BARBARA EHRENREICH Smile or Die: How positive thinking fooled America & the world. Reviewed by Adrian Phoon
Is positive thinking bad for you? Essayist Barbara Ehrenreich thinks so.
Smile or Die: How positive thinking fooled America & the world might sound positively (or negatively) Grinch-like. But Barbara Ehrenreich, who previously wrote a book about the history of collective joy, doesn’t want people to be joyless so much as to be liberated from what she views as a prison of the mind. Unfortunately, life isn’t always as rosy as we try to make it. Deluding ourselves into thinking otherwise only worsens the matter:
We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles, both of our own making and imposed by the natural world. And the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking.
Ehrenreich’s disdain for positive thinking is deeply felt. She explains how, after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, she directly encountered a ‘pink ribbon culture’, where cancer sufferers are called on to treat their illness as a gift, or made to feel that they can cure it through positive thinking. The consequences of this train of thought can be horrifying. She quotes a woman who, faced with the spread of cancer to her bones and lungs, writes to guru Deepak Chopra, beating herself up about her condition:
‘Am I missing a lesson here that it keeps reoccurring? I am positive I am going to beat it, yet it does get harder with each diagnosis to keep a positive attitude.’
Chopra replies, ‘As far as I can tell, you are doing all the right things to recover.’ By this kind of logic, positive thinking can help to triumph against cancer. But by the same token, negative thinking is implicitly held responsible for causing and perpetuating illness – a dangerous notion that renders patients culpable for their own condition. Ehrenreich draws on her own PhD in cell immunology to detonate some very wobbly, long discredited scientific research.
For Ehrenreich, positive thinking is a kind of magical thinking, a fanciful snake oil peddled to vulnerable people. It’s a manifestation of an unethical, exploitative capitalism, fostered by ‘its ideologues, spokespeople, preachers and salespersons’. Rhonda Byrnes’s bestselling The Secret is a case in point. This wildly successful book espouses the law of attraction, which holds that by visualising something, you can bring it into existence. ‘Think positively, and positive things will come to you,’ Ehrenreich paraphrases. People are made to feel they are obese, not because they eat too much, but because ‘the thought that food could make you fat actually results in weight gain’. Meanwhile, a woman attracts her perfect partner by pretending that she is already living with him. According to Byrnes, the law of attraction has been known and taught for centuries by inspirational thinkers. But in Ehrenreich’s analysis, The Secret is a shameless modern-day hustle.
Throughout Smile or Die, we learn about different variations of the same misguided promotion of positive thinking as a panacea for just about anything. Its effects can be found in the ‘prosperity gospel’ propagated by rock-star pastors in modern Christian megachurches; in the business seminars of self-help coaches and in the rhetoric of HR departments, which treat positive thinking as a key to career success (and then imply that career missteps are somehow the fault of a self-debilitating grumpiness). Ehrenreich explores the finance world, where successful businesspeople are led to believe that they are superhuman, and that their every move and investment is invincible. However, her account of the global financial crisis within the context of positive thinking doesn’t quite deliver the knockout blow it requires. The argument feels humdrum, lacking the attention to detail and vicious intensity of the previous chapters. That may be because Ehrenreich started working on this book years before the global financial crisis hit; the chapter feels simply tacked on. It may also be because the tidal wave of evidence that the GFC affords her central thesis seems too obvious to spell out.
The best chapter explains how the roots of the modern positive thinking movement lie in an American reaction against Calvinism. Ehrenreich shows how a dynamic, optimistic spiritualism took hold in the American imagination in contrast to the gloomy predisposition of Calvinists. And yet the first proponents of this anti-Calvinist movement were themselves the products of Calvinism, so the version of spiritualism they advocate emphasises a distinctly Calvinist conviction that the inner self must constantly work to better itself:
A curious self-alienation is required for this kind of effort: there is the self that must be worked on, and another self that does the work.
Self-help of this kind is arduous. It involves ‘anxious introspection’, despite the efforts taken to achieve peace and satisfaction. Ehrenreich distinguishes it from the transcendental spiritualism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who advocated a dissolution of the self and a oneness with nature. Ehrenreich’s depiction of Calvinism in this chapter is a caricature, but her observations about the relationship between positive thinking, labour and faith are solid and insightful.
Smile or Die is an incendiary obloquy and a well-researched exercise in cultural studies. If it doesn’t entirely come together, that’s because the examples Ehrenreich marshals sometimes seem arbitrary. Does positive thinking really originate in anti-Calvinism, or are there earlier precedents? What about non-Western forms of positive thinking? Are all forms of positive thinking linked to capitalism? Are they all bad for you? It’s perhaps a testament to Ehrenreich’s robust critique that the reader may finish her book feeling almost as sceptical about some of her claims as she is about positive thinking. After all, being sceptical is healthier than worshipping or being preyed upon by false idols. Smile or Die may not destroy positive thinking for good, but it highlights the timeless importance of having a reality check.
Barbara Ehrenreich Smile or Die: How positive thinking fooled America Granta 2010 PB 256pp $22.99
Adrian Phoon is a Sydney writer. He’s appeared in SameSame, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, New Matilda and a lot of karaoke bars. He tweets @highonprose.
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