A Review of William T. Cavanaugh’s Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire

Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2008.

Review by Paul Tyson

Is there a highest common good, a true final goal, for human life, or, is any universal and transcendently referenced human telos unknowable? The answer you give to this question will powerfully shape your outlook on economics. If, with Milton Freedman, you believe that any ‘true’ human telos is unknowable, then the freedom to pursue whatever desires one individually choose is freedom itself. To Freedman, economic and political policies are ‘good’ only to the extent that they impose no regime of what people collectively ought to desire onto us. Hence the pragmatic, non-qualitative notions of ‘reality’ and valid individual choice assumed in the neo-conservative economic outlook. However, if, with Augustine and William Cavanaugh, you believe that a Christian outlook does entail commitment to the true human telos – revealed in Christ and embodied in the church – then economics and politics will not revolve around the pursuit of unhindered personal desire, but will aim rather at qualitative and collective goals. Yet, Cavanaugh maintains that these different stances towards the human telos do not entail a choice between personal freedom on the one hand, and a commitment to high, religious or collective ideals on the other hand, but between two competing disciplines of desire. Where the transcendent and the collective is cut off from desire, then personal satiation, in very immediate, tangible and instinctively given terms, becomes the regime in which human desires are formed, and then this discipline of desire is foisted onto us by the enormously powerful consumer culture of late capitalism. And this is, in fact, the default desire regime of the world in which we are embedded. Further, the secularity of late capitalist consumerism is by no means neutral, but forms us into the distinctive practises of individual desire which shapes the very rhythms of our daily lives, and around which we fit our religion. But how, then, do we as Christians live in the world of late capitalist consumerism, and yet live out a different discipline of desire? These are the concerns William Cavanaugh addresses in his beautifully written and elegant little text Being Consumed.

There are four chapters in this book. The first chapter explores freedom and unfreedom, asking when is a market truly free. The second chapter looks at the Eucharist as a practise of consumption and being consumed, noting the Christian disciplines of attachment and detachment that arise from this outlook which places Christians at odds with the disciplines of attachment and detachment found in ‘free market’ consumerism. The third chapter looks at catholicity as a Christian approach to global and local practises, and as a means of Christianly engaging globalisation. The fourth chapter looks at scarcity and abundance noting how the Christian doctrine of creation makes it impossible for us to accept scarcity as a given, recognising rather that economic scarcity is created by human sin.

For a very profound piece of applied theological thinking, this is a slim and crystal clear book which not only hits theoretical issues powerfully, but also describes how various Christians are seeking to live out an alternative discipline of desire in the very world in which we live. Cavanaugh explains: “Taken as a whole, this book attempts to sketch out a view of everyday economic life with the use of Christian resources. I examine some pathologies of desire in contemporary “free-market economies,” and display a positive vision of how the dynamics of desire in Christ can both form and be formed by alternative economic practises.”

This is an excellent and timely read.