Interrogations

By Ophelia Benson

An eclectic, literary challenge to everyday thinking.

Number Nine: Mind the Gap

We live our whole lives in a gap - a yawning chasm, in fact. The is-ought gap, the fact-values gap. The discontinuity, the unbridgeable difference between what is and what ought to be. What we want the world to be like, and what in fact it is like, in blind heedless indifference to our wishes. We can think of so many ways the world could be better: more beautiful, more peaceful, better-ordered, more harmonious and pain-free and safe. The world is harshly thoughtlessly unadapted to our needs. It has entirely failed to fasten the drawers shut, put the poisons out of reach, lock up the sharp knives, pad the corners of tables. It watches us teeter back and forth on the top step and does nothing when we fall. It's not supportive, it's not there for us, it doesn't feel our pain, its eye is not on the sparrow. Really, what a cold arrangement.

We are not very pleased with the gap. We are not particularly delighted that the world simply is what it is, without consulting our good pleasure. Why weren't we asked? Why was there no ballot or opinion poll or show of hands? We want so many things we can't possibly have, we're aware of so much we wish were otherwise - pain and suffering, injustices and inefficiencies, the brevity of life, the waste and destruction and foolishness everywhere we look. This is one of the conspicuous by-products of human intelligence, this sense of the imperfection of everything in the sublunary world. Jeremiah and Isaiah and the Preacher in Ecclesiastes had it, Siddhartha, Gilgamesh, Arjuna, Genji had it, Achilles, Virgil, Hamlet had it. Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.

The bleak claustrophobic emptiness of the gap impels many of us to take to horse and ride out of it, Huns and Goths and Mongols and Vikings bearing down on the rest of the world. Luthers and Hitlers and Savonarolas and Napoleons troubling everyone's peace. Turning everything upside down, asking terrible questions, pushing over the tables, expelling the money-changers. Sleeping in barrels, telling Alexander to stop blocking the light, having visions, tilting at windmills, sailing into the west. Lighting a bonfire of the vanities, nailing up ninety-five theses, burning down the Bastille, catching a train to the Finland Station. Anything for a change. To make the world ever so slightly what we want it to be rather than what it is.

That's our nature. That's part of the way the world is, in fact: that we are like that: restless, irritable, hungry, demanding, volatile, indignant creatures rather than placid stony unmoving statues or rocks or silicon chips. Indifference and even much in the way of calm and tranquility are quite beyond us. The Stoic quest for ataraxia never had a lot of hope. Seneca and Marcus Aurelius can say what they like but, as Lear puts it, 'the first time that we smell the air/We wawl and cry'. We are what we are, needy flesh, not lumps of pig iron or diamonds or unchanging Ideas. We have endless insatiable needs and desires, in these annoying biological machines we inhabit, never at rest, always ticking along, burning and consuming and using up, needing more more more all the time, more fuel and water and maintenance, and however much maintenance we do it still rusts and wears out and breaks down and finally quits. Somehow, imagining ourselves as eternal doesn't seem to change that, whatever Deepak Chopra may say.

Of course people are always trying to close the gap, by fair means or foul. Bridges, grappling hooks, long jumps, whatever we can think of. Some of us just declare it closed, or never there to begin with, and walk out into space like Wile E. Coyote. Others say it is narrower than we think, or that there are bridges every few feet, or that the two are so close together that the gap is just a nice bit of scenery, not a dividing line. Some claim that the world is whatever we experience it as being; that to talk of independent truth about the world, the way the world simply is, regardless of us, is essentialism or foundationalism or metaphysics, and should be discarded. Others say that it's all our creation: that shoulds and oughts are our construction, but so is (what we take to be) the truth about the world, because whose else would it be? Therefore never mind the gap, we can just decide that things are the way they ought to be, and let a thousand flowers bloom.

But the rest of us think that's just human arrogance again, and prefer to accept that we don't control reality. A cold arrangement, but one that lets us keep our self-respect.

Ophelia Benson is editor of Butterflies and Wheels - http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com.

She can be emailed here.

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Interrogations will next be updated early February 2003

Previous Interrogations

1. Self and Internet
2. Perfection Isn't
3. Homo Quaerens
4. Showtime
5. Thinking Makes It So
6. Who's In There?
7. Gustave and Dawn
8. Sense and Sentimentality

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