VALUE AND WELFARE

Chapter X

THE MEANING OF VALUE

THERE IS a very general feeling at the present time that Western society, or perhaps the modern world, needs a new set of values or a new conception of value. This sense of the need for a new value­orientation transcends and includes economics, since according to the prevailing tradition of economic thinking the price system is a mechanism by which the values of the community are registered through the character and intensity of demand. A great many people seem to think that Western society (or the modern world) has valued the wrong things; that we have overvalued material comfort to the detriment of spiritual values such as freedom, which in consequence we are in a fair way to lose. But since we have never had any intention of relinquishing our freedom or spiritual integrity, the general dissatisfaction is to some extent directed at the social mechanisms through which our valuations take effect, dissatisfaction among other things with the economic mechanism and with traditional ways of economic thinking by which we seem somehow to have been tricked into valuing goods more than freedom and integrity. Could this have happened if our values had expressed a deep and unswerving certainty? Perhaps the most disturbing feature of the whole situation is the fact that the values of Western society have lost their sanction. Whatever they may be­­ whether or not we have valued the wrong things­­ we seem no longer to value anything with "abiding faith." This, as so many commentators have pointed out, is the chief weakness of the democracies. Although we see no merit whatever in the beliefs of other peoples in the racial superiority of the "Herrenvolk" or the divine mission of the Mikado, we are obliged to confess that we believe nothing any longer with the intensity of conviction which they are able to muster for their preposterous superstitions.

There is a reason for this which must be understood before there can be any possibility of correcting the condition. Belief itself is at a discount in the modern Western world. The progress of science has undermined the sanctions upon which hitherto the values of all communities have been founded. The whole difficulty is implicit in Sumner's doctrine of the "mores." Values are determined by the mores; the mores are determined by immemorial tradition; and immemorial tradition "just grows." Science has been unable to identify any immanent principle of spiritual growth. Indeed all the evidence points in the other direction. As Sumner declared with tedious reiteration, the mores can make anything right or wrong. The physical universe obviously does impose certain limits on the absurdity and bestiality of social practices. The Hindu practice of suttee made suicide mandatory for widows, but the mores which made suicide mandatory at the age of ten would not long continue to prevail. But short of the extinction of the community there is no limit to the variety of social practice and no general standard of value. Moreover, the intensity with which any value may be held is no index to its validity. We do not honor Hindu widows for the unflinching heroism with which they assume their position in their husband's funeral pyres. Rather do we deplore the state of mind and culture which induces that sort of unthinking dedication to custom, however hallowed.

This is a position from which we cannot recede, for it is a direct consequence of the whole scientific way of thinking. Not only is the mores­principle one of the most widely held and securely established of all the categories of social analysis, one which underlies and conditions all the modern work in all the social sciences; it is a consequence of scientific method itself and as such would inevitably reappear even if all the of all the social sciences were to be liquidated by some universal totalitarian regime. So long as the laboratory sciences persist­­ and no political regime, however benighted, could any longer fail to appreciate the dependence of its own mechanized might upon laboratory science­­ it is inevitable that laboratory techniques will be applied to the phenomena of human behavior, since there is no line of hard and fast demarcation between human and non­human phenomena. The control of subject peoples by the manipulation of calories and vitamins is a tacit admission that the superiority of the "Herrenvolk" derives not from "blood" but from digestion. Ministers of public "information" may suppress the dissemination of this truth; but they cannot prevent its existence and therefore its possible redissemination at some future time. Minerals are essential to mechanized might; prospecting is essential to obtaining minerals; geology is essential to prospecting; and archeology is instrumentally inseparable from geology. It is impossible to dig without turning up human remains, and such remains are in fact the raw materials of a science of society. Books can be burned; but unless the clock is turned back virtually to the stone age, they will inevitably be written again, since the materials from which the present books have drawn their facts will still exist and in even in greater profusion. And these books will inevitably restore the mores theory, since that theory is only a generalization of the fact of the variety of cultures.

It is this impasse in contemporary social thinking of which the present public confusion is the consequence. We have established the relativity of mores, a principle to which we have been led by the convergence of analytical techniques which cannot be gainsaid one from which therefore we cannot now recede. It seems to extend to every sort of social behavior, including all values whatsoever, and to result in a sort of intellectual nihilism which not only baulks further social thinking but entangles our present ideas in all sorts of contradictions. We seem even to be caught in the enigma of the Cretan who said that all Cretans are liars. If all values are relative, including intellectual values, then it would seem to follow that modern scientific thinking also is relative to the culture which accredits it, including social thinking, including the principle that all values are relative.

For economics in particular this impasse is disastrous. Economics is nothing if it is not a science of value. The founders of the classical tradition of political economy held the belief of the eighteenth and earlier centuries that genuine and stable, if not eternal, values do exist and are somehow knowable; that such values are registered in demand and therefore measured by price; and hence that the economic affairs of commercial society are meaningful, since they are organized by price which is the measure of value. The mores principle completely destroys this theory. If the things that people value are just the things those people happen to value, then demand means nothing beyond the bare fact that is what is demanded, and price means nothing more than the particular money­ratio at which something or other happened to be bought and sold; and the whole economic "system" of modern society is no system at all and means nothing but that such is the way things happen to be wherever they happened to be that way.

Contemporary economists are only too well aware of this difficulty. They have responded to it, generally speaking, in two ways: by giving up economic "theory" as a bad job and devoting themselves to empirical studies of the tin­plate and cottonseed oil industries and such like things; and by reading the whole value problem of value out of economics­­ referring it back to philosophy, whence it came­­ and devoting themselves with great assiduity and amazing ingenuity of mathematical technique to the analysis of "price relations." No sneer need be directed at empirical investigations. We very much need to know something of what is going on in the various industries. But price either means something or not. If not, what is the point to "price analysis"? If so, just what does it mean? The economist may determine to take wants as they come, to accept them as "given" and treat them as "primary data," but he is still under the necessity of assuming that they mean something to somebody, if not to him. If they mean nothing­­ and that is the corollary of the mores principle­­ then the whole of theoretical price analysis falls to the ground.

The only possibility of escape form mores­nihilism is by the further prosecution of the analysis from which that principle itself has been derived. If all judgements are relative to the ceremonial practices and traditional beliefs of the communities which make them, as we know some judgements are­­ if, for example, the analysis of social behavior in which we are now engaged is qualitatively indistinguishable from the myth­making of savage society­­ then our civilization is probably doomed. Loss of conviction is without doubt a very grave disaster. But is modern science no different from savage myth­making? Is Sumner's identification of mores the last word in social analysis? Or is it possible that by pursuing the investigation we may learn still more about the forces which are at work in human behavior and social development, and that further understanding may resolve the impasse which partial knowledge seems to have created? Surely these questions are self­answering. We have come to realize, not without dismay, that many of the values which our society has inherited are of dubious validity; but the assurance with which we pronounce this judgement offers a marked contrast to the disenchantment with which we view even our own legendary heritage. We no longer believe ourselves to be a "chosen people"; but our doubt in this regard is posited on our comparative certainty with regard to the theorems of science of which this negative judgement is one. Our doubt is born of certainty.

We do in fact make a distinction of kind between science and mythology, and social investigation did not come to an end with William Graham Sumner. Archeological exploration, the comparative study of existing cultures, the firsthand examination of the human animal, and theoretical analysis of social behavior, all have flourished more luxuriantly during the last few decades than ever before, and we have learned a very great deal. What we have not learned does not invalidate Sumner's conception of mores, but it does quite definitely establish the existence of another sort of behavior quite distinct from that with which Sumner was primarily concerned and quite different from it in every respect.

In a word, we have learned to distinguish technological from ceremonial behavior functions. We have learned that ceremonial purity, such as results from having "kept all the commandments," is indissociable from the system of relationships of rank and status and is in effect a matter of "knowing one's place" in the "well­established order of society"; and we have learned that this whole scheme of things derives its sanction from tribal legends and is therefore unamenable to change, since the legends from which all ceremonial sanctions come are a purportedly true account of what actually happened in the past­­ the divine descent of the tribal ancestor, and all the rest­­ which is accordingly inalterable. Such practices are nevertheless altered. They are altered by changes in the material setting of community life which result from the development of technical innovations, tools and skills such as boats and seamanship by use of which people travel from the old habitat to a new one in which, perhaps, the fact that their are no volcanoes to be appeased by human sacrifice means that the practice of human sacrifice disappears. We have learned that such technological innovations come about as a result of the physical character of tools which, like all physical objects, are capable of being combined. We know with certainty that inventions and discoveries are combinations of tools, instruments, and instrumentally manipulated materials; and that the more tools there are, the greater is the potentiality of technological innovation and discovery. Thus we have learned that this process of technological innovation is the dynamic force in social change.

But is it "good"? This is a question of the nature of value. Is "value," that is to say distinctions of "good" and "bad," exclusively ceremonial in character? If so­­ if distinctions of good and bad are necessarily determined by the mores­­ then technological development, however dynamic, is without moral significance and offers no avenue of escape form mores­ nihilism. But if the technological process is itself the locus of value, the case is very different. This is a question of fact. What in fact is the nature of value? what do we actually mean by value? What is it that we are trying to say­­ not what should we think and say, but what in fact are we thinking and saying when we talk about values? How do we actually evaluate ?

It is one of our immemorial traditions that values are unique phenomena, sui generis, different from everything else in heaven and earth. Thus "choosing" between virtue and transgression, or between lemon and strawberry, is thought to be a unique act, different from every other sort of act which man is capable. The "decision" between right and wrong, or between present consumption and the accumulation of capital, is thought to be a unique sort of decision; and the same is true of value "judgement." Other words are also used with reference to the act of valuation, but it is unnecessary to extend the list. The point is that all are used with other connotations from which however the value­ connotation is in all cases thought to be quite distinct. The questions is, Is this distinction valid? Is value in fact the unique phenomenon it has been traditionally held to be? Is choice, decision, or judgement between values a different sort of choice, decision, or judgement from other choices, decisions, or judgements ?

There is a sense in which every act is a choice, a decision, and a judgement. A mechanic reaches for a tool, or a housewife for a pan. Neither one takes what comes at random. The mechanic selects a wrench which he "judges" to be suitable. he "decides" which of two will more exactly fit his bolt and "chooses" that one. Clearly this issue is one of fact, that is, it is capable of being instrumentally verified. If both wrenches are actually tried, it can be established beyond argument which one fits the bolt and which does not. Here is a institution in which, apparently, there is no room for those differences of taste for which there is no accounting except in terms of unique value­ judgements. And yet a bystander may remark, "I like to use a pipe wrench for all those jobs"; or even, "We Joneses prefer pipe wrenches." The mechanic might well reply, "In that case you Joneses are fools," and might proceed to document his "judgement" by pointing out the fact that a pipe wrench cuts the head of the bolt and therefore prevents the use at any future time of a wrench which exactly fits it; and continued use of the pipe wrench may so cut the bolt that even the teeth of the pipe wrench will not longer take hold of it. To this Mr. Jones may reply that he nevertheless prefers to use a pipe wrench "because he likes it," because it gives him "satisfaction"; but the only effect of these remarks is to establish him as a fool who is ignorant even of his own folly.

Wherein is this case different from any other choice or decision? There are situations, to be sure, in which instrumental verification of a given judgement or choice is extremely difficult owing to the complexity of the materials involved, or even momentarily impossible owing to the absence of the materials that are essential for complete demonstration. This is true to a notable degree of judgements in the field of the fine arts. People whose knowledge of painting, for example, is confessedly limited nevertheless do not hesitate to express preferences and to insist not only that they know what they like but also that what they like is good. The eminent British critic (and painter ) , Mr. R. H. Wilenski, arguing that judgements of paintings are valid to the degree to which they are based on intimate and detailed knowledge, insists strongly that a judgement such as this one is not judgement at all but autobiography. "For when a man says, "This picture gives me a thrill and that does not,' he is not talking about the pictures, he is merely talking about himself. When he has confessed to the thrill if fifty different cases we begin to know something about him." But even so, it is his previous experiences of pictures, his knowledge such as it is, which this man's judgement is revealing, as Mr. Wilenski himself declares in other passages.

In part this knowledge and experience are instrumental and make the same appeal to instrumental verification as do bolt and wrench. People frequently express their delight in a certain type of landscape painting. This means in the first place that they are at least aware that landscapes have been painted for many years and by many painters of the highest reputation, and hence are "picturesque." More specifically it may perhaps mean that the landscape under consideration bears some resemblance to the work of Corot's "middle period" with the which the market was flooded in the latter part of the nineteenth century, with the result that many people's childhood recollections are of prints and debased imitations of Corot's (poorer) work. They may never have known Corot's name; and yet if the present work could be hung alongside samples of the work of Watteau, Constable, Cezanne, Dali, and Corot's popular style, they would unhesitatingly identity the Corot as sharing with the present work the qualities which make a picture "what they like." This is what Mr. Wilenski calls an "emotive fragment" Its presence and identity are capable of instrumental verification, given adequate materials; and its recognition can thus be proved to be the substance of the judgment and "choice" of the present picture, precisely as judgement of fit determines the choice of a wrench. The question is, Precisely what picture fits our emotional experience ?

But judgment of a picture is affected in considerable degree by other considerations which, although they are never entirely absent even from the machine shop and the laboratory, play a much less conspicuous part in those situations. Asked which of two pieces of electrical apparatus will work more effectively in a given mechanism, many people will excuse themselves from expressing a "choice," or judgement, on grounds of ignorance; but few people ever go thought an art museum without expressing any preference. Here there is a moral imperative. Whereas mechanics is a mere craft of which anyone may without shame confess his ignorance, to be wholly unresponsive to art is definitely shameful. For art is "a fine thing" by common consent, that is by rule of mores; and the mores, having placed us all under necessity of "admiring" works of art, proceed to supply us with simple rules for identifying proper objects of admiration. The good pictures are the ones the right people admire.

It is this quality, of course, which distinguishes moral as well as esthetic "choices" and "judgements." If few people decline to choose among objects of beauty, nobody ever declines to give advice; for nobody con confess to ignorance of "right" and "wrong." Not only do the mores forbid such a thing; they also provide simple rules well within the comprehension of all. Right is what the right people do publicly, and vice versa.

Judgements of this kind may become a bit complicated; but they are still objective and verifiable, and in this sense identical with the judgment which determines the choice of a tool. Who are the right people and what is actually done by them are matters of fact. An apprentice might be advised to watch a skilled mechanic and use the same tools he uses, just as a child is advised to follow the example of the right people in all things. If there is a difference, it is only one of meretriciousness.

As this word suggests, esthetic judgement may be serviceable material for analysis at this point also. We frequently identify works of art as meretricious, meaning that they are in some sense false. In what sense this is the case can often be stated accurately and in detail. For a supposedly original artist to represent a copy of another painter's picture as his own wold be a fraud, as would also be the case if he were to represent as an original what is really a duplicate of an earlier picture of his own. Furthermore pictures may be copies in different degrees. A given canvas may be original and unique as regards its subject. That is, it may be an unmistakable likeness of a sitter of whom no other portrait exists. And yet as regards treatment­­ color scheme, composition, manner of applying paint to canvas, etc, etc.­­ it may be a deliberate and slavish imitation of some other painter's work. It is this criticism which has so often been directed at the work of Sargent, for example, of which Mr. Wilenski remarks that "... in his landscapes his technique was the photographic naturalistic yellow and purple parody of the French Impressionist's spectrum palette," and "Occasionally Sargent left his naturalistic techniques in his wardrobe and made a successful imitation of a portrait by Van Dyck." Or a painter may imitate himself, as Corot did from 1850 to 1870, turning out hundreds of canvases all exactly alike. Such work is meretricious in the sense that it purports to represent original creative effort but in fact does not.

The conception of moral value in terms of conformity is meretricious in precisely the same sense. A "choice" or "decision" which is really a sidelong imitation of the behavior of somebody else certainly is not a genuine decision or choice, just as an apprentice's imitation of a master mechanic does not represent genuine skill. Social scientists declare that moral behavior is one hundred percent imitative, and copybook moralizing (like copybook art) bears them out; but not one of the great moral leaders of mankind whose sincerity is universally acknowledged has ever been satisfied with conformity. Nor has any moral leader been content to accept the mores; for the mores, too, are meretricious.

Social scientists have always hesitated to make unequivocal pronouncement of the baselessness of the mores and the falsehood of the superstitions from which they derive their supposed sanction. Perhaps this reluctance to be unequivocally clear is due in part to realization of the calamitousness of their moral nihilism were it to be shared by the whole community. Or it may be due to the scientists' conscientious realization of the limitations of present knowledge. Falsehood is necessarily relative to truth. Before it is possible to declare that superstition is false, some standard of comparison must exist; and prior to recent studies of technology this seemed not to be the case. With the recognition of the continuity of science and technology, however, such a standard of comparison has now been provided. Consequently it is now quite evident that all myths are quasi­scientific explanations of the phenomena of group behavior, just as all dreams, even the waking dreams of disordered minds, are projections of the physical universe in which we work with tools. Jove's thunderbolts are quasi­tools, and so are the simulacra into which witches insert pins as quasi­weapons. The blight which will afflict the crops as a result of an outrage to the mores is a real, physical affliction brought on by a series of quasi­mechanical causes and effects. Knowing something about electrical discharges, we now declare Jove and his thunderbolts to have been wholly imaginary, just as we declare without equivocation that phlogiston was a lamentable error; and in doing so we unhesitatingly subject Jove to the test of continuity with the tool­activities of mankind, just as we do with phlogiston.

Mores are inevitably subject to the same test. Always the mores have purported to be a true­­ that is quasi­technological­­ account of what would happen "if." Even conformity has this significance. To assume that all will be well if one walks uprightly in the eyes of the community is to predicate that the community is literally indestructible; and this is a matter of fact, subject to instrumental test. In this sense no system of mores has ever been "other­worldly." Always it is the preservation and salvation of mankind here and now that is at issue. It is to be presumed that Jesus advocated turning the other check as a measure conducive to immediate human welfare, here and now. The master­pattern of all prayer is, "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven." The Buddhist may contemplate extinction as the highest good; but this is a conception of the meaning of the universe, analogous to the scientific conception of a "contracting" universe, and no more postulates the inefficacy of Buddhism in the preset affairs of man than such an astronomical theory by forecasting ultimate extinction postulates the inefficacy of science.

To put the linkage of traditional belief to instrumental fact another way, no creed has ever represented itself as incredible. The definition of faith as "Believing' things you know ain't so," or "Credo quia impossibilis," is that of small boys and small minds, one which the church and the community necessarily reject. Throughout the ages the unanimous effort of spiritual, moral, and intellectual leaders has been to bring the mysteries of life into effective relation with the commonplaces. That is why such leaders have again and again sought to free their communities from incrustation by ideas and action­patterns which the advancement of material knowledge and instrumental skills has at length revealed to be without effect. Always the constructive effort of such leadership has been in the direction of some sort of integration of the "spiritual" ideals and truths with the physical realities of existence. The integration may now seem to have been the other way around, and to have been a flight form the commonplace to the transcendental. But the rain maker never carries occultism to the point of declaring that his rain is falling when none is actually in evidence, and the sophisticated transcendentalism by which modern thought has sought to integrate the two aspects of the universe does not offer itself as a substitute for machine technology as a means of subsistence. In declaring that science as a whole falls short of Absolute Truth modern transcendentalism in effect admits the efficacy of science and technology at every particular point as working guides to ordinary living. We are now free to follow science in all things provided only that out of respect to immemorial tradition we deny that we are doing so.

With the clear recognition of the meretriciousness of mores which comes of an understanding of the role of technology in social behavior we are for the first time in a position to resolve the dualism by which all civilization has been plagued and to recognize that all acts of choice, judgement, and decision are identical at least in their intent. By intent every judgement is a determination of fact. Every decision intends to take account of facts, and every choice has as its prototype the mechanics's choice of the right tool.

It is the technological continuum which is, and has always been, the locus of value; and it has this meaning because of its continuity. This continuum is identical with what John Dewey has called "the continuum of inquiry," and its significance as the locus of value­­ including economic value­­ may be understood in terms of the logical significance of the instrumental continuum.

Logicians have always conceived truth in terms of the process of "verification," which is to say "true­making." A proposition is true if the conclusion it implies, or the predictions which it makes, are "verified." What sort of act is a "verification" ? We sometimes talk as though prediction in this scientific sense were synonymous with prophecy; as though it were a peculiarly meritorious achievement on the part of astronomers to predict eclipses years ahead; and as though the social sciences stood self­condemned by their inability to predict the outcome of an election just a few months off. But this is a sad misconception of the scientific process. Physical scientists are no better able to predict the weather on election day than social scientists are to forecast the vote, and no astronomer is in a position to guarantee any eclipse. For all we know to the contrary the sun may collide with an unknown comet next week. All scientific prediction is essentially instrumental. Using certain specified apparatus a scientist gets certain results, and he announces these results with the implied "prediction" that if any other scientist performs the same operations with the same apparatus he will get the same results. Following such an announcement other scientists do assemble apparatus according to the specifications and try it out. If they do get the same results, this is considered to be a "verification" of the original research.

This kind of "prediction" and "verification" extends not only to all the sciences, social as well as physical; it is the common experience of the race. A housewife, following a familiar recipe for producing a cake, gets an unexpected result; and straightway she invites her neighbor to try out the same procedure. If she also gets the same result, this "verifies" the original operation, the result of which is thus "proved" to be due not to any lack of skill or mistake in following the recipe but to some other factor as yet unknown. When Sumner, for example, announced that his lifelong collection of data indicated a very wide variety of social practices, in effect he invited others to collect data of the same kind. This has of course been done, and Sumner's results have been copiously verified.

What we call truth is a function of this procedure. That is, it derives from the use of instruments, tools, and instrumentally manipulated materials. The very word, "truth," is in effect a synonym for continuity, and the continuity it postulates is that of instruments and tools­­ that is to say, technology. Deny this continuity by assuming the impossibility of repeating instrumental procedures, and truth itself straightway disappears.

Such is also the meaning of value. In the same sense the word "value" is a synonym for continuity, and the continuity of which it is a synonym is technological continuity. "Value" means continuity, literally; and that is its sole meaning. If anyone doubts this, let him try the simple experiment of substituting the word "continuity" for "value" in as many situations as he can. He will make two discoveries. One is the extreme vagueness, or scope of the word "value," which is actually used in an indefinitely wide variety of situations; and the other is the discovery that in all these situations it is used as a relational term to point to some particular stream of relationships. The one meaning all these situations have in common is this stream­nexus or continuity. In this sense truth itself is but one kind of value, as indeed logicians have often noted. but whatever the differences of emphasis in all these value­situations, there is still an underlying identity. Philosophers speak of "the true, the good, and the beautiful," and always the assumption is that logical values, moral values, and esthetic values have something in common. What they have in common is the technological (or instrumental) continuum to which all make reference and from which all derive their meaning.

Mankind is a tool­using species. All that man has done and thought and felt has been achieved by the use of tools. The continuity of civilization is the continuity of tools. All the arts, all the sciences, and the whole elaboration of organized activity by which "the great society," as Graham Wallas called it, has come to be, together owe their existence and derive their substance from the continuity which links the surrealist's pigments to the clays with which the Aurignacian caves were daubed, and in terms of which the cyclotron is but a continuation of Neanderthal experiments in chipping flint.

Economic value is no exception to this rule. Throughout the ages every community has owed its existence to its heritage of tools and apparatus, the "know­how" which is a function of the tools and the materials which owe their significance to the tools with which they are manipulated. It is by carrying on this instrumentally organized activity that every community­­ and each separate individual­­ "makes a living." Whatever contributes to carrying on this activity is economically valuable, and whatever arrests, or even hinders this activity is therefore economically deleterious. In the last analysis every economic choice or decision, from the shopper's choice between two brands of patent breakfast food to decisions of state upon matters of general economic policy, involves a judgement as to which of the alternatives presented will in fact contribute most to the continued efficient working of the technological system upon which all life depends.

The criterion of every economic judgement is "keeping the machines running." Such a phrase may have an ugly sound to conventional ears. But it must be remembered that keeping the machines running is a complex business. It used to thought (by some) that the way to keep machines running is to chain children to them, and that literature, painting, and music exist only for the delectation of the rich; but surely no one thinks so any longer. Surely no one supposes today that a community produces poetry and maintains symphony orchestras as the expense of its working efficiency. Does it detract from the dignity of the importance of "the finer things of life" to recognize that people do better work by virtue of living with them? Even in the midst of their great war effort­­ perhaps because of it !­­ the British have found that "Music While You Work" programs originating in the government's own studios and transmitted to the actual work­ rooms of munitions factories have in fact heightened industrial effort; and if "Deep in the Heart of Texas" has proved more popular than the symphonies of William Walton and Vaughan Williams, is this a judgement upon "serious" music or upon a frivolous and antiquated educational system and a social order which allows symphonic music still to remain outside the common experience of the majority of the people? Is it a condemnation of Mr. Walter Damrosch that as a result of his efforts millions of school children are now growing up in America who have listened weekly to the greatest masterpieces of musical literature throughout their school careers and may therefore some day run the machines better for listening to Bach and Beethoven ?

"But machines are only a means !" Are they? Deeply rooted in our thinking is the idea of a metaphysical dualism which bifurcates all human experience and even the universe itself. The supposed bifurcation of experience into "means" and "ends" is a manifestation of this dualism. As such it has been a chief object of attack in all of Dewey's discussions of value and related problems. It should be quite unnecessary to recapitulate his analysis here. "Means" and "ends" are no more distinct orders of phenomena than causes and effects, it is now, one hopes, universally understood that all causes and all effects are such relatively to each other; that no substance or event is of its own character inherently a cause, or an effect; but that every cause is so designated with reference to some particular inquiry in terms of which something has been taken as a given effect, or vice versa. In similar fashion we do distinguish, the particular means by which a given end is to be arrived at, understanding all the while that what is the end in view of certain means (as eating lunch may be the end to which trudging home may be the means) is not on that account the "end and aim" of all existence but is itself the means to something else. It is not from this working distinction that we have educed the metaphysical principle of the primacy of "ends" but from immemorial traditions of ceremony and superstition in which an imaginary universe has always been represented as the "real" one, the "first cause" of which the work­a­day world is only an effect, and the "end" to which common existence is but the "means."

Economists who repeat the familar adage to the effect that consumption is the end for which all economic activity is carried on may protest that they have no such metaphysical principle in mind. But what do they have in mind? Students commonly declare that "it stands to reason" that consumption is an "end" and production a "means." But why does it stand to reason? No particular act of consumption has any such significance. Indeed, as economists well know, the subsistence of the worker is one of the conventional "costs of production." Is consumption a state of grace in the spiritual sense, one which like salvation may be regarded as a consummatory state at which one arrives by (productive) penance and divine intercession? Without question that is the set of ideas which gave meaning to the adage in the mind of Adam Smith, and that is the background in terms of which such a proposition still seems to "stand to reason." What it stands to is not reason but tradition.

To challenge this tradition is not to assert that production is the "end"; it is rather to dismiss the whole dualism of metaphysical distinct states of grace in favor of the continuity of technological process. To speak of keeping the machines running is not to subordinate "human life" to "mere machines." What that phrase has reference to is the whole life­activity in which mankind has always been engaged. It is literally co­extensive with life itself, identical with the existence and continuance of the species, and it is the locus of value because of this integral continuity. To speak of value is speak of the relation of any single act­­ choice, preference, decision, or judgement­­ to the whole life­process.

To all those who are accustomed to think of price as the "measure" of economic value it will seem to be a great defect of the conception of economic value in terms of technological process that it lacks the quantitative certainty of price. But the quantitative certainty of price is an illusion, the very illusion from which economic thinking is now struggling to free itself. So accustomed have we become to thinking that in the field of economics values are known, definitely and quantitatively, that we have lost all sense of what a prodigious anomaly this is. In no other field of human experience does value make itself known in any such definite and quantitative way. Shall we say that moral and esthetic judgements are utterly defective so long as they fail to follow an accounting system in which units of beauty and virtue are enumerated? Moral and esthetic judgments are difficult. They are subject to error. Are they therefore in all cases utterly invalid? Few of us are prepared to make any such admission.

On the contrary it is the great defect of the price theory of economic value and the great embarrassment of orthodox economic thinking that prices makes economic value seem very much more definite and quantitative than it is. There are three notable respects in which this is the case. For one thing, price as we say "sets a value" on goods and services which by other and less quantitative standards of value we do not hesitate to designate as "anti­social." These, we have become accustomed to say, are economic values but not moral values. Just what does this mean? Does it mean that economic values are not real values? But the whole point to the price theory of value is that price is a social mechanism by virtue of which the community achieves some sort of value­economy of real significance. Or is it only a value­ mechanism, without real significance, a maximization of satisfactions whatever they may be, in the Mandevillian sense, public virtue being the summation of private vices? There is no escape from the paradox that price quantifies vice quite as readily as virtue except total escape, by pushing the whole problem out the back door with the declaration that for economics (with its majesty certainty) "wants are primary data."

Price also quantifies mistakes. Price can be supposed to measure value only inasmuch as it achieves a common denominator of "wants" registered in purchases. But purchases are acts of folly as well as of good judgment. This has been obvious all along, and has been the basis of one of the most familiar and persistent criticisms of the price theory of value. That theory, so runs the saying, endows the "economic man" with a degree of skill in managing his affairs which would make his fortune as a professional purchasing agent or a certified public accountant. That is, prices can be assumed to "measure value" only on the assumption that the people whose "wants" and other business judgements they summarize are all endowed with the wisdom of Solomon. Since they are not so endowed, prices do not measure real values but only quantify the judgements people make antecedent to their price transactions. Whether those judgements are wise or foolish is determined not by the pricing mechanism but by their relation to the technological life­stream.

Furthermore all the transactions which the pricing mechanism quantifies are conducted within the limits of the prevailing distribution of financial means. Economists are well aware of this limitation, and when they are speaking of the economic welfare of the community as a whole, they usually take account of it in some such fashion as this: the price systems brings about the great sum of satisfactions that is possible in view of the prevailing distribution of income. With regard to the welfare of the community this is as much as to say that slavery is the happiest arrangement that is possible consonant with the existence of slavery. With regard to value what it means is that price registers the limitations which are imposed upon the choices, preferences, decisions, and judgements of the members of the community by existing financial arrangements. But this also is as much as to say that real value is antecedent to price and is registered in price only to a very limited degree.

The certainty which price quantification seems to impute to economic values is the chief illusion under which economic thinking has labored throughout the period of dominance of the classical tradition. It is not the purpose of these paragraphs to rehearse again all the intellectual shortcomings of that tradition, but only to point out how indissociable they are from he quantitative rigidity of price. The apprehension of value, not less than the apprehension of truth and beauty, is a difficult and complicated business, subject to continual error and significant only by virtue of continuing verification and correction; and this is true of the valuation of the materials and activities of everyday living no less than of the highest and finest things of life. If economic value means anything at all, its meaning is that of a gradual and continuous realization of a more effective organization of the technological life­process.

The price system is not altogether unrelated to this process. Indeed, if it were, it could never have gained ascendancy over the economic thinking of the modern community. But it has the same relation to the actual life­process which the moving picture has. In the course of the continuous experiment of living we do make purchases, and those purchases ­­like the opening of the shutter of the moving­picture camera­­ take instantaneous photographs of the real process at isolated and widely separated moments. It is these fragmentary snapshots of reality which are registered in price. Because wants change and because successive price transactions do register the change, just as successive photographs do give evidence of movements which have occurred in the interval between snapshots, some proponents of the price theory of economic value have declared that the price system is true democracy, a democracy in which a vote is cast every time a purchase is made. This comparison is indeed significant, since it identifies the illusion of economic certainty with the illusion of political certainty. Is voting the essence of democracy? We sometimes say that every people enjoys the government it deserves; but this a singularly retributive conception of government. Surely the essence of democracy is to be seen not in the succession of electorial accidents but in the process of public information and discussion and resolution by the which accidents of the ballot box are mitigated. As Dewey would say, the essence of democracy is education, the continuous process of public enlightenment: and this is true of economic no less than of political life. The quantitative certainty of price is a misrepresentation of the realities of economic life just as the quantitative certainty of election returns is a cynical misrepresentation of political reality. In both situations we have a singular disposition to shirk the continuous effort of judgement by appeal to these spurious certainties. No political thinking need be done between elections, we sometimes say in effect, because the last election is a mandate which must prevail until another ballot is recorded; and no more economic thinking ever need be done than what is recorded in the price system. This is always a welcome relief, one which we have sought to enjoy throughout modern times. As professor Heckscher has remarked of the triumph of laissez faire over mercantilism, "Not the least reason for adherence to laissez­faire principles was the fact that they offered a very welcome pretext for doing nothing when nobody knew what to do." In appearance, at least, confusion is greater than ever today. Whereas in the eighteenth century no one knew what to do about the industrial system, today no one knows what to do about anything; and in the moral vacuum of the twentieth century we still find it very comforting to reflect that although wants have no general significance, they are at least brought to quantitative exactitude by price.

But nature abhors a vacuum, moral no less than physical, and the twentieth century is not the last. Social analysis has not stopped with the discovery of the diversity of ceremonial practices and conventional evaluations. There is also the continuity of tools, in terms of which­­ in spite of ceremonial diversities­­ a basic continuity of judgement has always prevailed. This continuity still prevails and is the basis of valid judgement today as it has always been. For every man the real and valid judgements of economic value are those he makes between purchases, judgements of value in use as economists once said, tested and verified by the way things work in the continuous effort of existence. It is to this test that all economic values are in fact submitted, those of public policy affecting the industrial system as a whole no less than those of private life. For every individual and for the community the criterion of value is the continuation of the life­process­­ keeping the machines running. That is what we have in fact been doing throughout the ages, and that is what we must continue to do and do continually better­­ technologically better­­ if we are to continue and exceed the achievements of the past.

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Continue on to Chapter 11 of The Theory of Economic Progress