The post below on consumerism generated some good comments; thought I’d do a bit of follow up.
I read the William Cavanaugh article from Sojourners and he made what I thought were some very good points. Cavanaugh emphasizes that the problem with consumerism is not just about “having more stuff” but also that it tends to reduce everything to the level of a commodity to be bought and sold. He argues that this is deeply bound up with the changes wrought be the industrial revolution – specifically with the fact that we are removed from the process by which the things we consume are produced.
Cavanaugh writes:
Consumerism is a spiritual attitude that is deeply entangled with changes since the Industrial Revolution in the way goods are produced. In pre-industrial society, the home was a place not merely of consumption but of production. Most people lived on farms and made the majority of the goods that they needed. Starting with the enclosure of common lands in England and elsewhere in Europe, the bulk of the population was moved away from subsistence farming and into factory labor. Cottage industries were wiped away by the production of cheap goods from mechanized factories, compelling people to enter the market as wage laborers.
With the relentless pressures on the family farm that continue today, the home as a site of significant production has all but disappeared. We make almost nothing of what we consume. The process of globalization has accelerated this detachment from production. Fewer and fewer of us have any idea what factory work is like, since manufacturing jobs are more and more being transferred overseas. Nor do we have much more than a vague idea of the wages or working conditions of the workers who make what we buy.
The result is that we are detached from our labor (since most of us now work for wages rather than to produce things for ourselves) and we are detached from the way the things we use are produced. Things come to us almost as free-floating bits with no history and no connection to a wider web of human relationships.
Cavanaugh also contends that we have been trained, counterintuitive as it may seem, to find dissatisfaction pleasurable:
Pleasure resides not in having but in wanting. Insofar as an item obtained brings a temporary halt to desire, it becomes undesirable. This is why shopping, not buying, captures the spirit of consumerism, and why shopaholism is being treated as an addiction. Consumerism is a restless spirit, constantly in search of something new. Consumerism is typified by detachment, not attachment, for desire must be kept on the move. Consumerism is also typified by scarcity, not abundance, for as long as desire is endless, there will never be enough stuff to go around.
The proper response to this is for Christians to recover the sense of creation’s interconnectedness. We can do this by “creat[ing] economic spaces that underscore our spiritual and physical connection to creation and to each other.”
We must strive to demystify commodities by being informed about where they come from, who makes them, and under what conditions. We should support products, such as fair-trade coffee, that pull back the veil from the production process and offer a sustainable life to their producers. We should attempt to create local, face-to-face economies, where consumers and producers know each other well enough that their interests tend to merge. My parish’s connection to a local cooperative of family farms (www.wholefarmcoop.com) is a hopeful example.
Finally, we should attempt to close the gap between work and consumption by supporting worker ownership of the means of production. The first step toward doing so is turning our homes back into sites of production. To bake bread, to make our own entertainment, and do so in community with others: These are small but important steps in turning from consumers to celebrants of God’s abundant life.
I think Cavanaugh is right that part of the problem is the commodification of everything. We could see this as a result of our drive for technological mastery which strives to make goods, services, and even experiences available upon demand. Surely a better attitude for Christians is to recognize the goods of this world as gifts that come from God which reflect the goodness of the Creator.
Still (and you know I’d have to say something critical), Cavanaugh seems to me a bit unwilling to acknowledge that the social phenomena he bemoans bring benefits as well as costs. Two things in particular stand out for me.
First, it has to be recognized that the division of labor and specialization have made available many goods that probably would otherwise have been available only to the very rich, if at all. And not all of these are trivial things – cheap food, clothing, eyeglasses, vaccines, etc, all owe their existence, at least in part, to the process of industrialization that Cavanaugh sees as the cause of so much ill.
Secondly, does it seem that Cavanaugh has a somewhat romanticized view of work? Surely it was wrong that English peasants were forced off their land by coercive enclosures, but that doesn’t mean the life of a subsistence farmer is any great shakes. I think the notion of work as “co-creation” – as a creative participation in the shaping and care of the world – downplays the extent to which, in a fallen world, work will necessarily be irksome (see, for instance, Stanley Hauerwas’ essay “Work as Co-Creation: A Critique of a Remarkably Bad Idea” in his book In Good Company).
In general I’m wary of identifying any particular set of economic arrangements with Christian truth. Every system has its good and bad points (which should not blind us to places where reform is needed!), and every system has to reckon with the intractable nature of human sin. This includes Wendell Berry-style agrarianism as much as corporate capitalism or state socialism.
None of which is to deny the validity of Cavanaugh’s critique, or much less to offer an apology for unfettered capitalism. But in discussing these matters I think we should be frank about the costs as well as the benefits of any project of social reform.
A Thinking Reed 
Leave a reply to Jennifer Cancel reply