Cobert's Alpha Dog on Habits

One of my favorite shows is the Colbert Report on Comedy Central, and I was watching old Alpha Dog of the Week clips when I came upon this. Colbert talked about Domino's being the Alpha Dog of the Week because Domino's decided to change change up their recipe and not apologize for their terrible product. While Colbert focused on the fact that Domino's did not apologize, I would instead like to focus on Domino's change in recipe and how it relates to habit.

What Domino's did requires an enormous amount of self-awareness. To make that change could not have been a purely internal thing. The pizza chain would have needed to see the reaction of the customers before it could have changed. In the same way, we must first recognize that our actions are wrong, according to Aristotle, before we can change. Having that self-awareness is much harder for us than it is for a corporation. Whereas the corporation can simply take a poll on customer satisfaction, people do not have that luxury. In the first place, the virtuous are in the minority. Finding a person who can help you work towards virtue is indeed rare, much rarer than finding a customer that has a relatively normal sense of taste. But on top of that, it is much easier to change for Domino's than it is for any of us.

This is not to discourage any of us that we may very well need change, but more of an analogy to how we may do it. We first need to find the virtuous person who can point us towards the virtuous life who can encourage change within us. Change may not be as easy for us as it was for Domino's, but we can still change for the better.

The Unmoved Mover

One of my favorite Jesuits, James Martin, wrote in one his books (I think it was his autobiography) about his undergraduate experience learning Arisotle's Metaphysics. Sister Louise French taught the class at Loyola Chicago for all the novices, and he recounted the story of how he learned about the unmoved mover.

He told of how, one day in class, they were all told to make a circle. They subsequently were told to extend their arms out to each of their neighbors. Sister French then dictated this one rule: if you are tapped, then you must tap the next person. So if someone were to tap my right hand, I would have to tap the next person with my left. It is no surprise that with this one rule, nothing happened. This is how she explained Aristotle's unmoved mover. This mover is necessarily outside of the constraints of other objects in the world. So for this experiment of Sister French to work, there would necessarily need to be something outside of the circle to begin the causal chain.

When it came time to have his cumulative exam, not just of the course but of his entire undergraduate education in philosophy and theology, one his questions asked to explain Aristotle's doctrine of the unmoved mover. He blurted out, "The untapped tapper!" All of his examiners looked puzzled, except for Sister French who replied, "Good," and promptly proceeded to the next question.

Sister French has since passed on, and James Martin was so gracious to her that her wrote in memory of her for America Magazine. But this scene is forever embedded in my mind, both for its relevance to philosophy and relevance to my desire at the time to soak up anything he wrote.