LIKE MOST PEOPLE when I think of Barbara Ehrenreich I always think of her best known book Nickled and Dimed in which she did some Nellie Bly style reportage by taking some minimal wage, awful jobs and trying to live on the money she made while reproducing the living conditions, travel, etc. that are the daily experience of the working poor. I admired the book very much and still find some of what she said in it insightful, especially her admission that she could only approximate the mental experience of People who knew they were trapped in that life because she knew it was a time-limited project and she would return to her life as a writer and intellectual.
I had more of a problem with her materialist-atheist-scientism, in fact encountering what she said and claimed out of that, the attitude it gave her to anything that she noticed might challenge her base ideology and most of what I've written and said about her has been about that. I noted that given her hostility to Christianity and religion in general, it was probably an irony that her greatest audience were probably among religious book readers and book clubs seriously reading Nickled and Dimed as supplementary material in their following of The Gospel, the Law and the Prophets (at least in my experience and my observation.) '
I did find reading about her book, her late-life memoir, "Living With a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth About Everything" in which she approached what might be interpreted as her religious experience kind of amusing. I noted that one thing was sure about her, she knew how to sell a book.
Just the end of last February I slammed a disappointingly lazy, typical, lazy Lynn White inspired and very sloppy conception of human history, religion and the extinction crisis that she had in The Guardian. I'll not quote from it here.
While I believe she'll probably have made her own peace with her career and life as she was surprised to find there is an afterlife, I don't feel any problem with what I've written about her. I do admire some of her work, especially when her ideology was not foremost in what she did. I think she was involved in some projects that may have seemed like a good idea at the time but which were anything from meaningless to unhelpful, such as the Socialist Scholars Conference which morphed into the comic "Left Forum." Marginally more respectable she was involved with the abortive Students for a Democratic Society. She had a typical white American lefty cum Marxist set of blinders for the mass murder that the Cultural Revolution in China was, something which is still typical of many of the scribbling class white lefties of that and the next generation. Along with my realization that anyone murdered under Stalinism was as murdered as anyone murdered under fascism or Nazism came a realization that that was as true of those murdered in China, Cambodia, etc. under those variations on Marxism, I've never looked back from that experience of shame and I never overlook it in others. Especially those in the scribbling, babbling, publishing classes. I could go on with other projects.
In the end I think her major work praised above has more than its match in far lesser read, far lesser promoted books, not a few of them from People who lived in those conditions and documented them from their own despair. Though they didn't have lunch with Lewis Lapham but she did write her book and I honor its intention and whatever influence it had. I think, unfortunately, her other activities did nothing to enhance its influence in politics and life.
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