The first essay, “Control Issues” by Daniel Akst rightly evaluates the lack of self-control that is rampant in our culture. He perceptively writes,
Most of us who live with children and computers know about software for controlling how the former use the latter. But what about the grownups who can’t control themselves?
For adult Internet users ready to admit that they're in the grip of a higher power, there is Covenant Eyes, a Web site that will keep track of all the other Web sites you visit –- and e-mail this potentially incriminating list to an “accountability partner” of your choosing.
The existence of Covenant Eyes is a measure of just how hard it can be to control ourselves nowadays in a landscape of boundless temptation. Thanks to rising affluence, loosening social constraints and the inexorable march of technology, most of us have more opportunities to overindulge than ever before. Life in modern Western cultures is like living at a giant all-you-can-eat buffet offering more calories, credit, sex, intoxicants and just about anything else one could take to excess than our forebears might ever have imagined.
While temptations have multiplied like fast-food outlets in the suburbs, the superstructure of external restraint that once helped check our impulses has been seriously eroded, in part by the same inexorably subversive force — capitalism — that has given us the wherewithal to indulge.…
Stigma, the ugly form of social shame that once helped keep so many of us in line, has withered like a cold soufflé.…Financial constraints, meanwhile, once a ready substitute for willpower, have been swept away by surging affluence and the remarkable openhandedness of lenders.…
Nor is the family, that other traditional brake on behavior, anything like the force it once was, here or elsewhere.
…the eyes of neighbors are no longer upon us.…
‘Self-regulation failure is the major social pathology of the present time,’ say psychologists Roy F. Baumeister, Todd F. Heatherton and Dianne M. Tice, who explore the subject in their book Losing Control: How and Why People Fail at Self-Regulation.…
As the structures of constraint come tumbling down, the ability to control ourselves only grows in importance.
Yet for all his helpful insights about the culture, his analysis of where and how we live stops far short of providing assistance. His concluding sentence demonstrates his failure to understand the significance of the issue and what can be done: “Self-regulation is a challenge, but one not nearly so daunting as the poverty and tyranny that are its most effective substitutes.”
The other essay, “What's the point of the success treadmill?” appeared on Monday. It lamented the lives of college students who are already weary of a “hurry, hurry” pace of life at 18 and 20 years of age garnered from the expectations of success (foisted on them by their own desires and an ever-present set of cultural mores). “They drink coffee and run ragged for 18 hours trying to beef up the resumes we tell them their very survival is dependent upon.”
What do people who can’t control their appetites and can’t control their desires (or have no direction in life) need? They need the grace of God.
People struggle with self-control because of heredity — the heredity of the sinful flesh inherited from Adam. They struggle because they are sinners. And until they acknowledge that their sin has infiltrated every fiber of their being, corrupting all that they do and are, they will never be able to be free (Rom. 6:20).
People struggle with a pace of life and expectations (from themselves and others) because they have not learned that there is only one thing worth living for — the glory of God (Rom. 11:36).
Only when sin is acknowledged can the grace of God be applied. Only when the direction of life is towards God is His gracious strengthening made available.
We struggle because we have thought too much about ourselves and too little about the grace of God.
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