“‘Wealth,’ I said (Socrates), ‘and poverty; the one is the parent of luxury and indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.'” Plato’s Republic Book IV 422a
In the previous essay we embarked on an examination of poverty’s affect on virtue and found that in extreme cases it brings man to a forked road whose paths lead to either ascent or baseness. It became clear that either road was possible to take, though one more prevalent in the Gulag, but such a choice hinged on the will. Once man had nothing left to lose, it becomes a matter of his own choice whether or not to take either path – no punishment could persuade him either way.
With this in mind we examine poverty’s contrary – abundance. Shall we merely employ Aristotle’s law of opposites set forth in the Nichomachean Ethics? Hardly. Instead we shall employ Pascal’s understanding of diversion and Plato’s understanding of philosophy. I deign to those who will propose that neither of these encompass every thought, and I preemptively applaud all of those who are searching through obscure philosophy transcripts of nameless thinkers to discredit these two great thinkers. Yes, I realize that there are other philosophy’s who make abundance seem very virtuous, but none without changing the idea of virtue, or the definition of good in the process, making it a strange abortion to any familiar with human life.
Why do we think? More importantly why do we think about certain things which we label ‘philosophy’. Once, again, since this matter is highly contested, I do hear all those deconstrucionalists saying that there is no such thing as ‘philosophy’. However, for the rest of the human race, there is, and although their definitions vary greatly they all believe it exists and that it is separate from other arts.
Thinking, particularly about big things (metaphysical things), is, as eluded to in the previous entry, secondary to life functions. Cavemen do not philosophize, they do not have the time. Education, the foundation for philosophy, depends on a certain level of peace that cannot be interrupted by constant movement, hunting, or war. Matters of life and death overwhelm man’s thought process and do not allow philosophy to be planted – notice here ‘planted’, philosophy can grow under these conditions but its original seed cannot be planted when there are more pressing concerns. Likewise, in times of great scarcity philosophy cannot arise, it is hard to think about ‘that without which the cause couldn’t be the cause’ or ‘that thing of which no greater can be thought’ if you are hungry, naked, thirsty, and cold. In other words, scarcity breeds practical wisdom, not philosophy. This should not surpise us terribly, but shouldn’t we then applaud abundance for allowing such a phenomenon to occur?
It is even difficult to philosophize when you’ve been farming all day while maintaining a family. Constant work doesn’t even offer fertile ground for philosophy – since philosophy demands a previous knowledge of writing, of elegance, and of deep contemplation. It is only when people have ‘free’ time, leisure, that they are able to pursue philosophy – and leisure is only possible if there is some sort of abundance.
So what argument could we then have against abundance? Plato responds: luxury and indolence. Or, as we will find out, in Solzhenitsyn’s terms anthropomorphism. Luxury and laziness – greed and sloth – are two sins also present in Dante’s hell and have been widely viewed as vices throughout ethical philosophy and theology. But it is not the point of this essay to merely state what tradition has handed down, but help elucidate it.
Luxury is problematic because man’s wants are endless. Man is the animal which can never be content for long periods of time – he will always return to discontent. Pascal, as well as previous philosophers, point to man’s ability to contemplate as the problem. Man can always understand a more happy condition for him to be in, because, unlike other animals (to our knowledge), man can understand theoretical existence – or things as they could be, rather than things as they are. Man’s mind also knows no bounds and can hyperbolize things to their greatest extent – leaving him constantly in desire.
Hence, Luxury breeds greed. Having luxury doesn’t make you greedy, but it does allow one to hyperbolize an already beneficial position to an even greater one. We know this to be true by example – the rich, though already saturated with material goods, continue to seek wealth. Bill Gates, who can’t even spend the money he makes, still gets more money without complaint. This is because luxury shows us the goods that money can get us, and who in their right mind would deny material comforts. In our modern times this is far more pervasive than it was to the ancients for our material objects can cause us far greater pleasures than they could even imagine.
Yet, there is always something to spoil the limitless material goods. The goods of the body, no matter how comforting, will always remind us of our downfalls. Though we gain pleasure through the body, we also gain pain, and more importantly death. Every pleasure of the body is linked to its death, because as pleasure subsides and disappears it eventually reminds man of a time when his body will not be able to feel such pleasures.
Hence why the natural state of man is unhappy. The more goods we obtain, the more we have to lose when we die (or the more we have to lose in general). This is why it is not good for man to experience too much luxury. Luxury not only weakens him by inducing laziness (by solving problems with money rather than skill, talent, or ability), but it also crushes the soul – for it must.
The soul wants acknowledgement, it wants betterment, it wants knowledge. The soul knows that the body is weak, the body will die, but the body does not want to hear it. The body will cling to life and all its pleasures. The more luxury we give it, the easier it becomes to feed the body and ignore the soul. And every time the meager voice arises from within we crush it with what Pascal calls diversion.
We live in a time where one does not even need luxury to get diversion. Even people living below the poverty line bask in the glow of the television. Thus we turn every person into the kind in Pascal ‘s Pensees 139:
“139. Diversion.- When I have occasionally set myself to consider the different distractions of men, the pains and perils to which they expose themselves at court or in war, whence arise so many quarrels, passions, bold and often bad ventures, etc., I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber. A man who has enough to live on, if he knew how to stay with pleasure at home, would not leave it to go to sea or to besiege a town. A commission in the army would not be bought so dearly, but that it is found insufferable not to budge from the town; and men only seek conversation and entering games, because they cannot remain with pleasure at home. / But, on further consideration, when, after finding the cause of all our ills, I have sought to discover the reason of it, I have found that there is one very real reason, namely, the natural poverty of our feeble and mortal condition, so miserable that nothing can comfort us when we think of it closely. Whatever condition we picture to ourselves, if we muster all the good things which it is possible to possess, royalty is the finest position in the world. Yet, when we imagine a king attended with every pleasure he can feel, if he be without diversion and be left to consider and reflect on what he is, this feeble happiness will not sustain him; he will necessarily fall into forebodings of dangers, of revolutions which may happen, and, finally, of death and inevitable disease; so that, if he be without what is called diversion, he is unhappy and more unhappy than the least of his subjects who plays and diverts himself.”
This is the truest definition of luxury – being able to buy oneself out of the natural misery of our condition. This is why luxury is even more pervasive in modernity than ever before – because it can be afforded by the poor. In the modern western state it is not impossible that 90% or more of the population owns a TV, subscribes to a magazine, has a money intensive hobby, or plays video games and even more likely that they spend over 4 hours a day doing it. Diversion from the ultimate wretchedness of bodily existence is the foremost luxury and in our age of ADD, ADHD, and Hyper Activity this problem has seemed to emerge in a very real and genetic way – a concern? or an explanation for our natural love of diversion?
Although we need leisure to promote the best activities, we also need to use it properly. Diversion impedes our ability to practice, to educate, to read, to philosophize, or even to contemplate or write. Leisure means being comfortable confronting the issues of your human conditions as they arise by giving voice to them through art, music, philosophy, or any of man’s high functions ( they are considered higher because they help others going through similar problems without diverting them from the same meaning). Luxury works against this by providing more pleasurable options and more diversions from essential human problems that tax or even frighten the mind.
This brings us back to America (the pinnacle example of Western Ideals) and its spiritual deadness as seen by Solzhenitsyn and Milosz. The spiritual ascent seems to be noted as a hard one for Milosz, and a painful one for Solzhenitsyn, but both considered it an inward turn that very much involves confrontation with the most fundamental problems of human existence. It is their knowledge of these fundamental conditions that propels them, and others like them to this spiritual height, but in so doing gives them a vantage point from which the American system, despite its pleasures, looks low. The inhabitants of this basilica of freedom have no desire to look inward, or to turn to the most important questions, they have replaced such concern for their spiritual wellbeing with the concern for money – that from which they can obtain luxury. Such is the most insidious snare of our modern gulag: even the pursuit of luxury is a diversion from our fundamental problems because it gives us a goal that is outside, if not contrary, to our spiritual wellbeing.
Veritas Ex Nihilo 