Harper’s Magazine February 2007
I
hate hope. It was hammered into me constantly a few years ago when I was being
treated for breast cancer: Think positively! Don't lose hope! Wear your pink
ribbon with pride! A couple of years later, I was alarmed to discover that the
facility where I received my follow-up care was called the Hope Center. Hope?
What about a cure? At antiwar and labor rallies
over the years, I have dutifully joined Jesse Jackson in chanting "Keep
hope alive!" – all the while crossing my fingers and thinking, "F***
hope. Keep us alive."
There.
It's out. Let pestilence rain down on me, for a whole chorus of voices rise up
to insist that hope, optimism, and a "positive attitude" are the keys
to health and longevity. The more academically respectable among them – the
new Ph.D.-level "positive psychologists" – like to cite a study of
nuns in which the ones professing a generally positive outlook in their
twenties went rather tardily to their maker while the glummer ones dropped off
like flies a decade earlier. The average author of motivational materials –
books, CDs, and audiotapes – needs no studies to buttress the warning that
negative thoughts "can be harmful to your health and might even
shorten your life span."
Not
only is health at stake; so is your credibility as a citizen, employee, or
social entity of any kind. "Ninety-nine out of every 100 people report
that they want to be around more positive people," claims the self-help book
How Full Is
Your Bucket? Many champions of positivity urge one to ostracize
negative people – complainers and "victims" – because they are "committed to lose."
It's
everywhere, this Cult of Positivity, at least in America, the birthplace of
Mary Baker Eddy, Norman Vincent Peale, and est, where 30,000 beaming "life
coaches" ply their trade and a pessimist is no more likely to be elected
president than an atheist. George W. Bush provides a sterling role model. Asked
on his most recent birthday about the potential nuclear threats of Iran and
North Korea, as well as the U.S.-instigated civil war in Iraq, he replied,
"I'm optimistic that all problems will be resolved."
Google
offers more than a million entries on "positive thinking" covering
almost any kind of challenge you might encounter. Dieting? Robert Ferguson,
the "Master Weight-Loss Coach," tells us, "With a positive attitude
you can do,
have and be everything you
want in life!" Bereaved? You can put the fun back in funeral by replacing
it with a "celebration" of the deceased's life. Need money? Attract
it to your wallet with positive mental affirmations, such as:
I love having money. . . .1 am open to receive
money. I give generously to myself and others. I am generous. I feel great
about all the money I spend. Note: Be
SPECIFIC about
amounts of money [you require].
Cancer?
See it positively, as a "growth opportunity," and hopefully not just
for the tumor. A representative of the American Cancer Society rebuffed a
researcher in the mid-Nineties by saying that the organization didn't
"want to be associated with a book on death. We want to emphasize the positive
aspects of cancer only." Laid off? Forget the economy and concentrate on
reconfiguring your attitude, as explained in the 2004 bestseller We Got Fired! .
. . And It's
the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Us.
One
measure of the cult's success is the growth of the "self-improvement"
industry, most of which promotes techniques for upgrading your attitude and
visualizing success through affirmations that open you to the abundance of
the world – like this one, for example, from a current financial self-help
book:
Place
your hand on your heart and say
“I admire rich people."
"I bless rich
people!" "I love rich people!"
"And I'm
going to be one of those rich people too!"
In
2000, the self-improvement industry – including books, CDs, seminars, and
coaches – took in $3.35 billion. In 2005, it grossed $5.62 billion, with the
coaching market alone growing by almost 500 percent.
Until
recently, the marketing of optimism was left largely to familiar snake-oil
purveyors like motivational speakers, prosperity-oriented preachers, and
self-anointed coaches. Then, in 2000, the new academic discipline of positive
psychology emerged, complete with annual conferences, a Journal of Happiness
Studies, and a World Database of
Happiness: There are now more than a hundred courses on positive psychology
available on college campuses, and in the spring of 2006, one of them was the
most popular course at Harvard. Its professor, Dr. Tal D. Ben-Shahar, takes an
indulgent stance toward his disreputable confederates. "For many
years," he says, "the people who were writing about happiness were
the self-help gurus. It had a bad rap.... What I'm trying to do in my class
is to regain respectability for the concept of self-help."
Much of
the behavioral advice offered by the gurus, both credentialed and otherwise, is
innocuous. "Smile," advises one success-oriented, positive-thinking
website, "greet coworkers." Surely the world would be a better,
happier place if we all held doors for one another and stopped to coax smiles
from babies – if only through the well-known social psychological mechanism of
"mood contagion." Nor can I quibble with the common assignment in
positive-psych courses to write "gratitude letters" or keep a
"gratitude journal." As the mother of two Ivy League graduates, I'm
for having all students write weekly odes to their tuition-payers.
The
problem, for anyone with a lingering loyalty to secular rationalism, is that
the prescriptions don't stop at behavior. Like our culture's ambient
Protestantism, the Cult of Positivity demands not only acts but faith. It's not
enough to manifest positivity through a visibly positive attitude; you must
establish it as one of the very structures of your mind, whether or not it is
justified by the actual circumstances. Some gurus attempt to dodge the
potential conflict with reality by attributing to positive thoughts the power
to control the outer world through a "Law of Attraction," as yet
unknown to physicists, whereby thoughts somehow produce their material
counterparts in the outer world. The 2005 book Secrets of the Millionaire
Mind, for example, explains that the
universe "is akin to a big mail-order department.... You 'order' what you
get by sending energetic messages out to the universe based on your predominant
beliefs."
The
academic side of the cult, which rests its claims to respectability on science,
is of course barred from endorsing wacko mind-over-matter notions. Instead, we
learn there that irrationality, at least in the form of "positive illusions,"
works like a vitamin, even at the admitted "cost perhaps of less realism."
Scientists should presumably avoid such magical thinking, but it is recommended
to everyone else: Go ahead, pump yourself up, imagine that all the obstacles
you face are projections of some lingering negativity, whatever gets you
through the day.
Why
should an intelligent species need to rely on illusions? According to positive
psychology's founder, University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman,
it is our negative, pessimistic, thoughts that are maladaptive and happily, as
it turns out, vestigial:
Because
our brain evolved during a time of ice, flood
and famine, we have a catastrophic brain. The way the brain works is looking
for what's wrong. The problem is, that worked in the Pleistocene era. It
favoured you, but it doesn't work in the modern world.
In
this view, which was restated uncritically in a February 2006 New Yorker review of two books on happiness, our Paleolithic
ancestors were well served by the suspicion that a saber-toothed cat crouched
behind every bush. Today we would do better to visualize pots of gold.
There
are exceptions, the positive psychologists concede, even in the modern world,
and at first glance they seem a little exotic: airplane pilots, for example,
need to anticipate worst outcomes rather than happy landings. Recently,
Seligman further limited the purview of positive psychology to nations that
"are wealthy and not in civil turmoil and not at war," perhaps not
realizing that he had thus excluded the majority of the world's people. But
even leaving the poor and war-ravaged aside: if a pilot needs a healthy dose of
negative thinking, what about the driver of a car? Should I assume, positively,
that no one is going to cut in front of me or, more negatively, be prepared to
brake?
Child-raising
is another quotidian activity that eludes the positive psychologists. Religion
and marriage are both recommended as positivity boosters, and they do seem to
increase self-reported happiness, but children, according to Harvard
psychologist Daniel Gilbert, can be "an extreme source of negative
affect." Kids are, in other words, bummers, and it's easy to see why. You
might want to be "positive" by advertising a trip to the pediatrician
as an opportunity to play with the cool toys in the waiting room rather than an
occasion for a painful shot, but no parent dare risk assuming that the sudden
quiet from the toddlers' room means they are studying with Baby Einstein.
Visualize fratricidal stranglings and electric outlets stabbed with forks:
that's how we reproduce our genomes.
If
health and well-being in general are at stake, the positive psychologists would
argue, why not indulge in some positive illusions even at the cost of
"realism"? There's no question but that extreme, locked-in negativity
in the form of depression is a risk factor for physical illness, but the
evidence for the health-enhancing effects of positivity is surprisingly
muddled. A frequently cited 1988 article arguing that positive illusions, such
as unwarrantedly high self-estimations, promote mental health has been
disputed. Nor are positive-thinking people necessarily happier than pessimists
or realists, since anyone who self-reports positivity is equally likely to
self-report happiness. As for "success": in workplaces that enjoin a
positive attitude, one would do well to conform, but the halls of fame are
lined with the busts of major depressives, including Max Weber, William James,
John Donne, and Samuel Johnson.
It
takes a positive spin to see a consistently positive effect of positivity on
physical health. A 2002 New York Times article
headlined "Power of Positive Thinking Extends, It Seems, to
Aging" cited two studies linking optimism to longevity – and four
studies tracing longevity to such other traits as “conscientiousness,"
calmness, pessimism, and even cantankerousness. A 2002 study not cited in the Times article found mildly depressed women living longer
than non-depressed or more severely depressed women, and even two positive
psychologists reported that people displaying negative affect "complain
about their health but show no hard evidence of poorer health or increased
mortality." As for those oft-cited nuns: Nuns are popular with researchers
because of their controlled, homogeneous lifestyle. But that lifestyle is not
for everyone, and Freud might think of reasons why those who were not initially
enthusiastic about their vocation would go on to live lives of quiet and
self-destructive desperation.
In
fact, there is some evidence that the ubiquitous moral injunction to think
positively may place an additional burden on the already sick or otherwise
aggrieved. Not only are you failing to get better but you're failing to feel
good about not getting better. Similarly for the long-term unemployed, who, as
I found while researching my book Bait and Switch, are informed by career coaches and self-help books
that their principal battle is against their own negative, resentful,
loser-like feelings. This is victim-blaming at its cruelest, and may help
account for the passivity of Americans in the face of repeated economic insult.
But what
is truly sinister about the positivity cult is that it seems to reduce our
tolerance of other people's suffering. Far from being a "culture of complaint"
that upholds "victims," ours has become "less and less tolerant
of people having a bad day or a bad year,” according to Barbara Held, professor
of psychology at Bowdoin College and a leading critic of positive psychology.
If no one will listen to my problems, I won't listen to theirs: "no
whining," as the popular bumper stickers and wall plaques warn. Thus the
cult acquires a viral-like reproductive energy, creating an empathy deficit
that pushes ever more people into a harsh insistence on positivity in others.
I got through my bout of cancer in a state of constant rage, directed chiefly against the kitschy positivity of American breast-cancer culture. I remain, although not absolutely, certifiably, cancer-free down to the last cell, at least hope-free. Do not mistake this condition for hopelessness, in the beaten or passive sense, or confuse it with unhappiness. The trick, as my teen hero Camus wrote, is to draw strength from the "refusal to hope, and the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation." To be hope-free is to acknowledge the lion in the tall grass, the tumor in the CAT scan, and to plan one’s moves accordingly.
From Harper’s Magazine February 2007
Keith and Marnie
Elliott’s “REMEDY” Site
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