I recently found myself at a sporting event. The hometown team was winning, and I was so swept up in the excitement of the crowd that when one of my kids handed me their drink, I took a sip without thinking. It wasn’t water. It was pink sugar-barely-staying-in-solution lemonade. The intense sweetness was overwhelming, and I felt guilty and ashamed that my thoughtlessness spoiled my temperance experiment. Honestly, there was a nanosecond where I scrabbled for a place to panic-spit, but I was on bleachers in the middle of a large crowd. So, I just swallowed defeat.

My personal temperance experiment is teaching me that sugar deprivation isn’t as difficult as I feared. The hardest part hasn’t been the clawing, insistent desire that I thought it would be; the hardest part has been remembering to check what I’m eating. Overall, I’ve found temperance empowering, which I hadn’t expected. But now I’m curious about how I can turn that empowerment into outward action. How can I use what I’ve learned to better the world? Can temperance make the world a better place? Can lack of temperance make the world a worse place?

What is the relationship between self and society, community and temperance? In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Kurtz is a leader of extraordinary eloquence; he has all the best words and he uses them to commit genocide. In a vacuum of corporate oversight and social accountability, Kurtz has lost his damned mind. Marlow, the story’s protagonist, believes Kurtz is mad because he has become separate from society—that without a the social pressure of a common moral code, Kurtz was left to confront himself and it was too much for his sanity to bear.

Do we need community to be sane? In my own experience, I can tell you that my kids laugh nervously if they witness me having a deep, philosophical conversation with one of our cats. And if my defense is that the dog doesn’t have a contemplative mind, they’re pushing me out of the house to be with other people. We all know that humans are social animals. We know that we need community and connection to be healthy, sane people. So, yes, absolutely, we need community. How, then, do we shore up the precious resource that is connection to other people?  

We practice temperance.

We restrain our offensive impulses all the time for the benefit of other people. We choose to obey laws. We choose to share. We choose to be polite. Do we make these choices because they’re more fun or satisfying? Nope. We choose to restrain ourselves for the communal good.

For the remainder of my month of practicing temperance, I’m going to try adapting the Quaker clearness process. It’s a procedure designed for a community to help a member come to clarity about a choice they need to make. The community’s job is to listen to the member’s concern and they must refrain from making comments, sharing their experience, and offering opinions. Their task is to listen and then only to ask questions designed to guide the member toward enlightenment with their problem. If you’d like to know more about the clearness process, you can read about it here.

In the Quaker tradition, an individual must seek the clearness process, but I’m intrigued by it. Specifically, I’m interested in exploring temperance in terms of restraining myself from blurting things out in my rush to connect to the people around me. I’ll be curious to see if this practice of temperance will help others feel more understood and connected.

Next week, I’ll let you know how it goes. In the meantime, I want to hear from you. Leave a comment below to share your thoughts. Is temperance necessary for community? In what ways do you practice temperance to make the world a better place?

Notes:

Image: Burne-Jones, Edward. “Temperantia.” Wikimedia Commons, the Free Media Repository, 15 June 2019, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edward_Burne-Jones_Temperantia_1872.jpg.

1. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Edited by Stanley Applebaum, First ed., Dover Publications, 1990.