The Dark Side of the Bright Side: Found Poems
from
Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
by Barbara Ehrenreich (2009)
This is the 4th of nine poems in the series, one from each chapter of the book.
Read #1 Here: The Dark Side of the Bright Side: Found Poems
Read #2 Here: The Dark Side of the Bright Side: Found Poems #2
Read #3 Here: The Dark Side of the Bright Side: Found Poems #3
The Dark Roots of American Optimism
Americans did not invent positive thinking
because their geography encouraged them to do so–
but because they had tried the opposite.
The Calvinism brought by white settlers to New England
could be described as a system of socially imposed depression.
For the individual believer, the weight of Calvinism,
with its demand for perpetual effort and self-examination
to the point of self-loathing, could be unbearable.
It terrified children.
It made people sick.
In England, the early 17th century author Robert Burton
blamed it for the epidemic of melancholy afflicting the nation.
Two hundred years later, this form of religious melancholy
was still rampant in New England,
reducing formerly healthy adults to a condition
of morbid withdrawal, physical maladies, and inner terror.
George Beecher– brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe –
tormented himself over his spiritual status
until he shattered his nervous system and died by suicide in 1843.
Calvinism offered no individual reassurance,
but it at least exalted the group, the congregation.
You might not be saved yourself,
but you were part of a social entity set apart by its rigorous spiritual discipline –
and set above all those who were unclean, untamed, and unchurched.
In the nineteenth century,
a substantial movement of working men, small farmers, and their wives
used meetings and publications to denounce
"kingcraft," "priest craft,"" lawyer craft," and "doctor craft"
and insist on the primacy of Individual Judgment.
Phineas Parkhurst Quimby,
a self-educated watchmaker and inventor in Portland, Maine,
filled his journals with metaphysical ideas about
what he called "the science of life and happiness" –
the focus on happiness being itself an implicit reproach to Calvinism.
At the same time, middle-class women were chafing against
the guilt-ridden, patriarchal structures of the old religion
and beginning to posit a more loving, maternal deity.
The most influential of these was Mary Baker Eddy –
the daughter of a hardscrabble, fire-and-brimstone-preaching Calvinist
farmer and self-taught amateur metaphysician.
The meeting of Eddy and Quimby in the 1860s
launched the cultural phenomenon
we now recognize as positive thinking.
The New Thought movement drew on many sources:
the transcendentalism of Emerson,
European mystical currents like Swedenborgianism,
even a dash of Hinduism –
it was designed to be a rebuke to the Calvinism
many of its adherents had been terrified by as children.
In the New Thought vision, God was no longer hostile or indifferent;
he was a ubiquitous, all-powerful Spirit or Mind,
and since "man" was really Spirit,
man was coterminous with God.
There was only "one Mind," infinite and all-encompassing.
In as much as humanity was a part of this Universal Mind,
how could there be such a thing as sin?
If it existed at all, it was an error, as was disease,
because if everything was Spirit or Mind or God,
everything was actually perfect.
In New Thought, illness was a disturbance in an otherwise perfect Mind
and could be cured through Mind alone.
Sadly, the strictly mental approach did not seem to work with infectious diseases –
such as diphtheria, scarlet fever, typhus, tuberculosis, and cholera –
that ravaged America until the introduction of public sanitary measures
at the end of the 19th century.
But as Quimby and Eddy were to discover,
it did work for the slow, nameless, debilitating illness
that was reducing many middle-class Americans to invalidism.
Most sufferers reported back problems, digestive ills, exhaustion,
headaches, insomnia, and melancholy.
This was a time before analgesics, safe laxatives, or antidepressants,
when the first prescription for any complaint, however counterproductive,
was prolonged bed rest.
Phineas Parkhurst Quimby,
the grandfather of today's positive thinking,
had no use for the medical profession.
He went into practice as a healer in 1815.
A fearless thinker,
he quickly identified Calvinism as the source of many of his patients' ills.
Calvinism depressed people; it's morality constricted their lives
and bestowed on them large burdens of debilitating, disease-producing guilt.
Quimby gained a minor reputation with a kind of "talking cure,"
through which he endeavored to convince his patients that
the Universe was fundamentally benevolent,
that they were one with the Mind out of which it was constituted,
and that they could leverage their own powers of Mind to cure or correct their ills.
Mary Baker Eddy gained considerable wealth by founding her own religion –
Christian Science, with its still ubiquitous "reading rooms."
The core of her teaching was that
there is no material world, only thought, Mind, spirit, goodness, love,
or, as she often put it in economic terms, "supply."
Hence there could be no such things as illness or want,
except as temporary delusions.
There is a final twist to the story.
If one of the best things you can say about positive thinking
is that it articulated an alternative to Calvinism,
one of the worst is that it ended up preserving some of Calvinism is more toxic features –
a harsh judgmentalism, echoing the old religion's condemnation of sin,
and an insistence on the constant interior labor of self-examination.
The American alternative to Calvinism was not to be Hedonism
or even just an emphasis on emotional spontaneity.
To the positive thinker, emotions remain suspect
and one's inner life must be subjected to relentless monitoring.
In the twentieth century, when positive thinkers
abandoned health issues to the medical profession,
the aim of all this work became wealth and success.
The book that introduced most 20th century Americans
to the ceaseless work of positive thinking
was Norman Vincent Peale's 1952 The Power of Positive Thinking.
Like the 19th century New Thought leaders before him,
he saw himself as a healer,
only the 20th century illness was not Calvinism,
but what Peale identified as an inferiority complex,
something he struggled with in his own life.
We have seen the enemy,
and it is ourselves,
or at least our thoughts.
Fortunately though,
thoughts can be monitored and corrected.
This work is never done.
Why retreat into anxious introspection when,
as Emerson might have said,
there is a vast world outside to explore?
Reciting affirmations, checking off worksheets,
compulsively re-reading get-rich-quick books:
these are not what Emerson had in mind
when he urged his countrymen to shake off the shackles of Calvinism
and embrace a bounteous world filled with new lands, new man, and new thoughts.
He was something of a Mystic, given to moments of transcendent illumination:
"I become a universal eyeball. I am nothing; I see all…"
In such States, the self does not double into a worker and an object of work;
it disappears.
The universe cannot be "supply,"
since such a perception requires a desiring, calculating ego.
And as soon as ego enters the picture,
the sense of Oneness is shattered.
Transcendent Oneness does not require
self-examination, self-help, or self-work.
It requires self loss.
Why should one be so preoccupied at all?
Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity
or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding?
Why retreat into anxious introspection when there is so much real work to be done?
The work of Americans is performed on the self
in order to make that self more acceptable and even likable
to employers, clients, co-workers, and potential customers.
Positive thinking has ceased to be just a balm for the anxious
or a cure for the psychosomatically distressed.
It has become an obligation
to be imposed
on all Americans.
lisa eddy (she/her) is a writer, researcher, youth advocate,
environmental educator, and musician. Email: lisagay.eddy1@gmail.com
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