Book Review by Janet Maslin
BRIGHT-SIDED
How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined
By Barbara Ehrenreich
235 pages. Metropolitan Books. $23.
When Barbara Ehrenreich became a breast cancer patient, she found herself infuriated by the disease’s upbeat, infantilizing culture of pink ribbons and teddy bears. When she found that there were patients’ message boards that extolled breast cancer as a blessing, she signed on and expressed her indignation. Along came “a chorus of rebukes” from other patients, one of whom condescendingly addressed her as Barb. The word “barb” can be associated with Ms. Ehrenreich, but it works better to describe her favorite kind of rhetorical weapon than as a nickname.
Flinging the vituperative barb is a specialty for this writer, whose book titles include “The Snarling Citizen,” “The Mean Season” and “The Worst Years of Our Lives” (as well as the snappier, better-known “Bait and Switch” and “Nickel and Dimed”). She thrives on righteous indignation, and she may seem to have found the perfect target with “Bright-Sided.” Here is her chance to make a frontal assault on the institutionalized American version of good cheer and to wipe that dopey smile off the happy-face symbol that pervades American culture.
“Bright-Sided” does have a point to make. And it’s a point so simple that it can be aptly summarized by the book’s subtitle, “How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.” Ms. Ehrenreich thinks the prevalence of bogus optimism has weakened
Her argument has the makings of a tight, incisive essay. And each chapter eventually delivers a succinct reiteration of the central point. But this short book is also padded with cheap shots, easy examples, research recycled from her earlier books and caustic reportorial stalking. Ms. Ehrenreich starts out with her ideas firmly in place, then goes out hunting for crass, benighted individuals whose perniciousness helps her accentuate the negative.
There’s no arguing with Ms. Ehrenreich’s sense that false optimism is a form of stupidity. Nor is there reason to dispute her idea that such false optimism can be profitably exploited. But it’s a little late for her to tell her readers about the decade-old mouse parable “Who Moved My Cheese?,” let alone explain that corporations use that book to convince the downsized employee that losing a job is a backhanded form of good fortune. The good-cheer baloney business has long since gone on to embrace the great news that this recession can be a blessing.
“Bright-Sided” begins with Ms. Ehrenreich’s highly humanizing chapter about her illness and with her legitimate scorn for “the ultrafeminine theme of the breast cancer marketplace.” (“Certainly men diagnosed with prostate cancer do not receive gifts of Matchbox cars.”) After that it takes a downhill trajectory. The next chapter concerns the cultural validation of “magical thinking,” as in the book “The Secret,” which makes another barn-sized target. What is the real meaning of that book’s assertion that we can attract whatever we want by wishing for it? “Bright-Sided” rightly says that the meaning is twofold: that we are encouraged to override the wishes of anyone else, and that we become failures when the process doesn’t pay off.
But as part of her skewering of magical thinking, Ms. Ehrenreich digs up one motivational speaker who advises increasing business by rereading one’s mailing list and “loving each name,” and another who boastfully proclaims “my life is what I would consider the definition of success.” She is simply too smart for this bottom-feeding, just as she is too smart to be citing the number of Google searches for “positive thinking” or to be quoting something fatuous said by Larry King. Her valuable insight about the solipsism of magical thinking and about the loneliness of a world that will grant any wish is obscured by the caliber of the evidence that supports it.
This book’s chapter on the historical roots of the optimism business and on the stern Calvinist values that are at the heart of it (since the self that can be improved must be inherently flawed) is sturdy. But it gives way to a smorgasbord of sneering illustrations. The canned optimism of the megachurch minister Joel Osteen actually involves asking God for help in getting seated in a crowded restaurant (“Father, I thank you that I have favor with this hostess, and she’s going to seat me soon”), and Ms. Ehrenreich rightly wonders what this has to do with Christian values. But her own values make it easier for her to infiltrate and ridicule an Osteen sermon than to ask parishioners about their responses to such gibberish. She would rather speak for the victims of trumped-up optimism than speak to them.
In its search for egregious silliness, “Bright-Sided” also unearths an academic (who has been written about by Ms. Ehrenreich before and thus goes to great lengths to dodge her), Martin E. P. Seligman, a former president of the American Psychological Association, whose book “Authentic Happiness” is tailor-made for her purposes. She finds Mr. Seligman’s ideas of cultural uplift to be laughable; he plays into her hands by suggesting that they go to an art museum and look at the Monets. Ms. Ehrenreich describes trying to take notes with a pen, being told she can’t use one in the museum and thinking privately that she dislikes Monets for their “middle-class notions of coziness,” but doesn’t “hate them enough to stab them with my felt-tip pen.”
All in all, this encounter offers more caustic humor than enlightenment. And it paves the way for saying that positive psychology has become a moneymaking enterprise, which is hardly a startling observation in the midst of this book’s parade of saccharine hucksters. The more important point, which is also here but coarsened by too much distraction, is that it is dangerous to lose sight of unpleasant realities and that we have ignored too many real-world danger signals in recent years. That’s as obvious on this book’s last page as it was on the first.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/books/12maslin.html
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