BARBARA EHRENREICH
Granta, 2014, 237 pages, $xx.yy (pb)
What are we to make of the latest book by Barbara
Ehrenreich, a writer of wit, clarity and insight, proud to count herself a
socialist, feminist, atheist and scientist, who concludes that her teenage ‘mystical’
experiences with some sort of ‘living Presence’, ‘higher Consciousness’ or ‘mysterious
Other’ were real encounters with another dimension, beyond the scope of rational
analysis? Not that much, alas.
Ehrenreich is no “New Age fluffhead” - spirituality is “a
crime against reason” especially to one “born to atheism” by parents “who had
derived their own atheism from a proud tradition of working-class rejection of authority
in all its forms” - but her ‘transcendent’ adventures in the 1950s have
prompted a late-life rethink of her intellectual roots.
She dismisses the explanatory materialist candidates for her
“aberrant mental phenomena” - sleep deprivation, hypoglycaemia, faulty
perceptual processing of sensory data, optical illusion, dissociative disorders,
impaired neuronal wiring.
She rejects the hypothesis that the “fabric of space-time
was doing just fine” and the problem might be with her internal psychology. As a good scientist, she does not write off
anomalous data like her too-strange-to-be-forgotten experiences, but she opts
for the scientifically incredible (mysticism) over the scientifically simple
(neuroscience) with her operating assumption that there is something out there,
an animistic force emanating from “conscious beings that normally elude
our senses”, a power which is, moreover, “seeking us out”.
This stance has only come about in the last decade, after
Ehrenreich’s long immersion in sixties-inspired politicisation and scholarly
investigation when she saw her “perceptual wanderings” as a petit-bourgeois “distraction
from political activism”. Now, with the
decline of the left into long,
navel-gazing meetings “in windowless conference rooms”, she has re-embraced her
illicit ‘mystical’ past.
Ehrenreich has declared that she will never write her life
story. This is a great pity because her
current memoir would then have been a more digestible, condensed chapter on,
say, ‘Neuroscience and the Teenage Mystic’ whilst the tantalising glimpses of
the rest of her wonderful life would elaborate on how her political
radicalisation tore apart the “façade of everyday normality” to reveal, not
some metaphysical power, but the very real, “ongoing, inexcusable cruelty” of the
powerful in human society.
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