Negative Positive Semantics, III

As much as it may hurt, and seem unjust—sometimes the first thing to do is not to acknowledge the problem.  Sometimes you have to start fixing the problem before you can acknowledge it.

Part of this is simply due to human pride: very few people want to be the bad guy, so if you begin your efforts at persuasion by implying that they are part of the problem, you’re likely to walk into a brick wall.

A personal confession, from a non-morally-inflected situation, may help to illustrate.

Way back in grade school, I found Shakespeare’s history plays boring.  His comedies were delightful; his tragedies were at least interesting; but the histories?  No thanks.

Now I’m dissertating on a group of the history plays and, I promise you, they are very, very interesting.  The details that Shakespeare puts in—the intricate links amid the series I’m working on—the deep philosophical questions—the exploration of human nature—problems, practical and ethical, about how politics works—there’s so much there.  Back when I thought the historical plays were boring, it was simply because I didn’t know enough to appreciate them.

I don’t think, however, that it would have been especially helpful for anyone to tell me to educate myself about them, or to suggest that my inability to appreciate them was indicative of some sort of deficiency on my part.  Those statements would have been true, in the sense that I did need to educate myself on those plays to grasp their beauty and wisdom (I think I can say that without exaggeration), and also in the sense that my inability to understand them was a real deficiency.  But once again, those statements are not the sort that (for most sorry humans like myself) actually motivate change.  They just activate defensiveness.