Feb 3, 2019
Gravity and Grace
Newton’s 1st and 3rd laws of motion state respectively that a body in motion tends to stay in motion and, each action provokes an equal and opposite reaction.
These are physical laws that work pretty well. You can send a rocket to the moon on the basis of them. Can they be applied to human affairs?
“An angry man gets drunk and beats his kids | The same old way his drunken father did”. Offspring, “Way Down The Line”, Ixnay on the Hombre
There is a narrative espoused by the pessimistic belief that nothing changes. It appears to accord with stories that we have heard, of cycles of revenge between hostile groups, whether nations or families, that seem eternal, propelled by an ineluctable reciprocity.
However, this view of reality is manifestly untrue.
I once heard a social worker say that in the case of the violent criminals he worked with, all of them, without exception, had abusive childhoods. But he added that not all people with abusive childhoods turn out to be violent criminals.
There is an asymmetry in observable reality, visible only at a group level, that suggests the deck is stacked in favor of the optimist. The recognition of this asymmetry is implicit in the culture of modern day civilized societies, in both West and East.
This was not always the case. In the cradle of Western civilization, ancient Greece, a common description of ‘justice’ was that of ‘helping friends and harming enemies’, a phrase which grates upon the modern conscientiousness. In ancient Rome, the tomb of the despot Sulla proudly recorded that ‘There was no man who did me so great a good or harm that I did not repay in full’.
In the ancient world, there were counterpoints to this view. Socrates observed that ‘it is better to suffer evil than to commit evil’. We see the same rule expressed in a different way in the words of Christ, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive’.
Just as there were counterpoints in the ancient world, there remain today a contingent of believers in old Newtonian view. The view is particularly appealing to those who set store by ‘rationality’, given that it is not only simpler, but also makes the future predictable.
The Socratic view, on the other hand, is unsettling because the countervailing, counter-intuitive force that works against the reciprocity of evil is fundamentally mysterious. Many who regard themselves as scientific — or in other words, who set greater store by what they themselves are capable of understanding—are fundamentally hostile to the mysterious.
The French philosopher Simone Weil—who despite being an individual of considerable genius, had no such qualms about the mysterious — described the progress of the human soul as the interaction between the two forces of Gravity and Grace.
She cites Shakespeare’s King Lear as an example of the triumph of Gravity. It is thus a fundamentally pessimistic play. In Cymbeline, we see an example of Grace as the evil Iachimo (somewhat abruptly) repents and alters course. A more nuanced representation of the battle between these two forces is in the soliloquy of Measure for Measure’s Angelo (“What dost thou, or what art thou, Angelo?”).
The triumph of Grace over Gravity is at the center of the Christian story, wherein Satan, Death, Hell and the Grave — forces of Gravity — are overturned.
Bret Weinstein and Richard Dawkins had a discussion last year, in which they disagreed on the importance of a biological understanding of human motivation. While Dawkins appeared to believe that cultural evolution had superseded biological evolution, Weinstein posited the existence of large tracts of latent ‘code’ that may still be activated by circumstances or artful demagoguery, resulting in acts of genocide akin to those of Soviet Russia and other countries subjected to extreme scarcity.
Given the increased destructive power of human technology, he warns, we must either ensure that this code is not triggered, or else risk the existence of the human race.
What Bret Weinstein is asking for — although he would be unlikely to phrase it in these terms—is an intervention of Grace to counteract powerful gravitational forces that operate at a societal rather than an individual level.
In his 2016 documentary ‘Hypernormalisation’, Adam Curtis reflects on the failure of attempts at societal change since the 1960s. He posits that movements such as Occupy Wall Street in the West, or the Arab Spring in the Middle East, while drawing upon far more efficient technology than that available to those in the Civil Rights movement, were ultimately unsuccessful for two reasons.
The first was the rise of individualism. Movements that require individuals to subsume themselves into a greater cause for a period of time longer than that of a Tuesday afternoon are unlikely to achieve much. Empirically, considering how these movements have operated, individualism precludes the voluntary giving of oneself to a collective goal for any sustained period of time.
The second reason is equally powerful : the absence of a positive vision for the future. This is connected to the first point, in that individualists are unlikely to coalesce around a common view of how things should be. It is also probably a by-product of the nihilistic endgame of postmodernism, which having no mechanism for discriminating between the relative worth of different outcomes, is incapable of making the deep commitment required to bring about a given outcome.
Curtis adds that in the case of the Egyptian Arab Spring, the revolutionaries were displaced by the Muslim Brotherhood, a group not encumbered by either of the above two disadvantages. The rapid progress of authoritarian social justice activism in corporations and public bodies in the West is another case in point. Having no firm vision for the future not only precludes one from bringing about change, but also leaves one with limited means of resisting change imposed by others.
Let’s return to Bret Weinstein’s challenge — how to avert the seemingly inevitable destruction of humanity by an intervention of Grace.
Here, we are in search of a society that has both a recognition that voluntary sacrifice of individualism for the sake of a group of individuals is ultimately the only way to preserve the individual. Furthermore, a society with a strong vision about how society should be, preferably predicated on asymmetric / Socratic principles of returning repaying harm with a lesser harm, and good with a greater good.
The hypothesis is that such a society will be able to overcome cataclysmic hardship, not only without being destroyed, but actually emerging the stronger for the hardship. As I have set out in former posts, South Korea provides just such an example.
If humanity can master the template set out by Korea, there is every reason to suppose that in the case of this planet at least, Grace will subdue Gravity, and humanity continue, in Simone Weil’s words, to ‘fall upwards towards the heights’.
