Words, Words, Words - Issue #6: “Positivity”
Part Six of an Exercise in Amateur Etymology for Practical Use
“Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.” – Philippians 4:8
“Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep.” – Romans 12:15
You won’t find the modern meaning of “positivity” in any dictionary before about 1920, since it came into the psychology lexicon around 1915. Not to be overly curmudgeonly, but I submit, and will soon justify, that the common contemporary meaning of “positivity” is literal nonsense, rising even in some cases to a reversal of the concept implied by its user. In short, “positivity” is a garbage word in common usage and we should consign it to the rubbish heap where it belongs. Lest you think I am now being “negative”, I will claim that I am an optimist of the highest order and the name of this very publication, given in the context of the epigraph, should be a clue that I don’t disagree per se with what people think they mean by their use of “positivity”. There’s something very important about dwelling on the good in life, but the whole realm of what can be loosely called “positive thinking” is utterly misguided, to put it charitably, about how such a practice works.
The goal I have in mind with this series is not pedantry but always practicality. Getting our words straight gets our thoughts straight, and perhaps no concept needs more straightening than the Plague of Platitudinous Internet Positivity.
Before we venture into the importance of (I hope) ditching this word, let’s dig a bit into its history and usage and, by necessity, its antonym, “negativity”. In English, when you want to make an abstract noun out of an adjective, you add the suffix “-ity”. So, let’s start with “positive”, the adjective from which we derive our main word for this piece. The earliest root is the Latin positivus, which means essentially “put into place”. It’s a form of ponere, the verb meaning to place or to position. It moves through the Old French positif in the 13th century to the English “positive”, itself a formal or legal decree set down by some authority. In the 16th century it comes to mean something like “stated without qualification” which then evolved in the 17th century to something like “with total certainty”. We still have this usage today when we say something like, pardon this silly example, “I am positive that the sun will rise tomorrow”. This developed in conjunction with the antonym “negative” which means “expressing denial”. So here we have a centuries long development into what is basically, Yes and No, respectively.
When the concepts of magnetism and electricity began to be explored in a detailed way in the 18th century, polarity came into the picture and we get positive and negative poles. Mathematical concepts around less-than- or more-than-zero developed in tandem with the physics meanings. You might catch already where I am going with this, but somewhere along this developmental chain, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a moral valence got attached to these terms and we started to think “positive” is “good” and “negative” is “bad”. There isn’t anything I can identify readily in the concepts we’ve discussed so far that inherently demands the good and bad dichotomy that sprang up. The best I can speculate is that the mathematical conception of negative being less-than-zero got attached to the idea of nothingness and negation, and hence became “bad” to the common mind. I sort of understand this as I’ve said before and affirm that something is better than nothing, and this to me is axiomatic given that I believe in a benevolent creator God. I see even less of an argument from a hard materialist perspective for making the case for the good/bad meanings, since, for what reason would something be better than nothing without a teleological or meaning-based view of reality? But I digress.
Of course, I am not the keeper of English and I don’t decide what things mean, I can only give my thoughts on usage for the betterment of ourselves and our spheres of the world. Now, I assert that imposing a moral context on both “positive” and “negative” is a foolish exercise and we should dispense with it. I shall presently explain my reasoning.
If Everything Is Positive (Good), Nothing Is
For most of the rest of this discussion I’d like to fluidly interchange the words “good” and “positive”. I think this will be instructive for seeing the sort of ridiculous thing we advocate if we argue for continual “positive thinking”. “Positivity” has a veneer of psychological science to it that I think obscures the irrationality that’s going on behind the scenes in our common speech. Telling someone to think positive thoughts sounds a little bit more respectable than “think only good thoughts”. Of course, it isn’t.
Ironically, modern “positivity” mostly does away with the concept of polarity that birthed the psychological usage. Positive thinking is self-refuting and can be shown with a syllogism:
1. Something is positive by comparison to its negative counterpart
2. Common advice: “We should only be ‘positive’ and consciously ignore the ‘negative’”
3. “Positivity” has no meaning, since “negativity” is forbidden
Now, you can reasonably argue that “negativity” is a known quantity and we need not experience it to know that “positivity” is superior. Fair enough. But there’s a fly in the ointment. That fly is commonly referred to as “real life”.
Let’s switch now to “good” and “bad” to see if we can’t flesh things out a bit. Let me restate the syllogism with the new words. I think it will be illuminating.
1. We know what is good by knowledge of its opposite, bad
2. Restated common advice: “We should only think or feel or do what is good”
3. Good has no meaning, since anything bad should be excluded
I see at least two problems here. The first is that by deliberately ignoring what is bad, #3 above manifests and “good” just becomes a baseline level of experience upon which the inescapable dichotomy of good and bad will reassert itself. Psychologists have various names for this in different contexts but the so-called “hedonic treadmill” is an illustrative example. What that paradigm refers to is that the excitement and “happiness” brought on by acquisition of a novel thing, or a new experience, produces over time acclimation to the experience or thing and becomes the new baseline. From that point you need something else to keep raising the bar, else you fall into “unhappiness”. Smart phones are an obvious reference point. There’s a new phone seemingly every few months and when you get it, it is the coolest thing you ever possessed. But you quickly get used to it and even get to a point where you feel like you can’t do without it and when the new one gets released, if you can’t have it, you become unhappy. I don’t think this is a fatalistic proposition, even if some do, and it can be consciously avoided with proper disciplines, but it is in fact descriptive of how many people feel and behave.
I propose that the same thing happens with “positive thinking”. We get used to the emotional high and then when the second problem I alluded to rears its head we are left tumbling down the mountainside of the peak where we just so recently basked in the glory of the ostensibly omnipresent Positivity gods.
The second problem of which I speak is this:
It is impossible to avoid everything in life that is bad
Try. This is what the common positive thinking advice essentially amounts to. Ignore or deny the “negative”. Or alchemically transmute it into Golden Positivity. Whatever you must do, avoid the bad. Well, you can’t. And when you inevitably fail, you’ll think you just didn’t “positive think” hard enough. Dog died? Well, surely there’s a silver lining here that if I just perfected my positive thinking I could get around feeling bad.
What is bad and wrong and evil and tragic and horrible, and any other dark adjective you can think of, is woven in to the fabric of reality. I happen to think this is the result of Adam’s sin and is not the final word nor the original intent, but whatever you think about that, it seems categorically insane to me to deny the role of badness in the world. And that’s what positivity platitudes ask you to do. Put away your intellect and your experience and just manipulate the world through the unlimited power of your thoughts. Again, you are free to try. You cannot do it. All we do as human beings is limited. The neo-Gnostic idea of your thoughts creating reality is so much hokum that easily disproven by just jumping off a three-story building and believing you can fly. Reality and gravity don’t care what you believe. And if you have the notion that maybe it’s because you just don’t know enough of The Secret (pun intended) to make you fly by the power of thought, you are perhaps already too far gone, bound to a lunatic false religion with an idol of yourself at its center.
You Cannot Directly Control Your Emotions
Another problem with advising people to be “positive” is that it confuses the respective function of thoughts, feelings, and actions. I assert that emotions cannot be directly altered in the moment. Emotions are a pre-thought manifestation in the present of a past pattern of action and thought. What I mean is, how you feel at any given moment is a largely subconscious reaction to a given situation, grounded in how you have been formed by the overall tone of your thought-life and actions. You are a “type” of person formed by your thoughts experiences and actions and that determines your emotional response. Now this is alterable, but only over time and is always prior to the situation at hand. If you have let a pattern of angry thoughts and expressions dominate your past, it does very little to try and grit your teeth and not flip the bird to the guy that cuts you off in traffic. That seems like a somewhat trivial example, but I’ll leave you to extrapolate it out to even potentially fatal atrocities.
All too often, an advocate of “positive thinking” will tell someone experiencing a difficult situation and having painful emotional reaction to it that they just need to “look on the bright side” or “find the lesson in it” or “accentuate the positive” or some other banality. The issue is that, in that moment, it’s not possible for the person addressed. So, what the advice amounts to is a condemnation. The thing not being said, very loudly, is “you should not feel the way you do and that makes you unacceptable”. It’s a rejection of the other person. And the issue is that these tidbits of so-called wisdom are doled out on the internet without any knowledge of the sufferer’s situation. It is not possible to behave compassionately toward someone you don’t understand and we can barely know each other at all through internet advice columns and tweets, etc.
Towards a Theory of Appropriateness
I’d like to introduce an idea now that I plan to develop more fully in my coming work. I’m calling this concept “appropriateness” and I think it plays a crucial role in much of life and especially with the razor’s edge we walk with in giving advice or how we handle our relationships with others who are suffering.
The basic premise is that a situation or relationship or object of work, what have you, any phenomenon, calls out to us with an “ought”. Said another way, there is an appropriate contextual response to a situation that is increasingly clear to us as we align ourselves through discipline to the highest good.
What I’ve just said is a little technical, and perhaps still imprecise, but I want to use it to deal with St. Paul’s injunction from the letter to the Romans in the epigraph: “Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep”.
If you are with someone in a close relationship, you will be able to feel, for lack of better words, what the right move is if your fundamental orientation is what is good for them. This is essentially what It means to love them. It may be that in the face of tragedy they simply need your physical presence, not a platitude or some hollow advice to “make it better”. It may be that they are way out of whack and need admonishment and “tough love” to get on the right path. It may be that something great has happened and they need you to stifle your selfish envy and celebrate with them. There is no way to prescribe a course of action universally. You must know them and yourself and the situation well and intimately. I believe this is what Paul is getting at with his statement.
To focus in on the weeping portion, we would do well to not rush into “positivity” to try to “fix” a bad situation. In addition to appropriate actions, we can discipline ourselves in a way that we inevitably have the appropriate emotional responses to happenings in our lives. Sometimes, often even, there are scenarios where it is entirely appropriate to mourn and cry and grieve. Death is an obvious one, but there are many things that happen that are a categorically bad. And here is my fundamental complaint against blanket positivity culture. It denies our need to cry out in agony. It denies that often this is the right response. In the face of abuse and violence and injustice and all manner of evil, one is seriously deranged to behave and feel otherwise.
I think that this is what the “positivity” cult inevitably leads to. It seeks to bury the tragedy inherent to living in a broken world. And fundamentally this is a denial of the nature of reality itself, said denial which, in a grand irony, is the supreme “negativity”. In offering positivity platitudes in the face of legitimate suffering I have negated the incontrovertible truth of suffering that confronts us in our lived experience, and thus existence itself.
I don’t say all suffering is needed, or genuine, or that we always have our heads screwed on straight, or that we aren’t sometimes unnecessarily playing the victim. Only we and our rightly-oriented loved ones can know these things. I merely submit that approaching these very real evils armed with feeble “bright side” platitudes is a recipe for despair. It refuses to acknowledge what we are and how we experience life.
Contemplating the Good, and Emotions Revisited
I’d like to now acknowledge, and I hope refine, the kernel of truth that exists in “positive thinking” culture. This truth is that what we allow to dwell in our minds, and what we intentionally set our minds on, will shape our character. And our character thus formed will determine our emotional reactions and our actual behavior in response to the vagaries of life in the future.
This is where a list like the one Paul gives in Philippians comes in handy. We simply must be more precise in what we seek for our thought-life than “positive thinking” can offer. There is little offered in that shallow culture that informs us of what we should rightly contemplate. Take Paul’s list instead: true, just, honest, pure, lovely, good report, virtuous, praiseworthy. Now these are qualities we can sink our teeth into. Take something like Achilles Lamenting the Death of Patroclus by Gavin Hamilton, reproduced here:
This is a man in anguish over the death of his beloved friend. But there is redemptive beauty in the suffering that is communicated straight to our souls through the work of the artist. This is something lovely, though born of tragedy. Dwelling upon such objects of beauty can form our spirit in ways that lead naturally to compassion for others. No platitudes and “positivity” needed. Of course there are instances of less tragic things, Monet’s Water Lillies for instance, that we can place before our minds, should we be prone to despairing over a more tragic artwork. There are even triumphal and majestic pieces like Handel’s Messiah. Only we can know what is appropriate for us based on the wise counsel we take from our conscience and teachers like Paul.
The point I’m driving at is that we indeed can form, indirectly, our spontaneous actions and feelings for the good. No “positivity” required.
So, I somewhat humbly submit that we dispense with “positivity”, and instead let our minds rest in the things which express that perennial longing for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Then, we will shine a pure light into our hearts and the hearts of others, unobscured by conceit and the pseudo-wisdom of trying to make reality conform to our misguided conceptions of “positivity”.
We can practice accepting and appreciating life and others as they are. The fruit of this pursuit will be a life lived the way it is meant to be: with hope and compassion and faith and grace and love. I can’t think of much better than that.