第56章 HUMAN UTILITY OFCONSUMPTION(7)

As reasoning man with his more complex life has more chances of going wrong than lower animals guided by instincts along a narrow life, so with each advance in the complexity of human life these chances of error multiply.

The explanation of this expanding scope for error is not that reason is an inferior instrument to instinct.Even in matters of 'life and death', with which.animal nature is primarily concerned, reason must be accounted in the main an improvement upon instinct.For though a particular instinct works more easily and accurately in an absolutely uniform environment, reason deals more successfully with eccentricities and changes.Its essential quality is this superior adaptiveness.Therefore, in handling an environment, which not only is various and ever changing by its own nature, but is made more various and more changing by the interference of man, the human reason must work more successfully even for purposes of physical survival than any array of instincts could.In the struggle for a sufficient regular supply of food, or in the war against microbes, the rationalism of modern science and industry performs 'survival' work for which the exactitude of animal instinct is essentially unfitted.

The view then that error and waste necessarily increase with the development of human society is not based upon any inferiority of reason to instinct.

It is due to the fact that, as humanity evolves further, a smaller proportion of its total energy is needed for mere survival, and a larger proportion is free for purposes of specific and individual progress.Now, the natural economy for survival, whether working by instinct or by reason, is far more rigorously enforced than the economy for progress.So long as the arts of industry are so crude as to absorb almost all the available work of man in provision for survival, the scope for waste is rigorously circumscribed.

But as industry develops to a stage that yields a considerable 'surplus'

beyond the needs for mere survival, the possibility of waste increases.

For, then, it becomes possible for individuals, or groups within a community, to divert to purposes of excessive personal enjoyment the surplus of productive power which, 'economically' directed by Nature or Reason, would have served to raise the general level of well-being.

The widest aspect of this phenomenon does not concern us here.It will be the subject of later commentary.We are here concerned only to explain why it is likely that, as wealth grows, waste also will grow, and why the higher standards of comfort in a nation or a class will contain a larger proportion of socially wasteful or injurious goods.Nature's guarantee of the sound organic use of the basic constituents of a standard of consumption does not extend with the same force to the conveniences, comforts and luxuries built upon this basis.Though one need not assume that no organically sound instinct of selection or rejection operates in the adoption of new comforts or luxuries, that natural safeguard must certainly be accounted weaker and less reliable.As we study presently the actual modes by which the higher ingredients are adopted into a class standard, we shall see that this assumption is borne out by experience, and that considerations of organic welfare play a rapidly diminishing part in determining the spread of most of the higher forms of material and intellectual consumption.

NOTES:

1.Collective or cooperative consumption outside the home or family is of course increasing.Not only have we municipal supplies for pub1ic use, e.g., schools, libraries, museums, parks, baths, lighting, etc., but many forms of private expenditure of income on educational, recreative, philanthrophic and other cooperative modes of consumption.

2.For the fullest and most recent exposition of this theory see Mr.

J.M.Robertson's The Evolution of States (Watts & Co.).