Untethered

Not long after I arrived for my freshman year of college, I was delighted to discover some few of my classmates could read and write Latin. They had attended boarding schools. They routinely rode underground trains, and they infrequently rode horses on English saddles. They lived in houses that were physically attached to other houses on both sides, and their parents paid a lot of money for those houses. One was a debutante, another a child prodigy, and yet another was a Hindu, and that there were a billion more of those latter.

Before I met all these amazing people, I didn’t believe. I didn’t believe in Latin, boarding schools, subways, riding English, townhouses, debutantes, child prodigies, or Hindus. It isn’t that I rejected them, exactly. I’d simply never needed to examine them. Between an Ent from The Lord of the Rings and a Hindu from India, one was a character from a Tolkein novel, and one was a character from a Kipling novel.

Both fit reasonably well into their respective narratives.

I’m older now, and I’ve traveled. I have children of my own. I’ve met quite a few people, and I watch the news. I have encountered a wide range of myths, I’ve read fantasy novels, and I’ve played quite a few video games. I’ve watched movies. I still read a lot of books, and I have a reasonable feel for whether some fact fits within a narrative.

I have Suspended Disbelief, but I don’t need to do that very often.

Disbelief is Different Than Unbelief

Disbelief is the opposite of belief. If you believe something to be true, you disbelieve its opposite. If you believe cats are real, then you disbelieve cats are imaginary. At least this is true if you accept real and imaginary as opposites. Perhaps it would be simpler to suggest if you believe cats to exist, you disbelieve them to non-exist.

Unbelief is a third option.

If you’ve ever seen a cat, your mind probably wanted to collapse into a state of belief or disbelief at that moment. “What an extraordinary creature!” or “That must be some kind of trick.” But imagine you haven’t ever seen one. In your mind, where other people have a belief (or disbelief) in cats, you have nothing.

You are a blank slate, cats-wise.

Tabula rasa.

This is unbelief.

Steady State

Perhaps the strangest truth about unbelief is that it is not always a precursor to belief or disbelief. Sometimes it is a steady state of its own.

The usual case for this is the simple one in which you never encounter a cat, and continue not to have a belief about it. Or your encounters with cats are so tertiary that you’re never forced to examine whether they’re real or imaginary. I was this way with Koalas for a long time, and Australians too, for that matter.

But there is another, less usual case, in which I have examined something closely and for a long time, and it doesn’t result in belief or disbelief.

It results, instead, in a wandering away.

Meandering.

A memory of the examination. Enjoyment, without a resulting belief. It feels decidedly un-fundamentalist, and I find I kind of like it here. I’m thinking of building a place, maybe living here part time.

Everything is Fine

The older I get, the more it happens. The more I wander away from what I thought was a core belief, but was in fact an ex post facto rationalization of something I was going to do with our without the belief.

I discover I do not need any philosophical belief to be kind.

I discover scientific inquiry is not predicated on a belief about the order or lack thereof of the universe. Scientific inquiry, at its best may be predicated in no beliefs whatsoever, not even a belief in the importance of the scientific method. Turns out you don’t need a reason to do science any more than you need a reason to be kind.

I discover that sometimes the outcome matters a great deal, but other times I act without concern for what might happen.

I discover that believing causes some mistakes to persist longer than they otherwise would have, and maybe longer than they should

I discover that with unbelief, I’m still okay.

My relationships still matter, and my life is still worth living. I discover that without belief I can still listen openly, I can still hold to my guns, and I can still change my mind.

I discover that my belief (or disbelief) doesn’t change much.

Doesn’t mean much.

I discover that I can often derive as much meaning from not having a belief as I do from having it (or rejecting it).

I discover that I like being a little untethered.