Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of
Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
By Barbara Ehrenreich
(Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 235 pages,
$23)
Should, god forbid, a close relation ever be diagnosed with
cancer, you may find yourself tempted to muster whatever
cheerfulness -possible. Your loved one may even insist he desires
such tender regard or be himself determined to “think positive.”
Resist this pre-Enlightenment urge. Instead, gaze down into those
enfeebled eyes and recite the following:
[F]rom an evolutionary perspective, why should the body
possess a means of combating cancer, such as a form of ‘natural
healing’ that would kick in if only we get past our fears and
negative thoughts? Cancer tends to strike older people who have
passed the age of reproduction and hence are of little or no
evolutionary significance…If you live long enough to get cancer,
chances are you will have already accomplished your biological
mission and produced a few children of your own.
Please, dear reader, don’t strain to thank me over the wailing
of the nearby childless patient. I cribbed the script from
Bright-Sided, a rumination, according to its subtitle, on
“How the Relent-less Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined
Amer-ica.” Curi-osi-ty piqued? In deference to the book’s “Social
Science” categorization, let us excavate its root causes:
Barbara Ehrenreich is diagnosed with breast cancer; there is a
mostly indirect attempt to buoy her spirits via “photocopied bits
of cuteness and sentimentality,” pink ribbons, teddy bears
manufactured (insult to injury) in China, and tacky knickknacks
(“Let me be hacked to death by a madman, was my silent
-supplication-anything but suffocation by the pink sticky
sentiment”); Ehrenreich discovers fellow cancer sufferers exuding
defiantly chipper, insufficiently realist outlooks (“Death is as
‘natural’ as anything gets, and the body has always seemed to me
like a retarded Siamese twin dragging along behind me…”); she
seeks a propor-tional analogy for her new sunshiny bête
noire (“Soviet-style communism exemplified the use of positive
thinking as a means of social control”); and at last is inspired to
toss the “mass delusion that is positive thinking” into a
book-shaped prosecution dock.
And boy, is the indictment long, stretching from jingoism
(“…it takes the effort of positive thinking to imagine that
America is the ‘best’ or the ‘greatest’”), Yanqui
imperialist crusades, and corporate downsizing (“America’s
white-collar cor-porate workforce…accepted positive thinking as a
sub-stitute for their former affluence and secu-rity. They did not
take to the streets, shift their political allegiance in large
numbers, or show up to work with automatic weapons in hand”) to
“How Positive Think-ing Destroyed the Economy” (chapter seven) and
even Joe Wurzel-bacher’s verbal assault on poor Barack Obama, which
stemmed from the plumber’s unwillingness to accept his societal
role as “an unlicensed plumber working in a two-man residential
business that was unlikely to ever be vulnerable to the proposed
tax increase.”
Hell, the self-professed “dedicated secular humanist” is
conscientious enough to fret over evangelical megachurch sermons
that are “long on ‘purpose’ and opportunity, short on sin and
redemption” and eschew “the threat of Hell and the promise of
salvation, along with the grim story of Jesus’ torment on the
cross.”
A celestial third party serving scapegoat for individuals’ sins
would appear the apogee of the “positive thinking,” yet when
proletarian evangelicals embrace “prosperity gospel” rather than
Ehren-reich’s preferred, equally naïve left-wing nostrums the
atheist suddenly pines for the days of believers fidgeting in their
cilices as they commit “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” to
memory. Odd, no?
Perhaps not. If Puritanism is, as Mencken quipped, the “haunting
fear that someone, some-where, may be happy,” Ehrenreich could be
the reincarnated Mistress of the Mayflower. Sure, she insists her
“utopia”-wait, conceptualizing a utopia isn’t hopelessly
Bright-Sided?-includes smiles, hugs, -single-payer health
care, parties, and “opportunities for dancing in the streets”-but
only under the rigid auspices of Barbara Ehrenreich, Secretary of
(Central) Party Planning.
The posi-horror, Ehrenreich warns, is trickling down: Internet
daters admonished to “radiate positivity, not mentioning, for
example, that their last boyfriend was a jerk or that they’re
dissatisfied with their weight.” Hotels “pleasantly touristic, the
internal ambience engineered for a maximally positive effect.”
Unemployed workers duped into believing “by being positive, a
person might not only feel better during his or her job search, but
actually bring it to a faster, happier, conclusion.” A father of a
soldier missing in action in Iraq appears on television to solicit
public goodwill, forcing Ehrenreich to provide a reality check:
“Positive thoughts notwithstanding the soldier’s body was found in
the Euphrates River one week later.”
The bright side of Bright-Sided, one supposes, is pop
sociology has kept Ehrenreich out of psychiatry. Imagine her wards,
staying in maximally depressing hotels; grimacing, scoffing, and
quoting Noam Chomsky throughout corporate job in-terviews with
dreams of registering Democrat and concealing automatic weapons
dancing in their heads; truculently slapping cellulite when their
blind date loses interest in bastard ex stories.
Ironically, Ehrenreich bemoans America’s “massive empathy
deficit” as if she truly believes Bright-Sided doubles as
a warm fuzzy blanket of compassion. It does not.
Take her cancer, for instance. No decent person would begrudge
Ehrenreich whatever atti-tude enabled her to endure the dual horror
of chemo-therapy and mastectomy. Those who fail to share
her “persistent anger,” however, are accused of a “positive embrace
of the disease,” of unwitting bedevilment by pseudoscience, of
viewing radiation therapy as a “makeover opportunity.” Ehren-reich
goes so far as to bait upbeat patrons of an online cancer support
group with complaints about insurance companies, environmental
carcinogens, and “most daringly,” as she modestly puts it, “sappy
pink ribbons,” as an experiment-and then derides them for
urging her to seek therapy while she was collecting material for
her book on their “mass delusion.”
Sometimes Ehrenreich’s body must feel as if it were dragging
around a retarded Siamese twin as well.
Never underestimate leeway available to scolds possessing proper
political views. From a recent New York Times profile of
Ehrenreich:
“No one can call me a sourpuss,” [Ehrenreich] declared. “I have
a big foot in the joy camp.” She is the author of Dancing in
the Streets, a history of “collective joy,” she notes, and a
lot of fun at parties. So her new book, Bright-Sided,
should not be mistaken for a curmudgeonly rant.
Insisting you are “a lot of fun at parties” is a bit like
saying, “I’m hilarious when I’m drunk”-i.e., something that really
requires independent con-firmation. And penning a fusillade against
a “cult
of cheerfulness” places one further outside the joy camp than that
irrepressible Pollyanna Frie-drich Nietzsche, who averred in the
very first line of Twilight of the Idols, “It requires no
little skill to maintain one’s cheerfulness when engaged in a
sullen and extremely responsible business; and yet, what is more
necessary than cheerfulness?”
Still, Ehrenreich’s negative think is, it’s true, selective and
conditional, the love affair with steely-eyed realism cooling
substantially whenever she veers within spitting distance of her
predictable left-wing hobbyhorses, winsome creatures apparently
sustained solely by a steady diet of bromides. Why, Ehrenreich
muses, aren’t self-help seminar enthusiasts “working for social
changes that would benefit all” (like me!)? Why isn’t this
underemployed computer scientist not “joining a social movement
working to create an adequate safety net or to bring about more
humane corporate polices” (like me!)?
This is, of course, all ludicrously subjective, especially
coming from an honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of
America. Advocates of positive thinking encourage “deliberate
self-deception, including a constant effort to repress or block out
unpleasant possibilities and ‘negative’ thoughts”? Well, of
course. Does Ehrenreich, with her standard-issue
petite-bourgeoisie Ethan Allen-armchair soupy radicalism, seriously
believe she is engaged in a more intellectually circumspect
pursuit?
The iconoclast so contemptuous of admittedly noxious “prosperity
gospel” once wrote of Barack Obama, “We, perhaps white people
especially, look to him for atonement and redemption.” (Er, what
we, kemosabe? Also: Genuflect much?) “In the West…leading
proponents of positive thinking are entrepreneurs in their own
right, marketing their speeches, books, and DVDs to anyone willing
to buy them,” sniffs the positive thinking opponent who…just sold
me a book.
“Perpetual growth, whether of a particular company or an entire
economy is of course an absurdity, but positive thinking makes it
seem possible if not ordained.” Endless expansion of government to
institutionalize/enforce Ehrenreich’s political manias, though?
Eminently reasonable! “[W]hat was market fundamentalism other than
runaway positive thinking?” asks the woman who hasn’t met a social
or economic problem that won’t be solved by a trade union or a
government regulation in the fantastical Thousand Year Ehren
Reich.
“My own Calvinist impulses…tell me insistently to get the work
done, save the world, and then maybe there’ll be time for
celebration,” Ehrenreich writes in Dancing in the Streets.
No starry-eyed delusions there.
“One must have the nerve to assert that, while people are
entitled to their illusions, they are not entitled to a limitless
enjoyment of them and they are not entitled to impose them upon
others,” Christopher Hitchens posits in Letters to a Young
Contrarian. It isn’t as simple as Ehrenreich believes. She
puffs herself up in Bright-Sided as a wily chimera slayer,
but her enthusiasm for her own illusions and unwillingness to
challenge the sensitive sensibilities of her upper-middle-class
white liberal clientele casts doubt on her motivation for
deconstructing of others. As Lenin said, “Who — whom?”
Bright-Sided is best contextualized as an ahistorical
luxury. Ehrenreich lounges in her cozy First World abode, snarking
Who Moved My Cheese? is “a classic of downsizing
propaganda.” I recall well a long chat with a young Kenyan man on
the outskirts of Nairobi, an escapee from primeval poverty who now
distributed that book, along with other business and inspirational
texts, to villages and slums as part of a program to raise the
entrepreneurial IQ and life expectations of poor Kenyans.
None of Ehrenreich’s self-aggrandizing,
you-be-a-victim-so-I-can-feed-my-messiah-complex tomes made it into
his distribution sack. I suppose when “downsizing” manifests itself
beneath your ribcage, navel-gazing about the horrors of a cult of
cheerfulness isn’t much of a priority.
