Suspension of Disbelief

I listened to much of the recent Petraeus testimony to the House Armed Services Committee. Mostly on the radio to and from work and during a lull in my afternoon. It was largely as expected, posturing and political puppet shows from the committee on both sides of the aisle and the general and ambassador tap-dancing and trying not to be caught having someone else mis-characterize their own statements.

I'm not going to agree nor disagree in this posting with the policies or current actions nor future actions--it is easy to see that this is a very complex issue and neither "stay the course" nor "bring them home" bumper sticker slogans can translate into those actions with success for the Iraqi people. In short, my opinion since "Mission Accomplished" has been aligned with former Secretary of State Colin Powell: "You broke it, you bought it." We've an obligation to get out of a sovereign nation as quick as we can, but without leaving vast numbers (thousands, tens of thousands) of innocents at risk of genocide, religocide, or to be driven from their homes or in a new war with Iran--and other crimes against humanity which are currently held at bay by our military presence. How and when we are able to leave without such horrific outcomes--it is clear to me from both the testimony and Committee questions--is that no one knows. We have a lot to figure out there.

Of course others have differing opinions, and one phrase in the disagreements expressed in the hearing stood out. Senator Clinton said that it would require a "willing suspension of disbelief" to accept the claim that the "surge" was working. That stuck with me. The concept behind that phrase is familiar to anyone who has studied film or literature. Suspension of disbelief is the essence of fiction. It is the contract a writer or filmmaker creates with an audience to require that the audience leaves some aspect of their critical thinking at the door, in essence to "believe" what the author is saying. If you suspend disbelief, you are believing. Not to understand as a scientist would, but to accept as truth without deep questioning about the veracity of all aspects of the story.

The premise behind the phrase is that we are skeptics in our natural, presumably intellectual, discourse. That we should bring to all encounters a presumption of disbelief--not harsh nor pejorative, but critical. Critical in the intellectual sense of the word, not in the casual, emotionally-charged sense that seems to pervade many aspects of culture--especially inter-generational communication. (How to express a critical posture without alienating the person you're engaged with is a topic for many other essays.) We generally do interact with new encounters skeptically, critically, with disbelief. Because we want to understand and see how what we're encountering fits in best with what we already know.

With literature, we don't have to have it "fit in best" with our accepted reality. We begin with a premise of fantasy, of an imagined place that has some familiarity with our shared reality, but not exactly. We accept that the author is going to take us on a journey where the fantastic or unexplained may happen. We don't pick at the edges, we relax our judgment--our active participation in judging the veracity--in order to what? For what reason would we not want to understand completely and know the truth of what is being presented to us? To be entertained. In the movie Galaxy Quest an alien race has no such facility, they accept that their Sci-Fi entertainers really have all the technology and power needed to do what the screen fiction presents to them.

So back to the Senator and the phrase as used in the hearing. I couldn't tell whether it was a sardonic remark. I would hope that it was. But under the sardony, there is a presumption: that we--the consumers of the reports of this administration and of their appointees' testimony--do indeed come to engage news and information with the same mindset with which we engage entertainment. It is easy to suspend disbelief--unraveled, that means it is easy to believe.

To believe is to accept without criticism. In our culture which has to contend with on a daily basis the challenges of a secular government and a spectrum of religions, we tend to ascribe "belief" to the realm of the spiritual, the religious. But belief has a strong component in all aspects of our engagement with the world. Philosophically, it is not possible to completely "know" anything. At some point one must "believe" that the authority on a topic--be it teacher, book or wikipedia--is correct, knows some level of detail more than we do. That's the essence of authority. But belief (in secular matters) should not be absolute, there should always be a measure of criticism available to any argument. And that is the essence of knowledge and learning.

What we as citizens are often faced with is the messages of our leaders and public servants (a label that politicians would be well-served to remember as part of their job description) which come through the same media as our entertainment. So we must always have our disbelief active, and only suspend it when we know that we're engaged to be entertained. If entertainment is not the intent, we should always have a "willing disbelief". Suspension should be reserved for a special relationships with authors and artists, and never with politicians nor generals.