Temptation
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Epigraph
Preface
Chapter 1 - A Democracy of Excess
Chapter 2 - Sickening Excess
Chapter 3 - On Having Yourself Committed
Chapter 4 - The Cost of Good Inventions
Chapter 5 - The Perils of Prosperity
Chapter 6 - Self-control and Social Change
Chapter 7 - The Greek Way
Chapter 8 - The Marshmallow Test
Chapter 9 - The Seesaw Struggle
Chapter 10 - Let My People Go
Chapter 11 - The Intimate Contest
Chapter 12 - The Mind-Body Problem
Chapter 13 - Self-control, Free Will, and Other Oxymorons
Chapter 14 - Odysseus and the Pigeons
Chapter 15 - Crimes of Passion
Chapter 16 - Addiction, Compulsion, and Choice
Chapter 17 - Tomorrow Is Another Day
Chapter 18 - Cutting Loose
Chapter 19 - Government and Self-government
Chapter 20 - Being Your Own Godfather
Chapter 21 - Carpe Diem
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
Praise for Temptation by Daniel Akst
“Given how reluctant we are to ask tough questions about our behavior, Mr. Akst’s approach is a helpful one, inviting a wide audience to think hard about a difficult problem and offering some ideas for solving it.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“As Akst recognizes, arguments about the reality of personal autonomy have political resonances.... Willpower, Akst says, is like a muscle that can be strengthened but is susceptible to exhaustion.”
—George F. Will, The Washington Post
“There is power in naming the problem, and this is part of what makes Akst’s book good. He lays it all out—all the many ways in which the modern matrix acts upon our psyches to our physical and emotional detriment. But the book is also good because it is positive, dedicated to seeking solutions.”
—The New Yorker Book Bench blog
“As Americans have learned to embrace their desires and break away from stern Puritan traditions, ‘the only thing left is to avoid killing ourselves with our newfound freedom.’”
—Bloomberg Business Week
“In a book full of startling facts, this might be the most startling: of the 2.5 million deaths in the U.S. annually, ‘something approaching half could be prevented . . . if people simply managed to lead healthier lives.’ . . . It is this kind of willful self-destruction, Akst concludes, that’s killing us in greater and greater numbers. A very thought-provoking and colorfully written book.”
—Booklist
“You wouldn’t be able to stop yourself from reading this book! Daniel Akst is among the sharpest, most perceptive writers of his generation, and he is in fine form in Temptation.”
—Gregg Easterbrook, author of Sonic Boom
“This book entertains even as it pokes at our most sensitive spots. Daniel Akst handles the touchiest heretical ideas with charm, humor, and painless scholarship. With no ax to grind, no cause to serve but reason he opens up the foregone conclusions by which we live and leaves a reader with new and alternate views of ourselves and others. Like the finest essayists Akst makes the deepest ideas fascinating and fun to read.”
—Nicholas von Hoffman
“The more a society progresses, the bigger a problem self-control turns out to be. If you wish to be ahead of the curve for understanding America’s problems, Dan Akst’s excellent and informative book is the place to start.”
—Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University and cocreator of The Marginal Revolution blog
PENGUIN BOOKS
TEMPTATION
Daniel Akst has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. His previous books include Wonder Boy, which chronicled the wondrous financial fraud he had a hand in exposing, and the novels St. Burl’s Obituary (a PEN/Faulkner finalist) and The Webster Chronicle. He lives with his wife and sons in New York’s bucolic Hudson Valley, generally a good place to hide from temptation.
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First published in the United States of America as We Have Met the Enemy by The Penguin Press,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2011
Published in Penguin Books 2011
Copyright © Daniel Akst, 2011
All rights reserved
ISBN : 978-1-101-55930-7
1. Self-control. 2. Moderation. 3. Supply and demand. I. Title.
BF632.A35 2011
153.8—dc22
2010028525
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The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another.
—J. M. Barrie
Preface
For a writer in today’s marketplace, moderation is an affliction. There’s something to be said for bourgeois respectability, of course, but nobody wants to read memoirs about heroic retirement saving, the Sturm und Drang of predawn carpooling, or the epic compromises that, strung together over the decades, produce an enduring marriage. All writers know this.
“The tranquil current of domestic happiness affords no materials for narrative,” Mary Brunton concluded two centuries ago in a didactic novel called Self-Control. “The joys that spring from chastened affection, tempered desires, useful employment, and devout meditation, must be felt—they cannot be described.” This is a truth universally acknowledged, which may be why Brunton has her heroine flee an evil boyfriend by tying herself to a birch-bark canoe and plunging over a Canadian waterfall. People made fun of that ending, but it sold books.
The same sort of thing sells nowadays, too, except it’s the writer’s hair-raising escape from his own demons that rings up the registers. A book about self-control today ought rightly to be about the author’s struggles (however embroi
dered) to conquer some fiendish addiction. The problem is that, despite my best efforts, nobody could lead a more humdrum life than I do. Although I check my e-mail a little too often, I am not addicted to anything. I do not even struggle with my weight, except—and this is embarrassing—for when it gets too low. I’ve had my excesses over the years, but the sad fact is that I never quite manage to take them to excess. Nor does religious fervor move me to ecstasy or wrath. In general I am deaf to spirituality; the main thing I do religiously is maintain our cars. I will admit that in Las Vegas once, on assignment, I developed a gambling problem. The problem was that I lost $10 on the Penn-Dartmouth football game, the sting of which is with me still. Some years after this youthful binge I married my dentist, compared to whom I am the long-lost twin of Amy Winehouse raised by wolves.
Yet even I have self-control problems. Do you have any idea how long it took me to buckle down to work on the paragraphs you just read? First, of course, I had to explore the vast discography of the pianist Paul Bley via the Internet, that accursed underminer of all our best intentions. In doing so I naturally worked up quite an appetite, which meant time out for food, followed by a restorative nap. While “working” on this same section I also found time to add to my remarkable e-mail oeuvre, dispatching messages of unparalleled artistry and wit to correspondents the world over. (As it is for most writers these days, e-mail is by far the form in which I am most prolific.) I did some laundry, went to the gym, and took measurements for various household repairs that I’m still putting off. I even kept a close eye on techbargains.com for—well, for some great tech bargains, the nature of which I haven’t yet imagined.
Now, during all this frantic self-distraction, I knew somewhere deep inside that sooner or later I really would have to write this preface—and that the longer it took the less money and self-regard I would have. As time went by I grew anxious, and finally even furious. After a while I was practically desperate to get going. Yet somehow, for days on end, I failed to yoke my actions to what I could have sworn all along was my will, leaving the necessary work undone. The question is, how can such a thing possibly happen? Why, in other words, is self-control so difficult?
And why does it seem to be so much harder for some people than for others? Is it a matter of circumstances? Or maybe it’s a matter of just a single circumstance—the circumstance of birth, in which our ancestors perform the function of the Fates, investing our DNA with our destiny. What if even your garden-variety, mild-mannered, house-maintaining dad is programmed to someday run amok like the Manchurian Candidate or the Malaysian pengamoks who gave us the term?
This book is the result of my attempt to find some answers. In searching for them, I discovered all sorts of interesting things—including the extent to which procrastination has been an enduring occupational hazard for writers. Victor Hugo, to cite a single example, supposedly ordered his valet to confiscate his clothes so he wouldn’t go off and waste time doing something—anything!—other than writing. Even the prolific Irving Wallace, who cranked out commercial fiction the way Ben Bernanke cranks out greenbacks in a crisis, had to face this problem, which he addressed in an academic paper called “Self-Control Techniques of Famous Novelists.”
What a relief to learn that, despite my boring rectitude, I share at least one of the characteristic failings of my scribbling brethren, for an excess of propriety is troubling in a writer. As a novelist familiar with the erratic history of my tribe, I’m all too aware of how often the lives of writers appear to be out of control, and after wallowing in the subject for a while, I came away afflicted with a worrisomely Calvinist perspective on my own feeble career. Think of Coleridge’s opium habit or Faulkner’s drinking. Alcoholism, debauchery, and other such excesses might not assure greatness, but what if they are God’s signs of literary grace—precious markers suggesting that you are, after so much doubt, really among the elect? And what if, despite filling in “writer” year after year on your tax returns, you had none of these markers whatsoever?
I console myself that obscurity likely beckons regardless of my excesses or any lack thereof. Meanwhile, we scribes without addictions can at least claim to be sensibly following Flaubert, who urged us to “be regular and orderly in your life . . . so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
The pages that follow are as violent and original as I could make them. Book buyers, take note.
1
A Democracy of Excess
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 onl
y 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.