It has passed in most essentials, by tradition and imitation, to the life of the upper class in modern civilised nations.The modes and conceptions of personal prowess and prestige have indeed shifted.The man of business has dethroned the warrior or the political chieftain.The typical great man of our time is the great entrepreneur, the financier who directs the flow of capital and rules prices on change, the railway or shipping magnate who plans a combine, the able and astute merchant, who controls a market, the manufacturer who conducts a great productive business, the organiser of a successful departmental store.The personal qualities and activities involved in these tasks are very different from those possessed by barbarian chieftains or oriental despots.Add to such men the surviving landed aristocracy of rent receivers, and a considerable number of families that live on dividends, taking no real part in the administration of industry, and we have a synopsis of the class which to day wields prestige.Though the elaboration of modern arts of pleasure directs a great part of the expenditure of this, our upper class, the traditional habits of ostentatious waste and conspicuous leisure as modes of glory are still paramount motives.Most rich people value riches less for the pleasures they afford than for the social consideration, the personal distinction, they procure.The craving to realise superiority over others, as attested by their servility or imitation, the power of money to make others do your will, the sense of freedom to realise every passing caprice, these remain the chief value of riches, and mould the valuations of life for the bulk of the well-to-do.
Such are the inevitable effects of easily-gotten and excessive wealth upon the possessors.So far as they operate, they induce futile extravagance in expenditure.Instead of making for utility, they make for disutility of consumption.Such is the gist of this analysis of the leisured life.
§11.Expenditure which is to be effectively ostentatious, so as to impress its magnificence upon the largest number of other people, cannot be directed to the satisfaction of a real personal want, even a bad want.
Futility is of its essence.The very type of this expenditure is a display of fireworks: there is no other way of consuming so large a quantity of wealth in so short a time with such sensational publicity and with no enduring effect whatever.This private extravagance may perhaps be paralleled in public expenditure by the squandering of millions upon war-ships which are not needed, will never be used, and will be obsolete within a few years of their construction.
The defects which every sane social critic finds in the modes of living of the rich, their frivolity, triviality and futility, are illustrations of Mr.Veblen's thesis.Perhaps the largest complex of forms of futile waste, waste of money and of time, is contained in the performance of what, with curious aptness of phrase, are termed 'social duties', the idle round of visits, entertainments and functions which constitutes the 'society life'.I speak of the aptness of the term 'social duties'.This is no paradox, but merely the finest instance of that perversion of values and valuations which is inherent in the situation.For it is essential to the accuracy of this analysis that the rich members of society should regard their most futile activities as 'duties', and their small section of humanity as 'society'.
Of the expenditure which is laid out on the satisfaction of material wants, the waste or disutility will often be considerable.But Nature is strong enough to enforce some sense and moderation in the satisfaction of primary organic desires.While, therefore, there is much luxury and waste in the material standard of comfort of the rich, we do quite wrong to find in food and clothing and other material consumption our chief instances of luxury and waste.It is in the non-material expenditure that the proportion of waste or disutility is largest.The great moral law, corruptio optimi pessima, requires that this be so.If we seek the largest sources of injurious waste in the standard of the well-to-do classes, we shall find them in the expenditure upon recreation, education and charity.
NOTES:
1.On the side of Consumption as of Production a progressive society that has not abandoned itself to excessive rationalism will recognise the desirability of keeping a scope for 'bonne chance' and 'hazard'.Cf Tarde.
I., p.130.
2.Though the term 'conventional' appears formally to preclude the play of individual taste or judgment, it is in fact only in such expenditures that these qualities obtain scope for expression.For though convention prescribes the general mode of such expenditure, it leaves a far larger scope for personal choice and capricious variation than in the more necessary elements of expenditure.
