The Monkish Impulse
Catherine Deveny is glad the price of petrol is going up. Here is her screed.
Can’t you see? All this gorging on abundance is destroying the environment, creating landfill and making us slaves to multinationals with “buying power”. It’s making us fat, sad and scared, which affects the cost of health care and leaves fewer resources for schools and aid. We’re getting stressed and sad and that impacts on our productivity, quality of life and happiness and that of those around us. And it’s corroding our souls.
Do what you like, buy what you like, drive what you like and shop where you like. But ask yourself if you are really getting value for money.
I’m glad the price of petrol is going up and the price of food is rising.
James Lileks comments:
Just so we’re on the same page, I am not irritated that someone criticized excess. …There’s so much twaddle in that piece it’s hard to know where to start – it’s like a bucket of depression larger than a human head, flavoured not with reason but panic-flavored fear-sauce – but there is one telling line:
“Abundance takes the value from everything.”
Ingratitude takes the value out of everything. I can easily imagine the columnist complaining about the abundance of a civilized frippery like toilet paper, and wishing we could go back to corn cobs, which would get us back in touch with nature. Literally.
If you needed any benchmarks about what the apogee of comfort looks like, there you are: a newspaper columnist paid to worry about the size of other people’s popcorn purchases.
My comment: the impulse that rejects with disgust the abundance and happiness of the world is a fundamentally religious impulse. In a society more suited to satisfy human needs, there would be an order of monks or nuns somewhere in the remote waste places of the world to which Miss Deveny could go. Instead of exercising herself daydreaming about abortive socialist utopias on Earth, she could spend her days under a vow of poverty in fasting and in prayer, and do, if only she knew it, much more good with her prayers than with her screeds.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
