At the top of Sennheiser's range is the "Orpheus Set," stereo headphones which retail for ?9,652. They are finely crafted headphones, no doubt. But to most ears, they deliver a sound quality not greatly superior to a pair of ?25 Vivanco SR250s, which have received several "best value" awards. As an evolutionary psychologist considering contemporary human culture, I wonder this: why would evolution produce a species of anthropoid ape that feels it simply must have the Sennheisers, when the Vivancos would stimulate its ears just as well?
The standard Darwinian account of consumerism is that natural selection shaped us to have certain preferences and desires which free markets fulfil by providing various goods and services. For example, sugars were rare and nutritionally valuable in Pleistocene Africa, so we evolved a taste for sweets, which chocolate and cola manufacturers now fulfil-or perhaps exploit. This theory can explain many features of many products, and seems to give the Darwinian seal of approval to free-market consumerism.
However, this theory of evolved preferences can't explain the Sennheiser effect. The nominal function of stereo headphones is to deliver a private soundscape, an acoustic virtual reality. We might expect headphones to be judged and priced in proportion to their sound quality. But they are not. The marketing people at Sennheiser know that Orpheus Sets are bought mainly by rich men, young or middle-aged, who are on the mating market, openly or tacitly. Their 400-times greater cost than the Vivancos is a courtship premium. While the Vivancos are merely good headphones, the Sennheisers are peacock's tails and nightingale's songs. Buyers of many top-of-the-range products understand that their price is a benefit, not a cost. It keeps poorer buyers from owning the product, thereby making it a reliable indicator of a possessor's wealth and taste. We want Sennheisers not for the sounds they make in our heads, but for the impressions they make in the heads of others.
Thorstein Veblen understood all this a century ago, with his theory of conspicuous consumption, outlined in The Theory of the Leisure Class. Yet Veblen's sociological insight did not connect in any obvious way with natural science. This missing link can now been made via a branch of evolutionary biology called sexual selection theory.
From this biological viewpoint, consumerism is what happens when a smart ape, evolved for sexual self-promotion, attains the ability to transform the raw material of nature into a network of sexual signals and status displays. It transmutes a world made of quarks into a world of tiny, unconscious courtship acts-every signal becomes sexual. Yet most sexual signals go unrecognised and unreciprocated. The result is the phenomenon we call modern civilisation, with its glory and progress, to be sure, but also with its colossal waste and incalculable alienation. The alienation of the modern consumer, the disappointment that sets in when the Sennheisers fail to deliver what they promise (not good sounds, but good mates) is not new. It may simply represent a deeper alienation of our selves from our sexual displays.
understanding consumerism requires understanding a little bit about the evolutionary process of sexual selection. Sexual selection is basically what happens when sexually-reproducing animals pick their sexual partners according to criteria which are consistent across generations. Darwin first realised that if peahens consistently prefer to mate with peacocks which have tails brighter and longer than average, then peacock tails must evolve to be ever brighter and longer over evolutionary time. Peacock genes, no matter how useful for survival, can only make it into the next generation if they are carried in peacock bodies with long, bright tails. Thus, sexual selection can be even more powerful than selection for survival itself. Evolution is driven not just by survival of the fittest, but reproduction of the sexiest.
Many sexually-selected traits, such as peacock tails, whale songs and male human aggressiveness, are so costly in time, energy and risk, that they severely reduce survival chances, but evolved, none the less, for their reproductive benefits. Until recently, biologists assumed that these costs of sexually-selected traits were incidental to their courtship function. But Israeli biologist Amotz Zahavi has been winning many converts to his view that these costs are an adaptive feature rather than a maladaptive fault of sexual signals. His book, The Handicap Principle (1997), argues that sexually-selected traits, such as peacock tails, must be costly handicaps in order to be reliable indicators of an animal's fitness as a potential mate and parent.
Zahavi's "handicap principle" identifies a tension between natural selection (for survival) and sexual selection (for attracting mates), and waste is at the heart of that tension. Waste in sexual displays guarantees that there will be some correlation between survival ability and reproductive success. On the one hand, waste is the bridge between natural and sexual selection: only the healthiest peacocks can develop big tails. But it is also the chasm between them: the tail's wastefulness, its uselessness for survival, is precisely what makes it a sexual trait.
Zahavi's logic is the same as Veblen's conspicuous consumption. If big, bright, peacock tails were cheap to grow, easy to maintain and light to carry around, any old peacock could sport one, no matter how unhealthy, hungry or parasite-ridden he was. The tails would carry no information about peacock quality if they carried no increased costs. In Zahavi's view, the real reason why peacock tails are so big, bright, heavy and cumbersome, is that only very healthy, fit, strong, well-fed peacocks can afford such tails. Because very fit peacocks tend to have fit sons and daughters which are more likely to survive and reproduce, peahens benefit by choosing big-tailed peacocks. Peahens which preferred shorter-than-average tails did not leave many descendants, because their offspring were less fit than average. Large peacock tails, like luxury Sennheiser headphones, are specifically designed not to be affordable by every individual. So, sexual selection favours both the preference for costly sexual displays, and the displays themselves.
the handicap principle suggests that prodigious waste is a necessary feature of sexual courtship. A clever peahen who read Veblen would understand that peacocks as a species would be better off if they didn't have to waste so much energy growing big tails (which are useless for survival). But as individual males and females, they have irresistible incentives to grow the biggest tails they can afford, or to choose sexual partners with the biggest tails they can attract (in order to ensure mating success). In nature, showy waste is the only guarantee of truth in advertising.
Conspicuous consumption is the modern human analogue of the peacock's tail: a handicap that reveals quality by wasting resources. Consumerism is a sort of ritualisation of conspicuous consumption, where people display their wealth and taste by owning widely recognised products of well-known cost.
Advertising based on image, as opposed to product features, attempts to create a sexual-signalling niche for each such product. This requires demonstrating a three-way relationship between product, potential consumer, and pool of potential mates appreciating the act of consumption. The cola advert must show the cola, the cola-buyer and the cola-buyer-watcher. It must pretend that it is already common knowledge that drinking the cola is cool, in order for the cola to qualify as an effective sexual signal. The advertising must lift the product from unrecognised thing to consensual object of desire.
The difficulties in comprehending this leap of faith are similar to the difficulties that evolutionary biologists had, for over a century, in understanding how peacock's tails could evolve. Logically, there seems nowhere for the process to get off the ground. If peahens didn't already prefer long bright tails, why should males evolve them? But if males didn't already have long bright tails, why should females prefer them? Likewise, if women don't already prefer men who drive Porsches, why should any men buy Porsches? But if no men drive Porsches, why should women develop any preference for Porsche-drivers? The history of sexual selection theory is the story of how biologists solved this chicken-and-egg problem. Details aside, the answer is that evolution does it gradually, through continuous escalation of both mate preferences (analogous to consumer tastes) and courtship traits (analogous to product quality).
Yet the cultural evolution of products as sexual signals need not follow the same gradual dynamics as the genetic evolution of peacock tails. Mass advertising can jump-start the process by showing fake men (actors) driving not-yet-available Porsches, and fake women winking at them. The whole signalling system based on the product can be posited, all at once, in the virtual reality of advertising before a single product is sold or a single sexual prospect is impressed.
When we buy a product because of image-based advertising, we buy into a sexual signalling system. But it is a hypothetical system, not a real one. It was invented by a few advertising executives for a client's profits. It was not evolved over millions of years by our ancestors to improve their children's fitness. This can create problems. Gullible people may act as if the hypothetical signal system had already been accepted as real. They may spend more time displaying virtual signals (advertised products) than real, biologically validated signals (wit, creativity, kindness). They may become frustrated when their virtual signals are ignored, and may increase their shopping rather than improve their character. The result can be pathological, a runaway consumerism in which an individual gets lost in a semiotic wilderness, searching for sexual signalling systems in all the wrong places.
This analysis raises another fundamental question: what is the link between biological fitness and monetary wealth in modern societies? Clearly, one's ability to buy things is a reliable indicator of one's wealth, but is wealth a reliable indicator of fitness? Politically, the right has posited a tight relationship between monetary wealth and biological fitness, and the left has denied such a link. The right views money as liquid fitness, accumulated by virtue of innate, heritable biological abilities such as intelligence and ambition, and translated into manifest symbols of success. The left puts money in a domain of culture, class and history supposedly divorced from biology. Scientifically, the relationship between wealth and fitness remains unresolved. The right cites the high correlation between intelligence and wealth, and the strong contribution of genetics to intelligence. The left points out that according to the standard biological measure of fitness-number of offspring-the rich and bright do not show higher fitness than the poor or the uneducated; indeed, it is often the opposite. So perhaps consumerism derives from sexual-display instincts which evolved under earlier, more polygamous, conditions.
as we have seen, one problem with consumerism is that advertising can raise unrealistic expectations about the sexual signalling power of products. Another problem is that even the most effective signals cannot improve everyone's mating success. Sexual competition is a zero-sum game. Some individuals attract good mates; others don't. Heartbreak is inevitable, given that human mating requires mutual consent, and given that people differ markedly in physical, mental and social attractiveness. Not every man can command a harem of 5,000 like the first emperor of China. Not every woman can cycle through eight husbands like Elizabeth Taylor.
Yet, if the costs of sending sexual signals become very high, a society's mating system can become a negative-sum game, costing everyone more time, money, effort and risk. Two generations ago, Japanese couples did not bother with buying engagement rings. Then the De Beers diamond cartel, through an advertising campaign in the 1970s, convinced Japanese women that they deserved a ring just like western women. A new standard was imposed: Japanese men must spend at least two months' salary on a colourless lump of carbon to demonstrate their romantic commitment. Japanese marriages are probably no happier than a generation ago, but De Beers is richer.
In thousands of such cases, consumerism leads to costlier signals of wealth, more taxing signals of taste and riskier signals of physical courage. They are endless treadmills of personal mating effort, often without social benefit. Sexual competition is one domain where improved technology does not usually improve average human welfare.
The sexual-signalling imperatives of consumerism introduce another form of waste: they give consumers little incentive to get good value for their money. Britain seems strangely comfortable with its oligopolies, cartels and retail-price-maintenance agreements. These artificially inflate the price of cars, clothes, books and consumer electronics by up to 50 per cent above their prices in the US. If the point of buying a Porsche is to get a good A-to-B machine for the money, these cartels seem pathological. But if the point is to advertise one's wealth and status, it does not much matter how the prices are set. As long as the prices are common knowledge in the mating market, each car model reliably signals the owner's wealth level. In sexual signalling, price differences are much more important than absolute prices. But in human welfare terms, the reverse is true. Sexual signalling undermines economic efficiency. Marketing products as courtship gifts gives businesses and governments great power over the buyers of those products, because it makes consumer activism look like the economic equivalent of erectile dysfunction. Only those who can't afford them complain about the unfairness of the prices and the taxes.
As one moves from courtship gifts to more pragmatic consumption, prices drop, profits fall and free-market competitiveness takes hold. Cultures differ in the boundaries they draw between courtship goods and ordinary goods. Yet every culture retains a core of courtship products or luxury goods with which people fall in love, conspicuously casting aside their roles as rational economic agents.
Humans are unusual because both men and women buy these courtship products. In most species, especially most mammals, conspicuous sexual display is a male activity. The traditional biological view can explain why men buy bespoke suits, sports cars and country houses, but not why any women would ever love to shop. However, biologists are adding some nuances to Darwin's view of the active male courting the passive female. New research reveals that male animals of many species are choosier about their sexual partners than Darwin suspected, and females of many species have evolved their own versions of wasteful sexual display. The female baboon's bright red genital swelling serves the same function as the peacock's tail. In our species, sexual choice is mutual and sexual display is mutual, so both sexes can be seen at the January sales.
veblen's biographers often argue that his contempt for conspicuous consumption reflects the frugality of his Norwegian ancestors encountering America's Gilded Age. Sub-Arctic, subsistence protestantism meets Boston, bourgeois luxury-and shakes its head in disapproval. Veblen claimed that he used "waste" as a neutral term, but his indignation at consumerist signalling shows through every example he analyses. Must we follow his moral crusade against waste?
Evolutionary theorists did so for many decades and, until recently, it kept them from understanding sexual selection. Veblen's peak was Darwin's trough. By 1900, sexual selection theory was viewed as Darwin's worst blunder. Then, in the 1930s, the biologists of the Modern Synthesis combined Darwinian selection theory and Mendelian genetics. The great synthesisers such as Julian Huxley, Ernst Mayr and JBS Haldane recognised that sexual selection could produce extravagant, wasteful signals, but they did not approve of such profligacy. They thought that it was bad for the species, bad for evolutionary progress and generally pathological. Their disdain for the biological waste of courtship was identical to Veblen's disdain for the cultural waste of consumerism. They revived natural selection, but left sexual selection to rot for another 50 years. Even when Zahavi first proposed his "handicap principle" more than two decades ago, biologists couldn't believe that nature could favour such wasteful signalling.
Like Veblen, most evolutionary biologists embraced a machine aesthetic that celebrated efficiency, good engineering and form following function. Veblen shared HG Wells's vision of a technocratic utopia run by enlightened engineers, from which all traces of conspicuous signalling and invidious comparison were eradicated. But the revival of sexual selection has changed all that. Many evolutionists now recognise that almost everything in nature which we find beautiful or impressive has been shaped for wasteful display, not for pragmatic efficiency. Flowers, fruits, butterfly wings, bowerbird nests, nightingale songs, mandrill faces, elephant tusks, elk antlers, humpback whale songs, firefly lights, fiddler crab claws, lion manes, swordfish tails and human language have all been shaped by sexual selection. Waste can be fun. Sexual signalling can be sublime. Evolution for invidious comparison can be creative rather than pathological. Modern evolutionists have become more comfortable in celebrating wasteful signalling.
In fact, because each sexually-reproducing species can be viewed as a different sexual signalling system, the proliferation of these systems is what creates biodiversity itself. Without so many varieties of waste, our planet would not host so many species. There may be a hidden irony in an environmentalism which worships biodiversity but despises consumerism: what if both result from the same imperatives of sexual signalling?
contra veblen, consumerist waste has some overlooked benefits. Courtship products bought in a money-based economy have unusual features which make them less wasteful than most sexual signals. First, being material objects, they last longer than the courtship dances, songs and ritual combats of most species. Once our species started using material culture for sexual display, we could accumulate and even inherit large numbers of objects that improve not just our status, but our quality of life. Consumer durables such as houses, cars and appliances, acquired partially for sexual display, stick around long after courtship ends.
More importantly, consumerism entails a social circulation of value rather than a solo act of waste. Compare the peacock's tail to a Porsche. Both are expensive to their displayer. But when the peacock pays the growth and maintenance costs of his tail, he doesn't transfer any value to any other member of his species. He simply burns the energy, and the energy is gone. By contrast, when the Porsche-buyer pays for the car, he transfers money to the seller, who transfers some to the manufacturer, and hence to the manufacturer's employees and shareholders. The only real waste in the production of the Porsche is whatever extra steel, leather, fuel, labour and human ingenuity goes into its production compared to an ordinary car. Its price premium is not waste in any broader social sense, because the price is transferred to others within society.
This is an important effect. Ever since the automation of agriculture and manufacturing, an increasing number of us have been employed, directly or indirectly, to produce wasteful consumerist displays for other people. If an asexual species invented automation, most of them would lose their jobs permanently. They would have no domain of waste to soak up the material surplus their technology gives them. In our sexual species, the demand for wasteful sexual displays is unbounded, so we need never fear mass permanent unemployment, as long as consumerism persists.
Consumerism redistributes not just money, but status. Advertising posits products as sexual signals, but the product-buyers are not the only people to benefit from a product's sexual status. The status trickles out in all directions, along the entire chain of production and consumption. Porsche advertises. Buyers of new Porsches reap the status benefits of that advertising. But so do Porsche salesmen, Porsche executives, Porsche factory workers, Porsche shareholders, Porsche mechanics, receivers of gift Porsches, and buyers and inheritors of used Porsches. Although a physical product can only be owned by one individual, its sexual status value can be enjoyed by anyone associated with its production, financing, marketing or consumption. In this sense, consumerism automatically redistributes sexual status from the wealthy to the suppliers of their status. This lends consumerism an egalitarian aspect utterly alien to sexual competition in most species.
This more positive attitude towards wasteful signalling may be good for the scientific analysis of waste, but is it the best attitude for fostering sustainable human societies? Surprisingly, biology suggests that the answer may be yes. All sexually-reproducing animals face a trade-off between courtship effort and parenting effort. The more time and energy you waste on showing how sexy you are, the less time and energy you have for raising offspring.
The same trade-off seems to hold for humans. With the industrial revolution, urbanisation and the rapid increase in consumerism came the demographic transition: a dramatic reduction in numbers of children. Sexual competition intensified so much that the products of sexual reproduction were delayed. Consumerism is soaking up the time and energy that our ancestors used to devote to having large families. Instead of spending our 20s taking care of our first six toddlers, as our ancestors would have done, we spend our 20s acquiring a university education, launching our careers, buying stuff, going to movies, taking vacations and worrying about status. Conspicuous consumption or conspicuous children, it is difficult to attend to both.
A well-intentioned, Veblenesque reduction in the waste of sexual signalling might reverse the demographic transition and create a population explosion. People like to keep busy. If a state decided to eliminate conspicuous consumption by outlawing luxury goods, costly entertainment, status differences between occupations and so on, people might just marry younger and pump out more offspring. In fact, eliminating conspicuous consumption and other forms of wasteful sexual signalling would mean eliminating most of what we consider to be human culture. It would roll back the evolutionary clock a couple of million years, trying to recreate an Australopithecine lifestyle of small-brained primates bored to death, and surrounded by babies.
It is not difficult for evolution to achieve mere sustainability. Trilobites flourished for hundreds of millions of years, enjoying their low-consumption, low-waste, sexually unsophisticated lifestyle. They were a model of Veblenesque rationality and efficiency. But waste is what makes things interesting.
For at least a million years, our species has been engaged in a great evolutionary experiment: to explore the wonderland of wasteful sexual signalling. An increasing number of evolutionary psychologists believe that many aspects of the human mind were shaped by sexual selection. In my view, language, art, music, humour and clothing were the first of our new wasteful signals to evolve. Other varieties of sexual waste-religion, philosophy, literature-followed.
The last century has seen a dramatic increase in a new form of sexual waste: conspicuous consumption, which translates a primordial logic of how to show off from biology to technology. This brings some problems, as we have seen. We may too easily forget our innate biological capacities for display-language, creativity, intelligence. We may rely too much on Sennheisers. But perhaps our critiques of consumerism go too far when they condemn waste in general, as Veblen did. Sexual waste is what made our species what it is. We are creatures of waste, evolved to burn off our time, our energy, our very lives to show that we can do so better than our sexual competitors. The human brain, that most expensively wasteful organ, that ultimate biological luxury, is our original bonfire of the vanities.
Human consciousness itself may have evolved partly through sexual selection as a sort of wasteful display. Suppose, during the evolution of language, that our ancestors chose mates who were better able to articulate a wider range of perceptions and concepts. That new criterion of mate choice would dramatically speed up the development of language and consciousness. Such a process would not make the mindless principles of sexual signalling any more rational, or conscious. But rather than consciousness evolving as a neutral executive that co-ordinates our behaviour and experiences, it may have evolved as a showpiece, an amusement park designed to entertain others. Full of sound and fury, it may signify nothing more than our biological fitness, to those who consider merging their genes with ours.
If used vigorously and frequently, the mind often delivers the courtship effects it evolved to produce. It impresses potential mates with facts, memories, hopes, ambitions, sensitivities, tastes, empathies and-perhaps its greatest trick-the illusion of boundless, authentic, conscious subjectivity. To work this courtship magic, the mind convinces us that we have an authentic, conscious subjectivity, and that the contents of our consciousness are uniquely worth communicating to others.
The human body is a patchwork of traits evolved for survival (legs, lungs, teeth) and traits evolved for sexual attraction (breasts, buttocks, beards, penises, lips). But human consciousness may have evolved as pure display, like a peacock's tail which needs no peacock body as its anchor. Perhaps human consciousness evolved to have exactly the forms and functions required for effective courtship. Perhaps the most intimate parts of our minds evolved through our most intimate relationships. In short, consciousness may be a product rather than a factory, a wasteful status symbol perfectly adapted to its consumers by sexual selection, evolution's ingenious marketing department.
where does this leave those of us who value the life of the mind? Perhaps equating ourselves with our vain, babbling, concept-spewing consciousness is no more authentic a lifestyle than identifying with an expensive, well-advertised possession. Intellectualism and consumerism may be equally alienated modes of existence, if over-identification with one's sexual signals counts as alienation.
This seems especially true of intellectualism in the style of the New York Review of Books, wherein acquaintance with a few big names (Freud, Nietzsche, Foucault, Bellow, Kristeva, Sontag, Borges) suffices to display membership in a cultural elite. These names have become the debased coinage in the libidinal economy of the bespectacled. Their ideas become mere gambits for coffee-house courtship. Europe's cultural icons are conveniently packaged as American products. Their only distinction is that they are marketed by New York book reviewers and essayists rather than New York advertising firms, and their acquisition cost is a university education rather than a price in dollars. Intellectual alienation no longer has any roots in the existentialism of Dostoevsky, Kafka or Sartre. It has become the same alienation felt by any other consumer buying products as sexual signals. And intellectual debate, too often, is carried out with the same bombast as lunching bond-dealers debating the merits of Mercedes versus Porsche, or the Sey-chelles versus Mauritius: signallers signalling their signals are best.
Perhaps it was always thus. Philosophy originated in sophistry, competitive public displays of prowess in reasoning and arguing. Universities were founded to teach dead languages, useless rituals, and a nodding acquaintance with Aristotle to a leisured class of priests. As Veblen noted, an English degree from Oxford was the premier badge of conspicuous leisure for centuries. Only with the rise of science have the intellectual varieties of wasteful display achieved any cognitive link to reality or any pragmatic link to social progress. Most intellectual display throughout history may have been waste in Veblen's sense. Yet those human achievements and insights we most value would never have been produced without our sexual instincts for waste.
