William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed; Economics and Christian Desire: Review Part 3

Finally in chapter 4, “Scarcity and Abundance,” Cavanaugh uses the logic of communion to challenge the logic of the market. We are desiring beings, but only in God can our desires be put to rest. An economics that bases itself on the assumption of scarcity is not only based on hunger but also on endless human wants. Shopping, then, is finally about the “pleasure of stroking desire,” for in “scarcity is implied . . . the daily erotics of desire that keeps the individual in the pursuit of novelty” (91). Such a lifestyle, Cavanaugh insists is “the death of Christian eschatology” (93). Instead, of placing our hope in Christ’s kingdom breaking into this fallen world system, we continually distract ourselves with more consumption even as we shrug before “a tragic world of scarcity.” Worse, we come to develop a taste for hearing of global tragedies: “Even the suffering of others can become a spectacle and a consumable item: tsunamis sell newspapers” (94). Cavanaugh holds that the Eucharist should teach us of “the communicability of pain from one person to another” within the Body of Christ. Rather than individuals facing off in competition over a scarce supply, we become truly individual as we impart help to each other, becoming dependent upon each other. We cannot give into despair but must respond in eschatological hope, for Christ daily gives of his self that we may know “where we are going” (100).

There are numerous ways to go about responding to Cavanaugh’s claims. One, for instance, could place his theology within numerous streams of Christian reflection. He draws off the Christian personalism of John Paul II and the economic distributism of early 20^th-century Catholic ethics. He also shows a great debt to the tradition of virtue ethics currently taught by Stanley Hauerwas at Duke Divinity School. Likewise, Cavanaugh is much indebted to the Augustinian tradition of reflection on ordered and disordered loves within the City of God and the City of Man, as well as the new Trinitarian insights of Hans urs von Balthasar, to name only one theologian. Each of these streams of Christian reflection has strengths and weaknesses. One could also ascertain whether he has truly understood the experience and logic of late, global capitalism in the last few decades. Has he, for instance, ignored counter-examples that might go against his theses of hypermobilization of capital, of the creation of constant, movable desire, and of globalization as a false parody of true Christian catholicity?

However, I want to respond more personally as one First World, Christian individual to his book. In my experience, much of what he claims rings true, at least some of the time. I am ashamed to say that I have found myself at various points in my life addicted to the buying of things, and of late, equally tempted by the consumption of short bursts of image and experience though online social networking and news. I, too, have often thrown up my hands in despair at the news of overseas economic abuses, wondering where to buy my clothing, my coffee, or my children’s toys. And I, too, have taken a kind of superficial pride and joy in my “diversity,” listening to African music while I eat fajitas, read a Russian novel, and look forward to watching a Dutch film on video later that evening. I would rather play it safe and not have to interact with the truly poor, unless, of course they seem grateful and don’t smell too much. After I finished reading Being Consumed , I struggled with what I should do in response, and my first desire was to simply and sadly think I could do nothing. Of course, this would simply be to “consume” Being Consumed as part of the endless diet of ideas in a collegiate environment. Instead, I am praying and seeking how my family should act differently in what we eat and buy and give. I have talked to my wife some about the book and will continue to do so.

It does not seem to me that you need be convinced by everything that Cavanaugh claims in order to respond to it with repentance and action. For example, I am somewhat dissatisfied with his theology of the Church and world. He seems to conflate the distinction between them too much at times, the logic of the Eucharist almost dissolving the need for individual repentance. I can’t always tell if his doctrine of the Supper actually merges nature and grace or simply brings them into a particular and local relationship for our time. Likewise, his portrait of multi-national abuses does not reflect the experience of local managers who are attached to their workers and seek to work for change for their benefit. Nonetheless, I am still left crying mea culpa. Well, not only “my fault” per se, for that too is part of his point. I am joined to the Body of Christ, and I must learn to work within the messy, faulty life of that local community called a church if I am to develop with others the habits and practices that help address some of these matters. Happily, Cavanaugh has provided some examples worth learning more about:

• Mondragón Cooperative Corporation, based on the principles of distributism, is worker-owned and governed and contributes greatly to neighborhood health, education, and lower crime.
• CRS Fair trade program in coffee, chocolate, and handcrafted items seeks to deal directly with growers and local artisans to promote fair payment, as well as promote a sense of solidarity with those overseas.
• Church Supported Agriculture (CSA) seeks to create a direct market between local family growers and local churches in hopes of providing a face-to-face buying environment with growers and helping to promote sustainable farming.
• The Economy of Communion Project associated with the Focolare Movement promotes a business model that divides profits into 1/3 aid to the poor, 1/3 education promotion, and 1/3 business sustainability. As of 2006, 700 businesses worldwide had adopted their model.

I would challenge us all to learn more about these and other Christian options like them.

William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed; Economics and Christian Desire: Review Part 2

Cavanaugh offers an insightful critique of consumerism, which he charges as being driven not by ownership of things but by consumption of things: “Consumerism is not so much about having more as it is about having something else; that’s why it is not simply buying but shopping that is the heart of consumerism” (35). Strangely then, consumerism is a kind of parody of the Christian call to be detached from things and, in giving things away, to become attached to others. Cavanaugh believes the problem is that currently we as consumers are disconnected from almost every stage of the making of things, including being separated from those who make them. Most of us, he believes, are not comfortable with the plight of exhausted and desperate workers in overseas sweatshops, but we are unable to know exactly where and under what conditions our clothing, our toys, or our electronic devices are produced, and since many of these might also be produced in conditions that are somewhat better than starvation in the fields, we are left mostly with a vague ennui and free-floating guilt. What’s worse for us is that increasingly we are even detached from the things we consume, so that marketers must produce simultaneously an “organized creation of dissatisfaction” and yet also invest the products we purchase with positive emotional associations. “Products are made in the factory, but brands are made in the mind,” as one marketer observed (45). What, then, are Christians to do? Cavanaugh, writing in the tradition of Antony of Egypt, Clement of Alexandria, and Thomas Aquinas, suggests that we return to the pursuit of God as our chief desire. To be the Body of Christ is to identify with the “least of these.” We must take practical steps to overcoming our detachment by giving to others in a way that supports a sustainable life for them. We must also make our homes places where food is prepared, musical instruments are played, and people are engaged in making things.

Chapter 3, “The Global and the Local,” is the most densely theological of the book, yet I suspect it is also the heart of Cavanaugh’s attempt to provide a Christian vision that runs counter to consumerism: “[C]ulture and economics are not autonomous spheres with no mutual effect. Economic relationships do not operate on value-neutral laws, but are rather carriers of specific convictions about the nature of the human person” (59). Globalization is a false catholicity; it purports to offer a universal world of multicultural communication and exchange, but it actually tends to flatten out local cultures into a world of McDonalds and Disneys, even as it also works to dismember communities into atomistic individuals. Here, he returns to his concern with the “hypermobility of capital” which can abandon its people easily, thus creating a situation that makes labor unions fairly impossible, as well as negotiations for better working environments, higher wages, and more ownership in the means of production. Cavanaugh is equally suspicious of the claims of religious pluralism and multiculturalism. Both doctrines, he believes, really perpetuate a post-modernist version of persons and reality that is still radically individualistic. We can consume surface-level, multi-cultural experiences without necessarily changing anything about ourselves and our patterns of First World consumption. The global village is a comforting fiction. In response to this, Cavanaugh looks to Jesus Christ as the “concrete universal: “Only in the Incarnation can an individual be universal and the universal be individual” (76), and only in the mission of Christ can we truly discover ourselves, for Christian discipleship teaches us to lay ourselves aside for others: “The true identity of each unique human person is thus founded on the overcoming of an illusory self-sufficiency” (83). This practice is deeply Trinitarian, for we enter into an exchange of mutual giving and receiving. But this Christian exchange is always realized in local places over time. Only then can we truly be and model what God intends for Creation.

William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed; Economics and Christian Desire: Review Part 1

Jekabs Bikis and I reviewed together Cavanaugh's Being Consumed. We've both agreed to post our reviews and our responses to each other here. Below is the first section of mine:

William T. Cavanaugh’s book is a slim volume on a broad topic. Just under a hundred pages, Being Consumed brings to our attention the impact of consumerism, commodification, and globalization on personhood, free markets, multinational corporations, marketing, shopping, tourism, self-identity, and human freedom. Yet despite such a wide range of concerns, Cavanaugh’s target is much more defined. As “a contribution to a kind of theological microeconomics,” he desires above all to help Christians “to discern and create economic practices, spaces, and transactions that are truly free” (viii). To do this, requires a theological critique of the spiritual and moral temptations of global capitalism. So rather than mount a macro-level reform of multinational markets, Cavanaugh is more concerned with how Christians might live differently at the local and particular level, and how by living in such a way they might further incarnate the eschatological promises that God has extended in the Lord’s Supper.

In chapter 1, “Freedom and Unfreedom,” Cavanaugh asserts that “true freedom requires an account of the end (telos) of human life and the destination of creation” (2), which for the Christian is to desire and participate in God. We need to keep this end in view because otherwise we cannot distinguish true and false desires. A model that judges the freedom of economic exchange as simply equal to the exchange itself is not truly free, for it has no standard by which to judge human flourishing. A model that values exchange in itself doesn’t care whether that exchange is about bread and beans or pornography and breast augmentation. Christians, on the other hand, are called to cultivate true desires, and we must do this in the face of marketing that seeks to create imprudent yearning in us and to addict us to the constant stimulation of those desires. We also have to work against large-scale organizations which ignore the needs of their employees. Charges Cavanaugh, we delude ourselves if we think that late capitalism is truly free for all its participants. Multinational corporations may choose to relocate their operations from one cheap source of labor to the next, quickly abandoning their workers, who after all, cannot easily move without disrupting their lives and communities. The ownership of property, Cavanuagh insists, is intended by God to serve the common good, not to pursue the maximization of profits at the expense of people. Christians then should work to create companies which keep this as one of their preeminent purposes.