Larvatus Prodeo

Happy New Year 2009 image courtesy of zltgfx at flickr – reproduced under a creative commons licence.

There are quite a few cultural constants of New Year’s Eve – fireworks (and the illegal ones in my neck of the woods certainly woke me up with a bang at midnight), revelling, and resolutions, the topic of today’s post. I haven’t traced the origins of the custom, but it makes intuitive sense that the social rhythm of time would prompt reflection and introspection and a desire to make a new beginning at the most significant turning point of our secular calendar. Perhaps time off work also contributes. No doubt there’s an aspect of secularisation in this cultural moment – examination of conscience and a resolution for amending the self have been part of a huge constellation of mindsets and practices in the West for a very long time, as Michel Foucault taught us.

From a sociological point of view, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts about freedom are interesting here. Merleau-Ponty pointed out that we adopt, and test against our surroundings, a set of dispositions and practices oriented towards the world – something similar to what Pierre Bourdieu subsequently dubbed a habitus. And that word’s not chosen lightly, because as over time we make certain choices, we shift the field for making subsequent choices – aware or unaware, we pursue a certain direction. We’re part of that lifeworld in which we choose, and can’t really stand apart from it. And over time, the “sedimentation” of those choices can narrow our sense of the possible. Probably one of the reasons why another stock cultural truism of the New Year is that resolutions are doomed to fail is that we over-estimate the degree to which individual will alone can reshape our behaviours and attitudes. Not surprising in a deeply individualist society (and some of that sense of the choosing self also harks back to the dissemination and transformation of the confessional urge).

Continue reading ‘2009: New year’s resolutions (the sociological edition!)’