CHAPTER XTHE COMPELLER OF EQUALITY
Eversince the first tall chimneys unfurled the sooty banners of the new, the industrial civilization, we have had the cry that the power machine is a monster whose reign means the debasement of the masses of mankind. And latterly, throughout the world, but most loudly in America, which has been foremost in promoting the new order, it has been charged that the men in control of the new order, the business men, are merciless and relentless; that in the struggle for markets and for profits they are trampling morality and all the other restraints and ideals. Now comes Thorstein Veblen, lately Assistant Professor of Political Economy at the University of Chicago, to formulate these charges upon a scientific basis. In hisTheory of Business Enterprisehe makes the following declarations of scientific principle:
First: That “the machine is a leveller, a vulgarizer, whose ends seem to be the extirpation of all that is respectable, noble and dignified in human intercourse and ideals”; that “in the nature of the case the cultural growth dominated by the machine industry is of a skeptical, matter-of-fact complexion, materialistic, unmoral, unpatriotic, undevout”; that “the machine, their (the masses’) master, is no respecter of persons, and knows neither morality nor dignity, nor prescriptive right, divine or human.”
Second: That “the machine methods which are corrupting the hearts and manners of the workmen are profitable to the business man.”
Third: That “the economic welfare of the community at large is best secured by a facile and uninterrupted interplay of the various processes which make up the industrial system at large; but the pecuniary interests of the business men, in whose hands lies the discretion in the matter, are not necessarily best served by an unbroken maintenance of the industrial balance. Especially is this true as regards those greater business men whose interests are very extensive. Gain may come to them from a given disturbance of the system, whetherthe disturbance makes for heightened facility or for widespread hardship, very much as a speculator in grain futures may be either a bull or a bear.”
Fourth: That, these being the facts, there has arisen a “class of pecuniary experts” who “have an interest in making the disturbances of the system large and frequent”; that, under the new civilization, industry being carried on for business, and not business for the sake of industry, such disturbances are as a matter of fact both large and frequent, are incident to a merciless struggle among business men for the supremacy which monopoly alone gives; that, while the business man, in common with other men, is moved by humane ideals, “motives of this kind detract from business efficiency, and an undue yielding to them on the part of business men is to be deprecated as an infirmity”; that, while sentiment has a certain force “in restraint upon pecuniary advantage, not in abrogation of it,” the “code of business ethics consists, after all, of mitigations of the maxim,caveat emptor(let the buyer beware)”; that, “under the system of handicraft and neighborhood industry, the adage ‘Honesty is the best policy’ seems, on the whole, to have been accepted and to have been true.This adage has come down from the days before the machine’s régime and before modern business enterprise”; that, under modern circumstances of lack of personal contact between business man and customer, “business management has a chance to proceed on a temperate and sagacious calculation of profit and loss, untroubled by sentimental considerations of human kindness or irritation or of honesty.”
Professor Veblen’s ideas have been given in his own language so far as has been permitted by his passionate professorial predilection for polysyllables—or, has he used long words and involved phrases from the prudent motive of screening from “the vulgar” the ferocity of his attack upon business men, rather than from the reactionary motive of scholastic snobbery? However this may be, to close study he makes it clear enough that, according to his reading of political economy:
First: The machine is a monster.
Second: It is making monsters of men—brutal serfs of the masses; bandits, liars, thieves and cheats of the managers and directors.
A savage indictment that! A terrifying, topsy-turvying of the dearest beliefs and hopes of us wholook upon steam and electricity as efficient agents of Democracy, the strong and inevitable unshacklers of the bodies and minds of mankind. But Professor Veblen has stated only the extreme of what is said without denial every day; he is simply the courageous spokesman of the majority of the classes who write and speak; he is putting into scientific formula the sneer of every snob who professes contempt of business and, indeed, of all other forms of modern democratic activity. His book, therefore, serves admirably as a provocation for presenting a few facts and suggestions on the other side.
Is it true, either in whole or in part, that our industrial civilization is degrading the masses into mere appurtenances of the machine, mere mechanical aids to the heaping up of vast profits in the treasuries of the few? Is it true, either in whole or in part, that our business men, whether great or small, whether captains of industry or sub-officers, are degenerating into dishonesty and the short-sighted selfishness of the slave-master?
A surface survey of our time reveals much that seems to compel a reluctant affirmative answer. To glance at a newspaper is to read of the cynical tyranniesof beef, oil, coal, iron, grain, railway magnates, who make their infamies nauseating by ardent professions of patriotism and piety. And from time to time the shameless adulterations of food and drink culminate in some sensational slaughter of people wholesale, suggesting vastly greater slaughters effected quietly from day to day.
And we see persons grown enormously rich upon stolen privileges of various kinds exhibiting themselves in luxurious ostentation, offering tempting rewards to sycophancy and pauperizing those fighting on the poverty line by supercilious gifts and condescensions. We see rascality rewarded with wealth and honors, success bought with self-sale. We see corruption, conspicuous and hideous, everywhere upon the surface of the social body. And we turn away heartsick, convinced that the Veblens have stated the truth with moderation.
But if we turn away to read history—not the fables and fancies, the poetical romances and romantic poems from which the Veblens draw their “facts,” but the true story of the mankind that was—if we read that painful recital, we turn again to the mankind of our day, and it is like a landscape from which the storms of winter are rolling away.The corruption which revolted us is still there, just as hideous as before; but we now see that it is the poison which was working in the veins and arteries of the patient and is now at the surface, on its way out of the body before the victorious legions of health.
Professor Veblen, and his like, are prone to use, in writing and speaking, words of many meanings; they unconsciously play upon these words, and so fall into grievous error. For instance, Professor Veblen talks of ours as a “machine” civilization—as if the machine were its new and characteristic factor, determining its form and its destiny. In fact, civilization from its very inception has been “machine-made.” It began when our remotest ancestor snatched the bough of a tree and decided thenceforth to walk erect, using the bough as staff and club—that is, as a machine. Every tool of every kind has been a machine; and the progress of the race has been determined by the number and efficiency of its machines, both those designed to compel peace and those designed to further the arts of peace. If you wish to measure the actual value of any civilization—value in producing healthy minds in healthy bodies—you need only inquire into thekind and number and efficiency of its machines. Why? Because the machine represents the effort of man to adjust himself to his environment, his environment to himself. It gives power to him, whoever he may be, that learns to use it; it leaves him who does not avail himself of its aid, whether through idleness or ignorance or intemperance or incapacity, about where he would have been—certainly no worse off than he would have been—had mankind remained in the helpless, machineless “state of nature.”
Evolution has so unevenly affected the human race that, fortunately for us in the foremost files of progress, we need not rely upon history and cautious conjecture for our encouraging and inspiring knowledge of the world of the past, which enables us to see how far and how high we have got, and that the journey is still swiftly, if steeply, upward. There is hardly a stage of human progress that is not now represented on the earth, inviting any man with a passion for the “glorious past,” to disillusionize himself and cheer his pessimism. And we are enabled easily to reconstruct any period of the past. Thus, we have visual confirmation of the truth about Athens which history can only suggest.We know that the Athens of Plato and Praxiteles was no more the true Athens than is the intellect and tradition of Booker Washington a true type of the intelligence and condition of the overwhelming mass of our eight million negroes. We come to understand what Athens’ twenty-five thousand free citizens and many hundred thousand slaves really meant; we penetrate into the profligacy of the Athenian rich, the degradation of the Athenian masses; we realize why Aristides was banished for being just and Alcibiades carried on the shoulders of the Athenian Democracy (!) because he was a degenerate and a debauchee. And so on through all the past.
In like manner, we need not rely upon the poets and poetical historians, as Professor Veblen apparently does, for knowledge of what the “handicraft” civilization meant. We can study it, as it survives practically unchanged in the miserable hovels of Bohemian and Italian and Spanish peasants, where men and beasts rot together in conditions of sanitation that would not long be tolerated in any place where the “machine civilization” has inaugurated its high and ever higher moral and physical standards. We need not go so far from home. To geta picture of a prosperous handicraft city of the middle ages, go to New York’s East Side, where are the fast disappearing sweatshops that were transplanted from “handicraft neighborhoods” of Europe. The poets have it otherwise; and so do those historians who like to paint alluring pictures for their readers—and hate to grub for facts. But there is the grisly truth. Contrast the average sweatshop with the average factory. No; contrast the best sweatshop with the worst factory.
Partly because some men are so much shrewder and more persistent and more far-sighted than the masses of their fellows, but chiefly because the mass of mankind has not been long enough emancipated by the power of the machine to learn how to work intelligently and efficiently, the power machine, become enormously beneficent through steam and electricity, has not yet done all, or even more than a very small part, of what it can do, and shall do, for mankind. But already—in less than ten decades, less than seven—what a forward stride! In place of a world where all but a handful toiled early and late—from dawn until far into the night—toiled that others might reap all and they only blows and the meagre bread of bitterness, we nowhave a world where millions upon millions are comfortable. And as for the masses and toilers still in the shackles of the old régime, are they not better off than they were under that régime where wages were alms, and alms of the scantiest; where the only lights in the black darkness of utter ignorance were the will-o’-the-wisps of Superstition, drawing man farther and farther into the morass of slavery to king and noble and priest?
In writing works on political economy, professors should not study the conditions of labor before steam and electricity in poems and romances and from orchestra stalls at productions of “Die Meistersinger.” There is not a serf toiling in the deepest depth of the most hell-like mine in Siberia, upon whose shoulders, and upon whose soul, the burden is not lighter for the modern expansion of the civilization of the machine.
The truth is, steam and electricity have made the human race suddenly and acutely self-conscious as a race for the first time in its existence. They have constructed a mighty mirror wherein humanity sees itself, with all its faults and follies, and diseases and deformities. And the sudden, unprecedented spectacle is so startling, is in such abhorrent contrastwith poetical pictures of the past, painted in school and popular text-books, that men of defective perspective shrink, and shriek: “Mankind has become monstrous!” But not so. Man, rising, rising, rising through the ages, is not nearer to the dark and bloody and cruel place of his origin than to the promised land toward which his ideals are drawing him. His diseases and deformities are of the past; and virtues that were, up to a few decades ago, almost unattainable ideals, are now so nearly a part of his natural adornment that hope of the nearness of the luminous penumbra of the Golden Age seems not unjustified.
What our grandfathers regarded as the natural and just demands of employer upon employé are now regarded as rigorous and tyrannous exactions of a brute. And in trying still to continue such exactions men slink behind the lawyer-constructed shield of the corporation, that they may be easier in conscience by trying to believe they are not “personally” responsible.
This brings us, naturally, to the charges against business men.
Professor Veblen does not, in so many words, assert that there was a time when business menwere in business with other motives—presumably idealistic—more potent than profits. But he forces his readers to infer that this was the case—and that lofty view is always taken by the assailants of our present civilization. That is, man used to be an altruistic animal; Democracy and the machine—for you will find that these assailants are always hitting at Democracy over the shoulders of the machine—have made him a selfish and cruel rascal.
False weights were found in the ruins of the oldest city that has yet been exhumed. And false weights will probably be consumed when the earth drops into the sun and the heavens are rolled together like a scroll. Ancient records and ancient statute books are full of evidence that every new plundering device—from capitalistic and labor monopolies, secret rebates and majority owners swindling minority owners, down to adulterations and crooked scales—was familiar to our ancestors of the plateau of Iran before the migrations. Vice is the old inhabitant; virtue is the newcomer, the immigrant, received with reluctance and compelled to fight for every inch of ground he gains. As for specific testimony as to past ages, we have the testimony of all the old writers that the mercantileclasses, the business men, were “without honor,” mean of soul, oppressors of their employés, robbers of their customers. We happen to know, also, that as for the other classes—the proud kings and haughty nobles and the rest—they certainly had a very quaint interpretation of that word “honor” when a murderer, a tyrant, a gambler, a practitioner of every vice that rots its slave and ruins its victims could yet be a “gentleman of unsullied honor.” And we know, finally, that only with the rise of the business men to influence and authority did the standard of honor become what all the world now recognizes as “ideal.” The very Biblical phrases in which honesty is enjoined are altogether commercial, are the language of the business world, of business men.
There are two vital facts about our new industrial civilization which its critics neglect:
First—It has created an unprecedented and infinitely great number of opportunities to dishonesty of the kinds that are, to as yet but slightly enlightened human nature, potently tempting.
Second—It has created new conditions of the moral, as well as of the material, relations of man to the masses of his fellow-men which are as yetimperfectly understood and constitute a debatable ground for even the fairest and rigidest consciences. Men now see that large action of any kind involves large evil as well as large good; and the balance of right and wrong is not easy to adjust, except in the tranquil studies of critics and theorists.
To the first of these two facts may justly be attributed the unquestionably large amount of dishonesty—dishonesty clearly and generally recognized as such. To the second of these two facts is undoubtedly due the most of the wrong-doing by men who in their private relations are above reproach. These statements are not put forward to justify men for yielding to temptation to dishonesty and to justify men in acts, approval of which can be got from conscience by sophistry only, if at all. They are put forward simply to explain why it is that, when there are actually more honesty and conscientiousness, and they of a higher quality, than ever before in human history, there should be a seeming of more dishonesty and consciencelessness. Further in support of the same view, while wrongdoers of the past were hidden or veiled by the imperfect means of publicity, wrongdoers of to-day are at once searched out and pilloried bythe press and by public opinion. Up to the middle of the last century men knew little of the large evil done them, and that little imperfectly; now, knowledge of individual acts of uprightness, once scattered everywhere by being immortalized in tradition, rhymed and prose, is lost in the vast revelations of huge and ancient wrongs persisting.
It is no new thing for a man to be admired and envied for wealth and station, regardless of how he got them. But it is a new thing in the world for the public conscience to be so sensitive that a man in possession of wealth or station, got not by outright and open robbery—methods not long ago regarded without grave disapproval—but by means that are questionable and suspicious merely, should be in an apologetic attitude, should feel called upon to defend himself and to give large sums in philanthropy in the effort to justify and to rehabilitate himself. Steam and electricity have given to man a sudden, vast power. It is not strange that he should commit errors and crimes in working out its unfamiliar possibilities. It is not strange that abuses, as old as the selfish struggle for existence, should succeed in adapting themselves to the new conditions, should contrive topersist. But is it not strange that professors of political economy, supposedly familiar with the truth about the past, should be so narrow and twisted in historic and psychological perspective as to misunderstand these simple phenomena? And what must we think of them if, in support of their pessimistic and unwarranted jeremiads, they conjure the fantastic and preposterous and long-exploded myth of humanity’s past Golden Age?
According to Professor Veblen, honesty is no longer the bestpolicy. What an incredible misreading of the very sign-board of our time! Under the old régime of priest or soldier or prince, honesty was distinctly not the best policy. Strategy, dexterity, chicane, finesse, sophistry, cozening—these were the sure, the only ways to preferment. For, under those régimes preferment meant securing the right to live without work upon the toil of others. And, to confine ourselves to the mercantile classes, was not the successful business man he who got from prince or priest or tyrant the right to rob the people, he who got a monopoly or a license or a concession?
How is it under the new régime, the democratic, the “vulgarizing” régime of the business man?Our chief troubles come from survivals into the present of the tenacious roots of the past’s methods to success, come from the persistence of the idea that by wit and not by wisdom and justice does the truly strong man truly prevail. But slowly—and surely!—the “vulgar” régime is enforcing the laws and sanctions of “vulgar” morality. Even our robber barons demand honesty, strict honesty, among themselves in their conspiracies to monopolize to their own profit the benefits intended for all. When they violate the law of honesty, they do it in secrecy and make haste to deny their crime and to return to their allegiance to the law. Honesty is the very ground upon which a commercial civilization must rest. That our business men are, as a class, and with rare exceptions, honest, keeping their bargains, giving and receiving the value agreed upon, is proved beyond question by the fact that we as a nation prosper, that our abject poverty is almost confined to newly arrived immigrants and to our only recently emancipated negroes.
Where a prince is armed with power arbitrarily to suspend the natural laws governing the intercourse of human beings, lies and dishonesty may, for a time, prosper; but not where the sole basisof intercourse is the voluntary belief of men in each other’s integrity. And more than ninety per cent. of our business is done upon credit! Under the old order, the very laws and customs, the very morality taught by the church, was grounded upon the justice of the unjust distribution of the products of labor; under the new régime, under “business enterprise,” law and custom and religion teach only value for value received.
Professor Veblen does well to criticise the misguided attempts of philanthropy and so-called charity to restore the old relations of superior and inferior. But his criticism that they are insufficient and not in keeping with the “machine civilization’s” merciless demand for economic efficiency does not go far enough. They are also unnecessary, and in large measure productive of greater ills—of pauperism and dependence—than those they seek to mitigate. The ills are not machine-created. They are inherent in the imperfect nature of man. They will tend wholly to disappear only when the machine’s “merciless” demand for efficiency is rigidly enforced. For, what is that “merciless” demand? What does the machine say to man? It says, “Work is not a curse, but a blessing.In a leisure class the only culture is of the germs of profligacy, superciliousness, snobbery and decay. All men must work, and must learn to work well. All men must serve that they may pay for service rendered. And where that order prevails, to the worker will come the full reward for his work. I, the machine, will make your burden into a blessing, your toil into labor, the noble, the dignified, the producer of civilization and self-respect. I will widen your horizon until you see that all men are brothers, brothers in the business of, by business enterprise, increasing and creating wants, and of, by business enterprise, satisfying them. I will give you ideals that are true and just—not loyalty to idle, thieving prince, not slavery to irrational superstition, not bondage to bloody soldier-tyrant, but intelligent loyalty to truth and justice and progress. I will make you master of nature and of yourself, servant of the true religion and the true morality.”
Until now has been reserved the inquiry into how it happens that these critics of industrialism fall into their fatal errors. That inquiry will not long detain us. Professor Veblen naïvely gives himself and his fellow-critics away. He confesses why he hates the régime of the business man, what hemeans when he calls the machine industry “materialistic, unmoral, undevout.” “Business life,” he says, “does not further the growth of manners and breeding, pride of caste, punctilios of honor or even religious fervor.” And he finds his hope for the future in militarism and imperialism—which he, by the way, unjustly charges to the business men instead of to the politicians pandering to the still lively passions of man’s inheritance from the past when all the world was militaristic and imperialistic. “There can be no serious question,” says he, “but that a consistent return to the ancient virtues of allegiance, piety, servility, graded dignity, class prerogatives, and prescriptive authority would greatly conduce to popular content and to the facile management of affairs.” Nor does he conceal under the ponderous sarcasm lurking in that statement the truth of his own fixed belief in at least a measure of those “ancient virtues.” For his whole book, and the speeches and writings of practically all the critics of industrialism, show that these critics abhor the new virtues as “materialistic.”
The motive in the mind of each critic is a little different from that of his fellow-critics. Onewishes college professors and the like to be in control; another is for the supremacy of birth; another for the supremacy of culture, whatever that may mean. Another wants the preacher back at the helm, with mankind an open-mouthed, uncritical congregation. Each wants the particular class or condition to which he himself has the good fortune to belong, to have the chief say in affairs. But all agree in denouncing the business man who is actually in control—and will remain there. They profess to despise money, yet they hate him for his profits. They profess to prefer the intellectual and moral dividends which their own intellectual and moral enterprises declare; yet their dainty fingers twitch for the material dividends which his material enterprises naturally declare. They would deny him the gains which are the only—and, as they loudly profess, the poor enough—rewards for wasting his life upon the gross and sordid things.
The business man—and that means the worker, the “toiler”—is in control, is there to stay, because the human animal is so constituted that its material affairs—proper food, proper clothing, proper shelter—must always be primal. Not of thehighestimportance, but of thefirstimportance. And if thosematerial matters are well attended to—as they will be when the worker’s instinct pervades the whole race—the spiritual matters, the growth of body and soul, must inevitably prosper. The worker, the worker’s instinct, provides the right soil for a soul to grow in—a real soil, full of the natural and nourishing substances, not a fanciful, unsubstantial soil of false ideals, fraudulent culture and barren fiddle-faddle of closet theorizings.
For proof that the business instinct will provide the right soil we need only point to our own country as it is. In America, the great business nation of the nations, there lives a race of idealists, eighty millions earnest, dominated by the instincts for self-help and helpfulness to others, afire with the passion for improvement, for education, for knowledge of all kinds and from any and all sources.
The world has wandered in the swamps of vain and sentimental imaginings long enough. By all means, let us have it established on the firm ground and in the straight, upward roads of science and business. The sun shines upon those roads by day, the moon and the stars light them by night; the flowers bloom beside them—and within reach of the humblest wayfarer.
This gospel will not be attractive toposeursand to the lazy and the incompetent. But it is gospel, the gospel of Democracy, America’s gospel. In the cargo of merchandise, Enlightenment and Democracy always travel as stowaway missionaries; when the cargo is landed, they go ashore and begin to preach.