Consumption as primary identity

We are consumers in every sense of the word. However, in the last few hundred years in the West, we have elevated consumption to dazzling and terrifying heights, and furthermore we are still looking up at the vision of a new stratum of economic prosperity, entertainment and pleasure achievable with artificial intelligence. With “Apple vision pro” on the horizon, those ahead of us are already experiencing emotional responses to the wonder of wandering inside worlds of our own creation. In the light of these ever-expanding plains of new fruit ripe for consumption, we should pause and ask whether this is where we want to go. Clearly (in a way) we do want this! The market knows our desires - or some of them. At this stage we know enough about companies exploiting the worst of human nature to wonder whether on a deeper level our embracing a hyper-materialistic future is unwise. In this essay I will be asking why this is the future open to us - why, historically we have chosen to open up these doors. The idea that I want to present starts very simply. We eat, and as such it is part of our identity to consume; nevertheless consumerism (defined here as the prioritization of spending on goods and services) now dominates Western consciousness. Significantly, however, consumerism has taken on religious significance because it has played a large part in replacing God in Western minds. In this essay I will explore how deeply (individually and historically) we are enmired in an unhelpful consumerism, and then to consider the need for and possibility of extraction.

Let me start with the consumerism that can be clearly observed around (and within) us. Consumerism as we know it is a reality, although not a necessity. Some people are immersed in consumerism so deeply that it drives everything they do, while others are less affected. We either know or can imagine a person who doesn’t care about possessions - other occupations are more interesting to them. However, our collective (and, in most cases, individual) fixation on consumption can be shown in a number of ways. One is the way in which many debate the merits or lack thereof of popular consumer products, and define themselves accordingly (to the extent of possessing great knowledge of our preferred brand and their proclivities, marketing, economic decisions and customer relationships). Another is the often-discussed objectification and perusal of people as “items'' on dating profiles. On a related front, I’ve come to believe that relationships and even friendships are now often scrutinized more carefully. Although this results in greater knowledge of possible harms stemming from abuse (narcissist/co-dependent relationships, gaslighting etc) there is also often greater attention paid to smaller potential red flags (no romantic dinner on valentine’s day, no gift for a birthday, banter that cuts too deep, etc etc). We are losing patience to deal with the rough edges of relationships. This suggests to me that relationships and friendships are being moved into the categories previously reserved for things to be consumed, inspected, and easily discarded if no longer fitting. Consumerism runs so deep that it is even found in the methods used to eliminate it. For example: minimalism as a visual style, which (although apparently eschewing consumerism) often demands the consumption of new (usually expensive) furniture and technology, and the removal of the old. In my own life, I found it interesting to think about how many conversations I observed having a consumeristic element in general - these all functioned as an exchange of reviews. The topic of these reviews could be where to go on holiday, which shows and movies to watch, or even the behaviour of other people (waiters, roommates, colleagues). The common thread of consumption and skill thereof connects such a wide range of domains as to demonstrate how broad this way of thinking has become. Revealingly, I also found myself consuming videos on products I was interested in when trying to rest or relax after work. This is what is most natural to me, and I often don’t know how to rest in any other way. When nobody else is around, my lived and deeply individualized self begins to emerge. I am a consumer.

Human beings do not need to be this consumeristic. Not every culture lives and breathes consumption in the deeply ingrained, psychologically abstract, nearly-all-encompassing way that has been normalised in the West. Furthermore, it was not always like this in the West. Firstly, it is important to point out that consumerism has not necessarily in other cultures, or even in the historical West, transcended into the unhealthy level of abstraction it has reached in the West as of late. Most people in the West do not have serious concerns about basic living standards: our consumerism has transcended to a more abstract level. Arguably psychology of some sort could say that our consumerism is still driven by basic human needs and desires - to feel accepted and so on. However, it is not necessarily true that we must root our feeling of belonging and acceptance in owning the right consumer goods, to address the aforementioned example - other cultures have felt it more natural to address this need in different ways. It could be argued that by taking consumerism to be a solution to needs that are higher on Maslow’s hierarchy, we have through a category error allowed it to access our individual and social psychology at greater depths. Secondly, consumerism has not always permeated our personal, social and national identities so extensively. Going back over a thousand years, we find that Christians were to have no gods above the Christian God. Greed is to be put away, and thus consumption is put in check, underneath the pursuit of God and the goodness that comes from him. Even the need for food was accompanied by equally pressing needs, as in Jesus’ response to Satan in the wilderness: “Man must not live on bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” We must not be so blinded by our culture or our position in history to believe that our current immersion in consumerism is inevitable or essential to humanity. Instead, our consumerism is rooted in our cultural and historical context. It is essential to understand this context in order to get the insight we need to extract ourselves.

To put it crudely, consumerism replaced Christianity* in mainstream Western thought. This happened because a new set of ethics concerning humanism and the economy did not fit well with a transcendent God. Charles Taylor in “A Secular Age” characterises Christianity as having an impetus to move above or beyond human flourishing. To translate this into New Testament language Christians were able to see the value of “the Spirit” rather than simply “the flesh”.** This transcendental gaze began to wane, however, due to a combination of social and political changes which were ironically triggered by a theological change! In what is perhaps a surprising turn of events, a key theological shift towards a very biblical humanism led turn by turn to a shift away from a biblical understanding of transcendence. The animus behind this theological development was an elevation of humanity, inspired no doubt by Jesus’ taking human form - “immanence”, or the intimate presence of God with us. This new valuing of all human beings slowly took hold as people came to believe that a real connection with God was no longer exclusively reserved for religious elites. In turn this led to attempts to “reform” the masses, to bring them into a greater standard of moral living. While this represented an admirable movement towards empowering each individual to grasp for themselves the wonder of a connection with God and to better themselves as a result, the confluence of church and state transformed this movement to a paradoxical undermining of Christian roots. State powers looked on the reform movement with interest, since citizens with greater self-regulation created a stronger country. While the focus may have initially been military strength, over time economic strength became more important, since as a key focus it was relatively painless; either way, the reform efforts supported the country. But it was economic flourishing along with humanism that seemed to lead to theological relaxation. The shift in focus is not quite as simple as a shift from valuing God to valuing self. Taylor often repeats the phrase “mutual benefit” to explain how this economic flourishing was approached. If each person benefits from an action, then the action is likely to be good. It benefits the actors, and it benefits the economy. The initial focus on humanism, by this stage, had not been lost - on the contrary, it had now swelled up alongside the economy to eclipse everything else. Now each human being could be lifted up to pursue their own interest, being able to make their own way in the economic sphere in a way impossible when subsumed under a nationalistic military machine, and all the while benefiting others. However, the existence of a God who transcended the dimensions of humanity and human flourishing became less clear to people. If human desires and preferences gained prominence as an end in themselves, then perhaps it should not be surprising that god was increasingly described as a being who also wanted, above all, these human desires and preferences to be satisfied.

If this god now wanted nothing more than our flourishing (expressed in our terms) the way this came about was a levelling of the whole hierarchy of authority. The new version of god was no longer necessarily so high above humanity in the minds of new writers and thinkers. The sweeping efforts to lift up the masses to participate in Christian belief and practice also led to their political elevation. The new political systems were less and less based on what was seen as a good and right hierarchy - from God, to the pantheon of lesser gods, to the king, to nobles to peasants. Instead, they became characterised by determinations made for and by equals. To discuss this in such a disinterested way is too difficult for me: it must be said that this is a beautiful historical development that nonetheless was succeeded by a suicidal twist. The apostle Paul writes about Christians “There is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female; since you are all one in Christ Jesus.” However, the reason for the existence of this oneness, and the identity of the one who sustained it, came to elude us. The full flowering of this humanism was an incredible levelling, in which (as it came about) the transcendent place of God was called into question alongside the rest of the traditional hierarchy. Humanity became the arbiter of values, and as such it was increasingly assumed that god must have our flourishing in mind above all else as well. Thus the economy naturally became central to how we operated collectively as human beings, even to the point where God’s purpose became for us to use the economy for our own betterment. We are now no longer supposed to live for something “beyond human flourishing” - human flourishing is now our only divinely sanctioned goal.***

In this intermingling of church and state we slid towards a glorification of the economy that would have lasting consequences. We are in our current morass because this glorification of mutual benefit was a fundamental social and political construct on which our present societies are built. However, more than that, the ideal of mutual benefit has in many ways replaced God in our collective imaginations, thereby in effect taking on a significance comparable to that of religion. This has deep historical, literary, conceptual, and ideological roots in the thought worlds of the West. 

This unsettlingly grandiose and tragic conclusion nevertheless leaves us with real options. A humanism that values expression of individual desires does not by its nature constrain individuals to make unhealthy choices. It is unfortunate that marketing makes companies money from human weakness, however. We must be aware that our attention and time is valuable, and that every company in the world is vying for it. Saturated colours, sweet tastes, erotic highs, chemical floods, our capacities for fear, rage, envy and greed and our tendency to respond to conditioning have all been exploited with unthinkable payoffs. This is how everything fits together; how society is structured, how we are at peace with one another, and how the government can keep us pacified with only the slightest of nudges here and there. This is the unspoken undercurrent of modern life. Whatever we want, we can now have. But we do not need to play this game. The first step to disengaging is knowing what to disengage from. It is not only purchasing new things or experience that damages us. We must also consider the mental space devoted to discussing and thinking about what to buy, how to grow our wealth to move into the next lifestyle echelon, and how best to fix, maintain and rearrange what we have. Any deeper thought will show these considerations in an honest light. They are ghosts of the companies that encourage them, parasites on our time, vapid nothings with which we distract ourselves from our existential reality. In Luke 12:13-34, Jesus addresses inhabitants of a much more economically volatile time period, but paradoxically and tragically with our material wealth we need an amplified version of this address. In summary: we could die tomorrow. If so, we must trust God, get ready to sell our possessions and give to the poor, and in so doing build up treasures in heaven. But for those of us now who live on empty consumeristic musings, how can we move on? This is who we are now. On the other hand, our choices are not just economic. We can go out and find something better to do with our time. If we do trust God, when all our non-economic resources are gladly and usefully spent, we can rest in the knowledge of a relationship with him.

Notes

*This focus might seem strange given that we are literally consumers as a biological necessity, and we have an intrinsic drive to improve standards of living for ourselves and for broader circles of shared solidarity. Why not start at the beginning of humanity? If Christianity was a brief detour into an ostensibly holier period, then am I not giving it too much attention? Although I love talking about Christianity, it also makes sense here for other reasons. It’s better for me to stick to more recent historical events, to avoid grandly inaccurate claims and also to examine the development into our current material transfixion.

**This is not a disembodied theology in the sense of rejecting the importance of embodied existence, although there are tensions which Taylor also explores towards the end of the book.

***As an aside from Taylor, by this stage we lost sight of how things connected together. God is called a consuming fire in the bible. So how can we, as weak, errant human beings survive his presence? We must be forgiven and receive grace to save us from being consumed, judged and destroyed as God approaches. However, a god who simply wants us to be “happy” (i.e. receive our often shallow and warped desires) can no longer be described as a consuming fire. As an example of how decontextualised these ideas had become from biblical faith, the emphasis on judgement (as Taylor points out) was gradually abandoned - not for the above reason - but because it was no longer necessary to manipulate people with eternal reward and punishment if the tantalizing possibility of present, material reward presented itself. In other words, the idea of judgement moved from a description of reality to a method of manipulation, and was finally abandoned as irrelevant.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Johnson Wang for the idea of approaching secularisation with a predominantly economic lens - from here I have moved to the inverse of approaching consumerism using Taylor’s secularisation theory.