The Addict as Modern Prophet

Kent Dunnington (Addiction and Virtue) observes that what Peter Berger called “the heretical imperative” sharpens questions about the “right ordering of the goods and activities of our lives.” Our diverse world doesn’t direct us to any particular ends; it deliberately refuses to do so. As a result, “ours . . . is a culture in which the decision to pursue one way of life at the expense of others can only be understood as an arbitrary choice, an existential assertion of the self in the absence of any ultimate rationale. Modern persons no longer know what to do because they know all too well how many things they could do” (108-9).

Addictions, he argues, are unsurprising outcomes, since “the lure of addiction increases to the extent that we lack other intelligible means of ordering our lives” (105).

More elaborately, “Addiction enacts a backlash against the notion of a self who consumes by arbitrary fiat of the will whatever seems to provide immediate gratification. Addiction is a sort of rejection of consumerism’s enthronement of the immediate over the teleological. It is true that many addictions begin from a desire to be distracted by immediate gratification. But addiction is addicting rather than merely distracting exactly because it provides the kind of propelling and purposive force that consumerism cannot provide. Consumers buy and sell to distract themselves from a lack of purpose. But addictions find purpose at precisely the moment in which they recognize that, rather than consuming their products by choice, they are instead consumed by those products. Addiction provides what consumers do not believe exists: necessity. Major addiction can therefore be interpreted both as a response to the absence of teleology in modern culture and as a kind of embodied critique of the late capitalist consumerism which this absence has produced” (112).