“Know thyself:” a phrase that’s chased us down millennia. On certain mornings, like on national holidays, old men and women still murmur it to themselves, a generational thing, maybe, an idiom waiting to fade away with its speakers. It’s difficult imagining Millennials worrying about knowing themselves. Maybe now it will be forgotten.
If the politicians and moralists are to be believed, we are living in a fallen world (another idea that’s been around for millennia). For young Americans, this means social inequality, institutionalized racism and sexism, bullying, mass shootings, rape culture, Islamaphobia, white talk, etc. This fallen world, like all the fallen worlds before it, is considered fallen only because we can imagine a better world. We can imagine a nation not based on hatred and division, in which people are genuinely equal and prejudice is a crime and a stupidity. But the point is, at least for Americans, that these are social failings.
But the human world can be degrading in so many ways: bureaucratization; spiritual starvation; ideological clashes; religious crises. Maybe this is why those two little words follow us through the years. Know thyself; know why your fallen world is fallen. It hasn’t always been social ills plunging the world into darkness. Look at how people have dealt with their fallen worlds in the past.
The 17th century Frenchman Blaise Pascal believed he was living in a time of religious crisis. He considered his world fallen because people had lost touch with God. Twitter being unavailable in his day, he turned to philosophy to reach out to others, and came up with a simple idea to help them.
Now known as Pascal’s wager, his idea was that, if God’s existence were a wager, the only logical – or strategic – bet would be that he did exist. This is because if he did exist, you would then be rewarded with everlasting life in paradise, and if he didn’t, you would simply die and cease to exist, as you would have anyhow, believer or not. Betting that he didn’t exist, however, would land you in some hot water if it turned out that there were an all-knowing, powerful God, but even if you were right and he didn’t exist, you only win the same dead-end reward as the believer who lost.
In other words, as a believer you have nothing to lose and everything to gain, but as a non-believer, you have everything to lose and nothing to gain.
Naturally, devoted believers have scoffed at such a facile argument to what is a central question in human existence (psychologist William James said that if he were God, he’d take special pleasure in sending those who believed in him because of Pascal’s wager to hell). We’re not playing the odds here, true believers say; we’re not trying to beat the house. This is cold self-interest. This is how a robot gets into heaven.
Interestingly, Pascal railed against the common scientific belief in his day that “nature abhors a vacuum,” the notion that vacuums could not be created and sustained in nature, that a void or “nothingness” could not be said to really exist.
Is there a slight equivocation to this? Pascal seemed to want to believe in “something” and “nothing” at the same time. Maybe this sheds light on why he formulated his tawdry argument pertaining to the infinite and divine. I picture a person toeing the edge of a cliff, certain a guardian angel will catch them if they fall, but praying that the guardian angel is off on a smoke break.
A crisis can create a kind of vacuum, can’t it? Or any extreme experience, in which all objects are blotted out except the source of your stress, so that you exist within it and cannot see outside of it.
That’s what I sometimes feel is happening when I read about the latest bomb in New York or knife-wielding maniac. A sense of scattering of all things material, a whoosh and sound dims, like someone turned down the volume knob on the world. People are arrested, unmoving, unable to see outside this artificial vacuum widening around them. Pascal was right, about this much at least. But don’t expect a marauding prophet to release us from these shackles.
It should be inspiring watching people attempt to dispel this vacuum and crawl back out into the light of day. And it is, until I look closer. Then I recoil in the same way that I do at Pascal’s wager. I don’t think all the social crusaders in the world could convince me that we want what we say we want.
What is inspiring are the street protesters and Trump crashers and vigilantes living the word equality, those afflicted by a system of wrong but refusing to stay quiet. What is even more inspiring are the poems, songs, films, paintings, all the beautiful thoughts expressed in alleyway murals and anonymous generosity. These are the sincere ones, who have no option of being any other way, and often do as much damage to their cause as anything else. (The sloppiest kind of thinker is one who is preoccupied.) But they do become inspiration, the most valuable currency.
There is also the polite protester, the social media savant, the "Facebook warrior.” Why is it that when I see these kinds of posts on Facebook I sense an equivocation, a slight hesitation, like when someone is talking to you about a serious subject but cannot look you in the eye? To hear them talk is to listen to a recitation. These are the ones rushing to fill a void, to dispel the vacuum. (They’ve been suckered by Pascal’s wager.) Because their aim is simply movement, a flexing of ontological muscles, the cause they espouse is irrelevant. It could be social justice as much as a reconnection to the divine, or getting more exercise, or gardening.
Horror vacui: nature abhors a vacuum – but not as much as mankind does.
Success – equality – eludes us because that kind of success is not what half of the people are fighting for (otherwise, social and judicial oppression would have vanished long ago). Rather, they have found their success in moving themselves: by at least nominally attaching themselves to a cause and announcing serious words. Is it possible that most of the supporters of a cause do not actually want the cause to succeed? Because then what the hell would they do? The vacuum would return…
I see this in the faces of all the passionate people, standing behind Trump at a rally with their Confederate flags or shouting themselves hoarse with Black Lives Matter banners in the streets. None of this is new, of course. Inequality in America has existed longer than America itself. America is not getting better because America does not want to get better. It splits all issues into two contentious sides so that they prop one another up and continue struggling against each other interminably.
Which, admittedly, is strong protection from the vacuum looming off in the distance from that perfect, imagined world we’re frightened of.
