The caution has already been repeated more than once, that while the
regulating norm of consumption is in large part the requirement of
conspicuous waste, it must not be understood that the motive on which
the consumer acts in any given case is this principle in its bald,
unsophisticated form. Ordinarily his motive is a wish to conform to
established usage, to avoid unfavorable notice and comment, to live
up to the accepted canons of decency in the kind, amount, and grade of
goods consumed, as well as in the decorous employment of his time and
effort. In the common run of cases this sense of prescriptive usage is
present in the motives of the consumer and exerts a direct constraining
force, especially as regards consumption carried on under the eyes of
observers. But a considerable element of prescriptive expensiveness is
observable also in consumption that does not in any appreciable degree
become known to outsiders--as, for instance, articles of underclothing,
some articles of food, kitchen utensils, and other household apparatus
designed for service rather than for evidence. In all such useful
articles a close scrutiny will discover certain features which add to
the cost and enhance the commercial value of the goods in question, but
do not proportionately increase the serviceability of these articles for
the material purposes which alone they ostensibly are designed to serve.
Under the selective surveillance of the law of conspicuous waste there
grows up a code of accredited canons of consumption, the effect of
which is to hold the consumer up to a standard of expensiveness and
wastefulness in his consumption of goods and in his employment of time
and effort. This growth of prescriptive usage has an immediate effect
upon economic life, but it has also an indirect and remoter effect upon
conduct in other respects as well. Habits of thought with respect to
the expression of life in any given direction unavoidably affect the
habitual view of what is good and right in life in other directions
also. In the organic complex of habits of thought which make up the
substance of an individual's conscious life the economic interest does
not lie isolated and distinct from all other interests. Something,
for instance, has already been said of its relation to the canons of
reputability.
The principle of conspicuous waste guides the formation of habits of
thought as to what is honest and reputable in life and in commodities.
In so doing, this principle will traverse other norms of conduct which
do not primarily have to do with the code of pecuniary honor, but
which have, directly or incidentally, an economic significance of some
magnitude. So the canon of honorific waste may, immediately or remotely,
influence the sense of duty, the sense of beauty, the sense of utility,
the sense of devotional or ritualistic fitness, and the scientific sense
of truth.
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