Thomas Sutcliffe: Agree on a resolution, and change the world

Let me suggest a novel problem with resolutions not the familiar drawback that we all face at this time of year, which is their pitifully short shelf-life, but a problem that only becomes apparent if you think of the resolution-making instinct operating at a different order of magnitude.

We're broadly accustomed to the idea that resolutions are essentially an atomic affair tailor-made by each one of us to address particular shortcomings and private disappointments. That's the point of them really... that you make your own and broadly do so without reference to others. Of course, it's possible to detect certain broad patterns in the urge to exert greater resolve self-denial, promises of greater kindness but even so, to extend the atomic metaphor, these tiny impulses towards betterment generally result in a unpredictable jitter directed in every direction at once. Like the motion of atoms in an apple, they effectively cancel each other out.

Imagine, though, that all the atoms or at least a substantial majority of them jinked in the same direction at once. The apple would jolt sideways. And it's not difficult to think of something similar happening at a social level. Instead of countless doomed individual resolutions fizzling out sometime in mid-January, you might have a single consensual resolution strengthened by its mutual nature (and mutual policing) persisting for long enough to actually effect a change.

And, at the atomic level, the individual particles of such large-scale change need not be very large. When I walk through my local park I have a habit of picking up bits of litter that I pass. This embarrasses my children and makes scarcely a dent on the broad level of municipal squalor. As a virtuous deed, it barely registers. But it wouldn't really take a lot of people to decide to pick up three pieces of litter a day to outweigh all the oafs who drop it. While it would require a communitarian saint to shoulder the burden of keeping a whole neighbourhood clean, if the task was effectively chopped up into microscopic portions and shared out, it could be achieved without anyone noticing.

As with atoms in apples, of course, it is vanishingly improbable that our seasonal spasms of good intention should all pulse in the same direction simultaneously, and it isn't easy to think of a mechanism that could make it happen. There is a website called PledgeBank which attempts something similar by aggregating a number of mild altruistic whims into one substantial one. One recent contributor, for example, pledged to create a standing order of 5 per month to support a campaign for digital rights in the UK on condition that 1,000 other people did the same a challenge that has successfully been met. Another pledged to buy only food produced in the UK if 100 other people agreed to do the same.

But there's something oddly conditional about the mechanism they've created which suggests that even if you end up one person short of your stated target you won't bother taking an action that you clearly believe is right in itself.

What I fantasise about is central-planning resolution clumping millions and millions of virtually undetectable units of WTDB (Willingness To Do Better) into one collectively useful gesture. Perhaps the Government could choose our resolutions for us announcing, say, that from 1 January we will all resolve to turn the lights off when we leave a room. You might argue that it would never work, but since when did individual resolutions?

So whose side was God on?

I'm not big on Boxing Day sporting fixtures but I greatly enjoyed this year's Church of the Nativity derby match between Greek Orthodox priests and their Armenian counterparts. Members of both teams, armed with broomsticks, iron rods and bare knuckles, laid into each other with impressive Christian zeal after a Greek Orthodox step-ladder reportedly intruded a few inches into "Armenian" territory. As in all previous encounter, the result was a no-score draw. The former Bishop of Oxford, Lord Harries, published a thoughtful piece the other day headlined "It Is Possible To Be Moral Without God" . It surely needs a companion piece though: "It Is All Too Easy to be Morally Contemptible With Him".

* Not that scientists don't have their off days, too. The December issue of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine includes an essay in which four neuroscientists put forward the theory that Renaissance artists covertly included anatomical details of brain architecture in their religious paintings. Their examples include the Sistine Chapel figure of God, reaching out to Adam and Gerard David's painting "The Transfiguration of Christ". And it's true that the robes that frame God do look a bit like a slice through the brain and that David's picture, with a kind of clover-leaf cloud formation surrounding a brain-stem Christ, echoes modern MRI images of the brain ventricles. But the true fascination of this material lies in the evidence it supplies of our tendency to project internal obsessions on to the suggestive ambiguity of the external world. It's an upmarket equivalent of the Virgin Mary "miraculously" turning up on a toasted cheese sandwich. They've just got brains on the brain.

t.sutcliffe@independent.co.uk