Therefore these
exigencies do not readily produce, in the members of this class,
that degree of uneasiness with the existing order which alone can
lead any body of men to give up views and methods of life that
have become habitual to them. The office of the leisure class in
social evolution is to retard the movement and to conserve what
is obsolescent. This proposition is by no means novel; it has
long been one of the commonplaces of popular opinion.
The prevalent conviction that the wealthy class is by nature
conservative has been popularly accepted without much aid from
any theoretical view as to the place and relation of that class
in the cultural development. When an explanation of this class
conservatism is offered, it is commonly the invidious one that
the wealthy class opposes innovation because it has a vested
interest, of an unworthy sort, in maintaining the present
conditions. The explanation here put forward imputes no unworthy
motive. The opposition of the class to changes in the cultural
scheme is instinctive, and does not rest primarily on an
interested calculation of material advantages; it is an
instinctive revulsion at any departure from the accepted way of
doing and of looking at things -- a revulsion common to all men
and only to be overcome by stress of circumstances.
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