Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

Cover via Amazon

At the end of the Monty Python movie, The Life of Brian, Brian is sentenced to death by crucifixion – a truly deplorable means of execution. Understandably, Brian is a bit depressed, but one of the other nearby crucified convicts implores Brian to think positively and strikes up a cheery song:

Some things in life are bad,
They can really make you mad.
Other things just make you swear and curse.
When you’re chewing on life’s gristle,
Don’t grumble, give a whistle,
And this’ll help things turn out for the best, and…

Always look on the bright side of life.

The song (written in 1979) and the circumstances under which it is sung takes the (fairly innocent idea) of positive thinking to an extremely absurd level to achieve a comic effect. However, in many ways, it seems to presage a relentless movement in positive thinking that would sweep through the United States beginning in the 1980s. Barbara Ehrenreich, in her book Bright-Sided, documents the sometimes comic level that this movement has reached over the past few decades and, more importantly, casts a much needed critical gaze upon it.

On the surface, “positive thinking” might seem like an unusual subject to be criticized. After all, nobody really doubts that positive feelings are an important part of leading a happy and healthy life. But what happens when positive thinking becomes transformed into an ideology? Barbara begins with her own personal story of being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2000 and becoming dismayed at the nature of the advice being offered online and through various support organizations. Optimism was being pushed as essentially mandatory to recovery – sometimes to extent of becoming part of the cure itself. This led many breast cancer sufferers to construe their disease as a gift – a positive life changing event! Now the disease is no longer the focus of the problem. If you are not thinking positively about it, then you become the problem. As Barbara concludes, this might cause any of us to “deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame ourselves for our fate” (44).

In other words, so-called “negative” feelings like distress or anger become viewed not as normal and valid emotional reactions but as stumbling blocks that need to be repressively cleared away.

Barbara locates the origins of this back in the nineteenth century post-Calvinist “New Thought” movement (such as Christian Science), which rejected traditional hellfire and brimstone theology in place with the idea that God wants you to prosper and be happy (the prosperity gospel). She then traces its re-emergence in the corporate world during the 1980s and 1990s as businesses downsized. The commodification of motivation created an enormous and profitable industry of life coaches and motivational speakers, as well as books and DVDs such as 2006’s The Secret. The “secret” of The Secret, of course, is that if you think positive thoughts then the universe will in turn give you what you want – like some kind of cosmic butler.

The movement reinfects religion through the rise of extremely wealthy mega churches with their charismatic positive-toting evangelists. It generates a buzz in scientific circles by creating new fields such as “positive psychology” and “the science of happiness” – where the science, unfortunately, is less than positively stellar. In fact, the positive mania seems to have left no aspect of our society uninfected. In the final and immediately relevant chapter, Barbara argues that this saturation of positive thinking help to hasten the current economic meltdown by encouraging lenders and their consumers to be reckless and overly optimistic financial firms to ignore any negative data. When positive thinking is turned into an ideology it can, as any ideology is apt to do, become a delusion of sorts.

That is why this is a much needed book. Happiness requires working, not wishing. You can think positively, but not before thinking clearly. A touch of skepticism will do us all well in the long run. The point is not to be negative or a cynic. The “point is to acquire the skills not of positive thinking but of critical thinking” (199). Barbara demonstrates why we need to be reminded of that even in the least obvious of places.