The instinct of workmanship, and the state of industrial arts

by Thorstein Veblen

These and the like consequences of pecuniary emulation are simple, direct and obvious; but the discipline of the pecuniary culture bears on workmanship also in a more subtle way, indirect and less evident at first sight. The discipline of daily life imparts its own bent to the sense of workmanship through habituation of the workman to that scheme and logic of things that rules this pecuniary culture. The outcome as concerns industry is somewhat equivocal; the discipline of self-seeking at some points favours workmanship and at others not. At one period or phase of the pecuniary culture, generally speaking an early or crude phase, the bent so given to workmanship and technology seems necessarily to be conducive to inefficiency; at another (later or maturer) phase the contrary is likely to be true.

The pecuniary discipline of invidious emulation takes effect on the state of the industrial arts chiefly and most pervasively through the bias which it gives to the knowledge on which workmanship proceeds. It may be called to mind that the body of knowledge (facts) turned to account in workmanship, the facts made use of in devising technological processes and appliances, are of the nature of habits of thought. This is particularly applicable to those (tactical) principles under whose control the information in hand is construed and connected up into a system of uses, agencies and instrumentalities. These habits of thought, elements of knowledge, items of information, accepted facts, principles of reality, in part represent the mechanical behaviour of objects, the brute nature of brute matter, and in part they stand for qualities, aptitudes and proclivities imputed to external objects and their behaviour and so infused into the facts and the generalisations based on them. The sense of workmanship has much to do with this imputation of traits to the phenomena of observation, perhaps more than any other of the proclivities native to man. The traits so imputed to the facts are in the main such as will be consonant with the sense of workmanship and will lend themselves to a concatenation in its terms. But this infusion of traits into the facts of observation, whether it takes effect at the instance of the sense of workmanship, or conceivably on impulse not to be identified with this instinct, is a logical process and is carried out by an intelligence whose logical processes have in all cases been profoundly biassed by habituation. So that the habits of life of the individual, and therefore of the community made up of such individuals, will pervasively and unremittingly bend this work of imputation with the set of their own current, and will accordingly involve incoming elements of knowledge in a putative system of relations consistent with these habits of life. This comprehensive scheme of habitual apprehensions and appreciations is what is called the “genius,” spirit, or character of any given culture. In all this range of habitual preconceptions touching the nature of things there prevails a degree of solidarity, of mutual support and re-enforcement among the several lines of habitual activity comprised in the current scheme of life; so that a certain characteristic tone or bias runs through the whole,—in so far as the cultural situation has attained that degree of maturity or assimilation that will allow it to be spoken of as a distinctive whole, standing out as a determinate and coherent phase in the life-history of the race. To this bias of scope and method in the current scheme of life, intellectual and sentimental, any new element or item must be assimilated if it is not to be rejected as alien and unreal or to fall through by neglect.

All this bears on the scope and method of knowledge, and therefore on the facts made use of in the industrial arts, just as it bears on any other feature of human life that is of the nature of habit. And the immediate question is as to the bias or drift of the pecuniary culture as it affects the apprehension of facts serviceable for technological ends. This pecuniary bias or bent may be described as invidious, personal, emulative, looking to differential values in respect of personal force or competitive success, looking to gradations in respect of comparative potency, validity, authenticity, propriety, reputability, decency. The canons of pecuniary repute preclude the well-to-do, who have leisure for such things, from inquiring narrowly into the facts of technology, since these things are beneath their dignity, conventionally distasteful; familiarity with such matters can not with propriety be avowed, nor can they without offence and humiliation be canvassed at all intimately among the better class. At the same time pecuniary competition, when carried to its ideal pitch, works the lower industrial classes to exhaustion and allows them no appreciable leisure or energy for indulging any possible curiosity of this kind on their part. The habitual (ideal) frame of mind is that of invidious self-interest on the one hand, due to the imperative and ubiquitous need of gain in wealth or in rank, and on the other hand class discrimination due to the ubiquitous prevalence of distinctions in prerogatives and authentic standing. The discipline of the pecuniary religions, or of the religious tenets and observances proper to the pecuniary culture, runs to a similar effect; more decisively so in the earlier, or distinctively predatory, phases of this culture than in the peaceable or commercial phase. The vulgar facts of industry are beneath the dignity of a feudalistic deity or of his priesthood; at the same time that the overmastering need of standing well in the graces of an all-powerful, exacting and irresponsible God throws a deeper shadow of ignobility over the material side of life, and makes any workmanlike preoccupation with industrial efficiency presumptively sinful as well as indecorous.

The pecuniary culture is not singular in this matter. Always and everywhere the acquirement of knowledge is a matter of observation guided and filled out by the imputation of qualities, relations and aptitudes to the observed phenomena. Without this putative content of active presence and potency the phenomena would lack reality; they could not be assimilated in the scheme of things human. It is only a commonplace of the logic of apperception that the substantial traits of objective facts are a figment of the brain. Under the discipline of this pecuniary phase of culture the requisite imputation of character to facts runs, as ever, in anthropomorphic terms; but it is an anthropomorphism which by habit conforms to the predatory-pecuniary scheme of preconceptions, such as the routine of life has made ready and convincing to men living under the discipline of emulation, invidious distinctions and authentic pecuniary decorum. Under these circumstances it is not in the anthropomorphism of naïve workmanship that the putative reality of facts is to be sought, but in their conformity to the conventionally definitive preconceptions of invidious merit, authentic excellence, force of character, mastery, complaisance, congruity with the run of the established institutional values and the ordinances of the Most High. The canons of reality, under which sense impressions are reduced to objective fact and so become available for use, and under which, again, facts are put in practice and turned to technological account, are the same canons of invidious distinction that rule in the world of property and among men occupied with predatory and pecuniary precedence. In effect men and things come to be rated in terms of what they (putatively) are—their intrinsic character—rather than in terms of what they (empirically) will do.

Without pursuing the question farther at this point, it should be evident that the bias of the pecuniary culture must on the whole act with pervasive force so to bend men’s knowledge of the things with which they have to do as to lessen its serviceability for technological ends. The result is a deflection from matter-of-fact to matter of imputation, and the imputation is of the personal character here spoken of. The dominant note appears to be a differential rating in respect of aggressive self-assertion, whether in human or non-human agents. Theological preconceptions are commonly strong in the pecuniary culture, and under their rule this differential rating developes into a scheme of graded powers and efficacies vested in the phenomena of external nature by delegation from an overruling personal authority. Such a bent is necessarily prejudicial to workmanship, and it may seem that the ubiquitous repressive force of this metaphysics of authority and authenticity should serve the same disserviceable end for workmanship as the more genial and diffuse anthropomorphism of the lower cultures, but with more decisive effect since it runs in a more competently organised, compact and prescriptive fashion.

Where the pecuniary culture has been carried through consistently on the predatory plan, without being diverted to that commercial phase current in the latterday Western civilisation, the conclusion of the matter has been decay of the industrial arts and effectual dissipation of that system of matter-of-fact knowledge on which technological efficiency rests. In the West, where the predatory phase proper has eventually given place to a commercial phase of the same pecuniary culture, the general run of events in this bearing has been a decline of knowledge, technology and workmanship, running on so long as the predatory (coercive) rule prevailed unbroken, but followed presently by a slow recovery and advance in technological efficiency and scientific insight; somewhat in proportion as the commercialisation of this culture has gained ground, and therefore correlated also in a general way with the decline of religious fear.

This run of events may tempt to the inference that while the predatory phase proper of this pecuniary civilisation is inimical to matter-of-fact knowledge and to technological insight, the rule of commercial ideas and ideals characteristic of its subsequent peaceable phase acts to propagate these material elements of culture. But what has already appeared in the course of the inquiry into that still earlier cultural phase that went before the coercive and invidious régime of predation suggests that the case is not so simple nor so flattering to our latterday self-complacency. The self-regarding sentiments of arrogance and abasement, out of whose free habitual exercise the pecuniary culture, with its institutions of prerogative and differential advantage, has been built up, are not the spiritual source from which such an outcome is to be looked for. These sentiments and the instinctive proclivities of which these sentiments are the emotional expression are presumed to have remained unchanged in force and character through that long course of cumulative habituation that has given them their ascendency in the institutions of the pecuniary culture, and of their own motion they will yield now results of the same kind as ever. But the like is true also for those other instincts out of whose working came the earlier gains made in knowledge and workmanship under the savage culture, before the self-regarding sentiments underlying the pecuniary culture took the upper hand. The parental bent and the instincts of workmanship and of curiosity will have been overborne by cumulative habituation to the rule of the self-regarding proclivities that triumphed in the culture of predation, and whose dominion has subsequently suffered some impairment in the later substitution of property rights for tenure by prowess, but these instincts that make for workmanship remain as intrinsic to human nature as the others. What is to be said for the current commercial scheme of life, therefore, appears to be that it is only less inimical to the functioning of those instinctive propensities that serve the common interest. Hence, gradually, these instincts and the non-invidious interests which they engender have been coming effectually into bearing again as fast as the stern repression of them exercised by the full-charged predatory scheme of life has weakened into a less and less effectual inhibition, under the discipline of compromise and mitigated self-aggrandisement embodied in the rights of property.

That authentication of ownership out of which the sacred rights of property have apparently grown may well have arisen as a sort of mutual insurance among owners as against the disaffection of the dispossessed; which would presently give rise to a sentiment of solidarity within the class of owners, would acquire prescriptive force through habitual enforcement, become a matter of customary right to be consistently respected under the institutional forms of property, and eventuate in that highly moralised expression of self-aggrandisement which it is today. But with the putting-away of fancy-free predation, as being a conventionally disallowed means of self-aggrandisement, sentiments of equity and solidarity would presently come in—perhaps at the outset by way of disingenuous make-believe—and so the way would be made easier under the shelter of this range of conceptions for a rehabilitation of the primordial parental instinct and its penchant for the common good. And when ownership has once been institutionalised in this impersonal and quasi-dispassionate form it will lend but a decreasingly urgent bias to the cultural scheme in the direction of differential respect of persons and a differential rating of natural phenomena in respect of the occult potencies and efficacies imputed to them.

As the institutional ground has shifted from free-swung predation to a progressively more covert régime of self-aggrandisement and differential gain, the instinct of workmanship has progressively found freer range and readier access to its raw material. The differential good repute of wealth and rank has of course continued to be of much the same nature in the later (commercial) stages of the pecuniary culture as in the earlier (predatory) stages. An aristocratic (or servile) scheme of life must necessarily run in invidious terms, since that is the whole meaning of the phenomenon; and resting as any such scheme does on pecuniary distinctions, whether direct or through the intermediary term of predatory exploit, it will necessarily involve the corollary that wealth and exemption from work (otium cum dignitate) is honourable and that poverty and work is dishonourable. But with the progressive commercialisation of gain and ownership it also comes to pass that peaceable application to the business in hand may have much to do with the acquirement of a reputable standing; and so long as work is of a visibly pecuniary kind and is sagaciously and visibly directed to the acquisition of wealth, the disrepute intrinsically attaching to it is greatly offset by its meritorious purpose. So much so, indeed, that there has even grown up something of a class feeling, among the class who have come by their wealth through industry and shrewd dealing, to the effect that peaceable diligence and thrift are meritorious traits.

This is “middle-class” sentiment of course. The aristocratic contempt for the tradesman and all his works has not suffered serious mitigation through all this growth of new methods of reputability. The three conventionally recognised classes, upper, middle, and lower, are all and several pecuniary categories; the upper being typically that (aristocratic) class which is possessed of wealth without having worked or bargained for it; while the middle class have come by their holdings through some form of commercial (business) traffic; and the lower class gets what it has by workmanship. It is a gradation of (a) predation, (b) business, (c) industry; the former being disserviceable and gainful, the second gainful, and the third serviceable. And no modern civilised man is so innocent of the canons of reputability as not to recognise off-hand that the first category is meritorious and the last discreditable, whatever his individual prejudices may lead him to think of the second. Aristocracy without unearned wealth, or without predatory antecedents, is a misnomer. When an aristocratic class loses its pecuniary advantage it becomes questionable. A poverty-stricken aristocrat is a “decayed gentleman;” and “the nobility of labour” is a disingenuous figure of speech.