§8.But a high uniform level of welfare throughout society does not exhaust the demands of human welfare.It evidently overstresses the life of the social as against the individual organism, imposing a regimen of equality which absorbs the many into the one.Now, desirous to hold the balance fair between the claims of individual personality and of society, we cannot acquiesce in an ideal of economical consumption which makes no direct provision for the former.So far, however, as the consumption of an individual is of a routine character, expressing only the needs of a human nature held in common with his fellows, it does not really express his individuality at all.The realisation of the unique values of his personality, and the conscious satisfaction that proceeds from this individual expression, can only be got by activities which lie beyond the scope of custom and convention.Though this issue has most important bearings that are outside the economic field, it is also vitally connected with the use of economic goods.For, unless a due proportion of the general income (the aggregate of goods and services) is placed at the free disposal of individuals in such forms as to nourish and stimulate the wholesome and joyous expansion of their powers, that social progress which first manifests itself in the free experimental and creative actions of individuals whose natures vary in some fine and serviceable way from the common life, will be thwarted.
This brings us to a better understanding of the nature and origin of the human injury and waste contained in large sections of that conventional consumption which plays so large and so depressing a part in every class standard of comfort.Where the production of an economic society has grown so far as to yield a considerable and a growing surplus beyond that required for survival purposes, this surplus is liable to several abuses.Instead of being applied as food and stimulus to the physical and spiritual growth of individual and social life, it may be squandered, either upon excessive satisfaction of existing routine wants in any class or classes, or in the stimulation and satisfaction of more routine wants and the evolution of a complex conventional standard of consumption, containing in its new factors a diminishing amount of human utility or even an increasing amount of human costs.If the industrial structure is such that particular groups of business men can make private gains by stimulating new wasteful modes of conventional consumption, this process, as we have seen, is greatly facilitated.
But, after all, the business motive is not in itself an adequate explanation.
Business firms suggest new wants, but the susceptibility to such suggestions, the active imitation by which a new article passes into the conventional consumption of a group or class, requires closer consideration.Falsification of a standard can seldom be understood as a mere perversion of the free choice of individuals.A convention is not produced by a mere coincidence of separate choices.Imitation plays an important part in the contagion and infection of example.In endeavouring to assess the human utility of the consumption of wealth we see the play of several imitative forces.
Current Prestige, Tradition, Authority, Fashion, Respectability supplement or often displace the play of individual taste, good or bad, in moulding a class and family standard of consumption.The psychology and sociology of these distinctively imitative forces which form or change standards are exceedingly obscure.
The merely gregarious instinct may lead to the spread in a class or group of any novelty which attracts attention and is not offensive.Where supported by any element of personal prestige, such novelty, irrespective of its real virtues or uses, may spread and become embedded in a standard of consumption.The beginnings of every fashion largely belong to this order of imitation.Some prestige is usually needed fairly to launch a new fashion; once launched it spreads mainly by 'gregariousness', the instinct to be, or look, or act, like other people.The limits of error, disutility or inconvenience, which can be set upon a novelty of fashion, appear to depend mainly upon the initial force of prestige.The King might introduce into London society a really inconvenient high hat, though the Queen perhaps could not carry a full revival of the crinoline.
Fashions change but they leave deposits of conventional expenditure behind.What is at first fashionable often remains as respectable and lives long in the conventional habits of a class.Every class standard is encrusted with little elements of dead fashion.
§9.But this formative influence of Prestige itself demands fuller consideration.For it not merely implants elements of expenditure in the standard of consumption, but infects the standard itself.
A true standard would rest on a basis of organic utility, expenditure being apportioned so as to promote the soundest, fullest human life.But all conventional consumption is determined largely by valuations imposed by the class possessing most prestige.It is, of course, a commonplace that fashions in dress, and in certain external modes of consumption, descend by snobbish imitation from high life through the different social strata, each class copying the class above.It is a matter of far more vital importance that religion, ethics, art, literature and the whole range of intellectual activities, manners, amusements, take their shapes and values largely by the same process of infiltration from above.
