The Diderot Effect

Who Owns The Story of You?

Denis Diderot, by Louis-Michel van Loo, 1767.

Catch-up service:
Keir Starmer’s Reality Avoidance Field
27 Notes on Growing Old(er)
Donald Trump and the End of Power
Why Are We So Bad At Grasping Difficult Things?
5 Reasons There Won’t Be an AI Jobs Apocalypse
Why Is TikTok Rocket Fuel For Populists?

In 1766, when he was 53, the philosopher Denis Diderot came into some money. It was quite a shock. For most of his career, he had worked as a translator and editor, living austerely even as his reputation grew. He had produced his wildly successful - and controversial - Encyclopédie, and been imprisoned by the French state for his free thinking on religion. All of this made him famous but not rich (he was paid a small salary to edit the Encyclopédie and received no royalties).

Unable to provide a dowry for his daughter, he even considered selling his beloved collection of books. When Catherine the Great of Russia, a supporter of Enlightenment ideas, heard about this, she bought Diderot’s library for a handsome sum and let him keep it. She also gave him an annual salary. Suddenly, Diderot had money to spare. Unsure what to do with it, he decided to buy a new dressing gown. He replaced the shabby black gown he had worn and worked in for years with a truly magnificent scarlet robe. And that’s when his trouble started.

Diderot spent most of his waking hours in his study, which was a ramshackle affair. There was a straw chair, a rickety table piled with books, a ratty old rug, some frameless prints stuck to the wall. Sitting there in his fine scarlet gown, Diderot felt uncomfortable. The old gown had been of a piece with his study and with him. He used it to dust his books and clean his nibs. The new gown felt out of place in surroundings which struck him for the first time as worn and cheap.

So he started buying things in order to make his new gown less incongruous. He bought a sumptuous new rug from Damascus. He replaced his table with a fancy writing desk, his straw chair with a leather armchair. He bought a mirror to put above the mantelpiece, a gold clock, fine paintings. Each new item created a desire for the next. When an old friend and collaborator paid a visit to Diderot’s study, he was astonished at the transformation. It hardly seemed like Diderot at all.

Diderot agreed. He had come to miss his old gown. It wasn’t very nice, but it was his: it was shaped to his needs, and asked nothing of him. The scarlet gown, by contrast, had compelled him to bend his whole world around it, spending much of his new fortune in the process. In a short, witty essay called Regrets On Parting With My Old Dressing Gown, he wrote, “I was absolute master of my old dressing gown, but I have become a slave to my new one.”¹

In 1986, an anthropologist of consumerism called Grant McCracken coined “the Diderot effect”: when the purchase of a product leads to a spiral of consumption, as each new item makes the consumer feel they need another in order to complete the set. You treat yourself to a luxury watch for the first time. Now you need the right shoes to go with it, and the right bag. So on until the money runs out, completion somehow never arriving.

Accounts of the Diderot Effect often take the form of little sermons on how we shouldn’t let consumer desires overwhelm us. In a 1992 book called The Overspent American, the sociologist Juliet Schor used the concept to attack competitive, status-driven consumption. James Clear, in his popular self-help book Atomic Habits, uses the Diderot Effect as a prelude to advice on avoiding the trap of “wanting things you don’t need”.

This is sensible enough, in a world where people can run up unmanageable debts on credit cards. It’s also, of course, how Diderot framed his experience. He talked almost as if he had been seized by an evil spirit; possessed by his possessions. I can’t help but observe, however, that he ended up with a much nicer study. He wrote that essay on a comfortable chair in a tastefully furnished room full of lovely things. Was that really something to feel bad about? As Kingsley Amis put it, nice things are nicer than nasty ones. Diderot was famously atheist, but there is a hint of Catholic guilt in his self-flagellation.

In his 1986 essay, McCracken also introduced the idea of a “Diderot unity”: a group of objects considered culturally complementary to one another, like the ones in Diderot’s transformed study. Luxury fashion is an obvious example. Brands like Ralph Lauren are Diderot unities unto themselves, creating whole worlds in which one’s choice of shirt and sport and holiday all complement each other. A Diderot unity might also be something like “modern healthy living”, requiring the purchase of a smartwatch, a Peloton, yards of branded Lycra. We might seek consistency among objects but what’s really at stake here is consistency of identity. What kind of person am I—this kind or that kind?

In a recent paper in Psychology and Marketing, a group of researchers led by Sujin Song of Korea University looked at the Diderot Effect in the context of the body and self. They interviewed ten South Korean women who had undergone cosmetic surgery. They found that the surgery triggered a cascade of purchases, as the women sought a new set of possessions and experiences consistent with what the researchers call, with a nod to Diderot’s magnificent gown, their "new magnificent self."In a break with convention, the authors of this paper do not present their subjects as tragic victims of capitalism, and when you read verbatim quotes from the interviews, you see why. This is Sharon (pseudonym):

"After the surgery, I can buy any clothes I want regardless of the brand…I wasn't confident in my looks and didn't buy them because the clothes celebrities wore didn't suit me well. I don't have to worry about that anymore. I buy what I want to wear because I look beautiful…My personality and self has changed too. As I become more confident in my appearance, I feel no burden to meet someone new."

Sharon does not sound like a woman regretting her choices! She isn’t being driven to buy things out of status anxiety, so much as exploring newfound possibilities. Here’s Trisha:

"I swam more after surgery, and even went abroad more. I think the surgery affected everything. That season I was more confident. You know in Korea, it is not easy for a woman to travel abroad alone, but it made me stronger and more confident about myself, so I tried everything I wanted to do."

Of course, we know plastic surgery doesn’t always go well. People who have it can get stuck into a spiral of further surgeries, with unfortunate results. Maybe the women in the study got caught in a vicious cycle of purchases later on and came to regret it all, who knows. But we should allow for the possibility that their initial “purchase'“ opened the door to a whole new Diderot unity, and a whole new version of themselves, and that they were happier as a result.

Consumerism gets a bad rap. The consensus among intellectuals is that it’s a way of getting people to buy things they don’t need, by playing on their anxieties. There is undoubtedly truth in that, but it’s also true that material things can bring delight, satisfaction, and yes, happiness. The British sociologist Colin Campbell is one of the few academics to take those effects seriously. In The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism he argued that when a consumer buys a dress, she isn’t just buying the dress; she’s buying permission to imagine a new version of herself.

He gives her agency, presenting the purchase as an act of creativity. In Campbell's phrase, the consumer is a ‘dream artist’ who knowingly weaves illusions around objects of desire. The dressing gown or watch or pair of trainers is merely an excuse to experience the pleasures of longing, pretending, and self-creating. The reality of a product is never quite as good as the dream – but then if it was, there would be no reason to dream again. Whether or not we “need” such experiences they make life feel more expansive. They can even, as the Korean women show us, liberate.

I see Diderot Effects beyond consumerism. What is the equivalent of Diderot’s gown for politics? Perhaps it is snagging on one particular issue on which you find yourself in disagreement with your own side. Maybe you can’t go along with what they’re all saying about asylum seekers or climate change, even though you agree with them on everything else. The incongruity of your position becomes painfully apparent to you. You start reconsidering your other positions, seeking a new consistency and eventually you flip to the other side. Many such cases.

Maybe you don’t need to flip. There has been a trend towards consistency of beliefs, at least among the politically engaged. If I know someone’s position on the Middle East conflict, I can tell you with some confidence their position on abortion and immigration. The underlying reason for this is that political beliefs have become tied to identity. There are only a few ready-made identities to choose from, and their internal consistency is fiercely enforced on social media. I don’t think this is a good development. High ideological consistency is associated with more rigid and extreme views. It’s also very boring.

What we could do instead is savour the incongruity of our anomalous beliefs, and use them as a spur to create a distinctive story about ourselves; one which doesn’t fit the ones on offer. A world or worldview can be coherent without being “consistent”, like the prefabricated versions that are constantly being pushed on us. We can use our freedom as consumers and thinkers to piece together idiosyncratic Diderot unities which become shaped around us like Diderot’s old gown. Otherwise we’re just striving to comply with somebody else’s rules. There’s nothing magnificent about that.

---

This one is free to read so feel free to share. After the jump: a rattle bag of what I’ve been reading, thinking about and enjoying. Please take out a paid subscription to The Ruffian, which will elevate anyone’s Diderot Unity. Without access to the benevolence of a foreign head of state I rely on my lovely paid subscribers to keep this thing going. This week, a deliciously enjoyable history book, excellent advice on how to change minds, a great John and Paul moment, and more…