A savage indictment that! A terrifying, topsy-turvying of the dearest beliefs and hopes of us who look upon steam and electricity as efficient agents of Democracy, the strong and inevitable unshacklers of the bodies and minds of mankind. But Professor Veblen has stated only the extreme of what is said without denial every day; he is simply the courageous spokesman of the majority of the classes who write and speak; he is putting into scientific formula the sneer of every snob who professes contempt of business and, indeed, of all other forms of modern democratic activity. His book, therefore, serves admirably as a provocation for presenting a few facts and suggestions on the other side.
Is it true, either in whole or in part, that our industrial civilization is degrading the masses into mere appurtenances of the machine, mere mechanical aids to the heaping up of vast profits in the treasuries of the few? Is it true, either in whole or in part, that our business men, whether great or small, whether captains of industry or sub-officers, are degenerating into dishonesty and the short-sighted selfishness of the slave-master?
A surface survey of our time reveals much that seems to compel a reluctant affirmative answer. To glance at a newspaper is to read of the cynical tyrannies of beef, oil, coal, iron, grain, railway magnates, who make their infamies nauseating by ardent professions of patriotism and piety. And from time to time the shameless adulterations of food and drink culminate in some sensational slaughter of people wholesale, suggesting vastly greater slaughters effected quietly from day to day.
And we see persons grown enormously rich upon stolen privileges of various kinds exhibiting themselves in luxurious ostentation, offering tempting rewards to sycophancy and pauperizing those fighting on the poverty line by supercilious gifts and condescensions. We see rascality rewarded with wealth and honors, success bought with self-sale. We see corruption, conspicuous and hideous, everywhere upon the surface of the social body. And we turn away heartsick, convinced that the Veblens have stated the truth with moderation.
But if we turn away to read history—not the fables and fancies, the poetical romances and romantic poems from which the Veblens draw their “facts,” but the true story of the mankind that was—if we read that painful recital, we turn again to the mankind of our day, and it is like a landscape from which the storms of winter are rolling away. The corruption which revolted us is still there, just as hideous as before; but we now see that it is the poison which was working in the veins and arteries of the patient and is now at the surface, on its way out of the body before the victorious legions of health.
Professor Veblen, and his like, are prone to use, in writing and speaking, words of many meanings; they unconsciously play upon these words, and so fall into grievous error. For instance, Professor Veblen talks of ours as a “machine” civilization—as if the machine were its new and characteristic factor, determining its form and its destiny. In fact, civilization from its very inception has been “machine-made.” It began when our remotest ancestor snatched the bough of a tree and decided thenceforth to walk erect, using the bough as staff and club—that is, as a machine. Every tool of every kind has been a machine; and the progress of the race has been determined by the number and efficiency of its machines, both those designed to compel peace and those designed to further the arts of peace. If you wish to measure the actual value of any civilization—value in producing healthy minds in healthy bodies—you need only inquire into the kind and number and efficiency of its machines. Why? Because the machine represents the effort of man to adjust himself to his environment, his environment to himself. It gives power to him, whoever he may be, that learns to use it; it leaves him who does not avail himself of its aid, whether through idleness or ignorance or intemperance or incapacity, about where he would have been—certainly no worse off than he would have been—had mankind remained in the helpless, machineless “state of nature.”
Evolution has so unevenly affected the human race that, fortunately for us in the foremost files of progress, we need not rely upon history and cautious conjecture for our encouraging and inspiring knowledge of the world of the past, which enables us to see how far and how high we have got, and that the journey is still swiftly, if steeply, upward. There is hardly a stage of human progress that is not now represented on the earth, inviting any man with a passion for the “glorious past,” to disillusionize himself and cheer his pessimism. And we are enabled easily to reconstruct any period of the past. Thus, we have visual confirmation of the truth about Athens which history can only suggest. We know that the Athens of Plato and Praxiteles was no more the true Athens than is the intellect and tradition of Booker Washington a true type of the intelligence and condition of the overwhelming mass of our eight million negroes. We come to understand what Athens’ twenty-five thousand free citizens and many hundred thousand slaves really meant; we penetrate into the profligacy of the Athenian rich, the degradation of the Athenian masses; we realize why Aristides was banished for being just and Alcibiades carried on the shoulders of the Athenian Democracy (!) because he was a degenerate and a debauchee. And so on through all the past.
In like manner, we need not rely upon the poets and poetical historians, as Professor Veblen apparently does, for knowledge of what the “handicraft” civilization meant. We can study it, as it survives practically unchanged in the miserable hovels of Bohemian and Italian and Spanish peasants, where men and beasts rot together in conditions of sanitation that would not long be tolerated in any place where the “machine civilization” has inaugurated its high and ever higher moral and physical standards. We need not go so far from home. To get a picture of a prosperous handicraft city of the middle ages, go to New York’s East Side, where are the fast disappearing sweatshops that were transplanted from “handicraft neighborhoods” of Europe. The poets have it otherwise; and so do those historians who like to paint alluring pictures for their readers—and hate to grub for facts. But there is the grisly truth. Contrast the average sweatshop with the average factory. No; contrast the best sweatshop with the worst factory.
Partly because some men are so much shrewder and more persistent and more far-sighted than the masses of their fellows, but chiefly because the mass of mankind has not been long enough emancipated by the power of the machine to learn how to work intelligently and efficiently, the power machine, become enormously beneficent through steam and electricity, has not yet done all, or even more than a very small part, of what it can do, and shall do, for mankind. But already—in less than ten decades, less than seven—what a forward stride! In place of a world where all but a handful toiled early and late—from dawn until far into the night—toiled that others might reap all and they only blows and the meagre bread of bitterness, we now have a world where millions upon millions are comfortable. And as for the masses and toilers still in the shackles of the old régime, are they not better off than they were under that régime where wages were alms, and alms of the scantiest; where the only lights in the black darkness of utter ignorance were the will-o’-the-wisps of Superstition, drawing man farther and farther into the morass of slavery to king and noble and priest?
In writing works on political economy, professors should not study the conditions of labor before steam and electricity in poems and romances and from orchestra stalls at productions of “Die Meistersinger.” There is not a serf toiling in the deepest depth of the most hell-like mine in Siberia, upon whose shoulders, and upon whose soul, the burden is not lighter for the modern expansion of the civilization of the machine.