§4.Such considerations must not, however, be pressed very far in the defence even of the most firmly-rooted elements of conventional consumption.For, though the deeper organic forces which work through 'natural selection' must eliminate the worst or most injurious modes of expenditure from the permanent standard of a race or class, it may leave elements fraught with grave danger.For neither the animal nor the spiritual nature of man is equipped with a selective apparatus for testing accurately for purposes of organic welfare the innumerable fresh applicants for 'consumption' which appear as the evolution of wants, on the one hand, and of industries upon the other, becomes more complex and more rapid.An extreme instance will enforce my meaning.To take a Red Indian or a Bantu from a natural and social environment relatively simple and staple, and to plunge him suddenly into the swirl of a modern Western city life is to court physical and moral disaster.Why? Because the pressures of animal desires or the emotions of pride and curiosity, which were related by effective 'taboos' in the primitive life from which he is drawn, now work their will unchecked.For the 'taboos' of civilised society are both ill-adapted to the emotional texture of his nature, and in their novelty and complexity are not adequately comprehended.But even for those born and bred in the environment of a rapidly changing civilisation there are evidently great hazards.Not only individual but widely collective experiments in novelties of consumption will often be injurious.This may be explained in the first instance as due to the perversion or defective working of the 'instincts' originally designed to protect and promote the life of the individual and the species.
An animal living upon what may be termed unmodified nature is possessed of instincts which make poisonous plants or animals repellent to its taste.
A man living in a highly modified environment finds such shreds of instinctive tastes as he possesses inadequate to the risk of rejecting the fabricated foods brought from remote quarters of the earth to tempt his appetite.
If this holds of articles of food, where errors may be mortal and where some protection, however insufficient, is still furnished by the palate and the stomach, still more does it hold of the 'higher' tastes comparatively recently implanted in civilised man.'Bad tastes' thus may introduce the use of books or art that disturb the mind without informing it, recreations that distract and dissipate our powers without recreating and restoring them.Nor does the 'social organism' furnish reliable checks which shall stop the spread of individual errors into conventional consumption.
§5.The question of individual errors and wastes in the process of evolving standards of consumption must not detain us.For though it rightly falls within the scope of a fully elaborated valuation of consumption, it must not be allowed to intrude into our more modest endeavour to discuss the several grades of wants which comprise a class standard of consumption.
The relative size of the wastes or defects of the conventional factors in a class standard will not indeed depend upon the mere addition of the perversion of the separate choices of its individuals.For a convention is not produced by a mere coincidence of separate actions of individual desire.
It may be well here to revert to the distinction which we found convenient to employ in our analysis of the human value of different forms of work, viz., the distinction between creation and imitation.Here it will take shape in an enquiry as to the ways in which new wants are discovered and pass into conventional use.Let us take for an example the case of a medicine which has become a recognised remedy for a disease.Among animals or 'primitive'
man the habit of eating a curative herb may be regarded as due to an organic instinct common to each member of the herd or group.Such consumption, however, would not really fall within the category of our 'conventional consumption'.It would in effect be confined to a limited number of articles containing strong elements of 'survival value', in a pre-economic period, though, as soon as tribal society began to evolve the medicine man, his prescriptions would add many elements of waste and error.But the consumables whose origin we are now considering must be regarded as involving invention or discovery, and conscious imitation or adoption by the group.Unless we suppose that the chewing of cinchona bark had a backing of instinctive adaptation, and so passed by tradition into later ages of Indian life, we must hold that the first beginnings of the use of quinine as a cure for intermittent fevers in South America were due either to chance or to early empiricism in treatment.Some person, probably enjoying distinction in his tribe, tried cinchona bark and recovered of his fever, others tried it upon this example and got benefit, and so the fame of the remedy spread first from a single centre, and afterwards from a number of other personal centres by conscious imitation.Or, similarly, take the adoption of some article of diet, such as sugar or tobacco, which is an element not of prime physical utility but of comfort or pleasure.The first men who chewed the sugar-cane, or tried the fumes of the herba nicotina, must be deemed to have done so 'by accident'.Liking the result, they repeated the experiment by design, and this personal habit become the customary habit of the group, moulded by a tradition continuously supported by a repetition of the feeling which attended the first chance experience.
