Liberty is dangerous.
—ALBERT CAMUS
Large, amiable Greg Kilgore clearly retains a sense of wonder about what he does. A friend, he reports, has told him of an 800-pound man whose death posed a problem for the local morgue: they were unable to jam his massive corpse into the freezer. Kilgore hears such stories because he sells motorized toilets for fat people. Very fat people. The LiftSeat 600 is so named because it will smoothly raise a person of 600 pounds to a standing position. A person of that weight should be as rare as he is enormous, but the number and size of such superobese Americans is growing fast, and LiftSeat Corp. is eager to keep up with a changing marketplace. So on its next model, Kilgore discloses, “We’re looking to go to 750.”
I encountered Kilgore at the twenty-sixth annual meeting of the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery, held at a resort outside of Dallas, where I discovered that products for people weighing even 750 pounds aren’t necessarily sufficient these days. Other vendors were showcasing electronic scales that could weigh someone of 1,000 pounds to within 100 grams of accuracy (wirelessly transmitting the results to a computer), and operating tables four feet wide instead of the usual three. A clever inflatable mattress for elevating the obese without endangering caregivers (or requiring a team of stevedores) was rated for 1,700 pounds—not so very far short of a ton. Surreally, most of the vendors had bowls of candy on their tables, as if determined to drum up more weight-reduction surgeries even among players in the weight-reduction industry.
The rise of bariatric surgery, which limits caloric intake by walling off parts of the stomach or removing some intestine, speaks volumes about the dilemma that is the subject of this book: the challenge of moderation in the face of freedom and affluence. A generation ago, when obesity was still relatively rare, restricting calories by brute surgical force was virtually unheard of. Today, with two-thirds of American adults overweight and nearly half of those qualifying as obese, weight-loss surgery is so common that a whole industry has sprung up around it. We now have medical centers that do nothing but bariatric operations, finance companies to help patients pay for them, and Web sites to help doctors, in the words of one vendor, “take away the roadblocks for getting patients to the table.” While American manufacturers of cars and other such standbys have been in decline for years, business is booming for domestic producers of industrial-strength gurneys and extra-long laparoscopic devices (the better to penetrate all those layers of fat). Nowadays, a remarkable 220,000 weight-loss surgeries are performed in this country annually.
Those operations are a sign of just how hard it can be to control ourselves in a world that appeals ever more effectively to our desires—even if these happen to be desires we’d prefer not to indulge. Self-control is by its nature a conundrum; why, after all, if nobody is holding a gun to my head and my wishes do not violate the laws of physics, shouldn’t I be able to carry out my own will as easily as I might take a step or dial a telephone? But it’s a conundrum that is especially urgent today, when our surroundings so insistently beckon us to excess. In 2006, for example, the most recent full year unsullied by financial panic, lenders sent Americans nearly 8 billion direct-mail credit card solicitations, each one an invitation to financial trouble. No doubt some of the resulting new plastic was used to grab a fattening bite to eat, since the number of fast food outlets per capita grew more than fivefold from 1970 to 2004.
Or how about gambling? In 1970 casinos were legal only in Nevada, while New Hampshire, New Jersey, and New York were the only states with lotteries. Today the picture is almost entirely reversed, with every state but Utah and Hawaii having legalized casinos or lotteries or both. And if near-ubiquity isn’t convenient enough, the Internet entices at all hours with offshore “virtual” casinos accessible from the comfort and privacy of home.
These kinds of changes make daily life, for many of us, an ongoing test of self-control. It’s not that we have less willpower than we used to, but rather that modern life immerses us daily in a set of temptations far more evolved than we are. The ideology of temptation has changed, too, so that it’s guilt now, rather than indulgence, that has a bad name. By now we’ve learned to exalt the passions, forget our longstanding obsession with the afterlife, and shake off the dour Puritan traditions to which we still imagine ourselves beholden; the only thing left is to avoid killing ourselves with our newfound freedom. For in our fair land the weapons of mass consumption—McDonald’s, credit cards, the Internet—are everywhere.
Yet while temptations have multiplied like fast food outlets in suburbia, the superstructure of external restraint that once helped check our impulses has been weakened by loosening social constraints, the inexorable march of technology, and the same powerfully subversive force—capitalism—that has given us the wherewithal to indulge. We have spent something like one hundred years now in flight from the selective suffocation of Victorian life, with what David Marquand called its “vast eiderdown of conformity, pressing down, ever so gently, but to deadly effect, on the individuals who made it up.” In this project, for the most part, we have succeeded. In the Western world tradition, ideology, and religion have loosened their grip. People are freer now to live, love, and express themselves than ever before, so that, in Western cultures at least, the theme of man against society—a staple of drama going back to Sophocles—has lost some of its potency.
That we have the chance to get ourselves into so much trouble— with food, drink, money, and one another—is actually a testament to human progress, for what we’re talking about here is nothing less than the democratization of temptation. It came about as the result of a great expansion of human freedom that has been gathering steam since the Industrial Revolution, and which accelerated around the turn of the twentieth century. In Western societies we’ve mostly been liberated from backbreaking labor, prefabricated sex roles, and taboos against physical pleasure. This unshackling of more and more of the world’s citizens from the bonds of ignorance, poverty, and convention may be civilization’s greatest achievement. But the price of this achievement is ever more pressure on the self in self-control, which can no longer rely as much on tradition, community, or the sheer brutality of stigma to keep excess at bay.
Self-mastery will always be a problem, of course, because each of us has conflicting desires—desires that swell and ebb depending on the gravitational pull of temptation, which varies with proximity. People have wrestled with their appetites since Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden in a self-regulatory lapse of truly Biblical proportions. The ancient Greeks were all over the subject, which was connected with their ideas about virtue, politics, and even the soul. Plato took up the issue more than once, and for the most part held that people may judge badly what is best but can’t really act against their own will. Aristotle, on the other hand, knew that weakness of will was all too real, and he delineated the problem with such obsessive precision that his anatomy of it speaks to us to this day.
But the Greeks were far from the last to puzzle over it. On the contrary, this business of self-control has obsessed not just garden-variety dieters, procrastinators, and philanderers but philosophers, theologians, psychologists, economists, and just about every other flavor of thinker from time immemorial. Saint Paul lamented the alienseeming impulses—“the sin that lives in me”—which drove him to vice despite his longing for virtue. Medieval Christians worried about the seven deadly sins, five of which (all but pride and envy) were classically shortcomings of self-control. David Hume considered our myopic preference for short-term rewards over long-term goals an immutable fact of human nature, with vast political implications. And Freud, the somewhat unwitting architect of modern attitudes on the suppression of desire, was never quite able to suppress his own insatiable desire for cigars, puffing right through sixteen agonizing years of oral cancer and surgery until finally his inability—or was it his unwillingness?—to resist this particular temptation killed him.
Societies, moreover, tend to oscillate between indulgence and restraint; in the early nineteenth century, for example, Americans drank so much it’s a miracle our country’s symbol isn’t a pink elephant instead of a bald eagle. A national backlash got us to clean up our act, and boozing plummeted. Crime, teenage pregnancy, and other signs of disorder have similarly ebbed and flowed, and the scandals of Eliot Spitzer, John Edwards, and Tiger Woods have ample historical analogs. As the sociologist Gary Alan Fine reminds us, “Belief in a golden age is misleading. Perhaps in bygone days actresses did not flaunt their absence of undergarments quite so publicly, but the censure that comedian Michael Richards and shock jock Don Imus received after their racist remarks reminds us that, Cole Porter notwithstanding, we do not believe that ‘anything goes.’ ”
If America has a characteristic literary form it is the jeremiad, often borne of the near-religious conviction, present in every generation at all times in human history, that the world is going to hell. But the world is not going to hell, and I could never muster the kind of frothing hysteria it would take to write such a screed. Life expectancy rises every year, violent crime is at thirty-year lows, and the boss can no longer chase his—or her!—secretary around the desk. The spending of Americans, for all our profligacy, has lifted hundreds of millions of Asians out of poverty. No moral panic here, people. The problems of freedom and affluence—of managing desire in a landscape rich with temptation— are just the kind all of us should want to have.
Yet they are problems nonetheless—ones so large that they represent the biggest and most enduring challenge individuals in a free society are likely to face. These problems go beyond any state of grace we might hope to achieve from moderation, for what’s at stake is not our souls but our lives. Dangerous habits like smoking, eating the wrong things, drinking too much, and having risky sex account for more than a million fatalities annually in this country, or close to half of all U.S. deaths. Most of these behaviors are undertaken by people who know that what they’re doing is risky and in many cases—as with cigarettes—would prefer to act differently, despite a conflicting desire for one more smoke or cupcake or line of coke. To put those million early deaths in perspective: no armed conflict, present or past, accounts for as much carnage as our losing war with ourselves—not even World War II, in which there were all of 400,000 U.S. deaths. With our helmets and lawsuits and regulations, modern-day Americans appear to be obsessed with safety. But as a people, we’re embarked on a campaign of slow-motion suicide.
A little self-mastery can improve the quality of your life as well as the quantity. If you are a man, it can preserve your marriage, since a strong predictor of marital stability is the husband’s ability to control his impulses. And if you’re a student, it can lead to higher lifelong earnings, since you are likely to do better—and go further—in school.
Studies of teenagers have found that self-discipline is a much better predictor of academic performance than IQ—and may account for the superior grades of girls, who display more of it. Self-control is associated with more education, less violence, lower alcohol and drug abuse, higher earnings, and an optimistic outlook—but only moderate optimism. One study of 997 Catholic Church personnel found that a high score on a test of conscientiousness—defined as “a tendency to control impulses and be goal-directed”—predicted an 89 percent lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease than the risk among low scorers, even after allowing for age, gender, and education level.
Yet for all its importance, this business of self-mastery remains essentially mysterious. I began investigating the problem of self-control in earnest for this book, but the deeper I delved, the more puzzling it became. Question soon piled upon question. Is willpower something you inherit, or can it be taught? Do people with anorexia or obsessive-compulsive disorder have too little self-control or too much? Is the suppression of instinct really, as Freud suggested, the price of civilization? After a while the very notion of self-control came to seem oxymoronic, or perhaps tautological; who else besides me could possibly be in charge of myself, after all? And if I fail to control myself, then to whom or what have I abdicated the job? Is it really possible that we’re all mere robots, guided by mysterious impulses we can’t begin to understand? And if so, how can we be held responsible for our own lapses?
Nowhere is the dilemma of self-control more plainly visible than here in America, where the democratization of temptation has reached something like an apotheosis. Until the recent recession, at least, life in this country had come to resemble a giant all-you-can-eat buffet, one that offers more calories, credit, sex, intoxicants, and just about anything else we can take to excess than at any time in history. We may vow, as we load up our plates, to start on a diet tomorrow, but tomorrow the buffet is still here. And when tomorrow comes, we’re still hungry.
Maybe this is one reason disorders of the will are so much more common than they used to be. Anorexia nervosa and obsessive-compulsive disorder, both still relatively rare, are nonetheless much more common today than they were fifty years ago, not to mention the explosive growth of attention deficit disorder and addictions of all kinds. Some of this boom is just more frequent diagnosis, but it also reflects changing circumstances. That it’s now possible to be addicted to cocaine, shopping, or sex is evidence of how far we’ve moved beyond the constraints of budget, custom, and embarrassment. There aren’t many compulsive eaters, video game addicts, or—God knows—anorexics—in sub-Saharan Africa, but in the West men and women can be consumed with almost anything, including not eating, because here you can get or do almost anything. Opportunities for obsession abound.
Americans do tend to pioneer in all areas of self-gratification, but as in so much else, the rest of the world is catching up. Scarcity is falling away for many people in China and India as it did long ago in North America and Europe, places where bounty has led companies to exquisite refinements in the art and science of selling—in exploiting taste, color, sound, and even smell to overcome consumer resistance. (No one cares more about how you make choices than the people trying to sell you something.) Obesity is surging all over the world, including in places where only recently the main dietary problem was getting enough to eat. South Korea, Turkey, and other countries have run into trouble with credit cards. License, it seems, can be contagious. As one banker put it, “One of the things the United States exported overseas was a debt culture.”
The financial crisis of 2007–09 is perhaps the most vivid example yet of the self-control challenges posed by modern life. The crisis had many causes—cheap money from Washington and China, inadequate government oversight, reckless executives, and the divorce of loan-making from risk-bearing—but at bottom it was a colossal failure of regulation, including, especially, self-regulation. Lenders and consumers by the millions tacitly agreed to ransack the future by means of loans that people simply couldn’t afford to repay. Consumer indebtedness reached epic proportions while the national savings rate fell to zero. Bankers exploited a skewed reward system to pad their personal fortunes by taking undue risks.
We’ve had crashes before, but this one was different. This was the people’s crash, and with our swollen homes and credit card balances, our $4 coffees and gas-guzzling SUVs on lease, nearly all of us took part. Reckless overspending, once limited to the rich, was now a course open to practically every American, just like reckless investing. Suddenly we were all Emma Bovary, bored, entitled, and aghast when the piper at last demanded to be paid. “It is because she feels that society is fettering her imagination, her body, her dreams, her appetites,” Mario Vargas Llosa writes in The Perpetual Orgy, “that Emma suffers, commits adultery, lies, steals, and in the end kills herself.”
Our attitude toward our appetites has evolved as the space for indulging them has expanded. In recent years science has cast doubt on the whole idea that we control our actions, with far-reaching legal and ethical implications. Countless experiments have demonstrated that we often don’t know why we do things, and that our ability to regulate our behavior is influenced by a bevy of factors outside our conscious control, including our genes, our lunch, and our peers. Behaviorism suggests that we are merely creaking robots responding to environmental inputs. Genetics threatens to substitute heredity, making the robot that much harder to reprogram. Skepticism about free will has flourished in this environment, undercutting faith in personal responsibility. More and more behavior over the years has come to be seen as involuntary, and a disease model of transgression has taken hold. Cee-Lo Green of Gnarls Barkley might have been speaking for all of us when he sang, “You really think you’re in control? Well, I think you’re crazy.”
At the same time, self-restraint has lost some of its traditional stature, at least compared with self-actualization. There are some good reasons for this; in the past people have been urged by someone or other to suppress every conceivable impulse and indulgence, no matter how innocent (hugging one’s children was at one time censured, and masturbation was said to induce blindness and lunacy), until finally the suppression of instinct itself fell into disfavor. At venues like the bariatric meeting I attended, no one speaks of gluttony anymore. Other behaviors once seen as issues of character—drug abuse, excessive playing of video games—have been medicalized as well, subtly absolving us of responsibility and thereby denying our power over an ever broader range of human action. At one point a top associate of New York’s governor (the governor whose predecessor quit in a prostitution scandal) found himself in hot water for not paying five years of income taxes. His lawyer said the man was suffering from “non-filer syndrome.”
This shift in thinking, humanely inspired though it might have been, has paradoxically undermined the thing that makes us most distinctly human, which is our ability to disobey our impulses in favor of some larger purpose. At the heart of our difficulties is the confusion over which of our behaviors are voluntary. We increasingly operate on the notion, pioneered by Plato, that self-destructive behavior can’t be in this category—that when we harm ourselves by our deeds we must act out of ignorance, illness, or the malign effects of genes or circumstances, for who could otherwise do evil to himself ?
But on such matters we should be following not Plato but Aristotle, who understood that self-destructive behavior often occurs because of recklessness or weakness. In neither case was an action to be regarded as “compulsive,” or beyond a person’s choice, for at the very least there is a kind of negligent acquiescence at work. A goal of this book, in fact, is to reinflate the narrowed arena of the elective, reclaiming most excessive behaviors from the realm of disease. The range of actions—and therefore outcomes—that are subject to volition is much larger than we have been led to believe. If we hold ourselves responsible for our behavior—none of which is entirely voluntary—we are more likely to consciously direct our actions rather than succumbing to impulse. The magnificent result might be for more of us, even in some small way, to take charge of our own destiny. Doing this requires a kind of faith, but only in our own power to choose. It requires imagination, so that we can visualize the future that our sacrifices might produce. And it requires cleverness, for creating methods to promote the kind of deeds we prefer. In the absence of these three things we too easily become our own worst enemy.
I saw this firsthand one morning at the conference near Dallas, during a starchy breakfast at a motel where I encountered a bariatric nurse who was perturbed by the implications of a book about the problem of self-control. This nurse was extremely fat despite having had bariatric surgery herself, and she contended that self-control was not the issue: people’s weight problems are genetic, or the result of high-fructose corn syrup, or fast food, or ignorance of healthy eating, or advertising, or their inability to access or afford fruits and vegetables. And while this prosperous, well-educated health care professional made these arguments—all of which have some plausible basis in fact—she ate not one but two Styrofoam plates full of waffles, smeared heavily with cream cheese.
The good news in all this is that, in much of the world, the problem of survival has been swapped for the more manageable one of self-control. The bad news is that self-control in modern life is so hard—which is a shame, because it turns out to be so damned important. I say this with some trepidation, because usually such observations come only from the kind of moralizing gasbags and hypocritical scolds typically found, in their off-duty hours, playing craps, visiting prostitutes, or soliciting anonymous sex. Such characters have a long and ignoble history in this country; the speakeasies were probably full of them during Prohibition. William Bennett made himself ubiquitous on the subject of values— and even published The Book of Virtues—until we learned what a high roller he was at Las Vegas casinos. Horatio Alger, whose name became synonymous with hortatory fictions about plucky young men, was run out of Massachusetts for being just a little too fond of boys. (Did I mention that he was also a minister?) The subject of self-mastery is always fraught, and anyone who makes too much of it may eventually wish he had heeded John Dewey’s caution that “it is the part of a gentleman not to obtrude virtues noticeably upon others.”
The moral dimensions of self-control inevitably lead us to political questions. If you believe your life is largely the result of your own discipline and decisions, you’re going to feel very differently about taxes, regulations, and redistribution than if you believe your life is largely the sum of your genes and your environment—factors irretrievably beyond your control. In general, conservatives seem to believe in people’s ability to control themselves more strongly than liberals do, except when the behavior is bad for women, minorities, or the planet, in which case the two sides trade places. Either way, the troubles many of us have with willpower raise big questions about how far government should go to try to save us from ourselves. Both sides claim to advocate lots of freedom, yet both support government intervention to keep people from exercising it, whether by limiting divorce or abortion (those conservative bête noires) or piling on taxes and regulations (the perennial choices of liberals).
But before we can decide whether self-control is a moral issue, or even whether it exists at all, we had better decide first just what the heck we mean by it. When the actor David Duchovny entered treatment for “sex addiction” in 2008, we recognized a self-control problem of some kind, even if it was shrouded in the exonerating terminology of disease. Yet there are many ways in which the term “self-control” is casually used, and any self-respecting taxonomy of the subject ought to provide a clearer sense of what it is.
“Control of one’s emotions, desires, or actions by one’s own will,” the definition offered by The American Heritage Dictionary, is hardly adequate, and it raises more questions than it answers. If you break your diet in an orgy of pizza and chips during the Super Bowl, by whose will did these things find their way into your mouth if not your own? Did Tiger Woods have a self-control problem during his years as a one-man make-work project for America’s cocktail waitresses, or was he acting precisely in accord with his own will, which was to get his hands on as many babes as he possibly could?
To get a better handle on this problem, let’s think for a moment about desires. Like people, they fall fairly easily into two broad categories: those that we like and those that we don’t. What I mean by self-control is deciding which of your desires you really want to espouse and then upholding them against the challenges of the competing desires that you like less. This distinction—between any old desire that we may have and the desires we actually want for ourselves—is crucial. We’ll call the former first-order desires, to describe the grab bag of appetites and longings that seem to beset us without conscious intervention. The others—those essential desires that you actually prefer—we’ll call second-order desires.
To the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, who enjoyed a short-lived celebrity outside the world of academic philosophy when his brief book On Bullshit climbed the best-seller lists, those second-order desires are the things that make you a person. Frankfurt’s notion is that while lots of creatures can deliberate, what sets Homo sapiens apart is the “structure” of our will—the way we can select or even cause our own motivation, or will our own will. Your humanity, in a sense, derives from having preferred preferences, and you are free to the extent that you are able to make your actions conform to the desires you want for yourself. Self-control, in other words, is what makes you a mensch.
Now imagine a person who doesn’t have second-order preferences— say, a drug addict who simply doesn’t care about his harmful cravings. If he wants drugs, he takes drugs, but he doesn’t trouble himself to consider whether he wants to want drugs or should struggle against his desire for them. In Frankfurt’s view, this individual doesn’t care about his own will, and in this respect is “no different from an animal.” To Frankfurt, he is not a person but a wanton.(Frankfurt, by the way, was not the first to locate our humanity in our responses to our own desires—or in their origins. John Stuart Mill defined character in much the same way: “A person whose desires and impulses are his own—are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture—is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character.”)
So self-control, we might say, consists simply in honoring and adhering to one’s second-order preferences, whatever they may be—and this is something we mostly can do. It just requires forming some intentions for yourself and finding ways to stick to them, a process that makes us not just happy and healthy, but free. “We have a power,” John Locke wrote, “to suspend the prosecution of this or that desire; as everyone may daily experiment in himself. This seems to me the source of all liberty.”
Now, these desires that you prefer don’t always have to involve temperance, chastity, or some other traditional virtue. You may have a considered preference for more indulgence and less prudence, or even to cheat on your spouse, and it may take enormous self-control to carry out this desire. As you can see, a certain agnosticism about values is built in here, and, in fact, people sometimes struggle with some truly terrible second-order preferences. Huck Finn beat himself up for failing to blow the whistle on Jim, the runaway slave who accompanied him on that Mississippi River raft. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov dreaded taking a life but forced himself to live up to some perverse second-order preference that led him to murder the pawnbroker. There are reports of Nazi functionaries steeling themselves against their reluctance to murder Jews; these men had a second-order preference to uphold the grotesque dictates of the Reich, and in order to do so some of them had to overcome a natural first-order preference not to pull the trigger.
The challenge, then, is exalting our second-order preferences without ignoring the instincts—like Huck’s compassion for Jim—that are as important to our humanity as our conscious choices about how to live and who to be. Not all instincts are base, and most of them at least enjoy seniority.
What self-control doesn’t mean, in my book, is mindless self-sacrifice or knee-jerk self-denial. On the contrary, it represents an affirmation of self, for it requires not the negation of instinct but its integration into a more complete form of character—one that takes account of more than just immediate pleasures and pains. The self-control I’m talking about means acting in keeping with your highest level of reflection.
And it’s not easy. One of the most important things I learned in the course of this book is that while we can do better, we can’t do it alone. Willpower by itself won’t get the job done without the help of institutions—a sensible legal framework and strong social connections. The desire to master our impulses will have to be matched with the means to commit to our desired courses of action, so that when strength of will falters (as it inevitably must) we don’t find it as easy to succumb. Reason can’t reliably overpower passion by force, and so will have to use its wiles.
Besides, what matters, when it comes to self-control, isn’t so much willpower as vision—the ability to see the future, so that the long-run consequences of our short-run choices are vividly clear. In that sense, our shortcomings in this arena are really failures of imagination; we are like Felix Carbury, Trollope’s debt-ridden wastrel, who “lacked sufficient imagination to realize future misery” as long as his troubles didn’t compromise “the outward comforts of the moment.” But self-control is all about seeing beyond the moment—about deferring gratification if necessary because we have some larger ongoing wishes that we prefer not to subvert. It would be great to have another drink for the road just now, but it would be better not to wake up in the drunk tank tomorrow.
Unfortunately, immediate rewards, with their great visibility, are always more seductive than those far off in the misty future somewhere (which is why foolish actions are so often called “shortsighted”). This is something modern neuroscientists have demonstrated again and again, yet they might have saved themselves the trouble just by asking Socrates. “Be so good as to answer me a question,” he begs slyly of Protagoras, in the dialogue of the same name. “Do not the same magnitudes appear larger to your sight when near, and smaller when at a distance?”
The history of our never-ending struggle with self-regulation is interesting for many reasons, not least because, from the ancient Greeks to the travails of modern life, the same themes occur again and again, as ever present as temptation itself. They include the debate over whether self-command is freedom or slavery, the nature of compulsion, the role of government in protecting us from ourselves, the place of the individual in his social context, the ways in which commerce is subversive or inhibiting, the sense that each of us is divided in some way (between body and soul, animal and god, passion and reason, ego and id), the extent to which we should live for today or plan for tomorrow, and finally the use of commitment devices by means of which one of our selves can bind the other(s) against temptations to come.
Modern science has managed to shed some light on these unchanging features of our Sisyphean self-regulatory landscape, with ambiguous results. Science can help with technologies and techniques designed to give mastery to the part of ourselves we most wish to obey. On the other hand, science may have made things harder by suggesting that we have quite a bit less self-control than we might like, to the point that defense lawyers in murder trials are now busily chipping away at the edifice of personal responsibility with the hammer and chisel of neuroscience. We may know at last where our self-regulatory functions are located—and in some very rudimentary way, how to manipulate them—but with this knowledge comes a nagging doubt about just who—or what—is really in charge.
The issue is no longer just personal. Our appetite for illegal narcotics has had political and economic ramifications from Latin America to Afghanistan, and while legalizing drugs would surely mitigate some of these effects, it might do so at the price of even more self-control problems here at home. And what else is global warming but the failure of each of us to restrain our use of fossil fuels? Given the evidence that human activity is causing potentially catastrophic climate change, the fate of the earth may hinge on our collective ability to resist our impulses and give up some ease, some wealth, and some pleasure in exchange for the more enduring satisfaction of a hospitable and harmoniously functioning planet. At the very least, the recent near-meltdown of the global banking system can plausibly be traced to a yawning self-control deficit among American borrowers and lenders—which is pretty much all of us, come to think.
Ultimately, the problem of self-control is the problem of the human condition, of whether we have free will, whether we’re rational, whether evolution has left us ill-suited for modern life. We have no idea, most of us, that our prefrontal cortex is the site of such “executive” functions as forgoing the sweet-looking cheesecake on the counter (or the sweet-looking new hire in accounting). We forget that once upon a time self-control was an unalloyed good, only later to be tarred as repression and fingered as a cause of disease. We don’t think about the limbic system, the role of evolution, the authenticity of Ben Franklin’s public persona, the influence of glucose, the films of Billy Wilder, or the future-minded genius of Odysseus—but all have something to do with not just your desire for the cheesecake, but your response to your desire. To succumb or not to succumb? That is the question.