Sophie Gee writes about the social trend that is disposing of experts in favor of amateurs. Gee argues that self-help books are now written by amateurs because society is not only more forgiving, but also ruled by amateurs thanks to phenomenon such as Facebook and YouTube:
Now amateurism is back. Let's call it Renaissance Idealism. Books have titles such as Alan Greenspan Grills or Lumbar Punctures with the Naked Chef, and they are selling fast. The amateur "improvement memoir" is self-help's new success story. Books such as The Year of Magical Thinking, Eat, Pray, Love and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle are big bestsellers.
Joan Didion describes the aftermath of catastrophic loss, Elizabeth Gilbert joyfully reconstructs her life after bleak depression, Barbara Kingsolver chronicles a year of sustainable farming with her family. None is an expert. That's the whole point - these books start with the writers not knowing what to do. And what's notable about each of them is how much attention they pay to the description of frustration, failure, error and misunderstanding.
It's self-help for "generation Facebook". Instead of an expert telling you how to live your life in a better way, you live your own life, then you write about it. At first glance, the turn to amateur self-help might seem retrograde, of a piece with MySpace and YouTube and other user-generated sites of dubious cultural authority.
[…] Historically, self-help was written in the form of religious conversion narrative. Texts such as St Augustine's Confessions and Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress. There, failure was crucial: people go wrong, many times, before they finally go right.
Then, during the Enlightenment, positivists began entertaining the idea that humanity was actually getting steadily, limitlessly better. Not just getting better at doing stuff - but actually becoming better people. It began to look like humans might stop making mistakes, which was scary for all the people who still felt frail and erring. But these days we are more forgiving of human frailty. After all, we figured out the mystery of flight, but we managed to melt a polar region in the process.
What does the new generation of self-help tell us about ourselves? It tells us, first of all, that we know we need help. That it is not just for other people any more. It might not be our fault when things go wrong - but that doesn't mean it is not our problem.
So self-help, version 2.0, brings good news. The good news is that you don't have to be an expert to start solving your problems. Just help yourself. Or wait - is that the bad news?
I happen to like the fact that “amateurs” are providing self-help tips and are talking about their personal experiences. Generally, I dislike self-help books for the simple reason that I don’t believe that there is such a thing as an expert in how one should live one’s life and that I hate it when someone claims to have find the answer to an existential question. It just seems too foolish religious to me. At least, amateurs have more humility than the so-called self-help experts do. Amateurs don’t claim to have found the miracle solution to day-to-day problems that will make people live their best lives today. They talk about themselves. They tell a story. I believe strongly that stories, literature teach us more things than self-books will ever be able to do.
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