From positive thinking to critical thinking

On visiting a megachurch devoted to the Me-First mania of the Name-It-And-Claim-It prosperity gospel, Barbara Ehrenreich found the church's conception of God sadly diminished: "Gone is the mystery and awe; he has been reduced to a kind of majordomo or personal assistant. He fixeth my speeding tickets, he secureth me a good table in the restaurant, he leadeth me to book contracts. Even in these minor tasks, the invocation of God seems more of a courtesy than a necessity. Once you have accepted the law of attraction--that the mind acts as a magnet attracting whatever it visualizes--you have granted humans omnipotence."

Ehrenreich's critique occurs in her new book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. With wit supported by solid evidence, Ehrenreich examines churches that employ positive thinking to promote greed rather than good, corporations that rely on motivational speakers to transform employees into mindless drones willing to turn a blind eye to injustice, and financial institutions so devoted to optimism that they ignore warning signs of disaster--leading, in part, to financial messes like the one we've been experiencing for the past year.

It's a large topic and Ehrenreich makes some large claims, including the sweeping assertion that much illness in the United States before the twentieth century can be blamed on the prevalence of Calvinism, a complex doctrine she describes with little nuance or sophistication. She is at her best, though, skewering the words and deeds of evangelists of positive thinking, from motivational speakers to prosperity preachers to corporate managers, whose doctrines place the blame for any misfortune firmly at the feet of the victim. For instance, Ehrenreich quotes motivational author and speaker Rhonda Byrne's responding to mass devastation by stating that "disasters like tsunamis can happen only to people who are 'on the same frequency as the event.'"

I'm sure Barbara Ehrenreich has never met a colleague of mine who insists that "if you think you have good luck, then you will." I have never considered myself particularly lucky, so the fact that I have cancer while my lucky colleague does not provides anecdotal evidence supporting his claim. If only I'd devoted more time to thinking that I have good luck, maybe that nasty carcinoma would have left me alone! My fault entirely.

In fact, Ehrenreich is at her most devastating in the chapter detailing her own struggle with breast cancer more than a decade ago. While researching her condition and treatment options, Ehrenreich felt increasingly isolated. "No one among the bloggers and book writers seemed to share my sense of outrage over the disease and the available treatments," she explains; moreover, when she expressed her anger among groups of cancer patients, she was reviled for failing to focus on the positive.

"Everything in mainstream breast cancer culture serves, no doubt inadvertently, to tame and normalize the disease: the diagnosis may be disastrous, but there are those cunning pink rhinestone angel pins to buy," she adds. Assailed by pink ribbons, pink pajamas, pink teddy bears, and relentlessly cheery rhetoric, Ehrenreich rails against the tendency of the breast-cancer culture to infantilize women. She describes a tote bag full of items to help women fight cancer, including hand lotion, a pink satin pillowcase, and crayons. "Possibly the idea was that regression to a state of childlike dependency puts one in the best frame of mind for enduring the prolonged and toxic treatments," writes Ehrenreich, but "Certainly men diagnosed with prostate cancer do not receive gifts of Matchbox cars."

If positive thinking is the problem, the solution, insists, Ehrenreich, is not negative thinking but critical thinking: the ability to look at the real world armed with a skeptical eye and the full use of the intellect, to be enriched by the wisdom of others without buying into mindless groupthink. Devotees of positive thinking spend too much time immersed within their own heads, she claims, and too little working to change those nasty negative aspects of life that result in injustice. She ends with a call to action: "The threats we face are real and can be vanquished only by shaking off self-absorption and taking action in the world. Build up the levees, get food to the hungry, find the cure, strengthen the 'first responders'! We will not succeed in all these things, certainly not all at once, but--if I may end with my own personal secret of happiness--we can have a good time trying."