If you’re a devout
believer in the power of positive thinking, you may want to consider
joining the Positive Thinking Club. The first rule of Positive Thinking
Club: Don’t criticize Positive Thinking Club. The second rule of
Positive Thinking Club: Don’t criticize Positive Thinking Club.
The devout positive thinker will be wary of the purveyors of critical thinking, which takes account of both the bright and shadowed sides of reality and doesn’t try to wish problems (I mean “challenges”) away. Critical thinking about positive thinking may cause us to doubt its powers, and then where will we be? Back in an imperfect reality where not all truths are pretty, no matter how much rose-colored light we bathe them in.
I’m all for being as optimistic as we reasonably can be in the face of problems (I mean “opportunities”). And I don’t like constant whining and complaining any more than others do. Compulsive negative thinking can be just as distortive as compulsive positive thinking in its denial of reality’s manifold complexities. But sometimes our dissatisfactions are legitimate and our complaints are warranted, and suppressing them doesn’t make them go away. It only drives them underground to fester.
That’s why I say “neither Polyanna nor Eeyore be.”
I believe instead in the power of honest thinking. Honest thinking doesn’t candycoat. It doesn’t habitually euphemize (or “tell the truth attractively,” like a real estate agent trying to sell a hole in the ceiling as a skylight). Honest thinking doesn’t spotlight positives while hiding negatives, as corporate advertising and public relations do. Honest thinking can be both critical and appreciative, both optimistic in some respects and pessimistic in others. Honest thinking isn’t so afraid of complex realities that it can’t face them squarely and respond to them creatively and constructively.
Positive thinking, on the other hand, sometimes amounts to little more than a sunny euphemism for denial or veritaphobia (also aletheiaphobia) – fear of the truth, in all of its glorious and grotesque aspects.
I live in Houston, the positive thinking capital of the world. Houston boasts, among other wonders, the largest megachurch in the country, Lakewood Church, whose boyish and infectiously optimistic pastor, the Reverend Joel Osteen, shepherds more than 40,000 worshippers each week (not counting those in televisionland) through the valley of the sunlight of life. Lakewood (which is nowhere near a lake or a wood, but meets in a former NBA basketball arena on a busy freeway) carries forward an American cultural lineage that stems from the New Thought movement of the late 19th century. The positive thinking movement has included among its leading advocates Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends and Influence People, 1936), Rev. Norman Vincent Peale (The Power of Positive Thinking, 1952), Rev. Robert Schuller (Living Positively One Day at a Time, 1986), and various strains of New Age and related thought, including Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret (2006). Joel Osteen, as the lineage’s most prominent figure today, carries the banner of positive thinking confidently aloft into the thick fog of the 21st century.
Joel's God has been very good to Joel, blessing him with a River Oaks mansion, a Bentley, and a Christian corporate empire. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to visit his main Sunday service awhile back. Its musical offerings – both from the choir and from an elaborate stage show – were top notch. The worship service’s overall production values rivaled those of Broadway or Las Vegas. The sermon was, as always, tirelessly upbeat. It was the same sermon I’ve heard Rev. Osteen preach several times before on television; only the homespun anecdotes and heartwarming, self-effacing jokes were fresh. I learned once again that Joel’s God wants us to accentuate the positive and overlook the negative. Through the grace of positive thinking we can prosper and get ahead in the world. Meanwhile, he urges us to be grateful for the blessings we’ve received rather than resentful toward those who’ve received more. Like Rev. Joel, for instance.
The message in a nutshell: If you can’t see something nice, don’t see anything at all.
Lakewood Church, Inc. is obviously doing well in the Sunday morning religious market, reaching a diverse demographic of hope consumers. The church draws many, including immigrants, who come from modest means and are looking to climb the ladder of American success. I mean the ladder to heaven.
I swear I was nowhere near Lakewood on the Sunday earlier this year when a thief made off with $600,000 in love offerings.
In addition to being a leading center of painless Christianity, Houston may also be the civic boosterism capital of the world. The city’s corporate culture, which suffuses every aspect of its life down to the cellular level, is cultivated assiduously by its many Chambers of Commerce, known collectively as the Greater Houston Partnership. The GHP recently unveiled a new promotional slogan for the city. We’re now the “City with No Limits.” (No limits to sprawl? No limits to greed? No limits to hyperinequality?)
Apart from Lakewood, no organization has done more to promote positive thinking in our community than GHP. Our projected image: Houston Means Business. We’re a bold, booming city, where regulations are limited and opportunities to get rich (I mean “successful”) are boundless. Here, even the sky itself is not the limit, says GHP. Apparently there are no limits to the growth of the oil and gas industry, the city’s economic foundation, or to the emission of greenhouse gases passing through Houston-based corporate offices, refineries and tailpipes on their way into Earth's warming atmosphere, land and oceans. Nothing must be allowed to stand in the way of the growth of the Houston economy, not even the laws of nature.
The best critique of positive thinking I know is Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided, a social history of the American positive thinking movement which she undertook after being diagnosed with breast cancer, and being told by one person after another that the essential key to her recovery was a cheerful attitude. Positive thinking, she argues, “requires deliberate self-deception, including a constant effort to repress or block out unpleasant possibilities and 'negative' thoughts.” It “encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate.”
Do women who die of breast cancer have only themselves to blame for their mortality? And what would a positive attitude toward carcinogens look like?
Ehrenreich herself is not morose, but only pleasantly skeptical. She’s by no means anti-optimistic within the bounds of an honest relationship with reality, and she takes a negative view of chronic negativity. But she sees in the positive thinking movement a relentless and superficial ideology offering merely psychological remedies to problems that are profoundly social and systemic in nature, and not just individual and personal.
Consider, for example the problem (“challenge,” “opportunity”) of long-term global warming and climate change. There are things we can do at the individual and psychological level to reduce our carbon footprints, to be sure. And we should be as optimistic as we reasonably can be in the light of current scientific understandings. But eventual solutions to the problem of destructive climate change, if they come, will require that we work far beyond the myopic limits of individual psychology. We will also need scientific and technical solutions e.g., further development of renewable energy technology, battery storage, and energy-efficient systems), economic solutions (massive investment in making clean energy cheaper, and taxing carbon to build the real environmental and health costs of fossil fuels into their prices), and political solutions (e.g., organizing resistance to the enormous political power of the carbon industries, and seeking international leadership and cooperation) as we usher in a new age of smarter, cleaner, more sustainable energy. On the scientific, technical, and economic fronts I’m personally optimistic. On the political front, not so much. Pardon the honest pessimism.
All the positive thinking in the world, by itself, is not going to turn the Keeling Curve downward by slowing or reversing the steadily rising accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The laws of nature don’t care what we think, how we think, or even whether we survive. They do what they do, and one thing they do is trap heat with greenhouse gasses.
I’m still trying to find the cool side of that brute fact.
Have an honestly good day. :)
-- originally posted in Danagram
The devout positive thinker will be wary of the purveyors of critical thinking, which takes account of both the bright and shadowed sides of reality and doesn’t try to wish problems (I mean “challenges”) away. Critical thinking about positive thinking may cause us to doubt its powers, and then where will we be? Back in an imperfect reality where not all truths are pretty, no matter how much rose-colored light we bathe them in.
I’m all for being as optimistic as we reasonably can be in the face of problems (I mean “opportunities”). And I don’t like constant whining and complaining any more than others do. Compulsive negative thinking can be just as distortive as compulsive positive thinking in its denial of reality’s manifold complexities. But sometimes our dissatisfactions are legitimate and our complaints are warranted, and suppressing them doesn’t make them go away. It only drives them underground to fester.
That’s why I say “neither Polyanna nor Eeyore be.”
I believe instead in the power of honest thinking. Honest thinking doesn’t candycoat. It doesn’t habitually euphemize (or “tell the truth attractively,” like a real estate agent trying to sell a hole in the ceiling as a skylight). Honest thinking doesn’t spotlight positives while hiding negatives, as corporate advertising and public relations do. Honest thinking can be both critical and appreciative, both optimistic in some respects and pessimistic in others. Honest thinking isn’t so afraid of complex realities that it can’t face them squarely and respond to them creatively and constructively.
Positive thinking, on the other hand, sometimes amounts to little more than a sunny euphemism for denial or veritaphobia (also aletheiaphobia) – fear of the truth, in all of its glorious and grotesque aspects.
I live in Houston, the positive thinking capital of the world. Houston boasts, among other wonders, the largest megachurch in the country, Lakewood Church, whose boyish and infectiously optimistic pastor, the Reverend Joel Osteen, shepherds more than 40,000 worshippers each week (not counting those in televisionland) through the valley of the sunlight of life. Lakewood (which is nowhere near a lake or a wood, but meets in a former NBA basketball arena on a busy freeway) carries forward an American cultural lineage that stems from the New Thought movement of the late 19th century. The positive thinking movement has included among its leading advocates Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends and Influence People, 1936), Rev. Norman Vincent Peale (The Power of Positive Thinking, 1952), Rev. Robert Schuller (Living Positively One Day at a Time, 1986), and various strains of New Age and related thought, including Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret (2006). Joel Osteen, as the lineage’s most prominent figure today, carries the banner of positive thinking confidently aloft into the thick fog of the 21st century.
Joel's God has been very good to Joel, blessing him with a River Oaks mansion, a Bentley, and a Christian corporate empire. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to visit his main Sunday service awhile back. Its musical offerings – both from the choir and from an elaborate stage show – were top notch. The worship service’s overall production values rivaled those of Broadway or Las Vegas. The sermon was, as always, tirelessly upbeat. It was the same sermon I’ve heard Rev. Osteen preach several times before on television; only the homespun anecdotes and heartwarming, self-effacing jokes were fresh. I learned once again that Joel’s God wants us to accentuate the positive and overlook the negative. Through the grace of positive thinking we can prosper and get ahead in the world. Meanwhile, he urges us to be grateful for the blessings we’ve received rather than resentful toward those who’ve received more. Like Rev. Joel, for instance.
The message in a nutshell: If you can’t see something nice, don’t see anything at all.
Lakewood Church, Inc. is obviously doing well in the Sunday morning religious market, reaching a diverse demographic of hope consumers. The church draws many, including immigrants, who come from modest means and are looking to climb the ladder of American success. I mean the ladder to heaven.
I swear I was nowhere near Lakewood on the Sunday earlier this year when a thief made off with $600,000 in love offerings.
In addition to being a leading center of painless Christianity, Houston may also be the civic boosterism capital of the world. The city’s corporate culture, which suffuses every aspect of its life down to the cellular level, is cultivated assiduously by its many Chambers of Commerce, known collectively as the Greater Houston Partnership. The GHP recently unveiled a new promotional slogan for the city. We’re now the “City with No Limits.” (No limits to sprawl? No limits to greed? No limits to hyperinequality?)
Apart from Lakewood, no organization has done more to promote positive thinking in our community than GHP. Our projected image: Houston Means Business. We’re a bold, booming city, where regulations are limited and opportunities to get rich (I mean “successful”) are boundless. Here, even the sky itself is not the limit, says GHP. Apparently there are no limits to the growth of the oil and gas industry, the city’s economic foundation, or to the emission of greenhouse gases passing through Houston-based corporate offices, refineries and tailpipes on their way into Earth's warming atmosphere, land and oceans. Nothing must be allowed to stand in the way of the growth of the Houston economy, not even the laws of nature.
The best critique of positive thinking I know is Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided, a social history of the American positive thinking movement which she undertook after being diagnosed with breast cancer, and being told by one person after another that the essential key to her recovery was a cheerful attitude. Positive thinking, she argues, “requires deliberate self-deception, including a constant effort to repress or block out unpleasant possibilities and 'negative' thoughts.” It “encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate.”
Do women who die of breast cancer have only themselves to blame for their mortality? And what would a positive attitude toward carcinogens look like?
Ehrenreich herself is not morose, but only pleasantly skeptical. She’s by no means anti-optimistic within the bounds of an honest relationship with reality, and she takes a negative view of chronic negativity. But she sees in the positive thinking movement a relentless and superficial ideology offering merely psychological remedies to problems that are profoundly social and systemic in nature, and not just individual and personal.
Consider, for example the problem (“challenge,” “opportunity”) of long-term global warming and climate change. There are things we can do at the individual and psychological level to reduce our carbon footprints, to be sure. And we should be as optimistic as we reasonably can be in the light of current scientific understandings. But eventual solutions to the problem of destructive climate change, if they come, will require that we work far beyond the myopic limits of individual psychology. We will also need scientific and technical solutions e.g., further development of renewable energy technology, battery storage, and energy-efficient systems), economic solutions (massive investment in making clean energy cheaper, and taxing carbon to build the real environmental and health costs of fossil fuels into their prices), and political solutions (e.g., organizing resistance to the enormous political power of the carbon industries, and seeking international leadership and cooperation) as we usher in a new age of smarter, cleaner, more sustainable energy. On the scientific, technical, and economic fronts I’m personally optimistic. On the political front, not so much. Pardon the honest pessimism.
All the positive thinking in the world, by itself, is not going to turn the Keeling Curve downward by slowing or reversing the steadily rising accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The laws of nature don’t care what we think, how we think, or even whether we survive. They do what they do, and one thing they do is trap heat with greenhouse gasses.
I’m still trying to find the cool side of that brute fact.
Have an honestly good day. :)
-- originally posted in Danagram
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