ILF POST

By Charles Lindblom My good friend Robert E. Lane has just published his erudite, brilliant, and enjoyable After The End of History. Among several themes is materialism, on which he joins countless critics of its excesses. He is persuasive. Precisely speaking, however, he joins most of his fellow critics in missing some junctions.

“Materialism”, as Lane and other critics often (not always) use the word, denotes an excessive pursuit of material rather than intangible things: hence not pursuit of food but of too much, not of a dwelling but of too big or too many, and not of a car but of an impressively long, powerful, or otherwise unusual object of pride. They would be better off, the critics say, if instead they stepped up their pursuit of intangibles: for example, friendship, adventure, literature, and the arts.

But I note that when people say that they want to eat better they usually mean that they want not more edible material but more novelty and variety in what they eat; or they, in some other way, want better tasting food. Or they want the food prepared for them, whether at home or at a restaurant. Look at those words: novelty, variety, taste. All intangibles. Not materials.

Or look at what they want in a car: to compete with their neighbors, to enjoy the delights of motion and acceleration, and, above all, to gain easy mobility. All intangibles.

Even very poor people pursue intangibles. Although deficient in nutrition, the very poor as an example, discard the nutritionally rich husks of rice because their taste is for white rice. Taste is an intangible.

When you or I buy a suit of clothing, little of what we pay goes to material itself–fabric to give us shelter. Most of it goes to giving us the comfort we want and a design that will keep us out of jail and also make us look good in other people’s eyes. We are buying, for the most part, intangible values.

Of course we live in a material world and use material objects in everything we do. But that does not convict us of an excessive desire for them, nor does it deny that we are also engaged in intangible pursuits every hour of our lives. I suspect that the critics are simply mistaken about an excess of material pursuits.

In further confusion, the critics often shift meaning. Instead of alleging an excessive pursuit of material things, they allege an excessive pursuit of those values that can be bought– buyable values, values that can be acquired with money. That’s more on target and may indeed be true.

What we buy, however, are not mostly material goods. We buy behavior rather than materials: a lawyer’s advice, insurance, medical care, education, and other services, novel experiences, admission to concerts and cinema, travel, loyalty, companionship, even love. And the wealthier the people, the smaller fraction of their wealth do they spend on material goods, and the more they spend to induce desired behavior–servants and services–and, of course, shares, through stocks and bonds, of flows of earnings.

Given our passion for values that can be bought, many of us come to place our highest value on money itself. And–confusion again– that is what some of the critics often mean by materialism as they switch from one meaning to another–not material things at all nor values that can be bought, but money itself. Money was once a material object but is now an intangible claim, the exchange value of which is recorded on paper or electronically but which, for the most part, is only distantly related to a commodity, gold or silver, than can be held in hand or viewed But however money is defined, a pursuit of it is not the same as pursuit of either material goods or buyable values.

I find it hard to imagine–and I cannot point to –a society that pursues materials to the relative neglect of intangibles. I can easily imagine one–and I can point to the and many others–that seem to be pursuing buyables rather than values that cannot be bought (and sold). And I can easily imagine–and point again–to societies excessive in pursuit of money. But I had better not confuse the three. The first is nonexistent. The second is a nation of spenders. The third is a nation of misers.

And, contrary to the sentiment of the critics, the pursuit of intangibles which the critics endorse, is not morally superior to the pursuit either of material objects or of buyable values or of money, each of which they deprecate. It depends on what kind of intangibles. The devastation visited on the world by the Nazis was the outcome of a pursuit of intangibles: national pride, revenge, domination, hatred, and racial purity, all intangibles far more destructive than the excesses of consumerism or love of money. Nazi example aside, better one who over spends than one who overbears.

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