Tuesday, August 31, 2010

3 Quarks Daily - Positive Failure - A review of "The Power" by Rhonda Byrne

3 Quarks Daily offers a detailed and scathing review of Rhonda Byrne's sequel to The Secret (2006), the mega-selling handbook for spiritual materialism and narcissism promoted by everyone from Oprah to all the "law of attraction" hucksters on Twitter.

Apparently it's no longer sufficient to Ask, Believe, and Receive - now you must engage the "Creation Process": Imagine it, Feel it, Receive it.

Oooohh, NOW I get it. Damn, I was doing it all wrong. Uh, yeah . . . .

Here is the first section:

Positive Failure - a review of "The Power" by Rhonda Byrne

Review of Rhonda Byrne, The Power (London: Simon & Schuster, 2010) ISBN: 978-085-720-1706.

1. The Law of Attraction

Rhonda Byrne, author of 2006 best-seller The Secret, has released its sequel. Entitled The Power, it claims further depth into the insights gleaned from The Secret. As she humbly states: ‘You don’t need to have read The Secret for The Power to change your life, because everything you need to know is contained in The Power.’

According to Byrne and her publishers, Byrne’s oeuvre (The Secret movie, released prior to the book; and various cards, sayings and other fashionable accessories) focuses on readers’ abilities to get what they ‘deserve’, using what is known as ‘the law of attraction’. According to The Secret’s synopsis by her publishers: ‘fragments of The Secret have been found in oral traditions, religions, literature and philosophies throughout the centuries … By unifying leading-edge scientific thought with ancient wisdom and spirituality, this riveting, practical knowledge will lead readers to a greater understanding of how they can be masters of their own lives.’ We become ‘masters’ of our lives by invoking the ‘law of attraction’.

To understand the law of attraction would require either a casual or a long glance at the current trend in the self-help industry. This is the factory-produced, standardised answers to questions of human betterment, which elicits a solipsistic attitude as the touchstone for all problems in the world; a tethered link between religious guilt and nihilistic dismissal, self-help gurus claim to walk this fine line over the precipice of our banal existence.

This is how they do it. The three rules of the Law of Attraction – let us capitalise the letters now – according to Byrne are the following: Ask. Believe. Receive. As Byrne says, in The Secret, it means that: ‘like attracts like. What that means in simple terms for your life is: what you give out, you receive back. Whatever you give out in life is what you receive back in life. Whatever you give, by the law of attraction, is exactly what you attract back to yourself.’ If you want good things to happen, be a good person, think positive thoughts. By doing so, you can have many things granted: if one wants a parking-space, simply ask the universe to provide it for you; if you want that career, simply ask for it, believe in it and you will receive it. By this logic, Byrne then went on to state one of the worst sentences any literate, twenty-first century individual can make. She says, in The Secret: ‘The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts.’

Consider this claim. Repeat it to yourself. Then consider the poverty-stricken multi-tudes. We may reasonably assume that horrendously poor individuals desire poverty alleviation, i.e. money, more than many of us already maintaining a regular income. After all, if we are already making money, why do we need to desire it – unless, as Byrne is hinting, we desire more? Of course, Byrne might say our regular income is a result of our ‘desire’ for money (Ask) – but this does not answer the question of the poor. Byrne sickeningly implies that the poverty-stricken, sub-Saharan African mother, dragging her crumpled, dying infant through a diseased village, has brought such hardship on herself. The mother is, after all, ‘blocking’ money from coming to her, thus preventing herself from saving her child.

The problem of course is Byrne never explains how the Law of Attraction works. Quantum physics, the old canard of a dying industry constantly asked for verification, is hinted at – but never elaborated upon. This is a false analogy: quantum physics is spooky and mysterious; the law of attraction is spooky and mysterious; therefore the latter must work according to the same principles. One is reminded of Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Richard Feynman, who said that if you think you understand quantum physics, you don’t understand quantum physics.

In The Power, Byrne has ‘updated’ her ideas from The Secret, invoking something called the Creation Process: ‘Imagine it. Feel it. Receive it.’ Why does Byrne assume we can obtain things through simply feeling and desiring it? She states her reason on the first page: ‘You are meant to have an amazing life! You are meant to have everything you love and desire.’ She proceeds to list the most juvenile of desires; similar to an outline of life as perhaps imagined by comfortable Western teenage girls who have yet to face hardship in life. She outlines things like a happy marriage, a ‘perfect husband’ (yes she actually does say that), money, etc. Her outline is one cheesy sunset away from being a 1920’s Hollywood movie.

And it is an outline, but one drawn with chalk as reality lays waste, constantly, to our dreams and desires. This is not illusory pessimism but reality. To think otherwise is to confine oneself to juvenile denial (to coin a silly word: ‘juvedenial’). By what logic are we meant to have anything, let alone happiness? There is no one we can appeal to; contra Byrne, there is no force that cares about us. We have no reason to accept, as we will later see, Byrne’s assertion of the Law of Attraction. Byrne’s logic is tautological: the law of attraction works because we are meant to have a good life. We are meant to have a good life because of the law of attraction. This shows how vacuous this notion is.

She does attempt something approaching sophistication, as with most adults who can write a fairly coherent sentence. But her sophistication ends up displaying her utter ignorance on matters of the world: ‘Five thousand years ago, ancient scriptures recorded that all of creation was done and complete, and that anything approaching that could possibly be created already exists. Now, five thousand years later, quantum physics has confirmed that every single possibility of anything and everything actually exists now.’

This appeal to authority – an informal logical fallacy – also forgets that people, five thousand years ago, thought the earth flat and the sun a raging god. She does not list her sources for this blanket assertion, so we cannot verify – as usual – her claims. Two points: ‘ancient sources’ are not necessarily good – just as ‘ancient wisdom’ is not necessarily wise. Ancient sources are the sources of ‘ancient wisdom’; but wisdom, like medicine, is either applicable or not: from where and when it comes does not give it a further quality at all. Medicine is medicine, it cures or it does not – there is no such thing as ‘alternative’ or ‘complementary’ medicine, for example. It is simply medicine. Similarly, wisdom either aids us in living better, or it is fallacious, solipsistic statements made without foundation – as is the case here

The second point appears to be a misunderstanding of quantum physics or quantum theory’s ideas of non-locality, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, etc. Her statement is nonsense, of course. Many quantum physicists will agree ‘spooky’ things happening to your atoms is not completely out of the question but the likelihood is equivalent to, as physicist Brian Greene says, you randomly marrying Nicole Kidman or Antonio Banderas, as you read this sentence. (This does not apply to any potential lovers of either celebrity). The other important point is all the ‘spooky’ aspects of quantum physics – that we cannot at the same time tell the speed and position of an atom for example – all happens at the quantum level not the everyday or, as biologist Richard Dawkins would say, ‘middle world’: that is what we encounter without the aid of micro- or telescopes. For example, we see rocks as completely solid even though they are, according to scientifically-verifiable observation methods, mostly empty-space. Similarly we do not deal with the quantum, i.e. smallest, level of the natural world because it simply does not operate on a scale which would be useful to us everyday. (This does not invalidate quantum theory; it only highlights that Byrne’s claims that quantum theory has confirmed her own shows up to be nonsense, since quantum theory deals with the quantum level. I would also asked more informed readers on the current trends of quantum physics to correct me, if I am severely mistaken.)

Byrne’s assertion that ‘every single possibility of anything and everything actually exists now’ makes no sense. Surely she cannot ignore the progress of, for example, technology, government and medical science which will show up new inventions, policies and medicines in the future? This is not hope but a logical extrapolation from history: could we have imagined a cure for polio, before we even had a germ-theory of disease? There will be things beyond the imagination of anyone – because we do not have the means to create any of it. We cannot dogmatically assert that every possibility exists now – what does that even mean? It seems this appeal to a static existence is one more feather in the cap of apathy and egotism. Take no heed for the morrow because today everything is possible.

Her undermining of science is shown elsewhere: ‘the law of attraction is what holds every star in the universe and forms every atom and molecule. The force of attraction of the sun holds the planets in our solar system, keeping them from hurtling into space … it holds your car to the road, water in your glass.’ I am not sure why she asserts this, because she has not forgotten about that tiny thing called ‘gravity’. But after mentioning gravity, she implies the Law of Attraction actually subverts or governs gravity. She is remarkably unclear about this. Her idea that planets will hurtle into space if not held, makes it seem like planets ‘want’ to hurtle away; that the only thing preventing them is the law of attraction or gravity (do not worry: I am getting confused, too). Of course, planets are reacting in accordance with the physical laws in the universe – even if hurtled, they would still be operating according to physical laws, not undermining them. Perhaps it would undermine the Law of Attraction, but it only shows then that the Law of Attraction is not a testable, physical law of the universe – it is Byrne’s assertion that all is well because all is well. (We should also note her relating the story of water reacting to positive and negative emotions [p.205]. A view, I think, which has been thoroughly disproved.)

Please, continue reading, it gets better - although I have no idea why they take it seriously enough to spend this much time on it.

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