Finished reading: Being Consumed by William T. Cavanaugh 📚

So straight-forward and insightful. I figured before reading Cavanaugh’s new one I would read this little guy (100 pages), sitting on the shelf for who-knows-how-long. If I were a teacher and had students reading Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism, I would have them follow it up with this one for two reasons:

1. While I thoroughly endorse Zuboff’s book, I was disappointed by the scarcity of light, which Cavanaugh does not lack and which he points more convincingly and specifically toward.

2. While Zuboff’s is something of a tour de force, the gist of her argument is old — we have known and been collectively inexcusable for way too much and for way too long. Cavanaugh’s contains, in far fewer pages and in much simpler terms, the essential diagnosis — and it was written a decade earlier.

As Zuboff is at pains to communicate, the “free market” — to say nothing about the surveilled, manipulated and manipulating one — relies on our ignorance. (And we should add, it relies on a large amount of acedia.) Cavanaugh is at pains to say that we are usually asking the wrong question, and by doing so we also avoid the correct answers. The question is not “Is the market free?” but when and to what end?

“The crucial question is: When is a market free? In other words, how can we judge when any particular transaction is free? I reject the idea that a transaction is free just because it is not subject to state intervention or any other form of external coercion. We must give a fuller, more positive, account of freedom.”

Ultimately, in the economy that we face every single day, we have a choice about how we will relate to the world, to the things and the people in it, both the ones we see and the ones that we do not see. “Things do not have personalities of there own,” Cavanaugh writes, “but they are embedded in relationships of production and distribution that bring us into contact, for better or worse, with other people’s lives.”

In a very important sense, then — and especially for those of us who believe that every single person is made in the image of God, that all bring not only to “the market” but to the table of life, the communio personarum, their own inviolable experience with God — it does not matter if that contact is made in person or made through the disguise of “the market.” Whether it is a cashier across the checkout counter or a mango lady in Haiti, in each case, we participate in a human communion that requires more of us than an empty, rationalizing slogan called “free.”