The Think Piece Interview: Dr. Lewis M. Andrews

Dr. Lewis M. Andrews is that rare intellectual who believes in divine intervention. He experienced it several years ago after giving a lecture on common therapy, which is his thesis that there are common truths to be found in all spiritual paths. It changed his life and motivated him to produce his new work, which focuses on the spiritual and mental health views of America’s early college presidents. We talked to him about that moment in his life, the frustrations of determinism in psychology, the surprisingly lethal nature of boredom, and the sci-fi novel he plans to write next.

TP: When did you decide to write To Thine Own Self Be True?

LA: Well, I can tell you that my interest in this really goes way, way back to when I was in college. I majored in psychology because I was interested in how people work and how people think—and I suppose I had problems of my own, like most college kids, and I was sort of interested in trying to make my own life better. And what struck me from the first psychology courses was how deterministic psychology was at that point. The two dominant theories in psychology were called conditioning, or stimulus/response—you know, where they saw ideas about human behavior reinforced in rats and laboratory animals and tried to build a whole theory on human behavior based on reinforcement. And the other big theory was Freud’s idea—you know, of competing underlying energies, psyche, and how people pull those things together. Psychology seemed to want to be science in the sense that physics or chemistry or biology is science and wanted to be able to say if you do this, then people are going to do that. And I always believed in free will. So I read everything I could about that issue, and you know, there’s a little bit of psychology and then suddenly, if you really want to get into that, you go into philosophy and history. So I also developed an interest early on in the history of science and the history of philosophy, and you could see going back that there were people, way back when—I mean, going all the way back, even before Jesus, going all the way back to the Hebrew prophets, and in Greek civilization going back to Plato and Socrates—a lot of what we call emotional issues—they didn’t use that phrase—but a lot of emotional problems really were addressed by ancient physicians like Galen and ancient philosophers like Plato and Socrates. And the more I read of different philosophies and began to look at different religions, it occurred to me that there was a kind of a universal approach to treating emotional problems. And that’s where To Thine Own Self Be True came from.

TP: That’s quite an undertaking. How many years did you work on the book?

LA: It took ten years to research it.

TP: I was struck in reading your book how highly you prize intuition.

LA: One of the things I struggled with way, way back in college was: how do you find your life, how do you know what to do, what should you study, what should you do for your career? And yet there was always a part of me that [would say], you know, if you didn’t worry about those things, you probably already know what you need to do; you just need to focus in on the present and do what you intuitively feel is right in the present, and everything will be okay. I mean, I knew that. I knew about intuition intuitively. And the novel of Saul Bellow said much the same thing—he won the Nobel Prize for literature years ago for a book called Humboldt’s Gift—and when he gave the Nobel address he said, “We all have this power of intuition, and we all feel it, but nobody wants to talk about it,” because in order to validate one’s own intuition, one has to hypothesize a kind of spiritual force, which isn’t logic, and it isn’t feeling, either. There are a lot of people who live emotionally—they’re prisoners of their emotions. Now, that’s not the same thing as intuition, because your intuition can sometimes tell you not to profess your feelings, or to keep them in check or to channel them in some way. But there is a force operating through us that we all feel is a reliable guide, and, if that’s true, then it represents some kind of intelligence. But to be able to affirm that, you have to have a spiritual perspective on life, whether you take a religious perspective, you say Jesus is talking through you, or … there are people out there who are not religious, who are spiritual—they believe God created the universe, but they wouldn’t necessarily prescribe to any given religion. But it is a belief that there is a higher intelligence operating through us.

TP: And you sensed that early?

LA: Yes, for me, I knew that to be true, but I didn’t have the faith that goes with that. In other words, I had the feeling of the intuition, but I didn’t necessarily know that I believed that the universe was that providentially constructed. But yet, the more I looked into what you would call mental health issues, I looked at all these kinds of emotional problems and then would go back and begin to look at them like the great thinkers and philosophers, and some psychologists, like Carl Jung and Abraham Maslow—these are mental health professionals in more recent times who had an interest in spiritual things—and the more I came to a conclusion that really there is a connection between having a spiritual perspective on life, which gives you the ability to trust your underlying, innate, intuitive intelligence, and having a happy life.

TP: It does seem like a lot of us get hung up on internal hurdles and if we could get out of our own way, things would be fine, yes?

LA: A lot of the issues I think that people suffer—I’m not talking about schizophrenia or psychosis; I think there are biochemical issues that affect some people, and I’m not getting into that—but what you might call the more normal forms, more common forms of emotional stress that everyone suffers from—everyone gets depressed at certain points, everyone gets bored, everyone feels anxious, everyone has fear—the intensity of those kinds of problems, I think, are really a function of one’s own spiritual development. And, you know, if you look at the great thinkers and all the world’s religions, they will all tell you that they have reached a place where they’re comfortable responding to what they feel is right in the present, and they think the future will take care of itself. It’s like … I forget which passage it is, but the passage from Matthew in the New Testament, where Christ says, look at the lilies of the field, and how beautiful they are, and if God takes care of them, what are you worrying about?

TP: Oh my, that’s lovely.

LA: Isn’t it?

TP: You write about the undeniable effectiveness of twelve-step programs, and how that one model is now used to treat so many compulsions. At the heart of these programs is belief, and it seems people need that. Why do you think that is?

LA: You know what’s interesting about AA and the other twelve-step programs—I didn’t know much about them when I started researching the book because, although I’ve known alcoholics and drug addicts, even in my own family, I didn’t have a personal relationship with anyone who did AA or Gamblers Anonymous or any of those programs, so I kind of discovered them in the course of my research. But what’s interesting about AA and the various spin-offs is that they really developed outside of professional, academic psychology. You have psychology as a profession evolving in the U.S. and in the world around the early 1900s from two different locations—you had Freud in Europe, and in the U.S. you had a psychologist named John Watson, who was one of the first psychology professors at Johns Hopkins University, and he was the one who did a lot of animal studies and noticed that we could control an animal’s behavior by reinforcing it for doing the right thing; he developed a whole theory of behavior based on that. And those two theories of psychology—the reinforcement theory and the Freudian theory—developed within the university, then the medical school, then the department of psychology. And because psychologists felt, I think, a little inferior to physicists and chemists from a scientific point of view, because it’s much harder to measure human behavior than it is to measure a chemistry experiment, they insisted on a strict, determinist view of human behavior, just kind of to prove that they were scientists. And AA came out of a totally different tradition. There is a spiritual tradition in the United States that comes out of the university system of an earlier time, before 1900, when most of the people that ran universities were ministers, and they lectured a lot about Christian theology and how that made people’s lives happier. And that way of thinking really infused American thinking and American philosophy all the way up to the beginning of the 1900s and then that kind of thinking kept going through a number of different popular groups. There was something called the Emmanuel Movement, which was a therapy movement that was developed by the Emmanuel of the Episcopal Church in Boston, and that was very popular, a huge trend in the U.S. until around the 1920s. Then you had something called the Oxford Groups, which became internationally successful—it’s forgotten now; most people don’t even know what the Oxford Groups are. But it was an organization … a very loose organization of groups around the country, and the idea was that if you were unhappy that they could make themselves happier by talking about their problems and trying to figure out a less judgmental way of dealing with their problem. And that evolved into Alcoholics Anonymous because someone who had attended Oxford Group meetings in New York City, a guy by the name of Bill Wilson, decided that that approach would be good for alcoholism.

TP: And some have claimed it’s one of the most significant contributions of the 20^th century.

LA: Yes, what you have today is the most successful therapeutic movement in the history of the world. It all contains a belief in what they would call a higher power, a divine organizing principle, and the way you bring that principle to life in your life is through a commitment to moral, ethical, and spiritual values. I mean, that’s basically what AA is about and what its various spinoffs are about. As a therapeutic movement, they treat, every day, millions more people than ever go into formal psychotherapy, academic psychotherapy. They’re by far and away the most successful kind of therapeutic program in the history of the world, and yet they’re separate from the university system, from the medical system, from the academic system. If you were to go out and buy a book about psychotherapy, you might not even see a reference to AA or Gamblers Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous. I saw the other day that there are now—someone had counted them—more than 400 different kinds of therapeutic programs in the U.S. based on these twelve-step models like Alcoholics Anonymous. You can’t say that about any other kind of psychological therapy.

TP: You’ve had your own struggles with addiction.

LA: I started off with marijuana and hash—and I’m one of those people who believe that it is a gateway drug, pot—so I was fortunate that through my research I was aware of AA and its various programs, and I got a tremendous amount out of it, and that only reinforced my belief. It’s interesting that my own personal therapy eventually had an effect on the research I was doing. You know, it’s a very rich way to go about writing a book.

TP: What was life like for you after To Thine Own Self Be True?

LA: For, gosh, maybe six, seven years—I was a professional lecturer and instructor. You know, what you do if you want people to learn about what you’ve written is you try to arrange workshops and seminars, and what I would do for about seven years is I would go to a hospital—a Minnesota one, actually, because there are a number of hospitals in Minnesota that have an interest in spirituality because of the popularity of the twelve-step program. I would go to a hospital and I would give a workshop and then I’d stay over Saturday and then I’d give a talk at a nearby church. And I did this for a number of years, but after about seven years, I was giving a presentation somewhere and a woman came up to me and looked me in the eyes and she said, “I liked your talk, but aren’t you leaving somebody out of this?” And I knew exactly what she was talking about. I wasn’t at all talking about Christ or Christianity. And I almost felt like this was a message. I felt like what she was telling me was, OK, you have written a book about the common therapy at the heart of all religions and philosophies. But what do you believe? Many times you said you’re very open-minded, you’re very tolerant, you talk about what’s universal—that’s great. But most people don’t adopt the universal philosophy. Most people get more particular. And she wanted to know what I believed. And I was dumbstruck. I mean, I really felt as if God had grabbed me by the collar and shaken me.

TP: What’d you do?

LA: I thought, well, if I want to talk about Christianity, how do I do that? I’m really not confident. I’m not a minister. I go to a Methodist church, but my minister knows a lot more about Methodism than I do. I know something about Christianity from a historical perspective, but I’m not confident to do this. But as coincidence would have it, I was reading a really interesting book about the history of the American university, The Soul of the American University by George Marsden. And I started reading it, and it told me something I knew but hadn’t really thought about a lot, which is, from the founding of Harvard in the mid-1600s right up until about the 1920s, a minister ran almost every American college and university. And almost all were Protestant ministers—there were some Catholic schools, but almost all of them were Protestant ministers. And when I started reading about this, I discovered that the way the curriculum ran at most of these universities was that the first three years you would do what most kids do today: you would take English and math and history or whatever. But then your senior year, in a seminar with the president of the school, who was a minister, you’d be learning how to apply Christian theology to the problems of everyday life. And when I read about this and started doing research about this, I found it fascinating because I also found out that these ministers who were running schools—Noah Porter at Yale, James McCosh at Princeton; these are famous names from the past—they were all very popular lecturers. They were the self-help gurus of their day. I mean, they were the ones who wrote the best-selling books. And they had a tremendous influence on the evolution of everything in America: popular philosophy, business curricula. To this day, the biggest-selling self-help book in the history of the United States is Acres of Diamonds, written by a Baptist minister named Russell Conwell, who also founded Temple University in Philadelphia. And the more I found out about their influence, the more I realized that this philosophy developed by the early college presidents became the basis for Alcoholics Anonymous. You can trace it from the colleges to the Emmanuel Groups to the Oxford Group, right down to AA. And you have, really, therapeutic tradition going all the way back to 1650 to the founding of Harvard, which has kind of been lost in America, or really kind of channeled into the recovery movement, which intellectually exists in a pocket separate from the university. These people had all kinds of things to say about every emotional problem, and they wouldn’t necessarily use our modern psychological language, but they knew how to deal with boredom and loneliness and fear and depression—all the kinds of problems we suffer from today. So I thought it would be really interesting to rewrite, in a sense, To Thine Own Self Be True, but write it from the point of view of the early college presidents and the message they were trying to give both to their students and to the American people. So I spent another 10 years reading—and I think I can say this in all honesty—every book written by every American college president, from the founding of Harvard right up until 1920. And I know what these guys were thinking. It was fascinating. And there’s a lot that they said that’s very relevant today.

TP: Lew, that blows my mind.

LA: I know, it blew mine, too. It’s so interesting. Some of them got interested in depression, some of them got interested in decision-making—all their books have been copied by Google and they’re available online for free. So if you get interested in any one of these guys, you can read everything that he, or in some cases she—a big school that had a huge influence back then was Wellesley and there was another female college that also had a big influence—said.

TP: And now you’re writing a book on all of this, for which we are running an excerpt. How far along are you on the full book?

LA: I’m pretty far along. What I’ve done is I’ve written every chapter and organized it in terms so that I know what the early college presidents were saying about each of the problems that I want to deal with: fear, loneliness, anxiety, depression, boredom, discouragement. But I’m in the process now of doing the last draft, in which I make it a little more readable and bring my own perspective to it. And I’ve done that on the chapter on depression, which is what the single is on, and I’m in the process now of doing that with all the other chapters now. My guess is that I’m probably about three months from finishing the whole thing.

TP: What has been among your most exciting revelations in doing this book?

LA: That depression is not the most common problem—the most common problem is boredom. But a lot of people don’t see that as a problem, the way they see anxiety or fear or depression as a problem. You know, in terms of the more serious problems that average people deal with, depression is probably number one.

TP: Boredom is that lethal?

LA: It can be.

TP: What do you think most people are really craving when they see a therapist? And taken further, what do you think makes a good therapist?

LA: I want to be careful in my answer because I don’t want to … this can sound conspiratorial; I don’t mean this to sound conspiratorial, but the professional system of therapy has a vested interest in emphasizing the importance of degrees. Because the degree indicates how much knowledge you have and therefore how helpful you can be. So, if you’re looking for a therapist, you know, presumably somebody with a Ph.D. is better than somebody with a master’s, and an M.D. is better than somebody with a Ph.D. certainly because they know more. But in practice, that’s really not the way it works at all. And Freud himself, who was a doctor nevertheless, when he was training people to be therapists felt that their academic training had nothing to do with whether they were a good therapist or not—that it really had to do with some personal quality. And I would take that one step further—if you believe in the theory that I say is common to all the world’s religions and philosophies, namely that there is a spiritual intelligence in the universe that operates through the human mind, and the way you refine that is by being true to certain basic values that in a sense opens up your access to a higher intelligence, then the person you want to talk to is the most intelligent person—and the most intelligent person, I would argue, is intelligent in the sense of somebody who is intuitive, who understands that God’s will is doing what you want to do as long as you’re not doing what you shouldn’t do. And that’s the person you want to talk to. What you want to do if you have a problem … it means you’re confused. Presumably, you’ve been going to a therapist, you’re already operating under the assumption that your problem is you. Supposedly you’re going to learn something that’s going to put you on the right track. The person you want to talk to, therefore, is the person who’s the most intelligent and insightful—not necessarily the person who’s read the most books, but the person who really has some wisdom and some insight. And I would argue that the person who has the wisdom and the insight is the person who at some level is a spiritual person. Now, there are other factors, too—I’m a great believer in the idea that if you’re a man, you probably want to talk to a man; if you’re a woman, you probably want to talk to a woman, because same sexes will understand certain things socially and will understand your issues better than someone from the opposite sex might. In fact, it’s interesting—in the twelve-step programs, they emphasize the importance of having a sponsor and they encourage people to take as sponsors people who are of the same sex and to some degree have similar backgrounds.

TP: It’s all about comfort level and trust.

LA: That’s huge.

TP: OK, here’s the most cliché question I can think of: books that influenced you?

LA: A lot of people know the writer Aldous Huxley, who’s probably best known for the science fiction novel Brave New World, which I think everybody has to read in high school or college, but he wrote a book called The Perennial Philosophy and it helped me in many ways shape To Thine Own Self Be True. What he argues in The Perennial Philosophy is that … he got the phrase perennial philosophy from the philosopher [Gottfried] Leibniz, who wrote a book called Philosophia Perennis, and the idea was that at the heart of all religions, there’s the common philosophy. And with To Thine Own Self Be True, I just took that one step further: I said, if there’s a common philosophy, then there has to be common therapy. So I started with Huxley’s common philosophy and I took it to common therapy. But in this book, what Huxley does is called the perennial philosophy, and it’s still in print and easily accessible, he looks at all the different religions of the world and he talks about the one religion at the heart of all religions. And he does it in a very accessible way. Huxley was a good writer. So that’s a terrific book that I recommend.

TP: What will be your next book?

LA: You know what I’d like to do? You’re going to think this is a little strange, but the idea I’ve been kind of working on since college presidents is … I’d like to write a science fiction novel about the first Christian colony on Mars. I’ve had an interest in science fiction, and I’ve written some science fiction over the years. I wrote a science fiction novel years ago for a friend of mine … for Doubleday, called Gomorrah. In the Bible, they talk about the two cities of sin: Sodom and Gomorrah, but they never talk about Gomorrah; they only describe Sodom. So that was something I did, and I’ve written science fiction stories. But I’d like to write a science fiction novel about the first Christian colony on Mars because I’d like to deal with this issue of where does religion go. Because I think that religious, spiritual people today … you know, we live in a very secular society. One of the reasons why spiritual issues aren’t more a part of conventional psychotherapy is because people tend to see religion as not relevant, or traditional but doesn’t have anything to do with really dealing with problems. I mean, a lot of people think that way because we live in a secular society. I think we’ve kind of bottomed out on that. I think there’s kind of a recharged spirituality. I think materialism is seen as a dead end. But where does religion go? And what is it about religion, and Christianity in particular, that’s really eternal and applies to the future? What is it that might be different? So I’d kind of like to come to terms with that in the context of the colonization of Mars, which I think is the … it’s going to happen in the next hundred years because it’s the only planet in the solar system that can be colonized.

This interview has been edited and condensed for publication.