Challenging a commodity culture
Kavanaugh, John
FAITH & ECONOMICS: CAN WE LIVE DIFFERENTLY?
Challenging a commodity culture I I I JOHN KAVANAUGH "Indeed there is already a real perceptible danger that while our dominion over the world...
...Yet, without community or familial support, without some expression in style of life or some commitment to social reordering, solitude alone does not provide an integrated, sustainable alternative praxis...
...Each must commit --not for the sake of some myopic one-sided issue, but for the sake of our Christ in faith...
...In this L'Arche community hidden in India...
...but with the encounter of God in silence, the phenomenon of personal reality is revealed...
...There is a politics, even an economics, of sex...
...If you clutch a loved one too closely, that person might disappear...
...The capitalist reality principle is so powerful that when the pope speaks to us of Christ's justice whereby the third world nations of the South will "rise up to judge the rich nations of the North," we say, surely he cannot mean us...
...And so, in so many rhetorical ways we ape the commodity culture that has formed us in the image and likeness of things...
...I N THE CENTRAL sections of John Paul II's great christologi- cal encyclical, Redeemer of Humankind, he launches into an unexpected and complicated reflection upon the spiritu- airy of economic systems...
...Consequently, when we imagine an alternative way of life in the context of our culture, we must include the heroics of social commitment -- against all the wisdom that it is unrealis- tic, against all the cultural prudence that advises we will get nowhere, against all the socio-psychological warnings that we not appear foolish...
...Redemptor Hominis (unofficial rendering...
...But, too often people of faith unwittingly choose only one area of alternative "resistance" and neglect the others...
...It is a world where, even if the only gesture we are able to offer is blowing the dust from the ground and offering an innocent hand of welcome, we do something mighty and majestic...
...What is it that we receive that cannot be bought...
...A living faith must be seen in such a context...
...Traveling light" is a response, not out of guilt or .9 trendy narcissistic asceticism, but out of love for persons and personal life...
...It is the irreplaceability and value of our own human persorthood...
...This is the outcome of prayer and of relationship...
...It is ourselves...
...Herein we discover that it is the human heart and hand which, no matter what the conditions of our woundedness, is most subversive and healing in a world of commodity consciousness...
...Some choose interiority, convinced that if they are able to maintain a citadel of solitude, they will be able to withstand the siege of depersonalizing forces...
...A full dialectic of personal living is the only alternative to the dialectics of domination and the idols of capitalism...
...Depersonalization is intrinsi- cally related to injustice...
...Life, faith, Jesus Christ, all collide in the complex maze which makes up our cultural reality and which makes the question of "alternative living" frustratingly problematic...
...All touches all...
...Violence and injus- tice --in all of the subtle institutional, political, and interper- sonal forms -- are the cultural mirrors of the"thingified" Self...
...It is a world where we encounter the utter unique- ness of each person and the utter universality of our shared human nature...
...Not being able to tap into the splendor of human personhood encountered in either solitude or solidarity, there is no subjec- tive or intersubjective referrent for the affirmation of the inher- ent worth of persons...
...S,J., is an associate professor of philosophy at St...
...We will not be able to do it all, but we will be able to do something...
...Conviction must be given concrete specificity in our culture...
...The best things in life really are free...
...Christ shatters all of this...
...Sip it with arrogance," an ad for drink says...
...Such behaviors are related not only to justice in the world, but also to fairness in our covenantal lives, and self-love or self-hatred in our interior lives...
...It will never walk out on you...
...After Jesus, everything is different...
...They are the very flesh of faith, the criteria of the Last Judgment which Jesus himself sets up as standards for following him and for encountering him on this earth...
...Others have sought community, hoping that they might be Commonweal: 606 may be told that we can believe in Remington, trust Woolite, or that Musk is love...
...And yet the young priest had wanted to help...
...And why does the relationship between faith and economics haunt the doctrine of the pope whether he is in Brazil condemning slavery "to consumerism," in England recommending the vow of poverty as an act of resistance to the "tyranny of consumerism," or in Canada delivering a ringing indictment of the economic life and priorities of the indus- trialized nations of the North...
...It will be concretely expressed in the "style of our lives...
...Such a view provides a key to unlocking the complexities we face in trying to imagine an alternative way of life to the consumerist world of cultural capitalism...
...But what, one might ask, does the following of Christ have to do with being "slaves to produc- tion...
...It takes time to allow myself to be known and thereby loved as I really am...
...We picket...
...He was surely as frightened as the "Mongoloid" man who had arrived on the same day, who was in his thirties, too, who was separated for the first time from his hovel and his mother, who could only sit crouched on the floor and blow away the dust...
...If we spend one half hour a day more in relationship --talking with a community friend, walking for a while with our spouse, "wasting time" with our children, speaking the truth to a brother or sister, we will find ourselves empowered to resist much of the institutionalized craving of our acculturated appetites...
...All of the "compartments" of our lives are connected...
...He was in a strange country...
...But this is also what we may most tragically evade...
...Underlying all violence is a human being that has been reduced to the status of an object...
...As a people, in so many ways we are taught to seek out what an American Motors advertisement called "a problem-free relationship...
...Such activities are neither easy nor without risk...
...This is what must be encountered --our own frightening fragility as persons...
...Two years, $43 ! ! I Canadian postage: $2 a year -- Foreign postage $5 a year I ! t Commonweal Subscription Dept...
...Surely his talk of economic imperialism, of mountains of munitions cannot refer to us...
...The priest's fears were different...
...Friendship, family intimacy, and community are economic realities...
...We cannot relinquish the place in the visible world that belongs to us...
...And not much worry ought to be expended...
...We inform...
...The economic myths and demands of our culture have massive influence on our relationships, our covenants...
...People come and go, die, starve, burn, are aborted, are exe- cuted...
...A civilization purely materialistic in outline condemns the human per- son to such slavery...
...JgI[IW.O t;7 I])E';'ONER-I HOrPOoS u of the dispossessed, we will discover our very own personhood which we need never fear losing...
...Motorcycle ad W PE BREATHE injustice...
...What can one man, one woman do...
...we, so helpless and passive, cannot respond...
...I 232 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y...
...That is why all of his sermons, letters, and speeches are so densely dialectical...
...We protest: We undergo the threat of arrest...
...Face the facts, the real world...
...Who are we -- so passive, so helpless, so determined and thing-like, so suscep- tible to the laws of supply and demand...
...It's everywhere...
...If it is real and effective it will be dialectical, not something fragmented or compartmentalized...
...and if at the same time we experience a painful absence of human convenantal intimacies in our lives, we may buy ourselves to death...
...As men and women of faith, a faith grounded in Jesus Christ, we can see that justice is not some liberal program of social planning and one-worldism...
...But they are counter-values for capitalism...
...The young priest was terrified...
...Such craving is, after all, little more than an attempt to fill up the stark emptiness of a life bereft of covenant or intimacy...
...It is so seductive, even while living simply, to ignore the plight of those for whom simplicity is no option -for whom it is at best a dream of wild imagination...
...The pre-eminently human enterprises of faith, hbpe, and love never are...
...The-Teresas of Calcutta, the Jean Vaniers, the Dorothy Days, the Dom Helder Camaras --all speak to us of the empowerment we receive "from the poor...
...There is a sociology of grace...
...It emerges in history only as inculturated, asembodied in concrete political, economic, social, and symbolic forms...
...We are all handicapped, he said to himself It's just that some of us can pretend better than others...
...There is sin in political reality...
...Louis University and the author of Following Christ in a Consumer Society (Orbis...
...The answer lies in his dialectical view of human experience...
...We look foolish...
...9 comments on books, plays, movies, the media, and culture unequaled in any other religious publication...
...It is so easy, even with prayer, to be deluded into a false consciousness about our true identity and purpose...
...Meanwhile we sell parakeet diapers, Calvin Klein diapers, and designer clothes for our cabbage patch adoptees...
...As often as you have done this to the least" --any and all, not merely the innocent, are included in this notion --"you have done it to me...
...Our faith lives in and through space and time...
...And, with the height of consumerist arrogance: "For the price of a small house you could own this chair...
...Commonweal: 612...
...Thus, systematic injustice is two-edged...
...10016 ! I ! ,................--------------' 2-16 November 1984:609 The final dimension of our "lived alternative" to the gospel of capitalism is that of opening ourselves to the vulnerable, those so unable to cover up their wounds that they serve us as living refutations of such dogmas as "self-made-persons" and "fulfillment in things...
...This is to embody our commitment to an alternative way of life...
...That is why a committed relationship in the midst of a society' that lives by efficient speed and quick pretense, where "looking good is everything," is an act of economic disengagement and courageous resistance...
...At the gesture of friendship and sympathy, the fears of the priest filmily melted away...
...They attempt to channel our loves, our passions, and our desires into things...
...This is the meaning of justice and simplicity...
...This is my body," Jesus says in the sacrament of communion whereby all human flesh, even in its least forms --unborn, imprisoned, dirty, homeless, communist or capitalist, oppres- sed or oppressor, the damaged, the ugly, the unproductive --is rendered holy...
...Simplicity of life is not a matter of bean sprouts and old jeans...
...give commonweal |mmmmmmmmmnmnmmnmnmmnmmm ! m m m ! Send COMMONWEAL to: ! ! I ! ! Name ! | ! III ! Add~ss City, State, Zip ! I With notification, as a gi~, ~om: ! ! ! ! I! Name !I ! ! ! Address City, Sate, Zip !! ! ! [] One year, $24...
...Each must act...
...Not only are we all judged capable of responding freely to the call of justice, but we are all deemed worthy of just action...
...And it is a truth that, while it may be "bad news" for American business, unleashes the human being into an engagement of personhood in each of the other arenas of life...
...It is the world of irrep- laceability...
...This spiritual, theological, and political insight is in abso- lute contradiction to the criteria of worth established by our cultural conscience where human value is a function of beauty, utility, innocence, whiteness, blackness, wealth, or masculin- ity...
...This domina- tion is systemic and dialectical...
...It is not grounded in some special virtue of want or frugality...
...The school of compassion is our final element in the" living alternative" to cultural capitalism...
...I FATHER JOHN KAVANAUGH...
...They reveal the truth that the most splendid gift we bestow upon each other is not some object, but our personhood...
...And they acted strangley...
...But there's no need to hold back when you're dealing with possessions...
...They will become unbreakable, impenetrable, like the dead objects of our love...
...It is so easy, even if working for justice, to forget the immediacy of compassion, of personal presence...
...It's hopeless...
...The only reality that can encounter them, be touched by them, or help them, is personal reality...
...Yet, as C.S...
...S O A run-of-the-mill Cosmopolitan article, "Passion for Possessions," ominously reveals our dread of relationship and flight to commercialism...
...Things are expendable...
...We gather information...
...To kill a person is literally to "thingify" a person...
...Craving consumption and simplicity of life "Living Well is the Best Revenge...
...Things feel no guilt...
...In each area of our lives there is a humanity that is poor and disenfranchised, that hungers and hides, that grows old and feeble and dies...
...Quite the contrary, it is the very exigency of the Gospel...
...To accept Christ as way, truth, and life, consequently, is to allow him to enter every dimension, inhabit every space, penetrate every experience...
...It will be confirmed and supported by our community and - covenantal exchange...
...No, if simplicity ha s any intelligibility, it is found in the value of persons over things, the primacy of labor over capital, the worth of humanity over property...
...Every- thing is related to everything else...
...Our "manner of living" will be authentically alternative when it is whole, abiding with our aloneness and with our solidarity, informing our just action and our simplicity, engaging us in our learning from the marginal and unprotected...
...There is no reason not to be unjust...
...There is a spirituality of economic and social systems...
...Moreover, all covenants take time...
...Clasp a sensuously soft cashmere as tightly as you like (assum- ing your fingernails are well cared for...
...It was on the third weeken d , more dreaded than longed for, after dragging himself back to the commun- ity of handicapped that the priest, still fearful, was halted by a grab at his leg...
...To speak of an "alternative way of life" in such a cultural formation system, consequently, is to address a whole network of inter-acting alternatives which live and thrive precisely in relationship to each other and their common connection in Christ...
...It is brought about, even when we do not perceive it happening, by a formation system which is made up of the social-political system ("the whole organiza- tion of community life"), the economic order ("the produc- tion system"), and the educative blandishments of the media ("the means of social communication...
...And we, we the living, the conscious...
...All the products of the market will not ease their existence or make the pain go away...
...The man with Downs syn- drome, staring at the floor that he was cleaning with his breath-brootn, stuck out his shaky hand, not looking, but refusing passage until that hand would be held and shaken...
...I I John Paul is quite aware of this complexity...
...The received wisdom of our culture tells us that nothing can be done...
...Pretenses dissolved, the rigid controls eased...
...Anywhere and on any level...
...To hope for otherwise is to be a pollyanna, to be hopelessly n~iive, to be headed for a "guilt trip...
...For the Christian, justice is the very embodiment of faith and love: faith in the revelation of Jesus and love for the human person who is revealed by Jesus as the very face of God...
...This area of praxis will be prodded and sustained by prayer...
...If we structure into our lives an ongoing contact with the marginal people of our society, we will sustain and be sustained by them...
...Our communities, so often fragmented by liturgies of media worship, and our families, so often regimented by dictates of productivity and achievement, carry within their very iden- tifies the seeds of resistance to consumerism...
...Challenging a commodity culture I I I JOHN KAVANAUGH "Indeed there is already a real perceptible danger that while our dominion over the world of things is making enormous advances, we could lose the essential threads of our dominion and in various ways let our humanity be subjected to the world and we ourselves become subject to manipulation in many ways -even if the manipula- tion is often not perceptible directly - through the whole of the organization of community life, through the pro- duction system and through pressure from the means of social communication...
...Of the terrible failure, Of some strange mentally-mutilated person drifting into his room at night...
...Systematiccdlu legitimated injustice and social commitment "Beat thy Neighbor...
...This is to change the given order...
...But at night he would shiver...
...The reality principle here is one of human expendability --in the midst of massive waste and with the help of stunning negligence...
...He was with strange people...
...Of the loss of control...
...This is defini- tively revealed in our faith, in the saving action and teachings of Jesus...
...v 9 O 0 0 O o O d 0 A 0 0 o o O -gift 22 times a year commonweal .9 a biweekly analysis of national and world political events and developments in the church...
...An anonymous story Those who cannot pretend, who cannot "make it" with success and achievement, minister in marvelous ways to those who are tempted to pretend that they are something better than they are.Those who cannot pretend to be anything other than human engage the humanity of those for whom they reach...
...The marginal are unable to cram themselves into the consumerist parameters of "meaningful existence" or the categories of commercial thought...
...The issues of hunger, imprisonment, homelessness, and economic injustice are not those of some social commissar...
...It is for this reason that John Paul II, whenever he advances a Christology which reveals the human person as pre-eminently valuable, created in the image of God, and transformed in Christ, insists that this liberating and saving truth may be suppressed by the force of advanced industrial society's cul- tural myths...
...For in finding the precious personhood It J'(I, ,r...
...We must note, however, that the commitment to justice is not simply an insight, but an embodied reality...
...We can become as helpless as the things we adore...
...The thought of his fear...
...Lewis reminded us in The Four Loves, if we want never to experi- ence the problematic pain of love, we should give our hearts to no person...
...In relationship, as in prayer, our truth can be known...
...Not from cold, but from shame...
...We cannot become slaves of things, slaves of economic systems, slaves of production, slaves of our own products...
...Why do they insist that"we receive so much from them...
...The loss of solidarity and the resistance of covenantal life "As we've heard a boring number of times, a child is only lent...
...Instead of freedom in Christ, we can be trapped into a subtle domination by the world of things...
...It is so possible, even with community life, to hide from the marginal persons both outside and within our families and communities...
...Of dirt...
...And yet, if faith is collapsed into these cultural expressions, if it serves as little more than the legitimation of the nation or culture in which it lives, it is lost...
...We should love only things, and our hearts will not be broken...
...For the old, for the poor, for the unborn, for the disenfranchised, for peace, for the future now threatened by our nuclear nuptials, for the millions in misery neglected by the bullheaded excesses of capitalism...
...B --Liquor ad UYING, CQNSUMING,and possessing can become acts of violence...
...Justice is passe...
...The human person cannot be relinquished...
...Handicapped...
Vol. 111 • November 1984 • No. 19
