In the gospels it says that it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. This is not the platitudinous condemnation of economic injustice, but rather a shrewd observation about human psychology. The point is that those who have wealth have the ability to create a world that is exactly how they want it, and this world becomes a prison which filters out anything that would intrude into it from the world outside--including grace. That's the price you pay when you have the means to create a the world in your own image.
It's a prison designed to keep the inmate safe and comfortable and moderately well entertained. They never have to deal with the world as it is; they live in a world of their own construction in which they are self-sufficient and isolated from "reality" in a way that the poor are not. The poor, who certainly find ways to live in other kinds of hells, nevertheless find it harder to live in self-created delusional worlds because they have fewer resources to block out the real world, and so they are of necessity more vulnerable, and in their vulnerability more open to the movement of grace in their lives.
I think that you could make the argument that the inability of so many Americans to see through the delusional thinking of our current political leaders is a function of their participating in the poison fruits of the affluent society. We have all to a certain extent been caught up in this ancient syndrome that until recently was the exclusive privilege of the rich, i.e., to build and live in castles of delusion. You could say that the affluent society has democratized delusion. And our national anxiety is in large part derived from our unconscious knowledge how flimsy a structure it really is. It is metaphysically vaporous. We've been building our very own Towers of Babel, and at some level we realize that sooner or later it will all come crashing down. Things can't possibly keep going this way. Something has to give. Everything looks more or less normal, but deep down we know that the whole business is rotten and near collapse.
I recently watched the movie version of John Guare's "Six Degrees of Separation". And it struck me that this was the story about how rich people live in such self-created prisons and of how not-rich people, like the insane Paul Poitier (Will Smith) character, long to live in the prisons that these rich people have created. It's also the story of how one of the inmates, Ouisa (Stockard Channing), wakes up to her condition and escapes. She's the camel that somehow found a way out through the eye of that needle. Her path out derived from her "imagination" of how she is connected to people outside that prison she realized she was living in, and in a curious way, Paul, the person who wanted in, became for her the way out.
The
exercise of freedom is meaningless unless we're willing to live with
the consequences of our choices. Our choices, for better or worse, are what make us real; our history is what gives us metaphysical ballast. Do we make bad choices? Of course we
do. But the test of our character is how we respond to the consequences
of these choices. The consumer culture in which we live reinforces a
mentality that would have us look at these choices as if they were poor
purchase decisions for which we have the option to either return or
discard what we've bought. We don't really want to believe that our past has anything to do with who we are; we want to believe that we are infinitely capable of reinventing ourselves. But what kind of person is capable of that kind of reinvention except someone who is a cipher--a nothing. But it's precisely this kind of person that modernity and the Liberal imagination of the human has created and celebrates. The Liberal sensibility hates the past and its limitations, and whether consciously or unconsciously, people who have been acculturated into modern society have this attitude toward the past.
In the affluent velvet prison the inmates are told continuously that they are happy and if they're not, to go shopping. Because their
happiness is measured by their capacity to consume--goods and services,
people, experiences. Whatever--we swallow them like junk food, defecate
them, and move on. We are not nourished by such consumption, and we're
not changed by it, except for the temporary bloated feeling that
they cause. We soon forget about them and the sum or our lives is so
many forgettable moments.
This kind of thinking is the air we
breathe. But I don't think we have much a sense of how this creates a
kind of solipsistic hell in which we all find ourselves; nor do we understand how this contributes to the anxiety that pervades cultures in the affluent, developed world. It's a hell
that 's created by the illusion of choices, illusory because they are choices that don't make a difference, that contribute not a whit to our spiritual substance because we almost always get do-overs. Or we find some excuse for running away from the consequences of our choices.
Because being human in a consumer culture is not about developing into a man or woman of substance, it's about being "happy", and the consumerist definition of happiness reinforces a kind of infantilism that keeps us passive and dependent, which we don't mind so long as we're relatively comfortable. Our prisons are comfortable, and we have good reason to believe the official propaganda that the consumer choices we make in them are what really makes us free. It supports us in our continuing denial of the truth, a truth we don't have the stomach to confront. Is there any wonder we have become so incapable of demanding more of our political leaders? We don't want them to tell us the truth, because it's a truth we'd rather not know about.
So who are we, then, really? What is the nature of our identity in the modern Liberal imagination? Identity in the psychosocial literature has come to mean something that is an arbitrary construction defined either "by the social roles an individual performs, the 'reference group' to which he belongs, or, on the other hand, by the deliberate management of impressions or 'presentation of self,' in Erving Goffman's phrase," writes Christopher Lasch in The Minimal Self.
There's no there there in the individual's identity understood in this way. It's changeable, shifting, and chameleon-like. It's Woody Allen's Zelig on the one hand or Madonna's inventing and reinventing herself on the other. In this understanding of personal identity, we are either subsumed into the group and its group think or we make ourselves up as we go along. And such reinvention is possible because neither is there a there there when it comes to the social world that is over against the individual. It has lost its solidity; it has become whatever we want it to be.
The psychosocial meaning of identity, which has itself passed into the common usage, weakens or eliminates altogether the association between identity and "continuity of the personality." It also excludes the possibility that identity is defined largely through a person's actions and the public record of those actions. In its new meaning, the term registers the waning of the old sense of a life as a life-history or narrative--a way of understanding identity that depended on the belief in a durable public world, reassuring in its solidity, which outlasts an individual life and passes some sort of judgment on it. Note that the older meaning of identity refers both to persons and things. Both have lost their solidity in modern society, their definiteness and continuity. Identity has become uncertain and problematical not because people no longer occupy fixed social stations--a commonplace explanation that unthinkingly incorporates the modern equation of identity and social role--but because they no longer inhabit a world that exists independently of themselves. Minimal Self, p. 32.
I think that this is an accurate description of identity formation in a choice-driven world as contrasted with a given world. In a traditional society, everything is given, and you just accept that this is the way it is because this is the way it always was. In a consumer society, very little is given. And what is given can be easily rejected as one moves on to live a life with little reference to what was given to him as a child. When the social worlds we live in are chosen or rejected as the whim seizes us, we experience our social world as temporary and interchangeable with any other social world and any other group of people. Even if we stay with one group for a long period of time, we know that we can leave it at any time. In fact if you stay in one place for too long--like a job--you are perceived as stodgy or lacking in ambition.
There's a freedom and an exhilaration in knowing that we can always keep our options open in that respect, but it's counterfeit freedom and cheap thrills. And we pay a price: The world no long maintains its solidity; its quality of being over against us and pointing to something unfathomable and unconsumable has collapsed. And the people and objects in our world lose their ability to be anything more than what makes them useful to us; we keep them in our world so long as there is value in them to consume, and we toss them as soon as they lose their consumable value. We get into relationships with people to "get our needs met," and we get out of them when it's clear that they are unable to give us what we have become convinced they or someone else should give us. There is an objective world of things, but there is no longer an objective world of meaning or value, because the things, including the people, are simply the value we project into them, and this has mostly to do with their usefulness to us, how they meet our needs.
This is reinforced by the therapeutic values of much of the human potential movement which has vulgarized the idea of self actualization into another consumer commodity. Think about how commonplace it has become, even when we are encouraged to volunteer for some social service. We are never "sold" on the idea because it's the right thing to do; we're told instead about how fulfilling the experience will be, and how much you get back when you give. Well, maybe/maybe not. This approach links doing the right thing to false expectations, and it makes of volunteering another experience we treat as a consumable object. We go into these experiences and stay with them only so long as we get something out of them.
My goal is not to shake my finger at the world as if to say, "How dare you be what I think you ought not to be." My goal is simply to see our predicament with as much clarity as I can, because I know that I'm as implicated in all of what I describe here as consumer culture as anyone else. As I've said before, we're all neck deep in this historical current, and I do not propose that we remove ourselves from the stream, only that we keep our head dry, and to make the effort to navigate in this stream rather than simply allow ourselves to swept away by it. But we can do much better than the modern/postmodern nihilistic imagination of the human.
Ultimately the goal is to create a society that reinforces the project to become what we were created to become--beings with a destiny to realize that they are only most profoundly free when as the realized image and likeness of God, beings with enough diamond-hard metaphysical substance that someday they will be able to see God face to face with the uncreated source of all that is, and not be vaporized in the encounter.
