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Identities Bought and Sold, Identity Received As Grace IDENTITIES BOUGHT AND SOLD, IDENTITY RECEIVED AS GRACE: A THEOLOGICAL CRITICISM OF AND ALTERNATIVE TO CONSUMERIST UNDERSTANDINGS OF THE SELF By James Burton Fulmer Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Religion December, 2006 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Professor Paul DeHart Professor Douglas Meeks Professor William Franke Professor David Wood Professor Patout Burns ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank all the members of my committee—Professors Paul DeHart, Douglas Meeks, William Franke, David Wood, and Patout Burns—for their support and guidance and for providing me with excellent models of scholarship and mentoring. In particular, I am grateful to Prof. DeHart for his careful, insightful, and challenging feedback throughout the writing process. Without him, I would have produced a dissertation on identity in which my own identity and voice were conspicuously absent. He never tried to control my project but rather always sought to make it more my own. Special thanks also to Prof. Franke for his astute observations and comments and his continual interest in and encouragement of my project. I greatly appreciate the help and support of friends and family. My mom, Arlene Fulmer, was a generous reader and helpful editor. James Sears has been a great friend throughout this process and has always led me to deeper thinking on philosophical and theological matters. Jimmy Barker, David Dault, and Eric Froom provided helpful conversation as well as much-needed breaks. All my colleagues in theology helped with valuable feedback as well. Thanks to my dad and Patsy for their interest and support. I am grateful for the love and friendship of Jeff, Sonja, Adam, Shand, and Emily. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................ii Chapter I...........................................................................................................................1 Consumerism ...........................................................................................3 Identity.....................................................................................................6 Persons and Personae: Playing with Identity .................................8 Bad Faith, the Knight of Faith and the Actor’s Motivation..........14 Borrowed Desires and the Interdividual ......................................20 Conclusion .............................................................................................25 II........................................................................................................................29 Background on Consumerism.................................................................31 The Expansion of Consumerism .................................................33 The Growth of Advertising and Status Symbols..........................42 Consumerism and Freedom....................................................................51 Consumerism and Identity......................................................................59 Conclusion .............................................................................................72 III ......................................................................................................................78 Mimetic Desire.......................................................................................79 Girard, Consumerism, and the Democratization of Desire ......................85 Mimetic Rivalry and the Loss of Self .....................................................89 Insatiable Desire................................................................................... 100 Conclusion ........................................................................................... 110 IV .................................................................................................................... 111 The Case against Comparison............................................................... 112 Despair and the Denial of Self.............................................................. 118 Despair Defined by the Relations of the Constituents of the Self................................................................................. 122 Despair Defined by Consciousness ........................................... 125 The Crowd, Christendom, and Christianity........................................... 133 Conclusion ........................................................................................... 141 V ..................................................................................................................... 144 iii Pride and the Fall of Satan.................................................................... 145 Pride and the Fall of Humankind .......................................................... 147 Wanting Something to Call Their Own ..................................... 148 Wanting to Be God................................................................... 152 Pride, Sin, and Identity.............................................................. 154 Salvation from Pride............................................................................. 162 Salvation from Pride................................................................. 162 Fallenness, Grace, and Charity.................................................. 167 Grace and Identity .................................................................... 173 Conclusion ........................................................................................... 180 VI .................................................................................................................... 183 The Teachers........................................................................................ 185 The Pedagogy: Indirect Communication............................................... 194 The Lesson: What It Means to Be a Human Being before God ............. 200 The Lesson: Compassion and the Imitation of Christ............................ 210 Conclusion ........................................................................................... 221 VII................................................................................................................... 224 Conversion: Recognizing the Model..................................................... 225 Conversion: Turning toward a Different Kind of Model ....................... 231 Conclusion ........................................................................................... 237 VIII.................................................................................................................. 239 Being Human: The Christian and the Consumer ................................... 240 The Sacralization of Consumerism, the Commercialization of Christianity ...................................................................................... 245 Life as Sacrament, Life as Sacrifice, Life as Art ................................... 252 Identity in the Church........................................................................... 264 Eschatological Identity......................................................................... 271 WORKS CITED.............................................................................................. 282 iv CHAPTER I The subject of this dissertation will be the effect of consumerism on identity. It will show that consumerism stunts identity development and will propose Christian compassion or love of the neighbor as an alternative to and a remedy for consumerism. Though it will include psychological, sociological, and philosophical arguments, it will be driven by a theological agenda, focusing on the ways in which consumerism generally and advertising and status symbols in particular result in a confused sense of identity. In the course of this argument, it will also be developing a theological anthropology, making claims not only about consumers but also about human beings as such. Because desire is mimetic as Girard claims, the desires of individuals are not spontaneously their own (indeed contrary to consumer society’s focus on the individual as a choosing monad, Girard speaks of the “interdividual”). Moreover, in a consumer society these desires do not even belong to anyone the consumer knows nor indeed initially to anyone at all. The consumer is imitating a desire that is feigned by a professional model. The idolization of these models and of those who possess the status symbols that one lacks lead to self-condemnation in the name of these idols. The system is structured so that one can in fact never achieve a satisfactory identity through consumption or status for one must always buy or possess the next thing in order to rise to the level of the next model; the system uses growth as the criteria for judging the performance of the economy, and continuous growth depends on these escalating desires that can never be satisfied. Kierkegaard’s entire authorship is concerned with the problem of avoiding these kinds of debilitating comparisons. Certainly such comparisons 1 are criticized in his discussion of the crowd, but a criticism of comparison is also present in the stylistic strategies employed by Kierkegaard. He seeks to leave the reader alone with the ideas presented in his books—free from comparison with their author. He points to the lilies of the field and the birds of air
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