      workmanship; and it works out its results with varying degrees of
+      consistency. It is seldom altogether unaffected, and at times it shades
+      off into something not widely different from that make-believe of
+      rusticity which has been referred to above.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A weakness for crudely serviceable contrivances that pointedly suggest
+      immediate and wasteless use is present even in the middle-class tastes;
+      but it is there kept well in hand under the unbroken dominance of the
+      canon of reputable futility. Consequently it works out in a variety of
+      ways and means for shamming serviceability&mdash;in such contrivances as
+      rustic fences, bridges, bowers, pavilions, and the like decorative
+      features. An expression of this affectation of serviceability, at what is
+      perhaps its widest divergence from the first promptings of the sense of
+      economic beauty, is afforded by the cast-iron rustic fence and trellis or
+      by a circuitous drive laid across level ground.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The select leisure class has outgrown the use of these pseudo-serviceable
+      variants of pecuniary beauty, at least at some points. But the taste of
+      the more recent accessions to the leisure class proper and of the middle
+      and lower classes still requires a pecuniary beauty to supplement the
+      aesthetic beauty, even in those objects which are primarily admired for
+      the beauty that belongs to them as natural growths.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The popular taste in these matters is to be seen in the prevalent high
+      appreciation of topiary work and of the conventional flower-beds of public
+      grounds. Perhaps as happy an illustration as may be had of this dominance
+      of pecuniary beauty over aesthetic beauty in middle-class tastes is seen
+      in the reconstruction of the grounds lately occupied by the Columbian
+      Exposition. The evidence goes to show that the requirement of reputable
+      expensiveness is still present in good vigor even where all ostensibly
+      lavish display is avoided. The artistic effects actually wrought in this
+      work of reconstruction diverge somewhat widely from the effect to which
+      the same ground would have lent itself in hands not guided by pecuniary
+      canons of taste. And even the better class of the city's population view
+      the progress of the work with an unreserved approval which suggests that
+      there is in this case little if any discrepancy between the tastes of the
+      upper and the lower or middle classes of the city. The sense of beauty in
+      the population of this representative city of the advanced pecuniary
+      culture is very chary of any departure from its great cultural principle
+      of conspicuous waste.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The love of nature, perhaps itself borrowed from a higher-class code of
+      taste, sometimes expresses itself in unexpected ways under the guidance of
+      this canon of pecuniary beauty, and leads to results that may seem
+      incongruous to an unreflecting beholder. The well-accepted practice of
+      planting trees in the treeless areas of this country, for instance, has
+      been carried over as an item of honorific expenditure into the heavily
+      wooded areas; so that it is by no means unusual for a village or a farmer
+      in the wooded country to clear the land of its native trees and
+      immediately replant saplings of certain introduced varieties about the
+      farmyard or along the streets. In this way a forest growth of oak, elm,
+      beech, butternut, hemlock, basswood, and birch is cleared off to give room
+      for saplings of soft maple, cottonwood, and brittle willow. It is felt
+      that the inexpensiveness of leaving the forest trees standing would
+      derogate from the dignity that should invest an article which is intended
+      to serve a decorative and honorific end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The like pervading guidance of taste by pecuniary repute is traceable in
+      the prevalent standards of beauty in animals. The part played by this
+      canon of taste in assigning her place in the popular aesthetic scale to
+      the cow has already been spokes of. Something to the same effect is true
+      of the other domestic animals, so far as they are in an appreciable degree
+      industrially useful to the community&mdash;as, for instance, barnyard
+      fowl, hogs, cattle, sheep, goats, draught-horses. They are of the nature
+      of productive goods, and serve a useful, often a lucrative end; therefore
+      beauty is not readily imputed to them. The case is different with those
+      domestic animals which ordinarily serve no industrial end; such as
+      pigeons, parrots and other cage-birds, cats, dogs, and fast horses. These
+      commonly are items of conspicuous consumption, and are therefore honorific
+      in their nature and may legitimately be accounted beautiful. This class of
+      animals are conventionally admired by the body of the upper classes, while
+      the pecuniarily lower classes&mdash;and that select minority of the
+      leisure class among whom the rigorous canon that abjures thrift is in a
+      measure obsolescent&mdash;find beauty in one class of animals as in
+      another, without drawing a hard and fast line of pecuniary demarcation
+      between the beautiful and the ugly. In the case of those domestic animals
+      which are honorific and are reputed beautiful, there is a subsidiary basis
+      of merit that should be spokes of. Apart from the birds which belong in
+      the honorific class of domestic animals, and which owe their place in this
+      class to their non-lucrative character alone, the animals which merit
+      particular attention are cats, dogs, and fast horses. The cat is less
+      reputable than the other two just named, because she is less wasteful; she
+      may even serve a useful end. At the same time the cat's temperament does
+      not fit her for the honorific purpose. She lives with man on terms of
+      equality, knows nothing of that relation of status which is the ancient
+      basis of all distinctions of worth, honor, and repute, and she does not
+      lend herself with facility to an invidious comparison between her owner
+      and his neighbors. The exception to this last rule occurs in the case of
+      such scarce and fanciful products as the Angora cat, which have some
+      slight honorific value on the ground of expensiveness, and have,
+      therefore, some special claim to beauty on pecuniary grounds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The dog has advantages in the way of uselessness as well as in special
+      gifts of temperament. He is often spoken of, in an eminent sense, as the
+      friend of man, and his intelligence and fidelity are praised. The meaning
+      of this is that the dog is man's servant and that he has the gift of an
+      unquestioning subservience and a slave's quickness in guessing his
+      master's mood. Coupled with these traits, which fit him well for the
+      relation of status&mdash;and which must for the present purpose be set
+      down as serviceable traits&mdash;the dog has some characteristics which
+      are of a more equivocal aesthetic value. He is the filthiest of the
+      domestic animals in his person and the nastiest in his habits. For this he
+      makes up is a servile, fawning attitude towards his master, and a
+      readiness to inflict damage and discomfort on all else. The dog, then,
+      commends himself to our favor by affording play to our propensity for
+      mastery, and as he is also an item of expense, and commonly serves no
+      industrial purpose, he holds a well-assured place in men's regard as a
+      thing of good repute. The dog is at the same time associated in our
+      imagination with the chase&mdash;a meritorious employment and an
+      expression of the honorable predatory impulse. Standing on this vantage
+      ground, whatever beauty of form and motion and whatever commendable mental
+      traits he may possess are conventionally acknowledged and magnified. And
+      even those varieties of the dog which have been bred into grotesque
+      deformity by the dog-fancier are in good faith accounted beautiful by
+      many. These varieties of dogs&mdash;and the like is true of other
+      fancy-bred animals&mdash;are rated and graded in aesthetic value somewhat
+      in proportion to the degree of grotesqueness and instability of the
+      particular fashion which the deformity takes in the given case. For the
+      purpose in hand, this differential utility on the ground of grotesqueness
+      and instability of structure is reducible to terms of a greater scarcity
+      and consequent expense. The commercial value of canine monstrosities, such
+      as the prevailing styles of pet dogs both for men's and women's use, rests
+      on their high cost of production, and their value to their owners lies
+      chiefly in their utility as items of conspicuous consumption. Indirectly,
+      through reflection upon their honorific expensiveness, a social worth is
+      imputed to them; and so, by an easy substitution of words and ideas, they
+      come to be admired and reputed beautiful. Since any attention bestowed
+      upon these animals is in no sense gainful or useful, it is also reputable;
+      and since the habit of giving them attention is consequently not
+      deprecated, it may grow into an habitual attachment of great tenacity and
+      of a most benevolent character. So that in the affection bestowed on pet
+      animals the canon of expensiveness is present more or less remotely as a
+      norm which guides and shapes the sentiment and the selection of its
+      object. The like is true, as will be noticed presently, with respect to
+      affection for persons also; although the manner in which the norm acts in
+      that case is somewhat different.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The case of the fast horse is much like that of the dog. He is on the
+      whole expensive, or wasteful and useless&mdash;for the industrial purpose.
+      What productive use he may possess, in the way of enhancing the well-being
+      of the community or making the way of life easier for men, takes the form
+      of exhibitions of force and facility of motion that gratify the popular
+      aesthetic sense. This is of course a substantial serviceability. The horse
+      is not endowed with the spiritual aptitude for servile dependence in the
+      same measure as the dog; but he ministers effectually to his master's
+      impulse to convert the "animate" forces of the environment to his own use
+      and discretion and so express his own dominating individuality through
+      them. The fast horse is at least potentially a race-horse, of high or low
+      degree; and it is as such that he is peculiarly serviceable to his owner.
+      The utility of the fast horse lies largely in his efficiency as a means of
+      emulation; it gratifies the owner's sense of aggression and dominance to
+      have his own horse outstrip his neighbor's. This use being not lucrative,
+      but on the whole pretty consistently wasteful, and quite conspicuously so,
+      it is honorific, and therefore gives the fast horse a strong presumptive
+      position of reputability. Beyond this, the race-horse proper has also a
+      similarly non-industrial but honorific use as a gambling instrument.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fast horse, then, is aesthetically fortunate, in that the canon of
+      pecuniary good repute legitimates a free appreciation of whatever beauty
+      or serviceability he may possess. His pretensions have the countenance of
+      the principle of conspicuous waste and the backing of the predatory
+      aptitude for dominance and emulation. The horse is, moreover, a beautiful
+      animal, although the race-horse is so in no peculiar degree to the
+      uninstructed taste of those persons who belong neither in the class of
+      race-horse fanciers nor in the class whose sense of beauty is held in
+      abeyance by the moral constraint of the horse fancier's award. To this
+      untutored taste the most beautiful horse seems to be a form which has
+      suffered less radical alteration than the race-horse under the breeder's
+      selective development of the animal. Still, when a writer or speaker&mdash;especially
+      of those whose eloquence is most consistently commonplace wants an
+      illustration of animal grace and serviceability, for rhetorical use, he
+      habitually turns to the horse; and he commonly makes it plain before he is
+      done that what he has in mind is the race-horse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It should be noted that in the graduated appreciation of varieties of
+      horses and of dogs, such as one meets with among people of even moderately
+      cultivated tastes in these matters, there is also discernible another and
+      more direct line of influence of the leisure-class canons of reputability.
+      In this country, for instance, leisure-class tastes are to some extent
+      shaped on usages and habits which prevail, or which are apprehended to
+      prevail, among the leisure class of Great Britain. In dogs this is true to
+      a less extent than in horses. In horses, more particularly in saddle
+      horses&mdash;which at their best serve the purpose of wasteful display
+      simply&mdash;it will hold true in a general way that a horse is more
+      beautiful in proportion as he is more English; the English leisure class
+      being, for purposes of reputable usage, the upper leisure class of this
+      country, and so the exemplar for the lower grades. This mimicry in the
+      methods of the apperception of beauty and in the forming of judgments of
+      taste need not result in a spurious, or at any rate not a hypocritical or
+      affected, predilection. The predilection is as serious and as substantial
+      an award of taste when it rests on this basis as when it rests on any
+      other, the difference is that this taste is and as substantial an award of
+      taste when it rests on this basis as when it rests on any other; the
+      difference is that this taste is a taste for the reputably correct, not
+      for the aesthetically true.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The mimicry, it should be said, extends further than to the sense of
+      beauty in horseflesh simply. It includes trappings and horsemanship as
+      well, so that the correct or reputably beautiful seat or posture is also
+      decided by English usage, as well as the equestrian gait. To show how
+      fortuitous may sometimes be the circumstances which decide what shall be
+      becoming and what not under the pecuniary canon of beauty, it may be noted
+      that this English seat, and the peculiarly distressing gait which has made
+      an awkward seat necessary, are a survival from the time when the English
+      roads were so bad with mire and mud as to be virtually impassable for a
+      horse travelling at a more comfortable gait; so that a person of decorous
+      tastes in horsemanship today rides a punch with docked tail, in an
+      uncomfortable posture and at a distressing gait, because the English roads
+      during a great part of the last century were impassable for a horse
+      travelling at a more horse-like gait, or for an animal built for moving
+      with ease over the firm and open country to which the horse is indigenous.
+      It is not only with respect to consumable goods&mdash;including domestic
+      animals&mdash;that the canons of taste have been colored by the canons of
+      pecuniary reputability. Something to the like effect is to be said for
+      beauty in persons. In order to avoid whatever may be matter of
+      controversy, no weight will be given in this connection to such popular
+      predilection as there may be for the dignified (leisurely) bearing and
+      poly presence that are by vulgar tradition associated with opulence in
+      mature men. These traits are in some measure accepted as elements of
+      personal beauty. But there are certain elements of feminine beauty, on the
+      other hand, which come in under this head, and which are of so concrete
+      and specific a character as to admit of itemized appreciation. It is more
+      or less a rule that in communities which are at the stage of economic
+      development at which women are valued by the upper class for their
+      service, the ideal of female beauty is a robust, large-limbed woman. The
+      ground of appreciation is the physique, while the conformation of the face
+      is of secondary weight only. A well-known instance of this ideal of the
+      early predatory culture is that of the maidens of the Homeric poems.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This ideal suffers a change in the succeeding development, when, in the
+      conventional scheme, the office of the high-class wife comes to be a
+      vicarious leisure simply. The ideal then includes the characteristics
+      which are supposed to result from or to go with a life of leisure
+      consistently enforced. The ideal accepted under these circumstances may be
+      gathered from descriptions of beautiful women by poets and writers of the
+      chivalric times. In the conventional scheme of those days ladies of high
+      degree were conceived to be in perpetual tutelage, and to be scrupulously
+      exempt from all useful work. The resulting chivalric or romantic ideal of
+      beauty takes cognizance chiefly of the face, and dwells on its delicacy,
+      and on the delicacy of the hands and feet, the slender figure, and
+      especially the slender waist. In the pictured representations of the women
+      of that time, and in modern romantic imitators of the chivalric thought
+      and feeling, the waist is attenuated to a degree that implies extreme
+      debility. The same ideal is still extant among a considerable portion of
+      the population of modern industrial communities; but it is to be said that
+      it has retained its hold most tenaciously in those modern communities
+      which are least advanced in point of economic and civil development, and
+      which show the most considerable survivals of status and of predatory
+      institutions. That is to say, the chivalric ideal is best preserved in
+      those existing communities which are substantially least modern. Survivals
+      of this lackadaisical or romantic ideal occur freely in the tastes of the
+      well-to-do classes of Continental countries. In modern communities which
+      have reached the higher levels of industrial development, the upper
+      leisure class has accumulated so great a mass of wealth as to place its
+      women above all imputation of vulgarly productive labor. Here the status
+      of women as vicarious consumers is beginning to lose its place in the
+      sections of the body of the people; and as a consequence the ideal of
+      feminine beauty is beginning to change back again from the infirmly
+      delicate, translucent, and hazardously slender, to a woman of the archaic
+      type that does not disown her hands and feet, nor, indeed, the other gross
+      material facts of her person. In the course of economic development the
+      ideal of beauty among the peoples of the Western culture has shifted from
+      the woman of physical presence to the lady, and it is beginning to shift
+      back again to the woman; and all in obedience to the changing conditions
+      of pecuniary emulation. The exigencies of emulation at one time required
+      lusty slaves; at another time they required a conspicuous performance of
+      vicarious leisure and consequently an obvious disability; but the
+      situation is now beginning to outgrow this last requirement, since, under
+      the higher efficiency of modern industry, leisure in women is possible so
+      far down the scale of reputability that it will no longer serve as a
+      definitive mark of the highest pecuniary grade.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Apart from this general control exercised by the norm of conspicuous waste
+      over the ideal of feminine beauty, there are one or two details which
+      merit specific mention as showing how it may exercise an extreme
+      constraint in detail over men's sense of beauty in women. It has already
+      been noticed that at the stages of economic evolution at which conspicuous
+      leisure is much regarded as a means of good repute, the ideal requires
+      delicate and diminutive hands and feet and a slender waist. These
+      features, together with the other, related faults of structure that
+      commonly go with them, go to show that the person so affected is incapable
+      of useful effort and must therefore be supported in idleness by her owner.
+      She is useless and expensive, and she is consequently valuable as evidence
+      of pecuniary strength. It results that at this cultural stage women take
+      thought to alter their persons, so as to conform more nearly to the
+      requirements of the instructed taste of the time; and under the guidance
+      of the canon of pecuniary decency, the men find the resulting artificially
+      induced pathological features attractive. So, for instance, the
+      constricted waist which has had so wide and persistent a vogue in the
+      communities of the Western culture, and so also the deformed foot of the
+      Chinese. Both of these are mutilations of unquestioned repulsiveness to
+      the untrained sense. It requires habituation to become reconciled to them.
+      Yet there is no room to question their attractiveness to men into whose
+      scheme of life they fit as honorific items sanctioned by the requirements
+      of pecuniary reputability. They are items of pecuniary and cultural beauty
+      which have come to do duty as elements of the ideal of womanliness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The connection here indicated between the aesthetic value and the
+      invidious pecuniary value of things is of course not present in the
+      consciousness of the valuer. So far as a person, in forming a judgment of
+      taste, takes thought and reflects that the object of beauty under
+      consideration is wasteful and reputable, and therefore may legitimately be
+      accounted beautiful; so far the judgment is not a bona fide judgment of
+      taste and does not come up for consideration in this connection. The
+      connection which is here insisted on between the reputability and the
+      apprehended beauty of objects lies through the effect which the fact of
+      reputability has upon the valuer's habits of thought. He is in the habit
+      of forming judgments of value of various kinds-economic, moral, aesthetic,
+      or reputable concerning the objects with which he has to do, and his
+      attitude of commendation towards a given object on any other ground will
+      affect the degree of his appreciation of the object when he comes to value
+      it for the aesthetic purpose. This is more particularly true as regards
+      valuation on grounds so closely related to the aesthetic ground as that of
+      reputability. The valuation for the aesthetic purpose and for the purpose
+      of repute are not held apart as distinctly as might be. Confusion is
+      especially apt to arise between these two kinds of valuation, because the
+      value of objects for repute is not habitually distinguished in speech by
+      the use of a special descriptive term. The result is that the terms in
+      familiar use to designate categories or elements of beauty are applied to
+      cover this unnamed element of pecuniary merit, and the corresponding
+      confusion of ideas follows by easy consequence. The demands of
+      reputability in this way coalesce in the popular apprehension with the
+      demands of the sense of beauty, and beauty which is not accompanied by the
+      accredited marks of good repute is not accepted. But the requirements of
+      pecuniary reputability and those of beauty in the naive sense do not in
+      any appreciable degree coincide. The elimination from our surroundings of
+      the pecuniarily unfit, therefore, results in a more or less thorough
+      elimination of that considerable range of elements of beauty which do not
+      happen to conform to the pecuniary requirement. The underlying norms of
+      taste are of very ancient growth, probably far antedating the advent of
+      the pecuniary institutions that are here under discussion. Consequently,
+      by force of the past selective adaptation of men's habits of thought, it
+      happens that the requirements of beauty, simply, are for the most part
+      best satisfied by inexpensive contrivances and structures which in a
+      straightforward manner suggest both the office which they are to perform
+      and the method of serving their end. It may be in place to recall the
+      modern psychological position. Beauty of form seems to be a question of
+      facility of apperception. The proposition could perhaps safely be made
+      broader than this. If abstraction is made from association, suggestion,
+      and "expression," classed as elements of beauty, then beauty in any
+      perceived object means that the mind readily unfolds its apperceptive
+      activity in the directions which the object in question affords. But the
+      directions in which activity readily unfolds or expresses itself are the
+      directions to which long and close habituation has made the mind prone. So
+      far as concerns the essential elements of beauty, this habituation is an
+      habituation so close and long as to have induced not only a proclivity to
+      the apperceptive form in question, but an adaptation of physiological
+      structure and function as well. So far as the economic interest enters
+      into the constitution of beauty, it enters as a suggestion or expression
+      of adequacy to a purpose, a manifest and readily inferable subservience to
+      the life process. This expression of economic facility or economic
+      serviceability in any object&mdash;what may be called the economic beauty
+      of the object-is best served by neat and unambiguous suggestion of its
+      office and its efficiency for the material ends of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On this ground, among objects of use the simple and unadorned article is
+      aesthetically the best. But since the pecuniary canon of reputability
+      rejects the inexpensive in articles appropriated to individual
+      consumption, the satisfaction of our craving for beautiful things must be
+      sought by way of compromise. The canons of beauty must be circumvented by
+      some contrivance which will give evidence of a reputably wasteful
+      expenditure, at the same time that it meets the demands of our critical
+      sense of the useful and the beautiful, or at least meets the demand of
+      some habit which has come to do duty in place of that sense. Such an
+      auxiliary sense of taste is the sense of novelty; and this latter is
+      helped out in its surrogateship by the curiosity with which men view
+      ingenious and puzzling contrivances. Hence it comes that most objects
+      alleged to be beautiful, and doing duty as such, show considerable
+      ingenuity of design and are calculated to puzzle the beholder&mdash;to
+      bewilder him with irrelevant suggestions and hints of the improbable&mdash;at
+      the same time that they give evidence of an expenditure of labor in excess
+      of what would give them their fullest efficency for their ostensible
+      economic end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This may be shown by an illustration taken from outside the range of our
+      everyday habits and everyday contact, and so outside the range of our
+      bias. Such are the remarkable feather mantles of Hawaii, or the well-known
+      cawed handles of the ceremonial adzes of several Polynesian islands. These
+      are undeniably beautiful, both in the sense that they offer a pleasing
+      composition of form, lines, and color, and in the sense that they evince
+      great skill and ingenuity in design and construction. At the same time the
+      articles are manifestly ill fitted to serve any other economic purpose.
+      But it is not always that the evolution of ingenious and puzzling
+      contrivances under the guidance of the canon of wasted effort works out so
+      happy a result. The result is quite as often a virtually complete
+      suppression of all elements that would bear scrutiny as expressions of
+      beauty, or of serviceability, and the substitution of evidences of
+      misspent ingenuity and labor, backed by a conspicuous ineptitude; until
+      many of the objects with which we surround ourselves in everyday life, and
+      even many articles of everyday dress and ornament, are such as would not
+      be tolerated except under the stress of prescriptive tradition.
+      Illustrations of this substitution of ingenuity and expense in place of
+      beauty and serviceability are to be seen, for instance, in domestic
+      architecture, in domestic art or fancy work, in various articles of
+      apparel, especially of feminine and priestly apparel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The canon of beauty requires expression of the generic. The "novelty" due
+      to the demands of conspicuous waste traverses this canon of beauty, in
+      that it results in making the physiognomy of our objects of taste a
+      congeries of idiosyncrasies; and the idiosyncrasies are, moreover, under
+      the selective surveillance of the canon of expensiveness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This process of selective adaptation of designs to the end of conspicuous
+      waste, and the substitution of pecuniary beauty for aesthetic beauty, has
+      been especially effective in the development of architecture. It would be
+      extremely difficult to find a modern civilized residence or public
+      building which can claim anything better than relative inoffensiveness in
+      the eyes of anyone who will dissociate the elements of beauty from those
+      of honorific waste. The endless variety of fronts presented by the better
+      class of tenements and apartment houses in our cities is an endless
+      variety of architectural distress and of suggestions of expensive
+      discomfort. Considered as objects of beauty, the dead walls of the sides
+      and back of these structures, left untouched by the hands of the artist,
+      are commonly the best feature of the building.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What has been said of the influence of the law of conspicuous waste upon
+      the canons of taste will hold true, with but a slight change of terms, of
+      its influence upon our notions of the serviceability of goods for other
+      ends than the aesthetic one. Goods are produced and consumed as a means to
+      the fuller unfolding of human life; and their utility consists, in the
+      first instance, in their efficiency as means to this end. The end is, in
+      the first instance, the fullness of life of the individual, taken in
+      absolute terms. But the human proclivity to emulation has seized upon the
+      consumption of goods as a means to an invidious comparison, and has
+      thereby invested consumable goods with a secondary utility as evidence of
+      relative ability to pay. This indirect or secondary use of consumable
+      goods lends an honorific character to consumption and presently also to
+      the goods which best serve the emulative end of consumption. The
+      consumption of expensive goods is meritorious, and the goods which contain
+      an appreciable element of cost in excess of what goes to give them
+      serviceability for their ostensible mechanical purpose are honorific. The
+      marks of superfluous costliness in the goods are therefore marks of worth&mdash;of
+      high efficency for the indirect, invidious end to be served by their
+      consumption; and conversely, goods are humilific, and therefore
+      unattractive, if they show too thrifty an adaptation to the mechanical end
+      sought and do not include a margin of expensiveness on which to rest a
+      complacent invidious comparison. This indirect utility gives much of their
+      value to the "better" grades of goods. In order to appeal to the
+      cultivated sense of utility, an article must contain a modicum of this
+      indirect utility.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While men may have set out with disapproving an inexpensive manner of
+      living because it indicated inability to spend much, and so indicated a
+      lack of pecuniary success, they end by falling into the habit of
+      disapproving cheap things as being intrinsically dishonorable or unworthy
+      because they are cheap. As time has gone on, each succeeding generation
+      has received this tradition of meritorious expenditure from the generation
+      before it, and has in its turn further elaborated and fortified the
+      traditional canon of pecuniary reputability in goods consumed; until we
+      have finally reached such a degree of conviction as to the unworthiness of
+      all inexpensive things, that we have no longer any misgivings in
+      formulating the maxim, "Cheap and nasty." So thoroughly has the habit of
+      approving the expensive and disapproving the inexpensive been ingrained
+      into our thinking that we instinctively insist upon at least some measure
+      of wasteful expensiveness in all our consumption, even in the case of
+      goods which are consumed in strict privacy and without the slightest
+      thought of display. We all feel, sincerely and without misgiving, that we
+      are the more lifted up in spirit for having, even in the privacy of our
+      own household, eaten our daily meal by the help of hand-wrought silver
+      utensils, from hand-painted china (often of dubious artistic value) laid
+      on high-priced table linen. Any retrogression from the standard of living
+      which we are accustomed to regard as worthy in this respect is felt to be
+      a grievous violation of our human dignity. So, also, for the last dozen
+      years candles have been a more pleasing source of light at dinner than any
+      other. Candlelight is now softer, less distressing to well-bred eyes, than
+      oil, gas, or electric light. The same could not have been said thirty
+      years ago, when candles were, or recently had been, the cheapest available
+      light for domestic use. Nor are candles even now found to give an
+      acceptable or effective light for any other than a ceremonial
+      illumination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A political sage still living has summed up the conclusion of this whole
+      matter in the dictum: "A cheap coat makes a cheap man," and there is
+      probably no one who does not feel the convincing force of the maxim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The habit of looking for the marks of superfluous expensiveness in goods,
+      and of requiring that all goods should afford some utility of the indirect
+      or invidious sort, leads to a change in the standards by which the utility
+      of goods is gauged. The honorific element and the element of brute
+      efficiency are not held apart in the consumer's appreciation of
+      commodities, and the two together go to make up the unanalyzed aggregate
+      serviceability of the goods. Under the resulting standard of
+      serviceability, no article will pass muster on the strength of material
+      sufficiency alone. In order to completeness and full acceptability to the
+      consumer it must also show the honorific element. It results that the
+      producers of articles of consumption direct their efforts to the
+      production of goods that shall meet this demand for the honorific element.
+      They will do this with all the more alacrity and effect, since they are
+      themselves under the dominance of the same standard of worth in goods, and
+      would be sincerely grieved at the sight of goods which lack the proper
+      honorific finish. Hence it has come about that there are today no goods
+      supplied in any trade which do not contain the honorific element in
+      greater or less degree. Any consumer who might, Diogenes-like, insist on
+      the elimination of all honorific or wasteful elements from his
+      consumption, would be unable to supply his most trivial wants in the
+      modern market. Indeed, even if he resorted to supplying his wants directly
+      by his own efforts, he would find it difficult if not impossible to divest
+      himself of the current habits of thought on this head; so that he could
+      scarcely compass a supply of the necessaries of life for a day's
+      consumption without instinctively and by oversight incorporating in his
+      home-made product something of this honorific, quasi-decorative element of
+      wasted labor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is notorious that in their selection of serviceable goods in the retail
+      market purchasers are guided more by the finish and workmanship of the
+      goods than by any marks of substantial serviceability. Goods, in order to
+      sell, must have some appreciable amount of labor spent in giving them the
+      marks of decent expensiveness, in addition to what goes to give them
+      efficiency for the material use which they are to serve. This habit of
+      making obvious costliness a canon of serviceability of course acts to
+      enhance the aggregate cost of articles of consumption. It puts us on our
+      guard against cheapness by identifying merit in some degree with cost.
+      There is ordinarily a consistent effort on the part of the consumer to
+      obtain goods of the required serviceability at as advantageous a bargain
+      as may be; but the conventional requirement of obvious costliness, as a
+      voucher and a constituent of the serviceability of the goods, leads him to
+      reject as under grade such goods as do not contain a large element of
+      conspicuous waste.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is to be added that a large share of those features of consumable goods
+      which figure in popular apprehension as marks of serviceability, and to
+      which reference is here had as elements of conspicuous waste, commend
+      themselves to the consumer also on other grounds than that of
+      expensiveness alone. They usually give evidence of skill and effective
+      workmanship, even if they do not contribute to the substantial
+      serviceability of the goods; and it is no doubt largely on some such
+      ground that any particular mark of honorific serviceability first comes
+      into vogue and afterward maintains its footing as a normal constituent
+      element of the worth of an article. A display of efficient workmanship is
+      pleasing simply as such, even where its remoter, for the time
+      unconsidered, outcome is futile. There is a gratification of the artistic
+      sense in the contemplation of skillful work. But it is also to be added
+      that no such evidence of skillful workmanship, or of ingenious and
+      effective adaptation of means to an end, will, in the long run, enjoy the
+      approbation of the modern civilized consumer unless it has the sanction of
+      the Canon of conspicuous waste.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The position here taken is enforced in a felicitous manner by the place
+      assigned in the economy of consumption to machine products. The point of
+      material difference between machine-made goods and the hand-wrought goods
+      which serve the same purposes is, ordinarily, that the former serve their
+      primary purpose more adequately. They are a more perfect product&mdash;show
+      a more perfect adaptation of means to end. This does not save them from
+      disesteem and deprecation, for they fall short under the test of honorific
+      waste. Hand labor is a more wasteful method of production; hence the goods
+      turned out by this method are more serviceable for the purpose of
+      pecuniary reputability; hence the marks of hand labor come to be
+      honorific, and the goods which exhibit these marks take rank as of higher
+      grade than the corresponding machine product. Commonly, if not invariably,
+      the honorific marks of hand labor are certain imperfections and
+      irregularities in the lines of the hand-wrought article, showing where the
+      workman has fallen short in the execution of the design. The ground of the
+      superiority of hand-wrought goods, therefore, is a certain margin of
+      crudeness. This margin must never be so wide as to show bungling
+      workmanship, since that would be evidence of low cost, nor so narrow as to
+      suggest the ideal precision attained only by the machine, for that would
+      be evidence of low cost.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The appreciation of those evidences of honorific crudeness to which
+      hand-wrought goods owe their superior worth and charm in the eyes of
+      well-bred people is a matter of nice discrimination. It requires training
+      and the formation of right habits of thought with respect to what may be
+      called the physiognomy of goods. Machine-made goods of daily use are often
+      admired and preferred precisely on account of their excessive perfection
+      by the vulgar and the underbred who have not given due thought to the
+      punctilios of elegant consumption. The ceremonial inferiority of machine
+      products goes to show that the perfection of skill and workmanship
+      embodied in any costly innovations in the finish of goods is not
+      sufficient of itself to secure them acceptance and permanent favor. The
+      innovation must have the support of the canon of conspicuous waste. Any
+      feature in the physiognomy of goods, however pleasing in itself, and
+      however well it may approve itself to the taste for effective work, will
+      not be tolerated if it proves obnoxious to this norm of pecuniary
+      reputability.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ceremonial inferiority or uncleanness in consumable goods due to
+      "commonness," or in other words to their slight cost of production, has
+      been taken very seriously by many persons. The objection to machine
+      products is often formulated as an objection to the commonness of such
+      goods. What is common is within the (pecuniary) reach of many people. Its
+      consumption is therefore not honorific, since it does not serve the
+      purpose of a favorable invidious comparison with other consumers. Hence
+      the consumption, or even the sight of such goods, is inseparable from an
+      odious suggestion of the lower levels of human life, and one comes away
+      from their contemplation with a pervading sense of meanness that is
+      extremely distasteful and depressing to a person of sensibility. In
+      persons whose tastes assert themselves imperiously, and who have not the
+      gift, habit, or incentive to discriminate between the grounds of their
+      various judgments of taste, the deliverances of the sense of the honorific
+      coalesce with those of the sense of beauty and of the sense of
+      serviceability&mdash;in the manner already spoken of; the resulting
+      composite valuation serves as a judgment of the object's beauty or its
+      serviceability, according as the valuer's bias or interest inclines him to
+      apprehend the object in the one or the other of these aspects. It follows
+      not infrequently that the marks of cheapness or commonness are accepted as
+      definitive marks of artistic unfitness, and a code or schedule of
+      aesthetic proprieties on the one hand, and of aesthetic abominations on
+      the other, is constructed on this basis for guidance in questions of
+      taste.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As has already been pointed out, the cheap, and therefore indecorous,
+      articles of daily consumption in modern industrial communities are
+      commonly machine products; and the generic feature of the physiognomy of
+      machine-made goods as compared with the hand-wrought article is their
+      greater perfection in workmanship and greater accuracy in the detail
+      execution of the design. Hence it comes about that the visible
+      imperfections of the hand-wrought goods, being honorific, are accounted
+      marks of superiority in point of beauty, or serviceability, or both. Hence
+      has arisen that exaltation of the defective, of which John Ruskin and
+      William Morris were such eager spokesmen in their time; and on this ground
+      their propaganda of crudity and wasted effort has been taken up and
+      carried forward since their time. And hence also the propaganda for a
+      return to handicraft and household industry. So much of the work and
+      speculations of this group of men as fairly comes under the
+      characterization here given would have been impossible at a time when the
+      visibly more perfect goods were not the cheaper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is of course only as to the economic value of this school of aesthetic
+      teaching that anything is intended to be said or can be said here. What is
+      said is not to be taken in the sense of depreciation, but chiefly as a
+      characterization of the tendency of this teaching in its effect on
+      consumption and on the production of consumable goods.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The manner in which the bias of this growth of taste has worked itself out
+      in production is perhaps most cogently exemplified in the book manufacture
+      with which Morris busied himself during the later years of his life; but
+      what holds true of the work of the Kelmscott Press in an eminent degree,
+      holds true with but slightly abated force when applied to latter-day
+      artistic book-making generally&mdash;as to type, paper, illustration,
+      binding materials, and binder's work. The claims to excellence put forward
+      by the later products of the bookmaker's industry rest in some measure on
+      the degree of its approximation to the crudities of the time when the work
+      of book-making was a doubtful struggle with refractory materials carried
+      on by means of insufficient appliances. These products, since they require
+      hand labor, are more expensive; they are also less convenient for use than
+      the books turned out with a view to serviceability alone; they therefore
+      argue ability on the part of the purchaser to consume freely, as well as
+      ability to waste time and effort. It is on this basis that the printers of
+      today are returning to "old-style," and other more or less obsolete styles
+      of type which are less legible and give a cruder appearance to the page
+      than the "modern." Even a scientific periodical, with ostensibly no
+      purpose but the most effective presentation of matter with which its
+      science is concerned, will concede so much to the demands of this
+      pecuniary beauty as to publish its scientific discussions in oldstyle
+      type, on laid paper, and with uncut edges. But books which are not
+      ostensibly concerned with the effective presentation of their contents
+      alone, of course go farther in this direction. Here we have a somewhat
+      cruder type, printed on hand-laid, deckel-edged paper, with excessive
+      margins and uncut leaves, with bindings of a painstaking crudeness and
+      elaborate ineptitude. The Kelmscott Press reduced the matter to an
+      absurdity&mdash;as seen from the point of view of brute serviceability
+      alone&mdash;by issuing books for modern use, edited with the obsolete
+      spelling, printed in black-letter, and bound in limp vellum fitted with
+      thongs. As a further characteristic feature which fixes the economic place
+      of artistic book-making, there is the fact that these more elegant books
+      are, at their best, printed in limited editions. A limited edition is in
+      effect a guarantee&mdash;somewhat crude, it is true&mdash;that this book
+      is scarce and that it therefore is costly and lends pecuniary distinction
+      to its consumer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The special attractiveness of these book-products to the book-buyer of
+      cultivated taste lies, of course, not in a conscious, naive recognition of
+      their costliness and superior clumsiness. Here, as in the parallel case of
+      the superiority of hand-wrought articles over machine products, the
+      conscious ground of preference is an intrinsic excellence imputed to the
+      costlier and more awkward article. The superior excellence imputed to the
+      book which imitates the products of antique and obsolete processes is
+      conceived to be chiefly a superior utility in the aesthetic respect; but
+      it is not unusual to find a well-bred book-lover insisting that the
+      clumsier product is also more serviceable as a vehicle of printed speech.
+      So far as regards the superior aesthetic value of the decadent book, the
+      chances are that the book-lover's contention has some ground. The book is
+      designed with an eye single to its beauty, and the result is commonly some
+      measure of success on the part of the designer. What is insisted on here,
+      however, is that the canon of taste under which the designer works is a
+      canon formed under the surveillance of the law of conspicuous waste, and
+      that this law acts selectively to eliminate any canon of taste that does
+      not conform to its demands. That is to say, while the decadent book may be
+      beautiful, the limits within which the designer may work are fixed by
+      requirements of a non-aesthetic kind. The product, if it is beautiful,
+      must also at the same time be costly and ill adapted to its ostensible
+      use. This mandatory canon of taste in the case of the book-designer,
+      however, is not shaped entirely by the law of waste in its first form; the
+      canon is to some extent shaped in conformity to that secondary expression
+      of the predatory temperament, veneration for the archaic or obsolete,
+      which in one of its special developments is called classicism. In
+      aesthetic theory it might be extremely difficult, if not quite
+      impracticable, to draw a line between the canon of classicism, or regard
+      for the archaic, and the canon of beauty. For the aesthetic purpose such a
+      distinction need scarcely be drawn, and indeed it need not exist. For a
+      theory of taste the expression of an accepted ideal of archaism, on
+      whatever basis it may have been accepted, is perhaps best rated as an
+      element of beauty; there need be no question of its legitimation. But for
+      the present purpose&mdash;for the purpose of determining what economic
+      grounds are present in the accepted canons of taste and what is their
+      significance for the distribution and consumption of goods&mdash;the
+      distinction is not similarly beside the point. The position of machine
+      products in the civilized scheme of consumption serves to point out the
+      nature of the relation which subsists between the canon of conspicuous
+      waste and the code of proprieties in consumption. Neither in matters of
+      art and taste proper, nor as regards the current sense of the
+      serviceability of goods, does this canon act as a principle of innovation
+      or initiative. It does not go into the future as a creative principle
+      which makes innovations and adds new items of consumption and new elements
+      of cost. The principle in question is, in a certain sense, a negative
+      rather than a positive law. It is a regulative rather than a creative
+      principle. It very rarely initiates or originates any usage or custom
+      directly. Its action is selective only. Conspicuous wastefulness does not
+      directly afford ground for variation and growth, but conformity to its
+      requirements is a condition to the survival of such innovations as may be
+      made on other grounds. In whatever way usages and customs and methods of
+      expenditure arise, they are all subject to the selective action of this
+      norm of reputability; and the degree in which they conform to its
+      requirements is a test of their fitness to survive in the competition with
+      other similar usages and customs. Other thing being equal, the more
+      obviously wasteful usage or method stands the better chance of survival
+      under this law. The law of conspicuous waste does not account for the
+      origin of variations, but only for the persistence of such forms as are
+      fit to survive under its dominance. It acts to conserve the fit, not to
+      originate the acceptable. Its office is to prove all things and to hold
+      fast that which is good for its purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Seven ~~ Dress as an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It will in place, by way of illustration, to show in some detail how the
+      economic principles so far set forth apply to everyday facts in some one
+      direction of the life process. For this purpose no line of consumption
+      affords a more apt illustration than expenditure on dress. It is
+      especially the rule of the conspicuous waste of goods that finds
+      expression in dress, although the other, related principles of pecuniary
+      repute are also exemplified in the same contrivances. Other methods of
+      putting one's pecuniary standing in evidence serve their end effectually,
+      and other methods are in vogue always and everywhere; but expenditure on
+      dress has this advantage over most other methods, that our apparel is
+      always in evidence and affords an indication of our pecuniary standing to
+      all observers at the first glance. It is also true that admitted
+      expenditure for display is more obviously present, and is, perhaps, more
+      universally practiced in the matter of dress than in any other line of
+      consumption. No one finds difficulty in assenting to the commonplace that
+      the greater part of the expenditure incurred by all classes for apparel is
+      incurred for the sake of a respectable appearance rather than for the
+      protection of the person. And probably at no other point is the sense of
+      shabbiness so keenly felt as it is if we fall short of the standard set by
+      social usage in this matter of dress. It is true of dress in even a higher
+      degree than of most other items of consumption, that people will undergo a
+      very considerable degree of privation in the comforts or the necessaries
+      of life in order to afford what is considered a decent amount of wasteful
+      consumption; so that it is by no means an uncommon occurrence, in an
+      inclement climate, for people to go ill clad in order to appear well
+      dressed. And the commercial value of the goods used for clotting in any
+      modern community is made up to a much larger extent of the
+      fashionableness, the reputability of the goods than of the mechanical
+      service which they render in clothing the person of the wearer. The need
+      of dress is eminently a "higher" or spiritual need.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This spiritual need of dress is not wholly, nor even chiefly, a naive
+      propensity for display of expenditure. The law of conspicuous waste guides
+      consumption in apparel, as in other things, chiefly at the second remove,
+      by shaping the canons of taste and decency. In the common run of cases the
+      conscious motive of the wearer or purchaser of conspicuously wasteful
+      apparel is the need of conforming to established usage, and of living up
+      to the accredited standard of taste and reputability. It is not only that
+      one must be guided by the code of proprieties in dress in order to avoid
+      the mortification that comes of unfavorable notice and comment, though
+      that motive in itself counts for a great deal; but besides that, the
+      requirement of expensiveness is so ingrained into our habits of thought in
+      matters of dress that any other than expensive apparel is instinctively
+      odious to us. Without reflection or analysis, we feel that what is
+      inexpensive is unworthy. "A cheap coat makes a cheap man." "Cheap and
+      nasty" is recognized to hold true in dress with even less mitigation than
+      in other lines of consumption. On the ground both of taste and of
+      serviceability, an inexpensive article of apparel is held to be inferior,
+      under the maxim "cheap and nasty." We find things beautiful, as well as
+      serviceable, somewhat in proportion as they are costly. With few and
+      inconsequential exceptions, we all find a costly hand-wrought article of
+      apparel much preferable, in point of beauty and of serviceability, to a
+      less expensive imitation of it, however cleverly the spurious article may
+      imitate the costly original; and what offends our sensibilities in the
+      spurious article is not that it falls short in form or color, or, indeed,
+      in visual effect in any way. The offensive object may be so close an
+      imitation as to defy any but the closest scrutiny; and yet so soon as the
+      counterfeit is detected, its aesthetic value, and its commercial value as
+      well, declines precipitately. Not only that, but it may be asserted with
+      but small risk of contradiction that the aesthetic value of a detected
+      counterfeit in dress declines somewhat in the same proportion as the
+      counterfeit is cheaper than its original. It loses caste aesthetically
+      because it falls to a lower pecuniary grade.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the function of dress as an evidence of ability to pay does not end
+      with simply showing that the wearer consumes valuable goods in excess of
+      what is required for physical comfort. Simple conspicuous waste of goods
+      is effective and gratifying as far as it goes; it is good prima facie
+      evidence of pecuniary success, and consequently prima facie evidence of
+      social worth. But dress has subtler and more far-reaching possibilities
+      than this crude, first-hand evidence of wasteful consumption only. If, in
+      addition to showing that the wearer can afford to consume freely and
+      uneconomically, it can also be shown in the same stroke that he or she is
+      not under the necessity of earning a livelihood, the evidence of social
+      worth is enhanced in a very considerable degree. Our dress, therefore, in
+      order to serve its purpose effectually, should not only he expensive, but
+      it should also make plain to all observers that the wearer is not engaged
+      in any kind of productive labor. In the evolutionary process by which our
+      system of dress has been elaborated into its present admirably perfect
+      adaptation to its purpose, this subsidiary line of evidence has received
+      due attention. A detailed examination of what passes in popular
+      apprehension for elegant apparel will show that it is contrived at every
+      point to convey the impression that the wearer does not habitually put
+      forth any useful effort. It goes without saying that no apparel can be
+      considered elegant, or even decent, if it shows the effect of manual labor
+      on the part of the wearer, in the way of soil or wear. The pleasing effect
+      of neat and spotless garments is chiefly, if not altogether, due to their
+      carrying the suggestion of leisure-exemption from personal contact with
+      industrial processes of any kind. Much of the charm that invests the
+      patent-leather shoe, the stainless linen, the lustrous cylindrical hat,
+      and the walking-stick, which so greatly enhance the native dignity of a
+      gentleman, comes of their pointedly suggesting that the wearer cannot when
+      so attired bear a hand in any employment that is directly and immediately
+      of any human use. Elegant dress serves its purpose of elegance not only in
+      that it is expensive, but also because it is the insignia of leisure. It
+      not only shows that the wearer is able to consume a relatively large
+      value, but it argues at the same time that he consumes without producing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The dress of women goes even farther than that of men in the way of
+      demonstrating the wearer's abstinence from productive employment. It needs
+      no argument to enforce the generalization that the more elegant styles of
+      feminine bonnets go even farther towards making work impossible than does
+      the man's high hat. The woman's shoe adds the so-called French heel to the
+      evidence of enforced leisure afforded by its polish; because this high
+      heel obviously makes any, even the simplest and most necessary manual work
+      extremely difficult. The like is true even in a higher degree of the skirt
+      and the rest of the drapery which characterizes woman's dress. The
+      substantial reason for our tenacious attachment to the skirt is just this;
+      it is expensive and it hampers the wearer at every turn and incapacitates
+      her for all useful exertion. The like is true of the feminine custom of
+      wearing the hair excessively long.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the woman's apparel not only goes beyond that of the modern man in the
+      degree in which it argues exemption from labor; it also adds a peculiar
+      and highly characteristic feature which differs in kind from anything
+      habitually practiced by the men. This feature is the class of contrivances
+      of which the corset is the typical example. The corset is, in economic
+      theory, substantially a mutilation, undergone for the purpose of lowering
+      the subject's vitality and rendering her permanently and obviously unfit
+      for work. It is true, the corset impairs the personal attractions of the
+      wearer, but the loss suffered on that score is offset by the gain in
+      reputability which comes of her visibly increased expensiveness and
+      infirmity. It may broadly be set down that the womanliness of woman's
+      apparel resolves itself, in point of substantial fact, into the more
+      effective hindrance to useful exertion offered by the garments peculiar to
+      women. This difference between masculine and feminine apparel is here
+      simply pointed out as a characteristic feature. The ground of its
+      occurrence will be discussed presently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So far, then, we have, as the great and dominant norm of dress, the broad
+      principle of conspicuous waste. Subsidiary to this principle, and as a
+      corollary under it, we get as a second norm the principle of conspicuous
+      leisure. In dress construction this norm works out in the shape of divers
+      contrivances going to show that the wearer does not and, as far as it may
+      conveniently be shown, can not engage in productive labor. Beyond these
+      two principles there is a third of scarcely less constraining force, which
+      will occur to any one who reflects at all on the subject. Dress must not
+      only be conspicuously expensive and inconvenient, it must at the same time
+      be up to date. No explanation at all satisfactory has hitherto been
+      offered of the phenomenon of changing fashions. The imperative requirement
+      of dressing in the latest accredited manner, as well as the fact that this
+      accredited fashion constantly changes from season to season, is
+      sufficiently familiar to every one, but the theory of this flux and change
+      has not been worked out. We may of course say, with perfect consistency
+      and truthfulness, that this principle of novelty is another corollary
+      under the law of conspicuous waste. Obviously, if each garment is
+      permitted to serve for but a brief term, and if none of last season's
+      apparel is carried over and made further use of during the present season,
+      the wasteful expenditure on dress is greatly increased. This is good as
+      far as it goes, but it is negative only. Pretty much all that this
+      consideration warrants us in saying is that the norm of conspicuous waste
+      exercises a controlling surveillance in all matters of dress, so that any
+      change in the fashions must conspicuous waste exercises a controlling
+      surveillance in all matters of dress, so that any change in the fashions
+      must conform to the requirement of wastefulness; it leaves unanswered the
+      question as to the motive for making and accepting a change in the
+      prevailing styles, and it also fails to explain why conformity to a given
+      style at a given time is so imperatively necessary as we know it to be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a creative principle, capable of serving as motive to invention and
+      innovation in fashions, we shall have to go back to the primitive,
+      non-economic motive with which apparel originated&mdash;the motive of
+      adornment. Without going into an extended discussion of how and why this
+      motive asserts itself under the guidance of the law of expensiveness, it
+      may be stated broadly that each successive innovation in the fashions is
+      an effort to reach some form of display which shall be more acceptable to
+      our sense of form and color or of effectiveness, than that which it
+      displaces. The changing styles are the expression of a restless search for
+      something which shall commend itself to our aesthetic sense; but as each
+      innovation is subject to the selective action of the norm of conspicuous
+      waste, the range within which innovation can take place is somewhat
+      restricted. The innovation must not only be more beautiful, or perhaps
+      oftener less offensive, than that which it displaces, but it must also
+      come up to the accepted standard of expensiveness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would seem at first sight that the result of such an unremitting
+      struggle to attain the beautiful in dress should be a gradual approach to
+      artistic perfection. We might naturally expect that the fashions should
+      show a well-marked trend in the direction of some one or more types of
+      apparel eminently becoming to the human form; and we might even feel that
+      we have substantial ground for the hope that today, after all the
+      ingenuity and effort which have been spent on dress these many years, the
+      fashions should have achieved a relative perfection and a relative
+      stability, closely approximating to a permanently tenable artistic ideal.
+      But such is not the case. It would be very hazardous indeed to assert that
+      the styles of today are intrinsically more becoming than those of ten
+      years ago, or than those of twenty, or fifty, or one hundred years ago. On
+      the other hand, the assertion freely goes uncontradicted that styles in
+      vogue two thousand years ago are more becoming than the most elaborate and
+      painstaking constructions of today.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The explanation of the fashions just offered, then, does not fully
+      explain, and we shall have to look farther. It is well known that certain
+      relatively stable styles and types of costume have been worked out in
+      various parts of the world; as, for instance, among the Japanese, Chinese,
+      and other Oriental nations; likewise among the Greeks, Romans, and other
+      Eastern peoples of antiquity so also, in later times, among the peasants
+      of nearly every country of Europe. These national or popular costumes are
+      in most cases adjudged by competent critics to be more becoming, more
+      artistic, than the fluctuating styles of modern civilized apparel. At the
+      same time they are also, at least usually, less obviously wasteful; that
+      is to say, other elements than that of a display of expense are more
+      readily detected in their structure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These relatively stable costumes are, commonly, pretty strictly and
+      narrowly localized, and they vary by slight and systematic gradations from
+      place to place. They have in every case been worked out by peoples or
+      classes which are poorer than we, and especially they belong in countries
+      and localities and times where the population, or at least the class to
+      which the costume in question belongs, is relatively homogeneous, stable,
+      and immobile. That is to say, stable costumes which will bear the test of
+      time and perspective are worked out under circumstances where the norm of
+      conspicuous waste asserts itself less imperatively than it does in the
+      large modern civilized cities, whose relatively mobile wealthy population
+      today sets the pace in matters of fashion. The countries and classes which
+      have in this way worked out stable and artistic costumes have been so
+      placed that the pecuniary emulation among them has taken the direction of
+      a competition in conspicuous leisure rather than in conspicuous
+      consumption of goods. So that it will hold true in a general way that
+      fashions are least stable and least becoming in those communities where
+      the principle of a conspicuous waste of goods asserts itself most
+      imperatively, as among ourselves. All this points to an antagonism between
+      expensiveness and artistic apparel. In point of practical fact, the norm
+      of conspicuous waste is incompatible with the requirement that dress
+      should be beautiful or becoming. And this antagonism offers an explanation
+      of that restless change in fashion which neither the canon of
+      expensiveness nor that of beauty alone can account for.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The standard of reputability requires that dress should show wasteful
+      expenditure; but all wastefulness is offensive to native taste. The
+      psychological law has already been pointed out that all men&mdash;and
+      women perhaps even in a higher degree abhor futility, whether of effort or
+      of expenditure&mdash;much as Nature was once said to abhor a vacuum. But
+      the principle of conspicuous waste requires an obviously futile
+      expenditure; and the resulting conspicuous expensiveness of dress is
+      therefore intrinsically ugly. Hence we find that in all innovations in
+      dress, each added or altered detail strives to avoid condemnation by
+      showing some ostensible purpose, at the same time that the requirement of
+      conspicuous waste prevents the purposefulness of these innovations from
+      becoming anything more than a somewhat transparent pretense. Even in its
+      freest flights, fashion rarely if ever gets away from a simulation of some
+      ostensible use. The ostensible usefulness of the fashionable details of
+      dress, however, is always so transparent a make-believe, and their
+      substantial futility presently forces itself so baldly upon our attention
+      as to become unbearable, and then we take refuge in a new style. But the
+      new style must conform to the requirement of reputable wastefulness and
+      futility. Its futility presently becomes as odious as that of its
+      predecessor; and the only remedy which the law of waste allows us is to
+      seek relief in some new construction, equally futile and equally
+      untenable. Hence the essential ugliness and the unceasing change of
+      fashionable attire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Having so explained the phenomenon of shifting fashions, the next thing is
+      to make the explanation tally with everyday facts. Among these everyday
+      facts is the well-known liking which all men have for the styles that are
+      in vogue at any given time. A new style comes into vogue and remains in
+      favor for a season, and, at least so long as it is a novelty, people very
+      generally find the new style attractive. The prevailing fashion is felt to
+      be beautiful. This is due partly to the relief it affords in being
+      different from what went before it, partly to its being reputable. As
+      indicated in the last chapter, the canon of reputability to some extent
+      shapes our tastes, so that under its guidance anything will be accepted as
+      becoming until its novelty wears off, or until the warrant of reputability
+      is transferred to a new and novel structure serving the same general
+      purpose. That the alleged beauty, or "loveliness," of the styles in vogue
+      at any given time is transient and spurious only is attested by the fact
+      that none of the many shifting fashions will bear the test of time. When
+      seen in the perspective of half-a-dozen years or more, the best of our
+      fashions strike us as grotesque, if not unsightly. Our transient
+      attachment to whatever happens to be the latest rests on other than
+      aesthetic grounds, and lasts only until our abiding aesthetic sense has
+      had time to assert itself and reject this latest indigestible contrivance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The process of developing an aesthetic nausea takes more or less time; the
+      length of time required in any given case being inversely as the degree of
+      intrinsic odiousness of the style in question. This time relation between
+      odiousness and instability in fashions affords ground for the inference
+      that the more rapidly the styles succeed and displace one another, the
+      more offensive they are to sound taste. The presumption, therefore, is
+      that the farther the community, especially the wealthy classes of the
+      community, develop in wealth and mobility and in the range of their human
+      contact, the more imperatively will the law of conspicuous waste assert
+      itself in matters of dress, the more will the sense of beauty tend to fall
+      into abeyance or be overborne by the canon of pecuniary reputability, the
+      more rapidly will fashions shift and change, and the more grotesque and
+      intolerable will be the varying styles that successively come into vogue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There remains at least one point in this theory of dress yet to be
+      discussed. Most of what has been said applies to men's attire as well as
+      to that of women; although in modern times it applies at nearly all points
+      with greater force to that of women. But at one point the dress of women
+      differs substantially from that of men. In woman's dress there is
+      obviously greater insistence on such features as testify to the wearer's
+      exemption from or incapacity for all vulgarly productive employment. This
+      characteristic of woman's apparel is of interest, not only as completing
+      the theory of dress, but also as confirming what has already been said of
+      the economic status of women, both in the past and in the present.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As has been seen in the discussion of woman's status under the heads of
+      Vicarious Leisure and Vicarious Consumption, it has in the course of
+      economic development become the office of the woman to consume vicariously
+      for the head of the household; and her apparel is contrived with this
+      object in view. It has come about that obviously productive labor is in a
+      peculiar degree derogatory to respectable women, and therefore special
+      pains should be taken in the construction of women's dress, to impress
+      upon the beholder the fact (often indeed a fiction) that the wearer does
+      not and can not habitually engage in useful work. Propriety requires
+      respectable women to abstain more consistently from useful effort and to
+      make more of a show of leisure than the men of the same social classes. It
+      grates painfully on our nerves to contemplate the necessity of any
+      well-bred woman's earning a livelihood by useful work. It is not "woman's
+      sphere." Her sphere is within the household, which she should "beautify,"
+      and of which she should be the "chief ornament." The male head of the
+      household is not currently spoken of as its ornament. This feature taken
+      in conjunction with the other fact that propriety requires more
+      unremitting attention to expensive display in the dress and other
+      paraphernalia of women, goes to enforce the view already implied in what
+      has gone before. By virtue of its descent from a patriarchal past, our
+      social system makes it the woman's function in an especial degree to put
+      in evidence her household's ability to pay. According to the modern
+      civilized scheme of life, the good name of the household to which she
+      belongs should be the special care of the woman; and the system of
+      honorific expenditure and conspicuous leisure by which this good name is
+      chiefly sustained is therefore the woman's sphere. In the ideal scheme, as
+      it tends to realize itself in the life of the higher pecuniary classes,
+      this attention to conspicuous waste of substance and effort should
+      normally be the sole economic function of the woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the stage of economic development at which the women were still in the
+      full sense the property of the men, the performance of conspicuous leisure
+      and consumption came to be part of the services required of them. The
+      women being not their own masters, obvious expenditure and leisure on
+      their part would redound to the credit of their master rather than to
+      their own credit; and therefore the more expensive and the more obviously
+      unproductive the women of the household are, the more creditable and more
+      effective for the purpose of reputability of the household or its head
+      will their life be. So much so that the women have been required not only
+      to afford evidence of a life of leisure, but even to disable themselves
+      for useful activity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is at this point that the dress of men falls short of that of women,
+      and for sufficient reason. Conspicuous waste and conspicuous leisure are
+      reputable because they are evidence of pecuniary strength; pecuniary
+      strength is reputable or honorific because, in the last analysis, it
+      argues success and superior force; therefore the evidence of waste and
+      leisure put forth by any individual in his own behalf cannot consistently
+      take such a form or be carried to such a pitch as to argue incapacity or
+      marked discomfort on his part; as the exhibition would in that case show
+      not superior force, but inferiority, and so defeat its own purpose. So,
+      then, wherever wasteful expenditure and the show of abstention from effort
+      is normally, or on an average, carried to the extent of showing obvious
+      discomfort or voluntarily induced physical disability. There the immediate
+      inference is that the individual in question does not perform this
+      wasteful expenditure and undergo this disability for her own personal gain
+      in pecuniary repute, but in behalf of some one else to whom she stands in
+      a relation of economic dependence; a relation which in the last analysis
+      must, in economic theory, reduce itself to a relation of servitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To apply this generalization to women's dress, and put the matter in
+      concrete terms: the high heel, the skirt, the impracticable bonnet, the
+      corset, and the general disregard of the wearer's comfort which is an
+      obvious feature of all civilized women's apparel, are so many items of
+      evidence to the effect that in the modern civilized scheme of life the
+      woman is still, in theory, the economic dependent of the man&mdash;that,
+      perhaps in a highly idealized sense, she still is the man's chattel. The
+      homely reason for all this conspicuous leisure and attire on the part of
+      women lies in the fact that they are servants to whom, in the
+      differentiation of economic functions, has been delegated the office of
+      putting in evidence their master's ability to pay. There is a marked
+      similarity in these respects between the apparel of women and that of
+      domestic servants, especially liveried servants. In both there is a very
+      elaborate show of unnecessary expensiveness, and in both cases there is
+      also a notable disregard of the physical comfort of the wearer. But the
+      attire of the lady goes farther in its elaborate insistence on the
+      idleness, if not on the physical infirmity of the wearer, than does that
+      of the domestic. And this is as it should be; for in theory, according to
+      the ideal scheme of the pecuniary culture, the lady of the house is the
+      chief menial of the household.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides servants, currently recognized as such, there is at least one
+      other class of persons whose garb assimilates them to the class of
+      servants and shows many of the features that go to make up the womanliness
+      of woman's dress. This is the priestly class. Priestly vestments show, in
+      accentuated form, all the features that have been shown to be evidence of
+      a servile status and a vicarious life. Even more strikingly than the
+      everyday habit of the priest, the vestments, properly so called, are
+      ornate, grotesque, inconvenient, and, at least ostensibly, comfortless to
+      the point of distress. The priest is at the same time expected to refrain
+      from useful effort and, when before the public eye, to present an
+      impassively disconsolate countenance, very much after the manner of a
+      well-trained domestic servant. The shaven face of the priest is a further
+      item to the same effect. This assimilation of the priestly class to the
+      class of body servants, in demeanor and apparel, is due to the similarity
+      of the two classes as regards economic function. In economic theory, the
+      priest is a body servant, constructively in attendance upon the person of
+      the divinity whose livery he wears. His livery is of a very expensive
+      character, as it should be in order to set forth in a beseeming manner the
+      dignity of his exalted master; but it is contrived to show that the
+      wearing of it contributes little or nothing to the physical comfort of the
+      wearer, for it is an item of vicarious consumption, and the repute which
+      accrues from its consumption is to be imputed to the absent master, not to
+      the servant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The line of demarcation between the dress of women, priests, and servants,
+      on the one hand, and of men, on the other hand, is not always consistently
+      observed in practice, but it will scarcely be disputed that it is always
+      present in a more or less definite way in the popular habits of thought.
+      There are of course also free men, and not a few of them, who, in their
+      blind zeal for faultless reputable attire, transgress the theoretical line
+      between man's and woman's dress, to the extent of arraying themselves in
+      apparel that is obviously designed to vex the mortal frame; but everyone
+      recognizes without hesitation that such apparel for men is a departure
+      from the normal. We are in the habit of saying that such dress is
+      "effeminate"; and one sometimes hears the remark that such or such an
+      exquisitely attired gentleman is as well dressed as a footman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Certain apparent discrepancies under this theory of dress merit a more
+      detailed examination, especially as they mark a more or less evident trend
+      in the later and maturer development of dress. The vogue of the corset
+      offers an apparent exception from the rule of which it has here been cited
+      as an illustration. A closer examination, however, will show that this
+      apparent exception is really a verification of the rule that the vogue of
+      any given element or feature in dress rests on its utility as an evidence
+      of pecuniary standing. It is well known that in the industrially more
+      advanced communities the corset is employed only within certain fairly
+      well defined social strata. The women of the poorer classes, especially of
+      the rural population, do not habitually use it, except as a holiday
+      luxury. Among these classes the women have to work hard, and it avails
+      them little in the way of a pretense of leisure to so crucify the flesh in
+      everyday life. The holiday use of the contrivance is due to imitation of a
+      higher-class canon of decency. Upwards from this low level of indigence
+      and manual labor, the corset was until within a generation or two nearly
+      indispensable to a socially blameless standing for all women, including
+      the wealthiest and most reputable. This rule held so long as there still
+      was no large class of people wealthy enough to be above the imputation of
+      any necessity for manual labor and at the same time large enough to form a
+      self-sufficient, isolated social body whose mass would afford a foundation
+      for special rules of conduct within the class, enforced by the current
+      opinion of the class alone. But now there has grown up a large enough
+      leisure class possessed of such wealth that any aspersion on the score of
+      enforced manual employment would be idle and harmless calumny; and the
+      corset has therefore in large measure fallen into disuse within this
+      class. The exceptions under this rule of exemption from the corset are
+      more apparent than real. They are the wealthy classes of countries with a
+      lower industrial structure&mdash;nearer the archaic, quasi-industrial type&mdash;together
+      with the later accessions of the wealthy classes in the more advanced
+      industrial communities. The latter have not yet had time to divest
+      themselves of the plebeian canons of taste and of reputability carried
+      over from their former, lower pecuniary grade. Such survival of the corset
+      is not infrequent among the higher social classes of those American
+      cities, for instance, which have recently and rapidly risen into opulence.
+      If the word be used as a technical term, without any odious implication,
+      it may be said that the corset persists in great measure through the
+      period of snobbery&mdash;the interval of uncertainty and of transition
+      from a lower to the upper levels of pecuniary culture. That is to say, in
+      all countries which have inherited the corset it continues in use wherever
+      and so long as it serves its purpose as an evidence of honorific leisure
+      by arguing physical disability in the wearer. The same rule of course
+      applies to other mutilations and contrivances for decreasing the visible
+      efficiency of the individual.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Something similar should hold true with respect to divers items of
+      conspicuous consumption, and indeed something of the kind does seem to
+      hold to a slight degree of sundry features of dress, especially if such
+      features involve a marked discomfort or appearance of discomfort to the
+      wearer. During the past one hundred years there is a tendency perceptible,
+      in the development of men's dress especially, to discontinue methods of
+      expenditure and the use of symbols of leisure which must have been
+      irksome, which may have served a good purpose in their time, but the
+      continuation of which among the upper classes today would be a work of
+      supererogation; as, for instance, the use of powdered wigs and of gold
+      lace, and the practice of constantly shaving the face. There has of late
+      years been some slight recrudescence of the shaven face in polite society,
+      but this is probably a transient and unadvised mimicry of the fashion
+      imposed upon body servants, and it may fairly be expected to go the way of
+      the powdered wig of our grandfathers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These indices and others which resemble them in point of the boldness with
+      which they point out to all observers the habitual uselessness of those
+      persons who employ them, have been replaced by other, more dedicate
+      methods of expressing the same fact; methods which are no less evident to
+      the trained eyes of that smaller, select circle whose good opinion is
+      chiefly sought. The earlier and cruder method of advertisement held its
+      ground so long as the public to which the exhibitor had to appeal
+      comprised large portions of the community who were not trained to detect
+      delicate variations in the evidences of wealth and leisure. The method of
+      advertisement undergoes a refinement when a sufficiently large wealthy
+      class has developed, who have the leisure for acquiring skill in
+      interpreting the subtler signs of expenditure. "Loud" dress becomes
+      offensive to people of taste, as evincing an undue desire to reach and
+      impress the untrained sensibilities of the vulgar. To the individual of
+      high breeding, it is only the more honorific esteem accorded by the
+      cultivated sense of the members of his own high class that is of material
+      consequence. Since the wealthy leisure class has grown so large, or the
+      contact of the leisure-class individual with members of his own class has
+      grown so wide, as to constitute a human environment sufficient for the
+      honorific purpose, there arises a tendency to exclude the baser elements
+      of the population from the scheme even as spectators whose applause or
+      mortification should be sought. The result of all this is a refinement of
+      methods, a resort to subtler contrivances, and a spiritualization of the
+      scheme of symbolism in dress. And as this upper leisure class sets the
+      pace in all matters of decency, the result for the rest of society also is
+      a gradual amelioration of the scheme of dress. As the community advances
+      in wealth and culture, the ability to pay is put in evidence by means
+      which require a progressively nicer discrimination in the beholder. This
+      nicer discrimination between advertising media is in fact a very large
+      element of the higher pecuniary culture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Eight ~~ Industrial Exemption and Conservatism
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The life of man in society, just like the life of other species, is a
+      struggle for existence, and therefore it is a process of selective
+      adaptation. The evolution of social structure has been a process of
+      natural selection of institutions. The progress which has been and is
+      being made in human institutions and in human character may be set down,
+      broadly, to a natural selection of the fittest habits of thought and to a
+      process of enforced adaptation of individuals to an environment which has
+      progressively changed with the growth of the community and with the
+      changing institutions under which men have lived. Institutions are not
+      only themselves the result of a selective and adaptive process which
+      shapes the prevailing or dominant types of spiritual attitude and
+      aptitudes; they are at the same time special methods of life and of human
+      relations, and are therefore in their turn efficient factors of selection.
+      So that the changing institutions in their turn make for a further
+      selection of individuals endowed with the fittest temperament, and a
+      further adaptation of individual temperament and habits to the changing
+      environment through the formation of new institutions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The forces which have shaped the development of human life and of social
+      structure are no doubt ultimately reducible to terms of living tissue and
+      material environment; but proximately for the purpose in hand, these
+      forces may best be stated in terms of an environment, partly human, partly
+      non-human, and a human subject with a more or less definite physical and
+      intellectual constitution. Taken in the aggregate or average, this human
+      subject is more or less variable; chiefly, no doubt, under a rule of
+      selective conservation of favorable variations. The selection of favorable
+      variations is perhaps in great measure a selective conservation of ethnic
+      types. In the life history of any community whose population is made up of
+      a mixture of divers ethnic elements, one or another of several persistent
+      and relatively stable types of body and of temperament rises into
+      dominance at any given point. The situation, including the institutions in
+      force at any given time, will favor the survival and dominance of one type
+      of character in preference to another; and the type of man so selected to
+      continue and to further elaborate the institutions handed down from the
+      past will in some considerable measure shape these institutions in his own
+      likeness. But apart from selection as between relatively stable types of
+      character and habits of mind, there is no doubt simultaneously going on a
+      process of selective adaptation of habits of thought within the general
+      range of aptitudes which is characteristic of the dominant ethnic type or
+      types. There may be a variation in the fundamental character of any
+      population by selection between relatively stable types; but there is also
+      a variation due to adaptation in detail within the range of the type, and
+      to selection between specific habitual views regarding any given social
+      relation or group of relations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the present purpose, however, the question as to the nature of the
+      adaptive process&mdash;whether it is chiefly a selection between stable
+      types of temperament and character, or chiefly an adaptation of men's
+      habits of thought to changing circumstances&mdash;is of less importance
+      than the fact that, by one method or another, institutions change and
+      develop. Institutions must change with changing circumstances, since they
+      are of the nature of an habitual method of responding to the stimuli which
+      these changing circumstances afford. The development of these institutions
+      is the development of society. The institutions are, in substance,
+      prevalent habits of thought with respect to particular relations and
+      particular functions of the individual and of the community; and the
+      scheme of life, which is made up of the aggregate of institutions in force
+      at a given time or at a given point in the development of any society,
+      may, on the psychological side, be broadly characterized as a prevalent
+      spiritual attitude or a prevalent theory of life. As regards its generic
+      features, this spiritual attitude or theory of life is in the last
+      analysis reducible to terms of a prevalent type of character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The situation of today shapes the institutions of tomorrow through a
+      selective, coercive process, by acting upon men's habitual view of things,
+      and so altering or fortifying a point of view or a mental attitude handed
+      down from the past. The institutions&mdash;that is to say the habits of
+      thought&mdash;under the guidance of which men live are in this way
+      received from an earlier time; more or less remotely earlier, but in any
+      event they have been elaborated in and received from the past.
+      Institutions are products of the past process, are adapted to past
+      circumstances, and are therefore never in full accord with the
+      requirements of the present. In the nature of the case, this process of
+      selective adaptation can never catch up with the progressively changing
+      situation in which the community finds itself at any given time; for the
+      environment, the situation, the exigencies of life which enforce the
+      adaptation and exercise the selection, change from day to day; and each
+      successive situation of the community in its turn tends to obsolescence as
+      soon as it has been established. When a step in the development has been
+      taken, this step itself constitutes a change of situation which requires a
+      new adaptation; it becomes the point of departure for a new step in the
+      adjustment, and so on interminably.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is to be noted then, although it may be a tedious truism, that the
+      institutions of today&mdash;the present accepted scheme of life&mdash;do
+      not entirely fit the situation of today. At the same time, men's present
+      habits of thought tend to persist indefinitely, except as circumstances
+      enforce a change. These institutions which have thus been handed down,
+      these habits of thought, points of view, mental attitudes and aptitudes,
+      or what not, are therefore themselves a conservative factor. This is the
+      factor of social inertia, psychological inertia, conservatism. Social
+      structure changes, develops, adapts itself to an altered situation, only
+      through a change in the habits of thought of the several classes of the
+      community, or in the last analysis, through a change in the habits of
+      thought of the individuals which make up the community. The evolution of
+      society is substantially a process of mental adaptation on the part of
+      individuals under the stress of circumstances which will no longer
+      tolerate habits of thought formed under and conforming to a different set
+      of circumstances in the past. For the immediate purpose it need not be a
+      question of serious importance whether this adaptive process is a process
+      of selection and survival of persistent ethnic types or a process of
+      individual adaptation and an inheritance of acquired traits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Social advance, especially as seen from the point of view of economic
+      theory, consists in a continued progressive approach to an approximately
+      exact "adjustment of inner relations to outer relations", but this
+      adjustment is never definitively established, since the "outer relations"
+      are subject to constant change as a consequence of the progressive change
+      going on in the "inner relations." But the degree of approximation may be
+      greater or less, depending on the facility with which an adjustment is
+      made. A readjustment of men's habits of thought to conform with the
+      exigencies of an altered situation is in any case made only tardily and
+      reluctantly, and only under the coercion exercised by a stipulation which
+      has made the accredited views untenable. The readjustment of institutions
+      and habitual views to an altered environment is made in response to
+      pressure from without; it is of the nature of a response to stimulus.
+      Freedom and facility of readjustment, that is to say capacity for growth
+      in social structure, therefore depends in great measure on the degree of
+      freedom with which the situation at any given time acts on the individual
+      members of the community-the degree of exposure of the individual members
+      to the constraining forces of the environment. If any portion or class of
+      society is sheltered from the action of the environment in any essential
+      respect, that portion of the community, or that class, will adapt its
+      views and its scheme of life more tardily to the altered general
+      situation; it will in so far tend to retard the process of social
+      transformation. The wealthy leisure class is in such a sheltered position
+      with respect to the economic forces that make for change and readjustment.
+      And it may be said that the forces which make for a readjustment of
+      institutions, especially in the case of a modern industrial community,
+      are, in the last analysis, almost entirely of an economic nature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Any community may be viewed as an industrial or economic mechanism, the
+      structure of which is made up of what is called its economic institutions.
+      These institutions are habitual methods of carrying on the life process of
+      the community in contact with the material environment in which it lives.
+      When given methods of unfolding human activity in this given environment
+      have been elaborated in this way, the life of the community will express
+      itself with some facility in these habitual directions. The community will
+      make use of the forces of the environment for the purposes of its life
+      according to methods learned in the past and embodied in these
+      institutions. But as population increases, and as men's knowledge and
+      skill in directing the forces of nature widen, the habitual methods of
+      relation between the members of the group, and the habitual method of
+      carrying on the life process of the group as a whole, no longer give the
+      same result as before; nor are the resulting conditions of life
+      distributed and apportioned in the same manner or with the same effect
+      among the various members as before. If the scheme according to which the
+      life process of the group was carried on under the earlier conditions gave
+      approximately the highest attainable result&mdash;under the circumstances&mdash;in
+      the way of efficiency or facility of the life process of the group; then
+      the same scheme of life unaltered will not yield the highest result
+      attainable in this respect under the altered conditions. Under the altered
+      conditions of population, skill, and knowledge, the facility of life as
+      carried on according to the traditional scheme may not be lower than under
+      the earlier conditions; but the chances are always that it is less than
+      might be if the scheme were altered to suit the altered conditions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The group is made up of individuals, and the group's life is the life of
+      individuals carried on in at least ostensible severalty. The group's
+      accepted scheme of life is the consensus of views held by the body of
+      these individuals as to what is right, good, expedient, and beautiful in
+      the way of human life. In the redistribution of the conditions of life
+      that comes of the altered method of dealing with the environment, the
+      outcome is not an equable change in the facility of life throughout the
+      group. The altered conditions may increase the facility of life for the
+      group as a whole, but the redistribution will usually result in a decrease
+      of facility or fullness of life for some members of the group. An advance
+      in technical methods, in population, or in industrial organization will
+      require at least some of the members of the community to change their
+      habits of life, if they are to enter with facility and effect into the
+      altered industrial methods; and in doing so they will be unable to live up
+      to the received notions as to what are the right and beautiful habits of
+      life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Any one who is required to change his habits of life and his habitual
+      relations to his fellow men will feel the discrepancy between the method
+      of life required of him by the newly arisen exigencies, and the
+      traditional scheme of life to which he is accustomed. It is the
+      individuals placed in this position who have the liveliest incentive to
+      reconstruct the received scheme of life and are most readily persuaded to
+      accept new standards; and it is through the need of the means of
+      livelihood that men are placed in such a position. The pressure exerted by
+      the environment upon the group, and making for a readjustment of the
+      group's scheme of life, impinges upon the members of the group in the form
+      of pecuniary exigencies; and it is owing to this fact&mdash;that external
+      forces are in great part translated into the form of pecuniary or economic
+      exigencies&mdash;it is owing to this fact that we can say that the forces
+      which count toward a readjustment of institutions in any modern industrial
+      community are chiefly economic forces; or more specifically, these forces
+      take the form of pecuniary pressure. Such a readjustment as is here
+      contemplated is substantially a change in men's views as to what is good
+      and right, and the means through which a change is wrought in men's
+      apprehension of what is good and right is in large part the pressure of
+      pecuniary exigencies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Any change in men's views as to what is good and right in human life make
+      its way but tardily at the best. Especially is this true of any change in
+      the direction of what is called progress; that is to say, in the direction
+      of divergence from the archaic position&mdash;from the position which may
+      be accounted the point of departure at any step in the social evolution of
+      the community. Retrogression, reapproach to a standpoint to which the race
+      has been long habituated in the past, is easier. This is especially true
+      in case the development away from this past standpoint has not been due
+      chiefly to a substitution of an ethnic type whose temperament is alien to
+      the earlier standpoint. The cultural stage which lies immediately back of
+      the present in the life history of Western civilization is what has here
+      been called the quasi-peaceable stage. At this quasi-peaceable stage the
+      law of status is the dominant feature in the scheme of life. There is no
+      need of pointing out how prone the men of today are to revert to the
+      spiritual attitude of mastery and of personal subservience which
+      characterizes that stage. It may rather be said to be held in an uncertain
+      abeyance by the economic exigencies of today, than to have been definitely
+      supplanted by a habit of mind that is in full accord with these
+      later-developed exigencies. The predatory and quasi-peaceable stages of
+      economic evolution seem to have been of long duration in life history of
+      all the chief ethnic elements which go to make up the populations of the
+      Western culture. The temperament and the propensities proper to those
+      cultural stages have, therefore, attained such a persistence as to make a
+      speedy reversion to the broad features of the corresponding psychological
+      constitution inevitable in the case of any class or community which is
+      removed from the action of those forces that make for a maintenance of the
+      later-developed habits of thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is a matter of common notoriety that when individuals, or even
+      considerable groups of men, are segregated from a higher industrial
+      culture and exposed to a lower cultural environment, or to an economic
+      situation of a more primitive character, they quickly show evidence of
+      reversion toward the spiritual features which characterize the predatory
+      type; and it seems probable that the dolicho-blond type of European man is
+      possessed of a greater facility for such reversion to barbarism than the
+      other ethnic elements with which that type is associated in the Western
+      culture. Examples of such a reversion on a small scale abound in the later
+      history of migration and colonization. Except for the fear of offending
+      that chauvinistic patriotism which is so characteristic a feature of the
+      predatory culture, and the presence of which is frequently the most
+      striking mark of reversion in modern communities, the case of the American
+      colonies might be cited as an example of such a reversion on an unusually
+      large scale, though it was not a reversion of very large scope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The leisure class is in great measure sheltered from the stress of those
+      economic exigencies which prevail in any modern, highly organized
+      industrial community. The exigencies of the struggle for the means of life
+      are less exacting for this class than for any other; and as a consequence
+      of this privileged position we should expect to find it one of the least
+      responsive of the classes of society to the demands which the situation
+      makes for a further growth of institutions and a readjustment to an
+      altered industrial situation. The leisure class is the conservative class.
+      The exigencies of the general economic situation of the community do not
+      freely or directly impinge upon the members of this class. They are not
+      required under penalty of forfeiture to change their habits of life and
+      their theoretical views of the external world to suit the demands of an
+      altered industrial technique, since they are not in the full sense an
+      organic part of the industrial community. Therefore these exigencies do
+      not readily produce, in the members of this class, that degree of
+      uneasiness with the existing order which alone can lead any body of men to
+      give up views and methods of life that have become habitual to them. The
+      office of the leisure class in social evolution is to retard the movement
+      and to conserve what is obsolescent. This proposition is by no means
+      novel; it has long been one of the commonplaces of popular opinion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The prevalent conviction that the wealthy class is by nature conservative
+      has been popularly accepted without much aid from any theoretical view as
+      to the place and relation of that class in the cultural development. When
+      an explanation of this class conservatism is offered, it is commonly the
+      invidious one that the wealthy class opposes innovation because it has a
+      vested interest, of an unworthy sort, in maintaining the present
+      conditions. The explanation here put forward imputes no unworthy motive.
+      The opposition of the class to changes in the cultural scheme is
+      instinctive, and does not rest primarily on an interested calculation of
+      material advantages; it is an instinctive revulsion at any departure from
+      the accepted way of doing and of looking at things&mdash;a revulsion
+      common to all men and only to be overcome by stress of circumstances. All
+      change in habits of life and of thought is irksome. The difference in this
+      respect between the wealthy and the common run of mankind lies not so much
+      in the motive which prompts to conservatism as in the degree of exposure
+      to the economic forces that urge a change. The members of the wealthy
+      class do not yield to the demand for innovation as readily as other men
+      because they are not constrained to do so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This conservatism of the wealthy class is so obvious a feature that it has
+      even come to be recognized as a mark of respectability. Since conservatism
+      is a characteristic of the wealthier and therefore more reputable portion
+      of the community, it has acquired a certain honorific or decorative value.
+      It has become prescriptive to such an extent that an adherence to
+      conservative views is comprised as a matter of course in our notions of
+      respectability; and it is imperatively incumbent on all who would lead a
+      blameless life in point of social repute. Conservatism, being an
+      upper-class characteristic, is decorous; and conversely, innovation, being
+      a lower-class phenomenon, is vulgar. The first and most unreflected
+      element in that instinctive revulsion and reprobation with which we turn
+      from all social innovators is this sense of the essential vulgarity of the
+      thing. So that even in cases where one recognizes the substantial merits
+      of the case for which the innovator is spokesman&mdash;as may easily
+      happen if the evils which he seeks to remedy are sufficiently remote in
+      point of time or space or personal contact&mdash;still one cannot but be
+      sensible of the fact that the innovator is a person with whom it is at
+      least distasteful to be associated, and from whose social contact one must
+      shrink. Innovation is bad form.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fact that the usages, actions, and views of the well-to-do leisure
+      class acquire the character of a prescriptive canon of conduct for the
+      rest of society, gives added weight and reach to the conservative
+      influence of that class. It makes it incumbent upon all reputable people
+      to follow their lead. So that, by virtue of its high position as the
+      avatar of good form, the wealthier class comes to exert a retarding
+      influence upon social development far in excess of that which the simple
+      numerical strength of the class would assign it. Its prescriptive example
+      acts to greatly stiffen the resistance of all other classes against any
+      innovation, and to fix men's affections upon the good institutions handed
+      down from an earlier generation. There is a second way in which the
+      influence of the leisure class acts in the same direction, so far as
+      concerns hindrance to the adoption of a conventional scheme of life more
+      in accord with the exigencies of the time. This second method of
+      upper-class guidance is not in strict consistency to be brought under the
+      same category as the instinctive conservatism and aversion to new modes of
+      thought just spoken of; but it may as well be dealt with here, since it
+      has at least this much in common with the conservative habit of mind that
+      it acts to retard innovation and the growth of social structure. The code
+      of proprieties, conventionalities, and usages in vogue at any given time
+      and among any given people has more or less of the character of an organic
+      whole; so that any appreciable change in one point of the scheme involves
+      something of a change or readjustment at other points also, if not a
+      reorganization all along the line. When a change is made which immediately
+      touches only a minor point in the scheme, the consequent derangement of
+      the structure of conventionalities may be inconspicuous; but even in such
+      a case it is safe to say that some derangement of the general scheme, more
+      or less far-reaching, will follow. On the other hand, when an attempted
+      reform involves the suppression or thorough-going remodelling of an
+      institution of first-rate importance in the conventional scheme, it is
+      immediately felt that a serious derangement of the entire scheme would
+      result; it is felt that a readjustment of the structure to the new form
+      taken on by one of its chief elements would be a painful and tedious, if
+      not a doubtful process.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In order to realize the difficulty which such a radical change in any one
+      feature of the conventional scheme of life would involve, it is only
+      necessary to suggest the suppression of the monogamic family, or of the
+      agnatic system of consanguinity, or of private property, or of the
+      theistic faith, in any country of the Western civilization; or suppose the
+      suppression of ancestor worship in China, or of the caste system in india,
+      or of slavery in Africa, or the establishment of equality of the sexes in
+      Mohammedan countries. It needs no argument to show that the derangement of
+      the general structure of conventionalities in any of these cases would be
+      very considerable. In order to effect such an innovation a very
+      far-reaching alteration of men's habits of thought would be involved also
+      at other points of the scheme than the one immediately in question. The
+      aversion to any such innovation amounts to a shrinking from an essentially
+      alien scheme of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The revulsion felt by good people at any proposed departure from the
+      accepted methods of life is a familiar fact of everyday experience. It is
+      not unusual to hear those persons who dispense salutary advice and
+      admonition to the community express themselves forcibly upon the
+      far-reaching pernicious effects which the community would suffer from such
+      relatively slight changes as the disestablishment of the Anglican Church,
+      an increased facility of divorce, adoption of female suffrage, prohibition
+      of the manufacture and sale of intoxicating beverages, abolition or
+      restriction of inheritances, etc. Any one of these innovations would, we
+      are told, "shake the social structure to its base," "reduce society to
+      chaos," "subvert the foundations of morality," "make life intolerable,"
+      "confound the order of nature," etc. These various locutions are, no
+      doubt, of the nature of hyperbole; but, at the same time, like all
+      overstatement, they are evidence of a lively sense of the gravity of the
+      consequences which they are intended to describe. The effect of these and
+      like innovations in deranging the accepted scheme of life is felt to be of
+      much graver consequence than the simple alteration of an isolated item in
+      a series of contrivances for the convenience of men in society. What is
+      true in so obvious a degree of innovations of first-rate importance is
+      true in a less degree of changes of a smaller immediate importance. The
+      aversion to change is in large part an aversion to the bother of making
+      the readjustment which any given change will necessitate; and this
+      solidarity of the system of institutions of any given culture or of any
+      given people strengthens the instinctive resistance offered to any change
+      in men's habits of thought, even in matters which, taken by themselves,
+      are of minor importance. A consequence of this increased reluctance, due
+      to the solidarity of human institutions, is that any innovation calls for
+      a greater expenditure of nervous energy in making the necessary
+      readjustment than would otherwise be the case. It is not only that a
+      change in established habits of thought is distasteful. The process of
+      readjustment of the accepted theory of life involves a degree of mental
+      effort&mdash;a more or less protracted and laborious effort to find and to
+      keep one's bearings under the altered circumstances. This process requires
+      a certain expenditure of energy, and so presumes, for its successful
+      accomplishment, some surplus of energy beyond that absorbed in the daily
+      struggle for subsistence. Consequently it follows that progress is
+      hindered by underfeeding and excessive physical hardship, no less
+      effectually than by such a luxurious life as will shut out discontent by
+      cutting off the occasion for it. The abjectly poor, and all those persons
+      whose energies are entirely absorbed by the struggle for daily sustenance,
+      are conservative because they cannot afford the effort of taking thought
+      for the day after tomorrow; just as the highly prosperous are conservative
+      because they have small occasion to be discontented with the situation as
+      it stands today.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From this proposition it follows that the institution of a leisure class
+      acts to make the lower classes conservative by withdrawing from them as
+      much as it may of the means of sustenance, and so reducing their
+      consumption, and consequently their available energy, to such a point as
+      to make them incapable of the effort required for the learning and
+      adoption of new habits of thought. The accumulation of wealth at the upper
+      end of the pecuniary scale implies privation at the lower end of the
+      scale. It is a commonplace that, wherever it occurs, a considerable degree
+      of privation among the body of the people is a serious obstacle to any
+      innovation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This direct inhibitory effect of the unequal distribution of wealth is
+      seconded by an indirect effect tending to the same result. As has already
+      been seen, the imperative example set by the upper class in fixing the
+      canons of reputability fosters the practice of conspicuous consumption.
+      The prevalence of conspicuous consumption as one of the main elements in
+      the standard of decency among all classes is of course not traceable
+      wholly to the example of the wealthy leisure class, but the practice and
+      the insistence on it are no doubt strengthened by the example of the
+      leisure class. The requirements of decency in this matter are very
+      considerable and very imperative; so that even among classes whose
+      pecuniary position is sufficiently strong to admit a consumption of goods
+      considerably in excess of the subsistence minimum, the disposable surplus
+      left over after the more imperative physical needs are satisfied is not
+      infrequently diverted to the purpose of a conspicuous decency, rather than
+      to added physical comfort and fullness of life. Moreover, such surplus
+      energy as is available is also likely to be expended in the acquisition of
+      goods for conspicuous consumption or conspicuous boarding. The result is
+      that the requirements of pecuniary reputability tend (1) to leave but a
+      scanty subsistence minimum available for other than conspicuous
+      consumption, and (2) to absorb any surplus energy which may be available
+      after the bare physical necessities of life have been provided for. The
+      outcome of the whole is a strengthening of the general conservative
+      attitude of the community. The institution of a leisure class hinders
+      cultural development immediately (1) by the inertia proper to the class
+      itself, (2) through its prescriptive example of conspicuous waste and of
+      conservatism, and (3) indirectly through that system of unequal
+      distribution of wealth and sustenance on which the institution itself
+      rests. To this is to be added that the leisure class has also a material
+      interest in leaving things as they are. Under the circumstances prevailing
+      at any given time this class is in a privileged position, and any
+      departure from the existing order may be expected to work to the detriment
+      of the class rather than the reverse. The attitude of the class, simply as
+      influenced by its class interest, should therefore be to let well-enough
+      alone. This interested motive comes in to supplement the strong
+      instinctive bias of the class, and so to render it even more consistently
+      conservative than it otherwise would be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this, of course, has nothing to say in the way of eulogy or
+      deprecation of the office of the leisure class as an exponent and vehicle
+      of conservatism or reversion in social structure. The inhibition which it
+      exercises may be salutary or the reverse. Wether it is the one or the
+      other in any given case is a question of casuistry rather than of general
+      theory. There may be truth in the view (as a question of policy) so often
+      expressed by the spokesmen of the conservative element, that without some
+      such substantial and consistent resistance to innovation as is offered by
+      the conservative well-to-do classes, social innovation and experiment
+      would hurry the community into untenable and intolerable situations; the
+      only possible result of which would be discontent and disastrous reaction.
+      All this, however, is beside the present argument.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But apart from all deprecation, and aside from all question as to the
+      indispensability of some such check on headlong innovation, the leisure
+      class, in the nature of things, consistently acts to retard that
+      adjustment to the environment which is called social advance or
+      development. The characteristic attitude of the class may be summed up in
+      the maxim: "Whatever is, is right" whereas the law of natural selection,
+      as applied to human institutions, gives the axiom: "Whatever is, is
+      wrong." Not that the institutions of today are wholly wrong for the
+      purposes of the life of today, but they are, always and in the nature of
+      things, wrong to some extent. They are the result of a more or less
+      inadequate adjustment of the methods of living to a situation which
+      prevailed at some point in the past development; and they are therefore
+      wrong by something more than the interval which separates the present
+      situation from that of the past. "Right" and "wrong" are of course here
+      used without conveying any rejection as to what ought or ought not to be.
+      They are applied simply from the (morally colorless) evolutionary
+      standpoint, and are intended to designate compatibility or incompatibility
+      with the effective evolutionary process. The institution of a leisure
+      class, by force or class interest and instinct, and by precept and
+      prescriptive example, makes for the perpetuation of the existing
+      maladjustment of institutions, and even favors a reversion to a somewhat
+      more archaic scheme of life; a scheme which would be still farther out of
+      adjustment with the exigencies of life under the existing situation even
+      than the accredited, obsolescent scheme that has come down from the
+      immediate past.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But after all has been said on the head of conservation of the good old
+      ways, it remains true that institutions change and develop. There is a
+      cumulative growth of customs and habits of thought; a selective adaptation
+      of conventions and methods of life. Something is to be said of the office
+      of the leisure class in guiding this growth as well as in retarding it;
+      but little can be said here of its relation to institutional growth except
+      as it touches the institutions that are primarily and immediately of an
+      economic character. These institutions&mdash;the economic structure&mdash;may
+      be roughly distinguished into two classes or categories, according as they
+      serve one or the other of two divergent purposes of economic life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To adapt the classical terminology, they are institutions of acquisition
+      or of production; or to revert to terms already employed in a different
+      connection in earlier chapters, they are pecuniary or industrial
+      institutions; or in still other terms, they are institutions serving
+      either the invidious or the non-invidious economic interest. The former
+      category have to do with "business," the latter with industry, taking the
+      latter word in the mechanical sense. The latter class are not often
+      recognized as institutions, in great part because they do not immediately
+      concern the ruling class, and are, therefore, seldom the subject of
+      legislation or of deliberate convention. When they do receive attention
+      they are commonly approached from the pecuniary or business side; that
+      being the side or phase of economic life that chiefly occupies men's
+      deliberations in our time, especially the deliberations of the upper
+      classes. These classes have little else than a business interest in things
+      economic, and on them at the same time it is chiefly incumbent to
+      deliberate upon the community's affairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The relation of the leisure (that is, propertied non-industrial) class to
+      the economic process is a pecuniary relation&mdash;a relation of
+      acquisition, not of production; of exploitation, not of serviceability.
+      Indirectly their economic office may, of course, be of the utmost
+      importance to the economic life process; and it is by no means here
+      intended to depreciate the economic function of the propertied class or of
+      the captains of industry. The purpose is simply to point out what is the
+      nature of the relation of these classes to the industrial process and to
+      economic institutions. Their office is of a parasitic character, and their
+      interest is to divert what substance they may to their own use, and to
+      retain whatever is under their hand. The conventions of the business world
+      have grown up under the selective surveillance of this principle of
+      predation or parasitism. They are conventions of ownership; derivatives,
+      more or less remote, of the ancient predatory culture. But these pecuniary
+      institutions do not entirely fit the situation of today, for they have
+      grown up under a past situation differing somewhat from the present. Even
+      for effectiveness in the pecuniary way, therefore, they are not as apt as
+      might be. The changed industrial life requires changed methods of
+      acquisition; and the pecuniary classes have some interest in so adapting
+      the pecuniary institutions as to give them the best effect for acquisition
+      of private gain that is compatible with the continuance of the industrial
+      process out of which this gain arises. Hence there is a more or less
+      consistent trend in the leisure-class guidance of institutional growth,
+      answering to the pecuniary ends which shape leisure-class economic life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The effect of the pecuniary interest and the pecuniary habit of mind upon
+      the growth of institutions is seen in those enactments and conventions
+      that make for security of property, enforcement of contracts, facility of
+      pecuniary transactions, vested interests. Of such bearing are changes
+      affecting bankruptcy and receiverships, limited liability, banking and
+      currency, coalitions of laborers or employers, trusts and pools. The
+      community's institutional furniture of this kind is of immediate
+      consequence only to the propertied classes, and in proportion as they are
+      propertied; that is to say, in proportion as they are to be ranked with
+      the leisure class. But indirectly these conventions of business life are
+      of the gravest consequence for the industrial process and for the life of
+      the community. And in guiding the institutional growth in this respect,
+      the pecuniary classes, therefore, serve a purpose of the most serious
+      importance to the community, not only in the conservation of the accepted
+      social scheme, but also in shaping the industrial process proper. The
+      immediate end of this pecuniary institutional structure and of its
+      amelioration is the greater facility of peaceable and orderly
+      exploitation; but its remoter effects far outrun this immediate object.
+      Not only does the more facile conduct of business permit industry and
+      extra-industrial life to go on with less perturbation; but the resulting
+      elimination of disturbances and complications calling for an exercise of
+      astute discrimination in everyday affairs acts to make the pecuniary class
+      itself superfluous. As fast as pecuniary transactions are reduced to
+      routine, the captain of industry can be dispensed with. This consummation,
+      it is needless to say, lies yet in the indefinite future. The
+      ameliorations wrought in favor of the pecuniary interest in modern
+      institutions tend, in another field, to substitute the "soulless"
+      joint-stock corporation for the captain, and so they make also for the
+      dispensability, of the great leisure-class function of ownership.
+      Indirectly, therefore, the bent given to the growth of economic
+      institutions by the leisure-class influence is of very considerable
+      industrial consequence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Nine ~~ The Conservation of Archaic Traits
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The institution of a leisure class has an effect not only upon social
+      structure but also upon the individual character of the members of
+      society. So soon as a given proclivity or a given point of view has won
+      acceptance as an authoritative standard or norm of life it will react upon
+      the character of the members of the society which has accepted it as a
+      norm. It will to some extent shape their habits of thought and will
+      exercise a selective surveillance over the development of men's aptitudes
+      and inclinations. This effect is wrought partly by a coercive, educational
+      adaptation of the habits of all individuals, partly by a selective
+      elimination of the unfit individuals and lines of descent. Such human
+      material as does not lend itself to the methods of life imposed by the
+      accepted scheme suffers more or less elimination as well as repression.
+      The principles of pecuniary emulation and of industrial exemption have in
+      this way been erected into canons of life, and have become coercive
+      factors of some importance in the situation to which men have to adapt
+      themselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These two broad principles of conspicuous waste and industrial exemption
+      affect the cultural development both by guiding men's habits of thought,
+      and so controlling the growth of institutions, and by selectively
+      conserving certain traits of human nature that conduce to facility of life
+      under the leisure-class scheme, and so controlling the effective temper of
+      the community. The proximate tendency of the institution of a leisure
+      class in shaping human character runs in the direction of spiritual
+      survival and reversion. Its effect upon the temper of a community is of
+      the nature of an arrested spiritual development. In the later culture
+      especially, the institution has, on the whole, a conservative trend. This
+      proposition is familiar enough in substance, but it may to many have the
+      appearance of novelty in its present application. Therefore a summary
+      review of its logical grounds may not be uncalled for, even at the risk of
+      some tedious repetition and formulation of commonplaces.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Social evolution is a process of selective adaptation of temperament and
+      habits of thought under the stress of the circumstances of associated
+      life. The adaptation of habits of thought is the growth of institutions.
+      But along with the growth of institutions has gone a change of a more
+      substantial character. Not only have the habits of men changed with the
+      changing exigencies of the situation, but these changing exigencies have
+      also brought about a correlative change in human nature. The human
+      material of society itself varies with the changing conditions of life.
+      This variation of human nature is held by the later ethnologists to be a
+      process of selection between several relatively stable and persistent
+      ethnic types or ethnic elements. Men tend to revert or to breed true, more
+      or less closely, to one or another of certain types of human nature that
+      have in their main features been fixed in approximate conformity to a
+      situation in the past which differed from the situation of today. There
+      are several of these relatively stable ethnic types of mankind comprised
+      in the populations of the Western culture. These ethnic types survive in
+      the race inheritance today, not as rigid and invariable moulds, each of a
+      single precise and specific pattern, but in the form of a greater or
+      smaller number of variants. Some variation of the ethnic types has
+      resulted under the protracted selective process to which the several types
+      and their hybrids have been subjected during the prehistoric and historic
+      growth of culture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This necessary variation of the types themselves, due to a selective
+      process of considerable duration and of a consistent trend, has not been
+      sufficiently noticed by the writers who have discussed ethnic survival.
+      The argument is here concerned with two main divergent variants of human
+      nature resulting from this, relatively late, selective adaptation of the
+      ethnic types comprised in the Western culture; the point of interest being
+      the probable effect of the situation of today in furthering variation
+      along one or the other of these two divergent lines.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ethnological position may be briefly summed up; and in order to avoid
+      any but the most indispensable detail the schedule of types and variants
+      and the scheme of reversion and survival in which they are concerned are
+      here presented with a diagrammatic meagerness and simplicity which would
+      not be admissible for any other purpose. The man of our industrial
+      communities tends to breed true to one or the other of three main ethic
+      types; the dolichocephalic-blond, the brachycephalic-brunette, and the
+      Mediterranean&mdash;disregarding minor and outlying elements of our
+      culture. But within each of these main ethnic types the reversion tends to
+      one or the other of at least two main directions of variation; the
+      peaceable or antepredatory variant and the predatory variant. The former
+      of these two characteristic variants is nearer to the generic type in each
+      case, being the reversional representative of its type as it stood at the
+      earliest stage of associated life of which there is available evidence,
+      either archaeological or psychological. This variant is taken to represent
+      the ancestors of existing civilized man at the peaceable, savage phase of
+      life which preceded the predatory culture, the regime of status, and the
+      growth of pecuniary emulation. The second or predatory variant of the
+      types is taken to be a survival of a more recent modification of the main
+      ethnic types and their hybrids&mdash;of these types as they were modified,
+      mainly by a selective adaptation, under the discipline of the predatory
+      culture and the latter emulative culture of the quasi-peaceable stage, or
+      the pecuniary culture proper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Under the recognized laws of heredity there may be a survival from a more
+      or less remote past phase. In the ordinary, average, or normal case, if
+      the type has varied, the traits of the type are transmitted approximately
+      as they have stood in the recent past&mdash;which may be called the
+      hereditary present. For the purpose in hand this hereditary present is
+      represented by the later predatory and the quasi-peaceable culture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is to the variant of human nature which is characteristic of this
+      recent&mdash;hereditarily still existing&mdash;predatory or
+      quasi-predatory culture that the modern civilized man tends to breed true
+      in the common run of cases. This proposition requires some qualification
+      so far as concerns the descendants of the servile or repressed classes of
+      barbarian times, but the qualification necessary is probably not so great
+      as might at first thought appear. Taking the population as a whole, this
+      predatory, emulative variant does not seem to have attained a high degree
+      of consistency or stability. That is to say, the human nature inherited by
+      modern Occidental man is not nearly uniform in respect of the range or the
+      relative strength of the various aptitudes and propensities which go to
+      make it up. The man of the hereditary present is slightly archaic as
+      judged for the purposes of the latest exigencies of associated life. And
+      the type to which the modern man chiefly tends to revert under the law of
+      variation is a somewhat more archaic human nature. On the other hand, to
+      judge by the reversional traits which show themselves in individuals that
+      vary from the prevailing predatory style of temperament, the
+      ante-predatory variant seems to have a greater stability and greater
+      symmetry in the distribution or relative force of its temperamental
+      elements.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This divergence of inherited human nature, as between an earlier and a
+      later variant of the ethnic type to which the individual tends to breed
+      true, is traversed and obscured by a similar divergence between the two or
+      three main ethnic types that go to make up the Occidental populations. The
+      individuals in these communities are conceived to be, in virtually every
+      instance, hybrids of the prevailing ethnic elements combined in the most
+      varied proportions; with the result that they tend to take back to one or
+      the other of the component ethnic types. These ethnic types differ in
+      temperament in a way somewhat similar to the difference between the
+      predatory and the antepredatory variants of the types; the dolicho-blond
+      type showing more of the characteristics of the predatory temperament&mdash;or
+      at least more of the violent disposition&mdash;than the
+      brachycephalic-brunette type, and especially more than the Mediterranean.
+      When the growth of institutions or of the effective sentiment of a given
+      community shows a divergence from the predatory human nature, therefore,
+      it is impossible to say with certainty that such a divergence indicates a
+      reversion to the ante-predatory variant. It may be due to an increasing
+      dominance of the one or the other of the "lower" ethnic elements in the
+      population. Still, although the evidence is not as conclusive as might be
+      desired, there are indications that the variations in the effective
+      temperament of modern communities is not altogether due to a selection
+      between stable ethnic types. It seems to be to some appreciable extent a
+      selection between the predatory and the peaceable variants of the several
+      types. This conception of contemporary human evolution is not
+      indispensable to the discussion. The general conclusions reached by the
+      use of these concepts of selective adaptation would remain substantially
+      true if the earlier, Darwinian and Spencerian, terms and concepts were
+      substituted. Under the circumstances, some latitude may be admissible in
+      the use of terms. The word "type" is used loosely, to denote variations of
+      temperament which the ethnologists would perhaps recognize only as trivial
+      variants of the type rather than as distinct ethnic types. Wherever a
+      closer discrimination seems essential to the argument, the effort to make
+      such a closer discrimination will be evident from the context.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ethnic types of today, then, are variants of the primitive racial
+      types. They have suffered some alteration, and have attained some degree
+      of fixity in their altered form, under the discipline of the barbarian
+      culture. The man of the hereditary present is the barbarian variant,
+      servile or aristocratic, of the ethnic elements that constitute him. But
+      this barbarian variant has not attained the highest degree of homogeneity
+      or of stability. The barbarian culture&mdash;the predatory and
+      quasi-peaceable cultural stages&mdash;though of great absolute duration,
+      has been neither protracted enough nor invariable enough in character to
+      give an extreme fixity of type. Variations from the barbarian human nature
+      occur with some frequency, and these cases of variation are becoming more
+      noticeable today, because the conditions of modern life no longer act
+      consistently to repress departures from the barbarian normal. The
+      predatory temperament does not lead itself to all the purposes of modern
+      life, and more especially not to modern industry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Departures from the human nature of the hereditary present are most
+      frequently of the nature of reversions to an earlier variant of the type.
+      This earlier variant is represented by the temperament which characterizes
+      the primitive phase of peaceable savagery. The circumstances of life and
+      the ends of effort that prevailed before the advent of the barbarian
+      culture, shaped human nature and fixed it as regards certain fundamental
+      traits. And it is to these ancient, generic features that modern men are
+      prone to take back in case of variation from the human nature of the
+      hereditary present. The conditions under which men lived in the most
+      primitive stages of associated life that can properly be called human,
+      seem to have been of a peaceful kind; and the character&mdash;the
+      temperament and spiritual attitude of men under these early conditions or
+      environment and institutions seems to have been of a peaceful and
+      unaggressive, not to say an indolent, cast. For the immediate purpose this
+      peaceable cultural stage may be taken to mark the initial phase of social
+      development. So far as concerns the present argument, the dominant
+      spiritual feature of this presumptive initial phase of culture seems to
+      have been an unreflecting, unformulated sense of group solidarity, largely
+      expressing itself in a complacent, but by no means strenuous, sympathy
+      with all facility of human life, and an uneasy revulsion against
+      apprehended inhibition or futility of life. Through its ubiquitous
+      presence in the habits of thought of the ante-predatory savage man, this
+      pervading but uneager sense of the generically useful seems to have
+      exercised an appreciable constraining force upon his life and upon the
+      manner of his habitual contact with other members of the group.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The traces of this initial, undifferentiated peaceable phase of culture
+      seem faint and doubtful if we look merely to such categorical evidence of
+      its existence as is afforded by usages and views in vogue within the
+      historical present, whether in civilized or in rude communities; but less
+      dubious evidence of its existence is to be found in psychological
+      survivals, in the way of persistent and pervading traits of human
+      character. These traits survive perhaps in an especial degree among those
+      ethic elements which were crowded into the background during the predatory
+      culture. Traits that were suited to the earlier habits of life then became
+      relatively useless in the individual struggle for existence. And those
+      elements of the population, or those ethnic groups, which were by
+      temperament less fitted to the predatory life were repressed and pushed
+      into the background. On the transition to the predatory culture the
+      character of the struggle for existence changed in some degree from a
+      struggle of the group against a non-human environment to a struggle
+      against a human environment. This change was accompanied by an increasing
+      antagonism and consciousness of antagonism between the individual members
+      of the group. The conditions of success within the group, as well as the
+      conditions of the survival of the group, changed in some measure; and the
+      dominant spiritual attitude for the group gradually changed, and brought a
+      different range of aptitudes and propensities into the position of
+      legitimate dominance in the accepted scheme of life. Among these archaic
+      traits that are to be regarded as survivals from the peaceable cultural
+      phase, are that instinct of race solidarity which we call conscience,
+      including the sense of truthfulness and equity, and the instinct of
+      workmanship, in its naive, non-invidious expression.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Under the guidance of the later biological and psychological science,
+      human nature will have to be restated in terms of habit; and in the
+      restatement, this, in outline, appears to be the only assignable place and
+      ground of these traits. These habits of life are of too pervading a
+      character to be ascribed to the influence of a late or brief discipline.
+      The ease with which they are temporarily overborne by the special
+      exigencies of recent and modern life argues that these habits are the
+      surviving effects of a discipline of extremely ancient date, from the
+      teachings of which men have frequently been constrained to depart in
+      detail under the altered circumstances of a later time; and the almost
+      ubiquitous fashion in which they assert themselves whenever the pressure
+      of special exigencies is relieved, argues that the process by which the
+      traits were fixed and incorporated into the spiritual make-up of the type
+      must have lasted for a relatively very long time and without serious
+      intermission. The point is not seriously affected by any question as to
+      whether it was a process of habituation in the old-fashioned sense of the
+      word or a process of selective adaptation of the race.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The character and exigencies of life, under that regime of status and of
+      individual and class antithesis which covers the entire interval from the
+      beginning of predatory culture to the present, argue that the traits of
+      temperament here under discussion could scarcely have arisen and acquired
+      fixity during that interval. It is entirely probable that these traits
+      have come down from an earlier method of life, and have survived through
+      the interval of predatory and quasi-peaceable culture in a condition of
+      incipient, or at least imminent, desuetude, rather than that they have
+      been brought out and fixed by this later culture. They appear to be
+      hereditary characteristics of the race, and to have persisted in spite of
+      the altered requirements of success under the predatory and the later
+      pecuniary stages of culture. They seem to have persisted by force of the
+      tenacity of transmission that belongs to an hereditary trait that is
+      present in some degree in every member of the species, and which therefore
+      rests on a broad basis of race continuity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such a generic feature is not readily eliminated, even under a process of
+      selection so severe and protracted as that to which the traits here under
+      discussion were subjected during the predatory and quasi-peaceable stages.
+      These peaceable traits are in great part alien to the methods and the
+      animus of barbarian life. The salient characteristic of the barbarian
+      culture is an unremitting emulation and antagonism between classes and
+      between individuals. This emulative discipline favors those individuals
+      and lines of descent which possess the peaceable savage traits in a
+      relatively slight degree. It therefore tends to eliminate these traits,
+      and it has apparently weakened them, in an appreciable degree, in the
+      populations that have been subject to it. Even where the extreme penalty
+      for non-conformity to the barbarian type of temperament is not paid, there
+      results at least a more or less consistent repression of the
+      non-conforming individuals and lines of descent. Where life is largely a
+      struggle between individuals within the group, the possession of the
+      ancient peaceable traits in a marked degree would hamper an individual in
+      the struggle for life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Under any known phase of culture, other or later than the presumptive
+      initial phase here spoken of, the gifts of good-nature, equity, and
+      indiscriminate sympathy do not appreciably further the life of the
+      individual. Their possession may serve to protect the individual from hard
+      usage at the hands of a majority that insists on a modicum of these
+      ingredients in their ideal of a normal man; but apart from their indirect
+      and negative effect in this way, the individual fares better under the
+      regime of competition in proportion as he has less of these gifts. Freedom
+      from scruple, from sympathy, honesty and regard for life, may, within
+      fairly wide limits, be said to further the success of the individual in
+      the pecuniary culture. The highly successful men of all times have
+      commonly been of this type; except those whose success has not been scored
+      in terms of either wealth or power. It is only within narrow limits, and
+      then only in a Pickwickian sense, that honesty is the best policy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As seen from the point of view of life under modern civilized conditions
+      in an enlightened community of the Western culture, the primitive,
+      ante-predatory savage, whose character it has been attempted to trace in
+      outline above, was not a great success. Even for the purposes of that
+      hypothetical culture to which his type of human nature owes what stability
+      it has&mdash;even for the ends of the peaceable savage group&mdash;this
+      primitive man has quite as many and as conspicuous economic failings as he
+      has economic virtues&mdash;as should be plain to any one whose sense of
+      the case is not biased by leniency born of a fellow-feeling. At his best
+      he is "a clever, good-for-nothing fellow." The shortcomings of this
+      presumptively primitive type of character are weakness, inefficiency, lack
+      of initiative and ingenuity, and a yielding and indolent amiability,
+      together with a lively but inconsequential animistic sense. Along with
+      these traits go certain others which have some value for the collective
+      life process, in the sense that they further the facility of life in the
+      group. These traits are truthfulness, peaceableness, good-will, and a
+      non-emulative, non-invidious interest in men and things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the advent of the predatory stage of life there comes a change in the
+      requirements of the successful human character. Men's habits of life are
+      required to adapt themselves to new exigencies under a new scheme of human
+      relations. The same unfolding of energy, which had previously found
+      expression in the traits of savage life recited above, is now required to
+      find expression along a new line of action, in a new group of habitual
+      responses to altered stimuli. The methods which, as counted in terms of
+      facility of life, answered measurably under the earlier conditions, are no
+      longer adequate under the new conditions. The earlier situation was
+      characterized by a relative absence of antagonism or differentiation of
+      interests, the later situation by an emulation constantly increasing in
+      relative absence of antagonism or differentiation of interests, the later
+      situation by an emulation constantly increasing in intensity and narrowing
+      in scope. The traits which characterize the predatory and subsequent
+      stages of culture, and which indicate the types of man best fitted to
+      survive under the regime of status, are (in their primary expression)
+      ferocity, self-seeking, clannishness, and disingenuousness&mdash;a free
+      resort to force and fraud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Under the severe and protracted discipline of the regime of competition,
+      the selection of ethnic types has acted to give a somewhat pronounced
+      dominance to these traits of character, by favoring the survival of those
+      ethnic elements which are most richly endowed in these respects. At the
+      same time the earlier&mdash;acquired, more generic habits of the race have
+      never ceased to have some usefulness for the purpose of the life of the
+      collectivity and have never fallen into definitive abeyance. It may be
+      worth while to point out that the dolicho-blond type of European man seems
+      to owe much of its dominating influence and its masterful position in the
+      recent culture to its possessing the characteristics of predatory man in
+      an exceptional degree. These spiritual traits, together with a large
+      endowment of physical energy&mdash;itself probably a result of selection
+      between groups and between lines of descent&mdash;chiefly go to place any
+      ethnic element in the position of a leisure or master class, especially
+      during the earlier phases of the development of the institution of a
+      leisure class. This need not mean that precisely the same complement of
+      aptitudes in any individual would insure him an eminent personal success.
+      Under the competitive regime, the conditions of success for the individual
+      are not necessarily the same as those for a class. The success of a class
+      or party presumes a strong element of clannishness, or loyalty to a chief,
+      or adherence to a tenet; whereas the competitive individual can best
+      achieve his ends if he combines the barbarian's energy, initiative,
+      self-seeking and disingenuousness with the savage's lack of loyalty or
+      clannishness. It may be remarked by the way, that the men who have scored
+      a brilliant (Napoleonic) success on the basis of an impartial self-seeking
+      and absence of scruple, have not uncommonly shown more of the physical
+      characteristics of the brachycephalic-brunette than of the dolicho-blond.
+      The greater proportion of moderately successful individuals, in a
+      self-seeking way, however, seem, in physique, to belong to the last-named
+      ethnic element.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The temperament induced by the predatory habit of life makes for the
+      survival and fullness of life of the individual under a regime of
+      emulation; at the same time it makes for the survival and success of the
+      group if the group's life as a collectivity is also predominantly a life
+      of hostile competition with other groups. But the evolution of economic
+      life in the industrially more mature communities has now begun to take
+      such a turn that the interest of the community no longer coincides with
+      the emulative interests of the individual. In their corporate capacity,
+      these advanced industrial communities are ceasing to be competitors for
+      the means of life or for the right to live&mdash;except in so far as the
+      predatory propensities of their ruling classes keep up the tradition of
+      war and rapine. These communities are no longer hostile to one another by
+      force of circumstances, other than the circumstances of tradition and
+      temperament. Their material interests&mdash;apart, possibly, from the
+      interests of the collective good fame&mdash;are not only no longer
+      incompatible, but the success of any one of the communities unquestionably
+      furthers the fullness of life of any other community in the group, for the
+      present and for an incalculable time to come. No one of them any longer
+      has any material interest in getting the better of any other. The same is
+      not true in the same degree as regards individuals and their relations to
+      one another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The collective interests of any modern community center in industrial
+      efficiency. The individual is serviceable for the ends of the community
+      somewhat in proportion to his efficiency in the productive employments
+      vulgarly so called. This collective interest is best served by honesty,
+      diligence, peacefulness, good-will, an absence of self-seeking, and an
+      habitual recognition and apprehension of causal sequence, without
+      admixture of animistic belief and without a sense of dependence on any
+      preternatural intervention in the course of events. Not much is to be said
+      for the beauty, moral excellence, or general worthiness and reputability
+      of such a prosy human nature as these traits imply; and there is little
+      ground of enthusiasm for the manner of collective life that would result
+      from the prevalence of these traits in unmitigated dominance. But that is
+      beside the point. The successful working of a modern industrial community
+      is best secured where these traits concur, and it is attained in the
+      degree in which the human material is characterized by their possession.
+      Their presence in some measure is required in order to have a tolerable
+      adjustment to the circumstances of the modern industrial situation. The
+      complex, comprehensive, essentially peaceable, and highly organized
+      mechanism of the modern industrial community works to the best advantage
+      when these traits, or most of them, are present in the highest practicable
+      degree. These traits are present in a markedly less degree in the man of
+      the predatory type than is useful for the purposes of the modern
+      collective life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the other hand, the immediate interest of the individual under the
+      competitive regime is best served by shrewd trading and unscrupulous
+      management. The characteristics named above as serving the interests of
+      the community are disserviceable to the individual, rather than otherwise.
+      The presence of these aptitudes in his make-up diverts his energies to
+      other ends than those of pecuniary gain; and also in his pursuit of gain
+      they lead him to seek gain by the indirect and ineffectual channels of
+      industry, rather than by a free and unfaltering career of sharp practice.
+      The industrial aptitudes are pretty consistently a hindrance to the
+      individual. Under the regime of emulation the members of a modern
+      industrial community are rivals, each of whom will best attain his
+      individual and immediate advantage if, through an exceptional exemption
+      from scruple, he is able serenely to overreach and injure his fellows when
+      the chance offers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It has already been noticed that modern economic institutions fall into
+      two roughly distinct categories&mdash;the pecuniary and the industrial.
+      The like is true of employments. Under the former head are employments
+      that have to do with ownership or acquisition; under the latter head,
+      those that have to do with workmanship or production. As was found in
+      speaking of the growth of institutions, so with regard to employments. The
+      economic interests of the leisure class lie in the pecuniary employments;
+      those of the working classes lie in both classes of employments, but
+      chiefly in the industrial. Entrance to the leisure class lies through the
+      pecuniary employments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These two classes of employment differ materially in respect of the
+      aptitudes required for each; and the training which they give similarly
+      follows two divergent lines. The discipline of the pecuniary employments
+      acts to conserve and to cultivate certain of the predatory aptitudes and
+      the predatory animus. It does this both by educating those individuals and
+      classes who are occupied with these employments and by selectively
+      repressing and eliminating those individuals and lines of descent that are
+      unfit in this respect. So far as men's habits of thought are shaped by the
+      competitive process of acquisition and tenure; so far as their economic
+      functions are comprised within the range of ownership of wealth as
+      conceived in terms of exchange value, and its management and financiering
+      through a permutation of values; so far their experience in economic life
+      favors the survival and accentuation of the predatory temperament and
+      habits of thought. Under the modern, peaceable system, it is of course the
+      peaceable range of predatory habits and aptitudes that is chiefly fostered
+      by a life of acquisition. That is to say, the pecuniary employments give
+      proficiency in the general line of practices comprised under fraud, rather
+      than in those that belong under the more archaic method of forcible
+      seizure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These pecuniary employments, tending to conserve the predatory
+      temperament, are the employments which have to do with ownership&mdash;the
+      immediate function of the leisure class proper&mdash;and the subsidiary
+      functions concerned with acquisition and accumulation. These cover the
+      class of persons and that range of duties in the economic process which
+      have to do with the ownership of enterprises engaged in competitive
+      industry; especially those fundamental lines of economic management which
+      are classed as financiering operations. To these may be added the greater
+      part of mercantile occupations. In their best and clearest development
+      these duties make up the economic office of the "captain of industry." The
+      captain of industry is an astute man rather than an ingenious one, and his
+      captaincy is a pecuniary rather than an industrial captaincy. Such
+      administration of industry as he exercises is commonly of a permissive
+      kind. The mechanically effective details of production and of industrial
+      organization are delegated to subordinates of a less "practical" turn of
+      mind&mdash;men who are possessed of a gift for workmanship rather than
+      administrative ability. So far as regards their tendency in shaping human
+      nature by education and selection, the common run of non-economic
+      employments are to be classed with the pecuniary employments. Such are
+      politics and ecclesiastical and military employments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The pecuniary employments have also the sanction of reputability in a much
+      higher degree than the industrial employments. In this way the
+      leisure-class standards of good repute come in to sustain the prestige of
+      those aptitudes that serve the invidious purpose; and the leisure-class
+      scheme of decorous living, therefore, also furthers the survival and
+      culture of the predatory traits. Employments fall into a hierarchical
+      gradation of reputability. Those which have to do immediately with
+      ownership on a large scale are the most reputable of economic employments
+      proper. Next to these in good repute come those employments that are
+      immediately subservient to ownership and financiering&mdash;such as
+      banking and the law. Banking employments also carry a suggestion of large
+      ownership, and this fact is doubtless accountable for a share of the
+      prestige that attaches to the business. The profession of the law does not
+      imply large ownership; but since no taint of usefulness, for other than
+      the competitive purpose, attaches to the lawyer's trade, it grades high in
+      the conventional scheme. The lawyer is exclusively occupied with the
+      details of predatory fraud, either in achieving or in checkmating
+      chicanery, and success in the profession is therefore accepted as marking
+      a large endowment of that barbarian astuteness which has always commanded
+      men's respect and fear. Mercantile pursuits are only half-way reputable,
+      unless they involve a large element of ownership and a small element of
+      usefulness. They grade high or low somewhat in proportion as they serve
+      the higher or the lower needs; so that the business of retailing the
+      vulgar necessaries of life descends to the level of the handicrafts and
+      factory labor. Manual labor, or even the work of directing mechanical
+      processes, is of course on a precarious footing as regards respectability.
+      A qualification is necessary as regards the discipline given by the
+      pecuniary employments. As the scale of industrial enterprise grows larger,
+      pecuniary management comes to bear less of the character of chicanery and
+      shrewd competition in detail. That is to say, for an ever-increasing
+      proportion of the persons who come in contact with this phase of economic
+      life, business reduces itself to a routine in which there is less
+      immediate suggestion of overreaching or exploiting a competitor. The
+      consequent exemption from predatory habits extends chiefly to subordinates
+      employed in business. The duties of ownership and administration are
+      virtually untouched by this qualification. The case is different as
+      regards those individuals or classes who are immediately occupied with the
+      technique and manual operations of production. Their daily life is not in
+      the same degree a course of habituation to the emulative and invidious
+      motives and maneuvers of the pecuniary side of industry. They are
+      consistently held to the apprehension and coordination of mechanical facts
+      and sequences, and to their appreciation and utilization for the purposes
+      of human life. So far as concerns this portion of the population, the
+      educative and selective action of the industrial process with which they
+      are immediately in contact acts to adapt their habits of thought to the
+      non-invidious purposes of the collective life. For them, therefore, it
+      hastens the obsolescence of the distinctively predatory aptitudes and
+      propensities carried over by heredity and tradition from the barbarian
+      past of the race.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The educative action of the economic life of the community, therefore, is
+      not of a uniform kind throughout all its manifestations. That range of
+      economic activities which is concerned immediately with pecuniary
+      competition has a tendency to conserve certain predatory traits; while
+      those industrial occupations which have to do immediately with the
+      production of goods have in the main the contrary tendency. But with
+      regard to the latter class of employments it is to be noticed in
+      qualification that the persons engaged in them are nearly all to some
+      extent also concerned with matters of pecuniary competition (as, for
+      instance, in the competitive fixing of wages and salaries, in the purchase
+      of goods for consumption, etc.). Therefore the distinction here made
+      between classes of employments is by no means a hard and fast distinction
+      between classes of persons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The employments of the leisure classes in modern industry are such as to
+      keep alive certain of the predatory habits and aptitudes. So far as the
+      members of those classes take part in the industrial process, their
+      training tends to conserve in them the barbarian temperament. But there is
+      something to be said on the other side. Individuals so placed as to be
+      exempt from strain may survive and transmit their characteristics even if
+      they differ widely from the average of the species both in physique and in
+      spiritual make-up. The chances for a survival and transmission of
+      atavistic traits are greatest in those classes that are most sheltered
+      from the stress of circumstances. The leisure class is in some degree
+      sheltered from the stress of the industrial situation, and should,
+      therefore, afford an exceptionally great proportion of reversions to the
+      peaceable or savage temperament. It should be possible for such aberrant
+      or atavistic individuals to unfold their life activity on ante-predatory
+      lines without suffering as prompt a repression or elimination as in the
+      lower walks of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Something of the sort seems to be true in fact. There is, for instance, an
+      appreciable proportion of the upper classes whose inclinations lead them
+      into philanthropic work, and there is a considerable body of sentiment in
+      the class going to support efforts of reform and amelioration. And much of
+      this philanthropic and reformatory effort, moreover, bears the marks of
+      that amiable "cleverness" and incoherence that is characteristic of the
+      primitive savage. But it may still be doubtful whether these facts are
+      evidence of a larger proportion of reversions in the higher than in the
+      lower strata, even if the same inclinations were present in the
+      impecunious classes, it would not as easily find expression there; since
+      those classes lack the means and the time and energy to give effect to
+      their inclinations in this respect. The prima facie evidence of the facts
+      can scarcely go unquestioned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In further qualification it is to be noted that the leisure class of today
+      is recruited from those who have been successful in a pecuniary way, and
+      who, therefore, are presumably endowed with more than an even complement
+      of the predatory traits. Entrance into the leisure class lies through the
+      pecuniary employments, and these employments, by selection and adaptation,
+      act to admit to the upper levels only those lines of descent that are
+      pecuniarily fit to survive under the predatory test. And so soon as a case
+      of reversion to non-predatory human nature shows itself on these upper
+      levels, it is commonly weeded out and thrown back to the lower pecuniary
+      levels. In order to hold its place in the class, a stock must have the
+      pecuniary temperament; otherwise its fortune would be dissipated and it
+      would presently lose caste. Instances of this kind are sufficiently
+      frequent. The constituency of the leisure class is kept up by a continual
+      selective process, whereby the individuals and lines of descent that are
+      eminently fitted for an aggressive pecuniary competition are withdrawn
+      from the lower classes. In order to reach the upper levels the aspirant
+      must have, not only a fair average complement of the pecuniary aptitudes,
+      but he must have these gifts in such an eminent degree as to overcome very
+      material difficulties that stand in the way of his ascent. Barring
+      accidents, the nouveaux arrivés are a picked body.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This process of selective admission has, of course, always been going on;
+      ever since the fashion of pecuniary emulation set in&mdash;which is much
+      the same as saying, ever since the institution of a leisure class was
+      first installed. But the precise ground of selection has not always been
+      the same, and the selective process has therefore not always given the
+      same results. In the early barbarian, or predatory stage proper, the test
+      of fitness was prowess, in the naive sense of the word. To gain entrance
+      to the class, the candidate had to be gifted with clannishness,
+      massiveness, ferocity, unscrupulousness, and tenacity of purpose. These
+      were the qualities that counted toward the accumulation and continued
+      tenure of wealth. The economic basis of the leisure class, then as later,
+      was the possession of wealth; but the methods of accumulating wealth, and
+      the gifts required for holding it, have changed in some degree since the
+      early days of the predatory culture. In consequence of the selective
+      process the dominant traits of the early barbarian leisure class were bold
+      aggression, an alert sense of status, and a free resort to fraud. The
+      members of the class held their place by tenure of prowess. In the later
+      barbarian culture society attained settled methods of acquisition and
+      possession under the quasi-peaceable regime of status. Simple aggression
+      and unrestrained violence in great measure gave place to shrewd practice
+      and chicanery, as the best approved method of accumulating wealth. A
+      different range of aptitudes and propensities would then be conserved in
+      the leisure class. Masterful aggression, and the correlative massiveness,
+      together with a ruthlessly consistent sense of status, would still count
+      among the most splendid traits of the class. These have remained in our
+      traditions as the typical "aristocratic virtues." But with these were
+      associated an increasing complement of the less obtrusive pecuniary
+      virtues; such as providence, prudence, and chicanery. As time has gone on,
+      and the modern peaceable stage of pecuniary culture has been approached,
+      the last-named range of aptitudes and habits has gained in relative
+      effectiveness for pecuniary ends, and they have counted for relatively
+      more in the selective process under which admission is gained and place is
+      held in the leisure class.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ground of selection has changed, until the aptitudes which now qualify
+      for admission to the class are the pecuniary aptitudes only. What remains
+      of the predatory barbarian traits is the tenacity of purpose or
+      consistency of aim which distinguished the successful predatory barbarian
+      from the peaceable savage whom he supplanted. But this trait can not be
+      said characteristically to distinguish the pecuniarily successful
+      upper-class man from the rank and file of the industrial classes. The
+      training and the selection to which the latter are exposed in modern
+      industrial life give a similarly decisive weight to this trait. Tenacity
+      of purpose may rather be said to distinguish both these classes from two
+      others; the shiftless ne'er do-well and the lower-class delinquent. In
+      point of natural endowment the pecuniary man compares with the delinquent
+      in much the same way as the industrial man compares with the good-natured
+      shiftless dependent. The ideal pecuniary man is like the ideal delinquent
+      in his unscrupulous conversion of goods and persons to his own ends, and
+      in a callous disregard of the feelings and wishes of others and of the
+      remoter effects of his actions; but he is unlike him in possessing a
+      keener sense of status, and in working more consistently and farsightedly
+      to a remoter end. The kinship of the two types of temperament is further
+      shown in a proclivity to "sport" and gambling, and a relish of aimless
+      emulation. The ideal pecuniary man also shows a curious kinship with the
+      delinquent in one of the concomitant variations of the predatory human
+      nature. The delinquent is very commonly of a superstitious habit of mind;
+      he is a great believer in luck, spells, divination and destiny, and in
+      omens and shamanistic ceremony. Where circumstances are favorable, this
+      proclivity is apt to express itself in a certain servile devotional fervor
+      and a punctilious attention to devout observances; it may perhaps be
+      better characterized as devoutness than as religion. At this point the
+      temperament of the delinquent has more in common with the pecuniary and
+      leisure classes than with the industrial man or with the class of
+      shiftless dependents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Life in a modern industrial community, or in other words life under the
+      pecuniary culture, acts by a process of selection to develop and conserve
+      a certain range of aptitudes and propensities. The present tendency of
+      this selective process is not simply a reversion to a given, immutable
+      ethnic type. It tends rather to a modification of human nature differing
+      in some respects from any of the types or variants transmitted out of the
+      past. The objective point of the evolution is not a single one. The
+      temperament which the evolution acts to establish as normal differs from
+      any one of the archaic variants of human nature in its greater stability
+      of aim&mdash;greater singleness of purpose and greater persistence in
+      effort. So far as concerns economic theory, the objective point of the
+      selective process is on the whole single to this extent; although there
+      are minor tendencies of considerable importance diverging from this line
+      of development. But apart from this general trend the line of development
+      is not single. As concerns economic theory, the development in other
+      respects runs on two divergent lines. So far as regards the selective
+      conservation of capacities or aptitudes in individuals, these two lines
+      may be called the pecuniary and the industrial. As regards the
+      conservation of propensities, spiritual attitude, or animus, the two may
+      be called the invidious or self-regarding and the non-invidious or
+      economical. As regards the intellectual or cognitive bent of the two
+      directions of growth, the former may be characterized as the personal
+      standpoint, of conation, qualitative relation, status, or worth; the
+      latter as the impersonal standpoint, of sequence, quantitative relation,
+      mechanical efficiency, or use.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The pecuniary employments call into action chiefly the former of these two
+      ranges of aptitudes and propensities, and act selectively to conserve them
+      in the population. The industrial employments, on the other hand, chiefly
+      exercise the latter range, and act to conserve them. An exhaustive
+      psychological analysis will show that each of these two ranges of
+      aptitudes and propensities is but the multiform expression of a given
+      temperamental bent. By force of the unity or singleness of the individual,
+      the aptitudes, animus, and interests comprised in the first-named range
+      belong together as expressions of a given variant of human nature. The
+      like is true of the latter range. The two may be conceived as alternative
+      directions of human life, in such a way that a given individual inclines
+      more or less consistently to the one or the other. The tendency of the
+      pecuniary life is, in a general way, to conserve the barbarian
+      temperament, but with the substitution of fraud and prudence, or
+      administrative ability, in place of that predilection for physical damage
+      that characterizes the early barbarian. This substitution of chicanery in
+      place of devastation takes place only in an uncertain degree. Within the
+      pecuniary employments the selective action runs pretty consistently in
+      this direction, but the discipline of pecuniary life, outside the
+      competition for gain, does not work consistently to the same effect. The
+      discipline of modern life in the consumption of time and goods does not
+      act unequivocally to eliminate the aristocratic virtues or to foster the
+      bourgeois virtues. The conventional scheme of decent living calls for a
+      considerable exercise of the earlier barbarian traits. Some details of
+      this traditional scheme of life, bearing on this point, have been noticed
+      in earlier chapters under the head of leisure, and further details will be
+      shown in later chapters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From what has been said, it appears that the leisure-class life and the
+      leisure-class scheme of life should further the conservation of the
+      barbarian temperament; chiefly of the quasi-peaceable, or bourgeois,
+      variant, but also in some measure of the predatory variant. In the absence
+      of disturbing factors, therefore, it should be possible to trace a
+      difference of temperament between the classes of society. The aristocratic
+      and the bourgeois virtues&mdash;that is to say the destructive and
+      pecuniary traits&mdash;should be found chiefly among the upper classes,
+      and the industrial virtues&mdash;that is to say the peaceable traits&mdash;chiefly
+      among the classes given to mechanical industry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a general and uncertain way this holds true, but the test is not so
+      readily applied nor so conclusive as might be wished. There are several
+      assignable reasons for its partial failure. All classes are in a measure
+      engaged in the pecuniary struggle, and in all classes the possession of
+      the pecuniary traits counts towards the success and survival of the
+      individual. Wherever the pecuniary culture prevails, the selective process
+      by which men's habits of thought are shaped, and by which the survival of
+      rival lines of descent is decided, proceeds proximately on the basis of
+      fitness for acquisition. Consequently, if it were not for the fact that
+      pecuniary efficiency is on the whole incompatible with industrial
+      efficiency, the selective action of all occupations would tend to the
+      unmitigated dominance of the pecuniary temperament. The result would be
+      the installation of what has been known as the "economic man," as the
+      normal and definitive type of human nature. But the "economic man," whose
+      only interest is the self-regarding one and whose only human trait is
+      prudence is useless for the purposes of modern industry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The modern industry requires an impersonal, non-invidious interest in the
+      work in hand. Without this the elaborate processes of industry would be
+      impossible, and would, indeed, never have been conceived. This interest in
+      work differentiates the workman from the criminal on the one hand, and
+      from the captain of industry on the other. Since work must be done in
+      order to the continued life of the community, there results a qualified
+      selection favoring the spiritual aptitude for work, within a certain range
+      of occupations. This much, however, is to be conceded, that even within
+      the industrial occupations the selective elimination of the pecuniary
+      traits is an uncertain process, and that there is consequently an
+      appreciable survival of the barbarian temperament even within these
+      occupations. On this account there is at present no broad distinction in
+      this respect between the leisure-class character and the character of the
+      common run of the population.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The whole question as to a class distinction in respect to spiritual
+      make-up is also obscured by the presence, in all classes of society, of
+      acquired habits of life that closely simulate inherited traits and at the
+      same time act to develop in the entire body of the population the traits
+      which they simulate. These acquired habits, or assumed traits of
+      character, are most commonly of an aristocratic cast. The prescriptive
+      position of the leisure class as the exemplar of reputability has imposed
+      many features of the leisure-class theory of life upon the lower classes;
+      with the result that there goes on, always and throughout society, a more
+      or less persistent cultivation of these aristocratic traits. On this
+      ground also these traits have a better chance of survival among the body
+      of the people than would be the case if it were not for the precept and
+      example of the leisure class. As one channel, and an important one,
+      through which this transfusion of aristocratic views of life, and
+      consequently more or less archaic traits of character goes on, may be
+      mentioned the class of domestic servants. These have their notions of what
+      is good and beautiful shaped by contact with the master class and carry
+      the preconceptions so acquired back among their low-born equals, and so
+      disseminate the higher ideals abroad through the community without the
+      loss of time which this dissemination might otherwise suffer. The saying
+      "Like master, like man," has a greater significance than is commonly
+      appreciated for the rapid popular acceptance of many elements of
+      upper-class culture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is also a further range of facts that go to lessen class differences
+      as regards the survival of the pecuniary virtues. The pecuniary struggle
+      produces an underfed class, of large proportions. This underfeeding
+      consists in a deficiency of the necessaries of life or of the necessaries
+      of a decent expenditure. In either case the result is a closely enforced
+      struggle for the means with which to meet the daily needs; whether it be
+      the physical or the higher needs. The strain of self-assertion against
+      odds takes up the whole energy of the individual; he bends his efforts to
+      compass his own invidious ends alone, and becomes continually more
+      narrowly self-seeking. The industrial traits in this way tend to
+      obsolescence through disuse. Indirectly, therefore, by imposing a scheme
+      of pecuniary decency and by withdrawing as much as may be of the means of
+      life from the lower classes, the institution of a leisure class acts to
+      conserve the pecuniary traits in the body of the population. The result is
+      an assimilation of the lower classes to the type of human nature that
+      belongs primarily to the upper classes only. It appears, therefore, that
+      there is no wide difference in temperament between the upper and the lower
+      classes; but it appears also that the absence of such a difference is in
+      good part due to the prescriptive example of the leisure class and to the
+      popular acceptance of those broad principles of conspicuous waste and
+      pecuniary emulation on which the institution of a leisure class rests. The
+      institution acts to lower the industrial efficiency of the community and
+      retard the adaptation of human nature to the exigencies of modern
+      industrial life. It affects the prevalent or effective human nature in a
+      conservative direction, (1) by direct transmission of archaic traits,
+      through inheritance within the class and wherever the leisure-class blood
+      is transfused outside the class, and (2) by conserving and fortifying the
+      traditions of the archaic regime, and so making the chances of survival of
+      barbarian traits greater also outside the range of transfusion of
+      leisure-class blood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But little if anything has been done towards collecting or digesting data
+      that are of special significance for the question of survival or
+      elimination of traits in the modern populations. Little of a tangible
+      character can therefore be offered in support of the view here taken,
+      beyond a discursive review of such everyday facts as lie ready to hand.
+      Such a recital can scarcely avoid being commonplace and tedious, but for
+      all that it seems necessary to the completeness of the argument, even in
+      the meager outline in which it is here attempted. A degree of indulgence
+      may therefore fairly be bespoken for the succeeding chapters, which offer
+      a fragmentary recital of this kind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Ten ~~ Modern Survivals of Prowess
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The leisure class lives by the industrial community rather than in it. Its
+      relations to industry are of a pecuniary rather than an industrial kind.
+      Admission to the class is gained by exercise of the pecuniary aptitudes&mdash;aptitudes
+      for acquisition rather than for serviceability. There is, therefore, a
+      continued selective sifting of the human material that makes up the
+      leisure class, and this selection proceeds on the ground of fitness for
+      pecuniary pursuits. But the scheme of life of the class is in large part a
+      heritage from the past, and embodies much of the habits and ideals of the
+      earlier barbarian period. This archaic, barbarian scheme of life imposes
+      itself also on the lower orders, with more or less mitigation. In its turn
+      the scheme of life, of conventions, acts selectively and by education to
+      shape the human material, and its action runs chiefly in the direction of
+      conserving traits, habits, and ideals that belong to the early barbarian
+      age&mdash;the age of prowess and predatory life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The most immediate and unequivocal expression of that archaic human nature
+      which characterizes man in the predatory stage is the fighting propensity
+      proper. In cases where the predatory activity is a collective one, this
+      propensity is frequently called the martial spirit, or, latterly,
+      patriotism. It needs no insistence to find assent to the proposition that
+      in the countries of civilized Europe the hereditary leisure class is
+      endowed with this martial spirit in a higher degree than the middle
+      classes. Indeed, the leisure class claims the distinction as a matter of
+      pride, and no doubt with some grounds. War is honorable, and warlike
+      prowess is eminently honorific in the eyes of the generality of men; and
+      this admiration of warlike prowess is itself the best voucher of a
+      predatory temperament in the admirer of war. The enthusiasm for war, and
+      the predatory temper of which it is the index, prevail in the largest
+      measure among the upper classes, especially among the hereditary leisure
+      class. Moreover, the ostensible serious occupation of the upper class is
+      that of government, which, in point of origin and developmental content,
+      is also a predatory occupation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The only class which could at all dispute with the hereditary leisure
+      class the honor of an habitual bellicose frame of mind is that of the
+      lower-class delinquents. In ordinary times, the large body of the
+      industrial classes is relatively apathetic touching warlike interests.
+      When unexcited, this body of the common people, which makes up the
+      effective force of the industrial community, is rather averse to any other
+      than a defensive fight; indeed, it responds a little tardily even to a
+      provocation which makes for an attitude of defense. In the more civilized
+      communities, or rather in the communities which have reached an advanced
+      industrial development, the spirit of warlike aggression may be said to be
+      obsolescent among the common people. This does not say that there is not
+      an appreciable number of individuals among the industrial classes in whom
+      the martial spirit asserts itself obtrusively. Nor does it say that the
+      body of the people may not be fired with martial ardor for a time under
+      the stimulus of some special provocation, such as is seen in operation
+      today in more than one of the countries of Europe, and for the time in
+      America. But except for such seasons of temporary exaltation, and except
+      for those individuals who are endowed with an archaic temperament of the
+      predatory type, together with the similarly endowed body of individuals
+      among the higher and the lowest classes, the inertness of the mass of any
+      modern civilized community in this respect is probably so great as would
+      make war impracticable, except against actual invasion. The habits and
+      aptitudes of the common run of men make for an unfolding of activity in
+      other, less picturesque directions than that of war.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This class difference in temperament may be due in part to a difference in
+      the inheritance of acquired traits in the several classes, but it seems
+      also, in some measure, to correspond with a difference in ethnic
+      derivation. The class difference is in this respect visibly less in those
+      countries whose population is relatively homogeneous, ethnically, than in
+      the countries where there is a broader divergence between the ethnic
+      elements that make up the several classes of the community. In the same
+      connection it may be noted that the later accessions to the leisure class
+      in the latter countries, in a general way, show less of the martial spirit
+      than contemporary representatives of the aristocracy of the ancient line.
+      These nouveaux arrivés have recently emerged from the commonplace body of
+      the population and owe their emergence into the leisure class to the
+      exercise of traits and propensities which are not to be classed as prowess
+      in the ancient sense.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Apart from warlike activity proper, the institution of the duel is also an
+      expression of the same superior readiness for combat; and the duel is a
+      leisure-class institution. The duel is in substance a more or less
+      deliberate resort to a fight as a final settlement of a difference of
+      opinion. In civilized communities it prevails as a normal phenomenon only
+      where there is an hereditary leisure class, and almost exclusively among
+      that class. The exceptions are (1) military and naval officers who are
+      ordinarily members of the leisure class, and who are at the same time
+      specially trained to predatory habits of mind and (2) the lower-class
+      delinquents&mdash;who are by inheritance, or training, or both, of a
+      similarly predatory disposition and habit. It is only the high-bred
+      gentleman and the rowdy that normally resort to blows as the universal
+      solvent of differences of opinion. The plain man will ordinarily fight
+      only when excessive momentary irritation or alcoholic exaltation act to
+      inhibit the more complex habits of response to the stimuli that make for
+      provocation. He is then thrown back upon the simpler, less differentiated
+      forms of the instinct of self-assertion; that is to say, he reverts
+      temporarily and without reflection to an archaic habit of mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This institution of the duel as a mode of finally settling disputes and
+      serious questions of precedence shades off into the obligatory, unprovoked
+      private fight, as a social obligation due to one's good repute. As a
+      leisure-class usage of this kind we have, particularly, that bizarre
+      survival of bellicose chivalry, the German student duel. In the lower or
+      spurious leisure class of the delinquents there is in all countries a
+      similar, though less formal, social obligation incumbent on the rowdy to
+      assert his manhood in unprovoked combat with his fellows. And spreading
+      through all grades of society, a similar usage prevails among the boys of
+      the community. The boy usually knows to nicety, from day to day, how he
+      and his associates grade in respect of relative fighting capacity; and in
+      the community of boys there is ordinarily no secure basis of reputability
+      for any one who, by exception, will not or can not fight on invitation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this applies especially to boys above a certain somewhat vague limit
+      of maturity. The child's temperament does not commonly answer to this
+      description during infancy and the years of close tutelage, when the child
+      still habitually seeks contact with its mother at every turn of its daily
+      life. During this earlier period there is little aggression and little
+      propensity for antagonism. The transition from this peaceable temper to
+      the predaceous, and in extreme cases malignant, mischievousness of the boy
+      is a gradual one, and it is accomplished with more completeness, covering
+      a larger range of the individual's aptitudes, in some cases than in
+      others. In the earlier stage of his growth, the child, whether boy or
+      girl, shows less of initiative and aggressive self-assertion and less of
+      an inclination to isolate himself and his interests from the domestic
+      group in which he lives, and he shows more of sensitiveness to rebuke,
+      bashfulness, timidity, and the need of friendly human contact. In the
+      common run of cases this early temperament passes, by a gradual but
+      somewhat rapid obsolescence of the infantile features, into the
+      temperament of the boy proper; though there are also cases where the
+      predaceous futures of boy life do not emerge at all, or at the most emerge
+      in but a slight and obscure degree.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In girls the transition to the predaceous stage is seldom accomplished
+      with the same degree of completeness as in boys; and in a relatively large
+      proportion of cases it is scarcely undergone at all. In such cases the
+      transition from infancy to adolescence and maturity is a gradual and
+      unbroken process of the shifting of interest from infantile purposes and
+      aptitudes to the purposes, functions, and relations of adult life. In the
+      girls there is a less general prevalence of a predaceous interval in the
+      development; and in the cases where it occurs, the predaceous and
+      isolating attitude during the interval is commonly less accentuated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the male child the predaceous interval is ordinarily fairly well marked
+      and lasts for some time, but it is commonly terminated (if at all) with
+      the attainment of maturity. This last statement may need very material
+      qualification. The cases are by no means rare in which the transition from
+      the boyish to the adult temperament is not made, or is made only partially&mdash;understanding
+      by the "adult" temperament the average temperament of those adult
+      individuals in modern industrial life who have some serviceability for the
+      purposes of the collective life process, and who may therefore be said to
+      make up the effective average of the industrial community.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ethnic composition of the European populations varies. In some cases
+      even the lower classes are in large measure made up of the
+      peace-disturbing dolicho-blond; while in others this ethnic element is
+      found chiefly among the hereditary leisure class. The fighting habit seems
+      to prevail to a less extent among the working-class boys in the latter
+      class of populations than among the boys of the upper classes or among
+      those of the populations first named.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If this generalization as to the temperament of the boy among the working
+      classes should be found true on a fuller and closer scrutiny of the field,
+      it would add force to the view that the bellicose temperament is in some
+      appreciable degree a race characteristic; it appears to enter more largely
+      into the make-up of the dominant, upper-class ethnic type&mdash;the
+      dolicho-blond&mdash;of the European countries than into the subservient,
+      lower-class types of man which are conceived to constitute the body of the
+      population of the same communities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The case of the boy may seem not to bear seriously on the question of the
+      relative endowment of prowess with which the several classes of society
+      are gifted; but it is at least of some value as going to show that this
+      fighting impulse belongs to a more archaic temperament than that possessed
+      by the average adult man of the industrious classes. In this, as in many
+      other features of child life, the child reproduces, temporarily and in
+      miniature, some of the earlier phases of the development of adult man.
+      Under this interpretation, the boy's predilection for exploit and for
+      isolation of his own interest is to be taken as a transient reversion to
+      the human nature that is normal to the early barbarian culture&mdash;the
+      predatory culture proper. In this respect, as in much else, the
+      leisure-class and the delinquent-class character shows a persistence into
+      adult life of traits that are normal to childhood and youth, and that are
+      likewise normal or habitual to the earlier stages of culture. Unless the
+      difference is traceable entirely to a fundamental difference between
+      persistent ethnic types, the traits that distinguish the swaggering
+      delinquent and the punctilious gentleman of leisure from the common crowd
+      are, in some measure, marks of an arrested spiritual development. They
+      mark an immature phase, as compared with the stage of development attained
+      by the average of the adults in the modern industrial community. And it
+      will appear presently that the puerile spiritual make-up of these
+      representatives of the upper and the lowest social strata shows itself
+      also in the presence of other archaic traits than this proclivity to
+      ferocious exploit and isolation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As if to leave no doubt about the essential immaturity of the fighting
+      temperament, we have, bridging the interval between legitimate boyhood and
+      adult manhood, the aimless and playful, but more or less systematic and
+      elaborate, disturbances of the peace in vogue among schoolboys of a
+      slightly higher age. In the common run of cases, these disturbances are
+      confined to the period of adolescence. They recur with decreasing
+      frequency and acuteness as youth merges into adult life, and so they
+      reproduce, in a general way, in the life of the individual, the sequence
+      by which the group has passed from the predatory to a more settled habit
+      of life. In an appreciable number of cases the spiritual growth of the
+      individual comes to a close before he emerges from this puerile phase; in
+      these cases the fighting temper persists through life. Those individuals
+      who in spiritual development eventually reach man's estate, therefore,
+      ordinarily pass through a temporary archaic phase corresponding to the
+      permanent spiritual level of the fighting and sporting men. Different
+      individuals will, of course, achieve spiritual maturity and sobriety in
+      this respect in different degrees; and those who fail of the average
+      remain as an undissolved residue of crude humanity in the modern
+      industrial community and as a foil for that selective process of
+      adaptation which makes for a heightened industrial efficiency and the
+      fullness of life of the collectivity. This arrested spiritual development
+      may express itself not only in a direct participation by adults in
+      youthful exploits of ferocity, but also indirectly in aiding and abetting
+      disturbances of this kind on the part of younger persons. It thereby
+      furthers the formation of habits of ferocity which may persist in the
+      later life of the growing generation, and so retard any movement in the
+      direction of a more peaceable effective temperament on the part of the
+      community. If a person so endowed with a proclivity for exploits is in a
+      position to guide the development of habits in the adolescent members of
+      the community, the influence which he exerts in the direction of
+      conservation and reversion to prowess may be very considerable. This is
+      the significance, for instance, of the fostering care latterly bestowed by
+      many clergymen and other pillars of society upon "boys' brigades" and
+      similar pseudo-military organizations. The same is true of the
+      encouragement given to the growth of "college spirit," college athletics,
+      and the like, in the higher institutions of learning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These manifestations of the predatory temperament are all to be classed
+      under the head of exploit. They are partly simple and unreflected
+      expressions of an attitude of emulative ferocity, partly activities
+      deliberately entered upon with a view to gaining repute for prowess.
+      Sports of all kinds are of the same general character, including
+      prize-fights, bull-fights, athletics, shooting, angling, yachting, and
+      games of skill, even where the element of destructive physical efficiency
+      is not an obtrusive feature. Sports shade off from the basis of hostile
+      combat, through skill, to cunning and chicanery, without its being
+      possible to draw a line at any point. The ground of an addiction to sports
+      is an archaic spiritual constitution&mdash;the possession of the predatory
+      emulative propensity in a relatively high potency, a strong proclivity to
+      adventuresome exploit and to the infliction of damage is especially
+      pronounced in those employments which are in colloquial usage specifically
+      called sportsmanship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is perhaps truer, or at least more evident, as regards sports than as
+      regards the other expressions of predatory emulation already spoken of,
+      that the temperament which inclines men to them is essentially a boyish
+      temperament. The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree
+      marks an arrested development of the man's moral nature. This peculiar
+      boyishness of temperament in sporting men immediately becomes apparent
+      when attention is directed to the large element of make-believe that is
+      present in all sporting activity. Sports share this character of
+      make-believe with the games and exploits to which children, especially
+      boys, are habitually inclined. Make-believe does not enter in the same
+      proportion into all sports, but it is present in a very appreciable degree
+      in all. It is apparently present in a larger measure in sportsmanship
+      proper and in athletic contests than in set games of skill of a more
+      sedentary character; although this rule may not be found to apply with any
+      great uniformity. It is noticeable, for instance, that even very
+      mild-mannered and matter-of-fact men who go out shooting are apt to carry
+      an excess of arms and accoutrements in order to impress upon their own
+      imagination the seriousness of their undertaking. These huntsmen are also
+      prone to a histrionic, prancing gait and to an elaborate exaggeration of
+      the motions, whether of stealth or of onslaught, involved in their deeds
+      of exploit. Similarly in athletic sports there is almost invariably
+      present a good share of rant and swagger and ostensible mystification&mdash;features
+      which mark the histrionic nature of these employments. In all this, of
+      course, the reminder of boyish make-believe is plain enough. The slang of
+      athletics, by the way, is in great part made up of extremely sanguinary
+      locutions borrowed from the terminology of warfare. Except where it is
+      adopted as a necessary means of secret communication, the use of a special
+      slang in any employment is probably to be accepted as evidence that the
+      occupation in question is substantially make-believe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A further feature in which sports differ from the duel and similar
+      disturbances of the peace is the peculiarity that they admit of other
+      motives being assigned for them besides the impulses of exploit and
+      ferocity. There is probably little if any other motive present in any
+      given case, but the fact that other reasons for indulging in sports are
+      frequently assigned goes to say that other grounds are sometimes present
+      in a subsidiary way. Sportsmen&mdash;hunters and anglers&mdash;are more or
+      less in the habit of assigning a love of nature, the need of recreation,
+      and the like, as the incentives to their favorite pastime. These motives
+      are no doubt frequently present and make up a part of the attractiveness
+      of the sportsman's life; but these can not be the chief incentives. These
+      ostensible needs could be more readily and fully satisfied without the
+      accompaniment of a systematic effort to take the life of those creatures
+      that make up an essential feature of that "nature" that is beloved by the
+      sportsman. It is, indeed, the most noticeable effect of the sportsman's
+      activity to keep nature in a state of chronic desolation by killing off
+      all living thing whose destruction he can compass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Still, there is ground for the sportsman's claim that under the existing
+      conventionalities his need of recreation and of contact with nature can
+      best be satisfied by the course which he takes. Certain canons of good
+      breeding have been imposed by the prescriptive example of a predatory
+      leisure class in the past and have been somewhat painstakingly conserved
+      by the usage of the latter-day representatives of that class; and these
+      canons will not permit him, without blame, to seek contact with nature on
+      other terms. From being an honorable employment handed down from the
+      predatory culture as the highest form of everyday leisure, sports have
+      come to be the only form of outdoor activity that has the full sanction of
+      decorum. Among the proximate incentives to shooting and angling, then, may
+      be the need of recreation and outdoor life. The remoter cause which
+      imposes the necessity of seeking these objects under the cover of
+      systematic slaughter is a prescription that can not be violated except at
+      the risk of disrepute and consequent lesion to one's self-respect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The case of other kinds of sport is somewhat similar. Of these, athletic
+      games are the best example. Prescriptive usage with respect to what forms
+      of activity, exercise, and recreation are permissible under the code of
+      reputable living is of course present here also. Those who are addicted to
+      athletic sports, or who admire them, set up the claim that these afford
+      the best available means of recreation and of "physical culture." And
+      prescriptive usage gives countenance to the claim. The canons of reputable
+      living exclude from the scheme of life of the leisure class all activity
+      that can not be classed as conspicuous leisure. And consequently they tend
+      by prescription to exclude it also from the scheme of life of the
+      community generally. At the same time purposeless physical exertion is
+      tedious and distasteful beyond tolerance. As has been noticed in another
+      connection, recourse is in such a case had to some form of activity which
+      shall at least afford a colorable pretense of purpose, even if the object
+      assigned be only a make-believe. Sports satisfy these requirements of
+      substantial futility together with a colorable make-believe of purpose. In
+      addition to this they afford scope for emulation, and are attractive also
+      on that account. In order to be decorous, an employment must conform to
+      the leisure-class canon of reputable waste; at the same time all activity,
+      in order to be persisted in as an habitual, even if only partial,
+      expression of life, must conform to the generically human canon of
+      efficiency for some serviceable objective end. The leisure-class canon
+      demands strict and comprehensive futility, the instinct of workmanship
+      demands purposeful action. The leisure-class canon of decorum acts slowly
+      and pervasively, by a selective elimination of all substantially useful or
+      purposeful modes of action from the accredited scheme of life; the
+      instinct of workmanship acts impulsively and may be satisfied,
+      provisionally, with a proximate purpose. It is only as the apprehended
+      ulterior futility of a given line of action enters the reflective complex
+      of consciousness as an element essentially alien to the normally
+      purposeful trend of the life process that its disquieting and deterrent
+      effect on the consciousness of the agent is wrought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The individual's habits of thought make an organic complex, the trend of
+      which is necessarily in the direction of serviceability to the life
+      process. When it is attempted to assimilate systematic waste or futility,
+      as an end in life, into this organic complex, there presently supervenes a
+      revulsion. But this revulsion of the organism may be avoided if the
+      attention can be confined to the proximate, unreflected purpose of
+      dexterous or emulative exertion. Sports&mdash;hunting, angling, athletic
+      games, and the like&mdash;afford an exercise for dexterity and for the
+      emulative ferocity and astuteness characteristic of predatory life. So
+      long as the individual is but slightly gifted with reflection or with a
+      sense of the ulterior trend of his actions so long as his life is
+      substantially a life of naive impulsive action&mdash;so long the immediate
+      and unreflected purposefulness of sports, in the way of an expression of
+      dominance, will measurably satisfy his instinct of workmanship. This is
+      especially true if his dominant impulses are the unreflecting emulative
+      propensities of the predaceous temperament. At the same time the canons of
+      decorum will commend sports to him as expressions of a pecuniarily
+      blameless life. It is by meeting these two requirements, of ulterior
+      wastefulness and proximate purposefulness, that any given employment holds
+      its place as a traditional and habitual mode of decorous recreation. In
+      the sense that other forms of recreation and exercise are morally
+      impossible to persons of good breeding and delicate sensibilities, then,
+      sports are the best available means of recreation under existing
+      circumstances.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But those members of respectable society who advocate athletic games
+      commonly justify their attitude on this head to themselves and to their
+      neighbors on the ground that these games serve as an invaluable means of
+      development. They not only improve the contestant's physique, but it is
+      commonly added that they also foster a manly spirit, both in the
+      participants and in the spectators. Football is the particular game which
+      will probably first occur to any one in this community when the question
+      of the serviceability of athletic games is raised, as this form of
+      athletic contest is at present uppermost in the mind of those who plead
+      for or against games as a means of physical or moral salvation. This
+      typical athletic sport may, therefore, serve to illustrate the bearing of
+      athletics upon the development of the contestant's character and physique.
+      It has been said, not inaptly, that the relation of football to physical
+      culture is much the same as that of the bull-fight to agriculture.
+      Serviceability for these lusory institutions requires sedulous training or
+      breeding. The material used, whether brute or human, is subjected to
+      careful selection and discipline, in order to secure and accentuate
+      certain aptitudes and propensities which are characteristic of the ferine
+      state, and which tend to obsolescence under domestication. This does not
+      mean that the result in either case is an all around and consistent
+      rehabilitation of the ferine or barbarian habit of mind and body. The
+      result is rather a one-sided return to barbarism or to the feroe natura&mdash;a
+      rehabilitation and accentuation of those ferine traits which make for
+      damage and desolation, without a corresponding development of the traits
+      which would serve the individual's self-preservation and fullness of life
+      in a ferine environment. The culture bestowed in football gives a product
+      of exotic ferocity and cunning. It is a rehabilitation of the early
+      barbarian temperament, together with a suppression of those details of
+      temperament, which, as seen from the standpoint of the social and economic
+      exigencies, are the redeeming features of the savage character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The physical vigor acquired in the training for athletic games&mdash;so
+      far as the training may be said to have this effect&mdash;is of advantage
+      both to the individual and to the collectivity, in that, other things
+      being equal, it conduces to economic serviceability. The spiritual traits
+      which go with athletic sports are likewise economically advantageous to
+      the individual, as contradistinguished from the interests of the
+      collectivity. This holds true in any community where these traits are
+      present in some degree in the population. Modern competition is in large
+      part a process of self-assertion on the basis of these traits of predatory
+      human nature. In the sophisticated form in which they enter into the
+      modern, peaceable emulation, the possession of these traits in some
+      measure is almost a necessary of life to the civilized man. But while they
+      are indispensable to the competitive individual, they are not directly
+      serviceable to the community. So far as regards the serviceability of the
+      individual for the purposes of the collective life, emulative efficiency
+      is of use only indirectly if at all. Ferocity and cunning are of no use to
+      the community except in its hostile dealings with other communities; and
+      they are useful to the individual only because there is so large a
+      proportion of the same traits actively present in the human environment to
+      which he is exposed. Any individual who enters the competitive struggle
+      without the due endowment of these traits is at a disadvantage, somewhat
+      as a hornless steer would find himself at a disadvantage in a drove of
+      horned cattle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The possession and the cultivation of the predatory traits of character
+      may, of course, be desirable on other than economic grounds. There is a
+      prevalent aesthetic or ethical predilection for the barbarian aptitudes,
+      and the traits in question minister so effectively to this predilection
+      that their serviceability in the aesthetic or ethical respect probably
+      offsets any economic unserviceability which they may give. But for the
+      present purpose that is beside the point. Therefore nothing is said here
+      as to the desirability or advisability of sports on the whole, or as to
+      their value on other than economic grounds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In popular apprehension there is much that is admirable in the type of
+      manhood which the life of sport fosters. There is self-reliance and
+      good-fellowship, so termed in the somewhat loose colloquial use of the
+      words. From a different point of view the qualities currently so
+      characterized might be described as truculence and clannishness. The
+      reason for the current approval and admiration of these manly qualities,
+      as well as for their being called manly, is the same as the reason for
+      their usefulness to the individual. The members of the community, and
+      especially that class of the community which sets the pace in canons of
+      taste, are endowed with this range of propensities in sufficient measure
+      to make their absence in others felt as a shortcoming, and to make their
+      possession in an exceptional degree appreciated as an attribute of
+      superior merit. The traits of predatory man are by no means obsolete in
+      the common run of modern populations. They are present and can be called
+      out in bold relief at any time by any appeal to the sentiments in which
+      they express themselves&mdash;unless this appeal should clash with the
+      specific activities that make up our habitual occupations and comprise the
+      general range of our everyday interests. The common run of the population
+      of any industrial community is emancipated from these, economically
+      considered, untoward propensities only in the sense that, through partial
+      and temporary disuse, they have lapsed into the background of
+      sub-conscious motives. With varying degrees of potency in different
+      individuals, they remain available for the aggressive shaping of men's
+      actions and sentiments whenever a stimulus of more than everyday intensity
+      comes in to call them forth. And they assert themselves forcibly in any
+      case where no occupation alien to the predatory culture has usurped the
+      individual's everyday range of interest and sentiment. This is the case
+      among the leisure class and among certain portions of the population which
+      are ancillary to that class. Hence the facility with which any new
+      accessions to the leisure class take to sports; and hence the rapid growth
+      of sports and of the sporting sentient in any industrial community where
+      wealth has accumulated sufficiently to exempt a considerable part of the
+      population from work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A homely and familiar fact may serve to show that the predaceous impulse
+      does not prevail in the same degree in all classes. Taken simply as a
+      feature of modern life, the habit of carrying a walking-stick may seem at
+      best a trivial detail; but the usage has a significance for the point in
+      question. The classes among whom the habit most prevails&mdash;the classes
+      with whom the walking-stick is associated in popular apprehension&mdash;are
+      the men of the leisure class proper, sporting men, and the lower-class
+      delinquents. To these might perhaps be added the men engaged in the
+      pecuniary employments. The same is not true of the common run of men
+      engaged in industry and it may be noted by the way that women do not carry
+      a stick except in case of infirmity, where it has a use of a different
+      kind. The practice is of course in great measure a matter of polite usage;
+      but the basis of polite usage is, in turn, the proclivities of the class
+      which sets the pace in polite usage. The walking-stick serves the purpose
+      of an advertisement that the bearer's hands are employed otherwise than in
+      useful effort, and it therefore has utility as an evidence of leisure. But
+      it is also a weapon, and it meets a felt need of barbarian man on that
+      ground. The handling of so tangible and primitive a means of offense is
+      very comforting to any one who is gifted with even a moderate share of
+      ferocity. The exigencies of the language make it impossible to avoid an
+      apparent implication of disapproval of the aptitudes, propensities, and
+      expressions of life here under discussion. It is, however, not intended to
+      imply anything in the way of deprecation or commendation of any one of
+      these phases of human character or of the life process. The various
+      elements of the prevalent human nature are taken up from the point of view
+      of economic theory, and the traits discussed are gauged and graded with
+      regard to their immediate economic bearing on the facility of the
+      collective life process. That is to say, these phenomena are here
+      apprehended from the economic point of view and are valued with respect to
+      their direct action in furtherance or hindrance of a more perfect
+      adjustment of the human collectivity to the environment and to the
+      institutional structure required by the economic situation of the
+      collectivity for the present and for the immediate future. For these
+      purposes the traits handed down from the predatory culture are less
+      serviceable than might be. Although even in this connection it is not to
+      be overlooked that the energetic aggressiveness and pertinacity of
+      predatory man is a heritage of no mean value. The economic value&mdash;with
+      some regard also to the social value in the narrower sense&mdash;of these
+      aptitudes and propensities is attempted to be passed upon without
+      reflecting on their value as seen from another point of view. When
+      contrasted with the prosy mediocrity of the latter-day industrial scheme
+      of life, and judged by the accredited standards of morality, and more
+      especially by the standards of aesthetics and of poetry, these survivals
+      from a more primitive type of manhood may have a very different value from
+      that here assigned them. But all this being foreign to the purpose in
+      hand, no expression of opinion on this latter head would be in place here.
+      All that is admissible is to enter the caution that these standards of
+      excellence, which are alien to the present purpose, must not be allowed to
+      influence our economic appreciation of these traits of human character or
+      of the activities which foster their growth. This applies both as regards
+      those persons who actively participate in sports and those whose sporting
+      experience consists in contemplation only. What is here said of the
+      sporting propensity is likewise pertinent to sundry reflections presently
+      to be made in this connection on what would colloquially be known as the
+      religious life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The last paragraph incidentally touches upon the fact that everyday speech
+      can scarcely be employed in discussing this class of aptitudes and
+      activities without implying deprecation or apology. The fact is
+      significant as showing the habitual attitude of the dispassionate common
+      man toward the propensities which express themselves in sports and in
+      exploit generally. And this is perhaps as convenient a place as any to
+      discuss that undertone of deprecation which runs through all the
+      voluminous discourse in defense or in laudation of athletic sports, as
+      well as of other activities of a predominantly predatory character. The
+      same apologetic frame of mind is at least beginning to be observable in
+      the spokesmen of most other institutions handed down from the barbarian
+      phase of life. Among these archaic institutions which are felt to need
+      apology are comprised, with others, the entire existing system of the
+      distribution of wealth, together with the resulting class distinction of
+      status; all or nearly all forms of consumption that come under the head of
+      conspicuous waste; the status of women under the patriarchal system; and
+      many features of the traditional creeds and devout observances, especially
+      the exoteric expressions of the creed and the naive apprehension of
+      received observances. What is to be said in this connection of the
+      apologetic attitude taken in commending sports and the sporting character
+      will therefore apply, with a suitable change in phraseology, to the
+      apologies offered in behalf of these other, related elements of our social
+      heritage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is a feeling&mdash;usually vague and not commonly avowed in so many
+      words by the apologist himself, but ordinarily perceptible in the manner
+      of his discourse&mdash;that these sports, as well as the general range of
+      predaceous impulses and habits of thought which underlie the sporting
+      character, do not altogether commend themselves to common sense. "As to
+      the majority of murderers, they are very incorrect characters." This
+      aphorism offers a valuation of the predaceous temperament, and of the
+      disciplinary effects of its overt expression and exercise, as seen from
+      the moralist's point of view. As such it affords an indication of what is
+      the deliverance of the sober sense of mature men as to the degree of
+      availability of the predatory habit of mind for the purposes of the
+      collective life. It is felt that the presumption is against any activity
+      which involves habituation to the predatory attitude, and that the burden
+      of proof lies with those who speak for the rehabilitation of the
+      predaceous temper and for the practices which strengthen it. There is a
+      strong body of popular sentiment in favor of diversions and enterprises of
+      the kind in question; but there is at the same time present in the
+      community a pervading sense that this ground of sentiment wants
+      legitimation. The required legitimation is ordinarily sought by showing
+      that although sports are substantially of a predatory, socially
+      disintegrating effect; although their proximate effect runs in the
+      direction of reversion to propensities that are industrially
+      disserviceable; yet indirectly and remotely&mdash;by some not readily
+      comprehensible process of polar induction, or counter-irritation perhaps&mdash;sports
+      are conceived to foster a habit of mind that is serviceable for the social
+      or industrial purpose. That is to say, although sports are essentially of
+      the nature of invidious exploit, it is presumed that by some remote and
+      obscure effect they result in the growth of a temperament conducive to
+      non-invidious work. It is commonly attempted to show all this empirically
+      or it is rather assumed that this is the empirical generalization which
+      must be obvious to any one who cares to see it. In conducting the proof of
+      this thesis the treacherous ground of inference from cause to effect is
+      somewhat shrewdly avoided, except so far as to show that the "manly
+      virtues" spoken of above are fostered by sports. But since it is these
+      manly virtues that are (economically) in need of legitimation, the chain
+      of proof breaks off where it should begin. In the most general economic
+      terms, these apologies are an effort to show that, in spite of the logic
+      of the thing, sports do in fact further what may broadly be called
+      workmanship. So long as he has not succeeded in persuading himself or
+      others that this is their effect the thoughtful apologist for sports will
+      not rest content, and commonly, it is to be admitted, he does not rest
+      content. His discontent with his own vindication of the practice in
+      question is ordinarily shown by his truculent tone and by the eagerness
+      with which he heaps up asseverations in support of his position. But why
+      are apologies needed? If there prevails a body of popular sentient in
+      favor of sports, why is not that fact a sufficient legitimation? The
+      protracted discipline of prowess to which the race has been subjected
+      under the predatory and quasi-peaceable culture has transmitted to the men
+      of today a temperament that finds gratification in these expressions of
+      ferocity and cunning. So, why not accept these sports as legitimate
+      expressions of a normal and wholesome human nature? What other norm is
+      there that is to be lived up to than that given in the aggregate range of
+      propensities that express themselves in the sentiments of this generation,
+      including the hereditary strain of prowess? The ulterior norm to which
+      appeal is taken is the instinct of workmanship, which is an instinct more
+      fundamental, of more ancient prescription, than the propensity to
+      predatory emulation. The latter is but a special development of the
+      instinct of workmanship, a variant, relatively late and ephemeral in spite
+      of its great absolute antiquity. The emulative predatory impulse&mdash;or
+      the instinct of sportsmanship, as it might well be called&mdash;is
+      essentially unstable in comparison with the primordial instinct of
+      workmanship out of which it has been developed and differentiated. Tested
+      by this ulterior norm of life, predatory emulation, and therefore the life
+      of sports, falls short.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The manner and the measure in which the institution of a leisure class
+      conduces to the conservation of sports and invidious exploit can of course
+      not be succinctly stated. From the evidence already recited it appears
+      that, in sentient and inclinations, the leisure class is more favorable to
+      a warlike attitude and animus than the industrial classes. Something
+      similar seems to be true as regards sports. But it is chiefly in its
+      indirect effects, though the canons of decorous living, that the
+      institution has its influence on the prevalent sentiment with respect to
+      the sporting life. This indirect effect goes almost unequivocally in the
+      direction of furthering a survival of the predatory temperament and
+      habits; and this is true even with respect to those variants of the
+      sporting life which the higher leisure-class code of proprieties
+      proscribes; as, e.g., prize-fighting, cock-fighting, and other like vulgar
+      expressions of the sporting temper. Whatever the latest authenticated
+      schedule of detail proprieties may say, the accredited canons of decency
+      sanctioned by the institution say without equivocation that emulation and
+      waste are good and their opposites are disreputable. In the crepuscular
+      light of the social nether spaces the details of the code are not
+      apprehended with all the facility that might be desired, and these broad
+      underlying canons of decency are therefore applied somewhat
+      unreflectingly, with little question as to the scope of their competence
+      or the exceptions that have been sanctioned in detail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Addiction to athletic sports, not only in the way of direct participation,
+      but also in the way of sentiment and moral support, is, in a more or less
+      pronounced degree, a characteristic of the leisure class; and it is a
+      trait which that class shares with the lower-class delinquents, and with
+      such atavistic elements throughout the body of the community as are
+      endowed with a dominant predaceous trend. Few individuals among the
+      populations of Western civilized countries are so far devoid of the
+      predaceous instinct as to find no diversion in contemplating athletic
+      sports and games, but with the common run of individuals among the
+      industrial classes the inclination to sports does not assert itself to the
+      extent of constituting what may fairly be called a sporting habit. With
+      these classes sports are an occasional diversion rather than a serious
+      feature of life. This common body of the people can therefore not be said
+      to cultivate the sporting propensity. Although it is not obsolete in the
+      average of them, or even in any appreciable number of individuals, yet the
+      predilection for sports in the commonplace industrial classes is of the
+      nature of a reminiscence, more or less diverting as an occasional
+      interest, rather than a vital and permanent interest that counts as a
+      dominant factor in shaping the organic complex of habits of thought into
+      which it enters. As it manifests itself in the sporting life of today,
+      this propensity may not appear to be an economic factor of grave
+      consequence. Taken simply by itself it does not count for a great deal in
+      its direct effects on the industrial efficiency or the consumption of any
+      given individual; but the prevalence and the growth of the type of human
+      nature of which this propensity is a characteristic feature is a matter of
+      some consequence. It affects the economic life of the collectivity both as
+      regards the rate of economic development and as regards the character of
+      the results attained by the development. For better or worse, the fact
+      that the popular habits of thought are in any degree dominated by this
+      type of character can not but greatly affect the scope, direction,
+      standards, and ideals of the collective economic life, as well as the
+      degree of adjustment of the collective life to the environment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Something to a like effect is to be said of other traits that go to make
+      up the barbarian character. For the purposes of economic theory, these
+      further barbarian traits may be taken as concomitant variations of that
+      predaceous temper of which prowess is an expression. In great measure they
+      are not primarily of an economic character, nor do they have much direct
+      economic bearing. They serve to indicate the stage of economic evolution
+      to which the individual possessed of them is adapted. They are of
+      importance, therefore, as extraneous tests of the degree of adaptation of
+      the character in which they are comprised to the economic exigencies of
+      today, but they are also to some extent important as being aptitudes which
+      themselves go to increase or diminish the economic serviceability of the
+      individual.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As it finds expression in the life of the barbarian, prowess manifests
+      itself in two main directions&mdash;force and fraud. In varying degrees
+      these two forms of expression are similarly present in modern warfare, in
+      the pecuniary occupations, and in sports and games. Both lines of
+      aptitudes are cultivated and strengthened by the life of sport as well as
+      by the more serious forms of emulative life. Strategy or cunning is an
+      element invariably present in games, as also in warlike pursuits and in
+      the chase. In all of these employments strategy tends to develop into
+      finesse and chicanery. Chicanery, falsehood, browbeating, hold a
+      well-secured place in the method of procedure of any athletic contest and
+      in games generally. The habitual employment of an umpire, and the minute
+      technical regulations governing the limits and details of permissible
+      fraud and strategic advantage, sufficiently attest the fact that
+      fraudulent practices and attempts to overreach one's opponents are not
+      adventitious features of the game. In the nature of the case habituation
+      to sports should conduce to a fuller development of the aptitude for
+      fraud; and the prevalence in the community of that predatory temperament
+      which inclines men to sports connotes a prevalence of sharp practice and
+      callous disregard of the interests of others, individually and
+      collectively. Resort to fraud, in any guise and under any legitimation of
+      law or custom, is an expression of a narrowly self-regarding habit of
+      mind. It is needless to dwell at any length on the economic value of this
+      feature of the sporting character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this connection it is to be noted that the most obvious characteristic
+      of the physiognomy affected by athletic and other sporting men is that of
+      an extreme astuteness. The gifts and exploits of Ulysses are scarcely
+      second to those of Achilles, either in their substantial furtherance of
+      the game or in the éclat which they give the astute sporting man among his
+      associates. The pantomime of astuteness is commonly the first step in that
+      assimilation to the professional sporting man which a youth undergoes
+      after matriculation in any reputable school, of the secondary or the
+      higher education, as the case may be. And the physiognomy of astuteness,
+      as a decorative feature, never ceases to receive the thoughtful attention
+      of men whose serious interest lies in athletic games, races, or other
+      contests of a similar emulative nature. As a further indication of their
+      spiritual kinship, it may be pointed out that the members of the lower
+      delinquent class usually show this physiognomy of astuteness in a marked
+      degree, and that they very commonly show the same histrionic exaggeration
+      of it that is often seen in the young candidate for athletic honors. This,
+      by the way, is the most legible mark of what is vulgarly called
+      "toughness" in youthful aspirants for a bad name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The astute man, it may be remarked, is of no economic value to the
+      community&mdash;unless it be for the purpose of sharp practice in dealings
+      with other communities. His functioning is not a furtherance of the
+      generic life process. At its best, in its direct economic bearing, it is a
+      conversion of the economic substance of the collectivity to a growth alien
+      to the collective life process&mdash;very much after the analogy of what
+      in medicine would be called a benign tumor, with some tendency to
+      transgress the uncertain line that divides the benign from the malign
+      growths. The two barbarian traits, ferocity and astuteness, go to make up
+      the predaceous temper or spiritual attitude. They are the expressions of a
+      narrowly self-regarding habit of mind. Both are highly serviceable for
+      individual expediency in a life looking to invidious success. Both also
+      have a high aesthetic value. Both are fostered by the pecuniary culture.
+      But both alike are of no use for the purposes of the collective life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0011" id="link2HCH0011">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Eleven ~~ The Belief in Luck
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The gambling propensity is another subsidiary trait of the barbarian
+      temperament. It is a concomitant variation of character of almost
+      universal prevalence among sporting men and among men given to warlike and
+      emulative activities generally. This trait also has a direct economic
+      value. It is recognized to be a hindrance to the highest industrial
+      efficiency of the aggregate in any community where it prevails in an
+      appreciable degree. The gambling proclivity is doubtfully to be classed as
+      a feature belonging exclusively to the predatory type of human nature. The
+      chief factor in the gambling habit is the belief in luck; and this belief
+      is apparently traceable, at least in its elements, to a stage in human
+      evolution antedating the predatory culture. It may well have been under
+      the predatory culture that the belief in luck was developed into the form
+      in which it is present, as the chief element of the gambling proclivity,
+      in the sporting temperament. It probably owes the specific form under
+      which it occurs in the modern culture to the predatory discipline. But the
+      belief in luck is in substance a habit of more ancient date than the
+      predatory culture. It is one form of the artistic apprehension of things.
+      The belief seems to be a trait carried over in substance from an earlier
+      phase into the barbarian culture, and transmuted and transmitted through
+      that culture to a later stage of human development under a specific form
+      imposed by the predatory discipline. But in any case, it is to be taken as
+      an archaic trait, inherited from a more or less remote past, more or less
+      incompatible with the requirements of the modern industrial process, and
+      more or less of a hindrance to the fullest efficiency of the collective
+      economic life of the present.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While the belief in luck is the basis of the gambling habit, it is not the
+      only element that enters into the habit of betting. Betting on the issue
+      of contests of strength and skill proceeds on a further motive, without
+      which the belief in luck would scarcely come in as a prominent feature of
+      sporting life. This further motive is the desire of the anticipated
+      winner, or the partisan of the anticipated winning side, to heighten his
+      side's ascendency at the cost of the loser. Not only does the stronger
+      side score a more signal victory, and the losing side suffer a more
+      painful and humiliating defeat, in proportion as the pecuniary gain and
+      loss in the wager is large; although this alone is a consideration of
+      material weight. But the wager is commonly laid also with a view, not
+      avowed in words nor even recognized in set terms in petto, to enhancing
+      the chances of success for the contestant on which it is laid. It is felt
+      that substance and solicitude expended to this end can not go for naught
+      in the issue. There is here a special manifestation of the instinct of
+      workmanship, backed by an even more manifest sense that the animistic
+      congruity of things must decide for a victorious outcome for the side in
+      whose behalf the propensity inherent in events has been propitiated and
+      fortified by so much of conative and kinetic urging. This incentive to the
+      wager expresses itself freely under the form of backing one's favorite in
+      any contest, and it is unmistakably a predatory feature. It is as
+      ancillary to the predaceous impulse proper that the belief in luck
+      expresses itself in a wager. So that it may be set down that in so far as
+      the belief in luck comes to expression in the form of laying a wager, it
+      is to be accounted an integral element of the predatory type of character.
+      The belief is, in its elements, an archaic habit which belongs
+      substantially to early, undifferentiated human nature; but when this
+      belief is helped out by the predatory emulative impulse, and so is
+      differentiated into the specific form of the gambling habit, it is, in
+      this higher-developed and specific form, to be classed as a trait of the
+      barbarian character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The belief in luck is a sense of fortuitous necessity in the sequence of
+      phenomena. In its various mutations and expressions, it is of very serious
+      importance for the economic efficiency of any community in which it
+      prevails to an appreciable extent. So much so as to warrant a more
+      detailed discussion of its origin and content and of the bearing of its
+      various ramifications upon economic structure and function, as well as a
+      discussion of the relation of the leisure class to its growth,
+      differentiation, and persistence. In the developed, integrated form in
+      which it is most readily observed in the barbarian of the predatory
+      culture or in the sporting man of modern communities, the belief comprises
+      at least two distinguishable elements&mdash;which are to be taken as two
+      different phases of the same fundamental habit of thought, or as the same
+      psychological factor in two successive phases of its evolution. The fact
+      that these two elements are successive phases of the same general line of
+      growth of belief does not hinder their coexisting in the habits of thought
+      of any given individual. The more primitive form (or the more archaic
+      phase) is an incipient animistic belief, or an animistic sense of
+      relations and things, that imputes a quasi-personal character to facts. To
+      the archaic man all the obtrusive and obviously consequential objects and
+      facts in his environment have a quasi-personal individuality. They are
+      conceived to be possessed of volition, or rather of propensities, which
+      enter into the complex of causes and affect events in an inscrutable
+      manner. The sporting man's sense of luck and chance, or of fortuitous
+      necessity, is an inarticulate or inchoate animism. It applies to objects
+      and situations, often in a very vague way; but it is usually so far
+      defined as to imply the possibility of propitiating, or of deceiving and
+      cajoling, or otherwise disturbing the holding of propensities resident in
+      the objects which constitute the apparatus and accessories of any game of
+      skill or chance. There are few sporting men who are not in the habit of
+      wearing charms or talismans to which more or less of efficacy is felt to
+      belong. And the proportion is not much less of those who instinctively
+      dread the "hoodooing" of the contestants or the apparatus engaged in any
+      contest on which they lay a wager; or who feel that the fact of their
+      backing a given contestant or side in the game does and ought to
+      strengthen that side; or to whom the "mascot" which they cultivate means
+      something more than a jest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In its simple form the belief in luck is this instinctive sense of an
+      inscrutable teleological propensity in objects or situations. Objects or
+      events have a propensity to eventuate in a given end, whether this end or
+      objective point of the sequence is conceived to be fortuitously given or
+      deliberately sought. From this simple animism the belief shades off by
+      insensible gradations into the second, derivative form or phase above
+      referred to, which is a more or less articulate belief in an inscrutable
+      preternatural agency. The preternatural agency works through the visible
+      objects with which it is associated, but is not identified with these
+      objects in point of individuality. The use of the term "preternatural
+      agency" here carries no further implication as to the nature of the agency
+      spoken of as preternatural. This is only a farther development of
+      animistic belief. The preternatural agency is not necessarily conceived to
+      be a personal agent in the full sense, but it is an agency which partakes
+      of the attributes of personality to the extent of somewhat arbitrarily
+      influencing the outcome of any enterprise, and especially of any contest.
+      The pervading belief in the hamingia or gipta (gaefa, authna) which lends
+      so much of color to the Icelandic sagas specifically, and to early
+      Germanic folk-legends, is an illustration of this sense of an
+      extra-physical propensity in the course of events.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this expression or form of the belief the propensity is scarcely
+      personified although to a varying extent an individuality is imputed to
+      it; and this individuated propensity is sometimes conceived to yield to
+      circumstances, commonly to circumstances of a spiritual or preternatural
+      character. A well-known and striking exemplification of the belief&mdash;in
+      a fairly advanced stage of differentiation and involving an
+      anthropomorphic personification of the preternatural agent appealed to&mdash;is
+      afforded by the wager of battle. Here the preternatural agent was
+      conceived to act on request as umpire, and to shape the outcome of the
+      contest in accordance with some stipulated ground of decision, such as the
+      equity or legality of the respective contestants' claims. The like sense
+      of an inscrutable but spiritually necessary tendency in events is still
+      traceable as an obscure element in current popular belief, as shown, for
+      instance, by the well-accredited maxim, "Thrice is he armed who knows his
+      quarrel just,"&mdash;a maxim which retains much of its significance for
+      the average unreflecting person even in the civilized communities of
+      today. The modern reminiscence of the belief in the hamingia, or in the
+      guidance of an unseen hand, which is traceable in the acceptance of this
+      maxim is faint and perhaps uncertain; and it seems in any case to be
+      blended with other psychological moments that are not clearly of an
+      animistic character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the purpose in hand it is unnecessary to look more closely into the
+      psychological process or the ethnological line of descent by which the
+      later of these two animistic apprehensions of propensity is derived from
+      the earlier. This question may be of the gravest importance to
+      folk-psychology or to the theory of the evolution of creeds and cults. The
+      same is true of the more fundamental question whether the two are related
+      at all as successive phases in a sequence of development. Reference is
+      here made to the existence of these questions only to remark that the
+      interest of the present discussion does not lie in that direction. So far
+      as concerns economic theory, these two elements or phases of the belief in
+      luck, or in an extra-causal trend or propensity in things, are of
+      substantially the same character. They have an economic significance as
+      habits of thought which affect the individual's habitual view of the facts
+      and sequences with which he comes in contact, and which thereby affect the
+      individual's serviceability for the industrial purpose. Therefore, apart
+      from all question of the beauty, worth, or beneficence of any animistic
+      belief, there is place for a discussion of their economic bearing on the
+      serviceability of the individual as an economic factor, and especially as
+      an industrial agent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It has already been noted in an earlier connection, that in order to have
+      the highest serviceability in the complex industrial processes of today,
+      the individual must be endowed with the aptitude and the habit of readily
+      apprehending and relating facts in terms of causal sequence. Both as a
+      whole and in its details, the industrial process is a process of
+      quantitative causation. The "intelligence" demanded of the workman, as
+      well as of the director of an industrial process, is little else than a
+      degree of facility in the apprehension of and adaptation to a
+      quantitatively determined causal sequence. This facility of apprehension
+      and adaptation is what is lacking in stupid workmen, and the growth of
+      this facility is the end sought in their education&mdash;so far as their
+      education aims to enhance their industrial efficiency.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In so far as the individual's inherited aptitudes or his training incline
+      him to account for facts and sequences in other terms than those of
+      causation or matter-of-fact, they lower his productive efficiency or
+      industrial usefulness. This lowering of efficiency through a penchant for
+      animistic methods of apprehending facts is especially apparent when taken
+      in the mass-when a given population with an animistic turn is viewed as a
+      whole. The economic drawbacks of animism are more patent and its
+      consequences are more far-reaching under the modern system of large
+      industry than under any other. In the modern industrial communities,
+      industry is, to a constantly increasing extent, being organized in a
+      comprehensive system of organs and functions mutually conditioning one
+      another; and therefore freedom from all bias in the causal apprehension of
+      phenomena grows constantly more requisite to efficiency on the part of the
+      men concerned in industry. Under a system of handicraft an advantage in
+      dexterity, diligence, muscular force, or endurance may, in a very large
+      measure, offset such a bias in the habits of thought of the workmen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Similarly in agricultural industry of the traditional kind, which closely
+      resembles handicraft in the nature of the demands made upon the workman.
+      In both, the workman is himself the prime mover chiefly depended upon, and
+      the natural forces engaged are in large part apprehended as inscrutable
+      and fortuitous agencies, whose working lies beyond the workman's control
+      or discretion. In popular apprehension there is in these forms of industry
+      relatively little of the industrial process left to the fateful swing of a
+      comprehensive mechanical sequence which must be comprehended in terms of
+      causation and to which the operations of industry and the movements of the
+      workmen must be adapted. As industrial methods develop, the virtues of the
+      handicraftsman count for less and less as an offset to scanty intelligence
+      or a halting acceptance of the sequence of cause and effect. The
+      industrial organization assumes more and more of the character of a
+      mechanism, in which it is man's office to discriminate and select what
+      natural forces shall work out their effects in his service. The workman's
+      part in industry changes from that of a prime mover to that of
+      discrimination and valuation of quantitative sequences and mechanical
+      facts. The faculty of a ready apprehension and unbiased appreciation of
+      causes in his environment grows in relative economic importance and any
+      element in the complex of his habits of thought which intrudes a bias at
+      variance with this ready appreciation of matter-of-fact sequence gains
+      proportionately in importance as a disturbing element acting to lower his
+      industrial usefulness. Through its cumulative effect upon the habitual
+      attitude of the population, even a slight or inconspicuous bias towards
+      accounting for everyday facts by recourse to other ground than that of
+      quantitative causation may work an appreciable lowering of the collective
+      industrial efficiency of a community.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The animistic habit of mind may occur in the early, undifferentiated form
+      of an inchoate animistic belief, or in the later and more highly
+      integrated phase in which there is an anthropomorphic personification of
+      the propensity imputed to facts. The industrial value of such a lively
+      animistic sense, or of such recourse to a preternatural agency or the
+      guidance of an unseen hand, is of course very much the same in either
+      case. As affects the industrial serviceability of the individual, the
+      effect is of the same kind in either case; but the extent to which this
+      habit of thought dominates or shapes the complex of his habits of thought
+      varies with the degree of immediacy, urgency, or exclusiveness with which
+      the individual habitually applies the animistic or anthropomorphic formula
+      in dealing with the facts of his environment. The animistic habit acts in
+      all cases to blur the appreciation of causal sequence; but the earlier,
+      less reflected, less defined animistic sense of propensity may be expected
+      to affect the intellectual processes of the individual in a more pervasive
+      way than the higher forms of anthropomorphism. Where the animistic habit
+      is present in the naive form, its scope and range of application are not
+      defined or limited. It will therefore palpably affect his thinking at
+      every turn of the person's life&mdash;wherever he has to do with the
+      material means of life. In the later, maturer development of animism,
+      after it has been defined through the process of anthropomorphic
+      elaboration, when its application has been limited in a somewhat
+      consistent fashion to the remote and the invisible, it comes about that an
+      increasing range of everyday facts are provisionally accounted for without
+      recourse to the preternatural agency in which a cultivated animism
+      expresses itself. A highly integrated, personified preternatural agency is
+      not a convenient means of handling the trivial occurrences of life, and a
+      habit is therefore easily fallen into of accounting for many trivial or
+      vulgar phenomena in terms of sequence. The provisional explanation so
+      arrived at is by neglect allowed to stand as definitive, for trivial
+      purposes, until special provocation or perplexity recalls the individual
+      to his allegiance. But when special exigencies arise, that is to say, when
+      there is peculiar need of a full and free recourse to the law of cause and
+      effect, then the individual commonly has recourse to the preternatural
+      agency as a universal solvent, if he is possessed of an anthropomorphic
+      belief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The extra-causal propensity or agent has a very high utility as a recourse
+      in perplexity, but its utility is altogether of a non-economic kind. It is
+      especially a refuge and a fund of comfort where it has attained the degree
+      of consistency and specialization that belongs to an anthropomorphic
+      divinity. It has much to commend it even on other grounds than that of
+      affording the perplexed individual a means of escape from the difficulty
+      of accounting for phenomena in terms of causal sequence. It would scarcely
+      be in place here to dwell on the obvious and well-accepted merits of an
+      anthropomorphic divinity, as seen from the point of view of the aesthetic,
+      moral, or spiritual interest, or even as seen from the less remote
+      standpoint of political, military, or social policy. The question here
+      concerns the less picturesque and less urgent economic value of the belief
+      in such a preternatural agency, taken as a habit of thought which affects
+      the industrial serviceability of the believer. And even within this
+      narrow, economic range, the inquiry is perforce confined to the immediate
+      bearing of this habit of thought upon the believer's workmanlike
+      serviceability, rather than extended to include its remoter economic
+      effects. These remoter effects are very difficult to trace. The inquiry
+      into them is so encumbered with current preconceptions as to the degree in
+      which life is enhanced by spiritual contact with such a divinity, that any
+      attempt to inquire into their economic value must for the present be
+      fruitless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The immediate, direct effect of the animistic habit of thought upon the
+      general frame of mind of the believer goes in the direction of lowering
+      his effective intelligence in the respect in which intelligence is of
+      especial consequence for modern industry. The effect follows, in varying
+      degree, whether the preternatural agent or propensity believed in is of a
+      higher or a lower cast. This holds true of the barbarian's and the
+      sporting man's sense of luck and propensity, and likewise of the somewhat
+      higher developed belief in an anthropomorphic divinity, such as is
+      commonly possessed by the same class. It must be taken to hold true also&mdash;though
+      with what relative degree of cogency is not easy to say&mdash;of the more
+      adequately developed anthropomorphic cults, such as appeal to the devout
+      civilized man. The industrial disability entailed by a popular adherence
+      to one of the higher anthropomorphic cults may be relatively slight, but
+      it is not to be overlooked. And even these high-class cults of the Western
+      culture do not represent the last dissolving phase of this human sense of
+      extra-causal propensity. Beyond these the same animistic sense shows
+      itself also in such attenuations of anthropomorphism as the
+      eighteenth-century appeal to an order of nature and natural rights, and in
+      their modern representative, the ostensibly post-Darwinian concept of a
+      meliorative trend in the process of evolution. This animistic explanation
+      of phenomena is a form of the fallacy which the logicians knew by the name
+      of ignava ratio. For the purposes of industry or of science it counts as a
+      blunder in the apprehension and valuation of facts. Apart from its direct
+      industrial consequences, the animistic habit has a certain significance
+      for economic theory on other grounds. (1) It is a fairly reliable
+      indication of the presence, and to some extent even of the degree of
+      potency, of certain other archaic traits that accompany it and that are of
+      substantial economic consequence; and (2) the material consequences of
+      that code of devout proprieties to which the animistic habit gives rise in
+      the development of an anthropomorphic cult are of importance both (a) as
+      affecting the community's consumption of goods and the prevalent canons of
+      taste, as already suggested in an earlier chapter, and (b) by inducing and
+      conserving a certain habitual recognition of the relation to a superior,
+      and so stiffening the current sense of status and allegiance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As regards the point last named (b), that body of habits of thought which
+      makes up the character of any individual is in some sense an organic
+      whole. A marked variation in a given direction at any one point carries
+      with it, as its correlative, a concomitant variation in the habitual
+      expression of life in other directions or other groups of activities.
+      These various habits of thought, or habitual expressions of life, are all
+      phases of the single life sequence of the individual; therefore a habit
+      formed in response to a given stimulus will necessarily affect the
+      character of the response made to other stimuli. A modification of human
+      nature at any one point is a modification of human nature as a whole. On
+      this ground, and perhaps to a still greater extent on obscurer grounds
+      that can not be discussed here, there are these concomitant variations as
+      between the different traits of human nature. So, for instance, barbarian
+      peoples with a well-developed predatory scheme of life are commonly also
+      possessed of a strong prevailing animistic habit, a well-formed
+      anthropomorphic cult, and a lively sense of status. On the other hand,
+      anthropomorphism and the realizing sense of an animistic propensity in
+      material are less obtrusively present in the life of the peoples at the
+      cultural stages which precede and which follow the barbarian culture. The
+      sense of status is also feebler; on the whole, in peaceable communities.
+      It is to be remarked that a lively, but slightly specialized, animistic
+      belief is to be found in most if not all peoples living in the
+      ante-predatory, savage stage of culture. The primitive savage takes his
+      animism less seriously than the barbarian or the degenerate savage. With
+      him it eventuates in fantastic myth-making, rather than in coercive
+      superstition. The barbarian culture shows sportsmanship, status, and
+      anthropomorphism. There is commonly observable a like concomitance of
+      variations in the same respects in the individual temperament of men in
+      the civilized communities of today. Those modern representatives of the
+      predaceous barbarian temper that make up the sporting element are commonly
+      believers in luck; at least they have a strong sense of an animistic
+      propensity in things, by force of which they are given to gambling. So
+      also as regards anthropomorphism in this class. Such of them as give in
+      their adhesion to some creed commonly attach themselves to one of the
+      naively and consistently anthropomorphic creeds; there are relatively few
+      sporting men who seek spiritual comfort in the less anthropomorphic cults,
+      such as the Unitarian or the Universalist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Closely bound up with this correlation of anthropomorphism and prowess is
+      the fact that anthropomorphic cults act to conserve, if not to initiate,
+      habits of mind favorable to a regime of status. As regards this point, it
+      is quite impossible to say where the disciplinary effect of the cult ends
+      and where the evidence of a concomitance of variations in inherited traits
+      begins. In their finest development, the predatory temperament, the sense
+      of status, and the anthropomorphic cult all together belong to the
+      barbarian culture; and something of a mutual causal relation subsists
+      between the three phenomena as they come into sight in communities on that
+      cultural level. The way in which they recur in correlation in the habits
+      and attitudes of individuals and classes today goes far to imply a like
+      causal or organic relation between the same psychological phenomena
+      considered as traits or habits of the individual. It has appeared at an
+      earlier point in the discussion that the relation of status, as a feature
+      of social structure, is a consequence of the predatory habit of life. As
+      regards its line of derivation, it is substantially an elaborated
+      expression of the predatory attitude. On the other hand, an
+      anthropomorphic cult is a code of detailed relations of status
+      superimposed upon the concept of a preternatural, inscrutable propensity
+      in material things. So that, as regards the external facts of its
+      derivation, the cult may be taken as an outgrowth of archaic man's
+      pervading animistic sense, defined and in some degree transformed by the
+      predatory habit of life, the result being a personified preternatural
+      agency, which is by imputation endowed with a full complement of the
+      habits of thought that characterize the man of the predatory culture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The grosser psychological features in the case, which have an immediate
+      bearing on economic theory and are consequently to be taken account of
+      here, are therefore: (a) as has appeared in an earlier chapter, the
+      predatory, emulative habit of mind here called prowess is but the
+      barbarian variant of the generically human instinct of workmanship, which
+      has fallen into this specific form under the guidance of a habit of
+      invidious comparison of persons; (b) the relation of status is a formal
+      expression of such an invidious comparison duly gauged and graded
+      according to a sanctioned schedule; (c) an anthropomorphic cult, in the
+      days of its early vigor at least, is an institution the characteristic
+      element of which is a relation of status between the human subject as
+      inferior and the personified preternatural agency as superior. With this
+      in mind, there should be no difficulty in recognizing the intimate
+      relation which subsists between these three phenomena of human nature and
+      of human life; the relation amounts to an identity in some of their
+      substantial elements. On the one hand, the system of status and the
+      predatory habit of life are an expression of the instinct of workmanship
+      as it takes form under a custom of invidious comparison; on the other
+      hand, the anthropomorphic cult and the habit of devout observances are an
+      expression of men's animistic sense of a propensity in material things,
+      elaborated under the guidance of substantially the same general habit of
+      invidious comparison. The two categories&mdash;the emulative habit of life
+      and the habit of devout observances&mdash;are therefore to be taken as
+      complementary elements of the barbarian type of human nature and of its
+      modern barbarian variants. They are expressions of much the same range of
+      aptitudes, made in response to different sets of stimuli.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0012" id="link2HCH0012">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Twelve ~~ Devout Observances
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      A discoursive rehearsal of certain incidents of modern life will show the
+      organic relation of the anthropomorphic cults to the barbarian culture and
+      temperament. It will likewise serve to show how the survival and efficacy
+      of the cults and he prevalence of their schedule of devout observances are
+      related to the institution of a leisure class and to the springs of action
+      underlying that institution. Without any intention to commend or to
+      deprecate the practices to be spoken of under the head of devout
+      observances, or the spiritual and intellectual traits of which these
+      observances are the expression, the everyday phenomena of current
+      anthropomorphic cults may be taken up from the point of view of the
+      interest which they have for economic theory. What can properly be spoken
+      of here are the tangible, external features of devout observances. The
+      moral, as well as the devotional value of the life of faith lies outside
+      of the scope of the present inquiry. Of course no question is here
+      entertained as to the truth or beauty of the creeds on which the cults
+      proceed. And even their remoter economic bearing can not be taken up here;
+      the subject is too recondite and of too grave import to find a place in so
+      slight a sketch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Something has been said in an earlier chapter as to the influence which
+      pecuniary standards of value exert upon the processes of valuation carried
+      out on other bases, not related to the pecuniary interest. The relation is
+      not altogether one-sided. The economic standards or canons of valuation
+      are in their turn influenced by extra-economic standards of value. Our
+      judgments of the economic bearing of facts are to some extent shaped by
+      the dominant presence of these weightier interests. There is a point of
+      view, indeed, from which the economic interest is of weight only as being
+      ancillary to these higher, non-economic interests. For the present
+      purpose, therefore, some thought must be taken to isolate the economic
+      interest or the economic hearing of these phenomena of anthropomorphic
+      cults. It takes some effort to divest oneself of the more serious point of
+      view, and to reach an economic appreciation of these facts, with as little
+      as may be of the bias due to higher interests extraneous to economic
+      theory. In the discussion of the sporting temperament, it has appeared
+      that the sense of an animistic propensity in material things and events is
+      what affords the spiritual basis of the sporting man's gambling habit. For
+      the economic purpose, this sense of propensity is substantially the same
+      psychological element as expresses itself, under a variety of forms, in
+      animistic beliefs and anthropomorphic creeds. So far as concerns those
+      tangible psychological features with which economic theory has to deal,
+      the gambling spirit which pervades the sporting element shades off by
+      insensible gradations into that frame of mind which finds gratification in
+      devout observances. As seen from the point of view of economic theory, the
+      sporting character shades off into the character of a religious devotee.
+      Where the betting man's animistic sense is helped out by a somewhat
+      consistent tradition, it has developed into a more or less articulate
+      belief in a preternatural or hyperphysical agency, with something of an
+      anthropomorphic content. And where this is the case, there is commonly a
+      perceptible inclination to make terms with the preternatural agency by
+      some approved method of approach and conciliation. This element of
+      propitiation and cajoling has much in common with the crasser forms of
+      worship&mdash;if not in historical derivation, at least in actual
+      psychological content. It obviously shades off in unbroken continuity into
+      what is recognized as superstitious practice and belief, and so asserts
+      its claim to kinship with the grosser anthropomorphic cults.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sporting or gambling temperament, then, comprises some of the
+      substantial psychological elements that go to make a believer in creeds
+      and an observer of devout forms, the chief point of coincidence being the
+      belief in an inscrutable propensity or a preternatural interposition in
+      the sequence of events. For the purpose of the gambling practice the
+      belief in preternatural agency may be, and ordinarily is, less closely
+      formulated, especially as regards the habits of thought and the scheme of
+      life imputed to the preternatural agent; or, in other words, as regards
+      his moral character and his purposes in interfering in events. With
+      respect to the individuality or personality of the agency whose presence
+      as luck, or chance, or hoodoo, or mascot, etc., he feels and sometimes
+      dreads and endeavors to evade, the sporting man's views are also less
+      specific, less integrated and differentiated. The basis of his gambling
+      activity is, in great measure, simply an instinctive sense of the presence
+      of a pervasive extraphysical and arbitrary force or propensity in things
+      or situations, which is scarcely recognized as a personal agent. The
+      betting man is not infrequently both a believer in luck, in this naive
+      sense, and at the same time a pretty staunch adherent of some form of
+      accepted creed. He is especially prone to accept so much of the creed as
+      concerts the inscrutable power and the arbitrary habits of the divinity
+      which has won his confidence. In such a case he is possessed of two, or
+      sometimes more than two, distinguishable phases of animism. Indeed, the
+      complete series of successive phases of animistic belief is to be found
+      unbroken in the spiritual furniture of any sporting community. Such a
+      chain of animistic conceptions will comprise the most elementary form of
+      an instinctive sense of luck and chance and fortuitous necessity at one
+      end of the series, together with the perfectly developed anthropomorphic
+      divinity at the other end, with all intervening stages of integration.
+      Coupled with these beliefs in preternatural agency goes an instinctive
+      shaping of conduct to conform with the surmised requirements of the lucky
+      chance on the one hand, and a more or less devout submission to the
+      inscrutable decrees of the divinity on the other hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is a relationship in this respect between the sporting temperament
+      and the temperament of the delinquent classes; and the two are related to
+      the temperament which inclines to an anthropomorphic cult. Both the
+      delinquent and the sporting man are on the average more apt to be
+      adherents of some accredited creed, and are also rather more inclined to
+      devout observances, than the general average of the community. It is also
+      noticeable that unbelieving members of these classes show more of a
+      proclivity to become proselytes to some accredited faith than the average
+      of unbelievers. This fact of observation is avowed by the spokesmen of
+      sports, especially in apologizing for the more naively predatory athletic
+      sports. Indeed, it is somewhat insistently claimed as a meritorious
+      feature of sporting life that the habitual participants in athletic games
+      are in some degree peculiarly given to devout practices. And it is
+      observable that the cult to which sporting men and the predaceous
+      delinquent classes adhere, or to which proselytes from these classes
+      commonly attach themselves, is ordinarily not one of the so-called higher
+      faiths, but a cult which has to do with a thoroughly anthropomorphic
+      divinity. Archaic, predatory human nature is not satisfied with abstruse
+      conceptions of a dissolving personality that shades off into the concept
+      of quantitative causal sequence, such as the speculative, esoteric creeds
+      of Christendom impute to the First Cause, Universal Intelligence, World
+      Soul, or Spiritual Aspect. As an instance of a cult of the character which
+      the habits of mind of the athlete and the delinquent require, may be cited
+      that branch of the church militant known as the Salvation Army. This is to
+      some extent recruited from the lower-class delinquents, and it appears to
+      comprise also, among its officers especially, a larger proportion of men
+      with a sporting record than the proportion of such men in the aggregate
+      population of the community.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      College athletics afford a case in point. It is contended by exponents of
+      the devout element in college life&mdash;and there seems to be no ground
+      for disputing the claim&mdash;that the desirable athletic material
+      afforded by any student body in this country is at the same time
+      predominantly religious; or that it is at least given to devout
+      observances to a greater degree than the average of those students whose
+      interest in athletics and other college sports is less. This is what might
+      be expected on theoretical grounds. It may be remarked, by the way, that
+      from one point of view this is felt to reflect credit on the college
+      sporting life, on athletic games, and on those persons who occupy
+      themselves with these matters. It happens not frequently that college
+      sporting men devote themselves to religious propaganda, either as a
+      vocation or as a by-occupation; and it is observable that when this
+      happens they are likely to become propagandists of some one of the more
+      anthropomorphic cults. In their teaching they are apt to insist chiefly on
+      the personal relation of status which subsists between an anthropomorphic
+      divinity and the human subject.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This intimate relation between athletics and devout observance among
+      college men is a fact of sufficient notoriety; but it has a special
+      feature to which attention has not been called, although it is obvious
+      enough. The religious zeal which pervades much of the college sporting
+      element is especially prone to express itself in an unquestioning
+      devoutness and a naive and complacent submission to an inscrutable
+      Providence. It therefore by preference seeks affiliation with some one of
+      those lay religious organizations which occupy themselves with the spread
+      of the exoteric forms of faith&mdash;as, e.g., the Young Men's Christian
+      Association or the Young People's Society for Christian Endeavor. These
+      lay bodies are organized to further "practical" religion; and as if to
+      enforce the argument and firmly establish the close relationship between
+      the sporting temperament and the archaic devoutness, these lay religious
+      bodies commonly devote some appreciable portion of their energies to the
+      furtherance of athletic contests and similar games of chance and skill. It
+      might even be said that sports of this kind are apprehended to have some
+      efficacy as a means of grace. They are apparently useful as a means of
+      proselyting, and as a means of sustaining the devout attitude in converts
+      once made. That is to say, the games which give exercise to the animistic
+      sense and to the emulative propensity help to form and to conserve that
+      habit of mind to which the more exoteric cults are congenial. Hence, in
+      the hands of the lay organizations, these sporting activities come to do
+      duty as a novitiate or a means of induction into that fuller unfolding of
+      the life of spiritual status which is the privilege of the full
+      communicant along.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That the exercise of the emulative and lower animistic proclivities are
+      substantially useful for the devout purpose seems to be placed beyond
+      question by the fact that the priesthood of many denominations is
+      following the lead of the lay organizations in this respect. Those
+      ecclesiastical organizations especially which stand nearest the lay
+      organizations in their insistence on practical religion have gone some way
+      towards adopting these or analogous practices in connection with the
+      traditional devout observances. So there are "boys' brigades," and other
+      organizations, under clerical sanction, acting to develop the emulative
+      proclivity and the sense of status in the youthful members of the
+      congregation. These pseudo-military organizations tend to elaborate and
+      accentuate the proclivity to emulation and invidious comparison, and so
+      strengthen the native facility for discerning and approving the relation
+      of personal mastery and subservience. And a believer is eminently a person
+      who knows how to obey and accept chastisement with good grace. But the
+      habits of thought which these practices foster and conserve make up but
+      one half of the substance of the anthropomorphic cults. The other,
+      complementary element of devout life&mdash;the animistic habit of mind&mdash;is
+      recruited and conserved by a second range of practices organized under
+      clerical sanction. These are the class of gambling practices of which the
+      church bazaar or raffle may be taken as the type. As indicating the degree
+      of legitimacy of these practices in connection with devout observances
+      proper, it is to be remarked that these raffles, and the like trivial
+      opportunities for gambling, seem to appeal with more effect to the common
+      run of the members of religious organizations than they do to persons of a
+      less devout habit of mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this seems to argue, on the one hand, that the same temperament
+      inclines people to sports as inclines them to the anthropomorphic cults,
+      and on the other hand that the habituation to sports, perhaps especially
+      to athletic sports, acts to develop the propensities which find
+      satisfaction in devout observances. Conversely; it also appears that
+      habituation to these observances favors the growth of a proclivity for
+      athletic sports and for all games that give play to the habit of invidious
+      comparison and of the appeal to luck. Substantially the same range of
+      propensities finds expression in both these directions of the spiritual
+      life. That barbarian human nature in which the predatory instinct and the
+      animistic standpoint predominate is normally prone to both. The predatory
+      habit of mind involves an accentuated sense of personal dignity and of the
+      relative standing of individuals. The social structure in which the
+      predatory habit has been the dominant factor in the shaping of
+      institutions is a structure based on status. The pervading norm in the
+      predatory community's scheme of life is the relation of superior and
+      inferior, noble and base, dominant and subservient persons and classes,
+      master and slave. The anthropomorphic cults have come down from that stage
+      of industrial development and have been shaped by the same scheme of
+      economic differentiation&mdash;a differentiation into consumer and
+      producer&mdash;and they are pervaded by the same dominant principle of
+      mastery and subservience. The cults impute to their divinity the habits of
+      thought answering to the stage of economic differentiation at which the
+      cults took shape. The anthropomorphic divinity is conceived to be
+      punctilious in all questions of precedence and is prone to an assertion of
+      mastery and an arbitrary exercise of power&mdash;an habitual resort to
+      force as the final arbiter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the later and maturer formulations of the anthropomorphic creed this
+      imputed habit of dominance on the part of a divinity of awful presence and
+      inscrutable power is chastened into "the fatherhood of God." The spiritual
+      attitude and the aptitudes imputed to the preternatural agent are still
+      such as belong under the regime of status, but they now assume the
+      patriarchal cast characteristic of the quasi-peaceable stage of culture.
+      Still it is to be noted that even in this advanced phase of the cult the
+      observances in which devoutness finds expression consistently aim to
+      propitiate the divinity by extolling his greatness and glory and by
+      professing subservience and fealty. The act of propitiation or of worship
+      is designed to appeal to a sense of status imputed to the inscrutable
+      power that is thus approached. The propitiatory formulas most in vogue are
+      still such as carry or imply an invidious comparison. A loyal attachment
+      to the person of an anthropomorphic divinity endowed with such an archaic
+      human nature implies the like archaic propensities in the devotee. For the
+      purposes of economic theory, the relation of fealty, whether to a physical
+      or to an extraphysical person, is to be taken as a variant of that
+      personal subservience which makes up so large a share of the predatory and
+      the quasi-peaceable scheme of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The barbarian conception of the divinity, as a warlike chieftain inclined
+      to an overbearing manner of government, has been greatly softened through
+      the milder manners and the soberer habits of life that characterize those
+      cultural phases which lie between the early predatory stage and the
+      present. But even after this chastening of the devout fancy, and the
+      consequent mitigation of the harsher traits of conduct and character that
+      are currently imputed to the divinity, there still remains in the popular
+      apprehension of the divine nature and temperament a very substantial
+      residue of the barbarian conception. So it comes about, for instance, that
+      in characterizing the divinity and his relations to the process of human
+      life, speakers and writers are still able to make effective use of similes
+      borrowed from the vocabulary of war and of the predatory manner of life,
+      as well as of locutions which involve an invidious comparison. Figures of
+      speech of this import are used with good effect even in addressing the
+      less warlike modern audiences, made up of adherents of the blander
+      variants of the creed. This effective use of barbarian epithets and terms
+      of comparison by popular speakers argues that the modern generation has
+      retained a lively appreciation of the dignity and merit of the barbarian
+      virtues; and it argues also that there is a degree of congruity between
+      the devout attitude and the predatory habit of mind. It is only on second
+      thought, if at all, that the devout fancy of modern worshippers revolts at
+      the imputation of ferocious and vengeful emotions and actions to the
+      object of their adoration. It is a matter of common observation that
+      sanguinary epithets applied to the divinity have a high aesthetic and
+      honorific value in the popular apprehension. That is to say, suggestions
+      which these epithets carry are very acceptable to our unreflecting
+      apprehension.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
+  He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
+  He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword;
+  His truth is marching on.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The guiding habits of thought of a devout person move on the plane of an
+      archaic scheme of life which has outlived much of its usefulness for the
+      economic exigencies of the collective life of today. In so far as the
+      economic organization fits the exigencies of the collective life of today,
+      it has outlived the regime of status, and has no use and no place for a
+      relation of personal subserviency. So far as concerns the economic
+      efficiency of the community, the sentiment of personal fealty, and the
+      general habit of mind of which that sentiment is an expression, are
+      survivals which cumber the ground and hinder an adequate adjustment of
+      human institutions to the existing situation. The habit of mind which best
+      lends itself to the purposes of a peaceable, industrial community, is that
+      matter-of-fact temper which recognizes the value of material facts simply
+      as opaque items in the mechanical sequence. It is that frame of mind which
+      does not instinctively impute an animistic propensity to things, nor
+      resort to preternatural intervention as an explanation of perplexing
+      phenomena, nor depend on an unseen hand to shape the course of events to
+      human use. To meet the requirements of the highest economic efficiency
+      under modern conditions, the world process must habitually be apprehended
+      in terms of quantitative, dispassionate force and sequence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As seen from the point of view of the later economic exigencies,
+      devoutness is, perhaps in all cases, to be looked upon as a survival from
+      an earlier phase of associated life&mdash;a mark of arrested spiritual
+      development. Of course it remains true that in a community where the
+      economic structure is still substantially a system of status; where the
+      attitude of the average of persons in the community is consequently shaped
+      by and adapted to the relation of personal dominance and personal
+      subservience; or where for any other reason&mdash;of tradition or of
+      inherited aptitude&mdash;the population as a whole is strongly inclined to
+      devout observances; there a devout habit of mind in any individual, not in
+      excess of the average of the community, must be taken simply as a detail
+      of the prevalent habit of life. In this light, a devout individual in a
+      devout community can not be called a case of reversion, since he is
+      abreast of the average of the community. But as seen from the point of
+      view of the modern industrial situation, exceptional devoutness&mdash;devotional
+      zeal that rises appreciably above the average pitch of devoutness in the
+      community&mdash;may safely be set down as in all cases an atavistic trait.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is, of course, equally legitimate to consider these phenomena from a
+      different point of view. They may be appreciated for a different purpose,
+      and the characterization here offered may be turned about. In speaking
+      from the point of view of the devotional interest, or the interest of
+      devout taste, it may, with equal cogency, be said that the spiritual
+      attitude bred in men by the modern industrial life is unfavorable to a
+      free development of the life of faith. It might fairly be objected to the
+      later development of the industrial process that its discipline tends to
+      "materialism," to the elimination of filial piety. From the aesthetic
+      point of view, again, something to a similar purport might be said. But,
+      however legitimate and valuable these and the like reflections may be for
+      their purpose, they would not be in place in the present inquiry, which is
+      exclusively concerned with the valuation of these phenomena from the
+      economic point of view.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The grave economic significance of the anthropomorphic habit of mind and
+      of the addiction to devout observances must serve as apology for speaking
+      further on a topic which it can not but be distasteful to discuss at all
+      as an economic phenomenon in a community so devout as ours. Devout
+      observances are of economic importance as an index of a concomitant
+      variation of temperament, accompanying the predatory habit of mind and so
+      indicating the presence of industrially disserviceable traits. They
+      indicate the presence of a mental attitude which has a certain economic
+      value of its own by virtue of its influence upon the industrial
+      serviceability of the individual. But they are also of importance more
+      directly, in modifying the economic activities of the community,
+      especially as regards the distribution and consumption of goods.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The most obvious economic bearing of these observances is seen in the
+      devout consumption of goods and services. The consumption of ceremonial
+      paraphernalia required by any cult, in the way of shrines, temples,
+      churches, vestments, sacrifices, sacraments, holiday attire, etc., serves
+      no immediate material end. All this material apparatus may, therefore,
+      without implying deprecation, be broadly characterized as items of
+      conspicuous waste. The like is true in a general way of the personal
+      service consumed under this head; such as priestly education, priestly
+      service, pilgrimages, fasts, holidays, household devotions, and the like.
+      At the same time the observances in the execution of which this
+      consumption takes place serve to extend and protract the vogue of those
+      habits of thought on which an anthropomorphic cult rests. That is to say,
+      they further the habits of thought characteristic of the regime of status.
+      They are in so far an obstruction to the most effective organization of
+      industry under modern circumstances; and are, in the first instance,
+      antagonistic to the development of economic institutions in the direction
+      required by the situation of today. For the present purpose, the indirect
+      as well as the direct effects of this consumption are of the nature of a
+      curtailment of the community's economic efficiency. In economic theory,
+      then, and considered in its proximate consequences, the consumption of
+      goods and effort in the service of an anthropomorphic divinity means a
+      lowering of the vitality of the community. What may be the remoter,
+      indirect, moral effects of this class of consumption does not admit of a
+      succinct answer, and it is a question which can not be taken up here.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It will be to the point, however, to note the general economic character
+      of devout consumption, in comparison with consumption for other purposes.
+      An indication of the range of motives and purposes from which devout
+      consumption of goods proceeds will help toward an appreciation of the
+      value both of this consumption itself and of the general habit of mind to
+      which it is congenial. There is a striking parallelism, if not rather a
+      substantial identity of motive, between the consumption which goes to the
+      service of an anthropomorphic divinity and that which goes to the service
+      of a gentleman of leisure chieftain or patriarch&mdash;in the upper class
+      of society during the barbarian culture. Both in the case of the chieftain
+      and in that of the divinity there are expensive edifices set apart for the
+      behoof of the person served. These edifices, as well as the properties
+      which supplement them in the service, must not be common in kind or grade;
+      they always show a large element of conspicuous waste. It may also be
+      noted that the devout edifices are invariably of an archaic cast in their
+      structure and fittings. So also the servants, both of the chieftain and of
+      the divinity, must appear in the presence clothed in garments of a
+      special, ornate character. The characteristic economic feature of this
+      apparel is a more than ordinarily accentuated conspicuous waste, together
+      with the secondary feature&mdash;more accentuated in the case of the
+      priestly servants than in that of the servants or courtiers of the
+      barbarian potentate&mdash;that this court dress must always be in some
+      degree of an archaic fashion. Also the garments worn by the lay members of
+      the community when they come into the presence, should be of a more
+      expensive kind than their everyday apparel. Here, again, the parallelism
+      between the usage of the chieftain's audience hall and that of the
+      sanctuary is fairly well marked. In this respect there is required a
+      certain ceremonial "cleanness" of attire, the essential feature of which,
+      in the economic respect, is that the garments worn on these occasions
+      should carry as little suggestion as may be of any industrial occupation
+      or of any habitual addiction to such employments as are of material use.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This requirement of conspicuous waste and of ceremonial cleanness from the
+      traces of industry extends also to the apparel, and in a less degree to
+      the food, which is consumed on sacred holidays; that is to say, on days
+      set apart&mdash;tabu&mdash;for the divinity or for some member of the
+      lower ranks of the preternatural leisure class. In economic theory, sacred
+      holidays are obviously to be construed as a season of vicarious leisure
+      performed for the divinity or saint in whose name the tabu is imposed and
+      to whose good repute the abstention from useful effort on these days is
+      conceived to inure. The characteristic feature of all such seasons of
+      devout vicarious leisure is a more or less rigid tabu on all activity that
+      is of human use. In the case of fast-days the conspicuous abstention from
+      gainful occupations and from all pursuits that (materially) further human
+      life is further accentuated by compulsory abstinence from such consumption
+      as would conduce to the comfort or the fullness of life of the consumer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may be remarked, parenthetically, that secular holidays are of the same
+      origin, by slightly remoter derivation. They shade off by degrees from the
+      genuinely sacred days, through an intermediate class of semi-sacred
+      birthdays of kings and great men who have been in some measure canonized,
+      to the deliberately invented holiday set apart to further the good repute
+      of some notable event or some striking fact, to which it is intended to do
+      honor, or the good fame of which is felt to be in need of repair. The
+      remoter refinement in the employment of vicarious leisure as a means of
+      augmenting the good repute of a phenomenon or datum is seen at its best in
+      its very latest application. A day of vicarious leisure has in some
+      communities been set apart as Labor Day. This observance is designed to
+      augment the prestige of the fact of labor, by the archaic, predatory
+      method of a compulsory abstention from useful effort. To this datum of
+      labor-in-general is imputed the good repute attributable to the pecuniary
+      strength put in evidence by abstaining from labor. Sacred holidays, and
+      holidays generally, are of the nature of a tribute levied on the body of
+      the people. The tribute is paid in vicarious leisure, and the honorific
+      effect which emerges is imputed to the person or the fact for whose good
+      repute the holiday has been instituted. Such a tithe of vicarious leisure
+      is a perquisite of all members of the preternatural leisure class and is
+      indispensable to their good fame. Un saint qu'on ne chôme pas is indeed a
+      saint fallen on evil days.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides this tithe of vicarious leisure levied on the laity, there are
+      also special classes of persons&mdash;the various grades of priests and
+      hierodules&mdash;whose time is wholly set apart for a similar service. It
+      is not only incumbent on the priestly class to abstain from vulgar labor,
+      especially so far as it is lucrative or is apprehended to contribute to
+      the temporal well-being of mankind. The tabu in the case of the priestly
+      class goes farther and adds a refinement in the form of an injunction
+      against their seeking worldly gain even where it may be had without
+      debasing application to industry. It is felt to be unworthy of the servant
+      of the divinity, or rather unworthy the dignity of the divinity whose
+      servant he is, that he should seek material gain or take thought for
+      temporal matters. "Of all contemptible things a man who pretends to be a
+      priest of God and is a priest to his own comforts and ambitions is the
+      most contemptible." There is a line of discrimination, which a cultivated
+      taste in matters of devout observance finds little difficulty in drawing,
+      between such actions and conduct as conduce to the fullness of human life
+      and such as conduce to the good fame of the anthropomorphic divinity; and
+      the activity of the priestly class, in the ideal barbarian scheme, falls
+      wholly on the hither side of this line. What falls within the range of
+      economics falls below the proper level of solicitude of the priesthood in
+      its best estate. Such apparent exceptions to this rule as are afforded,
+      for instance, by some of the medieval orders of monks (the members of
+      which actually labored to some useful end), scarcely impugn the rule.
+      These outlying orders of the priestly class are not a sacerdotal element
+      in the full sense of the term. And it is noticeable also that these
+      doubtfully sacerdotal orders, which countenanced their members in earning
+      a living, fell into disrepute through offending the sense of propriety in
+      the communities where they existed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The priest should not put his hand to mechanically productive work; but he
+      should consume in large measure. But even as regards his consumption it is
+      to be noted that it should take such forms as do not obviously conduce to
+      his own comfort or fullness of life; it should conform to the rules
+      governing vicarious consumption, as explained under that head in an
+      earlier chapter. It is not ordinarily in good form for the priestly class
+      to appear well fed or in hilarious spirits. Indeed, in many of the more
+      elaborate cults the injunction against other than vicarious consumption by
+      this class frequently goes so far as to enjoin mortification of the flesh.
+      And even in those modern denominations which have been organized under the
+      latest formulations of the creed, in a modern industrial community, it is
+      felt that all levity and avowed zest in the enjoyment of the good things
+      of this world is alien to the true clerical decorum. Whatever suggests
+      that these servants of an invisible master are living a life, not of
+      devotion to their master's good fame, but of application to their own
+      ends, jars harshly on our sensibilities as something fundamentally and
+      eternally wrong. They are a servant class, although, being servants of a
+      very exalted master, they rank high in the social scale by virtue of this
+      borrowed light. Their consumption is vicarious consumption; and since, in
+      the advanced cults, their master has no need of material gain, their
+      occupation is vicarious leisure in the full sense. "Whether therefore ye
+      eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God." It may be
+      added that so far as the laity is assimilated to the priesthood in the
+      respect that they are conceived to be servants of the divinity. So far
+      this imputed vicarious character attaches also to the layman's life. The
+      range of application of this corollary is somewhat wide. It applies
+      especially to such movements for the reform or rehabilitation of the
+      religious life as are of an austere, pietistic, ascetic cast&mdash;where
+      the human subject is conceived to hold his life by a direct servile tenure
+      from his spiritual sovereign. That is to say, where the institution of the
+      priesthood lapses, or where there is an exceptionally lively sense of the
+      immediate and masterful presence of the divinity in the affairs of life,
+      there the layman is conceived to stand in an immediate servile relation to
+      the divinity, and his life is construed to be a performance of vicarious
+      leisure directed to the enhancement of his master's repute. In such cases
+      of reversion there is a return to the unmediated relation of subservience,
+      as the dominant fact of the devout attitude. The emphasis is thereby thrown
+      oon austere and discomforting vicarious leisure, to the neglect of
+      conspicuous consumption as a means of grace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A doubt will present itself as to the full legitimacy of this
+      characterization of the sacerdotal scheme of life, on the ground that a
+      considerable proportion of the modern priesthood departs from the scheme
+      in many details. The scheme does not hold good for the clergy of those
+      denominations which have in some measure diverged from the old established
+      schedule of beliefs or observances. These take thought, at least
+      ostensibly or permissively, for the temporal welfare of the laity, as well
+      as for their own. Their manner of life, not only in the privacy of their
+      own household, but often even before the public, does not differ in an
+      extreme degree from that of secular-minded persons, either in its
+      ostensible austerity or in the archaism of its apparatus. This is truest
+      for those denominations that have wandered the farthest. To this objection
+      it is to be said that we have here to do not with a discrepancy in the
+      theory of sacerdotal life, but with an imperfect conformity to the scheme
+      on the part of this body of clergy. They are but a partial and imperfect
+      representative of the priesthood, and must not be taken as exhibiting the
+      sacerdotal scheme of life in an authentic and competent manner. The clergy
+      of the sects and denominations might be characterized as a half-caste
+      priesthood, or a priesthood in process of becoming or of reconstitution.
+      Such a priesthood may be expected to show the characteristics of the
+      sacerdotal office only as blended and obscured with alien motives and
+      traditions, due to the disturbing presence of other factors than those of
+      animism and status in the purposes of the organizations to which this
+      non-conforming fraction of the priesthood belongs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Appeal may be taken direct to the taste of any person with a
+      discriminating and cultivated sense of the sacerdotal proprieties, or to
+      the prevalent sense of what constitutes clerical decorum in any community
+      at all accustomed to think or to pass criticism on what a clergyman may or
+      may not do without blame. Even in the most extremely secularized
+      denominations, there is some sense of a distinction that should be
+      observed between the sacerdotal and the lay scheme of life. There is no
+      person of sensibility but feels that where the members of this
+      denominational or sectarian clergy depart from traditional usage, in the
+      direction of a less austere or less archaic demeanor and apparel, they are
+      departing from the ideal of priestly decorum. There is probably no
+      community and no sect within the range of the Western culture in which the
+      bounds of permissible indulgence are not drawn appreciably closer for the
+      incumbent of the priestly office than for the common layman. If the
+      priest's own sense of sacerdotal propriety does not effectually impose a
+      limit, the prevalent sense of the proprieties on the part of the community
+      will commonly assert itself so obtrusively as to lead to his conformity or
+      his retirement from office.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Few if any members of any body of clergy, it may be added, would avowedly
+      seek an increase of salary for gain's sake; and if such avowal were openly
+      made by a clergyman, it would be found obnoxious to the sense of propriety
+      among his congregation. It may also be noted in this connection that no
+      one but the scoffers and the very obtuse are not instinctively grieved
+      inwardly at a jest from the pulpit; and that there are none whose respect
+      for their pastor does not suffer through any mark of levity on his part in
+      any conjuncture of life, except it be levity of a palpably histrionic kind&mdash;a
+      constrained unbending of dignity. The diction proper to the sanctuary and
+      to the priestly office should also carry little if any suggestion of
+      effective everyday life, and should not draw upon the vocabulary of modern
+      trade or industry. Likewise, one's sense of the proprieties is readily
+      offended by too detailed and intimate a handling of industrial and other
+      purely human questions at the hands of the clergy. There is a certain
+      level of generality below which a cultivated sense of the proprieties in
+      homiletical discourse will not permit a well-bred clergyman to decline in
+      his discussion of temporal interests. These matters that are of human and
+      secular consequence simply, should properly be handled with such a degree
+      of generality and aloofness as may imply that the speaker represents a
+      master whose interest in secular affairs goes only so far as to
+      permissively countenance them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is further to be noticed that the non-conforming sects and variants
+      whose priesthood is here under discussion, vary among themselves in the
+      degree of their conformity to the ideal scheme of sacerdotal life. In a
+      general way it will be found that the divergence in this respect is widest
+      in the case of the relatively young denominations, and especially in the
+      case of such of the newer denominations as have chiefly a lower
+      middle-class constituency. They commonly show a large admixture of
+      humanitarian, philanthropic, or other motives which can not be classed as
+      expressions of the devotional attitude; such as the desire of learning or
+      of conviviality, which enter largely into the effective interest shown by
+      members of these organizations. The non-conforming or sectarian movements
+      have commonly proceeded from a mixture of motives, some of which are at
+      variance with that sense of status on which the priestly office rests.
+      Sometimes, indeed, the motive has been in good part a revulsion against a
+      system of status. Where this is the case the institution of the priesthood
+      has broken down in the transition, at least partially. The spokesman of
+      such an organization is at the outset a servant and representative of the
+      organization, rather than a member of a special priestly class and the
+      spokesman of a divine master. And it is only by a process of gradual
+      specialization that, in succeeding generations, this spokesman regains the
+      position of priest, with a full investiture of sacerdotal authority, and
+      with its accompanying austere, archaic and vicarious manner of life. The
+      like is true of the breakdown and redintegration of devout ritual after
+      such a revulsion. The priestly office, the scheme of sacerdotal life, and
+      the schedule of devout observances are rehabilitated only gradually,
+      insensibly, and with more or less variation in details, as a persistent
+      human sense of devout propriety reasserts its primacy in questions
+      touching the interest in the preternatural&mdash;and it may be added, as
+      the organization increases in wealth, and so acquires more of the point of
+      view and the habits of thought of a leisure class.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Beyond the priestly class, and ranged in an ascending hierarchy,
+      ordinarily comes a superhuman vicarious leisure class of saints, angels,
+      etc.&mdash;or their equivalents in the ethnic cults. These rise in grade,
+      one above another, according to elaborate system of status. The principle
+      of status runs through the entire hierarchical system, both visible and
+      invisible. The good fame of these several orders of the supernatural
+      hierarchy also commonly requires a certain tribute of vicarious
+      consumption and vicarious leisure. In many cases they accordingly have
+      devoted to their service sub-orders of attendants or dependents who
+      perform a vicarious leisure for them, after much the same fashion as was
+      found in an earlier chapter to be true of the dependent leisure class
+      under the patriarchal system.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may not appear without reflection how these devout observances and the
+      peculiarity of temperament which they imply, or the consumption of goods
+      and services which is comprised in the cult, stand related to the leisure
+      class of a modern community, or to the economic motives of which that
+      class is the exponent in the modern scheme of life to this end a summary
+      review of certain facts bearing on this relation will be useful. It
+      appears from an earlier passage in this discussion that for the purpose of
+      the collective life of today, especially so far as concerns the industrial
+      efficiency of the modern community, the characteristic traits of the
+      devout temperament are a hindrance rather than a help. It should
+      accordingly be found that the modern industrial life tends selectively to
+      eliminate these traits of human nature from the spiritual constitution of
+      the classes that are immediately engaged in the industrial process. It
+      should hold true, approximately, that devoutness is declining or tending
+      to obsolescence among the members of what may be called the effective
+      industrial community. At the same time it should appear that this aptitude
+      or habit survives in appreciably greater vigor among those classes which
+      do not immediately or primarily enter into the community's life process as
+      an industrial factor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It has already been pointed out that these latter classes, which live by,
+      rather than in, the industrial process, are roughly comprised under two
+      categories (1) the leisure class proper, which is shielded from the stress
+      of the economic situation; and (2) the indigent classes, including the
+      lower-class delinquents, which are unduly exposed to the stress. In the
+      case of the former class an archaic habit of mind persists because no
+      effectual economic pressure constrains this class to an adaptation of its
+      habits of thought to the changing situation; while in the latter the
+      reason for a failure to adjust their habits of thought to the altered
+      requirements of industrial efficiency is innutrition, absence of such
+      surplus of energy as is needed in order to make the adjustment with
+      facility, together with a lack of opportunity to acquire and become
+      habituated to the modern point of view. The trend of the selective process
+      runs in much the same direction in both cases.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the point of view which the modern industrial life inculcates,
+      phenomena are habitually subsumed under the quantitative relation of
+      mechanical sequence. The indigent classes not only fall short of the
+      modicum of leisure necessary in order to appropriate and assimilate the
+      more recent generalizations of science which this point of view involves,
+      but they also ordinarily stand in such a relation of personal dependence
+      or subservience to their pecuniary superiors as materially to retard their
+      emancipation from habits of thought proper to the regime of status. The
+      result is that these classes in some measure retain that general habit of
+      mind the chief expression of which is a strong sense of personal status,
+      and of which devoutness is one feature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the older communities of the European culture, the hereditary leisure
+      class, together with the mass of the indigent population, are given to
+      devout observances in an appreciably higher degree than the average of the
+      industrious middle class, wherever a considerable class of the latter
+      character exists. But in some of these countries, the two categories of
+      conservative humanity named above comprise virtually the whole population.
+      Where these two classes greatly preponderate, their bent shapes popular
+      sentiment to such an extent as to bear down any possible divergent
+      tendency in the inconsiderable middle class, and imposes a devout attitude
+      upon the whole community.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This must, of course, not be construed to say that such communities or
+      such classes as are exceptionally prone to devout observances tend to
+      conform in any exceptional degree to the specifications of any code of
+      morals that we may be accustomed to associate with this or that confession
+      of faith. A large measure of the devout habit of mind need not carry with
+      it a strict observance of the injunctions of the Decalogue or of the
+      common law. Indeed, it is becoming somewhat of a commonplace with
+      observers of criminal life in European communities that the criminal and
+      dissolute classes are, if anything, rather more devout, and more naively
+      so, than the average of the population. It is among those who constitute
+      the pecuniary middle class and the body of law-abiding citizens that a
+      relative exemption from the devotional attitude is to be looked for. Those
+      who best appreciate the merits of the higher creeds and observances would
+      object to all this and say that the devoutness of the low-class
+      delinquents is a spurious, or at the best a superstitious devoutness; and
+      the point is no doubt well taken and goes directly and cogently to the
+      purpose intended. But for the purpose of the present inquiry these
+      extra-economic, extra-psychological distinctions must perforce be
+      neglected, however valid and however decisive they may be for the purpose
+      for which they are made.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What has actually taken place with regard to class emancipation from the
+      habit of devout observance is shown by the latter-day complaint of the
+      clergy&mdash;that the churches are losing the sympathy of the artisan
+      classes, and are losing their hold upon them. At the same time it is
+      currently believed that the middle class, commonly so called, is also
+      falling away in the cordiality of its support of the church, especially so
+      far as regards the adult male portion of that class. These are currently
+      recognized phenomena, and it might seem that a simple reference to these
+      facts should sufficiently substantiate the general position outlined. Such
+      an appeal to the general phenomena of popular church attendance and church
+      membership may be sufficiently convincing for the proposition here
+      advanced. But it will still be to the purpose to trace in some detail the
+      course of events and the particular forces which have wrought this change
+      in the spiritual attitude of the more advanced industrial communities of
+      today. It will serve to illustrate the manner in which economic causes
+      work towards a secularization of men's habits of thought. In this respect
+      the American community should afford an exceptionally convincing
+      illustration, since this community has been the least trammelled by
+      external circumstances of any equally important industrial aggregate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After making due allowance for exceptions and sporadic departures from the
+      normal, the situation here at the present time may be summarized quite
+      briefly. As a general rule the classes that are low in economic
+      efficiency, or in intelligence, or both, are peculiarly devout&mdash;as,
+      for instance, the Negro population of the South, much of the lower-class
+      foreign population, much of the rural population, especially in those
+      sections which are backward in education, in the stage of development of
+      their industry, or in respect of their industrial contact with the rest of
+      the community. So also such fragments as we possess of a specialized or
+      hereditary indigent class, or of a segregated criminal or dissolute class;
+      although among these latter the devout habit of mind is apt to take the
+      form of a naive animistic belief in luck and in the efficacy of
+      shamanistic practices perhaps more frequently than it takes the form of a
+      formal adherence to any accredited creed. The artisan class, on the other
+      hand, is notoriously falling away from the accredited anthropomorphic
+      creeds and from all devout observances. This class is in an especial
+      degree exposed to the characteristic intellectual and spiritual stress of
+      modern organized industry, which requires a constant recognition of the
+      undisguised phenomena of impersonal, matter-of-fact sequence and an
+      unreserved conformity to the law of cause and effect. This class is at the
+      same time not underfed nor over-worked to such an extent as to leave no
+      margin of energy for the work of adaptation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The case of the lower or doubtful leisure class in America&mdash;the
+      middle class commonly so called&mdash;is somewhat peculiar. It differs in
+      respect of its devotional life from its European counterpart, but it
+      differs in degree and method rather than in substance. The churches still
+      have the pecuniary support of this class; although the creeds to which the
+      class adheres with the greatest facility are relatively poor in
+      anthropomorphic content. At the same time the effective middle-class
+      congregation tends, in many cases, more or less remotely perhaps, to
+      become a congregation of women and minors. There is an appreciable lack of
+      devotional fervor among the adult males of the middle class, although to a
+      considerable extent there survives among them a certain complacent,
+      reputable assent to the outlines of the accredited creed under which they
+      were born. Their everyday life is carried on in a more or less close
+      contact with the industrial process.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This peculiar sexual differentiation, which tends to delegate devout
+      observances to the women and their children, is due, at least in part, to
+      the fact that the middle-class women are in great measure a (vicarious)
+      leisure class. The same is true in a less degree of the women of the
+      lower, artisan classes. They live under a regime of status handed down
+      from an earlier stage of industrial development, and thereby they preserve
+      a frame of mind and habits of thought which incline them to an archaic
+      view of things generally. At the same time they stand in no such direct
+      organic relation to the industrial process at large as would tend strongly
+      to break down those habits of thought which, for the modern industrial
+      purpose, are obsolete. That is to say, the peculiar devoutness of women is
+      a particular expression of that conservatism which the women of civilized
+      communities owe, in great measure, to their economic position. For the
+      modern man the patriarchal relation of status is by no means the dominant
+      feature of life; but for the women on the other hand, and for the upper
+      middle-class women especially, confined as they are by prescription and by
+      economic circumstances to their "domestic sphere," this relation is the
+      most real and most formative factor of life. Hence a habit of mind
+      favorable to devout observances and to the interpretation of the facts of
+      life generally in terms of personal status. The logic, and the logical
+      processes, of her everyday domestic life are carried over into the realm
+      of the supernatural, and the woman finds herself at home and content in a
+      range of ideas which to the man are in great measure alien and imbecile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Still the men of this class are also not devoid of piety, although it is
+      commonly not piety of an aggressive or exuberant kind. The men of the
+      upper middle class commonly take a more complacent attitude towards devout
+      observances than the men of the artisan class. This may perhaps be
+      explained in part by saying that what is true of the women of the class is
+      true to a less extent also of the men. They are to an appreciable extent a
+      sheltered class; and the patriarchal relation of status which still
+      persists in their conjugal life and in their habitual use of servants, may
+      also act to conserve an archaic habit of mind and may exercise a retarding
+      influence upon the process of secularization which their habits of thought
+      are undergoing. The relations of the American middle-class man to the
+      economic community, however, are usually pretty close and exacting;
+      although it may be remarked, by the way and in qualification, that their
+      economic activity frequently also partakes in some degree of the
+      patriarchal or quasi-predatory character. The occupations which are in
+      good repute among this class and which have most to do with shaping the
+      class habits of thought, are the pecuniary occupations which have been
+      spoken of in a similar connection in an earlier chapter. There is a good
+      deal of the relation of arbitrary command and submission, and not a little
+      of shrewd practice, remotely akin to predatory fraud. All this belongs on
+      the plane of life of the predatory barbarian, to whom a devotional
+      attitude is habitual. And in addition to this, the devout observances also
+      commend themselves to this class on the ground of reputability. But this
+      latter incentive to piety deserves treatment by itself and will be spoken
+      of presently. There is no hereditary leisure class of any consequence in
+      the American community, except in the South. This Southern leisure class
+      is somewhat given to devout observances; more so than any class of
+      corresponding pecuniary standing in other parts of the country. It is also
+      well known that the creeds of the South are of a more old-fashioned cast
+      than their counterparts in the North. Corresponding to this more archaic
+      devotional life of the South is the lower industrial development of that
+      section. The industrial organization of the South is at present, and
+      especially it has been until quite recently, of a more primitive character
+      than that of the American community taken as a whole. It approaches nearer
+      to handicraft, in the paucity and rudeness of its mechanical appliances,
+      and there is more of the element of mastery and subservience. It may also
+      be noted that, owing to the peculiar economic circumstances of this
+      section, the greater devoutness of the Southern population, both white and
+      black, is correlated with a scheme of life which in many ways recalls the
+      barbarian stages of industrial development. Among this population offenses
+      of an archaic character also are and have been relatively more prevalent
+      and are less deprecated than they are elsewhere; as, for example, duels,
+      brawls, feuds, drunkenness, horse-racing, cock-fighting, gambling, male
+      sexual incontinence (evidenced by the considerable number of mulattoes).
+      There is also a livelier sense of honor&mdash;an expression of
+      sportsmanship and a derivative of predatory life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As regards the wealthier class of the North, the American leisure class in
+      the best sense of the term, it is, to begin with, scarcely possible to
+      speak of an hereditary devotional attitude. This class is of too recent
+      growth to be possessed of a well-formed transmitted habit in this respect,
+      or even of a special home-grown tradition. Still, it may be noted in
+      passing that there is a perceptible tendency among this class to give in
+      at least a nominal, and apparently something of a real, adherence to some
+      one of the accredited creeds. Also, weddings, funerals, and the like
+      honorific events among this class are pretty uniformly solemnized with
+      some especial degree of religious circumstance. It is impossible to say
+      how far this adherence to a creed is a bona fide reversion to a devout
+      habit of mind, and how far it is to be classed as a case of protective
+      mimicry assumed for the purpose of an outward assimilation to canons of
+      reputability borrowed from foreign ideals. Something of a substantial
+      devotional propensity seems to be present, to judge especially by the
+      somewhat peculiar degree of ritualistic observance which is in process of
+      development in the upper-class cults. There is a tendency perceptible
+      among the upper-class worshippers to affiliate themselves with those cults
+      which lay relatively great stress on ceremonial and on the spectacular
+      accessories of worship; and in the churches in which an upper-class
+      membership predominates, there is at the same time a tendency to
+      accentuate the ritualistic, at the cost of the intellectual features in
+      the service and in the apparatus of the devout observances. This holds
+      true even where the church in question belongs to a denomination with a
+      relatively slight general development of ritual and paraphernalia. This
+      peculiar development of the ritualistic element is no doubt due in part to
+      a predilection for conspicuously wasteful spectacles, but it probably also
+      in part indicates something of the devotional attitude of the worshippers.
+      So far as the latter is true, it indicates a relatively archaic form of
+      the devotional habit. The predominance of spectacular effects in devout
+      observances is noticeable in all devout communities at a relatively
+      primitive stage of culture and with a slight intellectual development. It
+      is especially characteristic of the barbarian culture. Here there is
+      pretty uniformly present in the devout observances a direct appeal to the
+      emotions through all the avenues of sense. And a tendency to return to
+      this naive, sensational method of appeal is unmistakable in the
+      upper-class churches of today. It is perceptible in a less degree in the
+      cults which claim the allegiance of the lower leisure class and of the
+      middle classes. There is a reversion to the use of colored lights and
+      brilliant spectacles, a freer use of symbols, orchestral music and
+      incense, and one may even detect in "processionals" and "recessionals" and
+      in richly varied genuflexional evolutions, an incipient reversion to so
+      antique an accessory of worship as the sacred dance. This reversion to
+      spectacular observances is not confined to the upper-class cults, although
+      it finds its best exemplification and its highest accentuation in the
+      higher pecuniary and social altitudes. The cults of the lower-class devout
+      portion of the community, such as the Southern Negroes and the backward
+      foreign elements of the population, of course also show a strong
+      inclination to ritual, symbolism, and spectacular effects; as might be
+      expected from the antecedents and the cultural level of those classes.
+      With these classes the prevalence of ritual and anthropomorphism are not
+      so much a matter of reversion as of continued development out of the past.
+      But the use of ritual and related features of devotion are also spreading
+      in other directions. In the early days of the American community the
+      prevailing denominations started out with a ritual and paraphernalia of an
+      austere simplicity; but it is a matter familiar to every one that in the
+      course of time these denominations have, in a varying degree, adopted much
+      of the spectacular elements which they once renounced. In a general way,
+      this development has gone hand in hand with the growth of the wealth and
+      the ease of life of the worshippers and has reached its fullest expression
+      among those classes which grade highest in wealth and repute.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The causes to which this pecuniary stratification of devoutness is due
+      have already been indicated in a general way in speaking of class
+      differences in habits of thought. Class differences as regards devoutness
+      are but a special expression of a generic fact. The lax allegiance of the
+      lower middle class, or what may broadly be called the failure of filial
+      piety among this class, is chiefly perceptible among the town populations
+      engaged in the mechanical industries. In a general way, one does not, at
+      the present time, look for a blameless filial piety among those classes
+      whose employment approaches that of the engineer and the mechanician.
+      These mechanical employments are in a degree a modern fact. The
+      handicraftsmen of earlier times, who served an industrial end of a
+      character similar to that now served by the mechanician, were not
+      similarly refractory under the discipline of devoutness. The habitual
+      activity of the men engaged in these branches of industry has greatly
+      changed, as regards its intellectual discipline, since the modern
+      industrial processes have come into vogue; and the discipline to which the
+      mechanician is exposed in his daily employment affects the methods and
+      standards of his thinking also on topics which lie outside his everyday
+      work. Familiarity with the highly organized and highly impersonal
+      industrial processes of the present acts to derange the animistic habits
+      of thought. The workman's office is becoming more and more exclusively
+      that of discretion and supervision in a process of mechanical,
+      dispassionate sequences. So long as the individual is the chief and
+      typical prime mover in the process; so long as the obtrusive feature of
+      the industrial process is the dexterity and force of the individual
+      handicraftsman; so long the habit of interpreting phenomena in terms of
+      personal motive and propensity suffers no such considerable and consistent
+      derangement through facts as to lead to its elimination. But under the
+      later developed industrial processes, when the prime movers and the
+      contrivances through which they work are of an impersonal, non-individual
+      character, the grounds of generalization habitually present in the
+      workman's mind and the point of view from which he habitually apprehends
+      phenomena is an enforced cognizance of matter-of-fact sequence. The
+      result, so far as concerts the workman's life of faith, is a proclivity to
+      undevout scepticism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It appears, then, that the devout habit of mind attains its best
+      development under a relatively archaic culture; the term "devout" being of
+      course here used in its anthropological sense simply, and not as implying
+      anything with respect to the spiritual attitude so characterized, beyond
+      the fact of a proneness to devout observances. It appears also that this
+      devout attitude marks a type of human nature which is more in consonance
+      with the predatory mode of life than with the later-developed, more
+      consistently and organically industrial life process of the community. It
+      is in large measure an expression of the archaic habitual sense of
+      personal status&mdash;the relation of mastery and subservience&mdash;and
+      it therefore fits into the industrial scheme of the predatory and the
+      quasi-peaceable culture, but does not fit into the industrial scheme of
+      the present. It also appears that this habit persists with greatest
+      tenacity among those classes in the modern communities whose everyday life
+      is most remote from the mechanical processes of industry and which are the
+      most conservative also in other respects; while for those classes that are
+      habitually in immediate contact with modern industrial processes, and
+      whose habits of thought are therefore exposed to the constraining force of
+      technological necessities, that animistic interpretation of phenomena and
+      that respect of persons on which devout observance proceeds are in process
+      of obsolescence. And also&mdash;as bearing especially on the present
+      discussion&mdash;it appears that the devout habit to some extent
+      progressively gains in scope and elaboration among those classes in the
+      modern communities to whom wealth and leisure accrue in the most
+      pronounced degree. In this as in other relations, the institution of a
+      leisure class acts to conserve, and even to rehabilitate, that archaic
+      type of human nature and those elements of the archaic culture which the
+      industrial evolution of society in its later stages acts to eliminate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0013" id="link2HCH0013">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Thirteen ~~ Survivals of the Non-Invidious Interests
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In an increasing proportion as time goes on, the anthropomorphic cult,
+      with its code of devout observations, suffers a progressive disintegration
+      through the stress of economic exigencies and the decay of the system of
+      status. As this disintegration proceeds, there come to be associated and
+      blended with the devout attitude certain other motives and impulses that
+      are not always of an anthropomorphic origin, nor traceable to the habit of
+      personal subservience. Not all of these subsidiary impulses that blend
+      with the habit of devoutness in the later devotional life are altogether
+      congruous with the devout attitude or with the anthropomorphic
+      apprehension of the sequence of phenomena. The origin being not the same,
+      their action upon the scheme of devout life is also not in the same
+      direction. In many ways they traverse the underlying norm of subservience
+      or vicarious life to which the code of devout observations and the
+      ecclesiastical and sacerdotal institutions are to be traced as their
+      substantial basis. Through the presence of these alien motives the social
+      and industrial regime of status gradually disintegrates, and the canon of
+      personal subservience loses the support derived from an unbroken
+      tradition. Extraneous habits and proclivities encroach upon the field of
+      action occupied by this canon, and it presently comes about that the
+      ecclesiastical and sacerdotal structures are partially converted to other
+      uses, in some measure alien to the purposes of the scheme of devout life
+      as it stood in the days of the most vigorous and characteristic
+      development of the priesthood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among these alien motives which affect the devout scheme in its later
+      growth, may be mentioned the motives of charity and of social
+      good-fellowship, or conviviality; or, in more general terms, the various
+      expressions of the sense of human solidarity and sympathy. It may be added
+      that these extraneous uses of the ecclesiastical structure contribute
+      materially to its survival in name and form even among people who may be
+      ready to give up the substance of it. A still more characteristic and more
+      pervasive alien element in the motives which have gone to formally uphold
+      the scheme of devout life is that non-reverent sense of aesthetic
+      congruity with the environment, which is left as a residue of the
+      latter-day act of worship after elimination of its anthropomorphic
+      content. This has done good service for the maintenance of the sacerdotal
+      institution through blending with the motive of subservience. This sense
+      of impulse of aesthetic congruity is not primarily of an economic
+      character, but it has a considerable indirect effect in shaping the habit
+      of mind of the individual for economic purposes in the later stages of
+      industrial development; its most perceptible effect in this regard goes in
+      the direction of mitigating the somewhat pronounced self-regarding bias
+      that has been transmitted by tradition from the earlier, more competent
+      phases of the regime of status. The economic bearing of this impulse is
+      therefore seen to transverse that of the devout attitude; the former goes
+      to qualify, if not eliminate, the self-regarding bias, through sublation
+      of the antithesis or antagonism of self and not-self; while the latter,
+      being and expression of the sense of personal subservience and mastery,
+      goes to accentuate this antithesis and to insist upon the divergence
+      between the self-regarding interest and the interests of the generically
+      human life process.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This non-invidious residue of the religious life&mdash;the sense of
+      communion with the environment, or with the generic life process&mdash;as
+      well as the impulse of charity or of sociability, act in a pervasive way
+      to shape men's habits of thought for the economic purpose. But the action
+      of all this class of proclivities is somewhat vague, and their effects are
+      difficult to trace in detail. So much seems clear, however, as that the
+      action of this entire class of motives or aptitudes tends in a direction
+      contrary to the underlying principles of the institution of the leisure
+      class as already formulated. The basis of that institution, as well as of
+      the anthropomorphic cults associated with it in the cultural development,
+      is the habit of invidious comparison; and this habit is incongruous with
+      the exercise of the aptitudes now in question. The substantial canons of
+      the leisure-class scheme of life are a conspicuous waste of time and
+      substance and a withdrawal from the industrial process; while the
+      particular aptitudes here in question assert themselves, on the economic
+      side, in a deprecation of waste and of a futile manner of life, and in an
+      impulse to participation in or identification with the life process,
+      whether it be on the economic side or in any other of its phases or
+      aspects.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is plain that these aptitudes and habits of life to which they give
+      rise where circumstances favor their expression, or where they assert
+      themselves in a dominant way, run counter to the leisure-class scheme of
+      life; but it is not clear that life under the leisure-class scheme, as
+      seen in the later stages of its development, tends consistently to the
+      repression of these aptitudes or to exemption from the habits of thought
+      in which they express themselves. The positive discipline of the
+      leisure-class scheme of life goes pretty much all the other way. In its
+      positive discipline, by prescription and by selective elimination, the
+      leisure-class scheme favors the all-pervading and all-dominating primacy
+      of the canons of waste and invidious comparison at every conjuncture of
+      life. But in its negative effects the tendency of the leisure-class
+      discipline is not so unequivocally true to the fundamental canons of the
+      scheme. In its regulation of human activity for the purpose of pecuniary
+      decency the leisure-class canon insists on withdrawal from the industrial
+      process. That is to say, it inhibits activity in the directions in which
+      the impecunious members of the community habitually put forth their
+      efforts. Especially in the case of women, and more particularly as regards
+      the upper-class and upper-middle-class women of advanced industrial
+      communities, this inhibition goes so far as to insist on withdrawal even
+      from the emulative process of accumulation by the quasi-predator methods
+      of the pecuniary occupations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The pecuniary or the leisure-class culture, which set out as an emulative
+      variant of the impulse of workmanship, is in its latest development
+      beginning to neutralize its own ground, by eliminating the habit of
+      invidious comparison in respect of efficiency, or even of pecuniary
+      standing. On the other hand, the fact that members of the leisure class,
+      both men and women, are to some extent exempt from the necessity of
+      finding a livelihood in a competitive struggle with their fellows, makes
+      it possible for members of this class not only to survive, but even,
+      within bounds, to follow their bent in case they are not gifted with the
+      aptitudes which make for success in the competitive struggle. That is to
+      say, in the latest and fullest development of the institution, the
+      livelihood of members of this class does not depend on the possession and
+      the unremitting exercise of those aptitudes are therefore greater in the
+      higher grades of the leisure class than in the general average of a
+      population living under the competitive system.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In an earlier chapter, in discussing the conditions of survival of archaic
+      traits, it has appeared that the peculiar position of the leisure class
+      affords exceptionally favorable chances for the survival of traits which
+      characterize the type of human nature proper to an earlier and obsolete
+      cultural stage. The class is sheltered from the stress of economic
+      exigencies, and is in this sense withdrawn from the rude impact of forces
+      which make for adaptation to the economic situation. The survival in the
+      leisure class, and under the leisure-class scheme of life, of traits and
+      types that are reminiscent of the predatory culture has already been
+      discussed. These aptitudes and habits have an exceptionally favorable
+      chance of survival under the leisure-class regime. Not only does the
+      sheltered pecuniary position of the leisure class afford a situation
+      favorable to the survival of such individuals as are not gifted with the
+      complement of aptitudes required for serviceability in the modern
+      industrial process; but the leisure-class canons of reputability at the
+      same time enjoin the conspicuous exercise of certain predatory aptitudes.
+      The employments in which the predatory aptitudes find exercise serve as an
+      evidence of wealth, birth, and withdrawal from the industrial process. The
+      survival of the predatory traits under the leisure-class culture is
+      furthered both negatively, through the industrial exemption of the class,
+      and positively, through the sanction of the leisure-class canons of
+      decency.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With respect to the survival of traits characteristic of the
+      ante-predatory savage culture the case is in some degree different. The
+      sheltered position of the leisure class favors the survival also of these
+      traits; but the exercise of the aptitudes for peace and good-will does not
+      have the affirmative sanction of the code of proprieties. Individuals
+      gifted with a temperament that is reminiscent of the ante-predatory
+      culture are placed at something of an advantage within the leisure class,
+      as compared with similarly gifted individuals outside the class, in that
+      they are not under a pecuniary necessity to thwart these aptitudes that
+      make for a non-competitive life; but such individuals are still exposed to
+      something of a moral constraint which urges them to disregard these
+      inclinations, in that the code of proprieties enjoins upon them habits of
+      life based on the predatory aptitudes. So long as the system of status
+      remains intact, and so long as the leisure class has other lines of
+      non-industrial activity to take to than obvious killing of time in aimless
+      and wasteful fatigation, so long no considerable departure from the
+      leisure-class scheme of reputable life is to be looked for. The occurrence
+      of non-predatory temperament with the class at that stage is to be looked
+      upon as a case of sporadic reversion. But the reputable non-industrial
+      outlets for the human propensity to action presently fail, through the
+      advance of economic development, the disappearance of large game, the
+      decline of war, the obsolescence of proprietary government, and the decay
+      of the priestly office. When this happens, the situation begins to change.
+      Human life must seek expression in one direction if it may not in another;
+      and if the predatory outlet fails, relief is sought elsewhere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As indicated above, the exemption from pecuniary stress has been carried
+      farther in the case of the leisure-class women of the advanced industrial
+      communities than in that of any other considerable group of persons. The
+      women may therefore be expected to show a more pronounced reversion to a
+      non-invidious temperament than the men. But there is also among men of the
+      leisure class a perceptible increase in the range and scope of activities
+      that proceed from aptitudes which are not to be classed as self-regarding,
+      and the end of which is not an invidious distinction. So, for instance,
+      the greater number of men who have to do with industry in the way of
+      pecuniarily managing an enterprise take some interest and some pride in
+      seeing that the work is well done and is industrially effective, and this
+      even apart from the profit which may result from any improvement of this
+      kind. The efforts of commercial clubs and manufacturers' organizations in
+      this direction of non-invidious advancement of industrial efficiency are
+      also well know.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The tendency to some other than an invidious purpose in life has worked
+      out in a multitude of organizations, the purpose of which is some work of
+      charity or of social amelioration. These organizations are often of a
+      quasi-religious or pseudo-religious character, and are participated in by
+      both men and women. Examples will present themselves in abundance on
+      reflection, but for the purpose of indicating the range of the
+      propensities in question and of characterizing them, some of the more
+      obvious concrete cases may be cited. Such, for instance, are the agitation
+      for temperance and similar social reforms, for prison reform, for the
+      spread of education, for the suppression of vice, and for the avoidance of
+      war by arbitration, disarmament, or other means; such are, in some
+      measure, university settlements, neighborhood guilds, the various
+      organizations typified by the Young Men's Christian Association and Young
+      People's Society for Christian Endeavor, sewing-clubs, art clubs, and even
+      commercial clubs; such are also, in some slight measure, the pecuniary
+      foundations of semi-public establishments for charity, education, or
+      amusement, whether they are endowed by wealthy individuals or by
+      contributions collected from persons of smaller means&mdash;in so far as
+      these establishments are not of a religious character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is of course not intended to say that these efforts proceed entirely
+      from other motives than those of a self-regarding kind. What can be
+      claimed is that other motives are present in the common run of cases, and
+      that the perceptibly greater prevalence of effort of this kind under the
+      circumstances of the modern industrial life than under the unbroken regime
+      of the principle of status, indicates the presence in modern life of an
+      effective scepticism with respect to the full legitimacy of an emulative
+      scheme of life. It is a matter of sufficient notoriety to have become a
+      commonplace jest that extraneous motives are commonly present among the
+      incentives to this class of work&mdash;motives of a self-regarding kind,
+      and especially the motive of an invidious distinction. To such an extent
+      is this true, that many ostensible works of disinterested public spirit
+      are no doubt initiated and carried on with a view primarily to the enhance
+      repute or even to the pecuniary gain, of their promoters. In the case of
+      some considerable groups of organizations or establishments of this kind
+      the invidious motive is apparently the dominant motive both with the
+      initiators of the work and with their supporters. This last remark would
+      hold true especially with respect to such works as lend distinction to
+      their doer through large and conspicuous expenditure; as, for example, the
+      foundation of a university or of a public library or museum; but it is
+      also, and perhaps equally, true of the more commonplace work of
+      participation in such organizations. These serve to authenticate the
+      pecuniary reputability of their members, as well as gratefully to keep
+      them in mind of their superior status by pointing the contrast between
+      themselves and the lower-lying humanity in whom the work of amelioration
+      is to be wrought; as, for example, the university settlement, which now
+      has some vogue. But after all allowances and deductions have been made,
+      there is left some remainder of motives of a non-emulative kind. The fact
+      itself that distinction or a decent good fame is sought by this method is
+      evidence of a prevalent sense of the legitimacy, and of the presumptive
+      effectual presence, of a non-emulative, non-invidious interest, as a
+      consistent factor in the habits of thought of modern communities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In all this latter-day range of leisure-class activities that proceed on
+      the basis of a non-invidious and non-religious interest, it is to be noted
+      that the women participate more actively and more persistently than the
+      men&mdash;except, of course, in the case of such works as require a large
+      expenditure of means. The dependent pecuniary position of the women
+      disables them for work requiring large expenditure. As regards the general
+      range of ameliorative work, the members of the priesthood or clergy of the
+      less naively devout sects, or the secularized denominations, are
+      associated with the class of women. This is as the theory would have it.
+      In other economic relations, also, this clergy stands in a somewhat
+      equivocal position between the class of women and that of the men engaged
+      in economic pursuits. By tradition and by the prevalent sense of the
+      proprieties, both the clergy and the women of the well-to-do classes are
+      placed in the position of a vicarious leisure class; with both classes the
+      characteristic relation which goes to form the habits of thought of the
+      class is a relation of subservience&mdash;that is to say, an economic
+      relation conceived in personal terms; in both classes there is
+      consequently perceptible a special proneness to construe phenomena in
+      terms of personal relation rather than of causal sequence; both classes
+      are so inhibited by the canons of decency from the ceremonially unclean
+      processes of the lucrative or productive occupations as to make
+      participation in the industrial life process of today a moral
+      impossibility for them. The result of this ceremonial exclusion from
+      productive effort of the vulgar sort is to draft a relatively large share
+      of the energies of the modern feminine and priestly classes into the
+      service of other interests than the self-regarding one. The code leaves no
+      alternative direction in which the impulse to purposeful action may find
+      expression. The effect of a consistent inhibition on industrially useful
+      activity in the case of the leisure-class women shows itself in a restless
+      assertion of the impulse to workmanship in other directions than that of
+      business activity. As has been noticed already, the everyday life of the
+      well-to-do women and the clergy contains a larger element of status than
+      that of the average of the men, especially than that of the men engaged in
+      the modern industrial occupations proper. Hence the devout attitude
+      survives in a better state of preservation among these classes than among
+      the common run of men in the modern communities. Hence an appreciable
+      share of the energy which seeks expression in a non-lucrative employment
+      among these members of the vicarious leisure classes may be expected to
+      eventuate in devout observances and works of piety. Hence, in part, the
+      excess of the devout proclivity in women, spoken of in the last chapter.
+      But it is more to the present point to note the effect of this proclivity
+      in shaping the action and coloring the purposes of the non-lucrative
+      movements and organizations here under discussion. Where this devout
+      coloring is present it lowers the immediate efficiency of the
+      organizations for any economic end to which their efforts may be directed.
+      Many organizations, charitable and ameliorative, divide their attention
+      between the devotional and the secular well-being of the people whose
+      interests they aim to further. It can scarcely be doubted that if they
+      were to give an equally serious attention and effort undividedly to the
+      secular interests of these people, the immediate economic value of their
+      work should be appreciably higher than it is. It might of course similarly
+      be said, if this were the place to say it, that the immediate efficiency
+      of these works of amelioration for the devout might be greater if it were
+      not hampered with the secular motives and aims which are usually present.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some deduction is to be made from the economic value of this class of
+      non-invidious enterprise, on account of the intrusion of the devotional
+      interest. But there are also deductions to be made on account of the
+      presence of other alien motives which more or less broadly traverse the
+      economic trend of this non-emulative expression of the instinct of
+      workmanship. To such an extent is this seen to be true on a closer
+      scrutiny, that, when all is told, it may even appear that this general
+      class of enterprises is of an altogether dubious economic value&mdash;as
+      measured in terms of the fullness or facility of life of the individuals
+      or classes to whose amelioration the enterprise is directed. For instance,
+      many of the efforts now in reputable vogue for the amelioration of the
+      indigent population of large cities are of the nature, in great part, of a
+      mission of culture. It is by this means sought to accelerate the rate of
+      speed at which given elements of the upper-class culture find acceptance
+      in the everyday scheme of life of the lower classes. The solicitude of
+      "settlements," for example, is in part directed to enhance the industrial
+      efficiency of the poor and to teach them the more adequate utilization of
+      the means at hand; but it is also no less consistently directed to the
+      inculcation, by precept and example, of certain punctilios of upper-class
+      propriety in manners and customs. The economic substance of these
+      proprieties will commonly be found on scrutiny to be a conspicuous waste
+      of time and goods. Those good people who go out to humanize the poor are
+      commonly, and advisedly, extremely scrupulous and silently insistent in
+      matters of decorum and the decencies of life. They are commonly persons of
+      an exemplary life and gifted with a tenacious insistence on ceremonial
+      cleanness in the various items of their daily consumption. The cultural or
+      civilizing efficacy of this inculcation of correct habits of thought with
+      respect to the consumption of time and commodities is scarcely to be
+      overrated; nor is its economic value to the individual who acquires these
+      higher and more reputable ideals inconsiderable. Under the circumstances
+      of the existing pecuniary culture, the reputability, and consequently the
+      success, of the individual is in great measure dependent on his
+      proficiency in demeanor and methods of consumption that argue habitual
+      waste of time and goods. But as regards the ulterior economic bearing of
+      this training in worthier methods of life, it is to be said that the
+      effect wrought is in large part a substitution of costlier or less
+      efficient methods of accomplishing the same material results, in relations
+      where the material result is the fact of substantial economic value. The
+      propaganda of culture is in great part an inculcation of new tastes, or
+      rather of a new schedule of proprieties, which have been adapted to the
+      upper-class scheme of life under the guidance of the leisure-class
+      formulation of the principles of status and pecuniary decency. This new
+      schedule of proprieties is intruded into the lower-class scheme of life
+      from the code elaborated by an element of the population whose life lies
+      outside the industrial process; and this intrusive schedule can scarcely
+      be expected to fit the exigencies of life for these lower classes more
+      adequately than the schedule already in vogue among them, and especially
+      not more adequately than the schedule which they are themselves working
+      out under the stress of modern industrial life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this of course does not question the fact that the proprieties of the
+      substituted schedule are more decorous than those which they displace. The
+      doubt which presents itself is simply a doubt as to the economic
+      expediency of this work of regeneration&mdash;that is to say, the economic
+      expediency in that immediate and material bearing in which the effects of
+      the change can be ascertained with some degree of confidence, and as
+      viewed from the standpoint not of the individual but of the facility of
+      life of the collectivity. For an appreciation of the economic expediency
+      of these enterprises of amelioration, therefore, their effective work is
+      scarcely to be taken at its face value, even where the aim of the
+      enterprise is primarily an economic one and where the interest on which it
+      proceeds is in no sense self-regarding or invidious. The economic reform
+      wrought is largely of the nature of a permutation in the methods of
+      conspicuous waste.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But something further is to be said with respect to the character of the
+      disinterested motives and canons of procedure in all work of this class
+      that is affected by the habits of thought characteristic of the pecuniary
+      culture; and this further consideration may lead to a further
+      qualification of the conclusions already reached. As has been seen in an
+      earlier chapter, the canons of reputability or decency under the pecuniary
+      culture insist on habitual futility of effort as the mark of a pecuniarily
+      blameless life. There results not only a habit of disesteem of useful
+      occupations, but there results also what is of more decisive consequence
+      in guiding the action of any organized body of people that lays claim to
+      social good repute. There is a tradition which requires that one should
+      not be vulgarly familiar with any of the processes or details that have to
+      do with the material necessities of life. One may meritoriously show a
+      quantitative interest in the well-being of the vulgar, through
+      subscriptions or through work on managing committees and the like. One
+      may, perhaps even more meritoriously, show solicitude in general and in
+      detail for the cultural welfare of the vulgar, in the way of contrivances
+      for elevating their tastes and affording them opportunities for spiritual
+      amelioration. But one should not betray an intimate knowledge of the
+      material circumstances of vulgar life, or of the habits of thought of the
+      vulgar classes, such as would effectually direct the efforts of these
+      organizations to a materially useful end. This reluctance to avow an
+      unduly intimate knowledge of the lower-class conditions of life in detail
+      of course prevails in very different degrees in different individuals; but
+      there is commonly enough of it present collectively in any organization of
+      the kind in question profoundly to influence its course of action. By its
+      cumulative action in shaping the usage and precedents of any such body,
+      this shrinking from an imputation of unseemly familiarity with vulgar life
+      tends gradually to set aside the initial motives of the enterprise, in
+      favor of certain guiding principles of good repute, ultimately reducible
+      to terms of pecuniary merit. So that in an organization of long standing
+      the initial motive of furthering the facility of life in these classes
+      comes gradually to be an ostensible motive only, and the vulgarly
+      effective work of the organization tends to obsolescence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What is true of the efficiency of organizations for non-invidious work in
+      this respect is true also as regards the work of individuals proceeding on
+      the same motives; though it perhaps holds true with more qualification for
+      individuals than for organized enterprises. The habit of gauging merit by
+      the leisure-class canons of wasteful expenditure and unfamiliarity with
+      vulgar life, whether on the side of production or of consumption, is
+      necessarily strong in the individuals who aspire to do some work of public
+      utility. And if the individual should forget his station and turn his
+      efforts to vulgar effectiveness, the common sense of the community-the
+      sense of pecuniary decency&mdash;would presently reject his work and set
+      him right. An example of this is seen in the administration of bequests
+      made by public-spirited men for the single purpose (at least ostensibly)
+      of furthering the facility of human life in some particular respect. The
+      objects for which bequests of this class are most frequently made at
+      present are schools, libraries,
+      hospitals, and asylums for the infirm or unfortunate. The avowed purpose
+      of the donor in these cases is the amelioration of human life in the
+      particular respect which is named in the bequest; but it will be found an
+      invariable rule that in the execution of the work not a little of other
+      motives, frequency incompatible with the initial motive, is present and
+      determines the particular disposition eventually made of a good share of
+      the means which have been set apart by the bequest. Certain funds, for
+      instance, may have been set apart as a foundation for a foundling asylum
+      or a retreat for invalids. The diversion of expenditure to honorific waste
+      in such cases is not uncommon enough to cause surprise or even to raise a
+      smile. An appreciable share of the funds is spent in the construction of
+      an edifice faced with some aesthetically objectionable but expensive
+      stone, covered with grotesque and incongruous details, and designed, in
+      its battlemented walls and turrets and its massive portals and strategic
+      approaches, to suggest certain barbaric methods of warfare. The interior
+      of the structure shows the same pervasive guidance of the canons of
+      conspicuous waste and predatory exploit. The windows, for instance, to go
+      no farther into detail, are placed with a view to impress their pecuniary
+      excellence upon the chance beholder from the outside, rather than with a
+      view to effectiveness for their ostensible end in the convenience or
+      comfort of the beneficiaries within; and the detail of interior
+      arrangement is required to conform itself as best it may to this alien but
+      imperious requirement of pecuniary beauty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In all this, of course, it is not to be presumed that the donor would have
+      found fault, or that he would have done otherwise if he had taken control
+      in person; it appears that in those cases where such a personal direction
+      is exercised&mdash;where the enterprise is conducted by direct expenditure
+      and superintendence instead of by bequest&mdash;the aims and methods of
+      management are not different in this respect. Nor would the beneficiaries,
+      or the outside observers whose ease or vanity are not immediately touched,
+      be pleased with a different disposition of the funds. It would suit no one
+      to have the enterprise conducted with a view directly to the most
+      economical and effective use of the means at hand for the initial,
+      material end of the foundation. All concerned, whether their interest is
+      immediate and self-regarding, or contemplative only, agree that some
+      considerable share of the expenditure should go to the higher or spiritual
+      needs derived from the habit of an invidious comparison in predatory
+      exploit and pecuniary waste. But this only goes to say that the canons of
+      emulative and pecuniary reputability so far pervade the common sense of
+      the community as to permit no escape or evasion, even in the case of an
+      enterprise which ostensibly proceeds entirely on the basis of a
+      non-invidious interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may even be that the enterprise owes its honorific virtue, as a means
+      of enhancing the donor's good repute, to the imputed presence of this
+      non-invidious motive; but that does not hinder the invidious interest from
+      guiding the expenditure. The effectual presence of motives of an emulative
+      or invidious origin in non-emulative works of this kind might be shown at
+      length and with detail, in any one of the classes of enterprise spoken of
+      above. Where these honorific details occur, in such cases, they commonly
+      masquerade under designations that belong in the field of the aesthetic,
+      ethical or economic interest. These special motives, derived from the
+      standards and canons of the pecuniary culture, act surreptitiously to
+      divert effort of a non-invidious kind from effective service, without
+      disturbing the agent's sense of good intention or obtruding upon his
+      consciousness the substantial futility of his work. Their effect might be
+      traced through the entire range of that schedule of non-invidious,
+      meliorative enterprise that is so considerable a feature, and especially
+      so conspicuous a feature, in the overt scheme of life of the well-to-do.
+      But the theoretical bearing is perhaps clear enough and may require no
+      further illustration; especially as some detailed attention will be given
+      to one of these lines of enterprise&mdash;the establishments for the
+      higher learning&mdash;in another connection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Under the circumstances of the sheltered situation in which the leisure
+      class is placed there seems, therefore, to be something of a reversion to
+      the range of non-invidious impulses that characterizes the ante-predatory
+      savage culture. The reversion comprises both the sense of workmanship and
+      the proclivity to indolence and good-fellowship. But in the modern scheme
+      of life canons of conduct based on pecuniary or invidious merit stand in
+      the way of a free exercise of these impulses; and the dominant presence of
+      these canons of conduct goes far to divert such efforts as are made on the
+      basis of the non-invidious interest to the service of that invidious
+      interest on which the pecuniary culture rests. The canons of pecuniary
+      decency are reducible for the present purpose to the principles of waste,
+      futility, and ferocity. The requirements of decency are imperiously
+      present in meliorative enterprise as in other lines of conduct, and
+      exercise a selective surveillance over the details of conduct and
+      management in any enterprise. By guiding and adapting the method in
+      detail, these canons of decency go far to make all non-invidious
+      aspiration or effort nugatory. The pervasive, impersonal, un-eager
+      principle of futility is at hand from day to day and works obstructively
+      to hinder the effectual expression of so much of the surviving
+      ante-predatory aptitudes as is to be classed under the instinct of
+      workmanship; but its presence does not preclude the transmission of those
+      aptitudes or the continued recurrence of an impulse to find expression for
+      them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the later and farther development of the pecuniary culture, the
+      requirement of withdrawal from the industrial process in order to avoid
+      social odium is carried so far as to comprise abstention from the
+      emulative employments. At this advanced stage the pecuniary culture
+      negatively favors the assertion of the non-invidious propensities by
+      relaxing the stress laid on the merit of emulative, predatory, or
+      pecuniary occupations, as compared with those of an industrial or
+      productive kind. As was noticed above, the requirement of such withdrawal
+      from all employment that is of human use applies more rigorously to the
+      upper-class women than to any other class, unless the priesthood of
+      certain cults might be cited as an exception, perhaps more apparent than
+      real, to this rule. The reason for the more extreme insistence on a futile
+      life for this class of women than for the men of the same pecuniary and
+      social grade lies in their being not only an upper-grade leisure class but
+      also at the same time a vicarious leisure class. There is in their case a
+      double ground for a consistent withdrawal from useful effort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It has been well and repeatedly said by popular writers and speakers who
+      reflect the common sense of intelligent people on questions of social
+      structure and function that the position of woman in any community is the
+      most striking index of the level of culture attained by the community, and
+      it might be added, by any given class in the community. This remark is
+      perhaps truer as regards the stage of economic development than as regards
+      development in any other respect. At the same time the position assigned
+      to the woman in the accepted scheme of life, in any community or under any
+      culture, is in a very great degree an expression of traditions which have
+      been shaped by the circumstances of an earlier phase of development, and
+      which have been but partially adapted to the existing economic
+      circumstances, or to the existing exigencies of temperament and habits of
+      mind by which the women living under this modern economic situation are
+      actuated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fact has already been remarked upon incidentally in the course of the
+      discussion of the growth of economic institutions generally, and in
+      particular in speaking of vicarious leisure and of dress, that the
+      position of women in the modern economic scheme is more widely and more
+      consistently at variance with the promptings of the instinct of
+      workmanship than is the position of the men of the same classes. It is
+      also apparently true that the woman's temperament includes a larger share
+      of this instinct that approves peace and disapproves futility. It is
+      therefore not a fortuitous circumstance that the women of modern
+      industrial communities show a livelier sense of the discrepancy between
+      the accepted scheme of life and the exigencies of the economic situation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The several phases of the "woman question" have brought out in
+      intelligible form the extent to which the life of women in modern society,
+      and in the polite circles especially, is regulated by a body of common
+      sense formulated under the economic circumstances of an earlier phase of
+      development. It is still felt that woman's life, in its civil, economic,
+      and social bearing, is essentially and normally a vicarious life, the
+      merit or demerit of which is, in the nature of things, to be imputed to
+      some other individual who stands in some relation of ownership or tutelage
+      to the woman. So, for instance, any action on the part of a woman which
+      traverses an injunction of the accepted schedule of proprieties is felt to
+      reflect immediately upon the honor of the man whose woman she is. There
+      may of course be some sense of incongruity in the mind of any one passing
+      an opinion of this kind on the woman's frailty or perversity; but the
+      common-sense judgment of the community in such matters is, after all,
+      delivered without much hesitation, and few men would question the
+      legitimacy of their sense of an outraged tutelage in any case that might
+      arise. On the other hand, relatively little discredit attaches to a woman
+      through the evil deeds of the man with whom her life is associated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The good and beautiful scheme of life, then&mdash;that is to say the
+      scheme to which we are habituated&mdash;assigns to the woman a "sphere"
+      ancillary to the activity of the man; and it is felt that any departure
+      from the traditions of her assigned round of duties is unwomanly. If the
+      question is as to civil rights or the suffrage, our common sense in the
+      matter&mdash;that is to say the logical deliverance of our general scheme
+      of life upon the point in question&mdash;says that the woman should be
+      represented in the body politic and before the law, not immediately in her
+      own person, but through the mediation of the head of the household to
+      which she belongs. It is unfeminine in her to aspire to a self-directing,
+      self-centered life; and our common sense tells us that her direct
+      participation in the affairs of the community, civil or industrial, is a
+      menace to that social order which expresses our habits of thought as they
+      have been formed under the guidance of the traditions of the pecuniary
+      culture. "All this fume and froth of 'emancipating woman from the slavery
+      of man' and so on, is, to use the chaste and expressive language of
+      Elizabeth Cady Stanton inversely, 'utter rot.' The social relations of the
+      sexes are fixed by nature. Our entire civilization&mdash;that is whatever
+      is good in it&mdash;is based on the home." The "home" is the household
+      with a male head. This view, but commonly expressed even more chastely, is
+      the prevailing view of the woman's status, not only among the common run
+      of the men of civilized communities, but among the women as well. Women
+      have a very alert sense of what the scheme of proprieties requires, and
+      while it is true that many of them are ill at ease under the details which
+      the code imposes, there are few who do not recognize that the existing
+      moral order, of necessity and by the divine right of prescription, places
+      the woman in a position ancillary to the man. In the last analysis,
+      according to her own sense of what is good and beautiful, the woman's life
+      is, and in theory must be, an expression of the man's life at the second
+      remove.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in spite of this pervading sense of what is the good and natural place
+      for the woman, there is also perceptible an incipient development of
+      sentiment to the effect that this whole arrangement of tutelage and
+      vicarious life and imputation of merit and demerit is somehow a mistake.
+      Or, at least, that even if it may be a natural growth and a good
+      arrangement in its time and place, and in spite of its patent aesthetic
+      value, still it does not adequately serve the more everyday ends of life
+      in a modern industrial community. Even that large and substantial body of
+      well-bred, upper and middle-class women to whose dispassionate, matronly
+      sense of the traditional proprieties this relation of status commends
+      itself as fundamentally and eternally right-even these, whose attitude is
+      conservative, commonly find some slight discrepancy in detail between
+      things as they are and things as they should be in this respect. But that
+      less manageable body of modern women who, by force of youth, education, or
+      temperament, are in some degree out of touch with the traditions of status
+      received from the barbarian culture, and in whom there is, perhaps, an
+      undue reversion to the impulse of self-expression and workmanship&mdash;these
+      are touched with a sense of grievance too vivid to leave them at rest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this "New-Woman" movement&mdash;as these blind and incoherent efforts
+      to rehabilitate the woman's pre-glacial standing have been named&mdash;there
+      are at least two elements discernible, both of which are of an economic
+      character. These two elements or motives are expressed by the double
+      watchword, "Emancipation" and "Work." Each of these words is recognized to
+      stand for something in the way of a wide-spread sense of grievance. The
+      prevalence of the sentiment is recognized even by people who do not see
+      that there is any real ground for a grievance in the situation as it
+      stands today. It is among the women of the well-to-do classes, in the
+      communities which are farthest advanced in industrial development, that
+      this sense of a grievance to be redressed is most alive and finds most
+      frequent expression. That is to say, in other words, there is a demand,
+      more or less serious, for emancipation from all relation of status,
+      tutelage, or vicarious life; and the revulsion asserts itself especially
+      among the class of women upon whom the scheme of life handed down from the
+      regime of status imposes with least litigation a vicarious life, and in
+      those communities whose economic development has departed farthest from
+      the circumstances to which this traditional scheme is adapted. The demand
+      comes from that portion of womankind which is excluded by the canons of
+      good repute from all effectual work, and which is closely reserved for a
+      life of leisure and conspicuous consumption.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      More than one critic of this new-woman movement has misapprehended its
+      motive. The case of the American "new woman" has lately been summed up
+      with some warmth by a popular observer of social phenomena: "She is petted
+      by her husband, the most devoted and hard-working of husbands in the
+      world.... She is the superior of her husband in education, and in almost
+      every respect. She is surrounded by the most numerous and delicate
+      attentions. Yet she is not satisfied.... The Anglo-Saxon 'new woman' is
+      the most ridiculous production of modern times, and destined to be the
+      most ghastly failure of the century." Apart from the deprecation&mdash;perhaps
+      well placed&mdash;which is contained in this presentment, it adds nothing
+      but obscurity to the woman question. The grievance of the new woman is
+      made up of those things which this typical characterization of the
+      movement urges as reasons why she should be content. She is petted, and is
+      permitted, or even required, to consume largely and conspicuously&mdash;vicariously
+      for her husband or other natural guardian. She is exempted, or debarred,
+      from vulgarly useful employment&mdash;in order to perform leisure
+      vicariously for the good repute of her natural (pecuniary) guardian. These
+      offices are the conventional marks of the un-free, at the same time that
+      they are incompatible with the human impulse to purposeful activity. But
+      the woman is endowed with her share-which there is reason to believe is
+      more than an even share&mdash;of the instinct of workmanship, to which
+      futility of life or of expenditure is obnoxious. She must unfold her life
+      activity in response to the direct, unmediated stimuli of the economic
+      environment with which she is in contact. The impulse is perhaps stronger
+      upon the woman than upon the man to live her own life in her own way and
+      to enter the industrial process of the community at something nearer than
+      the second remove.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So long as the woman's place is consistently that of a drudge, she is, in
+      the average of cases, fairly contented with her lot. She not only has
+      something tangible and purposeful to do, but she has also no time or
+      thought to spare for a rebellious assertion of such human propensity to
+      self-direction as she has inherited. And after the stage of universal
+      female drudgery is passed, and a vicarious leisure without strenuous
+      application becomes the accredited employment of the women of the
+      well-to-do classes, the prescriptive force of the canon of pecuniary
+      decency, which requires the observance of ceremonial futility on their
+      part, will long preserve high-minded women from any sentimental leaning to
+      self-direction and a "sphere of usefulness." This is especially true
+      during the earlier phases of the pecuniary culture, while the leisure of
+      the leisure class is still in great measure a predatory activity, an
+      active assertion of mastery in which there is enough of tangible purpose
+      of an invidious kind to admit of its being taken seriously as an
+      employment to which one may without shame put one's hand. This condition
+      of things has obviously lasted well down into the present in some
+      communities. It continues to hold to a different extent for different
+      individuals, varying with the vividness of the sense of status and with
+      the feebleness of the impulse to workmanship with which the individual is
+      endowed. But where the economic structure of the community has so far
+      outgrown the scheme of life based on status that the relation of personal
+      subservience is no longer felt to be the sole "natural" human relation;
+      there the ancient habit of purposeful activity will begin to assert itself
+      in the less conformable individuals against the more recent, relatively
+      superficial, relatively ephemeral habits and views which the predatory and
+      the pecuniary culture have contributed to our scheme of life. These habits
+      and views begin to lose their coercive force for the community or the
+      class in question so soon as the habit of mind and the views of life due
+      to the predatory and the quasi-peaceable discipline cease to be in fairly
+      close accord with the later-developed economic situation. This is evident
+      in the case of the industrious classes of modern communities; for them the
+      leisure-class scheme of life has lost much of its binding force,
+      especially as regards the element of status. But it is also visibly being
+      verified in the case of the upper classes, though not in the same manner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The habits derived from the predatory and quasi-peaceable culture are
+      relatively ephemeral variants of certain underlying propensities and
+      mental characteristics of the race; which it owes to the protracted
+      discipline of the earlier, proto-anthropoid cultural stage of peaceable,
+      relatively undifferentiated economic life carried on in contact with a
+      relatively simple and invariable material environment. When the habits
+      superinduced by the emulative method of life have ceased to enjoy the
+      section of existing economic exigencies, a process of disintegration sets
+      in whereby the habits of thought of more recent growth and of a less
+      generic character to some extent yield the ground before the more ancient
+      and more pervading spiritual characteristics of the race.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a sense, then, the new-woman movement marks a reversion to a more
+      generic type of human character, or to a less differentiated expression of
+      human nature. It is a type of human nature which is to be characterized as
+      proto-anthropoid, and, as regards the substance if not the form of its
+      dominant traits, it belongs to a cultural stage that may be classed as
+      possibly sub-human. The particular movement or evolutional feature in
+      question of course shares this characterization with the rest of the later
+      social development, in so far as this social development shows evidence of
+      a reversion to the spiritual attitude that characterizes the earlier,
+      undifferentiated stage of economic revolution. Such evidence of a general
+      tendency to reversion from the dominance of the invidious interest is not
+      entirely wanting, although it is neither plentiful nor unquestionably
+      convincing. The general decay of the sense of status in modern industrial
+      communities goes some way as evidence in this direction; and the
+      perceptible return to a disapproval of futility in human life, and a
+      disapproval of such activities as serve only the individual gain at the
+      cost of the collectivity or at the cost of other social groups, is
+      evidence to a like effect. There is a perceptible tendency to deprecate
+      the infliction of pain, as well as to discredit all marauding enterprises,
+      even where these expressions of the invidious interest do not tangibly
+      work to the material detriment of the community or of the individual who
+      passes an opinion on them. It may even be said that in the modern
+      industrial communities the average, dispassionate sense of men says that
+      the ideal character is a character which makes for peace, good-will, and
+      economic efficiency, rather than for a life of self-seeking, force, fraud,
+      and mastery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The influence of the leisure class is not consistently for or against the
+      rehabilitation of this proto-anthropoid human nature. So far as concerns
+      the chance of survival of individuals endowed with an exceptionally large
+      share of the primitive traits, the sheltered position of the class favors
+      its members directly by withdrawing them from the pecuniary struggle; but
+      indirectly, through the leisure-class canons of conspicuous waste of goods
+      and effort, the institution of a leisure class lessens the chance of
+      survival of such individuals in the entire body of the population. The
+      decent requirements of waste absorb the surplus energy of the population
+      in an invidious struggle and leave no margin for the non-invidious
+      expression of life. The remoter, less tangible, spiritual effects of the
+      discipline of decency go in the same direction and work perhaps more
+      effectually to the same end. The canons of decent life are an elaboration
+      of the principle of invidious comparison, and they accordingly act
+      consistently to inhibit all non-invidious effort and to inculcate the
+      self-regarding attitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0014" id="link2HCH0014">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Fourteen ~~ The Higher Learning as an Expression of the Pecuniary
+      Culture
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      To the end that suitable habits of thought on certain heads may be
+      conserved in the incoming generation, a scholastic discipline is
+      sanctioned by the common sense of the community and incorporated into the
+      accredited scheme of life. The habits of thought which are so formed under
+      the guidance of teachers and scholastic traditions have an economic value&mdash;a
+      value as affecting the serviceability of the individual&mdash;no less real
+      than the similar economic value of the habits of thought formed without
+      such guidance under the discipline of everyday life. Whatever
+      characteristics of the accredited scholastic scheme and discipline are
+      traceable to the predilections of the leisure class or to the guidance of
+      the canons of pecuniary merit are to be set down to the account of that
+      institution, and whatever economic value these features of the educational
+      scheme possess are the expression in detail of the value of that
+      institution. It will be in place, therefore, to point out any peculiar
+      features of the educational system which are traceable to the
+      leisure-class scheme of life, whether as regards the aim and method of the
+      discipline, or as regards the compass and character of the body of
+      knowledge inculcated. It is in learning proper, and more particularly in
+      the higher learning, that the influence of leisure-class ideals is most
+      patent; and since the purpose here is not to make an exhaustive collation
+      of data showing the effect of the pecuniary culture upon education, but
+      rather to illustrate the method and trend of the leisure-class influence
+      in education, a survey of certain salient features of the higher learning,
+      such as may serve this purpose, is all that will be attempted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In point of derivation and early development, learning is somewhat closely
+      related to the devotional function of the community, particularly to the
+      body of observances in which the service rendered the supernatural leisure
+      class expresses itself. The service by which it is sought to conciliate
+      supernatural agencies in the primitive cults is not an industrially
+      profitable employment of the community's time and effort. It is,
+      therefore, in great part, to be classed as a vicarious leisure performed
+      for the supernatural powers with whom negotiations are carried on and
+      whose good-will the service and the professions of subservience are
+      conceived to procure. In great part, the early learning consisted in an
+      acquisition of knowledge and facility in the service of a supernatural
+      agent. It was therefore closely analogous in character to the training
+      required for the domestic service of a temporal master. To a great extent,
+      the knowledge acquired under the priestly teachers of the primitive
+      community was knowledge of ritual and ceremonial; that is to say, a
+      knowledge of the most proper, most effective, or most acceptable manner of
+      approaching and of serving the preternatural agents. What was learned was
+      how to make oneself indispensable to these powers, and so to put oneself
+      in a position to ask, or even to require, their intercession in the course
+      of events or their abstention from interference in any given enterprise.
+      Propitiation was the end, and this end was sought, in great part, by
+      acquiring facility in subservience. It appears to have been only gradually
+      that other elements than those of efficient service of the master found
+      their way into the stock of priestly or shamanistic instruction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The priestly servitor of the inscrutable powers that move in the external
+      world came to stand in the position of a mediator between these powers and
+      the common run of unrestricted humanity; for he was possessed of a
+      knowledge of the supernatural etiquette which would admit him into the
+      presence. And as commonly happens with mediators between the vulgar and
+      their masters, whether the masters be natural or preternatural, he found
+      it expedient to have the means at hand tangibly to impress upon the vulgar
+      the fact that these inscrutable powers would do what he might ask of them.
+      Hence, presently, a knowledge of certain natural processes which could be
+      turned to account for spectacular effect, together with some sleight of
+      hand, came to be an integral part of priestly lore. Knowledge of this kind
+      passes for knowledge of the "unknowable", and it owes its serviceability
+      for the sacerdotal purpose to its recondite character. It appears to have
+      been from this source that learning, as an institution, arose, and its
+      differentiation from this its parent stock of magic ritual and shamanistic
+      fraud has been slow and tedious, and is scarcely yet complete even in the
+      most advanced of the higher seminaries of learning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The recondite element in learning is still, as it has been in all ages, a
+      very attractive and effective element for the purpose of impressing, or
+      even imposing upon, the unlearned; and the standing of the savant in the
+      mind of the altogether unlettered is in great measure rated in terms of
+      intimacy with the occult forces. So, for instance, as a typical case, even
+      so late as the middle of this century, the Norwegian peasants have
+      instinctively formulated their sense of the superior erudition of such
+      doctors of divinity as Luther, Malanchthon, Peder Dass, and even so late a
+      scholar in divinity as Grundtvig, in terms of the Black Art. These,
+      together with a very comprehensive list of minor celebrities, both living
+      and dead, have been reputed masters in all magical arts; and a high
+      position in the ecclesiastical personnel has carried with it, in the
+      apprehension of these good people, an implication of profound familiarity
+      with magical practice and the occult sciences. There is a parallel fact
+      nearer home, similarly going to show the close relationship, in popular
+      apprehension, between erudition and the unknowable; and it will at the
+      same time serve to illustrate, in somewhat coarse outline, the bent which
+      leisure-class life gives to the cognitive interest. While the belief is by
+      no means confined to the leisure class, that class today comprises a
+      disproportionately large number of believers in occult sciences of all
+      kinds and shades. By those whose habits of thought are not shaped by
+      contact with modern industry, the knowledge of the unknowable is still
+      felt to the ultimate if not the only true knowledge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Learning, then, set out by being in some sense a by-product of the
+      priestly vicarious leisure class; and, at least until a recent date, the
+      higher learning has since remained in some sense a by-product or
+      by-occupation of the priestly classes. As the body of systematized
+      knowledge increased, there presently arose a distinction, traceable very
+      far back in the history of education, between esoteric and exoteric
+      knowledge, the former&mdash;so far as there is a substantial difference
+      between the two&mdash;comprising such knowledge as is primarily of no
+      economic or industrial effect, and the latter comprising chiefly knowledge
+      of industrial processes and of natural phenomena which were habitually
+      turned to account for the material purposes of life. This line of
+      demarcation has in time become, at least in popular apprehension, the
+      normal line between the higher learning and the lower.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is significant, not only as an evidence of their close affiliation with
+      the priestly craft, but also as indicating that their activity to a good
+      extent falls under that category of conspicuous leisure known as manners
+      and breeding, that the learned class in all primitive communities are
+      great sticklers for form, precedent, gradations of rank, ritual,
+      ceremonial vestments, and learned paraphernalia generally. This is of
+      course to be expected, and it goes to say that the higher learning, in its
+      incipient phase, is a leisure-class occupation&mdash;more specifically an
+      occupation of the vicarious leisure class employed in the service of the
+      supernatural leisure class. But this predilection for the paraphernalia of
+      learning goes also to indicate a further point of contact or of continuity
+      between the priestly office and the office of the savant. In point of
+      derivation, learning, as well as the priestly office, is largely an
+      outgrowth of sympathetic magic; and this magical apparatus of form and
+      ritual therefore finds its place with the learned class of the primitive
+      community as a matter of course. The ritual and paraphernalia have an
+      occult efficacy for the magical purpose; so that their presence as an
+      integral factor in the earlier phases of the development of magic and
+      science is a matter of expediency, quite as much as of affectionate regard
+      for symbolism simply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This sense of the efficacy of symbolic ritual, and of sympathetic effect
+      to be wrought through dexterous rehearsal of the traditional accessories
+      of the act or end to be compassed, is of course present more obviously and
+      in larger measure in magical practice than in the discipline of the
+      sciences, even of the occult sciences. But there are, I apprehend, few
+      persons with a cultivated sense of scholastic merit to whom the
+      ritualistic accessories of science are altogether an idle matter. The very
+      great tenacity with which these ritualistic paraphernalia persist through
+      the later course of the development is evident to any one who will reflect
+      on what has been the history of learning in our civilization. Even today
+      there are such things in the usage of the learned community as the cap and
+      gown, matriculation, initiation, and graduation ceremonies, and the
+      conferring of scholastic degrees, dignities, and prerogatives in a way
+      which suggests some sort of a scholarly apostolic succession. The usage of
+      the priestly orders is no doubt the proximate source of all these features
+      of learned ritual, vestments, sacramental initiation, the transmission of
+      peculiar dignities and virtues by the imposition of hands, and the like;
+      but their derivation is traceable back of this point, to the source from
+      which the specialized priestly class proper came to be distinguished from
+      the sorcerer on the one hand and from the menial servant of a temporal
+      master on the other hand. So far as regards both their derivation and
+      their psychological content, these usages and the conceptions on which
+      they rest belong to a stage in cultural development no later than that of
+      the angekok and the rain-maker. Their place in the later phases of devout
+      observance, as well as in the higher educational system, is that of a
+      survival from a very early animistic phase of the development of human
+      nature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These ritualistic features of the educational system of the present and of
+      the recent past, it is quite safe to say, have their place primarily in
+      the higher, liberal, and classic institutions and grades of learning,
+      rather than in the lower, technological, or practical grades, and branches
+      of the system. So far as they possess them, the lower and less reputable
+      branches of the educational scheme have evidently borrowed these things
+      from the higher grades; and their continued persistence among the
+      practical schools, without the sanction of the continued example of the
+      higher and classic grades, would be highly improbable, to say the least.
+      With the lower and practical schools and scholars, the adoption and
+      cultivation of these usages is a case of mimicry&mdash;due to a desire to
+      conform as far as may be to the standards of scholastic reputability
+      maintained by the upper grades and classes, who have come by these
+      accessory features legitimately, by the right of lineal devolution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The analysis may even be safely carried a step farther. Ritualistic
+      survivals and reversions come out in fullest vigor and with the freest air
+      of spontaneity among those seminaries of learning which have to do
+      primarily with the education of the priestly and leisure classes.
+      Accordingly it should appear, and it does pretty plainly appear, on a
+      survey of recent developments in college and university life, that
+      wherever schools founded for the instruction of the lower classes in the
+      immediately useful branches of knowledge grow into institutions of the
+      higher learning, the growth of ritualistic ceremonial and paraphernalia
+      and of elaborate scholastic "functions" goes hand in hand with the
+      transition of the schools in question from the field of homely
+      practicality into the higher, classical sphere. The initial purpose of
+      these schools, and the work with which they have chiefly had to do at the
+      earlier of these two stages of their evolution, has been that of fitting
+      the young of the industrious classes for work. On the higher, classical
+      plane of learning to which they commonly tend, their dominant aim becomes
+      the preparation of the youth of the priestly and the leisure classes&mdash;or
+      of an incipient leisure class&mdash;for the consumption of goods, material
+      and immaterial, according to a conventionally accepted, reputable scope
+      and method. This happy issue has commonly been the fate of schools founded
+      by "friends of the people" for the aid of struggling young men, and where
+      this transition is made in good form there is commonly, if not invariably,
+      a coincident change to a more ritualistic life in the schools.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the school life of today, learned ritual is in a general way best at
+      home in schools whose chief end is the cultivation of the "humanities".
+      This correlation is shown, perhaps more neatly than anywhere else, in the
+      life-history of the American colleges and universities of recent growth.
+      There may be many exceptions from the rule, especially among those schools
+      which have been founded by the typically reputable and ritualistic
+      churches, and which, therefore, started on the conservative and classical
+      plane or reached the classical position by a short-cut; but the general
+      rule as regards the colleges founded in the newer American communities
+      during the present century has been that so long as the constituency from
+      which the colleges have drawn their pupils has been dominated by habits of
+      industry and thrift, so long the reminiscences of the medicine-man have
+      found but a scant and precarious acceptance in the scheme of college life.
+      But so soon as wealth begins appreciably to accumulate in the community,
+      and so soon as a given school begins to lean on a leisure-class
+      constituency, there comes also a perceptibly increased insistence on
+      scholastic ritual and on conformity to the ancient forms as regards
+      vestments and social and scholastic solemnities. So, for instance, there
+      has been an approximate coincidence between the growth of wealth among the
+      constituency which supports any given college of the Middle West and the
+      date of acceptance&mdash;first into tolerance and then into imperative
+      vogue&mdash;of evening dress for men and of the décolleté for women, as
+      the scholarly vestments proper to occasions of learned solemnity or to the
+      seasons of social amenity within the college circle. Apart from the
+      mechanical difficulty of so large a task, it would scarcely be a difficult
+      matter to trace this correlation. The like is true of the vogue of the cap
+      and gown.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cap and gown have been adopted as learned insignia by many colleges of
+      this section within the last few years; and it is safe to say that this
+      could scarcely have occurred at a much earlier date, or until there had
+      grown up a leisure-class sentiment of sufficient volume in the community
+      to support a strong movement of reversion towards an archaic view as to
+      the legitimate end of education. This particular item of learned ritual,
+      it may be noted, would not only commend itself to the leisure-class sense
+      of the fitness of things, as appealing to the archaic propensity for
+      spectacular effect and the predilection for antique symbolism; but it at
+      the same time fits into the leisure-class scheme of life as involving a
+      notable element of conspicuous waste. The precise date at which the
+      reversion to cap and gown took place, as well as the fact that it affected
+      so large a number of schools at about the same time, seems to have been
+      due in some measure to a wave of atavistic sense of conformity and
+      reputability that passed over the community at that period.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may not be entirely beside the point to note that in point of time this
+      curious reversion seems to coincide with the culmination of a certain
+      vogue of atavistic sentiment and tradition in other directions also. The
+      wave of reversion seems to have received its initial impulse in the
+      psychologically disintegrating effects of the Civil War. Habituation to
+      war entails a body of predatory habits of thought, whereby clannishness in
+      some measure replaces the sense of solidarity, and a sense of invidious
+      distinction supplants the impulse to equitable, everyday serviceability.
+      As an outcome of the cumulative action of these factors, the generation
+      which follows a season of war is apt to witness a rehabilitation of the
+      element of status, both in its social life and in its scheme of devout
+      observances and other symbolic or ceremonial forms. Throughout the
+      eighties, and less plainly traceable through the seventies also, there was
+      perceptible a gradually advancing wave of sentiment favoring
+      quasi-predatory business habits, insistence on status, anthropomorphism,
+      and conservatism generally. The more direct and unmediated of these
+      expressions of the barbarian temperament, such as the recrudescence of
+      outlawry and the spectacular quasi-predatory careers of fraud run by
+      certain "captains of industry", came to a head earlier and were
+      appreciably on the decline by the close of the seventies. The
+      recrudescence of anthropomorphic sentiment also seems to have passed its
+      most acute stage before the close of the eighties. But the learned ritual
+      and paraphernalia here spoken of are a still remoter and more recondite
+      expression of the barbarian animistic sense; and these, therefore, gained
+      vogue and elaboration more slowly and reached their most effective
+      development at a still later date. There is reason to believe that the
+      culmination is now already past. Except for the new impetus given by a new
+      war experience, and except for the support which the growth of a wealthy
+      class affords to all ritual, and especially to whatever ceremonial is
+      wasteful and pointedly suggests gradations of status, it is probable that
+      the late improvements and augmentation of scholastic insignia and
+      ceremonial would gradually decline. But while it may be true that the cap
+      and gown, and the more strenuous observance of scholastic proprieties
+      which came with them, were floated in on this post-bellum tidal wave of
+      reversion to barbarism, it is also no doubt true that such a ritualistic
+      reversion could not have been effected in the college scheme of life until
+      the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a propertied class had gone far
+      enough to afford the requisite pecuniary ground for a movement which
+      should bring the colleges of the country up to the leisure-class
+      requirements in the higher learning. The adoption of the cap and gown is
+      one of the striking atavistic features of modern college life, and at the
+      same time it marks the fact that these colleges have definitely become
+      leisure-class establishments, either in actual achievement or in
+      aspiration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As further evidence of the close relation between the educational system
+      and the cultural standards of the community, it may be remarked that there
+      is some tendency latterly to substitute the captain of industry in place
+      of the priest, as the head of seminaries of the higher learning. The
+      substitution is by no means complete or unequivocal. Those heads of
+      institutions are best accepted who combine the sacerdotal office with a
+      high degree of pecuniary efficiency. There is a similar but less
+      pronounced tendency to intrust the work of instruction in the higher
+      learning to men of some pecuniary qualification. Administrative ability
+      and skill in advertising the enterprise count for rather more than they
+      once did, as qualifications for the work of teaching. This applies
+      especially in those sciences that have most to do with the everyday facts
+      of life, and it is particularly true of schools in the economically
+      single-minded communities. This partial substitution of pecuniary for
+      sacerdotal efficiency is a concomitant of the modern transition from
+      conspicuous leisure to conspicuous consumption, as the chief means of
+      reputability. The correlation of the two facts is probably clear without
+      further elaboration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The attitude of the schools and of the learned class towards the education
+      of women serves to show in what manner and to what extent learning has
+      departed from its ancient station of priestly and leisure-class
+      prerogatives, and it indicates also what approach has been made by the
+      truly learned to the modern, economic or industrial, matter-of-fact
+      standpoint. The higher schools and the learned professions were until
+      recently tabu to the women. These establishments were from the outset, and
+      have in great measure continued to be, devoted to the education of the
+      priestly and leisure classes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The women, as has been shown elsewhere, were the original subservient
+      class, and to some extent, especially so far as regards their nominal or
+      ceremonial position, they have remained in that relation down to the
+      present. There has prevailed a strong sense that the admission of women to
+      the privileges of the higher learning (as to the Eleusianin mysteries)
+      would be derogatory to the dignity of the learned craft. It is therefore
+      only very recently, and almost solely in the industrially most advanced
+      communities, that the higher grades of schools have been freely opened to
+      women. And even under the urgent circumstances prevailing in the modern
+      industrial communities, the highest and most reputable universities show
+      an extreme reluctance in making the move. The sense of class worthiness,
+      that is to say of status, of a honorific differentiation of the sexes
+      according to a distinction between superior and inferior intellectual
+      dignity, survives in a vigorous form in these corporations of the
+      aristocracy of learning. It is felt that the woman should, in all
+      propriety, acquire only such knowledge as may be classed under one or the
+      other of two heads: (1) such knowledge as conduces immediately to a better
+      performance of domestic service&mdash;the domestic sphere; (2) such
+      accomplishments and dexterity, quasi-scholarly and quasi-artistic, as
+      plainly come in under the head of a performance of vicarious leisure.
+      Knowledge is felt to be unfeminine if it is knowledge which expresses the
+      unfolding of the learner's own life, the acquisition of which proceeds on
+      the learner's own cognitive interest, without prompting from the canons of
+      propriety, and without reference back to a master whose comfort or good
+      repute is to be enhanced by the employment or the exhibition of it. So,
+      also, all knowledge which is useful as evidence of leisure, other than
+      vicarious leisure, is scarcely feminine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For an appreciation of the relation which these higher seminaries of
+      learning bear to the economic life of the community, the phenomena which
+      have been reviewed are of importance rather as indications of a general
+      attitude than as being in themselves facts of first-rate economic
+      consequence. They go to show what is the instinctive attitude and animus
+      of the learned class towards the life process of an industrial community.
+      They serve as an exponent of the stage of development, for the industrial
+      purpose, attained by the higher learning and by the learned class, and so
+      they afford an indication as to what may fairly be looked for from this
+      class at points where the learning and the life of the class bear more
+      immediately upon the economic life and efficiency of the community, and
+      upon the adjustment of its scheme of life to the requirements of the time.
+      What these ritualistic survivals go to indicate is a prevalence of
+      conservatism, if not of reactionary sentiment, especially among the higher
+      schools where the conventional learning is cultivated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To these indications of a conservative attitude is to be added another
+      characteristic which goes in the same direction, but which is a symptom of
+      graver consequence that this playful inclination to trivialities of form
+      and ritual. By far the greater number of American colleges and
+      universities, for instance, are affiliated to some religious denomination
+      and are somewhat given to devout observances. Their putative familiarity
+      with scientific methods and the scientific point of view should presumably
+      exempt the faculties of these schools from animistic habits of thought;
+      but there is still a considerable proportion of them who profess an
+      attachment to the anthropomorphic beliefs and observances of an earlier
+      culture. These professions of devotional zeal are, no doubt, to a good
+      extent expedient and perfunctory, both on the part of the schools in their
+      corporate capacity, and on the part of the individual members of the corps
+      of instructors; but it can not be doubted that there is after all a very
+      appreciable element of anthropomorphic sentiment present in the higher
+      schools. So far as this is the case it must be set down as the expression
+      of an archaic, animistic habit of mind. This habit of mind must
+      necessarily assert itself to some extent in the instruction offered, and
+      to this extent its influence in shaping the habits of thought of the
+      student makes for conservatism and reversion; it acts to hinder his
+      development in the direction of matter-of-fact knowledge, such as best
+      serves the ends of industry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The college sports, which have so great a vogue in the reputable
+      seminaries of learning today, tend in a similar direction; and, indeed,
+      sports have much in common with the devout attitude of the colleges, both
+      as regards their psychological basis and as regards their disciplinary
+      effect. But this expression of the barbarian temperament is to be credited
+      primarily to the body of students, rather than to the temper of the
+      schools as such; except in so far as the colleges or the college officials&mdash;as
+      sometimes happens&mdash;actively countenance and foster the growth of
+      sports. The like is true of college fraternities as of college sports, but
+      with a difference. The latter are chiefly an expression of the predatory
+      impulse simply; the former are more specifically an expression of that
+      heritage of clannishness which is so large a feature in the temperament of
+      the predatory barbarian. It is also noticeable that a close relation
+      subsists between the fraternities and the sporting activity of the
+      schools. After what has already been said in an earlier chapter on the
+      sporting and gambling habit, it is scarcely necessary further to discuss
+      the economic value of this training in sports and in factional
+      organization and activity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But all these features of the scheme of life of the learned class, and of
+      the establishments dedicated to the conservation of the higher learning,
+      are in a great measure incidental only. They are scarcely to be accounted
+      organic elements of the professed work of research and instruction for the
+      ostensible pursuit of which the schools exists. But these symptomatic
+      indications go to establish a presumption as to the character of the work
+      performed&mdash;as seen from the economic point of view&mdash;and as to
+      the bent which the serious work carried on under their auspices gives to
+      the youth who resort to the schools. The presumption raised by the
+      considerations already offered is that in their work also, as well as in
+      their ceremonial, the higher schools may be expected to take a
+      conservative position; but this presumption must be checked by a
+      comparison of the economic character of the work actually performed, and
+      by something of a survey of the learning whose conservation is intrusted
+      to the higher schools. On this head, it is well known that the accredited
+      seminaries of learning have, until a recent date, held a conservative
+      position. They have taken an attitude of depreciation towards all
+      innovations. As a general rule a new point of view or a new formulation of
+      knowledge have been countenanced and taken up within the schools only
+      after these new things have made their way outside of the schools. As
+      exceptions from this rule are chiefly to be mentioned innovations of an
+      inconspicuous kind and departures which do not bear in any tangible way
+      upon the conventional point of view or upon the conventional scheme of
+      life; as, for instance, details of fact in the mathematico-physical
+      sciences, and new readings and interpretations of the classics, especially
+      such as have a philological or literary bearing only. Except within the
+      domain of the "humanities", in the narrow sense, and except so far as the
+      traditional point of view of the humanities has been left intact by the
+      innovators, it has generally held true that the accredited learned class
+      and the seminaries of the higher learning have looked askance at all
+      innovation. New views, new departures in scientific theory, especially in
+      new departures which touch the theory of human relations at any point,
+      have found a place in the scheme of the university tardily and by a
+      reluctant tolerance, rather than by a cordial welcome; and the men who
+      have occupied themselves with such efforts to widen the scope of human
+      knowledge have not commonly been well received by their learned
+      contemporaries. The higher schools have not commonly given their
+      countenance to a serious advance in the methods or the content of
+      knowledge until the innovations have outlived their youth and much of
+      their usefulness&mdash;after they have become commonplaces of the
+      intellectual furniture of a new generation which has grown up under, and
+      has had its habits of thought shaped by, the new, extra-scholastic body of
+      knowledge and the new standpoint. This is true of the recent past. How far
+      it may be true of the immediate present it would be hazardous to say, for
+      it is impossible to see present-day facts in such perspective as to get a
+      fair conception of their relative proportions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So far, nothing has been said of the Maecenas function of the well-to-do,
+      which is habitually dwelt on at some length by writers and speakers who
+      treat of the development of culture and of social structure. This
+      leisure-class function is not without an important bearing on the higher
+      and on the spread of knowledge and culture. The manner and the degree in
+      which the class furthers learning through patronage of this kind is
+      sufficiently familiar. It has been frequently presented in affectionate
+      and effective terms by spokesmen whose familiarity with the topic fits
+      them to bring home to their hearers the profound significance of this
+      cultural factor. These spokesmen, however, have presented the matter from
+      the point of view of the cultural interest, or of the interest of
+      reputability, rather than from that of the economic interest. As
+      apprehended from the economic point of view, and valued for the purpose of
+      industrial serviceability, this function of the well-to-do, as well as the
+      intellectual attitude of members of the well-to-do class, merits some
+      attention and will bear illustration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By way of characterization of the Maecenas relation, it is to be noted
+      that, considered externally, as an economic or industrial relation simply,
+      it is a relation of status. The scholar under the patronage performs the
+      duties of a learned life vicariously for his patron, to whom a certain
+      repute inures after the manner of the good repute imputed to a master for
+      whom any form of vicarious leisure is performed. It is also to be noted
+      that, in point of historical fact, the furtherance of learning or the
+      maintenance of scholarly activity through the Maecenas relation has most
+      commonly been a furtherance of proficiency in classical lore or in the
+      humanities. The knowledge tends to lower rather than to heighten the
+      industrial efficiency of the community.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Further, as regards the direct participation of the members of the leisure
+      class in the furtherance of knowledge, the canons of reputable living act
+      to throw such intellectual interest as seeks expression among the class on
+      the side of classical and formal erudition, rather than on the side of the
+      sciences that bear some relation to the community's industrial life. The
+      most frequent excursions into other than classical fields of knowledge on
+      the part of members of the leisure class are made into the discipline of
+      law and the political, and more especially the administrative, sciences.
+      These so-called sciences are substantially bodies of maxims of expediency
+      for guidance in the leisure-class office of government, as conducted on a
+      proprietary basis. The interest with which this discipline is approached
+      is therefore not commonly the intellectual or cognitive interest simply.
+      It is largely the practical interest of the exigencies of that relation of
+      mastery in which the members of the class are placed. In point of
+      derivation, the office of government is a predatory function, pertaining
+      integrally to the archaic leisure-class scheme of life. It is an exercise
+      of control and coercion over the population from which the class draws its
+      sustenance. This discipline, as well as the incidents of practice which
+      give it its content, therefore has some attraction for the class apart
+      from all questions of cognition. All this holds true wherever and so long
+      as the governmental office continues, in form or in substance, to be a
+      proprietary office; and it holds true beyond that limit, in so far as the
+      tradition of the more archaic phase of governmental evolution has lasted
+      on into the later life of those modern communities for whom proprietary
+      government by a leisure class is now beginning to pass away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For that field of learning within which the cognitive or intellectual
+      interest is dominant&mdash;the sciences properly so called&mdash;the case
+      is somewhat different, not only as regards the attitude of the leisure
+      class, but as regards the whole drift of the pecuniary culture. Knowledge
+      for its own sake, the exercise of the faculty of comprehensive without
+      ulterior purpose, should, it might be expected, be sought by men whom no
+      urgent material interest diverts from such a quest. The sheltered
+      industrial position of the leisure class should give free play to the
+      cognitive interest in members of this class, and we should consequently
+      have, as many writers confidently find that we do have, a very large
+      proportion of scholars, scientists, savants derived from this class and
+      deriving their incentive to scientific investigation and speculation from
+      the discipline of a life of leisure. Some such result is to be looked for,
+      but there are features of the leisure-class scheme of life, already
+      sufficiently dwelt upon, which go to divert the intellectual interest of
+      this class to other subjects than that causal sequence in phenomena which
+      makes the content of the sciences. The habits of thought which
+      characterize the life of the class run on the personal relation of
+      dominance, and on the derivative, invidious concepts of honor, worth,
+      merit, character, and the like. The casual sequence which makes up the
+      subject matter of science is not visible from this point of view. Neither
+      does good repute attach to knowledge of facts that are vulgarly useful.
+      Hence it should appear probable that the interest of the invidious
+      comparison with respect to pecuniary or other honorific merit should
+      occupy the attention of the leisure class, to the neglect of the cognitive
+      interest. Where this latter interest asserts itself it should commonly be
+      diverted to fields of speculation or investigation which are reputable and
+      futile, rather than to the quest of scientific knowledge. Such indeed has
+      been the history of priestly and leisure-class learning so long as no
+      considerable body of systematized knowledge had been intruded into the
+      scholastic discipline from an extra-scholastic source. But since the
+      relation of mastery and subservience is ceasing to be the dominant and
+      formative factor in the community's life process, other features of the
+      life process and other points of view are forcing themselves upon the
+      scholars. The true-bred gentleman of leisure should, and does, see the
+      world from the point of view of the personal relation; and the cognitive
+      interest, so far as it asserts itself in him, should seek to systematize
+      phenomena on this basis. Such indeed is the case with the gentleman of the
+      old school, in whom the leisure-class ideals have suffered no
+      disintegration; and such is the attitude of his latter-day descendant, in
+      so far as he has fallen heir to the full complement of upper-class
+      virtues. But the ways of heredity are devious, and not every gentleman's
+      son is to the manor born. Especially is the transmission of the habits of
+      thought which characterize the predatory master somewhat precarious in the
+      case of a line of descent in which but one or two of the latest steps have
+      lain within the leisure-class discipline. The chances of occurrence of a
+      strong congenital or acquired bent towards the exercise of the cognitive
+      aptitudes are apparently best in those members of the leisure class who
+      are of lower class or middle class antecedents&mdash;that is to say, those
+      who have inherited the complement of aptitudes proper to the industrious
+      classes, and who owe their place in the leisure class to the possession of
+      qualities which count for more today than they did in the times when the
+      leisure-class scheme of life took shape. But even outside the range of
+      these later accessions to the leisure class there are an appreciable
+      number of individuals in whom the invidious interest is not sufficiently
+      dominant to shape their theoretical views, and in whom the proclivity to
+      theory is sufficiently strong to lead them into the scientific quest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The higher learning owes the intrusion of the sciences in part to these
+      aberrant scions of the leisure class, who have come under the dominant
+      influence of the latter-day tradition of impersonal relation and who have
+      inherited a complement of human aptitudes differing in certain salient
+      features from the temperament which is characteristic of the regime of
+      status. But it owes the presence of this alien body of scientific
+      knowledge also in part, and in a higher degree, to members of the
+      industrious classes who have been in sufficiently easy circumstances to
+      turn their attention to other interests than that of finding daily
+      sustenance, and whose inherited aptitudes and anthropomorphic point of
+      view does not dominate their intellectual processes. As between these two
+      groups, which approximately comprise the effective force of scientific
+      progress, it is the latter that has contributed the most. And with respect
+      to both it seems to be true that they are not so much the source as the
+      vehicle, or at the most they are the instrument of commutation, by which
+      the habits of thought enforced upon the community, through contact with
+      its environment under the exigencies of modern associated life and the
+      mechanical industries, are turned to account for theoretical knowledge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Science, in the sense of an articulate recognition of causal sequence in
+      phenomena, whether physical or social, has been a feature of the Western
+      culture only since the industrial process in the Western communities has
+      come to be substantially a process of mechanical contrivances in which
+      man's office is that of discrimination and valuation of material forces.
+      Science has flourished somewhat in the same degree as the industrial life
+      of the community has conformed to this pattern, and somewhat in the same
+      degree as the industrial interest has dominated the community's life. And
+      science, and scientific theory especially, has made headway in the several
+      departments of human life and knowledge in proportion as each of these
+      several departments has successively come into closer contact with the
+      industrial process and the economic interest; or perhaps it is truer to
+      say, in proportion as each of them has successively escaped from the
+      dominance of the conceptions of personal relation or status, and of the
+      derivative canons of anthropomorphic fitness and honorific worth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is only as the exigencies of modern industrial life have enforced the
+      recognition of causal sequence in the practical contact of mankind with
+      their environment, that men have come to systematize the phenomena of this
+      environment and the facts of their own contact with it in terms of causal
+      sequence. So that while the higher learning in its best development, as
+      the perfect flower of scholasticism and classicism, was a by-product of
+      the priestly office and the life of leisure, so modern science may be said
+      to be a by-product of the industrial process. Through these groups of men,
+      then&mdash;investigators, savants, scientists, inventors, speculators&mdash;most
+      of whom have done their most telling work outside the shelter of the
+      schools, the habits of thought enforced by the modern industrial life have
+      found coherent expression and elaboration as a body of theoretical science
+      having to do with the causal sequence of phenomena. And from this
+      extra-scholastic field of scientific speculation, changes of method and
+      purpose have from time to time been intruded into the scholastic
+      discipline.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this connection it is to be remarked that there is a very perceptible
+      difference of substance and purpose between the instruction offered in the
+      primary and secondary schools, on the one hand, and in the higher
+      seminaries of learning, on the other hand. The difference in point of
+      immediate practicality of the information imparted and of the proficiency
+      acquired may be of some consequence and may merit the attention which it
+      has from time to time received; but there is more substantial difference
+      in the mental and spiritual bent which is favored by the one and the other
+      discipline. This divergent trend in discipline between the higher and the
+      lower learning is especially noticeable as regards the primary education
+      in its latest development in the advanced industrial communities. Here the
+      instruction is directed chiefly to proficiency or dexterity, intellectual
+      and manual, in the apprehension and employment of impersonal facts, in
+      their casual rather than in their honorific incidence. It is true, under
+      the traditions of the earlier days, when the primary education was also
+      predominantly a leisure-class commodity, a free use is still made of
+      emulation as a spur to diligence in the common run of primary schools; but
+      even this use of emulation as an expedient is visibly declining in the
+      primary grades of instruction in communities where the lower education is
+      not under the guidance of the ecclesiastical or military tradition. All
+      this holds true in a peculiar degree, and more especially on the spiritual
+      side, of such portions of the educational system as have been immediately
+      affected by kindergarten methods and ideals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The peculiarly non-invidious trend of the kindergarten discipline, and the
+      similar character of the kindergarten influence in primary education
+      beyond the limits of the kindergarten proper, should be taken in
+      connection with what has already been said of the peculiar spiritual
+      attitude of leisure-class womankind under the circumstances of the modern
+      economic situation. The kindergarten discipline is at its best&mdash;or at
+      its farthest remove from ancient patriarchal and pedagogical ideals&mdash;in
+      the advanced industrial communities, where there is a considerable body of
+      intelligent and idle women, and where the system of status has somewhat
+      abated in rigor under the disintegrating influence of industrial life and
+      in the absence of a consistent body of military and ecclesiastical
+      traditions. It is from these women in easy circumstances that it gets its
+      moral support. The aims and methods of the kindergarten commend themselves
+      with especial effect to this class of women who are ill at ease under the
+      pecuniary code of reputable life. The kindergarten, and whatever the
+      kindergarten spirit counts for in modern education, therefore, is to be
+      set down, along with the "new-woman movement," to the account of that
+      revulsion against futility and invidious comparison which the
+      leisure-class life under modern circumstances induces in the women most
+      immediately exposed to its discipline. In this way it appears that, by
+      indirection, the institution of a leisure class here again favors the
+      growth of a non-invidious attitude, which may, in the long run, prove a
+      menace to the stability of the institution itself, and even to the
+      institution of individual ownership on which it rests.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the recent past some tangible changes have taken place in the scope
+      of college and university teaching. These changes have in the main
+      consisted in a partial displacement of the humanities&mdash;those branches
+      of learning which are conceived to make for the traditional "culture",
+      character, tastes, and ideals&mdash;by those more matter-of-fact branches
+      which make for civic and industrial efficiency. To put the same thing in
+      other words, those branches of knowledge which make for efficiency
+      (ultimately productive efficiency) have gradually been gaining ground
+      against those branches which make for a heightened consumption or a
+      lowered industrial efficiency and for a type of character suited to the
+      regime of status. In this adaptation of the scheme of instruction the
+      higher schools have commonly been found on the conservative side; each
+      step which they have taken in advance has been to some extent of the
+      nature of a concession. The sciences have been intruded into the scholar's
+      discipline from without, not to say from below. It is noticeable that the
+      humanities which have so reluctantly yielded ground to the sciences are
+      pretty uniformly adapted to shape the character of the student in
+      accordance with a traditional self-centred scheme of consumption; a scheme
+      of contemplation and enjoyment of the true, the beautiful, and the good,
+      according to a conventional standard of propriety and excellence, the
+      salient feature of which is leisure&mdash;otium cum dignitate. In language
+      veiled by their own habituation to the archaic, decorous point of view,
+      the spokesmen of the humanities have insisted upon the ideal embodied in
+      the maxim, fruges consumere nati. This attitude should occasion no
+      surprise in the case of schools which are shaped by and rest upon a
+      leisure-class culture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The professed grounds on which it has been sought, as far as might be, to
+      maintain the received standards and methods of culture intact are likewise
+      characteristic of the archaic temperament and of the leisure-class theory
+      of life. The enjoyment and the bent derived from habitual contemplation of
+      the life, ideals, speculations, and methods of consuming time and goods,
+      in vogue among the leisure class of classical antiquity, for instance, is
+      felt to be "higher", "nobler", "worthier", than what results in these
+      respects from a like familiarity with the everyday life and the knowledge
+      and aspirations of commonplace humanity in a modern community, that
+      learning the content of which is an unmitigated knowledge of latter-day
+      men and things is by comparison "lower", "base", "ignoble"&mdash;one even
+      hears the epithet "sub-human" applied to this matter-of-fact knowledge of
+      mankind and of everyday life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This contention of the leisure-class spokesmen of the humanities seems to
+      be substantially sound. In point of substantial fact, the gratification
+      and the culture, or the spiritual attitude or habit of mind, resulting
+      from an habitual contemplation of the anthropomorphism, clannishness, and
+      leisurely self-complacency of the gentleman of an early day, or from a
+      familiarity with the animistic superstitions and the exuberant truculence
+      of the Homeric heroes, for instance, is, aesthetically considered, more
+      legitimate than the corresponding results derived from a matter-of-fact
+      knowledge of things and a contemplation of latter-day civic or workmanlike
+      efficiency. There can be but little question that the first-named habits
+      have the advantage in respect of aesthetic or honorific value, and
+      therefore in respect of the "worth" which is made the basis of award in
+      the comparison. The content of the canons of taste, and more particularly
+      of the canons of honor, is in the nature of things a resultant of the past
+      life and circumstances of the race, transmitted to the later generation by
+      inheritance or by tradition; and the fact that the protracted dominance of
+      a predatory, leisure-class scheme of life has profoundly shaped the habit
+      of mind and the point of view of the race in the past, is a sufficient
+      basis for an aesthetically legitimate dominance of such a scheme of life
+      in very much of what concerns matters of taste in the present. For the
+      purpose in hand, canons of taste are race habits, acquired through a more
+      or less protracted habituation to the approval or disapproval of the kind
+      of things upon which a favorable or unfavorable judgment of taste is
+      passed. Other things being equal, the longer and more unbroken the
+      habituation, the more legitimate is the canon of taste in question. All
+      this seems to be even truer of judgments regarding worth or honor than of
+      judgments of taste generally.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But whatever may be the aesthetic legitimacy of the derogatory judgment
+      passed on the newer learning by the spokesmen of the humanities, and
+      however substantial may be the merits of the contention that the classic
+      lore is worthier and results in a more truly human culture and character,
+      it does not concern the question in hand. The question in hand is as to
+      how far these branches of learning, and the point of view for which they
+      stand in the educational system, help or hinder an efficient collective
+      life under modern industrial circumstances&mdash;how far they further a
+      more facile adaptation to the economic situation of today. The question is
+      an economic, not an aesthetic one; and the leisure-class standards of
+      learning which find expression in the deprecatory attitude of the higher
+      schools towards matter-of-fact knowledge are, for the present purpose, to
+      be valued from this point of view only. For this purpose the use of such
+      epithets as "noble", "base", "higher", "lower", etc., is significant only
+      as showing the animus and the point of view of the disputants; whether
+      they contend for the worthiness of the new or of the old. All these
+      epithets are honorific or humilific terms; that is to say, they are terms
+      of invidious comparison, which in the last analysis fall under the
+      category of the reputable or the disreputable; that is, they belong within
+      the range of ideas that characterizes the scheme of life of the regime of
+      status; that is, they are in substance an expression of sportsmanship&mdash;of
+      the predatory and animistic habit of mind; that is, they indicate an
+      archaic point of view and theory of life, which may fit the predatory
+      stage of culture and of economic organization from which they have sprung,
+      but which are, from the point of view of economic efficiency in the
+      broader sense, disserviceable anachronisms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The classics, and their position of prerogative in the scheme of education
+      to which the higher seminaries of learning cling with such a fond
+      predilection, serve to shape the intellectual attitude and lower the
+      economic efficiency of the new learned generation. They do this not only
+      by holding up an archaic ideal of manhood, but also by the discrimination
+      which they inculcate with respect to the reputable and the disreputable in
+      knowledge. This result is accomplished in two ways: (1) by inspiring an
+      habitual aversion to what is merely useful, as contrasted with what is
+      merely honorific in learning, and so shaping the tastes of the novice that
+      he comes in good faith to find gratification of his tastes solely, or
+      almost solely, in such exercise of the intellect as normally results in no
+      industrial or social gain; and (2) by consuming the learner's time and
+      effort in acquiring knowledge which is of no use except in so far as this
+      learning has by convention become incorporated into the sum of learning
+      required of the scholar, and has thereby affected the terminology and
+      diction employed in the useful branches of knowledge. Except for this
+      terminological difficulty&mdash;which is itself a consequence of the vogue
+      of the classics of the past&mdash;a knowledge of the ancient languages,
+      for instance, would have no practical bearing for any scientist or any
+      scholar not engaged on work primarily of a linguistic character. Of
+      course, all this has nothing to say as to the cultural value of the
+      classics, nor is there any intention to disparage the discipline of the
+      classics or the bent which their study gives to the student. That bent
+      seems to be of an economically disserviceable kind, but this fact&mdash;somewhat
+      notorious indeed&mdash;need disturb no one who has the good fortune to
+      find comfort and strength in the classical lore. The fact that classical
+      learning acts to derange the learner's workmanlike attitudes should fall
+      lightly upon the apprehension of those who hold workmanship of small
+      account in comparison with the cultivation of decorous ideals: Iam fides
+      et pax et honos pudorque Priscus et neglecta redire virtus Audet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Owing to the circumstance that this knowledge has become part of the
+      elementary requirements in our system of education, the ability to use and
+      to understand certain of the dead languages of southern Europe is not only
+      gratifying to the person who finds occasion to parade his accomplishments
+      in this respect, but the evidence of such knowledge serves at the same
+      time to recommend any savant to his audience, both lay and learned. It is
+      currently expected that a certain number of years shall have been spent in
+      acquiring this substantially useless information, and its absence creates
+      a presumption of hasty and precarious learning, as well as of a vulgar
+      practicality that is equally obnoxious to the conventional standards of
+      sound scholarship and intellectual force.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The case is analogous to what happens in the purchase of any article of
+      consumption by a purchaser who is not an expert judge of materials or of
+      workmanship. He makes his estimate of value of the article chiefly on the
+      ground of the apparent expensiveness of the finish of those decorative
+      parts and features which have no immediate relation to the intrinsic
+      usefulness of the article; the presumption being that some sort of
+      ill-defined proportion subsists between the substantial value of an
+      article and the expense of adornment added in order to sell it. The
+      presumption that there can ordinarily be no sound scholarship where a
+      knowledge of the classics and humanities is wanting leads to a conspicuous
+      waste of time and labor on the part of the general body of students in
+      acquiring such knowledge. The conventional insistence on a modicum of
+      conspicuous waste as an incident of all reputable scholarship has affected
+      our canons of taste and of serviceability in matters of scholarship in
+      much the same way as the same principle has influenced our judgment of the
+      serviceability of manufactured goods.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is true, since conspicuous consumption has gained more and more on
+      conspicuous leisure as a means of repute, the acquisition of the dead
+      languages is no longer so imperative a requirement as it once was, and its
+      talismanic virtue as a voucher of scholarship has suffered a concomitant
+      impairment. But while this is true, it is also true that the classics have
+      scarcely lost in absolute value as a voucher of scholastic respectability,
+      since for this purpose it is only necessary that the scholar should be
+      able to put in evidence some learning which is conventionally recognized
+      as evidence of wasted time; and the classics lend themselves with great
+      facility to this use. Indeed, there can be little doubt that it is their
+      utility as evidence of wasted time and effort, and hence of the pecuniary
+      strength necessary in order to afford this waste, that has secured to the
+      classics their position of prerogative in the scheme of higher learning,
+      and has led to their being esteemed the most honorific of all learning.
+      They serve the decorative ends of leisure-class learning better than any
+      other body of knowledge, and hence they are an effective means of
+      reputability.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this respect the classics have until lately had scarcely a rival. They
+      still have no dangerous rival on the continent of Europe, but lately,
+      since college athletics have won their way into a recognized standing as
+      an accredited field of scholarly accomplishment, this latter branch of
+      learning&mdash;if athletics may be freely classed as learning&mdash;has
+      become a rival of the classics for the primacy in leisure-class education
+      in American and English schools. Athletics have an obvious advantage over
+      the classics for the purpose of leisure-class learning, since success as
+      an athlete presumes, not only waste of time, but also waste of money, as
+      well as the possession of certain highly unindustrial archaic traits of
+      character and temperament. In the German universities the place of
+      athletics and Greek-letter fraternities, as a leisure-class scholarly
+      occupation, has in some measure been supplied by a skilled and graded
+      inebriety and a perfunctory duelling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The leisure class and its standard of virtue&mdash;archaism and waste&mdash;can
+      scarcely have been concerned in the introduction of the classics into the
+      scheme of the higher learning; but the tenacious retention of the classics
+      by the higher schools, and the high degree of reputability which still
+      attaches to them, are no doubt due to their conforming so closely to the
+      requirements of archaism and waste.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Classic" always carries this connotation of wasteful and archaic, whether
+      it is used to denote the dead languages or the obsolete or obsolescent
+      forms of thought and diction in the living language, or to denote other
+      items of scholarly activity or apparatus to which it is applied with less
+      aptness. So the archaic idiom of the English language is spoken of as
+      "classic" English. Its use is imperative in all speaking and writing upon
+      serious topics, and a facile use of it lends dignity to even the most
+      commonplace and trivial string of talk. The newest form of English diction
+      is of course never written; the sense of that leisure-class propriety
+      which requires archaism in speech is present even in the most illiterate
+      or sensational writers in sufficient force to prevent such a lapse. On the
+      other hand, the highest and most conventionalized style of archaic diction
+      is&mdash;quite characteristically&mdash;properly employed only in
+      communications between an anthropomorphic divinity and his subjects.
+      Midway between these extremes lies the everyday speech of leisure-class
+      conversation and literature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Elegant diction, whether in writing or speaking, is an effective means of
+      reputability. It is of moment to know with some precision what is the
+      degree of archaism conventionally required in speaking on any given topic.
+      Usage differs appreciably from the pulpit to the market-place; the latter,
+      as might be expected, admits the use of relatively new and effective words
+      and turns of expression, even by fastidious persons. A discriminative
+      avoidance of neologisms is honorific, not only because it argues that time
+      has been wasted in acquiring the obsolescent habit of speech, but also as
+      showing that the speaker has from infancy habitually associated with
+      persons who have been familiar with the obsolescent idiom. It thereby goes
+      to show his leisure-class antecedents. Great purity of speech is
+      presumptive evidence of several lives spent in other than vulgarly useful
+      occupations; although its evidence is by no means entirely conclusive to
+      this point.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As felicitous an instance of futile classicism as can well be found,
+      outside of the Far East, is the conventional spelling of the English
+      language. A breach of the proprieties in spelling is extremely annoying
+      and will discredit any writer in the eyes of all persons who are possessed
+      of a developed sense of the true and beautiful. English orthography
+      satisfies all the requirements of the canons of reputability under the law
+      of conspicuous waste. It is archaic, cumbrous, and ineffective; its
+      acquisition consumes much time and effort; failure to acquire it is easy
+      of detection. Therefore it is the first and readiest test of reputability
+      in learning, and conformity to its ritual is indispensable to a blameless
+      scholastic life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On this head of purity of speech, as at other points where a conventional
+      usage rests on the canons of archaism and waste, the spokesmen for the
+      usage instinctively take an apologetic attitude. It is contended, in
+      substance, that a punctilious use of ancient and accredited locutions will
+      serve to convey thought more adequately and more precisely than would be
+      the straightforward use of the latest form of spoken English; whereas it
+      is notorious that the ideas of today are effectively expressed in the
+      slang of today. Classic speech has the honorific virtue of dignity; it
+      commands attention and respect as being the accredited method of
+      communication under the leisure-class scheme of life, because it carries a
+      pointed suggestion of the industrial exemption of the speaker. The
+      advantage of the accredited locutions lies in their reputability; they are
+      reputable because they are cumbrous and out of date, and therefore argue
+      waste of time and exemption from the use and the need of direct and
+      forcible speech.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
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+Project Gutenberg's The Theory of the Leisure Class, by Thorstein Veblen
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Theory of the Leisure Class
+
+Author: Thorstein Veblen
+
+Posting Date: August 6, 2008 [EBook #833]
+Release Date: March, 1997
+Last updated: January 21, 2011
+Last updated: November 14, 2012
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Reed
+
+
+
+
+
+THE THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS
+
+by Thorstein Veblen
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter One ~~ Introductory
+
+
+The institution of a leisure class is found in its best development at
+the higher stages of the barbarian culture; as, for instance, in feudal
+Europe or feudal Japan. In such communities the distinction between
+classes is very rigorously observed; and the feature of most striking
+economic significance in these class differences is the distinction
+maintained between the employments proper to the several classes.
+The upper classes are by custom exempt or excluded from industrial
+occupations, and are reserved for certain employments to which a degree
+of honour attaches. Chief among the honourable employments in any
+feudal community is warfare; and priestly service is commonly second to
+warfare. If the barbarian community is not notably warlike, the priestly
+office may take the precedence, with that of the warrior second. But the
+rule holds with but slight exceptions that, whether warriors or priests,
+the upper classes are exempt from industrial employments, and this
+exemption is the economic expression of their superior rank. Brahmin
+India affords a fair illustration of the industrial exemption of both
+these classes. In the communities belonging to the higher barbarian
+culture there is a considerable differentiation of sub-classes within
+what may be comprehensively called the leisure class; and there is a
+corresponding differentiation of employments between these sub-classes.
+The leisure class as a whole comprises the noble and the priestly
+classes, together with much of their retinue. The occupations of the
+class are correspondingly diversified; but they have the common economic
+characteristic of being non-industrial. These non-industrial upper-class
+occupations may be roughly comprised under government, warfare,
+religious observances, and sports.
+
+At an earlier, but not the earliest, stage of barbarism, the leisure
+class is found in a less differentiated form. Neither the class
+distinctions nor the distinctions between leisure-class occupations are
+so minute and intricate. The Polynesian islanders generally show this
+stage of the development in good form, with the exception that, owing
+to the absence of large game, hunting does not hold the usual place of
+honour in their scheme of life. The Icelandic community in the time of
+the Sagas also affords a fair instance. In such a community there is
+a rigorous distinction between classes and between the occupations
+peculiar to each class. Manual labour, industry, whatever has to
+do directly with the everyday work of getting a livelihood, is the
+exclusive occupation of the inferior class. This inferior class includes
+slaves and other dependents, and ordinarily also all the women. If there
+are several grades of aristocracy, the women of high rank are commonly
+exempt from industrial employment, or at least from the more vulgar
+kinds of manual labour. The men of the upper classes are not only
+exempt, but by prescriptive custom they are debarred, from all
+industrial occupations. The range of employments open to them is rigidly
+defined. As on the higher plane already spoken of, these employments are
+government, warfare, religious observances, and sports. These four lines
+of activity govern the scheme of life of the upper classes, and for
+the highest rank--the kings or chieftains--these are the only kinds of
+activity that custom or the common sense of the community will allow.
+Indeed, where the scheme is well developed even sports are accounted
+doubtfully legitimate for the members of the highest rank. To the lower
+grades of the leisure class certain other employments are open, but they
+are employments that are subsidiary to one or another of these typical
+leisure-class occupations. Such are, for instance, the manufacture
+and care of arms and accoutrements and of war canoes, the dressing
+and handling of horses, dogs, and hawks, the preparation of sacred
+apparatus, etc. The lower classes are excluded from these secondary
+honourable employments, except from such as are plainly of an industrial
+character and are only remotely related to the typical leisure-class
+occupations.
+
+If we go a step back of this exemplary barbarian culture, into the
+lower stages of barbarism, we no longer find the leisure class in fully
+developed form. But this lower barbarism shows the usages, motives,
+and circumstances out of which the institution of a leisure class has
+arisen, and indicates the steps of its early growth. Nomadic hunting
+tribes in various parts of the world illustrate these more primitive
+phases of the differentiation. Any one of the North American hunting
+tribes may be taken as a convenient illustration. These tribes
+can scarcely be said to have a defined leisure class. There is a
+differentiation of function, and there is a distinction between classes
+on the basis of this difference of function, but the exemption of the
+superior class from work has not gone far enough to make the designation
+"leisure class" altogether applicable. The tribes belonging on this
+economic level have carried the economic differentiation to the point
+at which a marked distinction is made between the occupations of men and
+women, and this distinction is of an invidious character. In nearly
+all these tribes the women are, by prescriptive custom, held to those
+employments out of which the industrial occupations proper develop at
+the next advance. The men are exempt from these vulgar employments and
+are reserved for war, hunting, sports, and devout observances. A very
+nice discrimination is ordinarily shown in this matter.
+
+This division of labour coincides with the distinction between the
+working and the leisure class as it appears in the higher barbarian
+culture. As the diversification and specialisation of employments
+proceed, the line of demarcation so drawn comes to divide the industrial
+from the non-industrial employments. The man's occupation as it stands
+at the earlier barbarian stage is not the original out of which any
+appreciable portion of later industry has developed. In the later
+development it survives only in employments that are not classed as
+industrial,--war, politics, sports, learning, and the priestly office.
+The only notable exceptions are a portion of the fishery industry
+and certain slight employments that are doubtfully to be classed as
+industry; such as the manufacture of arms, toys, and sporting goods.
+Virtually the whole range of industrial employments is an outgrowth of
+what is classed as woman's work in the primitive barbarian community.
+
+The work of the men in the lower barbarian culture is no less
+indispensable to the life of the group than the work done by the women.
+It may even be that the men's work contributes as much to the food
+supply and the other necessary consumption of the group. Indeed, so
+obvious is this "productive" character of the men's work that in the
+conventional economic writings the hunter's work is taken as the type of
+primitive industry. But such is not the barbarian's sense of the matter.
+In his own eyes he is not a labourer, and he is not to be classed with
+the women in this respect; nor is his effort to be classed with the
+women's drudgery, as labour or industry, in such a sense as to admit
+of its being confounded with the latter. There is in all barbarian
+communities a profound sense of the disparity between man's and woman's
+work. His work may conduce to the maintenance of the group, but it is
+felt that it does so through an excellence and an efficacy of a kind
+that cannot without derogation be compared with the uneventful diligence
+of the women.
+
+At a farther step backward in the cultural scale--among savage
+groups--the differentiation of employments is still less elaborate
+and the invidious distinction between classes and employments is less
+consistent and less rigorous. Unequivocal instances of a primitive
+savage culture are hard to find. Few of these groups or communities
+that are classed as "savage" show no traces of regression from a more
+advanced cultural stage. But there are groups--some of them apparently
+not the result of retrogression--which show the traits of primitive
+savagery with some fidelity. Their culture differs from that of the
+barbarian communities in the absence of a leisure class and the absence,
+in great measure, of the animus or spiritual attitude on which the
+institution of a leisure class rests. These communities of primitive
+savages in which there is no hierarchy of economic classes make up but a
+small and inconspicuous fraction of the human race. As good an instance
+of this phase of culture as may be had is afforded by the tribes of the
+Andamans, or by the Todas of the Nilgiri Hills. The scheme of life of
+these groups at the time of their earliest contact with Europeans seems
+to have been nearly typical, so far as regards the absence of a leisure
+class. As a further instance might be cited the Ainu of Yezo, and, more
+doubtfully, also some Bushman and Eskimo groups. Some Pueblo communities
+are less confidently to be included in the same class. Most, if not all,
+of the communities here cited may well be cases of degeneration from a
+higher barbarism, rather than bearers of a culture that has never risen
+above its present level. If so, they are for the present purpose to be
+taken with the allowance, but they may serve none the less as evidence
+to the same effect as if they were really "primitive" populations.
+
+These communities that are without a defined leisure class resemble one
+another also in certain other features of their social structure
+and manner of life. They are small groups and of a simple (archaic)
+structure; they are commonly peaceable and sedentary; they are poor; and
+individual ownership is not a dominant feature of their economic system.
+At the same time it does not follow that these are the smallest of
+existing communities, or that their social structure is in all respects
+the least differentiated; nor does the class necessarily include
+all primitive communities which have no defined system of individual
+ownership. But it is to be noted that the class seems to include the
+most peaceable--perhaps all the characteristically peaceable--primitive
+groups of men. Indeed, the most notable trait common to members of such
+communities is a certain amiable inefficiency when confronted with force
+or fraud.
+
+The evidence afforded by the usages and cultural traits of communities
+at a low stage of development indicates that the institution of a
+leisure class has emerged gradually during the transition from primitive
+savagery to barbarism; or more precisely, during the transition from
+a peaceable to a consistently warlike habit of life. The conditions
+apparently necessary to its emergence in a consistent form are: (1) the
+community must be of a predatory habit of life (war or the hunting
+of large game or both); that is to say, the men, who constitute the
+inchoate leisure class in these cases, must be habituated to the
+infliction of injury by force and stratagem; (2) subsistence must be
+obtainable on sufficiently easy terms to admit of the exemption of
+a considerable portion of the community from steady application to a
+routine of labour. The institution of leisure class is the outgrowth
+of an early discrimination between employments, according to which
+some employments are worthy and others unworthy. Under this ancient
+distinction the worthy employments are those which may be classed as
+exploit; unworthy are those necessary everyday employments into which no
+appreciable element of exploit enters.
+
+This distinction has but little obvious significance in a modern
+industrial community, and it has, therefore, received but slight
+attention at the hands of economic writers. When viewed in the light of
+that modern common sense which has guided economic discussion, it seems
+formal and insubstantial. But it persists with great tenacity as
+a commonplace preconception even in modern life, as is shown, for
+instance, by our habitual aversion to menial employments. It is a
+distinction of a personal kind--of superiority and inferiority. In the
+earlier stages of culture, when the personal force of the individual
+counted more immediately and obviously in shaping the course of events,
+the element of exploit counted for more in the everyday scheme of life.
+Interest centred about this fact to a greater degree. Consequently a
+distinction proceeding on this ground seemed more imperative and more
+definitive then than is the case to-day. As a fact in the sequence of
+development, therefore, the distinction is a substantial one and rests
+on sufficiently valid and cogent grounds.
+
+The ground on which a discrimination between facts is habitually made
+changes as the interest from which the facts are habitually viewed
+changes. Those features of the facts at hand are salient and substantial
+upon which the dominant interest of the time throws its light. Any given
+ground of distinction will seem insubstantial to any one who habitually
+apprehends the facts in question from a different point of view and
+values them for a different purpose. The habit of distinguishing and
+classifying the various purposes and directions of activity prevails of
+necessity always and everywhere; for it is indispensable in reaching a
+working theory or scheme of life. The particular point of view, or the
+particular characteristic that is pitched upon as definitive in the
+classification of the facts of life depends upon the interest from which
+a discrimination of the facts is sought. The grounds of discrimination,
+and the norm of procedure in classifying the facts, therefore,
+progressively change as the growth of culture proceeds; for the end for
+which the facts of life are apprehended changes, and the point of view
+consequently changes also. So that what are recognised as the salient
+and decisive features of a class of activities or of a social class at
+one stage of culture will not retain the same relative importance for
+the purposes of classification at any subsequent stage.
+
+But the change of standards and points of view is gradual only, and it
+seldom results in the subversion or entire suppression of a standpoint
+once accepted. A distinction is still habitually made between industrial
+and non-industrial occupations; and this modern distinction is a
+transmuted form of the barbarian distinction between exploit and
+drudgery. Such employments as warfare, politics, public worship, and
+public merrymaking, are felt, in the popular apprehension, to differ
+intrinsically from the labour that has to do with elaborating the
+material means of life. The precise line of demarcation is not the same
+as it was in the early barbarian scheme, but the broad distinction has
+not fallen into disuse.
+
+The tacit, common-sense distinction to-day is, in effect, that any
+effort is to be accounted industrial only so far as its ultimate purpose
+is the utilisation of non-human things. The coercive utilisation of man
+by man is not felt to be an industrial function; but all effort directed
+to enhance human life by taking advantage of the non-human environment
+is classed together as industrial activity. By the economists who have
+best retained and adapted the classical tradition, man's "power over
+nature" is currently postulated as the characteristic fact of industrial
+productivity. This industrial power over nature is taken to include
+man's power over the life of the beasts and over all the elemental
+forces. A line is in this way drawn between mankind and brute creation.
+
+In other times and among men imbued with a different body of
+preconceptions this line is not drawn precisely as we draw it to-day.
+In the savage or the barbarian scheme of life it is drawn in a different
+place and in another way. In all communities under the barbarian
+culture there is an alert and pervading sense of antithesis between
+two comprehensive groups of phenomena, in one of which barbarian
+man includes himself, and in the other, his victual. There is a felt
+antithesis between economic and non-economic phenomena, but it is not
+conceived in the modern fashion; it lies not between man and brute
+creation, but between animate and inert things.
+
+It may be an excess of caution at this day to explain that the barbarian
+notion which it is here intended to convey by the term "animate" is not
+the same as would be conveyed by the word "living". The term does not
+cover all living things, and it does cover a great many others. Such
+a striking natural phenomenon as a storm, a disease, a waterfall, are
+recognised as "animate"; while fruits and herbs, and even inconspicuous
+animals, such as house-flies, maggots, lemmings, sheep, are not
+ordinarily apprehended as "animate" except when taken collectively.
+As here used the term does not necessarily imply an indwelling soul or
+spirit. The concept includes such things as in the apprehension of the
+animistic savage or barbarian are formidable by virtue of a real or
+imputed habit of initiating action. This category comprises a large
+number and range of natural objects and phenomena. Such a distinction
+between the inert and the active is still present in the habits of
+thought of unreflecting persons, and it still profoundly affects the
+prevalent theory of human life and of natural processes; but it does not
+pervade our daily life to the extent or with the far-reaching practical
+consequences that are apparent at earlier stages of culture and belief.
+
+To the mind of the barbarian, the elaboration and utilisation of what is
+afforded by inert nature is activity on quite a different plane from his
+dealings with "animate" things and forces. The line of demarcation may
+be vague and shifting, but the broad distinction is sufficiently real
+and cogent to influence the barbarian scheme of life. To the class of
+things apprehended as animate, the barbarian fancy imputes an unfolding
+of activity directed to some end. It is this teleological unfolding of
+activity that constitutes any object or phenomenon an "animate" fact.
+Wherever the unsophisticated savage or barbarian meets with activity
+that is at all obtrusive, he construes it in the only terms that are
+ready to hand--the terms immediately given in his consciousness of his
+own actions. Activity is, therefore, assimilated to human action, and
+active objects are in so far assimilated to the human agent. Phenomena
+of this character--especially those whose behaviour is notably
+formidable or baffling--have to be met in a different spirit and with
+proficiency of a different kind from what is required in dealing with
+inert things. To deal successfully with such phenomena is a work of
+exploit rather than of industry. It is an assertion of prowess, not of
+diligence.
+
+Under the guidance of this naive discrimination between the inert and
+the animate, the activities of the primitive social group tend to fall
+into two classes, which would in modern phrase be called exploit and
+industry. Industry is effort that goes to create a new thing, with a
+new purpose given it by the fashioning hand of its maker out of passive
+("brute") material; while exploit, so far as it results in an outcome
+useful to the agent, is the conversion to his own ends of energies
+previously directed to some other end by an other agent. We still speak
+of "brute matter" with something of the barbarian's realisation of a
+profound significance in the term.
+
+The distinction between exploit and drudgery coincides with a difference
+between the sexes. The sexes differ, not only in stature and muscular
+force, but perhaps even more decisively in temperament, and this must
+early have given rise to a corresponding division of labour. The general
+range of activities that come under the head of exploit falls to the
+males as being the stouter, more massive, better capable of a sudden
+and violent strain, and more readily inclined to self assertion, active
+emulation, and aggression. The difference in mass, in physiological
+character, and in temperament may be slight among the members of the
+primitive group; it appears, in fact, to be relatively slight and
+inconsequential in some of the more archaic communities with which we
+are acquainted--as for instance the tribes of the Andamans. But so soon
+as a differentiation of function has well begun on the lines marked
+out by this difference in physique and animus, the original difference
+between the sexes will itself widen. A cumulative process of selective
+adaptation to the new distribution of employments will set in,
+especially if the habitat or the fauna with which the group is in
+contact is such as to call for a considerable exercise of the sturdier
+virtues. The habitual pursuit of large game requires more of the manly
+qualities of massiveness, agility, and ferocity, and it can therefore
+scarcely fail to hasten and widen the differentiation of functions
+between the sexes. And so soon as the group comes into hostile contact
+with other groups, the divergence of function will take on the developed
+form of a distinction between exploit and industry.
+
+In such a predatory group of hunters it comes to be the able-bodied
+men's office to fight and hunt. The women do what other work there is
+to do--other members who are unfit for man's work being for this purpose
+classed with women. But the men's hunting and fighting are both of the
+same general character. Both are of a predatory nature; the warrior
+and the hunter alike reap where they have not strewn. Their aggressive
+assertion of force and sagacity differs obviously from the women's
+assiduous and uneventful shaping of materials; it is not to be accounted
+productive labour but rather an acquisition of substance by seizure.
+Such being the barbarian man's work, in its best development and widest
+divergence from women's work, any effort that does not involve an
+assertion of prowess comes to be unworthy of the man. As the tradition
+gains consistency, the common sense of the community erects it into a
+canon of conduct; so that no employment and no acquisition is morally
+possible to the self respecting man at this cultural stage, except such
+as proceeds on the basis of prowess--force or fraud. When the predatory
+habit of life has been settled upon the group by long habituation, it
+becomes the able-bodied man's accredited office in the social economy
+to kill, to destroy such competitors in the struggle for existence as
+attempt to resist or elude him, to overcome and reduce to subservience
+those alien forces that assert themselves refractorily in the
+environment. So tenaciously and with such nicety is this theoretical
+distinction between exploit and drudgery adhered to that in many hunting
+tribes the man must not bring home the game which he has killed, but
+must send his woman to perform that baser office.
+
+As has already been indicated, the distinction between exploit and
+drudgery is an invidious distinction between employments. Those
+employments which are to be classed as exploit are worthy, honourable,
+noble; other employments, which do not contain this element of exploit,
+and especially those which imply subservience or submission, are
+unworthy, debasing, ignoble. The concept of dignity, worth, or honour,
+as applied either to persons or conduct, is of first-rate consequence
+in the development of classes and of class distinctions, and it is
+therefore necessary to say something of its derivation and meaning. Its
+psychological ground may be indicated in outline as follows.
+
+As a matter of selective necessity, man is an agent. He is, in his own
+apprehension, a centre of unfolding impulsive activity--"teleological"
+activity. He is an agent seeking in every act the accomplishment of some
+concrete, objective, impersonal end. By force of his being such an agent
+he is possessed of a taste for effective work, and a distaste for futile
+effort. He has a sense of the merit of serviceability or efficiency
+and of the demerit of futility, waste, or incapacity. This aptitude
+or propensity may be called the instinct of workmanship. Wherever the
+circumstances or traditions of life lead to an habitual comparison
+of one person with another in point of efficiency, the instinct of
+workmanship works out in an emulative or invidious comparison of
+persons. The extent to which this result follows depends in some
+considerable degree on the temperament of the population. In any
+community where such an invidious comparison of persons is habitually
+made, visible success becomes an end sought for its own utility as a
+basis of esteem. Esteem is gained and dispraise is avoided by putting
+one's efficiency in evidence. The result is that the instinct of
+workmanship works out in an emulative demonstration of force.
+
+During that primitive phase of social development, when the community is
+still habitually peaceable, perhaps sedentary, and without a developed
+system of individual ownership, the efficiency of the individual can
+be shown chiefly and most consistently in some employment that goes to
+further the life of the group. What emulation of an economic kind there
+is between the members of such a group will be chiefly emulation in
+industrial serviceability. At the same time the incentive to emulation
+is not strong, nor is the scope for emulation large.
+
+When the community passes from peaceable savagery to a predatory phase
+of life, the conditions of emulation change. The opportunity and the
+incentive to emulate increase greatly in scope and urgency. The activity
+of the men more and more takes on the character of exploit; and an
+invidious comparison of one hunter or warrior with another grows
+continually easier and more habitual. Tangible evidences of
+prowess--trophies--find a place in men's habits of thought as an
+essential feature of the paraphernalia of life. Booty, trophies of
+the chase or of the raid, come to be prized as evidence of pre-eminent
+force. Aggression becomes the accredited form of action, and booty
+serves as prima facie evidence of successful aggression. As accepted at
+this cultural stage, the accredited, worthy form of self-assertion
+is contest; and useful articles or services obtained by seizure or
+compulsion, serve as a conventional evidence of successful contest.
+Therefore, by contrast, the obtaining of goods by other methods than
+seizure comes to be accounted unworthy of man in his best estate. The
+performance of productive work, or employment in personal service, falls
+under the same odium for the same reason. An invidious distinction
+in this way arises between exploit and acquisition on the other hand.
+Labour acquires a character of irksomeness by virtue of the indignity
+imputed to it.
+
+With the primitive barbarian, before the simple content of the notion
+has been obscured by its own ramifications and by a secondary growth of
+cognate ideas, "honourable" seems to connote nothing else than
+assertion of superior force. "Honourable" is "formidable"; "worthy" is
+"prepotent". A honorific act is in the last analysis little if
+anything else than a recognised successful act of aggression; and where
+aggression means conflict with men and beasts, the activity which comes
+to be especially and primarily honourable is the assertion of the strong
+hand. The naive, archaic habit of construing all manifestations of
+force in terms of personality or "will power" greatly fortifies this
+conventional exaltation of the strong hand. Honorific epithets, in
+vogue among barbarian tribes as well as among peoples of a more advance
+culture, commonly bear the stamp of this unsophisticated sense of
+honour. Epithets and titles used in addressing chieftains, and in the
+propitiation of kings and gods, very commonly impute a propensity for
+overbearing violence and an irresistible devastating force to the person
+who is to be propitiated. This holds true to an extent also in the more
+civilised communities of the present day. The predilection shown in
+heraldic devices for the more rapacious beasts and birds of prey goes to
+enforce the same view.
+
+Under this common-sense barbarian appreciation of worth or honour, the
+taking of life--the killing of formidable competitors, whether brute
+or human--is honourable in the highest degree. And this high office of
+slaughter, as an expression of the slayer's prepotence, casts a
+glamour of worth over every act of slaughter and over all the tools and
+accessories of the act. Arms are honourable, and the use of them, even
+in seeking the life of the meanest creatures of the fields, becomes a
+honorific employment. At the same time, employment in industry becomes
+correspondingly odious, and, in the common-sense apprehension, the
+handling of the tools and implements of industry falls beneath the
+dignity of able-bodied men. Labour becomes irksome.
+
+It is here assumed that in the sequence of cultural evolution primitive
+groups of men have passed from an initial peaceable stage to a
+subsequent stage at which fighting is the avowed and characteristic
+employment of the group. But it is not implied that there has been an
+abrupt transition from unbroken peace and good-will to a later or higher
+phase of life in which the fact of combat occurs for the first time.
+Neither is it implied that all peaceful industry disappears on the
+transition to the predatory phase of culture. Some fighting, it is safe
+to say, would be met with at any early stage of social development.
+Fights would occur with more or less frequency through sexual
+competition. The known habits of primitive groups, as well as the habits
+of the anthropoid apes, argue to that effect, and the evidence from the
+well-known promptings of human nature enforces the same view.
+
+It may therefore be objected that there can have been no such initial
+stage of peaceable life as is here assumed. There is no point in
+cultural evolution prior to which fighting does not occur. But the
+point in question is not as to the occurrence of combat, occasional or
+sporadic, or even more or less frequent and habitual; it is a question
+as to the occurrence of an habitual; it is a question as to the
+occurrence of an habitual bellicose frame of mind--a prevalent habit
+of judging facts and events from the point of view of the fight. The
+predatory phase of culture is attained only when the predatory attitude
+has become the habitual and accredited spiritual attitude for the
+members of the group; when the fight has become the dominant note in the
+current theory of life; when the common-sense appreciation of men and
+things has come to be an appreciation with a view to combat.
+
+The substantial difference between the peaceable and the predatory phase
+of culture, therefore, is a spiritual difference, not a mechanical one.
+The change in spiritual attitude is the outgrowth of a change in the
+material facts of the life of the group, and it comes on gradually as
+the material circumstances favourable to a predatory attitude supervene.
+The inferior limit of the predatory culture is an industrial limit.
+Predation can not become the habitual, conventional resource of any
+group or any class until industrial methods have been developed to such
+a degree of efficiency as to leave a margin worth fighting for, above
+the subsistence of those engaged in getting a living. The transition
+from peace to predation therefore depends on the growth of technical
+knowledge and the use of tools. A predatory culture is similarly
+impracticable in early times, until weapons have been developed to such
+a point as to make man a formidable animal. The early development of
+tools and of weapons is of course the same fact seen from two different
+points of view.
+
+The life of a given group would be characterised as peaceable so long
+as habitual recourse to combat has not brought the fight into the
+foreground in men's every day thoughts, as a dominant feature of the
+life of man. A group may evidently attain such a predatory attitude with
+a greater or less degree of completeness, so that its scheme of life and
+canons of conduct may be controlled to a greater or less extent by the
+predatory animus. The predatory phase of culture is therefore conceived
+to come on gradually, through a cumulative growth of predatory aptitudes
+habits, and traditions this growth being due to a change in the
+circumstances of the group's life, of such a kind as to develop and
+conserve those traits of human nature and those traditions and norms of
+conduct that make for a predatory rather than a peaceable life.
+
+The evidence for the hypothesis that there has been such a peaceable
+stage of primitive culture is in great part drawn from psychology rather
+than from ethnology, and cannot be detailed here. It will be recited in
+part in a later chapter, in discussing the survival of archaic traits of
+human nature under the modern culture.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Two ~~ Pecuniary Emulation
+
+In the sequence of cultural evolution the emergence of a leisure class
+coincides with the beginning of ownership. This is necessarily the case,
+for these two institutions result from the same set of economic forces.
+In the inchoate phase of their development they are but different
+aspects of the same general facts of social structure.
+
+It is as elements of social structure--conventional facts--that leisure
+and ownership are matters of interest for the purpose in hand. An
+habitual neglect of work does not constitute a leisure class; neither
+does the mechanical fact of use and consumption constitute ownership.
+The present inquiry, therefore, is not concerned with the beginning
+of indolence, nor with the beginning of the appropriation of useful
+articles to individual consumption. The point in question is the origin
+and nature of a conventional leisure class on the one hand and the
+beginnings of individual ownership as a conventional right or equitable
+claim on the other hand.
+
+The early differentiation out of which the distinction between a leisure
+and a working class arises is a division maintained between men's and
+women's work in the lower stages of barbarism. Likewise the earliest
+form of ownership is an ownership of the women by the able bodied men
+of the community. The facts may be expressed in more general terms, and
+truer to the import of the barbarian theory of life, by saying that it
+is an ownership of the woman by the man.
+
+There was undoubtedly some appropriation of useful articles before the
+custom of appropriating women arose. The usages of existing archaic
+communities in which there is no ownership of women is warrant for such
+a view. In all communities the members, both male and female, habitually
+appropriate to their individual use a variety of useful things; but
+these useful things are not thought of as owned by the person who
+appropriates and consumes them. The habitual appropriation and
+consumption of certain slight personal effects goes on without
+raising the question of ownership; that is to say, the question of a
+conventional, equitable claim to extraneous things.
+
+The ownership of women begins in the lower barbarian stages of culture,
+apparently with the seizure of female captives. The original reason
+for the seizure and appropriation of women seems to have been their
+usefulness as trophies. The practice of seizing women from the enemy
+as trophies, gave rise to a form of ownership-marriage, resulting in a
+household with a male head. This was followed by an extension of slavery
+to other captives and inferiors, besides women, and by an extension of
+ownership-marriage to other women than those seized from the enemy.
+The outcome of emulation under the circumstances of a predatory life,
+therefore, has been on the one hand a form of marriage resting on
+coercion, and on the other hand the custom of ownership. The two
+institutions are not distinguishable in the initial phase of their
+development; both arise from the desire of the successful men to put
+their prowess in evidence by exhibiting some durable result of their
+exploits. Both also minister to that propensity for mastery which
+pervades all predatory communities. From the ownership of women the
+concept of ownership extends itself to include the products of their
+industry, and so there arises the ownership of things as well as of
+persons.
+
+In this way a consistent system of property in goods is gradually
+installed. And although in the latest stages of the development,
+the serviceability of goods for consumption has come to be the most
+obtrusive element of their value, still, wealth has by no means yet lost
+its utility as a honorific evidence of the owner's prepotence.
+
+Wherever the institution of private property is found, even in a
+slightly developed form, the economic process bears the character of a
+struggle between men for the possession of goods. It has been customary
+in economic theory, and especially among those economists who adhere
+with least faltering to the body of modernised classical doctrines, to
+construe this struggle for wealth as being substantially a struggle for
+subsistence. Such is, no doubt, its character in large part during
+the earlier and less efficient phases of industry. Such is also its
+character in all cases where the "niggardliness of nature" is so strict
+as to afford but a scanty livelihood to the community in return for
+strenuous and unremitting application to the business of getting the
+means of subsistence. But in all progressing communities an advance is
+presently made beyond this early stage of technological development.
+Industrial efficiency is presently carried to such a pitch as to afford
+something appreciably more than a bare livelihood to those engaged in
+the industrial process. It has not been unusual for economic theory to
+speak of the further struggle for wealth on this new industrial basis as
+a competition for an increase of the comforts of life,--primarily for
+an increase of the physical comforts which the consumption of goods
+affords.
+
+The end of acquisition and accumulation is conventionally held to be the
+consumption of the goods accumulated--whether it is consumption directly
+by the owner of the goods or by the household attached to him and for
+this purpose identified with him in theory. This is at least felt to
+be the economically legitimate end of acquisition, which alone it is
+incumbent on the theory to take account of. Such consumption may of
+course be conceived to serve the consumer's physical wants--his
+physical comfort--or his so-called higher wants--spiritual, aesthetic,
+intellectual, or what not; the latter class of wants being served
+indirectly by an expenditure of goods, after the fashion familiar to all
+economic readers.
+
+But it is only when taken in a sense far removed from its naive meaning
+that consumption of goods can be said to afford the incentive from which
+accumulation invariably proceeds. The motive that lies at the root
+of ownership is emulation; and the same motive of emulation continues
+active in the further development of the institution to which it has
+given rise and in the development of all those features of the social
+structure which this institution of ownership touches. The possession of
+wealth confers honour; it is an invidious distinction. Nothing equally
+cogent can be said for the consumption of goods, nor for any other
+conceivable incentive to acquisition, and especially not for any
+incentive to accumulation of wealth.
+
+It is of course not to be overlooked that in a community where nearly
+all goods are private property the necessity of earning a livelihood
+is a powerful and ever present incentive for the poorer members of
+the community. The need of subsistence and of an increase of physical
+comfort may for a time be the dominant motive of acquisition for those
+classes who are habitually employed at manual labour, whose subsistence
+is on a precarious footing, who possess little and ordinarily accumulate
+little; but it will appear in the course of the discussion that even in
+the case of these impecunious classes the predominance of the motive of
+physical want is not so decided as has sometimes been assumed. On the
+other hand, so far as regards those members and classes of the community
+who are chiefly concerned in the accumulation of wealth, the incentive
+of subsistence or of physical comfort never plays a considerable part.
+Ownership began and grew into a human institution on grounds unrelated
+to the subsistence minimum. The dominant incentive was from the outset
+the invidious distinction attaching to wealth, and, save temporarily and
+by exception, no other motive has usurped the primacy at any later stage
+of the development.
+
+Property set out with being booty held as trophies of the successful
+raid. So long as the group had departed and so long as it still stood
+in close contact with other hostile groups, the utility of things or
+persons owned lay chiefly in an invidious comparison between their
+possessor and the enemy from whom they were taken. The habit of
+distinguishing between the interests of the individual and those of
+the group to which he belongs is apparently a later growth. Invidious
+comparison between the possessor of the honorific booty and his less
+successful neighbours within the group was no doubt present early as an
+element of the utility of the things possessed, though this was not at
+the outset the chief element of their value. The man's prowess was
+still primarily the group's prowess, and the possessor of the booty
+felt himself to be primarily the keeper of the honour of his group. This
+appreciation of exploit from the communal point of view is met with also
+at later stages of social growth, especially as regards the laurels of
+war.
+
+But as soon as the custom of individual ownership begins to gain
+consistency, the point of view taken in making the invidious comparison
+on which private property rests will begin to change. Indeed, the one
+change is but the reflex of the other. The initial phase of ownership,
+the phase of acquisition by naive seizure and conversion, begins to pass
+into the subsequent stage of an incipient organization of industry on
+the basis of private property (in slaves); the horde develops into a
+more or less self-sufficing industrial community; possessions then come
+to be valued not so much as evidence of successful foray, but rather as
+evidence of the prepotence of the possessor of these goods over other
+individuals within the community. The invidious comparison now becomes
+primarily a comparison of the owner with the other members of the
+group. Property is still of the nature of trophy, but, with the cultural
+advance, it becomes more and more a trophy of successes scored in the
+game of ownership carried on between the members of the group under the
+quasi-peaceable methods of nomadic life.
+
+Gradually, as industrial activity further displaced predatory activity
+in the community's everyday life and in men's habits of thought,
+accumulated property more and more replaces trophies of predatory
+exploit as the conventional exponent of prepotence and success. With the
+growth of settled industry, therefore, the possession of wealth gains in
+relative importance and effectiveness as a customary basis of repute and
+esteem. Not that esteem ceases to be awarded on the basis of other, more
+direct evidence of prowess; not that successful predatory aggression or
+warlike exploit ceases to call out the approval and admiration of the
+crowd, or to stir the envy of the less successful competitors; but
+the opportunities for gaining distinction by means of this direct
+manifestation of superior force grow less available both in scope and
+frequency. At the same time opportunities for industrial aggression, and
+for the accumulation of property, increase in scope and availability.
+And it is even more to the point that property now becomes the
+most easily recognised evidence of a reputable degree of success as
+distinguished from heroic or signal achievement. It therefore becomes
+the conventional basis of esteem. Its possession in some amount becomes
+necessary in order to any reputable standing in the community. It
+becomes indispensable to accumulate, to acquire property, in order to
+retain one's good name. When accumulated goods have in this way once
+become the accepted badge of efficiency, the possession of wealth
+presently assumes the character of an independent and definitive basis
+of esteem. The possession of goods, whether acquired aggressively by
+one's own exertion or passively by transmission through inheritance from
+others, becomes a conventional basis of reputability. The possession
+of wealth, which was at the outset valued simply as an evidence of
+efficiency, becomes, in popular apprehension, itself a meritorious act.
+Wealth is now itself intrinsically honourable and confers honour on
+its possessor. By a further refinement, wealth acquired passively by
+transmission from ancestors or other antecedents presently becomes even
+more honorific than wealth acquired by the possessor's own effort;
+but this distinction belongs at a later stage in the evolution of the
+pecuniary culture and will be spoken of in its place.
+
+Prowess and exploit may still remain the basis of award of the highest
+popular esteem, although the possession of wealth has become the basis
+of common place reputability and of a blameless social standing.
+The predatory instinct and the consequent approbation of predatory
+efficiency are deeply ingrained in the habits of thought of those
+peoples who have passed under the discipline of a protracted predatory
+culture. According to popular award, the highest honours within human
+reach may, even yet, be those gained by an unfolding of extraordinary
+predatory efficiency in war, or by a quasi-predatory efficiency in
+statecraft; but for the purposes of a commonplace decent standing in the
+community these means of repute have been replaced by the acquisition
+and accumulation of goods. In order to stand well in the eyes of the
+community, it is necessary to come up to a certain, somewhat indefinite,
+conventional standard of wealth; just as in the earlier predatory stage
+it is necessary for the barbarian man to come up to the tribe's standard
+of physical endurance, cunning, and skill at arms. A certain standard
+of wealth in the one case, and of prowess in the other, is a necessary
+condition of reputability, and anything in excess of this normal amount
+is meritorious.
+
+Those members of the community who fall short of this, somewhat
+indefinite, normal degree of prowess or of property suffer in the esteem
+of their fellow-men; and consequently they suffer also in their own
+esteem, since the usual basis of self-respect is the respect accorded by
+one's neighbours. Only individuals with an aberrant temperament can in
+the long run retain their self-esteem in the face of the disesteem of
+their fellows. Apparent exceptions to the rule are met with, especially
+among people with strong religious convictions. But these apparent
+exceptions are scarcely real exceptions, since such persons commonly
+fall back on the putative approbation of some supernatural witness of
+their deeds.
+
+So soon as the possession of property becomes the basis of popular
+esteem, therefore, it becomes also a requisite to the complacency which
+we call self-respect. In any community where goods are held in severalty
+it is necessary, in order to his own peace of mind, that an individual
+should possess as large a portion of goods as others with whom he is
+accustomed to class himself; and it is extremely gratifying to
+possess something more than others. But as fast as a person makes new
+acquisitions, and becomes accustomed to the resulting new standard of
+wealth, the new standard forthwith ceases to afford appreciably greater
+satisfaction than the earlier standard did. The tendency in any case is
+constantly to make the present pecuniary standard the point of departure
+for a fresh increase of wealth; and this in turn gives rise to a new
+standard of sufficiency and a new pecuniary classification of one's
+self as compared with one's neighbours. So far as concerns the present
+question, the end sought by accumulation is to rank high in comparison
+with the rest of the community in point of pecuniary strength. So long
+as the comparison is distinctly unfavourable to himself, the normal,
+average individual will live in chronic dissatisfaction with his present
+lot; and when he has reached what may be called the normal pecuniary
+standard of the community, or of his class in the community, this
+chronic dissatisfaction will give place to a restless straining to place
+a wider and ever-widening pecuniary interval between himself and
+this average standard. The invidious comparison can never become so
+favourable to the individual making it that he would not gladly rate
+himself still higher relatively to his competitors in the struggle for
+pecuniary reputability.
+
+In the nature of the case, the desire for wealth can scarcely be
+satiated in any individual instance, and evidently a satiation of the
+average or general desire for wealth is out of the question. However
+widely, or equally, or "fairly", it may be distributed, no general
+increase of the community's wealth can make any approach to satiating
+this need, the ground of which is the desire of every one to excel every
+one else in the accumulation of goods. If, as is sometimes assumed, the
+incentive to accumulation were the want of subsistence or of physical
+comfort, then the aggregate economic wants of a community might
+conceivably be satisfied at some point in the advance of industrial
+efficiency; but since the struggle is substantially a race for
+reputability on the basis of an invidious comparison, no approach to
+a definitive attainment is possible.
+
+What has just been said must not be taken to mean that there are no
+other incentives to acquisition and accumulation than this desire to
+excel in pecuniary standing and so gain the esteem and envy of one's
+fellow-men. The desire for added comfort and security from want is
+present as a motive at every stage of the process of accumulation in
+a modern industrial community; although the standard of sufficiency in
+these respects is in turn greatly affected by the habit of pecuniary
+emulation. To a great extent this emulation shapes the methods and
+selects the objects of expenditure for personal comfort and decent
+livelihood.
+
+Besides this, the power conferred by wealth also affords a motive
+to accumulation. That propensity for purposeful activity and that
+repugnance to all futility of effort which belong to man by virtue of
+his character as an agent do not desert him when he emerges from the
+naive communal culture where the dominant note of life is the unanalysed
+and undifferentiated solidarity of the individual with the group with
+which his life is bound up. When he enters upon the predatory stage,
+where self-seeking in the narrower sense becomes the dominant note, this
+propensity goes with him still, as the pervasive trait that shapes his
+scheme of life. The propensity for achievement and the repugnance to
+futility remain the underlying economic motive. The propensity changes
+only in the form of its expression and in the proximate objects to which
+it directs the man's activity. Under the regime of individual ownership
+the most available means of visibly achieving a purpose is that afforded
+by the acquisition and accumulation of goods; and as the self-regarding
+antithesis between man and man reaches fuller consciousness, the
+propensity for achievement--the instinct of workmanship--tends more
+and more to shape itself into a straining to excel others in pecuniary
+achievement. Relative success, tested by an invidious pecuniary
+comparison with other men, becomes the conventional end of action. The
+currently accepted legitimate end of effort becomes the achievement of
+a favourable comparison with other men; and therefore the repugnance to
+futility to a good extent coalesces with the incentive of emulation. It
+acts to accentuate the struggle for pecuniary reputability by visiting
+with a sharper disapproval all shortcoming and all evidence of
+shortcoming in point of pecuniary success. Purposeful effort comes to
+mean, primarily, effort directed to or resulting in a more creditable
+showing of accumulated wealth. Among the motives which lead men to
+accumulate wealth, the primacy, both in scope and intensity, therefore,
+continues to belong to this motive of pecuniary emulation.
+
+In making use of the term "invidious", it may perhaps be unnecessary to
+remark, there is no intention to extol or depreciate, or to commend or
+deplore any of the phenomena which the word is used to characterise. The
+term is used in a technical sense as describing a comparison of persons
+with a view to rating and grading them in respect of relative worth or
+value--in an aesthetic or moral sense--and so awarding and defining
+the relative degrees of complacency with which they may legitimately be
+contemplated by themselves and by others. An invidious comparison is a
+process of valuation of persons in respect of worth.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Three ~~ Conspicuous Leisure
+
+If its working were not disturbed by other economic forces or other
+features of the emulative process, the immediate effect of such a
+pecuniary struggle as has just been described in outline would be to
+make men industrious and frugal. This result actually follows, in some
+measure, so far as regards the lower classes, whose ordinary means of
+acquiring goods is productive labour. This is more especially true
+of the labouring classes in a sedentary community which is at an
+agricultural stage of industry, in which there is a considerable
+subdivision of industry, and whose laws and customs secure to these
+classes a more or less definite share of the product of their industry.
+These lower classes can in any case not avoid labour, and the imputation
+of labour is therefore not greatly derogatory to them, at least not
+within their class. Rather, since labour is their recognised and
+accepted mode of life, they take some emulative pride in a reputation
+for efficiency in their work, this being often the only line of
+emulation that is open to them. For those for whom acquisition and
+emulation is possible only within the field of productive efficiency
+and thrift, the struggle for pecuniary reputability will in some
+measure work out in an increase of diligence and parsimony. But certain
+secondary features of the emulative process, yet to be spoken of,
+come in to very materially circumscribe and modify emulation in these
+directions among the pecuniary inferior classes as well as among the
+superior class.
+
+But it is otherwise with the superior pecuniary class, with which we
+are here immediately concerned. For this class also the incentive
+to diligence and thrift is not absent; but its action is so greatly
+qualified by the secondary demands of pecuniary emulation, that any
+inclination in this direction is practically overborne and any incentive
+to diligence tends to be of no effect. The most imperative of these
+secondary demands of emulation, as well as the one of widest scope, is
+the requirement of abstention from productive work. This is true in an
+especial degree for the barbarian stage of culture. During the predatory
+culture labour comes to be associated in men's habits of thought
+with weakness and subjection to a master. It is therefore a mark of
+inferiority, and therefore comes to be accounted unworthy of man in his
+best estate. By virtue of this tradition labour is felt to be debasing,
+and this tradition has never died out. On the contrary, with the advance
+of social differentiation it has acquired the axiomatic force due to
+ancient and unquestioned prescription.
+
+In order to gain and to hold the esteem of men it is not sufficient
+merely to possess wealth or power. The wealth or power must be put in
+evidence, for esteem is awarded only on evidence. And not only does the
+evidence of wealth serve to impress one's importance on others and
+to keep their sense of his importance alive and alert, but it is of
+scarcely less use in building up and preserving one's self-complacency.
+In all but the lowest stages of culture the normally constituted man is
+comforted and upheld in his self-respect by "decent surroundings" and
+by exemption from "menial offices". Enforced departure from his habitual
+standard of decency, either in the paraphernalia of life or in the kind
+and amount of his everyday activity, is felt to be a slight upon his
+human dignity, even apart from all conscious consideration of the
+approval or disapproval of his fellows.
+
+The archaic theoretical distinction between the base and the honourable
+in the manner of a man's life retains very much of its ancient force
+even today. So much so that there are few of the better class who are not
+possessed of an instinctive repugnance for the vulgar forms of labour.
+We have a realising sense of ceremonial uncleanness attaching in an
+especial degree to the occupations which are associated in our habits of
+thought with menial service. It is felt by all persons of refined taste
+that a spiritual contamination is inseparable from certain offices that
+are conventionally required of servants. Vulgar surroundings, mean (that
+is to say, inexpensive) habitations, and vulgarly productive occupations
+are unhesitatingly condemned and avoided. They are incompatible with
+life on a satisfactory spiritual plane __ with "high thinking". From the
+days of the Greek philosophers to the present, a degree of leisure and
+of exemption from contact with such industrial processes as serve the
+immediate everyday purposes of human life has ever been recognised by
+thoughtful men as a prerequisite to a worthy or beautiful, or even a
+blameless, human life. In itself and in its consequences the life of
+leisure is beautiful and ennobling in all civilised men's eyes.
+
+This direct, subjective value of leisure and of other evidences of
+wealth is no doubt in great part secondary and derivative. It is in part
+a reflex of the utility of leisure as a means of gaining the respect
+of others, and in part it is the result of a mental substitution. The
+performance of labour has been accepted as a conventional evidence of
+inferior force; therefore it comes itself, by a mental short-cut, to be
+regarded as intrinsically base.
+
+During the predatory stage proper, and especially during the earlier
+stages of the quasi-peaceable development of industry that follows the
+predatory stage, a life of leisure is the readiest and most conclusive
+evidence of pecuniary strength, and therefore of superior force;
+provided always that the gentleman of leisure can live in manifest ease
+and comfort. At this stage wealth consists chiefly of slaves, and the
+benefits accruing from the possession of riches and power take the
+form chiefly of personal service and the immediate products of personal
+service. Conspicuous abstention from labour therefore becomes the
+conventional mark of superior pecuniary achievement and the conventional
+index of reputability; and conversely, since application to productive
+labour is a mark of poverty and subjection, it becomes inconsistent with
+a reputable standing in the community. Habits of industry and thrift,
+therefore, are not uniformly furthered by a prevailing pecuniary
+emulation. On the contrary, this kind of emulation indirectly
+discountenances participation in productive labour. Labour would
+unavoidably become dishonourable, as being an evidence indecorous under
+the ancient tradition handed down from an earlier cultural stage. The
+ancient tradition of the predatory culture is that productive effort is
+to be shunned as being unworthy of able-bodied men, and this tradition
+is reinforced rather than set aside in the passage from the predatory to
+the quasi-peaceable manner of life.
+
+Even if the institution of a leisure class had not come in with the
+first emergence of individual ownership, by force of the dishonour
+attaching to productive employment, it would in any case have come in
+as one of the early consequences of ownership. And it is to be remarked
+that while the leisure class existed in theory from the beginning of
+predatory culture, the institution takes on a new and fuller meaning
+with the transition from the predatory to the next succeeding pecuniary
+stage of culture. It is from this time forth a "leisure class" in fact
+as well as in theory. From this point dates the institution of the
+leisure class in its consummate form.
+
+During the predatory stage proper the distinction between the leisure
+and the labouring class is in some degree a ceremonial distinction only.
+The able bodied men jealously stand aloof from whatever is in their
+apprehension, menial drudgery; but their activity in fact contributes
+appreciably to the sustenance of the group. The subsequent stage of
+quasi-peaceable industry is usually characterised by an established
+chattel slavery, herds of cattle, and a servile class of herdsmen and
+shepherds; industry has advanced so far that the community is no longer
+dependent for its livelihood on the chase or on any other form of
+activity that can fairly be classed as exploit. From this point on, the
+characteristic feature of leisure class life is a conspicuous exemption
+from all useful employment.
+
+The normal and characteristic occupations of the class in this mature
+phase of its life history are in form very much the same as in its
+earlier days. These occupations are government, war, sports, and devout
+observances. Persons unduly given to difficult theoretical niceties
+may hold that these occupations are still incidentally and indirectly
+"productive"; but it is to be noted as decisive of the question in hand
+that the ordinary and ostensible motive of the leisure class in
+engaging in these occupations is assuredly not an increase of wealth by
+productive effort. At this as at any other cultural stage, government
+and war are, at least in part, carried on for the pecuniary gain of
+those who engage in them; but it is gain obtained by the honourable
+method of seizure and conversion. These occupations are of the nature of
+predatory, not of productive, employment. Something similar may be said
+of the chase, but with a difference. As the community passes out of the
+hunting stage proper, hunting gradually becomes differentiated into two
+distinct employments. On the one hand it is a trade, carried on chiefly
+for gain; and from this the element of exploit is virtually absent,
+or it is at any rate not present in a sufficient degree to clear the
+pursuit of the imputation of gainful industry. On the other hand, the
+chase is also a sport--an exercise of the predatory impulse simply.
+As such it does not afford any appreciable pecuniary incentive, but it
+contains a more or less obvious element of exploit. It is this latter
+development of the chase--purged of all imputation of handicraft--that
+alone is meritorious and fairly belongs in the scheme of life of the
+developed leisure class.
+
+Abstention from labour is not only a honorific or meritorious act,
+but it presently comes to be a requisite of decency. The insistence on
+property as the basis of reputability is very naive and very imperious
+during the early stages of the accumulation of wealth. Abstention
+from labour is the convenient evidence of wealth and is therefore
+the conventional mark of social standing; and this insistence on the
+meritoriousness of wealth leads to a more strenuous insistence on
+leisure. Nota notae est nota rei ipsius. According to well established
+laws of human nature, prescription presently seizes upon this
+conventional evidence of wealth and fixes it in men's habits of thought
+as something that is in itself substantially meritorious and ennobling;
+while productive labour at the same time and by a like process becomes
+in a double sense intrinsically unworthy. Prescription ends by making
+labour not only disreputable in the eyes of the community, but morally
+impossible to the noble, freeborn man, and incompatible with a worthy
+life.
+
+This tabu on labour has a further consequence in the industrial
+differentiation of classes. As the population increases in density
+and the predatory group grows into a settled industrial community, the
+constituted authorities and the customs governing ownership gain in
+scope and consistency. It then presently becomes impracticable to
+accumulate wealth by simple seizure, and, in logical consistency,
+acquisition by industry is equally impossible for high minded and
+impecunious men. The alternative open to them is beggary or privation.
+Wherever the canon of conspicuous leisure has a chance undisturbed to
+work out its tendency, there will therefore emerge a secondary, and in a
+sense spurious, leisure class--abjectly poor and living in a precarious
+life of want and discomfort, but morally unable to stoop to gainful
+pursuits. The decayed gentleman and the lady who has seen better days
+are by no means unfamiliar phenomena even now. This pervading sense
+of the indignity of the slightest manual labour is familiar to all
+civilized peoples, as well as to peoples of a less advanced pecuniary
+culture. In persons of a delicate sensibility who have long been
+habituated to gentle manners, the sense of the shamefulness of manual
+labour may become so strong that, at a critical juncture, it will even
+set aside the instinct of self-preservation. So, for instance, we are
+told of certain Polynesian chiefs, who, under the stress of good form,
+preferred to starve rather than carry their food to their mouths with
+their own hands. It is true, this conduct may have been due, at least in
+part, to an excessive sanctity or tabu attaching to the chief's person.
+The tabu would have been communicated by the contact of his hands, and
+so would have made anything touched by him unfit for human food. But the
+tabu is itself a derivative of the unworthiness or moral incompatibility
+of labour; so that even when construed in this sense the conduct of the
+Polynesian chiefs is truer to the canon of honorific leisure than would
+at first appear. A better illustration, or at least a more unmistakable
+one, is afforded by a certain king of France, who is said to have lost
+his life through an excess of moral stamina in the observance of good
+form. In the absence of the functionary whose office it was to shift his
+master's seat, the king sat uncomplaining before the fire and suffered
+his royal person to be toasted beyond recovery. But in so doing he saved
+his Most Christian Majesty from menial contamination. Summum crede nefas
+animam praeferre pudori, Et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas.
+
+It has already been remarked that the term "leisure", as here used, does
+not connote indolence or quiescence. What it connotes is non-productive
+consumption of time. Time is consumed non-productively (1) from a
+sense of the unworthiness of productive work, and (2) as an evidence
+of pecuniary ability to afford a life of idleness. But the whole of the
+life of the gentleman of leisure is not spent before the eyes of the
+spectators who are to be impressed with that spectacle of honorific
+leisure which in the ideal scheme makes up his life. For some part of
+the time his life is perforce withdrawn from the public eye, and of this
+portion which is spent in private the gentleman of leisure should, for
+the sake of his good name, be able to give a convincing account. He
+should find some means of putting in evidence the leisure that is not
+spent in the sight of the spectators. This can be done only indirectly,
+through the exhibition of some tangible, lasting results of the leisure
+so spent--in a manner analogous to the familiar exhibition of tangible,
+lasting products of the labour performed for the gentleman of leisure by
+handicraftsmen and servants in his employ.
+
+The lasting evidence of productive labour is its material
+product--commonly some article of consumption. In the case of exploit it
+is similarly possible and usual to procure some tangible result that may
+serve for exhibition in the way of trophy or booty. At a later phase
+of the development it is customary to assume some badge of insignia of
+honour that will serve as a conventionally accepted mark of exploit, and
+which at the same time indicates the quantity or degree of exploit of
+which it is the symbol. As the population increases in density, and as
+human relations grow more complex and numerous, all the details of life
+undergo a process of elaboration and selection; and in this process of
+elaboration the use of trophies develops into a system of rank, titles,
+degrees and insignia, typical examples of which are heraldic devices,
+medals, and honorary decorations.
+
+As seen from the economic point of view, leisure, considered as an
+employment, is closely allied in kind with the life of exploit; and the
+achievements which characterise a life of leisure, and which remain as
+its decorous criteria, have much in common with the trophies of exploit.
+But leisure in the narrower sense, as distinct from exploit and from any
+ostensibly productive employment of effort on objects which are of no
+intrinsic use, does not commonly leave a material product. The criteria
+of a past performance of leisure therefore commonly take the form
+of "immaterial" goods. Such immaterial evidences of past leisure are
+quasi-scholarly or quasi-artistic accomplishments and a knowledge of
+processes and incidents which do not conduce directly to the furtherance
+of human life. So, for instance, in our time there is the knowledge
+of the dead languages and the occult sciences; of correct spelling; of
+syntax and prosody; of the various forms of domestic music and other
+household art; of the latest properties of dress, furniture, and
+equipage; of games, sports, and fancy-bred animals, such as dogs and
+race-horses. In all these branches of knowledge the initial motive from
+which their acquisition proceeded at the outset, and through which they
+first came into vogue, may have been something quite different from
+the wish to show that one's time had not been spent in industrial
+employment; but unless these accomplishments had approved themselves as
+serviceable evidence of an unproductive expenditure of time, they would
+not have survived and held their place as conventional accomplishments
+of the leisure class.
+
+These accomplishments may, in some sense, be classed as branches of
+learning. Beside and beyond these there is a further range of social
+facts which shade off from the region of learning into that of physical
+habit and dexterity. Such are what is known as manners and breeding,
+polite usage, decorum, and formal and ceremonial observances generally.
+This class of facts are even more immediately and obtrusively presented
+to the observation, and they therefore more widely and more imperatively
+insisted on as required evidences of a reputable degree of leisure. It
+is worth while to remark that all that class of ceremonial observances
+which are classed under the general head of manners hold a more
+important place in the esteem of men during the stage of culture
+at which conspicuous leisure has the greatest vogue as a mark of
+reputability, than at later stages of the cultural development. The
+barbarian of the quasi-peaceable stage of industry is notoriously a more
+high-bred gentleman, in all that concerns decorum, than any but the very
+exquisite among the men of a later age. Indeed, it is well known, or
+at least it is currently believed, that manners have progressively
+deteriorated as society has receded from the patriarchal stage. Many a
+gentleman of the old school has been provoked to remark regretfully upon
+the under-bred manners and bearing of even the better classes in the
+modern industrial communities; and the decay of the ceremonial code--or
+as it is otherwise called, the vulgarisation of life--among the
+industrial classes proper has become one of the chief enormities
+of latter-day civilisation in the eyes of all persons of delicate
+sensibilities. The decay which the code has suffered at the hands of a
+busy people testifies--all depreciation apart--to the fact that decorum
+is a product and an exponent of leisure class life and thrives in full
+measure only under a regime of status.
+
+The origin, or better the derivation, of manners is no doubt, to
+be sought elsewhere than in a conscious effort on the part of the
+well-mannered to show that much time has been spent in acquiring them.
+The proximate end of innovation and elaboration has been the
+higher effectiveness of the new departure in point of beauty or of
+expressiveness. In great part the ceremonial code of decorous usages
+owes its beginning and its growth to the desire to conciliate or to
+show good-will, as anthropologists and sociologists are in the habit
+of assuming, and this initial motive is rarely if ever absent from the
+conduct of well-mannered persons at any stage of the later development.
+Manners, we are told, are in part an elaboration of gesture, and in part
+they are symbolical and conventionalised survivals representing former
+acts of dominance or of personal service or of personal contact. In
+large part they are an expression of the relation of status,--a symbolic
+pantomime of mastery on the one hand and of subservience on the other.
+Wherever at the present time the predatory habit of mind, and the
+consequent attitude of mastery and of subservience, gives its character
+to the accredited scheme of life, there the importance of all punctilios
+of conduct is extreme, and the assiduity with which the ceremonial
+observance of rank and titles is attended to approaches closely to the
+ideal set by the barbarian of the quasi-peaceable nomadic culture. Some
+of the Continental countries afford good illustrations of this spiritual
+survival. In these communities the archaic ideal is similarly approached
+as regards the esteem accorded to manners as a fact of intrinsic worth.
+
+Decorum set out with being symbol and pantomime and with having utility
+only as an exponent of the facts and qualities symbolised; but it
+presently suffered the transmutation which commonly passes over
+symbolical facts in human intercourse. Manners presently came, in
+popular apprehension, to be possessed of a substantial utility in
+themselves; they acquired a sacramental character, in great measure
+independent of the facts which they originally prefigured. Deviations
+from the code of decorum have become intrinsically odious to all
+men, and good breeding is, in everyday apprehension, not simply an
+adventitious mark of human excellence, but an integral feature of
+the worthy human soul. There are few things that so touch us with
+instinctive revulsion as a breach of decorum; and so far have we
+progressed in the direction of imputing intrinsic utility to the
+ceremonial observances of etiquette that few of us, if any, can
+dissociate an offence against etiquette from a sense of the substantial
+unworthiness of the offender. A breach of faith may be condoned, but a
+breach of decorum can not. "Manners maketh man."
+
+None the less, while manners have this intrinsic utility, in the
+apprehension of the performer and the beholder alike, this sense of the
+intrinsic rightness of decorum is only the proximate ground of the vogue
+of manners and breeding. Their ulterior, economic ground is to be sought
+in the honorific character of that leisure or non-productive employment
+of time and effort without which good manners are not acquired. The
+knowledge and habit of good form come only by long-continued use.
+Refined tastes, manners, habits of life are a useful evidence of
+gentility, because good breeding requires time, application and expense,
+and can therefore not be compassed by those whose time and energy are
+taken up with work. A knowledge of good form is prima facie evidence
+that that portion of the well-bred person's life which is not spent
+under the observation of the spectator has been worthily spent in
+acquiring accomplishments that are of no lucrative effect. In the last
+analysis the value of manners lies in the fact that they are the voucher
+of a life of leisure. Therefore, conversely, since leisure is the
+conventional means of pecuniary repute, the acquisition of some
+proficiency in decorum is incumbent on all who aspire to a modicum of
+pecuniary decency.
+
+So much of the honourable life of leisure as is not spent in the sight
+of spectators can serve the purposes of reputability only in so far as
+it leaves a tangible, visible result that can be put in evidence and can
+be measured and compared with products of the same class exhibited
+by competing aspirants for repute. Some such effect, in the way of
+leisurely manners and carriage, etc., follows from simple persistent
+abstention from work, even where the subject does not take thought
+of the matter and studiously acquire an air of leisurely opulence and
+mastery. Especially does it seem to be true that a life of leisure
+in this way persisted in through several generations will leave a
+persistent, ascertainable effect in the conformation of the person,
+and still more in his habitual bearing and demeanour. But all the
+suggestions of a cumulative life of leisure, and all the proficiency
+in decorum that comes by the way of passive habituation, may be further
+improved upon by taking thought and assiduously acquiring the marks
+of honourable leisure, and then carrying the exhibition of these
+adventitious marks of exemption from employment out in a strenuous and
+systematic discipline. Plainly, this is a point at which a diligent
+application of effort and expenditure may materially further the
+attainment of a decent proficiency in the leisure-class properties.
+Conversely, the greater the degree of proficiency and the more patent
+the evidence of a high degree of habituation to observances which
+serve no lucrative or other directly useful purpose, the greater
+the consumption of time and substance impliedly involved in their
+acquisition, and the greater the resultant good repute. Hence under the
+competitive struggle for proficiency in good manners, it comes about
+that much pains in taken with the cultivation of habits of decorum; and
+hence the details of decorum develop into a comprehensive discipline,
+conformity to which is required of all who would be held blameless in
+point of repute. And hence, on the other hand, this conspicuous leisure
+of which decorum is a ramification grows gradually into a laborious
+drill in deportment and an education in taste and discrimination as
+to what articles of consumption are decorous and what are the decorous
+methods of consuming them.
+
+In this connection it is worthy of notice that the possibility of
+producing pathological and other idiosyncrasies of person and manner by
+shrewd mimicry and a systematic drill have been turned to account in
+the deliberate production of a cultured class--often with a very happy
+effect. In this way, by the process vulgarly known as snobbery, a
+syncopated evolution of gentle birth and breeding is achieved in
+the case of a goodly number of families and lines of descent. This
+syncopated gentle birth gives results which, in point of serviceability
+as a leisure-class factor in the population, are in no wise
+substantially inferior to others who may have had a longer but less
+arduous training in the pecuniary properties.
+
+There are, moreover, measureable degrees of conformity to the latest
+accredited code of the punctilios as regards decorous means and methods
+of consumption. Differences between one person and another in the
+degree of conformity to the ideal in these respects can be compared,
+and persons may be graded and scheduled with some accuracy and effect
+according to a progressive scale of manners and breeding. The award
+of reputability in this regard is commonly made in good faith, on
+the ground of conformity to accepted canons of taste in the matters
+concerned, and without conscious regard to the pecuniary standing or the
+degree of leisure practised by any given candidate for reputability; but
+the canons of taste according to which the award is made are constantly
+under the surveillance of the law of conspicuous leisure, and are indeed
+constantly undergoing change and revision to bring them into closer
+conformity with its requirements. So that while the proximate ground of
+discrimination may be of another kind, still the pervading principle and
+abiding test of good breeding is the requirement of a substantial and
+patent waste of time. There may be some considerable range of variation
+in detail within the scope of this principle, but they are variations of
+form and expression, not of substance.
+
+Much of the courtesy of everyday intercourse is of course a direct
+expression of consideration and kindly good-will, and this element
+of conduct has for the most part no need of being traced back to any
+underlying ground of reputability to explain either its presence or the
+approval with which it is regarded; but the same is not true of the code
+of properties. These latter are expressions of status. It is of course
+sufficiently plain, to any one who cares to see, that our bearing
+towards menials and other pecuniary dependent inferiors is the bearing
+of the superior member in a relation of status, though its manifestation
+is often greatly modified and softened from the original expression of
+crude dominance. Similarly, our bearing towards superiors, and in
+great measure towards equals, expresses a more or less conventionalised
+attitude of subservience. Witness the masterful presence of the
+high-minded gentleman or lady, which testifies to so much of dominance
+and independence of economic circumstances, and which at the same time
+appeals with such convincing force to our sense of what is right and
+gracious. It is among this highest leisure class, who have no superiors
+and few peers, that decorum finds its fullest and maturest expression;
+and it is this highest class also that gives decorum that definite
+formulation which serves as a canon of conduct for the classes beneath.
+And there also the code is most obviously a code of status and shows
+most plainly its incompatibility with all vulgarly productive work. A
+divine assurance and an imperious complaisance, as of one habituated
+to require subservience and to take no thought for the morrow, is the
+birthright and the criterion of the gentleman at his best; and it is in
+popular apprehension even more than that, for this demeanour is accepted
+as an intrinsic attribute of superior worth, before which the base-born
+commoner delights to stoop and yield.
+
+As has been indicated in an earlier chapter, there is reason to believe
+that the institution of ownership has begun with the ownership of
+persons, primarily women. The incentives to acquiring such property have
+apparently been: (1) a propensity for dominance and coercion; (2) the
+utility of these persons as evidence of the prowess of the owner; (3)
+the utility of their services.
+
+Personal service holds a peculiar place in the economic development.
+During the stage of quasi-peaceable industry, and especially during the
+earlier development of industry within the limits of this general stage,
+the utility of their services seems commonly to be the dominant motive
+to the acquisition of property in persons. Servants are valued for their
+services. But the dominance of this motive is not due to a decline
+in the absolute importance of the other two utilities possessed by
+servants. It is rather that the altered circumstance of life accentuate
+the utility of servants for this last-named purpose. Women and other
+slaves are highly valued, both as an evidence of wealth and as a means
+of accumulating wealth. Together with cattle, if the tribe is a pastoral
+one, they are the usual form of investment for a profit. To such an
+extent may female slavery give its character to the economic life under
+the quasi-peaceable culture that the women even comes to serve as a unit
+of value among peoples occupying this cultural stage--as for instance in
+Homeric times. Where this is the case there need be little question but
+that the basis of the industrial system is chattel slavery and that the
+women are commonly slaves. The great, pervading human relation in such a
+system is that of master and servant. The accepted evidence of wealth is
+the possession of many women, and presently also of other slaves engaged
+in attendance on their master's person and in producing goods for him.
+
+A division of labour presently sets in, whereby personal service and
+attendance on the master becomes the special office of a portion of the
+servants, while those who are wholly employed in industrial occupations
+proper are removed more and more from all immediate relation to the
+person of their owner. At the same time those servants whose office
+is personal service, including domestic duties, come gradually to be
+exempted from productive industry carried on for gain.
+
+This process of progressive exemption from the common run of industrial
+employment will commonly begin with the exemption of the wife, or the
+chief wife. After the community has advanced to settled habits of life,
+wife-capture from hostile tribes becomes impracticable as a customary
+source of supply. Where this cultural advance has been achieved, the
+chief wife is ordinarily of gentle blood, and the fact of her being so
+will hasten her exemption from vulgar employment. The manner in which
+the concept of gentle blood originates, as well as the place which it
+occupies in the development of marriage, cannot be discussed in this
+place. For the purpose in hand it will be sufficient to say that gentle
+blood is blood which has been ennobled by protracted contact with
+accumulated wealth or unbroken prerogative. The women with these
+antecedents is preferred in marriage, both for the sake of a resulting
+alliance with her powerful relatives and because a superior worth is
+felt to inhere in blood which has been associated with many goods and
+great power. She will still be her husband's chattel, as she was her
+father's chattel before her purchase, but she is at the same time of
+her father's gentle blood; and hence there is a moral incongruity in her
+occupying herself with the debasing employments of her fellow-servants.
+However completely she may be subject to her master, and however
+inferior to the male members of the social stratum in which her birth
+has placed her, the principle that gentility is transmissible will act
+to place her above the common slave; and so soon as this principle has
+acquired a prescriptive authority it will act to invest her in some
+measure with that prerogative of leisure which is the chief mark of
+gentility. Furthered by this principle of transmissible gentility the
+wife's exemption gains in scope, if the wealth of her owner permits it,
+until it includes exemption from debasing menial service as well as from
+handicraft. As the industrial development goes on and property becomes
+massed in relatively fewer hands, the conventional standard of wealth of
+the upper class rises. The same tendency to exemption from handicraft,
+and in the course of time from menial domestic employments, will then
+assert itself as regards the other wives, if such there are, and also as
+regards other servants in immediate attendance upon the person of their
+master. The exemption comes more tardily the remoter the relation in
+which the servant stands to the person of the master.
+
+If the pecuniary situation of the master permits it, the development of
+a special class of personal or body servants is also furthered by the
+very grave importance which comes to attach to this personal service.
+The master's person, being the embodiment of worth and honour, is of
+the most serious consequence. Both for his reputable standing in the
+community and for his self-respect, it is a matter of moment that he
+should have at his call efficient specialised servants, whose attendance
+upon his person is not diverted from this their chief office by any
+by-occupation. These specialised servants are useful more for show
+than for service actually performed. In so far as they are not kept for
+exhibition simply, they afford gratification to their master chiefly in
+allowing scope to his propensity for dominance. It is true, the care of
+the continually increasing household apparatus may require added labour;
+but since the apparatus is commonly increased in order to serve as
+a means of good repute rather than as a means of comfort, this
+qualification is not of great weight. All these lines of utility are
+better served by a larger number of more highly specialised servants.
+There results, therefore, a constantly increasing differentiation and
+multiplication of domestic and body servants, along with a concomitant
+progressive exemption of such servants from productive labour. By virtue
+of their serving as evidence of ability to pay, the office of such
+domestics regularly tends to include continually fewer duties, and their
+service tends in the end to become nominal only. This is especially true
+of those servants who are in most immediate and obvious attendance upon
+their master. So that the utility of these comes to consist, in great
+part, in their conspicuous exemption from productive labour and in
+the evidence which this exemption affords of their master's wealth and
+power.
+
+After some considerable advance has been made in the practice of
+employing a special corps of servants for the performance of a
+conspicuous leisure in this manner, men begin to be preferred above
+women for services that bring them obtrusively into view. Men,
+especially lusty, personable fellows, such as footmen and other menials
+should be, are obviously more powerful and more expensive than women.
+They are better fitted for this work, as showing a larger waste of time
+and of human energy. Hence it comes about that in the economy of the
+leisure class the busy housewife of the early patriarchal days, with her
+retinue of hard-working handmaidens, presently gives place to the lady
+and the lackey.
+
+In all grades and walks of life, and at any stage of the economic
+development, the leisure of the lady and of the lackey differs from the
+leisure of the gentleman in his own right in that it is an occupation of
+an ostensibly laborious kind. It takes the form, in large measure, of
+a painstaking attention to the service of the master, or to the
+maintenance and elaboration of the household paraphernalia; so that
+it is leisure only in the sense that little or no productive work is
+performed by this class, not in the sense that all appearance of
+labour is avoided by them. The duties performed by the lady, or by the
+household or domestic servants, are frequently arduous enough, and they
+are also frequently directed to ends which are considered extremely
+necessary to the comfort of the entire household. So far as these
+services conduce to the physical efficiency or comfort of the master
+or the rest of the household, they are to be accounted productive work.
+Only the residue of employment left after deduction of this effective
+work is to be classed as a performance of leisure.
+
+But much of the services classed as household cares in modern everyday
+life, and many of the "utilities" required for a comfortable existence
+by civilised man, are of a ceremonial character. They are, therefore,
+properly to be classed as a performance of leisure in the sense in which
+the term is here used. They may be none the less imperatively necessary
+from the point of view of decent existence: they may be none the less
+requisite for personal comfort even, although they may be chiefly or
+wholly of a ceremonial character. But in so far as they partake of this
+character they are imperative and requisite because we have been taught
+to require them under pain of ceremonial uncleanness or unworthiness. We
+feel discomfort in their absence, but not because their absence results
+directly in physical discomfort; nor would a taste not trained to
+discriminate between the conventionally good and the conventionally bad
+take offence at their omission. In so far as this is true the labour
+spent in these services is to be classed as leisure; and when performed
+by others than the economically free and self-directed head of the
+establishment, they are to be classed as vicarious leisure.
+
+The vicarious leisure performed by housewives and menials, under
+the head of household cares, may frequently develop into drudgery,
+especially where the competition for reputability is close and
+strenuous. This is frequently the case in modern life. Where this
+happens, the domestic service which comprises the duties of this
+servant class might aptly be designated as wasted effort, rather than as
+vicarious leisure. But the latter term has the advantage of indicating
+the line of derivation of these domestic offices, as well as of neatly
+suggesting the substantial economic ground of their utility; for
+these occupations are chiefly useful as a method of imputing pecuniary
+reputability to the master or to the household on the ground that a
+given amount of time and effort is conspicuously wasted in that behalf.
+
+In this way, then, there arises a subsidiary or derivative leisure
+class, whose office is the performance of a vicarious leisure for the
+behoof of the reputability of the primary or legitimate leisure class.
+This vicarious leisure class is distinguished from the leisure class
+proper by a characteristic feature of its habitual mode of life. The
+leisure of the master class is, at least ostensibly, an indulgence of
+a proclivity for the avoidance of labour and is presumed to enhance
+the master's own well-being and fulness of life; but the leisure of
+the servant class exempt from productive labour is in some sort a
+performance exacted from them, and is not normally or primarily directed
+to their own comfort. The leisure of the servant is not his own leisure.
+So far as he is a servant in the full sense, and not at the same time
+a member of a lower order of the leisure class proper, his leisure
+normally passes under the guise of specialised service directed to the
+furtherance of his master's fulness of life. Evidence of this relation
+of subservience is obviously present in the servant's carriage and
+manner of life. The like is often true of the wife throughout the
+protracted economic stage during which she is still primarily a
+servant--that is to say, so long as the household with a male head
+remains in force. In order to satisfy the requirements of the leisure
+class scheme of life, the servant should show not only an attitude of
+subservience, but also the effects of special training and practice
+in subservience. The servant or wife should not only perform certain
+offices and show a servile disposition, but it is quite as imperative
+that they should show an acquired facility in the tactics of
+subservience--a trained conformity to the canons of effectual and
+conspicuous subservience. Even today it is this aptitude and acquired
+skill in the formal manifestation of the servile relation that
+constitutes the chief element of utility in our highly paid servants, as
+well as one of the chief ornaments of the well-bred housewife.
+
+The first requisite of a good servant is that he should conspicuously
+know his place. It is not enough that he knows how to effect certain
+desired mechanical results; he must above all, know how to effect these
+results in due form. Domestic service might be said to be a spiritual
+rather than a mechanical function. Gradually there grows up an elaborate
+system of good form, specifically regulating the manner in which this
+vicarious leisure of the servant class is to be performed. Any departure
+from these canons of form is to be depreciated, not so much because it
+evinces a shortcoming in mechanical efficiency, or even that it shows
+an absence of the servile attitude and temperament, but because, in
+the last analysis, it shows the absence of special training. Special
+training in personal service costs time and effort, and where it is
+obviously present in a high degree, it argues that the servant who
+possesses it, neither is nor has been habitually engaged in any
+productive occupation. It is prima facie evidence of a vicarious leisure
+extending far back in the past. So that trained service has utility, not
+only as gratifying the master's instinctive liking for good and skilful
+workmanship and his propensity for conspicuous dominance over those
+whose lives are subservient to his own, but it has utility also as
+putting in evidence a much larger consumption of human service than
+would be shown by the mere present conspicuous leisure performed by an
+untrained person. It is a serious grievance if a gentleman's butler or
+footman performs his duties about his master's table or carriage in
+such unformed style as to suggest that his habitual occupation may be
+ploughing or sheepherding. Such bungling work would imply inability on
+the master's part to procure the service of specially trained servants;
+that is to say, it would imply inability to pay for the consumption
+of time, effort, and instruction required to fit a trained servant for
+special service under the exacting code of forms. If the performance of
+the servant argues lack of means on the part of his master, it defeats
+its chief substantial end; for the chief use of servants is the evidence
+they afford of the master's ability to pay.
+
+What has just been said might be taken to imply that the offence of an
+under-trained servant lies in a direct suggestion of inexpensiveness or
+of usefulness. Such, of course, is not the case. The connection is much
+less immediate. What happens here is what happens generally. Whatever
+approves itself to us on any ground at the outset, presently comes to
+appeal to us as a gratifying thing in itself; it comes to rest in our
+habits of though as substantially right. But in order that any specific
+canon of deportment shall maintain itself in favour, it must continue to
+have the support of, or at least not be incompatible with, the habit
+or aptitude which constitutes the norm of its development. The need of
+vicarious leisure, or conspicuous consumption of service, is a dominant
+incentive to the keeping of servants. So long as this remains true it
+may be set down without much discussion that any such departure from
+accepted usage as would suggest an abridged apprenticeship in service
+would presently be found insufferable. The requirement of an expensive
+vicarious leisure acts indirectly, selectively, by guiding the formation
+of our taste,--of our sense of what is right in these matters,--and so
+weeds out unconformable departures by withholding approval of them.
+
+As the standard of wealth recognized by common consent advances,
+the possession and exploitation of servants as a means of showing
+superfluity undergoes a refinement. The possession and maintenance of
+slaves employed in the production of goods argues wealth and prowess,
+but the maintenance of servants who produce nothing argues still higher
+wealth and position. Under this principle there arises a class of
+servants, the more numerous the better, whose sole office is fatuously
+to wait upon the person of their owner, and so to put in evidence his
+ability unproductively to consume a large amount of service. There
+supervenes a division of labour among the servants or dependents whose
+life is spent in maintaining the honour of the gentleman of leisure.
+So that, while one group produces goods for him, another group, usually
+headed by the wife, or chief, consumes for him in conspicuous leisure;
+thereby putting in evidence his ability to sustain large pecuniary
+damage without impairing his superior opulence.
+
+This somewhat idealized and diagrammatic outline of the development and
+nature of domestic service comes nearest being true for that cultural
+stage which was here been named the "quasi-peaceable" stage of industry.
+At this stage personal service first rises to the position of an
+economic institution, and it is at this stage that it occupies the
+largest place in the community's scheme of life. In the cultural
+sequence, the quasi-peaceable stage follows the predatory stage proper,
+the two being successive phases of barbarian life. Its characteristic
+feature is a formal observance of peace and order, at the same time that
+life at this stage still has too much of coercion and class antagonism
+to be called peaceable in the full sense of the word. For many purposes,
+and from another point of view than the economic one, it might as well
+be named the stage of status. The method of human relation during this
+stage, and the spiritual attitude of men at this level of culture, is
+well summed up under the term. But as a descriptive term to characterise
+the prevailing methods of industry, as well as to indicate the trend
+of industrial development at this point in economic evolution, the term
+"quasi-peaceable" seems preferable. So far as concerns the communities
+of the Western culture, this phase of economic development probably
+lies in the past; except for a numerically small though very conspicuous
+fraction of the community in whom the habits of thought peculiar to the
+barbarian culture have suffered but a relatively slight disintegration.
+
+Personal service is still an element of great economic importance,
+especially as regards the distribution and consumption of goods; but its
+relative importance even in this direction is no doubt less than it once
+was. The best development of this vicarious leisure lies in the past
+rather than in the present; and its best expression in the present is to
+be found in the scheme of life of the upper leisure class. To this
+class the modern culture owes much in the way of the conservation of
+traditions, usages, and habits of thought which belong on a more archaic
+cultural plane, so far as regards their widest acceptance and their most
+effective development.
+
+In the modern industrial communities the mechanical contrivances
+available for the comfort and convenience of everyday life are highly
+developed. So much so that body servants, or, indeed, domestic servants
+of any kind, would now scarcely be employed by anybody except on the
+ground of a canon of reputability carried over by tradition from earlier
+usage. The only exception would be servants employed to attend on the
+persons of the infirm and the feeble-minded. But such servants properly
+come under the head of trained nurses rather than under that of domestic
+servants, and they are, therefore, an apparent rather than a real
+exception to the rule.
+
+The proximate reason for keeping domestic servants, for instance, in
+the moderately well-to-do household of to-day, is (ostensibly) that the
+members of the household are unable without discomfort to compass the
+work required by such a modern establishment. And the reason for their
+being unable to accomplish it is (1) that they have too many "social
+duties", and (2) that the work to be done is too severe and that there
+is too much of it. These two reasons may be restated as follows: (1)
+Under the mandatory code of decency, the time and effort of the members
+of such a household are required to be ostensibly all spent in a
+performance of conspicuous leisure, in the way of calls, drives, clubs,
+sewing-circles, sports, charity organisations, and other like social
+functions. Those persons whose time and energy are employed in these
+matters privately avow that all these observances, as well as the
+incidental attention to dress and other conspicuous consumption, are
+very irksome but altogether unavoidable. (2) Under the requirement of
+conspicuous consumption of goods, the apparatus of living has grown so
+elaborate and cumbrous, in the way of dwellings, furniture, bric-a-brac,
+wardrobe and meals, that the consumers of these things cannot make way
+with them in the required manner without help. Personal contact with the
+hired persons whose aid is called in to fulfil the routine of decency is
+commonly distasteful to the occupants of the house, but their presence
+is endured and paid for, in order to delegate to them a share in
+this onerous consumption of household goods. The presence of domestic
+servants, and of the special class of body servants in an eminent
+degree, is a concession of physical comfort to the moral need of
+pecuniary decency.
+
+The largest manifestation of vicarious leisure in modern life is made
+up of what are called domestic duties. These duties are fast becoming a
+species of services performed, not so much for the individual behoof of
+the head of the household as for the reputability of the household taken
+as a corporate unit--a group of which the housewife is a member on a
+footing of ostensible equality. As fast as the household for which they
+are performed departs from its archaic basis of ownership-marriage,
+these household duties of course tend to fall out of the category of
+vicarious leisure in the original sense; except so far as they are
+performed by hired servants. That is to say, since vicarious leisure
+is possible only on a basis of status or of hired service, the
+disappearance of the relation of status from human intercourse at any
+point carries with it the disappearance of vicarious leisure so far as
+regards that much of life. But it is to be added, in qualification of
+this qualification, that so long as the household subsists, even with a
+divided head, this class of non-productive labour performed for the
+sake of the household reputability must still be classed as vicarious
+leisure, although in a slightly altered sense. It is now leisure
+performed for the quasi-personal corporate household, instead of, as
+formerly, for the proprietary head of the household.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Four ~~ Conspicuous Consumption
+
+In what has been said of the evolution of the vicarious leisure class
+and its differentiation from the general body of the working classes,
+reference has been made to a further division of labour,--that between
+the different servant classes. One portion of the servant class, chiefly
+those persons whose occupation is vicarious leisure, come to undertake a
+new, subsidiary range of duties--the vicarious consumption of goods.
+The most obvious form in which this consumption occurs is seen in the
+wearing of liveries and the occupation of spacious servants' quarters.
+Another, scarcely less obtrusive or less effective form of vicarious
+consumption, and a much more widely prevalent one, is the consumption of
+food, clothing, dwelling, and furniture by the lady and the rest of the
+domestic establishment.
+
+But already at a point in economic evolution far antedating the
+emergence of the lady, specialised consumption of goods as an evidence
+of pecuniary strength had begun to work out in a more or less elaborate
+system. The beginning of a differentiation in consumption even antedates
+the appearance of anything that can fairly be called pecuniary strength.
+It is traceable back to the initial phase of predatory culture, and
+there is even a suggestion that an incipient differentiation in this
+respect lies back of the beginnings of the predatory life. This most
+primitive differentiation in the consumption of goods is like the later
+differentiation with which we are all so intimately familiar, in that it
+is largely of a ceremonial character, but unlike the latter it does not
+rest on a difference in accumulated wealth. The utility of consumption
+as an evidence of wealth is to be classed as a derivative growth. It
+is an adaption to a new end, by a selective process, of a distinction
+previously existing and well established in men's habits of thought.
+
+In the earlier phases of the predatory culture the only economic
+differentiation is a broad distinction between an honourable superior
+class made up of the able-bodied men on the one side, and a base
+inferior class of labouring women on the other. According to the ideal
+scheme of life in force at the time it is the office of the men to
+consume what the women produce. Such consumption as falls to the women
+is merely incidental to their work; it is a means to their continued
+labour, and not a consumption directed to their own comfort and fulness
+of life. Unproductive consumption of goods is honourable, primarily as
+a mark of prowess and a perquisite of human dignity; secondarily it
+becomes substantially honourable to itself, especially the consumption
+of the more desirable things. The consumption of choice articles of
+food, and frequently also of rare articles of adornment, becomes tabu to
+the women and children; and if there is a base (servile) class of men,
+the tabu holds also for them. With a further advance in culture this
+tabu may change into simple custom of a more or less rigorous character;
+but whatever be the theoretical basis of the distinction which is
+maintained, whether it be a tabu or a larger conventionality, the
+features of the conventional scheme of consumption do not change
+easily. When the quasi-peaceable stage of industry is reached, with its
+fundamental institution of chattel slavery, the general principle, more
+or less rigorously applied, is that the base, industrious class should
+consume only what may be necessary to their subsistence. In the nature
+of things, luxuries and the comforts of life belong to the leisure
+class. Under the tabu, certain victuals, and more particularly certain
+beverages, are strictly reserved for the use of the superior class.
+
+The ceremonial differentiation of the dietary is best seen in the use of
+intoxicating beverages and narcotics. If these articles of consumption
+are costly, they are felt to be noble and honorific. Therefore the
+base classes, primarily the women, practice an enforced continence
+with respect to these stimulants, except in countries where they are
+obtainable at a very low cost. From archaic times down through all the
+length of the patriarchal regime it has been the office of the women to
+prepare and administer these luxuries, and it has been the perquisite
+of the men of gentle birth and breeding to consume them. Drunkenness
+and the other pathological consequences of the free use of stimulants
+therefore tend in their turn to become honorific, as being a mark,
+at the second remove, of the superior status of those who are able to
+afford the indulgence. Infirmities induced by over-indulgence are among
+some peoples freely recognised as manly attributes. It has even happened
+that the name for certain diseased conditions of the body arising from
+such an origin has passed into everyday speech as a synonym for "noble"
+or "gentle". It is only at a relatively early stage of culture that the
+symptoms of expensive vice are conventionally accepted as marks of a
+superior status, and so tend to become virtues and command the deference
+of the community; but the reputability that attaches to certain
+expensive vices long retains so much of its force as to appreciably
+lesson the disapprobation visited upon the men of the wealthy or noble
+class for any excessive indulgence. The same invidious distinction adds
+force to the current disapproval of any indulgence of this kind on
+the part of women, minors, and inferiors. This invidious traditional
+distinction has not lost its force even among the more advanced peoples
+of today. Where the example set by the leisure class retains its
+imperative force in the regulation of the conventionalities, it is
+observable that the women still in great measure practise the same
+traditional continence with regard to stimulants.
+
+This characterisation of the greater continence in the use of stimulants
+practised by the women of the reputable classes may seem an excessive
+refinement of logic at the expense of common sense. But facts within
+easy reach of any one who cares to know them go to say that the
+greater abstinence of women is in some part due to an imperative
+conventionality; and this conventionality is, in a general way,
+strongest where the patriarchal tradition--the tradition that the woman
+is a chattel--has retained its hold in greatest vigour. In a sense which
+has been greatly qualified in scope and rigour, but which has by no
+means lost its meaning even yet, this tradition says that the
+woman, being a chattel, should consume only what is necessary to her
+sustenance,--except so far as her further consumption contributes to the
+comfort or the good repute of her master. The consumption of luxuries,
+in the true sense, is a consumption directed to the comfort of the
+consumer himself, and is, therefore, a mark of the master. Any such
+consumption by others can take place only on a basis of sufferance. In
+communities where the popular habits of thought have been profoundly
+shaped by the patriarchal tradition we may accordingly look for
+survivals of the tabu on luxuries at least to the extent of a
+conventional deprecation of their use by the unfree and dependent class.
+This is more particularly true as regards certain luxuries, the use of
+which by the dependent class would detract sensibly from the comfort
+or pleasure of their masters, or which are held to be of doubtful
+legitimacy on other grounds. In the apprehension of the great
+conservative middle class of Western civilisation the use of these
+various stimulants is obnoxious to at least one, if not both, of these
+objections; and it is a fact too significant to be passed over that it
+is precisely among these middle classes of the Germanic culture, with
+their strong surviving sense of the patriarchal proprieties, that
+the women are to the greatest extent subject to a qualified tabu on
+narcotics and alcoholic beverages. With many qualifications--with more
+qualifications as the patriarchal tradition has gradually weakened--the
+general rule is felt to be right and binding that women should consume
+only for the benefit of their masters. The objection of course presents
+itself that expenditure on women's dress and household paraphernalia is
+an obvious exception to this rule; but it will appear in the sequel that
+this exception is much more obvious than substantial. During the earlier
+stages of economic development, consumption of goods without stint,
+especially consumption of the better grades of goods,--ideally all
+consumption in excess of the subsistence minimum,--pertains normally
+to the leisure class. This restriction tends to disappear, at least
+formally, after the later peaceable stage has been reached, with private
+ownership of goods and an industrial system based on wage labour or
+on the petty household economy. But during the earlier quasi-peaceable
+stage, when so many of the traditions through which the institution of a
+leisure class has affected the economic life of later times were taking
+form and consistency, this principle has had the force of a conventional
+law. It has served as the norm to which consumption has tended to
+conform, and any appreciable departure from it is to be regarded as
+an aberrant form, sure to be eliminated sooner or later in the further
+course of development.
+
+The quasi-peaceable gentleman of leisure, then, not only consumes of the
+staff of life beyond the minimum required for subsistence and physical
+efficiency, but his consumption also undergoes a specialisation as
+regards the quality of the goods consumed. He consumes freely and of the
+best, in food, drink, narcotics, shelter, services, ornaments, apparel,
+weapons and accoutrements, amusements, amulets, and idols or divinities.
+In the process of gradual amelioration which takes place in the articles
+of his consumption, the motive principle and proximate aim of innovation
+is no doubt the higher efficiency of the improved and more elaborate
+products for personal comfort and well-being. But that does not remain
+the sole purpose of their consumption. The canon of reputability is at
+hand and seizes upon such innovations as are, according to its standard,
+fit to survive. Since the consumption of these more excellent goods is
+an evidence of wealth, it becomes honorific; and conversely, the failure
+to consume in due quantity and quality becomes a mark of inferiority and
+demerit.
+
+This growth of punctilious discrimination as to qualitative excellence
+in eating, drinking, etc. presently affects not only the manner of life,
+but also the training and intellectual activity of the gentleman of
+leisure. He is no longer simply the successful, aggressive male,--the
+man of strength, resource, and intrepidity. In order to avoid
+stultification he must also cultivate his tastes, for it now becomes
+incumbent on him to discriminate with some nicety between the noble and
+the ignoble in consumable goods. He becomes a connoisseur in creditable
+viands of various degrees of merit, in manly beverages and trinkets,
+in seemly apparel and architecture, in weapons, games, dancers, and
+the narcotics. This cultivation of aesthetic faculty requires time and
+application, and the demands made upon the gentleman in this direction
+therefore tend to change his life of leisure into a more or less arduous
+application to the business of learning how to live a life of ostensible
+leisure in a becoming way. Closely related to the requirement that the
+gentleman must consume freely and of the right kind of goods, there
+is the requirement that he must know how to consume them in a seemly
+manner. His life of leisure must be conducted in due form. Hence arise
+good manners in the way pointed out in an earlier chapter. High-bred
+manners and ways of living are items of conformity to the norm of
+conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption.
+
+Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to
+the gentleman of leisure. As wealth accumulates on his hands, his
+own unaided effort will not avail to sufficiently put his opulence in
+evidence by this method. The aid of friends and competitors is therefore
+brought in by resorting to the giving of valuable presents and expensive
+feasts and entertainments. Presents and feasts had probably another
+origin than that of naive ostentation, but they required their utility
+for this purpose very early, and they have retained that character to
+the present; so that their utility in this respect has now long been the
+substantial ground on which these usages rest. Costly entertainments,
+such as the potlatch or the ball, are peculiarly adapted to serve this
+end. The competitor with whom the entertainer wishes to institute a
+comparison is, by this method, made to serve as a means to the end. He
+consumes vicariously for his host at the same time that he is witness to
+the consumption of that excess of good things which his host is unable
+to dispose of single-handed, and he is also made to witness his host's
+facility in etiquette.
+
+In the giving of costly entertainments other motives, of more genial
+kind, are of course also present. The custom of festive gatherings
+probably originated in motives of conviviality and religion; these
+motives are also present in the later development, but they do
+not continue to be the sole motives. The latter-day leisure-class
+festivities and entertainments may continue in some slight degree to
+serve the religious need and in a higher degree the needs of recreation
+and conviviality, but they also serve an invidious purpose; and they
+serve it none the less effectually for having a colorable non-invidious
+ground in these more avowable motives. But the economic effect of these
+social amenities is not therefore lessened, either in the vicarious
+consumption of goods or in the exhibition of difficult and costly
+achievements in etiquette.
+
+As wealth accumulates, the leisure class develops further in function
+and structure, and there arises a differentiation within the class.
+There is a more or less elaborate system of rank and grades. This
+differentiation is furthered by the inheritance of wealth and the
+consequent inheritance of gentility. With the inheritance of gentility
+goes the inheritance of obligatory leisure; and gentility of a
+sufficient potency to entail a life of leisure may be inherited without
+the complement of wealth required to maintain a dignified leisure.
+Gentle blood may be transmitted without goods enough to afford a
+reputably free consumption at one's ease. Hence results a class of
+impecunious gentlemen of leisure, incidentally referred to already.
+These half-caste gentlemen of leisure fall into a system of hierarchical
+gradations. Those who stand near the higher and the highest grades of
+the wealthy leisure class, in point of birth, or in point of wealth, or
+both, outrank the remoter-born and the pecuniarily weaker. These lower
+grades, especially the impecunious, or marginal, gentlemen of leisure,
+affiliate themselves by a system of dependence or fealty to the great
+ones; by so doing they gain an increment of repute, or of the means
+with which to lead a life of leisure, from their patron. They become
+his courtiers or retainers, servants; and being fed and countenanced by
+their patron they are indices of his rank and vicarious consumer of his
+superfluous wealth. Many of these affiliated gentlemen of leisure are at
+the same time lesser men of substance in their own right; so that some
+of them are scarcely at all, others only partially, to be rated as
+vicarious consumers. So many of them, however, as make up the retainer
+and hangers-on of the patron may be classed as vicarious consumer
+without qualification. Many of these again, and also many of the other
+aristocracy of less degree, have in turn attached to their persons a
+more or less comprehensive group of vicarious consumer in the persons of
+their wives and children, their servants, retainers, etc.
+
+Throughout this graduated scheme of vicarious leisure and vicarious
+consumption the rule holds that these offices must be performed in some
+such manner, or under some such circumstance or insignia, as shall point
+plainly to the master to whom this leisure or consumption pertains,
+and to whom therefore the resulting increment of good repute of right
+inures. The consumption and leisure executed by these persons for their
+master or patron represents an investment on his part with a view to an
+increase of good fame. As regards feasts and largesses this is obvious
+enough, and the imputation of repute to the host or patron here takes
+place immediately, on the ground of common notoriety. Where leisure
+and consumption is performed vicariously by henchmen and retainers,
+imputation of the resulting repute to the patron is effected by their
+residing near his person so that it may be plain to all men from what
+source they draw. As the group whose good esteem is to be secured in
+this way grows larger, more patent means are required to indicate the
+imputation of merit for the leisure performed, and to this end uniforms,
+badges, and liveries come into vogue. The wearing of uniforms or
+liveries implies a considerable degree of dependence, and may even
+be said to be a mark of servitude, real or ostensible. The wearers of
+uniforms and liveries may be roughly divided into two classes-the free
+and the servile, or the noble and the ignoble. The services performed
+by them are likewise divisible into noble and ignoble. Of course the
+distinction is not observed with strict consistency in practice; the
+less debasing of the base services and the less honorific of the noble
+functions are not infrequently merged in the same person. But the
+general distinction is not on that account to be overlooked. What
+may add some perplexity is the fact that this fundamental distinction
+between noble and ignoble, which rests on the nature of the ostensible
+service performed, is traversed by a secondary distinction into
+honorific and humiliating, resting on the rank of the person for whom
+the service is performed or whose livery is worn. So, those offices
+which are by right the proper employment of the leisure class are
+noble; such as government, fighting, hunting, the care of arms and
+accoutrements, and the like--in short, those which may be classed as
+ostensibly predatory employments. On the other hand, those employments
+which properly fall to the industrious class are ignoble; such as
+handicraft or other productive labor, menial services and the like. But
+a base service performed for a person of very high degree may become a
+very honorific office; as for instance the office of a Maid of Honor or
+of a Lady in Waiting to the Queen, or the King's Master of the Horse or
+his Keeper of the Hounds. The two offices last named suggest a principle
+of some general bearing. Whenever, as in these cases, the menial service
+in question has to do directly with the primary leisure employments
+of fighting and hunting, it easily acquires a reflected honorific
+character. In this way great honor may come to attach to an employment
+which in its own nature belongs to the baser sort. In the later
+development of peaceable industry, the usage of employing an idle corps
+of uniformed men-at-arms gradually lapses. Vicarious consumption by
+dependents bearing the insignia of their patron or master narrows down
+to a corps of liveried menials. In a heightened degree, therefore, the
+livery comes to be a badge of servitude, or rather servility. Something
+of a honorific character always attached to the livery of the armed
+retainer, but this honorific character disappears when the livery
+becomes the exclusive badge of the menial. The livery becomes obnoxious
+to nearly all who are required to wear it. We are yet so little removed
+from a state of effective slavery as still to be fully sensitive to the
+sting of any imputation of servility. This antipathy asserts itself
+even in the case of the liveries or uniforms which some corporations
+prescribe as the distinctive dress of their employees. In this country
+the aversion even goes the length of discrediting--in a mild and
+uncertain way--those government employments, military and civil, which
+require the wearing of a livery or uniform.
+
+With the disappearance of servitude, the number of vicarious consumers
+attached to any one gentleman tends, on the whole, to decrease. The like
+is of course true, and perhaps in a still higher degree, of the number
+of dependents who perform vicarious leisure for him. In a general way,
+though not wholly nor consistently, these two groups coincide. The
+dependent who was first delegated for these duties was the wife, or the
+chief wife; and, as would be expected, in the later development of
+the institution, when the number of persons by whom these duties are
+customarily performed gradually narrows, the wife remains the last.
+In the higher grades of society a large volume of both these kinds of
+service is required; and here the wife is of course still assisted in
+the work by a more or less numerous corps of menials. But as we descend
+the social scale, the point is presently reached where the duties of
+vicarious leisure and consumption devolve upon the wife alone. In the
+communities of the Western culture, this point is at present found among
+the lower middle class.
+
+And here occurs a curious inversion. It is a fact of common observance
+that in this lower middle class there is no pretense of leisure on the
+part of the head of the household. Through force of circumstances it
+has fallen into disuse. But the middle-class wife still carries on the
+business of vicarious leisure, for the good name of the household and
+its master. In descending the social scale in any modern industrial
+community, the primary fact-the conspicuous leisure of the master of
+the household-disappears at a relatively high point. The head of the
+middle-class household has been reduced by economic circumstances to
+turn his hand to gaining a livelihood by occupations which often partake
+largely of the character of industry, as in the case of the ordinary
+business man of today. But the derivative fact-the vicarious leisure
+and consumption rendered by the wife, and the auxiliary vicarious
+performance of leisure by menials-remains in vogue as a conventionality
+which the demands of reputability will not suffer to be slighted. It is
+by no means an uncommon spectacle to find a man applying himself to work
+with the utmost assiduity, in order that his wife may in due form render
+for him that degree of vicarious leisure which the common sense of the
+time demands.
+
+The leisure rendered by the wife in such cases is, of course, not a
+simple manifestation of idleness or indolence. It almost invariably
+occurs disguised under some form of work or household duties or social
+amenities, which prove on analysis to serve little or no ulterior end
+beyond showing that she does not occupy herself with anything that is
+gainful or that is of substantial use. As has already been noticed under
+the head of manners, the greater part of the customary round of domestic
+cares to which the middle-class housewife gives her time and effort is
+of this character. Not that the results of her attention to household
+matters, of a decorative and mundificatory character, are not pleasing
+to the sense of men trained in middle-class proprieties; but the taste
+to which these effects of household adornment and tidiness appeal is a
+taste which has been formed under the selective guidance of a canon
+of propriety that demands just these evidences of wasted effort. The
+effects are pleasing to us chiefly because we have been taught to find
+them pleasing. There goes into these domestic duties much solicitude for
+a proper combination of form and color, and for other ends that are to
+be classed as aesthetic in the proper sense of the term; and it is
+not denied that effects having some substantial aesthetic value are
+sometimes attained. Pretty much all that is here insisted on is that, as
+regards these amenities of life, the housewife's efforts are under the
+guidance of traditions that have been shaped by the law of conspicuously
+wasteful expenditure of time and substance. If beauty or comfort is
+achieved-and it is a more or less fortuitous circumstance if they
+are-they must be achieved by means and methods that commend themselves
+to the great economic law of wasted effort. The more reputable,
+"presentable" portion of middle-class household paraphernalia are, on
+the one hand, items of conspicuous consumption, and on the other hand,
+apparatus for putting in evidence the vicarious leisure rendered by the
+housewife.
+
+The requirement of vicarious consumption at the hands of the wife
+continues in force even at a lower point in the pecuniary scale than the
+requirement of vicarious leisure. At a point below which little if any
+pretense of wasted effort, in ceremonial cleanness and the like,
+is observable, and where there is assuredly no conscious attempt at
+ostensible leisure, decency still requires the wife to consume some
+goods conspicuously for the reputability of the household and its head.
+So that, as the latter-day outcome of this evolution of an archaic
+institution, the wife, who was at the outset the drudge and chattel of
+the man, both in fact and in theory--the producer of goods for him to
+consume--has become the ceremonial consumer of goods which he produces.
+But she still quite unmistakably remains his chattel in theory; for the
+habitual rendering of vicarious leisure and consumption is the abiding
+mark of the unfree servant.
+
+This vicarious consumption practiced by the household of the middle
+and lower classes can not be counted as a direct expression of the
+leisure-class scheme of life, since the household of this pecuniary
+grade does not belong within the leisure class. It is rather that the
+leisure-class scheme of life here comes to an expression at the second
+remove. The leisure class stands at the head of the social structure in
+point of reputability; and its manner of life and its standards of
+worth therefore afford the norm of reputability for the community. The
+observance of these standards, in some degree of approximation, becomes
+incumbent upon all classes lower in the scale. In modern civilized
+communities the lines of demarcation between social classes have grown
+vague and transient, and wherever this happens the norm of reputability
+imposed by the upper class extends its coercive influence with but
+slight hindrance down through the social structure to the lowest strata.
+The result is that the members of each stratum accept as their ideal of
+decency the scheme of life in vogue in the next higher stratum, and bend
+their energies to live up to that ideal. On pain of forfeiting their
+good name and their self-respect in case of failure, they must conform
+to the accepted code, at least in appearance. The basis on which good
+repute in any highly organized industrial community ultimately rests is
+pecuniary strength; and the means of showing pecuniary strength, and
+so of gaining or retaining a good name, are leisure and a conspicuous
+consumption of goods. Accordingly, both of these methods are in vogue
+as far down the scale as it remains possible; and in the lower strata
+in which the two methods are employed, both offices are in great part
+delegated to the wife and children of the household. Lower still, where
+any degree of leisure, even ostensible, has become impracticable for the
+wife, the conspicuous consumption of goods remains and is carried on by
+the wife and children. The man of the household also can do something
+in this direction, and indeed, he commonly does; but with a still lower
+descent into the levels of indigence--along the margin of the slums--the
+man, and presently also the children, virtually cease to consume
+valuable goods for appearances, and the woman remains virtually the sole
+exponent of the household's pecuniary decency. No class of society,
+not even the most abjectly poor, forgoes all customary conspicuous
+consumption. The last items of this category of consumption are not
+given up except under stress of the direst necessity. Very much of
+squalor and discomfort will be endured before the last trinket or the
+last pretense of pecuniary decency is put away. There is no class and
+no country that has yielded so abjectly before the pressure of physical
+want as to deny themselves all gratification of this higher or spiritual
+need.
+
+From the foregoing survey of the growth of conspicuous leisure and
+consumption, it appears that the utility of both alike for the purposes
+of reputability lies in the element of waste that is common to both.
+In the one case it is a waste of time and effort, in the other it is
+a waste of goods. Both are methods of demonstrating the possession of
+wealth, and the two are conventionally accepted as equivalents. The
+choice between them is a question of advertising expediency simply,
+except so far as it may be affected by other standards of propriety,
+springing from a different source. On grounds of expediency the
+preference may be given to the one or the other at different stages of
+the economic development. The question is, which of the two methods will
+most effectively reach the persons whose convictions it is desired
+to affect. Usage has answered this question in different ways under
+different circumstances.
+
+So long as the community or social group is small enough and compact
+enough to be effectually reached by common notoriety alone that is
+to say, so long as the human environment to which the individual is
+required to adapt himself in respect of reputability is comprised within
+his sphere of personal acquaintance and neighborhood gossip--so long the
+one method is about as effective as the other. Each will therefore serve
+about equally well during the earlier stages of social growth. But when
+the differentiation has gone farther and it becomes necessary to reach
+a wider human environment, consumption begins to hold over leisure as
+an ordinary means of decency. This is especially true during the later,
+peaceable economic stage. The means of communication and the mobility
+of the population now expose the individual to the observation of many
+persons who have no other means of judging of his reputability than
+the display of goods (and perhaps of breeding) which he is able to make
+while he is under their direct observation.
+
+The modern organization of industry works in the same direction also by
+another line. The exigencies of the modern industrial system frequently
+place individuals and households in juxtaposition between whom there
+is little contact in any other sense than that of juxtaposition.
+One's neighbors, mechanically speaking, often are socially not one's
+neighbors, or even acquaintances; and still their transient good opinion
+has a high degree of utility. The only practicable means of impressing
+one's pecuniary ability on these unsympathetic observers of one's
+everyday life is an unremitting demonstration of ability to pay. In
+the modern community there is also a more frequent attendance at large
+gatherings of people to whom one's everyday life is unknown; in such
+places as churches, theaters, ballrooms, hotels, parks, shops, and the
+like. In order to impress these transient observers, and to retain
+one's self-complacency under their observation, the signature of one's
+pecuniary strength should be written in characters which he who runs
+may read. It is evident, therefore, that the present trend of
+the development is in the direction of heightening the utility of
+conspicuous consumption as compared with leisure.
+
+It is also noticeable that the serviceability of consumption as a means
+of repute, as well as the insistence on it as an element of decency, is
+at its best in those portions of the community where the human contact
+of the individual is widest and the mobility of the population is
+greatest. Conspicuous consumption claims a relatively larger portion of
+the income of the urban than of the rural population, and the claim is
+also more imperative. The result is that, in order to keep up a decent
+appearance, the former habitually live hand-to-mouth to a greater extent
+than the latter. So it comes, for instance, that the American farmer and
+his wife and daughters are notoriously less modish in their dress, as
+well as less urbane in their manners, than the city artisan's family
+with an equal income. It is not that the city population is by nature
+much more eager for the peculiar complacency that comes of a conspicuous
+consumption, nor has the rural population less regard for pecuniary
+decency. But the provocation to this line of evidence, as well as its
+transient effectiveness, is more decided in the city. This method is
+therefore more readily resorted to, and in the struggle to outdo one
+another the city population push their normal standard of conspicuous
+consumption to a higher point, with the result that a relatively greater
+expenditure in this direction is required to indicate a given degree
+of pecuniary decency in the city. The requirement of conformity to this
+higher conventional standard becomes mandatory. The standard of decency
+is higher, class for class, and this requirement of decent appearance
+must be lived up to on pain of losing caste.
+
+Consumption becomes a larger element in the standard of living in the
+city than in the country. Among the country population its place is to
+some extent taken by savings and home comforts known through the medium
+of neighborhood gossip sufficiently to serve the like general purpose of
+Pecuniary repute. These home comforts and the leisure indulged in--where
+the indulgence is found--are of course also in great part to be classed
+as items of conspicuous consumption; and much the same is to be said of
+the savings. The smaller amount of the savings laid by by the artisan
+class is no doubt due, in some measure, to the fact that in the case
+of the artisan the savings are a less effective means of advertisement,
+relative to the environment in which he is placed, than are the savings
+of the people living on farms and in the small villages. Among the
+latter, everybody's affairs, especially everybody's pecuniary status,
+are known to everybody else. Considered by itself simply--taken in the
+first degree--this added provocation to which the artisan and the urban
+laboring classes are exposed may not very seriously decrease the amount
+of savings; but in its cumulative action, through raising the standard
+of decent expenditure, its deterrent effect on the tendency to save
+cannot but be very great.
+
+A felicitous illustration of the manner in which this canon of
+reputability works out its results is seen in the practice of
+dram-drinking, "treating," and smoking in public places, which is
+customary among the laborers and handicraftsmen of the towns, and among
+the lower middle class of the urban population generally Journeymen
+printers may be named as a class among whom this form of conspicuous
+consumption has a great vogue, and among whom it carries with it certain
+well-marked consequences that are often deprecated. The peculiar habits
+of the class in this respect are commonly set down to some kind of an
+ill-defined moral deficiency with which this class is credited, or to
+a morally deleterious influence which their occupation is supposed to
+exert, in some unascertainable way, upon the men employed in it. The
+state of the case for the men who work in the composition and press
+rooms of the common run of printing-houses may be summed up as follows.
+Skill acquired in any printing-house or any city is easily turned to
+account in almost any other house or city; that is to say, the inertia
+due to special training is slight. Also, this occupation requires more
+than the average of intelligence and general information, and the men
+employed in it are therefore ordinarily more ready than many others to
+take advantage of any slight variation in the demand for their labor
+from one place to another. The inertia due to the home feeling is
+consequently also slight. At the same time the wages in the trade are
+high enough to make movement from place to place relatively easy. The
+result is a great mobility of the labor employed in printing; perhaps
+greater than in any other equally well-defined and considerable body of
+workmen. These men are constantly thrown in contact with new groups
+of acquaintances, with whom the relations established are transient or
+ephemeral, but whose good opinion is valued none the less for the time
+being. The human proclivity to ostentation, reenforced by sentiments of
+good-fellowship, leads them to spend freely in those directions which
+will best serve these needs. Here as elsewhere prescription seizes
+upon the custom as soon as it gains a vogue, and incorporates it in the
+accredited standard of decency. The next step is to make this standard
+of decency the point of departure for a new move in advance in the same
+direction--for there is no merit in simple spiritless conformity to a
+standard of dissipation that is lived up to as a matter of course by
+everyone in the trade.
+
+The greater prevalence of dissipation among printers than among the
+average of workmen is accordingly attributable, at least in some
+measure, to the greater ease of movement and the more transient
+character of acquaintance and human contact in this trade. But the
+substantial ground of this high requirement in dissipation is in the
+last analysis no other than that same propensity for a manifestation
+of dominance and pecuniary decency which makes the French
+peasant-proprietor parsimonious and frugal, and induces the American
+millionaire to found colleges, hospitals and museums. If the canon of
+conspicuous consumption were not offset to a considerable extent by
+other features of human nature, alien to it, any saving should logically
+be impossible for a population situated as the artisan and laboring
+classes of the cities are at present, however high their wages or their
+income might be.
+
+But there are other standards of repute and other, more or less
+imperative, canons of conduct, besides wealth and its manifestation, and
+some of these come in to accentuate or to qualify the broad, fundamental
+canon of conspicuous waste. Under the simple test of effectiveness
+for advertising, we should expect to find leisure and the conspicuous
+consumption of goods dividing the field of pecuniary emulation pretty
+evenly between them at the outset. Leisure might then be expected
+gradually to yield ground and tend to obsolescence as the economic
+development goes forward, and the community increases in size; while the
+conspicuous consumption of goods should gradually gain in importance,
+both absolutely and relatively, until it had absorbed all the available
+product, leaving nothing over beyond a bare livelihood. But the actual
+course of development has been somewhat different from this ideal
+scheme. Leisure held the first place at the start, and came to hold a
+rank very much above wasteful consumption of goods, both as a direct
+exponent of wealth and as an element in the standard of decency, during
+the quasi-peaceable culture. From that point onward, consumption has
+gained ground, until, at present, it unquestionably holds the primacy,
+though it is still far from absorbing the entire margin of production
+above the subsistence minimum.
+
+The early ascendency of leisure as a means of reputability is traceable
+to the archaic distinction between noble and ignoble employments.
+Leisure is honorable and becomes imperative partly because it shows
+exemption from ignoble labor. The archaic differentiation into noble and
+ignoble classes is based on an invidious distinction between employments
+as honorific or debasing; and this traditional distinction grows into an
+imperative canon of decency during the early quasi-peaceable stage.
+Its ascendency is furthered by the fact that leisure is still fully as
+effective an evidence of wealth as consumption. Indeed, so effective
+is it in the relatively small and stable human environment to which the
+individual is exposed at that cultural stage, that, with the aid of the
+archaic tradition which deprecates all productive labor, it gives rise
+to a large impecunious leisure class, and it even tends to limit the
+production of the community's industry to the subsistence minimum. This
+extreme inhibition of industry is avoided because slave labor, working
+under a compulsion more vigorous than that of reputability, is forced to
+turn out a product in excess of the subsistence minimum of the working
+class. The subsequent relative decline in the use of conspicuous
+leisure as a basis of repute is due partly to an increasing relative
+effectiveness of consumption as an evidence of wealth; but in part it is
+traceable to another force, alien, and in some degree antagonistic, to
+the usage of conspicuous waste.
+
+This alien factor is the instinct of workmanship. Other circumstances
+permitting, that instinct disposes men to look with favor upon
+productive efficiency and on whatever is of human use. It disposes them
+to deprecate waste of substance or effort. The instinct of workmanship
+is present in all men, and asserts itself even under very adverse
+circumstances. So that however wasteful a given expenditure may be in
+reality, it must at least have some colorable excuse in the way of an
+ostensible purpose. The manner in which, under special circumstances,
+the instinct eventuates in a taste for exploit and an invidious
+discrimination between noble and ignoble classes has been indicated in
+an earlier chapter. In so far as it comes into conflict with the law of
+conspicuous waste, the instinct of workmanship expresses itself not so
+much in insistence on substantial usefulness as in an abiding sense of
+the odiousness and aesthetic impossibility of what is obviously futile.
+Being of the nature of an instinctive affection, its guidance touches
+chiefly and immediately the obvious and apparent violations of its
+requirements. It is only less promptly and with less constraining force
+that it reaches such substantial violations of its requirements as are
+appreciated only upon reflection.
+
+So long as all labor continues to be performed exclusively or usually
+by slaves, the baseness of all productive effort is too constantly
+and deterrently present in the mind of men to allow the instinct of
+workmanship seriously to take effect in the direction of industrial
+usefulness; but when the quasi-peaceable stage (with slavery and status)
+passes into the peaceable stage of industry (with wage labor and cash
+payment) the instinct comes more effectively into play. It then begins
+aggressively to shape men's views of what is meritorious, and asserts
+itself at least as an auxiliary canon of self-complacency. All
+extraneous considerations apart, those persons (adult) are but a
+vanishing minority today who harbor no inclination to the accomplishment
+of some end, or who are not impelled of their own motion to shape some
+object or fact or relation for human use. The propensity may in large
+measure be overborne by the more immediately constraining incentive to a
+reputable leisure and an avoidance of indecorous usefulness, and it
+may therefore work itself out in make-believe only; as for instance
+in "social duties," and in quasi-artistic or quasi-scholarly
+accomplishments, in the care and decoration of the house, in
+sewing-circle activity or dress reform, in proficiency at dress, cards,
+yachting, golf, and various sports. But the fact that it may under
+stress of circumstances eventuate in inanities no more disproves the
+presence of the instinct than the reality of the brooding instinct is
+disproved by inducing a hen to sit on a nestful of china eggs.
+
+This latter-day uneasy reaching-out for some form of purposeful activity
+that shall at the same time not be indecorously productive of either
+individual or collective gain marks a difference of attitude between
+the modern leisure class and that of the quasi-peaceable stage. At the
+earlier stage, as was said above, the all-dominating institution
+of slavery and status acted resistlessly to discountenance exertion
+directed to other than naively predatory ends. It was still possible to
+find some habitual employment for the inclination to action in the way
+of forcible aggression or repression directed against hostile groups or
+against the subject classes within the group; and this served to relieve
+the pressure and draw off the energy of the leisure class without a
+resort to actually useful, or even ostensibly useful employments. The
+practice of hunting also served the same purpose in some degree. When the
+community developed into a peaceful industrial organization, and when
+fuller occupation of the land had reduced the opportunities for the hunt
+to an inconsiderable residue, the pressure of energy seeking purposeful
+employment was left to find an outlet in some other direction. The
+ignominy which attaches to useful effort also entered upon a less acute
+phase with the disappearance of compulsory labor; and the instinct
+of workmanship then came to assert itself with more persistence and
+consistency.
+
+The line of least resistance has changed in some measure, and the energy
+which formerly found a vent in predatory activity, now in part takes the
+direction of some ostensibly useful end. Ostensibly purposeless leisure
+has come to be deprecated, especially among that large portion of the
+leisure class whose plebeian origin acts to set them at variance with
+the tradition of the otium cum dignitate. But that canon of reputability
+which discountenances all employment that is of the nature of productive
+effort is still at hand, and will permit nothing beyond the most
+transient vogue to any employment that is substantially useful or
+productive. The consequence is that a change has been wrought in the
+conspicuous leisure practiced by the leisure class; not so much in
+substance as in form. A reconciliation between the two conflicting
+requirements is effected by a resort to make-believe. Many and intricate
+polite observances and social duties of a ceremonial nature are
+developed; many organizations are founded, with some specious object of
+amelioration embodied in their official style and title; there is much
+coming and going, and a deal of talk, to the end that the talkers may
+not have occasion to reflect on what is the effectual economic value of
+their traffic. And along with the make-believe of purposeful employment,
+and woven inextricably into its texture, there is commonly, if not
+invariably, a more or less appreciable element of purposeful effort
+directed to some serious end.
+
+In the narrower sphere of vicarious leisure a similar change has gone
+forward. Instead of simply passing her time in visible idleness, as in
+the best days of the patriarchal regime, the housewife of the advanced
+peaceable stage applies herself assiduously to household cares. The
+salient features of this development of domestic service have already
+been indicated. Throughout the entire evolution of conspicuous
+expenditure, whether of goods or of services or human life, runs the
+obvious implication that in order to effectually mend the consumer's
+good fame it must be an expenditure of superfluities. In order to
+be reputable it must be wasteful. No merit would accrue from the
+consumption of the bare necessaries of life, except by comparison with
+the abjectly poor who fall short even of the subsistence minimum; and no
+standard of expenditure could result from such a comparison, except the
+most prosaic and unattractive level of decency. A standard of life would
+still be possible which should admit of invidious comparison in other
+respects than that of opulence; as, for instance, a comparison
+in various directions in the manifestation of moral, physical,
+intellectual, or aesthetic force. Comparison in all these directions is
+in vogue today; and the comparison made in these respects is commonly
+so inextricably bound up with the pecuniary comparison as to be scarcely
+distinguishable from the latter. This is especially true as regards the
+current rating of expressions of intellectual and aesthetic force
+or proficiency' so that we frequently interpret as aesthetic or
+intellectual a difference which in substance is pecuniary only.
+
+The use of the term "waste" is in one respect an unfortunate one. As
+used in the speech of everyday life the word carries an undertone
+of deprecation. It is here used for want of a better term that will
+adequately describe the same range of motives and of phenomena, and
+it is not to be taken in an odious sense, as implying an illegitimate
+expenditure of human products or of human life. In the view of economic
+theory the expenditure in question is no more and no less legitimate
+than any other expenditure. It is here called "waste" because this
+expenditure does not serve human life or human well-being on the whole,
+not because it is waste or misdirection of effort or expenditure as
+viewed from the standpoint of the individual consumer who chooses it. If
+he chooses it, that disposes of the question of its relative utility
+to him, as compared with other forms of consumption that would not
+be deprecated on account of their wastefulness. Whatever form of
+expenditure the consumer chooses, or whatever end he seeks in making his
+choice, has utility to him by virtue of his preference. As seen from the
+point of view of the individual consumer, the question of wastefulness
+does not arise within the scope of economic theory proper. The use of
+the word "waste" as a technical term, therefore, implies no deprecation
+of the motives or of the ends sought by the consumer under this canon of
+conspicuous waste.
+
+But it is, on other grounds, worth noting that the term "waste" in the
+language of everyday life implies deprecation of what is characterized
+as wasteful. This common-sense implication is itself an outcropping of
+the instinct of workmanship. The popular reprobation of waste goes to
+say that in order to be at peace with himself the common man must
+be able to see in any and all human effort and human enjoyment an
+enhancement of life and well-being on the whole. In order to meet with
+unqualified approval, any economic fact must approve itself under the
+test of impersonal usefulness--usefulness as seen from the point of
+view of the generically human. Relative or competitive advantage of
+one individual in comparison with another does not satisfy the economic
+conscience, and therefore competitive expenditure has not the approval
+of this conscience.
+
+In strict accuracy nothing should be included under the head of
+conspicuous waste but such expenditure as is incurred on the ground of
+an invidious pecuniary comparison. But in order to bring any given item
+or element in under this head it is not necessary that it should
+be recognized as waste in this sense by the person incurring the
+expenditure. It frequently happens that an element of the standard of
+living which set out with being primarily wasteful, ends with becoming,
+in the apprehension of the consumer, a necessary of life; and it may
+in this way become as indispensable as any other item of the consumer's
+habitual expenditure. As items which sometimes fall under this head,
+and are therefore available as illustrations of the manner in which this
+principle applies, may be cited carpets and tapestries, silver table
+service, waiter's services, silk hats, starched linen, many articles
+of jewelry and of dress. The indispensability of these things after the
+habit and the convention have been formed, however, has little to say
+in the classification of expenditures as waste or not waste in the
+technical meaning of the word. The test to which all expenditure must
+be brought in an attempt to decide that point is the question whether it
+serves directly to enhance human life on the whole-whether it furthers
+the life process taken impersonally. For this is the basis of award of
+the instinct of workmanship, and that instinct is the court of final
+appeal in any question of economic truth or adequacy. It is a question
+as to the award rendered by a dispassionate common sense. The question
+is, therefore, not whether, under the existing circumstances of
+individual habit and social custom, a given expenditure conduces to the
+particular consumer's gratification or peace of mind; but whether,
+aside from acquired tastes and from the canons of usage and conventional
+decency, its result is a net gain in comfort or in the fullness of life.
+Customary expenditure must be classed under the head of waste in so far
+as the custom on which it rests is traceable to the habit of making
+an invidious pecuniary comparison-in so far as it is conceived that it
+could not have become customary and prescriptive without the backing of
+this principle of pecuniary reputability or relative economic success.
+It is obviously not necessary that a given object of expenditure should
+be exclusively wasteful in order to come in under the category of
+conspicuous waste. An article may be useful and wasteful both, and its
+utility to the consumer may be made up of use and waste in the most
+varying proportions. Consumable goods, and even productive goods,
+generally show the two elements in combination, as constituents of
+their utility; although, in a general way, the element of waste tends
+to predominate in articles of consumption, while the contrary is true of
+articles designed for productive use. Even in articles which appear at
+first glance to serve for pure ostentation only, it is always possible
+to detect the presence of some, at least ostensible, useful purpose;
+and on the other hand, even in special machinery and tools contrived for
+some particular industrial process, as well as in the rudest appliances
+of human industry, the traces of conspicuous waste, or at least of the
+habit of ostentation, usually become evident on a close scrutiny. It
+would be hazardous to assert that a useful purpose is ever absent from
+the utility of any article or of any service, however obviously its
+prime purpose and chief element is conspicuous waste; and it would be
+only less hazardous to assert of any primarily useful product that the
+element of waste is in no way concerned in its value, immediately or
+remotely.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Five ~~ The Pecuniary Standard of Living
+
+For the great body of the people in any modern community, the proximate
+ground of expenditure in excess of what is required for physical comfort
+is not a conscious effort to excel in the expensiveness of their visible
+consumption, so much as it is a desire to live up to the conventional
+standard of decency in the amount and grade of goods consumed. This
+desire is not guided by a rigidly invariable standard, which must be
+lived up to, and beyond which there is no incentive to go. The standard
+is flexible; and especially it is indefinitely extensible, if only time
+is allowed for habituation to any increase in pecuniary ability and
+for acquiring facility in the new and larger scale of expenditure that
+follows such an increase. It is much more difficult to recede from a
+scale of expenditure once adopted than it is to extend the accustomed
+scale in response to an accession of wealth. Many items of customary
+expenditure prove on analysis to be almost purely wasteful, and they
+are therefore honorific only, but after they have once been incorporated
+into the scale of decent consumption, and so have become an integral
+part of one's scheme of life, it is quite as hard to give up these as
+it is to give up many items that conduce directly to one's physical
+comfort, or even that may be necessary to life and health. That is
+to say, the conspicuously wasteful honorific expenditure that confers
+spiritual well-being may become more indispensable than much of that
+expenditure which ministers to the "lower" wants of physical well-being
+or sustenance only. It is notoriously just as difficult to recede from a
+"high" standard of living as it is to lower a standard which is already
+relatively low; although in the former case the difficulty is a moral
+one, while in the latter it may involve a material deduction from the
+physical comforts of life.
+
+But while retrogression is difficult, a fresh advance in conspicuous
+expenditure is relatively easy; indeed, it takes place almost as a
+matter of course. In the rare cases where it occurs, a failure to
+increase one's visible consumption when the means for an increase are
+at hand is felt in popular apprehension to call for explanation, and
+unworthy motives of miserliness are imputed to those who fall short in
+this respect. A prompt response to the stimulus, on the other hand,
+is accepted as the normal effect. This suggests that the standard
+of expenditure which commonly guides our efforts is not the average,
+ordinary expenditure already achieved; it is an ideal of consumption
+that lies just beyond our reach, or to reach which requires some strain.
+The motive is emulation--the stimulus of an invidious comparison which
+prompts us to outdo those with whom we are in the habit of classing
+ourselves. Substantially the same proposition is expressed in the
+commonplace remark that each class envies and emulates the class next
+above it in the social scale, while it rarely compares itself with those
+below or with those who are considerably in advance. That is to say, in
+other words, our standard of decency in expenditure, as in other ends of
+emulation, is set by the usage of those next above us in reputability;
+until, in this way, especially in any community where class distinctions
+are somewhat vague, all canons of reputability and decency, and all
+standards of consumption, are traced back by insensible gradations to
+the usages and habits of thought of the highest social and pecuniary
+class--the wealthy leisure class.
+
+It is for this class to determine, in general outline, what scheme of
+Life the community shall accept as decent or honorific; and it is
+their office by precept and example to set forth this scheme of social
+salvation in its highest, ideal form. But the higher leisure class
+can exercise this quasi-sacerdotal office only under certain material
+limitations. The class cannot at discretion effect a sudden revolution
+or reversal of the popular habits of thought with respect to any of
+these ceremonial requirements. It takes time for any change to permeate
+the mass and change the habitual attitude of the people; and especially
+it takes time to change the habits of those classes that are socially
+more remote from the radiant body. The process is slower where the
+mobility of the population is less or where the intervals between the
+several classes are wider and more abrupt. But if time be allowed, the
+scope of the discretion of the leisure class as regards questions of
+form and detail in the community's scheme of life is large; while as
+regards the substantial principles of reputability, the changes which
+it can effect lie within a narrow margin of tolerance. Its example and
+precept carries the force of prescription for all classes below it; but
+in working out the precepts which are handed down as governing the form
+and method of reputability--in shaping the usages and the spiritual
+attitude of the lower classes--this authoritative prescription
+constantly works under the selective guidance of the canon of
+conspicuous waste, tempered in varying degree by the instinct of
+workmanship. To those norms is to be added another broad principle of
+human nature--the predatory animus--which in point of generality and of
+psychological content lies between the two just named. The effect of the
+latter in shaping the accepted scheme of life is yet to be discussed.
+The canon of reputability, then, must adapt itself to the economic
+circumstances, the traditions, and the degree of spiritual maturity
+of the particular class whose scheme of life it is to regulate. It is
+especially to be noted that however high its authority and however true
+to the fundamental requirements of reputability it may have been at
+its inception, a specific formal observance can under no circumstances
+maintain itself in force if with the lapse of time or on its
+transmission to a lower pecuniary class it is found to run counter
+to the ultimate ground of decency among civilized peoples, namely,
+serviceability for the purpose of an invidious comparison in pecuniary
+success. It is evident that these canons of expenditure have much to
+say in determining the standard of living for any community and for any
+class. It is no less evident that the standard of living which prevails
+at any time or at any given social altitude will in its turn have much
+to say as to the forms which honorific expenditure will take, and as
+to the degree to which this "higher" need will dominate a people's
+consumption. In this respect the control exerted by the accepted
+standard of living is chiefly of a negative character; it acts almost
+solely to prevent recession from a scale of conspicuous expenditure that
+has once become habitual.
+
+A standard of living is of the nature of habit. It is an habitual scale
+and method of responding to given stimuli. The difficulty in the way
+of receding from an accustomed standard is the difficulty of breaking
+a habit that has once been formed. The relative facility with which an
+advance in the standard is made means that the life process is a process
+of unfolding activity and that it will readily unfold in a new direction
+whenever and wherever the resistance to self-expression decreases. But
+when the habit of expression along such a given line of low resistance
+has once been formed, the discharge will seek the accustomed outlet even
+after a change has taken place in the environment whereby the external
+resistance has appreciably risen. That heightened facility of expression
+in a given direction which is called habit may offset a considerable
+increase in the resistance offered by external circumstances to the
+unfolding of life in the given direction. As between the various habits,
+or habitual modes and directions of expression, which go to make up an
+individual's standard of living, there is an appreciable difference in
+point of persistence under counteracting circumstances and in point
+of the degree of imperativeness with which the discharge seeks a given
+direction.
+
+That is to say, in the language of current economic theory, while men
+are reluctant to retrench their expenditures in any direction, they are
+more reluctant to retrench in some directions than in others; so that
+while any accustomed consumption is reluctantly given up, there are
+certain lines of consumption which are given up with relatively extreme
+reluctance. The articles or forms of consumption to which the consumer
+clings with the greatest tenacity are commonly the so-called necessaries
+of life, or the subsistence minimum. The subsistence minimum is of
+course not a rigidly determined allowance of goods, definite and
+invariable in kind and quantity; but for the purpose in hand it may
+be taken to comprise a certain, more or less definite, aggregate of
+consumption required for the maintenance of life. This minimum, it
+may be assumed, is ordinarily given up last in case of a progressive
+retrenchment of expenditure. That is to say, in a general way, the
+most ancient and ingrained of the habits which govern the individual's
+life--those habits that touch his existence as an organism--are the
+most persistent and imperative. Beyond these come the higher
+wants--later-formed habits of the individual or the race--in a somewhat
+irregular and by no means invariable gradation. Some of these higher
+wants, as for instance the habitual use of certain stimulants, or the
+need of salvation (in the eschatological sense), or of good repute, may
+in some cases take precedence of the lower or more elementary wants. In
+general, the longer the habituation, the more unbroken the habit, and
+the more nearly it coincides with previous habitual forms of the life
+process, the more persistently will the given habit assert itself. The
+habit will be stronger if the particular traits of human nature which
+its action involves, or the particular aptitudes that find exercise
+in it, are traits or aptitudes that are already largely and profoundly
+concerned in the life process or that are intimately bound up with the
+life history of the particular racial stock. The varying degrees of ease
+with which different habits are formed by different persons, as well as
+the varying degrees of reluctance with which different habits are given
+up, goes to say that the formation of specific habits is not a matter
+of length of habituation simply. Inherited aptitudes and traits of
+temperament count for quite as much as length of habituation in deciding
+what range of habits will come to dominate any individual's scheme of
+life. And the prevalent type of transmitted aptitudes, or in other words
+the type of temperament belonging to the dominant ethnic element in
+any community, will go far to decide what will be the scope and form
+of expression of the community's habitual life process. How greatly the
+transmitted idiosyncrasies of aptitude may count in the way of a rapid
+and definitive formation of habit in individuals is illustrated by the
+extreme facility with which an all-dominating habit of alcoholism
+is sometimes formed; or in the similar facility and the similarly
+inevitable formation of a habit of devout observances in the case of
+persons gifted with a special aptitude in that direction. Much the same
+meaning attaches to that peculiar facility of habituation to a specific
+human environment that is called romantic love.
+
+Men differ in respect of transmitted aptitudes, or in respect of
+the relative facility with which they unfold their life activity in
+particular directions; and the habits which coincide with or proceed
+upon a relatively strong specific aptitude or a relatively great
+specific facility of expression become of great consequence to the man's
+well-being. The part played by this element of aptitude in determining
+the relative tenacity of the several habits which constitute the
+standard of living goes to explain the extreme reluctance with which men
+give up any habitual expenditure in the way of conspicuous consumption.
+The aptitudes or propensities to which a habit of this kind is to be
+referred as its ground are those aptitudes whose exercise is comprised
+in emulation; and the propensity for emulation--for invidious
+comparison--is of ancient growth and is a pervading trait of human
+nature. It is easily called into vigorous activity in any new form, and
+it asserts itself with great insistence under any form under which it
+has once found habitual expression. When the individual has once
+formed the habit of seeking expression in a given line of honorific
+expenditure--when a given set of stimuli have come to be habitually
+responded to in activity of a given kind and direction under the
+guidance of these alert and deep-reaching propensities of emulation--it
+is with extreme reluctance that such an habitual expenditure is given
+up. And on the other hand, whenever an accession of pecuniary strength
+puts the individual in a position to unfold his life process in larger
+scope and with additional reach, the ancient propensities of the race
+will assert themselves in determining the direction which the new
+unfolding of life is to take. And those propensities which are already
+actively in the field under some related form of expression, which are
+aided by the pointed suggestions afforded by a current accredited
+scheme of life, and for the exercise of which the material means and
+opportunities are readily available--these will especially have much to
+say in shaping the form and direction in which the new accession to
+the individual's aggregate force will assert itself. That is to say,
+in concrete terms, in any community where conspicuous consumption is an
+element of the scheme of life, an increase in an individual's ability
+to pay is likely to take the form of an expenditure for some accredited
+line of conspicuous consumption.
+
+With the exception of the instinct of self-preservation, the propensity
+for emulation is probably the strongest and most alert and persistent of
+the economic motives proper. In an industrial community this propensity
+for emulation expresses itself in pecuniary emulation; and this, so
+far as regards the Western civilized communities of the present, is
+virtually equivalent to saying that it expresses itself in some form
+of conspicuous waste. The need of conspicuous waste, therefore, stands
+ready to absorb any increase in the community's industrial efficiency
+or output of goods, after the most elementary physical wants have
+been provided for. Where this result does not follow, under modern
+conditions, the reason for the discrepancy is commonly to be sought in
+a rate of increase in the individual's wealth too rapid for the habit of
+expenditure to keep abreast of it; or it may be that the individual in
+question defers the conspicuous consumption of the increment to a later
+date--ordinarily with a view to heightening the spectacular effect
+of the aggregate expenditure contemplated. As increased industrial
+efficiency makes it possible to procure the means of livelihood with
+less labor, the energies of the industrious members of the community are
+bent to the compassing of a higher result in conspicuous expenditure,
+rather than slackened to a more comfortable pace. The strain is not
+lightened as industrial efficiency increases and makes a lighter strain
+possible, but the increment of output is turned to use to meet this
+want, which is indefinitely expansible, after the manner commonly
+imputed in economic theory to higher or spiritual wants. It is owing
+chiefly to the presence of this element in the standard of living that
+J. S. Mill was able to say that "hitherto it is questionable if all
+the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any
+human being." The accepted standard of expenditure in the community
+or in the class to which a person belongs largely determines what his
+standard of living will be. It does this directly by commending
+itself to his common sense as right and good, through his habitually
+contemplating it and assimilating the scheme of life in which it
+belongs; but it does so also indirectly through popular insistence
+on conformity to the accepted scale of expenditure as a matter of
+propriety, under pain of disesteem and ostracism. To accept and
+practice the standard of living which is in vogue is both agreeable
+and expedient, commonly to the point of being indispensable to personal
+comfort and to success in life. The standard of living of any class, so
+far as concerns the element of conspicuous waste, is commonly as high as
+the earning capacity of the class will permit--with a constant tendency
+to go higher. The effect upon the serious activities of men is therefore
+to direct them with great singleness of purpose to the largest possible
+acquisition of wealth, and to discountenance work that brings no
+pecuniary gain. At the same time the effect on consumption is to
+concentrate it upon the lines which are most patent to the observers
+whose good opinion is sought; while the inclinations and aptitudes whose
+exercise does not involve a honorific expenditure of time or substance
+tend to fall into abeyance through disuse.
+
+Through this discrimination in favor of visible consumption it has come
+about that the domestic life of most classes is relatively shabby, as
+compared with the eclat of that overt portion of their life that is
+carried on before the eyes of observers. As a secondary consequence of
+the same discrimination, people habitually screen their private life
+from observation. So far as concerns that portion of their consumption
+that may without blame be carried on in secret, they withdraw from all
+contact with their neighbors, hence the exclusiveness of people, as
+regards their domestic life, in most of the industrially developed
+communities; and hence, by remoter derivation, the habit of privacy and
+reserve that is so large a feature in the code of proprieties of the
+better class in all communities. The low birthrate of the classes upon
+whom the requirements of reputable expenditure fall with great urgency
+is likewise traceable to the exigencies of a standard of living based
+on conspicuous waste. The conspicuous consumption, and the consequent
+increased expense, required in the reputable maintenance of a child is
+very considerable and acts as a powerful deterrent. It is probably the
+most effectual of the Malthusian prudential checks.
+
+The effect of this factor of the standard of living, both in the way of
+retrenchment in the obscurer elements of consumption that go to physical
+comfort and maintenance, and also in the paucity or absence of children,
+is perhaps seen at its best among the classes given to scholarly
+pursuits. Because of a presumed superiority and scarcity of the gifts
+and attainments that characterize their life, these classes are by
+convention subsumed under a higher social grade than their pecuniary
+grade should warrant. The scale of decent expenditure in their case
+is pitched correspondingly high, and it consequently leaves an
+exceptionally narrow margin disposable for the other ends of life. By
+force of circumstances, their habitual sense of what is good and right
+in these matters, as well as the expectations of the community in the
+way of pecuniary decency among the learned, are excessively high--as
+measured by the prevalent degree of opulence and earning capacity of the
+class, relatively to the non-scholarly classes whose social equals
+they nominally are. In any modern community where there is no priestly
+monopoly of these occupations, the people of scholarly pursuits are
+unavoidably thrown into contact with classes that are pecuniarily their
+superiors. The high standard of pecuniary decency in force among these
+superior classes is transfused among the scholarly classes with but
+little mitigation of its rigor; and as a consequence there is no class
+of the community that spends a larger proportion of its substance in
+conspicuous waste than these.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Six ~~ Pecuniary Canons of Taste
+
+The caution has already been repeated more than once, that while the
+regulating norm of consumption is in large part the requirement of
+conspicuous waste, it must not be understood that the motive on which
+the consumer acts in any given case is this principle in its bald,
+unsophisticated form. Ordinarily his motive is a wish to conform to
+established usage, to avoid unfavorable notice and comment, to live
+up to the accepted canons of decency in the kind, amount, and grade of
+goods consumed, as well as in the decorous employment of his time and
+effort. In the common run of cases this sense of prescriptive usage is
+present in the motives of the consumer and exerts a direct constraining
+force, especially as regards consumption carried on under the eyes of
+observers. But a considerable element of prescriptive expensiveness is
+observable also in consumption that does not in any appreciable degree
+become known to outsiders--as, for instance, articles of underclothing,
+some articles of food, kitchen utensils, and other household apparatus
+designed for service rather than for evidence. In all such useful
+articles a close scrutiny will discover certain features which add to
+the cost and enhance the commercial value of the goods in question, but
+do not proportionately increase the serviceability of these articles for
+the material purposes which alone they ostensibly are designed to serve.
+
+Under the selective surveillance of the law of conspicuous waste there
+grows up a code of accredited canons of consumption, the effect of
+which is to hold the consumer up to a standard of expensiveness and
+wastefulness in his consumption of goods and in his employment of time
+and effort. This growth of prescriptive usage has an immediate effect
+upon economic life, but it has also an indirect and remoter effect upon
+conduct in other respects as well. Habits of thought with respect to
+the expression of life in any given direction unavoidably affect the
+habitual view of what is good and right in life in other directions
+also. In the organic complex of habits of thought which make up the
+substance of an individual's conscious life the economic interest does
+not lie isolated and distinct from all other interests. Something,
+for instance, has already been said of its relation to the canons of
+reputability.
+
+The principle of conspicuous waste guides the formation of habits of
+thought as to what is honest and reputable in life and in commodities.
+In so doing, this principle will traverse other norms of conduct which
+do not primarily have to do with the code of pecuniary honor, but
+which have, directly or incidentally, an economic significance of some
+magnitude. So the canon of honorific waste may, immediately or remotely,
+influence the sense of duty, the sense of beauty, the sense of utility,
+the sense of devotional or ritualistic fitness, and the scientific sense
+of truth.
+
+It is scarcely necessary to go into a discussion here of the particular
+points at which, or the particular manner in which, the canon of
+honorific expenditure habitually traverses the canons of moral conduct.
+The matter is one which has received large attention and illustration at
+the hands of those whose office it is to watch and admonish with
+respect to any departures from the accepted code of morals. In modern
+communities, where the dominant economic and legal feature of the
+community's life is the institution of private property, one of the
+salient features of the code of morals is the sacredness of property.
+There needs no insistence or illustration to gain assent to the
+proposition that the habit of holding private property inviolate is
+traversed by the other habit of seeking wealth for the sake of the good
+repute to be gained through its conspicuous consumption. Most offenses
+against property, especially offenses of an appreciable magnitude, come
+under this head. It is also a matter of common notoriety and byword
+that in offenses which result in a large accession of property to the
+offender he does not ordinarily incur the extreme penalty or the extreme
+obloquy with which his offenses would be visited on the ground of the
+naive moral code alone. The thief or swindler who has gained great
+wealth by his delinquency has a better chance than the small thief of
+escaping the rigorous penalty of the law and some good repute accrues
+to him from his increased wealth and from his spending the irregularly
+acquired possessions in a seemly manner. A well-bred expenditure of his
+booty especially appeals with great effect to persons of a cultivated
+sense of the proprieties, and goes far to mitigate the sense of moral
+turpitude with which his dereliction is viewed by them. It may be noted
+also--and it is more immediately to the point--that we are all inclined
+to condone an offense against property in the case of a man whose motive
+is the worthy one of providing the means of a "decent" manner of
+life for his wife and children. If it is added that the wife has been
+"nurtured in the lap of luxury," that is accepted as an additional
+extenuating circumstance. That is to say, we are prone to condone such
+an offense where its aim is the honorific one of enabling the offender's
+wife to perform for him such an amount of vicarious consumption of time
+and substance as is demanded by the standard of pecuniary decency. In
+such a case the habit of approving the accustomed degree of conspicuous
+waste traverses the habit of deprecating violations of ownership, to the
+extent even of sometimes leaving the award of praise or blame uncertain.
+This is peculiarly true where the dereliction involves an appreciable
+predatory or piratical element.
+
+This topic need scarcely be pursued further here; but the remark may not
+be out of place that all that considerable body of morals that clusters
+about the concept of an inviolable ownership is itself a psychological
+precipitate of the traditional meritoriousness of wealth. And it should
+be added that this wealth which is held sacred is valued primarily
+for the sake of the good repute to be got through its conspicuous
+consumption. The bearing of pecuniary decency upon the scientific spirit
+or the quest of knowledge will be taken up in some detail in a separate
+chapter. Also as regards the sense of devout or ritual merit and
+adequacy in this connection, little need be said in this place. That
+topic will also come up incidentally in a later chapter. Still, this
+usage of honorific expenditure has much to say in shaping popular tastes
+as to what is right and meritorious in sacred matters, and the bearing
+of the principle of conspicuous waste upon some of the commonplace
+devout observances and conceits may therefore be pointed out.
+
+Obviously, the canon of conspicuous waste is accountable for a great
+portion of what may be called devout consumption; as, e.g., the
+consumption of sacred edifices, vestments, and other goods of the same
+class. Even in those modern cults to whose divinities is imputed a
+predilection for temples not built with hands, the sacred buildings and
+the other properties of the cult are constructed and decorated with some
+view to a reputable degree of wasteful expenditure. And it needs but
+little either of observation or introspection--and either will serve the
+turn--to assure us that the expensive splendor of the house of worship
+has an appreciable uplifting and mellowing effect upon the worshipper's
+frame of mind. It will serve to enforce the same fact if we reflect upon
+the sense of abject shamefulness with which any evidence of indigence or
+squalor about the sacred place affects all beholders. The accessories
+of any devout observance should be pecuniarily above reproach. This
+requirement is imperative, whatever latitude may be allowed with regard
+to these accessories in point of aesthetic or other serviceability. It
+may also be in place to notice that in all communities, especially in
+neighborhoods where the standard of pecuniary decency for dwellings
+is not high, the local sanctuary is more ornate, more conspicuously
+wasteful in its architecture and decoration, than the dwelling houses
+of the congregation. This is true of nearly all denominations and cults,
+whether Christian or Pagan, but it is true in a peculiar degree of
+the older and maturer cults. At the same time the sanctuary commonly
+contributes little if anything to the physical comfort of the members.
+Indeed, the sacred structure not only serves the physical well-being
+of the members to but a slight extent, as compared with their humbler
+dwelling-houses; but it is felt by all men that a right and enlightened
+sense of the true, the beautiful, and the good demands that in all
+expenditure on the sanctuary anything that might serve the comfort of
+the worshipper should be conspicuously absent. If any element of comfort
+is admitted in the fittings of the sanctuary, it should be at least
+scrupulously screened and masked under an ostensible austerity. In the
+most reputable latter-day houses of worship, where no expense is spared,
+the principle of austerity is carried to the length of making the
+fittings of the place a means of mortifying the flesh, especially in
+appearance. There are few persons of delicate tastes, in the matter of
+devout consumption to whom this austerely wasteful discomfort does not
+appeal as intrinsically right and good. Devout consumption is of the
+nature of vicarious consumption. This canon of devout austerity is based
+on the pecuniary reputability of conspicuously wasteful consumption,
+backed by the principle that vicarious consumption should conspicuously
+not conduce to the comfort of the vicarious consumer.
+
+The sanctuary and its fittings have something of this austerity in all
+the cults in which the saint or divinity to whom the sanctuary pertains
+is not conceived to be present and make personal use of the property for
+the gratification of luxurious tastes imputed to him. The character of
+the sacred paraphernalia is somewhat different in this respect in those
+cults where the habits of life imputed to the divinity more nearly
+approach those of an earthly patriarchal potentate--where he is
+conceived to make use of these consumable goods in person. In the latter
+case the sanctuary and its fittings take on more of the fashion given to
+goods destined for the conspicuous consumption of a temporal master or
+owner. On the other hand, where the sacred apparatus is simply employed
+in the divinity's service, that is to say, where it is consumed
+vicariously on his account by his servants, there the sacred properties
+take the character suited to goods that are destined for vicarious
+consumption only.
+
+In the latter case the sanctuary and the sacred apparatus are so
+contrived as not to enhance the comfort or fullness of life of the
+vicarious consumer, or at any rate not to convey the impression that
+the end of their consumption is the consumer's comfort. For the end of
+vicarious consumption is to enhance, not the fullness of life of the
+consumer, but the pecuniary repute of the master for whose behoof the
+consumption takes place. Therefore priestly vestments are notoriously
+expensive, ornate, and inconvenient; and in the cults where the priestly
+servitor of the divinity is not conceived to serve him in the capacity
+of consort, they are of an austere, comfortless fashion. And such it is
+felt that they should be.
+
+It is not only in establishing a devout standard of decent expensiveness
+that the principle of waste invades the domain of the canons of ritual
+serviceability. It touches the ways as well as the means, and draws on
+vicarious leisure as well as on vicarious consumption. Priestly demeanor
+at its best is aloof, leisurely, perfunctory, and uncontaminated with
+suggestions of sensuous pleasure. This holds true, in different degrees
+of course, for the different cults and denominations; but in the
+priestly life of all anthropomorphic cults the marks of a vicarious
+consumption of time are visible.
+
+The same pervading canon of vicarious leisure is also visibly present in
+the exterior details of devout observances and need only be pointed out
+in order to become obvious to all beholders. All ritual has a notable
+tendency to reduce itself to a rehearsal of formulas. This development
+of formula is most noticeable in the maturer cults, which have at the
+same time a more austere, ornate, and severe priestly life and garb; but
+it is perceptible also in the forms and methods of worship of the newer
+and fresher sects, whose tastes in respect of priests, vestments, and
+sanctuaries are less exacting. The rehearsal of the service (the term
+"service" carries a suggestion significant for the point in question)
+grows more perfunctory as the cult gains in age and consistency, and
+this perfunctoriness of the rehearsal is very pleasing to the correct
+devout taste. And with a good reason, for the fact of its being
+perfunctory goes to say pointedly that the master for whom it is
+performed is exalted above the vulgar need of actually proficuous
+service on the part of his servants. They are unprofitable servants, and
+there is an honorific implication for their master in their remaining
+unprofitable. It is needless to point out the close analogy at this
+point between the priestly office and the office of the footman. It is
+pleasing to our sense of what is fitting in these matters, in either
+case, to recognize in the obvious perfunctoriness of the service that it
+is a pro forma execution only. There should be no show of agility or of
+dexterous manipulation in the execution of the priestly office, such as
+might suggest a capacity for turning off the work.
+
+In all this there is of course an obvious implication as to the
+temperament, tastes, propensities, and habits of life imputed to the
+divinity by worshippers who live under the tradition of these pecuniary
+canons of reputability. Through its pervading men's habits of thought,
+the principle of conspicuous waste has colored the worshippers' notions
+of the divinity and of the relation in which the human subject stands
+to him. It is of course in the more naive cults that this suffusion
+of pecuniary beauty is most patent, but it is visible throughout. All
+peoples, at whatever stage of culture or degree of enlightenment, are
+fain to eke out a sensibly scant degree of authentic formation regarding
+the personality and habitual surroundings of their divinities. In so
+calling in the aid of fancy to enrich and fill in their picture of the
+divinity's presence and manner of life they habitually impute to him
+such traits as go to make up their ideal of a worthy man. And in
+seeking communion with the divinity the ways and means of approach are
+assimilated as nearly as may be to the divine ideal that is in men's
+minds at the time. It is felt that the divine presence is entered with
+the best grace, and with the best effect, according to certain accepted
+methods and with the accompaniment of certain material circumstances
+which in popular apprehension are peculiarly consonant with the divine
+nature. This popularly accepted ideal of the bearing and paraphernalia
+adequate to such occasions of communion is, of course, to a good extent
+shaped by the popular apprehension of what is intrinsically worthy
+and beautiful in human carriage and surroundings on all occasions of
+dignified intercourse. It would on this account be misleading to
+attempt an analysis of devout demeanor by referring all evidences of
+the presence of a pecuniary standard of reputability back directly and
+baldly to the underlying norm of pecuniary emulation. So it would also
+be misleading to ascribe to the divinity, as popularly conceived, a
+jealous regard for his pecuniary standing and a habit of avoiding and
+condemning squalid situations and surroundings simply because they are
+under grade in the pecuniary respect.
+
+And still, after all allowance has been made, it appears that the canons
+of pecuniary reputability do, directly or indirectly, materially affect
+our notions of the attributes of divinity, as well as our notions
+of what are the fit and adequate manner and circumstances of divine
+communion. It is felt that the divinity must be of a peculiarly serene
+and leisurely habit of life. And whenever his local habitation is
+pictured in poetic imagery, for edification or in appeal to the devout
+fancy, the devout word-painter, as a matter of course, brings out before
+his auditors' imagination a throne with a profusion of the insignia of
+opulence and power, and surrounded by a great number of servitors. In
+the common run of such presentations of the celestial abodes, the office
+of this corps of servants is a vicarious leisure, their time and efforts
+being in great measure taken up with an industrially unproductive
+rehearsal of the meritorious characteristics and exploits of the
+divinity; while the background of the presentation is filled with the
+shimmer of the precious metals and of the more expensive varieties of
+precious stones. It is only in the crasser expressions of devout fancy
+that this intrusion of pecuniary canons into the devout ideals reaches
+such an extreme. An extreme case occurs in the devout imagery of the
+Negro population of the South. Their word-painters are unable to descend
+to anything cheaper than gold; so that in this case the insistence on
+pecuniary beauty gives a startling effect in yellow--such as would be
+unbearable to a soberer taste. Still, there is probably no cult in which
+ideals of pecuniary merit have not been called in to supplement the
+ideals of ceremonial adequacy that guide men's conception of what is
+right in the matter of sacred apparatus.
+
+Similarly it is felt--and the sentiment is acted upon--that the priestly
+servitors of the divinity should not engage in industrially productive
+work; that work of any kind--any employment which is of tangible human
+use--must not be carried on in the divine presence, or within the
+precincts of the sanctuary; that whoever comes into the presence should
+come cleansed of all profane industrial features in his apparel
+or person, and should come clad in garments of more than everyday
+expensiveness; that on holidays set apart in honor of or for communion
+with the divinity no work that is of human use should be performed by
+any one. Even the remoter, lay dependents should render a vicarious
+leisure to the extent of one day in seven. In all these deliverances of
+men's uninstructed sense of what is fit and proper in devout observance
+and in the relations of the divinity, the effectual presence of the
+canons of pecuniary reputability is obvious enough, whether these canons
+have had their effect on the devout judgment in this respect immediately
+or at the second remove.
+
+These canons of reputability have had a similar, but more far-reaching
+and more specifically determinable, effect upon the popular sense
+of beauty or serviceability in consumable goods. The requirements of
+pecuniary decency have, to a very appreciable extent, influenced the
+sense of beauty and of utility in articles of use or beauty.
+Articles are to an extent preferred for use on account of their being
+conspicuously wasteful; they are felt to be serviceable somewhat in
+proportion as they are wasteful and ill adapted to their ostensible use.
+
+The utility of articles valued for their beauty depends closely upon the
+expensiveness of the articles. A homely illustration will bring out this
+dependence. A hand-wrought silver spoon, of a commercial value of some
+ten to twenty dollars, is not ordinarily more serviceable--in the first
+sense of the word--than a machine-made spoon of the same material.
+It may not even be more serviceable than a machine-made spoon of some
+"base" metal, such as aluminum, the value of which may be no more than
+some ten to twenty cents. The former of the two utensils is, in fact,
+commonly a less effective contrivance for its ostensible purpose than
+the latter. The objection is of course ready to hand that, in taking
+this view of the matter, one of the chief uses, if not the chief use,
+of the costlier spoon is ignored; the hand-wrought spoon gratifies our
+taste, our sense of the beautiful, while that made by machinery out of
+the base metal has no useful office beyond a brute efficiency. The facts
+are no doubt as the objection states them, but it will be evident
+on rejection that the objection is after all more plausible than
+conclusive. It appears (1) that while the different materials of which
+the two spoons are made each possesses beauty and serviceability for the
+purpose for which it is used, the material of the hand-wrought spoon is
+some one hundred times more valuable than the baser metal, without very
+greatly excelling the latter in intrinsic beauty of grain or color, and
+without being in any appreciable degree superior in point of mechanical
+serviceability; (2) if a close inspection should show that the supposed
+hand-wrought spoon were in reality only a very clever citation of
+hand-wrought goods, but an imitation so cleverly wrought as to give the
+same impression of line and surface to any but a minute examination by
+a trained eye, the utility of the article, including the gratification
+which the user derives from its contemplation as an object of beauty,
+would immediately decline by some eighty or ninety per cent, or even
+more; (3) if the two spoons are, to a fairly close observer, so nearly
+identical in appearance that the lighter weight of the spurious article
+alone betrays it, this identity of form and color will scarcely add
+to the value of the machine-made spoon, nor appreciably enhance the
+gratification of the user's "sense of beauty" in contemplating it, so
+long as the cheaper spoon is not a novelty, ad so long as it can be
+procured at a nominal cost. The case of the spoons is typical. The
+superior gratification derived from the use and contemplation of costly
+and supposedly beautiful products is, commonly, in great measure a
+gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name
+of beauty. Our higher appreciation of the superior article is an
+appreciation of its superior honorific character, much more frequently
+than it is an unsophisticated appreciation of its beauty. The
+requirement of conspicuous wastefulness is not commonly present,
+consciously, in our canons of taste, but it is none the less present as
+a constraining norm selectively shaping and sustaining our sense of what
+is beautiful, and guiding our discrimination with respect to what may
+legitimately be approved as beautiful and what may not.
+
+It is at this point, where the beautiful and the honorific meet and
+blend, that a discrimination between serviceability and wastefulness
+is most difficult in any concrete case. It frequently happens that an
+article which serves the honorific purpose of conspicuous waste is at
+the same time a beautiful object; and the same application of labor to
+which it owes its utility for the former purpose may, and often does,
+give beauty of form and color to the article. The question is further
+complicated by the fact that many objects, as, for instance, the
+precious stones and the metals and some other materials used for
+adornment and decoration, owe their utility as items of conspicuous
+waste to an antecedent utility as objects of beauty. Gold, for instance,
+has a high degree of sensuous beauty very many if not most of the highly
+prized works of art are intrinsically beautiful, though often with
+material qualification; the like is true of some stuffs used for
+clothing, of some landscapes, and of many other things in less degree.
+Except for this intrinsic beauty which they possess, these objects
+would scarcely have been coveted as they are, or have become monopolized
+objects of pride to their possessors and users. But the utility of these
+things to the possessor is commonly due less to their intrinsic beauty
+than to the honor which their possession and consumption confers, or to
+the obloquy which it wards off.
+
+Apart from their serviceability in other respects, these objects are
+beautiful and have a utility as such; they are valuable on this account
+if they can be appropriated or monopolized; they are, therefore, coveted
+as valuable possessions, and their exclusive enjoyment gratifies the
+possessor's sense of pecuniary superiority at the same time that their
+contemplation gratifies his sense of beauty. But their beauty, in the
+naive sense of the word, is the occasion rather than the ground of their
+monopolization or of their commercial value. "Great as is the sensuous
+beauty of gems, their rarity and price adds an expression of distinction
+to them, which they would never have if they were cheap." There is,
+indeed, in the common run of cases under this head, relatively little
+incentive to the exclusive possession and use of these beautiful
+things, except on the ground of their honorific character as items of
+conspicuous waste. Most objects of this general class, with the partial
+exception of articles of personal adornment, would serve all other
+purposes than the honorific one equally well, whether owned by the
+person viewing them or not; and even as regards personal ornaments it is
+to be added that their chief purpose is to lend eclat to the person
+of their wearer (or owner) by comparison with other persons who are
+compelled to do without. The aesthetic serviceability of objects of
+beauty is not greatly nor universally heightened by possession.
+
+The generalization for which the discussion so far affords ground is
+that any valuable object in order to appeal to our sense of beauty must
+conform to the requirements of beauty and of expensiveness both. But
+this is not all. Beyond this the canon of expensiveness also affects
+our tastes in such a way as to inextricably blend the marks of
+expensiveness, in our appreciation, with the beautiful features of
+the object, and to subsume the resultant effect under the head of an
+appreciation of beauty simply. The marks of expensiveness come to be
+accepted as beautiful features of the expensive articles. They are
+pleasing as being marks of honorific costliness, and the pleasure which
+they afford on this score blends with that afforded by the beautiful
+form and color of the object; so that we often declare that an article
+of apparel, for instance, is "perfectly lovely," when pretty much all
+that an analysis of the aesthetic value of the article would leave
+ground for is the declaration that it is pecuniarily honorific.
+
+This blending and confusion of the elements of expensiveness and
+of beauty is, perhaps, best exemplified in articles of dress and of
+household furniture. The code of reputability in matters of dress
+decides what shapes, colors, materials, and general effects in human
+apparel are for the time to be accepted as suitable; and departures from
+the code are offensive to our taste, supposedly as being departures from
+aesthetic truth. The approval with which we look upon fashionable attire
+is by no means to be accounted pure make-believe. We readily, and for
+the most part with utter sincerity, find those things pleasing that
+are in vogue. Shaggy dress-stuffs and pronounced color effects, for
+instance, offend us at times when the vogue is goods of a high,
+glossy finish and neutral colors. A fancy bonnet of this year's model
+unquestionably appeals to our sensibilities today much more forcibly
+than an equally fancy bonnet of the model of last year; although
+when viewed in the perspective of a quarter of a century, it would, I
+apprehend, be a matter of the utmost difficulty to award the palm
+for intrinsic beauty to the one rather than to the other of these
+structures. So, again, it may be remarked that, considered simply in
+their physical juxtaposition with the human form, the high gloss of a
+gentleman's hat or of a patent-leather shoe has no more of intrinsic
+beauty than a similarly high gloss on a threadbare sleeve; and yet
+there is no question but that all well-bred people (in the Occidental
+civilized communities) instinctively and unaffectedly cleave to the one
+as a phenomenon of great beauty, and eschew the other as offensive to
+every sense to which it can appeal. It is extremely doubtful if any one
+could be induced to wear such a contrivance as the high hat of civilized
+society, except for some urgent reason based on other than aesthetic
+grounds.
+
+By further habituation to an appreciative perception of the marks
+of expensiveness in goods, and by habitually identifying beauty with
+reputability, it comes about that a beautiful article which is not
+expensive is accounted not beautiful. In this way it has happened, for
+instance, that some beautiful flowers pass conventionally for offensive
+weeds; others that can be cultivated with relative ease are accepted
+and admired by the lower middle class, who can afford no more expensive
+luxuries of this kind; but these varieties are rejected as vulgar by
+those people who are better able to pay for expensive flowers and who
+are educated to a higher schedule of pecuniary beauty in the florist's
+products; while still other flowers, of no greater intrinsic beauty than
+these, are cultivated at great cost and call out much admiration from
+flower-lovers whose tastes have been matured under the critical guidance
+of a polite environment.
+
+The same variation in matters of taste, from one class of society to
+another, is visible also as regards many other kinds of consumable
+goods, as, for example, is the case with furniture, houses, parks,
+and gardens. This diversity of views as to what is beautiful in these
+various classes of goods is not a diversity of the norm according to
+which the unsophisticated sense of the beautiful works. It is not a
+constitutional difference of endowments in the aesthetic respect, but
+rather a difference in the code of reputability which specifies what
+objects properly lie within the scope of honorific consumption for the
+class to which the critic belongs. It is a difference in the traditions
+of propriety with respect to the kinds of things which may, without
+derogation to the consumer, be consumed under the head of objects of
+taste and art. With a certain allowance for variations to be accounted
+for on other grounds, these traditions are determined, more or less
+rigidly, by the pecuniary plane of life of the class.
+
+Everyday life affords many curious illustrations of the way in which the
+code of pecuniary beauty in articles of use varies from class to class,
+as well as of the way in which the conventional sense of beauty departs
+in its deliverances from the sense untutored by the requirements of
+pecuniary repute. Such a fact is the lawn, or the close-cropped yard or
+park, which appeals so unaffectedly to the taste of the Western peoples.
+It appears especially to appeal to the tastes of the well-to-do classes
+in those communities in which the dolicho-blond element predominates
+in an appreciable degree. The lawn unquestionably has an element of
+sensuous beauty, simply as an object of apperception, and as such no
+doubt it appeals pretty directly to the eye of nearly all races and all
+classes; but it is, perhaps, more unquestionably beautiful to the eye
+of the dolicho-blond than to most other varieties of men. This higher
+appreciation of a stretch of greensward in this ethnic element than
+in the other elements of the population, goes along with certain other
+features of the dolicho-blond temperament that indicate that this racial
+element had once been for a long time a pastoral people inhabiting a
+region with a humid climate. The close-cropped lawn is beautiful in the
+eyes of a people whose inherited bent it is to readily find pleasure in
+contemplating a well-preserved pasture or grazing land.
+
+For the aesthetic purpose the lawn is a cow pasture; and in some cases
+today--where the expensiveness of the attendant circumstances bars out
+any imputation of thrift--the idyl of the dolicho-blond is rehabilitated
+in the introduction of a cow into a lawn or private ground. In such
+cases the cow made use of is commonly of an expensive breed. The vulgar
+suggestion of thrift, which is nearly inseparable from the cow, is a
+standing objection to the decorative use of this animal. So that in all
+cases, except where luxurious surroundings negate this suggestion,
+the use of the cow as an object of taste must be avoided. Where the
+predilection for some grazing animal to fill out the suggestion of the
+pasture is too strong to be suppressed, the cow's place is often given
+to some more or less inadequate substitute, such as deer, antelopes, or
+some such exotic beast. These substitutes, although less beautiful
+to the pastoral eye of Western man than the cow, are in such cases
+preferred because of their superior expensiveness or futility, and their
+consequent repute. They are not vulgarly lucrative either in fact or in
+suggestion.
+
+Public parks of course fall in the same category with the lawn; they
+too, at their best, are imitations of the pasture. Such a park is of
+course best kept by grazing, and the cattle on the grass are themselves
+no mean addition to the beauty of the thing, as need scarcely be
+insisted on with anyone who has once seen a well-kept pasture. But it
+is worth noting, as an expression of the pecuniary element in popular
+taste, that such a method of keeping public grounds is seldom resorted
+to. The best that is done by skilled workmen under the supervision of a
+trained keeper is a more or less close imitation of a pasture, but
+the result invariably falls somewhat short of the artistic effect of
+grazing. But to the average popular apprehension a herd of cattle so
+pointedly suggests thrift and usefulness that their presence in the
+public pleasure ground would be intolerably cheap. This method
+of keeping grounds is comparatively inexpensive, therefore it is
+indecorous.
+
+Of the same general bearing is another feature of public grounds. There
+is a studious exhibition of expensiveness coupled with a make-believe of
+simplicity and crude serviceability. Private grounds also show the same
+physiognomy wherever they are in the management or ownership of persons
+whose tastes have been formed under middle-class habits of life or under
+the upper-class traditions of no later a date than the childhood of the
+generation that is now passing. Grounds which conform to the instructed
+tastes of the latter-day upper class do not show these features in so
+marked a degree. The reason for this difference in tastes between the
+past and the incoming generation of the well-bred lies in the changing
+economic situation. A similar difference is perceptible in other
+respects, as well as in the accepted ideals of pleasure grounds. In this
+country as in most others, until the last half century but a very small
+proportion of the population were possessed of such wealth as would
+exempt them from thrift. Owing to imperfect means of communication,
+this small fraction were scattered and out of effective touch with one
+another. There was therefore no basis for a growth of taste in disregard
+of expensiveness. The revolt of the well-bred taste against vulgar
+thrift was unchecked. Wherever the unsophisticated sense of beauty
+might show itself sporadically in an approval of inexpensive or thrifty
+surroundings, it would lack the "social confirmation" which nothing
+but a considerable body of like-minded people can give. There was,
+therefore, no effective upper-class opinion that would overlook
+evidences of possible inexpensiveness in the management of grounds;
+and there was consequently no appreciable divergence between the
+leisure-class and the lower middle-class ideal in the physiognomy of
+pleasure grounds. Both classes equally constructed their ideals with the
+fear of pecuniary disrepute before their eyes.
+
+Today a divergence in ideals is beginning to be apparent. The portion of
+the leisure class that has been consistently exempt from work and from
+pecuniary cares for a generation or more is now large enough to form and
+sustain opinion in matters of taste. Increased mobility of the members
+has also added to the facility with which a "social confirmation" can be
+attained within the class. Within this select class the exemption from
+thrift is a matter so commonplace as to have lost much of its utility
+as a basis of pecuniary decency. Therefore the latter-day upper-class
+canons of taste do not so consistently insist on an unremitting
+demonstration of expensiveness and a strict exclusion of the appearance
+of thrift. So, a predilection for the rustic and the "natural" in parks
+and grounds makes its appearance on these higher social and intellectual
+levels. This predilection is in large part an outcropping of the
+instinct of workmanship; and it works out its results with varying
+degrees of consistency. It is seldom altogether unaffected, and at times
+it shades off into something not widely different from that make-believe
+of rusticity which has been referred to above.
+
+A weakness for crudely serviceable contrivances that pointedly suggest
+immediate and wasteless use is present even in the middle-class tastes;
+but it is there kept well in hand under the unbroken dominance of the
+canon of reputable futility. Consequently it works out in a variety
+of ways and means for shamming serviceability--in such contrivances
+as rustic fences, bridges, bowers, pavilions, and the like decorative
+features. An expression of this affectation of serviceability, at what
+is perhaps its widest divergence from the first promptings of the
+sense of economic beauty, is afforded by the cast-iron rustic fence and
+trellis or by a circuitous drive laid across level ground.
+
+The select leisure class has outgrown the use of these
+pseudo-serviceable variants of pecuniary beauty, at least at some
+points. But the taste of the more recent accessions to the leisure class
+proper and of the middle and lower classes still requires a pecuniary
+beauty to supplement the aesthetic beauty, even in those objects which
+are primarily admired for the beauty that belongs to them as natural
+growths.
+
+The popular taste in these matters is to be seen in the prevalent high
+appreciation of topiary work and of the conventional flower-beds of
+public grounds. Perhaps as happy an illustration as may be had of this
+dominance of pecuniary beauty over aesthetic beauty in middle-class
+tastes is seen in the reconstruction of the grounds lately occupied by
+the Columbian Exposition. The evidence goes to show that the requirement
+of reputable expensiveness is still present in good vigor even where
+all ostensibly lavish display is avoided. The artistic effects actually
+wrought in this work of reconstruction diverge somewhat widely from
+the effect to which the same ground would have lent itself in hands not
+guided by pecuniary canons of taste. And even the better class of the
+city's population view the progress of the work with an unreserved
+approval which suggests that there is in this case little if any
+discrepancy between the tastes of the upper and the lower or middle
+classes of the city. The sense of beauty in the population of this
+representative city of the advanced pecuniary culture is very chary of
+any departure from its great cultural principle of conspicuous waste.
+
+The love of nature, perhaps itself borrowed from a higher-class code of
+taste, sometimes expresses itself in unexpected ways under the guidance
+of this canon of pecuniary beauty, and leads to results that may seem
+incongruous to an unreflecting beholder. The well-accepted practice of
+planting trees in the treeless areas of this country, for instance, has
+been carried over as an item of honorific expenditure into the heavily
+wooded areas; so that it is by no means unusual for a village or a
+farmer in the wooded country to clear the land of its native trees and
+immediately replant saplings of certain introduced varieties about the
+farmyard or along the streets. In this way a forest growth of oak, elm,
+beech, butternut, hemlock, basswood, and birch is cleared off to give
+room for saplings of soft maple, cottonwood, and brittle willow. It is
+felt that the inexpensiveness of leaving the forest trees standing
+would derogate from the dignity that should invest an article which is
+intended to serve a decorative and honorific end.
+
+The like pervading guidance of taste by pecuniary repute is traceable
+in the prevalent standards of beauty in animals. The part played by this
+canon of taste in assigning her place in the popular aesthetic scale to
+the cow has already been spokes of. Something to the same effect is
+true of the other domestic animals, so far as they are in an appreciable
+degree industrially useful to the community--as, for instance, barnyard
+fowl, hogs, cattle, sheep, goats, draught-horses. They are of the
+nature of productive goods, and serve a useful, often a lucrative end;
+therefore beauty is not readily imputed to them. The case is different
+with those domestic animals which ordinarily serve no industrial end;
+such as pigeons, parrots and other cage-birds, cats, dogs, and fast
+horses. These commonly are items of conspicuous consumption, and are
+therefore honorific in their nature and may legitimately be accounted
+beautiful. This class of animals are conventionally admired by the body
+of the upper classes, while the pecuniarily lower classes--and that
+select minority of the leisure class among whom the rigorous canon that
+abjures thrift is in a measure obsolescent--find beauty in one class of
+animals as in another, without drawing a hard and fast line of pecuniary
+demarcation between the beautiful and the ugly. In the case of those
+domestic animals which are honorific and are reputed beautiful, there
+is a subsidiary basis of merit that should be spokes of. Apart from the
+birds which belong in the honorific class of domestic animals, and which
+owe their place in this class to their non-lucrative character alone,
+the animals which merit particular attention are cats, dogs, and fast
+horses. The cat is less reputable than the other two just named, because
+she is less wasteful; she may even serve a useful end. At the same time
+the cat's temperament does not fit her for the honorific purpose. She
+lives with man on terms of equality, knows nothing of that relation of
+status which is the ancient basis of all distinctions of worth, honor,
+and repute, and she does not lend herself with facility to an invidious
+comparison between her owner and his neighbors. The exception to this
+last rule occurs in the case of such scarce and fanciful products as
+the Angora cat, which have some slight honorific value on the ground
+of expensiveness, and have, therefore, some special claim to beauty on
+pecuniary grounds.
+
+The dog has advantages in the way of uselessness as well as in special
+gifts of temperament. He is often spoken of, in an eminent sense, as
+the friend of man, and his intelligence and fidelity are praised. The
+meaning of this is that the dog is man's servant and that he has
+the gift of an unquestioning subservience and a slave's quickness in
+guessing his master's mood. Coupled with these traits, which fit him
+well for the relation of status--and which must for the present purpose
+be set down as serviceable traits--the dog has some characteristics
+which are of a more equivocal aesthetic value. He is the filthiest of
+the domestic animals in his person and the nastiest in his habits. For
+this he makes up is a servile, fawning attitude towards his master, and
+a readiness to inflict damage and discomfort on all else. The dog, then,
+commends himself to our favor by affording play to our propensity for
+mastery, and as he is also an item of expense, and commonly serves no
+industrial purpose, he holds a well-assured place in men's regard as
+a thing of good repute. The dog is at the same time associated in our
+imagination with the chase--a meritorious employment and an expression
+of the honorable predatory impulse. Standing on this vantage ground,
+whatever beauty of form and motion and whatever commendable mental
+traits he may possess are conventionally acknowledged and magnified.
+And even those varieties of the dog which have been bred into grotesque
+deformity by the dog-fancier are in good faith accounted beautiful by
+many. These varieties of dogs--and the like is true of other fancy-bred
+animals--are rated and graded in aesthetic value somewhat in proportion
+to the degree of grotesqueness and instability of the particular fashion
+which the deformity takes in the given case. For the purpose in hand,
+this differential utility on the ground of grotesqueness and instability
+of structure is reducible to terms of a greater scarcity and consequent
+expense. The commercial value of canine monstrosities, such as the
+prevailing styles of pet dogs both for men's and women's use, rests
+on their high cost of production, and their value to their owners
+lies chiefly in their utility as items of conspicuous consumption.
+Indirectly, through reflection upon their honorific expensiveness,
+a social worth is imputed to them; and so, by an easy substitution of
+words and ideas, they come to be admired and reputed beautiful. Since
+any attention bestowed upon these animals is in no sense gainful
+or useful, it is also reputable; and since the habit of giving them
+attention is consequently not deprecated, it may grow into an habitual
+attachment of great tenacity and of a most benevolent character. So that
+in the affection bestowed on pet animals the canon of expensiveness
+is present more or less remotely as a norm which guides and shapes the
+sentiment and the selection of its object. The like is true, as will be
+noticed presently, with respect to affection for persons also; although
+the manner in which the norm acts in that case is somewhat different.
+
+The case of the fast horse is much like that of the dog. He is on the
+whole expensive, or wasteful and useless--for the industrial purpose.
+What productive use he may possess, in the way of enhancing the
+well-being of the community or making the way of life easier for men,
+takes the form of exhibitions of force and facility of motion that
+gratify the popular aesthetic sense. This is of course a substantial
+serviceability. The horse is not endowed with the spiritual aptitude
+for servile dependence in the same measure as the dog; but he ministers
+effectually to his master's impulse to convert the "animate" forces of
+the environment to his own use and discretion and so express his own
+dominating individuality through them. The fast horse is at least
+potentially a race-horse, of high or low degree; and it is as such that
+he is peculiarly serviceable to his owner. The utility of the fast horse
+lies largely in his efficiency as a means of emulation; it gratifies the
+owner's sense of aggression and dominance to have his own horse outstrip
+his neighbor's. This use being not lucrative, but on the whole pretty
+consistently wasteful, and quite conspicuously so, it is honorific,
+and therefore gives the fast horse a strong presumptive position of
+reputability. Beyond this, the race-horse proper has also a similarly
+non-industrial but honorific use as a gambling instrument.
+
+The fast horse, then, is aesthetically fortunate, in that the canon of
+pecuniary good repute legitimates a free appreciation of whatever beauty
+or serviceability he may possess. His pretensions have the countenance
+of the principle of conspicuous waste and the backing of the predatory
+aptitude for dominance and emulation. The horse is, moreover, a
+beautiful animal, although the race-horse is so in no peculiar degree to
+the uninstructed taste of those persons who belong neither in the class
+of race-horse fanciers nor in the class whose sense of beauty is held in
+abeyance by the moral constraint of the horse fancier's award. To this
+untutored taste the most beautiful horse seems to be a form which has
+suffered less radical alteration than the race-horse under the
+breeder's selective development of the animal. Still, when a writer
+or speaker--especially of those whose eloquence is most consistently
+commonplace wants an illustration of animal grace and serviceability,
+for rhetorical use, he habitually turns to the horse; and he commonly
+makes it plain before he is done that what he has in mind is the
+race-horse.
+
+It should be noted that in the graduated appreciation of varieties
+of horses and of dogs, such as one meets with among people of even
+moderately cultivated tastes in these matters, there is also discernible
+another and more direct line of influence of the leisure-class canons of
+reputability. In this country, for instance, leisure-class tastes are
+to some extent shaped on usages and habits which prevail, or which are
+apprehended to prevail, among the leisure class of Great Britain. In
+dogs this is true to a less extent than in horses. In horses, more
+particularly in saddle horses--which at their best serve the purpose of
+wasteful display simply--it will hold true in a general way that a
+horse is more beautiful in proportion as he is more English; the English
+leisure class being, for purposes of reputable usage, the upper leisure
+class of this country, and so the exemplar for the lower grades. This
+mimicry in the methods of the apperception of beauty and in the forming
+of judgments of taste need not result in a spurious, or at any rate not
+a hypocritical or affected, predilection. The predilection is as serious
+and as substantial an award of taste when it rests on this basis as
+when it rests on any other, the difference is that this taste is and
+as substantial an award of taste when it rests on this basis as when it
+rests on any other; the difference is that this taste is a taste for the
+reputably correct, not for the aesthetically true.
+
+The mimicry, it should be said, extends further than to the sense of
+beauty in horseflesh simply. It includes trappings and horsemanship as
+well, so that the correct or reputably beautiful seat or posture is also
+decided by English usage, as well as the equestrian gait. To show how
+fortuitous may sometimes be the circumstances which decide what shall
+be becoming and what not under the pecuniary canon of beauty, it may be
+noted that this English seat, and the peculiarly distressing gait which
+has made an awkward seat necessary, are a survival from the time when
+the English roads were so bad with mire and mud as to be virtually
+impassable for a horse travelling at a more comfortable gait; so that
+a person of decorous tastes in horsemanship today rides a punch with
+docked tail, in an uncomfortable posture and at a distressing gait,
+because the English roads during a great part of the last century were
+impassable for a horse travelling at a more horse-like gait, or for
+an animal built for moving with ease over the firm and open country to
+which the horse is indigenous. It is not only with respect to consumable
+goods--including domestic animals--that the canons of taste have been
+colored by the canons of pecuniary reputability. Something to the like
+effect is to be said for beauty in persons. In order to avoid whatever
+may be matter of controversy, no weight will be given in this connection
+to such popular predilection as there may be for the dignified
+(leisurely) bearing and poly presence that are by vulgar tradition
+associated with opulence in mature men. These traits are in some measure
+accepted as elements of personal beauty. But there are certain elements
+of feminine beauty, on the other hand, which come in under this head,
+and which are of so concrete and specific a character as to admit of
+itemized appreciation. It is more or less a rule that in communities
+which are at the stage of economic development at which women are valued
+by the upper class for their service, the ideal of female beauty is a
+robust, large-limbed woman. The ground of appreciation is the physique,
+while the conformation of the face is of secondary weight only. A
+well-known instance of this ideal of the early predatory culture is that
+of the maidens of the Homeric poems.
+
+This ideal suffers a change in the succeeding development, when, in the
+conventional scheme, the office of the high-class wife comes to be a
+vicarious leisure simply. The ideal then includes the characteristics
+which are supposed to result from or to go with a life of leisure
+consistently enforced. The ideal accepted under these circumstances may
+be gathered from descriptions of beautiful women by poets and writers of
+the chivalric times. In the conventional scheme of those days ladies
+of high degree were conceived to be in perpetual tutelage, and to be
+scrupulously exempt from all useful work. The resulting chivalric or
+romantic ideal of beauty takes cognizance chiefly of the face, and
+dwells on its delicacy, and on the delicacy of the hands and feet,
+the slender figure, and especially the slender waist. In the pictured
+representations of the women of that time, and in modern romantic
+imitators of the chivalric thought and feeling, the waist is attenuated
+to a degree that implies extreme debility. The same ideal is still
+extant among a considerable portion of the population of modern
+industrial communities; but it is to be said that it has retained
+its hold most tenaciously in those modern communities which are least
+advanced in point of economic and civil development, and which show the
+most considerable survivals of status and of predatory institutions.
+That is to say, the chivalric ideal is best preserved in those existing
+communities which are substantially least modern. Survivals of this
+lackadaisical or romantic ideal occur freely in the tastes of the
+well-to-do classes of Continental countries. In modern communities which
+have reached the higher levels of industrial development, the upper
+leisure class has accumulated so great a mass of wealth as to place its
+women above all imputation of vulgarly productive labor. Here the status
+of women as vicarious consumers is beginning to lose its place in the
+sections of the body of the people; and as a consequence the ideal of
+feminine beauty is beginning to change back again from the infirmly
+delicate, translucent, and hazardously slender, to a woman of the
+archaic type that does not disown her hands and feet, nor, indeed, the
+other gross material facts of her person. In the course of economic
+development the ideal of beauty among the peoples of the Western culture
+has shifted from the woman of physical presence to the lady, and it is
+beginning to shift back again to the woman; and all in obedience to the
+changing conditions of pecuniary emulation. The exigencies of emulation
+at one time required lusty slaves; at another time they required a
+conspicuous performance of vicarious leisure and consequently an obvious
+disability; but the situation is now beginning to outgrow this last
+requirement, since, under the higher efficiency of modern industry,
+leisure in women is possible so far down the scale of reputability that
+it will no longer serve as a definitive mark of the highest pecuniary
+grade.
+
+Apart from this general control exercised by the norm of conspicuous
+waste over the ideal of feminine beauty, there are one or two details
+which merit specific mention as showing how it may exercise an extreme
+constraint in detail over men's sense of beauty in women. It has
+already been noticed that at the stages of economic evolution at which
+conspicuous leisure is much regarded as a means of good repute, the
+ideal requires delicate and diminutive hands and feet and a slender
+waist. These features, together with the other, related faults of
+structure that commonly go with them, go to show that the person so
+affected is incapable of useful effort and must therefore be supported
+in idleness by her owner. She is useless and expensive, and she is
+consequently valuable as evidence of pecuniary strength. It results that
+at this cultural stage women take thought to alter their persons, so as
+to conform more nearly to the requirements of the instructed taste of
+the time; and under the guidance of the canon of pecuniary decency,
+the men find the resulting artificially induced pathological features
+attractive. So, for instance, the constricted waist which has had so
+wide and persistent a vogue in the communities of the Western culture,
+and so also the deformed foot of the Chinese. Both of these are
+mutilations of unquestioned repulsiveness to the untrained sense. It
+requires habituation to become reconciled to them. Yet there is no room
+to question their attractiveness to men into whose scheme of life they
+fit as honorific items sanctioned by the requirements of pecuniary
+reputability. They are items of pecuniary and cultural beauty which have
+come to do duty as elements of the ideal of womanliness.
+
+The connection here indicated between the aesthetic value and the
+invidious pecuniary value of things is of course not present in the
+consciousness of the valuer. So far as a person, in forming a judgment
+of taste, takes thought and reflects that the object of beauty under
+consideration is wasteful and reputable, and therefore may legitimately
+be accounted beautiful; so far the judgment is not a bona fide judgment
+of taste and does not come up for consideration in this connection. The
+connection which is here insisted on between the reputability and the
+apprehended beauty of objects lies through the effect which the fact of
+reputability has upon the valuer's habits of thought. He is in the
+habit of forming judgments of value of various kinds-economic, moral,
+aesthetic, or reputable concerning the objects with which he has to do,
+and his attitude of commendation towards a given object on any other
+ground will affect the degree of his appreciation of the object when he
+comes to value it for the aesthetic purpose. This is more particularly
+true as regards valuation on grounds so closely related to the aesthetic
+ground as that of reputability. The valuation for the aesthetic purpose
+and for the purpose of repute are not held apart as distinctly as might
+be. Confusion is especially apt to arise between these two kinds of
+valuation, because the value of objects for repute is not habitually
+distinguished in speech by the use of a special descriptive term. The
+result is that the terms in familiar use to designate categories
+or elements of beauty are applied to cover this unnamed element of
+pecuniary merit, and the corresponding confusion of ideas follows by
+easy consequence. The demands of reputability in this way coalesce in
+the popular apprehension with the demands of the sense of beauty, and
+beauty which is not accompanied by the accredited marks of good repute
+is not accepted. But the requirements of pecuniary reputability and
+those of beauty in the naive sense do not in any appreciable degree
+coincide. The elimination from our surroundings of the pecuniarily
+unfit, therefore, results in a more or less thorough elimination of that
+considerable range of elements of beauty which do not happen to conform
+to the pecuniary requirement. The underlying norms of taste are of very
+ancient growth, probably far antedating the advent of the pecuniary
+institutions that are here under discussion. Consequently, by force of
+the past selective adaptation of men's habits of thought, it happens
+that the requirements of beauty, simply, are for the most part best
+satisfied by inexpensive contrivances and structures which in a
+straightforward manner suggest both the office which they are to perform
+and the method of serving their end. It may be in place to recall the
+modern psychological position. Beauty of form seems to be a question of
+facility of apperception. The proposition could perhaps safely be made
+broader than this. If abstraction is made from association, suggestion,
+and "expression," classed as elements of beauty, then beauty in any
+perceived object means that the mind readily unfolds its apperceptive
+activity in the directions which the object in question affords. But the
+directions in which activity readily unfolds or expresses itself are the
+directions to which long and close habituation has made the mind prone.
+So far as concerns the essential elements of beauty, this habituation
+is an habituation so close and long as to have induced not only a
+proclivity to the apperceptive form in question, but an adaptation of
+physiological structure and function as well. So far as the economic
+interest enters into the constitution of beauty, it enters as a
+suggestion or expression of adequacy to a purpose, a manifest and
+readily inferable subservience to the life process. This expression of
+economic facility or economic serviceability in any object--what may
+be called the economic beauty of the object-is best served by neat and
+unambiguous suggestion of its office and its efficiency for the material
+ends of life.
+
+On this ground, among objects of use the simple and unadorned article
+is aesthetically the best. But since the pecuniary canon of reputability
+rejects the inexpensive in articles appropriated to individual
+consumption, the satisfaction of our craving for beautiful things
+must be sought by way of compromise. The canons of beauty must be
+circumvented by some contrivance which will give evidence of a reputably
+wasteful expenditure, at the same time that it meets the demands of our
+critical sense of the useful and the beautiful, or at least meets the
+demand of some habit which has come to do duty in place of that sense.
+Such an auxiliary sense of taste is the sense of novelty; and this
+latter is helped out in its surrogateship by the curiosity with which
+men view ingenious and puzzling contrivances. Hence it comes that
+most objects alleged to be beautiful, and doing duty as such, show
+considerable ingenuity of design and are calculated to puzzle the
+beholder--to bewilder him with irrelevant suggestions and hints of the
+improbable--at the same time that they give evidence of an expenditure
+of labor in excess of what would give them their fullest efficency for
+their ostensible economic end.
+
+This may be shown by an illustration taken from outside the range of our
+everyday habits and everyday contact, and so outside the range of
+our bias. Such are the remarkable feather mantles of Hawaii, or the
+well-known cawed handles of the ceremonial adzes of several Polynesian
+islands. These are undeniably beautiful, both in the sense that they
+offer a pleasing composition of form, lines, and color, and in the sense
+that they evince great skill and ingenuity in design and construction.
+At the same time the articles are manifestly ill fitted to serve any
+other economic purpose. But it is not always that the evolution of
+ingenious and puzzling contrivances under the guidance of the canon of
+wasted effort works out so happy a result. The result is quite as
+often a virtually complete suppression of all elements that would
+bear scrutiny as expressions of beauty, or of serviceability, and the
+substitution of evidences of misspent ingenuity and labor, backed by a
+conspicuous ineptitude; until many of the objects with which we surround
+ourselves in everyday life, and even many articles of everyday dress and
+ornament, are such as would not be tolerated except under the stress of
+prescriptive tradition. Illustrations of this substitution of ingenuity
+and expense in place of beauty and serviceability are to be seen, for
+instance, in domestic architecture, in domestic art or fancy work,
+in various articles of apparel, especially of feminine and priestly
+apparel.
+
+The canon of beauty requires expression of the generic. The "novelty"
+due to the demands of conspicuous waste traverses this canon of beauty,
+in that it results in making the physiognomy of our objects of taste a
+congeries of idiosyncrasies; and the idiosyncrasies are, moreover, under
+the selective surveillance of the canon of expensiveness.
+
+This process of selective adaptation of designs to the end of
+conspicuous waste, and the substitution of pecuniary beauty for
+aesthetic beauty, has been especially effective in the development of
+architecture. It would be extremely difficult to find a modern civilized
+residence or public building which can claim anything better than
+relative inoffensiveness in the eyes of anyone who will dissociate the
+elements of beauty from those of honorific waste. The endless variety of
+fronts presented by the better class of tenements and apartment houses
+in our cities is an endless variety of architectural distress and of
+suggestions of expensive discomfort. Considered as objects of beauty,
+the dead walls of the sides and back of these structures, left untouched
+by the hands of the artist, are commonly the best feature of the
+building.
+
+What has been said of the influence of the law of conspicuous waste upon
+the canons of taste will hold true, with but a slight change of terms,
+of its influence upon our notions of the serviceability of goods for
+other ends than the aesthetic one. Goods are produced and consumed as a
+means to the fuller unfolding of human life; and their utility consists,
+in the first instance, in their efficiency as means to this end. The end
+is, in the first instance, the fullness of life of the individual, taken
+in absolute terms. But the human proclivity to emulation has seized upon
+the consumption of goods as a means to an invidious comparison, and has
+thereby invested consumable goods with a secondary utility as evidence
+of relative ability to pay. This indirect or secondary use of consumable
+goods lends an honorific character to consumption and presently also
+to the goods which best serve the emulative end of consumption. The
+consumption of expensive goods is meritorious, and the goods which
+contain an appreciable element of cost in excess of what goes to
+give them serviceability for their ostensible mechanical purpose
+are honorific. The marks of superfluous costliness in the goods are
+therefore marks of worth--of high efficency for the indirect, invidious
+end to be served by their consumption; and conversely, goods are
+humilific, and therefore unattractive, if they show too thrifty an
+adaptation to the mechanical end sought and do not include a margin of
+expensiveness on which to rest a complacent invidious comparison. This
+indirect utility gives much of their value to the "better" grades of
+goods. In order to appeal to the cultivated sense of utility, an article
+must contain a modicum of this indirect utility.
+
+While men may have set out with disapproving an inexpensive manner of
+living because it indicated inability to spend much, and so indicated
+a lack of pecuniary success, they end by falling into the habit of
+disapproving cheap things as being intrinsically dishonorable or
+unworthy because they are cheap. As time has gone on, each succeeding
+generation has received this tradition of meritorious expenditure from
+the generation before it, and has in its turn further elaborated and
+fortified the traditional canon of pecuniary reputability in goods
+consumed; until we have finally reached such a degree of conviction as
+to the unworthiness of all inexpensive things, that we have no
+longer any misgivings in formulating the maxim, "Cheap and nasty." So
+thoroughly has the habit of approving the expensive and disapproving
+the inexpensive been ingrained into our thinking that we instinctively
+insist upon at least some measure of wasteful expensiveness in all our
+consumption, even in the case of goods which are consumed in strict
+privacy and without the slightest thought of display. We all feel,
+sincerely and without misgiving, that we are the more lifted up in
+spirit for having, even in the privacy of our own household, eaten
+our daily meal by the help of hand-wrought silver utensils, from
+hand-painted china (often of dubious artistic value) laid on high-priced
+table linen. Any retrogression from the standard of living which we are
+accustomed to regard as worthy in this respect is felt to be a grievous
+violation of our human dignity. So, also, for the last dozen years
+candles have been a more pleasing source of light at dinner than any
+other. Candlelight is now softer, less distressing to well-bred eyes,
+than oil, gas, or electric light. The same could not have been said
+thirty years ago, when candles were, or recently had been, the cheapest
+available light for domestic use. Nor are candles even now found to
+give an acceptable or effective light for any other than a ceremonial
+illumination.
+
+A political sage still living has summed up the conclusion of this whole
+matter in the dictum: "A cheap coat makes a cheap man," and there is
+probably no one who does not feel the convincing force of the maxim.
+
+The habit of looking for the marks of superfluous expensiveness in
+goods, and of requiring that all goods should afford some utility of the
+indirect or invidious sort, leads to a change in the standards by which
+the utility of goods is gauged. The honorific element and the element
+of brute efficiency are not held apart in the consumer's appreciation of
+commodities, and the two together go to make up the unanalyzed
+aggregate serviceability of the goods. Under the resulting standard of
+serviceability, no article will pass muster on the strength of material
+sufficiency alone. In order to completeness and full acceptability to
+the consumer it must also show the honorific element. It results that
+the producers of articles of consumption direct their efforts to the
+production of goods that shall meet this demand for the honorific
+element. They will do this with all the more alacrity and effect, since
+they are themselves under the dominance of the same standard of worth in
+goods, and would be sincerely grieved at the sight of goods which lack
+the proper honorific finish. Hence it has come about that there are
+today no goods supplied in any trade which do not contain the
+honorific element in greater or less degree. Any consumer who might,
+Diogenes-like, insist on the elimination of all honorific or wasteful
+elements from his consumption, would be unable to supply his most
+trivial wants in the modern market. Indeed, even if he resorted to
+supplying his wants directly by his own efforts, he would find it
+difficult if not impossible to divest himself of the current habits of
+thought on this head; so that he could scarcely compass a supply of the
+necessaries of life for a day's consumption without instinctively and
+by oversight incorporating in his home-made product something of this
+honorific, quasi-decorative element of wasted labor.
+
+It is notorious that in their selection of serviceable goods in the
+retail market purchasers are guided more by the finish and workmanship
+of the goods than by any marks of substantial serviceability. Goods,
+in order to sell, must have some appreciable amount of labor spent in
+giving them the marks of decent expensiveness, in addition to what goes
+to give them efficiency for the material use which they are to serve.
+This habit of making obvious costliness a canon of serviceability of
+course acts to enhance the aggregate cost of articles of consumption.
+It puts us on our guard against cheapness by identifying merit in some
+degree with cost. There is ordinarily a consistent effort on the part
+of the consumer to obtain goods of the required serviceability at as
+advantageous a bargain as may be; but the conventional requirement of
+obvious costliness, as a voucher and a constituent of the serviceability
+of the goods, leads him to reject as under grade such goods as do not
+contain a large element of conspicuous waste.
+
+It is to be added that a large share of those features of consumable
+goods which figure in popular apprehension as marks of serviceability,
+and to which reference is here had as elements of conspicuous waste,
+commend themselves to the consumer also on other grounds than that of
+expensiveness alone. They usually give evidence of skill and effective
+workmanship, even if they do not contribute to the substantial
+serviceability of the goods; and it is no doubt largely on some such
+ground that any particular mark of honorific serviceability first comes
+into vogue and afterward maintains its footing as a normal constituent
+element of the worth of an article. A display of efficient workmanship
+is pleasing simply as such, even where its remoter, for the time
+unconsidered, outcome is futile. There is a gratification of the
+artistic sense in the contemplation of skillful work. But it is also to
+be added that no such evidence of skillful workmanship, or of ingenious
+and effective adaptation of means to an end, will, in the long run,
+enjoy the approbation of the modern civilized consumer unless it has the
+sanction of the Canon of conspicuous waste.
+
+The position here taken is enforced in a felicitous manner by the place
+assigned in the economy of consumption to machine products. The point
+of material difference between machine-made goods and the hand-wrought
+goods which serve the same purposes is, ordinarily, that the former
+serve their primary purpose more adequately. They are a more perfect
+product--show a more perfect adaptation of means to end. This does not
+save them from disesteem and deprecation, for they fall short under
+the test of honorific waste. Hand labor is a more wasteful method
+of production; hence the goods turned out by this method are more
+serviceable for the purpose of pecuniary reputability; hence the marks
+of hand labor come to be honorific, and the goods which exhibit these
+marks take rank as of higher grade than the corresponding machine
+product. Commonly, if not invariably, the honorific marks of hand
+labor are certain imperfections and irregularities in the lines of the
+hand-wrought article, showing where the workman has fallen short in the
+execution of the design. The ground of the superiority of hand-wrought
+goods, therefore, is a certain margin of crudeness. This margin must
+never be so wide as to show bungling workmanship, since that would be
+evidence of low cost, nor so narrow as to suggest the ideal precision
+attained only by the machine, for that would be evidence of low cost.
+
+The appreciation of those evidences of honorific crudeness to which
+hand-wrought goods owe their superior worth and charm in the eyes
+of well-bred people is a matter of nice discrimination. It requires
+training and the formation of right habits of thought with respect to
+what may be called the physiognomy of goods. Machine-made goods of
+daily use are often admired and preferred precisely on account of their
+excessive perfection by the vulgar and the underbred who have not given
+due thought to the punctilios of elegant consumption. The ceremonial
+inferiority of machine products goes to show that the perfection of
+skill and workmanship embodied in any costly innovations in the finish
+of goods is not sufficient of itself to secure them acceptance and
+permanent favor. The innovation must have the support of the canon of
+conspicuous waste. Any feature in the physiognomy of goods, however
+pleasing in itself, and however well it may approve itself to the taste
+for effective work, will not be tolerated if it proves obnoxious to this
+norm of pecuniary reputability.
+
+The ceremonial inferiority or uncleanness in consumable goods due to
+"commonness," or in other words to their slight cost of production,
+has been taken very seriously by many persons. The objection to machine
+products is often formulated as an objection to the commonness of such
+goods. What is common is within the (pecuniary) reach of many people.
+Its consumption is therefore not honorific, since it does not serve the
+purpose of a favorable invidious comparison with other consumers. Hence
+the consumption, or even the sight of such goods, is inseparable from an
+odious suggestion of the lower levels of human life, and one comes away
+from their contemplation with a pervading sense of meanness that is
+extremely distasteful and depressing to a person of sensibility. In
+persons whose tastes assert themselves imperiously, and who have not the
+gift, habit, or incentive to discriminate between the grounds of
+their various judgments of taste, the deliverances of the sense of the
+honorific coalesce with those of the sense of beauty and of the sense of
+serviceability--in the manner already spoken of; the resulting
+composite valuation serves as a judgment of the object's beauty or its
+serviceability, according as the valuer's bias or interest inclines him
+to apprehend the object in the one or the other of these aspects. It
+follows not infrequently that the marks of cheapness or commonness
+are accepted as definitive marks of artistic unfitness, and a code or
+schedule of aesthetic proprieties on the one hand, and of aesthetic
+abominations on the other, is constructed on this basis for guidance in
+questions of taste.
+
+As has already been pointed out, the cheap, and therefore indecorous,
+articles of daily consumption in modern industrial communities are
+commonly machine products; and the generic feature of the physiognomy
+of machine-made goods as compared with the hand-wrought article is their
+greater perfection in workmanship and greater accuracy in the detail
+execution of the design. Hence it comes about that the visible
+imperfections of the hand-wrought goods, being honorific, are accounted
+marks of superiority in point of beauty, or serviceability, or both.
+Hence has arisen that exaltation of the defective, of which John Ruskin
+and William Morris were such eager spokesmen in their time; and on this
+ground their propaganda of crudity and wasted effort has been taken up
+and carried forward since their time. And hence also the propaganda for
+a return to handicraft and household industry. So much of the work
+and speculations of this group of men as fairly comes under the
+characterization here given would have been impossible at a time when
+the visibly more perfect goods were not the cheaper.
+
+It is of course only as to the economic value of this school of
+aesthetic teaching that anything is intended to be said or can be said
+here. What is said is not to be taken in the sense of depreciation, but
+chiefly as a characterization of the tendency of this teaching in its
+effect on consumption and on the production of consumable goods.
+
+The manner in which the bias of this growth of taste has worked itself
+out in production is perhaps most cogently exemplified in the book
+manufacture with which Morris busied himself during the later years of
+his life; but what holds true of the work of the Kelmscott Press in an
+eminent degree, holds true with but slightly abated force when applied
+to latter-day artistic book-making generally--as to type, paper,
+illustration, binding materials, and binder's work. The claims to
+excellence put forward by the later products of the bookmaker's industry
+rest in some measure on the degree of its approximation to the crudities
+of the time when the work of book-making was a doubtful struggle with
+refractory materials carried on by means of insufficient appliances.
+These products, since they require hand labor, are more expensive; they
+are also less convenient for use than the books turned out with a view
+to serviceability alone; they therefore argue ability on the part of
+the purchaser to consume freely, as well as ability to waste time and
+effort. It is on this basis that the printers of today are returning to
+"old-style," and other more or less obsolete styles of type which are
+less legible and give a cruder appearance to the page than the "modern."
+Even a scientific periodical, with ostensibly no purpose but the most
+effective presentation of matter with which its science is concerned,
+will concede so much to the demands of this pecuniary beauty as to
+publish its scientific discussions in oldstyle type, on laid paper, and
+with uncut edges. But books which are not ostensibly concerned with the
+effective presentation of their contents alone, of course go farther
+in this direction. Here we have a somewhat cruder type, printed on
+hand-laid, deckel-edged paper, with excessive margins and uncut leaves,
+with bindings of a painstaking crudeness and elaborate ineptitude. The
+Kelmscott Press reduced the matter to an absurdity--as seen from the
+point of view of brute serviceability alone--by issuing books for modern
+use, edited with the obsolete spelling, printed in black-letter, and
+bound in limp vellum fitted with thongs. As a further characteristic
+feature which fixes the economic place of artistic book-making, there
+is the fact that these more elegant books are, at their best, printed in
+limited editions. A limited edition is in effect a guarantee--somewhat
+crude, it is true--that this book is scarce and that it therefore is
+costly and lends pecuniary distinction to its consumer.
+
+The special attractiveness of these book-products to the book-buyer of
+cultivated taste lies, of course, not in a conscious, naive recognition
+of their costliness and superior clumsiness. Here, as in the parallel
+case of the superiority of hand-wrought articles over machine products,
+the conscious ground of preference is an intrinsic excellence imputed to
+the costlier and more awkward article. The superior excellence imputed
+to the book which imitates the products of antique and obsolete
+processes is conceived to be chiefly a superior utility in the aesthetic
+respect; but it is not unusual to find a well-bred book-lover insisting
+that the clumsier product is also more serviceable as a vehicle of
+printed speech. So far as regards the superior aesthetic value of the
+decadent book, the chances are that the book-lover's contention has some
+ground. The book is designed with an eye single to its beauty, and the
+result is commonly some measure of success on the part of the designer.
+What is insisted on here, however, is that the canon of taste under
+which the designer works is a canon formed under the surveillance of
+the law of conspicuous waste, and that this law acts selectively to
+eliminate any canon of taste that does not conform to its demands. That
+is to say, while the decadent book may be beautiful, the limits within
+which the designer may work are fixed by requirements of a non-aesthetic
+kind. The product, if it is beautiful, must also at the same time be
+costly and ill adapted to its ostensible use. This mandatory canon of
+taste in the case of the book-designer, however, is not shaped entirely
+by the law of waste in its first form; the canon is to some extent
+shaped in conformity to that secondary expression of the predatory
+temperament, veneration for the archaic or obsolete, which in one of its
+special developments is called classicism. In aesthetic theory it might
+be extremely difficult, if not quite impracticable, to draw a line
+between the canon of classicism, or regard for the archaic, and the
+canon of beauty. For the aesthetic purpose such a distinction need
+scarcely be drawn, and indeed it need not exist. For a theory of taste
+the expression of an accepted ideal of archaism, on whatever basis it
+may have been accepted, is perhaps best rated as an element of beauty;
+there need be no question of its legitimation. But for the present
+purpose--for the purpose of determining what economic grounds are
+present in the accepted canons of taste and what is their significance
+for the distribution and consumption of goods--the distinction is not
+similarly beside the point. The position of machine products in the
+civilized scheme of consumption serves to point out the nature of the
+relation which subsists between the canon of conspicuous waste and the
+code of proprieties in consumption. Neither in matters of art and taste
+proper, nor as regards the current sense of the serviceability of goods,
+does this canon act as a principle of innovation or initiative. It does
+not go into the future as a creative principle which makes innovations
+and adds new items of consumption and new elements of cost. The
+principle in question is, in a certain sense, a negative rather than a
+positive law. It is a regulative rather than a creative principle. It
+very rarely initiates or originates any usage or custom directly. Its
+action is selective only. Conspicuous wastefulness does not directly
+afford ground for variation and growth, but conformity to its
+requirements is a condition to the survival of such innovations as may
+be made on other grounds. In whatever way usages and customs and methods
+of expenditure arise, they are all subject to the selective action of
+this norm of reputability; and the degree in which they conform to its
+requirements is a test of their fitness to survive in the competition
+with other similar usages and customs. Other thing being equal, the more
+obviously wasteful usage or method stands the better chance of survival
+under this law. The law of conspicuous waste does not account for the
+origin of variations, but only for the persistence of such forms as are
+fit to survive under its dominance. It acts to conserve the fit, not to
+originate the acceptable. Its office is to prove all things and to hold
+fast that which is good for its purpose.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Seven ~~ Dress as an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture
+
+It will in place, by way of illustration, to show in some detail how the
+economic principles so far set forth apply to everyday facts in some one
+direction of the life process. For this purpose no line of consumption
+affords a more apt illustration than expenditure on dress. It is
+especially the rule of the conspicuous waste of goods that finds
+expression in dress, although the other, related principles of pecuniary
+repute are also exemplified in the same contrivances. Other methods
+of putting one's pecuniary standing in evidence serve their end
+effectually, and other methods are in vogue always and everywhere; but
+expenditure on dress has this advantage over most other methods, that
+our apparel is always in evidence and affords an indication of our
+pecuniary standing to all observers at the first glance. It is also true
+that admitted expenditure for display is more obviously present, and is,
+perhaps, more universally practiced in the matter of dress than in any
+other line of consumption. No one finds difficulty in assenting to the
+commonplace that the greater part of the expenditure incurred by all
+classes for apparel is incurred for the sake of a respectable appearance
+rather than for the protection of the person. And probably at no other
+point is the sense of shabbiness so keenly felt as it is if we fall
+short of the standard set by social usage in this matter of dress. It
+is true of dress in even a higher degree than of most other items of
+consumption, that people will undergo a very considerable degree of
+privation in the comforts or the necessaries of life in order to afford
+what is considered a decent amount of wasteful consumption; so that
+it is by no means an uncommon occurrence, in an inclement climate,
+for people to go ill clad in order to appear well dressed. And the
+commercial value of the goods used for clotting in any modern community
+is made up to a much larger extent of the fashionableness, the
+reputability of the goods than of the mechanical service which they
+render in clothing the person of the wearer. The need of dress is
+eminently a "higher" or spiritual need.
+
+This spiritual need of dress is not wholly, nor even chiefly, a naive
+propensity for display of expenditure. The law of conspicuous waste
+guides consumption in apparel, as in other things, chiefly at the second
+remove, by shaping the canons of taste and decency. In the common run of
+cases the conscious motive of the wearer or purchaser of conspicuously
+wasteful apparel is the need of conforming to established usage, and of
+living up to the accredited standard of taste and reputability. It is
+not only that one must be guided by the code of proprieties in dress in
+order to avoid the mortification that comes of unfavorable notice and
+comment, though that motive in itself counts for a great deal; but
+besides that, the requirement of expensiveness is so ingrained into
+our habits of thought in matters of dress that any other than expensive
+apparel is instinctively odious to us. Without reflection or analysis,
+we feel that what is inexpensive is unworthy. "A cheap coat makes a
+cheap man." "Cheap and nasty" is recognized to hold true in dress with
+even less mitigation than in other lines of consumption. On the ground
+both of taste and of serviceability, an inexpensive article of apparel
+is held to be inferior, under the maxim "cheap and nasty." We find
+things beautiful, as well as serviceable, somewhat in proportion as
+they are costly. With few and inconsequential exceptions, we all find
+a costly hand-wrought article of apparel much preferable, in point
+of beauty and of serviceability, to a less expensive imitation of it,
+however cleverly the spurious article may imitate the costly original;
+and what offends our sensibilities in the spurious article is not that
+it falls short in form or color, or, indeed, in visual effect in any
+way. The offensive object may be so close an imitation as to defy
+any but the closest scrutiny; and yet so soon as the counterfeit
+is detected, its aesthetic value, and its commercial value as well,
+declines precipitately. Not only that, but it may be asserted with
+but small risk of contradiction that the aesthetic value of a detected
+counterfeit in dress declines somewhat in the same proportion as the
+counterfeit is cheaper than its original. It loses caste aesthetically
+because it falls to a lower pecuniary grade.
+
+But the function of dress as an evidence of ability to pay does not end
+with simply showing that the wearer consumes valuable goods in excess of
+what is required for physical comfort. Simple conspicuous waste of goods
+is effective and gratifying as far as it goes; it is good prima facie
+evidence of pecuniary success, and consequently prima facie evidence of
+social worth. But dress has subtler and more far-reaching possibilities
+than this crude, first-hand evidence of wasteful consumption only. If,
+in addition to showing that the wearer can afford to consume freely and
+uneconomically, it can also be shown in the same stroke that he or she
+is not under the necessity of earning a livelihood, the evidence of
+social worth is enhanced in a very considerable degree. Our dress,
+therefore, in order to serve its purpose effectually, should not only
+he expensive, but it should also make plain to all observers that
+the wearer is not engaged in any kind of productive labor. In the
+evolutionary process by which our system of dress has been elaborated
+into its present admirably perfect adaptation to its purpose, this
+subsidiary line of evidence has received due attention. A detailed
+examination of what passes in popular apprehension for elegant apparel
+will show that it is contrived at every point to convey the impression
+that the wearer does not habitually put forth any useful effort. It
+goes without saying that no apparel can be considered elegant, or
+even decent, if it shows the effect of manual labor on the part of the
+wearer, in the way of soil or wear. The pleasing effect of neat and
+spotless garments is chiefly, if not altogether, due to their carrying
+the suggestion of leisure-exemption from personal contact with
+industrial processes of any kind. Much of the charm that invests the
+patent-leather shoe, the stainless linen, the lustrous cylindrical hat,
+and the walking-stick, which so greatly enhance the native dignity of
+a gentleman, comes of their pointedly suggesting that the wearer cannot
+when so attired bear a hand in any employment that is directly and
+immediately of any human use. Elegant dress serves its purpose of
+elegance not only in that it is expensive, but also because it is
+the insignia of leisure. It not only shows that the wearer is able to
+consume a relatively large value, but it argues at the same time that he
+consumes without producing.
+
+The dress of women goes even farther than that of men in the way of
+demonstrating the wearer's abstinence from productive employment. It
+needs no argument to enforce the generalization that the more elegant
+styles of feminine bonnets go even farther towards making work
+impossible than does the man's high hat. The woman's shoe adds the
+so-called French heel to the evidence of enforced leisure afforded
+by its polish; because this high heel obviously makes any, even the
+simplest and most necessary manual work extremely difficult. The like
+is true even in a higher degree of the skirt and the rest of the drapery
+which characterizes woman's dress. The substantial reason for our
+tenacious attachment to the skirt is just this; it is expensive and it
+hampers the wearer at every turn and incapacitates her for all useful
+exertion. The like is true of the feminine custom of wearing the hair
+excessively long.
+
+But the woman's apparel not only goes beyond that of the modern man
+in the degree in which it argues exemption from labor; it also adds a
+peculiar and highly characteristic feature which differs in kind from
+anything habitually practiced by the men. This feature is the class of
+contrivances of which the corset is the typical example. The corset
+is, in economic theory, substantially a mutilation, undergone for the
+purpose of lowering the subject's vitality and rendering her permanently
+and obviously unfit for work. It is true, the corset impairs the
+personal attractions of the wearer, but the loss suffered on that
+score is offset by the gain in reputability which comes of her visibly
+increased expensiveness and infirmity. It may broadly be set down
+that the womanliness of woman's apparel resolves itself, in point of
+substantial fact, into the more effective hindrance to useful exertion
+offered by the garments peculiar to women. This difference between
+masculine and feminine apparel is here simply pointed out as a
+characteristic feature. The ground of its occurrence will be discussed
+presently.
+
+So far, then, we have, as the great and dominant norm of dress, the
+broad principle of conspicuous waste. Subsidiary to this principle,
+and as a corollary under it, we get as a second norm the principle of
+conspicuous leisure. In dress construction this norm works out in the
+shape of divers contrivances going to show that the wearer does not and,
+as far as it may conveniently be shown, can not engage in productive
+labor. Beyond these two principles there is a third of scarcely less
+constraining force, which will occur to any one who reflects at all
+on the subject. Dress must not only be conspicuously expensive and
+inconvenient, it must at the same time be up to date. No explanation at
+all satisfactory has hitherto been offered of the phenomenon of
+changing fashions. The imperative requirement of dressing in the latest
+accredited manner, as well as the fact that this accredited fashion
+constantly changes from season to season, is sufficiently familiar to
+every one, but the theory of this flux and change has not been worked
+out. We may of course say, with perfect consistency and truthfulness,
+that this principle of novelty is another corollary under the law of
+conspicuous waste. Obviously, if each garment is permitted to serve for
+but a brief term, and if none of last season's apparel is carried
+over and made further use of during the present season, the wasteful
+expenditure on dress is greatly increased. This is good as far as it
+goes, but it is negative only. Pretty much all that this consideration
+warrants us in saying is that the norm of conspicuous waste exercises a
+controlling surveillance in all matters of dress, so that any change in
+the fashions must conspicuous waste exercises a controlling surveillance
+in all matters of dress, so that any change in the fashions must conform
+to the requirement of wastefulness; it leaves unanswered the question
+as to the motive for making and accepting a change in the prevailing
+styles, and it also fails to explain why conformity to a given style at
+a given time is so imperatively necessary as we know it to be.
+
+For a creative principle, capable of serving as motive to invention
+and innovation in fashions, we shall have to go back to the primitive,
+non-economic motive with which apparel originated--the motive of
+adornment. Without going into an extended discussion of how and why this
+motive asserts itself under the guidance of the law of expensiveness, it
+may be stated broadly that each successive innovation in the fashions is
+an effort to reach some form of display which shall be more acceptable
+to our sense of form and color or of effectiveness, than that which it
+displaces. The changing styles are the expression of a restless search
+for something which shall commend itself to our aesthetic sense; but
+as each innovation is subject to the selective action of the norm of
+conspicuous waste, the range within which innovation can take place is
+somewhat restricted. The innovation must not only be more beautiful,
+or perhaps oftener less offensive, than that which it displaces, but it
+must also come up to the accepted standard of expensiveness.
+
+It would seem at first sight that the result of such an unremitting
+struggle to attain the beautiful in dress should be a gradual approach
+to artistic perfection. We might naturally expect that the fashions
+should show a well-marked trend in the direction of some one or more
+types of apparel eminently becoming to the human form; and we might even
+feel that we have substantial ground for the hope that today, after
+all the ingenuity and effort which have been spent on dress these many
+years, the fashions should have achieved a relative perfection and
+a relative stability, closely approximating to a permanently tenable
+artistic ideal. But such is not the case. It would be very hazardous
+indeed to assert that the styles of today are intrinsically more
+becoming than those of ten years ago, or than those of twenty, or fifty,
+or one hundred years ago. On the other hand, the assertion freely goes
+uncontradicted that styles in vogue two thousand years ago are more
+becoming than the most elaborate and painstaking constructions of today.
+
+The explanation of the fashions just offered, then, does not fully
+explain, and we shall have to look farther. It is well known that
+certain relatively stable styles and types of costume have been worked
+out in various parts of the world; as, for instance, among the Japanese,
+Chinese, and other Oriental nations; likewise among the Greeks, Romans,
+and other Eastern peoples of antiquity so also, in later times, among
+the peasants of nearly every country of Europe. These national or
+popular costumes are in most cases adjudged by competent critics to
+be more becoming, more artistic, than the fluctuating styles of modern
+civilized apparel. At the same time they are also, at least usually,
+less obviously wasteful; that is to say, other elements than that of a
+display of expense are more readily detected in their structure.
+
+These relatively stable costumes are, commonly, pretty strictly and
+narrowly localized, and they vary by slight and systematic gradations
+from place to place. They have in every case been worked out by peoples
+or classes which are poorer than we, and especially they belong in
+countries and localities and times where the population, or at least
+the class to which the costume in question belongs, is relatively
+homogeneous, stable, and immobile. That is to say, stable costumes
+which will bear the test of time and perspective are worked out under
+circumstances where the norm of conspicuous waste asserts itself less
+imperatively than it does in the large modern civilized cities, whose
+relatively mobile wealthy population today sets the pace in matters of
+fashion. The countries and classes which have in this way worked out
+stable and artistic costumes have been so placed that the pecuniary
+emulation among them has taken the direction of a competition in
+conspicuous leisure rather than in conspicuous consumption of goods. So
+that it will hold true in a general way that fashions are least stable
+and least becoming in those communities where the principle of a
+conspicuous waste of goods asserts itself most imperatively, as among
+ourselves. All this points to an antagonism between expensiveness and
+artistic apparel. In point of practical fact, the norm of conspicuous
+waste is incompatible with the requirement that dress should be
+beautiful or becoming. And this antagonism offers an explanation of that
+restless change in fashion which neither the canon of expensiveness nor
+that of beauty alone can account for.
+
+The standard of reputability requires that dress should show wasteful
+expenditure; but all wastefulness is offensive to native taste. The
+psychological law has already been pointed out that all men--and women
+perhaps even in a higher degree abhor futility, whether of effort or
+of expenditure--much as Nature was once said to abhor a vacuum. But the
+principle of conspicuous waste requires an obviously futile expenditure;
+and the resulting conspicuous expensiveness of dress is therefore
+intrinsically ugly. Hence we find that in all innovations in dress, each
+added or altered detail strives to avoid condemnation by showing some
+ostensible purpose, at the same time that the requirement of conspicuous
+waste prevents the purposefulness of these innovations from becoming
+anything more than a somewhat transparent pretense. Even in its freest
+flights, fashion rarely if ever gets away from a simulation of some
+ostensible use. The ostensible usefulness of the fashionable details
+of dress, however, is always so transparent a make-believe, and
+their substantial futility presently forces itself so baldly upon our
+attention as to become unbearable, and then we take refuge in a new
+style. But the new style must conform to the requirement of reputable
+wastefulness and futility. Its futility presently becomes as odious
+as that of its predecessor; and the only remedy which the law of waste
+allows us is to seek relief in some new construction, equally futile and
+equally untenable. Hence the essential ugliness and the unceasing change
+of fashionable attire.
+
+Having so explained the phenomenon of shifting fashions, the next
+thing is to make the explanation tally with everyday facts. Among these
+everyday facts is the well-known liking which all men have for the
+styles that are in vogue at any given time. A new style comes into vogue
+and remains in favor for a season, and, at least so long as it is
+a novelty, people very generally find the new style attractive. The
+prevailing fashion is felt to be beautiful. This is due partly to the
+relief it affords in being different from what went before it, partly
+to its being reputable. As indicated in the last chapter, the canon
+of reputability to some extent shapes our tastes, so that under its
+guidance anything will be accepted as becoming until its novelty wears
+off, or until the warrant of reputability is transferred to a new and
+novel structure serving the same general purpose. That the alleged
+beauty, or "loveliness," of the styles in vogue at any given time is
+transient and spurious only is attested by the fact that none of the
+many shifting fashions will bear the test of time. When seen in the
+perspective of half-a-dozen years or more, the best of our fashions
+strike us as grotesque, if not unsightly. Our transient attachment to
+whatever happens to be the latest rests on other than aesthetic grounds,
+and lasts only until our abiding aesthetic sense has had time to assert
+itself and reject this latest indigestible contrivance.
+
+The process of developing an aesthetic nausea takes more or less time;
+the length of time required in any given case being inversely as the
+degree of intrinsic odiousness of the style in question. This time
+relation between odiousness and instability in fashions affords ground
+for the inference that the more rapidly the styles succeed and
+displace one another, the more offensive they are to sound taste. The
+presumption, therefore, is that the farther the community, especially
+the wealthy classes of the community, develop in wealth and mobility and
+in the range of their human contact, the more imperatively will the law
+of conspicuous waste assert itself in matters of dress, the more will
+the sense of beauty tend to fall into abeyance or be overborne by the
+canon of pecuniary reputability, the more rapidly will fashions shift
+and change, and the more grotesque and intolerable will be the varying
+styles that successively come into vogue.
+
+There remains at least one point in this theory of dress yet to be
+discussed. Most of what has been said applies to men's attire as well
+as to that of women; although in modern times it applies at nearly all
+points with greater force to that of women. But at one point the dress
+of women differs substantially from that of men. In woman's dress there
+is obviously greater insistence on such features as testify to the
+wearer's exemption from or incapacity for all vulgarly productive
+employment. This characteristic of woman's apparel is of interest, not
+only as completing the theory of dress, but also as confirming what has
+already been said of the economic status of women, both in the past and
+in the present.
+
+As has been seen in the discussion of woman's status under the heads
+of Vicarious Leisure and Vicarious Consumption, it has in the course
+of economic development become the office of the woman to consume
+vicariously for the head of the household; and her apparel is contrived
+with this object in view. It has come about that obviously productive
+labor is in a peculiar degree derogatory to respectable women, and
+therefore special pains should be taken in the construction of women's
+dress, to impress upon the beholder the fact (often indeed a fiction)
+that the wearer does not and can not habitually engage in useful work.
+Propriety requires respectable women to abstain more consistently from
+useful effort and to make more of a show of leisure than the men of the
+same social classes. It grates painfully on our nerves to contemplate
+the necessity of any well-bred woman's earning a livelihood by useful
+work. It is not "woman's sphere." Her sphere is within the household,
+which she should "beautify," and of which she should be the "chief
+ornament." The male head of the household is not currently spoken of as
+its ornament. This feature taken in conjunction with the other fact that
+propriety requires more unremitting attention to expensive display in
+the dress and other paraphernalia of women, goes to enforce the view
+already implied in what has gone before. By virtue of its descent from a
+patriarchal past, our social system makes it the woman's function in
+an especial degree to put in evidence her household's ability to pay.
+According to the modern civilized scheme of life, the good name of the
+household to which she belongs should be the special care of the woman;
+and the system of honorific expenditure and conspicuous leisure by which
+this good name is chiefly sustained is therefore the woman's sphere.
+In the ideal scheme, as it tends to realize itself in the life of
+the higher pecuniary classes, this attention to conspicuous waste of
+substance and effort should normally be the sole economic function of
+the woman.
+
+At the stage of economic development at which the women were still in
+the full sense the property of the men, the performance of conspicuous
+leisure and consumption came to be part of the services required of
+them. The women being not their own masters, obvious expenditure and
+leisure on their part would redound to the credit of their master rather
+than to their own credit; and therefore the more expensive and the
+more obviously unproductive the women of the household are, the more
+creditable and more effective for the purpose of reputability of the
+household or its head will their life be. So much so that the women have
+been required not only to afford evidence of a life of leisure, but even
+to disable themselves for useful activity.
+
+It is at this point that the dress of men falls short of that of women,
+and for sufficient reason. Conspicuous waste and conspicuous leisure
+are reputable because they are evidence of pecuniary strength; pecuniary
+strength is reputable or honorific because, in the last analysis, it
+argues success and superior force; therefore the evidence of waste
+and leisure put forth by any individual in his own behalf cannot
+consistently take such a form or be carried to such a pitch as to argue
+incapacity or marked discomfort on his part; as the exhibition would in
+that case show not superior force, but inferiority, and so defeat its
+own purpose. So, then, wherever wasteful expenditure and the show of
+abstention from effort is normally, or on an average, carried to the
+extent of showing obvious discomfort or voluntarily induced physical
+disability. There the immediate inference is that the individual in
+question does not perform this wasteful expenditure and undergo this
+disability for her own personal gain in pecuniary repute, but in
+behalf of some one else to whom she stands in a relation of economic
+dependence; a relation which in the last analysis must, in economic
+theory, reduce itself to a relation of servitude.
+
+To apply this generalization to women's dress, and put the matter in
+concrete terms: the high heel, the skirt, the impracticable bonnet, the
+corset, and the general disregard of the wearer's comfort which is an
+obvious feature of all civilized women's apparel, are so many items of
+evidence to the effect that in the modern civilized scheme of life the
+woman is still, in theory, the economic dependent of the man--that,
+perhaps in a highly idealized sense, she still is the man's chattel. The
+homely reason for all this conspicuous leisure and attire on the part
+of women lies in the fact that they are servants to whom, in the
+differentiation of economic functions, has been delegated the office
+of putting in evidence their master's ability to pay. There is a marked
+similarity in these respects between the apparel of women and that of
+domestic servants, especially liveried servants. In both there is a very
+elaborate show of unnecessary expensiveness, and in both cases there is
+also a notable disregard of the physical comfort of the wearer. But
+the attire of the lady goes farther in its elaborate insistence on the
+idleness, if not on the physical infirmity of the wearer, than does that
+of the domestic. And this is as it should be; for in theory, according
+to the ideal scheme of the pecuniary culture, the lady of the house is
+the chief menial of the household.
+
+Besides servants, currently recognized as such, there is at least one
+other class of persons whose garb assimilates them to the class
+of servants and shows many of the features that go to make up the
+womanliness of woman's dress. This is the priestly class. Priestly
+vestments show, in accentuated form, all the features that have been
+shown to be evidence of a servile status and a vicarious life. Even
+more strikingly than the everyday habit of the priest, the vestments,
+properly so called, are ornate, grotesque, inconvenient, and, at least
+ostensibly, comfortless to the point of distress. The priest is at the
+same time expected to refrain from useful effort and, when before the
+public eye, to present an impassively disconsolate countenance, very
+much after the manner of a well-trained domestic servant. The
+shaven face of the priest is a further item to the same effect. This
+assimilation of the priestly class to the class of body servants, in
+demeanor and apparel, is due to the similarity of the two classes as
+regards economic function. In economic theory, the priest is a body
+servant, constructively in attendance upon the person of the divinity
+whose livery he wears. His livery is of a very expensive character, as
+it should be in order to set forth in a beseeming manner the dignity of
+his exalted master; but it is contrived to show that the wearing of it
+contributes little or nothing to the physical comfort of the wearer,
+for it is an item of vicarious consumption, and the repute which accrues
+from its consumption is to be imputed to the absent master, not to the
+servant.
+
+The line of demarcation between the dress of women, priests, and
+servants, on the one hand, and of men, on the other hand, is not always
+consistently observed in practice, but it will scarcely be disputed
+that it is always present in a more or less definite way in the popular
+habits of thought. There are of course also free men, and not a few
+of them, who, in their blind zeal for faultless reputable attire,
+transgress the theoretical line between man's and woman's dress, to the
+extent of arraying themselves in apparel that is obviously designed to
+vex the mortal frame; but everyone recognizes without hesitation that
+such apparel for men is a departure from the normal. We are in the habit
+of saying that such dress is "effeminate"; and one sometimes hears the
+remark that such or such an exquisitely attired gentleman is as well
+dressed as a footman.
+
+Certain apparent discrepancies under this theory of dress merit a more
+detailed examination, especially as they mark a more or less evident
+trend in the later and maturer development of dress. The vogue of the
+corset offers an apparent exception from the rule of which it has here
+been cited as an illustration. A closer examination, however, will show
+that this apparent exception is really a verification of the rule that
+the vogue of any given element or feature in dress rests on its utility
+as an evidence of pecuniary standing. It is well known that in the
+industrially more advanced communities the corset is employed only
+within certain fairly well defined social strata. The women of the
+poorer classes, especially of the rural population, do not habitually
+use it, except as a holiday luxury. Among these classes the women have
+to work hard, and it avails them little in the way of a pretense of
+leisure to so crucify the flesh in everyday life. The holiday use of
+the contrivance is due to imitation of a higher-class canon of decency.
+Upwards from this low level of indigence and manual labor, the corset
+was until within a generation or two nearly indispensable to a socially
+blameless standing for all women, including the wealthiest and most
+reputable. This rule held so long as there still was no large class of
+people wealthy enough to be above the imputation of any necessity
+for manual labor and at the same time large enough to form a
+self-sufficient, isolated social body whose mass would afford a
+foundation for special rules of conduct within the class, enforced by
+the current opinion of the class alone. But now there has grown up a
+large enough leisure class possessed of such wealth that any aspersion
+on the score of enforced manual employment would be idle and harmless
+calumny; and the corset has therefore in large measure fallen into
+disuse within this class. The exceptions under this rule of exemption
+from the corset are more apparent than real. They are the wealthy
+classes of countries with a lower industrial structure--nearer the
+archaic, quasi-industrial type--together with the later accessions of
+the wealthy classes in the more advanced industrial communities. The
+latter have not yet had time to divest themselves of the plebeian canons
+of taste and of reputability carried over from their former, lower
+pecuniary grade. Such survival of the corset is not infrequent among the
+higher social classes of those American cities, for instance, which
+have recently and rapidly risen into opulence. If the word be used as a
+technical term, without any odious implication, it may be said that the
+corset persists in great measure through the period of snobbery--the
+interval of uncertainty and of transition from a lower to the upper
+levels of pecuniary culture. That is to say, in all countries which
+have inherited the corset it continues in use wherever and so long as
+it serves its purpose as an evidence of honorific leisure by arguing
+physical disability in the wearer. The same rule of course applies to
+other mutilations and contrivances for decreasing the visible efficiency
+of the individual.
+
+Something similar should hold true with respect to divers items of
+conspicuous consumption, and indeed something of the kind does seem to
+hold to a slight degree of sundry features of dress, especially if such
+features involve a marked discomfort or appearance of discomfort to
+the wearer. During the past one hundred years there is a tendency
+perceptible, in the development of men's dress especially, to
+discontinue methods of expenditure and the use of symbols of leisure
+which must have been irksome, which may have served a good purpose in
+their time, but the continuation of which among the upper classes today
+would be a work of supererogation; as, for instance, the use of powdered
+wigs and of gold lace, and the practice of constantly shaving the face.
+There has of late years been some slight recrudescence of the shaven
+face in polite society, but this is probably a transient and unadvised
+mimicry of the fashion imposed upon body servants, and it may fairly be
+expected to go the way of the powdered wig of our grandfathers.
+
+These indices and others which resemble them in point of the boldness
+with which they point out to all observers the habitual uselessness
+of those persons who employ them, have been replaced by other, more
+dedicate methods of expressing the same fact; methods which are no less
+evident to the trained eyes of that smaller, select circle whose
+good opinion is chiefly sought. The earlier and cruder method of
+advertisement held its ground so long as the public to which the
+exhibitor had to appeal comprised large portions of the community who
+were not trained to detect delicate variations in the evidences of
+wealth and leisure. The method of advertisement undergoes a refinement
+when a sufficiently large wealthy class has developed, who have the
+leisure for acquiring skill in interpreting the subtler signs of
+expenditure. "Loud" dress becomes offensive to people of taste,
+as evincing an undue desire to reach and impress the untrained
+sensibilities of the vulgar. To the individual of high breeding, it is
+only the more honorific esteem accorded by the cultivated sense of the
+members of his own high class that is of material consequence. Since
+the wealthy leisure class has grown so large, or the contact of the
+leisure-class individual with members of his own class has grown so
+wide, as to constitute a human environment sufficient for the honorific
+purpose, there arises a tendency to exclude the baser elements of
+the population from the scheme even as spectators whose applause or
+mortification should be sought. The result of all this is a refinement
+of methods, a resort to subtler contrivances, and a spiritualization of
+the scheme of symbolism in dress. And as this upper leisure class sets
+the pace in all matters of decency, the result for the rest of society
+also is a gradual amelioration of the scheme of dress. As the community
+advances in wealth and culture, the ability to pay is put in evidence
+by means which require a progressively nicer discrimination in the
+beholder. This nicer discrimination between advertising media is in fact
+a very large element of the higher pecuniary culture.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Eight ~~ Industrial Exemption and Conservatism
+
+The life of man in society, just like the life of other species, is
+a struggle for existence, and therefore it is a process of selective
+adaptation. The evolution of social structure has been a process of
+natural selection of institutions. The progress which has been and is
+being made in human institutions and in human character may be set down,
+broadly, to a natural selection of the fittest habits of thought and to
+a process of enforced adaptation of individuals to an environment which
+has progressively changed with the growth of the community and with the
+changing institutions under which men have lived. Institutions are not
+only themselves the result of a selective and adaptive process which
+shapes the prevailing or dominant types of spiritual attitude and
+aptitudes; they are at the same time special methods of life and of
+human relations, and are therefore in their turn efficient factors of
+selection. So that the changing institutions in their turn make for a
+further selection of individuals endowed with the fittest temperament,
+and a further adaptation of individual temperament and habits to the
+changing environment through the formation of new institutions.
+
+The forces which have shaped the development of human life and of social
+structure are no doubt ultimately reducible to terms of living tissue
+and material environment; but proximately for the purpose in hand, these
+forces may best be stated in terms of an environment, partly human,
+partly non-human, and a human subject with a more or less definite
+physical and intellectual constitution. Taken in the aggregate or
+average, this human subject is more or less variable; chiefly, no doubt,
+under a rule of selective conservation of favorable variations.
+The selection of favorable variations is perhaps in great measure a
+selective conservation of ethnic types. In the life history of any
+community whose population is made up of a mixture of divers ethnic
+elements, one or another of several persistent and relatively stable
+types of body and of temperament rises into dominance at any given
+point. The situation, including the institutions in force at any given
+time, will favor the survival and dominance of one type of character in
+preference to another; and the type of man so selected to continue and
+to further elaborate the institutions handed down from the past will in
+some considerable measure shape these institutions in his own likeness.
+But apart from selection as between relatively stable types of character
+and habits of mind, there is no doubt simultaneously going on a process
+of selective adaptation of habits of thought within the general range of
+aptitudes which is characteristic of the dominant ethnic type or types.
+There may be a variation in the fundamental character of any population
+by selection between relatively stable types; but there is also a
+variation due to adaptation in detail within the range of the type, and
+to selection between specific habitual views regarding any given social
+relation or group of relations.
+
+For the present purpose, however, the question as to the nature of the
+adaptive process--whether it is chiefly a selection between stable types
+of temperament and character, or chiefly an adaptation of men's habits
+of thought to changing circumstances--is of less importance than the
+fact that, by one method or another, institutions change and develop.
+Institutions must change with changing circumstances, since they are
+of the nature of an habitual method of responding to the stimuli
+which these changing circumstances afford. The development of these
+institutions is the development of society. The institutions are,
+in substance, prevalent habits of thought with respect to particular
+relations and particular functions of the individual and of the
+community; and the scheme of life, which is made up of the aggregate
+of institutions in force at a given time or at a given point in the
+development of any society, may, on the psychological side, be broadly
+characterized as a prevalent spiritual attitude or a prevalent theory of
+life. As regards its generic features, this spiritual attitude or theory
+of life is in the last analysis reducible to terms of a prevalent type
+of character.
+
+The situation of today shapes the institutions of tomorrow through
+a selective, coercive process, by acting upon men's habitual view
+of things, and so altering or fortifying a point of view or a mental
+attitude handed down from the past. The institutions--that is to say the
+habits of thought--under the guidance of which men live are in this way
+received from an earlier time; more or less remotely earlier, but in
+any event they have been elaborated in and received from the past.
+Institutions are products of the past process, are adapted to past
+circumstances, and are therefore never in full accord with the
+requirements of the present. In the nature of the case, this process of
+selective adaptation can never catch up with the progressively changing
+situation in which the community finds itself at any given time; for
+the environment, the situation, the exigencies of life which enforce the
+adaptation and exercise the selection, change from day to day; and each
+successive situation of the community in its turn tends to obsolescence
+as soon as it has been established. When a step in the development has
+been taken, this step itself constitutes a change of situation which
+requires a new adaptation; it becomes the point of departure for a new
+step in the adjustment, and so on interminably.
+
+It is to be noted then, although it may be a tedious truism, that the
+institutions of today--the present accepted scheme of life--do not
+entirely fit the situation of today. At the same time, men's present
+habits of thought tend to persist indefinitely, except as circumstances
+enforce a change. These institutions which have thus been handed down,
+these habits of thought, points of view, mental attitudes and aptitudes,
+or what not, are therefore themselves a conservative factor. This is the
+factor of social inertia, psychological inertia, conservatism. Social
+structure changes, develops, adapts itself to an altered situation, only
+through a change in the habits of thought of the several classes of the
+community, or in the last analysis, through a change in the habits of
+thought of the individuals which make up the community. The evolution of
+society is substantially a process of mental adaptation on the part
+of individuals under the stress of circumstances which will no longer
+tolerate habits of thought formed under and conforming to a different
+set of circumstances in the past. For the immediate purpose it need not
+be a question of serious importance whether this adaptive process is
+a process of selection and survival of persistent ethnic types or a
+process of individual adaptation and an inheritance of acquired traits.
+
+Social advance, especially as seen from the point of view of economic
+theory, consists in a continued progressive approach to an approximately
+exact "adjustment of inner relations to outer relations", but this
+adjustment is never definitively established, since the "outer
+relations" are subject to constant change as a consequence of the
+progressive change going on in the "inner relations." But the degree
+of approximation may be greater or less, depending on the facility with
+which an adjustment is made. A readjustment of men's habits of thought
+to conform with the exigencies of an altered situation is in any case
+made only tardily and reluctantly, and only under the coercion exercised
+by a stipulation which has made the accredited views untenable.
+The readjustment of institutions and habitual views to an altered
+environment is made in response to pressure from without; it is of the
+nature of a response to stimulus. Freedom and facility of readjustment,
+that is to say capacity for growth in social structure, therefore
+depends in great measure on the degree of freedom with which the
+situation at any given time acts on the individual members of the
+community-the degree of exposure of the individual members to the
+constraining forces of the environment. If any portion or class of
+society is sheltered from the action of the environment in any essential
+respect, that portion of the community, or that class, will adapt
+its views and its scheme of life more tardily to the altered general
+situation; it will in so far tend to retard the process of social
+transformation. The wealthy leisure class is in such a sheltered
+position with respect to the economic forces that make for change
+and readjustment. And it may be said that the forces which make for
+a readjustment of institutions, especially in the case of a modern
+industrial community, are, in the last analysis, almost entirely of an
+economic nature.
+
+Any community may be viewed as an industrial or economic mechanism,
+the structure of which is made up of what is called its economic
+institutions. These institutions are habitual methods of carrying on the
+life process of the community in contact with the material environment
+in which it lives. When given methods of unfolding human activity in
+this given environment have been elaborated in this way, the life of
+the community will express itself with some facility in these habitual
+directions. The community will make use of the forces of the environment
+for the purposes of its life according to methods learned in the past
+and embodied in these institutions. But as population increases, and as
+men's knowledge and skill in directing the forces of nature widen, the
+habitual methods of relation between the members of the group, and the
+habitual method of carrying on the life process of the group as a
+whole, no longer give the same result as before; nor are the resulting
+conditions of life distributed and apportioned in the same manner or
+with the same effect among the various members as before. If the scheme
+according to which the life process of the group was carried on under
+the earlier conditions gave approximately the highest attainable
+result--under the circumstances--in the way of efficiency or facility
+of the life process of the group; then the same scheme of life unaltered
+will not yield the highest result attainable in this respect under the
+altered conditions. Under the altered conditions of population, skill,
+and knowledge, the facility of life as carried on according to the
+traditional scheme may not be lower than under the earlier conditions;
+but the chances are always that it is less than might be if the scheme
+were altered to suit the altered conditions.
+
+The group is made up of individuals, and the group's life is the life
+of individuals carried on in at least ostensible severalty. The group's
+accepted scheme of life is the consensus of views held by the body of
+these individuals as to what is right, good, expedient, and beautiful in
+the way of human life. In the redistribution of the conditions of life
+that comes of the altered method of dealing with the environment, the
+outcome is not an equable change in the facility of life throughout the
+group. The altered conditions may increase the facility of life for
+the group as a whole, but the redistribution will usually result in a
+decrease of facility or fullness of life for some members of the
+group. An advance in technical methods, in population, or in industrial
+organization will require at least some of the members of the community
+to change their habits of life, if they are to enter with facility and
+effect into the altered industrial methods; and in doing so they will be
+unable to live up to the received notions as to what are the right and
+beautiful habits of life.
+
+Any one who is required to change his habits of life and his habitual
+relations to his fellow men will feel the discrepancy between the
+method of life required of him by the newly arisen exigencies, and
+the traditional scheme of life to which he is accustomed. It is the
+individuals placed in this position who have the liveliest incentive to
+reconstruct the received scheme of life and are most readily persuaded
+to accept new standards; and it is through the need of the means of
+livelihood that men are placed in such a position. The pressure exerted
+by the environment upon the group, and making for a readjustment of the
+group's scheme of life, impinges upon the members of the group in
+the form of pecuniary exigencies; and it is owing to this fact--that
+external forces are in great part translated into the form of pecuniary
+or economic exigencies--it is owing to this fact that we can say that
+the forces which count toward a readjustment of institutions in any
+modern industrial community are chiefly economic forces; or more
+specifically, these forces take the form of pecuniary pressure. Such a
+readjustment as is here contemplated is substantially a change in men's
+views as to what is good and right, and the means through which a change
+is wrought in men's apprehension of what is good and right is in large
+part the pressure of pecuniary exigencies.
+
+Any change in men's views as to what is good and right in human life
+make its way but tardily at the best. Especially is this true of any
+change in the direction of what is called progress; that is to say, in
+the direction of divergence from the archaic position--from the position
+which may be accounted the point of departure at any step in the social
+evolution of the community. Retrogression, reapproach to a standpoint to
+which the race has been long habituated in the past, is easier. This is
+especially true in case the development away from this past standpoint
+has not been due chiefly to a substitution of an ethnic type whose
+temperament is alien to the earlier standpoint. The cultural stage which
+lies immediately back of the present in the life history of Western
+civilization is what has here been called the quasi-peaceable stage. At
+this quasi-peaceable stage the law of status is the dominant feature in
+the scheme of life. There is no need of pointing out how prone the
+men of today are to revert to the spiritual attitude of mastery and of
+personal subservience which characterizes that stage. It may rather be
+said to be held in an uncertain abeyance by the economic exigencies of
+today, than to have been definitely supplanted by a habit of mind that
+is in full accord with these later-developed exigencies. The predatory
+and quasi-peaceable stages of economic evolution seem to have been of
+long duration in life history of all the chief ethnic elements which go
+to make up the populations of the Western culture. The temperament
+and the propensities proper to those cultural stages have, therefore,
+attained such a persistence as to make a speedy reversion to the broad
+features of the corresponding psychological constitution inevitable in
+the case of any class or community which is removed from the action of
+those forces that make for a maintenance of the later-developed habits
+of thought.
+
+It is a matter of common notoriety that when individuals, or even
+considerable groups of men, are segregated from a higher industrial
+culture and exposed to a lower cultural environment, or to an economic
+situation of a more primitive character, they quickly show evidence of
+reversion toward the spiritual features which characterize the predatory
+type; and it seems probable that the dolicho-blond type of European man
+is possessed of a greater facility for such reversion to barbarism than
+the other ethnic elements with which that type is associated in the
+Western culture. Examples of such a reversion on a small scale abound in
+the later history of migration and colonization. Except for the fear
+of offending that chauvinistic patriotism which is so characteristic
+a feature of the predatory culture, and the presence of which is
+frequently the most striking mark of reversion in modern communities,
+the case of the American colonies might be cited as an example of such a
+reversion on an unusually large scale, though it was not a reversion of
+very large scope.
+
+The leisure class is in great measure sheltered from the stress of
+those economic exigencies which prevail in any modern, highly organized
+industrial community. The exigencies of the struggle for the means
+of life are less exacting for this class than for any other; and as a
+consequence of this privileged position we should expect to find it one
+of the least responsive of the classes of society to the demands
+which the situation makes for a further growth of institutions and a
+readjustment to an altered industrial situation. The leisure class is
+the conservative class. The exigencies of the general economic situation
+of the community do not freely or directly impinge upon the members of
+this class. They are not required under penalty of forfeiture to change
+their habits of life and their theoretical views of the external world
+to suit the demands of an altered industrial technique, since they
+are not in the full sense an organic part of the industrial community.
+Therefore these exigencies do not readily produce, in the members of
+this class, that degree of uneasiness with the existing order which
+alone can lead any body of men to give up views and methods of life that
+have become habitual to them. The office of the leisure class in social
+evolution is to retard the movement and to conserve what is obsolescent.
+This proposition is by no means novel; it has long been one of the
+commonplaces of popular opinion.
+
+The prevalent conviction that the wealthy class is by nature
+conservative has been popularly accepted without much aid from any
+theoretical view as to the place and relation of that class in the
+cultural development. When an explanation of this class conservatism is
+offered, it is commonly the invidious one that the wealthy class opposes
+innovation because it has a vested interest, of an unworthy sort, in
+maintaining the present conditions. The explanation here put forward
+imputes no unworthy motive. The opposition of the class to changes in
+the cultural scheme is instinctive, and does not rest primarily on an
+interested calculation of material advantages; it is an instinctive
+revulsion at any departure from the accepted way of doing and of looking
+at things--a revulsion common to all men and only to be overcome by
+stress of circumstances. All change in habits of life and of thought
+is irksome. The difference in this respect between the wealthy and the
+common run of mankind lies not so much in the motive which prompts to
+conservatism as in the degree of exposure to the economic forces that
+urge a change. The members of the wealthy class do not yield to the
+demand for innovation as readily as other men because they are not
+constrained to do so.
+
+This conservatism of the wealthy class is so obvious a feature that
+it has even come to be recognized as a mark of respectability. Since
+conservatism is a characteristic of the wealthier and therefore more
+reputable portion of the community, it has acquired a certain honorific
+or decorative value. It has become prescriptive to such an extent that
+an adherence to conservative views is comprised as a matter of course in
+our notions of respectability; and it is imperatively incumbent on all
+who would lead a blameless life in point of social repute. Conservatism,
+being an upper-class characteristic, is decorous; and conversely,
+innovation, being a lower-class phenomenon, is vulgar. The first and
+most unreflected element in that instinctive revulsion and reprobation
+with which we turn from all social innovators is this sense of the
+essential vulgarity of the thing. So that even in cases where one
+recognizes the substantial merits of the case for which the innovator
+is spokesman--as may easily happen if the evils which he seeks to
+remedy are sufficiently remote in point of time or space or personal
+contact--still one cannot but be sensible of the fact that the innovator
+is a person with whom it is at least distasteful to be associated, and
+from whose social contact one must shrink. Innovation is bad form.
+
+The fact that the usages, actions, and views of the well-to-do leisure
+class acquire the character of a prescriptive canon of conduct for
+the rest of society, gives added weight and reach to the conservative
+influence of that class. It makes it incumbent upon all reputable people
+to follow their lead. So that, by virtue of its high position as the
+avatar of good form, the wealthier class comes to exert a retarding
+influence upon social development far in excess of that which the
+simple numerical strength of the class would assign it. Its prescriptive
+example acts to greatly stiffen the resistance of all other classes
+against any innovation, and to fix men's affections upon the good
+institutions handed down from an earlier generation. There is a second
+way in which the influence of the leisure class acts in the same
+direction, so far as concerns hindrance to the adoption of a
+conventional scheme of life more in accord with the exigencies of
+the time. This second method of upper-class guidance is not in strict
+consistency to be brought under the same category as the instinctive
+conservatism and aversion to new modes of thought just spoken of; but
+it may as well be dealt with here, since it has at least this much
+in common with the conservative habit of mind that it acts to retard
+innovation and the growth of social structure. The code of proprieties,
+conventionalities, and usages in vogue at any given time and among any
+given people has more or less of the character of an organic whole;
+so that any appreciable change in one point of the scheme involves
+something of a change or readjustment at other points also, if not
+a reorganization all along the line. When a change is made which
+immediately touches only a minor point in the scheme, the consequent
+derangement of the structure of conventionalities may be inconspicuous;
+but even in such a case it is safe to say that some derangement of the
+general scheme, more or less far-reaching, will follow. On the
+other hand, when an attempted reform involves the suppression or
+thorough-going remodelling of an institution of first-rate importance
+in the conventional scheme, it is immediately felt that a serious
+derangement of the entire scheme would result; it is felt that a
+readjustment of the structure to the new form taken on by one of
+its chief elements would be a painful and tedious, if not a doubtful
+process.
+
+In order to realize the difficulty which such a radical change in any
+one feature of the conventional scheme of life would involve, it is only
+necessary to suggest the suppression of the monogamic family, or of
+the agnatic system of consanguinity, or of private property, or of the
+theistic faith, in any country of the Western civilization; or suppose
+the suppression of ancestor worship in China, or of the caste system in
+india, or of slavery in Africa, or the establishment of equality of the
+sexes in Mohammedan countries. It needs no argument to show that the
+derangement of the general structure of conventionalities in any of
+these cases would be very considerable. In order to effect such an
+innovation a very far-reaching alteration of men's habits of thought
+would be involved also at other points of the scheme than the one
+immediately in question. The aversion to any such innovation amounts to
+a shrinking from an essentially alien scheme of life.
+
+The revulsion felt by good people at any proposed departure from the
+accepted methods of life is a familiar fact of everyday experience. It
+is not unusual to hear those persons who dispense salutary advice
+and admonition to the community express themselves forcibly upon the
+far-reaching pernicious effects which the community would suffer from
+such relatively slight changes as the disestablishment of the Anglican
+Church, an increased facility of divorce, adoption of female suffrage,
+prohibition of the manufacture and sale of intoxicating beverages,
+abolition or restriction of inheritances, etc. Any one of these
+innovations would, we are told, "shake the social structure to its
+base," "reduce society to chaos," "subvert the foundations of morality,"
+"make life intolerable," "confound the order of nature," etc. These
+various locutions are, no doubt, of the nature of hyperbole; but, at the
+same time, like all overstatement, they are evidence of a lively sense
+of the gravity of the consequences which they are intended to describe.
+The effect of these and like innovations in deranging the accepted
+scheme of life is felt to be of much graver consequence than the simple
+alteration of an isolated item in a series of contrivances for the
+convenience of men in society. What is true in so obvious a degree of
+innovations of first-rate importance is true in a less degree of changes
+of a smaller immediate importance. The aversion to change is in large
+part an aversion to the bother of making the readjustment which any
+given change will necessitate; and this solidarity of the system of
+institutions of any given culture or of any given people strengthens the
+instinctive resistance offered to any change in men's habits of thought,
+even in matters which, taken by themselves, are of minor importance. A
+consequence of this increased reluctance, due to the solidarity of human
+institutions, is that any innovation calls for a greater expenditure of
+nervous energy in making the necessary readjustment than would otherwise
+be the case. It is not only that a change in established habits of
+thought is distasteful. The process of readjustment of the accepted
+theory of life involves a degree of mental effort--a more or less
+protracted and laborious effort to find and to keep one's bearings under
+the altered circumstances. This process requires a certain expenditure
+of energy, and so presumes, for its successful accomplishment, some
+surplus of energy beyond that absorbed in the daily struggle for
+subsistence. Consequently it follows that progress is hindered by
+underfeeding and excessive physical hardship, no less effectually than
+by such a luxurious life as will shut out discontent by cutting off the
+occasion for it. The abjectly poor, and all those persons whose
+energies are entirely absorbed by the struggle for daily sustenance, are
+conservative because they cannot afford the effort of taking thought for
+the day after tomorrow; just as the highly prosperous are conservative
+because they have small occasion to be discontented with the situation
+as it stands today.
+
+From this proposition it follows that the institution of a leisure class
+acts to make the lower classes conservative by withdrawing from them
+as much as it may of the means of sustenance, and so reducing their
+consumption, and consequently their available energy, to such a point
+as to make them incapable of the effort required for the learning and
+adoption of new habits of thought. The accumulation of wealth at the
+upper end of the pecuniary scale implies privation at the lower end of
+the scale. It is a commonplace that, wherever it occurs, a considerable
+degree of privation among the body of the people is a serious obstacle
+to any innovation.
+
+This direct inhibitory effect of the unequal distribution of wealth
+is seconded by an indirect effect tending to the same result. As has
+already been seen, the imperative example set by the upper class in
+fixing the canons of reputability fosters the practice of conspicuous
+consumption. The prevalence of conspicuous consumption as one of the
+main elements in the standard of decency among all classes is of course
+not traceable wholly to the example of the wealthy leisure class, but
+the practice and the insistence on it are no doubt strengthened by the
+example of the leisure class. The requirements of decency in this matter
+are very considerable and very imperative; so that even among classes
+whose pecuniary position is sufficiently strong to admit a consumption
+of goods considerably in excess of the subsistence minimum, the
+disposable surplus left over after the more imperative physical
+needs are satisfied is not infrequently diverted to the purpose of a
+conspicuous decency, rather than to added physical comfort and fullness
+of life. Moreover, such surplus energy as is available is also likely to
+be expended in the acquisition of goods for conspicuous consumption or
+conspicuous boarding. The result is that the requirements of pecuniary
+reputability tend (1) to leave but a scanty subsistence minimum
+available for other than conspicuous consumption, and (2) to absorb
+any surplus energy which may be available after the bare physical
+necessities of life have been provided for. The outcome of the whole is
+a strengthening of the general conservative attitude of the community.
+The institution of a leisure class hinders cultural development
+immediately (1) by the inertia proper to the class itself, (2) through
+its prescriptive example of conspicuous waste and of conservatism, and
+(3) indirectly through that system of unequal distribution of wealth and
+sustenance on which the institution itself rests. To this is to be added
+that the leisure class has also a material interest in leaving things
+as they are. Under the circumstances prevailing at any given time this
+class is in a privileged position, and any departure from the existing
+order may be expected to work to the detriment of the class rather than
+the reverse. The attitude of the class, simply as influenced by its
+class interest, should therefore be to let well-enough alone. This
+interested motive comes in to supplement the strong instinctive bias of
+the class, and so to render it even more consistently conservative than
+it otherwise would be.
+
+All this, of course, has nothing to say in the way of eulogy or
+deprecation of the office of the leisure class as an exponent and
+vehicle of conservatism or reversion in social structure. The inhibition
+which it exercises may be salutary or the reverse. Wether it is the one
+or the other in any given case is a question of casuistry rather than of
+general theory. There may be truth in the view (as a question of policy)
+so often expressed by the spokesmen of the conservative element, that
+without some such substantial and consistent resistance to innovation as
+is offered by the conservative well-to-do classes, social innovation
+and experiment would hurry the community into untenable and intolerable
+situations; the only possible result of which would be discontent and
+disastrous reaction. All this, however, is beside the present argument.
+
+But apart from all deprecation, and aside from all question as to the
+indispensability of some such check on headlong innovation, the leisure
+class, in the nature of things, consistently acts to retard that
+adjustment to the environment which is called social advance or
+development. The characteristic attitude of the class may be summed
+up in the maxim: "Whatever is, is right" whereas the law of natural
+selection, as applied to human institutions, gives the axiom: "Whatever
+is, is wrong." Not that the institutions of today are wholly wrong
+for the purposes of the life of today, but they are, always and in the
+nature of things, wrong to some extent. They are the result of a more or
+less inadequate adjustment of the methods of living to a situation which
+prevailed at some point in the past development; and they are therefore
+wrong by something more than the interval which separates the present
+situation from that of the past. "Right" and "wrong" are of course here
+used without conveying any rejection as to what ought or ought not to
+be. They are applied simply from the (morally colorless) evolutionary
+standpoint, and are intended to designate compatibility or
+incompatibility with the effective evolutionary process. The institution
+of a leisure class, by force or class interest and instinct, and by
+precept and prescriptive example, makes for the perpetuation of the
+existing maladjustment of institutions, and even favors a reversion to
+a somewhat more archaic scheme of life; a scheme which would be still
+farther out of adjustment with the exigencies of life under the existing
+situation even than the accredited, obsolescent scheme that has come
+down from the immediate past.
+
+But after all has been said on the head of conservation of the good old
+ways, it remains true that institutions change and develop. There is
+a cumulative growth of customs and habits of thought; a selective
+adaptation of conventions and methods of life. Something is to be said
+of the office of the leisure class in guiding this growth as well as
+in retarding it; but little can be said here of its relation to
+institutional growth except as it touches the institutions that
+are primarily and immediately of an economic character. These
+institutions--the economic structure--may be roughly distinguished into
+two classes or categories, according as they serve one or the other of
+two divergent purposes of economic life.
+
+To adapt the classical terminology, they are institutions of acquisition
+or of production; or to revert to terms already employed in a different
+connection in earlier chapters, they are pecuniary or industrial
+institutions; or in still other terms, they are institutions serving
+either the invidious or the non-invidious economic interest. The former
+category have to do with "business," the latter with industry, taking
+the latter word in the mechanical sense. The latter class are not
+often recognized as institutions, in great part because they do not
+immediately concern the ruling class, and are, therefore, seldom the
+subject of legislation or of deliberate convention. When they do receive
+attention they are commonly approached from the pecuniary or business
+side; that being the side or phase of economic life that chiefly
+occupies men's deliberations in our time, especially the deliberations
+of the upper classes. These classes have little else than a business
+interest in things economic, and on them at the same time it is chiefly
+incumbent to deliberate upon the community's affairs.
+
+The relation of the leisure (that is, propertied non-industrial)
+class to the economic process is a pecuniary relation--a relation of
+acquisition, not of production; of exploitation, not of serviceability.
+Indirectly their economic office may, of course, be of the utmost
+importance to the economic life process; and it is by no means here
+intended to depreciate the economic function of the propertied class or
+of the captains of industry. The purpose is simply to point out what is
+the nature of the relation of these classes to the industrial process
+and to economic institutions. Their office is of a parasitic character,
+and their interest is to divert what substance they may to their own
+use, and to retain whatever is under their hand. The conventions of the
+business world have grown up under the selective surveillance of this
+principle of predation or parasitism. They are conventions of ownership;
+derivatives, more or less remote, of the ancient predatory culture. But
+these pecuniary institutions do not entirely fit the situation of today,
+for they have grown up under a past situation differing somewhat from
+the present. Even for effectiveness in the pecuniary way, therefore,
+they are not as apt as might be. The changed industrial life requires
+changed methods of acquisition; and the pecuniary classes have some
+interest in so adapting the pecuniary institutions as to give them the
+best effect for acquisition of private gain that is compatible with the
+continuance of the industrial process out of which this gain arises.
+Hence there is a more or less consistent trend in the leisure-class
+guidance of institutional growth, answering to the pecuniary ends which
+shape leisure-class economic life.
+
+The effect of the pecuniary interest and the pecuniary habit of
+mind upon the growth of institutions is seen in those enactments
+and conventions that make for security of property, enforcement of
+contracts, facility of pecuniary transactions, vested interests. Of
+such bearing are changes affecting bankruptcy and receiverships, limited
+liability, banking and currency, coalitions of laborers or employers,
+trusts and pools. The community's institutional furniture of this kind
+is of immediate consequence only to the propertied classes, and in
+proportion as they are propertied; that is to say, in proportion as
+they are to be ranked with the leisure class. But indirectly these
+conventions of business life are of the gravest consequence for the
+industrial process and for the life of the community. And in guiding the
+institutional growth in this respect, the pecuniary classes, therefore,
+serve a purpose of the most serious importance to the community, not
+only in the conservation of the accepted social scheme, but also
+in shaping the industrial process proper. The immediate end of this
+pecuniary institutional structure and of its amelioration is the greater
+facility of peaceable and orderly exploitation; but its remoter effects
+far outrun this immediate object. Not only does the more facile conduct
+of business permit industry and extra-industrial life to go on with
+less perturbation; but the resulting elimination of disturbances and
+complications calling for an exercise of astute discrimination in
+everyday affairs acts to make the pecuniary class itself superfluous.
+As fast as pecuniary transactions are reduced to routine, the captain
+of industry can be dispensed with. This consummation, it is needless
+to say, lies yet in the indefinite future. The ameliorations wrought in
+favor of the pecuniary interest in modern institutions tend, in another
+field, to substitute the "soulless" joint-stock corporation for the
+captain, and so they make also for the dispensability, of the great
+leisure-class function of ownership. Indirectly, therefore, the bent
+given to the growth of economic institutions by the leisure-class
+influence is of very considerable industrial consequence.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Nine ~~ The Conservation of Archaic Traits
+
+The institution of a leisure class has an effect not only upon social
+structure but also upon the individual character of the members of
+society. So soon as a given proclivity or a given point of view has won
+acceptance as an authoritative standard or norm of life it will react
+upon the character of the members of the society which has accepted it
+as a norm. It will to some extent shape their habits of thought and
+will exercise a selective surveillance over the development of men's
+aptitudes and inclinations. This effect is wrought partly by a coercive,
+educational adaptation of the habits of all individuals, partly by a
+selective elimination of the unfit individuals and lines of descent.
+Such human material as does not lend itself to the methods of life
+imposed by the accepted scheme suffers more or less elimination as well
+as repression. The principles of pecuniary emulation and of industrial
+exemption have in this way been erected into canons of life, and have
+become coercive factors of some importance in the situation to which men
+have to adapt themselves.
+
+These two broad principles of conspicuous waste and industrial exemption
+affect the cultural development both by guiding men's habits of thought,
+and so controlling the growth of institutions, and by selectively
+conserving certain traits of human nature that conduce to facility of
+life under the leisure-class scheme, and so controlling the effective
+temper of the community. The proximate tendency of the institution of
+a leisure class in shaping human character runs in the direction of
+spiritual survival and reversion. Its effect upon the temper of a
+community is of the nature of an arrested spiritual development. In
+the later culture especially, the institution has, on the whole, a
+conservative trend. This proposition is familiar enough in substance,
+but it may to many have the appearance of novelty in its present
+application. Therefore a summary review of its logical grounds may
+not be uncalled for, even at the risk of some tedious repetition and
+formulation of commonplaces.
+
+Social evolution is a process of selective adaptation of temperament and
+habits of thought under the stress of the circumstances of associated
+life. The adaptation of habits of thought is the growth of institutions.
+But along with the growth of institutions has gone a change of a more
+substantial character. Not only have the habits of men changed with the
+changing exigencies of the situation, but these changing exigencies
+have also brought about a correlative change in human nature. The human
+material of society itself varies with the changing conditions of life.
+This variation of human nature is held by the later ethnologists to be
+a process of selection between several relatively stable and persistent
+ethnic types or ethnic elements. Men tend to revert or to breed true,
+more or less closely, to one or another of certain types of human nature
+that have in their main features been fixed in approximate conformity
+to a situation in the past which differed from the situation of today.
+There are several of these relatively stable ethnic types of mankind
+comprised in the populations of the Western culture. These ethnic types
+survive in the race inheritance today, not as rigid and invariable
+moulds, each of a single precise and specific pattern, but in the form
+of a greater or smaller number of variants. Some variation of the ethnic
+types has resulted under the protracted selective process to which
+the several types and their hybrids have been subjected during the
+prehistoric and historic growth of culture.
+
+This necessary variation of the types themselves, due to a selective
+process of considerable duration and of a consistent trend, has not been
+sufficiently noticed by the writers who have discussed ethnic survival.
+The argument is here concerned with two main divergent variants of human
+nature resulting from this, relatively late, selective adaptation of
+the ethnic types comprised in the Western culture; the point of interest
+being the probable effect of the situation of today in furthering
+variation along one or the other of these two divergent lines.
+
+The ethnological position may be briefly summed up; and in order to
+avoid any but the most indispensable detail the schedule of types and
+variants and the scheme of reversion and survival in which they
+are concerned are here presented with a diagrammatic meagerness and
+simplicity which would not be admissible for any other purpose. The man
+of our industrial communities tends to breed true to one or the other
+of three main ethic types; the dolichocephalic-blond, the
+brachycephalic-brunette, and the Mediterranean--disregarding minor and
+outlying elements of our culture. But within each of these main ethnic
+types the reversion tends to one or the other of at least two main
+directions of variation; the peaceable or antepredatory variant and the
+predatory variant. The former of these two characteristic variants
+is nearer to the generic type in each case, being the reversional
+representative of its type as it stood at the earliest stage
+of associated life of which there is available evidence, either
+archaeological or psychological. This variant is taken to represent the
+ancestors of existing civilized man at the peaceable, savage phase of
+life which preceded the predatory culture, the regime of status, and the
+growth of pecuniary emulation. The second or predatory variant of the
+types is taken to be a survival of a more recent modification of
+the main ethnic types and their hybrids--of these types as they were
+modified, mainly by a selective adaptation, under the discipline of
+the predatory culture and the latter emulative culture of the
+quasi-peaceable stage, or the pecuniary culture proper.
+
+Under the recognized laws of heredity there may be a survival from a
+more or less remote past phase. In the ordinary, average, or normal
+case, if the type has varied, the traits of the type are transmitted
+approximately as they have stood in the recent past--which may be called
+the hereditary present. For the purpose in hand this hereditary present
+is represented by the later predatory and the quasi-peaceable culture.
+
+It is to the variant of human nature which is characteristic of this
+recent--hereditarily still existing--predatory or quasi-predatory
+culture that the modern civilized man tends to breed true in the common
+run of cases. This proposition requires some qualification so far
+as concerns the descendants of the servile or repressed classes of
+barbarian times, but the qualification necessary is probably not so
+great as might at first thought appear. Taking the population as a
+whole, this predatory, emulative variant does not seem to have attained
+a high degree of consistency or stability. That is to say, the human
+nature inherited by modern Occidental man is not nearly uniform in
+respect of the range or the relative strength of the various aptitudes
+and propensities which go to make it up. The man of the hereditary
+present is slightly archaic as judged for the purposes of the latest
+exigencies of associated life. And the type to which the modern man
+chiefly tends to revert under the law of variation is a somewhat more
+archaic human nature. On the other hand, to judge by the reversional
+traits which show themselves in individuals that vary from the
+prevailing predatory style of temperament, the ante-predatory
+variant seems to have a greater stability and greater symmetry in the
+distribution or relative force of its temperamental elements.
+
+This divergence of inherited human nature, as between an earlier and a
+later variant of the ethnic type to which the individual tends to breed
+true, is traversed and obscured by a similar divergence between the
+two or three main ethnic types that go to make up the Occidental
+populations. The individuals in these communities are conceived to be,
+in virtually every instance, hybrids of the prevailing ethnic elements
+combined in the most varied proportions; with the result that they tend
+to take back to one or the other of the component ethnic types. These
+ethnic types differ in temperament in a way somewhat similar to the
+difference between the predatory and the antepredatory variants of the
+types; the dolicho-blond type showing more of the characteristics of the
+predatory temperament--or at least more of the violent disposition--than
+the brachycephalic-brunette type, and especially more than the
+Mediterranean. When the growth of institutions or of the effective
+sentiment of a given community shows a divergence from the predatory
+human nature, therefore, it is impossible to say with certainty that
+such a divergence indicates a reversion to the ante-predatory variant.
+It may be due to an increasing dominance of the one or the other of the
+"lower" ethnic elements in the population. Still, although the evidence
+is not as conclusive as might be desired, there are indications that
+the variations in the effective temperament of modern communities is not
+altogether due to a selection between stable ethnic types. It seems to
+be to some appreciable extent a selection between the predatory and the
+peaceable variants of the several types. This conception of contemporary
+human evolution is not indispensable to the discussion. The general
+conclusions reached by the use of these concepts of selective
+adaptation would remain substantially true if the earlier, Darwinian
+and Spencerian, terms and concepts were substituted. Under the
+circumstances, some latitude may be admissible in the use of terms. The
+word "type" is used loosely, to denote variations of temperament which
+the ethnologists would perhaps recognize only as trivial variants of
+the type rather than as distinct ethnic types. Wherever a closer
+discrimination seems essential to the argument, the effort to make such
+a closer discrimination will be evident from the context.
+
+The ethnic types of today, then, are variants of the primitive racial
+types. They have suffered some alteration, and have attained some degree
+of fixity in their altered form, under the discipline of the barbarian
+culture. The man of the hereditary present is the barbarian variant,
+servile or aristocratic, of the ethnic elements that constitute him.
+But this barbarian variant has not attained the highest degree of
+homogeneity or of stability. The barbarian culture--the predatory and
+quasi-peaceable cultural stages--though of great absolute duration, has
+been neither protracted enough nor invariable enough in character to
+give an extreme fixity of type. Variations from the barbarian human
+nature occur with some frequency, and these cases of variation are
+becoming more noticeable today, because the conditions of modern life no
+longer act consistently to repress departures from the barbarian normal.
+The predatory temperament does not lead itself to all the purposes of
+modern life, and more especially not to modern industry.
+
+Departures from the human nature of the hereditary present are most
+frequently of the nature of reversions to an earlier variant of the
+type. This earlier variant is represented by the temperament
+which characterizes the primitive phase of peaceable savagery. The
+circumstances of life and the ends of effort that prevailed before the
+advent of the barbarian culture, shaped human nature and fixed it as
+regards certain fundamental traits. And it is to these ancient, generic
+features that modern men are prone to take back in case of variation
+from the human nature of the hereditary present. The conditions under
+which men lived in the most primitive stages of associated life that can
+properly be called human, seem to have been of a peaceful kind; and the
+character--the temperament and spiritual attitude of men under these
+early conditions or environment and institutions seems to have been of
+a peaceful and unaggressive, not to say an indolent, cast. For the
+immediate purpose this peaceable cultural stage may be taken to mark
+the initial phase of social development. So far as concerns the present
+argument, the dominant spiritual feature of this presumptive initial
+phase of culture seems to have been an unreflecting, unformulated sense
+of group solidarity, largely expressing itself in a complacent, but by
+no means strenuous, sympathy with all facility of human life, and an
+uneasy revulsion against apprehended inhibition or futility of life.
+Through its ubiquitous presence in the habits of thought of the
+ante-predatory savage man, this pervading but uneager sense of the
+generically useful seems to have exercised an appreciable constraining
+force upon his life and upon the manner of his habitual contact with
+other members of the group.
+
+The traces of this initial, undifferentiated peaceable phase of culture
+seem faint and doubtful if we look merely to such categorical evidence
+of its existence as is afforded by usages and views in vogue within the
+historical present, whether in civilized or in rude communities; but
+less dubious evidence of its existence is to be found in psychological
+survivals, in the way of persistent and pervading traits of human
+character. These traits survive perhaps in an especial degree among
+those ethic elements which were crowded into the background during the
+predatory culture. Traits that were suited to the earlier habits of life
+then became relatively useless in the individual struggle for existence.
+And those elements of the population, or those ethnic groups, which
+were by temperament less fitted to the predatory life were repressed and
+pushed into the background. On the transition to the predatory culture
+the character of the struggle for existence changed in some degree from
+a struggle of the group against a non-human environment to a struggle
+against a human environment. This change was accompanied by an
+increasing antagonism and consciousness of antagonism between the
+individual members of the group. The conditions of success within the
+group, as well as the conditions of the survival of the group, changed
+in some measure; and the dominant spiritual attitude for the group
+gradually changed, and brought a different range of aptitudes and
+propensities into the position of legitimate dominance in the accepted
+scheme of life. Among these archaic traits that are to be regarded as
+survivals from the peaceable cultural phase, are that instinct of race
+solidarity which we call conscience, including the sense of truthfulness
+and equity, and the instinct of workmanship, in its naive, non-invidious
+expression.
+
+Under the guidance of the later biological and psychological science,
+human nature will have to be restated in terms of habit; and in the
+restatement, this, in outline, appears to be the only assignable place
+and ground of these traits. These habits of life are of too pervading a
+character to be ascribed to the influence of a late or brief discipline.
+The ease with which they are temporarily overborne by the special
+exigencies of recent and modern life argues that these habits are the
+surviving effects of a discipline of extremely ancient date, from the
+teachings of which men have frequently been constrained to depart in
+detail under the altered circumstances of a later time; and the almost
+ubiquitous fashion in which they assert themselves whenever the pressure
+of special exigencies is relieved, argues that the process by which the
+traits were fixed and incorporated into the spiritual make-up of the
+type must have lasted for a relatively very long time and without
+serious intermission. The point is not seriously affected by any
+question as to whether it was a process of habituation in the
+old-fashioned sense of the word or a process of selective adaptation of
+the race.
+
+The character and exigencies of life, under that regime of status and
+of individual and class antithesis which covers the entire interval from
+the beginning of predatory culture to the present, argue that the traits
+of temperament here under discussion could scarcely have arisen and
+acquired fixity during that interval. It is entirely probable that these
+traits have come down from an earlier method of life, and have survived
+through the interval of predatory and quasi-peaceable culture in a
+condition of incipient, or at least imminent, desuetude, rather than
+that they have been brought out and fixed by this later culture.
+They appear to be hereditary characteristics of the race, and to have
+persisted in spite of the altered requirements of success under the
+predatory and the later pecuniary stages of culture. They seem to have
+persisted by force of the tenacity of transmission that belongs to an
+hereditary trait that is present in some degree in every member of the
+species, and which therefore rests on a broad basis of race continuity.
+
+Such a generic feature is not readily eliminated, even under a process
+of selection so severe and protracted as that to which the traits here
+under discussion were subjected during the predatory and quasi-peaceable
+stages. These peaceable traits are in great part alien to the methods
+and the animus of barbarian life. The salient characteristic of the
+barbarian culture is an unremitting emulation and antagonism between
+classes and between individuals. This emulative discipline favors those
+individuals and lines of descent which possess the peaceable savage
+traits in a relatively slight degree. It therefore tends to eliminate
+these traits, and it has apparently weakened them, in an appreciable
+degree, in the populations that have been subject to it. Even where the
+extreme penalty for non-conformity to the barbarian type of temperament
+is not paid, there results at least a more or less consistent repression
+of the non-conforming individuals and lines of descent. Where life is
+largely a struggle between individuals within the group, the possession
+of the ancient peaceable traits in a marked degree would hamper an
+individual in the struggle for life.
+
+Under any known phase of culture, other or later than the presumptive
+initial phase here spoken of, the gifts of good-nature, equity, and
+indiscriminate sympathy do not appreciably further the life of the
+individual. Their possession may serve to protect the individual from
+hard usage at the hands of a majority that insists on a modicum of
+these ingredients in their ideal of a normal man; but apart from their
+indirect and negative effect in this way, the individual fares better
+under the regime of competition in proportion as he has less of these
+gifts. Freedom from scruple, from sympathy, honesty and regard for life,
+may, within fairly wide limits, be said to further the success of the
+individual in the pecuniary culture. The highly successful men of all
+times have commonly been of this type; except those whose success has
+not been scored in terms of either wealth or power. It is only within
+narrow limits, and then only in a Pickwickian sense, that honesty is the
+best policy.
+
+As seen from the point of view of life under modern civilized conditions
+in an enlightened community of the Western culture, the primitive,
+ante-predatory savage, whose character it has been attempted to trace
+in outline above, was not a great success. Even for the purposes of
+that hypothetical culture to which his type of human nature owes what
+stability it has--even for the ends of the peaceable savage group--this
+primitive man has quite as many and as conspicuous economic failings as
+he has economic virtues--as should be plain to any one whose sense of
+the case is not biased by leniency born of a fellow-feeling. At his
+best he is "a clever, good-for-nothing fellow." The shortcomings of this
+presumptively primitive type of character are weakness, inefficiency,
+lack of initiative and ingenuity, and a yielding and indolent
+amiability, together with a lively but inconsequential animistic sense.
+Along with these traits go certain others which have some value for the
+collective life process, in the sense that they further the facility
+of life in the group. These traits are truthfulness, peaceableness,
+good-will, and a non-emulative, non-invidious interest in men and
+things.
+
+With the advent of the predatory stage of life there comes a change in
+the requirements of the successful human character. Men's habits of life
+are required to adapt themselves to new exigencies under a new scheme
+of human relations. The same unfolding of energy, which had previously
+found expression in the traits of savage life recited above, is now
+required to find expression along a new line of action, in a new group
+of habitual responses to altered stimuli. The methods which, as counted
+in terms of facility of life, answered measurably under the earlier
+conditions, are no longer adequate under the new conditions. The earlier
+situation was characterized by a relative absence of antagonism or
+differentiation of interests, the later situation by an emulation
+constantly increasing in relative absence of antagonism or
+differentiation of interests, the later situation by an emulation
+constantly increasing in intensity and narrowing in scope. The traits
+which characterize the predatory and subsequent stages of culture, and
+which indicate the types of man best fitted to survive under the regime
+of status, are (in their primary expression) ferocity, self-seeking,
+clannishness, and disingenuousness--a free resort to force and fraud.
+
+Under the severe and protracted discipline of the regime of competition,
+the selection of ethnic types has acted to give a somewhat pronounced
+dominance to these traits of character, by favoring the survival of
+those ethnic elements which are most richly endowed in these respects.
+At the same time the earlier--acquired, more generic habits of the race
+have never ceased to have some usefulness for the purpose of the life of
+the collectivity and have never fallen into definitive abeyance. It may
+be worth while to point out that the dolicho-blond type of European man
+seems to owe much of its dominating influence and its masterful position
+in the recent culture to its possessing the characteristics of predatory
+man in an exceptional degree. These spiritual traits, together with
+a large endowment of physical energy--itself probably a result of
+selection between groups and between lines of descent--chiefly go to
+place any ethnic element in the position of a leisure or master
+class, especially during the earlier phases of the development of the
+institution of a leisure class. This need not mean that precisely the
+same complement of aptitudes in any individual would insure him an
+eminent personal success. Under the competitive regime, the conditions
+of success for the individual are not necessarily the same as those for
+a class. The success of a class or party presumes a strong element of
+clannishness, or loyalty to a chief, or adherence to a tenet; whereas
+the competitive individual can best achieve his ends if he combines the
+barbarian's energy, initiative, self-seeking and disingenuousness with
+the savage's lack of loyalty or clannishness. It may be remarked by the
+way, that the men who have scored a brilliant (Napoleonic) success on
+the basis of an impartial self-seeking and absence of scruple, have
+not uncommonly shown more of the physical characteristics of the
+brachycephalic-brunette than of the dolicho-blond. The greater
+proportion of moderately successful individuals, in a self-seeking way,
+however, seem, in physique, to belong to the last-named ethnic element.
+
+The temperament induced by the predatory habit of life makes for the
+survival and fullness of life of the individual under a regime of
+emulation; at the same time it makes for the survival and success of the
+group if the group's life as a collectivity is also predominantly a life
+of hostile competition with other groups. But the evolution of economic
+life in the industrially more mature communities has now begun to take
+such a turn that the interest of the community no longer coincides with
+the emulative interests of the individual. In their corporate capacity,
+these advanced industrial communities are ceasing to be competitors
+for the means of life or for the right to live--except in so far as the
+predatory propensities of their ruling classes keep up the tradition of
+war and rapine. These communities are no longer hostile to one another
+by force of circumstances, other than the circumstances of tradition
+and temperament. Their material interests--apart, possibly, from
+the interests of the collective good fame--are not only no longer
+incompatible, but the success of any one of the communities
+unquestionably furthers the fullness of life of any other community in
+the group, for the present and for an incalculable time to come. No one
+of them any longer has any material interest in getting the better
+of any other. The same is not true in the same degree as regards
+individuals and their relations to one another.
+
+The collective interests of any modern community center in industrial
+efficiency. The individual is serviceable for the ends of the community
+somewhat in proportion to his efficiency in the productive employments
+vulgarly so called. This collective interest is best served by honesty,
+diligence, peacefulness, good-will, an absence of self-seeking, and
+an habitual recognition and apprehension of causal sequence, without
+admixture of animistic belief and without a sense of dependence on any
+preternatural intervention in the course of events. Not much is to
+be said for the beauty, moral excellence, or general worthiness and
+reputability of such a prosy human nature as these traits imply; and
+there is little ground of enthusiasm for the manner of collective life
+that would result from the prevalence of these traits in unmitigated
+dominance. But that is beside the point. The successful working of a
+modern industrial community is best secured where these traits concur,
+and it is attained in the degree in which the human material is
+characterized by their possession. Their presence in some measure is
+required in order to have a tolerable adjustment to the circumstances of
+the modern industrial situation. The complex, comprehensive, essentially
+peaceable, and highly organized mechanism of the modern industrial
+community works to the best advantage when these traits, or most of
+them, are present in the highest practicable degree. These traits are
+present in a markedly less degree in the man of the predatory type than
+is useful for the purposes of the modern collective life.
+
+On the other hand, the immediate interest of the individual under the
+competitive regime is best served by shrewd trading and unscrupulous
+management. The characteristics named above as serving the interests
+of the community are disserviceable to the individual, rather than
+otherwise. The presence of these aptitudes in his make-up diverts his
+energies to other ends than those of pecuniary gain; and also in
+his pursuit of gain they lead him to seek gain by the indirect and
+ineffectual channels of industry, rather than by a free and unfaltering
+career of sharp practice. The industrial aptitudes are pretty
+consistently a hindrance to the individual. Under the regime of
+emulation the members of a modern industrial community are rivals, each
+of whom will best attain his individual and immediate advantage if,
+through an exceptional exemption from scruple, he is able serenely to
+overreach and injure his fellows when the chance offers.
+
+It has already been noticed that modern economic institutions fall into
+two roughly distinct categories--the pecuniary and the industrial. The
+like is true of employments. Under the former head are employments that
+have to do with ownership or acquisition; under the latter head, those
+that have to do with workmanship or production. As was found in speaking
+of the growth of institutions, so with regard to employments.
+The economic interests of the leisure class lie in the pecuniary
+employments; those of the working classes lie in both classes of
+employments, but chiefly in the industrial. Entrance to the leisure
+class lies through the pecuniary employments.
+
+These two classes of employment differ materially in respect of the
+aptitudes required for each; and the training which they give similarly
+follows two divergent lines. The discipline of the pecuniary employments
+acts to conserve and to cultivate certain of the predatory aptitudes and
+the predatory animus. It does this both by educating those individuals
+and classes who are occupied with these employments and by selectively
+repressing and eliminating those individuals and lines of descent that
+are unfit in this respect. So far as men's habits of thought are shaped
+by the competitive process of acquisition and tenure; so far as their
+economic functions are comprised within the range of ownership of
+wealth as conceived in terms of exchange value, and its management and
+financiering through a permutation of values; so far their experience
+in economic life favors the survival and accentuation of the predatory
+temperament and habits of thought. Under the modern, peaceable system,
+it is of course the peaceable range of predatory habits and aptitudes
+that is chiefly fostered by a life of acquisition. That is to say, the
+pecuniary employments give proficiency in the general line of practices
+comprised under fraud, rather than in those that belong under the more
+archaic method of forcible seizure.
+
+These pecuniary employments, tending to conserve the predatory
+temperament, are the employments which have to do with ownership--the
+immediate function of the leisure class proper--and the subsidiary
+functions concerned with acquisition and accumulation. These cover the
+class of persons and that range of duties in the economic process which
+have to do with the ownership of enterprises engaged in competitive
+industry; especially those fundamental lines of economic management
+which are classed as financiering operations. To these may be added
+the greater part of mercantile occupations. In their best and clearest
+development these duties make up the economic office of the "captain
+of industry." The captain of industry is an astute man rather than
+an ingenious one, and his captaincy is a pecuniary rather than an
+industrial captaincy. Such administration of industry as he exercises
+is commonly of a permissive kind. The mechanically effective details of
+production and of industrial organization are delegated to subordinates
+of a less "practical" turn of mind--men who are possessed of a gift for
+workmanship rather than administrative ability. So far as regards their
+tendency in shaping human nature by education and selection, the common
+run of non-economic employments are to be classed with the pecuniary
+employments. Such are politics and ecclesiastical and military
+employments.
+
+The pecuniary employments have also the sanction of reputability in
+a much higher degree than the industrial employments. In this way the
+leisure-class standards of good repute come in to sustain the
+prestige of those aptitudes that serve the invidious purpose; and the
+leisure-class scheme of decorous living, therefore, also furthers the
+survival and culture of the predatory traits. Employments fall into
+a hierarchical gradation of reputability. Those which have to do
+immediately with ownership on a large scale are the most reputable of
+economic employments proper. Next to these in good repute come
+those employments that are immediately subservient to ownership and
+financiering--such as banking and the law. Banking employments also
+carry a suggestion of large ownership, and this fact is doubtless
+accountable for a share of the prestige that attaches to the business.
+The profession of the law does not imply large ownership; but since no
+taint of usefulness, for other than the competitive purpose, attaches
+to the lawyer's trade, it grades high in the conventional scheme. The
+lawyer is exclusively occupied with the details of predatory fraud,
+either in achieving or in checkmating chicanery, and success in the
+profession is therefore accepted as marking a large endowment of that
+barbarian astuteness which has always commanded men's respect and fear.
+Mercantile pursuits are only half-way reputable, unless they involve a
+large element of ownership and a small element of usefulness. They grade
+high or low somewhat in proportion as they serve the higher or the lower
+needs; so that the business of retailing the vulgar necessaries of
+life descends to the level of the handicrafts and factory labor. Manual
+labor, or even the work of directing mechanical processes, is of course
+on a precarious footing as regards respectability. A qualification is
+necessary as regards the discipline given by the pecuniary employments.
+As the scale of industrial enterprise grows larger, pecuniary management
+comes to bear less of the character of chicanery and shrewd competition
+in detail. That is to say, for an ever-increasing proportion of the
+persons who come in contact with this phase of economic life, business
+reduces itself to a routine in which there is less immediate suggestion
+of overreaching or exploiting a competitor. The consequent exemption
+from predatory habits extends chiefly to subordinates employed in
+business. The duties of ownership and administration are virtually
+untouched by this qualification. The case is different as regards those
+individuals or classes who are immediately occupied with the technique
+and manual operations of production. Their daily life is not in the same
+degree a course of habituation to the emulative and invidious motives
+and maneuvers of the pecuniary side of industry. They are consistently
+held to the apprehension and coordination of mechanical facts and
+sequences, and to their appreciation and utilization for the purposes
+of human life. So far as concerns this portion of the population, the
+educative and selective action of the industrial process with which they
+are immediately in contact acts to adapt their habits of thought to the
+non-invidious purposes of the collective life. For them, therefore, it
+hastens the obsolescence of the distinctively predatory aptitudes and
+propensities carried over by heredity and tradition from the barbarian
+past of the race.
+
+The educative action of the economic life of the community, therefore,
+is not of a uniform kind throughout all its manifestations. That range
+of economic activities which is concerned immediately with pecuniary
+competition has a tendency to conserve certain predatory traits; while
+those industrial occupations which have to do immediately with the
+production of goods have in the main the contrary tendency. But with
+regard to the latter class of employments it is to be noticed in
+qualification that the persons engaged in them are nearly all to some
+extent also concerned with matters of pecuniary competition (as, for
+instance, in the competitive fixing of wages and salaries, in the
+purchase of goods for consumption, etc.). Therefore the distinction
+here made between classes of employments is by no means a hard and fast
+distinction between classes of persons.
+
+The employments of the leisure classes in modern industry are such as to
+keep alive certain of the predatory habits and aptitudes. So far as
+the members of those classes take part in the industrial process, their
+training tends to conserve in them the barbarian temperament. But there
+is something to be said on the other side. Individuals so placed as to
+be exempt from strain may survive and transmit their characteristics
+even if they differ widely from the average of the species both in
+physique and in spiritual make-up. The chances for a survival and
+transmission of atavistic traits are greatest in those classes that are
+most sheltered from the stress of circumstances. The leisure class is in
+some degree sheltered from the stress of the industrial situation,
+and should, therefore, afford an exceptionally great proportion of
+reversions to the peaceable or savage temperament. It should be possible
+for such aberrant or atavistic individuals to unfold their life activity
+on ante-predatory lines without suffering as prompt a repression or
+elimination as in the lower walks of life.
+
+Something of the sort seems to be true in fact. There is, for instance,
+an appreciable proportion of the upper classes whose inclinations
+lead them into philanthropic work, and there is a considerable body
+of sentiment in the class going to support efforts of reform and
+amelioration. And much of this philanthropic and reformatory effort,
+moreover, bears the marks of that amiable "cleverness" and incoherence
+that is characteristic of the primitive savage. But it may still be
+doubtful whether these facts are evidence of a larger proportion of
+reversions in the higher than in the lower strata, even if the same
+inclinations were present in the impecunious classes, it would not as
+easily find expression there; since those classes lack the means and the
+time and energy to give effect to their inclinations in this respect.
+The prima facie evidence of the facts can scarcely go unquestioned.
+
+In further qualification it is to be noted that the leisure class of
+today is recruited from those who have been successful in a pecuniary
+way, and who, therefore, are presumably endowed with more than an even
+complement of the predatory traits. Entrance into the leisure class lies
+through the pecuniary employments, and these employments, by selection
+and adaptation, act to admit to the upper levels only those lines of
+descent that are pecuniarily fit to survive under the predatory test.
+And so soon as a case of reversion to non-predatory human nature shows
+itself on these upper levels, it is commonly weeded out and thrown back
+to the lower pecuniary levels. In order to hold its place in the class,
+a stock must have the pecuniary temperament; otherwise its fortune would
+be dissipated and it would presently lose caste. Instances of this kind
+are sufficiently frequent. The constituency of the leisure class is kept
+up by a continual selective process, whereby the individuals and
+lines of descent that are eminently fitted for an aggressive pecuniary
+competition are withdrawn from the lower classes. In order to reach the
+upper levels the aspirant must have, not only a fair average complement
+of the pecuniary aptitudes, but he must have these gifts in such an
+eminent degree as to overcome very material difficulties that stand in
+the way of his ascent. Barring accidents, the nouveaux arrives are a
+picked body.
+
+This process of selective admission has, of course, always been going
+on; ever since the fashion of pecuniary emulation set in--which is much
+the same as saying, ever since the institution of a leisure class was
+first installed. But the precise ground of selection has not always been
+the same, and the selective process has therefore not always given the
+same results. In the early barbarian, or predatory stage proper, the
+test of fitness was prowess, in the naive sense of the word. To gain
+entrance to the class, the candidate had to be gifted with clannishness,
+massiveness, ferocity, unscrupulousness, and tenacity of purpose. These
+were the qualities that counted toward the accumulation and continued
+tenure of wealth. The economic basis of the leisure class, then as
+later, was the possession of wealth; but the methods of accumulating
+wealth, and the gifts required for holding it, have changed in some
+degree since the early days of the predatory culture. In consequence of
+the selective process the dominant traits of the early barbarian leisure
+class were bold aggression, an alert sense of status, and a free
+resort to fraud. The members of the class held their place by tenure of
+prowess. In the later barbarian culture society attained settled methods
+of acquisition and possession under the quasi-peaceable regime of
+status. Simple aggression and unrestrained violence in great measure
+gave place to shrewd practice and chicanery, as the best approved method
+of accumulating wealth. A different range of aptitudes and propensities
+would then be conserved in the leisure class. Masterful aggression, and
+the correlative massiveness, together with a ruthlessly consistent
+sense of status, would still count among the most splendid traits of
+the class. These have remained in our traditions as the typical
+"aristocratic virtues." But with these were associated an increasing
+complement of the less obtrusive pecuniary virtues; such as providence,
+prudence, and chicanery. As time has gone on, and the modern peaceable
+stage of pecuniary culture has been approached, the last-named range of
+aptitudes and habits has gained in relative effectiveness for pecuniary
+ends, and they have counted for relatively more in the selective process
+under which admission is gained and place is held in the leisure class.
+
+The ground of selection has changed, until the aptitudes which now
+qualify for admission to the class are the pecuniary aptitudes only.
+What remains of the predatory barbarian traits is the tenacity of
+purpose or consistency of aim which distinguished the successful
+predatory barbarian from the peaceable savage whom he supplanted.
+But this trait can not be said characteristically to distinguish the
+pecuniarily successful upper-class man from the rank and file of the
+industrial classes. The training and the selection to which the latter
+are exposed in modern industrial life give a similarly decisive weight
+to this trait. Tenacity of purpose may rather be said to distinguish
+both these classes from two others; the shiftless ne'er do-well and the
+lower-class delinquent. In point of natural endowment the pecuniary man
+compares with the delinquent in much the same way as the industrial man
+compares with the good-natured shiftless dependent. The ideal pecuniary
+man is like the ideal delinquent in his unscrupulous conversion of goods
+and persons to his own ends, and in a callous disregard of the feelings
+and wishes of others and of the remoter effects of his actions; but he
+is unlike him in possessing a keener sense of status, and in working
+more consistently and farsightedly to a remoter end. The kinship of the
+two types of temperament is further shown in a proclivity to "sport"
+and gambling, and a relish of aimless emulation. The ideal pecuniary
+man also shows a curious kinship with the delinquent in one of the
+concomitant variations of the predatory human nature. The delinquent is
+very commonly of a superstitious habit of mind; he is a great believer
+in luck, spells, divination and destiny, and in omens and shamanistic
+ceremony. Where circumstances are favorable, this proclivity is apt to
+express itself in a certain servile devotional fervor and a punctilious
+attention to devout observances; it may perhaps be better characterized
+as devoutness than as religion. At this point the temperament of the
+delinquent has more in common with the pecuniary and leisure classes
+than with the industrial man or with the class of shiftless dependents.
+
+Life in a modern industrial community, or in other words life under
+the pecuniary culture, acts by a process of selection to develop and
+conserve a certain range of aptitudes and propensities. The present
+tendency of this selective process is not simply a reversion to a given,
+immutable ethnic type. It tends rather to a modification of human nature
+differing in some respects from any of the types or variants transmitted
+out of the past. The objective point of the evolution is not a single
+one. The temperament which the evolution acts to establish as normal
+differs from any one of the archaic variants of human nature in its
+greater stability of aim--greater singleness of purpose and greater
+persistence in effort. So far as concerns economic theory, the objective
+point of the selective process is on the whole single to this extent;
+although there are minor tendencies of considerable importance diverging
+from this line of development. But apart from this general trend the
+line of development is not single. As concerns economic theory, the
+development in other respects runs on two divergent lines. So far
+as regards the selective conservation of capacities or aptitudes
+in individuals, these two lines may be called the pecuniary and the
+industrial. As regards the conservation of propensities, spiritual
+attitude, or animus, the two may be called the invidious or
+self-regarding and the non-invidious or economical. As regards the
+intellectual or cognitive bent of the two directions of growth, the
+former may be characterized as the personal standpoint, of conation,
+qualitative relation, status, or worth; the latter as the impersonal
+standpoint, of sequence, quantitative relation, mechanical efficiency,
+or use.
+
+The pecuniary employments call into action chiefly the former of
+these two ranges of aptitudes and propensities, and act selectively
+to conserve them in the population. The industrial employments, on the
+other hand, chiefly exercise the latter range, and act to conserve them.
+An exhaustive psychological analysis will show that each of these two
+ranges of aptitudes and propensities is but the multiform expression of
+a given temperamental bent. By force of the unity or singleness of
+the individual, the aptitudes, animus, and interests comprised in the
+first-named range belong together as expressions of a given variant
+of human nature. The like is true of the latter range. The two may be
+conceived as alternative directions of human life, in such a way that
+a given individual inclines more or less consistently to the one or
+the other. The tendency of the pecuniary life is, in a general way, to
+conserve the barbarian temperament, but with the substitution of fraud
+and prudence, or administrative ability, in place of that predilection
+for physical damage that characterizes the early barbarian. This
+substitution of chicanery in place of devastation takes place only in an
+uncertain degree. Within the pecuniary employments the selective action
+runs pretty consistently in this direction, but the discipline of
+pecuniary life, outside the competition for gain, does not work
+consistently to the same effect. The discipline of modern life in the
+consumption of time and goods does not act unequivocally to eliminate
+the aristocratic virtues or to foster the bourgeois virtues. The
+conventional scheme of decent living calls for a considerable exercise
+of the earlier barbarian traits. Some details of this traditional scheme
+of life, bearing on this point, have been noticed in earlier chapters
+under the head of leisure, and further details will be shown in later
+chapters.
+
+From what has been said, it appears that the leisure-class life and
+the leisure-class scheme of life should further the conservation of the
+barbarian temperament; chiefly of the quasi-peaceable, or bourgeois,
+variant, but also in some measure of the predatory variant. In the
+absence of disturbing factors, therefore, it should be possible to
+trace a difference of temperament between the classes of society. The
+aristocratic and the bourgeois virtues--that is to say the destructive
+and pecuniary traits--should be found chiefly among the upper classes,
+and the industrial virtues--that is to say the peaceable traits--chiefly
+among the classes given to mechanical industry.
+
+In a general and uncertain way this holds true, but the test is not so
+readily applied nor so conclusive as might be wished. There are several
+assignable reasons for its partial failure. All classes are in a measure
+engaged in the pecuniary struggle, and in all classes the possession
+of the pecuniary traits counts towards the success and survival of
+the individual. Wherever the pecuniary culture prevails, the selective
+process by which men's habits of thought are shaped, and by which the
+survival of rival lines of descent is decided, proceeds proximately on
+the basis of fitness for acquisition. Consequently, if it were not for
+the fact that pecuniary efficiency is on the whole incompatible with
+industrial efficiency, the selective action of all occupations would
+tend to the unmitigated dominance of the pecuniary temperament. The
+result would be the installation of what has been known as the "economic
+man," as the normal and definitive type of human nature. But the
+"economic man," whose only interest is the self-regarding one and whose
+only human trait is prudence is useless for the purposes of modern
+industry.
+
+The modern industry requires an impersonal, non-invidious interest in
+the work in hand. Without this the elaborate processes of industry
+would be impossible, and would, indeed, never have been conceived. This
+interest in work differentiates the workman from the criminal on the one
+hand, and from the captain of industry on the other. Since work must be
+done in order to the continued life of the community, there results a
+qualified selection favoring the spiritual aptitude for work, within
+a certain range of occupations. This much, however, is to be conceded,
+that even within the industrial occupations the selective elimination
+of the pecuniary traits is an uncertain process, and that there is
+consequently an appreciable survival of the barbarian temperament even
+within these occupations. On this account there is at present no broad
+distinction in this respect between the leisure-class character and the
+character of the common run of the population.
+
+The whole question as to a class distinction in respect to spiritual
+make-up is also obscured by the presence, in all classes of society, of
+acquired habits of life that closely simulate inherited traits and at
+the same time act to develop in the entire body of the population the
+traits which they simulate. These acquired habits, or assumed traits of
+character, are most commonly of an aristocratic cast. The prescriptive
+position of the leisure class as the exemplar of reputability has
+imposed many features of the leisure-class theory of life upon the
+lower classes; with the result that there goes on, always and throughout
+society, a more or less persistent cultivation of these aristocratic
+traits. On this ground also these traits have a better chance of
+survival among the body of the people than would be the case if it were
+not for the precept and example of the leisure class. As one channel,
+and an important one, through which this transfusion of aristocratic
+views of life, and consequently more or less archaic traits of character
+goes on, may be mentioned the class of domestic servants. These have
+their notions of what is good and beautiful shaped by contact with the
+master class and carry the preconceptions so acquired back among their
+low-born equals, and so disseminate the higher ideals abroad through
+the community without the loss of time which this dissemination might
+otherwise suffer. The saying "Like master, like man," has a greater
+significance than is commonly appreciated for the rapid popular
+acceptance of many elements of upper-class culture.
+
+There is also a further range of facts that go to lessen class
+differences as regards the survival of the pecuniary virtues. The
+pecuniary struggle produces an underfed class, of large proportions.
+This underfeeding consists in a deficiency of the necessaries of life or
+of the necessaries of a decent expenditure. In either case the result is
+a closely enforced struggle for the means with which to meet the daily
+needs; whether it be the physical or the higher needs. The strain of
+self-assertion against odds takes up the whole energy of the individual;
+he bends his efforts to compass his own invidious ends alone, and
+becomes continually more narrowly self-seeking. The industrial traits in
+this way tend to obsolescence through disuse. Indirectly, therefore, by
+imposing a scheme of pecuniary decency and by withdrawing as much as
+may be of the means of life from the lower classes, the institution of
+a leisure class acts to conserve the pecuniary traits in the body of the
+population. The result is an assimilation of the lower classes to the
+type of human nature that belongs primarily to the upper classes only.
+It appears, therefore, that there is no wide difference in temperament
+between the upper and the lower classes; but it appears also that the
+absence of such a difference is in good part due to the prescriptive
+example of the leisure class and to the popular acceptance of those
+broad principles of conspicuous waste and pecuniary emulation on which
+the institution of a leisure class rests. The institution acts to lower
+the industrial efficiency of the community and retard the adaptation of
+human nature to the exigencies of modern industrial life. It affects the
+prevalent or effective human nature in a conservative direction, (1) by
+direct transmission of archaic traits, through inheritance within the
+class and wherever the leisure-class blood is transfused outside the
+class, and (2) by conserving and fortifying the traditions of the
+archaic regime, and so making the chances of survival of barbarian
+traits greater also outside the range of transfusion of leisure-class
+blood.
+
+But little if anything has been done towards collecting or digesting
+data that are of special significance for the question of survival or
+elimination of traits in the modern populations. Little of a tangible
+character can therefore be offered in support of the view here taken,
+beyond a discursive review of such everyday facts as lie ready to hand.
+Such a recital can scarcely avoid being commonplace and tedious, but for
+all that it seems necessary to the completeness of the argument, even in
+the meager outline in which it is here attempted. A degree of indulgence
+may therefore fairly be bespoken for the succeeding chapters, which
+offer a fragmentary recital of this kind.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Ten ~~ Modern Survivals of Prowess
+
+The leisure class lives by the industrial community rather than in it.
+Its relations to industry are of a pecuniary rather than an industrial
+kind. Admission to the class is gained by exercise of the pecuniary
+aptitudes--aptitudes for acquisition rather than for serviceability.
+There is, therefore, a continued selective sifting of the human material
+that makes up the leisure class, and this selection proceeds on the
+ground of fitness for pecuniary pursuits. But the scheme of life of the
+class is in large part a heritage from the past, and embodies much of
+the habits and ideals of the earlier barbarian period. This archaic,
+barbarian scheme of life imposes itself also on the lower orders, with
+more or less mitigation. In its turn the scheme of life, of conventions,
+acts selectively and by education to shape the human material, and its
+action runs chiefly in the direction of conserving traits, habits, and
+ideals that belong to the early barbarian age--the age of prowess and
+predatory life.
+
+The most immediate and unequivocal expression of that archaic human
+nature which characterizes man in the predatory stage is the fighting
+propensity proper. In cases where the predatory activity is a collective
+one, this propensity is frequently called the martial spirit, or,
+latterly, patriotism. It needs no insistence to find assent to the
+proposition that in the countries of civilized Europe the hereditary
+leisure class is endowed with this martial spirit in a higher
+degree than the middle classes. Indeed, the leisure class claims the
+distinction as a matter of pride, and no doubt with some grounds. War is
+honorable, and warlike prowess is eminently honorific in the eyes of the
+generality of men; and this admiration of warlike prowess is itself
+the best voucher of a predatory temperament in the admirer of war. The
+enthusiasm for war, and the predatory temper of which it is the index,
+prevail in the largest measure among the upper classes, especially
+among the hereditary leisure class. Moreover, the ostensible serious
+occupation of the upper class is that of government, which, in point of
+origin and developmental content, is also a predatory occupation.
+
+The only class which could at all dispute with the hereditary leisure
+class the honor of an habitual bellicose frame of mind is that of
+the lower-class delinquents. In ordinary times, the large body of the
+industrial classes is relatively apathetic touching warlike interests.
+When unexcited, this body of the common people, which makes up the
+effective force of the industrial community, is rather averse to any
+other than a defensive fight; indeed, it responds a little tardily even
+to a provocation which makes for an attitude of defense. In the more
+civilized communities, or rather in the communities which have reached
+an advanced industrial development, the spirit of warlike aggression
+may be said to be obsolescent among the common people. This does not
+say that there is not an appreciable number of individuals among
+the industrial classes in whom the martial spirit asserts itself
+obtrusively. Nor does it say that the body of the people may not be
+fired with martial ardor for a time under the stimulus of some special
+provocation, such as is seen in operation today in more than one of the
+countries of Europe, and for the time in America. But except for such
+seasons of temporary exaltation, and except for those individuals who
+are endowed with an archaic temperament of the predatory type, together
+with the similarly endowed body of individuals among the higher and
+the lowest classes, the inertness of the mass of any modern civilized
+community in this respect is probably so great as would make war
+impracticable, except against actual invasion. The habits and aptitudes
+of the common run of men make for an unfolding of activity in other,
+less picturesque directions than that of war.
+
+This class difference in temperament may be due in part to a difference
+in the inheritance of acquired traits in the several classes, but it
+seems also, in some measure, to correspond with a difference in ethnic
+derivation. The class difference is in this respect visibly less in
+those countries whose population is relatively homogeneous, ethnically,
+than in the countries where there is a broader divergence between the
+ethnic elements that make up the several classes of the community. In
+the same connection it may be noted that the later accessions to the
+leisure class in the latter countries, in a general way, show less of
+the martial spirit than contemporary representatives of the aristocracy
+of the ancient line. These nouveaux arrives have recently emerged from
+the commonplace body of the population and owe their emergence into the
+leisure class to the exercise of traits and propensities which are not
+to be classed as prowess in the ancient sense.
+
+Apart from warlike activity proper, the institution of the duel is also
+an expression of the same superior readiness for combat; and the duel
+is a leisure-class institution. The duel is in substance a more or less
+deliberate resort to a fight as a final settlement of a difference of
+opinion. In civilized communities it prevails as a normal phenomenon
+only where there is an hereditary leisure class, and almost exclusively
+among that class. The exceptions are (1) military and naval officers
+who are ordinarily members of the leisure class, and who are at the
+same time specially trained to predatory habits of mind and (2) the
+lower-class delinquents--who are by inheritance, or training, or both,
+of a similarly predatory disposition and habit. It is only the high-bred
+gentleman and the rowdy that normally resort to blows as the universal
+solvent of differences of opinion. The plain man will ordinarily fight
+only when excessive momentary irritation or alcoholic exaltation act to
+inhibit the more complex habits of response to the stimuli that make
+for provocation. He is then thrown back upon the simpler, less
+differentiated forms of the instinct of self-assertion; that is to say,
+he reverts temporarily and without reflection to an archaic habit of
+mind.
+
+This institution of the duel as a mode of finally settling disputes
+and serious questions of precedence shades off into the obligatory,
+unprovoked private fight, as a social obligation due to one's good
+repute. As a leisure-class usage of this kind we have, particularly,
+that bizarre survival of bellicose chivalry, the German student duel. In
+the lower or spurious leisure class of the delinquents there is in all
+countries a similar, though less formal, social obligation incumbent on
+the rowdy to assert his manhood in unprovoked combat with his fellows.
+And spreading through all grades of society, a similar usage prevails
+among the boys of the community. The boy usually knows to nicety, from
+day to day, how he and his associates grade in respect of relative
+fighting capacity; and in the community of boys there is ordinarily no
+secure basis of reputability for any one who, by exception, will not or
+can not fight on invitation.
+
+All this applies especially to boys above a certain somewhat vague limit
+of maturity. The child's temperament does not commonly answer to this
+description during infancy and the years of close tutelage, when the
+child still habitually seeks contact with its mother at every turn of
+its daily life. During this earlier period there is little aggression
+and little propensity for antagonism. The transition from this
+peaceable temper to the predaceous, and in extreme cases malignant,
+mischievousness of the boy is a gradual one, and it is accomplished
+with more completeness, covering a larger range of the individual's
+aptitudes, in some cases than in others. In the earlier stage of his
+growth, the child, whether boy or girl, shows less of initiative and
+aggressive self-assertion and less of an inclination to isolate himself
+and his interests from the domestic group in which he lives, and he
+shows more of sensitiveness to rebuke, bashfulness, timidity, and the
+need of friendly human contact. In the common run of cases this early
+temperament passes, by a gradual but somewhat rapid obsolescence of the
+infantile features, into the temperament of the boy proper; though there
+are also cases where the predaceous futures of boy life do not emerge at
+all, or at the most emerge in but a slight and obscure degree.
+
+In girls the transition to the predaceous stage is seldom accomplished
+with the same degree of completeness as in boys; and in a relatively
+large proportion of cases it is scarcely undergone at all. In such cases
+the transition from infancy to adolescence and maturity is a gradual and
+unbroken process of the shifting of interest from infantile purposes and
+aptitudes to the purposes, functions, and relations of adult life. In
+the girls there is a less general prevalence of a predaceous interval
+in the development; and in the cases where it occurs, the predaceous and
+isolating attitude during the interval is commonly less accentuated.
+
+In the male child the predaceous interval is ordinarily fairly well
+marked and lasts for some time, but it is commonly terminated (if at
+all) with the attainment of maturity. This last statement may need very
+material qualification. The cases are by no means rare in which the
+transition from the boyish to the adult temperament is not made, or
+is made only partially--understanding by the "adult" temperament the
+average temperament of those adult individuals in modern industrial life
+who have some serviceability for the purposes of the collective life
+process, and who may therefore be said to make up the effective average
+of the industrial community.
+
+The ethnic composition of the European populations varies. In some
+cases even the lower classes are in large measure made up of the
+peace-disturbing dolicho-blond; while in others this ethnic element is
+found chiefly among the hereditary leisure class. The fighting habit
+seems to prevail to a less extent among the working-class boys in the
+latter class of populations than among the boys of the upper classes or
+among those of the populations first named.
+
+If this generalization as to the temperament of the boy among the
+working classes should be found true on a fuller and closer scrutiny of
+the field, it would add force to the view that the bellicose temperament
+is in some appreciable degree a race characteristic; it appears to
+enter more largely into the make-up of the dominant, upper-class
+ethnic type--the dolicho-blond--of the European countries than into the
+subservient, lower-class types of man which are conceived to constitute
+the body of the population of the same communities.
+
+The case of the boy may seem not to bear seriously on the question of
+the relative endowment of prowess with which the several classes of
+society are gifted; but it is at least of some value as going to show
+that this fighting impulse belongs to a more archaic temperament than
+that possessed by the average adult man of the industrious classes. In
+this, as in many other features of child life, the child reproduces,
+temporarily and in miniature, some of the earlier phases of the
+development of adult man. Under this interpretation, the boy's
+predilection for exploit and for isolation of his own interest is to be
+taken as a transient reversion to the human nature that is normal to the
+early barbarian culture--the predatory culture proper. In this respect,
+as in much else, the leisure-class and the delinquent-class character
+shows a persistence into adult life of traits that are normal to
+childhood and youth, and that are likewise normal or habitual to the
+earlier stages of culture. Unless the difference is traceable entirely
+to a fundamental difference between persistent ethnic types, the traits
+that distinguish the swaggering delinquent and the punctilious gentleman
+of leisure from the common crowd are, in some measure, marks of an
+arrested spiritual development. They mark an immature phase, as compared
+with the stage of development attained by the average of the adults in
+the modern industrial community. And it will appear presently that the
+puerile spiritual make-up of these representatives of the upper and the
+lowest social strata shows itself also in the presence of other archaic
+traits than this proclivity to ferocious exploit and isolation.
+
+As if to leave no doubt about the essential immaturity of the fighting
+temperament, we have, bridging the interval between legitimate boyhood
+and adult manhood, the aimless and playful, but more or less systematic
+and elaborate, disturbances of the peace in vogue among schoolboys of a
+slightly higher age. In the common run of cases, these disturbances
+are confined to the period of adolescence. They recur with decreasing
+frequency and acuteness as youth merges into adult life, and so they
+reproduce, in a general way, in the life of the individual, the sequence
+by which the group has passed from the predatory to a more settled habit
+of life. In an appreciable number of cases the spiritual growth of the
+individual comes to a close before he emerges from this puerile
+phase; in these cases the fighting temper persists through life. Those
+individuals who in spiritual development eventually reach man's
+estate, therefore, ordinarily pass through a temporary archaic phase
+corresponding to the permanent spiritual level of the fighting and
+sporting men. Different individuals will, of course, achieve spiritual
+maturity and sobriety in this respect in different degrees; and those
+who fail of the average remain as an undissolved residue of crude
+humanity in the modern industrial community and as a foil for that
+selective process of adaptation which makes for a heightened industrial
+efficiency and the fullness of life of the collectivity. This
+arrested spiritual development may express itself not only in a direct
+participation by adults in youthful exploits of ferocity, but also
+indirectly in aiding and abetting disturbances of this kind on the
+part of younger persons. It thereby furthers the formation of habits of
+ferocity which may persist in the later life of the growing generation,
+and so retard any movement in the direction of a more peaceable
+effective temperament on the part of the community. If a person so
+endowed with a proclivity for exploits is in a position to guide the
+development of habits in the adolescent members of the community, the
+influence which he exerts in the direction of conservation and reversion
+to prowess may be very considerable. This is the significance, for
+instance, of the fostering care latterly bestowed by many clergymen
+and other pillars of society upon "boys' brigades" and similar
+pseudo-military organizations. The same is true of the encouragement
+given to the growth of "college spirit," college athletics, and the
+like, in the higher institutions of learning.
+
+These manifestations of the predatory temperament are all to be classed
+under the head of exploit. They are partly simple and unreflected
+expressions of an attitude of emulative ferocity, partly activities
+deliberately entered upon with a view to gaining repute for prowess.
+Sports of all kinds are of the same general character, including
+prize-fights, bull-fights, athletics, shooting, angling, yachting,
+and games of skill, even where the element of destructive physical
+efficiency is not an obtrusive feature. Sports shade off from the basis
+of hostile combat, through skill, to cunning and chicanery, without its
+being possible to draw a line at any point. The ground of an addiction
+to sports is an archaic spiritual constitution--the possession of the
+predatory emulative propensity in a relatively high potency, a strong
+proclivity to adventuresome exploit and to the infliction of damage is
+especially pronounced in those employments which are in colloquial usage
+specifically called sportsmanship.
+
+It is perhaps truer, or at least more evident, as regards sports than as
+regards the other expressions of predatory emulation already spoken of,
+that the temperament which inclines men to them is essentially a boyish
+temperament. The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree
+marks an arrested development of the man's moral nature. This peculiar
+boyishness of temperament in sporting men immediately becomes apparent
+when attention is directed to the large element of make-believe that
+is present in all sporting activity. Sports share this character of
+make-believe with the games and exploits to which children, especially
+boys, are habitually inclined. Make-believe does not enter in the same
+proportion into all sports, but it is present in a very appreciable
+degree in all. It is apparently present in a larger measure in
+sportsmanship proper and in athletic contests than in set games of skill
+of a more sedentary character; although this rule may not be found to
+apply with any great uniformity. It is noticeable, for instance, that
+even very mild-mannered and matter-of-fact men who go out shooting are
+apt to carry an excess of arms and accoutrements in order to impress
+upon their own imagination the seriousness of their undertaking.
+These huntsmen are also prone to a histrionic, prancing gait and to
+an elaborate exaggeration of the motions, whether of stealth or of
+onslaught, involved in their deeds of exploit. Similarly in athletic
+sports there is almost invariably present a good share of rant and
+swagger and ostensible mystification--features which mark the histrionic
+nature of these employments. In all this, of course, the reminder of
+boyish make-believe is plain enough. The slang of athletics, by the way,
+is in great part made up of extremely sanguinary locutions borrowed from
+the terminology of warfare. Except where it is adopted as a necessary
+means of secret communication, the use of a special slang in any
+employment is probably to be accepted as evidence that the occupation in
+question is substantially make-believe.
+
+A further feature in which sports differ from the duel and similar
+disturbances of the peace is the peculiarity that they admit of other
+motives being assigned for them besides the impulses of exploit and
+ferocity. There is probably little if any other motive present in any
+given case, but the fact that other reasons for indulging in sports are
+frequently assigned goes to say that other grounds are sometimes present
+in a subsidiary way. Sportsmen--hunters and anglers--are more or less in
+the habit of assigning a love of nature, the need of recreation, and the
+like, as the incentives to their favorite pastime. These motives are no
+doubt frequently present and make up a part of the attractiveness of
+the sportsman's life; but these can not be the chief incentives. These
+ostensible needs could be more readily and fully satisfied without the
+accompaniment of a systematic effort to take the life of those creatures
+that make up an essential feature of that "nature" that is beloved
+by the sportsman. It is, indeed, the most noticeable effect of the
+sportsman's activity to keep nature in a state of chronic desolation by
+killing off all living thing whose destruction he can compass.
+
+Still, there is ground for the sportsman's claim that under the existing
+conventionalities his need of recreation and of contact with nature can
+best be satisfied by the course which he takes. Certain canons of good
+breeding have been imposed by the prescriptive example of a predatory
+leisure class in the past and have been somewhat painstakingly conserved
+by the usage of the latter-day representatives of that class; and these
+canons will not permit him, without blame, to seek contact with nature
+on other terms. From being an honorable employment handed down from the
+predatory culture as the highest form of everyday leisure, sports have
+come to be the only form of outdoor activity that has the full sanction
+of decorum. Among the proximate incentives to shooting and angling,
+then, may be the need of recreation and outdoor life. The remoter cause
+which imposes the necessity of seeking these objects under the cover of
+systematic slaughter is a prescription that can not be violated except
+at the risk of disrepute and consequent lesion to one's self-respect.
+
+The case of other kinds of sport is somewhat similar. Of these, athletic
+games are the best example. Prescriptive usage with respect to what
+forms of activity, exercise, and recreation are permissible under the
+code of reputable living is of course present here also. Those who are
+addicted to athletic sports, or who admire them, set up the claim that
+these afford the best available means of recreation and of "physical
+culture." And prescriptive usage gives countenance to the claim. The
+canons of reputable living exclude from the scheme of life of the
+leisure class all activity that can not be classed as conspicuous
+leisure. And consequently they tend by prescription to exclude it also
+from the scheme of life of the community generally. At the same
+time purposeless physical exertion is tedious and distasteful beyond
+tolerance. As has been noticed in another connection, recourse is in
+such a case had to some form of activity which shall at least afford
+a colorable pretense of purpose, even if the object assigned be only a
+make-believe. Sports satisfy these requirements of substantial futility
+together with a colorable make-believe of purpose. In addition to
+this they afford scope for emulation, and are attractive also on that
+account. In order to be decorous, an employment must conform to the
+leisure-class canon of reputable waste; at the same time all activity,
+in order to be persisted in as an habitual, even if only partial,
+expression of life, must conform to the generically human canon of
+efficiency for some serviceable objective end. The leisure-class canon
+demands strict and comprehensive futility, the instinct of workmanship
+demands purposeful action. The leisure-class canon of decorum acts
+slowly and pervasively, by a selective elimination of all substantially
+useful or purposeful modes of action from the accredited scheme of
+life; the instinct of workmanship acts impulsively and may be satisfied,
+provisionally, with a proximate purpose. It is only as the apprehended
+ulterior futility of a given line of action enters the reflective
+complex of consciousness as an element essentially alien to the normally
+purposeful trend of the life process that its disquieting and deterrent
+effect on the consciousness of the agent is wrought.
+
+The individual's habits of thought make an organic complex, the trend
+of which is necessarily in the direction of serviceability to the
+life process. When it is attempted to assimilate systematic waste or
+futility, as an end in life, into this organic complex, there presently
+supervenes a revulsion. But this revulsion of the organism may be
+avoided if the attention can be confined to the proximate, unreflected
+purpose of dexterous or emulative exertion. Sports--hunting, angling,
+athletic games, and the like--afford an exercise for dexterity and for
+the emulative ferocity and astuteness characteristic of predatory life.
+So long as the individual is but slightly gifted with reflection or
+with a sense of the ulterior trend of his actions so long as his life
+is substantially a life of naive impulsive action--so long the immediate
+and unreflected purposefulness of sports, in the way of an expression of
+dominance, will measurably satisfy his instinct of workmanship. This is
+especially true if his dominant impulses are the unreflecting emulative
+propensities of the predaceous temperament. At the same time the canons
+of decorum will commend sports to him as expressions of a pecuniarily
+blameless life. It is by meeting these two requirements, of ulterior
+wastefulness and proximate purposefulness, that any given employment
+holds its place as a traditional and habitual mode of decorous
+recreation. In the sense that other forms of recreation and exercise
+are morally impossible to persons of good breeding and delicate
+sensibilities, then, sports are the best available means of recreation
+under existing circumstances.
+
+But those members of respectable society who advocate athletic games
+commonly justify their attitude on this head to themselves and to their
+neighbors on the ground that these games serve as an invaluable means of
+development. They not only improve the contestant's physique, but it
+is commonly added that they also foster a manly spirit, both in the
+participants and in the spectators. Football is the particular game
+which will probably first occur to any one in this community when the
+question of the serviceability of athletic games is raised, as this form
+of athletic contest is at present uppermost in the mind of those who
+plead for or against games as a means of physical or moral salvation.
+This typical athletic sport may, therefore, serve to illustrate the
+bearing of athletics upon the development of the contestant's character
+and physique. It has been said, not inaptly, that the relation of
+football to physical culture is much the same as that of the bull-fight
+to agriculture. Serviceability for these lusory institutions requires
+sedulous training or breeding. The material used, whether brute or
+human, is subjected to careful selection and discipline, in order to
+secure and accentuate certain aptitudes and propensities which are
+characteristic of the ferine state, and which tend to obsolescence under
+domestication. This does not mean that the result in either case is
+an all around and consistent rehabilitation of the ferine or barbarian
+habit of mind and body. The result is rather a one-sided return to
+barbarism or to the feroe natura--a rehabilitation and accentuation
+of those ferine traits which make for damage and desolation, without
+a corresponding development of the traits which would serve the
+individual's self-preservation and fullness of life in a ferine
+environment. The culture bestowed in football gives a product of exotic
+ferocity and cunning. It is a rehabilitation of the early barbarian
+temperament, together with a suppression of those details of
+temperament, which, as seen from the standpoint of the social and
+economic exigencies, are the redeeming features of the savage character.
+
+The physical vigor acquired in the training for athletic games--so far
+as the training may be said to have this effect--is of advantage both
+to the individual and to the collectivity, in that, other things being
+equal, it conduces to economic serviceability. The spiritual traits
+which go with athletic sports are likewise economically advantageous
+to the individual, as contradistinguished from the interests of the
+collectivity. This holds true in any community where these traits are
+present in some degree in the population. Modern competition is in
+large part a process of self-assertion on the basis of these traits of
+predatory human nature. In the sophisticated form in which they enter
+into the modern, peaceable emulation, the possession of these traits
+in some measure is almost a necessary of life to the civilized man. But
+while they are indispensable to the competitive individual, they are
+not directly serviceable to the community. So far as regards the
+serviceability of the individual for the purposes of the collective
+life, emulative efficiency is of use only indirectly if at all. Ferocity
+and cunning are of no use to the community except in its hostile
+dealings with other communities; and they are useful to the individual
+only because there is so large a proportion of the same traits actively
+present in the human environment to which he is exposed. Any individual
+who enters the competitive struggle without the due endowment of these
+traits is at a disadvantage, somewhat as a hornless steer would find
+himself at a disadvantage in a drove of horned cattle.
+
+The possession and the cultivation of the predatory traits of character
+may, of course, be desirable on other than economic grounds. There is a
+prevalent aesthetic or ethical predilection for the barbarian aptitudes,
+and the traits in question minister so effectively to this predilection
+that their serviceability in the aesthetic or ethical respect probably
+offsets any economic unserviceability which they may give. But for the
+present purpose that is beside the point. Therefore nothing is said here
+as to the desirability or advisability of sports on the whole, or as to
+their value on other than economic grounds.
+
+In popular apprehension there is much that is admirable in the type
+of manhood which the life of sport fosters. There is self-reliance and
+good-fellowship, so termed in the somewhat loose colloquial use of
+the words. From a different point of view the qualities currently so
+characterized might be described as truculence and clannishness. The
+reason for the current approval and admiration of these manly qualities,
+as well as for their being called manly, is the same as the reason for
+their usefulness to the individual. The members of the community, and
+especially that class of the community which sets the pace in canons of
+taste, are endowed with this range of propensities in sufficient measure
+to make their absence in others felt as a shortcoming, and to make
+their possession in an exceptional degree appreciated as an attribute of
+superior merit. The traits of predatory man are by no means obsolete in
+the common run of modern populations. They are present and can be called
+out in bold relief at any time by any appeal to the sentiments in
+which they express themselves--unless this appeal should clash with the
+specific activities that make up our habitual occupations and comprise
+the general range of our everyday interests. The common run of the
+population of any industrial community is emancipated from these,
+economically considered, untoward propensities only in the sense
+that, through partial and temporary disuse, they have lapsed into the
+background of sub-conscious motives. With varying degrees of potency in
+different individuals, they remain available for the aggressive shaping
+of men's actions and sentiments whenever a stimulus of more than
+everyday intensity comes in to call them forth. And they assert
+themselves forcibly in any case where no occupation alien to the
+predatory culture has usurped the individual's everyday range of
+interest and sentiment. This is the case among the leisure class and
+among certain portions of the population which are ancillary to that
+class. Hence the facility with which any new accessions to the leisure
+class take to sports; and hence the rapid growth of sports and of
+the sporting sentient in any industrial community where wealth has
+accumulated sufficiently to exempt a considerable part of the population
+from work.
+
+A homely and familiar fact may serve to show that the predaceous impulse
+does not prevail in the same degree in all classes. Taken simply as a
+feature of modern life, the habit of carrying a walking-stick may seem
+at best a trivial detail; but the usage has a significance for the point
+in question. The classes among whom the habit most prevails--the classes
+with whom the walking-stick is associated in popular apprehension--are
+the men of the leisure class proper, sporting men, and the lower-class
+delinquents. To these might perhaps be added the men engaged in the
+pecuniary employments. The same is not true of the common run of men
+engaged in industry and it may be noted by the way that women do not
+carry a stick except in case of infirmity, where it has a use of a
+different kind. The practice is of course in great measure a matter
+of polite usage; but the basis of polite usage is, in turn, the
+proclivities of the class which sets the pace in polite usage. The
+walking-stick serves the purpose of an advertisement that the bearer's
+hands are employed otherwise than in useful effort, and it therefore has
+utility as an evidence of leisure. But it is also a weapon, and it meets
+a felt need of barbarian man on that ground. The handling of so tangible
+and primitive a means of offense is very comforting to any one who is
+gifted with even a moderate share of ferocity. The exigencies of
+the language make it impossible to avoid an apparent implication of
+disapproval of the aptitudes, propensities, and expressions of life here
+under discussion. It is, however, not intended to imply anything in the
+way of deprecation or commendation of any one of these phases of human
+character or of the life process. The various elements of the prevalent
+human nature are taken up from the point of view of economic theory,
+and the traits discussed are gauged and graded with regard to their
+immediate economic bearing on the facility of the collective life
+process. That is to say, these phenomena are here apprehended from
+the economic point of view and are valued with respect to their direct
+action in furtherance or hindrance of a more perfect adjustment of the
+human collectivity to the environment and to the institutional structure
+required by the economic situation of the collectivity for the present
+and for the immediate future. For these purposes the traits handed down
+from the predatory culture are less serviceable than might be. Although
+even in this connection it is not to be overlooked that the energetic
+aggressiveness and pertinacity of predatory man is a heritage of no mean
+value. The economic value--with some regard also to the social value in
+the narrower sense--of these aptitudes and propensities is attempted to
+be passed upon without reflecting on their value as seen from another
+point of view. When contrasted with the prosy mediocrity of the
+latter-day industrial scheme of life, and judged by the accredited
+standards of morality, and more especially by the standards of
+aesthetics and of poetry, these survivals from a more primitive type of
+manhood may have a very different value from that here assigned them.
+But all this being foreign to the purpose in hand, no expression
+of opinion on this latter head would be in place here. All that is
+admissible is to enter the caution that these standards of excellence,
+which are alien to the present purpose, must not be allowed to influence
+our economic appreciation of these traits of human character or of the
+activities which foster their growth. This applies both as regards those
+persons who actively participate in sports and those whose sporting
+experience consists in contemplation only. What is here said of
+the sporting propensity is likewise pertinent to sundry reflections
+presently to be made in this connection on what would colloquially be
+known as the religious life.
+
+The last paragraph incidentally touches upon the fact that everyday
+speech can scarcely be employed in discussing this class of aptitudes
+and activities without implying deprecation or apology. The fact is
+significant as showing the habitual attitude of the dispassionate common
+man toward the propensities which express themselves in sports and in
+exploit generally. And this is perhaps as convenient a place as any
+to discuss that undertone of deprecation which runs through all the
+voluminous discourse in defense or in laudation of athletic sports, as
+well as of other activities of a predominantly predatory character. The
+same apologetic frame of mind is at least beginning to be observable in
+the spokesmen of most other institutions handed down from the barbarian
+phase of life. Among these archaic institutions which are felt to need
+apology are comprised, with others, the entire existing system of the
+distribution of wealth, together with the resulting class distinction of
+status; all or nearly all forms of consumption that come under the head
+of conspicuous waste; the status of women under the patriarchal system;
+and many features of the traditional creeds and devout observances,
+especially the exoteric expressions of the creed and the naive
+apprehension of received observances. What is to be said in this
+connection of the apologetic attitude taken in commending sports and
+the sporting character will therefore apply, with a suitable change in
+phraseology, to the apologies offered in behalf of these other, related
+elements of our social heritage.
+
+There is a feeling--usually vague and not commonly avowed in so many
+words by the apologist himself, but ordinarily perceptible in the manner
+of his discourse--that these sports, as well as the general range of
+predaceous impulses and habits of thought which underlie the sporting
+character, do not altogether commend themselves to common sense. "As
+to the majority of murderers, they are very incorrect characters." This
+aphorism offers a valuation of the predaceous temperament, and of the
+disciplinary effects of its overt expression and exercise, as seen from
+the moralist's point of view. As such it affords an indication of what
+is the deliverance of the sober sense of mature men as to the degree
+of availability of the predatory habit of mind for the purposes of the
+collective life. It is felt that the presumption is against any activity
+which involves habituation to the predatory attitude, and that the
+burden of proof lies with those who speak for the rehabilitation of the
+predaceous temper and for the practices which strengthen it. There is a
+strong body of popular sentiment in favor of diversions and enterprises
+of the kind in question; but there is at the same time present in
+the community a pervading sense that this ground of sentiment wants
+legitimation. The required legitimation is ordinarily sought by
+showing that although sports are substantially of a predatory, socially
+disintegrating effect; although their proximate effect runs in
+the direction of reversion to propensities that are industrially
+disserviceable; yet indirectly and remotely--by some not readily
+comprehensible process of polar induction, or counter-irritation
+perhaps--sports are conceived to foster a habit of mind that is
+serviceable for the social or industrial purpose. That is to say,
+although sports are essentially of the nature of invidious exploit, it
+is presumed that by some remote and obscure effect they result in the
+growth of a temperament conducive to non-invidious work. It is commonly
+attempted to show all this empirically or it is rather assumed that this
+is the empirical generalization which must be obvious to any one who
+cares to see it. In conducting the proof of this thesis the treacherous
+ground of inference from cause to effect is somewhat shrewdly avoided,
+except so far as to show that the "manly virtues" spoken of above
+are fostered by sports. But since it is these manly virtues that are
+(economically) in need of legitimation, the chain of proof breaks
+off where it should begin. In the most general economic terms, these
+apologies are an effort to show that, in spite of the logic of the
+thing, sports do in fact further what may broadly be called workmanship.
+So long as he has not succeeded in persuading himself or others that
+this is their effect the thoughtful apologist for sports will not rest
+content, and commonly, it is to be admitted, he does not rest content.
+His discontent with his own vindication of the practice in question is
+ordinarily shown by his truculent tone and by the eagerness with which
+he heaps up asseverations in support of his position. But why are
+apologies needed? If there prevails a body of popular sentient in
+favor of sports, why is not that fact a sufficient legitimation? The
+protracted discipline of prowess to which the race has been subjected
+under the predatory and quasi-peaceable culture has transmitted to the
+men of today a temperament that finds gratification in these expressions
+of ferocity and cunning. So, why not accept these sports as legitimate
+expressions of a normal and wholesome human nature? What other norm is
+there that is to be lived up to than that given in the aggregate range
+of propensities that express themselves in the sentiments of this
+generation, including the hereditary strain of prowess? The ulterior
+norm to which appeal is taken is the instinct of workmanship, which is
+an instinct more fundamental, of more ancient prescription, than
+the propensity to predatory emulation. The latter is but a special
+development of the instinct of workmanship, a variant, relatively late
+and ephemeral in spite of its great absolute antiquity. The emulative
+predatory impulse--or the instinct of sportsmanship, as it might well
+be called--is essentially unstable in comparison with the primordial
+instinct of workmanship out of which it has been developed and
+differentiated. Tested by this ulterior norm of life, predatory
+emulation, and therefore the life of sports, falls short.
+
+The manner and the measure in which the institution of a leisure class
+conduces to the conservation of sports and invidious exploit can of
+course not be succinctly stated. From the evidence already recited it
+appears that, in sentient and inclinations, the leisure class is more
+favorable to a warlike attitude and animus than the industrial classes.
+Something similar seems to be true as regards sports. But it is chiefly
+in its indirect effects, though the canons of decorous living, that the
+institution has its influence on the prevalent sentiment with respect to
+the sporting life. This indirect effect goes almost unequivocally in
+the direction of furthering a survival of the predatory temperament
+and habits; and this is true even with respect to those variants of
+the sporting life which the higher leisure-class code of proprieties
+proscribes; as, e.g., prize-fighting, cock-fighting, and other
+like vulgar expressions of the sporting temper. Whatever the latest
+authenticated schedule of detail proprieties may say, the accredited
+canons of decency sanctioned by the institution say without equivocation
+that emulation and waste are good and their opposites are disreputable.
+In the crepuscular light of the social nether spaces the details of the
+code are not apprehended with all the facility that might be desired,
+and these broad underlying canons of decency are therefore applied
+somewhat unreflectingly, with little question as to the scope of their
+competence or the exceptions that have been sanctioned in detail.
+
+Addiction to athletic sports, not only in the way of direct
+participation, but also in the way of sentiment and moral support, is,
+in a more or less pronounced degree, a characteristic of the leisure
+class; and it is a trait which that class shares with the lower-class
+delinquents, and with such atavistic elements throughout the body of
+the community as are endowed with a dominant predaceous trend. Few
+individuals among the populations of Western civilized countries are
+so far devoid of the predaceous instinct as to find no diversion in
+contemplating athletic sports and games, but with the common run of
+individuals among the industrial classes the inclination to sports
+does not assert itself to the extent of constituting what may fairly
+be called a sporting habit. With these classes sports are an occasional
+diversion rather than a serious feature of life. This common body of the
+people can therefore not be said to cultivate the sporting propensity.
+Although it is not obsolete in the average of them, or even in any
+appreciable number of individuals, yet the predilection for sports in
+the commonplace industrial classes is of the nature of a reminiscence,
+more or less diverting as an occasional interest, rather than a vital
+and permanent interest that counts as a dominant factor in shaping
+the organic complex of habits of thought into which it enters. As it
+manifests itself in the sporting life of today, this propensity may not
+appear to be an economic factor of grave consequence. Taken simply by
+itself it does not count for a great deal in its direct effects on the
+industrial efficiency or the consumption of any given individual; but
+the prevalence and the growth of the type of human nature of which this
+propensity is a characteristic feature is a matter of some consequence.
+It affects the economic life of the collectivity both as regards the
+rate of economic development and as regards the character of the results
+attained by the development. For better or worse, the fact that the
+popular habits of thought are in any degree dominated by this type of
+character can not but greatly affect the scope, direction, standards,
+and ideals of the collective economic life, as well as the degree of
+adjustment of the collective life to the environment.
+
+Something to a like effect is to be said of other traits that go to make
+up the barbarian character. For the purposes of economic theory, these
+further barbarian traits may be taken as concomitant variations of that
+predaceous temper of which prowess is an expression. In great measure
+they are not primarily of an economic character, nor do they have much
+direct economic bearing. They serve to indicate the stage of economic
+evolution to which the individual possessed of them is adapted. They
+are of importance, therefore, as extraneous tests of the degree of
+adaptation of the character in which they are comprised to the economic
+exigencies of today, but they are also to some extent important as
+being aptitudes which themselves go to increase or diminish the economic
+serviceability of the individual.
+
+As it finds expression in the life of the barbarian, prowess manifests
+itself in two main directions--force and fraud. In varying degrees these
+two forms of expression are similarly present in modern warfare, in the
+pecuniary occupations, and in sports and games. Both lines of aptitudes
+are cultivated and strengthened by the life of sport as well as by the
+more serious forms of emulative life. Strategy or cunning is an element
+invariably present in games, as also in warlike pursuits and in the
+chase. In all of these employments strategy tends to develop into
+finesse and chicanery. Chicanery, falsehood, browbeating, hold a
+well-secured place in the method of procedure of any athletic contest
+and in games generally. The habitual employment of an umpire, and
+the minute technical regulations governing the limits and details of
+permissible fraud and strategic advantage, sufficiently attest the fact
+that fraudulent practices and attempts to overreach one's opponents
+are not adventitious features of the game. In the nature of the case
+habituation to sports should conduce to a fuller development of
+the aptitude for fraud; and the prevalence in the community of that
+predatory temperament which inclines men to sports connotes a prevalence
+of sharp practice and callous disregard of the interests of others,
+individually and collectively. Resort to fraud, in any guise and under
+any legitimation of law or custom, is an expression of a narrowly
+self-regarding habit of mind. It is needless to dwell at any length on
+the economic value of this feature of the sporting character.
+
+In this connection it is to be noted that the most obvious
+characteristic of the physiognomy affected by athletic and other
+sporting men is that of an extreme astuteness. The gifts and exploits
+of Ulysses are scarcely second to those of Achilles, either in their
+substantial furtherance of the game or in the eclat which they give the
+astute sporting man among his associates. The pantomime of astuteness
+is commonly the first step in that assimilation to the professional
+sporting man which a youth undergoes after matriculation in any
+reputable school, of the secondary or the higher education, as the case
+may be. And the physiognomy of astuteness, as a decorative feature,
+never ceases to receive the thoughtful attention of men whose serious
+interest lies in athletic games, races, or other contests of a similar
+emulative nature. As a further indication of their spiritual kinship,
+it may be pointed out that the members of the lower delinquent class
+usually show this physiognomy of astuteness in a marked degree, and that
+they very commonly show the same histrionic exaggeration of it that is
+often seen in the young candidate for athletic honors. This, by the
+way, is the most legible mark of what is vulgarly called "toughness" in
+youthful aspirants for a bad name.
+
+The astute man, it may be remarked, is of no economic value to the
+community--unless it be for the purpose of sharp practice in dealings
+with other communities. His functioning is not a furtherance of the
+generic life process. At its best, in its direct economic bearing, it is
+a conversion of the economic substance of the collectivity to a growth
+alien to the collective life process--very much after the analogy of
+what in medicine would be called a benign tumor, with some tendency to
+transgress the uncertain line that divides the benign from the malign
+growths. The two barbarian traits, ferocity and astuteness, go to make
+up the predaceous temper or spiritual attitude. They are the expressions
+of a narrowly self-regarding habit of mind. Both are highly serviceable
+for individual expediency in a life looking to invidious success. Both
+also have a high aesthetic value. Both are fostered by the pecuniary
+culture. But both alike are of no use for the purposes of the collective
+life.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Eleven ~~ The Belief in Luck
+
+The gambling propensity is another subsidiary trait of the barbarian
+temperament. It is a concomitant variation of character of almost
+universal prevalence among sporting men and among men given to warlike
+and emulative activities generally. This trait also has a direct
+economic value. It is recognized to be a hindrance to the highest
+industrial efficiency of the aggregate in any community where it
+prevails in an appreciable degree. The gambling proclivity is doubtfully
+to be classed as a feature belonging exclusively to the predatory type
+of human nature. The chief factor in the gambling habit is the belief in
+luck; and this belief is apparently traceable, at least in its elements,
+to a stage in human evolution antedating the predatory culture. It may
+well have been under the predatory culture that the belief in luck was
+developed into the form in which it is present, as the chief element of
+the gambling proclivity, in the sporting temperament. It probably owes
+the specific form under which it occurs in the modern culture to the
+predatory discipline. But the belief in luck is in substance a habit
+of more ancient date than the predatory culture. It is one form of the
+artistic apprehension of things. The belief seems to be a trait carried
+over in substance from an earlier phase into the barbarian culture,
+and transmuted and transmitted through that culture to a later stage
+of human development under a specific form imposed by the predatory
+discipline. But in any case, it is to be taken as an archaic trait,
+inherited from a more or less remote past, more or less incompatible
+with the requirements of the modern industrial process, and more or less
+of a hindrance to the fullest efficiency of the collective economic life
+of the present.
+
+While the belief in luck is the basis of the gambling habit, it is not
+the only element that enters into the habit of betting. Betting on the
+issue of contests of strength and skill proceeds on a further motive,
+without which the belief in luck would scarcely come in as a prominent
+feature of sporting life. This further motive is the desire of the
+anticipated winner, or the partisan of the anticipated winning side, to
+heighten his side's ascendency at the cost of the loser. Not only does
+the stronger side score a more signal victory, and the losing side
+suffer a more painful and humiliating defeat, in proportion as the
+pecuniary gain and loss in the wager is large; although this alone is
+a consideration of material weight. But the wager is commonly laid also
+with a view, not avowed in words nor even recognized in set terms in
+petto, to enhancing the chances of success for the contestant on which
+it is laid. It is felt that substance and solicitude expended to
+this end can not go for naught in the issue. There is here a special
+manifestation of the instinct of workmanship, backed by an even more
+manifest sense that the animistic congruity of things must decide for a
+victorious outcome for the side in whose behalf the propensity inherent
+in events has been propitiated and fortified by so much of conative
+and kinetic urging. This incentive to the wager expresses itself freely
+under the form of backing one's favorite in any contest, and it is
+unmistakably a predatory feature. It is as ancillary to the predaceous
+impulse proper that the belief in luck expresses itself in a wager. So
+that it may be set down that in so far as the belief in luck comes
+to expression in the form of laying a wager, it is to be accounted an
+integral element of the predatory type of character. The belief is, in
+its elements, an archaic habit which belongs substantially to early,
+undifferentiated human nature; but when this belief is helped out by the
+predatory emulative impulse, and so is differentiated into the specific
+form of the gambling habit, it is, in this higher-developed and specific
+form, to be classed as a trait of the barbarian character.
+
+The belief in luck is a sense of fortuitous necessity in the sequence
+of phenomena. In its various mutations and expressions, it is of very
+serious importance for the economic efficiency of any community in which
+it prevails to an appreciable extent. So much so as to warrant a more
+detailed discussion of its origin and content and of the bearing of its
+various ramifications upon economic structure and function, as well as
+a discussion of the relation of the leisure class to its growth,
+differentiation, and persistence. In the developed, integrated form
+in which it is most readily observed in the barbarian of the predatory
+culture or in the sporting man of modern communities, the belief
+comprises at least two distinguishable elements--which are to be taken
+as two different phases of the same fundamental habit of thought, or as
+the same psychological factor in two successive phases of its evolution.
+The fact that these two elements are successive phases of the same
+general line of growth of belief does not hinder their coexisting in the
+habits of thought of any given individual. The more primitive form
+(or the more archaic phase) is an incipient animistic belief, or an
+animistic sense of relations and things, that imputes a quasi-personal
+character to facts. To the archaic man all the obtrusive and obviously
+consequential objects and facts in his environment have a quasi-personal
+individuality. They are conceived to be possessed of volition, or rather
+of propensities, which enter into the complex of causes and affect
+events in an inscrutable manner. The sporting man's sense of luck and
+chance, or of fortuitous necessity, is an inarticulate or inchoate
+animism. It applies to objects and situations, often in a very vague
+way; but it is usually so far defined as to imply the possibility of
+propitiating, or of deceiving and cajoling, or otherwise disturbing the
+holding of propensities resident in the objects which constitute the
+apparatus and accessories of any game of skill or chance. There are few
+sporting men who are not in the habit of wearing charms or talismans to
+which more or less of efficacy is felt to belong. And the proportion is
+not much less of those who instinctively dread the "hoodooing" of the
+contestants or the apparatus engaged in any contest on which they lay a
+wager; or who feel that the fact of their backing a given contestant or
+side in the game does and ought to strengthen that side; or to whom the
+"mascot" which they cultivate means something more than a jest.
+
+In its simple form the belief in luck is this instinctive sense of an
+inscrutable teleological propensity in objects or situations. Objects or
+events have a propensity to eventuate in a given end, whether this end
+or objective point of the sequence is conceived to be fortuitously given
+or deliberately sought. From this simple animism the belief shades off
+by insensible gradations into the second, derivative form or phase above
+referred to, which is a more or less articulate belief in an inscrutable
+preternatural agency. The preternatural agency works through the visible
+objects with which it is associated, but is not identified with these
+objects in point of individuality. The use of the term "preternatural
+agency" here carries no further implication as to the nature of the
+agency spoken of as preternatural. This is only a farther development of
+animistic belief. The preternatural agency is not necessarily conceived
+to be a personal agent in the full sense, but it is an agency which
+partakes of the attributes of personality to the extent of somewhat
+arbitrarily influencing the outcome of any enterprise, and especially
+of any contest. The pervading belief in the hamingia or gipta
+(gaefa, authna) which lends so much of color to the Icelandic sagas
+specifically, and to early Germanic folk-legends, is an illustration of
+this sense of an extra-physical propensity in the course of events.
+
+In this expression or form of the belief the propensity is scarcely
+personified although to a varying extent an individuality is imputed to
+it; and this individuated propensity is sometimes conceived to yield to
+circumstances, commonly to circumstances of a spiritual or preternatural
+character. A well-known and striking exemplification of the belief--in
+a fairly advanced stage of differentiation and involving an
+anthropomorphic personification of the preternatural agent appealed
+to--is afforded by the wager of battle. Here the preternatural agent was
+conceived to act on request as umpire, and to shape the outcome of the
+contest in accordance with some stipulated ground of decision, such as
+the equity or legality of the respective contestants' claims. The like
+sense of an inscrutable but spiritually necessary tendency in events
+is still traceable as an obscure element in current popular belief, as
+shown, for instance, by the well-accredited maxim, "Thrice is he
+armed who knows his quarrel just,"--a maxim which retains much of its
+significance for the average unreflecting person even in the civilized
+communities of today. The modern reminiscence of the belief in the
+hamingia, or in the guidance of an unseen hand, which is traceable in
+the acceptance of this maxim is faint and perhaps uncertain; and it
+seems in any case to be blended with other psychological moments that
+are not clearly of an animistic character.
+
+For the purpose in hand it is unnecessary to look more closely into the
+psychological process or the ethnological line of descent by which the
+later of these two animistic apprehensions of propensity is derived
+from the earlier. This question may be of the gravest importance to
+folk-psychology or to the theory of the evolution of creeds and cults.
+The same is true of the more fundamental question whether the two
+are related at all as successive phases in a sequence of development.
+Reference is here made to the existence of these questions only to
+remark that the interest of the present discussion does not lie in that
+direction. So far as concerns economic theory, these two elements or
+phases of the belief in luck, or in an extra-causal trend or propensity
+in things, are of substantially the same character. They have an
+economic significance as habits of thought which affect the individual's
+habitual view of the facts and sequences with which he comes in contact,
+and which thereby affect the individual's serviceability for the
+industrial purpose. Therefore, apart from all question of the beauty,
+worth, or beneficence of any animistic belief, there is place for
+a discussion of their economic bearing on the serviceability of the
+individual as an economic factor, and especially as an industrial agent.
+
+It has already been noted in an earlier connection, that in order to
+have the highest serviceability in the complex industrial processes of
+today, the individual must be endowed with the aptitude and the habit
+of readily apprehending and relating facts in terms of causal sequence.
+Both as a whole and in its details, the industrial process is a process
+of quantitative causation. The "intelligence" demanded of the workman,
+as well as of the director of an industrial process, is little else
+than a degree of facility in the apprehension of and adaptation to a
+quantitatively determined causal sequence. This facility of apprehension
+and adaptation is what is lacking in stupid workmen, and the growth
+of this facility is the end sought in their education--so far as their
+education aims to enhance their industrial efficiency.
+
+In so far as the individual's inherited aptitudes or his training
+incline him to account for facts and sequences in other terms than those
+of causation or matter-of-fact, they lower his productive efficiency or
+industrial usefulness. This lowering of efficiency through a penchant
+for animistic methods of apprehending facts is especially apparent when
+taken in the mass-when a given population with an animistic turn is
+viewed as a whole. The economic drawbacks of animism are more patent and
+its consequences are more far-reaching under the modern system of large
+industry than under any other. In the modern industrial communities,
+industry is, to a constantly increasing extent, being organized in a
+comprehensive system of organs and functions mutually conditioning one
+another; and therefore freedom from all bias in the causal apprehension
+of phenomena grows constantly more requisite to efficiency on the
+part of the men concerned in industry. Under a system of handicraft an
+advantage in dexterity, diligence, muscular force, or endurance may, in
+a very large measure, offset such a bias in the habits of thought of the
+workmen.
+
+Similarly in agricultural industry of the traditional kind, which
+closely resembles handicraft in the nature of the demands made upon
+the workman. In both, the workman is himself the prime mover chiefly
+depended upon, and the natural forces engaged are in large part
+apprehended as inscrutable and fortuitous agencies, whose working lies
+beyond the workman's control or discretion. In popular apprehension
+there is in these forms of industry relatively little of the industrial
+process left to the fateful swing of a comprehensive mechanical sequence
+which must be comprehended in terms of causation and to which the
+operations of industry and the movements of the workmen must be adapted.
+As industrial methods develop, the virtues of the handicraftsman count
+for less and less as an offset to scanty intelligence or a halting
+acceptance of the sequence of cause and effect. The industrial
+organization assumes more and more of the character of a mechanism, in
+which it is man's office to discriminate and select what natural forces
+shall work out their effects in his service. The workman's part in
+industry changes from that of a prime mover to that of discrimination
+and valuation of quantitative sequences and mechanical facts. The
+faculty of a ready apprehension and unbiased appreciation of causes in
+his environment grows in relative economic importance and any element in
+the complex of his habits of thought which intrudes a bias at
+variance with this ready appreciation of matter-of-fact sequence gains
+proportionately in importance as a disturbing element acting to lower
+his industrial usefulness. Through its cumulative effect upon the
+habitual attitude of the population, even a slight or inconspicuous bias
+towards accounting for everyday facts by recourse to other ground than
+that of quantitative causation may work an appreciable lowering of the
+collective industrial efficiency of a community.
+
+The animistic habit of mind may occur in the early, undifferentiated
+form of an inchoate animistic belief, or in the later and more highly
+integrated phase in which there is an anthropomorphic personification of
+the propensity imputed to facts. The industrial value of such a lively
+animistic sense, or of such recourse to a preternatural agency or the
+guidance of an unseen hand, is of course very much the same in either
+case. As affects the industrial serviceability of the individual, the
+effect is of the same kind in either case; but the extent to which
+this habit of thought dominates or shapes the complex of his habits of
+thought varies with the degree of immediacy, urgency, or exclusiveness
+with which the individual habitually applies the animistic or
+anthropomorphic formula in dealing with the facts of his environment.
+The animistic habit acts in all cases to blur the appreciation of causal
+sequence; but the earlier, less reflected, less defined animistic sense
+of propensity may be expected to affect the intellectual processes
+of the individual in a more pervasive way than the higher forms of
+anthropomorphism. Where the animistic habit is present in the naive
+form, its scope and range of application are not defined or limited.
+It will therefore palpably affect his thinking at every turn of the
+person's life--wherever he has to do with the material means of life.
+In the later, maturer development of animism, after it has been defined
+through the process of anthropomorphic elaboration, when its application
+has been limited in a somewhat consistent fashion to the remote and the
+invisible, it comes about that an increasing range of everyday facts are
+provisionally accounted for without recourse to the preternatural agency
+in which a cultivated animism expresses itself. A highly integrated,
+personified preternatural agency is not a convenient means of handling
+the trivial occurrences of life, and a habit is therefore easily fallen
+into of accounting for many trivial or vulgar phenomena in terms of
+sequence. The provisional explanation so arrived at is by neglect
+allowed to stand as definitive, for trivial purposes, until special
+provocation or perplexity recalls the individual to his allegiance. But
+when special exigencies arise, that is to say, when there is peculiar
+need of a full and free recourse to the law of cause and effect, then
+the individual commonly has recourse to the preternatural agency as a
+universal solvent, if he is possessed of an anthropomorphic belief.
+
+The extra-causal propensity or agent has a very high utility as a
+recourse in perplexity, but its utility is altogether of a non-economic
+kind. It is especially a refuge and a fund of comfort where it has
+attained the degree of consistency and specialization that belongs to
+an anthropomorphic divinity. It has much to commend it even on other
+grounds than that of affording the perplexed individual a means of
+escape from the difficulty of accounting for phenomena in terms of
+causal sequence. It would scarcely be in place here to dwell on the
+obvious and well-accepted merits of an anthropomorphic divinity, as seen
+from the point of view of the aesthetic, moral, or spiritual interest,
+or even as seen from the less remote standpoint of political, military,
+or social policy. The question here concerns the less picturesque and
+less urgent economic value of the belief in such a preternatural agency,
+taken as a habit of thought which affects the industrial serviceability
+of the believer. And even within this narrow, economic range, the
+inquiry is perforce confined to the immediate bearing of this habit
+of thought upon the believer's workmanlike serviceability, rather than
+extended to include its remoter economic effects. These remoter effects
+are very difficult to trace. The inquiry into them is so encumbered with
+current preconceptions as to the degree in which life is enhanced by
+spiritual contact with such a divinity, that any attempt to inquire into
+their economic value must for the present be fruitless.
+
+The immediate, direct effect of the animistic habit of thought upon the
+general frame of mind of the believer goes in the direction of lowering
+his effective intelligence in the respect in which intelligence is of
+especial consequence for modern industry. The effect follows, in varying
+degree, whether the preternatural agent or propensity believed in is
+of a higher or a lower cast. This holds true of the barbarian's and
+the sporting man's sense of luck and propensity, and likewise of the
+somewhat higher developed belief in an anthropomorphic divinity, such as
+is commonly possessed by the same class. It must be taken to hold true
+also--though with what relative degree of cogency is not easy to say--of
+the more adequately developed anthropomorphic cults, such as appeal
+to the devout civilized man. The industrial disability entailed by a
+popular adherence to one of the higher anthropomorphic cults may be
+relatively slight, but it is not to be overlooked. And even these
+high-class cults of the Western culture do not represent the last
+dissolving phase of this human sense of extra-causal propensity. Beyond
+these the same animistic sense shows itself also in such attenuations of
+anthropomorphism as the eighteenth-century appeal to an order of nature
+and natural rights, and in their modern representative, the ostensibly
+post-Darwinian concept of a meliorative trend in the process of
+evolution. This animistic explanation of phenomena is a form of the
+fallacy which the logicians knew by the name of ignava ratio. For
+the purposes of industry or of science it counts as a blunder in the
+apprehension and valuation of facts. Apart from its direct industrial
+consequences, the animistic habit has a certain significance for
+economic theory on other grounds. (1) It is a fairly reliable indication
+of the presence, and to some extent even of the degree of potency,
+of certain other archaic traits that accompany it and that are of
+substantial economic consequence; and (2) the material consequences of
+that code of devout proprieties to which the animistic habit gives rise
+in the development of an anthropomorphic cult are of importance both
+(a) as affecting the community's consumption of goods and the prevalent
+canons of taste, as already suggested in an earlier chapter, and (b) by
+inducing and conserving a certain habitual recognition of the relation
+to a superior, and so stiffening the current sense of status and
+allegiance.
+
+As regards the point last named (b), that body of habits of thought
+which makes up the character of any individual is in some sense an
+organic whole. A marked variation in a given direction at any one point
+carries with it, as its correlative, a concomitant variation in the
+habitual expression of life in other directions or other groups of
+activities. These various habits of thought, or habitual expressions
+of life, are all phases of the single life sequence of the individual;
+therefore a habit formed in response to a given stimulus will
+necessarily affect the character of the response made to other stimuli.
+A modification of human nature at any one point is a modification of
+human nature as a whole. On this ground, and perhaps to a still greater
+extent on obscurer grounds that can not be discussed here, there are
+these concomitant variations as between the different traits of human
+nature. So, for instance, barbarian peoples with a well-developed
+predatory scheme of life are commonly also possessed of a strong
+prevailing animistic habit, a well-formed anthropomorphic cult, and
+a lively sense of status. On the other hand, anthropomorphism and
+the realizing sense of an animistic propensity in material are less
+obtrusively present in the life of the peoples at the cultural stages
+which precede and which follow the barbarian culture. The sense of
+status is also feebler; on the whole, in peaceable communities. It is to
+be remarked that a lively, but slightly specialized, animistic belief
+is to be found in most if not all peoples living in the ante-predatory,
+savage stage of culture. The primitive savage takes his animism less
+seriously than the barbarian or the degenerate savage. With him
+it eventuates in fantastic myth-making, rather than in coercive
+superstition. The barbarian culture shows sportsmanship, status, and
+anthropomorphism. There is commonly observable a like concomitance of
+variations in the same respects in the individual temperament of men in
+the civilized communities of today. Those modern representatives of
+the predaceous barbarian temper that make up the sporting element are
+commonly believers in luck; at least they have a strong sense of an
+animistic propensity in things, by force of which they are given to
+gambling. So also as regards anthropomorphism in this class. Such of
+them as give in their adhesion to some creed commonly attach themselves
+to one of the naively and consistently anthropomorphic creeds; there
+are relatively few sporting men who seek spiritual comfort in the less
+anthropomorphic cults, such as the Unitarian or the Universalist.
+
+Closely bound up with this correlation of anthropomorphism and prowess
+is the fact that anthropomorphic cults act to conserve, if not to
+initiate, habits of mind favorable to a regime of status. As regards
+this point, it is quite impossible to say where the disciplinary effect
+of the cult ends and where the evidence of a concomitance of variations
+in inherited traits begins. In their finest development, the predatory
+temperament, the sense of status, and the anthropomorphic cult all
+together belong to the barbarian culture; and something of a mutual
+causal relation subsists between the three phenomena as they come into
+sight in communities on that cultural level. The way in which they recur
+in correlation in the habits and attitudes of individuals and classes
+today goes far to imply a like causal or organic relation between the
+same psychological phenomena considered as traits or habits of the
+individual. It has appeared at an earlier point in the discussion
+that the relation of status, as a feature of social structure, is a
+consequence of the predatory habit of life. As regards its line
+of derivation, it is substantially an elaborated expression of the
+predatory attitude. On the other hand, an anthropomorphic cult is a
+code of detailed relations of status superimposed upon the concept of
+a preternatural, inscrutable propensity in material things. So that, as
+regards the external facts of its derivation, the cult may be taken as
+an outgrowth of archaic man's pervading animistic sense, defined and in
+some degree transformed by the predatory habit of life, the result being
+a personified preternatural agency, which is by imputation endowed with
+a full complement of the habits of thought that characterize the man of
+the predatory culture.
+
+The grosser psychological features in the case, which have an immediate
+bearing on economic theory and are consequently to be taken account
+of here, are therefore: (a) as has appeared in an earlier chapter,
+the predatory, emulative habit of mind here called prowess is but the
+barbarian variant of the generically human instinct of workmanship,
+which has fallen into this specific form under the guidance of a habit
+of invidious comparison of persons; (b) the relation of status is a
+formal expression of such an invidious comparison duly gauged and graded
+according to a sanctioned schedule; (c) an anthropomorphic cult, in the
+days of its early vigor at least, is an institution the characteristic
+element of which is a relation of status between the human subject as
+inferior and the personified preternatural agency as superior. With
+this in mind, there should be no difficulty in recognizing the intimate
+relation which subsists between these three phenomena of human nature
+and of human life; the relation amounts to an identity in some of their
+substantial elements. On the one hand, the system of status and the
+predatory habit of life are an expression of the instinct of workmanship
+as it takes form under a custom of invidious comparison; on the other
+hand, the anthropomorphic cult and the habit of devout observances
+are an expression of men's animistic sense of a propensity in material
+things, elaborated under the guidance of substantially the same general
+habit of invidious comparison. The two categories--the emulative habit
+of life and the habit of devout observances--are therefore to be taken
+as complementary elements of the barbarian type of human nature and of
+its modern barbarian variants. They are expressions of much the same
+range of aptitudes, made in response to different sets of stimuli.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twelve ~~ Devout Observances
+
+A discoursive rehearsal of certain incidents of modern life will show
+the organic relation of the anthropomorphic cults to the barbarian
+culture and temperament. It will likewise serve to show how the survival
+and efficacy of the cults and he prevalence of their schedule of devout
+observances are related to the institution of a leisure class and to the
+springs of action underlying that institution. Without any intention to
+commend or to deprecate the practices to be spoken of under the head of
+devout observances, or the spiritual and intellectual traits of which
+these observances are the expression, the everyday phenomena of current
+anthropomorphic cults may be taken up from the point of view of the
+interest which they have for economic theory. What can properly
+be spoken of here are the tangible, external features of devout
+observances. The moral, as well as the devotional value of the life of
+faith lies outside of the scope of the present inquiry. Of course no
+question is here entertained as to the truth or beauty of the creeds on
+which the cults proceed. And even their remoter economic bearing can not
+be taken up here; the subject is too recondite and of too grave import
+to find a place in so slight a sketch.
+
+Something has been said in an earlier chapter as to the influence which
+pecuniary standards of value exert upon the processes of valuation
+carried out on other bases, not related to the pecuniary interest. The
+relation is not altogether one-sided. The economic standards or canons
+of valuation are in their turn influenced by extra-economic standards of
+value. Our judgments of the economic bearing of facts are to some extent
+shaped by the dominant presence of these weightier interests. There is
+a point of view, indeed, from which the economic interest is of weight
+only as being ancillary to these higher, non-economic interests. For the
+present purpose, therefore, some thought must be taken to isolate
+the economic interest or the economic hearing of these phenomena of
+anthropomorphic cults. It takes some effort to divest oneself of the
+more serious point of view, and to reach an economic appreciation
+of these facts, with as little as may be of the bias due to higher
+interests extraneous to economic theory. In the discussion of the
+sporting temperament, it has appeared that the sense of an animistic
+propensity in material things and events is what affords the spiritual
+basis of the sporting man's gambling habit. For the economic purpose,
+this sense of propensity is substantially the same psychological element
+as expresses itself, under a variety of forms, in animistic beliefs and
+anthropomorphic creeds. So far as concerns those tangible psychological
+features with which economic theory has to deal, the gambling spirit
+which pervades the sporting element shades off by insensible gradations
+into that frame of mind which finds gratification in devout observances.
+As seen from the point of view of economic theory, the sporting
+character shades off into the character of a religious devotee. Where
+the betting man's animistic sense is helped out by a somewhat consistent
+tradition, it has developed into a more or less articulate belief in
+a preternatural or hyperphysical agency, with something of an
+anthropomorphic content. And where this is the case, there is commonly
+a perceptible inclination to make terms with the preternatural agency
+by some approved method of approach and conciliation. This element of
+propitiation and cajoling has much in common with the crasser forms
+of worship--if not in historical derivation, at least in actual
+psychological content. It obviously shades off in unbroken continuity
+into what is recognized as superstitious practice and belief, and so
+asserts its claim to kinship with the grosser anthropomorphic cults.
+
+The sporting or gambling temperament, then, comprises some of the
+substantial psychological elements that go to make a believer in creeds
+and an observer of devout forms, the chief point of coincidence being
+the belief in an inscrutable propensity or a preternatural interposition
+in the sequence of events. For the purpose of the gambling practice the
+belief in preternatural agency may be, and ordinarily is, less closely
+formulated, especially as regards the habits of thought and the scheme
+of life imputed to the preternatural agent; or, in other words, as
+regards his moral character and his purposes in interfering in events.
+With respect to the individuality or personality of the agency whose
+presence as luck, or chance, or hoodoo, or mascot, etc., he feels and
+sometimes dreads and endeavors to evade, the sporting man's views are
+also less specific, less integrated and differentiated. The basis of his
+gambling activity is, in great measure, simply an instinctive sense
+of the presence of a pervasive extraphysical and arbitrary force or
+propensity in things or situations, which is scarcely recognized as a
+personal agent. The betting man is not infrequently both a believer
+in luck, in this naive sense, and at the same time a pretty staunch
+adherent of some form of accepted creed. He is especially prone to
+accept so much of the creed as concerts the inscrutable power and the
+arbitrary habits of the divinity which has won his confidence. In such a
+case he is possessed of two, or sometimes more than two, distinguishable
+phases of animism. Indeed, the complete series of successive phases of
+animistic belief is to be found unbroken in the spiritual furniture
+of any sporting community. Such a chain of animistic conceptions will
+comprise the most elementary form of an instinctive sense of luck and
+chance and fortuitous necessity at one end of the series, together with
+the perfectly developed anthropomorphic divinity at the other end, with
+all intervening stages of integration. Coupled with these beliefs in
+preternatural agency goes an instinctive shaping of conduct to conform
+with the surmised requirements of the lucky chance on the one hand,
+and a more or less devout submission to the inscrutable decrees of the
+divinity on the other hand.
+
+There is a relationship in this respect between the sporting temperament
+and the temperament of the delinquent classes; and the two are related
+to the temperament which inclines to an anthropomorphic cult. Both
+the delinquent and the sporting man are on the average more apt to be
+adherents of some accredited creed, and are also rather more inclined
+to devout observances, than the general average of the community. It is
+also noticeable that unbelieving members of these classes show more of
+a proclivity to become proselytes to some accredited faith than the
+average of unbelievers. This fact of observation is avowed by the
+spokesmen of sports, especially in apologizing for the more naively
+predatory athletic sports. Indeed, it is somewhat insistently claimed as
+a meritorious feature of sporting life that the habitual participants in
+athletic games are in some degree peculiarly given to devout practices.
+And it is observable that the cult to which sporting men and the
+predaceous delinquent classes adhere, or to which proselytes from
+these classes commonly attach themselves, is ordinarily not one of the
+so-called higher faiths, but a cult which has to do with a thoroughly
+anthropomorphic divinity. Archaic, predatory human nature is not
+satisfied with abstruse conceptions of a dissolving personality that
+shades off into the concept of quantitative causal sequence, such as the
+speculative, esoteric creeds of Christendom impute to the First Cause,
+Universal Intelligence, World Soul, or Spiritual Aspect. As an instance
+of a cult of the character which the habits of mind of the athlete and
+the delinquent require, may be cited that branch of the church militant
+known as the Salvation Army. This is to some extent recruited from the
+lower-class delinquents, and it appears to comprise also, among its
+officers especially, a larger proportion of men with a sporting record
+than the proportion of such men in the aggregate population of the
+community.
+
+College athletics afford a case in point. It is contended by exponents
+of the devout element in college life--and there seems to be no ground
+for disputing the claim--that the desirable athletic material afforded
+by any student body in this country is at the same time predominantly
+religious; or that it is at least given to devout observances to a
+greater degree than the average of those students whose interest in
+athletics and other college sports is less. This is what might be
+expected on theoretical grounds. It may be remarked, by the way, that
+from one point of view this is felt to reflect credit on the college
+sporting life, on athletic games, and on those persons who occupy
+themselves with these matters. It happens not frequently that college
+sporting men devote themselves to religious propaganda, either as a
+vocation or as a by-occupation; and it is observable that when this
+happens they are likely to become propagandists of some one of the more
+anthropomorphic cults. In their teaching they are apt to insist
+chiefly on the personal relation of status which subsists between an
+anthropomorphic divinity and the human subject.
+
+This intimate relation between athletics and devout observance among
+college men is a fact of sufficient notoriety; but it has a special
+feature to which attention has not been called, although it is obvious
+enough. The religious zeal which pervades much of the college sporting
+element is especially prone to express itself in an unquestioning
+devoutness and a naive and complacent submission to an inscrutable
+Providence. It therefore by preference seeks affiliation with some one
+of those lay religious organizations which occupy themselves with
+the spread of the exoteric forms of faith--as, e.g., the Young Men's
+Christian Association or the Young People's Society for Christian
+Endeavor. These lay bodies are organized to further "practical"
+religion; and as if to enforce the argument and firmly establish the
+close relationship between the sporting temperament and the archaic
+devoutness, these lay religious bodies commonly devote some appreciable
+portion of their energies to the furtherance of athletic contests and
+similar games of chance and skill. It might even be said that sports
+of this kind are apprehended to have some efficacy as a means of grace.
+They are apparently useful as a means of proselyting, and as a means of
+sustaining the devout attitude in converts once made. That is to
+say, the games which give exercise to the animistic sense and to the
+emulative propensity help to form and to conserve that habit of mind to
+which the more exoteric cults are congenial. Hence, in the hands of
+the lay organizations, these sporting activities come to do duty as a
+novitiate or a means of induction into that fuller unfolding of the
+life of spiritual status which is the privilege of the full communicant
+along.
+
+That the exercise of the emulative and lower animistic proclivities are
+substantially useful for the devout purpose seems to be placed beyond
+question by the fact that the priesthood of many denominations is
+following the lead of the lay organizations in this respect. Those
+ecclesiastical organizations especially which stand nearest the lay
+organizations in their insistence on practical religion have gone some
+way towards adopting these or analogous practices in connection with the
+traditional devout observances. So there are "boys' brigades," and other
+organizations, under clerical sanction, acting to develop the emulative
+proclivity and the sense of status in the youthful members of the
+congregation. These pseudo-military organizations tend to elaborate and
+accentuate the proclivity to emulation and invidious comparison, and so
+strengthen the native facility for discerning and approving the relation
+of personal mastery and subservience. And a believer is eminently a
+person who knows how to obey and accept chastisement with good grace.
+But the habits of thought which these practices foster and conserve
+make up but one half of the substance of the anthropomorphic cults.
+The other, complementary element of devout life--the animistic habit
+of mind--is recruited and conserved by a second range of practices
+organized under clerical sanction. These are the class of gambling
+practices of which the church bazaar or raffle may be taken as the type.
+As indicating the degree of legitimacy of these practices in connection
+with devout observances proper, it is to be remarked that these raffles,
+and the like trivial opportunities for gambling, seem to appeal with
+more effect to the common run of the members of religious organizations
+than they do to persons of a less devout habit of mind.
+
+All this seems to argue, on the one hand, that the same temperament
+inclines people to sports as inclines them to the anthropomorphic cults,
+and on the other hand that the habituation to sports, perhaps especially
+to athletic sports, acts to develop the propensities which find
+satisfaction in devout observances. Conversely; it also appears that
+habituation to these observances favors the growth of a proclivity
+for athletic sports and for all games that give play to the habit of
+invidious comparison and of the appeal to luck. Substantially the same
+range of propensities finds expression in both these directions of
+the spiritual life. That barbarian human nature in which the predatory
+instinct and the animistic standpoint predominate is normally prone
+to both. The predatory habit of mind involves an accentuated sense of
+personal dignity and of the relative standing of individuals. The social
+structure in which the predatory habit has been the dominant factor
+in the shaping of institutions is a structure based on status. The
+pervading norm in the predatory community's scheme of life is the
+relation of superior and inferior, noble and base, dominant and
+subservient persons and classes, master and slave. The anthropomorphic
+cults have come down from that stage of industrial development and
+have been shaped by the same scheme of economic differentiation--a
+differentiation into consumer and producer--and they are pervaded by the
+same dominant principle of mastery and subservience. The cults impute to
+their divinity the habits of thought answering to the stage of economic
+differentiation at which the cults took shape. The anthropomorphic
+divinity is conceived to be punctilious in all questions of precedence
+and is prone to an assertion of mastery and an arbitrary exercise of
+power--an habitual resort to force as the final arbiter.
+
+In the later and maturer formulations of the anthropomorphic creed this
+imputed habit of dominance on the part of a divinity of awful presence
+and inscrutable power is chastened into "the fatherhood of God." The
+spiritual attitude and the aptitudes imputed to the preternatural agent
+are still such as belong under the regime of status, but they now assume
+the patriarchal cast characteristic of the quasi-peaceable stage of
+culture. Still it is to be noted that even in this advanced phase of the
+cult the observances in which devoutness finds expression consistently
+aim to propitiate the divinity by extolling his greatness and glory and
+by professing subservience and fealty. The act of propitiation or
+of worship is designed to appeal to a sense of status imputed to the
+inscrutable power that is thus approached. The propitiatory formulas
+most in vogue are still such as carry or imply an invidious comparison.
+A loyal attachment to the person of an anthropomorphic divinity endowed
+with such an archaic human nature implies the like archaic propensities
+in the devotee. For the purposes of economic theory, the relation of
+fealty, whether to a physical or to an extraphysical person, is to be
+taken as a variant of that personal subservience which makes up so large
+a share of the predatory and the quasi-peaceable scheme of life.
+
+The barbarian conception of the divinity, as a warlike chieftain
+inclined to an overbearing manner of government, has been greatly
+softened through the milder manners and the soberer habits of life that
+characterize those cultural phases which lie between the early predatory
+stage and the present. But even after this chastening of the devout
+fancy, and the consequent mitigation of the harsher traits of conduct
+and character that are currently imputed to the divinity, there still
+remains in the popular apprehension of the divine nature and temperament
+a very substantial residue of the barbarian conception. So it comes
+about, for instance, that in characterizing the divinity and his
+relations to the process of human life, speakers and writers are still
+able to make effective use of similes borrowed from the vocabulary of
+war and of the predatory manner of life, as well as of locutions which
+involve an invidious comparison. Figures of speech of this import
+are used with good effect even in addressing the less warlike modern
+audiences, made up of adherents of the blander variants of the creed.
+This effective use of barbarian epithets and terms of comparison by
+popular speakers argues that the modern generation has retained a lively
+appreciation of the dignity and merit of the barbarian virtues; and
+it argues also that there is a degree of congruity between the devout
+attitude and the predatory habit of mind. It is only on second thought,
+if at all, that the devout fancy of modern worshippers revolts at the
+imputation of ferocious and vengeful emotions and actions to the object
+of their adoration. It is a matter of common observation that sanguinary
+epithets applied to the divinity have a high aesthetic and honorific
+value in the popular apprehension. That is to say, suggestions
+which these epithets carry are very acceptable to our unreflecting
+apprehension.
+
+  Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
+  He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
+  He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword;
+  His truth is marching on.
+
+The guiding habits of thought of a devout person move on the plane of an
+archaic scheme of life which has outlived much of its usefulness for the
+economic exigencies of the collective life of today. In so far as the
+economic organization fits the exigencies of the collective life of
+today, it has outlived the regime of status, and has no use and no place
+for a relation of personal subserviency. So far as concerns the economic
+efficiency of the community, the sentiment of personal fealty, and the
+general habit of mind of which that sentiment is an expression, are
+survivals which cumber the ground and hinder an adequate adjustment of
+human institutions to the existing situation. The habit of mind which
+best lends itself to the purposes of a peaceable, industrial community,
+is that matter-of-fact temper which recognizes the value of material
+facts simply as opaque items in the mechanical sequence. It is
+that frame of mind which does not instinctively impute an animistic
+propensity to things, nor resort to preternatural intervention as an
+explanation of perplexing phenomena, nor depend on an unseen hand to
+shape the course of events to human use. To meet the requirements of the
+highest economic efficiency under modern conditions, the world process
+must habitually be apprehended in terms of quantitative, dispassionate
+force and sequence.
+
+As seen from the point of view of the later economic exigencies,
+devoutness is, perhaps in all cases, to be looked upon as a survival
+from an earlier phase of associated life--a mark of arrested spiritual
+development. Of course it remains true that in a community where the
+economic structure is still substantially a system of status; where
+the attitude of the average of persons in the community is consequently
+shaped by and adapted to the relation of personal dominance and
+personal subservience; or where for any other reason--of tradition or
+of inherited aptitude--the population as a whole is strongly inclined to
+devout observances; there a devout habit of mind in any individual, not
+in excess of the average of the community, must be taken simply as
+a detail of the prevalent habit of life. In this light, a devout
+individual in a devout community can not be called a case of reversion,
+since he is abreast of the average of the community. But as seen from
+the point of view of the modern industrial situation, exceptional
+devoutness--devotional zeal that rises appreciably above the average
+pitch of devoutness in the community--may safely be set down as in all
+cases an atavistic trait.
+
+It is, of course, equally legitimate to consider these phenomena from
+a different point of view. They may be appreciated for a different
+purpose, and the characterization here offered may be turned about.
+In speaking from the point of view of the devotional interest, or the
+interest of devout taste, it may, with equal cogency, be said that
+the spiritual attitude bred in men by the modern industrial life is
+unfavorable to a free development of the life of faith. It might fairly
+be objected to the later development of the industrial process that its
+discipline tends to "materialism," to the elimination of filial piety.
+From the aesthetic point of view, again, something to a similar purport
+might be said. But, however legitimate and valuable these and the like
+reflections may be for their purpose, they would not be in place in the
+present inquiry, which is exclusively concerned with the valuation of
+these phenomena from the economic point of view.
+
+The grave economic significance of the anthropomorphic habit of mind
+and of the addiction to devout observances must serve as apology for
+speaking further on a topic which it can not but be distasteful to
+discuss at all as an economic phenomenon in a community so devout as
+ours. Devout observances are of economic importance as an index of a
+concomitant variation of temperament, accompanying the predatory habit
+of mind and so indicating the presence of industrially disserviceable
+traits. They indicate the presence of a mental attitude which has a
+certain economic value of its own by virtue of its influence upon
+the industrial serviceability of the individual. But they are also of
+importance more directly, in modifying the economic activities of the
+community, especially as regards the distribution and consumption of
+goods.
+
+The most obvious economic bearing of these observances is seen in the
+devout consumption of goods and services. The consumption of ceremonial
+paraphernalia required by any cult, in the way of shrines, temples,
+churches, vestments, sacrifices, sacraments, holiday attire, etc.,
+serves no immediate material end. All this material apparatus may,
+therefore, without implying deprecation, be broadly characterized as
+items of conspicuous waste. The like is true in a general way of the
+personal service consumed under this head; such as priestly education,
+priestly service, pilgrimages, fasts, holidays, household devotions,
+and the like. At the same time the observances in the execution of which
+this consumption takes place serve to extend and protract the vogue of
+those habits of thought on which an anthropomorphic cult rests. That is
+to say, they further the habits of thought characteristic of the regime
+of status. They are in so far an obstruction to the most effective
+organization of industry under modern circumstances; and are, in the
+first instance, antagonistic to the development of economic institutions
+in the direction required by the situation of today. For the present
+purpose, the indirect as well as the direct effects of this consumption
+are of the nature of a curtailment of the community's economic
+efficiency. In economic theory, then, and considered in its proximate
+consequences, the consumption of goods and effort in the service of
+an anthropomorphic divinity means a lowering of the vitality of the
+community. What may be the remoter, indirect, moral effects of this
+class of consumption does not admit of a succinct answer, and it is a
+question which can not be taken up here.
+
+It will be to the point, however, to note the general economic character
+of devout consumption, in comparison with consumption for other
+purposes. An indication of the range of motives and purposes from which
+devout consumption of goods proceeds will help toward an appreciation
+of the value both of this consumption itself and of the general habit of
+mind to which it is congenial. There is a striking parallelism, if not
+rather a substantial identity of motive, between the consumption which
+goes to the service of an anthropomorphic divinity and that which goes
+to the service of a gentleman of leisure chieftain or patriarch--in the
+upper class of society during the barbarian culture. Both in the case of
+the chieftain and in that of the divinity there are expensive edifices
+set apart for the behoof of the person served. These edifices, as well
+as the properties which supplement them in the service, must not be
+common in kind or grade; they always show a large element of conspicuous
+waste. It may also be noted that the devout edifices are invariably of
+an archaic cast in their structure and fittings. So also the servants,
+both of the chieftain and of the divinity, must appear in the presence
+clothed in garments of a special, ornate character. The characteristic
+economic feature of this apparel is a more than ordinarily accentuated
+conspicuous waste, together with the secondary feature--more accentuated
+in the case of the priestly servants than in that of the servants or
+courtiers of the barbarian potentate--that this court dress must always
+be in some degree of an archaic fashion. Also the garments worn by the
+lay members of the community when they come into the presence, should be
+of a more expensive kind than their everyday apparel. Here, again, the
+parallelism between the usage of the chieftain's audience hall and
+that of the sanctuary is fairly well marked. In this respect there
+is required a certain ceremonial "cleanness" of attire, the essential
+feature of which, in the economic respect, is that the garments worn
+on these occasions should carry as little suggestion as may be of any
+industrial occupation or of any habitual addiction to such employments
+as are of material use.
+
+This requirement of conspicuous waste and of ceremonial cleanness from
+the traces of industry extends also to the apparel, and in a less degree
+to the food, which is consumed on sacred holidays; that is to say, on
+days set apart--tabu--for the divinity or for some member of the lower
+ranks of the preternatural leisure class. In economic theory, sacred
+holidays are obviously to be construed as a season of vicarious leisure
+performed for the divinity or saint in whose name the tabu is imposed
+and to whose good repute the abstention from useful effort on these days
+is conceived to inure. The characteristic feature of all such seasons
+of devout vicarious leisure is a more or less rigid tabu on all
+activity that is of human use. In the case of fast-days the conspicuous
+abstention from gainful occupations and from all pursuits that
+(materially) further human life is further accentuated by compulsory
+abstinence from such consumption as would conduce to the comfort or the
+fullness of life of the consumer.
+
+It may be remarked, parenthetically, that secular holidays are of the
+same origin, by slightly remoter derivation. They shade off by degrees
+from the genuinely sacred days, through an intermediate class of
+semi-sacred birthdays of kings and great men who have been in some
+measure canonized, to the deliberately invented holiday set apart to
+further the good repute of some notable event or some striking fact, to
+which it is intended to do honor, or the good fame of which is felt
+to be in need of repair. The remoter refinement in the employment
+of vicarious leisure as a means of augmenting the good repute of a
+phenomenon or datum is seen at its best in its very latest application.
+A day of vicarious leisure has in some communities been set apart as
+Labor Day. This observance is designed to augment the prestige of
+the fact of labor, by the archaic, predatory method of a compulsory
+abstention from useful effort. To this datum of labor-in-general is
+imputed the good repute attributable to the pecuniary strength put
+in evidence by abstaining from labor. Sacred holidays, and holidays
+generally, are of the nature of a tribute levied on the body of the
+people. The tribute is paid in vicarious leisure, and the honorific
+effect which emerges is imputed to the person or the fact for whose
+good repute the holiday has been instituted. Such a tithe of vicarious
+leisure is a perquisite of all members of the preternatural leisure
+class and is indispensable to their good fame. Un saint qu'on ne chome
+pas is indeed a saint fallen on evil days.
+
+Besides this tithe of vicarious leisure levied on the laity, there
+are also special classes of persons--the various grades of priests and
+hierodules--whose time is wholly set apart for a similar service. It is
+not only incumbent on the priestly class to abstain from vulgar labor,
+especially so far as it is lucrative or is apprehended to contribute to
+the temporal well-being of mankind. The tabu in the case of the priestly
+class goes farther and adds a refinement in the form of an injunction
+against their seeking worldly gain even where it may be had without
+debasing application to industry. It is felt to be unworthy of the
+servant of the divinity, or rather unworthy the dignity of the divinity
+whose servant he is, that he should seek material gain or take thought
+for temporal matters. "Of all contemptible things a man who pretends to
+be a priest of God and is a priest to his own comforts and ambitions
+is the most contemptible." There is a line of discrimination, which a
+cultivated taste in matters of devout observance finds little difficulty
+in drawing, between such actions and conduct as conduce to the
+fullness of human life and such as conduce to the good fame of the
+anthropomorphic divinity; and the activity of the priestly class, in the
+ideal barbarian scheme, falls wholly on the hither side of this line.
+What falls within the range of economics falls below the proper level
+of solicitude of the priesthood in its best estate. Such apparent
+exceptions to this rule as are afforded, for instance, by some of the
+medieval orders of monks (the members of which actually labored to some
+useful end), scarcely impugn the rule. These outlying orders of the
+priestly class are not a sacerdotal element in the full sense of the
+term. And it is noticeable also that these doubtfully sacerdotal
+orders, which countenanced their members in earning a living, fell into
+disrepute through offending the sense of propriety in the communities
+where they existed.
+
+The priest should not put his hand to mechanically productive work; but
+he should consume in large measure. But even as regards his consumption
+it is to be noted that it should take such forms as do not obviously
+conduce to his own comfort or fullness of life; it should conform to the
+rules governing vicarious consumption, as explained under that head in
+an earlier chapter. It is not ordinarily in good form for the priestly
+class to appear well fed or in hilarious spirits. Indeed, in many of
+the more elaborate cults the injunction against other than vicarious
+consumption by this class frequently goes so far as to enjoin
+mortification of the flesh. And even in those modern denominations which
+have been organized under the latest formulations of the creed, in a
+modern industrial community, it is felt that all levity and avowed zest
+in the enjoyment of the good things of this world is alien to the true
+clerical decorum. Whatever suggests that these servants of an invisible
+master are living a life, not of devotion to their master's good fame,
+but of application to their own ends, jars harshly on our sensibilities
+as something fundamentally and eternally wrong. They are a servant
+class, although, being servants of a very exalted master, they rank high
+in the social scale by virtue of this borrowed light. Their consumption
+is vicarious consumption; and since, in the advanced cults, their master
+has no need of material gain, their occupation is vicarious leisure in
+the full sense. "Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye
+do, do all to the glory of God." It may be added that so far as the
+laity is assimilated to the priesthood in the respect that they are
+conceived to be servants of the divinity. So far this imputed vicarious
+character attaches also to the layman's life. The range of application
+of this corollary is somewhat wide. It applies especially to such
+movements for the reform or rehabilitation of the religious life as
+are of an austere, pietistic, ascetic cast--where the human subject is
+conceived to hold his life by a direct servile tenure from his spiritual
+sovereign. That is to say, where the institution of the priesthood
+lapses, or where there is an exceptionally lively sense of the immediate
+and masterful presence of the divinity in the affairs of life, there
+the layman is conceived to stand in an immediate servile relation to
+the divinity, and his life is construed to be a performance of vicarious
+leisure directed to the enhancement of his master's repute. In such
+cases of reversion there is a return to the unmediated relation of
+subservience, as the dominant fact of the devout attitude. The emphasis
+is thereby thrown on an austere and discomforting vicarious leisure, to
+the neglect of conspicuous consumption as a means of grace.
+
+A doubt will present itself as to the full legitimacy of this
+characterization of the sacerdotal scheme of life, on the ground that a
+considerable proportion of the modern priesthood departs from the scheme
+in many details. The scheme does not hold good for the clergy of
+those denominations which have in some measure diverged from the old
+established schedule of beliefs or observances. These take thought, at
+least ostensibly or permissively, for the temporal welfare of the laity,
+as well as for their own. Their manner of life, not only in the privacy
+of their own household, but often even before the public, does not
+differ in an extreme degree from that of secular-minded persons, either
+in its ostensible austerity or in the archaism of its apparatus. This is
+truest for those denominations that have wandered the farthest. To
+this objection it is to be said that we have here to do not with a
+discrepancy in the theory of sacerdotal life, but with an imperfect
+conformity to the scheme on the part of this body of clergy. They are
+but a partial and imperfect representative of the priesthood, and must
+not be taken as exhibiting the sacerdotal scheme of life in an authentic
+and competent manner. The clergy of the sects and denominations might be
+characterized as a half-caste priesthood, or a priesthood in process of
+becoming or of reconstitution. Such a priesthood may be expected to
+show the characteristics of the sacerdotal office only as blended
+and obscured with alien motives and traditions, due to the disturbing
+presence of other factors than those of animism and status in the
+purposes of the organizations to which this non-conforming fraction of
+the priesthood belongs.
+
+Appeal may be taken direct to the taste of any person with a
+discriminating and cultivated sense of the sacerdotal proprieties, or
+to the prevalent sense of what constitutes clerical decorum in any
+community at all accustomed to think or to pass criticism on what a
+clergyman may or may not do without blame. Even in the most extremely
+secularized denominations, there is some sense of a distinction that
+should be observed between the sacerdotal and the lay scheme of life.
+There is no person of sensibility but feels that where the members of
+this denominational or sectarian clergy depart from traditional usage,
+in the direction of a less austere or less archaic demeanor and apparel,
+they are departing from the ideal of priestly decorum. There is probably
+no community and no sect within the range of the Western culture in
+which the bounds of permissible indulgence are not drawn appreciably
+closer for the incumbent of the priestly office than for the common
+layman. If the priest's own sense of sacerdotal propriety does not
+effectually impose a limit, the prevalent sense of the proprieties on
+the part of the community will commonly assert itself so obtrusively as
+to lead to his conformity or his retirement from office.
+
+Few if any members of any body of clergy, it may be added, would
+avowedly seek an increase of salary for gain's sake; and if such avowal
+were openly made by a clergyman, it would be found obnoxious to the
+sense of propriety among his congregation. It may also be noted in this
+connection that no one but the scoffers and the very obtuse are not
+instinctively grieved inwardly at a jest from the pulpit; and that there
+are none whose respect for their pastor does not suffer through any mark
+of levity on his part in any conjuncture of life, except it be levity
+of a palpably histrionic kind--a constrained unbending of dignity. The
+diction proper to the sanctuary and to the priestly office should also
+carry little if any suggestion of effective everyday life, and should
+not draw upon the vocabulary of modern trade or industry. Likewise,
+one's sense of the proprieties is readily offended by too detailed and
+intimate a handling of industrial and other purely human questions at
+the hands of the clergy. There is a certain level of generality below
+which a cultivated sense of the proprieties in homiletical discourse
+will not permit a well-bred clergyman to decline in his discussion
+of temporal interests. These matters that are of human and secular
+consequence simply, should properly be handled with such a degree of
+generality and aloofness as may imply that the speaker represents
+a master whose interest in secular affairs goes only so far as to
+permissively countenance them.
+
+It is further to be noticed that the non-conforming sects and variants
+whose priesthood is here under discussion, vary among themselves in the
+degree of their conformity to the ideal scheme of sacerdotal life. In
+a general way it will be found that the divergence in this respect is
+widest in the case of the relatively young denominations, and especially
+in the case of such of the newer denominations as have chiefly a lower
+middle-class constituency. They commonly show a large admixture of
+humanitarian, philanthropic, or other motives which can not be classed
+as expressions of the devotional attitude; such as the desire of
+learning or of conviviality, which enter largely into the effective
+interest shown by members of these organizations. The non-conforming or
+sectarian movements have commonly proceeded from a mixture of motives,
+some of which are at variance with that sense of status on which the
+priestly office rests. Sometimes, indeed, the motive has been in good
+part a revulsion against a system of status. Where this is the case
+the institution of the priesthood has broken down in the transition, at
+least partially. The spokesman of such an organization is at the outset
+a servant and representative of the organization, rather than a member
+of a special priestly class and the spokesman of a divine master. And
+it is only by a process of gradual specialization that, in succeeding
+generations, this spokesman regains the position of priest, with a full
+investiture of sacerdotal authority, and with its accompanying austere,
+archaic and vicarious manner of life. The like is true of the breakdown
+and redintegration of devout ritual after such a revulsion. The priestly
+office, the scheme of sacerdotal life, and the schedule of devout
+observances are rehabilitated only gradually, insensibly, and with more
+or less variation in details, as a persistent human sense of devout
+propriety reasserts its primacy in questions touching the interest in
+the preternatural--and it may be added, as the organization increases
+in wealth, and so acquires more of the point of view and the habits of
+thought of a leisure class.
+
+Beyond the priestly class, and ranged in an ascending hierarchy,
+ordinarily comes a superhuman vicarious leisure class of saints, angels,
+etc.--or their equivalents in the ethnic cults. These rise in grade, one
+above another, according to elaborate system of status. The principle of
+status runs through the entire hierarchical system, both visible and
+invisible. The good fame of these several orders of the supernatural
+hierarchy also commonly requires a certain tribute of vicarious
+consumption and vicarious leisure. In many cases they accordingly have
+devoted to their service sub-orders of attendants or dependents who
+perform a vicarious leisure for them, after much the same fashion as was
+found in an earlier chapter to be true of the dependent leisure class
+under the patriarchal system.
+
+It may not appear without reflection how these devout observances and
+the peculiarity of temperament which they imply, or the consumption of
+goods and services which is comprised in the cult, stand related to the
+leisure class of a modern community, or to the economic motives of which
+that class is the exponent in the modern scheme of life to this end a
+summary review of certain facts bearing on this relation will be useful.
+It appears from an earlier passage in this discussion that for the
+purpose of the collective life of today, especially so far as concerns
+the industrial efficiency of the modern community, the characteristic
+traits of the devout temperament are a hindrance rather than a help.
+It should accordingly be found that the modern industrial life tends
+selectively to eliminate these traits of human nature from the spiritual
+constitution of the classes that are immediately engaged in the
+industrial process. It should hold true, approximately, that devoutness
+is declining or tending to obsolescence among the members of what may
+be called the effective industrial community. At the same time it should
+appear that this aptitude or habit survives in appreciably greater vigor
+among those classes which do not immediately or primarily enter into the
+community's life process as an industrial factor.
+
+It has already been pointed out that these latter classes, which live
+by, rather than in, the industrial process, are roughly comprised under
+two categories (1) the leisure class proper, which is shielded from
+the stress of the economic situation; and (2) the indigent classes,
+including the lower-class delinquents, which are unduly exposed to
+the stress. In the case of the former class an archaic habit of mind
+persists because no effectual economic pressure constrains this class to
+an adaptation of its habits of thought to the changing situation; while
+in the latter the reason for a failure to adjust their habits of thought
+to the altered requirements of industrial efficiency is innutrition,
+absence of such surplus of energy as is needed in order to make the
+adjustment with facility, together with a lack of opportunity to acquire
+and become habituated to the modern point of view. The trend of the
+selective process runs in much the same direction in both cases.
+
+From the point of view which the modern industrial life inculcates,
+phenomena are habitually subsumed under the quantitative relation of
+mechanical sequence. The indigent classes not only fall short of the
+modicum of leisure necessary in order to appropriate and assimilate
+the more recent generalizations of science which this point of view
+involves, but they also ordinarily stand in such a relation of personal
+dependence or subservience to their pecuniary superiors as materially to
+retard their emancipation from habits of thought proper to the regime
+of status. The result is that these classes in some measure retain that
+general habit of mind the chief expression of which is a strong sense of
+personal status, and of which devoutness is one feature.
+
+In the older communities of the European culture, the hereditary leisure
+class, together with the mass of the indigent population, are given to
+devout observances in an appreciably higher degree than the average
+of the industrious middle class, wherever a considerable class of
+the latter character exists. But in some of these countries, the two
+categories of conservative humanity named above comprise virtually the
+whole population. Where these two classes greatly preponderate, their
+bent shapes popular sentiment to such an extent as to bear down any
+possible divergent tendency in the inconsiderable middle class, and
+imposes a devout attitude upon the whole community.
+
+This must, of course, not be construed to say that such communities or
+such classes as are exceptionally prone to devout observances tend to
+conform in any exceptional degree to the specifications of any code
+of morals that we may be accustomed to associate with this or that
+confession of faith. A large measure of the devout habit of mind
+need not carry with it a strict observance of the injunctions of the
+Decalogue or of the common law. Indeed, it is becoming somewhat of a
+commonplace with observers of criminal life in European communities that
+the criminal and dissolute classes are, if anything, rather more devout,
+and more naively so, than the average of the population. It is among
+those who constitute the pecuniary middle class and the body of
+law-abiding citizens that a relative exemption from the devotional
+attitude is to be looked for. Those who best appreciate the merits of
+the higher creeds and observances would object to all this and say that
+the devoutness of the low-class delinquents is a spurious, or at the
+best a superstitious devoutness; and the point is no doubt well taken
+and goes directly and cogently to the purpose intended. But for the
+purpose of the present inquiry these extra-economic, extra-psychological
+distinctions must perforce be neglected, however valid and however
+decisive they may be for the purpose for which they are made.
+
+What has actually taken place with regard to class emancipation from the
+habit of devout observance is shown by the latter-day complaint of
+the clergy--that the churches are losing the sympathy of the artisan
+classes, and are losing their hold upon them. At the same time it is
+currently believed that the middle class, commonly so called, is also
+falling away in the cordiality of its support of the church, especially
+so far as regards the adult male portion of that class. These are
+currently recognized phenomena, and it might seem that a simple
+reference to these facts should sufficiently substantiate the general
+position outlined. Such an appeal to the general phenomena of popular
+church attendance and church membership may be sufficiently convincing
+for the proposition here advanced. But it will still be to the purpose
+to trace in some detail the course of events and the particular forces
+which have wrought this change in the spiritual attitude of the more
+advanced industrial communities of today. It will serve to illustrate
+the manner in which economic causes work towards a secularization of
+men's habits of thought. In this respect the American community should
+afford an exceptionally convincing illustration, since this community
+has been the least trammelled by external circumstances of any equally
+important industrial aggregate.
+
+After making due allowance for exceptions and sporadic departures from
+the normal, the situation here at the present time may be summarized
+quite briefly. As a general rule the classes that are low in economic
+efficiency, or in intelligence, or both, are peculiarly devout--as, for
+instance, the Negro population of the South, much of the lower-class
+foreign population, much of the rural population, especially in those
+sections which are backward in education, in the stage of development of
+their industry, or in respect of their industrial contact with the rest
+of the community. So also such fragments as we possess of a specialized
+or hereditary indigent class, or of a segregated criminal or dissolute
+class; although among these latter the devout habit of mind is apt to
+take the form of a naive animistic belief in luck and in the efficacy of
+shamanistic practices perhaps more frequently than it takes the form of
+a formal adherence to any accredited creed. The artisan class, on
+the other hand, is notoriously falling away from the accredited
+anthropomorphic creeds and from all devout observances. This class is
+in an especial degree exposed to the characteristic intellectual and
+spiritual stress of modern organized industry, which requires a constant
+recognition of the undisguised phenomena of impersonal, matter-of-fact
+sequence and an unreserved conformity to the law of cause and effect.
+This class is at the same time not underfed nor over-worked to such an
+extent as to leave no margin of energy for the work of adaptation.
+
+The case of the lower or doubtful leisure class in America--the middle
+class commonly so called--is somewhat peculiar. It differs in respect
+of its devotional life from its European counterpart, but it differs in
+degree and method rather than in substance. The churches still have the
+pecuniary support of this class; although the creeds to which the
+class adheres with the greatest facility are relatively poor in
+anthropomorphic content. At the same time the effective middle-class
+congregation tends, in many cases, more or less remotely perhaps, to
+become a congregation of women and minors. There is an appreciable lack
+of devotional fervor among the adult males of the middle class, although
+to a considerable extent there survives among them a certain complacent,
+reputable assent to the outlines of the accredited creed under which
+they were born. Their everyday life is carried on in a more or less
+close contact with the industrial process.
+
+This peculiar sexual differentiation, which tends to delegate devout
+observances to the women and their children, is due, at least in
+part, to the fact that the middle-class women are in great measure a
+(vicarious) leisure class. The same is true in a less degree of the
+women of the lower, artisan classes. They live under a regime of status
+handed down from an earlier stage of industrial development, and thereby
+they preserve a frame of mind and habits of thought which incline them
+to an archaic view of things generally. At the same time they stand in
+no such direct organic relation to the industrial process at large as
+would tend strongly to break down those habits of thought which, for the
+modern industrial purpose, are obsolete. That is to say, the peculiar
+devoutness of women is a particular expression of that conservatism
+which the women of civilized communities owe, in great measure, to their
+economic position. For the modern man the patriarchal relation of status
+is by no means the dominant feature of life; but for the women on the
+other hand, and for the upper middle-class women especially, confined
+as they are by prescription and by economic circumstances to their
+"domestic sphere," this relation is the most real and most formative
+factor of life. Hence a habit of mind favorable to devout observances
+and to the interpretation of the facts of life generally in terms of
+personal status. The logic, and the logical processes, of her everyday
+domestic life are carried over into the realm of the supernatural, and
+the woman finds herself at home and content in a range of ideas which to
+the man are in great measure alien and imbecile.
+
+Still the men of this class are also not devoid of piety, although it
+is commonly not piety of an aggressive or exuberant kind. The men of
+the upper middle class commonly take a more complacent attitude towards
+devout observances than the men of the artisan class. This may perhaps
+be explained in part by saying that what is true of the women of
+the class is true to a less extent also of the men. They are to an
+appreciable extent a sheltered class; and the patriarchal relation of
+status which still persists in their conjugal life and in their habitual
+use of servants, may also act to conserve an archaic habit of mind and
+may exercise a retarding influence upon the process of secularization
+which their habits of thought are undergoing. The relations of the
+American middle-class man to the economic community, however, are
+usually pretty close and exacting; although it may be remarked, by the
+way and in qualification, that their economic activity frequently also
+partakes in some degree of the patriarchal or quasi-predatory character.
+The occupations which are in good repute among this class and which have
+most to do with shaping the class habits of thought, are the pecuniary
+occupations which have been spoken of in a similar connection in an
+earlier chapter. There is a good deal of the relation of arbitrary
+command and submission, and not a little of shrewd practice, remotely
+akin to predatory fraud. All this belongs on the plane of life of the
+predatory barbarian, to whom a devotional attitude is habitual. And in
+addition to this, the devout observances also commend themselves to this
+class on the ground of reputability. But this latter incentive to piety
+deserves treatment by itself and will be spoken of presently. There
+is no hereditary leisure class of any consequence in the American
+community, except in the South. This Southern leisure class is somewhat
+given to devout observances; more so than any class of corresponding
+pecuniary standing in other parts of the country. It is also well known
+that the creeds of the South are of a more old-fashioned cast than their
+counterparts in the North. Corresponding to this more archaic devotional
+life of the South is the lower industrial development of that section.
+The industrial organization of the South is at present, and especially
+it has been until quite recently, of a more primitive character than
+that of the American community taken as a whole. It approaches nearer
+to handicraft, in the paucity and rudeness of its mechanical appliances,
+and there is more of the element of mastery and subservience. It may
+also be noted that, owing to the peculiar economic circumstances of this
+section, the greater devoutness of the Southern population, both white
+and black, is correlated with a scheme of life which in many ways
+recalls the barbarian stages of industrial development. Among this
+population offenses of an archaic character also are and have been
+relatively more prevalent and are less deprecated than they are
+elsewhere; as, for example, duels, brawls, feuds, drunkenness,
+horse-racing, cock-fighting, gambling, male sexual incontinence
+(evidenced by the considerable number of mulattoes). There is also a
+livelier sense of honor--an expression of sportsmanship and a derivative
+of predatory life.
+
+As regards the wealthier class of the North, the American leisure class
+in the best sense of the term, it is, to begin with, scarcely possible
+to speak of an hereditary devotional attitude. This class is of too
+recent growth to be possessed of a well-formed transmitted habit in this
+respect, or even of a special home-grown tradition. Still, it may be
+noted in passing that there is a perceptible tendency among this class
+to give in at least a nominal, and apparently something of a real,
+adherence to some one of the accredited creeds. Also, weddings,
+funerals, and the like honorific events among this class are
+pretty uniformly solemnized with some especial degree of religious
+circumstance. It is impossible to say how far this adherence to a creed
+is a bona fide reversion to a devout habit of mind, and how far it is to
+be classed as a case of protective mimicry assumed for the purpose of
+an outward assimilation to canons of reputability borrowed from foreign
+ideals. Something of a substantial devotional propensity seems to
+be present, to judge especially by the somewhat peculiar degree of
+ritualistic observance which is in process of development in the
+upper-class cults. There is a tendency perceptible among the upper-class
+worshippers to affiliate themselves with those cults which lay
+relatively great stress on ceremonial and on the spectacular accessories
+of worship; and in the churches in which an upper-class membership
+predominates, there is at the same time a tendency to accentuate the
+ritualistic, at the cost of the intellectual features in the service and
+in the apparatus of the devout observances. This holds true even where
+the church in question belongs to a denomination with a relatively
+slight general development of ritual and paraphernalia. This peculiar
+development of the ritualistic element is no doubt due in part to a
+predilection for conspicuously wasteful spectacles, but it probably
+also in part indicates something of the devotional attitude of the
+worshippers. So far as the latter is true, it indicates a relatively
+archaic form of the devotional habit. The predominance of spectacular
+effects in devout observances is noticeable in all devout communities at
+a relatively primitive stage of culture and with a slight intellectual
+development. It is especially characteristic of the barbarian culture.
+Here there is pretty uniformly present in the devout observances a
+direct appeal to the emotions through all the avenues of sense. And
+a tendency to return to this naive, sensational method of appeal is
+unmistakable in the upper-class churches of today. It is perceptible
+in a less degree in the cults which claim the allegiance of the lower
+leisure class and of the middle classes. There is a reversion to the
+use of colored lights and brilliant spectacles, a freer use of symbols,
+orchestral music and incense, and one may even detect in "processionals"
+and "recessionals" and in richly varied genuflexional evolutions, an
+incipient reversion to so antique an accessory of worship as the sacred
+dance. This reversion to spectacular observances is not confined to the
+upper-class cults, although it finds its best exemplification and its
+highest accentuation in the higher pecuniary and social altitudes. The
+cults of the lower-class devout portion of the community, such as the
+Southern Negroes and the backward foreign elements of the population,
+of course also show a strong inclination to ritual, symbolism, and
+spectacular effects; as might be expected from the antecedents and the
+cultural level of those classes. With these classes the prevalence of
+ritual and anthropomorphism are not so much a matter of reversion as of
+continued development out of the past. But the use of ritual and related
+features of devotion are also spreading in other directions. In the
+early days of the American community the prevailing denominations
+started out with a ritual and paraphernalia of an austere simplicity;
+but it is a matter familiar to every one that in the course of time
+these denominations have, in a varying degree, adopted much of the
+spectacular elements which they once renounced. In a general way, this
+development has gone hand in hand with the growth of the wealth and the
+ease of life of the worshippers and has reached its fullest expression
+among those classes which grade highest in wealth and repute.
+
+The causes to which this pecuniary stratification of devoutness is
+due have already been indicated in a general way in speaking of
+class differences in habits of thought. Class differences as regards
+devoutness are but a special expression of a generic fact. The lax
+allegiance of the lower middle class, or what may broadly be called the
+failure of filial piety among this class, is chiefly perceptible among
+the town populations engaged in the mechanical industries. In a general
+way, one does not, at the present time, look for a blameless filial
+piety among those classes whose employment approaches that of the
+engineer and the mechanician. These mechanical employments are in a
+degree a modern fact. The handicraftsmen of earlier times, who served
+an industrial end of a character similar to that now served by the
+mechanician, were not similarly refractory under the discipline of
+devoutness. The habitual activity of the men engaged in these branches
+of industry has greatly changed, as regards its intellectual discipline,
+since the modern industrial processes have come into vogue; and the
+discipline to which the mechanician is exposed in his daily employment
+affects the methods and standards of his thinking also on topics which
+lie outside his everyday work. Familiarity with the highly organized and
+highly impersonal industrial processes of the present acts to derange
+the animistic habits of thought. The workman's office is becoming more
+and more exclusively that of discretion and supervision in a process of
+mechanical, dispassionate sequences. So long as the individual is the
+chief and typical prime mover in the process; so long as the obtrusive
+feature of the industrial process is the dexterity and force of the
+individual handicraftsman; so long the habit of interpreting phenomena
+in terms of personal motive and propensity suffers no such considerable
+and consistent derangement through facts as to lead to its elimination.
+But under the later developed industrial processes, when the prime
+movers and the contrivances through which they work are of an
+impersonal, non-individual character, the grounds of generalization
+habitually present in the workman's mind and the point of view from
+which he habitually apprehends phenomena is an enforced cognizance of
+matter-of-fact sequence. The result, so far as concerts the workman's
+life of faith, is a proclivity to undevout scepticism.
+
+It appears, then, that the devout habit of mind attains its best
+development under a relatively archaic culture; the term "devout" being
+of course here used in its anthropological sense simply, and not
+as implying anything with respect to the spiritual attitude so
+characterized, beyond the fact of a proneness to devout observances.
+It appears also that this devout attitude marks a type of human nature
+which is more in consonance with the predatory mode of life than with
+the later-developed, more consistently and organically industrial life
+process of the community. It is in large measure an expression of the
+archaic habitual sense of personal status--the relation of mastery and
+subservience--and it therefore fits into the industrial scheme of the
+predatory and the quasi-peaceable culture, but does not fit into the
+industrial scheme of the present. It also appears that this habit
+persists with greatest tenacity among those classes in the modern
+communities whose everyday life is most remote from the mechanical
+processes of industry and which are the most conservative also in other
+respects; while for those classes that are habitually in immediate
+contact with modern industrial processes, and whose habits of thought
+are therefore exposed to the constraining force of technological
+necessities, that animistic interpretation of phenomena and that
+respect of persons on which devout observance proceeds are in process
+of obsolescence. And also--as bearing especially on the present
+discussion--it appears that the devout habit to some extent
+progressively gains in scope and elaboration among those classes in
+the modern communities to whom wealth and leisure accrue in the most
+pronounced degree. In this as in other relations, the institution of a
+leisure class acts to conserve, and even to rehabilitate, that archaic
+type of human nature and those elements of the archaic culture which the
+industrial evolution of society in its later stages acts to eliminate.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Thirteen ~~ Survivals of the Non-Invidious Interests
+
+In an increasing proportion as time goes on, the anthropomorphic
+cult, with its code of devout observations, suffers a progressive
+disintegration through the stress of economic exigencies and the decay
+of the system of status. As this disintegration proceeds, there come to
+be associated and blended with the devout attitude certain other motives
+and impulses that are not always of an anthropomorphic origin, nor
+traceable to the habit of personal subservience. Not all of these
+subsidiary impulses that blend with the habit of devoutness in the later
+devotional life are altogether congruous with the devout attitude or
+with the anthropomorphic apprehension of the sequence of phenomena. The
+origin being not the same, their action upon the scheme of devout
+life is also not in the same direction. In many ways they traverse the
+underlying norm of subservience or vicarious life to which the code of
+devout observations and the ecclesiastical and sacerdotal institutions
+are to be traced as their substantial basis. Through the presence of
+these alien motives the social and industrial regime of status gradually
+disintegrates, and the canon of personal subservience loses the support
+derived from an unbroken tradition. Extraneous habits and proclivities
+encroach upon the field of action occupied by this canon, and it
+presently comes about that the ecclesiastical and sacerdotal structures
+are partially converted to other uses, in some measure alien to the
+purposes of the scheme of devout life as it stood in the days of the
+most vigorous and characteristic development of the priesthood.
+
+Among these alien motives which affect the devout scheme in its
+later growth, may be mentioned the motives of charity and of social
+good-fellowship, or conviviality; or, in more general terms, the various
+expressions of the sense of human solidarity and sympathy. It may
+be added that these extraneous uses of the ecclesiastical structure
+contribute materially to its survival in name and form even among
+people who may be ready to give up the substance of it. A still more
+characteristic and more pervasive alien element in the motives
+which have gone to formally uphold the scheme of devout life is that
+non-reverent sense of aesthetic congruity with the environment, which is
+left as a residue of the latter-day act of worship after elimination
+of its anthropomorphic content. This has done good service for the
+maintenance of the sacerdotal institution through blending with the
+motive of subservience. This sense of impulse of aesthetic congruity
+is not primarily of an economic character, but it has a considerable
+indirect effect in shaping the habit of mind of the individual for
+economic purposes in the later stages of industrial development;
+its most perceptible effect in this regard goes in the direction of
+mitigating the somewhat pronounced self-regarding bias that has been
+transmitted by tradition from the earlier, more competent phases of the
+regime of status. The economic bearing of this impulse is therefore seen
+to transverse that of the devout attitude; the former goes to qualify,
+if not eliminate, the self-regarding bias, through sublation of the
+antithesis or antagonism of self and not-self; while the latter, being
+and expression of the sense of personal subservience and mastery, goes
+to accentuate this antithesis and to insist upon the divergence between
+the self-regarding interest and the interests of the generically human
+life process.
+
+This non-invidious residue of the religious life--the sense of communion
+with the environment, or with the generic life process--as well as the
+impulse of charity or of sociability, act in a pervasive way to shape
+men's habits of thought for the economic purpose. But the action of
+all this class of proclivities is somewhat vague, and their effects are
+difficult to trace in detail. So much seems clear, however, as that the
+action of this entire class of motives or aptitudes tends in a direction
+contrary to the underlying principles of the institution of the leisure
+class as already formulated. The basis of that institution, as well
+as of the anthropomorphic cults associated with it in the cultural
+development, is the habit of invidious comparison; and this habit is
+incongruous with the exercise of the aptitudes now in question. The
+substantial canons of the leisure-class scheme of life are a conspicuous
+waste of time and substance and a withdrawal from the industrial
+process; while the particular aptitudes here in question assert
+themselves, on the economic side, in a deprecation of waste and of
+a futile manner of life, and in an impulse to participation in or
+identification with the life process, whether it be on the economic side
+or in any other of its phases or aspects.
+
+It is plain that these aptitudes and habits of life to which they give
+rise where circumstances favor their expression, or where they assert
+themselves in a dominant way, run counter to the leisure-class scheme of
+life; but it is not clear that life under the leisure-class scheme, as
+seen in the later stages of its development, tends consistently to the
+repression of these aptitudes or to exemption from the habits of
+thought in which they express themselves. The positive discipline of the
+leisure-class scheme of life goes pretty much all the other way. In its
+positive discipline, by prescription and by selective elimination, the
+leisure-class scheme favors the all-pervading and all-dominating primacy
+of the canons of waste and invidious comparison at every conjuncture
+of life. But in its negative effects the tendency of the leisure-class
+discipline is not so unequivocally true to the fundamental canons of the
+scheme. In its regulation of human activity for the purpose of
+pecuniary decency the leisure-class canon insists on withdrawal from
+the industrial process. That is to say, it inhibits activity in the
+directions in which the impecunious members of the community habitually
+put forth their efforts. Especially in the case of women, and more
+particularly as regards the upper-class and upper-middle-class women
+of advanced industrial communities, this inhibition goes so far as to
+insist on withdrawal even from the emulative process of accumulation by
+the quasi-predator methods of the pecuniary occupations.
+
+The pecuniary or the leisure-class culture, which set out as an
+emulative variant of the impulse of workmanship, is in its latest
+development beginning to neutralize its own ground, by eliminating
+the habit of invidious comparison in respect of efficiency, or even
+of pecuniary standing. On the other hand, the fact that members of the
+leisure class, both men and women, are to some extent exempt from the
+necessity of finding a livelihood in a competitive struggle with
+their fellows, makes it possible for members of this class not only to
+survive, but even, within bounds, to follow their bent in case they are
+not gifted with the aptitudes which make for success in the competitive
+struggle. That is to say, in the latest and fullest development of the
+institution, the livelihood of members of this class does not depend
+on the possession and the unremitting exercise of those aptitudes are
+therefore greater in the higher grades of the leisure class than in the
+general average of a population living under the competitive system.
+
+In an earlier chapter, in discussing the conditions of survival of
+archaic traits, it has appeared that the peculiar position of the
+leisure class affords exceptionally favorable chances for the survival
+of traits which characterize the type of human nature proper to an
+earlier and obsolete cultural stage. The class is sheltered from the
+stress of economic exigencies, and is in this sense withdrawn from
+the rude impact of forces which make for adaptation to the economic
+situation. The survival in the leisure class, and under the
+leisure-class scheme of life, of traits and types that are reminiscent
+of the predatory culture has already been discussed. These aptitudes
+and habits have an exceptionally favorable chance of survival under the
+leisure-class regime. Not only does the sheltered pecuniary position of
+the leisure class afford a situation favorable to the survival of such
+individuals as are not gifted with the complement of aptitudes
+required for serviceability in the modern industrial process; but
+the leisure-class canons of reputability at the same time enjoin the
+conspicuous exercise of certain predatory aptitudes. The employments
+in which the predatory aptitudes find exercise serve as an evidence of
+wealth, birth, and withdrawal from the industrial process. The survival
+of the predatory traits under the leisure-class culture is furthered
+both negatively, through the industrial exemption of the class, and
+positively, through the sanction of the leisure-class canons of decency.
+
+With respect to the survival of traits characteristic of the
+ante-predatory savage culture the case is in some degree different.
+The sheltered position of the leisure class favors the survival also of
+these traits; but the exercise of the aptitudes for peace and good-will
+does not have the affirmative sanction of the code of proprieties.
+Individuals gifted with a temperament that is reminiscent of the
+ante-predatory culture are placed at something of an advantage within
+the leisure class, as compared with similarly gifted individuals outside
+the class, in that they are not under a pecuniary necessity to
+thwart these aptitudes that make for a non-competitive life; but such
+individuals are still exposed to something of a moral constraint
+which urges them to disregard these inclinations, in that the code of
+proprieties enjoins upon them habits of life based on the predatory
+aptitudes. So long as the system of status remains intact, and so long
+as the leisure class has other lines of non-industrial activity to take
+to than obvious killing of time in aimless and wasteful fatigation,
+so long no considerable departure from the leisure-class scheme of
+reputable life is to be looked for. The occurrence of non-predatory
+temperament with the class at that stage is to be looked upon as a case
+of sporadic reversion. But the reputable non-industrial outlets for
+the human propensity to action presently fail, through the advance of
+economic development, the disappearance of large game, the decline of
+war, the obsolescence of proprietary government, and the decay of the
+priestly office. When this happens, the situation begins to change.
+Human life must seek expression in one direction if it may not in
+another; and if the predatory outlet fails, relief is sought elsewhere.
+
+As indicated above, the exemption from pecuniary stress has been
+carried farther in the case of the leisure-class women of the advanced
+industrial communities than in that of any other considerable group of
+persons. The women may therefore be expected to show a more pronounced
+reversion to a non-invidious temperament than the men. But there is also
+among men of the leisure class a perceptible increase in the range and
+scope of activities that proceed from aptitudes which are not to be
+classed as self-regarding, and the end of which is not an invidious
+distinction. So, for instance, the greater number of men who have to do
+with industry in the way of pecuniarily managing an enterprise take
+some interest and some pride in seeing that the work is well done and
+is industrially effective, and this even apart from the profit which
+may result from any improvement of this kind. The efforts of
+commercial clubs and manufacturers' organizations in this direction of
+non-invidious advancement of industrial efficiency are also well know.
+
+The tendency to some other than an invidious purpose in life has worked
+out in a multitude of organizations, the purpose of which is some work
+of charity or of social amelioration. These organizations are often of
+a quasi-religious or pseudo-religious character, and are participated in
+by both men and women. Examples will present themselves in abundance
+on reflection, but for the purpose of indicating the range of the
+propensities in question and of characterizing them, some of the
+more obvious concrete cases may be cited. Such, for instance, are the
+agitation for temperance and similar social reforms, for prison reform,
+for the spread of education, for the suppression of vice, and for the
+avoidance of war by arbitration, disarmament, or other means; such
+are, in some measure, university settlements, neighborhood guilds, the
+various organizations typified by the Young Men's Christian Association
+and Young People's Society for Christian Endeavor, sewing-clubs, art
+clubs, and even commercial clubs; such are also, in some slight measure,
+the pecuniary foundations of semi-public establishments for charity,
+education, or amusement, whether they are endowed by wealthy individuals
+or by contributions collected from persons of smaller means--in so far
+as these establishments are not of a religious character.
+
+It is of course not intended to say that these efforts proceed entirely
+from other motives than those of a self-regarding kind. What can be
+claimed is that other motives are present in the common run of cases,
+and that the perceptibly greater prevalence of effort of this kind under
+the circumstances of the modern industrial life than under the unbroken
+regime of the principle of status, indicates the presence in modern life
+of an effective scepticism with respect to the full legitimacy of an
+emulative scheme of life. It is a matter of sufficient notoriety to have
+become a commonplace jest that extraneous motives are commonly present
+among the incentives to this class of work--motives of a self-regarding
+kind, and especially the motive of an invidious distinction. To such an
+extent is this true, that many ostensible works of disinterested public
+spirit are no doubt initiated and carried on with a view primarily to
+the enhance repute or even to the pecuniary gain, of their promoters. In
+the case of some considerable groups of organizations or establishments
+of this kind the invidious motive is apparently the dominant motive both
+with the initiators of the work and with their supporters. This last
+remark would hold true especially with respect to such works as lend
+distinction to their doer through large and conspicuous expenditure; as,
+for example, the foundation of a university or of a public library
+or museum; but it is also, and perhaps equally, true of the more
+commonplace work of participation in such organizations. These serve
+to authenticate the pecuniary reputability of their members, as well as
+gratefully to keep them in mind of their superior status by pointing
+the contrast between themselves and the lower-lying humanity in whom the
+work of amelioration is to be wrought; as, for example, the university
+settlement, which now has some vogue. But after all allowances and
+deductions have been made, there is left some remainder of motives of
+a non-emulative kind. The fact itself that distinction or a decent good
+fame is sought by this method is evidence of a prevalent sense of
+the legitimacy, and of the presumptive effectual presence, of a
+non-emulative, non-invidious interest, as a consistent factor in the
+habits of thought of modern communities.
+
+In all this latter-day range of leisure-class activities that proceed
+on the basis of a non-invidious and non-religious interest, it is to
+be noted that the women participate more actively and more persistently
+than the men--except, of course, in the case of such works as require
+a large expenditure of means. The dependent pecuniary position of the
+women disables them for work requiring large expenditure. As regards
+the general range of ameliorative work, the members of the priesthood
+or clergy of the less naively devout sects, or the secularized
+denominations, are associated with the class of women. This is as the
+theory would have it. In other economic relations, also, this clergy
+stands in a somewhat equivocal position between the class of women and
+that of the men engaged in economic pursuits. By tradition and by the
+prevalent sense of the proprieties, both the clergy and the women of
+the well-to-do classes are placed in the position of a vicarious leisure
+class; with both classes the characteristic relation which goes to form
+the habits of thought of the class is a relation of subservience--that
+is to say, an economic relation conceived in personal terms; in both
+classes there is consequently perceptible a special proneness to
+construe phenomena in terms of personal relation rather than of causal
+sequence; both classes are so inhibited by the canons of decency from
+the ceremonially unclean processes of the lucrative or productive
+occupations as to make participation in the industrial life process
+of today a moral impossibility for them. The result of this ceremonial
+exclusion from productive effort of the vulgar sort is to draft a
+relatively large share of the energies of the modern feminine
+and priestly classes into the service of other interests than the
+self-regarding one. The code leaves no alternative direction in which
+the impulse to purposeful action may find expression. The effect of a
+consistent inhibition on industrially useful activity in the case of the
+leisure-class women shows itself in a restless assertion of the impulse
+to workmanship in other directions than that of business activity. As
+has been noticed already, the everyday life of the well-to-do women and
+the clergy contains a larger element of status than that of the average
+of the men, especially than that of the men engaged in the modern
+industrial occupations proper. Hence the devout attitude survives in a
+better state of preservation among these classes than among the common
+run of men in the modern communities. Hence an appreciable share of the
+energy which seeks expression in a non-lucrative employment among these
+members of the vicarious leisure classes may be expected to eventuate in
+devout observances and works of piety. Hence, in part, the excess of
+the devout proclivity in women, spoken of in the last chapter. But it
+is more to the present point to note the effect of this proclivity
+in shaping the action and coloring the purposes of the non-lucrative
+movements and organizations here under discussion. Where this
+devout coloring is present it lowers the immediate efficiency of
+the organizations for any economic end to which their efforts may be
+directed. Many organizations, charitable and ameliorative, divide their
+attention between the devotional and the secular well-being of the
+people whose interests they aim to further. It can scarcely be doubted
+that if they were to give an equally serious attention and effort
+undividedly to the secular interests of these people, the immediate
+economic value of their work should be appreciably higher than it is.
+It might of course similarly be said, if this were the place to say it,
+that the immediate efficiency of these works of amelioration for the
+devout might be greater if it were not hampered with the secular motives
+and aims which are usually present.
+
+Some deduction is to be made from the economic value of this class of
+non-invidious enterprise, on account of the intrusion of the devotional
+interest. But there are also deductions to be made on account of the
+presence of other alien motives which more or less broadly traverse
+the economic trend of this non-emulative expression of the instinct
+of workmanship. To such an extent is this seen to be true on a closer
+scrutiny, that, when all is told, it may even appear that this general
+class of enterprises is of an altogether dubious economic value--as
+measured in terms of the fullness or facility of life of the individuals
+or classes to whose amelioration the enterprise is directed.
+For instance, many of the efforts now in reputable vogue for the
+amelioration of the indigent population of large cities are of the
+nature, in great part, of a mission of culture. It is by this means
+sought to accelerate the rate of speed at which given elements of the
+upper-class culture find acceptance in the everyday scheme of life of
+the lower classes. The solicitude of "settlements," for example, is in
+part directed to enhance the industrial efficiency of the poor and to
+teach them the more adequate utilization of the means at hand; but it
+is also no less consistently directed to the inculcation, by precept and
+example, of certain punctilios of upper-class propriety in manners and
+customs. The economic substance of these proprieties will commonly be
+found on scrutiny to be a conspicuous waste of time and goods. Those
+good people who go out to humanize the poor are commonly, and advisedly,
+extremely scrupulous and silently insistent in matters of decorum and
+the decencies of life. They are commonly persons of an exemplary life
+and gifted with a tenacious insistence on ceremonial cleanness in the
+various items of their daily consumption. The cultural or civilizing
+efficacy of this inculcation of correct habits of thought with respect
+to the consumption of time and commodities is scarcely to be overrated;
+nor is its economic value to the individual who acquires these higher
+and more reputable ideals inconsiderable. Under the circumstances of
+the existing pecuniary culture, the reputability, and consequently
+the success, of the individual is in great measure dependent on his
+proficiency in demeanor and methods of consumption that argue habitual
+waste of time and goods. But as regards the ulterior economic bearing
+of this training in worthier methods of life, it is to be said that
+the effect wrought is in large part a substitution of costlier or
+less efficient methods of accomplishing the same material results, in
+relations where the material result is the fact of substantial economic
+value. The propaganda of culture is in great part an inculcation of
+new tastes, or rather of a new schedule of proprieties, which have been
+adapted to the upper-class scheme of life under the guidance of the
+leisure-class formulation of the principles of status and pecuniary
+decency. This new schedule of proprieties is intruded into the
+lower-class scheme of life from the code elaborated by an element of
+the population whose life lies outside the industrial process; and this
+intrusive schedule can scarcely be expected to fit the exigencies of
+life for these lower classes more adequately than the schedule already
+in vogue among them, and especially not more adequately than the
+schedule which they are themselves working out under the stress of
+modern industrial life.
+
+All this of course does not question the fact that the proprieties
+of the substituted schedule are more decorous than those which they
+displace. The doubt which presents itself is simply a doubt as to the
+economic expediency of this work of regeneration--that is to say, the
+economic expediency in that immediate and material bearing in which the
+effects of the change can be ascertained with some degree of confidence,
+and as viewed from the standpoint not of the individual but of the
+facility of life of the collectivity. For an appreciation of the
+economic expediency of these enterprises of amelioration, therefore,
+their effective work is scarcely to be taken at its face value, even
+where the aim of the enterprise is primarily an economic one and where
+the interest on which it proceeds is in no sense self-regarding or
+invidious. The economic reform wrought is largely of the nature of a
+permutation in the methods of conspicuous waste.
+
+But something further is to be said with respect to the character of the
+disinterested motives and canons of procedure in all work of this
+class that is affected by the habits of thought characteristic of the
+pecuniary culture; and this further consideration may lead to a further
+qualification of the conclusions already reached. As has been seen in
+an earlier chapter, the canons of reputability or decency under the
+pecuniary culture insist on habitual futility of effort as the mark of a
+pecuniarily blameless life. There results not only a habit of disesteem
+of useful occupations, but there results also what is of more decisive
+consequence in guiding the action of any organized body of people that
+lays claim to social good repute. There is a tradition which requires
+that one should not be vulgarly familiar with any of the processes or
+details that have to do with the material necessities of life. One may
+meritoriously show a quantitative interest in the well-being of the
+vulgar, through subscriptions or through work on managing committees and
+the like. One may, perhaps even more meritoriously, show solicitude in
+general and in detail for the cultural welfare of the vulgar, in the
+way of contrivances for elevating their tastes and affording them
+opportunities for spiritual amelioration. But one should not betray an
+intimate knowledge of the material circumstances of vulgar life, or of
+the habits of thought of the vulgar classes, such as would effectually
+direct the efforts of these organizations to a materially useful end.
+This reluctance to avow an unduly intimate knowledge of the lower-class
+conditions of life in detail of course prevails in very different
+degrees in different individuals; but there is commonly enough of
+it present collectively in any organization of the kind in question
+profoundly to influence its course of action. By its cumulative action
+in shaping the usage and precedents of any such body, this shrinking
+from an imputation of unseemly familiarity with vulgar life tends
+gradually to set aside the initial motives of the enterprise, in favor
+of certain guiding principles of good repute, ultimately reducible to
+terms of pecuniary merit. So that in an organization of long standing
+the initial motive of furthering the facility of life in these classes
+comes gradually to be an ostensible motive only, and the vulgarly
+effective work of the organization tends to obsolescence.
+
+What is true of the efficiency of organizations for non-invidious
+work in this respect is true also as regards the work of individuals
+proceeding on the same motives; though it perhaps holds true with more
+qualification for individuals than for organized enterprises. The habit
+of gauging merit by the leisure-class canons of wasteful expenditure and
+unfamiliarity with vulgar life, whether on the side of production or of
+consumption, is necessarily strong in the individuals who aspire to do
+some work of public utility. And if the individual should forget his
+station and turn his efforts to vulgar effectiveness, the common sense
+of the community-the sense of pecuniary decency--would presently
+reject his work and set him right. An example of this is seen in the
+administration of bequests made by public-spirited men for the single
+purpose (at least ostensibly) of furthering the facility of human life
+in some particular respect. The objects for which bequests of this class
+are most frequently made at present
+are schools, libraries, hospitals, and asylums for the infirm or
+unfortunate. The avowed purpose of the donor in these cases is the
+amelioration of human life in the particular respect which is named
+in the bequest; but it will be found an invariable rule that in
+the execution of the work not a little of other motives, frequency
+incompatible with the initial motive, is present and determines the
+particular disposition eventually made of a good share of the means
+which have been set apart by the bequest. Certain funds, for instance,
+may have been set apart as a foundation for a foundling asylum or a
+retreat for invalids. The diversion of expenditure to honorific waste in
+such cases is not uncommon enough to cause surprise or even to raise a
+smile. An appreciable share of the funds is spent in the construction
+of an edifice faced with some aesthetically objectionable but expensive
+stone, covered with grotesque and incongruous details, and designed, in
+its battlemented walls and turrets and its massive portals and strategic
+approaches, to suggest certain barbaric methods of warfare. The interior
+of the structure shows the same pervasive guidance of the canons of
+conspicuous waste and predatory exploit. The windows, for instance,
+to go no farther into detail, are placed with a view to impress their
+pecuniary excellence upon the chance beholder from the outside, rather
+than with a view to effectiveness for their ostensible end in the
+convenience or comfort of the beneficiaries within; and the detail of
+interior arrangement is required to conform itself as best it may to
+this alien but imperious requirement of pecuniary beauty.
+
+In all this, of course, it is not to be presumed that the donor would
+have found fault, or that he would have done otherwise if he had taken
+control in person; it appears that in those cases where such a personal
+direction is exercised--where the enterprise is conducted by direct
+expenditure and superintendence instead of by bequest--the aims and
+methods of management are not different in this respect. Nor would the
+beneficiaries, or the outside observers whose ease or vanity are not
+immediately touched, be pleased with a different disposition of the
+funds. It would suit no one to have the enterprise conducted with a view
+directly to the most economical and effective use of the means at hand
+for the initial, material end of the foundation. All concerned, whether
+their interest is immediate and self-regarding, or contemplative only,
+agree that some considerable share of the expenditure should go to
+the higher or spiritual needs derived from the habit of an invidious
+comparison in predatory exploit and pecuniary waste. But this only goes
+to say that the canons of emulative and pecuniary reputability so far
+pervade the common sense of the community as to permit no escape or
+evasion, even in the case of an enterprise which ostensibly proceeds
+entirely on the basis of a non-invidious interest.
+
+It may even be that the enterprise owes its honorific virtue, as a means
+of enhancing the donor's good repute, to the imputed presence of this
+non-invidious motive; but that does not hinder the invidious interest
+from guiding the expenditure. The effectual presence of motives of an
+emulative or invidious origin in non-emulative works of this kind
+might be shown at length and with detail, in any one of the classes of
+enterprise spoken of above. Where these honorific details occur, in such
+cases, they commonly masquerade under designations that belong in the
+field of the aesthetic, ethical or economic interest. These special
+motives, derived from the standards and canons of the pecuniary culture,
+act surreptitiously to divert effort of a non-invidious kind from
+effective service, without disturbing the agent's sense of good
+intention or obtruding upon his consciousness the substantial futility
+of his work. Their effect might be traced through the entire range
+of that schedule of non-invidious, meliorative enterprise that is so
+considerable a feature, and especially so conspicuous a feature, in the
+overt scheme of life of the well-to-do. But the theoretical bearing is
+perhaps clear enough and may require no further illustration; especially
+as some detailed attention will be given to one of these lines of
+enterprise--the establishments for the higher learning--in another
+connection.
+
+Under the circumstances of the sheltered situation in which the leisure
+class is placed there seems, therefore, to be something of a reversion
+to the range of non-invidious impulses that characterizes the
+ante-predatory savage culture. The reversion comprises both the sense of
+workmanship and the proclivity to indolence and good-fellowship. But
+in the modern scheme of life canons of conduct based on pecuniary or
+invidious merit stand in the way of a free exercise of these impulses;
+and the dominant presence of these canons of conduct goes far to divert
+such efforts as are made on the basis of the non-invidious interest to
+the service of that invidious interest on which the pecuniary culture
+rests. The canons of pecuniary decency are reducible for the present
+purpose to the principles of waste, futility, and ferocity. The
+requirements of decency are imperiously present in meliorative
+enterprise as in other lines of conduct, and exercise a selective
+surveillance over the details of conduct and management in any
+enterprise. By guiding and adapting the method in detail, these canons
+of decency go far to make all non-invidious aspiration or effort
+nugatory. The pervasive, impersonal, un-eager principle of futility is
+at hand from day to day and works obstructively to hinder the effectual
+expression of so much of the surviving ante-predatory aptitudes as is to
+be classed under the instinct of workmanship; but its presence does not
+preclude the transmission of those aptitudes or the continued recurrence
+of an impulse to find expression for them.
+
+In the later and farther development of the pecuniary culture, the
+requirement of withdrawal from the industrial process in order to
+avoid social odium is carried so far as to comprise abstention from
+the emulative employments. At this advanced stage the pecuniary culture
+negatively favors the assertion of the non-invidious propensities
+by relaxing the stress laid on the merit of emulative, predatory,
+or pecuniary occupations, as compared with those of an industrial
+or productive kind. As was noticed above, the requirement of such
+withdrawal from all employment that is of human use applies more
+rigorously to the upper-class women than to any other class, unless the
+priesthood of certain cults might be cited as an exception, perhaps
+more apparent than real, to this rule. The reason for the more extreme
+insistence on a futile life for this class of women than for the men
+of the same pecuniary and social grade lies in their being not only an
+upper-grade leisure class but also at the same time a vicarious
+leisure class. There is in their case a double ground for a consistent
+withdrawal from useful effort.
+
+It has been well and repeatedly said by popular writers and speakers who
+reflect the common sense of intelligent people on questions of social
+structure and function that the position of woman in any community
+is the most striking index of the level of culture attained by the
+community, and it might be added, by any given class in the community.
+This remark is perhaps truer as regards the stage of economic
+development than as regards development in any other respect. At the
+same time the position assigned to the woman in the accepted scheme of
+life, in any community or under any culture, is in a very great degree
+an expression of traditions which have been shaped by the circumstances
+of an earlier phase of development, and which have been but partially
+adapted to the existing economic circumstances, or to the existing
+exigencies of temperament and habits of mind by which the women living
+under this modern economic situation are actuated.
+
+The fact has already been remarked upon incidentally in the course of
+the discussion of the growth of economic institutions generally, and
+in particular in speaking of vicarious leisure and of dress, that the
+position of women in the modern economic scheme is more widely and
+more consistently at variance with the promptings of the instinct of
+workmanship than is the position of the men of the same classes. It
+is also apparently true that the woman's temperament includes a larger
+share of this instinct that approves peace and disapproves futility.
+It is therefore not a fortuitous circumstance that the women of modern
+industrial communities show a livelier sense of the discrepancy
+between the accepted scheme of life and the exigencies of the economic
+situation.
+
+The several phases of the "woman question" have brought out in
+intelligible form the extent to which the life of women in modern
+society, and in the polite circles especially, is regulated by a body of
+common sense formulated under the economic circumstances of an earlier
+phase of development. It is still felt that woman's life, in its civil,
+economic, and social bearing, is essentially and normally a vicarious
+life, the merit or demerit of which is, in the nature of things, to
+be imputed to some other individual who stands in some relation of
+ownership or tutelage to the woman. So, for instance, any action on the
+part of a woman which traverses an injunction of the accepted schedule
+of proprieties is felt to reflect immediately upon the honor of the man
+whose woman she is. There may of course be some sense of incongruity
+in the mind of any one passing an opinion of this kind on the woman's
+frailty or perversity; but the common-sense judgment of the community in
+such matters is, after all, delivered without much hesitation, and few
+men would question the legitimacy of their sense of an outraged tutelage
+in any case that might arise. On the other hand, relatively little
+discredit attaches to a woman through the evil deeds of the man with
+whom her life is associated.
+
+The good and beautiful scheme of life, then--that is to say the scheme
+to which we are habituated--assigns to the woman a "sphere" ancillary
+to the activity of the man; and it is felt that any departure from the
+traditions of her assigned round of duties is unwomanly. If the
+question is as to civil rights or the suffrage, our common sense in the
+matter--that is to say the logical deliverance of our general scheme
+of life upon the point in question--says that the woman should be
+represented in the body politic and before the law, not immediately in
+her own person, but through the mediation of the head of the
+household to which she belongs. It is unfeminine in her to aspire to a
+self-directing, self-centered life; and our common sense tells us that
+her direct participation in the affairs of the community, civil or
+industrial, is a menace to that social order which expresses our habits
+of thought as they have been formed under the guidance of the traditions
+of the pecuniary culture. "All this fume and froth of 'emancipating
+woman from the slavery of man' and so on, is, to use the chaste and
+expressive language of Elizabeth Cady Stanton inversely, 'utter rot.'
+The social relations of the sexes are fixed by nature. Our entire
+civilization--that is whatever is good in it--is based on the home."
+The "home" is the household with a male head. This view, but commonly
+expressed even more chastely, is the prevailing view of the woman's
+status, not only among the common run of the men of civilized
+communities, but among the women as well. Women have a very alert sense
+of what the scheme of proprieties requires, and while it is true that
+many of them are ill at ease under the details which the code imposes,
+there are few who do not recognize that the existing moral order, of
+necessity and by the divine right of prescription, places the woman in
+a position ancillary to the man. In the last analysis, according to her
+own sense of what is good and beautiful, the woman's life is, and in
+theory must be, an expression of the man's life at the second remove.
+
+But in spite of this pervading sense of what is the good and natural
+place for the woman, there is also perceptible an incipient development
+of sentiment to the effect that this whole arrangement of tutelage and
+vicarious life and imputation of merit and demerit is somehow a mistake.
+Or, at least, that even if it may be a natural growth and a good
+arrangement in its time and place, and in spite of its patent aesthetic
+value, still it does not adequately serve the more everyday ends of life
+in a modern industrial community. Even that large and substantial body
+of well-bred, upper and middle-class women to whose dispassionate,
+matronly sense of the traditional proprieties this relation of status
+commends itself as fundamentally and eternally right-even these, whose
+attitude is conservative, commonly find some slight discrepancy in
+detail between things as they are and things as they should be in this
+respect. But that less manageable body of modern women who, by force of
+youth, education, or temperament, are in some degree out of touch with
+the traditions of status received from the barbarian culture, and
+in whom there is, perhaps, an undue reversion to the impulse of
+self-expression and workmanship--these are touched with a sense of
+grievance too vivid to leave them at rest.
+
+In this "New-Woman" movement--as these blind and incoherent efforts to
+rehabilitate the woman's pre-glacial standing have been named--there
+are at least two elements discernible, both of which are of an economic
+character. These two elements or motives are expressed by the double
+watchword, "Emancipation" and "Work." Each of these words is recognized
+to stand for something in the way of a wide-spread sense of grievance.
+The prevalence of the sentiment is recognized even by people who do not
+see that there is any real ground for a grievance in the situation as
+it stands today. It is among the women of the well-to-do classes, in the
+communities which are farthest advanced in industrial development, that
+this sense of a grievance to be redressed is most alive and finds most
+frequent expression. That is to say, in other words, there is a demand,
+more or less serious, for emancipation from all relation of status,
+tutelage, or vicarious life; and the revulsion asserts itself especially
+among the class of women upon whom the scheme of life handed down from
+the regime of status imposes with least litigation a vicarious life, and
+in those communities whose economic development has departed farthest
+from the circumstances to which this traditional scheme is adapted. The
+demand comes from that portion of womankind which is excluded by the
+canons of good repute from all effectual work, and which is closely
+reserved for a life of leisure and conspicuous consumption.
+
+More than one critic of this new-woman movement has misapprehended its
+motive. The case of the American "new woman" has lately been summed
+up with some warmth by a popular observer of social phenomena: "She is
+petted by her husband, the most devoted and hard-working of husbands in
+the world.... She is the superior of her husband in education, and
+in almost every respect. She is surrounded by the most numerous and
+delicate attentions. Yet she is not satisfied.... The Anglo-Saxon 'new
+woman' is the most ridiculous production of modern times, and destined
+to be the most ghastly failure of the century." Apart from the
+deprecation--perhaps well placed--which is contained in this
+presentment, it adds nothing but obscurity to the woman question. The
+grievance of the new woman is made up of those things which this typical
+characterization of the movement urges as reasons why she should be
+content. She is petted, and is permitted, or even required, to consume
+largely and conspicuously--vicariously for her husband or other
+natural guardian. She is exempted, or debarred, from vulgarly useful
+employment--in order to perform leisure vicariously for the good repute
+of her natural (pecuniary) guardian. These offices are the conventional
+marks of the un-free, at the same time that they are incompatible with
+the human impulse to purposeful activity. But the woman is endowed
+with her share-which there is reason to believe is more than an even
+share--of the instinct of workmanship, to which futility of life or of
+expenditure is obnoxious. She must unfold her life activity in response
+to the direct, unmediated stimuli of the economic environment with which
+she is in contact. The impulse is perhaps stronger upon the woman
+than upon the man to live her own life in her own way and to enter the
+industrial process of the community at something nearer than the second
+remove.
+
+So long as the woman's place is consistently that of a drudge, she is,
+in the average of cases, fairly contented with her lot. She not only
+has something tangible and purposeful to do, but she has also no time or
+thought to spare for a rebellious assertion of such human propensity to
+self-direction as she has inherited. And after the stage of universal
+female drudgery is passed, and a vicarious leisure without strenuous
+application becomes the accredited employment of the women of the
+well-to-do classes, the prescriptive force of the canon of pecuniary
+decency, which requires the observance of ceremonial futility on their
+part, will long preserve high-minded women from any sentimental leaning
+to self-direction and a "sphere of usefulness." This is especially true
+during the earlier phases of the pecuniary culture, while the leisure
+of the leisure class is still in great measure a predatory activity, an
+active assertion of mastery in which there is enough of tangible
+purpose of an invidious kind to admit of its being taken seriously as an
+employment to which one may without shame put one's hand. This condition
+of things has obviously lasted well down into the present in some
+communities. It continues to hold to a different extent for different
+individuals, varying with the vividness of the sense of status and with
+the feebleness of the impulse to workmanship with which the individual
+is endowed. But where the economic structure of the community has so
+far outgrown the scheme of life based on status that the relation of
+personal subservience is no longer felt to be the sole "natural" human
+relation; there the ancient habit of purposeful activity will begin
+to assert itself in the less conformable individuals against the more
+recent, relatively superficial, relatively ephemeral habits and views
+which the predatory and the pecuniary culture have contributed to our
+scheme of life. These habits and views begin to lose their coercive
+force for the community or the class in question so soon as the habit of
+mind and the views of life due to the predatory and the quasi-peaceable
+discipline cease to be in fairly close accord with the later-developed
+economic situation. This is evident in the case of the industrious
+classes of modern communities; for them the leisure-class scheme of life
+has lost much of its binding force, especially as regards the element of
+status. But it is also visibly being verified in the case of the upper
+classes, though not in the same manner.
+
+The habits derived from the predatory and quasi-peaceable culture are
+relatively ephemeral variants of certain underlying propensities and
+mental characteristics of the race; which it owes to the protracted
+discipline of the earlier, proto-anthropoid cultural stage of peaceable,
+relatively undifferentiated economic life carried on in contact with a
+relatively simple and invariable material environment. When the habits
+superinduced by the emulative method of life have ceased to enjoy the
+section of existing economic exigencies, a process of disintegration
+sets in whereby the habits of thought of more recent growth and of a
+less generic character to some extent yield the ground before the more
+ancient and more pervading spiritual characteristics of the race.
+
+In a sense, then, the new-woman movement marks a reversion to a more
+generic type of human character, or to a less differentiated
+expression of human nature. It is a type of human nature which is to be
+characterized as proto-anthropoid, and, as regards the substance if not
+the form of its dominant traits, it belongs to a cultural stage that may
+be classed as possibly sub-human. The particular movement or evolutional
+feature in question of course shares this characterization with the rest
+of the later social development, in so far as this social development
+shows evidence of a reversion to the spiritual attitude that
+characterizes the earlier, undifferentiated stage of economic
+revolution. Such evidence of a general tendency to reversion from the
+dominance of the invidious interest is not entirely wanting, although it
+is neither plentiful nor unquestionably convincing. The general decay
+of the sense of status in modern industrial communities goes some way as
+evidence in this direction; and the perceptible return to a disapproval
+of futility in human life, and a disapproval of such activities as serve
+only the individual gain at the cost of the collectivity or at the
+cost of other social groups, is evidence to a like effect. There is a
+perceptible tendency to deprecate the infliction of pain, as well as to
+discredit all marauding enterprises, even where these expressions of the
+invidious interest do not tangibly work to the material detriment of
+the community or of the individual who passes an opinion on them. It
+may even be said that in the modern industrial communities the average,
+dispassionate sense of men says that the ideal character is a character
+which makes for peace, good-will, and economic efficiency, rather than
+for a life of self-seeking, force, fraud, and mastery.
+
+The influence of the leisure class is not consistently for or against
+the rehabilitation of this proto-anthropoid human nature. So far
+as concerns the chance of survival of individuals endowed with an
+exceptionally large share of the primitive traits, the sheltered
+position of the class favors its members directly by withdrawing them
+from the pecuniary struggle; but indirectly, through the leisure-class
+canons of conspicuous waste of goods and effort, the institution of a
+leisure class lessens the chance of survival of such individuals in the
+entire body of the population. The decent requirements of waste absorb
+the surplus energy of the population in an invidious struggle and leave
+no margin for the non-invidious expression of life. The remoter, less
+tangible, spiritual effects of the discipline of decency go in the same
+direction and work perhaps more effectually to the same end. The
+canons of decent life are an elaboration of the principle of invidious
+comparison, and they accordingly act consistently to inhibit all
+non-invidious effort and to inculcate the self-regarding attitude.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Fourteen ~~ The Higher Learning as an Expression of
+the Pecuniary Culture
+
+To the end that suitable habits of thought on certain heads may be
+conserved in the incoming generation, a scholastic discipline is
+sanctioned by the common sense of the community and incorporated into
+the accredited scheme of life. The habits of thought which are so
+formed under the guidance of teachers and scholastic traditions have
+an economic value--a value as affecting the serviceability of the
+individual--no less real than the similar economic value of the habits
+of thought formed without such guidance under the discipline of everyday
+life. Whatever characteristics of the accredited scholastic scheme and
+discipline are traceable to the predilections of the leisure class or to
+the guidance of the canons of pecuniary merit are to be set down to the
+account of that institution, and whatever economic value these features
+of the educational scheme possess are the expression in detail of the
+value of that institution. It will be in place, therefore, to point out
+any peculiar features of the educational system which are traceable to
+the leisure-class scheme of life, whether as regards the aim and method
+of the discipline, or as regards the compass and character of the body
+of knowledge inculcated. It is in learning proper, and more particularly
+in the higher learning, that the influence of leisure-class ideals is
+most patent; and since the purpose here is not to make an exhaustive
+collation of data showing the effect of the pecuniary culture upon
+education, but rather to illustrate the method and trend of the
+leisure-class influence in education, a survey of certain salient
+features of the higher learning, such as may serve this purpose, is all
+that will be attempted.
+
+In point of derivation and early development, learning is somewhat
+closely related to the devotional function of the community,
+particularly to the body of observances in which the service rendered
+the supernatural leisure class expresses itself. The service by which it
+is sought to conciliate supernatural agencies in the primitive cults is
+not an industrially profitable employment of the community's time and
+effort. It is, therefore, in great part, to be classed as a vicarious
+leisure performed for the supernatural powers with whom negotiations
+are carried on and whose good-will the service and the professions of
+subservience are conceived to procure. In great part, the early learning
+consisted in an acquisition of knowledge and facility in the service of
+a supernatural agent. It was therefore closely analogous in character to
+the training required for the domestic service of a temporal master. To
+a great extent, the knowledge acquired under the priestly teachers of
+the primitive community was knowledge of ritual and ceremonial; that
+is to say, a knowledge of the most proper, most effective, or most
+acceptable manner of approaching and of serving the preternatural
+agents. What was learned was how to make oneself indispensable to these
+powers, and so to put oneself in a position to ask, or even to require,
+their intercession in the course of events or their abstention from
+interference in any given enterprise. Propitiation was the end, and this
+end was sought, in great part, by acquiring facility in subservience.
+It appears to have been only gradually that other elements than those
+of efficient service of the master found their way into the stock of
+priestly or shamanistic instruction.
+
+The priestly servitor of the inscrutable powers that move in the
+external world came to stand in the position of a mediator between these
+powers and the common run of unrestricted humanity; for he was possessed
+of a knowledge of the supernatural etiquette which would admit him into
+the presence. And as commonly happens with mediators between the vulgar
+and their masters, whether the masters be natural or preternatural, he
+found it expedient to have the means at hand tangibly to impress upon
+the vulgar the fact that these inscrutable powers would do what he might
+ask of them. Hence, presently, a knowledge of certain natural processes
+which could be turned to account for spectacular effect, together with
+some sleight of hand, came to be an integral part of priestly lore.
+Knowledge of this kind passes for knowledge of the "unknowable", and
+it owes its serviceability for the sacerdotal purpose to its recondite
+character. It appears to have been from this source that learning, as an
+institution, arose, and its differentiation from this its parent stock
+of magic ritual and shamanistic fraud has been slow and tedious, and is
+scarcely yet complete even in the most advanced of the higher seminaries
+of learning.
+
+The recondite element in learning is still, as it has been in all ages,
+a very attractive and effective element for the purpose of impressing,
+or even imposing upon, the unlearned; and the standing of the savant in
+the mind of the altogether unlettered is in great measure rated in terms
+of intimacy with the occult forces. So, for instance, as a typical case,
+even so late as the middle of this century, the Norwegian peasants have
+instinctively formulated their sense of the superior erudition of such
+doctors of divinity as Luther, Malanchthon, Peder Dass, and even so late
+a scholar in divinity as Grundtvig, in terms of the Black Art. These,
+together with a very comprehensive list of minor celebrities, both
+living and dead, have been reputed masters in all magical arts; and a
+high position in the ecclesiastical personnel has carried with it,
+in the apprehension of these good people, an implication of profound
+familiarity with magical practice and the occult sciences. There is
+a parallel fact nearer home, similarly going to show the close
+relationship, in popular apprehension, between erudition and the
+unknowable; and it will at the same time serve to illustrate, in
+somewhat coarse outline, the bent which leisure-class life gives to
+the cognitive interest. While the belief is by no means confined to the
+leisure class, that class today comprises a disproportionately large
+number of believers in occult sciences of all kinds and shades. By those
+whose habits of thought are not shaped by contact with modern industry,
+the knowledge of the unknowable is still felt to the ultimate if not the
+only true knowledge.
+
+Learning, then, set out by being in some sense a by-product of the
+priestly vicarious leisure class; and, at least until a recent date,
+the higher learning has since remained in some sense a by-product or
+by-occupation of the priestly classes. As the body of systematized
+knowledge increased, there presently arose a distinction, traceable
+very far back in the history of education, between esoteric and exoteric
+knowledge, the former--so far as there is a substantial difference
+between the two--comprising such knowledge as is primarily of no
+economic or industrial effect, and the latter comprising chiefly
+knowledge of industrial processes and of natural phenomena which were
+habitually turned to account for the material purposes of life.
+This line of demarcation has in time become, at least in popular
+apprehension, the normal line between the higher learning and the lower.
+
+It is significant, not only as an evidence of their close affiliation
+with the priestly craft, but also as indicating that their activity to
+a good extent falls under that category of conspicuous leisure known
+as manners and breeding, that the learned class in all primitive
+communities are great sticklers for form, precedent, gradations of rank,
+ritual, ceremonial vestments, and learned paraphernalia generally.
+This is of course to be expected, and it goes to say that the higher
+learning, in its incipient phase, is a leisure-class occupation--more
+specifically an occupation of the vicarious leisure class employed in
+the service of the supernatural leisure class. But this predilection for
+the paraphernalia of learning goes also to indicate a further point of
+contact or of continuity between the priestly office and the office of
+the savant. In point of derivation, learning, as well as the priestly
+office, is largely an outgrowth of sympathetic magic; and this magical
+apparatus of form and ritual therefore finds its place with the learned
+class of the primitive community as a matter of course. The ritual and
+paraphernalia have an occult efficacy for the magical purpose; so
+that their presence as an integral factor in the earlier phases of the
+development of magic and science is a matter of expediency, quite as
+much as of affectionate regard for symbolism simply.
+
+This sense of the efficacy of symbolic ritual, and of sympathetic effect
+to be wrought through dexterous rehearsal of the traditional accessories
+of the act or end to be compassed, is of course present more obviously
+and in larger measure in magical practice than in the discipline of the
+sciences, even of the occult sciences. But there are, I apprehend,
+few persons with a cultivated sense of scholastic merit to whom the
+ritualistic accessories of science are altogether an idle matter. The
+very great tenacity with which these ritualistic paraphernalia persist
+through the later course of the development is evident to any one
+who will reflect on what has been the history of learning in our
+civilization. Even today there are such things in the usage of the
+learned community as the cap and gown, matriculation, initiation,
+and graduation ceremonies, and the conferring of scholastic degrees,
+dignities, and prerogatives in a way which suggests some sort of a
+scholarly apostolic succession. The usage of the priestly orders is
+no doubt the proximate source of all these features of learned ritual,
+vestments, sacramental initiation, the transmission of peculiar
+dignities and virtues by the imposition of hands, and the like; but
+their derivation is traceable back of this point, to the source from
+which the specialized priestly class proper came to be distinguished
+from the sorcerer on the one hand and from the menial servant of
+a temporal master on the other hand. So far as regards both their
+derivation and their psychological content, these usages and the
+conceptions on which they rest belong to a stage in cultural development
+no later than that of the angekok and the rain-maker. Their place in the
+later phases of devout observance, as well as in the higher educational
+system, is that of a survival from a very early animistic phase of the
+development of human nature.
+
+These ritualistic features of the educational system of the present and
+of the recent past, it is quite safe to say, have their place primarily
+in the higher, liberal, and classic institutions and grades of learning,
+rather than in the lower, technological, or practical grades, and
+branches of the system. So far as they possess them, the lower and less
+reputable branches of the educational scheme have evidently borrowed
+these things from the higher grades; and their continued persistence
+among the practical schools, without the sanction of the continued
+example of the higher and classic grades, would be highly improbable,
+to say the least. With the lower and practical schools and scholars, the
+adoption and cultivation of these usages is a case of mimicry--due to
+a desire to conform as far as may be to the standards of scholastic
+reputability maintained by the upper grades and classes, who have
+come by these accessory features legitimately, by the right of lineal
+devolution.
+
+The analysis may even be safely carried a step farther. Ritualistic
+survivals and reversions come out in fullest vigor and with the freest
+air of spontaneity among those seminaries of learning which have to
+do primarily with the education of the priestly and leisure classes.
+Accordingly it should appear, and it does pretty plainly appear, on
+a survey of recent developments in college and university life, that
+wherever schools founded for the instruction of the lower classes in the
+immediately useful branches of knowledge grow into institutions of the
+higher learning, the growth of ritualistic ceremonial and paraphernalia
+and of elaborate scholastic "functions" goes hand in hand with
+the transition of the schools in question from the field of homely
+practicality into the higher, classical sphere. The initial purpose of
+these schools, and the work with which they have chiefly had to do at
+the earlier of these two stages of their evolution, has been that of
+fitting the young of the industrious classes for work. On the higher,
+classical plane of learning to which they commonly tend, their dominant
+aim becomes the preparation of the youth of the priestly and the leisure
+classes--or of an incipient leisure class--for the consumption of
+goods, material and immaterial, according to a conventionally accepted,
+reputable scope and method. This happy issue has commonly been the fate
+of schools founded by "friends of the people" for the aid of struggling
+young men, and where this transition is made in good form there is
+commonly, if not invariably, a coincident change to a more ritualistic
+life in the schools.
+
+In the school life of today, learned ritual is in a general way best at
+home in schools whose chief end is the cultivation of the "humanities".
+This correlation is shown, perhaps more neatly than anywhere else, in
+the life-history of the American colleges and universities of recent
+growth. There may be many exceptions from the rule, especially among
+those schools which have been founded by the typically reputable and
+ritualistic churches, and which, therefore, started on the conservative
+and classical plane or reached the classical position by a short-cut;
+but the general rule as regards the colleges founded in the newer
+American communities during the present century has been that so long
+as the constituency from which the colleges have drawn their pupils
+has been dominated by habits of industry and thrift, so long the
+reminiscences of the medicine-man have found but a scant and precarious
+acceptance in the scheme of college life. But so soon as wealth begins
+appreciably to accumulate in the community, and so soon as a given
+school begins to lean on a leisure-class constituency, there comes
+also a perceptibly increased insistence on scholastic ritual and on
+conformity to the ancient forms as regards vestments and social and
+scholastic solemnities. So, for instance, there has been an approximate
+coincidence between the growth of wealth among the constituency
+which supports any given college of the Middle West and the date of
+acceptance--first into tolerance and then into imperative vogue--of
+evening dress for men and of the decollete for women, as the scholarly
+vestments proper to occasions of learned solemnity or to the seasons
+of social amenity within the college circle. Apart from the mechanical
+difficulty of so large a task, it would scarcely be a difficult matter
+to trace this correlation. The like is true of the vogue of the cap and
+gown.
+
+Cap and gown have been adopted as learned insignia by many colleges of
+this section within the last few years; and it is safe to say that this
+could scarcely have occurred at a much earlier date, or until there had
+grown up a leisure-class sentiment of sufficient volume in the community
+to support a strong movement of reversion towards an archaic view as to
+the legitimate end of education. This particular item of learned ritual,
+it may be noted, would not only commend itself to the leisure-class
+sense of the fitness of things, as appealing to the archaic propensity
+for spectacular effect and the predilection for antique symbolism;
+but it at the same time fits into the leisure-class scheme of life as
+involving a notable element of conspicuous waste. The precise date at
+which the reversion to cap and gown took place, as well as the fact that
+it affected so large a number of schools at about the same time,
+seems to have been due in some measure to a wave of atavistic sense
+of conformity and reputability that passed over the community at that
+period.
+
+It may not be entirely beside the point to note that in point of time
+this curious reversion seems to coincide with the culmination of a
+certain vogue of atavistic sentiment and tradition in other directions
+also. The wave of reversion seems to have received its initial impulse
+in the psychologically disintegrating effects of the Civil War.
+Habituation to war entails a body of predatory habits of thought,
+whereby clannishness in some measure replaces the sense of solidarity,
+and a sense of invidious distinction supplants the impulse to equitable,
+everyday serviceability. As an outcome of the cumulative action of these
+factors, the generation which follows a season of war is apt to witness
+a rehabilitation of the element of status, both in its social life and
+in its scheme of devout observances and other symbolic or ceremonial
+forms. Throughout the eighties, and less plainly traceable through the
+seventies also, there was perceptible a gradually advancing wave of
+sentiment favoring quasi-predatory business habits, insistence on
+status, anthropomorphism, and conservatism generally. The more direct
+and unmediated of these expressions of the barbarian temperament, such
+as the recrudescence of outlawry and the spectacular quasi-predatory
+careers of fraud run by certain "captains of industry", came to a
+head earlier and were appreciably on the decline by the close of the
+seventies. The recrudescence of anthropomorphic sentiment also seems to
+have passed its most acute stage before the close of the eighties. But
+the learned ritual and paraphernalia here spoken of are a still remoter
+and more recondite expression of the barbarian animistic sense; and
+these, therefore, gained vogue and elaboration more slowly and reached
+their most effective development at a still later date. There is reason
+to believe that the culmination is now already past. Except for the new
+impetus given by a new war experience, and except for the support which
+the growth of a wealthy class affords to all ritual, and especially to
+whatever ceremonial is wasteful and pointedly suggests gradations of
+status, it is probable that the late improvements and augmentation of
+scholastic insignia and ceremonial would gradually decline. But while it
+may be true that the cap and gown, and the more strenuous observance
+of scholastic proprieties which came with them, were floated in on this
+post-bellum tidal wave of reversion to barbarism, it is also no doubt
+true that such a ritualistic reversion could not have been effected in
+the college scheme of life until the accumulation of wealth in the
+hands of a propertied class had gone far enough to afford the requisite
+pecuniary ground for a movement which should bring the colleges of the
+country up to the leisure-class requirements in the higher learning. The
+adoption of the cap and gown is one of the striking atavistic features
+of modern college life, and at the same time it marks the fact that
+these colleges have definitely become leisure-class establishments,
+either in actual achievement or in aspiration.
+
+As further evidence of the close relation between the educational system
+and the cultural standards of the community, it may be remarked that
+there is some tendency latterly to substitute the captain of industry in
+place of the priest, as the head of seminaries of the higher learning.
+The substitution is by no means complete or unequivocal. Those heads of
+institutions are best accepted who combine the sacerdotal office with
+a high degree of pecuniary efficiency. There is a similar but less
+pronounced tendency to intrust the work of instruction in the higher
+learning to men of some pecuniary qualification. Administrative ability
+and skill in advertising the enterprise count for rather more than
+they once did, as qualifications for the work of teaching. This applies
+especially in those sciences that have most to do with the everyday
+facts of life, and it is particularly true of schools in the
+economically single-minded communities. This partial substitution of
+pecuniary for sacerdotal efficiency is a concomitant of the modern
+transition from conspicuous leisure to conspicuous consumption, as
+the chief means of reputability. The correlation of the two facts is
+probably clear without further elaboration.
+
+The attitude of the schools and of the learned class towards the
+education of women serves to show in what manner and to what extent
+learning has departed from its ancient station of priestly and
+leisure-class prerogatives, and it indicates also what approach has
+been made by the truly learned to the modern, economic or industrial,
+matter-of-fact standpoint. The higher schools and the learned
+professions were until recently tabu to the women. These establishments
+were from the outset, and have in great measure continued to be, devoted
+to the education of the priestly and leisure classes.
+
+The women, as has been shown elsewhere, were the original subservient
+class, and to some extent, especially so far as regards their nominal
+or ceremonial position, they have remained in that relation down to the
+present. There has prevailed a strong sense that the admission of
+women to the privileges of the higher learning (as to the Eleusianin
+mysteries) would be derogatory to the dignity of the learned craft. It
+is therefore only very recently, and almost solely in the industrially
+most advanced communities, that the higher grades of schools have
+been freely opened to women. And even under the urgent circumstances
+prevailing in the modern industrial communities, the highest and most
+reputable universities show an extreme reluctance in making the move.
+The sense of class worthiness, that is to say of status, of a honorific
+differentiation of the sexes according to a distinction between superior
+and inferior intellectual dignity, survives in a vigorous form in these
+corporations of the aristocracy of learning. It is felt that the woman
+should, in all propriety, acquire only such knowledge as may be classed
+under one or the other of two heads: (1) such knowledge as conduces
+immediately to a better performance of domestic service--the domestic
+sphere; (2) such accomplishments and dexterity, quasi-scholarly and
+quasi-artistic, as plainly come in under the head of a performance of
+vicarious leisure. Knowledge is felt to be unfeminine if it is knowledge
+which expresses the unfolding of the learner's own life, the acquisition
+of which proceeds on the learner's own cognitive interest, without
+prompting from the canons of propriety, and without reference back to a
+master whose comfort or good repute is to be enhanced by the employment
+or the exhibition of it. So, also, all knowledge which is useful as
+evidence of leisure, other than vicarious leisure, is scarcely feminine.
+
+For an appreciation of the relation which these higher seminaries of
+learning bear to the economic life of the community, the phenomena which
+have been reviewed are of importance rather as indications of a general
+attitude than as being in themselves facts of first-rate economic
+consequence. They go to show what is the instinctive attitude and
+animus of the learned class towards the life process of an industrial
+community. They serve as an exponent of the stage of development, for
+the industrial purpose, attained by the higher learning and by the
+learned class, and so they afford an indication as to what may fairly be
+looked for from this class at points where the learning and the life of
+the class bear more immediately upon the economic life and efficiency
+of the community, and upon the adjustment of its scheme of life to
+the requirements of the time. What these ritualistic survivals go
+to indicate is a prevalence of conservatism, if not of reactionary
+sentiment, especially among the higher schools where the conventional
+learning is cultivated.
+
+To these indications of a conservative attitude is to be added another
+characteristic which goes in the same direction, but which is a symptom
+of graver consequence that this playful inclination to trivialities
+of form and ritual. By far the greater number of American colleges
+and universities, for instance, are affiliated to some religious
+denomination and are somewhat given to devout observances. Their
+putative familiarity with scientific methods and the scientific point
+of view should presumably exempt the faculties of these schools
+from animistic habits of thought; but there is still a considerable
+proportion of them who profess an attachment to the anthropomorphic
+beliefs and observances of an earlier culture. These professions
+of devotional zeal are, no doubt, to a good extent expedient and
+perfunctory, both on the part of the schools in their corporate
+capacity, and on the part of the individual members of the corps of
+instructors; but it can not be doubted that there is after all a very
+appreciable element of anthropomorphic sentiment present in the
+higher schools. So far as this is the case it must be set down as the
+expression of an archaic, animistic habit of mind. This habit of
+mind must necessarily assert itself to some extent in the instruction
+offered, and to this extent its influence in shaping the habits of
+thought of the student makes for conservatism and reversion; it acts
+to hinder his development in the direction of matter-of-fact knowledge,
+such as best serves the ends of industry.
+
+The college sports, which have so great a vogue in the reputable
+seminaries of learning today, tend in a similar direction; and, indeed,
+sports have much in common with the devout attitude of the colleges,
+both as regards their psychological basis and as regards their
+disciplinary effect. But this expression of the barbarian temperament
+is to be credited primarily to the body of students, rather than to the
+temper of the schools as such; except in so far as the colleges or the
+college officials--as sometimes happens--actively countenance and foster
+the growth of sports. The like is true of college fraternities as
+of college sports, but with a difference. The latter are chiefly
+an expression of the predatory impulse simply; the former are more
+specifically an expression of that heritage of clannishness which is
+so large a feature in the temperament of the predatory barbarian. It is
+also noticeable that a close relation subsists between the fraternities
+and the sporting activity of the schools. After what has already been
+said in an earlier chapter on the sporting and gambling habit, it
+is scarcely necessary further to discuss the economic value of this
+training in sports and in factional organization and activity.
+
+But all these features of the scheme of life of the learned class,
+and of the establishments dedicated to the conservation of the higher
+learning, are in a great measure incidental only. They are scarcely
+to be accounted organic elements of the professed work of research and
+instruction for the ostensible pursuit of which the schools exists. But
+these symptomatic indications go to establish a presumption as to the
+character of the work performed--as seen from the economic point of
+view--and as to the bent which the serious work carried on under their
+auspices gives to the youth who resort to the schools. The presumption
+raised by the considerations already offered is that in their work also,
+as well as in their ceremonial, the higher schools may be expected to
+take a conservative position; but this presumption must be checked by a
+comparison of the economic character of the work actually performed, and
+by something of a survey of the learning whose conservation is
+intrusted to the higher schools. On this head, it is well known that
+the accredited seminaries of learning have, until a recent date, held
+a conservative position. They have taken an attitude of depreciation
+towards all innovations. As a general rule a new point of view or a new
+formulation of knowledge have been countenanced and taken up within the
+schools only after these new things have made their way outside of
+the schools. As exceptions from this rule are chiefly to be mentioned
+innovations of an inconspicuous kind and departures which do not bear
+in any tangible way upon the conventional point of view or upon the
+conventional scheme of life; as, for instance, details of fact in the
+mathematico-physical sciences, and new readings and interpretations of
+the classics, especially such as have a philological or literary bearing
+only. Except within the domain of the "humanities", in the narrow sense,
+and except so far as the traditional point of view of the humanities has
+been left intact by the innovators, it has generally held true that the
+accredited learned class and the seminaries of the higher learning
+have looked askance at all innovation. New views, new departures in
+scientific theory, especially in new departures which touch the theory
+of human relations at any point, have found a place in the scheme of
+the university tardily and by a reluctant tolerance, rather than by
+a cordial welcome; and the men who have occupied themselves with such
+efforts to widen the scope of human knowledge have not commonly been
+well received by their learned contemporaries. The higher schools have
+not commonly given their countenance to a serious advance in the methods
+or the content of knowledge until the innovations have outlived their
+youth and much of their usefulness--after they have become commonplaces
+of the intellectual furniture of a new generation which has grown
+up under, and has had its habits of thought shaped by, the new,
+extra-scholastic body of knowledge and the new standpoint. This is true
+of the recent past. How far it may be true of the immediate present it
+would be hazardous to say, for it is impossible to see present-day
+facts in such perspective as to get a fair conception of their relative
+proportions.
+
+So far, nothing has been said of the Maecenas function of the
+well-to-do, which is habitually dwelt on at some length by writers
+and speakers who treat of the development of culture and of social
+structure. This leisure-class function is not without an important
+bearing on the higher and on the spread of knowledge and culture. The
+manner and the degree in which the class furthers learning through
+patronage of this kind is sufficiently familiar. It has been frequently
+presented in affectionate and effective terms by spokesmen whose
+familiarity with the topic fits them to bring home to their hearers the
+profound significance of this cultural factor. These spokesmen, however,
+have presented the matter from the point of view of the cultural
+interest, or of the interest of reputability, rather than from that of
+the economic interest. As apprehended from the economic point of view,
+and valued for the purpose of industrial serviceability, this function
+of the well-to-do, as well as the intellectual attitude of members of
+the well-to-do class, merits some attention and will bear illustration.
+
+By way of characterization of the Maecenas relation, it is to be noted
+that, considered externally, as an economic or industrial relation
+simply, it is a relation of status. The scholar under the patronage
+performs the duties of a learned life vicariously for his patron, to
+whom a certain repute inures after the manner of the good repute imputed
+to a master for whom any form of vicarious leisure is performed. It is
+also to be noted that, in point of historical fact, the furtherance of
+learning or the maintenance of scholarly activity through the Maecenas
+relation has most commonly been a furtherance of proficiency in
+classical lore or in the humanities. The knowledge tends to lower rather
+than to heighten the industrial efficiency of the community.
+
+Further, as regards the direct participation of the members of the
+leisure class in the furtherance of knowledge, the canons of reputable
+living act to throw such intellectual interest as seeks expression among
+the class on the side of classical and formal erudition, rather than
+on the side of the sciences that bear some relation to the community's
+industrial life. The most frequent excursions into other than classical
+fields of knowledge on the part of members of the leisure class are made
+into the discipline of law and the political, and more especially the
+administrative, sciences. These so-called sciences are substantially
+bodies of maxims of expediency for guidance in the leisure-class office
+of government, as conducted on a proprietary basis. The interest with
+which this discipline is approached is therefore not commonly the
+intellectual or cognitive interest simply. It is largely the practical
+interest of the exigencies of that relation of mastery in which the
+members of the class are placed. In point of derivation, the office of
+government is a predatory function, pertaining integrally to the archaic
+leisure-class scheme of life. It is an exercise of control and coercion
+over the population from which the class draws its sustenance. This
+discipline, as well as the incidents of practice which give it its
+content, therefore has some attraction for the class apart from all
+questions of cognition. All this holds true wherever and so long as
+the governmental office continues, in form or in substance, to be a
+proprietary office; and it holds true beyond that limit, in so far as
+the tradition of the more archaic phase of governmental evolution has
+lasted on into the later life of those modern communities for whom
+proprietary government by a leisure class is now beginning to pass away.
+
+For that field of learning within which the cognitive or intellectual
+interest is dominant--the sciences properly so called--the case is
+somewhat different, not only as regards the attitude of the leisure
+class, but as regards the whole drift of the pecuniary culture.
+Knowledge for its own sake, the exercise of the faculty of comprehensive
+without ulterior purpose, should, it might be expected, be sought by
+men whom no urgent material interest diverts from such a quest. The
+sheltered industrial position of the leisure class should give free
+play to the cognitive interest in members of this class, and we should
+consequently have, as many writers confidently find that we do have, a
+very large proportion of scholars, scientists, savants derived from
+this class and deriving their incentive to scientific investigation and
+speculation from the discipline of a life of leisure. Some such result
+is to be looked for, but there are features of the leisure-class
+scheme of life, already sufficiently dwelt upon, which go to divert the
+intellectual interest of this class to other subjects than that causal
+sequence in phenomena which makes the content of the sciences. The
+habits of thought which characterize the life of the class run on
+the personal relation of dominance, and on the derivative, invidious
+concepts of honor, worth, merit, character, and the like. The casual
+sequence which makes up the subject matter of science is not visible
+from this point of view. Neither does good repute attach to knowledge of
+facts that are vulgarly useful. Hence it should appear probable that the
+interest of the invidious comparison with respect to pecuniary or other
+honorific merit should occupy the attention of the leisure class, to the
+neglect of the cognitive interest. Where this latter interest asserts
+itself it should commonly be diverted to fields of speculation or
+investigation which are reputable and futile, rather than to the quest
+of scientific knowledge. Such indeed has been the history of priestly
+and leisure-class learning so long as no considerable body of
+systematized knowledge had been intruded into the scholastic discipline
+from an extra-scholastic source. But since the relation of mastery and
+subservience is ceasing to be the dominant and formative factor in the
+community's life process, other features of the life process and other
+points of view are forcing themselves upon the scholars. The true-bred
+gentleman of leisure should, and does, see the world from the point of
+view of the personal relation; and the cognitive interest, so far as
+it asserts itself in him, should seek to systematize phenomena on this
+basis. Such indeed is the case with the gentleman of the old school, in
+whom the leisure-class ideals have suffered no disintegration; and such
+is the attitude of his latter-day descendant, in so far as he has fallen
+heir to the full complement of upper-class virtues. But the ways of
+heredity are devious, and not every gentleman's son is to the manor
+born. Especially is the transmission of the habits of thought which
+characterize the predatory master somewhat precarious in the case of a
+line of descent in which but one or two of the latest steps have lain
+within the leisure-class discipline. The chances of occurrence of a
+strong congenital or acquired bent towards the exercise of the cognitive
+aptitudes are apparently best in those members of the leisure class who
+are of lower class or middle class antecedents--that is to say, those
+who have inherited the complement of aptitudes proper to the industrious
+classes, and who owe their place in the leisure class to the possession
+of qualities which count for more today than they did in the times when
+the leisure-class scheme of life took shape. But even outside the range
+of these later accessions to the leisure class there are an appreciable
+number of individuals in whom the invidious interest is not sufficiently
+dominant to shape their theoretical views, and in whom the proclivity to
+theory is sufficiently strong to lead them into the scientific quest.
+
+The higher learning owes the intrusion of the sciences in part to these
+aberrant scions of the leisure class, who have come under the dominant
+influence of the latter-day tradition of impersonal relation and who
+have inherited a complement of human aptitudes differing in certain
+salient features from the temperament which is characteristic of
+the regime of status. But it owes the presence of this alien body of
+scientific knowledge also in part, and in a higher degree, to members of
+the industrious classes who have been in sufficiently easy circumstances
+to turn their attention to other interests than that of finding daily
+sustenance, and whose inherited aptitudes and anthropomorphic point of
+view does not dominate their intellectual processes. As between
+these two groups, which approximately comprise the effective force of
+scientific progress, it is the latter that has contributed the most. And
+with respect to both it seems to be true that they are not so much
+the source as the vehicle, or at the most they are the instrument of
+commutation, by which the habits of thought enforced upon the community,
+through contact with its environment under the exigencies of modern
+associated life and the mechanical industries, are turned to account for
+theoretical knowledge.
+
+Science, in the sense of an articulate recognition of causal sequence in
+phenomena, whether physical or social, has been a feature of the Western
+culture only since the industrial process in the Western communities has
+come to be substantially a process of mechanical contrivances in which
+man's office is that of discrimination and valuation of material forces.
+Science has flourished somewhat in the same degree as the industrial
+life of the community has conformed to this pattern, and somewhat in
+the same degree as the industrial interest has dominated the community's
+life. And science, and scientific theory especially, has made headway
+in the several departments of human life and knowledge in proportion
+as each of these several departments has successively come into closer
+contact with the industrial process and the economic interest;
+or perhaps it is truer to say, in proportion as each of them has
+successively escaped from the dominance of the conceptions of personal
+relation or status, and of the derivative canons of anthropomorphic
+fitness and honorific worth.
+
+It is only as the exigencies of modern industrial life have enforced the
+recognition of causal sequence in the practical contact of mankind with
+their environment, that men have come to systematize the phenomena of
+this environment and the facts of their own contact with it in terms
+of causal sequence. So that while the higher learning in its best
+development, as the perfect flower of scholasticism and classicism, was
+a by-product of the priestly office and the life of leisure, so modern
+science may be said to be a by-product of the industrial process.
+Through these groups of men, then--investigators, savants, scientists,
+inventors, speculators--most of whom have done their most telling work
+outside the shelter of the schools, the habits of thought enforced
+by the modern industrial life have found coherent expression and
+elaboration as a body of theoretical science having to do with the
+causal sequence of phenomena. And from this extra-scholastic field of
+scientific speculation, changes of method and purpose have from time to
+time been intruded into the scholastic discipline.
+
+In this connection it is to be remarked that there is a very perceptible
+difference of substance and purpose between the instruction offered in
+the primary and secondary schools, on the one hand, and in the higher
+seminaries of learning, on the other hand. The difference in point
+of immediate practicality of the information imparted and of the
+proficiency acquired may be of some consequence and may merit the
+attention which it has from time to time received; but there is more
+substantial difference in the mental and spiritual bent which is favored
+by the one and the other discipline. This divergent trend in discipline
+between the higher and the lower learning is especially noticeable as
+regards the primary education in its latest development in the advanced
+industrial communities. Here the instruction is directed chiefly to
+proficiency or dexterity, intellectual and manual, in the apprehension
+and employment of impersonal facts, in their casual rather than in their
+honorific incidence. It is true, under the traditions of the earlier
+days, when the primary education was also predominantly a leisure-class
+commodity, a free use is still made of emulation as a spur to diligence
+in the common run of primary schools; but even this use of emulation as
+an expedient is visibly declining in the primary grades of instruction
+in communities where the lower education is not under the guidance
+of the ecclesiastical or military tradition. All this holds true in
+a peculiar degree, and more especially on the spiritual side, of such
+portions of the educational system as have been immediately affected by
+kindergarten methods and ideals.
+
+The peculiarly non-invidious trend of the kindergarten discipline, and
+the similar character of the kindergarten influence in primary education
+beyond the limits of the kindergarten proper, should be taken in
+connection with what has already been said of the peculiar spiritual
+attitude of leisure-class womankind under the circumstances of the
+modern economic situation. The kindergarten discipline is at its
+best--or at its farthest remove from ancient patriarchal and pedagogical
+ideals--in the advanced industrial communities, where there is a
+considerable body of intelligent and idle women, and where the system of
+status has somewhat abated in rigor under the disintegrating influence
+of industrial life and in the absence of a consistent body of
+military and ecclesiastical traditions. It is from these women in easy
+circumstances that it gets its moral support. The aims and methods of
+the kindergarten commend themselves with especial effect to this class
+of women who are ill at ease under the pecuniary code of reputable life.
+The kindergarten, and whatever the kindergarten spirit counts for
+in modern education, therefore, is to be set down, along with the
+"new-woman movement," to the account of that revulsion against futility
+and invidious comparison which the leisure-class life under modern
+circumstances induces in the women most immediately exposed to its
+discipline. In this way it appears that, by indirection, the institution
+of a leisure class here again favors the growth of a non-invidious
+attitude, which may, in the long run, prove a menace to the stability
+of the institution itself, and even to the institution of individual
+ownership on which it rests.
+
+During the recent past some tangible changes have taken place in the
+scope of college and university teaching. These changes have in the main
+consisted in a partial displacement of the humanities--those branches
+of learning which are conceived to make for the traditional "culture",
+character, tastes, and ideals--by those more matter-of-fact branches
+which make for civic and industrial efficiency. To put the same thing
+in other words, those branches of knowledge which make for efficiency
+(ultimately productive efficiency) have gradually been gaining ground
+against those branches which make for a heightened consumption or a
+lowered industrial efficiency and for a type of character suited to the
+regime of status. In this adaptation of the scheme of instruction the
+higher schools have commonly been found on the conservative side; each
+step which they have taken in advance has been to some extent of
+the nature of a concession. The sciences have been intruded into
+the scholar's discipline from without, not to say from below. It is
+noticeable that the humanities which have so reluctantly yielded ground
+to the sciences are pretty uniformly adapted to shape the character
+of the student in accordance with a traditional self-centred scheme of
+consumption; a scheme of contemplation and enjoyment of the true,
+the beautiful, and the good, according to a conventional standard of
+propriety and excellence, the salient feature of which is leisure--otium
+cum dignitate. In language veiled by their own habituation to the
+archaic, decorous point of view, the spokesmen of the humanities have
+insisted upon the ideal embodied in the maxim, fruges consumere nati.
+This attitude should occasion no surprise in the case of schools which
+are shaped by and rest upon a leisure-class culture.
+
+The professed grounds on which it has been sought, as far as might be,
+to maintain the received standards and methods of culture intact
+are likewise characteristic of the archaic temperament and of the
+leisure-class theory of life. The enjoyment and the bent derived from
+habitual contemplation of the life, ideals, speculations, and methods of
+consuming time and goods, in vogue among the leisure class of classical
+antiquity, for instance, is felt to be "higher", "nobler", "worthier",
+than what results in these respects from a like familiarity with the
+everyday life and the knowledge and aspirations of commonplace humanity
+in a modern community, that learning the content of which is an
+unmitigated knowledge of latter-day men and things is by comparison
+"lower", "base", "ignoble"--one even hears the epithet "sub-human"
+applied to this matter-of-fact knowledge of mankind and of everyday
+life.
+
+This contention of the leisure-class spokesmen of the humanities
+seems to be substantially sound. In point of substantial fact, the
+gratification and the culture, or the spiritual attitude or habit of
+mind, resulting from an habitual contemplation of the anthropomorphism,
+clannishness, and leisurely self-complacency of the gentleman of an
+early day, or from a familiarity with the animistic superstitions
+and the exuberant truculence of the Homeric heroes, for instance, is,
+aesthetically considered, more legitimate than the corresponding results
+derived from a matter-of-fact knowledge of things and a contemplation
+of latter-day civic or workmanlike efficiency. There can be but little
+question that the first-named habits have the advantage in respect of
+aesthetic or honorific value, and therefore in respect of the "worth"
+which is made the basis of award in the comparison. The content of the
+canons of taste, and more particularly of the canons of honor, is in the
+nature of things a resultant of the past life and circumstances of
+the race, transmitted to the later generation by inheritance or by
+tradition; and the fact that the protracted dominance of a predatory,
+leisure-class scheme of life has profoundly shaped the habit of mind and
+the point of view of the race in the past, is a sufficient basis for an
+aesthetically legitimate dominance of such a scheme of life in very much
+of what concerns matters of taste in the present. For the purpose in
+hand, canons of taste are race habits, acquired through a more or less
+protracted habituation to the approval or disapproval of the kind
+of things upon which a favorable or unfavorable judgment of taste is
+passed. Other things being equal, the longer and more unbroken the
+habituation, the more legitimate is the canon of taste in question. All
+this seems to be even truer of judgments regarding worth or honor than
+of judgments of taste generally.
+
+But whatever may be the aesthetic legitimacy of the derogatory judgment
+passed on the newer learning by the spokesmen of the humanities, and
+however substantial may be the merits of the contention that the
+classic lore is worthier and results in a more truly human culture and
+character, it does not concern the question in hand. The question in
+hand is as to how far these branches of learning, and the point of
+view for which they stand in the educational system, help or hinder an
+efficient collective life under modern industrial circumstances--how
+far they further a more facile adaptation to the economic situation
+of today. The question is an economic, not an aesthetic one; and
+the leisure-class standards of learning which find expression in the
+deprecatory attitude of the higher schools towards matter-of-fact
+knowledge are, for the present purpose, to be valued from this point of
+view only. For this purpose the use of such epithets as "noble", "base",
+"higher", "lower", etc., is significant only as showing the animus
+and the point of view of the disputants; whether they contend for the
+worthiness of the new or of the old. All these epithets are honorific or
+humilific terms; that is to say, they are terms of invidious comparison,
+which in the last analysis fall under the category of the reputable or
+the disreputable; that is, they belong within the range of ideas that
+characterizes the scheme of life of the regime of status; that is, they
+are in substance an expression of sportsmanship--of the predatory and
+animistic habit of mind; that is, they indicate an archaic point of view
+and theory of life, which may fit the predatory stage of culture and of
+economic organization from which they have sprung, but which are,
+from the point of view of economic efficiency in the broader sense,
+disserviceable anachronisms.
+
+The classics, and their position of prerogative in the scheme of
+education to which the higher seminaries of learning cling with such a
+fond predilection, serve to shape the intellectual attitude and lower
+the economic efficiency of the new learned generation. They do this
+not only by holding up an archaic ideal of manhood, but also by the
+discrimination which they inculcate with respect to the reputable and
+the disreputable in knowledge. This result is accomplished in two ways:
+(1) by inspiring an habitual aversion to what is merely useful, as
+contrasted with what is merely honorific in learning, and so shaping the
+tastes of the novice that he comes in good faith to find gratification
+of his tastes solely, or almost solely, in such exercise of the
+intellect as normally results in no industrial or social gain; and (2)
+by consuming the learner's time and effort in acquiring knowledge which
+is of no use except in so far as this learning has by convention become
+incorporated into the sum of learning required of the scholar, and has
+thereby affected the terminology and diction employed in the useful
+branches of knowledge. Except for this terminological difficulty--which
+is itself a consequence of the vogue of the classics of the past--a
+knowledge of the ancient languages, for instance, would have no
+practical bearing for any scientist or any scholar not engaged on work
+primarily of a linguistic character. Of course, all this has nothing to
+say as to the cultural value of the classics, nor is there any intention
+to disparage the discipline of the classics or the bent which their
+study gives to the student. That bent seems to be of an economically
+disserviceable kind, but this fact--somewhat notorious indeed--need
+disturb no one who has the good fortune to find comfort and strength in
+the classical lore. The fact that classical learning acts to derange
+the learner's workmanlike attitudes should fall lightly upon the
+apprehension of those who hold workmanship of small account in
+comparison with the cultivation of decorous ideals: Iam fides et pax et
+honos pudorque Priscus et neglecta redire virtus Audet.
+
+Owing to the circumstance that this knowledge has become part of the
+elementary requirements in our system of education, the ability to use
+and to understand certain of the dead languages of southern Europe
+is not only gratifying to the person who finds occasion to parade his
+accomplishments in this respect, but the evidence of such knowledge
+serves at the same time to recommend any savant to his audience, both
+lay and learned. It is currently expected that a certain number of
+years shall have been spent in acquiring this substantially useless
+information, and its absence creates a presumption of hasty and
+precarious learning, as well as of a vulgar practicality that is
+equally obnoxious to the conventional standards of sound scholarship and
+intellectual force.
+
+The case is analogous to what happens in the purchase of any article of
+consumption by a purchaser who is not an expert judge of materials or
+of workmanship. He makes his estimate of value of the article chiefly
+on the ground of the apparent expensiveness of the finish of those
+decorative parts and features which have no immediate relation to the
+intrinsic usefulness of the article; the presumption being that some
+sort of ill-defined proportion subsists between the substantial value of
+an article and the expense of adornment added in order to sell it. The
+presumption that there can ordinarily be no sound scholarship where
+a knowledge of the classics and humanities is wanting leads to a
+conspicuous waste of time and labor on the part of the general body of
+students in acquiring such knowledge. The conventional insistence on a
+modicum of conspicuous waste as an incident of all reputable scholarship
+has affected our canons of taste and of serviceability in matters of
+scholarship in much the same way as the same principle has influenced
+our judgment of the serviceability of manufactured goods.
+
+It is true, since conspicuous consumption has gained more and more on
+conspicuous leisure as a means of repute, the acquisition of the dead
+languages is no longer so imperative a requirement as it once was,
+and its talismanic virtue as a voucher of scholarship has suffered a
+concomitant impairment. But while this is true, it is also true that the
+classics have scarcely lost in absolute value as a voucher of scholastic
+respectability, since for this purpose it is only necessary that
+the scholar should be able to put in evidence some learning which is
+conventionally recognized as evidence of wasted time; and the classics
+lend themselves with great facility to this use. Indeed, there can be
+little doubt that it is their utility as evidence of wasted time and
+effort, and hence of the pecuniary strength necessary in order to
+afford this waste, that has secured to the classics their position of
+prerogative in the scheme of higher learning, and has led to their being
+esteemed the most honorific of all learning. They serve the decorative
+ends of leisure-class learning better than any other body of knowledge,
+and hence they are an effective means of reputability.
+
+In this respect the classics have until lately had scarcely a rival.
+They still have no dangerous rival on the continent of Europe, but
+lately, since college athletics have won their way into a recognized
+standing as an accredited field of scholarly accomplishment, this latter
+branch of learning--if athletics may be freely classed as learning--has
+become a rival of the classics for the primacy in leisure-class
+education in American and English schools. Athletics have an obvious
+advantage over the classics for the purpose of leisure-class learning,
+since success as an athlete presumes, not only waste of time, but also
+waste of money, as well as the possession of certain highly unindustrial
+archaic traits of character and temperament. In the German universities
+the place of athletics and Greek-letter fraternities, as a leisure-class
+scholarly occupation, has in some measure been supplied by a skilled and
+graded inebriety and a perfunctory duelling.
+
+The leisure class and its standard of virtue--archaism and waste--can
+scarcely have been concerned in the introduction of the classics into
+the scheme of the higher learning; but the tenacious retention of the
+classics by the higher schools, and the high degree of reputability
+which still attaches to them, are no doubt due to their conforming so
+closely to the requirements of archaism and waste.
+
+"Classic" always carries this connotation of wasteful and archaic,
+whether it is used to denote the dead languages or the obsolete or
+obsolescent forms of thought and diction in the living language, or to
+denote other items of scholarly activity or apparatus to which it is
+applied with less aptness. So the archaic idiom of the English language
+is spoken of as "classic" English. Its use is imperative in all speaking
+and writing upon serious topics, and a facile use of it lends dignity to
+even the most commonplace and trivial string of talk. The newest form
+of English diction is of course never written; the sense of that
+leisure-class propriety which requires archaism in speech is present
+even in the most illiterate or sensational writers in sufficient
+force to prevent such a lapse. On the other hand, the highest and
+most conventionalized style of archaic diction is--quite
+characteristically--properly employed only in communications between an
+anthropomorphic divinity and his subjects. Midway between these extremes
+lies the everyday speech of leisure-class conversation and literature.
+
+Elegant diction, whether in writing or speaking, is an effective means
+of reputability. It is of moment to know with some precision what is
+the degree of archaism conventionally required in speaking on any given
+topic. Usage differs appreciably from the pulpit to the market-place;
+the latter, as might be expected, admits the use of relatively new and
+effective words and turns of expression, even by fastidious persons. A
+discriminative avoidance of neologisms is honorific, not only because it
+argues that time has been wasted in acquiring the obsolescent habit of
+speech, but also as showing that the speaker has from infancy habitually
+associated with persons who have been familiar with the obsolescent
+idiom. It thereby goes to show his leisure-class antecedents. Great
+purity of speech is presumptive evidence of several lives spent in other
+than vulgarly useful occupations; although its evidence is by no means
+entirely conclusive to this point.
+
+As felicitous an instance of futile classicism as can well be found,
+outside of the Far East, is the conventional spelling of the English
+language. A breach of the proprieties in spelling is extremely annoying
+and will discredit any writer in the eyes of all persons who are
+possessed of a developed sense of the true and beautiful. English
+orthography satisfies all the requirements of the canons of reputability
+under the law of conspicuous waste. It is archaic, cumbrous, and
+ineffective; its acquisition consumes much time and effort; failure to
+acquire it is easy of detection. Therefore it is the first and readiest
+test of reputability in learning, and conformity to its ritual is
+indispensable to a blameless scholastic life.
+
+On this head of purity of speech, as at other points where a
+conventional usage rests on the canons of archaism and waste, the
+spokesmen for the usage instinctively take an apologetic attitude. It
+is contended, in substance, that a punctilious use of ancient and
+accredited locutions will serve to convey thought more adequately and
+more precisely than would be the straightforward use of the latest form
+of spoken English; whereas it is notorious that the ideas of today are
+effectively expressed in the slang of today. Classic speech has the
+honorific virtue of dignity; it commands attention and respect as being
+the accredited method of communication under the leisure-class scheme
+of life, because it carries a pointed suggestion of the industrial
+exemption of the speaker. The advantage of the accredited locutions lies
+in their reputability; they are reputable because they are cumbrous and
+out of date, and therefore argue waste of time and exemption from the
+use and the need of direct and forcible speech.
+
+
+
+
+
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+*The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Theory of the Leisure Class*
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+
+The Theory of the Leisure Class
+by Thorstein Veblen
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter One
+
+Introductory
+
+
+The institution of a leisure class is found in its best
+development at the higher stages of the barbarian culture; as,
+for instance, in feudal Europe or feudal Japan. In such
+communities the distinction between classes is very rigorously
+observed; and the feature of most striking economic significance
+in these class differences is the distinction maintained between
+the employments proper to the several classes. The upper classes
+are by custom exempt or excluded from industrial occupations, and
+are reserved for certain employments to which a degree of honour
+attaches. Chief among the honourable employments in any feudal
+community is warfare; and priestly service is commonly second to
+warfare. If the barbarian community is not notably warlike, the
+priestly office may take the precedence, with that of the warrior
+second. But the rule holds with but slight exceptions that,
+whether warriors or priests, the upper classes are exempt from
+industrial employments, and this exemption is the economic
+expression of their superior rank. Brahmin India affords a fair
+illustration of the industrial exemption of both these classes.
+In the communities belonging to the higher barbarian culture
+there is a considerable differentiation of sub-classes within
+what may be comprehensively called the leisure class; and there
+is a corresponding differentiation of employments between these
+sub-classes. The leisure class as a whole comprises the noble and
+the priestly classes, together with much of their retinue. The
+occupations of the class are correspondingly diversified; but
+they have the common economic characteristic of being
+non-industrial. These non-industrial upper-class occupations may
+be roughly comprised under government, warfare, religious
+observances, and sports.
+
+At an earlier, but not the earliest, stage of barbarism, the
+leisure class is found in a less differentiated form. Neither the
+class distinctions nor the distinctions between leisure-class
+occupations are so minute and intricate. The Polynesian islanders
+generally show this stage of the development in good form, with
+the exception that, owing to the absence of large game, hunting
+does not hold the usual place of honour in their scheme of life.
+The Icelandic community in the time of the Sagas also affords a
+fair instance. In such a community there is a rigorous
+distinction between classes and between the occupations peculiar
+to each class. Manual labour, industry, whatever has to do
+directly with the everyday work of getting a livelihood, is the
+exclusive occupation of the inferior class. This inferior class
+includes slaves and other dependents, and ordinarily also all the
+women. If there are several grades of aristocracy, the women of
+high rank are commonly exempt from industrial employment, or at
+least from the more vulgar kinds of manual labour. The men of the
+upper classes are not only exempt, but by prescriptive custom
+they are debarred, from all industrial occupations. The range of
+employments open to them is rigidly defined. As on the higher
+plane already spoken of, these employments are government,
+warfare, religious observances, and sports. These four lines of
+activity govern the scheme of life of the upper classes, and for
+the highest rank -- the kings or chieftains  these are the only
+kinds of activity that custom or the common sense of the
+community will allow. Indeed, where the scheme is well developed
+even sports are accounted doubtfully legitimate for the members
+of the highest rank. To the lower grades of the leisure class
+certain other employments are open, but they are employments that
+are subsidiary to one or another of these typical leisure-class
+occupations. Such are, for instance, the manufacture and care of
+arms and accoutrements and of war canoes, the dressing and
+handling of horses, dogs, and hawks, the preparation of sacred
+apparatus, etc. The lower classes are excluded from these
+secondary honourable employments, except from such as are plainly
+of an industrial character and are only remotely related to the
+typical leisure-class occupations.
+
+If we go a step back of this exemplary barbarian culture, into
+the lower stages of barbarism, we no longer find the leisure
+class in fully developed form. But this lower barbarism shows the
+usages, motives, and circumstances out of which the institution
+of a leisure class has arisen, and indicates the steps of its
+early growth. Nomadic hunting tribes in various parts of the
+world illustrate these more primitive phases of the
+differentiation. Any one of the North American hunting tribes may
+be taken as a convenient illustration. These tribes can scarcely
+be said to have a defined leisure class. There is a
+differentiation of function, and there is a distinction between
+classes on the basis of this difference of function, but the
+exemption of the superior class from work has not gone far enough
+to make the designation "leisure class" altogether applicable.
+The tribes belonging on this economic level have carried the
+economic differentiation to the point at which a marked
+distinction is made between the occupations of men and women, and
+this distinction is of an invidious character. In nearly all
+these tribes the women are, by prescriptive custom, held to those
+employments out of which the industrial occupations proper
+develop at the next advance. The men are exempt from these vulgar
+employments and are reserved for war, hunting, sports, and devout
+observances. A very nice discrimination is ordinarily shown in
+this matter.
+
+This division of labour coincides with the distinction between
+the working and the leisure class as it appears in the higher
+barbarian culture. As the diversification and specialisation of
+employments proceed, the line of demarcation so drawn comes to
+divide the industrial from the non-industrial employments. The
+man's occupation as it stands at the earlier barbarian stage is
+not the original out of which any appreciable portion of later
+industry has developed. In the later development it survives only
+in employments that are not classed as industrial, -- war,
+politics, sports, learning, and the priestly office. The only
+notable exceptions are a portion of the fishery industry and
+certain slight employments that are doubtfully to be classed as
+industry; such as the manufacture of arms, toys, and sporting
+goods. Virtually the whole range of industrial employments is an
+outgrowth of what is classed as woman's work in the primitive
+barbarian community.
+
+The work of the men in the lower barbarian culture is no less
+indispensable to the life of the group than the work done by the
+women. It may even be that the men's work contributes as much to
+the food supply and the other necessary consumption of the group.
+Indeed, so obvious is this "productive" character of the men's
+work that in the conventional economic writings the hunter's work
+is taken as the type of primitive industry. But such is not the
+barbarian's sense of the matter. In his own eyes he is not a
+labourer, and he is not to be classed with the women in this
+respect; nor is his effort to be classed with the women's
+drudgery, as labour or industry, in such a sense as to admit of
+its being confounded with the latter. There is in all barbarian
+communities a profound sense of the disparity between man's and
+woman's work. His work may conduce to the maintenance of the
+group, but it is felt that it does so through an excellence and
+an efficacy of a kind that cannot without derogation be compared
+with the uneventful diligence of the women.
+
+At a farther step backward in the cultural scale -- among savage
+groups -- the differentiation of employments is still less
+elaborate and the invidious distinction between classes and
+employments is less consistent and less rigorous. Unequivocal
+instances of a primitive savage culture are hard to find. Few of
+these groups or communities that are classed as "savage" show no
+traces of regression from a more advanced cultural stage. But
+there are groups -- some of them apparently not the result of
+retrogression -- which show the traits of primitive savagery with
+some fidelity. Their culture differs from that of the barbarian
+communities in the absence of a leisure class and the absence, in
+great measure, of the animus or spiritual attitude on which the
+institution of a leisure class rests. These communities of
+primitive savages in which there is no hierarchy of economic
+classes make up but a small and inconspicuous fraction of the
+human race. As good an instance of this phase of culture as may
+be had is afforded by the tribes of the Andamans, or by the Todas
+of the Nilgiri Hills. The scheme of life of these groups at the
+time of their earliest contact with Europeans seems to have been
+nearly typical, so far as regards the absence of a leisure class.
+As a further instance might be cited the Ainu of Yezo, and, more
+doubtfully, also some Bushman and Eskimo groups. Some Pueblo
+communities are less confidently to be included in the same
+class. Most, if not all, of the communities here cited may well
+be cases of degeneration from a higher barbarism, rather than
+bearers of a culture that has never risen above its present
+level. If so, they are for the present purpose to be taken with
+the allowance, but they may serve none the less as evidence to
+the same effect as if they were really "primitive" populations.
+
+These communities that are without a defined leisure class
+resemble one another also in certain other features of their
+social structure and manner of life. They are small groups and of
+a simple (archaic) structure; they are commonly peaceable and
+sedentary; they are poor; and individual ownership is not a
+dominant feature of their economic system. At the same time it
+does not follow that these are the smallest of existing
+communities, or that their social structure is in all respects
+the least differentiated; nor does the class necessarily include
+all primitive communities which have no defined system of
+individual ownership. But it is to be noted that the class seems
+to include the most peaceable -- perhaps all the
+characteristically peaceable -- primitive groups of men. Indeed,
+the most notable trait common to members of such communities is a
+certain amiable inefficiency when confronted with force or fraud.
+
+The evidence afforded by the usages and cultural traits of
+communities at a low stage of development indicates that the
+institution of a leisure class has emerged gradually during the
+transition from primitive savagery to barbarism; or more
+precisely, during the transition from a peaceable to a
+consistently warlike habit of life. The conditions apparently
+necessary to its emergence in a consistent form are: (1) the
+community must be of a predatory habit of life (war or the
+hunting of large game or both); that is to say, the men, who
+constitute the inchoate leisure class in these cases, must be
+habituated to the infliction of injury by force and stratagem;
+(2) subsistence must be obtainable on sufficiently easy terms to
+admit of the exemption of a considerable portion of the community
+from steady application to a routine of labour. The institution
+of leisure class is the outgrowth of an early discrimination
+between employments, according to which some employments are
+worthy and others unworthy. Under this ancient distinction the
+worthy employments are those which may be classed as exploit;
+unworthy are those necessary everyday employments into which no
+appreciable element of exploit enters.
+
+This distinction has but little obvious significance in a modern
+industrial community, and it has, therefore, received but slight
+attention at the hands of economic writers. When viewed in the
+light of that modern common sense which has guided economic
+discussion, it seems formal and insubstantial. But it persists
+with great tenacity as a commonplace preconception even in modern
+life, as is shown, for instance, by our habitual aversion to
+menial employments. It is a distinction of a personal kind -- of
+superiority and inferiority. In the earlier stages of culture,
+when the personal force of the individual counted more
+immediately and obviously in shaping the course of events, the
+element of exploit counted for more in the everyday scheme of
+life. Interest centred about this fact to a greater degree.
+Consequently a distinction proceeding on this ground seemed more
+imperative and more definitive then than is the case to-day. As a
+fact in the sequence of development, therefore, the distinction
+is a substantial one and rests on sufficiently valid and cogent
+grounds.
+
+The ground on which a discrimination between facts is habitually
+made changes as the interest from which the facts are habitually
+viewed changes. Those features of the facts at hand are salient
+and substantial upon which the dominant interest of the time
+throws its light. Any given ground of distinction will seem
+insubstantial to any one who habitually apprehends the facts in
+question from a different point of view and values them for a
+different purpose. The habit of distinguishing and classifying
+the various purposes and directions of activity prevails of
+necessity always and everywhere; for it is indispensable in
+reaching a working theory or scheme of life. The particular point
+of view, or the particular characteristic that is pitched upon as
+definitive in the classification of the facts of life depends
+upon the interest from which a discrimination of the facts is
+sought. The grounds of discrimination, and the norm of procedure
+in classifying the facts, therefore, progressively change as the
+growth of culture proceeds; for the end for which the facts of
+life are apprehended changes, and the point of view consequently
+changes also. So that what are recognised as the salient and
+decisive features of a class of activities or of a social class
+at one stage of culture will not retain the same relative
+importance for the purposes of classification at any subsequent
+stage.
+
+But the change of standards and points of view is gradual only,
+and it seldom results in the subversion of entire suppression of
+a standpoint once accepted. A distinction is still habitually
+made between industrial and non-industrial occupations; and this
+modern distinction is a transmuted form of the barbarian
+distinction between exploit and drudgery. Such employments as
+warfare, politics, public worship, and public merrymaking, are
+felt, in the popular apprehension, to differ intrinsically from
+the labour that has to do with elaborating the material means of
+life. The precise line of demarcation is not the same as it was
+in the early barbarian scheme, but the broad distinction has not
+fallen into disuse.
+
+The tacit, common-sense distinction to-day is, in effect, that
+any effort is to be accounted industrial only so far as its
+ultimate purpose is the utilisation of non-human things. The
+coercive utilisation of man by man is not felt to be an
+industrial function; but all effort directed to enhance human
+life by taking advantage of the non-human environment is classed
+together as industrial activity. By the economists who have best
+retained and adapted the classical tradition, man's "power over
+nature" is currently postulated as the characteristic fact of
+industrial productivity. This industrial power over nature is
+taken to include man's power over the life of the beasts and over
+all the elemental forces. A line is in this way drawn between
+mankind and brute creation.
+
+In other times and among men imbued with a different body of
+preconceptions this line is not drawn precisely as we draw it
+to-day. In the savage or the barbarian scheme of life it is drawn
+in a different place and in another way. In all communities under
+the barbarian culture there is an alert and pervading sense of
+antithesis between two comprehensive groups of phenomena, in one
+of which barbarian man includes himself, and in the other, his
+victual. There is a felt antithesis between economic and
+non-economic phenomena, but it is not conceived in the modern
+fashion; it lies not between man and brute creation, but between
+animate and inert things.
+
+It may be an excess of caution at this day to explain that the
+barbarian notion which it is here intended to convey by the term
+"animate" is not the same as would be conveyed by the word
+"living". The term does not cover all living things, and it does
+cover a great many others. Such a striking natural phenomenon as
+a storm, a disease, a waterfall, are recognised as "animate";
+while fruits and herbs, and even inconspicuous animals, such as
+house-flies, maggots, lemmings, sheep, are not ordinarily
+apprehended as "animate" except when taken collectively. As here
+used the term does not necessarily imply an indwelling soul or
+spirit. The concept includes such things as in the apprehension
+of the animistic savage or barbarian are formidable by virtue of
+a real or imputed habit of initiating action. This category
+comprises a large number and range of natural objects and
+phenomena. Such a distinction between the inert and the active is
+still present in the habits of thought of unreflecting persons,
+and it still profoundly affects the prevalent theory of human
+life and of natural processes; but it does not pervade our daily
+life to the extent or with the far-reaching practical
+consequences that are apparent at earlier stages of culture and
+belief.
+
+To the mind of the barbarian, the elaboration and utilisation of
+what is afforded by inert nature is activity on quite a different
+plane from his dealings with "animate" things and forces. The
+line of demarcation may be vague and shifting, but the broad
+distinction is sufficiently real and cogent to influence the
+barbarian scheme of life. To the class of things apprehended as
+animate, the barbarian fancy imputes an unfolding of activity
+directed to some end. It is this teleological unfolding of
+activity that constitutes any object or phenomenon an "animate"
+fact. Wherever the unsophisticated savage or barbarian meets with
+activity that is at all obtrusive, he construes it in the only
+terms that are ready to hand -- the terms immediately given in
+his consciousness of his own actions. Activity is, therefore,
+assimilated to human action, and active objects are in so far
+assimilated to the human agent. Phenomena of this character  --
+especially those whose behaviour is notably formidable or
+baffling -- have to be met in a different spirit and with
+proficiency of a different kind from what is required in dealing
+with inert things. To deal successfully with such phenomena is a
+work of exploit rather than of industry. It is an assertion of
+prowess, not of diligence.
+
+Under the guidance of this naive discrimination between the inert
+and the animate, the activities of the primitive social group
+tend to fall into two classes, which would in modern phrase be
+called exploit and industry. Industry is effort that goes to
+create a new thing, with a new purpose given it by the fashioning
+hand of its maker out of passive ("brute") material; while
+exploit, so far as it results in an outcome useful to the agent,
+is the conversion to his own ends of energies previously directed
+to some other end by an other agent. We still speak of "brute
+matter" which something of the barbarian's realisation of a
+profound significance in the term.
+
+The distinction between exploit and drudgery coincides with a
+difference between the sexes. The sexes differ, not only in
+stature and muscular force, but perhaps even more decisively in
+temperament, and this must early have given rise to a
+corresponding division of labour. The general range of activities
+that come under the head of exploit falls to the males as being
+the stouter, more massive, better capable of a sudden and violent
+strain, and more readily inclined to self assertion, active
+emulation, and aggression. The difference in mass, in
+physiological character, and in temperament may be slight among
+the members of the primitive group; it appears, in fact, to be
+relatively slight and inconsequential in some of the more archaic
+communities with which we are acquainted -- as for instance the
+tribes of the Andamans. But so soon as a differentiation of
+function has well begun on the lines marked out by this
+difference in physique and animus, the original difference
+between the sexes will itself widen. A cumulative process of
+selective adaptation to the new distribution of employments will
+set in, especially if the habitat or the fauna with which the
+group is in contact is such as to call for a considerable
+exercise of the sturdier virtues. The habitual pursuit of large
+game requires more of the manly qualities of massiveness,
+agility, and ferocity, and it can therefore scarcely fail to
+hasten and widen the differentiation of functions between the
+sexes. And so soon as the group comes into hostile contact with
+other groups, the divergence of function will take on the
+developed form of a distinction between exploit and industry.
+
+In such a predatory group of hunters it comes to be the
+able-bodied men's office to fight and hunt. The women do what
+other work there is to do -- other members who are unfit for
+man's work being for this purpose classed with women. But the
+men's hunting and fighting are both of the same general
+character. Both are of a predatory nature; the warrior and the
+hunter alike reap where they have not strewn. Their aggressive
+assertion of force and sagacity differs obviously from the
+women's assiduous and uneventful shaping of materials; it is not
+to be accounted productive labour but rather an acquisition of
+substance by seizure. Such being the barbarian man's work, in its
+best development and widest divergence from women's work, any
+effort that does not involve an assertion of prowess comes to be
+unworthy of the man. As the tradition gains consistency, the
+common sense of the community erects it into a canon of conduct;
+so that no employment and no acquisition is morally possible to
+the self respecting man at this cultural stage, except such as
+proceeds on the basis of prowess -- force or fraud. When the
+predatory habit of life has been settled upon the group by long
+habituation, it becomes the able-bodied man's accredited office
+in the social economy to kill, to destroy such competitors in the
+struggle for existence as attempt to resist or elude him, to
+overcome and reduce to subservience those alien forces that
+assert themselves refractorily in the environment. So tenaciously
+and with such nicety is this theoretical distinction between
+exploit and drudgery adhered to that in many hunting tribes the
+man must not bring home the game which he has killed, but must
+send his woman to perform that baser office. 
+
+As has already been indicated, the distinction between exploit
+and drudgery is an invidious distinction between employments.
+Those employments which are to be classed as exploit are worthy,
+honourable, noble; other employments, which do not contain this
+element of exploit, and especially those which imply subservience
+or submission, are unworthy, debasing, ignoble. The concept of
+dignity, worth, or honour, as applied either to persons or
+conduct, is of first-rate consequence in the development of
+classes and of class distinctions, and it is therefore necessary
+to say something of its derivation and meaning. Its psychological
+ground may be indicated in outline as follows.
+
+As a matter of selective necessity, man is an agent. He is, in
+his own apprehension, a centre of unfolding impulsive activity --
+"teleological" activity. He is an agent seeking in every act the
+accomplishment of some concrete, objective, impersonal end. By
+force of his being such an agent he is possessed of a taste for
+effective work, and a distaste for futile effort. He has a sense
+of the merit of serviceability or efficiency and of the demerit
+of futility, waste, or incapacity. This aptitude or propensity
+may be called the instinct of workmanship. Wherever the
+circumstances or traditions of life lead to an habitual
+comparison of one person with another in point of efficiency, the
+instinct of workmanship works out in an emulative or invidious
+comparison of persons. The extent to which this result follows
+depends in some considerable degree on the temperament of the
+population. In any community where such an invidious comparison
+of persons is habitually made, visible success becomes an end
+sought for its own utility as a basis of esteem. Esteem is gained
+and dispraise is avoided by putting one's efficiency in evidence.
+The result is that the instinct of workmanship works out in an
+emulative demonstration of force.
+
+During that primitive phase of social development, when the
+community is still habitually peaceable, perhaps sedentary, and
+without a developed system of individual ownership, the
+efficiency of the individual can be shown chiefly and most
+consistently in some employment that goes to further the life of
+the group. What emulation of an economic kind there is between
+the members of such a group will be chiefly emulation in
+industrial serviceability. At the same time the incentive to
+emulation is not strong, nor is the scope for emulation large.
+
+When the community passes from peaceable savagery to a predatory
+phase of life, the conditions of emulation change. The
+opportunity and the incentive to emulate increase greatly in
+scope and urgency. The activity of the men more and more takes on
+the character of exploit; and an invidious comparison of one
+hunter or warrior with another grows continually easier and more
+habitual. Tangible evidences of prowess -- trophies -- find a
+place in men's habits of thought as an essential feature of the
+paraphernalia of life. Booty, trophies of the chase or of the
+raid, come to be prized as evidence of pre-eminent force.
+Aggression becomes the accredited form of action, and booty
+serves as prima facie evidence of successful aggression. As
+accepted at this cultural stage, the accredited, worthy form of
+self-assertion is contest; and useful articles or services
+obtained by seizure or compulsion, serve as a conventional
+evidence of successful contest. Therefore, by contrast, the
+obtaining of goods by other methods than seizure comes to be
+accounted unworthy of man in his best estate. The performance of
+productive work, or employment in personal service, falls under
+the same odium for the same reason. An invidious distinction in
+this way arises between exploit and acquisition on the other
+hand. Labour acquires a character of irksomeness by virtue of the
+indignity imputed to it.
+
+With the primitive barbarian, before the simple content of the
+notion has been obscured by its own ramifications and by a
+secondary growth of cognate ideas, "honourable" seems to connote
+nothing else that assertion of superior force. "Honourable" is
+"formidable"; "worthy" is "prepotent". A honorific act is in the
+last analysis little if anything else than a recognised
+successful act of aggression; and where aggression means conflict
+with men and beasts, the activity which comes to be especially
+and primarily honourable is the assertion of the strong hand. The
+naive, archaic habit of construing all manifestations of force in
+terms of personality or "will power" greatly fortifies this
+conventional exaltation of the strong hand. Honorific epithets,
+in vogue among barbarian tribes as well as among peoples of a
+more advance culture, commonly bear the stamp of this
+unsophisticated sense of honour. Epithets and titles used in
+addressing chieftains, and in the propitiation of kings and gods,
+very commonly impute a propensity for overbearing violence and an
+irresistible devastating force to the person who is to be
+propitiated. This holds true to an extent also in the more
+civilised communities of the present day. The predilection shown
+in heraldic devices for the more rapacious beasts and birds of
+prey goes to enforce the same view.
+
+Under this common-sense barbarian appreciation of worth or
+honour, the taking of life -- the killing of formidable
+competitors, whether brute or human -- is honourable in the
+highest degree. And this high office of slaughter, as an
+expression of the slayer's prepotence, casts a glamour of worth
+over every act of slaughter and over all the tools and
+accessories of the act. Arms are honourable, and the use of them,
+even in seeking the life of the meanest creatures of the fields,
+becomes a honorific employment. At the same time, employment in
+industry becomes correspondingly odious, and, in the common-sense
+apprehension, the handling of the tools and implements of
+industry falls beneath the dignity of able-bodied men. Labour
+becomes irksome.
+
+It is here assumed that in the sequence of cultural
+evolution primitive groups of men have passed from an initial
+peaceable stage to a subsequent stage at which fighting is the
+avowed and characteristic employment of the group. But it is not
+implied that there has been an abrupt transition from unbroken
+peace and good-will to a later or higher phase of life in which
+the fact of combat occurs for the first time. Neither is it
+implied that all peaceful industry disappears on the transition
+to the predatory phase of culture. Some fighting, it is safe to
+say, would be met with at any early stage of social development.
+Fights would occur with more or less frequency through sexual
+competition. The known habits of primitive groups, as well as the
+habits of the anthropoid apes, argue to that effect, and the
+evidence from the well-known promptings of human nature enforces
+the same view.
+
+It may therefore be objected that there can have been no such
+initial stage of peaceable life as is here assumed. There is no
+point in cultural evolution prior to which fighting does not
+occur. But the point in question is not as to the occurrence of
+combat, occasional or sporadic, or even more or less frequent and
+habitual; it is a question as to the occurrence of an habitual;
+it is a question as to the occurrence of an habitual bellicose
+from of mind -- a prevalent habit of judging facts and events
+from the point of view of the fight. The predatory phase of
+culture is attained only when the predatory attitude has become
+the habitual and accredited spiritual attitude for the members of
+the group; when the fight has become the dominant note in the
+current theory of life; when the common-sense appreciation of men
+and things has come to be an appreciation with a view to combat.
+
+The substantial difference between the peaceable and the
+predatory phase of culture, therefore, is a spiritual difference,
+not a mechanical one. The change in spiritual attitude is the
+outgrowth of a change in the material facts of the life of the
+group, and it comes on gradually as the material circumstances
+favourable to a predatory attitude supervene. The inferior limit
+of the predatory culture is an industrial limit. Predation can
+not become the habitual, conventional resource of any group or
+any class until industrial methods have been developed to such a
+degree of efficiency as to leave a margin worth fighting for,
+above the subsistence of those engaged in getting a living. The
+transition from peace to predation therefore depends on the
+growth of technical knowledge and the use of tools. A predatory
+culture is similarly impracticable in early times, until weapons
+have been developed to such a point as to make man a formidable
+animal. The early development of tools and of weapons is of
+course the same fact seen from two different points of view.
+
+The life of a given group would be characterised as
+peaceable so long as habitual recourse to combat has not brought
+the fight into the foreground in men's every day thoughts, as a
+dominant feature of the life of man. A group may evidently attain
+such a predatory attitude with a greater or less degree of
+completeness, so that its scheme of life and canons of conduct
+may be controlled to a greater or less extent by the predatory
+animus. The predatory phase of culture is therefore conceived to
+come on gradually, through a cumulative growth of predatory
+aptitudes habits, and traditions this growth being due to a
+change in the circumstances of the group's life, of such a kind
+as to develop and conserve those traits of human nature and those
+traditions and norms of conduct that make for a predatory rather
+than a peaceable life.
+
+The evidence for the hypothesis that there has been such a
+peaceable stage of primitive culture is in great part drawn from 
+psychology rather than from ethnology, and cannot be detailed
+here. It will be recited in part in a later chapter, in
+discussing the survival of archaic traits of human nature under
+the modern culture.
+
+Chapter Two
+
+Pecuniary Emulation
+
+In the sequence of cultural evolution the emergence of a leisure
+class coincides with the beginning of ownership. This is
+necessarily the case, for these two institutions result from the
+same set of economic forces. In the inchoate phase of their
+development they are but different aspects of the same general
+facts of social structure.
+
+It is as elements of social structure -- conventional facts --
+that leisure and ownership are matters of interest for the
+purpose in hand. An habitual neglect of work does not constitute
+a leisure class; neither does the mechanical fact of use and
+consumption constitute ownership. The present inquiry, therefore,
+is not concerned with the beginning of indolence, nor with the
+beginning of the appropriation of useful articles to individual
+consumption. The point in question is the origin and nature of a
+conventional leisure class on the one hand and the beginnings of
+individual ownership as a conventional right or equitable claim
+on the other hand.
+
+The early differentiation out of which the distinction between a
+leisure and a working class arises is a division maintained
+between men's and women's work in the lower stages of barbarism.
+Likewise the earliest form of ownership is an
+ownership of the women by the able bodied men of the community.
+The facts may be expressed in more general terms. and truer to
+the import of the barbarian theory of life, by saying that it is
+an ownership of the woman by the man.
+
+There was undoubtedly some appropriation of useful articles
+before the custom of appropriating women arose. The usages of
+existing archaic communities in which there is no ownership of
+women is warrant for such a view. In all communities the members,
+both male and female, habitually appropriate to their individual
+use a variety of useful things; but these useful things are not
+thought of as owned by the person who appropriates and consumes
+them. The habitual appropriation and consumption of certain
+slight personal effects goes on without raising the question of
+ownership; that is to say, the question of a conventional,
+equitable claim to extraneous things.
+
+The ownership of women begins in the lower barbarian stages of
+culture, apparently with the seizure of female captives. The
+original reason for the seizure and appropriation of women seems
+to have been their usefulness as trophies. The practice of
+seizing women from the enemy as trophies, gave rise to a form of
+ownership-marriage, resulting in a household with a male head.
+This was followed by an extension of slavery to other captives
+and inferiors, besides women, and by an extension of
+ownership-marriage to other women than those seized from the
+enemy. The outcome of emulation under the circumstances of a
+predatory life, therefore, has been on the one hand a form of
+marriage resting on coercion, and on the other hand the custom of
+ownership. The two institutions are not distinguishable in the
+initial phase of their development; both arise from the desire of
+the successful men to put their prowess in evidence by exhibiting
+some durable result of their exploits. Both also minister to that
+propensity for mastery which pervades all predatory communities.
+From the ownership of women the concept of ownership extends
+itself to include the products of their industry, and so there
+arises the ownership of things as well as of persons.
+
+In this way a consistent system of property in goods is gradually
+installed. And although in the latest stages of the development,
+the serviceability of goods for consumption has come to be the
+most obtrusive element of their value, still, wealth has by no
+means yet lost its utility as a honorific evidence of the owner's
+prepotence. 
+
+Wherever the institution of private property is found, even in a
+slightly developed form, the economic process bears the character
+of a struggle between men for the possession of goods. It has
+been customary in economic theory, and especially among those
+economists who adhere with least faltering to the body of
+modernised classical doctrines, to construe this struggle for
+wealth as being substantially a struggle for subsistence. Such
+is, no doubt, its character in large part during the earlier and
+less efficient phases of industry. Such is also its character in
+all cases where the "niggardliness of nature" is so strict as to
+afford but a scanty livelihood to the community in return for
+strenuous and unremitting application to the business of getting
+the means of subsistence. But in all progressing communities an
+advance is presently made beyond this early stage of
+technological development. Industrial efficiency is presently
+carried to such a pitch as to afford something appreciably more
+than a bare livelihood to those engaged in the industrial
+process. It has not been unusual for economic theory to speak of
+the further struggle for wealth on this new industrial basis as a
+competition for an increase of the comforts of life, -- primarily
+for an increase of the physical comforts which the consumption of
+goods affords.
+
+The end of acquisition and accumulation is conventionally held to
+be the consumption of the goods accumulated -- whether it is
+consumption directly by the owner of the goods or by the
+household attached to him and for this purpose identified with
+him in theory. This is at least felt to be the economically
+legitimate end of acquisition, which alone it is incumbent on the
+theory to take account of. Such consumption may of course be
+conceived to serve the consumer's physical wants -- his physical
+comfort -- or his so-called higher wants -- spiritual, aesthetic,
+intellectual, or what not; the latter class of wants being served
+indirectly by an expenditure of goods, after the fashion familiar
+to all economic readers.
+
+But it is only when taken in a sense far removed from its naive
+meaning that consumption of goods can be said to afford the
+incentive from which accumulation invariably proceeds. The motive
+that lies at the root of ownership is emulation; and the same
+motive of emulation continues active in the further development
+of the institution to which it has given rise and in the
+development of all those features of the social structure which
+this institution of ownership touches. The possession of wealth
+confers honour; it is an invidious distinction. Nothing equally
+cogent can be said for the consumption of goods, nor for any
+other conceivable incentive to acquisition, and especially not
+for any incentive to accumulation of wealth.
+
+It is of course not to be overlooked that in a community where
+nearly all goods are private property the necessity of earning a
+livelihood is a powerful and ever present incentive for the
+poorer members of the community. The need of subsistence and of
+an increase of physical comfort may for a time be the dominant
+motive of acquisition for those classes who are habitually
+employed at manual labour, whose subsistence is on a precarious
+footing, who possess little and ordinarily accumulate little; but
+it will appear in the course of the discussion that even in the
+case of these impecunious classes the predominance of the motive
+of physical want is not so decided as has sometimes been assumed.
+On the other hand, so far as regards those members and classes of
+the community who are chiefly concerned in the accumulation of
+wealth, the incentive of subsistence or of physical comfort never
+plays a considerable part. Ownership began and grew into a human
+institution on grounds unrelated to the subsistence minimum. The
+dominant incentive was from the outset the invidious distinction
+attaching to wealth, and, save temporarily and by exception, no
+other motive has usurped the primacy at any later stage of the
+development.
+
+Property set out with being booty held as trophies of the
+successful raid. So long as the group had departed and so long as
+it still stood in close contact with other hostile groups, the
+utility of things or persons owned lay chiefly in an invidious
+comparison between their possessor and the enemy from whom they
+were taken. The habit of distinguishing between the interests of
+the individual and those of the group to which he belongs is
+apparently a later growth. Invidious comparison between the
+possessor of the honorific booty and his less successful
+neighbours within the group was no doubt present early as an
+element of the utility of the things possessed, though this was
+not at the outset the chief element of their value. The man's
+prowess was still primarily the group's prowess, and the
+possessor of the booty felt himself to be primarily the keeper of
+the honour of his group. This appreciation of exploit from the
+communal point of view is met with also at later stages of social
+growth, especially as regards the laurels of war.
+
+But as soon as the custom of individual ownership begins to gain
+consistency, the point of view taken in making the invidious
+comparison on which private property rests will begin to change.
+Indeed, the one change is but the reflex of the other. The
+initial phase of ownership, the phase of acquisition by naive
+seizure and conversion, begins to pass into the subsequent stage
+of an incipient organization of industry on the basis of private
+property (in slaves); the horde develops into a more or less
+self-sufficing industrial community; possessions then come to be
+valued not so much as evidence of successful foray, but rather as
+evidence of the prepotence of the possessor of these goods over
+other individuals within the community. The invidious comparison
+now becomes primarily a comparison of the owner with the other
+members of the group. Property is still of the nature of trophy,
+but, with the cultural advance, it becomes more and more a trophy
+of successes scored in the game of ownership carried on between
+the members of the group under the quasi-peaceable methods of
+nomadic life.
+
+Gradually, as industrial activity further displaced
+predatory activity in the community's everyday life and in men's
+habits of thought, accumulated property more and more replaces
+trophies of predatory exploit as the conventional exponent of
+prepotence and success. With the growth of settled industry,
+therefore, the possession of wealth gains in relative importance
+and effectiveness as a customary basis of repute and esteem. Not
+that esteem ceases to be awarded on the basis of other, more
+direct evidence of prowess; not that successful predatory
+aggression or warlike exploit ceases to call out the approval and
+admiration of the crowd, or to stir the envy of the less
+successful competitors; but the opportunities for gaining
+distinction by means of this direct manifestation of superior
+force grow less available both in scope and frequency. At the
+same time opportunities for industrial aggression, and for the
+accumulation of property, increase in scope and availability. And
+it is even more to the point that property now becomes the most
+easily recognised evidence of a reputable degree of success as
+distinguished from heroic or signal achievement. It therefore
+becomes the conventional basis of esteem. Its possession in some
+amount becomes necessary in order to any reputable standing in
+the community. It becomes indispensable to accumulate, to acquire
+property, in order to retain one's good name. When accumulated
+goods have in this way once become the accepted badge of
+efficiency, the possession of wealth presently assumes the
+character of an independent and definitive basis of esteem. The
+possession of goods, whether acquired aggressively by one's own
+exertion or passively by transmission through inheritance from
+others, becomes a conventional basis of reputability. The
+possession of wealth, which was at the outset valued simply as an
+evidence of efficiency, becomes, in popular apprehension, itself
+a meritorious act. Wealth is now itself intrinsically honourable
+and confers honour on its possessor. By a further refinement,
+wealth acquired passively by transmission from ancestors or other
+antecedents presently becomes even more honorific than wealth
+acquired by the possessor's own effort; but this distinction
+belongs at a later stage in the evolution of the pecuniary
+culture and will be spoken of in its place.
+
+Prowess and exploit may still remain the basis of award of the
+highest popular esteem, although the possession of wealth has
+become the basis of common place reputability and of a blameless
+social standing. The predatory instinct and the consequent
+approbation of predatory efficiency are deeply ingrained in the
+habits of thought of those peoples who have passed under the
+discipline of a protracted predatory culture. According to
+popular award, the highest honours within human reach may, even
+yet, be those gained by an unfolding of extraordinary predatory
+efficiency in war, or by a quasi-predatory efficiency in
+statecraft; but for the purposes of a commonplace decent standing
+in the community these means of repute have been replaced by the
+acquisition and accumulation of goods. In order to stand well in
+the eyes of the community, it is necessary to come up to a
+certain, somewhat indefinite, conventional standard of wealth;
+just as in the earlier predatory stage it is necessary for the
+barbarian man to come up to the tribe's standard of physical
+endurance, cunning, and skill at arms. A certain standard of
+wealth in the one case, and of prowess in the other, is a
+necessary condition of reputability, and anything in excess of
+this normal amount is meritorious.
+
+Those members of the community who fall short of this, somewhat
+indefinite, normal degree of prowess or of property suffer in the
+esteem of their fellow-men; and consequently they suffer also in
+their own esteem, since the usual basis of self-respect is the
+respect accorded by one's neighbours. Only individuals with an
+aberrant temperament can in the long run retain their self-esteem
+in the face of the disesteem of their fellows. Apparent
+exceptions to the rule are met with, especially among people with
+strong religious convictions. But these apparent exceptions are
+scarcely real exceptions, since such persons commonly fall back
+on the putative approbation of some supernatural witness of their
+deeds.
+
+So soon as the possession of property becomes the basis of
+popular esteem, therefore, it becomes also a requisite to the
+complacency which we call self-respect. In any community where
+goods are held in severalty it is necessary, in order to his own
+peace of mind, that an individual should possess as large a
+portion of goods as others with whom he is accustomed to class
+himself; and it is extremely gratifying to possess something more
+than others. But as fast as a person makes new acquisitions, and
+becomes accustomed to the resulting new standard of wealth, the
+new standard forthwith ceases to afford appreciably greater
+satisfaction than the earlier standard did. The tendency in any
+case is constantly to make the present pecuniary standard the
+point of departure for a fresh increase of wealth; and this in
+turn gives rise to a new standard of sufficiency and a new
+pecuniary classification of one's self as compared with one's
+neighbours. So far as concerns the present question, the end
+sought by accumulation is to rank high in comparison with the
+rest of the community in point of pecuniary strength. So long as
+the comparison is distinctly unfavourable to himself, the normal,
+average individual will live in chronic dissatisfaction with his
+present lot; and when he has reached what may be called the
+normal pecuniary standard of the community, or of his class in
+the community, this chronic dissatisfaction will give place to a
+restless straining to place a wider and ever-widening pecuniary
+interval between himself and this average standard. The invidious
+comparison can never become so favourable to the individual
+making it that he would not gladly rate himself still higher
+relatively to his competitors in the struggle for pecuniary
+reputability.
+
+In the nature of the case, the desire for wealth can scarcely be
+satiated in any individual instance, and evidently a satiation of
+the average or general desire for wealth is out of the question.
+However widely, or equally, or "fairly", it may be distributed,
+no general increase of the community's wealth can make any
+approach to satiating this need, the ground of which approach to
+satiating this need, the ground of which is the desire of every
+one to excel every one else in the accumulation of goods.  If, as
+is sometimes assumed, the incentive to accumulation were the want
+of subsistence or of physical comfort, then the aggregate
+economic wants of a community might conceivably be satisfied at
+some point in the advance of industrial efficiency; but since the
+struggle is substantially a race for reputability on the basis of
+an invidious comparison, no approach to a definitive attainment
+is possible.
+
+What has just been said must not be taken to mean that there are
+no other incentives to acquisition and accumulation than this
+desire to excel in pecuniary standing and so gain the esteem and
+envy of one's fellow-men. The desire for added comfort and
+security from want is present as a motive at every stage of the
+process of accumulation in a modern industrial community;
+although the standard of sufficiency in these respects is in turn
+greatly affected by the habit of pecuniary emulation. To a great
+extent this emulation shapes the methods and selects the objects
+of expenditure for personal comfort and decent livelihood.
+
+Besides this, the power conferred by wealth also affords a motive
+to accumulation. That propensity for purposeful activity and that
+repugnance to all futility of effort which belong to man by
+virtue of his character as an agent do not desert him when he
+emerges from the naive communal culture where the dominant note
+of life is the unanalysed and undifferentiated solidarity of the
+individual with the group with which his life is bound up. When
+he enters upon the predatory stage, where self-seeking in the
+narrower sense becomes the dominant note, this propensity goes
+with him still, as the pervasive trait that shapes his scheme of
+life. The propensity for achievement and the repugnance to
+futility remain the underlying economic motive. The propensity
+changes only in the form of its expression and in the proximate
+objects to which it directs the man's activity. Under the regime
+of individual ownership the most available means of visibly
+achieving a purpose is that afforded by the acquisition and
+accumulation of goods; and as the self-regarding antithesis
+between man and man reaches fuller consciousness, the propensity
+for achievement -- the instinct of workmanship -- tends more and
+more to shape itself into a straining to excel others in
+pecuniary achievement. Relative success, tested by an invidious
+pecuniary comparison with other men, becomes the conventional end
+of action. The currently accepted legitimate end of effort
+becomes the achievement of a favourable comparison with other
+men; and therefore the repugnance to futility to a good extent
+coalesces with the incentive of emulation. It acts to accentuate
+the struggle for pecuniary reputability by visiting with a
+sharper disapproval all shortcoming and all evidence of
+shortcoming in point of pecuniary success. Purposeful effort
+comes to mean, primarily, effort directed to or resulting in a
+more creditable showing of accumulated wealth. Among the motives
+which lead men to accumulate wealth, the primacy, both in scope
+and intensity, therefore, continues to belong to this motive of
+pecuniary emulation.
+
+In making use of the term "invidious", it may perhaps be
+unnecessary to remark, there is no intention to extol or
+depreciate, or to commend or deplore any of the phenomena which
+the word is used to characterise. The term is used in a technical
+sense as describing a comparison of persons with a view to rating
+and grading them in respect of relative worth or value -- in an
+aesthetic or moral sense -- and so awarding and defining the
+relative degrees of complacency with which they may legitimately
+be contemplated by themselves and by others. An invidious
+comparison is a process of valuation of persons in respect of
+worth.
+
+Chapter Three
+
+Conspicuous Leisure
+
+If its working were not disturbed by other economic forces or
+other features of the emulative process, the immediate effect of
+such a pecuniary struggle as has just been described in outline
+would be to make men industrious and frugal. This result actually
+follows, in some measure, so far as regards the lower classes,
+whose ordinary means of acquiring goods is productive labour.
+This is more especially true of the labouring classes in a
+sedentary community which is at an agricultural stage of
+industry, in which there is a considerable subdivision of
+industry, and whose laws and customs secure to these classes a
+more or less definite share of the product of their industry.
+These lower classes can in any case not avoid labour, and the
+imputation of labour is therefore not greatly derogatory to them,
+at least not within their class. Rather, since labour is their
+recognised and accepted mode of life, they take some emulative
+pride in a reputation for efficiency in their work, this being
+often the only line of emulation that is open to them. For those
+for whom acquisition and emulation is possible only within the
+field of productive efficiency and thrift, the struggle for
+pecuniary reputability will in some measure work out in an
+increase of diligence and parsimony. But certain secondary
+features of the emulative process, yet to be spoken of, come in
+to very materially circumscribe and modify emulation in these
+directions among the pecuniary inferior classes as well as among
+the superior class.
+
+But it is otherwise with the superior pecuniary class, with which
+we are here immediately concerned. For this class also the
+incentive to diligence and thrift is not absent; but its action
+is so greatly qualified by the secondary demands of pecuniary
+emulation, that any inclination in this direction is practically
+overborne and any incentive to diligence tends to be of no
+effect. The most imperative of these secondary demands of
+emulation, as well as the one of widest scope, is the requirement
+of abstention from productive work. This is true in an especial
+degree for the barbarian stage of culture. During the predatory
+culture labour comes to be associated in men's habits of thought
+with weakness and subjection to a master. It is therefore a mark
+of inferiority, and therefore comes to be accounted unworthy of
+man in his best estate. By virtue of this tradition labour is
+felt to be debasing, and this tradition has never died out. On
+the contrary, with the advance of social differentiation it has
+acquired the axiomatic force due to ancient and unquestioned
+prescription.
+
+In order to gain and to hold the esteem of men it is not
+sufficient merely to possess wealth or power. The wealth or power
+must be put in evidence, for esteem is awarded only on evidence.
+And not only does the evidence of wealth serve to impress one's
+importance on others and to keep their sense of his importance
+alive and alert, but it is of scarcely less use in building up
+and preserving one's self-complacency. In all but the lowest
+stages of culture the normally constituted man is comforted and
+upheld in his self-respect by "decent surroundings" and by
+exemption from "menial offices". Enforced departure from his
+habitual standard of decency, either in the paraphernalia of life
+or in the kind and amount of his everyday activity, is felt to be
+a slight upon his human dignity, even apart from all conscious
+consideration of the approval or disapproval of his fellows.
+
+The archaic theoretical distinction between the base and the
+honourable in the manner of a man's life retains very much of its
+ancient force even today. So much so that there are few of the
+better class who are no possessed of an instinctive repugnance
+for the vulgar forms of labour. We have a realising sense of
+ceremonial uncleanness attaching in an especial degree to the
+occupations which are associated in our habits of thought with
+menial service. It is felt by all persons of refined taste that a
+spiritual contamination is inseparable from certain offices that
+are conventionally required of servants. Vulgar surroundings,
+mean (that is to say, inexpensive) habitations, and vulgarly
+productive occupations are unhesitatingly condemned and avoided.
+They are incompatible with life on a satisfactory spiritual plane
+__ with "high thinking". From the days of the Greek philosophers
+to the present, a degree of leisure and of exemption from contact
+with such industrial processes as serve the immediate everyday
+purposes of human life has ever been recognised by thoughtful men
+as a prerequisite to a worthy or beautiful, or even a blameless,
+human life. In itself and in its consequences the life of leisure
+is beautiful and ennobling in all civilised men's eyes.
+
+This direct, subjective value of leisure and of other evidences
+of wealth is no doubt in great part secondary and derivative. It
+is in part a reflex of the utility of leisure as a means of
+gaining the respect of others, and in part it is the result of a
+mental substitution. The performance of labour has been accepted
+as a conventional evidence of inferior force; therefore it comes
+itself, by a mental short-cut, to be regarded as intrinsically
+base.
+
+During the predatory stage proper, and especially during the
+earlier stages of the quasi-peaceable development of industry
+that follows the predatory stage, a life of leisure is the
+readiest and most conclusive evidence of pecuniary strength, and
+therefore of superior force; provided always that the gentleman
+of leisure can live in manifest ease and comfort. At this stage
+wealth consists chiefly of slaves, and the benefits accruing from
+the possession of riches and power take the form chiefly of
+personal service and the immediate products of personal service.
+Conspicuous abstention from labour therefore becomes the
+conventional mark of superior pecuniary achievement and the
+conventional index of reputability; and conversely, since
+application to productive labour is a mark of poverty and
+subjection, it becomes inconsistent with a reputable standing in
+the community. Habits of industry and thrift, therefore, are not
+uniformly furthered by a prevailing pecuniary emulation. On the
+contrary, this kind of emulation indirectly discountenances
+participation in productive labour. Labour would unavoidably
+become dishonourable, as being an evidence indecorous under the
+ancient tradition handed down from an earlier cultural stage. The
+ancient tradition of the predatory culture is that productive
+effort is to be shunned as being unworthy of able-bodied men. and
+this tradition is reinforced rather than set aside in the passage
+from the predatory to the quasi-peaceable manner of life.
+
+Even if the institution of a leisure class had not come in with
+the first emergence of individual ownership, by force of the
+dishonour attaching to productive employment, it would in any
+case have come in as one of the early consequences of ownership.
+And it is to be remarked that while the leisure class existed in
+theory from the beginning of predatory culture, the institution
+takes on a new and fuller meaning with the transition from the
+predatory to the next succeeding pecuniary stage of culture. It
+is from this time forth a "leisure class" in fact as well as in
+theory. From this point dates the institution of the leisure
+class in its consummate form.
+
+During the predatory stage proper the distinction between the
+leisure and the labouring class is in some degree a ceremonial
+distinction only. The able bodied men jealously stand aloof from
+whatever is in their apprehension, menial drudgery; but their
+activity in fact contributes appreciably to the sustenance of the
+group. The subsequent stage of quasi-peaceable industry is
+usually characterised by an established chattel slavery, herds of
+cattle, and a servile class of herdsmen and shepherds; industry
+has advanced so far that the community is no longer dependent for
+its livelihood on the chase or on any other form of activity that
+can fairly be classed as exploit. From this point on, the
+characteristic feature of leisure class life is a conspicuous
+exemption from all useful employment.
+
+The normal and characteristic occupations of the class in this
+mature phase of its life history are in form very much the same
+as in its earlier days. These occupations are government, war,
+sports, and devout observances. Persons unduly given to difficult
+theoretical niceties may hold that these occupations are still
+incidentally and indirectly "productive"; but it is to be noted
+as decisive of the question in hand that the ordinary and
+ostensible motive of the leisure class in engaging in these
+occupations is assuredly not an increase of wealth by productive
+effort. At this as at any other cultural stage, government and
+war are, at least in part, carried on for the pecuniary gain of
+those who engage in them; but it is gain obtained by the
+honourable method of seizure and conversion. These occupations
+are of the nature of predatory, not of productive, employment.
+Something similar may be said of the chase, but with a
+difference. As the community passes out of the hunting stage
+proper, hunting gradually becomes differentiated into two
+distinct employments. On the one hand it is a trade, carried on
+chiefly for gain; and from this the element of exploit is
+virtually absent, or it is at any rate not present in a
+sufficient degree to clear the pursuit of the imputation of
+gainful industry. On the other hand, the chase is also a sport
+-ªan exercise of the predatory impulse simply. As such it does
+not afford any appreciable pecuniary incentive, but it contains a
+more or less obvious element of exploit. It is this latter
+development of the chase -- purged of all imputation of
+handicraft -- that alone is meritorious and fairly belongs in the
+scheme of life of the developed leisure class.
+
+Abstention from labour is not only a honorific or meritorious
+act, but it presently comes to be a requisite of decency. The
+insistence on property as the basis of reputability is very naive
+and very imperious during the early stages of the accumulation of
+wealth. Abstention from labour is the convenient evidence of
+wealth and is therefore the conventional mark of social standing;
+and this insistence on the meritoriousness of wealth leads to a
+more strenuous insistence on leisure. Nota notae est nota rei
+ipsius. According to well established laws of human nature,
+prescription presently seizes upon this conventional evidence of
+wealth and fixes it in men's habits of thought as something that
+is in itself substantially meritorious and ennobling; while
+productive labour at the same time and by a like process becomes
+in a double sense intrinsically unworthy. Prescription ends by
+making labour not only disreputable in the eyes of the community,
+but morally impossible to the noble, freeborn man, and
+incompatible with a worthy life.
+
+This tabu on labour has a further consequence in the industrial
+differentiation of classes. As the population increases in
+density and the predatory group grows into a settled industrial
+community, the constituted authorities and the customs governing
+ownership gain in scope and consistency. It then presently
+becomes impracticable to accumulate wealth by simple seizure,
+and, in logical consistency, acquisition by industry is equally
+impossible for high minded and impecunious men. The alternative
+open to them is beggary or privation. Wherever the canon of
+conspicuous leisure has a chance undisturbed to work out its
+tendency, there will therefore emerge a secondary, and in a sense
+spurious, leisure class -- abjectly poor and living in a
+precarious life of want and discomfort, but morally unable to
+stoop to gainful pursuits. The decayed gentleman and the lady who
+has seen better days are by no means unfamiliar phenomena even
+now. This pervading sense of the indignity of the slightest
+manual labour is familiar to all civilized peoples, as well as to
+peoples of a less advanced pecuniary culture. In persons of a
+delicate sensibility who have long been habituated to gentle
+manners, the sense of the shamefulness of manual labour may
+become so strong that, at a critical juncture, it will even set
+aside the instinct of self-preservation. So, for instance, we are
+told of certain Polynesian chiefs, who, under the stress of good
+form, preferred to starve rather than carry their food to their
+mouths with their own hands. It is true, this conduct may have
+been due, at least in part, to an excessive sanctity or tabu
+attaching to the chief's person. The tabu would have been
+communicated by the contact of his hands, and so would have made
+anything touched by him unfit for human food. But the tabu is
+itself a derivative of the unworthiness or moral incompatibility
+of labour; so that even when construed in this sense the conduct
+of the Polynesian chiefs is truer to the canon of honorific
+leisure than would at first appear. A better illustration, or at
+least a more unmistakable one, is afforded by a certain king of
+France, who is said to have lost his life through an excess of
+moral stamina in the observance of good form. In the absence of
+the functionary whose office it was to shift his master's seat,
+the king sat uncomplaining before the fire and suffered his royal
+person to be toasted beyond recovery. But in so doing he saved
+his Most Christian Majesty from menial contamination.  Summum
+crede nefas animam praeferre pudori, Et propter vitam vivendi
+perdere causas. 
+
+It has already been remarked that the term "leisure", as here
+used, does not connote indolence or quiescence. What it connotes
+is non-productive consumption of time. Time is consumed
+non-productively (1) from a sense of the unworthiness of
+productive work, and (2) as an evidence of pecuniary ability to
+afford a life of idleness. But the whole of the life of the
+gentleman of leisure is not spent before the eyes of the
+spectators who are to be impressed with that spectacle of
+honorific leisure which in the ideal scheme makes up his life.
+For some part of the time his life is perforce withdrawn from the
+public eye, and of this portion which is spent in private the
+gentleman of leisure should, for the sake of his good name, be
+able to give a convincing account. He should find some means of
+putting in evidence the leisure that is not spent in the sight of
+the spectators. This can be done only indirectly, through the
+exhibition of some tangible, lasting results of the leisure so
+spent -- in a manner analogous to the familiar exhibition of
+tangible, lasting products of the labour performed for the
+gentleman of leisure by handicraftsmen and servants in his
+employ.
+
+The lasting evidence of productive labour is its material product
+-- commonly some article of consumption. In the case of exploit
+it is similarly possible and usual to procure some tangible
+result that may serve for exhibition in the way of trophy or
+booty. at a later phase of the development it is customary to
+assume some badge of insignia of honour that will serve as a
+conventionally accepted mark of exploit, and which at the same
+time indicates the quantity or degree of exploit of which it is
+the symbol. As the population increases in density, and as human
+relations grow more complex and numerous, all the details of life
+undergo a process of elaboration and selection; and in this
+process of elaboration the use of trophies develops into a system
+of rank, titles, degrees and insignia, typical examples of which
+are heraldic devices, medals, and honorary decorations.
+
+As seen from the economic point of view, leisure,
+considered as an employment, is closely allied in kind with the
+life of exploit; and the achievements which characterise a life
+of leisure, and which remain as its decorous criteria, have much
+in common with the trophies of exploit. But leisure in the
+narrower sense, as distinct from exploit and from any ostensibly
+productive employment of effort on objects which are of no
+intrinsic use, does not commonly leave a material product. The
+criteria of a past performance of leisure therefore commonly take
+the form of "immaterial" goods. Such immaterial evidences of past
+leisure are quasi-scholarly or quasi-artistic accomplishments and
+a knowledge of processes and incidents which do not conduce
+directly to the furtherance of human life. So, for instance, in
+our time there is the knowledge of the dead languages and the
+occult sciences; of correct spelling; of syntax and prosody; of
+the various forms of domestic music and other household art; of
+the latest properties of dress, furniture, and equipage; of
+games, sports, and fancy-bred animals, such as dogs and
+race-horses. In all these branches of knowledge the initial
+motive from which their acquisition proceeded at the outset, and
+through which they first came into vogue, may have been something
+quite different from the wish to show that one's time had not
+been spent in industrial employment; but unless these
+accomplishments had approved themselves as serviceable evidence
+of an unproductive expenditure of time, they would not have
+survived and held their place as conventional accomplishments of
+the leisure class.
+
+These accomplishments may, in some sense, be classed as branches
+of learning. Beside and beyond these there is a further range of
+social facts which shade off from the region of learning into
+that of physical habit and dexterity. Such are what is known as
+manners and breeding, polite usage, decorum, and formal and
+ceremonial observances generally. This class of facts are even
+more immediately and obtrusively presented to the observation,
+and they therefore more widely and more imperatively insisted on
+as required evidences of a reputable degree of leisure. It is
+worth while to remark that all that class of ceremonial
+observances which are classed under the general head of manners
+hold a more important place in the esteem of men during the stage
+of culture at which conspicuous leisure has the greatest vogue as
+a mark of reputability, than at later stages of the cultural
+development. The barbarian of the quasi-peaceable stage of
+industry is notoriously a more high-bred gentleman, in all that
+concerns decorum, than any but the very exquisite among the men
+of a later age. Indeed, it is well known, or at least it is
+currently believed, that manners have progressively deteriorated
+as society has receded from the patriarchal stage. Many a
+gentleman of the old school has been provoked to remark
+regretfully upon the under-bred manners and bearing of even the
+better classes in the modern industrial communities; and the
+decay of the ceremonial code -- or as it is otherwise called, the
+vulgarisation of life -- among the industrial classes proper has
+become one of the chief enormities of latter-day civilisation in
+the eyes of all persons of delicate sensibilities. The decay
+which the code has suffered at the hands of a busy people
+testifies -- all depreciation apart -- to the fact that decorum
+is a product and an exponent of leisure class life and thrives in
+full measure only under a regime of status.
+
+The origin, or better the derivation, of manners is no doubt, to
+be sought elsewhere than in a conscious effort on the part of the
+well-mannered to show that much time has been spent in acquiring
+them. The proximate end of innovation and elaboration has been
+the higher effectiveness of the new departure in point of beauty
+or of expressiveness. In great part the ceremonial code of
+decorous usages owes its beginning and its growth to the desire
+to conciliate or to show goodwill, as anthropologists and
+sociologists are in the habit of assuming, and this initial
+motive is rarely if ever absent from the conduct of well-mannered
+persons at any stage of the later development. Manners, we are
+told, are in part an elaboration of gesture, and in part they are
+symbolical and conventionalised survivals representing former
+acts of dominance or of personal service or of personal contact.
+In large part they are an expression of the relation of status,
+-- a symbolic pantomime of mastery on the one hand and of
+subservience on the other. Wherever at the present time the
+predatory habit of mind, and the consequent attitude of mastery
+and of subservience, gives its character to the accredited scheme
+of life, there the importance of all punctilios of conduct is
+extreme, and the assiduity with which the ceremonial observance
+of rank and titles is attended to approaches closely to the ideal
+set by the barbarian of the quasi-peaceable nomadic culture. Some
+of the Continental countries afford good illustrations of this
+spiritual survival. In these communities the archaic ideal is
+similarly approached as regards the esteem accorded to manners as
+a fact of intrinsic worth.
+
+Decorum set out with being symbol and pantomime and with having
+utility only as an exponent of the facts and qualities
+symbolised; but it presently suffered the transmutation which
+commonly passes over symbolical facts in human intercourse.
+Manners presently came, in popular apprehension, to be possessed
+of a substantial utility in themselves; they acquired a
+sacramental character, in great measure independent of the facts
+which they originally prefigured. Deviations from the code of
+decorum have become intrinsically odious to all men, and good
+breeding is, in everyday apprehension, not simply an adventitious
+mark of human excellence, but an integral feature of the worthy
+human soul. There are few things that so touch us with
+instinctive revulsion as a breach of decorum; and so far have we
+progressed in the direction of imputing intrinsic utility to the
+ceremonial observances of etiquette that few of us, if any, can
+dissociate an offence against etiquette from a sense of the
+substantial unworthiness of the offender. A breach of faith may
+be condoned, but a breach of decorum can not. "Manners maketh
+man."
+
+None the less, while manners have this intrinsic utility, in the
+apprehension of the performer and the beholder alike, this sense
+of the intrinsic rightness of decorum is only the proximate
+ground of the vogue of manners and breeding. Their ulterior,
+economic ground is to be sought in the honorific character of
+that leisure or non-productive employment of time and effort
+without which good manners are not acquired. The knowledge and
+habit of good form come only by long-continued use. Refined
+tastes, manners, habits of life are a useful evidence of
+gentility, because good breeding requires time, application and
+expense, and  can therefore not be compassed by those whose time
+and energy are taken up with work. A knowledge of good form is
+prima facie evidence that that portion of the well-bred person's
+life which is not spent under the observation of the spectator
+has been worthily spent in acquiring accomplishments that are of
+no lucrative effect. In the last analysis the value of manners
+lies in the fact that they are the voucher of a life of leisure.
+Therefore, conversely, since leisure is the conventional means of
+pecuniary repute, the acquisition of some proficiency in decorum
+is incumbent on all who aspire to a modicum of pecuniary decency.
+
+So much of the honourable life of leisure as is not spent in the
+sight of spectators can serve the purposes of reputability only
+in so far as it leaves a tangible, visible result that can be put
+in evidence and can be measured and compared with products of the
+same class exhibited by competing aspirants for repute. Some such
+effect, in the way of leisurely manners and carriage, etc.,
+follows from simple persistent abstention from work, even where
+the subject does not take thought of the matter and
+studiously acquire an air of leisurely opulence and mastery.
+Especially does it seem to be true that a life of leisure in this
+way persisted in through several generations will leave a
+persistent, ascertainable effect in the conformation of the
+person, and still more in his habitual bearing and demeanour. But
+all the suggestions of a cumulative life of leisure, and all the
+proficiency in decorum that comes by the way of passive
+habituation, may be further improved upon by taking thought and
+assiduously acquiring the marks of honourable leisure, and then
+carrying the exhibition of these adventitious marks of exemption
+from employment out in a strenuous and systematic discipline.
+Plainly, this is a point at which a diligent application of
+effort and expenditure may materially further the attainment of a
+decent proficiency in the leisure-class properties. Conversely,
+the greater the degree of proficiency and the more patent the
+evidence of a high degree of habituation to observances which
+serve no lucrative or other directly useful purpose, the greater
+the consumption of time and substance impliedly involved in their
+acquisition, and the greater the resultant good repute. Hence
+under the competitive struggle for proficiency in good manners,
+it comes about that much pains in taken with the cultivation of
+habits of decorum; and hence the details of decorum develop into
+a comprehensive discipline, conformity to which is required of
+all who would be held blameless in point of repute. And hence, on
+the other hand, this conspicuous leisure of which decorum is a
+ramification grows gradually into a laborious drill in deportment
+and an education in taste and discrimination as to what articles
+of consumption are decorous and what are the decorous methods of
+consuming them.
+
+In this connection it is worthy of notice that the
+possibility of producing pathological and other idiosyncrasies of
+person and manner by shrewd mimicry and a systematic drill have
+been turned to account in the deliberate production of a cultured
+class -- often with a very happy effect. In this way, by the
+process vulgarly known as snobbery, a syncopated evolution of
+gentle birth and breeding is achieved in the case of a goodly
+number of families and lines of descent. This syncopated gentle
+birth gives results which, in point of serviceability as a
+leisure-class factor in the population, are in no wise
+substantially inferior to others who may have had a longer but
+less arduous training in the pecuniary properties.
+
+There are, moreover, measureable degrees of conformity to the
+latest accredited code of the punctilios as regards decorous
+means and methods of consumption. Differences between one person
+and another in the degree of conformity to the ideal in these
+respects can be compared, and persons may be graded and scheduled
+with some accuracy and effect according to a progressive scale of
+manners and breeding. The award of reputability in this regard is
+commonly made in good faith, on the ground of conformity to
+accepted canons of taste in the matters concerned, and without
+conscious regard to the pecuniary standing or the degree of
+leisure practised by any given candidate for reputability; but
+the canons of taste according to which the award is made are
+constantly under the surveillance of the law of conspicuous
+leisure, and are indeed constantly undergoing change and revision
+to bring them into closer conformity with its requirements. So
+that while the proximate ground of discrimination may be of
+another kind, still the pervading principle and abiding test of
+good breeding is the requirement of a substantial and patent
+waste of time. There may be some considerable range of variation
+in detail within the scope of this principle, but they are
+variations of form and expression, not of substance.
+
+Much of the courtesy of everyday intercourse is of course a
+direct expression of consideration and kindly good-will, and this
+element of conduct has for the most part no need of being traced
+back to any underlying ground of reputability to explain either
+its presence or the approval with which it is regarded; but the
+same is not true of the code of properties. These latter are
+expressions of status. It is of course sufficiently plain, to any
+one who cares to see, that our bearing towards menials and other
+pecuniary dependent inferiors is the bearing of the superior
+member in a relation of status, though its manifestation is often
+greatly modified and softened from the original expression of
+crude dominance. Similarly, our bearing towards superiors, and in
+great measure towards equals, expresses a more or less
+conventionalised attitude of subservience. Witness the masterful
+presence of the high-minded gentleman or lady, which testifies to
+so much of dominance and independence of economic circumstances,
+and which at the same time appeals with such convincing force to
+our sense of what is right and gracious. It is among this highest
+leisure class, who have no superiors and few peers, that decorum
+finds its fullest and maturest expression; and it is this highest
+class also that gives decorum that definite formulation which
+serves as a canon of conduct for the classes beneath. And there
+also the code is most obviously a code of status and shows most
+plainly its incompatibility with all vulgarly productive work. A
+divine assurance and an imperious complaisance, as of one
+habituated to require subservience and to take no thought for the
+morrow, is the birthright and the criterion of the gentleman at
+his best; and it is in popular apprehension even more than that,
+for this demeanour is accepted as an intrinsic attribute of
+superior worth, before which the base-born commoner delights to
+stoop and yield. 
+
+As has been indicated in an earlier chapter, there is reason to
+believe that the institution of ownership has begun with the
+ownership of persons, primarily women. The incentives to
+acquiring such property have apparently been: (1) a propensity
+for dominance and coercion; (2) the utility of these persons as
+evidence of the prowess of the owner; (3) the utility of their
+services.
+
+Personal service holds a peculiar place in the economic
+development. During the stage of quasi-peaceable industry, and
+especially during the earlier development of industry within the
+limits of this general stage, the utility of their services seems
+commonly to be the dominant motive to the acquisition of property
+in persons. Servants are valued for their services. But the
+dominance of this motive is not due to a decline in the absolute
+importance of the other two utilities possessed by servants. It
+is rather that the altered circumstance of life accentuate the
+utility of servants for this last-named purpose. Women and other
+slaves are highly valued, both as an evidence of wealth and as a
+means of accumulating wealth. Together with cattle, if the tribe
+is a pastoral one, they are the usual form of investment for a
+profit. To such an extent may female slavery give its character
+to the economic life under the quasi-peaceable culture that the
+women even comes to serve as a unit of value among peoples
+occupying this cultural stage -- as for instance in Homeric
+times. Where this is the case there need be little question but
+that the basis of the industrial system is chattel slavery and
+that the women are commonly slaves. The great, pervading human
+relation in such a system is that of master and servant. The
+accepted evidence of wealth is the possession of many women, and
+presently also of other slaves engaged in attendance on their
+master's person and in producing goods for him.
+
+A division of labour presently sets in, whereby personal service
+and attendance on the master becomes the special office of a
+portion of the servants, while those who are wholly employed in
+industrial occupations proper are removed more and more from all
+immediate relation to the person of their owner. At the same time
+those servants whose office is personal service, including
+domestic duties, come gradually to be exempted from productive
+industry carried on for gain.
+
+This process of progressive exemption from the common run of
+industrial employment will commonly begin with the exemption of
+the wife, or the chief wife. After the community has advanced to
+settled habits of life, wife-capture from hostile tribes becomes
+impracticable as a customary source of supply. Where this
+cultural advance has been achieved, the chief wife is ordinarily
+of gentle blood, and the fact of her being so will hasten her
+exemption from vulgar employment. The manner in which the concept
+of gentle blood originates, as well as the place which it
+occupies in the development of marriage, cannot be discussed in
+this place. For the purpose in hand it will be sufficient to say
+that gentle blood is blood which has been ennobled by protracted
+contact with accumulated wealth or unbroken prerogative. The
+women with these antecedents is preferred in marriage, both for
+the sake of a resulting alliance with her powerful relatives and
+because a superior worth is felt to inhere in blood which has
+been associated with many goods and great power. She will still
+be her husband's chattel, as she was her father's chattel before
+her purchase, but she is at the same time of her father's gentle
+blood; and hence there is a moral incongruity in her occupying
+herself with the debasing employments of her fellow-servants.
+However completely she may be subject to her master, and however
+inferior to the male members of the social stratum in which her
+birth has placed her, the principle that gentility is
+transmissible will act to place her above the common slave; and
+so soon as this principle has acquired a prescriptive authority
+it will act to invest her in some measure with that prerogative
+of leisure which is the chief mark of gentility. Furthered by
+this principle of transmissible gentility the wife's exemption
+gains in scope, if the wealth of her owner permits it, until it
+includes exemption from debasing menial service as well as from
+handicraft. As the industrial development goes on and property
+becomes massed in relatively fewer hands, the conventional
+standard of wealth of the upper class rises. The same tendency to
+exemption from handicraft, and in the course of time from menial
+domestic employments, will then assert itself as regards the
+other wives, if such there are, and also as regards other
+servants in immediate attendance upon the person of their master.
+The exemption comes more tardily the remoter the relation in
+which the servant stands to the person of the master.
+
+If the pecuniary situation of the master permits it, the
+development of a special class of personal or body servants is
+also furthered by the very grave importance which comes to attach
+to this personal service. The master's person, being the
+embodiment of worth and honour, is of the most serious
+consequence. Both for his reputable standing in the community and
+for his self-respect, it is a matter of moment that he should
+have at his call efficient specialised servants, whose attendance
+upon his person is not diverted from this their chief office by
+any by-occupation. These specialised servants are useful more for
+show than for service actually performed. In so far as they are
+not kept for exhibition simply, they afford gratification to
+their master chiefly in allowing scope to his propensity for
+dominance. It is true, the care of the continually increasing
+household apparatus may require added labour; but since the
+apparatus is commonly increased in order to serve as a means of
+good repute rather than as a means of comfort, this qualification
+is not of great weight. All these lines of utility are better
+served by a larger number of more highly specialised servants.
+There results, therefore, a constantly increasing differentiation
+and multiplication of domestic and body servants, along with a
+concomitant progressive exemption of such servants from
+productive labour. By virtue of their serving as evidence of
+ability to pay, the office of such domestics regularly tends to
+include continually fewer duties, and their service tends in the
+end to become nominal only. This is especially true of those
+servants who are in most immediate and obvious attendance upon
+their master. So that the utility of these comes to consist, in
+great part, in their conspicuous exemption from productive labour
+and in the evidence which this exemption affords of their
+master's wealth and power.
+
+After some considerable advance has been made in the practice of
+employing a special corps of servants for the performance of a
+conspicuous leisure in this manner, men begin to be preferred
+above women for services that bring them obtrusively into view.
+Men, especially lusty, personable fellows, such as footmen and
+other menials should be, are obviously more powerful and more
+expensive than women. They are better fitted for this work, as
+showing a larger waste of time and of human energy. Hence it
+comes about that in the economy of the leisure class the busy
+housewife of the early patriarchal days, with her retinue of
+hard-working handmaidens, presently gives place to the lady and
+the lackey.
+
+In all grades and walks of life, and at any stage of the economic
+development, the leisure of the lady and of the lackey differs
+from the leisure of the gentleman in his own right in that it is
+an occupation of an ostensibly laborious kind. It takes the form,
+in large measure, of a painstaking attention to the service of
+the master, or to the maintenance and elaboration of the
+household paraphernalia; so that it is leisure only in the sense
+that little or no productive work is performed by this class, not
+in the sense that all appearance of labour is avoided by them.
+The duties performed by the lady, or by the household or domestic
+servants, are frequently arduous enough, and they are  also
+frequently directed to ends which are considered extremely
+necessary to the comfort of the entire household. So far as these
+services conduce to the physical efficiency or comfort of the
+master or the rest of the household, they are to be accounted
+productive work. Only the residue of employment left after
+deduction of this effective work is to be classed as a
+performance of leisure.
+
+But much of the services classed as household cares in modern
+everyday life, and many of the "utilities" required for a
+comfortable existence by civilised man, are of a ceremonial
+character. They are, therefore, properly to be classed as a
+performance of leisure in the sense in which the term is here
+used. They may be none the less imperatively necessary from the
+point of view of decent existence: they may be none the less
+requisite for personal comfort even, although they may be chiefly
+or wholly of a ceremonial character. But in so far as they
+partake of this character they are imperative and requisite
+because we have been taught to require them under pain of
+ceremonial uncleanness or unworthiness. We feel discomfort in
+their absence, but not because their absence results directly in
+physical discomfort; nor would a taste not trained to
+discriminate between the conventionally good and the
+conventionally bad take offence at their omission. In so far as
+this is true the labour spent in these services is to be classed
+as leisure; and when performed by others than the economically
+free and self-directed head of the establishment, they are to be
+classed as vicarious leisure.
+
+The vicarious leisure performed by housewives and menials, under
+the head of household cares, may frequently develop into
+drudgery, especially where the competition for reputability is
+close and strenuous. This is frequently the case in modern life.
+Where this happens, the domestic service which comprises the
+duties of this servant class might aptly be designated as wasted
+effort, rather than as vicarious leisure. But the latter term has
+the advantage of indicating the line of derivation of these
+domestic offices, as well as of neatly suggesting the substantial
+economic ground of their utility; for these occupations are
+chiefly useful as a method of imputing pecuniary reputability to
+the master or to the household on the ground that a given amount
+of time and effort is conspicuously wasted in that behalf.
+
+In this way, then, there arises a subsidiary or derivative
+leisure class, whose office is the performance of a vicarious
+leisure for the behoof of the reputability of the primary or
+legitimate leisure class. This vicarious leisure class is
+distinguished from the leisure class proper by a characteristic
+feature of its habitual mode of life. The leisure of the master
+class is, at least ostensibly, an indulgence of a proclivity for
+the avoidance of labour and is presumed to enhance the master's
+own well-being and fulness of life; but the leisure of the
+servant class exempt from productive labour is in some sort a
+performance exacted from them, and is not normally or primarily
+directed to their own comfort. The leisure of the servant is not
+his own leisure. So far as he is a servant in the full sense, and
+not at the same time a member of a lower order of the leisure
+class proper, his leisure normally passes under the guise of
+specialised service directed to the furtherance of his master's
+fulness of life. Evidence of this relation of subservience is
+obviously present in the servant's carriage and manner of life.
+The like is often true of the wife throughout the protracted
+economic stage during which she is still primarily a servant --
+that is to say, so long as the household with a male head remains
+in force. In order to satisfy the requirements of the leisure
+class scheme of life, the servant should show not only an
+attitude of subservience, but also the effects of special
+training and practice in subservience. The servant or wife should
+not only perform certain offices and show a servile disposition,
+but it is quite as imperative that they should show an acquired
+facility in the tactics of subservience -- a trained conformity
+to the canons of effectual and conspicuous subservience. Even
+today it is this aptitude and acquired skill in the formal
+manifestation of the servile relation that constitutes the chief
+element of utility in our highly paid servants, as well as one of
+the chief ornaments of the well-bred housewife.
+
+The first requisite of a good servant is that he should
+conspicuously know his place. It is not enough that he knows how
+to effect certain desired mechanical results; he must above all,
+know how to effect these results in due form. Domestic service
+might be said to be a spiritual rather than a mechanical
+function. Gradually there grows up an elaborate system of good
+form, specifically regulating the manner in which this vicarious
+leisure of the servant class is to be performed. Any departure
+from these canons of form is to be depreciated, not so much
+because it evinces a shortcoming in mechanical efficiency, or
+even that it shows an absence of the servile attitude and
+temperament, but because, in the last analysis, it shows the
+absence of special training. Special training in personal service
+costs time and effort, and where it is obviously present in a
+high degree, it argues that the servant who possesses it, neither
+is nor has been habitually engaged in any productive occupation.
+It is prima facie evidence of a vicarious leisure extending far
+back in the past. So that trained service has utility, not only
+as gratifying the master's instinctive liking for good and
+skilful workmanship and his propensity for conspicuous dominance
+over those whose lives are subservient to his own, but it has
+utility also as putting in evidence a much larger consumption of
+human service than would be shown by the mere present conspicuous
+leisure performed by an untrained person. It is a serious
+grievance if a gentleman's butler or footman performs his duties
+about his master's table or carriage in such unformed style as to
+suggest that his habitual occupation may be ploughing or
+sheepherding. Such bungling work would imply inability on the
+master's part to procure the service of specially trained
+servants; that is to say, it would imply inability to pay for the
+consumption of time, effort, and instruction required to fit a
+trained servant for special service under the exacting code of
+forms. If the performance of the servant argues lack of means on
+the part of his master, it defeats its chief substantial end; for
+the chief use of servants is the evidence they afford of the
+master's ability to pay.
+
+What has just been said might be taken to imply that the offence
+of an under-trained servant lies in a direct suggestion of
+inexpensiveness or of usefulness. Such, of course, is not the
+case. The connection is much less immediate. What happens here is
+what happens generally. Whatever approves itself to us on any
+ground at the outset, presently comes to appeal to us as a
+gratifying thing in itself; it comes to rest in our habits of
+though as substantially right. But in order that any specific
+canon of deportment shall maintain itself in favour, it must
+continue to have the support of, or at least not be incompatible
+with, the habit or aptitude which constitutes the norm of its
+development. The need of vicarious leisure, or conspicuous
+consumption of service, is a dominant incentive to the keeping of
+servants. So long as this remains true it may be set down without
+much discussion that any such departure from accepted usage as
+would suggest an abridged apprenticeship in service would
+presently be found insufferable. The requirement of an expensive
+vicarious leisure acts indirectly, selectively, by guiding the
+formation of our taste, -- of our sense of what is right in these
+matters, -- and so weeds out unconformable departures by
+withholding approval of them.
+
+As the standard of wealth recognized by common consent advances,
+the possession and exploitation of servants as a means of showing
+superfluity undergoes a refinement. The possession and
+maintenance of slaves employed in the production of goods argues
+wealth and prowess, but the maintenance of servants who produce
+nothing argues still higher wealth and position. Under this
+principle there arises a class of servants, the more numerous the
+better, whose sole office is fatuously to wait upon the person of
+their owner, and so to put in evidence his ability unproductively
+to consume a large amount of service. There supervenes a division
+of labour among the servants or dependents whose life is spent in
+maintaining the honour of the gentleman of leisure. So that,
+while one group produces goods for him, another group, usually
+headed by the wife, or chief, consumes for him in conspicuous
+leisure; thereby putting in evidence his ability to sustain large
+pecuniary damage without impairing his superior opulence.
+
+This somewhat idealized and diagrammatic outline of the
+development and nature of domestic service comes nearest being
+true for that cultural stage which was here been named the
+"quasi-peaceable" stage of industry. At this stage personal
+service first rises to the position of an economic institution,
+and it is at this stage that it occupies the largest place in the
+community's scheme of life. In the cultural sequence, the
+quasiªpeaceable stage follows the predatory stage proper, the two
+being successive phases of barbarian life. Its characteristic
+feature is a formal observance of peace and order, at the same
+time that life at this stage still has too much of coercion and
+class antagonism to be called peaceable in the full sense of the
+word. For many purposes, and from another point of view than the
+economic one, it might as well be named the stage of status. The
+method of human relation during this stage, and the spiritual
+attitude of men at this level of culture, is well summed up under
+the term. But as a descriptive term to characterise the
+prevailing methods of industry, as well as to indicate the trend
+of industrial development at this point in economic evolution,
+the term "quasi-peaceable" seems preferable. So far as concerns
+the communities of the Western culture, this phase of economic
+development probably lies in the past; except for a numerically
+small though very conspicuous fraction of the community in whom
+the habits of thought peculiar to the barbarian culture have
+suffered but a relatively slight disintegration.
+
+Personal service is still an element of great economic
+importance, especially as regards the distribution and
+consumption of goods; but its relative importance even in this
+direction is no doubt less than it once was. The best development
+of this vicarious leisure lies in the past rather than in the
+present; and its best expression in the present is to be found in
+the scheme of life of the upper leisure class. To this class the
+modern culture owes much in the way of the conservation of
+traditions, usages, and habits of thought which belong on a more
+archaic cultural plane, so far as regards their widest acceptance
+and their most effective development.
+
+In the modern industrial communities the mechanical
+contrivances available for the comfort and convenience of
+everyday life are highly developed. So much so that body
+servants, or, indeed, domestic servants of any kind, would now
+scarcely be employed by anybody except on the ground of a canon
+of reputability carried over by tradition from earlier usage. The
+only exception would be servants employed to attend on the
+persons of the infirm and the feeble-minded. But such servants
+properly come under the head of trained nurses rather than under
+that of domestic servants, and they are, therefore, an apparent
+rather than a real exception to the rule.
+
+The proximate reason for keeping domestic servants, for instance,
+in the moderately well-to-do household of to-day, is (ostensibly)
+that the members of the household are unable without discomfort
+to compass the work required by such a modern
+establishment. And the reason for their being unable to
+accomplish it is (1) that they have too many "social duties", and 
+(2) that the work to be done is too severe and that there is too
+much of it. These two reasons may be restated as follows: (1)
+Under the mandatory code of decency, the time and effort of the
+members of such a household are required to be ostensibly all
+spent in a performance of conspicuous leisure, in the way of
+calls, drives, clubs, sewing-circles, sports, charity
+organisations, and other like social functions. Those persons
+whose time and energy are employed in these matters privately
+avow that all these observances, as well as the incidental
+attention to dress and other conspicuous consumption, are very
+irksome but altogether unavoidable. (2) Under the requirement of
+conspicuous consumption of goods, the apparatus of living has
+grown so elaborate and cumbrous, in the way of dwellings,
+furniture, bric-a-brac, wardrobe and meals, that the consumers of
+these things cannot make way with them in the required manner
+without help. Personal contact with the hired persons whose aid
+is called in to fulfil the routine of decency is commonly
+distasteful to the occupants of the house, but their presence is
+endured and paid for, in order to delegate to them a share in
+this onerous consumption of household goods. The presence of
+domestic servants, and of the special class of body servants in
+an eminent degree, is a concession of physical comfort to the
+moral need of pecuniary decency.
+
+The largest manifestation of vicarious leisure in modern life is
+made up of what are called domestic duties. These duties are fast
+becoming a species of services performed, not so much for the
+individual behoof of the head of the household as for the
+reputability of the household taken as a corporate unit -- a
+group of which the housewife is a member on a footing of
+ostensible equality. As fast as the household for which they are
+performed departs from its archaic basis of ownership-marriage,
+these household duties of course tend to fall out of the category
+of vicarious leisure in the original sense; except so far as they
+are performed by hired servants. That is to say, since vicarious
+leisure is possible only on a basis of status or of hired
+service, the disappearance of the relation of status from human
+intercourse at any point carries with it the disappearance of
+vicarious leisure so far as regards that much of life. But it is
+to be added, in qualification of this qualification, that so long
+as the household subsists, even with a divided head, this class
+of non-productive labour performed for the sake of the household
+reputability must still be classed as vicarious leisure, although
+in a slightly altered sense. It is now leisure performed for the
+quasi-personal corporate household, instead of, as formerly, for
+the proprietary head of the household.
+
+Chapter Four
+
+Conspicuous Consumption
+
+In what has been said of the evolution of the vicarious leisure
+class and its differentiation from the general body of the
+working classes, reference has been made to a further
+division of labour, -- that between the different servant
+classes. One portion of the servant class, chiefly those persons
+whose occupation is vicarious leisure, come to undertake a new,
+subsidiary range of duties -- the vicarious consumption of goods.
+The most obvious form in which this consumption occurs is seen in
+the wearing of liveries and the occupation of spacious servants'
+quarters. Another, scarcely less obtrusive or less effective form
+of vicarious consumption, and a much more widely prevalent one,
+is the consumption of food, clothing, dwelling, and furniture by
+the lady and the rest of the domestic establishment.
+
+But already at a point in economic evolution far antedating the
+emergence of the lady, specialised consumption of goods as an
+evidence of pecuniary strength had begun to work out in a more or
+less elaborate system. The beginning of a differentiation in
+consumption even antedates the appearance of anything that can
+fairly be called pecuniary strength. It is traceable back to the
+initial phase of predatory culture, and there is even a
+suggestion that an incipient differentiation in this respect lies
+back of the beginnings of the predatory life. This most primitive
+differentiation in the consumption of goods is like the later
+differentiation with which we are all so intimately familiar, in
+that it is largely of a ceremonial character, but unlike the
+latter it does not rest on a difference in accumulated wealth.
+The utility of consumption as an evidence of wealth is to be
+classed as a derivative growth. It is an adaption to a new end,
+by a selective process, of a distinction previously existing and
+well established in men's habits of thought.
+
+In the earlier phases of the predatory culture the only economic
+differentiation is a broad distinction between an honourable
+superior class made up of the able-bodied men on the one side,
+and a base inferior class of labouring women on the other.
+According to the ideal scheme of life in force at the time it is
+the office of the men to consume what the women produce. Such
+consumption as falls to the women is merely incidental to their
+work; it is a means to their continued labour, and not a
+consumption directed to their own comfort and fulness of life.
+Unproductive consumption of goods is honourable, primarily as a
+mark of prowess and a perquisite of human dignity; secondarily it
+becomes substantially honourable to itself, especially the
+consumption of the more desirable things. The consumption of
+choice articles of food, and frequently also of rare articles of
+adornment, becomes tabu to the women and children; and if there
+is a base (servile) class of men, the tabu holds also for them.
+With a further advance in culture this tabu may change into
+simple custom of a more or less rigorous character; but whatever
+be the theoretical basis of the distinction which is maintained,
+whether it be a tabu or a larger conventionality, the features of
+the conventional scheme of consumption do not change easily. When
+the quasi-peaceable stage of industry is reached, with its
+fundamental institution of chattel slavery, the general
+principle, more or less rigorously applied, is that the base,
+industrious class should consume only what may be necessary to
+their subsistence. In the nature of things, luxuries and the
+comforts of life belong to the leisure class. Under the tabu,
+certain victuals, and more particularly certain beverages, are
+strictly reserved for the use of the superior class.
+
+The ceremonial differentiation of the dietary is best seen in the
+use of intoxicating beverages and narcotics. If these articles of
+consumption are costly, they are felt to be noble and honorific.
+Therefore the base classes, primarily the women, practice an
+enforced continence with respect to these stimulants, except in
+countries where they are obtainable at a very low cost. From
+archaic times down through all the length of the patriarchal
+regime it has been the office of the women to prepare and
+administer these luxuries, and it has been the perquisite of the
+men of gentle birth and breeding to consume them. Drunkenness and
+the other pathological consequences of the free use of stimulants
+therefore tend in their turn to become honorific, as being a
+mark, at the second remove, of the superior status of those who
+are able to afford the indulgence. Infirmities induced by
+over-indulgence are among some peoples freely recognised as manly
+attributes. It has even happened that the name for certain
+diseased conditions of the body arising from such an origin has
+passed into everyday speech as a synonym for "noble" or "gentle".
+It is only at a relatively early stage of culture that the
+symptoms of expensive vice are conventionally accepted as marks
+of a superior status, and so tend to become virtues and command
+the deference of the community; but the reputability that
+attaches to certain expensive vices long retains so much of its
+force as to appreciably lesson the disapprobation visited upon
+the men of the wealthy or noble class for any excessive
+indulgence. The same invidious distinction adds force to the
+current disapproval of any indulgence of this kind on the part of
+women, minors, and inferiors. This invidious traditional
+distinction has not lost its force even among the more advanced
+peoples of today. Where the example set by the leisure class
+retains its imperative force in the regulation of the
+conventionalities, it is observable that the women still in great
+measure practise the same traditional continence with regard to
+stimulants.
+
+This characterisation of the greater continence in the use of
+stimulants practised by the women of the reputable classes may
+seem an excessive refinement of logic at the expense of common
+sense. But facts within easy reach of any one who cares to know
+them go to say that the greater abstinence of women is in some
+part due to an imperative conventionality; and this
+conventionality is, in a general way, strongest where the
+patriarchal tradition -- the tradition that the woman is a
+chattel -- has retained its hold in greatest vigour. In a sense
+which has been greatly qualified in scope and rigour, but which
+has by no means lost its meaning even yet, this tradition says
+that the woman, being a chattel, should consume only what is
+necessary to her sustenance, -- except so far as her further
+consumption contributes to the comfort or the good repute of her
+master. The consumption of luxuries, in the true sense, is a
+consumption directed to the comfort of the consumer himself, and
+is, therefore, a mark of the master. Any such consumption by
+others can take place only on a basis of sufferance. In
+communities where the popular habits of thought have been
+profoundly shaped by  the patriarchal tradition we may
+accordingly look for survivals of the tabu on luxuries at least
+to the extent of a conventional deprecation of their use by the
+unfree and dependent class. This is more particularly true as
+regards certain luxuries, the use of which by the dependent class
+would detract sensibly from the comfort or pleasure of their
+masters, or which are held to be of doubtful legitimacy on other
+grounds. In the apprehension of the great conservative middle
+class of Western civilisation the use of these various stimulants
+is obnoxious to at least one, if not both, of these objections;
+and it is a fact too significant to be passed over that it is
+precisely among these middle classes of the Germanic culture,
+with their strong surviving sense of the patriarchal proprieties,
+that the women are to the greatest extent subject to a qualified
+tabu on narcotics and alcoholic beverages. With many
+qualifications -- with more qualifications as the patriarchal
+tradition has gradually weakened -- the general rule is felt to
+be right and binding that women should consume only for the
+benefit of their masters. The objection of course presents itself
+that expenditure on women's dress and household paraphernalia is
+an obvious exception to this rule; but it will appear in the
+sequel that this exception is much more obvious than substantial.
+During the earlier stages of economic development,
+consumption of goods without stint, especially consumption of the
+better grades of goods, -- ideally all consumption in excess of
+the subsistence minimum, -- pertains normally to the leisure
+class. This restriction tends to disappear, at least formally,
+after the later peaceable stage has been reached, with private
+ownership of goods and an industrial system based on wage labour
+or on the petty household economy. But during the earlier
+quasiªpeaceable stage, when so many of the traditions through
+which the institution of a leisure class has affected the
+economic life of later times were taking form and consistency,
+this principle has had the force of a conventional law. It has
+served as the norm to which consumption has tended to conform,
+and any appreciable departure from it is to be regarded as an
+aberrant form, sure to be eliminated sooner or later in the
+further course of development.
+
+The quasi-peaceable gentleman of leisure, then, not only consumes
+of the staff of life beyond the minimum required for subsistence
+and physical efficiency, but his consumption also undergoes a
+specialisation as regards the quality of the goods consumed. He
+consumes freely and of the best, in food, drink, narcotics,
+shelter, services, ornaments, apparel, weapons and accoutrements,
+amusements, amulets, and idols or divinities. In the process of
+gradual amelioration which takes place in the articles of his
+consumption, the motive principle and proximate aim of innovation
+is no doubt the higher efficiency of the improved and more
+elaborate products for personal comfort and well-being. But that
+does not remain the sole purpose of their consumption. The canon
+of reputability is at hand and seizes upon such innovations as
+are, according to its standard, fit to survive. Since the
+consumption of these more excellent goods is an evidence of
+wealth, it becomes honorific; and conversely, the failure to
+consume in due quantity and quality becomes a mark of inferiority
+and demerit.
+
+This growth of punctilious discrimination as to qualitative
+excellence in eating, drinking, etc. presently affects not only
+the manner of life, but also the training and intellectual
+activity of the gentleman of leisure. He is no longer simply the
+successful, aggressive male, -- the man of strength, resource,
+and intrepidity. In order to avoid stultification he must also
+cultivate his tastes, for it now becomes incumbent on him to
+discriminate with some nicety between the noble and the ignoble
+in consumable goods. He becomes a connoisseur in creditable
+viands of various degrees of merit, in manly beverages and
+trinkets, in seemly apparel and architecture, in weapons, games,
+dancers, and the narcotics. This cultivation of aesthetic faculty
+requires time and application, and the demands made upon the
+gentleman in this direction therefore tend to change his life of
+leisure into a more or less arduous application to the business
+of learning how to live a life of ostensible leisure in a
+becoming way. Closely related to the requirement that the
+gentleman must consume freely and of the right kind of goods,
+there is the requirement that he must know how to consume them in
+a seemly manner. His life of leisure must be conducted in due
+form. Hence arise good manners in the way pointed out in an
+earlier chapter. High-bred manners and ways of living are items
+of conformity to the norm of conspicuous leisure and conspicuous
+consumption.
+
+Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of
+reputability to the gentleman of leisure. As wealth accumulates
+on his hands, his own unaided effort will not avail to
+sufficiently put his opulence in evidence by this method. The aid
+of friends and competitors is therefore brought in by resorting
+to the giving of valuable presents and expensive feasts and
+entertainments. Presents and feasts had probably another origin
+than that of naive ostentation, but they required their utility
+for this purpose very early, and they have retained that
+character to the present; so that their utility in this respect
+has now long been the substantial ground on which these usages
+rest. Costly entertainments, such as the potlatch or the ball,
+are peculiarly adapted to serve this end. The competitor with
+whom the entertainer wishes to institute a comparison is, by this
+method, made to serve as a means to the end. He consumes
+vicariously for his host at the same time that he is witness to
+the consumption of that excess of good things which his host is
+unable to dispose of single-handed, and he is also made to
+witness his host's facility in etiquette.
+
+In the giving of costly entertainments other motives, of more
+genial kind, are of course also present. The custom of festive
+gatherings probably originated in motives of conviviality and
+religion; these motives are also present in the later
+development, but they do not continue to be the sole motives. The
+latter-day leisure-class festivities and entertainments may
+continue in some slight degree to serve the religious need and in
+a higher degree the needs of recreation and conviviality, but
+they also serve an invidious purpose; and they serve it none the
+less effectually for having a colorable non-invidious ground in
+these more avowable motives. But the economic effect of these
+social amenities is not therefore lessened, either in the
+vicarious consumption of goods or in the exhibition of difficult
+and costly achievements in etiquette.
+
+As wealth accumulates, the leisure class develops further in
+function and structure, and there arises a differentiation within
+the class. There is a more or less elaborate system of rank and
+grades. This differentiation is furthered by the inheritance of
+wealth and the consequent inheritance of gentility. With the
+inheritance of gentility goes the inheritance of obligatory
+leisure; and gentility of a sufficient potency to entail a life
+of leisure may be inherited without the complement of wealth
+required to maintain a dignified leisure. Gentle blood may be
+transmitted without goods enough to afford a reputably free
+consumption at one's ease. Hence results a class of impecunious
+gentlemen of leisure, incidentally referred to already. These
+half-caste gentlemen of leisure fall into a system of
+hierarchical gradations. Those who stand near the higher and the
+highest grades of the wealthy leisure class, in point of birth,
+or in point of wealth, or both, outrank the remoter-born and the
+pecuniarily weaker. These lower grades, especially the
+impecunious, or marginal, gentlemen of leisure, affiliate
+themselves by a system of dependence or fealty to the great ones;
+by so doing they gain an increment of repute, or of the means
+with which to lead a life of leisure, from their patron. They
+become his courtiers or retainers, servants; and being fed and
+countenanced by their patron they are indices of his rank and
+vicarious consumer of his superfluous wealth. Many of these
+affiliated gentlemen of leisure are at the same time lesser men
+of substance in their own right; so that some of them are
+scarcely at all, others only partially, to be rated as vicarious
+consumers. So many of them, however, as make up the retainer and
+hangers-on of the patron may be classed as vicarious consumer
+without qualification. Many of these again, and also many of the
+other aristocracy of less degree, have in turn attached to their
+persons a more or less comprehensive group of vicarious consumer
+in the persons of their wives and children, their servants,
+retainers, etc.
+
+Throughout this graduated scheme of vicarious leisure and
+vicarious consumption the rule holds that these offices must be
+performed in some such manner, or under some such circumstance or
+insignia, as shall point plainly to the master to whom this
+leisure or consumption pertains, and to whom therefore the
+resulting increment of good repute of right inures. The
+consumption and leisure executed by these persons for their
+master or patron represents an investment on his part with a view
+to an increase of good fame. As regards feasts and largesses this
+is obvious enough, and the imputation of repute to the host or
+patron here takes place immediately, on the ground of common
+notoriety . Where leisure and consumption is performed
+vicariously by henchmen and retainers, imputation of the
+resulting repute to the patron is effected by their residing near
+his person so that it may be plain to all men from what source
+they draw. As the group whose good esteem is to be secured in
+this way grows larger, more patent means are required to indicate
+the imputation of merit for the leisure performed, and to this
+end uniforms, badges, and liveries come into vogue. The wearing
+of uniforms or liveries implies a considerable degree of
+dependence, and may even be said to be a mark of servitude, real
+or ostensible. The wearers of uniforms and liveries may be
+roughly divided into two classes-the free and the servile, or the
+noble and the ignoble. The services performed by them are
+likewise divisible into noble and ignoble. Of course the
+distinction is not observed with strict consistency in practice;
+the less debasing of the base services and the less honorific of
+the noble functions are not infrequently merged in the same
+person. But the general distinction is not on that account to be
+overlooked. What may add some perplexity is the fact that this
+fundamental distinction between noble and ignoble, which rests on
+the nature of the ostensible service performed, is traversed by a
+secondary distinction into honorific and humiliating, resting on
+the rank of the person for whom the service is performed or whose
+livery is worn. So, those offices which are by right the proper
+employment of the leisure class are noble; such as government,
+fighting, hunting, the care of arms and accoutrements, and the
+like -- in short, those which may be classed as ostensibly
+predatory employments. On the other hand, those employments which
+properly fall to the industrious class are ignoble; such as
+handicraft or other productive labor, menial services and the
+like. But a base service performed for a person of very high
+degree may become a very honorific office; as for instance the
+office of a Maid of Honor or of a Lady in Waiting to the Queen,
+or the King's Master of the Horse or his Keeper of the Hounds.
+The two offices last named suggest a principle of some general
+bearing. Whenever, as in these cases, the menial service in
+question has to do directly with the primary leisure employments
+of fighting and hunting, it easily acquires a reflected honorific
+character. In this way great honor may come to attach to an
+employment which in its own nature belongs to the baser sort.
+In the later development of peaceable industry, the usage of
+employing an idle corps of uniformed men-at-arms gradually
+lapses. Vicarious consumption by dependents bearing the insignia
+of their patron or master narrows down to a corps of liveried
+menials. In a heightened degree, therefore, the livery comes to
+be a badge of servitude, or rather servility. Something of a
+honorific character always attached to the livery of the armed
+retainer, but this honorific character disappears when the livery
+becomes the exclusive badge of the menial. The livery becomes
+obnoxious to nearly all who are required to wear it. We are yet
+so little removed from a state of effective slavery as still to
+be fully sensitive to the sting of any imputation of servility.
+This antipathy asserts itself even in the case of the liveries or
+uniforms which some corporations prescribe as the distinctive
+dress of their employees. In this country the aversion even goes
+the length of discrediting -- in a mild and uncertain way --
+those government employments, military and civil, which require
+the wearing of a livery or uniform.
+
+With the disappearance of servitude, the number of vicarious
+consumers attached to any one gentleman tends, on the whole, to
+decrease. The like is of course true, and perhaps in a still
+higher degree, of the number of dependents who perform vicarious
+leisure for him. In a general way, though not wholly nor
+consistently, these two groups coincide. The dependent who was
+first delegated for these duties was the wife, or the chief wife;
+and, as would be expected, in the later development of the
+institution, when the number of persons by whom these duties are
+customarily performed gradually narrows, the wife remains the
+last. In the higher grades of society a large volume of both
+these kinds of service is required; and here the wife is of
+course still assisted in the work by a more or less numerous
+corps of menials. But as we descend the social scale, the point
+is presently reached where the duties of vicarious leisure and
+consumption devolve upon the wife alone. In the communities of
+the Western culture, this point is at present found among the
+lower middle class.
+
+And here occurs a curious inversion. It is a fact of common
+observance that in this lower middle class there is no pretense
+of leisure on the part of the head of the household. Through
+force of circumstances it has fallen into disuse. But the
+middle-class wife still carries on the business of vicarious
+leisure, for the good name of the household and its master. In
+descending the social scale in any modern industrial community,
+the primary fact-the conspicuous leisure of the master of the
+household-disappears at a relatively high point. The head of the
+middle-class household has been reduced by economic circumstances
+to turn his hand to gaining a livelihood by occupations which
+often partake largely of the character of industry, as in the
+case of the ordinary business man of today. But the derivative
+fact-the vicarious leisure and consumption rendered by the wife,
+and the auxiliary vicarious performance of leisure by
+menials-remains in vogue as a conventionality which the demands
+of reputability will not suffer to be slighted. It is by no means
+an uncommon spectacle to find a man applying himself to work with
+the utmost assiduity, in order that his wife may in due form
+render for him that degree of vicarious leisure which the common
+sense of the time demands.
+
+The leisure rendered by the wife in such cases is, of course, not
+a simple manifestation of idleness or indolence. It almost
+invariably occurs disguised under some form of work or household
+duties or social amenities, which prove on analysis to serve
+little or no ulterior end beyond showing that she does not occupy
+herself with anything that is gainful or that is of substantial
+use. As has already been noticed under the head of manners, the
+greater part of the customary round of domestic cares to which
+the middle-class housewife gives her time and effort is of this
+character. Not that the results of her
+attention to household matters, of a decorative and mundificatory
+character, are not pleasing to the sense of men trained in
+middle-class proprieties; but the taste to which these effects of
+household adornment and tidiness appeal is a taste which has been
+formed under the selective guidance of a canon of propriety that
+demands just these evidences of wasted effort. The effects are
+pleasing to us chiefly because we have been taught to find them
+pleasing. There goes into these domestic duties much solicitude
+for a proper combination of form and color, and for other ends
+that are to be classed as aesthetic in the proper sense of the
+term; and it is not denied that effects having some substantial
+aesthetic value are sometimes attained. Pretty much all that is
+here insisted on is that, as regards these amenities of life, the
+housewife's efforts are under the guidance of traditions that
+have been shaped by the law of conspicuously wasteful expenditure
+of time and substance. If beauty or comfort is achieved-and it is
+a more or less fortuitous circumstance if they are-they must be
+achieved by means and methods that commend themselves to the
+great economic law of wasted effort. The more reputable,
+"presentable" portion of middle-class household paraphernalia
+are, on the one hand, items of conspicuous consumption, and on
+the other hand, apparatus for putting in evidence the vicarious
+leisure rendered by the housewife.
+
+The requirement of vicarious consumption at the hands of the wife
+continues in force even at a lower point in the pecuniary scale
+than the requirement of vicarious leisure. At a point below which
+little if any pretense of wasted effort, in ceremonial cleanness
+and the like, is observable, and where there is
+assuredly no conscious attempt at ostensible leisure, decency
+still requires the wife to consume some goods conspicuously for
+the reputability of the household and its head. So that, as the
+latter-day outcome of this evolution of an archaic institution,
+the wife, who was at the outset the drudge and chattel of the
+man, both in fact and in theory -- the producer of goods for him
+to consume -- has become the ceremonial consumer of goods which
+he produces. But she still quite unmistakably remains his chattel
+in theory; for the habitual rendering of vicarious leisure and
+consumption is the abiding mark of the unfree servant.
+
+This vicarious consumption practiced by the household of the
+middle and lower classes can not be counted as a direct
+expression of the leisure-class scheme of life, since the
+household of this pecuniary grade does not belong within the
+leisure class. It is rather that the leisure-class scheme of life
+here comes to an expression at the second remove. The leisure
+class stands at the head of the social structure in point of
+reputability; and its manner of life and its standards of worth
+therefore afford the norm of reputability for the community. The
+observance of these standards, in some degree of approximation,
+becomes incumbent upon all classes lower in the scale. In modern
+civilized communities the lines of demarcation between social
+classes have grown vague and transient, and wherever this happens
+the norm of reputability imposed by the upper class extends its
+coercive influence with but slight hindrance down through the
+social structure to the lowest strata. The result is that the
+members of each stratum accept as their ideal of decency the
+scheme of life in vogue in the next higher stratum, and bend
+their energies to live up to that ideal. On pain of forfeiting
+their good name and their self-respect in case of failure, they
+must conform to the accepted code, at least in appearance.
+The basis on which good repute in any highly organized industrial
+community ultimately rests is pecuniary strength; and the means
+of showing pecuniary strength, and so of gaining or retaining a
+good name, are leisure and a conspicuous consumption of goods.
+Accordingly, both of these methods are in vogue as far down the
+scale as it remains possible; and in the lower strata in which
+the two methods are employed, both offices are in great part
+delegated to the wife and children of the household. Lower still,
+where any degree of leisure, even ostensible, has become
+impracticable for the wife, the conspicuous consumption of goods
+remains and is carried on by the wife and children. The man of
+the household also can do something in this direction, and
+indeed, he commonly does; but with a still lower descent into the
+levels of indigence -- along the margin of the slums -- the man,
+and presently also the children, virtually cease to consume
+valuable goods for appearances, and the woman remains virtually
+the sole exponent of the household's pecuniary decency. No class
+of society, not even the most abjectly poor, forgoes all
+customary conspicuous consumption. The last items of this
+category of consumption are not given up except under stresS of
+the direst necessity. Very much of squalor and discomfort will be
+endured before the last trinket or the last pretense of pecuniary
+decency is put away. There is no class and no country that has
+yielded so abjectly before the pressure of physical want as to
+deny themselves all gratification of this higher or spiritual
+need.
+
+From the foregoing survey of the growth of conspicuous leisure
+and consumption, it appears that the utility of both alike for
+the purposes of reputability lies in the element of waste that is
+common to both. In the one case it is a waste of time and effort,
+in the other it is a waste of goods. Both are methods of
+demonstrating the possession of wealth, and the two are
+conventionally accepted as equivalents. The choice between them
+is a question of advertising expediency simply, except so far as
+it may be affected by other standards of propriety, springing
+from a different source. On grounds of expediency the preference
+may be given to the one or the other at different stages of the
+economic development. The question is, which of the two methods
+will most effectively reach the persons whose
+convictions it is desired to affect. Usage has answered this
+question in different ways under different circumstances.
+
+So long as the community or social group is small enough and
+compact enough to be effectually reached by common notoriety
+alone that is to say, so long as the human environment to which
+the individual is required to adapt himself in respect of
+reputability is comprised within his sphere of personal
+acquaintance and neighborhood gossip -- so long the one method is
+about as effective as the other. Each will therefore serve about
+equally well during the earlier stages of social growth. But when
+the differentiation has gone farther and it becomes necessary to
+reach a wider human environment, consumption begins to hold over
+leisure as an ordinary means of decency. This is especially true
+during the later, peaceable economic stage. The means of
+communication and the mobility of the population now expose the
+individual to the observation of many persons who have no other
+means of judging of his reputability than the display of goods
+(and perhaps of breeding) which he is able to make while he is
+under their direct observation.
+
+The modern organization of industry works in the same direction
+also by another line. The exigencies of the modern industrial
+system frequently place individuals and households in
+juxtaposition between whom there is little contact in any other
+sense than that of juxtaposition. One's neighbors, mechanically
+speaking, often are socially not one's neighbors, or even
+acquaintances; and still their transient good opinion has a high
+degree of utility. The only practicable means of impressing one's
+pecuniary ability on these unsympathetic observers of one's
+everyday life is an unremitting demonstration of ability to pay.
+In the modern community there is also a more frequent attendance
+at large gatherings of people to whom one's everyday life is
+unknown; in such places as churches, theaters, ballrooms, hotels,
+parks, shops, and the like. In order to impress these transient
+observers, and to retain one's self-complacency under their
+observation, the signature of one's pecuniary strength should be
+written in characters which he who runs may read. It is evident,
+therefore, that the present trend of the development is in the
+direction of heightening the utility of conspicuous consumption
+as compared with leisure.
+
+It is also noticeable that the serviceability of consumption as a
+means of repute, as well as the insistence on it as an element of
+decency, is at its best in those portions of the community where
+the human contact of the individual is widest and the mobility of
+the population is greatest. Conspicuous
+consumption claims a relatively larger portion of the income of
+the urban than of the rural population, and the claim is also
+more imperative. The result is that, in order to keep up a decent
+appearance, the former habitually live hand-to-mouth to a greater
+extent than the latter. So it comes, for instance, that the
+American farmer and his wife and daughters are notoriously less
+modish in their dress, as well as less urbane in their manners,
+than the city artisan's family with an equal income. It is not
+that the city population is by nature much more eager for the
+peculiar complacency that comes of a conspicuous consumption, nor
+has the rural population less regard for pecuniary decency. But
+the provocation to this line of evidence, as well as its
+transient effectiveness, is more decided in the city. This method
+is therefore more readily resorted to, and in the struggle to
+outdo one another the city population push their normal standard
+of conspicuous consumption to a higher point, with the result
+that a relatively greater expenditure in this direction is
+required to indicate a given degree of pecuniary decency in the
+city. The requirement of conformity to this higher conventional
+standard becomes mandatory. The standard of decency is higher,
+class for class, and this requirement of decent appearance must
+be lived up to on pain of losing caste.
+
+Consumption becomes a larger element in the standard of living in
+the city than in the country. Among the country
+population its place is to some extent taken by savings and home
+comforts known through the medium of neighborhood gossip
+sufficiently to serve the like general purpose of Pecuniary
+repute. These home comforts and the leisure indulged in -- where
+the indulgence is found -- are of course also in great part to be
+classed as items of conspicuous consumption; and much the same is
+to be said of the savings. The smaller amount of the savings laid
+by by the artisan class is no doubt due, in some measure, to the
+fact that in the case of the artisan the savings are a less
+effective means of advertisement, relative to the environment in
+which he is placed, than are the savings of the people living on
+farms and in the small villages. Among the latter, everybody's
+affairs, especially everybody's pecuniary status, are known to
+everybody else. Considered by itself simply -- taken in the first
+degree -- this added provocation to which the artisan and the
+urban laboring classes are exposed may not very seriously
+decrease the amount of savings; but in its cumulative action,
+through raising the standard of decent expenditure, its deterrent
+effect on the tendency to save cannot but be very great.
+
+A felicitous illustration of the manner in which this canon of
+reputability works out its results is seen in the practice of
+dram-drinking, "treating," and smoking in public places, which is
+customary among the laborers and handicraftsmen of the towns, and
+among the lower middle class of the urban population generally
+Journeymen printers may be named as a class among whom this form
+of conspicuous consumption has a great vogue, and among whom it
+carries with it certain well-marked consequences that are often
+deprecated. The peculiar habits of the class in this respect are
+commonly set down to some kind of an ill-defined moral deficiency
+with which this class is credited, or to a morally deleterious
+influence which their occupation is supposed to exert, in some
+unascertainable way, upon the men employed in it. The state of
+the case for the men who work in the composition and press rooms
+of the common run of printing-houses may be summed up as follows.
+Skill acquired in any printing-house or any city is easily turned
+to account in almost any other house or city; that is to say, the
+inertia due to special training is slight. Also, this occupation
+requires more than the average of intelligence and general
+information, and the men employed in it are therefore ordinarily
+more ready than many others to take advantage of any slight
+variation in the demand for their labor from one place to
+another. The inertia due to the home feeling is consequently also
+slight. At the same time the wages in the trade are high enough
+to make movement from place to place relatively easy. The result
+is a great mobility of the labor employed in printing; perhaps
+greater than in any other equally well-defined and considerable
+body of workmen. These men are constantly thrown in contact with
+new groups of acquaintances, with whom the relations established
+are transient or ephemeral, but whose good opinion is valued none
+the less for the time being. The human proclivity to ostentation,
+reenforced by sentiments of goodfellowship, leads them to spend
+freely in those directions which will best serve these needs.
+Here as elsewhere prescription seizes upon the custom as soon as
+it gains a vogue, and incorporates it in the accredited standard
+of decency. The next step is to make this standard of decency the
+point of departure for a new move in advance in the same
+direction -- for there is no merit in simple spiritless
+conformity to a standard of dissipation that is lived up to as a
+matter of course by everyone in the trade.
+
+The greater prevalence of dissipation among printers than among
+the average of workmen is accordingly attributable, at least in
+some measure, to the greater ease of movement and the more
+transient character of acquaintance and human contact in this
+trade. But the substantial ground of this high requirement in
+dissipation is in the last analysis no other than that same
+propensity for a manifestation of dominance and pecuniary decency
+which makes the French peasant-proprietor parsimonious and
+frugal, and induces the American millionaire to found colleges,
+hospitals and museums. If the canon of conspicuous consumption
+were not offset to a considerable extent by other features of
+human nature, alien to it, any saving should logically be
+impossible for a population situated as the artisan and laboring
+classes of the cities are at present, however high their wages or
+their income might be.
+
+But there are other standards of repute and other, more or less
+imperative, canons of conduct, besides wealth and its
+manifestation, and some of these come in to accentuate or to
+qualify the broad, fundamental canon of conspicuous waste. Under
+the simple test of effectiveness for advertising, we should
+expect to find leisure and the conspicuous consumption of goods
+dividing the field of pecuniary emulation pretty evenly between
+them at the outset. Leisure might then be expected gradually to
+yield ground and tend to obsolescence as the economic development
+goes forward, and the community increases in size; while the
+conspicuous consumption of goods should gradually gain in
+importance, both absolutely and relatively, until it had absorbed
+all the available product, leaving nothing over beyond a bare
+livelihood. But the actual course of development has been
+somewhat different from this ideal scheme. Leisure held the first
+place at the start, and came to hold a rank very much above
+wasteful consumption of goods, both as a direct exponent of
+wealth and as an element in the standard of decency , during the
+quasi-peaceable culture. From that point onward, consumption has
+gained ground, until, at present, it unquestionably holds the
+primacy, though it is still far from absorbing the entire margin
+of production above the subsistence minimum.
+
+The early ascendency of leisure as a means of reputability is
+traceable to the archaic distinction between noble and ignoble
+employments. Leisure is honorable and becomes imperative partly
+because it shows exemption from ignoble labor. The archaic
+differentiation into noble and ignoble classes is based on an
+invidious distinction between employments as honorific or
+debasing; and this traditional distinction grows into an
+imperative canon of decency during the early quasi-peaceable
+stage. Its ascendency is furthered by the fact that leisure is
+still fully as effective an evidence of wealth as consumption.
+Indeed, so effective is it in the relatively small and stable
+human environment to which the individual is exposed at that
+cultural stage, that, with the aid of the archaic tradition which
+deprecates all productive labor, it gives rise to a large
+impecunious leisure class, and it even tends to limit the
+production of the community's industry to the subsistence
+minimum. This extreme inhibition of industry is avoided because
+slave labor, working under a compulsion more vigorous than that
+of reputability, is forced to turn out a product in excess of the
+subsistence minimum of the working class. The subsequent relative
+decline in the use of conspicuous leisure as a basis of repute is
+due partly to an increasing relative effectiveness of consumption
+as an evidence of wealth; but in part it is traceable to another
+force, alien, and in some degree antagonistic, to the usage of
+conspicuous waste.
+
+This alien factor is the instinct of workmanship. Other
+circumstances permitting, that instinct disposes men to look with
+favor upon productive efficiency and on whatever is of human use.
+It disposes them to depreCate waste of substance or effort. The
+instinct of workmanship is present in all men, and asserts itself
+even under very adverse circumstances. So that however wasteful a
+given expenditure may be in reality, it must at least have some
+colorable excuse in the way of an ostensible purpose. The manner
+in which, under special circumstances, the instinct eventuates in
+a taste for exploit and an invidious discrimination between noble
+and ignoble classes has been indicated in an earlier chapter. In
+so far as it comes into conflict with the law of conspicuous
+waste, the instinct of workmanship expresses itself not so much
+in insistence on substantial usefulness as in an abiding sense of
+the odiousness and aesthetic impossibility of what is obviously
+futile. Being of the nature of an instinctive affection, its
+guidance touches chiefly and immediately the obvious and apparent
+violations of its requirements. It is only less promptly and with
+less constraining force that it reaches such substantial
+violations of its requirements as are appreciated only upon
+reflection.
+
+So long as all labor continues to be performed exclusively or
+usually by slaves, the baseness of all productive effort is too
+constantly and deterrently present in the mind of men to allow
+the instinct of workmanship seriously to take effect in the
+direction of industrial usefulness; but when the quasi-peaceable
+stage (with slavery and status) passes into the peaceable stage
+of industry (with wage labor and cash payment) the instinct comes
+more effectively into play. It then begins aggressively to shape
+men's views of what is meritorious, and asserts itself at least
+as an auxiliary canon of self-complacency. All extraneous
+considerations apart, those persons (adult) are but a vanishing
+minority today who harbor no inclination to the accomplishment of
+some end, or who are not impelled of their own motion to shape
+some object or fact or relation for human use. The propensity may
+in large measure be overborne by the more immediately
+constraining incentive to a reputable leisure and an avoidance of
+indecorous usefulness, and it may therefore work itself out in
+make-believe only; as for instance in "social duties," and in
+quasi-artistic or quasi-scholarly accomplishments, in the care
+and decoration of the house, in sewing-circle activity or dress
+reform, in proficiency at dress, cards, yachting, golf, and
+various sports. But the fact that it may under stress of
+circumstances eventuate in inanities no more disproves the
+presence of the instinct than the reality of the brooding
+instinct is disproved by inducing a hen to sit on a nestful of
+china eggs.
+
+This latter-day uneasy reaching-out for some form of
+purposeful activity that shall at the same time not be
+indecorously productive of either individual or collective gain
+marks a difference of attitude between the modern leisure class
+and that of the quasi-peaceable stage. At the earlier stage, as
+was said above, the all-dominating institution of slavery and
+status acted resistlessly to discountenance exertion directed to
+other than naively predatory ends. It was still possible to find
+some habitual employment for the inclination to action in the way
+of forcible aggression or repression directed against hostile
+groups or against the subject classes within the group; and this
+sewed to relieve the pressure and draw off the energy of the
+leisure class without a resort to actually useful, or even
+ostensibly useful employments. The practice of hunting also sewed
+the same purpose in some degree. When the community developed
+into a peaceful industrial organization, and when fuller
+occupation of the land had reduced the opportunities for the hunt
+to an inconsiderable residue, the pressure of energy seeking
+purposeful employment was left to find an outlet in some other
+direction. The ignominy which attaches to useful effort also
+entered upon a less acute phase with the disappearance of
+compulsory labor; and the instinct of workmanship then came to
+assert itself with more persistence and consistency.
+
+The line of least resistance has changed in some measure, and the
+energy which formerly found a vent in predatory activity, now in
+part takes the direction of some ostensibly useful end.
+Ostensibly purposeless leisure has come to be deprecated,
+especially among that large portion of the leisure class whose
+plebeian origin acts to set them at variance with the tradition
+of the otium cum dignitate. But that canon of reputability which
+discountenances all employment that is of the nature of
+productive effort is still at hand, and will permit nothing
+beyond the most transient vogue to any employment that is
+substantially useful or productive. The consequence is that a
+change has been wrought in the conspicuous leisure practiced by
+the leisure class; not so much in substance as in form. A
+reconciliation between the two conflicting requirements is
+effected by a resort to make-believe. Many and intricate polite
+observances and social duties of a ceremonial nature are
+developed; many organizations are founded, with some specious
+object of amelioration embodied in their official style and
+title; there is much coming and going, and a deal of talk, to the
+end that the talkers may not have occasion to reflect on what is
+the effectual economic value of their traffic. And along with the
+make-believe of purposeful employment, and woven inextricably
+into its texture, there is commonly, if not invariably, a more or
+less appreciable element of purposeful effort directed to some
+serious end.
+
+In the narrower sphere of vicarious leisure a similar change has
+gone forward. Instead of simply passing her time in visible
+idleness, as in the best days of the patriarchal regime, the
+housewife of the advanced peaceable stage applies herself
+assiduously to household cares. The salient features of this
+development of domestic service have already been indicated.
+Throughout the entire evolution of conspicuous expenditure,
+whether of goods or of services or human life, runs the obvious
+implication that in order to effectually mend the consumer's good
+fame it must be an expenditure of superfluities. In order to be
+reputable it must be wasteful. No merit would accrue from the
+consumption of the bare necessaries of life, except by comparison
+with the abjectly poor who fall short even of the subsistence
+minimum; and no standard of expenditure could result from such a
+comparison, except the most prosaic and unattractive level of
+decency. A standard of life would still be possible which should
+admit of invidious comparison in other respects than that of
+opulence; as, for instance, a comparison in various directions in
+the manifestation of moral, physical, intellectual, or aesthetic
+force. Comparison in all these directions is in vogue today; and
+the comparison made in these respects is commonly so inextricably
+bound up with the pecuniary comparison as to be scarcely
+distinguishable from the latter. This is especially true as
+regards the current rating of expressions of intellectual and
+aesthetic force or proficiency' so that we frequently interpret
+as aesthetic or intellectual a difference which in substance is
+pecuniary only.
+
+The use of the term "waste" is in one respect an unfortunate one.
+As used in the speech of everyday life the word carries an
+undertone of deprecation. It is here used for want of a better
+term that will adequately describe the same range of motives and
+of phenomena, and it is not to be taken in an odious sense, as
+implying an illegitimate expenditure of human products or of
+human life. In the view of economic theory the expenditure in
+question is no more and no less legitimate than any other
+expenditure. It is here called "waste" because this expenditure
+does not serve human life or human well-being on the whole, not
+because it is waste or misdirection of effort or expenditure as
+viewed from the standpoint of the individual consumer who chooses
+it. If he chooses it, that disposes of the question of its
+relative utility to him, as compared with other forms of
+consumption that would not be deprecated on account of their
+wastefulness. Whatever form of expenditure the consumer chooses,
+or whatever end he seeks in making his choice, has utility to him
+by virtue of his preference. As seen from the point of view of
+the individual consumer, the question of wastefulness does not
+arise within the scope of economic theory proper. The use of the
+word "waste" as a technical term, therefore, implies no
+deprecation of the motives or of the ends sought by the consumer
+under this canon of conspicuous waste.
+
+But it is, on other grounds, worth noting that the term "waste"
+in the language of everyday life implies deprecation of what is
+characterized as wasteful. This common-sense implication is
+itself an outcropping of the instinct of workmanship. The popular
+reprobation of waste goes to say that in order to be at peace
+with himself the common man must be able to see in any and all
+human effort and human enjoyment an enhancement of life and
+well-being on the whole. In order to meet with unqualified
+approval, any economic fact must approve itself under the test of
+impersonal usefulness-usefulness as seen from the point of view
+of the generically human. Relative or competitive advantage of
+one individual in comparison with another does not satisfy the
+economic conscience, and therefore competitive expenditure has
+not the approval of this conscience.
+
+In strict accuracy nothing should be included under the head of
+conspicuous waste but such expenditure as is incurred on the
+ground of an invidious pecuniary comparison. But in order to
+bring any given item or element in under this head it is not
+necessary that it should be recognized as waste in this sense by
+the person incurring the expenditure. It frequently happens that
+an element of the standard of living which set out with being
+primarily wasteful, ends with becoming, in the apprehension of
+the consumer, a necessary of life; and it may in this way become
+as indispensable as any other item of the consumer's habitual
+expenditure. As items which sometimes fall under this head, and
+are therefore available as illustrations of the manner in which
+this principle applies, may be cited carpets and tapestries,
+silver table service, waiter's services, silk hats, starched
+linen, many articles of jewelry and of dress. The
+indispensability of these things after the habit and the
+convention have been formed, however, has little to say in the
+classification of expenditures as waste or not waste in the
+technical meaning of the word. The test to which all expenditure
+must be brought in an attempt to decide that point is the
+questiOn whether it serves directly to enhance human life on the
+whole-whether it furthers the life process taken impersonally.
+For this is the basis of award of the instinct of workmanship,
+and that instinct is the court of final appeal in any question of
+economic truth or adequacy. It is a question as to the award
+rendered by a dispassionate common sense. The question is,
+therefore, not whether, under the existing circumstances of
+individual habit and social custom, a given expenditure conduces
+to the particular consumer's gratification or peace of mind; but
+whether, aside from acquired tastes and from the canons of usage
+and conventional decency, its result is a net gain in comfort or
+in the fullness of life. Customary expenditure must be classed
+under the head of waste in so far as the custom on which it rests
+is traceable to the habit of making an invidious pecuniary
+comparison-in so far as it is conceived that it could not have
+become customary and prescriptive without the backing of this
+principle of pecuniary reputability or relative economic success.
+It is obviously not necessary that a given object of
+expenditure should be exclusively wasteful in order to come in
+under the category of conspicuous waste. An article may be useful
+and wasteful both, aud its utility to the consumer may be made up
+of use and waste in the most varying proportions. Consumable
+goods, and even productive goods, generally show the two elements
+in combination, as constituents of their utility; although, in a
+general way, the element of waste tends to predominate in
+articles of consumption, while the contrary is true of articles
+designed for productive use. Even in articles which appear at
+first glance to serve for pure ostentation only, it is always
+possible to detect the presence of some, at least ostensible,
+useful purpose; and on the other hand, even in special machinery
+and tools contrived for some particular industrial process, as
+well as in the rudest appliances of human industry, the traces of
+conspicuous waste, or at least of the habit of ostentation,
+usually become evident on a close scrutiny. It would be hazardous
+to assert that a useful purpose is ever absent from the utility
+of any article or of any service, however obviously its prime
+purpose and chief element is conspicuous waste; and it would be
+only less hazardous to assert of any primarily useful product
+that the element of waste is in no way concerned in its value,
+immediately or remotely.
+
+Chapter Five
+
+The Pecuniary Standard of Living
+
+For the great body of the people in any modern community, the
+proximate ground of expenditure in excess of what is required for
+physical comfort is not a conscious effort to excel in the
+expensiveness of their visible consumption, so much as it is a
+desire to live up to the conventional standard of decency in the
+amount and grade of goods consumed. This desire is not guided by
+a rigidly invariable standard, which must be lived up to, and
+beyond which there is no incentive to go. The standard is
+flexible; and especially it is indefinitely extensible, if only
+time is allowed for habituation to any increase in pecuniary
+ability and for acquiring facility in the new and larger scale of
+expenditure that follows such an increase. It is much more
+difficult to recede from a scale of expenditure once adopted than
+it is to extend the accustomed scale in response to an accession
+of wealth. Many items of customary expenditure prove on analysis
+to be almost purely wasteful, and they are therefore honorific
+only, but after they have once been incorporated into the scale
+of decent consumption, and so have become an integral part of
+one's scheme of life, it is quite as hard to give up these as it
+is to give up many items that conduce directly to one's physicaL
+comfort, or even that may be necessary to life and health. That
+is to say, the conspicuously wasteful honorific expenditure that
+confers spiritual well-being may become more indispensable than
+much of that expenditure which ministers to the "lower" wants of
+physical well-being or sustenance only. It is notoriously just as
+difficult to recede from a "high" standard of living as it is to
+lower a standard which is already relatively low; although in the
+former case the difficulty is a moral one, while in the latter it
+may involve a material deduction from the physical comforts of
+life.
+
+But while retrogression is difficult, a fresh advance in
+conspicuous expenditure is relatively easy; indeed, it takes
+place almost as a matter of course. In the rare cases where it
+occurs, a failure to increase one's visible consumption when the
+means for an increase are at hand is felt in popular apprehension
+to call for explanation, and unworthy motives of miserliness are
+imputed to those who fall short in this respect. A prompt
+response to the stimulus, on the other hand, is accepted as the
+normal effect. This suggests that the standard of expenditure
+which commonly guides our efforts is not the average, ordinary
+expenditure already achieved; it is an ideal of consumption that
+lies just beyond our reach, or to reach which requires some
+strain. The motive is emulation -- the stimulus of an invidious
+comparison which prompts us to outdo those with whom we are in
+the habit of classing ourselves. Substantially the same
+proposition is expressed in the commonplace remark that each
+class envies and emulates the class next above it in the social
+scale, while it rarely compares itself with those below or with
+those who are considerably in advance. That is to say, in other
+words, our standard of decency in expenditure, as in other ends
+of emulation, is set by the usage of those next above us in
+reputability; until, in this way, especially in any community
+where class distinctions are somewhat vague, all canons of
+reputability and decency, and all standards of consumption, are
+traced back by insensible gradations to the usages and habits of
+thought of the highest social and pecuniary class -- the wealthy
+leisure class.
+
+It is for this class to determine, in general outline, what
+scheme of Life the community shall accept as decent or honorific;
+and it is their office by precept and example to set forth this
+scheme of social salvation in its highest, ideal form. But the
+higher leisure class can exercise this quasi-sacerdotal office
+only under certain material limitations. The class cannot at
+discretion effect a sudden revolution or reversal of the popular
+habits of thought with respect to any of these ceremonial
+requirements. It takes time for any change to permeate the mass
+and change the habitual attitude of the people; and especially it
+takes time to change the habits of those classes that are
+socially more remote from the radiant body. The process is slower
+where the mobility of the population is less or where the
+intervals between the several classes are wider and more abrupt.
+But if time be allowed, the scope of the discretion of the
+leisure class as regards questions of form and detail in the
+community's scheme of life is large; while as regards the
+substantial principles of reputability, the changes which it can
+effect lie within a narrow margin of tolerance. Its example and
+precept carries the force of prescription for all classes below
+it; but in working out the precepts which are handed down as
+governing the form and method of reputability -- in shaping the
+usages and the spiritual attitude of the lower classes -- this
+authoritative prescription constantly works under the selective
+guidance of the canon of conspicuous waste, tempered in varying
+degree by the instinct of workmanship. To those norms is to be
+added another broad principle of human nature -- the predatory
+animus -- which in point of generality and of psychological
+content lies between the two just named. The effect of the latter
+in shaping the accepted scheme of life is yet to be discussed.
+The canon of reputability, then, must adapt itself to the
+economic circumstances, the traditions, and the degree of
+spiritual maturity of the particular class whose scheme of life
+it is to regulate. It is especially to be noted that however high
+its authority and however true to the fundamental requirements of
+reputability it may have been at its inception, a specific formal
+observance can under no circumstances maintain itself in force if
+with the lapse of time or on its transmission to a lower
+pecuniary class it is found to run counter to the ultimate ground
+of decency among civilized peoples, namely, serviceability for
+the purpose of an invidious comparison in pecuniary success.
+It is evident that these canons of expenditure have much to say
+in determining the standard of living for any community and for
+any class. It is no less evident that the standard of living
+which prevails at any time or at any given social altitude will
+in its turn have much to say as to the forms which honorific
+expenditure will take, and as to the degree to which this
+"higher" need will dominate a people's consumption. In this
+respect the control exerted by the accepted standard of living is
+chiefly of a negative character; it acts almost solely to prevent
+recession from a scale of conspicuous expenditure that has once
+become habitual.
+
+A standard of living is of the nature of habit. It is an habitual
+scale and method of responding to given stimuli. The difficulty
+in the way of receding from an accustomed standard is the
+difficulty of breaking a habit that has once been formed. The
+relative facility with which an advance in the standard is made
+means that the life process is a process of unfolding activity
+and that it will readily unfold in a new direction whenever and
+wherever the resistance to self-expression decreases. But when
+the habit of expression along such a given line of low resistance
+has once been formed, the discharge will seek the accustomed
+outlet even after a change has taken place in the environment
+whereby the external resistance has appreciably risen. That
+heightened facility of expression in a given direction which is
+called habit may offset a considerable increase in the resistance
+offered by external circumstances to the unfolding of life in the
+given direction. As between the various habits, or habitual modes
+and directions of expression, which go to make up an individual's
+standard of living, there is an appreciable difference in point
+of persistence under counteracting circumstances and in point of
+the degree of imperativeness with which the discharge seeks a
+given direction.
+
+That is to say, in the language of current economic theory, while
+men are reluctant to retrench their expenditures in any
+direction, they are more reluctant to retrench in some directions
+than in others; so that while any accustomed consumption is
+reluctantly given up, there are certain lines of consumption
+which are given up with relatively extreme reluctance. The
+articles or forms of consumption to which the consumer clings
+with the greatest tenacity are commonly the so-called necessaries
+of life, or the subsistence minimum. The subsistence minimum is
+of course not a rigidly determined allowance of goods, definite
+and invariable in kind and quantity; but for the purpose in hand
+it may be taken to comprise a certain, more or less definite,
+aggregate of consumption required for the maintenance of life.
+This minimum, it may be assumed, is ordinarily given up last in
+case of a progressive retrenchment of expenditure. That is to
+say, in a general way, the most ancient and ingrained of the
+habits which govern the individual's life -- those habits that
+touch his existence as an organism -- are the most persistent and
+imperative. Beyond these come the higher wants -- later-formed
+habits of the individual or the race -- in a somewhat irregular
+and by no means invariable gradation. Some of these higher wants,
+as for instance the habitual use of certain stimulants, or the
+need of salvation (in the eschatological sense), or of good
+repute, may in some cases take precedence of the lower or more
+elementary wants. In general, the longer the habituation, the
+more unbroken the habit, and the more nearly it coincides with
+previous habitual forms of the life process, the more
+persistently will the given habit assert itself. The habit will
+be stronger if the particular traits of human nature which its
+action involves, or the particular aptitudes that find exercise
+in it, are traits or aptitudes that are already largely and
+profoundly concerned in the life process or that are intimately
+bound up with the life history of the particular racial stock.
+The varying degrees of ease with which different habits are
+formed by different persons, as well as the varying degrees of
+reluctance with which different habits are given up, goes to say
+that the formation of specific habits is not a matter of length
+of habituation simply. Inherited aptitudes and traits of
+temperament count for quite as much as length of habituation in
+deciding what range of habits will come to dominate any
+individual's scheme of life. And the prevalent type of
+transmitted aptitudes, or in other words the type of temperament
+belonging to the dominant ethnic element in any community, will
+go far to decide what will be the scope and form of expression of
+the community's habitual life process. How greatly the
+transmitted idiosyncrasies of aptitude may count in the way of a
+rapid and definitive formation of habit in individuals is
+illustrated by the extreme facility with which an all-dominating
+habit of alcoholism is sometimes formed; or in the similar
+facility and the similarly inevitable formation of a habit of
+devout observances in the case of persons gifted with a special
+aptituDe in that direction. Much the same meaning attaches to
+that peculiar facility of habituation to a specific human
+environment that is called romantic love.
+
+Men differ in respect of transmitted aptitudes, or in respect of
+the relative facility with which they unfold their life activity
+in particular directions; and the habits which coincide with or
+proceed upon a relatively strong specific aptitude or a
+relatively great specific facility of expression become of great
+consequence to the man's well-being. The part played by this
+element of aptitude in determining the relative tenacity of the
+several habits which constitute the standard of living goes to
+explain the extreme reluctance with which men give up any
+habitual expenditure in the way of conspicuous
+consumption. The aptitudes or propensities to which a habit of
+this kind is to be referred as its ground are those aptitudes
+whose exercise is comprised in emulation; and the propensity for
+emulation -- for invidious comparison -- is of ancient growth and
+is a pervading trait of human nature. It is easily called into
+vigorous activity in any new form, and it asserts itself with
+great insistence under any form under which it has once found
+habitual expression. When the individual has once formed the
+habit of seeking expression in a given line of honorific
+expenditure -- when a given set of stimuli have come to be
+habitually responded to in activity of a given kind and direction
+under the guidance of these alert and deep-reaching propensities
+of emulation -- it is with extreme reluctance that such an
+habitual expenditure is given up. And on the other hand, whenever
+an accession of pecuniary strength puts the individual in a
+position to unfold his life process in larger scope and with
+additional reach, the ancient propensities of the race will
+assert themselves in determining the direction which the new
+unfolding of life is to take. And those propensities which are
+already actively in the field under some related form of
+expression, which are aided by the pointed suggestions afforded
+by a current accredited scheme of life, and for the exercise of
+which the material means and opportunities are readily available
+-- these will especially have much to say in shaping the form and
+direction in which the new accession to the individual's
+aggregate force will assert itself. That is to say, in concrete
+terms, in any community where conspicuous consumption is an
+element of the scheme of life, an increase in an individual's
+ability to pay is likely to take the form of an expenditure for
+some accredited line of conspicuous consumption.
+
+With the exception of the instinct of self-preservation, the
+propensity for emulation is probably the strongest and most alert
+and persistent of the economic motives proper. In an industrial
+community this propensity for emulation expresses itself in
+pecuniary emulation; and this, so far as regards the Western
+civilized communities of the present, is virtually equivalent to
+saying that it expresses itself in some form of conspicuous
+waste. The need of conspicuous waste, therefore, stands ready to
+absorb any increase in the community's industrial efficiency or
+output of goods, after the most elementary physical wants have
+been provided for. Where this result does not follow, under
+modern conditions, the reason for the discrepancy is commonly to
+be sought in a rate of increase in the individual's wealth too
+rapid for the habit of expenditure to keep abreast of it; or it
+may be that the individual in question defers the conspicuous
+consumption of the increment to a later date -- ordinarily with a
+view to heightening the spectacular effect of the aggregate
+expenditure contemplated. As increased industrial efficiency
+makes it possible to procure the means of livelihood with less
+labor, the energies of the industrious members of the community
+are bent to the compassing of a higher result in conspicuous
+expenditure, rather than slackened to a more comfortable pace.
+The strain is not lightened as industrial efficiency increases
+and makes a lighter strain possible, but the increment of output
+is turned to use to meet this want, which is indefinitely
+expansible, after the manner commonly imputed in economic theory
+to higher or spiritual wants. It is owing chiefly to the presence
+of this element in the standard of living that J. S. Mill was
+able to say that "hitherto it is questionable if all the
+mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of
+any human being." The accepted standard of expenditure in the
+community or in the class to which a person belongs largely
+determines what his standard of living will be. It does this
+directly by commending itself to his common sense as right and
+good, through his habitually contemplating it and assimilating
+the scheme of life in which it belongs; but it does so also
+indirectly through popular insistence on conformity to the
+accepted scale of expenditure as a matter of propriety, under
+pain of disesteem and ostracism. To accept and practice the
+standard of living which is in vogue is both agreeable and
+expedient, commonly to the point of being indispensable to
+personal comfort and to success in life. The standard of living
+of any class, so far as concerns the element of conspicuous
+waste, is commonly as high as the earning capacity of the class
+will permit -- with a constant tendency to go higher. The effect
+upon the serious activities of men is therefore to direct them
+with great singleness of purpose to the largest possible
+acquisition of wealth, and to discountenance work that brings no
+pecuniary gain. At the same time the effect on consumption is to
+concentrate it upon the lines which are most patent to the
+observers whose good opinion is sought; while the inclinations
+and aptitudes whose exercise does not involve a honorific
+expenditure of time or substance tend to fall into abeyance
+through disuse.
+
+Through this discrimination in favor of visible consumption it
+has come about that the domestic life of most classes is
+relatively shabby, as compared with the éclat of that overt
+portion of their life that is carried on before the eyes of
+observers. As a secondary consequence of the same discrimination,
+people habitually screen their private life from observation. So
+far as concerns that portion of their consumption that may
+without blame be carried on in secret, they withdraw from all
+contact with their neighbors, Hence the exclusiveness of people,
+as regards their domestic life, in most of the industrially
+developed communities; and hence, by remoter derivation, the
+habit of privacy and reserve that is so large a feature in the
+code of proprieties of the better class in all communities. The
+low birthrate of the classes upon whom the requirements of
+reputable expenditure fall with great urgency is likewise
+traceable to the exigencies of a standard of living based on
+conspicuous waste. The conspicuous consumption, and the
+consequent increased expense, required in the reputable
+maintenance of a child is very considerable and acts as a
+powerful deterrent. It is probably the most effectual of the
+Malthusian prudential checks.
+
+ The effect of this factor of the standard of living, both in the
+way of retrenchment in the obscurer elements of consumption that
+go to physical comfort and maintenance, and also in the paucity
+or absence of children, is perhaps seen at its best among the
+classes given to scholarly pursuits. Because of a presumed
+superiority and scarcity of the gifts and attainments that
+characterize their life, these classes are by convention subsumed
+under a higher social grade than their pecuniary grade should
+warrant. The scale of decent expenditure in their case is pitched
+correspondingly high, and it consequently leaves an exceptionally
+narrow margin disposable for the other ends of life. By force of
+circumstances, their habitual sense of what is good and right in
+these matters, as well as the expectations of the community in
+the way of pecuniary decency among the learned, are excessively
+high -- as measured by the prevalent degree of opulence and
+earning capacity of the class, relatively to the non-scholarly
+classes whose social equals they nominally are. In any modern
+community where there is no priestly monopoly of these
+occupations, the people of scholarly pursuits are unavoidably
+thrown into contact with classes that are pecuniarily their
+superiors. The high standard of pecuniary decency in force among
+these superior classes is transfused among the scholarly classes
+with but little mitigation of its rigor; and as a consequence
+there is no class of the community that spends a larger
+proportion of its substance in conspicuous waste than these.  
+Chapter Six
+
+Pecuniary Canons of Taste
+
+The caution has already been repeated more than once, that while
+the regulating norm of consumption is in large part the
+requirement of conspicuous waste, it must not be understood that
+the motive on which the consumer acts in any given case is this
+principle in its bald, unsophisticated form. Ordinarily his
+motive is a wish to conform to established usage, to avoid
+unfavorable notice and comment, to live up to the accepted canons
+of decency in the kind, amount, and grade of goods consumed, as
+well as in the decorous employment of his time and effort. In the
+common run of cases this sense of prescriptive usage is present
+in the motives of the consumer and exerts a direct constraining
+force, especially as regards consumption carried on under the
+eyes of observers. But a considerable element of prescriptive
+expensiveness is observable also in consumption that does not in
+any appreciable degree become known to outsiders -- as, for
+instance, articles of underclothing, some articles of food,
+kitchen utensils, and other household apparatus designed for
+service rather than for evidence. In all such useful articles a
+close scrutiny will discover certain features which add to the
+cost and enhance the commercial value of the goods in question,
+but do not proportionately increase the serviceability of these
+articles for the material purposes which alone they ostensibly
+are designed to serve.
+
+Under the selective surveillance of the law of conspicuous waste
+there grows up a code of accredited canons of consumption, the
+effect of which is to hold the consumer up to a standard of
+expensiveness and wastefulness in his consumption of goods and in
+his employment of time and effort. This growth of prescriptive
+usage has an immediate effect upon economic life, but it has also
+an indirect and remoter effect upon conduct in other respects as
+well. Habits of thought with respect to the expression of life in
+any given direction unavoidably affect the habitual view of what
+is good and right in life in other directions also. In the
+organic complex of habits of thought which make up the substance
+of an individual's conscious life the economic interest does not
+lie isolated and distinct from all other interests. Something,
+for instance, has already been said of its relation to the canons
+of reputability.
+
+The principle of conspicuous waste guides the formation of habits
+of thought as to what is honest and reputable in life and in
+commodities. In so doing, this principle will traverse other
+norms of conduct which do not primarily have to do with the code
+of pecuniary honor, but which have, directly or incidentally, an
+economic significance of some magnitude. So the canon of
+honorific waste may, immediately or remotely, influence the sense
+of duty, the sense of beauty, the sense of utility, the sense of
+devotional or ritualistic fitness, and the scientific sense of
+truth.
+
+It is scarcely necessary to go into a discussion here of the
+particular points at which, or the particular manner in which,
+the canon of honorific expenditure habitually traverses the
+canons of moral conduct. The matter is one which has received
+large attention and illustration at the hands of those whose
+office it is to watch and admonish with respect to any departures
+from the accepted code of morals. In modern communities, where
+the dominant economic and legal feature of the community's life
+is the institution of private property, one of the salient
+features of the code of morals is the sacredness of property.
+There needs no insistence or illustration to gain assent to the
+proposition that the habit of holding private property inviolate
+is traversed by the other habit of seeking wealth for the sake of
+the good repute to be gained through its conspicuous consumption.
+Most offenses against property, especially offenses of an
+appreciable magnitude, come under this head. It is also a matter
+of common notoriety and byword that in offenses which result in a
+large accession of property to the offender he does not
+ordinarily incur the extreme penalty or the extreme obloquy with
+which his offenses would he visited on the ground of the naive
+moral code alone. The thief or swindler who has gained great
+wealth by his delinquency has a better chance than the small
+thief of escaping the rigorous penalty of the law and some good
+repute accrues to him from his increased wealth and from his
+spending the irregularly acquired possessions in a seemly manner.
+A well-bred expenditure of his booty especially appeals with
+great effect to persons of a cultivated sense of the proprieties,
+and goes far to mitigate the sense of moral turpitude with which
+his dereliction is viewed by them. It may be noted also -- and it
+is more immediately to the point -- that we are all inclined to
+condone an offense against property in the case of a man whose
+motive is the worthy one of providing the means of a "decent"
+manner of life for his wife and children. If it is added that the
+wife has been "nurtured in the lap of luxury," that is accepted
+as an additional extenuating circumstance. That is to say, we are
+prone to condone such an offense where its aim is the honorific
+one of enabling the offender's wife to perform for him such an
+amount of vicarious consumption of time and substance as is
+demanded by the standard of pecuniary decency. In such a case the
+habit of approving the accustomed degree of conspicuous waste
+traverses the habit of deprecating violations of ownership, to
+the extent even of sometimes leaving the award of praise or blame
+uncertain. This is peculiarly true where the dereliction involves
+an appreciable predatory or piratical element.
+
+This topic need scarcely be pursued further here; but the remark
+may not be out of place that all that considerable body of morals
+that clusters about the concept of an inviolable ownership is
+itself a psychological precipitate of the traditional
+meritoriousness of wealth. And it should be added that this
+wealth which is held sacred is valued primarily for the sake of
+the good repute to be got through its conspicuous consumption.
+The bearing of pecuniary decency upon the scientific spirit or
+the quest of knowledge will he taken up in some detail in a
+separate chapter. Also as regards the sense of devout or ritual
+merit and adequacy in this connection, little need be said in
+this place. That topic will also come up incidentally in a later
+chapter. Still, this usage of honorific expenditure has much to
+say in shaping popular tastes as to what is right and meritorious
+in sacred matters, and the bearing of the principle of
+conspicuous waste upon some of the commonplace devout observances
+and conceits may therefore be pointed out.
+
+Obviously, the canon of conspicuous waste is accountable for a
+great portion of what may be called devout consumption; as, e.g.,
+the consumption of sacred edifices, vestments, and other goods of
+the same class. Even in those modern cults to whose divinities is
+imputed a predilection for temples not built with hands, the
+sacred buildings and the other properties of the cult are
+constructed and decorated with some view to a reputable degree of
+wasteful expenditure. And it needs but little either of
+observation or introspection -- and either will serve the turn --
+to assure us that the expensive splendor of the house of worship
+has an appreciable uplifting and mellowing effect upon the
+worshipper's frame of mind. It will serve to enforce the same
+fact if we reflect upon the sense of abject shamefulness with
+which any evidence of indigence or squalor about the sacred place
+affects all beholders. The accessories of any devout observance
+should be pecuniarily above reproach. This requirement is
+imperative, whatever latitude may be allowed with regard to these
+accessories in point of aesthetic or other serviceability.
+It may also be in place to notice that in all communities,
+especially in neighborhoods where the standard of pecuniary
+decency for dwellings is not high, the local sanctuary is more
+ornate, more conspicuously wasteful in its architecture and
+decoration, than the dwelling houses of the congregation. This is
+true of nearly all denominations and cults, whether Christian or
+Pagan, but it is true in a peculiar degree of the older and
+maturer cults. At the same time the sanctuary commonly
+contributes little if anything to the physical comfort of the
+members. Indeed, the sacred structure not only serves the
+physical well-being of the members to but a slight extent, as
+compared with their humbler dwelling-houses; but it is felt by
+all men that a right and enlightened sense of the true, the
+beautiful, and the good demands that in all expenditure on the
+sanctuary anything that might serve the comfort of the worshipper
+should be conspicuously absent. If any element of comfort is
+admitted in the fittings of the sanctuary, it should be at least
+scrupulously screened and masked under an ostensible austerity.
+In the most reputable latter-day houses of worship, where no
+expense is spared, the principle of austerity is carried to the
+length of making the fittings of the place a means of mortifying
+the flesh, especially in appearance. There are few persons of
+delicate tastes, in the matter of devout consumption to whom this
+austerely wasteful discomfort does not appeal as intrinsically
+right and good. Devout consumption is of the nature of vicarious
+consumption. This canon of devout austerity is based on the
+pecuniary reputability of conspicuously wasteful consumption,
+backed by the principle that vicarious consumption should
+conspicuously not conduce to the comfort of the vicarious
+consumer.
+
+The sanctuary and its fittings have something of this austerity
+in all the cults in which the saint or divinity to whom the
+sanctuary pertains is not conceived to be present and make
+personal use of the property for the gratification of luxurious
+tastes imputed to him. The character of the sacred paraphernalia
+is somewhat different in this respect in those cults where the
+habits of life imputed to the divinity more nearly approach those
+of an earthly patriarchal potentate -- where he is conceived to
+make use of these consumable goods in person. In the latter case
+the sanctuary and its fittings take on more of the fashion given
+to goods destined for the conspicuous consumption of a temporal
+master or owner. On the other hand, where the sacred apparatus is
+simply employed in the divinity's service, that is to say, where
+it is consumed vicariously on his account by his servants, there
+the sacred properties take the character suited to goods that are
+destined for vicarious consumption only.
+
+In the latter case the sanctuary and the sacred apparatus are so
+contrived as not to enhance the comfort or fullness of life of
+the vicarious consumer, or at any rate not to convey the
+impression that the end of their consumption is the consumer's
+comfort. For the end of vicarious consumption is to enhance, not
+the fullness of life of the consumer, but the pecuniary repute of
+the master for whose behoof the consumption takes place.
+Therefore priestly vestments are notoriously expensive, ornate,
+and inconvenient; and in the cults where the priestly servitor of
+the divinity is not conceived to serve him in the capacity of
+consort, they are of an austere, comfortless fashion. And such it
+is felt that they should be.
+
+It is not only in establishing a devout standard of decent
+expensiveness that the principle of waste invades the domain of
+the canons of ritual serviceability. It touches the ways as well
+as the means, and draws on vicarious leisure as well as on
+vicarious consumption. Priestly demeanor at its best is aloof,
+leisurely, perfunctory, and uncontaminated with suggestions of
+sensuOus pleasure. This holds true, in different degrees of
+course, for the different cults and denominations; but in the
+priestly life of all anthropomorphic cults the marks of a
+vicarious consumption of time are visible.
+
+The same pervading canon of vicarious leisure is also visibly
+present in the exterior details of devout observances and need
+only be pointed out in order to become obvious to all beholders.
+All ritual has a notable tendency to reduce itself to a rehearsal
+of formulas. This development of formula is most noticeable in
+the maturer cults, which have at the same time a more austere,
+ornate, and severe priestly life and garb; but it is perceptible
+also in the forms and methods of worship of the newer and fresher
+sects, whose tastes in respect of priests, vestments, and
+sanctuaries are less exacting. The rehearsal of the service (the
+term "service" carries a suggestion significant for the point in
+question) grows more perfunctory as the cult gains in age and
+consistency, and this perfunctoriness of the rehearsal is very
+pleasing to the correct devout taste. And with a good reason, for
+the fact of its being perfunctory goes to say pointedly that the
+master for whom it is performed is exalted above the vulgar need
+of actually proficuous service on the part of his servants. They
+are unprofitable servants, and there is an honorific implication
+for their master in their remaining
+unprofitable. It is needless to point out the close analogy at
+this point between the priestly office and the office of the
+footman. It is pleasing to our sense of what is fitting in these
+matters, in either case, to recognize in the obvious
+perfunctoriness of the service that it is a pro forma execution
+only. There should be no show of agility or of dexterous
+manipulation in the execution of the priestly office, such as
+might suggest a capacity for turning off the work.
+
+In all this there is of course an obvious implication as to the
+temperament, tastes, propensities, and habits of life imputed to
+the divinity by worshippers who live under the tradition of these
+pecuniary canons of reputability. Through its pervading men's
+habits of thought, the principle of conspicuous waste has colored
+the worshippers' notions of the divinity and of the relation in
+which the human subject stands to him. It is of course in the
+more naive cults that this suffusion of pecuniary beauty is most
+patent, but it is visible throughout. All peoples, at whatever
+stage of culture or degree of enlightenment, are fain to eke out
+a sensibly scant degree of authentic formation
+regarding the personality and habitual surroundings of their
+divinities. In so calling in the aid of fancy to enrich and fill
+in their picture of the divinity's presence and manner of life
+they habitually impute to him such traits as go to make up their
+ideal of a worthy man. And in seeking communion with the divinity
+the ways and means of approach are assimilated as nearly as may
+be to the divine ideal that is in men's minds at the time. It is
+felt that the divine presence is entered with the best grace, and
+with the best effect, according to certain accepted methods and
+with the accompaniment of certain material circumstances which in
+popular apprehension are peculiarly consonant with the divine
+nature. This popularly accepted ideal of the bearing and
+paraphernalia adequate to such occasions of communion is, of
+course, to a good extent shaped by the popular apprehension of
+what is intrinsically worthy and beautiful in human carriage and
+surroundings on all occasions of dignified intercourse. It would
+on this account be misleading to attempt an analysis of devout
+demeanor by referring all evidences of the presence of a
+pecuniary standard of reputability back directly and baldly to
+the underlying norm of pecuniary emulation. So it would also be
+misleading to ascribe to the divinity, as popularly conceived, a
+jealous regard for his pecuniary standing and a habit of avoiding
+and condemning squalid situations and surroundings simply because
+they are under grade in the pecuniary respect.
+
+And still, after all allowance has been made, it appears that the
+canons of pecuniary reputability do, directly or
+indirectly, materially affect our notions of the attributes of
+divinity, as well as our notions of what are the fit and adequate
+manner and circumstances of divine communion. It is felt that the
+divinity must be of a peculiarly serene and leisurely habit of
+life. And whenever his local habitation is pictured in poetic
+imagery, for edification or in appeal to the devout fancy, the
+devout word-painter, as a matter of course, brings out before his
+auditors' imagination a throne with a profusion of the insignia
+of opulence and power, and surrounded by a great number of
+servitors. In the common run of such presentations of the
+celestial abodes, the office of this corps of servants is a
+vicarious leisure, their time and efforts being in great measure
+taken up with an industrially unproductive rehearsal of the
+meritorious characteristics and exploits of the divinity; while
+the background of the presentation is filled with the shimmer of
+the precious metals and of the more expensive varieties of
+precious stones. It is only in the crasser expressions of devout
+fancy that this intrusion of pecuniary canons into the devout
+ideals reaches such an extreme. An extreme case occurs in the
+devout imagery of the Negro population of the South. Their
+word-painters are unable to descend to anything cheaper than
+gold; so that in this case the insistence on pecuniary beauty
+gives a startling effect in yellow -- such as would be unbearable
+to a soberer taste. Still, there is probably no cult in which
+ideals of pecuniary merit have not been called in to supplement
+the ideals of ceremonial adequacy that guide men's conception of
+what is right in the matter of sacred apparatus.
+
+Similarly it is felt -- and the sentiment is acted upon -- that
+the priestly servitors of the divinity should not engage in
+industrially productive work; that work of any kind -- any
+employment which is of tangible human use -- must not be carried
+on in the divine presence, or within the precincts of the
+sanctuary; that whoever comes into the presence should come
+cleansed of all profane industrial features in his apparel or
+person, and should come clad in garments of more than everyday
+expensiveness; that on holidays set apart in honor of or for
+communion with the divinity no work that is of human use should
+be performed by any one. Even the remoter, lay dependents should
+render a vicarious leisure to the extent of one day in seven.
+In all these deliverances of men's uninstructed sense of what is
+fit and proper in devout observance and in the relations of the
+divinity, the effectual presence of the canons of
+pecuniary reputability is obvious enough, whether these canons
+have had their effect on the devout judgment in this respect
+immediately or at the second remove.
+
+These canons of reputability have had a similar, but more
+far-reaching and more specifically determinable, effect upon the
+popular sense of beauty or serviceability in consumable goods.
+The requirements of pecuniary decency have, to a very appreciable
+extent, influenced the sense of beauty and of utility in articles
+of use or beauty. Articles are to an extent preferred for use on
+account of their being conspicuously wasteful; they are felt to
+be serviceable somewhat in proportion as they are wasteful and
+ill adapted to their ostensible use.
+
+The utility of articles valued for their beauty depends closely
+upon the expensiveness of the articles. A homely
+illustration will bring out this dependence. A hand-wrought
+silver spoon, of a commercial value of some ten to twenty
+dollars, is not ordinarily more serviceable -- in the first sense
+of the word -- than a machine-made spoon of the same material. It
+may not even be more serviceable than a machine-made spoon of
+some "base" metal, such as aluminum, the value of which may be no
+more than some ten to twenty cents. The former of the two
+utensils is, in fact, commonly a less effective contrivance for
+its ostensible purpose than the latter. The objection is of
+course ready to hand that, in taking this view of the matter, one
+of the chief uses, if not the chief use, of the costlier spoon is
+ignored; the hand-wrought spoon gratifies our taste, our sense of
+the beautiful, while that made by machinery out of the base metal
+has no useful office beyond a brute efficiency. The facts are no
+doubt as the objection states them, but it will be evident on
+reJection that the objection is after all more plausible than
+conclusive. It appears (1) that while the different materials of
+which the two spoons are made each possesses beauty and
+serviceability for the purpose for which it is used, the material
+of the hand-wrought spoon is some one hundred times more valuable
+than the baser metal, without very greatly excelling the latter
+in intrinsic beauty of grain or color, and without being in any
+appreciable degree superior in point of mechanical
+serviceability; (2) if a close inspection should show that the
+supposed hand-wrought spoon were in reality only a very clever
+citation of hand-wrought goods, but an imitation so cleverly
+wrought as to give the same impression of line and surface to any
+but a minute examination by a trained eye, the utility of the
+article, including the gratification which the user derives from
+its contemplation as an object of beauty, would immediately
+decline by some eighty or ninety per cent, or even more; (3) if
+the two spoons are, to a fairly close observer, so nearly
+identical in appearance that the lighter weight of the spurious
+article alone betrays it, this identity of form and color will
+scarcely add to the value of the machine-made spoon, nor
+appreciably enhance the gratification of the user's "sense of
+beauty" in contemplating it, so long as the cheaper spoon is not
+a novelty, ad so long as it can be procured at a nominal cost.
+The case of the spoons is typical. The superior
+gratification derived from the use and contemplation of costly
+and supposedly beautiful products is, commonly, in great measure
+a gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the
+name of beauty. Our higher appreciation of the superior article
+is an appreciation of its superior honorific character, much more
+frequently than it is an unsophisticated appreciation of its
+beauty. The requirement of conspicuous wastefulness is not
+commonly present, consciously, in our canons of taste, but it is
+none the less present as a constraining norm selectively shaping
+and sustaining our sense of what is beautiful, and guiding our
+discrimination with respect to what may legitimately be approved
+as beautiful and what may not.
+
+It is at this point, where the beautiful and the honorific meet
+and blend, that a discrimination between serviceability and
+wastefulness is most difficult in any concrete case. It
+frequently happens that an article which serves the honorific
+purpose of conspicuous waste is at the same time a beautiful
+object; and the same application of labor to which it owes its
+utility for the former purpose may, and often does, give beauty
+of form and color to the article. The question is further
+complicated by the fact that many objects, as, for instance, the
+precious stones and the metals and some other materials used for
+adornment and decoration, owe their utility as items of
+conspicuous waste to an antecedent utility as objects of beauty.
+Gold, for instance, has a high degree of sensuous beauty very
+many if not most of the highly prized works of art are
+intrinsically beautiful, though often with material
+qualification; the like is true of some stuffs used for clothing,
+of some landscapes, and of many other things in less degree.
+Except for this intrinsic beauty which they possess, these
+objects would scarcely have been coveted as they are, or have
+become monopolized objects of pride to their possessors and
+users. But the utility of these things to the possessor is
+commonly due less to their intrinsic beauty than to the honor
+which their possession and consumption confers, or to the obloquy
+which it wards off.
+
+Apart from their serviceability in other respects, these objects
+are beautiful and have a utility as such; they are valuable on
+this account if they can be appropriated or
+monopolized; they are, therefore, coveted as valuable
+possessions, and their exclusive enjoyment gratifies the
+possessor's sense of pecuniary superiority at the same time that
+their contemplation gratifies his sense of beauty. But their
+beauty, in the naive sense of the word, is the occasion rather
+than the ground of their monopolization or of their commercial
+value. "Great as is the sensuous beauty of gems, their rarity and
+price adds an expression of distinction to them, which they would
+never have if they were cheap." There is, indeed, in the common
+run of cases under this head, relatively little incentive to the
+exclusive possession and use of these beautiful things, except on
+the ground of their honorific character as items of conspicuous
+waste. Most objects of this general class, with the partial
+exception of articles of personal adornment, would serve all
+other purposes than the honorific one equally well, whether owned
+by the person viewing them or not; and even as regards personal
+ornaments it is to be added that their chief purpose is to lend
+áéáclat to the person of their wearer (or owner) by comparison
+with other persons who are compelled to do without. The aesthetic
+serviceability of objects of beauty is not greatly nor
+universally heightened by possession.
+
+The generalization for which the discussion so far affords ground
+is that any valuable object in order to appeal to our sense of
+beauty must conform to the requirements of beauty and of
+expensiveness both. But this is not all. Beyond this the canon of
+expensiveness also affects our tastes in such a way as to
+inextricably blend the marks of expensiveness, in our
+appreciation, with the beautiful features of the object, and to
+subsume the resultant effect under the head of an appreciation of
+beauty simply. The marks of expensiveness come to be accepted as
+beautiful features of the expensive articles. They are pleasing
+as being marks of honorific costliness, and the pleasure which
+they afford on this score blends with that afforded by the
+beautiful form and color of the object; so that we often declare
+that an article of apparel, for instance, is "perfectly lovely,"
+when pretty much all that an analysis of the aesthetic value of
+the article would leave ground for is the declaration that it is
+pecuniarily honorific.
+
+This blending and confusion of the elements of expensiveness and
+of beauty is, perhaps, best exemplified in articles of dress and
+of household furniture. The code of reputability in matters of
+dress decides what shapes, colors, materials, and general effects
+in human apparel are for the time to be accepted as suitable; and
+departures from the code are offensive to our taste, supposedly
+as being departures from aesthetic truth. The approval with which
+we look upon fashionable attire is by no means to be accounted
+pure make-believe. We readily, and for the most part with utter
+sincerity, find those things pleasing that are in vogue. Shaggy
+dress-stuffs and pronounced color effects, for instance, offend
+us at times when the vogue is goods of a high, glossy finish and
+neutral colors. A fancy bonnet of this year's model
+unquestionably appeals to our sensibilities today much more
+forcibly than an equally fancy bonnet of the model of last year;
+although when viewed in the perspective of a quarter of a
+century, it would, I apprehend, be a matter of the utmost
+difficulty to award the palm for intrinsic beauty to the one
+rather than to the other of these structures. So, again, it may
+be remarked that, considered simply in their physical
+juxtaposition with the human form, the high gloss of a
+gentleman's hat or of a patent-leather shoe has no more of
+intrinsic beauty than a similiarly high gloss on a threadbare
+sleeve; and yet there is no question but that all well-bred
+people (in the Occidental civilized communities) instinctively
+and unaffectedly cleave to the one as a phenomenon of great
+beauty, and eschew the other as offensive to every sense to which
+it can appeal. It is extremely doubtful if any one could be
+induced to wear such a contrivance as the high hat of civilized
+society, except for some urgent reason based on other than
+aesthetic grounds.
+
+By further habituation to an appreciative perception of the marks
+of expensiveness in goods, and by habitually identifying beauty
+with reputability, it comes about that a beautiful article which
+is not expensive is accounted not beautiful. In this way it has
+happened, for instance, that some beautiful flowers pass
+conventionally for offensive weeds; others that can be cultivated
+with relative ease are accepted and admired by the lower middle
+class, who can afford no more expensive luxuries of this kind;
+but these varieties are rejected as vulgar by those people who
+are better able to pay for expensive flowers and who are educated
+to a higher schedule of pecuniary beauty in the florist's
+products; while still other flowers, of no greater intrinsic
+beauty than these, are cultivated at great cost and call out much
+admiration from flower-lovers whose tastes have been matured
+under the critical guidance of a polite environment.
+
+The same variation in matters of taste, from one class of society
+to another, is visible also as regards many other kinds of
+consumable goods, as, for example, is the case with furniture,
+houses, parks, and gardens. This diversity of views as to what is
+beautiful in these various classes of goods is not a diversity of
+the norm according to which the unsophisticated sense of the
+beautiful works. It is not a constitutional difference of
+endowments in the aesthetic respect, but rather a difference in
+the code of reputability which specifies what objects properly
+lie within the scope of honorific consumption for the class to
+which the critic belongs. It is a difference in the traditions of
+propriety with respect to the kinds of things which may, without
+derogation to the consumer, be consumed under the head of objects
+of taste and art. With a certain allowance for variations to be
+accounted for on other grounds, these traditions are determined,
+more or less rigidly, by the pecuniary plane of life of the
+class.
+
+Everyday life affords many curious illustrations of the way in
+which the code of pecuniary beauty in articles of use varies from
+class to class, as well as of the way in which the
+conventional sense of beauty departs in its deliverances from the
+sense untutored by the requirements of pecuniary repute. Such a
+fact is the lawn, or the close-cropped yard or park, which
+appeals so unaffectedly to the taste of the Western peoples. It
+appears especially to appeal to the tastes of the well-to-do
+classes in those communities in which the dolicho-blond element
+predominates in an appreciable degree. The lawn unquestionably
+has an element of sensuous beauty, simply as an object of
+apperception, and as such no doubt it appeals pretty directly to
+the eye of nearly all races and all classes; but it is, perhaps,
+more unquestionably beautiful to the eye of the dolicho-blond
+than to most other varieties of men. This higher appreciation of
+a stretch of greensward in this ethnic element than in the other
+elements of the population, goes along with certain other
+features of the dolicho-blond temperament that indicate that this
+racial element had once been for a long time a pastoral people
+inhabiting a region with a humid climate. The close-cropped lawn
+is beautiful in the eyes of a people whose inherited bent it is
+to readily find pleasure in contemplating a well-preserved
+pasture or grazing land.
+
+For the aesthetic purpose the lawn is a cow pasture; and in some
+cases today -- where the expensiveness of the attendant
+circumstances bars out any imputation of thrift -- the idyl of
+the dolicho-blond is rehabilitated in the introduction of a cow
+into a lawn or private ground. In such cases the cow made use of
+is commonly of an expensive breed. The vulgar suggestion of
+thrift, which is nearly inseparable from the cow, is a standing
+objection to the decorative use of this animal. So that in all
+cases, except where luxurious surroundings negate this
+suggestion, the use of the cow as an object of taste must be
+avoided. Where the predilection for some grazing animal to fill
+out the suggestion of the pasture is too strong to be suppressed,
+the cow's place is often given to some more or less inadequate
+substitute, such as deer, antelopes, or some such exotic beast.
+These substitutes, although less beautiful to the pastoral eye of
+Western man than the cow, are in such cases preferred because of
+their superior expensiveness or futility, and their consequent
+repute. They are not vulgarly lucrative either in fact or in
+suggestion.
+
+Public parks of course fall in the same category with the lawn;
+they too, at their best, are imitations of the pasture. Such a
+park is of course best kept by grazing, and the cattle on the
+grass are themselves no mean addition to the beauty of the thing,
+as need scarcely be insisted on with anyone who has once seen a
+well-kept pasture. But it is worth noting, as an
+expression of the pecuniary element in popular taste, that such a
+method of keeping public grounds is seldom resorted to. The best
+that is done by skilled workmen under the supervision of a
+trained keeper is a more or less close imitation of a pasture,
+but the result invariably falls somewhat short of the artistic
+effect of grazing. But to the average popular apprehension a herd
+of cattle so pointedly suggests thrift and usefulness that their
+presence in the public pleasure ground would be intolerably
+cheap. This method of keeping grounds is comparatively
+inexpensive, therefore it is indecorous.
+
+Of the same general bearing is another feature of public grounds.
+There is a studious exhibition of expensiveness coupled with a
+make-believe of simplicity and crude serviceability. Private
+grounds also show the same physiognomy wherever they are in the
+management or ownership of persons whose tastes have been formed
+under middle-class habits of life or under the upper-class
+traditions of no later a date than the childhood of the
+generation that is now passing. Grounds which conform to the
+instructed tastes of the latter-day upper class do not show these
+features in so marked a degree. The reason for this difference in
+tastes between the past and the incoming generation of the
+well-bred lies in the changing economic situation. A similar
+difference is perceptible in other respects, as well as in the
+accepted ideals of pleasure grounds. In this country as in most
+others, until the last half century but a very small proportion
+of the population were possessed of such wealth as would exempt
+them from thrift. Owing to imperfect means of communication, this
+small fraction were scattered and out of effective touch with one
+another. There was therefore no basis for a growth of taste in
+disregard of expensiveness. The revolt of the well-bred taste
+against vulgar thrift was unchecked. Wherever the unsophisticated
+sense of beauty might show itself sporadically in an approval of
+inexpensive or thrifty surroundings, it would lack the "social
+confirmation" which nothing but a considerable body of
+like-minded people can give. There was, therefore, no effective
+upper-class opinion that would overlook evidences of possible
+inexpensiveness in the management of grounds; and there was
+consequently no appreciable divergence between the leisure-class
+and the lower middle-class ideal in the physiognomy of pleasure
+grounds. Both classes equally constructed their ideals with the
+fear of pecuniary disrepute before their eyes.
+
+Today a divergence in ideals is beginning to be apparent. The
+portion of the leisure class that has been consistently exempt
+from work and from pecuniary cares for a generation or more is
+now large enough to form and sustain opinion in matters of taste.
+increased mobility of the members has also added to the facility
+with which a "social confirmation" can be attained within the
+class. Within this select class the exemption from thrift is a
+matter so commonplace as to have lost much of its utility as a
+basis of pecuniary decency. Therefore the latter-day upper-class
+canons of taste do not so consistently insist on an unremitting
+demonstration of expensiveness and a strict exclusion of the
+appearance of thrift. So, a predilection for the rustic and the
+"natural" in parks and grounds makes its appearance on these
+higher social and intellectual levels. This predilection is in
+large part an outcropping of the instinct of workmanship; and it
+works out its results with varying degrees of consistency. It is
+seldom altogether unaffected, and at times it shades off into
+something not widely different from that make-believe of
+rusticity which has been referred to above.
+
+A weakness for crudely serviceable contrivances that
+pointedly suggest immediate and wasteless use is present even in
+the middle-class tastes; but it is there kept well in hand under
+the unbroken dominance of the canon of reputable futility.
+Consequently it works out in a variety of ways and means for
+shamming serviceability -- in such contrivances as rustic fences,
+bridges, bowers, pavilions, and the like decorative features. An
+expression of this affectation of serviceability, at what is
+perhaps its widest divergence from the first promptings of the
+sense of economic beauty, is afforded by the cast-iron rustic
+fence and trellis or by a circuitous drive laid across level
+ground.
+
+The select leisure class has outgrown the use of these
+pseudo-serviceable variants of pecuniary beauty, at least at some
+points. But the taste of the more recent accessions to the
+leisure class proper and of the middle and lower classes still
+requires a pecuniary beauty to supplement the aesthetic beauty,
+even in those objects which are primarily admired for the beauty
+that belongs to them as natural growths.
+
+The popular taste in these matters is to be seen in the prevalent
+high appreciation of topiary work and of the
+conventional flower-beds of public grounds. Perhaps as happy an
+illustration as may be had of this dominance of pecuniary beauty
+over aesthetic beauty in middle-class tastes is seen in the
+reconstruction of the grounds lately occupied by the Columbian
+Exposition. The evidence goes to show that the requirement of
+reputable expensiveness is still present in good vigor even where
+all ostensibly lavish display is avoided. The artistic effects
+actually wrought in this work of reconstruction diverge somewhat
+widely from the effect to which the same ground would have lent
+itself in hands not guided by pecuniary canons of taste. And even
+the better class of the city's population view the progress of
+the work with an unreserved approval which suggests that there is
+in this case little if any discrepancy between the tastes of the
+upper and the lower or middle classes of the city. The sense of
+beauty in the population of this representative city of the
+advanced pecuniary culture is very chary of any departure from
+its great cultural principle of conspicuous waste.
+
+The love of nature, perhaps itself borrowed from a
+higher-class code of taste, sometimes expresses itself in
+unexpected ways under the guidance of this canon of pecuniary
+beauty, and leads to results that may seem incongruous to an
+unreflecting beholder. The well-accepted practice of planting
+trees in the treeless areas of this country, for instance, has
+been carried over as an item of honorific expenditure into the
+heavily wooded areas; so that it is by no means unusual for a
+village or a farmer in the wooded country to clear the land of
+its native trees and immediately replant saplings of certain
+introduced varieties about the farmyard or along the streets. In
+this way a forest growth of oak, elm, beech, butternut, hemlock,
+basswood, and birch is cleared off to give room for saplings of
+soft maple, cottonwood, and brittle willow. It is felt that the
+inexpensiveness of leaving the forest trees standing would
+derogate from the dignity that should invest an article which is
+intended to serve a decorative and honorific end.
+
+The like pervading guidance of taste by pecuniary repute is
+traceable in the prevalent standards of beauty in animals. The
+part played by this canon of taste in assigning her place in the
+popular aesthetic scale to the cow has already been spokes of.
+Something to the same effect is true of the other domestic
+animals, so far as they are in an appreciable degree industrially
+useful to the community -- as, for instance, barnyard fowl, hogs,
+cattle, sheep, goats, draught-horses. They are of the nature of
+productive goods, and serve a useful, often a lucrative end;
+therefore beauty is not readily imputed to them. The case is
+different with those domestic animals which ordinarily serve no
+industrial end; such as pigeons, parrots and other cage-birds,
+cats, dogs, and fast horses. These commonly are items of
+conspicuous consumption, and are therefore honorific in their
+nature and may legitimately be accounted beautiful. This class of
+animals are conventionally admired by the body of the upper
+classes, while the pecuniarily lower classes -- and that select
+minority of the leisure class among whom the rigorous canon that
+abjures thrift is in a measure obsolescent -- find beauty in one
+class of animals as in another, without drawing a hard and fast
+line of pecuniary demarcation between the beautiful and the ugly.
+In the case of those domestic animals which are honorific and are
+reputed beautiful, there is a subsidiary basis of merit that
+should be spokes of. Apart from the birds which belong in the
+honorific class of domestic animals, and which owe their place in
+this class to their non-lucrative character alone, the animals
+which merit particular attention are cats, dogs, and fast horses.
+The cat is less reputable than the other two just named, because
+she is less wasteful; she may eves serve a useful end. At the
+same time the cat's temperament does not fit her for the
+honorific purpose. She lives with man on terms of equality, knows
+nothing of that relation of status which is the ancient basis of
+all distinctions of worth, honor, and repute, and she does not
+lend herself with facility to an invidious comparison between her
+owner and his neighbors. The exception to this last rule occurs
+in the case of such scarce and fanciful products as the Angora
+cat, which have some slight honorific value on the ground of
+expensiveness, and have, therefore, some special claim to beauty
+on pecuniary grounds.
+
+The dog has advantages in the way of uselessness as well as in
+special gifts of temperament. He is often spoken of, in an
+eminent sense, as the friend of man, and his intelligence and
+fidelity are praised. The meaning of this is that the dog is
+man's servant and that he has the gift of an unquestioning
+subservience and a slave's quickness in guessing his master's
+mood. Coupled with these traits, which fit him well for the
+relation of status -- and which must for the present purpose be
+set down as serviceable traits -- the dog has some
+characteristics which are of a more equivocal aesthetic value. He
+is the filthiest of the domestic animals in his person and the
+nastiest in his habits. For this he makes up is a servile,
+fawning attitude towards his master, and a readiness to inflict
+damage and discomfort on all else. The dog, then, commends
+himself to our favor by affording play to our propensity for
+mastery, and as he is also an item of expense, and commonly
+serves no industrial purpose, he holds a well-assured place in
+men's regard as a thing of good repute. The dog is at the same
+time associated in our imagination with the chase -- a
+meritorious employment and an expression of the honorable
+predatory impulse. Standing on this vantage ground, whatever
+beauty of form and motion and whatever commendable mental traits
+he may possess are conventionally acknowledged and magnified. And
+even those varieties of the dog which have been bred into
+grotesque deformity by the dog-fancier are in good faith
+accounted beautiful by many. These varieties of dogs -- and the
+like is true of other fancy-bred animals -- are rated and graded
+in aesthetic value somewhat in proportion to the degree of
+grotesqueness and instability of the particular fashion which the
+deformity takes in the given case. For the purpose in hand, this
+differential utility on the ground of grotesqueness and
+instability of structure is reducible to terms of a greater
+scarcity and consequent expense. The commercial value of canine
+monstrosities, such as the prevailing styles of pet dogs both for
+men's and women's use, rests on their high cost of production,
+and their value to their owners lies chiefly in their utility as
+items of conspicuous consumption. In directly, through reflection
+Upon their honorific expensiveness, a social worth is imputed to
+them; and so, by an easy substitution of words and ideas, they
+come to be admired and reputed beautiful. Since any attention
+bestowed upon these animals is in no sense gainful or useful, it
+is also reputable; and since the habit of giving them attention
+is consequently not deprecated, it may grow into an habitual
+attachment of great tenacity and of a most benevolent character.
+So that in the affection bestowed on pet animals the canon of
+expensiveness is present more or less remotely as a norm which
+guides and shapes the sentiment and the selection of its object.
+The like is true, as will be noticed presently, with respect to
+affection for persons also; although the manner in which the norm
+acts in that case is somewhat different.
+
+The case of the fast horse is much like that of the dog. He is on
+the whole expensive, or wasteful and useless -- for the
+industrial purpose. What productive use he may possess, in the
+way of enhancing the well-being of the community or making the
+way of life easier for men, takes the form of exhibitions of
+force and facility of motion that gratify the popular aesthetic
+sense. This is of course a substantial serviceability. The horse
+is not endowed with the spiritual aptitude for servile dependence
+in the same measure as the dog; but he ministers effectually to
+his master's impulse to convert the "animate" forces of the
+environment to his own use and discretion and so express his own
+dominating individuality through them. The fast horse is at least
+potentially a race-horse, of high or low degree; and it is as
+such that he is peculiarly serviceable to his owner. The utility
+of the fast horse lies largely in his efficiency as a means of
+emulation; it gratifies the owner's sense of aggression and
+dominance to have his own horse outstrip his neighbor's. This use
+being not lucrative, but on the whole pretty consistently
+wasteful, and quite conspicuously so, it is honorific, and
+therefore gives the fast horse a strong presumptive position of
+reputability. Beyond this, the race-horse proper has also a
+similarly non-industrial but honorific use as a gambling
+instrument.
+
+The fast horse, then, is aesthetically fortunate, in that the
+canon of pecuniary good repute legitimates a free
+appreciation of whatever beauty or serviceability he may possess.
+His pretensions have the countenance of the principle of
+conspicuous waste and the backing of the predatory aptitude for
+dominance and emulation. The horse is, moreover, a beautiful
+animal, although the race-horse is so in no peculiar degree to
+the uninstructed taste of those persons who belong neither in the
+class of race-horse fanciers nor in the class whose sense of
+beauty is held in abeyance by the moral constraint of the horse
+fancier's award. To this untutored taste the most beautiful horse
+seems to be a form which has suffered less radical alteration
+than the race-horse under the breeder's selective development of
+the animal. Still, when a writer or speaker -- especially of
+those whose eloquence is most consistently commonplace wants an
+illustration of animal grace and serviceability, for rhetorical
+use, he habitually turns to the horse; and he commonly makes it
+plain before he is done that what he has in mind is the
+race-horse.
+
+It should be noted that in the graduated appreciation of
+varieties of horses and of dogs, such as one meets with among
+people of even moderately cultivated tastes in these matters,
+there is also discernible another and more direct line of
+influence of the leisure-class canons of reputability. In this
+country, for instance, leisure-class tastes are to some extent
+shaped on usages and habits which prevail, or which are
+apprehended to prevail, among the leisure class of Great Britain.
+In dogs this is true to a less extent than in horses. In horses,
+more particularly in saddle horses -- which at their best serve
+the purpose of wasteful display simply -- it will hold true in a
+general way that a horse is more beautiful in proportion as he is
+more English; the English leisure class being, for purposes of
+reputable usage, the upper leisure class of this country, and so
+the exemplar for the lower grades. This mimicry in the methods of
+the apperception of beauty and in the forming of judgments of
+taste need not result in a spurious, or at any rate not a
+hypocritical or affected, predilection. The predilection is as
+serious and as substantial an award of taste when it rests on
+this basis as when it rests on any other, the difference is that
+this taste is and as substantial an award of taste when it rests
+on this basis as when it rests on any other; the difference is
+that this taste is a taste for the reputably correct, not for the
+aesthetically true.
+
+The mimicry, it should be said, extends further than to the sense
+of beauty in horseflesh simply. It includes trappings and
+horsemanship as well, so that the correct or reputably beautiful
+seat or posture is also decided by English usage, as well as the
+equestrian gait. To show how fortuitous may sometimes be the
+circumstances which decide what shall be becoming and what not
+under the pecuniary canon of beauty, it may be noted that this
+English seat, and the peculiarly distressing gait which has made
+an awkward seat necessary, are a survival from the time when the
+English roads were so bad with mire and mud as to be virtually
+impassable for a horse travelling at a more comfortable gait; so
+that a person of decorous tastes in horsemanship today rides a
+punch with docked tail, in an uncomfortable posture and at a
+distressing gait, because the English roads during a great part
+of the last century were impassable for a horse travelling at a
+more horse-like gait, or for an animal built for moving with ease
+over the firm and open country to which the horse is indigenous.
+It is not only with respect to consumable goods -- including
+domestic animals -- that the canons of taste have been colored by
+the canons of pecuniary reputability. Something to the like
+effect is to be said for beauty in persons. In order to avoid
+whatever may be matter of controversy, no weight will be given in
+this connection to such popular predilection as there may be for
+the dignified (leisurely) bearing and poly presence that are by
+vulgar tradition associated with opulence in mature men. These
+traits are in some measure accepted as elements of personal
+beauty. But there are certain elements of feminine beauty, on the
+other hand, which come in under this head, and which are of so
+concrete and specific a character as to admit of itemized
+appreciation. It is more or less a rule that in communities which
+are at the stage of economic development at which women are
+valued by the upper class for their service, the ideal of female
+beauty is a robust, large-limbed woman. The ground of
+appreciation is the physique, while the conformation of the face
+is of secondary weight only. A well-known instance of this ideal
+of the early predatory culture is that of the maidens of the
+Homeric poems.
+
+This ideal suffers a change in the succeeding development, when,
+in the conventional scheme, the office of the high-class wife
+comes to be a vicarious leisure simply. The ideal then includes
+the characteristics which are supposed to result from or to go
+with a life of leisure consistently enforced. The ideal accepted
+under these circumstances may be gathered from
+descriptions of beautiful women by poets and writers of the
+chivalric times. In the conventional scheme of those days ladies
+of high degree were conceived to be in perpetual tutelage, and to
+be scrupulously exempt from all useful work. The resulting
+chivalric or romantic ideal of beauty takes cognizance chiefly of
+the face, and dwells on its delicacy, and on the delicacy of the
+hands and feet, the slender figure, and especially the slender
+waist. In the pictured representations of the women of that time,
+and in modern romantic imitators of the chivalric thought and
+feeling, the waist is attenuated to a degree that implies extreme
+debility. The same ideal is still extant among a considerable
+portion of the population of modern industrial communities; but
+it is to be said that it has retained its hold most tenaciously
+in those modern communities which are least advanced in point of
+economic and civil development, and which show the most
+considerable survivals of status and of predatory institutions.
+That is to say, the chivalric ideal is best preserved in those
+existing communities which are substantially least modern.
+Survivals of this lackadaisical or romantic ideal occur freely in
+the tastes of the well-to-do classes of Continental countries.
+In modern communities which have reached the higher levels of
+industrial development, the upper leisure class has
+accumulated so great a mass of wealth as to place its women above
+all imputation of vulgarly productive labor. Here the status of
+women as vicarious consumers is beginning to lose its place in
+the sections of the body of the people; and as a consequence the
+ideal of feminine beauty is beginning to change back again from
+the infirmly delicate, translucent, and hazardously slender, to a
+woman of the archaic type that does not disown her hands and
+feet, nor, indeed, the other gross material facts of her person.
+In the course of economic development the ideal of beauty among
+the peoples of the Western culture has shifted from the woman of
+physical presence to the lady, and it is beginning to shift back
+again to the woman; and all in obedience to the changing
+conditions of pecuniary emulation. The exigencies of emulation at
+one time required lusty slaves; at another time they required a
+conspicuous performance of vicarious leisure and consequently an
+obvious disability; but the situation is now beginning to outgrow
+this last requirement, since, under the higher efficiency of
+modern industry, leisure in women is possible so far down the
+scale of reputability that it will no longer serve as a
+definitive mark of the highest pecuniary grade.
+
+Apart from this general control exercised by the norm of
+conspicuous waste over the ideal of feminine beauty, there are
+one or two details which merit specific mention as showing how it
+may exercise an extreme constraint in detail over men's sense of
+beauty in women. It has already been noticed that at the stages
+of economic evolution at which conspicuous leisure is much
+regarded as a means of good repute, the ideal requires delicate
+and diminutive bands and feet and a slender waist. These
+features, together with the other, related faults of structure
+that commonly go with them, go to show that the person so
+affected is incapable of useful effort and must therefore be
+supported in idleness by her owner. She is useless and expensive,
+and she is consequently valuable as evidence of pecuniary
+strength. It results that at this cultural stage women take
+thought to alter their persons, so as to conform more nearly to
+the requirements of the instructed taste of the time; and under
+the guidance of the canon of pecuniary decency, the men find the
+resulting artificially induced pathological features attractive.
+So, for instance, the constricted waist which has had so wide and
+persistent a vogue in the communities of the Western culture, and
+so also the deformed foot of the Chinese. Both of these are
+mutilations of unquestioned repulsiveness to the untrained sense.
+It requires habituation to become reconciled to them. Yet there
+is no room to question their attractiveness to men into whose
+scheme of life they fit as honorific items sanctioned by the
+requirements of pecuniary reputability. They are items of
+pecuniary and cultural beauty which have come to do duty as
+elements of the ideal of womanliness.
+
+The connection here indicated between the aesthetic value and the
+invidious pecuniary value of things is of course not present in
+the consciousness of the valuer. So far as a person, in forming a
+judgment of taste, takes thought and reflects that the object of
+beauty under consideration is wasteful and
+reputable, and therefore may legitimately be accounted beautiful;
+so far the judgment is not a bona fide judgment of taste and does
+not come up for consideration in this connection. The connection
+which is here insisted on between the reputability and the
+apprehended beauty of objects lies through the effect which the
+fact of reputability has upon the valuer's habits of thought. He
+is in the habit of forming judgments of value of various
+kinds-economic, moral, aesthetic, or reputable concerning the
+objects with which he has to do, and his attitude of commendation
+towards a given object on any other ground will affect the degree
+of his appreciation of the object when he comes to value it for
+the aesthetic purpose. This is more particularly true as regards
+valuation on grounds so closely related to the aesthetic ground
+as that of reputability. The valuation for the aesthetic purpose
+and for the purpose of repute are not held apart as distinctly as
+might be. Confusion is especially apt to arise between these two
+kinds of valuation, because the value of objects for repute is
+not habitually distinguished in speech by the use of a special
+descriptive term. The result is that the terms in familiar use to
+designate categories or elements of beauty are applied to cover
+this unnamed element of pecuniary merit, and the corresponding
+confusion of ideas follows by easy consequence. The demands of
+reputability in this way coalesce in the popular apprehension
+with the demands of the sense of beauty, and beauty which is not
+accompanied by the accredited marks of good repute is not
+accepted. But the requirements of pecuniary reputability and
+those of beauty in the naive sense do not in any appreciable
+degree coincide. The elimination from our surroundings of the
+pecuniarily unfit, therefore, results in a more or less thorough
+elimination of that considerable range of elements of beauty
+which do not happen to conform to the pecuniary requirement.
+The underlying norms of taste are of very ancient growth,
+probably far antedating the advent of the pecuniary institutions
+that are here under discussion. Consequently, by force of the
+past selective adaptation of men's habits of thought, it happens
+that the requirements of beauty, simply, are for the most part
+best satisfied by inexpensive contrivances and structures which
+in a straightforward manner suggest both the office which they
+are to perform and the method of serving their end, It may be in
+place to recall the modern psychological position. Beauty of form
+seems to be a question of facility of apperception. The
+proposition could perhaps safely be made broader than this. If
+abstraction is made from association, suggestion, and
+"expression," classed as elements of beauty, then beauty in any
+perceived object means that the mid readily unfolds its
+apperceptive activity in the directions which the object in
+question affords. But the directions in which activity readily
+unfolds or expresses itself are the directions to which long and
+close habituation bas made the mind prone. So far as concerns the
+essential elements of beauty, this habituation is an habituation
+so close and long as to have induced not only a proclivity to the
+apperceptive form in question, but an adaptation of physiological
+structure and function as well. So far as the economic interest
+enters into the constitution of beauty, it enters as a suggestion
+or expression of adequacy to a purpose, a manifest and readily
+inferable subservience to the life process. This expression of
+economic facility or economic serviceability in any object --
+what may be called the economic beauty of the object-is best
+sewed by neat and unambiguous suggestion of its office and its
+efficiency for the material ends of life.
+
+On this ground, among objects of use the simple and
+unadorned article is aesthetically the best. But since the
+pecuniary canon of reputability rejects the inexpensive in
+articles appropriated to individual consumption, the satisfaction
+of our craving for beautiful things must be sought by way of
+compromise. The canons of beauty must be circumvented by some
+contrivance which will give evidence of a reputably wasteful
+expenditure, at the same time that it meets the demands of our
+critical sense of the useful and the beautiful, or at least meets
+the demand of some habit which has come to do duty in place of
+that sense. Such an auxiliary sense of taste is the sense of
+novelty; and this latter is helped out in its surrogateship by
+the curiosity with which men view ingenious and puzzling
+contrivances. Hence it comes that most objects alleged to be
+beautiful, and doing duty as such, show considerable ingenuity of
+design and are calculated to puzzle the beholder -- to bewilder
+him with irrelevant suggestions and hints of the improbable -- at
+the same time that they give evidence of an expenditure of labor
+in excess of what would give them their fullest efficency for
+their ostensible economic end.
+
+This may be shown by an illustration taken from outside the range
+of our everyday habits and everyday contact, and so outside the
+range of our bias. Such are the remarkable feather mantles of
+Hawaii, or the well-known cawed handles of the ceremonial adzes
+of several Polynesian islands, These are undeniably beautiful,
+both in the sense that they offer a pleasing composition of form,
+lines, and color, and in the sense that they evince great skill
+and ingenuity in design and construction. At the same time the
+articles are manifestly ill fitted to serve any other economic
+purpose. But it is not always that the evolution of ingenious and
+puzzling contrivances under the guidance of the canon of wasted
+effort works out so happy a result. The result is quite as often
+a virtually complete suppression of all elements that would bear
+scrutiny as expressions of beauty, or of serviceability, and the
+substitution of evidences of misspent ingenuity and labor, backed
+by a conspicuous ineptitude; until many of the objects with which
+we surround ourselves in everyday life, and even many articles of
+everyday dress and ornament, are such as would not be tolerated
+except under the stress of prescriptive tradition. Illustrations
+of this substitution of ingenuity and expense in place of beauty
+and serviceability are to be seen, for instance, in domestic
+architecture, in domestic art or fancy work, in various articles
+of apparel, especially of feminine and priestly apparel.
+
+The canon of beauty requires expression of the generic. The
+"novelty" due to the demands of conspicuous waste traverses this
+canon of beauty, in that it results in making the physiognomy of
+our objects of taste a congeries of idiosyncrasies; and the
+idiosyncrasies are, moreover, under the selective surveillance of
+the canon of expensiveness.
+
+This process of selective adaptation of designs to the end of
+conspicuous waste, and the substitution of pecuniary beauty for
+aesthetic beauty, has been especially effective in the
+development of architecture. It would be extremely difficult to
+find a modern civilized residence or public building which can
+claim anything better than relative inoffensiveness in the eyes
+of anyone who will dissociate the elements of beauty from those
+of honorific waste. The endless variety of fronts presented by
+the better class of tenements and apartment houses in our cities
+is an endless variety of architectural distress and of
+suggestions of expensive discomfort. Considered as objects of
+beauty, the dead walls of the sides and back of these structures,
+left untouched by the hands of the artist, are commonly the best
+feature of the building.
+
+What has been said of the influence of the law of
+conspicuous waste upon the canons of taste will hold true, with
+but a slight change of terms, of its influence upon our notions
+of the serviceability of goods for other ends than the aesthetic
+one. Goods are produced and consumed as a means to the fuller
+unfolding of human life; and their utility consists, in the first
+instance, in their efficiency as means to this end. The end is,
+in the first instance, the fullness of life of the individual,
+taken in absolute terms. But the human proclivity to emulation
+has seized upon the consumption of goods as a means to an
+invidious comparison, and has thereby invested constable goods
+with a secondary utility as evidence of relative ability to pay.
+This indirect or secondary use of consumable goods lends an
+honorific character to consumption and presently also to the
+goods which best serve the emulative end of consumption. The
+consumption of expensive goods is meritorious, and the goods
+which contain an appreciable element of cost in excess of what
+goes to give them serviceability for their ostensible mechanical
+purpose are honorific. The marks of superfluous costliness in the
+goods are therefore marks of worth -- of high efficency for the
+indirect, invidious end to be served by their consumption; and
+conversely. goods are humilific, and therefore unattractive, if
+they show too thrifty an adaptation to the mechanical end sought
+and do not include a margin of expensiveness on which to rest a
+complacent invidious comparison. This indirect utility gives much
+of their value to the "better" grades of goods. In order to
+appeal to the cultivated sense of utility, an article must
+contain a modicum of this indirect utility.
+
+While men may have set out with disapproving an inexpensive
+manner of living because it indicated inability to spend much,
+and so indicated a lack of pecuniary success, they end by falling
+into the habit of disapproving cheap things as being
+intrinsically dishonorable or unworthy because they are cheap. As
+time has gone on, each succeeding generation has received this
+tradition of meritorious expenditure from the generation before
+it, and has in its turn further elaborated and fortified the
+traditional canon of pecuniary reputability in goods consumed;
+until we have finally reached such a degree of conviction as to
+the unworthiness of all inexpensive things, that we have no
+longer any misgivings in formulating the maxim, "Cheap and
+nasty."  So thoroughly has the habit of approving the expensive
+and disapproving the inexpensive been ingrained into our thinking
+that we instinctively insist upon at least some measure of
+wasteful expensiveness in all our consumption, even in the case
+of goods which are consumed in strict privacy and without the
+slightest thought of display. We all feel, sincerely and without
+misgiving, that we are the more lifted up in spirit for having,
+even in the privacy of our own household, eaten our daily meal by
+the help of hand-wrought silver utensils, from hand-painted china
+(often of dubious artistic value) laid on high-priced table
+linen. Any retrogression from the standard of living which we are
+accustomed to regard as worthy in this respect is felt to be a
+grievous violation of our human dignity. So, also, for the last
+dozen years candles have been a more pleasing source of light at
+dinner than any other. Candlelight is now softer, less
+distressing to well-bred eyes, than oil, gas, or electric light.
+The same could not have been said thirty years ago, when candles
+were, or recently had been, the cheapest available light for
+domestic use. Nor are candles even now found to give an
+acceptable or effective light for any other than a ceremonial
+illumination.
+
+A political sage still living has summed up the conclusion of
+this whole matter in the dictum : "A cheap coat makes a cheap
+man," and there is probably no one who does not feel the
+convincing force of the maxim.
+
+The habit of looking for the marks of superfluous
+expensiveness in goods, and of requiring that all goods should
+afford some utility of the indirect or invidious sort, leads to a
+change in the standards by which the utility of goods is gauged.
+The honorific element and the element of brute efficiency are not
+held apart in the consumer's appreciation of commodities, and the
+two together go to make up the unanalyzed aggregate
+serviceability of the goods. Under the resulting standard of
+serviceability, no article will pass muster on the strength of
+material sufficiency alone. In order to completeness and full
+acceptability to the consumer it must also show the honorific
+element. It results that the producers of articles of consumption
+direct their efforts to the production of goods that shall meet
+this demand for the honorific element. They will do this with all
+the more alacrity and effect, since they are themselves under the
+dominance of the same standard of worth in goods, and would be
+sincerely grieved at the sight of goods which lack the proper
+honorific finish. Hence it has come about that there are today no
+goods supplied in any trade which do not contain the honorific
+element in greater or less degree. Any consumer who might,
+Diogenes-like, insist on the elimination of all honorific or
+wasteful elements from his consumption, would be unable to supply
+his most trivial wants in the modern market. Indeed, even if he
+resorted to supplying his wants directly by his own efforts, he
+would find it difficult if not impossible to divest himself of
+the current habits of thought on this head; so that he could
+scarcely compass a supply of the necessaries of life for a day's
+consumption without instinctively and by oversight incorporating
+in his home-made product something of this honorific,
+quasi-decorative element of wasted labor.
+
+It is notorious that in their selection of serviceable goods in
+the retail market purchasers are guided more by the finish and
+workmanship of the goods than by any marks of substantial
+serviceability. Goods, in order to sell, must have some
+appreciable amount of labor spent in giving them the marks of
+decent expensiveness, in addition to what goes to give them
+efficiency for the material use which they are to serve. This
+habit of making obvious costliness a canon of serviceability of
+course acts to enhance the aggregate cost of articles of
+consumption. It puts us on our guard against cheapness by
+identifying merit in some degree with cost. There is ordinarily a
+consistent effort on the part of the consumer to obtain goods of
+the required serviceability at as advantageous a bargain as may
+be; but the conventional requirement of obvious costliness, as a
+voucher and a constituent of the serviceability of the goods,
+leads him to reject as under grade such goods as do not contain a
+large element of conspicuous waste.
+
+It is to be added that a large share of those features of
+consumable goods which figure in popular apprehension as marks of
+serviceability, and to which reference is here had as elements of
+conspicuous waste, commend themselves to the consumer also on
+other grounds than that of expensiveness alone. They usually give
+evidence of skill and effective workmanship, even if they do not
+contribute to the substantial serviceability of the goods; and it
+is no doubt largely on some such ground that any particular mark
+of honorific serviceability first comes into vogue and afterward
+maintains its footing as a normal constituent element of the
+worth of an article. A display of efficient workmanship is
+pleasing simply as such, even where its remoter, for the time
+unconsidered, outcome is futile. There is a gratification of the
+artistic sense in the contemplation of skillful work. But it is
+also to be added that no such evidence of skillful workmanship,
+or of ingenious and effective adaptation of means to an end,
+will, in the long run, enjoy the approbation of the modern
+civilized consumer unless it has the sanction of the Canon of
+conspicuous waste.
+
+The position here taken is enforced in a felicitous manner by the
+place assigned in the economy of consumption to machine products.
+The point of material difference between machine-made goods and
+the hand-wrought goods which serve the same purposes is,
+ordinarily, that the former serve their primary purpose more
+adequately. They are a more perfect product -- show a more
+perfect adaptation of means to end. This does not save them from
+disesteem and deprecation, for they fall short under the test of
+honorific waste. Hand labor is a more wasteful method of
+production; hence the goods turned out by this method are more
+serviceable for the purpose of pecuniary reputability; hence the
+marks of hand labor come to be honorific, and the goods which
+exhibit these marks take rank as of higher grade than the
+corresponding machine product. Commonly, if not invariably, the
+honorific marks of hand labor are certain imperfections and
+irregularities in the lines of the hand-wrought article, showing
+where the workman has fallen short in the execution of the
+design. The ground of the superiority of hand-wrought goods,
+therefore, is a certain margin of crudeness. This margin must
+never be so wide as to show bungling workmanship, since that
+would be evidence of low cost, nor so narrow as to suggest the
+ideal precision attained only by the machine, for that would be
+evidence of low cost.
+
+The appreciation of those evidences of honorific crUdeness to
+which hand-wrought goods owe their superior worth and charm in
+the eyes of well-bred people is a matter of nice discrimination.
+It requires training and the formation of right habits of thought
+with respect to what may be called the physiognomy of goods.
+Machine-made goods of daily use are often admired and preferred
+precisely on account of their excessive perfection by the vulgar
+and the underbred who have not given due thought to the
+punctilios of elegant consumption. The ceremonial inferiority of
+machine products goes to show that the perfection of skill and
+workmanship embodied in any costly innovations in the finish of
+goods is not sufficient of itself to secure them acceptance and
+permanent favor. The innovation must have the support of the
+canon of conspicuous waste. Any feature in the physiognomy of
+goods, however pleasing in itself, and however well it may
+approve itself to the taste for effective work, will not be
+tolerated if it proves obnoxious to this norm of pecuniary
+reputability.
+
+The ceremonial inferiority or uncleanness in consumable goods due
+to "commonness," or in other words to their slight cost of
+production, has been taken very seriously by many persons. The
+objection to machine products is often formulated as an objection
+to the commonness of such goods. What is common is within the
+(pecuniary) reach of many people. Its consumption is therefore
+not honorific, since it does not serve the purpose of a favorable
+invidious comparison with other consumers. Hence the consumption,
+or even the sight of such goods, is inseparable from an odious
+suggestion of the lower levels of human life, and one comes away
+from their contemplation with a pervading sense of meanness that
+is extremely distasteful and depressing to a person of
+sensibility. In persons whose tastes assert themselves
+imperiously, and who have not the gift, habit, or incentive to
+discriminate between the grounds of their various judgments of
+taste, the deliverances of the sense of the honorific coalesce
+with those of the sense of beauty and of the sense of
+serviceability -- in the manner already spoken of; the resulting
+composite valuation serves as a judgment of the object's beauty
+or its serviceability, according as the valuer's bias or interest
+inclines him to apprehend the object in the one or the other of
+these aspects. It follows not infrequently that the marks of
+cheapness or commonness are accepted as definitive marks of
+artistic unfitness, and a code or schedule of aesthetic
+proprieties on the one hand, and of aesthetic abominations On the
+other, is constructed on this basis for guidance in questions of
+taste.
+
+As has already been pointed out, the cheap, and therefore
+indecorous, articles of daily consumption in modern industrial
+communities are commonly machine products; and the generic
+feature of the physiognomy of machine-made goods as compared with
+the hand-wrought article is their greater perfection in
+workmanship and greater accuracy in the detail execution of the
+design. Hence it comes about that the visible imperfections of
+the hand-wrought goods, being honorific, are accounted marks of
+superiority in point of beauty, Or serviceability, or both. Hence
+has arisen that exaltation of the defective, of which John Ruskin
+and William Morris were such eager spokesmen in their time; and
+on this ground their propaganda of crudity and wasted effort has
+been taken up and carried forward since their time. And hence
+also the propaganda for a return to handicraft and household
+industry. So much of the work and speculations of this group of
+men as fairly comes under the characterization here given would
+have been impossible at a time when the visibly more perfect
+goods were not the cheaper.
+
+It is of course only as to the economic value of this school of
+aesthetic teaching that anything is intended to be said or can be
+said here. What is said is not to be taken in the sense of
+depreciation, but chiefly as a characterization of the tendency
+of this teaching in its effect on consumption and on the
+production of consumable goods.
+
+The manner in which the bias of this growth of taste has worked
+itself out in production is perhaps most cogently
+exemplified in the book manufacture with which Morris busied
+himself during the later years of his life; but what holds true
+of the work of the Kelmscott Press in an eminent degree, holds
+true with but slightly abated force when applied to latter-day
+artistic book-making generally -- as to type, paper,
+illustration, binding materials, and binder's work. The claims to
+excellence put forward by the later products of the bookmaker's
+industry rest in some measure on the degree of its approximation
+to the crudities of the time when the work of book-making was a
+doubtful struggle with refractory materials carried on by means
+of insufficient appliances. These products, since they require
+hand labor, are more expensive; they are also less convenient for
+use than the books turned out with a view to serviceability
+alone; they therefore argue ability on the part of the purchaser
+to consume freely, as well as ability to waste time and effort.
+It is on this basis that the printers of today are returning to
+"old-style," and other more or less obsolete styles of type which
+are less legible and give a cruder appearance to the page than
+the "modern." Even a scientific periodical, with ostensibly no
+purpose but the most effective presentation of matter with which
+its science is concerned, will concede so much to the demands of
+this pecuniary beauty as to publish its scientific discussions in
+oldstyle type, on laid paper, and with uncut edges. But books
+which are not ostensibly concerned with the effective
+presentation of their contents alone, of course go farther in
+this direction. Here we have a somewhat cruder type, printed on
+hand-laid, deckel-edged paper, with excessive margins and uncut
+leaves, with bindings of a painstaking crudeness and elaborate
+ineptitude. The Kelmscott Press reduced the matter to an
+absurdity -- as seen from the point of view of brute
+serviceability alone -- by issuing books for modern use, edited
+with the obsolete spelling, printed in black-letter, and bound in
+limp vellum fitted with thongs. As a further characteristic
+feature which fixes the economic place of artistic book-making,
+there is the fact that these more elegant books are, at their
+best, printed in limited editions. A limited edition is in effect
+a guarantee -- somewhat crude, it is true -- that this book is
+scarce and that it therefore is costly and lends pecuniary
+distinction to its consumer.
+
+The special attractiveness of these book-products to the
+book-buyer of cultivated taste lies, of course, not in a
+conscious, naive recognition of their costliness and superior
+clumsiness. Here, as in the parallel case of the superiority of
+hand-wrought articles over machine products, the conscious ground
+of preference is an intrinsic excellence imputed to the costlier
+and more awkward article. The superior excellence imputed to the
+book which imitates the products of antique and obsolete
+processes is conceived to be chiefly a superior utility in the
+aesthetic respect; but it is not unusual to find a well-bred
+book-lover insisting that the clumsier product is also more
+serviceable as a vehicle of printed speech. So far as regards the
+superior aesthetic value of the decadent book, the chances are
+that the book-lover's contention has some ground. The book is
+designed with an eye single to its beauty, and the result is
+commonly some measure of success on the part of the designer.
+What is insisted on here, however, is that the canon of taste
+under which the designer works is a canon formed under the
+surveillance of the law of conspicuous waste, and that this law
+acts selectively to eliminate any canon of taste that does not
+conform to its demands. That is to say, while the decadent book
+may be beautiful, the limits within which the designer may work
+are fixed by requirements of a non-aesthetic kind. The product,
+if it is beautiful, must also at the same time be costly and ill
+adapted to its ostensible use. This mandatory canon of taste in
+the case of the book-designer, however, is not shaped entirely by
+the law of waste in its first form; the canon is to some extent
+shaped in conformity to that secondary expression of the
+predatory temperament, veneration for the archaic or obsolete,
+which in one of its special developments is called classicism.
+In aesthetic theory it might be extremely difficult, if not quite
+impracticable, to draw a line between the canon of
+classicism, or regard for the archaic, and the canon of beauty,
+For the aesthetic purpose such a distinction need scarcely be
+drawn, and indeed it need not exist. For a theory of taste the
+expression of an accepted ideal of archaism, on whatever basis it
+may have been accepted, is perhaps best rated as an element of
+beauty; there need be no question of its legitimation. But for
+the present purpose -- for the purpose of determining what
+economic grounds are present in the accepted canons of taste and
+what is their significance for the distribution and consumption
+of goods -- the distinction is not similarly beside the point.
+The position of machine products in the civilized scheme of
+consumption serves to point out the nature of the relation which
+subsists between the canon of conspicuous waste and the code of
+proprieties in consumption. Neither in matters of art and taste
+proper, nor as regards the current sense of the serviceability of
+goods, does this canon act as a principle of innovation or
+initiative. It does not go into the future as a creative
+principle which makes innovations and adds new items of
+consumption and new elements of cost. The principle in question
+is, in a certain sense, a negative rather than a positive law. It
+is a regulative rather than a creative principle. It very rarely
+initiates or originates any usage or custom directly. Its action
+is selective only. Conspicuous wastefulness does not directly
+afford ground for variation and growth, but conformity to its
+requirements is a condition to the survival of such innovations
+as may be made on other grounds. In whatever way usages and
+customs and methods of expenditure arise, they are all subject to
+the selective action of this norm of reputability; and the degree
+in which they conform to its requirements is a test of their
+fitness to survive in the competition with other similar usages
+and customs. Other thing being equal, the more obviously wasteful
+usage or method stands the better chance of survival under this
+law. The law of conspicuous waste does not account for the origin
+of variations, but only for the persistence of such forms as are
+fit to survive under its dominance. It acts to conserve the fit,
+not to originate the acceptable. Its office is to prove all
+things and to hold fast that which is good for its purpose.   
+Chapter Seven
+
+Dress as an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture
+
+It will in place, by way of illustration, to show in some detail
+how the economic principles so far set forth apply to everyday
+facts in some one direction of the life process. For this purpose
+no line of consumption affords a more apt
+illustration than expenditure on dress. It is especially the rule
+of the conspicuous waste of goods that finds expression in dress,
+although the other, related principles of pecuniary repute are
+also exemplified in the same contrivances. Other methods of
+putting one's pecuniary standing in evidence serve their end
+effectually, and other methods are in vogue always and
+everywhere; but expenditure on dress has this advantage over most
+other methods, that our apparel is always in evidence and affords
+an indication of our pecuniary standing to all observers at the
+first glance. It is also true that admitted expenditure for
+display is more obviously present, and is, perhaps, more
+universally practiced in the matter of dress than in any other
+line of consumption. No one finds difficulty in assenting to the
+commonplace that the greater part of the expenditure incurred by
+all classes for apparel is incurred for the sake of a respectable
+appearance rather than for the protection of the person. And
+probably at no other point is the sense of shabbiness so keenly
+felt as it is if we fall short of the standard set by social
+usage in this matter of dress. It is true of dress in even a
+higher degree than of most other items of consumption, that
+people will undergo a very considerable degree of privation in
+the comforts or the neCessaries of life in order to afford what
+is considered a decent amount of wasteful consumption; so that it
+is by no means an uncommon occurrence, in an inclement climate,
+for people to go ill clad in order to appear well dressed. And
+the commercial value of the goods used for clotting in any modern
+community is made up to a much larger extent of the
+fashionableness, the reputability of the goods than of the
+mechanical service which they render in clothing the person of
+the wearer. The need of dress is eminently a "higher" or
+spiritual need.
+
+This spiritual need of dress is not wholly, nor even
+chiefly, a naive propensity for display of expenditure. The law
+of conspicuous waste guides consumption in apparel, as in other
+things, chiefly at the second remove, by shaping the canons of
+taste and decency. In the common run of cases the conscious
+motive of the wearer or purchaser of conspicuously wasteful
+apparel is the need of conforming to established usage, and of
+living up to the accredited standard of taste and reputability.
+It is not only that one must be guided by the code of proprieties
+in dress in order to avoid the mortification that comes of
+unfavorable notice and comment, though that motive in itself
+counts for a great deal; but besides that, the requirement of
+expensiveness is so ingrained into our habits of thought in
+matters of dress that any other than expensive apparel is
+instinctively odious to us. Without reflection or analysis, we
+feel that what is inexpensive is unworthy. "A cheap coat makes a
+cheap man." "Cheap and nasty" is recognized to hold true in dress
+with even less mitigation than in other lines of consumption. On
+the ground both of taste and of serviceability, an inexpensive
+article of apparel is held to be inferior, under the maxim "cheap
+and nasty." We find things beautiful, as well as serviceable,
+somewhat in proportion as they are costly. With few and
+inconsequential exceptions, we all find a costly hand-wrought
+article of apparel much preferable, in point of beauty and of
+serviceability, to a less expensive imitation of it, however
+cleverly the spurious article may imitate the costly original;
+and what offends our sensibilities in the spurious article is not
+that it falls short in form or color, or, indeed, in visual
+effect in any way. The offensive object may be so close an
+imitation aS to defy any but the closest scrutiny; and yet so
+soon as the counterfeit is detected, its aesthetic value, and its
+commercial value as well, declines precipitately. Not only that,
+but it may be asserted with but small risk of contradiction that
+the aesthetic value of a detected counterfeit in dress declines
+somewhat in the same proportion as the counterfeit is cheaper
+than its original. It loses caste aesthetically because it falls
+to a lower pecuniary grade.
+
+But the function of dress as an evidence of ability to pay does
+not end with simply showing that the wearer consumes
+valuable goods in excess of what is required for physical
+comfort. Simple conspicuous waste of goods is effective and
+gratifying as far as it goes; it is good prima facie evidence of
+pecuniary success, and consequently prima facie evidence of
+social worth. But dress has subtler and more far-reaching
+possibilities than this crude, first-hand evidence of wasteful
+consumption only. If, in addition to showing that the wearer can
+afford to consume freely and uneconomically, it can also be shown
+in the same stroke that he or she is not under the necessity of
+earning a livelihood, the evidence of social worth is enhanced in
+a very considerable degree. Our dress, therefore, in order to
+serve its purpose effectually, should not only he expensive, but
+it should also make plain to all observers that the wearer is not
+engaged in any kind of productive labor. In the evolutionary
+process by which our system of dress has been elaborated into its
+present admirably perfect adaptation to its purpose, this
+subsidiary line of evidence has received due attention. A
+detailed examination of what passes in popular apprehension for
+elegant apparel will show that it is contrived at every point to
+convey the impression that the wearer does not habitually put
+forth any useful effort. It goes without saying that no apparel
+can be considered elegant, or even decent, if it shows the effect
+of manual labor on the part of the wearer, in the way of soil or
+wear. The pleasing effect of neat and spotless garments is
+chiefly, if not altogether, due to their carrying the suggestion
+of leisure-exemption from personal contact with industrial
+processes of any kind. Much of the charm that invests the
+patent-leather shoe, the stainless linen, the lustrous
+cylindrical hat, and the walking-stick, which so greatly enhance
+the native dignity of a gentleman, comes of their pointedly
+suggesting that the wearer cannot when so attired bear a hand in
+any employment that is directly and immediately of any human use.
+Elegant dress serves its purpose of elegance not only in that it
+is expensive, but also because it is the insignia of leisure. It
+not only shows that the wearer is able to consume a relativeLy
+large value, but it argues at the same time that he consumes
+without producing.
+
+The dress of women goes even farther than that of men in the way
+of demonstrating the wearer's abstinence from productive
+employment. It needs no argument to enforce the generalization
+that the more elegant styLes of feminine bonnets go even farther
+towards making work impossible than does the man's high hat. The
+woman's shoe adds the so-called French heel to the evidence of
+enforced leisure afforded by its polish; because this high heel
+obviously makes any, even the simplest and most necessary manual
+work extremely difficult. The like is true even in a higher
+degree of the skirt and the rest of the drapery which
+characterizes woman's dress. The substantial reason for our
+tenacious attachment to the skirt is just this; it is expensive
+and it hampers the wearer at every turn and incapacitates her for
+alL useful exertion. The like is true of the feminine custom of
+wearing the hair excessively long.
+
+But the woman's apparel not only goes beyond that of the modern
+man in the degree in which it argues exemption from labor; it
+also adds a peculiar and highly characteristic feature which
+differs in kind from anything habitually practiced by the men.
+This feature is the class of contrivances of which the corset is
+the typical example. The corset is, in economic theory,
+substantially a mutilation, undergone for the purpose of lowering
+the subject's vitality and rendering her permanently and
+obviously unfit for work. It is true, the corset impairs the
+personal attractions of the wearer, but the loss suffered on that
+score is offset by the gain in reputability which comes of her
+visibly increased expensiveness and infirmity. It may broadly be
+set down that the womanliness of woman's apparel resolves itself,
+in point of substantial fact, into the more effective hindrance
+to useful exertion offered by the garments peculiar to women.
+This difference between masculine and feminine apparel is here
+simply pointed out as a characteristic feature. The ground of its
+occurrence will be discussed presently.
+
+So far, then, we have, as the great and dominant norm of dress,
+the broad principle of conspicuous waste. Subsidiary to this
+principle, and as a corollary under it, we get as a second norm
+the principle of conspicuous leisure. In dress construction this
+norm works out in the shape of divers contrivances going to show
+that the wearer does not and, as far as it may conveniently be
+shown, can not engage in productive labor. Beyond these two
+principles there is a third of scarcely less constraining force,
+which will occur to any one who reflects at all on the subject.
+Dress must not only be conspicuously expensive and inconvenient,
+it must at the same time be up to date. No explanation at all
+satisfactory has hitherto been offered of the phenomenon of
+changing fashions. The imperative requirement of dressing in the
+latest accredited manner, as well as the fact that this
+accredited fashion constantly changes from season to season, is
+sufficiently familiar to every one, but the theory of this flux
+and change has not been worked out. We may of course say, with
+perfect consistency and truthfulness, that this principle of
+novelty is another corollary under the law of conspicuous waste.
+Obviously, if each garment is permitted to serve for but a brief
+term, and if none of last season's apparel is carried over and
+made further use of during the present season, the wasteful
+expenditure on dress is greatly increased. This is good as far as
+it goes, but it is negative only. Pretty much all that this
+consideration warrants us in saying is that the norm of
+conspicuous waste exercises a controlling surveillance in all
+matters of dress, so that any change in the fashions must
+conspicuous waste exercises a controlling surveillance in all
+matters of dress, so that any change in the fashions must conform
+to the requirement of wastefulness; it leaves unanswered the
+question as to the motive for making and accepting a change in
+the prevailing styles, and it also fails to explain why
+conformity to a given style at a given time is so imperatively
+necessary as we know it to be.
+
+For a creative principle, capable of serving as motive to
+invention and innovation in fashions, we shall have to go back to
+the primitive, non-economic motive with which apparel originated
+-- the motive of adornment. Without going into an extended
+discussion of how and why this motive asserts itself under the
+guidance of the law of expensiveness, it may be stated broadly
+that each successive innovation in the fashions is an effort to
+reach some form of display which shall be more acceptable to our
+sense of form and color or of effectiveness, than that which it
+displaces. The changing styles are the expression of a restless
+search for something which shall commend itself to our aesthetic
+sense; but as each innovation is subject to the selective action
+of the norm of conspicuous waste, the range within which
+innovation can take place is somewhat restricted. The innovation
+must not only be more beautiful, or perhaps oftener less
+offensive, than that which it displaces, but it must also come up
+to the accepted standard of expensiveness.
+
+It would seem at first sight that the result of such an
+unremitting struggle to attain the beautiful in dress should be a
+gradual approach to artistic perfection. We might naturally
+expect that the fashions should show a well-marked trend in the
+direction of some one or more types of apparel eminently becoming
+to the human form; and we might even feel that ge have
+substantial ground for the hope that today, after all the
+ingenuity and effort which have been spent on dress these many
+years, the fashions should have achieved a relative perfection
+and a relative stability, closely approximating to a permanently
+tenable artistic ideal. But such is not the case. It would be
+very hazardous indeed to assert that the styles of today are
+intrinsically more becoming than those of ten years ago, or than
+those of twenty, or fifty, or one hundred years ago. On the other
+hand, the assertion freely goes uncontradicted that styles in
+vogue two thousand years ago are more becoming than the most
+elaborate and painstaking constructions of today.
+
+The explanation of the fashions just offered, then, does not
+fully explain, and we shall have to look farther. It is well
+known that certain relatively stable styles and types of costume
+have been worked out in various parts of the world; as, for
+instance, among the Japanese, Chinese, and other Oriental
+nations; likewise among the Greeks, Romans, and other Eastern
+peoples of antiquity so also, in later times, among the, peasants
+of nearly every country of Europe. These national or popular
+costumes are in most cases adjudged by competent critics to be
+more becoming, more artistic, than the fluctuating styles of
+modern civilized apparel. At the same time they are also, at
+least usually, less obviously wasteful; that is to say, other
+elements than that of a display of expense are more readily
+detected in their structure.
+
+These relatively stable costumes are, commonly, pretty strictly
+and narrowly localized, and they vary by slight and systematic
+gradations from place to place. They have in every case been
+worked out by peoples or classes which are poorer than we, and
+especially they belong in countries and localities and times
+where the population, or at least the class to which the costume
+in question belongs, is relatively homogeneous, stable, and
+immobile. That is to say, stable costumes which will bear the
+test of time and perspective are worked out under circumstances
+where the norm of conspicuous waste asserts itself less
+imperatively than it does in the large modern civilized cities,
+whose relatively mobile wealthy population today sets the pace in
+matters of fashion. The countries and classes which have in this
+way worked out stable and artistic costumes have been so placed
+that the pecuniary emulation among them has taken the direction
+of a competition in conspicuous leisure rather than in
+conspicuous consumption of goods. So that it will hold true in a
+general way that fashions are least stable and least becoming in
+those communities where the principle of a conspicuous waste of
+goods asserts itself most imperatively, as among ourselves. All
+this points to an antagonism between expensiveness and artistic
+apparel. In point of practical fact, the norm of conspicuous
+waste is incompatible with the requirement that dress should be
+beautiful or becoming. And this antagonism offers an explanation
+of that restless change in fashion which neither the canon of
+expensiveness nor that of beauty alone can account for.
+
+The standard of reputability requires that dress should show
+wasteful expenditure; but all wastefulness is offensive to native
+taste. The psychological law has already been pointed out that
+all men -- and women perhaps even in a higher degree abhor
+futility, whether of effort or of expenditure -- much as Nature
+was once said to abhor a vacuum. But the principle of conspicuous
+waste requires an obviously futile expenditure; and the resulting
+conspicuous expensiveness of dress is therefore intrinsically
+ugly. Hence we find that in all innovations in dress, each added
+or altered detail strives to avoid condemnation by showing some
+ostensible purpose, at the same time that the requirement of
+conspicuous waste prevents the purposefulness of these
+innovations from becoming anything more than a somewhat
+transparent pretense. Even in its freest flights, fashion rarely
+if ever gets away from a simulation of some ostensible use. The
+ostensible usefulness of the fashionable details of dress,
+however, is always so transparent a make-believe, and their
+substantial futility presently forces itself so baldly upon our
+attention as to become unbearable, and then we take refuge in a
+new style. But the new style must conform to the requirement of
+reputable wastefulness and futility. Its futility presently
+becomes as odious as that of its predecessor; and the only remedy
+which the law of waste allows us is to seek relief in some new
+construction, equally futile and equally untenable. Hence the
+essential ugliness and the unceasing change of fashionable
+attire.
+
+Having so explained the phenomenon of shifting fashions, the next
+thing is to make the explanation tally with everyday facts. Among
+these everyday facts is the well-known liking which all men have
+for the styles that are in vogue at any given time. A new style
+comes into vogue and remains in favor for a season, and, at least
+so long as it is a novelty, people very generally find the new
+style attractive. The prevailing fashion is felt to be beautiful.
+This is due partly to the relief it affords in being different
+from what went before it, partly to its being
+reputable. As indicated in the last chapter, the canon of
+reputability to some extent shapes our tastes, so that under its
+guidance anything will be accepted as becoming until its novelty
+wears off, or until the warrant of reputability is transferred to
+a new and novel structure serving the same general purpose. That
+the alleged beauty, or "loveliness," of the styles in vogue at
+any given time is transient and spurious only is attested by the
+fact that none of the many shifting fashions will bear the test
+of time. When seen in the perspective of half-a-dozen years or
+more, the best of our fashions strike us as grotesque, if not
+unsightly. Our transient attachment to whatever happens to be the
+latest rests on other than aesthetic grounds, and lasts only
+until our abiding aesthetic sense has had time to assert itself
+and reject this latest indigestible contrivance.
+
+The process of developing an aesthetic nausea takes more or less
+time; the length of time required in any given case being
+inversely as the degree of intrinsic odiousness of the style in
+question. This time relation between odiousness and instability
+in fashions affords ground for the inference that the more
+rapidly the styles succeed and displace one another, the more
+offensive they are to sound taste. The presumption, therefore, is
+that the farther the community, especially the wealthy classes of
+the community, develop in wealth and mobility and in the range of
+their human contact, the more imperatively will the law of
+conspicuous waste assert itself in matters of dress, the more
+will the sense of beauty tend to fall into abeyance or be
+overborne by the canon of pecuniary reputability, the more
+rapidly will fashions shift and change, and the more grotesque
+and intolerable will be the varying styles that successively come
+into vogue.
+
+There remains at least one point in this theory of dress yet to
+be discussed. Most of what has been said applies to men's attire
+as well as to that of women; although in modern times it applies
+at nearly all points with greater force to that of women. But at
+one point the dress of women differs substantially from that of
+men. In woman's dress there is obviously greater
+insistence on such features as testify to the wearer's exemption
+from or incapacity for all vulgarly productive employment. This
+characteristic of woman's apparel is of interest, not only as
+completing the theory of dress, but also as confirming what has
+already been said of the economic status of women, both in the
+past and in the present.
+
+As has been seen in the discussion of woman's status under the
+heads of Vicarious Leisure and Vicarious Consumption, it has in
+the course of economic development become the office of the woman
+to consume vicariously for the head of the household; and her
+apparel is contrived with this object in view. It has come about
+that obviously productive labor is in a peculiar degree
+derogatory to respectable women, and therefore special pains
+should be taken in the construction of women's dress, to impress
+upon the beholder the fact (often indeed a fiction) that the
+wearer does not and can not habitually engage in useful work.
+Propriety requires respectable women to abstain more consistently
+from useful effort and to make more of a show of leisure than the
+men of the same social classes. It grates painfully on our nerves
+to contemplate the necessity of any well-bred woman's earning a
+livelihood by useful work. It is not "woman's sphere." Her sphere
+is within the household, which she should "beautify," and of
+which she should be the "chief ornament." The male head of the
+household is not currently spoken of as its ornament. This
+feature taken in conjunction with the other fact that propriety
+requires more unremitting attention to expensive display in the
+dress and other paraphernalia of women, goes to enforce the view
+already implied in what has gone before. By virtue of its descent
+from a patriarchal past, our social system makes it the woman's
+function in an especial degree to put in evidence her household's
+ability to pay. According to the modern civilized scheme of life,
+the good name of the household to which she belongs should be the
+special care of the woman; and the system of honorific
+expenditure and conspicuous leisure by which this good name is
+chiefly sustained is therefore the woman's sphere. In the ideal
+scheme, as it tends to realize itself in the life of the higher
+pecuniary classes, this attention to conspicuous waste of
+substance and effort should normally be the sole economic
+function of the woman.
+
+At the stage of economic development at which the women were
+still in the full sense the property of the men, the performance
+of conspicuous leisure and consumption came to be part of the
+services required of them. The women being not their own masters,
+obvious expenditure and leisure on their part would redound to
+the credit of their master rather than to their own credit; and
+therefore the more expensive and the more obviously unproductive
+the women of the household are, the more creditable and more
+effective for the purpose of reputability of the household or its
+head will their life be. So much so that the women have been
+required not only to afford evidence of a life of leisure, but
+even to disable themselves for useful activity.
+
+It is at this point that the dress of men falls short of that of
+women, and for sufficient reason. Conspicuous waste and
+conspicuous leisure are reputable because they are evidence of
+pecuniary strength; pecuniary strength is reputable or honorific
+because, in the last analysis, it argues success and superior
+force; therefore the evidence of waste and leisure put forth by
+any individual in his own behalf cannot consistently take such a
+form or be carried to such a pitch as to argue incapacity or
+marked discomfort on his part; as the exhibition would in that
+case show not superior force, but inferiority, and so defeat its
+own purpose. So, then, wherever wasteful expenditure and the show
+of abstention from effort is normally. or on an average, carried
+to the extent of showing obvious discomfort or voluntarily
+induced physical disability. there the immediate inference is
+that the individual in question does not perform this wasteful
+expenditure and undergo this disability for her own personal gain
+in pecuniary repute, but in behalf of some one else to whom she
+stands in a relation of economic dependence; a relation which in
+the last analysis must, in economic theory, reduce itself to a
+relation of servitude.
+
+To apply this generalization to women's dress, and put the matter
+in concrete terms: the high heel, the skirt, the
+impracticable bonnet, the corset, and the general disregard of
+the wearer's comfort which is an obvious feature of all civilized
+women's apparel, are so many items of evidence to the effect that
+in the modern civilized scheme of life the woman is still, in
+theory, the economic dependent of the man -- that, perhaps in a
+highly idealized sense, she still is the man's chattel. The
+homely reason for all this conspicuous leisure and attire on the
+part of women lies in the fact that they are servants to whom, in
+the differentiation of economic functions, has been delegated the
+office of putting in evidence their master's ability to pay.
+There is a marked similarity in these respects between the
+apparel of women and that of domestic servants, especially
+liveried servants. In both there is a very elaborate show of
+unnecessary expensiveness, and in both cases there is also a
+notable disregard of the physical comfort of the wearer. But the
+attire of the lady goes farther in its elaborate insistence on
+the idleness, if not on the physical infirmity of the wearer,
+than does that of the domestic. And this is as it should be; for
+in theory, according to the ideal scheme of the pecuniary
+culture, the lady of the house is the chief menial of the
+household.
+
+Besides servants, currently recognized as such, there is at least
+one other class of persons whose garb assimilates them to the
+class of servants and shows many of the features that go to make
+up the womanliness of woman's dress. This is the priestly class.
+Priestly vestments show, in accentuated form, all the features
+that have been shown to be evidence of a servile status and a
+vicarious life. Even more strikingly than the everyday habit of
+the priest, the vestments, properly so called, are ornate,
+grotesque, inconvenient, and, at least ostensibly, comfortless to
+the point of distress. The priest is at the same time expected to
+refrain from useful effort and, when before the public eye, to
+present an impassively disconsolate countenance, very much after
+the manner of a well-trained domestic servant. The shaven face of
+the priest is a further item to the same effect. This
+assimilation of the priestly class to the class of body servants,
+in demeanor and apparel, is due to the similarity of the two
+classes as regards economic function. In economic theory, the
+priest is a body servant, constructively in
+attendance upon the person of the divinity whose livery he wears.
+His livery is of a very expensive character, as it should be in
+order to set forth in a beseeming manner the dignity of his
+exalted master; but it is contrived to show that the wearing of
+it contributes little or nothing to the physical comfort of the
+wearer, for it is an item of vicarious consumption, and the
+repute which accrues from its consumption is to be imputed to the
+absent master, not to the servant.
+
+The line of demarcation between the dress of women, priests, and
+servants, on the one hand, and of men, on the other hand, is not
+always consistently observed in practice, but it will
+scarcely be disputed that it is always present in a more or less
+definite way in the popular habits of thought. There are of
+course also free men, and not a few of them, who, in their blind
+zeal for faultless reputable attire, transgress the theoretical
+line between man's and woman's dress, to the extent of arraying
+themselves in apparel that is obviously designed to vex the
+mortal frame; but everyone recognizes without hesitation that
+such apparel for men is a departure from the normal. We are in
+the habit of saying that such dress is "effeminate"; and one
+sometimes hears the remark that such or such an exquisitely
+attired gentleman is as well dressed as a footman.
+
+Certain apparent discrepancies under this theory of dress merit a
+more detailed examination, especially as they mark a more or less
+evident trend in the later and maturer development of dress. The
+vogue of the corset offers an apparent exception from the rule of
+which it has here been cited as an illustration. A closer
+examination, however, will show that this apparent
+exception is really a verification of the rule that the vogue of
+any given element or feature in dress rests on its utility as an
+evidence of pecuniary standing. It is well known that in the
+industrially more advanced communities the corset is employed
+only within certain fairly well defined social strata. The women
+of the poorer classes, especially of the rural population, do not
+habitually use it, except as a holiday luxury. Among these
+classes the women have to work hard, and it avails them little in
+the way of a pretense of leisure to so crucify the flesh in
+everyday life. The holiday use of the contrivance is due to
+imitation of a higher-class canon of decency. Upwards from this
+low level of indigence and manual labor, the corset was until
+within a generation or two nearly indispensable to a socially
+blameless standing for all women, including the wealthiest and
+most reputable. This rule held so long as there still was no
+large class of people wealthy enough to be above the imputation
+of any necessity for manual labor and at the same time large
+enough to form a self-sufficient, isolated social body whose mass
+would afford a foundation for special rules of conduct within the
+class, enforced by the current opinion of the class alone. But
+now there has grown up a large enough leisure class possessed of
+such wealth that any aspersion on the score of enforced manual
+employment would be idle and harmless calumny; and the corset has
+therefore in large measure fallen into disuse within this class.
+The exceptions under this rule of exemption from the corset are
+more apparent than real. They are the wealthy classes of
+countries with a lower industrial structure -- nearer the
+archaic, quasi-industrial type -- together with the later
+accessions of the wealthy classes in the more advanced industrial
+communities. The latter have not yet had time to divest
+themselves of the plebeian canons of taste and of reputability
+carried over from their former, lower pecuniary grade. Such
+survival of the corset is not infrequent among the higher social
+classes of those American cities, for instance, which have
+recently and rapidly risen into opulence. If the word be used as
+a technical term, without any odious implication, it may be said
+that the corset persists in great measure through the period of
+snobbery -- the interval of uncertainty and of transition from a
+lower to the upper levels of pecuniary culture. That is to say,
+in all countries which have inherited the corset it continues in
+use wherever and so long as it serves its purpose as an evidence
+of honorific leisure by arguing physical disability in the
+wearer. The same rule of course applies to other mutilations and
+contrivances for decreasing the visible efficiency of the
+individual.
+
+Something similar should hold true with respect to divers items
+of conspicuous consumption, and indeed something of the kind does
+seem to hold to a slight degree of sundry features of dress,
+especially if such features involve a marked discomfort or
+appearance of discomfort to the wearer. During the past one
+hundred years there is a tendency perceptible, in the development
+of men's dress especially, to discontinue methods of expenditure
+and the use of symbols of leisure which must have been irksome,
+which may have served a good purpose in their time, but the
+continuation of which among the upper classes today would be a
+work of supererogation; as, for instance, the use of powdered
+wigs and of gold lace, and the practice of constantly shaving the
+face. There has of late years been some slight recrudescence of
+the shaven face in polite society, but this is probably a
+transient and unadvised mimicry of the fashion imposed upon body
+servants, and it may fairly be expected to go the way of the
+powdered wig of our grandfathers.
+
+These indices and others which resemble them in point of the
+boldness with which they point out to all observers the habitual
+uselessness of those persons who employ them, have been replaced
+by other, more dedicate methods of expressing the same fact;
+methods which are no less evident to the trained eyes of that
+smaller, select circle whose good opinion is chiefly sought. The
+earlier and cruder method of advertisement held its ground so
+long as the public to which the exhibitor had to appeal comprised
+large portions of the community who were not trained to detect
+delicate variations in the evidences of wealth and leisure. The
+method of advertisement undergoes a refinement when a
+sufficiently large wealthy class has developed, who have the
+leisure for acquiring skill in interpreting the subtler signs of
+expenditure. "Loud" dress becomes offensive to people of taste,
+as evincing an undue desire to reach and impress the untrained
+sensibilities of the vulgar. To the individual of high breeding,
+it is only the more honorific esteem accorded by the cultivated
+sense of the members of his own high class that is of material
+consequence. Since the wealthy leisure class has grown so large,
+or the contact of the leisure-class individual with members of
+his own class has grown so wide, as to constitute a human
+environment sufficient for the honorific purpose, there arises a
+tendency to exclude the baser elements of the population from the
+scheme even as spectators whose applause or mortification should
+be sought. The result of all this is a refinement of methods, a
+resort to subtler contrivances, and a spiritualization of the
+scheme of symbolism in dress. And as this upper leisure class
+sets the pace in all matters of decency, the result for the rest
+of society also is a gradual amelioration of the scheme of dress.
+As the community advances in wealth and culture, the ability to
+pay is put in evidence by means which require a progressively
+nicer discrimination in the beholder. This nicer discrimination
+between advertising media is in fact a very large element of the
+higher pecuniary culture.
+
+Chapter Eight
+
+Industrial Exemption and Conservatism
+
+The life of man in society, just like the life of other species,
+is a struggle for existence, and therefore it is a process of
+selective adaptation. The evolution of social
+structure has been a process of natural selection of
+institutions. The progress which has been and is being made in
+human institutions and in human character may be set down,
+broadly, to a natural selection of the fittest habits of thought
+and to a process of enforced adaptation of individuals to an
+environment which has progressively changed with the growth of
+the community and with the changing institutions under which men
+have lived. Institutions are not only themselves the result of a
+selective and adaptive process which shapes the prevailing or
+dominant types of spiritual attitude and aptitudes; they are at
+the same time special methods of life and of human relations, and
+are therefore in their turn efficient factors of selection. So
+that the changing institutions in their turn make for a further
+selection of individuals endowed with the fittest temperament,
+and a further adaptation of individual temperament and habits to
+the changing environment through the formation of new
+institutions.
+
+ The forces which have shaped the development of human life and
+of social structure are no doubt ultimately reducible to terms of
+living tissue and material environment; but proximately for the
+purpose in hand, these forces may best be stated in terms of an
+environment, partly human, partly non-human, and a human subject
+with a more or less definite physical and intellectual
+constitution. Taken in the aggregate or average, this human
+subject is more or less variable; chiefly, no doubt, under a rule
+of selective conservation of favorable variations. The selection
+of favorable variations is perhaps in great measure a selective
+conservation of ethnic types. In the life history of any
+community whose population is made up of a mixture of divers
+ethnic elements, one or another of several persistent and
+relatively stable types of body and of temperament rises into
+dominance at any given point. The situation, including the
+institutions in force at any given time, will favor the survival
+and dominance of one type of character in preference to another;
+and the type of man so selected to continue and to further
+elaborate the institutions handed down from the past will in some
+considerable measure shape these institutions in his own
+likeness. But apart from selection as between relatively stable
+types of character and habits of mind, there is no doubt
+simultaneously going on a process of selective adaptation of
+habits of thought within the general range of aptitudes which is
+characteristic of the dominant ethnic type or types. There may be
+a variation in the fundamental character of any population by
+selection between relatively stable types; but there is also a
+variation due to adaptation in detail within the range of the
+type, and to selection between specific habitual views regarding
+any given social relation or group of relations.
+
+ For the present purpose, however, the question as to the nature
+of the adaptive process -- whether it is chiefly a
+selection between stable types of temperament and character, or
+chiefly an adaptation of men's habits of thought to changing
+circumstances -- is of less importance than the fact that, by one
+method or another, institutions change and develop. Institutions
+must change with changing circumstances, since they are of the
+nature of an habitual method of responding to the stimuli which
+these changing circumstances afford. The development of these
+institutions is the development of society. The institutions are,
+in substance, prevalent habits of thought with respect to
+particular relations and particular functions of the individual
+and of the community; and the scheme of life, which is made up of
+the aggregate of institutions in force at a given time or at a
+given point in the development of any society, may, on the
+psychological side, be broadly characterized as a prevalent
+spiritual attitude or a prevalent theory of life. As regards its
+generic features, this spiritual attitude or theory of life is in
+the last analysis reducible to terms of a prevalent type of
+character.
+
+ The situation of today shapes the institutions of tomorrow
+through a selective, coercive process, by acting upon men's
+habitual view of things, and so altering or fortifying a point of
+view or a mental attitude banded down from the past. The
+institutions -- that is to say the habits of thought -- under the
+guidance of which men live are in this way received from an
+earlier time; more or less remotely earlier, but in any event
+they have been elaborated in and received from the past.
+Institutions are products of the past process, are adapted to
+past circumstances, and are therefore never in full accord with
+the requirements of the present. In the nature of the case, this
+process of selective adaptation can never catch up with the
+progressively changing situation in which the community finds
+itself at any given time; for the environment, the situation, the
+exigencies of life which enforce the adaptation and exercise the
+selection, change from day to day; and each successive situation
+of the community in its turn tends to obsolescence as soon as it
+has been established. When a step in the development has been
+taken, this step itself constitutes a change of situation which
+requires a new adaptation; it becomes the point of departure for
+a new step in the adjustment, and so on interminably.
+
+ It is to be noted then, although it may be a tedious truism,
+that the institutions of today -- the present accepted scheme of
+life -- do not entirely fit the situation of today. At the same
+time, men's present habits of thought tend to persist
+indefinitely, except as circumstances enforce a change. These
+institutions which have thus been handed down, these habits of
+thought, points of view, mental attitudes and aptitudes, or what
+not, are therefore themselves a conservative factor. This is the
+factor of social inertia, psychological inertia, conservatism.
+Social structure changes, develops, adapts itself to an altered
+situation, only through a change in the habits of thought of the
+several classes of the community, or in the last analysis,
+through a change in the habits of thought of the individuals
+which make up the community. The evolution of society is
+substantially a process of mental adaptation on the part of
+individuals under the stress of circumstances which will no
+longer tolerate habits of thought formed under and conforming to
+a different set of circumstances in the past. For the immediate
+purpose it need not be a question of serious importance whether
+this adaptive process is a process of selection and survival of
+persistent ethnic types or a process of individual adaptation and
+an inheritance of acquired traits.
+
+ Social advance, especially as seen from the point of view of
+economic theory, consists in a continued progressive approach to
+an approximately exact "adjustment of inner relations to outer
+relations", but this adjustment is never definitively
+established, since the "outer relations" are subject to constant
+change as a consequence of the progressive change going on in the
+"inner relations. " But the degree of approximation may be
+greater or less, depending on the facility with which an
+adjustment is made. A readjustment of men's habits of thought to
+conform with the exigencies of an altered situation is in any
+case made only tardily and reluctantly, and only under the
+coercion exercised by a stipulation which has made the accredited
+views untenable. The readjustment of institutions and habitual
+views to an altered environment is made in response to pressure
+from without; it is of the nature of a response to stimulus.
+Freedom and facility of readjustment, that is to say capacity for
+growth in social structure, therefore depends in great measure on
+the degree of freedom with which the situation at any given time
+acts on the individual members of the community-the degree of
+exposure of the individual members to the constraining forces of
+the environment. If any portion or class of society is sheltered
+from the action of the environment in any essential respect, that
+portion of the community, or that class, will adapt its views and
+its scheme of life more tardily to the altered general situation;
+it will in so far tend to retard the process of social
+transformation. The wealthy leisure class is in such a sheltered
+position with respect to the economic forces that make for change
+and readjustment. And it may be said that the forces which make
+for a readjustment of institutions, especially in the case of a
+modern industrial community, are, in the last analysis, almost
+entirely of an economic nature.
+
+ Any community may be viewed as an industrial or economic
+mechanism, the structure of which is made up of what is called
+its economic institutions. These institutions are habitual
+methods of carrying on the life process of the community in
+contact with the material environment in which it lives. When
+given methods of unfolding human activity in this given
+environment have been elaborated in this way, the life of the
+community will express itself with some facility in these
+habitual directions. The community will make use of the forces of
+the environment for the purposes of its life according to methods
+learned in the past and embodied in these institutions. But as
+population increases, and as men's knowledge and skill in
+directing the forces of nature widen, the habitual methods of
+relation between the members of the group, and the habitual
+method of carrying on the life process of the group as a whole,
+no longer give the same result as before; nor are the resulting
+conditions of life distributed and apportioned in the same manner
+or with the same effect among the various members as before. If
+the scheme according to which the life process of the group was
+carried on under the earlier conditions gave approximately the
+highest attainable result -- under the circumstances -- in the
+way of efficiency or facility of the life process of the group;
+then the same scheme of life unaltered will not yield the highest
+result attainable in this respect under the altered conditions.
+Under the altered conditions of population, skill, and knowledge,
+the facility of life as carried on according to the traditional
+scheme may not be lower than under the earlier conditions; but
+the chances are always that it is less than might he if the
+scheme were altered to suit the altered conditions.
+
+ The group is made up of individuals, and the group's life is the
+life of individuals carried on in at least ostensible
+severalty. The group's accepted scheme of life is the consensus
+of views held by the body of these individuals as to what is
+right, good, expedient, and beautiful in the way of human life.
+In the redistribution of the conditions of life that comes of the
+altered method of dealing with the environment, the outcome is
+not an equable change in the facility of life throughout the
+group. The altered conditions may increase the facility of life
+for the group as a whole, but the redistribution will usually
+result in a decrease of facility or fullness of life for some
+members of the group. An advance in technical methods, in
+population, or in industrial organization will require at least
+some of the members of the community to change their habits of
+life, if they are to enter with facility and effect into the
+altered industrial methods; and in doing so they will be unable
+to live up to the received notions as to what are the right and
+beautiful habits of life.
+
+ Any one who is required to change his habits of life and his
+habitual relations to his fellow men will feel the discrepancy
+between the method of life required of him by the newly arisen
+exigencies, and the traditional scheme of life to which he is
+accustomed. It is the individuals placed in this position who
+have the liveliest incentive to reconstruct the received scheme
+of life and are most readily persuaded to accept new standards;
+and it is through the need of the means of livelihood that men
+are placed in such a position. The pressure exerted by the
+environment upon the group, and making for a readjustment of the
+group's scheme of life, impinges upon the members of the group in
+the form of pecuniary exigencies; and it is owing to this fact --
+that external forces are in great part translated into the form
+of pecuniary or economic exigencies -- it is owing to this fact
+that we can say that the forces which count toward a readjustment
+of institutions in any modern industrial community are chiefly
+economic forces; or more specifically, these forces take the form
+of pecuniary pressure. Such a readjustment as is here
+contemplated is substantially a change in men's views as to what
+is good and right, and the means through which a change is
+wrought in men's apprehension of what is good and right is in
+large part the pressure of pecuniary exigencies.
+
+ Any change in men's views as to what is good and right in human
+life make its way but tardily at the best. Especially is this
+true of any change in the direction of what is called progress;
+that is to say, in the direction of divergence from the archaic
+position -- from the position which may be accounted the point of
+departure at any step in the social evolution of the community.
+Retrogression, reapproach to a standpoint to which the race has
+been long habituated in the past, is easier. This is especially
+true in case the development away from this past standpoint has
+not been due chiefly to a substitution of an ethnic type whose
+temperament is alien to the earlier standpoint.
+The cultural stage which lies immediately back of the present in
+the life history of Western civilization is what has here been
+called the quasi-peaceable stage. At this quasi-peaceable stage
+the law of status is the dominant feature in the scheme of life.
+There is no need of pointing out how prone the men of today are
+to revert to the spiritual attitude of mastery and of personal
+subservience which characterizes that stage. It may rather be
+said to be held in an uncertain abeyance by the economic
+exigencies of today, than to have been definitely supplanted by a
+habit of mind that is in full accord with these later-developed
+exigencies. The predatory and quasi-peaceable stages of economic
+evolution seem to have been of long duration in life history of
+all the chief ethnic elements which go to make up the populations
+of the Western culture. The temperament and the propensities
+proper to those cultural stages have, therefore, attained such a
+persistence as to make a speedy reversion to the broad features
+of the corresponding psychological constitution inevitable in the
+case of any class or community which is removed from the action
+of those forces that make for a maintenance of the
+later-developed habits of thought.
+
+ It is a matter of common notoriety that when individuals, or
+even considerable groups of men, are segregated from a higher
+industrial culture and exposed to a lower cultural environment,
+or to an economic situation of a more primitive character, they
+quickly show evidence of reversion toward the spiritual features
+which characterize the predatory type; and it seems probable that
+the dolicho-blond type of European man is possessed of a greater
+facility for such reversion to barbarism than the other ethnic
+elements with which that type is associated in the Western
+culture. Examples of such a reversion on a small scale abound in
+the later history of migration and colonization. Except for the
+fear of offending that chauvinistic patriotism which is so
+characteristic a feature of the predatory culture, and the
+presence of which is frequently the most striking mark of
+reversion in modern communities, the case of the American
+colonies might be cited as an example of such a reversion on an
+unusually large scale, though it was not a reversion of very
+large scope. 
+
+ The leisure class is in great measure sheltered from
+theÜjÜstress of those economic exigencies which prevail in any
+modem, highly organized industrial community. The exigencies of
+the struggle for the means of life are less exacting for this
+class than for any other; and as a consequence of this privileged
+position we should expect to find it one of the least responsive
+of the classes of society to the demands which the situation
+makes for a further growth of institutions and a readjustment to
+an altered industrial situation. The leisure class is the
+conservative class. The exigencies of the general economic
+situation of the community do not freely or directly impinge upon
+the members of this class. They are not required under penalty of
+forfeiture to change their habits of life and their theoretical
+views of the external world to suit the demands of an altered
+industrial technique, since they are not in the full sense an
+organic part of the industrial community. Therefore these
+exigencies do not readily produce, in the members of this class,
+that degree of uneasiness with the existing order which alone can
+lead any body of men to give up views and methods of life that
+have become habitual to them. The office of the leisure class in
+social evolution is to retard the movement and to conserve what
+is obsolescent. This proposition is by no means novel; it has
+long been one of the commonplaces of popular opinion.
+
+ The prevalent conviction that the wealthy class is by nature
+conservative has been popularly accepted without much aid from
+any theoretical view as to the place and relation of that class
+in the cultural development. When an explanation of this class
+conservatism is offered, it is commonly the invidious one that
+the wealthy class opposes innovation because it has a vested
+interest, of an unworthy sort, in maintaining the present
+conditions. The explanation here put forward imputes no unworthy
+motive. The opposition of the class to changes in the cultural
+scheme is instinctive, and does not rest primarily on an
+interested calculation of material advantages; it is an
+instinctive revulsion at any departure from the accepted way of
+doing and of looking at things -- a revulsion common to all men
+and only to be overcome by stress of circumstances. All change in
+habits of life and of thought is irksome. The difference in this
+respect between the wealthy and the common run of mankind lies
+not so much in the motive which prompts to conservatism as in the
+degree of exposure to the economic forces that urge a change. The
+members of the wealthy class do not yield to the demand for
+innovation as readily as other men because they are not
+constrained to do so.
+
+ This conservatism of the wealthy class is so obvious a feature
+that it has even come to be recognized as a mark of
+respectability. Since conservatism is a characteristic of the
+wealthier and therefore more reputable portion of the community,
+it has acquired a certain honorific or decorative value. It has
+become prescriptive to such an extent that an adherence to
+conservative views is comprised as a matter of course in our
+notions of respectability; and it is imperatively incumbent on
+all who would lead a blameless life in point of social repute.
+Conservatism, being an upper-class characteristic, is decorous;
+and conversely, innovation, being a lower-class phenomenon, is
+vulgar. The first and most unreflected element in that
+instinctive revulsion and reprobation with which we turn from all
+social innovators is this sense of the essential vulgarity of the
+thing. So that even in cases where one recognizes the substantial
+merits of the case for which the innovator is spokesman -- as may
+easily happen if the evils which he seeks to remedy are
+sufficiently remote in point of time or space or personal contact
+-- still one cannot but be sensible of the fact that the
+innovator is a person with whom it is at least distasteful to be
+associated, and from whose social contact one must shrink.
+Innovation is bad form.
+
+The fact that the usages, actions, and views of the
+well-to-do leisure class acquire the character of a prescriptive
+canon of conduct for the rest of society, gives added weight and
+reach to the conservative influence of that class. It makes it
+incumbent upon all reputable people to follow their lead. So
+that, by virtue of its high position as the avatar of good form,
+the wealthier class comes to exert a retarding influence upon
+social development far in excess of that which the simple
+numerical strength of the class would assign it. Its prescriptive
+example acts to greatly stiffen the resistance of all other
+classes against any innovation, and to fix men's affections upon
+the good institutions handed down from an earlier generation.
+There is a second way in which the influence of the leisure class
+acts in the same direction, so far as concerns hindrance to the
+adoption of a conventional scheme of life more in accord with the
+exigencies of the time. This second method of upperclass guidance
+is not in strict consistency to be brought under the same
+category as the instinctive conservatism and aversion to new
+modes of thought just spoken of; but it may as well be dealt with
+here, since it has at least this much in common with the
+conservative habit of mind that it acts to retard innovation and
+the growth of social structure. The code of proprieties,
+conventionalities, and usages in vogue at any given time and
+among any given people has more or less of the character of an
+organic whole; so that any appreciable change in one point of the
+scheme involves something of a change or readjustment at other
+points also, if not a reorganization all along the line. When a
+change is made which immediately touches only a minor point in
+the scheme, the consequent derangement of the structure of
+conventionalities may be inconspicuous; but even in such a case
+it is safe to say that some derangement of the general scheme,
+more or less far-reaching, will follow. On the other hand, when
+an attempted reform involves the suppression or thorough-going
+remodelling of an institution of first-rate importance in the
+conventional scheme, it is immediately felt that a serious
+derangement of the entire scheme would result; it is felt that a
+readjustment of the structure to the new form taken on by one of
+its chief elements would be a painful and tedious, if not a
+doubtful process.
+
+In order to realize the difficulty which such a radical change in
+any one feature of the conventional scheme of life would involve,
+it is only necessary to suggest the suppression of the monogamic
+family, or of the agnatic system of consanguinity, or of private
+property, or of the theistic faith, in any country of the Western
+civilization; or suppose the suppression of ancestor worship in
+China, or of the caste system in india, or of slavery in Africa,
+or the establishment of equality of the sexes in Mohammedan
+countries. It needs no argument to show that the derangement of
+the general structure of conventionalities in any of these cases
+would be very considerable. In order to effect such an innovation
+a very far-reaching alteration of men's habits of thought would
+be involved also at other points of the scheme than the one
+immediately in question. The aversion to any such innovation
+amounts to a shrinking from an essentially alien scheme of life.
+
+The revulsion felt by good people at any proposed departure from
+the accepted methods of life is a familiar fact of everyday
+experience. It is not unusual to hear those persons who dispense
+salutary advice and admonition to the community express
+themselves forcibly upon the far-reaching pernicious effects
+which the community would suffer from such relatively slight
+changes as the disestablishment of the Anglican Church, an
+increased facility of divorce, adoption of female suffrage,
+prohibition of the manufacture and sale of intoxicating
+beverages, abolition or restriction of inheritances, etc. Any one
+of these innovations would, we are told, "shake the social
+structure to its base," "reduce society to chaos," "subvert the
+foundations of morality," "make life intolerable," "confound the
+order of nature," etc. These various locutions are, no doubt, of
+the nature of hyperbole; but, at the same time, like all
+overstatement, they are evidence of a lively sense of the gravity
+of the consequences which they are intended to describe. The
+effect of these and like innovations in deranging the accepted
+scheme of life is felt to be of much graver consequence than the
+simple alteration of an isolated item in a series of contrivances
+for the convenience of men in society. What is true in so obvious
+a degree of innovations of first-rate importance is true in a
+less degree of changes of a smaller immediate importance. The
+aversion to change is in large part an aversion to the bother of
+making the readjustment which any given change will necessitate;
+and this solidarity of the system of institutions of any given
+culture or of any given people strengthens the instinctive
+resistance offered to any change in men's habits of thought, even
+in matters which, taken by themselves, are of minor importance.
+A consequence of this increased reluctance, due to the
+solidarity of human institutions, is that any innovation calls
+for a greater expenditure of nervous energy in making the
+necessary readjustment than would otherwise be the case. It is
+not only that a change in established habits of thought is
+distasteful. The process of readjustment of the accepted theory
+of life involves a degree of mental effort -- a more or less
+protracted and laborious effort to find and to keep one's
+bearings under the altered circumstances. This process requires a
+certain expenditure of energy, and so presumes, for its
+successful accomplishment, some surplus of energy beyond that
+absorbed in the daily struggle for subsistence. Consequently it
+follows that progress is hindered by underfeeding and excessive
+physical hardship, no less effectually than by such a luxurious
+life as will shut out discontent by cutting off the occasion for
+it. The abjectly poor, and all those persons whose energies are
+entirely absorbed by the struggle for daily sustenance, are
+conservative because they cannot afford the effort of taking
+thought for the day after tomorrow; just as the highly prosperous
+are conservative because they have small occasion to be
+discontented with the situation as it stands today.
+
+From this proposition it follows that the institution of a
+leisure class acts to make the lower classes conservative by
+withdrawing from them as much as it may of the means of
+sustenance, and so reducing their consumption, and consequently
+their available energy, to such a point as to make them incapable
+of the effort required for the learning and adoption of new
+habits of thought. The accumulation of wealth at the upper end of
+the pecuniary scale implies privation at the lower end of the
+scale. It is a commonplace that, wherever it occurs, a
+considerable degree of privation among the body of the people is
+a serious obstacle to any innovation.
+
+This direct inhibitory effect of the unequal distribution of
+wealth is seconded by an indirect effect tending to the same
+result. As has already been seen, the imperative example set by
+the upper class in fixing the canons of reputability fosters the
+practice of conspicuous consumption. The prevalence of
+conspicuous consumption as one of the main elements in the
+standard of decency among all classes is of course not traceable
+wholly to the example of the wealthy leisure class, but the
+practice and the insistence on it are no doubt strengthened by
+the example of the leisure class. The requirements of decency in
+this matter are very considerable and very imperative; so that
+even among classes whose pecuniary position is sufficiently
+strong to admit a consumption of goods considerably in excess of
+the subsistence minimum, the disposable surplus left over after
+the more imperative physical needs are satisfied is not
+infrequently diverted to the purpose of a conspicuous decency,
+rather than to added physical comfort and fullness of life.
+Moreover, such surplus energy as is available is also likely to
+be expended in the acquisition of goods for conspicuous
+consumption or conspicuous boarding. The result is that the
+requirements of pecuniary reputability tend (1) to leave but a
+scanty subsistence minimum available for other than conspicuous
+consumption, and (2) to absorb any surplus energy which may be
+available after the bare physical necessities of life have been
+provided for. The outcome of the whole is a strengthening of the
+general conservative attitude of the community. The institution
+of a leisure class hinders cultural development immediately (1)
+by the inertia proper to the class itself, (2) through its
+prescriptive example of conspicuous waste and of conservatism,
+and (3) indirectly through that system of unequal distribution of
+wealth and sustenance on which the institution itself rests.
+To this is to be added that the leisure class has also a material
+interest in leaving things as they are. Under the circumstances
+prevailing at any given time this class is in a privileged
+position, and any departure from the existing order may be
+expected to work to the detriment of the class rather than the
+reverse. The attitude of the class, simply as influenced by its
+class interest, should therefore be to let well-enough alone.
+This interested motive comes in to supplement the strong
+instinctive bias of the class, and so to render it even more
+consistently conservative than it otherwise would be.
+
+All this, of course, bas nothing to say in the way of eulogy or
+deprecation of the office of the leisure class as an exponent and
+vehicle of conservatism or reversion in social structure. The
+inhibition which it exercises may be salutary or the reverse.
+Wether it is the one or the other in any given case is a question
+of casuistry rather than of general theory. There may be truth in
+the view (as a question of policy) so often expressed by the
+spokesmen of the conservative element, that without some such
+substantial and consistent resistance to innovation as is offered
+by the conservative well-to-do classes, social innovation and
+experiment would hurry the community into untenable and
+intolerable situations; the only possible result of which would
+be discontent and disastrous reaction. All this, however, is
+beside the present argument.
+
+But apart from all deprecation, and aside from all question as to
+the indispensability of some such check on headlong innovation,
+the leisure class, in the nature of things, consistently acts to
+retard that adjustment to the environment which is called social
+advance or development. The characteristic attitude of the class
+may be summed up in the maxim: "Whatever is, is right" whereas
+the law of natural selection, as applied to human institutions,
+gives the axiom: "Whatever is, is wrong." Not that the
+institutions of today are wholly wrong for the purposes of the
+life of today, but they are, always and in the nature of things,
+wrong to some extent. They are the result of a more or less
+inadequate adjustment of the methods of living to a situation
+which prevailed at some point in the past development; and they
+are therefore wrong by something more than the interval which
+separates the present situation from that of the past. "Right"
+and "wrong" are of course here used without conveying any
+rejection as to what ought or ought not to be. They are applied
+simply from the (morally colorless) evolutionary standpoint, and
+are intended to designate compatibility or incompatibility with
+the effective evolutionary process. The institution of a leisure
+class, by force or class interest and instinct, and by precept
+and prescriptive example, makes for the perpetuation of the
+existing maladjustment of institutions, and even favors a
+reversion to a somewhat more archaic scheme of life; a scheme
+which would be still farther out of adjustment with the
+exigencies of life under the existing situation even than the
+accredited, obsolescent scheme that has come down from the
+immediate past.
+
+But after all has been said on the head of conservation of the
+good old ways, it remains true that institutions change and
+develop. There is a cumulative growth of customs and habits of
+thought; a selective adaptation of conventions and methods of
+life. Something is to be said of the office of the leisure class
+in guiding this growth as well as in retarding it; but little can
+be said here of its relation to institutional growth except as it
+touches the institutions that are primarily and immediately of an
+economic character. These institutions -- the economic structure
+-- may be roughly distinguished into two classes or categories,
+according as they serve one or the other of two divergent
+purposes of economic life.
+
+To adapt the classical terminology, they are institutions of
+acquisition or of production; or to revert to terms already
+employed in a different connection in earlier chapters, they are
+pecuniary or industrial institutions; or in still other terms,
+they are institutions serving either the invidious or the
+non-invidious economic interest. The former category have to do
+with "business," the latter with industry, taking the latter word
+in the mechanical sense. The latter class are not often
+recognized as institutions, in great part because they do not
+immediately concern the ruling class, and are, therefore, seLdom
+the subject of legislation or of deliberate convention. When they
+do receive attention they are commonly approached from the
+pecuniary or business side; that being the side or phase of
+economic life that chiefly occupies men's deliberations in our
+time, especially the deliberations of the upper classes. These
+classes have little else than a business interest in things
+economic, and on them at the same time it is chiefly incumbent to
+deliberate upon the community's affairs.
+
+The relation of the leisure (that is, propertied non-industrial)
+class to the economic process is a pecuniary relation -- a
+relation of acquisition, not of production; of exploitation, not
+of serviceability. indirectly their economic office may, of
+course, be of the utmost importance to the economic life process;
+and it is by no means here intended to depreciate the economic
+function of the propertied class or of the captains of industry,
+The purpose is simply to point out what is the nature of the
+relation of these classes to the industrial process and to
+economic institutions. Their office is of a parasitic character,
+and their interest is to divert what substance they may to their
+own use, and to retain whatever is under their hand. The
+conventions of the business world have grown up under the
+selective surveillance of this principle of predation or
+parasitism. They are conventions of ownership; derivatives, more
+or less remote, of the ancient predatory culture. But these
+pecuniary institutions do not entirely fit the situation of
+today, for they have grown up under a past situation differing
+somewhat from the present. Even for effectiveness in the
+pecuniary way, therefore, they are not as apt as might be. The
+changed industrial life requires changed methods of acquisition;
+and the pecuniary classes have some interest in so adapting the
+pecuniary institutions as to give them the best effect for
+acquisition of private gain that is compatible with the
+continuance of the industrial process out of which this gain
+arises. Hence there is a more or less consistent trend in the
+leisure-class guidance of institutional growth, answering to the
+pecuniary ends which shape leisure-class economic life.
+
+The effect of the pecuniary interest and the pecuniary habit of
+mind upon the growth of institutions is seen in those
+enactments and conventions that make for security of property,
+enforcement of contracts, facility of pecuniary transactions,
+vested interests. Of such bearing are changes affecting
+bankruptcy and receiverships, limited liability, banking and
+currency, coalitions of laborers or employers, trusts and pools.
+The community's institutional furniture of this kind is of
+immediate consequence only to the propertied classes, and in
+proportion as they are propertied; that is to say, in proportion
+as they are to be ranked with the leisure class. But indirectly
+these conventions of business life are of the gravest consequence
+for the industrial process and for the life of the community. And
+in guiding the institutional growth in this respect, the
+pecuniary classes, therefore, serve a purpose of the most serious
+importance to the community, not only in the conservation of the
+accepted social scheme, but also in shaping the industrial
+process proper. The immediate end of this pecuniary institutional
+structure and of its amelioration is the greater facility of
+peaceable and orderly exploitation; but its remoter effects far
+outrun this immediate object. Not only does the more facile
+conduct of business permit industry and extra-industrial life to
+go on with less perturbation; but the resulting elimination of
+disturbances and complications calling for an exercise of astute
+discrimination in everyday affairs acts to make the pecuniary
+class itself superfluous. As fast as pecuniary transactions are
+reduced to routine, the captain of industry can be dispensed
+with. This consummation, it is needless to say, lies yet in the
+indefinite future. The ameliorations wrought in favor of the
+pecuniary interest in modern institutions tend, in another field,
+to substitute the "soulless" joint-stock corporation for the
+captain, and so they make also for the dispensability, of the
+great leisure-class function of ownership. Indirectly, therefore,
+the bent given to the growth of economic institutions by the
+leisure-class influence is of very considerable industrial
+consequence.
+
+Chapter Nine
+
+The Conservation of Archaic Traits
+
+The institution of a leisure class has an effect not only upon
+social structure but also upon the individual character of the
+members of society. So soon as a given proclivity or a given
+point of view has won acceptance as an authoritative standard or
+norm of life it will react upon the character of the members of
+the society which has accepted it as a norm. It will to some
+extent shape their habits of thought and will exercise a
+selective surveillance over the development of men's aptitudes
+and inclinations. This effect is wrought partly by a coercive,
+educational adaptation of the habits of all individuals, partly
+by a selective elimination of the unfit individuals and lines of
+descent. Such human material as does not lend itself to the
+methods of life imposed by the accepted scheme suffers more or
+less elimination as well as repression. The principles of
+pecuniary emulation and of industrial exemption have in this way
+been erected into canons of life, and have become coercive
+factors of some importance in the situation to which men have to
+adapt themselves.
+
+These two broad principles of conspicuous waste and
+industrial exemption affect the cultural development both by
+guiding men's habits of thought, and so controlling the growth of
+institutions, and by selectively conserving certain traits of
+human nature that conduce to facility of life under the
+leisure-class scheme, and so controlling the effective temper of
+the community. The proximate tendency of the institution of a
+leisure class in shaping human character runs in the direction of
+spiritual survival and reversion. Its effect upon the temper of a
+community is of the nature of an arrested spiritual development.
+In the later culture especially, the institution has, on the
+whole, a conservative trend. This proposition is familiar enough
+in substance, but it may to many have the appearance of novelty
+in its present application. Therefore a summary review of its
+logical grounds may not be uncalled for, even at the risk of some
+tedious repetition and formulation of commonplaces.
+
+Social evolution is a process of selective adaptation of
+temperament and habits of thought under the stress of the
+circumstances of associated life. The adaptation of habits of
+thought is the growth of institutions. But along with the growth
+of institutions has gone a change of a more substantial
+character. Not only have the habits of men changed with the
+changing exigencies of the situation, but these changing
+exigencies have also brought about a correlative change in human
+nature. The human material of society itself varies with the
+changing conditions of life. This variation of human nature is
+held by the later ethnologists to be a process of selection
+between several relatively stable and persistent ethnic types or
+ethnic elements. Men tend to revert or to breed true, more or
+less closely, to one or another of certain types of human nature
+that have in their main features been fixed in approximate
+conformity to a situation in the past which differed from the
+situation of today. There are several of these relatively stable
+ethnic types of mankind comprised in the populations of the
+Western culture. These ethnic types survive in the race
+inheritance today, not as rigid and invariable moulds, each of a
+single precise and specific pattern, but in the form of a greater
+or smaller number of variants. Some variation of the ethnic types
+has resulted under the protracted selective process to which the
+several types and their hybrids have been subjected during the
+prehistoric and historic growth of culture.
+
+This necessary variation of the types themselves, due to a
+selective process of considerable duration and of a consistent
+trend, has not been sufficiently noticed by the writers who have
+discussed ethnic survival. The argument is here concerned with
+two main divergent variants of human nature resulting from this,
+relatively late, selective adaptation of the ethnic types
+comprised in the Western culture; the point of interest being the
+probable effect of the situation of today in furthering variation
+along one or the other of these two divergent lines.
+
+The ethnological position may be briefly summed up; and in order
+to avoid any but the most indispensable detail the schedule of
+types and variants and the scheme of reversion and survival in
+which they are concerned are here presented with a diagrammatic
+meagerness and simplicity which would not be admissible for any
+other purpose. The man of our industrial communities tends to
+breed true to one or the other of three main ethic types; the
+dolichocephalic-blond, the brachycephalic-brunette, and the
+Mediterranean -- disregarding minor and outlying elements of our
+culture. But within each of these main ethnic types the reversion
+tends to one or the other of at least two main directions of
+variation; the peaceable or antepredatory variant and the
+predatory variant. The former of these two characteristic
+variants is nearer to the generic type in each case, being the
+reversional representative of its type as it stood at the
+earliest stage of associated life of which there is available
+evidence, either archaeological or psychological. This variant is
+taken to represent the ancestors of existing civilized man at the
+peaceable, savage phase of life which preceded the predatory
+culture, the regime of status, and the growth of pecuniary
+emulation. The second or predatory variant of the types is taken
+to be a survival of a more recent modification of the main ethnic
+types and their hybrids -- of these types as they were modified,
+mainly by a selective adaptation, under the discipline of the
+predatory culture and the latter emulative culture of the
+quasi-peaceable stage, or the pecuniary culture proper.
+
+Under the recognized laws of heredity there may be a survival
+from a more or less remote past phase. In the ordinary, average,
+or normal case, if the type has varied, the traits of the type
+are transmitted approximately as they have stood in the recent
+past -- which may be called the hereditary present. For the
+purpose in hand this hereditary present is represented by the
+later predatory and the quasi-peaceable culture.
+
+It is to the variant of human nature which is characteristic of
+this recent -- hereditarily still existing -- predatory or
+quasipredatory culture that the modern civilized man tends to
+breed true in the common run of cases. This proposition requires
+some qualification so far as concerns the descendants of the
+servile or repressed classes of barbarian times, but the
+qualification necessary is probably not so great as might at
+first thought appear. Taking the population as a whole, this
+predatory, emulative variant does not seem to have attained a
+high degree of consistency or stability. That is to say, the
+human nature inherited by modern Occidental man is not nearly
+uniform in respect of the range or the relative strength of the
+various aptitudes and propensities which go to make it up. The
+man of the hereditary present is slightly archaic as judged for
+the purposes of the latest exigencies of associated life. And the
+type to which the modern man chiefly tends to revert under the
+law of variation is a somewhat more archaic human nature. On the
+other hand, to judge by the reversional traits which show
+themselves in individuals that vary from the prevailing predatory
+style of temperament, the ante-predatory variant seems to have a
+greater stability and greater symmetry in the distribution or
+relative force of its temperamental elements.
+
+This divergence of inherited human nature, as between an earlier
+and a later variant of the ethnic type to which the individual
+tends to breed true, is traversed and obscured by a similar
+divergence between the two or three main ethnic types that go to
+make up the Occidental populations. The individuals in these
+communities are conceived to be, in virtually every
+instance, hybrids of the prevailing ethnic elements combined in
+the most varied proportions; with the result that they tend to
+take back to one or the other of the component ethnic types.
+These ethnic types differ in temperament in a way somewhat
+similar to the difference between the predatory and the
+antepredatory variants of the types; the dolicho-blond type
+showing more of the characteristics of the predatory temperament
+-- or at least more of the violent disposition -- than the
+brachycephalic-brunette type, and especially more than the
+Mediterranean. When the growth of institutions or of the
+effective sentiment of a given community shows a divergence from
+the predatory human nature, therefore, it is impossible to say
+with certainty that such a divergence indicates a reversion to
+the ante-predatory variant. It may be due to an increasing
+dominance of the one or the other of the "lower" ethnic elements
+in the population. Still, although the evidence is not as
+conclusive as might be desired, there are indications that the
+variations in the effective temperament of modern communities is
+not altogether due to a selection between stable ethnic types. It
+seems to be to some appreciable extent a selection between the
+predatory and the peaceable variants of the several types.
+This conception of contemporary human evolution is not
+indispensable to the discussion. The general conclusions reached
+by the use of these concepts of selective adaptation would remain
+substantially true if the earlier, Darwinian and Spencerian,
+terms and concepts were substituted. Under the circumstances,
+some latitude may be admissible in the use of terms. The word
+"type" is used loosely, to denote variations of temperament which
+the ethnologists would perhaps recognize only as trivial variants
+of the type rather than as distinct ethnic types. Wherever a
+closer discrimination seems essential to the argument, the effort
+to make such a closer discrimination will be evident from the
+context.
+
+The ethnic types of today, then, are variants of the
+primitive racial types. They have suffered some alteration, and
+have attained some degree of fixity in their altered form, under
+the discipline of the barbarian culture. The man of the
+hereditary present is the barbarian variant, servile or
+aristocratic, of the ethnic elements that constitute him. But
+this barbarian variant has not attained the highest degree of
+homogeneity or of stability. The barbarian culture -- the
+predatory and quasi-peaceable cultural stages -- though of great
+absolute duration, has been neither protracted enough nor
+invariable enough in character to give an extreme fixity of type.
+Variations from the barbarian human nature occur with some
+frequency, and these cases of variation are becoming more
+noticeable today, because the conditions of modern life no longer
+act consistently to repress departures from the barbarian normal.
+The predatory temperament does not lead itself to all the
+purposes of modern life, and more especially not to modern
+industry.
+
+Departures from the human nature of the hereditary present are
+most frequently of the nature of reversions to an earlier variant
+of the type. This earlier variant is represented by the
+temperament which characterizes the primitive phase of peaceable
+savagery. The circumstances of life and the ends of effort that
+prevailed before the advent of the barbarian culture, shaped
+human nature and fixed it as regards certain fundamental traits.
+And it is to these ancient, generic features that modern men are
+prone to take back in case of variation from the human nature of
+the hereditary present. The conditions under which men lived in
+the most primitive stages of associated life that can properly be
+called human, seem to have been of a peaceful kind; and the
+character -- the temperament and spiritual attitude of men under
+these early conditions or environment and institutions seems to
+have been of a peaceful and unaggressive, not to say an indolent,
+cast. For the immediate purpose this peaceable cultural stage may
+be taken to mark the initial phase of social development. So far
+as concerns the present argument, the dominant spiritual feature
+of this presumptive initial phase of culture seems to have been
+an unreflecting, unformulated sense of group solidarity, largely
+expressing itself in a complacent, but by no means strenuous,
+sympathy with all facility of human life, and an uneasy revulsion
+against apprehended inhibition or futility of life. Through its
+ubiquitous presence in the habits of thought of the
+ante-predatory savage man, this pervading but uneager sense of
+the generically useful seems to have exercised an appreciable
+constraining force upon his life and upon the manner of his
+habitual contact with other members of the group.
+
+The traces of this initial, undifferentiated peaceable phase of
+culture seem faint and doubtful if we look merely to such
+categorical evidence of its existence as is afforded by usages
+and views in vogue within the historical present, whether in
+civilized or in rude communities; but less dubious evidence of
+its existence is to be found in psychological survivals, in the
+way of persistent and pervading traits of human character. These
+traits survive perhaps in an especial degree among those ethic
+elements which were crowded into the background during the
+predatory culture. Traits that were suited to the earlier habits
+of life then became relatively useless in the individual struggle
+for existence. And those elements of the population, or those
+ethnic groups, which were by temperament less fitted to the
+predatory life were repressed and pushed into the background.
+On the transition to the predatory culture the character of the
+struggle for existence changed in some degree from a struggle of
+the group against a non-human environment to a struggle against a
+human environment. This change was accompanied by an increasing
+antagonism and consciousness of antagonism between the individual
+members of the group. The conditions of success within the group,
+as well as the conditions of the survival of the group, changed
+in some measure; and the dominant spiritual attitude for the
+group gradually changed, and brought a different range of
+aptitudes and propensities into the position of legitimate
+dominance in the accepted scheme of life. Among these archaic
+traits that are to be regarded as survivals from the peaceable
+cultural phase, are that instinct of race solidarity which we
+call conscience, including the sense of truthfulness and equity,
+and the instinct of workmanship, in its naive, non-invidious
+expression.
+
+Under the guidance of the later biological and psychological
+science, human nature will have to be restated in terms of habit;
+and in the restatement, this, in outline, appears to be the only
+assignable place and ground of these traits. These habits of life
+are of too pervading a character to be ascribed to the influence
+of a late or brief discipline. The ease with which they are
+temporarily overborne by the special exigencies of recent and
+modern life argues that these habits are the surviving effects of
+a discipline of extremely ancient date, from the teachings of
+which men have frequently been constrained to depart in detail
+under the altered circumstances of a later time; and the almost
+ubiquitous fashion in which they assert themselves whenever the
+pressure of special exigencies is relieved, argues that the
+process by which the traits were fixed and incorporated into the
+spiritual makeup of the type must have lasted for a relatively
+very long time and without serious intermission. The point is not
+seriously affected by any question as to whether it was a process
+of habituation in the old-fashioned sense of the word or a
+process of selective adaptation of the race.
+
+The character and exigencies of life, under that regime of status
+and of individual and class antithesis which covers the entire
+interval from the beginning of predatory culture to the present,
+argue that the traits of temperament here under discussion could
+scarcely have arisen and acquired fixity during that interval. It
+is entirely probable that these traits have come down from an
+earlier method of life, and have survived through the interval of
+predatory and quasi-peaceable culture in a condition of
+incipient, or at least imminent, desuetude, rather than that they
+have been brought out and fixed by this later culture. They
+appear to be hereditary characteristics of the race, and to have
+persisted in spite of the altered requirements of success under
+the predatory and the later pecuniary stages of culture. They
+seem to have persisted by force of the tenacity of transmission
+that belongs to an hereditary trait that is present in some
+degree in every member of the species, and which therefore rests
+on a broad basis of race continuity.
+
+Such a generic feature is not readily eliminated, even under a
+process of selection so severe and protracted as that to which
+the traits here under discussion were subjected during the
+predatory and quasi-peaceable stages. These peaceable traits are
+in great part alien to the methods and the animus of barbarian
+life. The salient characteristic of the barbarian culture is an
+unremitting emulation and antagonism between classes and between
+individuals. This emulative discipline favors those individuals
+and lines of descent which possess the peaceable savage traits in
+a relatively slight degree. It therefore tends to eliminate these
+traits, and it has apparently weakened them, in an appreciable
+degree, in the populations that have been subject to it. Even
+where the extreme penalty for non-conformity to the barbarian
+type of temperament is not paid, there results at least a more or
+less consistent repression of the non-conforming individuals and
+lines of descent. Where life is largely a struggle between
+individuals within the group, the possession of the ancient
+peaceable traits in a marked degree would hamper an individual in
+the struggle for life.
+
+Under any known phase of culture, other or later than the
+presumptive initial phase here spoken of, the gifts of
+good-nature, equity, and indiscriminate sympathy do not
+appreciably further the life of the individual. Their possession
+may serve to protect the individual from hard usage at the hands
+of a majority that insists on a modicum of these ingredients in
+their ideal of a normal man; but apart from their indirect and
+negative effect in this way, the individual fares better under
+the regime of competition in proportion as he has less of these
+gifts. Freedom from scruple, from sympathy, honesty and regard
+for life, may, within fairly wide limits, he said to further the
+success of the individual in the pecuniary culture. The highly
+successful men of all times have commonly been of this type;
+except those whose success has not been scored in terms of either
+wealth or power. It is only within narrow limits, and then only
+in a Pickwickian sense, that honesty is the best policy.
+
+As seen from the point of view of life under modern
+civilized conditions in an enlightened community of the Western
+culture, the primitive, ante-predatory savage, whose character it
+has been attempted to trace in outline above, was not a great
+success. Even for the purposes of that hypothetical culture to
+which his type of human nature owes what stability it has -- even
+for the ends of the peaceable savage group -- this primitive man
+has quite as many and as conspicuous economic failings as he has
+economic virtues -- as should be plain to any one whose sense of
+the case is not biased by leniency born of a fellow-feeling. At
+his best he is "a clever, good-for-nothing fellow." The
+shortcomings of this presumptively primitive type of character
+are weakness, inefficiency, lack of initiative and ingenuity, and
+a yielding and indolent amiability, together with a lively but
+inconsequential animistic sense. Along with these traits go
+certain others which have some value for the collective life
+process, in the sense that they further the facility of life in
+the group. These traits are truthfulness, peaceableness,
+good-will, and a non-emulative, non-invidious interest in men and
+things.
+
+With the advent of the predatory stage of life there comes a
+change in the requirements of the successful human character.
+Men's habits of life are required to adapt themselves to new
+exigencies under a new scheme of human relations. The same
+unfolding of energy, which had previously found expression in the
+traits of savage life recited above, is now required to find
+expression along a new line of action, in a new group of habitual
+responses to altered stimuli. The methods which, as counted in
+terms of facility of life, answered measurably under the earlier
+conditions, are no longer adequate under the new conditions. The
+earlier situation was characterized by a relative absence of
+antagonism or differentiation of interests, the later situation
+by an emulation constantly increasing in relative absence of
+antagonism or differentiation of interests, the later situation
+by an emulation constantly increasing in intensity and narrowing
+in scope. The traits which characterize the predatory and
+subsequent stages of culture, and which indicate the types of man
+best fitted to survive under the regime of status, are (in their
+primary expression) ferocity, self-seeking, clannishness, and
+disingenuousness -- a free resort to force and fraud.
+
+Under the severe and protracted discipline of the regime of
+competition, the selection of ethnic types has acted to give a
+somewhat pronounced dominance to these traits of character, by
+favoring the survival of those ethnic elements which are most
+richly endowed in these respects. At the same time the earlier --
+acquired, more generic habits of the race have never ceased to
+have some usefulness for the purpose of the life of the
+collectivity and have never fallen into definitive abeyance.
+It may be worth while to point out that the dolicho-blond type of
+European man seems to owe much of its dominating
+influence and its masterful position in the recent culture to its
+possessing the characteristics of predatory man in an exceptional
+degree. These spiritual traits, together with a large endowment
+of physical energy -- itself probably a result of selection
+between groups and between lines of descent -- chiefly go to
+place any ethnic element in the position of a leisure or master
+class, especially during the earlier phases of the development of
+the institution of a leisure class. This need not mean that
+precisely the same complement of aptitudes in any individual
+would insure him an eminent personal success. Under the
+competitive regime, the conditions of success for the individual
+are not necessarily the same as those for a class. The success of
+a class or party presumes a strong element of clannishness, or
+loyalty to a chief, or adherence to a tenet; whereas the
+competitive individual can best achieve his ends if he combines
+the barbarian's energy, initiative, self-seeking and
+disingenuousness with the savage's lack of loyalty or
+clannishness. It may be remarked by the way, that the men who
+have scored a brilliant (Napoleonic) success on the basis of an
+impartial self-seeking and absence of scruple, have not
+uncommonly shown more of the physical characteristics of the
+brachycephalic-brunette than of the dolicho-blond. The greater
+proportion of moderately successful individuals, in a
+self-seeking way, however, seem, in physique, to belong to the
+last-named ethnic element.
+
+The temperament induced by the predatory habit of life makes for
+the survival and fullness of life of the individual under a
+regime of emulation; at the same time it makes for the survival
+and success of the group if the group's life as a collectivity is
+also predominantly a life of hostile competition with other
+groups. But the evolution of economic life in the industrially
+more mature communities has now begun to take such a turn that
+the interest of the community no longer coincides with the
+emulative interests of the individual. In their corporate
+capacity, these advanced industrial communities are ceasing to be
+competitors for the means of life or for the right to live --
+except in so far as the predatory propensities of their ruling
+classes keep up the tradition of war and rapine. These
+communities are no longer hostile to one another by force of
+circumstances, other than the circumstances of tradition and
+temperament. Their material interests -- apart, possibly, from
+the interests of the collective good fame -- are not only no
+longer incompatible, but the success of any one of the
+communities unquestionably furthers the fullness of life of any
+other community in the group, for the present and for an
+incalculable time to come. No one of them any longer has any
+material interest in getting the better of any other. The same is
+not true in the same degree as regards individuals and their
+relations to one another.
+
+The collective interests of any modern community center in
+industrial efficiency. The individual is serviceable for the ends
+of the community somewhat in proportion to his efficiency in the
+productive employments vulgarly so called. This collective
+interest is best served by honesty, diligence, peacefulness,
+good-will, an absence of self-seeking, and an habitual
+recognition and apprehension of causal sequence, without
+admixture of animistic belief and without a sense of dependence
+on any preternatural intervention in the course of events. Not
+much is to be said for the beauty, moral excellence, or general
+worthiness and reputability of such a prosy human nature as these
+traits imply; and there is little ground of enthusiasm for the
+manner of collective life that would result from the prevalence
+of these traits in unmitigated dominance. But that is beside the
+point. The successful working of a modern industrial community is
+best secured where these traits concur, and it is attained in the
+degree in which the human material is characterized by their
+possession. Their presence in some measure is required in order
+to have a tolerable adjustment to the circumstances of the modern
+industrial situation. The complex, comprehensive. essentially
+peaceable, and highly organized mechanism of the modern
+industrial community works to the best advantage when these
+traits, or most of them, are present in the highest practicable
+degree. These traits are present in a markedly less degree in the
+man of the predatory type than is useful for the purposes of the
+modern collective life.
+
+On the other hand, the immediate interest of the individual under
+the competitive regime is best served by shrewd trading and
+unscrupulous management. The characteristics named above as
+serving the interests of the community are disserviceable to the
+individual, rather than otherwise. The presence of these
+aptitudes in his make-up diverts his energies to other ends than
+those of pecuniary gain; and also in his pursuit of gain they
+lead him to seek gain by the indirect and ineffectual channels of
+industry, rather than by a free and unfaltering career of sharp
+practice. The industrial aptitudes are pretty consistently a
+hindrance to the individual. Under the regime of emulation the
+members of a modern industrial community are rivals, each of whom
+will best attain his individual and immediate advantage if,
+through an exceptional exemption from scruple, he is able
+serenely to overreach and injure his fellows when the chance
+offers.
+
+It has already been noticed that modern economic institutions
+fall into two roughly distinct categories -- the pecuniary and
+the industrial. The like is true of employments. Under the former
+head are employments that have to do with ownership or
+acquisition; under the latter head, those that have to do with
+workmanship or production. As was found in speaking of the growth
+of institutions, so with regard to employments. The economic
+interests of the leisure class lie in the pecuniary employments;
+those of the working classes lie in both classes of employments,
+but chiefly in the industrial. Entrance to the leisure class lies
+through the pecuniary employments.
+
+These two classes of employment differ materially in respect of
+the aptitudes required for each; and the training which they give
+similarly follows two divergent lines. The discipline of the
+pecuniary employments acts to conserve and to cultivate certain
+of the predatory aptitudes and the predatory animus. It does this
+both by educating those individuals and classes who are occupied
+with these employments and by selectively repressing and
+eliminating those individuals and lines of descent that are unfit
+in this respect. So far as men's habits of thought are shaped by
+the competitive process of acquisition and tenure; so far as
+their economic functions are comprised within the range of
+ownership of wealth as conceived in terms of exchange value, and
+its management and financiering through a permutation of values;
+so far their experience in economic life favors the survival and
+accentuation of the predatory temperament and habits of thought.
+Under the modern, peaceable system, it is of course the peaceable
+range of predatory habits and aptitudes that is chiefly fostered
+by a life of acquisition. That is to say, the pecuniary
+employments give proficiency in the general line of practices
+comprised under fraud, rather than in those that belong under the
+more archaic method of forcible seizure.
+
+These pecuniary employments, tending to conserve the
+predatory temperament, are the employments which have to do with
+ownership -- the immediate function of the leisure class proper
+-- and the subsidiary functions concerned with acquisition and
+accumulation. These cover the class of persons and that range of
+duties in the economic process which have to do with the
+ownership of enterprises engaged in competitive industry;
+especially those fundamental lines of economic management which
+are classed as financiering operations. To these may be added the
+greater part of mercantile occupations. In their best and
+clearest development these duties make up the economic office of
+the "captain of industry." The captain of industry is an astute
+man rather than an ingenious one, and his captaincy is a
+pecuniary rather than an industrial captaincy. Such
+administration of industry as he exercises is commonly of a
+permissive kind. The mechanically effective details of production
+and of industrial organization are delegated to subordinates of a
+less "practical" turn of mind -- men who are possessed of a gift
+for workmanship rather than administrative ability. So far as
+regards their tendency in shaping human nature by education and
+selection, the common run of non-economic employments are to be
+classed with the pecuniary employments. Such are politics and
+ecclesiastical and military employments.
+
+The pecuniary employments have also the sanction of
+reputability in a much higher degree than the industrial
+employments. In this way the leisure-class standards of good
+repute come in to sustain the prestige of those aptitudes that
+serve the invidious purpose; and the leisure-class scheme of
+decorous living, therefore, also furthers the survival and
+culture of the predatory traits. Employments fall into a
+hierarchical gradation of reputability. Those which have to do
+immediately with ownership on a large scale are the most
+reputable of economic employments proper. Next to these in good
+repute come those employments that are immediately subservient to
+ownership and financiering -- such as banking and the law.
+Banking employments also carry a suggestion of large ownership,
+and this fact is doubtless accountable for a share of the
+prestige that attaches to the business. The profession of the law
+does not imply large ownership ; but since no taint of
+usefulness, for other than the competitive purpose, attaches to
+the lawyer's trade, it grades high in the conventional scheme.
+The lawyer is exclusively occupied with the details of predatory
+fraud, either in achieving or in checkmating chicanery, and
+success in the profession is therefore accepted as marking a
+large endowment of that barbarian astuteness which has always
+commanded men's respect and fear. Mercantile pursuits are only
+half-way reputable, unless they involve a large element of
+ownership and a small element of usefulness. They grade high or
+low somewhat in proportion as they serve the higher or the lower
+needs; so that the business of retailing the vulgar necessaries
+of life descends to the level of the handicrafts and factory
+labor. Manual labor, or even the work of directing mechanical
+processes, is of course on a precarious footing as regards
+respectability. A qualification is necessary as regards the
+discipline given by the pecuniary employments. As the scale of
+industrial enterprise grows larger, pecuniary management comes to
+bear less of the character of chicanery and shrewd competition in
+detail. That is to say, for an ever-increasing proportion of the
+persons who come in contact with this phase of economic life,
+business reduces itself to a routine in which there is less
+immediate suggestion of overreaching or exploiting a competitor.
+The consequent exemption from predatory habits extends chiefly to
+subordinates employed in business. The duties of ownership and
+administration are virtually untouched by this qualification.
+The case is different as regards those individuals or classes who
+are immediately occupied with the technique and manual operations
+of production. Their daily life is not in the same degree a
+course of habituation to the emulative and invidious motives and
+maneuvers of the pecuniary side of industry. They are
+consistently held to the apprehension and coOrdination of
+mechanical facts and sequences, and to their appreciation and
+utilization for the purposes of human life. So far as concerns
+this portion of the population, the educative and selective
+action of the industrial process with which they are immediately
+in contact acts to adapt their habits of thought to the
+non-invidious purposes of the collective life. For them,
+therefore, it hastens the obsolescence of the distinctively
+predatory aptitudes and propensities carried over by heredity and
+tradition from the barbarian past of the race.
+
+The educative action of the economic life of the community,
+therefore, is not of a uniform kind throughout all its
+manifestations. That range of economic activities which is
+concerned immediately with pecuniary competition has a tendency
+to conserve certain predatory traits; while those indusstrial
+occupations which have to do immediately with the production of
+goods have in the main the contrary tendency. But with regard to
+the latter class of employments it is to be noticed in
+qualification that the persons engaged in them are nearly all to
+some extent also concerned with matters of pecuniary competition
+(as, for instance, in the competitive fixing of wages and
+salaries, in the purchase of goods for consumption, etc.).
+Therefore the distinction here made between classes of
+employments is by no means a hard and fast distinction between
+classes of persons.
+
+The employments of the leisure classes in modernindustry are such
+as to keep alive certain of the predatory habits and
+aptitudes. So far as the members of those classes take part in
+the industrial process, their training tends to conserve in them
+the barbarian temperament. But there is something to be said on
+the other side. Individuals so placed as to be exempt from strain
+may survive and transmit their characteristics even if they
+differ widely from the average of the species both in physique
+and in spiritual make-up. the chances for a survival and
+transmission of atavistic traits are greatest in those classes
+that are most sheltered from the stress of circumstances. The
+leisure class is in some degree sheltered from the stress of the
+industrial situation, and should, therefore, afford an
+exceptionally great proportion of reversions to the peaceable or
+savage temperament. It should be possible for such aberrant or
+atavistic individuals to unfold their life activity on
+ante-predatory lines without suffering as prompt a repression Or
+elimination as in the lower walks of life.
+
+Something of the sort seems to be true in fact. there is, for
+instance, an appreciable proportion of the upper classes whose
+inclinations lead them into philanthropic work, and there is a
+considerable body of sentiment in the class going to support
+efforts of reform and amelioration, And much of this
+philanthropic and reformatory effort, moreover, bears the marks
+of that amiable "cleverness" and incoherence that is
+characteristic of the primitive savage. But it may still be
+doubtful whether these facts are evidence of a larger proportion
+of reversions in the higher than in the lower strata, Even if the
+same inclinations were present in the impecunious classes, it
+would not as easily find expression there; since those classes
+lack the means and the time and energy to give effect to their
+inclinations in this respect. The prima facie evidence of the
+facts can scarcely go unquestioned.
+
+In further qualification it is to be noted that the leisure class
+of today is recruited from those who have been successful in a
+pecuniary way, and who, therefore, are presumably endowed with
+more than an even complement of the predatory traits. Entrance
+into the leisure class lies through the pecuniary employments,
+and these employments, by selection and adaptation, act to admit
+to the upper levels only those lines of descent that are
+pecuniarily fit to survive under the predatory test. And so soon
+as a case of reversion to non-predatory human nature shows itself
+on these upper levels, it is commonly weeded out and thrown back
+to the lower pecuniary levels. In order to hold its place in the
+class, a stock must have the pecuniary temperament; otherwise its
+fortune would he dissipated and it would presently lose caste.
+Instances of this kind are sufficiently frequent. The
+constituency of the leisure class is kept up by a continual
+selective process, whereby the individuals and lines of descent
+that are eminently fitted for an aggressive pecuniary competition
+are withdraw from the lower classes. In order to reach the upper
+levels the aspirant must have, not only a fair average complement
+of the pecuniary aptitudes, but he must have these gifts in such
+an eminent degree as to overcome very material difficulties that
+stand in the way of his ascent. Barring accidents, the nouveaux
+arriváéás are a picked body.
+
+This process of selective admission has, of course, always been
+going on; ever since the fashion of pecuniary emulation set in --
+which is much the same as saying, ever since the
+institution of a leisure class was first installed. But the
+precise ground of selection has not always been the same, and the
+selective process has therefore not always given the same
+results. In the early barbarian, or predatory stage proper, the
+test of fitness was prowess, in the naive sense of the word. to
+gain entrance to the class, the candidate had to he gifted with
+clannishness, massiveness, ferocity , unscrupulousness, and
+tenacity of purpose. these were the qualities that counted toward
+the accumulation and continued tenure of wealth. the economic
+basis of the leisure class, then as later, was the possession of
+wealth; hut the methods of accumulating wealth, and the gifts
+required for holding it, have changed in some degree since the
+early days of the predatory culture. In consequence of the
+selective process the dominant traits of the early barbarian
+leisure class were bold aggression, an alert sense of status, and
+a free resort to fraud. the members of the class held their place
+by tenure of prowess. In the later barbarian culture society
+attained settled methods of acquisition and possession under the
+quasi-peaceable regime of status. Simple aggression and
+unrestrained violence in great measure gave place to shrewd
+practice and chicanery, as the best approved method of
+accumulating wealth. A different range of aptitudes and
+propensities would then be conserved in the leisure class.
+Masterful aggression, and the correlative massiveness, together
+with a ruthlessly consistent sense of status, would still count
+among the most splendid traits of the class. These have remained
+in our traditions as the typical "aristocratic virtues." But with
+these were associated an increasing complement of the less
+obtrusive pecuniary virtues; such as providence, prudence, and
+chicanery. As time has gone on, and the modern peaceable stage of
+pecuniary culture has been approached, the last-named range of
+aptitudes and habits has gained in relative effectiveness for
+pecuniary ends, and they have counted for relatively more in the
+selective process under which admission is gained and place is
+held in the leisure class.
+
+The ground of selection has changed, until the aptitudes which
+now qualify for admission to the class are the pecuniary
+aptitudes only. What remains of the predatory barbarian traits is
+the tenacity of purpose or consistency of aim which distinguished
+the successful predatory barbarian from the peaceable savage whom
+he supplanted. But this trait can not be said characteristically
+to distinguish the pecuniarily successful upper-class man from
+the rank and file of the industrial classes. The training and the
+selection to which the latter are exposed in modernindustrial
+life give a similarly decisive weight to this trait. Tenacity of
+purpose may rather be said to distinguish both these classes from
+two others; the shiftless ne'er do-well and the lower-class
+delinquent. In point of natural endowment the pecuniary man
+compares with the delinquent in much the same way as the
+industrial man compares with the good-natured shiftless
+dependent. The ideal pecuniary man is like the ideal delinquent
+in his unscrupulous conversion of goods and persons to his own
+ends, and in a callous disregard of the feelings and wishes of
+others and of the remoter effects of his actions; but he is
+unlike him in possessing a keener sense of status, and in working
+more consistently and farsightedly to a remoter end. The kinship
+of the two types of temperament is further shown in a proclivity
+to "sport" and gambling, and a relish of aimless emulation. The
+ideal pecuniary man also shows a curious kinship with the
+delinquent in one of the concomitant variations of the predatory
+human nature. The delinquent is very commonly of a superstitious
+habit of mind; he is a great believer in luck, spells, divination
+and destiny, and in omens and shamanistic ceremony. Where
+circumstances are favorable, this proclivity is apt to express
+itself in a certain servile devotional fervor and a punctilious
+attention to devout observances; it may perhaps be better
+characterized as devoutness than as religion. At this point the
+temperament of the delinquent has more in common with the
+pecuniary and leisure classes than with the industrial man or
+with the class of shiftless dependents.
+
+Life in a modern industrial community, or in other words life
+under the pecuniary culture, acts by a process of selection to
+develop and conserve a certain range of aptitudes and
+propensities. The present tendency of this selective process is
+not simply a reversion to a given, immutable ethnic type. It
+tends rather to a modification of human nature differing in some
+respects from any of the types or variants transmitted out of the
+past. The objective point of the evolution is not a single one.
+The temperament which the evolution acts to establish as normal
+differs from any one of the archaic variants of human nature in
+its greater stability of aim -- greater singleness of purpose and
+greater persistence in effort. So far as concerns economic
+theory, the objective point of the selective process is on the
+whole single to this extent; although there are minor tendencies
+of considerable importance diverging from this line of
+development. But apart from this general trend the line of
+development is not single. As concerns economic theory, the
+development in other respects runs on two divergent lines. So far
+as regards the selective conservation of capacities or aptitudes
+in individuals, these two lines may be called the pecuniary and
+the industrial. As regards the conservation of propensities,
+spiritual attitude, or animus, the two may be called the
+invidious or self-regarding and the non-invidious or economical.
+As regards the intellectual or cognitive bent of the two
+directions of growth, the former may he characterized as the
+personal standpoint, of conation, qualitative relation, status,
+or worth; the latter as the impersonal standpoint, of sequence,
+quantitative relation, mechanical efficiency, or use.
+
+The pecuniary employments call into action chiefly the former of
+these two ranges of aptitudes and propensities, and act
+selectively to conserve them in the population. The industrial
+employments, on the other hand, chiefly exercise the latter
+range, and act to conserve them. An exhaustive psychological
+analysis will show that each of these two ranges of aptitudes and
+propensities is but the multiform expression of a given
+temperamental bent. By force of the unity or singleness of the
+individual, the aptitudes, animus, and interests comprised in the
+first-named range belong together as expressions of a given
+variant of human nature. The like is true of the latter range.
+The two may be conceived as alternative directions of human life,
+in such a way that a given individual inclines more or less
+consistently to the one or the other. The tendency of the
+pecuniary life is, in a general way, to conserve the barbarian
+temperament, but with the substitution of fraud and prudence, or
+administrative ability, in place of that predilection for
+physical damage that characterizes the early barbarian. This
+substitution of chicanery in place of devastation takes place
+only in an uncertain degree. Within the pecuniary employments the
+selective action runs pretty consistently in this direction, but
+the discipline of pecuniary life, outside the competition for
+gain, does not work consistently to the same effect. The
+discipline of modernlife in the consumption of time and goods
+does not act unequivocally to eliminate the aristocratic virtues
+or to foster the bourgeois virtues. The conventional scheme of
+decent living calls for a considerable exercise of the earlier
+barbarian traits. Some details of this traditional scheme of
+life, bearing on this point, have been noticed in earlier
+chapters under the head of leisure, and further details will be
+shown in later chapters.
+
+From what has been said, it appears that the leisure-class life
+and the leisure-class scheme of life should further the
+conservation of the barbarian temperament; chiefly of the
+quasi-peaceable, or bourgeois, variant, but also in some measure
+of the predatory variant. In the absence of disturbing factors,
+therefore, it should be possible to trace a difference of
+temperament between the classes of society. The aristocratic and
+the bourgeois virtues -- that is to say the destructive and
+pecuniary traits -- should be found chiefly among the upper
+classes, and the industrial virtues -- that is to say the
+peaceable traits -- chiefly among the classes given to mechanical
+industry.
+
+In a general and uncertain way this holds true, hut the test is
+not so readily applied nor so conclusive as might be wished.
+There are several assignable reasons for its partial failure. All
+classes are in a measure engaged in the pecuniary struggle, and
+in all classes the possession of the pecuniary traits counts
+towards the success and survival of the individual. Wherever the
+pecuniary culture prevails, the selective process by which men's
+habits of thought are shaped, and by which the survival of rival
+lines of descent is decided, proceeds proximately on the basis of
+fitness for acquisition. Consequently, if it were not for the
+fact that pecuniary efficiency is on the whole incompatible with
+industrial efficiency, the selective action of all occupations
+would tend to the unmitigated dominance of the pecuniary
+temperament. The result would be the installation of what has
+been known as the "economic man," as the normal and definitive
+type of human nature. But the "economic man," whose only interest
+is the self-regarding one and whose only human trait is prudence
+is useless for the purposes of modern industry.
+
+The modern industry requires an impersonal, non-invidious
+interest in the work in hand. Without this the elaborate
+processes of industry would be impossible, and would, indeed,
+never have been conceived. This interest in work differentiates
+the workman from the criminal on the one hand, and from the
+captain of industry on the other. Since work must be done in
+order to the continued life of the community, there results a
+qualified selection favoring the spiritual aptitude for work,
+within a certain range of occupations. This much, however, is to
+be conceded, that even within the industrial occupations the
+selective elimination of the pecuniary traits is an uncertain
+process, and that there is consequently an appreciable survival
+of the barbarian temperament even within these occupations. On
+this account there is at present no broad distinction in this
+respect between the leisure-class character and the character of
+the common run of the population.
+
+The whole question as to a class distinction in respect to
+spiritual make-up is also obscured by the presence, in all
+classes of society, of acquired habits of life that closely
+simulate inherited traits and at the same time act to develop in
+the entire body of the population the traits which they simulate.
+These acquired habits, or assumed traits of character, are most
+commonly of an aristocratic cast. The prescriptive position of
+the leisure class as the exemplar of reputability has imposed
+many features of the leisure-class theory of life upon the lower
+classes; with the result that there goes on, always and
+throughout society, a more or less persistent cultivation of
+these aristocratic traits. On this ground also these traits have
+a better chance of survival among the body of the people than
+would be the case if it were not for the precept and example of
+the leisure class. As one channel, and an important one, through
+which this transfusion of aristocratic views of life, and
+consequently more or less archaic traits of character goes on,
+may be mentioned the class of domestic servants. these have their
+notions of what is good and beautiful shaped by contact with the
+master class and carry the preconceptions so acquired back among
+their low-born equals, and so disseminate the higher ideals
+abroad through the community without the loss of time which this
+dissemination might otherwise suffer. The saying "Like master,
+like man, " has a greater significance than is commonly
+appreciated for the rapid popular acceptance of many elements of
+upper-class culture.
+
+There is also a further range of facts that go to lessen class
+differences as regards the survival of the pecuniary virtues. The
+pecuniary struggle produces an underfed class, of large
+proportions. This underfeeding consists in a deficiency of the
+necessaries of life or of the necessaries of a decent
+expenditure. In either case the result is a closely enforced
+struggle for the means with which to meet the daily needs;
+whether it be the physical or the higher needs. The strain of
+self-assertion against odds takes up the whole energy of the
+individual; he bends his efforts to compass his own invidious
+ends alone, and becomes continually more narrowly self-seeking.
+The industrial traits in this way tend to obsolescence through
+disuse. Indirectly, therefore, by imposing a scheme of pecuniary
+decency and by withdrawing as much as may be of the means of life
+from the lower classes, the institution of a leisure class acts
+to conserve the pecuniary traits in the body of the population.
+The result is an assimilation of the lower classes to the type of
+human nature that belongs primarily to the upper classes only.
+It appears, therefore, that there is no wide difference in
+temperament between the upper and the lower classes; but it
+appears also that the absence of such a difference is in good
+part due to the prescriptive example of the leisure class and to
+the popular acceptance of those broad principles of conspicuous
+waste and pecuniary emulation on which the institution of a
+leisure class rests. The institution acts to lower the industrial
+efficiency of the community and retard the adaptation of human
+nature to the exigencies of modern industrial life. It affects
+the prevalent or effective human nature in a conservative
+direction, (1) by direct transmission of archaic traits, through
+inheritance within the class and wherever the leisure-class blood
+is transfused outside the class, and (2) by conserving and
+fortifying the traditions of the archaic regime, and so making
+the chances of survival of barbarian traits greater also outside
+the range of transfusion of leisure-class blood.
+
+But little if anything has been done towards collecting or
+digesting data that are of special significance for the question
+of survival or elimination of traits in the modern populations.
+Little of a tangible character can therefore be offered in
+support of the view here taken, beyond a discursive review of
+such everyday facts as lie ready to hand. Such a recital can
+scarcely avoid being commonplace and tedious, but for all that it
+seems necessary to the completeness of the argument, even in the
+meager outline in which it is here attempted. A degree of
+indulgence may therefore fairly be bespoken for the succeeding
+chapters, which offer a fragmentary recital of this kind.
+
+Chapter Ten
+
+Modern Survivals of Prowess
+
+The leisure class lives by the industrial community rather than
+in it. Its relations to industry are of a pecuniary rather than
+an industrial kind. Admission to the class is gained by exercise
+of the pecuniary aptitudes -- aptitudes for acquisition rather
+than for serviceability. There is, therefore, a continued
+selective sifting of the human material that makes up the leisure
+class, and this selection proceeds on the ground of fitness for
+pecuniary pursuits. But the scheme of life of the class is in
+large part a heritage from the past, and embodies much of the
+habits and ideals of the earlier barbarian period. This archaic,
+barbarian scheme of life imposes itself also on the lower orders,
+with more or less mitigation. In its turn the scheme of life, of
+conventions, acts selectively and by education to shape the human
+material, and its action runs chiefly in the direction of
+conserving traits, habits, and ideals that belong to the early
+barbarian age -- the age of prowess and predatory life.
+
+The most immediate and unequivocal expression of that archaic
+human nature which characterizes man in the predatory stage is
+the fighting propensity proper. In cases where the predatory
+activity is a collective one, this propensity is frequently
+called the martial spirit, or, latterly, patriotism. It needs no
+insistence to find assent to the proposition that in the
+countries of civilized Europe the hereditary leisure class is
+endowed with this martial spirit in a higher degree than the
+middle classes. Indeed, the leisure class claims the distinction
+as a matter of pride, and no doubt with some grounds. War is
+honorable, and warlike prowess is eminently honorific in the eyes
+of the generality of men; and this admiration of warlike prowess
+is itself the best voucher of a predatory temperament in the
+admirer of war. The enthusiasm for war, and the predatory temper
+of which it is the index, prevail in the largest measure among
+the upper classes, especially among the hereditary leisure class.
+Moreover, the ostensible serious occupation of the upper class is
+that of government, which, in point of origin and developmental
+content, is also a predatory occupation.
+
+The only class which could at all dispute with the
+hereditary leisure class the honor of an habitual bellicose frame
+of mind is that of the lower-class delinquents. In ordinary
+times, the large body of the industrial classes is relatively
+apathetic touching warlike interests. When unexcited, this body
+of the common people, which makes up the effective force of the
+industrial community, is rather averse to any other than a
+defensive fight; indeed, it responds a little tardily even to a
+provocation which makes for an attitude of defense. In the more
+civilized communities, or rather in the communities which have
+reached an advanced industrial development, the spirit of warlike
+aggression may be said to be obsolescent among the common people.
+This does not say that there is not an appreciable number of
+individuals among the industrial classes in whom the martial
+spirit asserts itself obtrusively. Nor does it say that the body
+of the people may not be fired with martial ardor for a time
+under the stimulus of some special provocation, such as is seen
+in operation today in more than one of the countries of Europe,
+and for the time in America. But except for such seasons of
+temporary exaltation, and except for those individuals who are
+endowed with an archaic temperament of the predatory type,
+together with the similarly endowed body of individuals among the
+higher and the lowest classes, the inertness of the mass of any
+modern civilized community in this respect is probably so great
+as would make war impracticable, except against actual invasion.
+The habits and aptitudes of the common run of men make for an
+unfolding of activity in other, less picturesque directions than
+that of war.
+
+This class difference in temperament may be due in part to a
+difference in the inheritance of acquired traits in the several
+classes, but it seems also, in some measure, to correspond with a
+difference in ethnic derivation. The class difference is in this
+respect visibly less in those countries whose population is
+relatively homogeneous, ethnically, than in the countries where
+there is a broader divergence between the ethnic elements that
+make up the several classes of the community. In the same
+connection it may be noted that the later accessions to the
+leisure class in the latter countries, in a general way, show
+less of the martial spirit than contemporary representatives of
+the aristocracy of the ancient line. These nouveaux arrivés have
+recently emerged from the commonplace body of the population and
+owe their emergence into the leisure class to the exercise of
+traits and propensities which are not to be classed as prowess in
+the ancient sense.
+
+Apart from warlike activity proper, the institution of the duel
+is also an expression of the same superior readiness for combat;
+and the duel is a leisure-class institution. The duel is in
+substance a more or less deliberate resort to a fight as a final
+settlement of a difference of opinion. In civilized communities
+it prevails as a normal phenomenon only where there is an
+hereditary leisure class, and almost exclusively among that
+class. The exceptions are (1) military and naval officers who are
+ordinarily members of the leisure class, and who are at the same
+time specially trained to predatory habits of mind and (2) the
+lower-class delinquents -- who are by inheritance, or training,
+or both, of a similarly predatory disposition and habit. It is
+only the high-bred gentleman and the rowdy that normally resort
+to blows as the universal solvent of differences of opinion. The
+plain man will ordinarily fight only when excessive momentary
+irritation or alcoholic exaltation act to inhibit the more
+complex habits of response to the stimuli that make for
+provocation. He is then thrown back upon the simpler, less
+differentiated forms of the instinct of self-assertion; that is
+to say, he reverts temporarily and without reflection to an
+archaic habit of mind.
+
+This institution of the duel as a mode of finally settling
+disputes and serious questions of precedence shades off into the
+obligatory, unprovoked private fight, as a social obligation due
+to one's good repute. As a leisure-class usage of this kind we
+have, particularly, that bizarre survival of bellicose chivalry,
+the German student duel. In the lower or spurious leisure class
+of the delinquents there is in all countries a similar, though
+less formal, social obligation incumbent on the rowdy to assert
+his manhood in unprovoked combat with his fellows. And spreading
+through all grades of society, a similar usage prevails among the
+boys of the community. The boy usually knows to nicety, from day
+to day, how he and his associates grade in respect of relative
+fighting capacity; and in the community of boys there is
+ordinarily no secure basis of reputability for any one who, by
+exception, will not or can not fight on invitation.
+
+All this applies especially to boys above a certain somewhat
+vague limit of maturity. The child's temperament does not
+commonly answer to this description during infancy and the years
+of close tutelage, when the child still habitually seeks contact
+with its mother at every turn of its daily life. During this
+earlier period there is little aggression and little propensity
+for antagonism. The transition from this peaceable temper to the
+predaceous, and in extreme cases malignant, mischievousness of
+the boy is a gradual one, and it is accomplished with more
+completeness, covering a larger range of the individual's
+aptitudes, in some cases than in others. In the earlier stage of
+his growth, the child, whether boy or girl, shows less of
+initiative and aggressive self-assertion and less of an
+inclination to isolate himself and his interests from the
+domestic group in which he lives, and he shows more of
+sensitiveness to rebuke, bashfulness, timidity, and the need of
+friendly human contact. In the common run of cases this early
+temperament passes, by a gradual but somewhat rapid obsolescence
+of the infantile features, into the temperament of the boy
+proper; though there are also cases where the predaceous futures
+of boy life do not emerge at all, or at the most emerge in but a
+slight and obscure degree.
+
+In girls the transition to the predaceous stage is seldom
+accomplished with the same degree of completeness as in boys; and
+in a relatively large proportion of cases it is scarcely
+undergone at all. In such cases the transition from infancy to
+adolescence and maturity is a gradual and unbroken process of the
+shifting of interest from infantile purposes and aptitudes to the
+purposes, functions, and relations of adult life. In the girls
+there is a less general prevalence of a predaceous interval in
+the development; and in the cases where it occurs, the predaceous
+and isolating attitude during the interval is commonly less
+accentuated.
+
+In the male child the predaceous interval is ordinarily fairly
+well marked and lasts for some time, but it is commonly
+terminated (if at all) with the attainment of maturity. This last
+statement may need very material qualification. The cases are by
+no means rare in which the transition from the boyish to the
+adult temperament is not made, or is made only partially --
+understanding by the "adult" temperament the average temperament
+of those adult individuals in modern industrial life who have
+some serviceability for the purposes of the collective life
+process, and who may therefore be said to make up the effective
+average of the industrial community.
+
+The ethnic composition of the European populations varies. In
+some cases even the lower classes are in large measure made up of
+the peace-disturbing dolicho-blond; while in others this ethnic
+element is found chiefly among the hereditary leisure class. The
+fighting habit seems to prevail to a less extent among the
+working-class boys in the latter class of populations than among
+the boys of the upper classes or among those of the
+populations first named.
+
+If this generalization as to the temperament of the boy among the
+working classes should be found true on a fuller and closer
+scrutiny of the field, it would add force to the view that the
+bellicose temperament is in some appreciable degree a race
+characteristic; it appears to enter more largely into the make-up
+of the dominant, upper-class ethnic type -- the dolicho-blond --
+of the European countries than into the subservient, lower-class
+types of man which are conceived to constitute the body of the
+population of the same communities.
+
+The case of the boy may seem not to bear seriously on the
+question of the relative endowment of prowess with which the
+several classes of society are gifted; but it is at least of some
+value as going to show that this fighting impulse belongs to a
+more archaic temperament than that possessed by the average adult
+man of the industrious classes. In this, as in many other
+features of child life, the child reproduces, temporarily and in
+miniature, some of the earlier phases of the development of adult
+man. Under this interpretation, the boy's predilection for
+exploit and for isolation of his own interest is to be taken as a
+transient reversion to the human nature that is normal to the
+early barbarian culture -- the predatory culture proper. In this
+respect, as in much else, the leisure-class and the
+delinquent-class character shows a persistence into adult life of
+traits that are normal to childhood and youth, and that are
+likewise normal or habitual to the earlier stages of culture.
+Unless the difference is traceable entirely to a fundamental
+difference between persistent ethnic types, the traits that
+distinguish the swaggering delinquent and the punctilious
+gentleman of leisure from the common crowd are, in some measure,
+marks of an arrested spiritual development. They mark an immature
+phase, as compared with the stage of development attained by the
+average of the adults in the modern industrial community. And it
+will appear presently that the puerile spiritual make-up of these
+representatives of the upper and the lowest social strata shows
+itself also in the presence of other archaic traits than this
+proclivity to ferocious exploit and isolation.
+
+As if to leave no doubt about the essential immaturity of the
+fighting temperament, we have, bridging the interval between
+legitimate boyhood and adult manhood, the aimless and playful,
+but more or less systematic and elaborate, disturbances of the
+peace in vogue among schoolboys of a slightly higher age. In the
+common run of cases, these disturbances are confined to the
+period of adolescence. They recur with decreasing frequency and
+acuteness as youth merges into adult life, and so they reproduce,
+in a general way, in the life of the individual, the sequence by
+which the group has passed from the predatory to a more settled
+habit of life. In an appreciable number of cases the spiritual
+growth of the individual comes to a close before he emerges from
+this puerile phase; in these cases the fighting temper persists
+through life. Those individuals who in spiritual development
+eventually reach man's estate, therefore, ordinarily pass through
+a temporary archaic phase corresponding to the permanent
+spiritual level of the fighting and sporting men. Different
+individuals will, of course, achieve spiritual maturity and
+sobriety in this respect in different degrees; and those who fail
+of the average remain as an undissolved residue of crude humanity
+in the modern industrial community and as a foil for that
+selective process of adaptation which makes for a heightened
+industrial efficiency and the fullness of life of the
+collectivity. This arrested spiritual development may express
+itself not only in a direct participation by adults in youthful
+exploits of ferocity, but also indirectly in aiding and abetting
+disturbances of this kind on the part of younger persons. It
+thereby furthers the formation of habits of ferocity which may
+persist in the later life of the growing generation, and so
+retard any movement in the direction of a more peaceable
+effective temperament on the part of the community. If a person
+so endowed with a proclivity for exploits is in a position to
+guide the development of habits in the adolescent members of the
+community, the influence which he exerts in the direction of
+conservation and reversion to prowess may be very considerable.
+This is the significance, for instance, of the fostering care
+latterly bestowed by many clergymen and other pillars of society
+upon "boys' brigades" and similar pseudo-military organizations.
+The same is true of the encouragement given to the growth of
+"college spirit," college athletics, and the like, in the higher
+institutions of learning.
+
+These manifestations of the predatory temperament are all to be
+classed under the head of exploit. They are partly simple and
+unreflected expressions of an attitude of emulative ferocity,
+partly activities deliberately entered upon with a view to
+gaining repute for prowess. Sports of all kinds are of the same
+general character, including prize-fights, bull-fights,
+athletics, shooting, angling, yachting, and games of skill, even
+where the element of destructive physical efficiency is not an
+obtrusive feature. Sports shade off from the basis of hostile
+combat, through skill, to cunning and chicanery, without its
+being possible to draw a line at any point. The ground of an
+addiction to sports is an archaic spiritual constitution -- the
+possession of the predatory emulative propensity in a relatively
+high potency, A strong proclivity to adventuresome exploit and to
+the infliction of damage is especially pronounced in those
+employments which are in colloquial usage specifically called
+sportsmanship.
+
+It is perhaps truer, or at least more evident, as regards sports
+than as regards the other expressions of predatory emulation
+already spoken of, that the temperament which inclines men to
+them is essentially a boyish temperament. The addiction to
+sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree marks an arrested
+development of the man's moral nature. This peculiar boyishness
+of temperament in sporting men immediately becomes apparent when
+attention is directed to the large element of make-believe that
+is present in all sporting activity. Sports share this character
+of make-believe with the games and exploits to which children,
+especially boys, are habitually inclined. Make-believe does not
+enter in the same proportion into all sports, but it is present
+in a very appreciable degree in all. It is apparently present in
+a larger measure in sportsmanship proper and in athletic contests
+than in set games of skill of a more sedentary character;
+although this rule may not be found to apply with any great
+uniformity. It is noticeable, for instance, that even very
+mild-mannered and matter-of-fact men who go out shooting are apt
+to carry an excess of arms and accoutrements in order to impress
+upon their own imagination the seriousness of their undertaking.
+These huntsmen are also prone to a histrionic, prancing gait and
+to an elaborate exaggeration of the motions, whether of stealth
+or of onslaught, involved in their deeds of exploit. Similarly in
+athletic sports there is almost invariably present a good share
+of rant and swagger and ostensible mystification -- features
+which mark the histrionic nature of these employments. In all
+this, of course, the reminder of boyish make-believe is plain
+enough. The slang of athletics, by the way, is in great part made
+up of extremely sanguinary locutions borrowed from the
+terminology of warfare. Except where it is adopted as a necessary
+means of secret communication, the use of a special slang in any
+employment is probably to be accepted as evidence that the
+occupation in question is substantially make-believe.
+
+A further feature in which sports differ from the duel and
+similar disturbances of the peace is the peculiarity that they
+admit of other motives being assigned for them besides the
+impulses of exploit and ferocity. There is probably little if any
+other motive present in any given case, but the fact that other
+reasons for indulging in sports are frequently assigned goes to
+say that other grounds are sometimes present in a subsidiary way.
+Sportsmen -- hunters and anglers -- are more or less in the habit
+of assigning a love of nature, the need of recreation, and the
+like, as the incentives to their favorite pastime. These motives
+are no doubt frequently present and make up a part of the
+attractiveness of the sportsman's life; but these can not be the
+chief incentives. These ostensible needs could be more readily
+and fully satisfied without the accompaniment of a systematic
+effort to take the life of those creatures that make up an
+essential feature of that "nature" that is beloved by the
+sportsman. It is, indeed, the most noticeable effect of the
+sportsman's activity to keep nature in a state of chronic
+desolation by killing off all living thing whose destruction he
+can compass.
+
+Still, there is ground for the sportsman's claim that under the
+existing conventionalities his need of recreation and of contact
+with nature can best be satisfied by the course which he takes.
+Certain canons of good breeding have been imposed by the
+prescriptive example of a predatory leisure class in the past and
+have been somewhat painstakingly conserved by the usage of the
+latter-day representatives of that class; and these canons will
+not permit him, without blame, to seek contact with nature on
+other terms. From being an honorable employment handed down from
+the predatory culture as the highest form of everyday leisure,
+sports have come to be the only form of outdoor activity that has
+the full sanction of decorum. Among the proximate incentives to
+shooting and angling, then, may be the need of recreation and
+outdoor life. The remoter cause which imposes the necessity of
+seeking these objects under the cover of systematic slaughter is
+a prescription that can not be violated except at the risk of
+disrepute and consequent lesion to one's self-respect.
+
+The case of other kinds of sport is somewhat similar. Of these,
+athletic games are the best example. Prescriptive usage with
+respect to what forms of activity, exercise, and recreation are
+permissible under the code of reputable living is of course
+present here also. Those who are addicted to athletic sports, or
+who admire them, set up the claim that these afford the best
+available means of recreation and of "physical culture." And
+prescriptive usage gives countenance to the claim. The canons of
+reputable living exclude from the scheme of life of the leisure
+class all activity that can not be classed as conspicuous
+leisure. And consequently they tend by prescription to exclude it
+also from the scheme of life of the community generally. At the
+same time purposeless physical exertion is tedious and
+distasteful beyond tolerance. As has been noticed in another
+connection, recourse is in such a case had to some form of
+activity which shall at least afford a colorable pretense of
+purpose, even if the object assigned be only a make-believe.
+Sports satisfy these requirements of substantial futility
+together with a colorable make-believe of purpose. In addition to
+this they afford scope for emulation, and are attractive also on
+that account. In order to be decorous, an employment must conform
+to the leisure-class canon of reputable waste; at the same time
+all activity, in order to be persisted in as an habitual, even if
+only partial, expression of life, must conform to the generically
+human canon of efficiency for some serviceable objective end. The
+leisure-class canon demands strict and comprehensive futility,
+the instinct of workmanship demands purposeful action. The
+leisure-class canon of decorum acts slowly and pervasively, by a
+selective elimination of all substantially useful or purposeful
+modes of action from the accredited scheme of life; the instinct
+of workmanship acts impulsively and may be satisfied,
+provisionally, with a proximate purpose. It is only as the
+apprehended ulterior futility of a given line of action enters
+the reflective complex of consciousness as an element essentially
+alien to the normally purposeful trend of the life process that
+its disquieting and deterrent effect on the consciousness of the
+agent is wrought.
+
+The individual's habits of thought make an organic complex, the
+trend of which is necessarily in the direction of
+serviceability to the life process. When it is attempted to
+assimilate systematic waste or futility, as an end in life, into
+this organic complex, there presently supervenes a revulsion. But
+this revulsion of the organism may be avoided if the attention
+can be confined to the proximate, unreflected purpose of
+dexterous or emulative exertion. Sports -- hunting, angling,
+athletic games, and the like -- afford an exercise for dexterity
+and for the emulative ferocity and astuteness characteristic of
+predatory life. So long as the individual is but slightly gifted
+with reflection or with a sense of the ulterior trend of his
+actions so long as his life is substantially a life of naive
+impulsive action -- so long the immediate and unreflected
+purposefulness of sports, in the way of an expression of
+dominance, will measurably satisfy his instinct of workmanship.
+This is especially true if his dominant impulses are the
+unreflecting emulative propensities of the predaceous
+temperament. At the same time the canons of decorum will commend
+sports to him as expressions of a pecuniarily blameless life. It
+is by meeting these two requirements, of ulterior wastefulness
+and proximate purposefulness, that any given employment holds its
+place as a traditional and habitual mode of decorous recreation.
+In the sense that other forms of recreation and exercise are
+morally impossible to persons of good breeding and delicate
+sensibilities, then, sports are the best available means of
+recreation under existing circumstances.
+
+But those members of respectable society who advocate athletic
+games commonly justify their attitude on this head to themselves
+and to their neighbors on the ground that these games serve as an
+invaluable means of development. They not only improve the
+contestant's physique, but it is commonly added that they also
+foster a manly spirit, both in the participants and in the
+spectators. Football is the particular game which will probably
+first occur to any one in this community when the question of the
+serviceability of athletic games is raised, as this form of
+athletic contest is at present uppermost in the mind of those who
+plead for or against games as a means of physical or moral
+salvation. This typical athletic sport may, therefore, serve to
+illustrate the bearing of athletics upon the development of the
+contestant's character and physique. It has been said, not
+inaptly, that the relation of football to physical culture is
+much the same as that of the bull-fight to agriculture.
+Serviceability for these lusory institutions requires sedulous
+training or breeding. The material used, whether brute or human,
+is subjected to careful selection and discipline, in order to
+secure and accentuate certain aptitudes and propensities which
+are characteristic of the ferine state, and which tend to
+obsolescence under domestication. This does not mean that the
+result in either case is an all around and consistent
+rehabilitation of the ferine or barbarian habit of mind and body.
+The result is rather a one-sided return to barbarism or to the
+feroe natura -- a rehabilitation and accentuation of those ferine
+traits which make for damage and desolation, without a
+corresponding development of the traits which would serve the
+individual's self-preservation and fullness of life in a ferine
+environment. The culture bestowed in football gives a product of
+exotic ferocity and cunning. It is a rehabilitation of the early
+barbarian temperament, together with a suppression of those
+details of temperament, which, as seen from the standpoint of the
+social and economic exigencies, are the redeeming features of the
+savage character.
+
+The physical vigor acquired in the training for athletic games --
+so far as the training may be said to have this effect  -- is of
+advantage both to the individual and to the collectivity, in
+that, other things being equal, it conduces to economic
+serviceability. The spiritual traits which go with athletic
+sports are likewise economically advantageous to the individual,
+as contradistinguished from the interests of the collectivity.
+This holds true in any community where these traits are present
+in some degree in the population. Modern competition is in large
+part a process of self-assertion on the basis of these traits of
+predatory human nature. In the sophisticated form in which they
+enter into the modern, peaceable emulation, the possession of
+these traits in some measure is almost a necessary of life to the
+civilized man. But while they are indispensable to the
+competitive individual, they are not directly serviceable to the
+community. So far as regards the serviceability of the individual
+for the purposes of the collective life, emulative efficiency is
+of use only indirectly if at all. Ferocity and cunning are of no
+use to the community except in its hostile dealings with other
+communities; and they are useful to the individual only because
+there is so large a proportion of the same traits actively
+present in the human environment to which he is exposed. Any
+individual who enters the competitive struggle without the due
+endowment of these traits is at a disadvantage, somewhat as a
+hornless steer would find himself at a disadvantage in a drove of
+horned cattle.
+
+The possession and the cultivation of the predatory traits of
+character may, of course, be desirable on other than economic
+grounds. There is a prevalent aesthetic or ethical predilection
+for the barbarian aptitudes, and the traits in question minister
+so effectively to this predilection that their serviceability in
+the aesthetic or ethical respect probably offsets any economic
+unserviceability which they may give. But for the present purpose
+that is beside the point. Therefore nothing is said here as to
+the desirability or advisability of sports on the whole, or as to
+their value on other than economic grounds.
+
+In popular apprehension there is much that is admirable in the
+type of manhood which the life of sport fosters. There is
+self-reliance and good-fellowship, so termed in the somewhat
+loose colloquial use of the words. From a different point of view
+the qualities currently so characterized might be described as
+truculence and clannishness. The reason for the current approval
+and admiration of these manly qualities, as well as for their
+being called manly, is the same as the reason for their
+usefulness to the individual. The members of the community, and
+especially that class of the community which sets the pace in
+canons of taste, are endowed with this range of propensities in
+sufficient measure to make their absence in others felt as a
+shortcoming, and to make their possession in an exceptional
+degree appreciated as an attribute of superior merit. The traits
+of predatory man are by no means obsolete in the common run of
+modern populations. They are present and can be called out in
+bold relief at any time by any appeal to the sentiments in which
+they express themselves -- unless this appeal should clash with
+the specific activities that make up our habitual occupations and
+comprise the general range of our everyday interests. The common
+run of the population of any industrial community is emancipated
+from these, economically considered, untoward propensities only
+in the sense that, through partial and temporary disuse, they
+have lapsed into the background of sub-conscious motives. With
+varying degrees of potency in different individuals, they remain
+available for the aggressive shaping of men's actions and
+sentiments whenever a stimulus of more than everyday intensity
+comes in to call them forth. And they assert themselves forcibly
+in any case where no occupation alien to the predatory culture
+has usurped the individual's everyday range of interest and
+sentiment. This is the case among the leisure class and among
+certain portions of the population which are ancillary to that
+class. Hence the facility with which any new accessions to the
+leisure class take to sports; and hence the rapid growth of
+sports and of the sporting sentient in any industrial community
+where wealth has accumulated sufficiently to exempt a
+considerable part of the population from work.
+
+A homely and familiar fact may serve to show that the predaceous
+impulse does not prevail in the same degree in all classes. Taken
+simply as a feature of modern life, the habit of carrying a
+walking-stick may seem at best a trivial detail; but the usage
+has a significance for the point in question. The classes among
+whom the habit most prevails -- the classes with whom the
+walking-stick is associated in popular apprehension -- are the
+men of the leisure class proper, sporting men, and the
+lower-class delinquents. To these might perhaps be added the men
+engaged in the pecuniary employments. The same is not true of the
+common run of men engaged in industry and it may be noted by the
+way that women do not carry a stick except in case of infirmity,
+where it has a use of a different kind. The practice is of course
+in great measure a matter of polite usage; but the basis of
+polite usage is, in turn, the proclivities of the class which
+sets the pace in polite usage. The walking-stick serves the
+purpose of an advertisement that the bearer's hands are employed
+otherwise than in useful effort, and it therefore has utility as
+an evidence of leisure. But it is also a weapon, and it meets a
+felt need of barbarian man on that ground. The handling of so
+tangible and primitive a means of offense is very comforting to
+any one who is gifted with even a moderate share of ferocity.
+The exigencies of the language make it impossible to avoid an
+apparent implication of disapproval of the aptitudes,
+propensities, and expressions of life here under discussion. It
+is, however, not intended to imply anything in the way of
+deprecation or commendation of any one of these phases of human
+character or of the life process. The various elements of the
+prevalent human nature are taken up from the point of view of
+economic theory, and the traits discussed are gauged and graded
+with regard to their immediate economic bearing on the facility
+of the collective life process. That is to say, these phenomena
+are here apprehended from the economic point of view and are
+valued with respect to their direct action in furtherance or
+hindrance of a more perfect adjustment of the human collectivity
+to the environment and to the institutional structure required by
+the economic situation of the collectivity for the present and
+for the immediate future. For these purposes the traits handed
+down from the predatory culture are less serviceable than might
+be. Although even in this connection it is not to be overlooked
+that the energetic aggressiveness and pertinacity of predatory
+man is a heritage of no mean value. The economic value -- with
+some regard also to the social value in the narrower sense -- of
+these aptitudes and propensities is attempted to be passed upon
+without reflecting on their value as seen from another point of
+view. When contrasted with the prosy mediocrity of the latter-day
+industrial scheme of life, and judged by the accredited standards
+of morality, and more especially by the standards of aesthetics
+and of poetry, these survivals from a more primitive type of
+manhood may have a very different value from that here assigned
+them. But all this being foreign to the purpose in hand, no
+expression of opinion on this latter head would be in place here.
+All that is admissible is to enter the caution that these
+standards of excellence, which are alien to the present purpose,
+must not be allowed to influence our economic appreciation of
+these traits of human character or of the activities which foster
+their growth. This applies both as regards those persons who
+actively participate in sports and those whose sporting
+experience consists in contemplation only. What is here said of
+the sporting propensity is likewise pertinent to sundry
+reflections presently to be made in this connection on what would
+colloquially be known as the religious life.
+
+The last paragraph incidentally touches upon the fact that
+everyday speech can scarcely be employed in discussing this class
+of aptitudes and activities without implying deprecation or
+apology. The fact is significant as showing the habitual attitude
+of the dispassionate common man toward the propensities which
+express themselves in sports and in exploit generally. And this
+is perhaps as convenient a place as any to discuss that undertone
+of deprecation which runs through all the voluminous discourse in
+defense or in laudation of athletic sports, as well as of other
+activities of a predominantly predatory character. The same
+apologetic frame of mind is at least beginning to be observable
+in the spokesmen of most other institutions handed down from the
+barbarian phase of life. Among these archaic institutions which
+are felt to need apology are comprised, with others, the entire
+existing system of the distribution of wealth, together with the
+resulting class distinction of status; all or nearly all forms of
+consumption that come under the head of conspicuous waste; the
+status of women under the patriarchal system; and many features
+of the traditional creeds and devout observances, especially the
+exoteric expressions of the creed and the naive apprehension of
+received observances. What is to be said in this connection of
+the apologetic attitude taken in commending sports and the
+sporting character will therefore apply, with a suitable change
+in phraseology, to the apologies offered in behalf of these
+other, related elements of our social heritage.
+
+There is a feeling -- usually vague and not commonly avowed in so
+many words by the apologist himself, but ordinarily
+perceptible in the manner of his discourse -- that these sports,
+as well as the general range of predaceous impulses and habits of
+thought which underlie the sporting character, do not altogether
+commend themselves to common sense. "As to the majority of
+murderers, they are very incorrect characters." This aphorism
+offers a valuation of the predaceous temperament, and of the
+disciplinary effects of its overt expression and exercise, as
+seen from the moralist's point of view. As such it affords an
+indication of what is the deliverance of the sober sense of
+mature men as to the degree of availability of the predatory
+habit of mind for the purposes of the collective life. It is felt
+that the presumption is against any activity which involves
+habituation to the predatory attitude, and that the burden of
+proof lies with those who speak for the rehabilitation of the
+predaceous temper and for the practices which strengthen it.
+There is a strong body of popular sentiment in favor of
+diversions and enterprises of the kind in question; but there is
+at the same time present in the community a pervading sense that
+this ground of sentiment wants legitimation. The required
+legitimation is ordinarily sought by showing that although sports
+are substantially of a predatory, socially disintegrating effect;
+although their proximate effect runs in the direction of
+reversion to propensities that are industrially disserviceable;
+yet indirectly and remotely -- by some not readily comprehensible
+process of polar induction, or counter-irritation perhaps --
+sports are conceived to foster a habit of mind that is
+serviceable for the social or industrial purpose. That is to say,
+although sports are essentially of the nature of invidious
+exploit, it is presumed that by some remote and obscure effect
+they result in the growth of a temperament conducive to
+non-invidious work. It is commonly attempted to show all this
+empirically or it is rather assumed that this is the empirical
+generalization which must be obvious to any one who cares to see
+it. In conducting the proof of this thesis the treacherous ground
+of inference from cause to effect is somewhat shrewdly avoided,
+except so far as to show that the "manly virtues" spoken of above
+are fostered by sports. But since it is these manly virtues that
+are (economically) in need of legitimation, the chain of proof
+breaks off where it should begin. In the most general economic
+terms, these apologies are an effort to show that, in spite of
+the logic of the thing, sports do in fact further what may
+broadly be called workmanship. So long as he has not succeeded in
+persuading himself or others that this is their effect the
+thoughtful apologist for sports will not rest content, and
+commonly, it is to be admitted, he does not rest content. His
+discontent with his own vindication of the practice in question
+is ordinarily shown by his truculent tone and by the eagerness
+with which he heaps up asseverations in support of his position.
+But why are apologies needed? If there prevails a body of popular
+sentient in favor of sports, why is not that fact a sufficient
+legitimation? The protracted discipline of prowess to which the
+race has been subjected under the predatory and quasi-peaceable
+culture has transmitted to the men of today a temperament that
+finds gratification in these expressions of ferocity and cunning.
+So, why not accept these sports as legitimate expressions of a
+normal and wholesome human nature? What other norm is there that
+is to be lived up to than that given in the aggregate range of
+propensities that express themselves in the sentiments of this
+generation, including the hereditary strain of prowess? The
+ulterior norm to which appeal is taken is the instinct of
+workmanship, which is an instinct more fundamental, of more
+ancient prescription, than the propensity to predatory emulation.
+The latter is but a special development of the instinct of
+workmanship, a variant, relatively late and ephemeral in spite of
+its great absolute antiquity. The emulative predatory impulse --
+or the instinct of sportsmanship, as it might well be called --
+is essentially unstable in comparison with the primordial
+instinct of workmanship out of which it has been developed and
+differentiated. Tested by this ulterior norm of life, predatory
+emulation, and therefore the life of sports, falls short.
+
+The manner and the measure in which the institution of a leisure
+class conduces to the conservation of sports and
+invidious exploit can of course not be succinctly stated. From
+the evidence already recited it appears that, in sentient and
+inclinations, the leisure class is more favorable to a warlike
+attitude and animus than the industrial classes. Something
+similar seems to be true as regards sports. But it is chiefly in
+its indirect effects, though the canons of decorous living, that
+the institution has its influence on the prevalent sentiment with
+respect to the sporting life. This indirect effect goes almost
+unequivocally in the direction of furthering a survival of the
+predatory temperament and habits; and this is true even with
+respect to those variants of the sporting life which the higher
+leisure-class code of proprieties proscribes; as, e.g.,
+prize-fighting, cock-fighting, and other like vulgar expressions
+of the sporting temper. Whatever the latest authenticated
+schedule of detail proprieties may say, the accredited canons of
+decency sanctioned by the institution say without equivocation
+that emulation and waste are good and their opposites are
+disreputable. In the crepuscular light of the social nether
+spaces the details of the code are not apprehended with all the
+facility that might be desired, and these broad underlying canons
+of decency are therefore applied somewhat unreflectingly, with
+little question as to the scope of their competence or the
+exceptions that have been sanctioned in detail.
+
+Addiction to athletic sports, not only in the way of direct
+participation, but also in the way of sentiment and moral
+support, is, in a more or less pronounced degree, a
+characteristic of the leisure class; and it is a trait which that
+class shares with the lower-class delinquents, and with such
+atavistic elements throughout the body of the community as are
+endowed with a dominant predaceous trend. Few individuals among
+the populations of Western civilized countries are so far devoid
+of the predaceous instinct as to find no diversion in
+contemplating athletic sports and games, but with the common run
+of individuals among the industrial classes the inclination to
+sports does not assert itself to the extent of constituting what
+may fairly be called a sporting habit. With these classes sports
+are an occasional diversion rather than a serious feature of
+life. This common body of the people can therefore not be said to
+cultivate the sporting propensity. Although it is not obsolete in
+the average of them, or even in any appreciable number of
+individuals, yet the predilection for sports in the commonplace
+industrial classes is of the nature of a reminiscence, more or
+less diverting as an occasional interest, rather than a vital and
+permanent interest that counts as a dominant factor in shaping
+the organic complex of habits of thought into which it enters.
+As it manifests itself in the sporting life of today, this
+propensity may not appear to be an economic factor of grave
+consequence. Taken simply by itself it does not count for a great
+deal in its direct effects on the industrial efficiency or the
+consumption of any given individual; but the prevalence and the
+growth of the type of human nature of which this propensity is a
+characteristic feature is a matter of some consequence. It
+affects the economic life of the collectivity both as regards the
+rate of economic development and as regards the character of the
+results attained by the development. For better or worse, the
+fact that the popular habits of thought are in any degree
+dominated by this type of character can not but greatly affect
+the scope, direction, standards, and ideals of the collective
+economic life, as well as the degree of adjustment of the
+collective life to the environment.
+
+Something to a like effect is to be said of other traits that go
+to make up the barbarian character. For the purposes of economic
+theory, these further barbarian traits may be taken as
+concomitant variations of that predaceous temper of which prowess
+is an expression. In great measure they are not primarily of an
+economic character, nor do they have much direct economic
+bearing. They serve to indicate the stage of economic evolution
+to which the individual possessed of them is adapted. They are of
+importance, therefore, as extraneous tests of the degree of
+adaptation of the character in which they are comprised to the
+economic exigencies of today, but they are also to some extent
+important as being aptitudes which themselves go to increase or
+diminish the economic serviceability of the individual.
+
+As it finds expression in the life of the barbarian, prowess
+manifests itself in two main directions -- force and fraud. In
+varying degrees these two forms of expression are similarly
+present in modern warfare, in the pecuniary occupations, and in
+sports and games. Both lines of aptitudes are cultivated and
+strengthened by the life of sport as well as by the more serious
+forms of emulative life. Strategy or cunning is an element
+invariably present in games, as also in warlike pursuits and in
+the chase. In all of these employments strategy tends to develop
+into finesse and chicanery. Chicanery, falsehood, browbeating,
+hold a well-secured place in the method of procedure of any
+athletic contest and in games generally. The habitual employment
+of an umpire, and the minute technical regulations governing the
+limits and details of permissible fraud and strategic advantage,
+sufficiently attest the fact that fraudulent practices and
+attempts to overreach one's opponents are not adventitious
+features of the game. In the nature of the case habituation to
+sports should conduce to a fuller development of the aptitude for
+fraud; and the prevalence in the community of that predatory
+temperament which inclines men to sports connotes a prevalence of
+sharp practice and callous disregard of the interests of others,
+inDividually and collectively. Resort to fraud, in any guise and
+under any legitimation of law or custom, is an expression of a
+narrowly self-regarding habit of mind. It is needless to dwell at
+any length on the economic value of this feature of the sporting
+character.
+
+In this connection it is to be noteD that the most obvious
+characteristic of the physiognomy affected by athletic and other
+sporting men is that of an extreme astuteness. The gifts and
+exploits of Ulysses are scarcely second to those of Achilles,
+either in their substantial furtherance of the game or in the
+éclat which they give the astute sporting man among his
+associates. The pantomime of astuteness is commonly the first
+step in that assimilation to the professional sporting man which
+a youth undergoes after matriculation in any reputable school, of
+the secondary or the higher education, as the case may be. And
+the physiognomy of astuteness, as a decorative feature, never
+ceases to receive the thoughtful attention of men whose serious
+interest lies in athletic games, races, or other contests of a
+similar emulative nature. As a further indication of their
+spiritual kinship, it may be pointed out that the members of the
+lower delinquent class usually show this physiognomy of
+astuteness in a marked degree, and that they very commonly show
+the same histrionic exaggeration of it that is often seen in the
+young candidate for athletic honors. This, by the way, is the
+most legible mark of what is vulgarly called "toughness" in
+youthful aspirants for a bad name.
+
+The astute man, it may be remarked, is of no economic value to
+the community -- unless it be for the purpose of sharp
+practice in dealings with other communities. His functioning is
+not a furtherance of the generic life process. At its best, in
+its direct economic bearing, it is a conversion of the economic
+substance of the collectivity to a growth alien to the collective
+life process -- very much after the analogy of what in medicine
+would be called a benign tumor, with some tendency to transgress
+the uncertain line that divides the benign from the malign
+growths. The two barbarian traits, ferocity and astuteness, go to
+make up the predaceous temper or spiritual attitude. They are the
+expressions of a narrowly self-regarding habit of mind. Both are
+highly serviceable for individual expediency in a life looking to
+invidious success. Both also have a high aesthetic value. Both
+are fostered by the pecuniary culture. But both alike are of no
+use for the purposes of the collective life.
+
+Chapter Eleven
+
+The Belief in Luck
+
+The gambling propensity is another subsidiary trait of the
+barbarian temperament. It is a concomitant variation of character
+of almost universal prevalence among sporting men and among men
+given to warlike and emulative activities generally. This trait
+also has a direct economic value. It is recognized to be a
+hindrance to the highest industrial efficiency of the aggregate
+in any community where it prevails in an appreciable degree.
+The gambling proclivity is doubtfully to be classed as a feature
+belonging exclusively to the predatory type of human nature. The
+chief factor in the gambling habit is the belief in luck; and
+this belief is apparently traceable, at least in its elements, to
+a stage in human evolution antedating the predatory culture. It
+may well have been under the predatory culture that the belief in
+luck was developed into the form in which it is present, as the
+chief element of the gambling proclivity, in the sporting
+temperament. It probably owes the specific form under which it
+occurs in the modern culture to the predatory discipline. But the
+belief in luck is in substance a habit of more ancient date than
+the predatory culture. It is one form of the artistic
+apprehension of things. The belief seems to be a trait carried
+over in substance from an earlier phase into the barbarian
+culture, and transmuted and transmitted through that culture to a
+later stage of human development under a specific form imposed by
+the predatory discipline. But in any case, it is to be taken as
+an archaic trait, inherited from a more or less remote past, more
+or less incompatible with the requirements of the modern
+industrial process, and more or less of a hindrance to the
+fullest efficiency of the collective economic life of the
+present.
+
+While the belief in luck is the basis of the gambling habit, it
+is not the only element that enters into the habit of betting.
+Betting on the issue of contests of strength and skill proceeds
+on a further motive, without which the belief in luck would
+scarcely come in as a prominent feature of sporting life. This
+further motive is the desire of the anticipated winner, or the
+partisan of the anticipated winning side, to heighten his side's
+ascendency at the cost of the loser. Not only does the stronger
+side score a more signal victory, and the losing side suffer a
+more painful and humiliating defeat, in proportion as the
+pecuniary gain and loss in the wager is large; although this
+alone is a consideration of material weight. But the wager is
+commonly laid also with a view, not avowed in words nor even
+recognized in set terms in petto, to enhancing the chances of
+success for the contestant on which it is laid. It is felt that
+substance and solicitude expended to this end can not go for
+naught in the issue. There is here a special manifestation of the
+instinct of workmanship, backed by an even more manifest sense
+that the animistic congruity of things must decide for a
+victorious outcome for the side in whose behalf the propensity
+inherent in events has been propitiated and fortified by so much
+of conative and kinetic urging. This incentive to the wager
+expresses itself freely under the form of backing one's favorite
+in any contest, and it is unmistakably a predatory feature. It is
+as ancillary to the predaceous impulse proper that the belief in
+luck expresses itself in a wager. So that it may be set down that
+in so far as the belief in luck comes to expression in the form
+of laying a wager, it is to be accounted an integral element of
+the predatory type of character. The belief is, in its elements,
+an archaic habit which belongs substantially to early,
+undifferentiated human nature; but when this belief is helped out
+by the predatory emulative impulse, and so is differentiated into
+the specific form of the gambling habit, it is, in this
+higher-developed and specific form, to be classed as a trait of
+the barbarian character.
+
+The belief in luck is a sense of fortuitous necessity in the
+sequence of phenomena. In its various mutations and expressions,
+it is of very serious importance for the economic efficiency of
+any community in which it prevails to an appreciable extent. So
+much so as to warrant a more detailed discussion of its origin
+and content and of the bearing of its various ramifications upon
+economic structure and function, as well as a discussion of the
+relation of the leisure class to its growth, differentiation, and
+persistence. In the developed, integrated form in which it is
+most readily observed in the barbarian of the predatory culture
+or in the sporting man of modern communities, the belief
+comprises at least two distinguishable elements -- which are to
+be taken as two different phases of the same fundamental habit of
+thought, or as the same psychological factor in two successive
+phases of its evolution. The fact that these two elements are
+successive phases of the same general line of growth of belief
+does not hinder their coexisting in the habits of thought of any
+given individual. The more primitive form (or the more archaic
+phase) is an incipient animistic belief, or an animistic sense of
+relations and things, that imputes a quasi-personal character to
+facts. To the archaic man all the obtrusive and obviously
+consequential objects and facts in his environment have a
+quasiªpersonal individuality. They are conceived to be possessed
+of volition, or rather of propensities, which enter into the
+complex of causes and affect events in an inscrutable manner. The
+sporting man's sense of luck and chance, or of fortuitous
+necessity, is an inarticulate or inchoate animism. It applies to
+objects and situations, often in a very vague way; but it is
+usually so far defined as to imply the possibility of
+propitiating, or of deceiving and cajoling, or otherwise
+disturbing the holding of propensities resident in the objects
+which constitute the apparatus and accessories of any game of
+skill or chance. There are few sporting men who are not in the
+habit of wearing charms or talismans to which more or less of
+efficacy is felt to belong. And the proportion is not much less
+of those who instinctively dread the "hoodooing" of the
+contestants or the apparatus engaged in any contest on which they
+lay a wager; or who feel that the fact of their backing a given
+contestant or side in the game does and ought to strengthen that
+side; or to whom the "mascot" which they cultivate means
+something more than a jest.
+
+In its simple form the belief in luck is this instinctive sense
+of an inscrutable teleological propensity in objects or
+situations. Objects or events have a propensity to eventuate in a
+given end, whether this end or objective point of the sequence is
+conceiveD to be fortuitously given or deliberately sought. From
+this simple animism the belief shaDes off by insensible
+gradations into the second, derivative form or phase above
+referred to, which is a more or less articulate belief in an
+inscrutable preternatural agency. The preternatural agency works
+through the visible objects with which it is associated, but is
+not identified with these objects in point of individuality. The
+use of the term "preternatural agency" here carries no further
+implication as to the nature of the agency spoken of as
+preternatural. This is only a farther development of animistic
+belief. The preternatural agency is not necessarily conceived to
+be a personal agent in the full sense, but it is an agency which
+partakes of the attributes of personality to the extent of
+somewhat arbitrarily influencing the outcome of any enterprise,
+and especially of any contest. The pervading belief in the
+hamingia or gipta (gaefa, authna) which lends so much of color to
+the Icelandic sagas specifically, and to early Germanic
+folk-legends, is an illustration of this sense of an
+extra-physical propensity in the course of events.
+
+In this expression or form of the belief the propensity is
+scarcely personified although to a varying extent an
+individuality is imputed to it; and this individuated propensity
+is sometimes conceived to yield to circumstances, commonly to
+circumstances of a spiritual or preternatural character. A
+well-known and striking exemplification of the belief -- in a
+fairly advanced stage of differentiation and involving an
+anthropomorphic personification of the preternatural agent
+appealed to -- is afforded by the wager of battle. Here the
+preternatural agent was conceived to act on request as umpire,
+anD to shape the outcome of the contest in accordance with some
+stipulated ground of decision, such as the equity or legality of
+the respective contestants' claims. The like sense of an
+inscrutable but spiritually necessary tendency in events is still
+traceable as an obscure element in current popular belief, as
+shown, for instance, by the well-accredited maxim, "Thrice is he
+armed who knows his quarrel just," -- a maxim which retains much
+of its significance for the average unreflecting person even in
+the civilized communities of today. The modern reminiscence of
+the belief in the hamingia, or in the guidance of an unseen hand,
+which is traceable in the acceptance of this maxim is faint and
+perhaps uncertain; and it seems in any case to be blended with
+other psychological moments that are not clearly of an animistic
+character.
+
+For the purpose in hand it is unnecessary to look more closely
+into the psychological process or the ethnological line of
+descent by which the later of these two animistic
+apprehensions of propensity is derived from the earlier. This
+question may be of the gravest importance to folk-psychology or
+to the theory of the evolution of creeds and cults. The same is
+true of the more fundamental question whether the two are related
+at all as successive phases in a sequence of development.
+Reference is here made to the existence of these questions only
+to remark that the interest of the present discussion does not
+lie in that direction. So far as concerns economic theory, these
+two elements or phases of the belief in luck, or in an
+extra-causal trend or propensity in things, are of substantially
+the same character. They have an economic significance as habits
+of thought which affect the individual's habitual view of the
+facts and sequences with which he comes in contact, and which
+thereby affect the individual's serviceability for the industrial
+purpose. Therefore, apart from all question of the beauty, worth,
+or beneficence of any animistic belief, there is place for a
+discussion of their economic bearing on the serviceability of the
+individual as an economic factor, and especially as an industrial
+agent.
+
+It has already been noted in an earlier connection, that in order
+to have the highest serviceability in the complex
+industrial processes of today, the individual must be endowed
+with the aptitude and the habit of readily apprehending and
+relating facts in terms of causal sequence. Both as a whole and
+in its details, the industrial process is a process of
+quantitative causation. The "intelligence" demanded of the
+workman, as well as of the director of an industrial process, is
+little else than a degree of facility in the apprehension of and
+adaptation to a quantitatively determined causal sequence. This
+facility of apprehension and adaptation is what is lacking in
+stupid workmen, and the growth of this facility is the end sought
+in their education -- so far as their education aims to enhance
+their industrial efficiency.
+
+In so far as the individual's inherited aptitudes or his training
+incline him to account for facts and sequences in other terms
+than those of causation or matter-of-fact, they lower his
+productive efficiency or industrial usefulness. This lowering of
+efficiency through a penchant for animistic methods of
+apprehending facts is especially apparent when taken in the
+mass-when a given population with an animistic turn is viewed as
+a whole. The economic drawbacks of animism are more patent and
+its consequences are more far-reaching under the modern system of
+large industry than under any other. In the modern industrial
+communities, industry is, to a constantly increasing extent,
+being organized in a comprehensive system of organs and functions
+mutually conditioning one another; and therefore freedom from all
+bias in the causal apprehension of phenomena grows constantly
+more requisite to efficiency on the part of the men concerned in
+industry. Under a system of handicraft an advantage in dexterity,
+diligence, muscular force, or endurance may, in a very large
+measure, offset such a bias in the habits of thought of the
+workmen.
+
+Similarly in agricultural industry of the traditional kind, which
+closely resembles handicraft in the nature of the demands made
+upon the workman. In both, the workman is himself the prime mover
+chiefly depended upon, and the natural forces engaged are in
+large part apprehended as inscrutable and fortuitous agencies,
+whose working lies beyond the workman's control or discretion. In
+popular apprehension there is in these forms of industry
+relatively little of the industrial process left to the fateful
+swing of a comprehensive mechanical sequence which must be
+comprehended in terms of causation and to which the operations of
+industry and the movements of the workmen must be adapted. As
+industrial methods develop, the virtues of the handicraftsman
+count for less and less as an offset to scanty. intelligence or a
+halting acceptance of the sequence of cause and effect. The
+industrial organization assumes more and more of the character of
+a mechanism, in which it is man's office to discriminate and
+select what natural forces shall work out their effects in his
+service. The workman's part in industry changes from that of a
+prime mover to that of discrimination and valuation of
+quantitative sequences and mechanical facts. The faculty of a
+ready apprehension and unbiased appreciation of causes in his
+environment grows in relative economic importance and any element
+in the complex of his habits of thought which intrudes a bias at
+variance with this ready appreciation of matter-of-fact sequence
+gains proportionately in importance as a disturbing element
+acting to lower his industrial usefulness. Through its cumulative
+effect upon the habitual attitude of the population, even a
+slight or inconspicuous bias towards accounting for everyday
+facts by recourse to other ground than that of quantitative
+causation may work an appreciable lowering of the collective
+industrial efficiency of a community.
+
+The animistic habit of mind may occur in the early,
+undifferentiated form of an inchoate animistic belief, or in the
+later and more highly integrated phase in which there is an
+anthropomorphic personification of the propensity imputed to
+facts. The industrial value of such a lively animistic sense, or
+of such recourse to a preternatural agency or the guidance of an
+unseen hand, is of course very much the same in either case. As
+affects the industrial serviceability of the individual, the
+effect is of the same kind in either case; but the extent to
+which this habit of thought dominates or shapes the complex of
+his habits of thought varies with the degree of immediacy,
+urgency, or exclusiveness with which the individual habitually
+applies the animistic or anthropomorphic formula in dealing with
+the facts of his environment. The animistic habit acts in all
+cases to blur the appreciation of causal sequence; but the
+earlier, less reflected, less defined animistic sense of
+propensity may be expected to affect the intellectual processes
+of the individual in a more pervasive way than the higher forms
+of anthropomorphism. Where the animistic habit is present in the
+naive form, its scope and range of application are not defined or
+limited. It will therefore palpably affect his thinking at every
+turn of the person's life -- wherever he has to do with the
+material means of life. In the later, maturer development of
+animism, after it has been defined through the process of
+anthropomorphic elaboration, when its application has been
+limited in a somewhat consistent fashion to the remote and the
+invisible, it comes about that an increasing range of everyday
+facts are provisionally accounted for without recourse to the
+preternatural agency in which a cultivated animism expresses
+itself. A highly integrated, personified preternatural agency is
+not a convenient means of handling the trivial occurrences of
+life, and a habit is therefore easily fallen into of accounting
+for many trivial or vulgar phenomena in terms of sequence. The
+provisional explanation so arrived at is by neglect allowed to
+stand as definitive, for trivial purposes, until special
+provocation or perplexity recalls the individual to his
+allegiance. But when special exigencies arise, that is to say,
+when there is peculiar need of a full and free recourse to the
+law of cause and effect, then the individual commonly has
+recourse to the preternatural agency as a universal solvent, if
+he is possessed of an anthropomorphic belief.
+
+The extra-causal propensity or agent has a very high utility as a
+recourse in perplexity, but its utility is altogether of a
+non-economic kind. It is especially a refuge and a fund of
+comfort where it has attained the degree of consistency and
+specialization that belongs to an anthropomorphic divinity. It
+has much to commend it even on other grounds than that of
+affording the perplexed individual a means of escape from the
+difficulty of accounting for phenomena in terms of causal
+sequence. It would scarcely be in place here to dwell on the
+obvious and well-accepted merits of an anthropomorphic divinity,
+as seen from the point of view of the aesthetic, moral, or
+spiritual interest, or even as seen from the less remote
+standpoint of political, military, or social policy. The question
+here concerns the less picturesque and less urgent economic value
+of the belief in such a preternatural agency, taken as a habit of
+thought which affects the industrial serviceability of the
+believer. And even within this narrow, economic range, the
+inquiry is perforce confined to the immediate bearing of this
+habit of thought upon the believer's workmanlike serviceability,
+rather than extended to include its remoter economic effects.
+These remoter effects are very difficult to trace. The inquiry
+into them is so encumbered with current preconceptions as to the
+degree in which life is enhanced by spiritual contact with such a
+divinity, that any attempt to inquire into their economic value
+must for the present be fruitless.
+
+The immediate, direct effect of the animistic habit of thought
+upon the general frame of mind of the believer goes in the
+direction of lowering his effective intelligence in the respect
+in which intelligence is of especial consequence for modern
+industry. The effect follows, in varying degree, whether the
+preternatural agent or propensity believed in is of a higher or a
+lower cast. This holds true of the barbarian's and the sporting
+man's sense of luck and propensity, and likewise of the somewhat
+higher developed belief in an anthropomorphic divinity, such as
+is commonly possessed by the same class. It must be taken to hold
+true also -- though with what relative degree of cogency is not
+easy to say -- of the more adequately developed anthropomorphic
+cults, such as appeal to the devout civilized man. The industrial
+disability entailed by a popular adherence to one of the higher
+anthropomorphic cults may be relatively slight, but it is not to
+be overlooked. And even these high-class cults of the Western
+culture do not represent the last dissolving phase of this human
+sense of extra-causal propensity. Beyond these the same animistic
+sense shows itself also in such attenuations of anthropomorphism
+as the eighteenth-century appeal to an order of nature and
+natural rights, and in their modern representative, the
+ostensibly post-Darwinian concept of a meliorative trend in the
+process of evolution. This animistic explanation of phenomena is
+a form of the fallacy which the logicians knew by the name of
+ignava ratio. For the purposes of industry or of science it
+counts as a blunder in the apprehension and valuation of facts.
+Apart from its direct industrial consequences, the animistic
+habit has a certain significance for economic theory on other
+grounds. (1) It is a fairly reliable indication of the presence,
+and to some extent even of the degree of potency, of certain
+other archaic traits that accompany it and that are of
+substantial economic consequence; and (2) the material
+consequences of that code of devout proprieties to which the
+animistic habit gives rise in the development of an
+anthropomorphic cult are of importance both (a) as affecting the
+community's consumption of goods and the prevalent canons of
+taste, as already suggested in an earlier chapter, and (b) by
+inducing and conserving a certain habitual recognition of the
+relation to a superior, and so stiffening the current sense of
+status and allegiance.
+
+As regards the point last named (b), that body of habits of
+thought which makes up the character of any individual is in some
+sense an organic whole. A marked variation in a given direction
+at any one point carries with it, as its correlative, a
+concomitant variation in the habitual expression of life in other
+directions or other groups of activities. These various habits of
+thought, or habitual expressions of life, are all phases of the
+single life sequence of the individual; therefore a habit formed
+in response to a given stimulus will necessarily affect the
+character of the response made to other stimuli. A modification
+of human nature at any one point is a modification of human
+nature as a whole. On this ground, and perhaps to a still greater
+extent on obscurer grounds that can not be discussed here, there
+are these concomitant variations as between the different traits
+of human nature. So, for instance, barbarian peoples with a
+well-developed predatory scheme of life are commonly also
+possessed of a strong prevailing animistic habit, a well-formed
+anthropomorphic cult, and a lively sense of status. On the other
+hand, anthropomorphism and the realizing sense of an animistic
+propensity in material are less obtrusively present in the life
+of the peoples at the cultural stages which precede and which
+follow the barbarian culture. The sense of status is also
+feebler; on the whole, in peaceable communities. It is to be
+remarked that a lively, but slightly specialized, animistic
+belief is to be found in most if not all peoples living in the
+ante-predatory, savage stage of culture. The primitive savage
+takes his animism less seriously than the barbarian or the
+degenerate savage. With him it eventuates in fantastic
+myth-making, rather than in coercive superstition. The barbarian
+culture shows sportsmanship, status, and anthropomorphism. There
+is commonly observable a like concomitance of variations in the
+same respects in the individual temperament of men in the
+civilized communities of today. Those modern representatives of
+the predaceous barbarian temper that make up the sporting element
+are commonly believers in luck; at least they have a strong sense
+of an animistic propensity in things, by force of which they are
+given to gambling. So also as regards anthropomorphism in this
+class. Such of them as give in their adhesion to some creed
+commonly attach themselves to one of the naively and consistently
+anthropomorphic creeds; there are relatively few sporting men who
+seek spiritual comfort in the less anthropomorphic cults, such as
+the Unitarian or the Universalist.
+
+Closely bound up with this correlation of anthropomorphism and
+prowess is the fact that anthropomorphic cults act to
+conserve, if not to initiate, habits of mind favorable to a
+regime of status. As regards this point, it is quite impossible
+to say where the disciplinary effect of the cult ends and where
+the evidence of a concomitance of variations in inherited traits
+begins. In their finest development, the predatory temperament,
+the sense of status, and the anthropomorphic cult all together
+belong to the barbarian culture; and something of a mutual causal
+relation subsists between the three phenomena as they come into
+sight in communities on that cultural level. The way in which
+they recur in correlation in the habits and attitudes of
+individuals and classes today goes far to imply a like causal or
+organic relation between the same psychological phenomena
+considered as traits or habits of the individual. It has appeared
+at an earlier point in the discussion that the relation of
+status, as a feature of social structure, is a consequence of the
+predatory habit of life. As regards its line of derivation, it is
+substantially an elaborated expression of the predatory attitude.
+On the other hand, an anthropomorphic cult is a code of detailed
+relations of status superimposed upon the concept of a
+preternatural, inscrutable propensity in material things. So
+that, as regards the external facts of its derivation, the cult
+may be taken as an outgrowth of archaic man's pervading animistic
+sense, defined and in some degree transformed by the predatory
+habit of life, the result being a personified preternatural
+agency, which is by imputation endowed with a full complement of
+the habits of thought that characterize the man of the predatory
+culture.
+
+The grosser psychological features in the case, which have an
+immediate bearing on economic theory and are consequently to be
+taken account of here, are therefore: (a) as has appeared in an
+earlier chapter, the predatory, emulative habit of mind here
+called prowess is but the barbarian variant of the generically
+human instinct of workmanship, which has fallen into this
+specific form under the guidance of a habit of invidious
+comparison of persons; (b) the relation of status is a formal
+expression of such an invidious comparison duly gauged and graded
+according to a sanctioned schedule; (c) an anthropomorphic cult,
+in the days of its early vigor at least, is an institution the
+characteristic element of which is a relation of status between
+the human subject as inferior and the personified preternatural
+agency as superior. With this in mind, there should be no
+difficulty in recognizing the intimate relation which subsists
+between these three phenomena of human nature and of human life;
+the relation amounts to an identity in some of their substantial
+elements. On the one hand, the system of status and the predatory
+habit of life are an expression of the instinct of workmanship as
+it takes form under a custom of invidious comparison; on the
+other hand, the anthropomorphic cult and the habit of devout
+observances are an expression of men's animistic sense of a
+propensity in material things, elaborated under the guidance of
+substantially the same general habit of invidious comparison. The
+two categories -- the emulative habit of life and the habit of
+devout observances -- are therefore to be taken as complementary
+elements of the barbarian type of human nature and of its modern
+barbarian variants. They are expressions of much the same range
+of aptitudes, made in response to different sets of stimuli.    
+
+Chapter Twelve
+
+Devout Observances
+
+A discoursive rehearsal of certain incidents of modern life will
+show the organic relation of the anthropomorphic cults to the
+barbarian culture and temperament. It will likewise serve to show
+how the survival and efficacy of the cults and he prevalence of
+their schedule of devout observances are related to the
+institution of a leisure class and to the springs of action
+underlying that institution. Without any intention to commend or
+to deprecate the practices to be spoken of under the head of
+devout observances, or the spiritual and intellectual traits of
+which these observances are the expression, the everyday
+phenomena of current anthropomorphic cults may be taken up from
+the point of view of the interest which they have for economic
+theory. What can properly be spoken of here are the tangible,
+external features of devout observances. The moral, as well as
+the devotional value of the life of faith lies outside of the
+scope of the present inquiry. Of course no question is here
+entertained as to the truth or beauty of the creeds on which the
+cults proceed. And even their remoter economic bearing can not be
+taken up here; the subject is too recondite and of too grave
+import to find a place in so slight a sketch.
+
+Something has been said in an earlier chapter as to the influence
+which pecuniary standards of value exert upon the processes of
+valuation carried out on other bases, not related to the
+pecuniary interest. The relation is not altogether one-sided. The
+economic standards or canons of valuation are in their turn
+influenced by extra-economic standards of value. Our judgments of
+the economic bearing of facts are to some extent shaped by the
+dominant presence of these weightier interests. There is a point
+of view, indeed, from which the economic interest is of weight
+only as being ancillary to these higher, non-economic interests.
+For the present purpose, therefore, some thought must he taken to
+isolate the economic interest or the economic hearing of these
+phenomena of anthropomorphic cults. It takes some effort to
+divest oneself of the more serious point of view, and to reach an
+economic appreciation of these facts, with as little as may be of
+the bias due to higher interests extraneous to economic theory.
+In the discussion of the sporting temperament, it has
+appeared that the sense of an animistic propensity in material
+things and events is what affords the spiritual basis of the
+sporting man's gambling habit. For the economic purpose, this
+sense of propensity is substantially the same psychological
+element as expresses itself, under a variety of forms, in
+animistic beliefs and anthropomorphic creeds. So far as concerns
+those tangible psychological features with which economic theory
+has to deal, the gambling spirit which pervades the sporting
+element shades off by insensible gradations into that frame of
+mind which finds gratification in devout observances. As seen
+from the point of view of economic theory, the sporting character
+shades off into the character of a religious devotee. Where the
+betting man's animistic sense is helped out by a somewhat
+consistent tradition, it has developed into a more or less
+articulate belief in a preternatural or hyperphysical agency,
+with something of an anthropomorphic content. And where this is
+the case, there is commonly a perceptible inclination to make
+terms with the preternatural agency by some approved method of
+approach and conciliation. This element of propitiation and
+cajoling has much in common with the crasser forms of worship --
+if not in historical derivation, at least in actual psychological
+content. It obviously shades off in unbroken continuity into what
+is recognized as superstitious practice and belief, and so
+asserts its claim to kinship with the grosser anthropomorphic
+cults.
+
+The sporting or gambling temperament, then, comprises some of the
+substantial psychological elements that go to make a believer in
+creeds and an observer of devout forms, the chief point of
+coincidence being the belief in an inscrutable propensity or a
+preternatural interposition in the sequence of events. For the
+purpose of the gambling practice the belief in preternatural
+agency may be, and ordinarily is, less closely formulated,
+especially as regards the habits of thought and the scheme of
+life imputed to the preternatural agent; or, in other words, as
+regards his moral character and his purposes in interfering in
+events. With respect to the individuality or personality of the
+agency whose presence as luck, or chance, or hoodoo, or mascot,
+etc., he feels and sometimes dreads and endeavors to evade, the
+sporting man's views are also less specific, less integrated and
+differentiated. The basis of his gambling activity is, in great
+measure, simply an instinctive sense of the presence of a
+pervasive extraphysical and arbitrary force or propensity in
+things or situations, which is scarcely recognized as a personal
+agent. The betting man is not infrequently both a believer in
+luck, in this naive sense, and at the same time a pretty staunch
+adherent of some form of accepted creed. He is especially prone
+to accept so much of the creed as concerts the inscrutable power
+and the arbitrary habits of the divinity which has won his
+confidence. In such a case he is possessed of two, or sometimes
+more than two, distinguishable phases of animism. Indeed, the
+complete series of successive phases of animistic belief is to be
+found unbroken in the spiritual furniture of any sporting
+community. Such a chain of animistic conceptions will comprise
+the most elementary form of an instinctive sense of luck and
+chance and fortuitous necessity at one end of the series,
+together with the perfectly developed anthropomorphic divinity at
+the other end, with all intervening stages of integration.
+Coupled with these beliefs in preternatural agency goes an
+instinctive shaping of conduct to conform with the surmised
+requirements of the lucky chance on the one hand, and a more or
+less devout submission to the inscrutable decrees of the divinity
+on the other hand.
+
+There is a relationship in this respect between the sporting
+temperament and the temperament of the delinquent classes; and
+the two are related to the temperament which inclines to an
+anthropomorphic cult. Both the delinquent and the sporting man
+are on the average more apt to be adherents of some accredited
+creed, and are also rather more inclined to devout observances,
+than the general average of the community. it is also noticeable
+that unbelieving members of these classes show more of a
+proclivity to become proselytes to some accredited faith than the
+average of unbelievers. This fact of observation is avowed by the
+spokesmen of sports, especially in apologizing for the more
+naively predatory athletic sports. Indeed, it is somewhat
+insistently claimed as a meritorious feature of sporting life
+that the habitual participants in athletic games are in some
+degree peculiarly given to devout practices. And it is observable
+that the cult to which sporting men and the predaceous delinquent
+classes adhere, or to which proselytes from these classes
+commonly attach themselves, is ordinarily not one of the
+so-called higher faiths, but a cult which has to do with a
+thoroughly anthropomorphic divinity. Archaic, predatory human
+nature is not satisfied with abstruse conceptions of a dissolving
+personality that shades off into the concept of quantitative
+causal sequence, such as the speculative, esoteric creeds of
+Christendom impute to the First Cause, Universal Intelligence,
+World Soul, or Spiritual Aspect. As an instance of a cult of the
+character which the habits of mind of the athlete and the
+delinquent require, may be cited that branch of the church
+militant known as the Salvation Army. This is to some extent
+recruited from the lower-class delinquents, and it appears to
+comprise also, among its officers especially, a larger proportion
+of men with a sporting record than the proportion of such men in
+the aggregate population of the community.
+
+College athletics afford a case in point. It is contended by
+exponents of the devout element in college life -- and there
+seems to be no ground for disputing the claim -- that the
+desirable athletic material afforded by any student body in this
+country is at the same time predominantly religious; or that it
+is at least given to devout observances to a greater degree than
+the average of those students whose interest in athletics and
+other college sports is less. This is what might be expected on
+theoretical grounds. It may be remarked, by the way, that from
+one point of view this is felt to reflect credit on the college
+sporting life, on athletic games, and on those persons who occupy
+themselves with these matters. It happens not frequently that
+college sporting men devote themselves to religious propaganda,
+either as a vocation or as a by-occupation; and it is observable
+that when this happens they are likely to become propagandists of
+some one of the more anthropomorphic cults. In their teaching
+they are apt to insist chiefly on the personal relation of status
+which subsists between an anthropomorphic divinity and the human
+subject.
+
+This intimate relation between athletics and devout
+observance among college men is a fact of sufficient notoriety;
+but it has a special feature to which attention has not been
+called, although it is obvious enough. The religious zeal which
+pervades much of the college sporting element is especially prone
+to express itself in an unquestioning devoutness and a naive and
+complacent submission to an inscrutable Providence. It therefore
+by preference seeks affliation with some one of those lay
+religious organizations which occupy themselves with the spread
+of the exoteric forms of faith -- as, e.g., the Young Men's
+Christian Association or the Young People's Society for Christian
+Endeavor. These lay bodies are organized to further "practical"
+religion; and as if to enforce the argument and firmly establish
+the close relationship between the sporting temperament and the
+archaic devoutness, these lay religious bodies commonly devote
+some appreciable portion of their energies to the furtherance of
+athletic contests and similar games of chance and skill. It might
+even be said that sports of this kind are apprehended to have
+some efficacy as a means of grace. They are apparently useful as
+a means of proselyting, and as a means of sustaining the devout
+attitude in converts once made. That is to say, the games which
+give exercise to the animistic sense and to the emulative
+propensity help to form and to conserve that habit of mind to
+which the more exoteric cults are congenial. Hence, in the hands
+of the lay organizations, these sporting activities come to do
+duty as a novitiate or a means of induction into that fuller
+unfolding of the life of spiritual status which is the privilege
+of the full communicant along.
+
+That the exercise of the emulative and lower animistic
+proclivities are substantially useful for the devout purpose
+seems to be placed beyond question by the fact that the
+priesthood of many denominations is following the lead of the lay
+organizations in this respect. Those ecclesiastical organizations
+especially which stand nearest the lay organizations in their
+insistence on practical religion have gone some way towards
+adopting these or analogous practices in connection with the
+traditional devout observances. So there are "boys' brigades,"
+and other organizations, under clerical sanction, acting to
+develop the emulative proclivity and the sense of status in the
+youthful members of the congregation. These pseudo-military
+organizations tend to elaborate and accentuate the proclivity to
+emulation and invidious comparison, and so strengthen the native
+facility for discerning and approving the relation of personal
+mastery and subservience. And a believer is eminently a person
+who knows how to obey and accept chastisement with good grace.
+But the habits of thought which these practices foster and
+conserve make up but one half of the substance of the
+anthropomorphic cults. The other, complementary element of devout
+life -- the animistic habit of mind -- is recruited and conserved
+by a second range of practices organized under clerical sanction.
+These are the class of gambling practices of which the church
+bazaar or raffle may be taken as the type. As indicating the
+degree of legitimacy of these practices in connection with devout
+observances proper, it is to be remarked that these raffles, and
+the like trivial opportunities for gambling, seem to appeal with
+more effect to the common run of the members of religious
+organizations than they do to persons of a less devout habit of
+mind.
+
+All this seems to argue, on the one hand, that the same
+temperament inclines people to sports as inclines them to the
+anthropomorphic cults, and on the other hand that the habituation
+to sports, perhaps especially to athletic sports, acts to develop
+the propensities which find satisfaction in devout observances.
+Conversely; it also appears that habituation to these observances
+favors the growth of a proclivity for athletic sports and for all
+games that give play to the habit of invidious comparison and of
+the appeal to luck. Substantially the same range of propensities
+finds expression in both these directions of the spiritual life.
+That barbarian human nature in which the predatory instinct and
+the animistic standpoint predominate is normally prone to both.
+The predatory habit of mind involves an accentuated sense of
+personal dignity and of the relative standing of individuals. The
+social structure in which the predatory habit has been the
+dominant factor in the shaping of institutions is a structure
+based on status. The pervading norm in the predatory community's
+scheme of life is the relation of superior and inferior, noble
+and base, dominant and subservient persons and classes, master
+and slave. The anthropomorphic cults have come down from that
+stage of industrial development and have been shaped by the same
+scheme of economic differentiation -- a differentiation into
+consumer and producer -- and they are pervaded by the same
+dominant principle of mastery and subservience. The cults impute
+to their divinity the habits of thought answering to the stage of
+economic differentiation at which the cults took shape. The
+anthropomorphic divinity is conceived to be punctilious in all
+questions of precedence and is prone to an assertion of mastery
+and an arbitrary exercise of power -- an habitual resort to force
+as the final arbiter.
+
+In the later and maturer formulations of the anthropomorphic
+creed this imputed habit of dominance on the part of a divinity
+of awful presence and inscrutable power is chastened into "the
+fatherhood of God." The spiritual attitude and the aptitudes
+imputed to the preternatural agent are still such as belong under
+the regime of status, but they now assume the patriarchal cast
+characteristic of the quasi-peaceable stage of culture. Still it
+is to be noted that even in this advanced phase of the cult the
+observances in which devoutness finds expression consistently aim
+to propitiate the divinity by extolling his greatness and glory
+and by professing subservience and fealty. The act of
+propitiation or of worship is designed to appeal to a sense of
+status imputed to the inscrutable power that is thus approached.
+The propitiatory formulas most in vogue are still such as carry
+or imply an invidious comparison. A loyal attachment to the
+person of an anthropomorphic divinity endowed with such an
+archaic human nature implies the like archaic propensities in the
+devotee. For the purposes of economic theory, the relation of
+fealty, whether to a physical or to an extraphysical person, is
+to be taken as a variant of that personal subservience which
+makes up so large a share of the predatory and the
+quasi-peaceable scheme of life.
+
+The barbarian conception of the divinity, as a warlike chieftain
+inclined to an overbearing manner of government, has been greatly
+softened through the milder manners and the soberer habits of
+life that characterize those cultural phases which lie between
+the early predatory stage and the present. But even after this
+chastening of the devout fancy, and the consequent mitigation of
+the harsher traits of conduct and character that are currently
+imputed to the divinity, there still remains in the popular
+apprehension of the divine nature and temperament a very
+substantial residue of the barbarian conception. So it comes
+about, for instance, that in characterizing the divinity and his
+relations to the process of human life, speakers and writers are
+still able to make effective use of similes borrowed from the
+vocabulary of war and of the predatory manner of life, as well as
+of locutions which involve an invidious comparison. Figures of
+speech of this import are used with good effect even in
+addressing the less warlike modern audiences, made up of
+adherents of the blander variants of the creed. This effective
+use of barbarian epithets and terms of comparison by popular
+speakers argues that the modern generation has retained a lively
+appreciation of the dignity and merit of the barbarian virtues;
+and it argues also that there is a degree of congruity between
+the devout attitude and the predatory habit of mind. It is only
+on second thought, if at all, that the devout fancy of modern
+worshippers revolts at the imputation of ferocious and vengeful
+emotions and actions to the object of their adoration. It is a
+matter of common observation that sanguinary epithets applied to
+the divinity have a high aesthetic and honorific value in the
+popular apprehension. That is to say, suggestions which these
+epithets carry are very acceptable to our unreflecting
+apprehension.
+
+Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
+
+He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are
+stored;
+
+He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword;
+
+His truth is marching on.
+
+The guiding habits of thought of a devout person move on the
+plane of an archaic scheme of life which has outlived much of its
+usefulness for the economic exigencies of the collective life of
+today. In so far as the economic organization fits the exigencies
+of the collective life of today, it has outlived the regime of
+status, and has no use and no place for a relation of personal
+subserviency. So far as concerns the economic efficiency of the
+community, the sentiment of personal fealty, and the general
+habit of mind of which that sentiment is an expression, are
+survivals which cumber the ground and hinder an adequate
+adjustment of human institutions to the existing situation. The
+habit of mind which best lends itself to the purposes of a
+peaceable, industrial community, is that matter-of-fact temper
+which recognizes the value of material facts simply as opaque
+items in the mechanical sequence. It is that frame of mind which
+does not instinctively impute an animistic propensity to things,
+nor resort to preternatural intervention as an explanation of
+perplexing phenomena, nor depend on an unseen hand to shape the
+course of events to human use. To meet the requirements of the
+highest economic efficiency under modern conditions, the world
+process must habitually be apprehended in terms of quantitative,
+dispassionate force and sequence.
+
+As seen from the point of view of the later economic
+exigencies, devoutness is, perhaps in all cases, to be looked
+upon as a survival from an earlier phase of associated life -- a
+mark of arrested spiritual development. Of course it remains true
+that in a community where the economic structure is still
+substantially a system of status; where the attitude of the
+average of persons in the community is consequently shaped by and
+adapted to the relation of personal dominance and personal
+subservience; or where for any other reason -- of tradition or of
+inherited aptitude -- the population as a whole is strongly
+inclined to devout observances; there a devout habit of mind in
+any individual, not in excess of the average of the community,
+must be taken simply as a detail of the prevalent habit of life.
+In this light, a devout individual in a devout community can not
+be called a case of reversion, since he is abreast of the average
+of the community. But as seen from the point of view of the
+modern industrial situation, exceptional devoutness -- devotional
+zeal that rises appreciably above the average pitch of devoutness
+in the community -- may safely be set down as in all cases an
+atavistic trait.
+
+It is, of course, equally legitimate to consider these phenomena
+from a different point of view. They may be appreciated for a
+different purpose, and the characterization here offered may be
+turned about. In speaking from the point of view of the
+devotional interest, or the interest of devout taste, it may,
+with equal cogency, be said that the spiritual attitude bred in
+men by the modern industrial life is unfavorable to a free
+development of the life of faith. It might fairly be objected to
+the later development of the industrial process that its
+discipline tends to "materialism," to the elimination of filial
+piety. From the aesthetic point of view, again, something to a
+similar purport might be said. But, however legitimate and
+valuable these and the like reflections may be for their purpose,
+they would not be in place in the present inquiry, which is
+exclusively concerned with the valuation of these phenomena from
+the economic point of view.
+
+The grave economic significance of the anthropomorphic habit of
+mind and of the addiction to devout observances must serve as
+apology for speaking further on a topic which it can not but be
+distasteful to discuss at all as an economic phenomenon in a
+community so devout as ours. Devout observances are of economic
+importance as an index of a concomitant variation of temperament,
+accompanying the predatory habit of mind and so indicating the
+presence of industrially disserviceable traits. They indicate the
+presence of a mental attitude which has a certain economic value
+of its own by virtue of its influence upon the industrial
+serviceability of the individual. But they are also of importance
+more directly, in modifying the economic activities of the
+community, especially as regards the distribution and consumption
+of goods.
+
+The most obvious economic bearing of these observances is seen in
+the devout consumption of goods and services. The
+consumption of ceremonial paraphernalia required by any cult, in
+the way of shrines, temples, churches, vestments, sacrifices,
+sacraments, holiday attire, etc., serves no immediate material
+end. All this material apparatus may, therefore, without implying
+deprecation, be broadly characterized as items of conspicuous
+waste. The like is true in a general way of the personal service
+consumed under this head; such as priestly education, priestly
+service, pilgrimages, fasts, holidays, household devotions, and
+the like. At the same time the observances in the execution of
+which this consumption takes place serve to extend and protract
+the vogue of those habits of thought on which an anthropomorphic
+cult rests. That is to say, they further the habits of thought
+characteristic of the regime of status. They are in so far an
+obstruction to the most effective organization of industry under
+modern circumstances; and are, in the first instance,
+antagonistic to the development of economic institutions in the
+direction required by the situation of today. For the present
+purpose, the indirect as well as the direct effects of this
+consumption are of the nature of a curtailment of the community's
+economic efficiency. In economic theory, then, and considered in
+its proximate consequences, the consumption of goods and effort
+in the service of an anthropomorphic divinity means a lowering of
+the vitality of the community. What may be the remoter, indirect,
+moral effects of this class of consumption does not admit of a
+succinct answer, and it is a question which can not be taken up
+here.
+
+It will be to the point, however, to note the general economic
+character of devout consumption, in comparison with consumption
+for other purposes. An indication of the range of motives and
+purposes from which devout consumption of goods proceeds will
+help toward an appreciation of the value both of this consumption
+itself and of the general habit of mind to which it is congenial.
+There is a striking parallelism, if not rather a substantial
+identity of motive, between the consumption which goes to the
+service of an anthropomorphic divinity and that which goes to the
+service of a gentleman of leisure chieftain or patriarch -- in
+the upper class of society during the barbarian culture. Both in
+the case of the chieftain and in that of the divinity there are
+expensive edifices set apart for the behoof of the person served.
+These edifices, as well as the properties which supplement them
+in the service, must not be common in kind or grade; they always
+show a large element of conspicuous waste. It may also be noted
+that the devout edifices are invariably of an archaic cast in
+their structure and fittings. So also the servants, both of the
+chieftain and of the divinity, must appear in the presence
+clothed in garments of a special, ornate character. The
+characteristic economic feature of this apparel is a more than
+ordinarily accentuated conspicuous waste, together with the
+secondary feature -- more accentuated in the case of the priestly
+servants than in that of the servants or courtiers of the
+barbarian potentate -- that this court dress must always be in
+some degree of an archaic fashion. Also the garments worn by the
+lay members of the community when they come into the presence,
+should be of a more expensive kind than their everyday apparel.
+Here, again, the parallelism between the usage of the chieftain's
+audience hall and that of the sanctuary is fairly well marked. In
+this respect there is required a certain ceremonial "cleanness"
+of attire, the essential feature of which, in the economic
+respect, is that the garments worn on these occasions should
+carry as little suggestion as may be of any industrial occupation
+or of any habitual addiction to such employments as are of
+material use.
+
+This requirement of conspicuous waste and of ceremonial cleanness
+from the traces of industry extends also to the apparel, and in a
+less degree to the food, which is consumed on sacred holidays;
+that is to say, on days set apart -- tabu -- for the divinity or
+for some member of the lower ranks of the preternatural leisure
+class. In economic theory, sacred holidays are obviously to be
+construed as a season of vicarious leisure performed for the
+divinity or saint in whose name the tabu is imposed and to whose
+good repute the abstention from useful effort on these days is
+conceived to inure. The characteristic feature of all such
+seasons of devout vicarious leisure is a more or less rigid tabu
+on all activity that is of human use. In the case of fast-days
+the conspicuous abstention from gainful occupations and from all
+pursuits that (materially) further human life is further
+accentuated by compulsory abstinence from such consumption as
+would conduce to the comfort or the fullness of life of the
+consumer.
+
+It may be remarked, parenthetically, that secular holidays are of
+the same origin, by slightly remoter derivation. They shade off
+by degrees from the genuinely sacred days, through an
+intermediate class of semi-sacred birthdays of kings and great
+men who have been in some measure canonized, to the deliberately
+invented holiday set apart to further the good repute of some
+notable event or some striking fact, to which it is intended to
+do honor, or the good fame of which is felt to be in need of
+repair. The remoter refinement in the employment of vicarious
+leisure as a means of augmenting the good repute of a phenomenon
+or datum is seen at its best in its very latest application. A
+day of vicarious leisure has in some communities been set apart
+as Labor Day. This observance is designed to augment the prestige
+of the fact of labor, by the archaic, predatory method of a
+compulsory abstention from useful effort. To this datum of
+labor-in-general is imputed the good repute attributable to the
+pecuniary strength put in evidence by abstaining from labor.
+Sacred holidays, and holidays generally, are of the nature of a
+tribute levied on the body of the people. The tribute is paid in
+vicarious leisure, and the honorific effect which emerges is
+imputed to the person or the fact for whose good repute the
+holiday has been instituted. Such a tithe of vicarious leisure is
+a perquisite of all members of the preternatural leisure class
+and is indispensable to their good fame. Un saint qu'on ne chôme
+pas is indeed a saint fallen on evil days.
+
+Besides this tithe of vicarious leisure levied on the laity,
+there are also special classes of persons -- the various grades
+of priests and hierodules -- whose time is wholly set apart for a
+similar service. It is not only incumbent on the priestly class
+to abstain from vulgar labor, especially so far as it is
+lucrative or is apprehended to contribute to the temporal
+well-being of mankind. The tabu in the case of the priestly class
+goes farther and adds a refinement in the form of an injunction
+against their seeking worldly gain even where it may be had
+without debasing application to industry. It is felt to he
+unworthy of the servant of the divinity, or rather unworthy the
+dignity of the divinity whose servant he is, that he should seek
+material gain or take thought for temporal matters. "Of all
+contemptible things a man who pretends to be a priest of God and
+is a priest to his own comforts and ambitions is the most
+contemptible." There is a line of discrimination, which a
+cultivated taste in matters of devout observance finds little
+difficulty in drawing, between such actions and conduct as
+conduce to the fullness of human life and such as conduce to the
+good fame of the anthropomorphic divinity; and the activity of
+the priestly class, in the ideal barbarian scheme, falls wholly
+on the hither side of this line. What falls within the range of
+economics falls below the proper level of solicitude of the
+priesthood in its best estate. Such apparent exceptions to this
+rule as are afforded, for instance, by some of the medieval
+orders of monks (the members of which actually labored to some
+useful end), scarcely impugn the rule. These outlying orders of
+the priestly class are not a sacerdotal element in the full sense
+of the term. And it is noticeable also that these doubtfully
+sacerdotal orders, which countenanced their members in earning a
+living, fell into disrepute through offending the sense of
+propriety in the communities where they existed.
+
+The priest should not put his hand to mechanically
+productive work; but he should consume in large measure. But even
+as regards his consumption it is to be noted that it should take
+such forms as do not obviously conduce to his own comfort or
+fullness of life; it should conform to the rules governing
+vicarious consumption, as explained under that head in an earlier
+chapter. It is not ordinarily in good form for the priestly class
+to appear well fed or in hilarious spirits. Indeed, in many of
+the more elaborate cults the injunction against other than
+vicarious consumption by this class frequently goes so far as to
+enjoin mortification of the flesh. And even in those modern
+denominations which have been organized under the latest
+formulations of the creed, in a modern industrial community, it
+is felt that all levity and avowed zest in the enjoyment of the
+good things of this world is alien to the true clerical decorum.
+Whatever suggests that these servants of an invisible master are
+living a life, not of devotion to their master's good fame, but
+of application to their own ends, jars harshly on our
+sensibilities as something fundamentally and eternally wrong.
+They are a servant class, although, being servants of a very
+exalted master, they rank high in the social scale by virtue of
+this borrowed light. Their consumption is vicarious consumption;
+and since, in the advanced cults, their master has no need of
+material gain, their occupation is vicarious leisure in the full
+sense. "Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do,
+do all to the glory of God." It may be added that so far as the
+laity is assimilated to the priesthood in the respect that they
+are conceived to he servants of the divinity. so far this imputed
+vicarious character attaches also to the layman's life. The range
+of application of this corollary is somewhat wide. It applies
+especially to such movements for the reform or rehabilitation of
+the religious life as are of an austere, pietistic, ascetic cast
+-- where the human subject is conceived to hold his life by a
+direct servile tenure from his spiritual sovereign. That is to
+say, where the institution of the priesthood lapses, or where
+there is an exceptionally lively sense of the immediate and
+masterful presence of the divinity in the affairs of life, there
+the layman is conceived to stand in an immediate servile relation
+to the divinity, and his life is construed to be a performance of
+vicarious leisure directed to the enhancement of his master's
+repute. In such cases of reversion there is a return to the
+unmediated relation of subservience, as the dominant fact of the
+devout attitude. The emphasis is thereby throw on an austere and
+discomforting vicarious leisure, to the neglect of conspicuous
+consumption as a means of grace.
+
+A doubt will present itself as to the full legitimacy of this
+characterization of the sacerdotal scheme of life, on the ground
+that a considerable proportion of the modern priesthood departs
+from the scheme in many details. The scheme does not hold good
+for the clergy of those denominations which have in some measure
+diverged from the old established schedule of beliefs or
+observances. These take thought, at least ostensibly or
+permissively, for the temporal welfare of the laity, as well as
+for their own. Their manner of life, not only in the privacy of
+their own household, but often even before the public, does not
+differ in an extreme degree from that of secular-minded persons,
+either in its ostensible austerity or in the archaism of its
+apparatus. This is truest for those denominations that have
+wandered the farthest. To this objection it is to be said that we
+have here to do not with a discrepancy in the theory of
+sacerdotal life, but with an imperfect conformity to the scheme
+on the part of this body of clergy. They are but a partial and
+imperfect representative of the priesthood, and must not be taken
+as exhibiting the sacerdotal scheme of life in an authentic and
+competent manner. The clergy of the sects and denominations might
+be characterized as a half-caste priesthood, or a priesthood in
+process of becoming or of reconstitution. Such a priesthood may
+be expected to show the characteristics of the sacerdotal office
+only as blended and obscured with alien motives and traditions,
+due to the disturbing presence of other factors than those of
+animism and status in the purposes of the organizations to which
+this non-conforming fraction of the priesthood belongs.
+
+Appeal may be taken direct to the taste of any person with a
+discriminating and cultivated sense of the sacerdotal
+proprieties, or to the prevalent sense of what constitutes
+clerical decorum in any community at all accustomed to think or
+to pass criticism on what a clergyman may or may not do without
+blame. Even in the most extremely secularized denominations,
+there is some sense of a distinction that should be observed
+between the sacerdotal and the lay scheme of life. There is no
+person of sensibility but feels that where the members of this
+denominational or sectarian clergy depart from traditional usage,
+in the direction of a less austere or less archaic demeanor and
+apparel, they are departing from the ideal of priestly decorum.
+There is probably no community and no sect within the range of
+the Western culture in which the bounds of permissible indulgence
+are not drawn appreciably closer for the incumbent of the
+priestly office than for the common layman. If the priest's own
+sense of sacerdotal propriety does not effectually impose a
+limit, the prevalent sense of the proprieties on the part of the
+community will commonly assert itself so obtrusively as to lead
+to his conformity or his retirement from office.
+
+Few if any members of any body of clergy, it may be added, would
+avowedly seek an increase of salary for gain's sake; and if such
+avowal were openly made by a clergyman, it would be found
+obnoxious to the sense of propriety among his congregation. It
+may also be noted in this connection that no one but the scoffers
+and the very obtuse are not instinctively grieved inwardly at a
+jest from the pulpit; and that there are none whose respect for
+their pastor does not suffer through any mark of levity on his
+part in any conjuncture of life, except it be levity of a
+palpably histrionic kind -- a constrained unbending of dignity.
+The diction proper to the sanctuary and to the priestly office
+should also carry little if any suggestion of effective everyday
+life, and should not draw upon the vocabulary of modern trade or
+industry. Likewise, one's sense of the proprieties is readily
+offended by too detailed and intimate a handling of industrial
+and other purely human questions at the hands of the clergy.
+There is a certain level of generality below which a cultivated
+sense of the proprieties in homiletical discourse will not permit
+a well-bred clergyman to decline in his discussion of temporal
+interests. These matters that are of human and secular
+consequence simply, should properly be handled with such a degree
+of generality and aloofness as may imply that the speaker
+represents a master whose interest in secular affairs goes only
+so far as to permissively countenance them.
+
+It is further to be noticed that the non-conforming sects and
+variants whose priesthood is here under discussion, vary among
+themselves in the degree of their conformity to the ideal scheme
+of sacerdotal life. In a general way it will be found that the
+divergence in this respect is widest in the case of the
+relatively young denominations, and especially in the case of
+such of the newer denominations as have chiefly a lower
+middle-class constituency. They commonly show a large admixture
+of humanitarian, philanthropic, or other motives which can not be
+classed as expressions of the devotional attitude; such as the
+desire of learning or of conviviality, which enter largely into
+the effective interest shown by members of these organizations.
+The non-conforming or sectarian movements have commonly proceeded
+from a mixture of motives, some of which are at variance with
+that sense of status on which the priestly office rests.
+Sometimes, indeed, the motive has been in good part a revulsion
+against a system of status. Where this is the case the
+institution of the priesthood has broken down in the transition,
+at least partially. The spokesman of such an organization is at
+the outset a servant and representative of the organization,
+rather than a member of a special priestly class and the
+spokesman of a divine master. And it is only by a process of
+gradual specialization that, in succeeding generations, this
+spokesman regains the position of priest, with a full investiture
+of sacerdotal authority, and with its accompanying austere,
+archaic and vicarious manner of life. The like is true of the
+breakdown and redintegration of devout ritual after such a
+revulsion. The priestly office, the scheme of sacerdotal life,
+and the schedule of devout observances are rehabilitated only
+gradually, insensibly, and with more or less variation in
+details, as a persistent human sense of devout propriety
+reasserts its primacy in questions touching the interest in the
+preternatural -- and it may be added, as the organization
+increases in wealth, and so acquires more of the point of view
+and the habits of thought of a leisure class.
+
+Beyond the priestly class, and ranged in an ascending
+hierarchy,ordinarily comes a superhuman vicarious leisure class
+of saints, angels, etc. -- or their equivalents in the ethnic
+cults. These rise in grade, one above another, according to
+elaborate system of status. The principle of status runs through
+the entire hierarchical system, both visible and invisible. The
+good fame of these several orders of the supernatural hierarchy
+also commonly requires a certain tribute of vicarious consumption
+and vicarious leisure. In many cases they accordingly have
+devoted to their service sub-orders of attendants or dependents
+who perform a vicarious leisure for them, after much the same
+fashion as was found in an earlier chapter to be true of the
+dependent leisure class under the patriarchal system.
+
+It may not appear without reflection how these devout observances
+and the peculiarity of temperament which they imply, or the
+consumption of goods and services which is comprised in the cult,
+stand related to the leisure class of a modern community, or to
+the economic motives of which that class is the exponent in the
+modern scheme of life to this end a summary review of certain
+facts bearing on this relation will be useful. It appears from an
+earlier passage in this discussion that for the purpose of the
+collective life of today, especially so far as concerns the
+industrial efficiency of the modern community, the characteristic
+traits of the devout temperament are a hindrance rather than a
+help. It should accordingly be found that the modern industrial
+life tends selectively to eliminate these traits of human nature
+from the spiritual constitution of the classes that are
+immediately engaged in the industrial process. It should hold
+true, approximately, that devoutness is declining or tending to
+obsolescence among the members of what may be called the
+effective industrial community. At the same time it should appear
+that this aptitude or habit survives in appreciably greater vigor
+among those classes which do not immediately or primarily enter
+into the community's life process as an industrial factor.
+
+It has already been pointed out that these latter classes, which
+live by, rather than in, the industrial process, are roughly
+comprised under two categories (1) the leisure class proper,
+which is shielded from the stress of the economic situation; and
+(2) the indigent classes, including the lower-class delinquents,
+which are unduly exposed to the stress. In the case of the former
+class an archaic habit of mind persists because no effectual
+economic pressure constrains this class to an adaptation of its
+habits of thought to the changing situation; while in the latter
+the reason for a failure to adjust their habits of thought to the
+altered requirements of industrial efficiency is innutrition,
+absence of such surplus of energy as is needed in order to make
+the adjustment with facility, together with a lack of opportunity
+to acquire and become habituated to the modern point of view. The
+trend of the selective process runs in much the same direction in
+both cases.
+
+From the point of view which the modern industrial life
+inculcates, phenomena are habitually subsumed under the
+quantitative relation of mechanical sequence. The indigent
+classes not only fall short of the modicum of leisure necessary
+in order to appropriate and assimilate the more recent
+generalizations of science which this point of view involves, but
+they also ordinarily stand in such a relation of personal
+dependence or subservience to their pecuniary superiors as
+materially to retard their emancipation from habits of thought
+proper to the regime of status. The result is that these classes
+in some measure retain that general habit of mind the chief
+expression of which is a strong sense of personal status, and of
+which devoutness is one feature.
+
+In the older communities of the European culture, the hereditary
+leisure class, together with the mass of the indigent population,
+are given to devout observances in an appreciably higher degree
+than the average of the industrious middle class, wherever a
+considerable class of the latter character exists. But in some of
+these countries, the two categories of conservative humanity
+named above comprise virtually the whole population. Where these
+two classes greatly preponderate, their bent shapes popular
+sentiment to such an extent as to bear down any possible
+divergent tendency in the inconsiderable middle class, and
+imposes a devout attitude upon the whole community.
+
+This must, of course, not be construed to say that such
+communities or such classes as are exceptionally prone to devout
+observances tend to conform in any exceptional degree to the
+specifications of any code of morals that we may be accustomed to
+associate with this or that confession of faith. A large measure
+of the devout habit of mind need not carry with it a strict
+observance of the injunctions of the Decalogue or of the common
+law. Indeed, it is becoming somewhat of a commonplace with
+observers of criminal life in European communities that the
+criminal and dissolute classes are, if anything, rather more
+devout, and more naively so, than the average of the population.
+It is among those who constitute the pecuniary middle class and
+the body of law-abiding citizens that a relative exemption from
+the devotional attitude is to be looked for. Those who best
+appreciate the merits of the higher creeds and observances would
+object to all this and say that the devoutness of the low-class
+delinquents is a spurious, or at the best a superstitious
+devoutness; and the point is no doubt well taken and goes
+directly and cogently to the purpose intended. But for the
+purpose of the present inquiry these extra-economic,
+extra-psychological distinctions must perforce be neglected,
+however valid and however decisive they may be for the purpose
+for which they are made.
+
+What has actually taken place with regard to class
+emancipation from the habit of devout observance is shown by the
+latter-day complaint of the clergy -- that the churches are
+losing the sympathy of the artisan classes, and are losing their
+hold upon them. At the same time it is currently believed that
+the middle class, commonly so called, is also falling away in the
+cordiality of its support of the church, especially so far as
+regards the adult male portion of that class. These are currently
+recognized phenomena, and it might seem that a simple reference
+to these facts should sufficiently substantiate the general
+position outlined. Such an appeal to the general phenomena of
+popular church attendance and church membership may be
+sufficiently convincing for the proposition here advanced. But it
+will still be to the purpose to trace in some detail the course
+of events and the particular forces which have wrought this
+change in the spiritual attitude of the more advanced industrial
+communities of today. It will serve to illustrate the manner in
+which economic causes work towards a secularization of men's
+habits of thought. In this respect the American community should
+afford an exceptionally convincing illustration, since this
+community has been the least trammelled by external circumstances
+of any equally important industrial aggregate.
+
+After making due allowance for exceptions and sporadic departures
+from the normal, the situation here at the present time may be
+summarized quite briefly. As a general rule the classes that are
+low in economic efficiency, or in intelligence, or both, are
+peculiarly devout -- as, for instance, the Negro population of
+the South, much of the lower-class foreign
+population, much of the rural population, especially in those
+sections which are backward in education, in the stage of
+development of their industry, or in respect of their industrial
+contact with the rest of the community. So also such fragments as
+we possess of a specialized or hereditary indigent class, or of a
+segregated criminal or dissolute class; although among these
+latter the devout habit of mind is apt to take the form of a
+naive animistic belief in luck and in the efficacy of shamanistic
+practices perhaps more frequently than it takes the form of a
+formal adherence to any accredited creed. The artisan class, on
+the other hand, is notoriously falling away from the accredited
+anthropomorphic creeds and from all devout observances. This
+class is in an especial degree exposed to the characteristic
+intellectual and spiritual stress of modern organized industry,
+which requires a constant recognition of the undisguised
+phenomena of impersonal, matter-of-fact sequence and an
+unreserved conformity to the law of cause and effect. This class
+is at the same time not underfed nor over-worked to such an
+extent as to leave no margin of energy for the work of
+adaptation.
+
+The case of the lower or doubtful leisure class in America -- the
+middle class commonly so called -- is somewhat peculiar. It
+differs in respect of its devotional life from its European
+counterpart, but it differs in degree and method rather than in
+substance. The churches still have the pecuniary support of this
+class; although the creeds to which the class adheres with the
+greatest facility are relatively poor in anthropomorphic content.
+At the same time the effective middle-class congregation tends,
+in many cases, more or less remotely perhaps, to become a
+congregation of women and minors. There is an appreciable lack of
+devotional fervor among the adult males of the middle class,
+although to a considerable extent there survives among them a
+certain complacent, reputable assent to the outlines of the
+accredited creed under which they were born. Their everyday life
+is carried on in a more or less close contact with the industrial
+process.
+
+This peculiar sexual differentiation, which tends to
+delegate devout observances to the women and their children, is
+due, at least in part, to the fact that the middle-class women
+are in great measure a (vicarious) leisure class. The same is
+true in a less degree of the women of the lower, artisan classes.
+They live under a regime of status handed down from an earlier
+stage of industrial development, and thereby they preserve a
+frame of mind and habits of thought which incline them to an
+archaic view of things generally. At the same time they stand in
+no such direct organic relation to the industrial process at
+large as would tend strongly to break down those habits of
+thought which, for the modern industrial purpose, are obsolete.
+That is to say, the peculiar devoutness of women is a particular
+expression of that conservatism which the women of civilized
+communities owe, in great measure, to their economic position.
+For the modern man the patriarchal relation of status is by no
+means the dominant feature of life; but for the women on the
+other hand, and for the upper middle-class women especially,
+confined as they are by prescription and by economic
+circumstances to their "domestic sphere," this relation is the
+most real and most formative factor of life. Hence a habit of
+mind favorable to devout observances and to the interpretation of
+the facts of life generally in terms of personal status. The
+logic, and the logical processes, of her everyday domestic life
+are carried over into the realm of the supernatural, and the
+woman finds herself at home and content in a range of ideas which
+to the man are in great measure alien and imbecile. 
+
+Still the men of this class are also not devoid of piety,
+although it is commonly not piety of an aggressive or exuberant
+kind. The men of the upper middle class commonly take a more
+complacent attitude towards devout observances than the men of
+the artisan class. This may perhaps be explained in part by
+saying that what is true of the women of the class is true to a
+less extent also of the men. They are to an appreciable extent a
+sheltered class; and the patriarchal relation of status which
+still persists in their conjugal life and in their habitual use
+of servants, may also act to conserve an archaic habit of mind
+and may exercise a retarding influence upon the process of
+secularization which their habits of thought are undergoing. The
+relations of the American middle-class man to the economic
+community, however, are usually pretty close and exacting;
+although it may be remarked, by the way and in qualification,
+that their economic activity frequently also partakes in some
+degree of the patriarchal or quasi-predatory character. The
+occupations which are in good repute among this class and which
+have most to do with shaping the class habits of thought, are the
+pecuniary occupations which have been spoken of in a similar
+connection in an earlier chapter. There is a good deal of the
+relation of arbitrary command and submission, and not a little of
+shrewd practice, remotely akin to predatory fraud. All this
+belongs on the plane of life of the predatory barbarian, to whom
+a devotional attitude is habitual. And in addition to this, the
+devout observances also commend themselves to this class on the
+ground of reputability. But this latter incentive to piety
+deserves treatment by itself and will be spoken of presently.
+There is no hereditary leisure class of any consequence in the
+American community, except in the South. This Southern leisure
+class is somewhat given to devout observances; more so than any
+class of corresponding pecuniary standing in other parts of the
+country. It is also well known that the creeds of the South are
+of a more old-fashioned cast than their counterparts in the
+North. Corresponding to this more archaic devotional life of the
+South is the lower industrial development of that section. The
+industrial organization of the South is at present, and
+especially it has been until quite recently, of a more primitive
+character than that of the American community taken as a whole.
+It approaches nearer to handicraft, in the paucity and rudeness
+of its mechanical appliances, and there is more of the element of
+mastery and subservience. It may also be noted that, owing to the
+peculiar economic circumstances of this section, the greater
+devoutness of the Southern population, both white and black, is
+correlated with a scheme of life which in many ways recalls the
+barbarian stages of industrial development. Among this population
+offenses of an archaic character also are and have been
+relatively more prevalent and are less deprecated than they are
+elsewhere; as, for example, duels, brawls, feuds, drunkenness,
+horse-racing, cock-fighting, gambling, male sexual incontinence
+(evidenced by the considerable number of mulattoes). There is
+also a livelier sense of honor -- an expression of sportsmanship
+and a derivative of predatory life.
+
+As regards the wealthier class of the North, the American leisure
+class in the best sense of the term, it is, to begin with,
+scarcely possible to speak of an hereditary devotional attitude.
+This class is of too recent growth to be possessed of a
+well-formed transmitted habit in this respect, or even of a
+special home-grown tradition. Still, it may be noted in passing
+that there is a perceptible tendency among this class to give in
+at least a nominal, and apparently something of a real, adherence
+to some one of the accredited creeds. Also, weddings, funerals,
+and the like honorific events among this class are pretty
+uniformly solemnized with some especial degree of religious
+circumstance. It is impossible to say how far this adherence to a
+creed is a bona fide reversion to a devout habit of mind, and how
+far it is to be classed as a case of protective mimicry assumed
+for the purpose of an outward assimilation to canons of
+reputability borrowed from foreign ideals. Something of a
+substantial devotional propensity seems to be present, to judge
+especially by the somewhat peculiar degree of ritualistic
+observance which is in process of development in the upper-class
+cults. There is a tendency perceptible among the upper-class
+worshippers to affiliate themselves with those cults which lay
+relatively great stress on ceremonial and on the spectacular
+accessories of worship; and in the churches in which an
+upper-class membership predominates, there is at the same time a
+tendency to accentuate the ritualistic, at the cost of the
+intellectual features in the service and in the apparatus of the
+devout observances. This holds true even where the church in
+question belongs to a denomination with a relatively slight
+general development of ritual and paraphernalia. This peculiar
+development of the ritualistic element is no doubt due in part to
+a predilection for conspicuously wasteful spectacles, but it
+probably also in part indicates something of the devotional
+attitude of the worshippers. So far as the latter is true, it
+indicates a relatively archaic form of the devotional habit. The
+predominance of spectacular effects in devout observances is
+noticeable in all devout communities at a relatively primitive
+stage of culture and with a slight intellectual development. It
+is especially characteristic of the barbarian culture. Here there
+is pretty uniformly present in the devout observances a direct
+appeal to the emotions through all the avenues of sense. And a
+tendency to return to this naive, sensational method of appeal is
+unmistakable in the upper-class churches of today. It is
+perceptible in a less degree in the cults which claim the
+allegiance of the lower leisure class and of the middle classes.
+There is a reversion to the use of colored lights and brilliant
+spectacles, a freer use of symbols, orchestral music and incense,
+and one may even detect in "processionals" and "recessionals" and
+in richly varied genuflexional evolutions, an incipient reversion
+to so antique an accessory of worship as the sacred dance.
+This reversion to spectacular observances is not confined to the
+upper-class cults, although it finds its best exemplification and
+its highest accentuation in the higher pecuniary and social
+altitudes. The cults of the lower-class devout portion of the
+community, such as the Southern Negroes and the backward foreign
+elements of the population, of course also show a strong
+inclination to ritual, symbolism, and spectacular effects; as
+might be expected from the antecedents and the cultural level of
+those classes. With these classes the prevalence of ritual and
+anthropomorphism are not so much a matter of reversion as of
+continued development out of the past. But the use of ritual and
+related features of devotion are also spreading in other
+directions. In the early days of the American community the
+prevailing denominations started out with a ritual and
+paraphernalia of an austere simplicity; but it is a matter
+familiar to every one that in the course of time these
+denominations have, in a varying degree, adopted much of the
+spectacular elements which they once renounced. In a general way,
+this development has gone hand in hand with the growth of the
+wealth and the ease of life of the worshippers and has reached
+its fullest expression among those classes which grade highest in
+wealth and repute.
+
+The causes to which this pecuniary stratification of
+devoutness is due have already been indicated in a general way in
+speaking of class differences in habits of thought. Class
+differences as regards devoutness are but a special expression of
+a generic fact. The lax allegiance of the lower middle class, or
+what may broadly be called the failure of filial piety among this
+class, is chiefly perceptible among the town populations engaged
+in the mechanical industries. In a general way, one does not, at
+the present time, look for a blameless filial piety among those
+classes whose employment approaches that of the engineer and the
+mechanician. These mechanical employments are in a degree a
+modern fact. The handicraftsmen of earlier times, who served an
+industrial end of a character similar to that now served by the
+mechanician, were not similarily refractory under the discipline
+of devoutness. The habitual activity of the men engaged in these
+branches of industry has greatly changed, as regards its
+intellectual discipline, since the modern industrial processes
+have come into vogue; and the discipline to which the mechanician
+is exposed in his daily employment affects the methods and
+standards of his thinking also on topics which lie outside his
+everyday work. Familiarity with the highly organized and highly
+impersonal industrial processes of the present acts to derange
+the animistic habits of thought. The workman's office is becoming
+more and more exclusively that of discretion and supervision in a
+process of mechanical, dispassionate sequences. So long as the
+individual is the chief and typical prime mover in the process;
+so long as the obtrusive feature of the industrial process is the
+dexterity and force of the individual handicraftsman; so long the
+habit of interpreting phenomena in terms of personal motive and
+propensity suffers no such considerable and consistent
+derangement through facts as to lead to its elimination. But
+under the later developed industrial processes, when the prime
+movers and the contrivances through which they work are of an
+impersonal, non-individual character, the grounds of
+generalization habitually present in the workman's mind and the
+point of view from which he habitually apprehends phenomena is an
+enforced cognizance of matter-of-fact sequence. The result, so
+far as concerts the workman's life of faith, is a proclivity to
+undevout scepticism.
+
+It appears, then, that the devout habit of mind attains its best
+development under a relatively archaic culture; the term "devout"
+being of course here used in its anthropological sense simply,
+and not as implying anything with respect to the
+spiritual attitude so characterized, beyond the fact of a
+proneness to devout observances. It appears also that this devout
+attitude marks a type of human nature which is more in consonance
+with the predatory mode of life than with the later-developed,
+more consistently and organically industrial life process of the
+community. It is in large measure an expression of the archaic
+habitual sense of personal status -- the relation of mastery and
+subservience -- and it therefore fits into the industrial scheme
+of the predatory and the quasi-peaceable culture, but does not
+fit into the industrial scheme of the present. It also appears
+that this habit persists with greatest tenacity among those
+classes in the modern communities whose everyday life is most
+remote from the mechanical processes of industry and which are
+the most conservative also in other respects; while for those
+classes that are habitually in immediate contact with modern
+industrial processes, and whose habits of thought are therefore
+exposed to the constraining force of technological necessities,
+that animistic interpretation of phenomena and that respect of
+persons on which devout observance proceeds are in process of
+obsolescence. And also -- as bearing especially on the present
+discussion -- it appears that the devout habit to some extent
+progressively gains in scope and elaboration among those classes
+in the modern communities to whom wealth and leisure accrue in
+the most pronounced degree. In this as in other relations, the
+institution of a leisure class acts to conserve, and even to
+rehabilitate, that archaic type of human nature and those
+elements of the archaic culture which the industrial evolution of
+society in its later stages acts to eliminate.
+
+Chapter Thirteen
+
+Survivals of the Non-Invidious Interests
+
+In an increasing proportion as time goes on, the
+anthropomorphic cult, with its code of devout observations,
+suffers a progressive disintegration through the stress of
+economic exigencies and the decay of the system of status. As
+this disintegration proceeds, there come to be associated and
+blended with the devout attitude certain other motives and
+impulses that are not always of an anthropomorphic origin, nor
+traceable to the habit of personal subservience. Not all of these
+subsidiary impulses that blend with the habit of devoutness in
+the later devotional life are altogether congruous with the
+devout attitude or with the anthropomorphic apprehension of the
+sequence of phenomena. The origin being not the same, their
+action upon the scheme of devout life is also not in the same
+direction. In many ways they traverse the underlying norm of
+subservience or vicarious life to which the code of devout
+observations and the ecclesiastical and sacerdotal institutions
+are to be traced as their substantial basis. Through the presence
+of these alien motives the social and industrial regime of status
+gradually disintegrates, and the canon of personal subservience
+loses the support derived from an unbroken tradition. Extraneous
+habits and proclivities encroach upon the field of action
+occupied by this canon, and it presently comes about that the
+ecclesiastical and sacerdotal structures are partially converted
+to other uses, in some measure alien to the purposes of the
+scheme of devout life as it stood in the days of the most
+vigorous and characteristic development of the priesthood.
+
+Among these alien motives which affect the devout scheme in its
+later growth, may be mentioned the motives of charity and of
+social good-fellowship, or conviviality; or, in more general
+terms, the various expressions of the sense of human solidarity
+and sympathy. It may be added that these extraneous uses of the
+ecclesiastical structure contribute materially to its survival in
+name and form even among people who may be ready to give up the
+substance of it. A still more characteristic and more pervasive
+alien element in the motives which have gone to formally uphold
+the scheme of devout life is that non-reverent sense of aesthetic
+congruity with the environment, which is left as a residue of the
+latter-day act of worship after elimination of its
+anthropomorphic content. This has done good service for the
+maintenance of the sacerdotal institution through blending with
+the motive of subservience. This sense of impulse of aesthetic
+congruity is not primarily of an economic character, but it has a
+considerable indirect effect in shaping the habit of mind of the
+individual for economic purposes in the later stages of
+industrial development; its most perceptible effect in this
+regard goes in the direction of mitigating the somewhat
+pronounced self-regarding bias that has been transmitted by
+tradition from the earlier, more competent phases of the regime
+of status. The economic bearing of this impulse is therefore seen
+to transverse that of the devout attitude; the former goes to
+qualify, if not eliminate, the self-regarding bias, through
+sublation of the antithesis or antagonism of self and not-self;
+while the latter, being and expression of the sense of personal
+subservience and mastery, goes to accentuate this antithesis and
+to insist upon the divergence between the self-regarding interest
+and the interests of the generically human life process.
+
+This non-invidious residue of the religious life -- the sense of
+communion with the environment, or with the generic life process
+-- as well as the impulse of charity or of sociability, act in a
+pervasive way to shape men's habits of thought for the economic
+purpose. But the action of all this class of proclivities is
+somewhat vague, and their effects are difficult to trace in
+detail. So much seems clear, however, as that the action of this
+entire class of motives or aptitudes tends in a direction
+contrary to the underlying principles of the institution of the
+leisure class as already formulated. The basis of that
+institution, as well as of the anthropomorphic cults associated
+with it in the cultural development, is the habit of invidious
+comparison; and this habit is incongruous with the exercise of
+the aptitudes now in question. The substantial canons of the
+leisure-class scheme of life are a conspicuous waste of time and
+substance and a withdrawal from the industrial process; while the
+particular aptitudes here in question assert themselves, on the
+economic side, in a deprecation of waste and of a futile manner
+of life, and in an impulse to participation in or identification
+with the life process, whether it be on the economic side or in
+any other of its phases or aspects.
+
+It is plain that these aptitudes and habits of life to which they
+give rise where circumstances favor their expression, or where
+they assert themselves in a dominant way, run counter to the
+leisure-class scheme of life; but it is not clear that life under
+the leisure-class scheme, as seen in the later stages of its
+development, tends consistently to the repression of these
+aptitudes or to exemption from the habits of thought in which
+they express themselves. The positive discipline of the
+leisureªclass scheme of life goes pretty much all the other way.
+In its positive discipline, by prescription and by selective
+elimination, the leisure-class scheme favors the all-pervading
+and all-dominating primacy of the canons of waste and invidious
+comparison at every conjuncture of life. But in its negative
+effects the tendency of the leisure-class discipline is not so
+unequivocally true to the fundamental canons of the scheme. In
+its regulation of human activity for the purpose of pecuniary
+decency the leisure-class canon insists on withdrawal from the
+industrial process. That is to say, it inhibits activity in the
+directions in which the impecunious members of the community
+habitually put forth their efforts. Especially in the case of
+women, and more particularly as regards the upper-class and
+upper-middle-class women of advanced industrial communities, this
+inhibition goes so far as to insist on withdrawal even from the
+emulative process of accumulation by the quasi-predator methods
+of the pecuniary occupations.
+
+The pecuniary or the leisure-class culture, which set out as an
+emulative variant of the impulse of workmanship, is in its latest
+development beginning to neutralize its own ground, by
+eliminating the habit of invidious comparison in respect of
+efficiency, or even of pecuniary standing. On the other hand, the
+fact that members of the leisure class, both men and women, are
+to some extent exempt from the necessity of finding a livelihood
+in a competitive struggle with their fellows, makes it possible
+for members of this class not only to survive, but even, within
+bounds, to follow their bent in case they are not gifted with the
+aptitudes which make for success in the competitive struggle.
+That is to say, in the latest and fullest development of the
+institution, the livelihood of members of this class does not
+depend on the possession and the unremitting exercise of those
+aptitudes are therefore greater in the higher grades of the
+leisure class than in the general average of a population living
+under the competitive system.
+
+In an earlier chapter, in discussing the conditions of survival
+of archaic traits, it has appeared that the peculiar position of
+the leisure class affords exceptionally favorable chances for the
+survival of traits which characterize the type of human nature
+proper to an earlier and obsolete cultural stage. The class is
+sheltered from the stress of economic exigencies, and is in this
+sense withdrawn from the rude impact of forces which make for
+adaptation to the economic situation. The survival in the leisure
+class, and under the leisure-class scheme of life, of traits and
+types that are reminiscent of the predatory culture has already
+been discussed. These aptitudes and habits have an exceptionally
+favorable chance of survival under the leisureªclass regime. Not
+only does the sheltered pecuniary position of the leisure class
+afford a situation favorable to the survival of such individuals
+as are not gifted with the complement of aptitudes required for
+serviceability in the modern industrial process; but the
+leisure-class canons of reputability at the same time enjoin the
+conspicuous exercise of certain predatory aptitudes. The
+employments in which the predatory aptitudes find exercise serve
+as an evidence of wealth, birth, and withdrawal from the
+industrial process. The survival of the predatory traits under
+the leisure-class culture is furthered both negatively, through
+the industrial exemption of the class, and positively, through
+the sanction of the leisure-class canons of decency.
+
+With respect to the survival of traits characteristic of the
+ante-predatory savage culture the case is in some degree
+different. The sheltered position of the leisure class favors the
+survival also of these traits; but the exercise of the aptitudes
+for peace and good-will does not have the affirmative sanction of
+the code of proprieties. Individuals gifted with a temperament
+that is reminiscent of the ante-predatory culture are placed at
+something of an advantage within the leisure class, as compared
+with similarly gifted individuals outside the class, in that they
+are not under a pecuniary necessity to thwart these aptitudes
+that make for a non-competitive life; but such individuals are
+still exposed to something of a moral constraint which urges them
+to disregard these inclinations, in that the code of proprieties
+enjoins upon them habits of life based on the predatory
+aptitudes. So long as the system of status remains intact, and so
+long as the leisure class has other lines of nonªindustrial
+activity to take to than obvious killing of time in aimless and
+wasteful fatigation, so long no considerable departure from the
+leisure-class scheme of reputable life is to be looked for. The
+occurrence of non-predatory temperament with the class at that
+stage is to be looked upon as a case of sporadic reversion. But
+the reputable non-industrial outlets for the human propensity to
+action presently fail, through the advance of economic
+development, the disappearance of large game, the decline of war,
+the obsolescence of proprietary government, and the decay of the
+priestly office. When this happens, the situation begins to
+change. Human life must seek expression in one direction if it
+may not in another; and if the predatory outlet fails, relief is
+sought elsewhere.
+
+As indicated above, the exemption from pecuniary stress has been
+carried farther in the case of the leisure-class women of the
+advanced industrial communities than in that of any other
+considerable group of persons. The women may therefore be
+expected to show a more pronounced reversion to a non-invidious
+temperament than the men. But there is also among men of the
+leisure class a perceptible increase in the range and scope of
+activities that proceed from aptitudes which are not to be
+classed as self-regarding, and the end of which is not an
+invidious distinction. So, for instance, the greater number of
+men who have to do with industry in the way of pecuniarily
+managing an enterprise take some interest and some pride in
+seeing that the work is well done and is industrially effective,
+and this even apart from the profit which may result from any
+improvement of this kind. The efforts of commercial clubs and
+manufacturers' organizations in this direction of non-invidious
+advancement of industrial efficiency are also well know.
+
+The tendency to some other than an invidious purpose in life has
+worked out in a multitude of organizations, the purpose of which
+is some work of charity or of social amelioration. These
+organizations are often of a quasi-religious or pseudo-religious
+character, and are participated in by both men and women.
+Examples will present themselves in abundance on reflection, but
+for the purpose of indicating the range of the propensities in
+question and of characterizing them, some of the more obvious
+concrete cases may be cited. Such, for instance, are the
+agitation for temperance and similar social reforms, for prison
+reform, for the spread of education, for the suppression of vice,
+and for the avoidance of war by arbitration, disarmament, or
+other means; such are, in some measure, university settlements,
+neighborhood guilds, the various organizations typified by the
+Young Men's Christian Association and Young People's Society for
+Christian Endeavor, sewing-clubs, art clubs, and even commercial
+clubs; such are also, in some slight measure, the pecuniary
+foundations of semi-public establishments for charity, education,
+or amusement, whether they are endowed by wealthy individuals or
+by contributions collected from persons of smaller means -- in so
+far as these establishments are not of a religious character.
+
+It is of course not intended to say that these efforts proceed
+entirely from other motives than those of a self-regarding kind.
+What can be claimed is that other motives are present in the
+common run of cases, and that the perceptibly greater prevalence
+of effort of this kind under the circumstances of the modern
+industrial life than under the unbroken regime of the principle
+of status, indicates the presence in modern life of an effective
+scepticism with respect to the full legitimacy of an emulative
+scheme of life. It is a matter of sufficient notoriety to have
+become a commonplace jest that extraneous motives are commonly
+present among the incentives to this class of work -- motives of
+a self-regarding kind, and especially the motive of an invidious
+distinction. To such an extent is this true, that many ostensible
+works of disinterested public spirit are no doubt initiated and
+carried on with a view primarily to the enhance repute or even to
+the pecuniary gain, of their promoters. In the case of some
+considerable groups of organizations or establishments of this
+kind the invidious motive is apparently the dominant motive both
+with the initiators of the work and with their supporters. This
+last remark would hold true especially with respect to such works
+as lend distinction to their doer through large and conspicuous
+expenditure; as, for example, the foundation of a university or
+of a public library or museum; but it is also, and perhaps
+equally, true  of the more commonplace work of participation in
+such organizations. These serve to authenticate the pecuniary
+reputability of their members, as well as gratefully to keep them
+in mind of their superior status by pointing the contrast between
+themselves and the lower-lying humanity in whom the work of
+amelioration is to be wrought; as, for example, the university
+settlement, which now has some vogue. But after all allowances
+and deductions have been made, there is left some remainder of
+motives of a non-emulative kind. The fact itself that distinction
+or a decent good fame is sought by this method is evidence of a
+prevalent sense of the legitimacy , and of the presumptive
+effectual presence, of a non-emulative, non-invidious interest,
+as a consistent factor in the habits of thought of modern
+communities.
+
+In all this latter-day range of leisure-class activities that
+proceed on the basis of a non-invidious and non-religious
+interest, it is to be noted that the women participate more
+actively and more persistently than the men -- except, of course,
+in the case of such works as require a large expenditure of
+means. The dependent pecuniary position of the women disables
+them for work requiring large expenditure. As regards the general
+range of ameliorative work, the members of the priesthood or
+clergy of the less naively devout sects, or the secularized
+denominations, are associated with the class of women. This is as
+the theory would have it. In other economic relations, also, this
+clergy stands in a somewhat equivocal position between the class
+of women and that of the men engaged in economic pursuits. By
+tradition and by the prevalent sense of the proprieties, both the
+clergy and the women of the well-to-do classes are placed in the
+position of a vicarious leisure class; with both classes the
+characteristic relation which goes to form the habits of thought
+of the class is a relation of subservience -- that is to say, an
+economic relation conceived in personal terms; in both classes
+there is consequently perceptible a special proneness to construe
+phenomena in terms of personal relation rather than of causal
+sequence; both classes are so inhibited by the canons of decency
+from the ceremonially unclean processes of the lucrative or
+productive occupations as to make participation in the industrial
+life process of today a moral impossibility for them. The result
+of this ceremonial exclusion from productive effort of the vulgar
+sort is to draft a relatively large share of the energies of the
+modern feminine and priestly classes into the service of other
+interests than the self-regarding one. The code leaves no
+alternative direction in which the impulse to purposeful action
+may find expression. The effect of a consistent inhibition on
+industrially useful activity in the case of the leisure-class
+women shows itself in a restless assertion of the impulse to
+workmanship in other directions than that of business activity.
+As has been noticed already, the everyday life of the
+well-to-do women and the clergy contains a larger element of
+status than that of the average of the men, especially than that
+of the men engaged in the modern industrial occupations proper.
+Hence the devout attitude survives in a better state of
+preservation among these classes than among the common run of men
+in the modern communities. Hence an appreciable share of the
+energy which seeks expression in a non-lucrative employment among
+these members of the vicarious leisure classes may be expected to
+eventuate in devout observances and works of piety. Hence, in
+part, the excess of the devout proclivity in women, spoken of in
+the last chapter. But it is more to the present point to note the
+effect of this proclivity in shaping the action and coloring the
+purposes of the non-lucrative movements and organizations here
+under discussion. Where this devout coloring is present it lowers
+the immediate efficiency of the organizations for any economic
+end to which their efforts may be directed. Many organizations,
+charitable and ameliorative, divide their attention between the
+devotional and the secular well-being of the people whose
+interests they aim to further. It can scarcely he doubted that if
+they were to give an equally serious attention and effort
+undividedly to the secular interests of these people, the
+immediate economic value of their work should be appreciably
+higher than it is. It might of course similarly be said, if this
+were the place to say it, that the immediate efficiency of these
+works of amelioration for the devout might be greater if it were
+not hampered with the secular motives and aims which are usually
+present.
+
+Some deduction is to be made from the economic value of this
+class of non-invidious enterprise, on account of the intrusion of
+the devotional interest. But there are also deductions to be made
+on account of the presence of other alien motives which more or
+less broadly traverse the economic trend of this non-emulative
+expression of the instinct of workmanship. To such an extent is
+this seen to be true on a closer scrutiny, that, when all is
+told, it may even appear that this general class of enterprises
+is of an altogether dubious economic value -- as measured in
+terms of the fullness or facility of life of the individuals or
+classes to whose amelioration the enterprise is directed. For
+instance, many of the efforts now in reputable vogue for the
+amelioration of the indigent population of large cities are of
+the nature, in great part, of a mission of culture. It is by this
+means sought to accelerate the rate of speed at which given
+elements of the upper-class culture find acceptance in the
+everyday scheme of life of the lower classes. The solicitude of
+"settlements," for example, is in part directed to enhance the
+industrial efficiency of the poor and to teach them the more
+adequate utilization of the means at hand; but it is also no less
+consistently directed to the inculcation, by precept and example,
+of certain punctilios of upper-class propriety in manners and
+customs. The economic substance of these proprieties will
+commonly be found on scrutiny to be a conspicuous waste of time
+and goods. Those good people who go out to humanize the poor are
+commonly, and advisedly, extremely scrupulous and silently
+insistent in matters of decorum and the decencies of life. They
+are commonly persons of an exemplary life and gifted with a
+tenacious insistence on ceremonial cleanness in the various items
+of their daily consumption. The cultural or civilizing efficacy
+of this inculcation of correct habits of thought with respect to
+the consumption of time and commodities is scarcely to be
+overrated; nor is its economic value to the individual who
+acquires these higher and more reputable ideals inconsiderable.
+Under the circumstances of the existing pecuniary culture, the
+reputability, and consequently the success, of the individual is
+in great measure dependent on his proficiency in demeanor and
+methods of consumption that argue habitual waste of time and
+goods. But as regards the ulterior economic bearing of this
+training in worthier methods of life, it is to be said that the
+effect wrought is in large part a substitution of costlier or
+less efficient methods of accomplishing the same material
+results, in relations where the material result is the fact of
+substantial economic value. The propaganda of culture is in great
+part an inculcation of new tastes, or rather of a new schedule of
+proprieties, which have been adapted to the upper-class scheme of
+life under the guidance of the leisure-class formulation of the
+principles of status and pecuniary decency. This new schedule of
+proprieties is intruded into the lower-class scheme of life from
+the code elaborated by an element of the population whose life
+lies outside the industrial process; and this intrusive schedule
+can scarcely be expected to fit the exigencies of life for these
+lower classes more adequately than the schedule already in vogue
+among them, and especially not more adequately than the schedule
+which they are themselves working out under the stress of modern
+industrial life.
+
+All this of course does not question the fact that the
+prOprieties of the substituted schedule are more decorous than
+those which they displace. The doubt which presents itself is
+simply a doubt as to the economic expediency of this work of
+regeneration -- that is to say, the economic expediency in that
+immediate and material bearing in which the effects of the change
+can be ascertained with some degree of confidence, and as viewed
+from the standpoint not of the individual but of the facility of
+life of the collectivity. For an appreciation of the economic
+expediency of these enterprises of amelioration, therefore, their
+effective work is scarcely to be taken at its face value, even
+where the aim of the enterprise is primarily an economic one and
+where the interest on which it proceeds is in no sense
+self-regarding or invidious. The economic reform wrought is
+largely of the nature of a permutation in the methods of
+conspicuous waste.
+
+But something further is to be said with respect to the character
+of the disinterested motives and canons of procedure in all work
+of this class that is affected by the habits of thought
+characteristic of the pecuniary culture; and this further
+consideration may lead to a further qualification of the
+conclusions already reached. As has been seen in an earlier
+chapter, the canons of reputability or decency under the
+pecuniary culture insist on habitual futility of effort as the
+mark of a pecuniarily blameless life. There results not only a
+habit of disesteem of useful occupations, but there results also
+what is of more decisive consequence in guiding the action of any
+organized body of people that lays claim to social good repute.
+There is a tradition which requires that one should not be
+vulgarly familiar with any of the processes or details that have
+to do with the material necessities of life. One may
+meritoriously show a quantitative interest in the well-being of
+the vulgar, through subscriptions or through work on managing
+committees and the like. One may, perhaps even more
+meritoriously, show solicitude in general and in detail for the
+cultural welfare of the vulgar, in the way of contrivances for
+elevating their tastes and affording them opportunities for
+spiritual amelioration. But one should not betray an intimate
+knowledge of the material circumstances of vulgar life, or of the
+habits of thought of the vulgar classes, such as would
+effectually direct the efforts of these organizations to a
+materially useful end. This reluctance to avow an unduly intimate
+knowledge of the lower-class conditions of life in detail of
+course prevails in very different degrees in different
+individuals; but there is commonly enough of it present
+collectively in any organization of the kind in question
+profoundly to influence its course of action. By its cumulative
+action in shaping the usage and precedents of any such body, this
+shrinking from an imputation of unseemly familiarity with vulgar
+life tends gradually to set aside the initial motives of the
+enterprise, in favor of certain guiding principles of good
+repute, ultimately reducible to terms of pecuniary merit. So that
+in an organization of long standing the initial motive of
+furthering the facility of life in these classes comes gradually
+to be an ostensible motive only, and the vulgarly effective work
+of the organization tends to obsolescence.
+
+What is true of the efficiency of organizations for non-invidious
+work in this respect is true also as regards the work of
+individuals proceeding on the same motives; though it perhaps
+holds true with more qualification for individuals than for
+organized enterprises. The habit of gauging merit by the
+leisure-class canons of wasteful expenditure and unfamiliarity
+with vulgar life, whether on the side of production or of
+consumption, is necessarily strong in the individuals who aspire
+to do some work of public utility. And if the individual should
+forget his station and turn his efforts to vulgar effectiveness,
+the common sense of the community-the sense of pecuniary decency
+-- would presently reject his work and set him right. An example
+of this is seen in the administration of bequests made by
+public-spirited men for the single purpose (at least ostensibly)
+of furthering the facility of human life in some particular
+respect. The objects for which bequests of this class are most
+frequently made at present are most frequently made at present
+are schools, libraries, hospitals, and asylums for the infirm or
+unfortunate. The avowed purpose of the donor in these cases is
+the amelioration of human life in the particular respect which is
+named in the bequest; but it will be found an invariable rule
+that in the execution of the work not a little of other motives,
+frequenCy incompatible with the initial motive, is present and
+determines the particular disposition eventually made of a good
+share of the means which have been set apart by the bequest.
+Certain funds, for instance, may have been set apart as a
+foundation for a foundling asylum or a retreat for invalids. The
+diversion of expenditure to honorific waste in such cases is not
+uncommon enough to cause surprise or even to raise a smile. An
+appreciable share of the funds is spent in the construction of an
+edifice faced with some aesthetically objectionable but expensive
+stone, covered with grotesque and incongruous details, and
+designed, in its battlemented walls and turrets and its massive
+portals and strategic approaches, to suggest certain barbaric
+methods of warfare. The interior of the structure shows the same
+pervasive guidance of the canons of conspicuous waste and
+predatory exploit. The windows, for instance, to go no farther
+into detail, are placed with a view to impress their pecuniary
+excellence upon the chance beholder from the outside, rather than
+with a view to effectiveness for their ostensible end in the
+convenience or comfort of the beneficiaries within; and the
+detail of interior arrangement is required to conform itself as
+best it may to this alien but imperious requirement of pecuniary
+beauty.
+
+In all this, of course, it is not to he presumed that the donor
+would have found fault, or that he would have done
+otherwise if he had taken control in person; it appears that in
+those cases where such a personal direction is exercised -- where
+the enterprise is conducted by direct expenditure and
+superintendence instead of by bequest -- the aims and methods of
+management are not different in this respect. Nor would the
+beneficiaries, or the outside observers whose ease or vanity are
+not immediately touched, be pleased with a different disposition
+of the funds. It would suit no one to have the enterprise
+conducted with a view directly to the most economical and
+effective use of the means at hand for the initial, material end
+of the foundation. All concerned, whether their interest is
+immediate and self-regarding, or contemplative only, agree that
+some considerable share of the expenditure should go to the
+higher or spiritual needs derived from the habit of an invidious
+comparison in predatory exploit and pecuniary waste. But this
+only goes to say that the canons of emulative and pecuniary
+reputability so far pervade the common sense of the community as
+to permit no escape or evasion, even in the case of an enterprise
+which ostensibly proceeds entirely on the basis of a
+non-invidious interest.
+
+It may even be that the enterprise owes its honorific virtue, as
+a means of enhancing the donor's good repute, to the imputed
+presence of this non-invidious motive; but that does not hinder
+the invidious interest from guiding the expenditure. The
+effectual presence of motives of an emulative or invidious origin
+in non-emulative works of this kind might be shown at length and
+with detail, in any one of the classes of enterprise spoken of
+above. Where these honorific details occur, in such cases, they
+commonly masquerade under designations that belong in the field
+of the aesthetic, ethical or economic interest. These special
+motives, derived from the standards and canons of the pecuniary
+culture, act surreptitiously to divert effort of a non-invidious
+kind from effective service, without disturbing the agent's sense
+of good intention or obtruding upon his consciousness the
+substantial futility of his work. Their effect might be traced
+through the entire range of that schedule of non-invidious,
+meliorative enterprise that is so considerable a feature, and
+especially so conspicuous a feature, in the overt scheme of life
+of the well-to-do. But the theoretical bearing is perhaps clear
+enough and may require no further illustration; especially as
+some detailed attention will be given to one of these lines of
+enterprise -- the establishments for the higher learning -- in
+another connection.
+
+Under the circumstances of the sheltered situation in which the
+leisure class is placed there seems, therefore, to be
+something of a reversion to the range of non-invidious impulses
+that characterizes the ante-predatory savage culture. The
+reversion comprises both the sense of workmanship and the
+proclivity to indolence and good-fellowship. But in the modern
+scheme of life canons of conduct based on pecuniary or invidious
+merit stand in the way of a free exercise of these impulses; and
+the dominant presence of these canons of conduct goes far to
+divert such efforts as are made on the basis of the non-invidious
+interest to the service of that invidious interest on which the
+pecuniary culture rests. The canons of pecuniary decency are
+reducible for the present purpose to the principles of waste,
+futility, and ferocity. The requirements of decency are
+imperiously present in meliorative enterprise as in other lines
+of conduct, and exercise a selective surveillance over the
+details of conduct and management in any enterprise. By guiding
+and adapting the method in detail, these canons of decency go far
+to make all non-invidious aspiration or effort nugatory. The
+pervasive, impersonal, un-eager principle of futility is at hand
+from day to day and works obstructively to hinder the effectual
+expression of so much of the surviving ante-predatory aptitudes
+as is to be classed under the instinct of workmanship; but its
+presence does not preclude the transmission of those aptitudes or
+the continued recurrence of an impulse to find expression for
+them.
+
+In the later and farther development of the pecuniary culture,
+the requirement of withdrawal from the industrial process in
+order to avoid social odium is carried so far as to comprise
+abstention from the emulative employments. At this advanced stage
+the pecuniary culture negatively favors the assertion of the
+non-invidious propensities by relaxing the stress laid on the
+merit of emulative, predatory , or pecuniary occupations, as
+compared with those of an industrial or productive kind. As was
+noticed above, the requirement of such withdrawal from all
+employment that is of human use applies more rigorously to the
+upper-class women than to any other class, unless the priesthood
+of certain cults might be cited as an exception, perhaps more
+apparent than real, to this rule. The reason for the more extreme
+insistence on a futile life for this class of women than for the
+men of the same pecuniary and social grade lies in their being
+not only an upper-grade leisure class but also at the same time a
+vicarious leisure class. There is in their case a double ground
+for a consistent withdrawal from useful effort.
+
+It has been well and repeatedly said by popular writers and
+speakers who reflect the common sense of intelligent people on
+questions of social structure and function that the position of
+woman in any community is the most striking index of the level of
+culture attained by the community, and it might be added, by any
+given class in the community. This remark is perhaps truer as
+regards the stage of economic development than as regards
+development in any other respect. At the same time the position
+assigned to the woman in the accepted scheme of life, in any
+community or under any culture, is in a very great degree an
+expression of traditions which have been shaped by the
+circumstances of an earlier phase of development, and which have
+been but partially adapted to the existing economic
+circumstances, or to the existing exigencies of temperament and
+habits of mind by which the women living under this modern
+economic situation are actuated.
+
+The fact has already been remarked upon incidentally in the
+course of the discussion of the growth of economic institutions
+generally, and in particular in speaking of vicarious leisure and
+of dress, that the position of women in the modern economic
+scheme is more widely and more consistently at variance with the
+promptings of the instinct of workmanship than is the position of
+the men of the same classes. It is also apparently true that the
+woman's temperament includes a larger share of this instinct that
+approves peace and disapproves futility. It is therefore not a
+fortuitous circumstance that the women of modern industrial
+communities show a livelier sense of the discrepancy between the
+accepted scheme of life and the exigencies of the economic
+situation.
+
+The several phases of the "woman question" have brought out in
+intelligible form the extent to which the life of women in modern
+society, and in the polite circles especially, is regulated by a
+body of common sense formulated under the economic circumstances
+of an earlier phase of development. It is still felt that woman's
+life, in its civil, economic, and social bearing, is essentially
+and normally a vicarious life, the merit or demerit of which is,
+in the nature of things, to be imputed to some other individual
+who stands in some relation of ownership or tutelage to the
+woman. So, for instance, any action on the part of a woman which
+traverses an injunction of the accepted schedule of proprieties
+is felt to reflect immediately upon the honor of the man whose
+woman she is. There may of course be some sense of incongruity in
+the mind of any one passing an opinion of this kind on the
+woman's frailty or perversity; but the common-sense judgment of
+the community in such matters is, after all, delivered without
+much hesitation, and few men would question the legitimacy of
+their sense of an outraged tutelage in any case that might arise.
+On the other hand, relatively little discredit attaches to a
+woman through the evil deeds of the man with whom her life is
+associated.
+
+The good and beautiful scheme of life, then -- that is to say the
+scheme to which we are habituated -- assigns to the woman a
+"sphere" ancillary to the activity of the man; and it is felt
+that any departure from the traditions of her assigned round of
+duties is unwomanly. If the question is as to civil rights or the
+suffrage, our common sense in the matter -- that is to say the
+logical deliverance of our general scheme of life upon the point
+in question -- says that the woman should be represented in the
+body politic and before the law, not immediately in her own
+person, but through the mediation of the head of the household to
+which she belongs. It is unfeminine in her to aspire to a
+self-directing, self-centered life; and our common sense tells us
+that her direct participation in the affairs of the community,
+civil or industrial, is a menace to that social order which
+expresses our habits of thought as they have been formed under
+the guidance of the traditions of the pecuniary culture. "All
+this fume and froth of 'emancipating woman from the slavery of
+man' and so on, is, to use the chaste and expressive language of
+Elizabeth Cady Stanton inversely, 'utter rot.' The social
+relations of the sexes are fixed by nature. Our entire
+civilization -- that is whatever is good in it -- is based on the
+home." The "home" is the household with a male head. This view,
+but commonly expressed even more chastely, is the prevailing view
+of the woman's status, not only among the common run of the men
+of civilized communities, but among the women as well. Women have
+a very alert sense of what the scheme of proprieties requires,
+and while it is true that many of them are ill at ease under the
+details which the code imposes, there are few who do not
+recognize that the existing moral order, of necessity and by the
+divine right of prescription, places the woman in a position
+ancillary to the man. In the last analysis, according to her own
+sense of what is good and beautiful, the woman's life is, and in
+theory must be, an expression of the man's life at the second
+remove.
+
+But in spite of this pervading sense of what is the good and
+natural place for the woman, there is also perceptible an
+incipient development of sentiment to the effect that this whole
+arrangement of tutelage and vicarious life and imputation of
+merit and demerit is somehow a mistake. Or, at least, that even
+if it may be a natural growth and a good arrangement in its time
+and place, and in spite of its patent aesthetic value, still it
+does not adequately serve the more everyday ends of life in a
+modern industrial community. Even that large and substantial body
+of well-bred, upper and middle-class women to whose
+dispassionate, matronly sense of the traditional proprieties this
+relation of status commends itself as fundamentally and eternally
+right-even these, whose attitude is conservative, commonly find
+some slight discrepancy in detail between things as they are and
+things as they should be in this respect. But that less
+manageable body of modern women who, by force of youth,
+education, or temperament, are in some degree out of touch with
+the traditions of status received from the barbarian culture, and
+in whom there is, perhaps, an undue reversion to the impulse of
+self-expression and workmanship -- these are touched with a sense
+of grievance too vivid to leave them at rest.
+
+In this "New-Woman" movement -- as these blind and
+incoherent efforts to rehabilitate the woman's pre-glacial
+standing have been named -- there are at least two elements
+discernible, both of which are of an economic character. These
+two elements or motives are expressed by the double watchword,
+"Emancipation" and "Work." Each of these words is recognized to
+stand for something in the way of a wide-spread sense of
+grievance. The prevalence of the sentiment is recognized even by
+people who do not see that there is any real ground for a
+grievance in the situation as it stands today. It is among the
+women of the well-to-do classes, in the communities which are
+farthest advanced in industrial development, that this sense of a
+grievance to be redressed is most alive and finds most frequent
+expression. That is to say, in other words, there is a demand,
+more or less serious, for emancipation from all relation of
+status, tutelage, or vicarious life; and the revulsion asserts
+itself especially among the class of women upon whom the scheme
+of life handed down from the regime of status imposes with least
+litigation a vicarious life, and in those communities whose
+economic development has departed farthest from the circumstances
+to which this traditional scheme is adapted. The demand comes
+from that portion of womankind which is excluded by the canons of
+good repute from all effectual work, and which is closely
+reserved for a life of leisure and conspicuous consumption.
+
+More than one critic of this new-woman movement has
+misapprehended its motive. The case of the American "new woman"
+has lately been summed up with some warmth by a popular observer
+of social phenomena: "She is petted by her husband, the most
+devoted and hard-working of husbands in the world. ... She is the
+superior of her husband in education, and in almost every
+respect. She is surrounded by the most numerous and delicate
+attentions. Yet she is not satisfied. ... The Anglo-Saxon 'new
+woman' is the most ridiculous production of modern times, and
+destined to be the most ghastly failure of the century." Apart
+from the deprecation -- perhaps well placed -- which is contained
+in this presentment, it adds nothing but obscurity to the woman
+question. The grievance of the new woman is made up of those
+things which this typical characterization of the movement urges
+as reasons why she should be content. She is petted, and is
+permitted, or even required, to consume largely and conspicuously
+-- vicariously for her husband or other natural guardian. She is
+exempted, or debarred, from vulgarly useful employment -- in
+order to perform leisure vicariously for the good repute of her
+natural (pecuniary) guardian. These offices are the conventional
+marks of the un-free, at the same time that they are incompatible
+with the human impulse to purposeful activity. But the woman is
+endowed with her share-which there is reason to believe is more
+than an even share -- of the instinct of workmanship, to which
+futility of life or of expenditure is obnoxious. She must unfold
+her life activity in response to the direct, unmediated stimuli
+of the economic environment with which she is in contact. The
+impulse is perhaps stronger upon the woman than upon the man to
+live her own life in her own way and to enter the industrial
+process of the community at something nearer than the second
+remove.
+
+So long as the woman's place is consistently that of a drudge,
+she is, in the average of cases, fairly contented with her lot.
+She not only has something tangible and purposeful to do, but she
+has also no time or thought to spare for a rebellious assertion
+of such human propensity to self-direction as she has inherited.
+And after the stage of universal female drudgery is passed, and a
+vicarious leisure without strenuous application becomes the
+accredited employment of the women of the well-to-do classes, the
+prescriptive force of the canon of pecuniary decency, which
+requires the observance of ceremonial futility on their part,
+will long preserve high-minded women from any sentimental leaning
+to self-direction and a "sphere of usefulness." This is
+especially true during the earlier phases of the pecuniary
+culture, while the leisure of the leisure class is still in great
+measure a predatory activity, an active assertion of mastery in
+which there is enough of tangible purpose of an invidious kind to
+admit of its being taken seriously as an employment to which one
+may without shame put one's hand. This condition of things has
+obviously lasted well down into the present in some communities.
+It continues to hold to a different extent for different
+individuals, varying with the vividness of the sense of status
+and with the feebleness of the impulse to workmanship with which
+the individual is endowed. But where the economic structure of
+the community has so far outgrown the scheme of life based on
+status that the relation of personal subservience is no longer
+felt to be the sole "natural" human relation; there the ancient
+habit of purposeful activity will begin to assert itself in the
+less conformable individuals against the more recent, relatively
+superficial, relatively ephemeral habits and views which the
+predatory and the pecuniary culture have contributed to our
+scheme of life. These habits and views begin to lose their
+coercive force for the community or the class in question so soon
+as the habit of mind and the views of life due to the predatory
+and the quasi-peaceable discipline cease to be in fairly close
+accord with the later-developed economic situation. This is
+evident in the case of the industrious classes of modern
+communities; for them the leisure-class scheme of life has lost
+much of its binding force, especially as regards the element of
+status. But it is also visibly being verified in the case of the
+upper classes, though not in the same manner.
+
+The habits derived from the predatory and quasi-peaceable culture
+are relatively ephemeral variants of certain underlying
+propensities and mental characteristics of the race; which it
+owes to the protracted discipline of the earlier,
+proto-anthropoid cultural stage of peaceable, relatively
+undifferentiated economic life carried on in contact with a
+relatively simple and invariable material environment. When the
+habits superinduced by the emulative method of life have ceased
+to enjoy the section of existing economic exigencies, a process
+of disintegration sets in whereby the habits of thought of more
+recent growth and of a less generic character to some extent
+yield the ground before the more ancient and more pervading
+spiritual characteristics of the race.
+
+In a sense, then, the new-woman movement marks a reversion to a
+more generic type of human character, or to a less
+differentiated expression of human nature. It is a type of human
+nature which is to be characterized as proto-anthropoid, and, as
+regards the substance if not the form of its dominant traits, it
+belongs to a cultural stage that may be classed as possibly
+sub-human. The particular movement or evolutional feature in
+question of course shares this characterization with the rest of
+the later social development, in so far as this social
+development shows evidence of a reversion to the spiritual
+attitude that characterizes the earlier, undifferentiated stage
+of economic revolution. Such evidence of a general tendency to
+reversion from the dominance of the invidious interest is not
+entirely wanting, although it is neither plentiful nor
+unquestionably convincing. The general decay of the sense of
+status in modern industrial communities goes some way as evidence
+in this direction; and the perceptible return to a disapproval of
+futility in human life, and a disapproval of such activities as
+serve only the individual gain at the cost of the collectivity or
+at the cost of other social groups, is evidence to a like effect.
+There is a perceptible tendency to deprecate the infliction of
+pain, as well as to discredit all marauding enterprises, even
+where these expressions of the invidious interest do not tangibly
+work to the material detriment of the community or of the
+individual who passes an opinion on them. It may even be said
+that in the modern industrial communities the average,
+dispassionate sense of men says that the ideal character is a
+character which makes for peace, good-will, and economic
+efficiency, rather than for a life of self-seeking, force, fraud,
+and mastery.
+
+The influence of the leisure class is not consistently for or
+against the rehabilitation of this proto-anthropoid human nature.
+So far as concerns the chance of survival of individuals endowed
+with an exceptionally large share of the primitive traits, the
+sheltered position of the class favors its members directly by
+withdrawing them from the pecuniary struggle; but indirectly,
+through the leisure-class canons of conspicuous waste of goods
+and effort, the institution of a leisure class lessens the chance
+of survival of such individuals in the entire body of the
+population. The decent requirements of waste absorb the surplus
+energy of the population in an invidious struggle and leave no
+margin for the non-invidious expression of life. The remoter,
+less tangible, spiritual effects of the discipline of decency go
+in the same direction and work perhaps more effectually to the
+same end. The canons of decent life are an elaboration of the
+principle of invidious comparison, and they accordingly act
+consistently to inhibit all non-invidious effort and to inculcate
+the self-regarding attitude.
+
+Chapter Fourteen
+
+The Higher Learning as an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture
+
+To the end that suitable habits of thought on certain heads may
+be conserved in the incoming generation, a scholastic discipline
+is sanctioned by the common sense of the community and
+incorporated into the accredited scheme of life. The habits of
+thought which are so formed under the guidance of teachers and
+scholastic traditions have an economic value -- a value as
+affecting the serviceability of the individual -- no less real
+than the similar economic value of the habits of thought formed
+without such guidance under the discipline of everyday life.
+Whatever characteristics of the accredited scholastic scheme and
+discipline are traceable to the predilections of the leisure
+class or to the guidance of the canons of pecuniary merit are to
+be set down to the account of that institution, and whatever
+economic value these features of the educational scheme possess
+are the expression in detail of the value of that institution. It
+will be in place, therefore, to point out any peculiar features
+of the educational system which are traceable to the
+leisure-class scheme of life, whether as regards the aim and
+method of the discipline, or as regards the compass and character
+of the body of knowledge inculcated. It is in learning proper,
+and more particularly in the higher learning, that the influence
+of leisure-class ideals is most patent; and since the purpose
+here is not to make an exhaustive collation of data showing the
+effect of the pecuniary culture upon education, but rather to
+illustrate the method and trend of the leisure-class influence in
+education, a survey of certain salient features of the higher
+learning, such as may serve this purpose, is all that will be
+attempted.
+
+In point of derivation and early development, learning is
+somewhat closely related to the devotional function of the
+community, particularly to the body of observances in which the
+service rendered the supernatural leisure class expresses itself.
+The service by which it is sought to conciliate supernatural
+agencies in the primitive cults is not an industrially profitable
+employment of the community's time and effort. It is, therefore,
+in great part, to be classed as a vicarious leisure performed for
+the supernatural powers with whom negotiations are carried on and
+whose good-will the service and the professions of subservience
+are conceived to procure. In great part, the early learning
+consisted in an acquisition of knowledge and facility in the
+service of a supernatural agent. It was therefore closely
+analogous in character to the training required for the domestic
+service of a temporal master. To a great extent, the knowledge
+acquired under the priestly teachers of the primitive community
+was knowledge of ritual and ceremonial; that is to say, a
+knowledge of the most proper, most effective, or most acceptable
+manner of approaching and of serving the preternatural agents.
+What was learned was how to make oneself indispensable to these
+powers, and so to put oneself in a position to ask, or even to
+require, their intercession in the course of events or their
+abstention from interference in any given enterprise.
+Propitiation was the end, and this end was sought, in great part,
+by acquiring facility in subservience. It appears to have been
+only gradually that other elements than those of efficient
+service of the master found their way into the stock of priestly
+or shamanistic instruction.
+
+The priestly servitor of the inscrutable powers that move in the
+external world came to stand in the position of a mediator
+between these powers and the common run of unrestricted humanity;
+for he was possessed of a knowledge of the supernatural etiquette
+which would admit him into the presence. And as commonly happens
+with mediators between the vulgar and their masters, whether the
+masters be natural or preternatural, he found it expedient to
+have the means at hand tangibly to impress upon the vulgar the
+fact that these inscrutable powers would do what he might ask of
+them. Hence, presently, a knowledge of certain natural processes
+which could be turned to account for spectacular effect, together
+with some sleight of hand, came to be an integral part of
+priestly lore. Knowledge of this kind passes for knowledge of the
+"unknowable", and it owes its serviceability for the sacerdotal
+purpose to its recondite character. It appears to have been from
+this source that learning, as an institution, arose, and its
+differentiation from this its parent stock of magic ritual and
+shamanistic fraud has been slow and tedious, and is scarcely yet
+complete even in the most advanced of the higher seminaries of
+learning.
+
+The recondite element in learning is still, as it has been in all
+ages, a very attractive and effective element for the purpose of
+impressing, or even imposing upon, the unlearned; and the
+standing of the savant in the mind of the altogether
+unlettered is in great measure rated in terms of intimacy with
+the occult forces. So, for instance, as a typical case, even so
+late as the middle of this century, the Norwegian peasants have
+instinctively formulated their sense of the superior erudition of
+such doctors of divinity as Luther, Malanchthon, Peder Dass, and
+even so late a scholar in divinity as Grundtvig, in terms of the
+Black Art. These, together with a very comprehensive list of
+minor celebrities, both living and dead, have been reputed
+masters in all magical arts; and a high position in the
+ecclesiastical personnel has carried with it, in the apprehension
+of these good people, an implication of profound familiarity with
+magical practice and the occult sciences. There is a parallel
+fact nearer home, similarly going to show the close relationship,
+in popular apprehension, between erudition and the unknowable;
+and it will at the same time serve to illustrate, in somewhat
+coarse outline, the bent which leisure-class life gives to the
+cognitive interest. While the belief is by no means confined to
+the leisure class, that class today comprises a
+disproportionately large number of believers in occult sciences
+of all kinds and shades. By those whose habits of thought are not
+shaped by contact with modern industry, the knowledge of the
+unknowable is still felt to the ultimate if not the only true
+knowledge.
+
+Learning, then, set out by being in some sense a by-product of
+the priestly vicarious leisure class; and, at least until a
+recent date, the higher learning has since remained in some sense
+a by-product or by-occupation of the priestly classes. As the
+body of systematized knowledge increased, there presently arose a
+distinction, traceable very far back in the history of education,
+between esoteric and exoteric knowledge, the former -- so far as
+there is a substantial difference between the two -- comprising
+such knowledge as is primarily of no economic or industrial
+effect, and the latter comprising chiefly knowledge of industrial
+processes and of natural phenomena which were habitually turned
+to account for the material purposes of life. This line of
+demarcation has in time become, at least in popular apprehension,
+the normal line between the higher learning and the lower.
+
+It is significant, not only as an evidence of their close
+affiliation with the priestly craft, but also as indicating that
+their activity to a good extent falls under that category of
+conspicuous leisure known as manners and breeding, that the
+learned class in all primitive communities are great sticklers
+for form, precedent, gradations of rank, ritual, ceremonial
+vestments, and learned paraphernalia generally. This is of course
+to be expected, and it goes to say that the higher learning, in
+its incipient phase, is a leisure-class occupation -- more
+specifically an occupation of the vicarious leisure class
+employed in the service of the supernatural leisure class. But
+this predilection for the paraphernalia of learning goes also to
+indicate a further point of contact or of continuity between the
+priestly office and the office of the savant. In point of
+derivation, learning, as well as the priestly office, is largely
+an outgrowth of sympathetic magic; and this magical apparatus of
+form and ritual therefore finds its place with the learned class
+of the primitive community as a matter of course. The ritual and
+paraphernalia have an occult efficacy for the magical purpose; so
+that their presence as an integral factor in the earlier phases
+of the development of magic and science is a matter of
+expediency, quite as much as of affectionate regard for symbolism
+simply.
+
+This sense of the efficacy of symbolic ritual, and of sympathetic
+effect to be wrought through dexterous rehearsal of the
+traditional accessories of the act or end to be compassed, is of
+course present more obviously and in larger measure in magical
+practice than in the discipline of the sciences, even of the
+occult sciences. But there are, I apprehend, few persons with a
+cultivated sense of scholastic merit to whom the ritualistic
+accessories of science are altogether an idle matter. The very
+great tenacity with which these ritualistic paraphernalia persist
+through the later course of the development is evident to any one
+who will reflect on what has been the history of learning in our
+civilization. Even today there are such things in the usage of
+the learned community as the cap and gown, matriculation,
+initiation, and graduation ceremonies, and the conferring of
+scholastic degrees, dignities, and prerogatives in a way which
+suggests some sort of a scholarly apostolic succession. The usage
+of the priestly orders is no doubt the proximate source of all
+these features of learned ritual, vestments, sacramental
+initiation, the transmission of peculiar dignities and virtues by
+the imposition of hands, and the like; but their derivation is
+traceable back of this point, to the source from which the
+specialized priestly class proper came to be distinguished from
+the sorcerer on the one hand and from the menial servant of a
+temporal master on the other hand. So far as regards both their
+derivation and their psychological content, these usages and the
+conceptions on which they rest belong to a stage in cultural
+development no later than that of the angekok and the rain-maker.
+Their place in the later phases of devout observance, as well as
+in the higher educational system, is that of a survival from a
+very early animistic phase of the development of human nature.
+
+These ritualistic features of the educational system of the
+present and of the recent past, it is quite safe to say, have
+their place primarily in the higher, liberal, and classic
+institutions and grades of learning, rather than in the lower,
+technological, or practical grades, and branches of the system.
+So far as they possess them, the lower and less reputable
+branches of the educational scheme have evidently borrowed these
+things from the higher grades; and their continued persistence
+among the practical schools, without the sanction of the
+continued example of the higher and classic grades, would be
+highly improbable, to say the least. With the lower and practical
+schools and scholars, the adoption and cultivation of these
+usages is a case of mimicry -- due to a desire to conform as far
+as may be to the standards of scholastic reputability maintained
+by the upper grades and classes, who have come by these accessory
+features legitimately, by the right of lineal devolution.
+
+The analysis may even be safely carried a step farther.
+Ritualistic survivals and reversions come out in fullest vigor
+and with the freest air of spontaneity among those seminaries of
+learning which have to do primarily with the education of the
+priestly and leisure classes. Accordingly it should appear, and
+it does pretty plainly appear, on a survey of recent developments
+in college and university life, that wherever schools founded for
+the instruction of the lower classes in the immediately useful
+branches of knowledge grow into institutions of the higher
+learning, the growth of ritualistic ceremonial and paraphernalia
+and of elaborate scholastic "functions" goes hand in hand with
+the transition of the schools in question from the field of
+homely practicality into the higher, classical sphere. The
+initial purpose of these schools, and the work with which they
+have chiefly had to do at the earlier of these two stages of
+their evolution, has been that of fitting the young of the
+industrious classes for work. On the higher, classical plane of
+learning to which they commonly tend, their dominant aim becomes
+the preparation of the youth of the priestly and the leisure
+classes -- or of an incipient leisure class -- for the
+consumption of goods, material and immaterial, according to a
+conventionally accepted, reputable scope and method. This happy
+issue has commonly been the fate of schools founded by "friends
+of the people" for the aid of struggling young men, and where
+this transition is made in good form there is commonly, if not
+invariably, a coincident change to a more ritualistic life in the
+schools.
+
+In the school life of today, learned ritual is in a general way
+best at home in schools whose chief end is the cultivation of the
+"humanities". This correlation is shown, perhaps more neatly than
+anywhere else, in the life-history of the American colleges and
+universities of recent growth. There may be many exceptions from
+the rule, especially among those schools which have been founded
+by the typically reputable and ritualistic churches, and which,
+therefore, started on the conservative and classical plane or
+reached the classical position by a short-cut; but the general
+rule as regards the colleges founded in the newer American
+communities during the present century has been that so long as
+the constituency from which the colleges have drawn their pupils
+has been dominated by habits of industry and thrift, so long the
+reminiscences of the medicine-man have found but a scant and
+precarious acceptance in the scheme of college life. But so soon
+as wealth begins appreciably to accumulate in the community, and
+so soon as a given school begins to lean on a leisure-class
+constituency, there comes also a perceptibly increased insistence
+on scholastic ritual and on conformity to the ancient forms as
+regards vestments and social and scholastic solemnities. So, for
+instance, there has been an approximate coincidence between the
+growth of wealth among the constituency which supports any given
+college of the Middle West and the date of acceptance -- first
+into tolerance and then into imperative vogue -- of evening dress
+for men and of the décolleté for women, as the scholarly
+vestments proper to occasions of learned solemnity or to the
+seasons of social amenity within the college circle. Apart from
+the mechanical difficulty of so large a task, it would scarcely
+be a difficult matter to trace this correlation. The like is true
+of the vogue of the cap and gown.
+
+Cap and gown have been adopted as learned insignia by many
+colleges of this section within the last few years; and it is
+safe to say that this could scarcely have occurred at a much
+earlier date, or until there had grown up a leisure-class
+sentiment of sufficient volume in the community to support a
+strong movement of reversion towards an archaic view as to the
+legitimate end of education. This particular item of learned
+ritual, it may be noted, would not only commend itself to the
+leisure-class sense of the fitness of things, as appealing to the
+archaic propensity for spectacular effect and the predilection
+for antique symbolism; but it at the same time fits into the
+leisure-class scheme of life as involving a notable element of
+conspicuous waste. The precise date at which the reversion to cap
+and gown took place, as well as the fact that it affected so
+large a number of schools at about the same time, seems to have
+been due in some measure to a wave of atavistic sense of
+conformity and reputability that passed over the community at
+that period.
+
+It may not be entirely beside the point to note that in point of
+time this curious reversion seems to coincide with the
+culmination of a certain vogue of atavistic sentiment and
+tradition in other directions also. The wave of reversion seems
+to have received its initial impulse in the psychologically
+disintegrating effects of the Civil War. Habituation to war
+entails a body of predatory habits of thought, whereby
+clannishness in some measure replaces the sense of solidarity,
+and a sense of invidious distinction supplants the impulse to
+equitable, everyday serviceability. As an outcome of the
+cumulative action of these factors, the generation which follows
+a season of war is apt to witness a rehabilitation of the element
+of status, both in its social life and in its scheme of devout
+observances and other symbolic or ceremonial forms. Throughout
+the eighties, and less plainly traceable through the seventies
+also, there was perceptible a gradually advancing wave of
+sentiment favoring quasi-predatory business habits, insistence on
+status, anthropomorphism, and conservatism generally. The more
+direct and unmediated of these expressions of the barbarian
+temperament, such as the recrudescence of outlawry and the
+spectacular quasi-predatory careers of fraud run by certain
+"captains of industry", came to a head earlier and were
+appreciably on the decline by the close of the seventies. The
+recrudescence of anthropomorphic sentiment also seems to have
+passed its most acute stage before the close of the eighties. But
+the learned ritual and paraphernalia here spoken of are a still
+remoter and more recondite expression of the barbarian animistic
+sense; and these, therefore, gained vogue and elaboration more
+slowly and reached their most effective development at a still
+later date. There is reason to believe that the culmination is
+now already past. Except for the new impetus given by a new war
+experience, and except for the support which the growth of a
+wealthy class affords to all ritual, and especially to whatever
+ceremonial is wasteful and pointedly suggests gradations of
+status, it is probable that the late improvements and
+augmentation of scholastic insignia and ceremonial would
+gradually decline. But while it may be true that the cap and
+gown, and the more strenuous observance of scholastic proprieties
+which came with them, were floated in on this post-bellum tidal
+wave of reversion to barbarism, it is also no doubt true that
+such a ritualistic reversion could not have been effected in the
+college scheme of life until the accumulation of wealth in the
+hands of a propertied class had gone far enough to afford the
+requisite pecuniary ground for a movement which should bring the
+colleges of the country up to the leisure-class requirements in
+the higher learning. The adoption of the cap and gown is one of
+the striking atavistic features of modern college life, and at
+the same time it marks the fact that these colleges have
+definitely become leisure-class establishments, either in actual
+achievement or in aspiration.
+
+As further evidence of the close relation between the educational
+system and the cultural standards of the community, it may be
+remarked that there is some tendency latterly to substitute the
+captain of industry in place of the priest, as the head of
+seminaries of the higher learning. The substitution is by no
+means complete or unequivocal. Those heads of institutions are
+best accepted who combine the sacerdotal office with a high
+degree of pecuniary efficiency. There is a similar but less
+pronounced tendency to intrust the work of instruction in the
+higher learning to men of some pecuniary qualification.
+Administrative ability and skill in advertising the enterprise
+count for rather more than they once did, as qualifications for
+the work of teaching. This applies especially in those sciences
+that have most to do with the everyday facts of life, and it is
+particularly true of schools in the economically single-minded
+communities. This partial substitution of pecuniary for
+sacerdotal efficiency is a concomitant of the modern transition
+from conspicuous leisure to conspicuous consumption, as the chief
+means of reputability. The correlation of the two facts is
+probably clear without further elaboration.
+
+The attitude of the schools and of the learned class towards the
+education of women serves to show in what manner and to what
+extent learning has departed from its ancient station of priestly
+and leisure-class prerogatives, and it indicates also what
+approach has been made by the truly learned to the modern,
+economic or industrial, matter-of-fact standpoint. The higher
+schools and the learned professions were until recently tabu to
+the women. These establishments were from the outset, and have in
+great measure continued to be, devoted to the education of the
+priestly and leisure classes.
+
+The women, as has been shown elsewhere, were the original
+subservient class, and to some extent, especially so far as
+regards their nominal or ceremonial position, they have remained
+in that relation down to the present. There has prevailed a
+strong sense that the admission of women to the privileges of the
+higher learning (as to the Eleusianin mysteries) would be
+derogatory to the dignity of the learned craft. It is therefore
+only very recently, and almost solely in the industrially most
+advanced communities, that the higher grades of schools have been
+freely opened to women. And even under the urgent circumstances
+prevailing in the modern industrial communities, the highest and
+most reputable universities show an extreme reluctance in making
+the move. The sense of class worthiness, that is to say of
+status, of a honorific differentiation of the sexes according to
+a distinction between superior and inferior intellectual dignity,
+survives in a vigorous form in these corporations of the
+aristocracy of learning. It is felt that the woman should, in all
+propriety, acquire only such knowledge as may be classed under
+one or the other of two heads: (1) such knowledge as conduces
+immediately to a better performance of domestic service -- the
+domestic sphere; (2) such accomplishments and dexterity,
+quasi-scholarly and quasi-artistic, as plainly come in under the
+head of a performance of vicarious leisure. Knowledge is felt to
+be unfeminine if it is knowledge which expresses the unfolding of
+the learner's own life, the acquisition of which proceeds on the
+learner's own cognitive interest, without prompting from the
+canons of propriety, and without reference back to a master whose
+comfort or good repute is to be enhanced by the employment or the
+exhibition of it. So, also, all knowledge which is useful as
+evidence of leisure, other than vicarious leisure, is scarcely
+feminine.
+
+For an appreciation of the relation which these higher seminaries
+of learning bear to the economic life of the community, the
+phenomena which have been reviewed are of importance rather as
+indications of a general attitude than as being in themselves
+facts of first-rate economic consequence. They go to show what is
+the instinctive attitude and animus of the learned class towards
+the life process of an industrial community. They serve as an
+exponent of the stage of development, for the industrial purpose,
+attained by the higher learning and by the learned class, and so
+they afford an indication as to what may fairly be looked for
+from this class at points where the learning and the life of the
+class bear more immediately upon the economic life and efficiency
+of the community, and upon the adjustment of its scheme of life
+to the requirements of the time. What these ritualistic survivals
+go to indicate is a prevalence of conservatism, if not of
+reactionary sentiment, especially among the higher schools where
+the conventional learning is cultivated.
+
+To these indications of a conservative attitude is to be added
+another characteristic which goes in the same direction, but
+which is a symptom of graver consequence that this playful
+inclination to trivialities of form and ritual. By far the
+greater number of American colleges and universities, for
+instance, are affiliated to some religious denomination and are
+somewhat given to devout observances. Their putative familiarity
+with scientific methods and the scientific point of view should
+presumably exempt the faculties of these schools from animistic
+habits of thought; but there is still a considerable proportion
+of them who profess an attachment to the anthropomorphic beliefs
+and observances of an earlier culture. These professions of
+devotional zeal are, no doubt, to a good extent expedient and
+perfunctory, both on the part of the schools in their corporate
+capacity, and on the part of the individual members of the corps
+of instructors; but it can not be doubted that there is after all
+a very appreciable element of anthropomorphic sentiment present
+in the higher schools. So far as this is the case it must be set
+down as the expression of an archaic, animistic habit of mind.
+This habit of mind must necessarily assert itself to some extent
+in the instruction offered, and to this extent its influence in
+shaping the habits of thought of the student makes for
+conservatism and reversion; it acts to hinder his development in
+the direction of matter-of-fact knowledge, such as best serves
+the ends of industry.
+
+The college sports, which have so great a vogue in the reputable
+seminaries of learning today, tend in a similar direction; and,
+indeed, sports have much in common with the devout attitude of
+the colleges, both as regards their psychological basis and as
+regards their disciplinary effect. But this expression of the
+barbarian temperament is to be credited primarily to the body of
+students, rather than to the temper of the schools as such;
+except in so far as the colleges or the college officials -- as
+sometimes happens -- actively countenance and foster the growth
+of sports. The like is true of college fraternities as of college
+sports, but with a difference. The latter are chiefly an
+expression of the predatory impulse simply; the former are more
+specifically an expression of that heritage of clannishness which
+is so large a feature in the temperament of the predatory
+barbarian. It is also noticeable that a close relation subsists
+between the fraternities and the sporting activity of the
+schools. After what has already been said in an earlier chapter
+on the sporting and gambling habit, it is scarcely necessary
+further to discuss the economic value of this training in sports
+and in factional organization and activity.
+
+But all these features of the scheme of life of the learned
+class, and of the establishments dedicated to the conservation of
+the higher learning, are in a great measure incidental only. They
+are scarcely to be accounted organic elements of the professed
+work of research and instruction for the ostensible pursuit of
+which the schools exists. But these symptomatic indications go to
+establish a presumption as to the character of the work performed
+-- as seen from the economic point of view -- and as to the bent
+which the serious work carried on under their auspices gives to
+the youth who resort to the schools. The presumption raised by
+the considerations already offered is that in their work also, as
+well as in their ceremonial, the higher schools may be expected
+to take a conservative position; but this presumption must be
+checked by a comparison of the economic character of the work
+actually performed, and by something of a survey of the learning
+whose conservation is intrusted to the higher schools. On this
+head, it is well known that the accredited seminaries of learning
+have, until a recent date, held a conservative position. They
+have taken an attitude of depreciation towards all innovations.
+As a general rule a new point of view or a new formulation of
+knowledge have been countenanced and taken up within the schools
+only after these new things have made their way outside of the
+schools. As exceptions from this rule are chiefly to be mentioned
+innovations of an inconspicuous kind and departures which do not
+bear in any tangible way upon the conventional point of view or
+upon the conventional scheme of life; as, for instance, details
+of fact in the mathematico-physical sciences, and new readings
+and interpretations of the classics, especially such as have a
+philological or literary bearing only. Except within the domain
+of the "humanities", in the narrow sense, and except so far as
+the traditional point of view of the humanities has been left
+intact by the innovators, it has generally held true that the
+accredited learned class and the seminaries of the higher
+learning have looked askance at all innovation. New views, new
+departures in scientific theory, especially in new departures
+which touch the theory of human relations at any point, have
+found a place in the scheme of the university tardily and by a
+reluctant tolerance, rather than by a cordial welcome; and the
+men who have occupied themselves with such efforts to widen the
+scope of human knowledge have not commonly been well received by
+their learned contemporaries. The higher schools have not
+commonly given their countenance to a serious advance in the
+methods or the content of knowledge until the innovations have
+outlived their youth and much of their usefulness -- after they
+have become commonplaces of the intellectual furniture of a new
+generation which has grown up under, and has had its habits of
+thought shaped by, the new, extra-scholastic body of knowledge
+and the new standpoint. This is true of the recent past. How far
+it may be true of the immediate present it would be hazardous to
+say, for it is impossible to see present-day facts in such
+perspective as to get a fair conception of their relative
+proportions.
+
+So far, nothing has been said of the Maecenas function of the
+well-to-do, which is habitually dwelt on at some length by
+writers and speakers who treat of the development of culture and
+of social structure. This leisure-class function is not without
+an important bearing on the higher and on the spread of knowledge
+and culture. The manner and the degree in which the class
+furthers learning through patronage of this kind is sufficiently
+familiar. It has been frequently presented in affectionate and
+effective terms by spokesmen whose familiarity with the topic
+fits them to bring home to their hearers the profound
+significance of this cultural factor. These spokesmen, however,
+have presented the matter from the point of view of the cultural
+interest, or of the interest of reputability, rather than from
+that of the economic interest. As apprehended from the economic
+point of view, and valued for the purpose of industrial
+serviceability, this function of the well-to-do, as well as the
+intellectual attitude of members of the well-to-do class, merits
+some attention and will bear illustration.
+
+By way of characterization of the Maecenas relation, it is to be
+noted that, considered externally, as an economic or industrial
+relation simply, it is a relation of status. The scholar under
+the patronage performs the duties of a learned life vicariously
+for his patron, to whom a certain repute inures after the manner
+of the good repute imputed to a master for whom any form of
+vicarious leisure is performed. It is also to be noted that, in
+point of historical fact, the furtherance of learning or the
+maintenance of scholarly activity through the Maecenas relation
+has most commonly been a furtherance of proficiency in classical
+lore or in the humanities. The knowledge tends to lower rather
+than to heighten the industrial efficiency of the community.
+
+Further, as regards the direct participation of the members of
+the leisure class in the furtherance of knowledge, the canons of
+reputable living act to throw such intellectual interest as seeks
+expression among the class on the side of classical and formal
+erudition, rather than on the side of the sciences that bear some
+relation to the community's industrial life. The most frequent
+excursions into other than classical fields of knowledge on the
+part of members of the leisure class are made into the discipline
+of law and the political, and more especially the administrative,
+sciences. These so-called sciences are substantially bodies of
+maxims of expediency for guidance in the leisure-class office of
+government, as conducted on a proprietary basis. The interest
+with which this discipline is approached is therefore not
+commonly the intellectual or cognitive interest simply. It is
+largely the practical interest of the exigencies of that relation
+of mastery in which the members of the class are placed. In point
+of derivation, the office of government is a predatory function,
+pertaining integrally to the archaic leisure-class scheme of
+life. It is an exercise of control and coercion over the
+population from which the class draws its sustenance. This
+discipline, as well as the incidents of practice which give it
+its content, therefore has some attraction for the class apart
+from all questions of cognition. All this holds true wherever and
+so long as the governmental office continues, in form or in
+substance, to be a proprietary office; and it holds true beyond
+that limit, in so far as the tradition of the more archaic phase
+of governmental evolution has lasted on into the later life of
+those modern communities for whom proprietary government by a
+leisure class is now beginning to pass away.
+
+For that field of learning within which the cognitive or
+intellectual interest is dominant -- the sciences properly so
+called -- the case is somewhat different, not only as regards the
+attitude of the leisure class, but as regards the whole drift of
+the pecuniary culture. Knowledge for its own sake, the exercise
+of the faculty of comprehensive without ulterior purpose, should,
+it might be expected, be sought by men whom no urgent material
+interest diverts from such a quest. The sheltered industrial
+position of the leisure class should give free play to the
+cognitive interest in members of this class, and we should
+consequently have, as many writers confidently find that we do
+have, a very large proportion of scholars, scientists, savants
+derived from this class and deriving their incentive to
+scientific investigation and speculation from the discipline of a
+life of leisure. Some such result is to be looked for, but there
+are features of the leisure-class scheme of life, already
+sufficiently dwelt upon, which go to divert the intellectual
+interest of this class to other subjects than that causal
+sequence in phenomena which makes the content of the sciences.
+The habits of thought which characterize the life of the class
+run on the personal relation of dominance, and on the derivative,
+invidious concepts of honor, worth, merit, character, and the
+like. The casual sequence which makes up the subject matter of
+science is not visible from this point of view. Neither does good
+repute attach to knowledge of facts that are vulgarly useful.
+Hence it should appear probable that the interest of the
+invidious comparison with respect to pecuniary or other honorific
+merit should occupy the attention of the leisure class, to the
+neglect of the cognitive interest. Where this latter interest
+asserts itself it should commonly be diverted to fields of
+speculation or investigation which are reputable and futile,
+rather than to the quest of scientific knowledge. Such indeed has
+been the history of priestly and leisure-class learning so long
+as no considerable body of systematized knowledge had been
+intruded into the scholastic discipline from an extra-scholastic
+source. But since the relation of mastery and subservience is
+ceasing to be the dominant and formative factor in the
+community's life process, other features of the life process and
+other points of view are forcing themselves upon the scholars.
+The true-bred gentleman of leisure should, and does, see the
+world from the point of view of the personal relation; and the
+cognitive interest, so far as it asserts itself in him, should
+seek to systematize phenomena on this basis. Such indeed is the
+case with the gentleman of the old school, in whom the
+leisure-class ideals have suffered no disintegration; and such is
+the attitude of his latter-day descendant, in so far as he has
+fallen heir to the full complement of upper-class virtues. But
+the ways of heredity are devious, and not every gentleman's son
+is to the manor born. Especially is the transmission of the
+habits of thought which characterize the predatory master
+somewhat precarious in the case of a line of descent in which but
+one or two of the latest steps have lain within the leisure-class
+discipline. The chances of occurrence of a strong congenital or
+acquired bent towards the exercise of the cognitive aptitudes are
+apparently best in those members of the leisure class who are of
+lower class or middle class antecedents -- that is to say, those
+who have inherited the complement of aptitudes proper to the
+industrious classes, and who owe their place in the leisure class
+to the possession of qualities which count for more today than
+they did in the times when the leisure-class scheme of life took
+shape. But even outside the range of these later accessions to
+the leisure class there are an appreciable number of individuals
+in whom the invidious interest is not sufficiently dominant to
+shape their theoretical views, and in whom the proclivity to
+theory is sufficiently strong to lead them into the scientific
+quest.
+
+The higher learning owes the intrusion of the sciences in part to
+these aberrant scions of the leisure class, who have come under
+the dominant influence of the latter-day tradition of impersonal
+relation and who have inherited a complement of human aptitudes
+differing in certain salient features from the temperament which
+is characteristic of the regime of status. But it owes the
+presence of this alien body of scientific knowledge also in part,
+and in a higher degree, to members of the industrious classes who
+have been in sufficiently easy circumstances to turn their
+attention to other interests than that of finding daily
+sustenance, and whose inherited aptitudes and anthropomorphic
+point of view does not dominate their intellectual processes. As
+between these two groups, which approximately comprise the
+effective force of scientific progress, it is the latter that has
+contributed the most. And with respect to both it seems to be
+true that they are not so much the source as the vehicle, or at
+the most they are the instrument of commutation, by which the
+habits of thought enforced upon the community, through contact
+with its environment under the exigencies of modern associated
+life and the mechanical industries, are turned to account for
+theoretical knowledge.
+
+Science, in the sense of an articulate recognition of causal
+sequence in phenomena, whether physical or social, has been a
+feature of the Western culture only since the industrial process
+in the Western communities has come to be substantially a process
+of mechanical contrivances in which man's office is that of
+discrimination and valuation of material forces. Science has
+flourished somewhat in the same degree as the industrial life of
+the community has conformed to this pattern, and somewhat in the
+same degree as the industrial interest has dominated the
+community's life. And science, and scientific theory especially,
+has made headway in the several departments of human life and
+knowledge in proportion as each of these several departments has
+successively come into closer contact with the industrial process
+and the economic interest; or perhaps it is truer to say, in
+proportion as each of them has successively escaped from the
+dominance of the conceptions of personal relation or status, and
+of the derivative canons of anthropomorphic fitness and honorific
+worth.
+
+It is only as the exigencies of modern industrial life have
+enforced the recognition of causal sequence in the practical
+contact of mankind with their environment, that men have come to
+systematize the phenomena of this environment and the facts of
+their own contact with it,in terms of causal sequence. So that
+while the higher learning in its best development, as the perfect
+flower of scholasticism and classicism, was a by-product of the
+priestly office and the life of leisure, so modern science may be
+said to be a by-product of the industrial process. Through these
+groups of men, then -- investigators, savants, scientists,
+inventors, speculators -- most of whom have done their most
+telling work outside the shelter of the schools, the habits of
+thought enforced by the modern industrial life have found
+coherent expression and elaboration as a body of theoretical
+science having to do with the causal sequence of phenomena. And
+from this extra-scholastic field of scientific speculation,
+changes of method and purpose have from time to time been
+intruded into the scholastic discipline.
+
+In this connection it is to be remarked that there s a very
+perceptible difference of substance and purpose between the
+instruction offered in the primary and secondary schools, on the
+one hand, and in the higher seminaries of learning, on the other
+hand. The difference in point of immediate practicality of the
+information imparted and of the proficiency acquired may be of
+some consequence and may merit the attention which it has from
+time to time received; but there is more substantial difference
+in the mental and spiritual bent which is favored by the one and
+the other discipline. This divergent trend in discipline between
+the higher and the lower learning is especially noticeable as
+regards the primary education in its latest development in the
+advanced industrial communities. Here the instruction is directed
+chiefly to proficiency or dexterity, intellectual and manual, in
+the apprehension and employment of impersonal facts, in their
+casual rather than in their honorific incidence. It is true,
+under the traditions of the earlier days, when the primary
+education was also predominantly a leisure-class commodity, a
+free use is still mad of emulation as a spur to diligence in the
+common run of primary schools; but even this use of emulation as
+an expedient is visibly declining in the primary grades of
+instruction in communities where the lower education is not under
+the guidance of the ecclesiastical or military tradition. All
+this holds true in a peculiar degree, and more especially on the
+spiritual side, of such portions of the educational system as
+have been immediately affected by kindergarten methods and
+ideals.
+
+The peculiarly non-invidious trend of the kindergarten
+discipline, and the similar character of the kindergarten
+influence in primary education beyond the limits of the
+kindergarten proper, should be taken in connection with what has
+already been said of the peculiar spiritual attitude of
+leisure-class womankind under the circumstances of the modern
+economic situation. The kindergarten discipline is at its best --
+or at its farthest remove from ancient patriarchal and
+pedagogical ideals -- in the advanced industrial communities,
+where there is a considerable body of intelligent and idle women,
+and where the system of status has somewhat abated in rigor under
+the disintegrating influence of industrial life and in the
+absence of a consistent body of military and ecclesiastical
+traditions. It is from these women in easy circumstances that it
+gets its moral support. The aims and methods of the kindergarten
+commend themselves with especial effect to this class of women
+who are ill at ease under the pecuniary code of reputable life.
+The kindergarten, and whatever the kindergarten spirit counts for
+in modern education, therefore, is to be set down, along with the
+"new-woman movement," to the account of that revulsion against
+futility and invidious comparison which the leisure-class life
+under modern circumstances induces in the women most immediately
+exposed to its discipline. In this way it appears that, by
+indirection, the institution of a leisure class here again favors
+the growth of a non-invidious attitude, which may, in the long
+run, prove a menace to the stability of the institution itself,
+and even to the institution of individual ownership on which it
+rests. 
+
+During the recent past some tangible changes have taken place in
+the scope of college and university teaching. These changes have
+in the main consisted in a partial displacement of the humanities
+-- those branches of learning which are conceived to make for the
+traditional "culture", character, tastes, and ideals -- by those
+more matter-of-fact branches which make for civic and industrial
+efficiency. To put the same thing in other words, those branches
+of knowledge which make for efficiency (ultimately productive
+efficiency) have gradually been gaining ground against those
+branches which make for a heightened consumption or a lowered
+industrial efficiency and for a type of character suited to the
+regime of status. In this adaptation of the scheme of instruction
+the higher schools have commonly been found on the conservative
+side; each step which they have taken in advance has been to some
+extent of the nature of a concession. The sciences have been
+intruded into the scholar's discipline from without, not to say
+from below. It is noticeable that the humanities which have so
+reluctantly yielded ground to the sciences are pretty uniformly
+adapted to shape the character of the student in accordance with
+a traditional self-centred scheme of consumption; a scheme of
+contemplation and enjoyment of the true, the beautiful, and the
+good, according to a conventional standard of propriety and
+excellence, the salient feature of which is leisure -- otium cum
+dignitate. In language veiled by their own habituation to the
+archaic, decorous point of view, the spokesmen of the humanities
+have insisted upon the ideal embodied in the maxim, fruges
+consumere nati. This attitude should occasion no surprise in the
+case of schools which are shaped by and rest upon a leisure-class
+culture.
+
+The professed grounds on which it has been sought, as far as
+might be, to maintain the received standards and methods of
+culture intact are likewise characteristic of the archaic
+temperament and of the leisure-class theory of life. The
+enjoyment and the bent derived from habitual contemplation of the
+life, ideals, speculations, and methods of consuming time and
+goods, in vogue among the leisure class of classical time and
+goods, in vogue among the leisure class of classical antiquity,
+for instance, is felt to be "higher", "nobler", "worthier", than
+what results in these respects from a like familiarity with the
+everyday life and the knowledge and aspirations of commonplace
+humanity in a modern community. that learning the content of
+which is an unmitigated knowledge of latter-day men and things is
+by comparison "lower", "base", "ignoble" -- one even hears the
+epithet "sub-human" applied to this matter-of-fact knowledge of
+mankind and of everyday life.
+
+This contention of the leisure-class spokesmen of the
+humanities seems to be substantially sound. In point of
+substantial fact, the gratification and the culture, or the
+spiritual attitude or habit of mind, resulting from an habitual
+contemplation of the anthropomorphism, clannishness, and
+leisurely self-complacency of the gentleman of an early day, or
+from a familiarity with the animistic superstitions and the
+exuberant truculence of the Homeric heroes, for instance, is,
+aesthetically considered, more legitimate than the corresponding
+results derived from a matter-of-fact knowledge of things and a
+contemplation of latter-day civic or workmanlike efficiency.
+There can be but little question that the first-named habits have
+the advantage in respect of aesthetic or honorific value, and
+therefore in respect of the "worth" which is made the basis of
+award in the comparison. The content of the canons of taste, and
+more particularly of the canons of honor, is in the nature of
+things a resultant of the past life and circumstances of the
+race, transmitted to the later generation by inheritance or by
+tradition; and the fact that the protracted dominance of a
+predatory, leisure-class scheme of life has profoundly shaped the
+habit of mind and the point of view of the race in the past, is a
+sufficient basis for an aesthetically legitimate dominance of
+such a scheme of life in very much of what concerns matters of
+taste in the present. For the purpose in hand, canons of taste
+are race habits, acquired through a more or less protracted
+habituation to the approval or disapproval of the kind of things
+upon which a favorable or unfavorable judgment of taste is
+passed. Other things being equal, the longer and more unbroken
+the habituation, the more legitimate is the canon of taste in
+question. All this seems to be even truer of judgments regarding
+worth or honor than of judgments of taste generally.
+
+But whatever may be the aesthetic legitimacy of the derogatory
+judgment passed on the newer learning by the spokesmen of the
+humanities, and however substantial may be the merits of the
+contention that the classic lore is worthier and results in a
+more truly human culture and character, it does not concern the
+question in hand. The question in hand is as to how far these
+branches of learning, and the point of view for which they stand
+in the educational system, help or hinder an efficient collective
+life under modern industrial circumstances -- how far they
+further a more facile adaptation to the economic situation of
+today. The question is an economic, not an aesthetic one; and the
+leisure-class standards of learning which find expression in the
+deprecatory attitude of the higher schools towards matter-of-fact
+knowledge are, for the present purpose, to be valued from this
+point of view only. For this purpose the use of such epithets as
+"noble", "base", "higher", "lower", etc., is significant only as
+showing the animus and the point of view of the disputants;
+whether they contend for the worthiness of the new or of the old.
+All these epithets are honorific or humilific terms; that is to
+say, they are terms of invidious comparison, which in the last
+analysis fall under the category of the reputable or the
+disreputable; that is, they belong within the range of ideas that
+characterizes the scheme of life of the regime of status; that
+is, they are in substance an expression of sportsmanship -- of
+the predatory and animistic habit of mind; that is, they indicate
+an archaic point of view and theory of life, which may fit the
+predatory stage of culture and of economic organization from
+which they have sprung, but which are, from the point of view of
+economic efficiency in the broader sense, disserviceable
+anachronisms.
+
+The classics, and their position of prerogative in the scheme of
+education to which the higher seminaries of learning cling with
+such a fond predilection, serve to shape the intellectual
+attitude and lower the economic efficiency of the new learned
+generation. They do this not only by holding up an archaic ideal
+of manhood, but also by the discrimination which they inculcate
+with respect to the reputable and the disreputable in knowledge.
+This result is accomplished in two ways: (1) by inspiring an
+habitual aversion to what is merely useful, as contrasted with
+what is merely honorific in learning, and so shaping the tastes
+of the novice that he comes in good faith to find gratification
+of his tastes solely, or almost solely, in such exercise of the
+intellect as normally results in no industrial or social gain;
+and (2) by consuming the learner's time and effort in acquiring
+knowledge which is of no use,except in so far as this learning
+has  by convention become incorporated into the sum of learning
+required of the scholar, and has thereby affected the terminology
+and diction employed in the useful branches of knowledge. Except
+for this terminological difficulty -- which is itself a
+consequence of the vogue of the classics of the past -- a
+knowledge of the ancient languages, for instance, would have no
+practical bearing for any scientist or any scholar not engaged on
+work primarily of a linguistic character. Of course, all this has
+nothing to say as to the cultural value of the classics, nor is
+there any intention to disparage the discipline of the classics
+or the bent which their study gives to the student. That bent
+seems to be of an economically disserviceable kind, but this fact
+-- somewhat notorious indeed -- need disturb no one who has the
+good fortune to find comfort and strength in the classical lore.
+The fact that classical learning acts to derange the learner's
+workmanlike attitudes should fall lightly upon the apprehension
+of those who hold workmanship of small account in comparison with
+the cultivation of decorous ideals:  Iam fides et pax et honos
+pudorque Priscus et neglecta redire virtus Audet. 
+
+Owing to the circumstance that this knowledge has become part of
+the elementary requirements in our system of education, the
+ability to use and to understand certain of the dead languages of
+southern Europe is not only gratifying to the person who finds
+occasion to parade his accomplishments in this respect, but the
+evidence of such knowledge serves at the same time to recommend
+any savant to his audience, both lay and learned. It is currently
+expected that a certain number of years shall have been spent in
+acquiring this substantially useless information, and its absense
+creates a presumption of hasty and precarious learning, as well
+as of a vulgar practicality that is equally obnoxious to the
+conventional standards of sound scholarship and intellectual
+force.
+
+The case is analogous to what happens in the purchase of any
+article of consumption by a purchaser who is not an expert judge
+of materials or of workmanship. He makes his estimate of value of
+the article chiefly on the ground of the apparent expensiveness
+of the finish of those decorative parts and features which have
+no immediate relation to the intrinsic usefulness of the article;
+the presumption being that some sort of ill-defined proportion
+subsists between the substantial value of an article and the
+expense of adornment added in order to sell it. The presumption
+that there can ordinarily be no sound scholarship where a
+knowledge of the classics and humanities is wanting leads to a
+conspicuous waste of time and labor on the part of the general
+body of students in acquiring such knowledge. The conventional
+insistence on a modicum of conspicuous waste as an incident of
+all reputable scholarship has affected our canons of taste and of
+serviceability in matters of scholarship in much the same way as
+the same principle has influenced our judgment of the
+serviceability of manufactured goods.
+
+It is true, since conspicuous consumption has gained more and
+more on conspicuous leisure as a means of repute, the
+acquisition of the dead languages is no longer so imperative a
+requirement as it once was, and its talismanic virtue as a
+voucher of scholarship has suffered a concomitant impairment. But
+while this is true, it is also true that the classics have
+scarcely lost in absolute value as a voucher of scholastic
+respectability, since for this purpose it is only necessary that
+the scholar should be able to put in evidence some learning which
+is conventionally recognized as evidence of wasted time; and the
+classics lend themselves with great facility to this use. Indeed,
+there can be little doubt that it is their utility as evidence of
+wasted time and effort, and hence of the pecuniary strength
+necessary in order to afford this waste, that has secured to the
+classics their position of prerogative in the scheme of higher
+learning, and has led to their being esteemed the most honorific
+of all learning. They serve the decorative ends of leisure-class
+learning better than any other body of knowledge, and hence they
+are an effective means of reputability.
+
+In this respect the classics have until lately had scarcely a
+rival. They still have no dangerous rival on the continent of
+Europe, but lately, since college athletics have won their way
+into a recognized standing as an accredited field of scholarly
+accomplishment, this latter branch of learning -- if athletics
+may be freely classed as learning -- has become a rival of the
+classics for the primacy in leisure-class education in American
+and English schools. Athletics have an obvious advantage over the
+classics for the purpose of leisure-class learning, since success
+as an athlete presumes, not only waste of time, but also waste of
+money, as well as the possession of certain highly unindustrial
+archaic traits of character and temperament. In the German
+universities the place of athletics and Greek-letter
+fraternities, as a leisure-class scholarly occupation, has in
+some measure been supplied by a skilled and graded inebriety and
+a perfunctory duelling.
+
+The leisure class and its standard of virtue -- archaism and
+waste-- can scarcely have been concerned in the introduction of
+the classics into the scheme of the higher learning; but the
+tenacious retention of the classics by the higher schools, and
+the high degree of reputability which still attaches to them, are
+no doubt due to their conforming so closely to the requirements
+of archaism and waste.
+
+"Classic" always carries this connotation of wasteful and
+archaic, whether it is used to denote the dead languages or the
+obsolete or obsolescent forms of thought and diction in the
+living language, or to denote other items of scholarly activity
+or apparatus to which it is applied with less aptness. So the
+archaic idiom of the English language is spoken of as "classic"
+English. Its use is imperative in all speaking and writing upon
+serious topics, and a facile use of it lends dignity to even the
+most commonplace and trivial string of talk. The newest form of
+English diction is of course never written; the sense of that
+leisure-class propriety which requires archaism in speech is
+present even in the most illiterate or sensational writers in
+sufficient force to prevent such a lapse. On the other hand, the
+highest and most conventionalized style of archaic diction is --
+quite characteristically -- properly employed only in
+communications between an anthropomorphic divinity and his
+subjects. Midway between these extremes lies the everyday speech
+of leisure-class conversation and literature.
+
+Elegant diction, whether in writing or speaking, is an effective
+means of reputability. It is of moment to know with some
+precision what is the degree of archaism conventionally required
+in speaking on any given topic. Usage differs appreciably from
+the pulpit to the market-place; the latter, as might be expected,
+admits the use of relatively new and effective words and turns of
+expression, even by fastidious persons. A discriminative
+avoidance of neologisms is honorific, not only because it argues
+that time has been wasted in acquiring the obsolescent habit of
+speech, but also as showing that the speaker has from infancy
+habitually associated with persons who have been familiar with
+the obsolescent idiom. It thereby goes to show his leisure-class
+antecedents. Great purity of speech is presumptive evidence of
+several lives spent in other than vulgarly useful occupations;
+although its evidence is by no means entirely conclusive to this
+point.
+
+As felicitous an instance of futile classicism as can well be
+found, outside of the Far East, is the conventional spelling of
+the English language. A breach of the proprieties in spelling is
+extremely annoying and will discredit any writer in the eyes of
+all persons who are possessed of a developed sense of the true
+and beautiful. English orthography satisfies all the requirements
+of the canons of reputability under the law of conspicuous waste.
+It is archaic, cumbrous, and ineffective; its acquisition
+consumes much time and effort; failure to acquire it is easy of
+detection. Therefore it is the first and readiest test of
+reputability in learning, and conformity to its ritual is
+indispensable to a blameless scholastic life.
+
+On this head of purity of speech, as at other points where a
+conventional usage rests on the canons of archaism and waste, the
+spokesmen for the usage instinctively take an apologetic
+attitude. It is contended, in substance, that a punctilious use
+of ancient and accredited locutions will serve to convey thought 
+more adequately and more precisely than would be the
+straightforward use of the latest form of spoken English; whereas
+it is notorious that the ideas of today are effectively expressed
+in the slang of today. Classic speech has the honorific virtue of
+dignity; it commands attention and respect as being the
+accredited method of communication under the leisure-class scheme
+of life, because it carries a pointed suggestion of the
+industrial exemption of the speaker. The advantage of the
+accredited locutions lies in their reputability; they are
+reputable because they are cumbrous and out of date, and
+therefore argue waste of time and exemption from the use and the
+need of direct and forcible speech.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg Etext of The Theory of the Leisure Class
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Theory of the Leisure Class
+by Thorstein Veblen
+
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+Title: The Theory of the Leisure Class*
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+Author: Thorstein Veblen
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+March, 1997  [Etext #833]
+[Most recently updated: August 15, 2004]
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+*The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Theory of the Leisure Class*
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+
+A request to all readers:
+I have tried to catch as many actual errors as I could, but I am
+sure others exist.  If you notice an error, please let me know,
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+
+
+
+
+
+The Theory of the Leisure Class
+
+by Thorstein Veblen
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter One
+
+Introductory
+
+
+The institution of a leisure class is found in its best
+development at the higher stages of the barbarian culture; as,
+for instance, in feudal Europe or feudal Japan. In such
+communities the distinction between classes is very rigorously
+observed; and the feature of most striking economic significance
+in these class differences is the distinction maintained between
+the employments proper to the several classes. The upper classes
+are by custom exempt or excluded from industrial occupations, and
+are reserved for certain employments to which a degree of honour
+attaches. Chief among the honourable employments in any feudal
+community is warfare; and priestly service is commonly second to
+warfare. If the barbarian community is not notably warlike, the
+priestly office may take the precedence, with that of the warrior
+second. But the rule holds with but slight exceptions that,
+whether warriors or priests, the upper classes are exempt from
+industrial employments, and this exemption is the economic
+expression of their superior rank. Brahmin India affords a fair
+illustration of the industrial exemption of both these classes.
+In the communities belonging to the higher barbarian culture
+there is a considerable differentiation of sub-classes within
+what may be comprehensively called the leisure class; and there
+is a corresponding differentiation of employments between these
+sub-classes. The leisure class as a whole comprises the noble and
+the priestly classes, together with much of their retinue. The
+occupations of the class are correspondingly diversified; but
+they have the common economic characteristic of being
+non-industrial. These non-industrial upper-class occupations may
+be roughly comprised under government, warfare, religious
+observances, and sports.
+
+At an earlier, but not the earliest, stage of barbarism, the
+leisure class is found in a less differentiated form. Neither the
+class distinctions nor the distinctions between leisure-class
+occupations are so minute and intricate. The Polynesian islanders
+generally show this stage of the development in good form, with
+the exception that, owing to the absence of large game, hunting
+does not hold the usual place of honour in their scheme of life.
+The Icelandic community in the time of the Sagas also affords a
+fair instance. In such a community there is a rigorous
+distinction between classes and between the occupations peculiar
+to each class. Manual labour, industry, whatever has to do
+directly with the everyday work of getting a livelihood, is the
+exclusive occupation of the inferior class. This inferior class
+includes slaves and other dependents, and ordinarily also all the
+women. If there are several grades of aristocracy, the women of
+high rank are commonly exempt from industrial employment, or at
+least from the more vulgar kinds of manual labour. The men of the
+upper classes are not only exempt, but by prescriptive custom
+they are debarred, from all industrial occupations. The range of
+employments open to them is rigidly defined. As on the higher
+plane already spoken of, these employments are government,
+warfare, religious observances, and sports. These four lines of
+activity govern the scheme of life of the upper classes, and for
+the highest rank -- the kings or chieftains -- these are the only
+kinds of activity that custom or the common sense of the
+community will allow. Indeed, where the scheme is well developed
+even sports are accounted doubtfully legitimate for the members
+of the highest rank. To the lower grades of the leisure class
+certain other employments are open, but they are employments that
+are subsidiary to one or another of these typical leisure-class
+occupations. Such are, for instance, the manufacture and care of
+arms and accoutrements and of war canoes, the dressing and
+handling of horses, dogs, and hawks, the preparation of sacred
+apparatus, etc. The lower classes are excluded from these
+secondary honourable employments, except from such as are plainly
+of an industrial character and are only remotely related to the
+typical leisure-class occupations.
+
+If we go a step back of this exemplary barbarian culture, into
+the lower stages of barbarism, we no longer find the leisure
+class in fully developed form. But this lower barbarism shows the
+usages, motives, and circumstances out of which the institution
+of a leisure class has arisen, and indicates the steps of its
+early growth. Nomadic hunting tribes in various parts of the
+world illustrate these more primitive phases of the
+differentiation. Any one of the North American hunting tribes may
+be taken as a convenient illustration. These tribes can scarcely
+be said to have a defined leisure class. There is a
+differentiation of function, and there is a distinction between
+classes on the basis of this difference of function, but the
+exemption of the superior class from work has not gone far enough
+to make the designation "leisure class" altogether applicable.
+The tribes belonging on this economic level have carried the
+economic differentiation to the point at which a marked
+distinction is made between the occupations of men and women, and
+this distinction is of an invidious character. In nearly all
+these tribes the women are, by prescriptive custom, held to those
+employments out of which the industrial occupations proper
+develop at the next advance. The men are exempt from these vulgar
+employments and are reserved for war, hunting, sports, and devout
+observances. A very nice discrimination is ordinarily shown in
+this matter.
+
+This division of labour coincides with the distinction between
+the working and the leisure class as it appears in the higher
+barbarian culture. As the diversification and specialisation of
+employments proceed, the line of demarcation so drawn comes to
+divide the industrial from the non-industrial employments. The
+man's occupation as it stands at the earlier barbarian stage is
+not the original out of which any appreciable portion of later
+industry has developed. In the later development it survives only
+in employments that are not classed as industrial, -- war,
+politics, sports, learning, and the priestly office. The only
+notable exceptions are a portion of the fishery industry and
+certain slight employments that are doubtfully to be classed as
+industry; such as the manufacture of arms, toys, and sporting
+goods. Virtually the whole range of industrial employments is an
+outgrowth of what is classed as woman's work in the primitive
+barbarian community.
+
+The work of the men in the lower barbarian culture is no less
+indispensable to the life of the group than the work done by the
+women. It may even be that the men's work contributes as much to
+the food supply and the other necessary consumption of the group.
+Indeed, so obvious is this "productive" character of the men's
+work that in the conventional economic writings the hunter's work
+is taken as the type of primitive industry. But such is not the
+barbarian's sense of the matter. In his own eyes he is not a
+labourer, and he is not to be classed with the women in this
+respect; nor is his effort to be classed with the women's
+drudgery, as labour or industry, in such a sense as to admit of
+its being confounded with the latter. There is in all barbarian
+communities a profound sense of the disparity between man's and
+woman's work. His work may conduce to the maintenance of the
+group, but it is felt that it does so through an excellence and
+an efficacy of a kind that cannot without derogation be compared
+with the uneventful diligence of the women.
+
+At a farther step backward in the cultural scale -- among savage
+groups -- the differentiation of employments is still less
+elaborate and the invidious distinction between classes and
+employments is less consistent and less rigorous. Unequivocal
+instances of a primitive savage culture are hard to find. Few of
+these groups or communities that are classed as "savage" show no
+traces of regression from a more advanced cultural stage. But
+there are groups -- some of them apparently not the result of
+retrogression -- which show the traits of primitive savagery with
+some fidelity. Their culture differs from that of the barbarian
+communities in the absence of a leisure class and the absence, in
+great measure, of the animus or spiritual attitude on which the
+institution of a leisure class rests. These communities of
+primitive savages in which there is no hierarchy of economic
+classes make up but a small and inconspicuous fraction of the
+human race. As good an instance of this phase of culture as may
+be had is afforded by the tribes of the Andamans, or by the Todas
+of the Nilgiri Hills. The scheme of life of these groups at the
+time of their earliest contact with Europeans seems to have been
+nearly typical, so far as regards the absence of a leisure class.
+As a further instance might be cited the Ainu of Yezo, and, more
+doubtfully, also some Bushman and Eskimo groups. Some Pueblo
+communities are less confidently to be included in the same
+class. Most, if not all, of the communities here cited may well
+be cases of degeneration from a higher barbarism, rather than
+bearers of a culture that has never risen above its present
+level. If so, they are for the present purpose to be taken with
+the allowance, but they may serve none the less as evidence to
+the same effect as if they were really "primitive" populations.
+
+These communities that are without a defined leisure class
+resemble one another also in certain other features of their
+social structure and manner of life. They are small groups and of
+a simple (archaic) structure; they are commonly peaceable and
+sedentary; they are poor; and individual ownership is not a
+dominant feature of their economic system. At the same time it
+does not follow that these are the smallest of existing
+communities, or that their social structure is in all respects
+the least differentiated; nor does the class necessarily include
+all primitive communities which have no defined system of
+individual ownership. But it is to be noted that the class seems
+to include the most peaceable -- perhaps all the
+characteristically peaceable -- primitive groups of men. Indeed,
+the most notable trait common to members of such communities is a
+certain amiable inefficiency when confronted with force or fraud.
+
+The evidence afforded by the usages and cultural traits of
+communities at a low stage of development indicates that the
+institution of a leisure class has emerged gradually during the
+transition from primitive savagery to barbarism; or more
+precisely, during the transition from a peaceable to a
+consistently warlike habit of life. The conditions apparently
+necessary to its emergence in a consistent form are: (1) the
+community must be of a predatory habit of life (war or the
+hunting of large game or both); that is to say, the men, who
+constitute the inchoate leisure class in these cases, must be
+habituated to the infliction of injury by force and stratagem;
+(2) subsistence must be obtainable on sufficiently easy terms to
+admit of the exemption of a considerable portion of the community
+from steady application to a routine of labour. The institution
+of leisure class is the outgrowth of an early discrimination
+between employments, according to which some employments are
+worthy and others unworthy. Under this ancient distinction the
+worthy employments are those which may be classed as exploit;
+unworthy are those necessary everyday employments into which no
+appreciable element of exploit enters.
+
+This distinction has but little obvious significance in a modern
+industrial community, and it has, therefore, received but slight
+attention at the hands of economic writers. When viewed in the
+light of that modern common sense which has guided economic
+discussion, it seems formal and insubstantial. But it persists
+with great tenacity as a commonplace preconception even in modern
+life, as is shown, for instance, by our habitual aversion to
+menial employments. It is a distinction of a personal kind -- of
+superiority and inferiority. In the earlier stages of culture,
+when the personal force of the individual counted more
+immediately and obviously in shaping the course of events, the
+element of exploit counted for more in the everyday scheme of
+life. Interest centred about this fact to a greater degree.
+Consequently a distinction proceeding on this ground seemed more
+imperative and more definitive then than is the case to-day. As a
+fact in the sequence of development, therefore, the distinction
+is a substantial one and rests on sufficiently valid and cogent
+grounds.
+
+The ground on which a discrimination between facts is habitually
+made changes as the interest from which the facts are habitually
+viewed changes. Those features of the facts at hand are salient
+and substantial upon which the dominant interest of the time
+throws its light. Any given ground of distinction will seem
+insubstantial to any one who habitually apprehends the facts in
+question from a different point of view and values them for a
+different purpose. The habit of distinguishing and classifying
+the various purposes and directions of activity prevails of
+necessity always and everywhere; for it is indispensable in
+reaching a working theory or scheme of life. The particular point
+of view, or the particular characteristic that is pitched upon as
+definitive in the classification of the facts of life depends
+upon the interest from which a discrimination of the facts is
+sought. The grounds of discrimination, and the norm of procedure
+in classifying the facts, therefore, progressively change as the
+growth of culture proceeds; for the end for which the facts of
+life are apprehended changes, and the point of view consequently
+changes also. So that what are recognised as the salient and
+decisive features of a class of activities or of a social class
+at one stage of culture will not retain the same relative
+importance for the purposes of classification at any subsequent
+stage.
+
+But the change of standards and points of view is gradual only,
+and it seldom results in the subversion or entire suppression of
+a standpoint once accepted. A distinction is still habitually
+made between industrial and non-industrial occupations; and this
+modern distinction is a transmuted form of the barbarian
+distinction between exploit and drudgery. Such employments as
+warfare, politics, public worship, and public merrymaking, are
+felt, in the popular apprehension, to differ intrinsically from
+the labour that has to do with elaborating the material means of
+life. The precise line of demarcation is not the same as it was
+in the early barbarian scheme, but the broad distinction has not
+fallen into disuse.
+
+The tacit, common-sense distinction to-day is, in effect, that
+any effort is to be accounted industrial only so far as its
+ultimate purpose is the utilisation of non-human things. The
+coercive utilisation of man by man is not felt to be an
+industrial function; but all effort directed to enhance human
+life by taking advantage of the non-human environment is classed
+together as industrial activity. By the economists who have best
+retained and adapted the classical tradition, man's "power over
+nature" is currently postulated as the characteristic fact of
+industrial productivity. This industrial power over nature is
+taken to include man's power over the life of the beasts and over
+all the elemental forces. A line is in this way drawn between
+mankind and brute creation.
+
+In other times and among men imbued with a different body of
+preconceptions this line is not drawn precisely as we draw it
+to-day. In the savage or the barbarian scheme of life it is drawn
+in a different place and in another way. In all communities under
+the barbarian culture there is an alert and pervading sense of
+antithesis between two comprehensive groups of phenomena, in one
+of which barbarian man includes himself, and in the other, his
+victual. There is a felt antithesis between economic and
+non-economic phenomena, but it is not conceived in the modern
+fashion; it lies not between man and brute creation, but between
+animate and inert things.
+
+It may be an excess of caution at this day to explain that the
+barbarian notion which it is here intended to convey by the term
+"animate" is not the same as would be conveyed by the word
+"living". The term does not cover all living things, and it does
+cover a great many others. Such a striking natural phenomenon as
+a storm, a disease, a waterfall, are recognised as "animate";
+while fruits and herbs, and even inconspicuous animals, such as
+house-flies, maggots, lemmings, sheep, are not ordinarily
+apprehended as "animate" except when taken collectively. As here
+used the term does not necessarily imply an indwelling soul or
+spirit. The concept includes such things as in the apprehension
+of the animistic savage or barbarian are formidable by virtue of
+a real or imputed habit of initiating action. This category
+comprises a large number and range of natural objects and
+phenomena. Such a distinction between the inert and the active is
+still present in the habits of thought of unreflecting persons,
+and it still profoundly affects the prevalent theory of human
+life and of natural processes; but it does not pervade our daily
+life to the extent or with the far-reaching practical
+consequences that are apparent at earlier stages of culture and
+belief.
+
+To the mind of the barbarian, the elaboration and utilisation of
+what is afforded by inert nature is activity on quite a different
+plane from his dealings with "animate" things and forces. The
+line of demarcation may be vague and shifting, but the broad
+distinction is sufficiently real and cogent to influence the
+barbarian scheme of life. To the class of things apprehended as
+animate, the barbarian fancy imputes an unfolding of activity
+directed to some end. It is this teleological unfolding of
+activity that constitutes any object or phenomenon an "animate"
+fact. Wherever the unsophisticated savage or barbarian meets with
+activity that is at all obtrusive, he construes it in the only
+terms that are ready to hand -- the terms immediately given in
+his consciousness of his own actions. Activity is, therefore,
+assimilated to human action, and active objects are in so far
+assimilated to the human agent. Phenomena of this character --
+especially those whose behaviour is notably formidable or
+baffling -- have to be met in a different spirit and with
+proficiency of a different kind from what is required in dealing
+with inert things. To deal successfully with such phenomena is a
+work of exploit rather than of industry. It is an assertion of
+prowess, not of diligence.
+
+Under the guidance of this naive discrimination between the inert
+and the animate, the activities of the primitive social group
+tend to fall into two classes, which would in modern phrase be
+called exploit and industry. Industry is effort that goes to
+create a new thing, with a new purpose given it by the fashioning
+hand of its maker out of passive ("brute") material; while
+exploit, so far as it results in an outcome useful to the agent,
+is the conversion to his own ends of energies previously directed
+to some other end by an other agent. We still speak of "brute
+matter" with something of the barbarian's realisation of a
+profound significance in the term.
+
+The distinction between exploit and drudgery coincides with a
+difference between the sexes. The sexes differ, not only in
+stature and muscular force, but perhaps even more decisively in
+temperament, and this must early have given rise to a
+corresponding division of labour. The general range of activities
+that come under the head of exploit falls to the males as being
+the stouter, more massive, better capable of a sudden and violent
+strain, and more readily inclined to self assertion, active
+emulation, and aggression. The difference in mass, in
+physiological character, and in temperament may be slight among
+the members of the primitive group; it appears, in fact, to be
+relatively slight and inconsequential in some of the more archaic
+communities with which we are acquainted -- as for instance the
+tribes of the Andamans. But so soon as a differentiation of
+function has well begun on the lines marked out by this
+difference in physique and animus, the original difference
+between the sexes will itself widen. A cumulative process of
+selective adaptation to the new distribution of employments will
+set in, especially if the habitat or the fauna with which the
+group is in contact is such as to call for a considerable
+exercise of the sturdier virtues. The habitual pursuit of large
+game requires more of the manly qualities of massiveness,
+agility, and ferocity, and it can therefore scarcely fail to
+hasten and widen the differentiation of functions between the
+sexes. And so soon as the group comes into hostile contact with
+other groups, the divergence of function will take on the
+developed form of a distinction between exploit and industry.
+
+In such a predatory group of hunters it comes to be the
+able-bodied men's office to fight and hunt. The women do what
+other work there is to do -- other members who are unfit for
+man's work being for this purpose classed with women. But the
+men's hunting and fighting are both of the same general
+character. Both are of a predatory nature; the warrior and the
+hunter alike reap where they have not strewn. Their aggressive
+assertion of force and sagacity differs obviously from the
+women's assiduous and uneventful shaping of materials; it is not
+to be accounted productive labour but rather an acquisition of
+substance by seizure. Such being the barbarian man's work, in its
+best development and widest divergence from women's work, any
+effort that does not involve an assertion of prowess comes to be
+unworthy of the man. As the tradition gains consistency, the
+common sense of the community erects it into a canon of conduct;
+so that no employment and no acquisition is morally possible to
+the self respecting man at this cultural stage, except such as
+proceeds on the basis of prowess -- force or fraud. When the
+predatory habit of life has been settled upon the group by long
+habituation, it becomes the able-bodied man's accredited office
+in the social economy to kill, to destroy such competitors in the
+struggle for existence as attempt to resist or elude him, to
+overcome and reduce to subservience those alien forces that
+assert themselves refractorily in the environment. So tenaciously
+and with such nicety is this theoretical distinction between
+exploit and drudgery adhered to that in many hunting tribes the
+man must not bring home the game which he has killed, but must
+send his woman to perform that baser office.
+
+As has already been indicated, the distinction between exploit
+and drudgery is an invidious distinction between employments.
+Those employments which are to be classed as exploit are worthy,
+honourable, noble; other employments, which do not contain this
+element of exploit, and especially those which imply subservience
+or submission, are unworthy, debasing, ignoble. The concept of
+dignity, worth, or honour, as applied either to persons or
+conduct, is of first-rate consequence in the development of
+classes and of class distinctions, and it is therefore necessary
+to say something of its derivation and meaning. Its psychological
+ground may be indicated in outline as follows.
+
+As a matter of selective necessity, man is an agent. He is, in
+his own apprehension, a centre of unfolding impulsive activity --
+"teleological" activity. He is an agent seeking in every act the
+accomplishment of some concrete, objective, impersonal end. By
+force of his being such an agent he is possessed of a taste for
+effective work, and a distaste for futile effort. He has a sense
+of the merit of serviceability or efficiency and of the demerit
+of futility, waste, or incapacity. This aptitude or propensity
+may be called the instinct of workmanship. Wherever the
+circumstances or traditions of life lead to an habitual
+comparison of one person with another in point of efficiency, the
+instinct of workmanship works out in an emulative or invidious
+comparison of persons. The extent to which this result follows
+depends in some considerable degree on the temperament of the
+population. In any community where such an invidious comparison
+of persons is habitually made, visible success becomes an end
+sought for its own utility as a basis of esteem. Esteem is gained
+and dispraise is avoided by putting one's efficiency in evidence.
+The result is that the instinct of workmanship works out in an
+emulative demonstration of force.
+
+During that primitive phase of social development, when the
+community is still habitually peaceable, perhaps sedentary, and
+without a developed system of individual ownership, the
+efficiency of the individual can be shown chiefly and most
+consistently in some employment that goes to further the life of
+the group. What emulation of an economic kind there is between
+the members of such a group will be chiefly emulation in
+industrial serviceability. At the same time the incentive to
+emulation is not strong, nor is the scope for emulation large.
+
+When the community passes from peaceable savagery to a predatory
+phase of life, the conditions of emulation change. The
+opportunity and the incentive to emulate increase greatly in
+scope and urgency. The activity of the men more and more takes on
+the character of exploit; and an invidious comparison of one
+hunter or warrior with another grows continually easier and more
+habitual. Tangible evidences of prowess -- trophies -- find a
+place in men's habits of thought as an essential feature of the
+paraphernalia of life. Booty, trophies of the chase or of the
+raid, come to be prized as evidence of pre-eminent force.
+Aggression becomes the accredited form of action, and booty
+serves as prima facie evidence of successful aggression. As
+accepted at this cultural stage, the accredited, worthy form of
+self-assertion is contest; and useful articles or services
+obtained by seizure or compulsion, serve as a conventional
+evidence of successful contest. Therefore, by contrast, the
+obtaining of goods by other methods than seizure comes to be
+accounted unworthy of man in his best estate. The performance of
+productive work, or employment in personal service, falls under
+the same odium for the same reason. An invidious distinction in
+this way arises between exploit and acquisition on the other
+hand. Labour acquires a character of irksomeness by virtue of the
+indignity imputed to it.
+
+With the primitive barbarian, before the simple content of the
+notion has been obscured by its own ramifications and by a
+secondary growth of cognate ideas, "honourable" seems to connote
+nothing else than assertion of superior force. "Honourable" is
+"formidable"; "worthy" is "prepotent". A honorific act is in the
+last analysis little if anything else than a recognised
+successful act of aggression; and where aggression means conflict
+with men and beasts, the activity which comes to be especially
+and primarily honourable is the assertion of the strong hand. The
+naive, archaic habit of construing all manifestations of force in
+terms of personality or "will power" greatly fortifies this
+conventional exaltation of the strong hand. Honorific epithets,
+in vogue among barbarian tribes as well as among peoples of a
+more advance culture, commonly bear the stamp of this
+unsophisticated sense of honour. Epithets and titles used in
+addressing chieftains, and in the propitiation of kings and gods,
+very commonly impute a propensity for overbearing violence and an
+irresistible devastating force to the person who is to be
+propitiated. This holds true to an extent also in the more
+civilised communities of the present day. The predilection shown
+in heraldic devices for the more rapacious beasts and birds of
+prey goes to enforce the same view.
+
+Under this common-sense barbarian appreciation of worth or
+honour, the taking of life -- the killing of formidable
+competitors, whether brute or human -- is honourable in the
+highest degree. And this high office of slaughter, as an
+expression of the slayer's prepotence, casts a glamour of worth
+over every act of slaughter and over all the tools and
+accessories of the act. Arms are honourable, and the use of them,
+even in seeking the life of the meanest creatures of the fields,
+becomes a honorific employment. At the same time, employment in
+industry becomes correspondingly odious, and, in the common-sense
+apprehension, the handling of the tools and implements of
+industry falls beneath the dignity of able-bodied men. Labour
+becomes irksome.
+
+It is here assumed that in the sequence of cultural
+evolution primitive groups of men have passed from an initial
+peaceable stage to a subsequent stage at which fighting is the
+avowed and characteristic employment of the group. But it is not
+implied that there has been an abrupt transition from unbroken
+peace and good-will to a later or higher phase of life in which
+the fact of combat occurs for the first time. Neither is it
+implied that all peaceful industry disappears on the transition
+to the predatory phase of culture. Some fighting, it is safe to
+say, would be met with at any early stage of social development.
+Fights would occur with more or less frequency through sexual
+competition. The known habits of primitive groups, as well as the
+habits of the anthropoid apes, argue to that effect, and the
+evidence from the well-known promptings of human nature enforces
+the same view.
+
+It may therefore be objected that there can have been no such initial
+stage of peaceable life as is here assumed. There is no point in
+cultural evolution prior to which fighting does not occur.  But the
+point in question is not as to the occurrence of combat, occasional or
+sporadic, or even more or less frequent and habitual; it is a question
+as to the occurrence of an habitual; it is a question as to the
+occurrence of an habitual bellicose frame of mind -- a prevalent habit
+of judging facts and events from the point of view of the fight. The
+predatory phase of culture is attained only when the predatory
+attitude has become the habitual and accredited spiritual attitude for
+the members of the group; when the fight has become the dominant note
+in the current theory of life; when the common-sense appreciation of
+men and things has come to be an appreciation with a view to combat.
+
+The substantial difference between the peaceable and the
+predatory phase of culture, therefore, is a spiritual difference,
+not a mechanical one. The change in spiritual attitude is the
+outgrowth of a change in the material facts of the life of the
+group, and it comes on gradually as the material circumstances
+favourable to a predatory attitude supervene. The inferior limit
+of the predatory culture is an industrial limit. Predation can
+not become the habitual, conventional resource of any group or
+any class until industrial methods have been developed to such a
+degree of efficiency as to leave a margin worth fighting for,
+above the subsistence of those engaged in getting a living. The
+transition from peace to predation therefore depends on the
+growth of technical knowledge and the use of tools. A predatory
+culture is similarly impracticable in early times, until weapons
+have been developed to such a point as to make man a formidable
+animal. The early development of tools and of weapons is of
+course the same fact seen from two different points of view.
+
+The life of a given group would be characterised as
+peaceable so long as habitual recourse to combat has not brought
+the fight into the foreground in men's every day thoughts, as a
+dominant feature of the life of man. A group may evidently attain
+such a predatory attitude with a greater or less degree of
+completeness, so that its scheme of life and canons of conduct
+may be controlled to a greater or less extent by the predatory
+animus. The predatory phase of culture is therefore conceived to
+come on gradually, through a cumulative growth of predatory
+aptitudes habits, and traditions this growth being due to a
+change in the circumstances of the group's life, of such a kind
+as to develop and conserve those traits of human nature and those
+traditions and norms of conduct that make for a predatory rather
+than a peaceable life.
+
+The evidence for the hypothesis that there has been such a
+peaceable stage of primitive culture is in great part drawn from
+psychology rather than from ethnology, and cannot be detailed
+here. It will be recited in part in a later chapter, in
+discussing the survival of archaic traits of human nature under
+the modern culture.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Two
+
+Pecuniary Emulation
+
+In the sequence of cultural evolution the emergence of a leisure
+class coincides with the beginning of ownership. This is
+necessarily the case, for these two institutions result from the
+same set of economic forces. In the inchoate phase of their
+development they are but different aspects of the same general
+facts of social structure.
+
+It is as elements of social structure -- conventional facts --
+that leisure and ownership are matters of interest for the
+purpose in hand. An habitual neglect of work does not constitute
+a leisure class; neither does the mechanical fact of use and
+consumption constitute ownership. The present inquiry, therefore,
+is not concerned with the beginning of indolence, nor with the
+beginning of the appropriation of useful articles to individual
+consumption. The point in question is the origin and nature of a
+conventional leisure class on the one hand and the beginnings of
+individual ownership as a conventional right or equitable claim
+on the other hand.
+
+The early differentiation out of which the distinction between a
+leisure and a working class arises is a division maintained
+between men's and women's work in the lower stages of barbarism.
+Likewise the earliest form of ownership is an
+ownership of the women by the able bodied men of the community.
+The facts may be expressed in more general terms, and truer to
+the import of the barbarian theory of life, by saying that it is
+an ownership of the woman by the man.
+
+There was undoubtedly some appropriation of useful articles
+before the custom of appropriating women arose. The usages of
+existing archaic communities in which there is no ownership of
+women is warrant for such a view. In all communities the members,
+both male and female, habitually appropriate to their individual
+use a variety of useful things; but these useful things are not
+thought of as owned by the person who appropriates and consumes
+them. The habitual appropriation and consumption of certain
+slight personal effects goes on without raising the question of
+ownership; that is to say, the question of a conventional,
+equitable claim to extraneous things.
+
+The ownership of women begins in the lower barbarian stages of
+culture, apparently with the seizure of female captives. The
+original reason for the seizure and appropriation of women seems
+to have been their usefulness as trophies. The practice of
+seizing women from the enemy as trophies, gave rise to a form of
+ownership-marriage, resulting in a household with a male head.
+This was followed by an extension of slavery to other captives
+and inferiors, besides women, and by an extension of
+ownership-marriage to other women than those seized from the
+enemy. The outcome of emulation under the circumstances of a
+predatory life, therefore, has been on the one hand a form of
+marriage resting on coercion, and on the other hand the custom of
+ownership. The two institutions are not distinguishable in the
+initial phase of their development; both arise from the desire of
+the successful men to put their prowess in evidence by exhibiting
+some durable result of their exploits. Both also minister to that
+propensity for mastery which pervades all predatory communities.
+From the ownership of women the concept of ownership extends
+itself to include the products of their industry, and so there
+arises the ownership of things as well as of persons.
+
+In this way a consistent system of property in goods is gradually
+installed. And although in the latest stages of the development,
+the serviceability of goods for consumption has come to be the
+most obtrusive element of their value, still, wealth has by no
+means yet lost its utility as a honorific evidence of the owner's
+prepotence.
+
+Wherever the institution of private property is found, even in a
+slightly developed form, the economic process bears the character
+of a struggle between men for the possession of goods. It has
+been customary in economic theory, and especially among those
+economists who adhere with least faltering to the body of
+modernised classical doctrines, to construe this struggle for
+wealth as being substantially a struggle for subsistence. Such
+is, no doubt, its character in large part during the earlier and
+less efficient phases of industry. Such is also its character in
+all cases where the "niggardliness of nature" is so strict as to
+afford but a scanty livelihood to the community in return for
+strenuous and unremitting application to the business of getting
+the means of subsistence. But in all progressing communities an
+advance is presently made beyond this early stage of
+technological development. Industrial efficiency is presently
+carried to such a pitch as to afford something appreciably more
+than a bare livelihood to those engaged in the industrial
+process. It has not been unusual for economic theory to speak of
+the further struggle for wealth on this new industrial basis as a
+competition for an increase of the comforts of life, -- primarily
+for an increase of the physical comforts which the consumption of
+goods affords.
+
+The end of acquisition and accumulation is conventionally held to
+be the consumption of the goods accumulated -- whether it is
+consumption directly by the owner of the goods or by the
+household attached to him and for this purpose identified with
+him in theory. This is at least felt to be the economically
+legitimate end of acquisition, which alone it is incumbent on the
+theory to take account of. Such consumption may of course be
+conceived to serve the consumer's physical wants -- his physical
+comfort -- or his so-called higher wants -- spiritual, aesthetic,
+intellectual, or what not; the latter class of wants being served
+indirectly by an expenditure of goods, after the fashion familiar
+to all economic readers.
+
+But it is only when taken in a sense far removed from its naive
+meaning that consumption of goods can be said to afford the
+incentive from which accumulation invariably proceeds. The motive
+that lies at the root of ownership is emulation; and the same
+motive of emulation continues active in the further development
+of the institution to which it has given rise and in the
+development of all those features of the social structure which
+this institution of ownership touches. The possession of wealth
+confers honour; it is an invidious distinction. Nothing equally
+cogent can be said for the consumption of goods, nor for any
+other conceivable incentive to acquisition, and especially not
+for any incentive to accumulation of wealth.
+
+It is of course not to be overlooked that in a community where
+nearly all goods are private property the necessity of earning a
+livelihood is a powerful and ever present incentive for the
+poorer members of the community. The need of subsistence and of
+an increase of physical comfort may for a time be the dominant
+motive of acquisition for those classes who are habitually
+employed at manual labour, whose subsistence is on a precarious
+footing, who possess little and ordinarily accumulate little; but
+it will appear in the course of the discussion that even in the
+case of these impecunious classes the predominance of the motive
+of physical want is not so decided as has sometimes been assumed.
+On the other hand, so far as regards those members and classes of
+the community who are chiefly concerned in the accumulation of
+wealth, the incentive of subsistence or of physical comfort never
+plays a considerable part. Ownership began and grew into a human
+institution on grounds unrelated to the subsistence minimum. The
+dominant incentive was from the outset the invidious distinction
+attaching to wealth, and, save temporarily and by exception, no
+other motive has usurped the primacy at any later stage of the
+development.
+
+Property set out with being booty held as trophies of the
+successful raid. So long as the group had departed and so long as
+it still stood in close contact with other hostile groups, the
+utility of things or persons owned lay chiefly in an invidious
+comparison between their possessor and the enemy from whom they
+were taken. The habit of distinguishing between the interests of
+the individual and those of the group to which he belongs is
+apparently a later growth. Invidious comparison between the
+possessor of the honorific booty and his less successful
+neighbours within the group was no doubt present early as an
+element of the utility of the things possessed, though this was
+not at the outset the chief element of their value. The man's
+prowess was still primarily the group's prowess, and the
+possessor of the booty felt himself to be primarily the keeper of
+the honour of his group. This appreciation of exploit from the
+communal point of view is met with also at later stages of social
+growth, especially as regards the laurels of war.
+
+But as soon as the custom of individual ownership begins to gain
+consistency, the point of view taken in making the invidious
+comparison on which private property rests will begin to change.
+Indeed, the one change is but the reflex of the other. The
+initial phase of ownership, the phase of acquisition by naive
+seizure and conversion, begins to pass into the subsequent stage
+of an incipient organization of industry on the basis of private
+property (in slaves); the horde develops into a more or less
+self-sufficing industrial community; possessions then come to be
+valued not so much as evidence of successful foray, but rather as
+evidence of the prepotence of the possessor of these goods over
+other individuals within the community. The invidious comparison
+now becomes primarily a comparison of the owner with the other
+members of the group. Property is still of the nature of trophy,
+but, with the cultural advance, it becomes more and more a trophy
+of successes scored in the game of ownership carried on between
+the members of the group under the quasi-peaceable methods of
+nomadic life.
+
+Gradually, as industrial activity further displaced
+predatory activity in the community's everyday life and in men's
+habits of thought, accumulated property more and more replaces
+trophies of predatory exploit as the conventional exponent of
+prepotence and success. With the growth of settled industry,
+therefore, the possession of wealth gains in relative importance
+and effectiveness as a customary basis of repute and esteem. Not
+that esteem ceases to be awarded on the basis of other, more
+direct evidence of prowess; not that successful predatory
+aggression or warlike exploit ceases to call out the approval and
+admiration of the crowd, or to stir the envy of the less
+successful competitors; but the opportunities for gaining
+distinction by means of this direct manifestation of superior
+force grow less available both in scope and frequency. At the
+same time opportunities for industrial aggression, and for the
+accumulation of property, increase in scope and availability. And
+it is even more to the point that property now becomes the most
+easily recognised evidence of a reputable degree of success as
+distinguished from heroic or signal achievement. It therefore
+becomes the conventional basis of esteem. Its possession in some
+amount becomes necessary in order to any reputable standing in
+the community. It becomes indispensable to accumulate, to acquire
+property, in order to retain one's good name. When accumulated
+goods have in this way once become the accepted badge of
+efficiency, the possession of wealth presently assumes the
+character of an independent and definitive basis of esteem. The
+possession of goods, whether acquired aggressively by one's own
+exertion or passively by transmission through inheritance from
+others, becomes a conventional basis of reputability. The
+possession of wealth, which was at the outset valued simply as an
+evidence of efficiency, becomes, in popular apprehension, itself
+a meritorious act. Wealth is now itself intrinsically honourable
+and confers honour on its possessor. By a further refinement,
+wealth acquired passively by transmission from ancestors or other
+antecedents presently becomes even more honorific than wealth
+acquired by the possessor's own effort; but this distinction
+belongs at a later stage in the evolution of the pecuniary
+culture and will be spoken of in its place.
+
+Prowess and exploit may still remain the basis of award of the
+highest popular esteem, although the possession of wealth has
+become the basis of common place reputability and of a blameless
+social standing. The predatory instinct and the consequent
+approbation of predatory efficiency are deeply ingrained in the
+habits of thought of those peoples who have passed under the
+discipline of a protracted predatory culture. According to
+popular award, the highest honours within human reach may, even
+yet, be those gained by an unfolding of extraordinary predatory
+efficiency in war, or by a quasi-predatory efficiency in
+statecraft; but for the purposes of a commonplace decent standing
+in the community these means of repute have been replaced by the
+acquisition and accumulation of goods. In order to stand well in
+the eyes of the community, it is necessary to come up to a
+certain, somewhat indefinite, conventional standard of wealth;
+just as in the earlier predatory stage it is necessary for the
+barbarian man to come up to the tribe's standard of physical
+endurance, cunning, and skill at arms. A certain standard of
+wealth in the one case, and of prowess in the other, is a
+necessary condition of reputability, and anything in excess of
+this normal amount is meritorious.
+
+Those members of the community who fall short of this, somewhat
+indefinite, normal degree of prowess or of property suffer in the
+esteem of their fellow-men; and consequently they suffer also in
+their own esteem, since the usual basis of self-respect is the
+respect accorded by one's neighbours. Only individuals with an
+aberrant temperament can in the long run retain their self-esteem
+in the face of the disesteem of their fellows. Apparent
+exceptions to the rule are met with, especially among people with
+strong religious convictions. But these apparent exceptions are
+scarcely real exceptions, since such persons commonly fall back
+on the putative approbation of some supernatural witness of their
+deeds.
+
+So soon as the possession of property becomes the basis of
+popular esteem, therefore, it becomes also a requisite to the
+complacency which we call self-respect. In any community where
+goods are held in severalty it is necessary, in order to his own
+peace of mind, that an individual should possess as large a
+portion of goods as others with whom he is accustomed to class
+himself; and it is extremely gratifying to possess something more
+than others. But as fast as a person makes new acquisitions, and
+becomes accustomed to the resulting new standard of wealth, the
+new standard forthwith ceases to afford appreciably greater
+satisfaction than the earlier standard did. The tendency in any
+case is constantly to make the present pecuniary standard the
+point of departure for a fresh increase of wealth; and this in
+turn gives rise to a new standard of sufficiency and a new
+pecuniary classification of one's self as compared with one's
+neighbours. So far as concerns the present question, the end
+sought by accumulation is to rank high in comparison with the
+rest of the community in point of pecuniary strength. So long as
+the comparison is distinctly unfavourable to himself, the normal,
+average individual will live in chronic dissatisfaction with his
+present lot; and when he has reached what may be called the
+normal pecuniary standard of the community, or of his class in
+the community, this chronic dissatisfaction will give place to a
+restless straining to place a wider and ever-widening pecuniary
+interval between himself and this average standard. The invidious
+comparison can never become so favourable to the individual
+making it that he would not gladly rate himself still higher
+relatively to his competitors in the struggle for pecuniary
+reputability.
+
+In the nature of the case, the desire for wealth can scarcely be
+satiated in any individual instance, and evidently a satiation of
+the average or general desire for wealth is out of the question.
+However widely, or equally, or "fairly", it may be distributed,
+no general increase of the community's wealth can make any
+approach to satiating this need, the ground of which approach to
+satiating this need, the ground of which is the desire of every
+one to excel every one else in the accumulation of goods.  If, as
+is sometimes assumed, the incentive to accumulation were the want
+of subsistence or of physical comfort, then the aggregate
+economic wants of a community might conceivably be satisfied at
+some point in the advance of industrial efficiency; but since the
+struggle is substantially a race for reputability on the basis of
+an invidious comparison, no approach to a definitive attainment
+is possible.
+
+What has just been said must not be taken to mean that there are
+no other incentives to acquisition and accumulation than this
+desire to excel in pecuniary standing and so gain the esteem and
+envy of one's fellow-men. The desire for added comfort and
+security from want is present as a motive at every stage of the
+process of accumulation in a modern industrial community;
+although the standard of sufficiency in these respects is in turn
+greatly affected by the habit of pecuniary emulation. To a great
+extent this emulation shapes the methods and selects the objects
+of expenditure for personal comfort and decent livelihood.
+
+Besides this, the power conferred by wealth also affords a motive
+to accumulation. That propensity for purposeful activity and that
+repugnance to all futility of effort which belong to man by
+virtue of his character as an agent do not desert him when he
+emerges from the naive communal culture where the dominant note
+of life is the unanalysed and undifferentiated solidarity of the
+individual with the group with which his life is bound up. When
+he enters upon the predatory stage, where self-seeking in the
+narrower sense becomes the dominant note, this propensity goes
+with him still, as the pervasive trait that shapes his scheme of
+life. The propensity for achievement and the repugnance to
+futility remain the underlying economic motive. The propensity
+changes only in the form of its expression and in the proximate
+objects to which it directs the man's activity. Under the regime
+of individual ownership the most available means of visibly
+achieving a purpose is that afforded by the acquisition and
+accumulation of goods; and as the self-regarding antithesis
+between man and man reaches fuller consciousness, the propensity
+for achievement -- the instinct of workmanship -- tends more and
+more to shape itself into a straining to excel others in
+pecuniary achievement. Relative success, tested by an invidious
+pecuniary comparison with other men, becomes the conventional end
+of action. The currently accepted legitimate end of effort
+becomes the achievement of a favourable comparison with other
+men; and therefore the repugnance to futility to a good extent
+coalesces with the incentive of emulation. It acts to accentuate
+the struggle for pecuniary reputability by visiting with a
+sharper disapproval all shortcoming and all evidence of
+shortcoming in point of pecuniary success. Purposeful effort
+comes to mean, primarily, effort directed to or resulting in a
+more creditable showing of accumulated wealth. Among the motives
+which lead men to accumulate wealth, the primacy, both in scope
+and intensity, therefore, continues to belong to this motive of
+pecuniary emulation.
+
+In making use of the term "invidious", it may perhaps be
+unnecessary to remark, there is no intention to extol or
+depreciate, or to commend or deplore any of the phenomena which
+the word is used to characterise. The term is used in a technical
+sense as describing a comparison of persons with a view to rating
+and grading them in respect of relative worth or value -- in an
+aesthetic or moral sense -- and so awarding and defining the
+relative degrees of complacency with which they may legitimately
+be contemplated by themselves and by others. An invidious
+comparison is a process of valuation of persons in respect of
+worth.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Three
+
+Conspicuous Leisure
+
+If its working were not disturbed by other economic forces or
+other features of the emulative process, the immediate effect of
+such a pecuniary struggle as has just been described in outline
+would be to make men industrious and frugal. This result actually
+follows, in some measure, so far as regards the lower classes,
+whose ordinary means of acquiring goods is productive labour.
+This is more especially true of the labouring classes in a
+sedentary community which is at an agricultural stage of
+industry, in which there is a considerable subdivision of
+industry, and whose laws and customs secure to these classes a
+more or less definite share of the product of their industry.
+These lower classes can in any case not avoid labour, and the
+imputation of labour is therefore not greatly derogatory to them,
+at least not within their class. Rather, since labour is their
+recognised and accepted mode of life, they take some emulative
+pride in a reputation for efficiency in their work, this being
+often the only line of emulation that is open to them. For those
+for whom acquisition and emulation is possible only within the
+field of productive efficiency and thrift, the struggle for
+pecuniary reputability will in some measure work out in an
+increase of diligence and parsimony. But certain secondary
+features of the emulative process, yet to be spoken of, come in
+to very materially circumscribe and modify emulation in these
+directions among the pecuniary inferior classes as well as among
+the superior class.
+
+But it is otherwise with the superior pecuniary class, with which
+we are here immediately concerned. For this class also the
+incentive to diligence and thrift is not absent; but its action
+is so greatly qualified by the secondary demands of pecuniary
+emulation, that any inclination in this direction is practically
+overborne and any incentive to diligence tends to be of no
+effect. The most imperative of these secondary demands of
+emulation, as well as the one of widest scope, is the requirement
+of abstention from productive work. This is true in an especial
+degree for the barbarian stage of culture. During the predatory
+culture labour comes to be associated in men's habits of thought
+with weakness and subjection to a master. It is therefore a mark
+of inferiority, and therefore comes to be accounted unworthy of
+man in his best estate. By virtue of this tradition labour is
+felt to be debasing, and this tradition has never died out. On
+the contrary, with the advance of social differentiation it has
+acquired the axiomatic force due to ancient and unquestioned
+prescription.
+
+In order to gain and to hold the esteem of men it is not
+sufficient merely to possess wealth or power. The wealth or power
+must be put in evidence, for esteem is awarded only on evidence.
+And not only does the evidence of wealth serve to impress one's
+importance on others and to keep their sense of his importance
+alive and alert, but it is of scarcely less use in building up
+and preserving one's self-complacency. In all but the lowest
+stages of culture the normally constituted man is comforted and
+upheld in his self-respect by "decent surroundings" and by
+exemption from "menial offices". Enforced departure from his
+habitual standard of decency, either in the paraphernalia of life
+or in the kind and amount of his everyday activity, is felt to be
+a slight upon his human dignity, even apart from all conscious
+consideration of the approval or disapproval of his fellows.
+
+The archaic theoretical distinction between the base and the
+honourable in the manner of a man's life retains very much of its
+ancient force even today. So much so that there are few of the
+better class who are no possessed of an instinctive repugnance
+for the vulgar forms of labour. We have a realising sense of
+ceremonial uncleanness attaching in an especial degree to the
+occupations which are associated in our habits of thought with
+menial service. It is felt by all persons of refined taste that a
+spiritual contamination is inseparable from certain offices that
+are conventionally required of servants. Vulgar surroundings,
+mean (that is to say, inexpensive) habitations, and vulgarly
+productive occupations are unhesitatingly condemned and avoided.
+They are incompatible with life on a satisfactory spiritual plane
+__ with "high thinking". From the days of the Greek philosophers
+to the present, a degree of leisure and of exemption from contact
+with such industrial processes as serve the immediate everyday
+purposes of human life has ever been recognised by thoughtful men
+as a prerequisite to a worthy or beautiful, or even a blameless,
+human life. In itself and in its consequences the life of leisure
+is beautiful and ennobling in all civilised men's eyes.
+
+This direct, subjective value of leisure and of other evidences
+of wealth is no doubt in great part secondary and derivative. It
+is in part a reflex of the utility of leisure as a means of
+gaining the respect of others, and in part it is the result of a
+mental substitution. The performance of labour has been accepted
+as a conventional evidence of inferior force; therefore it comes
+itself, by a mental short-cut, to be regarded as intrinsically
+base.
+
+During the predatory stage proper, and especially during the
+earlier stages of the quasi-peaceable development of industry
+that follows the predatory stage, a life of leisure is the
+readiest and most conclusive evidence of pecuniary strength, and
+therefore of superior force; provided always that the gentleman
+of leisure can live in manifest ease and comfort. At this stage
+wealth consists chiefly of slaves, and the benefits accruing from
+the possession of riches and power take the form chiefly of
+personal service and the immediate products of personal service.
+Conspicuous abstention from labour therefore becomes the
+conventional mark of superior pecuniary achievement and the
+conventional index of reputability; and conversely, since
+application to productive labour is a mark of poverty and
+subjection, it becomes inconsistent with a reputable standing in
+the community. Habits of industry and thrift, therefore, are not
+uniformly furthered by a prevailing pecuniary emulation. On the
+contrary, this kind of emulation indirectly discountenances
+participation in productive labour. Labour would unavoidably
+become dishonourable, as being an evidence indecorous under the
+ancient tradition handed down from an earlier cultural stage. The
+ancient tradition of the predatory culture is that productive
+effort is to be shunned as being unworthy of able-bodied men, and
+this tradition is reinforced rather than set aside in the passage
+from the predatory to the quasi-peaceable manner of life.
+
+Even if the institution of a leisure class had not come in with
+the first emergence of individual ownership, by force of the
+dishonour attaching to productive employment, it would in any
+case have come in as one of the early consequences of ownership.
+And it is to be remarked that while the leisure class existed in
+theory from the beginning of predatory culture, the institution
+takes on a new and fuller meaning with the transition from the
+predatory to the next succeeding pecuniary stage of culture. It
+is from this time forth a "leisure class" in fact as well as in
+theory. From this point dates the institution of the leisure
+class in its consummate form.
+
+During the predatory stage proper the distinction between the
+leisure and the labouring class is in some degree a ceremonial
+distinction only. The able bodied men jealously stand aloof from
+whatever is in their apprehension, menial drudgery; but their
+activity in fact contributes appreciably to the sustenance of the
+group. The subsequent stage of quasi-peaceable industry is
+usually characterised by an established chattel slavery, herds of
+cattle, and a servile class of herdsmen and shepherds; industry
+has advanced so far that the community is no longer dependent for
+its livelihood on the chase or on any other form of activity that
+can fairly be classed as exploit. From this point on, the
+characteristic feature of leisure class life is a conspicuous
+exemption from all useful employment.
+
+The normal and characteristic occupations of the class in this
+mature phase of its life history are in form very much the same
+as in its earlier days. These occupations are government, war,
+sports, and devout observances. Persons unduly given to difficult
+theoretical niceties may hold that these occupations are still
+incidentally and indirectly "productive"; but it is to be noted
+as decisive of the question in hand that the ordinary and
+ostensible motive of the leisure class in engaging in these
+occupations is assuredly not an increase of wealth by productive
+effort. At this as at any other cultural stage, government and
+war are, at least in part, carried on for the pecuniary gain of
+those who engage in them; but it is gain obtained by the
+honourable method of seizure and conversion. These occupations
+are of the nature of predatory, not of productive, employment.
+Something similar may be said of the chase, but with a
+difference. As the community passes out of the hunting stage
+proper, hunting gradually becomes differentiated into two
+distinct employments. On the one hand it is a trade, carried on
+chiefly for gain; and from this the element of exploit is
+virtually absent, or it is at any rate not present in a
+sufficient degree to clear the pursuit of the imputation of
+gainful industry. On the other hand, the chase is also a sport
+-- an exercise of the predatory impulse simply. As such it does
+not afford any appreciable pecuniary incentive, but it contains a
+more or less obvious element of exploit. It is this latter
+development of the chase -- purged of all imputation of
+handicraft -- that alone is meritorious and fairly belongs in the
+scheme of life of the developed leisure class.
+
+Abstention from labour is not only a honorific or meritorious
+act, but it presently comes to be a requisite of decency. The
+insistence on property as the basis of reputability is very naive
+and very imperious during the early stages of the accumulation of
+wealth. Abstention from labour is the convenient evidence of
+wealth and is therefore the conventional mark of social standing;
+and this insistence on the meritoriousness of wealth leads to a
+more strenuous insistence on leisure. Nota notae est nota rei
+ipsius. According to well established laws of human nature,
+prescription presently seizes upon this conventional evidence of
+wealth and fixes it in men's habits of thought as something that
+is in itself substantially meritorious and ennobling; while
+productive labour at the same time and by a like process becomes
+in a double sense intrinsically unworthy. Prescription ends by
+making labour not only disreputable in the eyes of the community,
+but morally impossible to the noble, freeborn man, and
+incompatible with a worthy life.
+
+This tabu on labour has a further consequence in the industrial
+differentiation of classes. As the population increases in
+density and the predatory group grows into a settled industrial
+community, the constituted authorities and the customs governing
+ownership gain in scope and consistency. It then presently
+becomes impracticable to accumulate wealth by simple seizure,
+and, in logical consistency, acquisition by industry is equally
+impossible for high minded and impecunious men. The alternative
+open to them is beggary or privation. Wherever the canon of
+conspicuous leisure has a chance undisturbed to work out its
+tendency, there will therefore emerge a secondary, and in a sense
+spurious, leisure class -- abjectly poor and living in a
+precarious life of want and discomfort, but morally unable to
+stoop to gainful pursuits. The decayed gentleman and the lady who
+has seen better days are by no means unfamiliar phenomena even
+now. This pervading sense of the indignity of the slightest
+manual labour is familiar to all civilized peoples, as well as to
+peoples of a less advanced pecuniary culture. In persons of a
+delicate sensibility who have long been habituated to gentle
+manners, the sense of the shamefulness of manual labour may
+become so strong that, at a critical juncture, it will even set
+aside the instinct of self-preservation. So, for instance, we are
+told of certain Polynesian chiefs, who, under the stress of good
+form, preferred to starve rather than carry their food to their
+mouths with their own hands. It is true, this conduct may have
+been due, at least in part, to an excessive sanctity or tabu
+attaching to the chief's person. The tabu would have been
+communicated by the contact of his hands, and so would have made
+anything touched by him unfit for human food. But the tabu is
+itself a derivative of the unworthiness or moral incompatibility
+of labour; so that even when construed in this sense the conduct
+of the Polynesian chiefs is truer to the canon of honorific
+leisure than would at first appear. A better illustration, or at
+least a more unmistakable one, is afforded by a certain king of
+France, who is said to have lost his life through an excess of
+moral stamina in the observance of good form. In the absence of
+the functionary whose office it was to shift his master's seat,
+the king sat uncomplaining before the fire and suffered his royal
+person to be toasted beyond recovery. But in so doing he saved
+his Most Christian Majesty from menial contamination.  Summum
+crede nefas animam praeferre pudori, Et propter vitam vivendi
+perdere causas.
+
+It has already been remarked that the term "leisure", as here
+used, does not connote indolence or quiescence. What it connotes
+is non-productive consumption of time. Time is consumed
+non-productively (1) from a sense of the unworthiness of
+productive work, and (2) as an evidence of pecuniary ability to
+afford a life of idleness. But the whole of the life of the
+gentleman of leisure is not spent before the eyes of the
+spectators who are to be impressed with that spectacle of
+honorific leisure which in the ideal scheme makes up his life.
+For some part of the time his life is perforce withdrawn from the
+public eye, and of this portion which is spent in private the
+gentleman of leisure should, for the sake of his good name, be
+able to give a convincing account. He should find some means of
+putting in evidence the leisure that is not spent in the sight of
+the spectators. This can be done only indirectly, through the
+exhibition of some tangible, lasting results of the leisure so
+spent -- in a manner analogous to the familiar exhibition of
+tangible, lasting products of the labour performed for the
+gentleman of leisure by handicraftsmen and servants in his
+employ.
+
+The lasting evidence of productive labour is its material product
+-- commonly some article of consumption. In the case of exploit
+it is similarly possible and usual to procure some tangible
+result that may serve for exhibition in the way of trophy or
+booty. At a later phase of the development it is customary to
+assume some badge of insignia of honour that will serve as a
+conventionally accepted mark of exploit, and which at the same
+time indicates the quantity or degree of exploit of which it is
+the symbol. As the population increases in density, and as human
+relations grow more complex and numerous, all the details of life
+undergo a process of elaboration and selection; and in this
+process of elaboration the use of trophies develops into a system
+of rank, titles, degrees and insignia, typical examples of which
+are heraldic devices, medals, and honorary decorations.
+
+As seen from the economic point of view, leisure,
+considered as an employment, is closely allied in kind with the
+life of exploit; and the achievements which characterise a life
+of leisure, and which remain as its decorous criteria, have much
+in common with the trophies of exploit. But leisure in the
+narrower sense, as distinct from exploit and from any ostensibly
+productive employment of effort on objects which are of no
+intrinsic use, does not commonly leave a material product. The
+criteria of a past performance of leisure therefore commonly take
+the form of "immaterial" goods. Such immaterial evidences of past
+leisure are quasi-scholarly or quasi-artistic accomplishments and
+a knowledge of processes and incidents which do not conduce
+directly to the furtherance of human life. So, for instance, in
+our time there is the knowledge of the dead languages and the
+occult sciences; of correct spelling; of syntax and prosody; of
+the various forms of domestic music and other household art; of
+the latest properties of dress, furniture, and equipage; of
+games, sports, and fancy-bred animals, such as dogs and
+race-horses. In all these branches of knowledge the initial
+motive from which their acquisition proceeded at the outset, and
+through which they first came into vogue, may have been something
+quite different from the wish to show that one's time had not
+been spent in industrial employment; but unless these
+accomplishments had approved themselves as serviceable evidence
+of an unproductive expenditure of time, they would not have
+survived and held their place as conventional accomplishments of
+the leisure class.
+
+These accomplishments may, in some sense, be classed as branches
+of learning. Beside and beyond these there is a further range of
+social facts which shade off from the region of learning into
+that of physical habit and dexterity. Such are what is known as
+manners and breeding, polite usage, decorum, and formal and
+ceremonial observances generally. This class of facts are even
+more immediately and obtrusively presented to the observation,
+and they therefore more widely and more imperatively insisted on
+as required evidences of a reputable degree of leisure. It is
+worth while to remark that all that class of ceremonial
+observances which are classed under the general head of manners
+hold a more important place in the esteem of men during the stage
+of culture at which conspicuous leisure has the greatest vogue as
+a mark of reputability, than at later stages of the cultural
+development. The barbarian of the quasi-peaceable stage of
+industry is notoriously a more high-bred gentleman, in all that
+concerns decorum, than any but the very exquisite among the men
+of a later age. Indeed, it is well known, or at least it is
+currently believed, that manners have progressively deteriorated
+as society has receded from the patriarchal stage. Many a
+gentleman of the old school has been provoked to remark
+regretfully upon the under-bred manners and bearing of even the
+better classes in the modern industrial communities; and the
+decay of the ceremonial code -- or as it is otherwise called, the
+vulgarisation of life -- among the industrial classes proper has
+become one of the chief enormities of latter-day civilisation in
+the eyes of all persons of delicate sensibilities. The decay
+which the code has suffered at the hands of a busy people
+testifies -- all depreciation apart -- to the fact that decorum
+is a product and an exponent of leisure class life and thrives in
+full measure only under a regime of status.
+
+The origin, or better the derivation, of manners is no doubt, to
+be sought elsewhere than in a conscious effort on the part of the
+well-mannered to show that much time has been spent in acquiring
+them. The proximate end of innovation and elaboration has been
+the higher effectiveness of the new departure in point of beauty
+or of expressiveness. In great part the ceremonial code of
+decorous usages owes its beginning and its growth to the desire
+to conciliate or to show good-will, as anthropologists and
+sociologists are in the habit of assuming, and this initial
+motive is rarely if ever absent from the conduct of well-mannered
+persons at any stage of the later development. Manners, we are
+told, are in part an elaboration of gesture, and in part they are
+symbolical and conventionalised survivals representing former
+acts of dominance or of personal service or of personal contact.
+In large part they are an expression of the relation of status,
+-- a symbolic pantomime of mastery on the one hand and of
+subservience on the other. Wherever at the present time the
+predatory habit of mind, and the consequent attitude of mastery
+and of subservience, gives its character to the accredited scheme
+of life, there the importance of all punctilios of conduct is
+extreme, and the assiduity with which the ceremonial observance
+of rank and titles is attended to approaches closely to the ideal
+set by the barbarian of the quasi-peaceable nomadic culture. Some
+of the Continental countries afford good illustrations of this
+spiritual survival. In these communities the archaic ideal is
+similarly approached as regards the esteem accorded to manners as
+a fact of intrinsic worth.
+
+Decorum set out with being symbol and pantomime and with having
+utility only as an exponent of the facts and qualities
+symbolised; but it presently suffered the transmutation which
+commonly passes over symbolical facts in human intercourse.
+Manners presently came, in popular apprehension, to be possessed
+of a substantial utility in themselves; they acquired a
+sacramental character, in great measure independent of the facts
+which they originally prefigured. Deviations from the code of
+decorum have become intrinsically odious to all men, and good
+breeding is, in everyday apprehension, not simply an adventitious
+mark of human excellence, but an integral feature of the worthy
+human soul. There are few things that so touch us with
+instinctive revulsion as a breach of decorum; and so far have we
+progressed in the direction of imputing intrinsic utility to the
+ceremonial observances of etiquette that few of us, if any, can
+dissociate an offence against etiquette from a sense of the
+substantial unworthiness of the offender. A breach of faith may
+be condoned, but a breach of decorum can not. "Manners maketh
+man."
+
+None the less, while manners have this intrinsic utility, in the
+apprehension of the performer and the beholder alike, this sense
+of the intrinsic rightness of decorum is only the proximate
+ground of the vogue of manners and breeding. Their ulterior,
+economic ground is to be sought in the honorific character of
+that leisure or non-productive employment of time and effort
+without which good manners are not acquired. The knowledge and
+habit of good form come only by long-continued use. Refined
+tastes, manners, habits of life are a useful evidence of
+gentility, because good breeding requires time, application and
+expense, and can therefore not be compassed by those whose time
+and energy are taken up with work. A knowledge of good form is
+prima facie evidence that that portion of the well-bred person's
+life which is not spent under the observation of the spectator
+has been worthily spent in acquiring accomplishments that are of
+no lucrative effect. In the last analysis the value of manners
+lies in the fact that they are the voucher of a life of leisure.
+Therefore, conversely, since leisure is the conventional means of
+pecuniary repute, the acquisition of some proficiency in decorum
+is incumbent on all who aspire to a modicum of pecuniary decency.
+
+So much of the honourable life of leisure as is not spent in the
+sight of spectators can serve the purposes of reputability only
+in so far as it leaves a tangible, visible result that can be put
+in evidence and can be measured and compared with products of the
+same class exhibited by competing aspirants for repute. Some such
+effect, in the way of leisurely manners and carriage, etc.,
+follows from simple persistent abstention from work, even where
+the subject does not take thought of the matter and
+studiously acquire an air of leisurely opulence and mastery.
+Especially does it seem to be true that a life of leisure in this
+way persisted in through several generations will leave a
+persistent, ascertainable effect in the conformation of the
+person, and still more in his habitual bearing and demeanour. But
+all the suggestions of a cumulative life of leisure, and all the
+proficiency in decorum that comes by the way of passive
+habituation, may be further improved upon by taking thought and
+assiduously acquiring the marks of honourable leisure, and then
+carrying the exhibition of these adventitious marks of exemption
+from employment out in a strenuous and systematic discipline.
+Plainly, this is a point at which a diligent application of
+effort and expenditure may materially further the attainment of a
+decent proficiency in the leisure-class properties. Conversely,
+the greater the degree of proficiency and the more patent the
+evidence of a high degree of habituation to observances which
+serve no lucrative or other directly useful purpose, the greater
+the consumption of time and substance impliedly involved in their
+acquisition, and the greater the resultant good repute. Hence
+under the competitive struggle for proficiency in good manners,
+it comes about that much pains in taken with the cultivation of
+habits of decorum; and hence the details of decorum develop into
+a comprehensive discipline, conformity to which is required of
+all who would be held blameless in point of repute. And hence, on
+the other hand, this conspicuous leisure of which decorum is a
+ramification grows gradually into a laborious drill in deportment
+and an education in taste and discrimination as to what articles
+of consumption are decorous and what are the decorous methods of
+consuming them.
+
+In this connection it is worthy of notice that the
+possibility of producing pathological and other idiosyncrasies of
+person and manner by shrewd mimicry and a systematic drill have
+been turned to account in the deliberate production of a cultured
+class -- often with a very happy effect. In this way, by the
+process vulgarly known as snobbery, a syncopated evolution of
+gentle birth and breeding is achieved in the case of a goodly
+number of families and lines of descent. This syncopated gentle
+birth gives results which, in point of serviceability as a
+leisure-class factor in the population, are in no wise
+substantially inferior to others who may have had a longer but
+less arduous training in the pecuniary properties.
+
+There are, moreover, measureable degrees of conformity to the
+latest accredited code of the punctilios as regards decorous
+means and methods of consumption. Differences between one person
+and another in the degree of conformity to the ideal in these
+respects can be compared, and persons may be graded and scheduled
+with some accuracy and effect according to a progressive scale of
+manners and breeding. The award of reputability in this regard is
+commonly made in good faith, on the ground of conformity to
+accepted canons of taste in the matters concerned, and without
+conscious regard to the pecuniary standing or the degree of
+leisure practised by any given candidate for reputability; but
+the canons of taste according to which the award is made are
+constantly under the surveillance of the law of conspicuous
+leisure, and are indeed constantly undergoing change and revision
+to bring them into closer conformity with its requirements. So
+that while the proximate ground of discrimination may be of
+another kind, still the pervading principle and abiding test of
+good breeding is the requirement of a substantial and patent
+waste of time. There may be some considerable range of variation
+in detail within the scope of this principle, but they are
+variations of form and expression, not of substance.
+
+Much of the courtesy of everyday intercourse is of course a
+direct expression of consideration and kindly good-will, and this
+element of conduct has for the most part no need of being traced
+back to any underlying ground of reputability to explain either
+its presence or the approval with which it is regarded; but the
+same is not true of the code of properties. These latter are
+expressions of status. It is of course sufficiently plain, to any
+one who cares to see, that our bearing towards menials and other
+pecuniary dependent inferiors is the bearing of the superior
+member in a relation of status, though its manifestation is often
+greatly modified and softened from the original expression of
+crude dominance. Similarly, our bearing towards superiors, and in
+great measure towards equals, expresses a more or less
+conventionalised attitude of subservience. Witness the masterful
+presence of the high-minded gentleman or lady, which testifies to
+so much of dominance and independence of economic circumstances,
+and which at the same time appeals with such convincing force to
+our sense of what is right and gracious. It is among this highest
+leisure class, who have no superiors and few peers, that decorum
+finds its fullest and maturest expression; and it is this highest
+class also that gives decorum that definite formulation which
+serves as a canon of conduct for the classes beneath. And there
+also the code is most obviously a code of status and shows most
+plainly its incompatibility with all vulgarly productive work. A
+divine assurance and an imperious complaisance, as of one
+habituated to require subservience and to take no thought for the
+morrow, is the birthright and the criterion of the gentleman at
+his best; and it is in popular apprehension even more than that,
+for this demeanour is accepted as an intrinsic attribute of
+superior worth, before which the base-born commoner delights to
+stoop and yield.
+
+As has been indicated in an earlier chapter, there is reason to
+believe that the institution of ownership has begun with the
+ownership of persons, primarily women. The incentives to
+acquiring such property have apparently been: (1) a propensity
+for dominance and coercion; (2) the utility of these persons as
+evidence of the prowess of the owner; (3) the utility of their
+services.
+
+Personal service holds a peculiar place in the economic
+development. During the stage of quasi-peaceable industry, and
+especially during the earlier development of industry within the
+limits of this general stage, the utility of their services seems
+commonly to be the dominant motive to the acquisition of property
+in persons. Servants are valued for their services. But the
+dominance of this motive is not due to a decline in the absolute
+importance of the other two utilities possessed by servants. It
+is rather that the altered circumstance of life accentuate the
+utility of servants for this last-named purpose. Women and other
+slaves are highly valued, both as an evidence of wealth and as a
+means of accumulating wealth. Together with cattle, if the tribe
+is a pastoral one, they are the usual form of investment for a
+profit. To such an extent may female slavery give its character
+to the economic life under the quasi-peaceable culture that the
+women even comes to serve as a unit of value among peoples
+occupying this cultural stage -- as for instance in Homeric
+times. Where this is the case there need be little question but
+that the basis of the industrial system is chattel slavery and
+that the women are commonly slaves. The great, pervading human
+relation in such a system is that of master and servant. The
+accepted evidence of wealth is the possession of many women, and
+presently also of other slaves engaged in attendance on their
+master's person and in producing goods for him.
+
+A division of labour presently sets in, whereby personal service
+and attendance on the master becomes the special office of a
+portion of the servants, while those who are wholly employed in
+industrial occupations proper are removed more and more from all
+immediate relation to the person of their owner. At the same time
+those servants whose office is personal service, including
+domestic duties, come gradually to be exempted from productive
+industry carried on for gain.
+
+This process of progressive exemption from the common run of
+industrial employment will commonly begin with the exemption of
+the wife, or the chief wife. After the community has advanced to
+settled habits of life, wife-capture from hostile tribes becomes
+impracticable as a customary source of supply. Where this
+cultural advance has been achieved, the chief wife is ordinarily
+of gentle blood, and the fact of her being so will hasten her
+exemption from vulgar employment. The manner in which the concept
+of gentle blood originates, as well as the place which it
+occupies in the development of marriage, cannot be discussed in
+this place. For the purpose in hand it will be sufficient to say
+that gentle blood is blood which has been ennobled by protracted
+contact with accumulated wealth or unbroken prerogative. The
+women with these antecedents is preferred in marriage, both for
+the sake of a resulting alliance with her powerful relatives and
+because a superior worth is felt to inhere in blood which has
+been associated with many goods and great power. She will still
+be her husband's chattel, as she was her father's chattel before
+her purchase, but she is at the same time of her father's gentle
+blood; and hence there is a moral incongruity in her occupying
+herself with the debasing employments of her fellow-servants.
+However completely she may be subject to her master, and however
+inferior to the male members of the social stratum in which her
+birth has placed her, the principle that gentility is
+transmissible will act to place her above the common slave; and
+so soon as this principle has acquired a prescriptive authority
+it will act to invest her in some measure with that prerogative
+of leisure which is the chief mark of gentility. Furthered by
+this principle of transmissible gentility the wife's exemption
+gains in scope, if the wealth of her owner permits it, until it
+includes exemption from debasing menial service as well as from
+handicraft. As the industrial development goes on and property
+becomes massed in relatively fewer hands, the conventional
+standard of wealth of the upper class rises. The same tendency to
+exemption from handicraft, and in the course of time from menial
+domestic employments, will then assert itself as regards the
+other wives, if such there are, and also as regards other
+servants in immediate attendance upon the person of their master.
+The exemption comes more tardily the remoter the relation in
+which the servant stands to the person of the master.
+
+If the pecuniary situation of the master permits it, the
+development of a special class of personal or body servants is
+also furthered by the very grave importance which comes to attach
+to this personal service. The master's person, being the
+embodiment of worth and honour, is of the most serious
+consequence. Both for his reputable standing in the community and
+for his self-respect, it is a matter of moment that he should
+have at his call efficient specialised servants, whose attendance
+upon his person is not diverted from this their chief office by
+any by-occupation. These specialised servants are useful more for
+show than for service actually performed. In so far as they are
+not kept for exhibition simply, they afford gratification to
+their master chiefly in allowing scope to his propensity for
+dominance. It is true, the care of the continually increasing
+household apparatus may require added labour; but since the
+apparatus is commonly increased in order to serve as a means of
+good repute rather than as a means of comfort, this qualification
+is not of great weight. All these lines of utility are better
+served by a larger number of more highly specialised servants.
+There results, therefore, a constantly increasing differentiation
+and multiplication of domestic and body servants, along with a
+concomitant progressive exemption of such servants from
+productive labour. By virtue of their serving as evidence of
+ability to pay, the office of such domestics regularly tends to
+include continually fewer duties, and their service tends in the
+end to become nominal only. This is especially true of those
+servants who are in most immediate and obvious attendance upon
+their master. So that the utility of these comes to consist, in
+great part, in their conspicuous exemption from productive labour
+and in the evidence which this exemption affords of their
+master's wealth and power.
+
+After some considerable advance has been made in the practice of
+employing a special corps of servants for the performance of a
+conspicuous leisure in this manner, men begin to be preferred
+above women for services that bring them obtrusively into view.
+Men, especially lusty, personable fellows, such as footmen and
+other menials should be, are obviously more powerful and more
+expensive than women. They are better fitted for this work, as
+showing a larger waste of time and of human energy. Hence it
+comes about that in the economy of the leisure class the busy
+housewife of the early patriarchal days, with her retinue of
+hard-working handmaidens, presently gives place to the lady and
+the lackey.
+
+In all grades and walks of life, and at any stage of the economic
+development, the leisure of the lady and of the lackey differs
+from the leisure of the gentleman in his own right in that it is
+an occupation of an ostensibly laborious kind. It takes the form,
+in large measure, of a painstaking attention to the service of
+the master, or to the maintenance and elaboration of the
+household paraphernalia; so that it is leisure only in the sense
+that little or no productive work is performed by this class, not
+in the sense that all appearance of labour is avoided by them.
+The duties performed by the lady, or by the household or domestic
+servants, are frequently arduous enough, and they are also
+frequently directed to ends which are considered extremely
+necessary to the comfort of the entire household. So far as these
+services conduce to the physical efficiency or comfort of the
+master or the rest of the household, they are to be accounted
+productive work. Only the residue of employment left after
+deduction of this effective work is to be classed as a
+performance of leisure.
+
+But much of the services classed as household cares in modern
+everyday life, and many of the "utilities" required for a
+comfortable existence by civilised man, are of a ceremonial
+character. They are, therefore, properly to be classed as a
+performance of leisure in the sense in which the term is here
+used. They may be none the less imperatively necessary from the
+point of view of decent existence: they may be none the less
+requisite for personal comfort even, although they may be chiefly
+or wholly of a ceremonial character. But in so far as they
+partake of this character they are imperative and requisite
+because we have been taught to require them under pain of
+ceremonial uncleanness or unworthiness. We feel discomfort in
+their absence, but not because their absence results directly in
+physical discomfort; nor would a taste not trained to
+discriminate between the conventionally good and the
+conventionally bad take offence at their omission. In so far as
+this is true the labour spent in these services is to be classed
+as leisure; and when performed by others than the economically
+free and self-directed head of the establishment, they are to be
+classed as vicarious leisure.
+
+The vicarious leisure performed by housewives and menials, under
+the head of household cares, may frequently develop into
+drudgery, especially where the competition for reputability is
+close and strenuous. This is frequently the case in modern life.
+Where this happens, the domestic service which comprises the
+duties of this servant class might aptly be designated as wasted
+effort, rather than as vicarious leisure. But the latter term has
+the advantage of indicating the line of derivation of these
+domestic offices, as well as of neatly suggesting the substantial
+economic ground of their utility; for these occupations are
+chiefly useful as a method of imputing pecuniary reputability to
+the master or to the household on the ground that a given amount
+of time and effort is conspicuously wasted in that behalf.
+
+In this way, then, there arises a subsidiary or derivative
+leisure class, whose office is the performance of a vicarious
+leisure for the behoof of the reputability of the primary or
+legitimate leisure class. This vicarious leisure class is
+distinguished from the leisure class proper by a characteristic
+feature of its habitual mode of life. The leisure of the master
+class is, at least ostensibly, an indulgence of a proclivity for
+the avoidance of labour and is presumed to enhance the master's
+own well-being and fulness of life; but the leisure of the
+servant class exempt from productive labour is in some sort a
+performance exacted from them, and is not normally or primarily
+directed to their own comfort. The leisure of the servant is not
+his own leisure. So far as he is a servant in the full sense, and
+not at the same time a member of a lower order of the leisure
+class proper, his leisure normally passes under the guise of
+specialised service directed to the furtherance of his master's
+fulness of life. Evidence of this relation of subservience is
+obviously present in the servant's carriage and manner of life.
+The like is often true of the wife throughout the protracted
+economic stage during which she is still primarily a servant --
+that is to say, so long as the household with a male head remains
+in force. In order to satisfy the requirements of the leisure
+class scheme of life, the servant should show not only an
+attitude of subservience, but also the effects of special
+training and practice in subservience. The servant or wife should
+not only perform certain offices and show a servile disposition,
+but it is quite as imperative that they should show an acquired
+facility in the tactics of subservience -- a trained conformity
+to the canons of effectual and conspicuous subservience. Even
+today it is this aptitude and acquired skill in the formal
+manifestation of the servile relation that constitutes the chief
+element of utility in our highly paid servants, as well as one of
+the chief ornaments of the well-bred housewife.
+
+The first requisite of a good servant is that he should
+conspicuously know his place. It is not enough that he knows how
+to effect certain desired mechanical results; he must above all,
+know how to effect these results in due form. Domestic service
+might be said to be a spiritual rather than a mechanical
+function. Gradually there grows up an elaborate system of good
+form, specifically regulating the manner in which this vicarious
+leisure of the servant class is to be performed. Any departure
+from these canons of form is to be depreciated, not so much
+because it evinces a shortcoming in mechanical efficiency, or
+even that it shows an absence of the servile attitude and
+temperament, but because, in the last analysis, it shows the
+absence of special training. Special training in personal service
+costs time and effort, and where it is obviously present in a
+high degree, it argues that the servant who possesses it, neither
+is nor has been habitually engaged in any productive occupation.
+It is prima facie evidence of a vicarious leisure extending far
+back in the past. So that trained service has utility, not only
+as gratifying the master's instinctive liking for good and
+skilful workmanship and his propensity for conspicuous dominance
+over those whose lives are subservient to his own, but it has
+utility also as putting in evidence a much larger consumption of
+human service than would be shown by the mere present conspicuous
+leisure performed by an untrained person. It is a serious
+grievance if a gentleman's butler or footman performs his duties
+about his master's table or carriage in such unformed style as to
+suggest that his habitual occupation may be ploughing or
+sheepherding. Such bungling work would imply inability on the
+master's part to procure the service of specially trained
+servants; that is to say, it would imply inability to pay for the
+consumption of time, effort, and instruction required to fit a
+trained servant for special service under the exacting code of
+forms. If the performance of the servant argues lack of means on
+the part of his master, it defeats its chief substantial end; for
+the chief use of servants is the evidence they afford of the
+master's ability to pay.
+
+What has just been said might be taken to imply that the offence
+of an under-trained servant lies in a direct suggestion of
+inexpensiveness or of usefulness. Such, of course, is not the
+case. The connection is much less immediate. What happens here is
+what happens generally. Whatever approves itself to us on any
+ground at the outset, presently comes to appeal to us as a
+gratifying thing in itself; it comes to rest in our habits of
+though as substantially right. But in order that any specific
+canon of deportment shall maintain itself in favour, it must
+continue to have the support of, or at least not be incompatible
+with, the habit or aptitude which constitutes the norm of its
+development. The need of vicarious leisure, or conspicuous
+consumption of service, is a dominant incentive to the keeping of
+servants. So long as this remains true it may be set down without
+much discussion that any such departure from accepted usage as
+would suggest an abridged apprenticeship in service would
+presently be found insufferable. The requirement of an expensive
+vicarious leisure acts indirectly, selectively, by guiding the
+formation of our taste, -- of our sense of what is right in these
+matters, -- and so weeds out unconformable departures by
+withholding approval of them.
+
+As the standard of wealth recognized by common consent advances,
+the possession and exploitation of servants as a means of showing
+superfluity undergoes a refinement. The possession and
+maintenance of slaves employed in the production of goods argues
+wealth and prowess, but the maintenance of servants who produce
+nothing argues still higher wealth and position. Under this
+principle there arises a class of servants, the more numerous the
+better, whose sole office is fatuously to wait upon the person of
+their owner, and so to put in evidence his ability unproductively
+to consume a large amount of service. There supervenes a division
+of labour among the servants or dependents whose life is spent in
+maintaining the honour of the gentleman of leisure. So that,
+while one group produces goods for him, another group, usually
+headed by the wife, or chief, consumes for him in conspicuous
+leisure; thereby putting in evidence his ability to sustain large
+pecuniary damage without impairing his superior opulence.
+
+This somewhat idealized and diagrammatic outline of the
+development and nature of domestic service comes nearest being
+true for that cultural stage which was here been named the
+"quasi-peaceable" stage of industry. At this stage personal
+service first rises to the position of an economic institution,
+and it is at this stage that it occupies the largest place in the
+community's scheme of life. In the cultural sequence, the
+quasi-peaceable stage follows the predatory stage proper, the two
+being successive phases of barbarian life. Its characteristic
+feature is a formal observance of peace and order, at the same
+time that life at this stage still has too much of coercion and
+class antagonism to be called peaceable in the full sense of the
+word. For many purposes, and from another point of view than the
+economic one, it might as well be named the stage of status. The
+method of human relation during this stage, and the spiritual
+attitude of men at this level of culture, is well summed up under
+the term. But as a descriptive term to characterise the
+prevailing methods of industry, as well as to indicate the trend
+of industrial development at this point in economic evolution,
+the term "quasi-peaceable" seems preferable. So far as concerns
+the communities of the Western culture, this phase of economic
+development probably lies in the past; except for a numerically
+small though very conspicuous fraction of the community in whom
+the habits of thought peculiar to the barbarian culture have
+suffered but a relatively slight disintegration.
+
+Personal service is still an element of great economic
+importance, especially as regards the distribution and
+consumption of goods; but its relative importance even in this
+direction is no doubt less than it once was. The best development
+of this vicarious leisure lies in the past rather than in the
+present; and its best expression in the present is to be found in
+the scheme of life of the upper leisure class. To this class the
+modern culture owes much in the way of the conservation of
+traditions, usages, and habits of thought which belong on a more
+archaic cultural plane, so far as regards their widest acceptance
+and their most effective development.
+
+In the modern industrial communities the mechanical
+contrivances available for the comfort and convenience of
+everyday life are highly developed. So much so that body
+servants, or, indeed, domestic servants of any kind, would now
+scarcely be employed by anybody except on the ground of a canon
+of reputability carried over by tradition from earlier usage. The
+only exception would be servants employed to attend on the
+persons of the infirm and the feeble-minded. But such servants
+properly come under the head of trained nurses rather than under
+that of domestic servants, and they are, therefore, an apparent
+rather than a real exception to the rule.
+
+The proximate reason for keeping domestic servants, for instance,
+in the moderately well-to-do household of to-day, is (ostensibly)
+that the members of the household are unable without discomfort
+to compass the work required by such a modern
+establishment. And the reason for their being unable to
+accomplish it is (1) that they have too many "social duties", and
+(2) that the work to be done is too severe and that there is too
+much of it. These two reasons may be restated as follows: (1)
+Under the mandatory code of decency, the time and effort of the
+members of such a household are required to be ostensibly all
+spent in a performance of conspicuous leisure, in the way of
+calls, drives, clubs, sewing-circles, sports, charity
+organisations, and other like social functions. Those persons
+whose time and energy are employed in these matters privately
+avow that all these observances, as well as the incidental
+attention to dress and other conspicuous consumption, are very
+irksome but altogether unavoidable. (2) Under the requirement of
+conspicuous consumption of goods, the apparatus of living has
+grown so elaborate and cumbrous, in the way of dwellings,
+furniture, bric-a-brac, wardrobe and meals, that the consumers of
+these things cannot make way with them in the required manner
+without help. Personal contact with the hired persons whose aid
+is called in to fulfil the routine of decency is commonly
+distasteful to the occupants of the house, but their presence is
+endured and paid for, in order to delegate to them a share in
+this onerous consumption of household goods. The presence of
+domestic servants, and of the special class of body servants in
+an eminent degree, is a concession of physical comfort to the
+moral need of pecuniary decency.
+
+The largest manifestation of vicarious leisure in modern life is
+made up of what are called domestic duties. These duties are fast
+becoming a species of services performed, not so much for the
+individual behoof of the head of the household as for the
+reputability of the household taken as a corporate unit -- a
+group of which the housewife is a member on a footing of
+ostensible equality. As fast as the household for which they are
+performed departs from its archaic basis of ownership-marriage,
+these household duties of course tend to fall out of the category
+of vicarious leisure in the original sense; except so far as they
+are performed by hired servants. That is to say, since vicarious
+leisure is possible only on a basis of status or of hired
+service, the disappearance of the relation of status from human
+intercourse at any point carries with it the disappearance of
+vicarious leisure so far as regards that much of life. But it is
+to be added, in qualification of this qualification, that so long
+as the household subsists, even with a divided head, this class
+of non-productive labour performed for the sake of the household
+reputability must still be classed as vicarious leisure, although
+in a slightly altered sense. It is now leisure performed for the
+quasi-personal corporate household, instead of, as formerly, for
+the proprietary head of the household.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Four
+
+Conspicuous Consumption
+
+In what has been said of the evolution of the vicarious leisure
+class and its differentiation from the general body of the
+working classes, reference has been made to a further
+division of labour, -- that between the different servant
+classes. One portion of the servant class, chiefly those persons
+whose occupation is vicarious leisure, come to undertake a new,
+subsidiary range of duties -- the vicarious consumption of goods.
+The most obvious form in which this consumption occurs is seen in
+the wearing of liveries and the occupation of spacious servants'
+quarters. Another, scarcely less obtrusive or less effective form
+of vicarious consumption, and a much more widely prevalent one,
+is the consumption of food, clothing, dwelling, and furniture by
+the lady and the rest of the domestic establishment.
+
+But already at a point in economic evolution far antedating the
+emergence of the lady, specialised consumption of goods as an
+evidence of pecuniary strength had begun to work out in a more or
+less elaborate system. The beginning of a differentiation in
+consumption even antedates the appearance of anything that can
+fairly be called pecuniary strength. It is traceable back to the
+initial phase of predatory culture, and there is even a
+suggestion that an incipient differentiation in this respect lies
+back of the beginnings of the predatory life. This most primitive
+differentiation in the consumption of goods is like the later
+differentiation with which we are all so intimately familiar, in
+that it is largely of a ceremonial character, but unlike the
+latter it does not rest on a difference in accumulated wealth.
+The utility of consumption as an evidence of wealth is to be
+classed as a derivative growth. It is an adaption to a new end,
+by a selective process, of a distinction previously existing and
+well established in men's habits of thought.
+
+In the earlier phases of the predatory culture the only economic
+differentiation is a broad distinction between an honourable
+superior class made up of the able-bodied men on the one side,
+and a base inferior class of labouring women on the other.
+According to the ideal scheme of life in force at the time it is
+the office of the men to consume what the women produce. Such
+consumption as falls to the women is merely incidental to their
+work; it is a means to their continued labour, and not a
+consumption directed to their own comfort and fulness of life.
+Unproductive consumption of goods is honourable, primarily as a
+mark of prowess and a perquisite of human dignity; secondarily it
+becomes substantially honourable to itself, especially the
+consumption of the more desirable things. The consumption of
+choice articles of food, and frequently also of rare articles of
+adornment, becomes tabu to the women and children; and if there
+is a base (servile) class of men, the tabu holds also for them.
+With a further advance in culture this tabu may change into
+simple custom of a more or less rigorous character; but whatever
+be the theoretical basis of the distinction which is maintained,
+whether it be a tabu or a larger conventionality, the features of
+the conventional scheme of consumption do not change easily. When
+the quasi-peaceable stage of industry is reached, with its
+fundamental institution of chattel slavery, the general
+principle, more or less rigorously applied, is that the base,
+industrious class should consume only what may be necessary to
+their subsistence. In the nature of things, luxuries and the
+comforts of life belong to the leisure class. Under the tabu,
+certain victuals, and more particularly certain beverages, are
+strictly reserved for the use of the superior class.
+
+The ceremonial differentiation of the dietary is best seen in the
+use of intoxicating beverages and narcotics. If these articles of
+consumption are costly, they are felt to be noble and honorific.
+Therefore the base classes, primarily the women, practice an
+enforced continence with respect to these stimulants, except in
+countries where they are obtainable at a very low cost. From
+archaic times down through all the length of the patriarchal
+regime it has been the office of the women to prepare and
+administer these luxuries, and it has been the perquisite of the
+men of gentle birth and breeding to consume them. Drunkenness and
+the other pathological consequences of the free use of stimulants
+therefore tend in their turn to become honorific, as being a
+mark, at the second remove, of the superior status of those who
+are able to afford the indulgence. Infirmities induced by
+over-indulgence are among some peoples freely recognised as manly
+attributes. It has even happened that the name for certain
+diseased conditions of the body arising from such an origin has
+passed into everyday speech as a synonym for "noble" or "gentle".
+It is only at a relatively early stage of culture that the
+symptoms of expensive vice are conventionally accepted as marks
+of a superior status, and so tend to become virtues and command
+the deference of the community; but the reputability that
+attaches to certain expensive vices long retains so much of its
+force as to appreciably lesson the disapprobation visited upon
+the men of the wealthy or noble class for any excessive
+indulgence. The same invidious distinction adds force to the
+current disapproval of any indulgence of this kind on the part of
+women, minors, and inferiors. This invidious traditional
+distinction has not lost its force even among the more advanced
+peoples of today. Where the example set by the leisure class
+retains its imperative force in the regulation of the
+conventionalities, it is observable that the women still in great
+measure practise the same traditional continence with regard to
+stimulants.
+
+This characterisation of the greater continence in the use of
+stimulants practised by the women of the reputable classes may
+seem an excessive refinement of logic at the expense of common
+sense. But facts within easy reach of any one who cares to know
+them go to say that the greater abstinence of women is in some
+part due to an imperative conventionality; and this
+conventionality is, in a general way, strongest where the
+patriarchal tradition -- the tradition that the woman is a
+chattel -- has retained its hold in greatest vigour. In a sense
+which has been greatly qualified in scope and rigour, but which
+has by no means lost its meaning even yet, this tradition says
+that the woman, being a chattel, should consume only what is
+necessary to her sustenance, -- except so far as her further
+consumption contributes to the comfort or the good repute of her
+master. The consumption of luxuries, in the true sense, is a
+consumption directed to the comfort of the consumer himself, and
+is, therefore, a mark of the master. Any such consumption by
+others can take place only on a basis of sufferance. In
+communities where the popular habits of thought have been
+profoundly shaped by the patriarchal tradition we may
+accordingly look for survivals of the tabu on luxuries at least
+to the extent of a conventional deprecation of their use by the
+unfree and dependent class. This is more particularly true as
+regards certain luxuries, the use of which by the dependent class
+would detract sensibly from the comfort or pleasure of their
+masters, or which are held to be of doubtful legitimacy on other
+grounds. In the apprehension of the great conservative middle
+class of Western civilisation the use of these various stimulants
+is obnoxious to at least one, if not both, of these objections;
+and it is a fact too significant to be passed over that it is
+precisely among these middle classes of the Germanic culture,
+with their strong surviving sense of the patriarchal proprieties,
+that the women are to the greatest extent subject to a qualified
+tabu on narcotics and alcoholic beverages. With many
+qualifications -- with more qualifications as the patriarchal
+tradition has gradually weakened -- the general rule is felt to
+be right and binding that women should consume only for the
+benefit of their masters. The objection of course presents itself
+that expenditure on women's dress and household paraphernalia is
+an obvious exception to this rule; but it will appear in the
+sequel that this exception is much more obvious than substantial.
+During the earlier stages of economic development,
+consumption of goods without stint, especially consumption of the
+better grades of goods, -- ideally all consumption in excess of
+the subsistence minimum, -- pertains normally to the leisure
+class. This restriction tends to disappear, at least formally,
+after the later peaceable stage has been reached, with private
+ownership of goods and an industrial system based on wage labour
+or on the petty household economy. But during the earlier
+quasi-peaceable stage, when so many of the traditions through
+which the institution of a leisure class has affected the
+economic life of later times were taking form and consistency,
+this principle has had the force of a conventional law. It has
+served as the norm to which consumption has tended to conform,
+and any appreciable departure from it is to be regarded as an
+aberrant form, sure to be eliminated sooner or later in the
+further course of development.
+
+The quasi-peaceable gentleman of leisure, then, not only consumes
+of the staff of life beyond the minimum required for subsistence
+and physical efficiency, but his consumption also undergoes a
+specialisation as regards the quality of the goods consumed. He
+consumes freely and of the best, in food, drink, narcotics,
+shelter, services, ornaments, apparel, weapons and accoutrements,
+amusements, amulets, and idols or divinities. In the process of
+gradual amelioration which takes place in the articles of his
+consumption, the motive principle and proximate aim of innovation
+is no doubt the higher efficiency of the improved and more
+elaborate products for personal comfort and well-being. But that
+does not remain the sole purpose of their consumption. The canon
+of reputability is at hand and seizes upon such innovations as
+are, according to its standard, fit to survive. Since the
+consumption of these more excellent goods is an evidence of
+wealth, it becomes honorific; and conversely, the failure to
+consume in due quantity and quality becomes a mark of inferiority
+and demerit.
+
+This growth of punctilious discrimination as to qualitative
+excellence in eating, drinking, etc. presently affects not only
+the manner of life, but also the training and intellectual
+activity of the gentleman of leisure. He is no longer simply the
+successful, aggressive male, -- the man of strength, resource,
+and intrepidity. In order to avoid stultification he must also
+cultivate his tastes, for it now becomes incumbent on him to
+discriminate with some nicety between the noble and the ignoble
+in consumable goods. He becomes a connoisseur in creditable
+viands of various degrees of merit, in manly beverages and
+trinkets, in seemly apparel and architecture, in weapons, games,
+dancers, and the narcotics. This cultivation of aesthetic faculty
+requires time and application, and the demands made upon the
+gentleman in this direction therefore tend to change his life of
+leisure into a more or less arduous application to the business
+of learning how to live a life of ostensible leisure in a
+becoming way. Closely related to the requirement that the
+gentleman must consume freely and of the right kind of goods,
+there is the requirement that he must know how to consume them in
+a seemly manner. His life of leisure must be conducted in due
+form. Hence arise good manners in the way pointed out in an
+earlier chapter. High-bred manners and ways of living are items
+of conformity to the norm of conspicuous leisure and conspicuous
+consumption.
+
+Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of
+reputability to the gentleman of leisure. As wealth accumulates
+on his hands, his own unaided effort will not avail to
+sufficiently put his opulence in evidence by this method. The aid
+of friends and competitors is therefore brought in by resorting
+to the giving of valuable presents and expensive feasts and
+entertainments. Presents and feasts had probably another origin
+than that of naive ostentation, but they required their utility
+for this purpose very early, and they have retained that
+character to the present; so that their utility in this respect
+has now long been the substantial ground on which these usages
+rest. Costly entertainments, such as the potlatch or the ball,
+are peculiarly adapted to serve this end. The competitor with
+whom the entertainer wishes to institute a comparison is, by this
+method, made to serve as a means to the end. He consumes
+vicariously for his host at the same time that he is witness to
+the consumption of that excess of good things which his host is
+unable to dispose of single-handed, and he is also made to
+witness his host's facility in etiquette.
+
+In the giving of costly entertainments other motives, of more
+genial kind, are of course also present. The custom of festive
+gatherings probably originated in motives of conviviality and
+religion; these motives are also present in the later
+development, but they do not continue to be the sole motives. The
+latter-day leisure-class festivities and entertainments may
+continue in some slight degree to serve the religious need and in
+a higher degree the needs of recreation and conviviality, but
+they also serve an invidious purpose; and they serve it none the
+less effectually for having a colorable non-invidious ground in
+these more avowable motives. But the economic effect of these
+social amenities is not therefore lessened, either in the
+vicarious consumption of goods or in the exhibition of difficult
+and costly achievements in etiquette.
+
+As wealth accumulates, the leisure class develops further in
+function and structure, and there arises a differentiation within
+the class. There is a more or less elaborate system of rank and
+grades. This differentiation is furthered by the inheritance of
+wealth and the consequent inheritance of gentility. With the
+inheritance of gentility goes the inheritance of obligatory
+leisure; and gentility of a sufficient potency to entail a life
+of leisure may be inherited without the complement of wealth
+required to maintain a dignified leisure. Gentle blood may be
+transmitted without goods enough to afford a reputably free
+consumption at one's ease. Hence results a class of impecunious
+gentlemen of leisure, incidentally referred to already. These
+half-caste gentlemen of leisure fall into a system of
+hierarchical gradations. Those who stand near the higher and the
+highest grades of the wealthy leisure class, in point of birth,
+or in point of wealth, or both, outrank the remoter-born and the
+pecuniarily weaker. These lower grades, especially the
+impecunious, or marginal, gentlemen of leisure, affiliate
+themselves by a system of dependence or fealty to the great ones;
+by so doing they gain an increment of repute, or of the means
+with which to lead a life of leisure, from their patron. They
+become his courtiers or retainers, servants; and being fed and
+countenanced by their patron they are indices of his rank and
+vicarious consumer of his superfluous wealth. Many of these
+affiliated gentlemen of leisure are at the same time lesser men
+of substance in their own right; so that some of them are
+scarcely at all, others only partially, to be rated as vicarious
+consumers. So many of them, however, as make up the retainer and
+hangers-on of the patron may be classed as vicarious consumer
+without qualification. Many of these again, and also many of the
+other aristocracy of less degree, have in turn attached to their
+persons a more or less comprehensive group of vicarious consumer
+in the persons of their wives and children, their servants,
+retainers, etc.
+
+Throughout this graduated scheme of vicarious leisure and
+vicarious consumption the rule holds that these offices must be
+performed in some such manner, or under some such circumstance or
+insignia, as shall point plainly to the master to whom this
+leisure or consumption pertains, and to whom therefore the
+resulting increment of good repute of right inures. The
+consumption and leisure executed by these persons for their
+master or patron represents an investment on his part with a view
+to an increase of good fame. As regards feasts and largesses this
+is obvious enough, and the imputation of repute to the host or
+patron here takes place immediately, on the ground of common
+notoriety. Where leisure and consumption is performed
+vicariously by henchmen and retainers, imputation of the
+resulting repute to the patron is effected by their residing near
+his person so that it may be plain to all men from what source
+they draw. As the group whose good esteem is to be secured in
+this way grows larger, more patent means are required to indicate
+the imputation of merit for the leisure performed, and to this
+end uniforms, badges, and liveries come into vogue. The wearing
+of uniforms or liveries implies a considerable degree of
+dependence, and may even be said to be a mark of servitude, real
+or ostensible. The wearers of uniforms and liveries may be
+roughly divided into two classes-the free and the servile, or the
+noble and the ignoble. The services performed by them are
+likewise divisible into noble and ignoble. Of course the
+distinction is not observed with strict consistency in practice;
+the less debasing of the base services and the less honorific of
+the noble functions are not infrequently merged in the same
+person. But the general distinction is not on that account to be
+overlooked. What may add some perplexity is the fact that this
+fundamental distinction between noble and ignoble, which rests on
+the nature of the ostensible service performed, is traversed by a
+secondary distinction into honorific and humiliating, resting on
+the rank of the person for whom the service is performed or whose
+livery is worn. So, those offices which are by right the proper
+employment of the leisure class are noble; such as government,
+fighting, hunting, the care of arms and accoutrements, and the
+like -- in short, those which may be classed as ostensibly
+predatory employments. On the other hand, those employments which
+properly fall to the industrious class are ignoble; such as
+handicraft or other productive labor, menial services and the
+like. But a base service performed for a person of very high
+degree may become a very honorific office; as for instance the
+office of a Maid of Honor or of a Lady in Waiting to the Queen,
+or the King's Master of the Horse or his Keeper of the Hounds.
+The two offices last named suggest a principle of some general
+bearing. Whenever, as in these cases, the menial service in
+question has to do directly with the primary leisure employments
+of fighting and hunting, it easily acquires a reflected honorific
+character. In this way great honor may come to attach to an
+employment which in its own nature belongs to the baser sort.
+In the later development of peaceable industry, the usage of
+employing an idle corps of uniformed men-at-arms gradually
+lapses. Vicarious consumption by dependents bearing the insignia
+of their patron or master narrows down to a corps of liveried
+menials. In a heightened degree, therefore, the livery comes to
+be a badge of servitude, or rather servility. Something of a
+honorific character always attached to the livery of the armed
+retainer, but this honorific character disappears when the livery
+becomes the exclusive badge of the menial. The livery becomes
+obnoxious to nearly all who are required to wear it. We are yet
+so little removed from a state of effective slavery as still to
+be fully sensitive to the sting of any imputation of servility.
+This antipathy asserts itself even in the case of the liveries or
+uniforms which some corporations prescribe as the distinctive
+dress of their employees. In this country the aversion even goes
+the length of discrediting -- in a mild and uncertain way --
+those government employments, military and civil, which require
+the wearing of a livery or uniform.
+
+With the disappearance of servitude, the number of vicarious
+consumers attached to any one gentleman tends, on the whole, to
+decrease. The like is of course true, and perhaps in a still
+higher degree, of the number of dependents who perform vicarious
+leisure for him. In a general way, though not wholly nor
+consistently, these two groups coincide. The dependent who was
+first delegated for these duties was the wife, or the chief wife;
+and, as would be expected, in the later development of the
+institution, when the number of persons by whom these duties are
+customarily performed gradually narrows, the wife remains the
+last. In the higher grades of society a large volume of both
+these kinds of service is required; and here the wife is of
+course still assisted in the work by a more or less numerous
+corps of menials. But as we descend the social scale, the point
+is presently reached where the duties of vicarious leisure and
+consumption devolve upon the wife alone. In the communities of
+the Western culture, this point is at present found among the
+lower middle class.
+
+And here occurs a curious inversion. It is a fact of common
+observance that in this lower middle class there is no pretense
+of leisure on the part of the head of the household. Through
+force of circumstances it has fallen into disuse. But the
+middle-class wife still carries on the business of vicarious
+leisure, for the good name of the household and its master. In
+descending the social scale in any modern industrial community,
+the primary fact-the conspicuous leisure of the master of the
+household-disappears at a relatively high point. The head of the
+middle-class household has been reduced by economic circumstances
+to turn his hand to gaining a livelihood by occupations which
+often partake largely of the character of industry, as in the
+case of the ordinary business man of today. But the derivative
+fact-the vicarious leisure and consumption rendered by the wife,
+and the auxiliary vicarious performance of leisure by
+menials-remains in vogue as a conventionality which the demands
+of reputability will not suffer to be slighted. It is by no means
+an uncommon spectacle to find a man applying himself to work with
+the utmost assiduity, in order that his wife may in due form
+render for him that degree of vicarious leisure which the common
+sense of the time demands.
+
+The leisure rendered by the wife in such cases is, of course, not
+a simple manifestation of idleness or indolence. It almost
+invariably occurs disguised under some form of work or household
+duties or social amenities, which prove on analysis to serve
+little or no ulterior end beyond showing that she does not occupy
+herself with anything that is gainful or that is of substantial
+use. As has already been noticed under the head of manners, the
+greater part of the customary round of domestic cares to which
+the middle-class housewife gives her time and effort is of this
+character. Not that the results of her
+attention to household matters, of a decorative and mundificatory
+character, are not pleasing to the sense of men trained in
+middle-class proprieties; but the taste to which these effects of
+household adornment and tidiness appeal is a taste which has been
+formed under the selective guidance of a canon of propriety that
+demands just these evidences of wasted effort. The effects are
+pleasing to us chiefly because we have been taught to find them
+pleasing. There goes into these domestic duties much solicitude
+for a proper combination of form and color, and for other ends
+that are to be classed as aesthetic in the proper sense of the
+term; and it is not denied that effects having some substantial
+aesthetic value are sometimes attained. Pretty much all that is
+here insisted on is that, as regards these amenities of life, the
+housewife's efforts are under the guidance of traditions that
+have been shaped by the law of conspicuously wasteful expenditure
+of time and substance. If beauty or comfort is achieved-and it is
+a more or less fortuitous circumstance if they are-they must be
+achieved by means and methods that commend themselves to the
+great economic law of wasted effort. The more reputable,
+"presentable" portion of middle-class household paraphernalia
+are, on the one hand, items of conspicuous consumption, and on
+the other hand, apparatus for putting in evidence the vicarious
+leisure rendered by the housewife.
+
+The requirement of vicarious consumption at the hands of the wife
+continues in force even at a lower point in the pecuniary scale
+than the requirement of vicarious leisure. At a point below which
+little if any pretense of wasted effort, in ceremonial cleanness
+and the like, is observable, and where there is
+assuredly no conscious attempt at ostensible leisure, decency
+still requires the wife to consume some goods conspicuously for
+the reputability of the household and its head. So that, as the
+latter-day outcome of this evolution of an archaic institution,
+the wife, who was at the outset the drudge and chattel of the
+man, both in fact and in theory -- the producer of goods for him
+to consume -- has become the ceremonial consumer of goods which
+he produces. But she still quite unmistakably remains his chattel
+in theory; for the habitual rendering of vicarious leisure and
+consumption is the abiding mark of the unfree servant.
+
+This vicarious consumption practiced by the household of the
+middle and lower classes can not be counted as a direct
+expression of the leisure-class scheme of life, since the
+household of this pecuniary grade does not belong within the
+leisure class. It is rather that the leisure-class scheme of life
+here comes to an expression at the second remove. The leisure
+class stands at the head of the social structure in point of
+reputability; and its manner of life and its standards of worth
+therefore afford the norm of reputability for the community. The
+observance of these standards, in some degree of approximation,
+becomes incumbent upon all classes lower in the scale. In modern
+civilized communities the lines of demarcation between social
+classes have grown vague and transient, and wherever this happens
+the norm of reputability imposed by the upper class extends its
+coercive influence with but slight hindrance down through the
+social structure to the lowest strata. The result is that the
+members of each stratum accept as their ideal of decency the
+scheme of life in vogue in the next higher stratum, and bend
+their energies to live up to that ideal. On pain of forfeiting
+their good name and their self-respect in case of failure, they
+must conform to the accepted code, at least in appearance.
+The basis on which good repute in any highly organized industrial
+community ultimately rests is pecuniary strength; and the means
+of showing pecuniary strength, and so of gaining or retaining a
+good name, are leisure and a conspicuous consumption of goods.
+Accordingly, both of these methods are in vogue as far down the
+scale as it remains possible; and in the lower strata in which
+the two methods are employed, both offices are in great part
+delegated to the wife and children of the household. Lower still,
+where any degree of leisure, even ostensible, has become
+impracticable for the wife, the conspicuous consumption of goods
+remains and is carried on by the wife and children. The man of
+the household also can do something in this direction, and
+indeed, he commonly does; but with a still lower descent into the
+levels of indigence -- along the margin of the slums -- the man,
+and presently also the children, virtually cease to consume
+valuable goods for appearances, and the woman remains virtually
+the sole exponent of the household's pecuniary decency. No class
+of society, not even the most abjectly poor, forgoes all
+customary conspicuous consumption. The last items of this
+category of consumption are not given up except under stress of
+the direst necessity. Very much of squalor and discomfort will be
+endured before the last trinket or the last pretense of pecuniary
+decency is put away. There is no class and no country that has
+yielded so abjectly before the pressure of physical want as to
+deny themselves all gratification of this higher or spiritual
+need.
+
+From the foregoing survey of the growth of conspicuous leisure
+and consumption, it appears that the utility of both alike for
+the purposes of reputability lies in the element of waste that is
+common to both. In the one case it is a waste of time and effort,
+in the other it is a waste of goods. Both are methods of
+demonstrating the possession of wealth, and the two are
+conventionally accepted as equivalents. The choice between them
+is a question of advertising expediency simply, except so far as
+it may be affected by other standards of propriety, springing
+from a different source. On grounds of expediency the preference
+may be given to the one or the other at different stages of the
+economic development. The question is, which of the two methods
+will most effectively reach the persons whose
+convictions it is desired to affect. Usage has answered this
+question in different ways under different circumstances.
+
+So long as the community or social group is small enough and
+compact enough to be effectually reached by common notoriety
+alone that is to say, so long as the human environment to which
+the individual is required to adapt himself in respect of
+reputability is comprised within his sphere of personal
+acquaintance and neighborhood gossip -- so long the one method is
+about as effective as the other. Each will therefore serve about
+equally well during the earlier stages of social growth. But when
+the differentiation has gone farther and it becomes necessary to
+reach a wider human environment, consumption begins to hold over
+leisure as an ordinary means of decency. This is especially true
+during the later, peaceable economic stage. The means of
+communication and the mobility of the population now expose the
+individual to the observation of many persons who have no other
+means of judging of his reputability than the display of goods
+(and perhaps of breeding) which he is able to make while he is
+under their direct observation.
+
+The modern organization of industry works in the same direction
+also by another line. The exigencies of the modern industrial
+system frequently place individuals and households in
+juxtaposition between whom there is little contact in any other
+sense than that of juxtaposition. One's neighbors, mechanically
+speaking, often are socially not one's neighbors, or even
+acquaintances; and still their transient good opinion has a high
+degree of utility. The only practicable means of impressing one's
+pecuniary ability on these unsympathetic observers of one's
+everyday life is an unremitting demonstration of ability to pay.
+In the modern community there is also a more frequent attendance
+at large gatherings of people to whom one's everyday life is
+unknown; in such places as churches, theaters, ballrooms, hotels,
+parks, shops, and the like. In order to impress these transient
+observers, and to retain one's self-complacency under their
+observation, the signature of one's pecuniary strength should be
+written in characters which he who runs may read. It is evident,
+therefore, that the present trend of the development is in the
+direction of heightening the utility of conspicuous consumption
+as compared with leisure.
+
+It is also noticeable that the serviceability of consumption as a
+means of repute, as well as the insistence on it as an element of
+decency, is at its best in those portions of the community where
+the human contact of the individual is widest and the mobility of
+the population is greatest. Conspicuous
+consumption claims a relatively larger portion of the income of
+the urban than of the rural population, and the claim is also
+more imperative. The result is that, in order to keep up a decent
+appearance, the former habitually live hand-to-mouth to a greater
+extent than the latter. So it comes, for instance, that the
+American farmer and his wife and daughters are notoriously less
+modish in their dress, as well as less urbane in their manners,
+than the city artisan's family with an equal income. It is not
+that the city population is by nature much more eager for the
+peculiar complacency that comes of a conspicuous consumption, nor
+has the rural population less regard for pecuniary decency. But
+the provocation to this line of evidence, as well as its
+transient effectiveness, is more decided in the city. This method
+is therefore more readily resorted to, and in the struggle to
+outdo one another the city population push their normal standard
+of conspicuous consumption to a higher point, with the result
+that a relatively greater expenditure in this direction is
+required to indicate a given degree of pecuniary decency in the
+city. The requirement of conformity to this higher conventional
+standard becomes mandatory. The standard of decency is higher,
+class for class, and this requirement of decent appearance must
+be lived up to on pain of losing caste.
+
+Consumption becomes a larger element in the standard of living in
+the city than in the country. Among the country
+population its place is to some extent taken by savings and home
+comforts known through the medium of neighborhood gossip
+sufficiently to serve the like general purpose of Pecuniary
+repute. These home comforts and the leisure indulged in -- where
+the indulgence is found -- are of course also in great part to be
+classed as items of conspicuous consumption; and much the same is
+to be said of the savings. The smaller amount of the savings laid
+by by the artisan class is no doubt due, in some measure, to the
+fact that in the case of the artisan the savings are a less
+effective means of advertisement, relative to the environment in
+which he is placed, than are the savings of the people living on
+farms and in the small villages. Among the latter, everybody's
+affairs, especially everybody's pecuniary status, are known to
+everybody else. Considered by itself simply -- taken in the first
+degree -- this added provocation to which the artisan and the
+urban laboring classes are exposed may not very seriously
+decrease the amount of savings; but in its cumulative action,
+through raising the standard of decent expenditure, its deterrent
+effect on the tendency to save cannot but be very great.
+
+A felicitous illustration of the manner in which this canon of
+reputability works out its results is seen in the practice of
+dram-drinking, "treating," and smoking in public places, which is
+customary among the laborers and handicraftsmen of the towns, and
+among the lower middle class of the urban population generally
+Journeymen printers may be named as a class among whom this form
+of conspicuous consumption has a great vogue, and among whom it
+carries with it certain well-marked consequences that are often
+deprecated. The peculiar habits of the class in this respect are
+commonly set down to some kind of an ill-defined moral deficiency
+with which this class is credited, or to a morally deleterious
+influence which their occupation is supposed to exert, in some
+unascertainable way, upon the men employed in it. The state of
+the case for the men who work in the composition and press rooms
+of the common run of printing-houses may be summed up as follows.
+Skill acquired in any printing-house or any city is easily turned
+to account in almost any other house or city; that is to say, the
+inertia due to special training is slight. Also, this occupation
+requires more than the average of intelligence and general
+information, and the men employed in it are therefore ordinarily
+more ready than many others to take advantage of any slight
+variation in the demand for their labor from one place to
+another. The inertia due to the home feeling is consequently also
+slight. At the same time the wages in the trade are high enough
+to make movement from place to place relatively easy. The result
+is a great mobility of the labor employed in printing; perhaps
+greater than in any other equally well-defined and considerable
+body of workmen. These men are constantly thrown in contact with
+new groups of acquaintances, with whom the relations established
+are transient or ephemeral, but whose good opinion is valued none
+the less for the time being. The human proclivity to ostentation,
+reenforced by sentiments of good-fellowship, leads them to spend
+freely in those directions which will best serve these needs.
+Here as elsewhere prescription seizes upon the custom as soon as
+it gains a vogue, and incorporates it in the accredited standard
+of decency. The next step is to make this standard of decency the
+point of departure for a new move in advance in the same
+direction -- for there is no merit in simple spiritless
+conformity to a standard of dissipation that is lived up to as a
+matter of course by everyone in the trade.
+
+The greater prevalence of dissipation among printers than among
+the average of workmen is accordingly attributable, at least in
+some measure, to the greater ease of movement and the more
+transient character of acquaintance and human contact in this
+trade. But the substantial ground of this high requirement in
+dissipation is in the last analysis no other than that same
+propensity for a manifestation of dominance and pecuniary decency
+which makes the French peasant-proprietor parsimonious and
+frugal, and induces the American millionaire to found colleges,
+hospitals and museums. If the canon of conspicuous consumption
+were not offset to a considerable extent by other features of
+human nature, alien to it, any saving should logically be
+impossible for a population situated as the artisan and laboring
+classes of the cities are at present, however high their wages or
+their income might be.
+
+But there are other standards of repute and other, more or less
+imperative, canons of conduct, besides wealth and its
+manifestation, and some of these come in to accentuate or to
+qualify the broad, fundamental canon of conspicuous waste. Under
+the simple test of effectiveness for advertising, we should
+expect to find leisure and the conspicuous consumption of goods
+dividing the field of pecuniary emulation pretty evenly between
+them at the outset. Leisure might then be expected gradually to
+yield ground and tend to obsolescence as the economic development
+goes forward, and the community increases in size; while the
+conspicuous consumption of goods should gradually gain in
+importance, both absolutely and relatively, until it had absorbed
+all the available product, leaving nothing over beyond a bare
+livelihood. But the actual course of development has been
+somewhat different from this ideal scheme. Leisure held the first
+place at the start, and came to hold a rank very much above
+wasteful consumption of goods, both as a direct exponent of
+wealth and as an element in the standard of decency, during the
+quasi-peaceable culture. From that point onward, consumption has
+gained ground, until, at present, it unquestionably holds the
+primacy, though it is still far from absorbing the entire margin
+of production above the subsistence minimum.
+
+The early ascendency of leisure as a means of reputability is
+traceable to the archaic distinction between noble and ignoble
+employments. Leisure is honorable and becomes imperative partly
+because it shows exemption from ignoble labor. The archaic
+differentiation into noble and ignoble classes is based on an
+invidious distinction between employments as honorific or
+debasing; and this traditional distinction grows into an
+imperative canon of decency during the early quasi-peaceable
+stage. Its ascendency is furthered by the fact that leisure is
+still fully as effective an evidence of wealth as consumption.
+Indeed, so effective is it in the relatively small and stable
+human environment to which the individual is exposed at that
+cultural stage, that, with the aid of the archaic tradition which
+deprecates all productive labor, it gives rise to a large
+impecunious leisure class, and it even tends to limit the
+production of the community's industry to the subsistence
+minimum. This extreme inhibition of industry is avoided because
+slave labor, working under a compulsion more vigorous than that
+of reputability, is forced to turn out a product in excess of the
+subsistence minimum of the working class. The subsequent relative
+decline in the use of conspicuous leisure as a basis of repute is
+due partly to an increasing relative effectiveness of consumption
+as an evidence of wealth; but in part it is traceable to another
+force, alien, and in some degree antagonistic, to the usage of
+conspicuous waste.
+
+This alien factor is the instinct of workmanship. Other
+circumstances permitting, that instinct disposes men to look with
+favor upon productive efficiency and on whatever is of human use.
+It disposes them to deprecate waste of substance or effort. The
+instinct of workmanship is present in all men, and asserts itself
+even under very adverse circumstances. So that however wasteful a
+given expenditure may be in reality, it must at least have some
+colorable excuse in the way of an ostensible purpose. The manner
+in which, under special circumstances, the instinct eventuates in
+a taste for exploit and an invidious discrimination between noble
+and ignoble classes has been indicated in an earlier chapter. In
+so far as it comes into conflict with the law of conspicuous
+waste, the instinct of workmanship expresses itself not so much
+in insistence on substantial usefulness as in an abiding sense of
+the odiousness and aesthetic impossibility of what is obviously
+futile. Being of the nature of an instinctive affection, its
+guidance touches chiefly and immediately the obvious and apparent
+violations of its requirements. It is only less promptly and with
+less constraining force that it reaches such substantial
+violations of its requirements as are appreciated only upon
+reflection.
+
+So long as all labor continues to be performed exclusively or
+usually by slaves, the baseness of all productive effort is too
+constantly and deterrently present in the mind of men to allow
+the instinct of workmanship seriously to take effect in the
+direction of industrial usefulness; but when the quasi-peaceable
+stage (with slavery and status) passes into the peaceable stage
+of industry (with wage labor and cash payment) the instinct comes
+more effectively into play. It then begins aggressively to shape
+men's views of what is meritorious, and asserts itself at least
+as an auxiliary canon of self-complacency. All extraneous
+considerations apart, those persons (adult) are but a vanishing
+minority today who harbor no inclination to the accomplishment of
+some end, or who are not impelled of their own motion to shape
+some object or fact or relation for human use. The propensity may
+in large measure be overborne by the more immediately
+constraining incentive to a reputable leisure and an avoidance of
+indecorous usefulness, and it may therefore work itself out in
+make-believe only; as for instance in "social duties," and in
+quasi-artistic or quasi-scholarly accomplishments, in the care
+and decoration of the house, in sewing-circle activity or dress
+reform, in proficiency at dress, cards, yachting, golf, and
+various sports. But the fact that it may under stress of
+circumstances eventuate in inanities no more disproves the
+presence of the instinct than the reality of the brooding
+instinct is disproved by inducing a hen to sit on a nestful of
+china eggs.
+
+This latter-day uneasy reaching-out for some form of
+purposeful activity that shall at the same time not be
+indecorously productive of either individual or collective gain
+marks a difference of attitude between the modern leisure class
+and that of the quasi-peaceable stage. At the earlier stage, as
+was said above, the all-dominating institution of slavery and
+status acted resistlessly to discountenance exertion directed to
+other than naively predatory ends. It was still possible to find
+some habitual employment for the inclination to action in the way
+of forcible aggression or repression directed against hostile
+groups or against the subject classes within the group; and this
+sewed to relieve the pressure and draw off the energy of the
+leisure class without a resort to actually useful, or even
+ostensibly useful employments. The practice of hunting also sewed
+the same purpose in some degree. When the community developed
+into a peaceful industrial organization, and when fuller
+occupation of the land had reduced the opportunities for the hunt
+to an inconsiderable residue, the pressure of energy seeking
+purposeful employment was left to find an outlet in some other
+direction. The ignominy which attaches to useful effort also
+entered upon a less acute phase with the disappearance of
+compulsory labor; and the instinct of workmanship then came to
+assert itself with more persistence and consistency.
+
+The line of least resistance has changed in some measure, and the
+energy which formerly found a vent in predatory activity, now in
+part takes the direction of some ostensibly useful end.
+Ostensibly purposeless leisure has come to be deprecated,
+especially among that large portion of the leisure class whose
+plebeian origin acts to set them at variance with the tradition
+of the otium cum dignitate. But that canon of reputability which
+discountenances all employment that is of the nature of
+productive effort is still at hand, and will permit nothing
+beyond the most transient vogue to any employment that is
+substantially useful or productive. The consequence is that a
+change has been wrought in the conspicuous leisure practiced by
+the leisure class; not so much in substance as in form. A
+reconciliation between the two conflicting requirements is
+effected by a resort to make-believe. Many and intricate polite
+observances and social duties of a ceremonial nature are
+developed; many organizations are founded, with some specious
+object of amelioration embodied in their official style and
+title; there is much coming and going, and a deal of talk, to the
+end that the talkers may not have occasion to reflect on what is
+the effectual economic value of their traffic. And along with the
+make-believe of purposeful employment, and woven inextricably
+into its texture, there is commonly, if not invariably, a more or
+less appreciable element of purposeful effort directed to some
+serious end.
+
+In the narrower sphere of vicarious leisure a similar change has
+gone forward. Instead of simply passing her time in visible
+idleness, as in the best days of the patriarchal regime, the
+housewife of the advanced peaceable stage applies herself
+assiduously to household cares. The salient features of this
+development of domestic service have already been indicated.
+Throughout the entire evolution of conspicuous expenditure,
+whether of goods or of services or human life, runs the obvious
+implication that in order to effectually mend the consumer's good
+fame it must be an expenditure of superfluities. In order to be
+reputable it must be wasteful. No merit would accrue from the
+consumption of the bare necessaries of life, except by comparison
+with the abjectly poor who fall short even of the subsistence
+minimum; and no standard of expenditure could result from such a
+comparison, except the most prosaic and unattractive level of
+decency. A standard of life would still be possible which should
+admit of invidious comparison in other respects than that of
+opulence; as, for instance, a comparison in various directions in
+the manifestation of moral, physical, intellectual, or aesthetic
+force. Comparison in all these directions is in vogue today; and
+the comparison made in these respects is commonly so inextricably
+bound up with the pecuniary comparison as to be scarcely
+distinguishable from the latter. This is especially true as
+regards the current rating of expressions of intellectual and
+aesthetic force or proficiency' so that we frequently interpret
+as aesthetic or intellectual a difference which in substance is
+pecuniary only.
+
+The use of the term "waste" is in one respect an unfortunate one.
+As used in the speech of everyday life the word carries an
+undertone of deprecation. It is here used for want of a better
+term that will adequately describe the same range of motives and
+of phenomena, and it is not to be taken in an odious sense, as
+implying an illegitimate expenditure of human products or of
+human life. In the view of economic theory the expenditure in
+question is no more and no less legitimate than any other
+expenditure. It is here called "waste" because this expenditure
+does not serve human life or human well-being on the whole, not
+because it is waste or misdirection of effort or expenditure as
+viewed from the standpoint of the individual consumer who chooses
+it. If he chooses it, that disposes of the question of its
+relative utility to him, as compared with other forms of
+consumption that would not be deprecated on account of their
+wastefulness. Whatever form of expenditure the consumer chooses,
+or whatever end he seeks in making his choice, has utility to him
+by virtue of his preference. As seen from the point of view of
+the individual consumer, the question of wastefulness does not
+arise within the scope of economic theory proper. The use of the
+word "waste" as a technical term, therefore, implies no
+deprecation of the motives or of the ends sought by the consumer
+under this canon of conspicuous waste.
+
+But it is, on other grounds, worth noting that the term "waste"
+in the language of everyday life implies deprecation of what is
+characterized as wasteful. This common-sense implication is
+itself an outcropping of the instinct of workmanship. The popular
+reprobation of waste goes to say that in order to be at peace
+with himself the common man must be able to see in any and all
+human effort and human enjoyment an enhancement of life and
+well-being on the whole. In order to meet with unqualified
+approval, any economic fact must approve itself under the test of
+impersonal usefulness -- usefulness as seen from the point of view
+of the generically human. Relative or competitive advantage of
+one individual in comparison with another does not satisfy the
+economic conscience, and therefore competitive expenditure has
+not the approval of this conscience.
+
+In strict accuracy nothing should be included under the head of
+conspicuous waste but such expenditure as is incurred on the
+ground of an invidious pecuniary comparison. But in order to
+bring any given item or element in under this head it is not
+necessary that it should be recognized as waste in this sense by
+the person incurring the expenditure. It frequently happens that
+an element of the standard of living which set out with being
+primarily wasteful, ends with becoming, in the apprehension of
+the consumer, a necessary of life; and it may in this way become
+as indispensable as any other item of the consumer's habitual
+expenditure. As items which sometimes fall under this head, and
+are therefore available as illustrations of the manner in which
+this principle applies, may be cited carpets and tapestries,
+silver table service, waiter's services, silk hats, starched
+linen, many articles of jewelry and of dress. The
+indispensability of these things after the habit and the
+convention have been formed, however, has little to say in the
+classification of expenditures as waste or not waste in the
+technical meaning of the word. The test to which all expenditure
+must be brought in an attempt to decide that point is the
+question whether it serves directly to enhance human life on the
+whole-whether it furthers the life process taken impersonally.
+For this is the basis of award of the instinct of workmanship,
+and that instinct is the court of final appeal in any question of
+economic truth or adequacy. It is a question as to the award
+rendered by a dispassionate common sense. The question is,
+therefore, not whether, under the existing circumstances of
+individual habit and social custom, a given expenditure conduces
+to the particular consumer's gratification or peace of mind; but
+whether, aside from acquired tastes and from the canons of usage
+and conventional decency, its result is a net gain in comfort or
+in the fullness of life. Customary expenditure must be classed
+under the head of waste in so far as the custom on which it rests
+is traceable to the habit of making an invidious pecuniary
+comparison-in so far as it is conceived that it could not have
+become customary and prescriptive without the backing of this
+principle of pecuniary reputability or relative economic success.
+It is obviously not necessary that a given object of
+expenditure should be exclusively wasteful in order to come in
+under the category of conspicuous waste. An article may be useful
+and wasteful both, and its utility to the consumer may be made up
+of use and waste in the most varying proportions. Consumable
+goods, and even productive goods, generally show the two elements
+in combination, as constituents of their utility; although, in a
+general way, the element of waste tends to predominate in
+articles of consumption, while the contrary is true of articles
+designed for productive use. Even in articles which appear at
+first glance to serve for pure ostentation only, it is always
+possible to detect the presence of some, at least ostensible,
+useful purpose; and on the other hand, even in special machinery
+and tools contrived for some particular industrial process, as
+well as in the rudest appliances of human industry, the traces of
+conspicuous waste, or at least of the habit of ostentation,
+usually become evident on a close scrutiny. It would be hazardous
+to assert that a useful purpose is ever absent from the utility
+of any article or of any service, however obviously its prime
+purpose and chief element is conspicuous waste; and it would be
+only less hazardous to assert of any primarily useful product
+that the element of waste is in no way concerned in its value,
+immediately or remotely.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Five
+
+The Pecuniary Standard of Living
+
+For the great body of the people in any modern community, the
+proximate ground of expenditure in excess of what is required for
+physical comfort is not a conscious effort to excel in the
+expensiveness of their visible consumption, so much as it is a
+desire to live up to the conventional standard of decency in the
+amount and grade of goods consumed. This desire is not guided by
+a rigidly invariable standard, which must be lived up to, and
+beyond which there is no incentive to go. The standard is
+flexible; and especially it is indefinitely extensible, if only
+time is allowed for habituation to any increase in pecuniary
+ability and for acquiring facility in the new and larger scale of
+expenditure that follows such an increase. It is much more
+difficult to recede from a scale of expenditure once adopted than
+it is to extend the accustomed scale in response to an accession
+of wealth. Many items of customary expenditure prove on analysis
+to be almost purely wasteful, and they are therefore honorific
+only, but after they have once been incorporated into the scale
+of decent consumption, and so have become an integral part of
+one's scheme of life, it is quite as hard to give up these as it
+is to give up many items that conduce directly to one's physical
+comfort, or even that may be necessary to life and health. That
+is to say, the conspicuously wasteful honorific expenditure that
+confers spiritual well-being may become more indispensable than
+much of that expenditure which ministers to the "lower" wants of
+physical well-being or sustenance only. It is notoriously just as
+difficult to recede from a "high" standard of living as it is to
+lower a standard which is already relatively low; although in the
+former case the difficulty is a moral one, while in the latter it
+may involve a material deduction from the physical comforts of
+life.
+
+But while retrogression is difficult, a fresh advance in
+conspicuous expenditure is relatively easy; indeed, it takes
+place almost as a matter of course. In the rare cases where it
+occurs, a failure to increase one's visible consumption when the
+means for an increase are at hand is felt in popular apprehension
+to call for explanation, and unworthy motives of miserliness are
+imputed to those who fall short in this respect. A prompt
+response to the stimulus, on the other hand, is accepted as the
+normal effect. This suggests that the standard of expenditure
+which commonly guides our efforts is not the average, ordinary
+expenditure already achieved; it is an ideal of consumption that
+lies just beyond our reach, or to reach which requires some
+strain. The motive is emulation -- the stimulus of an invidious
+comparison which prompts us to outdo those with whom we are in
+the habit of classing ourselves. Substantially the same
+proposition is expressed in the commonplace remark that each
+class envies and emulates the class next above it in the social
+scale, while it rarely compares itself with those below or with
+those who are considerably in advance. That is to say, in other
+words, our standard of decency in expenditure, as in other ends
+of emulation, is set by the usage of those next above us in
+reputability; until, in this way, especially in any community
+where class distinctions are somewhat vague, all canons of
+reputability and decency, and all standards of consumption, are
+traced back by insensible gradations to the usages and habits of
+thought of the highest social and pecuniary class -- the wealthy
+leisure class.
+
+It is for this class to determine, in general outline, what
+scheme of Life the community shall accept as decent or honorific;
+and it is their office by precept and example to set forth this
+scheme of social salvation in its highest, ideal form. But the
+higher leisure class can exercise this quasi-sacerdotal office
+only under certain material limitations. The class cannot at
+discretion effect a sudden revolution or reversal of the popular
+habits of thought with respect to any of these ceremonial
+requirements. It takes time for any change to permeate the mass
+and change the habitual attitude of the people; and especially it
+takes time to change the habits of those classes that are
+socially more remote from the radiant body. The process is slower
+where the mobility of the population is less or where the
+intervals between the several classes are wider and more abrupt.
+But if time be allowed, the scope of the discretion of the
+leisure class as regards questions of form and detail in the
+community's scheme of life is large; while as regards the
+substantial principles of reputability, the changes which it can
+effect lie within a narrow margin of tolerance. Its example and
+precept carries the force of prescription for all classes below
+it; but in working out the precepts which are handed down as
+governing the form and method of reputability -- in shaping the
+usages and the spiritual attitude of the lower classes -- this
+authoritative prescription constantly works under the selective
+guidance of the canon of conspicuous waste, tempered in varying
+degree by the instinct of workmanship. To those norms is to be
+added another broad principle of human nature -- the predatory
+animus -- which in point of generality and of psychological
+content lies between the two just named. The effect of the latter
+in shaping the accepted scheme of life is yet to be discussed.
+The canon of reputability, then, must adapt itself to the
+economic circumstances, the traditions, and the degree of
+spiritual maturity of the particular class whose scheme of life
+it is to regulate. It is especially to be noted that however high
+its authority and however true to the fundamental requirements of
+reputability it may have been at its inception, a specific formal
+observance can under no circumstances maintain itself in force if
+with the lapse of time or on its transmission to a lower
+pecuniary class it is found to run counter to the ultimate ground
+of decency among civilized peoples, namely, serviceability for
+the purpose of an invidious comparison in pecuniary success.
+It is evident that these canons of expenditure have much to say
+in determining the standard of living for any community and for
+any class. It is no less evident that the standard of living
+which prevails at any time or at any given social altitude will
+in its turn have much to say as to the forms which honorific
+expenditure will take, and as to the degree to which this
+"higher" need will dominate a people's consumption. In this
+respect the control exerted by the accepted standard of living is
+chiefly of a negative character; it acts almost solely to prevent
+recession from a scale of conspicuous expenditure that has once
+become habitual.
+
+A standard of living is of the nature of habit. It is an habitual
+scale and method of responding to given stimuli. The difficulty
+in the way of receding from an accustomed standard is the
+difficulty of breaking a habit that has once been formed. The
+relative facility with which an advance in the standard is made
+means that the life process is a process of unfolding activity
+and that it will readily unfold in a new direction whenever and
+wherever the resistance to self-expression decreases. But when
+the habit of expression along such a given line of low resistance
+has once been formed, the discharge will seek the accustomed
+outlet even after a change has taken place in the environment
+whereby the external resistance has appreciably risen. That
+heightened facility of expression in a given direction which is
+called habit may offset a considerable increase in the resistance
+offered by external circumstances to the unfolding of life in the
+given direction. As between the various habits, or habitual modes
+and directions of expression, which go to make up an individual's
+standard of living, there is an appreciable difference in point
+of persistence under counteracting circumstances and in point of
+the degree of imperativeness with which the discharge seeks a
+given direction.
+
+That is to say, in the language of current economic theory, while
+men are reluctant to retrench their expenditures in any
+direction, they are more reluctant to retrench in some directions
+than in others; so that while any accustomed consumption is
+reluctantly given up, there are certain lines of consumption
+which are given up with relatively extreme reluctance. The
+articles or forms of consumption to which the consumer clings
+with the greatest tenacity are commonly the so-called necessaries
+of life, or the subsistence minimum. The subsistence minimum is
+of course not a rigidly determined allowance of goods, definite
+and invariable in kind and quantity; but for the purpose in hand
+it may be taken to comprise a certain, more or less definite,
+aggregate of consumption required for the maintenance of life.
+This minimum, it may be assumed, is ordinarily given up last in
+case of a progressive retrenchment of expenditure. That is to
+say, in a general way, the most ancient and ingrained of the
+habits which govern the individual's life -- those habits that
+touch his existence as an organism -- are the most persistent and
+imperative. Beyond these come the higher wants -- later-formed
+habits of the individual or the race -- in a somewhat irregular
+and by no means invariable gradation. Some of these higher wants,
+as for instance the habitual use of certain stimulants, or the
+need of salvation (in the eschatological sense), or of good
+repute, may in some cases take precedence of the lower or more
+elementary wants. In general, the longer the habituation, the
+more unbroken the habit, and the more nearly it coincides with
+previous habitual forms of the life process, the more
+persistently will the given habit assert itself. The habit will
+be stronger if the particular traits of human nature which its
+action involves, or the particular aptitudes that find exercise
+in it, are traits or aptitudes that are already largely and
+profoundly concerned in the life process or that are intimately
+bound up with the life history of the particular racial stock.
+The varying degrees of ease with which different habits are
+formed by different persons, as well as the varying degrees of
+reluctance with which different habits are given up, goes to say
+that the formation of specific habits is not a matter of length
+of habituation simply. Inherited aptitudes and traits of
+temperament count for quite as much as length of habituation in
+deciding what range of habits will come to dominate any
+individual's scheme of life. And the prevalent type of
+transmitted aptitudes, or in other words the type of temperament
+belonging to the dominant ethnic element in any community, will
+go far to decide what will be the scope and form of expression of
+the community's habitual life process. How greatly the
+transmitted idiosyncrasies of aptitude may count in the way of a
+rapid and definitive formation of habit in individuals is
+illustrated by the extreme facility with which an all-dominating
+habit of alcoholism is sometimes formed; or in the similar
+facility and the similarly inevitable formation of a habit of
+devout observances in the case of persons gifted with a special
+aptitude in that direction. Much the same meaning attaches to
+that peculiar facility of habituation to a specific human
+environment that is called romantic love.
+
+Men differ in respect of transmitted aptitudes, or in respect of
+the relative facility with which they unfold their life activity
+in particular directions; and the habits which coincide with or
+proceed upon a relatively strong specific aptitude or a
+relatively great specific facility of expression become of great
+consequence to the man's well-being. The part played by this
+element of aptitude in determining the relative tenacity of the
+several habits which constitute the standard of living goes to
+explain the extreme reluctance with which men give up any
+habitual expenditure in the way of conspicuous
+consumption. The aptitudes or propensities to which a habit of
+this kind is to be referred as its ground are those aptitudes
+whose exercise is comprised in emulation; and the propensity for
+emulation -- for invidious comparison -- is of ancient growth and
+is a pervading trait of human nature. It is easily called into
+vigorous activity in any new form, and it asserts itself with
+great insistence under any form under which it has once found
+habitual expression. When the individual has once formed the
+habit of seeking expression in a given line of honorific
+expenditure -- when a given set of stimuli have come to be
+habitually responded to in activity of a given kind and direction
+under the guidance of these alert and deep-reaching propensities
+of emulation -- it is with extreme reluctance that such an
+habitual expenditure is given up. And on the other hand, whenever
+an accession of pecuniary strength puts the individual in a
+position to unfold his life process in larger scope and with
+additional reach, the ancient propensities of the race will
+assert themselves in determining the direction which the new
+unfolding of life is to take. And those propensities which are
+already actively in the field under some related form of
+expression, which are aided by the pointed suggestions afforded
+by a current accredited scheme of life, and for the exercise of
+which the material means and opportunities are readily available
+-- these will especially have much to say in shaping the form and
+direction in which the new accession to the individual's
+aggregate force will assert itself. That is to say, in concrete
+terms, in any community where conspicuous consumption is an
+element of the scheme of life, an increase in an individual's
+ability to pay is likely to take the form of an expenditure for
+some accredited line of conspicuous consumption.
+
+With the exception of the instinct of self-preservation, the
+propensity for emulation is probably the strongest and most alert
+and persistent of the economic motives proper. In an industrial
+community this propensity for emulation expresses itself in
+pecuniary emulation; and this, so far as regards the Western
+civilized communities of the present, is virtually equivalent to
+saying that it expresses itself in some form of conspicuous
+waste. The need of conspicuous waste, therefore, stands ready to
+absorb any increase in the community's industrial efficiency or
+output of goods, after the most elementary physical wants have
+been provided for. Where this result does not follow, under
+modern conditions, the reason for the discrepancy is commonly to
+be sought in a rate of increase in the individual's wealth too
+rapid for the habit of expenditure to keep abreast of it; or it
+may be that the individual in question defers the conspicuous
+consumption of the increment to a later date -- ordinarily with a
+view to heightening the spectacular effect of the aggregate
+expenditure contemplated. As increased industrial efficiency
+makes it possible to procure the means of livelihood with less
+labor, the energies of the industrious members of the community
+are bent to the compassing of a higher result in conspicuous
+expenditure, rather than slackened to a more comfortable pace.
+The strain is not lightened as industrial efficiency increases
+and makes a lighter strain possible, but the increment of output
+is turned to use to meet this want, which is indefinitely
+expansible, after the manner commonly imputed in economic theory
+to higher or spiritual wants. It is owing chiefly to the presence
+of this element in the standard of living that J. S. Mill was
+able to say that "hitherto it is questionable if all the
+mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of
+any human being." The accepted standard of expenditure in the
+community or in the class to which a person belongs largely
+determines what his standard of living will be. It does this
+directly by commending itself to his common sense as right and
+good, through his habitually contemplating it and assimilating
+the scheme of life in which it belongs; but it does so also
+indirectly through popular insistence on conformity to the
+accepted scale of expenditure as a matter of propriety, under
+pain of disesteem and ostracism. To accept and practice the
+standard of living which is in vogue is both agreeable and
+expedient, commonly to the point of being indispensable to
+personal comfort and to success in life. The standard of living
+of any class, so far as concerns the element of conspicuous
+waste, is commonly as high as the earning capacity of the class
+will permit -- with a constant tendency to go higher. The effect
+upon the serious activities of men is therefore to direct them
+with great singleness of purpose to the largest possible
+acquisition of wealth, and to discountenance work that brings no
+pecuniary gain. At the same time the effect on consumption is to
+concentrate it upon the lines which are most patent to the
+observers whose good opinion is sought; while the inclinations
+and aptitudes whose exercise does not involve a honorific
+expenditure of time or substance tend to fall into abeyance
+through disuse.
+
+Through this discrimination in favor of visible consumption it
+has come about that the domestic life of most classes is
+relatively shabby, as compared with the éclat of that overt
+portion of their life that is carried on before the eyes of
+observers. As a secondary consequence of the same discrimination,
+people habitually screen their private life from observation. So
+far as concerns that portion of their consumption that may
+without blame be carried on in secret, they withdraw from all
+contact with their neighbors, hence the exclusiveness of people,
+as regards their domestic life, in most of the industrially
+developed communities; and hence, by remoter derivation, the
+habit of privacy and reserve that is so large a feature in the
+code of proprieties of the better class in all communities. The
+low birthrate of the classes upon whom the requirements of
+reputable expenditure fall with great urgency is likewise
+traceable to the exigencies of a standard of living based on
+conspicuous waste. The conspicuous consumption, and the
+consequent increased expense, required in the reputable
+maintenance of a child is very considerable and acts as a
+powerful deterrent. It is probably the most effectual of the
+Malthusian prudential checks.
+
+ The effect of this factor of the standard of living, both in the
+way of retrenchment in the obscurer elements of consumption that
+go to physical comfort and maintenance, and also in the paucity
+or absence of children, is perhaps seen at its best among the
+classes given to scholarly pursuits. Because of a presumed
+superiority and scarcity of the gifts and attainments that
+characterize their life, these classes are by convention subsumed
+under a higher social grade than their pecuniary grade should
+warrant. The scale of decent expenditure in their case is pitched
+correspondingly high, and it consequently leaves an exceptionally
+narrow margin disposable for the other ends of life. By force of
+circumstances, their habitual sense of what is good and right in
+these matters, as well as the expectations of the community in
+the way of pecuniary decency among the learned, are excessively
+high -- as measured by the prevalent degree of opulence and
+earning capacity of the class, relatively to the non-scholarly
+classes whose social equals they nominally are. In any modern
+community where there is no priestly monopoly of these
+occupations, the people of scholarly pursuits are unavoidably
+thrown into contact with classes that are pecuniarily their
+superiors. The high standard of pecuniary decency in force among
+these superior classes is transfused among the scholarly classes
+with but little mitigation of its rigor; and as a consequence
+there is no class of the community that spends a larger
+proportion of its substance in conspicuous waste than these.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Six
+
+Pecuniary Canons of Taste
+
+The caution has already been repeated more than once, that while
+the regulating norm of consumption is in large part the
+requirement of conspicuous waste, it must not be understood that
+the motive on which the consumer acts in any given case is this
+principle in its bald, unsophisticated form. Ordinarily his
+motive is a wish to conform to established usage, to avoid
+unfavorable notice and comment, to live up to the accepted canons
+of decency in the kind, amount, and grade of goods consumed, as
+well as in the decorous employment of his time and effort. In the
+common run of cases this sense of prescriptive usage is present
+in the motives of the consumer and exerts a direct constraining
+force, especially as regards consumption carried on under the
+eyes of observers. But a considerable element of prescriptive
+expensiveness is observable also in consumption that does not in
+any appreciable degree become known to outsiders -- as, for
+instance, articles of underclothing, some articles of food,
+kitchen utensils, and other household apparatus designed for
+service rather than for evidence. In all such useful articles a
+close scrutiny will discover certain features which add to the
+cost and enhance the commercial value of the goods in question,
+but do not proportionately increase the serviceability of these
+articles for the material purposes which alone they ostensibly
+are designed to serve.
+
+Under the selective surveillance of the law of conspicuous waste
+there grows up a code of accredited canons of consumption, the
+effect of which is to hold the consumer up to a standard of
+expensiveness and wastefulness in his consumption of goods and in
+his employment of time and effort. This growth of prescriptive
+usage has an immediate effect upon economic life, but it has also
+an indirect and remoter effect upon conduct in other respects as
+well. Habits of thought with respect to the expression of life in
+any given direction unavoidably affect the habitual view of what
+is good and right in life in other directions also. In the
+organic complex of habits of thought which make up the substance
+of an individual's conscious life the economic interest does not
+lie isolated and distinct from all other interests. Something,
+for instance, has already been said of its relation to the canons
+of reputability.
+
+The principle of conspicuous waste guides the formation of habits
+of thought as to what is honest and reputable in life and in
+commodities. In so doing, this principle will traverse other
+norms of conduct which do not primarily have to do with the code
+of pecuniary honor, but which have, directly or incidentally, an
+economic significance of some magnitude. So the canon of
+honorific waste may, immediately or remotely, influence the sense
+of duty, the sense of beauty, the sense of utility, the sense of
+devotional or ritualistic fitness, and the scientific sense of
+truth.
+
+It is scarcely necessary to go into a discussion here of the
+particular points at which, or the particular manner in which,
+the canon of honorific expenditure habitually traverses the
+canons of moral conduct. The matter is one which has received
+large attention and illustration at the hands of those whose
+office it is to watch and admonish with respect to any departures
+from the accepted code of morals. In modern communities, where
+the dominant economic and legal feature of the community's life
+is the institution of private property, one of the salient
+features of the code of morals is the sacredness of property.
+There needs no insistence or illustration to gain assent to the
+proposition that the habit of holding private property inviolate
+is traversed by the other habit of seeking wealth for the sake of
+the good repute to be gained through its conspicuous consumption.
+Most offenses against property, especially offenses of an
+appreciable magnitude, come under this head. It is also a matter
+of common notoriety and byword that in offenses which result in a
+large accession of property to the offender he does not
+ordinarily incur the extreme penalty or the extreme obloquy with
+which his offenses would be visited on the ground of the naive
+moral code alone. The thief or swindler who has gained great
+wealth by his delinquency has a better chance than the small
+thief of escaping the rigorous penalty of the law and some good
+repute accrues to him from his increased wealth and from his
+spending the irregularly acquired possessions in a seemly manner.
+A well-bred expenditure of his booty especially appeals with
+great effect to persons of a cultivated sense of the proprieties,
+and goes far to mitigate the sense of moral turpitude with which
+his dereliction is viewed by them. It may be noted also -- and it
+is more immediately to the point -- that we are all inclined to
+condone an offense against property in the case of a man whose
+motive is the worthy one of providing the means of a "decent"
+manner of life for his wife and children. If it is added that the
+wife has been "nurtured in the lap of luxury," that is accepted
+as an additional extenuating circumstance. That is to say, we are
+prone to condone such an offense where its aim is the honorific
+one of enabling the offender's wife to perform for him such an
+amount of vicarious consumption of time and substance as is
+demanded by the standard of pecuniary decency. In such a case the
+habit of approving the accustomed degree of conspicuous waste
+traverses the habit of deprecating violations of ownership, to
+the extent even of sometimes leaving the award of praise or blame
+uncertain. This is peculiarly true where the dereliction involves
+an appreciable predatory or piratical element.
+
+This topic need scarcely be pursued further here; but the remark
+may not be out of place that all that considerable body of morals
+that clusters about the concept of an inviolable ownership is
+itself a psychological precipitate of the traditional
+meritoriousness of wealth. And it should be added that this
+wealth which is held sacred is valued primarily for the sake of
+the good repute to be got through its conspicuous consumption.
+The bearing of pecuniary decency upon the scientific spirit or
+the quest of knowledge will be taken up in some detail in a
+separate chapter. Also as regards the sense of devout or ritual
+merit and adequacy in this connection, little need be said in
+this place. That topic will also come up incidentally in a later
+chapter. Still, this usage of honorific expenditure has much to
+say in shaping popular tastes as to what is right and meritorious
+in sacred matters, and the bearing of the principle of
+conspicuous waste upon some of the commonplace devout observances
+and conceits may therefore be pointed out.
+
+Obviously, the canon of conspicuous waste is accountable for a
+great portion of what may be called devout consumption; as, e.g.,
+the consumption of sacred edifices, vestments, and other goods of
+the same class. Even in those modern cults to whose divinities is
+imputed a predilection for temples not built with hands, the
+sacred buildings and the other properties of the cult are
+constructed and decorated with some view to a reputable degree of
+wasteful expenditure. And it needs but little either of
+observation or introspection -- and either will serve the turn --
+to assure us that the expensive splendor of the house of worship
+has an appreciable uplifting and mellowing effect upon the
+worshipper's frame of mind. It will serve to enforce the same
+fact if we reflect upon the sense of abject shamefulness with
+which any evidence of indigence or squalor about the sacred place
+affects all beholders. The accessories of any devout observance
+should be pecuniarily above reproach. This requirement is
+imperative, whatever latitude may be allowed with regard to these
+accessories in point of aesthetic or other serviceability.
+It may also be in place to notice that in all communities,
+especially in neighborhoods where the standard of pecuniary
+decency for dwellings is not high, the local sanctuary is more
+ornate, more conspicuously wasteful in its architecture and
+decoration, than the dwelling houses of the congregation. This is
+true of nearly all denominations and cults, whether Christian or
+Pagan, but it is true in a peculiar degree of the older and
+maturer cults. At the same time the sanctuary commonly
+contributes little if anything to the physical comfort of the
+members. Indeed, the sacred structure not only serves the
+physical well-being of the members to but a slight extent, as
+compared with their humbler dwelling-houses; but it is felt by
+all men that a right and enlightened sense of the true, the
+beautiful, and the good demands that in all expenditure on the
+sanctuary anything that might serve the comfort of the worshipper
+should be conspicuously absent. If any element of comfort is
+admitted in the fittings of the sanctuary, it should be at least
+scrupulously screened and masked under an ostensible austerity.
+In the most reputable latter-day houses of worship, where no
+expense is spared, the principle of austerity is carried to the
+length of making the fittings of the place a means of mortifying
+the flesh, especially in appearance. There are few persons of
+delicate tastes, in the matter of devout consumption to whom this
+austerely wasteful discomfort does not appeal as intrinsically
+right and good. Devout consumption is of the nature of vicarious
+consumption. This canon of devout austerity is based on the
+pecuniary reputability of conspicuously wasteful consumption,
+backed by the principle that vicarious consumption should
+conspicuously not conduce to the comfort of the vicarious
+consumer.
+
+The sanctuary and its fittings have something of this austerity
+in all the cults in which the saint or divinity to whom the
+sanctuary pertains is not conceived to be present and make
+personal use of the property for the gratification of luxurious
+tastes imputed to him. The character of the sacred paraphernalia
+is somewhat different in this respect in those cults where the
+habits of life imputed to the divinity more nearly approach those
+of an earthly patriarchal potentate -- where he is conceived to
+make use of these consumable goods in person. In the latter case
+the sanctuary and its fittings take on more of the fashion given
+to goods destined for the conspicuous consumption of a temporal
+master or owner. On the other hand, where the sacred apparatus is
+simply employed in the divinity's service, that is to say, where
+it is consumed vicariously on his account by his servants, there
+the sacred properties take the character suited to goods that are
+destined for vicarious consumption only.
+
+In the latter case the sanctuary and the sacred apparatus are so
+contrived as not to enhance the comfort or fullness of life of
+the vicarious consumer, or at any rate not to convey the
+impression that the end of their consumption is the consumer's
+comfort. For the end of vicarious consumption is to enhance, not
+the fullness of life of the consumer, but the pecuniary repute of
+the master for whose behoof the consumption takes place.
+Therefore priestly vestments are notoriously expensive, ornate,
+and inconvenient; and in the cults where the priestly servitor of
+the divinity is not conceived to serve him in the capacity of
+consort, they are of an austere, comfortless fashion. And such it
+is felt that they should be.
+
+It is not only in establishing a devout standard of decent
+expensiveness that the principle of waste invades the domain of
+the canons of ritual serviceability. It touches the ways as well
+as the means, and draws on vicarious leisure as well as on
+vicarious consumption. Priestly demeanor at its best is aloof,
+leisurely, perfunctory, and uncontaminated with suggestions of
+sensuous pleasure. This holds true, in different degrees of
+course, for the different cults and denominations; but in the
+priestly life of all anthropomorphic cults the marks of a
+vicarious consumption of time are visible.
+
+The same pervading canon of vicarious leisure is also visibly
+present in the exterior details of devout observances and need
+only be pointed out in order to become obvious to all beholders.
+All ritual has a notable tendency to reduce itself to a rehearsal
+of formulas. This development of formula is most noticeable in
+the maturer cults, which have at the same time a more austere,
+ornate, and severe priestly life and garb; but it is perceptible
+also in the forms and methods of worship of the newer and fresher
+sects, whose tastes in respect of priests, vestments, and
+sanctuaries are less exacting. The rehearsal of the service (the
+term "service" carries a suggestion significant for the point in
+question) grows more perfunctory as the cult gains in age and
+consistency, and this perfunctoriness of the rehearsal is very
+pleasing to the correct devout taste. And with a good reason, for
+the fact of its being perfunctory goes to say pointedly that the
+master for whom it is performed is exalted above the vulgar need
+of actually proficuous service on the part of his servants. They
+are unprofitable servants, and there is an honorific implication
+for their master in their remaining
+unprofitable. It is needless to point out the close analogy at
+this point between the priestly office and the office of the
+footman. It is pleasing to our sense of what is fitting in these
+matters, in either case, to recognize in the obvious
+perfunctoriness of the service that it is a pro forma execution
+only. There should be no show of agility or of dexterous
+manipulation in the execution of the priestly office, such as
+might suggest a capacity for turning off the work.
+
+In all this there is of course an obvious implication as to the
+temperament, tastes, propensities, and habits of life imputed to
+the divinity by worshippers who live under the tradition of these
+pecuniary canons of reputability. Through its pervading men's
+habits of thought, the principle of conspicuous waste has colored
+the worshippers' notions of the divinity and of the relation in
+which the human subject stands to him. It is of course in the
+more naive cults that this suffusion of pecuniary beauty is most
+patent, but it is visible throughout. All peoples, at whatever
+stage of culture or degree of enlightenment, are fain to eke out
+a sensibly scant degree of authentic formation
+regarding the personality and habitual surroundings of their
+divinities. In so calling in the aid of fancy to enrich and fill
+in their picture of the divinity's presence and manner of life
+they habitually impute to him such traits as go to make up their
+ideal of a worthy man. And in seeking communion with the divinity
+the ways and means of approach are assimilated as nearly as may
+be to the divine ideal that is in men's minds at the time. It is
+felt that the divine presence is entered with the best grace, and
+with the best effect, according to certain accepted methods and
+with the accompaniment of certain material circumstances which in
+popular apprehension are peculiarly consonant with the divine
+nature. This popularly accepted ideal of the bearing and
+paraphernalia adequate to such occasions of communion is, of
+course, to a good extent shaped by the popular apprehension of
+what is intrinsically worthy and beautiful in human carriage and
+surroundings on all occasions of dignified intercourse. It would
+on this account be misleading to attempt an analysis of devout
+demeanor by referring all evidences of the presence of a
+pecuniary standard of reputability back directly and baldly to
+the underlying norm of pecuniary emulation. So it would also be
+misleading to ascribe to the divinity, as popularly conceived, a
+jealous regard for his pecuniary standing and a habit of avoiding
+and condemning squalid situations and surroundings simply because
+they are under grade in the pecuniary respect.
+
+And still, after all allowance has been made, it appears that the
+canons of pecuniary reputability do, directly or
+indirectly, materially affect our notions of the attributes of
+divinity, as well as our notions of what are the fit and adequate
+manner and circumstances of divine communion. It is felt that the
+divinity must be of a peculiarly serene and leisurely habit of
+life. And whenever his local habitation is pictured in poetic
+imagery, for edification or in appeal to the devout fancy, the
+devout word-painter, as a matter of course, brings out before his
+auditors' imagination a throne with a profusion of the insignia
+of opulence and power, and surrounded by a great number of
+servitors. In the common run of such presentations of the
+celestial abodes, the office of this corps of servants is a
+vicarious leisure, their time and efforts being in great measure
+taken up with an industrially unproductive rehearsal of the
+meritorious characteristics and exploits of the divinity; while
+the background of the presentation is filled with the shimmer of
+the precious metals and of the more expensive varieties of
+precious stones. It is only in the crasser expressions of devout
+fancy that this intrusion of pecuniary canons into the devout
+ideals reaches such an extreme. An extreme case occurs in the
+devout imagery of the Negro population of the South. Their
+word-painters are unable to descend to anything cheaper than
+gold; so that in this case the insistence on pecuniary beauty
+gives a startling effect in yellow -- such as would be unbearable
+to a soberer taste. Still, there is probably no cult in which
+ideals of pecuniary merit have not been called in to supplement
+the ideals of ceremonial adequacy that guide men's conception of
+what is right in the matter of sacred apparatus.
+
+Similarly it is felt -- and the sentiment is acted upon -- that
+the priestly servitors of the divinity should not engage in
+industrially productive work; that work of any kind -- any
+employment which is of tangible human use -- must not be carried
+on in the divine presence, or within the precincts of the
+sanctuary; that whoever comes into the presence should come
+cleansed of all profane industrial features in his apparel or
+person, and should come clad in garments of more than everyday
+expensiveness; that on holidays set apart in honor of or for
+communion with the divinity no work that is of human use should
+be performed by any one. Even the remoter, lay dependents should
+render a vicarious leisure to the extent of one day in seven.
+In all these deliverances of men's uninstructed sense of what is
+fit and proper in devout observance and in the relations of the
+divinity, the effectual presence of the canons of
+pecuniary reputability is obvious enough, whether these canons
+have had their effect on the devout judgment in this respect
+immediately or at the second remove.
+
+These canons of reputability have had a similar, but more
+far-reaching and more specifically determinable, effect upon the
+popular sense of beauty or serviceability in consumable goods.
+The requirements of pecuniary decency have, to a very appreciable
+extent, influenced the sense of beauty and of utility in articles
+of use or beauty. Articles are to an extent preferred for use on
+account of their being conspicuously wasteful; they are felt to
+be serviceable somewhat in proportion as they are wasteful and
+ill adapted to their ostensible use.
+
+The utility of articles valued for their beauty depends closely
+upon the expensiveness of the articles. A homely
+illustration will bring out this dependence. A hand-wrought
+silver spoon, of a commercial value of some ten to twenty
+dollars, is not ordinarily more serviceable -- in the first sense
+of the word -- than a machine-made spoon of the same material. It
+may not even be more serviceable than a machine-made spoon of
+some "base" metal, such as aluminum, the value of which may be no
+more than some ten to twenty cents. The former of the two
+utensils is, in fact, commonly a less effective contrivance for
+its ostensible purpose than the latter. The objection is of
+course ready to hand that, in taking this view of the matter, one
+of the chief uses, if not the chief use, of the costlier spoon is
+ignored; the hand-wrought spoon gratifies our taste, our sense of
+the beautiful, while that made by machinery out of the base metal
+has no useful office beyond a brute efficiency. The facts are no
+doubt as the objection states them, but it will be evident on
+rejection that the objection is after all more plausible than
+conclusive. It appears (1) that while the different materials of
+which the two spoons are made each possesses beauty and
+serviceability for the purpose for which it is used, the material
+of the hand-wrought spoon is some one hundred times more valuable
+than the baser metal, without very greatly excelling the latter
+in intrinsic beauty of grain or color, and without being in any
+appreciable degree superior in point of mechanical
+serviceability; (2) if a close inspection should show that the
+supposed hand-wrought spoon were in reality only a very clever
+citation of hand-wrought goods, but an imitation so cleverly
+wrought as to give the same impression of line and surface to any
+but a minute examination by a trained eye, the utility of the
+article, including the gratification which the user derives from
+its contemplation as an object of beauty, would immediately
+decline by some eighty or ninety per cent, or even more; (3) if
+the two spoons are, to a fairly close observer, so nearly
+identical in appearance that the lighter weight of the spurious
+article alone betrays it, this identity of form and color will
+scarcely add to the value of the machine-made spoon, nor
+appreciably enhance the gratification of the user's "sense of
+beauty" in contemplating it, so long as the cheaper spoon is not
+a novelty, ad so long as it can be procured at a nominal cost.
+The case of the spoons is typical. The superior
+gratification derived from the use and contemplation of costly
+and supposedly beautiful products is, commonly, in great measure
+a gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the
+name of beauty. Our higher appreciation of the superior article
+is an appreciation of its superior honorific character, much more
+frequently than it is an unsophisticated appreciation of its
+beauty. The requirement of conspicuous wastefulness is not
+commonly present, consciously, in our canons of taste, but it is
+none the less present as a constraining norm selectively shaping
+and sustaining our sense of what is beautiful, and guiding our
+discrimination with respect to what may legitimately be approved
+as beautiful and what may not.
+
+It is at this point, where the beautiful and the honorific meet
+and blend, that a discrimination between serviceability and
+wastefulness is most difficult in any concrete case. It
+frequently happens that an article which serves the honorific
+purpose of conspicuous waste is at the same time a beautiful
+object; and the same application of labor to which it owes its
+utility for the former purpose may, and often does, give beauty
+of form and color to the article. The question is further
+complicated by the fact that many objects, as, for instance, the
+precious stones and the metals and some other materials used for
+adornment and decoration, owe their utility as items of
+conspicuous waste to an antecedent utility as objects of beauty.
+Gold, for instance, has a high degree of sensuous beauty very
+many if not most of the highly prized works of art are
+intrinsically beautiful, though often with material
+qualification; the like is true of some stuffs used for clothing,
+of some landscapes, and of many other things in less degree.
+Except for this intrinsic beauty which they possess, these
+objects would scarcely have been coveted as they are, or have
+become monopolized objects of pride to their possessors and
+users. But the utility of these things to the possessor is
+commonly due less to their intrinsic beauty than to the honor
+which their possession and consumption confers, or to the obloquy
+which it wards off.
+
+Apart from their serviceability in other respects, these objects
+are beautiful and have a utility as such; they are valuable on
+this account if they can be appropriated or
+monopolized; they are, therefore, coveted as valuable
+possessions, and their exclusive enjoyment gratifies the
+possessor's sense of pecuniary superiority at the same time that
+their contemplation gratifies his sense of beauty. But their
+beauty, in the naive sense of the word, is the occasion rather
+than the ground of their monopolization or of their commercial
+value. "Great as is the sensuous beauty of gems, their rarity and
+price adds an expression of distinction to them, which they would
+never have if they were cheap." There is, indeed, in the common
+run of cases under this head, relatively little incentive to the
+exclusive possession and use of these beautiful things, except on
+the ground of their honorific character as items of conspicuous
+waste. Most objects of this general class, with the partial
+exception of articles of personal adornment, would serve all
+other purposes than the honorific one equally well, whether owned
+by the person viewing them or not; and even as regards personal
+ornaments it is to be added that their chief purpose is to lend
+éclat to the person of their wearer (or owner) by comparison
+with other persons who are compelled to do without. The aesthetic
+serviceability of objects of beauty is not greatly nor
+universally heightened by possession.
+
+The generalization for which the discussion so far affords ground
+is that any valuable object in order to appeal to our sense of
+beauty must conform to the requirements of beauty and of
+expensiveness both. But this is not all. Beyond this the canon of
+expensiveness also affects our tastes in such a way as to
+inextricably blend the marks of expensiveness, in our
+appreciation, with the beautiful features of the object, and to
+subsume the resultant effect under the head of an appreciation of
+beauty simply. The marks of expensiveness come to be accepted as
+beautiful features of the expensive articles. They are pleasing
+as being marks of honorific costliness, and the pleasure which
+they afford on this score blends with that afforded by the
+beautiful form and color of the object; so that we often declare
+that an article of apparel, for instance, is "perfectly lovely,"
+when pretty much all that an analysis of the aesthetic value of
+the article would leave ground for is the declaration that it is
+pecuniarily honorific.
+
+This blending and confusion of the elements of expensiveness and
+of beauty is, perhaps, best exemplified in articles of dress and
+of household furniture. The code of reputability in matters of
+dress decides what shapes, colors, materials, and general effects
+in human apparel are for the time to be accepted as suitable; and
+departures from the code are offensive to our taste, supposedly
+as being departures from aesthetic truth. The approval with which
+we look upon fashionable attire is by no means to be accounted
+pure make-believe. We readily, and for the most part with utter
+sincerity, find those things pleasing that are in vogue. Shaggy
+dress-stuffs and pronounced color effects, for instance, offend
+us at times when the vogue is goods of a high, glossy finish and
+neutral colors. A fancy bonnet of this year's model
+unquestionably appeals to our sensibilities today much more
+forcibly than an equally fancy bonnet of the model of last year;
+although when viewed in the perspective of a quarter of a
+century, it would, I apprehend, be a matter of the utmost
+difficulty to award the palm for intrinsic beauty to the one
+rather than to the other of these structures. So, again, it may
+be remarked that, considered simply in their physical
+juxtaposition with the human form, the high gloss of a
+gentleman's hat or of a patent-leather shoe has no more of
+intrinsic beauty than a similarly high gloss on a threadbare
+sleeve; and yet there is no question but that all well-bred
+people (in the Occidental civilized communities) instinctively
+and unaffectedly cleave to the one as a phenomenon of great
+beauty, and eschew the other as offensive to every sense to which
+it can appeal. It is extremely doubtful if any one could be
+induced to wear such a contrivance as the high hat of civilized
+society, except for some urgent reason based on other than
+aesthetic grounds.
+
+By further habituation to an appreciative perception of the marks
+of expensiveness in goods, and by habitually identifying beauty
+with reputability, it comes about that a beautiful article which
+is not expensive is accounted not beautiful. In this way it has
+happened, for instance, that some beautiful flowers pass
+conventionally for offensive weeds; others that can be cultivated
+with relative ease are accepted and admired by the lower middle
+class, who can afford no more expensive luxuries of this kind;
+but these varieties are rejected as vulgar by those people who
+are better able to pay for expensive flowers and who are educated
+to a higher schedule of pecuniary beauty in the florist's
+products; while still other flowers, of no greater intrinsic
+beauty than these, are cultivated at great cost and call out much
+admiration from flower-lovers whose tastes have been matured
+under the critical guidance of a polite environment.
+
+The same variation in matters of taste, from one class of society
+to another, is visible also as regards many other kinds of
+consumable goods, as, for example, is the case with furniture,
+houses, parks, and gardens. This diversity of views as to what is
+beautiful in these various classes of goods is not a diversity of
+the norm according to which the unsophisticated sense of the
+beautiful works. It is not a constitutional difference of
+endowments in the aesthetic respect, but rather a difference in
+the code of reputability which specifies what objects properly
+lie within the scope of honorific consumption for the class to
+which the critic belongs. It is a difference in the traditions of
+propriety with respect to the kinds of things which may, without
+derogation to the consumer, be consumed under the head of objects
+of taste and art. With a certain allowance for variations to be
+accounted for on other grounds, these traditions are determined,
+more or less rigidly, by the pecuniary plane of life of the
+class.
+
+Everyday life affords many curious illustrations of the way in
+which the code of pecuniary beauty in articles of use varies from
+class to class, as well as of the way in which the
+conventional sense of beauty departs in its deliverances from the
+sense untutored by the requirements of pecuniary repute. Such a
+fact is the lawn, or the close-cropped yard or park, which
+appeals so unaffectedly to the taste of the Western peoples. It
+appears especially to appeal to the tastes of the well-to-do
+classes in those communities in which the dolicho-blond element
+predominates in an appreciable degree. The lawn unquestionably
+has an element of sensuous beauty, simply as an object of
+apperception, and as such no doubt it appeals pretty directly to
+the eye of nearly all races and all classes; but it is, perhaps,
+more unquestionably beautiful to the eye of the dolicho-blond
+than to most other varieties of men. This higher appreciation of
+a stretch of greensward in this ethnic element than in the other
+elements of the population, goes along with certain other
+features of the dolicho-blond temperament that indicate that this
+racial element had once been for a long time a pastoral people
+inhabiting a region with a humid climate. The close-cropped lawn
+is beautiful in the eyes of a people whose inherited bent it is
+to readily find pleasure in contemplating a well-preserved
+pasture or grazing land.
+
+For the aesthetic purpose the lawn is a cow pasture; and in some
+cases today -- where the expensiveness of the attendant
+circumstances bars out any imputation of thrift -- the idyl of
+the dolicho-blond is rehabilitated in the introduction of a cow
+into a lawn or private ground. In such cases the cow made use of
+is commonly of an expensive breed. The vulgar suggestion of
+thrift, which is nearly inseparable from the cow, is a standing
+objection to the decorative use of this animal. So that in all
+cases, except where luxurious surroundings negate this
+suggestion, the use of the cow as an object of taste must be
+avoided. Where the predilection for some grazing animal to fill
+out the suggestion of the pasture is too strong to be suppressed,
+the cow's place is often given to some more or less inadequate
+substitute, such as deer, antelopes, or some such exotic beast.
+These substitutes, although less beautiful to the pastoral eye of
+Western man than the cow, are in such cases preferred because of
+their superior expensiveness or futility, and their consequent
+repute. They are not vulgarly lucrative either in fact or in
+suggestion.
+
+Public parks of course fall in the same category with the lawn;
+they too, at their best, are imitations of the pasture. Such a
+park is of course best kept by grazing, and the cattle on the
+grass are themselves no mean addition to the beauty of the thing,
+as need scarcely be insisted on with anyone who has once seen a
+well-kept pasture. But it is worth noting, as an
+expression of the pecuniary element in popular taste, that such a
+method of keeping public grounds is seldom resorted to. The best
+that is done by skilled workmen under the supervision of a
+trained keeper is a more or less close imitation of a pasture,
+but the result invariably falls somewhat short of the artistic
+effect of grazing. But to the average popular apprehension a herd
+of cattle so pointedly suggests thrift and usefulness that their
+presence in the public pleasure ground would be intolerably
+cheap. This method of keeping grounds is comparatively
+inexpensive, therefore it is indecorous.
+
+Of the same general bearing is another feature of public grounds.
+There is a studious exhibition of expensiveness coupled with a
+make-believe of simplicity and crude serviceability. Private
+grounds also show the same physiognomy wherever they are in the
+management or ownership of persons whose tastes have been formed
+under middle-class habits of life or under the upper-class
+traditions of no later a date than the childhood of the
+generation that is now passing. Grounds which conform to the
+instructed tastes of the latter-day upper class do not show these
+features in so marked a degree. The reason for this difference in
+tastes between the past and the incoming generation of the
+well-bred lies in the changing economic situation. A similar
+difference is perceptible in other respects, as well as in the
+accepted ideals of pleasure grounds. In this country as in most
+others, until the last half century but a very small proportion
+of the population were possessed of such wealth as would exempt
+them from thrift. Owing to imperfect means of communication, this
+small fraction were scattered and out of effective touch with one
+another. There was therefore no basis for a growth of taste in
+disregard of expensiveness. The revolt of the well-bred taste
+against vulgar thrift was unchecked. Wherever the unsophisticated
+sense of beauty might show itself sporadically in an approval of
+inexpensive or thrifty surroundings, it would lack the "social
+confirmation" which nothing but a considerable body of
+like-minded people can give. There was, therefore, no effective
+upper-class opinion that would overlook evidences of possible
+inexpensiveness in the management of grounds; and there was
+consequently no appreciable divergence between the leisure-class
+and the lower middle-class ideal in the physiognomy of pleasure
+grounds. Both classes equally constructed their ideals with the
+fear of pecuniary disrepute before their eyes.
+
+Today a divergence in ideals is beginning to be apparent. The
+portion of the leisure class that has been consistently exempt
+from work and from pecuniary cares for a generation or more is
+now large enough to form and sustain opinion in matters of taste.
+Increased mobility of the members has also added to the facility
+with which a "social confirmation" can be attained within the
+class. Within this select class the exemption from thrift is a
+matter so commonplace as to have lost much of its utility as a
+basis of pecuniary decency. Therefore the latter-day upper-class
+canons of taste do not so consistently insist on an unremitting
+demonstration of expensiveness and a strict exclusion of the
+appearance of thrift. So, a predilection for the rustic and the
+"natural" in parks and grounds makes its appearance on these
+higher social and intellectual levels. This predilection is in
+large part an outcropping of the instinct of workmanship; and it
+works out its results with varying degrees of consistency. It is
+seldom altogether unaffected, and at times it shades off into
+something not widely different from that make-believe of
+rusticity which has been referred to above.
+
+A weakness for crudely serviceable contrivances that
+pointedly suggest immediate and wasteless use is present even in
+the middle-class tastes; but it is there kept well in hand under
+the unbroken dominance of the canon of reputable futility.
+Consequently it works out in a variety of ways and means for
+shamming serviceability -- in such contrivances as rustic fences,
+bridges, bowers, pavilions, and the like decorative features. An
+expression of this affectation of serviceability, at what is
+perhaps its widest divergence from the first promptings of the
+sense of economic beauty, is afforded by the cast-iron rustic
+fence and trellis or by a circuitous drive laid across level
+ground.
+
+The select leisure class has outgrown the use of these
+pseudo-serviceable variants of pecuniary beauty, at least at some
+points. But the taste of the more recent accessions to the
+leisure class proper and of the middle and lower classes still
+requires a pecuniary beauty to supplement the aesthetic beauty,
+even in those objects which are primarily admired for the beauty
+that belongs to them as natural growths.
+
+The popular taste in these matters is to be seen in the prevalent
+high appreciation of topiary work and of the
+conventional flower-beds of public grounds. Perhaps as happy an
+illustration as may be had of this dominance of pecuniary beauty
+over aesthetic beauty in middle-class tastes is seen in the
+reconstruction of the grounds lately occupied by the Columbian
+Exposition. The evidence goes to show that the requirement of
+reputable expensiveness is still present in good vigor even where
+all ostensibly lavish display is avoided. The artistic effects
+actually wrought in this work of reconstruction diverge somewhat
+widely from the effect to which the same ground would have lent
+itself in hands not guided by pecuniary canons of taste. And even
+the better class of the city's population view the progress of
+the work with an unreserved approval which suggests that there is
+in this case little if any discrepancy between the tastes of the
+upper and the lower or middle classes of the city. The sense of
+beauty in the population of this representative city of the
+advanced pecuniary culture is very chary of any departure from
+its great cultural principle of conspicuous waste.
+
+The love of nature, perhaps itself borrowed from a
+higher-class code of taste, sometimes expresses itself in
+unexpected ways under the guidance of this canon of pecuniary
+beauty, and leads to results that may seem incongruous to an
+unreflecting beholder. The well-accepted practice of planting
+trees in the treeless areas of this country, for instance, has
+been carried over as an item of honorific expenditure into the
+heavily wooded areas; so that it is by no means unusual for a
+village or a farmer in the wooded country to clear the land of
+its native trees and immediately replant saplings of certain
+introduced varieties about the farmyard or along the streets. In
+this way a forest growth of oak, elm, beech, butternut, hemlock,
+basswood, and birch is cleared off to give room for saplings of
+soft maple, cottonwood, and brittle willow. It is felt that the
+inexpensiveness of leaving the forest trees standing would
+derogate from the dignity that should invest an article which is
+intended to serve a decorative and honorific end.
+
+The like pervading guidance of taste by pecuniary repute is
+traceable in the prevalent standards of beauty in animals. The
+part played by this canon of taste in assigning her place in the
+popular aesthetic scale to the cow has already been spokes of.
+Something to the same effect is true of the other domestic
+animals, so far as they are in an appreciable degree industrially
+useful to the community -- as, for instance, barnyard fowl, hogs,
+cattle, sheep, goats, draught-horses. They are of the nature of
+productive goods, and serve a useful, often a lucrative end;
+therefore beauty is not readily imputed to them. The case is
+different with those domestic animals which ordinarily serve no
+industrial end; such as pigeons, parrots and other cage-birds,
+cats, dogs, and fast horses. These commonly are items of
+conspicuous consumption, and are therefore honorific in their
+nature and may legitimately be accounted beautiful. This class of
+animals are conventionally admired by the body of the upper
+classes, while the pecuniarily lower classes -- and that select
+minority of the leisure class among whom the rigorous canon that
+abjures thrift is in a measure obsolescent -- find beauty in one
+class of animals as in another, without drawing a hard and fast
+line of pecuniary demarcation between the beautiful and the ugly.
+In the case of those domestic animals which are honorific and are
+reputed beautiful, there is a subsidiary basis of merit that
+should be spokes of. Apart from the birds which belong in the
+honorific class of domestic animals, and which owe their place in
+this class to their non-lucrative character alone, the animals
+which merit particular attention are cats, dogs, and fast horses.
+The cat is less reputable than the other two just named, because
+she is less wasteful; she may eves serve a useful end. At the
+same time the cat's temperament does not fit her for the
+honorific purpose. She lives with man on terms of equality, knows
+nothing of that relation of status which is the ancient basis of
+all distinctions of worth, honor, and repute, and she does not
+lend herself with facility to an invidious comparison between her
+owner and his neighbors. The exception to this last rule occurs
+in the case of such scarce and fanciful products as the Angora
+cat, which have some slight honorific value on the ground of
+expensiveness, and have, therefore, some special claim to beauty
+on pecuniary grounds.
+
+The dog has advantages in the way of uselessness as well as in
+special gifts of temperament. He is often spoken of, in an
+eminent sense, as the friend of man, and his intelligence and
+fidelity are praised. The meaning of this is that the dog is
+man's servant and that he has the gift of an unquestioning
+subservience and a slave's quickness in guessing his master's
+mood. Coupled with these traits, which fit him well for the
+relation of status -- and which must for the present purpose be
+set down as serviceable traits -- the dog has some
+characteristics which are of a more equivocal aesthetic value. He
+is the filthiest of the domestic animals in his person and the
+nastiest in his habits. For this he makes up is a servile,
+fawning attitude towards his master, and a readiness to inflict
+damage and discomfort on all else. The dog, then, commends
+himself to our favor by affording play to our propensity for
+mastery, and as he is also an item of expense, and commonly
+serves no industrial purpose, he holds a well-assured place in
+men's regard as a thing of good repute. The dog is at the same
+time associated in our imagination with the chase -- a
+meritorious employment and an expression of the honorable
+predatory impulse. Standing on this vantage ground, whatever
+beauty of form and motion and whatever commendable mental traits
+he may possess are conventionally acknowledged and magnified. And
+even those varieties of the dog which have been bred into
+grotesque deformity by the dog-fancier are in good faith
+accounted beautiful by many. These varieties of dogs -- and the
+like is true of other fancy-bred animals -- are rated and graded
+in aesthetic value somewhat in proportion to the degree of
+grotesqueness and instability of the particular fashion which the
+deformity takes in the given case. For the purpose in hand, this
+differential utility on the ground of grotesqueness and
+instability of structure is reducible to terms of a greater
+scarcity and consequent expense. The commercial value of canine
+monstrosities, such as the prevailing styles of pet dogs both for
+men's and women's use, rests on their high cost of production,
+and their value to their owners lies chiefly in their utility as
+items of conspicuous consumption. In directly, through reflection
+Upon their honorific expensiveness, a social worth is imputed to
+them; and so, by an easy substitution of words and ideas, they
+come to be admired and reputed beautiful. Since any attention
+bestowed upon these animals is in no sense gainful or useful, it
+is also reputable; and since the habit of giving them attention
+is consequently not deprecated, it may grow into an habitual
+attachment of great tenacity and of a most benevolent character.
+So that in the affection bestowed on pet animals the canon of
+expensiveness is present more or less remotely as a norm which
+guides and shapes the sentiment and the selection of its object.
+The like is true, as will be noticed presently, with respect to
+affection for persons also; although the manner in which the norm
+acts in that case is somewhat different.
+
+The case of the fast horse is much like that of the dog. He is on
+the whole expensive, or wasteful and useless -- for the
+industrial purpose. What productive use he may possess, in the
+way of enhancing the well-being of the community or making the
+way of life easier for men, takes the form of exhibitions of
+force and facility of motion that gratify the popular aesthetic
+sense. This is of course a substantial serviceability. The horse
+is not endowed with the spiritual aptitude for servile dependence
+in the same measure as the dog; but he ministers effectually to
+his master's impulse to convert the "animate" forces of the
+environment to his own use and discretion and so express his own
+dominating individuality through them. The fast horse is at least
+potentially a race-horse, of high or low degree; and it is as
+such that he is peculiarly serviceable to his owner. The utility
+of the fast horse lies largely in his efficiency as a means of
+emulation; it gratifies the owner's sense of aggression and
+dominance to have his own horse outstrip his neighbor's. This use
+being not lucrative, but on the whole pretty consistently
+wasteful, and quite conspicuously so, it is honorific, and
+therefore gives the fast horse a strong presumptive position of
+reputability. Beyond this, the race-horse proper has also a
+similarly non-industrial but honorific use as a gambling
+instrument.
+
+The fast horse, then, is aesthetically fortunate, in that the
+canon of pecuniary good repute legitimates a free
+appreciation of whatever beauty or serviceability he may possess.
+His pretensions have the countenance of the principle of
+conspicuous waste and the backing of the predatory aptitude for
+dominance and emulation. The horse is, moreover, a beautiful
+animal, although the race-horse is so in no peculiar degree to
+the uninstructed taste of those persons who belong neither in the
+class of race-horse fanciers nor in the class whose sense of
+beauty is held in abeyance by the moral constraint of the horse
+fancier's award. To this untutored taste the most beautiful horse
+seems to be a form which has suffered less radical alteration
+than the race-horse under the breeder's selective development of
+the animal. Still, when a writer or speaker -- especially of
+those whose eloquence is most consistently commonplace wants an
+illustration of animal grace and serviceability, for rhetorical
+use, he habitually turns to the horse; and he commonly makes it
+plain before he is done that what he has in mind is the
+race-horse.
+
+It should be noted that in the graduated appreciation of
+varieties of horses and of dogs, such as one meets with among
+people of even moderately cultivated tastes in these matters,
+there is also discernible another and more direct line of
+influence of the leisure-class canons of reputability. In this
+country, for instance, leisure-class tastes are to some extent
+shaped on usages and habits which prevail, or which are
+apprehended to prevail, among the leisure class of Great Britain.
+In dogs this is true to a less extent than in horses. In horses,
+more particularly in saddle horses -- which at their best serve
+the purpose of wasteful display simply -- it will hold true in a
+general way that a horse is more beautiful in proportion as he is
+more English; the English leisure class being, for purposes of
+reputable usage, the upper leisure class of this country, and so
+the exemplar for the lower grades. This mimicry in the methods of
+the apperception of beauty and in the forming of judgments of
+taste need not result in a spurious, or at any rate not a
+hypocritical or affected, predilection. The predilection is as
+serious and as substantial an award of taste when it rests on
+this basis as when it rests on any other, the difference is that
+this taste is and as substantial an award of taste when it rests
+on this basis as when it rests on any other; the difference is
+that this taste is a taste for the reputably correct, not for the
+aesthetically true.
+
+The mimicry, it should be said, extends further than to the sense
+of beauty in horseflesh simply. It includes trappings and
+horsemanship as well, so that the correct or reputably beautiful
+seat or posture is also decided by English usage, as well as the
+equestrian gait. To show how fortuitous may sometimes be the
+circumstances which decide what shall be becoming and what not
+under the pecuniary canon of beauty, it may be noted that this
+English seat, and the peculiarly distressing gait which has made
+an awkward seat necessary, are a survival from the time when the
+English roads were so bad with mire and mud as to be virtually
+impassable for a horse travelling at a more comfortable gait; so
+that a person of decorous tastes in horsemanship today rides a
+punch with docked tail, in an uncomfortable posture and at a
+distressing gait, because the English roads during a great part
+of the last century were impassable for a horse travelling at a
+more horse-like gait, or for an animal built for moving with ease
+over the firm and open country to which the horse is indigenous.
+It is not only with respect to consumable goods -- including
+domestic animals -- that the canons of taste have been colored by
+the canons of pecuniary reputability. Something to the like
+effect is to be said for beauty in persons. In order to avoid
+whatever may be matter of controversy, no weight will be given in
+this connection to such popular predilection as there may be for
+the dignified (leisurely) bearing and poly presence that are by
+vulgar tradition associated with opulence in mature men. These
+traits are in some measure accepted as elements of personal
+beauty. But there are certain elements of feminine beauty, on the
+other hand, which come in under this head, and which are of so
+concrete and specific a character as to admit of itemized
+appreciation. It is more or less a rule that in communities which
+are at the stage of economic development at which women are
+valued by the upper class for their service, the ideal of female
+beauty is a robust, large-limbed woman. The ground of
+appreciation is the physique, while the conformation of the face
+is of secondary weight only. A well-known instance of this ideal
+of the early predatory culture is that of the maidens of the
+Homeric poems.
+
+This ideal suffers a change in the succeeding development, when,
+in the conventional scheme, the office of the high-class wife
+comes to be a vicarious leisure simply. The ideal then includes
+the characteristics which are supposed to result from or to go
+with a life of leisure consistently enforced. The ideal accepted
+under these circumstances may be gathered from
+descriptions of beautiful women by poets and writers of the
+chivalric times. In the conventional scheme of those days ladies
+of high degree were conceived to be in perpetual tutelage, and to
+be scrupulously exempt from all useful work. The resulting
+chivalric or romantic ideal of beauty takes cognizance chiefly of
+the face, and dwells on its delicacy, and on the delicacy of the
+hands and feet, the slender figure, and especially the slender
+waist. In the pictured representations of the women of that time,
+and in modern romantic imitators of the chivalric thought and
+feeling, the waist is attenuated to a degree that implies extreme
+debility. The same ideal is still extant among a considerable
+portion of the population of modern industrial communities; but
+it is to be said that it has retained its hold most tenaciously
+in those modern communities which are least advanced in point of
+economic and civil development, and which show the most
+considerable survivals of status and of predatory institutions.
+That is to say, the chivalric ideal is best preserved in those
+existing communities which are substantially least modern.
+Survivals of this lackadaisical or romantic ideal occur freely in
+the tastes of the well-to-do classes of Continental countries.
+In modern communities which have reached the higher levels of
+industrial development, the upper leisure class has
+accumulated so great a mass of wealth as to place its women above
+all imputation of vulgarly productive labor. Here the status of
+women as vicarious consumers is beginning to lose its place in
+the sections of the body of the people; and as a consequence the
+ideal of feminine beauty is beginning to change back again from
+the infirmly delicate, translucent, and hazardously slender, to a
+woman of the archaic type that does not disown her hands and
+feet, nor, indeed, the other gross material facts of her person.
+In the course of economic development the ideal of beauty among
+the peoples of the Western culture has shifted from the woman of
+physical presence to the lady, and it is beginning to shift back
+again to the woman; and all in obedience to the changing
+conditions of pecuniary emulation. The exigencies of emulation at
+one time required lusty slaves; at another time they required a
+conspicuous performance of vicarious leisure and consequently an
+obvious disability; but the situation is now beginning to outgrow
+this last requirement, since, under the higher efficiency of
+modern industry, leisure in women is possible so far down the
+scale of reputability that it will no longer serve as a
+definitive mark of the highest pecuniary grade.
+
+Apart from this general control exercised by the norm of
+conspicuous waste over the ideal of feminine beauty, there are
+one or two details which merit specific mention as showing how it
+may exercise an extreme constraint in detail over men's sense of
+beauty in women. It has already been noticed that at the stages
+of economic evolution at which conspicuous leisure is much
+regarded as a means of good repute, the ideal requires delicate
+and diminutive bands and feet and a slender waist. These
+features, together with the other, related faults of structure
+that commonly go with them, go to show that the person so
+affected is incapable of useful effort and must therefore be
+supported in idleness by her owner. She is useless and expensive,
+and she is consequently valuable as evidence of pecuniary
+strength. It results that at this cultural stage women take
+thought to alter their persons, so as to conform more nearly to
+the requirements of the instructed taste of the time; and under
+the guidance of the canon of pecuniary decency, the men find the
+resulting artificially induced pathological features attractive.
+So, for instance, the constricted waist which has had so wide and
+persistent a vogue in the communities of the Western culture, and
+so also the deformed foot of the Chinese. Both of these are
+mutilations of unquestioned repulsiveness to the untrained sense.
+It requires habituation to become reconciled to them. Yet there
+is no room to question their attractiveness to men into whose
+scheme of life they fit as honorific items sanctioned by the
+requirements of pecuniary reputability. They are items of
+pecuniary and cultural beauty which have come to do duty as
+elements of the ideal of womanliness.
+
+The connection here indicated between the aesthetic value and the
+invidious pecuniary value of things is of course not present in
+the consciousness of the valuer. So far as a person, in forming a
+judgment of taste, takes thought and reflects that the object of
+beauty under consideration is wasteful and
+reputable, and therefore may legitimately be accounted beautiful;
+so far the judgment is not a bona fide judgment of taste and does
+not come up for consideration in this connection. The connection
+which is here insisted on between the reputability and the
+apprehended beauty of objects lies through the effect which the
+fact of reputability has upon the valuer's habits of thought. He
+is in the habit of forming judgments of value of various
+kinds-economic, moral, aesthetic, or reputable concerning the
+objects with which he has to do, and his attitude of commendation
+towards a given object on any other ground will affect the degree
+of his appreciation of the object when he comes to value it for
+the aesthetic purpose. This is more particularly true as regards
+valuation on grounds so closely related to the aesthetic ground
+as that of reputability. The valuation for the aesthetic purpose
+and for the purpose of repute are not held apart as distinctly as
+might be. Confusion is especially apt to arise between these two
+kinds of valuation, because the value of objects for repute is
+not habitually distinguished in speech by the use of a special
+descriptive term. The result is that the terms in familiar use to
+designate categories or elements of beauty are applied to cover
+this unnamed element of pecuniary merit, and the corresponding
+confusion of ideas follows by easy consequence. The demands of
+reputability in this way coalesce in the popular apprehension
+with the demands of the sense of beauty, and beauty which is not
+accompanied by the accredited marks of good repute is not
+accepted. But the requirements of pecuniary reputability and
+those of beauty in the naive sense do not in any appreciable
+degree coincide. The elimination from our surroundings of the
+pecuniarily unfit, therefore, results in a more or less thorough
+elimination of that considerable range of elements of beauty
+which do not happen to conform to the pecuniary requirement.
+The underlying norms of taste are of very ancient growth,
+probably far antedating the advent of the pecuniary institutions
+that are here under discussion. Consequently, by force of the
+past selective adaptation of men's habits of thought, it happens
+that the requirements of beauty, simply, are for the most part
+best satisfied by inexpensive contrivances and structures which
+in a straightforward manner suggest both the office which they
+are to perform and the method of serving their end. It may be in
+place to recall the modern psychological position. Beauty of form
+seems to be a question of facility of apperception. The
+proposition could perhaps safely be made broader than this. If
+abstraction is made from association, suggestion, and
+"expression," classed as elements of beauty, then beauty in any
+perceived object means that the mid readily unfolds its
+apperceptive activity in the directions which the object in
+question affords. But the directions in which activity readily
+unfolds or expresses itself are the directions to which long and
+close habituation has made the mind prone. So far as concerns the
+essential elements of beauty, this habituation is an habituation
+so close and long as to have induced not only a proclivity to the
+apperceptive form in question, but an adaptation of physiological
+structure and function as well. So far as the economic interest
+enters into the constitution of beauty, it enters as a suggestion
+or expression of adequacy to a purpose, a manifest and readily
+inferable subservience to the life process. This expression of
+economic facility or economic serviceability in any object --
+what may be called the economic beauty of the object-is best
+sewed by neat and unambiguous suggestion of its office and its
+efficiency for the material ends of life.
+
+On this ground, among objects of use the simple and
+unadorned article is aesthetically the best. But since the
+pecuniary canon of reputability rejects the inexpensive in
+articles appropriated to individual consumption, the satisfaction
+of our craving for beautiful things must be sought by way of
+compromise. The canons of beauty must be circumvented by some
+contrivance which will give evidence of a reputably wasteful
+expenditure, at the same time that it meets the demands of our
+critical sense of the useful and the beautiful, or at least meets
+the demand of some habit which has come to do duty in place of
+that sense. Such an auxiliary sense of taste is the sense of
+novelty; and this latter is helped out in its surrogateship by
+the curiosity with which men view ingenious and puzzling
+contrivances. Hence it comes that most objects alleged to be
+beautiful, and doing duty as such, show considerable ingenuity of
+design and are calculated to puzzle the beholder -- to bewilder
+him with irrelevant suggestions and hints of the improbable -- at
+the same time that they give evidence of an expenditure of labor
+in excess of what would give them their fullest efficency for
+their ostensible economic end.
+
+This may be shown by an illustration taken from outside the range
+of our everyday habits and everyday contact, and so outside the
+range of our bias. Such are the remarkable feather mantles of
+Hawaii, or the well-known cawed handles of the ceremonial adzes
+of several Polynesian islands. These are undeniably beautiful,
+both in the sense that they offer a pleasing composition of form,
+lines, and color, and in the sense that they evince great skill
+and ingenuity in design and construction. At the same time the
+articles are manifestly ill fitted to serve any other economic
+purpose. But it is not always that the evolution of ingenious and
+puzzling contrivances under the guidance of the canon of wasted
+effort works out so happy a result. The result is quite as often
+a virtually complete suppression of all elements that would bear
+scrutiny as expressions of beauty, or of serviceability, and the
+substitution of evidences of misspent ingenuity and labor, backed
+by a conspicuous ineptitude; until many of the objects with which
+we surround ourselves in everyday life, and even many articles of
+everyday dress and ornament, are such as would not be tolerated
+except under the stress of prescriptive tradition. Illustrations
+of this substitution of ingenuity and expense in place of beauty
+and serviceability are to be seen, for instance, in domestic
+architecture, in domestic art or fancy work, in various articles
+of apparel, especially of feminine and priestly apparel.
+
+The canon of beauty requires expression of the generic. The
+"novelty" due to the demands of conspicuous waste traverses this
+canon of beauty, in that it results in making the physiognomy of
+our objects of taste a congeries of idiosyncrasies; and the
+idiosyncrasies are, moreover, under the selective surveillance of
+the canon of expensiveness.
+
+This process of selective adaptation of designs to the end of
+conspicuous waste, and the substitution of pecuniary beauty for
+aesthetic beauty, has been especially effective in the
+development of architecture. It would be extremely difficult to
+find a modern civilized residence or public building which can
+claim anything better than relative inoffensiveness in the eyes
+of anyone who will dissociate the elements of beauty from those
+of honorific waste. The endless variety of fronts presented by
+the better class of tenements and apartment houses in our cities
+is an endless variety of architectural distress and of
+suggestions of expensive discomfort. Considered as objects of
+beauty, the dead walls of the sides and back of these structures,
+left untouched by the hands of the artist, are commonly the best
+feature of the building.
+
+What has been said of the influence of the law of
+conspicuous waste upon the canons of taste will hold true, with
+but a slight change of terms, of its influence upon our notions
+of the serviceability of goods for other ends than the aesthetic
+one. Goods are produced and consumed as a means to the fuller
+unfolding of human life; and their utility consists, in the first
+instance, in their efficiency as means to this end. The end is,
+in the first instance, the fullness of life of the individual,
+taken in absolute terms. But the human proclivity to emulation
+has seized upon the consumption of goods as a means to an
+invidious comparison, and has thereby invested constable goods
+with a secondary utility as evidence of relative ability to pay.
+This indirect or secondary use of consumable goods lends an
+honorific character to consumption and presently also to the
+goods which best serve the emulative end of consumption. The
+consumption of expensive goods is meritorious, and the goods
+which contain an appreciable element of cost in excess of what
+goes to give them serviceability for their ostensible mechanical
+purpose are honorific. The marks of superfluous costliness in the
+goods are therefore marks of worth -- of high efficency for the
+indirect, invidious end to be served by their consumption; and
+conversely, goods are humilific, and therefore unattractive, if
+they show too thrifty an adaptation to the mechanical end sought
+and do not include a margin of expensiveness on which to rest a
+complacent invidious comparison. This indirect utility gives much
+of their value to the "better" grades of goods. In order to
+appeal to the cultivated sense of utility, an article must
+contain a modicum of this indirect utility.
+
+While men may have set out with disapproving an inexpensive
+manner of living because it indicated inability to spend much,
+and so indicated a lack of pecuniary success, they end by falling
+into the habit of disapproving cheap things as being
+intrinsically dishonorable or unworthy because they are cheap. As
+time has gone on, each succeeding generation has received this
+tradition of meritorious expenditure from the generation before
+it, and has in its turn further elaborated and fortified the
+traditional canon of pecuniary reputability in goods consumed;
+until we have finally reached such a degree of conviction as to
+the unworthiness of all inexpensive things, that we have no
+longer any misgivings in formulating the maxim, "Cheap and
+nasty."  So thoroughly has the habit of approving the expensive
+and disapproving the inexpensive been ingrained into our thinking
+that we instinctively insist upon at least some measure of
+wasteful expensiveness in all our consumption, even in the case
+of goods which are consumed in strict privacy and without the
+slightest thought of display. We all feel, sincerely and without
+misgiving, that we are the more lifted up in spirit for having,
+even in the privacy of our own household, eaten our daily meal by
+the help of hand-wrought silver utensils, from hand-painted china
+(often of dubious artistic value) laid on high-priced table
+linen. Any retrogression from the standard of living which we are
+accustomed to regard as worthy in this respect is felt to be a
+grievous violation of our human dignity. So, also, for the last
+dozen years candles have been a more pleasing source of light at
+dinner than any other. Candlelight is now softer, less
+distressing to well-bred eyes, than oil, gas, or electric light.
+The same could not have been said thirty years ago, when candles
+were, or recently had been, the cheapest available light for
+domestic use. Nor are candles even now found to give an
+acceptable or effective light for any other than a ceremonial
+illumination.
+
+A political sage still living has summed up the conclusion of
+this whole matter in the dictum: "A cheap coat makes a cheap
+man," and there is probably no one who does not feel the
+convincing force of the maxim.
+
+The habit of looking for the marks of superfluous
+expensiveness in goods, and of requiring that all goods should
+afford some utility of the indirect or invidious sort, leads to a
+change in the standards by which the utility of goods is gauged.
+The honorific element and the element of brute efficiency are not
+held apart in the consumer's appreciation of commodities, and the
+two together go to make up the unanalyzed aggregate
+serviceability of the goods. Under the resulting standard of
+serviceability, no article will pass muster on the strength of
+material sufficiency alone. In order to completeness and full
+acceptability to the consumer it must also show the honorific
+element. It results that the producers of articles of consumption
+direct their efforts to the production of goods that shall meet
+this demand for the honorific element. They will do this with all
+the more alacrity and effect, since they are themselves under the
+dominance of the same standard of worth in goods, and would be
+sincerely grieved at the sight of goods which lack the proper
+honorific finish. Hence it has come about that there are today no
+goods supplied in any trade which do not contain the honorific
+element in greater or less degree. Any consumer who might,
+Diogenes-like, insist on the elimination of all honorific or
+wasteful elements from his consumption, would be unable to supply
+his most trivial wants in the modern market. Indeed, even if he
+resorted to supplying his wants directly by his own efforts, he
+would find it difficult if not impossible to divest himself of
+the current habits of thought on this head; so that he could
+scarcely compass a supply of the necessaries of life for a day's
+consumption without instinctively and by oversight incorporating
+in his home-made product something of this honorific,
+quasi-decorative element of wasted labor.
+
+It is notorious that in their selection of serviceable goods in
+the retail market purchasers are guided more by the finish and
+workmanship of the goods than by any marks of substantial
+serviceability. Goods, in order to sell, must have some
+appreciable amount of labor spent in giving them the marks of
+decent expensiveness, in addition to what goes to give them
+efficiency for the material use which they are to serve. This
+habit of making obvious costliness a canon of serviceability of
+course acts to enhance the aggregate cost of articles of
+consumption. It puts us on our guard against cheapness by
+identifying merit in some degree with cost. There is ordinarily a
+consistent effort on the part of the consumer to obtain goods of
+the required serviceability at as advantageous a bargain as may
+be; but the conventional requirement of obvious costliness, as a
+voucher and a constituent of the serviceability of the goods,
+leads him to reject as under grade such goods as do not contain a
+large element of conspicuous waste.
+
+It is to be added that a large share of those features of
+consumable goods which figure in popular apprehension as marks of
+serviceability, and to which reference is here had as elements of
+conspicuous waste, commend themselves to the consumer also on
+other grounds than that of expensiveness alone. They usually give
+evidence of skill and effective workmanship, even if they do not
+contribute to the substantial serviceability of the goods; and it
+is no doubt largely on some such ground that any particular mark
+of honorific serviceability first comes into vogue and afterward
+maintains its footing as a normal constituent element of the
+worth of an article. A display of efficient workmanship is
+pleasing simply as such, even where its remoter, for the time
+unconsidered, outcome is futile. There is a gratification of the
+artistic sense in the contemplation of skillful work. But it is
+also to be added that no such evidence of skillful workmanship,
+or of ingenious and effective adaptation of means to an end,
+will, in the long run, enjoy the approbation of the modern
+civilized consumer unless it has the sanction of the Canon of
+conspicuous waste.
+
+The position here taken is enforced in a felicitous manner by the
+place assigned in the economy of consumption to machine products.
+The point of material difference between machine-made goods and
+the hand-wrought goods which serve the same purposes is,
+ordinarily, that the former serve their primary purpose more
+adequately. They are a more perfect product -- show a more
+perfect adaptation of means to end. This does not save them from
+disesteem and deprecation, for they fall short under the test of
+honorific waste. Hand labor is a more wasteful method of
+production; hence the goods turned out by this method are more
+serviceable for the purpose of pecuniary reputability; hence the
+marks of hand labor come to be honorific, and the goods which
+exhibit these marks take rank as of higher grade than the
+corresponding machine product. Commonly, if not invariably, the
+honorific marks of hand labor are certain imperfections and
+irregularities in the lines of the hand-wrought article, showing
+where the workman has fallen short in the execution of the
+design. The ground of the superiority of hand-wrought goods,
+therefore, is a certain margin of crudeness. This margin must
+never be so wide as to show bungling workmanship, since that
+would be evidence of low cost, nor so narrow as to suggest the
+ideal precision attained only by the machine, for that would be
+evidence of low cost.
+
+The appreciation of those evidences of honorific crudeness to
+which hand-wrought goods owe their superior worth and charm in
+the eyes of well-bred people is a matter of nice discrimination.
+It requires training and the formation of right habits of thought
+with respect to what may be called the physiognomy of goods.
+Machine-made goods of daily use are often admired and preferred
+precisely on account of their excessive perfection by the vulgar
+and the underbred who have not given due thought to the
+punctilios of elegant consumption. The ceremonial inferiority of
+machine products goes to show that the perfection of skill and
+workmanship embodied in any costly innovations in the finish of
+goods is not sufficient of itself to secure them acceptance and
+permanent favor. The innovation must have the support of the
+canon of conspicuous waste. Any feature in the physiognomy of
+goods, however pleasing in itself, and however well it may
+approve itself to the taste for effective work, will not be
+tolerated if it proves obnoxious to this norm of pecuniary
+reputability.
+
+The ceremonial inferiority or uncleanness in consumable goods due
+to "commonness," or in other words to their slight cost of
+production, has been taken very seriously by many persons. The
+objection to machine products is often formulated as an objection
+to the commonness of such goods. What is common is within the
+(pecuniary) reach of many people. Its consumption is therefore
+not honorific, since it does not serve the purpose of a favorable
+invidious comparison with other consumers. Hence the consumption,
+or even the sight of such goods, is inseparable from an odious
+suggestion of the lower levels of human life, and one comes away
+from their contemplation with a pervading sense of meanness that
+is extremely distasteful and depressing to a person of
+sensibility. In persons whose tastes assert themselves
+imperiously, and who have not the gift, habit, or incentive to
+discriminate between the grounds of their various judgments of
+taste, the deliverances of the sense of the honorific coalesce
+with those of the sense of beauty and of the sense of
+serviceability -- in the manner already spoken of; the resulting
+composite valuation serves as a judgment of the object's beauty
+or its serviceability, according as the valuer's bias or interest
+inclines him to apprehend the object in the one or the other of
+these aspects. It follows not infrequently that the marks of
+cheapness or commonness are accepted as definitive marks of
+artistic unfitness, and a code or schedule of aesthetic
+proprieties on the one hand, and of aesthetic abominations on the
+other, is constructed on this basis for guidance in questions of
+taste.
+
+As has already been pointed out, the cheap, and therefore
+indecorous, articles of daily consumption in modern industrial
+communities are commonly machine products; and the generic
+feature of the physiognomy of machine-made goods as compared with
+the hand-wrought article is their greater perfection in
+workmanship and greater accuracy in the detail execution of the
+design. Hence it comes about that the visible imperfections of
+the hand-wrought goods, being honorific, are accounted marks of
+superiority in point of beauty, or serviceability, or both. Hence
+has arisen that exaltation of the defective, of which John Ruskin
+and William Morris were such eager spokesmen in their time; and
+on this ground their propaganda of crudity and wasted effort has
+been taken up and carried forward since their time. And hence
+also the propaganda for a return to handicraft and household
+industry. So much of the work and speculations of this group of
+men as fairly comes under the characterization here given would
+have been impossible at a time when the visibly more perfect
+goods were not the cheaper.
+
+It is of course only as to the economic value of this school of
+aesthetic teaching that anything is intended to be said or can be
+said here. What is said is not to be taken in the sense of
+depreciation, but chiefly as a characterization of the tendency
+of this teaching in its effect on consumption and on the
+production of consumable goods.
+
+The manner in which the bias of this growth of taste has worked
+itself out in production is perhaps most cogently
+exemplified in the book manufacture with which Morris busied
+himself during the later years of his life; but what holds true
+of the work of the Kelmscott Press in an eminent degree, holds
+true with but slightly abated force when applied to latter-day
+artistic book-making generally -- as to type, paper,
+illustration, binding materials, and binder's work. The claims to
+excellence put forward by the later products of the bookmaker's
+industry rest in some measure on the degree of its approximation
+to the crudities of the time when the work of book-making was a
+doubtful struggle with refractory materials carried on by means
+of insufficient appliances. These products, since they require
+hand labor, are more expensive; they are also less convenient for
+use than the books turned out with a view to serviceability
+alone; they therefore argue ability on the part of the purchaser
+to consume freely, as well as ability to waste time and effort.
+It is on this basis that the printers of today are returning to
+"old-style," and other more or less obsolete styles of type which
+are less legible and give a cruder appearance to the page than
+the "modern." Even a scientific periodical, with ostensibly no
+purpose but the most effective presentation of matter with which
+its science is concerned, will concede so much to the demands of
+this pecuniary beauty as to publish its scientific discussions in
+oldstyle type, on laid paper, and with uncut edges. But books
+which are not ostensibly concerned with the effective
+presentation of their contents alone, of course go farther in
+this direction. Here we have a somewhat cruder type, printed on
+hand-laid, deckel-edged paper, with excessive margins and uncut
+leaves, with bindings of a painstaking crudeness and elaborate
+ineptitude. The Kelmscott Press reduced the matter to an
+absurdity -- as seen from the point of view of brute
+serviceability alone -- by issuing books for modern use, edited
+with the obsolete spelling, printed in black-letter, and bound in
+limp vellum fitted with thongs. As a further characteristic
+feature which fixes the economic place of artistic book-making,
+there is the fact that these more elegant books are, at their
+best, printed in limited editions. A limited edition is in effect
+a guarantee -- somewhat crude, it is true -- that this book is
+scarce and that it therefore is costly and lends pecuniary
+distinction to its consumer.
+
+The special attractiveness of these book-products to the
+book-buyer of cultivated taste lies, of course, not in a
+conscious, naive recognition of their costliness and superior
+clumsiness. Here, as in the parallel case of the superiority of
+hand-wrought articles over machine products, the conscious ground
+of preference is an intrinsic excellence imputed to the costlier
+and more awkward article. The superior excellence imputed to the
+book which imitates the products of antique and obsolete
+processes is conceived to be chiefly a superior utility in the
+aesthetic respect; but it is not unusual to find a well-bred
+book-lover insisting that the clumsier product is also more
+serviceable as a vehicle of printed speech. So far as regards the
+superior aesthetic value of the decadent book, the chances are
+that the book-lover's contention has some ground. The book is
+designed with an eye single to its beauty, and the result is
+commonly some measure of success on the part of the designer.
+What is insisted on here, however, is that the canon of taste
+under which the designer works is a canon formed under the
+surveillance of the law of conspicuous waste, and that this law
+acts selectively to eliminate any canon of taste that does not
+conform to its demands. That is to say, while the decadent book
+may be beautiful, the limits within which the designer may work
+are fixed by requirements of a non-aesthetic kind. The product,
+if it is beautiful, must also at the same time be costly and ill
+adapted to its ostensible use. This mandatory canon of taste in
+the case of the book-designer, however, is not shaped entirely by
+the law of waste in its first form; the canon is to some extent
+shaped in conformity to that secondary expression of the
+predatory temperament, veneration for the archaic or obsolete,
+which in one of its special developments is called classicism.
+In aesthetic theory it might be extremely difficult, if not quite
+impracticable, to draw a line between the canon of
+classicism, or regard for the archaic, and the canon of beauty.
+For the aesthetic purpose such a distinction need scarcely be
+drawn, and indeed it need not exist. For a theory of taste the
+expression of an accepted ideal of archaism, on whatever basis it
+may have been accepted, is perhaps best rated as an element of
+beauty; there need be no question of its legitimation. But for
+the present purpose -- for the purpose of determining what
+economic grounds are present in the accepted canons of taste and
+what is their significance for the distribution and consumption
+of goods -- the distinction is not similarly beside the point.
+The position of machine products in the civilized scheme of
+consumption serves to point out the nature of the relation which
+subsists between the canon of conspicuous waste and the code of
+proprieties in consumption. Neither in matters of art and taste
+proper, nor as regards the current sense of the serviceability of
+goods, does this canon act as a principle of innovation or
+initiative. It does not go into the future as a creative
+principle which makes innovations and adds new items of
+consumption and new elements of cost. The principle in question
+is, in a certain sense, a negative rather than a positive law. It
+is a regulative rather than a creative principle. It very rarely
+initiates or originates any usage or custom directly. Its action
+is selective only. Conspicuous wastefulness does not directly
+afford ground for variation and growth, but conformity to its
+requirements is a condition to the survival of such innovations
+as may be made on other grounds. In whatever way usages and
+customs and methods of expenditure arise, they are all subject to
+the selective action of this norm of reputability; and the degree
+in which they conform to its requirements is a test of their
+fitness to survive in the competition with other similar usages
+and customs. Other thing being equal, the more obviously wasteful
+usage or method stands the better chance of survival under this
+law. The law of conspicuous waste does not account for the origin
+of variations, but only for the persistence of such forms as are
+fit to survive under its dominance. It acts to conserve the fit,
+not to originate the acceptable. Its office is to prove all
+things and to hold fast that which is good for its purpose.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Seven
+
+Dress as an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture
+
+It will in place, by way of illustration, to show in some detail
+how the economic principles so far set forth apply to everyday
+facts in some one direction of the life process. For this purpose
+no line of consumption affords a more apt
+illustration than expenditure on dress. It is especially the rule
+of the conspicuous waste of goods that finds expression in dress,
+although the other, related principles of pecuniary repute are
+also exemplified in the same contrivances. Other methods of
+putting one's pecuniary standing in evidence serve their end
+effectually, and other methods are in vogue always and
+everywhere; but expenditure on dress has this advantage over most
+other methods, that our apparel is always in evidence and affords
+an indication of our pecuniary standing to all observers at the
+first glance. It is also true that admitted expenditure for
+display is more obviously present, and is, perhaps, more
+universally practiced in the matter of dress than in any other
+line of consumption. No one finds difficulty in assenting to the
+commonplace that the greater part of the expenditure incurred by
+all classes for apparel is incurred for the sake of a respectable
+appearance rather than for the protection of the person. And
+probably at no other point is the sense of shabbiness so keenly
+felt as it is if we fall short of the standard set by social
+usage in this matter of dress. It is true of dress in even a
+higher degree than of most other items of consumption, that
+people will undergo a very considerable degree of privation in
+the comforts or the necessaries of life in order to afford what
+is considered a decent amount of wasteful consumption; so that it
+is by no means an uncommon occurrence, in an inclement climate,
+for people to go ill clad in order to appear well dressed. And
+the commercial value of the goods used for clotting in any modern
+community is made up to a much larger extent of the
+fashionableness, the reputability of the goods than of the
+mechanical service which they render in clothing the person of
+the wearer. The need of dress is eminently a "higher" or
+spiritual need.
+
+This spiritual need of dress is not wholly, nor even
+chiefly, a naive propensity for display of expenditure. The law
+of conspicuous waste guides consumption in apparel, as in other
+things, chiefly at the second remove, by shaping the canons of
+taste and decency. In the common run of cases the conscious
+motive of the wearer or purchaser of conspicuously wasteful
+apparel is the need of conforming to established usage, and of
+living up to the accredited standard of taste and reputability.
+It is not only that one must be guided by the code of proprieties
+in dress in order to avoid the mortification that comes of
+unfavorable notice and comment, though that motive in itself
+counts for a great deal; but besides that, the requirement of
+expensiveness is so ingrained into our habits of thought in
+matters of dress that any other than expensive apparel is
+instinctively odious to us. Without reflection or analysis, we
+feel that what is inexpensive is unworthy. "A cheap coat makes a
+cheap man." "Cheap and nasty" is recognized to hold true in dress
+with even less mitigation than in other lines of consumption. On
+the ground both of taste and of serviceability, an inexpensive
+article of apparel is held to be inferior, under the maxim "cheap
+and nasty." We find things beautiful, as well as serviceable,
+somewhat in proportion as they are costly. With few and
+inconsequential exceptions, we all find a costly hand-wrought
+article of apparel much preferable, in point of beauty and of
+serviceability, to a less expensive imitation of it, however
+cleverly the spurious article may imitate the costly original;
+and what offends our sensibilities in the spurious article is not
+that it falls short in form or color, or, indeed, in visual
+effect in any way. The offensive object may be so close an
+imitation as to defy any but the closest scrutiny; and yet so
+soon as the counterfeit is detected, its aesthetic value, and its
+commercial value as well, declines precipitately. Not only that,
+but it may be asserted with but small risk of contradiction that
+the aesthetic value of a detected counterfeit in dress declines
+somewhat in the same proportion as the counterfeit is cheaper
+than its original. It loses caste aesthetically because it falls
+to a lower pecuniary grade.
+
+But the function of dress as an evidence of ability to pay does
+not end with simply showing that the wearer consumes
+valuable goods in excess of what is required for physical
+comfort. Simple conspicuous waste of goods is effective and
+gratifying as far as it goes; it is good prima facie evidence of
+pecuniary success, and consequently prima facie evidence of
+social worth. But dress has subtler and more far-reaching
+possibilities than this crude, first-hand evidence of wasteful
+consumption only. If, in addition to showing that the wearer can
+afford to consume freely and uneconomically, it can also be shown
+in the same stroke that he or she is not under the necessity of
+earning a livelihood, the evidence of social worth is enhanced in
+a very considerable degree. Our dress, therefore, in order to
+serve its purpose effectually, should not only he expensive, but
+it should also make plain to all observers that the wearer is not
+engaged in any kind of productive labor. In the evolutionary
+process by which our system of dress has been elaborated into its
+present admirably perfect adaptation to its purpose, this
+subsidiary line of evidence has received due attention. A
+detailed examination of what passes in popular apprehension for
+elegant apparel will show that it is contrived at every point to
+convey the impression that the wearer does not habitually put
+forth any useful effort. It goes without saying that no apparel
+can be considered elegant, or even decent, if it shows the effect
+of manual labor on the part of the wearer, in the way of soil or
+wear. The pleasing effect of neat and spotless garments is
+chiefly, if not altogether, due to their carrying the suggestion
+of leisure-exemption from personal contact with industrial
+processes of any kind. Much of the charm that invests the
+patent-leather shoe, the stainless linen, the lustrous
+cylindrical hat, and the walking-stick, which so greatly enhance
+the native dignity of a gentleman, comes of their pointedly
+suggesting that the wearer cannot when so attired bear a hand in
+any employment that is directly and immediately of any human use.
+Elegant dress serves its purpose of elegance not only in that it
+is expensive, but also because it is the insignia of leisure. It
+not only shows that the wearer is able to consume a relatively
+large value, but it argues at the same time that he consumes
+without producing.
+
+The dress of women goes even farther than that of men in the way
+of demonstrating the wearer's abstinence from productive
+employment. It needs no argument to enforce the generalization
+that the more elegant styles of feminine bonnets go even farther
+towards making work impossible than does the man's high hat. The
+woman's shoe adds the so-called French heel to the evidence of
+enforced leisure afforded by its polish; because this high heel
+obviously makes any, even the simplest and most necessary manual
+work extremely difficult. The like is true even in a higher
+degree of the skirt and the rest of the drapery which
+characterizes woman's dress. The substantial reason for our
+tenacious attachment to the skirt is just this; it is expensive
+and it hampers the wearer at every turn and incapacitates her for
+all useful exertion. The like is true of the feminine custom of
+wearing the hair excessively long.
+
+But the woman's apparel not only goes beyond that of the modern
+man in the degree in which it argues exemption from labor; it
+also adds a peculiar and highly characteristic feature which
+differs in kind from anything habitually practiced by the men.
+This feature is the class of contrivances of which the corset is
+the typical example. The corset is, in economic theory,
+substantially a mutilation, undergone for the purpose of lowering
+the subject's vitality and rendering her permanently and
+obviously unfit for work. It is true, the corset impairs the
+personal attractions of the wearer, but the loss suffered on that
+score is offset by the gain in reputability which comes of her
+visibly increased expensiveness and infirmity. It may broadly be
+set down that the womanliness of woman's apparel resolves itself,
+in point of substantial fact, into the more effective hindrance
+to useful exertion offered by the garments peculiar to women.
+This difference between masculine and feminine apparel is here
+simply pointed out as a characteristic feature. The ground of its
+occurrence will be discussed presently.
+
+So far, then, we have, as the great and dominant norm of dress,
+the broad principle of conspicuous waste. Subsidiary to this
+principle, and as a corollary under it, we get as a second norm
+the principle of conspicuous leisure. In dress construction this
+norm works out in the shape of divers contrivances going to show
+that the wearer does not and, as far as it may conveniently be
+shown, can not engage in productive labor. Beyond these two
+principles there is a third of scarcely less constraining force,
+which will occur to any one who reflects at all on the subject.
+Dress must not only be conspicuously expensive and inconvenient,
+it must at the same time be up to date. No explanation at all
+satisfactory has hitherto been offered of the phenomenon of
+changing fashions. The imperative requirement of dressing in the
+latest accredited manner, as well as the fact that this
+accredited fashion constantly changes from season to season, is
+sufficiently familiar to every one, but the theory of this flux
+and change has not been worked out. We may of course say, with
+perfect consistency and truthfulness, that this principle of
+novelty is another corollary under the law of conspicuous waste.
+Obviously, if each garment is permitted to serve for but a brief
+term, and if none of last season's apparel is carried over and
+made further use of during the present season, the wasteful
+expenditure on dress is greatly increased. This is good as far as
+it goes, but it is negative only. Pretty much all that this
+consideration warrants us in saying is that the norm of
+conspicuous waste exercises a controlling surveillance in all
+matters of dress, so that any change in the fashions must
+conspicuous waste exercises a controlling surveillance in all
+matters of dress, so that any change in the fashions must conform
+to the requirement of wastefulness; it leaves unanswered the
+question as to the motive for making and accepting a change in
+the prevailing styles, and it also fails to explain why
+conformity to a given style at a given time is so imperatively
+necessary as we know it to be.
+
+For a creative principle, capable of serving as motive to
+invention and innovation in fashions, we shall have to go back to
+the primitive, non-economic motive with which apparel originated
+-- the motive of adornment. Without going into an extended
+discussion of how and why this motive asserts itself under the
+guidance of the law of expensiveness, it may be stated broadly
+that each successive innovation in the fashions is an effort to
+reach some form of display which shall be more acceptable to our
+sense of form and color or of effectiveness, than that which it
+displaces. The changing styles are the expression of a restless
+search for something which shall commend itself to our aesthetic
+sense; but as each innovation is subject to the selective action
+of the norm of conspicuous waste, the range within which
+innovation can take place is somewhat restricted. The innovation
+must not only be more beautiful, or perhaps oftener less
+offensive, than that which it displaces, but it must also come up
+to the accepted standard of expensiveness.
+
+It would seem at first sight that the result of such an
+unremitting struggle to attain the beautiful in dress should be a
+gradual approach to artistic perfection. We might naturally
+expect that the fashions should show a well-marked trend in the
+direction of some one or more types of apparel eminently becoming
+to the human form; and we might even feel that ge have
+substantial ground for the hope that today, after all the
+ingenuity and effort which have been spent on dress these many
+years, the fashions should have achieved a relative perfection
+and a relative stability, closely approximating to a permanently
+tenable artistic ideal. But such is not the case. It would be
+very hazardous indeed to assert that the styles of today are
+intrinsically more becoming than those of ten years ago, or than
+those of twenty, or fifty, or one hundred years ago. On the other
+hand, the assertion freely goes uncontradicted that styles in
+vogue two thousand years ago are more becoming than the most
+elaborate and painstaking constructions of today.
+
+The explanation of the fashions just offered, then, does not
+fully explain, and we shall have to look farther. It is well
+known that certain relatively stable styles and types of costume
+have been worked out in various parts of the world; as, for
+instance, among the Japanese, Chinese, and other Oriental
+nations; likewise among the Greeks, Romans, and other Eastern
+peoples of antiquity so also, in later times, among the, peasants
+of nearly every country of Europe. These national or popular
+costumes are in most cases adjudged by competent critics to be
+more becoming, more artistic, than the fluctuating styles of
+modern civilized apparel. At the same time they are also, at
+least usually, less obviously wasteful; that is to say, other
+elements than that of a display of expense are more readily
+detected in their structure.
+
+These relatively stable costumes are, commonly, pretty strictly
+and narrowly localized, and they vary by slight and systematic
+gradations from place to place. They have in every case been
+worked out by peoples or classes which are poorer than we, and
+especially they belong in countries and localities and times
+where the population, or at least the class to which the costume
+in question belongs, is relatively homogeneous, stable, and
+immobile. That is to say, stable costumes which will bear the
+test of time and perspective are worked out under circumstances
+where the norm of conspicuous waste asserts itself less
+imperatively than it does in the large modern civilized cities,
+whose relatively mobile wealthy population today sets the pace in
+matters of fashion. The countries and classes which have in this
+way worked out stable and artistic costumes have been so placed
+that the pecuniary emulation among them has taken the direction
+of a competition in conspicuous leisure rather than in
+conspicuous consumption of goods. So that it will hold true in a
+general way that fashions are least stable and least becoming in
+those communities where the principle of a conspicuous waste of
+goods asserts itself most imperatively, as among ourselves. All
+this points to an antagonism between expensiveness and artistic
+apparel. In point of practical fact, the norm of conspicuous
+waste is incompatible with the requirement that dress should be
+beautiful or becoming. And this antagonism offers an explanation
+of that restless change in fashion which neither the canon of
+expensiveness nor that of beauty alone can account for.
+
+The standard of reputability requires that dress should show
+wasteful expenditure; but all wastefulness is offensive to native
+taste. The psychological law has already been pointed out that
+all men -- and women perhaps even in a higher degree abhor
+futility, whether of effort or of expenditure -- much as Nature
+was once said to abhor a vacuum. But the principle of conspicuous
+waste requires an obviously futile expenditure; and the resulting
+conspicuous expensiveness of dress is therefore intrinsically
+ugly. Hence we find that in all innovations in dress, each added
+or altered detail strives to avoid condemnation by showing some
+ostensible purpose, at the same time that the requirement of
+conspicuous waste prevents the purposefulness of these
+innovations from becoming anything more than a somewhat
+transparent pretense. Even in its freest flights, fashion rarely
+if ever gets away from a simulation of some ostensible use. The
+ostensible usefulness of the fashionable details of dress,
+however, is always so transparent a make-believe, and their
+substantial futility presently forces itself so baldly upon our
+attention as to become unbearable, and then we take refuge in a
+new style. But the new style must conform to the requirement of
+reputable wastefulness and futility. Its futility presently
+becomes as odious as that of its predecessor; and the only remedy
+which the law of waste allows us is to seek relief in some new
+construction, equally futile and equally untenable. Hence the
+essential ugliness and the unceasing change of fashionable
+attire.
+
+Having so explained the phenomenon of shifting fashions, the next
+thing is to make the explanation tally with everyday facts. Among
+these everyday facts is the well-known liking which all men have
+for the styles that are in vogue at any given time. A new style
+comes into vogue and remains in favor for a season, and, at least
+so long as it is a novelty, people very generally find the new
+style attractive. The prevailing fashion is felt to be beautiful.
+This is due partly to the relief it affords in being different
+from what went before it, partly to its being
+reputable. As indicated in the last chapter, the canon of
+reputability to some extent shapes our tastes, so that under its
+guidance anything will be accepted as becoming until its novelty
+wears off, or until the warrant of reputability is transferred to
+a new and novel structure serving the same general purpose. That
+the alleged beauty, or "loveliness," of the styles in vogue at
+any given time is transient and spurious only is attested by the
+fact that none of the many shifting fashions will bear the test
+of time. When seen in the perspective of half-a-dozen years or
+more, the best of our fashions strike us as grotesque, if not
+unsightly. Our transient attachment to whatever happens to be the
+latest rests on other than aesthetic grounds, and lasts only
+until our abiding aesthetic sense has had time to assert itself
+and reject this latest indigestible contrivance.
+
+The process of developing an aesthetic nausea takes more or less
+time; the length of time required in any given case being
+inversely as the degree of intrinsic odiousness of the style in
+question. This time relation between odiousness and instability
+in fashions affords ground for the inference that the more
+rapidly the styles succeed and displace one another, the more
+offensive they are to sound taste. The presumption, therefore, is
+that the farther the community, especially the wealthy classes of
+the community, develop in wealth and mobility and in the range of
+their human contact, the more imperatively will the law of
+conspicuous waste assert itself in matters of dress, the more
+will the sense of beauty tend to fall into abeyance or be
+overborne by the canon of pecuniary reputability, the more
+rapidly will fashions shift and change, and the more grotesque
+and intolerable will be the varying styles that successively come
+into vogue.
+
+There remains at least one point in this theory of dress yet to
+be discussed. Most of what has been said applies to men's attire
+as well as to that of women; although in modern times it applies
+at nearly all points with greater force to that of women. But at
+one point the dress of women differs substantially from that of
+men. In woman's dress there is obviously greater
+insistence on such features as testify to the wearer's exemption
+from or incapacity for all vulgarly productive employment. This
+characteristic of woman's apparel is of interest, not only as
+completing the theory of dress, but also as confirming what has
+already been said of the economic status of women, both in the
+past and in the present.
+
+As has been seen in the discussion of woman's status under the
+heads of Vicarious Leisure and Vicarious Consumption, it has in
+the course of economic development become the office of the woman
+to consume vicariously for the head of the household; and her
+apparel is contrived with this object in view. It has come about
+that obviously productive labor is in a peculiar degree
+derogatory to respectable women, and therefore special pains
+should be taken in the construction of women's dress, to impress
+upon the beholder the fact (often indeed a fiction) that the
+wearer does not and can not habitually engage in useful work.
+Propriety requires respectable women to abstain more consistently
+from useful effort and to make more of a show of leisure than the
+men of the same social classes. It grates painfully on our nerves
+to contemplate the necessity of any well-bred woman's earning a
+livelihood by useful work. It is not "woman's sphere." Her sphere
+is within the household, which she should "beautify," and of
+which she should be the "chief ornament." The male head of the
+household is not currently spoken of as its ornament. This
+feature taken in conjunction with the other fact that propriety
+requires more unremitting attention to expensive display in the
+dress and other paraphernalia of women, goes to enforce the view
+already implied in what has gone before. By virtue of its descent
+from a patriarchal past, our social system makes it the woman's
+function in an especial degree to put in evidence her household's
+ability to pay. According to the modern civilized scheme of life,
+the good name of the household to which she belongs should be the
+special care of the woman; and the system of honorific
+expenditure and conspicuous leisure by which this good name is
+chiefly sustained is therefore the woman's sphere. In the ideal
+scheme, as it tends to realize itself in the life of the higher
+pecuniary classes, this attention to conspicuous waste of
+substance and effort should normally be the sole economic
+function of the woman.
+
+At the stage of economic development at which the women were
+still in the full sense the property of the men, the performance
+of conspicuous leisure and consumption came to be part of the
+services required of them. The women being not their own masters,
+obvious expenditure and leisure on their part would redound to
+the credit of their master rather than to their own credit; and
+therefore the more expensive and the more obviously unproductive
+the women of the household are, the more creditable and more
+effective for the purpose of reputability of the household or its
+head will their life be. So much so that the women have been
+required not only to afford evidence of a life of leisure, but
+even to disable themselves for useful activity.
+
+It is at this point that the dress of men falls short of that of
+women, and for sufficient reason. Conspicuous waste and
+conspicuous leisure are reputable because they are evidence of
+pecuniary strength; pecuniary strength is reputable or honorific
+because, in the last analysis, it argues success and superior
+force; therefore the evidence of waste and leisure put forth by
+any individual in his own behalf cannot consistently take such a
+form or be carried to such a pitch as to argue incapacity or
+marked discomfort on his part; as the exhibition would in that
+case show not superior force, but inferiority, and so defeat its
+own purpose. So, then, wherever wasteful expenditure and the show
+of abstention from effort is normally, or on an average, carried
+to the extent of showing obvious discomfort or voluntarily
+induced physical disability. There the immediate inference is
+that the individual in question does not perform this wasteful
+expenditure and undergo this disability for her own personal gain
+in pecuniary repute, but in behalf of some one else to whom she
+stands in a relation of economic dependence; a relation which in
+the last analysis must, in economic theory, reduce itself to a
+relation of servitude.
+
+To apply this generalization to women's dress, and put the matter
+in concrete terms: the high heel, the skirt, the
+impracticable bonnet, the corset, and the general disregard of
+the wearer's comfort which is an obvious feature of all civilized
+women's apparel, are so many items of evidence to the effect that
+in the modern civilized scheme of life the woman is still, in
+theory, the economic dependent of the man -- that, perhaps in a
+highly idealized sense, she still is the man's chattel. The
+homely reason for all this conspicuous leisure and attire on the
+part of women lies in the fact that they are servants to whom, in
+the differentiation of economic functions, has been delegated the
+office of putting in evidence their master's ability to pay.
+There is a marked similarity in these respects between the
+apparel of women and that of domestic servants, especially
+liveried servants. In both there is a very elaborate show of
+unnecessary expensiveness, and in both cases there is also a
+notable disregard of the physical comfort of the wearer. But the
+attire of the lady goes farther in its elaborate insistence on
+the idleness, if not on the physical infirmity of the wearer,
+than does that of the domestic. And this is as it should be; for
+in theory, according to the ideal scheme of the pecuniary
+culture, the lady of the house is the chief menial of the
+household.
+
+Besides servants, currently recognized as such, there is at least
+one other class of persons whose garb assimilates them to the
+class of servants and shows many of the features that go to make
+up the womanliness of woman's dress. This is the priestly class.
+Priestly vestments show, in accentuated form, all the features
+that have been shown to be evidence of a servile status and a
+vicarious life. Even more strikingly than the everyday habit of
+the priest, the vestments, properly so called, are ornate,
+grotesque, inconvenient, and, at least ostensibly, comfortless to
+the point of distress. The priest is at the same time expected to
+refrain from useful effort and, when before the public eye, to
+present an impassively disconsolate countenance, very much after
+the manner of a well-trained domestic servant. The shaven face of
+the priest is a further item to the same effect. This
+assimilation of the priestly class to the class of body servants,
+in demeanor and apparel, is due to the similarity of the two
+classes as regards economic function. In economic theory, the
+priest is a body servant, constructively in
+attendance upon the person of the divinity whose livery he wears.
+His livery is of a very expensive character, as it should be in
+order to set forth in a beseeming manner the dignity of his
+exalted master; but it is contrived to show that the wearing of
+it contributes little or nothing to the physical comfort of the
+wearer, for it is an item of vicarious consumption, and the
+repute which accrues from its consumption is to be imputed to the
+absent master, not to the servant.
+
+The line of demarcation between the dress of women, priests, and
+servants, on the one hand, and of men, on the other hand, is not
+always consistently observed in practice, but it will
+scarcely be disputed that it is always present in a more or less
+definite way in the popular habits of thought. There are of
+course also free men, and not a few of them, who, in their blind
+zeal for faultless reputable attire, transgress the theoretical
+line between man's and woman's dress, to the extent of arraying
+themselves in apparel that is obviously designed to vex the
+mortal frame; but everyone recognizes without hesitation that
+such apparel for men is a departure from the normal. We are in
+the habit of saying that such dress is "effeminate"; and one
+sometimes hears the remark that such or such an exquisitely
+attired gentleman is as well dressed as a footman.
+
+Certain apparent discrepancies under this theory of dress merit a
+more detailed examination, especially as they mark a more or less
+evident trend in the later and maturer development of dress. The
+vogue of the corset offers an apparent exception from the rule of
+which it has here been cited as an illustration. A closer
+examination, however, will show that this apparent
+exception is really a verification of the rule that the vogue of
+any given element or feature in dress rests on its utility as an
+evidence of pecuniary standing. It is well known that in the
+industrially more advanced communities the corset is employed
+only within certain fairly well defined social strata. The women
+of the poorer classes, especially of the rural population, do not
+habitually use it, except as a holiday luxury. Among these
+classes the women have to work hard, and it avails them little in
+the way of a pretense of leisure to so crucify the flesh in
+everyday life. The holiday use of the contrivance is due to
+imitation of a higher-class canon of decency. Upwards from this
+low level of indigence and manual labor, the corset was until
+within a generation or two nearly indispensable to a socially
+blameless standing for all women, including the wealthiest and
+most reputable. This rule held so long as there still was no
+large class of people wealthy enough to be above the imputation
+of any necessity for manual labor and at the same time large
+enough to form a self-sufficient, isolated social body whose mass
+would afford a foundation for special rules of conduct within the
+class, enforced by the current opinion of the class alone. But
+now there has grown up a large enough leisure class possessed of
+such wealth that any aspersion on the score of enforced manual
+employment would be idle and harmless calumny; and the corset has
+therefore in large measure fallen into disuse within this class.
+The exceptions under this rule of exemption from the corset are
+more apparent than real. They are the wealthy classes of
+countries with a lower industrial structure -- nearer the
+archaic, quasi-industrial type -- together with the later
+accessions of the wealthy classes in the more advanced industrial
+communities. The latter have not yet had time to divest
+themselves of the plebeian canons of taste and of reputability
+carried over from their former, lower pecuniary grade. Such
+survival of the corset is not infrequent among the higher social
+classes of those American cities, for instance, which have
+recently and rapidly risen into opulence. If the word be used as
+a technical term, without any odious implication, it may be said
+that the corset persists in great measure through the period of
+snobbery -- the interval of uncertainty and of transition from a
+lower to the upper levels of pecuniary culture. That is to say,
+in all countries which have inherited the corset it continues in
+use wherever and so long as it serves its purpose as an evidence
+of honorific leisure by arguing physical disability in the
+wearer. The same rule of course applies to other mutilations and
+contrivances for decreasing the visible efficiency of the
+individual.
+
+Something similar should hold true with respect to divers items
+of conspicuous consumption, and indeed something of the kind does
+seem to hold to a slight degree of sundry features of dress,
+especially if such features involve a marked discomfort or
+appearance of discomfort to the wearer. During the past one
+hundred years there is a tendency perceptible, in the development
+of men's dress especially, to discontinue methods of expenditure
+and the use of symbols of leisure which must have been irksome,
+which may have served a good purpose in their time, but the
+continuation of which among the upper classes today would be a
+work of supererogation; as, for instance, the use of powdered
+wigs and of gold lace, and the practice of constantly shaving the
+face. There has of late years been some slight recrudescence of
+the shaven face in polite society, but this is probably a
+transient and unadvised mimicry of the fashion imposed upon body
+servants, and it may fairly be expected to go the way of the
+powdered wig of our grandfathers.
+
+These indices and others which resemble them in point of the
+boldness with which they point out to all observers the habitual
+uselessness of those persons who employ them, have been replaced
+by other, more dedicate methods of expressing the same fact;
+methods which are no less evident to the trained eyes of that
+smaller, select circle whose good opinion is chiefly sought. The
+earlier and cruder method of advertisement held its ground so
+long as the public to which the exhibitor had to appeal comprised
+large portions of the community who were not trained to detect
+delicate variations in the evidences of wealth and leisure. The
+method of advertisement undergoes a refinement when a
+sufficiently large wealthy class has developed, who have the
+leisure for acquiring skill in interpreting the subtler signs of
+expenditure. "Loud" dress becomes offensive to people of taste,
+as evincing an undue desire to reach and impress the untrained
+sensibilities of the vulgar. To the individual of high breeding,
+it is only the more honorific esteem accorded by the cultivated
+sense of the members of his own high class that is of material
+consequence. Since the wealthy leisure class has grown so large,
+or the contact of the leisure-class individual with members of
+his own class has grown so wide, as to constitute a human
+environment sufficient for the honorific purpose, there arises a
+tendency to exclude the baser elements of the population from the
+scheme even as spectators whose applause or mortification should
+be sought. The result of all this is a refinement of methods, a
+resort to subtler contrivances, and a spiritualization of the
+scheme of symbolism in dress. And as this upper leisure class
+sets the pace in all matters of decency, the result for the rest
+of society also is a gradual amelioration of the scheme of dress.
+As the community advances in wealth and culture, the ability to
+pay is put in evidence by means which require a progressively
+nicer discrimination in the beholder. This nicer discrimination
+between advertising media is in fact a very large element of the
+higher pecuniary culture.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Eight
+
+Industrial Exemption and Conservatism
+
+The life of man in society, just like the life of other species,
+is a struggle for existence, and therefore it is a process of
+selective adaptation. The evolution of social
+structure has been a process of natural selection of
+institutions. The progress which has been and is being made in
+human institutions and in human character may be set down,
+broadly, to a natural selection of the fittest habits of thought
+and to a process of enforced adaptation of individuals to an
+environment which has progressively changed with the growth of
+the community and with the changing institutions under which men
+have lived. Institutions are not only themselves the result of a
+selective and adaptive process which shapes the prevailing or
+dominant types of spiritual attitude and aptitudes; they are at
+the same time special methods of life and of human relations, and
+are therefore in their turn efficient factors of selection. So
+that the changing institutions in their turn make for a further
+selection of individuals endowed with the fittest temperament,
+and a further adaptation of individual temperament and habits to
+the changing environment through the formation of new
+institutions.
+
+ The forces which have shaped the development of human life and
+of social structure are no doubt ultimately reducible to terms of
+living tissue and material environment; but proximately for the
+purpose in hand, these forces may best be stated in terms of an
+environment, partly human, partly non-human, and a human subject
+with a more or less definite physical and intellectual
+constitution. Taken in the aggregate or average, this human
+subject is more or less variable; chiefly, no doubt, under a rule
+of selective conservation of favorable variations. The selection
+of favorable variations is perhaps in great measure a selective
+conservation of ethnic types. In the life history of any
+community whose population is made up of a mixture of divers
+ethnic elements, one or another of several persistent and
+relatively stable types of body and of temperament rises into
+dominance at any given point. The situation, including the
+institutions in force at any given time, will favor the survival
+and dominance of one type of character in preference to another;
+and the type of man so selected to continue and to further
+elaborate the institutions handed down from the past will in some
+considerable measure shape these institutions in his own
+likeness. But apart from selection as between relatively stable
+types of character and habits of mind, there is no doubt
+simultaneously going on a process of selective adaptation of
+habits of thought within the general range of aptitudes which is
+characteristic of the dominant ethnic type or types. There may be
+a variation in the fundamental character of any population by
+selection between relatively stable types; but there is also a
+variation due to adaptation in detail within the range of the
+type, and to selection between specific habitual views regarding
+any given social relation or group of relations.
+
+ For the present purpose, however, the question as to the nature
+of the adaptive process -- whether it is chiefly a
+selection between stable types of temperament and character, or
+chiefly an adaptation of men's habits of thought to changing
+circumstances -- is of less importance than the fact that, by one
+method or another, institutions change and develop. Institutions
+must change with changing circumstances, since they are of the
+nature of an habitual method of responding to the stimuli which
+these changing circumstances afford. The development of these
+institutions is the development of society. The institutions are,
+in substance, prevalent habits of thought with respect to
+particular relations and particular functions of the individual
+and of the community; and the scheme of life, which is made up of
+the aggregate of institutions in force at a given time or at a
+given point in the development of any society, may, on the
+psychological side, be broadly characterized as a prevalent
+spiritual attitude or a prevalent theory of life. As regards its
+generic features, this spiritual attitude or theory of life is in
+the last analysis reducible to terms of a prevalent type of
+character.
+
+ The situation of today shapes the institutions of tomorrow
+through a selective, coercive process, by acting upon men's
+habitual view of things, and so altering or fortifying a point of
+view or a mental attitude banded down from the past. The
+institutions -- that is to say the habits of thought -- under the
+guidance of which men live are in this way received from an
+earlier time; more or less remotely earlier, but in any event
+they have been elaborated in and received from the past.
+Institutions are products of the past process, are adapted to
+past circumstances, and are therefore never in full accord with
+the requirements of the present. In the nature of the case, this
+process of selective adaptation can never catch up with the
+progressively changing situation in which the community finds
+itself at any given time; for the environment, the situation, the
+exigencies of life which enforce the adaptation and exercise the
+selection, change from day to day; and each successive situation
+of the community in its turn tends to obsolescence as soon as it
+has been established. When a step in the development has been
+taken, this step itself constitutes a change of situation which
+requires a new adaptation; it becomes the point of departure for
+a new step in the adjustment, and so on interminably.
+
+ It is to be noted then, although it may be a tedious truism,
+that the institutions of today -- the present accepted scheme of
+life -- do not entirely fit the situation of today. At the same
+time, men's present habits of thought tend to persist
+indefinitely, except as circumstances enforce a change. These
+institutions which have thus been handed down, these habits of
+thought, points of view, mental attitudes and aptitudes, or what
+not, are therefore themselves a conservative factor. This is the
+factor of social inertia, psychological inertia, conservatism.
+Social structure changes, develops, adapts itself to an altered
+situation, only through a change in the habits of thought of the
+several classes of the community, or in the last analysis,
+through a change in the habits of thought of the individuals
+which make up the community. The evolution of society is
+substantially a process of mental adaptation on the part of
+individuals under the stress of circumstances which will no
+longer tolerate habits of thought formed under and conforming to
+a different set of circumstances in the past. For the immediate
+purpose it need not be a question of serious importance whether
+this adaptive process is a process of selection and survival of
+persistent ethnic types or a process of individual adaptation and
+an inheritance of acquired traits.
+
+ Social advance, especially as seen from the point of view of
+economic theory, consists in a continued progressive approach to
+an approximately exact "adjustment of inner relations to outer
+relations", but this adjustment is never definitively
+established, since the "outer relations" are subject to constant
+change as a consequence of the progressive change going on in the
+"inner relations." But the degree of approximation may be
+greater or less, depending on the facility with which an
+adjustment is made. A readjustment of men's habits of thought to
+conform with the exigencies of an altered situation is in any
+case made only tardily and reluctantly, and only under the
+coercion exercised by a stipulation which has made the accredited
+views untenable. The readjustment of institutions and habitual
+views to an altered environment is made in response to pressure
+from without; it is of the nature of a response to stimulus.
+Freedom and facility of readjustment, that is to say capacity for
+growth in social structure, therefore depends in great measure on
+the degree of freedom with which the situation at any given time
+acts on the individual members of the community-the degree of
+exposure of the individual members to the constraining forces of
+the environment. If any portion or class of society is sheltered
+from the action of the environment in any essential respect, that
+portion of the community, or that class, will adapt its views and
+its scheme of life more tardily to the altered general situation;
+it will in so far tend to retard the process of social
+transformation. The wealthy leisure class is in such a sheltered
+position with respect to the economic forces that make for change
+and readjustment. And it may be said that the forces which make
+for a readjustment of institutions, especially in the case of a
+modern industrial community, are, in the last analysis, almost
+entirely of an economic nature.
+
+ Any community may be viewed as an industrial or economic
+mechanism, the structure of which is made up of what is called
+its economic institutions. These institutions are habitual
+methods of carrying on the life process of the community in
+contact with the material environment in which it lives. When
+given methods of unfolding human activity in this given
+environment have been elaborated in this way, the life of the
+community will express itself with some facility in these
+habitual directions. The community will make use of the forces of
+the environment for the purposes of its life according to methods
+learned in the past and embodied in these institutions. But as
+population increases, and as men's knowledge and skill in
+directing the forces of nature widen, the habitual methods of
+relation between the members of the group, and the habitual
+method of carrying on the life process of the group as a whole,
+no longer give the same result as before; nor are the resulting
+conditions of life distributed and apportioned in the same manner
+or with the same effect among the various members as before. If
+the scheme according to which the life process of the group was
+carried on under the earlier conditions gave approximately the
+highest attainable result -- under the circumstances -- in the
+way of efficiency or facility of the life process of the group;
+then the same scheme of life unaltered will not yield the highest
+result attainable in this respect under the altered conditions.
+Under the altered conditions of population, skill, and knowledge,
+the facility of life as carried on according to the traditional
+scheme may not be lower than under the earlier conditions; but
+the chances are always that it is less than might be if the
+scheme were altered to suit the altered conditions.
+
+ The group is made up of individuals, and the group's life is the
+life of individuals carried on in at least ostensible
+severalty. The group's accepted scheme of life is the consensus
+of views held by the body of these individuals as to what is
+right, good, expedient, and beautiful in the way of human life.
+In the redistribution of the conditions of life that comes of the
+altered method of dealing with the environment, the outcome is
+not an equable change in the facility of life throughout the
+group. The altered conditions may increase the facility of life
+for the group as a whole, but the redistribution will usually
+result in a decrease of facility or fullness of life for some
+members of the group. An advance in technical methods, in
+population, or in industrial organization will require at least
+some of the members of the community to change their habits of
+life, if they are to enter with facility and effect into the
+altered industrial methods; and in doing so they will be unable
+to live up to the received notions as to what are the right and
+beautiful habits of life.
+
+ Any one who is required to change his habits of life and his
+habitual relations to his fellow men will feel the discrepancy
+between the method of life required of him by the newly arisen
+exigencies, and the traditional scheme of life to which he is
+accustomed. It is the individuals placed in this position who
+have the liveliest incentive to reconstruct the received scheme
+of life and are most readily persuaded to accept new standards;
+and it is through the need of the means of livelihood that men
+are placed in such a position. The pressure exerted by the
+environment upon the group, and making for a readjustment of the
+group's scheme of life, impinges upon the members of the group in
+the form of pecuniary exigencies; and it is owing to this fact --
+that external forces are in great part translated into the form
+of pecuniary or economic exigencies -- it is owing to this fact
+that we can say that the forces which count toward a readjustment
+of institutions in any modern industrial community are chiefly
+economic forces; or more specifically, these forces take the form
+of pecuniary pressure. Such a readjustment as is here
+contemplated is substantially a change in men's views as to what
+is good and right, and the means through which a change is
+wrought in men's apprehension of what is good and right is in
+large part the pressure of pecuniary exigencies.
+
+ Any change in men's views as to what is good and right in human
+life make its way but tardily at the best. Especially is this
+true of any change in the direction of what is called progress;
+that is to say, in the direction of divergence from the archaic
+position -- from the position which may be accounted the point of
+departure at any step in the social evolution of the community.
+Retrogression, reapproach to a standpoint to which the race has
+been long habituated in the past, is easier. This is especially
+true in case the development away from this past standpoint has
+not been due chiefly to a substitution of an ethnic type whose
+temperament is alien to the earlier standpoint.
+The cultural stage which lies immediately back of the present in
+the life history of Western civilization is what has here been
+called the quasi-peaceable stage. At this quasi-peaceable stage
+the law of status is the dominant feature in the scheme of life.
+There is no need of pointing out how prone the men of today are
+to revert to the spiritual attitude of mastery and of personal
+subservience which characterizes that stage. It may rather be
+said to be held in an uncertain abeyance by the economic
+exigencies of today, than to have been definitely supplanted by a
+habit of mind that is in full accord with these later-developed
+exigencies. The predatory and quasi-peaceable stages of economic
+evolution seem to have been of long duration in life history of
+all the chief ethnic elements which go to make up the populations
+of the Western culture. The temperament and the propensities
+proper to those cultural stages have, therefore, attained such a
+persistence as to make a speedy reversion to the broad features
+of the corresponding psychological constitution inevitable in the
+case of any class or community which is removed from the action
+of those forces that make for a maintenance of the
+later-developed habits of thought.
+
+ It is a matter of common notoriety that when individuals, or
+even considerable groups of men, are segregated from a higher
+industrial culture and exposed to a lower cultural environment,
+or to an economic situation of a more primitive character, they
+quickly show evidence of reversion toward the spiritual features
+which characterize the predatory type; and it seems probable that
+the dolicho-blond type of European man is possessed of a greater
+facility for such reversion to barbarism than the other ethnic
+elements with which that type is associated in the Western
+culture. Examples of such a reversion on a small scale abound in
+the later history of migration and colonization. Except for the
+fear of offending that chauvinistic patriotism which is so
+characteristic a feature of the predatory culture, and the
+presence of which is frequently the most striking mark of
+reversion in modern communities, the case of the American
+colonies might be cited as an example of such a reversion on an
+unusually large scale, though it was not a reversion of very
+large scope.
+
+ The leisure class is in great measure sheltered from
+the stress of those economic exigencies which prevail in any
+modern, highly organized industrial community. The exigencies of
+the struggle for the means of life are less exacting for this
+class than for any other; and as a consequence of this privileged
+position we should expect to find it one of the least responsive
+of the classes of society to the demands which the situation
+makes for a further growth of institutions and a readjustment to
+an altered industrial situation. The leisure class is the
+conservative class. The exigencies of the general economic
+situation of the community do not freely or directly impinge upon
+the members of this class. They are not required under penalty of
+forfeiture to change their habits of life and their theoretical
+views of the external world to suit the demands of an altered
+industrial technique, since they are not in the full sense an
+organic part of the industrial community. Therefore these
+exigencies do not readily produce, in the members of this class,
+that degree of uneasiness with the existing order which alone can
+lead any body of men to give up views and methods of life that
+have become habitual to them. The office of the leisure class in
+social evolution is to retard the movement and to conserve what
+is obsolescent. This proposition is by no means novel; it has
+long been one of the commonplaces of popular opinion.
+
+ The prevalent conviction that the wealthy class is by nature
+conservative has been popularly accepted without much aid from
+any theoretical view as to the place and relation of that class
+in the cultural development. When an explanation of this class
+conservatism is offered, it is commonly the invidious one that
+the wealthy class opposes innovation because it has a vested
+interest, of an unworthy sort, in maintaining the present
+conditions. The explanation here put forward imputes no unworthy
+motive. The opposition of the class to changes in the cultural
+scheme is instinctive, and does not rest primarily on an
+interested calculation of material advantages; it is an
+instinctive revulsion at any departure from the accepted way of
+doing and of looking at things -- a revulsion common to all men
+and only to be overcome by stress of circumstances. All change in
+habits of life and of thought is irksome. The difference in this
+respect between the wealthy and the common run of mankind lies
+not so much in the motive which prompts to conservatism as in the
+degree of exposure to the economic forces that urge a change. The
+members of the wealthy class do not yield to the demand for
+innovation as readily as other men because they are not
+constrained to do so.
+
+ This conservatism of the wealthy class is so obvious a feature
+that it has even come to be recognized as a mark of
+respectability. Since conservatism is a characteristic of the
+wealthier and therefore more reputable portion of the community,
+it has acquired a certain honorific or decorative value. It has
+become prescriptive to such an extent that an adherence to
+conservative views is comprised as a matter of course in our
+notions of respectability; and it is imperatively incumbent on
+all who would lead a blameless life in point of social repute.
+Conservatism, being an upper-class characteristic, is decorous;
+and conversely, innovation, being a lower-class phenomenon, is
+vulgar. The first and most unreflected element in that
+instinctive revulsion and reprobation with which we turn from all
+social innovators is this sense of the essential vulgarity of the
+thing. So that even in cases where one recognizes the substantial
+merits of the case for which the innovator is spokesman -- as may
+easily happen if the evils which he seeks to remedy are
+sufficiently remote in point of time or space or personal contact
+-- still one cannot but be sensible of the fact that the
+innovator is a person with whom it is at least distasteful to be
+associated, and from whose social contact one must shrink.
+Innovation is bad form.
+
+The fact that the usages, actions, and views of the
+well-to-do leisure class acquire the character of a prescriptive
+canon of conduct for the rest of society, gives added weight and
+reach to the conservative influence of that class. It makes it
+incumbent upon all reputable people to follow their lead. So
+that, by virtue of its high position as the avatar of good form,
+the wealthier class comes to exert a retarding influence upon
+social development far in excess of that which the simple
+numerical strength of the class would assign it. Its prescriptive
+example acts to greatly stiffen the resistance of all other
+classes against any innovation, and to fix men's affections upon
+the good institutions handed down from an earlier generation.
+There is a second way in which the influence of the leisure class
+acts in the same direction, so far as concerns hindrance to the
+adoption of a conventional scheme of life more in accord with the
+exigencies of the time. This second method of upper-class guidance
+is not in strict consistency to be brought under the same
+category as the instinctive conservatism and aversion to new
+modes of thought just spoken of; but it may as well be dealt with
+here, since it has at least this much in common with the
+conservative habit of mind that it acts to retard innovation and
+the growth of social structure. The code of proprieties,
+conventionalities, and usages in vogue at any given time and
+among any given people has more or less of the character of an
+organic whole; so that any appreciable change in one point of the
+scheme involves something of a change or readjustment at other
+points also, if not a reorganization all along the line. When a
+change is made which immediately touches only a minor point in
+the scheme, the consequent derangement of the structure of
+conventionalities may be inconspicuous; but even in such a case
+it is safe to say that some derangement of the general scheme,
+more or less far-reaching, will follow. On the other hand, when
+an attempted reform involves the suppression or thorough-going
+remodelling of an institution of first-rate importance in the
+conventional scheme, it is immediately felt that a serious
+derangement of the entire scheme would result; it is felt that a
+readjustment of the structure to the new form taken on by one of
+its chief elements would be a painful and tedious, if not a
+doubtful process.
+
+In order to realize the difficulty which such a radical change in
+any one feature of the conventional scheme of life would involve,
+it is only necessary to suggest the suppression of the monogamic
+family, or of the agnatic system of consanguinity, or of private
+property, or of the theistic faith, in any country of the Western
+civilization; or suppose the suppression of ancestor worship in
+China, or of the caste system in india, or of slavery in Africa,
+or the establishment of equality of the sexes in Mohammedan
+countries. It needs no argument to show that the derangement of
+the general structure of conventionalities in any of these cases
+would be very considerable. In order to effect such an innovation
+a very far-reaching alteration of men's habits of thought would
+be involved also at other points of the scheme than the one
+immediately in question. The aversion to any such innovation
+amounts to a shrinking from an essentially alien scheme of life.
+
+The revulsion felt by good people at any proposed departure from
+the accepted methods of life is a familiar fact of everyday
+experience. It is not unusual to hear those persons who dispense
+salutary advice and admonition to the community express
+themselves forcibly upon the far-reaching pernicious effects
+which the community would suffer from such relatively slight
+changes as the disestablishment of the Anglican Church, an
+increased facility of divorce, adoption of female suffrage,
+prohibition of the manufacture and sale of intoxicating
+beverages, abolition or restriction of inheritances, etc. Any one
+of these innovations would, we are told, "shake the social
+structure to its base," "reduce society to chaos," "subvert the
+foundations of morality," "make life intolerable," "confound the
+order of nature," etc. These various locutions are, no doubt, of
+the nature of hyperbole; but, at the same time, like all
+overstatement, they are evidence of a lively sense of the gravity
+of the consequences which they are intended to describe. The
+effect of these and like innovations in deranging the accepted
+scheme of life is felt to be of much graver consequence than the
+simple alteration of an isolated item in a series of contrivances
+for the convenience of men in society. What is true in so obvious
+a degree of innovations of first-rate importance is true in a
+less degree of changes of a smaller immediate importance. The
+aversion to change is in large part an aversion to the bother of
+making the readjustment which any given change will necessitate;
+and this solidarity of the system of institutions of any given
+culture or of any given people strengthens the instinctive
+resistance offered to any change in men's habits of thought, even
+in matters which, taken by themselves, are of minor importance.
+A consequence of this increased reluctance, due to the
+solidarity of human institutions, is that any innovation calls
+for a greater expenditure of nervous energy in making the
+necessary readjustment than would otherwise be the case. It is
+not only that a change in established habits of thought is
+distasteful. The process of readjustment of the accepted theory
+of life involves a degree of mental effort -- a more or less
+protracted and laborious effort to find and to keep one's
+bearings under the altered circumstances. This process requires a
+certain expenditure of energy, and so presumes, for its
+successful accomplishment, some surplus of energy beyond that
+absorbed in the daily struggle for subsistence. Consequently it
+follows that progress is hindered by underfeeding and excessive
+physical hardship, no less effectually than by such a luxurious
+life as will shut out discontent by cutting off the occasion for
+it. The abjectly poor, and all those persons whose energies are
+entirely absorbed by the struggle for daily sustenance, are
+conservative because they cannot afford the effort of taking
+thought for the day after tomorrow; just as the highly prosperous
+are conservative because they have small occasion to be
+discontented with the situation as it stands today.
+
+From this proposition it follows that the institution of a
+leisure class acts to make the lower classes conservative by
+withdrawing from them as much as it may of the means of
+sustenance, and so reducing their consumption, and consequently
+their available energy, to such a point as to make them incapable
+of the effort required for the learning and adoption of new
+habits of thought. The accumulation of wealth at the upper end of
+the pecuniary scale implies privation at the lower end of the
+scale. It is a commonplace that, wherever it occurs, a
+considerable degree of privation among the body of the people is
+a serious obstacle to any innovation.
+
+This direct inhibitory effect of the unequal distribution of
+wealth is seconded by an indirect effect tending to the same
+result. As has already been seen, the imperative example set by
+the upper class in fixing the canons of reputability fosters the
+practice of conspicuous consumption. The prevalence of
+conspicuous consumption as one of the main elements in the
+standard of decency among all classes is of course not traceable
+wholly to the example of the wealthy leisure class, but the
+practice and the insistence on it are no doubt strengthened by
+the example of the leisure class. The requirements of decency in
+this matter are very considerable and very imperative; so that
+even among classes whose pecuniary position is sufficiently
+strong to admit a consumption of goods considerably in excess of
+the subsistence minimum, the disposable surplus left over after
+the more imperative physical needs are satisfied is not
+infrequently diverted to the purpose of a conspicuous decency,
+rather than to added physical comfort and fullness of life.
+Moreover, such surplus energy as is available is also likely to
+be expended in the acquisition of goods for conspicuous
+consumption or conspicuous boarding. The result is that the
+requirements of pecuniary reputability tend (1) to leave but a
+scanty subsistence minimum available for other than conspicuous
+consumption, and (2) to absorb any surplus energy which may be
+available after the bare physical necessities of life have been
+provided for. The outcome of the whole is a strengthening of the
+general conservative attitude of the community. The institution
+of a leisure class hinders cultural development immediately (1)
+by the inertia proper to the class itself, (2) through its
+prescriptive example of conspicuous waste and of conservatism,
+and (3) indirectly through that system of unequal distribution of
+wealth and sustenance on which the institution itself rests.
+To this is to be added that the leisure class has also a material
+interest in leaving things as they are. Under the circumstances
+prevailing at any given time this class is in a privileged
+position, and any departure from the existing order may be
+expected to work to the detriment of the class rather than the
+reverse. The attitude of the class, simply as influenced by its
+class interest, should therefore be to let well-enough alone.
+This interested motive comes in to supplement the strong
+instinctive bias of the class, and so to render it even more
+consistently conservative than it otherwise would be.
+
+All this, of course, has nothing to say in the way of eulogy or
+deprecation of the office of the leisure class as an exponent and
+vehicle of conservatism or reversion in social structure. The
+inhibition which it exercises may be salutary or the reverse.
+Wether it is the one or the other in any given case is a question
+of casuistry rather than of general theory. There may be truth in
+the view (as a question of policy) so often expressed by the
+spokesmen of the conservative element, that without some such
+substantial and consistent resistance to innovation as is offered
+by the conservative well-to-do classes, social innovation and
+experiment would hurry the community into untenable and
+intolerable situations; the only possible result of which would
+be discontent and disastrous reaction. All this, however, is
+beside the present argument.
+
+But apart from all deprecation, and aside from all question as to
+the indispensability of some such check on headlong innovation,
+the leisure class, in the nature of things, consistently acts to
+retard that adjustment to the environment which is called social
+advance or development. The characteristic attitude of the class
+may be summed up in the maxim: "Whatever is, is right" whereas
+the law of natural selection, as applied to human institutions,
+gives the axiom: "Whatever is, is wrong." Not that the
+institutions of today are wholly wrong for the purposes of the
+life of today, but they are, always and in the nature of things,
+wrong to some extent. They are the result of a more or less
+inadequate adjustment of the methods of living to a situation
+which prevailed at some point in the past development; and they
+are therefore wrong by something more than the interval which
+separates the present situation from that of the past. "Right"
+and "wrong" are of course here used without conveying any
+rejection as to what ought or ought not to be. They are applied
+simply from the (morally colorless) evolutionary standpoint, and
+are intended to designate compatibility or incompatibility with
+the effective evolutionary process. The institution of a leisure
+class, by force or class interest and instinct, and by precept
+and prescriptive example, makes for the perpetuation of the
+existing maladjustment of institutions, and even favors a
+reversion to a somewhat more archaic scheme of life; a scheme
+which would be still farther out of adjustment with the
+exigencies of life under the existing situation even than the
+accredited, obsolescent scheme that has come down from the
+immediate past.
+
+But after all has been said on the head of conservation of the
+good old ways, it remains true that institutions change and
+develop. There is a cumulative growth of customs and habits of
+thought; a selective adaptation of conventions and methods of
+life. Something is to be said of the office of the leisure class
+in guiding this growth as well as in retarding it; but little can
+be said here of its relation to institutional growth except as it
+touches the institutions that are primarily and immediately of an
+economic character. These institutions -- the economic structure
+-- may be roughly distinguished into two classes or categories,
+according as they serve one or the other of two divergent
+purposes of economic life.
+
+To adapt the classical terminology, they are institutions of
+acquisition or of production; or to revert to terms already
+employed in a different connection in earlier chapters, they are
+pecuniary or industrial institutions; or in still other terms,
+they are institutions serving either the invidious or the
+non-invidious economic interest. The former category have to do
+with "business," the latter with industry, taking the latter word
+in the mechanical sense. The latter class are not often
+recognized as institutions, in great part because they do not
+immediately concern the ruling class, and are, therefore, seldom
+the subject of legislation or of deliberate convention. When they
+do receive attention they are commonly approached from the
+pecuniary or business side; that being the side or phase of
+economic life that chiefly occupies men's deliberations in our
+time, especially the deliberations of the upper classes. These
+classes have little else than a business interest in things
+economic, and on them at the same time it is chiefly incumbent to
+deliberate upon the community's affairs.
+
+The relation of the leisure (that is, propertied non-industrial)
+class to the economic process is a pecuniary relation -- a
+relation of acquisition, not of production; of exploitation, not
+of serviceability. Indirectly their economic office may, of
+course, be of the utmost importance to the economic life process;
+and it is by no means here intended to depreciate the economic
+function of the propertied class or of the captains of industry.
+The purpose is simply to point out what is the nature of the
+relation of these classes to the industrial process and to
+economic institutions. Their office is of a parasitic character,
+and their interest is to divert what substance they may to their
+own use, and to retain whatever is under their hand. The
+conventions of the business world have grown up under the
+selective surveillance of this principle of predation or
+parasitism. They are conventions of ownership; derivatives, more
+or less remote, of the ancient predatory culture. But these
+pecuniary institutions do not entirely fit the situation of
+today, for they have grown up under a past situation differing
+somewhat from the present. Even for effectiveness in the
+pecuniary way, therefore, they are not as apt as might be. The
+changed industrial life requires changed methods of acquisition;
+and the pecuniary classes have some interest in so adapting the
+pecuniary institutions as to give them the best effect for
+acquisition of private gain that is compatible with the
+continuance of the industrial process out of which this gain
+arises. Hence there is a more or less consistent trend in the
+leisure-class guidance of institutional growth, answering to the
+pecuniary ends which shape leisure-class economic life.
+
+The effect of the pecuniary interest and the pecuniary habit of
+mind upon the growth of institutions is seen in those
+enactments and conventions that make for security of property,
+enforcement of contracts, facility of pecuniary transactions,
+vested interests. Of such bearing are changes affecting
+bankruptcy and receiverships, limited liability, banking and
+currency, coalitions of laborers or employers, trusts and pools.
+The community's institutional furniture of this kind is of
+immediate consequence only to the propertied classes, and in
+proportion as they are propertied; that is to say, in proportion
+as they are to be ranked with the leisure class. But indirectly
+these conventions of business life are of the gravest consequence
+for the industrial process and for the life of the community. And
+in guiding the institutional growth in this respect, the
+pecuniary classes, therefore, serve a purpose of the most serious
+importance to the community, not only in the conservation of the
+accepted social scheme, but also in shaping the industrial
+process proper. The immediate end of this pecuniary institutional
+structure and of its amelioration is the greater facility of
+peaceable and orderly exploitation; but its remoter effects far
+outrun this immediate object. Not only does the more facile
+conduct of business permit industry and extra-industrial life to
+go on with less perturbation; but the resulting elimination of
+disturbances and complications calling for an exercise of astute
+discrimination in everyday affairs acts to make the pecuniary
+class itself superfluous. As fast as pecuniary transactions are
+reduced to routine, the captain of industry can be dispensed
+with. This consummation, it is needless to say, lies yet in the
+indefinite future. The ameliorations wrought in favor of the
+pecuniary interest in modern institutions tend, in another field,
+to substitute the "soulless" joint-stock corporation for the
+captain, and so they make also for the dispensability, of the
+great leisure-class function of ownership. Indirectly, therefore,
+the bent given to the growth of economic institutions by the
+leisure-class influence is of very considerable industrial
+consequence.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Nine
+
+The Conservation of Archaic Traits
+
+The institution of a leisure class has an effect not only upon
+social structure but also upon the individual character of the
+members of society. So soon as a given proclivity or a given
+point of view has won acceptance as an authoritative standard or
+norm of life it will react upon the character of the members of
+the society which has accepted it as a norm. It will to some
+extent shape their habits of thought and will exercise a
+selective surveillance over the development of men's aptitudes
+and inclinations. This effect is wrought partly by a coercive,
+educational adaptation of the habits of all individuals, partly
+by a selective elimination of the unfit individuals and lines of
+descent. Such human material as does not lend itself to the
+methods of life imposed by the accepted scheme suffers more or
+less elimination as well as repression. The principles of
+pecuniary emulation and of industrial exemption have in this way
+been erected into canons of life, and have become coercive
+factors of some importance in the situation to which men have to
+adapt themselves.
+
+These two broad principles of conspicuous waste and
+industrial exemption affect the cultural development both by
+guiding men's habits of thought, and so controlling the growth of
+institutions, and by selectively conserving certain traits of
+human nature that conduce to facility of life under the
+leisure-class scheme, and so controlling the effective temper of
+the community. The proximate tendency of the institution of a
+leisure class in shaping human character runs in the direction of
+spiritual survival and reversion. Its effect upon the temper of a
+community is of the nature of an arrested spiritual development.
+In the later culture especially, the institution has, on the
+whole, a conservative trend. This proposition is familiar enough
+in substance, but it may to many have the appearance of novelty
+in its present application. Therefore a summary review of its
+logical grounds may not be uncalled for, even at the risk of some
+tedious repetition and formulation of commonplaces.
+
+Social evolution is a process of selective adaptation of
+temperament and habits of thought under the stress of the
+circumstances of associated life. The adaptation of habits of
+thought is the growth of institutions. But along with the growth
+of institutions has gone a change of a more substantial
+character. Not only have the habits of men changed with the
+changing exigencies of the situation, but these changing
+exigencies have also brought about a correlative change in human
+nature. The human material of society itself varies with the
+changing conditions of life. This variation of human nature is
+held by the later ethnologists to be a process of selection
+between several relatively stable and persistent ethnic types or
+ethnic elements. Men tend to revert or to breed true, more or
+less closely, to one or another of certain types of human nature
+that have in their main features been fixed in approximate
+conformity to a situation in the past which differed from the
+situation of today. There are several of these relatively stable
+ethnic types of mankind comprised in the populations of the
+Western culture. These ethnic types survive in the race
+inheritance today, not as rigid and invariable moulds, each of a
+single precise and specific pattern, but in the form of a greater
+or smaller number of variants. Some variation of the ethnic types
+has resulted under the protracted selective process to which the
+several types and their hybrids have been subjected during the
+prehistoric and historic growth of culture.
+
+This necessary variation of the types themselves, due to a
+selective process of considerable duration and of a consistent
+trend, has not been sufficiently noticed by the writers who have
+discussed ethnic survival. The argument is here concerned with
+two main divergent variants of human nature resulting from this,
+relatively late, selective adaptation of the ethnic types
+comprised in the Western culture; the point of interest being the
+probable effect of the situation of today in furthering variation
+along one or the other of these two divergent lines.
+
+The ethnological position may be briefly summed up; and in order
+to avoid any but the most indispensable detail the schedule of
+types and variants and the scheme of reversion and survival in
+which they are concerned are here presented with a diagrammatic
+meagerness and simplicity which would not be admissible for any
+other purpose. The man of our industrial communities tends to
+breed true to one or the other of three main ethic types; the
+dolichocephalic-blond, the brachycephalic-brunette, and the
+Mediterranean -- disregarding minor and outlying elements of our
+culture. But within each of these main ethnic types the reversion
+tends to one or the other of at least two main directions of
+variation; the peaceable or antepredatory variant and the
+predatory variant. The former of these two characteristic
+variants is nearer to the generic type in each case, being the
+reversional representative of its type as it stood at the
+earliest stage of associated life of which there is available
+evidence, either archaeological or psychological. This variant is
+taken to represent the ancestors of existing civilized man at the
+peaceable, savage phase of life which preceded the predatory
+culture, the regime of status, and the growth of pecuniary
+emulation. The second or predatory variant of the types is taken
+to be a survival of a more recent modification of the main ethnic
+types and their hybrids -- of these types as they were modified,
+mainly by a selective adaptation, under the discipline of the
+predatory culture and the latter emulative culture of the
+quasi-peaceable stage, or the pecuniary culture proper.
+
+Under the recognized laws of heredity there may be a survival
+from a more or less remote past phase. In the ordinary, average,
+or normal case, if the type has varied, the traits of the type
+are transmitted approximately as they have stood in the recent
+past -- which may be called the hereditary present. For the
+purpose in hand this hereditary present is represented by the
+later predatory and the quasi-peaceable culture.
+
+It is to the variant of human nature which is characteristic of
+this recent -- hereditarily still existing -- predatory or
+quasi-predatory culture that the modern civilized man tends to
+breed true in the common run of cases. This proposition requires
+some qualification so far as concerns the descendants of the
+servile or repressed classes of barbarian times, but the
+qualification necessary is probably not so great as might at
+first thought appear. Taking the population as a whole, this
+predatory, emulative variant does not seem to have attained a
+high degree of consistency or stability. That is to say, the
+human nature inherited by modern Occidental man is not nearly
+uniform in respect of the range or the relative strength of the
+various aptitudes and propensities which go to make it up. The
+man of the hereditary present is slightly archaic as judged for
+the purposes of the latest exigencies of associated life. And the
+type to which the modern man chiefly tends to revert under the
+law of variation is a somewhat more archaic human nature. On the
+other hand, to judge by the reversional traits which show
+themselves in individuals that vary from the prevailing predatory
+style of temperament, the ante-predatory variant seems to have a
+greater stability and greater symmetry in the distribution or
+relative force of its temperamental elements.
+
+This divergence of inherited human nature, as between an earlier
+and a later variant of the ethnic type to which the individual
+tends to breed true, is traversed and obscured by a similar
+divergence between the two or three main ethnic types that go to
+make up the Occidental populations. The individuals in these
+communities are conceived to be, in virtually every
+instance, hybrids of the prevailing ethnic elements combined in
+the most varied proportions; with the result that they tend to
+take back to one or the other of the component ethnic types.
+These ethnic types differ in temperament in a way somewhat
+similar to the difference between the predatory and the
+antepredatory variants of the types; the dolicho-blond type
+showing more of the characteristics of the predatory temperament
+-- or at least more of the violent disposition -- than the
+brachycephalic-brunette type, and especially more than the
+Mediterranean. When the growth of institutions or of the
+effective sentiment of a given community shows a divergence from
+the predatory human nature, therefore, it is impossible to say
+with certainty that such a divergence indicates a reversion to
+the ante-predatory variant. It may be due to an increasing
+dominance of the one or the other of the "lower" ethnic elements
+in the population. Still, although the evidence is not as
+conclusive as might be desired, there are indications that the
+variations in the effective temperament of modern communities is
+not altogether due to a selection between stable ethnic types. It
+seems to be to some appreciable extent a selection between the
+predatory and the peaceable variants of the several types.
+This conception of contemporary human evolution is not
+indispensable to the discussion. The general conclusions reached
+by the use of these concepts of selective adaptation would remain
+substantially true if the earlier, Darwinian and Spencerian,
+terms and concepts were substituted. Under the circumstances,
+some latitude may be admissible in the use of terms. The word
+"type" is used loosely, to denote variations of temperament which
+the ethnologists would perhaps recognize only as trivial variants
+of the type rather than as distinct ethnic types. Wherever a
+closer discrimination seems essential to the argument, the effort
+to make such a closer discrimination will be evident from the
+context.
+
+The ethnic types of today, then, are variants of the
+primitive racial types. They have suffered some alteration, and
+have attained some degree of fixity in their altered form, under
+the discipline of the barbarian culture. The man of the
+hereditary present is the barbarian variant, servile or
+aristocratic, of the ethnic elements that constitute him. But
+this barbarian variant has not attained the highest degree of
+homogeneity or of stability. The barbarian culture -- the
+predatory and quasi-peaceable cultural stages -- though of great
+absolute duration, has been neither protracted enough nor
+invariable enough in character to give an extreme fixity of type.
+Variations from the barbarian human nature occur with some
+frequency, and these cases of variation are becoming more
+noticeable today, because the conditions of modern life no longer
+act consistently to repress departures from the barbarian normal.
+The predatory temperament does not lead itself to all the
+purposes of modern life, and more especially not to modern
+industry.
+
+Departures from the human nature of the hereditary present are
+most frequently of the nature of reversions to an earlier variant
+of the type. This earlier variant is represented by the
+temperament which characterizes the primitive phase of peaceable
+savagery. The circumstances of life and the ends of effort that
+prevailed before the advent of the barbarian culture, shaped
+human nature and fixed it as regards certain fundamental traits.
+And it is to these ancient, generic features that modern men are
+prone to take back in case of variation from the human nature of
+the hereditary present. The conditions under which men lived in
+the most primitive stages of associated life that can properly be
+called human, seem to have been of a peaceful kind; and the
+character -- the temperament and spiritual attitude of men under
+these early conditions or environment and institutions seems to
+have been of a peaceful and unaggressive, not to say an indolent,
+cast. For the immediate purpose this peaceable cultural stage may
+be taken to mark the initial phase of social development. So far
+as concerns the present argument, the dominant spiritual feature
+of this presumptive initial phase of culture seems to have been
+an unreflecting, unformulated sense of group solidarity, largely
+expressing itself in a complacent, but by no means strenuous,
+sympathy with all facility of human life, and an uneasy revulsion
+against apprehended inhibition or futility of life. Through its
+ubiquitous presence in the habits of thought of the
+ante-predatory savage man, this pervading but uneager sense of
+the generically useful seems to have exercised an appreciable
+constraining force upon his life and upon the manner of his
+habitual contact with other members of the group.
+
+The traces of this initial, undifferentiated peaceable phase of
+culture seem faint and doubtful if we look merely to such
+categorical evidence of its existence as is afforded by usages
+and views in vogue within the historical present, whether in
+civilized or in rude communities; but less dubious evidence of
+its existence is to be found in psychological survivals, in the
+way of persistent and pervading traits of human character. These
+traits survive perhaps in an especial degree among those ethic
+elements which were crowded into the background during the
+predatory culture. Traits that were suited to the earlier habits
+of life then became relatively useless in the individual struggle
+for existence. And those elements of the population, or those
+ethnic groups, which were by temperament less fitted to the
+predatory life were repressed and pushed into the background.
+On the transition to the predatory culture the character of the
+struggle for existence changed in some degree from a struggle of
+the group against a non-human environment to a struggle against a
+human environment. This change was accompanied by an increasing
+antagonism and consciousness of antagonism between the individual
+members of the group. The conditions of success within the group,
+as well as the conditions of the survival of the group, changed
+in some measure; and the dominant spiritual attitude for the
+group gradually changed, and brought a different range of
+aptitudes and propensities into the position of legitimate
+dominance in the accepted scheme of life. Among these archaic
+traits that are to be regarded as survivals from the peaceable
+cultural phase, are that instinct of race solidarity which we
+call conscience, including the sense of truthfulness and equity,
+and the instinct of workmanship, in its naive, non-invidious
+expression.
+
+Under the guidance of the later biological and psychological
+science, human nature will have to be restated in terms of habit;
+and in the restatement, this, in outline, appears to be the only
+assignable place and ground of these traits. These habits of life
+are of too pervading a character to be ascribed to the influence
+of a late or brief discipline. The ease with which they are
+temporarily overborne by the special exigencies of recent and
+modern life argues that these habits are the surviving effects of
+a discipline of extremely ancient date, from the teachings of
+which men have frequently been constrained to depart in detail
+under the altered circumstances of a later time; and the almost
+ubiquitous fashion in which they assert themselves whenever the
+pressure of special exigencies is relieved, argues that the
+process by which the traits were fixed and incorporated into the
+spiritual make-up of the type must have lasted for a relatively
+very long time and without serious intermission. The point is not
+seriously affected by any question as to whether it was a process
+of habituation in the old-fashioned sense of the word or a
+process of selective adaptation of the race.
+
+The character and exigencies of life, under that regime of status
+and of individual and class antithesis which covers the entire
+interval from the beginning of predatory culture to the present,
+argue that the traits of temperament here under discussion could
+scarcely have arisen and acquired fixity during that interval. It
+is entirely probable that these traits have come down from an
+earlier method of life, and have survived through the interval of
+predatory and quasi-peaceable culture in a condition of
+incipient, or at least imminent, desuetude, rather than that they
+have been brought out and fixed by this later culture. They
+appear to be hereditary characteristics of the race, and to have
+persisted in spite of the altered requirements of success under
+the predatory and the later pecuniary stages of culture. They
+seem to have persisted by force of the tenacity of transmission
+that belongs to an hereditary trait that is present in some
+degree in every member of the species, and which therefore rests
+on a broad basis of race continuity.
+
+Such a generic feature is not readily eliminated, even under a
+process of selection so severe and protracted as that to which
+the traits here under discussion were subjected during the
+predatory and quasi-peaceable stages. These peaceable traits are
+in great part alien to the methods and the animus of barbarian
+life. The salient characteristic of the barbarian culture is an
+unremitting emulation and antagonism between classes and between
+individuals. This emulative discipline favors those individuals
+and lines of descent which possess the peaceable savage traits in
+a relatively slight degree. It therefore tends to eliminate these
+traits, and it has apparently weakened them, in an appreciable
+degree, in the populations that have been subject to it. Even
+where the extreme penalty for non-conformity to the barbarian
+type of temperament is not paid, there results at least a more or
+less consistent repression of the non-conforming individuals and
+lines of descent. Where life is largely a struggle between
+individuals within the group, the possession of the ancient
+peaceable traits in a marked degree would hamper an individual in
+the struggle for life.
+
+Under any known phase of culture, other or later than the
+presumptive initial phase here spoken of, the gifts of
+good-nature, equity, and indiscriminate sympathy do not
+appreciably further the life of the individual. Their possession
+may serve to protect the individual from hard usage at the hands
+of a majority that insists on a modicum of these ingredients in
+their ideal of a normal man; but apart from their indirect and
+negative effect in this way, the individual fares better under
+the regime of competition in proportion as he has less of these
+gifts. Freedom from scruple, from sympathy, honesty and regard
+for life, may, within fairly wide limits, be said to further the
+success of the individual in the pecuniary culture. The highly
+successful men of all times have commonly been of this type;
+except those whose success has not been scored in terms of either
+wealth or power. It is only within narrow limits, and then only
+in a Pickwickian sense, that honesty is the best policy.
+
+As seen from the point of view of life under modern
+civilized conditions in an enlightened community of the Western
+culture, the primitive, ante-predatory savage, whose character it
+has been attempted to trace in outline above, was not a great
+success. Even for the purposes of that hypothetical culture to
+which his type of human nature owes what stability it has -- even
+for the ends of the peaceable savage group -- this primitive man
+has quite as many and as conspicuous economic failings as he has
+economic virtues -- as should be plain to any one whose sense of
+the case is not biased by leniency born of a fellow-feeling. At
+his best he is "a clever, good-for-nothing fellow." The
+shortcomings of this presumptively primitive type of character
+are weakness, inefficiency, lack of initiative and ingenuity, and
+a yielding and indolent amiability, together with a lively but
+inconsequential animistic sense. Along with these traits go
+certain others which have some value for the collective life
+process, in the sense that they further the facility of life in
+the group. These traits are truthfulness, peaceableness,
+good-will, and a non-emulative, non-invidious interest in men and
+things.
+
+With the advent of the predatory stage of life there comes a
+change in the requirements of the successful human character.
+Men's habits of life are required to adapt themselves to new
+exigencies under a new scheme of human relations. The same
+unfolding of energy, which had previously found expression in the
+traits of savage life recited above, is now required to find
+expression along a new line of action, in a new group of habitual
+responses to altered stimuli. The methods which, as counted in
+terms of facility of life, answered measurably under the earlier
+conditions, are no longer adequate under the new conditions. The
+earlier situation was characterized by a relative absence of
+antagonism or differentiation of interests, the later situation
+by an emulation constantly increasing in relative absence of
+antagonism or differentiation of interests, the later situation
+by an emulation constantly increasing in intensity and narrowing
+in scope. The traits which characterize the predatory and
+subsequent stages of culture, and which indicate the types of man
+best fitted to survive under the regime of status, are (in their
+primary expression) ferocity, self-seeking, clannishness, and
+disingenuousness -- a free resort to force and fraud.
+
+Under the severe and protracted discipline of the regime of
+competition, the selection of ethnic types has acted to give a
+somewhat pronounced dominance to these traits of character, by
+favoring the survival of those ethnic elements which are most
+richly endowed in these respects. At the same time the earlier --
+acquired, more generic habits of the race have never ceased to
+have some usefulness for the purpose of the life of the
+collectivity and have never fallen into definitive abeyance.
+It may be worth while to point out that the dolicho-blond type of
+European man seems to owe much of its dominating
+influence and its masterful position in the recent culture to its
+possessing the characteristics of predatory man in an exceptional
+degree. These spiritual traits, together with a large endowment
+of physical energy -- itself probably a result of selection
+between groups and between lines of descent -- chiefly go to
+place any ethnic element in the position of a leisure or master
+class, especially during the earlier phases of the development of
+the institution of a leisure class. This need not mean that
+precisely the same complement of aptitudes in any individual
+would insure him an eminent personal success. Under the
+competitive regime, the conditions of success for the individual
+are not necessarily the same as those for a class. The success of
+a class or party presumes a strong element of clannishness, or
+loyalty to a chief, or adherence to a tenet; whereas the
+competitive individual can best achieve his ends if he combines
+the barbarian's energy, initiative, self-seeking and
+disingenuousness with the savage's lack of loyalty or
+clannishness. It may be remarked by the way, that the men who
+have scored a brilliant (Napoleonic) success on the basis of an
+impartial self-seeking and absence of scruple, have not
+uncommonly shown more of the physical characteristics of the
+brachycephalic-brunette than of the dolicho-blond. The greater
+proportion of moderately successful individuals, in a
+self-seeking way, however, seem, in physique, to belong to the
+last-named ethnic element.
+
+The temperament induced by the predatory habit of life makes for
+the survival and fullness of life of the individual under a
+regime of emulation; at the same time it makes for the survival
+and success of the group if the group's life as a collectivity is
+also predominantly a life of hostile competition with other
+groups. But the evolution of economic life in the industrially
+more mature communities has now begun to take such a turn that
+the interest of the community no longer coincides with the
+emulative interests of the individual. In their corporate
+capacity, these advanced industrial communities are ceasing to be
+competitors for the means of life or for the right to live --
+except in so far as the predatory propensities of their ruling
+classes keep up the tradition of war and rapine. These
+communities are no longer hostile to one another by force of
+circumstances, other than the circumstances of tradition and
+temperament. Their material interests -- apart, possibly, from
+the interests of the collective good fame -- are not only no
+longer incompatible, but the success of any one of the
+communities unquestionably furthers the fullness of life of any
+other community in the group, for the present and for an
+incalculable time to come. No one of them any longer has any
+material interest in getting the better of any other. The same is
+not true in the same degree as regards individuals and their
+relations to one another.
+
+The collective interests of any modern community center in
+industrial efficiency. The individual is serviceable for the ends
+of the community somewhat in proportion to his efficiency in the
+productive employments vulgarly so called. This collective
+interest is best served by honesty, diligence, peacefulness,
+good-will, an absence of self-seeking, and an habitual
+recognition and apprehension of causal sequence, without
+admixture of animistic belief and without a sense of dependence
+on any preternatural intervention in the course of events. Not
+much is to be said for the beauty, moral excellence, or general
+worthiness and reputability of such a prosy human nature as these
+traits imply; and there is little ground of enthusiasm for the
+manner of collective life that would result from the prevalence
+of these traits in unmitigated dominance. But that is beside the
+point. The successful working of a modern industrial community is
+best secured where these traits concur, and it is attained in the
+degree in which the human material is characterized by their
+possession. Their presence in some measure is required in order
+to have a tolerable adjustment to the circumstances of the modern
+industrial situation. The complex, comprehensive, essentially
+peaceable, and highly organized mechanism of the modern
+industrial community works to the best advantage when these
+traits, or most of them, are present in the highest practicable
+degree. These traits are present in a markedly less degree in the
+man of the predatory type than is useful for the purposes of the
+modern collective life.
+
+On the other hand, the immediate interest of the individual under
+the competitive regime is best served by shrewd trading and
+unscrupulous management. The characteristics named above as
+serving the interests of the community are disserviceable to the
+individual, rather than otherwise. The presence of these
+aptitudes in his make-up diverts his energies to other ends than
+those of pecuniary gain; and also in his pursuit of gain they
+lead him to seek gain by the indirect and ineffectual channels of
+industry, rather than by a free and unfaltering career of sharp
+practice. The industrial aptitudes are pretty consistently a
+hindrance to the individual. Under the regime of emulation the
+members of a modern industrial community are rivals, each of whom
+will best attain his individual and immediate advantage if,
+through an exceptional exemption from scruple, he is able
+serenely to overreach and injure his fellows when the chance
+offers.
+
+It has already been noticed that modern economic institutions
+fall into two roughly distinct categories -- the pecuniary and
+the industrial. The like is true of employments. Under the former
+head are employments that have to do with ownership or
+acquisition; under the latter head, those that have to do with
+workmanship or production. As was found in speaking of the growth
+of institutions, so with regard to employments. The economic
+interests of the leisure class lie in the pecuniary employments;
+those of the working classes lie in both classes of employments,
+but chiefly in the industrial. Entrance to the leisure class lies
+through the pecuniary employments.
+
+These two classes of employment differ materially in respect of
+the aptitudes required for each; and the training which they give
+similarly follows two divergent lines. The discipline of the
+pecuniary employments acts to conserve and to cultivate certain
+of the predatory aptitudes and the predatory animus. It does this
+both by educating those individuals and classes who are occupied
+with these employments and by selectively repressing and
+eliminating those individuals and lines of descent that are unfit
+in this respect. So far as men's habits of thought are shaped by
+the competitive process of acquisition and tenure; so far as
+their economic functions are comprised within the range of
+ownership of wealth as conceived in terms of exchange value, and
+its management and financiering through a permutation of values;
+so far their experience in economic life favors the survival and
+accentuation of the predatory temperament and habits of thought.
+Under the modern, peaceable system, it is of course the peaceable
+range of predatory habits and aptitudes that is chiefly fostered
+by a life of acquisition. That is to say, the pecuniary
+employments give proficiency in the general line of practices
+comprised under fraud, rather than in those that belong under the
+more archaic method of forcible seizure.
+
+These pecuniary employments, tending to conserve the
+predatory temperament, are the employments which have to do with
+ownership -- the immediate function of the leisure class proper
+-- and the subsidiary functions concerned with acquisition and
+accumulation. These cover the class of persons and that range of
+duties in the economic process which have to do with the
+ownership of enterprises engaged in competitive industry;
+especially those fundamental lines of economic management which
+are classed as financiering operations. To these may be added the
+greater part of mercantile occupations. In their best and
+clearest development these duties make up the economic office of
+the "captain of industry." The captain of industry is an astute
+man rather than an ingenious one, and his captaincy is a
+pecuniary rather than an industrial captaincy. Such
+administration of industry as he exercises is commonly of a
+permissive kind. The mechanically effective details of production
+and of industrial organization are delegated to subordinates of a
+less "practical" turn of mind -- men who are possessed of a gift
+for workmanship rather than administrative ability. So far as
+regards their tendency in shaping human nature by education and
+selection, the common run of non-economic employments are to be
+classed with the pecuniary employments. Such are politics and
+ecclesiastical and military employments.
+
+The pecuniary employments have also the sanction of
+reputability in a much higher degree than the industrial
+employments. In this way the leisure-class standards of good
+repute come in to sustain the prestige of those aptitudes that
+serve the invidious purpose; and the leisure-class scheme of
+decorous living, therefore, also furthers the survival and
+culture of the predatory traits. Employments fall into a
+hierarchical gradation of reputability. Those which have to do
+immediately with ownership on a large scale are the most
+reputable of economic employments proper. Next to these in good
+repute come those employments that are immediately subservient to
+ownership and financiering -- such as banking and the law.
+Banking employments also carry a suggestion of large ownership,
+and this fact is doubtless accountable for a share of the
+prestige that attaches to the business. The profession of the law
+does not imply large ownership; but since no taint of
+usefulness, for other than the competitive purpose, attaches to
+the lawyer's trade, it grades high in the conventional scheme.
+The lawyer is exclusively occupied with the details of predatory
+fraud, either in achieving or in checkmating chicanery, and
+success in the profession is therefore accepted as marking a
+large endowment of that barbarian astuteness which has always
+commanded men's respect and fear. Mercantile pursuits are only
+half-way reputable, unless they involve a large element of
+ownership and a small element of usefulness. They grade high or
+low somewhat in proportion as they serve the higher or the lower
+needs; so that the business of retailing the vulgar necessaries
+of life descends to the level of the handicrafts and factory
+labor. Manual labor, or even the work of directing mechanical
+processes, is of course on a precarious footing as regards
+respectability. A qualification is necessary as regards the
+discipline given by the pecuniary employments. As the scale of
+industrial enterprise grows larger, pecuniary management comes to
+bear less of the character of chicanery and shrewd competition in
+detail. That is to say, for an ever-increasing proportion of the
+persons who come in contact with this phase of economic life,
+business reduces itself to a routine in which there is less
+immediate suggestion of overreaching or exploiting a competitor.
+The consequent exemption from predatory habits extends chiefly to
+subordinates employed in business. The duties of ownership and
+administration are virtually untouched by this qualification.
+The case is different as regards those individuals or classes who
+are immediately occupied with the technique and manual operations
+of production. Their daily life is not in the same degree a
+course of habituation to the emulative and invidious motives and
+maneuvers of the pecuniary side of industry. They are
+consistently held to the apprehension and coordination of
+mechanical facts and sequences, and to their appreciation and
+utilization for the purposes of human life. So far as concerns
+this portion of the population, the educative and selective
+action of the industrial process with which they are immediately
+in contact acts to adapt their habits of thought to the
+non-invidious purposes of the collective life. For them,
+therefore, it hastens the obsolescence of the distinctively
+predatory aptitudes and propensities carried over by heredity and
+tradition from the barbarian past of the race.
+
+The educative action of the economic life of the community,
+therefore, is not of a uniform kind throughout all its
+manifestations. That range of economic activities which is
+concerned immediately with pecuniary competition has a tendency
+to conserve certain predatory traits; while those industrial
+occupations which have to do immediately with the production of
+goods have in the main the contrary tendency. But with regard to
+the latter class of employments it is to be noticed in
+qualification that the persons engaged in them are nearly all to
+some extent also concerned with matters of pecuniary competition
+(as, for instance, in the competitive fixing of wages and
+salaries, in the purchase of goods for consumption, etc.).
+Therefore the distinction here made between classes of
+employments is by no means a hard and fast distinction between
+classes of persons.
+
+The employments of the leisure classes in modern industry are
+such as to keep alive certain of the predatory habits and
+aptitudes. So far as the members of those classes take part in
+the industrial process, their training tends to conserve in them
+the barbarian temperament. But there is something to be said on
+the other side. Individuals so placed as to be exempt from strain
+may survive and transmit their characteristics even if they
+differ widely from the average of the species both in physique
+and in spiritual make-up. The chances for a survival and
+transmission of atavistic traits are greatest in those classes
+that are most sheltered from the stress of circumstances. The
+leisure class is in some degree sheltered from the stress of the
+industrial situation, and should, therefore, afford an
+exceptionally great proportion of reversions to the peaceable or
+savage temperament. It should be possible for such aberrant or
+atavistic individuals to unfold their life activity on
+ante-predatory lines without suffering as prompt a repression or
+elimination as in the lower walks of life.
+
+Something of the sort seems to be true in fact. There is, for
+instance, an appreciable proportion of the upper classes whose
+inclinations lead them into philanthropic work, and there is a
+considerable body of sentiment in the class going to support
+efforts of reform and amelioration. And much of this
+philanthropic and reformatory effort, moreover, bears the marks
+of that amiable "cleverness" and incoherence that is
+characteristic of the primitive savage. But it may still be
+doubtful whether these facts are evidence of a larger proportion
+of reversions in the higher than in the lower strata, even if the
+same inclinations were present in the impecunious classes, it
+would not as easily find expression there; since those classes
+lack the means and the time and energy to give effect to their
+inclinations in this respect. The prima facie evidence of the
+facts can scarcely go unquestioned.
+
+In further qualification it is to be noted that the leisure class
+of today is recruited from those who have been successful in a
+pecuniary way, and who, therefore, are presumably endowed with
+more than an even complement of the predatory traits. Entrance
+into the leisure class lies through the pecuniary employments,
+and these employments, by selection and adaptation, act to admit
+to the upper levels only those lines of descent that are
+pecuniarily fit to survive under the predatory test. And so soon
+as a case of reversion to non-predatory human nature shows itself
+on these upper levels, it is commonly weeded out and thrown back
+to the lower pecuniary levels. In order to hold its place in the
+class, a stock must have the pecuniary temperament; otherwise its
+fortune would be dissipated and it would presently lose caste.
+Instances of this kind are sufficiently frequent. The
+constituency of the leisure class is kept up by a continual
+selective process, whereby the individuals and lines of descent
+that are eminently fitted for an aggressive pecuniary competition
+are withdraw from the lower classes. In order to reach the upper
+levels the aspirant must have, not only a fair average complement
+of the pecuniary aptitudes, but he must have these gifts in such
+an eminent degree as to overcome very material difficulties that
+stand in the way of his ascent. Barring accidents, the nouveaux
+arrivés are a picked body.
+
+This process of selective admission has, of course, always been
+going on; ever since the fashion of pecuniary emulation set in --
+which is much the same as saying, ever since the
+institution of a leisure class was first installed. But the
+precise ground of selection has not always been the same, and the
+selective process has therefore not always given the same
+results. In the early barbarian, or predatory stage proper, the
+test of fitness was prowess, in the naive sense of the word. To
+gain entrance to the class, the candidate had to be gifted with
+clannishness, massiveness, ferocity, unscrupulousness, and
+tenacity of purpose. These were the qualities that counted toward
+the accumulation and continued tenure of wealth. The economic
+basis of the leisure class, then as later, was the possession of
+wealth; but the methods of accumulating wealth, and the gifts
+required for holding it, have changed in some degree since the
+early days of the predatory culture. In consequence of the
+selective process the dominant traits of the early barbarian
+leisure class were bold aggression, an alert sense of status, and
+a free resort to fraud. The members of the class held their place
+by tenure of prowess. In the later barbarian culture society
+attained settled methods of acquisition and possession under the
+quasi-peaceable regime of status. Simple aggression and
+unrestrained violence in great measure gave place to shrewd
+practice and chicanery, as the best approved method of
+accumulating wealth. A different range of aptitudes and
+propensities would then be conserved in the leisure class.
+Masterful aggression, and the correlative massiveness, together
+with a ruthlessly consistent sense of status, would still count
+among the most splendid traits of the class. These have remained
+in our traditions as the typical "aristocratic virtues." But with
+these were associated an increasing complement of the less
+obtrusive pecuniary virtues; such as providence, prudence, and
+chicanery. As time has gone on, and the modern peaceable stage of
+pecuniary culture has been approached, the last-named range of
+aptitudes and habits has gained in relative effectiveness for
+pecuniary ends, and they have counted for relatively more in the
+selective process under which admission is gained and place is
+held in the leisure class.
+
+The ground of selection has changed, until the aptitudes which
+now qualify for admission to the class are the pecuniary
+aptitudes only. What remains of the predatory barbarian traits is
+the tenacity of purpose or consistency of aim which distinguished
+the successful predatory barbarian from the peaceable savage whom
+he supplanted. But this trait can not be said characteristically
+to distinguish the pecuniarily successful upper-class man from
+the rank and file of the industrial classes. The training and the
+selection to which the latter are exposed in modern industrial
+life give a similarly decisive weight to this trait. Tenacity of
+purpose may rather be said to distinguish both these classes from
+two others; the shiftless ne'er do-well and the lower-class
+delinquent. In point of natural endowment the pecuniary man
+compares with the delinquent in much the same way as the
+industrial man compares with the good-natured shiftless
+dependent. The ideal pecuniary man is like the ideal delinquent
+in his unscrupulous conversion of goods and persons to his own
+ends, and in a callous disregard of the feelings and wishes of
+others and of the remoter effects of his actions; but he is
+unlike him in possessing a keener sense of status, and in working
+more consistently and farsightedly to a remoter end. The kinship
+of the two types of temperament is further shown in a proclivity
+to "sport" and gambling, and a relish of aimless emulation. The
+ideal pecuniary man also shows a curious kinship with the
+delinquent in one of the concomitant variations of the predatory
+human nature. The delinquent is very commonly of a superstitious
+habit of mind; he is a great believer in luck, spells, divination
+and destiny, and in omens and shamanistic ceremony. Where
+circumstances are favorable, this proclivity is apt to express
+itself in a certain servile devotional fervor and a punctilious
+attention to devout observances; it may perhaps be better
+characterized as devoutness than as religion. At this point the
+temperament of the delinquent has more in common with the
+pecuniary and leisure classes than with the industrial man or
+with the class of shiftless dependents.
+
+Life in a modern industrial community, or in other words life
+under the pecuniary culture, acts by a process of selection to
+develop and conserve a certain range of aptitudes and
+propensities. The present tendency of this selective process is
+not simply a reversion to a given, immutable ethnic type. It
+tends rather to a modification of human nature differing in some
+respects from any of the types or variants transmitted out of the
+past. The objective point of the evolution is not a single one.
+The temperament which the evolution acts to establish as normal
+differs from any one of the archaic variants of human nature in
+its greater stability of aim -- greater singleness of purpose and
+greater persistence in effort. So far as concerns economic
+theory, the objective point of the selective process is on the
+whole single to this extent; although there are minor tendencies
+of considerable importance diverging from this line of
+development. But apart from this general trend the line of
+development is not single. As concerns economic theory, the
+development in other respects runs on two divergent lines. So far
+as regards the selective conservation of capacities or aptitudes
+in individuals, these two lines may be called the pecuniary and
+the industrial. As regards the conservation of propensities,
+spiritual attitude, or animus, the two may be called the
+invidious or self-regarding and the non-invidious or economical.
+As regards the intellectual or cognitive bent of the two
+directions of growth, the former may be characterized as the
+personal standpoint, of conation, qualitative relation, status,
+or worth; the latter as the impersonal standpoint, of sequence,
+quantitative relation, mechanical efficiency, or use.
+
+The pecuniary employments call into action chiefly the former of
+these two ranges of aptitudes and propensities, and act
+selectively to conserve them in the population. The industrial
+employments, on the other hand, chiefly exercise the latter
+range, and act to conserve them. An exhaustive psychological
+analysis will show that each of these two ranges of aptitudes and
+propensities is but the multiform expression of a given
+temperamental bent. By force of the unity or singleness of the
+individual, the aptitudes, animus, and interests comprised in the
+first-named range belong together as expressions of a given
+variant of human nature. The like is true of the latter range.
+The two may be conceived as alternative directions of human life,
+in such a way that a given individual inclines more or less
+consistently to the one or the other. The tendency of the
+pecuniary life is, in a general way, to conserve the barbarian
+temperament, but with the substitution of fraud and prudence, or
+administrative ability, in place of that predilection for
+physical damage that characterizes the early barbarian. This
+substitution of chicanery in place of devastation takes place
+only in an uncertain degree. Within the pecuniary employments the
+selective action runs pretty consistently in this direction, but
+the discipline of pecuniary life, outside the competition for
+gain, does not work consistently to the same effect. The
+discipline of modern life in the consumption of time and goods
+does not act unequivocally to eliminate the aristocratic virtues
+or to foster the bourgeois virtues. The conventional scheme of
+decent living calls for a considerable exercise of the earlier
+barbarian traits. Some details of this traditional scheme of
+life, bearing on this point, have been noticed in earlier
+chapters under the head of leisure, and further details will be
+shown in later chapters.
+
+From what has been said, it appears that the leisure-class life
+and the leisure-class scheme of life should further the
+conservation of the barbarian temperament; chiefly of the
+quasi-peaceable, or bourgeois, variant, but also in some measure
+of the predatory variant. In the absence of disturbing factors,
+therefore, it should be possible to trace a difference of
+temperament between the classes of society. The aristocratic and
+the bourgeois virtues -- that is to say the destructive and
+pecuniary traits -- should be found chiefly among the upper
+classes, and the industrial virtues -- that is to say the
+peaceable traits -- chiefly among the classes given to mechanical
+industry.
+
+In a general and uncertain way this holds true, but the test is
+not so readily applied nor so conclusive as might be wished.
+There are several assignable reasons for its partial failure. All
+classes are in a measure engaged in the pecuniary struggle, and
+in all classes the possession of the pecuniary traits counts
+towards the success and survival of the individual. Wherever the
+pecuniary culture prevails, the selective process by which men's
+habits of thought are shaped, and by which the survival of rival
+lines of descent is decided, proceeds proximately on the basis of
+fitness for acquisition. Consequently, if it were not for the
+fact that pecuniary efficiency is on the whole incompatible with
+industrial efficiency, the selective action of all occupations
+would tend to the unmitigated dominance of the pecuniary
+temperament. The result would be the installation of what has
+been known as the "economic man," as the normal and definitive
+type of human nature. But the "economic man," whose only interest
+is the self-regarding one and whose only human trait is prudence
+is useless for the purposes of modern industry.
+
+The modern industry requires an impersonal, non-invidious
+interest in the work in hand. Without this the elaborate
+processes of industry would be impossible, and would, indeed,
+never have been conceived. This interest in work differentiates
+the workman from the criminal on the one hand, and from the
+captain of industry on the other. Since work must be done in
+order to the continued life of the community, there results a
+qualified selection favoring the spiritual aptitude for work,
+within a certain range of occupations. This much, however, is to
+be conceded, that even within the industrial occupations the
+selective elimination of the pecuniary traits is an uncertain
+process, and that there is consequently an appreciable survival
+of the barbarian temperament even within these occupations. On
+this account there is at present no broad distinction in this
+respect between the leisure-class character and the character of
+the common run of the population.
+
+The whole question as to a class distinction in respect to
+spiritual make-up is also obscured by the presence, in all
+classes of society, of acquired habits of life that closely
+simulate inherited traits and at the same time act to develop in
+the entire body of the population the traits which they simulate.
+These acquired habits, or assumed traits of character, are most
+commonly of an aristocratic cast. The prescriptive position of
+the leisure class as the exemplar of reputability has imposed
+many features of the leisure-class theory of life upon the lower
+classes; with the result that there goes on, always and
+throughout society, a more or less persistent cultivation of
+these aristocratic traits. On this ground also these traits have
+a better chance of survival among the body of the people than
+would be the case if it were not for the precept and example of
+the leisure class. As one channel, and an important one, through
+which this transfusion of aristocratic views of life, and
+consequently more or less archaic traits of character goes on,
+may be mentioned the class of domestic servants. These have their
+notions of what is good and beautiful shaped by contact with the
+master class and carry the preconceptions so acquired back among
+their low-born equals, and so disseminate the higher ideals
+abroad through the community without the loss of time which this
+dissemination might otherwise suffer. The saying "Like master,
+like man," has a greater significance than is commonly
+appreciated for the rapid popular acceptance of many elements of
+upper-class culture.
+
+There is also a further range of facts that go to lessen class
+differences as regards the survival of the pecuniary virtues. The
+pecuniary struggle produces an underfed class, of large
+proportions. This underfeeding consists in a deficiency of the
+necessaries of life or of the necessaries of a decent
+expenditure. In either case the result is a closely enforced
+struggle for the means with which to meet the daily needs;
+whether it be the physical or the higher needs. The strain of
+self-assertion against odds takes up the whole energy of the
+individual; he bends his efforts to compass his own invidious
+ends alone, and becomes continually more narrowly self-seeking.
+The industrial traits in this way tend to obsolescence through
+disuse. Indirectly, therefore, by imposing a scheme of pecuniary
+decency and by withdrawing as much as may be of the means of life
+from the lower classes, the institution of a leisure class acts
+to conserve the pecuniary traits in the body of the population.
+The result is an assimilation of the lower classes to the type of
+human nature that belongs primarily to the upper classes only.
+It appears, therefore, that there is no wide difference in
+temperament between the upper and the lower classes; but it
+appears also that the absence of such a difference is in good
+part due to the prescriptive example of the leisure class and to
+the popular acceptance of those broad principles of conspicuous
+waste and pecuniary emulation on which the institution of a
+leisure class rests. The institution acts to lower the industrial
+efficiency of the community and retard the adaptation of human
+nature to the exigencies of modern industrial life. It affects
+the prevalent or effective human nature in a conservative
+direction, (1) by direct transmission of archaic traits, through
+inheritance within the class and wherever the leisure-class blood
+is transfused outside the class, and (2) by conserving and
+fortifying the traditions of the archaic regime, and so making
+the chances of survival of barbarian traits greater also outside
+the range of transfusion of leisure-class blood.
+
+But little if anything has been done towards collecting or
+digesting data that are of special significance for the question
+of survival or elimination of traits in the modern populations.
+Little of a tangible character can therefore be offered in
+support of the view here taken, beyond a discursive review of
+such everyday facts as lie ready to hand. Such a recital can
+scarcely avoid being commonplace and tedious, but for all that it
+seems necessary to the completeness of the argument, even in the
+meager outline in which it is here attempted. A degree of
+indulgence may therefore fairly be bespoken for the succeeding
+chapters, which offer a fragmentary recital of this kind.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Ten
+
+Modern Survivals of Prowess
+
+The leisure class lives by the industrial community rather than
+in it. Its relations to industry are of a pecuniary rather than
+an industrial kind. Admission to the class is gained by exercise
+of the pecuniary aptitudes -- aptitudes for acquisition rather
+than for serviceability. There is, therefore, a continued
+selective sifting of the human material that makes up the leisure
+class, and this selection proceeds on the ground of fitness for
+pecuniary pursuits. But the scheme of life of the class is in
+large part a heritage from the past, and embodies much of the
+habits and ideals of the earlier barbarian period. This archaic,
+barbarian scheme of life imposes itself also on the lower orders,
+with more or less mitigation. In its turn the scheme of life, of
+conventions, acts selectively and by education to shape the human
+material, and its action runs chiefly in the direction of
+conserving traits, habits, and ideals that belong to the early
+barbarian age -- the age of prowess and predatory life.
+
+The most immediate and unequivocal expression of that archaic
+human nature which characterizes man in the predatory stage is
+the fighting propensity proper. In cases where the predatory
+activity is a collective one, this propensity is frequently
+called the martial spirit, or, latterly, patriotism. It needs no
+insistence to find assent to the proposition that in the
+countries of civilized Europe the hereditary leisure class is
+endowed with this martial spirit in a higher degree than the
+middle classes. Indeed, the leisure class claims the distinction
+as a matter of pride, and no doubt with some grounds. War is
+honorable, and warlike prowess is eminently honorific in the eyes
+of the generality of men; and this admiration of warlike prowess
+is itself the best voucher of a predatory temperament in the
+admirer of war. The enthusiasm for war, and the predatory temper
+of which it is the index, prevail in the largest measure among
+the upper classes, especially among the hereditary leisure class.
+Moreover, the ostensible serious occupation of the upper class is
+that of government, which, in point of origin and developmental
+content, is also a predatory occupation.
+
+The only class which could at all dispute with the
+hereditary leisure class the honor of an habitual bellicose frame
+of mind is that of the lower-class delinquents. In ordinary
+times, the large body of the industrial classes is relatively
+apathetic touching warlike interests. When unexcited, this body
+of the common people, which makes up the effective force of the
+industrial community, is rather averse to any other than a
+defensive fight; indeed, it responds a little tardily even to a
+provocation which makes for an attitude of defense. In the more
+civilized communities, or rather in the communities which have
+reached an advanced industrial development, the spirit of warlike
+aggression may be said to be obsolescent among the common people.
+This does not say that there is not an appreciable number of
+individuals among the industrial classes in whom the martial
+spirit asserts itself obtrusively. Nor does it say that the body
+of the people may not be fired with martial ardor for a time
+under the stimulus of some special provocation, such as is seen
+in operation today in more than one of the countries of Europe,
+and for the time in America. But except for such seasons of
+temporary exaltation, and except for those individuals who are
+endowed with an archaic temperament of the predatory type,
+together with the similarly endowed body of individuals among the
+higher and the lowest classes, the inertness of the mass of any
+modern civilized community in this respect is probably so great
+as would make war impracticable, except against actual invasion.
+The habits and aptitudes of the common run of men make for an
+unfolding of activity in other, less picturesque directions than
+that of war.
+
+This class difference in temperament may be due in part to a
+difference in the inheritance of acquired traits in the several
+classes, but it seems also, in some measure, to correspond with a
+difference in ethnic derivation. The class difference is in this
+respect visibly less in those countries whose population is
+relatively homogeneous, ethnically, than in the countries where
+there is a broader divergence between the ethnic elements that
+make up the several classes of the community. In the same
+connection it may be noted that the later accessions to the
+leisure class in the latter countries, in a general way, show
+less of the martial spirit than contemporary representatives of
+the aristocracy of the ancient line. These nouveaux arrivés have
+recently emerged from the commonplace body of the population and
+owe their emergence into the leisure class to the exercise of
+traits and propensities which are not to be classed as prowess in
+the ancient sense.
+
+Apart from warlike activity proper, the institution of the duel
+is also an expression of the same superior readiness for combat;
+and the duel is a leisure-class institution. The duel is in
+substance a more or less deliberate resort to a fight as a final
+settlement of a difference of opinion. In civilized communities
+it prevails as a normal phenomenon only where there is an
+hereditary leisure class, and almost exclusively among that
+class. The exceptions are (1) military and naval officers who are
+ordinarily members of the leisure class, and who are at the same
+time specially trained to predatory habits of mind and (2) the
+lower-class delinquents -- who are by inheritance, or training,
+or both, of a similarly predatory disposition and habit. It is
+only the high-bred gentleman and the rowdy that normally resort
+to blows as the universal solvent of differences of opinion. The
+plain man will ordinarily fight only when excessive momentary
+irritation or alcoholic exaltation act to inhibit the more
+complex habits of response to the stimuli that make for
+provocation. He is then thrown back upon the simpler, less
+differentiated forms of the instinct of self-assertion; that is
+to say, he reverts temporarily and without reflection to an
+archaic habit of mind.
+
+This institution of the duel as a mode of finally settling
+disputes and serious questions of precedence shades off into the
+obligatory, unprovoked private fight, as a social obligation due
+to one's good repute. As a leisure-class usage of this kind we
+have, particularly, that bizarre survival of bellicose chivalry,
+the German student duel. In the lower or spurious leisure class
+of the delinquents there is in all countries a similar, though
+less formal, social obligation incumbent on the rowdy to assert
+his manhood in unprovoked combat with his fellows. And spreading
+through all grades of society, a similar usage prevails among the
+boys of the community. The boy usually knows to nicety, from day
+to day, how he and his associates grade in respect of relative
+fighting capacity; and in the community of boys there is
+ordinarily no secure basis of reputability for any one who, by
+exception, will not or can not fight on invitation.
+
+All this applies especially to boys above a certain somewhat
+vague limit of maturity. The child's temperament does not
+commonly answer to this description during infancy and the years
+of close tutelage, when the child still habitually seeks contact
+with its mother at every turn of its daily life. During this
+earlier period there is little aggression and little propensity
+for antagonism. The transition from this peaceable temper to the
+predaceous, and in extreme cases malignant, mischievousness of
+the boy is a gradual one, and it is accomplished with more
+completeness, covering a larger range of the individual's
+aptitudes, in some cases than in others. In the earlier stage of
+his growth, the child, whether boy or girl, shows less of
+initiative and aggressive self-assertion and less of an
+inclination to isolate himself and his interests from the
+domestic group in which he lives, and he shows more of
+sensitiveness to rebuke, bashfulness, timidity, and the need of
+friendly human contact. In the common run of cases this early
+temperament passes, by a gradual but somewhat rapid obsolescence
+of the infantile features, into the temperament of the boy
+proper; though there are also cases where the predaceous futures
+of boy life do not emerge at all, or at the most emerge in but a
+slight and obscure degree.
+
+In girls the transition to the predaceous stage is seldom
+accomplished with the same degree of completeness as in boys; and
+in a relatively large proportion of cases it is scarcely
+undergone at all. In such cases the transition from infancy to
+adolescence and maturity is a gradual and unbroken process of the
+shifting of interest from infantile purposes and aptitudes to the
+purposes, functions, and relations of adult life. In the girls
+there is a less general prevalence of a predaceous interval in
+the development; and in the cases where it occurs, the predaceous
+and isolating attitude during the interval is commonly less
+accentuated.
+
+In the male child the predaceous interval is ordinarily fairly
+well marked and lasts for some time, but it is commonly
+terminated (if at all) with the attainment of maturity. This last
+statement may need very material qualification. The cases are by
+no means rare in which the transition from the boyish to the
+adult temperament is not made, or is made only partially --
+understanding by the "adult" temperament the average temperament
+of those adult individuals in modern industrial life who have
+some serviceability for the purposes of the collective life
+process, and who may therefore be said to make up the effective
+average of the industrial community.
+
+The ethnic composition of the European populations varies. In
+some cases even the lower classes are in large measure made up of
+the peace-disturbing dolicho-blond; while in others this ethnic
+element is found chiefly among the hereditary leisure class. The
+fighting habit seems to prevail to a less extent among the
+working-class boys in the latter class of populations than among
+the boys of the upper classes or among those of the
+populations first named.
+
+If this generalization as to the temperament of the boy among the
+working classes should be found true on a fuller and closer
+scrutiny of the field, it would add force to the view that the
+bellicose temperament is in some appreciable degree a race
+characteristic; it appears to enter more largely into the make-up
+of the dominant, upper-class ethnic type -- the dolicho-blond --
+of the European countries than into the subservient, lower-class
+types of man which are conceived to constitute the body of the
+population of the same communities.
+
+The case of the boy may seem not to bear seriously on the
+question of the relative endowment of prowess with which the
+several classes of society are gifted; but it is at least of some
+value as going to show that this fighting impulse belongs to a
+more archaic temperament than that possessed by the average adult
+man of the industrious classes. In this, as in many other
+features of child life, the child reproduces, temporarily and in
+miniature, some of the earlier phases of the development of adult
+man. Under this interpretation, the boy's predilection for
+exploit and for isolation of his own interest is to be taken as a
+transient reversion to the human nature that is normal to the
+early barbarian culture -- the predatory culture proper. In this
+respect, as in much else, the leisure-class and the
+delinquent-class character shows a persistence into adult life of
+traits that are normal to childhood and youth, and that are
+likewise normal or habitual to the earlier stages of culture.
+Unless the difference is traceable entirely to a fundamental
+difference between persistent ethnic types, the traits that
+distinguish the swaggering delinquent and the punctilious
+gentleman of leisure from the common crowd are, in some measure,
+marks of an arrested spiritual development. They mark an immature
+phase, as compared with the stage of development attained by the
+average of the adults in the modern industrial community. And it
+will appear presently that the puerile spiritual make-up of these
+representatives of the upper and the lowest social strata shows
+itself also in the presence of other archaic traits than this
+proclivity to ferocious exploit and isolation.
+
+As if to leave no doubt about the essential immaturity of the
+fighting temperament, we have, bridging the interval between
+legitimate boyhood and adult manhood, the aimless and playful,
+but more or less systematic and elaborate, disturbances of the
+peace in vogue among schoolboys of a slightly higher age. In the
+common run of cases, these disturbances are confined to the
+period of adolescence. They recur with decreasing frequency and
+acuteness as youth merges into adult life, and so they reproduce,
+in a general way, in the life of the individual, the sequence by
+which the group has passed from the predatory to a more settled
+habit of life. In an appreciable number of cases the spiritual
+growth of the individual comes to a close before he emerges from
+this puerile phase; in these cases the fighting temper persists
+through life. Those individuals who in spiritual development
+eventually reach man's estate, therefore, ordinarily pass through
+a temporary archaic phase corresponding to the permanent
+spiritual level of the fighting and sporting men. Different
+individuals will, of course, achieve spiritual maturity and
+sobriety in this respect in different degrees; and those who fail
+of the average remain as an undissolved residue of crude humanity
+in the modern industrial community and as a foil for that
+selective process of adaptation which makes for a heightened
+industrial efficiency and the fullness of life of the
+collectivity. This arrested spiritual development may express
+itself not only in a direct participation by adults in youthful
+exploits of ferocity, but also indirectly in aiding and abetting
+disturbances of this kind on the part of younger persons. It
+thereby furthers the formation of habits of ferocity which may
+persist in the later life of the growing generation, and so
+retard any movement in the direction of a more peaceable
+effective temperament on the part of the community. If a person
+so endowed with a proclivity for exploits is in a position to
+guide the development of habits in the adolescent members of the
+community, the influence which he exerts in the direction of
+conservation and reversion to prowess may be very considerable.
+This is the significance, for instance, of the fostering care
+latterly bestowed by many clergymen and other pillars of society
+upon "boys' brigades" and similar pseudo-military organizations.
+The same is true of the encouragement given to the growth of
+"college spirit," college athletics, and the like, in the higher
+institutions of learning.
+
+These manifestations of the predatory temperament are all to be
+classed under the head of exploit. They are partly simple and
+unreflected expressions of an attitude of emulative ferocity,
+partly activities deliberately entered upon with a view to
+gaining repute for prowess. Sports of all kinds are of the same
+general character, including prize-fights, bull-fights,
+athletics, shooting, angling, yachting, and games of skill, even
+where the element of destructive physical efficiency is not an
+obtrusive feature. Sports shade off from the basis of hostile
+combat, through skill, to cunning and chicanery, without its
+being possible to draw a line at any point. The ground of an
+addiction to sports is an archaic spiritual constitution -- the
+possession of the predatory emulative propensity in a relatively
+high potency, a strong proclivity to adventuresome exploit and to
+the infliction of damage is especially pronounced in those
+employments which are in colloquial usage specifically called
+sportsmanship.
+
+It is perhaps truer, or at least more evident, as regards sports
+than as regards the other expressions of predatory emulation
+already spoken of, that the temperament which inclines men to
+them is essentially a boyish temperament. The addiction to
+sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree marks an arrested
+development of the man's moral nature. This peculiar boyishness
+of temperament in sporting men immediately becomes apparent when
+attention is directed to the large element of make-believe that
+is present in all sporting activity. Sports share this character
+of make-believe with the games and exploits to which children,
+especially boys, are habitually inclined. Make-believe does not
+enter in the same proportion into all sports, but it is present
+in a very appreciable degree in all. It is apparently present in
+a larger measure in sportsmanship proper and in athletic contests
+than in set games of skill of a more sedentary character;
+although this rule may not be found to apply with any great
+uniformity. It is noticeable, for instance, that even very
+mild-mannered and matter-of-fact men who go out shooting are apt
+to carry an excess of arms and accoutrements in order to impress
+upon their own imagination the seriousness of their undertaking.
+These huntsmen are also prone to a histrionic, prancing gait and
+to an elaborate exaggeration of the motions, whether of stealth
+or of onslaught, involved in their deeds of exploit. Similarly in
+athletic sports there is almost invariably present a good share
+of rant and swagger and ostensible mystification -- features
+which mark the histrionic nature of these employments. In all
+this, of course, the reminder of boyish make-believe is plain
+enough. The slang of athletics, by the way, is in great part made
+up of extremely sanguinary locutions borrowed from the
+terminology of warfare. Except where it is adopted as a necessary
+means of secret communication, the use of a special slang in any
+employment is probably to be accepted as evidence that the
+occupation in question is substantially make-believe.
+
+A further feature in which sports differ from the duel and
+similar disturbances of the peace is the peculiarity that they
+admit of other motives being assigned for them besides the
+impulses of exploit and ferocity. There is probably little if any
+other motive present in any given case, but the fact that other
+reasons for indulging in sports are frequently assigned goes to
+say that other grounds are sometimes present in a subsidiary way.
+Sportsmen -- hunters and anglers -- are more or less in the habit
+of assigning a love of nature, the need of recreation, and the
+like, as the incentives to their favorite pastime. These motives
+are no doubt frequently present and make up a part of the
+attractiveness of the sportsman's life; but these can not be the
+chief incentives. These ostensible needs could be more readily
+and fully satisfied without the accompaniment of a systematic
+effort to take the life of those creatures that make up an
+essential feature of that "nature" that is beloved by the
+sportsman. It is, indeed, the most noticeable effect of the
+sportsman's activity to keep nature in a state of chronic
+desolation by killing off all living thing whose destruction he
+can compass.
+
+Still, there is ground for the sportsman's claim that under the
+existing conventionalities his need of recreation and of contact
+with nature can best be satisfied by the course which he takes.
+Certain canons of good breeding have been imposed by the
+prescriptive example of a predatory leisure class in the past and
+have been somewhat painstakingly conserved by the usage of the
+latter-day representatives of that class; and these canons will
+not permit him, without blame, to seek contact with nature on
+other terms. From being an honorable employment handed down from
+the predatory culture as the highest form of everyday leisure,
+sports have come to be the only form of outdoor activity that has
+the full sanction of decorum. Among the proximate incentives to
+shooting and angling, then, may be the need of recreation and
+outdoor life. The remoter cause which imposes the necessity of
+seeking these objects under the cover of systematic slaughter is
+a prescription that can not be violated except at the risk of
+disrepute and consequent lesion to one's self-respect.
+
+The case of other kinds of sport is somewhat similar. Of these,
+athletic games are the best example. Prescriptive usage with
+respect to what forms of activity, exercise, and recreation are
+permissible under the code of reputable living is of course
+present here also. Those who are addicted to athletic sports, or
+who admire them, set up the claim that these afford the best
+available means of recreation and of "physical culture." And
+prescriptive usage gives countenance to the claim. The canons of
+reputable living exclude from the scheme of life of the leisure
+class all activity that can not be classed as conspicuous
+leisure. And consequently they tend by prescription to exclude it
+also from the scheme of life of the community generally. At the
+same time purposeless physical exertion is tedious and
+distasteful beyond tolerance. As has been noticed in another
+connection, recourse is in such a case had to some form of
+activity which shall at least afford a colorable pretense of
+purpose, even if the object assigned be only a make-believe.
+Sports satisfy these requirements of substantial futility
+together with a colorable make-believe of purpose. In addition to
+this they afford scope for emulation, and are attractive also on
+that account. In order to be decorous, an employment must conform
+to the leisure-class canon of reputable waste; at the same time
+all activity, in order to be persisted in as an habitual, even if
+only partial, expression of life, must conform to the generically
+human canon of efficiency for some serviceable objective end. The
+leisure-class canon demands strict and comprehensive futility,
+the instinct of workmanship demands purposeful action. The
+leisure-class canon of decorum acts slowly and pervasively, by a
+selective elimination of all substantially useful or purposeful
+modes of action from the accredited scheme of life; the instinct
+of workmanship acts impulsively and may be satisfied,
+provisionally, with a proximate purpose. It is only as the
+apprehended ulterior futility of a given line of action enters
+the reflective complex of consciousness as an element essentially
+alien to the normally purposeful trend of the life process that
+its disquieting and deterrent effect on the consciousness of the
+agent is wrought.
+
+The individual's habits of thought make an organic complex, the
+trend of which is necessarily in the direction of
+serviceability to the life process. When it is attempted to
+assimilate systematic waste or futility, as an end in life, into
+this organic complex, there presently supervenes a revulsion. But
+this revulsion of the organism may be avoided if the attention
+can be confined to the proximate, unreflected purpose of
+dexterous or emulative exertion. Sports -- hunting, angling,
+athletic games, and the like -- afford an exercise for dexterity
+and for the emulative ferocity and astuteness characteristic of
+predatory life. So long as the individual is but slightly gifted
+with reflection or with a sense of the ulterior trend of his
+actions so long as his life is substantially a life of naive
+impulsive action -- so long the immediate and unreflected
+purposefulness of sports, in the way of an expression of
+dominance, will measurably satisfy his instinct of workmanship.
+This is especially true if his dominant impulses are the
+unreflecting emulative propensities of the predaceous
+temperament. At the same time the canons of decorum will commend
+sports to him as expressions of a pecuniarily blameless life. It
+is by meeting these two requirements, of ulterior wastefulness
+and proximate purposefulness, that any given employment holds its
+place as a traditional and habitual mode of decorous recreation.
+In the sense that other forms of recreation and exercise are
+morally impossible to persons of good breeding and delicate
+sensibilities, then, sports are the best available means of
+recreation under existing circumstances.
+
+But those members of respectable society who advocate athletic
+games commonly justify their attitude on this head to themselves
+and to their neighbors on the ground that these games serve as an
+invaluable means of development. They not only improve the
+contestant's physique, but it is commonly added that they also
+foster a manly spirit, both in the participants and in the
+spectators. Football is the particular game which will probably
+first occur to any one in this community when the question of the
+serviceability of athletic games is raised, as this form of
+athletic contest is at present uppermost in the mind of those who
+plead for or against games as a means of physical or moral
+salvation. This typical athletic sport may, therefore, serve to
+illustrate the bearing of athletics upon the development of the
+contestant's character and physique. It has been said, not
+inaptly, that the relation of football to physical culture is
+much the same as that of the bull-fight to agriculture.
+Serviceability for these lusory institutions requires sedulous
+training or breeding. The material used, whether brute or human,
+is subjected to careful selection and discipline, in order to
+secure and accentuate certain aptitudes and propensities which
+are characteristic of the ferine state, and which tend to
+obsolescence under domestication. This does not mean that the
+result in either case is an all around and consistent
+rehabilitation of the ferine or barbarian habit of mind and body.
+The result is rather a one-sided return to barbarism or to the
+feroe natura -- a rehabilitation and accentuation of those ferine
+traits which make for damage and desolation, without a
+corresponding development of the traits which would serve the
+individual's self-preservation and fullness of life in a ferine
+environment. The culture bestowed in football gives a product of
+exotic ferocity and cunning. It is a rehabilitation of the early
+barbarian temperament, together with a suppression of those
+details of temperament, which, as seen from the standpoint of the
+social and economic exigencies, are the redeeming features of the
+savage character.
+
+The physical vigor acquired in the training for athletic games --
+so far as the training may be said to have this effect -- is of
+advantage both to the individual and to the collectivity, in
+that, other things being equal, it conduces to economic
+serviceability. The spiritual traits which go with athletic
+sports are likewise economically advantageous to the individual,
+as contradistinguished from the interests of the collectivity.
+This holds true in any community where these traits are present
+in some degree in the population. Modern competition is in large
+part a process of self-assertion on the basis of these traits of
+predatory human nature. In the sophisticated form in which they
+enter into the modern, peaceable emulation, the possession of
+these traits in some measure is almost a necessary of life to the
+civilized man. But while they are indispensable to the
+competitive individual, they are not directly serviceable to the
+community. So far as regards the serviceability of the individual
+for the purposes of the collective life, emulative efficiency is
+of use only indirectly if at all. Ferocity and cunning are of no
+use to the community except in its hostile dealings with other
+communities; and they are useful to the individual only because
+there is so large a proportion of the same traits actively
+present in the human environment to which he is exposed. Any
+individual who enters the competitive struggle without the due
+endowment of these traits is at a disadvantage, somewhat as a
+hornless steer would find himself at a disadvantage in a drove of
+horned cattle.
+
+The possession and the cultivation of the predatory traits of
+character may, of course, be desirable on other than economic
+grounds. There is a prevalent aesthetic or ethical predilection
+for the barbarian aptitudes, and the traits in question minister
+so effectively to this predilection that their serviceability in
+the aesthetic or ethical respect probably offsets any economic
+unserviceability which they may give. But for the present purpose
+that is beside the point. Therefore nothing is said here as to
+the desirability or advisability of sports on the whole, or as to
+their value on other than economic grounds.
+
+In popular apprehension there is much that is admirable in the
+type of manhood which the life of sport fosters. There is
+self-reliance and good-fellowship, so termed in the somewhat
+loose colloquial use of the words. From a different point of view
+the qualities currently so characterized might be described as
+truculence and clannishness. The reason for the current approval
+and admiration of these manly qualities, as well as for their
+being called manly, is the same as the reason for their
+usefulness to the individual. The members of the community, and
+especially that class of the community which sets the pace in
+canons of taste, are endowed with this range of propensities in
+sufficient measure to make their absence in others felt as a
+shortcoming, and to make their possession in an exceptional
+degree appreciated as an attribute of superior merit. The traits
+of predatory man are by no means obsolete in the common run of
+modern populations. They are present and can be called out in
+bold relief at any time by any appeal to the sentiments in which
+they express themselves -- unless this appeal should clash with
+the specific activities that make up our habitual occupations and
+comprise the general range of our everyday interests. The common
+run of the population of any industrial community is emancipated
+from these, economically considered, untoward propensities only
+in the sense that, through partial and temporary disuse, they
+have lapsed into the background of sub-conscious motives. With
+varying degrees of potency in different individuals, they remain
+available for the aggressive shaping of men's actions and
+sentiments whenever a stimulus of more than everyday intensity
+comes in to call them forth. And they assert themselves forcibly
+in any case where no occupation alien to the predatory culture
+has usurped the individual's everyday range of interest and
+sentiment. This is the case among the leisure class and among
+certain portions of the population which are ancillary to that
+class. Hence the facility with which any new accessions to the
+leisure class take to sports; and hence the rapid growth of
+sports and of the sporting sentient in any industrial community
+where wealth has accumulated sufficiently to exempt a
+considerable part of the population from work.
+
+A homely and familiar fact may serve to show that the predaceous
+impulse does not prevail in the same degree in all classes. Taken
+simply as a feature of modern life, the habit of carrying a
+walking-stick may seem at best a trivial detail; but the usage
+has a significance for the point in question. The classes among
+whom the habit most prevails -- the classes with whom the
+walking-stick is associated in popular apprehension -- are the
+men of the leisure class proper, sporting men, and the
+lower-class delinquents. To these might perhaps be added the men
+engaged in the pecuniary employments. The same is not true of the
+common run of men engaged in industry and it may be noted by the
+way that women do not carry a stick except in case of infirmity,
+where it has a use of a different kind. The practice is of course
+in great measure a matter of polite usage; but the basis of
+polite usage is, in turn, the proclivities of the class which
+sets the pace in polite usage. The walking-stick serves the
+purpose of an advertisement that the bearer's hands are employed
+otherwise than in useful effort, and it therefore has utility as
+an evidence of leisure. But it is also a weapon, and it meets a
+felt need of barbarian man on that ground. The handling of so
+tangible and primitive a means of offense is very comforting to
+any one who is gifted with even a moderate share of ferocity.
+The exigencies of the language make it impossible to avoid an
+apparent implication of disapproval of the aptitudes,
+propensities, and expressions of life here under discussion. It
+is, however, not intended to imply anything in the way of
+deprecation or commendation of any one of these phases of human
+character or of the life process. The various elements of the
+prevalent human nature are taken up from the point of view of
+economic theory, and the traits discussed are gauged and graded
+with regard to their immediate economic bearing on the facility
+of the collective life process. That is to say, these phenomena
+are here apprehended from the economic point of view and are
+valued with respect to their direct action in furtherance or
+hindrance of a more perfect adjustment of the human collectivity
+to the environment and to the institutional structure required by
+the economic situation of the collectivity for the present and
+for the immediate future. For these purposes the traits handed
+down from the predatory culture are less serviceable than might
+be. Although even in this connection it is not to be overlooked
+that the energetic aggressiveness and pertinacity of predatory
+man is a heritage of no mean value. The economic value -- with
+some regard also to the social value in the narrower sense -- of
+these aptitudes and propensities is attempted to be passed upon
+without reflecting on their value as seen from another point of
+view. When contrasted with the prosy mediocrity of the latter-day
+industrial scheme of life, and judged by the accredited standards
+of morality, and more especially by the standards of aesthetics
+and of poetry, these survivals from a more primitive type of
+manhood may have a very different value from that here assigned
+them. But all this being foreign to the purpose in hand, no
+expression of opinion on this latter head would be in place here.
+All that is admissible is to enter the caution that these
+standards of excellence, which are alien to the present purpose,
+must not be allowed to influence our economic appreciation of
+these traits of human character or of the activities which foster
+their growth. This applies both as regards those persons who
+actively participate in sports and those whose sporting
+experience consists in contemplation only. What is here said of
+the sporting propensity is likewise pertinent to sundry
+reflections presently to be made in this connection on what would
+colloquially be known as the religious life.
+
+The last paragraph incidentally touches upon the fact that
+everyday speech can scarcely be employed in discussing this class
+of aptitudes and activities without implying deprecation or
+apology. The fact is significant as showing the habitual attitude
+of the dispassionate common man toward the propensities which
+express themselves in sports and in exploit generally. And this
+is perhaps as convenient a place as any to discuss that undertone
+of deprecation which runs through all the voluminous discourse in
+defense or in laudation of athletic sports, as well as of other
+activities of a predominantly predatory character. The same
+apologetic frame of mind is at least beginning to be observable
+in the spokesmen of most other institutions handed down from the
+barbarian phase of life. Among these archaic institutions which
+are felt to need apology are comprised, with others, the entire
+existing system of the distribution of wealth, together with the
+resulting class distinction of status; all or nearly all forms of
+consumption that come under the head of conspicuous waste; the
+status of women under the patriarchal system; and many features
+of the traditional creeds and devout observances, especially the
+exoteric expressions of the creed and the naive apprehension of
+received observances. What is to be said in this connection of
+the apologetic attitude taken in commending sports and the
+sporting character will therefore apply, with a suitable change
+in phraseology, to the apologies offered in behalf of these
+other, related elements of our social heritage.
+
+There is a feeling -- usually vague and not commonly avowed in so
+many words by the apologist himself, but ordinarily
+perceptible in the manner of his discourse -- that these sports,
+as well as the general range of predaceous impulses and habits of
+thought which underlie the sporting character, do not altogether
+commend themselves to common sense. "As to the majority of
+murderers, they are very incorrect characters." This aphorism
+offers a valuation of the predaceous temperament, and of the
+disciplinary effects of its overt expression and exercise, as
+seen from the moralist's point of view. As such it affords an
+indication of what is the deliverance of the sober sense of
+mature men as to the degree of availability of the predatory
+habit of mind for the purposes of the collective life. It is felt
+that the presumption is against any activity which involves
+habituation to the predatory attitude, and that the burden of
+proof lies with those who speak for the rehabilitation of the
+predaceous temper and for the practices which strengthen it.
+There is a strong body of popular sentiment in favor of
+diversions and enterprises of the kind in question; but there is
+at the same time present in the community a pervading sense that
+this ground of sentiment wants legitimation. The required
+legitimation is ordinarily sought by showing that although sports
+are substantially of a predatory, socially disintegrating effect;
+although their proximate effect runs in the direction of
+reversion to propensities that are industrially disserviceable;
+yet indirectly and remotely -- by some not readily comprehensible
+process of polar induction, or counter-irritation perhaps --
+sports are conceived to foster a habit of mind that is
+serviceable for the social or industrial purpose. That is to say,
+although sports are essentially of the nature of invidious
+exploit, it is presumed that by some remote and obscure effect
+they result in the growth of a temperament conducive to
+non-invidious work. It is commonly attempted to show all this
+empirically or it is rather assumed that this is the empirical
+generalization which must be obvious to any one who cares to see
+it. In conducting the proof of this thesis the treacherous ground
+of inference from cause to effect is somewhat shrewdly avoided,
+except so far as to show that the "manly virtues" spoken of above
+are fostered by sports. But since it is these manly virtues that
+are (economically) in need of legitimation, the chain of proof
+breaks off where it should begin. In the most general economic
+terms, these apologies are an effort to show that, in spite of
+the logic of the thing, sports do in fact further what may
+broadly be called workmanship. So long as he has not succeeded in
+persuading himself or others that this is their effect the
+thoughtful apologist for sports will not rest content, and
+commonly, it is to be admitted, he does not rest content. His
+discontent with his own vindication of the practice in question
+is ordinarily shown by his truculent tone and by the eagerness
+with which he heaps up asseverations in support of his position.
+But why are apologies needed? If there prevails a body of popular
+sentient in favor of sports, why is not that fact a sufficient
+legitimation? The protracted discipline of prowess to which the
+race has been subjected under the predatory and quasi-peaceable
+culture has transmitted to the men of today a temperament that
+finds gratification in these expressions of ferocity and cunning.
+So, why not accept these sports as legitimate expressions of a
+normal and wholesome human nature? What other norm is there that
+is to be lived up to than that given in the aggregate range of
+propensities that express themselves in the sentiments of this
+generation, including the hereditary strain of prowess? The
+ulterior norm to which appeal is taken is the instinct of
+workmanship, which is an instinct more fundamental, of more
+ancient prescription, than the propensity to predatory emulation.
+The latter is but a special development of the instinct of
+workmanship, a variant, relatively late and ephemeral in spite of
+its great absolute antiquity. The emulative predatory impulse --
+or the instinct of sportsmanship, as it might well be called --
+is essentially unstable in comparison with the primordial
+instinct of workmanship out of which it has been developed and
+differentiated. Tested by this ulterior norm of life, predatory
+emulation, and therefore the life of sports, falls short.
+
+The manner and the measure in which the institution of a leisure
+class conduces to the conservation of sports and
+invidious exploit can of course not be succinctly stated. From
+the evidence already recited it appears that, in sentient and
+inclinations, the leisure class is more favorable to a warlike
+attitude and animus than the industrial classes. Something
+similar seems to be true as regards sports. But it is chiefly in
+its indirect effects, though the canons of decorous living, that
+the institution has its influence on the prevalent sentiment with
+respect to the sporting life. This indirect effect goes almost
+unequivocally in the direction of furthering a survival of the
+predatory temperament and habits; and this is true even with
+respect to those variants of the sporting life which the higher
+leisure-class code of proprieties proscribes; as, e.g.,
+prize-fighting, cock-fighting, and other like vulgar expressions
+of the sporting temper. Whatever the latest authenticated
+schedule of detail proprieties may say, the accredited canons of
+decency sanctioned by the institution say without equivocation
+that emulation and waste are good and their opposites are
+disreputable. In the crepuscular light of the social nether
+spaces the details of the code are not apprehended with all the
+facility that might be desired, and these broad underlying canons
+of decency are therefore applied somewhat unreflectingly, with
+little question as to the scope of their competence or the
+exceptions that have been sanctioned in detail.
+
+Addiction to athletic sports, not only in the way of direct
+participation, but also in the way of sentiment and moral
+support, is, in a more or less pronounced degree, a
+characteristic of the leisure class; and it is a trait which that
+class shares with the lower-class delinquents, and with such
+atavistic elements throughout the body of the community as are
+endowed with a dominant predaceous trend. Few individuals among
+the populations of Western civilized countries are so far devoid
+of the predaceous instinct as to find no diversion in
+contemplating athletic sports and games, but with the common run
+of individuals among the industrial classes the inclination to
+sports does not assert itself to the extent of constituting what
+may fairly be called a sporting habit. With these classes sports
+are an occasional diversion rather than a serious feature of
+life. This common body of the people can therefore not be said to
+cultivate the sporting propensity. Although it is not obsolete in
+the average of them, or even in any appreciable number of
+individuals, yet the predilection for sports in the commonplace
+industrial classes is of the nature of a reminiscence, more or
+less diverting as an occasional interest, rather than a vital and
+permanent interest that counts as a dominant factor in shaping
+the organic complex of habits of thought into which it enters.
+As it manifests itself in the sporting life of today, this
+propensity may not appear to be an economic factor of grave
+consequence. Taken simply by itself it does not count for a great
+deal in its direct effects on the industrial efficiency or the
+consumption of any given individual; but the prevalence and the
+growth of the type of human nature of which this propensity is a
+characteristic feature is a matter of some consequence. It
+affects the economic life of the collectivity both as regards the
+rate of economic development and as regards the character of the
+results attained by the development. For better or worse, the
+fact that the popular habits of thought are in any degree
+dominated by this type of character can not but greatly affect
+the scope, direction, standards, and ideals of the collective
+economic life, as well as the degree of adjustment of the
+collective life to the environment.
+
+Something to a like effect is to be said of other traits that go
+to make up the barbarian character. For the purposes of economic
+theory, these further barbarian traits may be taken as
+concomitant variations of that predaceous temper of which prowess
+is an expression. In great measure they are not primarily of an
+economic character, nor do they have much direct economic
+bearing. They serve to indicate the stage of economic evolution
+to which the individual possessed of them is adapted. They are of
+importance, therefore, as extraneous tests of the degree of
+adaptation of the character in which they are comprised to the
+economic exigencies of today, but they are also to some extent
+important as being aptitudes which themselves go to increase or
+diminish the economic serviceability of the individual.
+
+As it finds expression in the life of the barbarian, prowess
+manifests itself in two main directions -- force and fraud. In
+varying degrees these two forms of expression are similarly
+present in modern warfare, in the pecuniary occupations, and in
+sports and games. Both lines of aptitudes are cultivated and
+strengthened by the life of sport as well as by the more serious
+forms of emulative life. Strategy or cunning is an element
+invariably present in games, as also in warlike pursuits and in
+the chase. In all of these employments strategy tends to develop
+into finesse and chicanery. Chicanery, falsehood, browbeating,
+hold a well-secured place in the method of procedure of any
+athletic contest and in games generally. The habitual employment
+of an umpire, and the minute technical regulations governing the
+limits and details of permissible fraud and strategic advantage,
+sufficiently attest the fact that fraudulent practices and
+attempts to overreach one's opponents are not adventitious
+features of the game. In the nature of the case habituation to
+sports should conduce to a fuller development of the aptitude for
+fraud; and the prevalence in the community of that predatory
+temperament which inclines men to sports connotes a prevalence of
+sharp practice and callous disregard of the interests of others,
+individually and collectively. Resort to fraud, in any guise and
+under any legitimation of law or custom, is an expression of a
+narrowly self-regarding habit of mind. It is needless to dwell at
+any length on the economic value of this feature of the sporting
+character.
+
+In this connection it is to be noted that the most obvious
+characteristic of the physiognomy affected by athletic and other
+sporting men is that of an extreme astuteness. The gifts and
+exploits of Ulysses are scarcely second to those of Achilles,
+either in their substantial furtherance of the game or in the
+éclat which they give the astute sporting man among his
+associates. The pantomime of astuteness is commonly the first
+step in that assimilation to the professional sporting man which
+a youth undergoes after matriculation in any reputable school, of
+the secondary or the higher education, as the case may be. And
+the physiognomy of astuteness, as a decorative feature, never
+ceases to receive the thoughtful attention of men whose serious
+interest lies in athletic games, races, or other contests of a
+similar emulative nature. As a further indication of their
+spiritual kinship, it may be pointed out that the members of the
+lower delinquent class usually show this physiognomy of
+astuteness in a marked degree, and that they very commonly show
+the same histrionic exaggeration of it that is often seen in the
+young candidate for athletic honors. This, by the way, is the
+most legible mark of what is vulgarly called "toughness" in
+youthful aspirants for a bad name.
+
+The astute man, it may be remarked, is of no economic value to
+the community -- unless it be for the purpose of sharp
+practice in dealings with other communities. His functioning is
+not a furtherance of the generic life process. At its best, in
+its direct economic bearing, it is a conversion of the economic
+substance of the collectivity to a growth alien to the collective
+life process -- very much after the analogy of what in medicine
+would be called a benign tumor, with some tendency to transgress
+the uncertain line that divides the benign from the malign
+growths. The two barbarian traits, ferocity and astuteness, go to
+make up the predaceous temper or spiritual attitude. They are the
+expressions of a narrowly self-regarding habit of mind. Both are
+highly serviceable for individual expediency in a life looking to
+invidious success. Both also have a high aesthetic value. Both
+are fostered by the pecuniary culture. But both alike are of no
+use for the purposes of the collective life.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Eleven
+
+The Belief in Luck
+
+The gambling propensity is another subsidiary trait of the
+barbarian temperament. It is a concomitant variation of character
+of almost universal prevalence among sporting men and among men
+given to warlike and emulative activities generally. This trait
+also has a direct economic value. It is recognized to be a
+hindrance to the highest industrial efficiency of the aggregate
+in any community where it prevails in an appreciable degree.
+The gambling proclivity is doubtfully to be classed as a feature
+belonging exclusively to the predatory type of human nature. The
+chief factor in the gambling habit is the belief in luck; and
+this belief is apparently traceable, at least in its elements, to
+a stage in human evolution antedating the predatory culture. It
+may well have been under the predatory culture that the belief in
+luck was developed into the form in which it is present, as the
+chief element of the gambling proclivity, in the sporting
+temperament. It probably owes the specific form under which it
+occurs in the modern culture to the predatory discipline. But the
+belief in luck is in substance a habit of more ancient date than
+the predatory culture. It is one form of the artistic
+apprehension of things. The belief seems to be a trait carried
+over in substance from an earlier phase into the barbarian
+culture, and transmuted and transmitted through that culture to a
+later stage of human development under a specific form imposed by
+the predatory discipline. But in any case, it is to be taken as
+an archaic trait, inherited from a more or less remote past, more
+or less incompatible with the requirements of the modern
+industrial process, and more or less of a hindrance to the
+fullest efficiency of the collective economic life of the
+present.
+
+While the belief in luck is the basis of the gambling habit, it
+is not the only element that enters into the habit of betting.
+Betting on the issue of contests of strength and skill proceeds
+on a further motive, without which the belief in luck would
+scarcely come in as a prominent feature of sporting life. This
+further motive is the desire of the anticipated winner, or the
+partisan of the anticipated winning side, to heighten his side's
+ascendency at the cost of the loser. Not only does the stronger
+side score a more signal victory, and the losing side suffer a
+more painful and humiliating defeat, in proportion as the
+pecuniary gain and loss in the wager is large; although this
+alone is a consideration of material weight. But the wager is
+commonly laid also with a view, not avowed in words nor even
+recognized in set terms in petto, to enhancing the chances of
+success for the contestant on which it is laid. It is felt that
+substance and solicitude expended to this end can not go for
+naught in the issue. There is here a special manifestation of the
+instinct of workmanship, backed by an even more manifest sense
+that the animistic congruity of things must decide for a
+victorious outcome for the side in whose behalf the propensity
+inherent in events has been propitiated and fortified by so much
+of conative and kinetic urging. This incentive to the wager
+expresses itself freely under the form of backing one's favorite
+in any contest, and it is unmistakably a predatory feature. It is
+as ancillary to the predaceous impulse proper that the belief in
+luck expresses itself in a wager. So that it may be set down that
+in so far as the belief in luck comes to expression in the form
+of laying a wager, it is to be accounted an integral element of
+the predatory type of character. The belief is, in its elements,
+an archaic habit which belongs substantially to early,
+undifferentiated human nature; but when this belief is helped out
+by the predatory emulative impulse, and so is differentiated into
+the specific form of the gambling habit, it is, in this
+higher-developed and specific form, to be classed as a trait of
+the barbarian character.
+
+The belief in luck is a sense of fortuitous necessity in the
+sequence of phenomena. In its various mutations and expressions,
+it is of very serious importance for the economic efficiency of
+any community in which it prevails to an appreciable extent. So
+much so as to warrant a more detailed discussion of its origin
+and content and of the bearing of its various ramifications upon
+economic structure and function, as well as a discussion of the
+relation of the leisure class to its growth, differentiation, and
+persistence. In the developed, integrated form in which it is
+most readily observed in the barbarian of the predatory culture
+or in the sporting man of modern communities, the belief
+comprises at least two distinguishable elements -- which are to
+be taken as two different phases of the same fundamental habit of
+thought, or as the same psychological factor in two successive
+phases of its evolution. The fact that these two elements are
+successive phases of the same general line of growth of belief
+does not hinder their coexisting in the habits of thought of any
+given individual. The more primitive form (or the more archaic
+phase) is an incipient animistic belief, or an animistic sense of
+relations and things, that imputes a quasi-personal character to
+facts. To the archaic man all the obtrusive and obviously
+consequential objects and facts in his environment have a
+quasi-personal individuality. They are conceived to be possessed
+of volition, or rather of propensities, which enter into the
+complex of causes and affect events in an inscrutable manner. The
+sporting man's sense of luck and chance, or of fortuitous
+necessity, is an inarticulate or inchoate animism. It applies to
+objects and situations, often in a very vague way; but it is
+usually so far defined as to imply the possibility of
+propitiating, or of deceiving and cajoling, or otherwise
+disturbing the holding of propensities resident in the objects
+which constitute the apparatus and accessories of any game of
+skill or chance. There are few sporting men who are not in the
+habit of wearing charms or talismans to which more or less of
+efficacy is felt to belong. And the proportion is not much less
+of those who instinctively dread the "hoodooing" of the
+contestants or the apparatus engaged in any contest on which they
+lay a wager; or who feel that the fact of their backing a given
+contestant or side in the game does and ought to strengthen that
+side; or to whom the "mascot" which they cultivate means
+something more than a jest.
+
+In its simple form the belief in luck is this instinctive sense
+of an inscrutable teleological propensity in objects or
+situations. Objects or events have a propensity to eventuate in a
+given end, whether this end or objective point of the sequence is
+conceived to be fortuitously given or deliberately sought. From
+this simple animism the belief shades off by insensible
+gradations into the second, derivative form or phase above
+referred to, which is a more or less articulate belief in an
+inscrutable preternatural agency. The preternatural agency works
+through the visible objects with which it is associated, but is
+not identified with these objects in point of individuality. The
+use of the term "preternatural agency" here carries no further
+implication as to the nature of the agency spoken of as
+preternatural. This is only a farther development of animistic
+belief. The preternatural agency is not necessarily conceived to
+be a personal agent in the full sense, but it is an agency which
+partakes of the attributes of personality to the extent of
+somewhat arbitrarily influencing the outcome of any enterprise,
+and especially of any contest. The pervading belief in the
+hamingia or gipta (gaefa, authna) which lends so much of color to
+the Icelandic sagas specifically, and to early Germanic
+folk-legends, is an illustration of this sense of an
+extra-physical propensity in the course of events.
+
+In this expression or form of the belief the propensity is
+scarcely personified although to a varying extent an
+individuality is imputed to it; and this individuated propensity
+is sometimes conceived to yield to circumstances, commonly to
+circumstances of a spiritual or preternatural character. A
+well-known and striking exemplification of the belief -- in a
+fairly advanced stage of differentiation and involving an
+anthropomorphic personification of the preternatural agent
+appealed to -- is afforded by the wager of battle. Here the
+preternatural agent was conceived to act on request as umpire,
+and to shape the outcome of the contest in accordance with some
+stipulated ground of decision, such as the equity or legality of
+the respective contestants' claims. The like sense of an
+inscrutable but spiritually necessary tendency in events is still
+traceable as an obscure element in current popular belief, as
+shown, for instance, by the well-accredited maxim, "Thrice is he
+armed who knows his quarrel just," -- a maxim which retains much
+of its significance for the average unreflecting person even in
+the civilized communities of today. The modern reminiscence of
+the belief in the hamingia, or in the guidance of an unseen hand,
+which is traceable in the acceptance of this maxim is faint and
+perhaps uncertain; and it seems in any case to be blended with
+other psychological moments that are not clearly of an animistic
+character.
+
+For the purpose in hand it is unnecessary to look more closely
+into the psychological process or the ethnological line of
+descent by which the later of these two animistic
+apprehensions of propensity is derived from the earlier. This
+question may be of the gravest importance to folk-psychology or
+to the theory of the evolution of creeds and cults. The same is
+true of the more fundamental question whether the two are related
+at all as successive phases in a sequence of development.
+Reference is here made to the existence of these questions only
+to remark that the interest of the present discussion does not
+lie in that direction. So far as concerns economic theory, these
+two elements or phases of the belief in luck, or in an
+extra-causal trend or propensity in things, are of substantially
+the same character. They have an economic significance as habits
+of thought which affect the individual's habitual view of the
+facts and sequences with which he comes in contact, and which
+thereby affect the individual's serviceability for the industrial
+purpose. Therefore, apart from all question of the beauty, worth,
+or beneficence of any animistic belief, there is place for a
+discussion of their economic bearing on the serviceability of the
+individual as an economic factor, and especially as an industrial
+agent.
+
+It has already been noted in an earlier connection, that in order
+to have the highest serviceability in the complex
+industrial processes of today, the individual must be endowed
+with the aptitude and the habit of readily apprehending and
+relating facts in terms of causal sequence. Both as a whole and
+in its details, the industrial process is a process of
+quantitative causation. The "intelligence" demanded of the
+workman, as well as of the director of an industrial process, is
+little else than a degree of facility in the apprehension of and
+adaptation to a quantitatively determined causal sequence. This
+facility of apprehension and adaptation is what is lacking in
+stupid workmen, and the growth of this facility is the end sought
+in their education -- so far as their education aims to enhance
+their industrial efficiency.
+
+In so far as the individual's inherited aptitudes or his training
+incline him to account for facts and sequences in other terms
+than those of causation or matter-of-fact, they lower his
+productive efficiency or industrial usefulness. This lowering of
+efficiency through a penchant for animistic methods of
+apprehending facts is especially apparent when taken in the
+mass-when a given population with an animistic turn is viewed as
+a whole. The economic drawbacks of animism are more patent and
+its consequences are more far-reaching under the modern system of
+large industry than under any other. In the modern industrial
+communities, industry is, to a constantly increasing extent,
+being organized in a comprehensive system of organs and functions
+mutually conditioning one another; and therefore freedom from all
+bias in the causal apprehension of phenomena grows constantly
+more requisite to efficiency on the part of the men concerned in
+industry. Under a system of handicraft an advantage in dexterity,
+diligence, muscular force, or endurance may, in a very large
+measure, offset such a bias in the habits of thought of the
+workmen.
+
+Similarly in agricultural industry of the traditional kind, which
+closely resembles handicraft in the nature of the demands made
+upon the workman. In both, the workman is himself the prime mover
+chiefly depended upon, and the natural forces engaged are in
+large part apprehended as inscrutable and fortuitous agencies,
+whose working lies beyond the workman's control or discretion. In
+popular apprehension there is in these forms of industry
+relatively little of the industrial process left to the fateful
+swing of a comprehensive mechanical sequence which must be
+comprehended in terms of causation and to which the operations of
+industry and the movements of the workmen must be adapted. As
+industrial methods develop, the virtues of the handicraftsman
+count for less and less as an offset to scanty intelligence or a
+halting acceptance of the sequence of cause and effect. The
+industrial organization assumes more and more of the character of
+a mechanism, in which it is man's office to discriminate and
+select what natural forces shall work out their effects in his
+service. The workman's part in industry changes from that of a
+prime mover to that of discrimination and valuation of
+quantitative sequences and mechanical facts. The faculty of a
+ready apprehension and unbiased appreciation of causes in his
+environment grows in relative economic importance and any element
+in the complex of his habits of thought which intrudes a bias at
+variance with this ready appreciation of matter-of-fact sequence
+gains proportionately in importance as a disturbing element
+acting to lower his industrial usefulness. Through its cumulative
+effect upon the habitual attitude of the population, even a
+slight or inconspicuous bias towards accounting for everyday
+facts by recourse to other ground than that of quantitative
+causation may work an appreciable lowering of the collective
+industrial efficiency of a community.
+
+The animistic habit of mind may occur in the early,
+undifferentiated form of an inchoate animistic belief, or in the
+later and more highly integrated phase in which there is an
+anthropomorphic personification of the propensity imputed to
+facts. The industrial value of such a lively animistic sense, or
+of such recourse to a preternatural agency or the guidance of an
+unseen hand, is of course very much the same in either case. As
+affects the industrial serviceability of the individual, the
+effect is of the same kind in either case; but the extent to
+which this habit of thought dominates or shapes the complex of
+his habits of thought varies with the degree of immediacy,
+urgency, or exclusiveness with which the individual habitually
+applies the animistic or anthropomorphic formula in dealing with
+the facts of his environment. The animistic habit acts in all
+cases to blur the appreciation of causal sequence; but the
+earlier, less reflected, less defined animistic sense of
+propensity may be expected to affect the intellectual processes
+of the individual in a more pervasive way than the higher forms
+of anthropomorphism. Where the animistic habit is present in the
+naive form, its scope and range of application are not defined or
+limited. It will therefore palpably affect his thinking at every
+turn of the person's life -- wherever he has to do with the
+material means of life. In the later, maturer development of
+animism, after it has been defined through the process of
+anthropomorphic elaboration, when its application has been
+limited in a somewhat consistent fashion to the remote and the
+invisible, it comes about that an increasing range of everyday
+facts are provisionally accounted for without recourse to the
+preternatural agency in which a cultivated animism expresses
+itself. A highly integrated, personified preternatural agency is
+not a convenient means of handling the trivial occurrences of
+life, and a habit is therefore easily fallen into of accounting
+for many trivial or vulgar phenomena in terms of sequence. The
+provisional explanation so arrived at is by neglect allowed to
+stand as definitive, for trivial purposes, until special
+provocation or perplexity recalls the individual to his
+allegiance. But when special exigencies arise, that is to say,
+when there is peculiar need of a full and free recourse to the
+law of cause and effect, then the individual commonly has
+recourse to the preternatural agency as a universal solvent, if
+he is possessed of an anthropomorphic belief.
+
+The extra-causal propensity or agent has a very high utility as a
+recourse in perplexity, but its utility is altogether of a
+non-economic kind. It is especially a refuge and a fund of
+comfort where it has attained the degree of consistency and
+specialization that belongs to an anthropomorphic divinity. It
+has much to commend it even on other grounds than that of
+affording the perplexed individual a means of escape from the
+difficulty of accounting for phenomena in terms of causal
+sequence. It would scarcely be in place here to dwell on the
+obvious and well-accepted merits of an anthropomorphic divinity,
+as seen from the point of view of the aesthetic, moral, or
+spiritual interest, or even as seen from the less remote
+standpoint of political, military, or social policy. The question
+here concerns the less picturesque and less urgent economic value
+of the belief in such a preternatural agency, taken as a habit of
+thought which affects the industrial serviceability of the
+believer. And even within this narrow, economic range, the
+inquiry is perforce confined to the immediate bearing of this
+habit of thought upon the believer's workmanlike serviceability,
+rather than extended to include its remoter economic effects.
+These remoter effects are very difficult to trace. The inquiry
+into them is so encumbered with current preconceptions as to the
+degree in which life is enhanced by spiritual contact with such a
+divinity, that any attempt to inquire into their economic value
+must for the present be fruitless.
+
+The immediate, direct effect of the animistic habit of thought
+upon the general frame of mind of the believer goes in the
+direction of lowering his effective intelligence in the respect
+in which intelligence is of especial consequence for modern
+industry. The effect follows, in varying degree, whether the
+preternatural agent or propensity believed in is of a higher or a
+lower cast. This holds true of the barbarian's and the sporting
+man's sense of luck and propensity, and likewise of the somewhat
+higher developed belief in an anthropomorphic divinity, such as
+is commonly possessed by the same class. It must be taken to hold
+true also -- though with what relative degree of cogency is not
+easy to say -- of the more adequately developed anthropomorphic
+cults, such as appeal to the devout civilized man. The industrial
+disability entailed by a popular adherence to one of the higher
+anthropomorphic cults may be relatively slight, but it is not to
+be overlooked. And even these high-class cults of the Western
+culture do not represent the last dissolving phase of this human
+sense of extra-causal propensity. Beyond these the same animistic
+sense shows itself also in such attenuations of anthropomorphism
+as the eighteenth-century appeal to an order of nature and
+natural rights, and in their modern representative, the
+ostensibly post-Darwinian concept of a meliorative trend in the
+process of evolution. This animistic explanation of phenomena is
+a form of the fallacy which the logicians knew by the name of
+ignava ratio. For the purposes of industry or of science it
+counts as a blunder in the apprehension and valuation of facts.
+Apart from its direct industrial consequences, the animistic
+habit has a certain significance for economic theory on other
+grounds. (1) It is a fairly reliable indication of the presence,
+and to some extent even of the degree of potency, of certain
+other archaic traits that accompany it and that are of
+substantial economic consequence; and (2) the material
+consequences of that code of devout proprieties to which the
+animistic habit gives rise in the development of an
+anthropomorphic cult are of importance both (a) as affecting the
+community's consumption of goods and the prevalent canons of
+taste, as already suggested in an earlier chapter, and (b) by
+inducing and conserving a certain habitual recognition of the
+relation to a superior, and so stiffening the current sense of
+status and allegiance.
+
+As regards the point last named (b), that body of habits of
+thought which makes up the character of any individual is in some
+sense an organic whole. A marked variation in a given direction
+at any one point carries with it, as its correlative, a
+concomitant variation in the habitual expression of life in other
+directions or other groups of activities. These various habits of
+thought, or habitual expressions of life, are all phases of the
+single life sequence of the individual; therefore a habit formed
+in response to a given stimulus will necessarily affect the
+character of the response made to other stimuli. A modification
+of human nature at any one point is a modification of human
+nature as a whole. On this ground, and perhaps to a still greater
+extent on obscurer grounds that can not be discussed here, there
+are these concomitant variations as between the different traits
+of human nature. So, for instance, barbarian peoples with a
+well-developed predatory scheme of life are commonly also
+possessed of a strong prevailing animistic habit, a well-formed
+anthropomorphic cult, and a lively sense of status. On the other
+hand, anthropomorphism and the realizing sense of an animistic
+propensity in material are less obtrusively present in the life
+of the peoples at the cultural stages which precede and which
+follow the barbarian culture. The sense of status is also
+feebler; on the whole, in peaceable communities. It is to be
+remarked that a lively, but slightly specialized, animistic
+belief is to be found in most if not all peoples living in the
+ante-predatory, savage stage of culture. The primitive savage
+takes his animism less seriously than the barbarian or the
+degenerate savage. With him it eventuates in fantastic
+myth-making, rather than in coercive superstition. The barbarian
+culture shows sportsmanship, status, and anthropomorphism. There
+is commonly observable a like concomitance of variations in the
+same respects in the individual temperament of men in the
+civilized communities of today. Those modern representatives of
+the predaceous barbarian temper that make up the sporting element
+are commonly believers in luck; at least they have a strong sense
+of an animistic propensity in things, by force of which they are
+given to gambling. So also as regards anthropomorphism in this
+class. Such of them as give in their adhesion to some creed
+commonly attach themselves to one of the naively and consistently
+anthropomorphic creeds; there are relatively few sporting men who
+seek spiritual comfort in the less anthropomorphic cults, such as
+the Unitarian or the Universalist.
+
+Closely bound up with this correlation of anthropomorphism and
+prowess is the fact that anthropomorphic cults act to
+conserve, if not to initiate, habits of mind favorable to a
+regime of status. As regards this point, it is quite impossible
+to say where the disciplinary effect of the cult ends and where
+the evidence of a concomitance of variations in inherited traits
+begins. In their finest development, the predatory temperament,
+the sense of status, and the anthropomorphic cult all together
+belong to the barbarian culture; and something of a mutual causal
+relation subsists between the three phenomena as they come into
+sight in communities on that cultural level. The way in which
+they recur in correlation in the habits and attitudes of
+individuals and classes today goes far to imply a like causal or
+organic relation between the same psychological phenomena
+considered as traits or habits of the individual. It has appeared
+at an earlier point in the discussion that the relation of
+status, as a feature of social structure, is a consequence of the
+predatory habit of life. As regards its line of derivation, it is
+substantially an elaborated expression of the predatory attitude.
+On the other hand, an anthropomorphic cult is a code of detailed
+relations of status superimposed upon the concept of a
+preternatural, inscrutable propensity in material things. So
+that, as regards the external facts of its derivation, the cult
+may be taken as an outgrowth of archaic man's pervading animistic
+sense, defined and in some degree transformed by the predatory
+habit of life, the result being a personified preternatural
+agency, which is by imputation endowed with a full complement of
+the habits of thought that characterize the man of the predatory
+culture.
+
+The grosser psychological features in the case, which have an
+immediate bearing on economic theory and are consequently to be
+taken account of here, are therefore: (a) as has appeared in an
+earlier chapter, the predatory, emulative habit of mind here
+called prowess is but the barbarian variant of the generically
+human instinct of workmanship, which has fallen into this
+specific form under the guidance of a habit of invidious
+comparison of persons; (b) the relation of status is a formal
+expression of such an invidious comparison duly gauged and graded
+according to a sanctioned schedule; (c) an anthropomorphic cult,
+in the days of its early vigor at least, is an institution the
+characteristic element of which is a relation of status between
+the human subject as inferior and the personified preternatural
+agency as superior. With this in mind, there should be no
+difficulty in recognizing the intimate relation which subsists
+between these three phenomena of human nature and of human life;
+the relation amounts to an identity in some of their substantial
+elements. On the one hand, the system of status and the predatory
+habit of life are an expression of the instinct of workmanship as
+it takes form under a custom of invidious comparison; on the
+other hand, the anthropomorphic cult and the habit of devout
+observances are an expression of men's animistic sense of a
+propensity in material things, elaborated under the guidance of
+substantially the same general habit of invidious comparison. The
+two categories -- the emulative habit of life and the habit of
+devout observances -- are therefore to be taken as complementary
+elements of the barbarian type of human nature and of its modern
+barbarian variants. They are expressions of much the same range
+of aptitudes, made in response to different sets of stimuli.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twelve
+
+Devout Observances
+
+A discoursive rehearsal of certain incidents of modern life will
+show the organic relation of the anthropomorphic cults to the
+barbarian culture and temperament. It will likewise serve to show
+how the survival and efficacy of the cults and he prevalence of
+their schedule of devout observances are related to the
+institution of a leisure class and to the springs of action
+underlying that institution. Without any intention to commend or
+to deprecate the practices to be spoken of under the head of
+devout observances, or the spiritual and intellectual traits of
+which these observances are the expression, the everyday
+phenomena of current anthropomorphic cults may be taken up from
+the point of view of the interest which they have for economic
+theory. What can properly be spoken of here are the tangible,
+external features of devout observances. The moral, as well as
+the devotional value of the life of faith lies outside of the
+scope of the present inquiry. Of course no question is here
+entertained as to the truth or beauty of the creeds on which the
+cults proceed. And even their remoter economic bearing can not be
+taken up here; the subject is too recondite and of too grave
+import to find a place in so slight a sketch.
+
+Something has been said in an earlier chapter as to the influence
+which pecuniary standards of value exert upon the processes of
+valuation carried out on other bases, not related to the
+pecuniary interest. The relation is not altogether one-sided. The
+economic standards or canons of valuation are in their turn
+influenced by extra-economic standards of value. Our judgments of
+the economic bearing of facts are to some extent shaped by the
+dominant presence of these weightier interests. There is a point
+of view, indeed, from which the economic interest is of weight
+only as being ancillary to these higher, non-economic interests.
+For the present purpose, therefore, some thought must be taken to
+isolate the economic interest or the economic hearing of these
+phenomena of anthropomorphic cults. It takes some effort to
+divest oneself of the more serious point of view, and to reach an
+economic appreciation of these facts, with as little as may be of
+the bias due to higher interests extraneous to economic theory.
+In the discussion of the sporting temperament, it has
+appeared that the sense of an animistic propensity in material
+things and events is what affords the spiritual basis of the
+sporting man's gambling habit. For the economic purpose, this
+sense of propensity is substantially the same psychological
+element as expresses itself, under a variety of forms, in
+animistic beliefs and anthropomorphic creeds. So far as concerns
+those tangible psychological features with which economic theory
+has to deal, the gambling spirit which pervades the sporting
+element shades off by insensible gradations into that frame of
+mind which finds gratification in devout observances. As seen
+from the point of view of economic theory, the sporting character
+shades off into the character of a religious devotee. Where the
+betting man's animistic sense is helped out by a somewhat
+consistent tradition, it has developed into a more or less
+articulate belief in a preternatural or hyperphysical agency,
+with something of an anthropomorphic content. And where this is
+the case, there is commonly a perceptible inclination to make
+terms with the preternatural agency by some approved method of
+approach and conciliation. This element of propitiation and
+cajoling has much in common with the crasser forms of worship --
+if not in historical derivation, at least in actual psychological
+content. It obviously shades off in unbroken continuity into what
+is recognized as superstitious practice and belief, and so
+asserts its claim to kinship with the grosser anthropomorphic
+cults.
+
+The sporting or gambling temperament, then, comprises some of the
+substantial psychological elements that go to make a believer in
+creeds and an observer of devout forms, the chief point of
+coincidence being the belief in an inscrutable propensity or a
+preternatural interposition in the sequence of events. For the
+purpose of the gambling practice the belief in preternatural
+agency may be, and ordinarily is, less closely formulated,
+especially as regards the habits of thought and the scheme of
+life imputed to the preternatural agent; or, in other words, as
+regards his moral character and his purposes in interfering in
+events. With respect to the individuality or personality of the
+agency whose presence as luck, or chance, or hoodoo, or mascot,
+etc., he feels and sometimes dreads and endeavors to evade, the
+sporting man's views are also less specific, less integrated and
+differentiated. The basis of his gambling activity is, in great
+measure, simply an instinctive sense of the presence of a
+pervasive extraphysical and arbitrary force or propensity in
+things or situations, which is scarcely recognized as a personal
+agent. The betting man is not infrequently both a believer in
+luck, in this naive sense, and at the same time a pretty staunch
+adherent of some form of accepted creed. He is especially prone
+to accept so much of the creed as concerts the inscrutable power
+and the arbitrary habits of the divinity which has won his
+confidence. In such a case he is possessed of two, or sometimes
+more than two, distinguishable phases of animism. Indeed, the
+complete series of successive phases of animistic belief is to be
+found unbroken in the spiritual furniture of any sporting
+community. Such a chain of animistic conceptions will comprise
+the most elementary form of an instinctive sense of luck and
+chance and fortuitous necessity at one end of the series,
+together with the perfectly developed anthropomorphic divinity at
+the other end, with all intervening stages of integration.
+Coupled with these beliefs in preternatural agency goes an
+instinctive shaping of conduct to conform with the surmised
+requirements of the lucky chance on the one hand, and a more or
+less devout submission to the inscrutable decrees of the divinity
+on the other hand.
+
+There is a relationship in this respect between the sporting
+temperament and the temperament of the delinquent classes; and
+the two are related to the temperament which inclines to an
+anthropomorphic cult. Both the delinquent and the sporting man
+are on the average more apt to be adherents of some accredited
+creed, and are also rather more inclined to devout observances,
+than the general average of the community. It is also noticeable
+that unbelieving members of these classes show more of a
+proclivity to become proselytes to some accredited faith than the
+average of unbelievers. This fact of observation is avowed by the
+spokesmen of sports, especially in apologizing for the more
+naively predatory athletic sports. Indeed, it is somewhat
+insistently claimed as a meritorious feature of sporting life
+that the habitual participants in athletic games are in some
+degree peculiarly given to devout practices. And it is observable
+that the cult to which sporting men and the predaceous delinquent
+classes adhere, or to which proselytes from these classes
+commonly attach themselves, is ordinarily not one of the
+so-called higher faiths, but a cult which has to do with a
+thoroughly anthropomorphic divinity. Archaic, predatory human
+nature is not satisfied with abstruse conceptions of a dissolving
+personality that shades off into the concept of quantitative
+causal sequence, such as the speculative, esoteric creeds of
+Christendom impute to the First Cause, Universal Intelligence,
+World Soul, or Spiritual Aspect. As an instance of a cult of the
+character which the habits of mind of the athlete and the
+delinquent require, may be cited that branch of the church
+militant known as the Salvation Army. This is to some extent
+recruited from the lower-class delinquents, and it appears to
+comprise also, among its officers especially, a larger proportion
+of men with a sporting record than the proportion of such men in
+the aggregate population of the community.
+
+College athletics afford a case in point. It is contended by
+exponents of the devout element in college life -- and there
+seems to be no ground for disputing the claim -- that the
+desirable athletic material afforded by any student body in this
+country is at the same time predominantly religious; or that it
+is at least given to devout observances to a greater degree than
+the average of those students whose interest in athletics and
+other college sports is less. This is what might be expected on
+theoretical grounds. It may be remarked, by the way, that from
+one point of view this is felt to reflect credit on the college
+sporting life, on athletic games, and on those persons who occupy
+themselves with these matters. It happens not frequently that
+college sporting men devote themselves to religious propaganda,
+either as a vocation or as a by-occupation; and it is observable
+that when this happens they are likely to become propagandists of
+some one of the more anthropomorphic cults. In their teaching
+they are apt to insist chiefly on the personal relation of status
+which subsists between an anthropomorphic divinity and the human
+subject.
+
+This intimate relation between athletics and devout
+observance among college men is a fact of sufficient notoriety;
+but it has a special feature to which attention has not been
+called, although it is obvious enough. The religious zeal which
+pervades much of the college sporting element is especially prone
+to express itself in an unquestioning devoutness and a naive and
+complacent submission to an inscrutable Providence. It therefore
+by preference seeks affliation with some one of those lay
+religious organizations which occupy themselves with the spread
+of the exoteric forms of faith -- as, e.g., the Young Men's
+Christian Association or the Young People's Society for Christian
+Endeavor. These lay bodies are organized to further "practical"
+religion; and as if to enforce the argument and firmly establish
+the close relationship between the sporting temperament and the
+archaic devoutness, these lay religious bodies commonly devote
+some appreciable portion of their energies to the furtherance of
+athletic contests and similar games of chance and skill. It might
+even be said that sports of this kind are apprehended to have
+some efficacy as a means of grace. They are apparently useful as
+a means of proselyting, and as a means of sustaining the devout
+attitude in converts once made. That is to say, the games which
+give exercise to the animistic sense and to the emulative
+propensity help to form and to conserve that habit of mind to
+which the more exoteric cults are congenial. Hence, in the hands
+of the lay organizations, these sporting activities come to do
+duty as a novitiate or a means of induction into that fuller
+unfolding of the life of spiritual status which is the privilege
+of the full communicant along.
+
+That the exercise of the emulative and lower animistic
+proclivities are substantially useful for the devout purpose
+seems to be placed beyond question by the fact that the
+priesthood of many denominations is following the lead of the lay
+organizations in this respect. Those ecclesiastical organizations
+especially which stand nearest the lay organizations in their
+insistence on practical religion have gone some way towards
+adopting these or analogous practices in connection with the
+traditional devout observances. So there are "boys' brigades,"
+and other organizations, under clerical sanction, acting to
+develop the emulative proclivity and the sense of status in the
+youthful members of the congregation. These pseudo-military
+organizations tend to elaborate and accentuate the proclivity to
+emulation and invidious comparison, and so strengthen the native
+facility for discerning and approving the relation of personal
+mastery and subservience. And a believer is eminently a person
+who knows how to obey and accept chastisement with good grace.
+But the habits of thought which these practices foster and
+conserve make up but one half of the substance of the
+anthropomorphic cults. The other, complementary element of devout
+life -- the animistic habit of mind -- is recruited and conserved
+by a second range of practices organized under clerical sanction.
+These are the class of gambling practices of which the church
+bazaar or raffle may be taken as the type. As indicating the
+degree of legitimacy of these practices in connection with devout
+observances proper, it is to be remarked that these raffles, and
+the like trivial opportunities for gambling, seem to appeal with
+more effect to the common run of the members of religious
+organizations than they do to persons of a less devout habit of
+mind.
+
+All this seems to argue, on the one hand, that the same
+temperament inclines people to sports as inclines them to the
+anthropomorphic cults, and on the other hand that the habituation
+to sports, perhaps especially to athletic sports, acts to develop
+the propensities which find satisfaction in devout observances.
+Conversely; it also appears that habituation to these observances
+favors the growth of a proclivity for athletic sports and for all
+games that give play to the habit of invidious comparison and of
+the appeal to luck. Substantially the same range of propensities
+finds expression in both these directions of the spiritual life.
+That barbarian human nature in which the predatory instinct and
+the animistic standpoint predominate is normally prone to both.
+The predatory habit of mind involves an accentuated sense of
+personal dignity and of the relative standing of individuals. The
+social structure in which the predatory habit has been the
+dominant factor in the shaping of institutions is a structure
+based on status. The pervading norm in the predatory community's
+scheme of life is the relation of superior and inferior, noble
+and base, dominant and subservient persons and classes, master
+and slave. The anthropomorphic cults have come down from that
+stage of industrial development and have been shaped by the same
+scheme of economic differentiation -- a differentiation into
+consumer and producer -- and they are pervaded by the same
+dominant principle of mastery and subservience. The cults impute
+to their divinity the habits of thought answering to the stage of
+economic differentiation at which the cults took shape. The
+anthropomorphic divinity is conceived to be punctilious in all
+questions of precedence and is prone to an assertion of mastery
+and an arbitrary exercise of power -- an habitual resort to force
+as the final arbiter.
+
+In the later and maturer formulations of the anthropomorphic
+creed this imputed habit of dominance on the part of a divinity
+of awful presence and inscrutable power is chastened into "the
+fatherhood of God." The spiritual attitude and the aptitudes
+imputed to the preternatural agent are still such as belong under
+the regime of status, but they now assume the patriarchal cast
+characteristic of the quasi-peaceable stage of culture. Still it
+is to be noted that even in this advanced phase of the cult the
+observances in which devoutness finds expression consistently aim
+to propitiate the divinity by extolling his greatness and glory
+and by professing subservience and fealty. The act of
+propitiation or of worship is designed to appeal to a sense of
+status imputed to the inscrutable power that is thus approached.
+The propitiatory formulas most in vogue are still such as carry
+or imply an invidious comparison. A loyal attachment to the
+person of an anthropomorphic divinity endowed with such an
+archaic human nature implies the like archaic propensities in the
+devotee. For the purposes of economic theory, the relation of
+fealty, whether to a physical or to an extraphysical person, is
+to be taken as a variant of that personal subservience which
+makes up so large a share of the predatory and the
+quasi-peaceable scheme of life.
+
+The barbarian conception of the divinity, as a warlike chieftain
+inclined to an overbearing manner of government, has been greatly
+softened through the milder manners and the soberer habits of
+life that characterize those cultural phases which lie between
+the early predatory stage and the present. But even after this
+chastening of the devout fancy, and the consequent mitigation of
+the harsher traits of conduct and character that are currently
+imputed to the divinity, there still remains in the popular
+apprehension of the divine nature and temperament a very
+substantial residue of the barbarian conception. So it comes
+about, for instance, that in characterizing the divinity and his
+relations to the process of human life, speakers and writers are
+still able to make effective use of similes borrowed from the
+vocabulary of war and of the predatory manner of life, as well as
+of locutions which involve an invidious comparison. Figures of
+speech of this import are used with good effect even in
+addressing the less warlike modern audiences, made up of
+adherents of the blander variants of the creed. This effective
+use of barbarian epithets and terms of comparison by popular
+speakers argues that the modern generation has retained a lively
+appreciation of the dignity and merit of the barbarian virtues;
+and it argues also that there is a degree of congruity between
+the devout attitude and the predatory habit of mind. It is only
+on second thought, if at all, that the devout fancy of modern
+worshippers revolts at the imputation of ferocious and vengeful
+emotions and actions to the object of their adoration. It is a
+matter of common observation that sanguinary epithets applied to
+the divinity have a high aesthetic and honorific value in the
+popular apprehension. That is to say, suggestions which these
+epithets carry are very acceptable to our unreflecting
+apprehension.
+
+  Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
+  He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
+  He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword;
+  His truth is marching on.
+
+The guiding habits of thought of a devout person move on the
+plane of an archaic scheme of life which has outlived much of its
+usefulness for the economic exigencies of the collective life of
+today. In so far as the economic organization fits the exigencies
+of the collective life of today, it has outlived the regime of
+status, and has no use and no place for a relation of personal
+subserviency. So far as concerns the economic efficiency of the
+community, the sentiment of personal fealty, and the general
+habit of mind of which that sentiment is an expression, are
+survivals which cumber the ground and hinder an adequate
+adjustment of human institutions to the existing situation. The
+habit of mind which best lends itself to the purposes of a
+peaceable, industrial community, is that matter-of-fact temper
+which recognizes the value of material facts simply as opaque
+items in the mechanical sequence. It is that frame of mind which
+does not instinctively impute an animistic propensity to things,
+nor resort to preternatural intervention as an explanation of
+perplexing phenomena, nor depend on an unseen hand to shape the
+course of events to human use. To meet the requirements of the
+highest economic efficiency under modern conditions, the world
+process must habitually be apprehended in terms of quantitative,
+dispassionate force and sequence.
+
+As seen from the point of view of the later economic
+exigencies, devoutness is, perhaps in all cases, to be looked
+upon as a survival from an earlier phase of associated life -- a
+mark of arrested spiritual development. Of course it remains true
+that in a community where the economic structure is still
+substantially a system of status; where the attitude of the
+average of persons in the community is consequently shaped by and
+adapted to the relation of personal dominance and personal
+subservience; or where for any other reason -- of tradition or of
+inherited aptitude -- the population as a whole is strongly
+inclined to devout observances; there a devout habit of mind in
+any individual, not in excess of the average of the community,
+must be taken simply as a detail of the prevalent habit of life.
+In this light, a devout individual in a devout community can not
+be called a case of reversion, since he is abreast of the average
+of the community. But as seen from the point of view of the
+modern industrial situation, exceptional devoutness -- devotional
+zeal that rises appreciably above the average pitch of devoutness
+in the community -- may safely be set down as in all cases an
+atavistic trait.
+
+It is, of course, equally legitimate to consider these phenomena
+from a different point of view. They may be appreciated for a
+different purpose, and the characterization here offered may be
+turned about. In speaking from the point of view of the
+devotional interest, or the interest of devout taste, it may,
+with equal cogency, be said that the spiritual attitude bred in
+men by the modern industrial life is unfavorable to a free
+development of the life of faith. It might fairly be objected to
+the later development of the industrial process that its
+discipline tends to "materialism," to the elimination of filial
+piety. From the aesthetic point of view, again, something to a
+similar purport might be said. But, however legitimate and
+valuable these and the like reflections may be for their purpose,
+they would not be in place in the present inquiry, which is
+exclusively concerned with the valuation of these phenomena from
+the economic point of view.
+
+The grave economic significance of the anthropomorphic habit of
+mind and of the addiction to devout observances must serve as
+apology for speaking further on a topic which it can not but be
+distasteful to discuss at all as an economic phenomenon in a
+community so devout as ours. Devout observances are of economic
+importance as an index of a concomitant variation of temperament,
+accompanying the predatory habit of mind and so indicating the
+presence of industrially disserviceable traits. They indicate the
+presence of a mental attitude which has a certain economic value
+of its own by virtue of its influence upon the industrial
+serviceability of the individual. But they are also of importance
+more directly, in modifying the economic activities of the
+community, especially as regards the distribution and consumption
+of goods.
+
+The most obvious economic bearing of these observances is seen in
+the devout consumption of goods and services. The
+consumption of ceremonial paraphernalia required by any cult, in
+the way of shrines, temples, churches, vestments, sacrifices,
+sacraments, holiday attire, etc., serves no immediate material
+end. All this material apparatus may, therefore, without implying
+deprecation, be broadly characterized as items of conspicuous
+waste. The like is true in a general way of the personal service
+consumed under this head; such as priestly education, priestly
+service, pilgrimages, fasts, holidays, household devotions, and
+the like. At the same time the observances in the execution of
+which this consumption takes place serve to extend and protract
+the vogue of those habits of thought on which an anthropomorphic
+cult rests. That is to say, they further the habits of thought
+characteristic of the regime of status. They are in so far an
+obstruction to the most effective organization of industry under
+modern circumstances; and are, in the first instance,
+antagonistic to the development of economic institutions in the
+direction required by the situation of today. For the present
+purpose, the indirect as well as the direct effects of this
+consumption are of the nature of a curtailment of the community's
+economic efficiency. In economic theory, then, and considered in
+its proximate consequences, the consumption of goods and effort
+in the service of an anthropomorphic divinity means a lowering of
+the vitality of the community. What may be the remoter, indirect,
+moral effects of this class of consumption does not admit of a
+succinct answer, and it is a question which can not be taken up
+here.
+
+It will be to the point, however, to note the general economic
+character of devout consumption, in comparison with consumption
+for other purposes. An indication of the range of motives and
+purposes from which devout consumption of goods proceeds will
+help toward an appreciation of the value both of this consumption
+itself and of the general habit of mind to which it is congenial.
+There is a striking parallelism, if not rather a substantial
+identity of motive, between the consumption which goes to the
+service of an anthropomorphic divinity and that which goes to the
+service of a gentleman of leisure chieftain or patriarch -- in
+the upper class of society during the barbarian culture. Both in
+the case of the chieftain and in that of the divinity there are
+expensive edifices set apart for the behoof of the person served.
+These edifices, as well as the properties which supplement them
+in the service, must not be common in kind or grade; they always
+show a large element of conspicuous waste. It may also be noted
+that the devout edifices are invariably of an archaic cast in
+their structure and fittings. So also the servants, both of the
+chieftain and of the divinity, must appear in the presence
+clothed in garments of a special, ornate character. The
+characteristic economic feature of this apparel is a more than
+ordinarily accentuated conspicuous waste, together with the
+secondary feature -- more accentuated in the case of the priestly
+servants than in that of the servants or courtiers of the
+barbarian potentate -- that this court dress must always be in
+some degree of an archaic fashion. Also the garments worn by the
+lay members of the community when they come into the presence,
+should be of a more expensive kind than their everyday apparel.
+Here, again, the parallelism between the usage of the chieftain's
+audience hall and that of the sanctuary is fairly well marked. In
+this respect there is required a certain ceremonial "cleanness"
+of attire, the essential feature of which, in the economic
+respect, is that the garments worn on these occasions should
+carry as little suggestion as may be of any industrial occupation
+or of any habitual addiction to such employments as are of
+material use.
+
+This requirement of conspicuous waste and of ceremonial cleanness
+from the traces of industry extends also to the apparel, and in a
+less degree to the food, which is consumed on sacred holidays;
+that is to say, on days set apart -- tabu -- for the divinity or
+for some member of the lower ranks of the preternatural leisure
+class. In economic theory, sacred holidays are obviously to be
+construed as a season of vicarious leisure performed for the
+divinity or saint in whose name the tabu is imposed and to whose
+good repute the abstention from useful effort on these days is
+conceived to inure. The characteristic feature of all such
+seasons of devout vicarious leisure is a more or less rigid tabu
+on all activity that is of human use. In the case of fast-days
+the conspicuous abstention from gainful occupations and from all
+pursuits that (materially) further human life is further
+accentuated by compulsory abstinence from such consumption as
+would conduce to the comfort or the fullness of life of the
+consumer.
+
+It may be remarked, parenthetically, that secular holidays are of
+the same origin, by slightly remoter derivation. They shade off
+by degrees from the genuinely sacred days, through an
+intermediate class of semi-sacred birthdays of kings and great
+men who have been in some measure canonized, to the deliberately
+invented holiday set apart to further the good repute of some
+notable event or some striking fact, to which it is intended to
+do honor, or the good fame of which is felt to be in need of
+repair. The remoter refinement in the employment of vicarious
+leisure as a means of augmenting the good repute of a phenomenon
+or datum is seen at its best in its very latest application. A
+day of vicarious leisure has in some communities been set apart
+as Labor Day. This observance is designed to augment the prestige
+of the fact of labor, by the archaic, predatory method of a
+compulsory abstention from useful effort. To this datum of
+labor-in-general is imputed the good repute attributable to the
+pecuniary strength put in evidence by abstaining from labor.
+Sacred holidays, and holidays generally, are of the nature of a
+tribute levied on the body of the people. The tribute is paid in
+vicarious leisure, and the honorific effect which emerges is
+imputed to the person or the fact for whose good repute the
+holiday has been instituted. Such a tithe of vicarious leisure is
+a perquisite of all members of the preternatural leisure class
+and is indispensable to their good fame. Un saint qu'on ne chôme
+pas is indeed a saint fallen on evil days.
+
+Besides this tithe of vicarious leisure levied on the laity,
+there are also special classes of persons -- the various grades
+of priests and hierodules -- whose time is wholly set apart for a
+similar service. It is not only incumbent on the priestly class
+to abstain from vulgar labor, especially so far as it is
+lucrative or is apprehended to contribute to the temporal
+well-being of mankind. The tabu in the case of the priestly class
+goes farther and adds a refinement in the form of an injunction
+against their seeking worldly gain even where it may be had
+without debasing application to industry. It is felt to be
+unworthy of the servant of the divinity, or rather unworthy the
+dignity of the divinity whose servant he is, that he should seek
+material gain or take thought for temporal matters. "Of all
+contemptible things a man who pretends to be a priest of God and
+is a priest to his own comforts and ambitions is the most
+contemptible." There is a line of discrimination, which a
+cultivated taste in matters of devout observance finds little
+difficulty in drawing, between such actions and conduct as
+conduce to the fullness of human life and such as conduce to the
+good fame of the anthropomorphic divinity; and the activity of
+the priestly class, in the ideal barbarian scheme, falls wholly
+on the hither side of this line. What falls within the range of
+economics falls below the proper level of solicitude of the
+priesthood in its best estate. Such apparent exceptions to this
+rule as are afforded, for instance, by some of the medieval
+orders of monks (the members of which actually labored to some
+useful end), scarcely impugn the rule. These outlying orders of
+the priestly class are not a sacerdotal element in the full sense
+of the term. And it is noticeable also that these doubtfully
+sacerdotal orders, which countenanced their members in earning a
+living, fell into disrepute through offending the sense of
+propriety in the communities where they existed.
+
+The priest should not put his hand to mechanically
+productive work; but he should consume in large measure. But even
+as regards his consumption it is to be noted that it should take
+such forms as do not obviously conduce to his own comfort or
+fullness of life; it should conform to the rules governing
+vicarious consumption, as explained under that head in an earlier
+chapter. It is not ordinarily in good form for the priestly class
+to appear well fed or in hilarious spirits. Indeed, in many of
+the more elaborate cults the injunction against other than
+vicarious consumption by this class frequently goes so far as to
+enjoin mortification of the flesh. And even in those modern
+denominations which have been organized under the latest
+formulations of the creed, in a modern industrial community, it
+is felt that all levity and avowed zest in the enjoyment of the
+good things of this world is alien to the true clerical decorum.
+Whatever suggests that these servants of an invisible master are
+living a life, not of devotion to their master's good fame, but
+of application to their own ends, jars harshly on our
+sensibilities as something fundamentally and eternally wrong.
+They are a servant class, although, being servants of a very
+exalted master, they rank high in the social scale by virtue of
+this borrowed light. Their consumption is vicarious consumption;
+and since, in the advanced cults, their master has no need of
+material gain, their occupation is vicarious leisure in the full
+sense. "Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do,
+do all to the glory of God." It may be added that so far as the
+laity is assimilated to the priesthood in the respect that they
+are conceived to be servants of the divinity. So far this imputed
+vicarious character attaches also to the layman's life. The range
+of application of this corollary is somewhat wide. It applies
+especially to such movements for the reform or rehabilitation of
+the religious life as are of an austere, pietistic, ascetic cast
+-- where the human subject is conceived to hold his life by a
+direct servile tenure from his spiritual sovereign. That is to
+say, where the institution of the priesthood lapses, or where
+there is an exceptionally lively sense of the immediate and
+masterful presence of the divinity in the affairs of life, there
+the layman is conceived to stand in an immediate servile relation
+to the divinity, and his life is construed to be a performance of
+vicarious leisure directed to the enhancement of his master's
+repute. In such cases of reversion there is a return to the
+unmediated relation of subservience, as the dominant fact of the
+devout attitude. The emphasis is thereby throw on an austere and
+discomforting vicarious leisure, to the neglect of conspicuous
+consumption as a means of grace.
+
+A doubt will present itself as to the full legitimacy of this
+characterization of the sacerdotal scheme of life, on the ground
+that a considerable proportion of the modern priesthood departs
+from the scheme in many details. The scheme does not hold good
+for the clergy of those denominations which have in some measure
+diverged from the old established schedule of beliefs or
+observances. These take thought, at least ostensibly or
+permissively, for the temporal welfare of the laity, as well as
+for their own. Their manner of life, not only in the privacy of
+their own household, but often even before the public, does not
+differ in an extreme degree from that of secular-minded persons,
+either in its ostensible austerity or in the archaism of its
+apparatus. This is truest for those denominations that have
+wandered the farthest. To this objection it is to be said that we
+have here to do not with a discrepancy in the theory of
+sacerdotal life, but with an imperfect conformity to the scheme
+on the part of this body of clergy. They are but a partial and
+imperfect representative of the priesthood, and must not be taken
+as exhibiting the sacerdotal scheme of life in an authentic and
+competent manner. The clergy of the sects and denominations might
+be characterized as a half-caste priesthood, or a priesthood in
+process of becoming or of reconstitution. Such a priesthood may
+be expected to show the characteristics of the sacerdotal office
+only as blended and obscured with alien motives and traditions,
+due to the disturbing presence of other factors than those of
+animism and status in the purposes of the organizations to which
+this non-conforming fraction of the priesthood belongs.
+
+Appeal may be taken direct to the taste of any person with a
+discriminating and cultivated sense of the sacerdotal
+proprieties, or to the prevalent sense of what constitutes
+clerical decorum in any community at all accustomed to think or
+to pass criticism on what a clergyman may or may not do without
+blame. Even in the most extremely secularized denominations,
+there is some sense of a distinction that should be observed
+between the sacerdotal and the lay scheme of life. There is no
+person of sensibility but feels that where the members of this
+denominational or sectarian clergy depart from traditional usage,
+in the direction of a less austere or less archaic demeanor and
+apparel, they are departing from the ideal of priestly decorum.
+There is probably no community and no sect within the range of
+the Western culture in which the bounds of permissible indulgence
+are not drawn appreciably closer for the incumbent of the
+priestly office than for the common layman. If the priest's own
+sense of sacerdotal propriety does not effectually impose a
+limit, the prevalent sense of the proprieties on the part of the
+community will commonly assert itself so obtrusively as to lead
+to his conformity or his retirement from office.
+
+Few if any members of any body of clergy, it may be added, would
+avowedly seek an increase of salary for gain's sake; and if such
+avowal were openly made by a clergyman, it would be found
+obnoxious to the sense of propriety among his congregation. It
+may also be noted in this connection that no one but the scoffers
+and the very obtuse are not instinctively grieved inwardly at a
+jest from the pulpit; and that there are none whose respect for
+their pastor does not suffer through any mark of levity on his
+part in any conjuncture of life, except it be levity of a
+palpably histrionic kind -- a constrained unbending of dignity.
+The diction proper to the sanctuary and to the priestly office
+should also carry little if any suggestion of effective everyday
+life, and should not draw upon the vocabulary of modern trade or
+industry. Likewise, one's sense of the proprieties is readily
+offended by too detailed and intimate a handling of industrial
+and other purely human questions at the hands of the clergy.
+There is a certain level of generality below which a cultivated
+sense of the proprieties in homiletical discourse will not permit
+a well-bred clergyman to decline in his discussion of temporal
+interests. These matters that are of human and secular
+consequence simply, should properly be handled with such a degree
+of generality and aloofness as may imply that the speaker
+represents a master whose interest in secular affairs goes only
+so far as to permissively countenance them.
+
+It is further to be noticed that the non-conforming sects and
+variants whose priesthood is here under discussion, vary among
+themselves in the degree of their conformity to the ideal scheme
+of sacerdotal life. In a general way it will be found that the
+divergence in this respect is widest in the case of the
+relatively young denominations, and especially in the case of
+such of the newer denominations as have chiefly a lower
+middle-class constituency. They commonly show a large admixture
+of humanitarian, philanthropic, or other motives which can not be
+classed as expressions of the devotional attitude; such as the
+desire of learning or of conviviality, which enter largely into
+the effective interest shown by members of these organizations.
+The non-conforming or sectarian movements have commonly proceeded
+from a mixture of motives, some of which are at variance with
+that sense of status on which the priestly office rests.
+Sometimes, indeed, the motive has been in good part a revulsion
+against a system of status. Where this is the case the
+institution of the priesthood has broken down in the transition,
+at least partially. The spokesman of such an organization is at
+the outset a servant and representative of the organization,
+rather than a member of a special priestly class and the
+spokesman of a divine master. And it is only by a process of
+gradual specialization that, in succeeding generations, this
+spokesman regains the position of priest, with a full investiture
+of sacerdotal authority, and with its accompanying austere,
+archaic and vicarious manner of life. The like is true of the
+breakdown and redintegration of devout ritual after such a
+revulsion. The priestly office, the scheme of sacerdotal life,
+and the schedule of devout observances are rehabilitated only
+gradually, insensibly, and with more or less variation in
+details, as a persistent human sense of devout propriety
+reasserts its primacy in questions touching the interest in the
+preternatural -- and it may be added, as the organization
+increases in wealth, and so acquires more of the point of view
+and the habits of thought of a leisure class.
+
+Beyond the priestly class, and ranged in an ascending
+hierarchy,ordinarily comes a superhuman vicarious leisure class
+of saints, angels, etc. -- or their equivalents in the ethnic
+cults. These rise in grade, one above another, according to
+elaborate system of status. The principle of status runs through
+the entire hierarchical system, both visible and invisible. The
+good fame of these several orders of the supernatural hierarchy
+also commonly requires a certain tribute of vicarious consumption
+and vicarious leisure. In many cases they accordingly have
+devoted to their service sub-orders of attendants or dependents
+who perform a vicarious leisure for them, after much the same
+fashion as was found in an earlier chapter to be true of the
+dependent leisure class under the patriarchal system.
+
+It may not appear without reflection how these devout observances
+and the peculiarity of temperament which they imply, or the
+consumption of goods and services which is comprised in the cult,
+stand related to the leisure class of a modern community, or to
+the economic motives of which that class is the exponent in the
+modern scheme of life to this end a summary review of certain
+facts bearing on this relation will be useful. It appears from an
+earlier passage in this discussion that for the purpose of the
+collective life of today, especially so far as concerns the
+industrial efficiency of the modern community, the characteristic
+traits of the devout temperament are a hindrance rather than a
+help. It should accordingly be found that the modern industrial
+life tends selectively to eliminate these traits of human nature
+from the spiritual constitution of the classes that are
+immediately engaged in the industrial process. It should hold
+true, approximately, that devoutness is declining or tending to
+obsolescence among the members of what may be called the
+effective industrial community. At the same time it should appear
+that this aptitude or habit survives in appreciably greater vigor
+among those classes which do not immediately or primarily enter
+into the community's life process as an industrial factor.
+
+It has already been pointed out that these latter classes, which
+live by, rather than in, the industrial process, are roughly
+comprised under two categories (1) the leisure class proper,
+which is shielded from the stress of the economic situation; and
+(2) the indigent classes, including the lower-class delinquents,
+which are unduly exposed to the stress. In the case of the former
+class an archaic habit of mind persists because no effectual
+economic pressure constrains this class to an adaptation of its
+habits of thought to the changing situation; while in the latter
+the reason for a failure to adjust their habits of thought to the
+altered requirements of industrial efficiency is innutrition,
+absence of such surplus of energy as is needed in order to make
+the adjustment with facility, together with a lack of opportunity
+to acquire and become habituated to the modern point of view. The
+trend of the selective process runs in much the same direction in
+both cases.
+
+From the point of view which the modern industrial life
+inculcates, phenomena are habitually subsumed under the
+quantitative relation of mechanical sequence. The indigent
+classes not only fall short of the modicum of leisure necessary
+in order to appropriate and assimilate the more recent
+generalizations of science which this point of view involves, but
+they also ordinarily stand in such a relation of personal
+dependence or subservience to their pecuniary superiors as
+materially to retard their emancipation from habits of thought
+proper to the regime of status. The result is that these classes
+in some measure retain that general habit of mind the chief
+expression of which is a strong sense of personal status, and of
+which devoutness is one feature.
+
+In the older communities of the European culture, the hereditary
+leisure class, together with the mass of the indigent population,
+are given to devout observances in an appreciably higher degree
+than the average of the industrious middle class, wherever a
+considerable class of the latter character exists. But in some of
+these countries, the two categories of conservative humanity
+named above comprise virtually the whole population. Where these
+two classes greatly preponderate, their bent shapes popular
+sentiment to such an extent as to bear down any possible
+divergent tendency in the inconsiderable middle class, and
+imposes a devout attitude upon the whole community.
+
+This must, of course, not be construed to say that such
+communities or such classes as are exceptionally prone to devout
+observances tend to conform in any exceptional degree to the
+specifications of any code of morals that we may be accustomed to
+associate with this or that confession of faith. A large measure
+of the devout habit of mind need not carry with it a strict
+observance of the injunctions of the Decalogue or of the common
+law. Indeed, it is becoming somewhat of a commonplace with
+observers of criminal life in European communities that the
+criminal and dissolute classes are, if anything, rather more
+devout, and more naively so, than the average of the population.
+It is among those who constitute the pecuniary middle class and
+the body of law-abiding citizens that a relative exemption from
+the devotional attitude is to be looked for. Those who best
+appreciate the merits of the higher creeds and observances would
+object to all this and say that the devoutness of the low-class
+delinquents is a spurious, or at the best a superstitious
+devoutness; and the point is no doubt well taken and goes
+directly and cogently to the purpose intended. But for the
+purpose of the present inquiry these extra-economic,
+extra-psychological distinctions must perforce be neglected,
+however valid and however decisive they may be for the purpose
+for which they are made.
+
+What has actually taken place with regard to class
+emancipation from the habit of devout observance is shown by the
+latter-day complaint of the clergy -- that the churches are
+losing the sympathy of the artisan classes, and are losing their
+hold upon them. At the same time it is currently believed that
+the middle class, commonly so called, is also falling away in the
+cordiality of its support of the church, especially so far as
+regards the adult male portion of that class. These are currently
+recognized phenomena, and it might seem that a simple reference
+to these facts should sufficiently substantiate the general
+position outlined. Such an appeal to the general phenomena of
+popular church attendance and church membership may be
+sufficiently convincing for the proposition here advanced. But it
+will still be to the purpose to trace in some detail the course
+of events and the particular forces which have wrought this
+change in the spiritual attitude of the more advanced industrial
+communities of today. It will serve to illustrate the manner in
+which economic causes work towards a secularization of men's
+habits of thought. In this respect the American community should
+afford an exceptionally convincing illustration, since this
+community has been the least trammelled by external circumstances
+of any equally important industrial aggregate.
+
+After making due allowance for exceptions and sporadic departures
+from the normal, the situation here at the present time may be
+summarized quite briefly. As a general rule the classes that are
+low in economic efficiency, or in intelligence, or both, are
+peculiarly devout -- as, for instance, the Negro population of
+the South, much of the lower-class foreign
+population, much of the rural population, especially in those
+sections which are backward in education, in the stage of
+development of their industry, or in respect of their industrial
+contact with the rest of the community. So also such fragments as
+we possess of a specialized or hereditary indigent class, or of a
+segregated criminal or dissolute class; although among these
+latter the devout habit of mind is apt to take the form of a
+naive animistic belief in luck and in the efficacy of shamanistic
+practices perhaps more frequently than it takes the form of a
+formal adherence to any accredited creed. The artisan class, on
+the other hand, is notoriously falling away from the accredited
+anthropomorphic creeds and from all devout observances. This
+class is in an especial degree exposed to the characteristic
+intellectual and spiritual stress of modern organized industry,
+which requires a constant recognition of the undisguised
+phenomena of impersonal, matter-of-fact sequence and an
+unreserved conformity to the law of cause and effect. This class
+is at the same time not underfed nor over-worked to such an
+extent as to leave no margin of energy for the work of
+adaptation.
+
+The case of the lower or doubtful leisure class in America -- the
+middle class commonly so called -- is somewhat peculiar. It
+differs in respect of its devotional life from its European
+counterpart, but it differs in degree and method rather than in
+substance. The churches still have the pecuniary support of this
+class; although the creeds to which the class adheres with the
+greatest facility are relatively poor in anthropomorphic content.
+At the same time the effective middle-class congregation tends,
+in many cases, more or less remotely perhaps, to become a
+congregation of women and minors. There is an appreciable lack of
+devotional fervor among the adult males of the middle class,
+although to a considerable extent there survives among them a
+certain complacent, reputable assent to the outlines of the
+accredited creed under which they were born. Their everyday life
+is carried on in a more or less close contact with the industrial
+process.
+
+This peculiar sexual differentiation, which tends to
+delegate devout observances to the women and their children, is
+due, at least in part, to the fact that the middle-class women
+are in great measure a (vicarious) leisure class. The same is
+true in a less degree of the women of the lower, artisan classes.
+They live under a regime of status handed down from an earlier
+stage of industrial development, and thereby they preserve a
+frame of mind and habits of thought which incline them to an
+archaic view of things generally. At the same time they stand in
+no such direct organic relation to the industrial process at
+large as would tend strongly to break down those habits of
+thought which, for the modern industrial purpose, are obsolete.
+That is to say, the peculiar devoutness of women is a particular
+expression of that conservatism which the women of civilized
+communities owe, in great measure, to their economic position.
+For the modern man the patriarchal relation of status is by no
+means the dominant feature of life; but for the women on the
+other hand, and for the upper middle-class women especially,
+confined as they are by prescription and by economic
+circumstances to their "domestic sphere," this relation is the
+most real and most formative factor of life. Hence a habit of
+mind favorable to devout observances and to the interpretation of
+the facts of life generally in terms of personal status. The
+logic, and the logical processes, of her everyday domestic life
+are carried over into the realm of the supernatural, and the
+woman finds herself at home and content in a range of ideas which
+to the man are in great measure alien and imbecile.
+
+Still the men of this class are also not devoid of piety,
+although it is commonly not piety of an aggressive or exuberant
+kind. The men of the upper middle class commonly take a more
+complacent attitude towards devout observances than the men of
+the artisan class. This may perhaps be explained in part by
+saying that what is true of the women of the class is true to a
+less extent also of the men. They are to an appreciable extent a
+sheltered class; and the patriarchal relation of status which
+still persists in their conjugal life and in their habitual use
+of servants, may also act to conserve an archaic habit of mind
+and may exercise a retarding influence upon the process of
+secularization which their habits of thought are undergoing. The
+relations of the American middle-class man to the economic
+community, however, are usually pretty close and exacting;
+although it may be remarked, by the way and in qualification,
+that their economic activity frequently also partakes in some
+degree of the patriarchal or quasi-predatory character. The
+occupations which are in good repute among this class and which
+have most to do with shaping the class habits of thought, are the
+pecuniary occupations which have been spoken of in a similar
+connection in an earlier chapter. There is a good deal of the
+relation of arbitrary command and submission, and not a little of
+shrewd practice, remotely akin to predatory fraud. All this
+belongs on the plane of life of the predatory barbarian, to whom
+a devotional attitude is habitual. And in addition to this, the
+devout observances also commend themselves to this class on the
+ground of reputability. But this latter incentive to piety
+deserves treatment by itself and will be spoken of presently.
+There is no hereditary leisure class of any consequence in the
+American community, except in the South. This Southern leisure
+class is somewhat given to devout observances; more so than any
+class of corresponding pecuniary standing in other parts of the
+country. It is also well known that the creeds of the South are
+of a more old-fashioned cast than their counterparts in the
+North. Corresponding to this more archaic devotional life of the
+South is the lower industrial development of that section. The
+industrial organization of the South is at present, and
+especially it has been until quite recently, of a more primitive
+character than that of the American community taken as a whole.
+It approaches nearer to handicraft, in the paucity and rudeness
+of its mechanical appliances, and there is more of the element of
+mastery and subservience. It may also be noted that, owing to the
+peculiar economic circumstances of this section, the greater
+devoutness of the Southern population, both white and black, is
+correlated with a scheme of life which in many ways recalls the
+barbarian stages of industrial development. Among this population
+offenses of an archaic character also are and have been
+relatively more prevalent and are less deprecated than they are
+elsewhere; as, for example, duels, brawls, feuds, drunkenness,
+horse-racing, cock-fighting, gambling, male sexual incontinence
+(evidenced by the considerable number of mulattoes). There is
+also a livelier sense of honor -- an expression of sportsmanship
+and a derivative of predatory life.
+
+As regards the wealthier class of the North, the American leisure
+class in the best sense of the term, it is, to begin with,
+scarcely possible to speak of an hereditary devotional attitude.
+This class is of too recent growth to be possessed of a
+well-formed transmitted habit in this respect, or even of a
+special home-grown tradition. Still, it may be noted in passing
+that there is a perceptible tendency among this class to give in
+at least a nominal, and apparently something of a real, adherence
+to some one of the accredited creeds. Also, weddings, funerals,
+and the like honorific events among this class are pretty
+uniformly solemnized with some especial degree of religious
+circumstance. It is impossible to say how far this adherence to a
+creed is a bona fide reversion to a devout habit of mind, and how
+far it is to be classed as a case of protective mimicry assumed
+for the purpose of an outward assimilation to canons of
+reputability borrowed from foreign ideals. Something of a
+substantial devotional propensity seems to be present, to judge
+especially by the somewhat peculiar degree of ritualistic
+observance which is in process of development in the upper-class
+cults. There is a tendency perceptible among the upper-class
+worshippers to affiliate themselves with those cults which lay
+relatively great stress on ceremonial and on the spectacular
+accessories of worship; and in the churches in which an
+upper-class membership predominates, there is at the same time a
+tendency to accentuate the ritualistic, at the cost of the
+intellectual features in the service and in the apparatus of the
+devout observances. This holds true even where the church in
+question belongs to a denomination with a relatively slight
+general development of ritual and paraphernalia. This peculiar
+development of the ritualistic element is no doubt due in part to
+a predilection for conspicuously wasteful spectacles, but it
+probably also in part indicates something of the devotional
+attitude of the worshippers. So far as the latter is true, it
+indicates a relatively archaic form of the devotional habit. The
+predominance of spectacular effects in devout observances is
+noticeable in all devout communities at a relatively primitive
+stage of culture and with a slight intellectual development. It
+is especially characteristic of the barbarian culture. Here there
+is pretty uniformly present in the devout observances a direct
+appeal to the emotions through all the avenues of sense. And a
+tendency to return to this naive, sensational method of appeal is
+unmistakable in the upper-class churches of today. It is
+perceptible in a less degree in the cults which claim the
+allegiance of the lower leisure class and of the middle classes.
+There is a reversion to the use of colored lights and brilliant
+spectacles, a freer use of symbols, orchestral music and incense,
+and one may even detect in "processionals" and "recessionals" and
+in richly varied genuflexional evolutions, an incipient reversion
+to so antique an accessory of worship as the sacred dance.
+This reversion to spectacular observances is not confined to the
+upper-class cults, although it finds its best exemplification and
+its highest accentuation in the higher pecuniary and social
+altitudes. The cults of the lower-class devout portion of the
+community, such as the Southern Negroes and the backward foreign
+elements of the population, of course also show a strong
+inclination to ritual, symbolism, and spectacular effects; as
+might be expected from the antecedents and the cultural level of
+those classes. With these classes the prevalence of ritual and
+anthropomorphism are not so much a matter of reversion as of
+continued development out of the past. But the use of ritual and
+related features of devotion are also spreading in other
+directions. In the early days of the American community the
+prevailing denominations started out with a ritual and
+paraphernalia of an austere simplicity; but it is a matter
+familiar to every one that in the course of time these
+denominations have, in a varying degree, adopted much of the
+spectacular elements which they once renounced. In a general way,
+this development has gone hand in hand with the growth of the
+wealth and the ease of life of the worshippers and has reached
+its fullest expression among those classes which grade highest in
+wealth and repute.
+
+The causes to which this pecuniary stratification of
+devoutness is due have already been indicated in a general way in
+speaking of class differences in habits of thought. Class
+differences as regards devoutness are but a special expression of
+a generic fact. The lax allegiance of the lower middle class, or
+what may broadly be called the failure of filial piety among this
+class, is chiefly perceptible among the town populations engaged
+in the mechanical industries. In a general way, one does not, at
+the present time, look for a blameless filial piety among those
+classes whose employment approaches that of the engineer and the
+mechanician. These mechanical employments are in a degree a
+modern fact. The handicraftsmen of earlier times, who served an
+industrial end of a character similar to that now served by the
+mechanician, were not similarly refractory under the discipline
+of devoutness. The habitual activity of the men engaged in these
+branches of industry has greatly changed, as regards its
+intellectual discipline, since the modern industrial processes
+have come into vogue; and the discipline to which the mechanician
+is exposed in his daily employment affects the methods and
+standards of his thinking also on topics which lie outside his
+everyday work. Familiarity with the highly organized and highly
+impersonal industrial processes of the present acts to derange
+the animistic habits of thought. The workman's office is becoming
+more and more exclusively that of discretion and supervision in a
+process of mechanical, dispassionate sequences. So long as the
+individual is the chief and typical prime mover in the process;
+so long as the obtrusive feature of the industrial process is the
+dexterity and force of the individual handicraftsman; so long the
+habit of interpreting phenomena in terms of personal motive and
+propensity suffers no such considerable and consistent
+derangement through facts as to lead to its elimination. But
+under the later developed industrial processes, when the prime
+movers and the contrivances through which they work are of an
+impersonal, non-individual character, the grounds of
+generalization habitually present in the workman's mind and the
+point of view from which he habitually apprehends phenomena is an
+enforced cognizance of matter-of-fact sequence. The result, so
+far as concerts the workman's life of faith, is a proclivity to
+undevout scepticism.
+
+It appears, then, that the devout habit of mind attains its best
+development under a relatively archaic culture; the term "devout"
+being of course here used in its anthropological sense simply,
+and not as implying anything with respect to the
+spiritual attitude so characterized, beyond the fact of a
+proneness to devout observances. It appears also that this devout
+attitude marks a type of human nature which is more in consonance
+with the predatory mode of life than with the later-developed,
+more consistently and organically industrial life process of the
+community. It is in large measure an expression of the archaic
+habitual sense of personal status -- the relation of mastery and
+subservience -- and it therefore fits into the industrial scheme
+of the predatory and the quasi-peaceable culture, but does not
+fit into the industrial scheme of the present. It also appears
+that this habit persists with greatest tenacity among those
+classes in the modern communities whose everyday life is most
+remote from the mechanical processes of industry and which are
+the most conservative also in other respects; while for those
+classes that are habitually in immediate contact with modern
+industrial processes, and whose habits of thought are therefore
+exposed to the constraining force of technological necessities,
+that animistic interpretation of phenomena and that respect of
+persons on which devout observance proceeds are in process of
+obsolescence. And also -- as bearing especially on the present
+discussion -- it appears that the devout habit to some extent
+progressively gains in scope and elaboration among those classes
+in the modern communities to whom wealth and leisure accrue in
+the most pronounced degree. In this as in other relations, the
+institution of a leisure class acts to conserve, and even to
+rehabilitate, that archaic type of human nature and those
+elements of the archaic culture which the industrial evolution of
+society in its later stages acts to eliminate.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Thirteen
+
+Survivals of the Non-Invidious Interests
+
+In an increasing proportion as time goes on, the
+anthropomorphic cult, with its code of devout observations,
+suffers a progressive disintegration through the stress of
+economic exigencies and the decay of the system of status. As
+this disintegration proceeds, there come to be associated and
+blended with the devout attitude certain other motives and
+impulses that are not always of an anthropomorphic origin, nor
+traceable to the habit of personal subservience. Not all of these
+subsidiary impulses that blend with the habit of devoutness in
+the later devotional life are altogether congruous with the
+devout attitude or with the anthropomorphic apprehension of the
+sequence of phenomena. The origin being not the same, their
+action upon the scheme of devout life is also not in the same
+direction. In many ways they traverse the underlying norm of
+subservience or vicarious life to which the code of devout
+observations and the ecclesiastical and sacerdotal institutions
+are to be traced as their substantial basis. Through the presence
+of these alien motives the social and industrial regime of status
+gradually disintegrates, and the canon of personal subservience
+loses the support derived from an unbroken tradition. Extraneous
+habits and proclivities encroach upon the field of action
+occupied by this canon, and it presently comes about that the
+ecclesiastical and sacerdotal structures are partially converted
+to other uses, in some measure alien to the purposes of the
+scheme of devout life as it stood in the days of the most
+vigorous and characteristic development of the priesthood.
+
+Among these alien motives which affect the devout scheme in its
+later growth, may be mentioned the motives of charity and of
+social good-fellowship, or conviviality; or, in more general
+terms, the various expressions of the sense of human solidarity
+and sympathy. It may be added that these extraneous uses of the
+ecclesiastical structure contribute materially to its survival in
+name and form even among people who may be ready to give up the
+substance of it. A still more characteristic and more pervasive
+alien element in the motives which have gone to formally uphold
+the scheme of devout life is that non-reverent sense of aesthetic
+congruity with the environment, which is left as a residue of the
+latter-day act of worship after elimination of its
+anthropomorphic content. This has done good service for the
+maintenance of the sacerdotal institution through blending with
+the motive of subservience. This sense of impulse of aesthetic
+congruity is not primarily of an economic character, but it has a
+considerable indirect effect in shaping the habit of mind of the
+individual for economic purposes in the later stages of
+industrial development; its most perceptible effect in this
+regard goes in the direction of mitigating the somewhat
+pronounced self-regarding bias that has been transmitted by
+tradition from the earlier, more competent phases of the regime
+of status. The economic bearing of this impulse is therefore seen
+to transverse that of the devout attitude; the former goes to
+qualify, if not eliminate, the self-regarding bias, through
+sublation of the antithesis or antagonism of self and not-self;
+while the latter, being and expression of the sense of personal
+subservience and mastery, goes to accentuate this antithesis and
+to insist upon the divergence between the self-regarding interest
+and the interests of the generically human life process.
+
+This non-invidious residue of the religious life -- the sense of
+communion with the environment, or with the generic life process
+-- as well as the impulse of charity or of sociability, act in a
+pervasive way to shape men's habits of thought for the economic
+purpose. But the action of all this class of proclivities is
+somewhat vague, and their effects are difficult to trace in
+detail. So much seems clear, however, as that the action of this
+entire class of motives or aptitudes tends in a direction
+contrary to the underlying principles of the institution of the
+leisure class as already formulated. The basis of that
+institution, as well as of the anthropomorphic cults associated
+with it in the cultural development, is the habit of invidious
+comparison; and this habit is incongruous with the exercise of
+the aptitudes now in question. The substantial canons of the
+leisure-class scheme of life are a conspicuous waste of time and
+substance and a withdrawal from the industrial process; while the
+particular aptitudes here in question assert themselves, on the
+economic side, in a deprecation of waste and of a futile manner
+of life, and in an impulse to participation in or identification
+with the life process, whether it be on the economic side or in
+any other of its phases or aspects.
+
+It is plain that these aptitudes and habits of life to which they
+give rise where circumstances favor their expression, or where
+they assert themselves in a dominant way, run counter to the
+leisure-class scheme of life; but it is not clear that life under
+the leisure-class scheme, as seen in the later stages of its
+development, tends consistently to the repression of these
+aptitudes or to exemption from the habits of thought in which
+they express themselves. The positive discipline of the
+leisure-class scheme of life goes pretty much all the other way.
+In its positive discipline, by prescription and by selective
+elimination, the leisure-class scheme favors the all-pervading
+and all-dominating primacy of the canons of waste and invidious
+comparison at every conjuncture of life. But in its negative
+effects the tendency of the leisure-class discipline is not so
+unequivocally true to the fundamental canons of the scheme. In
+its regulation of human activity for the purpose of pecuniary
+decency the leisure-class canon insists on withdrawal from the
+industrial process. That is to say, it inhibits activity in the
+directions in which the impecunious members of the community
+habitually put forth their efforts. Especially in the case of
+women, and more particularly as regards the upper-class and
+upper-middle-class women of advanced industrial communities, this
+inhibition goes so far as to insist on withdrawal even from the
+emulative process of accumulation by the quasi-predator methods
+of the pecuniary occupations.
+
+The pecuniary or the leisure-class culture, which set out as an
+emulative variant of the impulse of workmanship, is in its latest
+development beginning to neutralize its own ground, by
+eliminating the habit of invidious comparison in respect of
+efficiency, or even of pecuniary standing. On the other hand, the
+fact that members of the leisure class, both men and women, are
+to some extent exempt from the necessity of finding a livelihood
+in a competitive struggle with their fellows, makes it possible
+for members of this class not only to survive, but even, within
+bounds, to follow their bent in case they are not gifted with the
+aptitudes which make for success in the competitive struggle.
+That is to say, in the latest and fullest development of the
+institution, the livelihood of members of this class does not
+depend on the possession and the unremitting exercise of those
+aptitudes are therefore greater in the higher grades of the
+leisure class than in the general average of a population living
+under the competitive system.
+
+In an earlier chapter, in discussing the conditions of survival
+of archaic traits, it has appeared that the peculiar position of
+the leisure class affords exceptionally favorable chances for the
+survival of traits which characterize the type of human nature
+proper to an earlier and obsolete cultural stage. The class is
+sheltered from the stress of economic exigencies, and is in this
+sense withdrawn from the rude impact of forces which make for
+adaptation to the economic situation. The survival in the leisure
+class, and under the leisure-class scheme of life, of traits and
+types that are reminiscent of the predatory culture has already
+been discussed. These aptitudes and habits have an exceptionally
+favorable chance of survival under the leisure-class regime. Not
+only does the sheltered pecuniary position of the leisure class
+afford a situation favorable to the survival of such individuals
+as are not gifted with the complement of aptitudes required for
+serviceability in the modern industrial process; but the
+leisure-class canons of reputability at the same time enjoin the
+conspicuous exercise of certain predatory aptitudes. The
+employments in which the predatory aptitudes find exercise serve
+as an evidence of wealth, birth, and withdrawal from the
+industrial process. The survival of the predatory traits under
+the leisure-class culture is furthered both negatively, through
+the industrial exemption of the class, and positively, through
+the sanction of the leisure-class canons of decency.
+
+With respect to the survival of traits characteristic of the
+ante-predatory savage culture the case is in some degree
+different. The sheltered position of the leisure class favors the
+survival also of these traits; but the exercise of the aptitudes
+for peace and good-will does not have the affirmative sanction of
+the code of proprieties. Individuals gifted with a temperament
+that is reminiscent of the ante-predatory culture are placed at
+something of an advantage within the leisure class, as compared
+with similarly gifted individuals outside the class, in that they
+are not under a pecuniary necessity to thwart these aptitudes
+that make for a non-competitive life; but such individuals are
+still exposed to something of a moral constraint which urges them
+to disregard these inclinations, in that the code of proprieties
+enjoins upon them habits of life based on the predatory
+aptitudes. So long as the system of status remains intact, and so
+long as the leisure class has other lines of non-industrial
+activity to take to than obvious killing of time in aimless and
+wasteful fatigation, so long no considerable departure from the
+leisure-class scheme of reputable life is to be looked for. The
+occurrence of non-predatory temperament with the class at that
+stage is to be looked upon as a case of sporadic reversion. But
+the reputable non-industrial outlets for the human propensity to
+action presently fail, through the advance of economic
+development, the disappearance of large game, the decline of war,
+the obsolescence of proprietary government, and the decay of the
+priestly office. When this happens, the situation begins to
+change. Human life must seek expression in one direction if it
+may not in another; and if the predatory outlet fails, relief is
+sought elsewhere.
+
+As indicated above, the exemption from pecuniary stress has been
+carried farther in the case of the leisure-class women of the
+advanced industrial communities than in that of any other
+considerable group of persons. The women may therefore be
+expected to show a more pronounced reversion to a non-invidious
+temperament than the men. But there is also among men of the
+leisure class a perceptible increase in the range and scope of
+activities that proceed from aptitudes which are not to be
+classed as self-regarding, and the end of which is not an
+invidious distinction. So, for instance, the greater number of
+men who have to do with industry in the way of pecuniarily
+managing an enterprise take some interest and some pride in
+seeing that the work is well done and is industrially effective,
+and this even apart from the profit which may result from any
+improvement of this kind. The efforts of commercial clubs and
+manufacturers' organizations in this direction of non-invidious
+advancement of industrial efficiency are also well know.
+
+The tendency to some other than an invidious purpose in life has
+worked out in a multitude of organizations, the purpose of which
+is some work of charity or of social amelioration. These
+organizations are often of a quasi-religious or pseudo-religious
+character, and are participated in by both men and women.
+Examples will present themselves in abundance on reflection, but
+for the purpose of indicating the range of the propensities in
+question and of characterizing them, some of the more obvious
+concrete cases may be cited. Such, for instance, are the
+agitation for temperance and similar social reforms, for prison
+reform, for the spread of education, for the suppression of vice,
+and for the avoidance of war by arbitration, disarmament, or
+other means; such are, in some measure, university settlements,
+neighborhood guilds, the various organizations typified by the
+Young Men's Christian Association and Young People's Society for
+Christian Endeavor, sewing-clubs, art clubs, and even commercial
+clubs; such are also, in some slight measure, the pecuniary
+foundations of semi-public establishments for charity, education,
+or amusement, whether they are endowed by wealthy individuals or
+by contributions collected from persons of smaller means -- in so
+far as these establishments are not of a religious character.
+
+It is of course not intended to say that these efforts proceed
+entirely from other motives than those of a self-regarding kind.
+What can be claimed is that other motives are present in the
+common run of cases, and that the perceptibly greater prevalence
+of effort of this kind under the circumstances of the modern
+industrial life than under the unbroken regime of the principle
+of status, indicates the presence in modern life of an effective
+scepticism with respect to the full legitimacy of an emulative
+scheme of life. It is a matter of sufficient notoriety to have
+become a commonplace jest that extraneous motives are commonly
+present among the incentives to this class of work -- motives of
+a self-regarding kind, and especially the motive of an invidious
+distinction. To such an extent is this true, that many ostensible
+works of disinterested public spirit are no doubt initiated and
+carried on with a view primarily to the enhance repute or even to
+the pecuniary gain, of their promoters. In the case of some
+considerable groups of organizations or establishments of this
+kind the invidious motive is apparently the dominant motive both
+with the initiators of the work and with their supporters. This
+last remark would hold true especially with respect to such works
+as lend distinction to their doer through large and conspicuous
+expenditure; as, for example, the foundation of a university or
+of a public library or museum; but it is also, and perhaps
+equally, true of the more commonplace work of participation in
+such organizations. These serve to authenticate the pecuniary
+reputability of their members, as well as gratefully to keep them
+in mind of their superior status by pointing the contrast between
+themselves and the lower-lying humanity in whom the work of
+amelioration is to be wrought; as, for example, the university
+settlement, which now has some vogue. But after all allowances
+and deductions have been made, there is left some remainder of
+motives of a non-emulative kind. The fact itself that distinction
+or a decent good fame is sought by this method is evidence of a
+prevalent sense of the legitimacy, and of the presumptive
+effectual presence, of a non-emulative, non-invidious interest,
+as a consistent factor in the habits of thought of modern
+communities.
+
+In all this latter-day range of leisure-class activities that
+proceed on the basis of a non-invidious and non-religious
+interest, it is to be noted that the women participate more
+actively and more persistently than the men -- except, of course,
+in the case of such works as require a large expenditure of
+means. The dependent pecuniary position of the women disables
+them for work requiring large expenditure. As regards the general
+range of ameliorative work, the members of the priesthood or
+clergy of the less naively devout sects, or the secularized
+denominations, are associated with the class of women. This is as
+the theory would have it. In other economic relations, also, this
+clergy stands in a somewhat equivocal position between the class
+of women and that of the men engaged in economic pursuits. By
+tradition and by the prevalent sense of the proprieties, both the
+clergy and the women of the well-to-do classes are placed in the
+position of a vicarious leisure class; with both classes the
+characteristic relation which goes to form the habits of thought
+of the class is a relation of subservience -- that is to say, an
+economic relation conceived in personal terms; in both classes
+there is consequently perceptible a special proneness to construe
+phenomena in terms of personal relation rather than of causal
+sequence; both classes are so inhibited by the canons of decency
+from the ceremonially unclean processes of the lucrative or
+productive occupations as to make participation in the industrial
+life process of today a moral impossibility for them. The result
+of this ceremonial exclusion from productive effort of the vulgar
+sort is to draft a relatively large share of the energies of the
+modern feminine and priestly classes into the service of other
+interests than the self-regarding one. The code leaves no
+alternative direction in which the impulse to purposeful action
+may find expression. The effect of a consistent inhibition on
+industrially useful activity in the case of the leisure-class
+women shows itself in a restless assertion of the impulse to
+workmanship in other directions than that of business activity.
+As has been noticed already, the everyday life of the
+well-to-do women and the clergy contains a larger element of
+status than that of the average of the men, especially than that
+of the men engaged in the modern industrial occupations proper.
+Hence the devout attitude survives in a better state of
+preservation among these classes than among the common run of men
+in the modern communities. Hence an appreciable share of the
+energy which seeks expression in a non-lucrative employment among
+these members of the vicarious leisure classes may be expected to
+eventuate in devout observances and works of piety. Hence, in
+part, the excess of the devout proclivity in women, spoken of in
+the last chapter. But it is more to the present point to note the
+effect of this proclivity in shaping the action and coloring the
+purposes of the non-lucrative movements and organizations here
+under discussion. Where this devout coloring is present it lowers
+the immediate efficiency of the organizations for any economic
+end to which their efforts may be directed. Many organizations,
+charitable and ameliorative, divide their attention between the
+devotional and the secular well-being of the people whose
+interests they aim to further. It can scarcely be doubted that if
+they were to give an equally serious attention and effort
+undividedly to the secular interests of these people, the
+immediate economic value of their work should be appreciably
+higher than it is. It might of course similarly be said, if this
+were the place to say it, that the immediate efficiency of these
+works of amelioration for the devout might be greater if it were
+not hampered with the secular motives and aims which are usually
+present.
+
+Some deduction is to be made from the economic value of this
+class of non-invidious enterprise, on account of the intrusion of
+the devotional interest. But there are also deductions to be made
+on account of the presence of other alien motives which more or
+less broadly traverse the economic trend of this non-emulative
+expression of the instinct of workmanship. To such an extent is
+this seen to be true on a closer scrutiny, that, when all is
+told, it may even appear that this general class of enterprises
+is of an altogether dubious economic value -- as measured in
+terms of the fullness or facility of life of the individuals or
+classes to whose amelioration the enterprise is directed. For
+instance, many of the efforts now in reputable vogue for the
+amelioration of the indigent population of large cities are of
+the nature, in great part, of a mission of culture. It is by this
+means sought to accelerate the rate of speed at which given
+elements of the upper-class culture find acceptance in the
+everyday scheme of life of the lower classes. The solicitude of
+"settlements," for example, is in part directed to enhance the
+industrial efficiency of the poor and to teach them the more
+adequate utilization of the means at hand; but it is also no less
+consistently directed to the inculcation, by precept and example,
+of certain punctilios of upper-class propriety in manners and
+customs. The economic substance of these proprieties will
+commonly be found on scrutiny to be a conspicuous waste of time
+and goods. Those good people who go out to humanize the poor are
+commonly, and advisedly, extremely scrupulous and silently
+insistent in matters of decorum and the decencies of life. They
+are commonly persons of an exemplary life and gifted with a
+tenacious insistence on ceremonial cleanness in the various items
+of their daily consumption. The cultural or civilizing efficacy
+of this inculcation of correct habits of thought with respect to
+the consumption of time and commodities is scarcely to be
+overrated; nor is its economic value to the individual who
+acquires these higher and more reputable ideals inconsiderable.
+Under the circumstances of the existing pecuniary culture, the
+reputability, and consequently the success, of the individual is
+in great measure dependent on his proficiency in demeanor and
+methods of consumption that argue habitual waste of time and
+goods. But as regards the ulterior economic bearing of this
+training in worthier methods of life, it is to be said that the
+effect wrought is in large part a substitution of costlier or
+less efficient methods of accomplishing the same material
+results, in relations where the material result is the fact of
+substantial economic value. The propaganda of culture is in great
+part an inculcation of new tastes, or rather of a new schedule of
+proprieties, which have been adapted to the upper-class scheme of
+life under the guidance of the leisure-class formulation of the
+principles of status and pecuniary decency. This new schedule of
+proprieties is intruded into the lower-class scheme of life from
+the code elaborated by an element of the population whose life
+lies outside the industrial process; and this intrusive schedule
+can scarcely be expected to fit the exigencies of life for these
+lower classes more adequately than the schedule already in vogue
+among them, and especially not more adequately than the schedule
+which they are themselves working out under the stress of modern
+industrial life.
+
+All this of course does not question the fact that the
+proprieties of the substituted schedule are more decorous than
+those which they displace. The doubt which presents itself is
+simply a doubt as to the economic expediency of this work of
+regeneration -- that is to say, the economic expediency in that
+immediate and material bearing in which the effects of the change
+can be ascertained with some degree of confidence, and as viewed
+from the standpoint not of the individual but of the facility of
+life of the collectivity. For an appreciation of the economic
+expediency of these enterprises of amelioration, therefore, their
+effective work is scarcely to be taken at its face value, even
+where the aim of the enterprise is primarily an economic one and
+where the interest on which it proceeds is in no sense
+self-regarding or invidious. The economic reform wrought is
+largely of the nature of a permutation in the methods of
+conspicuous waste.
+
+But something further is to be said with respect to the character
+of the disinterested motives and canons of procedure in all work
+of this class that is affected by the habits of thought
+characteristic of the pecuniary culture; and this further
+consideration may lead to a further qualification of the
+conclusions already reached. As has been seen in an earlier
+chapter, the canons of reputability or decency under the
+pecuniary culture insist on habitual futility of effort as the
+mark of a pecuniarily blameless life. There results not only a
+habit of disesteem of useful occupations, but there results also
+what is of more decisive consequence in guiding the action of any
+organized body of people that lays claim to social good repute.
+There is a tradition which requires that one should not be
+vulgarly familiar with any of the processes or details that have
+to do with the material necessities of life. One may
+meritoriously show a quantitative interest in the well-being of
+the vulgar, through subscriptions or through work on managing
+committees and the like. One may, perhaps even more
+meritoriously, show solicitude in general and in detail for the
+cultural welfare of the vulgar, in the way of contrivances for
+elevating their tastes and affording them opportunities for
+spiritual amelioration. But one should not betray an intimate
+knowledge of the material circumstances of vulgar life, or of the
+habits of thought of the vulgar classes, such as would
+effectually direct the efforts of these organizations to a
+materially useful end. This reluctance to avow an unduly intimate
+knowledge of the lower-class conditions of life in detail of
+course prevails in very different degrees in different
+individuals; but there is commonly enough of it present
+collectively in any organization of the kind in question
+profoundly to influence its course of action. By its cumulative
+action in shaping the usage and precedents of any such body, this
+shrinking from an imputation of unseemly familiarity with vulgar
+life tends gradually to set aside the initial motives of the
+enterprise, in favor of certain guiding principles of good
+repute, ultimately reducible to terms of pecuniary merit. So that
+in an organization of long standing the initial motive of
+furthering the facility of life in these classes comes gradually
+to be an ostensible motive only, and the vulgarly effective work
+of the organization tends to obsolescence.
+
+What is true of the efficiency of organizations for non-invidious
+work in this respect is true also as regards the work of
+individuals proceeding on the same motives; though it perhaps
+holds true with more qualification for individuals than for
+organized enterprises. The habit of gauging merit by the
+leisure-class canons of wasteful expenditure and unfamiliarity
+with vulgar life, whether on the side of production or of
+consumption, is necessarily strong in the individuals who aspire
+to do some work of public utility. And if the individual should
+forget his station and turn his efforts to vulgar effectiveness,
+the common sense of the community-the sense of pecuniary decency
+-- would presently reject his work and set him right. An example
+of this is seen in the administration of bequests made by
+public-spirited men for the single purpose (at least ostensibly)
+of furthering the facility of human life in some particular
+respect. The objects for which bequests of this class are most
+frequently made at present are most frequently made at present
+are schools, libraries, hospitals, and asylums for the infirm or
+unfortunate. The avowed purpose of the donor in these cases is
+the amelioration of human life in the particular respect which is
+named in the bequest; but it will be found an invariable rule
+that in the execution of the work not a little of other motives,
+frequency incompatible with the initial motive, is present and
+determines the particular disposition eventually made of a good
+share of the means which have been set apart by the bequest.
+Certain funds, for instance, may have been set apart as a
+foundation for a foundling asylum or a retreat for invalids. The
+diversion of expenditure to honorific waste in such cases is not
+uncommon enough to cause surprise or even to raise a smile. An
+appreciable share of the funds is spent in the construction of an
+edifice faced with some aesthetically objectionable but expensive
+stone, covered with grotesque and incongruous details, and
+designed, in its battlemented walls and turrets and its massive
+portals and strategic approaches, to suggest certain barbaric
+methods of warfare. The interior of the structure shows the same
+pervasive guidance of the canons of conspicuous waste and
+predatory exploit. The windows, for instance, to go no farther
+into detail, are placed with a view to impress their pecuniary
+excellence upon the chance beholder from the outside, rather than
+with a view to effectiveness for their ostensible end in the
+convenience or comfort of the beneficiaries within; and the
+detail of interior arrangement is required to conform itself as
+best it may to this alien but imperious requirement of pecuniary
+beauty.
+
+In all this, of course, it is not to be presumed that the donor
+would have found fault, or that he would have done
+otherwise if he had taken control in person; it appears that in
+those cases where such a personal direction is exercised -- where
+the enterprise is conducted by direct expenditure and
+superintendence instead of by bequest -- the aims and methods of
+management are not different in this respect. Nor would the
+beneficiaries, or the outside observers whose ease or vanity are
+not immediately touched, be pleased with a different disposition
+of the funds. It would suit no one to have the enterprise
+conducted with a view directly to the most economical and
+effective use of the means at hand for the initial, material end
+of the foundation. All concerned, whether their interest is
+immediate and self-regarding, or contemplative only, agree that
+some considerable share of the expenditure should go to the
+higher or spiritual needs derived from the habit of an invidious
+comparison in predatory exploit and pecuniary waste. But this
+only goes to say that the canons of emulative and pecuniary
+reputability so far pervade the common sense of the community as
+to permit no escape or evasion, even in the case of an enterprise
+which ostensibly proceeds entirely on the basis of a
+non-invidious interest.
+
+It may even be that the enterprise owes its honorific virtue, as
+a means of enhancing the donor's good repute, to the imputed
+presence of this non-invidious motive; but that does not hinder
+the invidious interest from guiding the expenditure. The
+effectual presence of motives of an emulative or invidious origin
+in non-emulative works of this kind might be shown at length and
+with detail, in any one of the classes of enterprise spoken of
+above. Where these honorific details occur, in such cases, they
+commonly masquerade under designations that belong in the field
+of the aesthetic, ethical or economic interest. These special
+motives, derived from the standards and canons of the pecuniary
+culture, act surreptitiously to divert effort of a non-invidious
+kind from effective service, without disturbing the agent's sense
+of good intention or obtruding upon his consciousness the
+substantial futility of his work. Their effect might be traced
+through the entire range of that schedule of non-invidious,
+meliorative enterprise that is so considerable a feature, and
+especially so conspicuous a feature, in the overt scheme of life
+of the well-to-do. But the theoretical bearing is perhaps clear
+enough and may require no further illustration; especially as
+some detailed attention will be given to one of these lines of
+enterprise -- the establishments for the higher learning -- in
+another connection.
+
+Under the circumstances of the sheltered situation in which the
+leisure class is placed there seems, therefore, to be
+something of a reversion to the range of non-invidious impulses
+that characterizes the ante-predatory savage culture. The
+reversion comprises both the sense of workmanship and the
+proclivity to indolence and good-fellowship. But in the modern
+scheme of life canons of conduct based on pecuniary or invidious
+merit stand in the way of a free exercise of these impulses; and
+the dominant presence of these canons of conduct goes far to
+divert such efforts as are made on the basis of the non-invidious
+interest to the service of that invidious interest on which the
+pecuniary culture rests. The canons of pecuniary decency are
+reducible for the present purpose to the principles of waste,
+futility, and ferocity. The requirements of decency are
+imperiously present in meliorative enterprise as in other lines
+of conduct, and exercise a selective surveillance over the
+details of conduct and management in any enterprise. By guiding
+and adapting the method in detail, these canons of decency go far
+to make all non-invidious aspiration or effort nugatory. The
+pervasive, impersonal, un-eager principle of futility is at hand
+from day to day and works obstructively to hinder the effectual
+expression of so much of the surviving ante-predatory aptitudes
+as is to be classed under the instinct of workmanship; but its
+presence does not preclude the transmission of those aptitudes or
+the continued recurrence of an impulse to find expression for
+them.
+
+In the later and farther development of the pecuniary culture,
+the requirement of withdrawal from the industrial process in
+order to avoid social odium is carried so far as to comprise
+abstention from the emulative employments. At this advanced stage
+the pecuniary culture negatively favors the assertion of the
+non-invidious propensities by relaxing the stress laid on the
+merit of emulative, predatory, or pecuniary occupations, as
+compared with those of an industrial or productive kind. As was
+noticed above, the requirement of such withdrawal from all
+employment that is of human use applies more rigorously to the
+upper-class women than to any other class, unless the priesthood
+of certain cults might be cited as an exception, perhaps more
+apparent than real, to this rule. The reason for the more extreme
+insistence on a futile life for this class of women than for the
+men of the same pecuniary and social grade lies in their being
+not only an upper-grade leisure class but also at the same time a
+vicarious leisure class. There is in their case a double ground
+for a consistent withdrawal from useful effort.
+
+It has been well and repeatedly said by popular writers and
+speakers who reflect the common sense of intelligent people on
+questions of social structure and function that the position of
+woman in any community is the most striking index of the level of
+culture attained by the community, and it might be added, by any
+given class in the community. This remark is perhaps truer as
+regards the stage of economic development than as regards
+development in any other respect. At the same time the position
+assigned to the woman in the accepted scheme of life, in any
+community or under any culture, is in a very great degree an
+expression of traditions which have been shaped by the
+circumstances of an earlier phase of development, and which have
+been but partially adapted to the existing economic
+circumstances, or to the existing exigencies of temperament and
+habits of mind by which the women living under this modern
+economic situation are actuated.
+
+The fact has already been remarked upon incidentally in the
+course of the discussion of the growth of economic institutions
+generally, and in particular in speaking of vicarious leisure and
+of dress, that the position of women in the modern economic
+scheme is more widely and more consistently at variance with the
+promptings of the instinct of workmanship than is the position of
+the men of the same classes. It is also apparently true that the
+woman's temperament includes a larger share of this instinct that
+approves peace and disapproves futility. It is therefore not a
+fortuitous circumstance that the women of modern industrial
+communities show a livelier sense of the discrepancy between the
+accepted scheme of life and the exigencies of the economic
+situation.
+
+The several phases of the "woman question" have brought out in
+intelligible form the extent to which the life of women in modern
+society, and in the polite circles especially, is regulated by a
+body of common sense formulated under the economic circumstances
+of an earlier phase of development. It is still felt that woman's
+life, in its civil, economic, and social bearing, is essentially
+and normally a vicarious life, the merit or demerit of which is,
+in the nature of things, to be imputed to some other individual
+who stands in some relation of ownership or tutelage to the
+woman. So, for instance, any action on the part of a woman which
+traverses an injunction of the accepted schedule of proprieties
+is felt to reflect immediately upon the honor of the man whose
+woman she is. There may of course be some sense of incongruity in
+the mind of any one passing an opinion of this kind on the
+woman's frailty or perversity; but the common-sense judgment of
+the community in such matters is, after all, delivered without
+much hesitation, and few men would question the legitimacy of
+their sense of an outraged tutelage in any case that might arise.
+On the other hand, relatively little discredit attaches to a
+woman through the evil deeds of the man with whom her life is
+associated.
+
+The good and beautiful scheme of life, then -- that is to say the
+scheme to which we are habituated -- assigns to the woman a
+"sphere" ancillary to the activity of the man; and it is felt
+that any departure from the traditions of her assigned round of
+duties is unwomanly. If the question is as to civil rights or the
+suffrage, our common sense in the matter -- that is to say the
+logical deliverance of our general scheme of life upon the point
+in question -- says that the woman should be represented in the
+body politic and before the law, not immediately in her own
+person, but through the mediation of the head of the household to
+which she belongs. It is unfeminine in her to aspire to a
+self-directing, self-centered life; and our common sense tells us
+that her direct participation in the affairs of the community,
+civil or industrial, is a menace to that social order which
+expresses our habits of thought as they have been formed under
+the guidance of the traditions of the pecuniary culture. "All
+this fume and froth of 'emancipating woman from the slavery of
+man' and so on, is, to use the chaste and expressive language of
+Elizabeth Cady Stanton inversely, 'utter rot.' The social
+relations of the sexes are fixed by nature. Our entire
+civilization -- that is whatever is good in it -- is based on the
+home." The "home" is the household with a male head. This view,
+but commonly expressed even more chastely, is the prevailing view
+of the woman's status, not only among the common run of the men
+of civilized communities, but among the women as well. Women have
+a very alert sense of what the scheme of proprieties requires,
+and while it is true that many of them are ill at ease under the
+details which the code imposes, there are few who do not
+recognize that the existing moral order, of necessity and by the
+divine right of prescription, places the woman in a position
+ancillary to the man. In the last analysis, according to her own
+sense of what is good and beautiful, the woman's life is, and in
+theory must be, an expression of the man's life at the second
+remove.
+
+But in spite of this pervading sense of what is the good and
+natural place for the woman, there is also perceptible an
+incipient development of sentiment to the effect that this whole
+arrangement of tutelage and vicarious life and imputation of
+merit and demerit is somehow a mistake. Or, at least, that even
+if it may be a natural growth and a good arrangement in its time
+and place, and in spite of its patent aesthetic value, still it
+does not adequately serve the more everyday ends of life in a
+modern industrial community. Even that large and substantial body
+of well-bred, upper and middle-class women to whose
+dispassionate, matronly sense of the traditional proprieties this
+relation of status commends itself as fundamentally and eternally
+right-even these, whose attitude is conservative, commonly find
+some slight discrepancy in detail between things as they are and
+things as they should be in this respect. But that less
+manageable body of modern women who, by force of youth,
+education, or temperament, are in some degree out of touch with
+the traditions of status received from the barbarian culture, and
+in whom there is, perhaps, an undue reversion to the impulse of
+self-expression and workmanship -- these are touched with a sense
+of grievance too vivid to leave them at rest.
+
+In this "New-Woman" movement -- as these blind and
+incoherent efforts to rehabilitate the woman's pre-glacial
+standing have been named -- there are at least two elements
+discernible, both of which are of an economic character. These
+two elements or motives are expressed by the double watchword,
+"Emancipation" and "Work." Each of these words is recognized to
+stand for something in the way of a wide-spread sense of
+grievance. The prevalence of the sentiment is recognized even by
+people who do not see that there is any real ground for a
+grievance in the situation as it stands today. It is among the
+women of the well-to-do classes, in the communities which are
+farthest advanced in industrial development, that this sense of a
+grievance to be redressed is most alive and finds most frequent
+expression. That is to say, in other words, there is a demand,
+more or less serious, for emancipation from all relation of
+status, tutelage, or vicarious life; and the revulsion asserts
+itself especially among the class of women upon whom the scheme
+of life handed down from the regime of status imposes with least
+litigation a vicarious life, and in those communities whose
+economic development has departed farthest from the circumstances
+to which this traditional scheme is adapted. The demand comes
+from that portion of womankind which is excluded by the canons of
+good repute from all effectual work, and which is closely
+reserved for a life of leisure and conspicuous consumption.
+
+More than one critic of this new-woman movement has
+misapprehended its motive. The case of the American "new woman"
+has lately been summed up with some warmth by a popular observer
+of social phenomena: "She is petted by her husband, the most
+devoted and hard-working of husbands in the world. ... She is the
+superior of her husband in education, and in almost every
+respect. She is surrounded by the most numerous and delicate
+attentions. Yet she is not satisfied. ... The Anglo-Saxon 'new
+woman' is the most ridiculous production of modern times, and
+destined to be the most ghastly failure of the century." Apart
+from the deprecation -- perhaps well placed -- which is contained
+in this presentment, it adds nothing but obscurity to the woman
+question. The grievance of the new woman is made up of those
+things which this typical characterization of the movement urges
+as reasons why she should be content. She is petted, and is
+permitted, or even required, to consume largely and conspicuously
+-- vicariously for her husband or other natural guardian. She is
+exempted, or debarred, from vulgarly useful employment -- in
+order to perform leisure vicariously for the good repute of her
+natural (pecuniary) guardian. These offices are the conventional
+marks of the un-free, at the same time that they are incompatible
+with the human impulse to purposeful activity. But the woman is
+endowed with her share-which there is reason to believe is more
+than an even share -- of the instinct of workmanship, to which
+futility of life or of expenditure is obnoxious. She must unfold
+her life activity in response to the direct, unmediated stimuli
+of the economic environment with which she is in contact. The
+impulse is perhaps stronger upon the woman than upon the man to
+live her own life in her own way and to enter the industrial
+process of the community at something nearer than the second
+remove.
+
+So long as the woman's place is consistently that of a drudge,
+she is, in the average of cases, fairly contented with her lot.
+She not only has something tangible and purposeful to do, but she
+has also no time or thought to spare for a rebellious assertion
+of such human propensity to self-direction as she has inherited.
+And after the stage of universal female drudgery is passed, and a
+vicarious leisure without strenuous application becomes the
+accredited employment of the women of the well-to-do classes, the
+prescriptive force of the canon of pecuniary decency, which
+requires the observance of ceremonial futility on their part,
+will long preserve high-minded women from any sentimental leaning
+to self-direction and a "sphere of usefulness." This is
+especially true during the earlier phases of the pecuniary
+culture, while the leisure of the leisure class is still in great
+measure a predatory activity, an active assertion of mastery in
+which there is enough of tangible purpose of an invidious kind to
+admit of its being taken seriously as an employment to which one
+may without shame put one's hand. This condition of things has
+obviously lasted well down into the present in some communities.
+It continues to hold to a different extent for different
+individuals, varying with the vividness of the sense of status
+and with the feebleness of the impulse to workmanship with which
+the individual is endowed. But where the economic structure of
+the community has so far outgrown the scheme of life based on
+status that the relation of personal subservience is no longer
+felt to be the sole "natural" human relation; there the ancient
+habit of purposeful activity will begin to assert itself in the
+less conformable individuals against the more recent, relatively
+superficial, relatively ephemeral habits and views which the
+predatory and the pecuniary culture have contributed to our
+scheme of life. These habits and views begin to lose their
+coercive force for the community or the class in question so soon
+as the habit of mind and the views of life due to the predatory
+and the quasi-peaceable discipline cease to be in fairly close
+accord with the later-developed economic situation. This is
+evident in the case of the industrious classes of modern
+communities; for them the leisure-class scheme of life has lost
+much of its binding force, especially as regards the element of
+status. But it is also visibly being verified in the case of the
+upper classes, though not in the same manner.
+
+The habits derived from the predatory and quasi-peaceable culture
+are relatively ephemeral variants of certain underlying
+propensities and mental characteristics of the race; which it
+owes to the protracted discipline of the earlier,
+proto-anthropoid cultural stage of peaceable, relatively
+undifferentiated economic life carried on in contact with a
+relatively simple and invariable material environment. When the
+habits superinduced by the emulative method of life have ceased
+to enjoy the section of existing economic exigencies, a process
+of disintegration sets in whereby the habits of thought of more
+recent growth and of a less generic character to some extent
+yield the ground before the more ancient and more pervading
+spiritual characteristics of the race.
+
+In a sense, then, the new-woman movement marks a reversion to a
+more generic type of human character, or to a less
+differentiated expression of human nature. It is a type of human
+nature which is to be characterized as proto-anthropoid, and, as
+regards the substance if not the form of its dominant traits, it
+belongs to a cultural stage that may be classed as possibly
+sub-human. The particular movement or evolutional feature in
+question of course shares this characterization with the rest of
+the later social development, in so far as this social
+development shows evidence of a reversion to the spiritual
+attitude that characterizes the earlier, undifferentiated stage
+of economic revolution. Such evidence of a general tendency to
+reversion from the dominance of the invidious interest is not
+entirely wanting, although it is neither plentiful nor
+unquestionably convincing. The general decay of the sense of
+status in modern industrial communities goes some way as evidence
+in this direction; and the perceptible return to a disapproval of
+futility in human life, and a disapproval of such activities as
+serve only the individual gain at the cost of the collectivity or
+at the cost of other social groups, is evidence to a like effect.
+There is a perceptible tendency to deprecate the infliction of
+pain, as well as to discredit all marauding enterprises, even
+where these expressions of the invidious interest do not tangibly
+work to the material detriment of the community or of the
+individual who passes an opinion on them. It may even be said
+that in the modern industrial communities the average,
+dispassionate sense of men says that the ideal character is a
+character which makes for peace, good-will, and economic
+efficiency, rather than for a life of self-seeking, force, fraud,
+and mastery.
+
+The influence of the leisure class is not consistently for or
+against the rehabilitation of this proto-anthropoid human nature.
+So far as concerns the chance of survival of individuals endowed
+with an exceptionally large share of the primitive traits, the
+sheltered position of the class favors its members directly by
+withdrawing them from the pecuniary struggle; but indirectly,
+through the leisure-class canons of conspicuous waste of goods
+and effort, the institution of a leisure class lessens the chance
+of survival of such individuals in the entire body of the
+population. The decent requirements of waste absorb the surplus
+energy of the population in an invidious struggle and leave no
+margin for the non-invidious expression of life. The remoter,
+less tangible, spiritual effects of the discipline of decency go
+in the same direction and work perhaps more effectually to the
+same end. The canons of decent life are an elaboration of the
+principle of invidious comparison, and they accordingly act
+consistently to inhibit all non-invidious effort and to inculcate
+the self-regarding attitude.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Fourteen
+
+The Higher Learning as an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture
+
+To the end that suitable habits of thought on certain heads may
+be conserved in the incoming generation, a scholastic discipline
+is sanctioned by the common sense of the community and
+incorporated into the accredited scheme of life. The habits of
+thought which are so formed under the guidance of teachers and
+scholastic traditions have an economic value -- a value as
+affecting the serviceability of the individual -- no less real
+than the similar economic value of the habits of thought formed
+without such guidance under the discipline of everyday life.
+Whatever characteristics of the accredited scholastic scheme and
+discipline are traceable to the predilections of the leisure
+class or to the guidance of the canons of pecuniary merit are to
+be set down to the account of that institution, and whatever
+economic value these features of the educational scheme possess
+are the expression in detail of the value of that institution. It
+will be in place, therefore, to point out any peculiar features
+of the educational system which are traceable to the
+leisure-class scheme of life, whether as regards the aim and
+method of the discipline, or as regards the compass and character
+of the body of knowledge inculcated. It is in learning proper,
+and more particularly in the higher learning, that the influence
+of leisure-class ideals is most patent; and since the purpose
+here is not to make an exhaustive collation of data showing the
+effect of the pecuniary culture upon education, but rather to
+illustrate the method and trend of the leisure-class influence in
+education, a survey of certain salient features of the higher
+learning, such as may serve this purpose, is all that will be
+attempted.
+
+In point of derivation and early development, learning is
+somewhat closely related to the devotional function of the
+community, particularly to the body of observances in which the
+service rendered the supernatural leisure class expresses itself.
+The service by which it is sought to conciliate supernatural
+agencies in the primitive cults is not an industrially profitable
+employment of the community's time and effort. It is, therefore,
+in great part, to be classed as a vicarious leisure performed for
+the supernatural powers with whom negotiations are carried on and
+whose good-will the service and the professions of subservience
+are conceived to procure. In great part, the early learning
+consisted in an acquisition of knowledge and facility in the
+service of a supernatural agent. It was therefore closely
+analogous in character to the training required for the domestic
+service of a temporal master. To a great extent, the knowledge
+acquired under the priestly teachers of the primitive community
+was knowledge of ritual and ceremonial; that is to say, a
+knowledge of the most proper, most effective, or most acceptable
+manner of approaching and of serving the preternatural agents.
+What was learned was how to make oneself indispensable to these
+powers, and so to put oneself in a position to ask, or even to
+require, their intercession in the course of events or their
+abstention from interference in any given enterprise.
+Propitiation was the end, and this end was sought, in great part,
+by acquiring facility in subservience. It appears to have been
+only gradually that other elements than those of efficient
+service of the master found their way into the stock of priestly
+or shamanistic instruction.
+
+The priestly servitor of the inscrutable powers that move in the
+external world came to stand in the position of a mediator
+between these powers and the common run of unrestricted humanity;
+for he was possessed of a knowledge of the supernatural etiquette
+which would admit him into the presence. And as commonly happens
+with mediators between the vulgar and their masters, whether the
+masters be natural or preternatural, he found it expedient to
+have the means at hand tangibly to impress upon the vulgar the
+fact that these inscrutable powers would do what he might ask of
+them. Hence, presently, a knowledge of certain natural processes
+which could be turned to account for spectacular effect, together
+with some sleight of hand, came to be an integral part of
+priestly lore. Knowledge of this kind passes for knowledge of the
+"unknowable", and it owes its serviceability for the sacerdotal
+purpose to its recondite character. It appears to have been from
+this source that learning, as an institution, arose, and its
+differentiation from this its parent stock of magic ritual and
+shamanistic fraud has been slow and tedious, and is scarcely yet
+complete even in the most advanced of the higher seminaries of
+learning.
+
+The recondite element in learning is still, as it has been in all
+ages, a very attractive and effective element for the purpose of
+impressing, or even imposing upon, the unlearned; and the
+standing of the savant in the mind of the altogether
+unlettered is in great measure rated in terms of intimacy with
+the occult forces. So, for instance, as a typical case, even so
+late as the middle of this century, the Norwegian peasants have
+instinctively formulated their sense of the superior erudition of
+such doctors of divinity as Luther, Malanchthon, Peder Dass, and
+even so late a scholar in divinity as Grundtvig, in terms of the
+Black Art. These, together with a very comprehensive list of
+minor celebrities, both living and dead, have been reputed
+masters in all magical arts; and a high position in the
+ecclesiastical personnel has carried with it, in the apprehension
+of these good people, an implication of profound familiarity with
+magical practice and the occult sciences. There is a parallel
+fact nearer home, similarly going to show the close relationship,
+in popular apprehension, between erudition and the unknowable;
+and it will at the same time serve to illustrate, in somewhat
+coarse outline, the bent which leisure-class life gives to the
+cognitive interest. While the belief is by no means confined to
+the leisure class, that class today comprises a
+disproportionately large number of believers in occult sciences
+of all kinds and shades. By those whose habits of thought are not
+shaped by contact with modern industry, the knowledge of the
+unknowable is still felt to the ultimate if not the only true
+knowledge.
+
+Learning, then, set out by being in some sense a by-product of
+the priestly vicarious leisure class; and, at least until a
+recent date, the higher learning has since remained in some sense
+a by-product or by-occupation of the priestly classes. As the
+body of systematized knowledge increased, there presently arose a
+distinction, traceable very far back in the history of education,
+between esoteric and exoteric knowledge, the former -- so far as
+there is a substantial difference between the two -- comprising
+such knowledge as is primarily of no economic or industrial
+effect, and the latter comprising chiefly knowledge of industrial
+processes and of natural phenomena which were habitually turned
+to account for the material purposes of life. This line of
+demarcation has in time become, at least in popular apprehension,
+the normal line between the higher learning and the lower.
+
+It is significant, not only as an evidence of their close
+affiliation with the priestly craft, but also as indicating that
+their activity to a good extent falls under that category of
+conspicuous leisure known as manners and breeding, that the
+learned class in all primitive communities are great sticklers
+for form, precedent, gradations of rank, ritual, ceremonial
+vestments, and learned paraphernalia generally. This is of course
+to be expected, and it goes to say that the higher learning, in
+its incipient phase, is a leisure-class occupation -- more
+specifically an occupation of the vicarious leisure class
+employed in the service of the supernatural leisure class. But
+this predilection for the paraphernalia of learning goes also to
+indicate a further point of contact or of continuity between the
+priestly office and the office of the savant. In point of
+derivation, learning, as well as the priestly office, is largely
+an outgrowth of sympathetic magic; and this magical apparatus of
+form and ritual therefore finds its place with the learned class
+of the primitive community as a matter of course. The ritual and
+paraphernalia have an occult efficacy for the magical purpose; so
+that their presence as an integral factor in the earlier phases
+of the development of magic and science is a matter of
+expediency, quite as much as of affectionate regard for symbolism
+simply.
+
+This sense of the efficacy of symbolic ritual, and of sympathetic
+effect to be wrought through dexterous rehearsal of the
+traditional accessories of the act or end to be compassed, is of
+course present more obviously and in larger measure in magical
+practice than in the discipline of the sciences, even of the
+occult sciences. But there are, I apprehend, few persons with a
+cultivated sense of scholastic merit to whom the ritualistic
+accessories of science are altogether an idle matter. The very
+great tenacity with which these ritualistic paraphernalia persist
+through the later course of the development is evident to any one
+who will reflect on what has been the history of learning in our
+civilization. Even today there are such things in the usage of
+the learned community as the cap and gown, matriculation,
+initiation, and graduation ceremonies, and the conferring of
+scholastic degrees, dignities, and prerogatives in a way which
+suggests some sort of a scholarly apostolic succession. The usage
+of the priestly orders is no doubt the proximate source of all
+these features of learned ritual, vestments, sacramental
+initiation, the transmission of peculiar dignities and virtues by
+the imposition of hands, and the like; but their derivation is
+traceable back of this point, to the source from which the
+specialized priestly class proper came to be distinguished from
+the sorcerer on the one hand and from the menial servant of a
+temporal master on the other hand. So far as regards both their
+derivation and their psychological content, these usages and the
+conceptions on which they rest belong to a stage in cultural
+development no later than that of the angekok and the rain-maker.
+Their place in the later phases of devout observance, as well as
+in the higher educational system, is that of a survival from a
+very early animistic phase of the development of human nature.
+
+These ritualistic features of the educational system of the
+present and of the recent past, it is quite safe to say, have
+their place primarily in the higher, liberal, and classic
+institutions and grades of learning, rather than in the lower,
+technological, or practical grades, and branches of the system.
+So far as they possess them, the lower and less reputable
+branches of the educational scheme have evidently borrowed these
+things from the higher grades; and their continued persistence
+among the practical schools, without the sanction of the
+continued example of the higher and classic grades, would be
+highly improbable, to say the least. With the lower and practical
+schools and scholars, the adoption and cultivation of these
+usages is a case of mimicry -- due to a desire to conform as far
+as may be to the standards of scholastic reputability maintained
+by the upper grades and classes, who have come by these accessory
+features legitimately, by the right of lineal devolution.
+
+The analysis may even be safely carried a step farther.
+Ritualistic survivals and reversions come out in fullest vigor
+and with the freest air of spontaneity among those seminaries of
+learning which have to do primarily with the education of the
+priestly and leisure classes. Accordingly it should appear, and
+it does pretty plainly appear, on a survey of recent developments
+in college and university life, that wherever schools founded for
+the instruction of the lower classes in the immediately useful
+branches of knowledge grow into institutions of the higher
+learning, the growth of ritualistic ceremonial and paraphernalia
+and of elaborate scholastic "functions" goes hand in hand with
+the transition of the schools in question from the field of
+homely practicality into the higher, classical sphere. The
+initial purpose of these schools, and the work with which they
+have chiefly had to do at the earlier of these two stages of
+their evolution, has been that of fitting the young of the
+industrious classes for work. On the higher, classical plane of
+learning to which they commonly tend, their dominant aim becomes
+the preparation of the youth of the priestly and the leisure
+classes -- or of an incipient leisure class -- for the
+consumption of goods, material and immaterial, according to a
+conventionally accepted, reputable scope and method. This happy
+issue has commonly been the fate of schools founded by "friends
+of the people" for the aid of struggling young men, and where
+this transition is made in good form there is commonly, if not
+invariably, a coincident change to a more ritualistic life in the
+schools.
+
+In the school life of today, learned ritual is in a general way
+best at home in schools whose chief end is the cultivation of the
+"humanities". This correlation is shown, perhaps more neatly than
+anywhere else, in the life-history of the American colleges and
+universities of recent growth. There may be many exceptions from
+the rule, especially among those schools which have been founded
+by the typically reputable and ritualistic churches, and which,
+therefore, started on the conservative and classical plane or
+reached the classical position by a short-cut; but the general
+rule as regards the colleges founded in the newer American
+communities during the present century has been that so long as
+the constituency from which the colleges have drawn their pupils
+has been dominated by habits of industry and thrift, so long the
+reminiscences of the medicine-man have found but a scant and
+precarious acceptance in the scheme of college life. But so soon
+as wealth begins appreciably to accumulate in the community, and
+so soon as a given school begins to lean on a leisure-class
+constituency, there comes also a perceptibly increased insistence
+on scholastic ritual and on conformity to the ancient forms as
+regards vestments and social and scholastic solemnities. So, for
+instance, there has been an approximate coincidence between the
+growth of wealth among the constituency which supports any given
+college of the Middle West and the date of acceptance -- first
+into tolerance and then into imperative vogue -- of evening dress
+for men and of the décolleté for women, as the scholarly
+vestments proper to occasions of learned solemnity or to the
+seasons of social amenity within the college circle. Apart from
+the mechanical difficulty of so large a task, it would scarcely
+be a difficult matter to trace this correlation. The like is true
+of the vogue of the cap and gown.
+
+Cap and gown have been adopted as learned insignia by many
+colleges of this section within the last few years; and it is
+safe to say that this could scarcely have occurred at a much
+earlier date, or until there had grown up a leisure-class
+sentiment of sufficient volume in the community to support a
+strong movement of reversion towards an archaic view as to the
+legitimate end of education. This particular item of learned
+ritual, it may be noted, would not only commend itself to the
+leisure-class sense of the fitness of things, as appealing to the
+archaic propensity for spectacular effect and the predilection
+for antique symbolism; but it at the same time fits into the
+leisure-class scheme of life as involving a notable element of
+conspicuous waste. The precise date at which the reversion to cap
+and gown took place, as well as the fact that it affected so
+large a number of schools at about the same time, seems to have
+been due in some measure to a wave of atavistic sense of
+conformity and reputability that passed over the community at
+that period.
+
+It may not be entirely beside the point to note that in point of
+time this curious reversion seems to coincide with the
+culmination of a certain vogue of atavistic sentiment and
+tradition in other directions also. The wave of reversion seems
+to have received its initial impulse in the psychologically
+disintegrating effects of the Civil War. Habituation to war
+entails a body of predatory habits of thought, whereby
+clannishness in some measure replaces the sense of solidarity,
+and a sense of invidious distinction supplants the impulse to
+equitable, everyday serviceability. As an outcome of the
+cumulative action of these factors, the generation which follows
+a season of war is apt to witness a rehabilitation of the element
+of status, both in its social life and in its scheme of devout
+observances and other symbolic or ceremonial forms. Throughout
+the eighties, and less plainly traceable through the seventies
+also, there was perceptible a gradually advancing wave of
+sentiment favoring quasi-predatory business habits, insistence on
+status, anthropomorphism, and conservatism generally. The more
+direct and unmediated of these expressions of the barbarian
+temperament, such as the recrudescence of outlawry and the
+spectacular quasi-predatory careers of fraud run by certain
+"captains of industry", came to a head earlier and were
+appreciably on the decline by the close of the seventies. The
+recrudescence of anthropomorphic sentiment also seems to have
+passed its most acute stage before the close of the eighties. But
+the learned ritual and paraphernalia here spoken of are a still
+remoter and more recondite expression of the barbarian animistic
+sense; and these, therefore, gained vogue and elaboration more
+slowly and reached their most effective development at a still
+later date. There is reason to believe that the culmination is
+now already past. Except for the new impetus given by a new war
+experience, and except for the support which the growth of a
+wealthy class affords to all ritual, and especially to whatever
+ceremonial is wasteful and pointedly suggests gradations of
+status, it is probable that the late improvements and
+augmentation of scholastic insignia and ceremonial would
+gradually decline. But while it may be true that the cap and
+gown, and the more strenuous observance of scholastic proprieties
+which came with them, were floated in on this post-bellum tidal
+wave of reversion to barbarism, it is also no doubt true that
+such a ritualistic reversion could not have been effected in the
+college scheme of life until the accumulation of wealth in the
+hands of a propertied class had gone far enough to afford the
+requisite pecuniary ground for a movement which should bring the
+colleges of the country up to the leisure-class requirements in
+the higher learning. The adoption of the cap and gown is one of
+the striking atavistic features of modern college life, and at
+the same time it marks the fact that these colleges have
+definitely become leisure-class establishments, either in actual
+achievement or in aspiration.
+
+As further evidence of the close relation between the educational
+system and the cultural standards of the community, it may be
+remarked that there is some tendency latterly to substitute the
+captain of industry in place of the priest, as the head of
+seminaries of the higher learning. The substitution is by no
+means complete or unequivocal. Those heads of institutions are
+best accepted who combine the sacerdotal office with a high
+degree of pecuniary efficiency. There is a similar but less
+pronounced tendency to intrust the work of instruction in the
+higher learning to men of some pecuniary qualification.
+Administrative ability and skill in advertising the enterprise
+count for rather more than they once did, as qualifications for
+the work of teaching. This applies especially in those sciences
+that have most to do with the everyday facts of life, and it is
+particularly true of schools in the economically single-minded
+communities. This partial substitution of pecuniary for
+sacerdotal efficiency is a concomitant of the modern transition
+from conspicuous leisure to conspicuous consumption, as the chief
+means of reputability. The correlation of the two facts is
+probably clear without further elaboration.
+
+The attitude of the schools and of the learned class towards the
+education of women serves to show in what manner and to what
+extent learning has departed from its ancient station of priestly
+and leisure-class prerogatives, and it indicates also what
+approach has been made by the truly learned to the modern,
+economic or industrial, matter-of-fact standpoint. The higher
+schools and the learned professions were until recently tabu to
+the women. These establishments were from the outset, and have in
+great measure continued to be, devoted to the education of the
+priestly and leisure classes.
+
+The women, as has been shown elsewhere, were the original
+subservient class, and to some extent, especially so far as
+regards their nominal or ceremonial position, they have remained
+in that relation down to the present. There has prevailed a
+strong sense that the admission of women to the privileges of the
+higher learning (as to the Eleusianin mysteries) would be
+derogatory to the dignity of the learned craft. It is therefore
+only very recently, and almost solely in the industrially most
+advanced communities, that the higher grades of schools have been
+freely opened to women. And even under the urgent circumstances
+prevailing in the modern industrial communities, the highest and
+most reputable universities show an extreme reluctance in making
+the move. The sense of class worthiness, that is to say of
+status, of a honorific differentiation of the sexes according to
+a distinction between superior and inferior intellectual dignity,
+survives in a vigorous form in these corporations of the
+aristocracy of learning. It is felt that the woman should, in all
+propriety, acquire only such knowledge as may be classed under
+one or the other of two heads: (1) such knowledge as conduces
+immediately to a better performance of domestic service -- the
+domestic sphere; (2) such accomplishments and dexterity,
+quasi-scholarly and quasi-artistic, as plainly come in under the
+head of a performance of vicarious leisure. Knowledge is felt to
+be unfeminine if it is knowledge which expresses the unfolding of
+the learner's own life, the acquisition of which proceeds on the
+learner's own cognitive interest, without prompting from the
+canons of propriety, and without reference back to a master whose
+comfort or good repute is to be enhanced by the employment or the
+exhibition of it. So, also, all knowledge which is useful as
+evidence of leisure, other than vicarious leisure, is scarcely
+feminine.
+
+For an appreciation of the relation which these higher seminaries
+of learning bear to the economic life of the community, the
+phenomena which have been reviewed are of importance rather as
+indications of a general attitude than as being in themselves
+facts of first-rate economic consequence. They go to show what is
+the instinctive attitude and animus of the learned class towards
+the life process of an industrial community. They serve as an
+exponent of the stage of development, for the industrial purpose,
+attained by the higher learning and by the learned class, and so
+they afford an indication as to what may fairly be looked for
+from this class at points where the learning and the life of the
+class bear more immediately upon the economic life and efficiency
+of the community, and upon the adjustment of its scheme of life
+to the requirements of the time. What these ritualistic survivals
+go to indicate is a prevalence of conservatism, if not of
+reactionary sentiment, especially among the higher schools where
+the conventional learning is cultivated.
+
+To these indications of a conservative attitude is to be added
+another characteristic which goes in the same direction, but
+which is a symptom of graver consequence that this playful
+inclination to trivialities of form and ritual. By far the
+greater number of American colleges and universities, for
+instance, are affiliated to some religious denomination and are
+somewhat given to devout observances. Their putative familiarity
+with scientific methods and the scientific point of view should
+presumably exempt the faculties of these schools from animistic
+habits of thought; but there is still a considerable proportion
+of them who profess an attachment to the anthropomorphic beliefs
+and observances of an earlier culture. These professions of
+devotional zeal are, no doubt, to a good extent expedient and
+perfunctory, both on the part of the schools in their corporate
+capacity, and on the part of the individual members of the corps
+of instructors; but it can not be doubted that there is after all
+a very appreciable element of anthropomorphic sentiment present
+in the higher schools. So far as this is the case it must be set
+down as the expression of an archaic, animistic habit of mind.
+This habit of mind must necessarily assert itself to some extent
+in the instruction offered, and to this extent its influence in
+shaping the habits of thought of the student makes for
+conservatism and reversion; it acts to hinder his development in
+the direction of matter-of-fact knowledge, such as best serves
+the ends of industry.
+
+The college sports, which have so great a vogue in the reputable
+seminaries of learning today, tend in a similar direction; and,
+indeed, sports have much in common with the devout attitude of
+the colleges, both as regards their psychological basis and as
+regards their disciplinary effect. But this expression of the
+barbarian temperament is to be credited primarily to the body of
+students, rather than to the temper of the schools as such;
+except in so far as the colleges or the college officials -- as
+sometimes happens -- actively countenance and foster the growth
+of sports. The like is true of college fraternities as of college
+sports, but with a difference. The latter are chiefly an
+expression of the predatory impulse simply; the former are more
+specifically an expression of that heritage of clannishness which
+is so large a feature in the temperament of the predatory
+barbarian. It is also noticeable that a close relation subsists
+between the fraternities and the sporting activity of the
+schools. After what has already been said in an earlier chapter
+on the sporting and gambling habit, it is scarcely necessary
+further to discuss the economic value of this training in sports
+and in factional organization and activity.
+
+But all these features of the scheme of life of the learned
+class, and of the establishments dedicated to the conservation of
+the higher learning, are in a great measure incidental only. They
+are scarcely to be accounted organic elements of the professed
+work of research and instruction for the ostensible pursuit of
+which the schools exists. But these symptomatic indications go to
+establish a presumption as to the character of the work performed
+-- as seen from the economic point of view -- and as to the bent
+which the serious work carried on under their auspices gives to
+the youth who resort to the schools. The presumption raised by
+the considerations already offered is that in their work also, as
+well as in their ceremonial, the higher schools may be expected
+to take a conservative position; but this presumption must be
+checked by a comparison of the economic character of the work
+actually performed, and by something of a survey of the learning
+whose conservation is intrusted to the higher schools. On this
+head, it is well known that the accredited seminaries of learning
+have, until a recent date, held a conservative position. They
+have taken an attitude of depreciation towards all innovations.
+As a general rule a new point of view or a new formulation of
+knowledge have been countenanced and taken up within the schools
+only after these new things have made their way outside of the
+schools. As exceptions from this rule are chiefly to be mentioned
+innovations of an inconspicuous kind and departures which do not
+bear in any tangible way upon the conventional point of view or
+upon the conventional scheme of life; as, for instance, details
+of fact in the mathematico-physical sciences, and new readings
+and interpretations of the classics, especially such as have a
+philological or literary bearing only. Except within the domain
+of the "humanities", in the narrow sense, and except so far as
+the traditional point of view of the humanities has been left
+intact by the innovators, it has generally held true that the
+accredited learned class and the seminaries of the higher
+learning have looked askance at all innovation. New views, new
+departures in scientific theory, especially in new departures
+which touch the theory of human relations at any point, have
+found a place in the scheme of the university tardily and by a
+reluctant tolerance, rather than by a cordial welcome; and the
+men who have occupied themselves with such efforts to widen the
+scope of human knowledge have not commonly been well received by
+their learned contemporaries. The higher schools have not
+commonly given their countenance to a serious advance in the
+methods or the content of knowledge until the innovations have
+outlived their youth and much of their usefulness -- after they
+have become commonplaces of the intellectual furniture of a new
+generation which has grown up under, and has had its habits of
+thought shaped by, the new, extra-scholastic body of knowledge
+and the new standpoint. This is true of the recent past. How far
+it may be true of the immediate present it would be hazardous to
+say, for it is impossible to see present-day facts in such
+perspective as to get a fair conception of their relative
+proportions.
+
+So far, nothing has been said of the Maecenas function of the
+well-to-do, which is habitually dwelt on at some length by
+writers and speakers who treat of the development of culture and
+of social structure. This leisure-class function is not without
+an important bearing on the higher and on the spread of knowledge
+and culture. The manner and the degree in which the class
+furthers learning through patronage of this kind is sufficiently
+familiar. It has been frequently presented in affectionate and
+effective terms by spokesmen whose familiarity with the topic
+fits them to bring home to their hearers the profound
+significance of this cultural factor. These spokesmen, however,
+have presented the matter from the point of view of the cultural
+interest, or of the interest of reputability, rather than from
+that of the economic interest. As apprehended from the economic
+point of view, and valued for the purpose of industrial
+serviceability, this function of the well-to-do, as well as the
+intellectual attitude of members of the well-to-do class, merits
+some attention and will bear illustration.
+
+By way of characterization of the Maecenas relation, it is to be
+noted that, considered externally, as an economic or industrial
+relation simply, it is a relation of status. The scholar under
+the patronage performs the duties of a learned life vicariously
+for his patron, to whom a certain repute inures after the manner
+of the good repute imputed to a master for whom any form of
+vicarious leisure is performed. It is also to be noted that, in
+point of historical fact, the furtherance of learning or the
+maintenance of scholarly activity through the Maecenas relation
+has most commonly been a furtherance of proficiency in classical
+lore or in the humanities. The knowledge tends to lower rather
+than to heighten the industrial efficiency of the community.
+
+Further, as regards the direct participation of the members of
+the leisure class in the furtherance of knowledge, the canons of
+reputable living act to throw such intellectual interest as seeks
+expression among the class on the side of classical and formal
+erudition, rather than on the side of the sciences that bear some
+relation to the community's industrial life. The most frequent
+excursions into other than classical fields of knowledge on the
+part of members of the leisure class are made into the discipline
+of law and the political, and more especially the administrative,
+sciences. These so-called sciences are substantially bodies of
+maxims of expediency for guidance in the leisure-class office of
+government, as conducted on a proprietary basis. The interest
+with which this discipline is approached is therefore not
+commonly the intellectual or cognitive interest simply. It is
+largely the practical interest of the exigencies of that relation
+of mastery in which the members of the class are placed. In point
+of derivation, the office of government is a predatory function,
+pertaining integrally to the archaic leisure-class scheme of
+life. It is an exercise of control and coercion over the
+population from which the class draws its sustenance. This
+discipline, as well as the incidents of practice which give it
+its content, therefore has some attraction for the class apart
+from all questions of cognition. All this holds true wherever and
+so long as the governmental office continues, in form or in
+substance, to be a proprietary office; and it holds true beyond
+that limit, in so far as the tradition of the more archaic phase
+of governmental evolution has lasted on into the later life of
+those modern communities for whom proprietary government by a
+leisure class is now beginning to pass away.
+
+For that field of learning within which the cognitive or
+intellectual interest is dominant -- the sciences properly so
+called -- the case is somewhat different, not only as regards the
+attitude of the leisure class, but as regards the whole drift of
+the pecuniary culture. Knowledge for its own sake, the exercise
+of the faculty of comprehensive without ulterior purpose, should,
+it might be expected, be sought by men whom no urgent material
+interest diverts from such a quest. The sheltered industrial
+position of the leisure class should give free play to the
+cognitive interest in members of this class, and we should
+consequently have, as many writers confidently find that we do
+have, a very large proportion of scholars, scientists, savants
+derived from this class and deriving their incentive to
+scientific investigation and speculation from the discipline of a
+life of leisure. Some such result is to be looked for, but there
+are features of the leisure-class scheme of life, already
+sufficiently dwelt upon, which go to divert the intellectual
+interest of this class to other subjects than that causal
+sequence in phenomena which makes the content of the sciences.
+The habits of thought which characterize the life of the class
+run on the personal relation of dominance, and on the derivative,
+invidious concepts of honor, worth, merit, character, and the
+like. The casual sequence which makes up the subject matter of
+science is not visible from this point of view. Neither does good
+repute attach to knowledge of facts that are vulgarly useful.
+Hence it should appear probable that the interest of the
+invidious comparison with respect to pecuniary or other honorific
+merit should occupy the attention of the leisure class, to the
+neglect of the cognitive interest. Where this latter interest
+asserts itself it should commonly be diverted to fields of
+speculation or investigation which are reputable and futile,
+rather than to the quest of scientific knowledge. Such indeed has
+been the history of priestly and leisure-class learning so long
+as no considerable body of systematized knowledge had been
+intruded into the scholastic discipline from an extra-scholastic
+source. But since the relation of mastery and subservience is
+ceasing to be the dominant and formative factor in the
+community's life process, other features of the life process and
+other points of view are forcing themselves upon the scholars.
+The true-bred gentleman of leisure should, and does, see the
+world from the point of view of the personal relation; and the
+cognitive interest, so far as it asserts itself in him, should
+seek to systematize phenomena on this basis. Such indeed is the
+case with the gentleman of the old school, in whom the
+leisure-class ideals have suffered no disintegration; and such is
+the attitude of his latter-day descendant, in so far as he has
+fallen heir to the full complement of upper-class virtues. But
+the ways of heredity are devious, and not every gentleman's son
+is to the manor born. Especially is the transmission of the
+habits of thought which characterize the predatory master
+somewhat precarious in the case of a line of descent in which but
+one or two of the latest steps have lain within the leisure-class
+discipline. The chances of occurrence of a strong congenital or
+acquired bent towards the exercise of the cognitive aptitudes are
+apparently best in those members of the leisure class who are of
+lower class or middle class antecedents -- that is to say, those
+who have inherited the complement of aptitudes proper to the
+industrious classes, and who owe their place in the leisure class
+to the possession of qualities which count for more today than
+they did in the times when the leisure-class scheme of life took
+shape. But even outside the range of these later accessions to
+the leisure class there are an appreciable number of individuals
+in whom the invidious interest is not sufficiently dominant to
+shape their theoretical views, and in whom the proclivity to
+theory is sufficiently strong to lead them into the scientific
+quest.
+
+The higher learning owes the intrusion of the sciences in part to
+these aberrant scions of the leisure class, who have come under
+the dominant influence of the latter-day tradition of impersonal
+relation and who have inherited a complement of human aptitudes
+differing in certain salient features from the temperament which
+is characteristic of the regime of status. But it owes the
+presence of this alien body of scientific knowledge also in part,
+and in a higher degree, to members of the industrious classes who
+have been in sufficiently easy circumstances to turn their
+attention to other interests than that of finding daily
+sustenance, and whose inherited aptitudes and anthropomorphic
+point of view does not dominate their intellectual processes. As
+between these two groups, which approximately comprise the
+effective force of scientific progress, it is the latter that has
+contributed the most. And with respect to both it seems to be
+true that they are not so much the source as the vehicle, or at
+the most they are the instrument of commutation, by which the
+habits of thought enforced upon the community, through contact
+with its environment under the exigencies of modern associated
+life and the mechanical industries, are turned to account for
+theoretical knowledge.
+
+Science, in the sense of an articulate recognition of causal
+sequence in phenomena, whether physical or social, has been a
+feature of the Western culture only since the industrial process
+in the Western communities has come to be substantially a process
+of mechanical contrivances in which man's office is that of
+discrimination and valuation of material forces. Science has
+flourished somewhat in the same degree as the industrial life of
+the community has conformed to this pattern, and somewhat in the
+same degree as the industrial interest has dominated the
+community's life. And science, and scientific theory especially,
+has made headway in the several departments of human life and
+knowledge in proportion as each of these several departments has
+successively come into closer contact with the industrial process
+and the economic interest; or perhaps it is truer to say, in
+proportion as each of them has successively escaped from the
+dominance of the conceptions of personal relation or status, and
+of the derivative canons of anthropomorphic fitness and honorific
+worth.
+
+It is only as the exigencies of modern industrial life have
+enforced the recognition of causal sequence in the practical
+contact of mankind with their environment, that men have come to
+systematize the phenomena of this environment and the facts of
+their own contact with it,in terms of causal sequence. So that
+while the higher learning in its best development, as the perfect
+flower of scholasticism and classicism, was a by-product of the
+priestly office and the life of leisure, so modern science may be
+said to be a by-product of the industrial process. Through these
+groups of men, then -- investigators, savants, scientists,
+inventors, speculators -- most of whom have done their most
+telling work outside the shelter of the schools, the habits of
+thought enforced by the modern industrial life have found
+coherent expression and elaboration as a body of theoretical
+science having to do with the causal sequence of phenomena. And
+from this extra-scholastic field of scientific speculation,
+changes of method and purpose have from time to time been
+intruded into the scholastic discipline.
+
+In this connection it is to be remarked that there is a very
+perceptible difference of substance and purpose between the
+instruction offered in the primary and secondary schools, on the
+one hand, and in the higher seminaries of learning, on the other
+hand. The difference in point of immediate practicality of the
+information imparted and of the proficiency acquired may be of
+some consequence and may merit the attention which it has from
+time to time received; but there is more substantial difference
+in the mental and spiritual bent which is favored by the one and
+the other discipline. This divergent trend in discipline between
+the higher and the lower learning is especially noticeable as
+regards the primary education in its latest development in the
+advanced industrial communities. Here the instruction is directed
+chiefly to proficiency or dexterity, intellectual and manual, in
+the apprehension and employment of impersonal facts, in their
+casual rather than in their honorific incidence. It is true,
+under the traditions of the earlier days, when the primary
+education was also predominantly a leisure-class commodity, a
+free use is still made of emulation as a spur to diligence in the
+common run of primary schools; but even this use of emulation as
+an expedient is visibly declining in the primary grades of
+instruction in communities where the lower education is not under
+the guidance of the ecclesiastical or military tradition. All
+this holds true in a peculiar degree, and more especially on the
+spiritual side, of such portions of the educational system as
+have been immediately affected by kindergarten methods and
+ideals.
+
+The peculiarly non-invidious trend of the kindergarten
+discipline, and the similar character of the kindergarten
+influence in primary education beyond the limits of the
+kindergarten proper, should be taken in connection with what has
+already been said of the peculiar spiritual attitude of
+leisure-class womankind under the circumstances of the modern
+economic situation. The kindergarten discipline is at its best --
+or at its farthest remove from ancient patriarchal and
+pedagogical ideals -- in the advanced industrial communities,
+where there is a considerable body of intelligent and idle women,
+and where the system of status has somewhat abated in rigor under
+the disintegrating influence of industrial life and in the
+absence of a consistent body of military and ecclesiastical
+traditions. It is from these women in easy circumstances that it
+gets its moral support. The aims and methods of the kindergarten
+commend themselves with especial effect to this class of women
+who are ill at ease under the pecuniary code of reputable life.
+The kindergarten, and whatever the kindergarten spirit counts for
+in modern education, therefore, is to be set down, along with the
+"new-woman movement," to the account of that revulsion against
+futility and invidious comparison which the leisure-class life
+under modern circumstances induces in the women most immediately
+exposed to its discipline. In this way it appears that, by
+indirection, the institution of a leisure class here again favors
+the growth of a non-invidious attitude, which may, in the long
+run, prove a menace to the stability of the institution itself,
+and even to the institution of individual ownership on which it
+rests.
+
+During the recent past some tangible changes have taken place in
+the scope of college and university teaching. These changes have
+in the main consisted in a partial displacement of the humanities
+-- those branches of learning which are conceived to make for the
+traditional "culture", character, tastes, and ideals -- by those
+more matter-of-fact branches which make for civic and industrial
+efficiency. To put the same thing in other words, those branches
+of knowledge which make for efficiency (ultimately productive
+efficiency) have gradually been gaining ground against those
+branches which make for a heightened consumption or a lowered
+industrial efficiency and for a type of character suited to the
+regime of status. In this adaptation of the scheme of instruction
+the higher schools have commonly been found on the conservative
+side; each step which they have taken in advance has been to some
+extent of the nature of a concession. The sciences have been
+intruded into the scholar's discipline from without, not to say
+from below. It is noticeable that the humanities which have so
+reluctantly yielded ground to the sciences are pretty uniformly
+adapted to shape the character of the student in accordance with
+a traditional self-centred scheme of consumption; a scheme of
+contemplation and enjoyment of the true, the beautiful, and the
+good, according to a conventional standard of propriety and
+excellence, the salient feature of which is leisure -- otium cum
+dignitate. In language veiled by their own habituation to the
+archaic, decorous point of view, the spokesmen of the humanities
+have insisted upon the ideal embodied in the maxim, fruges
+consumere nati. This attitude should occasion no surprise in the
+case of schools which are shaped by and rest upon a leisure-class
+culture.
+
+The professed grounds on which it has been sought, as far as
+might be, to maintain the received standards and methods of
+culture intact are likewise characteristic of the archaic
+temperament and of the leisure-class theory of life. The
+enjoyment and the bent derived from habitual contemplation of the
+life, ideals, speculations, and methods of consuming time and
+goods, in vogue among the leisure class of classical antiquity,
+for instance, is felt to be "higher", "nobler", "worthier", than
+what results in these respects from a like familiarity with the
+everyday life and the knowledge and aspirations of commonplace
+humanity in a modern community, that learning the content of
+which is an unmitigated knowledge of latter-day men and things is
+by comparison "lower", "base", "ignoble" -- one even hears the
+epithet "sub-human" applied to this matter-of-fact knowledge of
+mankind and of everyday life.
+
+This contention of the leisure-class spokesmen of the
+humanities seems to be substantially sound. In point of
+substantial fact, the gratification and the culture, or the
+spiritual attitude or habit of mind, resulting from an habitual
+contemplation of the anthropomorphism, clannishness, and
+leisurely self-complacency of the gentleman of an early day, or
+from a familiarity with the animistic superstitions and the
+exuberant truculence of the Homeric heroes, for instance, is,
+aesthetically considered, more legitimate than the corresponding
+results derived from a matter-of-fact knowledge of things and a
+contemplation of latter-day civic or workmanlike efficiency.
+There can be but little question that the first-named habits have
+the advantage in respect of aesthetic or honorific value, and
+therefore in respect of the "worth" which is made the basis of
+award in the comparison. The content of the canons of taste, and
+more particularly of the canons of honor, is in the nature of
+things a resultant of the past life and circumstances of the
+race, transmitted to the later generation by inheritance or by
+tradition; and the fact that the protracted dominance of a
+predatory, leisure-class scheme of life has profoundly shaped the
+habit of mind and the point of view of the race in the past, is a
+sufficient basis for an aesthetically legitimate dominance of
+such a scheme of life in very much of what concerns matters of
+taste in the present. For the purpose in hand, canons of taste
+are race habits, acquired through a more or less protracted
+habituation to the approval or disapproval of the kind of things
+upon which a favorable or unfavorable judgment of taste is
+passed. Other things being equal, the longer and more unbroken
+the habituation, the more legitimate is the canon of taste in
+question. All this seems to be even truer of judgments regarding
+worth or honor than of judgments of taste generally.
+
+But whatever may be the aesthetic legitimacy of the derogatory
+judgment passed on the newer learning by the spokesmen of the
+humanities, and however substantial may be the merits of the
+contention that the classic lore is worthier and results in a
+more truly human culture and character, it does not concern the
+question in hand. The question in hand is as to how far these
+branches of learning, and the point of view for which they stand
+in the educational system, help or hinder an efficient collective
+life under modern industrial circumstances -- how far they
+further a more facile adaptation to the economic situation of
+today. The question is an economic, not an aesthetic one; and the
+leisure-class standards of learning which find expression in the
+deprecatory attitude of the higher schools towards matter-of-fact
+knowledge are, for the present purpose, to be valued from this
+point of view only. For this purpose the use of such epithets as
+"noble", "base", "higher", "lower", etc., is significant only as
+showing the animus and the point of view of the disputants;
+whether they contend for the worthiness of the new or of the old.
+All these epithets are honorific or humilific terms; that is to
+say, they are terms of invidious comparison, which in the last
+analysis fall under the category of the reputable or the
+disreputable; that is, they belong within the range of ideas that
+characterizes the scheme of life of the regime of status; that
+is, they are in substance an expression of sportsmanship -- of
+the predatory and animistic habit of mind; that is, they indicate
+an archaic point of view and theory of life, which may fit the
+predatory stage of culture and of economic organization from
+which they have sprung, but which are, from the point of view of
+economic efficiency in the broader sense, disserviceable
+anachronisms.
+
+The classics, and their position of prerogative in the scheme of
+education to which the higher seminaries of learning cling with
+such a fond predilection, serve to shape the intellectual
+attitude and lower the economic efficiency of the new learned
+generation. They do this not only by holding up an archaic ideal
+of manhood, but also by the discrimination which they inculcate
+with respect to the reputable and the disreputable in knowledge.
+This result is accomplished in two ways: (1) by inspiring an
+habitual aversion to what is merely useful, as contrasted with
+what is merely honorific in learning, and so shaping the tastes
+of the novice that he comes in good faith to find gratification
+of his tastes solely, or almost solely, in such exercise of the
+intellect as normally results in no industrial or social gain;
+and (2) by consuming the learner's time and effort in acquiring
+knowledge which is of no use,except in so far as this learning
+has by convention become incorporated into the sum of learning
+required of the scholar, and has thereby affected the terminology
+and diction employed in the useful branches of knowledge. Except
+for this terminological difficulty -- which is itself a
+consequence of the vogue of the classics of the past -- a
+knowledge of the ancient languages, for instance, would have no
+practical bearing for any scientist or any scholar not engaged on
+work primarily of a linguistic character. Of course, all this has
+nothing to say as to the cultural value of the classics, nor is
+there any intention to disparage the discipline of the classics
+or the bent which their study gives to the student. That bent
+seems to be of an economically disserviceable kind, but this fact
+-- somewhat notorious indeed -- need disturb no one who has the
+good fortune to find comfort and strength in the classical lore.
+The fact that classical learning acts to derange the learner's
+workmanlike attitudes should fall lightly upon the apprehension
+of those who hold workmanship of small account in comparison with
+the cultivation of decorous ideals:  Iam fides et pax et honos
+pudorque Priscus et neglecta redire virtus Audet.
+
+Owing to the circumstance that this knowledge has become part of
+the elementary requirements in our system of education, the
+ability to use and to understand certain of the dead languages of
+southern Europe is not only gratifying to the person who finds
+occasion to parade his accomplishments in this respect, but the
+evidence of such knowledge serves at the same time to recommend
+any savant to his audience, both lay and learned. It is currently
+expected that a certain number of years shall have been spent in
+acquiring this substantially useless information, and its absence
+creates a presumption of hasty and precarious learning, as well
+as of a vulgar practicality that is equally obnoxious to the
+conventional standards of sound scholarship and intellectual
+force.
+
+The case is analogous to what happens in the purchase of any
+article of consumption by a purchaser who is not an expert judge
+of materials or of workmanship. He makes his estimate of value of
+the article chiefly on the ground of the apparent expensiveness
+of the finish of those decorative parts and features which have
+no immediate relation to the intrinsic usefulness of the article;
+the presumption being that some sort of ill-defined proportion
+subsists between the substantial value of an article and the
+expense of adornment added in order to sell it. The presumption
+that there can ordinarily be no sound scholarship where a
+knowledge of the classics and humanities is wanting leads to a
+conspicuous waste of time and labor on the part of the general
+body of students in acquiring such knowledge. The conventional
+insistence on a modicum of conspicuous waste as an incident of
+all reputable scholarship has affected our canons of taste and of
+serviceability in matters of scholarship in much the same way as
+the same principle has influenced our judgment of the
+serviceability of manufactured goods.
+
+It is true, since conspicuous consumption has gained more and
+more on conspicuous leisure as a means of repute, the
+acquisition of the dead languages is no longer so imperative a
+requirement as it once was, and its talismanic virtue as a
+voucher of scholarship has suffered a concomitant impairment. But
+while this is true, it is also true that the classics have
+scarcely lost in absolute value as a voucher of scholastic
+respectability, since for this purpose it is only necessary that
+the scholar should be able to put in evidence some learning which
+is conventionally recognized as evidence of wasted time; and the
+classics lend themselves with great facility to this use. Indeed,
+there can be little doubt that it is their utility as evidence of
+wasted time and effort, and hence of the pecuniary strength
+necessary in order to afford this waste, that has secured to the
+classics their position of prerogative in the scheme of higher
+learning, and has led to their being esteemed the most honorific
+of all learning. They serve the decorative ends of leisure-class
+learning better than any other body of knowledge, and hence they
+are an effective means of reputability.
+
+In this respect the classics have until lately had scarcely a
+rival. They still have no dangerous rival on the continent of
+Europe, but lately, since college athletics have won their way
+into a recognized standing as an accredited field of scholarly
+accomplishment, this latter branch of learning -- if athletics
+may be freely classed as learning -- has become a rival of the
+classics for the primacy in leisure-class education in American
+and English schools. Athletics have an obvious advantage over the
+classics for the purpose of leisure-class learning, since success
+as an athlete presumes, not only waste of time, but also waste of
+money, as well as the possession of certain highly unindustrial
+archaic traits of character and temperament. In the German
+universities the place of athletics and Greek-letter
+fraternities, as a leisure-class scholarly occupation, has in
+some measure been supplied by a skilled and graded inebriety and
+a perfunctory duelling.
+
+The leisure class and its standard of virtue -- archaism and
+waste -- can scarcely have been concerned in the introduction of
+the classics into the scheme of the higher learning; but the
+tenacious retention of the classics by the higher schools, and
+the high degree of reputability which still attaches to them, are
+no doubt due to their conforming so closely to the requirements
+of archaism and waste.
+
+"Classic" always carries this connotation of wasteful and
+archaic, whether it is used to denote the dead languages or the
+obsolete or obsolescent forms of thought and diction in the
+living language, or to denote other items of scholarly activity
+or apparatus to which it is applied with less aptness. So the
+archaic idiom of the English language is spoken of as "classic"
+English. Its use is imperative in all speaking and writing upon
+serious topics, and a facile use of it lends dignity to even the
+most commonplace and trivial string of talk. The newest form of
+English diction is of course never written; the sense of that
+leisure-class propriety which requires archaism in speech is
+present even in the most illiterate or sensational writers in
+sufficient force to prevent such a lapse. On the other hand, the
+highest and most conventionalized style of archaic diction is --
+quite characteristically -- properly employed only in
+communications between an anthropomorphic divinity and his
+subjects. Midway between these extremes lies the everyday speech
+of leisure-class conversation and literature.
+
+Elegant diction, whether in writing or speaking, is an effective
+means of reputability. It is of moment to know with some
+precision what is the degree of archaism conventionally required
+in speaking on any given topic. Usage differs appreciably from
+the pulpit to the market-place; the latter, as might be expected,
+admits the use of relatively new and effective words and turns of
+expression, even by fastidious persons. A discriminative
+avoidance of neologisms is honorific, not only because it argues
+that time has been wasted in acquiring the obsolescent habit of
+speech, but also as showing that the speaker has from infancy
+habitually associated with persons who have been familiar with
+the obsolescent idiom. It thereby goes to show his leisure-class
+antecedents. Great purity of speech is presumptive evidence of
+several lives spent in other than vulgarly useful occupations;
+although its evidence is by no means entirely conclusive to this
+point.
+
+As felicitous an instance of futile classicism as can well be
+found, outside of the Far East, is the conventional spelling of
+the English language. A breach of the proprieties in spelling is
+extremely annoying and will discredit any writer in the eyes of
+all persons who are possessed of a developed sense of the true
+and beautiful. English orthography satisfies all the requirements
+of the canons of reputability under the law of conspicuous waste.
+It is archaic, cumbrous, and ineffective; its acquisition
+consumes much time and effort; failure to acquire it is easy of
+detection. Therefore it is the first and readiest test of
+reputability in learning, and conformity to its ritual is
+indispensable to a blameless scholastic life.
+
+On this head of purity of speech, as at other points where a
+conventional usage rests on the canons of archaism and waste, the
+spokesmen for the usage instinctively take an apologetic
+attitude. It is contended, in substance, that a punctilious use
+of ancient and accredited locutions will serve to convey thought
+more adequately and more precisely than would be the
+straightforward use of the latest form of spoken English; whereas
+it is notorious that the ideas of today are effectively expressed
+in the slang of today. Classic speech has the honorific virtue of
+dignity; it commands attention and respect as being the
+accredited method of communication under the leisure-class scheme
+of life, because it carries a pointed suggestion of the
+industrial exemption of the speaker. The advantage of the
+accredited locutions lies in their reputability; they are
+reputable because they are cumbrous and out of date, and
+therefore argue waste of time and exemption from the use and the
+need of direct and forcible speech.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg Etext of The Theory of the Leisure Class
+
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