Cavanaugh on Multiculturalism and Capitalism

"Are we left to conclude, therefore, that globalization is the realization of both greater universality and greater particularity? In a sense, this is an accurate way of expressing it...However, I think that, if we examine it more closely, such an apparently happy synthesis of the universal and the particular is misleading. There is no question that the new economy has produced an abundance of goods for those who can afford to purchase them. But difference in globalization is largely a surface difference. The sheer abundance of difference, the very variety and speed with which differences are produced, mandates that no difference be sufficiently different to constitute a true departure from the same. Any difference is on the surface and is ultimately dispensable. This applies not only to products but to traditions, cultures, religions, and self-identities of all kinds.

If we examine multiculturalism, for example, it becomes apparent that the true battle lines in this culture war are not the diversity of global cultures versus the sameness and hegemony of Western civilization. Both sides are wrong. Multiculturalism is more accurately described as a rival unity, a rival hegemony. Beyond simple and laudable attempts to include those who are different in our institutions, multiculturalism as an ideology is in fact postcultural or anticultural: it subjects every culture to the withering hegemony of cultural relativism and individual choice. As Christopher Clausen observes, 'Twentieth century America is a graveyard of cultures.' The melting pot is where cultures come to die, where bagpipes and haggis are traded for Britney Spears and Big Macs, unless one chooses consciously to retain elements of the past. To make a tradition the subject of choice, however, is to kill it as a tradition. Any claim a particular cultural or religious tradition might make on the individual is threatened by the overriding imperative of choice. The result is what Clausen appropriately labels 'mass individualism': the more we celebrate our differences for their own sake, the more similar we become...

This homogeneity is not just a matter of corporate culture but culture in general. Globalization is an aesthetic, a way of seeing the world, of reading its images and signs. Fredric Jameson is right, I think, to call postmodernism the 'cultural logic of late capitalism,' because in both it is the surface image that counts. In globalized capitalism, exchange value has overcome use value, and what is desired is desire itself. Postmodernism also trumpets the vacuity of signs, such that the signifier refers only to other signifiers, not to the signified. According to Jameson, postmodernism is a leap in what Walter Benjamin called the 'aestheticization' of reality, the cutting loose of representations from what they represent. 'Postmodernism is the consumption of sheer commodification as a process.' Andy Warold captured this depthlessness of signs in his Campbell soup-can art. As Jameson observes, Warhold's art should be a powerful political critique of commodity fetishism. The fact that it is not makes it postmodern. Now even the critique of commodities has itself become a commodity."


--William T. Cavanaugh Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire (Grand Rapids: Eerdman's Publishing Company, 2008) pp.67-70