Christ in a Consumer Society

¶ … Christ in a Consumer Society

Passages from Kavanaugh I agree with:

John F. Kavanaugh tells the truth about many things in modern society, including how corporations are constantly attacking the average individual with a barrage of marketing campaigns. In the section of Kavanaugh's book called "Knowing and Being Known as a Commodity" he suggests that because the powerful dynamic of marketing - and the fact that we are the consumers of nearly all that is marketed - individuals have become "things" to be marketed to. By being reduced to mere "things" individuals lose their ability to reflect upon themselves and they lose their "internal consciousness," the author writes.

"thing" is also a commodity, which is understood only through its ability to be manipulated and observed from the outside - never looking inside to see what kind of spirit or heart the individual has. I agree with these descriptions of what the marketing corporations have boiled it all down to; people are being sold based on the categories they fall into. Like, middle class suburban American, or upper middle class white color workers, etc.

What Kavanaugh is really pointing out here is that the power of marketing through television, the Internet, movies and magazines, billboards - all the marketing tools - is reducing humans into non-thinking stooges. Marketing is reducing humanity to a source of capital. A "thing" that buys items based on the particular brand of commodity "it" is. One's knowledge of one's self, Kavanaugh is explaining cannot be measured by traditional means (love, family, fidelity) because "technical intelligence" seems more relevant and is ever-present.

Kavanaugh resorts to cynical, even cryptic language when he rages against the loss of some of the most precious human emotions that mankind has had and believed in for eons and generation after generation. That is, marketing has reduced the human condition to a kind of creeping science, a flat, objective tool to measure the ability of humans to buy and commit a large part of their earnings to certain marketed items and services. Humans are hence only useful as a commodity, and it is not hard to agree with Kavanaugh - and chuckle as an aside - when he writes that "thingified knowledge" makes the deepest humanity in all of us becomes "most alien in us." The love and compassion, the moral principles, the human dignity and human potential that was inside of us, now, because we are all consumers and subjected to the will of the pitch man, is rendered emotionless in a world of "thinghood."

There are other ways to describe what is happening to the individual as he or she becomes commodified, but take a young girl in her mid-teens today. She is being turned into a commodity that buys the CDs of her favorite pop stars that she sees on television. Marketing executives target the cute teenage girl of 14, 15, or 16; they want to sell that young girl on the fun it is to go to movies where cute teen boys and girls get together; they want to sell her make up, lipstick, perfume, clothes, bathing suits, CDs, magazines, and food (fast food, sodas, snacks for around the house). She becomes a commodity herself as the things she wears (T-shirts with advertising messages; her shoes; her jeans; her underclothing that other girls see when they dress for gym or PE classes) help sell the same items to other teen girls.

Boys too become part of the "thinghood" movement. They play sports wearing NIKE sneakers, and use baseball equipment from WILSON. Their T-shirts advertise the music they listen to on their iPods. The knowledge they obtain comes more from the Internet and television than it does from their teachers. How would they find any time for Jesus Christ when they are so busy playing video games? The best-selling video game today is "Grand Theft Auto IV," a violent game that mesmerizes boys into playing it for hours. Stealing, misbehaving, using foul language and hurting others is the theme of this and many other video games; boys buy PlayStation game machines, Nintendo, X-Box, and they wear the T-shirts from these brands, becoming not only commodities and "things" (rather than boys), but becoming billboards and life models for the marketing companies that sold them these entertainment items.

Passages from Kavanaugh I disagree with:

On pages 72-73, the author develops the case that many Christians find the Sermon on the Mount "scandalous," and those same Christians "ignore it" and lead lives "surrounded by power, wealth, and military might." He is right that many Americans who call themselves Christians and who attend Christian worship services do not live their lives based on the Beatitudes. And then Kavanaugh also says "Nietzsche seems to have understood the Sermon on the Mount better than many Christians." Well wait a minute. If Nietzsche found the Sermon on the Mount "scandalous," and attacked it as "demeaning of the will to power," how can that be construed as understanding it better than many Christians?

To even bring Nietzsche into a discussion about "The Alternative Kingdom" is ludicrous. In Nietzsche's the Birth of Tragedy (p. 23) he says the "Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life's nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in 'another' or 'better' life." In his essay, Human, all too Human, Nietzsche denounces the Christian idea of "...sins perpetrated against a god, atoned for by a god" and argues against "...fear of a beyond to which death is the portal." Perhaps Kavanaugh was bringing Nietzsche into this discussion for the sake of contrast, but in any event, it was a confusing analysis that easily can be disagreeable in the eyes of an objective person.

Meanwhile, whether or not Christ intended for the Beatitudes (Sermon on the Mount) to be interpreted literally or not, these themes are poetic, beautiful, and meaningful. He may have meant the Beatitudes in order to present ideas to live by with the highest possible spiritual standards, that only holy people would possibly aspire to, but Kavanaugh does not spell that out. But of course the Beatitudes do not fit very well into the American consciousness at this moment in history. It makes it very hard to live a Christian life and also at the same time follow the paths of the government of the United States. That is, to be a "true patriot" according to the definition of patriotism expounded by the executive branch of the U.S. Government, one has to support the ongoing slaughter in Iraq, a conflict which at this point has no particular battle lines, has very little justification based on the initial explanations of why America is invading Iraq, and one should support the torture of prisoners taken during wartime actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. So it is clear, one can't be a Christian and a patriot at the same time.