There is nothing wrong with the fact that today’s consumer society provides abundant goods for everyone. Such abundance is in itself good and necessary for society to function properly.
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What can be criticized are the philosophical roots of consumer society. Notre Dame’s Prof. Brad Gregory traces it to a widely embraced Romantic and post-Romantic conception of the individual. The modern consumer came to see himself not as “an embodied soul called by God to flourish in a family within a community through the exercise of the virtues, but an emotive ‘self’ that constructs itself as it pleases in the self-chosen relationships it makes and breaks, by exercising its right to do so through the desire for and acquisition of material things and their contribution to its self-construction of identity” (Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2012, p. 292).
In other words, consumption became a self-absorbing activity that puts man at the center of everything and thus prepares the way for a secular society without official recognition of the Creator.
