The history of 'habit'

The new Google N-grams facility allows searching their huge digitized text collection for relative frequencies of terms.  Below is a plot for three concepts that come up often in this blog: 'habit' (blue), 'choice' (red) and 'decision' (green), shown from 1840-2000.  (A pretty amazing resource !)

Data from all English books, 1840-2000, computed 2010.12.17.

For many decades the three terms track each other at around .0035 percent of all items. They begin diverging sharply in the late 1920s, with 'habit' declining steadily from its peak in 1929. 'Decision' rises gently, and then quite sharply beginning in World War II. By 1980 it is at nearly ten times the level of 'habit'. 1929 is also the year in which 'choice' first becomes more frequent than 'habit', and it rises steadily from that point onward.

The data match up quite well with the claim that ideas of habit have been disappearing from our ways of thinking about the sources of action. (As in the Camic 1986 article, "The Matter of Habit".) In the 1920s Dewey could write that "habit is the mainspring of action" without seeming a little odd (in The Public and its Problems). Although our current era has many similarities to the "confused publics" he analyzed, we don't seem to have available for our reflections the  notion of habit as a fundamental human faculty that was an established resource in his time. 

The public and its problems

In 1927 John Dewey laid out a remarkable analysis of why it is so hard to move our society in humane and democratic directions that seem to us so obvious. Despairing again today of our inability to have useful public discussion of our situation, I went back to The public and its problems (1927) and reread his Chapter 5, "Search for the great community".  It's stunning how superficial the changes of the last 85 years seem and how stable are the sources of our troubles.

I may end up writing several posts about this, but here is a first thought. Dewey argues that a deep part of our problem connects to the running theme of this blog: our failure to appreciate the crucial role of habit.

The Public, Dewey says, is "eclipsed": confused, unable to identify its own interests or find its voice. (If you are wondering, here is Dewey's definition: "The public consists of all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for."[p15-16])  He feels our nominally democratic political institutions are not delivering anything resembling progress toward a life that corresponds to democratic ideals. He asks how we should diagnose our situation and what might help us find our way out of it?

Why hasn't the promise of democratic ideals been realized within our institutions? Dewey's view is that we depended on the assumption that each individual had "the intelligence needed, under the operation of self-interest, to engage in political affairs; and that general suffrage, frequent elections of officials, and majority rule are sufficient to ensure the responsibility of elected rulers to the desires and and interests of the public." [157]  The "omnicompetent individual" assumed in this approach has proved illusory. We haven't appreciated that because the psychology we assumed 

"held that ideas and knowledge were functions of a mind or consciousness which originated in individuals by means of isolated contact with objects. But in fact, knowledge is a function of association and communication; it depends upon tradition, upon tools and methods socially transmitted, developed and sanctioned. Faculties of effectual observation, reflection and desire are habits acquired under the influence of the culture and institutions of society, not ready-made inherent powers. The fact that man acts from crudely intelligized emotions and from habit rather than from rational consideration, is now so familiar that it is not easy to appreciate that the other idea was taken seriously as the basis of economic and political philosophy. [158]"

Only the last sentence seems misaligned with our moment. It isn't true in our time that the crucial roles of habit and emotion in generating action are so clearly appreciated.  In retrospect, Dewey may also have overestimated his own era.

He goes on to account for how the omnicompetent view could have prevailed:

The measure of truth it contains was derived from the observation of a relatively small group of shrewd business men who regulated their enterprises by calculation and accounting, and of citizens of small and stable local communities who were so intimately acquainted with the persons and affairs of their locality that they could pass competent judgment upon the bearing of proposed measures upon their own concerns.

He goes on to contrast the omnicompetent view with one that acknowledges the character and primacy of habit, saying "Habit is the mainspring of human action, and habits are formed for the most part under the influence of the customs of a group."

Dewey links the question of public helplessness directly to the inadequacies of our received understanding of how human action is generated. Working our way out of our vexing situation will evidently require us to bring habit (and emotion) properly into consideration in the way we think about public discourse, policy design, and education.