In recent columns, we’ve been looking at the Catholic Worker’s critique of our consumer society.
One of the main features of that society, I wrote back in August, is that the production of basic necessities ceases to be internal to local communities and is taken over by large impersonal institutions. This amounts to the destruction of the strong community bonds of local economies, and results in the social fragmentation we see around us.
I mentioned that these corporations and institutions “radically monopolize” the production of the things we need for daily living. Let me explain what I mean by that phrase.
We all know what a monopoly is: the dominance of the market by exclusion of all competitors. A “radical monopoly” goes even further: it’s the dominance of an aspect of life by the exclusion of the ability to provide it from the local community.
For example, if Microsoft were the only brand in town, that would be a monopoly. When you need a smartphone to have a social life, that is a radical monopoly. If Aldi were the only place for groceries, that would be a monopoly. When you can only get your food from grocery stores, that is a radical monopoly.
And this has, in fact, happened in virtually every aspect of our lives. A few more examples are below.
Care for our bodies: From time immemorial, local cultures have made use of traditional arts of treating illness, much of which they could utilize skillfully even before modern medicine. Today, however, we have a hard time knowing what to do with a cold without recourse to a health care professional.
Transportation: Our bodies are naturally mobile. For much of history, people have gotten around on foot, horse or bicycle. But for the last 100 years, our infrastructure has been constructed so that it can be difficult to move without paved roads, cars, oil and the jungle of institutions that stand behind them.
Insurance: People used to be secured against the vicissitudes of life and financial catastrophe, as they still are today in many non-Western cultures, by virtues of neighborliness, norms of solidarity, family obligations and traditions of hospitality. Today, even the closest of relations take care of each other only when recourse to insurance companies fails.
And let me again underline the significant examples with which we started. Human beings — rich and poor — have always procured most of their food locally, and with significant amounts of neighborly cooperation. Today, this can be done only with great effort, and only by those well-off enough to afford the additional expense, time and travel necessary.
And last but not least: It is increasingly difficult to be part of any community of friends, much less function in society, without a smartphone. Our “social” life now depends on it. This is a radical monopoly, and it is also a redefinition of the word “social,” partly in response to other radical monopolies.
Now consider the cumulative practical difference the introduction of these radical monopolies has made in daily community life. Perhaps one way to put it is that, without commercial and institutional support, it is increasingly difficult to be sick, secure, eat, talk or move.
The situation we’re in, then, is that we are permanently atomized and fragmented from one another by the very systems that make our practical lives possible. Because our productive lives are external to local communities, we have only the thinnest common goods holding us together. At the same time, our almost exclusive dependence on these external systems makes it extremely hard for us to re-form any alternative, internal, local social bonds, and thus such institutions assure their own indispensability and continued dominance. They are the current social fabric, and their hegemony keeps us fragmented.
It’s probably worth remarking that I do not think anyone intended things to turn out like this. To be sure, there is plenty of sin, greed and opportunism in the equation. But I would, in fact, argue that one of the key characteristics of our society is that no one is ultimately in control, and that no one could be in control.
But all this is not, for the Christian, a council of despair. As we’ll start to see next time, it’s an opportunity to reimagine the way we do Church, and to rediscover the importance of doing it together.
Miller is the director of the Center for Catholic Social Thought at Assumption in St. Paul. He is the author of “We Are Only Saved Together: Living the Revolutionary Vision of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement,” published by Ave Maria Press.
