It is not news that the Leisure Class is socially and economically conservative, even reactionary. But we are not accustomed to seeing, as Veblen invites us to, how pervasive certain invidious habits of thought are within their own lives, and how inescapable Conservative politics seems to them.
Aristocrats, the Leisure Class in its purest form, have it almost all their own way in feudal societies, but in increasingly industrial societies new social and political forces gradually appear, based on the requirement for dealing in real causes and effects in science and technology. This eventually took the form of asserting new human rights, for women, for workers, for despised minorities, for the old, and so on. At the same time, new financial forces appeared, so that aristocrats were shoved aside by industrialists and their bankers, and in time the bankers become pure financiers, independent of industry. All of this is complicated by changes in religious doctrine and practice, some progressive, while the Religious Right became even more regressive in certain respects than the churches that supported aristocratic privilege.
In Part 1 we examined the Leisure Class principles of prowess (force and fraud), and Conspicuous Consumption, from the beginnings of the prescriptive division of labor between men and women in hunter-gatherer societies up to the heights of aristocratic privilege and ostentatious waste in palace and cathedral, and its emulation at every level of society. In Europe, the next stage began in the Renaissance, which gradually led to the age of science and industry, and thus considerations of actual cause and effect, and so on to our time, which we have proclaimed the Information Age. Let us examine how these forces play out up to our time, and consider what we might say about where they will take us next.
We obviously do not have space to go over all of the manifestations of Leisure Class exemption from honest toil in favor of the exercise of force and fraud, and the force of Conspicuous Consumption on every aspect of Leisure Class behavior. When waste and uselessness become the canons of respectability, nothing can be omitted from their rule.
Nor can we cover the multitude of ways in which Conspicuous Consumption works its way downward through society, setting each class to try to spend as lavishly as the one just above it, and the ways in which all of these phenomena infect our politics. If you really want to understand that, you have to read the book yourself to begin with, and then you have to look at the ways that Veblen's theory has been extended in the 20th century and on to today.
But we must take one such manifestation very seriously, because it is the most important political fact of the last fifty years: the Republican Southern Strategy, and its extension into the rest of the country. The essence of the strategy is that the rich promise political aid to the various classes whose primary animating principle is hatred of supposed inferiors, and an overwhelming desire to keep them firmly in their traditional places. For Neo-Confederates, White Supremacists, and other racists, that means keeping Blacks and other minorities poor and helpless while railing against Northern Liberal tyranny and Communism. For misogynists, it is traditionally expressed as keeping women barefoot and pregnant, and as far as possible in the state of personal property, while railing against Feminists and Liberals. For bigots, keeping LGBTs in the closet while railing against Liberals and Secular Humanists. Immigrants, out! And so on for Tea Party Birchers, Neo-Cons, and the other denizens of the Republican Bestiary according to their pet issues and perceived enemies.
The most important fact about this strategy that makes sense in the light of Veblen's theory is that several such classes will vote firmly against their own economic interests if it seems to them that it will keep them wealthier or more powerful or more respectable than the Other, or at least keep the Other down. "It's OK," Reagan strategist Lee Atwater explained, "as long as Blacks get hurt worse." Or women, immigrants, LGBTs, furriners, Muslims, whoever. Also, in the most egregiously forceful and fraudulent current form of Conspicuous Consumption, spending trillions of US dollars and many thousands of US and other lives in failed attempts allegedly to bring democracy and human rights to Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere is obviously the correct thing to do, as long as we can assert that we were in control. The fact that this is nonsense counts for nothing when those spouting it can also count on Cognitive Dissonance within their base. In Dick Cheney's word,
So?
It must be understood that the Neo-Cons who created this project meant by democracy and human rights the rule of the Leisure Class as so often seen in American politics, and especially property rights of multinational corporations.
Historical and Anthropological Analysis
Veblen distinguished several levels of societal development, which later anthropology and other studies have found not as accurate historically or as complete as one could wish, but which nevertheless can be properly said to exist, and to be characterized by certain sets of customs and ideas of honor and propriety that Veblen wished to bring out. We might also disagree with the names Veblen gave them, but it is convenient to use his names while discussing his book. We must later go past the period of his study in 1899, and then we can consider other descriptions, as in calling the current version of Veblen's Leisure Class the 1%. Veblen's proposed societal forms, which are not in strict sequence, are
- Peaceable savagery, such as Kalahari Bushmen, without legalistic notions of private property such as one finds in the code of Hammurabi or the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, without slavery, and with only the most basic distinction between men's and women's work
- Predatory barbarism, honoring war, conquest, and plunder as the highest goods, with ownership of women
- A quasi-peaceable stage, characterized by slavery, a growing institution of private property, and status determined by wealth rather than military prowess
- Higher barbarism, with increasingly developed class structures (such as the caste system of India, the feudalism of Japan under the Shogunate, or the European feudal aristocracy), and handicraft industry in cottage or guild
- The period of increasingly mechanized industry and finance and of European nation-states and empires, characterized by a gradual shift of production to wage labor in field and factory, and eventually a very uneven decrease in the importance of aristocracies, as in the Meiji Restoration in Japan, in which all samurai were disarmed, or the various European and American Revolutions and the American Civil War
- The period of high finance, which began with financing of ships, railroads, factories, and inventions, and evolved to predatory finance for its own sake, where in the worst cases bankers and traders caused bubbles and panics on purpose in order to profit from them
It is also a matter of common notoriety and byword that in offenses which result in a large accession of property to the offender he does not ordinarily incur the extreme penalty or the extreme obloquy with which his offenses would be visited on the ground of the naive moral code alone.
Thus Too Big to Fail and Too Big to Jail.
Veblen discussed some changes that had begun to move in the other direction from barbarian Leisure Class dominance, such as the late Medieval rise of guilds and free cities, and the later ascendancy of parliaments over kings and aristocracies, new fortunes from trade and industry displacing inherited military wealth, the abolition of slavery, agitation for women's rights, and labor issues. Some developments since then that his theory bears on are
- Increasing rights for women, labor, minorities, immigrants, and now LGBTs
- The temporary rise of Communism and Fascism
- The decline of Empires
- The New Deal in the US and Social Democracy in much of Europe
- The very unevenly distributed age of Human Rights
- The major realignment in US politics in the Civil Rights era, and the Republican Southern Strategy backlash
- The Information Age
William Gibson's observation has always been true.
The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.
In Veblen's time only lower-class women worked outside the home, except as nurses or teachers, and women were expected to spend much of their time in vicarious consumption of what their husbands provided them, whether by work or as members of the Leisure Class. This included a much greater expectation of religious devotion. Between getting the vote and getting jobs, and taking much more control of their own destinies, women now consume much more for themselves, and have in large numbers radically rejected religious views and practices that put them in an inferior position.
Leisure Class Conservatism
Any one who is required to change his habits of life and his habitual relations to his fellow men will feel the discrepancy between the method of life required of him by the newly arisen exigencies, and the traditional scheme of life to which he is accustomed. It is the individuals placed in this position who have the liveliest incentive to reconstruct the received scheme of life and are most readily persuaded to accept new standards; and it is through the need of the means of livelihood that men are placed in such a position. The pressure exerted by the environment upon the group, and making for a readjustment of the group's scheme of life, impinges upon the members of the group in the form of pecuniary exigencies; and it is owing to this fact—that external forces are in great part translated into the form of pecuniary or economic exigencies—it is owing to this fact that we can say that the forces which count toward a readjustment of institutions in any modern industrial community are chiefly economic forces; or more specifically, these forces take the form of pecuniary pressure. Such a readjustment as is here contemplated is substantially a change in men's views as to what is good and right, and the means through which a change is wrought in men's apprehension of what is good and right is in large part the pressure of pecuniary exigencies.
However, our previous study of Cognitive Dissonance leads us to note that those subjected to economic forces affecting their conceptions of personal honor and propriety, especially religious propriety, will resist and deny such forces as long as possible, and even predict publicly and indeed ever more stridently that no such thing will ever happen, with increasingly tenuous excuses.
Today we can see denialist Conservatism very clearly in the Koch brothers' Global Warming denial, since the switchover to renewable energy sources is going to strand most of their coal and oil assets, rendering them valueless for energy production. They will still be of importance for steelmaking (what is called metallurgical coal, a higher grade than the thermal coal used for boiling water to run turbines) and petrochemicals. Similarly for all other fossil carbon assets, and for organizations such as the American Petroleum Institute. Similarly we have seen it in the racism, classism, bigotry, and misogyny of the Religious Right since before the Civil War.
In the case of the American Revolution, taxation became the motivating economic force. First, the colonies resisted Taxation Without Representation, but afterwards they realized that taxation with representation, that is the Constitution rather than the Articles of Confederation, was essential. Smugglers such as Samuel Adams went much further in the Revolution, as did the participants in the later Whiskey Rebellion, put down by President George Washington personally riding out at the head of the Pennsylvania militia. But hatred of Revenooers never went away.
This conservatism of the wealthy class is so obvious a feature that it has even come to be recognized as a mark of respectability. Since conservatism is a characteristic of the wealthier and therefore more reputable portion of the community, it has acquired a certain honorific or decorative value. It has become prescriptive to such an extent that an adherence to conservative views is comprised as a matter of course in our notions of respectability; and it is imperatively incumbent on all who would lead a blameless life in point of social repute. Conservatism, being an upper-class characteristic, is decorous; and conversely, innovation, being a lower-class phenomenon, is vulgar. The first and most unreflected element in that instinctive revulsion and reprobation with which we turn from all social innovators is this sense of the essential vulgarity of the thing. So that even in cases where one recognizes the substantial merits of the case for which the innovator is spokesman—as may easily happen if the evils which he seeks to remedy are sufficiently remote in point of time or space or personal contact—still one cannot but be sensible of the fact that the innovator is a person with whom it is at least distasteful to be associated, and from whose social contact one must shrink. Innovation is bad form.
The fact that the usages, actions, and views of the well-to-do leisure class acquire the character of a prescriptive canon of conduct for the rest of society, gives added weight and reach to the conservative influence of that class. It makes it incumbent upon all reputable people to follow their lead.
Then, of course, we had the Suffragettes, whom Veblen commented on, and later the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement, along with a few wars, and even more since then. All carried on by thoroughly disreputable people, according to the social canons of the Gilded Age when Veblen wrote. We all know how disreputable the Great Orange Satan is, particularly when discussing Income Inequality.
…the institution of a leisure class acts to make the lower classes conservative by withdrawing from them as much as it may of the means of sustenance, and so reducing their consumption, and consequently their available energy, to such a point as to make them incapable of the effort required for the learning and adoption of new habits of thought. The accumulation of wealth at the upper end of the pecuniary scale implies privation at the lower end of the scale. It is a commonplace that, wherever it occurs, a considerable degree of privation among the body of the people is a serious obstacle to any innovation.
This has been given as part of the explanation of Ferguson MO having a two-thirds poor Black population and a White city council and police force. People working low-wage jobs find it difficult to vote, much less to organize and put up credible candidates. Having elections on a Thursday in April of off years doesn't help, either.
Education
The original conceptions of education were aristocratic and religious, going back to the earliest civilizations, even before the invention of writing. Curiously, education was the province of slaves in the Roman Empire, particularly of Greeks teaching history, philosophy, literature, and rhetoric in addition to the Greek language. At the height of Leisure Class development in Europe the great universities were created specifically to teach Catholic theology, with the support of such Greek philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy as had made it into Latin. Hardly anything useful was taught there beyond arithmetic until Galileo. The tension between the useful arts (science, engineering, medicine, agriculture), and the unproductive study of religion, literature, philosophy, law, politics, and other Liberal Arts continues to this day. It is not that the Liberal Arts have to be entirely useless. It is merely unusual for students to put them to real use, as opposed to bolstering Leisure Class wealth and pretensions.
Much of the purpose of Leisure Class education is to render the recipients even more useless and to bolster their sense of entitlement and their habits of predation. The MBA is widely held to be the most useless of all useless degrees, and the most predatory.
Public schools were invented in Scotland primarily so that even the poor could read the Bible, not for any practical purpose. Their conversion to split academic and vocational schooling on Leisure Class principles took more than a century. Prussia developed a factory automation model of education specifically to support its national war machine. The notion of education for democracy put forward by John Dewey, one of Veblen's associates, has had heavy going ever since. Veblen notes, however, the non-invidious character of the kindergarten and its beneficial influences in primary education. I can recommend You Can't Say You Can't Play, by Vivian Gussin Paley, as an excellent modern extension of those practices and ideals.
The most frequent excursions into other than classical fields of knowledge on the part of members of the leisure class are made into the discipline of law and the political, and more especially the administrative, sciences. These so-called sciences are substantially bodies of maxims of expediency for guidance in the leisure-class office of government, as conducted on a proprietary basis. The interest with which this discipline is approached is therefore not commonly the intellectual or cognitive interest simply. It is largely the practical interest of the exigencies of that relation of mastery in which the members of the class are placed. In point of derivation, the office of government is a predatory function, pertaining integrally to the archaic leisure-class scheme of life. It is an exercise of control and coercion over the population from which the class draws its sustenance.
Finance
The relation of the leisure (that is, propertied non-industrial) class to the economic process is a pecuniary relation—a relation of acquisition, not of production; of exploitation, not of serviceability…Their office is of a parasitic character, and their interest is to divert what substance they may to their own use, and to retain whatever is under their hand. The conventions of the business world have grown up under the selective surveillance of this principle of predation or parasitism.
Veblen was hopeful that the advance of finance would render management of industry so routine that CEOs (captains of industry in nineteenth century parlance) could someday be dispensed with, and that the development of the corporation would render the Leisure Class function of ownership equally superfluous. It just shows how wrong one can be when operating in the complete absence of data.
Also, please ignore everything Veblen says about ethnicity. Genetics was in its infancy at the time, and was almost universally misapplied, whether to nonsensical notions of personality relating to head shape and hair color, which Veblen embraced, or to the even more pernicious notions of eugenics, which he fortunately did not. For example, although he wrote
The collective interests of any modern community center in industrial efficiency. The individual is serviceable for the ends of the community somewhat in proportion to his efficiency in the productive employments vulgarly so called. This collective interest is best served by honesty, diligence, peacefulness, good-will, an absence of self-seeking, and an habitual recognition and apprehension of causal sequence, without admixture of animistic belief and without a sense of dependence on any preternatural intervention in the course of events.
he did not propose breeding such people. It turns out that they can be produced sufficiently by education, although education can be misapplied to produce much less useful types, as for instance in Nazi Germany and many Communist regimes. Both drew on Prussian models going back to the 18th century. Here is Prussian state philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte:
You must fashion [the person], and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will.
Addresses to the German Nation
This is a particular perversion of Leisure Class predation, in support of the Prussian policy of Imperial conquest, of which the Nazis were direct descendants.
Anyway, coming back to Veblen, he also wrote
On the other hand, the immediate interest of the individual under the competitive regime is best served by shrewd trading and unscrupulous management.
In the age of Occupy, of Thomas Piketty's analysis of
Capital in the Twenty First Century, and of current discussions of Income Inequality, I do not need to belabor these points.
Religion
Devout Observances get an entire chapter to themselves, relating the religious impulse to gambling, sports, the predatory impulse (Onward Christian Soldiers, The Battle Hymn of the Republic), the servile state of mind that glorifies its anthropomorphic divinities as Kings, industrial inefficiency (from a denigration of relations of cause and effect), and of course Conspicuous Consumption.
Obviously, the canon of conspicuous waste is accountable for a great portion of what may be called devout consumption; as, e.g., the consumption of sacred edifices, vestments, and other goods of the same class.
The phenomenon of Sunday Go to Meeting clothing is well known. Likewise, churches regularly taught vain repetitions, fasts, pilgrimages, holidays requiring abstention from useful work, and other devout observances rather than any productive work for our fellow humans such as feeding the poor. Many seem to have taken the record of Jesus's admonition in favor of a wasteful observance using a precious ointment,
The poor ye have always with you
more as a commandment.
Religion is also responsible for teaching people not to object to leisure class depredations and waste, but
That we may be content in that station in life in which it hath pleased God to place us.
Book of Common Prayer, Church of England
We should also note, as I said last time, the prevalence of force (Crusades, Inquisitions, Thirty Years War and other wars of religion) in the European Christian churches and fraud (particularly in televangelism and Creationism) in American Christianity. Although Martin Luther did claim that there was enough wood from the True Cross in Europe to build a cathedral, and several Epistles in the New Testament are forgeries, while much in the Jewish Scriptures is simply mythical. We can talk more about other religions later on when we read The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James.
I have mentioned the function of Leisure Class thinking in the Republican Southern Strategy. The Religious Right is one of the main components in that strategy, particularly on women's reproductive and other rights and everybody's rights in marriage and divorce. The Religious Right used to be at the center of racism in the US, when it offered theological justification for slavery and then Jim Crow, and for the self-proclaimed Southern Aristocracy, but the Southern Baptist Convention and some other churches have sworn off racism, and started recruiting minorities to make up for their otherwise declining numbers. Unfortunately, that means that they doubled down on bigotry and misogyny, and some on Creationism and other science denial in the service of Leisure Class delusions of racial and material superiority. A particularly Leisure Class form of Evangelical Christianity is the Prosperity Gospel, which proclaims that God wants you to be rich, which you do by donating to the Church of Mammon, and never mind the poor.
I should point out that I find that there is such a thing as genuine religion aiming to help all of humankind, indeed as we Buddhists say all sentient beings, but that it is not common compared with Leisure Class perversions of religious ideals and practices in this world of sin and sorrow (as Christians say) or Samsara. We could end poverty in the next generation or two, but under Leisure Class canons of politics, economics, and religion we cannot even discuss the matter seriously in public.
The Instinct of Workmanship
Veblen held that there is an inherent desire to be useful that sometimes runs counter to the ethos of uselessness of the Leisure Class, but is often co-opted by it, so that for example artists and others who actually made things often vie to produce the most conventionally beautiful objects, that is objects of Conspicuous Consumption and objects honoring Leisure Class values in a high degree. In prehistoric cultures known to archaeology, much effort went into producing both genuinely useful objects for hunting, cooking, sewing, and so on, and objects of ceremonial uselessness. In the industrial age both motives often work together, so that useful objects are made with useless decoration.
As a matter of selective necessity, man is an agent. He is, in his own apprehension, a centre of unfolding impulsive activity—"teleological" activity. He is an agent seeking in every act the accomplishment of some concrete, objective, impersonal end. By force of his being such an agent he is possessed of a taste for effective work, and a distaste for futile effort. He has a sense of the merit of serviceability or efficiency and of the demerit of futility, waste, or incapacity. This aptitude or propensity may be called the instinct of workmanship…
The instinct of workmanship is present in all men, and asserts itself even under very adverse circumstances. So that however wasteful a given expenditure may be in reality, it must at least have some colorable excuse in the way of an ostensible purpose…
So long as all labor continues to be performed exclusively or usually by slaves, the baseness of all productive effort is too constantly and deterrently present in the mind of men to allow the instinct of workmanship seriously to take effect in the direction of industrial usefulness; but when the quasi-peaceable stage (with slavery and status) passes into the peaceable stage of industry (with wage labor and cash payment) the instinct comes more effectively into play…
Under the regime of individual ownership the most available means of visibly achieving a purpose is that afforded by the acquisition and accumulation of goods; and as the self-regarding antithesis between man and man reaches fuller consciousness, the propensity for achievement—the instinct of workmanship—tends more and more to shape itself into a straining to excel others in pecuniary achievement.
This instinct may be directed to a variety of ends. In some cases, it means producing something of use, while in others, it can mean being effective in Conspicuous Consumption, warfare, plunder, or financial and political shenanigans. Veblen expressed a hope that we could get back to honoring the genuinely productive in society, but gave no path to achieving that. I would think that ending global poverty might bring us to the point where we could talk about it, but we can't even discuss poverty seriously in the present toxic political environment, especially when the inmates are in charge of the economic asylum.
Conservatism
Institutions are products of the past process, are adapted to past circumstances, and are therefore never in full accord with the requirements of the present. In the nature of the case, this process of selective adaptation can never catch up with the progressively changing situation in which the community finds itself at any given time; for the environment, the situation, the exigencies of life which enforce the adaptation and exercise the selection, change from day to day; and each successive situation of the community in its turn tends to obsolescence as soon as it has been established.
This is of course only a tendency. Confiscatory rents in the form of sharecropping, Klan violence, and Jim Crow segregation grew as the self-proclaimed Southern Aristocracy response to the South's military defeat in the Civil War, and the confiscation of all of their property in slaves. There were forces operating against them from the start, but it took a century for those forces to coalesce into a Civil Rights Movement that was able to inspire somewhat effective legislation. That in its turn provoked the development of every imaginable kind of double dealing to get around those laws, a fight that is not yet over. But we can foresee a time when young people in the South will turn away from the old hatreds in sufficient numbers so that their states will, this time, willingly rejoin the Union. In every generation there have been more and more like young Scout in
To Kill a Mockingbird, and we have progressed to the point where they can say so openly, at least in the university towns.
The evolution of the social order can be compared with biological evolution, in that customs that fail of the purpose of maintaining the privileged position of members of the Leisure Class will be discarded, or those holding to them will lose their positions, and those holding to more effective customs will take their places. This is obvious in the failure of the great hereditary aristocratic classes and their replacement by captains of industry and finance in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Similarly, the political opinions of the Leisure Class depend on time and circumstance, and who is in the class at the particular time. In late Medieval and Renaissance times, traders and craft guilds were highly progressive in politics in contrast with hereditary aristocrats, but as they pushed the aristocrats aside they came to be the great bastion of conservatism.
I tell you, social evolution fires up the Republican base as hotly as biology. Darwin told the flower of the Southern Aristocracy that they were descended from Black Africans just like everybody else in 1859, just in time to inflame pre-Civil War passions even more. But now it is not just their old privileges over slaves or at least ex-slaves and their descendants, and not just other minorities and immigrants, either. It is workers and the poor and women and LGBTs and mainstream Christians and Muslims and, in fact, everybody who isn't them. At this point, each of the Republican factions that I described in my Diary A Republican Bestiary loathes and despises several of the others, to the point of occasionally bluffing about splitting into a Third Party. The entire social order ordained by God in the Bible, as these people see it, is being upended, with various predicted consequences (all previously extensively debunked).
For the Religious Right in particular, the only possible result is that the whole world will go to Hell in a handbasket. Which would of course be the beginning of the End Times, including the reign of the Antichrist, leading to Armageddon, the Rapture, the Kingdom of God on Earth, the Resurrection, the Final Judgment, and everything else that they profess to desire with all their hearts. And not one of them has the decency to thank us.
For Birchers, which means most of the Tea Parties, it means Communism. For Neo-Confederates, Yankee Tyranny beyond all imagining. For Wall Street, taking away all of their money. For gun nuts, taking away all of their guns. And so on. Whatever is their view of their own essential wealth and status, their own special varieties of Conspicuous Consumption, Liberals are a conspiracy to take it away and make them just like everybody else. Which is true, up to a point. We do want equality of opportunity, equality of Liberty and Justice for All, equality of responsibility to the country, and more. The deadenders are those for whom impinging on their status in the slightest is as bad in their own fevered imaginations as confiscating everything.
But it hasn't happened, and it isn't going to happen. While the rich remain rich and the powerful powerful, however, they will persist in saying so. Some will follow the old Bill Buckley National Review code of standing athwart history yelling "Stop!", but those people are considered RINOs today. The real Republicans yell, "Go back!"
The leisure class is the conservative class. The exigencies of the general economic situation of the community do not freely or directly impinge upon the members of this class. They are not required under penalty of forfeiture to change their habits of life and their theoretical views of the external world to suit the demands of an altered industrial technique, since they are not in the full sense an organic part of the industrial community. Therefore these exigencies do not readily produce, in the members of this class, that degree of uneasiness with the existing order which alone can lead any body of men to give up views and methods of life that have become habitual to them. The office of the leisure class in social evolution is to retard the movement and to conserve what is obsolescent. This proposition is by no means novel; it has long been one of the commonplaces of popular opinion.
The prevalent conviction that the wealthy class is by nature conservative has been popularly accepted without much aid from any theoretical view as to the place and relation of that class in the cultural development. When an explanation of this class conservatism is offered, it is commonly the invidious one that the wealthy class opposes innovation because it has a vested interest, of an unworthy sort, in maintaining the present conditions. The explanation here put forward imputes no unworthy motive. The opposition of the class to changes in the cultural scheme is instinctive, and does not rest primarily on an interested calculation of material advantages; it is an instinctive revulsion at any departure from the accepted way of doing and of looking at things—a revulsion common to all men and only to be overcome by stress of circumstances. All change in habits of life and of thought is irksome. The difference in this respect between the wealthy and the common run of mankind lies not so much in the motive which prompts to conservatism as in the degree of exposure to the economic forces that urge a change. The members of the wealthy class do not yield to the demand for innovation as readily as other men because they are not constrained to do so.
Certainly the Leisure Class does not see itself as evil, but as the guardian of civilization and the vanguard of true progress. Income inequality, for example, is to them a positive good, and the only motive they can believe in for opposing them is a wish to supplant them, not any genuine desire for a better-functioning economy. How can an economy that does not put them far to the fore be said to function better?
It is not unusual to hear those persons who dispense salutary advice and admonition to the community express themselves forcibly upon the far-reaching pernicious effects which the community would suffer from such relatively slight changes as the disestablishment of the Anglican Church, an increased facility of divorce, adoption of female suffrage, prohibition of the manufacture and sale of intoxicating beverages, abolition or restriction of inheritances, etc. Any one of these innovations would, we are told, "shake the social structure to its base," "reduce society to chaos," "subvert the foundations of morality," "make life intolerable," "confound the order of nature," etc.
Of Prohibition, the less said the better. But still, in spite of that massive failure, we have yet to undo the War on Drugs, which we are confidently assured will also destroy civilization as we know it and so on, even though it never has. (See Cognitive Dissonance.)
The abolition of slavery in many countries was undoubtedly the biggest such change in the last two centuries. Marriage Equality and Global Warming Denial are among the most obvious cases today, but there have been many others. If you weren't there, it is very difficult to imagine Ronald Reagan in Operation Coffee Cup campaigning against Medicare as Socialized Medicine, ending in the lament that we would have to tell our grandchildren today what it was like when men were free. Which I guess makes all of the Tea Partiers Socialists.
Next week
We have started with two of the most important negative sets of Republican traits. Cognitive Dissonance supports Denialism and the imperative to spread denial worldwide. Leisure Class predation via force and fraud, and Conspicuous Consumption, not only lead to massive income inequality, but infect all of our politics with the racism, bigotry, misogyny, Mammonism, and other faults of the various haters nominally supported by the 1%, but without any real intention of giving them what they want.
Next we will examine a positive theory, The Evolution of Cooperation, which promises to tell us how to break the power of the 1% and the assorted haters, with examples.
