Willpower

a premium on diligence (or a great need for sobriety). Their villages didn’t offer many obvious temptations beyond alcohol, sex, or plain old sloth. Virtue was generally enforced by a desire to avoid public disgrace rather than by any zeal to achieve human perfection. In the medieval Catholic Church, salvation depended more on being part of the group and keeping up with the standard rituals than on heroic acts of willpower.
    But as farmers moved into industrial cities during the nineteenth century, they were no longer constrained by village churches and social pressures and universal beliefs. The Protestant Reformation had made religion more individualistic, and the Enlightenment had weakened faith in any kind of dogma. Victorians saw themselves as living in a time of transition as the moral certainties and rigid institutions of medieval Europe died away. A popular topic of debate was whether morality could survive without religion. Many Victorians came to doubt religious principles on theoretical grounds, but they kept pretending to be faithful believers because they considered it their public duty to preserve morality. Today it’s easy to mock their hypocrisy and prudery, like the little skirts they put on table legs—no bare ankles! Mustn’t excite anyone! If you read their earnest sermons on God and duty, or their battier theories on sex, you can understand why people of that era turned for relief to Oscar Wilde’s philosophy: “I can resist everything except temptation.” But considering all the new temptations available, it was hardly neurotic to be searching for new sources of strength. As Victorians fretted over moral decay and the social pathologies concentrated in cities, they looked for something more tangible than divine grace, some internal strength that could protect even an atheist.
    They began using the term willpower because of the folk notion that some kind of force was involved—some inner equivalent to the steam powering the Industrial Revolution. People sought to increase their store of it by following the exhortations of the Englishman Samuel Smiles in Self-Help, one of the most popular books of the nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic. “Genius is patience,” he reminded readers, explaining the success of everyone from Isaac Newton to Stonewall Jackson as the result of “self-denial” and “untiring perseverance.” Another Victorian-era guru, the American minister Frank Channing Haddock, published an international bestseller titled simply The Power of Will. He tried to sound scientific by calling it “an energy which is susceptible of increase in quantity and of development in quality,” but he had no idea—much less any evidence—of what it might be. A similar notion occurred to someone with better credentials, Sigmund Freud, who theorized that the self depended on mental activities involving the transfer of energy.
    But Freud’s energy model of the self was generally ignored by subsequent researchers. It wasn’t until recently, in Baumeister’s laboratory, that scientists began systematically looking for this source of energy. Until then, for most of the past century, psychologists and educators and the rest of the chattering classes kept finding one reason or another to believe it didn’t exist.

The Decline of the Will
    Whether you survey the annals of academe or the self-help books at the airport, it’s clear that the nineteenth-century concept of “character building” has been out of fashion for quite a while. The fascination with willpower ebbed in the twentieth century partly in reaction to the Victorians’ excesses, and partly due to economic changes and the world wars. The prolonged bloodshed of World War I seemed a consequence of too many stubborn gentlemen following their “duty” to senseless deaths. Intellectuals preached a more relaxed view of life in America and much of Western Europe—but not, unfortunately, in Germany, where they developed a “psychology of will” to guide their country during its bleak recovery from the war. That theme would be embraced by the Nazis, whose rally in 1934 was featured in Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous propaganda film, The Triumph of the Will. The Nazi concept of mass obedience to a sociopath was hardly the Victorian concept of personal moral strength, but the distinction was lost. If the Nazis represented the triumph of the will . . . well, when it comes to bad PR, there’s nothing quite like a