Spinoza, Nemirovsky, terror, and the violent event

I’ve been enthralled by and absorbed in Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise since I started reading it this week. The opening chapters detail the lives of people evacuating Paris in early June 1940 when it became clear the Germans would soon be marching into the city, or, more importantly, destroying it. Terror, fear, panic, and chaos reigned as Parisians scrambled by every available means to escape the city. Even a young family cat gets a chapter detailing his experience of the evacuation.

One wonders why people waited so long to take the necessary steps to get out of town. Nemirovsky asks and answers this question about her characters. It takes a dramatic and violent event to shake people from their everyday lethargy. The first reaction is denial. Once denial has passed, the old ways of thinking and living in society are not easily quit. One expects other’s behavior to remain the same during a time of chaos even though one has altered one’s own behavior without recognizing it.

This put me in mind of the preface to Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise.

(1)Men would never be superstitious, if they could govern all their circumstances by set rules, or if they were always favoured by fortune: but being frequently driven into straits where rules are useless, and being often kept fluctuating pitiably between hope and fear by the uncertainty of fortune's greedily coveted favours, they are consequently, for the most part, very prone to credulity. (2) The human mind is readily swayed this way or that in times of doubt, especially when hope and fear are struggling for the mastery, though usually it is boastful, over - confident, and vain.

(3) This as a general fact I suppose everyone knows, though few, I believe, know their own nature; no one can have lived in the world without observing that most people, when in prosperity, are so over-brimming with wisdom (however inexperienced they may be), that they take every offer of advice as a personal insult, whereas in adversity they know not where to turn, but beg and pray for counsel from every passer-by. (4) No plan is then too futile, too absurd, or too fatuous for their adoption; the most frivolous causes will raise them to hope, or plunge them into despair - if anything happens during their fright which reminds them of some past good or ill, they think it portends a happy or unhappy issue, and therefore (though it may have proved abortive a hundred times before) style it a lucky or unlucky omen. (5) Anything which excites their astonishment they believe to be a portent signifying the anger of the gods or of the Supreme Being, and, mistaking superstition for religion, account it impious not to avert the evil with prayer and sacrifice. (6) Signs and wonders of this sort they conjure up perpetually, till one might think Nature as mad as themselves, they interpret her so fantastically.

(7) Thus it is brought prominently before us, that superstition's chief victims are those persons who greedily covet temporal advantages; they it is, who (especially when they are in danger, and cannot help themselves) are wont with Prayers and womanish tears to implore help from God: upbraiding Reason as blind, because she cannot show a sure path to the shadows they pursue, and rejecting human wisdom as vain; but believing the phantoms of imagination, dreams, and other childish absurdities, to be the very oracles of Heaven. (8) As though God had turned away from the wise, and written His decrees, not in the mind of man but in the entrails of beasts, or left them to be proclaimed by the inspiration and instinct of fools, madmen, and birds. Such is the unreason to which terror can drive mankind!

I wrote earlier this year about walking down State Street to the Chicago Loop. As I walked along, I tried to identify something beyond the changing mortar and brick along the street. As hard as I tried I could not imagine a different politics or economics supporting the structures. That is not because it is not possible. My mind, despite its activity, is not well tempered to change during the course of an ordinary day. Is it possible that only violent events rouse me from my lethargy? Partly, yes.

A related question is whether a violent event would make me superstitiously cling to the old beliefs that caused the violent event, or would I reason my way into a new and better position. That’s the more scary question.