A tougher seasonal reflection...

Considered by many critics to be a motion picture classic, the winner of the Canne's Special Jury prize of 1957, Ingmar Bergman's, The Seventh Seal, (Det sjunde inseglet, 1957) depicts the story of a knight returning home from the crusades only to find Death in the form of the grim reaper awaiting him as he sets foot upon the shore of his homeland.

Death requires that the knight come with him immediately, but the knight in order to gain time to reach home and see his wife and child, challenges Death to a game of chess — Death has never lost. Throughout the film the knight journeys to find Death awaiting his next move at every stop that the knight makes. Tension is built in the film as to whether the knight will be able to forestall Death's winning gambit, or whether he will be taken by Death before seeing his family again. The knight uses all his wits to eventually reach home, only to find that Death has arrived with him, and now not only takes the knight, but his whole family and those whom he has met on his homeward journey in a macabre dance of death across the hills. The viewer begins to realize that the reason why Death had met the knight at the movie's opening was that the knight, unbeknown to himself, was infected with the plague, and in the knight's desire to go home, had spread the plague.

Clive Hamilton and Richard Dennis (2005), in their work Affluenza: When Too Much Is Never Enough, discuss a modern day plague that they apprehend is running rampant through Australian society. According to the authors, Affluenza is defined as:

1. The bloated, sluggish and unfulfilled feeling that results from efforts to keep up with the Joneses.
2. An epidemic of stress, overwork, waste and indebtedness caused by dogged pursuit of the Australian dream.
3. An unsustainable addiction to economic growth".
[Hamilton and Dennis, 2005, Inside Cover].

The authors discuss in their text that one of the great dangers in this striving for affluence is that society becomes so selfish that individuals become blind to the plight of the marginalised and the impoverished. Moreover as the authors write: "to tackle the problem of poverty, we must first tackle the problem of affluence. And the problem with affluence is that once people become affluent they continue to believe that more money is the key to a happier life … This belief has powerful personal and social ramifications, not the least being that the affluent become more preoocupied with themselves". [Hamilton and Dennis, 2005, p. 18].

A number of the symptoms of Affluenza the authors list are: consumerism, waste, fractured relationships, psychological disorders, as well as the damage done to the next generation by parents, the media and corporations passing on to children the notion that material possessions and greed are the key motivations for living.

The Harvard University Medical School scholar, Susan Linn, in Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood [2004], issues a loud warning to all parents of the abuse of children by big business searching to shape the consumer spending patterns of children. Linn depicts how more and more businesses are investing increasing proportions of their budgets to get inside the minds of children in order to trigger consumerism from the earliest of ages. Even schools are becoming involved in this lucrative process by selling access to children to market researchers who act on behalf of large corporations, such as Nestlé and McDonalds. As Linn writes: "this is not free money. It's buying advertising. The school is selling advertising. They are selling the hearts and minds of children."

Plato in Critias told us many years ago of the dangers of materialism when he issued the warning "that both wealth and concord decline as possessions become pursued and honoured. And virtue perishes with them as well". [Plato: The Complete Works, 1997, p. 1306]. From a Christian perspective, St. John Chrysostom, preaching in Constantinople in the midst of the city's ever increasing wealth, attempted to sway the consciences of his audience by exhorting the people: "When large numbers are engaged in producing luxuries for the rich, that society has become corrupt" [St. John Chrysostom, 1996, p. 36]

Extending on from this, Chrysostom illustrated a scenario to reveal the futility of materialism as an overriding motivation of a person's life:

A man decides to build a house. He digs down into the earth until he reaches solid rock, and then lays the foundations. He collects great lumps of stone, hews them into regular shapes, and puts them one on top of the other to make walls. He goes into the forest to chop down trees, which he saws into rafters for the roof. At last his work is complete. He stands back and admires his achievement. "Nothing can destroy such a strong building," he says to himself; "my house will last forever." Certainly such a man is skilled with his hands; but he is totally unskilled with his soul. Even if his house were to last forever, it is utterly irrelevant to him. He may be struck down by an accident or a disease within a few days. He may survive his full span, but as the breath leaves his body, his house will count for nothing. He might just as well have built himself a shelter from sticks and mud and used the time saved to concentrate on the salvation of his own soul. [St. John Chrysostom, 1996, p. 32]

In our desperate attempts to provide good things for our families, we must take a step back and place these "things" in context to the broader picture and meaning of our lives. The modern person is living in a far more complex world than either Plato or Chrysostom, whose warnings, which were valid in their times, carry far more veracity for our own Age.

Children lying in their beds fall victim to Affluenza, spread to them by their radio, or by a television in their rooms. The power of advertisements, of brand marketing, the influence of the media, and the decline of the Church as a source of values for the majority of people in our society, combined, have contributed to the parent being infected with a consumerism difficult to detect on themselves, especially when seen in the light of their desire to pass on to their children nothing short of what they had been given in material possessions by their parents. Yet like the knight in Bergman's The Seventh Seal, we must not lose sight of what is infecting us and bringing us to ruination. We must avoid passing this on to our families and communities. When we are caught up in the very act of providing for our children and the busy-ness of living, it is difficult for us to perceive how each of us falls victim to the culture of consumerism. We need therefore to make conscious decisions to ensure that those virtues, values and life-skills most important to good living are passed on in place of the mere provision of "good things".

It has often been said that the "best things" in life are free, but if this indeed is the case, no large corporation will invest in any of the "best things". It is therefore up to parents who labour in the process of child-rearing, to ensure that these "best things" are indeed adequately 'marketed' to the next generation in order to immune our young people against a plague which does not seek to infect the body as much as it does the soul.

Andrew

Dr Andrew Thomas Kania is Director of Spirituality at Aquinas College, Western Australia. He is a member of one of the Eastern Rite Churches in full communion with Rome.

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©2006 Dr Andrew Thomas Kania

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