The Diderot Effect

Don’t you just love it when you discover there actually is a word or expression for a phenomenon you’d recognized but didn’t realize had a name? That happened to me recently with the Diderot Effect.

I first became aware of this tendency in human nature when I bought my house here in New Orleans. I loved the house because of its floor plan and its long breezy gallery and its rows of French doors opening onto a secluded, iron-gated courtyard (and because it had lots of lovely built-in bookcases in the family room that I planned to turn into my office; my real estate agent said, “I’ve sold houses because they had hot tubs or crown molding or granite countertops, but this is the first time I’ve ever sold a house because it had bookcases.”). But the house was an outdated wreck painted a dull gray beige on the inside and pink and turquoise on the outside, so the girls and I (joined later by Steve) set to work painting and renovating.

That’s when we discovered this strange phenomenon. We painted the upstairs hall but instead of making the hall look better, all it did was emphasize how ratty the carpet was. So we pulled up the carpet and put down a wood floor, and suddenly we were really, really bothered by the tacky light fixtures overhead. The massive renovations necessitated by Katrina only increased the problem. The new paneled doors downstairs made the old slab doors left upstairs unbearable. The new master bath doomed the old hall bath. We laughed about what we assumed was simply our own private quirk. Then I discovered that there really is nothing new under the sun.

Denis Diderot was one of the French philosophes of the eighteenth century who brought us the Enlightenment (and, by extension, such various legacies as the American Declaration of Independence and the Reign of Terror). In 1769 or thereabouts he wrote a humorous essay entitled, "Regrets on Parting with My Old Dressing Gown, or a Warning to those who have more taste than fortune." In it he describes how the possession of a splendid new scarlet dressing gown leads him to replace his scruffy old chair with a lovely new armchair of Moroccan leather. Then he realizes the chair makes his desk look beat up, so he springs for a glossy new writing table. And so it goes, on and on, until he has completely redone his study and is as a result on the brink of financial ruin.

The Diderot Effect.