Zadok Paper S101 Winter 1999
The Abuse of Consumerism
by Dave Collis

The sacred commodity

ME-ISM: A search by an individual, in the absence of training in traditional religious tenets, to formulate a personally tailored religion by himself. Most frequently a mishmash of reincarnation, personal dialogue with a nebulously defined god figure, naturalism, and karmic eye-for-eye attitudes.[135] 

Religious imagery has been progressively trivialised under consumerism. All religions are commodified and presented in convenient bits and pieces. Of particular centrality to Western culture has been the taming of the Christian religion to the point of becoming an ideological justification for capitalism. Biblical images which conflict with the operations of capitalism ("You cannot serve both God and money"[136] ) have been swamped by personal pietistic readings which lack any challenge to the dominant consumer ethos. Christmas, for example, being supposedly the ritual remembrance of Jesus' birth, has become the pinnacle celebration of consumerism. Christian imagery, which people have historically used as a fictive resource to emplot their identities, within consumerism loses its potential for effectiveness. It no longer stands as a viable fictive resource to usefully draw upon. Luke, for example, describes the way that through America televangelism "corporate capital has successfully transposed even religious faith into an audiovisual cult".[137]  The fictive resources of Christian experience and imagery lose their power through their participation in consumerism.

Neither an ineffable god, the unknown mysteries, nor limitless good can be revered or celebrated fully in such bureaucratically controlled consumption. The electronic mediations of Christian fundamentalism destroy these auras of faith in order to produce an electronic image. Animation, cosmic sound scores, computer graphics, or telegenic talking heads all can and will reduce limitless good to a light-show image; the mysterious unknown to a haunting rift of organ or synthesiser chords; and the ineffable godhead to an uplifting cartoon animation. The codes of televisionary ministries . . . necessarily must attractively package and completely commodify even the Divine to effectively integrate an unseen, diverse, and passive audience.[138] 

In the heat of the spectacle the original meanings of traditional images of religious faith are swamped by their new significance as consumer objects.

An entire industry of Christian products, services, and merchandisers has emerged with televangelism, marketing Jesus as a product that works and God as a service that delivers . . . The cross, the dove, the fish, and Jesus are no longer merely icons or holy symbols; they are mass-marketed insignia of Christian consumption . . . [thereby becoming] devoid of much of [their] original substance.[139] 

Although televangelism is an extreme example of the vacuous nature of religion under consumerism, it represents the general taming of religious imagery to the point where it can no longer effectively serve as viable fictive resource from which to emplot an identity.

The second example we will look at is the way that people under consumerism have been distanced from the imagery of nature. I mentioned the estranged relationship between humans and nature under capitalism. I want to now apply this insight to the formation of personal identity through the following argument: The separation of humans from nature prevents people from drawing upon nature as a fictive resource.

By being caught up in the exciting spectacle of consumer life, consumers are deprived of the chance to draw their identity from such a connection to nature. Although it would be unfair to blame the estrangement from nature entirely upon consumerism, especially seeing that the estrangement grew largely during the rise of the city in an earlier historical time, consumerism must accept a special responsibility because of the way it replaces the imagery of nature with the imagery of the product. It forces out nature in favour of the product as a fictive resource.

This separation from nature as mythic resource is not an inevitable or natural condition. Other cultures contain a strong link between human identity and the world of nature, as the following example of Australian Aboriginal people shows. Australian environmental philosopher, Val Plumwood, explains this connection in broad terms for Aborigines.

Identity is not connected to nature as a general abstract category . . . but to particular areas of land, just as the connection one has to close relatives is highly particularistic and involves special attachments and obligations not held to humankind in general. And in complete contrast to Western views of land and nature as only accidentally related to self and as interchangeable means to human satisfaction, the land is conceptualised as just as essentially related to self as kin are, and its loss may be as deeply grieved for and felt as the death of kin.[140] 

This connection is not only to the land but also to animals and the 'natural' imagery associated with Dreamtime. Whereas within consumerism the consumer becomes part of a totemic virtual community centred around the product through the process of consumption, within traditional aboriginal cultures the person is totemically linked to other people, the land, animals, and supernatural beings

This is not meant to suggest that Western culture needs to re-embrace the technologically and economically less complicated lifestyle of indigenous cultures. Instead it was simply meant to show that the estrangement of nature's images from our identities is peculiar to western consumer culture rather than being a necessary feature of existence. In other words, the example shows how nature is currently used in practice by other cultures as a fictive resource. Our lack of use of nature's imagery, I suggest, is part of the abuse and fragmentation of consumerism.

To: The silencing of the 'other'

Dave Collis is project worker for Jubilee 2000 Campaign in Australia, and is involved with street ministries with the Urban Mission Unit of Collins Street Baptist Church and the St Vincent de Paul Society.