False Transcendence and the “Collector Subculture”
Copyright 2012 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
In the world we find ourselves living in today it is more difficult to be indifferent to material possessions than perhaps at any other period in human history. The Western world of the 21st century is a world that is culturally obsessed with the significance of “stuff”, the current euphemism for the things we individually own. Having lived with many decades of consumerism, and the millions of products it has spawned, we find ourselves attaching great meaning to personal possessions in a way that was unknown in times past when people had little more than the clothes on their back and a small number of other necessities.
There are few places where our contemporary quest for meaning in man-made things is more evident than in the rise of what might be called the “Collector Subculture.” Today millions of Westerners, especially in America, collect everything from cars to baseball cards to movie and television memorabilia. There are conventions, organizations and websites dedicated to obtaining a myriad of objects that we have invested with great personal significance (witness the rise of the multi-billion dollar eBay internet franchise, a collector’s paradise if there ever was one.) Whatever the nature of the objects being collected there are people who have been captivated by them to the point of being willing to part with large sums of money to call one or more of them their own.
There are a number of reasons for the transformation of what were once called “hobbies” into an international obsession, but we will only concern ourselves with one motivation here: the desire to find some kind of transcendence in material things that are the product of human instrumentalities. This is the area of concern for the Christian living in the developed world, and for a fairly obvious reason. Any object, whether it is a product of the direct hand of God as we find in nature, or the indirect hand of humankind has the potential to become an idol in the possession of fallen human beings.
The rise of the Collector Subculture is at least partially attributable to the loss of an understanding and appreciation for the truly eternal in our world today. It is also specifically an outcome of trying to find our transcendence not in God but in our past (at least in the case of collecting that which is no longer in production and redolent of a particular era in recent history.)
There is a reason people collect the toys they played with as kids or the automobiles they either owned in their youth or wanted to own. Such things often remind us of childhood and early adolescence, times in our lives that were, or at least seemed, happier and less complicated than the times we know now as adults. For many people the closest thing to Heaven that they ever experienced was found in their formative years and they yearn to recover that “heaven” in some way. This yearning takes the form of a fervent pursuit of nostalgia. In having near them today the material things they remember from those times these individuals may experience a sense of recovery of the spirit of their own youth, and that can be a comforting thing in the midst of the vicissitudes of adulthood.
This pursuit has become almost a new form of religion to the degree that persons give themselves over to it as a place to find solace, and herein lays the spiritual danger. The sense of transcendence that comes from owning things associated with our past is no more truly permanent than that past itself was. All things in this world will pass away and that includes every material thing we have ever owned, whether in childhood or today. Real and eternally permanent transcendence is found in God and God alone.
I cannot go so far as to say that every aspect of the Collector Subculture is somehow intrinsically evil. For one thing this would make me a hypocrite since, truth be told, I am a collector myself. God does not prohibit the enjoyment of material things, old or new, and because childhood tends to be a time of a certain “natural” (though not saving) closeness to the Divine I’m not sure a nostalgia for that time cannot be a sign of a desire for God Himself, at least on a subconscious level.
That being said we still, as Christians, do well not to become nearly as caught up in this particular feature of Post-Modernity in the West as some in the world allow themselves to be. As with so many other cultural currents in these later days we must be vigilant to not seek any thing at the expense of the most important One. All that we own, for whatever reason, must be subordinated to focusing on God, He Who embodies truly eternal and infinite value. Only He can give us the real transcendence that all created things may falsely promise in our fallen hearts.