In their general traits these various civilisations founded (in conquest) by the pastoral peoples are of the same character as is the pecuniary culture as found elsewhere, but they have certain special features which set them off somewhat in a class by themselves. They are predatory in a peculiarly overt and accentuated degree, so that their institutions foster the invidious sentiments, the self-regarding animus of servility and of arrogance, beyond what commonly happens in the pecuniary culture at large; and they carry a large content of peculiarly high-wrought religious superstitions and fear of the supernatural, which likewise works out from and into an animus of servility and arrogance. In these cultures it is true, even beyond the great significance which the proposition has in the barbarian culture elsewhere, that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. The discipline of life in such a culture, therefore, is consistently unfavourable to any technological gain; the instinct of workmanship is constantly dominated by prevalent habits of thought that are worse than useless for any technological purpose.
Much the same, of course, is true for any civilisation founded on personal government of the coercive kind, whatever may be the remoter antecedents of the dynastic and ruling classes; but these other cultures have not the same secure and ancient patriarchal foundation, ready to hand, and so they are constrained to build their institutions of coercion, domestic, civil, political and military, more slowly and with a more doubtful outcome; nor does their religious system so readily work out in a monarchical theology with an omnipotent sovereign and in all-pervading fear of God. A home-bred despotism in an agricultural community that has set out with maternal descent, a matriarchal clan system, and mother goddesses, is hampered both on the temporal and the spiritual side by ancient and inbred usage and preconceptions that can be effectually overcome only in the long course of time. The civilisations of Asia-Minor and the Ægean region, and even of Egypt and Rome, however much of pastoral and patriarchal elements may have been infused into them in the course of time, show their shortcomings in this respect to the last; perhaps in their religions more than in any other one cultural trait, since religion is after all an epigenetic feature and follows rather than leads in the unfolding of the cultural scheme.
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But these great civilisations dominated by pastoral antecedents have no grave significance for the modern culture, except as drawbacks, and none at all for modern technology or for that matter-of-fact knowledge on which modern technology runs. The Western peoples, whose cultural past is of more immediate interest, have also had their warlike experience, late and early, but it seems never to have reached the consummate outcome to be seen in the East. Neither as regards the scale on which dynastic organisation has been carried out nor as regards the thoroughness with which their institutions have been permeated by predatory preconceptions have the Western peoples in their earlier history approached the standard of the oriental despotisms. Even now, it may be remarked, advocates of war and armaments commonly speak (doubtless disingenuously) for the predatory régime as being a necessity of defence rather than something to be desired on its own merits. Not that the predatory régime has not been a sufficiently grave fact in the history of occidental civilisation; to take such a view of history one would have to overlook the Roman Empire, the barbarian invasions, the feudal system, the Catholic church, the Era of statemaking, and the existing armed neutrality of the powers; but these have, all but the last, proved to be episodes on a grand scale rather than such an historical finality as any one of the successive monarchies in the Mesopotamian-Chaldæan country,—the test being that occidental civilisation has not died of any one of these maladies, though it has come through more than one critical period.
Western civilisation has gone through these eras of accentuated predation and has at all times shown an appreciable admixture of predatory conceptions in its scheme of institutions and ideals, in its domestic institutions and its public affairs, in its art and religion, but it is after all within the mark to say that, at least since the close of the Dark Ages, a distinctive characteristic that sets off this civilisation in contradistinction from any definitively predatory phase of the pecuniary culture, has been a pertinacious pursuit of the arts of peace, to which those peoples that have led in this civilisation have ever returned at every respite. For an appreciation of the relations subsisting between the sense of workmanship and the discipline of habituation in the modern culture, therefore, the phenomena of peaceful ownership are of greater, or at least of more vivid interest than those of the predatory phase of the pecuniary culture.
Modern civilisation, and indeed all history for that matter, lies within the pecuniary culture as a whole; but the Western culture of modern times belongs, perhaps somewhat precariously, to the secondary or peaceable phase of this pecuniary culture, rather than to that predatory phase with which the pecuniary scheme of life began somewhere in the lower barbarism, and that has repeatedly closed its life cycle in the collapse of one and another of the great dynastic empires of the old world.
As in the predatory phase, so also in the peaceable pecuniary culture, the dominant note is given by the self-regarding impulses; and the sense of workmanship is therefore characteristically hedged about and guided by the institutional exigencies and preconceptions incident to life under the circumstances imposed by ownership,—in a situation where the economic interest, the interest in those material means of life with which workmanship has to deal, converges on property rights. Ownership is self-regarding, of course, and the rights of ownership are of a personal, invidious, differential, emulative nature; although in the peaceable phase of the civilisation of ownership, force and fraud are, in theory, barred out of the game of acquisition,—wherein this differs from the predatory phase proper.
An obvious consequence following immediately on the emergence of ownership in any community is an increased application to work. This has been taken as a matter of course in theoretical speculations and is borne out by the observation of peoples among whom trade relations have been introduced in recent times. An immediate result is greater diligence, accompanied apparently in all cases, if the reports of observers are to be accepted, by an increase in contention, distrust and chicanery[107] and an increasingly wasteful consumption of goods. The diligence so fostered by emulative self-interest is directed to the acquisition of property, in great part to the acquisition of more than is possessed by those others with whom the invidious comparison in ownership is made; and under the spur of ownership simply, it is only secondarily, as a means to the emulative end of acquisition, that productive work, and therefore workmanship in its naïve sense, comes into the case at all. Ownership conduces to diligence in acquisition and therefore indirectly to diligence in work, if no more expeditious means of acquiring wealth can be devised. In its first incidence the incentive to diligence afforded by ownership is a proposition in business not in workmanship. Its effects on workmanship, industry and technology, therefore, are necessarily somewhat uncertain and uneven. Apparently from the start there is some appreciable resort to fraudulent thrift, to the production of spurious or inferior goods.[108] This of course very presently is corrected in the increased astuteness and vigilance exercised in men’s dealings with one another, whereby an appreciable portion of energy goes to defeat these artifices of disingenuous worldly wisdom.
It should be added that the pecuniary incentive to work takes the direction of making the most of the means at hand, considered as means of pecuniary gain rather than as means of serviceability, and that it conduces therefore to the fullest (pecuniary) exploitation of the standard accepted ways and means of industry rather than to the improvement of these ways and means beyond the conjuncture at hand. Further, though this is also somewhat of a tedious commonplace, since the only authentic end of work under the pecuniary dispensation is the acquisition of wealth; since the possession of wealth in so far exempts its possessor from productive work; and since such exemption is a mark of wealth and therefore of superiority over those who have nothing and therefore must work; it follows that addiction to work becomes a mark of inferiority and therefore discreditable. Whereby work becomes distasteful to all men instructed in the proprieties of the pecuniary culture; and it has even become so irksome to men trained in the punctilios of the servile, predatory, phase of this culture that it was once credibly proclaimed by a shrewd priesthood as the most calamitous curse laid on mankind by a vindictive God. Also, since wealth affords means for a free consumption of goods, the conspicuous consumption of goods becomes a mark of pecuniary excellence, and so it becomes an element of respectability in any pecuniary culture, and presently becomes a meritorious act and even a requirement of pecuniary decency. The outcome is conspicuous wastefulness of consumption, the limits of which, if any, have apparently not been approached hitherto.[109]
The bearings of this pecuniary culture on workmanship and technology are wide and diverse. Most immediate and perhaps most notable is the conventional disesteem of labour spoken of above, which seems to follow as a necessary consequence from the institution of ownership in all cases where distinctions of wealth are at all considerable or where property rights are associated with facts of mastery and prestige. The pecuniary disrepute of labour acts to discourage industry, but this may be offset, at least in part, by the incentive given to emulation by the good repute attaching to acquisition. The wasteful expenditure of goods and services enjoined by the pecuniary canons of conspicuous consumption gives an economically untoward direction to industry, at the same time that it greatly increases the hardships and curtails the amenities of life. So also, estrangement and distrust between persons, classes and nations necessarily pervades this cultural era, due to the incessant gnawing of incompatible pecuniary interests; and this state of affairs appreciably lowers the aggregate efficiency of human industry and sets up bootless obstacles to be overcome and irrelevant asperities to be put up with.