Positive and negative thinking
I’ve been reading a couple of books lately which reflect critically on the problems associated with what Barbara Ehrenreich is calling ‘the relentless promotion of positive thinking’. In her new book Smile or Die, she reflects poignantly on the dark side of this approach for individuals dealing with issues like breast cancer and job loss, rendering taboo their expressions of grief and anxiety. She also looks at the financial ruin that follows entrepreneurial ventures driven more by positive thinking than by careful planning. Though I don’t think I’m an especially negative person, and I can definitely see the value of being cheerful and looking for the best in people and situations, I am pretty much with Ehrenreich all the way on this issue. I think it’s silly not to make contingency plans, unkind to inflate people’s expectations beyond reason, and cruel to insist that people who are suffering or frightened should try to ‘avoid negative thoughts’.
But because I spend quite a lot of time talking with people at universities, I do also wonder if there is a twin trend by which we are called to demonstrate our academic rigour by being perennially gloomy – as if any world-is-going-to-pot analysis must be somehow aligned with intelligence (and any maybe-it-will-never happen analysis reduced to an appalling lack of familiarity with fashionable theory and current affairs).
With this possibility in mind, something else I read recently and enjoyed was an article in April’s issue of The Spectator by Owen Harries called ‘Don’t panic, it’s only prophecy’. Having just turned eighty, he takes the opportunity to reflect on all the horrors predicted during his own lifetime which never, in fact, eventuated. He remembers the world during the Cold War, ’poised on the knife-edge of a nuclear disaster’, he quotes Jean-Francois Revel describing democracy as ‘a brief parenthesis that is closing before our eyes’ , and cites Cyril Connolly’s statement that ‘from now on an artist will be judged only by the responance of his solitude or the quality of his despair’. (While I write these out, Sting is hovering around at the back of my mind singing ‘what might save us me and you is if the Russians love their children too…’)
Noting the slightly updated prophecies of utter doom that continue to hang over our postmodern heads (‘global warming, the collapse of capitalism, the prospect of more terrorism and further nuclear proliferations’ ) he writes that a vantage point of eighty years ‘can do something to rescue one from what has been well termed “the parochialism of the present” – the tendency to believe that what is happening now, and to us, must be of unprecedented and transcendent significance’.
For me, this is all very welcome thinking and should such thoughts ever be compiled into a book or even a regular publication like a magazine, I would gladly subscribe – not out of any adherence to the doctrine of positive thinking, but as an antidote to the gloom of academia which might be just as irrational.