These various considerations, taken crudely in their first incidence, would seem to preclude any technological advance under this quasi-peaceable régime of business. Business principles and pecuniary distinctions rule the familiar routine of life, and even the common welfare is conceived in terms of price, and so of differential advantage; and under such a system there should apparently be little chance of the dispassionate pursuit of such a non-invidious interest as that of workmanship. The prime mover in this cultural scheme appears to be invidious self-aggrandisement, without fear or favour; and its goal appears to be the conspicuous waste of goods and services. Yet in point of fact the technological advance under these modern conditions has been larger and more rapid than in any other cultural situation. Therefore the circumstances under which these modern gains in technology have been made will merit somewhat more detailed attention; as also the cultural consequences that have followed from this technological advance or been conditioned by it. And at the risk of some tedious repetition it seems pertinent summarily to recall these peculiar circumstances that have conditioned the modern culture and have presumably shaped its technological output.
By and large this modern technological era runs its course within the frontiers of Occidental civilisation, and in the period subsequent to the feudal age. Roughly, its centre of diffusion is the region of the North Sea, and its placement in point of time is in that period of comparative peace spoken of as “modern times.” Such of the peoples comprised within this Western culture as have continued to be actively occupied with fighting during this modern period have had no creative share in this technological era, and indeed they have had little share of any kind. The broad centre of diffusion of this technology coincides in a curious way with that of the singularly competent and singularly matter-of-fact neolithic culture of northern Europe; and the racial elements that have been engaged in this modern technological advance are still substantially the same, and mixed in substantially the same proportions, as during that prehistoric technological era of the lower barbarism or the higher savagery. This implies, of course, that the spiritual (instinctive) endowment of the peoples that have made the modern technological era is still substantially the same as was that of their forebears of the Danish stone age.
The peoples that have taken the lead in this cultural growth, and more particularly in the technological advance, have never lived under a full grown and consistently worked out patriarchal system, nor have they, therefore, ever fully assimilated that peculiarly personal and arbitrarily authoritative scheme of anthropomorphic beliefs that commonly goes with the patriarchal system. In the earlier phases of their cultural experience, and until recently, they have lived in small communities, under more or less of local self-government, and have in great part shown some degree of religious scepticism and insubordination. They have had some experience of the sea and of that impersonal run of phenomena which the sea offers; which call on those who have to do with the sea for patient observation of how such impersonal forces work, and which constrain them to learn by trial and error how these forces may be turned to account. Latterly, in the days of their most pronounced technological advance, these peoples have had experience of an economic and industrial system organised on an unexampled scale, such as to constitute a very wide and inclusive industrial community within which intercourse has been increasingly easy and effective.
These circumstances have determined the range of their habituation in its larger features; and these peoples have come under the discipline of this situation with a spiritual endowment apparently differing in some degree from what any other group of peoples has ever brought to a similar task. How much of the outcome, cultural and technological, is to be set down naïvely and directly to a peculiar temperamental bent in this human raw material would be hazardous to conjecture. Something seems fairly to be credited to that score. The particular mixture of hybrids that goes to make up these peoples, and in which the dolicho-blond enters more or less ubiquitously, appears to lack a certain degree of subtlety, such as seems native to many other peoples that have created civilisations of a different complexion,—a subtlety that shows itself in a readiness for intrigue and farsighted appreciation of the springs of human nature, and which often shows itself also in high-wrought and stupendous constructions of anthropomorphic myth and theology, religion and magic, as well as in such large and fertile systems of creative art as will commonly accompany these anthropomorphic creations. Those peoples that are infused with an appreciable blond admixture have on the other hand, not commonly excelled in the farther reaches of the spiritual life, particularly not in the refinements of a sustained and finished anthropomorphism. Their best efficiency has rather run to those bull-headed deeds of force and those mechanic arts that touch closely on the domain of the inorganic forces.
Of such a character is also this modern technological era. It is in the mechanic arts dealing with brute matter that the modern technology holds over all else, in matter-of-fact insight, in the naïveté of the questions with which its adepts search the facts of observation, and in the crudity (anthropomorphically speaking) of the answers with which they are content to go back to their work. Outside of the mechanic arts this technology must be rated lower than second best. In subtlety of craftsmanlike insight and contrivance or in delicacy of manipulation and adroit use of man’s physical aptitudes the peoples of this Western culture are not now and never have been equal to the best.
Such a characterisation of the modern technology may seem too broad and too schematic,—that it overlooks features of the case that are sufficiently large and distinctive to call for their recognition even in the most general characterisation. So, e. g., in the light of what has been noted above in speaking of the domestication of the crop plants and animals, the question may well suggest itself: Is not the patent success of these modern industrial peoples in the use and improvement of crops and cattle to be accepted as evidence of a genial anthropomorphic bent, of the same kind and degree as took effect in the original domestication of plants and animals? For some two hundred years past, it is true, very substantial advances have been made in tillage and breeding, and this is at the same time the peculiar domain in which the anthropomorphic savages of the stone age once achieved those things which have made civilisation physically possible; but the modern gains made in these lines have, in the main if not altogether, been technologically of the same mechanistic character as the rest of the modern advance in the industrial arts, with little help or hindrance due to any such anthropomorphic bias as guided the savage ancients. It is rather by virtue of their having come competently to apprehend these facts of animate nature in substantially inanimate terms, mechanistic and chemical terms, that the modern technological adepts in tillage and cattle-breeding have successfully carried this line of workmanship forward at a rate and with an effect not approached before. The livestock expert is soberly learning by trial and error what to attempt and how to go about it in his breeding experiments, and he deals as callously as any mechanical engineer with the chemistry of stock foods and the use and abuse of ferments, germs and enzymes. The soil specialist talks, thinks and acts in terms of salts, acids, alkalies, stratifications, 200-mesh siftings, and nitrogen-fixing organisms. The crop-plant expert looks to handmade cross-fertilisation and to the Mendelian calculus of hybridisation, with no more imputation of anthropomorphic traits than the metallurgist who analyses fuels and fluxes, mixes ores, and with goggled eye scrutinises the shifting tints of the incandescent gases in the open hearth. It is from such facts so construed that modern technology is made up, and it is by such channels that the sense of workmanship has gone to the making of it.
So the question recurs, How has it come about that this pecuniary culture—with its institutions drawn in terms of differential advantage and moved by sentiments that converge on emulative gain and the invidiously conspicuous waste of goods—has yet furthered the growth of such a technology, even permissively? In its direct incidence, the discipline of this pecuniary culture is doubtless inimical to any advance in workmanlike insight or any matter-of-fact apprehension and use of objective phenomena. It is a civilisation whose substantial core is of a subjective kind, in the narrowly subjective, personal, individualistic sense given by the self-regarding sentiments of emulous rivalry.[113] But when all is said it is after all a peaceable culture, on the whole; and indeed the rules of the business game of profit and loss, forfeit and sequestration, require it to be so. It has at least that much, and perhaps much else, in common with the great technological era of the north-European neolithic age. The discipline to which its peoples are subject may be exacting enough, and its exactions may run to worldly wisdom rather than to matter-of-fact; but its invidious distinctions run in terms of price, that is to say in terms of an objective, impersonal money unit, in the last resort a metallic weight; and the traffic of daily life under this price system affords an unremitting exercise in the exact science of making change, large and small. Even the daydreams of the pecuniary day-dreamer take shape as a calculus of profit and loss computed in standard units of an impersonal magnitude, even though the magnitude of these standard units may on analysis prove to be of a largely putative character. The imputation under the price system is of an impersonal kind. In the current apprehension of the pecuniary devotee these magnitudes are wholly objective, so that in effect the training that comes of busying himself with them is after all a training in the accurate appreciation of brute fact.
At the same time, the instinct of workmanship, being not an acquired trait, has not been got rid of by disuse; and when the occasion offers, under the relatively tranquil conditions of this peaceable or quasi-peaceable pecuniary régime, the ancient proclivity asserts itself in its ancient force, uneager and asthenic perhaps, but pervasive and resilient. And when this instinct works out through the Bœotic genius of the north-European hybrid there is a good chance that the outcome of such observation and reflection will fall into terms of matter-of-fact, of such close-shorn naïveté, indeed, as to afford very passable material for the material sciences and the machine technology.
So also, the ancient and time-worn civil institutions of the north-European peoples have apparently not been of the high-wrought invidious character that comes of long and strenuous training in the practices and ideals of the patriarchal system; nor are their prevailing religious conceits extremely drastic, theatrical or ceremonious, as compared with what is to be found in the cults of the great dynastic civilisations of the East. On the whole, it is only through the Middle Ages that these peoples have been subject to the rigorous servile discipline that characterises a dynastic despotism, secular or religious; and much of the ancient, pagan and prehistoric preconceptions on civil and religious matters appear to have stood over in the habits of thought of the common people even through that interval of submergence under aristocratic and patriarchal rule. In the same connection it may be remarked that the blond-hybrid peoples of Christendom were the last to accept the patriarchal mythology of the Semites and have also been the first and readiest to shuffle out of it in the sequel; which suggests the inference that they have never fully assimilated its spirit; perhaps for lack of a sufficiently strict and protracted discipline in its ways and ideals, perhaps for lack of a suitable temperamental ground.
There is, indeed, a curiously pervasive concomitance, in point of time, place, and race, between the modern machine technology, the material sciences, religious scepticism, and that spirit of insubordination that makes the substance of what are called free or popular institutions. On none of these heads is the concomitance so close or consistent as to warrant the conclusion that race and topography alone have made this modern cultural outcome. The exceptions and side issues are too broad and too numerous for that; but it is after all a concomitance of such breadth and scope that it can also not be overlooked.