photography by Namiko Kitaura
Originally I was hoping to start a blog here dealing with ideas about self-help, self-improvement, and how those cultural concepts have shifted over time. I don’t know if I have the time and inclination to juggle that kind of project when I’m already launching my podcast, but I came across this article in Aeon which rang my bell and I figure it’s worth reproducing if only for my own further reflection:
As ever, the habits literature of today promises order in a disordered world, but it also comes with a subtle and significant difference. The most important difference is not the forgotten art of style, though the staccato prose, exclamation points, bland generalisations, and clichéd motivational quotations of today’s literature neither stimulate the imagination nor activate the will. Rather, it is the lost promise of habits literature as a form of ethical inquiry and social commentary. Individual improvement has always been the purpose of habits literature, but the genre used to require appraising the society in which the self, and the habits, formed. Historically, thinking about habits without social contexts or ethical consequences was unthinkable. Today it is axiomatic.
Back in college, I began studying the history of self-help literature for my own edification. Edmund Morris’s The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt proved a tremendous inspiration, and I admired him as much for his relentless quest for self-improvement and self-perfection as for his actual accomplishments in life. It took awhile for me to really put my finger on the difference between historical quests for self-improvement and those of today, until I realized there was a gigantic absence in 21st century self-help literature: goals of character. The commonest 21st century goals are relentlessly, inexorably self-centered in nature: lose 20 pounds, get a promotion, buy a house, acquire something, learn something, be something. It’s so rare to come across a goal which involves one’s relationship to others (and I’m in the same boat – my New Years Resolutions look like everybody else’s!). There’s rigorous self-interrogation only insofar as it helps someone understand why they haven’t lost 20 pounds, or what personality flaws are preventing them from a promotion, etc. Some of the negative consequences of this are really obvious – if you don’t regularly and routinely ask yourself whether you lived in accordance with your virtues, you’re more likely to live out of accordance with those virtues. But this Aeon piece takes things a step forward and asks how that lack of self-interrogation, that absence of an introspective habit, that failure to acknowledge that “being yourself” may not be good enough if one’s self needs improvement, leads to resolutions which are inherently harmful or destructive:
Today’s habit industry is similarly blinkered about the social and economic architecture which for many makes cultivating personally-rewarding habits possible. […] One cannot blame these authors for turning to Montaigne. In Of Habit, and Not Easily Changing an Accepted Law (1580), he provides a treasure trove of images for thinking about how practices calcified into habits can deform the self. What is often missed is his equally urgent insistence that habits deform one’s understanding of others. What was insidious about one’s own silent consent to certain habits was not only that they ‘unhinged’ one from critical reason and self-reflection, but also that they blunted one’s ability to discern the beauty and dignity of other people.
photography by Namiko Kitaura
This reminds me about another idea I studied in college: of responsibility in American jurisprudence. The U.S. Constitution is such a funny beast in comparison to other written constitutions in that it enumerates almost zero duties for the American citizen, only rights and freedoms. Most of the Founding Fathers reasonably expected that ideas about responsibility and duty were being instilled by other private (re: religious) institutions of the time. This fits in with Alexis de Toqueville’s observations at that time:
For de Tocqueville, what he called ‘habits of the heart’ – family relations, religion, notions of belonging – were crucial for fostering and sustaining a democracy. He thought the absence of these habits of affiliation might ‘some day prove fatal to its liberties’. Though de Tocqueville coined the term ‘individualism’, he did not think that habits belonged to the atomised human being, but rather to the social self.
I vaguely remember writing a paper about this, arguing about the significance of the decline of those institutions which would normally sustain “habits of the heart” – if Americans by and large aren’t too religious anymore, or if their religion preaches some notion of “be yourself!” then who is doing the work of teaching Americans how to interrogate their own values and set goals for self-improvement? Are we all just getting closer to an age of relentless BE YOURSELF! teachings, where all of our internal impulses are perfect because they’re ours?
(All of this is just to say that my resolution for this June is to go call my grandmothers and volunteer more.)