Barbara Ehrenreich

02/02/2010

Award-winning muckraking writer takes aim at the positive-thinking industry

Thomas Quinn

Butte, Montana is a blue-collar town where the work’s hard, the weather’s harsh and where the people tend to think for themselves. Unionism, for example, has always been strong in Butte. You get the distinct impression that the copper from its mines still runs in the veins of one of its most famous daughters, Barbara Ehrenreich.

Ehrenreich is a political commentator, writer and thinker and has taught journalism at Columbia University. She keeps a withering eye on the goings on of Washington from her base in Virginia but she’s still a Butte girl at heart. “The men in my family were miners. They tended to have a strong resentment of lawyers, doctors, priests and bankers. Those professions got lumped together. I guess I grew up around scepticism,” she says.

Ehrenreich also grew up a scientist and, somewhat unusually for an American, as an atheist. She is a woman, therefore, who likes to stick to the facts. As a student studying her PhD in biology she became a political activist campaigning against the Vietnam war. It was at this point she discovered a talent not just for analysis but also for writing.

In 1979 she wrote a satirical article about ‘How To Make Your Own H-Bomb’ which suggested separating out the different isotopes by placing them in a bucket and swinging it round your head. She had long forgotten about the piece by the time it was used as evidence against alleged British terrorist Binyam Mohamed at Guantanamo. He had admitted to reading the article on the internet, but even under torture was able to point out to his captors that it was meant to be a joke.

So Ehrenreich – now 68 years old – can boast a long career of independent, left-of-centre thinking.

Her latest book, Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America & The World, doesn’t simply add to her personal catalogue of journalistic investigations into the dark side of the American Dream: it goes some way to explaining many of the mishaps of the last decade, including the flooding of New Orleans, the financial crisis, 9/11 and even the war in Iraq. Ehrenreich has a reputation for the thoroughness of her reporting.

She has ‘gone undercover’ to expose real conditions among the low paid (Nickel and Dimed, 2002) and among the corporate middle classes (Bait and Switch, 2006). But it was only when she herself fell victim to breast cancer that she realised what was really wrong with America, and the idea for Smile or Die occurred to her: everyone was so desperately, goddamned upbeat all the time.

“When I started writing this book many of my friends asked me what I was talking about. The idea of positive thinking has been so accepted into the culture that it is hard to see it is there,” she observes. What Ehrenreich objected to was the positive, and most often pink, messages she got, saying she should be grateful for her cancer rather than furious with it. Cyclist Lance Armstrong, for instance, is frequently quoted as saying his cancer was “the best thing that ever happened to me”.

When she expressed her anger about the diagnosis on an online forum, other sufferers advised her to “run not walk to counselling”. She was told that a positive mental attitude was necessary for her to defeat the disease.

However, as she regularly points out in the book, treatments cure disease, not smiling. There is no evidence to suggest that a positive mental attitude has any impact on cancer cells: and remember, she studied this stuff at university; she knows what she’s talking about.

Of course, this cynical approach led to her being dismissed by some as a sourpuss, or a grump. She even ruffled Oprah Winfrey’s feathers by pointing out live on her show that sometimes it wasn’t “all down to you”. But a) she doesn’t care about that and b) she  was vindicated by the emails she received following publication of the book in America last October.

“The response has been overwhelmingly positive,” she says. “So many women have written and said, ‘Thank you for saying it. I thought it was me, that I couldn’t get with the programme’. I found there was a lot of anger and resentment out there. “One man wrote about watching someone die who was berating herself about not being positive enough to save their own life.” This approach to what is to many a terminal illness (despite her attitude, her cancer has thankfully been defeated) was, she realised, an expression of a far wider positive-thinking industry.

In Smile or Die she traces the roots of this phenomenon, finding its beginnings in a 19th century epidemic of what we might call a psychosomatic invalidism – a sort of depression.

Educated, middle-class women were thought to be most at risk. They were sent on ‘rest cures’ but seldom got better. “Many put this down to a religious melancholy,” Ehrenreich says.

“The Calvinism that dominated American churches promised people an eternity of torment if they were sinners. Mary Baker Eddy, who founded the Christian Science movement, fell into one depressed episode when she realised that while she might go to heaven her siblings would go to hell.” Thanks to Eddy’s campaigning zeal, positive thinking emerged in part as a response to this invalidism – it helped many of the afflicted get better but proved useless against TB. Out went the fire and brimstone as preachers began offering a different form of Christianity to Americans, one with a happy ending.

Over a few short decades, this positive thinking influenced the commercial world. By the time of the Great Depression in the 1930s, the first of the self-help books arrived, including Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich. In recent years we have had The Secret, a mega-best-selling how-to guide that further suggests the key to a better life isn’t your upbringing, skills, talents, where you went to school or whether or not your uncle is chairman of the board, but your own will power.

Ehrenreich points out that corporate-sponsored positive-thinking programmes simply “helped workers cope with the threat of redundancy”.

Religion has maintained the approach. There are now thousands of mega-churches across the US offering not just salvation but personal wealth and success. One of the preachers she considers, Joel Osteen, attracts 40,000 followers every Sunday to his church, a converted basket ball stadium in Texas.

Osteen has written a string of bestsellers and you can see his extraordinary plastic smile on YouTube, being interviewed by Larry King. Ehrenreich notes: His church doesn’t have any crosses, no images of Jesus. But I guess when you think of it, all that stuff about Jesus is a downer, all that torture! Instead, God wants you to be rich, to prosper.” In itself this might not be so bad. “I’d rather listen to a preacher say a lot of positive things about life and the future than one of those old-fashioned types going on about sin,” she points out. Where it goes so terribly wrong is when it leads people to disregard reality.

She cites the example of Wells Fargo bank using churches as a base to sell subprime mortgages to customers from the African American community who were previously considered credit risks. “There was an overwhelming feeling that God wants me to have this, therefore it must be OK,” she sighs.

Her argument therefore is that positive thinking contributed to the financial crisis. “The culture in corporations is that if you are negative, if you have doubts, you can lose your job. This happened to people who were trying to sound warnings about the subprime lending,” she says.

Ominously, it also invaded politics. “George W Bush saw himself as the Optimist in Chief,” she says, referring to the 43rd president of the US’s play on the term Commander in Chief. “He did not want to talk to pessimists. Condaleeza Rice, his Secretary of State, said there were doubts she might have raised about the invasion of Iraq but she knew the president wouldn’t listen to negatives.”

The terrible setbacks of the Noughties, the destruction of the Twin Towers, hurricane Katrina’s impact on New Orleans and the financial crash, might have been hard to predict but the warning signs were there. They were simply ignored.
“The CEOs of big companies were the same,” she says. “If you are like that you end up in a bubble where everyone keeps telling you nice things.”

If Ehrenreich has her way, the days of bubble-pricking have well and truly arrived.

Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America & The World (Granta, £10.99) is out now

---

Obama: the negatives and the positives

As a leading American left winger, you would expect Barbara Ehrenreich to have been ecstatic at the election of her country’s first black president. Indeed, she was as supporter of Barack Obama from the start of his campaign. His first year in office, however, has been a serious let down. “I’m not happy with his performance, no, not at all,” she says.

As someone critical of positive thinking mumbo-jumbo, what did she make of Obama’s guru-like insistence on “Change We Can Believe In” and his reiteration of the phrase “Yes We Can”, now that “No He Can’t” seems more appropriate.

“That slogan was really a reworking of an old trade union phrase. He emphasised the ‘we’, that ‘we’ can do things. Positive thinking falls into trouble when they start talking about the ‘I’, the power of the individual will. So I’ve never had a problem with that,” she says.

“I am more bothered by his emphasis on ‘hope’. I’m more interested in what a politician is ‘planning’ to do than what he ‘hopes’ to do.

“But I’m not happy with the banking bailout. All that money has been spent on the bankers, who are now all happy piggies feeding at the trough again. And I am not happy with what is emerging in Afghanistan.

“He has put more funding into food stamps and unemployment insurance – we have a lot of people relying on those now. But I don’t think it was enough. As for the health reforms: what we’ve ended up with strengthens the insurance companies rather than weakens them.

“It will now be illegal not to have a policy with one of them.” Health is a major area of concern for the commentator.

“We had that whole summer of arguing over how many people would die because of socialised medicine but 60,000 people in America die every year because they have insufficient health insurance. “Insurance is never adequate enough. Some 60 per cent of bankruptcies are caused by unpaid medical bills.

“One of my own nephews is preparing to go bankrupt right now for that reason.”

Can Obama solve these issues? “You know, at least we have a president who we know won’t embarrass on the world stage,” she says.

“But perhaps our standards have been too low in that regard.”