Here's why sodium lauryl sulfate is in most of your cleaning products (including toothpaste)

Watercolour by John Orlando Parry, "A London Street Scene" 1835. Public Domain via Wikimedia.

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do and How to Change by Charles Duhigg

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is an interesting work in that it helps to distil a good deal of scientific research into a practical and interesting guidebook. Habits are effortless ways to live, some good, some bad. But what is clear from the research is that habits consist of three elements:

1. The Cue.
2. The Routine.
3. The Reward.

Extrapolating from this process, the way to change one's habits is as follows:

1. Identify the routine.
2. Experiment with rewards.
3. Isolate the cue.
4. Have a plan.

Duhigg not only looks at individuals, but discusses organisational habits. I would call these institutions (rules, routines, procedures), but Duhigg looks into various organisations such as Alcoholics Anonymous, and then broadens this to includes how Target uses statistical data to "target" advertising to customers. The discussion on Pepsodent toothpaste ans how the tingly feeling now associated with brushing one's teeth was a way to create a habit, to the point where if we do not experience the tingle from the toothpaste, we would consider our teeth not clean. What is equally interesting is the notion of suds forming when using cleaning products (including toothpaste). Some time back, we looked for soap alternatives that did not contain the foaming agent sodium lauryl ether sulfate (SLS). (I recall too how we learnt that not all vinegar products are created equal - if you use vinegar to clean your house in an environmentally-friendly manner, ensure you are using brewed vinegar, not the cheaper varieties which I understand are made from a petrochemical by-product.) Put simply, SLS is in almost every product we use because we have become habituated to the nation that cleaning products are not workings unless they foam up (yes, including your toothpaste). Duhigg doesn't mention this chemical but it now makes sense why so many products include this unnecessary chemical - it is to create habits that sell products. While this is quite depressing, Duhigg also mentions the social habits that kicked in during the Montgomery bus boycott in the 1960s, and Dr Martin Luther King Jr.'s use of such social habits to create a social movement. The book concludes with a discussion of free will, and in an appendix, Duhigg provides his procedure for changing his own habits. I find this work useful in combination with many others I have read, such as Change Anything, and almost any of the motivational work by Steven Pressfield. Putting the science behind the process makes for a more nuanced understanding of why we do the things we do. While at times I felt the work was overtly middle-class and mono-cultural, reading at times like a work written before the social decline in the US recognised in Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, this shouldn't take away from the usefulness of recognising the processes of habits, and the ways to analyse these habits with an aim to changing oneself. As James Allen (1926) may have put it, it is only through self-examination and self-analysis that we can achieve self-purification. Duhigg provides a useful way to actualise such examination and analysis, and a starting point for action.

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Depoliticising the English Language, One App at a Time

 Discurso Funebre Pericles (Pericles' Funeral Oration) by Philipp Foltz (1877) Public Domain via Wikimedia

Politics and the English Language by George Orwell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

To say that this book is equally applicable today is naive. Orwell's work is applicable to all of history, whether in the sense that politicians rarely say what they mean, or hide atrocities through vague language, or whether all of history has been re-written in such a way as to hide the truth. The word "democracy" as we use it today, and especially when we mean the phrase "liberal democracy", is the opposite of what Orwell writes. For example, why use a phrase when a single word will do? In the case of liberal democracy, why use a single word when we really mean a phrase? Any undergraduate student of politics should know that "liberal democracy" is an "essentially contested concept". But why is this so? Orwell explains:

In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.

What does this mean? It means that attempting to "depoliticise" (Orwell criticises the use of un- and de- and -ise words) language is a political act. Indeed, to be conservative is to prevent another's exercise of power by exercising a legacy power while claiming that no such power exists. It is interesting that this work includes Orwell's review of Hitler's Mein Kampf, where he claims that in Hitler's Brownshirt days, he was regarded by both the left and the right as a conservative. And whenever I think of Hitler I cannot help but think of the movie Tea with Mussolini, for the same reason. To conclude, this work is relevant to all time, just as the political dramas unfolding today have been unfolding forever, and will continue to do so. But what can we do? If my other reading is anything to go by, we can take a "bird's-eye view" like the Stoics, and see history for what it is. Or, one might adopt an Epicurean approach and withdraw from politics altogether. Nonetheless, if one combines the two approaches, one can see it for what it is, and withdraw, knowing it will make no difference either way, and then focus on using plain and simple English to convey the truth. The major difference today, however, is that there is an app that will help one do just that. Aren't we lucky.

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On First Principles and Happiness

Dice players. Roman fresco from the Osteria della Via di Mercurio (VI 10,1.19, room b) in Pompeii.
Public Domain via Wikimedia

The Art of Happiness by Epicurus

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I found this book quite perplexing. I expected a hedonistic discussion of the life of reading, conversation, and communal living. Instead, I was learning about atomic theory and the atomic "swerve" (a way to explain randomness in the universe and the subsequent collision of atoms), the logic of the sun, moon,stars, and weather, and the need to be ever-vigilant to ignore the popular gods and to rely on empirical evidence rather than determinism (fate) and mythology to comprehend the otherwise unknown. The letters to Herodotus and Pythocles were all about such concepts, with only the letter to Menoeceus even touching upon the concept of happiness. I was surprised by the depth of the logos of Epicurean thought, and the loftiness of its ideals when compared with Stoic philosophy. Physics was originally known as natural philosophy, and Epicurus' understanding of the universe (based on the ideas of others and not just his own, of course), led to an anti-religious philosophy. Yet God is not absent in Epicurean thought. In the "Leading Doctrines" (pp. 174-5), Epicurus explains:

10. If the things that produce the debauchee's pleasures dissolved the mind's fears regarding the heavenly bodies, death, and pain and also told us how to limit our desires, we would never have any reason to find fault with such people, because they would be glutting themselves with every sort of pleasure and never suffer any physical or mental pain, which is the real evil.

11. We would have no need for natural science unless we were worried by apprehensiveness regarding the heavenly bodies, by anxiety about the meaning of death, and also by our failure to understand the limitations of pain and desire.

12. It is impossible to get rid of our anxieties about essentials if we do not understand the nature of the universe and are apprehensive about some of the theological accounts. Hence it is impossible to enjoy our pleasures unadulterated without natural science.

Moral acts involve deliberate "choices" of possible concrete pleasures and "aversions", i.e., the "deliberate avoidance of prospective pain. An act is moral if in the long run, all things considered, it produces in the agent a surplus of pleasure over pain; otherwise it is immoral". Our choices, desires, and aversions play a prominent role in Stoic philosophy, too. So too, are our impressions, and Epicurus outlines his theology thus:

The gods do indeed exist, since our knowledge of them is a matter of clear and distinct perception.

However, Epicurus warned against anthropomorphising the gods (or God), and that the gods did not control nature. Rather, their role was ethical, and the gods were abstract (p. 41):

psychological projections of what every good Epicurean wanted himself to be... Thus a relapse into "the old-time religion" of a god-controlled universe has very serious consequences: It cuts the worshipper off from the gods' images - that is, alienates him from the divine communion - and it plunges the naive believer once more into the ancient fears that Epicurus seeks to allay: namely, that the gods will avenge themselves on wicked men by causing natural disasters, political upheavals, and finally the torments of death and hell.

For the Roman poet, Lucretius:

True religion is rather the power to contemplate nature with a mind set at peace.

Nevertheless, Epicurus was keen to attack other philosophies and religions, so it is not surprising that he got some of his own back! When I was schooled in snippets of Greek philosophy, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were the godhead "gang of three" (see De Bono), and the Presocratics and others were treated as the great pretenders. Yet Epicurus, too, was asking those two great questions: How to live and what to believe (see Murray in my previous article), and his atomic theory addressed the second question in order to address the first. God exists, but, like the atomic swerve, free will exists otherwise there would be no need for ethics, for our behaviour would be pre-determined. According to Strodach's Introduction, the Epicurean materialism (which was morphed or "garbled" into "eat, drink, and be merry") was "so unpalatable" to the ancient and medieval worlds that Epicurus' atomic theory was lost until the 17th Century (uncovered by "the Jesuit priest Pierre Gassendi, a contemporary of Descartes", see p. 76). And so I find myself in agreement with Daniel Klein (see Foreword):

For a moment, the twenty-first-century mind might recoil at the idea of a self-anointed pundit proclaiming to his students - and to us - exactly how to live. But I, for one, read on for the simple reason that I suspect Epicurus may, in fact, have gotten it right.

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