Tag: Friendship

Posted on

Pascal’s Conditional, Subjunctive Wager

Since the age of sixteen, I have entertained discussions with a friend it would not be wrong to call a theologian. For most of our adult lives we were out of touch, though he was often in my thoughts the way everything and everyone have always been in our thoughts when we come to think of them again.

Last year, we renewed contact and naturally re-engaged with our debate.

One of his thrusts or parries led me to reflect on other stages of my life in which I had not only concourse but friendship even intercourse with religious persons, learning to speak the terminology of theology and doctrine with them in order to communicate.

His question turned around Pascal’s wager that each and every human bets that God exists or not. Given that such might be the case and taking into consideration the infinite gain or loss associated with belief, unbelief or disbelief in said God (an eternity in either heaven or hell), Pascal held that any rational person ought to live as if God exists and seek to believe in Him. If God did not actually exist, such a losing gambler would suffer not infinite but mere finite loss, measurable because imaginable, pleasures more likely than not sensual, and measured in the end against an infinity in hell.

Though admiring Pascal’s logic, which contributed to probability theory, I was never happy with his assumption that we could “pretend as if we believe” and God wouldn’t know or care about how false any virtue we thereby attained might be. This attitude betrays my Protestant orientation, since I presume that a relationship with a god or even God would be not only personal but sincere, without mediation.

The most telling description I ever heard of this “knowingness” of God was not from a Christian, rather a Muslim, the Imam of one of the first mosques in North America, Al Rashid, founded in Edmonton in the 1930s. In 1986, I ceremoniously converted to Islam in order to marry Nasrin legally in the eyes of the Iranian government — a legal procedure which facilitated her life and lent her a margin of safety in the early years of the Iranian Revolution, when she had to travel back for family reasons. The Sunni Lebanese Imam who married us and who filled out the documents she submitted to the Iranian Embassy in Ottawa was doubtlessly aware that my conversion was factitious. At one point in our discussions about Islam he assured me that it was not important to him if I were sincere in my conversion, since that was a matter between myself and Allah. Allah would know, when the time came to know, what I really thought.

The notion of a panoptic deity is a terrifying one, even more disturbing than that of a panoptic state, of which one extreme model is the eighteenth century prison which Jeremy Bentham imagined and about which Michel Foucault later wrote. Foucault was the consummate Parisian intellectual, hence bore within the crypto-Protestant strain of Catholic Jansenism, which remains strong among that national elite — one reason French Communism sank such deep roots. In his later thought, Foucault shifted towards a more orthodox perspective, arguing that confession to a human authority was the ultimate instrument of power and also of truth about one’s self, not observation of our acts. In other words, truth is institutional, not located in one’s own independent thoughts about oneself or about God.

This passing, peripheral reflexion on privacy and confession is, I would argue, relevent in this age of social media, selfies, and mass collection of that upstart deity, data.

Posted on

Tell Me, James

These were the speaking notes for my brief eulogy of James Olney delivered at his home in University Hills, Irvine, on February 26, 2015. As they reveal, at several crucial points he had a major influence on the course of my life and career(s).  I didn’t see him much in the last few years, but his absence is palpable.  Here is his academic obituary.

  • Laura asked me to speak to James’s pre-Irvine life. So many memories from those years, beginning in 1967 at Cuttington College, in upcountry Liberia. James was first a mentor, then a friend. “Modest” even “reticent” are words I’ve heard applied to him. I would say “succinct”.
  • And generous towards others, even when critical. As one of our young colleagues there, Lois Johnson, wrote to me last week: “Those of us in the English department at Cuttington were the better for his encouragement and his willingness to trust our judgment regarding curriculum, and his respect for our opinion, especially considering how very green our own understanding was.”
  • Tell Me, Africa, was the fruit of that sojourn for him. It is being republished next month in Princeton UP Legacy Series. More important to me is that over forty years later African colleagues and friends still say to me “Olney got it right“.
  • It was at this time, in 1969. that I had to make a major decision, and James was my mentor in it. I was in Liberia not only to avoid the draft, but to avoid Grad School, about which I had misgivings. His words, engraven in my memory: “George, if you read and study and write, you’ll be happy enough, even in Canada“. He was right.
  • James was a mentor in many other fine things of life: food, wine, table conversation, but even animal husbandry. At one point I even baby-sat for a week with his pet spider monkey, Harriet.
  • But back to food and wine. Lessons in high hedonism, epicurianism, plus a network which lead to the five years I spent in the French import wine business. In Liberia, in Paris on furlough from Africa in the winter of 1968, and then after we left Liberia, in Solliès-Toucas, and in restaurants in Provence. I have this indeliable memory of returning late one night from some amazing meal, crammed between James and his brother Richard into the backseat of a small French car of yogurt-pot shape and size. His words that night: “If you’ve had a lot of wine for dinner, do not forget to put a glass of water at your bedside.”
  • I did keep in touch with James after the 70s. He had wonderful penmanship, and in those days letters were composed by hand. Around 2000, he wrote he had met and married Laura, that Marina was on the way, and that he was retiring to “some place in southern California”. Those weren’t his words, but mine: I didn’t know then where Irvine is. Only when I arrived here and stumbled across that envelop bearing his address on Los Trancos Drive, did I realize he lived only a few blocks away. You can imagine my delight.
  • In a kind of throw-back to earlier years, James and I were somehow on the same shopping schedules, crossing paths at Albertson’s or Bristol Farms instead of at Joseph Eid’s store-front grocery in Gbarnga, Liberia. So his mentoring continued, about where to get this wine or that cheese, but also how to age gracefully, and never lose your sense of humour.
  • Tell Me, James: now that would be a proper title for this short piece. James was a man of words and, apart from his beautiful, whimsical eyes, I remember him most for and through his words. Read, study and write. Don’t forget a glass of water. For 45 years I haven’t forgotten that glass of water. And I shall never forget James.