Barbara Ehrenreich vs 'positive thinking'

Thank goodness Barbara Ehrenreich has written about a subject that has been grinding my gears for several years, the self-help industry and above all the odious ideology of 'positive thinking', i.e. the logic of laissez faire capitalism elevated to the supramundane level of metaphyics. While to some extent personal optimism can be a motivator to overcome the most egregious of obstacles, as the basis for a world view it is obscene. What personally gets you over is not the basis for the whole cosmos, and the universe is not everybody's friend, not yours either.

As usual, Adorno expresses the issue better than anyone:

Adorno on Truth, Survival, Consolation & Freedom of Thought

But back to Barbara. She's written a whole book on the subject:

Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America (2009)

I wouldn't call this "utterly original" as I've had exactly the same thoughts for years, but I also have not seen these thoughts expressed elsewhere in print. There are links to videos and other material on her site, but let me point out this essay:

Pathologies of hope by Barbara Ehrenreich, Harper's Magazine, February 1, 2007

But here is another video for your perusal. Barbara's talk is good, the comments not so much:

RSA Animate - Smile or Die

Max Horkheimer, Montaigne, & bourgeois skepticism (2)

Bildung and Critical Theory facing Post-modernity by Ilan Gur-Ze'ev

The postmodernity part and the conclusions are insufferable ("critical pedagogy" has always struck me as idiotic) but the content concerning the Frankfurt School and Bildung is interesting.

Here's the passage specifically about Montaigne:

A clear manifestation of this optimist-positive utopianism is Horkheimer's "Montaigne and the role of skepticism." From within the Marxist tradition Horkheimer here articulates the importance and weaknesses of modern, bourgeois skepticism, which is a central element of Enlightenment and the project of Bildung. Because the bourgeoisie have the upper hand, claims Horkheimer, the worth of the individual becomes mainly an economic issue and the critical Spirit becomes an individual’s aesthetic pastime. Skepticism, he claims, is targeted at saving the individual. This is its great goal. But Critical Theory, in opposition to this tradition, conceives the individual as basically dependent on social conditions and understands her emancipation as part of the liberation of humanity, coming about within an essential change in the social totality. This new society, according to the early Horkheimer, will actualize Montaigne's quest for the happy realization of the essence of the human.

It's hard to imagine an academic department more worthless than Education, "Critical Pedagogy" included, unless it's Political Science. Anyway, here's another specimen:

Adorno, Horkheimer, Critical Theory and the Possibility of a Non-Repressive Critical Pedagogy by Ilan Gur-Ze’ev

Horkeimer's essay on Montaigne is mentioned here, too. And here at least is a critique of Henry Giroux, his descent into postmodernism, and his misunderstanding of Marcuse (who also comes under fire) and other critical theorists. The author also recapitulates the development of the ideas of Horkheimer and Adorno.

What does all this come to?

Counter-education, if true to itself, cannot be, like Critical Pedagogy wants us to believe, an attempt to implement any “theory”, as sophisticated or good-intentioned as it may be. If true to itself, counter-education must challenge any theoretical, ideological, or political "home", any master signifier, dogma, or ethnocentrism as manifestations of the Same, of the thingness in Being, which human beings are called to guard and transcend (Heidegger 196, 234). Counter-education, in this sense, must be at once Messianic and negative at any cost. This means that it cannot satisfy itself even with identification with the negation of self-evident, with the resistance to the ethnocentrism of the oppressed and cannot identify itself with the “worthier” violences they actualize against their own "internal" and "external" Others.

Ugh! I can't go on.

Neuroscience as ideology: bourgeois wisdom at work

In re:

Hall, Stephen S. Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.

"A compelling investigation into one of the most coveted and cherished ideals, 'Wisdom' also chronicles the efforts of modern science to penetrate the mysterious nature of this timeless virtue."

Contents:
PART ONE: Wisdom defined (sort of)
What is wisdom?;
The wisest man in the world: the philosophical roots of wisdom;
Heart and mind: the psychological roots of wisdom
PART TWO: Eight neural pillars of wisdom.
Emotional regulation: the art of coping;
Knowing what’s important: the neural mechanism of establishing value and making a judgment;
Moral reasoning: the biology of judging right from wrong;
Compassion: the biology of loving-kindness and empathy;
Humility: the gift of perspective;
Altruism: social justice, fairness, and the wisdom of punishment;
Patience: temptation, delayed gratification, and the biology of learning to wait for larger rewards;
Dealing with uncertainty : change, "meta-wisdom," and the vulcanization of the human brain
PART THREE: Becoming wise.
Youth, adversity, and resilience: the seeds of wisdom;
Older and wiser: the wisdom of aging;
Classroom, board room, bedroom, back room: everyday wisdom in our everyday world;
Dare to be wise: does wisdom have a future?

See also the web site of Stephen C. Hall.

*     *     *

"Wrong life cannot be lived rightly."

          — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, section 18

This aphorism does not appear in Stephen Hall's book, and Adorno does not appear to be part of the mental universe of Hall's attempt to scientize "timeless virtue". As bourgeois reason totters on its last legs, the latest fad of popular science purporting to explain social and in many cases political behavior is neurobiology. Like all bourgeois scientism, this line of inquiry is predicated on ideological amnesia, an erasure of real history, society, and politics. Granted that both neurobiology and evolutionary theory are essential to comprehension of the material basis of the organism, of everything it is capable of thinking and doing, the conceit here is that the biology of individual cognition in abstraction is proffered as an explanation of how we function in society, and this is why the spate of popular books on the subject is reactionary to the core.

Hall only questions his endeavor in the final chapter, pondering whether a focus on wise individuals only fosters a personality cult and hero worship, distracting from the thing itself. He also contemplates the future of wisdom given the state of consumer culture.

Otherwise, Hall trots out various culture heroes as possible examples of wisdom: Confucius, Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Oprah. Again, qualities of wisdom are abstracted out of total social situations, oblivious to the dimension of ideology critique that could be applied to any and all of his examples. 

Anyone who could quote David Brooks even in passing as a person to take seriously betrays a political cluelessness the contemptibility of which defies description.

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly

"Wrong life cannot be lived rightly."

          — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, section 18

Here are some of my thoughts on the subject, from 2009, slightly edited.

* * *

22 Jan 2009

Of late this aphorism keeps popping up in my head, as a spontaneous counterpoint to social/cultural input. I can't recall the contexts that spur these thoughts, but they may have something to do with the self-help industry, Oprah, Obamamania, the culture industry, American individualism, upper middle class liberalism . . . vs. the larger perspective that challenges the false immediacy of popular ideology. I also have in mind Adorno's notion of theory and practice, of his lectures on Kant's morality, on his obsession with Auschwitz. Otherwise, I am just considering this sentence in isolation from its context in Minima Moralia.

I keep coming back to this quote as a challenge to the veil of falsity that hangs over American life, which this insane fetishism of President Obama perpetuates. There should be a way of explaining accessibly what is at stake in Adorno's view, or in any intellectual's that does not join in with the crowd.

Now I am curious about who has written what on the ethical dimension of Adorno's thought, indeed, that lies behind Adorno's thought. I haven't read it, but the first thing that comes to mind is . . .

Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics by J. M. Bernstein

Contents:

Introduction;

1. Wrong life cannot be lived rightly;

2. Disenchantment: the skepticism of enlightened reason;

3. The instrumentality of moral reason;

4. Mastered by nature: abstraction, independence, and the simple concept;

5. Interlude: three versions of modernity;

6. Disenchanting identity: the complex concept;

7. Toward an ethic of nonidentity;

8. After Auschwitz;

9. Ethical modernism.

You can also read some of the intro via amazon.com.

Also, there are two essays in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno.

23 Jan 2009

A few years back I objected to Adorno's notion that the good life could only be characterized negatively; that we couldn't say anything positive. This also dovetails with Adorno's animosity towards Erich Fromm, who, because of his generally affirmative posture, was called by one of the Frankfurters — maybe it was Marcuse — the Norman Vincent Peale of the left. And yes, I have found Adorno far too ascetic and austere. But when one feels that one's culture and society has been totally compromised, and one can see the long-range implications of negative social forces, taking this stance makes more sense.

But it's not mere elitism that drove Adorno, though it does relate to his lived experience as a product of high bourgeois culture. Adorno lived through the destruction of European culture as he knew it. His first book, on Kierkegaard, was published the day Hitler took power. The swallowing up of the individual personality — what was then called "modern man" — by the monstrous machine of society, was not the world of postwar prosperity in western nations as we knew it from approx. 1950-1970, which also involved a dehumanizing regimentation against which the '60s generation rebelled. Fascism meant that the individual life could be totally compromised, and there was no room to maneuver. Adorno may have also experienced survivor's guilt, not only in general, but in particular, in relation to his close friend Walter Benjamin.

However exaggerated Adorno might have depicted the iron cage in prosperous western democracies (but for only about the last two decades of his life), even with a more differentiated and refined analysis, Adorno's broad-brush picture nonetheless abstracts out broad social trends, ongoing processes rather than total faits accompli. As such, Adorno highlights decisive aspects of contemporary society that are ideologically repressed by the culture industry and the so-called ideological state apparatuses: that is, Adorno expresses broad contours of society against the enforced silence about how society is fundamentally constituted.

Hence Adorno doesn't address what the individual is going to do, or what social activists are going to do, but what can't be spoken in the mainstream media and cultural apparatus. And this is why I bring in the self-help industry, Oprah, Dr. Phil, Extreme Home Makeover, American Idol, and the rest. The largess bestowed by the wealthy and corporate America on a few lucky people is fine for the individuals who benefit, but it is predicated on the falsification of social reality and social misery, while fostering a groveling attitude to corporate America (or whatever country you live in).

So maybe we don't need to be depressed all the time, but the gap between the illusory notions on which society runs and the recognition of the gap between that and an understanding of what's really going on and the depth at which it has to be challenged, is likely to promote a much-needed negativity. Though I don't believe in being grumpy 24-7, I don't trust people who always want to think positively, for, when one examines their ideology, one always finds it predicated on falsehood. And when the people who espouse it belong to the privileged upper middle class (though not exclusive to them), I find their attitude insufferable.

Jeremiah Wright, MLK, black theology & Obama (1)

I could not be more indifferent, nay, even contemptuous, of the Obama-Wright “scandal” as a political football. Since John Edwards dropped out of the race, this campaign cycle has been devoid of content, reduced to the manipulation of the voting public on the basis of personalities and superficial symbolic issues. We are guinea pigs in a high-stakes experiment in electoral market research. The union of electoral politics and the advertising industry is hardly a novel subject for research, but the accelerated irrationality of American politics on the threshold of the final breakdown of American democracy is cause for even more alarm.

For those of you inclined towards social theory, here’s one reference that crosses this issue with the work of the Frankfurt School on the culture industry:

Adorno, Theodor W. "Opinion Research and Publicness (Meinungsforschung und Offentlichkeit)", translated with an introduction by Andrew J. Perrin & Lars Jarkko, Sociological Theory, vol. 23, no. 1, March 2005, pp. 116-123.

For a recent diagnosis of the American disorder, see:

Sargis, John. “The American Celebration of Democracy,” The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, vol. 4, no. 2, April 2008.

Let us remember that prior to Super-Tuesday, focus groups, assembled by “experts” (most notably campaign consultant Frank Luntz, a Republican) in analyzing the minutiae of audience response to the slightest political gestures, showed a highly favorable attitude toward Hillary Clinton, including the response of black voters charmed by her rhetoric on race. Obama’s television commercials for Super-Tuesday constituted the most brilliant manipulation of political visual imagery I've seen since Leni Riefenstal. But look how the symbolic fortunes of both candidates have seesawed in only two months. The black electorate dropped Clinton like a hot potato and she and her supporters were forced to pander shamelessly to white racist sensibilities in order to stay in the race, irreparably damaging the Clintons’ reputation in Black America, a disenchantment long overdue.

This is not to downplay the fundamental fraudulence of Obama’s campaign, his obviously superior basic decency and progressive past notwithstanding. I am a firm practitioner of the depressing principle of the lesser-of-two-evils, so nothing I say here I think matters in the slightest in choosing a candidate. However, what seems to matter to a nation of brainless couch potatoes is another story, yet the underlying ideological structure of even that is a tabooed subject for public discourse. Both the detractors and defenders of Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright have missed the boat.

There is, of course, a fair amount of cynicism about Wright and Obama not predicated on white America’s exaggerated outrage.

“Obama Is No King” by Christopher Hitchens, SLATE, Monday, April 7, 2008
(Today, the national civil rights pulpit is largely occupied by second-rate shakedown artists.)

On April 7 Lenni Brenner (BrennerL21@aol.com) circulated a hilarious put-down entitled “Obama's Constitution, His Pastor, & His Unbelieving Mom In Heaven”. It is not yet posted among his online essays, but hopefully it will be added before too long.

Brenner’s point of departure is this article:

“Obama Suggests Jesus Christ Not the Only Way to Heaven” by Jennifer Riley, Christian Post Reporter, March 27, 2008.

The dominance of faith-based electoral politics is a bottomless swamp. The real questions cannot be posed, because both Obama's supporters and detractors have a vested interest in avoiding them—more fundamentally they do not even understand them. Obama is a middle class progressive community activist turned mainstream politician on the make in a neoliberal, i.e. anti-working-class, Democratic Party. The nature of this transformation is the fundamental question. While people fuss over his choice of a pastor, they can't and won't ask the more interesting question as to why the biracial offspring of a white atheist mother found Jesus and joined an Afrocentric church—let alone any Christian church, its political orientation notwithstanding. The sincerity of middle class progressive activism and this particular transformation may be impossible to determine sans telepathic access to personal motivation, yet there is enough to be disgusted by without impugning Obama’s personal or political motives. Perhaps, though, Obama as progressive community activist in the bosom of an Afrocentric Jesus is not so different from Obama as Democratic presidential candidate bending over backwards to placate white people in his effort to gain the top position in the management of the neoliberal political order.

South Park’s Anti-Semitic Xmas

Early on Christmas morn I saw a rerun of South Park’s Xmas episode in which Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo is introduced. I thought the Mr. Hankey character was over the top the first time I saw him. But since I got over the shock value of seeing South Park (largely in reruns) and of getting used to what’s now allowed on television (on network TV and not just cable anymore), I’ve had a chance to scrutinize South Park’s ideology more closely.

The 1990s was a fantastic decade for comedy, all the better as American society degenerated even further beyond repair. But at some point a line was crossed, and the subversive power of comedy was neutralized by mindless cynicism that ceases to promote social critique and instead serves to further adjust us to our dehumanization.

This is true both of normal sitcoms and adult cartoons. The critical thrust of The Simpsons at its best was blunted by the growth in pure decadence of the adult cartoons that succeeded it.

Some years ago a friend summed up it up this way: “South Park is for people who are too dumb to understand The Simpsons.” Or, as I concluded eventually, the baby boomers knew rebellion against social convention and hypocrisy; but the new brand of humor was designed by slackers for clueless teens and twenty-somethings who never knew anything before Reaganism, who never rebelled against anything, and who have no perspective beyond mindless cynicism which at the end of the day manages to serve the status quo.

After a while I learned to laugh at South Park’s outrageous humor. Funny isn’t supposed to be moral; if it’s funny to you, you laugh . . . but in it there’s also ideology. South Park is gratuitously vicious and sadistic. The gruesome death of Kenny in every episode alone testifies to the sadism at the bottom of this kind of humor, and, by implication, much other humor. But South Park is not mindless cynicism alone, for there is also quite a bit of moralism mixed in with the cynical filth, summed up in the resolution or even a speech at the end of an episode. If you examine these episodes carefully, you will also discover that the perspective of the series’ creators is completely confused, and in the end, rather conservative. These slackers mock redneck values, presumably thinking they are above them, but in the final analysis, they’re idiots.

Another feature of South Park is the pervasive anti-Semitism contained within it. Ostensibly, the ignorant anti-Semitism, racism, nastiness, and piggishness of Cartman is an object of ridicule, but after a while, one wonders. The Jewish stereotypes go beyond Cartman’s constant nasty remarks about Jews, mostly targeting his “friend” Kyle. Kyle’s father is a yarmulke-sporting greedy lawyer; his mother a matronly New York stereotype. When Earth is discovered to be a reality show for the entertainment of the rest of the universe, the cosmic media moguls are a species conspicuously modeled on the Jews.

This is the sort of humor beloved of the young and stupid—what, did I repeat myself?—who think they are too hip to be taken in by anything. So naturally, they don’t take the anti-Semitic stereotypes seriously; it’s all in fun. But then again, given what this nation is like, I have to wonder . . .

Seeing some of these episodes for the umpteenth time, the contradictory messages, splitting the difference, ideological incoherence, and platitudinous morals mixed with cynical degeneracy reveal a pattern.

Viewing this Xmas episode this time around revealed this pattern in a way I hadn’t paid attention to before. It begins with Kyle performing in a sleazy school nativity scene. When his mother walks in on a rehearsal, she hits the roof, and complains to Mr. Garrison that this is an affront to Jews. He dismisses her as a nuisance, but thanks to her agitation soon the whole town is up in arms about public displays of religious symbols and Santa too. Everything has to be modified to placate everyone who finds the least little holiday decoration offensive. Meanwhile Kyle, who feels lonely as a Jew at Christmastime, is judged to be losing his sanity as no one believes that he has seen his object of veneration, Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo. His friends have him committed to a mental institution where he sings the dreidle song in a straightjacket in a padded cell. When Chef reveals that Mr. Hankey is real, the other kids have Kyle released. The dispute over holiday symbols in the school auditorium escalates into a brawl. Mr. Hankey comes to life and, calling the brawl to a halt, delivers the moral of the episode: Everybody’s fighting over what’s wrong with Christmas, they’ve forgotten what’s right with Christmas. It’s all about eating cookies and having a good time.

In the process, of course, the original affront to the Jews is reduced to mindless politically correct frivolity in the barrage of complaints that follow. Hence the anti-Semitic implications of forcing Xmas on Jews are conveniently lost in this display of degenerate cynicism mixed with cheesy moralizing.

Fame legitimates everything, in spite of controversy, and apparently, aside from the objections of traditionalist organizations, nobody sees anything wrong with this show. In the episode under review, the message of the true spirit of Christmas is delivered by a talking piece of shit. This is indeed a metaphor for our time.