Volume LIV, No. 8
April, 2001
Affluenza, According to the Times:
A Magazine Review
Joseph E. Mulligan, S.J.
IN THIS ISSUE
Analyzing a single issue of a Sunday supplement magazine, Joseph Mulligan reflects on the disease of "affluenza," its epidemic and its impact on those who immerse themselves in service to the poor.
The first six pages of The New York Times Magazine (Oct. 15, 2000) display ads featuring Ralph Lauren suits which "signify personal achievement and great style," not just the mere money required to buy them. Such apparel is not touted to project the owner's material superiority over his neighbor but "conveys confidence and strong character."
These and other ads exemplify the entire content of this special issue of the Magazine, which bears the title "Spending: How Americans Part With Their Money." A Saks ad offers: "Real Life. Real Women. Real Clothes," while Fidelity pictures a fifty-ish gentleman asserting "I will not underestimate the amount I'll need to retire comfortably."
In an interview Ivana Trump notes that the one thing she has bought which has given her the most pleasure "is probably the yacht," explaining: "I adore the boat for one reason. If you own a house—and I own a lot of homes—you just sit and you go left and right and you go take your car and drive somewhere. But on the boat you are in St. Tropez, an hour later you are in Monte Carlo. So it gives you tremendous freedom."
Who said there are no gods to adore any more? And this tempting one on water, an "inordinate attachment," as St. Ignatius of Loyola would say (or an addiction in modern terms), pretends to liberate the buyer to do this or that, go here or there. Freedom as detachment from self and things in order to love and serve is not on sale in these Times' pages.
Nevertheless, there is an occasional nod to social responsibility, at least as some millionaires' antidote to the boredom which is part of the "sudden-wealth syndrome" also described in the Magazine. In an investment house ad a thirty-ish woman, with eyes looking up, is said to have "changed careers 3 times before starting own business; made more money in 1st year
than prior bosses combined; never missed a little league game; launched a career counseling program for inner-city teens; what next?" What kind of counseling, based on what values?
An Indianapolis attorney who decided to challenge Sen. Richard Lugar was advised by his media consultant: Raise money; it makes you look like a serious candidate, thereby allowing you to raise still more money.
A special advertising supplement on "Luxury Travel" tells of a Caribbean villa whose butler "once worked for the royal family of the Netherlands" and whose opening rate is $2,250 a day (three-day minimum), including "cuisine and selected spirits." In New York the luxury traveler may wish to check out the chic Tribeca Grand Hotel where suites start at $649 and may also wish to "ask about the Sex in the City package, each with a personalized weekend agenda." At W Hotels your concierge will perform almost any service, including filling the bathtub with champagne at a tab of $3,000.
Returning home, the luxury travelers can tell their friends about their historic Dutch butler, their personalized weekend, or their tub of champagne; but they have really gotten a bad deal for their money. They probably got to know no real natives or the history, culture, or economics of the place. Been there, done that.
Crass materialism and consumption is not presented as an unqualified good. Some of the authors deal with the topic in a more nuanced way, acknowledging some questions and anxieties which lurk in the Big Spenders' hearts and minds. In the end, however, there is general acquiescence to what Jesuit theologian Walter J. Burghardt calls "idolizing the mighty dollar and the almighty me."
In "Investing is the New Spending," writer Jeff Turrentine brings us up to date on the new mores of the young super-rich. "Conspicuous equity seems to have supplanted conspicuous consumption as the most effective means of broadcasting your wealth and status." A small but significant group of young and successful individuals are deferring their purchases of cars, homes, and especially luxury items, "deciding to keep their dollars in the market, where they can generate even more purchasing power in the future."
This new breed, which looks forward to retiring perhaps at 40, is not rejecting the accumulation of money, just strategizing to get more of it in the future.
A young law student put it this way: "Your investment in the market reflects your status. One, it reflects your intelligence, and two, it reflects how connected you are. It's not about being invited to one of Mr. and Mrs. Astor's parties anymore; it's how many people you know in really good start-ups."
Intelligence is the technical know-how to make a killing in the market rather than the capacity to understand oneself and life and the world. Connectedness means knowing the up-and-comers so that you can scramble up with them.
A "feeling of connection" is a different matter for Howard Fast, author of Spartacus and many other novels, who reflected in his memoirs: "I don't know of anything in life so satisfying and nourishing as the sense that you are doing what you were put on earth to do, fighting for things you believe, for the poor and the oppressed and against racism. It gives one a feeling of being, of consciousness, and of connection. This connection is very important; if one is an isolated bit of matter on earth, without reason or explanation, then one exists with pain and sorrow."
Writer Turrentine worries for the young investors. How possible will it be for them to achieve their fantasy future? Aside from the danger of a market crash, "what are the odds that, having spent their entire lives in the glow of a computer screen, they will be able to reinvent themselves in middle age as carefree bons vivants?"
A more basic question would be: Is that what it's all about? To retire in middle age to be a carefree bon vivant for the last third of one's life?
Christian commitment to build a more just society and to serve the needy, as well as a genuine holistic education, should preserve us from a middle-age regression to infantile narcissism.
This issue is tackled head-on in "The Disease You'd Love to Have," an article about affluenza or sudden-wealth syndrome, which is described as "a dysfunctional or unhealthy relationship with money or wealth or the pursuit of it." According to one pioneer in this new school of therapy, "in terms of sudden-wealth syndrome, it is when suddenly our clients wake up one morning and they realize they don't have to work again, and after the excitement wears off they're thrust into an early identity crisis. They don't know what to do with their lives anymore."
A colleague added: "They feel that somehow they don't deserve their wealth, because it's inherited or because it's new money that came to them too easily."
Another therapist, a millionaire who founded the Affluenza Project in Milwaukee, thinks that affluenza is "at the base of many of the other isms: alcoholism, shopaholics, gambling addictions. The making of the money is the score card by which they judge their success or failure. And wealth creates its own host of problems—from an inability to delay gratification to a false sense of entitlement to a loss of future motivation."
Sudden-wealth syndrome can trigger depression and anxiety. One therapist's response: "In the worst cases, I had to send someone to a psychiatrist for antianxiety drugs so they could stop the paralysis and move on with their lives and get back into the world and start reconnecting." How about a dose of Howard Fast's version of connecting, or of Viktor Frankl's logotherapy (healing by finding meaning in one's life) as found in his Man's Search for Meaning, or of Jesus' prescription for the rich young man (who went away sad)?
One therapist did show some good common sense in going to the root of a problem presented by a woman of considerable inherited wealth who had never worked a day for pay in her life and who felt anguish about that fact: she was told to get a job.
Some of the troubled rich who come for this kind of therapy are asked: "Do you harbor secret feelings of guilt that you don't deserve the money? Do you find it difficult to form trusting relationships because you are afraid people are after your money?" If the answer to the first question is yes, does the therapist try to assuage the guilt or to help the client to entertain the possibility that the money is indeed not deserved? Regarding the second question, does the therapist recognize the possibility that money (getting it, having it, or wanting it) can be destructive of genuine inter-personal relationships?
"One of the cures of affluenza," according to one counselor, "is a turning away from the self. And if you can take one rich person and divert five million of his or her income to a donation of good will, then you've done a service to the world."
Now we're getting close to some fundamental truths and realities. This counselor acknowledges, however, that many clients are often "quite resistant to looking at money as the culprit."
Even this kind of therapy is part of the profit-making activity described in this special issue. "I think it will become a larger and larger industry," one counselor observed. "Major banks are involved. They know their clients are needing this and wanting this. Financial advisers are calling us; psychiatrists are calling us. I think we are at the very beginning." From the title to this last line, the article situates the entire issue of affluenza, even the therapy that goes with it, comfortably within the framework of the quest for affluence.
Perhaps the saddest story in this magazine is that of a rich young woman. Wendy Spears was just a girl when she visited Cape Cod and looked upon grand houses, fine cars and yachts. "It hits you," she said, "that this is living, and that if you work hard in America, there are so many resources you can use wisely to get what you want." She began to entertain a vision of her "American dream": a house with a white picket fence, a pedigreed dog and a high-performance vehicle. "My happiness is my No. 1 priority," Wendy decided. A marriage didn't work out. Her work as a flight attendant enabled her to get $1,200 worth of shoes. "I love me," she explained, "and I feel like no one else is going to love me like I love me. And sometimes I just give myself something to myself from myself with all my love."
When Wendy set eyes on a Mercedes Benz station wagon, she knew this was it. A voice within was saying: "Buy it, Wendy. Buy it." And it was to that voice that Wendy listened, opening negotiations with, "I want that car!" That voice within had come from without, a hidden persuader and oppressor drilled into her by ads such as the ones which finance the Times magazine. And anyone who thinks she must give objects to herself to feel loved is easy prey.
One entrepreneur who tells her story in the Magazine started up urbanhound.com when she realized that "last year Americans spent an estimated $25 billion on pet supplies, more than they spent on toys for children." Another good angle would be pushing credit cards. "I don't really know what these things cost," said one lady quoted in the Times. "I just give them my credit card and they ring it up." In "The Way We Spend Now," David Brooks cautions: "Don't blame baby boomers for our supposedly profligate habits. It's really their parents, the generation that survived the Depression, who are America's most conspicuous consumers." His critique of the "conventional story beginning with the Great Depression" may or may not be true. Americans in the middle of the 20th century, scarred by deprivation, showed a definite thrift mentality; but now this cohort is "setting new standards for post-retirement consumption." Even if this is true, it does not justify the younger generation's profligate habits. "My parents and grandparents are doing it too" is no excuse. If there are a lot of "gray-haired hedonists" around today, as Brooks seems to relish to point out, they do not validate hedonism as a philosophy of life for others.
Brooks cites tales about "East Hampton millionaires dropping $1.5 million on a pool, companies asking $3 million for a diamond-studded bra. In these stories you can hear the reporter sharpening the sword of justice in the background. The clear subtext is that the rich today don't deserve their bounty and that a terrible day of reckoning soon will be upon them."
The Times article does not deal with the issue of whether or not the rich today deserve their bounty and whether judgment is coming; the sword of justice is deflected supposedly by the author's contention that the older folks have cast aside their old-fashioned thrift and are consuming in modern style. There is no logic here, especially in the face of biblical and traditional arguments against possessing more than we need, exploiting others in order to amass wealth, failing to share the goods of God's earth, serving two masters, etc.
Keeping up with the richer neighbors, or even with those potential neighbors seen on TV or in the classy magazine ads, is presented as a perfectly normal desire in "Why Living in a Rich Society Makes Us Feel Poor" by Robert H. Frank. "Millions of Americans find their own sense of what they need pushed inexorably higher by the rapidly escalating consumption all around them," notes Mr. Frank, not making any distinction between the words "need" and "want." "There are now 590,000 American households worth $5 million or more," he adds. (Another article—about pawnshops— notes that "forty-seven million households in the U.S. have annual incomes below $35,000, and in the event of a layoff or a medical crisis, 40 percent of American families would run out of cash within three days.")
The majority do not need to look to the very top of the ladder to feed their desire to keep up. "H.L. Mencken once defined a wealthy man as one who earns $100 a year more than his wife's sister's husband," Mr. Frank notes Frank was almost liberated from the pressure of created "needs" by his two-year stint as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal, where he lived in a one-room house with a leaky thatched roof and no electricity or plumbing. "At no time, however, did I feel it was unsatisfactory in any way."
But now he is back home: "I could not live in that same house in the U.S., even in the poorest neighborhood, without experiencing a profound sense of humiliation." The author has set himself an extreme example; of course no one, except perhaps the growing numbers of homeless, would want to live in such a house in the U.S. Whether it would be "humiliating," however, depends on one's sense of values, what is important, how to define success in life, etc.
His conclusion goes far beyond his extreme case-example: "The kind of house people feel they need depends on the kind of house that others around them have."
I have worked with many college students who have spent a semester in Nicaragua, living with lower-middle class or working-class families, doing volunteer service in extremely poor neighborhoods, and studying and analyzing the reality they are seeing and feeling all around them. I am also associated with college grads who come to Nicaragua for two years of service to the poor, living in Christian community.
These young adults are very talented and are high achievers. Here, they "fall in love" with the poor; their hearts are broken (open) by the malnourished children, the majority of people who are unemployed, the sick poor who cannot receive adequate medical care. And yet these victims of society receive the young Americans with care and gratitude and become permanent pieces of the visitors' hearts.
Returning to the U.S., the youngsters find it hard to fall back into a "normal" college routine. They do pursue their studies, but now with deep motivation to learn and to develop skills for the service of others and the promotion of justice. Many return to Latin America to work; many dedicate themselves to the victims of society in the U.S.
While they would not want to live under a leaky thatched roof, they would never say that such a dwelling would be "humiliating," nor would they subscribe to the criterion that what you need depends on what others around you have. While they may have to face quizzical parents, peers and even professors and priests, they are grateful that they are moving ahead on a path in life which seems to promise inner peace, joy, and satisfaction in a way which the allurements of our individualistic culture do not.
Moreover, they are free to be by themselves and with themselves at times, capable of turning off the TV, logging out for a while, skipping that beer, stopping the perpetual motion. Since they are searching for meaning and purpose in life, they do not have to be afraid of the big questions, "hiding out, dreading that love which summons us, summons us when all is said, to become ourselves," as Dan Berrigan put it in a meditation on one of the psalms (Uncommon Prayer, Orbis, 1998, p.118). "Which can only be (it sticks in the throat, it sticks in the mind) by choosing ... to be chosen."
The Rev. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, S.J., Superior General of the Society of Jesus, emphasized the need for contact with the real world in an address delivered at Santa Clara University, Oct. 6, 2000, during the "Commitment to Justice in Jesuit Higher Education" conference. "Tomorrow's `whole person' cannot be whole without an educated awareness of society and culture with which to contribute socially, generously, in the real world," he said. "Tomorrow's whole person must have, in brief, a well-educated solidarity.
"We must therefore raise our Jesuit educational standard to `educate the whole person of solidarity for the real world.' Solidarity is learned through `contact' rather than through `concepts,' as the Holy Father said recently at an Italian university conference (John Paul II, Address to Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan, May 5, 2000, n.9). When the heart is touched by direct experience, the mind may be challenged to change. Personal involvement with innocent suffering, with the injustice others suffer, is the catalyst for solidarity which then gives rise to intellectual inquiry and moral reflection.
"Students, in the course of their formation, must let the gritty reality of this world into their lives, so they can learn to feel it, think about it critically, respond to its suffering and engage it constructively. They should learn to perceive, think, judge, choose and act for the rights of others, especially the disadvantaged and the oppressed. Campus ministry does much to foment such intelligent, responsible and active compassion, compassion that deserves the name solidarity."
Professors and researchers also need contact with the gritty reality of the world if they are to educate "men and women for others" to change the world. "All professors, in spite of the cliché of the ivory tower, are in contact with the world," Fr. Kolvenbach notes. "But no point of view is ever neutral or value-free. By preference, by option, our Jesuit point of view is that of the poor. So our professors' commitment to faith and justice entails a most significant shift in viewpoint and choice of values. Adopting the point of view of those who suffer injustice, our professors seek the truth and share their search and its results with our students. A legitimate question, even if it does not sound academic, is for each professor to ask, `When researching and teaching, where and with whom is my heart?'...
"To make sure that the real concerns of the poor find their place in research, faculty members need an organic collaboration with those in the Church and in society who work among and for the poor and actively seek justice. They should be involved together in all aspects: presence among the poor, designing the research, gathering the data, thinking through problems, planning and action, doing evaluation and theological reflection.....
"Just as the students need the poor in order to learn, so the professors need partnerships with the social apostolate in order to research and teach and form. Such partnerships do not turn Jesuit universities into branch plants of social ministries or agencies of social change, as certain rhetoric of the past may have led some to fear, but are a verifiable pledge of the faculty's option and really help, as the colloquial expression goes, 'to keep your feet to the fire!'"
CONCLUSION
The gospel, always becoming incarnate, means different things for different groups. For the impoverished masses of the world, and indeed for sectors of the U.S. population who are suffering some kind of oppression (women, minorities, gays, people with disabilities, people whose bodies are damaged by environmental poisoning, etc.), the good news of Jesus is that things can change, that God's will and glory is that people live decent human lives, that the Kingdom of peace and justice should begin to be inaugurated here and now, that we can and should organize and struggle for justice.
For Americans and Latin American elites who share responsibility for perpetuating injustice and exploitation either at home or abroad, the gospel is a wake-up call to see, judge and act, as the Young Christian Students/Workers put it decades ago. In order to see the reality of the world, an intellectual searcher must get free of the necessarily limited point of view of his/her neighborhood or college. It would seem that professors and administrators would recogize this as an epistemological necessity.
Once we have gotten a more complete and adequate view of the world in which we live (i.e., the whole world), then we are called to judge or evaluate it according to the values of the gospel, and then to act and struggle to change it.
Even though initially this may be experienced as a heavy burden, it is also felt as a sweet and light yoke bringing a deep peace and joy which "the world" (i.e., the dominant culture) cannot give, especially when we serve and struggle in communities of solidarity.
One young woman who studied in Nicaragua and who is now a member of a community dedicated to non-violence and justice wrote: "Joy lies in the struggle for justice. Students _ especially those who are `privileged' with wealth, status, race _ are often swimming in a world of apathy and triviality. I know this because I was one of them, and my redemption came from joining the struggle."
Another student returned from Nicaragua with a passion for knowledge and a joy in learning which would be any professor's dream: "The classes I am taking and have been taking for the past three years: political science, theology, philosophy, literature, math...etc...they are so BIG! I am realizing on a daily basis how huge our minds really are. There are macro and micro cosms for everything. The way parallels hit and ideas slam is so incredibly stimulating. This is not just about the academics either; it is all connected. The Carney case [priest who disappeared in Honduras in 1983], Nicaragua semester, families, friendships, systemic struggle and good meals...Ahhh! Que te vaya bien; Katie."
Finally, the call of Jesus is good news to the rich and to those who feel they must strive to be rich in that it liberates us from such a false and enslaving idol, telling us not only that gold and silver will turn to rust but that their promise is empty and deceiving, even if they are gained and possessed to the hilt. This is a more radical cure for the shopping itch than a new pill, Celexa, being tested by a New York pharmaceutical company on the women-who-shop-too-much population, as reported by the Times, which announces some promising results of the study as "good news for those afflicted with shopping fever" and great financial news for the manufacturer.
The best things in life do not have to be possessed individually: music, books, nature, and above all, other people. Education should help us to appreciate and delight in beauty which is all around us. This is the contemplative attitude expressed by Robert M. Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: "The main skill is to keep from getting lost....With those tools [compass, map] and a lack of pressure to `get somewhere,' it works out fine and we just about have America all to ourselves."
The false propaganda of consumer society is not only that things will make you feel good, but that possessing more of them will make you feel better and superior. "The average American family carries about $6,000 on its plastic," the Times says.
Liberated from internalized slavemasters, young adults may decide to do what they really want to do in life, looking for something which hurts neither themselves nor others, which enables them to express their talents and creativity, and which gives them the opportunity to help others and to promote social justice. What more could a Christian family, parish, or university want for its young?
The gospel of affluence is really the disease of Affluenza. Even the Times' special issue calls it "our hedonic treadmill."
About the Author
Joseph E. Mulligan, a Jesuit from Detroit, works with Christian base communities in Nicaragua and on human-rights issues in Honduras. He can be reached by e-mail at mull@ibw.com.ni
