Random thoughts regarding popes and consumption...

Pope Benedict XYZ has joined the troupe of pontificating public figures to lash out at consumer culture. Speaking at a formal address before tens of thousands of young Australian Roman Catholics, the Holy One warned that natural resources were being squandered and that people were worshipping false idols in the form of iPods, expensive clothing, and other materialist items that they don't really need.

"Our world has grown weary of greed, exploitation and division, of the tedium of false idols and piecemeal responses, and the pain of false promises," he told the crowd. Last week ginger fashion designer Vivienne Westwood went along similar lines by telling consumers that they need to stop buying so much crap. So does the current trend for materialist backlash suggest that our days beneath a duracell sunshine are about to reach their sordid conclusion?

Most signs seem to point to there being a slight shift in the way that the public are attempting to relate to our culture of consumption. Recent revelations that the sale of seeds has increased tenfold, for example, demonstrate that, along with the trends for people to make their own clothes and to start recycling more, there is a new conscious effort on behalf of many of us to stop purchasing things that are made for us and instead concentrate on those things that are made by us. But why?

It's interesting that the church has gotten involved with the whole debate, but perhaps that's the key. Materialism is often criticised for the inspid and soulless rudiments of its nature, a direct opposite to the soulful bliss that non-secular thinkers are said to be subject to. And it could be argued that this difference is one that holds the answers to some of the emptiness felt by the average consuming atheist.

Not that we want to come off as sounding like old hippies, but, whether you believe in god or not, a simple act like growing your own vegetables reconnects you with an important part of life on earth that is easy to forget in the ready-made supermarket culture that we've become accustomed to - the cycle of life, a.k.a the act of creation. It reminds you that you're human. That there's more to life than the blemish free but sterile vegetables on our supermarket shelves, and that a good life doesn't have to be perfect.

Perhaps the Pope is just attempting to swing us non-believers over to the light-side with his speech, but it does seem that something is afoot with the way things currently stand. Using drug and alcohol abuse as his examples, the Holy One suggested that the rise in social problems such as these can be attributed to a lack of religious feelings - something that echoes the words of the mythologist Joseph Campbell back in the 1980s.

Campbell, after studying the world's religions, believed that the increase in alcoholism and drug related problems in our modern societys stemmed from young people lacking spiritual experience within a secular society. In his famous interviews with journalist Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, he stated that there would be a time when the world needed a new myth to keep it going. And, if the Pope is to be believed, perhaps now is the time...

Photo: Flickr

Written by Oli Anderson on 17 Jul 2008 11:14 AM. There are 2 comments so far. Permalink