I BELIEVE THAT the importance of the Church’s teaching on social justice will become more and more apparent during Pope Francis’ tenure as the leader of the Catholic Church. Pope Francis has made so many statements about the evil of consumerism that his remarks have led me back to a book that I read several years ago, a book that profoundly influenced my outlook on society. The book is “Following Christ in a Consumer Society: The Spirituality of Cultural Resistance” (New York, Maryknoll: Orbis, 1991, pp. 194) by John F. Kavanaugh, S.J. I doubt if there is anything in Father Kavanaugh’s book with which Pope Francis would disagree.
Before I read his book I had heard Father Kavanaugh give a few lectures on consumerism. He was a brilliant speaker, both informative and inspiring. I was not the only person who was impressed with his presentations. The reactions to his lectures seemed to be unanimously positive. When his book appeared, I knew I had to read it.
The book is divided into two parts. The first, consisting of five chapters, is called “The Commodity Form,” and the second, consisting of six chapters, is called “The Personal Form.” The first part is an analysis of contemporary society as a consumer culture; the second is a detailed reflection on how Christ’s teaching should challenge us to live in our contemporary consumer culture. Not only does this book still seem relevant almost 25 years after its publication date, but its insights seem even more relevant today.
Commenting on the loss of interior life in our society and calling attention to the loss of our personhood, Father Kavanaugh writes the following:
“No matter where we turn – to ourselves, to others or to society at large – we find personal reality overshadowed by the omnipresent immensity of objects, whether it is in producing them, buying them, amassing them, or relating to them.
“The Consumer Society is a formation system: it forms us and our behavior. It is also an information system: it informs us as to our identity and as to the status of our world. Its influence is felt in every dimension of our lives and each dimension echoes and mirrors the others. The individual’s ‘lost self’ is paralleled in the dissolution of mutuality and relationship. The personal and interpersonal breakdown is reflected in the social economic worlds through a general socialized degradation of persons, through flight from human vulnerability, especially found in marginal people, and through a channeling of human desire into the amassing of possessions.” (p. 4)
What makes Father Kavanagh’s insights seem even more relevant today is my observation of people using cell phones and other gadgets to “communicate” with other persons. I put the word communicate in quotation marks because I fear that these gadgets are not really fostering communication.
When I walk from my office to my classes at St. John’s University, I probably pass about 30 or 40 students. No student makes eye contact. Everyone, and I mean everyone, is on some kind of gadget. I forbid any use of cell phones in class but between classes, students are all on their cell phones.
Even more amazing to me is the presence of cell phones in other social situations. More than once I have seen two people sitting at the same table in a restaurant and each is on a cell phone. I have a vivid memory of driving in a car with a man who called his wife about 15 times in under an hour. Many of my friends keep in contact through phones most of the day. If they’re not speaking with someone, they’re checking messages. Why must there be what seems like constant communication?
What does this kind of pressure to be in touch with others do to us? Is our ability to relate to other persons improving because of technology or is the opposite happening? Are these tools of communication helping us to relate interpersonally or are they fostering shallow communication?
What Father Kavanaugh stresses in his book is the danger that objects are becoming more important than persons, that people are judged in terms of things that they own. Pope Francis is calling us to reflect profoundly and prayerfully on what we value most in our lives and in our societies.
Father Robert Lauder, philosophy professor at St. John’s University, Jamaica, is the author of “Pope Francis’ Spirituality and Our Story” (Resurrection Press).
