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NOW that we can’t open a newspaper or turn on a television set without
seeing a ‘green’ issue, a lot of us feel very guilty about our harmful and
wasteful habits. It is rather hard to change, though, and, in general, the
media don’t help because they appeal to our love of the new and fashionable,
which leads us to consume more and hence to risk harming the planet even
further.

I realised this the other day during a conversation with a friend, the
managing director of a large department store. The recent downturn in trade
is linked with high interest rates, he told me: people are not buying new
furniture because they cannot sell their houses, and they have not any spare
cash anyway because their mortgages have gone up.

But a man in the position of my friend can’t afford to be gloomy and
he was speaking of all this as a temporary setback. Ecologically more clued-up,
or so I thought, I said: ‘But surely, the green movement is going to be
thoroughly bad for business in the long term?’

At first, he thought I was joking; then he realised I was just ignorant.
He patiently drew attention to all the retailing opportunities that greenness
will bring, as customers throw out their tropical hardwood furniture and
CFC fridges and buy environmentally friendly new ones to salve their consciences
and impress their neighbours.

This conversation sent me back to a wonderful book, now undeservedly
out of print: The Theory of the Leisure Class, by Thorstein Veblen. He was
the man who pointed out what we now see as obvious: that high status attaches
to the appearance of wealth and that conspicuous leisure puts a person’s
wealth and power on social display.

Veblen is famous for having coined such cynical phrases as ‘conspicuous
consumption,’ ‘vicarious leisure’ and ‘reputable futility’. His book was
published in 1899, so some of the examples he chooses to illustrate conspicuous
leisure are a bit dated – women’s corsets, men’s top hats, brawny footmen
in frogged jackets and white gloves. Others – the study of dead languages,
ownership of fancy-bred dogs and racehorses, connoisseurship of what he
calls ‘creditable viands’ – can still provide us with unpalatable food for
thought.

Veblen held that despite a natural human liking for simple efficiency,
our appreciation of what is desirable and beautiful is always coloured by
what he calls ‘pecuniary reputability’ – in other words, the need to show
that effort or materials have been wasted in its manufacture. ‘In their
selection of serviceable goods in the retail market,’ he wrote, ‘consumers
are guided more by the finish and workmanship of the goods than by any marks
of substantial serviceability.’

Veblen was a Marxist, and was driven by the conviction that what he
saw as waste would have been better employed to relieve poverty. He was
criticised in the 1950s for his assumption that the economic ‘pie’ was of
only a certain size, but perhaps our subsequent understanding of the finite
resour ces of the planet Earth makes him look not such a fool, after all.

How do we get out of this bind, in which our need to be green has to
be reconciled with a desire for honorific consumption? So what sort of advice
would Veblen himself have given? I think he would have surveyed with amusement
such pseudogreen phenomena as fashion shows held in rainforest settings,
and charity nights out in which thousands are collected for green causes,
in exchange for hundreds and thousands being spent in conspicuous consumption
of elaborate dress, food, wine and entertainment. He would, I feel sure,
have noted with interest but without surprise that lead-free petrol makes
it feel OK to put a second car on the road. He would have shaken his head
at the hopeless task of making thrift fashionable, and he would have pointed
out that his analysis of shopping in 1899 is just as true of a supermarket
today.

‘Any consumer who might, Diogenes-like, insist on the elimination of
all honorific or wasteful elements from his consumption, would be unable
to supply his most trivial wants in the modern market.’

He was obviously thinking of all that colourful, printed packaging material,
and the glaze and patterning on loaves of bread.

He does offer a ray of hope, though, in the last chapter of his book
which is called ‘The higher learning as an expression of the pecuniary culture’.

After explaining, with his usual cynicism, that science was first practised
by priests because they needed a knowledge of natu ral processes. To work
magic and impress the ignorant, he points out that scientific knowledge
is evidence of time spent in study rather than in productive labour. The
application of science is therefore, by implication, prestigious.

So can science bring us to a proper understanding of what it means to
be environmentally aware? Unfortunately, Veblen warns: ‘Conventional insistence
on a modicum of conspicuous waste as an incident of all reputable scholarship
has affected our canons of taste and of serviceability.’ In other words,
useless science is OK, useful science is not; technologists can therefore
expect to enjoy much less prestige than the ‘pure’ scientists.

I can see a tentative way through. Perhaps if we are careful to boast
enough about the time and money we’ve wasted in learning what it truly means
to be green, we can get away with living far more simply and less wastefully,
and each of us do our bit towards saving the planet.

Caroline Dilke is a freelance writer living in London.