The Luxury of Capitalist Excess. (03/26/2002)
I almost never want to write anything about the concept of luxury. I want neither to praise its pursuit nor condemn its existence. The idea that there is even a word in any language to signify its presence in civilized society seems odious to me. In Western culture, of course, and unfortunately, the concept cannot be avoided forever because the nature of our collective ideology demands recognition of both sides of every binary opposition that comes to attention. Luxury must, therefore, be considered because its opposite, abject poverty, for instance, is currently so widespread in our society that to deny existence to the one is the same as pretending that the other does not affect anyone either. One of the only indications that Western civilization has managed to evolve beyond the Middle Ages is the fact that back then Luxuria was considered to be one of the seven deadly sins whereas now it has been elevated to a status that places it among the seven most significant signs of a healthy and robust economy. Private and public pursuit of luxury has become a standard response for most people, even those who have little or no actual capacity to achieve it, at virtually every level of our culture. James B. Twitchell, in his essay entitled "A (Mild) Defense of Luxury" (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 03/15/2002, B7-B10) argues that a moderate defense of luxury is appropriate because not everything connected to its pursuit is necessarily destructive. He cautions us, for instance, that we "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 [people]" (B10). While Twitchell may well be engaged in stating his case ironically, even after the mode and model of Jonathan Swift in his "A Modest Proposal," he generally fails to condemn excess unequivocally enough to make it an obvious target of his attack. In other words, if his purpose is ironical, he has not written with compelling effectiveness.
He notes at one point that American consumerism, and its "accumulation of the new luxury," may be connected to 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" and wonders, if only rhetorically, what we should do "about the lower sixth of our population that seems mired in transgenerational poverty" ((B10). After putting the question, he says: "These are important questions but ones I will leave to others" (B10). He justifies his disinterest in the subject by noting that "[e]ntire academic, governmental, and commercial industries are dedicated" to solving these problems and his own view of the issue is to claim that a "redemptive aspect of cultures that produce the concept of luxury is that they also produce the real luxury of having time and energy to discuss it" (B10). Talk, of course, is cheap and Twitchell seems to believe that only talking about poverty, even of an abject and "transgenerational" kind, is a far better course to follow than making any effort to redistribute wealth in a way that closes the current gap between those who have and spend vast quantities of it and those who have less than they need to survive. He also takes exception to the notion that consumerism itself generates "artificial desires" for goods and services that no one actually needs:
"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." (B10)
The problem with this reasoning, the truly "hazy" thinking it contains, arises from the fact that capitalism-"and the promise of the better life it carries"-is just that-a promise which has gone unrealized, as Twitchell himself admits, for fully one-six of the population of the most advanced, developed, and long-standing capitalistic nation on earth. The answer given to explain away the disparity so obvious here between haves and have-nots, the traditional answer, has always been structured in two tiers: firstly, people who suffer from poverty and want in capitalist society must prefer to be too poor to participate in the quest for luxury. Being lazy is the source of being abjectly poor in a land of unlimited opportunity. The second part of the same argument, and its true foundation in Western ideology, is the old Puritan notion that wealth is a sign of God's favor on those who possess it and a further sign of His displeasure with those who have not managed to accumulate any. People who suffer poverty do so either willingly because they are lazy or do so because God curses them to that status for the sin of laziness they commit by not being properly motivated toward the accumulation of wealth. The more likely fact, however, is that the wealthiest people at the top of the economic hierarchy own and consume so much of the material property of capitalistic society, where wealth itself is by no means infinite in its extent, that there is never enough left over for the people at the bottom of the chain to elevate themselves above the level to which they are condemned by the wealthiest among us.
The idea that this system of distribution is ordained by God, and that anyone who attempts to alter its terms is guilty of heresy, constitutes one, even the best, reason it has persisted so long in "Christian" economies. At least in the Middle Ages, when the link between wealth and power was still directly connected to God's will, a view was maintained in the social contract that the wealthiest people were responsible for the well-being of their underlings. As the connection between wealth and luxury as a benefit of God's ordination has waned, the idea that individuals who possess it are expected to defend those who do not has also vanished. Initially, that responsibility was shifted from individual people to the States they generated and controlled, a fact which gave rise to governmental agencies that were supposed to provide welfare for people who fell below an acceptable standard of living. As everyone knows, those agencies, with their long record of failure, are being systematically under-funded and eliminated by a government now preoccupied with waging a war against terrorists who attacked this country because of their perception of a wide disparity of wealth between us and them. Twitchell dismisses "Muslim extremists" as one group of people who periodically disrupt our God-given right to pursue luxury, with all its attendant harms and ills, without regard to the damage it may cause to the environment and to those other people we exclude from participation in the dream of having vastly more material wealth than anyone can possibly need or consume.
Twitchell's argument seems to be that, if the US punishes poor people and nations severely enough for a long enough period of time, they will eventually see the error of their ways and join us in the liberating and democratic pursuit of a luxury that exists wholly beyond any hope they have of ever achieving it. Encouraging the people of Afghanistan, by waging an endless war against them, to aspire to the lofty goal of securing what we have already achieved, consigning only one-sixth of our population to "transgenerational" poverty, in a place that already does not contain enough material resource to feed even one-tenth of its people, sounds like a plan to me. Anyone reading Twitchell's "(Mild) Defense of Luxury" with anything like half an active consciousness, can well understand why the people who suffer most at the expense of our excessive prosperity periodically launch terrorist attacks against us.