One Simple Idea (2 page)

Predicting the destiny of religious movements is a tricky business. Thomas Jefferson wrote that every young man alive during his lifetime would likely “die an Unitarian.” In the early twentieth century Mark Twain envisaged a future America dominated by Christian Science. Yet James’s predictions struck closer to the mark. If the philosopher’s foresights were exaggerated, it had to do only with the kind of institutional structure that this healthy-minded religion would take. No high church
of positive thought extends across the American scene today. But the influence of positive thinking is greater than that of any one established religion.

In my previous book,
Occult America
, I considered the history of mystical movements in the United States, including the careers of some of the early positive thinkers. I came to realize, however, that those positive-thinking pioneers—and their many counterparts who populate these pages—could not be understood merely through their
influence
on American religion. Rather, positive thinking entered the groundwater of American life. It became the unifying element of all aspects of the American search for meaning. The shapers of positive thinking fundamentally altered how we see ourselves today—psychologically, religiously, commercially, and politically. Their story
is
the backstory of modern America.

Peer into any corner of current American life, and you’ll find the positive-thinking outlook. From the mass-media ministries of evangelists such as Joel Osteen, Creflo Dollar, and T.D. Jakes to the millions-strong audiences of Oprah, Dr. Phil, and Mehmet Oz, from the motivational bestsellers and seminars of the self-help movement to myriad twelve-step programs and support groups, from the rise of positive psychology, mind-body therapies, and stress-reduction programs to the self-affirmative posters and pamphlets found on walls and racks in churches, human-resources offices, medical suites, and corporate corridors, this one idea—
to think positively
—is metaphysics morphed into mass belief. It is the ever-present, every-man-and-woman wisdom of our time. It forms the foundation of business motivation, self-help, and therapeutic spirituality, including within the world of evangelism. Its influence has remade American religion from being a salvational force to also being a healing one.

Positive thinking is an indelible part of our political climate, as well. When Ronald Reagan used to routinely announce in his speeches that “nothing is impossible,” his listeners were able to make sense of his sentiments due to decades of motivational psychology. Reagan’s
America-can-do anything
philosophy, for good or ill, reshaped the nation’s political landscape (and, not incidentally, sounded a lot like the mail-order self-improvement courses to which the president’s father subscribed during the Great Depression). Reagan’s oratory compelled every president who came after him, whether Republican or Democrat, to sing praises to the limitless potential of the American public. In this sense, positive thinking is our national creed.

Most sensitive, educated people are taught to believe that positive thinking is a foolish quirk of modern culture. Barbara Ehrenreich has chronicled the dreary, dystopian experience of being told to think sunny thoughts as a cancer patient. The social critic Richard Hofstadter observed in the early 1960s that hearty thinking was a pitiable substitute for a careful understanding of the social forces that weigh on people’s economic lives. The punk band X, my high-school heroes, agreed with Ehrenreich and Hofstadter when they sang sardonically:
“I MUST NOT THINK BAD THOUGHTS …”

I once found myself explaining to a media executive the manner in which evangelist Pat Robertson had reworked the so-called Law of Attraction into his more acceptable-sounding Law of Reciprocity—but before I could continue, I was cut off. “It’s all such bullshit!” my host exclaimed, pointing out how such a system was, in effect, used to blame the poor or ill for their plights. “I hope I haven’t insulted your belief system,” she said. No, I told her, she hadn’t. The fact is, she was right. But, like most critics, only partly so. And only about those people who see such metaphysical “laws” as an overarching, cause-and-effect rule of life. Or those who believe in the popular New Age precept “there are no accidents”—a bromide that forms the Achilles’ heel of the positive-thinking philosophy and has kept it from attaining greater moral seriousness, a topic I will consider.

Other critics have rightly observed how prohibitions against “negative thinking” can amount to blaming a patient or injured person, or to setting up the expectation that the absence of recovery will be the patient’s fault. Being told how to think is the kind of wearying and dubious advice that no sick person should ever have to endure. Indeed, the human proclivity for dispensing advice (rather than concrete assistance, in time or money) is rarely anything more than the vanity of cheap talk, and often causes more anxiety than relief. Once in a maternity ward I overheard the distraught mother of an ill newborn being urged by a relative to “think positive.” It is difficult to imagine crueler or more impotent words at such a moment.

Over the past two decades, I have seen some of the best people in the positive-thinking movement—that is, members of metaphysical churches or positivity-based support groups—depart or distance themselves from such organizations after experiencing the contradictions that an ill-conceived program of affirmative thought can visit upon a suffering person. A support-group leader for female survivors of sexual abuse—someone who had spent many years within a positive-thinking metaphysical church—wrote to me in 2012. She said that she had experienced both sides of the positive-thinking equation, witnessing how survivors could ably use a program of mental therapeutics to rebuild their sense of self, but also observing the kind of mindless victim-blaming that affirmative-thinking nostrums could visit upon those recovering from trauma. She continued:

In conclusion, she wondered: “Is there room for a positive-thinking model that doesn’t include blame and single-model definitions of success?”

This book takes the attitude that such a model can exist. But to reach that point requires not only understanding the background, breadth, and flaws of this movement, but also realizing that it is often the most sensitive people within a movement who are its clearest critics, and not necessarily those onlookers who believe that positivity-based philosophy deserves little more than a disdainful eye roll or a withering exposé. Spiritual and social movements that do not write their own history get it written for them, often by historians who are indifferent toward, or derisive of, a movement’s aims and ideals, and are thus unable to see the possibilities and values that emanate from it.

Hence, it is from the inside that I approach this book—as someone who has worked with positive-thinking ideas not only in my personal life but for much of my professional life, as well. As I write this, I am vice-president and editor-in-chief at a publishing house that specializes in self-help, New Age, and positive thinking. The positive-thinking movement is one that I love—for its sense of possibilities, its challenge to religious conformity, and its practical ideas; yet it is also a movement that I sometimes disdain—for its lack of moral rigor, its inconsistencies, and its intellectual laxity.

“The term ‘positive thinking,’ ” wrote historian Gary Ward Materra, “has permeated American culture to such an extent that it is difficult to overestimate its influence.” Yet the positive-thinking paradigm, for all the vastness of its reach and the importance of the questions it raises about the mind, has not been understood—historically, theologically, or practically. The outlook of this book is that positive thinking is less than its most enthusiastic exponents believe—it is not a psycho-spiritual magic wand or an all-encompassing, result-making law of life. But it is
also a great deal more than what its critics see it as, namely a fool-baiting philosophy of refrigerator magnets and page-a-day calendars.

Rather, positive thinking is an approach to life that stems from the late Enlightenment era’s boldest attempts at self-understanding, starting with a ferment of ideas at the close of the eighteenth century from which emerged independent spiritual innovators who struggled to assemble a psychological view of life, and to devise practical applications of old and new religious concepts. For all its shortcomings, positive thinking has stood up with surprising muscularity in the present era of placebo studies, mind-body therapies, brain-biology research, and, most controversial, the findings of quantum physics experiments. When reported without sensationalism or half-baked understanding, the data emerging from the quantum physics field suggests some vital, not-yet-understood verity about how the mind interplays with the surrounding world. The questions that quantum physics raises about the nature of the mind may challenge how we come to view ourselves in the twenty-first century, at least as much as Darwinism challenged man’s self-perception in the Victorian age.

But in dealing with any practical philosophy, one must finally leave behind the various and disputatious claims about quantum-this and placebo-that. Any defender or detractor of positive thinking must weigh his perspective against one simple, ultimate question:
Does it work?
To find out, we will consider where this radical idea arose from; how it grew beneath our culture like a vast root system, touching nearly every aspect of life; the persistence of its ethical problems (and possible paths out of them); and, finally, what positive thinking says about our existence and what it offers people today.

Twenty-first-century Americans are shaped by the imperative to think positively. Whether someone displays a “positive attitude” is considered a mark of ambition or apathy, effectiveness or ineptness, success or failure.

The song of the affirmative emanates from wildly disparate sources. Kansas physician George Tiller, murdered in 2009 by an anti-abortion vigilante, was known for wearing a lapel button reading “Attitude Is Everything.” At the start of the 2008 recession, media minister Joel Osteen counseled his television viewers on three rules to avoid being laid off:
improvement of job skills; expansion of responsibilities; and a positive attitude. Longevity studies frequently cite five correlates to a longer life: low or no alcohol, no smoking, low caloric intake, exercise, and a positive outlook.

In consumer culture, the language of self-affirmation has shaped some of advertising’s most memorable campaigns, such as the recruitment slogan of the U.S. Army, “Be All You Can Be”; Nike’s “Just Do It”; MasterCard’s “Master the Possibilities”; and Merrill Lynch’s “To Know No Boundaries.”

Positive thinking forms the keynote of modern life. Like all widely extolled principles, from healthy eating to thrifty spending, aspiration toward positivity seems like it has always been with us. But the concept is newer than we think.

A century and a half ago, if you told someone that “thinking positively” could bring solutions, you would have been looked at in puzzlement. Not that America lacked a literature of character development. Such works extend back to Puritan writings of the seventeenth century and Benjamin Franklin’s colonial-era guide to conduct,
Poor Richard’s Almanack
.
^*1
But the pamphlets, sermons, and chapbooks of early America focused mostly on injunctions to piety, frugality, hard work, reliability, early rising, and good neighborliness—not to the workings of inner will or the psychological or spiritual dimensions of an attitude. Where did such notions come from?

Seen from a certain perspective, every idea that’s ever been thought has always been with us. The general concept of the mind as an
influencing agency
, whether psychological or metaphysical, has ancient roots.

Shortly before the dissipation of the ancient world, and the
widespread embrace of Christianity, a branch of Greek-Egyptian philosophy arose called Hermeticism. It grew from a body of wisdom attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, or “Thrice-Greatest Hermes,” a mythical Greco-Egyptian sage who was seen as an incarnation of Thoth, Egypt’s god of writing. Hermeticists reasoned that man had access to
nous
, or a universal over-mind—and that with the proper preparation of prayer, ritual, and meditation, an individual could be permeated by the universal mind, and would thus receive temporary powers of prophecy and higher realization. This Hermetic concept got preserved within a small cluster of Arabic, Greek, and Latin manuscripts. These writings reemerged during the Renaissance, when European scholars grew fascinated with the occult philosophies of antiquity.

In the early eighteenth century, the Irish bishop George Berkeley sounded a transformative note in Western philosophy when he argued that material reality had no existence outside of man’s mental-sensory perceptions. What appears in our world is a result of our observation, Berkeley reasoned. Without a sensate observer, phenomena have nothing in which to be grounded. Berkeley’s insights gave rise to the thought school later called Idealism. Yet the Anglo-Irish philosopher stopped short of anointing man as the inventor of reality: there also exists, he insisted, a
rerum natura
, or fixed nature of things, of which the sole author is God.