Wishful thinking and the mystery of who we are
Albert Jay Nock was fond of quoting something said by Joseph Butler, an 18th-century Anglican bishop: “Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why then should we desire to be deceived?”
The first part of this is just a more elegant form of the proposition about something looking like a duck being a duck. It’s the second part that is interesting. Do we in fact desire to be deceived?
Readers of Don Quixote will recall how the Don, early in the book, makes himself a visor out of pasteboard, only to discover that his sword can cut right through it. He then repairs it, and even reinforces it. But he does not test it again.
J.B. Priestley, commenting on this, says that this “is what we all do, what indeed the whole world does, when cherished illusions are challenged by facts.”
I am not so sure. I don’t think we desire to be deceived so much as to be reassured. We want to feel confident that things are as we think they are. Confirmation bias — for this is really what we’re talking about — has less to do with disdain for facts than with the inflated value we bestow on thought.
We are inordinately proud of how we think about things. The things themselves aren’t enough. In fact, they are a mystery to us, and we find that mystery burdensome. Our thoughts address the mystery, and so relieve the burden. Don Quixote knows perfectly well that his repaired visor offers no better protection than the original one. He just doesn’t want to think about it.
Most disputes have little to do with the facts of the matter and everything to do with ideas about the matter. Take the current debate over health care. I think it would be hard to find anyone who thinks that people who can’t afford health care should just have to do without it. Disagreement centers on how to go about arranging for them to get it.
The dispute, in other words, isn’t over the end, but over the means to achieve that end. As it happens, a good many people do not think that the government is either the only agent or the best agent to work on the problem. (A Rasmussen poll released Sept. 28 has 56 percent opposed to the health-care reform currently being mulled over in Congress.)
I mention health care only because it is being talked about a lot just now, but plenty of other examples abound. I have a couple of friends who, I am sure, think that their theological debates have something to do with God or faith, and not simply with different sets of ideas about God or faith. (Of course, their disputes do have something to with God and faith, and some ideas about God and faith are correct, while others aren’t, but ideas about anything are different from what they are ideas about: Theology is not religion.)
What is interesting in all this is how protective we are of the notions we form about things. I guess this is because the things we think about — that tree, this book, some other guy’s idea — are all givens, but what we think about them is not. We went to the trouble of arriving at that all on our own.
We like to think that we arrive at our ideas by dispassionately examining the facts and proceeding as logically as we can. But I suspect that passion has much more to do with the outcome than logic does. We think as we do because it “feels right.” That is why more of our thinking than we would like to admit tends to be wishful. What we should be paying more attention to is not the reasons and the evidence we have for thinking as we do. We will almost certainly find that both reasons and evidence are sound.
No, what we want to find out more about is our reasons for wishing to think as we find ourselves thinking over and over again. That is likely to bring us nearer to understanding the mystery of who we are.
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“We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.” – Anais Nin
Well said, Frank. Here is an example that perhaps responds to your nicely written essay:
People engaged in the God versus no-God debate (with folks like Dawkins and Hutchins prominently joining the side of the latter) offer sometimes shrewd and sometimes flawed arguments for their positions; what interests me often is not the strengths or weaknesses of the arguments but the reasons the folks have for wanting to have things their way. In other words, the reasons behind their arguments (i.e., the fact that they wish to have things or see things in certain ways) are sometimes difficult to fathom but almost always interesting to assess. And, as we are critiquing the debate, it would be a mistake to overlook the underlying reasons for the debaters’ positions.
That’s why God created psychoanalysts.
That was really nicely done Frank. Chesterton, in his Orthodoxy said the insane seek reasons in everything — they are insane because they have absolute system worked out. The sane are those that can accept the mystery.
Great post! So long as we’re sharing similar quotes:
“We can evade reality but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality” Ayn Rand, author, sometime evader of reality.
Ignorance is bliss.
An old 1960s hippie (she was still a hippie 30 years later) once told me: “Self-deception leads to happiness. Self-knowledge leads to suicide.”