An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its PerpetuationVeblen, Thorstein
Philosophy
An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation
Veblen, Thorstein
Peace; World War, 1914-1918 -- Peace
The modern industrial occupations, the modern technology, and that
modern empirical science that runs so close to the frontiers of
technology, all work at cross purposes with the received preconceptions
of the nationalist order; and in a more pronounced degree they are at
cross purposes with that dynastic order of preconceptions that converges
on Imperial dominion. The like is true, with a difference, of the ways,
means and routine of business enterprise as it is conducted in the
commercialised communities of today. The working of these agencies runs
to this effect not by way of deliberate and destructive antagonism, but
almost wholly by force of systematic, though unintended and incidental,
neglect of those values, standards, verities, and grounds of
discrimination and conviction that make up the working realities of the
national spirit and of dynastic ambition. The working concepts of this
new, essentially mechanistic, order of human interests, do not
necessarily clash with those of the old order, essentially the order of
personages and personalities; the two are incommensurable, and they are
incompatible only in the sense and degree implied in that state of the
case. The profoundest and most meritorious truths of dynastic politics
can on no provocation and by no sleight of hand be brought within the
logic of that system of knowledge and appraisal of values by which the
mechanistic technology proceeds. Within the premises of this modern
mechanistic industry and science all the best values and verities of the
dynastic order are simply "incompetent, irrelevant and impertinent."
There is accordingly no unavoidable clash and no necessary friction
between the two schemes of knowledge or the two habits of mind that
characterise the two contrasted cultural eras. It is only that a given
individual--call him the common man--will not be occupied with both of
these incommensurable systems of logic and appreciation at the same time
or bearing on the same point; and further that in proportion as his
waking hours and his mental energy are fully occupied within the lines
of one of these systems of knowledge, design and employment, in much the
same measure he will necessarily neglect the other, and in time he will
lose proficiency and interest in its pursuits and its conclusions. The
man who is so held by his daily employment and his life-long attention
within the range of habits of thought that are valid in the mechanistic
technology, will, on an average and in the long run, lose his grip on
the spiritual virtues of national prestige and dynastic primacy; "for
they are foolishness unto him; neither can he know them, because they
are spiritually discerned."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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