'Smile or die': positive ideology and its discontents

Ehrenreich plots the growth of the New Thought and Christian Science movements in the United States as a positive thinking, “Jesus loves you” alternative to the fire and brimstone fear-mongering of Calvinism. Although these movements may have offered a palliative to Calvinism’s relentless focus on sin, repression and relentless busyness they also “ended up preserving some of Calvinism’s more toxic features - a harsh judgmentally, echoing the old religion’s condemnation of sin, and an insistence on the constant interior labor of self-examination”. Whereas under Calvinism the believer had to be ever vigilant for signs of laziness or sin, under New Thought they must be ever vigilant against the dangers of negative thinking.

Ehrenreich also draws attention to today’s positive or prosperity theology that developed from New Thought and promotes a belief system where “God stands ready to give you anything you want”. A world of churches without crosses, stained glass windows or images of Jesus - a more secular and corporatised church in both management and appearance. Essentially a church without church. The emerging picture is one of a self-enclosed, mutually reinforcing lifeworld linking church, office and mall that has been comprehensively colonised by positive ideology:

“Everywhere, he or she hears the same message - that you can have all that stuff in the mall, as well as the beautiful house and car, if only you believe that you can. But always, in a hissed undertone, there is the darker message that if you don’t have all that you want, if you feel sick, discouraged, or defeated, you have only yourself to blame.”

Ehrenreich then sets her sights on the positive psychology movement founded by Martin Seligman. The central claim of this movement is that positive affect is not only a desirable state in its own right, but may actually lead to better health and success regardless of an individual’s life circumstances.

According to this school of thought happy people seem to be more successful at work, more likely to get a second interview when job hunting, get positive evaluations from superiors, resist work fatigue and advance through the corporate ranks. Ehrenreich contention is that “this probably reflects little more than corporate bias in favor of positive attitude and against ‘negative’ people” than it does in favour of positive affect.

As for the scores of studies that purport to show that positive thinkers are healthier than pessimists, we have a classic correlation versus causation scenario: are happy people happy because they are well, or well because they are happy? While it seems that further longitudinal studies will be necessary to sort out this quandary, there is already ample evidence that suggests that positive affect has no bearing on cancer survival or immune system functioning.

Indeed there is evidence that pessimism may inhibit the risk taking behaviour that leads to higher levels of premature morbidity. And people with a pessimistic affect are less likely to succumb to depression following a negative life event. Despite the palpable uncertainty, and quite frankly lack of results, positive psychology has lent an aura of scientific respectability to self help snake oil and New Thought mysticism.

Perhaps Ehrenreich’s coup de grace is her analysis of how positive thinking “turned toxic on Wall Street”. Ehrenreich provides a compelling cultural backdrop to a period where many borrowers, at the behest of wealth gurus, mortgage salesmen, motivational speakers and prosperity gospel hucksters, felt entitled to homes they couldn’t afford; of how they entered into mortgages in the optimistic belief that prices always went up, that they would be earning much more in the future, and that if things went badly they could always refinance their mortgage anyway.

It was an era where financial institutions didn’t mind lending excessively to borrowers with low documentation and poor credit histories because housing prices either always went up or at least didn’t go down nationwide all at once; and over-confident investment bankers created financial instruments they didn’t understand and systematically mismanaged risk because they thought they were the smartest people in town. It was a time where share traders and banking executives were fired because they placed a sell order on a stock or questioned their banks sub-prime business model and bank regulators like Alan Greenspan believed banking regulation was unnecessary in a free market where the self interest of lending institutions could be relied on to protect equity holders’ interests.

While economists continue to debate the causes of the crisis, be they easy credit, excessive leverage, a structurally flawed US housing finance market, financial complexity, declining labor productivity levels, inadequate regulation, international imbalances, simple fraud and the list goes on, Ehrenreich provides a stunning hint at the collective cognitive bias that fuelled the bubble, and contributed to the great crash of 2008.

There are many avenues one could take to criticise Ehrenreich’s book, but I will leave that to others. Smile or Die does not pretend to be an academic work and as a journalistic thought piece it more than meets its mark. Perhaps in more academically rigorous hands this book could have been a modern sequel to Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In spirit or essence at least I think it is worthy of comparison.

I am undeniably sympathetic to Ehrenreich’s cause: I want to see a world where the likes of John Curtin, Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln would be considered serious leadership prospects once more rather than dour, melancholic burnouts. I worry about how we encourage people with depressive illnesses to seek appropriate support and thrive in an environment that treats them as losers who will only ever drag down everyone else. I want to work and study in an environment free from bullying and intimidation as much as any positive psychologist, but I also worry that positive psychology pays insufficient regard to the circumstances in which individuals will inevitably suffer.

If there is one overriding message to come from this book it is that reason matters. Scepticism, realism and critical thinking are crucial for human intellectual progress in a way that feeling good about oneself never can be. We have to engage with the world as it really is if we are to lead meaningful lives and purposefully address the growing challenges affecting us all.

As Noel Pearson might say, the central question of our times will not be whether we are positive enough to overcome these challenges, but whether we are a “serious people”. Addressing issues such as mass unemployment, global warming, and rising and persistent inequality demands realism and seriousness above all other dispositions. Barbara Ehrenreich should be congratulated for taking the time to make this case.