A Nation That Accentuates the Positive

A Nation That Accentuates the Positive

 

Confidence in the benefits of a sunny outlook has roots in 19th-century religious America.

 

By Mitch Horowitz in the Wall Street Journal

At the close of virtually every religious calendar—from ancient solstice festivals to the Jewish new year of Rosh Hashana to the days of advent preceding Christmas—believers are called upon to make an inner reassessment. But Americans have elevated New Year's resolutions into a secular national rite. If America possesses one unifying creed—one principle that unites New Age spiritual centers and evangelical mega-ministries—it is the belief that our thoughts, rightly directed, produce personal improvement.

Our national philosophy of positive thinking undergirds our political campaigns ("Yes, we can"); advertising slogans ("Just Do It"); and our cultures of therapy, business motivation, recovery and self-help. Like all widely extolled principles, from healthy eating to thrifty spending, aspiration toward positivity seems like it has always been with us. But the concept is newer than we realize.

A century-and-a-half ago, if you told someone to "think positive" you would have been looked at in puzzlement. That's not to say that America lacked a literature of character development. Such works extend back to Puritan writings of the 17th century and Benjamin Franklin's colonial-era guide to conduct, "Poor Richard's Almanack." But the pamphlets, sermons and chapbooks of early America focused mostly on piety, frugality, hard work, reliability and good neighborliness—not on the psychological or spiritual dimensions of thought.

It was only deep within subcultures of religious experimentation that the positive-thinking ideal took shape—and in settings far removed from universities, seminaries or philosophical societies.

In the 1830s, a handful of New Englanders, some raised in America and others transplanted from England and France, started to probe the inner workings of the mind. In particular, a Maine clockmaker named Phineas Quimby discovered that an uplift in his mood relieved his symptoms from tuberculosis. "Man's happiness is in his belief," Quimby wrote. The clockmaker's insights touched a Swedenborgian minister named Warren Felt Evans, who inspired the influential mind-power movement called New Thought, and a brilliant young Mary Baker Eddy, who founded the healing faith of Christian Science in the 1870s.

While never exactly embraced in the mainstream, these metaphysical religions attracted hundreds of thousands of adherents who were seeking alternatives to the harsh protocols of Victorian medicine, which clung to such practices as bloodletting and narcotics ingestion.

By the late 19th century, in an America consumed with economic striving, a fresh generation of New Thoughters applied mental-healing methods and prayer therapy to material needs. The key principle of New Thought is thoughts are causative—and what you think affects your wallet, career, character and life prospects. This outlook formed the basis of the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale's 1952 landmark "The Power of Positive Thinking" and is found in myriad best sellers, from Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" to Rhonda Byrne's recent "The Secret."

While affirmative thought and New Year's resolutions are encouraged from many church pulpits, the positive-thinking approach is widely dismissed today in journalism and academia as a simpleton's philosophy of page-a-day calendars and refrigerator-magnet bromides. Yet it is impossible to understand modern America without grasping the impact—and efficacy—of positive thinking.

When Ronald Reagan used to announce in speeches that "nothing is impossible," his listeners were able to make sense of his sentiments due to decades of motivational psychology and spiritual self-help. Reagan's America-can-do-anything philosophy reshaped the nation's political landscape, and, not incidentally, sounded a lot like the mail-order self-improvement courses to which the president's father subscribed during the Great Depression.

For good or ill, Reagan's oratory compelled every president who followed him to sing praises to the limitless potential of the American public. The one who did not, George H.W. Bush, was not elected to a second term.

While critics roll their eyes over facile expressions of positive thinking, the philosophy has stood up with surprising muscularity beyond the spiritual culture in placebo studies, mind-body therapies, 12-step recovery programs, support groups and 21st-century research into the biologic benefits of meditation and "neuroplasticity," in which brain scans show that neural pathways associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder are alterable through new thought patterns. And perhaps most surprising, the power of the human mind over physical reality is at the heart of a longstanding debate within quantum physics, where researchers study the "quantum measurement problem," specifically whether the presence of a conscious observer affects the nature and manifestation of subatomic particles.

For the past 150 years, since the dawn of clinical scientific study, virtually all fields of inquiry, from medicine to psychology to brain biology to quantum theories, have broadened our conceptions of the mind. While shallower expressions of motivational thought are easy to dismiss, the pioneers of positive thinking not only supplied America with its national creed, but also displayed a precocious instinct that our thoughts may accomplish more than we realize.

Mr. Horowitz, the vice president and editor in chief of Tarcher/Penguin, is the author of "One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life" (Crown, 2014).