On Envy

Posted by julienleyre

In 2017, I reflected on the four cardinal virtues, exploring them one per season through the year. Practicing virtue was an exercise in saying yes. But as I gradually realized, in order to do this, I also needed to decide where I should say ‘no’. And so, by the end of the year, I started thinking about sin, and the role of that concept in leading us towards the good life. Sin is a precious concept, acknowledging that not all our instincts and appetites are good. There are things we do, whether as individuals or collectively, that we should resist and condemn. But what this is may not always be transparent, and therefore, we must cultivate discernment. So, this year, from the first of January till Easter, I will consider the seven deadly sins – Sloth, Pride, Gluttony, Lust, Greed, Wrath, Envy – as an inherited typology supporting the practice of prudence, and share my reflections on this blog every thirteen days, in the form of a free-flowing meditation.

In French, the word ‘envy’ became synonymous with desire before I was born. It is therefore highly difficult for me to natively think of it as a sin. I can hear the voice of parents and friends asking me ‘Qu’est-ce qui te fait envie?’ literally ‘what makes you envy’, meaning, ‘what would you like?’ I can hear the lyrics of an 80s rock song that played on the radio through my childhood: ‘On m’a trop donné, bien avant l’envie – qu’on me donne l’envie, envie d’avoir envie’ – and though the song is about the exhaustion of desire in a consumerist world of material abundance, a word-for-word translation would read ‘I’ve been given too much, way before envy – let somebody give me envy, envy to have envy.’ It’s an odd reversal of values when the radio broadcasts an aspiration to sin.

The lyrics of that song echo my experience of material abundance as an only child of wealthy divorced parents. Toys and games rained over me – both parents, I guess, and parts of the broader family vying for my affection through gifts. I had more things, I think, than any kids at school. I remember moments of envy, when one of them had a toy that I didn’t – but this never lasted very long: either I came back home and appreciated how superior my collection was, or I was able to acquire the plastic object of my desire.

Material abundance protected me from material desire, but a different and deeper form of envy characterised elements of my life that compared unfavourably with others. I envied the children of married parents, who didn’t have to shuffle around from one apartment to the other, nor act as mediator in the financial and emotional struggles of adults. When my father left for the capital, I envied anybody whose two parents lived in the same city, and were spared a fortnightly plane commute. Later still, I envied kids without hostile or manipulative step-parents. Envy led me to regular bouts of despair, a belief that my family situation would make it impossible for me to reach happiness, ever – while others around, though materially less fortunate, were given all the right emotional and spiritual circumstances to lead balanced happy lives. And I became incapable of seeing the good in my own situation.

At school, struggling with my own romantic attraction to men, growing up in a period when gay was not OK, I envied couples of male platonic friends who shared a clear mutual desire to spend time together. Some times, instead of letting new friendships and attachments emerge, I let myself be possessed by envy, targeted and seduced – soon resulting in embarrassment, or even harm.

Envy lost its grip on me when I came out and moved out of home. But the possibility to do this depended on so much – high levels of privilege, a scholarship system, decades of activism from LGBT groups, and the sheer luck of remarkable encounters leading to friendships and romantic relationships that, I hope, were mutually nourishing. And so, when I look back at my own experience of envy, I sense how difficult it is to curb its power, and how dangerous it is for all communities and social relations.

Tragedies of the commons are all based on envy. Prisoner’s dilemma: what if I was to reduce my carbon emissions, and others don’t. Why should I work harder for lower benefits? Why should less developed countries – hey, China – get a right to burn more cheap coal and save money to buy beef, while we must forsake immediate satisfaction to build more expensive insulated buildings and wind farms? Why should future generations be protected, and live in a world of greater potential abundance than us? Why should I go to the effort of looking after the public good, if the public does not look after my interest?

Envy squares greed: while greed is a perverted relationship to the material world, envy looks at other people and their possessions or attributes, seeking discrepancies, and aiming to get even. Envy derives from a scarcity mindset: you have more of something than I do, whether brains, looks, money, relationships, or attention. Envy wears a mask of heroic justice – I would rather risk both of us losing everything, than let such inequality continues. But the same person, here, is both judge and party.

I am writing this – the last of my reflections on sin – on Easter Day. Judah betrayed for greed, but envy led the Pharisees to condemn and kill Christ: why should this man receive such attention – yay, claim to be son of God – rather than us? I would rather take the chance of killing the Messiah than let this uneducated man steal the love and respect of the people from us. Easter, however, is not a revenge story. The judges and executors simply disappear, while abundance returns for the believers who did not let envy possess them. And on this day, at least, it is possible to dream of a future community where envy does not exist, and a genuine sense of abundance prevails.

On Greed

Posted by julienleyre

As I read through the notes I took for this post over the past two weeks, this is what I noticed. There is a lot about the current state of the world, capitalism, economic systems, theory, change. Nothing about myself. Lust evoked shame – greed, abstraction and righteousness.

I could write pages about the systemic greed of our society. Capitalism, consumer culture, negative externalities. Reagan, Thatcher, Trump. Boomers in McMansions, SUVs and cruise-ships, burning away gas, oil and coal, destroying ecosystems for their immediate enjoyment. No fair go for future generations. I could write about the people who produced and promoted single-use plastic bags and forks and cups – disposable pens, razors, printers – and the piles of waste that their fortune was built on. I could mention the start-up world, where success begins at 9 zeros. The slave merchants of past centuries. Colonists over the globe, destroying cultures and land everywhere. All this unpunished, for greed.

I could write about this conversation, last year, on a Facebook thread with a guy contending that ‘everyone’ should put aside four million dollars for retirement: that’s how much you need to secure adequate returns, and you couldn’t possibly start eating up your capital, because what if you lived up to 100? I could reflect on greed as a sin of old age, often based in fear. Then I could look for causal chains, how individualism, consumerism and the loss of intergenerational solidarity nurtures greed. If all incentives are for each of us to look after themselves, the result is irrational collective behaviour, Tragedy of the Commons, and its pending catastrophe.

I could write more about all of this, but would I understand anything about greed as a sin? What if, instead, I wrote about myself. How I live a very comfortable life in a very wealthy country, yet hardly give anything to charity, and only part with money for my own future self through super – and even then, with difficulty. How I know very well that animal farming and large-scale fishing are wrecking our environment, yet struggle to wean myself off meat, fish, eggs, or dairy. How I pass by homeless people every day, yet would rather spend my dollars on cakes and coffee for myself than share it with them.

I do try to moderate my appetite – because I know greed to be dangerous, and because I see the connection between simpler needs and more freedom. But as soon as I got a larger income, a few years back, I started upgrading. The better jam, the better yoghurt, the better peanut butter. The box of fresh vegetables and fruit delivered once a week. The regular coffee outside. The books bought online, rather than borrowed from the library. And when I needed to travel, ubers and taxis, my own airBNB, and the better airline. Because I was working hard, and therefore should be compensated with greater comfort.

Greed is about refusing death, greed is about infinite growth, greed is about placing the self above others. But greed is also that insidious voice in our head, whispering ‘you’re worth it’, and hoarding objects in our cupboards, cash in our bank accounts, consumable experiences in our memories – and piles of waste all over the place.

On Lust

Posted by julienleyre

As I try to write about lust, I encounter an immediate block. Sharing personal encounters with pride, sloth or gluttony seemed easier than sharing my encounters with lust. The sin comes with an ambivalent combination of shame – revealing details will bring embarrassment – and righteousness – as an aunt once famously said, ‘do whatever you like with your ass’. After decades of sexual revolution, our current social agreement seems to be that lust is fine, as long as it stays in the shadows. Indeed, there is a very high taboo on the public consumption of lust. Polite society welcomes pride, greed and envy more than it does sex.

Lust has been described as the most minor of all sins, and the root of all sins. I turned and turned around this in my head, until I landed on the concept of scandal. In its original meaning – and in the Gospel – a scandal is, literally, the little stone that enters the shoe. With each step, the scandal digs deeper into the foot, causing pain, and eventually preventing further forward movement.

The question, then, is this: would it be possible to think of lust, the most minor of all sins and the mother of all sins, as not evil in itself, but in its consequences. This I found in Chesterton, articulating the radical nature of Christianity – that no thing in creation is evil in itself, but evil is always spiritual: it lies in the nature of our relationship to that thing. Such is physical pleasure then – orgasm – or the bodies of other people as a source of pleasure. Nothing there is evil in itself, but our relationship to the thing may be sinful.

As a little stone digs into the sole, softening it, increasing sensitivity to pain, and eventually limiting the capacity to walk – so lust digs into the soul, softening it, increasing sensitivity to pain, and eventually limiting the capacity to walk. There is nothing intrinsically bad about the pleasures of the flesh – whether strictly sexual, or more broadly the many pleasure of soft fabrics, elaborate foods, and sophisticated service, that cushion our encounter with the outside world. But each of those makes a little mark that grows larger and softer with each encounter, until we find ourselves unable to deal with harsher circumstances, or bear the absence of a physical comfort. Then freedom disappears, replaced with addiction to pleasure.

Another concept, then, is useful to think about lust: comfort, the milder side of lust, or endless desire for higher and higher levels of cushioning from the world. Addiction, then, could be the more common manifestation of lust. Here, pleasure is no longer found in resolute and coordinated activity, but in pure consumption. As the need for comfort increases – whether in the form of sexual pleasure, cocaine, booze or thick carpets, in higher and higher doses – other people and, indeed, the entire natural world become nothing more than a means to an end, providing me with the comfort I need in order to keep on living.

All forms of abuse ensue – harassment, exploitation, slavery, rape, of individuals, of natural ecosystems. But abuse is equally directed inwards. Our bodies primarily become a means towards pleasure. We curate images of ourselves intended to get us more sex; we sacrifice entire days to recover from a big night out drinking; we sell off our time and energy to the most evil masters in order to get the money that will pay for the luxuries we can no longer live without.

An entire system develops on the back of this boundless appetite, whose only task is to satisfy our addiction: drugs and prostitution. Business class lounges. Chocolate bar manufacturers. Barrista Coffee. Consumer-driven capitalism. And as the system grows, it feeds upon itself: it needs people to maintain it, and those people, irritated by the many scandals of the system, need more comfort to move forward.

‘You should not test your God’ is one of the most important statements of biblical wisdom. We are, after all, largely mechanical creatures – freewill, if ever within our reach, requires immense concentration. We can, at best, only build better habits, and use their momentum as a path towards virtue. If yielding to lust opens the door to gluttony, greed, sloth, envy, pride and wrath, should we – then – concentrate all our efforts on resisting lust, and virtue will naturally follow?

Among angels, maybe – but not in our present world. The many scandals of a failing system dig from all directions in our souls – public advertisement, addiction to comfort trained from childhood, coffee shops, wine bars & dating apps. Comfort has a calming effect, even if temporary. Giving in to lust puts a balm on our wounds, it relieves us from temporary paralysis, allowing us to take a few steps ahead and – maybe – by doing so, saving us from worse evil. Lust is the mother of all sins, but also the lesser one. Giving in, therefore, rather than firmly resisting, may be prudence: we acknowledge our weakness, and humbly choose a lesser evil.

On Gluttony

Posted by julienleyre

‘Little belly, rejoice, rejoice – every cent I make is for you.’ According to family lore, this is what my great-grandfather used to chant before each meal. Being of French-Italian descent, one would expect gluttony to be particularly challenging for me: from the earliest age, I was trained to believe that food is at the centre of civilised life.

I have noted on several occasions that food plays a role in my own psychological balance. Two days without a good meal, and I will start feeling sad and grumpy. The sensual pleasure of a well-balanced dish enjoyed on a regular basis is a way for me to offset the many frustrations of the day. To that extent, food – good food preferably – is a drug that I depend on to keep my own balance.

As with all drugs, addiction is a risk. Stress, frustration, or even boredom, call for a quick solution. This I find in the form of a chocolate, pizza, cake – or a very large bowl of lettuce with cracked walnuts and shaved parmesan that I prepare, for no reason, in the middle of the afternoon. There is a huge, complex project to work on, where so much is unknown. Munching my way through chips and a burger gives me the sense of control that is missing in other areas of my life, even if only temporarily. When I eat, I’m in charge.

Gluttony, Lust, and greed all have to do with excessive appetite. They are the vices of our time, fed by advertisement, capitalism, and our hedonistic ideology. But what exactly distinguishes them? Is it purely their object – food, sex, money? Or do those three sins differ in a more subtle manner? This is what I would like to reflect on in this post.

I have not been warned against gluttony to the same extent that I have been about sloth, wrath, or envy. Indeed, our entire social system is built on gluttony. Food is available everywhere, and cheap. We subsidise farmers – irrespective of their impact on our environment – so that we can eat in abundance.

Gluttony goes beyond the sensual enjoyment of drink and food. It establishes the purpose of the natural world ss ingestion by humans. Gluttony, quite literally, may result in our species eating the planet to destruction – with all fish- and meat-lovers to the front.

Waste is the necessary by-produce of gluttony. Let the sin go loose, and the world will literally turn to shit. Gluttony destroys its object in order to nurture the self – and to that extent, may be seen as an extension of pride. Gluttony seeks balance and fulfilment through consumption rather than activity – and to that extent, may be seen as an extension of sloth.

Gluttony goes beyond the mindless consumption of food to those extensions of our selves – gas-guzzling SUVs and big houses and the fuel we burn for heating, cooling and decorating them. More broadly, the cities we build, where suburbs encroach further and further into the non-human world, because we want to live close to nature, may be framed as a form of gluttony.

Gluttony comes with an expectation that there will always be more. Resisting it, therefore, is also respecting the right for others to leave. Resisting gluttony preserves our future freedom: parts of the world are untouched. I don’t have to transform the entire world into my own substance. It is OK that food remains uneaten – or even, that food may never be produced.

Resisting gluttony creates internal space: physically, by lowering the pressure on our internal organs, and spiritually, by giving up on our limitless appetite for ingesting the whole world, and keeping time for other activities. What if, then, gluttony was nothing but the fear of freedom, replacing the space of possibility with endless food consumption – and therefore, also, the best ally of tyranny?

On Pride

Posted by julienleyre

I am writing this post on Australia Day. On January 26, 1788, the First Fleet landed on the coast of New South Wales, and raised a British flag on the banks of what is now Sydney harbour. This date has been chosen to mark the birth of Australia as a nation. While crowds are blocking off Swanston Street for a commemorative march, others are protesting what they call ‘Invasion day’.

There is a close connection between pride and nationalism. Pride is an inflated sense of self, a deluded belief in our own importance – and typically takes the form of a carefully curated public image. Enter nationalism, and its two-step process of delusional storytelling. First, select a few figures among the large crowds of our collective past, and establish them as exclusive ancestors. Then, loudly celebrate their glorious achievements, keeping any contribution from others hidden in the shadows of history, while any crime is carefully brushed under the carpet of oblivion.

As a gay man, I am staunchly aware of collective pride and its appeal. Every year, we celebrate the resistance of gay patrons to police intrusions at the Stonewall bar in New York, 49 years ago. Collective gaymory made those people our ancestors. ‘Pride March’ commemorates their courage, from which our current freedom was born. In my time, I proudly marched along the streets of Paris, dancing to techno music with a joyful crowd, celebrating identity. There is, however, danger in this sense of pride – forgetting the plight of those still suffer from oppression today – other genders, other cultures, other ages even – and are easily swept under the carpet of gaystory.

Television – the news particularly – gives our nationalist pride its daily feed through selective reporting. Last week-end, I was in Hobart. At breakfast, large screens were playing the morning show, reporting on the tennis in Melbourne, fires in New South Wales, and an accident in Queensland. Nothing of local interest, nothing about the broader world, but Australia, beautiful Australia, featured exclusively.

Walking to the harbour, I passed a number of monuments erected in St David’s park, bearing the names of early settlers, explorers, governors. Those stone carvings are intended to shape collective memory, and proudly defy death. Soon, however, the vaults of the MONA museum demonstrated their laughable vanity. Mummies, human bodies preserved in white bandages for eternity, now an object of distant curiosity. A gruesome arrangement of twenty-seven taxidermied kittens playing croquet and drinking tea, in derisive imitation of advanced civilization. A room covered in blank books, mocking our attempts at survival through words. A machine reproducing the digestive system: plastic vats filled with bacteria, producing shit on schedule, reminder that our existence depends on those very basic lifeforms, that make up most of our body-weight.

If pride is excessive self-importance, then professional life is a dangerous field. Exposed are entrepreneurs: the fight for attention from clients and funding bodies demand that they put their best profile forward, always, in pitching situations. Yet the most vulnerable may be ‘wannapreneurs’, as I once heard them labelled, who proudly discuss their ideas for a new venture among their supporters, but never learn humility from the resistance of the real that comes with any genuine attempt at making ideas concrete. More broadly, job seekers are dangerously exposed, at least in Australia: when I first arrived, I thought I would never work here, since every job required ‘outstanding communication skills’. I later understood that this actually meant ‘can write an email’. Pride, or at least its verbal demonstration, seems to be the condition for entrance into the contemporary world of work.

Professional pride can take many forms. One is neglecting details, because ‘I’m a big picture person’, and my time is better spent on lofty visions. One is the pride of the magician, that if we say the right words in the right tone at the right time, the laws of nature will bend to our will. One is manic activity, because the world would stop turning without me. One, more insidious, is a stern attachment to personal reputation, whereby we throw colleagues and partners under the bus at the first occasion to preserve our integrity, no matter what the consequences may be for the collective.

Pride is based on a lie, that I am indeed part of a team, a network, a collective, an ecosystem – but there is something unique to me which makes my absolute value relatively superior to that of others. Pride, therefore, dangerously erodes confidence. The proud person cannot be trusted. Their flawed perception requires effort in all interactions: not only must the situation be managed, but also their inflated ego. Pride unravels the complex web of collective life, until nothing but loose threads of humanity are left adrift on an ocean of sterile chaos.

On Sloth

Posted by julienleyre

In 2017, I reflected on the four cardinal virtues, exploring them one per season through the year. Practicing virtue was an exercise in saying yes. But as I gradually realized, in order to do this, I also needed to decide where I should say ‘no’. And so, by the end of the year, I started thinking about sin, and the role of that concept in leading us towards the good life. Sin is a precious concept, acknowledging that not all our instincts and appetites are good. There are things we do, whether as individuals or collectively, that we should resist and condemn. But what this is may not always be transparent, and so, we must cultivate discernment. So, this year, from the first of January till Easter, I will consider the seven deadly sins – Sloth, Pride, Gluttony, Lust, Greed, Wrath, Envy – as an inherited typology supporting the practice of prudence, and share my reflections on this blog every thirteen days, in the form of a free-flowing meditation.

On New Year’s Eve, my partner and I were throwing a big open-door party, as we’ve done every year since moving to the Melbourne CBD. In the hours leading up to the party, we received a number of messages, either on our event page or privately, that people would not be coming because they were ‘unwell’. ‘Unwellness’ is a frequent and accepted way to decline social engagements. The term is vague, and covers a spectrum of conditions from hangovers to food poisoning, mild social tiredness or the darkest pit of depression. ‘I’m unwell’ codes: ‘this is too much for me right now, I don’t feel that I can cope with it, and would rather retreat.’ To what extent, I wonder, is unwellness a manifestation of sloth?

The sin that we call ‘sloth’ has received various names over the centuries and across languages. Among those, ‘tristitia’, melancholy sorrow, and ‘acedia’, negligence, lack of care. Exploring those various names, I hope, will help me better understand elements of its nature. Sloth is not a deliberate decision to lie under warm sheets and watch an indulgent rom-com rather than cleaning the fridge, doing the tax, or conversing with a bore. It is a more insidious failure on our part, not stemming from the voluptuous pleasure of doing nothing and regaining shape, but rather a withdrawal from duties, engagements and activities based on a lack of appetite for the world, a ‘why bother’ attitude, or a sense of overwhelming despair.

What are the varieties of sloth, I wondered as I started the year? As a migrant to Melbourne, I have often called sloth ‘the Australian sin’. I amusingly remember this memorable quote from a Hong Kong friend ‘You know Australians, they’re a bit lazy sometimes.’ But isn’t everyone? Rather, I thought I should try and understand what form sloth takes in this country.

On my first trip, in 2007, I saw the piles of mess lining the walls of gigantic suburban houses as a sign of sloth – as I did the shapeless afternoons slumping on couches in a backyard, idly drinking beer. The curse of abundance? Maybe, but could that Australian form of sloth be more precisely defined as a chaotic relationship to time and space, and a lack of decisiveness regarding the best use of them. I wondered: could it be the natural reaction to the sheer size of the country – why make effort to keep things in order when space is abundant – to the disturbing overlap of a northern hemisphere culture and a southern hemisphere location – how could our days be structured when summer is winter and winter summer – and underlying both, the nagging but repressed question of land ownership and sovereignty – why make a deliberate and collective effort to create order and structure down here, if we’re not quite certain who the land belongs to, and what can be done on it.

Sloth is particularly noticeable in professional settings, where it adopts a number of forms. Sloth may be the basic failure to show up and keep commitments. Sloth may be slow replies or unclear communications. Sloth can be lack of preparation and a ‘she’ll be alright’ attitude. Sloth can also take a more perverse form, whereby one retreats into the mechanical execution of delegated tasks instead of making a difficult decision: there is such a thing as ‘busy’ sloth.

In all cases, sloth easily spreads. When one organ fails, soon the whole body collapses, either because essential functions are no longer performed, or because the pressure on other parts of the system becomes excessive. People weighed with an extra load of responsibility through the sloth of another will eventually give up – thus adding a new link to the chain of sloth. There is a logical consequence: that the person who failed us was surely failed by someone else, and that someone else by another, ad infinitum. We must resist sloth, as individuals and collectively. But we must also cultivate forgiveness, for others, and ourselves.

Sloth is not a voluptuous desire for the comfort of bed, but an absence of courage hiding under the veil of reason: sloth will more likely manifest itself when goals appear impossible, and therefore, action seems useless. I have been working for the last few weeks on a full draft of my PhD, which I committed to completing on the 17. By Wednesday last week, the text overall was in order, but I still had two and chapters and a half – over 30,000 words – that I needed to review before I could share them with my supervisors. I was overwhelmed, and started procrastinating in all sorts of way. Time before the deadline reduced, and the task of ‘completing a draft’ remained a seemingly never-ending path to the top of a mountain lost in clouds. Since I could not meet the deadline, should I not, rather, prioritise other things, so that I could better continue the PhD journey later, when the clouds cleared? And so, rather than making progress in any direction, my brain went in endless circles, spiraling into despair.

I collected myself on Friday, and took a different approach. I opened my cloth-bound, grey 2018 agenda, looked over the coming week, and calculated that I had approximately 21 hours available to work on the draft before the deadline. With about 30,000 words to review, this meant I had to make progress at the rate of 1,500 words per hour. Since the goal was to write a first complete draft – not a final one – my goal should simply be to do whatever I could at that pace. I went through the three word files containing the current text of chapters 5, 6 and 7, and broke down my to-do list into 33 sections – each corresponding to one section which I would spend 15 to 45 minutes editing. My mood instantly lifted. I was out of the despair spiral.

Sloth has nothing to do with short breaks between sessions of concentrated work. Sloth is blankly looking at the wall and repeating in loop, since I can’t have it all, I might as well stop now. I met a partner to discuss a new project Friday, to reframe language learning as a way to better cope with failure, chaos and uncertainty. Whenever I coached anyone wishing to learn a language, I told them: ‘the only reason people fail is because they give up. Therefore, anything that will make you give up, you should stop; and anything that encourages you forward, you should pursue. Now let’s figure what will do that for you.’

Sloth may be the sin most opposite to prudence: it is absence of movement towards the good, born from a sense of overwhelming confusion. The best way to resist sloth, then, may be discernment and careful goal setting. But the path forward is not straight, and as we progress, the goals we set are no longer relevant. The world is chaotic, of its inherent nature, from the sins of others, and our own. Therefore, the work of careful discernment, goal-setting and decision-making is never-ending. Resisting sloth is learning to find joy in this ever-changing world.

Cardinal virtues – a project for 2017

Posted by julienleyre

fortitude-2

This is a sharp memory from my grade Ten French class. We were studying French moralist writers of the 17th century, and our teacher explained one of the fundamental religious debates of the time: the respective role of Grace and Virtues on our salvation. It was the height of religious wars in Europe, and the question of Grace was at the core of a theological opposition between Protestants and Catholics, echoed in France in a polemic between two Catholic factions, the Jesuits and the Jansenists (represented by Pascal). According to Jesuit views – inspired by Renaissance Humanism – God offers his supernatural grace to all humans; it is our duty to meet Him halfway, and use our free-will to deliberately cultivate virtues and accomplish good works. This goes directly against the belief of Jansenists – as well as most Protestant theology – who take a more pessimistic view of mankind: our sinful nature is such that only the Grace of God has efficacy to grant us salvation. All attempts at cultivating moral virtues and conducting good works carry the risk of fostering pride and delusion.

What exactly do we mean when we talk of virtues? For over twenty years, I’ve worn a symbol of my father’s home region around my neck, the ‘guardian cross’, blending a heart, an anchor and a cross. The symbol represents Faith, Hope and Love – three virtues that Paul’s Epistles identify as defining Christianism, and known together as theological virtues. Today, in our post-Christian world, the word virtue evokes at worst a conceited bigot, at best a coy individual, looking for shelter from a corrupting world. But it was not always this way: in its original meaning, virtue has the same root as ‘virile’, and refers to the character of a good citizen – in a famous reflection on the dominant affect in various, Montesquieu associates Virtue to Republican rule. Through the works of Sts Ambrosius, Augustine and Thomas,Catholic theology considers not three, but seven fundamental virtues. Four cardinal virtues, identified in the works of Aristotle, and therefore common to Christians and Pagans, complement Faith, Hope and Love: known as Cardinal Virtues, they are Prudence, Temperance, Justice and Fortitude. On a recent public profile I wrote – ‘I like to listen and look for common ground’. My exploration of Cardinal Virtues in 2017 will both allow me to reconnect with my own Catholic heritage, and reflect on universal forms of good behaviour – what makes a good citizen in a range of tradition, and how to cultivate one’s own character.

Last year, I started a daily blogging project – a daily page of handwriting which I posted online after light editing. After three months, this was interrupted by a demanding new role with the Global Challenges Foundation. The project I was in charge of setting up has now found its shape, systems are in place, and I’ve been able to reduce the extent of my engagement. This allows me to resume daily writing meditation. So this is what I propose for 2017. I will associate a virtue to each season: Prudence and Summer, Temperance and Autumn, Justice and Winter, Fortitude and Spring. Every day, I will reflect on the season’s virtue, decide a way to practice it over the course of the day, and write about the experience in the evening in a diary. At the end of each week, I will write a short blog post summarising what I did and learnt. Marking the end of each season, I will take a full week to reflect, and compose a deeper written meditation. The project will blend writing and practice – and hopefully, lead both to personal transformation and valuable intellectual insights.

I look forward to this year exploring virtues – and hope we can all learn from this.

On gluttony

Posted by julienleyre

Today, I calculated my body fat ratio. There is a website for it. The result is a factor of your waist, neck and hips circumference in relation to your height. I took out a tape, filled in the blank slots, and was placed in the ‘acceptable’ category.

From there, I fell into an Internet burrow, and discovered a number of facts I didn’t triple check. You burn 350 calories in one hour of exercise. One pound of fat is 3500 calories. Tips to lose weight include, drink more water, eat vegetables, cut sugar, reduce carbs. Sustainable weight loss requires long-term lifestyle adjustment.

When I was growing up, all adult women around me were on rotating diets. Sometimes it was all meat and fish, sometimes it was alternative foods on alternative days, and sometimes it was protein shakes and cold wrapping sessions. Then they put weight back on, and the cycle started again.

We may think of weight loss as a vain pursuit, but I am curious about its odd, contradictory status. Half the magazines currently selling will offer weight loss tips. Meanwhile advertising – and our surrounding urban environment – bombard us with images of desirable food in extreme quantities. Yet one word is absent from the debate between ‘an epidemics of obesity’ and ‘body positive’ movements: gluttony.

Old Medieval Europe identified seven deadly sins, one of which was excessive desire for food, or the pursuit of it as an end in itself. But who would be radical enough now to simply condemn recreational eating? Let us appreciate slim bodies as a token of character strength – only by resisting the pressure of consumerist messages can you maintain one. But let us not develop a transparently moral tone when talking of controlling our appetites. Our economy might collapse.

Julien Leyre – 忠廉

Moral reflections & professional musings across cultures and languages

sin

On Envy

On Greed

On Lust

On Gluttony

On Pride

On Sloth

Cardinal virtues – a project for 2017

On gluttony