The Vice of Luxury

Economic Excess in a Consumer Age

David Cloutier

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781626162563, 9781626162709
• eBook ISBN: 9781626162570
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Luxury. The word alone conjures up visions of attractive, desirable lifestyle choices, yet luxury also faces criticism as a moral vice harmful to both the self and society. Engaging ideas from business, marketing, and economics, The Vice of Luxury takes on the challenging task of naming how much is too much in today's consumer-oriented society.

David Cloutier’s critique goes to the heart of a fundamental contradiction. Though overconsumption and materialism make us uneasy, they also seem inevitable in advanced economies. Current studies of economic ethics focus on the structural problems of poverty, of international trade, of workers' rights—but rarely, if ever, do such studies speak directly to the excesses of the wealthy, including the middle classes of advanced economies. Cloutier proposes a new approach to economic ethics that focuses attention on our everyday economic choices. He shows why luxury is a problem, explains how to identify what counts as the vice of luxury today, and develops an ethic of consumption that is grounded in Christian moral convictions.

Part I

CHAPTER 1

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Luxury in History

A Brief Survey

What is luxury? Father James Martin tells the story of an old Jesuit, a “living rule,” whose room he would visit for confession. His room is spartan, the bed “a single . . . nothing but a box spring and a mattress perched atop a rickety metal frame. But what caught my eye was the yellow bedspread. An inexpensive polyester spread barely covering the mattress, it looked ancient, thin nearly to the point of transparency, faded in color; it was the most meager bedspread I could imagine. ‘Father,’ I said, ‘I think it’s time for a new bedspread.’ ‘Mister,’ he said with a laugh, ‘that is the new bedspread.’”¹ Martin himself had asked for a new bedspread the week before, and here realized he had not really needed it.

Was this new bedspread a luxury? As Martin notes, American Jesuits may live simply compared to some “affluent Americans,” but he admits they live less simply than countless poor around the world.² The category of luxury is a challenging and difficult one. This book seeks to answer the question of what luxury is. The concept must be defined inductively during the course of the discussion. The first task is to examine how writers in the Western tradition put flesh on the bones of this notion—but not all in the same way. History leads us into the crucial eighteenth century, where developments in philosophy, theology, and economics (subjects not yet fully distinguished from one another) interrupted the traditional critique in significant and problematic ways. However, even before that time the notion of truphe/tryphe or luxuria had an odd history. It appears as central, gets lost or overlooked in the moral discourse, and then later returns but often in a different way.

Luxury in the Ancient Traditions

In his narrative of the “eventful history” of the idea, Christopher Berry notes that luxury’s “contemporary usage in the rhetoric of advertising is far removed from the opprobrium to which it was subjected by Cato the Elder.”³ Ancient usage is uniform in its moral condemnation of luxury. The related Greek terms, built on the root truphe/tryphe, all have strongly negative connotations. Yet their rendering in English is imprecise: a Greek-English lexicon offers a cluster of terms, including daintiness, fastidiousness, voluptuousness, licentiousness, extravagance, wantonness, and effeminacy.⁴ This imprecision bespeaks an attempt to characterize some problem that is evident yet difficult to identify.

Berry points out that the basic moral assumption undergirding all classical criticisms of luxury was that “needs have fixed limits” and that exceeding these limits is ultimately destructive of both the person and the polis.⁵ Criticisms of luxury rested on two sorts of limits. First, ancient writers assumed a definite teleology—a vision of the truly good life for humans. Luxury names some sort of excess beyond the limits set by the nature of the person. Second, within this teleology there is an assumed priority of common life over private life, such that one’s resources should be directed toward the good of the civic order instead of for personal ease. Luxury names a “fastidious” and excessive attention to private goods that detrimentally diverts attention and resources from the city. This ideal of the priority of the common good reflects the general sense that civic life is a noble calling of the propertied class; the wealthy elite should not turn inward toward the luxury of a private life.⁶ To lack the discipline of these limitations is to suffer from the vice of luxury.

Plato’s criticism of the “luxurious city” in The Republic exemplifies the elements of classical critiques.⁷ The city, in Socrates’s description, is necessary for human life because “no human being is self-sufficient” (369b) and it is better “if each does the work nature has equipped him to do” (370c), thus dividing labor among different jobs. Socrates attempts to describe the different things needed in the city, but Glaucon breaks in on his description by saying Socrates is describing a “city of pigs” that lacks comfortable furniture and tasty food. Socrates retorts that Glaucon’s vision would be “a city in a state of fever,” but he accepts that “many will not be content with simple fare and simple ways” (372d). He then describes all the new professions that will be needed to satisfy this “fevered” city, a city that constantly demands to “be extended and filled up with superfluities” (373b). There is reference to the need for a surplus of doctors to treat all the diseases of the luxurious city on account of the diet and the lack of exercise! Most especially, the city will need more land to satisfy all its wants and thus will need to go to war because of its covetousness. It cannot live within its means. The luxurious city is beset by conflict, both within and without, in contrast to the harmony engendered by properly limited desire that characterizes the ideal person and the ideal city.

Socrates’s initial description of the ideal nonluxurious city is not one of abject poverty. It has “bread, wine, clothes, shoes, and houses” (372b), food is served on “mats of reeds” with desserts of “figs, chickpeas, and beans,” and all is enjoyed while wearing “garlands, and singing hymns to the gods and enjoying one another’s company . . . all the while drinking in moderation” (372c). The ideal is not poverty, which leads to “meanness and incompetence,” but neither is it wealth, which “spawns luxury and indolence” (422a). The problem is the desire for fancy food, ornamental clothing, and finely decorated houses.

This critique of luxury is not peripheral but central to Plato’s entire argument. It appears and reappears throughout the dialogue. As Glaucon exclaims in the discussion of appropriate music for the ideal city, “there is something we have done without even noticing it. We have been purging away those things we discussed earlier that transformed our city into a city of luxury” (399e). Appropriate music turns out to require only simple instruments. In Plato, the city reflects the human soul in its tripartite division. Luxury in the city reflects a base dominance of the body over the mind and the spirit—it is harmful both to the contemplative life and to the next-best warrior life. Like the disordered soul, the disordered city is eventually not headed to triumph but ruin. Ultimately, “unbalanced” cities do not deserve to be called cities at all; they are merely “aggregations of factions” (422e). And what is faction’s source? That source is none other than “money-making and the acquisition of land and houses and gold and silver,” causing the originally virtuous guardians and rulers to fatally compromise and leading to the loss of independence for small proprietors, and finally their subsequent coercion into work and (more important) warfare (547b–c). Note well: a compromise with luxury is the first step in Socrates’s book-length description of the gradual decline of the city into tyranny.

This line of criticism of luxury as fundamentally disruptive for both individual and social flourishing can be found throughout ancient literature, both Greco-Roman and Jewish. Aristotle carefully distinguishes the art of economics from “chrematistics,” with the latter indicating an unlimited desire for material goods as ends rather than as a means to living well.⁸ While he refers to luxury only in passing in the Nicomachean Ethics (1150b), Aristotle’s account of prodigality and vulgarity as excesses in relation to the virtues of liberality and magnificence suggests many similar themes. (He also mentions luxury in a list of vices in the Eudemian Ethics.⁹) The discussion of these virtues comes immediately after a lengthy discussion of temperance, where the self-indulgent person is said to “delight either in the wrong things, or more than most people do, or in the wrong way” (1118b23–24), and thus “is led by his appetite to choose [pleasant things] at the cost of everything else” (1119a2). He then goes on to note that we call “prodigal” those “who are incontinent and spend money on self-indulgence.” Aristotle explains that prodigals are usually “self-indulgent, for they spend lightly and waste money on their indulgences, and incline toward pleasures because they do not live with a view to what is noble.” Prodigality turns out to be complex. The mean or miserly person simply cares too much for wealth (1119b29); the prodigal is careless in his giving and is neglectful of “taking” (1121a8–15). This, of course, leads to the problem that one cannot be prodigal for long, so prodigality then turns to “taking recklessly and from any source” (1121b2).¹⁰ Prodigality leads eventually to social conflict.

Aristotle’s assessment of magnificence, however, may seem to lie in some tension with Plato’s criticisms. The magnificent man primarily spends on public splendor, so that even on “private occasions” (for example, a wedding), he “spends not on himself but on public objects” (1123a4–5). Yet Aristotle also considers one’s house “a sort of public ornament” and so he licenses spending on lasting, beautiful, and becoming things. Still, at least the magnanimous man is not vulgar, which entails overspending the circumstances and displaying a “tasteless showiness” that is “not for the sake of the noble, but to show off his wealth, and because he thinks he is admired for such things” (1123a20–26). Aristotle, in line with his tendency to show less scorn for external goods than Plato, in essence expands the limits on material goods here. But he nevertheless retains such limits in describing what is excessive.

Stoic thinkers manifest a complex relation to Plato and Aristotle by shifting toward a less polis-centered view of life and a more nuanced position on external goods.¹¹ Given their belief that external goods are ultimately “indifferents,” one might imagine them weakening the argument against luxury. In many cases, however, their more rigorous suspicion of “unnatural” individual desire strengthens the critique. More influentially, many cite the pursuit of luxury as the mark of the decline of the Republic, and their critiques remained accepted (if not always heeded) well into the eighteenth century.¹² The roots of this Roman critique lie in later Greek historians of the second and early first century BCE, such as Polybius and Posidonius, who cultivated a longstanding tradition of the “devastating consequences of tryphe” on cities, especially identified with the fall of Sybaris.¹³ This theme is so dominant in the literature of ancient Rome that even contemporary economist Lester Thurow can quote Cicero on the Roman ideal: “The Roman people hate private luxury, they love public magnificence.”¹⁴ Augustine happily plays this same tune, remarking that the supposed Roman desire for peace and prosperity masks the “desire to enjoy your luxurious license unrestrained” and “thus to generate from your prosperity a moral pestilence which will prove a tho...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Why Luxury?
• PART I
• PART II
• Conclusion: Resisting with Discipline, Responding with Hope
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author