Divinest Sense

I’m not phoning it in, I swear. I just like to talk about things I’ve read in the paper. Today our topic is “positive psychology”, or “good medicine can’t cure bad art”.

This NYT feature on the emerging discipline of Positive Psychology is pretty interesting. The idea is that lots more study needs to be done on how positive thinking affects physical health as well as mental health. After thinking about this for a while, I don’t believe this should be its own intellectual discipline, but it sure wouldn’t hurt to teach such things in med school. If you’ve ever had surgery or some other serious medical concern (or know someone who has), you know very well the effect that a doctor’s attitude can have on your own attitude, and therefore your stress level, and therefore your general well-being. Injecting a little positive thinking into medical procedures couldn’t hurt.

This topic caught my eye because of my recent prolonged exposure to some very negative-thinking friends of mine. If anyone needs a positive-thinking intervention, it’s these folks. After only 16 waking hours of listening to this couple’s bemoaning and criticism of friends, relatives, neighbors, complete strangers, shopkeepers, various objectionable ethnic groups, the town, the state, the country, the world… I wanted to kill myself. My mood was in the toilet. I was seriously starting to believe that life was just not worth living, and that there was nothing out there to stem the tide of ill will raging unchecked through our universe. After a quick trip to a coffee shop and some venting, I was able to stop the dark whooshing noises in my head.

But the experience got me thinking. Mr. and Mrs. Complainalot have nice lives, live in a cute town, have a nice house, a decent income, family members close by, friends, hobbies, and various things that make life engaging and interesting. They keep busy but not too busy. To the outside observer, life’s not exactly perfect, but it’s pretty good. But they have health problems, and seem older and more tired than other people in their same demographic. It’s hard to believe that their attitude toward life has nothing to do with this. After all, why try to stay healthy and active when everything’s all just going to hell, nobody cares about you, and you’re just going to die eventually anyway?

In a situation like this, positive psychology could potentially save lives. I like the idea of an intervention. It would be really refreshing to shake my finger at these folks and yell YOU ARE NOT GOING TO BED UNTIL YOU TELL ME ONE NICE THING THAT HAPPENED TODAY! NOW SPILL IT!

Another interesting aspect of positive psychology is that instead of being essentially narcissistic, like all those positive-thinking self-help books out there, there is evidence that you can attain more personal contentment by doing something nice for someone else than you can by doing something nice for yourself. I can buy this. In fact, I think the thing that’s lacking in the Complainalots’ worldview is the frequent exercise of altruism, whether in thought or in action. Taken to extremes, the lack of altruism is a personality disorder. But I suspect that in today’s American culture, altruism simply is not valued as a laudable trait, and a lot of us fall into a pattern of thinking that pits us against the horde of miscreants who are constantly trying to take our stuff or elbow ahead of us in the cosmic line.

So, the study of positive psychology has some potential application in medicine and social policy, and let’s not forget religion. As a matter of fact, as the Times article points out, the proposed area of study has some uncomfortable religious trappings. Spread goodwill in the world? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you? Be kind to people whether you think they deserve your kindness or not? Sounds a bit like Christianity to me. Admittedly, these are the good parts of Christianity, so hey, let’s not strike it down as unworthy of our philosophical consideration.

However, like any religion, positive psychology’s relative benefit is in its practical application. My support of the idea comes to a screeching halt when the article starts to talk about schools incorporating positive psychology’s lessons into literature classes. To wit:

This endeavor outstrips the ongoing Strath Haven experiment. The effort there, financed by a $2.8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education, is limited to the ninth-grade language-arts program. At the school last year, the positive psychologists interwove their teachings with the literature classes. The idea was to buffer the lessons from bleak books like “Lord of the Flies” and “Romeo and Juliet” with some reassuring thoughts — or at least a more positive framework for understanding human behavior than the classics offer. Thus, according to Mark Linkins, now coordinator of the Swarthmore school district’s curriculum, who helped teach the classes, the animalistic and murderous Jack in “Lord of the Flies” shows “what happens when someone is lacking in signature strengths.” And when reading “The Odyssey,” students were asked: “What are the signature strengths that Odysseus lived and breathed? What are the things he might have improved on to make things go better?”

Now, this is taking things too far. It is not OK to fuck with literature by infusing it with contemporary psychology. What are the things that Odysseus could have improved on? Gimme a break. This is basically saying to your teenage students: “Dear students, you have been placed in the special ed class because of your violent tendencies and your inability to understand the complexities of classical thought. Your dignity will be returned to you at the close of school hours.” The very idea of putting Odysseus on the guidance counselor’s couch is just… unfathomable. For those of you who were educated in a dignity-free school system, let’s sum up: Characters in ancient Greek literature were considered to be playthings of capricious gods, and their fates were determined by outside forces, such as whom their grandaddy ate for dinner. Odysseus was never, ahem, in any position to make healthy life decisions.

And, as I can tell you from my experiences in art school, healthy life decisions and positive thinking have no place in art. Rather than attempting to teach teenagers to drop the sulkiness and act more helpful and chipper, we should be teaching them to understand literature and art on a deep level, so that their minds can stay active and engaged. Studying art and literature requires the development of a healthy understanding that sometimes life just has no meaning, and horrible things happen - but that even in tragedy and meaninglessness, there can be beauty. Now there is a positive thought.

Just as we at Divinest Sense always suspected - messy people are super cool, laid-back, and creative, and neat, fussy people are, I believe the quote is, “humorless and inflexible prigs, [that] have way too much time on their hands.” Tongue-in-cheekery from the New York Times. Also:

Mr. Freedman is co-author, with Eric Abrahamson, of “A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder,” out in two weeks from Little, Brown & Company. The book is a meandering, engaging tour of beneficial mess and the systems and individuals reaping those benefits, like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose mess-for-success tips include never making a daily schedule.
As a corollary, the book’s authors examine the high cost of neatness — measured in shame, mostly, and family fights, as well as wasted dollars — and generally have a fine time tipping over orthodoxies and poking fun at clutter busters and their ilk, and at the self-help tips they live or die by. They wonder: Why is it better to pack more activities into one day? By whose standards are procrastinators less effective than their well-scheduled peers? Why should children have to do chores to earn back their possessions if they leave them on the floor, as many professional organizers suggest?

That’s what really bothers me about organizational systems - the false morality associated with neatness, and the guilt that is supposed to accompany messiness. Why can’t we just look at these things objectively? Why all the persecution?

When I was a 7th grader, our school hit upon the brilliant idea of hiring a professional organizer to come in and help out the students with special binders and dividers, assignment logs, and individual counseling. I can understand now why they would do such a thing - this was a very tough private school, and 7th grade marked the beginning of “getting serious” about one’s academic performance and extracurriculars. This was the year that the culling and sorting began. High scorers on math tests went into pre-algebra, computational dullards were stuck in “regulars” math. Promising young philosophes and raconteurs continued their study of the noble French language, while those who could not differentiate “et” and “est” were shuttled off to learn the peasant language of Spanish. (This was in Texas, where there are certain attitudes about Spanish speakers.)

Just as we were beginning to understand that the difference between an 80 and a 100 on a test was not simply a determinant of how many appreciative smiles we could win from our teachers but a prognosis for how successful and worthy we’d turn out to be, the seventh grade faculty, exasperated from years of giving lukewarm grades to kids who really ought to be doing better, decided that bad organization was unfairly holding us back–causing our homework to be late, our pencils forgotten, our handouts lost, our attitudes sullen. Perhaps a professional organizer could remove these barriers for us and help us realize our full potential.

But here was the problem: I had no potential, and I knew it. Not that I was stupid or uninterested in learning - in fact, I was pretty sharp, and got sorted right away into the honors track. I had just spent a great deal of my young life thinking about my purpose in it, and had recently come to the conclusion that life had no meaning. Religions were false. People were mean, petty, selfish, and destructive. There was no such thing as magic. Life was messy. People didn’t love each other for who they were, they loved the things that they could get other people to do for them. Certainly nobody loved me.

I’m not sure where this tide of negativity came from, but I’m sure I wasn’t the only thirteen-year-old to ever feel such things. The overwhelming sentiment, even among the robotic miss perfects who always had crisp paper and neatly-lettered filing systems, was that none of this school crap really mattered.

Enter Ms. Travis, the organizer. Ms. Travis was a slim, patrician woman in her fifties with a stiff platinum-blond bob and unbelievably white skin, set off stunningly by ruby-red lipstick and immaculate jewel-tone suits. She sent a letter to our parents before the school year began, asking them not to purchase looseleaf binders for us, because she would provide special binders that would form the basis for our new system of organization.

The binders were slick, flexible plastic with no pockets. Pockets, explained Ms. Travis, represented a deadly temptation to collect hoards of unfiled papers, thus leading to unacceptable rumpling of edges and unseemly shuffling when searching for a particular handout. Everything was to be immedately hole-punched and filed in the appropriate divider of the binder, one for each subject. Within each divider papers should be filed in chronological order, with handouts first, assignments second, quizzes third, and so on. I don’t remember exactly what the program was, because I followed none of it.

The keystone of the binder system was the assignment book, which was a hole-punched affair neatly clasped in front of the dividers. It was a simple unmarked calendar grid, and we were directed to write our assignments for all classes into the block for each day. This was really just fine, and at first I dutifully wrote down as many assignments as I could remember to write down. I relied, however, on the stack of papers and handwritten notes that I kept in another folder to remember what my assignments were. It seemed like a pointless step to write “Science: handout due monday”, with no real explanation, when I could just look at the handout itself, saved in my pile of important stuff.

But my lackadaisical approach to the recording of assignments was not pleasing to Ms. Travis, who would make her rounds during study hall, demanding to see our binders and chastising us loudly for not making full use of the system. After being shamed in this manner on several occasions, I became defiant and rather than promising to try to be a better person, I decided it would be more constructive in the long run to make a complete mockery of the whole system. No, screw that explanation–I was angry and filled with contempt. I saw Ms. Travis as an embodiment of the universe, which was clearly not made for someone like me. If the whole point of life was to be as neat and clean as possible and to wear houndstooth skirts and yellow silk scarves, then what was the point of living?

Doodles began to appear around the edges of my assignment book pages, little spirals and vines and quotes from Pink Floyd songs. Then they began to spread, sprout blossoms of vivid color quite outside the approved ballpoint blue and black, and inevitably broke the rigid bonds of the gridlines to explode fully across the page. Diagonally across December was scrawled “Why be normal?”, the W illuminated by pictures of galloping horses, twisting vines, arrows, bits of cross-hatching, greek borders, irises and pupils and shiny teardrops. Pretty soon the entire book was full of these hieroglyphics of defiance.

Ms. Travis exploded at me during her study hall rounds. My teachers met with me to find out what my damn problem was, citing my excellent work in French and English classes as reasons for their confusion. More talk about my “potential” and my lack of concern for it. Tearful tirades from my parents about how my attitude problem was ruining all my chances. More data to support my theory of the inherent absence of love and joy in the world. In response, I did only the assignments that I cared about, and let the others slide. I erected impenetrable fortresses of papers in my locker. I wore tie dye and wrote poems about loneliness. I was pretty convinced that nobody had my interests in mind, only my production capacity. Then one day the assistant principal, one of the people I loathed most of all for his neat desk, short stature, and creepy concern about possible “problems at home”, made the decision that changed things - “I’m enrolling you in painting class with that new teacher we brought over from the arts magnet school.” From then on, things got better.

Wake County, North Carolina, where Raleigh and surrounding suburbs are located, reports huge successes in its program to economically integrate public schools. The main emphasis of the program is avoiding large concentrations of low-income students in one school. Placing poor kids in a middle-class learning environment has been shown to vastly improve their chances of doing well, because of exposure to kids, teachers, and parents with higher expectations. It seems like a no-brainer when you think about it in these simple terms, but lots of (mainly white, upper-middle income) people get really upset about the government forcing kids to attend particular schools, which are sometimes far away from home and in a different kind of neighborhood.

I grew up in Dallas, and was enrolled in private school at a pretty young age because the conventional wisdom around town was that the public schools, especially in the Dallas school district, were just terrible, and you should avoid them if you could afford to. There was a lot of resentment among North Dallasites (white and higher-income) over the forced racial integration in the 60’s and 70’s. People say that “bussing” was the worst thing that ever happened to Dallas schools. Kids from black neighborhoods were shipped up to North Dallas and vice versa. The overall quality of all the schools declined - as if the presence of a few blacks and Mexicans in the classroom could ruin everyone’s experience of pre-calc. But this was Dallas in the 70’s, racial tensions ran high, and people freaked out. The program, consequently, was never fully tended to its fruition.

As the Raleigh article points out, the integration measures succeeded because they were not done in isolation - there were many other factors involved. This exact program would not work in every city. The Research Triangle area is doing very well economically, and corporate and community leaders are supportive of the school district’s efforts. Notably, the media are supportive - this is incredibly important. It’s frustrating to watch news on TV or read the letters to the editor when I’m visiting Dallas, and see conservatives whipping up a froth of panic over some sort of progressive thing that the government might force them to do - and to see the black and hispanic members of city council portrayed as crazy, ignorant wingnuts.

The people who frevently believe in school choice and educational vouchers don’t see that such programs inhibit cultural and economic integration and make the problem worse. If a frightened white family is given a choice of public schools or a private school, won’t they just choose the one that has the most “people like us” in it? Will a kid from a poor family have any clue that these voucher programs are available? And what happens when the poor kid lands in the middle of an affluent school - will there be any sort of programs in place to help him catch up academically and integrate socially with everyone else?

School voucher proponents tend to be of the mindset that giving someone an “opportunity” means doing nothing at all - that just being alive means you have every opportunity in the world, if only you will choose to take it. Sadly, these people are living in a dream world. Children should not just be dropped at the door of their chosen school and left for the wolves to devour. They need to be led to the well of opportunity and shown how to retrieve the bucket.

Education is a serious problem in this country, and it’s not the place for politics and polemics. This is exactly the sort of thing that needs serious, sustained regulatory and financial efforts over a long period of time in order to fix.