This non-invidious residue of the religious life--the sense of communion
with the environment, or with the generic life process--as well as the
impulse of charity or of sociability, act in a pervasive way to shape
men's habits of thought for the economic purpose. But the action of
all this class of proclivities is somewhat vague, and their effects are
difficult to trace in detail. So much seems clear, however, as that the
action of this entire class of motives or aptitudes tends in a direction
contrary to the underlying principles of the institution of the leisure
class as already formulated. The basis of that institution, as well
as of the anthropomorphic cults associated with it in the cultural
development, is the habit of invidious comparison; and this habit is
incongruous with the exercise of the aptitudes now in question. The
substantial canons of the leisure-class scheme of life are a conspicuous
waste of time and substance and a withdrawal from the industrial
process; while the particular aptitudes here in question assert
themselves, on the economic side, in a deprecation of waste and of
a futile manner of life, and in an impulse to participation in or
identification with the life process, whether it be on the economic side
or in any other of its phases or aspects.
It is plain that these aptitudes and habits of life to which they give
rise where circumstances favor their expression, or where they assert
themselves in a dominant way, run counter to the leisure-class scheme of
life; but it is not clear that life under the leisure-class scheme, as
seen in the later stages of its development, tends consistently to the
repression of these aptitudes or to exemption from the habits of
thought in which they express themselves. The positive discipline of the
leisure-class scheme of life goes pretty much all the other way. In its
positive discipline, by prescription and by selective elimination, the
leisure-class scheme favors the all-pervading and all-dominating primacy
of the canons of waste and invidious comparison at every conjuncture
of life. But in its negative effects the tendency of the leisure-class
discipline is not so unequivocally true to the fundamental canons of the
scheme. In its regulation of human activity for the purpose of
pecuniary decency the leisure-class canon insists on withdrawal from
the industrial process. That is to say, it inhibits activity in the
directions in which the impecunious members of the community habitually
put forth their efforts. Especially in the case of women, and more
particularly as regards the upper-class and upper-middle-class women
of advanced industrial communities, this inhibition goes so far as to
insist on withdrawal even from the emulative process of accumulation by
the quasi-predator methods of the pecuniary occupations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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