Today's most prominent New Thought teachers deliver their sermons from the couches of television talk shows rather than pulpits; their books are more likely to be shelved under "Business" and "Self-Help" in bookstores than in "Religion." Stephen Covey's highly effective business executives are direct descendants of the constitutionally "healthy-minded" Victorians that William James marveled at one hundred years ago.
Wayne Dyer's "Power of Intention," the ordained Unity minister Marianne Williamson's "A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles," Deepak Chopra's many books on quantum healing and spiritual affluence, Gary Zukav's recondite explorations of quantum physics and practical exercises for "soul empowerment," Jerry and Esther Hicks' "Ask and It is Given" (the channeled wisdom of a spiritual entity named Abraham who reveals how you can become "vibrationally aligned" with your desires), not to mention the tapes, infomercials, and packed lectures by the motivational guru Tony Robbins and the first "New Thought" film "What the Bleep Do We Know?" about the invisible organization of energy-all offer variations on ideas that were first proclaimed by Quimby, Warren Felt Evans, the Dressers, Emma Curtis Hopkins, and Mary Baker Eddy more than a century ago.
Clearly New Thought spawned an effective practical psychology-millions of Americans recite daily affirmations to encourage their positivity while they struggle up the career ladder and through the vagaries of toxic relationships. 12-Step programs have empowered countless addicts to reclaim their lives; support groups help the chronically ill maintain hope and according to some studies actually improve their longevity. And innumerable informal groups gather together to learn how to access Universal Spirit in order to "manifest" more good in their lives.
It has been said, rightly I think, that human desire always looks beyond present enjoyments to an absent good. The minute we find ourselves contented by something, we set out afresh on work in the pursuit of happiness. What then is to be made of the recent claim from architects that something as seemingly fleeting and elusive as happiness can be ‘designed in’?
Happiness is the latest Big Idea amongst policymakers and social scientists. And given architects now justify design almost entirely in terms of delivering social policy, it was probably only a matter of time before attentions turned to shaping our feelings.
The popularity of designing happiness indicates the extent designers have returned to previously discredited ideas of environmental determinism. In recent decades we’ve become used to neighbourhoods designed to control criminal and anti social behaviour, ideas recently extended to include shaping how communities feel – for example safe and secure. Health and well-being are also seen as fair game. The popularity of the “nudge” approach of behavioural psychologists is evident in the “choice architecture” planners require in neighbourhoods to encourage the right – healthy – choice of foods. Seen in this light, it’s a small step to using design to “optimise” emotions and improve happiness.
What’s striking about the happiness movement is their desperately low opinion of the public, who seem to figure as little more than passive objects in need of designers to pep up their positive thinking or shape their “wise living”. Despite the claim of following in the tradition of the Enlightenment, it’s clear today’s happy clappy architects reject Enlightenment values of autonomy.
In the 18th century, the active pursuit of happiness represented part of a human awakening. The notable thing about today’s happiness brigade is their degraded view of humanity, for example seeing human society as prisoners of its biology. The RSA, (who ironically promote a “21st century Enlightenment”), argue that our “hunter gatherer” brains haven’t always adapted to abundance in modern society, a problem, they say, that retards our decision making capacity, and makes us obese, or lonely. The evolutionary biologist Bjorn Grinde thinks we’re ‘stone age creatures living in a jet age zoo’.
So where does this leave designers? Given the interest in designing environmental cues to shape the happiness of those in the zoo, it‘s little surprise that the collaborations designers seem most excited about just now are with neuroscientists. Yet for all the claims that this puts design on a scientific footing (and architects are never happier than when “evidencing” their design), what shines through is a miserable combination of the mystical and the authoritarian.
Not only have some architects become hostile to medical science (one favours designing hospitals as ‘architectural placebo effects’) but in line with environmentalist fads, discredited ideas of “nature therapy” have become popular. From parks as “natural health services” to the therapeutic value accorded to views of nature out of hospital windows, ideas are flourishing which have their roots in that dark historical period when homeopathy and hydrotherapy were closely aligned with biological notions of superiority.
So that's how we make these connections. Are they connected? Of course, they are.
First we're told to read stuff like this:
Only to have it followed by stuff like this:
As The Los Angeles Times said:
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