Ping Pong 10: Miracles en masse
In the last Rant, three different themes were identified. Each associated with a different anarchy. These were, firstly that of the need to create an arbitrary ruler, secondly that one could colonalize an anarchy, and thirdly that one could create loose and moving associations – an all were considered in some detail. These three themes, the argument ran, constituted three rather different responses to the English Civil war, a war that threw far older themes into a melting pot of possibility. However this raises the problem of how such themes were understood by those who had not been caught up in the events of that war, - that is by continental Europe (which had at the same time been caught up in the far longer and bloodier Thirty Years War). This question is of course way beyond the scope of one of these essays. I will therefore narrow it down to an examination of how continental Europe thought about the weirdness of the English Civil War, and the strange changes in understanding that were associated with it. How after all can one understand the subtle changes of that war, if one had not been personally caught up in them? One answer was clear enough. The war, and the three themes it produced could be viewed in terms of miracles. That is, they might be the work of God, which is in some sense shining through these actions.
However to make this argument it is necessary to understand what the miraculous was. Or more specifically it was necessary first to understand how one might talk of a miracle not as an individual phenomenon (the blind seeing or sick healed), but rather in relation to a mass phenomena. That is, how one might understand how God walked his destiny through peoples, and through societies, rather than revealing it on an individual ad hoc basis. How would, when would, God reveal himself through the miracle of the collective? Four great thinkers asked themselves this question during the latter half of the Seventeenth Century, These thinkers being Pascal, Malebranche, Spinoza and Leibniz, and it is to their complex interwoven solutions that the next Rant will also turn. In this Rant I will consider in depth Pascal and Malebranche, and in the next, Spinoza and Leibniz.
Pascal, the oldest of these four, was one of the great unsung heroes of Maths. The Man who nearly invented differentiation, and who laid foundation of probability theory. He was also a fine theologian, who codified one of the oddest and yet most believable proofs for the reasonableness of a belief in God. The argument ran, that one always by choice should act, (i.e. believe in God) as the costs involved are low, and the possible outcome of such action very good. And if nothing bad happens as a direct result of that action, how can one lose? Therefore, how belief in God, and adherence to religious dogma was clearly a very small price to pay, and so sensible, (where that dogma need not occupy too much time), all the more so if the supposed benefit was eternal life. What is more if God did not exist, then one would not have lost anything by believing in him. It made perfect rational sense therefore to believe in the divine. Such a proof in effect rests on a probabilistic inference. The actual probability of God’s existence might be small (or at least not known) but the result of his being, and one’s belief in that being, is so great, that one should accept it, if no bad consequences follow on from that belief.
Truth slips then away from statements about being, and becomes rather centred around how one manages conflicting probabilities, in a highly complex world. Pascal’s point is that as probabilities relate one necessarily to the chance of some future good, one should take heed of them, in order to ensure that one gets the best shot at such a good. Probability therefore becomes a way of codifying how the future needs to invade one’s own actions in the present. It invades not as a reality, but rather a command or at least a request. It will therefore place one in a situation of choice; a Future has invaded the present, and yet the very fact that it is not there yet (that it is just a probability), means that one can choose how one responds to it (one might not stop smoking or using petrol).
Critical in the above challenge is the fact that all probabilistic arguments are necessarily defined en masse. That is, the arguments about smoking or polluting are made about entire populations, and not individuals. Individuals are therefore always free to gamble their own anomaly status (their own individuality) against the accepted norm. Be that as it may, Pascal has clearly formalised in this argument two different ideas. On the one hand there is the power of the future to tumble into the present and transform it. A power which is strangely miraculous, in that it comes from beyond what is (or could be) now, and yet changes absolutely everything. Secondly the power of change, this power is bound up with humanity, understood not in their singular identity, but rather as somehow en masse and collective. It is in humanity’s collective soul that its future emerges and we act as we feel a part of, or are caught up in, this collectivity.
Here then is a strange rather dry miracle, but a miracle none the less. That is, a point where some other truth shines through the apparent world of rational choices and individual actions in which we are otherwise immersed. In our modern rendition of this argument, we might struggle to be ourselves and yet still conform to expectation (in some way or other). We have by and large lost sight of Pascal’s miracle. That is, the miracle of a future tumbling into the present which has been replaced by a grim and somewhat expectation of the inevitability of Pascal’s argument. We live (and have since Pascal) in a society were the future, codified by statistics, hangs over all of us like a cloud (‘children of single mothers are…’ or ‘eating chocolate does…’). Whereas Pascal might argue, that one needs to open oneself up to the miracle of the future already inscribed in one’s nature. We have become bitter and resentful, that anything other than ourselves, should also be in our nature ‘telling us what to do’.
This last move has of course led in turn to a strangely twisted relationship to our own future. We resent the fact that it will come from outside (and can therefore be predicted), and yet our entire society necessarily demands that we allow for that fact. That is, our society would become quite unmanageable if it was not the case that at some level, elements removed from day to day perception were at work, making humanity predictable en masse. Moreover all government is the government of this collectivity. Governments therefore act in the interests of ‘single mothers’ or ‘the poor’, ‘the City’ or ‘the rich’ or whoever. Government is therefore always carried out in the interests and name of the ‘miracled’ voter. A voter at no point present, and yet who offers a clue to the future of a certain section of the population. However at the same time, in the last twenty years, any hope of organizing society along the lines of these hidden voters has proved impossible. Humanity has rejected the idea that it is a standard size, even as society has become so complex that it has by and large become impossible to govern anything but the standard sized. We do so like to pretend we are individuals and do so even if that individuality actively works against our own interests. Hence the majority of people can be convinced to protect the rights of the very very rich (against their own interests) if they are offered the dream of being very rich themselves.
This last point leads to two further modern aspects of Pascal’s argument. Firstly as I mentioned above, Pascal was very aware that the future that tumbled into the present, was itself a highly textured affair. Numerous futures will therefore tumble into our minds, and demand we act in their light. Pascal’s argument is that we will need to sort through these conflicting possibilities, and choose those that cost us least, but allow us to gain most, while not overtly affecting our options in the present. The problem with our society is that the second element in this formula does not sit very neatly with the first. Our society is, in effect, offered a choice between fairly mundane dreams, which can be followed in the present with minimal harm to our present interests; and far more distant dreams which offer more, and yet involve us sacrificing much now. (Adequate healthcare vs. being in the 60% tax band.) However the very posing of this choice actively obscures the penalties one might pay if one chooses the second of these options. These sacrifices will include not just what one is, but also the far more problematic - what one might have otherwise become (that is, the more immediate futures of the first choice). The penalties which one pays in the name of a distant dream are therefore often really rather high, and yet strangely intangible (all the more so because to think them, one will have to allow oneself to conform to a stereotype). This does not mean that one should not choose the long shot, only that one needs at all times to be suspicious of it. Or rather, suspicious of whether someone else is actively benefiting from one’s dreams, and so conniving with one’s own hopes to ensure that one looses sight of what might have been gained if another path was followed.
Society therefore is caught up in a drama which pitches collective and realizable small goals against long term dreams, which can only be realized by specific individuals and never en masse. Our problem is that the first reality is constantly sacrificed in the name of the second. And yet here the second point comes into its own. Key of course within Pascal’s argument, was the fact that the future was not simply present, but rather constituted a nuanced challenge to the present. One had to act in a certain way in the light of that future. Thence the problem is one of whether one can then organize these responses en masse and so turn the politics of the future into the politics of the present. At this point the more individualistic dream based futures score very highly. One can certainly organize a society based on maximising people’s belief that IT really might be them (a dream which one can then silently manipulate). Far greater problems occur if one follows the other path, and attempts to sell the merits of collective politics. The deep problem here (one faced by all socialist societies) is that collective action in the foreknowledge of a supposed collective future, will in fact change all the possibilities for that future. Modern socialisms are therefore caught up in the agony of necessarily moving the goal posts even as they attempt to enact a policy (the existence of a national health service, makes the population more likely to take risks with their health…).
Socialism, as it might be configured by a Pascal inspired system (which is the only modern incarnation of it) is caught up in the dilemma of either accepting that the goal posts really are moving, or trying drastic (and invariably terrifying) ways to stop them moving. (Stalin or Pol Pot.) The result is that Pascal inspired governments are faced with three choices. Either they will ‘do what ever it takes’ to hold the collective down, while enunciating it; or they will conspire in the foreknowledge of what will be, and govern in the interests of statistics, without ever formally nuancing out why; or they will follow the right wing, and celebrate hope (and therefore sacrifice the most possibly realizable of goods). Pascal offers governments a bitter wager, - they can be wicked, or secretive or corrupting…
An alternative path to this rather pessimistic viewpoint was traced out by another Seventeenth Century theologian, Malebranche. Malebranche argued that one needs really to divide up the realities of the mind from those of external reality. The mind will therefore work on a certain set of rules, which we can know directly. The world will in contrast, be bound up within casual (and predetermined) chains of causality. One can know then of the world only through experiments, in which these chains are investigated. It is then only God’s infinite (and miraculous) power which allows these two otherwise different spheres to link up in someway. All humans are therefore at once free to act as they choose, and yet are bound up in a world of external cause, by a perpetuating miracle. Humans are free to change their own world (through actions), while God is free to change the rules. Moreover if God does change the rules, the new rules will also be logical in themselves, and will therefore conform with previous rules, even as they qualify them in some way (as Einstein modified Newton, by including and explaining him, is a wider theory).
Thence (in the modern version of the Malebanche argument) the sphere of the world will in itself be predictable. And yet there still remains the possibility that in accordance with a new desire of the human mind, or to fit some purpose of his own, God might change everything, and show how that predictability was caught up in some higher destiny (and so in a sense contingent). Malebranche will then reconcile the twin elements of Pascal’s argument. It is possible, he argues to imagine a force existing between the predictable world of collective futures, and the more volatile world of individual hopes, a force one might call God. And yet Malebranche at this point by and large breaks off, good priest as he was, and leaves the mystery of what this power might be to the mystery of God. It will then be up to the thinkers considered in next week’s Rant, Leibniz and Spinoza, to investigate the ways of this infinite being.
Pascal, in direct contrast with the post-Civil-War thinkers, argues that the real lesson that one needs to learn from mass action is not anarchy, but order. The very fact that people behave collectively in large numbers, produces (or at least opens the way) both for new and silent ordering processes to come to the fore, but also new ways for individual advancement. These two facts by themselves means that it is in an individual’s interests always that order be maintained, as much of their reality will simply slip away if it is ever lost. Pascal can however make this move only by effectively blasting wide open the link between individual and collective futures within the scope of this collective body. What was good for any one individual, was never good for everyone. A problem which Malebanche hints might be solved if only we knew, the nature of the power which takes one from one sphere to the next. A nature and a power that I will then consider in detail next week .
