What You Can Change . . . And What You Can't*: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement (5 page)

Enter Francis Bacon, one of the truly iconoclastic minds of the Renaissance. Bacon, who it has been speculated wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare and was the bastard son of the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I, was born in 1561. His father was Nicholas Bacon, keeper of the great seal of England, and his mother was Anne Cooke, lady-in-waiting to Elizabeth. Bacon senior was notable for his social progress: He had been a clerk before Henry VIII established the Anglican church, but when Henry abolished the monasteries, and was short of loyalists to run things, he promoted Nicholas Bacon, among other formerly humble men. Bacon senior leapt social barriers, becoming the first member of his family to rise in class. First the Black Death had destroyed the feudal system; now Henry had disenfranchised many of the gentry, opening up the higher-status jobs that the myriad plague dead and Henry’s new enemies had once filled. Whole families scrambled upward. Francis Bacon grew up knowing that the social order is not fixed.

Francis Bacon entered Cambridge at twelve (no artificially prolonged adolescence in this subsistence economy) and immediately loathed the mandatory Aristotelian curriculum that then passed for knowledge. He rebelled against it openly. In a breathtaking break with the past, he urged us to look to nature—not to authority—for knowledge in order to benefit humankind. Science should not be restricted merely to observing nature passively, he said. Humans can actually manipulate nature (just as he had learned that man could alter the social order). We can do experiments. If we want to know why water is boiling, we should not consult Aristotle or the Church. We can experiment and find out. We remove the fire and the boiling stops. We rekindle the fire and the boiling resumes. Fire is the cause.

Science can change things, Bacon told us. Within fifty years Isaac Newton had unlocked the secrets of motion. This was followed rapidly by an explosion of knowledge in medicine, agriculture, and economics. In a burst of activity, the next two centuries witnessed human beings changing their kings, their God, and Nature herself. Perhaps human beings, as individuals, could even change themselves. But for this to become plausible, the final crack in the firmament had to appear. It did, and in deceptively academic guise—in debate among theologians.

Free will
. In the 1480s, heretics were burned at the stake all over Europe. The infamous
Malleus Maleficarum
, a guide to detecting witches and torturing them into confessing, was published. With the stench of burning flesh in his nostrils, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, a young Ferraran aristocrat, arrived in Rome and defied the dogma of human implasticity. In his
Oration: On the Dignity of Man
, Pico’s God tells Adam

Neither a determined dwelling place, nor a unique shape, nor a role that is peculiarly your own have we given you, O Adam, so that you may have and possess what habitation, shape, and roles you yourself may wish for according to your desire and as you decide. The nature of all the rest is defined and encompassed by laws prescribed by us; you, restrained by no limitations, of your own free will in whose hand I have placed you, shall appoint your own nature.
⁴

Pico revels in the vision that man is free to choose. Man is endowed by his Creator with the potential of raising himself above all created beings, even above the angels.

The pope condemned Pico and prohibited his writings. Pico wandered barefoot through the world and died of fever at age thirty-one.

But within thirty years, the Protestant Reformation was in full swing. The Catholic church lost its monopoly on the spiritual life of Europe. The Reformation was decidedly not, however, a celebration of free will. Luther dismissed freedom of the will, viewing humanity as having been created vile and powerless: Everyone is fallen, all of us merit damnation.
⁵

John Calvin then argued that everyone is damned or saved even before they are born. God predestines some of us to eternal life and the rest of us to eternal death. His elect are kept by God in faith and holiness through their lives. Worldly success can be an emblem of their election. No actions you undertake, no choices you make, will change your fate. Unaided, humans are incapable of choosing good, and human reason is incapable of knowing a single truth beyond the mere existence of God. Good works do not produce grace. Your destiny is sealed before you are born.

If this is so, why should people bother to try to be good? How could people be held responsible for their actions? The theological battle for human agency was engaged. On the outcome of this monumental battle hinged the very fate of the idea that humans can change and advance themselves. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, liberal Dutch Protestants, led by Jacobus Arminius (the latinization of Jacob Harmensen), claimed that man has free will and participates in his election to grace.
⁶
To be saved we must meet God, if not halfway, some of the way. This was dubbed “the Arminian Heresy.”

This debate continued for almost two hundred years, with inroads made by the Arminians in Holland immediately and in England one hundred years later during the Restoration purge of the Calvinists. This “heresy” then became popular through the evangelical preaching of John Wesley, the English cofounder of Methodism, who preached this doctrine of salvation widely. First, Wesley declared, humans have free will:

He was endowed with a will, exerting itself in various affections and passions; and, lastly, with liberty, or freedom of choice; without which all the rest would have been in vain . . . he would have been as incapable of vice or virtue as any part of inanimate creation. In these, in the power of self motion, understanding, will, and liberty, the natural image of God consisted.
⁷

Wesley told the masses who turned out for his sermons that God offers salvation
in general
but that humans, using free will, actively participate in attaining their own salvation by using the “means”:

The sure and general rule for all who groan for the salvation of God is this—Whenever opportunity serves, use all the means which God has ordained; for who knows in which God will meet thee with the grace that bringeth salvation?
⁸

Wesley’s charismatic sermons, heard through the cities, towns, and villages of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, and in the American colonies, and the efficiency of the organizations he set up to keep the converted from backsliding made Methodism a strong and popular religion. Free will now entered popular consciousness. Ordinary people no longer saw themselves as passive vessels waiting to be filled with grace. Ordinary human life could be improved. Ordinary people could act to better themselves. Even the insane, formerly thought hopeless, were now unshackled from their prison walls. In 1792, Philippe Pinel, newly appointed chief physician of La Bicetre asylum in Paris, boldly struck the chains from his patients in the presence of the leaders of the French Revolution.

S
O BY THE BEGINNING
of the nineteenth century, the three cracks in the dogma of human implasticity had grown into irreparable fissures. The American and French revolutions had been fought and won; many had attained a large measure of political liberty. It was widely believed that science could change nature, that humans need not sit passively by and let nature grind them down, that human beings have free will. It followed that human beings could change and better themselves. The dogma of human implasticity that had lasted almost two thousand years and had paralyzed human progress was at last overthrown.

The Dogma of Human Plasticity

There was no better soil than that of nineteenth-century America for this new dogma. Rugged individualism was America’s answer to the unraveling European mind-set of human implasticity. All of these fed the faith:

• the democratic idea that all men are created equal
  

• an endless frontier for the poor to find riches
  

• waves of immigrants, subsistence laborers who were soon clamoring for power
  

• the gold rush
  

• the motto “Rags to Riches”
  

• universal schooling
  

• the notion of criminal rehabilitation
  

• public libraries
  

• the freeing of the slaves
  

• the drive toward women’s suffrage
  

• a new religious liberalism that emphasized free will and good works as the road to heaven
  

• the idealization of the entrepreneur—ambition and initiative incarnate
  

The Federalists, skeptical that the people could govern themselves wisely (“Your people, sir—your people is a great
beast!”
declared Alexander Hamilton), soon lost their hold on power to the Democrats. Few now advocated human implasticity. The first half of the nineteenth century became a great age of social reform. The evangelical religious movement of the American frontier was intensely individualistic, the meetings climaxing with the drama of the choice of Christ. Utopian communities sprang up to achieve human perfection.

It was commonly accepted that humans could change and improve. Andrew Jackson, when he was president-elect, gave voice to it:

I believe man can be elevated; man can become more and more endowed with divinity; and as he does he becomes more God-like in his character and capable of governing himself. Let us go on elevating our people, perfecting our institutions, until democracy shall reach such a point of perfection that we can acclaim with truth that the voice of the people is the voice of God.
⁹

There were two dominant opinions in this era as to who can be the agent of change; both are still very much with us as we enter the next millennium.

The booters and the bootstrappers
. The
hooters
believed that people can improve, but that
the agent of change must be someone else
. For some of the booters, the means of change was the therapist who guides the patient into change. Freud, the founder of the therapeutic movement, tried self-analysis and gave up.

My self-analysis remains interrupted. I have realized why I can analyze myself only with the help of knowledge obtained objectively (like an outsider). True self-analysis is impossible; otherwise there would be no neurotic illness.
¹⁰

When the analysand and the analyst are the same, the conflicts that distort thinking and impede insight are insuperable.

For other booters, the means of human advancement was changing the social institutions. These reformers founded public libraries, installed universal schooling, advocated rehabilitation of criminals, urged moral treatment of the insane, marched for women’s suffrage and abolition of slavery, and founded Utopian communities. They still march today. Marx epitomized this view of change: Humans are prisoners of the capitalistic economic system; change the economic system, put the means of production into the hands of the workers, and thereby change humanity for the better.

Out of this group, the idea of a “social science” emerged. In the wake of Chicago’s Haymarket Riot of 1886, in which seventy policemen were injured and one killed by armed strikers, class warfare became apparent to American opinion makers. Their explanation of bad behavior shifted from bad character (immutable and individual) to poverty and social class (changeable and general). The cure was to improve the environment of the lower class, since the individual perpetrators were not responsible. Theologians asked “not how every individual was responsible, but how they could be responsible for the many who were not.”
¹¹
The science of social institutions took this program as its agenda.

For still other booters, the means of change was to manipulate the environmental contingencies that affect the individual. The behaviorists, led by John Watson, told us that the child is totally a product of the environment. Watson said in 1920 that the only way to change

is to remake the individual by changing his environment in such a way that new habits have to form. The more completely they change, the more the personality changes. Few individuals can do all this unaided.
¹²

The science of learning theory was dedicated to this proposition (B. F. Skinner was the most popular recent advocate of this worldview).

All these propositions share the notion that people will change. But they need to be booted into it—by a therapist, by reformed social institutions, by benevolent manipulation of the environment. People can’t change on their own. The booters are the heirs of Francis Bacon.

The
bootstrappers
are the heirs of the individualism of Pico, Arminius, and Wesley. The agent of change is the self: Human beings can lift themselves by their own bootstraps.

For some of the bootstrappers, self-improvement had theological roots, derived from Wesley and nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism melded with the American doctrine of “rugged individualism.” Norman Vincent Peale’s
The Power of Positive Thinking
, published in 1952, and Robert Schuller’s present-day Sunday-morning preaching in the Crystal Cathedral have touched the lives of tens of millions of Americans.
¹³
Individuals believe that they can achieve success in this world by improving themselves, and salvation in the next by good works. Emile Coué, the French pharmacist who urged turn-of-the-century pill takers to accompany their medication with the thought “Every day and in every way, I am becoming better and better,” was a worthy secular forerunner of these contemporary religious bootstrappers.