Father of the self-help movement (and expert kite-flyer)

Ben Franklin was a writer, printer, scientist and diplomat. He was also, it turns out, the great-great-grandfather of the self-help movement.

In the second part of his autobiography, Franklin writes about his “bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection.” First, he catalogs 13 virtues — temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity and humility, and provides “precepts,” or rules, for each.

Under “industry,” for example, Franklin advises, “Lose no time. Be always employ’d in something useful. Cut off all unnecessary Actions.” (This virtually eliminates Netflix and social media for modern readers.)

For “tranquility, he notes, “Be not disturbed at Trifles, or Accidents common or unavoidable.” It makes me ponder the many nights I lie awake, staring at the ceiling, replaying conversations in my head and worrying about whether I responded appropriately or inappropriately, too strongly or not strongly enough.

Once Franklin identifies his virtues, he goes one step further, making “a little Book” to chronicle his attempts at improvement. Each page has seven vertical lines, one for each day of the week, and 13 horizontal lines, one for each virtue.

Then, each week, he tries to achieve perfection in just one virtue, while allowing the others to slide. Nevertheless, he records a “little black Spot” for failures in these other virtues that week, marking them dutifully at the points where the lines for the day of the week and each particular virtue intersect.

On the week devoted to temperance, Franklin goes an entire seven days without once eating “to Dulness” or drinking “to Elevation.” However, he really drops the ball on five of the other virtues, most especially “Order,” where he gives himself black marks six times that week, and “Silence,” where he records five lapses.

While Franklin is surprised to see just how many faults he has, he is also pleased to watch himself improve under his organized efforts. And if that doesn’t sound like the comment a self-help guru makes right before asking for a check or credit card, then I don’t know anything about marketing.

Regardless, Franklin later undercuts his own success, perhaps ironically because of his adherence to another virtue, Frugality, where one must “Waste nothing.” The author attempts to “avoid the Trouble of renewing” his book of virtues by “scraping out” the old marks and reusing the pages, which results in a book “full of Holes.”

This could, I suppose, be Franklin’s sly commentary about the probability of achieving moral perfection, a sort of preemptive snarkiness toward the entire cottage industry of self-help, which wouldn’t reach full flowering until centuries later, when people had enough free time to perseverate about such matters.

Further in his autobiography, Franklin graphs his daily routine, which involves rising at 5 a.m. and asking, “What Good shall I do this Day?” For the next two hours, he ponders this question while bathing, planning the day’s business and eating breakfast. He works from 8 to noon; spends two hours eating lunch, reading and looking over his “Accounts” (and who in today’s world wouldn’t love a 120-minute lunch break?); works another four hours; and then spends the time from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. putting “Things in their Places, Supper, Musick, or Diversion, or Conversation, Examination of the Day.”

His evening question is similar to his morning query: “What Good have I done today?”

It’s easy in 2019 to subvert these dawn and dusk reflections, to ask simply “What am I going to do today?” and “What did I do?” But that’s not what Franklin is after here. Doing good is much different from just being productive. After all, people can stay busy wreaking havoc on others and on their work and home environments without doing one objectively “good” thing.

Franklin’s schedule indicates bed by 10 p.m., where he probably dreams of moral perfection, or at least of erasers for pencils, something that wouldn’t be invented until almost 70 years after his death and which would make it much easier to reuse pages in his book of virtues.

Or at least make it easier to erase the instances where he failed to live up to his own code, another problem that plagues self-help experts even today.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com


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