This post is prompted by some reflections of Linda Grant's excerpted from her new book, The Thoughtful Dresser, and defends one of its theses. The value of my defence may be thought to be placed in jeopardy by the fact that Linda is a friend of mine. But, on the other hand, my own feelings about shopping are not the same as Linda's - far from it - so I hope that this is enough of a balancing consideration to disjep the jeop.
Linda describes one negative view of her subject:
Most hostile responses to shopping see it as an act of acquisition, of avarice and greed for things that we do not need but advertising and marketing have made us think we want, a condition that Marx called "false consciousness". We are dupes, and only the strong individualist can hold out against mass consumption.
And Linda's argument in the excerpt here is devoted to countering that view with another view of shopping. Briefly put, this is that:
It's a meditation, a frame of mind, a therapy, a balm for the troubled soul.
Well, frame of mind maybe; but shopping isn't for me a meditation or therapy or balm for the soul. Still, I'd say Linda is right to think it's not an instance of false consciouness. (Or, for those who prefer to bypass that concept, she's right to think there's nothing wrong with enjoying shopping.) Here's why.
I will argue the point in Thoughtful Dresser terms, that is, by concentrating on shopping for clothes, because this is Linda's own focus; but the argument can be generalized. First off, taking an interest in one's appearance is an elementary human concern. As a reviewer in yesterday's Observer relays Linda's thinking:
Grant is perplexed as to why fashion is maligned as meaningless when it is obvious that anyone who neglects their appearance has something seriously wrong with them. As she observes, the only people who have no interest in how they appear to others "are those who are depressed or stricken by a sudden, dreadful grief, the loss of a loved one, when you wander round the house as if you yourself were the ghost".
So, the first step in my defence is just to say that, in the way that the world is now organized, shopping is a straightforward means towards taking care of one's appearance; it's the instrumentality of a basic human good. But, it might be said, this is just shopping of the kind anyone can do - even me, even people who take no special joy from the activity but treat it in a matter of fact way, as the mere means to a necessary end. A deep interest in shopping such as Linda describes and commends is not necessarily part of taking care of one's appearance. We can shop instrumentally without developing any deep interest in shopping, shop without passion.
However - the second step in the defence - one can do anything without developing a deep interest in that particular thing, without its becoming a passion. All the same, people do - they develop passions of one kind and another. They become passionate collectors of this or that - books, stamps, art - passionate about literature or music or movies or sport (or just about their team), become bird-watchers, train-spotters, students of many different kinds of subject. Each of us has a life to dole out as we see fit, subject to meeting our various obligations to others. An interest in shopping is as legitimate a pursuit within the range of human interests as any other. Save for those who urge upon us an ethic of devoting all our disposable time and resources to helping people in need, no one is well placed to condemn the interest someone else may have in shopping. And the ethic of comprehensive self-sacrifice may be good for saints, but applied to the generality of humankind it is mean and unbearable.
But what about shopping as an obsession? What when it becomes pathological? The problem, then, is with the obsession, the pathology, not with the shopping. Any pursuit can be taken too far. And what about the fact that not everyone is in a position to enjoy shopping, because some don't have the means for it? This is a critique of systemic inequality and poverty and their effects and it is a valid one. But deployed by anyone who has disposable income which they use for (non-shopping) enjoyments of their own rather than directing it towards people living closer to the margins, it is a hypocrisy. Unless you believe that those living above the level of the bare necessities - whatever these are taken to be - should part with all their surplus income, you allow that each of us has a right to some enjoyments. It is not then for you to say what mine should be or vice versa. I won't be going round with Linda spending time looking at scarves. I doubt she'd want to join me in following all five days of a Test match. You plays it as you feels it. But there is a right to that for everyone.