蜜芽传媒

鈥淟ead us not into temptation鈥� goes the famous prayer that Jesus taught his disciples. And yes: I imagine what he had in mind was something a little more existentially demanding than the 鈥渘o bread, no booze鈥� January that I have committed to. But according to psychologists, whether it be Adam鈥檚 weakness for apples or my weakness for the grape, the same basic psychological principles apply.

Back in the 1960s, Professor Walter Mischel developed what came to be known as the Marshmallow test. Four-year old children were offered the choice between one marshmallow now or two marshmallows if they had the self-control to wait for 20 minutes. Following these children as they grew into adulthood, Mischel found a strong correlation between those who were successful at exercising self-control and those who were successful in many areas of life: from academic performance to relationships to a general sense of well-being. The longer the four-year old children waited, for instance, the better their college admission scores. Not only are those with a high delay ability better at putting money aside for pensions, but as Mischel argues, the ability to overcome the need for instant gratification is a 鈥渕aster aptitude, underlying emotional intelligence [and] essential for constructing a fulfilling life.鈥�

Of course, self-denial for the sake of some future reward is at the heart of many traditional understandings of religion, including Christianity. If I am a good boy now, and restrain my appetites, then I will go to heaven later. In other words, Christianity is the ultimate Marshmallow test. According to Max Weber, this is why early Protestants made for particularly successful capitalists: they were better at saving than they were at spending. Conversely, for Karl Marx, the Christian insistence on the virtue of delayed gratification turned out to be a pretty good way of persuading people to accept their lot in life and thus to tolerate the status quo. As the socialist songwriter Jo Hill sarcastically put it: 鈥淵ou will eat, bye and bye. In that glorious land above the sky. Work and pray, and live on hay. You鈥檒l get pie in the sky when you die.鈥�

Of course I don鈥檛 agree with that assessment, not least because it seems to me that the real problem with contemporary society is almost the opposite of the one Marx envisaged. For one look at the crowds out shopping in the January sales suggests that the greater pressure is the instant gratification of 鈥榮pend now, pay later鈥�. Unlike Weber鈥檚 Christian capitalists, or Marx鈥檚 acquiescent Christian proletariat, today鈥檚 market economy is built on debt - and on the belief that by borrowing off the future I can actually have those two marshmallows right away. In the world of the January sales, self-denial (Christian or otherwise) is not a way of being complicit with the status quo: it鈥檚 actually a way of challenging it.

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