Sunday 31 January 2010

Smile or Die


Smile or Die is Barbara Ehrenreich's swipe at the positive thinking industry: the motivational speakers; the megachurch pastorpreneurs; the Oprah-psychology of positive-thoughts-attract-positive-things; the proliferation of self-help manuals and visualisation techniques; the rictus smile of optimism that outshines every sadness, anger or doubt. Her bibliography gives a snapshot of this cultural phenomenon: The Gift of Cancer: A Call to Awakening, Think and Grow Rich!, The Power of Positive Thinking, Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential. She attacks the positive thinking movement as dishonest, exploitative and the latest form of cultural tyranny.

Ehrenreich traces the roots of positive thinking to the Calvinism brought to America by the first settlers. In time, this came to be viewed by sections of the population as an oppressive form of religious pessimism. Ideas of fear, judgement and the punishment of God predominated. The terrors of Predestination became the locus of all theological thinking, practice and discourse. Sinful thoughts and sinful actions in an individual were a sure sign that they were damned to eternal separation from God. A theological smog settled over the nation and the only way to escape its suffocating effect was to work, be industrious and busy. In this atmosphere, the Protestant Work Ethic was conceived.

By the nineteenth century, this dour, judgemental religiosity was being called into question. A theological and cultural thaw began to take place after the hard winter of Calvinism and the "New Thought Movement" emerged, attracting such followers as Mary Baker Eddy and William James, the author of The Varieties of Religious Experience. Harnessing the power of our thoughts, they believed, could cure us from all emotional and physical ills and bring us success. However, this was not so much a break with the judgementalism of the old religion but more a repackaging of Calvinist attitudes, albeit with a shiny happy people veneer. Ehrenreich writes

...the most striking continuity between the old religion and the new positive thinking lies in their common insistence on work - the constant internal work of self monitoring. The Calvinist monitored his or her thoughts and feelings for signs of laxness, sin, and self-indulgence, while the positive thinker is ever on the lookout for "negative thoughts" charged with anxiety or doubt. As sociologist Micki McGee writes of the positive-thinking self help literature, using language that harks back to its religious antecedents, "continuous and never-ending work on the self is offered not only as a road to success but also to a kind of secular salvation."


The viral spread of positive-thinking has contaminated huge areas of modern life. Nothing is a "problem", everything is a "challenge" and an "opportunity" for self-improvement. We are encouraged to "big up" everyone and everything; avoid anything that has "negative vibes" and might be a "downer", including the biggest "downer", death. Our energies are to be mobilised in order to "stay positive" and if you are not positive then you are not putting in the work. Ehrenreich contends that this imbecilic optimism masks reality, airbrushing out all that is difficult, mysterious and unsettling in human life. For example, those "pessimistic" analysts who warned that the American subprime housing market was about to implode and that the financial markets were teetering on the edge of an economic abyss were drowned out by the whooping cheers and high five exchanges in company boardrooms as executives opened their bonus envelopes. Nobody wanted to hear the party-pooping Cassandras.

Ehrenreich presents a compelling case for the prosecution but her proposed alternative is less convincing. "Human intellectual progress," she writes, "results from our long struggle to see things "as they are", or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions...What we call the Enlightenment...is the slow-dawning understanding that the world is unfolding according to its own inner algorithms of cause and effect, probability and chance, without any regard for human feelings." Ehrenreich appears to put her faith in human progress and the driving force of evolutionary biology. At no point does she examine the concept of hope. Are optimism and hope just synonyms or does the virtue of hope have a more profound quality? Is there a hope that I can personally participate in or are all our hopes projections for a distant future that remain out of my reach? Is my best hope in scientific, political and social progress or am I asking too much of these disciplines? If I am to trust in the perfection of human structures what happens to my exercise of personal freedom? Is there a Hope that encompasses all the greater and lesser hopes of daily living and in which I can put my trust?

Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America & the World, Barbara Ehrenreich, Granta Books, 2009. http://www.barbaraehrenreich.com/index.htm

1 comment:

  1. To Hope
    John Keats

    When by my solitary hearth I sit,
    And hateful thoughts enwrap my soul in gloom;
    When no fair dreams before my "mind's eye" flit,
    And the bare heath of life presents no bloom;
    Sweet Hope, ethereal balm upon me shed,
    And wave thy silver pinions o'er my head!

    Whene'er I wander, at the fall of night,
    Where woven boughs shut out the moon's bright ray,
    Should sad Despondency my musings fright,
    And frown, to drive fair Cheerfulness away,
    Peep with the moonbeams through the leafy roof,
    And keep that fiend Despondence far aloof!

    Should Disappointment, parent of Despair,
    Strive for her son to seize my careless heart;
    When, like a cloud, he sits upon the air,
    Preparing on his spell-bound prey to dart:
    Chase him away, sweet Hope, with visage bright,
    And fright him as the morning frightens night!

    Whene'er the fate of those I hold most dear
    Tells to my fearful breast a tale of sorrow,
    O bright-eyed Hope, my morbidfancy cheer;
    Let me awhile thy sweetest comforts borrow:
    Thy heaven-born radiance around me shed,
    And wave thy silver pinions o'er my head!

    Should e'er unhappy love my bosom pain,
    From cruel parents, or relentless fair;
    O let me think it is not quite in vain
    To sigh out sonnets to the midnight air!
    Sweet Hope, ethereal balm upon me shed,
    And wave thy silver pinions o'er my head!

    In the long vista of the years to roll,
    Let me not see our country's honour fade:
    O let me see our land retain her soul,
    Her pride, her freedom; and not freedom's shade.
    From thy bright eyes unusual brightness shed
    Beneath thy pinions canopy my head!

    Let me not see the patriot's high bequest,
    Great Liberty! how great in plain attire!
    With the base purple of a court oppress'd,
    Bowing her head, and ready to expire:
    But let me see thee stoop from heaven on wings
    That fill the skies with silver glitterings!

    And as, in sparkling majesty, a star
    Gilds the bright summit of some gloomy cloud;
    Brightening the half veil'd face of heaven afar:
    So, when dark thoughts my boding spirit shroud,
    Sweet Hope, celestial influence round me shed,
    Waving thy silver pinions o'er my head!


    To Hope
    John Keats

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