“All 
of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
BLAISE PASCAL (1623-1662), PENSÉES 48
I consider myself fairly well-read in a range of fields – is that redundant? I am also familiar with Blaise Pascal from both his own writing and that of others written about him, at least as a scientist, mathematician and philosopher.
But it was television that led me to Pascal the religious thinker and his meditations that most people know as Pensées, a name adopted by his editors. Pascal, according to historians Jean Orcibal and Lucien Jerphagnon, referred to it as Apologie de la religion Chrétienne. But I digress.
Actor Denis Lawson, newly added to the cast of New Tricks as Det. Steve McAndrew offered some sage advice about the cause of all humanity’s problems, normally something that would bounce off my outermost filter. But it somehow got inside and stuck after he said it was a quote from Blaise Pascal, full quote and portrait above. So I had to look a bunch of stuff up, my usual reaction to new information, drilled into me by my indentured servitude as a journalist: check accuracy, verify, get other sources. HooRAH.
After the reporter due diligence I took the mandatory pause called a gut check -did my gut give me a true or a false? Universals like “all” signal erosional wear around the edges of truth. Exceptions were overflowing my cup and quickly filling a bushel basket with no end to the flow in sight. But exceptions by definition prove there is at least a general rule or they couldn’t exist. No A, no A-x, as Pascal might say. The the agreeably burning in my bosom, a cultural remainder from my religious upbringing of how to recognize truth, contrasted with the buzzing caused by exposure to social media.
Social media is analogous to the Borg, the Collective of many species, the buzzing Hive of Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek. Think about it. It is difficult, impossible for some, to have their own thoughts. Facebook is built on reacting to the thoughts of others. Posting other people’s choices for thinking, sharing them with some of our own identity hopefully attached. Occasionally we get to add our own thoughts to someone else’s topic. But to often the topic itself is part of the Hive. And the buzzing never stops.
To sit quietly in a room alone connoted to me a mind working out things on its own, developing parameters, outlines, scouting potential problems with logic and argument,
rationalizing, perhaps, in a higher sense. It implied time to me, rather than a time-suck, as KA McCudden calls maintaining a social media presence. This would be very attractive to me. Boiled to its essence the phrase suggests time to think in a disciplined way.
Later it occurred to me that this doesn’t actually mention thinking. Pascal could have meant time not to think. To retreat from the thoughts, sometimes so Gordian knot-like, (see the Jean-Simon Berthélemy, above) of the world. A time to be quiet, with no need to adjust or even consider another’s thoughts, needs, feelings, desires or emotions. No need to calculate responses, power equations, fight or flight; to weigh group mores, cultural imperatives, religious tenets, demands and responsibilities; or do the calculus to determine action or response.
What state would that be, ‘sitting quietly in a room alone’? It’s something worth pondering. According to Pascal, something that, if done, could guide us through ‘all humanity’s problems,’ with a few exceptions, of course.
What do you think?
CauseriE 