BRIGHT-SIDED: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
Barbara Ehrenreich
Metropolitan Books
Current Affairs
ISBN: 9780805087499
Barbara Ehrenreich, our country’s literary pop-sociologist-in-residence, has come up with another provocative and brightly written survey of what’s wrong with our social/cultural scene. Clear a space for it on the shelf beside her earlier efforts in the same genre, NICKEL AND DIMED and BAIT AND SWITCH.
Those books dealt in their different ways with the phenomenon of underemployment --- people stuck in jobs that condemn them to failed efforts at making ends meet. BRIGHT-SIDED takes on an easier target, although one that is much more difficult to reduce to statistics --- the whole many-sided idea of “positive thinking” as it has affected politics, religion, medicine, business and numerous other facets of American life. Ehrenreich finds the concept almost entirely vacuous, largely ineffective, illogical, even harmful and positively dangerous in the long run. She explores its origins as a reaction to Puritan Calvinism and parades before us a melancholy procession of its chief advocates, from Mary Baker Eddy to Norman Vincent Peale and beyond. None of them escape unscathed from her sharp-pointed pen.
The chief sin of positive thinking, in Ehrenreich’s gospel, is its irrational and pervasive optimism, amounting to a stubborn refusal to confront the world as it really is. Herself a survivor of breast cancer, she is outraged by the commonly promoted idea that cancer is a “gift” or an “opportunity” to redirect one’s life. In like fashion, she goes after the notion that suddenly finding yourself downsized at work can somehow be camouflaged as a chance to make your life better or more meaningful. She attends windy conferences of “life coaches” and “spiritual advisers,” mainly for the purpose of recording and scoffing at their nostrums and, indeed, at their whole reason for being. She visits megachurch services to preach her own sermon against their crass materialism and the doctrine that “God wants you to be rich.” And she ridicules the business world’s adoption of company-wide cheerleading exercises as a means of boosting employee morale --- that is, for those employees who are left after the mass layoffs have been announced. She interviews, at length, a leading “positive psychologist” and concludes that his line of treatment is largely nonsense (he didn’t like her much, either).
Another of her major targets is the “law of attraction,” which asks us to believe that you can have whatever you want --- good health, the right spouse, the mansion, the yacht, the huge bank account, etc. --- simply by wishing for it ardently enough. If you do not achieve these things, you have only yourself to blame. You are just “too negative” and will never make the grade. Stop reading newspapers and watching the news --- they just make you more negative. This will strike most readers as knocking down a self-evidently ridiculous idea, but Ehrenreich finds its ghost lurking behind many of the notions and practices found today in the business world. Late in the book, she confronts the current financial meltdown and blames it fully as much on unscrupulously optimistic promotional tactics by Ponzi disciples in plush offices as on the gullibility of those who fell for them and lost everything.
Reading along in this chamber of new-age horrors, one keeps wondering: What does Ehrenreich propose as remedy? A mass retreat into gloom and despair perhaps? Her answer is simple: realism --- the knowledge that the world is indeed a perilous place and that you cannot wish those perils away. Optimism has a place in her outlook, but so do common sense, hard work, concern for others, and the quest for greater knowledge of the world around us. And she finds all these qualities to be sorely lacking in the Never Never Land of wishful optimism and life coaches.
Ehrenreich’s writing here is brisk, and her thesis passionately held and convincingly laid out. If you come across any readers (or book reviewers) who remain unimpressed, well, just put them down as those incurably “negative” sourpusses we need to watch out for and vanquish.
--- Reviewed by Robert Finn (Robertfinn@aol.com)
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