The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

452 chapter 43of hidden persuasion or, to use a favorite word of the clerisy, “manipulation.”The peculiarly American attribution of gigantic power to thirtysecondtelevision spots is puzzling to an economist. If advertising had thepowers attributed to it by the clerisy, then unlimited fortunes could be hadfor the writing. Yet advertising is less than 2 percent of national product,much of it uncontroversially informative—such as shop signs and entries inthe Yellow Pages or ads in trade magazines aimed at highly sophisticatedbuyers. When Vance Packard published his attack on advertising, The HiddenPersuaders (1957), he thought he would lose his friends on MadisonAvenue. But they were delighted. An adman friend came up and said,“Vance, before your book I was having a devil of a time convincing myclients that advertising worked. Now they think it’s magic.”The American clerisy’s hostility to advertising is puzzling to a rhetorician.Why would a country adoring of free speech in its higher intellectualcircles have such a distaste for commercial free speech? Perhaps the distasteis merely a branch of that great river of antirhetoric rhetoric in the Westsince Bacon. But anyway if hoi polloi were as rhetorically stupid as most ofthe clerisy seems to believe, then as I say any reasonably clever ad writercould “manipulate” them with ease. But it ain’t so. The TV generation cansee through advertising directed at children by age eight, and by age eighteenit bases its humor—see Saturday Night Live—on parodies of attemptedmanipulation.So mass consumption is supposed to be motiveless, gormless, stupid.And anyway there’s too damned much of it. “Why do they buy so muchstuff? The dolts. The common consumer does not own a single classicalmusic recording. It is ages, if ever, that she has read a nonfiction book on thebourgeois virtues. She thinks the Three Tenors are classy. Her house isjammed with tasteless rubbish.” One is reminded of the disdain c. 1910 onthe part of modernist litterateurs like D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf forthe nasty little commuters of London. An air of immorality hangs aboutWaterloo Station and the super mall.The amount of American stuff nowadays is to be sure formidable. A standardphotographic ploy is to get a family in Topeka, Kansas, and one inLagos, Nigeria, to dump the entire contents of their houses out on the frontsidewalk, and then pose for the camera en famille and en stuff. The contrastis remarkable. Americans certainly do have a lot of clothing and gadgets andlawn mowing equipment. Of course, they have twenty times the average