Religion of Healthy-Mindedness
The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness is a phrase coined by psychologist William James to describe the often pathological pursuit of "happiness" through spirituality and religion. For James there is a peculiar type of individual who "refuses to feel unhappy" and who "passionately fling...themselves upon their sense of the goodness of life, in spite of the hardships of their own condition..." [1]. James considered this a person like this congenitally deformed, with a "temperament organically weighted on the side of cheer and fatally forbidden to linger...over the darker aspects of the universe. In some individuals optimism may become quasi-pathological. The capacity for even a transient sadness or a momentary humility seems cut off from them as by a kind of congenital anesthesia." [2]
Interestingly, James uses the Freemason Walt Whitman as a quintessential example of an individual succumbing to the religion of healthy-mindedness. According to James, Whitman refuses to express any negativity, and in fact saw everything, even evil, as good. "What is called good is perfect and what is called bad is just as perfect..." James has little respect for Whitman. He says "his optimism is too voluntary and defiant; his gospel has a touch of bravado and an affected twist..." [3]. One wonders here however whether Whitman's "forced positivity" was not merely an ideological campaign to fool people into believing that even the harsh and sometimes violent consequences of the Industrial Revolution were not bad, but good.
James distinguishes between two forms of health-mindedness, a more reasonable kind which he calls involuntary, and a more systematic, abstract, and voluntary form.
If, then, we give the name of healthy-mindedness to the tendency which looks on all things and sees that they are good, we find that we must distinguish between a more involuntary and a more voluntary or systematic way of being healthy-minded. In its involuntary variety, healthy mindedness is a way of feeling happy about things immediately. In its systematical variety, it is an abstract way of conceiving things as good. Every abstract way of conceiving things selects some one aspect of them as their essence for the time being, and disregards the other aspects. Systematic healthy-mindedness, conceiving good as the essential and universal aspect of being, deliberately excludes evil from its field of vision; and although, when thus nakedly stated, this might seem a difficult feat to perform for one who is intellectually sincere with himself and honest about facts, a little reflection shows that the situation is too complex to lie open to so simple a criticism.
In the first place, happiness, like every other emotional state, has blindness and insensibility to opposing facts given it as its instinctive weapon for self-protection against disturbance. When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in. He must ignore it; and to the bystander he may then seem perversely to shut his eyes to it and hush it up.
But more than this: the hushing of it up may, in a perfectly candid and honest mind, grow into a deliberate religious policy, or parti pris. Much of what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take the phenomenon. It can so often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple change of the sufferer's inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight; its sting so often departs and turns into a relish when, after vainly seeking to shun it, we agree to face about and bear it cheerfully, that a man is simply bound in honor, with reference to many of the facts that seem at first to disconcert his peace, to adopt this way of escape. Refuse to admit their badness; despise their power; ignore their presence; turn your attention the other way; and so far as you yourself are concerned at any rate, though the facts may still exist, their evil character exists no longer. Since you make them evil or good by your own thoughts about them, it is the ruling of your thoughts which proves to be your principal concern.[4]
Ultimately James attributes this tendency towards healthy-mindedness as caused by "important currents in human nature." This is a thing that a psychologist would typically say, but it is most certainly not the case. Humans may have a developed propensity to ignore the bad and focus on the good (as we see in phrases like "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger") but this propensity is not "human nature." Rather, it is part of an ideological fabric, a Creation Template, designed with justification in mind.[5]
The observant reader will note the similarity between James identification of "healthy-mindedness" and the modern manifestation of this religious current in the "new age movement" or the "law of attraction" movement. In both these cases you can find the same pathological orientation to the positive, and the same blind refusal to see the negative. Just as with James' original observances, the tendency however is not the result of human nature, but of the imposition of ideology designed with justification in mind.
See Also
References
- ↑ William James, 1928, The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Penguin (p. 79).
- ↑ William James, 1928, The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Penguin (p. 83).
- ↑ William James, 1928, The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Penguin (p. 87).
- ↑ William James, 1928, The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Penguin (p. 87-9).
- ↑ see Michael Sosteric, unpublished manuscript, The Sociology of Tarot.
