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
With wholly negligible exceptions, these matters touch the needs or the
sensibilities of the common man only through the channel of the
national honour, which may be injured in the hardships suffered by his
compatriots in foreign parts, or which may, again, be repaired or
enhanced by the meritorious achievements of the same compatriots; of
whose existence he will commonly have no other or more substantial
evidence, and in whose traffic he has no share other than this vicarious
suffering of vague and remote indignity or vainglory by force of the
wholly fortuitous circumstance that they are (inscrutably) his
compatriots. These immaterial goods of vicarious prestige are, of
course, not to be undervalued, nor is the fact to be overlooked or
minimised that they enter into the sum total of the common citizen's
"psychic income," for whatever they may foot up to; but evidently their
consideration takes us back to the immaterial category of prestige
value, from which the argument just now was hopefully departing with a
view to consideration of the common man's material interest in that
national enterprise about which patriotic aspirations turn.
These things, then, are matters in which the common man has an interest
only as they have a prestige value. But there need be no question as to
their touching his sensibilities and stirring him to action, and even to
acts of bravery and self-sacrifice. Indignity or ill treatment of his
compatriots in foreign parts, even when well deserved, as is not
infrequently the case, are resented with a vehemence that is greatly to
the common man's credit, and greatly also to the gain of those patriotic
statesmen who find in such grievances their safest and most reliable raw
materials for the production of international difficulty. That he will
so respond to the stimulus of these, materially speaking irrelevant,
vicissitudes of good or ill that touch the fortunes of his compatriots,
as known to him by hearsay, bears witness, of course, to the high
quality of his manhood; but it falls very far short of arguing that
these promptings of his patriotic spirit have any value as traits that
count toward his livelihood or his economic serviceability in the
community in which he lives. It is all to his credit, and it goes to
constitute him a desirable citizen, in the sense that he is properly
amenable to the incitements of patriotic emulation; but it is none the
less to be admitted, however reluctantly, that this trait of impulsively
vicarious indignation or vainglory is neither materially profitable to
himself nor an asset of the slightest economic value to the community in
which he lives. Quite the contrary, in fact. So also is it true that the
common man derives no material advantage from the national success along
this line, though he commonly believes that it all somehow inures to his
benefit. It would seem that an ingrown bias of community interest,
blurred and driven by a jealously sensitive patriotic pride, bends his
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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