Tag Archives: Blaise Pascal

Hawthorne Against the Techno-Utopians

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I’ve had occasion to mention Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writing a time or two in previous posts. In his journal, he noted the manner in which the train whistle broke into the natural idyll he was enjoying — “But, hark! there is the whistle of the locomotive” — inaugurating a long-standing literary convention which persists to this day (see Sherry Turkle).

Elsewhere, Hawthorne anticipated de Chardin and McLuhan’s metaphorical rendering of the electric age: “Is it a fact — or have I dreamt it — that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?”

Hawthorne and his generation were grappling with the consequences of industrialization. We are grappling with the consequences of digitization. These two are not necessarily analogous, but they share one variable: human nature. Hawthorne in particular had a keen sense of our faults and foibles. While his stories did not always dwell on technology explicitly, they imaginatively explored the darker proclivities that human beings bring to the techno-scientific project.

In the opening paragraph of The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne writes,

“The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.”

This is a grim observation, but it seems incontrovertible; and it applies with equal force to all techno-utopian projects and hopes. Wherever we go, there we are and our imperfections with us.

Pascal observed that the error of Stoicism lay in believing that what can be done once can be done always. I would offer an analogous framing of the techno-utopian error: Believing the wonderful use to which a technology can be put, will be the use to which it is always put.

Better, it would seem, to go forward with a hopeful skepticism that avoids the cycloptic vision of either the techno-utopians or the techno-cynics. And reading a little Hawthorne might be a good way of nurturing that disposition.

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Over the past couple of years, the folks at The New Atlantis have been publishing a series of reflections on a handful of Hawthorne’s short stories as they bear on Science, Progress, and Human Nature. These are each thoughtful and engaging essays.  

The New New (Actually Old, Pascalian) Atheists

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So I thought this was interesting. In a discussion of the New New Atheists (no, that wasn’t a typo) in Harper’s, Christopher Beha cites Alex Rosenberg, a philosopher at Duke, who “insists that doing away with religion means doing away with most of what comes with it: a sense of order in the universe, the hope that life has some inherent meaning, even the belief in free will.”

Now, is it just me or wasn’t that kind of Nietzsche’s whole point some hundred and twenty or so years ago? So at least one of the New New Atheists is actually just like the Old Atheists. In any case, I appreciate the consistency.

Of course, this is a gloomy picture and Rosenberg acknowledges that it can create a certain angst in some:  “There is . . . in us all the hankering for a satisfactory narrative to make ‘life, the universe and everything’ (in Douglas Adams’s words) hang together in a meaningful way. When people disbelieve in God and see no alternative, they often find themselves wishing they could believe, since now they have an itch and no way to scratch it.”

So Beha asks Rosenberg what can be done about this. Response:

“Rosenberg’s answer in his book is basically to ignore it. The modern world offers lots of help in this effort. To begin with, there are pharmaceuticals; Rosenberg strongly encourages those depressed by the emptiness of the Godless world to avail themselves of mood-altering drugs. Then there are the pleasures of acquisitive consumer culture—the making of money and the getting of things.”

Well, at least this is honest — and oddly Pascalian in an inverted sort of way.

Hole In Our Hearts

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Many thanks to Kevin Kelly for linking to Matt Honan’s “Fever Dream of a Guilt-Ridden Gadget Reporter.” Writing for Gizmodo, Honan describes his experience at the massive Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and it reads like a passage from Augustine’s Confessions had Augustine been writing in the 21st rather than 5th century.

The quasi-religious overtones begin early on when Honan tells us, ”There was ennui upon ennui upon ennui set in this amazing temple to technology.”

Then, a little further on, comes the passage that caught Kelly’s attention, and deservedly so. Honan writes:

“There is a hole in my heart dug deep by advertising and envy and a desire to see a thing that is new and different and beautiful. A place within me that is empty, and that I want to fill it up. The hole makes me think electronics can help. And of course, they can.

They make the world easier and more enjoyable. They boost productivity and provide entertainment and information and sometimes even status. At least for a while. At least until they are obsolete. At least until they are garbage.

Electronics are our talismans that ward off the spiritual vacuum of modernity; gilt in Gorilla Glass and cadmium. And in them we find entertainment in lieu of happiness, and exchanges in lieu of actual connections.

And, oh, I am guilty. I am guilty. I am guilty.

I feel that way too. More than most, probably. I’m forever wanting something new. Something I’ve never seen before, that no one else has. Something that will be both an extension and expression of my person. Something that will take me away from the world I actually live in and let me immerse myself in another. Something that will let me see more details, take better pictures, do more at once, work smarter, run faster, live longer.”

Here is the confession, the thrice repeated mea culpa, alongside a truly Augustinian account of our disordered attachments and loves complete with a Pascalian nod to the diversionary nature of our engagement with technology.

I call this an Augustinian account not only because of the religiously inflected language and the confessional tone. There is also the explicit frame of an unfulfilling quest to fill a primordial emptiness. Augustine’s Confesssions amounts to a retrospective narrative of the spiritual quest which takes him from dissatisfaction to dissatisfaction until it culminates in his conversion. He famously frames his narrative at the outset when he prays, ”You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.” The restless heart knows its own emptiness and seeks, often heroically and tragically, to fill it. It loves and seeks to be loved, but it loves all the wrong things.

Pascal, writing in the shadow of Augustine’s influence, put it thus:

“What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.”

In his post, “Making Holes in Our Hearts,” Kelly agrees to a point with Honan’s diagnosis, but his interpretation is quite different and also worth quoting at length. Here is Kelly:

“If we are honest, we must admit that one aspect of the technium is to make holes in our heart. One day recently we decided that we cannot live another day unless we have a smart phone, when a dozen years earlier this need would have dumbfounded us. Now we get angry if the network is slow, but before, when we were innocent, we had no thoughts of the network at all. Now we crave the instant connection of friends, whereas before we were content with weekly, or daily, connections. But we keep inventing new things that make new desires, new longings, new wants, new holes that must be filled.

Yes, this is what technology does to us. Some people are furious that our hearts are pierced this way by the things we make. They see this ever-neediness as a debasement, a lowering of human nobility, the source of our continuous discontentment. I agree that it is the source. New technology forces us to be always chasing the new, which is always disappearing under the next new, a salvation always receding from our grasp.

But I celebrate the never-ending discontentment that the technium brings. Most of what we like about being human is invented. We are different from our animal ancestors in that we are not content to merely survive, but have been incredibly busy making up new itches which we have to scratch, digging extra holes that we have to fill, creating new desires we’ve never had before.”

Kelly is on to something here. Discontentment is generative. Dissatisfaction can be productive. When Cain, having murdered his brother, is cursed to be forever a wanderer alienated from God and family, he builds a city in response. Here is an allegory to match Kelly’s observation. The perpetually wandering, alienated heart builds and makes and creates.

But does it follow that we should then celebrate discontentment, dissatisfaction, and unhappiness? I don’t see how. It is hard to cheer on misery, and it is a certain misery that we are talking about here. Perhaps the more appropriate response is the kind of plaintive admiration we reserve for the tragic hero. They may posses a real nobility, but it is finally consumed in despair and destruction.

The narrator of Cain’s story tells us that he built his city in the land called Nod, a name that echoes the Hebrew word for “wandering.” This touch of literary artistry poignantly suggests that even surrounded by the accouterments of civilization the human soul wanders lost and alienated – never satisfied, never home, never secure.

There is at least one other reason why we need not celebrate generative misery. Misery is not the only fount of human creativity. Love, wonderment, compassion, kindness, curiosity, beauty — all of these might also set us to work and marvelously so.

Augustine understood that finding rest for his restless heart in the love of God did not necessarily extinguish all other loves. It merely reordered them. Having found the kind of satisfaction and happiness that our stuff (for lack of a more inclusive word) can never bring does not mean that we can never again create or enjoy the fruits of human creativity. In fact, it likely means that we may create and enjoy more fully because such creation and enjoyment will not be burden with the unbearable weight of filling the primordial vacuum of the human heart.

The simplest and only way to enjoy penultimate and impermanent things is to resist the temptation to invest them with the significance and adoration that only ultimate and permanent things can sustain.

Saint Augustine by Phillippe de Champaigne, c. 1645

Jacques Lacan, Jansenist?

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If I imagine a Venn diagram consisting of one circle representing those interested in Jacques Lacan (a modest circle), and another representing those who read this blog (a rather tiny circle), then the overlapping area probably includes one person … if I count myself.  Nonetheless, I’ll post this anyway.

In conversation with a friend I was made aware of an article that contains this intriguing anecdote (if you’re in that overlapping area in the Venn diagram):

Jan Miel was, he says, the first to propose translating a text of Lacan’s into English and as a result had been invited to lunch in his country house in Guirrancourt, not far from Paris.  After the meal during a stroll in the garden Lacan turned to him and said:  ‘You are neither an analyst nor an analysand, so why are you interested in my teaching?’.  Miel found it difficult to answer because, he admits, he really did not know what he found so fascinating in Lacan’s work, so he eventually stammered:  ‘Well, my main interest is in Pascal.’  To which Lacan replied, ‘Ah, I understand’ and led him back to his library where he showed him a quite substantial collection of Jansenist books.  So if reading Lacan leads to Pascal, it appears that reading Pascal may also lead to Lacan.

“Ah, I understand” — loved that, and wondered how many times those same words were uttered in a Lacan seminar!

The article goes on to explore the use Lacan makes of Pascal’s Wager and presents some helpful background material on the Wager.  Be warned though, some math is involved.

The Search

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Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” presented us with a striking illustration of the potentially debilitating consequences of the constant distraction.  In that story the distraction is brutally imposed; but, as we noted last week, we choose our distractions.  In fact, we embrace our Internet-empowered distractions.  We love to be distracted and we crave diversion.  We can hardly stand it if we are without distraction or diversion for more than a few moments at a time.  We complain incessantly about our busyness, but were it all to stop we would hardly know what to do with ourselves.  This raises some interesting questions.  Why are we so keen to envelope ourselves in constant distraction?  Why do some of us develop an addictive relationship to the constant flow of distraction?  Why are we so uneasy when the distractions stop?

Back in June, I reflected on the theme of distraction and diversion on the heels of a post about the religious aura that sometimes surrounds our love affair with sports.  We were then, you will remember, at the height of World Cup fever.  I want to revisit some of those same thoughts and tweak them just a little bit as a follow up to Friday’s post on distraction and “Harrison Bergeron.”

Distractedness and the need for diversion are not new phenomenon of course.  Although the condition may now be intensified and heightened, it has been with us at least since the 17th century, and almost certainly before then.  It was in the 17th century that Blaise Pascal began assembling a series of notes on scraps of paper in preparation for a book he never wrote.  When he died at the age of 39 he left behind hundreds of barely organized notes which were later collected and published under the French title Pensées, or thoughts.  Pascal is today remembered, if at all, either for his law of fluid pressure or an argument for God’s existence known as Pascal’s Wager.  Neither quite does justice to the depth of his insight into what we used to call the human condition.

Pascal knew that we needed our diversions and distractions and that without them we would be miserable.  His description of the younger generation sounds wholly contemporary:

Anyone who does not see the vanity of the world is very vain himself.  So who does not see it, apart from young people whose lives are all noise, diversions, and thoughts for the future?  But take away their diversion and you will see them bored to extinction.  Then they feel their nullity without recognizing it, for nothing could be more wretched than to be intolerably depressed as soon as one is reduced to introspection with no means of diversion.

But Pascal is not merely an old crank berating a younger generation he fails to understand.  Pascal applies the same analysis indiscriminately.  Young or old, rich or poor, male or female — for Pascal it just comes with being human.  “If our condition were truly happy,” he explains, “we should not need to divert ourselves from thinking about it.”  As things stand, however,

What people want is not the easy peaceful life that allows us to think of our unhappy condition, nor the dangers of war, nor the burdens of office, but the agitation that takes our mind off it and diverts us.  That is why we prefer the hunt to the capture.

We need distractions and diversions to keep us from contemplating our true condition, frail and mortal as it is.  For this reason we cannot stand to be alone with our own thoughts and seek to fill every moment with distraction.  Pascal’s view is admittedly rather grim even as it resonates with our experience.  Yet, Pascal knew there was more than this to the human condition.  There was also love and passion, knowledge and creativity, wonder and courage.  Pascal knew this and he insisted that we recognize both the glory and the misery of humanity:

Let man now judge his own worth, let him love himself, for there is within him a nature capable of good; but that is no reason for him to love the vileness within himself.  Let him despise himself because this capacity remains unfilled; but that is no reason for him to despise this natural capacity.  Let him both hate and love himself; he has within him the capacity for knowing truth and being happy, but he possesses no truth which is either abiding or satisfactory.

Pascal insists that we reckon with all that is good and all that is bad in us.  It is our awareness of the possibility of goodness, however, which heightens our misery.  And, yet again, it is our awareness of our misery that is part of our glory.  In the end Pascal believed that “God alone is man’s true good” and Christ the “via veritas.”  With St. Augustine, whose influence permeates Pascal’s thought, he would have prayed, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.”  Perhaps this is why at times something akin to spirituality and the language of worship suffuses our most prominent and powerful diversions.

Augustine and Pascal in turn both helped shape the thought of  2oth century novelist Walker Percy.  Percy blended Pascalian insight with a touch of existentialism in his best known novel The Moviegoer (1960) in which the main character, Binx Bolling, finds himself on a search.  “What is the nature of the search? you ask.”

Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me; so simple that it is easily overlooked.  The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life …. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.  Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

Near the middle of the novel throughout which Bolling has been amassing clues he thinks are somehow related to the search, he despairs:

… when I awake, I awake in the grip of everydayness.  Everydayness is the enemy.  No search is possible.  Perhaps there was a time when everydayness was not too strong and one could break its grip by brute strength.  Now nothing breaks it — but disaster.

However, through a rather tortured relationship with a very broken young woman named Kate whom he has come to love, Binx begins to see grace in the ordinary.  Near the very end of the novel, while he and Kate are sitting at a service station discussing marriage and the worries that still fill Kate’s mind, Binx notices a man coming out of a church.  It is Ash Wednesday.  Binx watches while the man sits in his car looking down at something on the seat beside him.  The man’s presence puzzles Binx:

It is impossible to say why he is here.  Is it part and parcel of the complex business of coming up in the world?  Or is it because he believes that God himself is present here at the corner of Elysian Fields and Bons Enfants?  Or is he here for both reasons:  through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming for the one and receiving the other as God’s own importunate bonus?  It is impossible to say.

In June with sports on my mind, I wondered whether, as Pascal would have it, sports were a mere distraction which facilitated our unwillingness to acknowledge our true condition; or, taking a cue from Percy, whether it might be a rupture of the “everydayness,” the ordinariness of our lives that may awaken us to the possibility of the search.  My sense at the time was that both were on to something, each was a possibility.  Sports can be merely a distraction conducive to living in bad faith in denial of the truth of our situation.  But at times bursts of grace and beauty appeared suddenly and unexpectedly in the midst of our diversion to remind us that we ought to be searching for their source.  “Through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming for the one” we receive “the other as God’s own importunate bonus.”

Thinking now about the distractions enabled by the Internet, social media, smart phones, and all the rest I wonder if something like the same analysis might also apply.  Do we embrace these distractions as a way of refusing silence and contemplation because we do not care to entertain the thoughts that may come?  Perhaps.  Surely more than this is going on.  Sometimes a moment of carefree distraction is just that.  Is it possible that coming for distraction we might find something more — a real connection with another human being, a new insight, real wisdom, genuine laughter?

I am not so much of a pessimist that I would discount such possibilities.  But I do fear that more often than not our distractions, as Pascal would put it, are diversions that keep us from considering our true condition. They are part of the “everydayness” of life that is the enemy of the search and might even hide from us the possibility of the search.   To give up on the search, to be unaware of it, is to be in despair. If it doesn’t feel like despair, is it because, as Kierkegaard put it in a line that opens The Moviegoer, “… the specific character of despair is precisely this:  it is unaware of being despair”?

Perhaps it is also because we are too distracted to notice.  We are the “diverted selves” Percy described in Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book,

In a free and affluent society, self is free to divert itself endlessly from itself.  It works in order to enjoy the diversions that the fruit of one’s labor can purchase.  The pursuit of happiness becomes the pursuit of diversion …

Some Dim Dazzling Trick of Grace

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Image: AFP

Unintentionally, yesterday’s post on sport as religion dovetailed suggestively with the preceding one, “Distracted from distraction by distraction.”  In that post I had continued a series of reflections on Nicholas Carr’s analysis of the Internet’s impact on our brains in his latest book, The Shallows combining a brief rejoinder to a strand of criticism frequently directed at Carr with strikingly apropos lines from T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets.”  Distraction was the recurring theme.  The Internet according to Carr habituates our mind to perpetual distraction, and in the long run our ability to think deeply and creatively suffers.  Eliot already laments a culture of distraction in the mid-20th century and seems to be describing us with eerie foresight.

Whether or not we finally judge sport to be a kind of religion, it is certainly a distraction; more precisely, it is a diversion.  As one comment noted, perhaps a bit harshly, it is escapist entertainment diverting us from ordinary life.  Sports may be more than this, and I will suggest that it is, but it is at least this.  And as our embrace of Internet-empowered distraction also demonstrates, we love to be distracted and we crave diversion.  We can hardly stand it if we are without either distraction or diversion for more than a few moments at a time.  We complain incessantly about our busyness, but were it all to stop we would hardly know what to do with ourselves.

This is not, however, a new problem.  Although the condition may now be intensified and heightened, it has been with us at least since the 17th century, and almost certainly before then.  It was in the 17th century that Blaise Pascal began assembling a series of notes on scraps of paper in preparation for a book he never wrote.  When he died at the age of 39 he left behind hundreds of barely organized notes which were later collected and published under the French title Pensees, or thoughts.  Pascal is today remembered, if at all, either for his law of fluid pressure or an argument for God’s existence known as Pascal’s Wager.  Neither quite does justice to the depth of his insight into what it is now unfashionable to call the human condition.

Pascal knew that we needed our diversions and distractions and that without them we would be miserable.  His description of the younger generation sounds wholly contemporary:

Anyone who does not see the vanity of the world is very vain himself.  So who does not see it, apart from young people whose lives are all noise, diversions, and thoughts for the future?  But take away their diversion and you will see them bored to extinction.  Then they feel their nullity without recognizing it, for nothing could be more wretched than to be intolerably depressed as soon as one is reduced to introspection with no means of diversion.

But Pascal is not merely an old crank berating a younger generation he fails to understand.  Pascal applies the same analysis indiscriminately.  Young or old, rich or poor, male or female — for Pascal it just comes with being human.  “If our condition were truly happy,” he explains, “we should not need to divert ourselves from thinking about it.”  As things stand, however,

Being unable to cure death, wretchedness, and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things …. What people want is not the easy peaceful life that allows us to think of our unhappy condition, nor the dangers of war, nor the burdens of office, but the agitation that takes our mind off it and diverts us.  That is why we prefer the hunt to the capture.

We need distractions and diversions to keep us from contemplating our true condition, frail and mortal as it is.  For this reason we cannot stand to be alone with our own thoughts and seek to fill every moment with distraction.  Pascal’s view is admittedly rather grim even as it resonates with our experience.  Yet, Pascal knew there was more than this to the human condition.  There was also love and passion, knowledge and creativity, wonder and courage.  Pascal knew this and he insisted that we recognize both the glory and the misery of humanity:

Let man now judge his own worth, let him love himself, for there is within him a nature capable of good; but that is no reason for him to love the vileness within himself.  Let him despise himself because this capacity remains unfilled; but that is no reason for him to despise this natural capacity.  Let him both hate and love himself; he has within him the capacity for knowing truth and being happy, but he possesses no truth which is either abiding or satisfactory.

Pascal insists that we reckon with all that is good and all that is bad in us.  It is our awareness of the possibility of goodness, however, which heightens our misery.  And, yet again, it is our awareness of our misery that is part of our glory.  In the end Pascal believed that “God alone is man’s true good” and Christ the “via veritas.”  With St. Augustine, whose influence permeates Pascal’s thought, he would have prayed, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.”  Perhaps this is why at times spirituality and the language of worship suffuses our most prominent and powerful diversions.

Augustine and Pascal in turn both helped shape the thought of Walker Percy, a 20th century Roman Catholic novelist.  Percy blended Pascalian insight with a touch of existentialism in his best known novel The Moviegoer (1960) in which the main character, Binx Bolling, finds himself on a search.  “What is the nature of the search? you ask.”

Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me; so simple that it is easily overlooked.  The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life …. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.  Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

Near the middle of the novel throughout which Bolling has been amassing clues he thinks are somehow related to the search, he despairs:

… when I awake, I awake in the grip of everydayness.  Everydayness is the enemy.  No search is possible.  Perhaps there was a time when everydayness was not too strong and one could break its grip by brute strength.  Now nothing breaks it — but disaster.

However, through a rather tortured relationship with a very broken young woman named Kate whom he has come to love, Binx begins to see grace in the ordinary.  Near the very end of the novel, while he and Kate are sitting at a service station discussing marriage and the worries that still fill Kate’s mind, Binx notices a man coming out of a church.  It is Ash Wednesday.  Binx watches while the man sits in his car looking down at something on the seat beside him.  The man’s presence puzzles Binx:

It is impossible to say why he is here.  Is it part and parcel of the complex business of coming up in the world?  Or is it because he believes that God himself is present here at the corner of Elysian Fields and Bons Enfants?  Or is he here for both reasons:  through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming for the one and receiving the other as God’s own importunate bonus?  It is impossible to say.

If sport diverts us from ordinary life, what do we make of it?  Is it as Pascal would have it a mere distraction which facilitates our unwillingness to acknowledge our true condition?  Or, taking a cue from Percy, might it be a rupture of the “everydayness,” the ordinariness of our lives that may awaken us to the possibility of the search?  My sense is that they are both right; each is a possibility.  Sports can be merely a distraction conducive to living in bad faith in denial of the truth of our situation.  It is odd, however, that something very much like a spiritual or religious aura so often surrounds sport.  Maybe it is because bursts of grace and beauty appear suddenly and unexpectedly even in the midst of our diversions to remind us that we ought to be searching for their source.  Maybe it is because “through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming for the one” we receive “the other as God’s own importunate bonus?”

It is impossible to say.

Beginnings

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“Why engage in an activity that I have regarded as narcissistic, therapeutic, self-important, trivial bloviation? Perhaps it is my own narcissism.”

So begins the first blog post by Patrick Deneen, a political theorist whose work I’ve appreciated and whose blog, What I Saw in America, I recommend. I could hardly do better to express my own misgivings and apprehensions. However, Deneen goes on to say,

“Or, I’d like to think that there are things to be said.”

Indeed.  There are things to be said — many things. They are to be said because they are true or good and sometimes also beautiful — or sometimes they are just entertaining. These are hardly ideas that will be original to me. Nor do I believe that they are ideas I will be particularly adept at expressing. My hope is that this blog will point others to the things that ought to be said and to those who are doing an exemplary job of saying them.

The title of this blog is taken from number 213 of Pascal’s Pensees.

“Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.”

That in itself is one of those things that need to be said. Life is the frailest thing in the world, so we must learn to live it well. This is the end of all learning, and it is to that end I hope the things said here will contribute. Deo volente.