The leisure class lives by the industrial community rather than in it.
Its relations to industry are of a pecuniary rather than an industrial
kind. Admission to the class is gained by exercise of the pecuniary
aptitudes--aptitudes for acquisition rather than for serviceability.
There is, therefore, a continued selective sifting of the human material
that makes up the leisure class, and this selection proceeds on the
ground of fitness for pecuniary pursuits. But the scheme of life of the
class is in large part a heritage from the past, and embodies much of
the habits and ideals of the earlier barbarian period. This archaic,
barbarian scheme of life imposes itself also on the lower orders, with
more or less mitigation. In its turn the scheme of life, of conventions,
acts selectively and by education to shape the human material, and its
action runs chiefly in the direction of conserving traits, habits, and
ideals that belong to the early barbarian age--the age of prowess and
predatory life.
The most immediate and unequivocal expression of that archaic human
nature which characterizes man in the predatory stage is the fighting
propensity proper. In cases where the predatory activity is a collective
one, this propensity is frequently called the martial spirit, or,
latterly, patriotism. It needs no insistence to find assent to the
proposition that in the countries of civilized Europe the hereditary
leisure class is endowed with this martial spirit in a higher
degree than the middle classes. Indeed, the leisure class claims the
distinction as a matter of pride, and no doubt with some grounds. War is
honorable, and warlike prowess is eminently honorific in the eyes of the
generality of men; and this admiration of warlike prowess is itself
the best voucher of a predatory temperament in the admirer of war. The
enthusiasm for war, and the predatory temper of which it is the index,
prevail in the largest measure among the upper classes, especially
among the hereditary leisure class. Moreover, the ostensible serious
occupation of the upper class is that of government, which, in point of
origin and developmental content, is also a predatory occupation.
The only class which could at all dispute with the hereditary leisure
class the honor of an habitual bellicose frame of mind is that of
the lower-class delinquents. In ordinary times, the large body of the
industrial classes is relatively apathetic touching warlike interests.
When unexcited, this body of the common people, which makes up the
effective force of the industrial community, is rather averse to any
other than a defensive fight; indeed, it responds a little tardily even
to a provocation which makes for an attitude of defense. In the more
civilized communities, or rather in the communities which have reached
an advanced industrial development, the spirit of warlike aggression
may be said to be obsolescent among the common people. This does not
say that there is not an appreciable number of individuals among
the industrial classes in whom the martial spirit asserts itself
obtrusively. Nor does it say that the body of the people may not be
fired with martial ardor for a time under the stimulus of some special
provocation, such as is seen in operation today in more than one of the
countries of Europe, and for the time in America. But except for such
seasons of temporary exaltation, and except for those individuals who
are endowed with an archaic temperament of the predatory type, together
with the similarly endowed body of individuals among the higher and
the lowest classes, the inertness of the mass of any modern civilized
community in this respect is probably so great as would make war
impracticable, except against actual invasion. The habits and aptitudes
of the common run of men make for an unfolding of activity in other,
less picturesque directions than that of war.
This class difference in temperament may be due in part to a difference
in the inheritance of acquired traits in the several classes, but it
seems also, in some measure, to correspond with a difference in ethnic
derivation. The class difference is in this respect visibly less in
those countries whose population is relatively homogeneous, ethnically,
than in the countries where there is a broader divergence between the
ethnic elements that make up the several classes of the community. In
the same connection it may be noted that the later accessions to the
leisure class in the latter countries, in a general way, show less of
the martial spirit than contemporary representatives of the aristocracy
of the ancient line. These nouveaux arrivés have recently emerged from
the commonplace body of the population and owe their emergence into the
leisure class to the exercise of traits and propensities which are not
to be classed as prowess in the ancient sense.
Apart from warlike activity proper, the institution of the duel is also
an expression of the same superior readiness for combat; and the duel
is a leisure-class institution. The duel is in substance a more or less
deliberate resort to a fight as a final settlement of a difference of
opinion. In civilized communities it prevails as a normal phenomenon
only where there is an hereditary leisure class, and almost exclusively
among that class. The exceptions are (1) military and naval officers
who are ordinarily members of the leisure class, and who are at the
same time specially trained to predatory habits of mind and (2) the
lower-class delinquents--who are by inheritance, or training, or both,
of a similarly predatory disposition and habit. It is only the high-bred
gentleman and the rowdy that normally resort to blows as the universal
solvent of differences of opinion. The plain man will ordinarily fight
only when excessive momentary irritation or alcoholic exaltation act to
inhibit the more complex habits of response to the stimuli that make
for provocation. He is then thrown back upon the simpler, less
differentiated forms of the instinct of self-assertion; that is to say,
he reverts temporarily and without reflection to an archaic habit of
mind.
This institution of the duel as a mode of finally settling disputes
and serious questions of precedence shades off into the obligatory,
unprovoked private fight, as a social obligation due to one's good
repute. As a leisure-class usage of this kind we have, particularly,
that bizarre survival of bellicose chivalry, the German student duel. In
the lower or spurious leisure class of the delinquents there is in all
countries a similar, though less formal, social obligation incumbent on
the rowdy to assert his manhood in unprovoked combat with his fellows.
And spreading through all grades of society, a similar usage prevails
among the boys of the community. The boy usually knows to nicety, from
day to day, how he and his associates grade in respect of relative
fighting capacity; and in the community of boys there is ordinarily no
secure basis of reputability for any one who, by exception, will not or
can not fight on invitation.
All this applies especially to boys above a certain somewhat vague limit
of maturity. The child's temperament does not commonly answer to this
description during infancy and the years of close tutelage, when the
child still habitually seeks contact with its mother at every turn of
its daily life. During this earlier period there is little aggression
and little propensity for antagonism. The transition from this
peaceable temper to the predaceous, and in extreme cases malignant,
mischievousness of the boy is a gradual one, and it is accomplished
with more completeness, covering a larger range of the individual's
aptitudes, in some cases than in others. In the earlier stage of his
growth, the child, whether boy or girl, shows less of initiative and
aggressive self-assertion and less of an inclination to isolate himself
and his interests from the domestic group in which he lives, and he
shows more of sensitiveness to rebuke, bashfulness, timidity, and the
need of friendly human contact. In the common run of cases this early
temperament passes, by a gradual but somewhat rapid obsolescence of the
infantile features, into the temperament of the boy proper; though there
are also cases where the predaceous futures of boy life do not emerge at
all, or at the most emerge in but a slight and obscure degree.
In girls the transition to the predaceous stage is seldom accomplished
with the same degree of completeness as in boys; and in a relatively
large proportion of cases it is scarcely undergone at all. In such cases
the transition from infancy to adolescence and maturity is a gradual and
unbroken process of the shifting of interest from infantile purposes and
aptitudes to the purposes, functions, and relations of adult life. In
the girls there is a less general prevalence of a predaceous interval
in the development; and in the cases where it occurs, the predaceous and
isolating attitude during the interval is commonly less accentuated.
In the male child the predaceous interval is ordinarily fairly well
marked and lasts for some time, but it is commonly terminated (if at
all) with the attainment of maturity. This last statement may need very
material qualification. The cases are by no means rare in which the
transition from the boyish to the adult temperament is not made, or
is made only partially--understanding by the "adult" temperament the
average temperament of those adult individuals in modern industrial life
who have some serviceability for the purposes of the collective life
process, and who may therefore be said to make up the effective average
of the industrial community.
The ethnic composition of the European populations varies. In some
cases even the lower classes are in large measure made up of the
peace-disturbing dolicho-blond; while in others this ethnic element is
found chiefly among the hereditary leisure class. The fighting habit
seems to prevail to a less extent among the working-class boys in the
latter class of populations than among the boys of the upper classes or
among those of the populations first named.
If this generalization as to the temperament of the boy among the
working classes should be found true on a fuller and closer scrutiny of
the field, it would add force to the view that the bellicose temperament
is in some appreciable degree a race characteristic; it appears to
enter more largely into the make-up of the dominant, upper-class
ethnic type--the dolicho-blond--of the European countries than into the
subservient, lower-class types of man which are conceived to constitute
the body of the population of the same communities.
The case of the boy may seem not to bear seriously on the question of
the relative endowment of prowess with which the several classes of
society are gifted; but it is at least of some value as going to show
that this fighting impulse belongs to a more archaic temperament than
that possessed by the average adult man of the industrious classes. In
this, as in many other features of child life, the child reproduces,
temporarily and in miniature, some of the earlier phases of the
development of adult man. Under this interpretation, the boy's
predilection for exploit and for isolation of his own interest is to be
taken as a transient reversion to the human nature that is normal to the
early barbarian culture--the predatory culture proper. In this respect,
as in much else, the leisure-class and the delinquent-class character
shows a persistence into adult life of traits that are normal to
childhood and youth, and that are likewise normal or habitual to the
earlier stages of culture. Unless the difference is traceable entirely
to a fundamental difference between persistent ethnic types, the traits
that distinguish the swaggering delinquent and the punctilious gentleman
of leisure from the common crowd are, in some measure, marks of an
arrested spiritual development. They mark an immature phase, as compared
with the stage of development attained by the average of the adults in
the modern industrial community. And it will appear presently that the
puerile spiritual make-up of these representatives of the upper and the
lowest social strata shows itself also in the presence of other archaic
traits than this proclivity to ferocious exploit and isolation.
As if to leave no doubt about the essential immaturity of the fighting
temperament, we have, bridging the interval between legitimate boyhood
and adult manhood, the aimless and playful, but more or less systematic
and elaborate, disturbances of the peace in vogue among schoolboys of a
slightly higher age. In the common run of cases, these disturbances
are confined to the period of adolescence. They recur with decreasing
frequency and acuteness as youth merges into adult life, and so they
reproduce, in a general way, in the life of the individual, the sequence
by which the group has passed from the predatory to a more settled habit
of life. In an appreciable number of cases the spiritual growth of the
individual comes to a close before he emerges from this puerile
phase; in these cases the fighting temper persists through life. Those
individuals who in spiritual development eventually reach man's
estate, therefore, ordinarily pass through a temporary archaic phase
corresponding to the permanent spiritual level of the fighting and
sporting men. Different individuals will, of course, achieve spiritual
maturity and sobriety in this respect in different degrees; and those
who fail of the average remain as an undissolved residue of crude
humanity in the modern industrial community and as a foil for that
selective process of adaptation which makes for a heightened industrial
efficiency and the fullness of life of the collectivity. This
arrested spiritual development may express itself not only in a direct
participation by adults in youthful exploits of ferocity, but also
indirectly in aiding and abetting disturbances of this kind on the
part of younger persons. It thereby furthers the formation of habits of
ferocity which may persist in the later life of the growing generation,
and so retard any movement in the direction of a more peaceable
effective temperament on the part of the community. If a person so
endowed with a proclivity for exploits is in a position to guide the
development of habits in the adolescent members of the community, the
influence which he exerts in the direction of conservation and reversion
to prowess may be very considerable. This is the significance, for
instance, of the fostering care latterly bestowed by many clergymen
and other pillars of society upon "boys' brigades" and similar
pseudo-military organizations. The same is true of the encouragement
given to the growth of "college spirit," college athletics, and the
like, in the higher institutions of learning.
These manifestations of the predatory temperament are all to be classed
under the head of exploit. They are partly simple and unreflected
expressions of an attitude of emulative ferocity, partly activities
deliberately entered upon with a view to gaining repute for prowess.
Sports of all kinds are of the same general character, including
prize-fights, bull-fights, athletics, shooting, angling, yachting,
and games of skill, even where the element of destructive physical
efficiency is not an obtrusive feature. Sports shade off from the basis
of hostile combat, through skill, to cunning and chicanery, without its
being possible to draw a line at any point. The ground of an addiction
to sports is an archaic spiritual constitution--the possession of the
predatory emulative propensity in a relatively high potency, a strong
proclivity to adventuresome exploit and to the infliction of damage is
especially pronounced in those employments which are in colloquial usage
specifically called sportsmanship.
It is perhaps truer, or at least more evident, as regards sports than as
regards the other expressions of predatory emulation already spoken of,
that the temperament which inclines men to them is essentially a boyish
temperament. The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree
marks an arrested development of the man's moral nature. This peculiar
boyishness of temperament in sporting men immediately becomes apparent
when attention is directed to the large element of make-believe that
is present in all sporting activity. Sports share this character of
make-believe with the games and exploits to which children, especially
boys, are habitually inclined. Make-believe does not enter in the same
proportion into all sports, but it is present in a very appreciable
degree in all. It is apparently present in a larger measure in
sportsmanship proper and in athletic contests than in set games of skill
of a more sedentary character; although this rule may not be found to
apply with any great uniformity. It is noticeable, for instance, that
even very mild-mannered and matter-of-fact men who go out shooting are
apt to carry an excess of arms and accoutrements in order to impress
upon their own imagination the seriousness of their undertaking.
These huntsmen are also prone to a histrionic, prancing gait and to
an elaborate exaggeration of the motions, whether of stealth or of
onslaught, involved in their deeds of exploit. Similarly in athletic
sports there is almost invariably present a good share of rant and
swagger and ostensible mystification--features which mark the histrionic
nature of these employments. In all this, of course, the reminder of
boyish make-believe is plain enough. The slang of athletics, by the way,
is in great part made up of extremely sanguinary locutions borrowed from
the terminology of warfare. Except where it is adopted as a necessary
means of secret communication, the use of a special slang in any
employment is probably to be accepted as evidence that the occupation in
question is substantially make-believe.
A further feature in which sports differ from the duel and similar
disturbances of the peace is the peculiarity that they admit of other
motives being assigned for them besides the impulses of exploit and
ferocity. There is probably little if any other motive present in any
given case, but the fact that other reasons for indulging in sports are
frequently assigned goes to say that other grounds are sometimes present
in a subsidiary way. Sportsmen--hunters and anglers--are more or less in
the habit of assigning a love of nature, the need of recreation, and the
like, as the incentives to their favorite pastime. These motives are no
doubt frequently present and make up a part of the attractiveness of
the sportsman's life; but these can not be the chief incentives. These
ostensible needs could be more readily and fully satisfied without the
accompaniment of a systematic effort to take the life of those creatures
that make up an essential feature of that "nature" that is beloved
by the sportsman. It is, indeed, the most noticeable effect of the
sportsman's activity to keep nature in a state of chronic desolation by
killing off all living thing whose destruction he can compass.
Still, there is ground for the sportsman's claim that under the existing
conventionalities his need of recreation and of contact with nature can
best be satisfied by the course which he takes. Certain canons of good
breeding have been imposed by the prescriptive example of a predatory
leisure class in the past and have been somewhat painstakingly conserved
by the usage of the latter-day representatives of that class; and these
canons will not permit him, without blame, to seek contact with nature
on other terms. From being an honorable employment handed down from the
predatory culture as the highest form of everyday leisure, sports have
come to be the only form of outdoor activity that has the full sanction
of decorum. Among the proximate incentives to shooting and angling,
then, may be the need of recreation and outdoor life. The remoter cause
which imposes the necessity of seeking these objects under the cover of
systematic slaughter is a prescription that can not be violated except
at the risk of disrepute and consequent lesion to one's self-respect.
The case of other kinds of sport is somewhat similar. Of these, athletic
games are the best example. Prescriptive usage with respect to what
forms of activity, exercise, and recreation are permissible under the
code of reputable living is of course present here also. Those who are
addicted to athletic sports, or who admire them, set up the claim that
these afford the best available means of recreation and of "physical
culture." And prescriptive usage gives countenance to the claim. The
canons of reputable living exclude from the scheme of life of the
leisure class all activity that can not be classed as conspicuous
leisure. And consequently they tend by prescription to exclude it also
from the scheme of life of the community generally. At the same
time purposeless physical exertion is tedious and distasteful beyond
tolerance. As has been noticed in another connection, recourse is in
such a case had to some form of activity which shall at least afford
a colorable pretense of purpose, even if the object assigned be only a
make-believe. Sports satisfy these requirements of substantial futility
together with a colorable make-believe of purpose. In addition to
this they afford scope for emulation, and are attractive also on that
account. In order to be decorous, an employment must conform to the
leisure-class canon of reputable waste; at the same time all activity,
in order to be persisted in as an habitual, even if only partial,
expression of life, must conform to the generically human canon of
efficiency for some serviceable objective end. The leisure-class canon
demands strict and comprehensive futility, the instinct of workmanship
demands purposeful action. The leisure-class canon of decorum acts
slowly and pervasively, by a selective elimination of all substantially
useful or purposeful modes of action from the accredited scheme of
life; the instinct of workmanship acts impulsively and may be satisfied,
provisionally, with a proximate purpose. It is only as the apprehended
ulterior futility of a given line of action enters the reflective
complex of consciousness as an element essentially alien to the normally
purposeful trend of the life process that its disquieting and deterrent
effect on the consciousness of the agent is wrought.
The individual's habits of thought make an organic complex, the trend
of which is necessarily in the direction of serviceability to the
life process. When it is attempted to assimilate systematic waste or
futility, as an end in life, into this organic complex, there presently
supervenes a revulsion. But this revulsion of the organism may be
avoided if the attention can be confined to the proximate, unreflected
purpose of dexterous or emulative exertion. Sports--hunting, angling,
athletic games, and the like--afford an exercise for dexterity and for
the emulative ferocity and astuteness characteristic of predatory life.
So long as the individual is but slightly gifted with reflection or
with a sense of the ulterior trend of his actions so long as his life
is substantially a life of naive impulsive action--so long the immediate
and unreflected purposefulness of sports, in the way of an expression of
dominance, will measurably satisfy his instinct of workmanship. This is
especially true if his dominant impulses are the unreflecting emulative
propensities of the predaceous temperament. At the same time the canons
of decorum will commend sports to him as expressions of a pecuniarily
blameless life. It is by meeting these two requirements, of ulterior
wastefulness and proximate purposefulness, that any given employment
holds its place as a traditional and habitual mode of decorous
recreation. In the sense that other forms of recreation and exercise
are morally impossible to persons of good breeding and delicate
sensibilities, then, sports are the best available means of recreation
under existing circumstances.
But those members of respectable society who advocate athletic games
commonly justify their attitude on this head to themselves and to their
neighbors on the ground that these games serve as an invaluable means of
development. They not only improve the contestant's physique, but it
is commonly added that they also foster a manly spirit, both in the
participants and in the spectators. Football is the particular game
which will probably first occur to any one in this community when the
question of the serviceability of athletic games is raised, as this form
of athletic contest is at present uppermost in the mind of those who
plead for or against games as a means of physical or moral salvation.
This typical athletic sport may, therefore, serve to illustrate the
bearing of athletics upon the development of the contestant's character
and physique. It has been said, not inaptly, that the relation of
football to physical culture is much the same as that of the bull-fight
to agriculture. Serviceability for these lusory institutions requires
sedulous training or breeding. The material used, whether brute or
human, is subjected to careful selection and discipline, in order to
secure and accentuate certain aptitudes and propensities which are
characteristic of the ferine state, and which tend to obsolescence under
domestication. This does not mean that the result in either case is
an all around and consistent rehabilitation of the ferine or barbarian
habit of mind and body. The result is rather a one-sided return to
barbarism or to the feroe natura--a rehabilitation and accentuation
of those ferine traits which make for damage and desolation, without
a corresponding development of the traits which would serve the
individual's self-preservation and fullness of life in a ferine
environment. The culture bestowed in football gives a product of exotic
ferocity and cunning. It is a rehabilitation of the early barbarian
temperament, together with a suppression of those details of
temperament, which, as seen from the standpoint of the social and
economic exigencies, are the redeeming features of the savage character.
The physical vigor acquired in the training for athletic games--so far
as the training may be said to have this effect--is of advantage both
to the individual and to the collectivity, in that, other things being
equal, it conduces to economic serviceability. The spiritual traits
which go with athletic sports are likewise economically advantageous
to the individual, as contradistinguished from the interests of the
collectivity. This holds true in any community where these traits are
present in some degree in the population. Modern competition is in
large part a process of self-assertion on the basis of these traits of
predatory human nature. In the sophisticated form in which they enter
into the modern, peaceable emulation, the possession of these traits
in some measure is almost a necessary of life to the civilized man. But
while they are indispensable to the competitive individual, they are
not directly serviceable to the community. So far as regards the
serviceability of the individual for the purposes of the collective
life, emulative efficiency is of use only indirectly if at all. Ferocity
and cunning are of no use to the community except in its hostile
dealings with other communities; and they are useful to the individual
only because there is so large a proportion of the same traits actively
present in the human environment to which he is exposed. Any individual
who enters the competitive struggle without the due endowment of these
traits is at a disadvantage, somewhat as a hornless steer would find
himself at a disadvantage in a drove of horned cattle.
The possession and the cultivation of the predatory traits of character
may, of course, be desirable on other than economic grounds. There is a
prevalent aesthetic or ethical predilection for the barbarian aptitudes,
and the traits in question minister so effectively to this predilection
that their serviceability in the aesthetic or ethical respect probably
offsets any economic unserviceability which they may give. But for the
present purpose that is beside the point. Therefore nothing is said here
as to the desirability or advisability of sports on the whole, or as to
their value on other than economic grounds.
In popular apprehension there is much that is admirable in the type
of manhood which the life of sport fosters. There is self-reliance and
good-fellowship, so termed in the somewhat loose colloquial use of
the words. From a different point of view the qualities currently so
characterized might be described as truculence and clannishness. The
reason for the current approval and admiration of these manly qualities,
as well as for their being called manly, is the same as the reason for
their usefulness to the individual. The members of the community, and
especially that class of the community which sets the pace in canons of
taste, are endowed with this range of propensities in sufficient measure
to make their absence in others felt as a shortcoming, and to make
their possession in an exceptional degree appreciated as an attribute of
superior merit. The traits of predatory man are by no means obsolete in
the common run of modern populations. They are present and can be called
out in bold relief at any time by any appeal to the sentiments in
which they express themselves--unless this appeal should clash with the
specific activities that make up our habitual occupations and comprise
the general range of our everyday interests. The common run of the
population of any industrial community is emancipated from these,
economically considered, untoward propensities only in the sense
that, through partial and temporary disuse, they have lapsed into the
background of sub-conscious motives. With varying degrees of potency in
different individuals, they remain available for the aggressive shaping
of men's actions and sentiments whenever a stimulus of more than
everyday intensity comes in to call them forth. And they assert
themselves forcibly in any case where no occupation alien to the
predatory culture has usurped the individual's everyday range of
interest and sentiment. This is the case among the leisure class and
among certain portions of the population which are ancillary to that
class. Hence the facility with which any new accessions to the leisure
class take to sports; and hence the rapid growth of sports and of
the sporting sentient in any industrial community where wealth has
accumulated sufficiently to exempt a considerable part of the population
from work.
A homely and familiar fact may serve to show that the predaceous impulse
does not prevail in the same degree in all classes. Taken simply as a
feature of modern life, the habit of carrying a walking-stick may seem
at best a trivial detail; but the usage has a significance for the point
in question. The classes among whom the habit most prevails--the classes
with whom the walking-stick is associated in popular apprehension--are
the men of the leisure class proper, sporting men, and the lower-class
delinquents. To these might perhaps be added the men engaged in the
pecuniary employments. The same is not true of the common run of men
engaged in industry and it may be noted by the way that women do not
carry a stick except in case of infirmity, where it has a use of a
different kind. The practice is of course in great measure a matter
of polite usage; but the basis of polite usage is, in turn, the
proclivities of the class which sets the pace in polite usage. The
walking-stick serves the purpose of an advertisement that the bearer's
hands are employed otherwise than in useful effort, and it therefore has
utility as an evidence of leisure. But it is also a weapon, and it meets
a felt need of barbarian man on that ground. The handling of so tangible
and primitive a means of offense is very comforting to any one who is
gifted with even a moderate share of ferocity. The exigencies of
the language make it impossible to avoid an apparent implication of
disapproval of the aptitudes, propensities, and expressions of life here
under discussion. It is, however, not intended to imply anything in the
way of deprecation or commendation of any one of these phases of human
character or of the life process. The various elements of the prevalent
human nature are taken up from the point of view of economic theory,
and the traits discussed are gauged and graded with regard to their
immediate economic bearing on the facility of the collective life
process. That is to say, these phenomena are here apprehended from
the economic point of view and are valued with respect to their direct
action in furtherance or hindrance of a more perfect adjustment of the
human collectivity to the environment and to the institutional structure
required by the economic situation of the collectivity for the present
and for the immediate future. For these purposes the traits handed down
from the predatory culture are less serviceable than might be. Although
even in this connection it is not to be overlooked that the energetic
aggressiveness and pertinacity of predatory man is a heritage of no mean
value. The economic value--with some regard also to the social value in
the narrower sense--of these aptitudes and propensities is attempted to
be passed upon without reflecting on their value as seen from another
point of view. When contrasted with the prosy mediocrity of the
latter-day industrial scheme of life, and judged by the accredited
standards of morality, and more especially by the standards of
aesthetics and of poetry, these survivals from a more primitive type of
manhood may have a very different value from that here assigned them.
But all this being foreign to the purpose in hand, no expression
of opinion on this latter head would be in place here. All that is
admissible is to enter the caution that these standards of excellence,
which are alien to the present purpose, must not be allowed to influence
our economic appreciation of these traits of human character or of the
activities which foster their growth. This applies both as regards those
persons who actively participate in sports and those whose sporting
experience consists in contemplation only. What is here said of
the sporting propensity is likewise pertinent to sundry reflections
presently to be made in this connection on what would colloquially be
known as the religious life.
The last paragraph incidentally touches upon the fact that everyday
speech can scarcely be employed in discussing this class of aptitudes
and activities without implying deprecation or apology. The fact is
significant as showing the habitual attitude of the dispassionate common
man toward the propensities which express themselves in sports and in
exploit generally. And this is perhaps as convenient a place as any
to discuss that undertone of deprecation which runs through all the
voluminous discourse in defense or in laudation of athletic sports, as
well as of other activities of a predominantly predatory character. The
same apologetic frame of mind is at least beginning to be observable in
the spokesmen of most other institutions handed down from the barbarian
phase of life. Among these archaic institutions which are felt to need
apology are comprised, with others, the entire existing system of the
distribution of wealth, together with the resulting class distinction of
status; all or nearly all forms of consumption that come under the head
of conspicuous waste; the status of women under the patriarchal system;
and many features of the traditional creeds and devout observances,
especially the exoteric expressions of the creed and the naive
apprehension of received observances. What is to be said in this
connection of the apologetic attitude taken in commending sports and
the sporting character will therefore apply, with a suitable change in
phraseology, to the apologies offered in behalf of these other, related
elements of our social heritage.
There is a feeling--usually vague and not commonly avowed in so many
words by the apologist himself, but ordinarily perceptible in the manner
of his discourse--that these sports, as well as the general range of
predaceous impulses and habits of thought which underlie the sporting
character, do not altogether commend themselves to common sense. "As
to the majority of murderers, they are very incorrect characters." This
aphorism offers a valuation of the predaceous temperament, and of the
disciplinary effects of its overt expression and exercise, as seen from
the moralist's point of view. As such it affords an indication of what
is the deliverance of the sober sense of mature men as to the degree
of availability of the predatory habit of mind for the purposes of the
collective life. It is felt that the presumption is against any activity
which involves habituation to the predatory attitude, and that the
burden of proof lies with those who speak for the rehabilitation of the
predaceous temper and for the practices which strengthen it. There is a
strong body of popular sentiment in favor of diversions and enterprises
of the kind in question; but there is at the same time present in
the community a pervading sense that this ground of sentiment wants
legitimation. The required legitimation is ordinarily sought by
showing that although sports are substantially of a predatory, socially
disintegrating effect; although their proximate effect runs in
the direction of reversion to propensities that are industrially
disserviceable; yet indirectly and remotely--by some not readily
comprehensible process of polar induction, or counter-irritation
perhaps--sports are conceived to foster a habit of mind that is
serviceable for the social or industrial purpose. That is to say,
although sports are essentially of the nature of invidious exploit, it
is presumed that by some remote and obscure effect they result in the
growth of a temperament conducive to non-invidious work. It is commonly
attempted to show all this empirically or it is rather assumed that this
is the empirical generalization which must be obvious to any one who
cares to see it. In conducting the proof of this thesis the treacherous
ground of inference from cause to effect is somewhat shrewdly avoided,
except so far as to show that the "manly virtues" spoken of above
are fostered by sports. But since it is these manly virtues that are
(economically) in need of legitimation, the chain of proof breaks
off where it should begin. In the most general economic terms, these
apologies are an effort to show that, in spite of the logic of the
thing, sports do in fact further what may broadly be called workmanship.
So long as he has not succeeded in persuading himself or others that
this is their effect the thoughtful apologist for sports will not rest
content, and commonly, it is to be admitted, he does not rest content.
His discontent with his own vindication of the practice in question is
ordinarily shown by his truculent tone and by the eagerness with which
he heaps up asseverations in support of his position. But why are
apologies needed? If there prevails a body of popular sentient in
favor of sports, why is not that fact a sufficient legitimation? The
protracted discipline of prowess to which the race has been subjected
under the predatory and quasi-peaceable culture has transmitted to the
men of today a temperament that finds gratification in these expressions
of ferocity and cunning. So, why not accept these sports as legitimate
expressions of a normal and wholesome human nature? What other norm is
there that is to be lived up to than that given in the aggregate range
of propensities that express themselves in the sentiments of this
generation, including the hereditary strain of prowess? The ulterior
norm to which appeal is taken is the instinct of workmanship, which is
an instinct more fundamental, of more ancient prescription, than
the propensity to predatory emulation. The latter is but a special
development of the instinct of workmanship, a variant, relatively late
and ephemeral in spite of its great absolute antiquity. The emulative
predatory impulse--or the instinct of sportsmanship, as it might well
be called--is essentially unstable in comparison with the primordial
instinct of workmanship out of which it has been developed and
differentiated. Tested by this ulterior norm of life, predatory
emulation, and therefore the life of sports, falls short.
The manner and the measure in which the institution of a leisure class
conduces to the conservation of sports and invidious exploit can of
course not be succinctly stated. From the evidence already recited it
appears that, in sentient and inclinations, the leisure class is more
favorable to a warlike attitude and animus than the industrial classes.
Something similar seems to be true as regards sports. But it is chiefly
in its indirect effects, though the canons of decorous living, that the
institution has its influence on the prevalent sentiment with respect to
the sporting life. This indirect effect goes almost unequivocally in
the direction of furthering a survival of the predatory temperament
and habits; and this is true even with respect to those variants of
the sporting life which the higher leisure-class code of proprieties
proscribes; as, e.g., prize-fighting, cock-fighting, and other
like vulgar expressions of the sporting temper. Whatever the latest
authenticated schedule of detail proprieties may say, the accredited
canons of decency sanctioned by the institution say without equivocation
that emulation and waste are good and their opposites are disreputable.
In the crepuscular light of the social nether spaces the details of the
code are not apprehended with all the facility that might be desired,
and these broad underlying canons of decency are therefore applied
somewhat unreflectingly, with little question as to the scope of their
competence or the exceptions that have been sanctioned in detail.
Addiction to athletic sports, not only in the way of direct
participation, but also in the way of sentiment and moral support, is,
in a more or less pronounced degree, a characteristic of the leisure
class; and it is a trait which that class shares with the lower-class
delinquents, and with such atavistic elements throughout the body of
the community as are endowed with a dominant predaceous trend. Few
individuals among the populations of Western civilized countries are
so far devoid of the predaceous instinct as to find no diversion in
contemplating athletic sports and games, but with the common run of
individuals among the industrial classes the inclination to sports
does not assert itself to the extent of constituting what may fairly
be called a sporting habit. With these classes sports are an occasional
diversion rather than a serious feature of life. This common body of the
people can therefore not be said to cultivate the sporting propensity.
Although it is not obsolete in the average of them, or even in any
appreciable number of individuals, yet the predilection for sports in
the commonplace industrial classes is of the nature of a reminiscence,
more or less diverting as an occasional interest, rather than a vital
and permanent interest that counts as a dominant factor in shaping
the organic complex of habits of thought into which it enters. As it
manifests itself in the sporting life of today, this propensity may not
appear to be an economic factor of grave consequence. Taken simply by
itself it does not count for a great deal in its direct effects on the
industrial efficiency or the consumption of any given individual; but
the prevalence and the growth of the type of human nature of which this
propensity is a characteristic feature is a matter of some consequence.
It affects the economic life of the collectivity both as regards the
rate of economic development and as regards the character of the results
attained by the development. For better or worse, the fact that the
popular habits of thought are in any degree dominated by this type of
character can not but greatly affect the scope, direction, standards,
and ideals of the collective economic life, as well as the degree of
adjustment of the collective life to the environment.
Something to a like effect is to be said of other traits that go to make
up the barbarian character. For the purposes of economic theory, these
further barbarian traits may be taken as concomitant variations of that
predaceous temper of which prowess is an expression. In great measure
they are not primarily of an economic character, nor do they have much
direct economic bearing. They serve to indicate the stage of economic
evolution to which the individual possessed of them is adapted. They
are of importance, therefore, as extraneous tests of the degree of
adaptation of the character in which they are comprised to the economic
exigencies of today, but they are also to some extent important as
being aptitudes which themselves go to increase or diminish the economic
serviceability of the individual.
As it finds expression in the life of the barbarian, prowess manifests
itself in two main directions--force and fraud. In varying degrees these
two forms of expression are similarly present in modern warfare, in the
pecuniary occupations, and in sports and games. Both lines of aptitudes
are cultivated and strengthened by the life of sport as well as by the
more serious forms of emulative life. Strategy or cunning is an element
invariably present in games, as also in warlike pursuits and in the
chase. In all of these employments strategy tends to develop into
finesse and chicanery. Chicanery, falsehood, browbeating, hold a
well-secured place in the method of procedure of any athletic contest
and in games generally. The habitual employment of an umpire, and
the minute technical regulations governing the limits and details of
permissible fraud and strategic advantage, sufficiently attest the fact
that fraudulent practices and attempts to overreach one's opponents
are not adventitious features of the game. In the nature of the case
habituation to sports should conduce to a fuller development of
the aptitude for fraud; and the prevalence in the community of that
predatory temperament which inclines men to sports connotes a prevalence
of sharp practice and callous disregard of the interests of others,
individually and collectively. Resort to fraud, in any guise and under
any legitimation of law or custom, is an expression of a narrowly
self-regarding habit of mind. It is needless to dwell at any length on
the economic value of this feature of the sporting character.
In this connection it is to be noted that the most obvious
characteristic of the physiognomy affected by athletic and other
sporting men is that of an extreme astuteness. The gifts and exploits
of Ulysses are scarcely second to those of Achilles, either in their
substantial furtherance of the game or in the éclat which they give the
astute sporting man among his associates. The pantomime of astuteness
is commonly the first step in that assimilation to the professional
sporting man which a youth undergoes after matriculation in any
reputable school, of the secondary or the higher education, as the case
may be. And the physiognomy of astuteness, as a decorative feature,
never ceases to receive the thoughtful attention of men whose serious
interest lies in athletic games, races, or other contests of a similar
emulative nature. As a further indication of their spiritual kinship,
it may be pointed out that the members of the lower delinquent class
usually show this physiognomy of astuteness in a marked degree, and that
they very commonly show the same histrionic exaggeration of it that is
often seen in the young candidate for athletic honors. This, by the
way, is the most legible mark of what is vulgarly called "toughness" in
youthful aspirants for a bad name.
The astute man, it may be remarked, is of no economic value to the
community--unless it be for the purpose of sharp practice in dealings
with other communities. His functioning is not a furtherance of the
generic life process. At its best, in its direct economic bearing, it is
a conversion of the economic substance of the collectivity to a growth
alien to the collective life process--very much after the analogy of
what in medicine would be called a benign tumor, with some tendency to
transgress the uncertain line that divides the benign from the malign
growths. The two barbarian traits, ferocity and astuteness, go to make
up the predaceous temper or spiritual attitude. They are the expressions
of a narrowly self-regarding habit of mind. Both are highly serviceable
for individual expediency in a life looking to invidious success. Both
also have a high aesthetic value. Both are fostered by the pecuniary
culture. But both alike are of no use for the purposes of the collective
life.