Either he must abolish war, or teach people
how to wage it with the greatest psychic economy; either he must
abolish the economic life of man and feed him with stardust and dew,
or he must investigate all the perplexities of economic life and offer
patterns of conduct which are applicable in a world where no man is
self-supporting. But that is just what the prevailing moral culture so
generally refuses to do. In its best aspects it is diffident at the
awful complication of the modern world. In its worst, it is just
cowardly. Now whether the moralists study economics and politics and
psychology, or whether the social scientists educate the moralists is
no great matter. Each generation will go unprepared into the modern
world, unless it has been taught to conceive the kind of personality
it will have to be among the issues it will most likely meet.
4
Most of this the naive view of self-interest leaves out of account. It
forgets that self and interest are both conceived somehow, and that
for the most part they are conventionally conceived. The ordinary
doctrine of self-interest usually omits altogether the cognitive
function. So insistent is it on the fact that human beings finally
refer all things to themselves, that it does not stop to notice that
men's ideas of all things and of themselves are not instinctive. They
are acquired.
Thus it may be true enough, as James Madison wrote in the tenth paper
of the Federalist, that "a landed interest, a manufacturing interest,
a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests,
grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into
different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views.
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