by Bruce Sanguin

Forfeit awe and the world becomes a marketplace.

– Rabbi Abraham Heschel

If you want to gain a sense of the wonder of the world, take a walk with a two-year-old. Do not be in a hurry. I learned this with my own daughter. Every twig and blade of grass was an occasion for her to squat down and take a real good look. Without the same agenda-driven, caffeine-infused urgency of her father, a bug struggling through the forest of grass was an opportunity for relationship. I remember the monk-like, single-minded attention she bestowed upon this creature. Similarly, a piece of coloured glass stopped her in her tracks for a good five minutes, as she turned it over and over in the sun to capture the changing colours. An hour passed and we hadn’t progressed even a block. Such is the enchantment of two-year-olds for the natural world.
It takes a good 15 to 20 years for our educational system to wean people from wonder, to demystify and disenchant the universe. This weaning from wonder is a travesty. I remember learning about the life of cells in biology. I had to memorize the various parts of a cell: the nucleus, the organelles, the DNA and RNA, the membrane and later, some of the chemical interactions necessary to produce energy. I learned this stuff because there was “going to be a test.” After completing the test, most of the information simply disappeared from my memory. I didn’t retain it because it wasn’t taught as a source of wonder. A cell was a collection of parts, which worked together like a machine. Furthermore, despite the fact that my own body was made of 50 trillion of these tiny energy fields, I was not helped to make a connection between my own body and its cellular composition. I could go down the list of subjects on the curriculum and tell the same story.
I struggled with math, for example, not because I couldn’t learn the formulas, but because none of my teachers could answer my question, “Why do I have to learn math?” No one could tell me. Because I was a “good” boy, I learned the bare minimum. For ancient Greeks, mathematics was revelatory. It was how they accessed invisible forms behind the visible forms of creation. They had a passion for dealing with first principles. Through math, they plumbed the elegance and mystery of the universe. Modern theoretical physics confirms their ancient intuition. The elegance and beauty of a mathematical formula is the primary predictor of whether it will correspond to reality. My grade 12 math teacher first bored me nearly to death, and then threw me out of the class on a regular basis for being restless (for which I am truly grateful).
I chose my undergraduate university because it had the best volleyball team in Canada. The pedagogical methods in the post-secondary system were the same as in high school, except with more information. I received adequate grades, without ever really being interested in any of the subjects. I majored in psychology. The brand in vogue at the time was behavioural psychology. We spent a lot of time proving that B. F. Skinner was right. We could control the behaviour of rats in a laboratory through a system of rewards and punishments. By extension, my professor assured me, human beings could be reduced to the sum total of rewards and punishments received for particular behaviours. He encouraged us to practise our rat-training techniques on our girlfriends. So much for wonder. Our volleyball team, on the other hand, was doing quite well.
A recent study has shown that children are more likely to be able to identify the 10 top corporate jingles and brands than name the planets in our solar system. This, perhaps, should not surprise us. Brian Swimme asks where and how we are initiated into the universe. For primal peoples, it happened in caves, through vision quests and sacred stories told around the campfire. Today, our children are initiated into the universe through television and video games. Ancient chants have been replaced by corporate jingoes. By the time a child enters first grade, she has ingested some 30,000 advertisements. Children are being systematically initiated into a worldview of commercialism and capitalism. There’s a new 24-hour satellite television station called Baby TV, which targets six-month-olds to two-year-olds! In other words, from the age of six months, our children are initiated into the culture of television, the medium of choice for advertisers.
Virtually nothing is sacred to advertisers, other than selling products. The industry will appropriate any image in order to initiate our children into the cult of consumerism. The power and mystery of sexuality is exploited to sell every conceivable product, from cars to mattresses to clothing to vacuum cleaners. Previously mysterious and sacred symbols are reduced to mere “hooks” designed to encourage us to buy. These symbols hook us because we retain ancient memories of them. So today, Eternity is a perfume. We don’t drive cars; we are transported by Infinitis, Mysteres and Allures. Our relationship with the planets is reduced to the Mercury or Saturn that carries us to work. Babies sell car tires and toilet paper. Corporations have caught on to our fascination with animals. Lizards, monkeys, sheep, toucans, hippos and many other species, including those on the verge of extinction, are exploited for their attention-galvanizing power. Literally nothing is sacred in this new religion, into which we are initiating our children.
We are living through a modern-day version of the story of the golden calf in Exodus. In the story, the Hebrew people have escaped the slavery they endured under the Egyptian pharaoh. They find themselves in the desert, starving and looking impatiently for signs that God is with them. In their desperation, while Moses is away, up a mountain receiving some divine instruction, they gather up all the gold and silver they possess and make out of it a golden calf. In the absence of any God they can perceive, they appropriate the symbol of the god of the dominant culture. They remove all their jewellery and cast it into a fire, to be melted and reformed into an idol.
So today, in a universe devoid of awe and wonder, we are ripe for the picking. Our children and youth, particularly, are susceptible to the allurements of the materialism and commercialism of dominant culture. Advertising imbues products with the numinous powers of gods and goddesses. It promises that we can participate directly in the good life, through an orgy of consumption. When Moses confronts Aaron, the priest who supervised the forging of the golden calf, Aaron lamely denies responsibility. He tells Moses that he instructed the people to throw their jewellery into the fire, and presto, “Out came this calf!” (Gen.32:24).
We are the Hebrew people, disenchanted with the world into which we have been initiated. Yet, we are hard-wired for sacred mystery, the capacity to know that we are accompanied in our journey through this universe by the Spirit of God. We are, therefore, susceptible to golden calves of all shapes and sizes. Only the names, voided of sacred essence, remain. We find ourselves revelling in an orgy of consumption, which is destroying our planet and denying our souls the deeper meaning and purpose for which we hunger. Marketing geniuses are the high priests of our corporate culture. As contemporary incarnations of Aaron, they deny responsibility for the golden calf of consumerism. After all, they tell us, they are just giving us what we want. And we, the citizenry, also deny responsibility, since our primary civic duty apparently consists of shopping, as President Bush reminded the American people on national television after 9-11. Get thee to Disneyland!

Excerpted from Darwin, Divinity, and the Dance of the Cosmos by Bruce Sanguin, copyright 2007, Wood Lake Publishing Inc. Bruce Sanguin is a minister at Canadian Memorial United Church and Centre for Peace.