What You Can Change . . . And What You Can't*: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement (4 page)

The knowledge of the difference between what we can change and what we must accept in ourselves is the beginning of real change. With this knowledge, we can use our precious time to make the many rewarding changes that are possible. We can live with less self-reproach and less remorse. We can live with greater confidence. This knowledge is a new understanding of who we are and where we are going.

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Booters and Bootstrappers:
The Age of Self-Improvement
and Psychotherapy

“The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and the secret motion of things, and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire for the affecting of all things possible.”

Inscription over the door of the
House of Solomon—Francis Bacon,
The New Atlantis
, 1626

W
HAT
A
MERICANS
believe people can change is—in historical perspective—truly astonishing.

We are told from childhood that we can improve ourselves in almost every way. This is what our schools are supposed to help us accomplish. Our children are not just to be filled up with facts but taught to read, to be good citizens, to be lovingly sexual, to exercise, to have high self-esteem, to enjoy literature, to be tolerant of people who are different, to play baseball, to sing on key, to be competitive as well as cooperative, to lead and to follow, to have good health habits, to be ambitious, to use condoms, to obey the law.

The reality may fall short, but that is the mission of American schools.

Improving is absolutely central to American ideology. It is tantamount in importance to freedom in our national identity; indeed, advancement is probably the end for which Americans believe freedom is the means. Every boy and, at last, every girl might be president of the United States—with enough work and ambition.

The reality may fall short, but that is the ideal that Americans profess.

This is more than empty rhetoric. There is an enormous, and profitable, self-improvement industry that plays to your desire to achieve. Adult Americans spend billions of dollars and pass tens of billions of hours taking courses in

This does little more than scratch the surface of what courses are available. But what all these share is the simple premise that we can change, improve, and advance. Is this so obvious as to not need saying? Its very obviousness, how deeply we all accept it, is just the point—because most of humankind over most of history has not believed anything remotely like this.

Traditionally, most people in the West have believed that human character is fixed and unalterable, that people do not and cannot improve, advance, or perfect themselves. The change from a deep belief in the unchangeability of character to an equally deep belief in the capacity to improve is recent, and it represents one of the most fundamental and important revolutions in modern thought. Strangely, this is a history that has gone unwritten.

How did Americans come to believe so strongly in human plasticity? Where did the belief in psychotherapy come from? From where did our faith in self-improvement emanate?

The Seder and the Road to Damascus

How do we hear and retell the great acts of courage of the Judeo-Christian tradition? Let’s examine two of them: the Exodus from Egypt and the conversion of Saul. Do you think that the Israelites, hard oppressed by Pharaoh, screwed up their courage, decided they must have freedom, and bravely gathered themselves up and fled? This is what I thought until I listened more closely to the readings at a recent Seder. Here is the story of the Passover as told in the Haggadah. Listen for who did what to whom.

And he went down into Egypt, compelled by the word of God, and sojourned there. . . . And the children of Israel were fruitful, increased abundantly, multiplied, and became exceedingly mighty. . . . “I have caused thee to multiply like the growth of the field.”

And the Egyptians ill-treated us, afflicted us, and laid heavy bondage upon us.

And we cried unto the Eternal. . . . And the Eternal heard our voice. . . . And the Eternal brought us forth from Egypt, with a strong hand and with an outstretched arm, with great terror, and with signs and wonders.
¹

God is the actor, and the Israelites (and, to a lesser extent, the Egyptians) are the acted-upon. There is almost nothing that the Israelites do that is not caused or commanded by God. Their only act without God’s command is to complain. This paradigmatic act of liberation is not portrayed as the act of a brave people resolved on freedom. It is not even commanded by a daring general. Moses, in fact, merely quotes God verbatim, as ordered. God says:

I will be with thy mouth, and with his [Aaron’s] mouth, and will teach you what ye shall do. (Exodus 4:15)

Every step of the way, the good events are wholly the doing of God. When the situation improves, it is not by human agency but by God’s intervention. Indeed, this is the central message of the tale and why we are supposed to retell it every Passover.

Examine a different major event, one from Christianity—the conversion of Saul. Do you think that Saul rued his mistreatment of Jesus’ followers, was fed up with the old religion, understood with blinded insight the promise of Jesus, and decided to convert? This is what I thought until I reread Acts 9:

And suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven:

And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?

And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest:
it is
hard for thee to kick against the pricks.

And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me do? And the Lord
said
unto him, Arise, and go to the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do. . . .

The Lord . . . hath sent me, that thou mightest receive thy sight, and be filled with the Holy Ghost.

And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and he received sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptized.

Again, God is the actor and Saul is passively acquiescent. Saul merely inquires, but God commands. There is no decision making, not a wisp of thought or choice or insight on Saul’s part.

The Bible is almost devoid of psychology.
²
You will search the Old Testament and the New Testament in vain for feats of human intention—individual choice, decision, and preference. You will search in vain for some hero wreaking change by his own initiative in a world of adversity. You will search in vain for a character who thinks, weighs the pros and cons, and then acts. God commands Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, the son of his old age. Abraham, without a thought, saddles his ass and sets off.
³
So it goes with the entire dramatis personae of the Bible.

The Bible presents a stunning contrast with modern reportage. When any major event occurs today—an earthquake, the World Cup, a battlefield victory, an assassination, a riot in Los Angeles—reporters badger the participants with “How does it feel?” and “What was going through your mind?” It is anachronistic to wonder how Joshua felt upon toppling the walls of Jericho. This impulse was totally alien to those who reported the monumental doings from the time of Abraham to the time of Jesus. What happened—particularly if it was good, an improvement, an advance—was simply God’s intervention in human affairs. Human thought, decision, and intention played no role. The Scriptures militantly and uniformly nullify human agency.

This dogma of human implasticity pervades Western civilization from biblical times through the next two thousand years.

Cracks in the Firmament

This dour view of human advancement—that if things improve, it is only through God’s grace—went largely unchallenged through the Middle Ages. While the Middle Ages are no longer characterized as utterly stagnant, there undoubtedly was a great slowing of change in human affairs. For eight hundred years, individual character did not change, and the society did not change much. Sons largely did what their fathers did before them. Women were little noted. The poor remained poor. The rich remained rich. Knowledge, coming only from authority, did not accumulate. Except for astronomy describing the heavenly bodies’ movements, science did not progress. The Church was at the center, standing immutable on the Rock of Peter. The pace of change mirrored the ideology.

Then three cracks in the firmament appeared—liberty, science, and free will—and the dogma of human implasticity finally shattered. The first crack was the movement toward individual liberty.

Political liberty
. On June 15, 1215, at Runnymede, England, a handful of rebellious barons wrested from King John a document, Magna Carta, that protected them from some of the caprices of their king. While it hardly proclaimed universal suffrage, Magna Carta is certainly the forerunner of freedom as we know it:

No freeman shall be taken, or imprisoned, or disseised [dispossessed], or outlawed, or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him, nor will we send upon him, except by the legal judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. . . .

All persons are to be free to come and go, except outlaws and prisoners.

The growth of freedom was glacial in its pace, however, and it was more than four centuries before civil war broke out in England, Charles I was beheaded, and the Commonwealth declared. It was almost six centuries before the American Revolution realized John Locke’s claim that government derives its power from the consent of the governed. This was followed in 1789 by the even more sweepingly democratic Declaration of the Rights of Man of the French Revolution.

The movement toward liberty had now become a torrent. For our purposes, it is one of the three streams that washed away the dogma that human character cannot change and that individuals cannot, without the intervention of God, improve or advance.

The second crack was the belief that we are not completely at the mercy of nature.

Science can manipulate nature
. Until the Renaissance, Western science did little but describe God’s creation, though detailed observation of the tides and of the heavenly bodies predicted eclipses, and sometimes even floods, pretty well. Given the prevailing worldview that humans were powerless to change the nature of things and that all knowledge depended upon authority, the feeble science of the era should come as no surprise.