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

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.

CommentaryCameron SummersSeptember 29, 2021Negativity, Ethics, Philosophy Comment

What is Modernity?

My worry is that, as alienating and bad as things are now, that the cessation of modernity might be followed by merely swapping one savagery for another. We like to believe that the world is growing less brutal and less violent, but the moral arc of the universe doesn’t bend towards justice: there is no arc. There is no absolute, inevitable progress. Everything that we get, we need to push for, fight for, argue for. It’s possible that the world might be a better and more just place if the modern era had never happened, but it has happened. If it is undone, it will most likely be undone through a great deal of suffering.

In the Empire of Empty Ghosts: On and Against the Emerging New Dualism (Odd Columns, #8)

The solid and the ethereal, though, have traded traits, and the result is something new and unfamiliar. We no longer have the “spiritual” and the “material” – I would argue that what we have is the “informational” and the “totemic”.

The Collapse of Possibility: The Problem of Aesthetics and Ontology in Science Fiction

But all of this is beside the point: the fact that we can pick out two dominant aesthetics in the visual media form of what is supposed to be a “literature of ideas” is a problem. It indicates, if anything, a lack of ideas. If our options are just a visual vocabulary iteration of the old Star Wars vs. Star Trek debate that no one but the people having it are interested in, we've got problems.

Reality Gives Way to the Real: The Epistemic Crisis and the Damaging Omnipresence of the Sublime

While the news media sometimes talks about an Epistemic Crisis, or discusses the caustic effect that social media has on discourse, or features a think piece about how kids these days don't share the values of their elders, et cetera, et cetera. This isn't what I'm talking about, or not the whole thing. I feel that we are in a dangerous and critically important period of epistemic uncertainty. To whit, in addition to the examples that I mention, I want to introduce some anecdotes (which is an ironic move as far as proof goes; more on that some other time.)