Reality bites
In an age of seemingly too much information and not enough thinking, an argument for eschewing our culture's relentless optimism and seeing things as they really are.
Several recent events and experiences have left me wondering if the defining characteristic of our times is its loose grip on reality.
There was the much ballyhooed “balloon boy” incident. It turns out that the parents of the boy were doing their version of an audition for “reality TV.” The Heenes had appeared on the reality TV show “Wife Swap” a couple of times and were looking to break back into the action. One conclusion to draw from this is that reality TV has very little to do with reality. Its contrived situations are anything but real. “Pseudo-real” might be the best term for the genre, though such a term would qualify as the mother of all oxymorons.
Of course, difficulty in determining what’s real is not particularly new. When Dan Brown’s previous bestseller The Da Vinci Code was all the rage, people in my line of work found ourselves being asked questions on the order of, “Well, what about it? Did Jesus marry Mary Magdalene, have a family and live in Paris?” Quite a remarkable number of people, or so it seemed to me, had concluded that Brown was revealing hitherto repressed truth. I responded to such questions by saying, “I believe this is a work of fiction. Fiction, got it?”
The realm we are in here is that of "truthiness," which was the 2005 Word of the Year according to the American Dialect Society. The New York Times identified truthiness as one of the nine words that defines the spirit of our age. Truthiness, whose currency has also been aided by late-night comedian Stephen Colbert, seems to mean believing something to be true because you wish it to be true or think it might be, corroborating facts (what are those? do we care?) be damned.
George Will once commented in his typically acerbic way, “It is axiomatic that everyone is entitled to one’s own opinion, but not one’s own facts.” Nevertheless, people do seem increasingly to believe that they are fully entitled to their own version of reality. Or to the reality they create.
Barbara Ehrenreich was in Seattle recently promoting her new book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. Ehrenreich’s book points to yet another way in which reality is up for grabs these days, as well as the consequences of this line of thinking. She got going on this project as a result of her own experience with breast cancer in 2000. Ehrenreich was bowled over by the requirement of positive thinking in the world of breast cancer patients and treatment. This ideology holds that you will get well if you think, really think and truly believe, that you will get well. Moreover, if you don’t get well, it is your own fault for harboring negative thoughts or insufficient positive energy.
In some respects, Ehrenreich’s book is an update of a classic text, the Bible’s Book of Job. In that extended exploration of suffering and its meaning, Job’s erstwhile “friends” urge him to fess up. Somehow, in some way, the friends are sure that Job has brought it all on himself. Make a clean breast of it, they urge poor Job, and you’ll feel better fast. Job steadfastly refuses. He clings to the assertion of his innocence. In the end, God sides with Job and against those who presume themselves to be on God’s side. God vindicates Job and judges his friends clueless for insisting on their own (self-serving) version of reality.
Ehrenreich’s analysis in Bright-Sided extends far beyond the pink-ribboned cult of breast cancer survivors to take in religion, politics, and economics. She notes the way the ideology of positive thinking seduced many into taking mortgages well beyond their means, as well as keeping financial institutions believing their own rhetoric even though it bore less and less resemblance to reality. From this perspective the Great Recession was a reality-bites moment, a bursting not just of the housing bubble, but of the bubble of a broad-based and willful self-deception.
Some theologians have long argued that optimism is really the official religion of America. President Obama’s favorite theologian and philosopher, Reinhold Niebuhr, urged mid-20th century Americans always to hold hope in tension with sober realism. But even then the popular vote went with another preacher, Norman Vincent Peale, the author and promoter of The Power of Positive Thinking.
So is the current difficulty in facing up to reality simply more of the same, or are we into qualitatively new territory? In some measure our current capacity for self-deception is nothing new and is as old as the human story itself. And yet what does seem somehow new or different is the insidiousness and totality of hype in all aspects of our culture, as well as the decline of something that might be called mental rigor.
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Comments:
Posted Thu, Nov 5, 7:25 a.m. inappropriate
I heard Ehrenreich on KUOW and I was no sufficiently impressed by her to take time to read her book. So I would be curious to know if your paraphrasing is precise:
"Ehrenreich was bowled over by the requirement of positive thinking in the world of breast cancer patients and treatment. This ideology holds that you will get well if you think, really think and truly believe, that you will get well."
Requirement? Does she really say that positive thinking is a requirement?
Sounds odd. My sister just died of brain cancer and her major complaint was that there was no "positive thinking" in the treatments i.e. no mention, much less emphasis much less "requirement" involving the patient's own frame-of-mind. So are you being fair to Ehrenreich? or is her book even more distorted than I had surmised from listening to her?
Posted Thu, Nov 5, 8:39 a.m. inappropriate
There is some interesting scholarship related to the authorship of the Book of Job. It has been conjectured (and I share in this theory) that the ending of Job, in which he gains back everything plus some, was actually added later on by a different author. Perhaps the culture needed a happy ending, which would show that the need for positive thinking is not unique to our own culture.
Nevertheless, I do see some issues in our own society that might contribute to this. Most of consumerism and entertainment is about escaping from reality. We like to believe in quick fixes--our hair will regrow, a new television will make me happy, President Obama will solve all our problems, etc. Positive thinking as a virtue has been taken by some to be some sort of metaphysical principle, that somehow having positive thoughts causes good things to happen.
A while back on Bill Moyers' show on PBS, he had on David Paterson to talk about the financial crisis. Paterson said that he was watching CNBC a few years ago, and one of the invited pundits made a prediction that there might be a bit of a pulling back in the markets. The host of the program asked the guest if he was being "alarmist", and the guest quickly backpedaled. Of course, the "alarmist" prediction turned out to be much milder than what actually happened. Paterson said that at that point, he knew we were in trouble. We had gotten to the point where any sort of concern about the state of economy was considered taboo, which probably prevented many people from speaking and thinking candidly, which prevented us from dealing with problems before they became crises.
My hope is that tough times will bring us a little closer to Niebuhr's way of thinking. We shall see.
Posted Thu, Nov 5, 8:47 a.m. inappropriate
A particular vision of positive thinkers comes to mind - a group of happy, drunk Bush Republicans sitting around agreeing that they need to cut the wages of their first time home buyer employee so they can afford the payment on both their jumbo mortgage and the speculative real estate deals they got - all based on the same lenient credit standards that were rightly given to first timers by Clinton.
Your words resonate with me in this piece, and though non-religious the allegories of the Bible are worthwhile - and for me, fresh reading! Thanks.
Posted Thu, Nov 5, 9:01 a.m. inappropriate
Got me thinking about the "truthiness" of green jobs, etc...
Posted Thu, Nov 5, 9:50 a.m. inappropriate
There is no "Objective Reality;" merely a veneer in the form of Western Culture. Mr. Robinson's journalistic objectivity is merely a bastardization of the Scientific Method; a mental crutch preventing him from stepping outside his own mental constructs--enslaving him to mere tools.
The assertion of objective reality is a form of hopelessness, and yes, the false optimism denial. Were Mr. Robinson to step outside himself, he might recognize a culture in decline, rather than the decline of seriousness and critical thought. The fact is, popular thought is as superficial and hollowed out as the Culture that breeds it.
Posted Thu, Nov 5, 10:22 a.m. inappropriate
FlyintheOintment,
Take a strong dose of Thomas Berger and call me in the morning.
Posted Thu, Nov 5, 11:15 a.m. inappropriate
A response to David Sucher's post, irrespective of the topic at hand: I'm sorry to hear you lost your sister, & I was surprised at her complaint you aired. I've been fortunate enough never to have to go through that, but every woman I've known who's had breast cancer treatment has found "positivity" to be an integral part of the therapy. In fact, I marveled at the ability of one former (now late) coworker who was incredibly positive right up until the end. Maybe it was all for show, maybe she cried when no one was there, or perhaps it was a reflection of some serious state of denial; in any case, she was positively exuberant. Perhaps this is more a part of the breast cancer "culture" than for other forms. In any case, I'm sorry your sister didn't have that support.
Posted Thu, Nov 5, 8:19 p.m. inappropriate
I found Robinson's piece an eloquent meditation on a serious problem in our intellectual and moral culture. Thanks for more to ponder.
Posted Fri, Nov 6, 11:24 a.m. inappropriate
afreeman,
Appeals to authority by name-dropping does not impress me; it fails to advance the discourse; equally, it seems dubious that your prescription would alter a disposition that is not an affliction, but a most natural one.
In the end, Mr. Robinson asserts his own reality--the crack-up of traditional media, and the shrinking pool of well-compensated professional journalists--in the superficial, unsubstantiated form you dismiss mine, ant the very one he seems to be targeting. He offers no historical overview of America's tendency toward's optimism--typically termed American Exceptionalism--the condition from which it grew, nor a critical examination of the conditions that currently sustain it. A more rigorous line of intellectual inquiry.
Ironically, the crisis of modern industrial society is a crisis of faith, not the decline of critical thought, as Robinson asserts (ironic, perhaps, for those who've read Robinson writings on Faith). As Ernest Becker noted in "Denial of Death": "civilized" society is a hopeful belief and protest that science, money and goods MAKE MEN COUNT for more than any other animal. In this sense everything that man does is religious and heroic, and yet in danger of being fictitious and fallible (emphasis added)."
Of course, this is also a crisis of organized religion. In an exercise of intellectual rigor, Becker sums up the state of the collective discourse: "If traditional culture is discredited as heroics, then the church that supports that culture automatically discredits itself. If the church, on the other hand, chooses to insist on its own special heroics, it might find that in crucial ways it must work against the culture, recruit youth to be anti-heroes to the ways of life of the society they live in."