|
 Interrogations
By
Kassandra
An
eclectic, literary challenge to everyday thinking.
Number
Five: Thinking Makes It So
But,
you may ask, is being fooled really our favourite state? Do we not
rather prefer to be right, and triumph in our rightness over the
wrongness of everyone else? Is not that our idea of the best fun,
rather than being suckers and chumps and stooges?
Well,
maybe, for some. It is indeed delightful to be right, and to preen
ourselves on our rightness. But consider the sheer amount of time
we spend being fooled, compared to how much we spend being right.
There is no contest! And a great deal of that being-fooled state
is voluntary, or half-voluntary, rather than mere error or oversight
or ignorance. We are wilfully credulous, just as Pascal and William
James urged us to be. We believe, for the two hours we sit in the
cinema, that the characters on the screen are real. We also believe
that angels find us parking spaces, that Heaven is hiding behind
the Hale-Bopp comet, that the stars and our date of birth determine
our nature and fate, that ghosts and poltergeists are real and we've
seen them or at least know someone who has, that we have lived before,
that we will live again, that Jesus rose from the dead, that God
made the world in six days, that eating pork is wicked but beef
is all right, or the reverse of that. We believe extra-terrestrials
crash-landed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. We believe in crop
circles and alien-built ancient airfields in Peru. We believe extra-terrestrials
send vehicles to hover or fly erratically over our planet; we believe
they have landed and abducted some of our species, sexually tampered
with us, even impregnated us. We believe the stock market can go
up forever, that bubbles don't burst, that pyramid schemes can avoid
collapse.
We
don't all believe all of these things, of course. Some of us don't
believe any of them; a few eclectic types believe all of them; most
believe or half-believe, sort of believe, provisionally believe,
a selection. The tentative, maybe sort of kind of, hopeful belief
is operative in a lot of religion and 'spirituality' or New Age,
where we don't believe with the same sharp-edged confidence that
we believe, say, the world will still be there when we wake up in
the morning. We hope it's true, we think it might be, everyone else
seems to think it is, it's comforting and uniting and (New Age apart)
has a long pedigree, so we give it the benefit of the doubt.
Some
of our more bizarre or whimsical beliefs could be seen as a sort
of game, or diversion, or art or story; a kind of play, like Coleridge's
'willing suspension of disbelief'. Sure, there are angels and ghosts,
and we are being visited by aliens, and we were all Cleopatra in
previous lives--why not? It makes a change. Livens up the place.
We get a different haircut, paint the living room red, talk to angels--anything
for a laugh. And most of us don't have a lot of resistance to overcome.
We haven't learned Ockham's razor or Hume's way with miracles, we
don't have much sense of the difference between the natural and
the supernatural, physical and metaphysical. And we have a confused
idea, or perhaps it's more of an emotion, that scientific explanations
must be wrong because they're too simple. They're cold, reductionist,
mechanical, mathematical, unfeeling, counter-intuitive, heartless,
unpoetic--in short, we don't like them, and therefore they must
be wrong. But we pretend we think they're wrong not because they're
not to our taste but because they don't describe reality, they don't
come to grips with the complexity and mystery and depth and meaningfulness
and beauty and 'spirit' of the world. Hamlet's 'There are more things
in Heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy' is a
favourite prop for this line of thought, but of course it belongs
mostly to people whose idea of science is more supposition and guess-work,
not to say pure invention, than actual knowledge and experience.
Happily, that is a problem only if one sees religion as a cognitive
issue rather than as a 'lifestyle' or consumer choice: a bit of
decor, an accessory, a fashion statement, part of the aestheticization
of everyday life.
No
matter. Because the happy truth is, as far as most of us are concerned,
there is no need to choose between the joy of being right and the
pleasure of being fooled. We can do both! We can eat our cake and
have it! Humans are such delightfully flexible, adaptable, contriving
creatures. We enjoy the ecstasy of knowing ourselves to be right
and our opponents to be wrong by the simple expedient of believing
it to be so. Hamlet helps us out here, too: 'For there is nothing
either good or bad, but thinking makes it so'. If we believe it,
it's true for us, so if we believe we're right, why then, right
we are! And what the real truth of the matter may be, well, that's
not our concern. We congratulate ourselves on our superior 'spirituality',
our depth and sensitivity and wisdom and intuition, and pity the
poor benighted materialistic wretches who deny our spiritual truths.
Heads I win tails you lose, swings and roundabouts...it's a good
old world, after all.
Kassandra
is the pen name of Ophelia Benson.
.
Interrogations
will next be updated early October 2002
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Interrogations
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