Seven deadly sins don’t change
Matt Pearl
In these final months of my brief return to the classroom, I have taken occasion to review a classic medieval work of British literature: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The lesson is precisely as interesting as it sounds….
Anyway, we study the aspects of the seven deadly sins that folks in the middle ages regarded as being the most critical mistakes a person can make, both in the eyes of God and those of men.
During the lesson, it occurred to me that we are no different today than people were then: we need and want the same things, possess the same shortcomings and fall prey to the same weaknesses. I demonstrated my point by going sin-to-sin and giving modern illustrations of our modern abuses and failures.
The first sin was greed, or avarice, as it was commonly identified in Chaucer’s day. It is the obvious breaking point in many of our political ideals and policies. Each side of the great Democrat-Republican schism sees the other as operating out of greed–moreover, each is right about the other, to some degree at least.
Capitalism used the principal of greed expected, meaning that a pure capitalist makes the somewhat bleak assumption that greed drives an economy, and uses greed to empower everyone freely to pursue capital to his or her heart’s content. Socialism is greed contained, a notion that assumes that human love of money may be kept in check by use of governmental mechanisms that force wealth to be, to varying extent based upon the powers in charge, redistributed for the common good.
We moved on to wrath, which is the purposeful use of anger and ill will toward one another to guide our thoughts and deeds. Never has there been poison stronger in this world than the hatred we possess for one another, and for the justification our wrath lends to our deeds.
Lust was on the list. The room was full of teenagers, so this one required little elaboration. But we all combat lust in at least a few of its various forms, and we generally do so to the corruption of ourselves and our society.
Next up was pride, made most evident of late by the influx of experts on the national stage, folks who have complete self-assurance that their ideas are always right. I have said before I wish President Trump had never discovered Twitter, and I stand by it. Social media grows the ego to record size, but the mind doesn’t seem to grow with it.
And the award show celebrity types, who are themselves in love with ego-inflated self-image, promote unrest as well with their prideful assessments of how everyone who has a different worldview or set of experiences from theirs is ruining the world. Less Trump, less Streep, and I’m a happy man–or maybe that’s my pride overreaching.
Sloth was the next sin on the slate, and for those who don’t use that word much these days, we’re talking about laziness. I instructed this room of millennials that this would be the sin folks a generation or two older would pin upon them in the years to come. To the perspective of my folks’ generation, millennials seem chiefly adept at sitting around and looking at their phones, all while letting other people run the shovels and hammers. That’s not fair to them, but it’s the criticism they face right now.
Gluttony, or overindulging in material things (food being the most common object) is known to most of us. It’s tough not to live excessively in a land of plenty.
The final sin: envy. We want what others have, and we resent them for having it. Take jealousy out of the equation, and neither capitalism nor socialism has a leg to stand on. Systems fail, because people fail in deadly ways.
Matt Pearl owns and operates newspapers in King City, Albany, and Grant City.
