Why Growth Is Good: New Free E-Book
I'm pleased to introduce you to a collection of articles from this site that I've put together called "Why Growth Is Good: The Case for Personal Growth, Self-Help and the 'New Age'," which is available here as a free e-book. I've edited many of my posts together into longer essays, and I've also written a new introduction.
These essays have the same goal as this site -- to present a compelling, organized argument for the value of personal development ideas and practices, and respond to their critics.
This book will be great food for thought if you've ever wondered about any of these questions:
* Are there practical benefits to self-development practices like meditation, yoga, and transformational workshops?
* Does self-help advice that encourages taking personal responsibility invite us to beat ourselves up?
* Does the same kind of advice discourage us from caring about others?
* Is psychotherapy about nothing more than whining about our families of origin?
* Did too much "positive thinking" cause the recent economic downturn?
* Do people who are into self-help tend to be more selfish and less generous?
* Is there a danger that self-development practices may make us feel "too happy" and neglect problem areas in our lives?
* Do personal development ideas discourage us from getting involved in politics?
I hope you enjoy this compilation, and I'm looking forward to your feedback!
(Sponsored by http://e-library.)
Rhonda Byrne’s The Power: Is The Packaging The Problem?
A common reason people attack The Secret (and now, Rhonda Byrne's sequel, The Power) is that it promotes a self-centered and "consumerist" attitude. Byrne, critics say, encourages us to focus on "manifesting" luxury cars, expensive shoes, and so on, rather than on helping others.
It's true that the Law of Attraction is often packaged as something we can use to improve our own lives, rather than those of others. The publisher's description of The Power, for example, proclaims that "perfect health, incredible relationships, a career you love, a life filled with happiness, and the money you need to be, do, and have everything you want, all come from The Power."
On the other hand, we can certainly imagine people using the Law of Attraction (assuming, for the moment, that it works) to serve others. Perhaps we might visualize a sick relative getting better, hungry people receiving food, or a dangerous tropical storm abating -- just as Buddhists pray for the wellness of all beings in Metta, or loving kindness, meditation.
So, I suspect many critics' real gripe with the Law of Attraction has to do with the "self-centered" way they think it's marketed, rather than the concept itself.
The "Opportunity Cost" of Spirituality
To be sure, some critics recognize that the Law of Attraction -- again, assuming it works -- can potentially be used to help others. The real problem, they say, is that it obviously doesn't work. Wishing a tropical storm won't devastate a town simply won't have any effect.
Even if this critique is right, I think it's open to the objection "so what?" People do all kinds of pointless activities, such as (in my opinion) watching reality TV and tweeting about what they ate for breakfast. Even assuming it accomplishes nothing, why is visualizing the improvement of others' lives more problematic?
This is where some charge that trying to "manifest" what we want isn't just a waste of time -- it's socially harmful, because every minute we spend visualizing is a minute we could have used taking concrete action to help somebody.
Interestingly, this is the same objection we often see critics of "mainstream religion" making. People who pray to God to relieve suffering in the world are misguided, the critics say, because there is no God. But more importantly, churchgoers are squandering time they could be spending on real charitable work. (This is the sort of thing we often hear from "New Atheist" Sam Harris.)
Religious People Give More
If this argument is right, we should expect religious people to do less charitable giving than unbelievers. While believers are uselessly propitiating their imaginary sky-god, atheists are down in the trenches, solving real people's problems -- right?
Actually, much evidence suggests the opposite: religious people tend to be more generous than unbelievers. In Who Really Cares, a study of charitable donation, economist Arthur C. Brooks found that religious belief was the strongest predictor of giving to charity among the factors he looked at -- more so than any political orientation, age group or race.
So, while it may be true that believers spend time in worship that nonbelievers don't, it seems religious people nonetheless find the time to do more giving. But why?
One plausible explanation I've heard is that religious people are happier. They feel more secure, and grateful, living in a universe they see as orderly and benevolent. And psychological studies have found that happier people tend to give more generously.
In any case, all this suggests that we shouldn't be too quick to conclude that adherents of the Law of Attraction are less likely to be charitable, simply because they believe their thoughts can affect reality. Of course, because the ideas in The Secret are different in many ways from traditional religion, we shouldn't necessarily assume The Secret's followers are more giving either.
We'll explore this issue in more depth soon.
Do Thoughts Create Things?, Part 1: Yes, Unless You’re A Robot
It will probably be obvious, to anyone who follows debates about personal development, that a central question in these debates is whether our inner experience can affect reality. In other words, can changes in our thoughts and feelings cause changes in the world around us?
It's tempting to respond the way some critics do, and treat the answer as plain -- and, perhaps, the question itself as dumb. Clearly, the answer is no -- thinking about a BMW won't cause one to appear in my driveway, my bad moods don't cause inclement weather, and so on. Only a fluff-headed, New-Agey navel-gazer could think otherwise.
But that response, as we'll see, caricatures and oversimplifies the question. In fact, this question raises profound, and hotly debated, philosophical and scientific issues. To illustrate, let's look at a few (and by no means all) of the ways we might answer this question.
Reductive Materialism
From one perspective, it's impossible for our thoughts and feelings to affect reality. What we perceive as "thoughts" and "feelings" are merely our subjective experiences, or "epiphenomena," of biochemical processes in our brains. Our experience of those processes plainly cannot cause or influence those processes.
Here's a crude analogy -- the chemical reactions in my brain are like a movie, and "I" am like a person watching that movie. Clearly, my experience of the film can't alter the film itself. The fact that I like some character in the film, for instance, won't cause the movie's plot to change so that the character lives rather than dying.
One result of this view is that human beings don't have free will. This is because the very concept of "I" -- an individual who chooses, wants, makes plans, and so on -- is itself just a subjective experience of chemical reactions in the brain. "I," being merely an illusion created by neurological activity, can't influence anything that happens in the physical world.
If you buy this view, you're free to claim that our thoughts and feelings don't affect reality at all. But if you don't accept it, I think, you have to believe -- on some level -- that they do.
Emotions As Reasons
You may recall that, in an earlier post, I observed that we do most, or all, of the things we do in life because we want to experience certain feelings. For example, as I pointed out, most people don't make money just to own little colored pieces of paper -- they do it to create feelings of security, power, joy, or something else.
If this is so, there is clearly a sense in which our inner experience -- our thoughts, feelings and sensations -- affects our reality.
Take the example of making money. The feelings we desire (security, power, etc.) influence the actions we take in the world (starting a business, getting a job, and so on) -- and when we act, of course, we alter the physical world in some way. This is just another way to put the point that we make money because we want those feelings.
Thus, on some level, I think most people would agree that our inner experience does affect reality. The real question is the way in which, and perhaps the extent to which, it does so. We'll get into that question more deeply in the next post.
Growth As An Opiate, Part 3: The Hard Work Of Happiness
Last time, we discussed the argument that some personal growth techniques put people at risk of being, basically, too happy. Practices like meditation and yoga, in this view, generate "artificial happiness" that can blind people to genuine problems in their lives or with their society.
In this post, I'll turn to a similar argument often made against the "positive thinking" strain of personal growth -- i.e., the idea that thinking optimistically is a good way to deal with a seemingly bad situation. For some, positive thinking is a futile enterprise, because pushing negative thoughts or feelings away is impossible. For others, it's doable, but it takes a lot of work. And if it takes so much work to be happy, is it worth the effort?
In Bright-Sided, for instance, Barbara Ehrenreich derides positive thinking because it seems to require "a constant effort to repress or block out unpleasant possibilities and negative thoughts." In The Last Self-Help Book You'll Ever Need, psychologist Paul Pearsall writes that "striving to keep your hopes up at the worst times in your life can be exhausting."
I'll do something unusual for this blog and agree with this argument, at least partly. In my experience, some people seem to love deliberate positive thinking. To them, saying affirmations, visualizing success, and similar techniques don't feel like "work" at all. But to others -- myself included -- making an effort to think happy thoughts or generate positive emotion can feel draining.
However, I think critics of personal development go astray when they suggest that, because positive thinking feels draining or self-deceptive to some people, no one should practice it. Another common mistake is to equate all personal development with positive thinking, and then dismiss it all as "feel-good fluff," when in fact many personal growth techniques take a very different approach.
The "Art" Vs. "Drug" Models Of Personal Growth
Positive thinking may feel false and self-deceptive to some people, but that doesn't mean that, objectively, it is false and self-deceptive. It won't be controversial for me to say, I think, that different behaviors feel authentic (or false) for different people. For example, I would feel inauthentic speaking with a Portuguese accent, because I'm not from Portugal. However, a native of Portugal wouldn't feel that way.
Similarly, perhaps thinking optimistically in the face of adversity causes some people to feel better, but not others. But it doesn't follow that positive thinking "doesn't work" or is "fake." For instance, suppose I happen to enjoy looking at Monet paintings, but you don't. No one would claim that, simply because our opinions differ, the pleasure I feel when looking at Monet's work must be "false."
Yet, when attacking positive thinking, critics often make this kind of argument. They treat optimism as if it were a drug that we shouldn't take until clinical trials have proven it's safe and more than just a placebo. If some people react negatively to it, you shouldn't use it. But I don't think that analogy works, because -- unlike drugs with dangerous side effects -- people don't physically hurt themselves simply by thinking.
I think what I've said applies to many forms of personal growth. It makes more sense to think about these techniques as if they were pieces of art or music than to liken them to harmful drugs. Because everyone's mind and body is unique, it stands to reason that each technique "works" for some but not others, and each person must do their own exploration to find out what "works" for them.
The "Change" Vs. "Acceptance" Models
As I mentioned last month in a post on my other blog, when I talk with people about meditation, they often tell me they "can't meditate." This is because, they say, they can't seem to force their minds to empty, or compel themselves to feel peaceful.
It struck me recently that these people's understanding of meditation is completely different from mine. I don't see meditation as being about "forcing" anything to happen. To me, it's about allowing whatever thoughts and feelings arise to be there, without resistance.
I think this mirrors a distinction between two schools of thought in personal development. I'll call one of them the "Change" model. On this view, personal growth is about seeking positive experiences or emotions, and avoiding negative ones.
I think positive thinking, as it's usually understood, falls in this category -- as Norman Vincent Peale, the father of positive thinking, put it, "whenever a negative thought concerning your personal power comes to mind, deliberately voice a positive one to cancel it out.”
Let's call the other model "Acceptance." From this perspective, the purpose of personal development is not to seek the "right" kind of experience, but to drop our resistance to the experience we're having right now -- even if, in this moment, we're feeling sad or angry.
The end goal of the Acceptance approach is to find what Buddhists call "equanimity" -- when we learn to allow all of the experiences life has to throw at us, the distinction between "positive" and "negative" feelings disappears, and we are always at peace.
Why This Matters
This distinction is important to our discussion because critics of personal development often neglect it. In Artificial Happiness, for instance, Ronald W. Dworkin criticizes meditation by citing the example of a patient who "escapes her own consciousness through meditation, and keeps her unhappiness at bay," but thus "also postpones any serious analysis of her situation."
True, some people may use meditation from what I've called a "Change" perspective -- to repress or transform their grief, anger, and so on. But this certainly isn't the only way people use meditation (nor do I think it's the most helpful way). As I noted, many forms of Buddhist meditation have the goal of "Acceptance" -- that is, learning to simply allow the anger and grief to arise and pass away.
So, in a nutshell, even if you aren't a fan of the "never let a negative thought enter your mind" approach, I think personal development still has much to offer you.
Other Posts In This Series
E-Book: Why Growth Is Good
Most Popular Posts
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Thoughts on the Mankind Project Lawsuit
Personal Development Politics, Part 2: The Elections and Self-Responsibility
Regulating Self-Help, Part 2: What Is a Benefit?
Rainbow Right-Wingers, and Other Myths About Personal Development Politics
Authenticity Answers, Part 1: How Deep Is Your Want?
