CHAPTER 4-8
              SELF-DISCIPLINE AND HABITS OF THOUGHT


     Just knowing how to think well is satisfying and enjoyable.  
But to get the full benefit of the knowledge, you must do it.  
That is, you must get into the habit of thinking well.  This 
brings us to the subject of habits, their importance and their 
acquisition.  
     These are a few examples of useful general habits mentioned 
elsewhere in the book:  1) Ask "So what?" as a test of an 
argument's relevance (Chapter 4-6 on fallacies). 2) Ask what the 
data are, and how big the sample of observations is, when someone 
asserts the existence of a phenomenon or a change in society or 
economy.  (Examples 1 and 2 both illustrate the more general 
habit of inquiring about the logical and evidential processes 
that underlie ideas people present to you, or ideas you come up 
with yourself.)  3) Check whether there are alternatives that 
have not been mentioned when offered an unpalatable choice.  
(Chapters 2-3 and 3-1.)  4) Ask "Is there a good reason to 
compare myself to X?" when you make a painful negative self-
comparison to some standard in your mind. (See Chapter 5-2 on joy 
and sadness.)         
     There are also a myriad of very specific habits that can 
help you live more effectively and more enjoyably.  Don Aslett, 
founder of a large commercial cleaning organization and author of 
amusing and helpful books on how to keep your home clean easily, 
insists that habits like the following are the key to easy 
cleanliness:  "Anytime, anywhere you pass inches from something 
that needs to be tucked in, thrown out, adjusted, put back, you 
can and should do it."  (Washington Post, August 22, 1986, p. 
D5).  
     A habit is a psychological device that enables you to repeat 
an action or thought many times without repeating the effort 
required to get that action or thought going.  For those of you 
who groove on computers, a habit is like a "do loop", causing the 
program to repeat an action without you having to re-write the 
instructions, or the computer to re-read the instructions, for 
each repetition.  
     Habits are devices that economize on our resources (at 
least, good habits do).  As William James, the greatest-ever 
student of habit wrote:  "[H]abit diminishes the conscious 
attention with which our acts are performed." If habit did not 
"economize the expense of nervous and muscular energy, [humans 
would] be in a sorry plight" (1890/1950, vol 1, p. 113).  And 
Albert North Whitehead puts it this way: "It is a profoundly 
erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent 
people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate 
the habit of thinking of what we are doing.  The precise opposite 
is the case.  Civilization advances by extending the number of 
important operations which we can perform without thinking about 
them." (An Introduction to Mathematics, p. 42). 
     Perhaps some people are born with greater potential for good 
thinking habits than are others.  And it is probable that the 
home environment you lived in as a child affects your thinking 
habits, though sometimes children take just the opposite 
direction than the parents.  (The best psychological 
generalization I've come across was stated by Gordon Allport in 
my freshman introductory course:  The same fire that melts the 
butter hardens the egg.)  But over and beyond the propensities 
that you start with, you certainly can improve your habits of 
thought.  
     Habits and self-discipline may be the most important 
learning we do, because they control the learning of other 
subjects.  If a child lacks the discipline to do homework, or to 
practice shooting baskets left-handed, that child will not get to 
be a skilled practitioner of algebra or basketball.     
     Jack Barnaby, the successful long-time coach of squash at 
Harvard, tells this story about Victor Niederhoffer, one of his 
greatest champions:  
     I spent less time in the court with Niederhoffer than with      
my other players. Here's how come.  Vic always came to me      
and said, "Show me about shot X".  I'd explain...After we      
drilled a while, he'd say, "I think I've got the concept"      
and I'd leave him. He would then drill himself for another      
half hour to an hour, grinding it into himself.  He would be      
using the shot, correctly and effectively in actual play, a      
day or so later...Yes, he was talented and all that, but      
above all, Niederhoffer , before he came to me, had learned      
how to learn and how to practice ("Squash Tips", Squash      
News, February, 1986, p. 16). 

     James offered suggestions about how to acquire self-
discipline: 1) Start the habit with determination.  Set up all 
possible conditions to be consistent with it -- make fixed 
practice times and place, tell everyone that you are doing it, 
put signs on the wall, and whatever.  2)  Do not let yourself 
make exceptions.  None of that "I'll just skip today because I'm 
feeling tired".  James says that "Continuity of training is the 
great means of making the nervous system act infallibly right" 
(p. 123). 3) Take the habit to the fullest.  Do not stop with 
rehearsing it.  "[N]o matter how good one's sentiments may be, if 
one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, 
one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better" 
(p. 125). 
     For James, acquiring habits is valuable for more than the 
effects of the individual habits.  The general habit of exerting 
effort to attain cherished goals creates will and character -- 
the two being very closely related in James's view of human 
nature. "[I]t is not simply particular lines of discharge, but 
also general forms of discharge, that seem to be grooved out by 
habit in the brain...Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a 
little gratuitous exercise every day.  That is, be systematically 
ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or 
two something for no other reason than that you would rather not 
do it..." (p. 126).  (I go along with James on the latter point, 
however, only if the ascetic or heroic act is valuable in itself. 
I don't share his value of suffering for its own sake.) 
     The statements in this chapter are almost all casual 
observations of others and mine, rather than controlled 
scientific tests.  To reassure you, however, that this is not 
just hot air to be regarded as no better than some other batch of 
hot air, here is some systematic evidence -- thinner than I would 
like, but better than nothing -- on related matters.  Sheldon and 
Eleanor Glueck began a study of college-entrant boys in the 
1940's, and they and George and Caroline Vaillant carried it up 
through the 1980's, giving them a chance to connect early 
behavior to later success when the boys were in their late 40's.  
The extent of industriousness that the boys showed when young, as 
indicated by doing better in school than their IQ's indicated 
they would, predicted their later success on the job better than 
any other variable.  (quoted by Amitai Etzioni, Self-Discipline, 
Schools, and the Business Community (Washington: National Chamber 
Foundation, 1984, p. 8.  Write Vaillant for cite).  
     Acquiring the habits of thinking requires effort.  You must 
give up some of the pleasures of self-indulgence in your 
thinking, and accept the pain of discipline.  Ordinarily we can 
only improve our discipline a bit at a time.  That is why schools 
gradually increase the amount of homework that children do, 
starting with almost none in the lowest grades; very young 
children are not capable of forcing themselves to do very much of 
what they perceive as disagreeable.  
     It is interesting to compare getting rid of an addiction 
with acquiring a discipline.  Addictions must usually be gotten 
rid of suddenly, and a bit of backsliding is seen as a threat to 
"staying clean".  That is, a single drink usually starts an 
alcoholic on a slippery slope toward drunkenness (though some 
recent reports question whether this pattern is invariable).  But 
in contrast to this all-or-nothing pattern with addiction, 
acquiring a discipline usually cannot be done all at once, but 
rather must be done gradually.  The key difference is that the 
drug gives you a pleasure, and hence experiencing it makes you 
want more.  But the discipline gives you a pain, at first at 
least, and therefore a bit of it makes you want less rather than 
more.  
     I said that discipline gives you a pain at first.  But 
curiously, what starts as a pain often turns into a pleasure.  
For example, when I was a student and afterwards as a beginner, I 
found that I had to force myself to write.  I had to struggle 
with myself to remain in the chair for 15 minutes at a time; it 
was difficult to master the desire to get up and move around and 
think of other things.  But over the years I found that I could 
write for longer and longer stretches at a time, with less and 
less need to master the desire to stop.  At some point there was 
no longer any need at all to force myself to write.  And there 
are times when I get so caught up in the writing that I must 
force myself to stop in order to do other important things. And I 
have read others describing the same experience. 
     As with many other matters, there is similarity between the 
processes of disciplining yourself and disciplining others as a 
manager.  When young men first come to Marine boot camp, much 
discipline is needed to get them to march at all, let alone march 
correctly and with style.  A few months later those same young 
Marines, coming back to the barracks after a few beers, will 
march back under informal joking command of one of them, 
exaggerating the correct forms, just for laughs.  And athletic 
teams often take pride in how tough their coach is (but only the 
successful teams?). 
     This transition from pain to pleasure is not always such a 
good thing, however.  Disciplining yourself not to eat too much 
is not pleasant for most of us; pigging-out is more enjoyable for 
the moment.  But some people get so caught up in disciplining 
themselves not to eat too much that they eat too little, and they 
get so much perverse pleasure from not eating that they make 
themselves sick and even die of the anorexia.  Perhaps pride in 
our ability to discipline ourselves is part of the explanation.  
Certainly there is great satisfaction in overcoming an addiction 
to, say, smoking or drinking, especially if we do it by 
ourselves, and especially if we do it cold turkey. 
     The differences among schools in teaching the capacity to 
discipline oneself are very great.  For example, a study of 
tenth-grade students found that students did 3.7 hours, 5.6 
hours, and 6.0 hours of homework per week in public, Catholic, 
and private schools respectively (Etzioni, 1984, Table 16). 
     Which studies best teach discipline and good mental habits? 
My impression is that it matters little whether it be classics, 
physics, Talmud, being a jockey, or whatever, as long as the 
course of study is demanding.  That is, what you study probably 
is less important than the quality of your study.  All else 
equal, studies that are relevant to your future interests are 
better, I suppose, as long as there is not too little of 
broadening material, too much of only "relevant" material, or too 
little discipline.      
     Discipline in one aspect of life does not automatically 
bring about discipline in other areas of life, however.  I once 
had a colleague who had remarkable discipline in running, 
practicing long hours every day for marathons.  But he barely 
found the discipline to finish a PhD thesis after many years, 
despite his very great intellectual skills.  Ironically, he used 
marathon practice as an excuse not to work on the thesis.     
     Believing in the importance of acquiring self-discipline is 
important.  In earlier times, people were fond of pithy verities 
on the subject, and a few years ago I saw these on the wall of a 
materially-poor school in rural India:  "Work is worship".  "If 
you kill time, time will kill you".  "Delay breeds corruption."  
"A path of duty is a way to glory".  "Duty is beauty".  "Idleness 
is the nursery of sinful thoughts".  "Hard work is key to 
success".  "Learn to obey if you wish to command".  Nowadays 
these sentiments would seem corny in an advanced country.  But 
believing in them fits with acquiring self-discipline.  
     Not all habit-formation is beneficial.  Some habits 
obviously are counter-productive.  But even habits of thought 
that are beneficial on the whole can hinder you by making your 
thinking more rigid.  James talks vividly about increasing 
rigidity as people grow older and acquire more habits -- what 
Scheffler (1986, p. 124) calls "loss of personal plasticity". 
James writes:  "Already at the age of twenty-five you see the 
professional mannerism settling down on the young minister, on 
the young counselor-at-law.  You see..the tricks of thought, the 
prejudices...On the whole, it is best he should not escape.  It 
is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, 
the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again." 
(p. 121). 
     Here we return to one of the main themes of this book, the 
value of opposites.  Habits are crucial.  But also crucial is 
sufficient freedom from habit to enable you to create new 
patterns of behavior which are better than the old ones. 
     Traditions are social habits.  Like habits, there is a 
tension between the virtue of maintaining traditions and the vice 
of maintaining them so firmly that they inhibit change.  There 
can be no general answer about how important it is for an 
individual to observe a tradition and for a society to maintain 
it.  Each potential change should be examined individually.  
Perhaps it is useful to presume that the rule should not be 
changed unless there is substantial reason to change it.  We can 
learn from Robert Frost:  Never pull down a fence unless you know 
why it was put up.  This follows from the truth discovered by 
David Hume, and presented most forcefully in present times by 
Friedrich Hayek, that many patterns have great value even though 
we do not, and cannot, understand why they are what they are. 
This includes codes of conduct, traditions, and rituals.  
     Sometimes the logic behind the pattern of behavior is fairly 
obvious.  For example, two games which I have played demand that 
the players observe rules of conduct which are not, and cannot 
be, fully specified in the written rules of the game, yet are 
indispensable.  In judo, a player throwing the opponent over his 
shoulder must stop exerting his force at the very last moment - 
but at a time where it may keep her/him from an all-out effort - 
and pull up on the opponent's arm to keep the opponent's shoulder 
from hitting the mat when he falls; otherwise, the opponent may 
injure his/her shoulder.  If you don't protect your opponents in 
friendly matches, you either won't have any partners to play 
with, or someone will purposely do you in by not protecting you, 
or both.  And in the game of squash, which is played within an 
enclosed court and both players use the same area, you must get 
out of your opponent's way sufficiently quickly and cleanly so 
that your opponent can freely go after the ball.  Of course you 
can gain an advantage by not "clearly" cleanly.  But if you 
repeatedly use that device, you soon won't have anyone to play 
with, or you will find yourself being hit by the wall 
uncomfortably hard and often.  
     Many young American men refuse to believe that these games 
must be played in this fashion.  They insist that they would play 
them to win at all costs, just staying within the written rules, 
the way one can (almost) play tennis or basketball.  But if they 
were to play judo or squash, they would soon learn that in those 
sports that attitude simply won't do. 

THE NECESSARY VALUES AND NORMS AND ETHICS FOR SOCIAL FUNCTIONING

     Some patterns of voluntary behavior can be understood at the 
group level though they do not "make sense" for the individual.  
One of the main propositions of David Hume, Adam Smith, and the 
founders of the U. S.--the framers of the Constitution--was that 
a viable democratic society requires people to behave according 
to conventions of mutual respect and cooperation far beyond what 
is required by law.  For example, a for a society to function 
well, people must accord legitimacy to the accepted norms of 
social and business behavior. 
     Hume and Smith put forth the idea that many of these 
conventions are the result of the spontaneous growth of 
traditions in ways that cannot be understood, and for reasons 
that cannot be understood by rational thinking.  These 
conventions are necessary for cooperative action in the economic 
as well as other social spheres.  If there is a breakdown in the 
social fabric in such fashion that people refuse to follow these 
conventions and patterns of behavior willingly, then the society 
will collapse.  This is very far from the vision of a dog-eat-dog 
competitive society which idea many who are against a market 
system impute to such a market system. 
     Many of these conventions seem to be mere rituals or 
courtesies, without obvious meaning. That is, many of these 
activities connected to the underlying values values cannot be 
explained logically.  They may be explicable in terms of some 
group survival or group good but this is not the same thing as 
being explicable in terms of the individual's own welfare.  For 
example, why should a person step aside on the sidewalk for a 
handicapped older person?   Why should a business render 
assistance to its competitor when the competitor suffers a fire 
(as very often happens, to the surprise of critics of business)?   
Why should there be conventions among lawyers or undertakers 
about what practices for seeking clients are acceptable and which 
are not?   Why should a member of a college class refrain from 
behavior which is discourteous to the other students or the 
instructor, or disruptive to the class? It is certainly 
impossible to demonstrate to any student that it would be good 
for that student to, for example, refrain from putting feet up on 
the seat in front of the student.  But the attitude expressed by 
this behavior, and the general atmosphere engendered by it 
indicating lack of respect for the conventions, is deleterious to 
the educational process.  If one has to make an argument for the 
observance of each and every one of these conventions, the system 
will not work.  Rather, there must be a propensity and a 
willingness by the participants to do such things simply because 
they are done, unsatisfactory as that may seem to the "rational" 
mind.  
     These writers whose ideas underlie our democracy and our 
market economy emphasize again and again that erosion of these 
values is possible at any time. And such erosion necessarily 
renders impossible the satisfactory functioning of this sort of 
society. 
     John Maynard Keynes and his Bloomsbury set before World War 
II prided themselves on being free of all social conventions.  
This is how Keynes assessed the matter later: 
      
     We repudiated all versions of original sin...We were not      
aware that civilization was a thin and precarious      
crust...only maintained by rules and conventions skillfully      
put across and guilefully preserved.  We had no respect for      
traditional wisdom and the restraints of custom.  We lacked      
reverence...And as the years wore on towards 1914, the      
thinness and superficiality as well as the falsity of our      
view of man's heart became more obvious.   (quoted by Michael      
Straight, After Long Silence, New York: Norton, 1983, pp.      
93-94).

     Some social habits - rituals - are particularly hard to 
understand.  Take a wedding ceremony, for example.  It is not 
obvious why it has the pattern it does - the choice of content 
for the beginning, middle, and end, and the particular acts 
performed and words spoken in any particular religious tradition.  
Some couples believe that they can create a better wedding 
ceremony for themselves starting from scratch.  Perhaps some can.  
But in most cases the ceremony that has evolved from long 
experience is more satisfying esthetically and emotionally than a 
new creation. 
     Frost's injunction may be too strong, however.  Though we 
can never understand how some patterns evolved, wisdom leads us 
to sometimes change some of them.  
     Einstein hated the discipline that German youths were then 
subjected to, and he believed in the creative powers of freedom.  
This is too simple, I think.  Some people are more likely to 
strike off on independent paths if they are given the freedom to 
do so.   But others -- perhaps the larger group -- get little 
benefit from the lack of disciplined study and behavior.  The 
best answer probably is that there is no best general answer.  
     James urges us "to make our nervous system our ally instead 
of our enemy.  It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and 
live at ease upon the interest of the fund.   For this we must 
make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful 
actions as we can" (p. 122).  This quote is also interesting 
because its language provides another example of the commonality 
of some important concepts between psychology and business. 
     The assumption which underlies this chapter is that we can 
alter important elements of our thought processes if we decide to 
do so.  This relates to a more general philosophy of individual 
responsibility.  Everyone believes that people have some capacity 
to alter their thinking and lives.  And everyone also believes 
that there are some constraints upon us, so that we cannot 
reinvent ourselves entirely at will.  The relevant question is 
the extent to which our lives are under our own control.  This is 
one of the great debates throughout history, closely connected to 
the ongoing debate about how much assistance society should give 
to persons in need, or instead should give people broad lattitude 
to help themselves. 
          This is an example of the conflict in views: 
     A week or so after the woman showed up at the Sarah House 
for      the homeless last year, she was told she no longer could      
sleep at the shelter.  The reason...was that the woman      
refused to be deloused and her lice posed a danger to other      
residents...

     "But even if she had lice," [homeless advocate Mitch] Snyder      
said, "we wouldn't have put the woman out.  You have to      
start accepting people with dignity.  You can't do it with      
force and coercion."

     But [president of the D. C. Coalition for the Homeless      
Elisabeth] Huguenin explained:  "I was not willing to      
endanger 15 women for one woman.  When you love somebody,      
you can't just let them do anything they want with their      
lives or to others." (Washington Post, Sep 29, 1985, p. C1)
Should the woman be held responsible for getting rid of her lice 
before being eligible for social services? 
     A major part of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous is to 
induce people to take responsibility for their actions.  For 
example, "it treats all attempts to blame third parties as 
exercises in denial" (A. Lawrence Chickering, "Denial Hardens the 
Drug Crisis" Wall Street Journal, July 25, 1988, p. 16).  
     Our power to control our own minds, and to build habits of 
joyful and serene thought and feeling, are at the heart of 
cognitive-behavioral therapy, which is discussed in Chapter 5-3.  
     Sometimes we set up systems of self-compulsion that are 
enforced by others, in order to ensure that we do the things 
later that we decide now we want to do later.  These systems of 
binding commitments are discussed in Chapter 6-7 on self-
management.  The subject is placed in Part 6 because the 
intellectual machinery used is similar to the machinery used to 
think systematically about loyalties to others.  

                            REFERENCE 

     William James, The Principles of Psychology,New York:  
Dover, 1890/1950, Vol 1, p. 113.  In my discussion of James on 
habit, I have benefited from reading Israel Scheffler, Four 
Pragmatists -- A Critical Introduction to Peirce, James, Mead and 
Dewey, New York:  Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974, Chapter VI).  

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