One Simple Idea Read online

  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.

  Perspective on the Positive

  “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.

  * * *

  * When referencing the overall mind-power culture, I often employ the term positive-thinking movement (in which I do not include Christian Science, which, as will be seen, branched into a specific denomination of its own). At various points I use terms such as mind-cure and mental healing to connote the early days of the movement. Historically, these terms—mind-cure, mental healing, and positive thinking—have taken on connotations, sometimes pleasing and sometimes displeasing, to those inside the various movements to which they refer. I use them only as historical appellations; they indicate no judgment toward one school or another.

  chapter two

  positive nation

  Be All You Can Be

  —U.S. Army recruiting slogan, 1980-2001

  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?

  A Brief History of the Mind

  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.

  The next generation of Idealist philosophers, most significantly Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel, also saw reality as a product
of man’s perceptive faculties—but our senses, they argued, were limited in their ability to perceive the true nature of things. The mind was finally experiencing itself, Kant and Hegel reasoned, and not ultimate reality. Like Berkeley, Kant and Hegel also believed, more or less, in a fixed nature or set of universal laws, within which an awakened person could serve as an extraordinary actor but not as an agent of creation.

  Some mid- to late-nineteenth-century modernists, such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, extolled the powers of human will and spoke of an inner-self that formed an invisible seat of power. But, again, such views did not elevate the mind as the author of reality. Indeed, all of the major Idealist philosophers and their offspring, from Kant to Emerson to Nietzsche, held that natural man could ally himself with universal forces, and thus attain a kind of greatness or at least a right way of living, but none broke with Berkeley’s assertion that the shapes and shades of reality “are not creatures of my will.”

  A countercurrent of sorts emerged in the eighteenth-century writings of Swedish scientist and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. Swedenborg’s vast and challenging cosmic philosophy depicted the presence of God as a “Divine influx”—an animating body of energies and ideas—that permeated all of nature, including the mind. Swedenborg’s “Divine influx” echoed aspects of ancient Hermetic thought. In turn, the American philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson took partial influence from Swedenborg’s ideas. In a vastly more engaging manner than the Swedish mystic, Emerson, starting in the 1830s, depicted the mind as a capillary of divine influence, and he described human thought as a kind of concentrically expanding awareness, ultimately capable of godlike perception. Emerson extolled the power of ideas to shape a person’s life, noting in his 1841 essay “Spiritual Laws” that “the ancestor of every action is a thought.” Emerson saw the touch of divine power in an active, sensitive human mind.

  All of these ideas presented tantalizing possibilities to liberal religious thinkers. Yet even by the mid-nineteenth century, the notion of an empirically empowering mysticism, one that could create and shape circumstance, was unheard-of within either reformist or mainstream congregations—and certainly not within Calvinist Protestantism and Catholicism. The modern West possessed no concept that our thoughts, much less a healthful sense of self-worth, could influence or reorder outer events.

  It was only deep within subcultures of religious experimentation that the positive-thinking ideal actually began to take shape—and in settings far removed from universities, seminaries, or philosophical societies.

  In the 1830s, a handful of New Englanders, some raised in America and others transplanted from England and France, started to probe the inner workings of the mind. The New England experimenters, in a period before modern psychological language, gave birth to a set of hypotheses about the effects of thoughts and emotions on health, and about the power of a deeply held idea to alter behavior or outer events.

  “I Gave Up to Die”

  A dramatic turn in how the Western world came to view the mind played out in Maine in 1833. This development hinged upon the experience of a simple and extremely influential man: a New England clockmaker named Phineas P. Quimby. That year, quietly and with little forethought, Quimby embarked on a psychological experiment that formed the germination of the positive-thinking outlook.

  A man in his early thirties, Quimby was suffering from tuberculosis. Under doctor’s orders he had been ingesting calomel, a popular though disastrous therapy in the first half of the nineteenth century. It was a mercury-based toxin that induced massive salivating and foaming of the mouth. Calomel was a common treatment among physicians who practiced “heroic medicine.” The theoretical framework behind heroic medicine was that the draining of bodily fluids could rid a patient of disease and serve as an overall tonic to health. The champion of this approach was physician Benjamin Rush, a friend of Thomas Jefferson’s and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Rush was broadminded in matters of religion. He was among the few friends in whom Jefferson confided his own heterodox religious views, including his disbelief in Biblical miracles. But Rush’s medical ideas, which dominated the American scene for generations, were medieval.

  Along with calomel ingestion, Rush prescribed bleeding or bloodletting, a protocol embraced by other American doctors, who added a variety of measures to drain bodily fluids, such as open or “weeping” wounds, the ingestion of toxins and narcotics to produce profuse sweating, and—almost unbelievable in the modern era—the application of bloodsucking leeches. Rush viewed illness not as something to be healed but to be combated. “Always treat nature in a sick room as you would a noisy dog or cat,” he told students, “drive her out at the door and lock it upon her.” This was the reality facing Quimby and most American patients in the first half of the nineteenth century.

  By the early 1830s, the ingestion of calomel was causing Quimby to suffer from mercury poisoning. The side effects were disfiguring. “I had taken so much calomel,” he later wrote in his journals, “that my system was said to be poisoned with it; I lost many of my teeth from that effect.” He continued, “In this state I was compelled to abandon my business and, losing all hope, I gave up to die.” At this time Quimby and his wife, Susannah, had two sons and an infant daughter. How they managed to support a family during Quimby’s illness is a trial of which he makes no mention.

  With little left to lose, Quimby turned to a therapeutic procedure recommended by a friend: horseback riding. “Having an acquaintance who cured himself by riding horseback,” he recalled, “I thought I would try riding in a carriage as I was too weak to ride horseback.” In actuality, Quimby was reprising a treatment known to the ancient Greeks, who used vigorous horseback riding as a tonic. One day Quimby set off in his carriage in the countryside outside Belfast, Maine. He had a “contrary” horse, which kept stopping and finally would not budge unless the clockmaker ran beside him. Exhausted from running the horse up a hill, Quimby collapsed into the carriage and sat stranded two miles from home. He managed to call to a man plowing a nearby field and asked him to come and start the horse. “He did so,” Quimby continued,

  and at the time I was so weak I could scarcely lift my whip. But excitement took possession of my senses, and I drove the horse as fast as he could go, up hill and down, till I reached home and, when I got into the stable, I felt as strong as I ever did. From that time I continued to improve, not knowing, however, that the excitement was the cause…

  Quimby grew intrigued at how the frenetic carriage ride seemed to lift his symptoms of tuberculosis. As his spirits rose, he noticed, so did his bodily vigor. The carriage ride formed Quimby’s earliest notions that the mind had an effect on the body. But it would take the experience of an occult philosophy called Mesmerism, which was then reaching America from Paris, to make Quimby ponder the full possibilities. Mesmerism, the work of self-styled eighteenth-century Viennese healer Franz Anton Mesmer, ignited a new range of hypotheses about the human mind.

  Mesmer’s Revolution

  Born in 1734, Franz Anton Mesmer was a German-speaking physician of the late Enlightenment era. In the 1770s, Mesmer theorized that all of life was shot through with an invisible ethereal fluid, which he called animal magnetism. If this vital fluid was out of alignment, Mesmer reasoned, illness resulted. He claimed to correct the flow of animal magnetism by placing a patient into a trance state, or a magnetized condition. Mesmer induced trances by making a series of hand and eye gestures, or “passes,” around a subject’s face and head. Once a subject was entranced, his vital energies, Mesmer believed, could be realigned. Most notably, Mesmer also discovered that trance subjects were receptive and malleable to his commands.

  This is the practice that was redubbed “hypnotism” in the early 1840s by Scottish physician James Braid. Braid considered it a mental process and not an occult manipulation of unseen energies. Indeed, Mesmer himself did not perceive his method as an occult healing, but as a practice in league with Enlightenment
-age principles.

  Mesmer attained his greatest public acclaim, and notoriety, in 1778 after moving to Paris, a place already roiling with intrigues and tensions in the years preceding the French Revolution. Mesmer conducted public séances, or sittings, where he would attempt to heal patients in a dramatic group atmosphere. During Mesmer’s séances, people suffering from maladies ranging from consumption to joint pain to melancholia were seated, hands linked, around a wooden tub, or baquet, containing iron rods and fillings, which had been specially “magnetized” to realign a subject’s vital energies. During séances, patients were expected to experience convulsions and fainting—which Mesmer dubbed “crises”—as a signal that their bodily magnetism was responding to treatment.

  While Mesmer acknowledged that his treatments depended upon sympathies between the patient and Mesmerist (someone who practiced his art), he rarely probed the matter further. “There is only one illness and one healing,” Mesmer wrote, steadfastly insisting on the existence of an invisible fluidic flow. The eighteenth-century healer possessed neither a vocabulary nor the background to pursue questions about mind-body healing and subliminal states. The question of mental suggestion went unasked.

  Many advocates of social reform in France took a deep interest in Mesmerism. To these enthusiasts, the susceptibility of all people, from peasants to noblemen, to enter a Mesmeric trance validated the ideal of an innate equality within human beings. Indeed, in France of the late eighteenth century, every advance in science or industry took on political overtones. To Mesmer’s supporters, efforts to discredit Mesmerism amounted to the ploy of entrenched aristocratic interests, such as the French Academy of Sciences, to suppress a medical practice that was outside their purview and that could be used to aid common people.