I’m Alexandra Hudson, author of The Soul of Civility and founder of Civic Renaissance, a movement to renew our culture through beauty, wisdom, and civility. Here, we take part in the Great Conversation—the ongoing dialogue among seekers across time and place about what it means to live well, to belong, and to flourish together. Civic Renaissance exists to help us remember what is most worth loving—beauty, goodness, and truth—and to live those truths in the work of restoring civility, meaning, and grace in our daily lives.
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Gracious reader,
I recently had the opportunity to join the Prager University Book Club, and you know I’ll never pass up a chance to discuss Blaise Pascal—one of my favorite thinkers, and among the most underrated yet most relevant to our current moment. I hope you enjoy that conversation, and in what follows, a few other insights from Pascal that I find especially illuminating for our time.
Who Was Pascal, and Why Does He Matter?
For those of you who are new here—first, welcome. Pascal is beloved in this community, and here’s why.
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) was a French mathematician, inventor, and philosopher whose brilliance was matched only by his insight into the human soul. By twenty-five he had invented the first calculator, designed an early public transit system for Paris, and laid the groundwork for modern probability theory. A unit of scientific measurement—the pascal—still bears his name.
And yet, after a profound spiritual conversion, Pascal turned away from science altogether. He withdrew into a bare, windowless room to wrestle with the deepest questions of human existence—what we are, why we seek meaning, and why we cannot find lasting happiness in the world’s diversions. His unfinished masterpiece, Pensées (“thoughts”), gathers these fragments of genius: aphorisms about faith, reason, love, pride, and despair that have never stopped speaking to readers.
Pascal understood, perhaps better than anyone before or since, the contradictions of the human condition. We are at once magnificent and miserable—capable of soaring thought, yet undone by vanity, distraction, and self-deception. He called this tension our “greatness and wretchedness.”
He was also among the first to warn that diversion—our endless flight from stillness and self-knowledge—is the great enemy of peace. Long before smartphones or social media, Pascal saw that our need for noise and novelty was not new technology’s fault but a feature of the human heart. “All men’s unhappiness,” he observed, “comes from one thing only: that he cannot sit quietly in his room.”
That insight alone makes him timeless. But Pascal also challenges the modern superstition that science or technology can solve what is ultimately a spiritual problem. Descartes, his contemporary, believed reason could perfect humanity. Pascal saw that reason can explain the world but not redeem it. We need the heart for that.
In this way, Pascal was an early critic of what we now call technological optimism. He knew progress could make life easier without making it better. He foresaw our modern malaise: material abundance without meaning, constant stimulation without rest.
Pascal matters to Civic Renaissance because his questions are our questions. How can we live wisely and well amid distraction? How do we remember our dignity without denying our flaws? How do we hold both truth and tenderness in an age of vanity? His life and writings remind us that the challenge of being human has not changed—and that the way back to sanity begins with humility, attention, and love.
I. The Mirror of the Soul
Pascal wrote:
“The nature of self-love is to love only oneself and to consider only oneself. But what is a man to do? He can’t bear to see his faults.”
Today:
Every algorithm rewards us for pretending otherwise. We polish our lives for admiration, then wonder why we feel unseen. Pascal’s insight goes beyond psychology—it’s civic. A society built on mutual flattery cannot sustain truth, and without truth, it cannot sustain trust.
II. The Age of Courtesy without Candor
Pascal wrote:
“Human society is grounded on mutual deceit; few friendships would endure if each person knew what his friend said about him in his absence.”
Today:
We live in an age of performative civility—where people mistake niceness for respect, and outrage for conviction. Pascal saw that manners often protect our vanity more than our neighbor.
At Civic Renaissance, we return to this distinction constantly: politeness soothes; civility dignifies. Politeness hides conflict; civility redeems it. Pascal reminds us that genuine respect sometimes sounds like correction.
III. The Fragile Greatness of Being Human
Pascal wrote:
“It is dangerous to show man his vileness without his greatness—and dangerous to show him his greatness without his vileness. But it is very advantageous to show him both.”
Today:
His warning speaks to our polarized moment. One side exalts humanity as perfectible; the other despairs of it as irredeemable. Both are half-true and therefore false. Pascal’s realism offers another path: humility without cynicism, hope without illusion.
Civic renewal begins when we hold both truths—that we are fallible and luminous, selfish and noble, capable of cruelty yet made for love.
IV. The Prince and the Algorithm
Pascal wrote:
“A prince can be the laughing-stock of all Europe and the only one who doesn’t know it.”
Today:
Replace the prince with the influencer, executive, or politician surrounded by sycophants—or with any of us surrounded by algorithms that feed us only affirmation. Flattery has been automated. It isolates us from correction, community, and reality itself.
Pascal’s warning is civic as well as spiritual: a people that cannot bear truth will soon lose freedom.
V. Toward a Civility of Truth
Pascal offers no comfort, only clarity. He teaches that honesty is an act of love and humility a form of strength. To be known is painful—but necessary if we are to live together in truth.
Civility begins when we choose candor over comfort, integrity over impression.
A Pascalian Practice:
Invite one person this week to tell you something true about yourself that you would rather not hear. Listen without defense. See what grows in the space where vanity once stood.
Watch my earlier video about Pascal!
You might hear my baby crying in the background — fitting, really, since I was filming a video about our crisis of distraction. Consider it an immersive learning experience.
If you make it through to the end, you’ve proven your powers of focus. Somewhere, Pascal is applauding.
🌿 How to Join the Civic Renaissance
1. Join the waitlist for the Civic Renaissance Ambassador Program.
If you have a vision for your community, I want to help you build it.
This program is something I created to get to know you—and to support those of you who want to do more with the ideas of my book and of Civic Renaissance: healing our present through the wisdom of the past, and through healing ourselves.
Your participation can take many forms. You might start a book club (I have resources to help you host one), or even organize a Civility Summit in your community. Whatever your vision, I’d love to help you bring it to life.
2. Start a Civility Circle.
Use our Civility Circle Starter Kit to bring a few friends, colleagues, or neighbors together to read The Soul of Civility and explore how these ideas can come alive where you are.
3. Subscribe to Civic Renaissance.
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4. Host a conversation.
Invite me or a local leader to join your school, library, or city hall for a discussion about rehumanizing public life.
5. Share the story of the growing Civic Renaissance in our country right now.
Share this essay with a friend.
Share the Civility Summit recap video, tag your community, and remind people that renewal begins wherever we choose attention over outrage.
6. Join us for the 2026 Civic Renaissance Retreat in Indianapolis, April 24–25.
The Civic Renaissance Retreat offers more than rest—it offers renewal of purpose. Participants will leave with a rekindled sense of hope, a clearer vision for their work, and a community of kindred spirits who remind them they’re not alone in trying to heal the world. Through beauty, conversation, and shared reflection, they’ll recover the joy that sustains courage and rediscover the interior resources—intellectual, moral, and spiritual—that make lasting civic leadership possible. It’s a retreat for those who give much to others, to finally receive something back: restoration of heart, clarity of mind, and friendship for the journey ahead.
Year Ago on Civic Renaissance:
If people lash out at you, remember: it’s more about them than you
Thank you for being part of our Civic Renaissance community!
You capture Pascal’s depth with admirable clarity, especially his themes of self-love, diversion, and the tension between greatness and wretchedness. Yet a few refinements would bring it even closer to Pascal’s own logic.
He is less a teacher of civility than a surgeon of the soul—he wounds to heal. His Pensées do not seek balance but exposure: our failure to hold truth and tenderness reveals the corruption of the heart. Where you write that Pascal “offers no comfort, only clarity,” he would say rather that he consoles after he wounds—clarity first, then remedy. His warnings about "automated flattery" are most Pascalian when tied to his real enemies: the imagination that deceives us and the self-love that needs to be fed.
Your closing invitation beautifully channels his spirit; it could go one step further: after hearing the hard truth, ask what in you wanted the flattery. That turn to humility—wound to cure—would make the piece fully Pascalian and truer to the demands of civility.
Thanks again for another thoughtful post.
“Pascal wrote:
“Human society is grounded on mutual deceit; few friendships would endure if each person knew what his friend said about him in his absence.””
In his book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen called the antithesis of this “loyalty to the absent.” Of course, Pascal references “friendships” and Stephen Covey was talking about friends and also work colleagues. People we know who know us. He went on to expand, in some of his presentations, that it doesn’t mean you can’t disagree with the absent person. The focus is would you say that same thing, in that same way, if the person were there?