Consumerism and Neighbor

Consumerism directly impacts our relationship with our neighbor. The consumerist society equates freedom with individual choice and private life. If freedom is my right, and if freedom means individual choice and private life, then one’s neighbor eventually becomes an enemy from whom one has to defend one’s self because any genuine relationship eventually impinges on my ability to do what I want, when I want. In his 1995 encyclical The Gospel of Life, Pope John Paul II argues that “This view of freedom leads to a serious distortion of life in society. If the promotion of the self is understood in terms of absolute autonomy, people inevitably reach the point of rejecting one another. Everyone else is considered an enemy from whom one has to defend himself. Thus society becomes a mass of individuals placed side by side, but without any mutual bonds.”[1] Christians are not the only ones to notice this. In an interview about his grimly apocalyptic song “The Future,” Canadian poet and musician Leonard Cohen commented that “Very slowly the contract between people has dissolved. And people are really doing anything they want to each other… that essential unwritten, unspoken contract between one soul and another has disintegrated.”
[1] John Paul II, as quoted in Gordon Wenham, “Life and Death and the Consumerist Ethic” in Christ and Consumerism, 131.

Alright, enough complaining about Consumerism for now. Just one more post on this, I promise! That last one will be on ways that we, as God's peculiar people, can respond to it.
Shalom,
David