MY INFANT DAUGHTER NICOLE WAS DUE the day of the recent coup
attempt in theSoviet Union. She waited until it was over to come out and
so was born into a new world. In my lifetime, the prospects for this
nation have never been brighter.
The nightmare of our long struggle against Stalinism is over, and
the forces of social democracy have won. Fewer Americans are dying on
battlefields and fewer children are starving than at any other time in
this century. Dictators such as Marcos, Baby Doc, and Ceausescu are gone,
and the time of the tyrant is winding down. The Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientist has moved its clock far back from midnight. Peace in the Middle
East even seems possible.
True, we have AIDS, crack, a recession that won't go away, an
unbowed Saddam Hussein, and global warming--among other problems to worry
about. But only people blinded by their ideology or their own personal
troubles believe that these present-day ills loom as large as the ones
just ending. In fact it is the victories over these horrors which allows
us the luxury of taking such matters as sexual harassment and the fate of
the spotted owl as seriously as we do.
I believe my little Nikki is born into a better word than I was.
But I worry that she and her generation will never grasp what is now
within their reach. What stands in their way, I believe, is a
psychological vacuum--not very different from the "Nothing" that gobbles
up the Earth in The Neverending Story. And this nothing is about to be
transmitted from us to them.
America's baby boomers and their children are now in a growing
epidemic of depression. One of the seeds of depression is pessimism. In
the 1950s it became fashionable for thinking Americans to espouse
pessimism as a reaction to the boosterism and footless optimism of the
"Every day in every way I'm getting better and better" stripe that became
popular after the agony of the Great Depression.
Contrary to our national self-image, our epidemic of depression in
young people shows that we are becoming a nation of pessimists. Pessimism
is an ingrained habit of seeing the causes of bad events--for instance
the steady withering of American initiative, the endless history of
dictatorship in Russia--as permanent and pervasive: "It's going to last
forever" and "It's going to undermine everything." The optimist has the
skill of finding temporary and local causes, such as the current Federal
Reserve policy and a poor wheat harvest.
Pessimism is not inborn--we learn it from our parents, our
teachers, and our Little League coaches. Those of Nikki's generation are
steeped in a pessimism engendered by the assassinations of the '60s, by
Watergate and Vietnam.
If pessimism were still just a posture, I would not be writing
about it today. But it is a way of being that has enormous costs: For
individuals it produces vulnerability to depression, lowered productivity
and poor health. Multiplied across a nation it produces a vacuum of
passivity, caution, and selfishness so widespread as to threaten the
prospects of the next generation.
If Nikki's generation absorbs the pessimism of its elders, it will,
I predict, lose the economic straggle to more optimistic nations in Asia
and Europe. It will lack the nerve to make the sacrifices necessary to
maintain a "pax americana," and lack the initiative to clean up the
environment or achieve racial and sexual equality.
How can the word that will lodge in the hearts of our children be
changed to "yes"?
One of the most important discoveries of modem cognitive psychology
is that we have a choice about how we think. We are not forever prisoners
of our present cognitive styles. We can choose to change the habits of
pessimism into optimism if we are convinced that the cost of the former
is too high.
The key to permanently undoing pessimism lies in using a skill we
all have: disputing catastrophic thoughts. We are very good at this when
others wrongly accuse us, but we rarely deploy it when we wrongly
criticize ourselves. Adults and children can, with practice, learn to
dispute automatic negative thoughts. Once learned, these skills persist
because they feel so good to use. And reality is usually on our
side.
Most of our children will not, on their own, acquire the skills to
dispute the catastrophic thoughts that are their usual first reaction to
setbacks. Optimism is a set of learned skills, and we can teach our
children alternative causes for setbacks other than the catastrophic
ones. We can teach our children to marshal evidence for the alternatives
against the most dire one and to weigh the implications of setbacks
rationally.
I commend these cognitive skills to you as parents and teachers,
and I urge you to arm the next generation with them.
Tags:
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ills,
infant daughter,
neverending story,
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peace in the middle east,
personal troubles,
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