Thorstein Veblen
The Modern Point of View and the New Order.
I. THE INSTABILITY OF KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF.

The Dial. A Fortnightly (New York)
Vol. LXV (June 20 to December 28, 1918)
No. 775, October 19, 1918. pp. 289-293.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
[289]
The Modern Point of View and the New Order

I. THE INSTABILITY OF KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF

AS is TRUE of any other point of view that may be characteristic of any other 
period of history, so also the modern point of view is a matter of habit. It is 
a trait which is common to modern civilized peoples only in so far as these 
peoples have come through substantially the same historical experience and have 
thereby acquired substantially the same habits of thought and have fallen into 
somewhat the same prevalent frame of mind. This modern point of view therefore 
is limited both in time and space. It is characteristic of the modern historical 
era and of such peoples as lie within the range of that peculiar civilization 
which marks off the modern world from what has gone before and from what still 
prevails outside of its range. In other words, it is a trait of modern 
Christendom, of Occidental civilization as it has run within the past few 
centuries. This general statement is not vitiated by the fact that there has 
been some slight diffusion of these modern and Western ideas outside of this 
range in recent times.

By historical accident, it happens that the modern point of view has reached its 
maturest formulation and prevails with the least faltering among the French and 
English-speaking peoples; so that these peoples may be said to constitute the 
center of diffusion for that system of ideas which is called the modern point of 
view. Outward from this broad center the same range of ideas prevail throughout 
Christendom, but they prevail with less singleness of conviction among the 
peoples who are culturally more remote from this center increasingly so with 
each farther remove. These others have carried over a larger remainder of the 
habits of thought of an earlier age, and have carried them over in a better 
state of preservation. It may also be that these others, or some of them, have 
acquired habits of thought of a new order which do not altogether fit into that 
system of ideas that is commonly spoken of as the modern point of view. That 
such is the case need imply neither praise nor blame. It is only that, by common 
usage, these remainders of ancient habits of thought and these newer 
preconceptions which do not fit into the framework of West-European conventional 
thinking are not ordinarily rated as intrinsic to the modern point of view. They 
need not therefore be less to the purpose as a guide and criterion of human 
living; it is only that they are alien to those purposes which are considered to 
be of prime consequence in civilized life as it is guided and tested by the 
constituent principles of the modern point of view.

What is spoken of as a point of view is always a composite affair some sort of 
rounded and balanced system of principles and standards, which are taken for 
granted, at least provisionally, and which serve as a base of reference and 
legitimation in all questions of deliberate opinion. So, when any given usage or 
any line of conduct or belief is seen and approved from the modern point of 
view, it comes to the same as saying that these things are seen and accepted in 
the light of those principles which modern men habitually consider to be final 
and sufficient. They are principles of right, equity, propriety, duty perhaps of 
knowledge, belief, and taste.

It is evident that these principles and standards of what is right, good, true, 
and beautiful will vary from one age to another and from one people to another 
in response to the varying conditions of life inasmuch as these principles are 
of the nature of habit although the variation will of course range only within 
the limits of that human nature that finds expression in these same principles 
of right, good, truth, and beauty. So also it will be found that something in 
the way of a common measure of verity and sufficiency runs through any such body 
of principles that are accepted as final and self-evident at any given time and 
place in so far as this habitual body of principles has reached such a degree of 
poise and consistency that they can fairly be said to constitute a stable point 
of view. It is only because there is such a degree of consistency and such a 
common measure of validity among the [290] commonly accepted principles of 
conduct and belief today, that it is possible to speak intelligently of the 
modern point of view, and to contrast it with any other point of view which may 
have prevailed in the Middle Ages or in pagan antiquity.

The Romans were given to saying "tempora mutantur," and the Spanish have learned 
to speak indulgently in the name of "costumbres del pais." The common law of the 
English-speaking peoples does not coincide at all points with what was indef 
easibly right and good in the eyes of the Romans; and still less do its 
principles countenance all the vagaries of the Mosaic code. Yet, each and 
several, in their due time and institutional setting, these have all been tried 
and found valid and have approved themselves as securely and eternally right and 
good in principle.

Evidently these principles, which so are made to serve as standards of validity 
in law and custom, knowledge and belief, are of the nature of canons, 
established rules, and have the authority of precedent. They have been defined 
by the attrition of use and wont and disputation, and they are accepted in a 
somewhat deliberate manner by common consent and are upheld by a deliberate 
public opinion as to what is right and seemly. In the popular apprehension, and 
indeed in the apprehension of the trained jurists and scholars for the time 
being, these constituent principles of the accepted point of view are 
"fundamentally and eternally right and good." But this perpetuity with which 
they so are habitually invested in the popular apprehension, in their time, is 
evidently only such a qualified perpetuity as belongs to any settled outgrowth 
of use and wont. They are of an institutional character, and they are endowed 
with only that degree of perpetuity that belongs to any institution. So soon as 
a marked change of circumstances comes on a change of a sufficiently profound, 
enduring, and comprehensive character, such as persistently to cross or to go 
beyond those lines of use and wont out of which these 
settled principles have emerged then these principles and their standards of 
validity and finality must presently undergo a revision, such as to bring on a 
new balance of principles, embodying the habits of thought enforced by a new 
situation, and expressing itself in a revised scheme of authoritative use and 
wont, law and custom. In the transition from the medieval to the modern point of 
view, for example, there is to be seen such a pervasive change in men's habitual 
outlook, answering to the compulsion of a new range of circumstances which then 
came to condition the daily life of the peoples of Christendom.

In this mutation of the habitual outlook between medieval and modern times, the 
contrast is perhaps most neatly shown in the altered standards of knowledge and 
belief, rather than in the immediate domain of law and morals. Not that the 
mutation of habits which then overtook the Western world need have been less 
wide or less effectual in matters of conduct; but the change which has taken 
effect in science and philosophy, between the fourteenth century and the 
nineteenth, for instance, appears to have been of a more articulate character, 
more readily defined in succinct and convincing terms. It has also quite 
generally attracted the attention of those men who have interested themselves in 
the course of historical events, and it has therefore become something of a 
commonplace in any standard historical survey of modern civilization.

It will also be found true that the canons of knowledge and belief, the 
principles governing what is fact and what is credible, are more intimately and 
intrinsically involved in the habitual behavior of the human spirit than the 
habitual elements of human behavior in other bearings. Such is necessarily the 
case, because the principles which guide and limit knowledge and belief are the 
ways and means by which men take stock of what is to be done and by which they 
take thought of how it is to be done. It is by the use of their habitual canons 
of knowledge and belief that men construct those canons of conduct which serve 
as guide and standards in practical life. Men do not pass appraisal on matters 
which lie beyond the reach of their knowledge and belief, nor do they formulate 
rules to govern the game of life beyond that limit.

So, congenitally blind persons do not build color schemes, nor will a man 
without "an ear for music" become a master of musical composition. So also, "the 
medieval mind" took no thought and made no provision for those later-arisen 
exigencies of life and those later-known facts of material science which lay yet 
beyond the bounds of its medieval knowledge and belief; but this "medieval mind" 
at the same time spent much thought and took many excellent precautions about 
things which have now come to be accounted altogether fanciful things which the 
maturer insight, or perhaps the less fertile conceit, of a more experienced age 
has disowned as being palpably not in accord with fact.

That is to say, things which once were convincingly substantial and 
demonstrable, according to the best knowledge and belief of the medieval mind, 
can now no longer be discerned as facts, according to those canons of knowledge 
and belief that are now doing duty among modern men as conclusive standards of 
reality. Not that all persons who are born within modern times are thereby 
rendered unable to [291] know and to believe in such medieval facts, for 
example, as horoscopes, or witchcraft, or gentle birth, or the efficacy of 
prayer, or the divine right of kings; but, taken by and large, and in so far as 
it falls under the control of the modern point of view, the deliberate consensus 
of knowledge and belief now runs to the effect that these and other 
imponderables like them no longer belong among ascertained or ascertainable 
facts, but that they are on the other hand wholly illusory conceits, traceable 
to a mistaken point of view prevalent in that earlier and cruder age.

The principles governing knowledge and belief are primary and pervasive, beyond 
any others, in that they underlie all human deliberation and comprise the 
necessary elements of all human logic. But it is also to be noted that these 
canons of knowledge and belief are more immediately exposed to revision and 
correction by experience than the principles of law and morals. So soon as the 
conditions of life shift and change in any appreciable degree, experience will 
enforce a revision of the habitual standards of actuality and credibility, by 
force of the habitual and increasingly obvious failure of what has before 
habitually been regarded as ascertained fact. Things which, under the ancient 
canons of knowledge, have habitually been regarded as known fact as, for 
instance, witchcraft or the action of bodies at a distance will under altered 
circumstances prove themselves by experience to have only a supposed reality. 
Any knowledge that runs in such outworn terms will turn out to be futile, 
misleading, meaningless; and the habit of imputing qualities and behavior of 
this kind to everyday facts will then fall into disuse, progressively as 
experience continues to bring home the futility of all that kind of imputation. 
And presently the habit of perceiving that class of qualities and behavior in 
the known facts is therefore gradually lost.

So also, in due time, the observances and the precautions and provisions 
embodied in law and custom for the preservation or the control of these lost 
imponderables will fall into disuse and disappear out of the scheme of 
institutions, by way of becoming dead-letter or by abrogation. Particularly will 
such a loss of belief and insight, and the consequent loss of those 
imponderables whose ground has thereby gone out from under them, take effect 
with the passing of generations. An imponderable is an article of make-believe 
which has become axiomatic by force of settled habituation. It can accordingly 
cease to be an imponderable by a course of unsettling habituation. Those elders 
in whom the ancient habits of faith and insight were ingrained, and in whose 
knowledge and belief consequently the imponderables in question had a vital 
reality, will presently fall away; and the new generation, whose experience has 
run on other lines, is in a fair way to lose these articles of faith and insight 
by disuse. It is a case of obsolescence by habitual disuse. And the habitual 
disuse which so allows the ancient canons of knowledge and belief to fall away, 
and thereby cuts the ground from under the traditional system of law and custom, 
is reenforced by the advancing discipline of a new order of experience, which 
exacts an habitual apprehension of workday facts in terms of a different kind 
and thereby brings on a revaluation and revision of the traditional rules 
governing human relations. The new terms of workday knowledge and belief, which 
do not conform to the ancient canons, go to enforce and stabilize new canons and 
standards, of a character alien to the traditional point of view. It is, in 
other words, a case of obsolescence by displacement as well as by habitual 
disuse.

This unsettling discipline that is brought to bear by workday experience is 
chiefly and most immediately the discipline exercised by the material 
conditions, the exigencies that beset men in their everyday dealings with the 
material means of life, inasmuch as these material facts are insistent and 
uncompromising. And the scope and method of knowledge and belief which is forced 
on men in their everyday material concerns will unavoidably, by habitual use, 
extend to other matters as well, so as to affect the scope and method of 
knowledge and belief in all that concerns those imponderable facts which lie 
outside the immediate range of material experience. It results that, in the 
further course of changing habituation, those imponderable relations, 
conventions, claims, and perquisites that make up the timeworn system of law and 
custom will unavoidably also be brought under review, and will be revised and 
reorganized in the light of the same new principles of validity that are found 
to be sufficient in dealing with material facts. Given time and a sufficiently 
exacting run of experience, and it will follow necessarily that much the same 
standards of truth and finality will come to govern men's knowledge and 
valuation of facts throughout, whether the facts in question lie in the domain 
of material things or in the domain of those imponderable conventions and 
preconceptions that decide what is right and proper in human intercourse. It 
follows necessarily because the same persons, bent by the same discipline and 
habituation, take stock of both and are required to get along with both during 
the same lifetime. The scope and method of knowledge and valuation will control 
the thinking of the same individuals throughout, at least to the extent that any 
given article of faith and usage which is palpably at [292] cross-purposes with 
this main intellectual bent will soon begin to seem immaterial and irrelevant, 
and will tend to become obsolete by neglect.

Such has always been the fate which overtakes any notable articles of faith and 
usage that belong to a bygone point of view. Any established system of law and 
order will remain securely stable only on condition that it be kept in line or 
brought into line to conform with those canons of validity that have the vogue 
for the time being; and the vogue is a matter of habits of thought ingrained by 
everyday experience. And the moral is that any established system of law and 
custom is due to undergo a revision of its constituent principles so soon as a 
new order of economic life has had time materially to affect the community's 
habits of thought. But all the while the changeless native proclivities of the 
race will assert themselves in some measure in any eventual revision of the 
received institutional system; and always they will stand ready eventually to 
break the ordered scheme of things into a paralytic mass of confusion if it can 
not be bent into some passable degree of congruity with the paramount native 
needs of life.

What is likely to arrest the attention of any student of the modern era from the 
outset is the peculiar character of its industry and of its intellectual 
outlook, particularly the scope and method of modern science and philosophy. The 
intellectual life of modern Europe and its cultural dependencies differs notably 
from what has gone before. There is all about it an air of matter-of-fact, both 
in its technology and in its science, which culminates in a "mechanistic 
conception" of all those things with which scientific inquiry is concerned, and 
in the light of which many of the dread realities of the Middle Ages look like 
superfluous make-believe.

But it has been only during the later decades of the modern era that this 
mechanistic conception of things has begun seriously to affect the current 
system of knowledge and belief, and it has not hitherto seriously taken effect 
except in technology and in the material sciences. So that it has not hitherto 
seriously invaded the established scheme of institutional arrangements the 
system of law and custom which governs the relations of men to one another and 
defines their mutual rights, obligations, advantages, and disabilities. But it 
should reasonably be expected that this established system of rights, duties, 
proprieties, and disabilities will also in due time come in for something in the 
way of a revision, to bring it all more nearly into congruity with that matter-
of-fact conception of things that lies at the root of modern civilization. The 
constituent principles of the established system of law and custom are of the 
nature of imponderables, of course; but they are imponderables which have been 
conceived and formulated in terms of a different order from those that are 
convincing to the modern scientists and engineers. Whereas the line of advance 
of the scientists and engineers, dominated by their mechanistic conception of 
things, appears to be the main line of march for modern civilization. It should 
seem reasonable to expect, therefore, that the scheme of law and custom will 
also fall into line with this mechanistic conception that appears to mark the 
apex of growth in modern intellectual life. But hitherto the "due time" needed 
for the adjustment has apparently not been had, or perhaps the experience which 
drives men in the direction of a mechanistic conception of all things has not 
hitherto been driving them hard enough or unremittingly enough to carry such a 
revision of ideas out in the system of law and custom. The modern point of view 
in matters of law and custom appears to be somewhat in arrears, as measured by 
the later advance in science and technology.

But just now the attention of thoughtful men centers on questions of practical 
concern questions of law and usage brought to a focus by the flagrant 
miscarriage of that organization of Christendom that has brought the war upon 
the civilized nations. The paramount question just now is what to do to save the 
civilized nations from irretrievable disaster, and what further may be 
accomplished by taking thought so that no similar epoch of calamities shall be 
put in train for the next generation. It is realized that there must be 
something in the way of a "reconstruction" of the scheme of things; and it is 
also realized, though more dimly, that the reconstruction must be carried out 
with a view to the security of life under such conditions as men will put up 
with, rather than with a view to the impeccable preservation of the received 
scheme of law and custom. All of which is only saying that the constituent 
principles of the modern point of view are to be taken under advisement reviewed 
and, conceivably, revised and brought into line in so far as these principles 
are constituent elements of that received scheme of law and custom that is 
spoken of as the status quo. It is the status quo in respect of law and custom, 
not in respect of science and technology or of knowledge and belief, that is to 
be brought under review. Law and custom, it is believed, may be revised to meet 
the requirements of civilized men's knowledge and belief; but no man hopes to 
revise the modern system of knowledge and belief to bring it all into conformity 
with the timeworn scheme of law and custom of the status quo.

[293] Therefore the bearing of this stabilized modern point of view on these 
questions of practical concern is of present interest its practical value as 
ground for a reasonably hopeful reconstruction of the war-shattered scheme of 
use and wont, it’s possible serviceability as a basis of enduring settlement, as 
well as the share which its constituent principles have had in the creation of 
that status quo out of which this epoch of calamities has been precipitated.

The status quo ante, in which the roots of this growth of misfortunes and 
impossibilities are to be found, lies within the modern era, of course, and it 
is nowise to be decried as an alien, or even as an unforeseen, outgrowth of this 
modern era. By and large, the stabilized modern point of view has governed men's 
dealings within this era, and its constituent principles of right and honest 
living must therefore, presumptively, be held answerable for the disastrous 
event of it all at least to the extent that they have permissively countenanced 
the growth of those sinister conditions which have now ripened into a state of 
world-wide shame and confusion. How and how far is this modern point of view, 
this established body of legal and moral principles, to be accounted an 
accessory to this crime? And if it be argued that this complication of 
atrocities has come on, not because of these principles of conduct which are so 
dear to civilized men and so blameless in their sight, but only in spite of 
them, then what is the particular weakness or shortcoming inherent in this body 
of principles which has allowed such a growth of malignant conditions to go on 
and gather head? If the modern point of view these settled principles of conduct 
by which modern men collectively are actuated in what they will do and in what 
they will permit if these canons and standards of clean and honest living have 
proved to be a fatal snare, then it becomes an urgent question: Is it safe, or 
sane, to go into the future by the light of these same established canons of 
right, equity, and propriety that have been tried and found wanting?

Perhaps the question should rather take the less didactic form: Will the present 
experience of calamities induce men to revise these established principles of 
conduct, and the specifications of the code based on them, so effectually as to 
guard against any chance of return to the same desperate situation in the 
calculable future? Can the discipline of recent experience and the insight bred 
by the new order of knowledge and belief, reenforced by the shock of the present 
miscarriage, be counted on to bring such a revision of these principles of law 
and custom as will preclude a return to that status quo ante from which this 
miscarriage of civilization has resulted? The latter question is more to the 
point. History teaches that men, taken collectively, learn by habituation rather 
than by precept and reflection particularly as touches those underlying 
principles of truth and validity on which the effectual scheme of law and custom 
finally rests.

In the last analysis it resolves itself into a question as to how and how far 
the habituation of the recent past, mobilized by the shock of the present 
conjuncture, will have affected the frame of mind of the common man in these 
civilized countries; for in the last analysis, and with due allowance for a 
margin of tolerance, it is the frame of mind of the common man that makes the 
foundation of society in the modern world. And the fortunes of the civilized 
world, for good or ill, have come to turn on the deeds of commission and 
omission of these advanced peoples among whom the frame of mind of the common 
man is the finally conditioning circumstance in what may safely be done or left 
undone. The advice and consent of the common run has latterly come to be 
indispensable to the conduct of affairs among civilized men, somewhat in the 
same degree in which the community is to be accounted a civilized people. It is 
indispensable at least in a permissive way, at least to the extent that no line 
of policy can long be pursued successfully without the permissive tolerance of 
the common run; and the margin of tolerance in the case appears to be narrower, 
the more alert and the more matter-of-fact the frame of mind of the common man.

THORSTEIN VEBLEN.
------------------------------------------------------------------------