Empire of Illusion - Chris Hedges [66]
The conference is filled with people in business attire. At the break, many stand in clusters, holding a coffee in one hand and a pastry in the other.
The university is quiet for a Saturday afternoon. The weather outside is overcast and cold. The browning lawns of Claremont’s Pomona College, dotted with palm trees and oaks, reflect the harshness of the statewide drought. There is a half-moon wall visible from the conference center. “CLOSE THE SCHOOL OF THE AMERICAS” is written in large red letters on the wall. “Dan Eats Chicken Skin” and “Dog Boner To The Rescue!” read other graffiti. “SUCK IT, LIFE” is spray-painted in black. Sections of the wall resemble works by Picasso or Diego Rivera. The largest message is “Vote Obama ’08.” The university buildings, with imitation adobe walls and red clay tile roofs, cluster around the college’s clock tower. The campus has the appearance of a California Spanish mission.
In the auditorium, the round face of Martin Seligman appears in a video on a twenty-foot screen. His gaze is serious. Behind him are disordered bookshelves.
“Welcome to this auspicious occasion,” he says to the attentive, mostly white crowd. A young woman, a student of psychology at California State University at Long Beach, scribbles notes. She underlines auspicious occasion.
Seligman speaks of four endeavors for the movement.
“The first endeavor I call ‘positive physical health,’” Seligman says. “If you think about positive psychology as having argued that positive mental health is something over and above the absence of mental illness. That is,” he clarifies, hammering his desk with every “presence,” “the presence of positive emotion, the presence of flow, the presence of engagement, the presence of meaning, the presence of positive relationships.” Seligman pauses. “Can the same thing be said for physical health?” He believes researchers will find a correlation between these positive mental states and the “real” body.4
Seligman announces that twenty $200,000 grants--a dream sum for any researcher—will be given out for “groundbreaking research” in the burgeoning field of positive neuroscience. The goal is to locate where positive emotions originate in the brain.
“Education usually consists of taking young people and teaching them workplace skills. . . . But there is an epidemic of depression,” he says sadly. His optimistic tone returns: “Would it be possible to have positive education? . . . That is, without sacrificing any of the usual skills such as discipline, reading, literacy, numeracy. . . . Can we build engagement, meaning, positive emotion, good relations in schools?”
Seligman announces that schools in the United States, such as the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) schools in Riverside, California, as well as schools in the United Kingdom and in Australia, are putting his theory into practice. The Geelong Grammar School in Australia is implementing a positive psychology curriculum. Hundreds of teachers there are being taught, in missionary fashion, to “spread the notion of positive education.”
In Authentic Happiness, written in 2002, Seligman argues that authentic happiness can be conditioned and thus taught.
A similar-sounding life of “enjoyment,” “engagement,” and “affiliation” is the engineered temperament of the pliant characters in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. There, the protagonist, Bernard Marx, turns in frustration to his girlfriend Lenina:
“Don’t you wish you were free, Lenina?”
“I don’t know what you mean. I am free. Free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody’s happy nowadays.”
He laughed, “Yes, ‘Everybody’s happy nowadays.’ We have been giving the children that at five. But wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else’s way.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she