Then, in 1952, Norman Vincent Peale came out with the mother of all optimistic books, The Power of Positive Thinking, urging readers to cast negative thoughts from mind and pep-talk themselves into greatness. That book rested atop the Times list for an astounding ninety-eight weeks.
Then came humanistic psychology led by people like Carl Rogers, the most influential psychologist of the twentieth century. The humanistic psychologists shifted away from Freud’s darker conception of the unconscious and promoted a sky-high estimation of human nature. The primary psychological problem, he argued, is that people don’t love themselves enough, and so therapists unleashed a great wave of self-loving. “Man’s behavior is exquisitely rational,” Rogers wrote, “moving with subtle and ordered complexity toward the goal his organism is endeavoring to achieve.”12 The words that best describe human nature, he continued, are “positive, forward moving, constructive, realistic and trustworthy.” People don’t need to combat themselves, they only need to open up, to liberate their inner selves, so that their internalized drive to self-actualize can take over. Self-love, self-praise, and self-acceptance are the paths to happiness. To the extent that a person “can be freely in touch with his valuing process in himself, he will behave in ways that are self-enhancing.”13
Humanistic psychology has shaped nearly every school, nearly every curriculum, nearly every HR department, nearly every self-help book. Soon there were “IALAC” posters on school walls everywhere—I AM LOVABLE AND CAPABLE. The self-esteem movement was born. Our modern conversation lives in this romantic vision.
The Age of Self-Esteem
The shift from one moral culture to another is not a crude story of decline, from noble restraint to self-indulgent decadence. Each moral climate is a collective response to the problems of the moment. People in the Victorian era were faced with a decline in religious faith and adopted a strict character morality as a way to compensate. People in the 1950s and 1960s confronted a different set of problems. When people shift from one moral ecology to another, they are making a trade-off in response to changing circumstances. Since legitimate truths sit in tension with one another, one moral climate will put more emphasis here and less emphasis there, for better or worse. Certain virtues are cultivated, certain beliefs go too far, and certain important truths and moral virtues are accidentally forgotten.
The shift in the 1950s and 1960s to a culture that put more emphasis on pride and self-esteem had many positive effects; it helped correct some deep social injustices. Up until those years, many social groups, notably women, minorities, and the poor, had received messages of inferiority and humiliation. They were taught to think too lowly of themselves. The culture of self-esteem encouraged members of these oppressed groups to believe in themselves, to raise their sights and aspirations.
For example, many women had been taught to lead lives so committed to subservience and service that it led to self-abnegation. Katharine Meyer Graham’s life illustrates why so many people embraced the shift from self-effacement to self-expression.
Katharine Meyer grew up in a wealthy publishing family in Washington, D.C. She attended the Madeira School, a progressive but genteel private school in which young ladies were raised amid mottoes such as “Function in disaster. Finish in style.” At home, she was thoroughly dominated by a father who was awkward and distant and by a mother who demanded Stepford Wife perfection: “I think we all felt we somehow hadn’t lived up to what she expected or wanted of us, and the insecurities and lack of self-confidence she bred were long lasting,” she would write years later in her superb memoir.14
Girls were expected to be quiet, reserved, and correct, and Katharine grew up painfully self-conscious. “Had I said the right thing? Had I worn the right clothes? Was I attractive? These questions were unsettling and self-absorbing, even overwhelming at times.”
In 1940, Katharine married a charming, witty, mercurial man named Philip Graham, who had a subtle or not so subtle way of belittling her views and abilities. “I increasingly saw my role as the tail to his kite—and the more I felt overshadowed, the more it became a reality.”15 Graham had a series of affairs, which Katharine discovered and was devastated by.
Graham, who suffered from depression, committed suicide on August 3, 1963. Six weeks later, Katharine was elected president of the Washington Post Company. At first she saw herself as a bridge between her dead husband and her children who would eventually inherit it. But she shut her eyes, took a step as manager, took another step, and found she could do the job.
Over the next few decades the surrounding culture encouraged Katharine to assert herself and to develop the full use of her capacities. The year she took over the Post, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, which embraced Carl Rogers’s humanistic psychology. Gloria Steinem later wrote a bestselling book, Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem. Dr. Joyce Brothers, a prominent advice columnist at the time, put the ethos bluntly: “Put yourself first—at least some of the time. Society has brainwashed women into believing that their husbands’ and children’s needs should always be given priority over their own. Society has never impressed on women as it has on men the human necessity of putting yourself first. I am not advocating selfishness. I’m talking about the basics of life. You have to decide how many children you want, what kind of friends you want, what kind of relationships you want with your family.”16
The emphasis on self-actualization and self-esteem gave millions of women a language to articulate and cultivate self-assertion, strength, and identity. Graham eventually became one of the most admired and powerful publishing executives in the world. She built the Post into a major and highly profitable national newspaper. She stood up to the Nixon White House and storm of abuse during the Watergate crisis, maintaining steadfast support for Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, and the rest of the journalists who broke that story. She never fully overcame her insecurities, but she did learn to project a formidable image. Her memoir is a masterwork, understated but also honest and authoritative, without a hint of self-pity or false sentiment.
Katharine Graham, like many women and members of minority groups, needed a higher and more accurate self-image—needed to move from Little Me to Big Me.
Authenticity
The underlying assumptions about human nature and the shape of human life were altered by this shift to the Big Me. If you were born at any time over the last sixty years, you were probably born into what the philosopher Charles Taylor has called “the culture of authenticity.” This mindset is based on the romantic idea that each of us has a Golden Figure in the core of our self. There is an innately good True Self, which can be trusted, consulted, and gotten in touch with. Your personal feelings are the best guide for what is right and wrong.
In this ethos, the self is to be trusted, not doubted. Your desires are like inner oracles for what is right and true. You know you are doing the right thing when you feel good inside. The valid rules of life are those you make or accept for yourself and that feel right to you.
“Our moral salvation,” Taylor writes, describing this culture, “comes from recovering authentic moral contact with ourselves.” It is important to stay true to that pure inner voice and not follow the conformities of a corrupting world. As Taylor puts it, “There is a certain way of being that is my way. I am called to live my life in this way and not in imitation of anyone else’s…. If I am not, I miss the point of my life. I miss what being human is for me.”17