“Those with an intellectual orientation are often the worst offenders. Noting steady progress seems a bit, well, dumb. The intellectual glamor is always to be found in the negative. As my hero John Stuart Mill lamented, “it is thought necessary of any man who knows anything of the world to think ill of it”.
I don’t want to downplay the dangers of our polarized culture and politics. I worry a lot about that, in fact. There are bad things being said and done on many fronts. But I’ve come to believe that our salvation will come not from engaging with the nonsense of the culture warriors, but in acknowledging and accelerating the common sense of most of our fellow citizens”
- from Richard Reeves
I’m attracted to this line of thought. I’m prone to an overly-online cynicism; I’ve picked up the kind of journalistic defaulting to negativity and a focus on the worst wrongs being done as oppossed to the good quietly unfolding. My proclivities need reshaping in this respect. I want to become someone attending more often to the good, in part because I think it may well be in sharing stories of goodness that we recover from a sense of paralysis induced by too much time spent on news websites barraging us with negativity.
Reeves' sentiment here pairs well with this On Being interview with David Bornstein on ‘our lives with the news.’