The Eighth Deadly Sin

Humankind has devised a new form of debasement.

- By James Parker

Sometimes, staring brainlessly into my laptop in the trough of a weekday afternoon, experiencing myself as a kind of online shadow, a thing of fidgets, a half-being hollowed out by roaming spectral appetites—for destruction, for gratification, for the email that never comes—it occurs to me to ask: Now, which of the seven deadly sins is this?

Anger’s in there somewhere, sure, a kind of generalized psychic road rage, but not enough of it to qualify. Same with envy, pride, gluttony, lust—just floating shards. Avarice? Nah. Of the seven, sloth probably comes closest, that enigmatic void state known to the early Christians as “acedia.” But not even acedia, bottomless as it is, can quite comprehend this plugged-in groundlessness, this ether-sweeping emptiness, this interstellar elongation of the spirit. Whatever blocks the beams of divine love. And at 3:23 p.m. in Caffe Nero, I am all but unreachable by heavenly radiation; I can feel it wavering, honey-colored, at the fringes of my soul. So have we done it at last—you, me, the kids? Have we invented an eighth deadly sin?

I thought initially that the title of Peter Jones's Self-Help From the Middle Ages: What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us About Living was an oxymoron. Self-help is our thing, after all, our exemplary piece of circular modernity, our little closed circuit—the distressed subject coming to its own aid. The medievals, more vertical in their thinking, would have counted on the down-rushing swoop of God's grace.