The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Wednesday, January 1, 2025

Sermonizing: “Hence it appears that God,” writes Pascal in one of his Pensées, “wanting to keep to himself alone the right to teach us about ourselves, wanting to make the difficult explanation of our being unintelligible to our-selves, hid the knot so high, or rather, so low, that we were quite incapable of finding out about it ourselves. So it is not through the proud workings of our reason but the simple submission of reason that we can truly know ourselves.” This, among so many such points of conflicts–as the Florida Department of Transportation describes potential collision points in crisscrossing roadways–is where god and I part, or should I blame Pascal? wanting to keep to himself alone the right is an interesting phrase. It states a right. Whose? From where? The cosmology of the phrase is unanswerable. Unlike our universe as we know it today, it has no big bang. The “right” hangs there, a creation before creation. But in Pascal’s thinking, for god to want to abrogate that right suggests a step that places god outside the right, as if the right were an even more supreme deity. Let that pass. The problem with that particular thought, as with so much in Pascal, is the sense of submission (keep in mind that submission is synonymous with Islam, Islam being Arabic for submission and French for Houellebecquian best-seller) to what appears to be a calculating, thin-skinned god who wants it all for himself, if not a cruel god: why this “wanting to make the difficult explanation of our being unintelligible to our-selves,” why this hiding of knots, why this juvenile hide and seek game with our own beings, as if god were racking up the billables of our endless hours in counseling as we pay the consequences of this cruelty? This is the Augustinian/Calvinist/Islamist (that indissoluble trinity) part of the theology of self-abnegation: you must not only have faith, but the only way to have faith, or at least to have the key to faith’s bunker, is to debase yourself, to admit–like in PolPot’s reeducation camps, incidentally inspired by Augustine and Rousseau–that you are less than zero, that you do not count, that you do not have the capability to count, that all you may do, all you are given to do, is submit. Anything else is heresy. Ask the Albigensians, whose sweet Christianity did not save them from eradication at the hands of pre-Pascalian Christians. Only then will you–maybe–have the grace to see, or at least to be seen. Maybe, because in Augustinian Calvinism you are either chosen or you’re shit out of luck. It’s one more cruelty in god’s lottery. Do everything right. Do everything well. Submit every DNA strand in your body, the useless ones included. You’re probably still going to lose. No 70 virgins for you. Especially if you put these “proud workings of our reason” to work. Here’s Pascal, proudly displaying his sublime reason in even more sublime style telling you it’s all for naught. I don’t think you can chalk that up to just another paradox–the favorite indemnifier of all absurd things from scriptures to Rousseau to yesterday’s pablum from the stage of most churches in this county. With Pascalian reasoning, there’s always, always a get out of jail free card, plucked from the very deck stacked against you. You can’t win. Not even in an argument with the absurd. All this might be irrelevant. It might all be just another theological debate, and like all theology, it’s the real less than zero: it doesn’t get more pointless, more useless. Theology is the swindle that never peaks. But for this: Political submission is no different. That’s the age we’re living in. That’s what explains how half the country can submit to the absurd without second thoughts, because it is not for us to think. Pascal would have headlined the GOP convention some months ago, preaching to a choir more converted to Pascalianism than Pascal. In our America now so calcified to Islamo-Calvinism, Bobby Kennedy’s “why not” has retrograded to Tennyson’s decree plagiarized from Pascal: “ours is not to reason why.”

—P.T.

 

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When he was still fresh out of the academy, Matthew used to tell his mother, «You know something, I have more power than the president. You know why? I can take people’s rights away. Their rights of freedom. ‘You’re under arrest. You’re pinched. Your freedom is gone.’” And it was a sense of responsibility to all this power that caused Matthew so assiduously to toe the line. “He never gets upset,” his mother told Sabbath. “If there’s another cop who is mouthing off, calling the suspect a this or a that, Matthew tells him, ‘It’s not worth it. You’re going to get yourself in trouble. We’re doing what we’re supposed to do.’ Last week they brought a guy in, he was kicking the cruiser and everything, and Matthew said, Let him do what he’s going to do, he’s pinched. What are we going to prove by screaming at him and swearing at him? This is all stuff he can bring up in court. It’s just another reason for this guy to get out of what he’s done wrong.’ Matthew says they can swear, they can do whatever they want—they’ve got handcuffs on, he’s in control of the situation, not them. Matthew says, He’s trying to get me to lose control. There are cops who do lose control. They start screaming at them—and why, Ma? For what?’ Matthew is just quiet and takes them in.”

—From Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater (1995).

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