The Metaphysical Promise of the Consumer Society

In a book documenting his travels through the United States, a Frenchman commented that “there is nothing funny about Halloween,” a holiday characterized by an “evil force” and “infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world. . . . There is nothing more unhealthy than this childish sorcery, behind all the dressing up and the presents. . . . And it is no accident that some [adults] stick needles or razor blades into the apples or cookies they hand out to the children.” This screed against Halloween was not written by a prudish religious conservative, but by the atheist sociologist and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard.

Some believe we have arrived at a “horseshoe” moment, where traditionalists are finding common ground with those on the far left of postmodern discourse. Authors in these very pages have drawn on the insights of critical theorists, including Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, highlighting the unexpected ways certain of their ideas overlap with orthodox Christian theology. Religious conservatives should also pay attention to Baudrillard. 

Building on John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1958 The Affluent Society, the rogue French thinker’s 1970 book The Consumer Society (La Société de Consommation) examined the spread of consumerism from the United States and Western Europe to the rest of the world. The book came on the heels of his debut volume The System of Objects, which described how objects in a capitalist system are valued for signifying a certain social status or ideal, rather than for their functions. Products no longer interest us because they fulfill concrete needs, but because the “aura” surrounding them (“the brand”) promises us happiness. Further, they signal to others that we are fulfilled, and thus “worthy.” Though an atheist and nihilist, Baudrillard lamented the loss of the sense of the sacred, exacerbated by the rise of technocratic power and the “consumer society” it spawned. 

Baudrillard was unorthodox for a Marxist theorist, as he is often labeled. He insisted, along with Situationist theorists like Guy Debord and Attila Kotanyi, that capitalism was driven less by production than by consumption. Marx named this dynamic “commodity fetishism.” The separation of the commodity from its capacity to fulfill an actual need is propelled by magical thinking: If I purchase this white T-shirt with the label “Supreme,” people will associate me with the likes of Drake and Justin Bieber. I will be transported out of the monotony of my boring, everyday life. The fact that I can buy a white T-shirt of equal or better quality for $140 less is inconsequential. 

Thus the appeal of accumulating consumer goods is fueled by the “myth of well-being.” I will be happy once I acquire x item or experience. For Baudrillard, the “sin” of consumer capitalism is not material in nature, as most Marxists and liberal reformists would hold. The consumer society is driven by a fundamentally metaphysical promise. The ideal of consuming ephemera has replaced the ideal of pursuing lasting relationships or eternal values. 

Consumer objects are divinized insofar as they appeal to the desire to transcend our mundane, earthly needs. Yet Baudrillard is not naive about the “inverted”—he dares to say “diabolical”—nature of this transcendence. Accordingly, “just as the gods of all countries coexisted syncretically in the Roman Pantheon in an immense ‘digest,’ so all the gods—or demons—of consumption have come together in our Super Shopping Centre” where we participate in a “formal liturgy of the object.”

Well-being is predicated on an aspirational dynamic fueled by dissatisfaction: As soon as we acquire the Supreme T-shirt, we see Travis Scott wearing Mikimoto pearls, and we’re back to square one. “Real poverty,” Baudrillard claims, “is a myth.” It cannot be found “in the slums or in the shanty-towns, but in the socio-economic structure.” Poverty is “psychological in nature.” When we buy a given product, we aren’t fulfilling a material need. We are buying fulfillment, theosis. The system is sustained by the internal restlessness Augustine diagnosed, which is masked by the allure of growth and accumulation. 

So what are we to do? For Baudrillard, a pessimist by temperament, there wasn’t much that could be done. He was highly critical of “material” attempts (both revolutionary and liberal) to reform the system. While one can redistribute wealth fairly in the manner proposed by Galbraith, inequality remains intrinsic to the system because needs are no longer principally material but psychological and spiritual. Further, the real power is held not by the wealthy, but by those who control “knowledge, culture, the structures of responsibility and decision making,” the technocrats who “play God” by deciding which objects indicate one’s “growth” in happiness or well-being.

Baudrillard also dismissed moralistic critiques of consumerism as naive. Such simplistic approaches, whether explicitly religious or liberal humanist, fail to recognize their own formation within the matrix of power and thus can’t effectively challenge the hegemonic elites who control it. The only force that could pose a real threat to those who presume to play God is an act of God himself. 

It is in this totalizing, quasi-theological critique of the metaphysical dimensions of technocratic power that religious thinkers can find themselves agreeing with Baudrillard’s end of the horseshoe. But for solutions, we should turn to another thinker who engaged seriously with Galbraith’s work on the affluent society: the Italian political philosopher Augusto Del Noce. 

A devout Catholic and Thomist, Del Noce focused on the affluent society as it had manifested in Italy in the postwar era. The West, he asserted, swapped out the “vertical” ideal of “beatitude” (unity with God) for the “horizontal” ideal of material “well-being.” Commercial corporations, mass media, and the state have conditioned us to assess value by a transactional (or “technical”) criterion: Objects (including people) are good, not in themselves, but only insofar as they help us to acquire more wealth and comfort.

Del Noce lauded the young soixante-huitards’ rejection of the bourgeois, consumerist ideals of the technocratic hegemony. Yet he regarded their effort to destroy all “oppressive” forces, which falsely conflated Christian traditional values with those of bourgeois society, to be a “tragic miscalculation” that ushered in the “final bourgeois revolution.” With no transcendent bulwark to counter technocratic power, the commodification of the human person is inevitable. Del Noce also critiqued reactionaries (“traditionalists” and “integralists”) who gave into the delusion that they could return to an age before the affluent society. Though he advocated for Christian Democracy (and ran for office on Italy’s Democrazia Cristiana ticket), he understood that the only reliable force of change would come from something much more powerful than human strength: true metanoia, the conversion of mind and heart.

Del Noce’s thought developed in dialogue with that of the Milanese priest and leader of the Communion and Liberation lay movement Luigi Giussani, whose body of work served as a spiritual counterpart to Del Noce’s philosophy. To Giussani, the fulfillment of the heart’s infinite desire for beauty, love, justice, and happiness was born of an encounter with Jesus—the Infinite in the flesh—who makes himself present in one’s life through Christian community. Giussani was adamant about distinguishing “the Christian claim” from the various warring ideologies that dominated Italy’s cultural scene in the 1950s: fascism, communism, and bourgeois liberalism. He feared that as Italy moved further away from fascism and communism, the spread of liberal individualism posed a more sinister, covert threat. 

The idea that freedom consists in doing as one wills is a dead end. As finite beings, we don’t possess the means to fulfill ourselves. Moreover, our desires and actions are easily influenced by “abstract” powers (bureaucratic and corporate entities). “Either we depend upon the flux of our material antecedents, and are consequently slaves of the powers that be,” he claimed, “or we depend upon What lies at the origin of the movement of all things, beyond them, which is to say, God.” 

Giussani was less interested in creating a new political order that privileged Christian morals than he was in fostering a revolution of the “I,” whose locus of change was the heart. We can only be freed from our slavery to the “system of objects” if our relationship with them changes not on a merely “political” or “moral” level, but on an “ontological” one. 

The overlap between Baudrillard and these Christian thinkers is apparent. What are we to make of the fact that he couldn’t bring himself to hope in God’s grace? His atheism was less an ideological position than a result of his defeatist attitude. “God is not dead,” Baudrillard insists. But even if he exists, his grace is inaccessible to us because “he has become hyperreal.” He precludes the possibility of God entering “the matrix,” as “salvation by grace is unattainable . . . this frenzy, this berserk world of knick-knacks, gadgets, fetishes, all of which seek to mark out a value for all eternity,” convinces us that salvation is only attainable by human strength, which is concentrated into the hands of a select few.

Baudrillard’s insistence that escape is impossible should not be dismissed as the groaning of a defeated nihilist, but heeded as the cry of an apocalyptic prophet. Acknowledging consumer society’s comprehensive reign over our bodies, minds, and souls, and the concomitant futility of human efforts at resistance, should incite us to look to the One who alone can free us from our shackles.

Stephen G. Adubato writes from New York City. Follow him on Twitter @stephengadubato.

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