Can We Cure Our Faults?

For the ancient Greeks, to know better was to do better. The possession of right knowledge would inevitably lead to right action.

“This idea is totally alien to me—I don’t understand it at all,” writes essayist Meghan O’Gieblyn in her bracing new memoir of addiction, Will and Attention. “What I understand is the bewilderment of the apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans: ‘I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.’”