第61章 CLASS STANDARDS OFCONSUMPTION(5)
Such accretions to a standard of consumption may be regarded as possessing guarantees of utility or safeguards against strong positive disutility in their method of adoption.They have grown into the conventional standard 'on their merits'.Those 'merits' may indeed be variously estimated from the 'organic' standpoint.Quinine has a high organic virtue, sugar perhaps an even wider but less vital virtue, while the virtue of tobacco may be purely superficial and compensated by considerable organic demerits.But both discovery and propagation have been in all these cases 'natural' and 'reasonable' processes, in the plain ordinary acceptation of these terms.
Some actual utility has been discovered and recognised, and new articles thus incorporated in a standard of consumption, either for regular or special use, have at any rate satisfied a preliminary test of organic welfare.
If all new habits of consumption arose in this fashion, and the preliminary test could be considered thoroughly reliable, the economy of the evolution of standards of consumption would be a safe and sound one.This hypothesis in its very form indicates the several lines of error discernible in the actual evolution of class standards.A falsification of the standard, involving the ad mission of wasteful or positively noxious consumables, may arise, either in the initial stage of invention, or in the process of imitative adoption.This will occur wherever the initial or the imitative process is vitiated by an extraneous motive.A very small proportion of medicines in customary use among primitive peoples have the organic validity of quinine.
Most of them are 'charms', invented by medicine men, not as the result either of a chance or planned experiment, but as the work of an imagination operating upon the lines of an empirical psychology, in which the relation of the actual or known properties of the medicine towards the disease play no appreciable part.So a whole magical pharmacopoeia will be erected upon a basis of totemist and animist beliefs, mingled with circumstantial misconceptions and gratuitous fabrications, and containing no organic utility.Each addition or variant will begin as an artificial invention and will be adopted for reasons of prestige, authority or fear, carrying none of that organic confirmation which secured its position for quinine.The limit of error in such cases will be that the medicine must not frequently cause a serious and immediate aggravation of the suffering of the patient.The patent or 'conventional'
medicines among civilised peoples must be considered in the main as containing a falsification of standard of the same kind, though different in degree.
As the primitive medicine man, called upon to cure a fever or a drought, is primarily motived by the desire to maintain or enhance his personal or caste prestige, while the adoption of his specific into a convention is due to a wholly irrational authority or to a wholly accidental success, so is it with a large proportion of modern remedies.Even in the orthodox branches of the medical profession the process of converting vague empiricism into scientific experiment has gone such a little way as to furnish no guarantee for the full organic efficacy of many of the treatments upon which the patient public spends an increasing share of its income.But as regards the profession there is at any rate some basis of confidence in the disinterested application of science to the discovery of genuine organic utility.
In the patent medicine trade there is very little.Here we have a condition very little better than that of the power of the witch-doctor in primitive society.The maxim 'caveat emptor' carries virtually no security, for the guidance of the palate is ruled out, while the test of experience, except for purgation or for some equally simple and immediate result, is nearly worthless.
§6.When the invention and propagation of a mode of consumption have passed into the hands of a trade, the guarantees of organic utility, the checks against organic injury, are at their weakest.For neither process is directed, either by instinct or reason, along serviceable channels.
Where the commercial motive takes the initiative, there can be no adequate security that the articles which pass as new elements into a standard of consumption shall be wealth, not illth.Where an invention is stimulated to meet a genuinely 'long-felt need', the generality and duration of that need may be a fair guarantee of utility.But this is not the case where the supply precedes and evokes the demand, the more usual case under developed commercialism.Neither in the action of the inventor, nor in the spread of the new habit of consumption, is there any safe gauge of utility.The inventor, or commercial initiator, is only concerned with the question, Can I make and sell a sufficient quantity of this article at a profit?