Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire

Introduction
Is economics related to theology? Should we, as Christians, be for or against a free market?
Should we think of ourselves as consumers? Should we be for or against globalization? How
should we live in a world of scarce resources?

The book argues that very often the questions we ask miss the point. For example, it is not so
much that we should be for or against a free market, but that we should come to understand the
true meaning of “free.” It is not a question of whether we consume (we all consume), but what
consumption is, and how the Christian view differs from the consumerist view.

Part of the approach is to understand our culture’s pathologies of desire, so that we may be able
to live whole and authentic lives and participate in God’s life. Cavanaugh offers concrete
examples of alternative economic practices that Christians do, or can, participate in, to “behave
according to the logic of the gospel.”

Each chapter focuses on a set of binaries.

Chapter 1: Negative freedom is contrasted with positive freedom.

Chapter 2: Detachment is contrasted with attachment.
Chapter 3: Global is contrasted with local.
Chapter 4: Scarcity is contrasted with abundance.

Chapter 1: Freedom and Unfreedom

Notice the duality: we live in an age of unparalleled freedom of choice (think of the choices of
cereal, for example), but we also have a “profound sense of resignation to fate in attitudes toward
the market.”

We are bombarded with advertisements and are the objects of constant surveillance, not by the
government but by those seeking to know us well enough to know how to sell something to us
most effectively. This seeming contradiction makes more sense when we consider the nature of
the market.

I. When Is a Market Free?

“Freedom is conceived as the absence of interference from others. There are no common ends to
which our desires are directed.” This condition profoundly contrasts with the biblical view of
freedom.

To Adam Smith and Milton Friedman, well-known free-market economists, freedom is the
absence of external coercion: “Two parties enter into exchanges because it will be mutually
beneficial for them to do so, ‘provided the transaction is bi-laterally voluntary and informed.’”

The two conditions for freedom, put differently, are:

1. That the transaction does not take place out of coercion.
2. That both buyer and seller are not misinformed.
 1. Being informed

The consumer is protected from coercion by the competition between multiple sellers. Likewise,
the seller is protected from coercion by the presence of multiple buyers. The state (government)
is there simply to make sure these conditions, and other similar ones, are met.

Assuming the law protects buyers and sellers from bad information, the only information
necessary for the buyer and the seller is the price of the product. Neither party needs to know
why the price is what it is, only that it is what it is. This is true even when the thing that is bought
and sold is labor. The cost of labor is a price. The only thing necessary (according to Adam
Smith, Friedman, etc.) to know is what that price is.

2. Voluntary transactions

The chief culprit here is the state.

a. In a free market, the state does not interfere with economic transactions. “Each party
enters into the transaction in the expectation of gain and not in the fear of punishment.”

b. Voluntary exchanges are based on each party’s desire. Freedom is “pursuing whatever
you want without interference from others.”

Two corollaries:

a. Freedom is defined negatively, as freedom from the interference of others, especially the
state.

b. There is no common telos in a free market, “no common end to which desire is directed.
Each individual chooses his or her own ends.”

The basis of choices, consequently, is “wants” or “preferences” or “desires.” So of course this is

what advertising appeals to. They start with wants that are already there (and then go on to create
new wants, if necessary).

II. Augustine on Freedom and Desire

In Christian thinking, both corollaries are suspect.

a. To Augustine, “freedom is not simply a negative freedom from, but a freedom for, a
capacity to achieve certain worthwhile goals…”

Together, these goals are the telos of human life. God is the condition of freedom; “Being is not
autonomous; all being participates in God, the source of being.”
True autonomy is not possible. To be cut off from God is to be cut off from being, “thus to be
nothing at all.”

Sin is not a human power but a weakness, described in metaphors of slavery and sickness.
Slaves of sin do not have freedom of choice; freedom is by grace alone.

How free the alcoholic is when he has money and passes by the liquor store? He is free in the
negative sense, not in the positive one. What this man needs to be truly free is the grace to desire
the right things. This requires liberation to heal his will.

Freedom in this sense is received, not just exercised. Other people are essential to the addict’s
freedom just as much as they are for a slave. Addicts, like slaves, cannot free themselves.
Ultimately they need God, and God does his work through “a community of virtue.” Good
“desire” is thus a social production and not the result of raw individual efforts or taste.

Augustine called the object of some desires, “in reality a nothing.” What does this mean? When
the desire is not fixed on the true end of human life, as determined not by us but by our Creator,
then the object of that desire is a nothing. This is explained in more detail below.

Thus, there are true desires and false desires, and we need a telos to distinguish between them. In
free-market economics, “freedom is maximized in the absence of a common telos…individuals
are free to choose their own ends based on nothing more than their own wants.”

b. In response to the second corollary of free-market economics, that there is no common

telos in a free market, Cavanaugh argues (as Augustine points out), that “freedom in fact
depends not on the autonomy of the will but on the end to which the will is moved.”

It is not whether the will was moved externally or internally that matters, but the end toward
which it has been moved. Habit or ignorance can hold a will captive, and it may take an outside
(external) force to move it toward the right end. Think of Paul’s conversion in Acts 9, wherein
Christ acted against Paul’s will, but for Paul’s good.

Freedom, defined in this way, is found not by simply following whatever desires come our way,
but by cultivating the right desires. “The internal movement of the will is not a sufficient
condition for freedom; we must consider the end toward which the will is moved.”

It is not the absence of external force that determines whether an action, or exchange is truly
free, but “whether or not the will is moved toward a good end.” This then requires that we have
an appropriate account of the true end (the telos) of the human person.

The only common end we (as consumers) are encouraged to aim at is the end of consumption.
That is, consumption (we are told) is good for its own sake. Consumption helps the economy.

But things cut free from their true source, which is God, are in the end “nothings.” That is, they
came from the dust, and are returning to the dust. All creation is in itself good, but only as it
participates in God. Things pursued for their own sakes are nothings—they came from nothing
and are returning to nothing.

It is not a matter of wanting too much. It is a matter of wanting something that is disconnected
from its Creator. (Of course nothing is actually disconnected from its Creator, but in our desiring
it for its own end (and not the end for which God created it), it is disconnected in our use of it.)
This is the pursuit of lower things.

But as we pursue the lower things, we also grope for the higher, because we, and the objects of
our desires, are by nature from God and belong to him.

When we attempt to fill the God-made emptiness within our souls with lower objects, separated
from their Creator (in the way we hope to use them) and therefore Nothings, we are searching in
the wrong place, and filling in the wrong way. This way can never quench the desire. An artful
example of this is the depiction of Hell in Lewis’ The Great Divorce.

III. Libido dominandi

If the problem is that society as a whole has missed right telos, the immediate question arises,
“Who determines the right ends?” Is it the state? Individuals?

The free-market ideology seeks to abolish objective goods so that individuals can function
autonomously. (“Autonomy” is “self-law,” or “self-rule”.) This may sound like freedom, but
what it inevitably works itself into is a condition where, “in the absence of a substantive account
of the good, all that remains is sheer arbitrary power, one will against another. This is what
Augustine calls the libido dominandi, the lust for power with which Pharaoh was possessed.”

Shifts in Power by Marketing

If no good is objectively better than another, the will moves arbitrarily, or by domination by a
stronger will. Thrasymachus would be smiling.

Business strategies today recognize this and market accordingly. They proclaim marketing to be
the dispensing of information. What it turns out to be is the drive to create desire, to manipulate
desire, to associate our desire for their products with other things we already desire. Marketing in
fact does not provide information so much as it associates products with desires for “self-esteem,
love, sex, friendship, and success.” It creates dissatisfaction with present conditions; it creates
emotional bonds between consumers and products by humanizing products.

This ubiquitous habit of businesses works precisely because the vast majority of consumers see
themselves as immune to their strategy. But “being subjected to advertising is more akin to
playing poker against an opponent who, unbeknownst to you, has already seen the hand you are
holding…” In this way, there is an imbalance of power in favor of the advertisers.

Shifts in Power by Marketing: Imbalance of Power: Surveillance and Saturation

This imbalance is two-fold. First, we are subject to surveillance by companies. This is true both
of individuals and of classes of people. Secondly, consumers are saturated with advertisements.
Such imbalance cannot in a meaningful sense produce, or be, a “free” market.

Shifts in Power by Marketing: Imbalance of Power: Sheer Size

Another concentration of power (in addition to that which favors advertisers) is found in the
sheer magnitude of companies. (There are many examples of this.) Where consumers have
enormous choice in particular products, very often there are only a few companies competing for
vast areas of the market.

The disparities of power are obvious in the differences between the salaries of employees and
CEOs. When individuals assert their rights, companies, with vastly more power, often respond
by moving to oversees labor.

Who is to blame for the poor conditions of labor?

1. The owners and managers of businesses are to blame. Sheer lust for power and profit
seems to be their final telos. But managers often themselves seem compelled by forces
bigger than themselves—factors such as the competition with other companies or with
other managers.
2. The consumers are to blame. They, after all, are the ones who create the demand for the
products in the first place, and drive companies to force prices down by any means
possible. The consumer stands against the laborer in this sense, since the consumer
doesn’t care or doesn’t think about the conditions of production. But what else is the
consumer to do? Is it even possible for consumers to be fully informed about the source
of production of all that s/he consumes?
3. The stockholders are to blame. “Institutional investors have put tremendous pressure on
executives to maximize returns for their clients.” Executives have “strong incentives to
favor the concerns of stockholders over those of other stakeholders, such as employees
and their families and their communities.” But a large majority of Americans are
stockholders today, as most retirement accounts share in a large number of stocks, and it
is virtually impossible for them to be adequately informed about all of them or even most
of them.
4. (The government is to blame. Governments create the miserable labor conditions of labor
for the sake of the free market.)

As you can see, it is difficult to place the blame clearly on any one entity. Is the system as a
whole to blame?

IV. Judging When a Market is Free

Under Friedman’s view of freedom, those who labor in miserable conditions are “free” to not
labor there, are not under coercion, and therefore are free. Irrelevant to Friedman is the question
of justice; also irrelevant is the question of the common good. Justice applies only to the whole
system. “Does the system produce better living conditions, on the whole?” is a more relevant
question (to Friedman) than that which addresses justice for individuals.
To address the question of justice in individual exchanges, Cavanaugh suggests we abandon
Friedman’s view of freedom. He gives examples that contrast injustice with justice: Liz
Claiborne is contrasted with Mondragon Cooperative Corporation. In the latter case, the
company is founded on principles of distributism. Justice here is obtained by 1) the just
distribution of property, and 2) a recognition of the dignity of labor. (Re-read the stories on pages
26-27.) The MCC is an example of truer freedom.

The telos of property is not property for its own sake, but the common good. It is to be used in
the service of others. If this is true, freedom is not doing whatever you want with your stuff.

Two contrasting examples are given to contrast two views of freedom in consumption.

Friedman (and others) says that when you buy a steak, the only thing you need to know about it
is its price. You need know nothing, for example, about the lives of cattle that you are eating.
Read the story on page 30 and consider whether the rationale for feeding cattle corn rather than
grass, and for injecting them with antibiotics, is convincing. What compels companies to do
these things? What is the telos driving these decisions?

It is not an accident that most people have never heard about the conditions of the cattle they are
now eating. The system is designed to keep this mysterious. The consumer’s knowledge is thus
highly limited. The limits of freedom are further multiplied by the fact that, though there seem to
be many choices (of beef, in this case), there are in fact only four conglomerates that dominate
the meatpacking industry. The cumulative effects of these factors have been monumental.

What is the answer to these problems?