Lead Us Into Temptation Briefly

Lead Us into Temptation Briefly summarize Twitchell's views on advertising, focusing on his unique insights. Then evaluate and critique his notions.

During the Middle Ages, religion permeated the life of persons in a way that it is difficult for modern observers to understand. The calendar, the diet, the rationales for warfare and inheritance, and the politics of the day were all justified by the ideology of the Roman Catholic Church. Today, even for people who are devout believers, religion does not permeate the culture of larger society in the same fashion. However, according to Chapter 2 of Twitchell's Lead Us into Temptation, advertising has replaced such a totally immersing cultural ideology in today's contemporary framework.

According to Twitchell, advertising and religion both promise a kind of peace of mind. Advertising promises the consumer salvation in this world, as religion promises salvation in the world to come. The effectiveness of advertising, of course, is that it provides more instant gratification than religion. The pleasures of consuming have replaced the pleasures promised in heaven by religion, because consuming allows us as individuals to possess what we want to have in the 'now' rather than later. Twitchell sees consumers as active participants in this cultural shift. Consumers critically view advertising with an eye upon self-fashioning and self-improvement, rather than function as passive entities, oppressed or overwhelmed by advertising's pervasive influence.

As with religion, advertising offers a source of potential satisfaction. The consumer if offered the promise of salvation that lifts him or her above reality of the consumer's unfulfilled life. In advertising, celebrity spokespersons prove a personal connection between 'heaven' and earth, like a priest. Television stories in the form of advertising and sitcoms rather than Biblical parables give instruction through short stories as to how consumers should live their lives and improve themselves, by taking action.

Despite the ubiquity of modern advertising, Twitchell states that consumers can discriminate between the types of messages they do or do not choose to believe. If consumers robotically obeyed advertising messages, then 80% of all new products would not be destined for failure, despite the over 200 billion dollars (in 1997 figures) spent by producers to bombard the senses of the consumer through every possible venue, from television to the Internet. (45; 50)

Twitchell concludes that the presence of consumer culture paradoxically gives consumers the tools of empowerment by offering them new tools of self-fashioning. Through buying products and exercising individual choice, persons can remake themselves into new individuals, much like the rituals of the church provided similar tools of self-improvement and self-fashioning.

However, one must ask the question -- does the existence of consumerism replace other moral aspirations of humankind? For example, a person who believes the rhetoric of advertising might decide that personally buying an ecologically sound product is a replacement for actually writing his or her congressman as part of a widespread letter-writing campaign to do something about the environment. Also, the stress upon the individual, a necessary aspect of consumerism (as the individual must be convinced to buy a particular product) belies the idea that the consumer is all-powerful in relation to the producer.