BOOK
William T. Cavanaugh. Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008.
REVIEWER
Andy Alexis-Baker, PhD student, Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
What is “freedom”? According to free-market ideology, we are free when the state limits its interference in economic transactions. Using Augustine, William Cavanaugh challenges this answer.
Cavanaugh asserts that when society lacks a good common end this “freedom” can only degenerate into a battle of wills, public manipulation through marketing, concentrated power in the hands of few large corporations, and a steady increase in economic injustice and class inequalities. Without a life that is ordered toward helping life flourish, the desire to consume is internalized in our culture until we simply move from one manufactured desire for this or that product to another, never realizing that we are being controlled under the guise of liberation. After detailing and exposing the consumer trap in which we are caught, Cavanaugh provides concrete examples of how to overcome this spiral of idolatrous desire.
Although I am convinced by Cavanaugh’s thesis that desires must be rightly ordered toward helping life flourish if we are to resist being seduced by the market’s manipulations, his argument does not fully account for how our desires prevent or sustain the flourishing of nonhuman animal life.
Upon learning about the nightmare that cattle endure in typical “beef” production, the author notes his decision to purchase grass-fed, hormone- and antibiotic-free cattle from a local farmer. He makes this choice on the grounds that while the industrial “meat” industry hides the horrors and suffering of nonhuman animals, “all the information I need is available and transparent” on the small farm (31). This statement is open to challenge on at least two points.
First, Cavanaugh neglects to note that the small farmer is a part of a larger web that is largely beyond his control. When a cow gets an infection, organic farmers may withhold antibiotics even if the cow suffers tremendously to make sure their meat can be labeled organic. Moreover, there are common farming practices necessary to production -- forced impregnation, castration, and others – that, while not horrific, inflict pain and limit the nonhuman animals’ ability to be free and to flourish.
The second point is that care for nonhuman animals within Cavanaugh’s framework demands more than simply minimizing pain, and this requires questions and answers that are not as available and transparent as the author makes them seem. For example, why do we desire “meat” in the first place, and is it a rightly-ordered desire? Do we facilitate flourishing when we kill another living being to satiate a desire that is not only unnecessary for human survival but also damages our health? Given the state of our ecosystem and the growing awareness that all life on this planet hangs together on a precipice, Cavanaugh’s anthropocentric view of the common end is incompatible with his goal of overcoming idolatrous desire.
In response to the narrative of the market, Cavanaugh offers a counter story centered on the Catholic Eucharist. He argues that consumerism detaches the consumer from the process of production and from the people who produce our goods. Furthermore, our attachment to the goods themselves has decreased because we constantly abandon each product for the latest upgrade. Our pleasure comes from the pursuit of goods, from shopping itself, so a never-ending cycle of consumption ensues.
The Catholic practice of the Eucharist provides a counterweight to this frenzy by absorbing each person into a larger body. Instead of being fragmented individuals trapped in the non-stop game of pursuing the latest trinkets, we become a community shaped into the Body of Christ.
Cavanaugh’s account should provide a lot of thought for Mennonites as to how Mennonite worship shapes us into people capable of resisting consumerism. We do not have a Catholic practice or theology of the Eucharist, and I am not convinced that if we did so it would be adequate. But how does our worship shape us? What have we lost or gained that might be useful in giving an account of our own?
One of the most powerful practices that Cavanaugh mentions in this book, but does not give enough attention to, is making our own stuff (57). Instead of buying free trade and relocating consumerism to a new though better corporation, making our own clothes, growing our own food, and playing our own music can shape us to be producers who have learned the value of production through doing it and who question the industrial technological society itself.
Simply moving from one type of industrial, gadget-hungry model to a “fair trade” version is not enough. We have to question it at its core. Maybe backwards is forwards. Cavanaugh provides a good base for starting to find out.