Charlie Rose

REMant  01/12/2010 10:01 PM Report

Rieff and Lasch were here before, so also Charles Perrow in his criticism of the human relations management movement, and, of course, David Riesman, et al. Norman Vincent Peale, the originator of the phrase "positive thinking" in 1952, was a major cog in the therapeutic social views they attack, but it goes back to the 19th c, both as "mind cure," the New Thought movement whose motto was "Think Your Way to Wealth," and as revivalism, for example, in the Horatio Alger stories, where youth were admonished to work hard, but were invariably hired for their "personality," which J B Watson likewise advised, if memory serves. Dale Carnegie began his courses in 1912. Historian William Leuchtenburg, similarly, quotes Walter Weyl, co-founder of The New Republic and student of Simon Patten, patron saint of consumerism, in 1919: "Our future may depend less on the hours that we work today than on the words or the smile we exchange with some anonymous fellow-passenger in the office-building elevator," and he adds "aggressively optimistic, [20th c man] was friendlier but had less depth, was more demanding of approval, less certain of himself. He did not knock, he boosted. He had lots of pep, hustle, and zip. He joined the Rotary or Kiwanis, and he believed in 'service,' a word that was repeated ad nauseam during the decade." Begun just before WWI these clubs grew exponentially during the decade. Frederick Lewis Allen writes, during the '20's "in every American city and town, service clubs gathered the flower of the middle-class citizenry together for weekly luncheons noisy with good fellowship....Nor did these clubs content themselves with singing songs and conducting social-service campaigns; they expressed the national faith in what one of their founders called 'the redemptive and regenerative influence of business'...Indeed, the association of business with religion was one of the most significant phenomena of the day." Adman Bruce Barton went so far as to identify Jesus as the original businessman in what became a best-seller. Like these same Progressives' enthusiasm for a "new economy," which would banish depressions via unlimited credit, the past several decades have also seen the resurrection of this quite different sort of social gospel, tho its roots certainly lie in the Great Awakenings (or much earlier if Mandeville, who railed at Shaftesbury on this subject is to be believed), and there is a sure connection between it and the development of mkt society. Often professing to defend the "values" of hard work and family, these latter-day saints are clearly responsible for their dissolution by making them a matter of sympathy, and it is a matter of some amusement that they do not realize that many of their Progressive predecessors, before WWI, were quite explicit about doing away with both.