Gospels Cigarettes Tell You

Photo by Nicolas Ladino Silva on Unsplash

In 2011, as an attempt to reduce smoking and its associated health costs, the Australian government mandated that all tobacco products be sold in uniformly plain green packaging, with the most prominent aspect of the packaging being a series of graphic health warnings. Debates on the wisdom of the measure raged for months before it came into force. However, what the debate ignored was a much subtler, more powerful, cultural dynamic underpinning the consumption of cigarettes.

In volume one of his Das Kapital, Karl Marx observed that industrialised societies had become marked by what he termed “commodity fetishism”. In a landscape where everything has become turned into a thing for exchange for profit, commodities are now perceived to have a life of their own, a value independent of their material structure or the processes that created them.

That was in the 19th century. In the 20th, thinkers in the tradition of the Frankfurt School took this analysis a step further. Whilst a commodity in the 19th century was seen to have an independent value of its own marked by a dollar sign, the commodity has in the 20th century compounded this value by developing the capacity to convey stories to consumers.

The reason why this is significant, is that we cannot live without stories. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are constantly directed by stories, directed by a longing to cleave to them, be taken up by them, and be part of them.

The link between commodities and stories was highlighted in a conversation I had with Conor Sweeney of Christendom College. Sweeney used the example of cigarettes, which became commonplace after they became mass produced in the First World War as a means to deliver a quick tobacco hit to soldiers in between pauses in fighting.

The smoke, Sweeney noted, became associated with an ideal situation in wartime, the escape from the grind of killing, the “as good as it gets” moment that the soldier longed for. We, living long after the two World Wars, still have a similar association with the smoke. In Australia, the “smoke-o” has become an important pastime linked with leisure, a moment of communion with other smokers, the achievement of a goal, and so on. This can just as easily apply to other commodities, but the problem exemplified by the cigarette is twofold.

First, we have to remember that commodity’s capacity to tell stories is not inherent in the commodity itself. Rather, those stories were injected into the commodity by powerful commercial players who have an interest in selling the commodity for profit. Awash with commodities, advertisers now have the capacity to drench the social landscape with stories. There now exists a massive power asymmetry between the producer of the commodity on the one hand and its consumer on the other.

The second aspect of this problem is far more subtle, and is coupled by another problem of the loss of a central binding narrative within Western culture more broadly. When a central cultural narrative is either ignored or expunged, cultures or persons will find some alternative – any alternative – and the multiplicity of commercial players with their array of commodities on sale would be more than willing to provide that alternative for you, provided you fork out the cash to buy their product.

The result is a tragic culture constituted by a multiplicity of narratives with nothing in common to harmonise them.

Individuals become fragmented as they slowly meld with the collages of narratives conveyed by the different products they consume. What compounds the tragedy is the fact that many of these essentially manufactured stories will not even address the consumer’s need for a fulfilling and sustaining biography. Indeed, the commodity is deliberately designed not to provide that fulfilling narrative. This is best summarised by Charles Kettering, who became head of research at General Moters in the early 20th century, and was best remembered for saying that “the key to economic prosperity is the organised creation of dissatisfaction”. Far from satisfying the deepest longings of the consumer’s soul, our products are specifically designed to leave a gap that the consumer thinks could be filled when he moves onto the next act of consumption.

Thus, the government’s measure to curb consumption by mandating uniform packaging might have worked as a short term deterrent by removing the narrative capacities of a cigarette’s packaging, but it removes only one aspect of those capacities (think of the number of other ways cigarettes are glorified in our entertainment forms). Furthermore, the measure ignores the larger cultural malaise – that of the lack of a harmonising narrative – that drives people to commodities like cigarettes in the first place.

If the above analysis is true, then the Church’s contribution to the antidote is not so much to “lay down the law” with the culture, but to offer to that culture a better narrative than what it is offering. For the Church has a narrative that is well and truly hers, the life of Jesus Christ, that gives to the culture a “life to the full” (John 10:10). This is so because the biography is not manufactured by industrial players and foisted upon hapless human recipients, but by the one who not only created but assumed the human condition.

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