You may or may not remember that I have set the intention of going through Simone Weil’s remarkable book Roots, using its exploration of the “needs of the soul” as a guidepost for reflecting on the state of things these days.
Ironically, the theme of Weil’s first section is order. I say “ironic” because I’ve been working on a separate post for weeks; it has been lingering like an unmade bed on my spread of open tabs, having gotten completely out of control and taken on a life of its own. If I can’t figure out what I’m trying to say, how could anyone else?
Lo and behold: “order.” Phew.
Weil describes order as “a texture of social relationships such that no one is compelled to violate imperative obligations in order to carry out other ones.” That’s a mouthful, but it does speak to something that has always felt very true (and very confusing) to me: with all of our obligations — to self, family, friends, community, country, planet, morality — how do we possibly weigh and juggle them all to ensure that none are being sacrificed for the sake of others? I have struggled with this for my entire adult life. For example: what if, in meeting the needs of one friend, I am, by definition and because of the immutable laws of time and space, abandoning the needs of another? By what metric can I possibly prioritize? And who made me the judge, anyway?
And that’s just a seemingly minor social example (although, to be honest, the circumstances I’m thinking of were actually anything but minor).
Here’s another: my daughter, now almost eighteen, has been a (very, very) determined vegetarian since she was eight years old. Every day and at every meal, I have an internal fight (often spilling over into dinnertime angst) derived from competing obligations: no matter how well we plan our meals, she simply does not take in as much protein as she would if she ate meat, chicken, or fish. I am not at all confident that our plant-based substitutes are, in the long run, the way to go, but also feel compelled to honor her deeply-considered choices, and acknowledge their congruency with my own profound desire to do no harm.
This set of incompatible urges leads to a state of perpetual disorder within me.
The list of examples is endless, and the more I think about it, the more certain I am that I am perpetually stuck in the crosshairs of what Weil calls being a “troublemaker” and being an “agent of order.” Troublemakers increase the number of incompatible obligations in their lives, and agents of order (you will have guessed) decrease that number.
Thankfully, she gives perfectionists like me a “pass” by declaring that the idea of true order, along these lines, is probably a “fiction.” There are just too many variables, too many people, too many factors, and too many choices competing for our attention to render a perfectly ordered existence. But damn, if I don’t try. I’m pretty sure that everyone around me would appreciate it greatly if I tried a little less.
And yet, as if in laughing counterpoint to all of that angsty, self-created chaos, there’s the universe itself. Weil then turns her attention to the cosmos, where an “infinite number of mechanical actions concur” and produce an order that feels total, and breathtakingly beautiful even if we can’t possibly understand it. And then there are the artistic masterpieces that somehow seem to echo or reflect that cosmic order, even if we can’t quite understand how they do it, either. Perhaps that’s part of the mystery of art.
She seems to acknowledge that we’ll never actually “get there,” at least not permanently, but that to strive for such a state of order should be top of mind. How? By remaining attuned to the incomprehensible cosmos, the vast beauty of great art, and the human urge to do good, even when we fail.
This brings to mind the other great thinker I’ve been reading lately, Carl Jung.
In his book The Undiscovered Self, Jung really takes us to task for how we, as individuals, are (let’s be honest) failing at our biggest directive in life — to become full, flourishing individuals — and are thus subject to deeply violent instincts that will weaponize our need for belonging to their own ends.
In a passage that could have been written this morning, Jung writes:
…insofar as society itself is composed of de-individualized persons, it is completely at the mercy of ruthless individualists. Let it band together into groups and organizations as much as it likes — it is just this banding together and the resultant extinction of the individual personality that makes it succumb so readily to a dictator. A million zeroes joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one [emphasis mine. That is brilliant.]. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but the fatally shortsighted habit of our age is to think only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations, though one would think the world had seen more than enough of what a well-disciplined mob can do in the hands of a single madman.
Weil talks about these “instigators of violence,” too. She seems to be saying that their belief in the machine-like qualities of the universe are fundamentally anti-human and, I would add, dead. We can look at the clockwork of the cosmos and see a dead machine that we must use and exploit for our own purposes, or we can look at the same unfathomable structures and see “beauty.”
I think, in our inflamed political moment, we’ve all fallen victim to the tyranny of the bumper sticker. No matter what we think, feel, and believe, we are pretty committed to a narrative in which the world would FINALLY click into place if we could just get everyone marching to the same tune (the tune of our choosing, of course). But that looks, to me, an awful lot like the very things Jung was warning us against. He continues:
…our blindness in this respect is extremely dangerous. People go on blithely organizing and believing in the sovereign remedy of mass action, without the least consciousness of the fact that the most powerful organizations can only be maintained by the greatest ruthlessness of their leaders and the cheapest of slogans.
I do not know how to reconcile my desperate need for order with the messy chaos of life, but I do know that it always feels a little less suffocating when I remember, occasionally, to look up at the stars and wonder about it all.
This is eloquent and thought provoking so thanks for that. Yet Jung strikes me as a bluffer who uses hyperbole and insinuates that he has an impossible insight into the unknowable. The million zeroes are of course not zeroes at all. I prefer the cosmic vision of Einstein’s 1948 essay “Why We Need Socialism.” He begins with the condition of the human soul: we are more dependent than ever on our social interdependence and yet we perceive it as a degrading threat. To make a long story short, Einstein argues, like Tolstoy, that life is only meaningful when we live for others. Perhaps I’m mistaken, but I read him as psychologically and politically opposed to the direction in which Jung would push us.
Perhaps this doesn’t fulfill the need to find order in the chaos but I can say that this column landed perfectly for me today Allison. Whether it was perfect timing or coincidence, the result was a good one. Thank you for your thoughtful writings!