Why I call myself an atheist... and why (most of) you shouldn't care

It's been a long time. I've either had nothing to say, or no time to say it... I'm not even sure I'm "back." But a recent conversation with a friend had me reflecting on this, and I reflect best in writing...

Here's a question I get: are you really an atheist?

It usually comes up after I've used Christian imagery in a class discussion to illustrate something (say, the difference between a cross as symbol or artifact) and I want to assure the students that such references are not an underhanded way to proselytize. (For some reason this is important to me, probably because I once had an annoying statistics teacher who saw himself as a Christian stand-up comic and took every opportunity to turn a statistics problem into an opportunity to preach to us. Overreacting? Sure. But I don't ever want to be seen as that guy...).

But that's not the only time. It comes up when someone has had too much to drink at a party and wants to talk religion; or when I empathize with a friend who's had some particularly bad luck, and my advice is decidedly pragmatic; or when I'm asked to agree with some benignly magical view of the universe. And just the other day, a friend and I were comparing and contrasting our pasts and presents, marveling at common themes.... In my case, that contrast between past and present is virtually structured on my shift from evangelical Christian to atheist.

Yes, I really am an atheist. Most of the time, I don't care. And you probably shouldn't, either.

First, let me get the argument about semantics out of the the way. Some of my students delight in trying to maneuver me into saying that, since I can't possibly be so arrogant as to pretend my beliefs are infallible, I should actually call myself an agnostic. Fine.

Nevertheless, I still call myself an atheist. Think of it as an analogue to my Christian days: back then, I would have had the arrogance to hold that my beliefs were infallible — yet, in those inevitable moments when I struggled with doubt (as do most thinking Christians), I didn't suddenly call myself an agnostic. I still believed, even with doubts. I was still a Christian.

Similarly, an admission of fallibility isn't enough to make the shift from atheist to agnostic.

As is often the case, there's a psychological reason, too: for a long time I did use the label "agnostic" to avoid admitting to myself that I had, in fact, rejected my past beliefs. Those were deeply uncomfortable times. (In fact, they remain so, to some extent; I still have an involuntary tightening in the stomach when someone makes a joke at Jesus' expense.) Letting go of the past — in any number of ways — isn't as easy as I'd like it to be; calling myself "atheist" is thus a way of letting go.

Of course, invoking the word "belief" almost inevitably raises a further objection: that atheism is as much a religion as, say, Christianity or Islam. I'll admit that, with some atheists, it looks like that, even to me. I have a  friend (a former student), for example, whom I call an "evangelical atheist" because, in the novel he's writing, he often sneaks in off-handed references to atheism. It's the same strategy I used when I wrote lyrics for my Christian band. More amusingly, it's the same thing he criticizes Stephanie Meyer for doing with her Mormon worldview in Twilight. (If he reads this, he'll know who he is, and that last comparison will annoy him to no end. Heh. [Update: It got his goat, but he also informs me he's changed.])

But I don't see atheism as a religion. It's not an affirmative belief;  I'm not claiming to believe in something. It's not codified; I have no atheist text that I point to as my bible (not even Origin of Species). I have no rituals. Atheism doesn't explain much about how the world works, at least not for me; indeed, I spend a lot of time noticing all the things I don't know, and that I don't expect ever to be able to explain.

More important, perhaps, my identity is not tied up with my atheism. I don't feel any camaraderie with other atheists, at least not as atheists; I feel no thrill of recognition or gratitude when I learn that someone else believes (or, more precisely, doesn't believe) the same as I do — as I did when, as a Christian, I stumbled upon another Christian in a classroom, or at a conference, or wherever.

And guess what? I don't even want you to become an atheist.

Back when I was a Christian, I would have seen the way I am now as some mixture of pathetic — how does one get up in the morning with no meaning, nothing to live for? — and scary — how would the world survive without morals grounded in God, or at least in something beyond the petty interests of humans, beyond the merely material? Indeed, I've been asked these questions directly, but I also think they're behind that first question I mentioned: "Are you really an atheist?"

And since I've been asked this quite a lot over the past year, I figured there might actually be some interest in an answer. (Thus this blog post...)

So: how do I get up in the morning with no meaning, with nothing to live for?

The short, kind of smart-ass answer is that it just kind of happens; the alarm goes off, and I get out of bed and do the things I do: make some coffee, write 1000 words in a journal, put away the dishes, get the kids ready for school....

The longer answer is more complicated: Meaning, such as I find it, lies within the things I do, and in the value I place on doing them. Sure, it's not always easy; sometimes I feel like my journal is a waste of words; sometimes I hate the dishes; sometimes the kids are too loud, or too contentious, or too uncooperative, and the point of it all escapes me. (Coffee, however, is constant.)

But in the end, I value these things, and they take on the meaning I give them. That's enough for me.

This is not to say I believe in "free will." While I operate on the premise that the meaning of a thing rests in my interpretation of it, I don't delude myself into thinking this interpretation is simply my choice. For one thing, I can't make myself interpret things in a way that doesn't make sense to me (I know this because I've tried). I can't, for example, simply decide that Christianity works as a touchstone for me. Nor can I make myself believe the the types of things that so many others — friends of mine; indeed, smart friends of mine — find comfort in: that when God closes a door, he opens a window; or that my father is in a better place; or that such-and-such happened because the Universe wants to teach me something....

No. If I'm a believer in anything, it's in something like the concept of overdetermination — a concept I learned back in my critical theory days, which argues that a subject (in this case, moi) is a function of complex interactions among multiple, even competing determinants. And while "exercising my free will" may be one of the things that feeds into my interpretation of the world, or of my experience of the world, it's only one thing. There are many, many others--the way I was raised, including the religious background I now no longer accept; the experiences I've had; the way I've been socialized into, for example, the profession of teaching; the way society sees me and what I believe... All these things, and many more I could list — and many more I could not list because I am not even aware of them — go into a blender and spit out the beliefs and values that make up me.

Many have told me this sounds "hopeless" to them — hopeless is indeed the term I've heard from many who've challenged me on my position. And maybe it is. But I prefer it, at least, to a belief system based on hope in a jealous God whose "grace" saves me from a literally hellish anger at human fallibility, or in a Universe that vibrates in sympathy with my thoughts (the "law of attraction"), or....

So why should you care?

Aside from my family — Christians with a personal and, likely, painful fear for my soul — I'd argue that you probably shouldn't care.

Especially in my case: I'm not strong enough to be a Nietzsche, nor witty enough to be a Wilde, nor smart enough to be a Hitchens. As atheists go, I'm relatively harmless; I'm not going to bring the country down in nihilistic flames. Truth is, I don't like hurting people, and I don't like being hurt, so I teach (just one vector in my students' overdetermined lives) values of diversity, tolerance, acceptance... and I do it without appealing to a transcendent morality, or a fear of God, or a belief in Hell, or the expectation of karma, or the sympathy of a vibrating universe.

All these seem to me to be a form of magical bullying.

Many of my students hear me say this and accuse me of inconsistency. How can I be ethical with no transcendent ground for ethics? It's hypocritical. But I don't mind. I say everyone is a hypocrite, to some extent.

But I like my hypocrisy better than most.

Rashomon

I finally saw Akiro Kurosawa's 1950 masterpiece, Rashomon. It's one of the (many) films that I'd been embarrassed to admit that I hadn't seen yet, especially since it appeared often in critical theory and philosophy articles I read back in my student days.

Better late than never....

Since it's a Kurosawa film, it's a priori worth seeing. The cinematography is brilliant. The half-destroyed temple (pictured on the cover of the Criterion Collection edition, above) is stunning, both visually and conceptually. And I'm still baffled as to how he pulled off some of the tracking shots in the dense forest. Brilliant stuff.

But the film is known primarily for its epistemological challenge. Netflix offers this summary of the film: "four witnesses to a rape and murder report their versions of the attack, leaving the viewer to decide what really happened." As a general outline, this works fine, but the film's genius arises from the specific ways that the four stories are incompatible. At the very least, the notion of the eye-witness account, which we Americans are so (unjustifiably) fond of, is called into question. But—and the film draws attention to this several times—Kurosawa's interest goes far beyond courts of law, raising questions about the consequences of human uncertainty more generally. Indeed, one character, a priest (Buddhist? not Catholic, anyway), finds his very faith in humanity shaken by the confusion caused by the conflicting accounts.

The movie is sixty years old, but Kurosawa's critique still resonates. Not long ago, a colleague of mine asked how I get up in the morning, since I don't believe in... well, I'm not really sure what I was expected to believe in. Something transcendent, I suppose. The notion that there is an Absolute, Captial-T Truth that grounds our knowledge and being still holds sway, whether that Truth comes in the form of God or science or reason or....

How do I get up in the morning? Well, I cut my philosophical teeth on the post-modernists—Lyotard, Baudrillard, Jameson, et al.—who for all the nihilism attributed to them are actually quite playful. I enjoy the uncertainty in the cracks—the "interstices," as they say—among les petits récits, those "little stories" undermining the metanarratives that shape so much of so many of our lives.

And since so much of man's inhumanity toward man is grounded in the great metanarratives, I find the interstices to be valuable places as well.

"Four witnesses to a rape and murder report their versions of the attack, leaving the viewer to decide what really happened..." I said above that this summary might work as a general outline, but in fact there's a sense in which it doesn't work at all. I could sift through competing motives, compare similarities in stories, weigh circumstantial evidence, etc., and come up with a reasonably satisfying solution to the crimes. But I'd probably be wrong—not least because the question of what really happened isn't, in the end, what matters. I won't spoil the ending, in case there are others like me who are late to the film. But it's pretty clear to me that what happened, and even what we believe about what happened, are in the end not that relevant.

And, as far as I'm concerned, the value of the film lies in the way the epistemological questions are raised—and dismissed.

A quick note: This was the first film I used Netflix to stream. It worked beautifully. Two thumbs up for Netflix...

Citizen 13660

This semester, I got to sit in on a colleague's class as he taught Miné Okubo's Citizen 13660, a graphic memoir from way before our relatively recent interest (academic and cultural) in graphic novels. Okubo was a young art student who found herself, along with 110,000 other people of Japanese descent, swept off into internment camps under President Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066. Citizen 13660 consists of some 200 illustrations, each accompanied by a brief narrative, of daily life at a a couple of the "relocation centers."  It's a fascinating book, lying as it does at the intersection of historical importance and literary interest.

Historically, the illustrations provide a rare visual record of the camps. There are, of course, official photographs from the camps, taken by U.S. Government photographers; a good number of these can be found in the Online Archive of California. There are also the famous Ansel Adams photos—allowed, however, on the condition that no barbed wire, guard towers, or armed guards would be depicted.  But since cameras were not allowed in the camps, Citizen 13660 is one of the only—and perhaps the only sustained—depiction of the camps from an internee's perspective.

Beyond its historical relevance, it's worth a read on its own.  There's a fascinating range of things one could pursue if one had the inclination. There's the role of the gaze, for example: Okubo draws herself into almost every illustration, making herself both observer and observed, and using that ambivalent place to focus the reader's attention. And there's the irony created by the gap between the narrative—often a matter-of-fact, even bland recitation of events—and the illustration.

You can see both of these in action in the scene where she goes to the "Civil Control Station" to register:

Citizen 13660, page 18
(click to enlarge)

On Sunday, April 26, 1942, I reported to Pilgrim Hall of the First Congregational Church in Berkeley to register for my brother and myself—a family unit of two. Soldiers were standing guard at the entrance and around the building.

Just the facts in the text, but a world in the illustration: we watch as she enters, a defiant look on her face, her gaze drawing us to the ambiguous expression on the guard's face. You can see, too, why Ansel Adams was forbidden to photograph guards with guns; the text's "soldier" of course includes the notion of a gun, but there's something stark and disturbing seeing it on the soldier's shoulder.

The unadorned narrative sets up wonderful moments of pathos and irony, too.  A consistently angry or critical narrative—certainly this would be understandable, given the situation—would likely bury the power of those occasional moments of biting irony, such as when she describes the importance of the camp's post office to the internees and concludes, "Letters from my European friends told me how lucky I was to be free and safe at home." Ouch.

Citizen 13660, page 61
(click to enlarge)

Citizen 13660, title page
(click to enlarge)

It's an important book, and I'm glad my colleague is teaching it. Further, it's an important time to do so, as debates about immigration or terrorism often meander into troubling territory. One of the issues with Arizona's new law, which requires police to detain people that they suspect might be in the country illegally, is the question of how the police are supposed to identify such people if not by appearance, and reassurances that racial profiling won't be tolerated ("We have to trust our law enforcement," said Arizona Governor Brewer) ring hollow. And then there's Juan Williams and his fear of people in "Muslim garb"—again, reducing identification of a "problem" population to appearance. 

And appearance was one of the justifications for the Japanese internment; as Frank H. Wu explains in Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White, the belief that all Asians look alike was used by the U.S. Government to defend the internment—indeed, to represent it as in the internees' best interest. Wu quotes U.S. Supreme Court Justice Black in the New York Times:

They all look alike to a person not a Jap. Had they attacked our shores you'd have a large number fighting with the Japanese troops. And a lot of innocent Japanese Americans would have been shot in the panic. 

The emotions around immigration reform and protection against terrorism both have the potential to lead to scary things, so we need to be reminded what we are capable of. Citizen 13660 brings the relatively recent past—the Japanese internment was less than 70 years ago, after all—and sets it before us graphically and poignantly.

A thought on Ansel Adams:

In my colleague's class, there was some debate as to how much Ansel Adams' photographs hid the plight of the Japanese and Japanese Americans (two-thirds of the internees were American citizens). The photos tend to portray life in the camps as, above all, normal, and in that sense can be seen as complicit with the internment. I find it hard to argue against this position, but there are nonetheless a few subversive moments in his project. One photo, a long shot of the whole camp, is entitled "Manzanar from Guard Tower"; Adams couldn't include the tower in the photo, so perhaps he decided to include it in the title.

More interesting, though, was this photo, entitled "Pictures and mementoes on phonograph top: Yonemitsu home, Manzanar Relocation Center":

Few things show up the injustice of the internment as starkly as the reminder that Japanese American soldiers were fighting loyally for a country even as it incarcerated their families. Given the ambivalence of Adams' Manzanar project, it's good to note moments like this.

A further thought, this one on "Muslim garb":

If Juan Williams, and those like him, are afraid of Muslims to the point of feeling fearful when they see people in "Muslim garb," imagine what nightmares the Muslims in the wonderful, and growing, Pictures of Muslims Wearing Things blog must be causing...

Buddhism: Lies, Lies, Lies

What I love about Buddhism: that Buddhists would not see this poem, by the 19th-century haiku poet Masaoka Shiki, as an insult or challenge to their beliefs. In many ways, it's precisely the point (insofar as there is such a thing as a "point" in Buddhism...):

Autumn wind:

gods, Buddha—

lies, lies, lies.

I'm not sure if this poem acts as a koan to the Buddhist, or if this would be considered commonplace. But for someone like me—who abandoned the capital-T truth of Christianity and flirted with the often smug ideals of the Enlightenment—this is a mind-blower.

I have a friend, one of those guys who finds elements of truth in all religions, who says that I would be happy as a Buddhist. I doubt it. But the Universe paused when I read this poem—the closest thing, aside from moments watching my kids sleep, that I've felt to "spiritual" in a long time.

(Side note: see Don DeLillo's White Noise (toward the end of Chapter 21) for a brilliant description of the near-spirituality of watching your kids sleep...)

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.]

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…

Old Age and Roth's Everyman

I've now read five of the over twenty-five novels that Roth has written: the coarsely sexual (not a bad thing, btw) Portnoy's Complaint, the scathingly satirical Our Gang, the oddly surreal The Breast,  the dizzily metafictional Operation: Shylock (my favorite so far), and now Everyman, a short meditation on the life and preoccupation by death of an American Everyman.   With each new novel, I'm amazed that such a different book could be written by the same author.  The man is a master.

The novel begins at a funeral as family and a handful of friends and colleagues offer their admittedly inadequate words for the passing of a retired advertising executive. From there, we are taken back through his life, through a string of wives, affairs, diagnoses, surgeries, and ill or departed friends.  Like the 15th-century allegory's Everyman—who has, as the play's full title announces, been summoned by Death—Roth's everyman, who remains unnamed throughout the novel, moves inexorably toward that opening funeral.

Unlike the Everyman of the allegorical play, who discovered that at least Good Works would accompany him as he met his Maker, Roth's everyman does not discover any core that accompanies him, or anyone else, beyond the terrible moment of death.  In one part of the narrative, he learns that three of his acquaintances are either dead, dying, or institutionalized, and calls widow or friend to offer what comfort he can.  At the end of these conversations, he despairs at how banal and limited these conversations were:

Yet what he'd learned was nothing when measured against the inevitable onslaught that is the end of life. Had he been aware of the mortal suffering of every man and woman he happened to have known during all his years of professional life, of each one's painful story of regret and loss and stoicism, of fear and panic and isolation and dread, had he learned of every last thing they had parted with that had once been vitally theirs and of how, systematically, they were being destroyed, he would havehad to stay on the phone through the day and into the night, making another hundred calls at least. Old age isn't a battle; old age is massacre.

In the end, I'm reminded of Keats's negative capability, the ability to accept contradictory notions without feeling the need to resolve them.  Everyman does this for me; the inevitability and, at times, terror of death exist along with moments of tenderness and gentle memory.  Neither extreme is attenuated by the other, though they are both somehow changed.  Death is what it is, and it is everything we fear.  But until we die, we live.