Publishing: Help Yourself - Bibliography

National Review, Feb 8, 1999 by David Klinghoffer

There is a monumental quality to the western wall on the second floor of my neighborhood Barnes & Noble. Some 350 square feet of solid shelf space, it's devoted to self-help books.

Standing in front of it is like visiting another Western Wall. I mean Herod's great monument at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, to which pilgrims have long carried wads of paper inscribed with their hopes and dreams. These pilgrims wedge the papers between the stones and pray that their lives will take a turn for the better. At Barnes & Noble, pilgrims take papers out of the wall-neatly bound papers, likewise inscribed with hopes and dreams for a better life-instead of sticking them in.

Either way, self-help is nothing new, including on our own shores. Americans of the 19th century got hip to the Mind Cure and New Thought. After the Second World War you had Positive Thinking, thought up by Norman Vincent Peale, followed in the Sixties by the Human Potential movement of Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers. More recently, the Recovery movement convinced much of the nation that everybody is the victim of some sort of abuse, regarding which you can be "in denial" or "in recovery."

As late as 1993, the radio therapist "Dr. Laura" Schlessinger was denouncing the recovery-ites and their "torrent of apologetic self-help books." These books attracted women in particular who "insist on rationalizing their self-destructive behavior by identifying themselves as 'sick.' "

Yet just six years later, at your own local Barnes & Noble, take a look at the tables next to the self-help wall, stacked with the biggest-name authors in the genre. Against the backdrop of modern culture, something countercultural is happening. Pace Dr. Laura, the self-help authors who have become institutions favor individual responsibility and graceful acceptance of one's life circumstance. A few examples:

1) More than an institution, Stephen R. Covey is an industry. His 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989) has generated the Franklin Covey Company, whose 12,000 "licensed client facilitators" teach Covey's 7 Habits to three-quarters of a million people every year. Covey even has retail outlets, 117 of them, called Franklin Covey 7 Habits Stores, hawking inspirational tapes and videos plus customized personal organizers and computer software.

Though Covey's appeal escapes me, his verbose magnum opus-full of charts showing the 7 Habits and their interrelationships modeled on mathematical illustrations or certain kabbalistic cosmological maps- must be having some positive effect on the lives of his customers. The notable thing about him is his stress on "self-mastery." He writes: "Look at the word responsibility-'response-ability'-the ability to choose your response. Highly proactive people . . . do not blame circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behavior."

2) In hugely successful books with braying titles like Ten Stupid Things Men Do To Mess Up Their Lives (1997), Dr. Laura insists on the complementary point that in relationships nobody forces anybody to do anything. She inveighs against "sex-too-soon" and tells young women they have no excuse for buckling under when men demand physical intimacy. As she sees it, a person's respect for himself grows in proportion to the effort he makes to do the right thing.

For her trouble, Dr. Laura has replaced Rush Limbaugh as the radio host better-dressed young city women most love to hate. But this hasn't stopped the rest of the public from boosting her new book, The Ten Commandments, which endorses all ten, onto the New York Times bestseller list.

3) Another relationships expert, John Gray, argues for the traditional view that women are fundamentally different from men. His book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (1992) spawned a succession of sequels (Mars and Venus on a Date, Mars and Venus in the Bedroom, etc.), all drawing on a basic insight: Women talk to be listened to and men talk in order to solve problems.

4) The anti-modernist trend received a gloss of upper-middle-class respectability from Jungian therapist Thomas Moore. Taking inspiration from self-help books of the Renaissance, Moore's bestselling Care of the Soul (1992) argues in decorative language for the importance of a spiritual life.

There's much Jung-inspired talk here of mythologizing and ritualizing. Thus if you got chewed out a lot as a kid by your alcoholic father, don't consider yourself an abuse victim. Instead, mythologize old Dad- which means . . . actually I'm not sure what it means. In any event, rather than complain about your family, relationships, job, and home, you should try to infuse all of them with mystical meaning.

5) Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence (1995) and its quickie follow-up, Working with Emotional Intelligence (1998), make one point: that straightforward IQ doesn't help much if you can't control your emotions. Illustrated by charts of how the brain is wired, Emotional Intelligence presents neurological research indicating that to let it all hang out, in the manner of the Sixties, isn't the path of the smart heart. Anger, for instance, is actually stoked rather than minimized if you vent it as soon as it makes itself felt.