Book review: "Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America"

The San Francisco State program I'm working through to become a life coach is based heavily on the growing field of positive psychology, which focuses on the functional rather than the dysfunctional side of the mental spectrum.

So it seems only fair to spend some time with the principled opposition, especially if it comes in as appealing a form as Barbara Ehrenreich, a writer of tremendous power and conviction who's done much to awaken America to the plight of its growing underclass.

With "Bright-sided," Ehrenreich takes aim at the many-tentacled self-help industry, including positive psychology and its founder, Martin Seligman.

Ehrenreich clearly starts off with a personal beef surrounding her recent treatment for breast cancer and the relentless positive thinking promotion that made her feel infantalized and negated. From there, she goes on to build a bigger case that the myriad sources promoting positive thinking in American life are:

• Undermining our intelligence.
• Blinding us to injustice and inequality.
• Promoting the kind of magical thinking that helped set the stage for the mortgage crisis and other catastrophes.

There's a lot of though here and some solid reasoning, but Ehrenreich paints with an awfully large brush. Lumping Seligman, "The Secret" author Rhonda Byrne and Christian Science originator Mary Baker Eddy into an amorphous philosophical blob really does justice to none of them.

Byrne, for instance, takes a basic fact of life -- instant karma's gonna get you -- and flattens it into a "dream it, get it" message that ignores the hard work part of the equation. Christian Science -- well, let's not even go there.

Positive psychology, on the other hand, looks at optimism/pessimism from the basic standpoint that underlies most mental health: Which better serves the individual?

From that view, it's not hard to make the case for optimism. It's more likely to lead the person to act, and "anything + work" is a better formula for success than "anything + not work."

Optimism, by which we mean consistently erring somewhat on the positive side when predicting future outcomes -- always erring on the positive side, despite any evidence to the contrary, is called "delusion," and Ehrenreich has some trouble distinguishing between the two -- could fairly be considered an adaptive trait. A bit of wishful thinking tends to be quite helpful for getting one's ass out bed in the morning. In fact, there's a name for people who make the most accurate predictions about future events: "clinically depressed."

So cheers to Ehrenreich for doing a bit to expose the charlatans selling a message of success without effort. (The corrosive amorality of such schemes was a favorite theme of Wallace Stegner.) But next book, it would be good to do a little more work on knowing your opponent.