You Are What You Consume: “Being Consumed”: A Review
I’ve heard a few rumors that Wal-Mart is moving into an area near where I live.
Discussing with an acquaintance of mine who had brought it up, I immediately (probably parroting something I had heard from someone else) said with selfish conviction, “Oh, yeah, that’s going to be just awful for traffic.”
To which they responded, “Well, maybe, but think of how necessary it is. Wal-Mart’s prices are great, and it’s going to help a lot of people out having one this close.”
This is a vague recollection of how the actual conversation went, since it wasn’t very important to me at the time. I remember thinking a little about the selfishness of my comment in light of my companion’s comment, and how it had caused me to feel a slight twinge of guilt, since my companion obviously was not thinking of just herself, as I was. But now, after spending the day reading William T. Cavanaugh’s new book, “Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire,” I realize we were both untruthful in our statements, for very different reasons.
Mine, was quite obviously a selfish comment. It is ridiculous that I would judge an event’s worth by how much inconvenience it would cause me through excessive amounts of traffic. My statement was not even concerned with environmental issues or safety issues that more traffic would cause… traffic was simply a negative entity because it would cost me an extra five minutes to get to where I wanted to go, as if the time was mine in the first place and that the new Wal-Mart’s traffic would unjustly rob me of that time.
My acquaintance’s comment, although seemingly more thoughtful, was unfortunately just as erroneous. Just as traffic is inherently a negative, something that’s going to save money is a positive, and Wal-Mart does this well, both by offering low product prices, and with the recent gas rates, being close in proximity for convenience. But even if the items are cheaper at Wal-Mart, one has to wonder, in this free market economy with other competing stores that charge a much higher price, how are those price reductions possible for a competitive business? How is the company dealing with the money that’s being lost?
One can only infer that, through globalizing and paying minuscule wages to workers in foreign countries, Wal-Mart saves money and can “afford” to keep their prices so low. But that is perhaps a hasty assumption. They may very well pay their workers a decent amount. But that’s an even larger issue– although, as my companion’s comment said, Wal-Mart might be convenient for the community in which it resides, that community will have no idea exactly where those products came from. Nor will they care. So in fact, although Wal-Mart offers decent prices, it cultivates a detachment from the products, and from the production process.
Through the unlimited amount of commodities they offer, they are encouraging an endless amount of desire for stuff. Cavanaugh makes a magnificent point saying that the problem of consumerism isn’t that people are too greedy, and hoarding away as much wealth as they can… the problem is that people are addicted to wanting for the sake of wanting. Instead of being overly attached to items, they are in fact quite detached from them, never being fully satiated and always returning to shop again and again. This detachment ends up not being just directed at the products, but at the method of production as well. Put simply, our want for a nice pair of jeans competes against our desire to have justice reign in the world. So although the jeans might have been made by a Chinese woman who had been working a 16 hour shift for the 30th day in a row, we feel like there is nothing we can do. We have no way of finding out whether or not the worker who made them made them with dignity. And even if we could find that information out, what would the alternative be? Our addiction to the idea of capital is often too strong for us to gauge how worthwhile it really is to pay more money for a product for the cause of justice, or healthfulness. We want a healthy world… but often the price seems to high.
Cavanaugh does not offer an easy answers for this. But what he does suggest, since the question should not be whether or not we consume but rather how or what we consume, that we allow our lives to be transformed through consuming the Eucharist. Cavanaugh’s Catholicism comes into place quite nicely here.
The Eucharist joins the body of Christ in a common telos, an end desire that is what directs our consumption. Any desire that does not have a goal, desire sought for desire’s sake, is nothingness, according to Augustine. The Eucharist is a sacrament in which a community of virtue learns to desire truthfully, and in that experiences true freedom.
Cavanaugh explains, when we consume the Eucharist, although the body of Christ is being consumed, it is mysteriously consuming us. We are the body of Christ. We, like Christ, are identified with the poor and the weak. By consuming the Eucharist, we are subscribing to a reality more real than capitalism. We are allowing our lives to be transformed by this consumption by living “eucharistically”, giving and pouring ourselves out to be consumed by others.The Eucharist shows us a different sort of globalization, a universalism that is made real by embracing particularity, not by shunning it, replacing the abstraction of capitalism not with other abstractions but recognizing the concrete particulars of our community, and recognizing in that particularity of each person, a universalism that makes clear the universal nature of the Gospel.
Trade turns everything into a commodity, according to Cavanaugh– objects, people, ideas, feelings, etc. This is done with a mindset that assumes scarcity. To trade something implies a giving up of something for the sake of something else. It implies ownership of one object that is transfered to be owned by someone else. The Eucharist works with a very different mindset. By allowing oneself to be consumed, instead of just consuming, it gives up the illusion of being in control and offers one up to the vulnerability of a sovereign God, a God who invites us on a difficult journey of discipleship that will not always make sense, and will require us to lose everything, claiming that (illogically- loosening our grip on what makes sense) we will gain Christ. The Eucharist invites us to participate in a heart-wrenching event of loss, of death, claiming that in that very event lies true life, and hope for redemption. But that hope cannot be gained unless one lays down the desire to simply consume and allows oneself to be consumed.
