THE COLLECTED WORKS OF THORSTEIN VEBLEN: Business Theories, Economic Articles & Essays. Thorstein Veblen
going on among the several racial stocks that enter into the hybrid mass, with varying fortunes according as the shifting cultural demands and opportunities have favoured now one, now another type of man. These cul- tural conditions of survival in the racial struggle for existence have varied in the course of centuries, and with grave consequences for the life-history of the race and of its culture; and they are perhaps changing more substantially and rapidly in the immediate present than at any previous time within the historical period. So that, for instance, the continued biological success of any given one of these stocks in the European racial mixture has within a moderate Period Of time shifted from the ground of fighting capacity, and even in a measure from the ground of climatic fitness, to that of spiritual fitness to survive under the conditions imposed by a new cultural situation, by a scheme of institutions that is insensibly but incessantly changing as it runs.9 These unremitting changes and adaptations that go forward in the scheme of institutions, legal and customary, unremittingly induce new habits of work and of thought in the community, and so they continually instill new principles of conduct; with the outcome that the same range of instinctive dispositions innate in the population will work out to a different effect as regards the demands of race survival. To all appearance, what counts first in this connection toward the selective survival of the several European racial stocks is their relative fitness to meet the material requirements of life, - their economic fitness to live under the new cultural limitations and with the new training which this altered cultural situation gives. But the fortunes of the Western civilisation as a cultural scheme, apart from the biological survival or success of any given racial constituent in the Western peoples, is likewise bound up with the viability of European mankind under these institutional changes, and dependent on the spiritual fitness of inherited human nature successfully and enduringly to carry on the altered scheme of life so imposed on these peoples by the growth of their own culture. Such limitations imposed on cultural growth by native proclivities ill suited to civilised life are sufficiently visible in several directions and in all the nations of Christendom.
What is known of heredity goes to say that the various racial types of man are stable; so that during the life-history of any given racial stock, it is held, no heritable modification of its typical make-up, whether spiritual or physical, is to be looked for. The typical human endowment of instincts, as well as the typical make-up of the race in the physical respect, has according to this current view been transmitted intact from the beginning of humanity, - that is to say from whatever point in the mutational development of the race it is seen fit to date humanity, - except so far as subsequent mutations have given rise to new racial stocks, to and by which this human endowment of native proclivities has been transmitted in a typically modified form. On the other hand the habitual elements of human life change unremittingly and cumulatively, resulting in a continued proliferous growth of institutions. Changes in the institutional structure are continually taking place in response to the altered discipline of life under changing cultural conditions, but human nature remains specifically the same.
The ways and means, material and immaterial, by which the native proclivities work out their ends, therefore, are forever in process of change, being conditioned by the changes cumulatively going forward in the institutional fabric of habitual elements that governs the scheme of life.
But there is no warrant for assuming that each or any of these successive changes in the scheme of institutions affords successively readier, surer or more facile ways and means for the instinctive proclivities to work out their ends, or that the phase of habituation in force at any given point in this sequence of change is more suitable to the untroubled functioning of these instincts than any phase that has gone before. Indeed, the presumption is the other way. On grounds of selective survival it is reasonably to be presumed that any given racial type that has endured the test of selective elimination, including the complement of instinctive dispositions by virtue of which it has endured the test, will on its first emergence have been passably suited to the circumstances, material and cultural, under which the type emerged as a mutant and made good its survival; and in so far as the subsequent growth of institutions has altered the available scope and method of instinctive action it is therefore to be presumed that any such subsequent change in the scheme of institutions will in some degree hinder or divert the free play of its instinctive proclivities and will thereby hinder the direct and unsophisticated working-out of the instinctive dispositions native to this given racial type.
What is known of the earlier phases of culture in the life-history of the existing races and peoples goes to say that the initial phase in the life of any given racial type, the phase of culture which prevailed in its environment when it emerged, and under which the stock first proved its fitness to survive, was presumably some form of savagery. Therefore the fitness of any given type of human nature for life after the manner and under the conditions imposed by any later phase in the growth of culture is a matter of less and less secure presumption the farther the sequence of institutional change has departed from that form of savagery which marked the initial stage in the life-history of the given racial stock. Also, presumably, though by no means assuredly, the younger stocks, those which have emerged from later mutations of type, have therefore initially fallen into and made good their survival under the conditions of a relatively advanced phase of savagery, - these younger races should therefore conform with greater facility and better effect to the requirements imposed by a still farther advance in that cumulative complication of institutions and intricacy of ways and means that is involved in cultural growth. The older or more primitive stocks, those which arose out of earlier mutations of type and made good their survival under a more elementary scheme of savage culture, are presumably less capable of adaptation to an advanced cultural scheme.
But at the same time it is on the same grounds to be expected that in all races and peoples there should always persist an ineradicable sentimental disposition to take back to something like that scheme of savagery for which their particular type of human nature once proved its fitness during the initial phase of its life-history. This seems to be what is commonly intended in the cry, “Back to Nature!” The older known racial stocks, the offspring of earlier mutational departures from the initially generic human type, will have been selectively adapted to more archaic forms of savagery, and these show an appreciably more refractory penchant for elementary savage modes of life, and conform to the demands and opportunities of a “higher” civilisation only with a relatively slight facility, amounting in extreme cases to a practical unfitness for civilised life. Hence the “White Man’s burden” and the many perplexities of the missionaries.
Under the Mendelian theories of heredity some qualification of these broad generalisations is called for. As has already been noted above, the peoples of Europe, each and several, are hybrid mixtures made up of several racial stocks. The like is true in some degree of most of the peoples outside of Europe; particularly of the more important and better known nationalities.
These various peoples show more or less distinct and recognisable national types of physique - or perhaps rather of physiognomy - and temperament, and the lines of differentiation between these national types incontinently traverse the lines that divide the racial stocks. At the same time these national types have some degree of permanence; so much so that they are colloquially spoken of as types of race. While no modern anthropologist would confuse nationality with race, it is not to be overlooked that these national hybrid types are frequently so marked and characteristic as to simulate racial characters and perplex the student of race who is intent on identifying the racial stocks out of which any one of these hybrid populations has been compounded. Presumably these national and local types of physiognomy and temperament are to be rated as hybrid types that have been fixed by selective breeding, and for an explanation of this phenomenon recourse is to be taken to the latterday theories of heredity.
To any student familiar with the simpler phenomena of hybridism it will be evident that under the Mendelian rules of hybridisation the number of biologically successful - viable - hybrid forms arising from any cross between two or more forms may diverge very widely from one another and from either of the parent types. The variation must be extreme both in the number of hybrid types so constructed and in the range over which the variation extends, - much greater in both respects than the range of fluctuating (non-typical) variations obtainable under any circumstances in a pure-bred race, particularly in the remoter filial generations. It is also well known, by experiment, that by selective