§7.As the opportunities of leisure and of some surplus income beyond the current accepted standard of class comfort become more general, this sympathetic imitation of recreations, education and morals, undoubtedly makes for a national standardisation of life, though the enormous discrepancies in economic resources greatly limit the efficacy of such a tendency to unity.But the apparent gain in humanity thus suggested is largely counterworked by the stronger sense of national and especially of racial cleavage which has come with modern world intercourse.If class barriers of conduct, education and feeling are somewhat weakening in the foremost European nations, a clearer and intenser realisation of national and racial barriers takes their place.Every modification of class exclusiveness, and of economic plunder, upon the smaller scale, is compensated by this wider racial exclusiveness, with its accompanying parasitism.The civilised Western world is coming more consciously to mould its practical policy, political and economic, and its sentiments and theories, upon a white exploitation of the lower and the backward peoples.Imperialism is displacing, or at present is crossing, class supremacy, and is evolving an intellectualism and a morals accommodated to the needs of this new social cleavage.It is moving towards a not distant epoch in which Western white nations may, as regards their means of livelihood, be mainly dependent upon the labour of regimented lower peoples in various distant portions of the globe, all or most members of the dominant peoples enjoying a life of comparative pleasure and leisure and a collective sense of personal superiority as the rulers of the earth.
That standards of recreation, education and morals, thus formed and transformed, are likely to contain enormous 'wastes' in their direct and indirect bearing upon economic life, is obvious.How far this waste is to be imputed to imitation of the prestige-possessing habits of 'the leisured class', how far to 'original sin' or the errors or excesses natural to all sorts and conditions of men, it is not possible to ascertain.But it will be evident that in these higher satisfactions, to which an increasing 'surplus' of wealth, leisure and energy can be devoted, will be found the largest wastes.For the conventional expenditure embedded in these strata of the various class standards will be largely directed by motives which are very loosely related to any real standard of organic welfare.One need not exaggerate this expenditure of time or money, or deem it wholly unproductive.
It may even be conceded that few of the pursuits of pleasure are wholly destitute of benefit, nor are prestige and the imitation it engenders wholly valueless.But such practices contain much that is obsolete, incongruous or indigestible, much that is actively injurious, both to the individual and to society.Regarded from the standpoint of pecuniary expenditure, the misdirection of the surplus income into empty or depraved modes of recreation, culture, religion and charity is the largest of all economic wastes.Could it be set forth in veracious accounts, its enormity would impress all reflective minds.How small the total yield of human welfare or even of current pleasurable satisfaction from the idle travel, racing, hunting, motoring, golfing, yachting, betting and gambling, in comparison with the human gain from the work and arts of which they are the futile substitutes! Consider the damage to agriculture, the sheer loss of human energy, the selfishness, sensuality and brutality incidental to many sports, the empty-mindedness, obtuseness of intelligence and insensate pride, the shutting of the senses and the emotions to most of the finer and nobler scenes in the spectacle of nature and the drama of humanity, that are the natural and necessary consequences of 'a sporting life.' Or could one accurately analyse the costs of dilettantism, sham culture, with its monstrous perversions of productive energy in the fields of pedagogy, art, science, and literature, in a descending scale of frivolousness or depravity, as they seize by imitation the awakening mind of ever larger strata of our populations! But even worse than sham intellectualism is the sham morality which tricks itself out in pietistic formulas and charitable practices, so as to evade obedience to the plain laws of human brotherhood and social justice in this world.
The widest and deepest implications of this parasitic life of luxury and leisure, the substitution of recreation for art and exercise, of dilettantism for the life of thought, of pietism, and charity for human fellowship, lie beyond the scope of our formal enquiry.We are concerned with them primarily as affecting economic production and consumption.Sport, dilettantism and charity are for us characteristic products of mal-distribution seizing that surplus-income which is the economic nutriment of social progress, and applying it to evolve a complicated life of futile frivolities for a small leisured class who damage by their contagious example and incitement the standards of the working members of the society in which they exercise dominion.
