 Section 18 of the Theory of the Leisure Class. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Tracey Datlin. The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen. Chapter 8. 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 approximately for the purpose in hand, these forces may be best 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 diverse 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 asked 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 the 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, 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 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 a 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 whatnot, 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 definitely 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 totally 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 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 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 caring 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 wide, the habitual methods of relation between the members of the group and the habitual method of caring 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 it 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 a sensible severity. The group's accepted scheme of life is the consensus of views 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 equitable 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. And advanced and 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. Anyone 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 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, re-approach 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 mine that is in full accord with these later developed exigencies. The predatory end, 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 these 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 reversion toward the spiritual features which characterize the predatory type. And it seems probable that the Dalek-Oblon type of the 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 and 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 anybody 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 common places 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 forth imputes no unworthy motive. The opposition of the class to changes in 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 the 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 the 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 return from all social innovators in 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. And a first part of chapter eight. Section 19 of the theory of the leisure class. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorsten Weblen. Second part of chapter eight, Industrial Exemption and Conservatism. 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. The second method of upper class guidance is not in strict consistency to be brought under the same category as the instinctive conservatism and the version 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, conventionalties 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 arrangement of the structure of conventionalties 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 remodeling 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 the 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 in 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 Muhammedan 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 affect 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 revolution 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 solitary 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, et cetera. 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, et cetera. These various locutions are, no doubt, of the nature of hyperbole, but at the same time, like all over statement, 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 greater consequence than the simple alteration of an isolated item in a series of contravences for the convenience of men in society. What is true in so obvious a degree of innovations of first-rate importance is true in the 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 the 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 the 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 an excessive physical hardship, no less effectually than by such a luxurious life as will shut out this content by cutting off the occasion for it. The objectively 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 a 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 one to leave but the scanty subsistence minimum available for other than conspicuous consumption and two 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 one by the inertia proper to the class itself two through its prescriptive example of conspicuous waste and of conservatism and three indirectly through that system of an equal 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 living 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 a version in social structure. The inhibition which it exercises may be salutary or the reverse whether it is the one or the other in any given case is a question of casual history rather than of general theory. There may be truth in the view as a question of policy so often expressed by the spokesman of the conservative element that without some such substantial and consistent resistance to innovation as is offered by the conservative world to do classes social innovation and experiment would hurt 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 for 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 supplied to human institutions gives the action 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 face 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 the 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 property non-industrial class to the economic process is a pecuniary relation. A relation of acquisition not of production of exploitation not of serviceability. Indirectly, the 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 property 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. There 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 game 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 property classes and in proportion as they are property, 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 greatest consequence for the industrial process and for the life of the community. And in guiding the institutional growth in disrespect, 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 remote 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 stand 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 a very considerable industrial consequence. End of Chapter 8, Recording by Shana Sear, Fresno, California. Section 20 of the Theory of the Leisure Class. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by M.B. The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorsten Weblen. Chapter 9, 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 dissent. 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 can do 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 too 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 common places. 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 molds, 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. The 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 ethnic types. The dolicocephalic blonde, 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 anti-predatory 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 archeological or psychological. This variant is taken to represent the ancestors of existing civilized men 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 later 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 be 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 the 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 the 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 anti-predatory variant seems to have a greater stability and greater symmetry in the distribution or relative force of its temperamental elements. The 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 anti-predatory variants of the types. The dolico blonde 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 anti-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 Spensarian 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 they 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 lend 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 genetic 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 caste. 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 the 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 anti-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 a special degree among those ethnic elements which were crowded into the background during the predatory culture. Traits that were suited to the earlier habits of life then become relatively useless in the individual struggle for existence. And those elements of the population or those ethnic groups who 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 raw solidarity which we call conscience including the sense of truthfulness and equity and the instinct of workmanship in its naive, non-inviteous 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 overborn by the special exigencies of recent and modern life argues that these habits are the surviving effects of a discipline of extremely ancient date. From the teachings of which men have frequently been constrained to depart in detail under the altered circumstances of a later time and the almost ubiquitous fashion in which they assert themselves whenever the pressure of special exigencies is relieved argues that the process by which the traits were fixed and incorporated into the spiritual makeup of the type must have lasted for a relatively very long time and without serious intermission. The point is not seriously affected by any question as to whether it was a process of habituation in the old-fashioned sense of the word or a process of selective adaptation of the race. The character and exigencies of life under that regime of status and of individual and class antithesis which covers the entire interval from the beginning of predatory culture to the present argue that the traits of temperament here under discussion could scarcely have arisen and acquired fixity during that interval. It is entirely probable that these traits have come down from an earlier method of life and have survived through the interval of predatory and quasi-peaceable culture in a condition of incipient or at least imminent desuitude 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 genetic 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 method 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 if therefore tends to eliminate these traits and 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. End of the first part of chapter nine. Section 21 of The Theory of the Leisure Class. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by M.B. The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorsten Veblen. Second part of chapter nine, The Conservation of Archaic Traits. 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 Piquican 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, anti-predatory stage 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 this 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 anyone 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, goodwill and a non-emulative, non-invidious interest in men and things. With the advent of the predatory stage of life there comes a change to 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 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 worthwhile to point out that the Doliq Blonde type of European man seems to have 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 dissent, 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 ensure 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 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 Brachysophallic brunette than of the dolico blonde. 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 insofar as the predatory propensities of their ruling classes keep up the tradition of war and repine. 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 employment's vulgarly so-called. The collective interest is best served by honesty, diligence, peacefulness, goodwill, and 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 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 makeup 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 dissent that are unfit in this respect. So far as men's habits of thoughts are shaped by the competitive process of acquisition and tender, 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 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 the 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 operations. 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 into 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 man's respect and fear. Mercantile pursuits are only halfway 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 necessities 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. The 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, et cetera. 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 makeup. 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 anti-predatory lines without suffering as prompt or 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. End of the second part of chapter nine. Section 22 of the theory of the leisure class. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Dennis Sayers. The theory of the leisure class by Thorsten Veblen. Third part of chapter nine, the conservation of archaic traits. 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 compliment of the predatory traits. Interance 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 cast. 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 imminently 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 compliment of the pecuniary aptitudes, but he must have these gifts in such an imminent degree as to overcome very material difficulties that stand in the way of his ascent. Barring accidents, the nouveau arrivé 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, messiveness, 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 and 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 compliment 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 places 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 distinguish the successful predatory barbarian from the peaceable savage whom he supplanted. But this trait cannot 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, naredoel, 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 remotor 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 remotor 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 deboutness 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 dependence. 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 multi-form expression of a given temperamental bent. By force of the unity or singleness of the individuals, the aptitudes, animus and interest 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 approximately 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 purpose of modern industry. The modern industry requires an impersonal, non-inviteous 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 workmen 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 trait 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 makeup 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 caste. 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 their community without the loss of time which this dissemination might otherwise suffer. The sane, 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 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, one, by direct transmission of archaic traits through inheritance within the class and wherever the leisure class blood is transfused outside the class, and, two, 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. End of Chapter 9 Read by Dennis Sayers in Modesto, California for LibriVox.