Bright-Sided by Barbara Ehrenreich

The complete, rather hyperbolic title of this book is Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. Barbara Ehrenreich has written the ultimate secular humanist anti-positive thinking book, the antithesis to The Secret, What the Bleep Do We Know and other new age, metaphysical and “Law of Attraction” type material.

This book is basically a polemic, and is unlikely to convince anyone who doesn’t already agree with its premise. Most likely, few people who don’t agree with it will even read it. I’m an exception to this, as I like to familiarize myself with as many aspects of the cultural landscape as possible.

Barbara Ehrenreich represents one third of what might be considered an ideological triangle into which the majority of people can be located. The three sides of the triangle are orthodox religion, securalism/atheism and new age spirituality (under this I’d also include modern interpretations of Eastern religions and neo-paganism).

Obviously Ehrenreich occupies the second of these positions, which might be called (though probably not by those who fall into this camp) fundamentalist atheism or secular humanism, whose leading advocate right now is probably Richard Dawkins.

I wrote a review of Bright-Sided that is now on the Associated Content site, so I won’t go into any more detail here. I would, however, suggest that it’s not a bad idea to read this book, even if you are a believer in things like the Law of Attraction. It’s healthy to expose yourself to all points of view.