Chapter Six

Veblen restates that while conspicuous waste regulates consumption, consumers are typically motivated by conformity to established usage and avoiding disapproval, not by the principle of waste itself.

Prescriptive standards of expensiveness appear even in private consumption—like underclothing and kitchen utensils—suggesting that aesthetic features beyond mere utility are universally demanded.

The law of conspicuous waste generates a code of accredited consumption standards that constrains economic life and shapes habits of thought across multiple domains of conduct.

Habits of thought about consumption are interconnected with all other evaluative habits, so economic norms cannot be isolated from moral, aesthetic, and other domains.

The principle of conspicuous waste influences moral judgments about honesty and reputation, creating conflicts with other moral norms like respect for property.

Veblen illustrates that violations of property rights are morally condoned when the perpetrator displays conspicuous consumption, showing wealth and status override property morality.

The moral code surrounding inviolable property ownership itself originated as a psychological result of the traditional merit assigned to wealth.

Veblen indicates he will discuss the canon of honorific expenditure's influence on sacred matters and will treat related topics separately.

The canon of conspicuous waste accounts for much devout consumption, including expensive sacred buildings and vestments, despite the absence of physical utility.

Sacred spaces must be expensively decorated yet austere and uncomfortable, rejecting any suggestion of personal comfort while demonstrating pecuniary reputability.

The character of sacred spaces—austere or luxurious—reflects how people conceive of the divinity: either served vicariously by priests or enjoying consumption as a temporal ruler.

Vicarious sacred consumption aims not to enhance the consumer's comfort but to demonstrate the master's (divinity's) pecuniary repute through honorific crudeness.

The principle of waste invades the styles of ritual observance through the demeanor of priests, who display marks of vicarious leisure—aloof, leisurely, and perfunctory conduct.

Ritual tends to reduce itself to the rehearsal of formulas, with perfunctoriness increasing in mature cults; this perfunctoriness is aesthetically pleasing because it suggests the master's exaltation above need for profitable service.

Through habits of thought, the principle of conspicuous waste has colored notions of divinity and the divine ideal, imputing to God traits that reflect human ideals of worthy character.

Pecuniary canons of reputability materially affect conceptions of divine attributes and the proper manner of divine communion, including depictions of serene, leisurely divinity surrounded by opulent furnishings.

Religious doctrine dictates that priests avoid industrially productive work and worshippers approach sacred space in fine apparel, embodying vicarious leisure and conspicuous waste.

Pecuniary standards have profoundly influenced the sense of beauty and utility in consumable goods, making articles preferred for their wastefulness rather than serviceability.

Veblen uses the example of an expensive hand-wrought silver spoon versus cheap aluminum to show that perceived beauty often derives from costliness rather than intrinsic aesthetic qualities.

The superior gratification from costly products is typically a gratification of our sense of costliness disguised as aesthetic appreciation, not genuine beauty.

Beautiful objects and wasteful ones often coincide, complicating the distinction between aesthetic and honorific value; moreover, many prized objects owe their utility as waste items to antecedent aesthetic beauty.

Objects are monopolized and valued primarily for their honorific character as items of conspicuous waste, not for intrinsic beauty, with exclusivity conferring status.

Valuable objects must conform to both beauty and expensiveness requirements; moreover, the canon of expensiveness blends the marks of costliness with beautiful features, creating confusion in aesthetic judgment.

The code of reputability in dress and furniture decides what is acceptable; people sincerely find fashionable items pleasing, yet the same items would appear equally beautiful in different eras despite aesthetic constancy.

Through habituation to marks of expensiveness, beautiful articles that are inexpensive come to be regarded as not beautiful, with different classes adopting different expense-based beauty standards.

Variation in taste across social classes is not constitutional but rather reflects different codes of reputability and pecuniary standing that determine what objects are acceptable for honorific consumption.

The close-cropped lawn exemplifies how an object may possess intrinsic sensuous beauty yet be preferred primarily as a marker of pecuniary status, with ethnic preferences reflecting inherited pastoral habits.

Cows are excluded from decorative use despite being aesthetically fitting because they suggest thrift and utility, violating the canon of honorific waste; exotic animals are preferred for their futility and expense.

Public parks attempt to recreate pasture beauty but eliminate grazing cattle because the animals suggest thrift, making maintained grounds aesthetically inferior yet more honorific.

Both private and public grounds exhibit costliness coupled with a pretense of simplicity; earlier generations showed little divergence from this standard due to lack of leisure-class consensus.

As a substantial portion of the leisure class becomes consistently exempt from work, they can afford to overlook expensiveness and develop a taste for the natural and rustic, breaking from traditional displays of waste.

Middle-class taste includes a weakness for serviceable-looking contrivances, but this is suppressed under the canon of reputable futility through fake rusticity and decorative features.

The select leisure class has outgrown pseudo-serviceable variants, though recent arrivals to the leisure class and lower classes still require pecuniary beauty even in naturally beautiful objects.

The reconstruction of Columbian Exposition grounds demonstrates the dominance of pecuniary beauty over aesthetic beauty in middle-class taste, with even upper classes approving the results.

The practice of clearing native forests to plant costly introduced saplings illustrates how the canon of pecuniary beauty overrides ecological and aesthetic sense.

The canon of taste assigns beauty to domestic animals based on their economic utility: productive animals lack beauty while non-productive ones are conventionally admired as beautiful.

The cat is less beautiful than dogs because she is less wasteful, may serve utility, lacks the subordinate temperament required for honorific status, and does not facilitate invidious comparison.

The dog is valued for embodying the relation of status—subservience and servility—and for being an expensive, non-productive item; these traits make his various virtues and even deformities conventionally beautiful.

Fancy-bred dogs with grotesque deformities are rated beautiful in proportion to their costliness and scarcity, demonstrating how expensiveness becomes the criterion of beauty.

Attention to pet animals is reputable and gains approval because it is non-gainful; the canon of expensiveness guides and shapes the sentiment and selection of pet objects.

The fast horse is valued for expressing the owner's dominance through emulation and for being wasteful and honorific; his aesthetic merits are legitimated by the canon of conspicuous waste.

Speakers habitually invoke the race-horse when illustrating animal grace and serviceability, showing how aesthetic judgment is guided by what the canon of waste has legitimated.

Taste in horses is shaped by mimicry of English leisure-class usage; a horse is judged beautiful in proportion to its Englishness, reflecting upper-class aesthetic standards.

The English riding seat and gait—now deemed beautiful—are survivals from bad roads, illustrating how purely contingent historical facts shape beauty standards through pecuniary canonicity.

Veblen shifts focus to how pecuniary canons of reputability influence beauty standards in persons, particularly regarding bodily development and feminine ideals.

Feminine beauty ideals have shifted from robust women in predatory culture to delicate, leisurely women in status systems, and back to robust women as wealth accumulates and leisure ceases to mark status.

The chivalric ideal of feminine beauty—featuring attenuated waist, delicate hands and feet—reflects a requirement that women appear incapable of productive labor, marking them as expensive dependents.

In advanced industrial societies, accumulated wealth places leisure-class women beyond accusation of productive labor, so feminine beauty ideals revert to robust forms no longer burdened with markers of vicarious leisure.

Features like constricted waist and deformed feet, while repulsive naturally, become attractive when habituated to as marks of expensive dependence; they are artificially induced pathologies valorized by pecuniary taste.

The valuer does not consciously recognize the connection between reputability and perceived beauty; rather, pecuniary reputability shapes the valuer's habits of thought, affecting aesthetic appreciation.

In popular apprehension, demands of reputability and beauty coalesce; beauty lacking proper marks of pecuniary repute is rejected, eliminating many genuinely beautiful elements from our surroundings.

Deep aesthetic norms probably predate pecuniary institutions and are satisfied by simple, inexpensive contrivances suggesting efficiency; pecuniary requirements conflict with and eliminate these natural beauty elements.

Beauty consists in the mind's ready unfolding of apperceptive activity; habituation shapes what minds readily grasp, so deep adaptive changes occur around what appears beautiful.

Economic beauty—expression of serviceability and efficiency—resides in simple, unadorned articles; but the pecuniary canon rejects inexpensiveness, forcing compromise through wasteful ornamentation.

Novelty and ingenious contrivances substitute for beauty, allowing objects to display both wastefulness and some semblance of aesthetic value through puzzling complexity.

Examples of objects from outside Western culture demonstrate how ingenious wasteful design can successfully create genuine beauty without modern aesthetic confusion.

The substitution of expensive ingenuity for beauty frequently results in suppression of genuine beauty and serviceability, producing objects that would be intolerable without prescriptive tradition.

The canon of beauty demands expression of the generic; but conspicuous waste, through its requirement of novelty, produces a congeries of idiosyncrasies shaped by expensiveness.

Modern buildings are nearly impossible to view as beautiful if one separates beauty from honorific waste; the best features are often the unadorned dead walls.

What has been said about waste's influence on beauty canons applies equally to conceptions of serviceability; goods are valued for secondary utility as evidence of ability to pay.

Through generations, the tradition of meritorious expenditure has become so deeply habituated that people instinctively condemn cheap things as intrinsically dishonorable and now invoke the maxim 'Cheap and nasty.'

People insist on wasteful expensiveness in all consumption, even private and unobserved, feeling violated and degraded by regression from accustomed standards of living.

Candlelight was only recently expensive and is now found beautiful; thirty years ago it would have seemed inexpensive and unattractive, showing how beauty judgments follow pecuniary status.

The political sage's dictum 'A cheap coat makes a cheap man' captures how people feel the convincing force of associating expensiveness with merit.

Producers direct efforts to supply the honorific element because it is demanded and they themselves are under the same standard of worth; this makes it impossible to consume without waste.

Even someone attempting to avoid honorific waste would unconsciously incorporate wastefulness into homemade goods due to habituated modes of thought.

Purchasers select goods based on finish and workmanship rather than substantial serviceability; goods require marks of decent expensiveness beyond efficiency to sell.

Features showing conspicuous waste appeal to consumers on grounds beyond expensiveness alone, including evidence of skill and effective workmanship, though expensiveness ultimately provides the sanction.

Machine products serve their primary purpose more adequately than hand-wrought goods but face disesteem because they fail the test of honorific waste; hand labor is more wasteful and thus more reputably valuable.

Imperfections and irregularities in hand-wrought goods become honorific marks of superiority because they evidence wasteful production methods; a margin of crudeness is preferred.

Cultivated taste requires discrimination in appreciating the crudeness of hand-wrought goods; machine-made perfection may be admired by the vulgar or underbred unfamiliar with elegant consumption.

Common goods—those within reach of many—are unhonoific and contaminated by suggestions of lower human life; their sight produces distasteful meanness in persons of sensibility.

A schedule of aesthetic proprieties and abominations is constructed on the basis of cheapness and commonness, with marks of cheapness accepted as definitive marks of artistic unfitness.

The visible imperfections of hand-wrought goods become marks of superior beauty and serviceability because they evidence expensiveness, a reversal made possible by machine products being cheaper.

Ruskin and Morris's exaltation of handcraft and crudity, and their propaganda for household industry, arose from the fact that visibly perfect machine goods are cheaper, making their campaign historically contingent.

Veblen notes that the craft movement's impact is characterized here economically rather than aesthetically, describing its tendency on consumption and production.

Morris's book-making work exemplifies how taste shaped by conspicuous waste demand results in expensive, inconvenient, deliberately crude reproductions of antiquated processes.

Modern artistic books employ obsolete type, hand-laid paper, and inefficient binding to demonstrate waste and ability to consume freely, despite reduced utility and legibility.

The Kelmscott Press represented the principle of conspicuous waste reduced to absurdity by issuing books for modern use in obsolete orthography, black-letter, and impractical vellum binding.

Limited editions function as guarantees of scarcity and cost, lending pecuniary distinction to consumers through monopolized access.

The attractiveness of artistic books rests on imputed excellence rather than conscious recognition of costliness and clumsiness; the beauty is genuinely perceived, though guided by waste canons.

The decadent book designed for beauty often achieves success, but its designer works under a canon shaped by conspicuous waste that acts selectively to exclude non-wasteful designs.

The canon of classicism or veneration for the archaic works alongside conspicuous waste to shape book design; for aesthetic purposes these may be indistinguishable, but economically they distinguish between creative principles and selective survival.

Conspicuous waste does not originate innovations but selectively permits survival of those innovations that conform to its requirements, acting as a negative conservative principle.