’Tis the season: for plastic, for wrapping, for quantity, for abundance. It is a funny word, abundance. My 1901 dictionary defines it as “ample sufficiency.” Today’s Webster’s defines it as “more than sufficient quantity.” The former points to an appreciation of what we have; the latter speaks to our current state of overconsumption. The former indicates an abundance secured against future want; the latter, merely a quantity in excess of what is needed for the present, just stuff, all of it the same.
Our local discussion group is reading the wonderful book Larding the Lean Earth by Steven Stoll. Stoll discusses at some length a topic that has troubled me for years. Has the sheer abundance of our continent ultimately conspired to corrupt our better angels? Or were we doomed by some inner corruption, some genetic predisposition to be the bipedal locusts hoovering up all in their path?
Has this abundance destroyed our sense of wonder and beauty? William Cobbett in his curious and judgmental work The American Gardener (1817) wrote of assessing the morality of a man by how he kept his garden. George Marsh (congressman from Vermont), when he took the floor in 1848 to argue against the Mexican War, made the unusual argument that what we already had was enough for any civilization, that to grasp for more, we would risk losing the sense of what was best about where we lived. It’s an argument that seems out of place with where we journeyed and where we have ended up.
Where we have ended up is as the spoiled kid on Christmas morning, surrounded by new geegaws and already bored. Why take care of the presents when he’s been given so much and expects more? Our consumer ethic, molded by abundance, has stunted our hearts: why take care of a home when it is only a “starter” home, a spouse, land, or neighbors when they can so easily be replaced?
Cursed by an abundance of land and resources, we have fouled our nest and moved on so often that our internal landscape now mirrors our external. The sheer ugliness of our daily landscape has a corrosive effect on our spiritual and political selves. Do all the geegaws we purchase this holiday season give us any more sense of well-being?
Maybe the true act of love for our planet, our home, is to repaint, tidy the garden, repair the torn pants, patch the jacket, sweep the sidewalk, bake some bread and give it to the neighbors. Maybe less can still be more. Maybe less is still abundance.
These questions about the nature of abundance and our orientation to it are good questions but ultimately unanswerable, I’m afraid. Moral philosophy of the sort you point to with Cobbett and Marsh is anathema to us in the era of the Black Friday stampede. Sure, you and I might have stayed home and eschewed the crowds, but there is a palpable sense, an omnipresent corporate/media drumbeat, that channels us there anyway as gawkers and judgmental onlookers after the fact. And the irony is that shoppers aren’t even there particularly to partake in abundance and overconsumption anymore; they go to share in the communal excitement lost in tamer exploits. It’s a sporting event akin to running of the bulls in Pamplona. Like traffic on the roadways, however, where we complain while we are the traffic, we’re now the bulls, too, trampling and goring each other for sheer thrills. Sure, it extinguishes boredom, but at the cost of our souls.
Well said, Brutus. Running with the bulls, that is a great comparison for compulsive shopping.
That American style consumer capitalism came to dominate the planet may be tied into our initial abundance of land. That that abundance coincided with the beginning of the exploitation of the hydrocarbons that have fueled this growth and the culture is probably moot, as you point out.
Cheers,
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