THE OUTLOOK REGARDING CASTE
THE QUESTION—HOW FAR THE INHERITANCE PRINCIPLE ACTUALLY
PREVAILS—INFLUENCES FAVORING ITS GROWTH—THOSE ANTAGONIZING IT—THE
PRINCIPLES OF INHERITANCE AND EQUAL OPPORTUNITY AS AFFECTING SOCIAL
EFFICIENCY—CONCLUSION.
A very pertinent question is that of the part which the hereditary or
caste principle is likely to play in the coming life; whether it is
probable that caste, other than that due to race, will arise in modern
society; or that the hereditary principle will, to any degree, have
increased ascendency.
The answer should probably be that the principle is always powerful,
and may gain somewhat as conditions become more settled, but certainly
can never produce true caste in the modern world.
As regards the power, in general, of the inheritance tendency, I
have perhaps said enough already. The inheritance of property,
notwithstanding the perennial agitation of communism, is probably as
secure as any institution can be—because there is apparently nothing
practicable to take its place as a means to economic stability. And
with inheritance of property goes, in all prosperous countries, a class
of people who come without effort into wealth and all its advantages:
their number and riches are certainly on the rapid increase. The less
formal inheritance of culture, opportunity and position is equally
real.
As to occupation, even now a census would perhaps show that the
majority of young men follow that of their father, or one cognate
to it. Most farmers’ sons probably remain farmers (in spite of the
well-known drift to the towns), most mechanics’ sons become mechanics,
and a large proportion of the children of professional men enter the
professions. The child of a well-to-do parent is given, as a matter
of course, the education, often long and expensive, which is required
for entrance upon a profession, and is coming to be necessary also for
commerce. Not only this, but he is made to feel from childhood that
success in achieving a professional or business position is expected of
him; he _must_ get it or lose the respect of his family and friends.
In the majority of cases—though the minority on the other side is no
small one—these opportunities and incitements, together with the power
to wait and choose which judicious paternal support gives him, are
effective in drawing out his energies and directing them continuously
upon the desired point. Certainly they will not make a good lawyer or
a captain of industry out of a fool, nor will the lack of them keep
decisive natural ability from exercising these functions; but with the
common run of men, having fair capacity not very definitely inclined in
a special direction, they are potent. Paternal suggestion and backing
must be used with great discretion and often fail entirely, but no man
of the world, so far as I know, regards them as unimportant.
If we ask whether the influence of inheritance is likely to increase or
diminish, we find, on studying the situation as a whole, a conflict of
tendencies the precise outcome of which can only be guessed at.
As favoring the growth of the principle and the crystallization of
classes, we have chiefly two considerations: the probability of more
settled conditions, and the influence of that sharper differentiation
of functions which modern life involves.
Social change, as already pointed out, is a main force in breaking up
the inheritance of function, and to this must largely be attributed
the comparative weakness of the principle in the United States. The
changes incident to the settlement of a new country, coinciding with
those incident to an economic revolution, have set everything afloat
and brought in a somewhat confused and disorderly sort of competition.
Our cities, especially, are aggregates of immigrants, most of whom
have broken away from early associations, and a large part of whom are
performing functions unheard of by their fathers. It is hardly possible
that trades should become hereditary when most of them endure less than
one man’s lifetime. And something of the same uncertainty runs through
commerce and the professions.
Without predicting any great decline in the pace of invention, we
may yet expect that the next fifty years will see a great deal of
the consolidation that comes with maturity. The population will be
comparatively established, in place at least, and the forces making for
inheritance will have a chance to work. An immense body of transmitted
wealth will exist, and democratic influences will have all they can
do to keep it from generating an aristocratic spirit. Industries,
professions and trades can hardly fail to be more stable than they
have been, and the rural population, as always, will be a stronghold of
the forces that favor inheritance.
The sentiment of regard for ancestry, of which caste is the extreme
expression, is likely to increase in this and in all new countries.
As communities grow older the family line comes more and more under
public observation. It is _seen_, and displayed in memory, wherever any
sort of continuity is preserved, and, being seen, it is judged, and
the individual shares the credit or discredit of his kin. While this
influence is now weak in the United States, on the whole, and is almost
absent in the recent and confused life of our cities, it is gaining
rapidly wherever—as is generally the case in the East and Southeast
outside of large towns—the conditions are settled enough to make the
family as a whole a matter of observation. And there can be little
doubt that it is increasing in the West wherever it has a similar
chance.
In some ways this greater recognition of descent is wholesome. A sense
of being part of a kindred, of bearing the honor of a continuing group
as well as of a perishing individual, tends to make one a better man;
and from this point of view our somewhat disintegrated society might
well have more of it.
As to the sharper differentiation that goes with modern life, we
see it on all hands. The city is more clearly marked off from the
country, in its functions, and is itself broken up into quarters the
inhabitants of which have often little or no intercourse with those
of other quarters. Trades and professions subdivide into specialties,
and, a more elaborate training being demanded, it is more necessary
than formerly that a man should know from the start what he wants
to do and assiduously prepare himself to do it. Not forgetting that
there is another side to this, a side of unification implied in these
differences, one may yet say that in themselves they tend to separate
people more sharply into social groups which might conceivably become
hereditary.
The forces antagonizing inheritance of function come chiefly under two
heads, the opposition of ambitious young men and the general current of
democratic sentiment.
Caste means restriction of opportunity, and consequently lies across
the path of the most energetic part of the people. Its rule can prevail
only where individual self-assertion is restrained by ignorance and
formal institutions. Under our flexible modern conditions, it is safe
to say, no system can endure that does not make a point of propitiating
the formidable ambition of youth by at least an apparent freedom of
opportunity. Even the inheritance of property is constantly questioned
in the minds of the young, and nothing but the lack of a plausible
alternative prevents its being more seriously assailed. And since this
stronghold of inequality can hardly be shaken, there is all the more
demand that it be offset by opening every other kind of advantage,
especially in the way of education and training, to whomsoever may be
fit to profit by it.
Somewhat vaguer but perhaps even more effective than the resistance
of young men is the opposition of the general current of sentiment to
any growth of inheritance at the expense of opportunity. To abolish
extrinsic inequalities and give each a chance to serve all in his own
fit way, is undoubtedly the democratic ideal. In politics this is
expressed by doing away with hereditary privilege and basing everything
on popular suffrage; in education it is seeking an expression quite as
vital by striving to open to every one the training to any function
for which he may show fitness. But the spirit of unity and brotherhood
is far from satisfied with what has been achieved in these directions,
and aspires to bring home to every child that fair access to the fruits
of progress which, in spite of theoretical liberty, is now widely
lacking. It calls for _social_ democracy, the real presence of freedom
and justice in every fibre of the social fabric. To this spirit any
increase of the privileges, already unavoidably great, which come by
inheritance, is evidently hateful.
In America at least this sentiment is not that of a struggling lower
class but of, practically, the whole community. With reference to so
vital a part of our traditional ideal there are no classes; all the
people feel substantially alike; and there is no public purpose for
which wealth is so freely spent as in the support of institutions whose
purpose is to keep open the path of opportunity from any condition of
life to any other.
There is also, back of this sentiment, a belief that equal opportunity
makes for the general good, since that system of society =will= be most
efficient, other things equal, in which each individual is required to
prove that he has more fitness than others for his special function.
Every one can see, at times, the deteriorating effect of family
influence—as upon business establishments when a less competent son
succeeds his father, or upon military service, as in the British army
at the outbreak of the Boer war.
On the other hand, the results of a confused competition may be worse
than those of order, even if the latter rests upon an artificial
principle.
Thus it is said with some truth—and this is perhaps the most
considerable argument for caste in modern life—that a class having
hereditary wealth and position, like the English aristocracy, makes a
permanent channel for high traditions of culture and public service,
and that it is well to preserve such traditions even at the cost of a
somewhat exclusive order to contain and cherish them. De Tocqueville,
himself imbued with the best traditions of the old French aristocracy,
held this view, and ascribed the lack of intellectual distinction
in the America of his day largely to the fact that there was no
class “in which the taste for intellectual pleasures is transmitted
with hereditary fortune and leisure, and by which the labors of the
intellect are held in honor.”[112]
The answer, of course, is that there are other means than caste for
securing the continuity of special traditions, and, more particularly,
that voluntary associations are capable of supplanting inherited
wealth as channels of culture. In the various branches of science, for
example, we have vigorous and continuing groups, with plenty of _esprit
de corps_, by which the labors of the intellect are held in honor. If
libraries, associations and educational institutions can do this for
one phase of culture, why not for others?
It would be unfair, however, not to acknowledge that great services
are constantly rendered to society by persons whom inherited wealth
enables to devote themselves earlier and more independently to high
aims than would otherwise be possible. There is certainly something
favorable to originality in an inherited competence, without which
one is more apt to be coerced into seeking a kind of success already
in vogue, and so having a market value. And the movement to foster
originality by endowments depending upon merit rather than birth will
be most difficult to make effectual, since such endowments almost
inevitably fall into the control of an institutional sort of men who
cannot be expected to subsidize heresy. Funds for this purpose will
probably aid only those sorts of originality already recognized, and in
a manner established; not the radical innovations from which important
movements usually start. It is hard to see how they can do much outside
of experimental science, in which there is a sort of conventional test
of originality.
On the whole, whatever is good in the principle of descent may be
appropriated by a democratic society without going back to formal
rank or exclusive opportunity. Freedom offers no bar to continuity of
function in the family, so long as efficiency is maintained, but merely
requires this, like everything else, to meet the test of service. There
is no adequate reason why a hereditary group, transmitting special
culture and fitness, should not continue their functions under a
democratic system—as is actually the case to a certain extent with the
political families of England. They will do their work all the better
for not being too sure of their position. I see nothing but good in
the fact that a military career has become traditional in a number of
American families who have rendered distinguished service of this sort.
The more special family ambitions we have, of a noble kind, the better
for the country.
No sober observer will imagine that the opposing forces are to abolish
the power of inheritance; they merely set reasonable limits to its
scope. When the way of ambition is opened to the most energetic
individuals, the sharpest teeth of discontent are drawn, and the mass
of men very willingly avoid trouble to themselves and to society by
keeping on in the paternal road. The family is after all too natural
and too convenient a channel of social continuity not to play a great
part in every phase of organization, and there seems little reason to
depart from the opinion of Comte that it must ordinarily be the main
influence in determining occupation.
I am inclined to expect that, owing to somewhat more settled conditions
of life, inheritance of function will be rather more common, and the
tendency to see the individual as one of a stock rather greater, in
the future than in the immediate past. On the other hand it is nearly
certain that educational opportunities will become more open and
varied, making it easier than now for special aptitude to find its
place. These things are not inconsistent, and both will make for order
and contentment.
Also much more endeavor will be directed to the welfare of the less
privileged classes as classes—that is, of those who are content to
remain in the ancestral status instead of trying to get into one more
favored. Heretofore we have given too much thought, relatively, to the
one man who aims at distinction, and too little to the ninety and nine
who do not.
FOOTNOTES:
[112] Democracy in America, vol. i, chap. 3.