Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America, by Barbara Ehrenreich, New York: Henry Holt, 2009.

This is an important and frustrating book.  Important because it correctly points out just how deeply New Thought has become embedded in the US, frustrating because it wastes a lot of time on personal attacks against selected personalities involved in the evolution of the movement, from John Calvin to Rhonda Byrne.

Long time Doomers will remember "Phoenix Realtors: Don’t Worry, Be Happy" (December 6, 2007) and its discussion of "The Law of Attraction" as a positive force for selling homes in AZ.  Well, we all know where that went since, but we didn’t know how broadly based this mindset had become here in North America.  Ehrenreich’s contribution is to show how positive thinking has become entrenched in cancer care, business practice, the new mainstream religion of mega-churches and positive psychology (the last a complete revelation to me, I’d never heard of anything so wild).

The penultimate chapter on "How Positive Thinking Destroyed the Economy" is curiously unconvincing, though.  While she notes that some key executives like Angelo Mozilo were foolishly positive deep into the subprime crisis, she doesn’t really draw a convincing line connecting  the positive thinking philosophy and the recent financial meltdown.  In fact she documents this failure herself.

It’s almost impossible to trace the attitudes of failed titans like Fuld to particular ideologues of positive thinking–the coaches and motivators who advise, for example, that one purge "negative people" from the ranks.  Among top execultives, there’s a degree of secretiveness about the use of coaches. … (188)

Ehrenreich sees Phineas Quimby and Mary Baker Eddy as the founders of New Thought.  I would have preferred if she’d gone a bit further back and looked at Emerson (who she barely mentions) and Prentice Mulford (although she cites Mulford’s trademark lapidary remark "Thoughts Are Things" several times without attribution).  It’s likely that positive thinking derives more from Concord Transcendentalism and the origins of the Unitarian Church than Christian Science, but clearly this question needs much more work.

She’s more convincing when she describes how early- and mid-20th century positive thinking gurus worked their way into the fabric of American companies.

In Chapter Three, "The Dark Roots of American Optimism," she lays the ultimate blame for American optimism onto Calvinism.  Now I’m a Presbyterian and a bit familiar with what was going down in England during the 17th Century, and I’d like to suggest that things were perhaps a bit less simple than she’s asserting there.  It’s possible this narrative has more to do with Enlightenment values and the conservative reaction to them than with the Reformed protestant church.

One funny observation: we have this bit of description about a Positive Psychology meeting …

… The audience was instructed to stand, do a few shoulder rolls and neck stretches, shake their bodies, and then utter a big collective "Aaaaah." … (172)

The director of our 70-voice community choir had us do exactly the same thing in the course of our warm-ups Tuesday evening.  Years ago a similar sequence was perpetrated on us in a beginning Tai Chi class.

I suppose there is a point to getting everyone’s emotions in sync in a singing group, and there’s some funny spiritual undertones to even the mildest oriental martial art.  When, however, I encounter such things in the context of a religious service or secular meeting it tends to seriously creep me out.  Authority figures rob inferiors of their dignity at their peril, and that is at least one valuable take-away from Bright-Sided.