Guest Editorials: September 20, 1985

TV Advertising’s Double Threat

How to be a better materialist in 60 seconds.

I recently heard about a father who critiques (and sometimes ridicules) the commercials his family watches on TV. He often asks his kids: “Can this product really do that?” “Is that really true?” “What emotional need are they appealing to there?”

This dad’s got a good idea.

Many people—not just conservative Christians—complain loud and long about sex and violence on television. But most of us just accept the commercials.

Our modern, sophisticated lack of concern stands in stark contrast to the attitudes of the ancients. About 2250 B.C., the Code of Hammurabi made selling something to a child or buying something from a child without power of attorney a crime punishable by death. Today, we hardly seem to notice that our children are exposed to 350,000 television commercials by the time they reach the age of 18.

The commercial exploitation of our children should be reason enough for resistance. But TV advertising carries yet more dangerous perils. Thirty years ago, Vance Packard explained that advertisements weren’t just selling a product, they were marketing answers for hidden human needs. He catalogued a number of those needs, including a reassurance of worth, ego gratification, and a sense of power.

The electronic packaging and many of the products have changed since then, but today’s TV ads aim at those same basic human needs. A commercial that tells viewers, “You deserve a break today,” reassures them of their worth as persons just as surely as “Have it your way” offers them decision-making power. And the ad that comments, “You never looked so good,” tries to gratify the ego even as it attempts to sell cosmetics to make viewers look even better.

Hardly any felt need or human problem escapes the attention or use of some television commercial. If trouble is brewing at home, Mrs. Olson’s coffee is guaranteed to perk up the marriage. One sip of her terrific brand and everyone’s smiling again.

Next time you spend an evening with the tube, conduct your own personal survey. Jot down product names and the promised benefits—stated or implied. You’ll discover that in selling salvation for everything from heartburn to social insecurity, TV commercials promise love, happiness, personal fulfillment, and nearly every other human desire. Never mind the price: a $2.00 greeting card or a $12,000 car will bring bliss.

What do TV commercials preach? The gospel of materialism: Products solve our problems.

God’s gospel says, “Deny yourself,” “Die to self,” and “Seek ye first the kingdom of God.” But the 60-second signals we receive at every station break encourage us to indulge: “You, you’re the one,” and “You only go around once in life, so you have to grab all the gusto you can get.”

The basic appeal of the materialistic gospel works so well, but it’s hardly a new technique. It is the oldest temptation in the Book. Satan himself could easily have built his first advertising campaign around the slogan, “Try it, you’ll like it.”

Today’s television commercials have merely embellished and glamorized the age-old appeal, according to educator Roy Truby. Testifying before a PTA hearing on television’s impact, Truby, then Idaho’s superintendent of public instruction, said, “There is what we might call a ‘theology of television’ developing as a prevailing influence on American society. The ads constantly tell us to seek greater pleasure through more consumption. Philosophers down through the ages, since Aristotle, have rejected this theology as a way of life. But somehow the ads make us feel that to have nothing less than too much is un-American.”

That effect is intentional. People in the advertising industry know just how to motivate and manipulate. In a CHRISTIANITY TODAY article on TV’s impact on viewers (Feb. 16, 1973), D. G. Kehl quoted Ernest Dichter, president of the Institute of Motivational Research: “One of the main jobs of the advertiser is not so much to sell the product as to give moral permission to have fun without guilt.”

That is merely the first punch of a dangerous one-two combination: At the same time the gospel of materialism allays all guilt over selfish indulgence, it creates new false guilts and anxieties.

Ring around the collar, bitter coffee, and dingy kitchen floors replace sloth, envy, and gluttony on the list of cardinal sins. Water-spotted crystal, baggy pantyhose, and the threat of embarrassing foot odor produce fear and trembling among TV’s true believers. The danger for viewers, especially Christian viewers who know the Truth, is that our emotional and spiritual concern can be channeled away from pressing human needs and problems.

Beware TV advertising’s dual threat: If it doesn’t lure us into accepting the false values of materialism, it may convince us actually to care whether or not we can see our reflections in our everyday china.

I’m not sure which would be worse.

In either case, the world’s most important message—God’s gospel—may go unheard. The most sensational offer of all time may be lost in the commercial clutter.

GREGG LEWISMr. Lewis is senior editor of Campus Life magazine.

Nietzsche’s Truth

According to George Parkin Grant, people who care about the moral foundations of public life need to pay more attention to Friedrich Nietzsche. That seems an unlikely suggestion in view of Nietzsche’s rabid hostility to religion and to the very idea of morality. Ah, says Grant in his book, English-Speaking Justice, that is precisely the point. Nietzsche’s truth is precisely in his relentless consistency.

In Nietzsche’s nineteenth-century intellectual world, there was nothing unusual about his rejection of religion and of classical philosophy’s claim to know something about the nature of the good. Such rejection was almost de rigueur. What was unusual about Nietzsche was his determination to face up to the consequences of that rejection. His most withering scorn was not directed at believers nor at those who philosophically affirmed knowledge of the good. He believed they were wrong, but at least they were coherent. His most withering scorn, indeed his unbridled contempt, was directed at those who, having abandoned the idea of an objective grounding of truth and morality, went on chattering about truth and morality.

A friend of mine describes the contemporary intellectual climate as “nihilism without the abyss.” To Nietzsche’s credit, he recognized that you cannot have the one without the other. The reason many others, in his day and ours, fail to recognize this is attributable in large part to Immanuel Kant, whom Nietzsche called “the great delayer.” Kant taught that morality is the one fact of reason and that we, who are otherwise autonomous, are commanded to obedience. Morality is derived not from revelation, nor from tradition, nor from nature, nor from the purposes of history, but from reason alone. As George Grant notes, “The view of traditional philosophy and religion is that justice is the overriding order which we do not measure and define, but in terms of which we are measured and defined.” But thanks to Kant, this is now reversed. There are no moral facts but only what we call our “values,” and our “values” are the interpretations that we will to impose upon facts.

Traditional notions of justice assumed moral facts, not artifacts of human creation. Nietzsche recognized that an abandonment of that assumption entailed an abandonment of justice and every other statement of moral meaning. “Because of the brilliance of Kant’s delaying tactics,” Grant writes, “men were held from seeing that [the modern idea of] justice was secularized survival of an archaic Christianity, and the absolute commands were simply the man-made ‘values’ of an era we have transcended.” Grant believes that at least some eyes are now beginning to be opened by evidence that modern exercises of power refuse to stay within the limits of our insubstantial notions of justice.

The 1973 Roe v. Wade decision on abortion, he suggests, is such an evidence. “The need to justify modern liberal justice has been kept in the wings of our English-speaking drama by our power and the strengths of our tradition. In such events as the decision on abortion it begins to walk upon the stage. To put the matter simply: if ‘species’ is an historical concept and we are a species whose origin and existence can be explained in terms of mechanical necessity and chance, living on a planet which also can be explained in such terms, what requires us to live together according to the principles of equal justice?”

Nietzsche knew the answer: Nothing, absolutely nothing at all. In his twisted genius he unblinkingly saw the abyss—a world in which we cannot debate moral truths but can only count moral opinions. In this world we subscribe to the “value” that all opinions count equally. But there is no reason why the stronger and the smarter should continue to be constrained by such a “value” that is obviously not in their interest. In other words, the moral argument for equality is undone by the assumed equality of all moral arguments.

The author of English-Speaking Justice ends on the note that it is “improbable” that our culture will find a remedy for its undoing. Of course he may be right. But, although it is almost a century late, and it is not a remedy, it could be the beginning of the search for a remedy if today we were to acknowledge Nietzsche’s truth.

RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUSPastor Neuhaus is editor of The Religion & Society Report.

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