Reasons to be cheerful

‘Power dwells with cheerfulness,’ wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. Though we often think of cheerfulness as the opposite of power, as an insincere urge to liven things up, Emerson knew it to be a resource of the self, a tool for shaping our emotional lives that can help to relocate us in the social world and link us to community.

With cheerfulness, we see a rise in emotional energy, a sudden uptick in mood. It is fleeting or ephemeral, in that it comes and goes. But we can control it. We can ‘cheer up’, just as we can ‘calm down’. As the English philosopher Robert Burton put it in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621): ‘expect a little ... Cheer up.’ Burton’s advice to ‘expect a little’ reminds us that cheerfulness is a modest power.

Perhaps it is because of the modesty of cheerfulness that philosophers have largely overlooked it. They tend to focus on more dramatic emotions such as anger and melancholy, viewing human emotional life as a battleground of unconscious drives or overwhelming passions. The classic example of the man ruled by passion is the Greek hero Achilles. Overcome by his wrath towards Agamemnon, Achilles refused to join his fellow Greeks in the war against Troy, thereby betraying his own duty as Greece’s greatest warrior. Unlike wrath, cheerfulness is largely elective. We can manage it.

It is no accident that Burton mentions cheerfulness in a book about melancholy. In much writing about emotion, cheerfulness is presented as the antidote to the dark emotions of the melancholic. Medical thinkers up into the 19th century assumed that the human body was governed by the circulation of fluids, or humours. Melancholy, for example, arose from an excess of black bile, while certain stimulants were understood to counter melancholy and generate cheerfulness — one glass of wine (not two), bright music, a well-lit room. The Renaissance doctor Levinus Lemnius recommended good company, ‘dallying and kissing’, drink and dancing — all of which, he noted, generate an emotional uplift that endures for days afterwards, visible in the face. Other doctors argued that it was possible to stimulate cheer chemically: in 1696, the English doctor William Salmon prescribed a powder to stimulate cheerfulness: mix up some clove, basil, saffron, lemon peel, bits of ivory, leaves of gold and silver, with shavings from the heart of a stag and, voilà! — you will be made cheerful.

Whether anyone took these medical approaches to cheer seriously, it’s clear that cheerfulness is deeply linked to the body, and, in particular, the face. Indeed, it begins in the face and moves inward. As the French writer Germaine de Staël pointed out at the beginning of the 19th century, when you take on a cheerful expression, no matter what the state of your soul, your cheerfulness moves into the self: ‘the facial expression penetrates, bit by bit, what one experiences.’ The interior of the self is changed by the power of cheer.

This trajectory of cheerfulness through the self is linked to the history of the word ‘cheer’ itself. ‘Cheer’ comes from an Old French word that means, simply, ‘face’. The term comes into English and spreads through medieval culture in the 14th century. In Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1387-1400), for example, people are depicted as having a ‘piteous cheer’ or a ‘sober cheer’. ‘Cheer’ is an expression, but also a body part. It lies at the intersection of our emotions and physiognomy.

In the 16th century, the Protestant Reformation sparked intense debate over the meaning of spiritual community. At the same moment, when the Bible begins to be widely translated into vernacular languages, the simple noun ‘cheer’ expands to encompass the adjective ‘cheerful’ and, eventually, around 1530, includes the more abstract idea of ‘cheerful-ness’, which turns the local expression of the face into an abstract noun, something that can circulate as an emotional quality of the self. In the Geneva Bible (1560), from Saint Paul’s ‘Second Letter to the Corinthians’ we learn that to participate in the Christian community you must practise caritas, or love. ‘As every man wisheth in his heart,’ says Paul, ‘so let him give; not grudgingly, or of necessity, for God loveth a cheerful giver.’ God loveth a cheerful giver. These words resonated widely across the early modern world, linking cheer — and the face — to the practice of caritas, a social and religious activity.

Modern readers might be struck in these early accounts by the extent to which cheerfulness is much more than the superficial performance of the upbeat colleague or the annoying salesman. A social quality, it shapes and defines a particular moral community. It emerges between people, binding them together.

During the European Enlightenment, as the great religious debates of the early modern period begin to wane in Europe, the theological dimension of cheerfulness falls away. Yet its essential social dimension remains, as the characteristic of enlightened gatherings. The 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume notes that cheerfulness is a force that is larger than the individual. The individual doesn’t perform cheer, as Calvin had suggested; instead, it envelops him. Hume uses the metaphor of the flame to describe how cheerfulness might set a company alight.

If cheerfulness is healthy and social, even morally upright, we can understand why Emerson, with whom I began, understands it as a kind of power. Cheerfulness can condition our mood, but it also inflects our social being. It is essential to a healthy society. For Emerson, the first great moral philosopher of the Americas, cheerfulness informs a well-lived life. It is also linked to creativity.

In his essay ‘Shakespeare, or the Poet’ (1850), Emerson asserts that poetic genius requires “cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet — for beauty is his aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation, but for its grace.’ The poet’s cheerfulness involves his ability to see the beauty of the world, to see things ‘for the lovely light that sparkles from them’.

Emerson’s celebration of the cheerful sensibility brings the social vision of the moralist together with the creativity of the poet. He suggests not only that cheerfulness links people together in communities, but that he who controls cheerfulness can remake the world. Cheerfulness is a psychological and emotional force, originating in vision and sensibility.

The turn of the 20th century saw a proliferation of what the philosopher William James called ‘mind-cure ’ movements — that is, approaches to living that assumed the influence of mental states on everyday productivity and social interaction. These movements swept cheerfulness along with them. The turn of the century ‘inspirational’ writer Orison Swett Marden, who founded SUCCESS magazine in 1897, placed cheerfulness at the centre of his thought. His many titles include Cheerfulness as a Life Power (1899), The Optimistic Life (or, in the Cheering-Up Business) (1907) and Thoughts about Cheerfulness (1910). Marden’s volumes are largely lists of ‘wise sayings’ and clichés about the advantages of being upbeat. These advantages are both personal and professional. They will make you happy — and help you make money.

Marden sees cheerfulness not as a philosophical concept or theological idea, but as a tool. Stripped now of its roots in debates about community and charity, it can be deployed in daily life and generate specific rewards. In the years after the Second World War, the clergyman Norman Vincent Peale made a fortune selling his own brand of ‘positive thinking’, which purported to lead even the most desperate and bereft to success and happiness.

Peale’s most famous book, The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), aims to mobilise the power of attitude for the goal of worldly success. It is built out of a set of exhortations, disguised as scientific truths, and intertwined with illustrative anecdotes.

Peale is an easy target for criticism. His book is a transparent hodgepodge of clichés and fake anecdotes, presented through the sober ‘case study’ tone of the mid-century’s social sciences. But the larger implications of his description of the US malaise are worth noting. Peale’s answer to the misery of his subjects is to translate their objective dilemmas, rooted in economic uncertainty and a changing job market, into subjective problems. You are pathetic, not because you’ve been fired in a corporate restructuring and are too old to be rehired, but because you have the wrong attitude. The solution is cheerfulness.

The story of cheerfulness is bound up with the story of bodies, with how we inhabit our faces and gestures. But it is no less bound up with the story of communities. Both Marden and Peale build on the earlier language of cheerfulness as articulated in the Bible and in the work of early modern philosophy. But they strip it of its collective dimension. And as those communities are erased and reimagined in the developing world of industrial, and now post-industrial, capitalism, cheerfulness is at once endlessly evoked and drained of its power to bind humans to each other. Today, cheerfulness mainly evokes the ghosts of earlier cheerful scenes: we walk among the ruins of theological and natural cheer. Contemporary cheer — the gaiety of networking apps and cheer squads — mimics the spirituality of communities that no longer exist.

And yet, something has changed.

One consequence of life in the pandemic age is that it has demanded cheerfulness, perhaps only as a momentary, modest respite from a situation haunted by dread and confusion.

Perhaps only in expressions of care and concern, in offers of help from afar. These are only small gestures, but they are gestures nonetheless — like the Biblical practice of the ‘cheerful giver’. They imply care and empathy. Because we control and cultivate cheerfulness through our conversations — digital or otherwise — we recreate community through an act of the will.

In this more modern iteration, cheerfulness is a form of emotional power that should not be overlooked. It is not the ‘hope’ of the messianic, or the ‘optimism’ of the cheap politician. It makes more modest promises — to get you through the next few hours, to connect you to a neighbour. You can’t build a politics on it. But you probably can’t rebuild a world without it.

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