The instinct of workmanship, and the state of industrial artsVeblen, Thorstein
Philosophy
The instinct of workmanship, and the state of industrial arts
Veblen, Thorstein
Industrial arts -- History; Industries -- History; Technology -- History; Workmanship -- History
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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