The gambling propensity is another subsidiary trait of the barbarian
temperament. It is a concomitant variation of character of almost
universal prevalence among sporting men and among men given to warlike
and emulative activities generally. This trait also has a direct
economic value. It is recognized to be a hindrance to the highest
industrial efficiency of the aggregate in any community where it
prevails in an appreciable degree. The gambling proclivity is doubtfully
to be classed as a feature belonging exclusively to the predatory type
of human nature. The chief factor in the gambling habit is the belief in
luck; and this belief is apparently traceable, at least in its elements,
to a stage in human evolution antedating the predatory culture. It may
well have been under the predatory culture that the belief in luck was
developed into the form in which it is present, as the chief element of
the gambling proclivity, in the sporting temperament. It probably owes
the specific form under which it occurs in the modern culture to the
predatory discipline. But the belief in luck is in substance a habit
of more ancient date than the predatory culture. It is one form of the
artistic apprehension of things. The belief seems to be a trait carried
over in substance from an earlier phase into the barbarian culture,
and transmuted and transmitted through that culture to a later stage
of human development under a specific form imposed by the predatory
discipline. But in any case, it is to be taken as an archaic trait,
inherited from a more or less remote past, more or less incompatible
with the requirements of the modern industrial process, and more or less
of a hindrance to the fullest efficiency of the collective economic life
of the present.
While the belief in luck is the basis of the gambling habit, it is not
the only element that enters into the habit of betting. Betting on the
issue of contests of strength and skill proceeds on a further motive,
without which the belief in luck would scarcely come in as a prominent
feature of sporting life. This further motive is the desire of the
anticipated winner, or the partisan of the anticipated winning side, to
heighten his side's ascendency at the cost of the loser. Not only does
the stronger side score a more signal victory, and the losing side
suffer a more painful and humiliating defeat, in proportion as the
pecuniary gain and loss in the wager is large; although this alone is
a consideration of material weight. But the wager is commonly laid also
with a view, not avowed in words nor even recognized in set terms in
petto, to enhancing the chances of success for the contestant on which
it is laid. It is felt that substance and solicitude expended to
this end can not go for naught in the issue. There is here a special
manifestation of the instinct of workmanship, backed by an even more
manifest sense that the animistic congruity of things must decide for a
victorious outcome for the side in whose behalf the propensity inherent
in events has been propitiated and fortified by so much of conative
and kinetic urging. This incentive to the wager expresses itself freely
under the form of backing one's favorite in any contest, and it is
unmistakably a predatory feature. It is as ancillary to the predaceous
impulse proper that the belief in luck expresses itself in a wager. So
that it may be set down that in so far as the belief in luck comes
to expression in the form of laying a wager, it is to be accounted an
integral element of the predatory type of character. The belief is, in
its elements, an archaic habit which belongs substantially to early,
undifferentiated human nature; but when this belief is helped out by the
predatory emulative impulse, and so is differentiated into the specific
form of the gambling habit, it is, in this higher-developed and specific
form, to be classed as a trait of the barbarian character.
The belief in luck is a sense of fortuitous necessity in the sequence
of phenomena. In its various mutations and expressions, it is of very
serious importance for the economic efficiency of any community in which
it prevails to an appreciable extent. So much so as to warrant a more
detailed discussion of its origin and content and of the bearing of its
various ramifications upon economic structure and function, as well as
a discussion of the relation of the leisure class to its growth,
differentiation, and persistence. In the developed, integrated form
in which it is most readily observed in the barbarian of the predatory
culture or in the sporting man of modern communities, the belief
comprises at least two distinguishable elements--which are to be taken
as two different phases of the same fundamental habit of thought, or as
the same psychological factor in two successive phases of its evolution.
The fact that these two elements are successive phases of the same
general line of growth of belief does not hinder their coexisting in the
habits of thought of any given individual. The more primitive form
(or the more archaic phase) is an incipient animistic belief, or an
animistic sense of relations and things, that imputes a quasi-personal
character to facts. To the archaic man all the obtrusive and obviously
consequential objects and facts in his environment have a quasi-personal
individuality. They are conceived to be possessed of volition, or rather
of propensities, which enter into the complex of causes and affect
events in an inscrutable manner. The sporting man's sense of luck and
chance, or of fortuitous necessity, is an inarticulate or inchoate
animism. It applies to objects and situations, often in a very vague
way; but it is usually so far defined as to imply the possibility of
propitiating, or of deceiving and cajoling, or otherwise disturbing the
holding of propensities resident in the objects which constitute the
apparatus and accessories of any game of skill or chance. There are few
sporting men who are not in the habit of wearing charms or talismans to
which more or less of efficacy is felt to belong. And the proportion is
not much less of those who instinctively dread the "hoodooing" of the
contestants or the apparatus engaged in any contest on which they lay a
wager; or who feel that the fact of their backing a given contestant or
side in the game does and ought to strengthen that side; or to whom the
"mascot" which they cultivate means something more than a jest.
In its simple form the belief in luck is this instinctive sense of an
inscrutable teleological propensity in objects or situations. Objects or
events have a propensity to eventuate in a given end, whether this end
or objective point of the sequence is conceived to be fortuitously given
or deliberately sought. From this simple animism the belief shades off
by insensible gradations into the second, derivative form or phase above
referred to, which is a more or less articulate belief in an inscrutable
preternatural agency. The preternatural agency works through the visible
objects with which it is associated, but is not identified with these
objects in point of individuality. The use of the term "preternatural
agency" here carries no further implication as to the nature of the
agency spoken of as preternatural. This is only a farther development of
animistic belief. The preternatural agency is not necessarily conceived
to be a personal agent in the full sense, but it is an agency which
partakes of the attributes of personality to the extent of somewhat
arbitrarily influencing the outcome of any enterprise, and especially
of any contest. The pervading belief in the hamingia or gipta
(gaefa, authna) which lends so much of color to the Icelandic sagas
specifically, and to early Germanic folk-legends, is an illustration of
this sense of an extra-physical propensity in the course of events.
In this expression or form of the belief the propensity is scarcely
personified although to a varying extent an individuality is imputed to
it; and this individuated propensity is sometimes conceived to yield to
circumstances, commonly to circumstances of a spiritual or preternatural
character. A well-known and striking exemplification of the belief--in
a fairly advanced stage of differentiation and involving an
anthropomorphic personification of the preternatural agent appealed
to--is afforded by the wager of battle. Here the preternatural agent was
conceived to act on request as umpire, and to shape the outcome of the
contest in accordance with some stipulated ground of decision, such as
the equity or legality of the respective contestants' claims. The like
sense of an inscrutable but spiritually necessary tendency in events
is still traceable as an obscure element in current popular belief, as
shown, for instance, by the well-accredited maxim, "Thrice is he
armed who knows his quarrel just,"--a maxim which retains much of its
significance for the average unreflecting person even in the civilized
communities of today. The modern reminiscence of the belief in the
hamingia, or in the guidance of an unseen hand, which is traceable in
the acceptance of this maxim is faint and perhaps uncertain; and it
seems in any case to be blended with other psychological moments that
are not clearly of an animistic character.
For the purpose in hand it is unnecessary to look more closely into the
psychological process or the ethnological line of descent by which the
later of these two animistic apprehensions of propensity is derived
from the earlier. This question may be of the gravest importance to
folk-psychology or to the theory of the evolution of creeds and cults.
The same is true of the more fundamental question whether the two
are related at all as successive phases in a sequence of development.
Reference is here made to the existence of these questions only to
remark that the interest of the present discussion does not lie in that
direction. So far as concerns economic theory, these two elements or
phases of the belief in luck, or in an extra-causal trend or propensity
in things, are of substantially the same character. They have an
economic significance as habits of thought which affect the individual's
habitual view of the facts and sequences with which he comes in contact,
and which thereby affect the individual's serviceability for the
industrial purpose. Therefore, apart from all question of the beauty,
worth, or beneficence of any animistic belief, there is place for
a discussion of their economic bearing on the serviceability of the
individual as an economic factor, and especially as an industrial agent.
It has already been noted in an earlier connection, that in order to
have the highest serviceability in the complex industrial processes of
today, the individual must be endowed with the aptitude and the habit
of readily apprehending and relating facts in terms of causal sequence.
Both as a whole and in its details, the industrial process is a process
of quantitative causation. The "intelligence" demanded of the workman,
as well as of the director of an industrial process, is little else
than a degree of facility in the apprehension of and adaptation to a
quantitatively determined causal sequence. This facility of apprehension
and adaptation is what is lacking in stupid workmen, and the growth
of this facility is the end sought in their education--so far as their
education aims to enhance their industrial efficiency.
In so far as the individual's inherited aptitudes or his training
incline him to account for facts and sequences in other terms than those
of causation or matter-of-fact, they lower his productive efficiency or
industrial usefulness. This lowering of efficiency through a penchant
for animistic methods of apprehending facts is especially apparent when
taken in the mass-when a given population with an animistic turn is
viewed as a whole. The economic drawbacks of animism are more patent and
its consequences are more far-reaching under the modern system of large
industry than under any other. In the modern industrial communities,
industry is, to a constantly increasing extent, being organized in a
comprehensive system of organs and functions mutually conditioning one
another; and therefore freedom from all bias in the causal apprehension
of phenomena grows constantly more requisite to efficiency on the
part of the men concerned in industry. Under a system of handicraft an
advantage in dexterity, diligence, muscular force, or endurance may, in
a very large measure, offset such a bias in the habits of thought of the
workmen.
Similarly in agricultural industry of the traditional kind, which
closely resembles handicraft in the nature of the demands made upon
the workman. In both, the workman is himself the prime mover chiefly
depended upon, and the natural forces engaged are in large part
apprehended as inscrutable and fortuitous agencies, whose working lies
beyond the workman's control or discretion. In popular apprehension
there is in these forms of industry relatively little of the industrial
process left to the fateful swing of a comprehensive mechanical sequence
which must be comprehended in terms of causation and to which the
operations of industry and the movements of the workmen must be adapted.
As industrial methods develop, the virtues of the handicraftsman count
for less and less as an offset to scanty intelligence or a halting
acceptance of the sequence of cause and effect. The industrial
organization assumes more and more of the character of a mechanism, in
which it is man's office to discriminate and select what natural forces
shall work out their effects in his service. The workman's part in
industry changes from that of a prime mover to that of discrimination
and valuation of quantitative sequences and mechanical facts. The
faculty of a ready apprehension and unbiased appreciation of causes in
his environment grows in relative economic importance and any element in
the complex of his habits of thought which intrudes a bias at
variance with this ready appreciation of matter-of-fact sequence gains
proportionately in importance as a disturbing element acting to lower
his industrial usefulness. Through its cumulative effect upon the
habitual attitude of the population, even a slight or inconspicuous bias
towards accounting for everyday facts by recourse to other ground than
that of quantitative causation may work an appreciable lowering of the
collective industrial efficiency of a community.
The animistic habit of mind may occur in the early, undifferentiated
form of an inchoate animistic belief, or in the later and more highly
integrated phase in which there is an anthropomorphic personification of
the propensity imputed to facts. The industrial value of such a lively
animistic sense, or of such recourse to a preternatural agency or the
guidance of an unseen hand, is of course very much the same in either
case. As affects the industrial serviceability of the individual, the
effect is of the same kind in either case; but the extent to which
this habit of thought dominates or shapes the complex of his habits of
thought varies with the degree of immediacy, urgency, or exclusiveness
with which the individual habitually applies the animistic or
anthropomorphic formula in dealing with the facts of his environment.
The animistic habit acts in all cases to blur the appreciation of causal
sequence; but the earlier, less reflected, less defined animistic sense
of propensity may be expected to affect the intellectual processes
of the individual in a more pervasive way than the higher forms of
anthropomorphism. Where the animistic habit is present in the naive
form, its scope and range of application are not defined or limited.
It will therefore palpably affect his thinking at every turn of the
person's life--wherever he has to do with the material means of life.
In the later, maturer development of animism, after it has been defined
through the process of anthropomorphic elaboration, when its application
has been limited in a somewhat consistent fashion to the remote and the
invisible, it comes about that an increasing range of everyday facts are
provisionally accounted for without recourse to the preternatural agency
in which a cultivated animism expresses itself. A highly integrated,
personified preternatural agency is not a convenient means of handling
the trivial occurrences of life, and a habit is therefore easily fallen
into of accounting for many trivial or vulgar phenomena in terms of
sequence. The provisional explanation so arrived at is by neglect
allowed to stand as definitive, for trivial purposes, until special
provocation or perplexity recalls the individual to his allegiance. But
when special exigencies arise, that is to say, when there is peculiar
need of a full and free recourse to the law of cause and effect, then
the individual commonly has recourse to the preternatural agency as a
universal solvent, if he is possessed of an anthropomorphic belief.
The extra-causal propensity or agent has a very high utility as a
recourse in perplexity, but its utility is altogether of a non-economic
kind. It is especially a refuge and a fund of comfort where it has
attained the degree of consistency and specialization that belongs to
an anthropomorphic divinity. It has much to commend it even on other
grounds than that of affording the perplexed individual a means of
escape from the difficulty of accounting for phenomena in terms of
causal sequence. It would scarcely be in place here to dwell on the
obvious and well-accepted merits of an anthropomorphic divinity, as seen
from the point of view of the aesthetic, moral, or spiritual interest,
or even as seen from the less remote standpoint of political, military,
or social policy. The question here concerns the less picturesque and
less urgent economic value of the belief in such a preternatural agency,
taken as a habit of thought which affects the industrial serviceability
of the believer. And even within this narrow, economic range, the
inquiry is perforce confined to the immediate bearing of this habit
of thought upon the believer's workmanlike serviceability, rather than
extended to include its remoter economic effects. These remoter effects
are very difficult to trace. The inquiry into them is so encumbered with
current preconceptions as to the degree in which life is enhanced by
spiritual contact with such a divinity, that any attempt to inquire into
their economic value must for the present be fruitless.
The immediate, direct effect of the animistic habit of thought upon the
general frame of mind of the believer goes in the direction of lowering
his effective intelligence in the respect in which intelligence is of
especial consequence for modern industry. The effect follows, in varying
degree, whether the preternatural agent or propensity believed in is
of a higher or a lower cast. This holds true of the barbarian's and
the sporting man's sense of luck and propensity, and likewise of the
somewhat higher developed belief in an anthropomorphic divinity, such as
is commonly possessed by the same class. It must be taken to hold true
also--though with what relative degree of cogency is not easy to say--of
the more adequately developed anthropomorphic cults, such as appeal
to the devout civilized man. The industrial disability entailed by a
popular adherence to one of the higher anthropomorphic cults may be
relatively slight, but it is not to be overlooked. And even these
high-class cults of the Western culture do not represent the last
dissolving phase of this human sense of extra-causal propensity. Beyond
these the same animistic sense shows itself also in such attenuations of
anthropomorphism as the eighteenth-century appeal to an order of nature
and natural rights, and in their modern representative, the ostensibly
post-Darwinian concept of a meliorative trend in the process of
evolution. This animistic explanation of phenomena is a form of the
fallacy which the logicians knew by the name of ignava ratio. For
the purposes of industry or of science it counts as a blunder in the
apprehension and valuation of facts. Apart from its direct industrial
consequences, the animistic habit has a certain significance for
economic theory on other grounds. (1) It is a fairly reliable indication
of the presence, and to some extent even of the degree of potency,
of certain other archaic traits that accompany it and that are of
substantial economic consequence; and (2) the material consequences of
that code of devout proprieties to which the animistic habit gives rise
in the development of an anthropomorphic cult are of importance both
(a) as affecting the community's consumption of goods and the prevalent
canons of taste, as already suggested in an earlier chapter, and (b) by
inducing and conserving a certain habitual recognition of the relation
to a superior, and so stiffening the current sense of status and
allegiance.
As regards the point last named (b), that body of habits of thought
which makes up the character of any individual is in some sense an
organic whole. A marked variation in a given direction at any one point
carries with it, as its correlative, a concomitant variation in the
habitual expression of life in other directions or other groups of
activities. These various habits of thought, or habitual expressions
of life, are all phases of the single life sequence of the individual;
therefore a habit formed in response to a given stimulus will
necessarily affect the character of the response made to other stimuli.
A modification of human nature at any one point is a modification of
human nature as a whole. On this ground, and perhaps to a still greater
extent on obscurer grounds that can not be discussed here, there are
these concomitant variations as between the different traits of human
nature. So, for instance, barbarian peoples with a well-developed
predatory scheme of life are commonly also possessed of a strong
prevailing animistic habit, a well-formed anthropomorphic cult, and
a lively sense of status. On the other hand, anthropomorphism and
the realizing sense of an animistic propensity in material are less
obtrusively present in the life of the peoples at the cultural stages
which precede and which follow the barbarian culture. The sense of
status is also feebler; on the whole, in peaceable communities. It is to
be remarked that a lively, but slightly specialized, animistic belief
is to be found in most if not all peoples living in the ante-predatory,
savage stage of culture. The primitive savage takes his animism less
seriously than the barbarian or the degenerate savage. With him
it eventuates in fantastic myth-making, rather than in coercive
superstition. The barbarian culture shows sportsmanship, status, and
anthropomorphism. There is commonly observable a like concomitance of
variations in the same respects in the individual temperament of men in
the civilized communities of today. Those modern representatives of
the predaceous barbarian temper that make up the sporting element are
commonly believers in luck; at least they have a strong sense of an
animistic propensity in things, by force of which they are given to
gambling. So also as regards anthropomorphism in this class. Such of
them as give in their adhesion to some creed commonly attach themselves
to one of the naively and consistently anthropomorphic creeds; there
are relatively few sporting men who seek spiritual comfort in the less
anthropomorphic cults, such as the Unitarian or the Universalist.
Closely bound up with this correlation of anthropomorphism and prowess
is the fact that anthropomorphic cults act to conserve, if not to
initiate, habits of mind favorable to a regime of status. As regards
this point, it is quite impossible to say where the disciplinary effect
of the cult ends and where the evidence of a concomitance of variations
in inherited traits begins. In their finest development, the predatory
temperament, the sense of status, and the anthropomorphic cult all
together belong to the barbarian culture; and something of a mutual
causal relation subsists between the three phenomena as they come into
sight in communities on that cultural level. The way in which they recur
in correlation in the habits and attitudes of individuals and classes
today goes far to imply a like causal or organic relation between the
same psychological phenomena considered as traits or habits of the
individual. It has appeared at an earlier point in the discussion
that the relation of status, as a feature of social structure, is a
consequence of the predatory habit of life. As regards its line
of derivation, it is substantially an elaborated expression of the
predatory attitude. On the other hand, an anthropomorphic cult is a
code of detailed relations of status superimposed upon the concept of
a preternatural, inscrutable propensity in material things. So that, as
regards the external facts of its derivation, the cult may be taken as
an outgrowth of archaic man's pervading animistic sense, defined and in
some degree transformed by the predatory habit of life, the result being
a personified preternatural agency, which is by imputation endowed with
a full complement of the habits of thought that characterize the man of
the predatory culture.
The grosser psychological features in the case, which have an immediate
bearing on economic theory and are consequently to be taken account
of here, are therefore: (a) as has appeared in an earlier chapter,
the predatory, emulative habit of mind here called prowess is but the
barbarian variant of the generically human instinct of workmanship,
which has fallen into this specific form under the guidance of a habit
of invidious comparison of persons; (b) the relation of status is a
formal expression of such an invidious comparison duly gauged and graded
according to a sanctioned schedule; (c) an anthropomorphic cult, in the
days of its early vigor at least, is an institution the characteristic
element of which is a relation of status between the human subject as
inferior and the personified preternatural agency as superior. With
this in mind, there should be no difficulty in recognizing the intimate
relation which subsists between these three phenomena of human nature
and of human life; the relation amounts to an identity in some of their
substantial elements. On the one hand, the system of status and the
predatory habit of life are an expression of the instinct of workmanship
as it takes form under a custom of invidious comparison; on the other
hand, the anthropomorphic cult and the habit of devout observances
are an expression of men's animistic sense of a propensity in material
things, elaborated under the guidance of substantially the same general
habit of invidious comparison. The two categories--the emulative habit
of life and the habit of devout observances--are therefore to be taken
as complementary elements of the barbarian type of human nature and of
its modern barbarian variants. They are expressions of much the same
range of aptitudes, made in response to different sets of stimuli.