Is it Possible to Practice Self-Control in an Age of Excess?

Technological development and "weapons of mass consumption," says Daniel Akst in We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in and Age of Excess (Penguin Group, 2011), have made it too easy for us to overindulge in everything from food, sex, and drugs to credit, television, and the internet. We have become a nation of Madame Bovarys, over-indulgent, bored, listless, and killing ourselves.

Akst at first makes a case that self-control is possible, even stating that one of the book's goals "is to reinflate the narrowed arenas of the elective, reclaiming most excessive behaviors from the realm of disease. The range of actions---and therefore outcomes---that are subject to volition is much larger than we have been led to believe." However, he concludes by suggesting a number of solutions that are perhaps more other-control than self-control because they involve enlisting the government to "protect us from ourselves." He asks, "And is it really capable of doing so? The answers are yes and maybe."

I agree that the answer is "yes and maybe." I mean, just see how successfully communist governments have prevented overconsumption of junk food through mass starvation. Furthermore, certain Islamic governments have done a pretty good job of preventing women from indulging in promiscuous and/or adulterous sex through humiliation, rape, prison, or execution. I don't doubt the government can save us from our baser instincts. The question is not so much can the government do it as should the government do it. Of course, Akst is not advocating the establishment of the Fat Police. Rather, he's advocating that the government reward behaviors it prefers and give people more options for self-enforcement (for instance, he suggests allowing them to put a "no alcohol" label on their driver's licenses).

This is hardly a new idea, of course, and, in fact, the government does this already, by, for example, giving more legal benefits to those who are married than to those who are merely living together, or by offering people tax credits for producing children or educating themselves. It's a kind of subtle choice-control; yes, the government, like a theocratic ruler, is deciding what is morally good for everyone, but at least it's not enforcing it with lashings. It's just pushing you in one direction with economic benefits, or away from another direction with economic punishments. The government is also ultimately reducing the choices available to you, which in turn reduces temptation, but in an indirect way.

These days, a paternalistic view of government is common. Both the left and the right look to the government as the enforcer of morality and the guider of errant children. They just want to see different values enforced. I myself find my political soul to be divided. While part of me finds these ideas of governmental guidance attractive and thinks, "Yes, people can be dreadfully stupid, and sometimes their stupidity can have ill effects on me, and it would be nice if someone would guide them onto wiser paths," the other part of me thinks, "Well, freedom is the greater good, and while freedom makes vice possible, it is also the only thing that makes true virtue possible, and we should therefore not curtail freedom, even indirectly, and what if the government should decide my likes are vices, and make it more inconvenient and expensive for me to practice them? And who is the government to decide what is moral and immoral, healthy and unhealthy, wise and unwise, anyway?"

Akst suggests that "one way the government might protect us, paradoxically, is to expose us fully to the consequences of our actions, no matter how terrible." In other words, quit protecting us so we can learn to protect ourselves. If the government must be our parent, then at least let it adopt the benign neglect school of parenting. Even a libertarian could cheer such a suggestion, but Akst also wants the government to become more involved in the lives of individuals and the market place through regulations that would give people more information about the poor consequences of their bad decisions and reward them for good behavior. It's a reasonable model for parenting, but we might still ask if Congress should be our parent. More to the point, we might ask if the government is likely to be a good enforcer of self-control. If you're wondering what I mean by that statement, then just take a gander at the current National Debt Clock.