THE COMPELLER OF EQUALITY
Ever since 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 his _Theory of Business Enterprise_
he 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, whether the 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 who look 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 tyrannies of 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 the kind
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 get a
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 now have 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 contrast with 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 men were 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 mercantile classes, 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
yet imperfectly 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 by the 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 to persist.
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 best _policy_.
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 basis of 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 he means 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. One wishes 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 the _highest_ importance, but
of the _first_ importance. And if those material 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 to _poseurs_ and 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.