Dissecting disgust

A friend recently observed that the contents of this blog were mostly rants. He seemed to think (quite justifiably) that this signified that my view of the world was a morose one, populated with conspiracy theories and people with malicious/naive/disingenuous intentions, and admitting not one single shred of hope. He went on to observe (correctly) that such viewpoints were unhealthy and could not lead to places other than ones populated with grief and discontent.

To my shock, I found myself agreeing with every piece of logic that he put forth to further his argument. He seemed to be proving, right before my eyes, that I was fundamentally an unhappy person because of my scathingly critical outlook towards everything that was around me. If other people took a pinch of salt with their daily news, I supplied a bucketful. I epitomized, to him (and, for a scary few hours, to myself), the stereotypically discontent critic that fought everything that was presented before him quite strenuously.

But something in the argument did not quite latch on, wasn't quite right. I was capable of finding joy, and indeed in the most mundane of occurrences; in, for example a squirrel munching diffidently on a peanut or two, or in a man playing the most brilliant jazz solos on his saxophone (I am thinking here of my excursion to Berkeley, CA in the beginning of this year. It was about 7:30 in the evening, and I had just gotten off BART(Bay Area Rapid Transit), and was earnestly attempting to push my way through the crowd to catch my first glimpse of Berkeley, the liberal stronghold I had read so much about. And there he was, on Shattuck and University, just beside the signal, unselfconsciously playing the most beautiful saxophone music that I had ever heard. No, it was more than that, more than beauty; it instilled in me an immense hope for us, for the human race, for if we were capable still of being so utterly confident of ourselves, of infecting our own kind with such confidence, then surely nothing was beyond us.)

So I knew I wasn't incapable of joy. So why all these rants? Why discontentment at such a 'young age'(as he put it)?

I think it's because it is easier to rant. The roots of disgust lie within rationality and logic, and as such can be articulated exactly. My reactions to a bad movie, for example, follow from quick analysis - I find a one here, a one there, and a two hidden somewhere, and add them up to make four. There isn't much room for emotional intervention; I can be detached, cold, even, and write my sentences with the confidence of a person who is about to disapprove.

Joy, however, does not admit of such shoddy treatment. It demands an involvement of sentiment and feeling that precludes automatically any attempt at objective analysis. More importantly, the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts - meaning that the feeling of joy is imbued with an intangible something that elevates it above the mere summation of its components; no analysis can decompose it. The same can in fact be said of all true emotions, emotions like grief, laughter and empathy.

So it was with some relief that I concluded that I had not yet descended into cynicism, which I believe should be guarded against most vigorously. Yes, we must preserve our sense of wonder, for it is what propels us into the next day, into the next hour, into the next minute; yes, we must possess the ability to be cheered by acts of human kindness, and goodwill; and indeed we must try to root our ideologies in a foundation of trust and decency. But it is also true that we must protect ourselves from the untruths that exist to deceive us into false emotional submission and transform us into petty shadows of timorous character. We can only be strong if we preserve in ourselves a breed of healthy skepticism, fueled occasionally by the adorable squirrel or virtuosic saxophonist; we are otherwise reduced to a mere sum of our own ineffectual parts.