Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America - Hardcover

Ehrenreich, Barbara

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805087494 ISBN 13: 9780805087499

Publisher: Metropolitan Books, 2009

Synopsis

A sharp-witted knockdown of America's love affair with positive thinking and an urgent call for a new commitment to realism

Americans are a "positive" people―cheerful, optimistic, and upbeat: this is our reputation as well as our self-image. But more than a temperament, being positive, we are told, is the key to success and prosperity.
In this utterly original take on the American frame of mind, Barbara Ehrenreich traces the strange career of our sunny outlook from its origins as a marginal nineteenth-century healing technique to its enshrinement as a dominant, almost mandatory, cultural attitude. Evangelical mega-churches preach the good news that you only have to want something to get it, because God wants to "prosper" you. The medical profession prescribes positive thinking for its presumed health benefits. Academia has made room for new departments of "positive psychology" and the "science of happiness." Nowhere, though, has bright-siding taken firmer root than within the business community, where, as Ehrenreich shows, the refusal even to consider negative outcomes―like mortgage defaults―contributed directly to the current economic crisis.

With the mythbusting powers for which she is acclaimed, Ehrenreich exposes the downside of America's penchant for positive thinking: On a personal level, it leads to self-blame and a morbid preoccupation with stamping out "negative" thoughts. On a national level, it's brought us an era of irrational optimism resulting in disaster. This is Ehrenreich at her provocative best―poking holes in conventional wisdom and faux science, and ending with a call for existential clarity and courage.

About this title

About the Author

Barbara Ehrenreich is the bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed, Bait and Switch, Bright-sided, This Land Is Their Land, Dancing in the Streets and Blood Rites, among others. A frequent contributor to Harper's and The Nation, she has also been a columnist at The New York Times and Time magazine. She is the winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize for Current Interest and ALA Notable Books for Nonfiction.

Ehrenreich was born in Butte, Montana, when it was still a bustling mining town. She studied physics at Reed College, and earned a Ph.D. in cell biology from Rockefeller University. Rather than going into laboratory work, she got involved in activism, and soon devoted herself to writing her innovative journalism. She lives and works in Florida.

Reviews

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com When Barbara Ehrenreich was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2000, the sharp-eyed social critic found herself nearly as discomfited by the "pink ribbon culture" surrounding the disease as by the illness itself. Relentlessly upbeat, cloyingly inspirational, the breast cancer world, as Ehrenreich describes it, is a place where anger, fear and depression -- all perfectly reasonable responses to a potentially mortal diagnosis -- are frowned upon and the cancer itself is lauded as a great opportunity for spiritual growth. In this cocoon of optimism, the prevailing opinion is that cancer is a gift, a chance to become closer to God, to find life's true meaning. It's not a tragedy; it's a rite of passage with an enormous upside. "What does not destroy you, to paraphrase Nietzsche," writes Ehrenreich, "makes you a spunkier, more evolved sort of person." Why, three centuries after the Enlightenment, is American culture so bewitched by magical thinking, elevating feelings and intuition and hope over preparation, information and science? Why do so many of us seem so willing to discount reality in favor of vague wishes, dreams and secrets? And has this gospel of good times delivered us not into a life of ease but instead into a worldwide economic meltdown? Ehrenreich's examination of the history of positive thinking is a tour de force of well-tempered snark, culminating in a persuasive indictment of the bright-siders as the culprits in our current financial mess. She begins with a look at where positive thinking originated, from its founding parents in the New Thought Movement (inventors of the law of attraction, recently made famous in books such as "The Secret") through mid-20th-century practitioners like Norman Vincent Peale and Dale Carnegie, to current disciples ranging from Oprah Winfrey to the preachers of the prosperity gospel. We're not talking here about garden-variety hopefulness or genuine happiness, but rather the philosophy that individuals create -- rather than encounter -- their own circumstances. Crafted as a correction to Calvinism's soul-crushing pessimism, positive thinking, in Ehrenreich's view, has become a kind of national religion, an abettor to capitalism's crueler realities and an overcorrection every bit as anxiety-producing as the Puritans' Calvinism ever was. Bouncing from cancer lab to motivational business meeting to megachurch, Ehrenreich tests the theses embedded in American positive thinking and finds them wanting. Studies proclaiming a link between a positive attitude and cancer survival, she finds, are full of problems and discounted by most researchers. Furthermore, she points out, the popular insistence that cheerfulness can help beat the Big C, while it can be "a great convenience for health workers and even friends of the afflicted, who might prefer fake cheer to complaining," leaves patients in the uncomfortable position of having to hide or deny their very real anger and sadness, even to themselves, for fear of being complicit in their own illness. As for the tests and formulas devised by practitioners of positive psychology, an academic field that receives major funding from ultra-conservative groups (such as the Templeton Foundation, which also bankrolled the Proposition 8 campaign to overturn California's same-sex marriage law), Ehrenreich points out that the "real conservatism of [the field] lies in its attachment to the status quo, with all its inequalities and abuses of power." Unlike scholarship that aims to understand or ameliorate social problems, positive psychology focuses only on the individual's attitude toward those problems, meaning it's a short skip to the point of view that happiness or unhappiness is entirely a function of how a person feels about her circumstances. But what if your circumstances are awful? How on Earth is one to parse the Satisfaction with Life Scale developed by positive psychologists? Can you say "In most ways my life is close to my ideal" if you've just been laid off, or if you face medical bankruptcy because you're uninsured? What if you're a slave or a refugee? If all that stands between you and the good life is a positive attitude, as positive psychology posits, then the only person you have to blame if your life isn't good is yourself. The author deploys her sharpest tone to eviscerate the business community's embrace of positive thinking. Offered as a sap to those facing layoffs, used as a spur to better performance by those workers who remain (often while enduring cuts in pay and benefits) and relied on as an excuse to ignore unpleasant inevitabilities like bubbles bursting, American positivism reaches its giddiest and most dangerous heights in the corner office. Although our current economic mess has complex and varied causes, Ehrenreich's aim here feels all too true. "Recall that American corporate culture had long since abandoned the dreary rationality of professional management for the emotional thrills of mysticism, charisma, and sudden intuitions," Ehrenreich writes. "Pumped up by paid motivators and divinely inspired CEOs, American business entered the midyears of the decade at a manic peak of delusional expectations, extending to the higher levels of leadership." Gripped by "runaway positive thinking," the markets rose and rose until reality receded into the far distance. Little wonder that it hit so hard when we all fell. bookworld@washpost.com
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

No critic completely dismissed Ehrenreich's critique of America's "happiness" culture. But reviewers' enthusiasm for her critique seemed to depend on their assessment of the book's moral urgency. Several critics felt that the message of Bright-Sided was essential to readers in the aftermath of last year's economic meltdown. But others felt that Ehrenreich's ideas, while relevant, had been better expressed by others. They also criticized the author for "cheap shots" and outdated research. For example, she criticizes the book Who Moved My Cheese?, which has long been superseded by other, even sillier titles. But many readers may react like Hanna Rosin, who wrote in the New York Times Book Review that even when she did not agree with Ehrenreich's arguments, she felt less guilty about not sharing in our smiley :-) culture.

Starred Review. Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed) delivers a trenchant look into the burgeoning business of positive thinking. A bout with breast cancer puts the author face to face with this new breed of frenetic positive thinking promoted by everyone from scientists to gurus and activists. Chided for her anger and distress by doctors and fellow cancer patients and survivors, Ehrenreich explores the insistence upon optimism as a cultural and national trait, discovering its symbiotic relationship with American capitalism and how poverty, obesity, unemployment and relationship problems are being marketed as obstacles that can be overcome with the right (read: positive) mindset. Building on Max Weber's insights into the relationship between Calvinism and capitalism, Ehrenreich sees the dark roots of positive thinking emerging from 19th-century religious movements. Mary Baker Eddy, William James and Norman Vincent Peale paved the path for today's secular $9.6 billion self-improvement industry and positive psychology institutes. The author concludes by suggesting that the bungled invasion of Iraq and current economic mess may be intricately tied to this reckless national penchant for self-delusion and a lack of anxious vigilance, necessary to societal survival. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Metropolitan Books
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805087494
• ISBN 13: 9780805087499
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 235