I have made another mistake! This week's chapter was supposed to be a double portion with last week's chapter - whoops! So instead I'll double up this coming week. My bad!
This week we read "The Stairs of Cirith Ungol." Gollum leads Frodo and Sam up those very stairs, the least guarded way into Mordor. Before they start climbing, though, Frodo has an encounter with the Witch King, whom he sees as he rides out to make war on Gondor. Frodo begins to worry he will be caught, and he remembers the attack on Weathertop.
Even as these thoughts pierced him with dread and held him
bound as with a spell, the Rider
halted suddenly, right before the
entrance of the bridge, and behind him all the host stood still.
There
was a pause, a dead silence. Maybe it was the Ring that called to the
Wraith-lord,
and for a moment he was troubled, sensing some other
power within his valley. This way
and that turned the dark head
helmed and crowned with fear, sweeping the shadows with its
unseen
eyes. Frodo waited, like a bird at the approach of a snake, unable to
move. And as he
waited, he felt, more urgent than ever before, the
command that he should put on the Ring.
But great as the pressure
was, he felt no inclination now to yield to it. He knew that
the Ring
would only betray him, and that he had not, even if he put it on, the
power to
face the Morgul-king – not yet. There was no longer any
answer to that command
in his own will, dismayed by terror though
it was, and he felt only the beating
upon him of a great power from
outside. It took his hand, and as Frodo watched
with his mind, not
willing it but in suspense (as if he looked on some old story far away),
it moved the hand inch by inch towards the chain upon his neck.
I've written before about how the Ring can be a metaphor for bad habits. Particularly those habits which eventually become maladaptive - and which we should leave behind.
To quote the first link above: I both love and hate Diet Coke. But I absolutely hate what Diet Coke does to me. And yet. And yet. I cannot get rid of my desire for it. I have no will in the matter. I will drink it.
I think we can all relate. There's a reason the phrase 'guilty pleasure' is so familiar, or why we call new shows or games 'addicting' when what we mean is "very engaging." Bad habits are part of life.
And I think we can also relate to the idea that somehow our own willpower is supplanted in the struggle. I don't know which is worse: To admit we chose to engage in the bad habit, or to admit that the pull of the bad habit overrode our ability to choose at all. Both rob us of our agency - which is a necessary part of living ethically. Someone forced to do the right thing, we understand, is not correctly considered a model citizen. Someone forced to do the wrong thing, too, is not entirely villainous. Free will is a large part of how we evaluate people - and ourselves.
The good news is we can build good habits - over time. Unfortunately, even the first paragraph of this undermines the importance of free-will: "What we mistake for willpower is often a hallmark of habit." People who do the right thing aren't constantly winning the battle to do the right thing - they stack the deck in their favor. Neurons that fire together wire together and all that. The more you do an action the easier it is to do again in the future.
We often consider life to be a series of events, choices, and consequences. Maybe it would be better to reimagine life not as a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story but as a sports match. Players practice far more hours than the games they play take. They practice not only to improve their skills but to automate them. This is why booing and cheering at a sports game, while obviously fun, doesn't really make an impact. They're very much within their own world, completing plays they have done many, many, many more times in private.
Let's take basketball. When a player has the option to pass or to shoot, they make that decision based on the hundreds of hours of experience they've accumulated. It is not event-choice-consequence. The choice isn't really actively made - they're following a script they trust and have mastered. It doesn't always work - and of course sometimes they go off script - but imagine playing basketball - a fast-moving game - and constantly thinking about what to do. That would be mentally exhausting, as well as greatly disadvantage you whenever you pause to think.
The scipt is like a habit. Similarly, we should strive to not just do good, but to develop do-good habits. If you can automate good deeds you can avoid decision fatigue (which would make turning a blind eye easier). Practice, practice, practice. Your free will may not be engaged whenever you encounter an event-choice-consequence, but that's because it has instead been engaged ahead of time.
Bringing good into the world is too important to be left up to our whims. We should practice doing the right thing as often as possible - so that when it really matters (and we all know it sometimes matters more than other times) we are more likely to do it not because we want to do the right thing but because doing the right thing is as natural as can be.
Or maybe we practice simply lessening our bad habits. I do drink less Diet Coke than I did when I first wrote that post 10 years ago. In another 10 years, who knows? Maybe I'll be down to just 5 cans a week🙃. Little victories, and all.
This had been a patreon-supported project, but that proved too annoying to maintain. If you would like to financially support this project, drop $1.11 (or any amount, I suppose) into my Venmo!
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