We need new political and personal habits.
We need new political and personal habits.
A re more Americans angry than are lonely? As I watched the Democratic convention this summer, I thought this is what the presidential election could come down to. Donald Trump is a mad-as-hell choice, and Kamala Harris is the candidate for the lonely and the sad. She may make you a word salad, but you’ll hear laughter. Trump might inspire a riot on Capitol Hill, but somebody will get fired in every episode.
It’s not quite all that simple — though the anger and sadness are real. The price of milk can make for both. But if you are an undecided voter right now, you probably need much more than a presidential candidate in your life. You probably need better habits. (Don’t we all?)
“Take one large thing that you really want, for whatever reason — camaraderie, sense of purpose, connection with nature — and then coach and guide any smaller desires you have that might push you in a contrary direction, such as staying at home and watching YouTube videos, back toward that one bigger goal,” Andrew V. Abela writes in Superhabits: The Universal System for a Successful Life, focusing on the habit of self-discipline. “Our desires can sometimes lead us to do things that we know are really stupid things to do. Sometimes I desire to say something, do something, eat something, that I know I’ll regret,” he writes.
Self-discipline could, for example, help Americans who are on the fence about voting to get off the couch. And, needless to say, it is a concept often missing from our politics.
Superhabits are virtues. Abela, dean of the business school at the Catholic University of America, didn’t want to throw a catechism at people. Instead, his is a self-help book that presents superhabits not in moral or religious terms but merely in practical ones.
Besides self-discipline, Abela has chapters on humility, forgiveness, courage, “gentlefirmness,” and justice, to name a few.
About forgiveness and “gentlefirmness,” Abela explains that they are companion virtues. “Gentlefirmness is the habit of directing your anger toward making things right. Forgiveness is the habit of moderating your response — whether it be hatred, retaliation, or punishment — toward what caused the anger in the first place.” You won’t always avoid getting mad when living virtuously, but you will channel it better, and that habit may very well be contagious.
“Superhabits have all the benefits of regular habits, and a lot more,” Abela writes. “Like regular habits, they can be cultivated by practicing them a little bit at a time. Once acquired, they allow you to act much more quickly and easily.” They can become a way of life.
The superhabits that help us manage our desires . . . are not about using our willpower to force our desires to be what we think they should be, or to force ourselves to do things we don’t desire to do. Rather, they are about gently guiding our desires into more productive directions and carefully modifying our actions in small and repeated ways.
The virtues aren’t just a moral code to abide by; they don’t exist as prohibitions that religious folk invoke to keep people from fun, which is a typical caricature. They make for better students, employees, and spouses.
Catholic University, Abela says, encourages the superhabits as part of its campus culture. “Our graduates are in great demand by employers, and, as shown by a recent Gallup survey, are outperforming their peers in the different dimensions of human well-being, social, personal, and financial, and have a workforce engagement rate that is double the national average.”
Abela quotes Captain Chesley Burnett “Sully” Sullenberger, who landed a commercial plane on the Hudson River after birds had damaged its engines:
Through the media, we have all heard about ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary situations. They act courageously or responsibly, and their efforts are described as if they opted to act that way on the spur of the moment. . . . I believe many people in those situations actually have made decisions years before. Somewhere along the line, they came to define the sort of person they wanted to be, and then they conducted their lives accordingly.
Deliberately cultivating one’s character requires taking one’s eyes off the screens. Then virtues are like muscles — they must be used and stretched, and often. They are not necessarily associated with politics, although they are desperately needed in that domain too. Ditto business. Schools that teach and model them show their students a nobler way to live.
Superhabits may sound elementary; they are critical. The virtues need to be practiced, and we need practical reminders to kick our bad habits, to stop going with the flow of the (especially online) culture.
“The content of our character, the ancients tell us, is the virtues — the superhabits,” Abela writes. And character can be king if we choose to let the virtues guide us.
Harris or Trump will win, and a nation will continue its obsession with the reality show of politics that it can’t seem to quit. But we can refuse to make it all that we see and talk about, especially during leisure time that could otherwise be imbued with beauty and challenge. If we can manage that, fewer of us would be feeding on and into anger and loneliness.
This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.