Thorstein Veblen and Today's Arguments About the Draft

In his important book The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904) Thorstein Veblen's great theme was the increasing conflict between the motivations and prerogatives of business on the one hand, and the demands of modern industry on the other--with the latter of which he identified the needs of society in the age of the "machine process." Much of this was a matter of the clash between businessmen oriented to quick profits through financial operations--as with what we today call "financial engineering"--and the requirements of the "real" economy, and not least a technologically progressing manufacturing base, ever undermined and disrupted by the associated management and investment patterns in ways that seem all too familiar in our era of "financialization." However, there was also the matter of the broader culture associated with all this, with the rationalistic, matter-of-fact, cause-and-effect modern culture at odds with the comparatively old-fashioned outlook of business and professions key to it, like the law as it relates to property and contract.

Of course, the businessmen who increasingly defined conservatism naturally resisted that more rationalistic outlook, in part by supporting conservative institutions (the Jacobins of the eighteenth century learning to love throne and altar and the rest of the Old Regime package), with it seeming to Veblen that the most important of these was the militarization of society. Besides being instrumental to their business interests of "pecuniary mastery and . . . commercial solvency" in an "age of imperialism," he held its "incidental, disciplinary effects . . . no less important." As he put it, "a warlike business policy . . . makes for a conservative animus on the part of the populace." The abeyance of civil rights inside armies, and under martial law, is of course always attractive to those who have power, and fear and hate dissent, and so are "the sensational appeals to patriotic pride and animosity made by victories, defeats, or comparisons of military and naval strength" which "direct the popular interest to other, nobler, institutionally less hazardous matters than the unequal distribution of wealth or of creature comforts." Veblen also adds that the "[m]ilitary training" that becomes universal in a "nation in arms" implementing a policy of universal service "is a training in ceremonial precedence, arbitrary command . . . unquestioning obedience," and in "think[ing] in warlike terms of rank, authority, and subordination," with the habits formed in such a "servile" organization where "[i]nsubordination is the deadly sin" carried over into civilian life, training the population "into habits of subordination" and away from democratic attitudes.

Indeed, in a culture that, growing increasingly civilized, was becoming worrisomely so for an elite whose privileges owed to an "uncivilized"--barbarian--social condition and social outlook, war was a source of welcome rebarbarization ("the stress on subordination and mastery and the insistence on gradations of dignity and honor incident to a militant organization . . . an effective school in barbarian methods of thought").

Today, as talk of a draft resurges, almost all of it half-baked, with cynical cultural warfare absolutely pervading it (not least, appeals by politicians as artless as they are sleazy and the courtiers of the news media to old right-wingers who hate young folks)--to say nothing of a lot of begging some very serious questions about foreign policy and civil-military relations, and what the existing social model has meant for the plausibility or legitimacy of calls for "sacrifice" and "solidarity"--we hear much of the supposed virtues of a draft, and the supposedly salutary effects it would have on the young put through it. Indeed, even publications like the Guardian (if as close as one gets to a left perspective in a major newspaper of the English-speaking world, ever showing its essential centrism) in a recent piece which indulged in a bit of "both sidesism" as it treated the rightist position with considerable respect.

Perhaps the folks who run that paper never read Veblen. (I get the impression that they haven't read a lot of things.) Still, what Veblen had to say about the effects of a draft--that its really "salutary" effect is spreading authoritarian, hierarchical, inegalitarian, undemocratic attitudes through society, all as the broader militarization with which it is associated diverts attention from socioeconomic issues and restricts the civil rights that activists concerned with socioeconomic issues so sorely need when protesting those matters--should always be much on the minds of any who would presume to consider the effects of a draft in at all a critical fashion, and certainly those who would even presume to be on the side of democracy and freedom. So, too, should what conscription means for the conscripted in a more immediate way, very neatly summed up by Jonah Walters--the more in as a "crime against humanity" is precisely what so many haters of the young, and "apologists and admirers of injustice, misery, and brutality" in general, are eager to inflict on their nation's youth.