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  “We became a victimology … Psychology is not just the study of weakness and damage, it is also the study of strength and virtue,” Seligman wrote in his monthly column for the APA Monitor in 1989, the year he served as president of the American Psychological Association. We have managed to help people go from negative five to zero, he says, but if you’re looking to get up into the positive integers, mental health–wise, you’re on your own. The happy and gifted among us were essentially taking their marching orders from the vast, gray masses of the unhappy bottom and middle. The movement was an attempt to address this imbalance.

  Seligman refers to that which is solely concerned with disease and disorder as “remedial psychology.” “How has it happened that the social sciences view the human strengths and virtues—altruism, courage, honesty, duty, joy, health, responsibility, and good cheer—as derivative, defensive, or downright illusions, while weakness and negative motivations—anxiety, lust, selfishness, paranoia, anger, disorder, and sadness—are viewed as authentic?” he asks.

  While Norem had no quarrel with the movement’s desire to study all human emotion and not just the troubled end of the spectrum, she did have issues with its premise. “Any movement should only have the status of a scientific movement if the outcomes of research, what is going to be proclaimed to be adaptive or healthy, are not preordained.” It’s far easier to swallow a mouthful of honey than one of curry powder, but one doesn’t then judge the former an elixir and the latter poison. Positive feelings may redound to positive outcomes, but it isn’t a given, despite what we are told, and we are told, all the time and in countless ways. “The consequences are not inherent in the emotion itself. It is a sloppy assumption that hedonically positive emotion is related to positive outcomes. Positive emotions may, of course, relate to good things, but there is no necessary relationship. Pride, for example, is positive in that it feels good. It may lead people to work hard or behave well, but it may also lead them to treat others shabbily. Embarrassment is negative because nobody likes how it feels, and it can have negative consequences, but it can also be a powerfully pro-social emotion [hello, Canada!]. The consequences are not inherent in the emotion itself.”

  Norem is absolutely right. It is the false equation of what feels good with what is good that rankles. Self-esteem might seem an unimpeachably positive state, but you don’t have to sit through an endless children’s talent show (is there any other kind?) to know that it has reached unhealthy and epidemic proportions in this country.

  More than the shaky corollaries, though, it was the prickling, Ayn Rand–ish sensation that troubled me. Seligman wrote of a Manhattan Project of sorts being set up to explore how to foster personal strength and civic virtue, returning our society to the greatness of ages past: the democracy of Athens; the honor, discipline, and duty of Victorian England; the pursuit of beauty that was classical Florence. “My vision,” he writes, “is that social science will finally see beyond the remedial and escape from the muckraking that has claimed it, that social science will become a positive force for understanding and promoting the highest qualities of civic and personal life.”

  I’ll leave the glories of ancient Athens’s slave class, Victorian England’s debtors’ prisons (and the rampant syphilis among the child prostitutes resulting from just such parental incarcerations), and the grinding poverty of those Florentines not fortunate enough to be Medicis up to the historians. A return to notions of discipline and civic virtue would be welcome, God knows, but I’m not convinced that social scientists are muckrakers conducting more studies about widespread income disparity, infant mortality, or suicide rates than they are about more positive human endeavors (if, in fact, they are) simply because they find them more “authentic,” or because of some kind of if-it-bleeds-it-leads sensationalism, or worse yet—in classic blaming the thermometer for the temperature—that scrutinizing such problems somehow exacerbates their power and unpleasant effect on the rest of us. It must be a vestigial race memory of the maple-scented egalitarianism of my Canadian upbringing that makes me find it unattractively greedy for the essentially satisfied to demand still greater satisfaction.

  But more than any abstemious impulse to ration out help to those who barely need it, it’s the false division that so repels me. The vision of these warring constituencies—the gloomy hordes, sucking up all available time and resources from the shiny, happy, excellent few. I keep flashing back to what it says in the Inferno: “There is no greater pain than to remember happiness in the midst of one’s misery.” There will be peaks of great joy from which to crow and vales of tears out of which to climb. When and why they will happen, no one can say, but they will happen. To all of us. We will all go back and forth from one to the other countless times during a lifetime. This is not some call to bipartisanship between inimical sides. The Happy and the Sad are the same population.

  There is a question that frequently runs through the reporter’s mind when he is sent on assignment and the story as initially envisioned is failing to bear fruit, and that question is this: “Am I fucked?” It was ricocheting through my brain as I, tape recorder in hand, walked the leafy quads of Wellesley with Julie Norem, and the answer that was pinging back was a qualified yes. Norem’s conclusions were too measured, her argument too subtle for an easily digestible and zeitgeisty magazine piece.

  But it was not the subtlety of Norem’s argument that was in the way as much as I myself. A therapy junkie I know is fond of parroting the adage: “All research is Me-search.” Even though I had read The Positive Power of Negative Thinking very carefully before arriving, I had come up to Massachusetts thinking, hoping, that Norem had actually written a book not about anxiety but about sadness. Specifically, my sadness—highly unlikely as we had only just met that very day.

  Anxiety and sadness often occur at the same time. Psychological assessments for sadness often look for an anxiety component, but they are absolutely separate. One can be anxious and happy, for example (an incomprehensible combination to my mind, like Jewish Republicans). I couldn’t for the life of me tease the anxious and sad strands apart, so I spent a good portion of the day asking poor Julie Norem to once more explain the difference to me. She was doubtless very glad to drop me off at the Amtrak station six hours later.

  My confusion was making me stupid in other ways, too. On the train back, I realized that I had allowed the cassette to auto-reverse on itself over and over, all day long, like a weaver’s shuttle. I had lost many of the hours and hours of questions and answers in a magnetic pentimento. Even as I sat there in the Quiet Car, my hand covering my mouth in wonder at my “yes I am indeed fucked … so very, very fucked” stupidity, I was not hugely surprised at this small act of self-sabotage: I didn’t want to write this piece.

  So I didn’t.

  In the three weeks leading up to the due date, I did no writing at all, aside from my self-pitying, stultifying diary, whose entries all began “T minus X days,” referring to the twentieth, when I would have to call my editor and tell her that I had failed, without even the necessary pages of twaddle I’d need to qualify for a kill fee. I was Penelope at her loom, filling my time with busywork. I woke each day at the crack and, when it seemed appropriate, I would pick up the phone and begin that day’s interviews with other psychologists, all purportedly in the name of re(me)search.

  I spoke to James Pennebaker, the chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas in Austin, who worked with survivors of traumatic experiences. He found that if patients wrote, talked about, or articulately confronted what they had gone through, as opposed to suppressing the feelings, they showed marked improvements in physical health, immune function, and other markers. In another study he conducted in 1989 with David Watson, they found that even the kvetchiest patients, those with the least-positive attitudes, who complained most about their symptoms, turned out to be no objectively sicker than those with low negative affect. It was nice to find out, then, that if one is characterologically incapa
ble of not being a total fuckface, science has not shown you will die any sooner. People might just be gladder when you eventually do.

  David Lykken conducted the Minnesota Study of Twins (not the baseball team; think Doublemint, or Romulus and Remus), collecting data from hundreds of pairs of identical and fraternal twins for years, measuring their subjective well-being (SWB)—their self-reported happiness—and found that “the effects on current SWB of both positive and negative life events are largely gone after just three months and undetectable after six … Most people will have adapted back to their genetically determined set-point.” Lykken found this to be the case across the board among his subjects, regardless of economic, racial, ethnic, gender, or other circumstantial factors. So if you win the lottery or have your limbs lopped off by an oncoming train, within 180 days, you’ll be back to your old self, which is very good—or bad—to know.

  Many scientists have challenged Lykken’s results, and the media has misinterpreted his findings, often conflating the malleable and potential notion of heritability with the genetic verdict of heredity. Even Lykken himself contends that one mustn’t use one’s set-point as a pretext for resigning oneself to one’s DNA.

  “After we published that study, I said something like ‘trying to be happier is like trying to be taller,’ and I regretted that as soon as I saw it in print,” said Lykken on the phone. “It was a smart-aleck comment and in fact I wrote a book to contradict it … one can manage to bounce along above one’s set-point, if you play your cards right and if you realize that the striving for winning the lottery or the big goals is not the solution unless working to get there is in itself gratifying … the important thing is that nature has equipped us, has arranged for us to do her bidding by marshaling us with pain and pleasure. It’s extremely important that we not feel so happy all the time that we don’t get the work done or feel so sad all the time that we don’t get the work done.”

  (The following is off point but amusing, and so I include it: reading further in Lykken’s article “The Heritability of Happiness” in the Harvard Mental Health Letter, I was diverted by—and have no memory as to the pertinence of—an absolutely charming and unintentionally hilarious paragraph about homosexuals, starting with a mention of his wife’s cousin, a man who “brought joy and new life into any room he entered. He was funny … a delightful and imaginative host, an ideal guest …” He goes on to mention that these qualities were wonderfully embodied by William Hurt in Kiss of the Spider Woman as well as Harvey Fierstein. “Only the intractably homophobic would fail to get a lift when he enters the room. What I am suggesting is that gay men, at least those with more feminine natures, seem to make an art of daily living, they enliven the tedious, decorate the drab, make the mundane more amusing … Perhaps the euphemism ‘gay’ is more apt than I had previously thought.”

  Clearly Dr. Lykken has neither had his path blocked by twenty feet of retractable dog leash unreeled across the sidewalk, just so that some narcissistic, over-muscled invert’s pug—imaginatively named Will or Grace or Liza—might walk unimpeded by tax-paying humans, nor, I’m guessing, has Dr. Lykken been the opposite of helped by one of the evil queens on staff at Barneys, but on behalf of my fellow deviants, I would like to say—as I sit here in my own sodomitically bedizened surroundings [the silks, the brocades, the stuffed cockatoo in the golden cage!]—thank you, sir.)

  ———

  I wasn’t getting any work done. At T minus nine days, I startled out of sleep an hour before the alarm, at 5:00 AM, hissing, “Who the hell do you think you are?”—the words out of my mouth before I was fully conscious. I often resort to precisely this little pep talk to myself to get it together and stop fucking around—a cautionary admonition against sloth, usually uttered when I feel I’ve either eaten too much or am lying in bed too long. I sat down and began transcribing my notes. Some time before 9:00, I picked up the phone to call Martin Seligman himself. He had been very nice when setting up the interview, which made me feel like a shitheel. I tried to clear my mind of prejudicial thoughts, reminding myself who was the learned professional with numerous advanced degrees and who was the smart-ass faux journalist.

  The phone was out. Motherfucker. I put on my sneakers and walked out to the corner to the pay phone to call repair. It was street-wide as there were already three people waiting on line. My mood briefly brightened to see that one of them was my next-door neighbor, a handsome Frenchman with a comically perfect V-shaped torso. As I crossed the street, one of the women pointed downtown and there, already in progress at the top of the horizon, a worst-case scenario even the most detail-obsessed defensive pessimist could not have foreseen. The first tower was on fire.

  I never wrote the piece.

  On the day I spent with Norem, both of us having no idea what would be transpiring mere weeks later, I had asked her if she thought it was all going to change, citing the Kruger and Dunning study where optimists got a ticket back to earth when faced with the truth. Would the culture finally come up against reality and temper folks’ rampant enthusiasm in the absence of facts, I wondered? “It had better change,” she answered. “What’s been celebrated in the media for the last ten years were all these twenty-two-year-old dot-com zillionaires, and they were all really optimistic and a lot of people were really optimistic about them in a pretty unnuanced and stupid way. And things have gone well for them, and they made money during the boom years and are perfectly willing to take credit for all their financial astuteness, even though you had to be an idiot if you didn’t make money during those years, apparently. I didn’t,” she added.

  Julie Norem is my kind of girl, I thought at that moment, not knowing that by “my kind of girl” I meant oblivious to the point of consigning Madonna to the dustbin of history. We were both so very wrong. Not wrong in the way everyone not privy to a daily intelligence briefing about bin Laden being determined to strike in the United States was wrong, but because we both grievously misread the tenacity of American glee and its extreme resistance to sharing the emotional spotlight with doubt. Rather than blasting open the doors to allow negative thinking into the public consciousness, the September 11 attacks only seemed to galvanize the optimists to new, adamantine heights of impenetrable positivity. Optimism didn’t just not go away; it became belligerent, aggressive. There was now officially no room for valenced emotions.

  As Norem pointed out, “arguing for negative thinking, under certain circumstances, is very different from arguing against positive thinking.” But the line had been drawn. One could no longer point out that doubts, when voiced, can give dimension to reasoning, improve performance, or stave off disaster. Just like the fallacious separation of the Happy from the Sad, it was both a false division and an intrinsic judgment. Contingency thinking, and contingency thinkers, became saddled with such ancillary traits as being counterproductive, not team players, killjoys, Cassandras, or worse: people whose allegiances were seriously in question, appeasers. In reality, it was no more traitorous than a parent looking out for the best interests of his child. Say you came to me, for example, contemplating a preemptive invasion of a sovereign nation (an incursion predicated on cooked intelligence, misinformation, and outright lies, but never mind), and you tried to convince me that said incursion would spread the honeyed sunshine of democracy and freedom upon a formerly dark corner of the world and occasion from the inhabitants of that sovereign nation nothing but full-throated greetings to you and your troops as liberators and the heaping upon you of grateful garlands. I might say, “Well, that’s terrific, and best of luck on your dubiously noble and messianic project.” But if I in turn add, “Before you go, have you checked that you have enough soldiers, adequately outfitted with sufficient gear? We don’t want them scavenging the Baghdad rubbish heaps for scrap metal to fashion hillbilly armor, now, do we?” If that’s all I said, just that little bit of small-voiced advocacy for some contingency planning. If I never once asked after the authenticity of those aerial photographs presented to the
U.N. by Colin Powell (merely acting according to the tenets of the loyal soldier he was. Truly, if he’s so bound by the ancient codes of honor, so haunted by the ghosts of the thousands of lives he is partially responsible for snuffing out, then let’s go all ancient Sparta on his loyal soldier ass. Let him fall upon his sword or offer up his tender throat to the blade. Isn’t that what they did back then? All that wrestling with himself on the Sunday morning news shows, the repellent too-little-too-late ex post facto tortured regret, his conscience-ridden resignation … well, all I can say is Yiddishists everywhere should bow down before this apotheosis of chutzpah. But let me be clear about this: Bush and Co. didn’t lie because they are optimists. They lied because they are liars. Okay, back to the matter at hand …), supposing I didn’t mention any of that, nor even the complicit looking the other way as soldiers were sold shitty, inadequate, extortionate insurance policies. If all I said was, “Hey buddy, looks like you’ll need more soldiers, if only to protect all those vases,” it does not necessarily follow that my contingency thinking nullifies your positive agenda, or that my advancing some more detailed cognition means that I lack patriotism.

  See how that works?

  Except that it almost never works. It is an almost unwinnable battle. American self-assurance and individuality lionize the can-do positivity of the optimist. It’s what settled the prairies and built the railroads, I suppose, although I like to think it was the pessimists who had the anxious foresight to circle the wagons. Given the greater comforts of our lives off the frontier today, optimism seems even more like the natural choice. (It’s presumptuous of me to assess your level of luxury, I know, but if you’re reading this, chances are you’re bobbing along in the same lavishly appointed boat as I am: an inhabitant of the developed world, at least, which in and of itself makes us very lucky indeed, and which makes those among us who still report feelings of dissatisfaction and anxiety seem very ungrateful.) That very privilege imbues all of us with a sense of power over cause and effect, a feeling that our actions can and do affect outcomes—which they sometimes do—but it remains among the prettiest of delusions, one that is ground down and out of most people elsewhere on this earth.