Bright-Sided by Barbara Ehrenreich

A while back Errol Morris posted on Twitter the phrase: “optimism is blight.” I re-tweeted that and have been thinking about it since. Blight is a word I associate with rundown parts of a city.. or suburban strip malls. It’s an eyesore. Inevitably some variety of misplaced optimism led someone to invest in building. Then when the optimism proves unfounded we are left with blight. It’s not hard to streamline that train of thought and say: “optimism is blight.”

We could extend the idea of blight into intellectual life. The vast undergrowth of American popular culture is to some degree based on incurable optimist: the best thing is yet to come.. the newest song will be better.. the next model will be worth buying. Without that optimism it’s hard to imagine American consumer culture. It’s also the source of large tracts of stupid.

This is one way to approach Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. It functions as a guidebook to these tracts of stupid, inquiring especially about its intellectual foundations, which run surprisingly deep. The book is a lighter more journalistic approach to the kind of sociology that Max Weber produced in his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Ehrenreich proceeds from the same belief that structures of meaning ultimately guide the way people act in this world, and thus her close engagement with motivational classics and religious texts.

This is a brave book, in its way. In the first chapter Ehrenreich narrates her experience with breast cancer. Here the woman who has been known for going undercover (Nickel and Dimed) is personally engaged with her subject.. with no escape hatches. During her experience with cancer she found herself drawn to the world of positive thinking that surrounds the disease, from the pink ribbons to the support groups. Though she maintains a compassionate voice throughout, she sharply questions the orthodoxies that surround the prescribed response to the disease. Instead of natural feelings of anger and even depression, patients fighting cancer are instructed to be upbeat and positive.. and to develop an elaborate personal narrative that embraces the disease.

She cites inspirational books such as The First Year of the Rest of Your Life and The Gift of Cancer: A Call to Awakening, and proceeds to wonder whether this narrative construction (“I can honestly say I am happier now than I have ever been in my life—even before the breast cancer”) does not evade some of the darker issues surrounding the disease. When Ehrenreich herself posts some questioning comments on a community website under the heading “angry” and references “sappy pink ribbons” she receives critical comments from other women. An orthodoxy has formed around this experience.. and a language for talking about it. Summing up her experience she writes:

Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a “gift,” was a very personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before—one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate. [44]

This ideology of positive-thinking turns out to be everywhere. American business has been thoroughly infected by it.. to the extent that we could almost talk about positive-thinking as a corporate religion. Corporations that worry so much about their bottom line are willing to buy motivational books in bulk and pay for expensive speakers at retreats. There must be some benefit, for all this spending. Ehrenreich makes a strong case that a result of this emphasis on positivity and optimism is the willing adoption of this ideology on the part of workers. It’s the corporations themselves who benefit from this ideology, as workers throw themselves into their work and take downturns as a reflection on themselves.. never complaining or getting negative. In this light, positive-thinking is a perfect ideology for a job market marked by downsizing and repeated reductions in workforce. It makes for compliant workers who will not direct anger toward the corporate decision making and governmental policies that brought about the current situation.. which would ultimately be the actions that can bring change.

This section of Ehrenreich’s work plays into a pet theory of mine on the emergence of the corporation as a separate identity category that is coming to vie with the state and religion. Like any group of people, the corporation is most effective when governed not by rules, but by an ideology internally directing its members. The religious stance adopted by the corporation will not usually be in conflict with religious and state ideologies, but will work on a higher level of abstraction. Through its own parables and tales of success and failure this corporate religion will build comfort with the actions of the corporation.. and finally provide meaning to those who live inside it.

Ehrenreich is not in favor of pessimism or dark-thinking.. let’s be clear. The final “Postscript on Post-Positive Thinking” is helpful in this regard. Despair and pessimism can be as reality-distorting as any optimism, and that is not what Ehrenreich wants. She does not envision a workplace in which everyone walks around with a morose look on their faces. She writes:

The alternative to both is to try to get outside of ourselves and see things “as they are,” or as uncolored as possible by our own feelings and fantasies, to understand that the world is full of both danger and opportunity—the chance of great happiness as well as the certainty of death. [196]

This is a style of thinking Ehrenreich associates with the Enlightenment and higher education. As human beings we are apt to conflate the real world around us with our own mental states, but our success depends on dissociating how we feel about the world from our perception of the world as it is. Getting to this place of dissociation requires skepticism and mental acuity.. and it does not involve telling ourselves over and over again that we are winners and successful and that our wishes will come true (what a pop culture cliché that is!).

To my ears, as an educator, this sounds like a call to action. The goal of education is not just a body of knowledge, but a skill set quite close to what is described here. Total objectivity is impossible, granted, but that does not invalidate the attempt to perceive more accurately and finely the physical world and social cultures around us. This book is a triumph because of its careful insistence—even in the midst of support groups for cancer survivors—that we must be critical and engaged with the systems of thought that surround us. Finally it is also a warning about the extent to which an ideology can act as a blinder. If America is in thrall to positive-thinking, it is also closed off from the ability to question itself and devise new answers to pressing questions. And so our current politics and national discussion, like our landscapes, can be best characterized as blighted.

Click on book image to see page in Google Books.