Article: The Seven Deadlies Revisited, Continued: Sloth

MARY EBERSTADT

What could possibly be more unwanted at this particular intense and critical political moment than a thumb-sucking reflection on -- of all things -- the Deadly Sin known as Sloth?

In all likelihood, just about nothing. One week after an election that has made national laughingstocks of many believers and their beliefs, much of Catholic America lies temporarily spent and despondent. Meanwhile, conservative America, this faction's accustomed ally, is flat-out moribund, a gross object for dissection, with a thousand gloating obituaries buzzing daily around its head.

Other signs of exhaustion abound. The country's people, it is widely believed -- including by them -- are overworked, the more so as they navigate churning financial waters. Even the better-off are said to labor constantly, and at night visions of Blackberries d"ance in their heads. Truly, have any people ever worked so much, or as far removed from the sin of Sloth, as we Americans today?

Show me a sin, deadly or otherwise, that you think is farthest away at any given time, and I'll show you something breathing just over your shoulder with a pickax under its coat. In truth, the signs of Sloth are everywhere in our lives. "Our technology and our gadgets have freed us from most drudgery," as Henry Fairlie observed in his rich study, The Seven Deadly Sins Today, "and what do we do with the time that is now available to us? We turn inward and become utterly absorbed in ourselves." All the more prescient, Fairlie penned these words in 1979 -- i.e., even before every home in America was to acquire what has become for many a virtual shrine to Sloth at any given hour, namely an internet connection in the kitchen or living room.

Consider also the critical role of Sloth in our modern sexual disarray. The unprecedented rates at which pornography is devoured in states red and blue may be more commonly associated with the Deadly Sin known as Lust. But pornography owes much to Sloth, too. Pornography and Sloth between them have induced in some men a state that their ancestors would have thought impossible: it has rendered them too lazy for real sex. And Sloth plays a similar supporting role in other aspects of our moral disorder. Defined from Aquinas on down as "the desire not to be troubled by what God wants," Sloth obviously dictates the shortcut of artificial contraception, for example, at least as much as Lust does.

It is Sloth that whispers into our willing modern ears, telling us to postpone marriage and childbearing till our careers are solid and we're "financially stable." Sloth is the voice confiding that other forms of human "union" -- i.e., those without the rigors of real marriage -- will be easier on us no matter what the Bible says. And it is Sloth, finally, that seduces us into shirking the public consequences of believing just what we believe - that tells us we should just give up, go along and get along like the rest of the folks, and put up with the fiercely held untruths of our time.

Faith, after all, is more like a muscle than an instinct; it is only by exercising that most people can even begin to learn how to use it. Yet straight-faced instruction about religion by militant unbelievers who wouldn't know a tabernacle if it fell on them couldn't abound more.

The recent revival of atheism also owes a hidden debt to Sloth. How often is the refusal to attend religious services really a result of high-minded principle -- and how often instead an unwillingness to get out of bed on Sunday morning, to leave the internet for no apparent purpose for even one hour a week, or to be bothered in any way at all from doing what "I" want to do with "my" time? One suspects that Sloth is similarly helpful to the spread of secularism itself. Faith, after all, is more like a muscle than an instinct; it is only by exercising that most people can even begin to learn how to use it. Yet straight-faced instruction about religion by militant unbelievers who wouldn't know a tabernacle if it fell on them couldn't abound more.

"Sloth," says the Catechism in a particularly useful reminder this week, "becomes a sin when it slows down and even brings to a halt the energy we must expend in using the means to salvation." Translation today: "Business as usual, Sloth's comfortable traveling companion, may just have to go.

So where does this possibility of actually having to bestir ourselves leave American Catholics? For lay people, how about getting off those couches and internet connections long enough for, say, daily Mass? For those in the public eye, how about ignoring what's said in the papers and on Campbell Brown and in the blogosphere -- especially in the blogosphere -- and instead just slugging the arguments out as best we can?

And speaking of the public eye, maybe our bishops and archbishops could forgo that easy and coveted state dinner, that tres charmant next white-tie event in honor of this one or that one in our new administration, so long as the executive branch brings such brio to the destruction of the unborn. In these and a hundred other small ways, maybe meditating on Sloth will be a first step out of the hole we're all in. What's the alternative, after all -- being too lazy for salvation? Bad as things may look now, it's hard to get more pathetic than that.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Mary Eberstadt. "The Seven Deadlies Revisited, Continued: Sloth." The Catholic Thing (November 13, 2008).

Reprinted with permission from The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@thecatholicthing.org.

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THE AUTHOR

Mary Tedeschi Eberstadt is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and consulting editor to Policy Review. She is the author of Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs and Other Parent Substitutes and the editor of Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys.

Eberstadt focuses on issues on American society, culture, and philosophy. She has written widely for various magazines and newspapers, including Policy Review, the Weekly Standard, First Things, American Conservative, the American Spectator, Los Angeles Times, London Times, Newark Star-Ledger, and the Wall Street Journal. Between 1998 and 1990, she was executive editor of the National Interest magazine. From 1985 to 1987, she was a member of the Policy Planning Staff of the U.S. State Department, a speechwriter for Secretary of State George P. Shultz, and a special assistant to Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. She was also managing editor at the Public Interest. A four-year Telluride Scholar at Cornell University, Eberstadt graduated magna cum laude in 1983. She is an associate member of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars.

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