Between Pollyanna and Eeyore

Have you heard the term "glurge"? It's used mostly for the sort of uplifting or inspirational stories that proliferate on social media, and become strangely depressing after a while-- perhaps because they seem so contrived or manipulative. God knows, I'm not taking a potshot at uplift, inspiration, or even sentimentality-- I think all those things are necessary and desirable features of human discourse. But too concentrated a dose of any of them provokes an irritable reaction in me, and-- I think-- in others. Humans of New York really got my goat, back when I was on social media.

On the opposite extreme to glurge is the sort of relentless negativity that is often perpetrated by conservatives like myself. When every social or cultural development is claimed to be a sign of decline, they rather cancel each other out. For instance, there seems to be a contradiction in complaining about shortening attention spans while also complaining about binge-watching of streamed content, and seeing them both as signs of cultural decline. Or in complaining about areas in Britain and Ireland where English is supposedly hardly spoken any more, while also deploring the destruction of languages and dialects left behind by the relentless spread of English. I could probably get a whole blog post out of other examples.

Yes, twin and opposing evils can both be evidence of one underlying problem-- but it seems unlikely that this would always be the case, or even generally.

So surely we should strive to avoid falling into either ditch. That is, we should try to affirm life without developing a fixed grin and glassy eyes; but we should also freely criticize those things that deserve to be criticized, without seeing the world through jaundiced glasses. I think the second ditch is the most likely danger for anyone even vaguely on the right.