Happy Thanksgiving!

Fig. 1. Turkey. From Vintage Printable

Here is a good Thanksgiving message from Patrick Deneen.

The contrast between our "feast" days and our regular days has faded nearly to the point of indistinction. In America today, we are more likely to contend with obesity than starvation, with binge shopping than asceticism, with adult diabetes than scurvy. I don't mean to minimize the genuine sufferings of the genuine poor, but many of our disadvantaged people today are far more wealthy and comfortable than even the wealthiest of the Pilgrims; poverty, "the middle class" and wealth are and have always been relative standards, points of comparison that reflect contemporary levels of material want or plenitude.

My friend and Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, Charles Mathewes, has suggested that the problem we may face in the future (if not the present) is not too much want, but too much plenty. How do we, as a civilization, deal with the existence of so much stuff when our operative definition of the world and the economy has been based on the idea that nature is one of scarcity and we need, in response, an ever-increasing generation of more?

Much of modern philosophy - from thinkers ranging from Francis Bacon to Thomas Hobbes, from John Locke to Adam Smith - has held that nature is chintzy and that human freedom consists in extending our mastery over, and control of, the natural

Rather than seeing the world as one of scarcity that required our conquest, they saw a world of plenitude and as gift

world. Freedom is the expansion of the human power to fulfill our wills and desires. Freedom today is so often defined as choice - but more, the power to fulfill choice. If we are so often dissatisfied, it is not that many of our desires go unfulfilled, but that new desires inevitably trail those that have been met, demanding new power and the further extension of mastery. As a result, our one official political policy - regardless of party or leader - is growth....

I find this fact noteworthy - for it is our older inheritance, once embodied in our humanities disciplines, that offered a different understanding of freedom. By this older definition - found in our classical and Biblical inheritance - freedom is the attainment of self-government over our appetites. Ancient and religious thinkers (ranging from Aristotle to Augustine and beyond) argued that human appetites were infinitely expandable, and that submission to the pursuit to fulfill appetite was an endless and impossible task. To pursue their fulfillment was to make oneself a slave to one's appetites. True freedom, such thinkers argued, consisted in the governance of appetite. By extension, rather than seeing the world as one of scarcity that required our conquest, such thinkers saw a world of plenitude and as gift, one that offered us many goods and even plenitude and required of us in turn good stewardship and moderate appetites. The first Thanksgiving - for all the hardship experienced by the Pilgrims - was celebrated in this spirit, not one that despised the earth for giving us too little, but celebrated creation for offering so much.

The view of the world as miserly is becoming dominant in our world today...

Changing behavior is difficult, more difficult than getting legislation passed or inventing a new form of indigestible fat. Yet, it is a capacity given to every one of us. This is our challenge and our task. In this, we have much to learn from our Puritan forbears. Let us give thanks.

He also remarks on the use of science and technology to wield power over our world, but the forsaking of the wisdom to understand, or even ask, why? and to what extent? He also touches on the failure of both political parties to ask these question as well. You should read the rest.