It is an affluent city in which an astounding 64% of residents have four or more years of college according to the most current city guide published by a local magazine. Crime is low compared to nearby Detroit. But there is a deeper problem in Ann Arbor, and it is despair.
Many residents would wince in astonishment at this diagnosis. They see themselves as living very self-actualized, upwardly mobile lives. But self-appraisals are highly suspect. Denial is in our blood. Let's look at some evidence and make some inferences. If you look through the local, privately published city guide, you are struck with a full-page color ad that seems to come right out of the late sixties and seventies. It is an add for a “pipe” shop termed “The Best Head Shop” with Ann Arbor's “largest selection of pipes.” The ad, with pictures of garish and strange pipes, also makes a point of noting that it also sells scales. There is a disclaimer saying that all “pipes are sold for tobacco use only.”
If you continue browsing the city guide, you come to an ad placed by an office of the University of Michigan entitled “Lesbian Gay Bisexual & Transgender Affairs,” apparently located in the university union building.
Then you come to the Planned Parenthood ad which offers “All Birth Control Methods,” “Sexually Transmitted Infection Testing and Treatment,” and “Surgical and Medical Abortion.” Strangely enough, right below the line pitching abortion is a pitch for “Prenatal Care.”
And, of course, profusely cramming every page of the guide are ads for an overwhelming variety of consumer products and services.
Now this locally and privately published city guide must certainly not be unique among university towns. Boston and Berkeley must have more of the same. Ann Arbor is not alone. What do these ads tell the social observer or the armchair philosopher?
Well, the philosopher must have some prism by which to analyze. Let's use the classic Christian and Catholic prism: the capital sins listed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. These sins “engender other sins, other vices” (CCC, 1866). They include “pride, avarice, envy, wrath, lust, gluttony, and sloth or acedia.”
We can easily do the matching. The technology and dangers of lust are banally advertised by Planned Parenthood. The pipe ad is an appeal to gluttony, the gluttony seeking compulsive and slothful satiation. The university department ad ministering to unnatural inclinations is another testimony to the distorting effects of lust. The consumer ads in their excess are a testimony to lurking envy, avarice, and more gluttony. Pride is present in the proud ticking off of the educational attainments of the residents. The residents are a cut above the rest.
On the positive side of the scale, there is no ad appealing to wrath or hatred. It appears to be quite an amiable and civil culture. But I submit that the wrath, although not manifest in the ads, is also lurking. The wrath is directed inward: wrath toward one's own human body. What we have is a modern adaptation of ancient Gnostic religions that viewed the body as a burdensome evil. The body's natural reproductive capacity is to be manipulated with technology and twisted into strange sexual orientations. That does not sound like love for one's body. The body's (and mind's) fatigue is to be enveloped and drowned in a haze of ambiguously advertised pipe smoke.
Highly educated, apparently amiable, but self-hating because our bodies are a crucial part of who we are. That is the startling inference we can make about some of the most educationally and economically privileged people to have ever lived on the face of the earth. In the Christian view, we are destined to be embodied forever. So maybe the hell of the final judgment will have similar advertisements.
© Copyright 2004 Catholic Exchange
Oswald Sobrino’s daily columns can be found at the Catholic Analysis website. He is a graduate lay student at Detroit’s Sacred Heart Major Seminary. He recently published Unpopular Catholic Truths, a collection of apologetic essays, available on the internet at Virtualbookworm.com, Amazon.com, and Barnes & Noble.
