Too cheerful by half

It was Americans who forced the concept on us in the first place, God knows. But it was heartening to learn this week that a small band of US psychologists is at last fighting back against the tyranny of positive thinking.

Many people have long suspected the pressure to be happy is making us all miserable. Now a number of eminent shrinks have come out in agreement - grudging agreement, presumably - and they got together in Washington recently for a symposium entitled The (Overlooked) Virtues of Negativity.

Negativity's virtues are particularly overlooked in the US, which has more than 80 per cent of the world's known reserves of optimism. But these intrepid psychologists - including one Barbara Held, author of a book called Stop Smiling, Start Kvetching (Yiddish for complaining noisily) - are hoping to turn the tide. You don't have to smile all the time, is their radical message, and it's OK if you're not having a nice day.

Whatever happens, the movement will be watched with interest in Ireland, a traditional stronghold of negativity but a country where, as we all know, optimism has been rampant of late, even though before this damned boom it was as foreign to us as cappuccino.

I think it's fair to say nobody disagrees that happiness is a good thing. The issue, which has divided thinkers down the ages, is how it can be achieved. Schopenhauer argued that it was in fact unattainable, whereas Benson and Hedges contended that it was a cigar called Hamlet. Most people would come down somewhere between these two extremes.

What worries the psychologists who met in Washington, according to a report in the New York Times, is that their profession - and the US as a whole - has succumbed to "an ethos of unrelenting positivity"; which prescribes "cheerfulness and optimism as a formula for success, resilience and good health, and equates negativity with failure, vulnerability and general unhealthiness".

The Times reporter who wrote the article is called Erica Goode, which shows how far the madness has gone over there. But anyway, she quotes the less-optimistically named Held, as arguing that the pressure on people to be upbeat all the time can be harmful. "I'm worried that we're not making space for people to feel bad," Held says.

Although psychologists have spearheaded the positive thinking movement, the doctrine is reinforced by popular culture. From children's television programmes to Hollywood movies, the unrelenting message is that we must smile and be happy and that the ultimate goal of all human activity is "fun".

The US ambassador to the world's children is Barney, a fun-obsessed purple dinosaur who appears in a daily television programme with a group of kids who've undergone personality-enhancement surgery. Barney is hugely popular with them, and with children generally, it seems. But, in keeping with the aims of the new psychology movement, I would just like to say here that I hate his dinosaur guts.

I hate him I hate him I hate him I hate him. There.

But moving on; pop music too is relentless in its mission to turn us into shiny happy people. And this is despite the fact that most of the traditional music forms from which it emerged drew on the power of misery to cheer people up.

Black Americans sang the blues to feel happy. White Americans preferred country: songs about lonesome train whistles or - if they really needed a lift - songs like the one about the little boy in a wheelchair talking to truckers on his deceased father's CB radio while waiting for his Mom to come home from her 18-hour-day as a guinea pig for a multinational drugs company.

Indeed, to quote another of the Washington psychologists, we too have traditionally used pessimism as a "way of coping", especially during those 800 years of oppression, which left us with a vast archive of ballads about emigration and famine and general slaughter, lightened occasionally by more humorous material, such as The Night Before Larry was Stretched.

Even in these days, when optimism is official Government policy and anyone who refuses to look on the bright side is either a left-wing pinko or a creepin' Jesus, some of the old tradition lingers. It's no coincidence that the favourite chant of Irish soccer supporters is a song about how lonely it is around the fields of Athenry - and how low-lying and generally miserable those poxy, rain-sodden fields are.

Supporters are never happier that when singing that song. And yet this ancient wisdom has counted for nothing with psychologists, at least until now.

Yet another example of the extent of the positive thinking movement arrived through my letterbox this week, in the form of the Eircom annual report.

As long-time readers will know, this column has an investment portfolio comprising a 6 per cent holding in a greyhound along and a small number of Eircom shares. Unfortunately, the greyhound has underperformed in the financial year ending last Monday in Harolds Cross; and in case you haven't been following the stock markets in the past 12 months, the strength of Eircom has been such that, had it been a greyhound, it would have been humanely destroyed long before now.

But you wouldn't know this from reading the chairman's statement, in which Ray MacSharry reports a strong financial and operational performance and makes no mention at all of the fact that the share price has gone down the toilet. He isn't smiling in the accompanying photograph, admittedly, but otherwise this is classic positive thinking.

And in fairness it seems to be working for Eircom's senior executives - two of whom, as this paper reported on Wednesday, received £1.7 million in remuneration, including bonuses, last year. Next month's annual general meeting is expected to be attended by many of the company's half-million investors. Financial analysts predict a lot of kvetching.

Frank McNally is at fmcnally@irish-times.ie