Compromises and miracles at the edge of the universe

Or how Pascal learned to love the irreconcilable

At the beginning of his new collection of essays, Carlo Ginzburg draws our attention towards Niccolo Machiavelli’s habitual use of 'nevertheless' (or nondimanco in Italian). Here are his favorite examples from The Prince:

"It would be desirable to be considered generous; nevertheless if generosity is practised in such a way that you will be considered generous, it will harm you."

"Every ruler should want to be thought merciful, not cruel; nevertheless, one should take care not to be merciful in an inappropriate way. Cesare Borgia was considered cruel, yet his harsh measures restored order to the Romagna, unifying it and rendering it peaceful and loyal."

"Everyone knows how praiseworthy it is for a ruler to keep his promises, and live uprightly and not by trickery. Nevertheless, experience shows that in our times the rulers who have done great things are those who have set little store by keeping their word, being skilful rather in cunningly deceiving men; they have got the better of those who have relied on being trustworthy."

The Prince has haunted generations of political actors and thinkers in both simplified and subtle incarnations not just because of Machiavelli's ideas, reckons Ginzburg, but because of how he attempted to reconcile them with one another. Ginzburg is best known as a practitioner of microhistory, a practice of deep textual analysis of long dead individuals in an attempt to work out what was going through their head and why and any given time. It usually involves identifying historical subjects—sometimes powerful, sometimes ordinary—and conducting a forensic study of the ideas they had access to at a given moment. Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms (1976), now considered a classic, explored the texts that inspired a 16th-century Italian miller, known as Menocchio, to declare that life had emerged from a process of fermentation, "just as cheese is made out of milk – and worms appeared in it.” It sounded to some, including an incredulous clergy, as if Menocchio was describing a world that had come about by accident. Using the records from the heresy trial, Ginzburg examined the texts available to the miller, how they might have come to him, and why they ultimately lead to his epiphany, and consequently, his execution.

The tone of microhistory undulates between the omniscience of cartography and the intrigue of detective fiction. Ginzburg’s previous investigations include a prehistory of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and their French origins. The text of The Protocols was plagiarised by Russian monarchists in 1903 from a fictional dialogue between Machiavelli and Montesquieu which takes place in Hell where a fictional Machiavelli argues for cultural and political domination by an elite and explains how he would bring it about if he still had the ear of the rich and powerful. That dialogue first appeared in Brussels in 1864, written by Maurice Joly, a French republican lawyer. It made no reference to Judaism. Joly’s cartoon Machiavelli was conjured as a less-than-subtle satire of life under Napoleon III at a moment when criticism of the emperor was illegal. After decades in obscurity, the text was then repurposed by Tsarist secret police and presented as the leaked minutes of a shadowy Jewish clique, detailing their infiltration of global finance, politics and the press.

Nevertheless: Machiavelli, Pascal, begins with a meticulous survey of the books that would have been available to Machiavelli as an adolescent. We move from sentence to sentence and translation to translation on a bridge of parchment that stretches over the Adriatic, from the Lyceum in Athens, to the banks of the Arno, before winding across the Alps and onto the desk of Blaise Pascal in 17th-century Paris.

To cross that bridge is to take in the history of casuistry in continental Europe. Older works, edited by Ginzburg have pithily characterised casuistry as a “cognitive technique” to “mediate the intricate relationship between norms and expectations”. In more relatable terms, it’s the clever use of half-truths to generate popular support for unpopular ideas and usually entails case-based reasoning designed to evade moral precedents. To readers in the 21^st century it could be the reframing that allows an inheritance tax to become a “death tax” or how an armed invasion becomes “humanitarian intervention”. To the devout Pascal, casuistry constituted the infuriating excuses that allowed Christians to follow the word of God selectively.

But what if  European nations needed a certain amount of casuistry to function and progress while simultaneously espousing a rigid moral code passed down from God? Before democracy, monarchical governments relied on religion for their legitimacy. Right up until 1917, European kings wholeheartedly believed that God ruled though them. Absolutism was heaving with contractions, but one of the hardest to ignore was inequality. Jesus, who did not live in a palace, had been explicit on the subject of money; those who have it must give it away to the poor if they wish to reach Heaven. Not some of it later. All of it now. And so people who accumulated vast wealth, including lords, kings and even popes, needed stories they could tell others, and themselves, about how they could be rich and still be on the right side of God. Similarly, creating a state strong enough to govern the surrounding area and repel the occasional bloodthirsty war of aggression might involve a loose approach to the sixth commandment and a reluctance to turn the other cheek. States also relied on a perception of law and order predicated on mutually understood moral standards which ostensibly applied to everyone, preferably with clear red lines which citizens know they mustn’t cross. To maintain the consent of the governed, those who did the governing had to be able to tell convincing explanations to account for their moral flexibility.

Ginzburg writes that while much of Machiavelli’s advice relied on the use and abuse of casuistry, Pascal loathed it enough to spend page upon page excoriated wealthy Jesuits who attempted reason their sins away by donating money to the church. If he was alive today he would probably be writing polemics about effective altruists who send 10% of their earning to Africa while mining carbon intensive crypto currencies.

How could the ends ever justify the means when humans were so ill-equipped to make moral judgments? The French pioneer of probability had a unique ability to scrutinise hope from a safe distance. His mother died when he was three years old, and he grew up as an ailing and unpopular hunchback. For Pascal, Ginzburg writes, miracles were “something God alone, the God of the Bible not of the philosophers, could perform”. Pascal’s response to the endless disappointments of life was to urge his readers to seek salvation in Heaven. Those of us who suffer were the victims of inflated expectations. "Man's greatness", Pascal wrote, "comes from knowing we are wretched".

But Pascal was not naïve. He knew that states had to fall short of the ideal if they were going to survive on a violent continent. Governance under heaven, Pascal argued, is always contingent on one compromise after another. “States", he declared, "would perish if their laws were not often stretched to meet necessity, but religion has never tolerated or practiced such a thing. So either compromises or miracles are needed".

But states didn’t just need to be flexible they also needed to be to flex their muscles.

“It is right", he wrote in another famous passage, "that what is just should be obeyed; it is necessary that what is strongest should be obeyed. Justice without might is helpless; might without justice is tyrannical." And so we must "make what is just strong, or what is strong just."

Ginzburg has sought to capture an unacknowledged harmony between two reticent renditions of realism dispersed across time and space with profound consequences for what it would have meant to have faith in a higher power. In his most infamous passage, Machiavelli wrote that a prince should aspire to be both loved and feared, but that when forced to choose, he should always favour being feared. One hundred and fifty years later, Pascal implored his readers to have faith in a higher power because if there was no God they had little to lose by believing in him, but if there was a God they would have eternity to gain. Machiavelli's Prince and Pascal's God both want to be loved but need to be feared.

So how did Pascal, with his love of God and his disdain for casuistry, arrived at conclusions adjacent to those of Machiavelli, despite the latter’s apparent indifference towards religion as anything other than a source of piety and political capital?

Ginzburg has a unique set of skills. His investigative use of microhistory doesn’t just tell us which people influence each other across the centuries, but how. In the case of Machiavelli and Pascal, the answers are written in the stars.

Ginzburg thinks Pascal could have read The Prince in Italian but probably came across a French translation by Gaspar d'Auvergne, published in 1563. But that wouldn’t explain why he would have liked it.

As well as being a philosopher, Pascal was a physicist and a mathematician. He had pioneered the measurement of atmospheric pressure and invented the world's first calculator. At a time when scientific progress was beginning to chafe under the power of the church. Pascal had to chart an intellectual course between the hegemonic doctrines of the clergy and the increasingly inconvenient inferences emerging from the domains of measurement and observation. And Ginzburg utilises this emerging tension to suggest that Pascal may have been drawn to The Prince because Machiavelli’s infernal reputation had parallels with that of Galileo, who in 1609 had inadvertently challenged the scientific authority of the church, just as Machiavelli had challenged the potency of divine ethics. Galileo had contended that the universe did not revolve around the Earth fifty years after Machiavelli had suggested that politics couldn't revolve around the word of God. Both had ruffled feathers in Rome. Galileo thus had to articulate a distinction between scripture and science: both, he wrote, were "expressions of the divine Word . . . one as it is dictated by the Holy Spirit, and the other as the strictest operation of God's laws". If the miracle was Galileo's scientific genius, the compromise was his casuistry; the sentences he and his supporters crafted to coexist with Christianity. What Ginzburg implies, but doesn’t quite say, is that Pascal was trying to reconcile his devotion to God with his research in mathematics, and what he found was that those who defended Galileo’s revolutionary reordination of the heavens were also apologists for Machiavelli’s radical reinventions of morality on earth.

Reading Ginzburg isn’t easy and isn’t for everybody. The text is dense and requires heaps of prior knowledge. And while the book is littered with insight, large tracts can feel tedious and unrewarding. There are no introductions explaining the significance of the newly revealed connections, nor are clear conclusions offered to consolidate them. Signposts are few and far between and some will wonder if the journey warrants the time and effort. But regardless of whether Ginzburg is worth reading or not, modern political writing could benefit from a more microhistoic approach towards people and their ideas. When the origins of polarising attitudes and unpopular compromises go unexplained, the discourse around them quickly descends into zero sum games of winners, losers, enemies and allies. The fruit of all this unexamined strife is a centrifugal electorate which in turn slows the pace of meaningful reform. In the algorithmic public sphere, compromises are miracles.