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FOR the last half century psychology has been largely consumed with a snigle tonic only - mental illness - and it has done fairly well with it. Psychologists can now measure with some precision such formerly fuzzy concepts as depression and alcoholism. We now know a fair amount about how these troubles develop across the lifespan, and about their genetics, their biochemistry and their psychological causes. Best of all, we have learned how to relieve some of these disorders. But this progress has come at a high cost. Relieving the states that make life miserable has relegated building the states that make life worth living to a distant back seat.
There has been a profound obstacle to a science and practice of positive traits and positive states: the belief that virtue and happiness are inauthentic, epiphenomenal, parasitic upon or reducible to the negative traits and states. This 'rotten-to-the-core' view pervades Western thought, and if there is any doctrine positive psychology seeks to overthrow it is this one. Its original manifestation is the doctrine of original sin. In secular form, Freud dragged this doctrine into 20th-century psychology where it remains fashionably entrenched in academia today. For Freud, all of civilisation is just an elaborate defence against basic conflicts over infantile sexuality and aggression. So Bill Gates's competitiveness is really a desire to outdo his father, and Princess Diana's opposition to land mines was but the outcome of sublimating a murderous hate for Prince Charles and the other royals. Positive motives, like exercising fairness or pursuing duty, are ruled out as fundamental; there must be some covert, negative motivation that underpins goodness if the analysis is to be academically respectable.
In spite of its widespread acceptance in the religious and secular world, there is not a shred of evidence, not an iota of data, that compels us to believe that virtue is derived from negative motivation. On the contrary, I believe that evolution has favoured both sorts of traits, and any number of adaptive roles in the world have selected for morality, cooperation, altruism, and goodness, just as any number have also selected for murder, theft, self-seeking, and terrorism. The rotten-to-the-core view is only a theory, and not a very comprehensive one...