The Age of Reason was also the Age of Uncertainty, a time when people experienced a “crisis in narrative,” as Vaclav Havel called unsettled and unsettling eras. Old ideas washed away; new ones had yet to come ashore. Strong currents tugged in competing directions. Ben didn’t fight these currents or surrender to them. He surfed them. As any surfer knows, you don’t stand on the board; you plant yourself on it. Habits were the glue that enabled Ben to do this.
For Franklin, habit was a powerful force, right up there with electricity. Habit explained why good people did good deeds and why bad people did the opposite. “Men don’t become very good or very bad in an instant,” he said, “both vicious and virtuous habits being acquired by length of time and repeated acts.”
Ben was obsessed with the power of habits from his early years as a habitual reader in Boston. In Philadelphia, that interest accelerated, peaking in 1731 when Franklin, aged twenty-five, entered one of his periodic I-need-to-get-my-act-together phases.
I am familiar with these phases. Mine occur often, usually at the start of a new year, but they can crop up anytime. (I feel one coming on now, in fact.) These cloudbursts of self-improvement are like the weather: always unpredictable, often messy, never conclusive.
Paper is involved. Lots of it. I’ve tried apps and other digital doodads but keep coming back to paper. Beginning in January and often extending well into spring, a steady parade of planners and organizers lands on my doorstep. They come in various sizes, colors, and configurations, but each contains the implicit promise of redemption. If I can just find the perfect planner, I tell myself, the many moving parts of my life will click into place.
Whenever a new planner arrives, my hopes soar. This is the one, I tell myself. And it is—for a while. But after a few weeks (sometimes only days), I discover something wrong with my perfect planner. The margins are too wide or too narrow, the timeline too vertical or too horizontal, the to-do section too large or too skimpy, the paper too thick or too thin, the cover too stiff or too flexible, the pen loop (pen loops are important) too tight or too loose. I worry I spend more time arranging my life than living it. Surely Ben was more disciplined.
I am pleasantly surprised to learn he was not. Like me, he also wrestled with order throughout his life. Like me, he was prone to distraction and absentmindedness. Like me, he loved a good planner. Like me, he possessed a strong and persistent drive to improve. Unlike me, Ben converted that drive into an actual plan and—this is where we truly part ways—implemented that plan.
First, he subdued his daily schedule. For Franklin, as for all us self-employed, unstructured time was the enemy. As a young printer in Philadelphia, he methodically vanquished it. He assigned tasks for each hour of the day. He woke at 5 a.m., then washed, and said a prayer, addressing not God per se but Powerful Goodness before plotting his day’s business. He then studied for two hours, ate breakfast, and worked at his print shop from 8 a.m. until noon. He had lunch, studied for another hour or two and worked until 6 p.m. He set aside 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. for dinner, music, and “diversion.”
It sounds like a remarkably twenty-first-century day, only without time allotted for catching up on emails or binge watching. There’s another significant difference: Ben bracketed his day with two questions. In the morning, he’d ask, “What good shall I do this day?” and in the evening, “What good have I done today?” These are simple questions, yet few of us bother asking them. I know I don’t. Several of my planners prompt me to note my productivity or what I’m grateful for or my “wins.” They say nothing about doing good, about being useful. Clearly, I have yet to find the perfect planner.
Ben emphasized actions, not motives. Not what good thoughts or feelings did he have today but what good did he do? Results, not intentions, mattered to him. He had no desire to get in touch with his inner child, or his inner anything, to be honest. While ours is largely an inside-out approach to self-improvement, Franklin’s was outside-in, a philosophy later articulated by the twentieth-century psychologist B. F. Skinner: “The problem is to induce people not to be good but to behave well.”
The first person Ben needed to induce to behave well was… Ben. As he explains in his autobiography, he decided to embark on a “bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.” His goal was nothing less than to live “without committing any fault at any time.”
I sigh. I have just collided with Ambitious Ben. Ambitious Ben annoys me. We have nothing to say to one another, Ambitious Ben and I. A bold and arduous plan for moral perfection? Really, Ben? I have no such aim. Sure, I have been known to launch bold and arduous plans to lose fifteen pounds or to clean out that desk drawer, the one that has possibly become home to a family of small rodents. I once vowed to prep the coffee maker the night before. These are my bold and arduous plans. But moral perfection? Never.
As a budding possibilian, I regroup and read on. Ben called his plan “The Art of Virtue.” His choice of that term was no accident (little is accidental when it comes to Ben Franklin). He believed virtuous behavior could be learned just like any art or skill. “If a man would become a painter, navigator, or architect, it is not enough that he is advised to be one… he must also be taught the principles of the art, be shown all the methods of working, and how to acquire the habits of using properly all the instruments; and thus regularly and gradually, he arrives by practice at some perfection in the art.”
I can see that, but why the fixation on virtue? To my twenty-first-century ears, the word smacks of smug self-satisfaction. Virtuous people are better than me, or at least they think they are, and they trumpet their alleged superiority. Striving for moral perfection sounds noble, I suppose. It does not sound like much fun.
None of this was true during Franklin’s time. Virtues were seen as character traits that consistently yielded goodness. Character meant a lot to Ben. He used the word frequently in his autobiography. Character comes from the Greek charassein, meaning “to sharpen or engrave.” Originally, it referred to the molding and stamping of coins, but soon expanded to the molding of humans. We are not born with character. It is stamped on us. How? Through the grace of God, said the Puritans. Through self-discipline, said Ben.
Virtue was not a nicety or a signal (of anything) during Franklin’s day. It was the key to happiness. “Happiness is the aim of life, but virtue is the foundation of happiness,” said Thomas Jefferson. Franklin, as usual, expressed the same idea more succinctly: “Virtue and happiness are mother and daughter.”
The virtuous life was not a luxury accessible to only a few, he said. It should interest anyone “who wish’d to be happy even in this world.” Even a rascal would act virtuously if he knew a jackpot of happiness awaited him. Recent studies bear this idea out. People who regularly engage in altruistic activity report higher levels of happiness, life satisfaction, and meaningfulness. Yet virtue has fallen out of favor. The twentieth century saw a sharp decline in the use of words related to virtue and moral character, such as “perseverance, kindness, gratitude, courage and honesty,” one recent study found.
One of Franklin’s more quixotic ideas was to found a United Party of Virtue, open to virtuous people everywhere. It sounds risible today, but it was no joke. Virtue held the key not only to happiness, Franklin believed, but to progress as well. “There was never yet a truly great man that was not at the same time truly virtuous.” Virtue, and by extension happiness, were necessary for a truly free and democratic society. “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom,” Ben told a friend.
Any attempt at leading a more virtuous life immediately encounters a speed bump: Just what counts as a virtue? That question has been asked for millennia. Aristotle had his list, the Christians theirs. Working from these and other sources, Franklin drew up his own list of Thirteen Virtues:
One virtue missing from Ben’s list is charity. I don’t think it was an oversight. For Ben, benevolence was a given, the natural consequence of a virtuous life.
Why thirteen? Why not the four cardinal virtues of the ancient Greeks: prudence, justice, courage, and temperance? Ben did value simplicity after all. Yes, but he wanted to slice those larger virtues into smaller bite-sized ones, figuring they’d be easier to master. Another reason for thirteen was strictly mathematical. His plan called for devoting four weeks to each of the thirteen, a routine that would take one year to complete.
The order of the virtues mattered too. One led to the next. Temperance came first because, he figured, without “coolness and clearness of head” he could never tackle the other twelve virtues. Silence came next, since knowledge was obtained “rather by the use of the ears than of the tongue.” And so on. Ben added the final virtue, humility, after a Quaker friend suggested he could be “overbearing and rather insolent.”
One quality all of Ben’s Thirteen Virtues have in common is that I cannot in good conscience claim a single one. Does this make me a moral failure? Or, worse, a sinner? Ben wouldn’t think so. I am simply a craftsman who has not yet mastered his craft. More specifically, I have yet to harness the power of habit. We are fluid beings. Our habits and customs, even our beliefs, are malleable. That is good, Franklin thought, for what can be molded can be molded into something beautiful—and useful. What prevents us from acting virtuously is not an evil heart but simply bad habits. Thus, Lieutenant Governor Keith, who dispatched young Ben on a fool’s errand to London, was not a bad man. His tendency to overpromise didn’t stem from evil intent—quite the opposite; he wanted to please everyone. “It was a habit he had acquired,” Franklin concludes, not a character flaw.
The key is constancy. Too many people, Ben said, “wander perpetually from one thing to another.” A habit applied only once is no habit at all. What distinguishes a true virtue from a false one is not its purity but its consistency. Acting courageously once may be admirable, but it does not mean you possess the virtue of courage. The inconsistent person, Franklin said, is like the captain of a ship who steers toward one port and then another, never getting anywhere. Just as we learn to build by building or to be a musician by playing music, “we become just by doing just acts; temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts,” Aristotle said. At first, we may perform these virtuous acts because our parents insist or because we think it will boost our standing in the community, but through regular practice, they become internalized. It’s the fake-it-until-you-make-it school of self-improvement.
Ben’s plan for moral perfection worked this way. First, he needed to find the right notebook (notebooks, like pen loops and planners, are important). Allotting a page for each virtue, he then marked one column for each day of the week, then crossed those columns with thirteen red lines, one for each virtue. He pocketed the little book and went about his day. Every time he’d stray from a virtue—by drinking too much ale or telling a hurtful lie, for example—he’d put a small black mark in the corresponding square. He focused on one virtue per week.
Ben’s plan strikes me as overly methodical. But that was the point. Everyone knows what virtue is, Ben thought. We just don’t know how to achieve it. Self-control is the key. It’s the “master virtue,” the one that unlocks all the others. Sadly, self-control is the character strength that today people across all fifty states and in fifty-four nations say they possess the least.
Franklin’s plan was methodical but not cold-blooded. He never saw habit formation as self-denial. His aim was to internalize these habits, rendering them second nature. He wanted to make these exercises in self-discipline not only tolerable but pleasurable, fun even. One way was by deploying his notebook and pen to aim for a high score. His bold and arduous plan for moral perfection was also a game.
That doesn’t make Ben frivolous or unserious. We can take games seriously, as any Red Sox or Manchester United fan can attest. The difference is that in a game, as opposed to, say, a war, the stakes are not as high. We always get another roll of the dice, another move on the chess board, another shot at moral perfection. Should your notebook fill up with black marks, buy another one and start again. You can always start again.
Franklin didn’t think it would come to that. He thought his plan for moral perfection would be relatively easy. “As I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other.” But Franklin soon discovered he wasn’t nearly as virtuous as he thought. “I was surpriz’d to find myself so much fuller of faults than I imagined.” Virtue demanded constant vigilance, like weeding a garden. When focused on eliminating one fault, others cropped up—so many faults that his little book was soon riddled with holes due to all those black marks (a different kind of holy book, he punned). He switched to a more durable ivory paper and a gentler lead pencil, “which marks I could easily wipe out with a wet sponge.”
Ben struggled with two virtues in particular: order and, especially, humility. “I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue; but I had a good deal with regard to the appearance of it,” he said.
Moral perfection. Such an odd, almost laughable, term. We seek perfection in so many aspects of life—technology, SAT scores, bowling—yet not when it comes to something as important as morality. Try telling friends you’re aiming for moral perfection and see their response. Franklin did not achieve moral perfection, but that was not the point. He emerged from the experiment “a better and a happier man.” He compares himself to scribes who strive for perfect calligraphy by imitating the masters. They may not achieve the desired excellence but “their hand is mended by the endeavour.” Better to miss a faraway target than hit a nearby one.
Ben stuck to his plan diligently for the first few years, less diligently afterward, but he always carried his little book with him wherever he went. So do I. Back home in Maryland, I order it online from a website called The Art of Manliness. Such a wonderfully retrograde name! I feel my testosterone levels spike when I click on the “complete your order” button.
A few days later, a brown leather notebook with a nice pen loop arrives. The cover reads, “Ben Franklin’s Virtues. Daily Record & Journal.” Inside is a faithful replica of Franklin’s virtues book, complete with lined pages for tracking your habits, as well as space to meditate on the question, “What good should I do this day?” I like it and bump it up to the top of my planner lineup.
I decide to tackle just one virtue, the one I struggle with the most: silence. I am that rare introvert who talks too much. Silence makes me squirm. I shuddered when I heard a friend was embarking on a ten-day silent retreat. Ten days! I once went ten hours without talking. Then I woke up. But that was the old me. The new me is better than that. For the next week, I vow to take my Franklin journal with me wherever I go and record any lapses from the virtue of silence.
I would like to report that the experiment went swimmingly and I achieved a prolonged and profound silence of Dalai Lama proportions. Alas, I did not. So defaced was my journal with black marks, I had to abort the project after a few days. I. Could. Not. Stop. Talking. My daughter felt vindicated by the results. My wife was more blunt. “You are constitutionally incapable of shutting the fuck up,” she said.
She may be right, but I don’t think the exercise was a failure. I had discovered the extent of my verbosity—not only how much I talked but when. Without fail, the words began to fly whenever I was nervous. The greater my anxiety, the higher my word count. My talking overmuch, as Ben would put it, is a coping mechanism. An imperfect one, yes, but it serves a purpose. Talking reduces my anxiety. Vices can be useful too.
Like the ambitious scribes, I had progressed, even if I failed to achieve perfection. I was mended by the endeavor. I realized just how far I had to go before mastering the virtue of silence, and that matters. The next time I annoy the heck out of someone with my incessant and inane verbiage, I will know why. And knowing why you do something annoying is the first step toward undoing it.