Let Them Eat Cake: Lux 'R' Us
Twitchell, James B.
"Let Them Eat Cake: Lux 'R' Us" BY JAMES B. TWITCHELL Who but fools, toadies and hacks have ever come to the defense of modern American luxury? No one, not even bulk consumers of the stuff,...
...We lived near the top of the hill, right next to his parents, who were just down from my great-grandparents...
...He said we could, but that we didn't need to...
...cows, not so good...
...And the answer, from the point of view of those historically excluded, is yes...
...It's hard to be on Rodeo Drive and seea man wearing a pinkie ring, a flashy Rolex, decked out like Regis Philbin, getting into a Lincoln Navigator, and not feel a kind of smug self-satisfaction with one's own life...
...As the last two decades of the 20th century showed, gov 72 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • MAY/JUNE 2002 ernments, religions and cultures neglect this unnecessary stuff at their peril...
...Others push SAT scores, charitable giving, clean-air days or commuting time...
...Little wonder we misunderstand it...
...The first, not surprisingly, is that Americans were far better off in 1990 than they were in 1900...
...They whittle away at his retinue until only one is left...
...William Bennett's leading economic indicators, as well as the environmental indicators from quality-of-life groups like Redefining Progress or from lobbying outfits like Sustainable Seattle or Livable Tucson, show that happiness may be beside the point...
...I go for months now without hearing "noblesse oblige...
...Still, all in all, I like this new world better...
...Of course, I regret the passing of that world...
...He has moved in with them, and they don't think he needs so many expensive guards...
...We used to be outside looking in...
...Their answer is existentially simple...
...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...
...First, the industrial rich, then the inherited rich and now the incidentally rich, the accidentally rich...
...While the poor, loveless, ever-anxious crowd may think that individual satisfaction tracks closely with luxury consumption, such is not the case...
...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...
...Just say something like "I am a visiting assistant professor of sociology at Podunk U" and I can MAY/JUNE 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 73 pretty accurately spin a description of what your life has been like...
...My point is-this is a social decisionnot a moral one or even an economic one...
...Getting to luxury is a goal...
...Now millions of us are on the inside looking out...
...The idea that it was easy is one of our most cherished luxuries...
...the age of luxury markets may be losing steam in North America, but it is just starting to gather force elsewhere...
...After the war, she and her siblings couldn't wait to get the hell out of there...
...We're talking education here, not tail fins...
...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...
...This perplexity has become so established that it is known as the "Easterlin paradox...
...Most Americans walked to work at the start of the century, but by 1990 essentially none did, in part because nearly 90 percent of families had a car...
...I think it's quite joyful, and, moreover, I think it's far more fair than the world I grew up in...
...What about the environment...
...He wants what his consumption community wants...
...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 hou' I happened to acquire it, I would never really feel comfortable driving it...
...I was amazed, it was a Daisy Buchanan Moment, a frisson of the Stendhal Syndrome...
...Restoration Hardware may really be on to something more than nostalgia...
...They are false needs: sumptuous, wasteful, luxurious...
...These were the people who so disturbed economist Thorstein Veblen, and from them, this new generation of consumer has descended...
...One day when I was about 10, Dr...
...By 1987 all households had onetime luxuries: a fridge, a radio, nearly all had a TV, and about three-quarters had a washing machine...
...True, Lear doesn't need these soldiers any more than Scrooge needed silver, Midas needed gold, the characters on Friends need stuff from Crate & Barrel, those shoppers on Rodeo/Worth/Madison Avenues need handbags, or I need to spend the night at the Luxor in Las Vegas...
...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 ancestral home is a tract house in the suburbs, not paid for, and a family crest comes downloaded from the Internet...
...For example, if happiness doesn't equate with income, why worry about minimum wages or distributions to the poor...
...That's got to mean something...
...The very idea that what we have defines who we are is repulsive to many of us...
...Bowling alone is not a lot of fun...
...No one, not even bulk consumers of the stuff, will ever really defend it...
...Who knows...
...Before you denounce happiness research as leftist propaganda, be aware that it also cuts the other way...
...Empty calories...
...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...
...And this is true regardless of class or culture...
...Given a choice between a lucky-sperm culture-in which birth decides social placeor a lucky-stock-option culture, I think I prefer the latter...
...It's pretty much bow ties, Volvos and horn-rimmed glasses, thank you very much...
...This is a world not driven by the caprices of the rich, as was the first Gilded Age...
...Why so universally dour and critical...
...What was high...
...No matter how you slice it, chances are if a group makes an index, the one thing it is sure to show is that there is no correlation between affluence and what the group considers happiness...
...These are important questions, but ones I will leave to others...
...And if they say yes, they should carefully watch the recent BBC/PBS show called 1900 Horse or the PBS Frontier House...
...WAS IT WORTH IT...
...Now, in Professor Frank's words, I was sorely tempted...
...It seems a relative of his bought a red Porsche in France...
...Forget happiness...
...And, yes, such positional power is transitory...
...Pinnacled dim in the intense inane...
...As Freud famously said of consuming another product-psychotherapy-high-end consumption will not make you happier, only less anxious...
...they are far more numerous...
...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...
...Instead of asking the haves how they are feeling, ask the have-nots...
...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...
...We stayed put...
...Never will he see himself as a luxury consumer, deeply embedded in a consumption community...
...Consumption has become production, especially at the high end in the category of luxury...
...The answer is not rocket science...
...We have done more than acknowledge that the good life starts with the material life, as the ancients did...
...Xanadu...
...Let Them Eat Cake LUXE 'El' US BY JAMES B. TWITCHELL Who but fools, toadies and hacks have ever come to the defense of modern American luxury...
...if his 11-year-old brother is not in sight...
...Whatever these meanings may be, they are superpotent and no longer culturally specific...
...Once fed and sheltered, our needs have always been cultural, not natural...
...Terrified and suddenly bereft of purpose, he bellows from his innermost soul, "Reason not the need...
...Nothing...
...Smell of horses, good...
...MAY/JUNE 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 75...
...No, to bobos like the professor (and me, I hasten to add), these choices have nothing to do with taste...
...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...
...Well-tenured and -tended economists like Robert Frank and Juliet Schor certainly argue that it does...
...suniption by the rich has remained relatively steady, the rest of us have certainly had a good go of it...
...In order to talk with my dad, Dr...
...they make their money far sooner...
...As modern families have found by trying it, life at the turn of the 19th century was hard, very hard, indeed...
...After all, you knew your place from the moment of birth and had plenty of time to make your peace...
...Social scientists like Mary Douglas, Baron Isherwood, Mihalay Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton have put forward what are called the "good life definitions" of "positive sociology...
...And few of us truly admire those who have amassed vast quantities of this stuff...
...How close is the connection between the accumulation of the new luxury and the fact that the United States also 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...
...In other words, you might want to turn the United States into France...
...It would be nice to think that more and more of the poor and disenfranchised will find their way into the cycle of increased affluence without contracting the dreaded affluenza or, worse, luxury fever...
...For females, marriage became the defining act of social place...
...What are we going to do about the lower sixth of our population that seems mired in transgenerational poverty...
...Yet my small upstate college town has a strong, if usually unstated, social norm against conspicuous consumption...
...Slavin came driving up the hill...
...Imelda Marcos is a pathetic character...
...If you are an academic, I instantly know about you from just a few words...
...Look at how we define relationships in economic terms: Is he/she worth the trouble...
...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...
...Lear knows that possessions are definitions-superficial meanings, perhaps, but meanings, nonetheless...
...Is he/she marriage material...
...Although it is not pictured this way in popular culture, the consumption of highend goods is rarely impulsive, emotional or extravagant...
...Forget where we're going, and since there is nowhere else to go, why not get there in comfort...
...In addition, this disconnect between consumption and happiness seems not to depend on cultural differences...
...We lived in a city on a hill next to a lake...
...This is a far more equitable currency than the capriciousness of ancestry and the whimsy of gender and birth order...
...And discomfort...
...He knows who the Joneses are...
...Ditto Leona Helmsley...
...If you can't tell where you are in life by consulting the Social Register, then check your car nameplate, your zip code, the amount of stainless steel wrapped around your barbecue...
...In a sense, modern luxury is insurance against misunderstanding, a momentary stay against panic and confusion...
...For many of us, especially when young, consumerism is our better judgment...
...Ditto the Voluntary Simplifiers with all their self-help books, their how-tobuy-less magazines and their cut-excessconsumption videos...
...At one level this kind of luxury is indefensible...
...Little wonder academics are so perplexed by an outside world that seems preoccupied with social place via consumption...
...in fact, he delivered me...
...My dad always knew where he was...
...We have been in this lap of luxury a short time, and it is an often scary and melancholy place...
...Read just a bit between the lines: Having been raised as an only child, I have always observed the sibling rivalries among my own children with great interest...
...We watched them from afar...
...After all, it may be more efficient-not to mention, more fun-to spend your money buying a badge good like a fancy car or an Armani wardrobe to announce your social place than to do it the old-fashioned way and join the country club...
...He came from a small town in Vermont, had attended the local university, and was, in that perplexing term to me, a "self-made man...
...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 equitable distribution of rank than what other systems have provided...
...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 bought their way into having a blood line...
...Let them eat cake...
...So if happiness is not related to consumption, why not tamp down luxury consumption-tax or shame it into oblivion...
...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 exist ed some halcyon era of noble savages with purely natural needs...
...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...
...Professor Frank knows exactly what goods to buy and exactly what goods not to buy...
...Plus, you don't have to play golf...
...pigs and sheep, bad...
...Lebergott poses a simple question for such critics: Would they want to return to 1900...
...Rather like governments attempting to redistribute wealth or like academics criticizing the consumption habits of others, they conclude that his needs are excessive...
...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...
...All aboard...
...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...
...Primogeniture, the cautious passage and consolidation of wealth to the first-born male, made the anxiety of exclusion somehow bearable...
...Economists like Martin Feldstein at Harvard and Paul David at Stanford have been arguing that certain acts of consumption mimic a kind of equitable savings, a kind of universal investment in a mythic bank of communal value...
...I'd much rather just have them check out my nifty chunky loafers from Prada and my Coach edition Lexus out in the driveway...
...The old-fashioned Kenmore-type kitchen, in which the appliances looked like what they were instead of pieces of commercialized builtin elegance...
...What are we going to do when all this stuff we have shopped for becomes junk...
...The act of wanting what we don't need is indeed doing the work of a generation of idealists...
...Perhaps the social construction of luxury is deconstructing...
...If you drew a short straw, not to worry...
...Perhaps the mass class of consumers has been living in the lap of luxury for too long...
...And why should they...
...here it is...
...if decreasing pain and discomfort is a goal, consumption of the "finer things" has indeed done what gov ernments, churches, schools and even laws have promised...
...It's a lot more fun, however, than not being able to bowl at all...
...Slavin pushed a button and the window automatically descended...
...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...
...Opuluxe is one-dimensional, shallow, ahistorical, without memory, expendable...
...Nor is it being whipsawed by marketers eager to sell crapular products...
...He was never haughty, just confident...
...He wants to fit in with the Joneses...
...Yes, luxury is a one-dimensional status and hierarchy marker.Yes, pecuniary emulation is still key for shallow social distinctions and contrived position...
...The film Pretty Wonan, with Richard Gere as the bewildered millionaire and Julia Roberts as the insecure hooker, makes a point worth considering...
...FUTURE DISAPPEARANCEOF LUXE...
...What needs one...
...But are the French happier...
...Nope...
...Who knows...
...MAY/JUNE 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 71 While being on the treadmill to the Land of Opuluxe may not provide happiness, not being on the treadmill almost certainly guarantees unhappiness...
...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...
...The differences between top-of-the-line luxury objects, and the differences among various mid-range objects, have in many cases ceased to be observable...
...Recall that Athens ceased to be a world power around 400 B.C., yet for the next 300 years, Greek culture was the culture of the world...
...He 74 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR . MAY/JUNE 2002 stopped and chatted with my dad...
...Being invested in a relationship This relationship is costing me too much...
...OK, OK, money can't buy happiness, but you stand a better chance than with penury...
...In many ways this is more frightening...
...Maybe the very ubiquity of luxury will cause us to recharge human relationships and deflate material values...
...Indeed, the problem is not how to get some people off the treadmill, but how to get other people on...
...I am often reminded of something my mother told me...
...Shelburne is such a pretty little town: church, library, town hall, community green...
...We have made consuming stuff, most of it unnecessary stuff, the dominant prerequisite of organized society...
...But it is also democratic and unifying...
...We have not been led astray by marketers of unnecessary goods...
...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...
...THE ECONOMIC DEFENSEOF OPULUXE While making status distinctions on the basis of luxury consumption seems silly, even incompatible with common sense, contemporary economists and sociologists are not so sure...
...But at least the treadmills get more comfortable and more people have more access to them...
...But that's not the entire story...
...That we should be unified by sharing this material and the brand stories they tell is dreary and depressing to some, as doubtless it should be...
...Then Chris is at his violin lesson, or at the orthodontists office, ive have no problem...
...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...
...As Holly Brubach has wittily observed, they ordered their trunks from Louis Vuitton, their trousseaus from Christian Dior, their Dom Perignon by the case, and spent lots of time looking out over water...
...Instead it may more often be thoughtful, clever and sensible...
...I know to some it's the joyless economy, but not to me...
...Another reason most academics don't need storebought affiliation is because the school world, like the church world it mimics, is a cosseted world, a world in which rank and order are `sell known and trusted and stable...
...A comfortable life as a vicar would await you...
...Close your Rousseau, open your Darwin...
...Absolutely, yes...
...They do not stay put...
...At that time, a red Porsche convertible really would have been seen as an in-your-face car in a community like ours...
...He doesn't want to keep up with the Joneses or ditch the Joneses...
...If what you want is peace on earth, a unifying system that transcends religious, cultural and caste differences, well, whoops...
...As the standard of living has risen, erstwhile luxury is becoming the norm...
...Until there is some other system to codify and satisfy those needs and yearnings, capitalism-and the promise of the better life it carries with it-will continue not just to thrive, but to triumph, Muslim extremists notwithstanding...
...So let's forget any argument that happiness correlates with buying stuff, let alone luxurious stuff...
...Maybe they had money to burn...
...Per capita spending on food rose by more than 75 percent between 1900 and 1990, with a marked increase in meat consumption...
...Returning to the subject a few years ago, Easterlin cited an annual U.S...
...That such "peace of mind" can be bought may seem shallow until you realize that the transformation is dependent only on money, and the color of money is always the same...
...Here, for instance, is Frank talking in Luxury Fever not about consumption per se, but about the anxieties of relative position...
...And how did he know to whom to extend credit...
...I don't mean to belittle current inequities...
...So the question then becomes: Are we better off for living in a culture in which luxuries are turned into necessities, in which mild addictions are made into expected tastes, in which elegancies are made niceties, expectancies are made into entitlements, in which opulence is made into populence...
...A few years ago he argued in Pursuin,o Happiness:Arierican Consumers in the Twentieth Century that Americans have "spent their way to happiness...
...Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless...
...Slavin was a prosperous obstetrician...
...The most interesting part of Pursuing Happiness is the second half of the book...
...and they are far more flexible in financing and fickle in choice...
...We need to be reminded that luxury has a bright side as well as a dark side...
...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...
...He is using his sons' behavior to illustrate the childish nature of competitive consumption...
...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...
...remember he's in the B-school, not arts and sciences), and then postgraduate polishing...
...For example, real consumer spending rose in 70 of the 84 years between 1900 and 1984...
...How concerned should we be...
...Perhaps we have overluxurified the commonplace...
...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...
...Without soldiers he is no king...
...The higher your birth and the larger your bank account, the closer you were to the front-the closer, by implication, to God...
...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...
...This new definition of must-have luxury is spreading around the globe at the speed of, first, the television and now the Internet...
...If who you are is increasingly what you have, then the have-nots are doubly distressed...
...It is now clear why modern transgenerational poverty is so debilitating...
...France has an unemployment rate more than twice as high as that of the United States, largely because of those same government policies...
...I don't mean to overlook racial profiling, sexual stereotypes, job discrimination, glass ceilings, unemployment, hunger...
...He offered it to the professor at a fraction of its market value...
...What's extraordinary is that rarely, if ever, will Frank roll over at night and think he is spending foolishly...
...Even if they say yes, in a democratic society would they be justified in forcing their aesthetic and moral judgments on other con sumers...
...But not needing doesn't stop the desiring...
...But this opens up such an interesting question, at least to me...
...He was an atheist in midlife, but, my mother later told me, when he went into the hospital to die, he asked for the bishop to come by for a chat...
...Some groups throw into the mix such concerns as legal fees, medical bills, divorce rates, affordable housing and levels of trust...
...The very unassailability of old luxe made it safe, like old name, old blood, old land, old pew, old coat of arms...
...Early capitalism is probably more like it...
...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...
...Her father ran a country store in the small town of Shelburne,Vermont...
...Do some of us suffer inordinately for the excesses of others...
...Does this mean consumption is a treadmill going nowhere...
...We have not been led into this world of material closeness and shared desires against our better judgment...
...Average happiness rose from the 1940s to the late 1950s, then gradually sank again until the early 1970s, even as personal income grew sharply...
...Academic Marxists love to refer to this as "late capitalism...
...Well into the 19th century, the placement of your family pew was a marker of status...
...The competition for their attention is intense, and their consumption patterns-if you haven't noticed-are changing life for the rest of us...
...Before he drove off, he opened and closed all the windows for me, automatically...
...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...
...Published byColumbia University Press, 2002...
...When the relative returned to California, he found that the German car couldn't be retrofitted to meet the state's rigorous pollution regulations...
...But one should not forget that the often vulgar, sensational, immediate, trashy, tribalizing, wasteful, equitable, sometimes transcendent and unifying force of consuming is liberating and democratic to many more...
...Lest this sound overly Panglossian, what Lebergott means is that while con Frorn Living It Up: Our Love Affair With Luxury by James B. Tivitchell...
...They contribute, to be sure...
...We had to buy coal...
...In fact, in many categories, quality of life may even decline as high-end consumption increases...
...ARE WE HAPPY YET?NOT SO FAST W bile happiness as the be-alland-end-all argument has the whiff of a red herring, it is not entirely dismissible...
...But the globalization of the new luxury is more likely to result in the banalities of an ever-increasing, worldwide consumerist culture...
...One of his clients is a manufacturer of specialty faucets...
...They don't seem to last for long...
...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...
...And let's face it, the Vegas Strip is an exciting place to visit, but most of us wouldn't want to live there...
...People here are fir more likely to drive hblvos than Jaguars, and although ours is a cold climate, u'e almost never see anyone wearing a fur coat...
...Or the officer corps...
...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...
...Where's the payotf...
...Call them yuppies, yip-pies, bobos—David Brooks' felicitous coinage—nobrows (John Seabrook's) or whatever...
...They are needs, goddammit...
...MCONSUMING GOODS AND THE GOOD OF CONSUMING y dad was an Episcopal choir boy, a fourth-generation Vermonter, a Harvard-trained doctor...
...Average levels of reported satisfaction didn't change an iota...
...It would be nice to think that commercialism could be heroic, self-abnegating and redemptive...
...The "good life” seems so blatantly unnecessary, even evil, especially when millions of people around the globe are living without the bare necessities...
...Remember Oscar Wilde's observation that "the brotherhood of man is not a mere poet's dream: it is a most depressing and humiliating reality...
...During the Depression he sold on credit...
...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...
...Entire academic, governmental and commercial industries are dedicated to each of them...
...Far more than these other systems, betterment through consumption has delivered the goods...
...He always drove a new black Cadillac, probably a Fleetwood...
...And unemployment makes some people very unhappy...
...they say...
...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...
...Even when you move away from material consumption as an index, the contradiction remains...
...I looked inside...
...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...
...It had much I miss...
...If Donald Trump has his defenders, it is primarily those who are entertained, not edified, by his obstreperousness...
...Plus, after all, it's just cake, a sugar high...
...Now, I don't know either Professor Frank or his sons, but I'll make a prediction...
...He has decided not to define himself in terms of a red Porsche convertible...
...In 1990 an hour's work earned six times as much as in 1900...
...They stayed put...
...For not only do the poor miss out on creature comforts, they miss out on community meanings...
...I remember asking my dad if we could have a car like that instead of the stupid green Plymouth...
...MAYBE 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...
...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...
...although they can't afford a house in Paris' Sixteenth Arrondissement or an apartment on Park Avenue, they have enough disposable income to buy aVuitton handbag (if not a trunk), a bottle of Dior James B. Twitchell teaches romantic poetry and advertising at the University of Florida...
...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 Christopher Lasch (plus 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...
...WHY ACADEMICS CRITICIZETHE NEW LUXURY Remember in King Lear when the two nasty daughters want to strip Lear of his last remaining trappings of majesty...
...As so many luxuries become necessities, maybe the concept of luxury is being drained of meaning...
...Why have academics proved such myopic observers of the consumerist world...
...I say, not very...
...70 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • MAY/JUNE 2002 perfume (if not a flagon), a Bombay martini (if not quite a few) and a timeshare vacation on the water (if not a second home...
...He did it by smell, aroma profiling...
...In fact, buying stuff is more likely to confuse status than illuminate it...
...On returning from a friend's house, my 8-year-old son immediately asks, "Wheres Chris...
...But is it fair...
...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...
...This system of social place is so stable that you wear it like a pair of Gucci sunglasses or an old school tie...
...Economists have known about this perplexity for a while...
...Two themes emerge strongly from this data...
...Call these goods whatever you want-bridge goods, heraldic goods, demonstration goods-the ability to have them seems to be restructuring communities...
...Educational affiliations for academic offspring have nothing to do with the lawyer next door who drives an S-class Mercedes or the software designer I play tennis with, who sports a Patek Philippe wristwatch...
...In fact, sometimes it falls...
...And given a choice, I'd rather be in the Prada league than the junior League...
...And why can't they see that their own buying habits are more a matter of taste than degree...
...But let him be at a movie, or just visiting a friend, the next thing we'll hear is Hayden's angry shoat of "That's not fair...
...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 meaning that stuff carries...
...Whatever it becomes, the mass-mediated and massmarketed world of the increasingly powerful information age is drawing us ever closer together...
...These new customers for luxury are younger than clients of the old luxe used to be...
...Now, mind you, this has nothing to do with happiness...
...Professor Stanley Lebergott, an economist at Wesleyan University, has ventured into this moral and economic quicksand...
...I only mean to say that romanticism, my erstwhile field of study, still informs much of the academic interpretation of commercialism...
...In a famous 1.972 essay titled "Is Growth Obsolete...
...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...
...Give me a bit more, like a publication cite (not the subject, but where it appears), and you are flying right into my radar...
...Maybe we are indeed slouching toward Utopia...
...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...
...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...
...Perhaps the luxury of reflection will help resolve at least some of the shortcomings of consumption...
...For instance, during the so-called Asian miracle from the late 1950s to the late 1980s, real per capita income in Japan soared nearly fivefold...
...Lear, however, knows otherwise...
...THE SOCIOLOGICALDEFENSE OF OPULUXE Economists aren't the only ones to crook an eyebrow at consumption scolds...
...We have not just asked to go this way, we have demanded...
...Here's what the boys can look forward to: straight teeth, plenty of soccer (not football), music lessons galore (preferably piano and violin), summer camp at Duke, magnet school or maybe a year or two at Deerfield, trips to Europe, four years at a private college or university or at one of the public Ivys (celebrated on the rear windscreen of the professor's BMWnotVolvo...
...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...
...The age of European exposition ended in the mid-20th century...
...Nothing extraordinary about this expenditure of-what?-about $400,000 a kid...
...Professor Robert Frank tells a revealing story in his Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess...
...Getting and spending have been the most passionate, and often the most imaginative, endeavors of modern life...
...Their taste, like their politics, was determined largely by considerations of safeguarding wealth and perpetuating the social conventions that affirmed their sense ofsuperiority...
...Terrorism is a perverse tribute to its power...
...No Berlin Wall can keep them out for long...
...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...
...the inevitable prelude to an anguished outburst about the it justice of life...
...I can't imagine what it would be like to tell someone I was a CFO of a pre-IPO dot-com...
Vol. 35 • May 2002 • No. 3
