PENNIES FROM HEAVEN.

Every time it rains

Pennies from heaven

Don’t you know each cloud contains

Pennies from heaven

by stanley

It’s extraordinary the way the madness of positive-thinking infects people who have not been directly exposed to its teachings. It has spread like a virus. It has mutated into a form for which we have little resistance. It has merged with spirituality. To think positively has become a secular spiritual religion, where being positive and being spiritual are the same thing: an irresistible and deadly combination.

We need to say again that this new religion flies in the face of all psychological evidence. The truth is that our thoughts do not govern our emotional life. The kind of thinking that goes on in our head most of the time is the product of our emotional life, not the cause of it.

But at last there are some brave souls who are speaking out. This week’s Listener (March 20-26) carries a front page banner: HOW POSITIVE THINKING IS FOOLING US; and inside there is a full five page article reviewing a new book by Barbara Ehrenreich ‘Smile or Die: how positive thinking has fooled America and the World’

The ChCh Public Library’s summary of the book is: ‘A sharp-witted knockdown of America's love affair with positive thinking and an urgent call for a new commitment to realism, existential clarity and courage.’

‘We have, she says, been “bright-sided”. Although there is nothing more natural than the pursuit of happiness, it is now being ruthlessly enforced in a way that is most unnatural. Positiveness is now demanded of powerless employees, who in the US, can be sacked if they don’t have the “right attitude”, of Christians who are told they are letting God down if they dwell on bad things, even of invalids, who are told their negativity probably made them ill.

There is no proof, Ehrenreich says, that adopting a positive attitude will make you happier, healthier and richer – instead, says a US researcher, it could be making things worse. “Other studies suggest that mild pessimists are more resilient to life’s catastrophes and less pray to actual depression, because they may be slightly more realistic than optimists.”

Retuning to my point that the kind of thinking we do is the product of our emotional life, not its cause, I am reminded of David Hume’s famous remark (Treatise, ii. iii. 3): ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them’.

What Hume meant by ‘the passions’ in his day, we would now call one’s ‘emotional life’.

‘Smile or Die’ (also published as ‘Bright-sided’) by Barbara Ehrenreich is available at the Canterbury Public Library : 155.23 EHR.