Barbara Ehrenreich: Bright-Sided

Cover via Amazon

I finished Barbara Ehrenreich's 2009 book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America earlier this week, and I've been too busy to write it up. There are really three themes in this book:

1. The history of positive thinking in America
2. Positive thinking, management fads, and exploitation
3. Positive thinking, illness, and positive psychology

Ehrenreich contextualizes positive thinking as a reaction to Calvinism, self-criticism, and neurasthenia, starting with Phineas Parkhurst Quimby and New Thought, running through both Mary Baker Eddy and Norman Vincent Peale into the American religious landscape, through the prosperity theology of Kenneth Hagin and Joel Osteen Jr., wrapping up with the now-popular comparison between megachurches and large corporations. I guess she had to go to press before she had a chance to cover Hanna Rosin's article in The Atlantic asking whether and how prosperity theology itself contributed to the current recession.

She blames positive thinking for the rise of irrational professional management, blaming management gurus like Tom Peters for the "management bubble" that led to so much irrational decision-making in the last twenty years, suggesting that the spreading irrational optimism, while it couldn't all be blamed on Peters, could be tracked by following the arc of his career. She includes this quote from Fortune:

If you know one thing about Tom Peters, you know about his first book (In Search of Excellence), and if you know two things, the second is that he hasn't written a book as good as that since, and if you know three things, the third is that some time in the 18 years since that first precious book, he's gone bonkers.

She traces the spread of various kinds of positive thinking for its own sake in corporations: imposed on low-status workers to make them more productive in the face of mounting layoffs and reduced job security, adopted by mid-status workers as a kind of willful self-deception in an attempt to become more successful, and embraced by high-status workers as justification for their escalating salaries and compensation packages, all the while becoming less effective and in some cases outright destructive. Of course Ehrenreich wouldn't be Ehrenreich if she didn't trot out the usual complaints about modern capitalism: too few people own too much, pay discrepancies are too high, etc. This really has nothing to do with the book's supposed thesis: Ehrenreich is really describing several things that happened without demonstrating that one caused the other.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Ehrenreich begins the book with a chapter on positive thinking and breast cancer, demonstrating that while resolute positive thinking is part of the breast cancer patient/victim/survivor subculture, there is no clinical evidence that it actually helps. However, when she returns to the question of attitude and illness later in the book, it does appear that a positive outlook can be helpful in avoiding and recovering from other illnesses. She also delves into the phenomenon of positive psychology, the study of happiness as a positive outcome, as described by Martin Seligman and his colleagues, and by turns declares it and him a fraud and a product of a right-wing conspiracy courtesy the Templeton Foundation. Some of the stuff she says about the positive psychology people borders on nitpickery, and I was left wondering if she'd been fair to Seligman and Suzanne Segerstrom, or if perhaps she was treating them with disdain because they're in the social sciences and she has a background in lab sciences (Cellular Biology PhD, Rockefeller University, 1963).

This was a fairly light, quick read at 206 pages, the sort of book I could have easily knocked off on a long plane flight, and that's about what it is: a handful of relatively simple themes, explained briskly, with occasional visits to familiar if occasionally tedious territory. I'd recommend the book for its discussion of positive thinking and prosperity theology: as an evangelical Christian I'm disturbed by the spread of Word-Faith doctrine but I didn't know much about its history. It's not a very good book: Ehrenreich doesn't know enough about some of the things she dislikes and doesn't bother to fill the gaps in her knowledge, so she occasionally takes second-rate explanations as sufficient: she often doesn't distinguish between what something is and what it does, and makes a mess of Calvinism, for example, and probably places too much confidence in D. R. McConnell's book A Different Gospel as a definitive history of the Word-Faith movement. On the other hand, I'm not sure what is an appropriate standard for what is admittedly a popular, not a scholarly, treatment of a topic that can't really be rigorously defined.

I'm increasingly curious about Ehrenreich generally, though, and I will probably have to dig into her backlist. Just because I thought Nickel and Dimed was intellectually dishonest doesn't mean one of her books would make for an adequate way to while away a long plane flight.

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Barbara Ehrenreich: Bright-Sided

Cover via Amazon

Barbara Ehrenreich is something of an institution: she's a social critic, essayist, and author of nearly twenty books. She's probably best known for Nickel and Dimed, in which she took four entry-level/minimum-wage jobs in an attempt to prove that it's impossible to live on minimum wage. She's also what, exactly? A curmudgeon? A pessimist? I'm not sure. She's a Socialist, and unfortunately in what I've read of her writing some sort of magical central planning seems to be the obvious conclusion she leads her reader to.

I got on the wait list for her book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America after hearing her speak at the Commonwealth Club of California. It came available over the weekend, and I almost immediately dived in. It's mostly a loosely-connected series of essays on the pitfalls of positive thinking; so far (after five of seven and a half essays) she hasn't gotten around to demonstrating how positive thinking undermines anything. Instead she mostly deals with the obvious implications of believing that you're the master of your own fate given that not everything goes your way.

The opening essay is about her experience with breast cancer, and more or less with the contention that a positive attitude is in any sense helpful when dealing with a potentially life-threatening disease. She first deals with the phenomenon itself: the outfits, the trinkets, the social obligations, etc. associated with breast cancer, and then she delves into the effectiveness of a relentlessly positive attitude on survival rates. Evidently there is none. Ehrenreich doesn't really deal with other related questions: whether a positive attitude makes someone with cancer easier to be around, improves quality of life, etc.

I won't be returning to this essay the next time I post about this book. It doesn't really fit into the sweep of the book, which has more to do with positive thinking in business and religion, and could have been left out without weakening the book.

I'm mostly interested in this book because it deals with an aspect of American evangelicalism I find disturbing: not just the positive thinking angle, but also the blurring of the lines between MBA-style business leadership and executive-pastor-style church leadership. I often fall into the trap of thinking that people who believe and behave even slightly differently than I do aren't "real Christians" and furthermore that the differences are clear to everyone. I'm baffled by the rise and persistence of prosperity theology, the Word of Faith movement, etc. and tend to assume that everyone can tell on its face that it's nonsense. It's helpful to get a perspective from someone who isn't just not in my part of the culture, but who confronts the same questions from an entirely different frame of reference.

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Bill McKibben: The Age of Missing Information

Book cover via AmazonBill McKibben is a Christian environmentalist; or rather he's both a Christian and an environmentalist, and one of the people I want to look to in my effort to reconcile my values on one side (the Christian side, for lack of a better word) with the values on the other side (the uneasy side; the countercultural side). I first discovered him through Long Distance, a book he wrote about taking a year off to train as a cross-country skier. I liked that book a lot: it was short, it was linear, it was a personal narrative with a strong human voice, and it was a book about an obsession.

I'd heard about The Age of Missing Information some years ago: McKibben gets tapes of everything broadcast on the Fairfax cable system, then sits down and watches it all. In the book he contrasts this with a day spent hiking, camping, and swimming in the Adirondacks.

There are several ways to approach a narrative like this; one is to lay out facts for the reader and encourage him toward conclusions. Another is to lay out a narrative and fit bits of story into it. McKibben chooses the latter, and the book suffers for it. This is a problem that crops up repeatedly with these adventure-as-activism narratives: Barbara Ehrenreich doesn't make the choices a real person who had to live on the proceeds from a minimum-wage job would have to make, and she doesn't take advantage of all the services society offers someone in that position: no earned income credits on her taxes, no food stamps, no public transit, etc. Judith Levine splurges and compromises until her experiment in not buying things is empty and silly, so she pads out the book with protest rallies.

McKibben doesn't compromise; his narrative is subjective from the beginning. He doesn't tell us what he watched, and he doesn't tell us where he went camping, etc. So while his experience may have been valid his representation of it is just one long unbroken appeal to experiences we haven't shared and can't observe. And while I'm not that eager to visit his idyllic Adirondacks village, I guess I found myself discounting every uncritical thing he had to say about it.

I guess what I'm saying is this: I think his book would have been improved substantially if he'd bothered to share the Fairfax cable TV schedule with us, instead of just his impressions of it, arranged to suit his points.

Instead what we get is an impressionistic portrait of the day arranged in chapters with headings that suggest that they took place at different parts of the day: 10AM, 2:30PM, Twilight, Deeper Twilight, etc. Against this background McKibben arranges sections about how television is ruining society because it does various things: presents lots of a certain kind of information, but none of another kind, portrays unrealistic lifestyles, suggests unrealistic expectations for conflict resolution, etc. Unfortunately this too is weakened by the lack of facts in his story: he tells two stories, one about a future we can interpret and another about a past we can't see, and suggests that one of them is better than the other, but without suggesting anything helpful for moving from one to the other.

I very badly wanted to like this book: I like the idea of watching everything that can be seen on one cable system in one iconic day. But I honestly don't care how homesick Bill McKibben is for some disappearing past; he's welcome to go live there as far as I'm concerned.

In the interest of full disclosure I'll say the following: I don't own a television, and haven't lived in a house that had one in over a year. I haven't watched the late local news in years, and I couldn't tell you if for example Nightline is still on the air. I suspect that we'd all be better off if we were more in tune with the cycle of seasons and could feed ourselves from our own little gardens, etc. I just found this book to be a needlessly emotional nostalgic soup. And I was insulted by the author's approach of sticking fact-like things to a narrative rather than making observations and presenting us with warranted conclusions.

Oh yeah: I'll probably read more McKibben. But it'll be a while.

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• soundbites about video
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soundbites about video

Does anyone remember Bill McKibben's 1992 book The Age of Missing Information? It was one of the earlier "I did something silly as an experiment and now feel qualified to comment on society" books (see e.g. Morgan Spurlock, Barbara Ehrenreich, Judith Levine): McKibben videotaped everything that was available on his cable system in one day (some summaries say 1700 hours, some say 2400 hours) and spent a year watching it, then contrasted the experience with taking a camping trip. Why a camping trip? I'm not sure; maybe that's what he'd rather have been doing anyway.

Regardless, he'd have a hard time repeating the exercise with YouTube today; according to a post on the Official Google Blog today, thirteen hours of new video are posted on YouTube each minute. That's 780 minutes of video per minute. You'd need eight to eleven Bill McKibbens to watch all that video (and take the corresponding camping trips).