For as long as three hundred thousand years, human beings have huddled together in the night to ponder and celebrate the mysteries of the universe and to find their way through the Great World they inhabit. No matter what continent the humans lived on, no matter what culture, no matter what era, the work of cosmology took place every year and every month and even every day. Around the fires on the African plains, in the caves of the Eurasian forests, under the brilliant night sky of the Australian landmass, in the longhouses of North America, the people told the sacred stories of how the world came to be, of what human beings bring into the universe, and of what it takes to live a noble life.
We modern humans seem to be the first culture to break with this primordial tradition of celebrating the mysteries of the universe. When we learn about other cultures that do, we feel a sense of superiority or nostalgia, depending on our evaluations of such cultures. If we regard the scientific enterprise as freeing us from such superstitions, we look with pity upon these primitives who devoted so much energy to fantasies about the universe. If, on the other hand, we think that earlier cultures knew something important about the universe that completely escapes our ways of knowing, we are left with a sense of sadness that such experiences are not possible for us today.
Modern industrial society does it differently. Questions of ultimate meaning and value are dealt with not in caves or on the open plains, but in the churches, mosques, and temples. Each weekend, billions of humans gather to reflect on their relationship with the divine — whether God, Allah, Brahma, or the Great Spirit. In all these millions of weekly religious ceremonies, so essential to the health and spirituality of humanity as a whole, one will rarely find serious contemplation of the primal human questions of meaning within the context of the actual universe — a universe of stars, topsoil, amphibians, wetlands.
Of course, in the world’s scriptures and in the religious rituals performed each week, there are powerful uses of such words as water, sky, sun, and rain. But these are employed in a symbolic, rather than a literal, sense. For instance, water might be used as a sign of the saving grace of God, but it is not used to describe the hydrology of the Mississippi River. For us, the Mississippi River and God do not really intersect. God has to do with the gospel of love, with salvation, with care for the poor, and with the drama of the Bible, whereas “the hydrology of the Mississippi River” connotes for us various “physical” things, like H2O molecules, or dams built by the Army Corps of Engineers, or laws dealing with water rights — all of which is understood as separate from questions of God and ultimate purposes.
The result is that, when we do ponder the deep questions of meaning in the universe, we do so in the context of the time when the classical scriptures achieved their written form. We do not worship or contemplate in the context of the universe as we have come to know it over the last several centuries, a context that includes the species diversity of the Appalachian Mountains, the development of the ecosystem, the intricate processes of the human genome, the stellar dynamics that gave birth to the planet 5 billion years ago, or anything else that is both specific and true concerning the earth and the universe. All of that — the earth and the universe as they are and as they actually function — is regarded as “science,” something separate from questions of meaning and value.
Modern humans, instead of gathering in the caves or cathedrals as a way of learning their place in the universe, sit in classrooms and study science. Certainly, education in the sciences is fundamental for the survival of humanity. The challenges that beset us today will grow ever more fierce for our children and their children, and we require the best science and technology possible. But nowhere in science education — not in Europe, nor Asia, nor Africa, nor the Americas — is the fundamental role and meaning of the human in the universe treated in any significant manner. The ruling assumption is that science is concerned with facts, whereas meaning and purpose and value are the domain of religion.
The tragedy here is that our religions can remain true to their essence and work within the larger context of the universe. This would not mean shrinking away from the central religious truths. On the contrary, expressed within the context of the dynamics of the developing universe, the essential truths of religion would find a far more vast and more profound form. The recasting would not be a compromise, nor a diminution, nor a belittlement; it would be a surprising and creative fulfillment, one whose significance goes beyond today’s most optimistic evaluations of the value of religion.
During the modern era of humanity, the ancient cosmological enterprise was broken apart, not by some accidental development, but by the ways of thought rooted in the very core values of our modern world. The division between science and religion can be argued with libraries of modern philosophical texts and defended with mountains of legal briefs. We are prevented from engaging in the cosmological enterprise precisely because the institutional processes of the modern world keep humans away from such questions.
But if, in order to become fully human, we truly do need to ponder the universe and discover our place in nature, if this three-hundred-thousand-year tradition is rooted in the requirements of our genetic makeup, then we will find our way to ideas concerning the proper human role in the universe one way or another. And if the institutions of education and religion have, for whatever well-defended reasons, decided to abdicate that role, someone, somewhere is going to step forward and provide it.
So where are we initiated into the story of the universe? To answer, we need only to reflect on what our children experience over and over again each night, the way those children in the past gathered in the caves and listened to the chant of the elders. If we think in terms of pure quantities of time, the answer is immediate: the cave has been replaced by the television room and the chant by the advertisement.
One might think that the television show has replaced the chant, but at the core of each show, driving the action and determining whether or not the show will survive the season, is the advertisement. That is the essential message that will be there night after night, season after season. Bonanza, Cheers, and Cosby have come and gone, but the advertisement endures.
What effect does this have on our children? Before entering first-grade science class, and before entering, in any real way, into our religious ceremonies, a child will have soaked in thirty thousand advertisements. The time our teenagers spend absorbing ads is more than their total stay in high school. None of us feels very good about this, but for the most part, we just ignore it. It’s background noise. It’s just there, part of what’s going on. We learned to accept it so long ago that we hardly ever think about it anymore.
But imagine how we would feel if we heard that another country programmed its citizenry with religious dogma in such a manner. In fact, it was just such accounts concerning the Soviet Union that outraged us for decades: the thought that they would take young children and subject them to brainwashing and Soviet lies, removing their natural feelings for their parents and for God and for the truth of history, and replacing these with the assumptions necessary for their domination.
Immersed in the religion of consumerism, we are unable to see such comparisons. We repeat to ourselves soothing clichés, such as the obvious fact that television ads are not put on by any political dictatorship. We tell ourselves that ads are simply the efforts of corporations to get us interested in their various products.
And it’s true, of course, that the advertisers are not bad persons with evil designs. They’re just doing their jobs. On the other hand, we can also say that their primary concern is not the well-being of our children. Why should it be? Their objective is to create ads that get the television viewers interested in products. But already we can see that this is a less-than-desirable situation. After all, we demand that teachers, for example, have our children’s best interests in mind, because teachers shape our children when they are young and vulnerable. To hand over so much of our children’s lives to people who obviously do not have their well-being foremost in mind is, at the very least, questionable.
But at a deeper level, we need to confront the power of the advertiser to promulgate a worldview, a minicosmology based on dissatisfaction and craving. An ad-industry cliché captures the view succinctly: “An ad’s job is to make them unhappy with what they have.”
We rarely think of ads as being shaped by explicit worldviews, but that is precisely why they are so effective. The last thing we want to think about when we’re lying on the couch relaxing is the philosophy behind the ad. So we soak it all up, and it sinks down deep into our psyche. Now, if this takes place in the adult soul, imagine how much more damage is done to the psyches of our children, who have none of our protective cynicism and take in the ad’s message as if it were coming from a trusted parent or teacher.
The corporate advertising world, of course, offers lucrative salaries, and that financial draw attracts our highest IQs and our best artistic talent, not to mention any sports hero or movie star the corporations want to buy. Combining brain power and social status with sophisticated electronic graphics and penetrating psychological techniques, these teams of highly trained adults descend upon children not yet in school with the simple goal to create in them — and in the rest of us — a dissatisfaction with their lives and a craving for yet another consumer product. It’s hard to imagine any child having the capacity to survive such a lopsided battle, especially when it’s fought ten thousand times a year, with no cultural bulwark capable of keeping out the forces of consumerism. Could even one child in the whole world endure that onslaught and come out intact? It’s extremely doubtful. Put it all together, and it’s no great mystery why consumerism has become the dominant faith in every corner of the planet today.
It’s not just that our children are easy prey. It’s not just that the rushing river of advertisements determines the sorts of shoes and clothes and toys and games and sugar cereals that they must have. It’s not just that they are left with a pervasive unhappiness whenever they cannot have such commodities, an unhappiness that in many cases leads to aggression and violence of the worst kind in order to obtain what their parents will not or cannot give them. All of this is of great concern, but the central point I wish to focus on here is that they are initiated into a particular view of the world.
Advertisements are where our children receive their cosmology, their basic grasp of the world’s meaning, which amounts to their primary “faith,” though they don’t recognize it as such. Perhaps the more recalcitrant children will view upwards of a hundred thousand ads before they cave in and accept consumerism’s basic worldview. But eventually they all get the message. It’s a simple cosmology, told to great effect and delivered a billion times a day, not only to Americans, but to nearly everyone on the planet. Its message: human beings exist to work at jobs, to earn money, to buy stuff. The image of the ideal person put forth by the ad is not Jesus or Socrates. Forget all about Rachel Carson or Martin Luther King Jr., with all their suffering and love and wisdom. In the propaganda world of the ad, the ideal people — the fully human humans — are relaxed and carefree, drinking Pepsis around a pool, unencumbered by powerful ideas concerning the nature of goodness, undisturbed by visions of suffering that could inspire a commitment to justice. None of that ever appears. In the religion of the ad, the task of civilization is much simpler. The ultimate meaning behind human existence is getting all this stuff. That’s paradise. And the meaning of the earth? To provide the raw materials from which to manufacture consumer stuff.
I have mentioned only television here, but of course TV is just one part of the program. We need to remember roadside billboards, the backs of cereal boxes, the fifty thousand magazines crammed with glossy sales pitches, the lunchboxes wrapped with toy advertisements, the trillion radio commercials, the come-ons piped into video programs, the seductions pouring into the telephone receiver when we’re put on hold, the corporate logos stitched onto our clothes, and on and on. Literally everywhere on earth, advertising continues toward its goal of becoming omnipresent, even entering space on the surfaces of our satellites.
If those bizarre cults we read about in the papers used even one-tenth of 1 percent of the dazzling deceit of our advertisers, the cult leaders would be hounded by the U.S. Justice Department and thrown in jail straightaway. But in American and European and Japanese society, and increasingly everywhere else, we are so blinded by the all-encompassing propaganda of the ads that we never think to confront the advertisers and demand they cease. On the contrary, as if cult members ourselves, we pay them lucrative salaries and hand over our children in the bargain.
If we do come to an awareness of the way in which the advertisement is shaping our children, and if we find this unacceptable, we are left with the task of inventing new ways of introducing our children — and everyone else — to the universe. Teaching the new cosmology, grounded in our contemporary understanding of the universe and nourished by our more ancient spiritual convictions concerning its meaning, is a first step out of the religion of consumerism and into a way of life based upon the conviction that we live within a sacred universe.
“The Religion of the Ad” is excerpted from Brian Swimme’s The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos: Humanity and the New Story. © 1996 by Brian Swimme. It appears here by permission of Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York 10545.
