Publishing: Help Yourself - Bibliography

National Review, Feb 8, 1999 by David Klinghoffer

6) The most intriguing of the big self-help books may be Richard Carlson's diminutive Don't Sweat the Small Stuff (1997). Consisting of 100 very practical tips for "becoming more peaceful," Carlson's book encourages gratitude, humility, and putting things in perspective.

Not that everything he has to say comes as a revelation. The peculiar aspect of all these books is that while they present their lessons as if freshly discovered, much of what they advocate has been heard before-long before. As I read them I kept checking off points I'd heard my own rabbi make.

I can testify that Gray's insight about listening to women is straight out of the injunction in the Talmud that one should "lean down and listen to your wife." Carlson's suggestion that we "learn to find holiness in seemingly ugly circumstances" recapitulates the fundamental lesson of Deuteronomy 6:4, with its assertion of God's oneness and the unity of creation. Needless to say, Dr. Laura's endorsement of sexual self-control did not originate with herself.

Alone among the self-help stars, Thomas Moore understands what's going on here. He explains that "we have lost our wisdom about the soul" but "we can look to the past for guidance in restoring this wisdom." In the last couple of centuries, the transmission of wisdom from generation to generation broke down.

Religious faith was once universally understood to encompass and affect every single aspect of life, not just what you believed about abstruse theological questions. From parents and clergymen, you learned how to be a contented person. The modern conception of religion is much narrower, thus less relevant, and hence much more likely to be neglected in the teaching of the young. We keep religion in a little box, and such boxes are notorious for getting mislaid.

When the train of transmission through faith was interrupted, we modern people were thrown back on the resources of our own reason. Wisdom about how to live our lives could be recovered imperfectly by applying common sense to life's problems. When self-help teachers recently began arriving at conclusions their ancestors had known perfectly well, conclusions directly opposed to the bogusness of much previous self- help material, they taught the "new" information as if they were scientists who had identified properties of the physical world by investigation alone. Hence the scientific veneer of Daniel Goleman and the pseudo-mathematical one of Stephen Covey.

A verse in Genesis illuminates the two sources of wisdom, secular and sacred. Abraham, the octogenarian patriarch, has just had a prophetic vision: "And he believed in the Lord, and He reckoned it to him as righteousness." Though Abraham had believed in God since he was young man, he arrived at that belief through reasoning and common sense. Not until now did he know God through faith.

Already the religious underpinnings of the best self-help books are starting to be recognized-as Laura Schlessinger's Ten Commandments makes clear. Most likely, other books like hers are already in production or soon will be, probably by clergymen with a more direct link to the old traditions than Dr. Laura has. These as yet unknown authors will reconnect practical wisdom with its ancient roots. When they do, it will be accounted to them as righteousness, to us as good fortune, and to Barnes & Noble as a bonanza.