Chapter 2: Detachment and Attachment

Typical analyses of our consumer culture focus on condemning consumerism and the greed
inherent to it. There may be some value in this critique, but this is not where Cavanaugh is going.

It is more interesting to think about the ability a consumer culture has to commodify just about
everything. (To commodify something is to turn it into a commodity; a commodity is something
that is bought or sold.)

Christianity has condemned avarice (greed); it is foolish to store up treasures on earth (Mt. 6:19-
21); greed is a form of idolatry (Col. 3:5); avarice is one of the seven deadly sins.

But because greed is usually defined as excessive attachment to money and things, and in this
sense it does not capture the essence of our consumer economy. Compared to other wealthy
countries, the United States has a low rate of savings, and a high rate of debt. Here, “People do
not hoard money; they spend it. People do not cling to things; they discard them and buy other
things.”

Anything and everything is bought and sold, including body parts and substances, (invisible)
insurance, news, space, healthcare, names, water, information (such as genetic codes), etc.
Cavanaugh reports that even one man’s forehead was (metaphorically) detached and sold as a
billboard.

The point is that our tendency is not to be overly attached to our things, but overly detached. We
are restless. “Consumerism is not so much about having more as it is about having something
else.”

I. Detachment
Typical critiques of consumerism miss the mark in a couple of ways.

“First, they set up a false dichotomy between the spiritual and the material. In the Christian
tradition, which believes that God became flesh (John 1:14), the material world is sanctified and
charged with spiritual significance.”

Secondly, most people don’t choose material goods over spiritual values. They want both.
Indeed, consumerism is a type of spirituality, even if not recognized as such. The problem is not
choosing our comfort over others’ well being; the problem is detachment. (This will be spelled
out in more detail later.)

A. Production
Of all the things we own, how many did we ourselves make? Before the Industrial Revolution,
homes were places of production, not just consumption. With the Industrial Revolution, many
common lands were privatized (to the advantage of large landholders). Cottage industries were
all but wiped out by inexpensive factory-manufactured goods. The very people who made a
living by their cottage industry were often forced to work at the manufacturers who put them out
of business.
The Industrial Revolution led to
1. Movement from handcrafts to the factory
2. Mass movement away from production
Today, individuals make hardly anything at all.

This change may have contributed to the widespread ambivalence and apathy toward work.
Labor itself is one of the commodities our society buys and sells.

Our work was meant (by God) to be an outlet for our creativity and an outlet for our interaction
with the material world. It was meant to make us more human (we are made to produce, to
create). We are created in the image of God and are called to share in his work as a Creator (Gen.
1:28 etc.).

The Industrial Revolution detached us from production and thus one of the primary ways we live
out the imago Dei.

B. Producers
The work force has been depersonalized to the point that labor itself is a commodity to be both
sold and bought. Man in Genesis is created in God’s image as a maker and creator; today he is
treated more like a tool, an instrument of production. When this happens, it is not hard to
depersonalize him altogether. It is even easier when labor is shifted overseas, where the labor is
harder (for us) to see and barely recognized as human at all. There, though the conditions of
labor may be miserable, neither the company producing nor consumers know or care. (See pp.
40-41 for examples.)

Naomi Klein has argued, “the goal of a transnational corporation is a kind of transcendence of
the material world.” The “superbrand” companies have established their souls (for the sake of
marketing) and have no need for “cumbersome bodies.” In other words, the means of production
are irrelevant and boring; what counts is the image, and the image is through marketing.

Consumers are strongly, even overwhelmingly, encouraged to ignore the human origins of the
objects of consumption. When we begin to think about what would be involved in knowing who
produced all that I own, we also begin to see our problem. There is a multitude of roadblocks in
our way, some of them put there intentionally by those who have an interest in keeping our
thoughts of such things to a minimum. On the part of the consumer, it might not be that s/he is
overly greedy or uncaring, but simply that the lives of those who produce what we consume are
invisible to us.

C. Products
We live in an age of superabundance. We buy just about everything—even “the past” and
“different cultures.” These are in quotation marks because, of course, we are not buying the
things themselves, but our own replications of the things in our restaurants, stores, and malls. It
is so pervasive that we hardly notice it anymore. This is the end condition of globalization.

But though “globalization has increased our awareness of, and sympathy for, other times and
places,” it has also produced “a detachment from all times and places.” We are everywhere, and
we are nowhere. We are everywhere in that we can participate in any culture at any time, through
our own recreations of them. That we are nowhere in particular is shown by the fact that, once
we are inside a mall, or a restaurant, or a hotel complex, we might just as easily be in Orlando or
Paris or San Francisco. The experience, having been universalized, has been homogenized as
well.

[We see this same phenomenon in the way we listen to music. In the ‘50s, people listened to
music of the ‘50s; in the ‘60s, people listened to music of the ‘60s; same with the ‘70s and ‘80s.
But starting in the ‘90s, and even more so today, people pick and choose what era they want to
identify with. We have all the music we want on iTunes or Amazon.com—vastly more than was
available in any previous generation. Of course we all appreciate having more choices; the point
is that with the abundance of choices, the particularity of our age loses its potency as we blend it
with all the previous ages…]

Our everyday experience is thus far more detached from particularities today than it was a
hundred years ago. Another evidence of this basic claim: think of how similar the average
seventeen-year-old American to another seventeen-year-old American. Make the same
comparison, but in, say, 1900 (prior to the proliferation of radios). Our entire culture has become
homogenized through our embrace of our technologies. Such an effect has led to a general
detachment from the particular—whether the particular be a place or a thing or an event. Where,
under these conditions, is our connection to the products we consume?

This is not to imply that we don’t have a personal relationship with out things—far from it. To
the contrary, mega-companies have done all they can to make this relationship quite intimate.
They have done this largely through “branding,” which creates a sense of identity between the
consumer and the brands that they consume. Brands provide a sense of community with others of
the same brand. Just think of iPhone owners as the ridiculous extreme of this.

But this relationship of intimate love is not made in heaven. In fact, its gods, its creators,
designed it from the beginning to be just temporary. The relationship was designed to lead to
satisfaction, but only temporary satisfaction. As important as short-term satisfaction is long-term
dissatisfaction. Without either of these, a company will go out of business.

The pleasure, for the American consumer, is in the desire itself, rather than in the possession of
the object of desire. In fact, “possession kills desire; familiarity breeds contempt.” Consequently,
“The consumerist spirit is a restless spirit, typified by detachment, because desire must be
constantly kept on the move.”

II. Moral Formation and the Material World

We are inundated with advertisements, and they are not morally neutral, but actively seek to train
us how to see the physical world around us.

1. Transcendence
Consumerism, like faith traditions, “trains us to transcend the material world.”
a. We leave behind the bodily labor of production.
 b. It trains us to be constantly dissatisfied with particular material things, so that we will
move beyond them to new material things by convincing us that the thing itself is
never enough.
Christianity teaches us:
a. The material world is good.
b. Man must (and longs to) transcend the material world.
c. The created world, and the things in it, are not ultimate, are not ends in themselves.
Instead, they “contain within themselves traces of the Creator.” They are not ends but
“means toward the enjoyment of God.”

Notice the common element between Consumerism and Christianity (point ‘b’ under
Consumerism and ‘c’ under Christianity). What is behind this commonality? How can
Consumerism lay the groundwork, or prepare the soil, for the sense of need for God in Christ?

The Christian tradition teaches that we are restless and dissatisfied in this life; that to be alive is
to desire, and that the things in this world can begin to satisfy these desires, but only as a flash of
mist can satisfy one’s thirst. Only God is able to satisfy the desires within us. The desires
themselves point us to God.

We may rightly infer from this that desires themselves are not bad or wrong, any more than
consumption itself is wrong: they are there to point us to God. What is wrong is to think that we
can find our contentment in the very restlessness of desire (i.e., consumerism). Instead, we must
look through the desires to the ultimate (and right) object of our desires: the living God.

2. Community
Like other spiritual disciplines, Consumerism “lends itself to a certain practice of community.”
How? Through brand identification.

We can now participate in virtual communities that fit our own likings. However, we should be
warned: such “communities” tend to “reduce community to disembodied acts of consumption.”
Our identification with such “communities” is out of context, detached from flesh and blood, and
thus, “disembodied.”

In our collective effort to commodify all things, we have commodified the suffering of various
groups of people by offering a “virtual solidarity” with no actual, concrete, particular
results…other than that someone has made money from it.

Christianity also offers solidarity with those who suffer, but requires that it be concrete
solidarity.

Christianity, like Consumerism, teaches that our attachment to things ought to be temporary, or
loose, but for a very different purpose. For consumerism, we are detached so that we might
desire something else, to be attached for a short time, until we grow restless for something else.
For Christianity, we choose detachment from things so that we might “follow Jesus,” to be
“attached” to him, or “united to him” (to use the biblical language). But here the detachment is
for the sake of concrete attachment to others in service to God. This is another way of saying that
material goods are a vehicle of service. Or to think of it from another angle: God owns all things,
and we are his stewards. We seek his direction in our use of his things; his direction will always
be such that we use them for the common good.

For the Christian, “detachment from material goods means using them as a means to a greater
end, and the great end is greater attachment to God and our fellow human beings. In
consumerism, detachment means standing back from all people, times, and places, and
appropriating our choices for private use.” As a consequence of our attachment to the body of
Christ, we are detached from the items of our consumption, in the sense that they are not used for
individual purposes so much as for how they help the entire body.

III. Being Consumed

It hardly needs to be said that everyone is a consumer. The question is, how can we consume
such that we facilitate, by our very consumption, abundant life for everyone?

The answer is the Eucharist (or the Lord’s Supper, or holy communion). In the Eucharist, Jesus
offers his body for consumption (Jn. 6:35). In so doing, “the insatiability of human desire is
absorbed by the abundance of God’s grace in the consumption of Jesus’ body and blood.”

It might be tempting for us, in this consumer culture, to think of the Eucharist as a kind of self-
help. But when we consume Christ, we are taken up into his body (1Cor. 10:16-17). We who are
many become one, and “the act of consumption is turned inside out.” We not only consume the
body of Christ; we are the body being consumed by the other members of the body. This does
not imply that we lose our identity. In fact, it is closer to the opposite: in the Eucharist we gain
our true individuality by virtue of our participation as a member of the one body of Christ.

[We gloss over the section on Mt. 25…]

Since we are one body, we feel each other’s pain. We shouldn’t over-spiritualize our union in
one body. The physical sufferings of others, in the form of hunger or disease or anything else,
and particularly the sufferings of the body of Christ, are impossible to ignore. It should therefore
not comfort us to say that my purchase of the object of my consumption makes jobs for other
people, and is by virtue of that one fact a good thing. The question still remains: what kind of
jobs does it create?

Cavanaugh offers a couple concrete ways “to overcome our detachment from production,
producers, and products.” In doing this he is explaining how we can live our faith, live out the
truth of our communion with Christ.

First, we can turn our homes into places of production instead of what they are—places of
consumption. He suggests making our own bread or music, and there are any number of other
things that could be produced from our homes. This type of activity gives us an appreciation of
what goes into producing things. It also moves us out of the role of spectators of life.
Another concrete step we can take in the right direction is to donate our time and money to those
in need, especially local businesses and workers. We can buy fruit that is locally grown and sold
(like you might get at the Farmers’ Market).

Thirdly, we can resolve “not to cling to our things, but to use them for the sake of the common
good.” Notice that we are not overcoming detachment by becoming overly attached to our
things. No, we should have “a proper relationship with things” as well as with people. We can
also seek to understand where our things come from and how they were produced. We can learn
how this part of God’s creation was meant to be used for the glory of God, and in this way fill
them with the meaning they were intended to have.