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From a recent Archeion Press edition of Mark Twain's "Christian Science."

Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How The Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America is enough to make the heart of an American Studies scholar skip a beat. We Americanists share Ehrenreich’s deep skepticism about the torrent of wan motivation that saturates our society, including the modern university that aspires to an “excellence” empty of any real content. I recently heard a story about a university president who worried aloud to his faculty that they did not “want it” enough (no mention of what “it” might be or why insufficient want was at the root of the university’s problems). He presumably thought it was enough to mimic the language of corporate America that Ehrenreich so brilliantly dissects. In this, as in so many things, academe has come to look more and more like the for-profit institutions it once eschewed.

Yet there is even more cause for celebration in Bright-Sided, because Ehrenreich has taken pains to articulate a history of positive thinking in the nineteenth century—which, any American Studies scholar worth her salt will tell you, is the crucible of everything that is interesting in U.S. culture, good or ill. No wonder we keep wanting to turn Barack Obama’s election into a discussion of Abraham Lincoln.

So when Ehrenreich states that positive thinking has its origins in nineteenth-century New Thought (a belief in the power of mind over matter), you can hear the sound of a thousand scholars thumping their copies of Walden with approval. Indeed, her chapter on the “Dark Roots of American Optimism” reads like a who’s who of nineteenth-century cultural history: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the James family (William and Alice, but no Henry) all make appearances.

But not Mark Twain.

This omission seems odd at first, because Twain was the great skeptic of America’s first gilded age. Christopher Hitchens recently (and with a crankiness that both Ehrenreich and Twain himself might appreciate) argued in The Atlantic that our own time has yet to produce a satirist of Twain’s range and depth. Politics, finance, religion, imperialism: these were all targets for his pen. His famous wit was laced with a darkness that would be terrifying were it not so funny. “Why is it that people rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral?” he asked. “It is because we are not the people involved.”  

However, the greatest statements of Twain’s pessimism comes in his fiction, in which he seemed almost to delight in torturing the characters he had created, from the famous “problem” ending of Huckleberry Finn to the ghastly carnage of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Reading Twain is sometimes like observing a boy training his magnifying glass on a nest of insects. We know that somebody should stop him, but we can’t stop watching.

Twain seems to be a natural ally for Ehrenreich, as his targets included one of the pillars of nineteenth-century New Thought: Mary Baker Eddy and Church of Christ, Scientist. Bright-Sided draws a direct line from Eddy’s teaching that “there is no material world, only Thought, Mind, Spirit, Goodness, Love” to contemporary motivational coaches who preach a similar “mystical notion”: “the world is dissolved in Mind, Energy, and vibrations, all of which are potentially subject to our conscious control.” In both cases, the right kind of thinking is good for what ails you.

Near the end of his career, Twain himself wrote a series of articles on Eddy and her church, eventually culminating in a volume simply titled Christian Science. The book begins with a well-known sketch in which Twain describes himself as the victim of a hiking accident (looking like “a hat-rack”), and the only medical aid available is a professor of Christian Science, a Mrs. Fuller, who purports to heal him by explaining that Twain’s pain, his broken bones, and his body are all nothing more than the imagined products of “Mind.” “All else is substanceless, all else is imaginary,” she explains. The sketch concludes with Twain trying to pay her for her services with “an imaginary check,” only to be sued for “substantial dollars.” As Twain says, “It looks inconsistent.”

This seems to be exactly the kind of debunking that Ehrenreich has in mind. The opening set-piece of Christian Science is a perfect counterpart to the first chapter of Bright-Sided, where Ehrenreich describes how the culture of breast cancer patients has become saturated with the ethos of positive thinking, as though pink ribbons, teddy bears, and meditation were a substitute for medical research or the investigation of the environmental causes of the disease. However, to stop with Twain after his initial send-up of the healing practices of Christian Science is only to tell a small part of his story.  

Tags: christian science, christopher hitchens, church of christ scientist, harriet beecher stowe, mark twain, mary baker eddy, ralph waldo emerson

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