The Gift of the Negative: You Don't Have To Be Positive

A man never in danger of being too positive, Jean Baudrillard, pictured here putting forward the exact energy I’m going for in this piece.

Another round of student papers, another cascade of thoughts that I never anticipated. It’s one of the joys of teaching – the way that the students always find a way to surprise you. Of course, sometimes something comes up and sends you hurtling off in a direction that no one anticipated, so you have to write a couple thousand words and put it up on your website to get the thought straight.

No? Just me?

I imagine not, but this is where I put my thoughts, so I’m going to clear a space for this.

There is a particular mindset that is often extolled as the key to success, something that people have to have to be victorious in whatever battles they have in front of them. I am speaking, of course, of positive thinking.

Image taken from Persona 2 (I think…Innocent Sin?) while this game was never terribly popular, this is the sort of sentiment that pervaded the media of my youth. Perhaps I’m simply reacting against it.

Motivational speakers, gurus, luminaries of all kinds, will talk your ear off about how important it is to keep a positive mindset and push negative thoughts away. Only by staying positive, they say, can you achieve anything. This often carries with it – to the sorts of people who tend to write about this sort of thing – that you should dismiss criticism, that people who would question your course of action are simply “haters.”

I was first accused of being a hater by a student in the Fall of 2010. I admitted to it immediately. In many ways, one could easily say that I still am. The student, needless to say, didn’t know how to respond. Apparently, to be a “hater” was the worst thing in the world, and someone taking that title and made a badge out of it was not something that he was really prepared to consider. Allow me to explain: positivity is neither good nor bad, nor is negativity good or bad – though, I would be willing to venture, given how negativity is viewed as solely bad, it is more useful to be thoughtfully negative than thoughtlessly positive, which is often just a means of enforcing uniformity.

Let’s take an inventory. Positive feelings are pleasant, they help us get out of bed in the morning, they help motivate us to achieve great things – well, most of the time, and spite can be a hell of a motivator – and they make us more outgoing and energetic. Spreading positivity is done by making other people feel good, with gifts and compliments.

Negative feelings, on the other hand, are rooted in the unpleasant and unwanted. Grief, sorrow, anger, pain, disdain, fear and doubt– these are not fun to undergo. Would it not be better to replace them, the thinking goes, with joy, generosity, love, enthusiasm, contentment, and confidence?

Frankly, no.

Positivity, while not itself bad, is dangerously incomplete on its own. The phrase “toxic positivity” exists for a reason, after all. No mood is permanent, and when the indefatigably positive hit a setback, they tend to shatter. They also tend to be exhausting to spend time with.

Let’s stick with the theme of reversals, and start at the end: confidence. This is tied in with the dismissal of all criticism. It views feedback as an attack and, as a result, refuses to grow and improve. One might point out that true confidence would involve a discerning eye to sort the good criticism from the bad.

This is just moving the goalposts. One might as well say that “true doubt” involves the wisdom to zero in on one’s own faults and the motivation to eliminate them.

Also, think about it: sometimes you have to embrace the strange and unusual. Despite the character’s gloomy outlook, Lydia Deetz here represents a favorite character archetype.

And if fear is so terrible, then why does every culture seemingly have a season dedicated to horror – the time around Christmas in England and high summer in Japan. Here in the United States, we’re at the start of our own so-called “spooky season” (though, I must admit, I detest the word “spooky,” personally). Every culture seems to set aside a period for ghost stories, embracing fear, sorrow, and grief.

We have a hunger for the negative. Why else would we have such a time? And why would we tell stories of tragic falls from grace and inevitable misfortune? Is it solely what Freud called the Id, Jung called the Shadow, and Stephen King referred to as the alligators underneath the trap door?

What is this thing in the darkness that we must acknowledge as our own?

The most common theory about these cultural practices are that it’s a sort of pressure release valve. Engaging in this is a way to let darker impulses out to play so that they can remain safely bottled up elsewhere. You watch an awful horror movie with friends so you don’t make a terrible joke at your Great Aunt Cassandra’s funeral – even though she really should have seen that coming.

Of course, what put these darker impulses in there to begin with? That’s still the question. Are we, as Hobbes asserts, just bad from the very beginning? Or is something else at work?

Look, longtime readers know we take a strong anti-essentialist stance. People aren’t inherently good or bad. People are just people. In fact, we would also state that these impulses aren’t good or bad, it’s the context that they find themselves in that defines them as such.

Negativity becomes negativity because our culture defines it as such. Every thought and emotion gets sorted into positive and negative, and different cultures sort them differently. Sometimes this is fine; at other times it’s not (I’d say that one of our major political parties turning into a death cult is a miscategorization of positive and negative, personally).

Okay, you may say, but what about the things that our culture defines as negative? We might have to play games of grief, sorrow, and wrath to make it through stressful times with grace, but surely those things cannot be good in and of themselves. Shouldn’t we avoid the negative within reason?

Let me counter with a thought experiment.

This negative vision is what the Islamic figure of Al-Khidr, pictured here in a 17th-century Mughal painting (photographed by wikimedia commons user “Seeroos123BigBoy” and used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license), represented. Eventually he was transposed into Arthuriana and became the Green Knight.

What would an ethic of negativity be? Not an inverted or perverted ethic, but an ethic aimed at the same end goals – to live a good life in the company of others doing the same – that makes use principally of negative tools.

First, let us acknowledge that negativity is focused on the diminishing and the absent. On not acting instead of acting. Ergo, it can be thought of as an ethic of discretion. We can use this to limit the perceived harmfulness of criticism: a critic who practices discretion does not punch down – they offer guidance and a way to cut away that which is harmful.

Second, if we think of the positive as being the domain of all of the traditional virtues, perhaps some unorthodox virtues will present themselves. Maybe some things normally thought of as vices can be recontextualized to become virtues. Let’s start with what Dante thought was the worst vice: betrayal.

If betrayal is never good and virtuous, then no one is allowed to step out of line or walk away from a bad situation. Consider whistle-blowers, who expose injustice. Consider people like the Saint Patrick Battalion, Irish soldiers during the Mexican-American War who decided they didn’t want to serve a colonial war machine and switched sides. When one is in service to something unjust, betrayal becomes a virtue.

Of course, it might be easy to simply accuse me of that ancient intellectual vice, sophistry, to write this sort of thing. After all, Plato mentions at least one Sophist who wrote a text called “The Encomium of Helen,” praising the woman whose betrayal started the Trojan war.

To this I would reply: so?

Look, certain things are non-negotiable. Murder, cannibalism, rape, and so on are wrong, yes, but I feel like just about everything else is contingent. Beyond the ground-floor level ethical requirements for staying a part of society, almost everything is negotiated and constantly under adjustment and recreation.

By dismissing the negative, we surrender important parts of what makes us human. We have been doing this for ages, and it seems to me that it would be much better to consider the alternative than endlessly repeat the same set of moves that have failed us in the past. If anything is at all relative, wouldn’t a bit of sophistry be justifiable?

Look, before anyone says anything, I’ve never read Hegel, and I don’t really have the space on my to-read list. I’m full up.

If you disagree with me, I would like to introduce you to another negative. Key to much of post-Hegelian philosophy is the concept of the dialectic. In the dialectic, a positive statement – a thesis – is confronted with it’s opposite, generally a negative statement – an antithesis – and through conflict, competition, and negotiation the two dismember one another and produce a hybrid, or sharply diverged, survivor – the synthesis.

While I’m more invested in the negative than I properly should be, I’m not beyond hearing someone out if they want to disagree. So, if you disagree, speak up in the comments, and let’s synthesize.

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