Bright-Sided

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  The more pastors functioned as CEOs, socialized with CEOs, and immersed themselves in the lore of corporate management, the more they were likely to think of themselves as fellow CEOs. Business leaders needed to think positively in order to sell their products and increase their market share; so too did enterprising pastors. A growing number of them are nondenominational, meaning they cannot turn to a centralized bureaucracy for financial or any other kind of support. Facing uncharted territory and a skeptical population of the unchurched, they depend entirely on their own charisma and salesmanship, which in turn often depends on positive thinking. Osteen, for example, attributes his acquisition of the Compaq Center not only to God but also to his ability to visualize this bold move: “I began to ‘see’ our congregation worshiping God in the Compaq Center in the heart of Houston.” He advises anyone interested in prosperity to do the same: “Get rid of those old wineskins. Get rid of that small-minded thinking and start thinking as God thinks. Think big. Think increase. Think abundance. Think more than enough.” 28

  Churches are not the only institutions to have become more “corporate” in recent decades, in their appearance, management, and techniques for growth. Universities have been corporatized, hiring MBAs as administrators, evolving from Gothic to blank modernist design, adopting aggressive marketing techniques, and, as noted earlier, occasionally bringing in motivational speakers. At a meeting of another kind of nonprofit a few years ago—one devoted to expanding women’s economic opportunities—I was surprised to find it “facilitated” by a hired team-building coach who had us start by breaking into small groups to “bond” over our dreams and “most embarrassing experiences.” Even labor unions, the historic antagonists of corporations, are likely today to employ corporate styles of management and—what would have been unthinkable to the kind of old-fashioned organizer who struck up conversations with workers in bars or at factory gates—to use surveys and focus groups to shape their appeals to potential recruits. Everywhere you go, you are likely to encounter the same corporate jargon of “incentivizing,” “value added,” and “going forward”; the same chains of command; the same arrays of desks and cubicles; the same neutral, functionalist disregard for aesthetics; the same reliance on motivation and manufactured team spirit.

  But it could be argued that a special affinity has grown up between corporations and the churches, especially megachurches, that goes beyond superficial similarities. In the last couple of decades, while churches were becoming more like corporations, corporations were becoming more like churches—headed up by charismatic figures claiming, or aspiring to, almost mystical powers of leadership. Commenting on the trend toward charismatic, or, as they call it, “transformational” leadership, two management professors have written that “much management practice is indeed moving beyond a purely metaphorical similarity to the rituals and mindsets of religious devotion.” They argue that corporations increasingly resemble what are commonly known as cults—organizations that demand total acquiescence to a seemingly divinely inspired leader. 29 Not only have megachurch pastors taken corporate CEOs as role models, but CEOs have sometimes returned the favor, as in the mutual admiration between Rick Warren and his CEO friends. In an article on the megachurch phenomenon, the Economist noted:

  Indeed, in a nice reversal businesses have also started to learn from the churches. The late Peter Drucker pointed out that these churches have several lessons to teach mainline businesses. They are excellent at motivating their employees and volunteers, and at transforming volunteers from well-meaning amateurs into disciplined professionals. The best churches (like some of the most notorious cults) have discovered the secret of low-cost and self-sustaining growth: transforming seekers into evangelicals who will then go out and recruit more seekers. 30

  So, from a seeker’s point of view, what is the difference between a megachurch and the corporation at which he or she works? Visually, not much: the megachurch looks like a corporate office building or headquarters; its pastor is more likely to wear a business suit than clerical robes; religious symbols and icons have been stripped away. In addition, both institutions offer, as their core philosophy, a motivational message about getting ahead, overcoming obstacles, and achieving great things through positive thinking. To further enhance the connection between church and workplace, some leading pastors make a point of endorsing “free enterprise” and its demands on the average worker. Schuller warns against using the fact of being “disadvantaged” or subjected to racial prejudice as “an excuse to keep from trying.” 31 Osteen writes that “employers prefer employees who are excited about working at their companies,” and to those who feel they’re not paid enough to feel “excited,” he counsels: “You won’t be blessed, with that kind of attitude. God wants you to give it everything you’ve got. Be enthusiastic. Set an example.” 32

  But there’s one immediately obvious difference between the megachurch and the corporate workplace: church is nice. No one will yell at you, impose impossible deadlines, or make you feel inadequate. Smiling volunteers greet you as you enter on Sunday morning, and after the service you may get to shake the CEO’s—that is, the pastor’s—hand. There is child care, as well as all the support groups and services. Best of all, even if you fail to tithe at the generally recommended 10 percent, even if you are guilty of frequent absenteeism or lack the time to volunteer, even if you lapse back into what was once known as sin and now understood as “negativity,” you will not be asked to leave. And this may be an important part of the megachurches’ appeal: they are simulacra of the corporate workplace, offering all the visual signs of corporate power and efficiency, only without the cruelty and fear. You cannot be downsized from church.

  So the seeker who embraces positive theology finds him-or herself in a seamless, self-enclosed world, stretching from workplace to mall to corporate-style church. Everywhere, he or she hears the same message—that you can have all that stuff in the mall, as well as the beautiful house and car, if only you believe that you can. But always, in a hissed undertone, there is the darker message that if you don’t have all that you want, if you feel sick, discouraged, or defeated, you have only yourself to blame. Positive theology ratifies and completes a world without beauty, transcendence, or mercy.

  SIX

  Positive Psychology:

  The Science of Happiness

  It was 1997, and Martin Seligman anxiously awaited the results of an electoral drama little noted by the rest of the nation—the choice of a new president for the American Psychological Association. A distinguished researcher and skilled organizational player within the APA, Seligman was nevertheless convinced that he would lose. By his own admission, he is a “dyed-in-the-wool pessimist,” a “grouch,” even a “walking nimbus cloud.” 1 But apparently unharmed by his negativity, he won and within a few months proposed that the theme of his presidency would be “positive psychology”—the study of “positive” emotions and mind-sets like optimism, happiness, fulfillment, and “flow.”

  Until Seligman’s ascendency within the psychology profession, positive thinking had gained no purchase in the academy. In the fifties, intellectuals mocked Norman Vincent Peale, and four decades later academics tended to dismiss the ideas of his successors as pop cultural ephemera and the stuff of cheap hucksterism. But when Seligman secured a bully pulpit—and set about attracting a rich, nurturing stream of foundation money—respectable Ph.D.-level psychologists began to generate a huge volume of academic papers, some of them published in the new Journal of Happiness Studies, linking optimism and happiness to every possible desirable outcome, including health and career success. The new positive psychology, or “science of happiness,” was an instant hit with the media, winning cover stories in news magazines and a steady drumbeat of good news (for optimists, anyway) in the newspapers. For any nonacademic motivational speaker, coach, or self-help entrepreneur who happened to be paying attention, it was a godsend. No longer did they need to invoke the deity or occult notions like the law
of attraction to explain the connection between positive thoughts and positive outcomes; they could fall back on that touchstone phrase of rational, secular discourse—“studies show . . .”

  Positive psychologists are usually careful to distance themselves from the pop versions of positive thinking. “We see it as so different from what we do,” one academic happiness researcher—Stanford’s Sonja Lyubomirsky—told Elle magazine, “like, ‘Well, we do science, and those people are just spouting off their ideas.’ ” In the same article, Seligman dismissed pop positive thinking as “fraudulent” and promised that, within a decade, “we’ll have self-help books that actually work.” 2 Positive psychologists do not subscribe to the law of attraction or promise to make their readers rich. In fact, they have a certain contempt for wealth—not uncommon among academics—and focus instead on the loftier goal of happiness and all the benefits, such as health, that it supposedly confers.

  But the positive psychologists have been quick to borrow from the playbook of their cousins in the coaching and motivation businesses. They publish mass-market books with “you” or “your” in the title—a tell-tale sign of the self-help genre—like Seligman’s What You Can Change . . . and What You Can’t and Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment. They go into the life-coaching business—as Seligman did, for example, until 2005, providing coaching by conference call to hundreds of people at a time for $2,000 each. He also developed a cash-generating Web site, [http://reflectivehappiness.com] reflectivehappiness.com, promoting “monthly exercises intended to increase happiness,” which came with the hucksterish assurance that “we are so confident that this program will help you, we’ve developed a no-obligation, limited-time offer to try Dr. Seligman’s powerful program for one month free.” 3

  And, following the motivation industry, positive psychologists have reached out to claim a market in the corporate world. The 2007 book Positive Psychology Coaching: Putting the Science of Happiness to Work for Your Clients admits that “the idea of selling happiness to large companies might seem preposterous” but quickly goes on to list the bottom-line benefits of happiness in the form of more eager and productive workers, eventually concluding that “happiness doesn’t need to be sold. . . . It sells itself.” 4 Seligman himself consulted to the management of David’s, a chain of bridal shops, reportedly generating increased sales, as well as to unnamed Fortune 500 companies, offering “exercises” to increase employees’ optimism and hence, supposedly, their health. 5

  Whatever it was—scientific breakthrough or flamboyant bid for funding and attention—positive psychology provided a solution to the mundane problems of the psychology profession. Effective antidepressants had become available at the end of the 1980s, and these could be prescribed by a primary care physician after a ten-minute diagnostic interview, so what was left for a psychologist to do? In the 1990s, managed care providers and insurance companies turned against traditional psychotherapy, effectively defunding those practitioners who offered lengthy courses of talk therapy. The Michigan Psychological Association declared psychology “a profession at risk” and a California psychologist told the San Francisco Chronicle that “because of managed care, many clinical psychologists aren’t being allowed to treat clients as they believe they should. They still want to work in the field of helping people, so they’re moving out of therapy into coaching.” 6 If there was no support for treating the sick, there were endless possibilities in coaching ordinary well people in the direction of greater happiness, optimism, and personal success. “Lying awake at night,” Seligman wrote in his introduction to his book Authentic Happiness, “you probably ponder, as I have, how to go from plus two to plus seven in your life, not just how to go from minus five to minus three.” 7

  Seligman did not, of course, present the shift away from a “negative,” pathology-oriented psychology as a new career strategy for psychologists. He spoke of it as a response to historical circumstances, telling an interviewer in 2000—perhaps forgivably, since this was before the bursting of the dot-com bubble, 9/11, and war with Iraq—that:

  It is surprising that we have very high levels of depression and pessimism in a world in which the hands on the nuclear clock are farther away from midnight than they have ever been, in a nation in which every economic indicator, every objective indicator of well-being, is going north, in a world in which there are fewer soldiers dying on the battlefield than any time since WWII, and in which there is a lower percentage of children dying of starvation than at any time in human history. 8

  Why so much negativity in such a comfortable age? Seligman blames our perilous evolution: “Because our brain evolved during a time of ice, flood and famine, we have a catastrophic brain. The way the brain works is looking for what’s wrong. The problem is, that worked in the Pleistocene era. It favored you, but it doesn’t work in the modern world.” 9 As he wrote in 2004 with his frequent collaborator Ed Diener, “Because goods and services are plentiful and because simple needs are largely satisfied in modern societies, people today have the luxury of refocusing their attention on the ‘good life.’ ” 10 In this view, which was restated uncritically by a reviewer of two books on happiness in a February 2006 issue of the New Yorker, our Paleolithic ancestors may have been well served by the suspicion that a saber-toothed cat crouched behind every bush, but today we would do better to visualize pots of gold. 11

  Going to the Source

  I approached my chance to interview Martin Seligman in May 2007 with some trepidation. Only three months earlier I had published an essay in Harper’s critical of both positive psychology and pop positive thinking. Sure enough, when I first encountered Seligman he was practically scowling. “There he is!” the security guard at the reception desk in a boxlike building at the University of Pennsylvania said, pointing upward to a short, solid, bullet-headed man looking down from the second-floor balcony. I smiled and waved, to which Seligman responded only, “You’ll have to take the elevator.”

  He was not, however, waiting for me on the second floor and had disappeared into his office. His secretary informed me that he would be busy for a minute and that he wanted me to meet these two ladies from the Australian military while I waited. after shaking their hands and learning that they had come for help in “preventing problems before they get to the complaint stage,” I was ushered into his office, only to face another delay—a phone call from the BBC, he told me, which I was welcome to sit through, although no chair was offered.

  The phone call—to schedule an interview about a plan to offer “optimism training” in the British public schools—seemed to lift his spirits, and after a few minutes of innocuous conversation, he announced that it was such a beautiful day that it would be a shame to spend it indoors. “I have a plan,” he said. “We’re going to go the art museum. Flowers will be blooming outdoors and we can see the Monets.” I protested weakly that this excursion might interfere with note taking, not bothering to point out the contradiction between being in a museum and being outdoors. But apparently he was following his own instruction from Authentic Happiness: “Choose your venue and design your mood to fit the task at hand.” 12 As soon as we were in a taxi heading to the museum, he revealed that the Monets were his wife’s idea. “That’ll put her in a good mood,” she had suggested. I began to wonder whether the Australian visitors and the BBC call had been timed, in part, for my benefit.

  Once we were at the museum—the one made famous by Rocky Balboa—the barriers to a normal interview seemed only to multiply. First he insisted on a quick tramp around the outside of the building; then, inside at the reception desk, he made my heart sink by inquiring about a lecture that seemed to be going on. When that turned out to be unavailable, he started asking about an exhibition of photographs of early Santa Monica, and I pictured an afternoon spent trailing him throughout the more obscure sections of the museum. It was impossible not to dwell on the fact that Seligman’s early work, before he anno
unced the launching of positive psychology, had been about “learned helplessness,” showing that when dogs are tormented in random ways they become passive, depressed, and unable to defend themselves.

  Although note taking was almost impossible, I attempted to carry on a conversation about Authentic Happiness, which I had found just as elusive as he was turning out to be. Like most lay books on positive thinking, it’s a jumble of anecdotes (primarily autobiographical in Seligman’s case), references to philosophers and religious texts, and tests you can take to assess your progress toward a happier and healthier mind-set. Only on a second reading did I begin to discern a progression of thoughts—not a logical progression but at least a kind of arc. He begins with what positive psychologists call their field’s “origin story,” about how he was weeding his garden one day when his five-year-old daughter challenged him to stop being such a “grouch.” Grouchiness, he realizes, is endemic to the academic world: “I have noticed over thirty years of psychology department faculty meetings—conducted in a cheerless, gray, and windowless room full of unrepentant grouches—that the ambient mood is on the chilly side of zero.” Prodded by his daughter, he decides that “it was worth trying hard to put more positive emotion into my life,” and a veritable candy land of pleasures begins to open up, epitomized by “a cloudless spring day, the ending of the Beatles’ ‘Hey Jude,’ pictures of babies and young lambs, and sitting down in front of a blazing fire on a snowy evening.” 13