In touch with my inner skeptic
At the end of a year is it more useful to look back or to look forward? Optimists and pessimists disagree, but don’t we all want to be happy?
In the past year, two outstanding daily newspapers, the Christian Science Monitor and the Seattle Post Intelligencer, ceased daily publication. That’s a real loss. Other news organizations struggle to keep advertisers and subscribers.
A generation of information junkies has switched to the immediate, if often inaccurate, dispensers of news and views (with little distinction between the two) over their mobile phones. Many of the older generation keep their TVs tuned to the 24-hour cable news channels.
What is lost in that process is the innate skepticism of print journalists and editors whose mantra is: Take the time to get it right. Get all the verifiable facts available at deadline. If print were our major news source, there would have been no “balloon boy.” And maybe we would have been spared the White House party crashers. The instigators of both non-stories were spurred on by the hope of lucrative reality TV shows. The talent-challenged in search of celebrity.
So where were the skeptics who might have said, “Wait a minute. Who are these folks? Have they perpetrated hoaxes in the past? What would they have to gain?” I guess with so much airtime to fill, news presenters are just glad to have anything to run with.
Authors of books can explore more deeply. Publishers often come up with the newsy titles that sell controversial theories and opinions.
In her new book, “Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America” (Metropolitan/Holt, October 2009), Barbara Ehrenreich explores how the culture of optimism prevents us from holding to account both corporate heads and elected officials.
She writes, “manufactured optimism has become a method to make the poor feel guilty for their poverty, the ill for their lack of health and the victims of corporate layoffs for their inability to find worthwhile jobs.”
She also blasts “mega-churches” that preach the “gospel of prosperity,” exhorting poor people to visualize financial success. “This mania for looking on the bright side has given us the present financial collapse; optimistic business leaders, assisted by rosy-eyed policymakers, made very bad decisions.”
Point taken. But weren’t all those people just pursuing happiness? And the few who opposed the excessive risk taking were muzzled and threatened with the loss of their jobs?
The pursuit of happiness also informs Daniel Gilbert’s TV series “This Emotional Life,” which airs this week on PBS. In an NPR interview, Gilbert talked of happiness in a pragmatic way. He cited author Louise Hay’s book, “Heal Your Body,” in which she opined that we can choose thoughts that make us feel good.
“I don’t see any evidence that thoughts can cure disease or prevent it,” Gilbert said. “The constitution guarantees us only the pursuit of happiness, not happiness itself.”
It seems to me that Americans are obsessed with the idea of happiness; hence the proliferation of self-help books and motivational seminars. Europeans tend to laugh at the question, “Are you happy?” My French relatives may be skeptical and yet they seem happier because they maintain close relationships with family and enjoy social support.
Also, research shows that elderly people are more often happier than when they were young. Is it because they have seen their children grown to adulthood and are no longer consumed by worry? Or do they simply have more time to indulge their curiosity and skepticism?
Scientists and journalists are the quintessential skeptics. As Nobel scientist Linus Pauling once said, “Satisfaction of one’s curiosity is one of the greatest sources of happiness in life.”
In my old age, I’ve discovered a balance between the curiosity that plagued my youth and the skepticism with which I view news. And therein lies my happiness.