The Galli Report: 02.12.21
The benefits of positive thinking. Mysterious humans. A comedy of anti-racism errors. 8 taboos that are no longer.
The Benefits of Negative Thinking
I’ve never been a fan of “the power of positive thinking.” No question that it helps some people push through some ugly situations. It’s even helped me at times. But all in all, it’s never been as interesting to me as the power of realistic thinking. Such thinking includes the upside of any given situation, yes, but it also frankly concedes the challenges and the fact that some problems may be insurmountable. Thus GR readers can see why I appreciated “The Art of Negativity: On Rejecting Positive Thinking.”
The American ironist James Branch Cabell wrote that: “An optimist believes we live in the best possible of worlds. A pessimist fears that this is true.” Far from the sunny entitlement of life’s Panglossian amblers, to practice the art of negativity is to see the world with darkly artful perception. While a valorization of the negative may be hideously alien to some, its paradox holds cast-iron worth.
People Are Finally a Mystery
The following link puts an exclamation mark on the previous one. But I liked Gary Saul Morson’s “Fyodor Dostoevsky: philosopher of freedom: On the political and moral lessons of Fyodor Dostoevsky” mainly because it helped me understand some of the crazy decisions made by many of Dostoevsky’s characters, while helping me think more about the nature of political freedom.
In fact, people harm themselves for many reasons. They tear at their own wounds and derive a peculiar pleasure from doing so. They deliberately humiliate themselves. To their own surprise, they experience impulses stemming from resentments long suppressed and, as a result, create scandalous scenes or commit horrible crimes. Freud particularly appreciated Dostoevsky’s exploration of the dynamics of guilt. But neither Freud nor most Western readers have grasped that Dostoevsky intended his descriptions of human complexity to convey political lessons. If people are so surprising, so “undefined and mysterious,” then social engineers are bound to cause more harm than good.
A Comedy of Anti-Racism Errors
John McWhorter is a contributing editor to The Atlantic and professor of linguistics at Columbia University. So the following link is not a rant by an unsophisticated white supremacist. In fact, he’s not even white. He’s a mighty frustrated African-American, as is clear in “The Neoracists: A new religion is preached across America. It's nonsense posing as wisdom.” He breaks anti-racism efforts into three waves, the last of which (starting in 2010) “teaches that racism is baked into the structure of society, so whites’ ‘complicity’ in living within it constitutes racism itself, while for black people, grappling with the racism surrounding them is the totality of experience and must condition exquisite sensitivity toward them, including a suspension of standards of achievement and conduct.”
Among his concerns:
Third Wave Antiracism is losing innocent people jobs. It is coloring, detouring and sometimes strangling academic inquiry. It forces us to render a great deal of our public discussion of urgent issues in doubletalk any 10-year-old can see through. It forces us to start teaching our actual 10-year-olds, in order to hold them off from spoiling the show in that way, to believe in sophistry in the name of enlightenment.
The same day I read a story that perfectly illustrated this concern:
In 2019, New York Times reporter Donald McNeil Jr., working as a tour guide for high-school students traveling to Peru (a service apparently offered by the paper), got into an argument with several of them. The debate centered around whether one of the students’ classmates deserved to have been suspended over a video that surfaced of her, as a 12-year-old, saying the N-word. McNeil, according to a statement released by the Times, asked about the context of the word — was she rapping, or quoting a book title, or using the word as a slur?
McNeil’s distinction apparently made little headway with his interlocutors, who accused him of using the term himself. Two weeks ago, the Daily Beast reported on their allegations. At first, Times editor Dean Baquet argued that McNeil’s action was regrettable but that he deserved “another chance” to learn from the mistake. But after 150 Times staffers wrote to express their outrage, McNeil resigned.
As McWhorter is emphatic to note, he has championed the many, many recent statements and actions taken against racism (as do I—just to be clear!). Then again, when things like the McNeil resignation happen, I’m not so much angry as I am bemused. Not because they are not serious, but because they are absurd. They show this type of thinking to be as fragile as powdered snow that falls briefly on a sunny spring day but will in due coarse melt away. In the meantime, it’s just really weird to see.
(Nearly) Forgotten Taboos
Speaking of taboos, here’s a video on “8 Things You Could Do in the Past that You Wouldn’t Do Today.” Fortunately, it’s a little lighter than the above discussion.
Grace and peace,
Mark Galli
www.markgalli.com