From the issue dated March 15, 2002
|
|
A (Mild) Defense of LuxuryBy JAMES B. TWITCHELLWho but fools, toadies, and hacks have ever come to the defense of modern American luxury? No one, not even bulk consumers of the stuff, will ever really defend it. And why should they? The very idea that what we have defines who we are is repulsive to many of us. The irrationality of overvaluing certain rocks, fabrics, logos, textures, wines, bottles, appliances, nameplates, tassels, ZIP codes, T-shirts, monograms, hotel rooms, purses, and the like is insulting to our intellect. At one level this kind of luxury is indefensible. The "good life" seems so blatantly unnecessary, even evil, especially when millions of people around the globe are living without the bare necessities. Generations ago the market for luxury goods consisted of a few people who lived in majestic houses with a full complement of servants, in some time-honored enclave of the privileged. As Holly Brubach has wittily observed, they ordered their trunks from Louis Vuitton, their trousseaux from Christian Dior, their Dom Perignon by the case, and spent lots of time looking out over water. Their taste, like their politics, was determined largely by considerations of safeguarding wealth and perpetuating the social conventions that affirmed their sense of superiority. They stayed put. We watched them from afar. We stayed put. Maybe they had money to burn. We had to buy coal. The very unassailability of old luxe made it safe, like old name, old blood, old land, old pew, old coat of arms, or old service to the crown. Primogeniture, the cautious passage and consolidation of wealth to the first-born male, made the anxiety of exclusion somehow bearable. After all, you knew your place from the moment of birth and had plenty of time to make your peace. If you drew a short straw, not to worry. A comfortable life as a vicar would await you. Or the officer corps. For females marriage became the defining act of social place. The application of steam, and then electricity, to the engines of production brought a new market of status, an industrial market, one made up of people who essentially had bought their way into having a blood line. These were the people who so disturbed Veblen, and from them this new generation of consumer has descended. First the industrial rich, then the inherited rich, and now the incidentally rich, the accidentally rich. Call them yuppies, yippies, bobos, nobrows, or whatever; although they can't afford a house in Paris's 16th Arrondissement or an apartment on Park Avenue, they have enough disposable income to buy a Vuitton handbag (if not a trunk), a bottle of Dior perfume (if not a flagon), a Bombay martini (if not quite a few), and a time-share vacation on the water (if not a second home). The consumers of the new luxury have a sense of entitlement that transcends social class, a conviction that the finer things are their birthright -- never mind that they were born into a family whose estate is a tract house in the suburbs, near the mall, still not paid for, and whose family crest comes downloaded from the Internet. These new customers for luxury are younger than clients of the old luxe used to be, they are far more numerous, they make their money far sooner, and they are far more flexible in financing and fickle in choice. They do not stay put. They now have money to burn. The competition for their attention is intense, and their consumption patterns -- if you haven't noticed -- are changing life for the rest of us. They seem almost recession-proof. How concerned should we be? I say, not very. Let them eat cake. Now, mind you, luxury has nothing to do with happiness. As Freud famously said of consuming another product -- psychotherapy -- high-end consumption will not make you happier, only less anxious. While the poor, loveless, ever-anxious crowd may think that individual satisfaction tracks closely with luxury consumption, such is not the case. Numerous studies show that as society grows richer over time, the average level of happiness -- as measured by the percentage of people who rate themselves "happy" or "very happy" in national surveys -- doesn't budge. In fact, sometimes it falls. Does this mean consumption is a treadmill going nowhere? Well-tenured and -tended economists like Robert Frank and Juliet Schor certainly argue that it does. But one might suggest that at least the treadmills get more comfortable and more people have more access to them. That's got to mean something. Economists have known about this perplexity for a while. In a famous 1972 essay titled "Is Growth Obsolete?" the Yale University economists William Nordhaus and James Tobin pointed out that the growing gross domestic product doesn't account for such important factors as leisure, household labor, pollution, and unsnarling traffic jams. In fact, in many categories, quality of life may even decline as high-end consumption increases. On the heels of this study, Richard Easterlin, now an economic historian at the University of Southern California, argued that there was no clear trend in surveys of Americans' reported happiness. Average happiness rose from the 1940s to the late 1950s, then gradually sank again until the early 1970s, even as personal income grew sharply. Returning to the subject a few years ago, Easterlin cited an annual U.S. survey that showed a slight downward trend in the percentage of Americans saying they were "very happy," from 1972 to 1991 -- even though per-capita income, adjusted for inflation and taxes, rose by a third. In fact, this perplexity has become so established that it is known as the "Easterlin paradox." So let's forget any argument that happiness correlates with buying stuff, let alone luxurious stuff. Lottery winners don't stay happier than other people for long (about two weeks), and accident victims who become paraplegics typically return over time to pre-trauma levels. So if happiness is not related to consumption, why not tamp down luxury consumption by taxing it -- or shaming it -- into oblivion? The answer is not rocket science; in fact, it's simple. While being on the treadmill to the Land of Opuluxe may not provide happiness, not being on the treadmill almost certainly guarantees unhappiness. And discomfort. Instead of asking the haves how they are feeling, ask the have-nots. Their answer is existentially simple. Forget where we're going, and since there is nowhere else to go, why not get there in comfort? All aboard. Ironically, the problem is not how to get some people off the treadmill but how to get other people on. If goods are what carry meaning in this world (and, alas, they do, and have always), then the poor are doubly disenfranchised: They don't have stuff, and they don't have the meanings that stuff carries. While the happiness-as-be-all-and-end-all argument has the whiff of a red herring, it is not entirely dismissible. Before you denounce (or applaud) happiness research as left-ist propaganda, be aware that it also cuts the other way. For example, if happiness doesn't equate with income, why worry about minimum wages or distributions to the poor? Or to move it up a notch, if you don't want a society in which everyone is desperately trying to get ahead, you might advocate government policies that slow down consumption: high tax rates, generous health and unemployment benefits, long mandatory paid vacations, maybe even a limit on individual working hours. In other words, you might want to turn the United States into France. But are the French happier? Nope. France has an unemployment rate more than twice as high as that of the United States, largely because of those same government policies. And unemployment makes some people very unhappy. Professor Stanley Lebergott, an economist at Wesleyan University, has ventured into this moral and economic quicksand. A few years ago he argued in Pursuing Happiness: American Consumers in the Twentieth Century that Americans have spent their way to happiness. Lest this sound overly Panglossian, what Lebergott means is that while consumption by the rich has remained relatively steady, the rest of us have certainly had a good go of it. If we think that the rich are different from you and me, and that the difference is that the rich have longer shopping lists, then we have, in the last 50 years, substantially caught up. The most interesting part of Pursuing Happiness is the second half of the book. Here Lebergott unloads reams of government statistics and calculations to chart the path that American consumption has taken through a wide range of products and services -- food, tobacco, clothing, fuel, domestic service, and medicine, to name only a few. Two themes emerge strongly from these data. The first, not surprisingly, is that Americans were far better off in 1990 than they were in 1900. For example, real consumer spending rose in 70 of the 84 years from 1900 to 1984. In 1990 an hour's work earned six times as much as in 1900. Most Americans walked to work at the start of the century, but by 1990 relatively few did, in part because nearly 90 percent of families had a car. By 1987 all households had a fridge, a radio, onetime luxuries; nearly all had a TV; and about three-quarters had a washing machine. Per-capita spending on food rose by more than 75 percent from 1900 to 1990, with a marked increase in meat consumption. "Wants" became "necessities" because, ironically, the pushing and shoving of other consumers was lowering the price. Your consumption of luxury has made life easier for me. The second theme emerging from Lebergott's data is that old-line, left-leaning academic critics such as Robert Heilbroner, Tibor Scitovsky, Robert and Helen Lynd, and legions of others now teaching American studies, who have censured the waste and tastelessness of much of American consumerism, may have simply missed the big point. Ditto the Voluntary Simplifiers with all their self-help books, their how-to-buy-less magazines, and their cut-excess-consumption videos. OK, OK, money can't buy happiness, but you stand a better chance than with penury. Lebergott poses a simple question for such critics: Would they want to return to 1900? Even if they say yes, in a democratic society would they be justified in forcing their aesthetic and moral judgments on other consumers? And if they say yes, they should carefully watch the recent BBC-PBS show called 1900 House. As a modern family found by trying it, life at the turn of the 20th century was hard, very hard indeed. The idea that it was easy is one of our most cherished luxuries. While studies may show that people who purchase luxuries are not happier than those who cannot, they also show that being able to consume these positional objects seems to be a driving force in most large social groups today. Call these goods whatever you want -- bridge goods, heraldic goods, demonstration goods -- the ability to have them seems to be restructuring communities. Happiness may not be improved by having luxe, but unhappiness is increased by not being able to get into the supposed community of supposed peers. It is now clear why modern transgenerational poverty is so debilitating. If who you are is increasingly what you have, then the have-nots are doubly distressed. For not only do the poor miss out on creature comforts; they miss out on community meanings. Whatever these meanings may be, they are superpotent and no longer culturally specific. No Berlin Wall can keep them out for long. This new definition of must-have luxury is spreading around the globe at the speed of first the television and now the Internet. We need to be reminded that luxury has a bright side as well as a dark side. Yes, luxury is a one-dimensional marker of status and hierarchy. Yes, pecuniary emulation is still key for shallow social distinctions and contrived position. And, yes, such positional power is transitory. Opuluxe is one-dimensional, shallow, ahistorical, without memory, and expendable. But it is also strangely democratic and unifying. If what you want is peace on earth, a unifying system that transcends religious, cultural, and caste differences, well -- whoops! -- here it is. The Global Village is not quite the City on the Hill, not quite the Emerald City, and certainly not quite what millennial utopians had in mind, but it is closer to the equitable distribution of rank than what other systems have provided. Remember in King Lear when the two nasty daughters want to strip Lear of his remaining trappings of majesty? He has moved in with them, and they don't think he needs so many expensive guards. They convince themselves by saying that their dad, who is used to having everything he has ever wanted, doesn't need a hundred or even a dozen soldiers around him. They whittle away at his retinue until only one is left. "What needs one?" they say. Rather like governments attempting to redistribute wealth or like academics criticizing the consumption habits of others, they conclude that his needs are excessive. They are false needs: sumptuous, wasteful, luxurious. Lear, however, knows otherwise. Terrified and suddenly bereft of purpose, he bellows from his innermost soul, "Reason not the need." True, Lear doesn't need these soldiers any more than Scrooge needed silver, Midas needed gold, the characters on Friends need stuff from Crate and Barrel, those shoppers on Rodeo Drive, Worth Avenue, and Madison Avenue need handbags, or I need to spend the night at the Bellagio. But not needing doesn't stop the desiring. Lear knows that possessions are definitions -- superficial meanings, perhaps, but meanings nonetheless. Without soldiers he is no king. Without a BMW there can be no yuppie, without tattoos no adolescent rebel, without big hair no Southwestern glamorpuss, without Volvos no academic intellectuals, without cake no Marie Antoinette. Professor Robert Frank tells a revealing story in his Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess. It seems a relative of his bought a red Porsche in France. When the relative returned to California, he found that the German car couldn't be retrofitted to meet the state's rigorous pollution regulations. He offered it to the professor at a fraction of its market value. Now, in Professor Frank's words: "I was sorely tempted. Yet my small upstate college town has a strong, if usually unstated, social norm against conspicuous consumption. People here are far more likely to drive Volvos than Jaguars, and although ours is a cold climate, we almost never see anyone wearing a fur coat. At that time, a red Porsche convertible really would have been seen as an in-your-face car in a community like ours. Although I have never thought of myself as someone unusually sensitive to social pressure, I realized that unless I could put a sign on the car that explained how I happened to acquire it, I would never really feel comfortable driving it." Professor Frank knows exactly what goods to buy and exactly what goods not to buy. He doesn't want to keep up with the Joneses or ditch the Joneses. He wants to fit in with the Joneses. He knows who the Joneses are. It's pretty much bow ties, Volvos, and horn-rimmed glasses, thank you very much. My point is simple: This is a social decision, not a moral one or even an economic one. He has decided not to define himself in terms of a red Porsche convertible. He wants what his consumption community wants. But this opens up such an interesting question, at least to me. Why have academics proved such myopic observers of the consumerist world? Why so universally dour and critical? And why can't they see that their own buying habits are more a matter of taste than degree? I think one reason we academics have been so unappreciative of the material world, often so downright snotty about it, is that we don't need it. Academics say they don't need it because they have the life of the mind, they have art, they contemplate the best that has been thought and said. (Plus, not a whole lot of disposable income.) But that's not the entire story. I think that another reason most academics don't need store-bought affiliation is that the school world, like the church world it mimics, is a cosseted world, a world in which rank and order are well known and trusted and stable. In fact, buying stuff is more likely to confuse status than illuminate it. Let me tell you who I am in this context. I am a professor in the English department at the University of Florida; I teach Romanticism. Members of my cohort know what the title "professor" means; they know how English fits into the academic food chain; they know where Florida ranks as a university; and they know Romanticism is not as hot as theory nor as cool as race/class/gender. If you are an academic, I instantly know about you from just a few words. Just say something like "I am a visiting assistant professor of sociology at Podunk U.," and I can pretty accurately spin a description of what your life has been like. Give me a bit more, like a publication cite (not the subject, but where it appears), and you are flying right into my radar. This system of social place is so stable that you wear it like a pair of Gucci sunglasses or an old-school tie. Little wonder academics are so perplexed by an outside world that seems preoccupied with social place via consumption. Little wonder we misunderstand it. I can't imagine what it would be like to tell people I was a CFO of a pre-IPO dot-com. I'd much rather just have them check out my nifty chunky loafers from Prada and my Coach edition of Lexus out in the driveway. Most of us, yes, even academics, are living in a time of intense extropersonal relationships (in Latin, extro means "outward"), in which the focus on things, on people as things, on relationships as things, defines modern meanings. Look at how we define relationships in economic terms: Is he or she worth the trouble? This relationship is costing me too much. Where's the payoff? Cost-benefit analysis is second nature to our language because it is second nature to our perceptions, regardless of how far we are from the marketplace. However, we may be reaching the point where the center of such a system will not hold, things fall apart, and, like it or not, we find ourselves moving away from defining the self via goods, because positional goods have become too plentiful and thus not meaningful enough. As so many luxuries become necessities, maybe the concept of luxury is being drained of meaning. As the standard of living has risen, erstwhile luxury is becoming the norm. Since the 1970s we have been defining luxury downward into ordinary goods and services, even as we have increased our ability to consume objects and sensations hitherto beyond our reach. Perhaps the social construction of luxury is unraveling. Maybe we are indeed slouching toward Utopia. When I mentioned the possible disappearance of luxury as a distinction to a friend who is the creative director of a large Midwestern advertising agency, his eyes lit up. One of his clients is a manufacturer of specialty faucets. When the agency tested images of kitchens that women felt reflected their sense of comfort and ease, the deluxe kitchen, complete with all the yuppie appliances, tested surprisingly low. What was high? The old-fashioned Kenmore-type kitchen, in which the appliances looked like what they were instead of pieces of commercialized, built-in elegance. It was, he said, as if the women were tired of seeing themselves as perfectionists and yearned for the more relaxed life of their mothers or grandmothers. Restoration Hardware may really be on to something more than nostalgia. Perhaps the mass class of consumers has been living in the lap of luxury for too long. We used to be on the outside looking in. Now millions of us are inside looking out. Who knows? Maybe the very ubiquity of luxury will cause us to recharge human relationships and deflate material values. The question then becomes: Are we better off for living in a culture in which luxuries are turned into necessities, mild addictions are made into expected tastes, elegancies are made niceties, expectancies are made entitlements, opulence is made into populence? The answer, from the point of view of those historically excluded, is yes. Absolutely, yes. Ironically, just as the very stuff that I often find unaesthetic and others may find contemptible has ameliorated the condition of life for many, many millions of people, the very act of getting to this stuff promises a better life for others. I don't mean to belittle the value of religion, politics, law, education, and all the other patterns of meaning making in the modern world, but only to state the obvious. Forget happiness; if decreasing pain and discomfort is a goal, consumption of the "finer things" has indeed done what governments, churches, schools, and even laws have promised. Far more than these other systems, betterment through consumption has delivered the goods. Paul Krugman is certainly correct when he writes, "On sheer material grounds one would almost surely prefer to be poor today than upper middle class a century ago." But is it fair? Do some of us suffer inordinately for the excesses of others? What are we going to do when all this stuff we have shopped for becomes junk? What about the environment? How close is the connection between the accumulation of the new luxury and the fact that the United States leads the industrialized world in rates of murder, violent crime, juvenile violent crime, imprisonment, divorce, abortion, single-parent households, obesity, teen suicide, cocaine consumption, per-capita consumption of all drugs, pornography production, and pornography consumption? What are we going to do about the lower sixth of our population that seems mired in transgenerational poverty? These are important questions but ones I will leave to others. Entire academic, governmental, and commercial industries are dedicated to each of them. One of the more redemptive aspects of cultures that produce the concept of luxury is that they also produce the real luxury of having time and energy to discuss it. Who knows? Perhaps the luxury of reflection will help resolve at least some of the shortcomings of consumption. Romanticism, my putative field of study, still informs much of the academic interpretation of commercialism. I am often reminded of something my mother told me. Her father ran a country store in the small town of Shelburne, Vt. During the Depression he sold on credit. And how did he know to whom to extend credit? He did it by smell, aroma profiling. Smell of horses, good; cows not so good, pigs and sheep bad. Shelburne is such a pretty little town: church, library, town hall, and community green. After the war, she and her siblings couldn't wait to get the hell out of there. Let's face it: The idea that consumerism creates artificial desires rests on a wistful ignorance of history and human nature, on the hazy, romantic feeling that there existed some halcyon era of noble savages with purely natural needs. Once fed and sheltered, our needs have always been cultural, not natural. Until there is some other system to codify and satisfy those needs and yearnings, capitalism -- and the promise of the better life it carries -- will continue not just to thrive but to triumph, Muslim extremists and periodic recessions notwithstanding. While you don't have to like needless consumption, let alone participate in it, it doesn't hurt to understand it and our part in it. We have not been led astray by marketers of unnecessary goods. It would be nice to think that this eternally encouraging market for top-of-the-line products will result in the cosmopolitanism envisioned by the Enlightenment philosophes, that a universalism of the new luxury will end in a crescendo of hosannas. It would be nice to think that more and more of the poor and disenfranchised will find their ways into the cycle of increased affluence without contracting the dreaded affluenza or, worse, luxury fever. It would be nice to think that commercialism could be heroic, self-abnegating, and redemptive. It would be nice to think that greater material comforts -- more and more luxuries -- will release us from racism, sexism, terrorism, and ethnocentrism and that the apocalypse will come as it did at the end of Romanticism, in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, leaving us, "Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed ... Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless ... Pinnacled dim in the intense inane." But the globalization of the new luxury is more likely to result in the banalities of an ever-increasing, worldwide consumerist culture. Recall that Athens ceased to be a major power around 400 BC, yet for centuries afterward Greek culture was the culture of the Mediterranean world. The age of European expansion ended in the mid-20th century; the age of luxury markets may be losing steam in North America, but it is just starting to gather force elsewhere. Academic Marxists love to refer to this as late capitalism. Early capitalism is probably more like it. We have been in this lap of luxury a short time, and it is an often scary and melancholy place. This is a world not driven by the caprices of the rich, as was the first Gilded Age. Nor is it being whipsawed by marketers eager to sell crapulous products. They contribute, to be sure. But our world is being driven primarily by the often crafty and seemingly irrational desires of the mass class of consumers, most of them young. In many ways this is more frightening. A butterfly flapping its wings in China may not cause storm clouds over Miami, but a few lines of computer code written by some kid on his Palm Pilot in Palo Alto or Calcutta may indeed change life for all the inhabitants of Prague. Worse still, a Fendi purse or a Lexus automobile or a weekend at the Bellagio may be better understood by more people than the plight of the homeless, a Keats ode, or the desecration of the rain forest. Whatever it becomes, the mass-mediated and mass-marketed world of the increasingly powerful information age is drawing us ever closer together. The act of wanting what we don't need is indeed doing the work of a generation of idealists. Terrorism is a perverse tribute to its power. We have not been led into this world of material closeness and shared desires against our better judgment. For many of us, especially when young, consumerism is our better judgment. Getting to luxury is a goal. And this is true regardless of class or culture. We have not just asked to go this way; we have demanded. Now most of the world is lining up, pushing and shoving, eager to elbow into the mall to buy what no one needs. Woe to the government or religion that says no. They don't seem to last for long. As I have argued elsewhere, getting and spending have been the most passionate, and often the most imaginative, endeavors of modern life. We have done more than acknowledge that the good life starts with the material life, as the ancients did. We have made consuming stuff, most of it unnecessary stuff, the dominant prerequisite of organized society. Consumption has become production, especially at the high end in the category of luxury. That we should be unified by sharing this material and the stories that brands tell is dreary and depressing to some, as doubtless it should be. Remember Oscar Wilde's observation that "the brotherhood of man is no mere poet's dream, it is a most depressing and humiliating reality"? But one should not forget that the often vulgar, sensational, immediate, trashy, tribalizing, wasteful, equitable, sometimes transcendent, and unifying force of consuming the unnecessary is liberating and democratic to many more. James B. Twitchell is a professor of English at the University of Florida. This essay is adapted from Living It Up: Our Love Affair With Luxury, published this month by Columbia University Press. Copyright © 2002 by James B. Twitchell. Reprinted with permission. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B7
|
Copyright © 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education