The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [27]
In tales from the Middle Ages, people were expected to make one serious conversion in their life, from bad to godly, or, at least as often, from good to fallen. Here in our modern world the motivation machine never stops pumping; people are never supposed to stop trying to grow and change, so there is a kind of instability of personal value. Emerson’s contemporaries were uncomfortable with his idea of people in a constant state of self-realization. Today, we are all used to the idea that the people around us may announce at any time that they are trying to make a grand change, that they are finally going to become themselves, and that, yes, this is an implicit critique of who they had been, and perhaps of who you are now.
William James’s Varieties of Religious Experiences is a book of philosophy, subtle and strange, as is all good philosophy, but meant to address the lived experience of real people, and meant to do so in prose that real people would find useful. As such, it mixes contemplation of timeless literature with contemplation of what was essentially the pop culture of 1902. As James reports, there was a tremendous fad raging called “the mind-cure.” It was so popular that you did not have to be a devotee of the cure to know its details: “Its principles are beginning so to pervade the air that one catches their spirit at second-hand. One hears of the ‘Gospel of Relaxation,’ of the ‘Don’t Worry Movement,’ of people who repeat to themselves, ‘Youth, health, vigor!’ when dressing in the morning, as their motto for the day.”8 James is not a drumbeater for the movement, and there is critique in his tone, but he also has a lot of respect for it. I think it is worth paying careful attention to where that respect comes from. He relegates one of his most important comments to a footnote. Here’s the relevant excerpt:
One of the doctrinal sources of Mind-cure is the four Gospels; another is Emersonianism or New England transcendentalism; another is Berkeleyan idealism; another is spiritism…; another the optimistic popular science evolutionism of which I have recently spoken; and, finally, Hinduism has contributed a strain. But the most characteristic feature of the mind-cure movement is an inspiration much more direct. The leaders in this faith have had an intuitive belief in the all-saving power of healthy-minded attitudes as such, in the conquering efficacy of courage, hope, and trust, and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry, and all nervously precautionary states of mind.* Their belief has in a general way been corroborated by the practical experience of their disciples; and this experience forms to-day a mass imposing in amount.
The accompanying footnote reads as follows:
*“Cautionary Verses for Children”: this title of a much used work, published early in the nineteenth century, shows how far the muse of evangelical Protestantism in England, with her mind fixed on the idea of danger, had at last drifted away from the original gospel freedom. Mind-cure might be briefly called a reaction against all that religion of chronic anxiety which marked the earlier part of our century in the evangelical circles of England and America.
If you don’t know what Berkeleyan idealism has to do with all this, you might do well to get hold of a 2004 film called What the Bleep Do We Know!? The film begins with physicists talking about quantum