The Good Life: Should This Man Be Smiling?

“I envy him,” says Murray Melton, a self-described Las Vegas “card bum” who often spends hours each day playing bridge with Seligman on the Internet. “I don’t know how the hell he does it all.”

We’ve gotten the check by the time Seligman is finishing a long explanation of why he thinks basic scientific research in psychology is often misdirected. He pauses for an uncomfortably long time. “Ah, ah — I’m trying to find a modest way of saying this.” Another long pause. “I’ve never said this before, but I’ll try to say it in a fairly modest way.

“One of my friends, Henry Gleitman — who is one of the great old professors here at Penn — someone told me secondhand that he described me as one of the great overachievers in psychology. Which is to say that it was Henry’s impression that my IQ was not very high.

“Up until the time I was about 28, I was very fast and really kind of an enfant terrible in the usual scientific sense. And about that time the department hired someone named Ed Pugh, who’d been a Jesuit priest before being a psychologist. Ed told me that his teacher would send him out and give him sort of one sentence and say, ‘Go sit under that tree and think about it for a few hours.’ So I told Ed that I wanted to become slow. Ed and I spent about a year together reading Kierkegaard one page at a time. We’d meet and do just one page. And I consciously spent several years becoming slow.

“And so there was a retirement dinner for Henry Gleitman about six months ago, and we were drinking, and he said ‘Marty, what’s your IQ?’ Well, Henry, it’s 185. And his jaw dropped.”

Seligman gives me a meaningful look, but I have no idea what he wants me to understand.

“I’ve gone out of my way not to be smart,” he continues, “and not to go over the heads of the people around me. I decided that relating what I did to what ordinary people could think about and incorporate into their lives was vastly more important than being clever. And that cleverness and IQ and speed are nothing. Most people who know me, people like Henry, think I’m kind of slow and dumb. Maybe I’ve become that, but I once wasn’t.”

Unlike the professor, I’ve never had to work at being slow. Like him, I am a pessimist and a depressive and a skeptic. (“Your profession and mine select for the dour, hypercritical and the like,” Seligman assured me.) He offers me a lift to the train station in his Lexus sedan, a very pleasurable car, and as much as I’ve come to like him, I can’t quite decide whether, in his new role, he is best compared to Sigmund Freud, or Elmer Gantry.

Positive Psychology is tantalizing in its possibilities. Like most fascinating new fields, the skeptic in me suspects, much of it will turn out to be completely wrong. At this early stage, a lot of the notions of Positive Psychology, while powerful, seem like simple common sense, stuff that might spark the estimable Dr. Phil to say, “Put that on the cover of the Duh Journal.”

You wouldn’t think it would take a genius to make us ordinary folk realize that happiness depends on getting over the bad things that happened in our past, on savoring the good things we have now, on showing gratitude, on finding something we love to do and losing ourselves in it, on realizing consumerism won’t satisfy us, on making ourselves be altruistic.

Does it take a genius to convince us that we can stop focusing on the crooked arrow shot through our heads and instead start dreaming of the arrow we shoot straight out ahead of ourselves? Probably.