Twice Read Books: Blaise Pascal's "Penseés" Or, On Distraction
Absolutely not an essay about Pascal's Wager
Book recommendation:
Blaise Pascal, Penseés (translated by A.J. Krailsheimer)
On the Distribution of Essays about Pascal's Penseés
Pascal’s Wager is an attractive subject for essay writing. It is a small fragment of a long book, taking up little more than a page or two in most printed editions of the Penseés. The argument is straightforward and presentable with elementary probability theory, along with the ever-handy 2x2 matrix (God/No God, Religious/Not Religious). It involves interesting questions about the nature of infinities.1 In short, its a great topic for an essay.
This is not, however, an essay about Pascal’s Wager. In this, it is uncommon among essays that deal with Pascal's philosophy, illustrated by the Venn diagram below.2
Now to our main subject: the misery and wretchedness of man, according to Pascal.3
On Distraction and Diversion
While Pascal’s Pensees is the one of the best extended treatment on the subject, Alexander Pope posed the riddle of human nature pithily in his great poem, The Epistle on Man, Epistle II:
Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise, and rudely great: With too much knowledge for the sceptic side, With too much weakness for the stoic's pride, He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest; In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast; In doubt his mind or body to prefer; Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err; Alike in ignorance, his reason such, Whether he thinks too little, or too much: Chaos of thought and passion, all confus'd; Still by himself abus'd, or disabus'd; Created half to rise, and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd: The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!
Everyone reading this must know (or, perhaps, are themselves) someone who cannot be still. Someone who constantly generates drama in their life through love affairs, personal squabbles with friends, family, and coworkers, lawsuits, bylaw squabbles with neighbors, parties, business ventures, exercise routines and fad diets, exotic vacations, social media flame wars, petitions, protests, and all the other time filling activities people use to not be alone for ten minutes with just their own thoughts for company.
Some people are more extreme cases than others, but it applies to just about everyone to different degrees at different times. They fill every moment with some form of distraction and stimulation – scrolling through news on their smartphones, tapping away at mobile games, watching funny video shorts, sharing and commenting on social media memes. Some rest and relaxation is vital to health, but people consume leisure beyond all possible need for rest.
Then there is the attention sink that is politics. Politics seems, on the surface, like an “important” subject to stay informed about. It is about power, wealth, issues of life and death, about who gets what and how much. But the effort so many people devote to it is out of all proportion to what they can hope to accomplish by being involved.
Consider this basic account of being rational: applying thought and effort towards desirable (or at least less bad) ends about which you have some non-negligible influence, seeking out and acquiring information and adjusting in your behavior in light of that new info given your values. Being vexed about the number of moons of Jupiter is plainly irrational, as would starting a petition to have Io removed from its orbit and cast into the Sun. Being mildly vexed about finding fruit flies in your kitchen is rational, as is researching and implementing a non-toxic way to remove them.
Any single voters influence on all but the most local politics is close to nil, not quite as inconsequential as having strong opinions about the Galilean moons but close to it. In an election with many voters, your vote will – except for the vanishingly small chance that yours is a tie-breaker – count for nothing. Your efforts to stay informed are similarly pointless. Then consider where the politically active spend the time: either shouting (online or in person) at those they consider to be their tribal enemies, or policing the expression of opinions and thoughts within their own ranks. Even – perhaps especially – when their collective efforts are without consequence.
To these mysteries of human nature Pascal provides an insightful but sobering answer. All of these activities, from the drama-seeker to the video game enthusiast to the politically partisan, are desperately chasing distraction to turn their attention from the wretchedness of human life.
On Staying Quietly in One’s Room
Pascal states the situation quite bluntly.
“Sometimes, when I set to thinking about the various activities of men, the dangers and troubles which they face at Court, or in war, giving rise to so many quarrels and passions, daring and often wicked enterprises and so on, I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”
Pascal meant, of course, by staying quietly in one’s room activities like serious reading, study, meditation, and prayer, not playing MMORPGs, masturbating to pornography, or sharing memes and hot take commentary on social media networks. The modern world has made staying in one’s room more bearable than it was in Pascal’s time, and all by bringing distractions closer to home. In Pascal’s day one had to leave the house, go to court or the theatre, or at the very least the marketplace, for amusement and diversion. What makes Pascal’s insight different from all the modern think pieces bemoaning the distraction of our digital devices and counselling taking a sabbath from cyberspace is his diagnosis of the cause.
They have a secret instinct driving them to seek external diversion and occupation, and this is the result of their constant sense of wretchedness. They have another secret instinct, left over from the greatness of our original nature, telling them that the only true happiness lies in rest and not in excitement. These two contrary instincts give rise to a confused plan buried out of sight in the depths of their soul, which leads them to seek rest by way of activity and always to imagine that the satisfaction they miss will come to them once they overcome certain obvious difficulties and can open the door to welcome rest.
The references to ‘original nature’ are to human nature before the Biblical Fall. One need not take the Fall literally to see the power of the insight.
The primary reason, Pascal posits, for our distraction seeking is because we are in an unbearable middle condition: we know that we are better than animals – we have intellect, culture, technology, and the capacity for spiritual and transcendent experiences. We have minds capable of grasping truths about the nature of the universe (finding gamma secrets, in other words) but we are much less than we know we could be. We have second-order desires, to use Harry Frankfurt’s term, desires about what our desires should be, but are often powerless to bring them about.4 We have an idea that we should be able to command our minds, emotions, and bodies to do our bidding, but we cannot. Witness the vast number of annual gym memberships purchased for New Year’s resolutions and then abandoned after a few visits; indeed, gyms make most of their money from such failures of will, enjoying the money but not having to deal with the cleaning and maintenance costs of more regular patrons.
We cannot acquire, by force of will or persuasion of reason a true equanimity of mind: to delight in things when they go well, but not be saddened when they go poorly. It takes minimal reflection – a reflection we often avoid with distraction – to see the transitoriness of almost all of the things we desire: wealth, fame, power, sex, experiences, luxuries. “You can’t take it with you,” we nod sagely at, but then rush back into another round of seeking and acquisition. Then there are the quarrels we contrive with friends, family, and neighbors, seeking to be “right,” by which we mean not accurate but to have others, even people we supposedly love and care for, see things our way.5
Not only are we easily distracted, but we can readily invent distractions for ourselves by putting some element of chance or risk into an activity. In one section Pascal talks about gamblers who live for the thrill of wagering a small or large sum of money each day, but who would not take the money if you offered to pay it to them every day as a gift. The consumption of attention enabled by the wagering is what is attractive, not the reward.
The range and intensity of distractions available in our modern world would not surprise Pascal, especially when you would tell him how much wealthier we are than people in his day. It’s not at all odd that as we have grown richer the amount of our spending, in money and time, devoted to distractions has increased. For we purchase not only comfort and safety with our wealth - better clothes, shelter, healthcare, and nutritious food - but ever more and more diversified entertainment and leisure activities. Consider that one of the selling points about games for smartphones is, as well as the main complaint about them, is their supposed addictiveness. Then there are the huge range of films and television series available through streaming platforms, in constantly growing catalogues of diversion. Before the era of streaming content on the internet, the existence of so-called “reality” television series revealed once and for all that people were watching television not for any quality of the content, but because they simply liked watching television.
The most disturbing evidence I know of demonstrating Pascal's thesis about the drive for distraction is contained in Natasha Dow Schull's Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. Schull documents the world of gambling addicts hooked on video poker and slot machines, showing that the players do not play to win, but for the dissipative oblivion (the “Dark Flow”) that interacting with the machine gives. Indeed, even those who win jackpots, earning multiples of the stake they began an evening with, will stay to gamble it all away, wanting the time of self-forgetting the machines provide more than money. They are conscious addicts as well, using time on the machines to escape from depression and anxiety, troubles in their lives (personal and, obviously, monetary), and from simple boredom.
We only single out the gambling addicts - and addicts of all stripes, whether to alcohol, nicotine, or opiates - because of the obvious harm involved, to their finances, their bodies, and to those around them. But these distraction seems to work for some people even when there is no stake but their own time - something that would have baffled Pascal: he believed that trivial activities were became distraction worthy through the element of risk and imagination. But how do you explain the people who play these (quite poor) games without any stakes at all? Every day I go to my local public library I see people on the computer terminals spending their 60 minutes a day turning the handle on virtual slot machines. It's not just cash-free gambling either: one regular has been playing the same Farmville game for the past ten years. I hesitate to think what depths of unhappiness these people are escaping from into such meagre entertainment. Then I wonder what we’re escaping from when we consume more sophisticated amusements. What are Netflix binges or epic-sessions of League of Legends masking in our lives?
The Great Beyond
Beyond these considerations of how little we are compared to what we could be, of how we cannot attain peace of mind through will alone, we know that we will die, and that poses an enormous, unanswerable mystery to any thinking being.
More poetry:
To be no more. Sad cure! for who would lose, Though full of pain, this intellectual being, Those thoughts that wander through eternity, To perish rather, swallowed up and lost In the wide womb of uncreated Night, Devoid of sense and motion?
-Milton, Paradise Lost, Book II
Death is unknown and, to the living, unknowable. If it is something, some afterlife state, the quality of that state cannot be known with anything like certainty. If it is annihilation, our nature is not such as to be self-limiting: to bring in an evolutionary argument unknown to Pascal, avoidance of death, via the proxy of fearing pain and injury, precedes conceptual awareness of death: creatures avoided death long before they evolved minds capable of conceiving it. It's not a winning evolutionary strategy for organisms to have an “everything is going to be totally cool” approach to their own extinction. Any individuals born with the trait would be reproductively disadvantaged in passing on those traits to offspring. So fear and avoidance of death is here to stay.
Contemplation of death has a way of focusing attention on what we think is valuable, however, though the answers can be disheartening.
Sex and the Single Asteroid
News guy wept and told us / Earth was really dying / Cried so much his face was wet / Then I knew he was not lying
-David Bowie, “Five Years”
Imagine: for the first time in a long time, the news carries something worth reporting on, something that is genuinely “news” to you - as in relevant and worth weighing in your decisions going forward.
There is a five kilometer in diameter asteroid on a collision course with Earth. It will collide with our planet in a month. It is not possible to divert the asteroid in such a short period of time, nor to build shelters to last out the impact period and its decades long effects in the biosphere.
What would you do?6
Your long term plans and aspirations are going to come to nothing. The issues you care about, the future you want to see, the cause you have struggled for, are rendered meaningless. You will not live to grow old, see your children grow up, even have children if you don't already have them. Everyone you know will die, as will every institution and value you hold dear.
How would you spend your last days?
I've asked this question to different people, and am struck by the emptiness of the most common answer people give. Most of the time, people say they would spend their last hours in some kind of sybaritic excess - alcohol and other drugs, sexual athleticism. Which I really think goes to prove Pascal's point about human wretchedness: presented with the ultimate dividing line, the moment to decide what it is you truly believe about Life, the Universe, and Everything, they choose to obliterate themselves in diversion and distraction. If the approach of death strips away restraints, one gets a sense of what these people imagine to be their Sovereign Good.7
Perhaps Social Acceptability Bias is at work in the answers I have received: in answer to questions like this you are expected to give some kind of jokey, ironic answer, perhaps to chastise the questioner for trying to be “deep.” But I have heard others, not as commonly, answer they would want to spend time with their loved ones - visit with their parents, siblings, and children.
And if you would go off and sacrifice virgins to Quetzalcoatl you probably wouldn't want to say that out loud in mixed company.
I think we have here a strong indication of the attractiveness of distraction. At the ultimate limit, a time to take stock of what you believe about the world and yourself, most people envision themselves doing what they do most of the time - distracting themselves, only with the greatest intensity.
An Answer to Pascal
Is human life truly so wretched? Yes.
Does it have to be? Yes.
Do you personally have to be wretched? Maybe not.
Am I going to tell you about the saving power of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? No.8
Sticking within the frame of our mortal life, there is a famous line embracing distraction as the solution to life’s ills:
Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.
The saying is often sourced from Omar Khayyam’s The Rubaiayat, and it is a good summary of the poem, particularly the “drink” part. G.K. Chesterton had a reply to such a hedonistic philosophy (which I cannot locate right now, so I am going to paraphrase it) that anyone who holds such a philosophy has never truly been happy. Simply put, diversions and dissipation are not happiness.
I was tempted, when I first drafted this essay, to explore Aristotle’s conception of eudaimonia, the life of excellence in accordance with virtue: to making the most of one’s human capacities for reason and creation as the best way to happiness in this life. And if you want to know more about that, you should read the Nicomachaean Ethics, which I may write about here as a Twice Read Book recommendation. But I would rather speak from personal experience.
People lament to me that they have been happy and not known it till afterwards. I am grateful that I have been happy and have known it at the time. This happiness has a singular quality, something ineffable. Sometimes it comes from the most focused activity, working away at a problem. Other times it comes quietly, watching my children play or walking in silence through the woods. It's radically distinct from the pleasures of food and drink, or the excitement and attention consumption of a well made video game. It's timeless and complete in itself, not a state I want for anything in, even for the happiness to continue. It's a cliche to say “I felt so happy I could die,” but if that cliche was started by someone who felt what I felt, then it's a truth: in the moment I am indifferent to continuing or ceasing to be.
The power of the states carries over into even my lowest moments. It's not a state I seek to reproduce - I don’t think it is even possible to seek it directly - but it sustains me, knowing that I have felt it, that I did touch something timeless. The main lasting effect has been an awareness of my drive to distraction, and the growing will to counter it. I work hard now to remove distractions from my life, to avoid involvement with the things over which I have limited to no control - I do not read the news or follow politics, for example, nor do I use social media. All to create conditions where that sense can break over me again, as unexpected as a sudden breeze in a dense forest.
So what I believe is this: one cannot rise above wretchedness through conscious effort, but can clear the ground for such rising above to occur on its own. That means conscious reduction of distractions, which can be very difficult, especially as distractions can creep in without our being aware of them.
I if course have a religious interpretation I apply to such states of being, but I had the states of mind when I was an atheist as well. Naturally, I have a religious interpretation of how that was possible, but I believe (and hope) the state is open to anyone who can let it happen.
If you must know my thoughts on Pascal's much criticized Wager, it is this: the Wager is not a standalone argument, but a step in a long argument that constitutes the entire book, an argument against indifference in questions of religion. The usual formulation of the Wager posits that there is no confirming or disconfirming evidence for belief or unbelief in God (specifically, living the ascetic, self-denying Christian life out of belief in God's existence). The rest of the book is filled with evidence for the truth of Christian belief, from the misery of man and the corruption of nature, before turning to the arguments from the fulfillment of the prophecies of the Old Testament in the person of Christ, as well as the evidence available to those who commits to a religious life. Like the theological third and fourth books of Hobbes Leviathan, hardly any modern reader bothers themselves about these other parts.
Because I do not wish to dispute questions of religion in this essay, I leave aside here my judgment as to the soundness of Pascal's Argument, understanding it to be the whole of the Penseés, of which the Wager is a tiny part. My focus here is on Pascal's account of human life and distraction.
(incidentally, one reasons to read the rest of the book is that Pascal addresses the most common objection to the Wager presented by itself, the Which God? Argument.)
Originally this essay was subtitled “Super Happy Fun Times with Pascal” but I felt that flippancy did not suit the gravity of the topic.
Consider how powerless we often are to resist the groups of which we are part, and how the best means to change our behavior so is to change our circumstances – who we consider our peers. Prisoners often become worse in prison than they were outside – who else do they have to interact with? – while religious contemplatives become more contemplative the longer they spend in cloistered communities (results may vary, of course).
I still find it unbelievable that there are guides telling people how to ‘win’ political arguments with their extended family over Thanksgiving dinner. Because putting Uncle Jack in his place about abortion and immigration is what Thanksgiving is all about.
The Spaceguard Program watches near-Earth space for one kilometer in diameter or larger asteroids, but there is still potential for them to slip through. Then consider thay we have the technology to detect earth intercepting asteroids, but nothing better than theoretical plans about how to divert or destroy one.
I have been similarly disappointed when I hear people discuss what they think “A Good Death” is. Mostly it is some variation of skydiving on heroin. Have we lost so much spirit, do we believe ourselves so incapable of great things, that we cannot echo MacCaulay's fine lines in “The Lay's of Ancient Rome? ”
Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
"To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods.
Haul down the bridge, Sir Consul,
With all the speed ye may;
I, with two more to help me,
Will hold the foe in play.
In yon strait path a thousand
May well be stopped by three.
Now who will stand on either hand,
And keep the bridge with me?
Or, less violently, I will tell you my own good death. I'm not going to achieve it, but it's being on the first manned Mars mission, sacrificing my life to stay behind at the base camp to work some vital piece of equipment to make sure my colleagues get away alive to bring our samples back to Earth.
I mean, if you really want me to I will, but I prefer to do so one on one, and only when I am directly asked about my faith.
Though I'm an atheist myself I've come to understand the emotional and philosophical wisdom behind many religious traditions. I've also thought about the powerfull sentiment in the "sacrificial love" posited by by the Christian faith. To identify oneself with a goal to the point of wagering one's life on it, as many parents would do for the survival of their children or on your example of a "good death" is a powerful thing, but I wonder if it is not just another kind of stimuli, an experience with powerfull valence in the field of possible mental states, but just an experience nonetheless. In this sense, wouldn't this also make you a drugged skydiver, just jumping off a different plane, in the search of a different thrill?