SOME time back, I spent a year studying at a university in America. It was Duke University in North Carolina, and the time my wife and I spent there was fascinating. One of the things we discovered was that most of the stereotypes of Americans were false.
At the end of the university year, we drove from coast to coast, from North Carolina to California. The beauty of the country, in all its different aspects, was breathtaking.
Not quite so much fun, though, was American radio. It seemed to be relentlessly positive and upbeat. After a while, it got a bit wearing.
Now I am not advocating pessimism as a healthy outlook on life, but sometimes positive thinking can become an absurd ideology.
I remember switching on the car radio one day and an evangelical preacher was on air. He was ultra-confident and positive: “If you become a Christian," he said, "you can prepare to move house."
I wondered what all this was about, and he went on to explain. He said that if you believed in Jesus, you would become prosperous, and you would soon be able to move to a bigger and better house.
Now this seemed bizarre to me, because Jesus didn't say anything like that at all. In fact, he said that the Christian life would be full of challenges.
Somehow, Christianity had become subverted by the creed of positive thinking. Jesus had been transformed into a wealthy guru who promised wealth to those who followed him.
Having a good attitude is obviously a help in life. People who are always gloomy can be a drag on things. But there are aspects of the positive-thinking movement which can be very unhelpful indeed. Let me explain.
Positive thinking can be a menace when it bypasses realism. Some of its gurus will say that everything depends on your attitude. With a positive attitude, it is argued, everything is possible for you. Your positive attitude, it is alleged, will automatically draw to you riches, prestige and success.
There is some truth in this philosophy, but it is far from the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
I'm sure that those investment bankers who took crazy risks with other people's money advocated that kind of creed. For a spell, they got success and, because of that, lots of people jumped on their bandwagon. Many are now facing ruin. Perpetual optimism which blinds itself to some hard realities becomes dangerous.
A few years ago, there was a poster which seemed to be everywhere. It had a picture of birds in mid-air. The slogan beside them read: They fly because they think they can.
Unfortunately, this is not true. They fly because they have wings.
There is a name for people who jump out of high buildings flapping home-made wings. That name is “dead people”.
Positive thinking which is not allied to realism is simply wishful thinking. Politicians who go this route can be positively dangerous. They can take countries into wars that are unwinnable. They can ignore warnings in intelligence documents and “sex them up" and persuade trusting people to go to war.
When positive-thinking gurus speak about illness, they start with something which is obviously true – that a good attitude can be helpful. The problems start when they go beyond that realistic statement and promise cures. If you believe enough, they say, you will be healed.
This is simply a false prospectus. In fact, it is a cruel prospectus. People who are not cured might be told by the preacher that it's their fault because they didn't believe hard enough. So not only do you have a life-threatening illness, but you have the added burden of believing that it's all your own fault.
One respected American writer has taken a look at the positive-thinking epidemic in America and challenged it. When Barbara Ehrenreich went to be treated for breast cancer, she was told to think positively. When she expressed feelings of fear and anger, she was chided for being negative.
Ehrenreich, the author of 16 books, studied the issue and has written a book about it called Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.
Positive thinking is different, she says, from being cheerful or good-natured – it's believing that the world is shaped by our wants and desires and that by focusing on the good, the bad somehow ceases to exist.
The positive-thinking movement, it seems, was started by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, and an amateur philosopher called – wait for it – Phineas Parkhurst Quimby. Mr Quimby was reacting against Calvinism, which seemed to dwell on all the negative things about human beings.
Positive thinking moved from being a low-key philosophy about having a cheerful attitude to being an ideology that was taken up by big business. It has become a bit of a cult.
Its gurus tell workers that all they have to do to be wealthy is to think positively and picture the nice new house they will live in or the fancy car they will drive. A lot of these people are now redundant, and as well as having lost their jobs they blame themselves for not believing enough.
Barbara Ehrenreich says: “I have traced how positive thinking became the corporate culture in America. It was mandatory to be positive. You had companies who would literally fire people for being negative, negative in the sense of maybe raising too many questions.
“One example is the man who was the head of the real-estate division of Lehman Brothers. In 2006, he told his boss that he thought the whole housing thing was a bubble and they should start getting out, and he was fired for that. So we had a culture of complete denial at all levels of the possibility that bad things could happen.”
At the beginning of the year 2010, we could all do with being positive, but not in the inflated way which characterises a lot of popular self-help books. Positive thinking without a healthy dose of realism is a damaging creed.