March 23, 2024: Gluttony
Good morning. We are approaching the climax of Lent now (all this is in the Western calendar; in the Eastern calendar, everything is five weeks later this year). Tomorrow is Palm Sunday, which marks the beginning of Holy Week. Each day carries great significance, especially Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday, where we commemorate the Last Supper, Jesus’ passion and crucifixion, and death respectively. Then comes Easter, On March 31 this year, where we celebrate the Resurrection. It is the most significant holiday of the year in Christianity. For this blog, this is Part 6 of the seven deadly sins series, on gluttony this week. Next week, I will round out the series with a discussion of lust.
Gluttony differs from avarice is that, while avarice is the desire to accumulate wealth, gluttony is the desire to consume. We think of gluttony primarily in terms of food and drink, but it can take many forms. There is gluttony in drug and alcohol addiction, in an overly hurried lifestyle, and one can be a glutton for punishment. With gluttony for entertainment, we might be crossing the line into sloth, while with gluttony for sex, we are probably talking about lust.
Obviously, not all eating should be considered gluttony, as we need to eat to survive. In the early Middle Ages, Pope Gregory I (who also brought the seven deadly sins into its present form), posited five forms of gluttony: eating or drinking before a meal, to gratify taste, with too much expense, excessively, and too eagerly.
Many religions feature fasting, the purpose of which is to remove us from one of our most immediate worldly temptations and bring our minds closer to God. In Catholicism, fast days are Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday (maybe I should have saved this topic for next week), and abstinence from non-fish meat on Fridays in Lent is also mandated. Our individual Lenten sacrifices—‘sacrifice’ literally makes to make holy—may or may not take the form of abstaining from food, but they nevertheless are intended to bring ourselves closer to God in whatever way we find that we need.
Different religions also have different dietary restrictions that are to be observed at all times. Mormons, for instance, are proscribed from caffeine, alcohol, and tobacco; Muslims from eating pork; and Hindus from eating beef.
All the deadly sins can be understood as putting something temporal ahead of one’s relationship with God, and in the case of gluttony, that something is usually food or whatever the object of one’s gluttony is.
We can look deeper and ask what wound underlies gluttony? Alcoholism, for instance, is a complex condition and many factors—personality, environmental, social, and so on—contribute to it. Depression and anxiety are risk factors, though they aren’t necessarily the norm. A person suffering from these conditions may find that, at least in the short term, alcohol alleviates feelings of sadness or anxiety, though in the long run, alcohol makes these conditions worse. Mental illnesses are also a contributor to drug abuse, as well as a consequence, though this also isn’t necessarily always the case. I don’t know if too much of generality can be said here. A person who is suffering from drug or alcohol abuse should seek individual help.
Drug laws in the United States go at least as far back as San Francisco’s 1875 ordinance against opium smoking, and alcohol was banned federally under the 18th Amendment and Volstead Act from 1920 to 1933, when it was repealed by the 21st Amendment. The modern “war on drugs” dates to the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970. The notion that American drug policy is designed solely to be racist and punitive is grossly oversimplified, and these policies were designed to address real social problems. But still, too often we think of drug users as problems from which the rest of society must be shielded. How drug policy might be different if we regarded drug users as children of God, worthy of compassion rather than scorn, is an exercise left to the reader.
I found this article, “The gluttony of busy people”, to be quite interesting. At least in the circles I’ve traversed, it is generally regarded as virtuous to have a busy schedule. Postponing meetings because “something came up” and being on one’s cell phone all the time are the norm. But what can happen, according to the article, is that over-busyness becomes a form of gluttony, as one seeks to “consume” as many experiences as one can. When one adopts this kind of lifestyle, it is impossible to live in the moment and be connected to things that matter, including spirituality.
Gluttony is very much at the center of much of our ecological brokenness. A few years ago, back when I was writing on Tumblr, I addressed consumerism, and it is a topic that I would like to address again someday in a more nuanced manner that I can do here. A working definition of consumerism comes from Wikipedia.
Consumerism is a social and economic order in which the goals of many individuals include the acquisition of goods and services beyond those that are necessary for survival or for traditional displays of status.
As mentioned last week in the context of avarice, the phrase “necessary for survival” is open to interpretation. Fast fashion, or the practice of manufacturing low-quality, trendy clothes that are intended to be worn once or twice, gets singled out. I would contend that much of the cultural angst around consumerism, going back to Vance Packard’s 1960 The Waste Makers, makes something of a strawman of the concept.
Critiques of consumerism center on two issues. First is the environmental impact of consumption, a point made by James Gustave Speth, among many others. The second critique is that it is spiritually deadening. As Victor Lebow wrote in 1955,
Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption. The measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is now to be found in our consumptive patterns. The very meaning and significance of our lives today expressed in consumptive terms.
Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical Laudato si' makes both of these critiques.
Going back to our diets, let’s examine the controversial subject of vegetarianism. Among anthropogenic (human-driven) land use worldwide, the vast majority is for agricultural purposes. The chart here misses a few things such as mining and quarrying, and I think the “urban and built up land” category is too small when we account for built-up rural land and rural infrastructure such as roads, railway, and power lines. See my analysis of the subject for more detail. I would estimate that land for food crops constitutes about 60% of all anthropogenic land use, with most of the remainder being managed forests.
Among agricultural land use, the Our World in Data plot finds that livestock, cropland for feed, and grazing land constitute 80% of agricultural land, while animal products constitute 17% of human caloric intake and 38% of protein intake. Food production comprises about a quarter of world greenhouse gas emissions. As of 2014, there were nearly 27 billion livestock animals, of which 21 billion were chickens, more than triple the number of humans. For most people, diet is the most ecologically consequential decision they will make.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church, in paragraphs 2415-2418, explicitly legitimizes the use of animals for food and clothing (p. 2417), though affirms the human duty to care for animals as inherent in stewardship for creation and proscribes causing animals to suffer and die needlessly. I find the Catechism’s treatment of this subject to be a bit confused, as though it is trying to have things both ways. Religious vegetarianism is strongest in religions that originated from India.
I want to conclude this post with some thoughts about modernity. It is beyond any reasonable dispute that, worldwide, material standards of living have risen drastically over the centuries. The classic World As 100 People charts tell the story as well any any blog post could.
Yet many Christians are dissatisfied, and they haven’t done a good job, in my opinion, of articulating why that is the case. The most obvious explanation is, among the stories about modernity that advocates such as Max Roser like to tell triumphalistically, is the story of secularization. Since the Enlightenment, the role of religion as a driver of world affairs has been waning, and when religion is a visible driver, it is usually in an unflattering, reactionary fashion such as the Taliban. Institutions, especially in so-called developed countries, increasingly do not have a discernible religious character. This explanation is correct, but it is far from complete.
I think the deeper problem is a sense that, along with rising standards of living, is a sterilization of the meaning of life to a mere attainment of pleasure and avoidance of pain. Modern science has accomplished these things well and will no doubt continue to do so if left to advance. But there is a deep fear that in so doing, those human experiences that cannot be reduced to attainment of pleasure and avoidance of pain will be forgotten. Dystopian literature such as Brave New World has been produced about this. As discussed earlier in the context of Sloth, we have already witnessed great depersonalization, whereby human needs are transferred from personal family and friend relationships and into impersonal institutions. That, coupled with anxiety over possible eventual technological unemployment, raise great questions about the purpose of human beings, and whether our relationship with God and love for each other can fit into a modernist vision of the future. A vision of human wellbeing that can be satisfied with soma or with virtual reality adds fuel to the fire. And next week, there will be plenty more fuel to consider.
The challenge for those who are frightened by such a vision is to articulate their views that does not come across simply as antimodern. And the challenge for the rest of us is to recognize that gluttony is not the final yardstick of humanity.