Searching about for an account of modern capitalism that might enable him to justify the term “modern Christendom,” economic anthropologist Thorstein Veblen hit upon a correspondence between the Golden Rule and British Fair Play.
Throughout all the vicissitudes of cultural change, the golden rule of the peaceable savage has never lost the respect of occidental mankind, and its hold on men’s convictions is, perhaps, stronger now than at any earlier period of the modern time (“Christian Morals and the Competitive System,” International Journal of Ethics 1910:20(3) 182).
For readers not familiar with Veblen’s works, it is important to note that “the peaceable savage” to which he makes reference is any member of a wandering human community whose members are so dependent upon one another that the rules of reciprocity and rough equality dictate the limits of all social behavior. With any capital accumulation whatever, this peaceable community gives way to pecuniary relations and invidious distinctions grounded in conspicuous consumption and leisure. The “Golden Rule,” for Veblen, is a throw-back to archaic times, a throw-back sustained by a community whose members endure hardship and oppression for the sake of their Lord and who therefore anachronistically promote an ethic of reciprocity and equality.
No doubt “fair play” played well during the years leading up to the Great War and continued to play well through to its end. Yet, Veblen appears to mistake the symbolic cultural value this catch phrase commanded for the genuine article, which, at least in the United States and Great Britain, was strictly reserved for leisured sports, but enjoyed next to no traction whatever among the Carnegies, Rockefellers, and other scions of industry.
Perhaps like most economists, then as now, Veblen had come to believe in his own fairy tale, a fairy tale that made the four-fold catastrophe of war, depression, holocaust and atomic/fire bombs all the more frightening because all the more unanticipated.