I’m already going broke on a million dollars a year! The appalling figures came popping up into his brain. Last year his income had been $980,000. But he had to pay out $21,000 a month for the $1.8 million loan he had taken out to buy the apartment. What was $21,000 a month to someone making a million a year? That was the way he had thought of it at the time—and in fact, it was merely a crushing, grinding burden—that was all! It came to $252,000 a year, none of it deductible, because it was a personal loan, not a mortgage. (The cooperative boards in Good Park Avenue Buildings like his didn’t allow you to take out a mortgage on your apartment.) So, considering the taxes, it required $420,000 in income to pay the $252,000. Of the $560,000 remaining of his income last year, $44,400 was required for the apartment’s monthly maintenance fees; $116,000 for the house on Old Drover’s Mooring Lane in Southampton ($84,000 for mortgage payment and interest, $18,000 for heat, utilities, insurance, and repairs, $6,000 for lawn and hedge cutting, $8,000 for taxes). Entertaining at home and in restaurants had come to $37,000. This was a modest sum compared to what other people spent; for example, Campbell’s birthday party in Southampton had had only one carnival ride (plus, of course, the obligatory ponies and the magician) and had cost less than $4,000. The TaliaferroSchool, including the bus service, cost $9,400 for the year. The tab for furniture and clothes had come to about $65,000; and there was little hope of reducing that, since Judy was, after all, a decorator and had to keep things up to par. The servants (Bonita, Miss Lyons, Lucille the cleaning woman, and Hobie the handyman in Southampton) came to $62,000 a year. That left only $226,200, or $18,850 a month, for additional taxes and this and that, including insurance payments (nearly a thousand a month, if averaged out), garage rent for two cars ($840 a month), household food ($1,500 a month), club dues (about $250 a month)—the abysmal truth was that he had spent more than $980,000 last year. Well, obviously he could cut down here and there—but not nearly enough—if the Worst happened! There was no getting out from under the $1.8 million loan, the crushing $21,000-a-month nut, without paying it off or selling the apartment and moving into one far smaller and more modest—an impossibility!
There was no turning back! Once you had lived in a $2.6 million apartment on Park Avenue-it was impossible to live in a $1 million apartment! Naturally, there was no way to explain this to a living soul. Unless you were a complete fool, you couldn’t even make the words come out of your mouth Nevertheless—it was so! It was . . . an impossibility! Why, his building was one of the great ones built just before the First World War! Back then it was still not entirely proper for a good family to live in an apartment (instead of a house). So the apartments were built like mansions, with eleven-, twelve-, thirteen-foot ceilings, vast entry galleries, staircases, servants’ wings, herringbone-parquet floors, interior walls a foot thick, exterior walls as thick as a fort’s, and fireplaces, fireplaces, fireplaces, even though the buildings were all built with central heating. A mansion!—except that you arrived at the front door via an elevator (opening upon your own private vestibule) instead of the street. That was what you got for $2.6 million, and anyone who put one foot in the entry gallery of the McCoy duplex on the tenth floor knew he was in…one of those fabled apartments that the world, le monde, died for! And what did a million get you today? At most, at most, at most: a three-bedroom apartment—no servants’ rooms, no guest rooms, let alone dressing rooms and a sunroom—in a white-brick high-rise built east of Park Avenue in the 1960s with 8½-foot ceilings, a dining room but no library, an entry gallery the size of a closet, no fireplace, skimpy lumberyard moldings, if any, plasterboard walls that transmit whispers, and no private elevator stop. Oh no; instead, a mean windowless elevator hall with at least five pathetically plain bile-beige metal-sheathed doors, each protected by two or more ugly drop locks, opening upon it, one of these morbid portals being yours. Patently . . . an impossibility!
He sat with his $600 New & Lingwood shoes pulled up against the cold white bowl of the toilet and the newspaper rustling in his trembling hands, envisioning Campbell, her eyes brimming with tears, leaving the marbled entry hail on the tenth floor for the last time, commencing her descent into the lower depths. Since I’ve foreseen it, God, you can’t let it happen, can you?
The utility of articles valued for their beauty depends closely upon the expensiveness of the articles. A hand-wrought silver spoon of a commercial value of some ten to twenty dollars is not ordinarily more serviceable than a machine-made spoon of the same material. It may not even be more serviceable than a machine-made spoon of some base metal, such as aluminium, the value of which may be no more than ten cents. If a close inspection should show that the supposed hand-wrought spoonwere in reality only a very clever citation of hand-wrought goods but an imitation so cleverly wrought as to give the same impression of line and service to any but a minute examination by a trained eye, the utility of the article including the gratification which the user derives from its contemplation as an object of beauty would immediately decline by some eighty or ninety per cent, or even more. The superior gratification derived from the use and contemplation of costly and supposedly beautiful products is commonly in great measure a gratification of our sense of costliness, masquerading under the name of beauty. The requirement of conspicuous wastefulness is not commonly present, consciously, in our canons of taste, but it is none the less present as a constraining norm, selectively shaping and sustaining our sense of what is beautiful, and guiding our discrimination with respect to what may legitimately be approved as beautiful and what may not.
At a secular moment, in which neither magic nor religion the original mainsprings of art—has quite the prestige that it once enjoyed, luxury can be understood as a synthetic alternative. For certain objects, the concept of luxury is used to create the aura that art once provided. You do not have to believe in God or in magic to be seduced, in however minor a way, by a banal version of luxury. But, to judge by Koolhaas’s messianic tone, luxury itself may yet become a religious cult. Certainly luxury has become the driving force fuelling Western industrial economies. They have abandoned basic manufacturing to China, and focus instead on building cars that reek of carefully tanned leather and whose heavy doors click shut reassuringly softly. Europe is in the business of making expensive clothes and luggage, wristwatches of impossible precision, and military aircraft made from exotic carbon fibre and alloy that are capable of flying at the speed of sound.
Each of these is a conspicuous luxury of a kind. Strictly speaking, we don’t need any of them, and yet if we didn’t make them and then buy them, the economy on which we depend for our survival would suffer, so in a sense we certainly do need them.
But luxury is an ever more elusive concept in the contemporary context. It is harder and harder to make an object that feels sufficiently out of the ordinary to qualify. The wonder is that the concept has survived at all, when there are so many more possessions and they are so much easier to make than in the past, when skills were jealously guarded secrets, passed from generation to generation. It’s even more remarkable that luxury has managed to retain its allure, given the archaic nature of so many objects that are notionally its embodiment. It seems to be easier to imbue categories of object that are at the brink of redundancy with the quality of luxury than to create new ones that can demonstrate it.
For luxury to survive, the traditions on which it depends, far from staying the same, need to be continuously reinvented. Some objects are more redundant than others. The wristwatch still retains its prestige. But the fountain pen is losing the attraction it once had. For a while, the pen was presented as more than a practical writing implement. It was a possession that could be passed from father to son—the kind of industrial object that might form part of an atavistic coming-of-age rite. The protective cap could be unwound slowly and reverentially to reveal a sculpted gold nib. The proportions were satisfyingly commanding, and would be made even more so by placing the cap on the end of the barrel. There was a clip on the cap to discreetly signal the presence of the pen even when it was concealed in a jacket top pocket.
It is now on the brink of the same fate that befell the portable typewriter. The basic concept has lost its relevance. Keyboards have sharply reduced opportunities to demonstrate elegant handwriting. Pens still have those clips, because that is what they have always had, but fewer and fewer people want to risk them in a jacket pocket — ink reservoirs and traditional nibs are notoriously prone to leak over hands and clothes. Ballpoints are a less risky alternative. But, even when equipped with a barrel just as glossy, and a cap identical to that of a fountain pen, the ballpoint version of a brand has nothing like the same charisma and fails to command the same premium price no matter how many gold carats it is finished with.
The wristwatch, in contrast, has been able to maintain its position as a desirable artifact in very much the same shape that it assumed at the start of the twentieth century when Cartier first started to make them for men, followed shortly afterwards by Rolex. The traditional wristwatch has managed to see off the eruption of quartz technology despite a wobble over the introduction of digital as opposed to analog faces, mass-produced accuracy, and the impact of fashion as exemplified by the Swatch phenomenon.
What makes the wristwatch different from the pen is that its form was born from a collaboration between jewelers, who made the cases, and mechanical-movement makers, who in the early days supplied the working parts. Jewelry has a long history of addressing the emotional and tactile interaction between people and things. This is an interaction which every kind of personal object must succeed in if it is to acquire an emotional resonance, but few manage it.
Certainly archaic technologies do have their appeal. Enthusiasts for mid-twentieth-century recording technology have kept the vinyl disc alive. And there are manufacturers who have gone back to the use of vacuum tubes rather than solid state circuits for amplifiers. But the charming easily tips over into the preposterous. When digital readouts increasingly replace the dials and instruments on the dashboards of cars, how can a walnut fascia designed as the backdrop to carefully delineated sets of dials be made to accommodate them convincingly? When this is attempted, walnut turns into an anachronism, not an asset. It signals not luxury, but pretension.
Because the cellphone is permanently in the hand, and close to mouth and ear, it has a relationship with its user as intimate as any they will have with a wristwatch. The visual interface, the sound made, the mechanism that protects the keypad offer plenty of scope for a designer to give cellphones a personality. But when their makers have attempted to produce what they call luxury products they have had a much harder time of it than the watchmakers. The usual strategy has been to use precious metals and stones in the most conspicuous way possible. But a gold-plated case for an object that is technically redundant after six months looks gratingly profligate even in the midst of a culture of excess. Rather than gold adding luster to the phone, the phone undermines the prestige of gold as a material when it is used in that way.
If you study people as they shop, you quickly perceive that the economists’ model of human behavior—in which rational actors calculate costs and benefits doesn’t explain the crucial choices. (Why do some people fall in love with Jaguars but not Corvettes?) Nor does Thorstein Veblen’s model, in which consumers are involved in a status race to keep up with the Joneses. (Do you really think that’s how you select your purchases? And if you don’t, what makes you think everyone else is more shallow and status-crazed than you are? Furthermore, in a decentralizing world, which Joneses are you supposed to keep up with, anyway?
The key to consumption is not calculation or emulation, it’s aspiration. Shopping, at least for non-necessities, a form of daydreaming. People wander through stores browsing for dream kindling. They are looking for things that inspire them to tell fantasy tales about themselves. That apple corer at Crate and Barrel can help you make those pies you’ve always savored; you can imagine the aromas and the smiles when you bring them out for dessert. That drill from Sears can help you build a utility closet; you can imagine the organized garage and the satisfaction of having everything in its place. That necklace is just what your wife would love; you can imagine the joy she will feel when you give it to her.
Often the pleasure that shoppers get from anticipating an object is greater than the pleasure they get from owning it. Once an item ceases to fire their imagination—when it no longer inspires a story about some brighter future—then they lose interest in it, and their imagination goes off in search of new and exciting things to dream about and buy. (Kids can go through this process with dispiriting speed, as anybody can tell you on a Christmas afternoon.)
People might browse through things they cannot possibly afford, simply because the pleasure they get from daydreaming in a luxury showroom compensates for the frustration of not being able to buy anything. The shoppers may play a distinctly modern game: They know that Gatorade won’t make them jocks, that Nike sneakers won’t make them jump like Mike. At the same time, they enjoy the fantasies and are happy to play along. Sometimes shopping sets off a dream or a sensation that is actually revealing and true. In Virginia Woolf’s short story “The New Dress,” a woman tries on a dress:
Suffused with light, she sprang into existence. Rid of cares and wrinkles, what she had dreamed of herself was there—a beautiful woman. Just for a second…there looked at her, framed in the scrolloping mahogany, a gray-white, mysteriously smiling, charming girl, the core of herself, the soul of herself; and it was not true vanity only, not only self-love that made her think it good, tender and true.
Woolf beautifully captured the way the woman’s vision has both the quality of hallucination—it exists for a moment, the woman’s cares and wrinkles vanish—but also the quality of truth, because in this moment, the woman sees her truest and best self, which does exist deep down.
People tend to buy things that set off light shows in their imaginations, which fit into the daydreams. For many people, shopping is its own joy, a way of envisioning a better life to come. In his book The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, Colin Campbell calls this desiring/consuming!daydreaming state “modern autonomous imaginative hedonism.” He is describing the hedonism of the not there yet. This is an imaginative hedonism rather than a sensual hedonism: When a person is deciding what to buy, she is not experiencing the good by merely fantasizing about what the experience of the good will be like. This is not an aristocratic Marie Antoinette—style hedonism practiced by people who already have access to everything. Rather, it’s a middle-class Walter Mitty hedonism practiced by people—regardless of their current economic situation who hope to fulfill their ideals someday.
Nor is it entirely benign. Campbell says that shoppers suffer from a “pleasurable discomfort”—pleasurable because they enjoy living in their daydreams, discomforting because shoppers are aware that they remain, in real life, unfulfilled. Still, shoppers are bathed in hope. The products they confront might be trivial baubles or shams, but shoppers get caught up in the romance and spend optimistically if not always wisely. Campbell argues that shopping is not the opposite of working. Shopping is not about instant gratification while work is about deferred gratification. Both activities are part of the same process of pursuing satisfaction.
The magazine stand, the department store, and the mall are all arenas for fantasy. The more upscale you go the more imaginatively evocative the stores become--Cartier is less utilitarian than Dollar General. Lamborghini is more fantasy-oriented than Ford. People with money flock toward things that don’t only serve a purpose but stir the heart. They are drawn by their imagination to move and improve and chase their fantasy visions of their own private heaven. The cash register is a gateway to paradise.
Rich as I may be from a material standpoint, I’ve long felt that I’m very poor, indeed, in time. For decades, my business affairs have made extremely heavy inroads on my time, leaving me very little I could use as I pleased. There are books that I have wanted to read—and books I have wanted to write. I’ve always yearned to travel to remote parts of the globe which I’ve never seen; one of my greatest unfulfilled ambitions has been to go on a long, leisurely safari in Africa.
Money has not been a bar to the realization of these desires; insofar as money is concerned, I could have easily afforded to do any of these things for many years. The blunt and simple truth is that I’ve never been able to do them because I could never afford the time. It’s paradoxical but true that the so-called captains of industry frequently have less time for indulging their personal desires than their rear-rank privates. This applies to little things as well as big ones.
It is not my intent to imply that I am in any way dissatisfied with my lot in life. Indeed, I would be more than ungrateful for the good fortune and advantages I’ve enjoyed if I were anything less than happy. Moreover, I am very gratified that I have managed to accomplish most of the goals I set for myself when I began my business career.
The point I’m trying to make is that each individual has to establish his own standards of values, and that these are largely subjective. They are based on what the individual considers most important to him and what he is willing to give for a certain thing or in order to achieve a certain aim.
Old—but true are the bromides that you can’t have everything and that you can’t get something for nothing. An individual always has to give—or give up—something in order to have or get something else. Whether he’s willing to make the exchange or not is entirely up to him and his own sense of values.
Some people find their purpose by taking a competitive attitude to life. In the movie Wall Street the main character Bud Fox challenges Gordon Gekko’s lust for more and more money, asking: ‘How much is enough?’ Here is Gekko’s answer:
It’s not a question of enough, pal. It’s a zero-sum game. Somebody wins, somebody loses.
The reply will touch a familiar chord with anyone who knows how the big names of the eighties think, talk and write. In the first chapter of his second book, “Surviving at the Top”, Donald Trump reports on what has happened since his first book by writing of his ‘victories’ and of the lessons that have taught him ‘not to take the winning for granted’. A few pages on, he compares himself with ‘a professional prize fighter’. Later, in a more introspective mood, he remarks:
I’m sometimes too competitive for my own good. If someone is going around labeling people winners and losers, I want to play the game and, of course, come out on the right side.
Thorstein Veblen, the crusty turn-of-the-century American sociologist of Norwegian stock who wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class would have smiled at the way in which people like Trump displayed their wealth, buying absurdly luxurious yachts in which they seldom had time to sail, or palatial country residences they rarely visited. It was Veblen who coined the term ‘conspicuous consumption’ to describe consumption that has the purpose of displaying one’s wealth, and thus enhancing one’s relative status. Veblen held that, once needs for subsistence and a reasonable degree of physical comfort have been satisfied, the motive that lies at the root of the desire to own is ‘emulation’ — the desire to equal or surpass others. Property becomes ‘the most easily recognized evidence of a reputable degree of success as distinguished from heroic or signal achievement. It therefore becomes ‘the conventional basis of esteem’. Conspicuous consumption, if it is to be effective in enhancing the consumer’s fame,must be ‘an expenditure of superfluities…it must be wasteful.’ The canons of ‘pecuniary taste’ dictate that ‘marks of superfluous costliness’ are indications of worth, and goods will be unattractive if ‘they show too thrifty an adaptation to the mechanical end sought’. The result is a striving that can never be satisfied:
…the end sought by accumulation is to rank high in comparison with the rest of the community in point of pecuniary strength. So long as the comparison is distinctly unfavorable to himself, the normal, average individual will live in chronic dissatisfaction with his present lot; and when he has reached what may be called the normal pecuniary standard of the community, or of his class in the community, this chronic dissatisfaction will give place to a restless straining to place a wider and ever-widening pecuniary interval between himself and this average standard. The invidious comparison can never become so favorable to the individual making it that he would not gladly rate himself still higher relatively to his competitors in the struggle for pecuniary reputability.
if, by nature or by socialization, men are more likely to engage in this striving for status than women, that is at once their burden, and their means of escaping the need to face questions about the meaning of their lives. They can go on accumulating wealth since, as Veblen adds:
In the nature of the case, the desire for wealth can scarcely be satiated in any individual instance.
This matches a remark that Michael Lewis reports in Liar’s Poker. When he was a rising bond trader at Salomon Brothers, one of his colleagues said to him:
You don’t get rich in this business, you only attain new levels of relative poverty. You think Gutfreund [Salomon Brothers’ chief executive] feels rich? I’ll bet not.
Indeed, John Gutfreund’s wife, Susan, famous for her exotic dinner parties reportedly once concluded an account of the problems of getting proper staff for their New York and Paris residences by complaining: ‘It’s so expensive to be rich!” In Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe ridiculed the lifestyle of people like the Gutfreunds. In one devastating scene the bond trader Sherman McCoy and his wife, Judy, are invited to a dinner on Fifth Avenue, six blocks from where they live. Judy’s dress made walking impossible; a taxi is out of the question too:
What would they do after the party? How could they walk out of the Bavardages’ building and have all the world, tout le monde, see them standing out in the street, the McCoys, that game couple, their hands up in the air, bravely, desperately, pathetically trying to hail a taxi?
So the McCoys hire a limousine and driver to drive them six blocks, wait four hours, and then drive them six blocks borne, at a cost of S197.20. But this does not ensure happiness:
the driver couldn’t pull up to the sidewalk near the entrance, because so many limousines were in the way. He had to double-park. Sherman and Judy bad to thread their way between the limousines…Envy…envy…From the license plates Sherman could tell that these limousines were not hired. They were owned by those whose sleek hides were hauled here in them. A chauffeur, a good one willing to work long hours and late hours, cost $36,000 a year, minimum; garage space, maintenance, insurance, would cost another $14,000 at least; a total of $50,000, none of it deductible. I make a million dollars a year — and yet I can’t afford that!
Acquisition without limit is another form of escape from meaninglessness. But it is an escape-hole that suggests a fundamental lack of wisdom. By ‘wisdom’, I mean the product of reflection with some intelligence and self-awareness about what is important in life; ‘practical wisdom’ adds to this the ability to act accordingly. The goal of emulation described by Veblen cannot possibly satisfy a reflective mind, and seems not even to satisfy those who do not reflect on what they are doing.
As Veblen suggests, behind the desire for acquisition lies a competitive urge. Already in the seventies, Michael Maccoby, who had studied both psychoanalysis and social science, sensed the rise of a new style of business executive. After interviewing 250 managers from twelve major American corporations, he concluded that for many of these executives, business life was about winning — for themselves, for their unit, or for their corporation. He wrote a book about what he had found, and called it after the new style of executive: The Gamesman. But the book was no celebration of the rising competitive executive dedicated to winning. Instead it contained a warning that if life is regarded simply as a game, then eventually a time will come when it ceases to matter:
Once his youth, vigor, and even the thrill in winning are lost, [the gamesman] becomes depressed and goalless, questioning the purpose of his life. No longer energized by the team struggle and unable to dedicate himself to something he believes in beyond himself, which might be the corporation or alternatively the larger society, he fmds himself starkly alone.
Michael Milken seems to have been a classic example of a supreme winner who gained little satisfaction from winning. When Milken was at the height of his success, a legend around the financial world with a personal fortune of a billion dollars, one of his colleagues told Connie Bruck: “Nothing is good enough for Michael. He is the most unhappy person I know. He never has enough ... He drives everything — more, more, more deals.” In 1986 one longtime buyer of Milken’s junk bonds told Bruck that “there seemed to be less and less joy in Milken — something that had been part of him in the early years — and more compulsion.”
In a critical study of the emphasis on competition in Western society, Alfie Kohn found that many sporting competitors report feeling empty after achieving the greatest possible success in their chosen sport. Here is Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry:
even after you’ve just won the Super Bowl — especially after you’ve just won the Super Bowl — there’s always next year. If “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing” then “the only thing” is nothing — emptiness, the nightmare of life without ultimate meaning.
Harvey Ruben, author of a book called Competing and an enthusiast for competition, concedes that: “The discovery, ultimately, that “making it” is often a hollow gain is one of the most traumatic events that the successful competitor can experience”. Stuart Walker, a sailing boat racer and another author of a book about winning and competing, says:
Winning doesn’t satisfy us — we need to do it again, and again. The taste of success seems merely to whet the appetite for more. When we lose, the compulsion to seek future success is overpowering; the need to get out on the course the following weekend is irresistible. We cannot quit when we are ahead, after we’ve won, and we certainly cannot quit when we’re behind, after we’ve lost. We are addicted.
Again, why did Ivan Boesky risk everything for a few million dollars, when he already had more than he could ever spend? In 1992, six years after Boesky pleaded guilty to insider trading, his estranged wife Seema broke her silence and spoke about Ivan Boesky’s motives in an interview with Barbara Walters for the American ABC network’s 20/20 program. Walters asked whether Ivan Boesky was a man who craved luxury. Seema Boesky thought not, pointing out that he worked around the clock, seven days a week, and never took a day off to enjoy his money. She then recalled that when, in 1982, Forbes magazine first listed Boesky among the wealthiest people in the US, he was upset. She assumed he disliked the publicity, and made some remark to that effect. Boesky replied:
That’s not what’s upsetting me. We’re no one. We’re nowhere. We’re at the bottom of the list and I promise you I won’t shame you like that again ever. We will not remain at the bottom of that list.
As a magazine writer in 1950s America, Betty Friedan interviewed many women who were living the classic American dream: they were young and healthy, they lived in fine suburban homes, their husbands had well-paid jobs, their children went to school, their housework was made easier by many labour-saving appliances and (we can add with the benefit of hindsight) no one worried about drugs or AIDS. This was the Good Life, in the most prosperous country in the world, and these women should surely have been the envy of anyone who has ever lacked comfort, leisure and financial security. Yet when Friedan talked to them, she found that they had a problem. They didn’t have a name for it, and nor did Friedan, so she called it ‘the problem that has no name’. The problem formed the core of Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, the book that more than any other single work triggered the modem feminist movement. In it women describe the problem in their own words. Here is a 23-year-old mother:
I ask myself why I am so dissatisfied. I’ve got my health, fine children, a lovely new home, enough money... It’s as if ever since you were a little girl, there’s always been somebody or something that will take care of your life: your parents, or college, or falling in love, or having a child, or moving to a new house. Then you wake up one morning and there’s nothing to look forward to.
The magazines and television soaps of the time tried to tell women that the role of wife and mother was the most fulfilling there can be. After all, compared to women in earlier periods, or in other countries today the American housewife of the fifties had it easy. ‘Having it easy’, however, was little consolation; in reality it was precisely the problem. This kind of life was supposed to be all that a woman needed for fulfillment, but when she had achieved everything she was supposed to want, her life plan came to a dead stop. The suburban housewife lives an isolated existence in her comfortable home, equipped with labour-saving devices that allow her to complete her daily chores in an hour or two. In another hour at the supermarket she can gather the week’s food supply for the entire family. Her only role is to bring up a family, and her children soon spend all day at school, and much of the rest of their time watching television. Nothing else seems worth achieving.
Consider a quite different way of living. Over the past forty years, several groups of Australian Aboriginals who subsisted by hunting and gathering in remote desert areas have come into contact with Western civilization. Through this contact they have access to reliable supplies of food, steel axes, clothes, and many other goods. If quality of life depended on quantity of material possessions, this contact would be bound to improve the quality of life of the Aboriginal groups. Yet observers are agreed that it has had exactly the opposite effect. We do not have to idealize the nomadic Aboriginal life in order to recognize that it provides many opportunities for finding satisfaction in the tasks of obtaining the necessities of life. Richard Gould, an American anthropologist who lived with an Australian Aboriginal hunter-gatherer group, found that:
the daily lives of the nomadic Aborigines are essentially harmonious and rewarding. An individual grows up realizing what is expected of him. By acquiring and developing practical knowledge and skill he learns to fulfill these expectations and is rewarded immediately by his own satisfaction in achievement and in the long run by the esteem of his kin. When food comes from a shop, bought with a government welfare check provided by a well-meaning social worker eager to see that all Australians get what they are legally entitled to receive, the skills and knowledge acquired over a lifetime are immediately devalued. The result is deeply demoralizing. Almost everything that the members of the nomadic group used to spend their days doing has lost its point. It is no wonder that alcohol often becomes a major problem, and even when it does not, these formerly nomadic Aboriginals appear to be at a loss for anything to do.
The modern housewife in her tidy household and the Aboriginal Australian sitting on the dusty ground outside the store are suffering from the same malaise: the elimination of purpose from their lives. The need for purpose lies deep in our nature. We can observe it in other animals, especially those who, like us, are social mammals. The tiger, restlessly pacing back and forth behind the bars of a small concrete cell, is fortunately becoming a less common sight at the zoo. But the monkeys still kept in barren metal cages in laboratories, or the pigs confined for months on factory farms in stalls too small to allow them even to pace back and forth, are suffering from the same problem. When you provide a sow with food and a warm dry place to lie down, you have not provided her with everything she needs. Such animals exhibit what ethologists call ‘stereotypical behaviour’ — they restlessly gnaw at the bars of their pen, or stand rocking their heads back and forth. They are trying to make up for the absence of purposive activity in their lives. Even the caged factory farm hen devours her daily nutritional needs a few minutes pecking at the feed with which she is supplied and then is left with nothing at all to do. As a result she will restlessly peck at her companions and all factory farm hens are now ‘debeaked’ to stop them killing each other. Some relatively more enlightened keepers of animals now mix the day’s food with straw or other inedible material and scatter it across the floor of the cage, so that the animal must work to find it. Hens kept indoors can be given food that is very finely ground; then instead of getting their daily food intake in a few minutes, it may take them several hours.
On the modern view of work and leisure, as we apply it to humans, these devices make the animals work harder, reduce their leisure time, and so should make them worse off; but observation shows that the animals’ welfare is improved. Of course, such strategems are at best a poor imitation of the wide variety of activities that animals have available to them in their natural conditions. They do not make it acceptable to keep animals in barren cages; but their relative success should make us re-examine our attitude to work and leisure. It is clear that our quest for a purpose to our lives has its roots a long way back in our evolutionary history, and will not easily be eliminated.
There is one short cut to overcoming the need for purpose. For the pharmaceutical industry, an existential void is a marketing opportunity. In the sixties, suburban doctors started prescribing tranquillizers in increasing quantities to housewives who came to them feeling depressed. As the Rolling Stones sang in ‘Mother’s Little Helper’:
Kids are different today, I hear every mother say
Mother needs something today to calm her down
And though she’s not really ill, there’s a little yellow pill
She goes running for the shelter of her mother’s little helper
And it helps her on her way
Gets her through her busy day
Doctor please, some more of these
Outside the door she took four more
What a drag it is getting old.
That is one way of ‘solving’ the dissatisfaction caused by a loss of purpose: turn the dissatisfied housewife into a contented zombie. It solves the problem only in the sense that alcohol solves the problems Australian Aboriginals have in adjusting to Western civilization, and crack and other drugs that solve the problems of unemployed Americans living in urban slums.
Not quite as addictive as heroin, less harmful than alcohol, but still problematic from an environmental perspective, is that other great modern tranquillizer, going shopping. Many people readily admit that shopping is not so much a means to obtain goods that they need, but rather their major recreational activity. A large dose of it seems to help overcome depression. Shopping is a modem substitute for more traditional hunter-gatherer activities. The shopping mall has replaced the old hunting grounds. Like gathering roots, seeds and berries in an arid environment, shopping can take a large portion of the day. It allows for the development of specialized forms of knowledge and skill. (How do you select the right items to gather? Where and when are the genuine bargains to be found?) Shopping can even pass as purposeful activity; its leisure component can be disguised or denied, in a way that it cannot if one spends the day playing golf.
Why was it mostly women who experienced such a loss of purpose in the fifties? At that time most men, but relatively few women, worked in jobs that held out the prospect of a promotion, an increase in responsibility and power. This is still often the case, if not quite to the same extent. So when one morning a man wakes up and asks himself, ‘Is this all there is to my life?’ he can quieten the doubts by thinking about that coming glorious day when he gets to move up to a more important position, with higher pay and more responsibility. That is why, as both employers and unions have found, a career structure, a ladder leading upwards, is often more crucial for job satisfaction than actual rates of pay. In contrast, for a housewife there is no promotion. Romance will fade, and the children will need their mother less and less. No wonder that many American housewives, once they had everything they were supposed to want, felt the meaningless of their existence more acutely than their husbands did.
And brings a fresh name from each fresh direction.
What greater name will you have, if you are old
When you put aside your flesh, than if you had died
Before you had given up baby-talk and rattles,
Once a thousand years have passed? And that is a shorter
Space to the eternal than the flash of an eyelid
To the circle which turns in the heavens most slowly.
-Dante
Many celebrities sour on fame as their careers progress. The rock star Pat Benatar told an interviewer that she was desperate to become famous at the age of twenty-two, indifferent at twenty-six, and by the age of twenty-eight had come to detest fame. The famous face higher expectations, greater demands on their time, and greater pressures to succeed, given the large sums of money at stake. Many people underestimate these costs when they start to seek fame. The television actor Jason Priestley said, “You never think about the price of fame when you start out. You’re far too busy trying to work. All of a sudden you find yourself a working actor and six months later you’ve got Hard Copy camped out on your doorstep.” And the actor Michael Maloney said that “anyone who craves fame is not aware of the consequences.”
The search for fame derives in part from personal insecurities. Both Blaise Pascal and Adam Smith argued that individuals look to others for approval when they are uncertain about the quality of their decisions and contributions. According to Pascal, if someone tells us that we have a headache when we do not, we are not upset. We know that the opinion has no merit. If someone criticizes us and tells us that an opinion of ours is wrong, however, we are greatly disturbed. We cannot be certain that our opinion is correct, and the expressed disapproval makes us nervous. Approbation has its greatest force when insecurity is most prominent.
Adam Smith compared poets and mathematicians. The quality of poetry, he thought, is difficult to judge, which makes poets insecure about their work. They seek favor with great ardor, and divide themselves into cabals and factions. Mathematicians, by contrast, have greater assurance about the quality of their work, even when they receive little or no public recognition. Since right and wrong answers usually can be proven, time will validate the merit of their contributions. According to Smith, mathematicians enter into less intrigue than do poets, and they reject participation in factions and cabals.
To the extent that fame-seeking is based in personal insecurity, the attainment of fame will not eradicate performers’ underlying feelings of inadequacy. The receipt of approval of ten feeds upon insecurities. It nourishes and magnifies fears, rather than alleviating them. The fame-seeker is trying to fill a personal void by addressing symptoms rather than causes, by looking for external approval instead of internal self-respect. The magnification and intensification of fame brought by modernity can heighten these tendencies and spread them to larger numbers of people. Hegel viewed the attainment of recognition as alienating for both parties, since it elevates the status of one human being over another.
.jpg)
