Post #38: The Positive in the Negative

17 June 2023

Negativity has few friends, and no wonder: in meditator’s terms it is an impurity or defilement on the mind, in Stoical terms a failure of character, in secular terms decidedly unattractive to others and burdensome to oneself. As we think of the world, so we color it, and the darker and bloodier hues we may employ will not make for a very hospitable effect; they also have a way of spreading from one part of the picture to others, often until they have shaded the whole thing with their tendentious tones and tinges. A persistently negative sort must be prepared to spend much time alone, and to reap all the bitter harvest that comes from disconcerting and even outright repelling others. A recipe for a happy life it is not, and one can easily see the temptation to invert everything and live, as far as humanly possible, by positive judgments alone.

(One might object here that our habit of dividing the world into dualities in this manner does no justice to their inner nature, which is more unified. Thus the logic of the cosmic Yin-Yang wherein seeming opposites are revealed as containing each other. There is much to this objection, taken as a warning that the distinctions we impose to describe and discuss the world are ours, not those of the world. At the same time, our distinctions are far from arbitrary; at bottom they all come down to the most primal one between life and death, and so long as we retain our inborn preference for the first, dualities have their validity as being all, however indirectly, reflections of the guiding light whereby sentient existence must steer so long as it has not shed its interested perspective.)

To return to the case against negativity, it looks as open-and-shut as any—and still there is another side to it. All criticism presupposes easy relations with negativity, all trenchant wit requires at least a good dose, and humor would be unthinkable without it, especially in its darker registers, which are often the funniest. Under the highly civilized conditions in many parts of the world today (by historical standards, I mean, not ideal ones), it may be possible to get by on positive thinking alone; but how our ancestors could have possibly prevailed against much longer and steeper odds with such a blinkered perspective (unless sheltered by special circumstances and social deference, as in the case of protected classes such as recognized monastics and the like) is much harder to see. We did not evolve our arsenal of negativities to spoil the parade of a perfect creation; it developed in tandem with how things happen to be East of Eden, whether we like it or not.

Saints and sages, the enlightened and the liberated, may tell a very different story, and I will not challenge them. They are out of my league, and I have no judgments to make of the higher truths they proclaim to a fallen world. All I will say is that, as I understand the logic of their eminent position, their perspectives are precisely not constrained—however true they may prove in some ultimate sense—by the imperatives of survival and procreation that have shaped the instincts of more ordinary human animals during two billion years of life on this planet. One may deplore the results to which this conditioning has given rise, and I do not dispute that it would be desirable to escape from them; but that jail-break, if possible at all, is no weekend excursion, but a fundamental departure from all that otherwise defines our lives here below the vast skies and the starry heavens.

The Dhamma—“this abstruse Teaching that goes against the worldly stream” (Majjhima Nikaya 26:19), see Post #8—does point very much in a supra-mundane direction, towards a radical break with the fecal dimension, one might say, and thus with life as we know it (see Post #3). I have that most radical aspect of the Path well in mind, the royal road leading up into the mountains (#3 again), towards the clouds and the very sun itself (as Plato puts it in his Allegory of the Cave), but my own work is on the footpaths in the valley, near the marshlands, with all the limitations that implies for my point of view.

To focus on the positive in other people may be excellent advice for holding on to one’s sanity as a gregarious creature that cannot do without others, either physically or emotionally; but this is such vital advice, it seems to me, precise because the unattractive features of others are often so eye-catching that they threaten to drown out everything else. A negative caricature can in many cases produce an instantly recognizable effect with a few quick strokes, whereas a nuanced portrait might take hours, and a positive one would perhaps be unachievable without egregious falsifications and omissions. That the negative angle leaves out much as well, and distorts the rest, remains undisputed; its justification is economy, not accuracy, and nobody has ever proposed it as a salutary way of life.

Say what one may about the importance of outlook and attitude in a world to which we only ever have access from a particular angle (which is not to say that higher truths do not exist, only that we must glimpse them as reflections in a looking glass, not eye-to-eye, at least not in our current condition), I see no way how consistent positive thinking, to the exclusion of the negative, could ever succeed without constantly correcting the evidence by wishful thinking and denial in all directions. Yes, we make the world with our thoughts, and we can paint it only in pastel pink and baby blue if we so desire; some such fabrications may even be beautiful—the blue seas and skies of Greece at rose-fingered dawn, for example. But the Greeks had the darker aspects of Homer and their tragedians to keep the beauty in perspective and not mistake it for the whole picture, or even the preponderant part.

Given the orientation outlined above, it is hardly surprising that I would be made uncomfortable, sometimes to the point of aggression, by environments in which the positive is made to predominate too much, or where an attempt is made to crowd out the negative altogether, as not worthy of existence in such rarified settings. I have sought out those environs myself at times and cannot complain of my discomforts there; I might even go further and anticipate, with some sympathy, the diagnosis that my more aspirational brothers and sisters on the Path would probably make of my negativist stirrings, that is, just too damn many impurities remaining on a hard-drive that has still not been cleaned or defragmented nearly enough. If I could not see that myself, I probably would not keep meditating.

As a creature with a worldlier outlook than theirs, I cannot help feeling that we need the element of realism very urgently to check our otherwise dangerous proclivity towards all manner of fantastic imaginings and wild flights of fancy. The salt of realism stings and, in excess, ruins even the best of meals; but where it is left out altogether, something is palpably missing and the result is usually bland and unappetizing. Not for nothing did Jesus liken his faithful to the salt of the earth.

Even at the risk of looking a case of arrested spiritual development in the eyes of my more advanced fellow-travelers (I salute them!), I confess that unduly rose-tinted vistas in adult life make me think of sets in an elaborate production for the stage, beautiful perhaps in a stylized way, but artificial and more than a little misleading. I can enjoy the show, but I would not make my home there, nor encourage others to do so. Scenes of only blacks and grays I would not find alluring, but without some shadows in the colorful picture for contrast and definition—a properly set black-point, so to speak—nothing comes out looking quite right. The effect may feel heavenly to some, but from my angle it just too otherworldly to be reassuring or pacifying, and it puts me on edge instead.

(To Jeremy R.)