Instant Gratification in Our Society

Recently I graded the final exams for a Christian ethics course. On a question about premarital sexual intercourse, I found that I was generally giving higher grades to students who took the position that for Christians sexual intimacy is to be entered upon only after marriage. Concerned that I might be grading according to my own ethical values, not according to classroom standards of analysis, use of resources, and the like, I reread a number of papers.

After examining the essays afresh, I was satisfied that most of the students who argued the traditional position had, indeed, been more analytic and had struggled more intelligently with the issue. Those who had argued in favor of premarital sexual relationships -- many of them Christians -- had tended to make assumptions about human relationships which allowed them to avoid analysis and struggle. Why? Because, I think, they simply accepted our consumption-based society's basic assumption: all needs require instant gratification.

My students are products of a culture that does not question that constantly repeated theme. Neil Postman, professor of "media ecology" at New York University, estimated recently that children in America see 750,000 TV commercials during the formative period of their lives from six to 18. Is it any wonder that immediate gratification is built into our perceptions? It is an idea taught 15 times an hour, six hours a day, seven days a week.

What we see in our country today is a perfectly good economic process -- the mechanisms for producing and consuming goods -- made into a religion. Production is good: How could humans live without producing food, clothing, housing? Consumption is good: How could we live without consuming food, wearing clothes, living in dwellings? The means by which we produce such abundance are good: Who would argue against making human toil easier by means of machines? But taken together, they constitute America's other religion. The struggle between consumer religion and the Christian faith is a battle at least as old as that of the prophets against Baalism or the early church against the divinized Roman Empire.

Indeed, we have only to look at the change in Rome from the year 58 or so, when St. Paul wrote Romans, to about 85 when John wrote Revelation, to see a good thing become bad by assuming an aura of divinity. In Romans 13 Paul calls the empire's officials "ministers [deacons] of God to do his will.