Current Worldview. Consumer Society and its Spirituality

Abstract

In this article, our objective is not to predict a future that, due to human freedom, is unpredictable, but rather to describe our complex, multiform present, with diverse textures, height and depth, breadth, temporality, and mystery. We therefore attempt to describe only notes of the current worldview, in the part of the global cultural space that integrates Euro-American civilization —of which we are a part— particularly the mediation between the idea of man, which Marcuse called one-dimensional, and the idea of the absolute in which it is valued: technology. Our Euro-American civilization today is a civilization of desire, governed by technology, individuality—with validation by the tribe/hive—and consumption as predominant values. Needs have been replaced by desires, and desires can never be fully satisfied by finite goods, since it is constitutive of human desire to always leave a debt uncovered. The novelty of our time is that it can be renewed by planned obsolescence and expanded by marketing. In an inconsequential worldview, not only because of the closed vision of history left by the secularism of the second Modernity, but also because of its interpersonal inconsequentiality, anthropological fullness is not evident as such, but its effect is observed, a factual spiritual anxiety, a debt. Thus, an epochal interregnum developed in which the most has been written and spoken about man, and paradoxically, also the period in human history of massive, industrial, and merciless violations of human rights, of the deepest anguish regarding one’s identity and destiny, and in which there was a determination not to accept the whole of man, nor all men. The transposition of the religious to the political during the first half of the 20th century (Stalinism, Fascism, and Nazism) and the failure of real (Soviet) socialism did not entail significant questioning. What was contradictory in the Enlightenment became parallel from the second half of the 20th century onwards: The inconsequential individualism of mere action, pure becoming, the mutable logos, and change as the only security is growing. But with an emancipated individuality, no longer seen as the fruit of close ties in public freedom, but rather in the Olympus of the tribe/hive/social monad and consumption. Man, a “thing” among things, loses his place in nature/creation, the unity, harmony, and hierarchy of his own being. He becomes the arena of a struggle of opposites vying for supremacy over others and the expression of their full autonomy.