THE PHASES OF THE ECONOMIC INTEREST (continued 2)

§ 20. In at least two respects the argument falls short of what might be desired. No account is given of the actual procedure of constructive comparison and nothing like a complete survey of the leading ideas and problems of economic theory is undertaken by way of verification. But to have supplied the former in any satisfactory way would have required an unduly extended discussion of the more general, or ethical, phases of constructive comparison. The other deficiency is less regrettable, since the task in question is one that could only be hopefully undertaken and convincingly carried through by a professional economist.

For the present purpose, it is perhaps enough to have found in our economic experience and behavior the same interest in novelty that is so manifest in other departments of life, and the same attainment of new self-validating levels of power and interest, through the acquisition and exploitation of the novel. In our economic experience, no more than elsewhere, is satisfaction an ultimate and self-explanatory term. Satisfaction carries with it always a reference to the level of power and interest that makes it possible and on which it must be measured. To seek satisfaction for its own sake or to hinge one's interest in science or art upon their ability to serve the palpable needs of the present moment—these, together, make up the meaning of what is called Utilitarianism. And Utilitarianism in this sense (which is far less what Mill meant by the term than a tradition he could never, with all his striving, quite get free of), this type of Utilitarianism spells routine. It is the surrender of initiative and control, in the quest for ends in life, for a philistine pleased acceptance of the ends that Nature, assisted by the advertisement-writers, sets before us. But this type of Utilitarianism is less frequent in actual occurrence than its vogue in popular literature and elsewhere may appear to indicate. As a matter of fact, we more often look to satisfaction, not as an end of effort or a condition to be preserved, but as the evidence that an experimental venture has been justified in its event. And this is a widely different matter, for in this there is no inherent implication of a habit-bound or egoistic narrowness of interest in the conceiving or the launching of the venture.

The economic interest, as a function of intelligence, finds its proper expression in a valuation set upon one thing in terms of another—a valuation that is either a step in a settled plan of spending and consumption or marks the passing of an old plan and our embarkation on a new. From such a view it must follow that the economic betterment of an individual or a society can consist neither in the accumulation of material wealth alone nor in a more diversified technical knowledge and skill. For the individual or for a collectivist state there must be added to these things alertness and imagination in the personal quest and discovery of values and a broad and critical intelligence in making the actual trial of them. Without a commensurate gain in these qualities it will avail little to make technical training and industrial opportunity more free or even to make the rewards of effort more equitable and secure. But it has been one of the purposes of this discussion to suggest that just this growth in outlook and intelligence may in the long run be counted on—not indeed as a direct and simple consequence of increasing material abundance but as an expression of an inherent creativeness in man that responds to discipline and education and will not fail to recognize the opportunity it seeks.

Real economic progress is ethical in aim and outcome. We cannot think of the economic interest as restricted in its exercise to a certain sphere or level of effort—such as "the ordinary business of life" or the gaining of a "livelihood" or the satisfaction of our so-called "material" wants, or the pursuit of an enlightened, or an unenlightened, self-regard. Economics has no special relation to "material" or even to commonplace ends. Its materialism lies not in its aim and tendency but in its problem and method. It has no bias toward a lower order of mundane values. It only takes note of the ways and degrees of dependence upon mundane resources and conditions that values of every order must acknowledge. It reminds us that morality and culture, if they are genuine, must know not only what they intend but what they cost. They must understand not only the direct but the indirect and accidental bearing of their purposes upon all of our interests, private and social, that they are likely to affect. The detachment of the economic interest from any particular level or class of values is only the obverse aspect of the special kind of concern it has with values of every sort. The very generality of the economic interest, and the abstractness of the ideas by which it maintains routine or safeguards change in our experience, are what make it unmistakably ethical. Without specific ends of its own, it affords no ground for dogmatism or apologetics. And this indicates as the appropriate task of economic theory not the arrest and thwarting but the steadying and shaping of social change.