We don’t hope for heaven because we don’t know what heaven will be like [Essay Four], and we don’t know when it will come [Essay Five]. There is a third, more subtle reason we don’t hope for heaven, I think: We become numb in our current existence to a sense of the afterlife. We live in a trance. We get so accustomed to our present life that we lose sight of the bigger picture. 

This does not necessarily happen naturally. Something has to come and take this sense away, to numb us just as a dentist gives a patient a shot to shut off the nerves in our mouths before going in with all his scary instruments. In this essay I argue that contemporary culture serves as a novacaine to sensations of the coming of eternity. In our busy-ness, our materialism, and our over-entertainment, we become numb to eternity.

First of all, we live our lives in what one my college professors called “the misery of busy-ness,” the light-speed pace at which we live, work, and even play. We bustle about our business, from one errand to another, from class to class, meeting to meeting, sports practice to music recital. We hardly have a good moment for reflection from the time we wake up to the time we hit the pillow again at night. 

In the meantime, we lose sight of the fact that there is more to life. Not just that there is more to this life, but more to the history of the universe as a whole, including the afterlife. The busier we get, the less room thoughts like these have to work their way into our brains. 

It is possible that this numbness by busy-ness comes about deliberately – we voluntarily numb ourselves, as with “eschatological chastity” as Neal Plantinga describes. We choose to avoid any thoughts of the end of the world because it all seems so strange, and our current lives are more familiar. They’re a known quantity. So better to focus in on the smaller picture and keep careful track of our daily planners.

Or this may happen by chance in the course of our busy-ness. We get so bogged down by our schedules, all the meetings, practices, recitals, school events, church functions, and so on that we end up racing around, in a half-panic, trying to get it all done, to keep it all straight. We become like worker ants, marching diligently, with no thought of anything but the task directly in front of us. Somewhere along the line, the distant future becomes more and more distant.

Either way, there are times, maybe just once in a while, when we stop and think. We step outside our mini-universes, break free from our tunnel vision, and experience moments that jolt us into realization of something more.

Plantinga describes such a moment: 
 

Especially at those times that naturally provoke reflection on the shape of one’s life – around the time of the twenty-fifth high school reunion, say – people sometimes suffer from a sense of futility, particularly in their work. Around that time, an advertising executive, for example, might pause and wonder what good it is, finally, to have spent an excellent mind and half a life’s energies on the task of arousing human hunger for electric card shufflers.

Mitch Albom comes to an even more sobering realization in his moving book Tuesdays With Morrie. Albom has rekindled a relationship with a former college professor who is now slowly dying. The frail man gets Albom to think about life and death, and about what’s important. Albom often comes up speechless in the face of his probing questions.
 

I squirmed, wanting to show I had been grappling deeply with such questions. What happened to me? I once promised myself I would never work for money, that I would join the Peace Corps, that I would live in beautiful, inspirational places.Instead, I had been in Detroit for ten years now, at the same workplace, using the same bank, visiting the same barber. I was thirty-seven, more efficient than in college, tied to computers and modems and cell phones…. I [no longer had] long discussions over egg salad sandwiches about the meaning of life. My days were full, yet I remained, much of the time, unsatisfied.

Later, when a tabloid reporter knocks Albom over while chasing down some tidbit about a celebrity romance, Albom remembers more of Morrie’s words:
 

So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they’re busy doing things they think are important. This is because they’re chasing the wrong things…. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.

These glimpses are haunting because of their sheer weight. They overwhelm us with their importance. We realize with some dread that there are more important things in life that last, while our daily details are gone with the sunset. It’s hard to look back on a stretch of days, or months, or years of living unconsciously and realize how much time you wasted. 

Consumption Communities

A second way we become numb to the reality of heaven is our obsession with things, with stuff. We get caught up in materialism to an alarming extent. Our culture conditions us to gain our identity through the name brand clothes we wear, the cars we drive, the house we live in, the stereo we listen to – our world ticks on the selling and buying of goods and services. In the 1980’s pop artist Madonna heralded the arrival of the age of consumption in her famous song: “We are living in a material world, and I am a material girl.”

The interesting thing about this materialism, this consumption, is how it creates a culture all its own – you join a group when you buy something. If you buy clothes at the Gap, you are part of a larger community of Gap shoppers. You are connected to an entire subculture of people who also wear what you are now wearing. In fact, this is often why we buy something – we want to identify with the community and lifestyle we see represented in advertisements. 

In the past, humans found their identity by sharing a common experience with their family or immediate physical community. For most of world history, people formed communities around geographical location, religious belief, or both. People identified with a group if they lived in the same place or worshiped God in the same way. Consider the Mormon church, Italian immigrants, African slaves, or Appalachian mountain communities. These are the only most obvious examples of community coming from geography, religion, or both. 

In America, that has been radically changing over the last century. Historian Daniel Boorstin coined the term “consumption community” to describe this American phenomenon, in his brilliant book, The Americans: The Democratic Experience. “Invisible new communities were created and preserved by how and what men consumed,” he writes. “No American transformation was more remarkable than these new American ways of changing things from objects of possession and envy into vehicles of community.” 

Today, more and more people search for their identity through what they buy. We try to fit in, to join a crowd, through the purchase of makeup, music, or whatever.

As Boorstin puts it elsewhere:
 

From the moment of our rising in the morning, the breakfast food we eat, the coffee we drink, the automobile we drive to work – all these and nearly all the things we consume become thin, but not negligible, bonds with thousands of other Americans.

It used to be that the church was the center of the community. Now it’s the mall. We are what James B. Twitchell, in his book The Triumph of American Materialism, calls a “mallcondo” culture. In her book The Overspent American, Juliet Schor talks to a curator whose museum was combined with a mall. “The fact is,” he says,  “that shopping is the chief cultural activity in the United States.” 

Our culture derives some level of comfort from this new form of community-making. We are soothed by buying things. Quentin Schultze explains:
 

The media always accept us and entertain us; advertisers and filmmakers never reject us. [Marilyn] Manson accepts every adolescent who purchases his products or attends his concerts. In Hollywood, everyone can be a neighbor. Consumerism invites us not only to purchase particular products but also to identify with people who have the same lifestyle.

Unlike traditional communities, however, perople are not genuinely accepted for their personhood. They are only accepted for their money. Malls and music groups are interested in their patrons as far only as the money those patrons spend. The result is shallow communities, shallow acceptance, shallow personal identity. Unfortunatley, the shallower things get, the more we try to fill our lives with things.

This idea of consumer culture helps explain why how fewer and fewer advertisements talk about the actual product being sold. Instead, most ads try to sell an image, a personality, a value system that you are to join in order to buy something, or vice versa. Thus beer ads do not speak much of beer, but rather a sort of jocular beer culture with its own lingo and view of women. 

It’s not that consumption itself is evil. Buying goods and services is a morally neutral act. The danger is the extent to which we gain personal and cultural identity from the products we buy, the way we feel affirmed by society for wearing Calvin Klein or driving a Lexis. This is an artificial vehicle to forming our personhood, and leads us to artificial views of life. 

Besides, the more we materially interact with the world, shaping our lives according to what we can see and feel and obtain, the more we desire the finite, the immediate, the now, and the more we become numb to infinity, to the larger picture of cosmic history, to the pending coming of heaven.

Twitchell puts it this way: “When we have few things, we make the next world holy. When he have plenty, we enchant the objects around us. The hereafter becomes the here and now.” 

Video Hypnosis

Finally, this numbness to the afterlife may happen completely subconsciously, through no actions of our own, in the hypnotic glow of the television set. Simply put, we spend too much time watching TV, absorbing the televisual world, its materialism, and life inside the box. The average American spends one and a half years of his or her life watching television commercials alone. 

I am not the first to rant about the evils of television in society (though few, perhaps, have connected such complaints with the idea of hoping for heaven). Of all the diatribes on the topic, however, none is as provocative as Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves To Death.

In the foreword to his book, he compares our televisually hypnotic existence to the dystopian visions of George Orwell’s 1984 and Alduous Huxley’s Brave New World.
 

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture…. In 1984, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, people are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

Thanks in part to television, we live in the constant expectation of entertainment. With around-the-clock cable and satellite systems, entertainment is always within reach. Unfortunately, with entertainment the audience is passive and disengaged, and when entertainment becomes regular rather than occasional, more people are passive more often. TV creates hordes of disengaged drones. TV rests our minds, and there is such a thing as too much resting. 

Beyond that, when we watch TV, we are exposed to the distorted view of the world from the producers of fictional dramas and sit-coms or the reporters of news. We are less prone to go out and see the world for ourselves, to ask our own questions. 

We are also bombarded with commercial messages that invite us to join consumption communities, maybe even to leave our more traditional communities. To watch television is to accumulate so many of these invitations to buy and thereby to join that we begin to let our guard down and accept these invitations without thinking.

The more television makes us passive, dazed, and image-oriented, the more it imperils our thinking about heaven. The more we are still and strafed by flashing images, the harder it is to prompt the soul to ache for what is unseen. 

Busy-ness, materialism, and entertainment make us numb to sensations of the afterlife. They deaden our nerves. They dull our senses. They make it harder to see the bigger picture, to get a glimpse of heaven. 

The problem is not with busy-ness, materialism, and entertainment per se. Often, we cannot help being busy, buying things, or enjoying moments of diversion. The problem is what they crowd out, what they replace, what they make us numb to. The problem is when they take away our hope for heaven.

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