‘Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. And never sleep with a woman whose -troubles are worse than your own.’ These were Nelson Algren’s Three Rules of Life.
You may have noticed a few more ‘rules of life’ appearing recently. After years of our being advised to drink some forgettable number of units of alcohol every week, a new rule seems to have emerged: ‘Don’t worry much about how much you drink but do abstain from alcohol completely for at least two days in seven.’ The hottest diet of the moment, sometimes called the 5:2 Diet, lets you eat freely except for two days of fasting each week. Other diets focus on total abstinence from carbohydrates, especially sugar.
Something about this black-and-white, binary approach makes sense. For any diet or health regimen to work, it must be based on rules we find psychologically easy to follow. And as the world’s religions have known for thousands of years, abstinence is far easier than the continuous exercise of self-restraint. Or, as the neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran suggests, humans may not have free will but they do have free won’t.
Let’s consider the old rule of restricting yourself to a maximum number of units of alcohol a week. It demands constant vigilance. It often requires you to stop drinking while drunk. And it is fiendishly easy to cheat: you simply convince yourself that a 25cl glass of 14.7 per cent Chilean Merlot is one unit when it is really three. Better men than us have deceived themselves this way: Immanuel Kant rationed himself to one pipe of tobacco after breakfast; he stuck to his rule, but friends noticed that by the end of his life, all his pipes were enormous.
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