The Good Life, Part I
Xfinity and Axe vs. Socrates and St. Paul
In 2017, Comcast’s Xfinity won “best ad” from industry heavyweight Cablefax Magazine for its 2-minute spot, “Hooking up Grandma’s House.” The ad begins with a kind-faced elderly woman reading this tweet, obviously written by her granddaughter:
“Entering the gates of hell where there’s no wi-fi and no shows, AKA grandmas”
Is grandma hurt? Offended? No. She and Grandpa sheepishly realize they are “not up to date,” and there is, therefore, something wrong with them.
Predictably, the Xfinity crew shows up and wires Grandma’s house with all the latest — surround sound, several screens (including a huge one above the fireplace, superseding that traditional focal point of family gathering), and a remote control that is apparently voice activated. When cheeky little brat, er, granddaughter shows up, all sullen and I-don’t-want-to-be-here, she is blown away by the transformation of her matriarch’s home into a virtual theater. Instantly, grandmother and granddaughter are best friends.
Sweet right?
A shockingly large number thought so. People Magazine listed it among the top “12 Holiday Commercials That Will Make You Feel All The Feels” (whatever that means).
SBNation, on the other hand, roasted the ad. Among its many criticisms is this gem:
“The grandparents’ reaction to this obnoxious tweet is to go out and get Wi-Fi for the granddaughter who sent it. I’m sorry, but that’s absurd! You do not reward this kind of behavior. If I were in their position, I would shut off the electricity altogether and make that ungrateful girl spend Christmas reading the Bible outside while wearing a hair shirt.”
The ad sends a very clear message: Grandma means nothing to me unless she has wifi. This is the way all advertising works. Replace the wi-fi with beer, deodorant, or a hemi-infused 4x4, and the message is the same: The good life is not cultivated; it’s purchased.
What is the good life?
In his dialogue Protagoras, Plato explores the nature of good and evil, pleasure and pain, and ultimately the good life. Socrates, Plato’s mouthpiece, insists that all wrongdoing, all evil, is a result of ignorance. He says that people often make the argument that wrongdoing is the product of a momentary pleasure that overcomes them to abandon what they know to be good. But Socrates says this is absurd. Through their dialogue, Protagoras and Socrates conclude that that which is good is that which brings pleasure, and that which is evil is that which brings pain. Before we balk at this, we have to take the long view. Is there any pain in Heaven? Any real pleasure in Hell?
Paul tells us in Romans 12:2 that God’s will is “good, pleasing, and perfect.” The difficulty is in the momentary perception of the good life.
Socrates puts it this way:
“Do not objects of the same size appear larger to your sight when near, and smaller when at a distance? … And the same holds of thickness and number; also sounds, which are in themselves equal, are greater when near, and lesser when at a distance….Now suppose doing well to consist in doing or choosing the greater, and in not doing or in avoiding the less, what would be the saving principle of human life? Would it be the art of measuring or the power of appearance? Is not the latter that deceiving art that makes us wander up and down and take at one time the things of which we repent at another, both in our actions and in our choice of things great and small? But the art of measurement would invalidate the power of appearance and, showing the truth, would fain teach the soul at last to find lasting rest in the truth, and would thus save our life. Would not mankind generally acknowledge that the art which accomplishes this result is the art of measurement?” (356 d-e)
In other words, regardless of momentary perception, there is a normative measurement — a standard that transcends any one individual’s experience — for pleasure and pain, and that pleasure which sometimes seems to lead to the good life often does not, while that pain which dissuades us from discipline is often the path to the most pleasure; “No Pain, No Gain” may have biblical warrant.
Imagine Eve in the garden, nose pressed against the forbidden fruit, thereby making the fruit of every other tree in the garden seem tiny by comparison. She didn’t trust that God wanted to give her the best, and when we make an idol of some pleasure in this world, we are making the same mistake.
And so I submit to you that Socrates is correct: all wrongdoing is, in a certain way, a product of ignorance; not ignorance of what we should do in the moment, but ignorance of what is truly the good life. When it comes to the wisdom of the long view, Christians often get it just as wrong as everybody else. We flog ourselves, convinced that the Christian life is the dutiful life, the righteous life, but not the good life. In fact, we think we must give up the good life if we are to be a Christian. We deprive ourselves of what we believe to be true pleasure in order to receive our eternal reward; suffer, suffer, and suffer, so that one day we’ll be patted on the back. But is this how we should understand the workings of a cosmos that is designed and sustained by a God who made us in his image and sacrificed his son on our behalf? If God “did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32).
If our imaginations are captured by 30-second spots for unlimited data or underarm deodorant and not by the Supreme Creator of the cosmos, is there a chance that our vision of the good life might be a bit short-sighted?
In Part II we’ll see how Asaph might answer that question…
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