Glaucoma of the mind

Glaucoma of the mind
by David Benjamin

“Hell isn’t other people. Hell is yourself.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

PARIS — As a college freshman, I had the odd experience of not being seen all morning, three days a week, by my teachers. Ms. Slavens, my Spanish professor, moved nimbly around campus with a white cane and the occasional helping hand from students. My next class was Philosophy. My prof, whose name I’ve forgotten — let’s call him Dr. Helenkeller — navigated a world unseen, aided by a shaggy, languid golden retriever who had heard, and disregarded, more deep thoughts on the Meaning of Life than any dog in history.

I was largely in tune with the dog.

I was not an avid philosophy fan, but read it more willingly than I chose to admit. One summer, I ploughed through Will and Ariel Durant on my own. In college, I listened patiently to the maunderings of my roommate Mackie, who frequently referenced — with all due opacity — Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. But I never took philosophy as seriously as I knew I oughta. There was something in my psyche that saw it as mildly compelling but lacking in urgency, like cheerleading and Parade magazine.

Nonetheless, I held philosophy in respectful awe because without it I didn’t think we’d be civilized. Without philosophy’s abstruse, unprovable explanations — without Plato’s shadowy cave or Adam Smith’s invisible hand, Rousseau’s social contract, Nietzsche’s abyss or Sartre’s inescapable room full of insufferable whiners — modern humanity would have never climbed atop the pinnacle of pure reason and moral clarity where we stand proud, wise and serene today.

Seriously though, the writings of thinkers from Pascal to Jefferson are the catechism of humanity, informing us how to govern ourselves, how to behave in mixed company, how to regulate our impulses, hungers and angers, how we have risen and how far we have to fall. Without philosophy, we would have no politics, no economics, no faith and no skepticism.

Reminiscing more specifically, Dr. Helenkeller’s class is where I learned about solipsism, a branch of philosophy that seemed to me preposterous and utterly useless.

I was wrong. I’ve come to realize that solipsism as the only strain of classic philosophy consistently practiced in real life, by millions of ostensibly sane people. For more than 200 years, solipsism has been the essence and creed of the raggedest fringe of American politics. Today, solipsism has blossomed into America’s guiding faith.

Put briefly, solipsism contends that there is no fixed and universally perceived reality beyond the single selfish self. The world beyond the solipsist’s skin only exists as the solipsist sees it. No other perception of reality is relevant. Every word, sight, sound, human being, animal, tree, sky or bug exists only through the solipsist’s willingness to both acknowledge and define that alien presence. If a tree falls in the forest it does not make a sound because, “Forest? What forest?”

Or, in the words of America’s reigning philosopher-king, Donald J. Trump, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

Solipsism, as it works today, is not so much an intellectual conceit nurtured by wry academics as it is a practical guide to an atomized jungle of parallel realities. Popular solipsism today transcends mere refusal to see beyond oneself, one’s class, club or tribe, to peer through any but one’s fixed and unfocused lens. It’s a refusal to hear the unchosen voice, to perceive the unfamiliar, to accept unwelcome knowledge. It spurns — with all due violence — accommodation, cooperation, empathy. It’s a black cave of shadowless refuge, the glaucoma of the mind.

I think about solipsism here in Paris because my perspective on things American clarifies a little with distance. The French, I discovered long ago, are ambivalent about Americans, but they love the idea of America. Ever since Ben Franklin’s Paris charm offensive in 1776, the French have admired and emulated our democracy, for its eloquence and resilience, its conviction, its openness — for its philosophy. They drafted their republic based on our idea.

The French don’t like to look up to anyone, and they especially don’t like to show it. But they’ve looked up to America all the more since D-Day, because we convinced them that America was looking out for them. For much of the past century, we have been, despite all our blunders, the least selfish nation in the world.

The French tolerate the bad manners, ugly clothes, barbaric children and monolingualism of Americans because of our openness, our generosity, our devotion to political ideals born in Philadelphia in 1776 and never since defeated, debunked or overcome.

However, most of that respect has disappeared.

The French joke about America now, but not triumphantly. They’re not really having any fun. When I’m here, I’ve ceased trying to explain Trump. I need only roll my eyes, smile sheepishly and shrug in resignation. They understand. The French are way ahead of Americans when it comes to absurdity. Vladimir, Estragon and Godot are all Frenchmen.

Speaking of drama, an American playwright, Herb Gardner, once invented a clown named Chuckles, who frightened and saddened but did not amuse. The only laughter he inspired was ironic.

The French, more clearly than most Americans, look at our misbegotten president and they think, in all its permutations: “Chuckles.”

Most troubling here, more than their mirthless laughter, is the sadness of the French for a heroic nation disgraced. At bottom, there is fear. The French — moreso than Americans — are philosophers. They know solipsism. They see an expansive, generous, gregarious America that has turned inward, mean and forbidding, led by a buffoon who sees nothing beyond his own fake tan, feels nothing but his own vanity and his countless petty grievances, insists that nothing he hears and reads, except cheers for him, can possibly be true.

The French, whose history is longer than ours, have suffered their own solipsists in charge. The aftermath was always long and painful, because in solipsism, there’s no future. There are no generations to come, no children, no grandchildren. There is only an immense me. It was the whore of a narcissist French king who coined the motto for all future political solipsists: “Après nous, le déluge.”

I try to assure French friends that America is coming to its senses. I try to believe myself when I say that Chuckles is an occasional fever in the American blood that soon will pass. I could be wrong, I hope I’m not.

But just in case, I have an epitaph in French, ready to be etched by a properly ironic and solipsist stonecutter, perhaps on the mangled stub of the Statue of Liberty.

“Après Trump, le vide.”