Positively Ehrenreich: Bright-Sided (Part I, Perhaps)

When The Secret came out in 2006, I had already been dabbling in self-help lore. I was mainly interested in time management; my family and I had been through a lot of changes recently (moving, job changes, new kids), and I was trying to find strategies to make myself feel less overwhelmed. But since time management, at least in the many forms I found it, comes packaged with all the other self-help paraphernalia of goal setting and positive thinking, I had already come across variants of The Secret  and its focus, the “scientific” Law of Attraction.

According to The Secret—that is, according to Rhonda Byrne, who produced the film and wrote the book, but also according to all the “experts” she interviews—we humans telegraph our vision (positive or negative) to a Universe that simply, and sympathetically, manifests that vision.

For a number of reasons, not all of them rational (if I decide to blog a second part to this entry, I may comment on that), this type of talk drives me absolutely batty. It’s a secularized version of prayer—and not the contemplative communion-with-one’s-God version, either, but the selfish God-is-a-slot-machine version.

And taking this Law of Attraction seriously leads to some nutty claims.  Sometimes it’s cruelly nutty; here’s Byrne in an email interview with Associated Press writer Tara Burghart, discussing how the Law of Attraction applies to tragedies such as the Holocaust:

In responding to the question about events where massive numbers of people are killed, there are a few important points to consider. First, there is no one to blame.

Secondly, the law of attraction is absolute; it is impersonal and it is precise and exact…. In a large-scale tragedy, like 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, etc. we see that the law of attraction responds to people being at the wrong place at the wrong time because their dominant thoughts were on the same frequency of such events.

Now, this doesn't mean that they thought of the same exact event, but if their dominant thoughts and feelings were in alignment with the energy of fear, separation, powerlessness and having no control over outside circumstances, then that is what they attracted.

“There is no one to blame”: not Nazis, for example, nor terrorists, nor unprepared governmental agencies—and this list of course only scratches the surface of culpability in the Holocaust, 9/11, and Katrina, and leaves unmentioned the structural, societal inequities that, while they can’t be “blamed,” per se, we are responsible to change... No. The victims (blamelessly) brought the disasters upon themselves by wallowing in their fear, separation, and powerlessness.

Then there are the just plain nutty claims: here’s Byrne again, this time in the book version of The Secret:

I never studied science or physics at school, and yet when I read complex books on quantum physics I understood them perfectly because I wanted to understand them. (156)

It’s hard to know what to say to that.

It’s important to remember that The Secret and the Law-of-Attraction sub-culture that it swims in (Byrne doesn’t claim to have discovered the Law, only to bring together experts to present it comprehensively) are only the nutty tip of the iceberg. Indeed, if Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America were focused primarily on this pseudo-scientific nonsense, the book would hardly be worth mentioning.

But there’s a much deeper, often mainstreamed version of the Cult of Optimism, and Ehrenreich turns her materialist, skeptical eye on a series of examples of this, beginning with the “Smile or Die” culture of breast cancer survival—her experience with breast cancer catalyzed the research and writing of this book—and working through the fields of business and finance, religion, psychology and the academy, and politics. Her discussion in particular of the role of optimism in both the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the recent economic collapse should put to rest any fears that her subtitle about undermining America is mere sensationalism.

I am (perhaps ironically) a bit skeptical of Ehrenreich’s solution—her “Post-Positive Thinking,” an Enlightenment-based realism that does its best to see things ““as they are”” (most of the time, the scare quotes around that “as they are” notion are hers). I am also less disturbed than she (and, perhaps, less than I should be) of the power of self-delusion. (If I do continue to blog on this issue, I’ll address this, too, I’m sure).

Nonetheless, I consider Bright-Sided a must-read.  Positive thinking is more than just a quaint movement of self-help gurus in an echo chamber (which is how I would have considered it before reading her book).  Rather, as Ehrenreich convincingly argues in her introduction, positive thinking is an “ideology”—”the way we explain the world and think we ought to function within it” (4).  And as such, it carries force far beyond its official, business-of-motivation boundaries.

The greatest danger of positive thinking is the way that what sociologist Karen Cerulo calls “optimistic bias” (10) hides important questions—indeed, it often hides the very need for questions. If we believe (and I’ve heard this from a wide range of people, many of whom, I’ve thought, should know better) that we need to banish negativity and doubt from our lives (lest our lives manifest that doubt), that we just need a clearer vision of what we want, that we just need to believe in ourselves or the Universe—after all, “everything happens for a purpose” (by which is meant a good purpose)—then we close ourselves to a range of solutions to our problems. If we believe that, say, poor people make themselves poor through lack of imagination or commitment or belief in themselves—and this need not point to a mystical Law of Attraction—then we close ourselves to (or excuse ourselves from?) systemic, societal changes that could have serious, positive effects.

And for anyone who thinks the “American Dream” of class mobility is simply a matter of imagination or commitment, I’d recommend Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America…