Avoiding materialism

The second myth that must be given up by the Christian is the Stoic overlay that has plagued Christianity since the beginning: that "spiritual" things like thinking or even seeing and hearing (e.g. art and music) are "high" and "material" acts (like sex or eating or clothes or possessions) are somehow "low" and degrading, even if not downright sinful.

This is partly because the Bible contrasts "the spirit" and "the flesh," and, particularly in St. Paul, "the flesh," and "thinking according to the flesh" loses out to "thinking according to the spirit." In the first place, the term that is translated "flesh" occasionally means "meat," as in "when you eat my flesh" (i.e. the meat that is my body), but more often it simply means what we mean by "matter" or "materiality" (i.e. that which is simply not spiritual), and has no connotations of "skin" or sexiness as we now have when we use the term "flesh."

What St. Paul meant by "thinking according to the flesh," then, was thinking in materialistic terms, not taking the spiritual realities of salvation and so on into account; and I think it is a mistake to think that the body, which was also redeemed, is something somehow evil. True, "the flesh" wars against the spirit; we do have a materializing tendency in ourselves; but St. Augustine fought this one out against the Manicheans. Matter and what is material is loved infinitely by God also. There is nothing bad about it in itself.

But this "lowliness" of what is the more material aspect of ourselves leads to a kind of false redemption in the attitude that regards mealtimes, for instance, as truly Christian only when the fact that you are actually eating is ignored in favor of "conversation," and the taste of the food and so on is something not to be mentioned. That there could be such a thing as a symphonic dinner, in which the tastes were precisely arranged for an aesthetic effect is something that would be inconceivable for this type of mentality; to concentrate on the taste of the food as if it could be meaningful in its relation to other tastes is, if not sinful, at least a travesty of spirituality--for this kind of mind, it is "the flesh" and its desires trying to insinuate itself into our lives in the sheep's clothing of art.

The point, of course, is that the Christian, and most especially the Christian layman, has a love for material things, including his own body and its bodily functions, and he respects the material with God's infinite respect; he does not look down on it as "beneath his dignity and high calling as a child of God." There is nothing crass about material possessions; they are extensions of our bodies, by which we can do things that otherwise we cannot do; and so they are to be respected with God's infinite respect also.

Then what is the materialism which is to be avoided if you are truly Christian? As far as the body is concerned, it is the centering on the body and its acts as the display of the importance of the self. The person who is concerned with dress and appearance or physical fitness as a way of being attractive so that others will be attracted or envious is using bodily appearance the way some use the spiritual attributes of learning to enhance his selfhood and give importance to it, either in others' eyes or even just in his own. On the other hand, not having this attitude does not mean that you neglect appearance or physical fitness, any more than not viewing education as a means by which you can look down on others as inferior means that you remain ignorant. It is a question of attitude. The Christian respects his body infinitely, and respects his mind infinitely. He does not neglect his appearance, for two reasons: first, because an unpleasant appearance means that he is to some degree repellent to others, and why do that? Secondly, because this body of ours is our major work of art, the one closest to hand; and why should we treat it as if it were dirt, and do nothing to beautify it? God doesn't mind if we go around with matted hair and dirty nails and a paunch, any more than he minds if we remain ignorant or neglect our yards; but this is not to respect the creation he has given us to work upon.

So the Christian can engage in a physical fitness program with as much fervor as the vainglorious atheist. God gave me this body; and I am going to make of it as beautiful a thing as I can. There is no materialism in this. This body will be with us, resurrected, forever; but the resurrected body, the plant that emerges from the seed we see before us now--as St. Paul says--will be the plant that grows from the seed we have created, and a shriveled seed will eternally be a stunted plant. God will not beautify our resurrected body in spite of us; the body we live with forever will be mediocre or radiant beyond belief insofar as we respect it here and cultivate it out of Christian love for it.

And in this, the Christian spiritualization of things is different from the pagan type of spiritualism. The pagans laughed at St. Paul because he said that the body would return to life and live forever; they believed in eternal life, but only as a spirit, who at last was free of this cage of a body that it had got trapped in.

Now then, to get to the point that is more relevant in our discussion of economics, materialism in possessions comes about when we acquire the possessions just because we have the means--the money--to acquire them, whether we want to do anything with them or not. It is the person without goals who heaps to himself means without ends who is the materialist.

In this, the Christian attitude toward material possessions is connected with the first point I made about goals being finite and our not being infinitely greedy. The goal of any possession is the action you can perform with it. The possession itself does not mean anything except as an extension of your body, another organ, as it were. In fact, the Greek word "organon," from which we get "organ," means "tool"; Aristotle thought of the body as "organic" in the sense that it was a set of tools permitting certain types of activity; and in this he was perfectly right. Possessions extend the organism, and make us able to do more.

Thus, the computer I am now using makes me able to communicate with you, in such a way that I can look at what I am writing and can revise it easily, as well as print it into a pleasant book-like format with no trouble. It enables me to do things as a writer that before I got it were extremely difficult and even impossible. And I look on myself as a writer: I have things to share with vast numbers of people, even after I die; and to do this, I need to have things written down. And I enjoy it; part of my constitution is to be a writer. So the computer makes me more myself.

Am I "tied down" by it, "chained to the machine"? Nonsense. In one sense, I would be lost without it, because I would be lost without the acts it enables me to do so easily and enjoyably. But in another sense, I am not its slave; it is mine. Similar with my car, which I also love. It moves me from place to place in a comfort inconceivable by kings two centuries ago, with whole symphony orchestras playing just exactly what I choose while I am at it--something Elizabeth I couldn't have; she only had Handel and the court musicians to play for her on her trips down the Thames. I can have Handel or Wagner and played by the New York Philharmonic or the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. As I drive and watch the scenery, I have the world of auditory art to comfort me. This is to be a slave of the machine? This is materialism? Even my traveling leads me to goals which are more than just the physical location I am headed for.

Now of course, I could do this sort of thing if I just rented a car and didn't own one. But ownership of the car allows me to do it when and in the way in which it is most convenient for me. The shape of the car expresses my esthetic idea of what motion, to me, means; the accessories and so on in the car enable me to do the kinds of things I want to do when I am engaged in this activity of traveling. Similarly, using the College's computer could be done; but then I would not necessarily be able to write when I had the time, or when the ideas came to me. Having three computers, as in fact I do, enables me to use my computer in my office in school, and also when I get home; and at the same time, it allows my wife to be using the computer at the time I am using mine. She uses hers rather less than I do; but she finds it extremely helpful to what she is doing (for, I might say, reasons considerably different from mine); and so it makes sense to have several computers.

What is the difference between this sort of thing and materialism? It is materialism to buy a computer because "this is what one does" when one reaches a certain income level. What the computer can do for you is secondary. Very often, having bought it--and usually "the best" one too--you have spent so much money for it that you regret having it sit around idle, and you try to find a use for it. So you play games on it, or spend hours figuring out how to keep your tax records on it, and when it comes to the crunch, you get out your pencil and paper and do the whole thing the old way anyhow. This is materialism; making the means the end, or even having the means define for you an end that you never had beforehand.

This is not to say that the materialistic attitude cannot lead to self-expansion. There are many, perhaps, who have bought computers without any idea of what to use them for who then became fascinated with them and learned all sorts of things, and found their lives greatly enriched. But this is by accident; it is the act of one who does not have goals, and is letting chance determine what his reality is to be.

But the Christian has some fairly good idea of what he is; and so he has a reasonable idea of what actions he wants to perform: he has goals. These goals, then, imply certain means toward their realization; and these means involve using and even often owning parts of the material world. The Christian then can figure out what he should own, and how much of it in order to be able to pursue the goals he is interested in.

For instance, I happen to be interested in music in a rather serious way. I love classical music, and I can hear differences in different performances, and recognize that they mean different things. I can also hear when something is off pitch or off tempo, and so on. People standing around the piano "having a good time singing" are a source of distinct distress to me; I hate to hear even bad music ruined; and I cannot stand to participate in it. On the other hand, it is an act that I consider very proper to myself to be able actually to participate in producing good music well: to make the composer's meaning come through to people.

For this reason, I belong to Cincinnati's May Festival Chorus, and spend Monday nights during the year rehearsing Brahms and Verdi and Mahler and Haydn, until the final two weeks when Leonard Bernstein or Claus Tenstedt or some other famous conductor comes to lead us in performance--many of which are quite good, and some of which have been great. The chorus is a means by which I can make a contribution that is in me to make, but which I certainly can't do by myself. It is my instrument, if you will.

(I have a confession to make. Since I originally wrote this--I am revising in 2004--I had an audition for the chorus, which instead of just "pass/fail" gave me a grade. And though I passed, my grade on vocal production was so low that I thought, "Mendelson doesn't deserve this," and I quit. It wasn't worth it to be just a body increasing the volume level but not making a positive contribution.)

But I also own fairly high fidelity sound equipment in my house, enhanced just a few days before this writing by a compact disk player. The appreciation of music as well as the production of it is part of my reality; and it makes sense for me to have rather expensive equipment, because the hiss and buzz and distortion of the cheap equipment is something that destroys the aesthetic effect for me.

But for someone who likes to listen to pop music, and for whom the difference, say, between FM radio sound and AM sound--as long as the latter is decent--is of no consequence, then owning a super-high-fi stereo system is materialism. The difference between what the expensive equipment can do for him and what the cheap one can do is nil; in either case, he can hear the music he wants and can appreciate it as fully as he is interested in.

When this kind of person buys very expensive equipment, then he is faced with the nuisance of all those knobs and equalizers and balances and adjustments to the tweeters of his speakers and so on; and it is very apt to be the case that he doesn't bother studying the manual that comes with the system, and just leaves all the knobs wherever they happen to be, and finds that the sound is even less satisfactory than the little set he had when he was poor and couldn't afford anything this grandiose. This is to be the slave of machinery.

This sort of person doesn't know what he wants to do, and so the machine or the possession isn't a means toward an end; it is there, forcing him often to act in a way he wishes he didn't have to act.

Or suppose he subscribes to cable television. Why? Does he do it because he wants a clear picture, or because there is some channel like the news channel that he can get with the cable that he can't get without it? Or does he subscribe just because it is "better" and then find that he can get three NBC stations now instead of one; and all with perfect clarity showing the same program at the same time. Or he can get the Movie Channel, and watch movies; but he isn't particularly interested in which ones; and you can watch movies without having cable. He sits in front of the TV for hours, and just has it on without even paying attention to the program guide; he is watching the program (if you can even call it "watching," because he is distracted most of the time) he is watching because it happens to be on, and there is no particular reason for tuning in a different channel. The means is determining the activity. This is materialism.

On the other hand, one who subscribes to cable television for a definite reason is not being materialistic; he knows what activity it enables him to do, and he ignores the other acts that are irrelevant to his purposes and uses it for the purpose for which he subscribed to it.

There is nothing wrong, in other words, in surrounding yourself with material possessions, if you know what you are going to do with them; if you have the goal beforehand, and they enable you to reach that goal. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in his Divine Milieu, has a beautiful chapter about the spiritual value of the material, which is what essentially I am driving at--and which is, as I recall, where I got the idea. This is the redemption of possessions; they are subsumed under the eternal goals you have for yourself; and in that sense you will take them with you as your eternal milieu.

I suppose this is the place also to talk about how the Christian deals with the possessions, particular the technological ones, he owns.

There are those who are so afraid of being slaves to machinery that they never learn to submit to the machinery; they resent having to study it and learn how to use it; and the result is--especially with complicated machinery like computers or stereo sets--they break it, and then complain how things aren't made the way they used to be. As a matter of fact, they aren't; they're made considerably better. With the old radios, the tubes would burn out; new radios will last practically forever. The old cars--yes, those well-built old cars--were really old when they'd been fifty or sixty thousand miles, and would need ring jobs and valve jobs and transmission overhauls long before a hundred thousand miles was reached, by which time they'd be a piece of junk. Now a hundred thousand miles is middle age for a car that is reasonably well taken care of. No "they don't make 'em the way they used to" is the excuse of the person who has no respect for the exceedingly complex assistant he has acquired, and wants to be its master and make it do his will simply by telling it what to do.

But the Christian has God's infinite respect for his material universe. He will submit to the reality of the machine; he will study it and learn what it does, and how it "wants" to do it; and he will cooperate with it, so that both together can do what the machine does. And what the machine does is, of course, the means toward the goal that the owner wants to achieve. He and the machine together cooperate to achieve this goal. The Christian is not so enamored of his own "dignity" that he cannot submit to a set of silicon chips and work their way while he is using them. He respects his machine; he loves it infinitely.

And, of course, this respect enables him to dominate the machine. Knowing what it can do, knowing all of its possibilities, he can pick out the course of action that will do most closely what he wants most quickly and easily. The machine becomes truly his tool, an extension of his hands and of his mind. It is by submission that we control the material world. It will do what we want, but it will do it only in its own way; if we want it to do what we want, but in our way, it will baulk. To treat the material world of machines as slaves to be forced into service is not God's respect for the world of technology.

Technology, in other words, can be redeemed by the Christian; there is nothing evil about it; but it too is fallen, and can lead us into materialism and slavery to our possessions. But when we learn to submit to them and cooperate with them, then they can be beautiful, and our own lives and those around us can be enhanced beyond measure. Why should we give up this humanization and spiritualization of our lives, just because it is machinery and not "natural," as if only the "natural" is divine?

Putting together, then, what has been said on these two main points, the Christian will have a fairly good idea of what his reality means in terms of actions; and this life style of his can then be assessed in terms of what he needs in order to live in the way he has set for himself; and this in turn will give him an idea of how much money he will need to be able to afford these means.

Therefore, the Christian will have a fairly accurate notion of the income level that is "his" as a Christian living in this world; and money above that level is not something that is of interest to him; and in this way, he will avoid a second aspect of materialism: that the amount of money one can acquire somehow defines one's "worth."