Theodor Mommsen - "Römische Geschichte Book 3"

Horace - "The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos"

Anonymous - "The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I"

Gilbert K. Chesterton - "The Napoleon of Notting Hill"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation

T >> Thorstein Veblen >> An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation




At this point, again, the experience of the Victorian peace and the
functioning of its gentlefolk come in to indicate what may fairly be
hoped for in this way under this prospective regime of peace at large.
But with the difference that the scale of things is to be larger, the
pace swifter, and the volume and dispersion of this prospective leisure
class somewhat wider. The work of this leisure class--and there is
neither paradox nor inconsistency in the phrase--should be patterned on
the lines worked out by their prototypes of the Victorian time, but with
some appreciable accentuation in the direction of what chiefly
characterised the leisure class of that era of tranquility. The
characteristic feature to which attention naturally turns at this
suggestion is the tranquility that has marked that body of gentlefolk
and their code of clean and honest living. Another word than
"tranquility" might be hit upon to designate this characteristic animus,
but any other word that should at all adequately serve the turn would
carry a less felicitous suggestion of those upper-class virtues that
have constituted the substantial worth of the Victorian gentleman. The
conscious worth of these gentlefolk has been a beautifully complete
achievement. It has been an achievement of "faith without works," of
course; but, needless to say, that is as it should be, also of course.
The place of gentlefolk in the economy of Nature is tracelessly to
consume the community's net product, and in doing so to set a standard
of decent expenditure for the others emulatively to work up to as near
as may be. It is scarcely conceivable that this could have been done in
a more unobtrusively efficient manner, or with a more austerely virtuous
conviction of well-doing, than by the gentlefolk bred of the Victorian
peace. So also, in turn, it is not to be believed that the prospective
breed of gentlefolk derivable from the net product of the pacific
nations under the promised regime of peace at large will prove in any
degree less effective for the like ends. More will be required of them
in the way of a traceless consumption of superfluities and an unexampled
expensive standard of living. But this situation that so faces them may
be construed as a larger opportunity, quite as well as a more difficult
task.

A theoretical exposition of the place and cultural value of a leisure
class in modern life would scarcely be in place here; and it has also
been set out in some detail elsewhere.[10] For the purpose in hand it
may be sufficient to recall that the canons of taste and the standards
of valuation worked out and inculcated by leisure-class life have in all
ages run, with unbroken consistency, to pecuniary waste and personal
futility. In its economic bearing, and particularly in its immediate
bearing on the material well-being of the community at large, the
leadership of the leisure class can scarcely be called by a less
derogatory epithet than "untoward." But that is not the whole of the
case, and the other side should be heard. The leisure-class life of
tranquility, running detached as it does above the turmoil out of which
the material of their sustenance is derived, enables a growth of all
those virtues that mark, or make, the gentleman; and that affect the
life of the underlying community throughout, pervasively, by imitation;
leading to a standardisation of the everyday proprieties on a
presumably, higher level of urbanity and integrity than might be
expected to result in the absence of this prescriptive model.

[Footnote 10: Cf. _The Theory of the Leisure Class_, especially ch.
v.-ix. and xiv.]

_Integer vitae scelerisque purus_, the gentleman of assured station
turns a placid countenance to all those petty vexations of breadwinning
that touch him not. Serenely and with an impassive fortitude he faces
those common vicissitudes of life that are impotent to make or mar his
material fortunes and that can neither impair his creature comforts nor
put a slur on his good repute. So that without afterthought he deals
fairly in all everyday conjunctures of give and take; for they are at
the most inconsequential episodes to him, although the like might spell
irremediable disaster to his impecunious counterfoil among the common
men who have the community's work to do. In short, he is a gentleman, in
the best acceptation of the word,--unavoidably, by force of
circumstance. As such his example is of invaluable consequence to the
underlying community of common folk, in that it keeps before their eyes
an object lesson in habitual fortitude and visible integrity such as
could scarcely have been created except under such shelter from those
disturbances that would go to mar habitual fortitude and integrity.
There can be little doubt but the high example of the Victorian
gentlefolk has had much to do with stabilising the animus of the British
common man on lines of integrity and fair play. What else and more in
the way of habitual preconceptions he may, by competitive imitation, owe
to the same high source is not immediately in question here.

* * * * *

Recalling once more that the canon of life whereby folk are gentlefolk
sums itself up in the requirements of pecuniary waste and personal
futility, and that these requirements are indefinitely extensible, at
the same time that the management of the community's industry by
investment for a profit enables the owners of invested wealth to divert
to their own use the community's net product, wherewith to meet these
requirements, it follows that the community at large which provides this
output of product will be allowed so much as is required by their
necessary standard of living,--with an unstable margin of error in the
adjustment. This margin of error should tend continually to grow
narrower as the businesslike management of industry grows more efficient
with experience; but it will also continually be disturbed in the
contrary sense by innovations of a technological nature that require
continual readjustment. This margin is probably not to be got rid of,
though it may be expected to become less considerable under more settled
conditions.

It should also not be overlooked that the standard of living here spoken
of as necessarily to be allowed the working population by no means
coincides with the "physical subsistence minimum," from which in fact it
always departs by something appreciable. The necessary standard of
living of the working community is in fact made up of two
distinguishable factors: the subsistence minimum, and the requirements
of decorously wasteful consumption--the "decencies of life." These
decencies are no less requisite than the physical necessaries, in point
of workday urgency, and their amount is a matter of use and wont. This
composite standard of living is a practical minimum, below which
consumption will not fall, except by a fluctuating margin of error; the
effect being the same, in point of necessary consumption, as if it were
all of the nature of a physical subsistence minimum.

Loosely speaking, the arrangement should leave nothing appreciable over,
after the requirements of genteel waste and of the workday standard of
consumption have been met. From which in turn it should follow that the
rest of what is comprised under the general caption of "culture" will
find a place only in the interstices of leisure-class expenditure and
only at the hands of aberrant members of the class of the gently-bred.
The working population should have no effectual margin of time, energy
or means for other pursuits than the day's work in the service of the
price-system; so that aberrant individuals in this class, who might by
native propensity incline, e.g., to pursue the sciences or the fine
arts, should have (virtually) no chance to make good. It would be a
virtual suppression of such native gifts among the common folk, not a
definitive and all-inclusive suppression. The state of the case under
the Victorian peace may, again, be taken in illustration of the point;
although under the presumably more effectual control to be looked for in
the pacific future the margin might reasonably be expected to run
somewhat narrower, so that this virtual suppression of cultural talent
among the common men should come nearer a complete suppression.

The working of that free initiative that makes the advance of
civilisation, and also the greater part of its conservation, would in
effect be allowed only in the erratic members of the kept classes; where
at the same time it would have to work against the side-draught of
conventional usage, which discountenances any pursuit that is not
visibly futile according to some accepted manner of futility. Now under
the prospective perfect working of the price-system, bearers of the
banners of civilisation could effectually be drawn only from the kept
classes, the gentlefolk who alone would have the disposal of such free
income as is required for work that has no pecuniary value. And
numerically the gentlefolk are an inconsiderable fraction of the
population. The supply of competently gifted bearers of the community's
culture would accordingly be limited to such as could be drawn by
self-selection from among this inconsiderable proportion of the
community at large.

It may be recalled that in point of heredity, and therefore in point of
native fitness for the maintenance and advance of civilisation, there is
no difference between the gentlefolk and the populace at large; or at
least there is no difference of such a nature as to count in abatement
of the proposition set down above. Some slight, but after all
inconsequential, difference there may be, but such difference as there
is, if any, rather counts against the gentlefolk as keepers of the
cultural advance. The gentlefolk are derived from business; the
gentleman represents a filial generation of the businessman; and if the
class typically is gifted with any peculiar hereditary traits,
therefore, they should presumably be such as typically mark the
successful businessman--astute, prehensile, unscrupulous. For a
generation or two, perhaps to the scriptural third and fourth
generation, it is possible that a diluted rapacity and cunning may
continue to mark the businessman's well-born descendants; but these are
not serviceable traits for the conservation and advancement of the
community's cultural heritage. So that no consideration of special
hereditary fitness in the well-born need be entertained in this
connection.

As to the limitation imposed by the price-system on the supply of
candidates suited by native gift for the human work of civilisation; it
would no doubt, be putting the figure extravagantly high to say that the
gentlefolk, properly speaking, comprise as much as ten percent of the
total population; perhaps something less than one-half of that
percentage would still seem a gross overstatement. But, to cover loose
ends and vagrant cases, the gentlefolk may for the purpose be credited
with so high a percentage of the total population. If ten percent be
allowed, as an outside figure, it follows that the community's
scientists, artists, scholars, and the like individuals given over to
the workday pursuits of the human spirit, are by conventional
restriction to be drawn from one-tenth of the current supply of persons
suited by native gift for these pursuits. Or as it may also be
expressed, in so far as the projected scheme takes effect it should
result in the suppression of nine (or more) out of every ten persons
available for the constructive work of civilisation. The cultural
consequences to be looked for, therefore, should be quite markedly of
the conservative order.

Of course, in actual effect, the retardation or repression of
civilisation by this means, as calculated on these premises, should
reasonably be expected to count up to something appreciably more than
nine-tenths of the gains that might presumably be achieved in the
conceivable absence of the price-system and the regime of investment.
All work of this kind has much of the character of teamwork; so that the
efforts of isolated individuals count for little, and a few working in
more or less of concert and understanding will count for proportionally
much less than many working in concert. The endeavours of the
individuals engaged count cumulatively, to such effect that doubling
their forces will more than double the aggregate efficiency; and
conversely, reducing the number will reduce the effectiveness of their
work by something more than the simple numerical proportion. Indeed, an
undue reduction of numbers in such a case may lead to the total defeat
of the few that are left, and the best endeavours of a dwindling remnant
may be wholly nugatory. There is needed a sense of community and
solidarity, without which the assurance necessary to the work is bound
to falter and dwindle out; and there is also needed a degree of popular
countenance, not to be had by isolated individuals engaged in an
unconventional pursuit of things that are neither to be classed as
spendthrift decorum nor as merchantable goods. In this connection an
isolated one does not count for one, and more than the critical minimum
will count for several per capita. It is a case where the "minimal dose"
is wholly inoperative.

There is not a little reason to believe that consequent upon the
installation of the projected regime of peace at large and secure
investment the critical point in the repression of talent will very
shortly be reached and passed, so that the principle of the "minimal
dose" will come to apply. The point may readily be illustrated by the
case of many British and American towns and neighbourhoods during the
past few decades; where the dominant price-system and its commercial
standards of truth and beauty have over-ruled all inclination to
cultural sanity and put it definitively in abeyance. The cultural, or
perhaps the conventional, residue left over in these cases where
civilisation has gone stale through inefficiency of the minimal dose is
not properly to be found fault with; it is of a blameless character,
conventionally; nor is there any intention here to cast aspersion on the
desolate. The like effects of the like causes are to be seen in the
American colleges and universities, where business principles have
supplanted the pursuit of learning, and where the commercialisation of
aims, ideals, tastes, occupations and personnel is following much the
same lines that have led so many of the country towns effectually
outside the cultural pale. The American university or college is coming
to be an outlier of the price-system, in point of aims, standards and
personnel; hitherto the tradition of learning as a trait of
civilisation, as distinct from business, has not been fully displaced,
although it is now coming to face the passage of the minimal dose. The
like, in a degree, is apparently true latterly for many English, and
still more evidently for many German schools.

In these various instances of what may be called dry-rot or local blight
on the civilised world's culture the decline appears to be due not to a
positive infection of a malignant sort, so much as to a failure of the
active cultural ferment, which has fallen below the critical point of
efficacy; perhaps through an unintended refusal of a livelihood to
persons given over to cultivating the elements of civilisation; perhaps
through the conventional disallowance of the pursuit of any other ends
than competitive gain and competitive spending. Evidently it is
something much more comprehensive in this nature that is reasonably to
be looked for under the prospective regime of peace, in case the
price-system gains that farther impetus and warrant which it should come
in for if the rights of ownership and investment stand over intact, and
so come to enjoy the benefit of a further improved state of the
industrial arts and a further enlarged scale of operation and enhanced
rate of turnover.

* * * * *

To turn back to the point from which this excursion branched off. It has
been presumed all the while that the technological equipment, or the
state of the industrial arts, must continue to advance under the
conditions offered by this regime of peace at large. But the last few
paragraphs will doubtless suggest that such a single-minded addiction to
competitive gain and competitive spending as the stabilised and
amplified price-system would enjoin, must lead to an effectual
retardation, perhaps to a decline, of those material sciences on which
modern technology draws; and that the state of the industrial arts
should therefore cease to advance, if only the scheme of investment and
businesslike sabotage can be made sufficiently secure. That such may be
the outcome is a contingency which the argument will have to meet and to
allow for; but it is after all a contingency that need not be expected
to derange the sequence of events, except in the way of retardation.
Even without further advance in technological expedients or in the
relevant material sciences, there will still necessarily ensue an
effectual advance in the industrial arts, in the sense that further
organisation and enlargement of the material equipment and industrial
processes on lines already securely known and not to be forgotten must
bring an effectually enhanced efficiency of the industrial process as a
whole.

In illustration, it is scarcely to be assumed even as a tentative
hypothesis that the system of transport and communication will not
undergo extension and improvement on the lines already familiar, even in
the absence of new technological contrivances. At the same time a
continued increase of population is to be counted on; which has, for the
purpose in hand, much the same effect as an advance in the industrial
arts. Human contact and mutual understanding will necessarily grow wider
and closer, and will have its effect on the habits of thought prevalent
in the communities that are to live under the promised regime of peace.
The system of transport and communication having to handle a more
voluminous and exacting traffic, in the service of a larger and more
compact population, will have to be organised and administered on
mechanically drawn schedules of time, place, volume, velocity, and
price, of a still more exacting accuracy than hitherto. The like will
necessarily apply throughout the industrial occupations that employ
extensive plant or processes, or that articulate with industrial
processes of that nature; which will necessarily comprise a larger
proportion of the industrial process at large than hitherto.

As has already been remarked more than once in the course of the
argument, a population that lives and does its work, and such play as is
allowed it, in and by an exactingly articulate mechanical system of this
kind will necessarily be an "intelligent" people, in the colloquial
sense of the word; that is to say it will necessarily be a people that
uses printed matter freely and that has some familiarity with the
elements of those material sciences that underlie this mechanically
organised system of appliances and processes. Such a population lives by
and within the framework of the mechanistic logic, and is in a fair way
to lose faith in any proposition that can not be stated convincingly in
terms of this mechanistic logic. Superstitions are liable to lapse by
neglect or disuse in such a community; that is to say propositions of a
non-mechanistic complexion are liable to insensible disestablishment in
such a case; "superstition" in these premises coming to signify whatever
is not of this mechanistic, or "materialistic" character. An exception
to this broad characterisation of non-mechanistic propositions as
"superstition" would be matters that are of the nature of an immediate
deliverance of the senses or of the aesthetic sensibilities.

By a simile it might be said that what so falls under the caption of
"superstition" in such a case is subject to decay by inanition. It
should not be difficult to conceive the general course of such a decay
of superstitions under this unremitting discipline of mechanistic habits
of life. The recent past offers an illustration, in the unemotional
progress of decay that has overtaken religious beliefs in the more
civilised countries, and more particularly among the intellectually
trained workmen of the mechanical industries. The elimination of such
non-mechanistic propositions of the faith has been visibly going on, but
it has not worked out on any uniform plan, nor has it overtaken any
large or compact body of people consistently or abruptly, being of the
nature of obsolescence rather than of set repudiation. But in a slack
and unreflecting fashion the divestment has gone on until the aggregate
effect is unmistakable.

A similar divestment of superstitions is reasonably to be looked for
also in that domain of preconceptions that lies between the supernatural
and the mechanistic. Chief among these time-warped preconceptions--or
superstitions--that so stand over out of the alien past among these
democratic peoples is the institution of property. As is true of
preconceptions touching the supernatural verities, so here too the
article of use and wont in question will not bear formulation in
mechanistic terms and is not congruous with that mechanistic logic that
is incontinently bending the habits of thought of the common man more
and more consistently to its own bent. There is, of course, the
difference that while no class--apart from the servants of the
church--have a material interest in the continued integrity of the
articles of the supernatural faith, there is a strong and stubborn
material interest bound up with the maintenance of this article of the
pecuniary faith; and the class in whom this material interest vests are
also, in effect, invested with the coercive powers of the law.

The law, and the popular preconceptions that give the law its binding
force, go to uphold the established usage and the established
prerogatives on this head; and the disestablishment of the rights of
property and investment therefore is not a simple matter of obsolescence
through neglect. It may confidently be counted on that all the apparatus
of the law and all the coercive agencies of law and order, will be
brought in requisition to uphold the ancient rights of ownership,
whenever any move is made toward their disallowance or restriction. But
then, on the other hand, the movement to disallow or diminish the
prerogatives of ownership is also not to take the innocuous shape of
unstudied neglect. So soon, or rather so far, as the common man comes to
realise that these rights of ownership and investment uniformly work to
his material detriment, at the same time that he has lost the "will to
believe" in any argument that does not run in terms of the mechanistic
logic, it is reasonable to expect that he will take a stand on this
matter; and it is more than likely that the stand taken will be of an
uncompromising kind,--presumably something in the nature of the stand
once taken by recalcitrant Englishmen in protest against the
irresponsible rule of the Stuart sovereign. It is also not likely that
the beneficiaries under these proprietary rights will yield their ground
at all amicably; all the more since they are patently within their
authentic rights in insisting on full discretion in the disposal of
their own possessions; very much as Charles I or James II once were
within their prescriptive right,--which had little to say in the
outcome.

Even apart from "time immemorial" and the patent authenticity of the
institution, there were and are many cogent arguments to be alleged in
favor of the position for which the Stuart sovereigns and their
spokesmen contended. So there are and will be many, perhaps more, cogent
reasons to be alleged for the maintenance of the established law and
order in respect of the rights of ownership and investment. Not least
urgent, nor least real, among these arguments is the puzzling question
of what to put in the place of these rights and of the methods of
control based on them, very much as the analogous question puzzled the
public-spirited men of the Stuart times. All of which goes to argue that
there may be expected to arise a conjuncture of perplexities and
complications, as well as a division of interests and claims. To which
should be added that the division is likely to come to a head so soon as
the balance of forces between the two parties in interest becomes
doubtful, so that either party comes to surmise that the success of its
own aims may depend on its own efforts. And as happens where two
antagonistic parties are each convinced of the justice of its cause, and
in the absence of an umpire, the logical recourse is the wager of
battle.

Granting the premises, there should be no reasonable doubt as to this
eventual cleavage between those who own and those who do not; and of the
premises the only item that is not already an accomplished fact is the
installation of peace at large. The rest of what goes into the argument
is the well-known modern state of the industrial arts, and the equally
well-known price-system; which, in combination, give its character to
the modern state of business enterprise. It is only an unusually broad
instance of an institutional arrangement which has in the course of time
and changing conditions come to work at cross purposes with that
underlying ground of institutional arrangements that takes form in the
commonplace aphorism, Live and let live. With change setting in the
direction familiar to all men today, it is only a question of limited
time when the discrepancy will reach a critical pass, and the
installation of peace may be counted on to hasten this course of things.

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