Our era is full of competing and often contradictory ways of seeing the world. This is nothing new. Many eras have competing voices shaping them, creating a tension which eventually leads to conflict and finally some sort of settlement. What is striking about our era though is the way these competing claims seem to live side by side, even within the same ideology, without many people realizing the contradictions are there.
Take for example the funny marriage of individualism and consumerism which marks the modern world. On the surface, these would seem to be strange bedfellows. Individualism asserts that personal autonomy is our highest ideal. It encourages us to do what we need for ourselves and not to worry about what anyone else thinks. It says, “if what you’re doing isn’t hurting anyone, do whatever you want,” and then proceeds to define “hurting anyone” so narrowly that very few acts would actually be restrained by it. There is no collective we, only a series of Is. On the other hand, consumerism requires collectivism. We all have to keep buying and producing in order to keep the economy going. Power gets concentrated into fewer and fewer hands in the process. Corporations are granted the same rights as individuals, even considered as persons in law. Human beings are no longer individuals but a series of data points on a sales sheet.
It is hard to imagine anything more at odds with individualism than consumerism, yet somehow we have managed to weave these things together in our era so seamlessly that people often do not even notice. As the desire for greater individual autonomy has grown, markets have adapted. We are encouraged to see our identity as individuals expressed through our choices as consumers. What we buy and what we use are marks of who we are. In an overall sense, this actually limits our individuality. Even if the options seem infinite, we are still operating within a oneness, a groupthink, in which what makes me who I am is how I spend money. Yet this never even occurs to us as we live it out because we have been so thoroughly trained to see spending money and acquiring things as a form of liberation. In the age of social media and artificial intelligence, we have even become the product ourselves, generating revenue for large corporations through our willing surrender of our personal information.
Personal autonomy is our highest ideal, but we have come to define personal autonomy as an unfettered ability to produce and consume. Three decades ago, Pope St. John Paul II could already see this as a looming problem. He believed that western culture was becoming a “culture of death” which locates the value of individual persons in an amorphous notion called “quality of life” which is marked by “economic efficiency” and “inordinate consumerism” (Evangelium vitae 23). What gives our lives meaning is our ability to control them and make our own choices, which translates into our capacity to do things and take things in. “The criterion of personal dignity-which demands respect, generosity and service-is replaced by the criterion of efficiency, functionality and usefulness: others are considered not for what they ‘are’, but for what they ‘have, do and produce’. This is the supremacy of the strong over the weak.”
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