Ars Vitae: The Fate of Inwardness and the Return of the Ancient Arts of Living - Softcover

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Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn is professor of history at Syracuse University. She is the author of a number of essays and books, including Black Neighbors (winner of the Berkshire prize) and Race Experts.

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It is understandable that people would turn to comforting nostrums for help. But we need to consult something more elaborate than a single saying on a mug extracted from the context of its larger vision. What if the saying, shorn of that broader view, turns out to be inscrutable right when we need it most? We could end up doing the very opposite of what the words intended and find ourselves tangled up in something worse than where we started. Prodded by anxiety or mere curiosity, we encounter oceans of advice telling us how to live or what to make of life. It is a free country with a free(ish) market. The self-help industry is no exception. It is basically a free-for-all. Anyone hanging out a shingle can dispense advice, which can mean the publication of self-help books by major publishers and vanity presses, with Amazon enabling authors whose only qualification is the ability to compose words into sentences. Shingles include websites, blogs, advice columns, college classes, and consulting firms. Luck, pluck, and marketing allow self-help Horatio Algers to ply their trade unchallenged. In a world of short attention spans, any kind of follow up on the effects of the advice is nonexistent.

This is not to suggest we need more studies. Only willed ignorance would suggest as much. Sadly, the evidence is in. Rates of depression, anxiety, addiction, and suicide have reached epidemic proportions. On arguably the most important question we face—how to live—there is little concerted effort to think through the assumptions or results of one plan versus another or to admit that we are in dire straits, not just as persons but as a people.

In this anarchy of advice, we could call for tighter regulations and more professional training. Yet most professionals are these days mainly trained in techniques of what is called service delivery. Between the vast needs they face and the failure of insurance companies to cover extensive counseling or preventive medicine, they tend to be experts in pharmaceuticals or crisis intervention. Even when licensed for some form of talk therapy, certification does not automatically ensure wisdom. It does not generally include education in a deep understanding of ways to think about life’s meaning, alternative intellectual approaches to living, and the question of which practices are better for us and why. The best counselor, whether parent, pastor, friend, teacher, or therapist, must eventually send someone off to become master of his or her life. Everything hinges on the content of the advice, or the quality of ideas encountered elsewhere about how to live.

In New York Magazine’s “Self-Help Issue,” Kathryn Schulz argues that, despite the huge number of self-help books out now, all self-help literature comes down to the same thing, what she calls “the master theory of self-help”:

It goes like this: Somewhere below or above or beyond the part of you that is struggling with weight loss or procrastination or whatever your particular problem might be, there is another part of you that is immune to that problem and capable of solving it for the rest of you. In other words, this master theory is fundamentally dualist. It posits, at a minimum, two selves: one that needs a kick in the ass and one that is capable of kicking.

This is a helpful observation for moving us beyond such simplistic binaries. Yet for Schulz, given the lack of a clear understanding of the self—something she thinks we cannot reach anyway—self-help has equal standing with any other safe and legal means the individual can use to overcome depression or other emotional challenges: “Try something. Better still, try everything—throw all the options at the occluding wall of the self and see what sticks. Meditation, marathon training, fasting, freewriting, hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, speed dating, volunteering, moving to Auckland, redecorating the living room.”

Schulz’ entertaining call to action—any action—aside, all activities one might choose to engage in do not share a moral equivalence. Looking more closely at self-help offerings, along with a full range of other cultural expressions, reveals vital differences in both content and quality. Identifying the nature of the particular framework at hand can get us into more promising territory for those seeking deeper answers. If ideas matter, then in the course of offering advice, self-help literature has a significant role in shaping what we think are the possibilities of our lives, especially if increasingly purveyed in additional forms and genres outside of self-help. We need to admit that it is time we call our popular culture—from movies to internet sites—what it really is: popular education.