Secularism (3/3): Where is it going?

Graham Sutherland – sketch for the Crucifixion

The steed of this valley [of love] is pain; and if there be no pain this journey will never end. In this station the lover hath no thought save the Beloved, and seeketh no refuge save the Friend.

(Bahá’u'lláh: Seven Valleys+ page 8)

Towards the end of his chapter on the subject, Hamilton, in his book The Sociology of Religion, quotes Fenn (page 180) as wondering whether secularisation “does not so much drive religion from modern society [as foster] a type of religion which has no major functions for the entire society.” Spirituality becomes purely magical, even occult. The conclusion voiced in Century of Light captures this (page 6):

inherited orthodoxies [are] all too often replaced by the blight of an aggressive secularism that [calls] into doubt both the spiritual nature of humankind and the authority of moral values themselves. Everywhere, the secularization of society’s upper levels [seems] to go hand in hand with a pervasive religious obscurantism among the general population.

The evidence currently available suggests, for example, that the secularisation of society’s upper levels does indeed coincide with “religious obscurantism.” Hamilton (page 180) quotes a study by Luhrmann (1989) as showing how followers of witchcraft and magic in London and surrounding areas of South Eastern England are for the most part well educated, well-qualified professionals many of whom are scientifically trained and employed in such industries as computers and as research chemists!

A Road to Ruin?

David Gascoyne

Not from a monstrance silver-wrought
But from the tree of human pain
Redeem our sterile misery,
Christ of Revolution and of Poetry,
That man’s long journey through the night
May not be in vain.

(David Gascoyne: Poems 1937-1942)

On the one hand the picture within the Writings, with Bahá’u'lláh setting the tone by using words like “godlessness” and “heedlessness”, highlights how, as the light of religion fades, we find it decaying into a fanaticism, terrorism, fundamentalism, superstition or a mere market choice, surrounded by a darkening atmosphere of materialism, greed and scientism which culminates in the decadence the Guardian so forcefully depicts and condemns (World Order of Bahá’u'lláh: page 188) and concludes that at this stage we have become  ’. . . .  a society that must either be reborn or perish.” The evasion of the challenge that true religion presents us with comes, when looked at from a spiritual perspective, with a high price in the form of pain.

On the other hand many scholars draw no such drastic conclusions, content to detect a not too unpleasant state of intellectual freedom which might lack meaning and clear moral direction but with none of the major consequences referred to. Admittedly, while other thinkers, such as McGrath (2004) in The Twilight of Atheism, present a far less rosy picture, this is generally from a position heavily influenced by a religious perspective.

The Academic View

None the less, I feel it can be argued that thinkers, researchers and scholars outside the Bahá’í Faith and within the main tradition of the social sciences have been grappling vigorously with the phenomenon of secularisation from their own perspective, and the fruits of their work do enrich our understanding even when some of them clearly do not share a sense that it is a destructive process. Their emphasis on data as a corrective to unbridled intuition is a healthy one, though this must not be allowed to lead to the all too frequent conclusion that what cannot be empirically proven is by the absence of that type of evidence proved wrong.

Even the agnostic and atheist majority amongst them recognise that there has been a price paid for the decline of religion, though they disagree amongst themselves greatly as to the value of what has been lost. There is also an increasingly detectable trend for academic writers to explore the values of religion to both the individual and to society. Some of these writers I have discussed in previous posts.

Measuring the Mind?

Rupert Sheldrake is one such writer. He is a scientist who has risked his credibiliity and his career arguing publicly for science to accept its limitations and allow for the existence of baffling mysteries it cannot (yet?) explain.

In his excellent book The Science Delusion, he lists ten unhelpful dogmas that the church of science teaches (pages 7-8). These include: everything is essentially mechanical, all matter is unconscious, nature is purposeless and evolution has no goal or direction, minds are inside heads and are nothing but the activities of brains, and mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works.

Jonathan Haidt is another who writes in the same vein. He finds, for example, that religions are better than other ideologies at binding communities together long-term. He quotes evidence of where communes were compared (The Righteous Mind: page 256) and the findings indicated that just 6 percent of the secular communes were still functioning twenty years after their founding, compared to 39 percent of the religious communes. He looks at the analysis of the key ingredient of this superiority (ibid.): ’the more sacrifice a commune demanded, the longer it lasted.’ This did not work for secular communes even though such sacrifices are necessary for longevity (ibid.): for them, ‘demands for sacrifice did not help.’ The inescapable conclusion seems to be, as Sosis argues, that (ibid.): ‘. . .  rituals, laws, and other constraints work best when they are sacralized.’

For now perhaps it’s sufficient to close this list with a brief mention of Roy Baumeister and Ron Tierney who have trawled the scientific literature and found numerous examples of how religion benefits society and the individual. (I am not blind to the dark side of faith and have discussed it at some length – see my posts on Conviction for example.)

‘Unquiet Frontiers of Modernity’

I don’t think I can end this post without making some further reference to the work of Charles Taylor, whom I mentioned in the previous post. I cannot claim to have read him thoroughly or carefully as yet but dipping in and out of his book A Secular Age has convinced me I must make the monumental effort of reading through all 776 pages at some point.  To give a sense of why I feel he is saying things worthy of careful note, I’ll quote briefly from a short section (Number 16 of his 19th Chapter ‘Unquiet Frontiers of Modernity’: pages 726-727).

He feels that there are a number of dilemmas which both faith and exclusive humanism have to deal with:

These demands include: finding the moral sources which can enable us to live up to our very strong universal commitments to human rights and well-being; and finding how to avoid the turn to violence which returns uncannily and often unnoticed in the “higher” forms of life which have supposedly set it aside definitively.

Both positions are shakily maintained:

The more one reflects, the more the easy certainties of either “spin”, transcendental or immanentist, are undermined.

There are strong pressures towards the latter: ‘the present fractured expressionist culture . . . seems very inhospitable to belief.’ However, he feels the pressure to believe has not completely vanished.

. . . . the sense that there is something more presses in. Great numbers of people feel it: in moments of reflection about their life; in moments of relaxation in nature; in moments of bereavement and loss; and quite wildly and unpredictably. Our age is very far from settling into a comfortable unbelief.

He describes the secular age as ‘deeply cross-pressured.’

Coda

So, where do I stand? Secularisation, however positively you see it, comes at a price. So, of course, does religion. Defining what that price is, exactly, is the tricky part. That’s the task that we all must perform if we are to act responsibly. It’s also possibly not a once and for all decision, involving as it does the question whether or not  to believe in a God of some kind. And if we don’t believe in a God, what do we read into this reality? If we do believe in God, what kind of god do we believe in? For my part, I find it harder to imagine that we can solve the problems that confront us without a belief in a higher being: such a belief will, I admit, only work if our sense of this higher being widens the compass of our compassion to include all life without exception and raises our sense of justice to its loftiest possible level.

The choices we make in this respect are likely to be constantly tested. The only things we cannot afford to do are pretend it does not matter or that we are not choosing. Ignoring the problem is a choice. These choices will shape the world our children thrive or die in.

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Roads to Reality

Goya’s ‘Truth Has Died’

Just as there is a fundamental difference between divine Revelation itself and the understanding that believers have of it, so also there is a basic distinction between scientific fact and reasoning on the one hand and the conclusions or theories of scientists on the other. There is, and can be, no conflict between true religion and true science: true religion is revealed by God, while it is through true science that the mind of man “discovers the realities of things and becomes cognizant of their peculiarities and effects, and of the qualities and properties of beings” and “comprehendeth the abstract by the aid of the concrete”. However, whenever a statement is made through the lens of human understanding it is thereby limited, for human understanding is limited; and where there is limitation there is the possibility of error; and where there is error, conflicts can arise.

(A Compilation on Scholarship: Baha’i Reference Library)

This faculty of meditation frees man from the animal nature, discerns the reality of things, puts man in touch with God.

This faculty brings forth from the invisible plane the sciences and arts. Through the meditative faculty inventions are made possible, colossal undertakings are carried out; through it governments can run smoothly. Through this faculty man enters into the very kingdom of God.

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Paris Talks, page 175)

A Turning Point in Human History

At a critical period in the prehistory of humanity, traces of three trends can be found in the archaeological record at a level not previously seen: artistic activity, burial and advances in tool making. As the basis of his examination of the link he sees between this flowering of creativity and a vulnerability to problems of the mind, Horrobin summarises this turning point in the following terms (The Madness of Adam & Eve, page 19):

While our knowledge of our ancestors remains very limited, the artefacts that they left behind demonstrate a clear discontinuity in mind, if not in body, which occurred at some point between about 50,000 and 200,000 years ago.

More recently Keith Oatley has unpacked a similar point in his exploration of the importance of fiction, Such Stuff as Dreams (page 28):

Steven Mithen has proposed that the ability to make metaphors is close to the essence of being human, and close to the essence of art. It’s the ability to discover that something can be both itself and something else. . . . It could be that our attainment of it was the crossing of a threshold from the archaic to the modern human mind. Evidence of the archaeological record indicates that this ability arose between (sic) relatively recently. . . .  A musical instrument – a flute – has been found from 43,000 years ago. The first known cave paintings were made 31,000 years ago. At around the same time, people started burying their dead.

Altamira Cave Painting

An increased variation in the tools created also dates from this period.

This is a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms and can only be seen as a dramatic development. The reasons are hard to explain and reducing them to the result of accelerated brain development from some combination of vitamin-rich fish and digestion-aiding fire fails to be completely convincing. That a bigger brain gives us an evolutionary advantage in the ability it confers on us to deal with the complexities of our social life misses part of the mystery for me.

My concern is not so much with this development’s physical causes, its suddenness or the evolutionary advantages it might be said to bestow, but with the fact that it seemed to implicate three diverse forms of human expertise and inquiry: art, religion and science/technology. The roots of all those three are here. Horrobin quoted Picasso (op. cit: page 16) as having viewed the cave paintings at Altamira, painted throughout a period between 10,000 and 40,000 years ago, and commented: ‘We have learned nothing.’

The Dangers of Dogmatic Science

We have become prone to see the realms within which art, religion and science move as quite distinct, even hostile. Is that position justified? Might it be possible that each is a path towards a better understanding of reality, towards a closer approximation of the truth? By divorcing them have we blocked off any hope of achieving a more complete perspective than the current fragmented and contradictory one?

There are increasing numbers of reputable thinkers who believe so. Rupert Sheldrake is a scientist who has risked his credibiliity and his career arguing publicly for science to accept its limitations and allow for the existence of baffling mysteries it cannot (yet?) explain.

He lists unhelpful dogmas that the church of science teaches (pages 7-8):

Here are the ten core beliefs that most scientists take for granted.

1. Everything is essentially mechanical. Dogs, for example, are complex mechanisms, rather than living organisms with goals of their own. Even people are machines, ‘lumbering robots’, in Richard Dawkins’s vivid phrase, with brains that are like genetically programmed computers.

2. All matter is unconscious. It has no inner life or subjectivity or point of view. Even human consciousness is an illusion produced by the material activities of brains.

3. The total amount of matter and energy is always the same (with the exception of the Big Bang, when all the matter and energy of the universe suddenly appeared).

4. The laws of nature are fixed. They are the same today as they were at the beginning, and they will stay the same for ever.

5. Nature is purposeless, and evolution has no goal or direction.

6. All biological inheritance is material, carried in the genetic material, DNA, and in other material structures.

7. Minds are inside heads and are nothing but the activities of brains. When you look at a tree, the image of the tree you are seeing is not ‘out there’, where it seems to be, but inside your brain.

8. Memories are stored as material traces in brains and are wiped out at death.

9. Unexplained phenomena like telepathy are illusory.

10. Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works.

Oatley is both a psychologist and novelist who makes what might seem extraordinary claims for fiction as ‘not just a slice of life’ (From the Preface) but as ‘a guided dream, a model that we readers and viewers construct in collaboration with the writer, which can enable us to see others and ourselves more clearly. The dream can offer us glimpses beneath the surface of the everyday world.’

Both of these writers, Baumeister and Oatley, bring the methods of science to bear upon the positions they are arguing for.

Combining our Powers

In the posts of this blog we have already seen Eric Reitan argue that it is just as reasonable to believe in God as not to believe in Him. There is no evidence, scientific or otherwise so completely compelling as to force anyone to believe or not believe. We have seen Ken Wilber and Margaret Donaldson clearly demonstrate that scientism privileges the kind of evidence that supports scientism’s reductionist prejudices and discounts replicable experiences within the meditative traditions that suggest they might be unwise to do so. Baumeister and Tierney as we have recently discussed have trawled the scientific literature and found numerous examples of how religion benefits society and the individual. (I am not blind to the dark side of faith and have discussed it at some length – see my posts on Conviction in the list below.)

In the end, though, how much longer can a beleaguered humanity grope for solutions to its complex and global problems in the semi-darkness, refusing to use every possible source of light?

All too often it seems, as Sheldrake contends, the light of science is dimmed by reductionist and simplistic filters that need to be discarded. Robert Wright has strongly implied that religion in the hands of too many of us is narrowed to the pencil torch of some kind of fundamentalism. At the same time, too much of art at the so-called high end has surrendered to the fragmented perspectives of modernism and merely reflects our bewildered and chaotic perceptions of reality back to us in its broken mirror.

We can’t afford to let this continue for much longer, I would have said. We need to stop bickering and combine our powers if we are to solve our problems in time.

I plan to come back to the works of Sheldrake and Oatley in more detail at a later date but feel that what they write is of such importance and said so eloquently that I needed to highlight their work almost as soon as I had found it.

Related articles

• Review: Such Stuff As Dreams – Keith Oatley
• Rupert Sheldrake: the ‘heretic’ at odds with scientific dogma
• The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry, By Rupert Sheldrake
• Skilfully Willing (2/2) (A summary of Baumeister and Tierney’s points about the value of religion)
• Conviction 1, Conviction 2 & Conviction 3
• ‘Is God a Delusion?’ by Eric Reitan
• The Self & the Soul (5/5) (for Wilber and Donaldson)
• Expanding the Moral Imagination (A review of Robert Wright’s book ‘The Evolution of God’)

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Skilfully Willing (2/2)

The attainment of any object is conditioned upon knowledge, volition and action. Unless these three conditions are forthcoming there is no execution or accomplishment.

(Promise of Universal Peace: page 100)

In the previous post we looked at the resurrection of willpower as a valid construct to describe a key component influencing human behaviour. We stopped just at the point when its importance in that respect had been established and before the agnostic authors of an intriguing book on the topic moved on to consider religion. This is where it all gets really interesting or totally soft in the head depending on your point of view.

Surrender to a Higher Power

Baumeister and Tierney surprised me by quoting the following conclusion at the start of their exploration of this topic (Kindle reference: 2488): “His “real self,” as Bula Matari [the explorer Henry Morton Stanley's name among locals in the Congo] saw it, was his will.” Even so, they are almost embarrassed to open their discussion of religion (2551):

Although many scientists are skeptical of institutions that promote spirituality—and psychologists, for some reason, have been particularly skeptical of religion—self-control researchers have developed a grudging respect for the practical results.

They begin their consideration of this issue with two dramatic examples of prominent agnostics surrendering to ‘a higher power.’ One concerns Eric Clapton whose biography they quote: the other is Mary Karr, the author of The Liars’ Club. 

Here is Clapton’s story (2528):

Drinking was in my thoughts all the time,” he writes in his autobiography, Clapton. “I was absolutely terrified, in complete despair.” As he was panicking one night alone in his room at the clinic, he found himself sinking to his knees and begging for help. “I had no notion who I thought I was talking to, I just knew that I had come to the end of my tether,” he recalls. “I had nothing left to fight with. Then I remembered what I had heard about surrender, something I thought I could never do, my pride just wouldn’t allow it, but I knew that on my own I wasn’t going to make it, so I asked for help, and, getting down on my knees, I surrendered.” Since that moment, he says, he has never seriously considered taking another drink, not even on the horrifying day in New York when he had to identify the body of his son, Conor, who had fallen fifty-three stories to his death.

They close with the crucial question (ibid):

Why did Clapton’s decision to “surrender” leave him with more self-control?

It is this question that moves them to consider religion, but not before considering one more example of ‘surrender.’

Mary Karr

Mary Karr’s story has close parallels with Clapton’s (2545):

Religion was so irrational, and yet, when she found herself desperately craving a drink at a cocktail party for the New York literati at the Morgan Library, she retreated to the ladies’ room, went into a stall, and irrationally sank to her knees to pray: Please keep me away from a drink. I know I haven’t been really asking, but I really need it. Please, please, please. Just as with Clapton, it worked for her: “The primal chattering in my skull has dissipated as if some wizard conjured it away.”

Interestingly, this resonates strongly with my own experience. I left the Catholic Church for good when I was 17. I oscillated between atheism and agnosticism until I was 38 years old and completing my MSc in Clinical Psychology.

I was snowbound in a tiny village in Sussex and enmeshed in what seemed an intractable web of mistakes, all of my own making. It was close to Christmas – not that this counted for much with me. Sheep were dying in snowdrifts all over the country. The roads were virtually impassible. I was literally and emotionally trapped. As evening fell one day, without premeditation I sank down on my knees with tears in my eyes and prayed to God: ‘If you exist, please, please help me.’ The prayer came from my heart and not my head.

It took 12 months or more to clear a path out of my frozen mental wasteland and the situation it had created. It felt as though I was helped to do so. At the end of that time, by coincidence or providence, I found the Faith I’m following still. I suppose you could say either that this makes me a biased reader of these passages in this book or particularly well equipped to test their truth. I’ll have to leave that choice to you. Not surprisingly I find them compelling and authentic.

Religion – the Evidence

Baumeister and Tierney then move on to quoting from the extensive research that demonstrates religion’s many benefits (from 2675):

Any sort of religious activity increases your longevity, according to the psychologist Michael McCullough (who isn’t religiously devout himself).  . . . . .

It turned out that the nonreligious people died off sooner, and that at any given point, a religiously active person was 25 percent more likely than a nonreligious person to remain alive. . . . . . .

Religious people are less likely than others to develop unhealthy habits, like getting drunk, engaging in risky sex, taking illicit drugs, and smoking cigarettes. They’re more likely to wear seat belts, visit a dentist, and take vitamins. They have better social support, and their faith helps them cope psychologically with misfortunes. And they have better self-control. . . . . . .

Less obvious benefits included the finding that religion reduces people’s inner conflicts among different goals and values.

What is even more interesting is that they locate these benefits principally in the positive effect religion has upon people’s ability to self-regulate (2690-2708):

More important, religion affects two central mechanisms for self-control: building willpower and improving monitoring. . . . . . .

When neuroscientists observe people praying or meditating, they see strong activity in two parts of the brain that are also important for self-regulation and control of attention. . . . .

Religion also improves the monitoring of behavior, another of the central steps to self-control. Religious people tend to feel that someone important is watching them.

They are able to eliminate other variables with some confidence, for example just hanging around religious people (2730):

Psychologists have found that people who attend religious services for extrinsic reasons, like wanting to impress others or make social connections, don’t have the same high level of self-control as the true believers.

They are so impressed with the evidence that they quote advice to the effect that ‘agnostics [should] look for their own set of hallowed values.” (2734)

They suggest that many of us have replaced God with other Goods (2736):

It’s probably no coincidence that environmentalism is especially strong in rich countries where traditional religion has waned. The devotion to God seems to give way to a reverence for nature’s beauty and transcendence.

In the end, what this seems to mean is that, if we are to make the best use of our willpower we need not only practice/exercise, standards and self-awareness but also the highest most inclusive idea of a Higher Good that we can entertain. Erich Fromm was probably right. We are programmed for devotion. In a post on conviction (see link below) I quoted from his seminal book, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973: page 260) where he develops this idea very clearly.  He argues that, in human beings, character has replaced instinct as a driver of what we do. And character creates a special need in us.

Man needs an object of total devotion to be the focal point of all his strivings. In being devoted to a goal beyond his isolated ego, he transcends himself and leaves the prison of absolute egocentricity. He can be devoted to the most diverse goals and idols but the need for devotion is itself a primary, essential need demanding fulfilment.

This has created a god-shaped hole in the middle of our being. We cannot help but fill it with something. And we’d better be careful what we decide to be devoted to because not only our own future as individuals but the future of our civilisation depends upon the combined impact of all our choices. That’s a thought sobering enough to stop even the most hardened drinker in his tracks if only his head were clear enough for him to hear it.

Interestingly Steven Pressfield in his book, The War of Art, finds spiritual experiences lie very close to the heart of creativity (316):

We’re never alone. As soon as we step outside the campfire glow, our Muse lights on our shoulder like a butterfly. The act of courage calls forth infallibly that deeper part of ourselves that supports and sustains us.

So perhaps we can close on an inspiring note with the video Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox put me onto, where Elizabeth Gilbert shares her ideas about genius. Which brings us back to where I started with my first post on the willpower book: creativity.

Related articles

• Maximum Willpower: How to master the new science of self-control, by Kelly McGonigal; Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength, by Roy F Baumeister and John Tierney – review
• Study Finds Religion Helps Us Gain Self-Control
• Conversion: my return from exile 
• Conviction: the double-edged sword (2/3)

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Skilfully Willing (1/2)

Man possesses certain virtues of which nature is deprived. He exercises volition; nature is without will.

(Promise of Universal Peace: page 80)

The Reductionist Position

Daniel Dennett

It is good to see so many books, rooted in good scientific evidence, at last admitting to the reality of will as a human attribute. When I was first studying psychology more than 30 years ago, the whole idea of will power was discredited in academic circles. By the time Dennett was writing his influential tract about consciousness in the early 90s he spoke for many when he dismissed the idea of conscious choice as a genuine initiator of action. He wrote (page 163):

[Libet] found evidence that . . . “conscious decisions” lagged between 350 and 400 msec behind the onset of “readiness potentials” he was able to record from scalp electrodes, which, he claims, tap the neural events that determine the voluntary actions performed. He concludes that “cerebral initiation of a spontaneous voluntary act begins unconsciously.”

. . . It seems to rule out a real (as opposed to an illusory) “executive role for “the conscious self.”

In other words, we might believe we are deliberately and consciously deciding what to do, but we are not. Brain processes beneath consciousness are performing that trick automatically.

A recent book on what the authors call “biocentrism,” seeks to prove that consciousness, as far as we are concerned, is all there is:

Without consciousness, “matter” dwells in an undetermined state of probability. Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state.

They base their case in physics and I found the validity of their arguments in that area impossible to assess. However, when they trundled out their variation of the Dennet case they lost their credibility with me (page 38):

Ten seconds is nearly an eternity when it comes to cognitive decisions, and yet a person’s eventual decision could be seen on brain scans that long before the subject was even remotely aware of having made any decision.

I stopped reading Biocentrism not long after this passage.

Credibility Restored

In earlier posts I had mobilised my arguments against this glib reductionism, focusing mainly on the fact that the evidence is based on button-pressing reaction-time experiments for the most part (see the links to the two posts on The Self and The Soul below).

Then I began to find other books that marshalled strong evidence for the opposite case (see link below to the work of Schwartz for example).

And now a fascinating book has appeared, written by Baumeister and Tierney, that contains further compelling evidence for the reality of the will and argues against the reductionist point at issue here (Kindle references 262 and 267):

Much of self-control operates unconsciously. At a business lunch, you don’t have to consciously restrain yourself from eating meat off your boss’s plate. Your unconscious brain continuously helps you avoid social disaster, and it operates in so many subtly powerful ways that some psychologists have come to view it as the real boss.

. . . . There is no consciousness in that process. Nobody is aware of nerve cells firing. But the will is to be found in connecting units across time. Will involves treating the current situation as part of a general pattern.

The point that Roberto Assagioli makes in his thought-provoking book, The Act of Will can no longer be dismissed as irrational (page 47):

Psychosynthesis Star Diagram

The essential function of the skilful will, which we need to cultivate, is the ability to develop that strategy which is most effective and which entails the greatest economy of effort, rather than the strategy that is most direct and obvious.  . . . . .The most effective and satisfactory role of the will is not as a source of direct power or force, but as that function which, being at our command, can stimulate, regulate, and direct all the other functions and forces of our being so that they may lead us to our predetermined goal.

Willpower – the Basics

So, what do Baumeister and Tierney have to say about will that might resonate strongly with my own feelings and thoughts on the matter?

First, though, I need to repeat a summary of their basic idea. In the last post I made a summary of my own. I now have the benefit of the one they wrote in this month’s edition of The Psychologist:

. . . . self-control is like a muscle that gets tired. People may start the day fresh and rested, but as they exert self-control over the course of the day, their powers may diminish. Many researchers have observed that self-control tends to break down late in the day, especially if it has been a demanding or stressful day. . . .

A series of experiments confirmed that willpower is tied to glucose (Gailliot et al., 2007). After people exert self-control, even on artificial lab tasks, their blood glucose levels drop. Low levels of blood glucose predict poor performance on tests of self- control.

Their book makes an extremely important additional point quite clearly (545):

The experiments consistently demonstrated two lessons: You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. You use the same stock of willpower for all manner of tasks.

They emphasise the importance of both standards and self-awareness in maximising the adaptive effects of will power (1715):

Changing personal behavior to meet standards requires willpower, but willpower without self-awareness is as useless as a cannon commanded by a blind man.

Why Willpower Matters

Pulp Fiction Cartoon

Relatively late in their book, Baumeister and Tierney turn their attention to religion and make some interesting observations. Before we deal with them in more detail, there is a preparatory point to consider. Before research into will power got off the ground there was a keen desire to find a quality related to success in life that could be significantly and easily improved.

Self-esteem was an early candidate that bit the dust as it fell at the hurdle of systematic study. Their most damning comment about self-esteem needs to be quoted here, I feel. They refer to the “the observation that some people doing truly awful things—like professional hit men and serial rapists—had remarkably high levels of self-esteem.” (2855)

In the end, almost against their will it seems, they stumbled upon self-control (1995):

The initial results caused great excitement among psychologists, because self-control was one of only two traits known to produce a wide spectrum of benefits, and the other trait, intelligence, had turned out to be quite difficult to improve.

With willpower, on the other hand, improvement was relatively easy (2056):

As long as you were motivated to do some kind of exercise, your overall willpower could improve, at least over the course of the experiment.

It also makes you less narcissistic and therefore presumably less likely to kill people (2444):

. . . self-control is not selfish. Willpower enables us to get along with others and override impulses that are based on personal short-term interests.

Now we come to what they write about religion and the interesting observations they make. Dealing with them in more detail will need to wait, though, till next week’s post.

Related articles

• Maximum Willpower: How to master the new science of self-control, by Kelly McGonigal; Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength, by Roy F Baumeister and John Tierney – review
• The Self & the Soul
• Mind over Matter (a post on the work of Schwartz)

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Willing to Write

Dickens at his Desk

Sometimes ideas that move my thoughts along come totally unexpectedly. I recently read a review of a book on willpower by Baumeister and Tierney and bought it on impulse so I  obviously needed to read it. I expected it to shed some light on personal change of the kind I’d come across in Schwartz and in my reading about ACT. I hadn’t expected it to map onto two  of my other obsessions – the creativity/personal life relationship and religion. I’ll save religion for a later post and focus for now on some interesting insights about creativity that are scattered throughout this gem of a book.

In two previous posts I looked in detail at the relationship between Dickens’s art and his life (Perfecting the Life or Perfecting the Art below). In the end I closed the second post with the following points about two possible kinds of explanation for the dramatic discrepancy in his case.

Maitreyabandhu has a subtle take on this whole issue. He takes up the spiritual thread in a way that complements the psychological explanation (The Farthest Reach: in this Autumn’s Poetry Review pages 68-69):

The main difference between spiritual life and the path of the poet is that the first is a self-conscious mind-training, while the second is more ad hoc – breakthroughs into a new modes of consciousness are accessible to the poet within the work, but they fall away outside it. (This accounts for the famous double life of poets – how they can oscillate between god-like creation and animal-like behaviour.) Imagination’s sudden uplifts are sustained by the laws of kamma-niyama. But as soon as we want something, as soon as the usual ‘me’ takes over – tries to be ‘poetic’ or clever or coarse -we’re back on the stony ground of self. Egoism in poetry, as in any other field of life, is always predictable, doomed to repetition and banality or destined to tedious self-aggrandisement.

Baumeister and Tierney come at it from a different angle in a way that does not contradict his point of view but complements it by explaining the problem at a different level – not necessarily a deeper or a better one, but intriguing nonetheless.

What is the will?

Before I get onto to that perhaps I need to give a brutally brief summary of their key ideas about will. Going into more detail can wait for the later post. So, here’s my version of the bottom line.

Will is in some ways like a muscle. It gets tired with use. The body needs energy in the form of glucose to feed the brain if the will is to keep going.

The link between glucose and self-control appeared in studies of people with hypoglycaemia, the tendency to have low blood sugar. Researchers noted that hypoglycemics were more likely than the average person to have trouble concentrating and controlling their negative emotions when provoked.

(670: the Kindle version I am using stubbornly refuses to give me page numbers rather than these useless co-ordinates. Maybe it’s a test of will: I’ll have another biscuit and press on.)

Taking slow release food fixes the problem. Regular exercise of the will increases its stamina enabling us to self-regulate for longer periods but not indefinitely.

This then raises the question of whether the discrepancy between a lofty art and a debased life could stem from what they term ‘ego depletion.’ ‘Ego’ is used here to mean the faculty of self-regulation. They contend (428):

Restraining sexual impulses takes energy, and so does creative work. If you pour energy into your art, you have less available to restrain your libido.

Ego Depletion & Discipline

They go onto to extend their discussion beyond libido in any sexual sense to impulses, moods and thought patterns of all kinds. They argue that as the will tires we begin to experience our impulses and emotions more strongly just as our ability to contain them begins to weaken. At the crossover point we can no longer withhold our anger or master our depression.

This then begins to sound like a very plausible explanation of Edward Thomas‘s contrasting states of being. The drudgery he endured in writing hack work to feed his family can be seen as seriously depleting  his capacity for self-regulation in precisely this way. He became ungovernably depressed and could not resist acting out his frustration on those closest to him.

Once he began to write poetry those problems became more manageable. So the link between periods of intense creative effort and lapses of self-control in-between is by no means inevitable. Interestingly there are other examples in Baumeister and Tierney’s book of where this simple relationship seems to break down. Take Anthony Trollope for example (1719).

Anthony Trollope

Anthony Trollope believed it unnecessary—and inadvisable—to write for more than three hours a day. He became one of the greatest and most prolific novelists in history while holding a full-time job with the British Post Office. He would rise at five-thirty, fortify himself with coffee, and spend a half hour reading the previous day’s work to get himself in the right voice. Then he would write for two and a half hours, monitoring the time with a watch placed on the table. He forced himself to produce one page of 250 words every quarter hour. Just to be sure, he counted the words. “I have found that the 250 words have been forthcoming as regularly as my watch went,” he reported. At this rate he could produce 2,500 words by breakfast.

What’s more, this combination of a full-time job and a disciplined writing schedule did not seem to create periods of poor self-control (1737):

Trollope was an anomaly—few people can turn out 1,000 good words an hour—and he himself could have been benefited from slowing down occasionally (and cutting some of those 250-word digressions). But he managed to produce masterpieces like Barchester Towers and The Way We Live Now while living a very good life. While other novelists were worrying about money and struggling to turn in chapters overdue at their publishers, Trollope was prospering and remaining ahead of schedule. While one of his novels was being serialized, he usually had at least one other completed novel, often two or three, awaiting publication.

The Force of Habit

They come to an interesting conclusion (2377):

The clear implication was that the best advice for young writers and aspiring professors is: Write every day. Use your self-control to form a daily habit, and you’ll produce more with less effort in the long run.

They speak of how making an activity a habit reduces the amount of will power needed to sustain it (3824):

. . . . a lasting technique for conserving willpower [is] a habit.

That would seem to be a trick that works for some even when the tasks undertaken are massive. However, following the example of Trollope is a huge ask well beyond the capacity of most of us. All is not lost, though, for those of us who aspire to write a bit (3806).

Fortunately, there is another strategy for ordinary mortals, courtesy of Raymond Chandler, who was bewildered by writers who could churn out prose every day.

His solution is a somewhat surprising one:

Chandler had his own system for turning out The Big Sleep and other classic detective stories. “Me, I wait for inspiration,” he said, but he did it methodically every morning. He believed that a professional writer needed to set aside at least four hours a day for his job: “He doesn’t have to write, and if he doesn’t feel like it, he shouldn’t try. He can look out of the window or stand on his head or writhe on the floor, but he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines, or write checks.”

They give this Raymond Chandler principle another name (3811-13):

This Nothing Alternative is a marvelously simple tool against procrastination for just about any kind of task. . . . . .  you can still benefit by setting aside time to do one and only one thing.

I’ve heard this called ‘time banding’ and it works well for me. I label a span of time my ‘blogging time’ for example and refuse to do anything else for that hour or so. Blog posts get written. Only you can judge whether they’re worth reading. They’re certainly worth writing in that I dig deeper into the books I’ve read and the experiences I’ve had and mine more gold from them that way. Chandler, it seems, summarised the idea in terms of writing by saying (3815):

“Write or nothing. It’s the same principle as keeping order in a school. If you make the pupils behave, they will learn something just to keep from being bored. I find it works. Two very simple rules, a. you don’t have to write. b. you can’t do anything else. The rest comes of itself.”

I think I’ll go now and lock myself in an empty garret for the next few hours with only a pen and paper for company. War and Peace here I come.

Related articles

• The Situation of Willpower
• Reason.tv: John Tierney – Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength
• Perfecting the Art or Perfecting the Life
• Mind over Matter (discusses Schwartz)
• Willing Change (four posts that deal with ACT)
• Hollis’s Edward Thomas (three posts on the poet’s last years)

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