Morality and Christianity: The Prodigal Son

I was in a cafe the other day and the song "Prodigal Son," by the Rolling Stones came on. It's an amazing song, and I hadn't heard it in ages, and I got to thinking about the parable. I'm sure you know the story: father has two sons; one takes his inheritance and squanders it, living a dissolute life, while the other stays close to home; when the "prodigal son" returns, begging help and forgiveness from his father, his father is thrilled to have him home and throws a giant celebration. The other son, naturally, is indignant at this unfair treatment.

The father says to him,
"My son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found."

I consider myself a morally sensitive person even though I'm not religious, and I got to thinking about how to understand this story from a secular moral point of view. It's not obvious, I think, because we tend to put fairness front and center when we talk about morality, and there's a sense in which the celebration for the prodigal son really isn't fair to his brother. The point of the story in a religious context seems to be partly that approaching human life with excess concern for things like "equal treatment" reflects a narrow and ungenerous nature. Which seems sort of right to me, prompting me to wonder: how might such a thought be explained in a non-religious context?

Some traditional interpretations of the story seem to take the lesson to concern the importance of forgiveness. But forgiveness is very puzzling from a moral point of view. The famous "paradox of forgiveness" points out that if the person deserves condemnation, then forgiveness is unjust, whereas if the person does not deserve condemnation, there is nothing to forgive. And furthermore, we tend to think that morality is fair when it applies to everyone in the same way. But a lesson of forgiveness can't be a lesson to treat everyone the same way: if you forgave everyone all the time there would be no meaning to forgiveness at all. In a way, forgiveness isn't even something you can plan for. If the father planned to forgive the son from the beginning the story wouldn't really be about forgiveness at all - it would be more about a father who doesn't mind that his son squanders his money and lives a bad life. But uncaring is different from forgiveness.

Other traditional interpratations seem to focus on compassion and love instead of forgiveness per se. The father is so patient and loving with his son that he cannot but rejoice to see the son returned to him. This seems to be a little different from the forgiveness idea: it's not that there was a transgression that must be forgiven but more that any considerations of justice, punishment, and equality are just insignificant in the face of the power of the basic fact that this person, who was gone astray, has now returned.

They're not mutually exclusive, of course, but I resonate more to the compassion and love idea than to the forgiveness one, perhaps because forgiveness seems so puzzling. Interestingly, love and compassion, while certainly having moral aspects, don't fit tidily into the category of "secular morality" the way "fairness" and "equality" seem to. But they're not unsecular emotions at all. This seems a pretty universal experience: the joy at the return and safety of someone you love suddenly overwhelming any indignation you might have felt, or even would have been justified in feeling. This universality transcends the religious/secular distinction.

So maybe the "moral" point of view is too narrow for living a good life, and we need some richer concepts for talking about how to live in the secular way -- concepts that go beyond just "morality," concepts that would include the importance of things like love, compassion, and even forgiveness.

The Invisible Hand Meets The Five Foot Antler

Listen, I got a question about economics that's been bugging me for a really long time. Maybe someone can help me out.

Let me take as a starting point here the excellent short piece in yesterday's New York Times by the economist, Robert H. Frank on the successes and limitations of free market competition. The successes, he points out, were seen and understood by Adam Smith. As Frank puts it, "when greedy people trade for their own advantage in unfettered private markets, they will often be led, as if by an invisible hand, to produce the greatest good for all."

The invisible hand: a powerful idea. But Frank says that though most economists probably think of it as the most basic and fundamental idea of their discipline, he predicts they won't do so for long. Because alongside the invisible hand, he says, we have the powerful example of evolution putting self-interest against the interests of the group. Sometimes individual and collective interests coincide; sometimes they don't.

Consider the example of the elk, he says. Though a mutation for huge antlers tends to help any individual elk, the resulting evolutionary pressure for larger and larger antlers is a disaster for elk as a whole, who now have antlers that are a hazard in general -- getting in the way, for instance, when the elk are pursued into forests by predators.

It's like an antlers arms race. If male elk could vote to scale back their antlers, with a kind of antler-regulation, Frank says, they would have excellent reason to do so. Likewise, he says, in those cases in which unfettered competition puts individual interests against group interests, humans have excellent reason to enact regulation to, in effect, scale back our antlers.

Frank cites examples of neighborhood schools and steroid use. If everyone works extra to earn money to try to get the house with the best schools for their kids, housing prices just go up, while schools stay the same. If everyone uses steroids in sports, then you must use them to be competitive, and everyone suffers. What is good for the individual is bad for us collectively.

Frank uses these points as an argument for regulation in certain cases. Sounds good to me. In fact, it sounds so obvious to me that I'm prompted to wonder again, as I have before, about why it gets so little attention.

The idea that what is good for individuals is sometimes good for groups, but not always, seems pretty obvious just from looking around, but it was confirmed in precise terms by game theory. In games like the prisoner's dilemma, pursuing what is best for you alone doesn't always lead to the optimal outcome for all. Indeed, a classic example is the arms race: if any country disobeys a disrmament treaty while its neighbors obey it, they do best as individuals. But if all countries obey, the outcome is best overall.

But game theory, and prisoners' dilemma cases, have been known to economists for decades. These are concepts familiar to most of my undergraduates. So if the conflict between individual and collective success is underappreciated by economists in general and free market proponents in particular, as Frank suggests and as seems plausible, what is going on?

That's my question: why do economists still talk so often in terms of the rationality of doing what is in one's individual self-interest, when game theory shows clearly that optimal outcomes in certain cases are only reached by not doing so, are reached only through treaties, regulation, and antler-decreasing voting?

Is it a normative committment to the idea that that it is better to allow people maximal individual autonomy even if the outcome isn't best overall?

Or is it a factual committment to the belief that the vast range of cases we tend to see in terms of conflict between individual and collective good -- like the housing prices-schools case Frank cites -- aren't really examples of conflict after all, appearances to the contrary?

Either way, I'm skeptical.

"Full And Vivid Information"

Image from the website biscotte.us

I have crappy teeth. I've got a gazillion fillings; I've got several crowns; I've got other problems you don't want to hear more about. When I was in Paris recently I broke a piece off of a tooth by biting into a biscotte. A biscotte! It's like a little piece of toasted bread! OK, this one was multigrain. But still.

One reason I have crappy teeth is that for a long time I didn't really take care of my teeth properly. Years went by with no dentist visits, minimal flossing, general lackadaisicalness. While there were a lot of reasons for all this carelessness, probably the number one reason is that I just hate thinking about teeth and and the fact that they decay. And you kind of have to think about it to be motivated to do anything to prevent it.

I hate thinking about tooth decay because as soon as I think about tooth decay, my next thought is almost always, Oh Yeah, I Am Going To Die. Teeth are a profound reminder of mortality. I think it's because unlike the rest of your body, teeth don't heal. They just stay bad or get worse until it's all over and you are dead. It's extraordinary, but there have been times when I've been reduced almost to tears by just sitting in the dentist's chair for a cleaning. I know the hygenist must think I'm nuts, because I'm always so unhappy even when I don't have any cavities and I'm just there for a check-up.

When philosphers talk about what it is rational to do, or what is the right thing to do, or about deciding among alternatives, they sometimes talk about "full and vivid information." So, you know, you might say the sensible thing to do is what you would do if you had full and vivid information about all the alternatives and you were reflecting in a calm state of mind.

I wrote about my doubts about the calm state of mind business before. But I'm nervous about this full and vivid information stuff too. Because when I have full and vivid information about the dental facts -- when I really have in my mind, front and center, that unless I take steps they are going to decay, fall apart, fall out of my head, break on a biscotte -- I feel so discouraged I feel motivated not to brush and floss but rather to stretch out in despair on the living room floor and feel sad about the human condition.

I guess you could say this is a defect about me, that a fully rational person wouldn't be motivated in such perverse ways, but would simply note the dental facts and act accordingly, without going through the whole "discouraged" and "depressed" phases. Like Spock, you could just do the calculations and choose the right outcome.

But that doesn't seem quite right to me. I don't think I would be a better person if I were less inclined to despair over the human condition, and I don't think I would be a better person if I were more like Spock. Even Spock isn't a better person when he is more like Spock: it's when we see glimpses of Spock caring about things that we start to care about him.

As a practical solution to these problems, I try to channel my motivations in more short-term directions. I work out because of how it will make me feel tomorrow, not because I want to live longer. I refrain from smoking so I can breathe today, not so I can avoid a horrible death from lung cancer. I floss so my teeth will feel healthy and look good, this month, rather than worrying about the big picture.

This little bait-and-switch works pretty well when things are going fine. But it's not a real solution to the problem, and interestingly, it requires keeping in one's mind a set of less full, and less vivid, information, than what is really the truth.

Trois Sourires (Three Smiles)

You know what I'm sick of? I'm sick of listening to people complain. Since I'm visiting Paris just now, I'm particularly sick of listening to people complain about Paris: waah, it's crowded; waah the bathroom's dirty; it's hot; the line is too long, waah waah waah. But it's not just Paris I'm sick of hearing about; it's everything.

The worst part of it is, the person I'm most sick of listening to is ME. Complain complain complain.

So in the interest of shutting up about everything I don't like in the world just now, I thought I'd write about three things I saw in Paris today that made me smile.

First: the Solferino metro sign.

I have a soft spot for all the metro signs in Paris: they're big and blue with nice bold white letters. But the ones I love best are the old ones. They're ceramic tile, and the letters are really big and really blocky. When I see these signs, instead of a soft voice saying "You're now at the Solferino station," I hear a voice like James Earl Jones's booming out, "SOLFERINO." Isn't this sign just so pretty?

Second: some weird art.

I love the Pompidou museum, and I often go to the cafe there. The Pompidou isn't just an art collection; it's a whole complex commitment to public space. There's a huge open area in front outside that anyone can use -- and there are performers and homeless people and little kids and everybody all hanging out there. There's free wireless access for anyone. There's a spacious and low-key cafe. There's even a place to buy stamps and mail letters. It's like a tiny tiny town all in itself.

Anyway, I went today and there was this crazy funny work of art that is a giant gold plant holder. I don't know why I like this so much but I do.

Third: plastic ants in a window display.

This is the window display of a little pharmacy near my house. I don't know what the point of the ants is exactly, except maybe it's to say, Hey Guys!! It's Summertime!

The Examined Life: Not So Great Either

There was cute post on one of the Times blogs last week in which a guy -- a food writer -- reflects on marathon running. And there's a great moment in his recounting of past marathons where he describes getting to the middle of some race, and thinking to himself, "Why am I doing this?" As he says, it's a question you should never ask yourself while running a marathon. After he thinks of it, he simply gives up, quits the race, and goes to the park.

This story really resonated with me, because that's a feeling I have a lot. I always think it would be cool to be really into some sports team, or have an interesting hobby, or get all into crafts. I'd love to know all about current opera singers, or exotic mushrooms; I'd love to be able to whip up some really great pasta sauce, or grow fresh vegetables in a garden, or ride a horse. But the truth is, about one minute into most of those activities, I'm already thinking, "Why am I doing this?" And that's it, game over.

I'm sure you've heard that idea, attributed to Socrates, that the unexamined life is not worth living. I suppose there's a sense in which, as a person who both philosophizes and teaches other people to do so, I'm professionally committed to a certain amount of faith in this idea.

But the truth is I regard philosophical reflection with a certain amount of ambivalence and wariness. While of course it would be stupid to live without ever thinking about how you live, it's also undeniable, as the marathon story suggests, sometimes the Why question isn't the question to ask.

Some of the great things in life are just impossible to engage in without a heavy dose of real unthinkingness. Would you ever make a lego illustrated story of the bible, or learn Esperanto, or make a super gigantic astronomical complex, if you were closely focused on the question of "Why am I doing this?" I know I wouldn't.

Eventually the marathon guy's daughter says she wants to run a marathon, too, and when he asks her, "Why a marathon?" she says, "It seems like the right thing to do now," which he says is "as good an answer as any."

I envy her this answer, just as I envy most people who have manias for things like marathon running, or amateur astronomy, or whatever. But instead of nursing a grudge, I'm going to take a page from this woman's playbook. Now I've got the words, if not the music, and I'm going to practice. Next time I find myself thinking, "Why am I doing this?" I'm going to tell myself, "It seems like the right thing to do now. . . So stop bothering me with all these pointless questions, and let me get back to my Puttanesca sauce!

Objectification: It's Quantity Not Just Quality

So as it happens I am in Paris, visiting. Two things always strike me immediately on arriving here. One, everyone is better dressed than I am. Two, I encounter far fewer images of women that are 1) scantily-clad and 2) being used to sell me something.

This second thing tends to take me by surprise. You tend to think, well, Paris, a city of romance and fashion, in a country of topless sunbathing; there must be a lot of images of women around, right? But there aren't really. There are some, for sure, but there are also images of men and children, and of buildings, and of landscapes, and so on and so forth. The main thing is that there aren't that many images around with women in them, and in the ones there are, the women are usually beautifully dressed, engaged, intelligent-looking, or at least presented in a dramatic and interesting way.

My main response to this is Ah, how relaxing! Indeed, I tend not to notice how stressful and anxiety-producing it is to be constantly bombarded with images of women's bodies to sell diet products, images of women's bodies to sell cars, images of women's bodies to sell consumer electronics, and images of women's bodies to sell a whole kind of cultural narrative of women-as-decorator-items, but only-if-they-look-just-right.

The usual line on this sort of thing is that what's wrong with using images of women's bodies to sell things is that the women in question are objectified, and that this is inherently wrong.

But as it stands, I don't think this line of thought can be quite right. Because people use other people -- and their bodies -- for all sorts of things all the time in ways that are just fine. We have sex with people; we watch them play sports; we pay them to cook for us; we enjoy looking at the curve of a stranger's neck or a rippling set of abdominal muscles. When we do these things respectfully and kindly, none of them seems to me bad in itself.

Furthermore, it doesn't seem that the more objectifying the worse it is, necessarily. If an artist creates a sculpture of a headless woman from a model, and puts it in a gallery, this strikes me as a much better form of objectification than when a Maxim editor pastes a photo of some girl who looks 16 next to a caption about how she's an aspiring model and speaks several languages. This despite the fact that in absolute terms, the sculpture shows an objectified woman in a more extreme, literal sense.

But I think the usual line of thought is almost right. What's missing are two ideas. First, being treated as an object is always bad when it's something you can't opt out of, when you're treated just as an object whether you like it or not. Second, one way conditions arise under which a woman can't help but be treated as an object is when women, in general, are just generally treated as objects, all the time.

Now this second item rests essentially on quantity, not quality. That is, it's not the details of some particular act of objectification that make it bad; it's whether there are so many acts of objectification of that type around that they create the effect that women are, in a sense, objects -- objects we may use to sell things.

Basically, the idea is that when women are frequently and relentlessly objectified, this creates a tendency for people to regard them as objects whether they like it or not; since they can't opt out they can't be treated as fully human with full agency. But when particular people are occasionally objectified in particular and uncommon ways, no such danger arises.

If I am right this explains why the Maxim pictorial seems worse than the sculpture, even though the Maxim story "humanizes" the woman depicted and the sculpture does not: objectifications like those in "lad magazines" are relentless, and present a kind of objectification that is very pervasive already.

If I am right this also explains why the same sort of objectification -- in, say, pornography -- is more of a problem when it depicts women than when it depicts men. Because women really are in far greater danger, in our society, of being regarded as less than fully human.

Of course, if I am right this also explains why I find Paris so relaxing in this regard. Sure, women may be objectified on the catwalks of the great fashion houses, when it is their bodies we want to use and look at. But there it's not too relentless, or too pervasive about it, and therefore, in itself, it feeds less pernicious effects than the ubiquitous girls-in-ads of North America.

So . . . how do you create a culture that doesn't constantly use images of women's bodies to sell crap? I wish I knew.

Assume Your Vices!

Maybe you remember the classic scene from the movie "As Good As It Gets," where Carol (Helen Hunt) has completely lost patience with the shenanigans of Melvin (!) (Jack Nicholson) who is both genuinely obsessive-compulsive and also just sort of a pain in the ass kind of guy. It's a-do-or-die moment, and she's maybe going to leave forever, unless he can say something nice. Say something really nice, she demands. There's a long pause and then he says, "You make me want to be a better man."

It's a total success as a reply (indeed, when says says it's the best compliment she's ever gotten, he says maybe he overshot a little). And we know basically what he means. There are things you want, and there are things you think are worth wanting, and they're not always the same. Melvin wants to wash his hands with a new bar of soap every five minutes but he doesn't regard this as a worthy desire to have. He doesn't want to be the kind of person who wants to wash his hands every five minutes; he just can't help it.

This is a common feeling. In lots of ordinary cases it seems like what we want to want and what we find worth wanting aren't the same. Maybe you want to eat a whole bag or Doritos while you watch "I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!" but you wish you wanted to snack on mineral water while watching PBS. Maybe you want to be snippy with your sister in retaliation for some hurtful thing she said, but you wish you wanted to have a warm friendly chat about it. Maybe you want to have sex with your neighbor's spouse, but you wish you wanted only to have sex with your own.

It's a common feeling, but I'm here to tell you it's maybe a little too common. That is, we say it, but we don't really mean it. It's often just an excuse. Because we are, generally, way more attached to our bad qualities than we are willing to let on.

Imagine some future time and some other place, in which mood-drugs are highly specialized. Imagine you're told: "You have a problem with junk food and bad TV? Here, take these "Eau de Sante" and "Masterpiece Theater" pills; you'll only want to watch Brideshead Revisited and drink Perrier from now on. You have a problem with your temper? Here, take the "Can't We All Get Along" pill; you'll be transformed immediately into a mild, even-tempered type person who never loses her cool. You have a problem with desiring people who are not your spouse? Here, take the "Hi-Fidelity" pill; you'll only feel sexual desire for your spouse.

Would you take these pills? I'm guessing not only would most people not want to take these pills; but they wouldn't even want their loved ones taking them. Living with someone transformed this way would be like living with a zombie.

Of course, this isn't Melvin's situation at all; he really would take a pill to stop wanting to wash his hands. That's not a pretend-vice; it's something he really wishes he didn't have. There are such things, for sure. I'm just saying a lot of what masquerades as real helplessness in the face of a bad impulse actually reflects qualities we're not so unhappy with after all. If you wouldn't take the pill to get rid of the desire, how can you say you want not to have it? You can't.

The moral of this story is that we might not be so alienated from our vices as we like to think. That's OK; but if you're not alienated from your vices, why think of them as vices at all? Why not, as the French say, assumer your vice, acknowledge it, stand behind it, take it on as part of you? After all, as long as you're not mean, or violent, dishonest, or incredibly intemperate, desiring junk food, bad TV, snippiness, and sex isn't so bad.

It's desires like these that make us the humans we are. Might as well give them a little respect now and then.

This Week I Was An Angry Feminist

This week I got mad about some stuff. You'd think being mad would be the perfect state of mind for blogging -- and I think, for some people it is -- but not for me. I get mad about stuff, I just want to go home, get under a blanket with a novel and a glass of wine, and sulk.

At first I was just a little mad. I went to see Star Trek, and while the movie is delightful, I got mad about the whole Bechdel-test-failure problem. Maybe you've heard about Allison Bechdel's famous comic strip, where one woman says to another that she only sees movies in which one woman talks to another woman about something other than a man? The punch line is that the last movie she was able to see was "Alien," because two women talk about the monster.

OK so that was a while ago, but how many movies have you seen lately that would pass the test? The Devil Wears Prada. Sunshine Cleaners. Um ...?

The thing with Star Trek is it's not like it's just in violation of the letter of the law; it's in violation of the spirit. The women in this movie are either 1) giving birth 2) symbolizing "motherhood" or 3) Lt. Uhura. Uhura starts off OK, but immedately becomes just a source of love, support, and sexual intrigue for Kirk and Spock. And did you notice how many women were on council of elders or whatever that was on Vulcan, or on the board that administers the hearing for Starfleet? Oh yeah, its ZERO. And of course, all women in the movie obey the cardinal rule of being an accomplished woman: it only counts if you can look super-cute while you're doing it. Why else are all the female cadets in mini skirts and boots?

But I got madder later in the week when I made the mistake of clicking on Ross Douthat's piece in the The New York Times, "Liberated and Unhappy." Douthat discusses the "paradox" of declining female happiness: women are more liberated and yet less happy. How can this be?

While some of Douthat's conclusions are reasonable (we need to think about work-parenthood balance issues), the title and frame of his ideas are enraging. Isn't it obvious that the point of liberation is not happiness, but freedom, autonomy, and self-directedness? It is offsensively patronizing to suggest of any group of people that they're "better off " when someone else looks after their interests and tells them what to do. People want rights not -- or not only -- because the happiness they might expect to enjoy, but because freedom and autonomy are good in themselves.

And anyway, lots of thing worth doing don't necessarily increase happiness. Research suggests parents are less happy than non-parents. Does this undermine the good of having children? Of course not. Likewise, it's not a "paradox of parenting" that people want to have kids and value parenting and yet are less happy than non-parents. It's just part of the obvious fact of life that some things worth doing are difficult.

So I was pretty mad about those things, and then Dr. George Tiller, provider of late-term abortions that saved women's lives and protected their health, was shot and killed at church on Sunday morning.

A good blogger would some interesting thoughts and news analysis, but me, I'm just mad.

I Have No Self-Control

Odysseus tied to the mast; image from a detail of Greek pottery. Via Wikimedia Commons, here.

OK OK let me rephrase that: I have less self-control than you probably think. I've been thinking about self-control a lot lately because 1) there was some interesting research on being distracted described recently in The Times; 2) there was a great article about the famous so-called "marshmallow test" in The New Yorker and 3) I'm amazed and astonished at my own inability to do the simplest things I want to do. Like, update this blog with regular entries. Just for instance.

In the marshmallow test, kids are given one marshmallow and told that if they can wait for a few minutes before eating, they can have two marshmallows instead. Then 30 years later the ones who waited are more likely to be Mister and Mrs. Success-in-life. Leaving aside all the questions you might want to ask about this, I want to talk instead about the strategies people use to increase their likelihood of not giving in to impulse. How, and how well, do these work?

The main researcher involved, Walter Mischel, says that that kids who are good at waiting find ways not to think about the marshmallow in front of them. They sing songs, or cover their eyes, or whatever. The kids who stare at the marshmallow, though, pondering its sweet deliciousness, give in right away. The author of the article, Jonah Lehrer, explains that knowing how to avoid thinking about the marshmallow is based on metacognition: thinking about thinking. As an example of metacogntive reasoning, Lehrer mention Odysseus having himself tied to the mast of his ship so he won't give in to the siren's song.

These two examples, though, got me thinking. Because they're actually really different. The marshmallow kids aren't changing their environment, they're changing their own thoughts. But Odysseus, having himself tied to the mast, is changing the world he lives in. He is making it impossible for himself to give in. He's not just putting his fingers in his ears and saying "La la la I can't hear you! I'm going to sing the alphabet song! And say no to marshmallows!" He's making it physically impossible to do what he does not want himself to do.

The important thing about the second strategy is it's not actually a strategy for improving your self-control at all. It's a strategy for not letting yourself give in. Once you got the ropes and all that you don't need self-control; you can't do anything anyway.

Doesn't this make it seem like a much more effective strategy? Especially if, you know, you haven't got a lot of self-control? For your average impulsive person, the more you can tie yourself to the mast, the better, right? Obviously this won't work in all cases; if you gotta steer the ship you can't be screwing around with rope and masts and all that. But as everyone knows who has tried to quit a bad habit, you can change a lot about your environment. You can not go to the coffeeshop with the pastries; you can tell your friends not to smoke in front of you; you can take your laptop to places where there is no wifi. It's not quite ropes to the mast but you see what I mean.

The article goes on to explain how some schools are trying to teach self-control. But I got to wondering about this, too. How do you know when you're teaching self-control, and when you're just getting kids used to a new set of habits? Some schools have long days of classes, with lots of rules, and they insist kids show respect for their teachers and for each other. Sometimes it works, and kids improve dramatically. Insisting on respect sounds like a great lesson to me. But it sounds less like a lesson in self-control than a lesson on proper behavior and, well, respect. Are these kids thinking about their gratification deferral differently? Or are they absorbing, from their environment, a new way of being in the world? Is there a difference? Does it matter?

At one point the researcher, Mischal, says about teaching kids self-control, "We can't control the world, but we can control how we think about it (p. 27). This doesn't seem right to me -- or at least, it doesn't seem obvious. Often we can control the world, especially when it comes to stuff like whether there is fresh produce in everybody's supermarket. And often we can't control how we think about it -- or, not altogether, anyway. Just because it's thinking doesn't mean it's free of influences.

Anyway, I'm bad at controlling how I think about the world; thinking always leads me back to the same, boring, oh, who cares, what difference does it make? One marshmallow, two. . . what's the difference? But I get along in life because 1) I am lucky enough to have a reasonable set of desires and preferences (I sometimes crave vegetables as well as cookies) and 2) I'm good at deploying the other strategies, of changing the environment and developing new habits.

I always thought if I had done the marshmallow test, I'd probably have waited, not because I like marshmallows so much, but because I fear embarrassment. Hell, the actual marshmallow test requires you to ring a bell to summon the researcher if you want to eat the first marshmallow before the time is up. I'm inclined to say there is no way at four years old I would have rung a bell to summon a strange adult. Even if 50 marshmallows had been on the line.

So, self-control? Not so much. Luck, cunning, and rote habit formation? More like it. I don't know what to say about the luck part, but happily the development of cunning and new habits is open to everyone. Even if you're a marshmallow-grabbing self-control drop-out.

Finally, in the interest of changing my environment to make myself do the right thing, let me announce here that this blog will now update every Monday morning. It's not a guarantee. But as we know, fear of embarrassment can be highly motivating.

What Is Wrong With Consumer Culture?

This is a mannequin in a store near my home. What is this strange expression he has, and who thought it would be useful for selling me something?

Now that the economy sucks, we're getting a lot of funny reverse moralizing about the consumers we once were. "Wow, were we ever profligate, eh? All that spending! What a bunch of . . . gluttons we were!"

The implication is that now that we have no money, we're starting to remember the happier, simpler pleasures of life. "The kids and I have rediscovered the library, and boy are we having fun!" No need to spend spend spend. Fun is just around the corner.

Now it seems to me there is some truth to all this. Too much consumer culture really is bad for people, and going to the library really is fun and wholesome.

But I think the basic elements are often misidentified. It's often suggested that consumer culture is inherently evil because it involves superficial values, or because it induces conformity, but it seems to me this is mistaken: what is wrong with consumer culture isn't that it is inherently bad, but just that it is so goddamn distracting.

Consider the charge of superficiality. Sometimes people seem to think there's something wrong with the whole shopping concept -- that buying stuff, especially stuff you don't really need, is itself a suspect activity.

But this just seems false. Not because of abstractions about how the economy functions (though those may be relevant too), but just because an economy with shopping has jobs that workers can go to, with specified hours, predictable demands, and life and family benefits -- all of which can be profitably regulated by the state. No shopping would put many of us at the whims of nature and chance. No rain this year? No crops? Too bad for you. Sure, you may say, some of the jobs associated with consumer culture suck. And that is true. But that is not a problem with consumer culture itself; it's a problem with the particular implementation of it we've got hold of here and now.

Other times the superficiality charge comes packaged differently, and people will say that it's shallow to enjoy buying things when you could be enjoying more sophisticated activities, like reading novels and listening to music. Now, anyone who knows me knows that no one is more supportive of the so-called "sophisticated activities" than I am. I read; I go to artsy French movies and opera performances; I don't own a TV. But none of these conflict with liking things, and liking to buy them. On the contrary, it's all of a piece. I enjoy beauty and pleasure; I like nice things; so I like having them in my home where I can use and look at them all the time. Sure, this doesn't justify the buying of ugly, useless, crap. But that just means the thinking participant in consumer culture should shop wisely, not that he shouldn't shop at all.

Some people think what's bad about consumer culture is that it leads to conformity. If everyone sews, everyone's clothes are different. If everyone goes to the same store to buy their prom dress, everyone looks the same.

It is true that consumer culture can tend toward conformity. But that's not always bad. One amazing and great thing about the can of Diet Coke you had with breakfast (OK, the can of Diet Coke I had with breakfast) is that it's exactly the same as the can of Diet Coke Lindsay Lohan is drinking on her movie set. There's no vintages, no guide book to selecting the best kind of Diet Coke. It's all the same. Conformity can be democratizing.

And shopping needn't produce conformity. Anyone with a crazed obsession for wearing 70's clothes with fringe isn't going to stay home every evening sewing. She's just going to buy them on Ebay.

The problem with consumer culture isn't that it's superficial to shop, or that it consumerism induces conformity. The problem with consumer culture is that it's so distracting. You live in a consumer culture, and voila! you find you can't think about anything except buying stuff. It's exhausting. You have a perfectly good MacBook Pro, and all you can think about is a MacBook Air. You have some workout clothes, but gee, wouldn't it be nice to go shopping for some shiny new tanktops? Is that new TV technology? Are those new sandals? Want, want, want; buy buy buy. It's relentless.

It's this distracting influence, I think, that makes gives consumer culture its truly morally questionable quality. Because the more you're thinking about what you want to buy, the less you're thinking about other stuff -- and for sure, the less you're thinking about giving your money away to people who actually need stuff more than you do. There used to be sort of natural checks on the all-encompassing nature of consumer culture. People used to go more regularly to church, to be reminded about other people; they used to see other people face-to-face more often; there weren't as many affordable things to buy.

If you think about it, it's no surprise that consumer culture tends to take over your entire brain, given that it's the job of thousands of people to make it do just that. All day, every day, they're thinking, how can we get inside this person's mind? So it's not a big shock that they're successful.

As I see it, the answer isn't to try to get rid of consumer products, or to change your entire value system so you start growing your own cotton. You just have to build in a few checks on the system. Put yourself in situations where you'll be reminded of other people, and where you'll be likely to forget, for a few moments, the siren call of the shiny, the new, the cute, the awesome.