Negative insight

“No is, generally speaking, a better word than Yes.”

 --Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman

I’ve been very happy to hear and read responses to my most recent crumb from a few readers— a couple who replied privately, and a couple who commented publicly. All of these have been thought-provoking, and the most recent (which is no longer so recent), provoked such general and extended thoughts that they have become a crumb of their own.

 

The commenter, who identifies himself as “Lars Schmiel” (a disguise I’m sure no one can penetrate) writes:

 

You ask us to take your list as a whole before we make our individual objections. Yet I find that while I agree with most, maybe all, of your particulars, there's something in the big picture that makes me uneasy. The issue is that your values, at least as expressed here, seem largely negative. That is, you know better what you don't want than what you do.

This is clearest in the final item, "a desire to raise children..." where you mention only things to be avoided -- neither fetish and coddle, nor hold under constant surveillance -- nothing about what is to be enjoyed, encouraged, celebrated. Yes, we can infer what you like, but why should we have to infer? …

 

The comment goes on a good deal longer, discussing in detail certain list items. I have replied to the rest within the comment thread, but I want here to reply to the central point.

Lars is right: this is very much a list of values in opposition—and opposition on both sides: it's not this and also not that. Why is it so grounded in rejection? And can rejection be the basis for a project so basically optimistic and hopeful as the one I am trying to imagine?

 

I feel that I can’t separate the fact of having a worldview from the fact of being in opposition to ideas around me—ideas that are so loudly and repeatedly proclaimed, which so fill up the available space of thought and discourse that it takes an act of rebellion and imagination to discover that there is anywhere else left to think and speak from. It was through the feeling of opposition to these surrounding ideas that I became aware of my worldview as something distinct, particular, and significant to who I am and who I wish to be in community with.

 

This is not so unusual. Jesus’s teachings are, to a large extent, rejections of the error and corruption that he sees around him. One feels especially in all his lines about “this generation” and “this wicked generation” and “O generation of vipers” his sense of being surrounded by folly and error, at war with bad ideas and wrong interpretations. In this, as in many things, Jesus is echoing the tone of the majority of the old testament prophets. The Bhagavad Gita speaks more serenely (because it is more at peace with the fallenness of the world; because it takes that condition as natural and necessary; because it is not millenarian) but its message is also one of rejection of false ideas, sloughing off of illusions, errors, unhealthy attachments. Ecclesiastes is in yet a different tone from all these, but it too is about rejection.

 

Why is wisdom so negative?

 

Long ago, in the spring of 2018, when I was first writing these crumbs, I wrote, but never posted, a short one that began like this:

 

Truth is not contained in propositions. Truth is not contained anywhere, for it is not a substance but an action. It is the action of casting off false understanding. Afterwards, we cling to the words that refuted the false understanding, because we have nothing else to cling to. But these words are not the truth. The truth already lies behind us, in the moment of recognition. As long as we can remember our former illusions, how they compelled us and limited us, we can experience again the sublime moment of casting them off. But soon we forget….

 

There is a form of theology called apophatic theology that seeks to approach God by negation. The idea is that we can say nothing positive about God. We can describe Them only by saying what They are not, by rejecting false descriptions. I haven’t studied apophatic theology, but I find the idea compelling. Claims about what God is always seem to fall short—infinitely short. Falling short is the best they do—often they’re decidedly wrong, dangerous, reductive, empty. By describing God, we make Them into a figure of our petty imaginations. But therefore there really are useful things to say about what God is not.

 

The problems we face in trying to describe or respond to or think about God are the same ones we face in trying to describe or respond to or think about the world. In both cases, we have to do with something vastly bigger than ourselves and beyond our powers to comprehend, something that can be only glimpsed and groped for, never held in the mind’s hand. (Maybe these are not even two different cases. The pantheists say that God is the world. I want to say something more like God is actuality. But this of course at best falls infinitely short.)

 

So my list of values is mostly in the negative in order to say as little as necessary. By saying how we should not raise children, I leave open endless possibilities of how we should or could or might. But if I said how we should raise them, I would be negating all the infinite other ways of going about it. The purpose of the list is to carve out a space where we are free to try things, not to tell us in advance what we ought to try.

 

The purpose is also to gather people who share a certain outlook, and a negative outlook is much more capacious than a positive one. My images of what sort of a life I want depend on very personal likes and dislikes, childhood, upbringing, cultural milieu, temperament. The people who share those will be very few and very similar to me. Whereas, to the extent that I have seen clearly, anyone may see what I see in the world and long to escape what I long to escape. A diagnosis is always much more generally acceptable, for it is more generally right, than a prescription.

*

 

It strikes me that the whole thrust of these crumbs over the past 15 months can be framed in terms of this distinction between a negative outlook and a positive one.

 

Like so many of us, I’ve been dreaming of community all my life. But I always imagined it in terms of a gathering of friends and family (and friends of friends, family of friends, etc.): a gathering of just exactly those people who I most easily got along with. One way to say this is that I imagined a community of people who shared a positive vision of life.

 

Last June, when I returned to these crumbs after a two-and-a-half-year hiatus, the basic insight that led me back was that a gathering of friends was not enough: that, even if it could form in the first place (which is not at all certain), it would be too small and too homogenous to be the kind of little world I’d imagined, to hold inside it a different way of life, and thus to hold itself together: to last. And it would be too private, too particular, too irrelevant to the society around it to engage with and do something for that society and draw more people into its orbit and so become politically or socially or economically meaningful beyond its own narrow borders. So it would not satisfy the longings that inspired it, and like all the utopian communes of the past two hundred years, from Brook Farm and the Fourier Phalanxes on down, it might be a beautiful act of resistance, but finally it would be a failed one. And I did not want a failed act, however beautiful. I wanted a successful one—or at least one whose failure was not a foregone conclusion. That meant there needed to be many more people of many more kinds.

 

But there also had to be something shared among all these people—and not just because that’s necessary for collaboration, but because there was some insight or critique or perspective that was fundamental to the whole project, without which there just was no project. For a long time I struggled with what that insight/critique/perspective was, and I was troubled, because although I knew it must not be too constraining, I also felt that it could not be too simple, that it was not just one or two axioms, and that if you said too little about it, it was apt to be entirely misunderstood. Because everywhere around me I saw (as I still see) people who had got their hands on a shard of truth and fused it with bad ideas (which for various reasons they couldn’t bear to let go of) and made of it a fetish that gleamed because there was a little truth in it, and dragged them down into the swamp because it was weighted down with confusion and misunderstanding and dogmatism. And I could see that this same process was very likely to happen to any bit truth that anyone put forward as a cause or a cure, because the bad ideas that filled the air had the peculiar chemical property that they would almost instantly bind with any fragment of insight or perception—just as the silvery, liquid-like surface of elemental lithium when it is freshly cut almost instantly turns dull and worm-colored as it bonds with the oxygen in the air. So whatever it was that this group shared had to have a certain wholeness to it (even if it could never be wholly or exactly articulated); it had to be a total response to the world with no raw surfaces for bad ideas to cling to. 

 

And yet, it had to leave room for every sort of person, every temperament, every cultural background. So it had to be a negative vision, not a positive one.