Mitch Horowitz believes that “one simple idea,” as he puts it, has reshaped modern life. But although he purports to give a history of that simple idea — the notion of positive thinking — his is a biased retelling.
In the opening chapter of One Simple Idea, Horowitz describes the principle of positive thinking this way: “Picture an outcome, dwell on it in your thoughts and feelings, and unseen agencies — whether metaphysical or psychological — will supposedly come to your aid.” (The “supposedly” asserts that Horowitz is looking at the movement at a remove, but that distance does not remain for the entire book.)
The most enduring concept of the positive thinking movement, Horowitz writes, is the Law of Attraction, popularized in Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret. The idea is that “like attracts like” and “there are no accidents.” If you think positive thoughts, Byrne declares in her famous book, you can bring about positive outcomes, including money, material things, and career success. But if something bad happens to you, your own negative thoughts are to blame.
Horowitz makes the case that positive thinking is pervasive in twenty-first-century America. He cites “the mass-media ministries of evangelists such as Joel Osteen, Creflo Dollar, and T.D. Jakes,” the huge audiences of Oprah, Dr. Phil, and Dr. Oz, support groups, twelve-step programs, self-affirmation posters, and other trappings of the movement we encounter daily.
If your immediate reaction to rah-rah posters on a wall or to Joel Osteen is “It’s all such bullshit!”, Horowitz will not be surprised. In fact, a section of his first chapter has exactly that heading. There, he acknowledges Barbara Ehrenreich’s stinging critique of how we chirpily tell cancer patients to think positive thoughts — that critique being part of her own book on how positive-thinking culture has undermined America.
Horowitz assures readers that he does not ascribe to the magic-wand view of positive thinking. Yet he also cautions that the most vociferous detractors have also overstated their case. He promises to build up to a final and most significant chapter titled, “Does it work?”
Horowitz’s book sounded reasonable to me, and sweeping in its scope — and, potentially fascinating. In too many ways, though, it wasn’t.
Positive psychology, “the scientific study of the strengths that enable individuals and communities to thrive,” has taken academic psychology by storm. The many practicing positive-psychology scholars now have their own conferences and journals and sources of research funding. I would have found a thoughtful assessment of that development most welcome in Horowitz’s book. Oddly, there is no discussion of it at all.
One Simple Idea is, more than anything else, a history of the positive thinking (or New Thought) movement, yet told primarily through the stories of insiders. All but the first and last chapters are devoted almost entirely to the telling of this history. Familiar names appear, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as well as Norman Vincent Peale (a reverend who wrote about positive thinking in the post-war years), Dale Carnegie, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, and Bob Smith (the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous). There are also brief sketches of other lesser-known figures, one after another after another.
Horowitz develops several significant themes, such as how the movement evolved from “thinking one’s way to health and happiness” to thinking one’s way to wealth. He also discusses how the movement “remade American religion from being a salvational force to also being a healing one.” He includes intriguing sections on the important roles women played in the early days and on the turn-of-the-twentieth-century hope that positive thinking could be a force for reducing inequality. (Couldn’t anyone be taught to think positively and thereby attract wealth?, the thinking went.)
The book does not cover up the embarrassments and stains of the positive thinking movement. Norman Vincent Peale, we learn, was part of the group of people arguing that John F. Kennedy should never be elected president because he would take his marching orders from the Pope. Dale Carnegie, Horowitz writes, “believed that the men on top deserved to be there — and his level of introspection on the matter went no further.” Nancy Reagan was not the only member of the Presidential power couple to believe in astrology and UFOs — Ronald Reagan did, too.
Rhonda Byrne would not back off her belief in the Law of Attraction as an absolute explanation even of the most horrible events; when it came to the Holocaust, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina, she insisted that victims’ “dominant thoughts were on the same frequency of such events.” James Ray, leader of the infamous sweat lodge episode in Sedona, Arizona, in which several participants died, left the next morning without talking to survivors or visiting the injured in the hospital.
And yet, Horowitz is overwhelmingly forgiving of all but the most egregious sins within the movement. Critics, he maintains, do not fully understand what they are criticizing. Peale, he writes, “possessed spiritual depth,” though “the world did not see that depth.” Ronald Reagan’s dabbling in psychics, UFOs, astrology, and the like, Horowitz insists, “should not be dismissed as shallowness or mental weakness.” When Horowitz tells the stories of people who were ill or paralyzed or dying and then cured by positive thinking, or by the colorful figures who promised they had the power to cure, he usually does not include any notes of skepticism. He heaps praise on the people and writings he loves, telling us, for instance, that It Works: The Famous Little Red Book That Makes Your Dreams Come True! is “one of the most beguiling and infectious books ever written on mental manifestation.” But he never shares any passages so that we might judge for ourselves.
The most disappointing part of the book, though, is the way Horowitz answers the most important question about positive thinking: Does it work? Of course, Horowitz believes that it does work, even if he acknowledges that it is just one force among many others that shape our lives. The evidence he cites, however, is weird and narrow and bizarrely selective.
The book invokes one researcher’s work on neuroplasticity, as well as a very select slice of a very substantial literature on placebo effects. Horowitz is enamored of extrasensory perception studies, yet seems oblivious to the 2011 publication of Professor Daryl Bem’s ESP research in a mainstream journal and the controversy that ensued. And, in any case, isn’t it a stretch to connect the discerning of what someone in another room is thinking or doing to the “one simple idea” of positive thinking?
Horowitz also marshals as further evidence, if only suggestive, quantum mechanics research on how observation impacts the nature or even presence of an object or an outcome. Here, again, the leap seems a bit too big from the effect of observation at a subatomic level to the power of positive thinking in human life.
Entirely absent from One Simple Idea is the huge stack of studies from academic psychology on the concepts that really are directly relevant to that one simple idea. How effective is optimism and positive thinking? How do ways of thinking affect actual physical measures of health and well-being? In which situations is positive thinking risky, and in which ones is it truly beneficial?
Serious researchers have been busy addressing those questions, and they already have much to tell us. From their efforts, we already know, for example, that exposure to ideas about the power of positive thinking “can lead to cancer patients being perceived as culpable if they do not recover from the disease.” Without even a nod to all of these empirical contributions to the science of positive thinking, One Simple Idea, despite the historical observations it offers, is woefully incomplete.
One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life
Crown, January 2014
Hardcover, 352 pages
$24
from Psych Central http://ift.tt/1FP9zmT
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