Our modern lives have become increasingly characterized by consumption. This is not to say that we merely aspire to consume, but that a life of consuming has itself (to varying degrees) become necessary in contemporary Western society.1 Indeed, the everyday consumption of products and services has gained a prominence hitherto unknown. No sooner are the objects of our desire obtained, before others, new and unforeseen, present themselves. The ends of consumer society lure us onward and “upward”, into a sort of Sisyphean cycle.2 In previous essays I have mentioned consumer society, but have yet failed to offer a more comprehensive explanation of what I mean. What exactly I mean, as well as some account of both how it developed and some of its effects, is what I hope to begin exploring in this essay.3
Given the multifariousness of “consumer society”, let me begin by offering a rough definition.4 Broadly, I refer to “the enhanced societal importance of the purchase of commodities and their cultural meanings and significance”. This implies a “comparatively greater role for consumption–in contrast with work and employment, religion, family, investment, or politics–in determining economic organization, cultural institutions, and personal motivations and experience.”5 Put simply, buying stuff–goods and services–has become a big part of our lives. Aspiration and necessity are two aspects of this phenomenon which I alluded to above. On the one hand, we desire things. On the other hand, we need them. In order to live comfortably, we need food, a place to live, and a great many other things.6 But we also want–desire–these things, as well as many others besides. There is a kind of relationship of entailment existing between consumer society and what I have called the workaday world, since it seems one cannot exist without the other. In order to have the things we need, we must procure an income. And to this end, the majority of our time and effort is usually spent. Simultaneously, what allows such activity to produce an income is the fact that it is economically productive, i.e., it contributes to the production of goods or services in some way–things which are then sold and, in turn, consumed. Thus, the workaday world and consumer society are two sides of the same coin existing within the human world. Each is a reinforcing aspect of the same cyclic system.
The origins of this aspect of the modern world are complex, involving not merely economic but also social and cultural, as well as psychological, considerations. I have explored some of this already.7 Consider first “the rational and methodical reorganization of life, structured around the idea of a vocation or calling”.8 In the wake of the Protestant Reformation in Europe, we have seen that the idea of a calling–one’s task as given by God–became the core organizing principle in the practical life of large numbers of people. Such a thing is “a duty, an obligation” and becomes “imbued with an imperative of success”.9 As Max Weber observed, this amounted to “attaching religious significance to daily work” for the first time in history.10 This imperative to succeed was, at first, theological; it was bound up with fulfilling God’s will, bringing His purposes into being. Built-in to the imperative of success is the imperative of improvement or innovation.11 The endless striving for more–not in the sense of unrestrained consumption, for this was clearly condemned at the time12–but for more means. Means to achieve or fulfill one’s divinely sanctioned vocation or calling. i.e., The means to increase production and profit.
Over time, this theological imperative became increasingly secular, as the (secularized) concept of success gradually displaced the (theological) concept of a vocation or calling.13 “Over the course of centuries–centuries of continued work, improvement, profit, accumulation, investment, reinvestment, scientific-, industrial-, and technological revolutions, and many others–the human world was added to, expanded upon, and finally, transformed.”14 As Max Weber has said, “to the extent that asceticism moved out of the monastic cell and was carried over into the life of work in a vocational calling, and then commenced to rule over this-worldly morality, it helped to do its part to build the mighty cosmos of the modern economic order.”15
Notice, there is a relationship of logical entailment between the drive to succeed and the drive to innovate or improve. The continuous pursuit of success requires the continuous pursuit of innovation and improvement.16 This is part of the nature of competition, and economic interests are no exception to this. It is perhaps within the sphere of technology that this is most visible. For technology seems to set the limits–not only on what may be defined as a natural resource, and to what extent such resources can be used–but also on the nature of consumer demand itself.17 The role technology plays in consumer society has been clearly explained by the American economist Paul Zane Pilzer. “The way in which technology defines human need–and hence determines the nature of consumer demand–is quite straightforward. By providing us with new products and processes, advancing technology invariably induces change in our basic behavior–changes that are sometimes so fundamental that before very long we cannot imagine living any other way. The new product or process on which our way of living depends thus becomes essential to maintaining our way of life. In other words, it assumes the status of a necessity–something that we need in order to live the way we want.”18
The continual striving to succeed (i.e., for increased production and profit), in the form of endless technological improvement and innovation, has led to a world of ever-expanding goods and services–without limit. With the dramatic expansion of the Economic sphere, a new mode of life was brought into being. One characterized by production, acquisition, and consumption, with an increasing emphasis on the latter. “To the extent that asceticism undertook to transform and influence the world, the world’s material goods acquired an increasing and, in the end, inescapable power over people–as never before in history.”19 The “inescapable power” that material goods and services have come to exercise over people is especially clear in the cases of aspiration (desire or want) and necessity. As the “floor of necessity” has steadily risen, new goods and services have emerged as essential, as time passes even becoming unthinkable to forgo. At the same time, the “ceiling of limitation” for new goods and services has been effectively removed. “The classic example of this sort of self-justifying innovation is the automobile. When it was first introduced, the automobile was considered to be a luxury–an expensive toy that men of means bought mainly to take their families for Sunday drives in the country. Over time, however, and not very much time at that, as mass production made car ownership practical for an increasingly wide public, people’s notions of distance and mobility changed profoundly. Before long, a sizable chunk of the population had actually moved to the country–or at least to that convenient strip of it that we now call suburbia–and suddenly the car was a necessity.”20 “So it is that by creating new products that soon become the basis of an entirely new way of life, technology creates needs that did not exist before.”21
This takes us beyond what the British economist John Maynard Keynes thought about human needs and the nature of economic demand. Famously, Keynes was concerned that increasing affluence would, in the long run, reduce demand and even work against society’s economic stability.22 The richer people became, Keynes thought, the smaller the proportion of their income would be spent. Yet it now seems clear that the nature of demand is not so limited. As John Kenneth Galbraith has observed, “Once a society has provided itself with food, clothing, and shelter […] its members begin to desire other things.”23 One reason for this has been the distinction between quality demand and quantity demand. “Quantity demand, […] is the consumer’s basic desire for more of what he or she already has: more food, a bigger house, an extra suit of clothing. […] If quantity demand can be thought of as the consumer’s demand for a larger supply of an existing […] product, quality demand reflects the appetite for a different kind of product. […] When you have all the food, clothing, and TVs you need–as most Americans do today–you start wanting better food, better clothing, and better TVs. To put it another way, the typical middle-class American couple would probably have little if any interest in buying a third Toyota to add to the two they already own. Far more likely, they would get rid of one of the Toyotas and upgrade to a BMW. Moreover, this flip in the nature of demand is not one-way. For as the consumer begins to satisfy his or her desire for higher quality, quantity demand once again begins to work its magic. Now the consumer wants two BMWs […], the distinction we traditionally make between what we call luxuries and necessities is entirely illusory, for as we have seen, technology is constantly transforming the former into the latter.”24
Still more perceptive is Pilzer’s observation that new products tend to perpetuate consumption. “Indeed, many of the new products created by technology are by definition incapable of satiating the demand they create, for they are themselves […] demand machines that generate endless loops of continuing consumer need. For example, when a merchant sells a consumer a new Sony Walkman for $50, he is in fact creating far more demand than he is satisfying–in this case a continuing and potentially unlimited need for tape cassettes and batteries.25 That is, by buying the Walkman, the consumer has not completed a process that began when he first perceived his need for the product; rather, he has merely finished the first cycle of a potentially unlimited series of transactions–in the course of which he may well wind up spending far more each month on the accessories than he did on the original item.”26 The same can be said for things that are not particularly new, such as the private home. “While the purchase of a house or apartment may satisfy the consumer’s need for shelter, it also simultaneously generates a wide-ranging series of fresh needs for everything from new furniture to new carpets to new appliances, the acquisition of each in turn creating another round of new demand.”27 “The […] consumer can be thought of as a mountain climber trying to reach the highest peak in an unlimited mountain range in which each mountain he or she climbs turns out to be merely the foothill of another even higher peak.”28
Now, Pilzer does not appear to have been the first person to notice this. Nearly 50 years before Unlimited Wealth was published, James S. Duesenberry wrote that “ours is a society in which one of the principal social goals is a higher standard of living. [This] has great significance for the theory of consumption [as] the desire to get superior goods takes on a life of its own. It provides a drive to higher expenditure which may even be stronger than that arising out of the needs which are supposed to be satisfied by that expenditure.”29 Furthermore, as Galbraith has observed, because “society sets great store by ability to produce a high standard of living, it evaluates people by the products they possess. The urge to consume is fathered by the value system which emphasizes the ability of a society to produce. The more that is produced, the more that must be owned in order to maintain the appropriate prestige.”30 Pilzer echoes this, writing that what “matters to us in our affluent […] world is not the absolute level of our standard of living, but where it stands in relation to other levels: the levels enjoyed by friends and acquaintances, by people (both real and fictional) whom we see on television, by ourselves at some other point in our life. Moreover, there is a kind of ratchet effect to rising standards of living; our current standard, no matter how superior it may be to the standard we enjoyed last year, is invariably and inevitably the minimum we will accept […], it merely becomes the floor for a whole new array of desires.”31
Reactions to this phenomenon are mixed. Pilzer’s view is largely favorable; he sees it as a world of unlimited potential and opportunity, “we have the power to create unlimited wealth, what we can accomplish is limited only by our dreams.”32 Even still, he does admit that given “technology’s apparently unlimited ability to keep pumping out new and better goods, there is not much likelihood that more than a tiny fraction of consumers will ever reach that happy state of equilibrium.”33 Galbraith is less optimistic. “As a society becomes increasingly affluent, wants are increasingly created by the process by which they are satisfied. This may operate passively. Increases in consumption, the counterpart of increases in production, act by suggestion or emulation to create wants. Expectation rises with attainment. Or producers may proceed actively to create wants through advertising and salesmanship. Wants thus come to depend on output. In technical terms, it can no longer be assumed that welfare is greater at an all-round higher level of production than a lower one. It may be the same. The higher level of production has, merely, a higher level of want creation necessitating a higher level of want satisfaction.”34 The main thrust of this statement by Galbraith is that the process of production creates or kindles the desires necessary to consume. What I take him to be saying is that, very simply, the more there is–the more there is to want. And given what Pilzer has said about the role of technology in creating wants, this seems difficult to deny.
So while the massive expansion of production was fueled by the Protestant work ethic which helped build the “mighty cosmos of the modern economic order”, the number of goods and services available to consume exponentially increased across the globe. This actualized new possibilities latent in the human psyche–the desires for new goods and services that hitherto did not exist. In turn, this became a new floor upon which to stand while grasping for still more goods and services. Ad infinitum. The acquisition of goods appears inexhaustible–if one wants to play that game.35 But it is hard to escape the gravitational pull of consumption; indeed, it is impossible to do so entirely, for we all must live. “Among the many models of the good society, no one has urged the squirrel wheel.”36
A friend tells me that if you take the time to peruse the cereal aisle of a large grocery store, you will discover there are twelve different kinds of Cheerios on the shelves. Twelve. (Woe to the shopper who must make do without their pet cereal!) To what does one turn amidst the chaos of such endless consumption? Here the ancient sunlight of the non-instrumental breaks through, illuminating the view of good qua good. Schopenhauer may have been right after all.
Notes:
1. The aspiration to consume has always existed throughout human history, but in the past was largely limited by historical circumstance, as in the case of fixed social hierarchies, et al. The modern epoch has in many ways lifted the historic limitations of the past, increasing the potential and expanding the scope and scale of goods and services. Thus, increasing the potential for the human aspiration to consume. The ground floor of necessity has risen higher, and the ceilings (or limits) have exponentially increased.
2. There is an allusion of sorts that appears to be linked with the idea of increased consumption. It is this: as our consumption increases, there is a pervasive illusion of progress. Increased consumption is psychically associated with an increased standard of living, of “doing better”. Thus, it is a common mark of the onward march of progress. This is also evident in the widespread view that rising GDP is good without qualification. This was touched upon by John Kenneth Galbraith in his book, The Affluent Society.
3. My remarks will remain somewhat truncated, as (again) this is a massive subject.
4. This is sometimes called “materialism”, but to avoid confusion with philosophical materialism, I will avoid this usage and prefer the more correct “consumerism”.
5. Indeed, in many ways work and employment, investment, and politics, have become subservient to the altar of consumption. Their existence is directed toward–or “for the sake of”–consumption as an end or goal. The quotations are from The Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology, edited by Bryan S. Turner; the entry, “consumer society”, was written by Alan Warde of the University of Manchester.
6. I spoke of many of these things in my essay, A Sketch of the Workaday World.
7. Perhaps foremost is my essay, Achievement Culture: Some Considerations In Context.
8. Quoted from my essay, Achievement Culture: Some Considerations In Context.
9. Ibid.
10. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Chapter 3.
11. Eugene McCarraher explores some of this development in his recent work, The Enchantments of Mammon.
12. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
13. See my essay, Achievement Culture: Some Considerations In Context. Max Weber alludes to this when he writes, “As the paroxysms of the search for God’s kingdom gradually dissolved into the dispassionate virtues of the vocational calling and the religious roots of the movement slowly withered, a utilitarian orientation to the world took hold.” See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Chapter 5. To be sure, the idea of a vocation or calling still exists today, albeit in secularized form. The theological underpinnings of the past have for the most part been shed, displaced by considerations of income and lifestyle.
14. See my essay, Achievement Culture: Some Considerations In Context. The changes I speak of involve a great deal of considerations, and I am somewhat remiss to pass them over so crassly. The problem is I do not believe consumer society is merely the product of this or that development within the modern world, but is rather a product of the modern world as a whole. Having said that, I do believe the developments of the Reformation to be of central importance, which is why I chose to focus on them in this essay. As a supplement, however, it may be helpful to quote from a previous essay (Some Further Thoughts on Modern Education), in which I attempted to encapsulate the complexity of the rise of modernity: “The development of the modern world can be considered from the perspective of many different spheres existing across time. The Religious, the Political, the Scientific, the Economic, the Educational, et al. Its birth is a product of the overlapping and interconnectedness of these and other aspects of the human world. I have spoken before of the impact of the printing press […], specifically within the context of the Protestant Reformation. The advent of printing dramatically increased the rate of the exchange of information, and this, in turn, had a great effect on changes occurring within the various spheres. Increases in the ability of people to communicate led to an increased rate of change in general, increases in literacy and education, and the spreading of ideas. This led to further developments. The Reformation, for instance, may be first and center in terms of its general impact on Europe. In the Political sphere, the rise of liberalism. In the Scientific sphere, the rise of modern science and the developments of technology. In the Economic, increases in trade, bookkeeping, the Industrial Revolution, the rise of capitalism. In the Educational, increases in literacy and general understanding, the formation of an educated class, and so on.”
15. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Chapter 5.
16. Efficiency standards, for instance.
17. This is thoroughly discussed by the American economist Paul Zane Pilzer in his book Unlimited Wealth.
18. See Paul Zane Pilzer, Unlimited Wealth, Chapter 3.
19. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Chapter 5.
20. See Paul Zane Pilzer, Unlimited Wealth, Chapter 3. Emphasis in original. This example could be multiplied many times. Consider indoor plumbing, electricity, the washing machine, the telephone, the internet, et al. Note that each new technology brings with it an entire industry of products and services, which are created, expand in size and scope, and exhibit internal innovations and transformations; sometimes these industries change into others, sometimes they are displaced by new and emerging technologies. Consider how the telegraph was eventually replaced by the telephone, which itself underwent many changes and innovations, before largely being replaced by mobile, and later, smartphone technologies.
21. Ibid.
22. “The fundamental psychological law upon which we are entitled to depend with great confidence… is that men are disposed, as a rule and on the average, to increase their consumption as their income increases, but not by as much as the increase in their income.” See John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.
23. See John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society.
24. See Paul Zane Pilzer, Unlimited Wealth, Chapter 3. Pilzer goes on to say that theoretically “the demand for more and better goods will be satiated when he or she finally owns a sufficiently large number of the best car available on the market. But as long as technology continues to advance, there never will be a best car–at least not for very long. Each year a better car will be developed, and the process will start all over again. Less evident but even more pervasive is the way in which quantity and quality demand feed off each other directly. A man gets a better job and buys a better quality suit. Immediately, he needs a better tie, a better shirt, and a better pair of shoes. Then he needs another better quality suit, and acquisition of which causes him to need another new set of accessories–and so on and so on. […] In other words, quality is inextricably linked to quantity.”
25. This dates the book quite well. In fact, Unlimited Wealth was published in 1991. Consider that the Walkman was among the first portable media players, eventually being replaced by portable CD players, which were in turn replaced by digital audio players (such as iPods), which were eventually displaced by streaming services and smartphones.
26. See Paul Zane Pilzer, Unlimited Wealth, Chapter 3.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. See James S. Duesenberry, Income, Saving and the Theory of Consumer Behavior.
30. See John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, Chapter 11.
31. See Paul Zane Pilzer, Unlimited Wealth, Chapter 3.
32. See Paul Zane Pilzer, Unlimited Wealth, Chapter 11.
33. See Paul Zane Pilzer, Unlimited Wealth, Chapter 3. Note here that happiness is equated with a balance of material goods–a further instance of happiness as preference satisfaction. The instrumental stance is also in full view here. Also, note that here “new” is synonymous with “better”–something that is probably not true, despite being widely believed. Consider the phenomenon of planned obsolescence.
34. See John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, Chapter 11. To be fair, Galbraith is not without his critics, and who better to criticize him than those able to most coherently defend the position of capitalism? Here I am thinking mainly of the Austrian School of economics. Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard are perhaps the school’s best-known defenders contemporaneous with Galbraith. (Some may be puzzled that I have not named Ayn Rand here, but what Rand has to say about economics generally mirrors what writers like Mises and Rothbard have said. In fact, they influenced her thinking a great deal.) In what many people believe to be Rothbard’s magnum opus, Man, Economy, and State, he dedicates a full section to criticizing Galbraith. “Galbraith’s entire theory of excess affluence rests on this flimsy assertion that consumer wants are artificially created by business itself.” But his arguments are poor, in my view. First, he is rather uncharitable to Galbraith; for instance, hinging some of his own criticism on the “correct meaning” of the word “created”–a meaning which Galbraith is clearly not adopting in his text. Second, his criticism of the way Galbraith treats advertising–“creating wants”–is somewhat outmoded. Rothbard follows Mises, for instance, in saying that advertising is really about educating the consumer, so the consumer can make his or her own informed choice. (For my part, I would like to know what educational standards are being adopted by Diageo when Christina Hendricks walks up to the camera and says “It’s Johnnie Walker. And you ordered it.”) Third, if we adopt Galbraith’s basic proposition–which I have stated as “the more there is–the more there is to want”–Rothbard’s criticisms simply have no force. For the proposition is clearly true. If “want” implies a capacity to “have”, then the more there is to have, the more there is to want. To be sure, this is part of a larger debate involving many things. But the really interesting thing for me about this conflict is the battle that is going on behind the scenes, as it were, between rival philosophical viewpoints. Galbraith may in fact be unintelligible to Rothbard, because of the latter’s commitments to classical liberalism, particularly one rooted in Lockean philosophical ideas and concepts. See Ludwig von Mises, Human Action. See Murray Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State.
35. This makes the ancient Stoic, the Buddhist, the ascetic Christian–all the more intelligible.
36. See John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, Chapter 11.