The Difference Between Negativity and Critical Thinking

There’s been a lot of talk in the blogosphere recently about the possibility that we’re all just a bunch of complainers. They say that blogworld is an overwhelmingly negative place. We ought to try to be more optimistic and less cynical, they say. I couldn’t disagree more.

Does this highly democratic medium lend itself to unfettered self-expression? Absolutely. Is unfettered self-expression sometimes less than perky? Most definitely. Is it realistic? On the whole, yes.

Here’s a factoid for you. People diagnosed with clinical depression tend to correctly estimate the amount of control they have over external situations, while people who are not depressed tend to overestimate their level of control over those same situations. In other words, our society calls realism unhealthy while holding up delusional positive thinking as a model of health and functionality. How sane is that?

Now, there’s nothing wrong with enthusiasm, optimism, passion or any of the thousands of other things that make a blog truly readable–and life truly livable–day after day. But there’s also nothing wrong with thinking critically and being skeptical about the world. There’s nothing wrong with seeing hypocrisy in a public figure and pointing it out. If we don’t acknowledge problems, what hope have we of solving them to any real degree?

This mush about negativity is the same complaint that we used to hear about the mainstream media. “Doom and gloom sells newspapers,” they said, “so the media paints an inaccurately grim picture of our world.” But if that were true, then bloggers–who do not have the same economic compulsion to fixate on the distasteful–would not be as “negative” as the media.

We write about what we see. And what we see troubles us. After all, we’ve had an incompetent president and a do-nothing Congress for the past six years. North Korea has the bomb and Iran is pursuing it. Microsoft is releasing a new version of Office that is incompatible with previous versions. There is a genocide going on in the Sudan. Dell has bad customer support. Let me see you put a positive spin on any of that and still do right by your readers.

That’s not to say that the world is all doom and gloom. There’s beauty and joy to leaven the complexity and bitterness of this life. But we need to take off the rose-colored glasses and press on. Knowing where things really stand inspires us to work for a better future. A healthy dose of skepticism and self-doubt enhances our efforts because we don’t automatically assume that everything will go as we plan. We must remain skeptical of solutions–be they political, spiritual, social or economic–that seem too good to be true. It’s called critical thinking, and it’s time that we started using it again.