Criticism and praise

New Year's reset (+ being mean to your parents and what's wrong with the left)

I know that feeling like you’re reverting to a worse version of yourself when you go home for the holidays is a pretty ubiquitous experience, but that certainly doesn’t make it any less shitty. I’ve found myself on the verge of googling “how to stop being mean to your parents” more than once this winter break. The dissonance between the person I want to be and the person looking back at me in my childhood bedroom mirror coils unpleasantly in the pit of my stomach. I try to be gentle, patient, and forgiving, but I can’t help criticizing every little thing my family members do. I find that I’m hard in all the places I want to be soft. I know the rigid branch is the branch that breaks, but I’m still struggling to find flexibility.

The sense of confinement when I’m home, the too-short temper, and the tendency to vent my frustrations on my family—just because they’re there and because I trust they’ll love me regardless—are absolutely not new. But in the transition from adolescence to young adulthood, and especially in the past year or two, I’ve watched my impulse to criticize take on a different shape: not random outbursts of emotion, but proper arguments. A systematic I-know-you’re-wrong-here’s-why. My parents’ idiosyncratic habits bother me less than they used to, but I catch myself giving in to the urge to lecture them. The distance between my brother’s politics and my own has always been hard to swallow, but in a way, arguing with him is more tempting now; we’re both more informed and emotionally regulated than we were at 16, and so convincing each other feels within reach. Of course, arguing rarely works as intended, and the outcome is generally that our dinner-table conversations raise everybody’s blood pressure and change nobody’s mind.

I resent the arguer in me, but sometimes she takes over like the wolf under the full moon. I’ve tried to subdue her with self-control, to bite my tongue instead of biting everyone’s head off. But time and time again, I give in. Being the thought police is a full-time job, and it’s no fun at all. In high school, I could chalk the critical impulse up to my being generally hormonal and insecure. Teenagers suck, but it’s because being a teenager sucks! Now, it feels like I have no excuse.

A few weeks ago, Zed said something that burrowed into my brain and refuses to leave. We were soft-arguing about critical theory—which I’ve been studying in grad school—and they told me their disillusionment comes from the fact that critical theory rigorously dissects humanity’s failings but loses sight of what redeems us. I think their exact words were that critical theory as a system of thought has trouble integrating truth and the remarkable success of human inquiry. Truth and the remarkable success of human inquiry.

Throughout most of undergrad, I felt that my own worldview and the way I was being taught to think—or my education and my schooling, in the Mark Twain sense—were complementary. I am less sure now. The conversation with Zed crystallized this nagging feeling I’ve had that spending all my time in an academic space focused on constant questioning, deconstructing, and critiquing is distorting the way I move through the world, including the way I interact with other people. Or at least, it isn’t helping to balance my worldview. Criticism has become the default mode my brain works in, and my academic environment is one of factors encouraging that.

The best thing about my undergrad was that it taught me to ask questions, argue rigorously, and think about society in terms of structures of power without elevating critical thought above every other way of knowing. This is why I will never shut up about PoK¹: because it placed the poetic, the erotic, and the mystical on equal footing with empiricism and rational analysis. The dictionary tells me the opposite of criticism is praise. If criticism means critique and praise means prayer, then in undergrad I got to practice both: I learned how to construct a good argument and how to surrender to the unknowable, how to speak and how to listen, how to stand up and how to kneel.

My housemates taught me a similar kind of balance. I had never been part of a group of people who were so fiercely analytical and also so sensitive and filled with wonder. Our house was alive with debate and with song. We discussed politics and read Mary Oliver poems to each other with the same sincerity. I learned that questioning, deconstructing, and critiquing feel good when those acts are steeped in curiosity and love for the world; I worry that in grad school, I’ve been forgetting this.

Obviously, critical thinking is valuable. I think life would be bleak and humanity’s prognosis not particularly good if we didn’t learn to challenge the institutions that structure our reality and to question our inheritance, both personal and political. I think shared questioning is an essential pathway to growth and to finding truth, and that in the right form, it can make our relationships richer and more generative. What I want to push back against is the idea that critical thinking is exclusively and everywhere the right orientation to have toward the world.

I think it’s dehumanizing to move through life without ever taking off the critical glasses—or at the very least, it’s stressful, and it unnecessarily closes off whole spheres of emotion and experience that are otherwise open to us. You have to take a step back from reality to be able to critically appraise it; gaining critical distance is valuable, but I also want to be able to immerse myself in my reality, to lose myself in it. This is why I always come back to Alan Watts: because he so elegantly captures the idea that you can’t surrender to experience while analyzing it at the same time. Analysis, which is ego-action, by definition can’t co-exist with experience, which has no self.² You need to be able to switch off the analyzing brain to be fully in the present moment, to feel awe, and to properly do the most important things, like read poetry and have sex and pray.

There’s also a tradeoff between critically analyzing and appreciating. There’s a lot of bad in the world to condemn, but there’s also so much good to celebrate—so much kindness, ingenuity, beauty, miraculous good luck, and, yes, the remarkable success of human inquiry. It’s reductive to focus only on where we’ve gone wrong.

I want to be an observer of humanity, but also a part of it! I want to be able to step back and see, but not so far that I can no longer reach out and touch what’s in front of me! And I don’t want to gain critical distance at the expense of the closeness of my relationships.

At the beginning of Pure Colour—yes, I am talking about this again—Sheila Heti sets out the typology that structures the rest of the novel philosophically: every person is born a bear, a fish, or a bird. Bears are protectors, funnelling their love toward the small set of people closest to them. Fish are humanitarians, concerned with justice and the good of the shoal. And birds are artists and critics, surveying the world aesthetically from on high, attracted to “beauty, order, harmony, and meaning.” The bird’s life is an elevated but lonely one, and it’s a prospect that scares me.

The driving question in Pure Colour, as I read it, is this: how to "find the right distance from everything in life... To stand at the right distance, like God standing back from the canvas—for you can't see anything if you're too up close, and you can't see anything if you're too far back." This is the critical distance question. Heti says that bears, fish, and birds are born and not made, but my hope is that we all have a bear-ness, a fish-ness, and a bird-ness accessible inside us.³ What matters is to be able to step closer or farther away depending on the context. I need to remember that I can’t be a bird to my parents or my brother; I am not God, and my family is no canvas. My job is to hold them close, close as a bear.

I think the tyranny of critical thinking is also harmful intellectually. First, it draws an arbitrary line between ways of knowing, which collapses the intellectual universe—this is the PoK insight—and just makes the experience of learning worse. Second, reverting to criticism as a knee-jerk reaction to any problem feels to me like a cop-out. It’s often easier and safer to point out the bad than it is to reach for the good. Praise—at least in my corner of academia, and I think also in public discourse—is marginalized. I’m sure there are many reasons why this is the case, but it seems like a sign of collective immaturity. If childhood is marked by acceptance of the world as it is, and adolescence is the time to interrogate and reject what is given, then what is adulthood? It must have a positive, constructive side to it, because how else would the world continue? To not only take reality apart, but also honour the pieces and try to make something worthwhile from them is a risk, and it requires a kind of sustained, thoughtful engagement that pure criticism doesn’t. But I think this is what it means for us to grow up.

An imbalance between criticism and praise infects our politics too. (This is not my idea, and other people have said it better than I can.) I think if you look at politics on the left in general and left social movements in particular over the past four decades, the general picture you get is more reactive than constructive. I think we’re both out of touch and lacking in political imagination, both untethered from reality and enslaved by it. I think we’re too dismissive of political power and too hesitant to wield it for progressive ends, and impotence breeds more cynicism. I think we’ve forgotten the lessons of the civil rights era—forgotten that an effective movement needs both disruption and negotiation, both challenging the status quo and building alternatives, both criticizing unjust institutions and seeking in good faith to recover the promise of justice latent in some of them. Reaction might be warranted, but it only goes so far. Where is the courage to try and make something?

Remembering how to read poetry and have sex and pray might not fix our politics (although who knows?). But I think on both the personal and political levels, we can start by paying attention to the ways of being that the structure of our environment encourages. The evolution of the global economy, technological disruption, and changes in the information and communication landscape since the 1980s didn’t lock us into the critical-reactive politics we ended up with, but they did give shape to it, and we can’t neglect that context if we want to build a new kind of politics now. Similarly, I don’t want to blame my behaviour on my environment (academic or otherwise), but instead to think about how I spend my days, the content I consume and how I consume it, and the type of worldview this fosters—and, hopefully, to be able to change the latter by changing the former.

I’m not dropping out of grad school, but I do think it’s time to grow up and stop entrusting my education to my schooling! I’m going home to Mary Oliver—like a few of my old housemates have been doing too—and I know she’ll be waiting to embrace me. I’m going to carve out more time in my days where I turn off my analyzing brain and surrender to experience. Like Margaret Fuller writes, I will practice using my microscope and my telescope. I’m going to stop intellectualizing everything. I’m going to resist the knee-jerk impulse to criticize, and push myself to recognize the good as well as the bad. In 2025, I want to feel at home in my brain. The next time I look in the mirror in my childhood bedroom, I want my reflection to be kneeling, and smiling.

1. ARTSSCI 1A06, Practices of Knowledge: ineffable, weird, widely loved and widely hated, a formative experience for many of us. PoK will always haunt me, in the best possible way

2. Think for example about those moments when you’re reading a book and your mind wanders, and in the same instant that you become conscious of yourself and the fact that you are reading, you’ve stopped absorbing the meaning of the words and your eyes are just skimming over the page. Your thinking mind and the experience of reading can’t coexist. Or, think about pain—think about how real pain is oblivion, an instant that evades all attempts at rationalization. “You” are not “in pain.” In the moment of pain, you are pain. (This is from The Wisdom of Insecurity! But you could also just read Laozi.)

3. For the record, I do believe this in addition to hoping it! I’m also always anti-categorizing people (though it’s a great premise for a novel)