Positively Ehrenreich: Bright-Sided (Part II-ish, since it's more about me than the book...)

The optimist, the joke goes, sees the glass of milk and says, "It's half full." The pessimist sees the glass of milk and says, "It's half empty."

The cynic sees the glass of milk and says, "It's probably sour."

I have a reputation — partly earned, perhaps partly cultivated — of being a cynic, but the truth is that I wish I could be an optimist. I would love to believe in a Benevolent Universe, where imagining things vividly makes them manifest, where every closed door indicates an open window, where everything that happens is "for a reason" because "Someone" is looking out for me.

I would love to believe this, but I can't.

In most cases, I'm content to let people believe as they will. I don't mean this as a condescending "I-know-I'm-right-so-I'm-unconcerned-with-your-beliefs"; I would be the first to laugh myself out of the room if I claimed to be that certain about how the world works. In the classroom, of course, I seek to provoke thought, to challenge students to think differently than they have in the past. And when people attack my views — when they "start something," so to speak — I am willing to debate, to prod, to be (however weakly) the Socratic gadfly. But on the whole I have no Big Agenda that I hope people will Come Around To. Little agendas, yes. Big Agenda, no.

So the depth of my reaction to The Secret has surprised even me. I have wasted far too many hours reading and listening to all kinds of nonsense, trying better to understand the Law of Attraction's roots and branches. I speak against it passionately, roll my eyes over-dramatically, mock scathingly (look at all those adverbs!) — and, embarrassingly, here I am, writing a blog entry about it.

It reminds me of my days as a Christian, when I would spend hours reading the literature of groups we called “cults” so I’d be better able to “witness” when they showed up at my door.

It turns out that this religious analogy is no accident: my problem with The Secret arises from my Christian past — and it does so ironically, in that The Secret raises all the hackles that the "prosperity gospel," which preaches that "God wants you to be rich" (the title of Ehrenreich's fifth chapter, incidentally), raised for me back when I was a Christian. Material wealth, in this view, is unequivocal evidence of God's favor. God becomes a slot machine in the sky: all you need to do is ask in faith and — ka-ching — wealth is yours. (No wealth? Obviously, your faith is lacking, and God is not happy with you...)

The Secret is a secularized version of this — and I mean this quite literally. In Wallace D. Wattles The Science of Growing Rich — the book that Byrne credits with introducing her to the concepts in The Secret — it's made explicit:

“Whatsoever things ye ask for when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them,” said Jesus.

See the things you want as if they were actually around you all the time. See yourself as owning and using them. Make use of them in imagination just as you will use them when they are your tangible possessions. Dwell upon your mental picture until it is clear and distinct, and then take the mental attitude of ownership toward everything in that picture. Take possession of it, in mind, in the full faith that it is actually yours. Hold to this mental ownership. Do not waiver for an instant in the faith that it is real.

It makes sense that we'd find this religious rhetoric, too. In the third chapter of Bright-Sided, “The Dark Roots of American Optimism,” Ehrenreich lays out the genealogy of Positive Thinking, uncovering an ironic, double-edged relationship to Calvinism. Modern optimism, she argues, heralds back to the “New Thought” movement, which arose as a repudiation of the long tyranny of a cheerless, even terrifying Calvinist world view. (The most famous version of the New Thought is Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science.)

Yet, at the same time, modern optimism maintains Calvinism’s harsh insistence on self-examination. “To the positive thinker,” Ehrenreich explains, “emotions remain suspect and one’s inner life must be subjected to relentless monitoring.” If our thoughts create our reality, “attracting” to us whatever we’re focusing on, then we’d better be really careful about what we focus on. Overweight? We must be sure we don’t focus on losing weight because, as Byrne puts it in The Secret, we will “attract back having to lose more weight." Focusing on what we don’t want will only give us more of the same — more of what we don’t want. We must, like the Calvinist, be endlessly vigilant.

Do not waiver for an instant in the faith that it is real...

Nevertheless, I am no longer Christian, so what do I care about these prosperity gospels, religious or otherwise?

The Law of Attraction strikes a nerve in me precisely because I see it as secularized prayer, for prayer played a central role in, as the song goes, Losing My Religion. My descent from Christianity — and understand, I was a serious Christian — was fairly gradual, taking a number of years and involving a wide range of issues and questions and decisions, many of which I don't even remember any more. I do remember, though, that my first significant doubts came out of my experiences with prayer.

In my church's college group, there was a young woman, a couple years ahead of me, who got cancer. She went through chemo, losing her appetite and her hair, but never her cheerfulness. For a time, the chemo seemed to work; the cancer disappeared, which we heralded as an "answer to prayer." I remember one particular incident, where there was dark mark on an X-ray — cancer, the doctors feared —that turned out to be nothing (a shadow? an artifact? who knows. But we were certain that prayer saved the day).

And then, as often happens, the cancer returned with a vengeance. She went downhill fast. Her body liked the chemo even less than before, and the cancer took over, apparently untouched.

So we prayed, and we prayed a lot. We prayed individually, with her, with her boyfriend, with her family. We prayed as a group, putting her at the top of our "prayer list" at every Bible study. We even held a "prayer chain," where the members of the youth group committed to having someone praying at all times across a 24-hour period (I took something like the 3:00-4:00 a.m. slot).

And, of course, she died.

Up to this point, I hadn't been bothered too much when prayers weren't answered. I had always accepted, though a little uneasily, the explanations I'd been given: "It's not that God didn't answer; He just said 'no'"; "God had something better in mind"; "You weren't praying according to God's will"; or, in an echo of the Wattles quote above, "Your faith wasn't strong enough." There were other explanations, too, I'm sure, and they always rankled a little. But the stakes for most of my relatively sheltered life hadn't really been that high, so it didn't matter much. This time... well, I didn't simply throw up my hands and abandon my faith, but this was certainly a turning point.

Years later, I just see prayer as magical thinking, pure and simple. But it's magical thinking that I used to believe in — and that I wanted to believe in.

And that, I think, is why I react so violently against The Secret, and the Law of Attraction, and the (lucrative business) world that revolves around it: even though I always rejected anything at all like a prosperity gospel, it's nonetheless far too close to what I used to believe. And I don't think I like confronting that very much...

[Correction: Not sure why, but I'd called the book Blind-Sided in the original title and post. It's Bright-Sided, as I correctly noted in Part I.]