All this, however, is
beside the present argument.
But apart from all deprecation, and aside from all question as to
the indispensability of some such check on headlong innovation,
the leisure class, in the nature of things, consistently acts to
retard that adjustment to the environment which is called social
advance or development. The characteristic attitude of the class
may be summed up in the maxim: "Whatever is, is right" whereas
the law of natural selection, as applied to human institutions,
gives the axiom: "Whatever is, is wrong." Not that the
institutions of today are wholly wrong for the purposes of the
life of today, but they are, always and in the nature of things,
wrong to some extent. They are the result of a more or less
inadequate adjustment of the methods of living to a situation
which prevailed at some point in the past development; and they
are therefore wrong by something more than the interval which
separates the present situation from that of the past. "Right"
and "wrong" are of course here used without conveying any
rejection as to what ought or ought not to be. They are applied
simply from the (morally colorless) evolutionary standpoint, and
are intended to designate compatibility or incompatibility with
the effective evolutionary process.
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