"[Barbara] Ehrenreich begins with the history of Christian Science and the other think-yourself-well religions that thrive in the American culture of individualism. Those faiths are the obvious forerunners of things like The Secret. The latter's New Age Wingnuttery claims you can control the world with your wishes and the universe is just one big mail-order catalogue. Of course the corollary of The Secret is that if you're poor, uneducated, or unhealthy it's your own damn fault for not wishing hard enough. (It's just so terribly Ayn Rand, despite its Australian author, Rhonda Byrne.)
But before the law of attraction, there was Protestant minister Norman Vincent Peale's 1952 book, The Power of Positive Thinking, which infected the business world via his proselytizing with sales people. That thinking inspired the money-making 'human potential movement' of the ‘70s, which spawned all sorts of revenue streams in the form of cults delivering self-empowerment workshops and motivational speakers. (Remember EST? Have you heard of the contemporary Landmark Forum?)
Ehrenreich traces how combining religious notions with healthcare led to the self-help movement, including the 12-Steppers, who demanded we all acknowledge a higher power. (As an aside, I had long wondered why reiki practitioners and other energy healers demand their patients have some sort of 'spiritual belief,' which makes them sound like faithhealers from another era. Ehrenreich's history confirms this is exactly what they are, albeit under a new label.)
She takes unseemly pleasure in skewering popular but academically-dubious 'happiness' psychology. In a particularly funny chapter, she fences with University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman, the author of pop psych books with titles like Authentic Happiness. She tries to pin down what he's really saying with his meaningless equations and vague terms. But this isn't science-based psychology; it's the armchair version that brainwashes people into thinking whatever serves authorities best.
Seligman is expressly opposed to changing the external circumstances that cause misery, which he writes can be can be 'impractical and expensive,' preferring to get people to adjust their attitude. One can only imagine what Seligman and his colleagues might have said about slavery...
Ehrenreich doesn't mention it, but it's worth noting that in the 1960s Seligman was influential in developing 'aversion therapy' for curing homosexuals -- which reveals the sinister underpinnings of his optimism training, and much of what passes for positive psychology.
Surprisingly, Ehrenreich was blissfully unaware of much of this delusional thinking when she got breast cancer in 2000. She was exhorted to be cheerful or die, which just piqued her curiousity and led to this book. The woman has a PhD in cell biology, so she knows the difference between knowledge and belief. She also knows that the so-called research these people cite about how happy thoughts affect your health is just so much superstition.
But faced with surgery, chemo, and other medical horrors, she needed a distraction. So she began looking at exactly why otherwise sensible people were embracing the notion that you must pretend to be 'positive' to get well. She found that constant demand to be cheerful for the convenience of others, downright oppressive. Or would that be Oprah-essive since, as she notes, many of the silliest positive thinking ideas are touted by Lady O.
Positive thinking has also reinvigorated the opiate of the masses. The so-called prosperity preachers like Joel Osteen (Your Best Life Now) advise their flocks to embrace a lavish lifestyle because, essentially, God wants you live large. So be positive and go buy that house with a mortgage you can't afford, assured that your higher power will help you out. Even a conservative magazine like Time has traced the U.S.-led financial collapse to the American obsession with 'spirituality' in all its variations. 'Maybe we should blame God for the subprime mortgage mess,' was the headline on a 2008 article.
Ehrenreich also documents how economists and government officials who warned of the impending financial meltdown were ignored or even fired for being 'negative' -- they pointed out the facts. In fact, the term negative seems to have become codespeak for knowledgeable and realistic. It's obvious to anyone with RRSP that those leadership coaches that advise purging negative employees from the body corporate were (and still are) in the depths of denial. In effect, they're claiming that if you deny the Doppler snow forecast it will guarantee sunny weather. And yet, most of us believe it.
But then, the alternative to spouting upbeat slogans is being labeled with 'a bad attitude,' and as Ehrenreich records that's a career-limiting move.
Besides, there's no arguing with people who believe the Emperor actually has new clothes. Bright-Sided might be funny, if it weren't for the fact that this Dark Age anti-thinking is destroying our economy, threatening our health, and undermining our quality of life."
--
Shannon Rupp, reviewing Barbara Ehrenreich's
Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America (yes: again) and discovering pretty much the same thing I blog about - though in Ehrenreich's telling (as with the approach of most secularists) NewAge "spirituality" takes a back seat to the "Oprah-essive" movements it's spawned - and also finding herself similarly repelled, in
The Tyee.
I would like to briefly make the case for rational positivity.
ReplyDeleteFirst, I think that most people would agree that is is not healthy to let every event and every situation affect your emotional state. Such a being is a stimulus-response creature which is what we see in animals.
Humans have the capacity to imagine and manifest their thoughts into action. We plan, we invent, we scheme. We see the future through the lens of our current situation and a healthy person imagines what they can do to make the future better - maybe we need to lose weight and exercise or stop being late to work or reach out and make more friends.
Healthy people use what is called the "executive functions" of the mind to rise above the stimulus-response mode of living and make plans, delay gratification, etc.
When we do not like a situation, we have the capacity to refuse to accept it and search for a solution. When we believe that we can change the future in a way that is compelling, we can become highly engaged and passionate and our ability to think and act in the service of long term goals increases dramatically.
Every great human accomplishment has come out of dissatisfaction and a belief that things could be better.
Yet this kind of "positive thinking" requires hard work, discipline and often suffering. It is easy to become discouraged or to settle for the guaranteed pleasures of now and give up on the uncertain possibilities of the future.
The toxic psychology you are writing about is designed to appeal to our belief that we can effect a better tomorrow while convincing us that it will easy and all we really have to do is wish really hard and talk about "vibrations" and send out "positive energy".
If Edison has done that we would be using our computers by candle light. If Eisenhower had thought that way we would all be speaking German.
This is the seduction of the New Age movement. Power without responsibility. Results without effort. Wealth without work. Sin without death.
This is the original lie.
Nice thoughts are expressed in Rhonda Byrne’s book, but perhaps that kind of positive thinking has actually added to the problems we are facing in these modern times: http://thmngolf.blogspot.com/2009/06/on-free-will-and-determinism_17.html
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