Ben and Me_ From Temperance to Humility - Cameron Gunn [4]
SO WHY IS IT THAT SO MANY SEEM COLLECTIVELY SO ENAMORED OF these “programs”? Why do books on self-improvement and programs of personal empowerment seem to capture our imagination and our wallets? Some commentators have said it is a result of our narcissism. Others claim that it is some combination of the twin philosophies of empowerment and victimization. I think there are just a lot of Triple T sufferers. Remember Thinning, Thickening, and Thirsting?
Whatever the reason, we buy books, we take courses, and we attend seminars. And we also fail. In Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless, Steve Salerno points out that the likeliest customer for a self-help book is someone who bought a similar book within the preceding eighteen months. “If what we sold worked,” he says, “one would expect lives to improve. One would not expect people to need further help.” 5
Surely Benjamin Franklin, with his “arduous project of arriving at moral perfection,” wasn’t, as Micki McGee suggests, the father of such a dissolute and self-indulgent industry. He wasn’t after profit or luxury. Franklin wasn’t motivated by personal self-interest (okay, maybe a little). Though he may have desired financial security and personal achievement, history shows us that his was truly a quest for the common good.
He formed America’s first lending library, a volunteer fire department, and a mutual insurance association. When he invented something with commercial potential, he refused to patent it so that it could be widely copied. He created a club for the exchange of political and philosophical ideas, and he promoted and practiced tolerance in matters of conscience and religion. The motto for his lending library was, “To pour forth benefits for the common good is divine.” Citizen Ben was no self-help huckster.
In establishing his program of virtue, Franklin was simply trying to improve the lot of mankind by creating a habit of doing good in himself and others. Habit is a powerful thing. Habit is the bane of antismoking advocates and the boon of marketers. It is the spokes in the wheels of religion and commercialism and politics. It is the foundation of a successful exercise program and the gravestone of an unsuccessful diet. Cicero said, “Great is the power of habit. It teaches us to bear fatigue and to despise wounds and pain.”6 This was the power that Franklin sought to exploit to make himself and others better—a program for harnessing routine into a force for good. And he believed in it. As Isaacson notes, “His morality was built on a sincere belief in leading a virtuous life, serving the country he loved and hoping to achieve salvation through good works.”7
And so, to return to the sloth, I blame Ben. For how can a person, a Thirster, who reads of Franklin’s virtues not seek to emulate him? Franklin issued that very challenge when he wrote of his course, “I hope, therefore, that some of my descendants may follow the example and reap the benefit.”
Now, if you knew me, as my wife, Michelle, does, you might be saying to yourself at this point, “Here we go again”; something sloth-like this way comes. John Hay once said of Theodore Roosevelt that if “you can restrain him for the first fifteen minutes after he has conceived a new idea,” he would calm down and behave like a reasonable human being.8 No one caught me before minute sixteen.
Who, I ask (rhetorically—no need for an answer here), needs more help seeking moral perfection than a scatterbrained lawyer? Who needs civic-minded intellectual hydration more than a chronic Thirster? Who should be more diligent in seeking virtues like Order and Resolution than an admitted procrastinator? Who requires help in seeking Justice if not a prosecutor? Who, I ask (a note of desperation