Mission in Action

I am teaching a Theology unit at Vose Seminary this semester entitled the Christian Faith in Western Society.  It, among other things, is keeping me busy hence the lack of posts recently.

However this was too good to pass up.  We are looking at consumerism this week and in the Unit Reader I have a chapter from Catholic scholar William Cavanaugh’s ripping little read “Being Consumed”.  It is a brilliant book, not just for what it says, but the brevity and depth in which it says it.  In the light of the recent GFC I thought the following quotes were pertinent.

…most people do not simply choose material goods over spiritual values. The person who deliberately decides to become a hedonist and materialist is rare. Even pop singer, Madonna, the self-declared “Material Girl” is involved in spirituality, a de-Judaized version of the ancient Jewish mystical practice called Kabbalah. Consumerism is not simply people rejecting spirituality for materialism. For many people, consumerism is a type of spirituality, even if they do not recognise it as such.

Cavanaugh pinpoints the issue later when he says…

The “extreme makeover” is an ongoing process in the search for novelty, for bigger and better, for “new and improved” and for different experiences.  The shaving razor with the one blade had to be surpassed by the double-bladed razor, which was bested by three blades, then for; and now an absurd five blades to one razor.  This is more than just a continuing attempt to make a product better; it is what the General Motors people called “the organised creation of disssatisfaction.”

What an irony that the drive to satisfy what cannot be satisfied by stuff – something that GM admitted fuelling – underlies the very thing that is bringing this self-same GM to its knees as we speak.  Cavanaugh points out that the truly spiritual issue is not the having of something, but the wanting to have it.  When you get it, much like illicit sex, lo and  behold, it was never as good as the idea.  Cavanaugh points out that consumerism is not so much about having more as about having something else.  That’s why shopping rather than buying is at the heart of consumerism.

The economic stimuli of our federal governments is simply fuelling the fire of our spiritual problem and destining us to a repetition of what we are currently experiencing. I wait with bated breath for the six-blade razor.