The third warm-hearted sin is
named Gula in Latin and in English, Gluttony. In its
vulgarest and most obvious form we may feel that we are not much tempted to
it. Certain other classes of. People—not ourselves—do, of course, indulge
in this disreputable kind of wallowing. Poor people of coarse and unrefined
habits drink too much beer. Rich people, particularly in America and in
those luxury hotels which we cannot afford, stuff themselves with food.
Young people—especially girls younger than ourselves—drink far too many
cocktails and smoke like chimneys. And some very reprehensible people
contrive, even in wartime, to make pigs of themselves in defiance of the
rationing order—like the young woman who (according to a recent gossip
column) contrived to eat five separate lunches in five separate restaurants
in the course of a single morning. But on the whole, England in wartime is
not a place where the majority of us can very easily destroy our souls with
Gluttony. We may congratulate ourselves that, if we have not exactly
renounced our sins, this particular sin at any rate has renounced us.
Let us seize this
breathing-space, while we are out of reach of temptation, to look at one
very remarkable aspect of the sin of Gula. We have all become aware lately
of something very disquieting about what we call our economic system. An
odd change has come over us since the arrival of the machine age. Whereas
formerly it was considered a virtue to be thrifty and content with one's
lot, it is now considered to be the mark of a progressive nation that it is
filled with hustling, go-getting citizens, intent on raising their standard
of living. And this is not interpreted to mean merely that a decent
sufficiency of food, clothes and shelter is attainable by all citizens. It
means much more and much less than this. It means that every citizen is
encouraged to consider more, and more complicated, luxuries necessary to his
well-being. The gluttonous consumption of manufactured goods had become,
before the war, the prime civic virtue. And why? Because the machines can
produce cheaply only if they produce in vast quantities; because unless the
machines can produce cheaply nobody can afford to keep them running; and
because, unless they are kept running, millions of citizens will be thrown
out of employment, and the community will starve.
We need not stop now to go round
and round the vicious circle of production and consumption. We need not
remind ourselves of the furious barrage of advertisement by which people are
flattered and frightened out of a reasonable contentment into a greedy
hankering after goods which they do not really need; nor point out for the
thousandth time how every evil passion—snobbery, laziness, vanity,
concupiscence, ignorance, greed—is appealed to in these campaigns. Nor how
unassuming communities (described as "backward countries") have these
desires ruthlessly forced upon them by their neighbours in the effort to
find an outlet for goods whose home market is saturated. And we must not
take up too much time in pointing out how, as the necessity to sell goods in
quantity becomes more desperate the peop1e's appreciation of quality is
violently discouraged and suppressed. You must not buy goods that last too
long, for production cannot be kept going unless the goods wear out, or fall
out of fashion, and so can be thrown away and replaced with others. If a
man invents anything that would give lasting satisfaction, his invention
must be bought up by the manufacturer so that it may never see the light of
day. Nor must the worker be encouraged to take too much interest in the
thing he makes; if he did, he might desire to make it as well as it can be
made, and that would not pay. It is better that he should work in a
soulless indifference, even though such treatment should break his spirit,
and cause him to hate his work. The difference between the factory hand and
the craftsman is that the craftsman lives to do the work he loves; but the
factory hand lives by doing the work he despises. The service of the
machine will not have it otherwise. We know about all this, and must not
discuss it now—but I will ask you to remember it.
The point I want to make now
is this: that whether or not it is desirable to keep up this fearful
whirligig of industrial finance based on gluttonous consumption, it could
not be kept up for a single moment without the co-operative gluttony of the
consumer. Legislation, the control of wages and profits, the balancing of
exports and imports, elaborate schemes for the distribution of
surplus commodities, the State
ownership of enterprise, complicated systems of social credit, and finally
wars and revolutions are all invoked in the hope of breaking down the thing
known as the present Economic System. Now it may well be that its breakdown
would be a terrific disaster and produce a worse chaos than that which went
before—we need not argue about it. The point is that, without any
legislation whatever, the whole system would come crashing down in a day if
every consumer were voluntarily to restrict his purchases to the things he
really needed. "The fact is," said a working man the other day at a
meeting, "that when we fall for these advertisements we're being had for
mugs." So we are. The sin of Gluttony, of Greed, of over-much stuffing of
ourselves, is the sin that has delivered us over into the power of the
machine.
In the evil days between the
wars we were confronted with some ugly contrasts between plenty and
poverty. Those contrasts should be, and must be, reduced. But let us say
frankly that they are not likely to be reduced, so long as the poor admire
the rich for their indulgence in precisely that gluttonous way of living
which rivets on the world the chains of the present economic system, and do
their best to imitate rich men's worst vices. To do that is to play into
the hands of those whose interest it is to keep the system going. You will
notice that, under a War economy, the contrast is being flattened out; we
are being forced to reduce and regulate our personal consumption of
commodities, and to revise our whole notion of what constitutes good
citizenship in the financial sense. This is the judgment of this world:
when we will not amend ourselves by Grace, we are compelled under the yoke
of the Law. You will notice also that we are learning certain things.
There seems, for example, to be no noticeable diminution in our health and
spirits due to the fact that we have only the choice of, say, half-a-dozen
dishes in a restaurant instead of forty. In the matter of clothing, we are
beginning to regain our respect for stuffs that will wear well; we can no
longer be led away by the specious argument that it is smarter and more
hygienic to wear underlinen and stockings once and then throw them away than
to buy things that will serve us for years. We are having to learn,
painfully, to save food and material and to salvage waste products; and in
learning to do these things we have found a curious and stimulating sense of
adventure. For it is the great curse of Gluttony that it ends by destroying
all sense of the precious, the unique, the irreplaceable. But what will
happen to us when the war-machine ceases to consume our surplus products for
us? Shall we hold fast to our rediscovered sense of real values and our
adventurous attitude to life? If so, we shall revolutionise world economy
without any political revolution. Or shall we again allow our Gluttony to
become the instrument of an economic system that is satisfactory to nobody?
That system as we know it thrives upon waste and rubbish-heaps. At present
the waste (that is, sheer gluttonous consumption) is being done for us in
the field of war. In peace, if we do not revise our ideas, we shall
ourselves become its instruments. The rubbish-heap will again be piled on
our own doorsteps, on our own backs, in our own bellies. Instead of the
wasteful consumption of trucks and tanks, metal and explosives, we shall
have back the wasteful consumption of wireless sets and silk stockings,
drugs and paper, cheap pottery and cosmetics—all the slop and swill that
pour down the sewers over which the palace of Gluttony is built.
Gluttony is warm-hearted. It is
the excess and perversion of that free, careless and generous mood which
desires to enjoy life and to see others enjoy it. But, like Lust and Wrath,
it is a headless, heedless sin, that puts the good-natured person at the
mercy of the cold head and the cold heart; and these exploit it and bring it
to judgment, so that at length it issues in its own opposite—in that very
"dearth in the midst of plenty" at which we stand horrified to-day.
