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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.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Theory of the Leisure Class, by
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