The Origins of the Modern Culture of Achievement, Part I

Like most of what I have written about on The Modern Frame, the development of a culture of achievement in modernity, or what I have sometimes called an “ethic of success or wealth”, is a complex subject. It is sometimes referred to as a postmodern phenomenon since much of self-help literature and the like did not become hegemonic until the latter half of the twentieth century.1 What I refer to is a very broad and general cultural phenomenon where individuals and groups increasingly come to view success–most commonly rooted in monetary success, i.e., wealth creation–as the end-goal or purpose of everyday life and existence. Though there are exceptions, throughout history the rich and powerful have generally been envied by those less fortunate. With the rise of capitalism, we find a broadening of the scope and possibilities for wealth and power. More and more people are able to achieve levels of wealth hitherto unknown. Advances in technology, such as newspapers, pamphlets, mass printing of books, et al., made possible the emergence of a unique body of literature–success literature–which proposed for the first time in history to disclose the so-called wisdom and knowledge of those who claimed to know the way to success, wealth, and prosperity.

With the massive expansion of the Economic sphere beginning in the early modern period–a situation which has slowly expanded the role that money plays in our society–this phenomenon was perhaps inevitable. In other words, the concept of success, conceived as an end-goal or purpose of life, developed alongside the socioeconomic factors which led to the rise of modern capitalism. The combination of factors that have led to the widening and interconnectedness of the economic with nearly all areas of life have in turn led to the development of a body of thought that supports this very idea. The question “How do I succeed?” becomes the preoccupation of the majority of people–especially young people–living today. Here I intend to explore the history of the development of this thought and will predominantly concern myself with America. I do not pretend to establish any kind of direct-causal lineage between the thinkers mentioned, though some evidence for that does exist.2 Nor do I maintain that the following examples are exhaustive in any way, but serve rather as a snapshot or perhaps an introduction. It is also the case that I do not currently seek to criticize or refute the content of this thought; I wish merely to explore it and its development. Lastly, I do not believe that what I am calling the culture of achievement developed as a result of the literature in question, though there is a sense in which it did. Rather, the literature in question developed and emerged within a culture that already existed.3 Indeed both have become mutually reinforcing over time.

Looking back across history there appears to have always been “advice literature” in some form or another, though not in terms of that ever-abstract modern telos, “success”. Hesiod’s Works and Days may be among the first examples in the West. Clocking in at 700 B.C. the Works and Days concern, among other things, advice in agriculture and everyday living. The wisdom literature contained in the Hebrew Bible, such as the books of Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Wisdom, and Sirach, all provide examples from the ancient Near East. This could easily be extended to Hindu and Confucian traditions as well, some of which may predate their Western counterparts. Some of Cicero’s works, such as De Officiis, and Cato Maior de Senectute, fall into this category. As do some of the writings of the Roman Stoics, such as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.4 St. Augustine’s Confessions, while perhaps the first written autobiography in history, offers advice on converting to Catholic Christianity. The poem Hávamál from the Icelandic Konungsbók, provides yet another example. What is common among such ancient and medieval sources is that the advice given concerns the life well-lived, the classical conception of happiness. A way to live honorably, justly, nobly–relative to the culture and society in which the texts were promulgated.

It is not until the eighteenth century that we see advice on wealth creation and success explicitly articulated for the average person. In America, Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack (1732-1758), with entries later collected and published as The Way to Wealth (1758), is perhaps the first example of its kind. In England, Samuel Smiles serves a the counterpart to Franklin, albeit in the nineteenth century. Smiles’ most famous book, Self-Help, was published in 1859. Both Franklin and Smiles work in a down to earth pragmatic style, offering sound and applicable advice for those seeking to better their standing in the world. “The common life of every day, with its cares, necessities, and duties, affords ample opportunity for acquiring experience of the best kinds, and its most beaten paths provide the true worker with abundant scope for effort and room for self-improvement. The road of human welfare lies along the old highway of steadfast well-doings, and they who are the most persistent, and work in the truest spirit, will usually be the most successful.”5 The book is filled with references to both historical and leading figures of the day, including industrialists, inventors, scientists, as well as commoners who have bettered themselves and their circumstances. The value of industry, economy, perseverance, energy, courage, frugality, self-denial, individual action and many others are praised and shown to be eminently useful. “Heaven helps those who help themselves.”6

In the same year Self-Help was published in England, Frederick Douglass gave a speech on “Self-Made Men” for the first time. “Self-made men are the men who, under peculiar difficulties and without the ordinary helps of favoring circumstances, have attained knowledge, usefulness, power and position and have learned from themselves the best uses to which life can be put in this world, and in the exercises of these uses to build up worthy character. They are the men who owe little or nothing to birth, relationship, friendly surroundings; to wealth inherited or to early approved means of education; who are what they are, without the aid of any favoring conditions by which other men usually rise in the world and achieve great results.”7 Douglass appears to base his entire theory of such men on his own lived experience, as well as that of actual men he has known. His reflections are sober, down to earth, and keen; he clearly operates in a pragmatic tradition similar to that of Franklin and Smiles, though in many ways he is more perceptive.

If we back up ever so slightly to the early nineteenth century–before Smiles had published Self-Help–the Transcendentalist movement was gaining momentum in America. Transcendentalism was in many ways centered around the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, but also included many others, such as Henry David Thoreau. The Transcendental Club began in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1836 as a discussion group for disaffected young Unitarian clergy and prominent New England intellectuals.8 Here emerged a new kind of individualism, one unfettered by the past or the present. Sundered from tradition, history, empiricism, politics or religion, the individual was free; and insights and intuition into nature and goodness were, therefore, free from corruption. Coupled with such a worldview was advice in living and conduct, perhaps best embodied in the writings of Emerson. Though the later collection of essays known as Conduct of Life (1860) provides an excellent example, it is Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance” (1841) which is perhaps best known. “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.”9 Here is a kind of recognition of providence, coupled with a unique, proto-existentialist10 autonomy of will: “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.”11

A somewhat close descendant (or should I say cousin?) of Transcendentalism is the New Thought movement, which began in America sometime during the mid-nineteenth century with the work of Phineas P. Quimby.12 The most basic idea behind this movement is that disease or sickness originates in the mind–that is, by incorrect thinking–and consequently such ailments can be cured by thinking correctly. “[T]he trouble is in the mind, for the body is only the house for the mind to dwell in, and we put a value on it according to its worth. Therefore if your mind has been deceived by some invisible enemy into a belief, you have put it into the form of a disease, with or without your knowledge. By my theory or truth I come in contact with your enemy, and restore you to your health and happiness. This I do partly mentally and partly by talking till I correct the wrong impressions and establish the Truth, and the Truth is the cure.”13 This line of thought is sometimes associated with Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, though Eddy seemed to have incorporated elements of it into her own brand of Christianity. The term “New Thought” does not enter the stage until Prentice Mulford published Your Forces, and How To Use Them in 1888. The main current running through this river of thought is the causal-efficacy of thought itself. The world around us is a reflex of mental states; it is our mental states which create the world. This is the underlying basis of the so-called “law of attraction”–a concept also introduced for the first time by Mulford–which more or less states that we attract to ourselves whatever we think about.14

Similar ideas, such as the power of thought, individual autonomy, and others, can be found in the work of Orison Swett Marden. Although there appears to be an affinity with certain New Thought ideas, Marden does seem to temper such thinking with strong doses of pragmatism reminiscent of Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help. His first book, Pushing to the Front, was published in 1894. Marden went on to found Success Magazine in 1897, which still exists to this day, as well as publish many more books of the same genre. He also appears to be the first writer and thinker on the subject of success and personal development that gained a wide popular recognition, including by U.S. Presidents, heads of state, and wealthy industrialists.15

At this point, we have not yet reached the modern culture of achievement, but have only explored some of its initial groundwork. Premodern advice literature, as we have briefly noted, was concerned with classical ideas of the good life. In the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth century, advice about living comes to be strongly associated with success and wealth creation. Or rather, advice about conduct becomes structured by ideas of success or wealth as the end-goal or purpose of life. What the Greek’s called the vice of pleonexia–roughly translated as greed or avarice–in modern times has become a virtue.16 But there are really two separate stories here. On the one hand, we have a pragmatic, down to earth advice on making one’s way in the world, as embodied best by Franklin and Smiles, and later commented upon by Frederick Douglass. On the other hand, we have a developing body of thought concerned with the power of thought itself, individual autonomy and power, as seen in the Transcendentalists and New Thought movements. We can see a slight blending of the two in the work of Orison Swett Marden, but its development remains inchoate. What we will find happening in the early twentieth century is a synthesizing of the two; where thought, autonomy, and power, come to be applied directly to ideas of success and wealth creation.


Notes:

1. Here I mainly refer the explosion in popularity as witnessed in America.

2. Perhaps the best evidence we have is when one thinker directly quotes a predecessor. In the absence of a direct attribution it is difficult to maintain direct causal connections, since some ideas seem to have developed independently.

3. It may be the case that a culture of achievement and its corresponding literature are connected by a sort of mutual dependence. Before this litature became widespread in the late 20th century, it existed in small pockets of society. But now it is widespread, and has almost taken on a life of its own, and could perhaps be considered as a separate phenomenon altogether.

4. Epictetus was technically Greek, though he came to reside in Rome. See Epictetus, Discourses, and Marcus Aurelius, Meditations.

5. See Samuel Smiles, Self-Help, IV.

6. Ibid.

7. From what I can tell, this speech was given many times at various locations. A copy of the speech given in 1872 at the Indian Industrial School of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, can be found here: http://monadnock.net/douglass/self-made-men.html.

8. A good introduction to Transcendentalism can be found in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. See https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/transcendentalism/.

9. See Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”.

10. There are certain affinities between Transcendentalism and Existentialism, though to my knowledge no causal connection. Existentialism as a formal philosophy had a much more pronounced affect in Europe than it did in America.

11. See Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”.

12. The connection to the Transcendentalist movement appears to be associated with individual autonomy, and the so-called power to be found therein. It is possible that Emerson even influenced Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of the “will to power”. William James refers to the New Thought movement when he talks about what he calls the “mind-cure movement” in his 1901 Gifford Lecture, which was later published as The Varieties of Religious Experience.

13. See Phineas P. Quimby, The Quimby Manuscripts.

14. See Prentice Mulford, Your Forces, and How To Use Them, Vol 1. Specifically the chapter entitled “The Law of Success”.

15. Indeed, Orison Swett Marden may be an example of a direct-causal connection, since we know he was greatly impressed by Smiles’ Self-Help, and there are also certain similarities with New Thought. Marden may be the first example of a synthesized thought between New Thought and down to earth, pragmatic advice.

16. This has been noted many times by Alasdair MacIntyre.

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