Looking on the Bright Side without Blinding Yourself

Positive thinking can help us achieve more, hut we’ve got to stay in touch with reality.

If you think in negative terms you will get negative results. If you think in positive terms you will get positive results. That is the simple fact … of an astonishing law of prosperity and success.

—Norman Vincent Peale

Christianity has traditionally (and rightly) emphasized an under-appreciated truth: the potent and corrupting power of self-serving pride. But, as Pascal taught, no single truth is ever sufficient, because the world is not simple. Any truth separated from its complementary truth is a half-truth.

It is true that pride leads to self-sufficient individualism, the taking of credit and displacement of blame, and an intolerance of those considered “inferior.” However, let us not forget the complementary truth about the benefits of positive self-esteem and positive thinking.

Jesus called us to self-denial—“If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me”—but not to self-rejection. Far from devaluing our individual lives, he proclaimed their value. Being created in the image of God, we are more valuable than “the birds of the air” and the other animals for whom God cares. As one young victim of prejudice insisted, “I’m me and I’m good ‘cause God don’t make junk.”

Indeed, our worth is more than we appreciate—worth enough to motivate Jesus’ kindness and respect toward those dishonored in his time—women and children, Samaritans and Gentiles, leprosy victims and prostitutes, the poor and the tax collectors. Recognizing that our worth is what we are worth to God—an agonizing but redemptive execution on a cross—therefore draws us to a self-affirmation that is rooted in divine love.

Without doubt, such feelings of self-worth pay dividends. People who feel good about themselves, who express a positive self-esteem, are generally less depressed, freer of certain ailments and drug abuse, more independent of peer pressure, and more persistent when facing tough tasks. Many clinicians report that underneath much of the human despair and disorder with which they deal is an impoverished self-acceptance, a sense that “I am junk.”

The Positive Side Of Positive Thinking

Perhaps miserable experiences cause feelings of worthlessness rather than the other way around. But experiments indicate that a lowered self-image can indeed have negative consequences.

Imagine yourself being temporarily deflated by the news that you scored poorly on an intelligence test or that some people you met earlier thought you were unappealing and unattractive. Might you react as experimental subjects often have—by disparaging others or even exhibiting racial prejudice as a way to restore your feelings of self-worth? The defensive, self-righteous pride that feeds contemptuous attitudes can itself be fed by the inner turmoil of self-doubt.

People who are made to feel insecure and who therefore have a need to impress others are more likely to make scathing assessments of others’ work than are those who feel secure and comfortable with themselves. Mockery says as much about the mocker as the one mocked.

Positive thinking about one’s potential also pays dividends. The positive-thinking preachers Norman Vincent Peale and Robert Schuller would be pleased but not surprised at the breadth of psychological research that confirms the power of faith in one’s possibilities. For example:

Those who believe they can control their own destiny, who have what researchers in more than a thousand studies have called internal locus of control, achieve more, make more money, and are better able to cope with problems. Believe that things are beyond your control and they probably will be. Believe that you can do it, and maybe, just maybe, you will.

Jesse Jackson has carried this hopeful, take-control-of-your-future attitude to black youth, an attitude conveyed by his speech to the 1983 civil rights march on Washington: “If my mind can conceive it and my heart can believe it, I know I can achieve it.”

Additional studies indicate that when people undertake challenging tasks and succeed, their feelings of self-efficacy are strengthened. For example, people who are helped to conquer an animal phobia may subsequently become less timid and more self-directed and venturesome in other areas of their lives. Albert Bandura, a recent president of the American Psychological Association, theorizes that the key to self-efficacy is not merely positive self-talk (“I think I can, I think I can”), but actual mastery experience—tackling realistic goals and achieving them.

Additional studies put the mainstream of recent psychological research squarely behind conceptions of human freedom, dignity, and self-control. The moral of all this research is that people benefit from experiences of freedom and from being able to view themselves as free creatures rather than as pawns of external forces.

The Perils Of Positive Thinking

But this truth also has a complementary truth: the perils of positive thinking. One such peril is the guilt, shame, and dejection that may accompany shattered expectations. If a 1982 Fortune magazine ad was right in proclaiming that you can “make it on your own,” on “your own drive, your own guts, your own energy, your own ambition,” then whose fault is it if you don’t make it on your own?

If writers Barbara Smallwood and Steve Kilborn are right to say that “what you believe yourself to be, you are.… Believing is magic. You can always better your best,” then whose fault is it if you don’t progress upward from highs to higher highs? Whose fault is it if Amway President Richard DeVos was correct in explaining why so many Amway distributors fail? “Those who really want to succeed, succeed; the others didn’t try hard enough.” What do we conclude when our marriages are less than ideal, our children are flawed, our vocations less successful than we dreamed?

In Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller suggested that by trying too hard to win, one ultimately loses when the dream collapses. Limitless expectations breed endless frustrations. “Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed,” counseled poet Alexander Pope in a 1727 letter. Life’s greatest disappointments, as well as its highest achievements, are born of the most positive expectations.

A second peril of positive thinking is that one begins to live in the future rather than the present. C. S. Lewis’s devilish Screwtape advised Wormwood to “fix men’s affections on the Future,” where nearly all vices are rooted: “Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.”

By so doing, Screwtape hoped to counter his enemy’s ideal of the person “who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him.” Pascal, too, saw the perils of endless ambition: “The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means—the future alone is our end. So we never live, but we hope to live—and as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so.”

The third peril of positive thinking is an excessive optimism that leads to complacency about evil. In the face of a worldwide arms race, exploding population, and assaults on the environment, positive thinkers are inclined not to worry. “The pessimists have often been wrong in the past,” they say, “so let’s not trouble ourselves with their negative thinking.”

It was an optimistic we-can-do-it attitude that emboldened Lyndon Johnson to invest our weapons and soldiers in the effort to salvage democracy in South Vietnam. It was positive thinking that gave Jimmy Carter the courage to attempt the rescue of American hostages in Iran. It was possibility thinking that enabled a resolute Ronald Reagan to send troops to Lebanon in hopes of restoring peace, to support the contras’ guerrilla warfare in Nicaragua, to assume that selling weapons of death to Iran would promote moderation and reduce the number of American hostages in Lebanon.

By contrast, experiments indicate that one type of negative thinking—anxiety over contemplated failure—can motivate high achievement. (Think of the students who, fearing they are going to bomb their coming exam, proceed to study furiously and, not surprisingly, get A’s.) To be sure, hopeless despair breeds as much apathy as does naïve optimism. What we therefore need is neither negative nor positive thinking, but realistic thinking—thinking characterized by enough pessimism to trigger concern, enough optimism to provide hope.

In Search Of True Humility

How then can we realize self-denial without self-rejection? Self-affirmation without vain self-love? And what is a genuine Christian humility?

First, we must remember that humility is not self-contempt. To paraphrase C. S. Lewis, humility does not consist in handsome people trying to believe they are ugly and clever people trying to believe they are fools. Ivan Lendl and Martina Navratilova can acknowledge their greatness at tennis without violating the spirit of humility. False modesty regarding one’s gifts can actually lead to pride—pride in one’s better-than-average humility.

Screwtape recognized this possibility in advising Wormwood to catch his prey “at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, ‘By jove! I’m being humble,’ and almost immediately pride—pride at his own humility—will appear.”

True humility also is not found by straddling the fence between egotistical vanity and self-hatred. Humility is more like self-forgetfulness. It is flowing with life with minimal self-consciousness, as when we become totally absorbed in a challenging task, an exciting game, or even a life mission. Dancers, athletes, chess players, surgeons, and writers often experience this kind of absorption. With it comes a satisfaction that accompanies the relinquishment of the self-conscious pursuit of happiness.

Dennis Voskuil, a Reformed thinker who has written thoughtfully about Robert Schuller’s positive thinking, states the phenomenon in Christian terms: The refreshing gospel promise is “not that we have been freed by Christ to love ourselves, but that we are free from self-obsession. Not that the cross frees us for the ego trip but that the cross frees us from the ego trip.” This leaves us free to esteem our special talents and, with equal honesty, to esteem our neighbor’s. Both the neighbor’s talents and our own talents are recognized as gifts that, like our height, demand neither vanity nor self-deprecation.

Obviously, true humility is a state not easily attained. C. S. Lewis offered, “If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realize that one is proud. And a biggish step, too.” The way to take this first step, continued Lewis, is to glimpse the greatness of God and see oneself in light of it. “He and you are two things of such a kind that if you really get into any kind of touch with him you will, in fact, be humble, feeling the infinite relief of having for once got rid of [the pretensions that have] made you restless and unhappy all your life.” To be self-affirming yet self-forgetful, positive yet realistic, grace-filled and unpretentious—that is the Christian vision of abundant life.

David G. Myers is the John Dirk Werkman Professor of Psychology at Hope College, Holland, Michigan. He has been awarded the Gordon Allport Prize for social psychological research and written for more than two dozen journals and magazines. Cognitive neuroscientist Malcolm A. Jeeves is Foundation Professor of Psychology at the University of Saint Andrews, Scotland. He has written several dozen scientific articles and books on the issues of science and faith. The above article is adapted from Myers’s and Jeeves’s recent book, Psychology Through the Eyes of Faith (Harper & Row).

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