Rain and the Rhinoceros

If a Catholic cannot feel confident in a time of globalization, what is the point in bearing the name ‘Catholic,’ which is another name for global? (The imperative for globalization began with the commission ‘Go preach the gospels to all nations,’ which turned Christianity away from being the religion of one tribe or one people only, and commanded it to see the whole human race as one people of God.) Globalization is the natural ecology of the Catholic faith.

Michael Novak, “Catholic Social Teaching, Markets, and the Poor,” in Doug Bandow and David Schindler, Wealth, Poverty, and Human Destiny (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2003) 56.

It is common in American liberal culture to find an appreciation for “the great world religions.” The “enlightened” of our culture (i.e. those disciplined by our university system) realize that to progress as a society, to achieve the world peace for which we all seek, we must learn to “appreciate” the diversity of cultures and religions of our world. This is perhaps most evident in the American desire to travel the world. In order to become “well-rounded” we must travel to see and experience other cultures. Almost all American universities offer “travel abroad” programs in order to expose us to the diversity of life on earth, so that we can become better human beings. Sadly, the selling point of many times church “mission trips” is the chance to travel the world and experience other cultures.
Of course, in some ways globalization offers us the “experience” of other cultures right in our own neighborhood. For instance, we experience what appears to us as Latin America every time we eat at Taco Bell. Or, in urban areas we have access to “authentic” cultures -we can visit China town, etc. and experience a form of China.

So, it seems that, provided we have money, globalization has given us access to the world. “We have,” to recall the old song, “the whole world in our hands.”
And so we do Yoga Thursdays, we eat sushi on Fridays, and buy Amish furniture on the internet on the weekends. Of course, those who have the most money have the ability to travel and experience the real of what Taco Bell attempts to simulate for us. There is a deep sense in which Taco Bell does not offer us enough and so we must travel.

Recently my wife astutely commented to me, “Why do rich people always have Buddhas all over their homes?” Of course, it is not all that uncommon to have a Buddha statue placed near an Eastern Orthodox icon, for instance.

Global capitalism offers us nothing less than the freedom to consume the world. It is often said that the problem with global capitalism is that this “freedom” is only offered to those of us with “capital.” There is, of course, much to truth to this. However, with the expansion of the free market to all the ends of the earth, more and more people (even the poor) have access to other cultures, in the form of a Taco Bell or a Starbucks.

Global capitalism gives us the freedom to consume the particular and then if we are savvy we find ways to commodify, to project, our digested experience onto the world. Global capitalism thus marks the obliteration, the flattening out, the annihilation of the particular, the local, the cultural. In its place it creates a new universal language that is built on an ethic of consumption that drives out old forms for new forms.

Global capitalism is nothing less than an all out war against all particularity. Thus it is the new universal; it is the new global God.

One of our great faculty members in the Department of Theology at St. Thomas, William T. Cavanaugh, was recently interviewed by The Other Journal. Check out the interview here.