Tech Paladin

Last Wednesday’s Daily Show featured Barbara Ehrenreich, a popular lefty journalist who writes almost exclusively about poverty and inequality. It’s a fascinating interview, and I encourage you to take a look. In a nutshell, she describes a cancer of the middle class, a mostly-unnoticed condition that appalls her. The culprit: positive thinking!

Really, watch the interview. It’s got Stewart at his best, and Ehrenreich at her most perplexing. Here it is if you haven’t seen it yet:

See, we don’t really have any real control over our lives, so we’d better just admit it and not try to delude ourselves with false cheer. Boy, how much more negative can you get?

Another fascinating, if ironic twist, is that the next day, Stewart interviews one Jennifer Burns regarding her book about Ayn Rand, whose philosophy is perhaps the most opposed to Ehrenreich’s as is possible: Ayn Rand essentially believed that humans were strong, powerful, possessed of an inner will that if tapped, would make them productive and powerful. Ehrenreich seems to believe that people are generally weak and impotent, running on rails already laid down for them, and that believing yourself to have any agency over your own life is delusional at best, and dangerous at worst.

This is not to say that I’m a Randian or anything, because I’ve known someone who held himself to her ideal, and he was emotionally stunted and generally miserable for it. But I have to say, if someone put a gun to my head and asked me to choose from among a philosophy that cast me as a powerful force with the will to mold the world in my image, or one that told me I was impotent, weak, and incapable of achieving anything, I’d go with the first. Then I’d use that power to beat the hoodlum unconscious with a loaf of stale bread. But I digress.

Stewart even asks her at one point whether the method really matters if the results are there, giving the example of a former alcoholic who swears off drink after finding religion. Ehrenreich’s response: “I never think delusion is okay.”

I’ve read some of Ehrenreich’s work, including Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, her most famous one. Politically, I’ve changed a great deal since then, but even at the time, I noticed how all her criticisms were focused entirely on society failing to provide for its citizens, rather than those citizens’ failure to provide for themselves. This is not to say that everyone must be a self-made man or anything, but given an example of a person who has made extremely poor decisions regarding their money, time, property, or family, Ehrenreich lumps them in the same category as the serially unlucky and the genuinely discriminated-against.

Now I understand why. She can’t hold people accountable for their actions because she believes them to be completely at the mercy of the hostile world around them. If people really are weak and impotent, as she clearly believes, then obviously, they can hardly be blamed when they inevitably fail to achieve their goals. This is why, for example, she takes the government to task for failing to raise the minimum wage to far higher levels; in such a world, a caring, benevolent government is one of the weak, impotent individual’s only resources.

But what of the 97.8% of the employed-hourly population who earn more than the minimum wage? Why are they earning more? If the world is so hostile and personal effort is mostly wasted, what has caused these people to earn more? These are questions that can’t be answered purely by looking through the lens of victimization or exploitation.

In the end, she sort of comes off as a bitter old lady whose pet peeve is excessive cheeriness, and generalizes her distaste for same onto the rest of the country. But there’s more there; in between the lines, she is laying out a very saddening personal philosophy and world view, and I believe she is poorer for it.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 7:46 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.