Christopher Lasch’s ;The Propaganda of Commodities essay
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this section? Would you classify his reasoning process here as inductive or deductive? If you think it is deductive, can you say how the syllogism upon which the reasoning is based works?
3. Why does Boorstin discuss Don Quixote at such length in paragraph 8? Why might a simple statement of the point be Jess effective than this analogy? Is the point any Jess dear to someone who has not read Cervantes? Why or why not?
Suggestions for Further Discussion and Writing
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1. Do you think that television has a positive or negative effect on the quality of life in this country? Or are the effects both good and bad? To what extent are the harmful consequences of television due to the programs that the networks offer us, and to what extent are they due to the nature of the medium itself?
2. Write an essay in which you analyze some other aspect of American culture-for example the automobile, supermarkets, fast-food res- taurants, or stereos. What effects, good and bad, does it have on our lives? How might we think or behave differently if it did not exist? What problems do you see it presenting us? What changes would you argue for in order to help us confront those problems?
Christopher Lasch American historio.n Christopher Lasch was born in Omalm, Nebraska, in 1932. With his first book, The American Uberals and the Russian Revolution (1962), through his sixth and Infest study, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1978), Lasch has gained a growing reputation as an important and controversial social critic. In the following incisive analysis of America’s “culture of consumption” from The Culture of Narcissism, Lasch argues that once modern manufacturers realized tluzt manning the factory was only part of a worker’s job, they set about training the worker to fit the needs of the other part of his job: to be a con- sumer, to be “perpetually unsatisfied, restless, anxious, and bored.”
The Propaganda of Commodities t In the early days of industrial capitalism, employers saw the Workingman as no more than a beast of burden-” a man of the type
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of the ox,” in the words of the efficiency expert Frederick W. Taylor. Capitalists considered the worker purely as a producer; they cared nothing for the worker’s activities in his leisure time-the little leisure that was left to him after twelve or fourteen hours in the factory. Employers attempted to supervise the worker’s life on the job, but their control ended when the worker left the factory at closing time. Even when Henry Ford established a Sodologicai Department at the Ford Motor Works in 1914, he regarded the supervision of the workers’ private lives merely as a means of making the men sober, thrifty, industrious producers. Ford’s sociologists attempted to impose an old-fashioned Protestant morality on the labor force; they inveighed against tobacco, liquor, and dissipation. 2 Only a handful of employers at this time understood that the worker might be useful to the capitalist as a consumer; that he needed to be imbued with a taste for higher things; that an economy based on mass production required not only the capitalistic organ- ization of production but the organization of consumption and leisure as well. “Mass production,” said the Boston department store magnate Edward A. Filenein 1919, “demands the education of the masses; the masses must learn to behave like human beings in a mass production world …. They must achieve, not mere literacy, but culture.” In other words, the modem manufacturer has to “educate” the masses in the culture of consumption. The mass production of commodities in ever-increasing abundance demands a mass market to absorb them. 3 The American economy, having reached the point where its technology was capable of satisfying basic material needs, now relied on the creation of new consumer demands-on convincing people to buy goods for which they are unaware of any need until the “need” is forcibly brought to their attention by the mass media. Advertising, said Calvin Coolidge, “is the method by which the desire is created for better things.” The attempt to “civilize” the masses has now given rise to a society dominated by appearances– the society of the spectacle. In the period of primitive accumulation, capitalism subordinated being to having, the use value of commod- ities to their exchange value. Now it subordinates possession itself to appearance and measures exchange value as a commodity’s capacity to confer prestige-the illusion of prosperity and well- being. “When economic necessity yields to the necessity for limit- less economic development,” writes Guy Debord, “the satisfaction
1 Christopher Lasch 445 of basic and generally recognized human needs gives way to an uninterrupted fabrication of pseudo-needs.” 4 In a simpler time, advertising merely called attention to the product and extolled its advantages. Now it manufactures a product of its own: the consumer, perpetually unsatisfied, restless, anxious, and bored. Advertising serves not so much to advertise products as to promote consumption as a way of life. It “educates” the masses into an unappeasable appetite not only for goods but for new experiences and personal fulfillment. It upholds consumption as the answer to the age-old discontents of loneliness, sickness, weari- ness, lack of sexual satisfaction; at the same time it creates new forms of discontent peculiar to the modern age. It plays seductively on the malaise of industrial civilization. Is your job boring and meaningless? Does it leave you with feelings of futility and fatigue? Is your life empty? Consumption promises to fill the aching void; hence the attempt to surround commodities with an aura of ro- mance; with allusions to exotic places and vivid experiences; and with images of female breasts from which all blessings flow. s The propaganda of commodities serves a double function. First, it upholds consumption as an alternative to protest or rebel- lion. Paul Nystrom, an early student of modern marketing, once noted that industrial civilization gives rise to a “philosophy of futil- ity,” a pervasive fatigue, a “disappointment with achievements” that finds an outlet in changing the “more superficial things in which fashion reigns.” The tired worker, instead of attempting to change the conditions of his work, seeks renewal in brightening his immediate surroundings with new goods and services. 6 In the second place, the propaganda of consumption turns alienation itself into a commodity. It addresses itself to the spiritual desolation of modern life and proposes consumption as the cure. It not only promises to palliate all the old unhappiness to which flesh is heir; it creates or exacerbates new forms of unhappiness-person- al insecurity, status anxiety, anxiety in parents about their ability to satisfy the needs of the young. Do you look dowdy next to your neighbors? Do you own a car inferior to theirs? Are your children as healthy? as popular? doing as well in school? Advertising institu- tionalizes envy and its attendant anxieties. 7 The servant of the status quo, advertising has nevertheless identified itself with a sweeping change in values, a “revolution in manners and morals” that began in the early years of the twentieth century and has continued until the present. The demands of the
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mass-consumption economy have made the work ethic obsolete even for workers. Formerly the guardians of public health and morality urged the worker to labor as a moral obligation; now they teach him to labor so that he can partake of the fruits of consump- tion. In the nineteenth century, elites alone obeyed the laws of fashion, exchanging old possessions for new ones for no other reason than that they had gone out of style. Economic orthodoxy condemned the rest of society to a life of drudgery and mere subsis- tence. The mass production of luxury items now extends aristocratic habits to the masses. The apparatus of mass promotion attacks ideologies based on the postponement of gratification; it allies itself with sexual “revolution”; it sides or seems to side with women against male oppression and with the young against the authority of their elders. The logic of demand creation requires that women smoke and drink in public, move about freely, and assert their right to happiness instead of living for others. The advertising industry thus encourages the pseudo-emancipation of women, flattering them with its insinuating reminder, “You’ve come a long way, baby,” and disguising the freedom to consume as genuine auton- omy. Similarly it flatters and glorifies youth in the hope of elevating young people to the status of full-fledged consumers in their own right, each with a telephone, a television set, and a hi-fi in his own room. The “education” of the masses has altered the balance of forces within the family, weakening the authority of the husband in relation to the wife and parents in relation to their children. It emancipates women and children from patriarchal authority, however, only to subject them to the new paternalism of the adver- tising industry, the industrial corporation, and the state.
Additional Rhetorical Strategies
Definition (paragraph 1); Illustration (paragraphs, 1, 5, 6); Cause and Effect (paragraphs 3, 5, 7); Comparison and Contrast (paragraphs 4, 7). Christopher Lasch’s ;The Propaganda of Commodities essay
Examining Words and Meaning
1. According to Lasch, how have employers’ ideas about their workers changed since the early days of industrialism? How have these changes made workers useful to their employers and to the economy in new ways? Have the changes given the employees greater dignity in the eyes
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of the people they work for? Explain, referring to specific passages in the text to support your answer.
2. In what ways has advertising changed since the beginnings of inaustrial- ism? What economic developments have made these changes neces- sary? How does advertising take advantage of and subvert such move- ments against the status quo as feminism?
3. What does Lasch mean by the statement that now capitalism “subordi- nates possession itself to appearance” (paragraph 3)? In other words, what changes have occurred in the way we think about possessions? Does the statement by Guy Debord clarify Lasch’s assertion?
4. Look up these words in a dictionary, if they are unfamiliar to you: inveighed (paragraph 1); imbued (paragraph 2); magnate (paragraph 2); extolled (paragraph 4); unappeasable (paragraph 4); malaise (paragraph 4); aura (paragraph 4); palliate (paragraph 6); exacerbates (paragraph 6); dowdy (paragraph 6); ideologies (paragraph 7); insinuating (paragraph 7). Christopher Lasch’s ;The Propaganda of Commodities essay
Focusing on Structures and Strategies
1. How does Lasch’s discussion of the status of workers in the early days of industrialism contribute to his claim that advertising now molds them into anxious consumers? Suppose that he had left out this historical background. How would his argument be less clear?
2. Examine the course of Lasch’s argument in paragraphs 3 through 6. What is the logic of his organization? For example, why do paragraphs 5 and 6 follow paragraphs 3 and 4? Why does paragraph 7 follow para- graph 5? What transitional words and phrases does Lasch use to mark the course of this development?
Suggestions for Further Discussion and Writing
1. Compare Lasch’s selection to Mobil’s “The Emperor’s New Clause” (p. 456). What might Lasch say about the Mobil advertisement? What decep- tion might he accuse it of practicing? What might a Mobil representative say in reply? Whose arguments would you find more compelling?
2. Lasch says that advertising creates artificial needs in us, that it influences us to buy things we would not otherwise feel a need for-or, as Will Rogers put it, “Advertising makes us buy things we don’t need with money we ain’t got.” Choose three or four advertisements that you think are guilty of doing so and, in a short essay, analyze them. How do they use words and pictures to create this need in us? To what extent is what Lasch says about advertisements in general true of them? What anx- ieties, what kinds of unhappiness, might they be producing in promis- ing to cure them?
Christopher Lasch’s ;The Propaganda of Commodities essay