From Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know, which will be published in December by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Among the recent discoveries of neuroscience is that radical self-delusion can have an organic source. Doctors have long encountered patients whose capacity for denial and confabulation is so extraordinary that they seem in the grip of pathological certainty, like Hamlets in reverse. Some suffer from anosognosia, a neurological disorder that keeps people from recognizing their own physical or mental conditions, even such dramatic ones as partial paralysis. Blind people who have Anton syndrome are convinced that they can see, and they speak easily and at length about whatever they believe themselves to be seeing at any given moment. Korsakoff syndrome can cause people to have false memories that are as real to them as memories of things that have actually happened. The most terrifying of these conditions is surely Capgras syndrome, which gives someone the conviction that a loved one has been replaced by an imposter. None of these conditions, we now know, develops solely, if at all, to gratify some deep psychological need or wish. It seems to be in the wiring.
But what about the rest of us? We all suffer from delusions, and we all, like Oedipus, use tricks of self-deception to keep ourselves from acknowledging truths about our lives. Yet understanding, or even describing, this everyday experience can seem like a fool’s errand.
Some delusions reflect nothing more than benign self-ignorance. Those who can’t hold a tune sing loudest in the choir, and God forgives them in their innocence. Other delusions require active work. We suck in our stomachs when we walk past a shopwindow or elaborately comb our hair to mask encroaching baldness. We do this automatically, though every once in a while we get the mild shock of catching ourselves doing it. Our little ruses seem to emerge from a space between consciousness and unconsciousness, knowing and not knowing. If, at some level, we didn’t think we were overweight, we would not have developed the habit of tensing our abdominal muscles; if a part of us did not recognize a receding hairline, we would not have spent all that time before the mirror. Our mental faculties are not asleep while this is happening, but neither are they giving their full attention. Language fails us the moment we try to put words to what is going on. The phrases I used above—“catching ourselves,” “space between,” “at some level,” “a part of us,” “full attention”—are feeble and incompatible metaphors we’ve concocted to make sense of a mystery: how we can be not at one with ourselves, yet somehow still the same. Isn’t it strange, a wit once remarked, that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde both knew the way home?
Perhaps self-evasion is a skill we all should learn. If we could ignore the things about ourselves that keep us from being happy, or from “achieving our potential,” that might be a good thing. But no religious tradition accepts this view—and for good reason.
Recall the biblical story of King David and his soldier Uriah the Hittite. One evening, while David’s troops were laying siege to a city and he remained in Jerusalem, David saw from his rooftop a beautiful young woman, Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba, giving herself a ritual bath. He sent for her, slept with her, and impregnated her. To avoid scandal, he then recalled Uriah from the battlefield and told him to go home and spend the night with his wife, so Uriah might believe that the coming child was his own. But as a matter of honor and out of solidarity with the other troops, Uriah insisted on sleeping outdoors, not with his wife. So the dishonorable David sent him back into battle, ordering a general to deploy Uriah where the fighting was fiercest in hopes that he would be killed, and he was. When the news reached David, he moved Bathsheba into his home and married her.
God was not pleased. But rather than simply punish David, God made him confront himself. He sent to the king the prophet Nathan, who recounted a parable about a rich shepherd who had many sheep and a poor shepherd who had but one, which “was unto him as a daughter.” One day, the rich man stole his neighbor’s only lamb to prepare a feast for a visitor rather than sacrifice one of his own large flock. When David heard this story, he forgot that it was a parable and interrupted Nathan, declaring, “As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die.” And Nathan replied, “You are the man.” David felt the shock of recognition and confessed his hypocrisy. And God forgave him, though his bastard child had to die—the price of learning that self-awareness is a necessary condition of moral responsibility and, therefore, an obligation.
Yet more seems to be at stake than policing people’s behavior; security cameras can now do that work for us. When we say of someone that he doesn’t know himself or he never learns his lesson, we mean that he unwittingly does harm to himself, not others, and we find this tragic. His suffering has less to do with an external state of affairs than with an internal state of dispossession, with his not being fully at one with himself in his thoughts and actions. We witness him flailing about, we hear his self-reproaches, yet we are unable to relieve his suffering, because we cannot provide what he most needs: inner knowledge and recognition of his condition. And there seems to be no way to breach the walls of the unknowing self.
As we learn from St. Augustine’s Confessions, this was the piteous state of his own soul before his conversion to Christianity. Augustine had grown up in the religious bazaar of late antiquity, where traditional Roman religion, Christianity, and various gnostic and philosophic sects had adherents. His mother, Monica, was a simple, uneducated Christian who conveyed to him all the truths and moral principles he would later propagate as an adult. Yet, as a young man, he resisted them with all his strength. Why? A pagan observer at the time might have said that it was because Augustine was a healthy young man. He spent his days seeking wisdom wherever he thought he might find it—from rhetoricians, philosophers, even gurus. At night he returned home to enjoy the company of his concubine, with whom he had a son. The anti-erotic Christianity that Monica professed condemned the vanity of human learning and encouraged chastity. From the pagan standpoint, Augustine had simply chosen the joys of learning and lovemaking over the superstition of the Cross.
But they were not joys to him. In truth, his frantic pursuit of pleasure was a flight from reckoning with a deeper misery and despair that he could not bring himself to acknowledge. It was only when a young friend of his died unexpectedly and he fell into depression that Augustine’s latent suffering rose to the surface: “I had become to myself a place of unhappiness in which I could not bear to be, but I could not escape from myself.” In this agonized state, Augustine had an inkling that Christianity could help him escape, but something still kept him from embracing the faith. He described himself as having been the pawn of two conflicting wills: one that sought pleasure in sex and vain learning, and another that wanted to rise up to God and be happy. These were not alien forces that occupied his soul. They were both, somehow, expressions of the same self. Even his prayers, when he did pray, reflected this state: Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet. Only after his conversion could he relish the irony.
Confessions reads like a drawn-out game of peekaboo, with Augustine himself the seeker and the sought. He could not reach out to God until he stopped evading himself, but like Oedipus, he was incapable of that. And so God reached out to him. It happened one afternoon while Augustine was listening to a young man recount his own conversion:
While he was speaking, Lord, you turned my attention back to myself. You took me up from behind my own back, where I had placed myself because I did not wish to observe myself, and you set me before my face so that I should see how vile I was, how twisted and filthy, covered in sores and ulcers. And I looked and was appalled, but there was no way of escaping from myself. If I tried to avert my gaze from myself, his story continued relentlessly, and you once again placed me in front of myself; you thrust me before my own eyes so that I should discover my iniquity and hate it. I had known it, but deceived myself, refused to admit it, and pushed it out of my mind.
You took me up from behind my own back. Of all the metaphors for self-evasion and self-confrontation, it is hard to think of one more vivid than this. Augustine asks us to imagine a Janus-faced self: a conscious one with eyes looking in one direction and an unavowed one laminated to its back, looking behind. Other people can see that Augustine is self-divided, but he cannot; he is not blind, yet he cannot see his own misery. And so it takes a divine force to reveal him to himself. God peels off Augustine’s unacknowledged side, the one that suffers because he wallows in sin, and places it before his conscious eyes. Know thyself. That is all. No thunderclaps. No falling from horses. No rebirth. No vision of the kingdom to come. His was a thoroughly human epiphany.
