On Bill Nighy and Medieval Indulgences

The starting point for this essay belongs to William Francis Nighy, whose podcast "Ill-advised" has a disarming tendency to make apparently throwaway observations linger rather longer than one expects. This is what became of one of those.

My friend Bill recently observed that people who read primarily fiction have a habit of regarding non-fiction readers with bewilderment. Life, they suspect, already contains enough facts. The opposing camp returns the favour, wondering why anyone with finite time would voluntarily consume invented people when there are perfectly real ones who have built bridges or discovered penicillin. It is one of those disagreements that is never quite resolved because the two camps expect fundamentally different things from books. One looks for understanding, the other for experience and both, incidentally, suspect the other of wasting perfectly good reading time.

There is, however, one corner of the bookshop that seems to operate according to an entirely different set of rules. No one buys a novel expecting it to improve them. Nor does anyone leave a bookshop convinced that simply purchasing a history of the Peloponnesian War has conferred an instinctive grasp of hoplite warfare. Books, by and large, require the discourtesy of being read before they begin to justify themselves. Self-help books are the conspicuous exception. They occupy the peculiar territory in which the purchase itself begins to resemble progress. (The reading, if it happens at all, is almost an optional extra.) The book is in the bag, the intention has been publicly declared and an oddly reassuring sensation settles in that the business of becoming more disciplined, thinner, calmer, richer, more productive or less addicted to one's phone is, if not complete, then at least well underway.

It is a remarkable commercial trick. It is also, I suspect, a considerably older one than publishers would care to admit. We tend to imagine the self-help aisle as an invention of Californian optimism, somewhere between the smoothie blender and the standing desk, but its underlying mechanics would have been immediately recognisable to a medieval theologian. The resemblance is not, as critics of either religion or self-improvement occasionally suggest, that both sell false hope. That comparison is too easy, and rather unfair to both and the resemblance lies elsewhere. Long before behavioural psychologists invented sufficiently respectable terminology for it, it had already become clear that human beings derive enormous comfort from feeling that a difficult internal transformation has ceased to be merely an intention and has become a process already underway.

The medieval indulgence suffers from the peculiar fate of historical concepts that everyone thinks they understand because everyone has heard the joke. In popular memory it has become little more than a receipt for forgiveness, the sort of ecclesiastical accounting exercise against which Martin Luther supposedly nailed ninety-five objections and thereby rearranged European history. The reality was, naturally, rather more complicated. An indulgence did not forgive sins, which still required repentance, confession and absolution, but concerned the temporal consequences of sins that had already been forgiven, a distinction that occupied generations of theologians with enviable enthusiasm. It did not spare anyone the difficult work of salvation, nor did it promise that the work had been completed. What it offered was the reassurance that one had already entered into that work; that salvation was no longer simply something to hope for, but something in which one had already begun to participate. One left not necessarily holier, but with the comforting conviction that the difficult business of becoming holy was, however imperfectly, already underway.

The self-help book performs much the same psychological function. It converts self-improvement from an uncomfortable future obligation into something one can carry home in a paper bag. The transaction itself becomes strangely therapeutic. One has not yet become the sort of person who rises before dawn, keeps a journal, meditates daily, answers emails immediately or possesses what every subtitle now insists on calling "clarity", but one has acquired persuasive evidence that such a person is, at the very least, under construction.

Economists, psychologists and assorted behavioural scientists have all attempted to describe this phenomenon, each in their own determinedly joyless vocabulary. One speaks of moral licensing, another of symbolic self-completion, another of intention-behaviour gaps. In other words, human beings have always displayed a touching confidence in the proposition that buying the equipment for a difficult task constitutes an encouraging first instalment towards completing it. Purchasing expensive running shoes feels suspiciously like beginning to run. Ordering a handsome notebook from Smythson seems, for an afternoon at least, to solve the problem of organisation. The acquisition itself produces a fleeting but unmistakable sensation that the difficult part has somehow been completed, leaving only the comparatively trivial matter of actually doing the thing.

This perhaps explains why the genre has become so peculiarly resistant to failure. A history book containing bad history is simply discarded. A detective novel that fails to entertain is unlikely to receive a sequel. Self-help, by contrast, possesses the enviable commercial advantage that its disappointments can almost always be attributed to insufficient commitment on the part of its reader (i.e. the responsibility migrates elsewhere. Clever!). If the book failed to transform you, you presumably failed to implement chapter seven with sufficient conviction.

It is here that Samuel Smiles becomes unexpectedly interesting. Modern readers tend to assume that Self-Help, first published in 1859 and responsible for giving the entire genre its name, is simply the Victorian ancestor of today's productivity manuals. It is almost the opposite. Smiles was profoundly suspicious of shortcuts. His heroes are engineers, mechanics, inventors and industrialists whose achievements emerge so gradually that they threaten, from time to time, to become almost offensively uneventful. Improvement, for Smiles, is neither revelation nor optimisation. It is accumulation. There are no hacks, no systems and certainly no secrets. One simply performs the same disagreeable tasks repeatedly until competence ceases to feel remarkable. Benjamin Franklin's painstaking charts recording his failures against thirteen virtues belonged to much the same tradition. So did Marcus Aurelius' private notebooks, written not for publication but because even a Roman emperor required constant reminders to govern himself before attempting to govern anyone else. None imagined that reading about virtue constituted an encouraging first instalment of possessing it. On the contrary, they assumed that the distance between recognising the good and doing the good was likely to occupy most of a lifetime.

The irony, then, is that the modern self-help industry bears remarkably little resemblance to the book from which it inherited its name. Samuel Smiles offered perseverance, which is commercially much less attractive because it cannot be consumed in an airport lounge and is almost impossible to package with a fluorescent dust jacket. Somewhere between the medieval indulgence and the modern hardback we seem to have developed an enduring faith that difficult internal work can be brought fractionally closer simply by acquiring the correct object. Samuel Smiles would have been appalled.