There are seven deaths and ninety injuries on record attributed to seven nights’ worth of Black Friday Shopping for the last seven years. Not exactly an actuarial tsunami, and perhaps not an iron clad statistic, but imagine how much insult and damage go unreported? Though chances of surviving Black Friday are very high, even if you do get trampled, it ought to jar us out of our material complacency to learn that by comparison, Black Friday is more deadly than running with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. Though it is comparing apples to oranges, it is still interesting to note that there have only been fifteen deaths since 1910 and only one since 2003. Running with the bulls is an activity that intuitively seems as if it would be much more perilous than shopping on a Friday.
By comparison, there is a romantic allure to running with the bulls. It begins with the rush that one is taking his life into his own hands in an act of bravado that harkens back to a time forgotten. Running with the bulls is steeped in a tradition that began in the 14th century as bulls were escorted either to the market place or to the bullfights. Being gored by a bull, though a dismal end, possesses an air of the heroic compared to death caused by a seething hoard of bargain shoppers. How will this go down in the history books? Running with the Black Friday Shoppers? Are we witness to a budding American tradition? Such a burgeoning trend is an ill omen for the future of this country, but bodes infinitely worse for the eternal disposition of our immortal souls.
Our growing compulsion to “shop” is a tragedy that causes too little alarm. As our gaze lowers to materialism, there is a corresponding forgetfulness that Hell is real. Pope John Paul II regarded consumerism a threat to human freedom by causing a person to give into the inferior demands of material desires, rather than the higher demands of properly ordered love. Our mad rush to embrace a frenzied consumerism moves us further away from the vision of our Founding Fathers and hastens us towards a vision we would likely want to forget; that of the ante-chamber of hell so chillingly described by Dante Alighieri in Canto III of the Inferno. The shopping scene on Black Friday is beginning to bear a resemblance to that unforgiving landscape.
As Dante descends into the valley of shadows on a daunting trek down the deep and savage road to the underworld with his guide Virgil, he comes to the horrid threshold with the terrifying words “cut into stone” above the very gates of Hell:
“I am the way into the city of woe.
I am the way to a forsaken people.
I am the way into eternal sorrow.Sacred justice moved my architect.
I was raised here by divine omnipotence,
Primordial love and ultimate intellect.Only those elements time cannot wear
Were made before me, and beyond time I stand.
Abandon all hope ye who enter here.”
These are hard words made incomprehensible by fear, and when Dante asks Virgil to explain them, the sage guide tells him that his fear must be left behind and to “gather your soul against all cowardice,” for they are going to see those fallen souls “who have lost the good of intellect.” Americans caught up in the vicious cycle of rabid consumerism have lost more than just the “good of intellect,” our very souls may be approaching a similar state to those Dante witnessed in the pit of the ante-chamber.
As Virgil and Dante begin further descent towards Hell proper, Dante begins to hear chilling laments, “sighs and cries and wails coiled and recoiled on the starless air, spilling my soul to tears. A confusion of tongues and monstrous accents toiled in pain and anger. Voices hoarse and shrill and sounds of blows, all intermingled, raised tumult and pandemonium.” The video footage of many Black Friday scenes foreshadows a parallel to Dante’s description of this ante-chamber of Hell.
Dante looks down to witness teeming masses, overrun throngs of souls “naked in a swarm of wasps and hornets that goaded them the more they fled, and made their faces stream with bloody gouts of pus and tears that dribbled to their feet to be swallowed there by loathsome worms and maggots.” They are all running after a golden banner, trampling one another, pummeling one another in an endless pursuit of the thing that dazzles their eyes, eerily similar to the shopaholic who holds the allure of the sale above all other considerations of justice, duty and decorum. Violence characterizes the swirling throng of numbed souls in the ante-chamber as they chase the golden flag, unnervingly similar to mobs undulating at the entrance and throughout Walmart as they chase the bargains on Black Friday.
Dante asks his guide Virgil, “What souls are these who run through this black haze?” And Virgil answers: “These are the nearly soulless whose lives concluded neither blame nor praise. They are mixed here with that despicable corps of angels who were neither for God nor Satan, but only for themselves.” God will “not receive them since the wicked might feel some glory over them.” These are the souls that are “hateful to God and to His enemies, these wretches never born and never dead.” These are the lukewarm, who have become habituated in chasing worldly treasure.
Unbridled consumerism is a sign of a much deeper disorder of the American soul. As St. Augustine reminds us “our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” Disordered shopping is our attempt to fulfill needs for ourselves that we are not equipped to fulfill. We will notice that consumerism, far from truly fulfilling us, breeds apathy in the human soul. Like the souls doomed to the ante-chamber, we run the risk of being lukewarm about those things that are above and this danger leads to a warning we ought to heed in Revelation 3:16 “So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth.” The poor souls in the ante-chamber were not in league with the Father of Lies, but self-interested in material habits similar to those recklessly cultivated by American culture embodied by new traditions like Black Friday.
Our politicians, professors, and psychologists are steeped in brave and bold social utopian ideologies that would see all human souls equally satiated with material abundance. The experts use the acquisition of material goods as the measure of progress towards “heaven on earth.” It is no small irony that even though we have more material riches than any other time in history, the closer we get to their stated ideal of “perfection,” the less we have heaven and the more our world begins to resemble Hell. Unrestrained consumerism is the downward spiral towards chasing the golden flag in the ante-chamber of the underworld described by Dante. Christ reminds us that “my kingdom is not of this world.” The Devil’s kingdom is of this world. Black Friday indeed!
Books on the topic of this essay may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore. Republished with the gracious permission of Catholic Exchange.
A bit over the top no? The “unbridled consumerism” of dolts has always been around, but this across-the-board damnation of the materialism is silly. My soul is fit as a fiddle, my intellect well-educated and ever curious about knowledge—and I love to buy and be surrounded by beautiful things. No damnation there. At least I hope!
“My soul is fit as a fiddle …”
Wow. Words fail. Though you did just provide a great example of that “corresponding forgetfulness that Hell is real” that the author mentioned.
Why–because I feel emotionally and psycholgocially healthy? Because I am happy and successful? Because I am very fulfilled spiritually? What words fail you?
Ms. Politine,
It is not the damnation of materialism that concerns this essay, but that materialism leads to damnation.
Mr. Rummelsburg,
I understood what the essay concerns, and I strongly disagree with your premise. Materialism does not lead to damnation. A corrupted spirit and immoral way of life leads to damnation. Material goods are not to blame–a person’s personal emptiness and poor values are the culprit. There are many of us who enjoy our success and enjoy being surrounded by beautiful things and who are not empty souls at the gates of Inferno–Dante’s or otherwise–chasing after “gold banner” with the “maggots and pus” and the rest of it swarming all around.
There are, I find, many conservatives who cannot accept the fact that many of us do not see the material and spiritual world in some kind of eternal conflict, but enjoy the best of both worlds. I refuse to see myself as immoral or “damned” because I enjoy the beauty and fun of “materialism”‘s technological and luxurious creations. And only idiots shop on Black Friday anyway.
Dear Ms. Politine,
If we share definitions of “materialism” then your comments are reminiscent of the frog in a slowly heating pot of water. Of course if you mean that the appreciation of beautiful things with an appropriate detachment, then indeed we may have some common ground. Material goods are not to blame at all, but actually a soul’s disposition towards material goods is what is at issue, and if a soul is improperly disposed to keep things in their right order concerning material goods, we are apt to refer to that soul as “materialistic.” Is there a good way to be a materialist? Materialism does not seem an appropriate word to describe a well ordered soul, does it to you? Are you familiar with the Beatitude “blessed are those poor in spirit?”
Indeed there is no conflict between the material and spiritual world when all is in its proper order, no conservative would say otherwise, you might be thinking of another group. For the rest of your comments, that might take a little untangling, a thing I am perfectly willing to attempt, however, I do not wish to overtax your charity, so I bid you adieu with many thanks for your interesting and spirited comments.
The person who concerns me far more than the one who lusts for mere material things is the person who lusts for POWER. They seem to cause the bulk of the evil in this world.
For sure Eric! The one who is a materialist is like the lukewarm, the power hungry find themselves in many of the lower circles in Hell proper.