By DONALD DeMARCO
“Culture,” writes the existentialist philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset, “is what saves human life from being a mere disaster; it is what enables man to live a life which is something above meaningless tragedy or inward disgrace” (Mission of the University).
Wild animals live in an environment. Human beings live in a culture. Animals conform to their environment. Human beings have the freedom and ingenuity to change their culture.
But this change is kaleidoscopic. It can move in the direction of a more humanized civilization, or it can degenerate in the direction of a closed environment in which everyone thinks in the same way.
In the absence of culture, as Ortega remarks, “Life is a chaos, a tangled and confused jungle, in which man is lost.” We need culture though it can betray us.
Culture can assist human beings in transforming their lives for the better or it can assist them in adapting to a closed environment of homogenous ideas. The essential problem here is the fact that environments tend to be invisible, leading people to conform to a static culture without their realizing it. A fish does not know that it swims in an aqueous environment. It is blissfully unaware of its own life-giving medium. How, then, can one make his surrounding cultural environment visible so that he can see it for the stultifying effect it may have on him?
Hindsight is 20/20. One way of making environments visible is to view them from a distance of time. People will deride “old fogies” for adapting to an environment that is no longer fashionable. But they do not see their own environment that traps them as securely as they presume their elders were trapped. Environments pass away, but they are always replaced by new environments that people will inevitably find amusing from a viewpoint in the distant future.
Commercial advertising offers us an excellent opportunity to see through old cultural environments and gain some insight as to how we might make the environment in which we now live more visible to us.
Let us consider a television ad from the early 1950s. A sophisticated gentleman, wearing glasses, is sitting in a lounge chair reading a book. A voice appears out of nowhere asking him about what he is reading. The gentleman is not in the least astonished by the sudden presence of the intruder, but obligingly informs his uninvited guest that he is reading Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, written more than 300 years earlier, during the time of Shakespeare. He finds more “life” in this selection than he finds in most best-sellers.
His responses lead the invisible person behind the voice to assume that the gentleman is an English teacher, but is surprised to learn that he is a chemist. Once it is clearly established that the gentleman is a man who thinks for himself, the cigarette he is smoking is identified as Viceroy. The jingle is heard, repeatedly: “A thinking man’s filter. A smoking man’s taste.” And then, the clincher: “The man who thinks for himself usually smokes Viceroy.”
The commercial is an appeal to vanity and conveys the message: “If you want to be a sophisticated, urbane, thinking person, you should smoke Viceroy Cigarettes.” Given the advantage of more than 60 years of hindsight, we now realize that a man who truly thinks for himself would avoid cigarette smoking for health reasons. This realization is greatly assisted by the fact that there is a ban on cigarette commercials. In addition, the surgeon general advises that cigarette smoking can cause cancer.
We find the old Viceroy commercial to be amusing and wonder how people could have fallen prey to such a transparently silly commercial. As a chemist, the gentleman should have been more alert to the damage that cigarette smoking can cause. His preoccupation with Faust notwithstanding, taste in literature does not translate into taste in smoking.
Marshall McLuhan, the most celebrated, if not the most insightful, student of commercial advertising, found that ads are “employed in an effort to paralyze the mind.” The thinking man, if he thinks at all, resists being a slave to consumerism.
How, then, do we escape our current environmental trap? The answer is both simple and direct — by focusing not on what is trendy, but on what is true. It is a theme to which St. John Paul II repeatedly referred to throughout his 14 encyclicals, but especially in Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth).
We need to look at the truth about marriage, the unborn, human sexuality, life, religion, and education. The current fashion is akin to wrapping culture in an all-encompassing blanket of commercial lies. G.K. Chesterton put it nicely in The Catholic Church and Conversion when he stated: “The Catholic Church is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.”
We are creatures who belong to eternity, not to the fleeting moment. Culture is a kaleidoscope for better or for worse.
The aim of commercial advertising is not to inspire human beings to become better citizens or better persons, but to get them to adapt to the climate of the times. Yet, the truth of things is ever-available and ever-attainable. The Catholic Church offers an escape route out of a commercial-bound cultural environment into a more personally satisfactory world of freedom, knowledge, and love of God, who is the source of all truth.
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(Dr. Donald DeMarco is a senior fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, Conn., and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review.
(His latest works, How to Remain Sane in a World That is Going Mad; Poetry That Enters the Mind and Warms the Heart; and How to Flourish in a Fallen World are available through Amazon.com. Some of his recent writings may be found at Human Life International’s Truth and Charity Forum. He is the 2015 Catholic Civil Rights League recipient of the prestigious Exner Award.)
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