Full Metal Racket

In the wake of Jesse Singal’s recent critique of the Army’s embrace of Martin Seligman’s psychological theories, let’s pause to praise The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan’s 1967 cult TV series about a man imprisoned in a feel-good dystopia called “The Village.” The “veritable carnival of unskilled intuition and exaggerated storytelling” that Singal describes recalls The Prisoner’s rotating cast of apparatchiks, all bent on brainwashing the prisoner. There’s no mastermind, no man behind the curtain, just a lot of oppressive, self-aggrandizing verbiage producing the impression of authority.

Positive Psychology: A Debate

Ann Cutting for The Chronicle

Recently, the Review published an essay by Jesse Singal, “Positive Psychology Goes to War,” taking a critical look at the role of academic psychology — especially the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center, directed by Martin Seligman — in military culture. In response, Seligman argued for the evidentiary robustness of PP.

The debate continues. Here, Matthew Carey Salyer, an associate professor of English at West Point, attacks what he sees as the rhetorical hollowness of positive psychology’s adaptation by the Army. And Jesse Singal criticizes Seligman’s claims about PP and its benefits for soldiers.

McGoohan’s parable helps us perceive the ease with which the linguistic strategies of government bureaucracies and academic hierarchies can converge. Indeed, Seligman’s militarized psychological program (Comprehensive Soldier Fitness, or CSF) illustrates the degree to which authority, both institutional and intellectual, often functions as little more than a rhetorical style.

Seligman’s goals are leadership-guru LinkedIn guff, like “authentic happiness” and “the positives,” worked toward via ArmyFit™ exercises to achieve “resilience” and “performance enhancement.” (No, I’m not sure why a state-run platform for universal “keys to living a healthy lifestyle” is trademarked.) These and other pleasant goals are achieved via what Seligman calls the “optimistic explanatory style.” It’s really a literary descriptive style saturated with the diffused, recursive production of metonymies. CSF’s genre is comedy, oriented toward happy endings; it promises that if I chin-up now, I’ll get what Henry James called the “distribution at the last of prizes, pensions … and cheerful remarks” later. In “milspeak,” CSF’s idiom is now ubiquitous, employed in questions of organizational management, private morals, oath-making, public duties, interpersonal relationships, and religious practice. CSF promises liberation from “thinking traps” through individual expressive acts. Instead, it enforces groupthink.

CSF’s descriptive strategies for ensuring a happy resolution are endless. As someone obliged to take his Global Assessment Tool questionnaires, I’ve learned that Seligman has a lot of keys jangling in my ears — from the “keys to Perma [positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment],” to “human beings at their best,” to “disputing [my] own pessimistic thoughts,” and so on. These keys function as what the Roman rhetorician Quintilian called a “middle step” to metaphor, “signifying nothing, but giving passage.”

“We demonstrate,” Seligman explains, “through a series of role plays.” What he really means is “scripted vignettes,” which serve as something like creative-writing prompts. CSF is like an MFA workshop from hell where no one understands the difference between poetic personae and living persons. It is essentially a slapdash rhetorical exercise, and it invites critique on those terms.

I’m troubled by Seligman’s own use of an optimistic style when he describes CSF’s evolution in the Harvard Business Review and in his book Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being. Consider how Seligman describes important military officers. One general is “legendary,” a “Delta Force hero,” another’s a “6-foot-3-inch West Point football star.” Someone carried “the ‘football’ with the nuclear codes for President Bill Clinton.” Big ones, these “Greek ideal[s] of the hero” who “tell the world an important truth about how to live,” these uber-resilient “people of whom Friedrich Nietzsche said, ‘That which does not kill us makes us stronger.’” In walks a general, “lithe, short; late fifties, buzz-cut greying hair … and we all stood to attention.”

I don’t know why Seligman, a civilian, stood to attention for a military officer. In Seligman’s writing, though, this vignette contributes to an overarching rhetoric of social emulation. The Victorian sage Thomas Carlyle has described the dynamic whereby certain sorts of figure — military men, say — become fetishes of such emulation. Who among us, I suppose, would not prefer to be one of Carlyle’s “natural luminar[ies] shining by the gift of Heaven”? Whatever that means. I, for one, am 6-foot-4.

In Seligman’s prose, abiding in the Carlylean “profitable company” of high-ranking military men is a method for absorbing heroic status. One colleague charged with the “‘militarizing’ of the material” for CSF becomes a “No. 1 master trainer and the Oprah Winfrey of positive psychology.” Elsewhere, two generals have an enthusiastic conversation about the rollout of mandatory online classes. “Fast work, General,” the other general says. “What do you and Marty want to do next?” (Does a general call another general “General?”) “We sat,” Seligman remarks, “and I noticed that the three-star general on my left had headed his notes ‘Seligman Lunch.’”

At the same time, CSF is grounded in academic status-signaling. The rhetorical appeal to authority — “designed at the University of Pennsylvania by behavioral specialists” — is unmistakable. The generals get some of the intellectual status of the academic expert, while the academics get some of the glory of the generals.

At their most absurd, such status exchanges become an endless game of deferred meaning. Consider this 2009 NPR interview conducted with Seligman and one of the generals from Flourish:

NPR: “And this will be the largest-ever [positive psychology] experiment, I guess is not too strong a word to use?”

The general: “Well, we’re not calling it an experiment. We’re calling it training.”

NPR: “Well, how do you teach resilience?”

The general: “Well, now, I am not the expert at that particular task, but I understand that we may have someone else on the show who is more expert.”

NPR: “Is there any data about how this training affects troops’ ability to perform tasks and even fight in the field?”

Seligman: “No. There is no data about that. And of course Gen. Cornum and her research group will be monitoring this.”

“Training,” “experiment,” “monitoring,” and “research” are all used interchangeably. “The expert” who’s “more expert,” the grand-G “and-of-course-general”: Seligman and the general’s language trips over itself in using status words that refer, and defer, to putatively complementary domains of expertise. In Seligman’s defense of the program, he says he finds it “odd that Singal did not present interviews with any of the thousands of soldiers trained in Comprehensive Soldier Fitness.” His “personal impression is that they loved the program.” I find it odd that Seligman imagines that soldiers have the same unfettered speech and eagerness to talk to the press that he does. But Seligman’s book also fails to give voice to soldiers’ impressions of his program. Flourish’s rhetoric treats soldiers as the objects of heroic force rather than critical subjectivities. It’s as though generals and academics with name recognition inherit “the power of articulate Thinking, and many other powers, as yet miraculous” from Carlyle’s Odin, while rank-and-file soldiers get to be extras on Vikings, waiting to hit their mark and holler.

Seligman depicts soldiers in a flat register. He discusses “the soldier’s spiritual core,” “what the soldier did.” “The soldier is distracted,” he notes. At least “the sergeants” get speaking roles. The sergeants “keep a gratitude journal.” A “simple fact comes as a surprise to many of the sergeants.” One sergeant “used his strength of love to engage the soldier.” I came across two sergeants with names in Flourish, but they were make-believe characters in a “passive destructive” vignette. This is not the kind of situation that produces frank, bottom-up feedback. I suppose Singal might have asked the soldiers if Seligman knew their names.

If the therapeutic parlance of positive psychology seems borderline Orwellian, it’s because the idea that we are raw material for expert identity-formation is antidemocratic. Its aestheticized optimism echoes what Edmund Burke refers to as the terrifying confidence that we can “safely take to pieces, and put together at … pleasure, a moral machine.” Rereading Plato’s Apology of Socrates between semesters, though, I was reminded of a different sort of risk, one that Seligman’s descriptive techniques and narrative conventions attempt to mitigate. Critical inquiry is unpredictable. Yet without the democratization of critical judgment we depend on, expertise becomes chimeric — good-hearted (perhaps) but authoritarian. I’ll say that softly, though, before the heroes come to take the words right out of my mouth.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.