There is no more ridiculed literary genre than the self-help book. Intellectually-minded
people universally scorn the idea of them. Self-help books don’t appear on reading
lists at any prestigious university, they’re not reviewed by highbrow journals and it’s
inconceivable that a major literary prize could ever be awarded to one of their authors.
This concerted attack on the entire genre of self help is a symptom of a Romantic prejudice
against the idea of Emotional Education. Offering explicit Emotional Education is regarded as
beneath the dignity of any serious writer. We should - if we are at all intelligent - know
how to live already. Unsurprisingly therefore, the quality of all
self-help books is at present highly degraded. The most accomplished stylists and sharpest
thinkers would feel ashamed to put their name to a work which would be destined to end up
on the most ludicrous shelves of any book shop.
Yet not all eras have shared this dismissive attitude. In the classical culture of ancient
Greece and Rome, it was taken for granted that the highest ambition of any author was
to offer the reader an Emotional Education that could guide them towards fulfilment (Eudaimonia).
Self-help books were at the pinnacle of literature. The most admired thinkers - Plato, Aristotle,
Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch and Marcus Aurelius - all wrote self-help books, whose aim was
to teach us to live and die well. Furthermore, they deployed every resource of intelligence,
wit and style in writing their manuals so as to ensure that their messages would delight
the intellectual as well as the emotional faculties. Seneca’s On Anger and Marcus
Aurelius’s Meditations are among the greatest works of literature of any nation or era.
They are also, undeniably, self-help books. It can look as if humans stopped writing good
self-help after the Fall of Rome. But once we view Culture as a tool for Emotional Education,
many more works emerge as, in fact, belonging to the currently much maligned genre of self-help.
For example, Tolstoy’s War and Peace explicitly aims to teach compassion, calm and forgiveness;
it offers guidance around money, manners, relationships and career development; it seeks
to show us how to be a good friend and how to be a better parent. It clearly is a self-help
book - it just doesn’t happen to be officially described this way by the current guardians
of Culture. Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is, similarly, also a self-help
book, teaching us how to surrender our attachment to romantic love and social status in favour
of a focus on art and thought. It’s not an insult to describe such masterpieces
as self-help books. It’s a way of correctly identifying their ambitions, which are to
guide us away from folly towards more sincere and authentic lives. Such works show us that
self-help shouldn’t be a low-grade marginal undertaking: the desire to guide and teach
wisdom is at the core of all ambitious writing. In the bookstores of the utopia, the self-help
shelves would be the most prestigious of them all and on them would sit many of the most
distinguished works of world literature - returned, at last, to their true home.
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