Habitual

As a child, I was encouraged to cultivate good habits and discouraged from acquiring bad ones.   An example of a good habit might have been brushing my teeth each night before I went to bed; an example of a bad habit might have been eating too much sugary food.   Another good habit was taking regular exercise; another bad habit was smoking cigarettes.  From a child’s perspective, good habits always needed to be cultivated – that is, they needed regular work and attention – because they were not things that one would have done instinctively.  Given the choice, plenty of sugar and no toothpaste would seem far more enjoyable.  Likewise, the appeal of bad habits called for an effort of resistance, since they held out the promise of immediate gratification, whatever worries one might have about long-term harms.  I learned that nurturing the right habits is hard work, requiring us to swim against the flow of pure contentment, against our natural predilection for easy pleasures.

As an adult, I have come to regard this approach as too simplistic.  For sure, it matters that we make good choices about daily health and hygiene, but it matters more that our habits – both of behaviour and thought – are truly ours, that is, that they are chosen by us rather than adopted unreflectively.   Habitual ways of thinking and acting are bad for us not just when they lead us into foolish or unhealthy actions, but also when they are acquired without thoughtful consent.  Just as the smoke from someone else’s cigarette can damage our lungs, so too the passive acquisition of habits can damage our character. 

A few years ago, I was sitting in Gatwick airport, waiting for a delayed flight to Oakland.  I had planned to occupy myself on the long journey by reading Proust, but I had already completed the first fifty pages before I boarded the plane.  While I sat in the departure lounge, I was struck by a phrase early in the novel, describing “the anaesthetic effect of custom”.  I realised that I had no idea when anaesthetics were first used in medical treatment (in 1846, in Boston, I later discovered) but I enjoyed the thought that there is something analogically deadening about waiting for a late plane.  As I took my seat, a couple of hours behind schedule, it struck me that what Proust had said was precisely true: what is customary, what is habitual, has a predictable effect upon our thinking and feeling, for just like an anaesthetic it desensitizes us, in this case not to pain but life itself. 

That does not mean that we should embrace novelty as a guiding principle for life.  Valuing what is new for its newness is as foolish as valuing what is old for its oldness.  The problem with the customary is that it encourages a lack of attention, thereby dulling our sense of responsibility for our thoughts and actions.  To avoid unintended irresponsibility, we need to engage in reflection.  When we consider a behaviour or a belief that we might adopt, we need to weigh its value, its appropriateness to the situation at hand, to judge its merits based on its qualities and likely consequences, to determine whether this should be the behaviour or belief that we choose for ourselves.  That a behaviour is customary is not a reason to repeat it, that a belief is habitual is not a reason to retain it.  Longstanding, traditional actions and ideas are those most in need of reflective thought, precisely because we are so easily inclined to repeat and retain for no good reason.

By subjecting what we believe and how we act to reflective thought, we improve our chances of discarding erroneous beliefs and harmful acts.  As the philosopher Jürgen Habermas noted, in Knowledge and Human Interests, “… reflection destroys, along with a false view of things, the dogmatic attitudes of a habitual form of life”.  Appealing to the authority of reason, rather than the authority of tradition, is for Habermas the defining characteristic of philosophical modernity, the only secure ground from which to develop our normative systems of ethical and political values.  Recognising that our reflective processes are imperfect, and susceptible to many forms of failed or distorted reasoning, means that we need to test them through discussion with others, and to improve them through use.   We need to be habitually suspicious of the habitual and persistent in our self-reflections.

That might sound paradoxical, but I do not think it is.  There really are good habits and bad habits, just not the ones that I learned about as a child.  Bad habits are things we do “unthinkingly”, that is, without proper reflection.  Such habits might involve the language that we use to describe certain people or the tone or attitude we take towards them; the beliefs or values we cling to for comfort; the way we spend our money or time; our willingness to help others; our response to criticism; the way we organise our space and our work; and so on.   By contrast, good habits are things we do “thinkingly”, that is, after due reflection and cognisant of the fact that the decisions we make are our choices.  What we do and think is what we choose – knowingly – to do and think.  Good habits are determinations we have made not bequests we have received.

There are many things in life that must be done repetitiously if they are to be performed to a high standard.  To play a musical instrument well, to play a sport well, to cook well, all require practice routines.   To become successful at a profession, to complete a major project at work or home, to build strong friendships, all require the consistent application of time and energy to the task.  It is tiresome to have to persuade oneself every week to spend hours playing the piano, or bowling leg-spin, or baking soufflé; and to spend time at the weekend reading journal articles of innovative new work practices, digging over the beds of the vegetable garden, or writing emails to friends living on other continents.  The benefit of a good habit is that having chosen these various actions for the value we see in them, we can more easily accustom ourselves to the costs of achieving them, even though these might accrue on a recurrent basis.

Teaching habits to others is one of the most important mechanisms by which knowledge and successful practice are shared and spread throughout society.  It is by observing others, whose skill we recognise and admire whether in thinking or doing, and copying their approach for ourselves, that we improve and, in turn, provide an example to others.  When I say copying, I do not mean the simple replication or mimicking of another, rather I mean that we learn to do for ourselves what others, whom we judge better than us, already do for themselves, by following their patterns of thought and practice.  This is how the best teachers operate, whether in music, sport, cooking, academic research, professional practice, and so on: they do not demand that their students imitate them, rather they demonstrate successful performance and encourage their students to emulate them, but in their own way. 

A few years ago, I was involved in a difficult governance decision.  I was the deputy Chair of a board of non-executives and, together with the Chair, I was responsible for persuading a senior manager voluntarily to leave employment at the institution.  There were three stages to the discussions, which lasted a whole day.  First, making clear that the departure would happen one way or another, but that resignation would be a better option than being sacked.  Second, negotiating what level of compensation might be provided in a settlement agreement and how it would be structured.  Third, agreeing a statement for internal and external distribution, that would provide a credible account of why the manager had resigned, that did the least damage to the reputation of the individual and the institution.  Coming to an agreement on each of these elements was difficult, and it was only possible to work productively on the third once the second had been decided, but that could only be done after the first had been agreed.  All day, I watched with admiration as the Chair worked through the series of decisions, calmly and courteously, always finding a way to show the departing manager the benefit of coming to a sensible agreement, while maintaining a sound balance of firmness and kindness.  The outcome was as good for both sides as could have been hoped for at the start of the day.  Since then, whenever I have had to engage in difficult governance conversations, with fellow board members or members of the executive team, I try to remind myself how the Chair acted that day, and as best as I can, to copy his approach in my own way. Having observed the skilled practice of a colleague, I try to make this a habit of my own.

As we grow older, it becomes harder to change our habits, but for that very reason it becomes important to review them regularly and check that they remain the choices we want to make.  Habitual behaviour is by nature self-reinforcing, which means that over time it becomes easier to repeat than to innovate.  If we are sure that we are doing the things we want in the way we want, this does not matter: our habits reinforce our good choices.  When, contrariwise, we neglect to reflect on our settled beliefs and patterns of behaviour, then inadvertently we become resistant to change and susceptible to dogmatism.  We act and we think just as we always have done, but without any real ownership of our lives.  We cede control to the decisions of a former self in an earlier time. 

There are exceptions to this rule: older people who are open to new ideas and new ways of living, and who enjoy the challenge of not being set in their ways; and younger people who inherit ways of thinking and acting from family and friends at an early age and never bother to ask themselves whether the life they have is the one they wanted. In my experience, the best way to maintain an open, reflective approach is to maintain a group of friends who are diverse in age and background, and who are willing to question and challenge my settled ways of thinking and acting.  Being a good friend means, I think, occasionally being provocative. 

Our habits reflect the choices we have made or those we have avoided making.  Over time, the aggregation of these habits becomes synonymous with the person we have chosen to be, actively or by default.  What we do becomes who we are and our habits metamorphize into character.  For which reasons it matters that we choose wisely.