OleopteneA blog for Mara Collins

Betting Against Pascal

December 21st, 2008

Friday night I was really grateful that some friends who are moving to Portland, new friends I am really excited about getting to see more often, who are renting a house here for the winter break, were willing to brave Portland’s icy roads and snow-inexperienced drivers to come have dinner with me and the boys. Because we talked about real estate and the state of schools one idea that came up a few times was that of the abundance. It’s so easy when trying to buy or sell a house to start believing in a scarcity, in there being exactly one right house/buyer for you and lots of competition for that same house/buyer. The anxiety is echoed for me in the way a lot of people get worked up about their children’s education (if they don’t succeed at this level, then how will they succeed at the next enough to get into a competitive college so that they can compete in the job market?) These friends sort of nodded and smiled when I said I try to maintain my sanity by countering this thinking with a belief in the universe’s abundance.

After they went home, though, I thought that I maybe carry around this abundance thing as a habit, that it still requires examination. I’ve been reading the collection of essays Unholy Ghosts: Writers on Depression edited by Nell Casey and one of the more provocative ones in there is Susanna Kaysen suggesting that it’s to her advantage to be depressive “What would we be without self-doubt and despair?” and she points out that her friends who are optimistic are disappointed often when things don’t turn out as well as their high hopes, whereas her pessimism means she gets to either be surprised in a good way or smug because she was right. “Optimism is a lousy self-defense mechanism.”

And not to be the world’s biggest equivocator, caveating that I don’t think that pessimism is not identical with biochemical depression, and so on, but, yeah, that resonates a little. I vividly remember being taken with the medieval idea of the wheel of fortune (sounds so much fancier in Latin: rota fortunae) in high school, and when fortunes are always being reversed, when things are good, you are really just a sitting duck waiting for that reversal. Self-sabotage is a way of wresting back the power, however perverse that seems, to bring the reversal on, myself, preemptively, rather than be the victim when it comes on by surprise.

But of course, that really is not so reconcilable with belief that the universe is abundant, and any moderate middle way seems excluded. And it occurs to me that I can find evidence for both points of view, so that it finally comes down to a matter of choice. I make a grid of the possibilities, the positions, the outcomes:I pretend that this is scientific. That there isn’t the third option of trying always to act as if the universe is an abundant place that asks of me only trust and generosity, while there is a little voice in my head, that when things go badly, pipes up “What did I tell you?” I don’t to have been naive, a chump, right? But oh, we love stories of the Fool, how he has “chosen” the naive and trusting position and been miraculously protected.

My confession, that there have been the long dark nights when I have challenged God/the universe, attempting the scientific test: “You exist, you’re benevolent? Prove it, make that phone ring, let a message arrive in my email box, anything to cut the heavy aloneness going on here, or that’s it, I’m out of here.” And you know I’m still here, but the phone didn’t ring, and I don’t know that it’s not a protection of a benevolent universe that somehow I was endowed with some nature that says “Wait, hang on, that’s not a fair challenge, and things might, just maybe get a little better.” Or if it there isn’t a simple materialistic explanation with biological imperatives of self-preservation (and then what about those for whom that providence was not there?)

I like to pretend this is an updating of Pascal’s wager, that his wager on the existence of God wasn’t simplified somehow by not having to choose between a passel of religions claiming to be the exclusive way to know God. So I pretend that the wager on the nature of the universe is a non-sectarian way of approaching the whole business, but as I scrape the bottom of this idea, I know that woven into the fabric of my Bahà’í identity are the fragments I’ve blogged before “I swear by My life! Nothing save that which profiteth them can befall my loved ones. To this testifieth the pen of God, the Most Powerful the All-Glorious, the Best-Beloved.” and as long as I obstinately cling to this faith, I have no choice but to keep struggling to interpret the universe as benevolent and abundant.

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