This is a short filibuster (surely some oxymoron? - ed.) against avarice and its near cousin, affluence. The warnings against avarice go back to ancient times and cross many different cultures and religions. Too much of a good thing and the desire to have more it, which seems almost axiomatic, is likely to be visited by disaster. There is a pretty strong case that this is so. How much deception, how many murders, what quantity of theft, bribery, false witness, how many wars, are the result of avarice?

Affluence may strike you as but a pale shadow of avarice, but the former is the fertile ground for the latter to grow in. Today we have too much of everything except those qualities that add genuine value to life. I don't need to be swatting at you from a pulpit to extol the likely benefit that healthy doses of patience, forebearance, generosity, kindness and the like can have. Nor is there anything wrong with being humble,though the excesses of hubris and narcissism that inform the modern sensibility make that seem positively Dickensian. I am tired of the flagrant exhibitionism, unwarranted celebrity and self-infatuated dullardry of the times. The genuinely talented, noteworthy and hard-working get swallowed up in a sea of mediocrity, a sea that has no event horizon.

Does this all sound a little like jealousy? Maybe.