Review of Veblen’s "Vested Interests and the State of the Industrial Arts", by H[arry] A[llen] Overstreet, The Nation (New York), Vol. 110, No. 2848,(Jan., 31, 1920), p. 150. ['article: Vested Interests'.] ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- [150] Vested Interests Vested Interests and the State of the Industrial Arts. By Thorstein Veblen. B. W. Huebsch We have yet to learn - and to learn it hard - that good men may do evil. Ethical individualists have a way of being impatient with schemes for social reorganization. "Get good men," they cry, "and you get a good society." The ethical socialist answers: "No! Get a whole society of good men who are socially visionless, and you get a ruinous society." But the ethical socialist, despite himself, often joins hands with the ethical individualist by unconsciously adopting the converse of his proposition. He is angry at certain men. He draws cartoons of bloated, self-satisfied exploiters. He calls heaven to witness the heartless selfishness of the rich, their deliberate willingness to live in parasitic ease upon the labor of slaves. "These are evil men," he cries. And the ethical individualist comes back at him in triumph. "I told so," he says; "make men good." It is much harder, it takes maturer thinking, to see the social conflict as a conflict of philosophies. Much harder, because we are compelled, then, to discard the satisfying belief in the evil of our opponents and to acknowledge them to be men and women merely misled by false ideas. We may even have to acknowledge them to be as sincere and high-minded as ourselves. And yet we shall all, in one way or another, eventually have to come to this maturer way of thinking, for the other way is really intolerable. Life is not fundamentally, as the Manichees would have it, a struggle between the good and the bad. It is rather, as Socrates would have it, a struggle between the more and the less intelligent. There is bitterness and there is withering sarcasm in Mr. Veblen’s book; but its upshot is about this. The eighteenth century, he points out, shaped for itself a philosophy of economic, political, and social life, embodied in law and custom, which was excellent for its time. It was a high-minded, forward-looking philosophy. It wrought confidently for human betterment. It wag radical for its day, so radical, indeed, that in the American Constitution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man it marked an abrupt departure from the older conceptions and habits of social life. But the world moved ahead so rapidly during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the eighteenth century philosophy was left behind in many respects in a condition of unadaptable antiquity as great almost as that of the laws of Solon. The tragedy of our day is the failure of the greater number of people, particularly those in economic, political, and educational authority, to realize this. In the eighteenth century, as Mr. Veblen shows, the individual was the unit of society. In the twentieth century, the technological "plant" is the unit. Where the individual was the unit, the principles of self-help, of free contract, and of free competition made for healthy initiative and sturdy accomplishment. Where the complex technological equipment that we call a "plant" is the unit, self- help, free contract, and free competition become not only inoperative in practice but positively pernicious in effect. The plant is the focus of a whole range of social heritages - science, technology, skill, education, social discipline. Where it is treated as a private possession, the social heritages, inexhaustible in their richness, become the "legitimate" prey of individuals. Practices gradually develop, all legal and respectable. which, in effect, deny the social character of the plant and turn its marvellous productivity into means of individual gratification and misdirection. The most pernicious result has been the gradual subordination of the productive to the profit-making motive, with its evil climax in the vested interest. Profit being the end, all roads that lead to profit, though they may in themselves be non-productive or even anti-productive, are eagerly traversed. The vested interest is the remarkable social invention, legitimatized in law and custom, whereby factors and processes really nonproductive are enabled to exact their toll of productive society. The result is pernicious, of course, because a society healthy both morally and technologically must root in the instinct of workmanship. To get as much and to give as little as possible may be good business; but it is poor morals and poor social economy. The instinct of the artist is to create; of the scientist to discover; of the craftsman to shape materials to a purpose. These are fruitful ways of human life. The instinct of the modern business man is none of these-except as he is more than a business man. If he creates, he does so only incidentally; if he discovers, if he shapes materials, it is only by the way. And the tragedy of it all is that this unfortunate attitude has grown out of a perfectly reputable, but belated, philosophy of life, a philosophy that the good people of the present still reverence as they reverence those who gave them life. The degradation of the best is the worst. If our present social difficulties were, indeed, the result of evil character, we might rise up manfully and cast these evil ones from us. We cannot rise up and cast out our fine-minded though philosophically belated neighbors. The only hope is that the circumstances of the last few years will have shown so vividly the inadequacy of our social laws and mechanisms that increasing numbers of men and women will be led at last to see that the fundamental failure of our times lies precisely in the attempt to carry into new conditions of life a social philosophy not only not intended for these conditions but almost completely inadequate to meet their needs. Above all, Mr. Veblen thinks, the hope lies in the fact that the practical logic of machine industry and the mechanical organization of life increasingly train the common man "to a matter-of-fact outlook and to a rating of men and things in terms of tangible performance and to an ever slighter respect for the traditional principles that have come down to us, so that, as he concludes, "the common man is constantly and increasingly exposed to the risk of becoming an undesirable citizen in the eyes of the votaries of law and order.” Yet what is in sight is not a constructive program. "It is something of the simpler and cruder sort such as history is full of, to the effect that whenever and so far as time-worn rules no longer fit the new material circumstances, they presently fail to carry conviction as they once did." The Zeitgeist, in short, is the real revolutionist. H. A.OVERSTREET ----------------------------------------------------------------------------