Speaker 1: Pushkin. It's early morning in Venice Beach, a few blocks
Speaker 1: away from the Pacific Ocean. My producer Hunter and I
Speaker 1: are ordering breakfast at a cafe. The menu is long
Speaker 1: and many items have oddly positive names an uplifting, blissful,
Speaker 1: super eternal, grace, stella or cool. We've just blown in
Speaker 1: from New York and we're feeling some culture shock. I mean,
Speaker 1: I like a fancy breakfast as much as the next man,
Speaker 1: but this place seems to have its own agenda. I
Speaker 1: think I like the vivid with cold Brook coffee. Let's
Speaker 1: get a healthy I think the idea is that by
Speaker 1: making our breakfast order will harness the power of these
Speaker 1: uplifting words, will invite a little positivity into our lives.
Speaker 1: In the end, we are focused, healthy and trusting. Oh
Speaker 1: and Hunter has two refills of Courageous. When I go
Speaker 1: to the bathroom, I read the flyers on the board.
Speaker 1: They're mostly from alternative therapists. I can get something called
Speaker 1: deep integrative shadow work. I can get full body cryotherapy,
Speaker 1: which sounds suspiciously like paying to get into a bath
Speaker 1: of ice. My phone buzzes and I take it out
Speaker 1: and look at it. I am unique, says a message
Speaker 1: on my screen. It's from a positive thinking app that
Speaker 1: I felt I ought to download when I landed at LAX.
Speaker 1: I'm supposed to repeat this phrase to myself like a mantra.
Speaker 1: I am une, I am uni, I am unique. It's
Speaker 1: all very well saying I am unique, but am I really?
Speaker 1: In many ways I'm exactly like everyone else. Thinking of
Speaker 1: myself as unique is just vanity. I realize that I'm
Speaker 1: arguing with my affirmation app. I think that means I'm
Speaker 1: doing it wrong. The phone buzzers again. I am open,
Speaker 1: free and loving. This is Into the Zone, a podcast
Speaker 1: about opposites and how borders are never as clear as
Speaker 1: we think. I'm hurry, Kunzru. This episode is about positive
Speaker 1: and negative. It's about optimism and pessimism, and it's about
Speaker 1: a particular kind of opposition, the dialectic, the clash of
Speaker 1: opposites that produces something new. Good place for Jeff to live?
Speaker 1: What am I pressing? Seventy ninety six? I think I've
Speaker 1: come to La to see a friend of mine named
Speaker 1: Jeff Dyer. He's a writer who lives in Venice, just
Speaker 1: around the corner from the cafe with the mantra menu.
Speaker 1: Jeff and I both left the UK to come and
Speaker 1: live in the US. He's someone I think of as
Speaker 1: very English. He's witty and a little bit sarcastic. He
Speaker 1: wrote a book called Yoga for People who can't be
Speaker 1: bothered to do it, and another one called out of
Speaker 1: sheer rage that one's about failing to write a book
Speaker 1: about dh Lawrence. Hello there, Hello, great, what are we doing?
Speaker 1: We need hugging. It always makes me chuckle to think
Speaker 1: of Jeff here in the land of positive thinking. No,
Speaker 1: I mean, time passes so quickly. We've been here about
Speaker 1: six years. I think. You know, we were living in London.
Speaker 1: You'd already gone to America. It seemed so many of
Speaker 1: my friends were in America and I was stuck there
Speaker 1: in London. I would say to Rebecca, you know it
Speaker 1: was my destiny to live in California. We're not doing it.
Speaker 1: My whole life is a complete and utter waste. Have
Speaker 1: you changed? Have you become more more a Southern Californian.
Speaker 1: So one of the things that we were first struck
Speaker 1: by is that, you know, we had to become so
Speaker 1: much more polite living here, And there's an irony there
Speaker 1: because Americans always think of England as being this. I
Speaker 1: don't know. Jane Austen, Henry James like society where everyone
Speaker 1: is super polite, but as you know from London, it's
Speaker 1: a it's a right old dogg eat dog world, there
Speaker 1: isn't it, you know? So yeah, we became so much.
Speaker 1: When I listen back to this tape, I hear something
Speaker 1: strange and kind of comical, the Soviet resignation to things
Speaker 1: not being Jeff and I start denouncing various aspects of
Speaker 1: British culture, to the inefficiency, the rudeness, the cynicism. We're
Speaker 1: both particularly down on the British habit of complaining. We
Speaker 1: start complaining about the complaining, and we're enjoying ourselves. We
Speaker 1: are enjoying complaining about complaining. It's a quintessentially British way
Speaker 1: of bonding. Affirmation through negativity. I mean, more generally, would
Speaker 1: you describe yourself as an optimist or a pessimist? Oh?
Speaker 1: Do you know? I would reject terms really because you know,
Speaker 1: what difference does it make whether you're an optimist or
Speaker 1: a pessimist? And that doesn't make any difference to the
Speaker 1: successful resolution of a situation, does it. Jeff tells me
Speaker 1: that he doesn't spend any time at the Positive Thinking Cafe.
Speaker 1: He prefers another place a few blocks away. But I
Speaker 1: want to know if he believes in any of the
Speaker 1: stuff about the Californian mental attitude. Does he think that
Speaker 1: by thinking positively you can make positive things happen for yourself? Well, actually, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I guess this thing of you know, which
Speaker 1: is such an important part of life here, of that
Speaker 1: positive attitude, and it's created a nice society in many ways.
Speaker 1: Jeff starts ruminating about philosophy, trying to remember a passage
Speaker 1: from the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche where he suggests that small
Speaker 1: acts of kindness have done more for the world than
Speaker 1: lofty ideals of heroism and self sacrifice. Do you realize,
Speaker 1: oh my god it Nietzsche, in his weird way, is
Speaker 1: described why life here in California is in many ways
Speaker 1: of success, because all of your interactions with people are
Speaker 1: really a source of great affirmation, and they make daily
Speaker 1: life much nicer. So that I thought I delicit some
Speaker 1: classic Jeff grumbling. Instead when it comes to California, he's
Speaker 1: filled with positive tivity, well, positivity couched in regret, but
Speaker 1: still for Jeff that's new. He even thinks California is
Speaker 1: changing his look for the better. I've got sixty years
Speaker 1: worth of English disappointment in my face, and now I've
Speaker 1: learned since being here to sort of smart, to smile more,
Speaker 1: and I've got my you know, my teeth are whiter
Speaker 1: than they were, but they're still crooked English team, you know,
Speaker 1: and that kind of thing. Yes, of course, it generates
Speaker 1: well being for everybody. And I love the way that
Speaker 1: here you meet somebody on the street, you always say
Speaker 1: hello and smile at them. And what we find is
Speaker 1: we when we go back to England after we've been
Speaker 1: here for six months or so, we go back for
Speaker 1: the summer, we come back with our Californian ways and
Speaker 1: we're smiling at people in Labrate Grove. And after a
Speaker 1: week we stopped doing it because it's really inappropriate. I
Speaker 1: haven't come all the way to California just to talk
Speaker 1: about England. Jeff and I are huge fans of someone
Speaker 1: who's been called the high prest of Negativity, the grumpy
Speaker 1: German intellectual who arrived in Los Angeles in nineteen forty one.
Speaker 1: His name was Theodore Adorna, the hinder futum to Jeff
Speaker 1: and I have been joking about New world positivity and
Speaker 1: old world gloom. But Adorno embodied these contradictions like no
Speaker 1: one else. I want to tell you a little about
Speaker 1: him because his story illuminates what we like to call
Speaker 1: the American dream and how it's tangled up with positive thinking. Adorno,
Speaker 1: known to his friends as Teddy, was a sociologist who
Speaker 1: wound up in California after fleeing the Nazis. He'd been
Speaker 1: one of the leading thinkers at the Institute for Social
Speaker 1: Research in Frankfort, the Frankfurt School. The Frankfurt School pioneered
Speaker 1: a rigorous style of thinking known as critical theory, which
Speaker 1: tried to analyze society with the aim of transforming it.
Speaker 1: In photos, Adornaut's piercing eyes drill into the viewer out
Speaker 1: of a smooth, round face. It's like being stared at
Speaker 1: by a hyperintelligent baby. There was indeed something of the
Speaker 1: child prodigy about him. Adorna was an only son. His
Speaker 1: father was a Jewish wine merchant in Frankfurt. This Jewish
Speaker 1: dad had married a Catholic opera singer and wanted to
Speaker 1: assimilate into German society. Their son, Theodore Wi Adorno was
Speaker 1: baptized a Catholic, and though he bore both his parents' names,
Speaker 1: the Jewish sounding Wiesengrend was quietly dropped. Teddy grew up
Speaker 1: in affluence. Adored and encouraged by his artistic mother, Teddy
Speaker 1: wanted to be a composer. When he was twenty one,
Speaker 1: he moved to Vienna to study with the modernist master
Speaker 1: Alban Berg. This is the kind of music Adorno wrote
Speaker 1: in those days. After a few years of trying to
Speaker 1: make it as a composer, he switched to philosophy almost
Speaker 1: at once. He was asked to teach at the newly
Speaker 1: founded Institute for Social Research back in Frankfurt. There he
Speaker 1: was exposed to left wing ideas and turned from esthetics
Speaker 1: to a more urgent political agenda gi k in the
Speaker 1: enlighting de Phenomenology. Thus Blossitusian heist, Adorno became a Marxist
Speaker 1: and as such an obvious target for the Nazis. As
Speaker 1: soon as they came to power, his charmed life started
Speaker 1: to fall apart. His license to teach was revoked, his
Speaker 1: house was searched. When he applied to join the official
Speaker 1: Writers Union, he was told that membership was limited to
Speaker 1: quote persons who belonged to the German nation by profound
Speaker 1: ties of character and blood. As a non arian, you
Speaker 1: are unable to feel and appreciate such an obligation. End
Speaker 1: of horrible quote. Soon afterwards, Adorno left Germany. He didn't
Speaker 1: return for many years. Before Adornau arrived in LA he'd
Speaker 1: spent some time in Oxford in New York writing about
Speaker 1: the rise of fascism. His best friend and fellow critical theorist,
Speaker 1: Max Horkheimer, was already in California, part of an extraordinary
Speaker 1: community of German exiles. The group included some of the
Speaker 1: greatest creative minds of the twentieth century, the novelists Mann,
Speaker 1: the poet and playwright bertel Brecht, the composer Arnold Scherenberg,
Speaker 1: film directors like Fritz Lange, and actors like Greta Garbo
Speaker 1: and Peter Laurie. Teddy and his wife Gretel moved into
Speaker 1: a house in Brentwood. For some years, Adorna had also
Speaker 1: been writing fragments and short essays about everything from toys
Speaker 1: to insomnia. While he was in LA he decided to
Speaker 1: put them together into a book. He called it minimum Moralia,
Speaker 1: a Latin phrase meaning little ethics. It was a humble
Speaker 1: title for a rather humble book, which was originally intended
Speaker 1: as a present for Max Hawcheimer's fiftieth birthday in nineteen
Speaker 1: forty five. Adorna published it in nineteen fifty one. So
Speaker 1: here's my copy of minimum Aralia, very nice verso edition
Speaker 1: for the record. It's written here. Brought thirteenth of May
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty six in London. Plosophy ethics is traditionally the
Speaker 1: study of how to live a good life. With fascism, communism,
Speaker 1: and consumerism battling for supremacy. A Dorno suspected that living
Speaker 1: a good life might no longer be possible. He grappled
Speaker 1: with this question in an accessible style. So perhaps it's
Speaker 1: no surprise that Minimamoralia has been enduringly popular. Jeff Dyer
Speaker 1: has been fascinated by it ever since he was a
Speaker 1: young writer in the nineteen eighties. Yeah, and it was great. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So this is a earl souvenir. And it's just that
Speaker 1: it's a beautiful addition. There as a Doorno on the
Speaker 1: back cup playing the playing the piano looking cross. He's
Speaker 1: obviously playing something like I don't know, late Beethoven or
Speaker 1: Albnberg or something we can he describe it a bit
Speaker 1: more about what kind of things it talks about. Yeah,
Speaker 1: as you rightly say, it's a collection of aphorisms, but
Speaker 1: length lengthy aphorisms, you know, essays of about a page
Speaker 1: and a half, something like that. The subtitle is Reflections
Speaker 1: from a Damaged Life, but it's ironic. Dornau's voice in
Speaker 1: this book is witty and worldly talent. He writes, there's
Speaker 1: perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage talking about the
Speaker 1: Nazis and art. They're as incompatible as an air aid
Speaker 1: shelter and a stork's nest. On power, the most powerful
Speaker 1: person is he who is able to do least himself
Speaker 1: and burdens others most with the things for which he
Speaker 1: lends his name and pockets the credit is the damaged
Speaker 1: life a Doornaugh's life, or is it the life more
Speaker 1: generally of the life we have to live world? But
Speaker 1: both of them, I think, but his is particularly damaged.
Speaker 1: Intellectual exiles from Nazi Germany faced a precarious life. The
Speaker 1: networks they relied on for work had been wiped out.
Speaker 1: Clever people who could turn pirouettes in their native language
Speaker 1: suddenly couldn't order a meal in a restaurant. The pain
Speaker 1: of being an exile is everywhere. A Doornaugh writes, every
Speaker 1: intellectual in emigration is, without exception mutilated. He lives in
Speaker 1: an environment that must remain incomprehensible to him. Adorna also
Speaker 1: writes that the splinter in your eye is the best
Speaker 1: magnifying glass. I take this to mean that your pain,
Speaker 1: your damage, can be a way into understanding what's wrong
Speaker 1: with the world. Adorna's critical theory makes negativity an important
Speaker 1: tool for thought. He wanted his criticism to be ruthless,
Speaker 1: sparing nothing and nobody, not even himself. Just this incredible
Speaker 1: irony that Adorna the embodiment of European uncompromising seriousness, with
Speaker 1: his hatred of all the kind of vulgarity and crassness
Speaker 1: that capitalism leads to ends up here. Adorna had good
Speaker 1: reason to be in favor of seriousness. He was living
Speaker 1: in serious times, but like a lot of the German exiles,
Speaker 1: he felt guilty that he was safe while the Nazis
Speaker 1: were destroying Europe. He and his fellow exiles had chosen
Speaker 1: between what he calls the infinite torment of dying and
Speaker 1: the infinite abasement of living. Adornou thought that serious times
Speaker 1: demanded serious art like this. This is Scherenberg's fourth string quartet,
Speaker 1: written just after he arrived in California in nineteen thirty six.
Speaker 1: The reason it doesn't sound like conventional music is because
Speaker 1: he wrote it using the twelve tone system, a method
Speaker 1: that forces the composer to use all the notes of
Speaker 1: the scale equally in a particular order. While a Dorna
Speaker 1: was in La, he worked for his friend Thomas Mann,
Speaker 1: who was writing a novel about a composer and wanted
Speaker 1: someone to teach him about these latest developments in music theory.
Speaker 1: Every weekday morning, regular as clockwork, Man would write, and
Speaker 1: every afternoon a Dorna would come over, sit down at
Speaker 1: the piano and explain Scherenberg's musical theories. The result was
Speaker 1: one of Man's masterpieces, Doctor Faustus. It's perhaps the most
Speaker 1: German thing ever written outside of Germany. A tone about
Speaker 1: a composer who intentionally infects himself with syphilis so he
Speaker 1: can go mad and heighten his creative powers. When Scherenberg
Speaker 1: heard about this story, he was furious, not just about
Speaker 1: the syphilis and the whole selling his soul to the
Speaker 1: devil plot. He also accused Man of taking credit for
Speaker 1: his musical ideas. In truth, the musical ideas in Doctor
Speaker 1: Faustus should mostly be credited to Adorno. But this was
Speaker 1: obscure stuff even as it was happening in the nineteen forties.
Speaker 1: Most people weren't listening to twelve tone music. They were
Speaker 1: munching popcorn at MGM musicals. Big dance numbers did not
Speaker 1: thrill Teddy Adorno. He was wary of Hollywood, which he
Speaker 1: felt was distracting people and dumbing them down. That didn't
Speaker 1: stop him from spending time on movie sets and making
Speaker 1: friends with people from the film world, but Adorna also
Speaker 1: wanted films to be high art and in music, he
Speaker 1: particularly disliked jazz. In an unbelievably snooty essay, he pours
Speaker 1: scorn on what he calls its mechanical, soullessness and its
Speaker 1: licentious decadence. My friend Jeff Dat is a huge jazz
Speaker 1: fan and a fan of Adornos. This strikes me as
Speaker 1: a kind of cognitive dissonance. You're a big Adornao fan
Speaker 1: and you love jazz. You're a huge jazz fan. Was
Speaker 1: he just wrong or was there Is there anything rescuable
Speaker 1: about what about Teddy's bad opinions about jazz? No, I
Speaker 1: don't think there is anything rescuable about it. Jeff A.
Speaker 1: Dawes jazz so much that he wrote a whole book
Speaker 1: on it. It's called but Beautiful, and it uses fiction
Speaker 1: to imagine the inner lives of several of the jazz greats.
Speaker 1: Adorno had seen how entertainment of all kinds had been
Speaker 1: corrupted by the Nazis to serve their agenda, and it's
Speaker 1: doubtful he'd ever experienced the virtuosity of a good live
Speaker 1: jazz band. A lot of people use Adornaugh's bad opinions
Speaker 1: about jazz to dismiss him as a snob and an elitist.
Speaker 1: But he saw what he termed entertainment music as a
Speaker 1: tool of power, something that lulled the listener, urging them
Speaker 1: to consume, instead of provoking a genuine emotional and intellectual response.
Speaker 1: He seemed very formal in his habits, but I don't
Speaker 1: know if he was always sitting in his study. It
Speaker 1: would be nice to meet him vacationally, taking off his
Speaker 1: shoes and going to the beach and Santa Monica and
Speaker 1: having a think. I think somebody asking him about hobbies
Speaker 1: and he says, hobbies. You know, I take all of
Speaker 1: my interests very seriously, and I would never relegate them
Speaker 1: to the idea of hobbies. It's very difficult to imagine
Speaker 1: Adorno ever relaxing at anything except playing a difficult passage
Speaker 1: of Beethoven on the piano. Jeff really likes what he
Speaker 1: calls the tangible quality in Adorna's writing, the way that
Speaker 1: his thoughts are always anchored in something concrete and particular,
Speaker 1: and increasingly, as you learn more about the circumstances in
Speaker 1: which it's written, a lot of what is tang all
Speaker 1: turns out to be. Oh, it's Los Angeles. To give
Speaker 1: you an idea of how La influenced to Dornau's thought,
Speaker 1: here's a passage in Minimumorlia he calls tough Baby. He's
Speaker 1: at the cinema watching the archetypal alpha male of thirties
Speaker 1: Hollywood movies. The handsome dinner jacketed figure returning late to
Speaker 1: his bachelor flat, switching on the indirect lighting and mixing
Speaker 1: himself a whiskey and soda. The carefully recorded hissing of
Speaker 1: the mineral Water says what the arrogant mouth keeps to itself,
Speaker 1: that he despises anything that does not smell of smoke,
Speaker 1: leather and shaving cream, particularly women, which is precisely why
Speaker 1: they find him irresistible. You can see the guy in
Speaker 1: front of you, the type of dude who slaps the
Speaker 1: heroine's face to stop her being hysterical. Her Dornaut spools
Speaker 1: out this description into a point about sadism, masochism, and
Speaker 1: the homer erotic mass gualinity of fascism, the kind of
Speaker 1: masculinity that hates anything it defines as feminine. It's typical
Speaker 1: of the way he writes in Minimumoralia, and for me,
Speaker 1: the excitement of it. It's the dialectical method is just
Speaker 1: taken to such a pitch of intensity that an argument
Speaker 1: will be advanced, and then it's flipped right back and
Speaker 1: then back again, and there's this relentless back and forthing
Speaker 1: which is exhausting and incredibly exciting to read, and you
Speaker 1: never quite know where the argument is going to take him.
Speaker 1: You've probably heard of the dialectic, you could call it
Speaker 1: a style of thinking, but for some philosophers it's much
Speaker 1: more than that. Hegel and marks in different ways. Thought
Speaker 1: it was the very motor of human history. Here's how
Speaker 1: it goes. You have a thought, or perhaps a situation,
Speaker 1: a social or political state of affairs. That's the thesis.
Speaker 1: Then there's an opposing idea or an opposing force that's
Speaker 1: the antithesis, something that challenges or negates the thesis. Then
Speaker 1: they fight it out. The tension between the two results
Speaker 1: in something that in German is called the alphable. It's
Speaker 1: usually translated as synthesis, but that makes it sound a
Speaker 1: little too neat. What comes out of the clash of
Speaker 1: opposites isn't a nice little package tied up with a bow.
Speaker 1: It's not a resolution, an end to struggle. It's a
Speaker 1: new state of affairs, something that's soon enough will provoke
Speaker 1: a reaction, starting the whole process again. Adorna is so
Speaker 1: steeped in this stuff that it comes out in the
Speaker 1: very structure of his sentences. When he says the splinter
Speaker 1: in his eye is the best magnifying glass. He's writing dialectically.
Speaker 1: He's taking the conventional idea of knowledge as something to
Speaker 1: do with vision the eye, and clashing it with its antithesis,
Speaker 1: the splinter something that blinds the clash of the eye
Speaker 1: and the glass splinter produces a surprising synthesis, the image
Speaker 1: of a magnifying glass. Something that helps you see better
Speaker 1: out of blindness comes in sight. You can open minimum
Speaker 1: Moralia almost anywhere and see him Judo flipping concepts like this,
Speaker 1: confronting things with their opposites, seeing what shakes out. Adorno
Speaker 1: believes in the value of negativity. The dialectic makes him uneasy.
Speaker 1: You can't say that what emerges from the clash is
Speaker 1: always positive. What was the result of the great political
Speaker 1: clashes of his own time, the Holocaust? So Adorna rejects
Speaker 1: the idea of some magical dialectical synthesis that resolves all disagreements.
Speaker 1: Adorna calls it the negation of negation. But this makes
Speaker 1: me wonder who might be the antithesis of Adorno? If
Speaker 1: he's the high priest of negativity, who's the pope of
Speaker 1: the positive? Positive thinking works? Wonders? And it does too,
Speaker 1: that is for sure, inevitably, indubitably. The man who wants
Speaker 1: to overcome fats with confidence is Norman Vincent Peel, author
Speaker 1: of a book called The Power of Positive Thinking. It
Speaker 1: was published in nineteen fifty two. The year after Adornau's
Speaker 1: minimum Ralia, The Power of Positive Thinking became one of
Speaker 1: the best selling books in American history. Whatever your life
Speaker 1: is this morning, unsatisfactory, unhappy, defeated. Perhaps you're in a
Speaker 1: place We're presides the one who can change everything for
Speaker 1: you by changing you. Peele was pastor of New York
Speaker 1: City's Marble Collegiate Church all the way until his retirement
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty four. Peele preached to his congregation and
Speaker 1: the millions who bought his books that whenever a negative
Speaker 1: thought came to mind, they're supposed to voice a positive thought.
Speaker 1: The goal was a state of permanent positivity, a sort
Speaker 1: of self hypnosis. So when the app on my phone
Speaker 1: tells me I am unique, I'm not supposed to question it.
Speaker 1: That's negativity. It will prevent me from being successful. Stamp
Speaker 1: indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding.
Speaker 1: Norman Peele urges us hold this picture tenaciously, never permitted
Speaker 1: to fade. But Peel didn't invent the idea of positive thinking.
Speaker 1: It has a long history. Someone who knows all about
Speaker 1: this is the journalist Barbara Aaron Reich. Arin Reich is
Speaker 1: a heroine of mine. When she wanted to write about
Speaker 1: low waged labor in America's she spent time working as
Speaker 1: a waitress and a home help. A few years ago,
Speaker 1: she wrote a book about positive thinking called Bright Sided.
Speaker 1: How the relentless promotion of positive thinking is undermining America.
Speaker 1: She told me that positive thinking grew dialectically enough out
Speaker 1: of negativity. It all started because people in nineteenth century
Speaker 1: America were depressed. Our culture here has a strong tinge
Speaker 1: of Puritanism, that would be the English inheritance. The tendency
Speaker 1: in the nineteenth century was to see that you had
Speaker 1: you had no future that you could control, because God
Speaker 1: had already decided, possibly before you were even born, about
Speaker 1: whether you will get into heaven or not. Calvinism was
Speaker 1: the version of Protestant Christianity followed by the Puritan colonists.
Speaker 1: It taught that even before the creation of the world,
Speaker 1: God had decided that only one hundred and forty four
Speaker 1: thousand souls were predestined to get into heaven. Either you
Speaker 1: were lucky and pre approved, or you were going to burn.
Speaker 1: It's sort of hard to imagine living with that over
Speaker 1: hanging over you all at all times when you're morbidly
Speaker 1: convinced you're going to hell, You'll turn to anyone or
Speaker 1: anything that can make you feel better. So people would
Speaker 1: seek forms of healing. And there were also of quacks
Speaker 1: around willing to provide some form of healing for people
Speaker 1: in these states of existential depression. But the most interesting
Speaker 1: to me was a man named Phineas Quimby. He lived
Speaker 1: in Maine. He was a watchmaker by trade, but very
Speaker 1: very interested in this issue of depression. And while we're Americans,
Speaker 1: so tortured by their likely future, which was likely to
Speaker 1: be hell, Phineas Quimby started a movement called new Thought.
Speaker 1: He taught the illness was just a disturbance in the
Speaker 1: mind and could be cured by thinking positively. One of
Speaker 1: Quimby's associates was Mary Baker Eddie, the founder of Christian Science.
Speaker 1: If you've ever been to a motivational seminar or seen
Speaker 1: a life coach, you've been exposed to new Thought. Quimby
Speaker 1: is the ancestor of everyone from Tony Robbins to books
Speaker 1: like The Secret, the international best seller that promises that,
Speaker 1: because of something called the law of attraction, you can
Speaker 1: think good things into your life. Money, a good job,
Speaker 1: The Secret is part of a very modern form of
Speaker 1: American Christianity, the exact opposite of the religion practiced by
Speaker 1: the dour, hell obsessed Puritans of Your Yes. The Prosperity
Speaker 1: Gospel movement is positive thinking applied to religion. The pastor
Speaker 1: will tell you, or or rate to that you can
Speaker 1: have everything because God wants you to have everything. Barbara
Speaker 1: Aaron Reich was first exposed to positive thinking at a
Speaker 1: rough time in her life. One I was diagnosed with
Speaker 1: breast cancer. Suddenly I became fascinated not by the biology
Speaker 1: of cancer, which would have made more sense to me
Speaker 1: as a somebody with PhD in biology, but more the
Speaker 1: anthropology of cancer. You will recover from your illness if
Speaker 1: you think positively about recovery. So the idea is if
Speaker 1: you express that you're angry, or you know, you complain
Speaker 1: about the bad luck even that made you have the disease,
Speaker 1: that this actually reduces your chance of being cured. That's right.
Speaker 1: And so if you find yourself just getting steadily worse, well,
Speaker 1: who do you have to blame for that? Listening to Barbara,
Speaker 1: it's obvious that not everything about positive thinking is well positive.
Speaker 1: It's a way of blaming people for the problems in
Speaker 1: their lives, of privatizing problems. But hey, let's look on
Speaker 1: the bright side. And Norman Vincent Peel, the Great Norman
Speaker 1: Vincent Peel was my pastor. The power of positive thing.
Speaker 1: And everybody's heard of Norman Vincent Peale. He was so great.
Speaker 1: He would give a sermon you never wanted to leave.
Speaker 1: Sometimes we have sermons and every once in a while
Speaker 1: we think about leaving a little early, right, even though
Speaker 1: we're Christian. Doctor Norman Vincent Peale, Frank would give a sermon.
Speaker 1: I'm telling you, I still remember his sermons. It was unbelievable.
Speaker 1: And what he would do is he'd bring real life situations,
Speaker 1: modern day situations into the sermon, and you could listen
Speaker 1: to him all day long. He listened in. Donald Trump
Speaker 1: grew up going to Norman Vincent Peale's church. Peel officiated
Speaker 1: at his first marriage and buried his parents. The mind
Speaker 1: can overcome any obstacle, Trump told The New York Times
Speaker 1: in the early eighties. I never think of the negative.
Speaker 1: You can see Trump using the power of positive thinking
Speaker 1: every day. Everything is perfect. Great. Trump's current pastor is
Speaker 1: the televangelist Paula White. The President even gave her a
Speaker 1: job as a special advisor at the White House. The
Speaker 1: mind is the battle field, So the quality of life
Speaker 1: that I live is determined by the quality of mind
Speaker 1: that I have. In essence, our life is what our
Speaker 1: thoughts make us. In this Peel Trump White universe, there's
Speaker 1: no dialectic, no clash of opposites. There's only the positive.
Speaker 1: There are not twelve tones. There's only one extra credit
Speaker 1: if you can name the title of this song. Paula
Speaker 1: White's third and current husband is the keyboard player in
Speaker 1: the band Journey for positive thinkers and prosperity gospel preachers.
Speaker 1: We can't stop believing. If we do, whatever bad things
Speaker 1: come our way are clearly our own fault. Let's say
Speaker 1: your thesis is simple, don't stop believe it that some
Speaker 1: were born to win and some to lose, and some
Speaker 1: were born to sing the blues, that the movie never ends,
Speaker 1: it goes on and on and on. What's the antithesis
Speaker 1: of that. It's that when someone tells you to believe,
Speaker 1: a red light should go on in your head, you
Speaker 1: should push back. You should ask questions like is this
Speaker 1: belief really so optimistic or is it just disgusting fatalism.
Speaker 1: People aren't born to win or lose their situations of
Speaker 1: the results of social conditions, and those social conditions can
Speaker 1: be changed. That's certainly what Teddy Adorno believed. One difficulty
Speaker 1: Adorno had in La was that he didn't drive. He
Speaker 1: wrote that in the fantastical love of cars resonates the
Speaker 1: feeling of physical homelessness, but that homelessness was actually something
Speaker 1: he identified with. He was homeless, an emigrant, an exile,
Speaker 1: and though he didn't drive, he rather enjoyed road trips.
Speaker 1: He and his wife, Gretel went to Tahoe, to Palm
Speaker 1: Springs and all the way down to the Mexican border.
Speaker 1: Gretel drove, Teddy navigated. For her birthday one year, he
Speaker 1: bore her a brand new dark blue Ford that they
Speaker 1: called Aladdin Chien or Little Aladdin. During their La exile,
Speaker 1: the Adornos lived in a house in Brentwood. I want
Speaker 1: to make a pilgrimage there, and I assume my friend
Speaker 1: Jeff will take me. But it turns out that his
Speaker 1: Adorno worship has gone a little too far. Okay, hunter,
Speaker 1: So keep your eyes on the road and your hands
Speaker 1: upon the wheel. No crashing crunch like a Doorno before him.
Speaker 1: Jeff doesn't drive, so my producer Hunter volunteers to drive.
Speaker 1: Jeff navigates. We are on are we on Fourth Street
Speaker 1: in Santa Monica coming up to Wilshire. It's fourth and
Speaker 1: this is Wilshire is a willshare and Santa Monica Boulevard
Speaker 1: in I mean, they're increasingly kind of close to my
Speaker 1: heart because there's all these kind of places specializing and
Speaker 1: orthopedic orthopedic mattresses and knee braces and all this kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. There we go, there's a physic Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: no endless places for physical therapy. Because the key thing
Speaker 1: about life in Los Angeles, of course, is you've got
Speaker 1: to be able to continue playing tennis, paddle tennis and
Speaker 1: running until you're well into your hundreds. Do you spend
Speaker 1: a lot of time at that paddle tennis court on
Speaker 1: the beach? No, sir, I despise paddle tennis because I
Speaker 1: still play proper tennis. I wondered whether you'd reduced your standards. No, No,
Speaker 1: that will never happen. And also I still I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't play doubles, and I feel so cut off
Speaker 1: from things that are going on in Europe, and you
Speaker 1: think of Adorno here without any Internet and anything like that.
Speaker 1: There where the crucible of the Second World War in
Speaker 1: Europe being removedment So there they are. There, They're here
Speaker 1: there on the sort of the edge of the world.
Speaker 1: There must have seemed to them. Still seems that way
Speaker 1: to me. Now, you know, by the way, you can't Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can't go. You know what's the next stop? Hawaii?
Speaker 1: Our next stop is Brentwood, where Teddy lived in exile. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's cars, there's no people that If we do, there'll
Speaker 1: probably be somebody jogging at some point. Brentwood is a
Speaker 1: very neat place. It seems rich, but without the excitement
Speaker 1: that some rich places have. It seems like the sort
Speaker 1: of neighborhood where your neighbors will complain if you forget
Speaker 1: to cut your front lawn. I think this is it.
Speaker 1: This is the Adornau hoarse. It is a very ordinary
Speaker 1: looking house on a busy street. Cars are rushing by.
Speaker 1: So how strange, Harry, We're the only we're the only
Speaker 1: pilgrims here today. Do you think there are often a
Speaker 1: lot of critical theorists, kind of bad analyzing on the
Speaker 1: sidewalk outside surprised that we're not seeing Freddie Jameson and
Speaker 1: Harry Anderson here and Martin j I'm sure he's here
Speaker 1: most days, isn't he, Sir? I don't know how you
Speaker 1: feel the general. I don't know what are your feelings
Speaker 1: generally about literary pilgrimage. Is it something you always up for?
Speaker 1: I am always up for it, and I'm I'm always disappointed.
Speaker 1: But the but the the disappointment is kind of baked
Speaker 1: in because it just reminds you of the difference between
Speaker 1: what's made in somewhere and the location, you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's like we will learn virtually nothing about about the
Speaker 1: mind that was at work there. But somehow it's still
Speaker 1: satisfying to have come. I'm pleased, I've I've come to
Speaker 1: Brentwood today with you. Jeff. Well, unfortunately this isn't going
Speaker 1: to be a very dialectical exchange because Harry has said
Speaker 1: exactly what I think. Jeff talks about his various disappointments,
Speaker 1: some dialectical, some tennis related, and we stare at the
Speaker 1: very ordinary White House with its double garage. You know,
Speaker 1: we're here. I'm not getting the Adorno vibe, but you,
Speaker 1: as your Geiger counter registering some some style. Yes, it's
Speaker 1: an intensive a case of the dialectic. I'd love to
Speaker 1: say yes, but I'm yeah. I mean here we are
Speaker 1: failing to have profound things to say in the house
Speaker 1: in front of us. The exiled Adorno wrote this, What
Speaker 1: does it mean for the subject? That there are no
Speaker 1: window shutters anymore which can be opened, but only frames
Speaker 1: to be brusquely shoved. No gentle latches, but only handles
Speaker 1: to be turned, No front lawn, no barrier against the street,
Speaker 1: no wall around the garden. Magnolia on the other side
Speaker 1: of this wall. Actually there is a wall around the garden,
Speaker 1: but I'm not sure if a door had it put
Speaker 1: in or what? Thank you? Here in this house, the
Speaker 1: grumpy European Adorno was faced with his antithesis, sunny, positive
Speaker 1: thinking California. What came out of the clash well, actually,
Speaker 1: despite himself, he had some fun. He made some new friends,
Speaker 1: including some of the Hollywood people whose work he officially despised.
Speaker 1: One night in nineteen forty seven, Adornau showed up at
Speaker 1: the after party for a private screening of Charlie Chaplain's
Speaker 1: film Monsieur valdu Adornaugh and Chaplin got together around the
Speaker 1: piano while Adornau played selections from Verdi and Wagner Chaplain
Speaker 1: did hilarious mimes, the two of them being thoroughly silly,
Speaker 1: to the delight of all their friends. But eventually Adornaugh
Speaker 1: went back to Germany, where he became one of the
Speaker 1: nation's most famous thinkers. Once again, he taught at the
Speaker 1: Frankfurt School. In nineteen sixty nine, the school was occupied
Speaker 1: by striking students. In a statement, they said that the
Speaker 1: Frankfurt School was no longer critical enough. They accused Adornau
Speaker 1: and his colleagues of training them to be domesticated revolutionaries,
Speaker 1: what they termed the integrated allies of the authoritarian state. Adorno,
Speaker 1: the self proclaimed revolutionary, called the police. It was a
Speaker 1: moment of defeat. Outraged, the students distributed a flyer with
Speaker 1: the slogan Adornaut as institution is dead. The final humiliation
Speaker 1: was the so called bouzon axion or breast action. Radical
Speaker 1: students disrupted his class and young women surrounded him, bearing
Speaker 1: their breasts and showering him with flower petals. The old
Speaker 1: man picked up his hat and coat and fled. Within
Speaker 1: a year he was dead, suffering a heart attack on
Speaker 1: a country hike. Norman Vincent Peale lived to a ripe
Speaker 1: old age, finally dying of a stroke at the age
Speaker 1: of ninety five, and much to everyone's surprise, his acolyte
Speaker 1: became president, positively thinking his way through the hardest of problems,
Speaker 1: from global destant to global pandemics, buoyed up by his
Speaker 1: unwavering belief in his own stable genius. We will have
Speaker 1: a very successful vaccine, therapeutic and cure would make in
Speaker 1: tremendous progress. Ideal with these credible scientists, doctors, the best,
Speaker 1: the smartest, the most brilliant anywhere, and they've come up
Speaker 1: with the age vaccine. In Minimumoralia, there's a section titled simple.
Speaker 1: Simon Adorno describes what he calls colorful personalities, people who
Speaker 1: plunge passionately into the privilege of the self. Their eager,
Speaker 1: uninhibited impulsiveness, their sudden fancies, their originality, even if it
Speaker 1: be only a helia odiousness, even their garbles language turn
Speaker 1: human qualities into a clown costume. Positivity isn't a bad thing.
Speaker 1: It's good to believe in yourself, to say I can
Speaker 1: rather than I can't. But the idea that you can't
Speaker 1: even risk thinking negative thoughts for fear that they'll infect
Speaker 1: your mind. Well, that's just nonsense. It's the thinking of
Speaker 1: a child who's scared of the dark. I could be
Speaker 1: communing now, hurry, but that moment of communion has mean
Speaker 1: rather hunch and I could take a walk down and
Speaker 1: we could walk a little bit with a little way
Speaker 1: down the block and leave you, leave you communions. Sobbing
Speaker 1: here at the altar of the dialectic. Yeah, Perhaps the alphabon,
Speaker 1: the synthesis of Peel and Adorno is a kind of determination,
Speaker 1: a willingness to forge your head without being lied to you.
Speaker 1: Perhaps true positive thinking. He's about being able to face
Speaker 1: reality without flinching. Our pilgrimage complete. We bid our feeders
Speaker 1: in to Adorno and Scherenberg and the other Germans trapped
Speaker 1: in sunny California. Oh but I'm not done with Germans yet,
Speaker 1: not by a long shot. He was afraid from the beginning,
Speaker 1: I mean even to the point of being paranoid. And
Speaker 1: he used to like write the songs and immediately memorize them,
Speaker 1: and then he would burn the paper. He literally burn
Speaker 1: it so it would be gone next week on into
Speaker 1: the zone. We'll eavesdrop on an East German cat and
Speaker 1: mouse game between the Secret Police and a teenage punk
Speaker 1: rocker listening Never Please. Into the Zone is produced by
Speaker 1: Ryder Also and Hunter Braithwaite. Our editor is Julia Barton.
Speaker 1: Mia La Belle is our executive producer. Martin Gonzalez is
Speaker 1: our engineer. Music for this episode composed by Griffin Jennings.
Speaker 1: Our theme song is composed by Sarah K. Petinatti, also
Speaker 1: known as lipp Talk Special Thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Faane,
Speaker 1: John Schnarz, Mia Kanig, Karlie mcgliory, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostick,
Speaker 1: and Maggie Taylor. Into the Zone is a production of
Speaker 1: Pushkin Industries. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider letting
Speaker 1: others know. The best way to do this is by
Speaker 1: rating us on Apple Podcasts. We could even write a review.
Speaker 1: See you next week. I'm the best, the smart at,
Speaker 1: the most brilliant anywhere Harry Country two