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AKRASIA


A central problem of our minds is that we know so much in theory about how we should behave, but engage so little with our knowledge in our day-to-day conduct. We know in theory about not eating too much, being kind, getting to bed early, focusing on our opportunities before it is too late, showing charity and remembering to be grateful. Yet in practice, our wise ideas have a notoriously weak ability to motivate our actual behaviour. Our knowledge is both embedded within us and yet is ineffective for us. The Ancient Greeks were unusually alert to this phenomenon and gave it a helpfully resonant name: 'akrasia', commonly translated as ‘weakness of will’. It is because of akrasia, they proposed, that we have such a tragic proclivity for knowing what to do but not acting upon our own best principles. There are two central solutions to akrasia, located in two unexpected quarters: art and ritual. The real purpose of art (which includes novels, films and songs as well as photos, paintings and works of design and architecture) is to give sensuous and emotional lustre to a range of ideas that are most important to us, but that are also most under threat in the conditions of everyday life. Art shouldn’t be a matter of introducing us to, or challenging us with, a stream of new ideas so much as about lending the good ideas we already have compelling forms – so that they can more readily weigh upon our behaviour. A euphoric song should activate the reserves of tenderness and sympathy in which we already believe in theory; a novel should move us to the forgiveness in which we are already invested at an intellectual level. Art should help us to feel and then act upon the truths we already know. Ritual is the second defence we have against akrasia. By ritual, we mean the structured, often highly seductive or aesthetic, repetition of a thought or an action, with a view to making it at once convincing and habitual. Ritual rejects the notion that it can ever be sufficient to teach anything important once – an optimistic delusion by which the modern education system has been fatefully marked. Once might be enough to get us to admit an idea is right, but is nothing like enough to convince us it should be acted upon. Our brains are leaky, and, under pressure of any kind, readily revert to customary patterns of thought and feeling. Ritual trains our cognitive muscles; it makes a sequence of appointments in our diaries to refresh our acquaintance with our most important ideas. Our current culture tends to see ritual mainly as an antiquated infringement of individual freedom; a bossy command to turn our thoughts in particular directions at specific times. But the defenders of ritual would see it another way: we aren’t being told to think of something we don’t agree with; we are being returned with grace to what we always believed in at heart. We are being tugged by a collective force back to a more loyal and authentic version of ourselves. The greatest human institutions that have tried to address the problem of akrasia have been religions. Religions have wanted to do something much more serious than simply promote abstract ideas: they have wanted to get people to behave in line with those ideas, which is a very different thing. They didn’t just want people to think that kindness or forgiveness were nice (which we generally do already); they wanted us to be kind or forgiving most days of the year. They invented a host of ingenious mechanisms for mobilising the will, which is why, across much of the world, the finest art and buildings, the most seductive music, the most impressive and moving rituals have all been religious. Religion is a vast machine for addressing the problem of akrasia. This has presented a conundrum for a more secular era. Bad secularisation has lumped together religious superstition and religion’s anti-akrasia strategies. It has rejected both the supernatural ideas of the faiths and their wise attitude to the motivational roles of art and ritual. A more discerning form of secularisation makes a major distinction between (on the one hand) religion as a set of speculative claims about God and the afterlife and (on the other hand) the always valid ambition to improve our social and psychological lives by combating our notoriously weak wills. The challenge for the secular world is now to redevelop its own versions of purposeful art and ritual so that we will cease so regularly to ignore our real commitments and might henceforth not only believe wise things but also, on a day-to-day basis, have a slightly higher chance of enacting wisdom in our lives.

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