Review of Veblen's "The Place of Science in Modern Civilization".

The North American Review, (New York),
Vol. 211, No. 772, (Mar., 1920), pp. 424-426.
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THE PLACE OF SCIENCE IN MODERN CIVILIZATION, and other Essays. By Thorstein 
Veblen. New York: B. W. Huebsch.

No other thinker, perhaps, has succeeded in being so consistently impersonal as 
Mr. Veblen; and this quality, so conspicuous in him, seems the more remarkable 
when one considers the kind of subjects with which he deals, especially in his 
latest set of essays. He is, to be sure, a scientist, and scientists are 
currently supposed to be as impersonal as it is possible for human beings to be; 
but the impersonality of Mr. Veblen is greater than the impersonality of the 
scientists. As compared with his copious frankness, his liveliness of 
appreciation of human problems and human motives, and his arid reserve as to 
human values, the detachment of the average scientist seems little more than a 
kind of professional pose. Not for Mr. Veblen so stale a theme as the 
anthropomorphism of religion! Rather, he will show the lingering animism in 
science, the quasi-theological assumptions of political economy, the connection 
of Karl Marx with the Romantic Philosophers. And when he has done all this he 
will simply remark that there is no means of determining whether these things 
are in themselves good or bad.

In the sense of being idly destructive, Mr. Veblen is, of course, no mere 
iconoclast: he is not out to abolish or even to bring into disrepute any of the 
systems that he criticises. But he is a great smasher of idols - idols of the 
cave, idols of the tribe, idols of the market place. It is at the 'pretensions' 
of various systems of thought - pretensions to superior 'value' of some kind, to 
being "indefeasably right and good" - that his criticism is really directed. Of 
modern thinkers, he alone, examines even science in a perfectly dry light; and 
this he is able to do by shedding upon it a light dryer than its own.

Ostensibly the author in his essay upon the place of science - the first of a 
series of more or less related discourses contained in his latest book - is 
concerned in explaining the dominance of scientific thought in the modern world 
and the restiveness of the modern man under this dominance. He arrives at the 
conclusion that the peculiar reverence for the scientific mode of thinking is 
largely the outgrowth of a mental attitude produced by respect for machine 
technology, as mediaeval Christianity got part of its strength from the general 
respect felt for monarchial institutions, and later Puritanism perhaps reflects 
the ethics of the market place. He reaches the further conclusion that since the 
scientific discipline has been of relatively short duration, while the period of 
savagery has been indefinitely long, it [425] is only natural that mankind 
should find the process of adjustment to the scientific point of view somewhat 
painful.

These are the formal results. The most interesting remarks, however, both for 
the scientist and for the layman, are found by the way. For the scientist, there 
is the criticism that nearly all science retains in its talk of causation relics 
of a primitive animism; for the common reader there is the somewhat refreshing 
suggestion that scientific standards may not be in all respects final. "While 
the scientist's spirit and achievements stir an unqualified admiration in modern 
men, and while his discoveries carry conviction as nothing else does, it does 
not follow that the manner of man which this quest of knowledge produces or 
requires comes near answering to the current ideal of manhood, or that his 
conclusions are felt to be as good and beautiful as they are true. The ideal 
man, and the ideal of human life, even in the apprehension of those who most 
rejoice in the advance of science, is neither the finikin skeptic in the 
laboratory nor the animated slide rule." Moreover, "there is room for much more 
than a vague doubt that this cult of science is not altogether a wholesome 
growth - that the unmitigated quest of knowledge of this matter-of-fact kind, 
makes for race deterioration and discomfort on the whole, both in its immediate 
effects upon the spiritual life of mankind, and in the material consequences 
that follow from a great advance in matter-of-fact knowledge." Surely there is 
something inspiring in this assertion from a philosophical, though not a 
religious, point of view, that man may possibly be greater than his science.

The greater number of the essays contained in this volume deal with political 
economy, and by the same token they have less significance for the common reader 
than have Mr. Veblen's disquisitions on less conventionalized subjects. For one 
thing, Mr. Veblen has rather less of what is new to offer in this field; or 
better, perhaps, it requires a trained economist to discern and value the 
novelty. Others, before the author, have detected and pointed out, though not 
with equal thoroughness, the fact that even modern schools have tended to make 
political economy not so much a science as a sort of compensatory philosophy - a 
code embodying the common sense conception of what 'ought' to be and of what 
therefore always 'will' be in the absence of "disturbing causes." It is scarcely 
news that even the celebrated "historical school" did not succeed in making 
political economy truly scientific. For another factor, one may mention that to 
the average reader, questions concerning the relation of Karl Marx to Hegel on 
the one hand and to Darwin on the other, seem comparatively academic. The essays 
on the 'Blond Race' and upon 'Aryan Culture' are, of course, purely scientific.

There is, too, in these later essays, less concerned as they are with human life 
as a whole, a certain falling off in the stimulating effect of Mr. Veblen's 
style. When the author speaks the language of protest, he manages, while 
maintaining a strictly correct philosophical and scientific attitude to be as 
enlivening as the late Elbert Hubbard. Economic discussion, however, notoriously 
tends to be prolix and parenthetical, and even Veblen does not wholly escape the 
tendency. Perhaps it was a certain tedium which made him write a sentence so 
egregious as the following: "If we are getting restless under the [426] taxonomy 
of a monocotyledonous wage doctrine and a cryptogamic theory of interest, with 
involute, loculicidal, tomentous, and moniliform variants, what is the 
cytoplasm, centrosome, or karyokinetic process to which we may turn, and in 
which we may find surcease from the metaphysics of normality and controlling 
principles?" Certainly Mr. Veblen is secure from parody! But this momentary 
outbreak is not a fair sample of his style. Nor is it due to pedantry: one would 
call it rather a flash of Teufelsdröckhian affectation. One would rather quote 
as an instance of what may be expected of Mr. Veblen now and then, a shrewd 
piece of literary criticism contained in his essay on 'Science': "Even the 
romancers who ostensibly rehearse the phenomena of chivalry, unavoidably make 
their knights and ladies speak the language and the sentiments of the slums of 
that time, tempered with certain schematised modern reflections and 
speculations. The gallantries, the genteel inanities and devout imbecilities of 
medieval high-life would be insufferable even to the meanest and most romantic 
modern intelligence."

One cannot help wondering whether Mr. Veblen himself knows what an excellent 
literary quality his writings have, and what a boon to the jaded reader is the 
absence in his work of certain conventional literary virtues - solemnity, 
geniality, sonority, and the like. Since he writes in large part for technical 
journals, it is probable that many readers who would find him a kindred spirit 
have never made his acquaintance. Technical, to some extent, many of his 
writings of course are, and none of them are offered as "popular science." But 
even when he is most technical, his 'obiter dicta' are often of more interest 
than another man's whole theory, and there is always a chance that any book of 
Veblen's may prove to be a wonderful "find" for some particular reader of the 
kind classed as "average."
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