LITERARY REVIEW
Intro: The father of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, offers a three-step plan that means you can take control of your own destiny
Shakespeare got it right: “All things be ready, if our minds be so,” says King Harry in Henry V. The scene depicts the English being vastly outnumbered by French forces, but he has no doubt what will bring about an English victory on St Crispin’s Day.
Sheer will, he tells the assembled Lords. Will is at the root of agency; willpower drives performance and success. Even in these depressed and uncertain times, that seems self-evident.
Over a half-a-century ago, however, the world-renowned psychologist, Martin Seligman, witnessed the collapse of will in his best student at Cornell University.
Faced with a project well within her capabilities she simply gave up, because she had convinced herself she couldn’t do it.
Her professor realised that, “in 1968, psychology had no vocabulary for what I wanted to say”.
For even the rival “camps” in his subject agreed on one thing: “Free will was an illusion. People were products – of conditioning, of unconscious drives, or forces beyond their control.”
It became Seligman’s mission to identify, “the most important force in human experience: agency – the belief that you can influence your own future”. He thought of his brilliant student giving up and wondered if she might have been able to learn how to persist, how to strive for what seemed impossible, and how to resist her own sense of inadequacy.
“Agency”, he writes, is “the audacious human belief that tomorrow can be better than today, and that we have the power to make it so.”
Seligman is widely respected as the founder of positive psychology – the scientific study of what makes life worth living and what can make people thrive.
He is known for his inspiring works on happiness, optimism, change, and wellbeing – yet he is most emphatically not to be mistaken for a self-help guru or therapist.
His bracing view that individuals can take control of their own lives is central. This hard-won optimism counters his own natural depressive tendencies by focusing on human strength, not weakness – as he insists, the most effective way to become more optimistic is through “mental toughness”.
Strict scientific data underpins whatever motivational advice readers may take from his many books.
This latest volume is perhaps the most ambitious, embracing a vast sweep of human history in order to assess how “agency” affects human progress and survival.
There are lessons for the individual in his analysis of why some societies thrive, why some flounder, and how whole civilisations can be swept away.
Seligman admits to being a pessimist himself, which perhaps explains his life’s work as a personal pep talk.
He identifies three elements that combine to form the energy behind “the belief that I can achieve my goals” – which is the agency driving the human spirit.
1. Efficacy is “my estimate of achieving a specific goal in the here and now”. 2. Optimism is about “achievement in the future”. 3. Imagination is “my mental representation of the range of goals I can achieve beyond the here and now”.
That three-step works on a personal level. But the whole drive of the book is societal too: “Efficacy causes trying hard, optimism causes persistence, and imagination causes innovation. This is exactly how agency causes progress.”
This is the core belief of the book. Without agency there is no action.
When a society is confident and forward-looking, progress occurs. When it is absent the result is stagnation – a malaise which, incidentally, some readers may recognise in Britain today.
TWO
To illustrate his theory, Seligman conducts us on an exhilarating whistlestop tour through human history, seeking answers to the question, “Why some [people] crumble under life’s blows while others bounce back.”
Why are some individuals resilient while others exhibit “Learned Helplessness”? How does that play out across a whole culture? Is it inevitably true that “poverty . . . causes present-mindedness and wealth causes future-mindedness”? What does rigorous belief in an ideology or religion do to human agency? Just some of the fascinating and vital questions Seligman poses in this hugely important book.
His answers are to be found in history. He examines the later books of the Hebrew Bible and makes a comparison between their growth of human agency, and the writings of the Zhou Dynasty in China and the Golden Age of Greece: “Three unrelated civilisations across the globe and within a broadly comparable period, recognise the power of human agency and their gods retreat.”
He compares the development of those three different cultures and observes that their Golden periods of success arrived once people had lessened their slavish belief in gods as the source of power, who therefore had to be obeyed. “When we mortals are thought to control our destiny, we actually do. When supernatural forces . . . are thought to control our destiny, we languish,” he notes. Readers should be reminded this is a book written by a psychologist.
Technology allows Seligman to dissect language, listing “agentic” words of action and determination and hope used through key texts and documents, which indicate the states of mind of individuals and societies.
After a cheerful and useful chapter called More Agency In Your Life (tips on how to learn optimism), Seligman does an extraordinary thing.
This brilliant book about human agency ends with what some critics’ regard as a kowtow to Artificial Intelligence (AI). He even shows how it can take his place in solving problems.
I did wonder if it had infected the brilliant brain of a man who has sought nothing but good, yet fails to grasp the obvious peril that the will of AI will banish human agency altogether.
– Agency by Martin Seligman is published by John Murray One, 400pp
