The substantial difference between the peaceable and the predatory phase
of culture, therefore, is a spiritual difference, not a mechanical one.
The change in spiritual attitude is the outgrowth of a change in the
material facts of the life of the group, and it comes on gradually as
the material circumstances favourable to a predatory attitude supervene.
The inferior limit of the predatory culture is an industrial limit.
Predation can not become the habitual, conventional resource of any
group or any class until industrial methods have been developed to such
a degree of efficiency as to leave a margin worth fighting for, above
the subsistence of those engaged in getting a living. The transition
from peace to predation therefore depends on the growth of technical
knowledge and the use of tools. A predatory culture is similarly
impracticable in early times, until weapons have been developed to such
a point as to make man a formidable animal. The early development of
tools and of weapons is of course the same fact seen from two different
points of view.
The life of a given group would be characterised as peaceable so long
as habitual recourse to combat has not brought the fight into the
foreground in men's every day thoughts, as a dominant feature of the
life of man. A group may evidently attain such a predatory attitude with
a greater or less degree of completeness, so that its scheme of life and
canons of conduct may be controlled to a greater or less extent by the
predatory animus. The predatory phase of culture is therefore conceived
to come on gradually, through a cumulative growth of predatory aptitudes
habits, and traditions this growth being due to a change in the
circumstances of the group's life, of such a kind as to develop and
conserve those traits of human nature and those traditions and norms of
conduct that make for a predatory rather than a peaceable life.
The evidence for the hypothesis that there has been such a peaceable
stage of primitive culture is in great part drawn from psychology rather
than from ethnology, and cannot be detailed here. It will be recited in
part in a later chapter, in discussing the survival of archaic traits of
human nature under the modern culture.
Chapter Two ~~ Pecuniary Emulation
In the sequence of cultural evolution the emergence of a leisure class
coincides with the beginning of ownership. This is necessarily the case,
for these two institutions result from the same set of economic forces.
In the inchoate phase of their development they are but different
aspects of the same general facts of social structure.
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