Keywords of the Moral Life: Habit

The Most Boring Word of them All, The Most Necessary Yet for Our Freedom

So much of our world is drowning in tired, predicable conflicts, made possible by tired routine. All the more reason to distinguish the banality of routine from the surprise of habit.

The Routinization of The World and the Yearning of Advent

For the last three years, I’ve taken to reading slowly through W.H. Auden’s For the Time Being during Advent. It’s a truly profound work which really bites down into the feel of Christmas. Auden’s work traverses the Christmas story, from Advent to the shepherds to the birth and beyond, operating within the skulls of most of the main characters of the story.¹ In reading through the early parts this week, on the nature of Advent waiting, Auden writes this:

Time turns round itself in an obedient circle,

They occur again and again but only to pass

Again and again into their formal opposites

From sword to ploughsare, coffin to cradle, war to work,

So that, taking the bad with the good, the pattern composed

By the ten thousand odd things that can possibly happen

Is permanent in a general average way.

Dagger in the heart: the season of Advent is so unbearable for us, not because it is terrible, but because any terror—any real stakes or risk in the world—has become completely subverted. The swords, the coffins, the war—they are all part of the process, completely routinized, and their outcome now just part of how the sausage gets made. Their terror and destruction is now part of the “pattern composed”, so that they are “permanent in a general average way”.

Auden has more to devastate us with:

This is why we despair; that is why we would welcome

The nursery bogey or the winecellar ghost, why even

The violent howling of winter and war has become

Like a juke-box tune that we dare not stop. We are afraid

Of pain but more afraid of silence; for no nightmare

Of hostile objects could be as terrible as this Void.

This is the Abomination. This is the wrath of God.

Advent holds up to us the truth we experience every year as a sated, exhausted, fully-consuming world careens through a December punctuated by Christmas music: the activity is nothing but a way to stave off the boredom, the fear that unless things are constantly moving, we will be faced with the abyss not of terror but of a world which has wound down to recurring sameness over and over, a world in which there is no free God but only the memory routinized and organized.

Of course, we don’t Auden for us to see it: any controversy, any cycle of “violent howling of winter and war” follows the same pattern of every other conflict. Usually, it’s something of the following: someone tries to offer a nuanced statement of moral value, and the predictable sides shape up. Two days letter, everyone has vented their spleen, and the next fight takes its place. One conflict prepares us to fight the next one, with our partisanship more finely honed than before. Ideology is fit for this kind of world, in that in ideology is a managed and patterned kind of thought: there are arguments, categories, and answers already provided, and all that is needed is to learn how to deploy them.

The nuance offered was, in many cases, an offer to stop the pattern, and the quiet it offered was treated as if it was Abomination. For what could be worse than a world offered quiet, the opportunity to have to live with itself and not with the vigor of another social conflict?

It’s all so tired and so predictable. And truly, it’s so unthinking: because the roles and sides are already provided for us, all we have to do is slip into the roles, and take up the place provided for us in the script. This is the exhaustion of Advent: the world has become—even in its conflict—so utterly the same. One form of sin leads to its contradiction, which is like saying that the solution to austerity is gluttony.

History has come utterly to an end, not because the conflict is over, but because the conflict comes right on schedule, and our answers to whatever the skirmish is over are just increasingly refined versions of whatever we already had before.

Waiting for nothing in particular

When Routine Rules the World

Michael Sacasas, in his essay “Lonely Surfaces” explores the nature of all of the artificial intelligence art that seems to be flooding the Internet today. It’s a really nice piece, focusing on how AI art affects the way we pay attention to the world. But the question I had after reading it was whether or not AI was less a new development than the logical end of a world in which everything has become routinized.

One of the dominant features of the modern world, as we’ve discussed several times with Ivan Illich’s help, is that it excessively managed. There are cultural but also theological versions of this. Education becomes a way of providing credentials to help one enter a pre-determined job market; medical bureaucracy dictates the forms of treatment which insurance providers will pay for. It is churches which are simply vague therapy, but no promises of forgiveness; it is corporate research focused less on the humanizing and innovative, and more focused on refining fewer and fewer things that monetize you.

There are no jetpacks, only a new version of the same iPhone; the convivial society in which we are offered the opportunity of invention and play is just too exhausting to consider, and so we stay with a more and more refined version of the boredom we know.

In this way, AI is the kind of art that we deserve at the end of an exhausted age. For AI cannot produce anything new or novel: AI can only produce a more refined version of what already exists. AI cannot think, or extrapolate, or innovate: it can only offer a simualted, more quickly constructed, version of what already is. It can accelerate and purify the artistic and processing processes, but it cannot do the work of thinking new thoughts.

AI art is, in other words, the essence of routine: it is removing all of the cumbersome edges, farting out something which is a processed version of what has been programmed into it. And if what has been programmed into it is already slowing down, routinized—AI art gives us exactly what is due a tired world: more of the same, only faster.

Auden’s identification of not violence, but routine as being at the heart of modern exhaustion rings true. In higher education, most of the issues can be diagnosable in this way: the overtaking of habit by routine, and routine, in times, gives birth to unsinkable ideologies which crowd out argument. There is a kind of violence which comes from thought, from following a trail of thinking to its unvarnished end, but the kind Auden has in mind is the banal kind: it is just part of the plan, part of how the machine moves forward.

The 5-minute film here is both amazing, and a perfect example of how innovation becomes routine, made perfect in bot form.

Routine and Habit: Breaking the Advent Slumber

“Habit” can defined in lots of ways, and sometimes, like in James Clear’s bestseller, it’s really indistinguishable from routine. For Clear, habit is a kind of action you commit yourself to over and over again, creating the environment which nudges you into behaviors you find desirable and productive. How that’s not just “routine” is unclear to me: it doesn’t require thought, just planning.

Habit, on the other hand, means something like “a movement in the soul”. It’s something which is not only second-nature to us, but is desired as well. It is the thing which is done repeatedly, which though good for us, is not desired initially, but over time, becomes a shaping power, by the Holy Spirit, within our lives.² The moral life we seek is not one of pure spontaneity, but of being attentive, but you can only be attentive to that which you’ve learned to listen for and long for, to love.

And habit, in this way, overcomes the limits of routine. This morning, since my workout group is cancelled for the next month, I let my alarm wake me up at the same normal time, and did my workout in the garage. Routine would be doing something with the proper conditions, and letting my working out coincide with the time, place, and people that help facilitate that action. But habit is doing the action when the environment is not conducive.

To have “habit”, then, means a desire for a good thing, and the creativity to perform it under less than desirable conditions. In this, the desire persists and the form alters, bringing with it new elements of the habit that would have otherwise been obscured by routine. In that way, habit breaks out of the managed life of routine, and preserves both good things on rotation, and the freedom to improvise with how the good thing will take root in your life.

The gift of habit is the gift of routine’s death, and with it, the responsibility to include others within the scope of our habits: to get up in my garage means trying not to inconvenience my aging dog, who sleeps next to the garage, and my wife who doesn’t get up that early. It means not playing my music as loudly as the gym would. It means making do with my more limited equipment at home. It means being creative with what is at hand, and finding new ways for that desire, that habit, to root into my life.

And with that, habit becomes a way of embracing the penitence that Advent invites us toward.³ For in habit, we find that the world does not yield to us and that inconveniences to the best habits are great. We find that routine has made us unthinking, lazy, and uncreative. And we find that, in habit, the spiritual life—the best kind of habits—take the shape of a journey, and can survive the collapse of the cultures which bore them, and even the collapse of the world itself.

As always, thanks for reading along. If you’d like to support the writing here, please:

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1. “The Temptation of St. Joseph” will lay you open and leave you ruined. It’s truly fantastic and I look forward to being ruined by it every year.

2. Obviously this also describes addiction. I’m assuming “good” habit here, in the sense that our habits lead us toward what is good, and are good in and of themselves to do.

3. Get your Christmas shopping done. Or not. You’re the one who has face your grandmother empty-handed: mine are both dead, so I’m clear on that front.