Being Consumed

Economics and Christian Desire

William T. Cavanaugh

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781467438292
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Should Christians be for or against the free market? For or against globalization? How are we to live in a world of scarcity? William Cavanaugh uses Christian resources to incisively address basic economic matters -- the free market, consumer culture, globalization, and scarcity -- arguing that we should not just accept these as givens but should instead change the terms of the debate. Among other things, Cavanaugh discusses how God, in the Eucharist, forms us to consume and be consumed rightly. Examining pathologies of desire in contemporary "free market" economies, Being Consumed puts forth a positive and inspiring vision of how the body of Christ can engage in economic alternatives. At every turn, Cavanaugh illustrates his theological analysis with concrete examples of Christian economic practices.

chapter 1

FREEDOM AND UNFREEDOM

There is a gap between dual perceptions of the market economy that seems to be getting wider in the age of globalization. On the one hand, we are told that we live in an era of unparalleled freedom of choice. As the last few state barriers to free markets crumble, we see an infinity of opportunities for work and consumption opening up all around us. On the other hand, there is a profound sense of resignation to fate in attitudes toward the market. The process of globalization seems to have advanced beyond anyone’s control. Managers sigh that their decisions are subject to the impersonal control of “market forces.” The popularity of Dilbert cartoons bespeaks a cynicism about the instrumentalized and bureaucratized nature of corporate employment. Consumers feel besieged by marketing and surveillance, and they feel powerless in the face of enormous transnational corporations that are disconnected from the communities where they live. We hear rumors that our shoes are made by children and other exploited laborers, but we have no idea how we could begin to resist.

The argument of this chapter is that there is a fundamental connection between these two kinds of perception of the market. In the ideology of the free market, freedom is conceived as the absence of interference from others. There are no common ends to which our desires are directed. In the absence of such ends, all that remains is the sheer arbitrary power of one will against another. Freedom thus gives way to the aggrandizement of power and the manipulation of will and desire by the greater power. The liberation of desire from ends, on the one hand, and the domination of impersonal power, on the other, are two sides of the same coin.

If this is the case, then true freedom requires an account of the end (telos) of human life and the destination of creation. I use St. Augustine to help make this argument. There is no point to either blessing or damning the “free market” as such. What is required is a substantive account of the end of earthly life and creation so that we may enter into particular judgments of what kinds of exchanges are free and what kinds are not.

I. When Is a Market Free?

When is a market free? According to Milton Friedman, the central problematic of economics is how to ensure the cooperation of free individuals without coercion. The answer, says Friedman, was provided by Adam Smith, who saw that, in 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.”¹ No exchange will take place unless both parties benefit.

So long as effective freedom of exchange is maintained, the central feature of the market organization of economic activity is that it prevents one person from interfering with another with respect to most of his activities. The consumer is protected from coercion by the seller because of the presence of other sellers with whom he can deal; the seller is protected from coercion by the consumer because of other consumers to whom she can sell; the employee is protected from coercion by the employer because of other employers for whom he can work, and so on. And the market does this impersonally and without centralized authority.²

State authority is necessary to maintain law and order and enforce contracts that are voluntarily entered into, but the state must not interfere in the market; in fact, the state may be called on to prevent such interference. According to Friedman, if individuals are voluntarily entering into exchanges from which both parties expect to benefit, then the market is free.

This is a fairly conventional definition of a free-market economy. It hinges on the insistence that exchanges be voluntary and informed. With regard to information, an exchange cannot be free if one party has deceived another, say, by selling the other a house without divulging a severe problem with termites. Barring such deception, however, Friedman is confident that the price system in a free-market economy transmits all the information needed to make exchanges informed. Indeed, “[t]he price system transmits only the important information and only to the people who need to know.”³ Producers of wood do not need to know why demand for pencils has increased or even that it has increased. They only need to know that someone is willing to pay more for their product to increase production. At the other end, the increased price of pencils will tell the consumer to wear her pencil down to a stub before buying a new one. She doesn’t need to know why the price of pencils has increased, only that it has.⁴ Similar comments apply to the contract between employer and employee: the price system applies in equal measure because wages and salaries are the prices of labor, and the employer-employee relationship is an exchange of labor for money.

Besides being informed, a free-market exchange must also be voluntary. What this seems to mean, first, is an absence of external coercion. The chief culprit here is the state. In a free-market economy, the state does not interfere. No one threatens dire consequences if one party decides not to enter into a particular exchange. In a voluntary exchange, each party enters into the transaction in the expectation of gain and not in the fear of punishment. Second, then, voluntary exchanges are based on each party’s desires. They need not want the same kinds of things: wrestling videos and rosaries can be freely exchanged for each other. There need be no agreement at all on the nature of desire for a voluntary exchange to take place. A market is free if people can satisfy their wants without harming others, even if there are utterly incommensurable ideas about what people ought to desire. As Friedman says, a free-market economy “gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”⁵ Freedom itself is pursuing whatever you want without interference from others.

Two corollaries follow from this concept of voluntary exchange. The first is that freedom is defined negatively, that is, as freedom from the interference of others, especially from the state. Freedom is what exists spontaneously in the absence of coercion. This approach is agnostic about the positive capacities of each party to a transaction, for example, how much power or property each party has at his or her disposal. To be free, it suffices that there be no external interference. The second corollary is that a free market has no telos, that is, no common end to which desire is directed. Each individual chooses his or her own ends. As Friedrich Hayek says, “this recognition of the individual as the ultimate judge of his ends” does not mean there can be no common action among individuals, but the ends on which such actions are based are merely the “coincidence of individual ends.”⁶ “What are called ‘social ends’ are [from a free-market view] merely identical ends of many individuals—or ends to the achievement of which individuals are willing to contribute in return for the assistance they receive in the satisfaction of their own desires.”⁷ To claim that desires can be ordered either rightly or wrongly to objectively desirable ends has no place in a free market. To stake such a claim within the market itself would be to interfere in the freedom of the market. As Michael Novak says, democratic capitalism—of which a free market is a crucial component—is built on the explicit denial of any unitary order. There is no common telos or “sacred canopy” above the diversity of desires, only an “empty shrine” or “wasteland” where common goals used to stand.

The “wasteland” at the heart of democratic capitalism is like a field of battle, on which individuals wander alone, in some confusion, amid many casualties. Nonetheless, like the dark night of the soul in the inner journey of the mystics, this desert has an indispensable purpose. It is maintained out of respect for the diversity of human consciences, perceptions, and intentions. It is swept clean out of reverence for the sphere of the transcendent, to which the individual has access through the self, beyond the mediations of social institutions.⁸

The transcendent is not denied but preserved in the freedom of each individual to pursue the ends of his or her choice.

If ends are chosen and not received, on what basis are these choices of ends made? On the basis of “wants” or “preferences” or “desires.” Where do these come from? Free-market economists are agnostic on this question. It may be unanswerable, and it does not matter anyway. Milton and Rose Friedman address a distinction sometimes made between the “real wants or desires of consumers” and artificial wants supposedly created by advertising. They believe that advertising succeeds not by creating artificial wants but by appealing to real wants. “Is it not more sensible to appeal to real wants or desires of consumers than to try to manufacture artificial wants or desires? Surely it will generally be cheaper to sell them something that meets wants they already have than to create an artificial want.”⁹ As an example, the Friedmans cite the success of automobiles that change models year after year over those, such as the Superba, that did not. If unchanging models were “what consumers really wanted, the companies that offered that option would have prospered, and the others would have followed suit.”¹⁰ How do you tell the difference between real wants and artificial wants? Simply by seeing what people in fact choose. If they choose something, they must have a real want for it. Where do real wants come from? For the Friedmans, it doesn’t matter. All that matters for a market to be free is that individuals have real wants and can pursue them without the interference of others, especially the state.

II. Augustine on Freedom and Desire

An examination of Christian thinking on voluntary action renders both of the above corollaries—that freedom is defined purely negatively and that freedom requires no objective ends—suspect. I will take as my principal guide St. Augustine of Hippo, arguably the classic source of Christian reflection on freedom and desire. Augustine was forced to wrestle with these questions in controversies with both the Pelagians, whose account of free will seemed to render God’s grace unnecessary, and the Donatists, whose schism from the Catholic Church raised questions of using coercion to reunify the fold. These controversies may at first seem far removed from the dynamics of market economies, but Augustine represents the heart of Christian reflection on freedom and desire, and is thus directly implicated in any Christian attempt to answer the question “When is a market free?”

With regard to the first corollary identified above, freedom in Augustine’s view is not simply the absence of external interference. Augustine’s view of freedom is more complex: freedom is not simply a negative freedom from, but a freedom for, a capacity to achieve certain worthwhile goals. All of those goals are taken up into the one overriding telos of human life, the return to God. Freedom is thus fully a function of God’s grace working within us. Freedom is being wrapped up in the will of God, who is the condition of human freedom. Being is not autonomous; all being participates in God, the source of being.

Autonomy in the strict sense is simply impossible, for to be independent of others and independent of God is to be cut off from being, and thus to be nothing at all. To be left to our own devices, cut off from God, is to be lost in sin, which is the negation of being. For the Pelagians, in order for humans to be convicted of sin and rewarded for righteousness, their freedom must be in some sense “external” to divine grace. Freedom then becomes a kind of human power, and sin is an exercise of that power. For Augustine, on the other hand, sin is not a power but a weakness. Augustine uses the metaphors of slavery and sickness to discuss the nature of sin. In his Confessions he says of his own condition, before his conversion, that he was “bound not by an iron imposed by anyone else, but by the iron of my own choice.”¹¹ In his anti-Pelagian treatise, The Spirit and the Letter, he says: “How, if they are slaves of sin, can they boast freedom of choice?”¹² Or again, “by grace comes the healing of the soul from sin’s sickness; by the healing of the soul comes freedom of choice.”¹³ Sin is not subject to free choice, properly speaking. The alcoholic with plenty of money and access to an open liquor store may, in a purely negative sense, be free from anything interfering with getting what he wants; but in reality he is profoundly unfree and cannot free himself. In order for him to regain freedom of choice, he cannot be left alone. He can only be free by being liberated from his false desires and being moved to desire rightly. This is the sense in which Augustine says “freedom of choice is not made void but established by grace, since grace heals the will whereby righteousness may freely be loved.”¹⁴ Freedom is something received, not merely exercised. Therefore, in order to determine whether a person is acting freely, we need to know much more than whether or not that person is acting on his or her desires without the interference of others. In Augustine’s view, others are in fact crucial to one’s freedom. A slave or an addict, by definition, cannot free himself or herself. Others from outside the self—the ultimate Other being God—are neces...