Consumerism is what happens when a smart ape

evolved for obsessive sexual self-promotion

attains the technological inventiveness

and social organization to transform

the raw material of nature into a network

of sexual signals and status displays

Everything becomes a product,

every product becomes a signal,

and every signal becomes sexual

Yet most sexual signals go unrecognized,

unappreciated, and unreciprocated

The result is that fascinating phenomenon

we call modern civilization,

with its colossal waste and incalculable alienation

Consumerism’s trouble is not that it is

tainted by sexuality, or that material acquisition

is some Freudian sublimation of sexual conquest

On the contrary, the problem is that

human sexuality is tainted and mediated by consumerism

Sexual Selection & Consumerism

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 that are consistent across generations.

Darwin first realized that if peahens consistently prefer to mate with peacocks that 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 more powerful than selection for survival. Evolution is driven not just by survival of the fittest, but reproduction of the sexiest.

Many sexually-selected traits, such as peacock tails, humpback whale songs, and male human aggressiveness, are so costly in time, energy, and risk, that they severely reduce survival chances, but evolved nonetheless for their reproductive benefits.

Advertising & Sexual Signals

Conspicuous consumption is the cultural analogue of the peacock’s tail: a handicap that reveals quality by wasting resources.

Consumerism is a sort of ritualization of conspicuous consumption, where people display their wealth and taste by owning widely recognized products of commonly known cost.

Advertising based on image, as opposed to product features and price, attempts to create a sexual-signalling niche for each such product.

This requires demonstrating a credible 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.

Crucially, 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 up by its bootstraps from unrecognized thing to consensual object of desire.

Conspicuous consumption from Veblen to Darwin

Thorstein Veblen understood all this a century ago with his theory of conspicuous consumption in The theory of the leisure class.

Yet Veblen’s sociological insight did not connect in any obvious way with natural science.

That missing link can now be made, via new developments in a branch of evolutionary biology called sexual selection theory.

From this biological viewpoint, consumerism is what happens when a smart ape evolved for obsessive sexual self-promotion suddenly attains the technological inventiveness and social organization 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.

Everything becomes a product, every product becomes a signal, and every signal becomes sexual.

Yet most sexual signals go unrecognized, unappreciated, and unreciprocated. The result is that fascinating phenomenon we call modern civilization, with its glory and progress, to be sure, but also with its colossal waste and incalculable alienation.

Consumerism’s trouble is not that it is tainted by sexuality, or that material acquisition is some Freudian sublimation of sexual conquest. On the contrary, the problem is that human sexuality is tainted and mediated by consumerism.

The alienation of the modern consumer, the habituation and disappointment that set in when the new Mercedes fails to deliver what it promises (not good looks, but good mates) is not new. It may represent a deeper alienation of our selves from our sexual displays.

We will see that consumerism is just the most recent and superficial manifestation of evolutionary pressures for sexual signalling.

These pressures have reached not only deep into our wallets, but deep into our hearts and minds.

Perhaps our consciousness itself may be counted among our wasteful sexual displays.

If so, the new evolutionary psychology may do to our sense of personal identity what postmodernist criticism does to a literary text: revealing systems of signals that produce effects without communicating meaning, that stimulate readers without disclosing authors.

Prodigious waste as a feature of sexual signals

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 that are consistent across generations.

Darwin first realized that if peahens consistently prefer to mate with peacocks that 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 more powerful than selection for survival. Evolution is driven not just by survival of the fittest, but reproduction of the sexiest.

Many sexually-selected traits, such as peacock tails, humpback whale songs, and male human aggressiveness, are so costly in time, energy, and risk, that they severely reduce survival chances, but evolved nonetheless for their reproductive benefits.

Until about ten years ago, biologists assumed that these costs of sexually-selected traits were incidental to their courtship function.

However, 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 recent book The handicap principle proposes that sexually-selected traits must be costly in order to be reliable indicators of an animal’s fitness as a potential mate and parent.

Zahavi called these costly displays ‘handicaps’, because their ability to indicate fitness in the reproductive domain stems directly from the way they reduce fitness in the survival domain.

Zahavi’s logic is the same as Veblen’s. 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.

Since very fit peacocks tend to have fit sons and daughters that are more likely to survive and reproduce, peahens benefit by choosing big-tailed peacocks.

Peahens that 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.

A clever peahen who read Veblen might propose that, for the good of the species, peacocks should stop this mad waste.

Perhaps each peacock could agree to wear a little hat showing a number between one and ten that reveals his actual fitness (perhaps a composite score of their health, strength, fecundity, intelligence, and screeching ability).

But there would be no effective way to police this system of arbitrary quality-signs. Too many low-fitness peacocks would lie, because they could attract better mates by lying.

The signalling system has to be self-policing. It has to include a range of sexual signals that differ in cost, that are differentially affordable by individuals of different fitness, by virtue of which they honestly reveal their fitness.

The handicap principle suggests that prodigious waste is a necessary feature of sexual courtship.

Peacocks as a species would be much better off if they didn’t have to waste so much energy growing big tails.

But as individual males and females, they have irresistible incentives to grow they biggest tails they can afford, or to choose sexual partners with the biggest tails they can attract.

In nature, showy waste is the only guarantee of truth in advertising.

Advertising and sexual signal systems

Conspicuous consumption is the cultural analogue of the peacock’s tail: a handicap that reveals quality by wasting resources.

Consumerism is a sort of ritualization of conspicuous consumption, where people display their wealth and taste by owning widely recognized products of commonly known cost.

Advertising based on image, as opposed to product features and price, attempts to create a sexual-signalling niche for each such product.

This requires demonstrating a credible 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.

Crucially, 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 up by its bootstraps from unrecognized thing to consensual object of desire.

The difficulties in comprehending this semiotic 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 basically 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 this signal-evolution process by showing fake men (actors) driving not-yet-available Porsches, and fake women winking at them.

The whole signalling system based around 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 system. It was invented by a few advertising executives in the last several months for one client company’s profit. It was not evolved over millions of years by all of 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 improving 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.