No ‘Healthy Outlet’ for Bad Habits

February 24, 2012 By leahlibresco 7 Comments

Remember you can vote once per day for the About.com Atheism Awards.  I’m one of five nominees for Best Atheist Blog.  More details here.

This is part two of my response to Brian S. about my choice to give up free food during Lent.  The first focused on why I glommed on to Lent in the first place.  Now we’re addressing the substance of the change I’m trying to make.  Brian wrote:

I disagree [that the feeling of having cheated someone is a bad pleasure to cultivate], or at any rate don’t feel that you’ve demonstrated that sufficiently. I could make the argument, as you almost do, that “getting one over on someone” is a natural human feeling, and you’re finding a healthy outlet for it. Or I could argue that what you’re feeling isn’t a sense of having outfoxed someone, but rather just a misinterpretation of your pleasure at getting something for nothing – since it’s often the case that doing that does involve taking advantage of something, you’ve been conditioned to associate the two implicitly.

I think the basic point on which Brian and I disagree is that I think these feelings are unsafe at any dose.  I don’t want to channel this attitude differently, I want to burn it out of myself.  For me, there’s no such thing as a healthy outlet for these impulses.

We imagine that we have certain immutable tendencies or faults, so, if we have to express them, we should do it safely.  Punch a pillow, play a video game, do visualizations, vent to a friend.  One way or another, those flaws will surface, so you might as well be careful about their manifestations.  As a transhumanist, this kind of concession to my character depresses me, and, fortunately, the social science is on my side.

The ASL word for 'habit' looks like bound wrists for a reason. Choose your constraints wisely.

David McRaney, author of You Are Not So Smart, did a nice rundown of the research on venting and catharsis.  Here’s a representative study by Bushman, Baumeister, and Stack.  Subjects wrote an essay, and half were told their essays were great and half got back a comment that said “This is the worst essay I have ever read!”  They got a little break before the next step of the experiment, and could pick an activity from a list that included “play a game, watch some comedy, read a story, or punch a bag.”  And then they got to play a game against the person who had graded their essay.

The game was simple, press a button as fast as you can. If you lose, you get blasted with a horrible noise. When you win, blast your opponent. They could set the volume the other person had to endure, a setting between zero and 10 with 10 being 105 decibels.

On average, the punching bag group set the volume as high as 8.5. The timeout group set it to 2.47.

The people who got angry didn’t release their anger on the punching bag, it was sustained by it. The group which cooled off lost their desire for vengeance.

In subsequent studies where the subjects chose how much hot sauce the other person had to eat, the punching bag group piled it on. The cooled off group did not.

When the punching bag group later did word puzzles where they had to fill in the blanks to words like ch_ _e, they were more likely to pick choke instead of chase.

Now here’s the kicker: in another iteration of the study, the researchers found that if people believe venting is useful (in this case, they read an article to that effect) they’re much more likely to choose the punching bag.  But, even though they think they’re cooling down, they still score as much more aggressive in the competitions, same as the people who weren’t primed to think venting would help.

Talking about blowing your lid, losing your cool, etc, reinforces a feeling of powerless over our actions and reactions.  We’re managing them, not changing them, and, as the studies show, we’re not managing them particularly well.

So when I notice myself falling on bad habits, I don’t want to to write them off as a safe manifestation of my faults.  I want to disrupt this feedback loop wherever I can and reinforce the habit of spotting this tendency and immediately trying to subvert it.  There’s no safe dosage for solipsism.

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Stoicism is a Helluva Drug

February 4, 2012 By leahlibresco

While discussing Feser and First Mover problems with a college friend, he tried to pitch me on Deism (but mostly as a waystation to paganism).  I asked what he had read that he found compelling, and he recommended Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus.  ”Sorry,” I said, “I read Epictetus’s The Handbook back in Directed Studies, and I can’t touch the stuff.  It’s bad for me.”

My professor in first term philosophy was great because, after we discussed the substance of our readings and he was sure we were all clear on the content, he would ask us: “Could you live this philosophy?  Would you want to?  Is it true?”  And then we’d have an argument.  The week we read Epictetus, I was the staunchest defender of stoicism in the room.

You see, and a young and impressionable age, I read Frank Herbert’s Dune, and I learned two things: never sit with my back to a door and the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear:

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

I heard a message of stoicism all over the place.  I liked Dear Abby’s “No one can make you feel inferior without your own consent” for its brevity, but when you’re a weird, smart elementary schooler, there’s no shortage of opportunities to be reminded that you can’t control the actions or opinions of other people.  Therefore, they must be as irrelevant to my character as a sleeting rainstorm.  All I can control is my internal and external reactions to their actions.

It was another consequence of the bad Kantianism (not to be confused with Dark Kantianism) I was sticking with at the time, but that wasn’t what made me first twig I’d gone wrong.  The trouble was that morality only applied to me.  I felt contempt for my own weakness if I let other people move me, but I wasn’t angry when people I knew were sad about being treated badly.  If I shared my stoical beliefs with them, I only pitched it as a pragmatic coping mechanism, not the moral imperative I considered it when applied to myself.

So what do you call someone who thinks she has a unique moral duty and that everyone else is exempted from mattering in the same way?  Solipsist seems like a fair accusation.

 

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Greedy Self-Denial

August 15, 2011 By leahlibresco 11 Comments

 

Sorry for the delay in Sunday’s Good Book posts!  A Song of Ice and Fire is at least partly to blame, but, now that I’m done with A Dance with Dragons, presumably that particular distraction won’t be a problem for–shall we guess–another eight years.  I know this is technically going up Monday, but I was gone this weekend seeing my brother at the conclusion of his Shakespeare intensive and it seemed silly to hold the post for a week now that it’s written.

A little while ago, Eve lent me a copy of C.S. Lewis’s The Weight of Glory, and I found the opening of the title essay very affecting.

If you asked twenty good men to-day what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative ideal of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point. I do not think this is the Christian virtue of Love. The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself 

Given my previous Kantian sympathies, this criticism hit home.  I still have a tendency to try to help other people in a selfish, unpleasant way.  I might particularly celebrate a chance to do a good turn for someone who I know doesn’t like me because that way I get the chance to mortify my dislike while fulfilling my duty. Essentially, I end up reveling their dislike or for any other brokenness in the world as long as it gives me a chance to prove myself.

It’s almost an embodiment of the shallow critique of Kant: “In a Kantian framework, shouldn’t you wish to hate the good, so that your fulfillment of your duty isn’t tainted by pleasure?”

Christians aren’t playing a zero-sum game; they deny themselves baser pleasures because they are pursuing higher ones (see this speech, h/t Eve).  For an atheist like me, it’s different. I don’t believe myself eligible for any cosmic rebalancing where goodness and sacrifice is rewarded a hundredfold (and even if I did, I certainly disagree with some orderings in the Christian hierarchy of goods).  But even in an unfair, God-free world, Lewis’s criticism of self-denial holds water.

Sacrifice should always be sacrifice for.  And choosing to sacrifice means that we thought the price was worth it and have some reason to rejoice.  Something is lost if we blur the lines between chosen sacrifice for some desired end and aimless self-denial or even happenstance misfortune.  At best, we’re encouraging a kind of grim stoicism where one aims to sacrifice attachment to emotion/pain/etc and becomes unmoored from the physical and social world.  At worst, we’re back to my bad Kantianism, where every human interaction is reduced to another pop quiz testing my ethics and will, a chance to score points.

 

 

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