THE COLLECTED WORKS OF THORSTEIN VEBLEN: Business Theories, Economic Articles & Essays. Thorstein Veblen
tend to have an industrial system of its own, with a technological character somewhat distinct from its neighbours.62 If the degree of isolation is pronounced, so that traffic and communication do not run freely between groups, the size of the local group will limit the state of the industrial arts somewhat rigidly; and on the other hand a marked advance in the industrial arts, such as the domestication of crop plants or animals or the introduction of metals, is likely to bring about such a redistribution of population and industry as to increase the effective size of the community.63 Among the peoples on the lower levels of culture there prevails commonly a considerable degree of isolation, or even of estrangement. In a great degree each community is thrown on its own resources, and under these circumstances the size of the community may become a matter of decisive importance for the industrial arts. Where a serious decline in the numbers of any of these savage or barbarous peoples is recorded it is also commonly noted that they have suffered a concomitant decay in their technological knowledge and workmanship.64 In view of these considerations it is probably safe to say that under settled conditions any community is, commonly, no larger than is required to keep up and carry forward the state of the industrial arts as it runs. The known evidence appears to warrant the generalisation that the state of the industrial arts is limited by the size of the industrial community, and that whenever a given community is broken up or suffers a serious diminution of numbers its technological heritage will deteriorate and dwindle even though it may apparently have been meagre enough before.
The considerations recited above are matters of commonplace observation and might fairly be taken for granted without argument. But so much of current and recent theoretical speculation proceeds on tacit assumptions at variance with these commonplaces that it seems pertinent to recall them, particularly since they will come in as premises in later passages of the inquiry.
Given the material environment, the rate and character of the technological gains made in any community will depend on the initiative and application of its members, in so far as the growth of institutions has not seriously diverted the genius of the race from its natural bent; it will depend immediately and obviously on individual talent for workmanship - on the workmanlike bent and capacity of the individual members of the community. Therefore any difference of native endowment in this respect between the several races will show itself in the character of their technological achievements as well as in the rate of gain. Races differ among themselves in this matter, both as to the kind and as to the degree of technological proficiency of which they are capable.65 It is perhaps as needless to insist on this spiritual difference between the various racial stocks as it would be difficult to determine the specific differences that are known to exist, or to exhibit them convincingly in detail. To some such ground much of the distinctive character of different peoples is no doubt to be assigned, though much also may as well be traceable to local peculiarities of environment and of institutional circumstances. Something of the kind, a specific difference in the genius of the people, is by common consent assigned, for instance, in explanation of the pervasive difference in technology and workmanship between the Western culture and the Far East. The like difference in “genius” is still more convincingly shown where different races have long been living near one another under settled cultural conditions.66 It should be noted in the same connection that hybrid Peoples, such as those of Europe or of Japan, where somewhat widely distinct racial stocks are mingled, should afford a great variety and wide individual variation of native gifts, in workmanship as in other respects. Hybrid stocks, indeed, have a wider range of usual variability than the combined extreme limits of the racial types that enter into the composition of the hybrid. So that a great variety, even aberration and eccentricity, of native gifts is to be looked for in such cases, and this wide range of variation in workmanlike initiative should show itself in the technology of any such peoples. Yet there may still prevail a strikingly determinate difference between any two such hybrid populations, both in the characteristic features of their technology and in their routine workmanship; as is illustrated in the contrast between Japan and the Western nations. These racial differences in point of endowment may be slight in the first instance, but as they work cumulatively their ulterior effect may still be very marked; and they may result in marked differences not only in respect of the character of the technological situation at a given point of time but also in the rate of advance and the direction taken by the technological advance. So in the case of the Far East, as contrasted with the Occidental peoples, the genius of the races engaged has prevailingly taken the direction of proficiency in handicraft, rather than that somewhat crude but efficient recourse to mechanical expedients which chiefly distinguishes the technology of the West.
The stability of racial types makes it possible to study the innate characters of the existing population under less complex and confusing circumstances than those of the cultural situation in which this population is now found. By going back into the earlier phases of the Western culture the scrutiny of the living population of Europe and its colonies can, in effect, be pushed back in a fragmentary way over an interval of some thousands of years. Such acquaintance as may in this way be gained with the spiritual makeup of the peoples of the Western culture at any point in its past history and prehistory should bear immediately and without serious abatement on the native character of the generation in whose hands the fortunes of that culture now rest; provided only that the inquiry assures itself of the racial continuity, racial identity, of these peoples through this period of time. This question of race identity is no longer a matter of serious debate so far as concerns the peoples of northern and western Europe, within the effective bounds of the Occidental civilisation and as far back as the beginning of the neolithic period.
Assuredly there is debate and uncertainty as to local details of racial mixture in nearly all parts of this cultural area at some point in past time, but these uncertainties of detail are not of such a nature or such magnitude as to vitiate the data for an inquiry into the general characteristics of the races concerned. By and large, the mixture of races in north Europe has apparently not varied greatly since early neolithic times, and the changes that have taken place are known with some confidence, in the main. Much the same holds true for the Mediterranean seaboard, although the changes in that region appear to have been more considerable and are perhaps less readily traceable. For northern and western Europe taken together, in spite of considerable local fluctuations, the variations in the general racial composition of the peoples has, on the whole, not been extensive or extremely serious since the latter part of the stone age. The three great racial stocks67 of Western civilisation have apparently shared their joint dominance in this culture among themselves since about the time when the use of bronze first came into Europe, which should be before the close of the stone age. And these three stocks are not greatly alien to one another; two of them, the Mediterranean and the blond, being apparently somewhat closely related in point of descent and therefore presumably in point of spiritual makeup.
It is with less confidence that any student of these modern cultures can test his case by evidence drawn from existing or historical communities living on the savage or lower barbarian plane and not closely related, racially, to the peoples of Western Europe. The discrepancies in such a case are of two kinds: (a) The racial type, and therefore the spiritual (instinctive) make-up of these alien savages or barbarians, is not the same as that of the modern Europeans; hence the culture worked out under the control of their somewhat different endowment of instincts should come to a different result, particularly since any such racial discrepancy in the matter of instincts should be expected to work cumulatively to a different cultural outcome. These alien communities of the lower cultures can therefore not be accepted off-hand as representing an earlier phase of Occidental civilisation. This infirmity attaches to any recourse to an existing savage or barbarian community for object-lessons to illustrate the working of European human nature in similarly primitive circumstances, in the degree in which the community in question may be remote from the Europeans in point of racial type; which reduces itself to a difficult question as to the point in the family-tree of the races of man from which the two contrasted races have diverged, and of the number, character, and magnitude of the racial mutations that may have intervened between the presumed point of divergence and the existing racial types so contrasted. (b) It is commonly said, and it is presumably true enough, that all known communities on the lower levels of culture are far from a state of primitive savagery; that they are not to be taken as genuinely archaic, but are the result either of a comparatively late