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Don’t ask questions, just consume product and then get excited for next product!

Jay, Red Letter Media

Well, here we are. After spending entirely too long choosing a title (One I’m still not overjoyed with, but deadlines are deadlines) and the order in which I’d be covering the subjects, the day is upon me. But before I jump in, I do first want to touch on the title itself.

I’ve considered using this verse from Judges 21:25 for quite some time, the full verse being: “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” The context for this being, of course, the Isrealites and their gradual spiral further and further from the dictates of God during the time of the Judges prior to the coronation of the first king, Saul. Spoiler alert: that doesn’t solve the problem. It does, however, set the stage for Christ’s arrival by showing the people’s need for that very human yet spiritual guidance. Back to the point, it also showed what became of people when they didn’t have that involvement, and lives of sin they drifted toward. Something I think we can all relate to at this point.

The Deadly Sins are, in short, generalizations of the behaviors that lead us to live flawed lives. Dante Alighieri defined these sins as corrupt visions of love, and I find that to be an excellent summation. In each of the Deadly Sins, we can find a mote of truth and beauty that has been poorly directed.

Now, with that table set and me having just settled in from a likely-too-large lunch, let’s kick this off with our first sin – gluttony.

These first three articles are going to have very similar threads. Gluttony, Lust, and Greed have the same focus – they want more. More food, more pleasure, more, well, more. But, if I was to cover each, I didn’t want to focus on the obvious nature of each sin. I wanted the generalizations to help see how they have shaped and continue to shape our lives in order to help combat them. What, then, is the generalization of Gluttony?

Gluttony is an overwhelming focus on consumption. It doesn’t care the quality of what it consumes or the outcome of that consumption, it simply wants more. More food, more entertainment, more satisfaction. It doesn’t seek to hoard or boast, only to devour.

In an obvious way, we can see the effect of Gluttony in the West. We live disposable ways of life. It has been reported Americans throw out on average six hundred and forty dollars worth of food a year, more than any other nation on the planet. We’ve gravitated toward individually packaged everything, leading to ever increasing waste. Every year, we replace one perfectly functional phone for the next, just to have the latest and greatest. We live in a twenty-four-seven news cycle, in an age of global visibility that allows us to suck down content to fuel whatever feeling we wish to feel. It seems, at times, that we must live in a post-scarcity world where anything and everything can show up at our doorstep in a day or less with the click of a button.

And to what end? If we listen to the worries of the left, this hyper-consumerism is leading to a dying planet, overtaxed and overburdened. If we listen to the worries of the right, it has become its own Ouroboros, a perpetual cycle of hedonism that further perverts the desired nature of man. And while we argue back and forth over causes and outcomes and policies, we continue to pass over the fact that we agree, at least in part, on the nature of the problem. Overconsumption is a problem.

So, what do we do about it? Well, to continue to be a broken record on this, the only person you can truly change is yourself. We have to look at our own lives and expose them to fresh air and sunlight. The first step is knowing our own needs to improve and building upon them.

Myself, for instance. I used to be much worse when it came to the more obvious nature of Gluttony – I’d put on a lot of weight and I was, for lack of a better term, the trash can of the family. Anything anyone else wasn’t planning to eat, that was mine. No waste over here, which made me more virtuous in whatever bent ideology I’d invented. I’m past that, though, and while I still can go a little overboard at times, I consider myself better in that regard. No, the problem I have content. I spend an inordinate amount of time listening to politics. Consuming the state of the world through the lense of ideology. This may be worse than physical gluttony. Rather than becoming unhealthy and lax, I become jaded and distrusting. People’s actions take on new lights that they otherwise would not. I start to believe I know people without having ever met or spoken with them. I take away their benefit of the doubt and cast them to roles, dehumanizing them.

After all, I am what I eat.

With that understanding, we turn to the corresponding virtue: Temperence.

Temperence is more than just a pretty word for discipline. Yes, it’s a dictate of self-restraint that also features prominently in discipline, but there’s an extra edge of using that restraint toward specific, countering ends. I’m perfectly able to practice discipline in my disorders to the benefit of no one. Temperence, however, will steer me away from those ill-suited practices.

Let’s apply a little Temperence toward my particular trouble with Gluttony, shall we? At a glance, it would be simple for me to practice Temperence with regard to how I view people and their motives, but I can see that this isn’t the problem so much as the symptom. What I need to combat here is my voracious appetite for finding the flaws in my fellow man. It’s a bit of a compounded sin, blended for my pleasure, but I expect that’s the case for most. A little Gluttony here, some Envy there, a sprinkle of Wrath and blend with a heaping helping of Pride. This will take time to pull apart and treat with the right virtues, but with all things I need to start somewhere, and here it is. The first stop, peeling myself away from King Content. I’ll be reducing my time spent on political matters and putting that time toward something less mentally warping. Prayers and higher pursuits when I can manage, my music library when I can’t.

Though I’m starting with Gluttony, I recognize it can be one of the more pernicious of the sins. I sympathize with people that have food addictions – it is the only addiction where one cannot go cold-turkey and live without. When it comes to Gluttony, we must consume to live. But relying on Temperence, we can fight to ensure that consumption doesn’t become a force unto itself and, if we find ourselves geared toward overconsumption, that we guide that nature toward the overconsumption of what is good and just. A zeal for holiness and bettering the world around us, as always, beginning with ourselves.

Until next time, my friends, when we explore Gluttony’s fraternal twin, Avarice.