Some condiments are useful for assisting the digestion of primary foods, but it is easier to make mistakes in condiments than in staple foods.So with all the higher and more complex wants.As one rises above the prime requisites and conveniences, organic instincts, or tastes directly dependent on them, play a diminishing part as faithful directors of consumption.
This natural guidance does not indeed disappear.The evolution of a human being with finer nervous structure, and with higher intellectual and moral needs and desires related to that structure, is a fairly continuous process.
The finest and best-balanced natures thus carry into their more complex modes of satisfaction a true psycho-physical standard of utility.But it is already admitted that the liability to go wrong is far greater in those modes of expenditure which are not directly contributory to survival.This is the case, whether individual tastes or some accepted convention determines the expenditure.
This is so generally recognised that it is likely that the organic utility of personal tastes on the one hand, custom and convention on the other, has been unduly disparaged.The temper of economists in assessing values has been too short-sighted and too inelastic.A good deal of personal expenditure that is wasteful or worse when taken on its separate merits may be justified as a rude experimental process by which a person learns wisdom and finds his soul.What is true of certain freakish personal conduct is probably true also of those conventional practices, in which whole societies or classes conduct their collective experiments in the art of living.
A too rigorous economy, whether directed by instinct or reason, which should rule with minute exactitude the expenditure of individuals or societies, in order to extract from all expenditure of income the maximum of seen utilities, would be bound to sin against that law of progress which demands an adequate provision for these experimental processes in life which, taken by themselves, appear so wasteful.
Social psychology brings a more liberal and sympathetic understanding to bear upon some of the practices which to a shortsighted economist appear mere wasteful extravagance, destitute of utility and displacing some immediately serviceable consumption.Let me take some notable examples from current working-class expenditure.The lavish expenditure upon bank-holidays, in which large classes of wage-earners 'blow' a large proportion of any surplus they possess beyond the subsistence wage, is the subject of caustic criticism by thrifty middle-class folk.But may not this holiday spirit, with a certain abandon it contains, be regarded as a 'natural' and even wholesome reaction against the cramping pressure of routine industrialism and the normal rigour of a close domestic economy? It may not, indeed, be an ideally good mode of reaction, may even contain elements of positive detriment, and yet may be the vent for valuable organic instincts seeking after those qualities of freedom, joy and personal distinction that are essential to a life worth living.1Or take the gravest of all defects of working-class expenditure, the drink-bill.This craving, hostile as it is to the physical and moral life of man, is not understood, and therefore cannot be effectively eradicated, unless due account is taken of certain emotional implications.The yielding to drink is not mere brutality.Brutes do not drink.It is in some part the response to an instinct to escape from the imprisonment in a narrow cramping environment which affords no scope for aspiration and achievement.
It may indeed be said that the drinker does not aspire and does not achieve.
He is doubtless the victim of an illusion.But it is a certain dim sense of a higher freer life that lures him on.'Elevation' is what is sought.
'Kings may be blessed but Tam was glorious O'er a' the ills o' life victorious.'
Or take still another item of working-class expenditure frequently condemned as a typical example of extravagance, the relatively large expense of funerals.
Is this to be dismissed offhand as mere wanton waste? A more human interpretation will find in it other elements of meaning.In the ordinary life of 'the common people' there is little scope for that personal distinction which among the upper classes finds expression in so many ways.The quiet working-man or woman has never for a brief hour through a long lifetime stood out among his fellows, or gathered round him the sympathetic attention of his neighbours.
Is it wholly unintelligible or regrettable that those who care for him should wish to give this narrow, thwarted, obscure personality a moment of dignity and glory? The sum of life is added up in this pomp of reckoning, and the family is gathered into a focus of neighbourly attention and good-feeling, the outward emblems of honour are displayed, and a whole range of human emotions finds expression.Such excess as exists must be understood as a natural fruit of those aspiring qualities of personality which, thwarted in their natural and healthy growth by narrowness of opportunity, crave this traditional outlet.
In fact, the more closely we study the conventional factors in consumption, the less are we able to dismiss them out of hand as mere extravagance or waste.Some organic impulse, half physical, half psychical, nearly always enters into even the least desirable elements.A margin of expenditure, either conventional or expressing individual caprice,2 which serves to evoke pleasure, to stir interest, and above all to satisfy a sense of personal dignity, even though at the expense of some more obvious and immediate utilities, may be justified by considerations of individual and social progress.
