This week, we have two highly perceptive and provocative readings by way of advice and dissent: Algis Valiunas’s hard-hitting “The Science of Self-Help” in the Summer 2010 issue of
The New Atlantis, and Alix Christie’s plaintive “We Ten Million” in the Autumn 2010 issue of
More Intelligent Life magazine.
A nation awash in self-help drivel. In “The Science of Self-Help,” Valiunas,
New Atlantis contributing editor and fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, takes a disapproving, dismissive look at what he calls the “vast apparatus of uplift and solicitude [that] services Americans’ longings for success and happiness.” He is outraged by what he finds. Although he acknowledges that “studying self-help seriously not only illuminates the American character but may actually turn up some needed wisdom,” he finds the self-help industry chockfull of feel-good purveyors “turning out swill by the boatload and feeding the cravings of the perennially feckless.”
His overall appraisal of the self-help industry is no less harsh: “For now... even the best purveyors of functional wisdom offer less than we really need. And as for the rest, there is pap from sea to shining sea, of wanton avarice, or diaphanous lunacy, or simpleton dullness. One fears for a nation awash in this drivel. One longs for a practical democratic philosopher to save us from drowning in it.”
Read Algis Valiunas’s “The Science of Self-Help” in The New Atlantis now!Hopeful scribblers hunched in their holes. In “We Ten Million,” novelist Alix Christie, a semi-finalist in the 2008 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, makes a plaintive but nevertheless hopeful rallying cry for herself and for her kindred novelists who, she says, will probably never be published: “Somewhere in the world right now, ten million souls are hunched over their keyboards writing novels. Ten million hopeful scribblers in their holes. Good Lord, I’m one of them.”
Christie observes with dismay that even the publishing industry itself is undergoing some discouraging changes. “New numbers show that even successful authors earn far less money from books than they used to,” she says. “In an industry driven by hunger for the next blockbuster, the chances of making a living as a writer are slimmer now than ever.”
But if the prospects of the fiction-book publishing are that dismal, why still pursue novel-writing as a career? “What helps keep me going...is literature itself,” Christie says. “With its heft, its moral purpose and its beauty, it is a counterweight to our increasingly flighty and commercial world.”
Read Alix Christie’s “We Ten Million” in More Intelligent Life magazine now! THE PAGE FOR THIS ARTICLE IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE ON THE WEB
