EIGHT
Postscript on
Post–Positive Thinking
What can we be if not positive? “I do believe in the power of positive thinking,” veteran newspaper editor Ben Bradlee wrote recently. “I don’t know any other way to live.” 1 We’ve gone so far down this yellow brick road that “positive” seems to us not only normal but normative—the way you should be. A restaurant not far from where I live calls itself the “Positive Pizza and Pasta Place,” apparently distinguishing itself from the many sullen and negative Italian dining options. A veteran human resources executive, baffled by my questions about positive thinking in the workplace, ventured hesitantly, “But isn’t positive . . . good?” He was right: we have come to use the words “positive” and “good” almost interchangeably. In this moral system, either you look on the bright side, constantly adjusting your attitude and revising your perceptions—or you go over to the dark side.
The alternative to positive thinking is not, however, despair. In fact, negative thinking can be just as delusional as the positive kind. Depressed people project their misery onto the world, imagining worst outcomes from every endeavor and then feeding their misery on these distorted expectations. In both cases, there is an inability to separate emotion from perception, a willingness to accept illusion for reality, either because it “feels good” or, in the depressive’s case, because it reinforces familiar, downwardly spiraling neural pathways. The alternative to both is to try to get outside of ourselves and see things “as they are,” or as uncolored as possible by our own feelings and fantasies, to understand that the world is full of both danger and opportunity—the chance of great happiness as well as the certainty of death.
This is not easy. Our moods affect our perceptions, as do the moods of others around us, and there will always be questions about the reliability of the evidence. Generally it helps to recruit the observations of others, since our individual perceptions could be erroneous, and whether the issue has to do with the approach of a marauding leopard or the possibility of a financial downturn, the more information we can gather the better off we are. This is the project of science: to pool the rigorous observations of many people into a tentative accounting of the world, which will of course always be subject to revisions arising from fresh observations.
But the group—whether it’s a prehistoric band of forty people, the president’s National Security Council, or the American Psychological Association—is not entirely trustworthy either. No matter how intelligent and well informed its members are, the group may fall into the grip of collective delusions, frenzies, intellectual fads, or what has been identified in recent decades as “group think.” There seems to be an evolutionary paradox at work here: human survival in the face of multiple threats depended on our ability to live in groups, but the imperative of maintaining group cohesion can sometimes override realism and common sense, making us hesitate to challenge the consensus or be the bearer of bad news. So, after checking with others, it remains the responsibility of each individual to sift through the received wisdom, insofar as possible, and decide what’s worth holding on to. This can require the courage of a Galileo, the iconoclasm of a Darwin or Freud, the diligence of a homicide detective.
At issue is not only knowledge of the world but our survival as individuals and as a species. All the basic technologies ever invented by humans to feed and protect themselves depend on a relentless commitment to hard-nosed empiricism: you cannot assume that your arrowheads will pierce the hide of a bison or that your raft will float just because the omens are propitious and you have been given supernatural reassurance that they will. You have to be sure. Prehistoric humans had to make a careful study of the natural world and the materials it offered them—for example, rocks, clay, plant fibers, animal sinews. Then they had to experiment until, through trial and error, they found what actually works. Without a doubt, throughout our several hundred thousand years of existence on earth, humans have also been guided by superstition, mystical visions, and collective delusions of all sorts. But we got where we are, fanning out over the huge continent of Africa and from there all over the earth, through the strength of the knots we could tie, the sturdiness of shelters and boats, the sharpness of spearheads.
Human intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things “as they are,” or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions. Thunder is not a tantrum in the sky, disease is not a divine punishment, and not every death or accident results from witchcraft. What we call the Enlightenment and hold on to only tenuously, by our fingernails, is the slow-dawning understanding that the world is unfolding according to its own inner algorithms of cause and effect, probability and chance, without any regard for human feelings.
I realize that after decades of positive thinking the notion of realism, of things as they are, may seem a little quaint. But even in America, the heartland of positive thinking, some stubborn strain of realism has persisted throughout these years of delusion. When the stakes are high enough and the risks obvious, we still turn to people who can be counted on to understand those risks and prepare for worst-case scenarios. A chief of state does not want to hear a general in the field say that he “hopes” to win tomorrow’s battle or that he’s “visualizing victory”; he or she wants one whose plans include the possibility that things may go very badly, and fall-back positions in case they do. Even that ultra-optimistic president Ronald Reagan invoked realism when dealing with the Soviets, constantly repeating the slogan “Trust, but verify.” Magazine editors expect their fact-checkers to assume that a writer’s memory is unreliable. We want our airplane pilots to anticipate failed engines as well as happy landings.
In our daily lives, too, all of us, no matter how determinedly upbeat, rely on what psychologist Julie Norem calls “defensive pessimism” to get through the day. 2 Not only pilots need to envision the worst; so does the driver of a car. Should you assume, positively, that no one is going to cut in front of you or, more negatively, be prepared to brake? Most of us would choose a physician who is willing to investigate the most dire possibilities rather than one who is known to settle quickly on an optimistic diagnosis. In matters of the heart as well, a certain level of negativity and suspicion is universally recommended. You may try to project a thoroughly “positive” outlook in order to attract a potential boyfriend, but you are also advised to Google him. When people write to advice columnists about their suspicions as to a spouse’s infidelity, they are told not to ignore the warnings and think positively but to confront the problem openly.
One of the most essential and mundane of human activities—taking care of children—requires high levels of anxious vigilance. It would be unwise, even negligent, to assume that teenagers can be counted on to drive carefully and abstain from unsafe sex. To conscientious caretakers, the world is a potential minefield of disasters-in-waiting—tiny plastic toy parts that a baby might swallow, contaminated or unhealthful foods, speeding drivers, pederasts, vicious dogs. Parents 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 they dare not 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: this is how we have reproduced our genomes.
When our children are old enough, and if we can afford to, we send them to college, where despite the recent proliferation of courses on “happiness” and “positive psychology,” the point is to acquire the skills not of positive thinking but of critical thinking, and critical thinking is inherently skeptical. The best students—and in good colleges, also the most successful—are the ones who raise sharp questions, even at the risk of making a professor momentarily uncomfortable. Whether the subject is literature or engineering, graduates should be capable of challenging authority figures, going against the views of their classmates, and defending novel points of view. This is not because academics value contrarianism for its own sake but because they recognize that a society needs people who will do exactly what the gurus of positive thinking warn us to avoid—“overintellectualize” and ask hard questions. Physicians are among the highly educated professionals who dare not risk the comforts of positive thinking in their daily work, and as one of them, author and surgeon Atul Gawande, has written: “Whether one is fighting a cancer, an insurgency or just an unyielding problem at work, the prevailing wisdom is that thinking positive is the key—The Secret, even—to success. But the key, it seems to me, is actually negative thinking: looking for, and sometimes expecting, failure.” 3
Realism—to the point of defensive pessimism—is a prerequisite not only for human survival but for all animal species. Watch almost any wild creature for a few moments and you will be impressed, above all, by its vigilance. The cormorant restlessly scans the water for unexpected splashes; the deer cocks its head to pick up stray sounds and raises a foot in preparation for flight. Many animals—from monkeys to birds—augment their individual watchfulness by living in groups so that many eyes can be on the lookout for intruders, many voices raised in an alarm call, should one approach. In its insistence that we concentrate on happy outcomes rather than on lurking hazards, positive thinking contradicts one of our most fundamental instincts, one that we share not only with other primates and mammals but with reptiles, insects, and fish.
The rationale of the positive thinkers has been that the world is not, or at least no longer is, the dangerous place we imagined it to be. This is how Mary Baker Eddy saw it: the universe was “Supply” and “Abundance” made available to everyone by a benevolent deity. Sin, crime, disease, poverty—all these were “errors” wrought by minds that had fallen out of resonance with the cosmic vibrations of generosity and love. A hundred years later, Martin Seligman, the founder of positive psychology, was describing anxiety and pessimism as unhelpful vestiges of our Paleolithic past, when our ancestors scrambled to avoid predators, “flood, and famine.” Today, however, “goods and services are plentiful,” as he put it; there is enough to go around, and we can finally let our guard down. Any lingering dissatisfaction is, as Eddy would have said, a kind of error—correctible through the right self-help techniques and optimism exercises.
But has the human outlook really been improving over time? For affluent individuals in peaceful settings, decidedly yes, but our overall situation is as perilous as it has ever been. Even some of the most positive-thinking evangelical pastors have recently acknowledged the threat of global warming. The notion that the world’s supply of oil may have peaked is no longer the province of a few environmentally minded kooks; “doomsters” are gaining respectability. Everywhere we look, the forests are falling, the deserts are advancing, the supply of animal species is declining. The seas are rising, and there are fewer and fewer fish in them to eat.
Over the last couple of decades, as icebergs sank and levels of debt mounted, dissidents from the prevailing positive-thinking consensus were isolated, mocked, or urged to overcome their perverse attachment to negative thoughts. Within the United States, any talk of intractable problems like poverty could be dismissed as a denial of America’s greatness. Any complaints of economic violence could be derided as the “whining” of self-selected victims.
It’s easy to see positive thinking as a uniquely American form of na?veté, but it is neither uniquely American nor endearingly na?ve. In vastly different settings, positive thinking has been a tool of political repression worldwide. We tend to think that tyrants rule through fear—fear of the secret police, of torture, detention, the gulag—but some of the world’s most mercilessly authoritarian regimes have also demanded constant optimism and cheer from their subjects. In his book Shah of Shahs, about life under the shah of Iran, who ruled until the revolution of 1979, Ryszard Kapuscinski tells the story of a translator who managed to get a poem published despite the fact that it included the seditious line “Now is the time of sorrow, of darkest night.” The translator was “elated” at being able to get the poem past the censors, “in this country where everything is supposed to inspire optimism, blossoming, smiles—suddenly ‘the time of sorrow’! Can you imagine?” 4
Soviet-style Communism, which we do not usually think of as a cheerful sort of arrangement, exemplified the use of positive thinking as a means of social control. Writing of the former Yugoslavia at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Dubravka Ugresic observed that “former communists, modern capitalists, nationalists, religious fanatics” were all picking up on the fresh breeze of positivity from the West. “They have all become optimists.” But this was hardly something new, she went on, because “optimism has a stain on its ideological record. . . . If anything has survived Stalinism itself, it is the Stalinist demand for optimism.” 5 In the Soviet Union, as in the Eastern European states and North Korea, the censors required upbeat art, books, and films, meaning upbeat heroes, plots about fulfilling production quotas, and endings promising a glorious revolutionary future. Czechoslovakian literature was suffused with “blind optimism”; North Korean short stories still beam with “relentless optimism.” In the Soviet Union itself, “being charged with a lack of historical optimism meant being charged with distortion of the truth or transmission of false truths. Pessimism and ideological wavering meant the same thing. . . . In various disputes, the possibility of an alienated and lonely hero in socialism was forbidden in the name of the demands for historical optimism and a positive hero.” 6
The penalties for negative thinking were real. Not to be positive and optimistic was to be “defeatist,” and, as Ugresic writes of the Soviet Union, “defeatists paid for the sin of defeatism. Accusing someone of spreading defeatism condemned him to several years in Stalinist camps.” 7 In his 1968 novel, The Joke, the Czech writer Milan Kundera has a character send a postcard bearing the line “Optimism is the opium of the people,” for which the character is accused of being an enemy of the people and sentenced to hard labor in the coal mines. Kundera himself was punished for daring to write The Joke. He was expelled from the Communist Party, saw his works removed from libraries and bookstores, and was banned from traveling to the West.
American preachers of positive thinking would no doubt be appalled to find themselves mentioned in the same breath or even the same book as Stalinist censors and propagandists. After all, Americans exalt individual success, which was not a Communist ideal, and no one gets hauled off to labor camps for ignoring their teachings. But even among American proponents of positive thinking, you can find a faint uneasiness about its role as a mental discipline, a form of self-hypnosis involving affirmations, visualizations, and tightly focused thoughts. “Don’t think of ‘thought control’ as a repressive tool out of George Orwell’s 1984,” John Templeton advised the readers of one of his self-help books. “Rather, think of it as a positive force that will leave your mind clearer, more directed, and more effective.” 8
The big advantage of the American approach to positive thinking has been that people can be counted on to impose it on themselves. Stalinist regimes used the state apparatus—schools, secret police, and so on—to enforce optimism; capitalist democracies leave this job to the market. In the West, as we have seen, the leading proponents of positive thinking are entrepreneurs in their own right, marketing their speeches, books, and DVDs to anyone willing to buy them. Large companies may make their employees listen to the speeches and may advise them to read the books; they may fire people who persist in a “negative attitude.” But it’s ultimately up to the individual to embrace positive thinking and do the hard work of attitude adjustment and maintenance on him-or herself. And judging from the sales of motivational products and the popularity of figures like Oprah and Osteen, this is a task that large numbers of Americans have eagerly undertaken on their own.
Yet, as the cover story of the January 2009 issue of Psychology Today acknowledges, the American infatuation with positive thinking has not made us happier. Lumping academic positive psychology and the ever-growing host of “self-appointed experts” together into what he calls the “happiness movement,” the writer notes that, “according to some measures, as a nation we’ve grown sadder and more anxious during the same years that the happiness movement has flourished; perhaps that’s why we’ve eagerly bought up its offerings.” 9 This finding should hardly come as a surprise: positive thinking did not abolish the need for constant vigilance; it only turned that vigilance inward. Instead of worrying that one’s roof might collapse or one’s job be terminated, positive thinking encourages us to worry about the negative expectations themselves and subject them to continual revision. It ends up imposing a mental discipline as exacting as that of the Calvinism it replaced—the endless work of self-examination and self-control or, in the case of positive thinking, self-hypnosis. It requires, as historian Donald Meyer puts it, “constant repetition of its spirit lifters, constant alertness against impossibility perspectives, constant monitoring of rebellions of body and mind against control.” 10
This is a burden that we can finally, in good conscience, put down. The effort of positive “thought control,” which is always presented as such a life preserver, has become a potentially deadly weight—obscuring judgment and shielding us from vital information. Sometimes we need to heed our fears and negative thoughts, and at all times we need to be alert to the world outside ourselves, even when that includes absorbing bad news and entertaining the views of “negative” people. As we should have learned by now, it is dangerous not to.
A vigilant realism does not foreclose the pursuit of happiness; in fact, it makes it possible. How can we expect to improve our situation without addressing the actual circumstances we find ourselves in? Positive thinking seeks to convince us that such external factors are incidental compared with one’s internal state or attitude or mood. We have seen how the coaches and gurus dismiss real-world problems as “excuses” for failure and how positive psychologists have tended to minimize the “C,” for circumstances, in their happiness equation. It’s true that subjective factors like determination are critical to survival and that individuals sometimes triumph over nightmarish levels of adversity. But mind does not automatically prevail over matter, and to ignore the role of difficult circumstances—or worse, attribute them to our own thoughts—is to slide toward the kind of depraved smugness Rhonda Byrne expressed when confronted with the tsunami of 2006. Citing the law of attraction, she stated that disasters like tsunamis can happen only to people who are “on the same frequency as the event.” 11
Worldwide, the most routine obstacle to human happiness is poverty. To the extent that happiness surveys can be believed, they consistently show that the world’s happiest countries tend also to be among the richest. While the United States ranks 23rd and the United Kingdom 41st, for example, India comes in a gloomy 125th out of 178 nations. 12 Some recent studies find furthermore that, within countries, richer people tend to be happier, with about 90 percent of Americans in households earning at least $250,000 a year reporting being “very happy,” compared with only 42 percent of people in households earning less than $30,000. 13 When the New York Times surveyed New York neighborhoods in 2009, it found that the happiest areas were also the most affluent and, not coincidentally, the most thickly supplied with cafés, civic associations, theaters, and opportunities for social interaction. The least happy neighborhood was a part of the Bronx characterized by abandoned buildings, mounds of uncollected garbage, and the highest unemployment rate in the city. 14
For centuries, or at least since the Protestant Reformation, Western economic elites have flattered themselves with the idea that poverty is a voluntary condition. The Calvinist saw it as a result of sloth and other bad habits; the positive thinker blamed it on a willful failure to embrace abundance. This victim-blaming approach meshed neatly with the prevailing economic conservatism of the last two decades. Welfare recipients were pushed out into low-wage jobs, supposedly, in part, to boost their self-esteem; laid-off and soon-to-be-laid-off workers were subjected to motivational speakers and exercises. But the economic meltdown should have undone, once and for all, the idea of poverty as a personal shortcoming or dysfunctional state of mind. The lines at unemployment offices and churches offering free food include strivers as well as slackers, habitual optimists as well as the chronically depressed. When and if the economy recovers we can never allow ourselves to forget how widespread our vulnerability is, how easy it is to spiral down toward destitution.
Happiness is not, of course, guaranteed even to those who are affluent, successful, and well loved. But that happiness is not the inevitable outcome of happy circumstances does not mean we can find it by journeying inward to revise our thoughts and feelings. The threats we face are real and can be vanquished only by shaking off self-absorption and taking action in the world. Build up the levees, get food to the hungry, find the cure, strengthen the “first responders”! We will not succeed at all these things, certainly not all at once, but—if I may end with my own personal secret of happiness—we can have a good time trying.
Acknowledgments
Book writing can be a lonely business, but in this case I was able to pull together a little support group of people who were also challenging the prevailing positive-thinking consensus: Barbara Held, Jim Coyne, Micki McGee, Heather Love, Richard P. Sloan, and, most recently, Karen Cerulo. We conferred at length by phone, e-mail, and at our jolly annual “negative lunches,” and I thank them all for sharing their ideas and keeping me up to date—especially Barbara Held and Jim Coyne, who took the time to read and comment on chapter draft s.
If he had lived long enough, historian Donald Meyer would have been a perfect addition to this group. I returned to his brilliant book The Positive Thinkers: popular Religious Psychology from Mary Baker Eddy to Norman Vincent Peale and Ronald Reagan again and again while working on mine.
Others who were dragooned into reading and commenting on chapters include Bob Richardson, Ben Ehrenreich, Robert Orsi, Steve Eisman, Gary Long, and the delightful Eric Dezenhall. I also thank the many people who took time to talk or correspond with me along the way, including Catherine Albanese, Rosa Brooks, James Champy, David Collins, Aine Donovan, Marla Frederick, Carol Graham, Jonathan Haidt, Arlie Hochschild, Robert Jackall, Janet McIntosh, Helen Meldrum, Tom Morris, Nomi Prins, Ashley Pinnington, Vickie Sullivan, Howard Tennen, and Neil Weinstein. Sanho Tree and Tim Townsend shared their research on the Templeton Foundation with me; Diane Alexander provided invaluable assistance at many stages in the process.
Kris Dahl was more than the agent for this book; she was a source of important contacts and insights. Much thanks to Riva Hocherman for her insightful suggestions and to Roslyn Schloss for her expert copyediting. And there’s no adequate way to thank my editor, Sara Bershtel, whose humanism and laserlike logic inform every line of this book.