THE COLLECTED WORKS OF THORSTEIN VEBLEN: Business Theories, Economic Articles & Essays. Thorstein Veblen
It does not commonly, or normally, work to an independent, creative end of its own, but is rather con-cerned with the ways and means whereby instinctively given purposes are to be accomplished. According, therefore, as one or another of the instinctive dispositions is predominant in the community’s scheme of life or in the individual’s everyday interest, the habitual trend of the sense of workmanship will be bent to one or another line of proficiency and technological mastery. By cumulative habituation a bias of this character may come to have very substantial consequences for the range and scope of technological knowledge, the state of the industrial arts, and for the rate and direction of growth in workmanlike ideals.
Changes are going forward constantly and incontinently in the institutional apparatus, the habitual scheme of rules and principles that regulate the community’s life, and not least in the technological ways and means by which the life of the race and its state of culture are maintained; but changes come rarely - in effect not at all - in the endowment of instincts whereby mankind is enabled to employ these means and to live under the institutions which its habits of life have cumulatively created. In the case of hybrid populations, such as the peoples of Christendom, some appreciable adaptation of this spiritual endowment to meet the changing requirements, of civilisation may be counted on, through the establishment of composite pure lines of a hybrid type more nearly answering to the later phases of culture than any one of the original racial types out of which the hybrid population is made up. But in so slow-breeding a species as man, and with changes in the conditions of life going forward at a visibly rapid pace, the chance of an adequate adaptation of hybrid human nature to new conditions seems doubtful at the best. It is also to be noted that the vague character of many of the human instincts, and their consequent pliability under habituation, affords an appreciable margin of adaptation within which human nature may adjust itself to new conditions of life. But after all has been said it remains true that the margin within which the instinctive nature of the race can be effectively adapted to changing circumstances is relatively narrow - narrow as contrasted with the range of variation in institutions - and the limits of such adaptation are somewhat rigid. As the matter stands, the race is required to meet changing conditions of life to which its relatively unchanging endowment of instincts is presumably not wholly adapted, and to meet these conditions by the use of technological ways and means widely different from those that were at the disposal of the race from the outset. In the initial phases of the life-history of the race, or of any given racial stock, the exigencies to which its spiritual (instinctive) nature was selectively required to conform were those of the savage culture, as has been indicated above, - presumably in all cases a somewhat “low” or elementary form of savagery.
This savage mode of life, which was, and is, in a sense, native to man, would be characterised by a considerable group solidarity within a relatively small group, living very near the soil, and unremittingly dependent for their daily life on the workmanlike efficiency of all the members of the group. The prime requisite for survival under these conditions would be a propensity unselfishly and impersonally to make the most of the material means at hand and a penchant for turning all resources of knowledge and material to account to sustain the life of the group.
At the outset, therefore, as it first comes into the life-history of any one or all of the racial stocks with which modern inquiry concerns itself, this instinctive disposition will have borne directly on workmanlike efficiency in the simple and obvious sense of the word. By virtue of the stability of the racial type, such is still its character, primarily and substantially, apart from its sophistication by habit and tradition. The instinct of workmanship brought the life of mankind from the brute to the human plane, and in all the later growth of culture it has never ceased to pervade the works of man. But the extensive complication of circumstances and the altered outlook of succeeding generations, brought on by the growth of institutions and the accumulation of knowledge, have led to an extension of its scope and of its canons and logic to activities and conjunctures that have little traceable bearing on the means of subsistence.
Chapter II.
Contamination of Instincts in Primitive Technology
All instinctive behaviour is subject to development and hence to modification by habit.17 Such impulsive action as is in no degree intelligent, and so suffers no adaptation through habitual use, is not properly to be called instinctive; it is rather to be classed as tropismatic. In human conduct the effects of habit in this respect are particularly far-reaching. In man the instincts appoint less of a determinate sequence of action, and so leave a more open field for adaptation of behaviour to the circumstances of the case. When instinct enjoins little else than the end of endeavour, leaving the sequence of acts by which this end is to be approached somewhat a matter of open alternatives, the share of reflection, discretion and deliberate adaptation will be correspondingly large. The range and diversity of habituation is also correspondingly enlarged.
In man, too, by the same fact, habit takes on more of a cumulative character, in that the habitual acquirements of the race are handed on from one generation to the next, by tradition, training, education, or whatever general term may best designate that discipline of habitu-ation by which the young acquire what the old have learned. By similar means the like elements of habitual conduct are carried over from one community or one culture to another, leading to further complications. Cumulatively, therefore, habit creates usages, customs, conventions, preconceptions, composite principles of conduct that run back only indirectly to the native predispositions of the race, but that may affect the working-out of any given line of endeavour in much the same way as if these habitual elements were of the nature of a native bias.
Along with this body of derivative standards and canons of conduct, and handed on by the same discipline of habituation, goes a cumulative body of knowledge, made up in part of matter-of-fact acquaintance with phenomena and in greater part of conventional wisdom embodying certain acquired predilections and preconceptions current in the community. Workmanship proceeds on the accumulated knowledge so received and current, and turns it to account in dealing with the material means of life. Whatever passes current in this way as knowledge of facts is turned to account as far as may be, and so it is worked into a customary scheme of ways and means, a system of technology, into which new elements of information or acquaintance with the nature and use of things are incorporated, assimilated as they come.
The scheme of technology so worked out and carried along in the routine of getting a living will be serviceable for current use and have a substantial value for a further advance in technological efficiency somewhat in proportion as the knowledge so embodied in technological prac-tice is effectually of the nature of matter-of-fact. Much of the information derived from experience in industry is likely to be of this matter-of-fact nature; but much of the knowledge made use of for the technological purpose is also of the nature of convention, inference and authentic opinion, arrived at on quite other grounds than workmanlike experience. This alien body of information, or pseudo-information, goes into the grand total of human knowledge quite as freely as any matter of fact, and it is therefore also necessarily taken up and assimilated in that technological equipment of knowledge and proficiency by use of which the work in hand is to be done.
But the experience which yields this useful and pseudo-useful knowledge is got under the impulsion and guidance of one and another of the instincts with which man is endowed, and takes the shape and color given it by the instinctive bias in whose service it is acquired. At the same time, whatever its derivation, the knowledge acquired goes into the aggregate of information drawn on for the ways and means of workmanship. Therefore the habits formed in any line of experience, under the guidance of any given instinctive disposition, will have their effect on the conduct and aims of the workman in all his work and play; so that progress in technological matters is by no means an outcome of the sense of workmanship alone.
It follows that in all their working the human instincts are in this way incessantly subject to mutual “contamination,” whereby the working of any one is incidentally affected by the bias and proclivities inherent in all the rest; and in so far as these current habits and customs in this way come to reënforce the predispositions comprised under any one instinct