Those of us who affirm the market economy as a path to human flourishing need to offer an alternate to the basically negative view of human consumption that critics as well as apologists of the free market too often assume. This is especially true for men and women of faith who hold to a higher vision of human life, its purpose, and the means required for the person to become fully and truly who they were created by God to be.
To that end, it is worth looking at two seminal figures in the history of economic thought: the mid-twentieth-century economist and retail analyst Victor Lebow and the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen. These two thinkers illustrate the analytical dangers inherent in looking at our economic life through the lens of a warped anthropology that sees consumption as fundamentally destructive rather than intrinsically productive.
To be fair to the critics, greed is a problem in the free market. Think about department store customers rioting on Black Friday as they push, shove, and trample each other to buy a deeply discounted flat screen television. And, while we’re at it, what does it say about the store and the corporation that owns it that they—knowing what has happened in years past—continue to hold these kinds of sales? Yes, I know people are responsible for their actions. And yes, I know in a fallen world greed is a constant. But the fact that human beings are sinful and that business can make a profit from sin is not a compelling defense for a market economy.
Victor Lebow, in his article “Price Competition in 1955,” argues that the free market is motivated by greed. While his argument has some merit, it can easily mislead us as we work to understand the ethical challenges facing our economic life in the context of a free market. Specifically, I have in mind his assumption that consumption is the key to the free market’s success. If we make consumption, rather than virtue, the engine that drives our economic life, then I think the Church is right to be skeptical of the free market itself. But what if the market not only fosters virtue but also requires it? What if, as economist Deirdre McCloskey has argued, “Without virtue the machinery of neither the market nor the government works for our good?”
Lebow’s work certainly encourages skepticism that the free market is an arena for developing virtue. Take, for example, his contention that mid-twentieth-century American capitalism’s “enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption.” Although Lebow is wrong in asserting that consumption alone drives the free market, he is partially right when he says, “The measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is now to be found in our consumptive patterns.”
For Lebow it is axiomatic that a growing capitalist economy needs “things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing pace.” For this reason “commodities and services must be offered to the consumer with a special urgency.” He goes on to say that the market economy as it existed in the 1950s requires “not only ‘forced draft’ consumption, but ‘expensive’ consumption as well.” While there are significant differences between what we see on Black Friday and the consumption that Lebow says drives a market economy, both are modes of “conspicuous consumption,” a term that economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) introduced in his “The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions.”
Veblen argues that we want things because in “order to gain and to hold the esteem of men it is not sufficient merely to possess wealth or power. The wealth or power must be put in evidence, for esteem is awarded only on evidence.” In other words, we want things to show off and to show up our neighbors; our consumption is motivated by pride, vainglory, and a desire to inspire envy in others. Our consumption is inherently self-aggrandizing.
Veblen is correct when he says that decisions about consumption are meant to signal the status of the person and that they help to sketch out the boundaries of a community. We desire and use goods to create, communicate, and confirm our personal identity and so our place in the community. This is why we can say with him that all decisions about leisure or consumption are “conspicuous.” Veblen is also correct in saying that, like manners and decorum, economic decisions “are an expression of the relation of status—a symbolic pantomime of mastery on the one hand and of subservience on the other.” His argument becomes more problematic, and so less useful for understanding consumerism, when he says that conspicuous leisure and consumption, manners and decorum, serve to insulate the wealthier members of society from the poorer neighbors and to enforce this distinction to the harm of the latter and the advantage of the former.
Critically, Veblen reduces the social function of consumption simply to self-aggrandizement. He overlooks the fact that discrete segments of a society are constituted not only by the consumption decisions of other segments but also by their own internal decisions about the relative value of particular goods and ways of spending time.
In light of this, it is simplistic (and condescending) to assume that members of a particular social classes are incapable of making their own decisions about the nature of what they value. Moreover, Veblen and those who have taken his analysis as their own implicitly deny the moral agency of the poor. To be sure, power can be—and often is—exercised by one segment of society at the expense of another. However, this isn’t simply a matter of the wealthy oppressing the poor; different social segments are constantly interacting and seeking to affirm their own vision of life. They do this externally relative to each other and internally among their own members.
While it isn’t clear whether or not Lebow and Veblen are speaking prescriptively or descriptively, they clearly see greed and self-aggrandizement as central to a market economy. If we make their assumptions our own, we cannot help but see the pursuit of profit, wealth creation, and private property as inherently immoral. If, in fact, Lebow and Veblen are correct in how the market functions, then Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kyrill is right to worry about the “cult of consumerism.” If aimless production and acquisition alone drives the free market, then the market economy doesn’t just exploit the moral weakness of the individual, it fundamentally deforms society. While certainly there is evidence that this can be the case, the situation is more complicated. Greed and self-aggrandizement are only two—albeit dark and worrying— elements in the constellation of motives and goals for a market economy. Consumerism is not intrinsic or essential to the free market but is, in fact, a deformation of it. As McCloskey points out, “Vulgar devotion to consumption alone is more characteristic of pre- and anticapitalist than of late-capitalist societies.” We need to balance criticism of the excesses of the market with the fact that for the tradition of the Orthodox Church, profit, wealth creation, and private property are all not only morally good but are also part of God’s blessing for humanity.
Failing to take into account the moral goodness of wealth and the moral complexity of the market in order to criticize the cult of material prosperity or the presence of greed and envy in the marketplace can easily lead us to the opposite mistake: the facile assumption that if “more” is the problem, then “less” is the solution. Doing so is to accept as real what the Desert Father Abba Moses calls a “fake and counterfeit coinage” While it has the “appearance of piety,” it ends up harming the poor who need (and have a right to) personally meaningful and economically profitable employment. This is especially true for the poorest and most vulnerable members of the human family who cannot care for themselves and so are dependent upon society having an excess of wealth sufficient to care for them. The hard and inconvenient truth is that “you” aren’t necessarily any better off because “I” have less; shared material poverty isn’t to anyone’s real advantage.
Anthropologically we can define wealth in terms of the relative amount of resources (e.g., time, money, effort) needed to acquire the basic necessities of life (e.g., food, water, shelter) as well as the range of options one has in choosing among these necessities. If consumption is immoral, if the goal of our economic life is to consume less, then we ought to dismiss the economic gains of the last two centuries as also immoral. Assuming this not only reflects a lack of gratitude for God for his material blessings, but it also condemns our neighbor to poverty.
Rev. Gregory Jensen is a priest in the Orthodox Church in America. He is a social scientist specializing in religion and personality theory. A frequent lecturer at Acton University, in 2013 he was also a Lone Mountain Fellow with the Property and Environmental Research Center (PERC). This essay was excerpted from his forthcoming The Cure for Consumerism (Acton Institute, Spring 2015).
