‘Late modern society is principally concerned with purchasing
things, in ever greater abundance and variety, and so has to strive to fabricate
an ever greater number of desires to gratify, and to abolish as many limits and
prohibitions upon desire as it can. Such a society is already implicitly atheist
and so must slowly but relentlessly apply itself to the dissolution of
transcendent values. It cannot allow ultimate goods to distract us from
proximate goods. Our sacred writ is advertising, our piety is shopping, our
highest devotion is private choice. God and the soul too often hinder the purely
acquisitive longings upon which the market depends, and confront us with values
that stand in stark rivalry to the only truly substantial value at the center of
the social universe: the price tag.’
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