Homo Phagon: Are We Nothing But Consumers?

I’m going to blame our dear friends for talking us into the Italy/Greece cruise vacation. That’s not entirely fair—we were easily persuaded—but like Chad Pierce, I feel guilty about going on a vacation while the world burns. Still, after reading and teaching classical and Renaissance literature all my life, I did want to see Italy and Greece just once in my life, and this was my chance.

Ron and I had a wonderful time with our friends, saw incredible sights, visited world-class museums. I would say the cruise itself, however, was… OK. If you love cruises, no judgment from me. But it’s not my thing. Lovely as our sedate Holland America ship was, I started to feel like a caged animal on it. And something else bothered me, too, and it took me a while to figure out what it was.   

One of our ports of call was Kotor, Montenegro. Before the ship glided into the fjord-like Bay of Kotor, I was not entirely sure what Montenegro even was. Is it a region? A country? It’s in Europe, I guess? Yes, it’s a country. With a “rich history,” of course—the bland claim about all the ports we visited.

In Kotor, three of us decided to hike the “Ladder of Kotor,” a zig-zagging, “challenging” hike up the mountain overlooking the bay, 70-some switchbacks with an elevation gain of 3000 feet. You can imagine three late-middle-age puffers trudging steadily up the rocky trail. As we sweated along, I felt a quiet little joy. It wasn’t just the views. What was going on? I realized: I am most comfortable in life walking uphill with a pack on my back. I’m speaking metaphorically. But literally is great, too.

Contrast hiking uphill, then, with life on the ship, where all the guests on board had paid good money to do nothing but consume. Yes, I’m talking about the food (and the drinks—eesh!). But also, the whole experience is an exercise in choosing your preferences and then consuming them. We consume food, entertainment, experiences, we do nothing for ourselves. You lie by the pool and a friendly waiter comes by to offer you drinks. You “dine out” at your choice of dining spots on the ship, where you can choose from a three-course menu with rich desserts at every meal. You have nothing to do all day but consume the entertaining options provided for you, from trivia (we cleaned up!) to dance shows to watercolor classes to gambling (we did none of that). In the ports, you choose from a menu of tourist experiences, which you then merely consume, carried along in coaches and herded like sheep by a hired tour guide. These places have a “rich history” all right, which you will hear two or three things about. These towns are people’s homes, of course. Yet as you’re strolling around, it seems as if the “locals” are there to provide “quaint” experiences and pretty views for you.

I suppose normal people consider this the ideal vacation: you do not work, you produce nothing. You just see stuff and eat and “enjoy.” Cruising is consuming distilled to its essence. Why couldn’t I get into the spirit of that? Relax, you dummy!

I tried, and sometimes succeeded, but I was haunted. While trudging up that mountain (it was a long hike—I had many thoughts), I kept thinking about one of my doctoral students’ thesis projects. In partnership with a congregation, Betsy managed to grow heirloom wheat and bake it into bread for communion. The idea was to challenge the fact that the very elements we use for the sacraments have become mass-produced consumer products, whether it’s bakery bread or those little wafers. Did you know that 80% of the communion wafers “consumed” in the US Catholic “market” are made by one company, a company that boasts their wafers remain “untouched by human hands”? How ironic, when the liturgy calls for the priest to raise the elements and say “the fruit of the earth and the work of human hands.” What would it be like, Betsy wondered, if when we raise the elements for communion, the elements were indeed the work of human hands, and those human hands were… our own?

Thanks to Betsy’s thesis, I’ve wondered more about how agribusiness and a consumer economy truncate our agency as producers. We become passive and, in a way, helpless. This helplessness, which we usually think of as ease or convenience, has become more distasteful and worrisome to me. I’m not ready to become a homesteader, but I do worry. We are becoming merely homo phagon—humans who consume, from the Greek phagein, to devour. We are all mouth.

When we arrived home from our vacation, a new book was waiting for me: sociologist Christian Smith’s Why Religion Went Obsolete. Hoo boy, this book is a page-turner. (I’m tempted to say I devoured it, but never mind.) Smith’s thesis is that in America, traditional religion (which he defines carefully) is now obsolete (which he also defines carefully) not because of some secular conspiracy or the evils of university professors, but because of huge cultural shifts that have nothing to do with religion. Well, also because of religion’s failures, mostly scandals. But economic shifts, the digital revolution, a loss of trust in institutions, the rise of “expressive individualism,” and more, have formed Americans in post-Boomer generations to imagine themselves and the world differently from previous generations, creating profound “cultural mismatch” with traditional religious forms.

Note: Every church leader and educator should read this book.  

To explain the economic factors at play, Smith describes the post-World War II economic boom and the rise of the advertising industry, which he calls the “evangelistic arm of capitalism deployed on apostolic mission”:

In its hugely successful campaign to sell ever-growing quantities of goods, the advertising industry transformed popular culture so that life was understood to be centrally about shopping for, buying, consuming, and discarding mass-manufactured products.

The result is that Americans developed a different anthropology:

More fundamentally, this revolution redefined persons not primarily as citizens or Presbyterians or proud family farmers but as consumers: perpetually hungry creatures out to satiate their appetites through the acquisition of products purchased on the market.

Later he describes the “impasse” between religion and a neoliberal economic worldview, in which we are all “atomistic” individuals jostling in a marketplace to get the goods and services we want. All traditional religions, he writes,

despite their vast theological differences, would agree that the neoliberal view is not only wrong but also delusional. For traditional American religions, humans are divinely dependent and socially interdependent creatures who inhabit a morally significant universe in which they are on a quest to realize, with divine aid, their spiritually and morally higher selves, the aim of which is to enjoy flourishing lives in communities of peace and love that reside under the governing care and judgement of God.

Yep. That about sums it up. Meanwhile, neoliberalism reduces us to “efficient producer, rational exchanger, and desiring consumer.”

So I suppose, on that cruise, I was experiencing a fundamental existential dissonance between homo religiosus and homo phagon. Or something like that.

One lovely evening on the cruise, we were waddling back to our staterooms after dinner, and we passed the professional photographer with her pop-up studio ready to take photos of guests. Why not? We were all dressed up anyway. We hesitated for a moment, though: the fake backdrop she had prepared for the evening depicted—get this—the grand staircase from the Titanic.

“Hey, um, that’s the Titanic,” I observed. “Isn’t that kind of a bad omen?”

“Don’t overthink it,” she replied.

Too late, lady. Too late.