May 1, 2022
Some of the best parts of my childhood were the two or three weeks every summer when I would leave my Florida suburban existence to visit my grandparents in small town Georgia. They lived on a large farm and my grandfather would let me help in his large hardware store downtown. One hot summer day when I was nine years old, my grandfather did something I have always remembered. There was a Coca-Cola machine in the store and he had just handed me a cold bottle. When I asked him whether he was getting one for himself, he said he was not. He told me that he really would like a Coke at that moment, but that he tried to say No to at least one thing a day, and that the Coke was going to be that day’s one thing.
My grandfather had decided arbitrarily not to drink a Coke. William James would have approved. James wrote:
Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.
Thus, if you want a Coke or chocolate bar, though you have no reason to refuse it, refuse it as a little practice in resisting desires. If you do this sort of thing regularly, you will be more the master of yourself. You will have more self-control.
When you think about it, the idea of controlling or struggling with yourself seems rather odd, since there is only one of you, not two, and so only one self to control anything else. This puzzle dissolves once you see that self-control involves not literally the domination of yourself by another self. Rather, what you manage in self-control are inclinations or tendencies that are out of synch with your ideal vision of the life you want and the person you wish to be.
We all have unwelcome inclinations ends a that are at odds with what we think of as our better selves. Sometimes these are momentary impulses like the desire for one more piece of chocolate cake, the angry impulse to curse at the person who just cut you off in traffic or, as often happens to me, the impulse to do anything but get on the treadmill for the next hour instead of keeping my New Year’s resolution. Sometimes they are feelings at odds with a more considered sense of how we ought to treat other people: twinges of impatience, envy, contempt or revulsion. Sometimes the inclinations are passionate attachments like a compulsion for gambling or an infatuation with your best friend’s spouse.
Often, these inclinations are a combination of impulse, emotion and passion. What they have in common is that they are threats to what we more deeply conceive ourselves to be, or ought to be. To give in to such inclinations is to suffer damage to ourselves. But of course this assumes that you like the rest of us have some idea of the kind of person you would like to be.
Shakespeare said that all the world’s a stage. Whatever the great bard may have meant, I think it’s helpful to think of yourself as the main character in the story of your life. If you are reading this post, then whatever your age there are uncountably many things you can choose to do and ways you can enhance your future story. You can change your job or profession, your lifestyle, your partner, your diet, or where you live. You can learn to play the piano, take up birding, or hike the Appalachian Trail. You can ride a treetop zipline in the Amazon forest or go snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef.
Of course, none of these things just happen. That’s what Aristotle says at the beginning in his lectures on ethics when discussing how to have a happy life. He says that you will never achieve happiness unless you develop an idea of happiness that will serve as the target you are shooting for. He says you need to think about the elements of a good life and make them your goals.
The Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt has provided another way to appreciate the centrality of self-control in life. He begins his Tanner Lectures with the observation that human beings spend a lot of time thinking about themselves, that “we put considerable effort into trying to get clear what we are really like, trying to figure out what we are actually up to, and trying to decide whether anything can be done about this.”
Frankfurt explains the thought behind the title of the lectures, Taking Ourselves Seriously and Getting It Right:
Taking ourselves seriously means that we are not prepared to accept ourselves just as we come. We want our thoughts, our feelings, our choices, and our behavior to make sense. We are not satisfied to think that our ideas are formed haphazardly, or that our actions are driven by transient and opaque impulses or by mindless decisions. We need to direct ourselves--in thoughtful conformity to stable and appropriate norms. We want to get things right.
For Frankfurt, getting it right involves your refusing to accept various thoughts, desires and feelings just because they enter your mind. Like a desire to surf the Internet instead of getting on the treadmill, they are intruders that do not express what you truly think, feel or want. Acting on such thoughts, desires and feelings runs contrary to what you decided you really want to do or be. Your self-control then is the power to overcome these inclinations which threaten to throw you off the track of getting it right.
The big sidetracking passions, urges, promptings and desires are familiar to us all. The lack of self-control they occasion is the stuff of tabloid headlines and the storylines for movies, novels and biographies portraying the personal ruin of reputation, fortune and marriages. Lust is the sexiest of the bunch, but it has some stiff competition from gluttonous urges, greed, pride and envy.
We all have personal stories that demonstrate how even temporary lack of self-control in people we have known has lead to dire consequences. Fortunately, for most of us and most of the time, a failure of self-control does not have such serious consequences. We don’t fly so high or fall so low. Rarely does what we do or don’t do make a dramatic difference. Nevertheless, it’s still the case that when you refrain from an action, your failure to act often makes a difference in the way things turn out. For this reason, doing whatever first comes into your head, without pausing to reflect about it, is no way to live--not at least if you have difficult goals (and any goal that requires discipline and effort is sometimes going to be difficult).
Living well is not a particularly easy thing to do, not so much because it is hard –which it may be—but because it is complicated in the details.
This is perhaps most obvious when you think of one of the most important questions all of us must answer in life: How are you going to spend your time? The passage of time, like choice and action, is an unavoidable feature of your story. How you spend your time is how you spend your life. Period.
A line from Gerard Manley Hopkins comes to mind: “But where I say hours, I mean years, I mean life.”