CHAPTER X
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.