THE COLLECTED WORKS OF THORSTEIN VEBLEN: Business Theories, Economic Articles & Essays. Thorstein Veblen
users. Something of this kind has already been set out in some detail as regards the domestication and early use of the crop plants and animals; and the like is currently held to be true, perhaps in a higher degree, for the beginnings of art, both representative and decorative, by the latterday students of that subject; the beginnings of art being held to have been magical and symbolic in the main, so far as regards the prime motives to its inception and its initial principles.89 In the origination and indigenous working-out of any given technological factor, e. g., such as the use of the crop plants or the domestic animals, elements of imputed anthropomorphism are likely to be comprised in the habitual apprehension of the nature of these factors, and so find lodgment in the technological routine that has to do with them; the result being, chiefly, a limitation on their uses and on the ways and means by which they are utilised, together with a margin of lost motion in the way of magical and religious observances presumed to be intrinsic to the due working of such factors. The ritual connected with tillage and cattle-breeding shows this magical side of a home-bred technology perhaps as felicitously as anything; but similar phenomena are by no means infrequent in the mechanic arts, and in the fine arts these principles of symbolism and the like are commonly present in such force as to afford ground for distinguishing one school or epoch of art from another.
Now, when any given technological or decorative element crosses the frontier between one culture and another, in the course of borrowing, it is likely to happen that it will come into the new culture stripped of most or all of its anthropomorphic or spiritual virtues and limitations, more particularly, of course, if the cultural frontier in question is at the same time a linguistic frontier; since the borrowing is likely to be made from motives of workmanlike expediency, and the putative spiritual attributes of the facts involved are not obvious to men who have not been trained to impute them. The chief exception to such a rule would be any borrowing that takes effect on religious grounds, in which case, of course, the magical or symbolic efficacy of the borrowed elements are the substance that is sought in the borrowing. Herein, presumably, lies much of the distinctive character of the north-European prehistoric culture, which was in an eminent degree built up out of borrowed elements, so far as concerns both its technology and its art. And to this free and voluminous borrowing may likewise be due the apparent poverty of this early culture in religious or magical elements.
A further effect follows. The borrowing being (relatively) unencumbered with ritual restrictions and mag-ical exactions attached to their employment, they would fall into the scheme of things as mere matter-of-fact, to be handled with the same freedom and unhindered sagacity with which a workman makes use of his own hands, and could, without reservation, be turned to any use for which they were mechanically suited. Something of symbolism and superstition might, of course, be carried over in the borrowing, and something more would unavoidably be bred into the borrowed elements in the course of their use; but the free start would always count for something in the outcome, both as regards the rate of progress made in the exploitation of the expedients acquired by borrowing and in the character of the technological system at large into which they had been introduced. Both the relative freedom from magical restraint and the growth of home-made anthropomorphic imputations, may easily be detected in the course of this northern culture and in its outcome in modern times. Cattle, for instance, are a borrowed technological fact in the Baltic and North-Sea region, but superstitious practices seem never to have attached to cattle-breeding in that region in such volume and rigorous exaction as may be found nearer the original home of the domesticated species; and yet the volume of folk-lore, mostly of a genial and relatively unobstructive character, that has in later times grown up about the care of cattle in the Scandinavian countries is by no means inconsiderable.
Chapter IV.
The Technology of the Predatory Culture
The scheme of technological insight and proficiency current in any given culture is manifestly a product of group life and is held as a common stock, and as manifestly the individual workman is helpless without access to it. It is none too broad to say that he is a workman only because and so far as he effectually shares in this common stock of technological equipment. He may be gifted in a special degree with workmanlike aptitudes, may by nature be stout or dextrous or keen-sighted or quick-witted or sagacious or industrious beyond his fellows; but with all these gifts, so long as he has assimilated none of this common stock of workmanlike knowledge he remains simply an admirable parcel of human raw material; he is of no effect in industry. With such special gifts or with special training based on this common stock an individual may stand out among his fellows as a workman of exceptional merit and value, and without the common run of workmanlike aptitudes he may come to nothing worth while as a workman even with the largest opportunities and most sedulous training. It is the two together that make the working force of the community; and in both respects, both in his inherited and in his acquired traits, the individual is a product of group life.
Using the term in a sufficiently free sense, pedigree is no less and no more requisite to the workman’s effectual equipment than the common stock of technological mastery which the community offers him. But his pedigree is a group pedigree, just as his technology is a group technology.
As is sometimes said to the same effect, the individual is a creature of heredity and circumstances. And heredity is always group heredity,90 perhaps peculiarly so in the human species.
The promptings of invidious self-respect commonly lead men to evade or deny something of the breadth of their inheritance in respect of human nature. “I am not as the publican yonder,” whether I have the grace to thank God for this invidious distinction or more simply charge it to the account of my reputable ancestors in the male line. With a change of venue by which the cause is taken out of the jurisdiction of interested parties, its complexion changes. So evident is the fact of group heredity in the lower animals, for instance, that biologists have no inclination to deny its pervading force, apart from any conceivably parthenogenetic lines of descent, - and, to the inconvenience of the eugenic pharisee, parthenogenetic descent never runs in the male line, besides being of extremely rare occurrence in the human species. As a matter of course the Darwinian biologists have the habit of appealing to group heredity as the main actor in the stability of species, and they are very curious about the special circumstances of any given case in which it may appear not to be fully operative: and they have, on the other hand, even looked hopefully to fortuitous isolation of particular lines of descent as a possible factor in the differentiation and fixation of specific types, being at a loss to account for such differentiation or fixation so long as no insuperable mechanical obstacle stands in the way of persistent crossing. The like force of group heredity is visible in the characteristic differences of race. The heredity of any given race of mankind is always sufficiently homogeneous to allow all its individuals to be classed under the race. And when an individual comes to light in a fairly pure-bred community who shows physical traits that vary obviously from the common racial type of the community, the question which suggests itself to the anthropologists is not, How does this individual differ from others of the same breed? but, What is the alien strain, and how has it come in? And what is true of the physical characters of the race in this respect is only less obviously true of its spiritual traits.
In a culture where all individuals are hybrids, in point of pedigree, as is the case with all the leading peoples of Christendom, the ways of this group heredity are particularly devious, and the fortunes of the individual in this respect are in a peculiar degree exposed to the caprice of Mendelian contingencies - so that his make-up, physical and spiritual, is, humanly speaking, in the main a chapter of accidents. Where each individual draws for his hereditary traits on a wide ancestry of unstable hybrids, as all civilised men do, his chances are always those of the common lot, with some slight antecedent probability of his resembling the nearer ones among his variegated ancestry. But he has also and everywhere in this hybrid panmixis an excellent chance of being allotted something more accentuated, for good or ill, in the way of hereditary traits than anything shown by his varied assortment of ancestors. It commonly happens in such a hybrid community that in the new crossing of hybrids that takes place at every marriage, some new idiosyncracy, slight or considerable, comes to light in the offspring,