"Self-Help Books Dressed Up In A Lab Coat" - The Dish | By Andrew ...

That's what Steven Poole calls books by?Malcolm Gladwell and Jonah Lehrer:

Illumination is promised on a personal as well as a political level by the junk enlightenment of the popular brain industry. How can I become more creative? How can I make better decisions? How can I be happier? Or thinner? Never fear: brain research has the answers. It is self-help armoured in hard science. Life advice is the hook for nearly all such books. (Some cram the hard sell right into the title ? such as John B Arden?s?Rewire Your Brain: Think Your Way to a Better Life.) Quite consistently, heir recommendations boil down to a kind of neo- Stoicism, drizzled with brain-juice. In a selfcongratulatory egalitarian age, you can no longer tell people to improve themselves morally. So self-improvement is couched in instrumental, scientifically approved terms.

?In response, McArdle defends self-help books:

You will say that the books are not very good. ?The lessons they offer are obvious--be nice to your spouse, save more, give constructive feedback to your team members, eat less and exercise more. ?And of course this is true, not through any particular fault of the authors, but because there are very few revolutions in human affairs. ?The basic facts of living, getting along with others, and dying haven't actually changed all that much since they were first discussed in blockbuster self-help titles like The Bible. ?

But that doesn't mean they don't bear repeating.?I must have read dozens--hundreds--of melancholy laments about the process of aging when I was in my twenties. ?I enjoyed the writing of many, and even managed to eke a wistful moment out of a few of them. ?But then one day, in my mid-thirties, I found myself reading another--and resonating to its message of lost youth like a finely tuned wind-chime. ?Suddenly I shared the wistful and slightly angry sense of a profound loss of possibility; I too had realized that there was no longer time for me to try another career, take up ballet, or enlist in the military. ?For the rest of my life, I was going to be basically what I am now. ?I also shared the sense of comfort that that realization brings; I wasted far too much of my twenties trying to construct unlikely selves from the basic starting material I was given. ?

Some messages can only be heard when you are ready. ?And some can only be taken from a stranger, as witness the dismal record of friends who try to "help" each other with their marriages. ?"Practice makes perfect" may not be any more true because someone did a study demonstrating it--but the edict may be easier to swallow coming from Malcolm Gladwell than from your mother. ?

Source: http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/09/self-help-books-dressed-up-in-a-lab-coat-.html

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