The actor Dan Blocker, who played Hoss on the old television show Bonanza, suffered through an incident once that is by turns charming and chilling. He was at a public event, signing autographs, when an older lady came up to him and started complaining that the cook on the Ponderosa, Hop Sing, wasn’t feeding them right.
“When you get back there,” she insisted, “you tell you pa that you need to get someone who knows how to cook good American food, feed you all properly.”
Blocker, who by all accounts was the epitome of a gentleman, explained to her after a couple of minutes of this that there was no Ponderosa, that Bonanza was a tv show—fiction—and that he was just an actor playing a part.
“Yes, yes,” she said impatiently, “I know that. But really you must tell Ben to fire that Chinaman and get a real cook before all you boys dry up and blow away.”
She was absolutely convinced of the reality of the Cartwrights, the “fact” of the Ponderosa, and the need to be concerned on their behalf, as if the events on the show were somehow as real as anything she encountered in her daily life.
Charming, yes, but chilling in the respect of encountering a rock hard, immovable assertion of the reality of something fabricated. Made up.
One can dance around this in a variety of ways, philosophically speaking. As a writer of fiction I object when critics assert that what I do is tell lies for a living. “What you create is not true.” In one sense, I must agree completely. The events I depict in my stories have never, nor will likely ever, “happen” in so-called “real life.” But there is another level in which the “fact” of the story is itself a reality—the story exists, the events depicted have an effect in the reader’s imagination, there is no contravention of consensual reality in the sense that the story replaces the actual world, and yet there is a substance to them (if I’ve done my job well enough) that is not so easily dismissed as a lie. On yet another level, the question of truth comes into it in regards to the felicity of the essence of the story to what we might recognize as truthful observations, mainly about the human condition. A piece of fiction can tell a truth—in fact, good fiction does exactly this by examining human nature under conditions where a revelation about how people are takes place. We find ourselves responding to characters, in the course of reading fiction, as if they were, in some sense, real.
This is what Art does. It reveals truth. To do so, it need not exhibit an absolute correspondence to the given world. Indeed, the distortions to be found in certain fiction work to focus our attention on a truth in a way we might not be able to see in the usual course of daily life.
But most of us recognize the line that divides living from nonliving experience. We—most of us—know the Cartwrights don’t exist, that the Ponderosa is not a place we could go visit, and that Hoss, Adam, Little Joe, and Ben are not “real” people in the same way our next door neighbor is. (We may know the Cartwrights better, more intimately, than that neighbor, but that’s another issue.)
The old lady confronting Dan Blocker had crossed the line somewhere and decided what she saw weekly on television was real.
Harmless, though. Isn’t it? What does it really matter if she spends her time imagining that one day she might get on a bus and travel to Virginia City, get off in the earthen main street, and take a wagon ride up to the Ponderosa to have dinner with the Cartwrights? If this delusion gives her pleasure and enriches her life, wouldn’t it be cruel to disabuse her of it, shatter the illusion (assuming it could be shattered)?
Consider another example of exactly the same thing.
[1]That the Nazis murdered six million Jews is a fabrication advocated by those bent on destroying Christian supremacy, white supremacy, and maintaining the power of the international Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world.
Extreme? Is that really the same thing?
It is the assertion of a false point of view as reality in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Veterans who liberated the death camps have from time to time been faced with Holocaust deniers who somehow manage to maintain their delusion regardless of eyewitness testimony.
It would seem evident that the same delusion process is at work.
One of the most dangerous aspects of this emerges in the realm of public discourse and decision making. Quaint myths, false syllogisms, and assertions of personal belief in place of rational apprehension of reality all feed into the difficulty of conducting policy that effects all of us. Of late, this is most evident in the debate over the place of religion in civic institutions.
Adults we consider to have the ability and responsibility to sift through the dross of problematic assertions and deal with contradictions. Those who do, often are marginalized. We don’t necessarily take special pains to debunk nonsense, rather we tend to ignore it and pay little attention to the purveyor of nonsense.
But this is a mistake. Consider this:
http://failblog.org/2010/01/06/field-trip-fail/
The parent who scrawled this note on the bottom of the permission slip is indulging in the assertion of a delusion. Let’s be frank, Young Earth Creationism is nonsense. The weight of evidence against it is so vast that it seems incredible that anyone could maintain it. One might, of course, ask what difference it makes. Isn’t maintaining one’s own perspective on the universe the privilege of living in a free society?
As far as it goes, yes. We as individuals may believe anything we want, play whatever games with our own majesterium we wish, amuse ourselves with the fanciful and fraudulent all day, week, or year.
As long as it causes no one else harm.
Here the child is being harmed. And before anyone might ask whether or not some equivalency of delusional discourse might be at work—what makes the current paradigm any more privileged than the one the parent is asserting—it is that the real freedom being suppressed is the child’s right to free discovery. We should all be allowed to make up our own mind. Truth will win in the long run, but only if all avenues of inquiry and exploration are open. The mind that believes the Holocaust was faked and that the Earth is only 6,000 years old tends also to seek to bar alternative views from free examination. Hence, the child is being denied a field trip to the museum. (If the parent really believed his or her version of reality was supportable, then such a trip should be seen as harmless.)
The question, though, is always Why do people think this way?
And, secondarily, is it only kooks, crackpots, and zealots who do?
Here is a lecture that addresses exactly that issue.
We can see by this that habit—if we can call it that—forms a kind of mental shortcut for us that we all use. Understanding something is not the same as accepting it, and to be honest (by all means, let us be honest) we all rely on certain shortcuts in order to navigate our way through the complexities of the world. We trust people.
True, we cultivate our sources, those of us who are not yearning for delusion, we find people, books, lectures, and so forth that we feel we can depend on. The skeptical facility, so vital to an ability to comprehend the world and to accept changes is our perception of it—and our valuable ability to detect nonsense when it confronts us—relies on networks of synopses and sources constructed by people who, we believe, do understand what they’re talking about.
Most of us are more or less comfortable with the conditional nature of our understanding. This is what the delusional examples I’ve mentioned most reject. Their demand for some certainty transcends their ability to reason.
But we must remember that not all delusion is on That Side of the fence. That often we find ourselves in company with people who agree with our hard-earned understanding—but for all the wrong reasons.
Print this post [2]
[3]