To Live in Temperance
Temperance as inner order
I’ve been reading Paul Kingsnorth’s Against The Machine as research for my next book, Shoring Up the Ruins (working title), focusing on language of the “Machine” and how it compares to my understanding of “Worldly Powers.” One point that Kingsnorth rightly makes is that the Machine (whatever it is) operates on growth, and therefore depends on us consuming more and more. In other words, we could not have the conditions Kingsnorth describes in his book (or I describe in You Are Not Your Own) unless we had a culture of mass consumption, where nearly everyone had been trained from a very young age to say “Yes!” to their desires. The puritan ethics of simplicity and frugality just would not allow for the kind of endless consumption and disposal of goods and services that feeds endless, directionless growth. Our natural human bent is to give into our desires, and people have always sought to profit off of tempting us into our desires, but never before have people have so systematically, scientifically, and thoroughly tempted us into our desires as a culture. This creates a plausibility structure for us where it feels plausible to give in to what feels right deep in your heart: buy that special cup of coffee (“You deserve it!”), pursue that inappropriate relationship (“You deserve them!”), or get into that debt for something fun (“You deserve this!”). So how does practicing the virtue of temperance help reorient us in this disorienting culture? As I’ve argued in To Live Well, temperance is not the same as balance or moderation; instead, it reflects the inner order of our lives. As we reorient our lives and our loves toward God, we find freedom from intemperate desires sold to us by the world.
