The year of the will

We no longer trust politics, language, institutions. We look for saviours and leaders who have the power to act on the world

OUR CIVIL CALENDAR new year, not withstanding the sociability associated with it, marks a profoundly lonely moment. Other forms of “new year” are about the world changing: The seasons changing, the planets turning, or the year itself signifying something new. The new year supposedly tracked some rhythm,ofnature,ofthecosmiccycle,oreven fate. The rhythm may not always be consoling, but it brought the expectation of change. The civil new year marks a change of date. Most people rightly treat it as a matter of indifference. But there are rituals associated with it. Usually these are endowed significance not by the promise that the world will change but by an exhortation that we should, as individuals, change.

The “new year resolution” is a profoundly subjective act. The year does not promise you change;youpromisechangetotheyear.itisan exhortation to change oneself, find new willpower, and start a new personal regimen or hobby. You might say, it is the type of | resolution suited to modernity: Men and women, no longer prisoners of rhythms they cannot control; we have at least the power to order ourselves, no matter what the world portends. The new year resolve, if it exists at all, is about care of the self.

But care of the self is often overshadowed by two concerns. On a lighter vein, as the wise Mark Twain knew, a resolution to oneself has about as much sanctity as money printed by oneself. He wrote: “Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink, and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever.”

There is a reassuring stability in this human frailty. But resolutions of the self also require a degree of certainty in our public world. How much certainty men and women can assume varies considerably. The world, despite a decline in poverty, still has an unconscionably appalling degree of poverty, always the greatest threat to human dignity. But now