on four different ways to lie to yourself
This semester I have been co-teaching a class on ancient and modern accounts of science. I have asked the students to consider the physicists’ dilemma—that, scientifically speaking, the table we gather around is mostly empty space and electro-magnetic fields. What to do, then, about a human life that must be lived out around a table which feels perfectly table-like to us? I’m not cruel enough to ask the students to read Husserl’s The Crisis of the European Sciences, but if they did happen to read it, I’d point them to his suggestion that modern science effected a “surreptitious substitution of the mathematically abstracted world of idealities for the only real world, the one that is actually given through perception, that is ever experienced and experienceable—our everyday life.” Students rightly want to know which desk is the “real” one. Their earnestness won’t accept that what the desk might be can known in differently, with varying degrees of precision. That this might be the way things are—that things aren’t simply one thing—can’t stand up to the young, spirited desire for simplicity. They feel like they’re lying to themselves, just a little bit, when the “actual” desk is not what their senses tell them is there.
It is February. Last weekend it was 10 degrees Celsius both days here in Fredericton, New Brunswick. The historical average for February is about 20 degrees Celsius lower than that. It has hardly snowed this winter, so we can’t even enjoy the unexpected warmth as a reward earned by suffering through storm after storm. But there is an undeniable animal delight in being in the warm sun as it melts the snow. The warmth is cut by the slight chill of the air cooled by the melting snow, which is militated by the warm sun, and so on. But last weekend this hivernal dialectic was accompanied by more ambivalence, since we all knew the source of this abnormal weather.
And yet, it’s not quite right to say that I still didn’t enjoy myself. Can I lie to myself enough to enjoy a spring day in the depths of the winter? I don’t need to lie to myself to admit that after so many days in the cold and the dark I enjoyed the sun. I’m a bona fide, documented winter lover, but even still the sunshine and the warmth made me happy. I substituted my planned ski for a run, and felt fine about it. But, the pleasure was accompanied by a certain foreboding. This abnormality is on its way to becoming normal for us, and I can’t believe it will be good. But I can lie to myself, just a little bit, to soak up the February sun.
This ability to half-believe something, to allow yourself to be taken in by an image—a chimera, Rousseau would say—is surprisingly necessary for adult life. In Rousseau’s Emile, Sophie is able to love Emile because he is like Telemachus, but she also knows that he is not Telemachus. She can love the image, which is some sense true!, while also acknowledging the deflationary reality. Similarly, when I grade student work I sometimes have to be wilfully naive about the circumstances of its composition. I’ve been a student—I know how it goes! I also know that sometimes I tried my best and really cared. And so doubts about student enthusiasm or student motivations for producing the work have to be suppressed in the interest of fairness and charity. I’m taking it seriously even if I half-worry they haven’t. Because what if they did? It’s not worth it to be “right” in a way that makes everything wrong.
There’s this scene I think about every Ash Wednesday from the end of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. Binx has decided to go to medical school and to get married to Kate. She tells him, “I’m not sure I’ll ever change. Really change,” and he replies: “You might.” There’s a lot in that “you might.” Binx, whose shrewd perceptiveness has been something of a hallmark throughout the novel, observe an African American man go into a church for an Ash Wednesday service. Does he emerge with ashes on his forehead, or not?
“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 Bond 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.”
I’ve always found the Lord’s advice to the twelve—“I am sending you out as sheep among wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves”—to be an odd injunction along these lines (even in addition to the frustrating mixed animal metaphors).
I understand that the immediate context speaks to the disjunction between the gospel message and the ways of the world, but if that’s the case, why do we still need to retain the wisdom of the serpent? Shouldn’t we simply trust in the Lord, and bleat merrily as the wolves circle? How can you possibly be expected to do both? My “serpentine” qualities rest very uneasily with my few dovelike ones. In fact, the former are constantly in danger of sinking their fangs into the latter. But I think that Percy might be on to something apposite to these questions: you need to remain as wise as serpents to understand the difficulty of being as innocent as doves. The innocence isn’t much of an achievement if you’re not also walking around with your eyes open.
A religious sister once told me that the hardest thing about being a Christian is assuming that everyone means well, even against your own better judgment. I was about 20 years old when she told me this, and I sagaciously assumed she thought this because the good sister wasn’t assaulted at all times and from all sides by the temptations of beautiful bodies and dark liquor. But who was the dove there! Anyway, sometimes it’s hard to even believe in your own good intentions—but a little lie like that, if it can even be called that, is required if you’re ever going to change.