Orland Evangelical Free Church | New York Times Readers and Happiness

The sight of "Happiness 101" at the top of the Times most e-mailed list early this week made me grumpy. For starters, maybe someday we can stop attaching "101" to nouns and calling it a title. But my surliness went further.

The article is long. It was published on January 7^th in the New York Times Magazine, an influential weekly that comes with the Times Sunday edition. So it has all the pretensions one expects from a magazine piece in this market, of which the prodigious word-count is only the most obvious.

When I saw the article's focus was psychology, I was even more irritated. Psychologists' insights are first and best discovered non-scientifically, and their mania for quantification tends to distort even what they get right. This article, for instance, mentions a web site that "has a 240-question test to help determine whether your gift is for creativity, bravery, love or something else." Mr. Raley, we've evaluated your results, and your gift is clearly for something else.

But most of my snarling had nothing to do with the article or even the new field of positive psychology it describes.

I know what evangelicals will do with this stuff.

Near the beginning they will read about a professor at George Mason who teaches "the distinction between feeling good, which according to positive psychologists only creates a hunger for more pleasure - they call this syndrome the hedonic treadmill - and doing good, which can lead to lasting happiness." Say, that's biblical.

They will read how students in the class start doing good - giving blood, donating clothes, buying a homeless guy a 12-pack of Natty Ice. Other students "pass out chocolates and handwritten notes to school custodians and secretaries." "Gratitude visits - looking up someone who has taught or mentored you and thanking him or her - are important in positive psychology, too . . . ." Lo, the students are happier.

Evangelicals will then read that interest in this field is spreading. "More than 200 colleges and graduate schools in the United States offer classes like the one at George Mason." In the last nine years positive psychology "has taken a firm hold in academia." Schools and institutions in England and Australia are making inquiries. Even the Scots want to be positive. That's right, the ones in Scotland: "Our old nation has been renewed through our new Parliament, and if we can embrace this new science of positive psychology, we have the opportunity to create a new Enlightenment."

We can't thank them enough for creating the last one.

And the lure of science is what will convert the evangelicals. The whole appeal of this field is summed by the words on screen in front of that George Mason classroom: "The Scientific Pursuit of Happiness."

The positive psychologists hope to prove through research that the ethics common to all the world's philosophies and religions "lead to better outcomes" in life. Doing good releases you from the hedonic treadmill and allows you to build happiness into the structure of your existence. Hard science will prove it.

Evangelicals can't resist that. Here's the old enemy finally coming around. At last values and spirituality will have credibility among secular people. We've got to get on board. This train is bound for relevance.

There's just one problem. The science is a little iffy. Here's the chairwoman of Wellesley's psychology department: "There is way too little evidence of stable, long-term benefits - and lack of harm - to justify large-scale incorporation of positive psychology programs into schools. It pays scant attention to individual differences." Says Daniel Gilbert of Harvard, "I guess I just wish it didn't look so much like a religion."

About the time evangelicals are fully invested in this field, the last secular academic will have reached the exit.

In reality, a field like positive psychology is symptomatic of the Enlightenment's demise. Hard science with its numbers has never succeeded in providing meaning. As the consensus that science offers the only authentic knowledge falls the pieces, all the sciences are scrambling to make their case to the average person.

Even to themselves. Martin Seligman, past president of the American Psychological Association and "renowned for his hard science", became one of the founders of positive psychology after his five-year-old chastised him for being grumpy. He "decided to put his considerable talents into finding out ‘what made life worth living.'"

Scientific proof, for such a man, remains the only true door to knowledge. To critics who say there is not yet first-rate science in positive psychology, Seligman replies, "I have the same worry they do. That's what I do at 4 in the morning."

Yet again, evangelicals will miss the big story.