In defence of naïveté

When I was at primary school, one of our jokes (I think we had about four or so) was that we would point upwards and say “Look, someone wrote ‘gullible’ on the ceiling!”

When they looked, hilarity ensued. They were gullible.

If we were outside, it was especially funny. Because what kind of idiot looks at the ceiling when they’re outside!?
(Of course, the answer to that is “no kind of idiot”. Because you’re not actually responding to their words — you’re responding to them pointing.)

This would inevitably extend into pointing and saying literally anything. “Look! There’s a bird!” (There wasn’t).
If they pointed and you looked…you were gullible.

Of course, this kind of conditioning could only ever lead to one place: We stopped looking up. We all did.
We’re too street smart. We’re not naïve. We see things as they truly are… as long as they’re next to our shoes.

C.S. Lewis talked about the natural human inclination to ‘look up’. The inconsolable longing that we had for something else, some better beauty, some true happiness:

“The scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

But we can’t listen to that any more. We are so determined not to be caught out that no matter how much you point, we don’t look up anymore.

This is essentially a played-out version of the fable of ‘The Boy who cried “Wolf”’. (If you want to refresh your memory of the tale, it’s here). Like most of these old fables and nursery rhymes, the story had a moral (Don’t lie; don’t steal; stepmothers are evil; be careful of heights if you’re an egg; murder is bad etc.)

I want to establish a slightly different moral from this particular story, though. ‘The Boy who cried “Wolf”’ is designed to warn kids that if they lie, then eventually they won’t be believed…and then they’ll die (Fable-writers understood that threats of death have a superior effect in disciplining children.) But what about the villagers? Surely they are the ones we should really learn from? Because a child lied twice, they lost their entire livestock and someone presumably lost a son. Because a child lied twice.

And yet, here is the thing: in the story, having been tricked twice, the villagers sent the boy out a third time. Why did they do that?
The sole merit of his being there was that he could raise the alarm if there was a wolf. Yet, because he had proven himself unreliable, they had decided not to believe him if he raised the alarm.
So they had no system, they just had a boy living with the sheep for no reason. It’s the equivalent of appointing Cassandra of Troy to host an emergency broadcast, or Donald Trump to conduct a census of his own crowd (“Biggest ever!”).

I believe; I do not believe

So why did they do this? Why have an alarm that they wouldn’t trust?
I suppose that they were creatures of habit: they were farming people — it was an inveterate impulse to protect against wolves, a quotidian note on everyday life… but no one had ever actually experienced a wolf attack.

Like the fire drill for the emergency you know will never happen, like the £1 insurance you pay megabus in case you manage to lose your bag between the door and your seat, so too they sent the boy to the hills, out of mundane due diligence, but would never believe his function was actually needed.

Their farming instincts to be wary are paradoxically entwined with their lax cynicism. That’s what’s happened to us: The innate longing for ‘something more’ is juxtaposed with a determination not to believe; not to be caught out: disappointed and humiliated.

We’re open minded, but only morons believe in God.

When our cynical minds are made up, we are able to believe almost anything except that which we have resolved to disbelieve. The villagers, having heard the boy shout ‘Wolf’ must, undoubtedly, have also heard his harrowing screams, not to mention the anguished bleating of the terrified sheep, as the wolf carried out its massacre. Goodness knows what narrative they told themselves as they remained in the valley, convinced that it was all a prank. Once they had decided not to believe him, they ignored their farming instincts, then they ignored all further evidences.

So, to return to the start, what is our equivalent? As we look down at ground, what beauty do we tell ourselves lies there? What contrary nonsense do we tell ourselves? We have decided against the optimism of belief, of the antiquated promise of true and lasting joy. So how do we align that with our inherent desire for that self-same lasting joy?

There are a number of ways we can do it. We can simply ‘pretend’ to have constant happiness; or we can choose to ‘not mind’ as per Laurence of Arabia and the Buddhists. Or, as is currently more popular — we simply redefine happiness.

Where Pink, over 15 years ago, once gave voice to a child whose parents were splitting up by crying out to “play pretend”, now James TW says that we don’t have to merely pretend to be happy: we can instead pretend that this is what happiness is. He wrote this last year for a young boy caught in the middle of a divorce:

Sometimes moms and dads fall out of love
Sometimes two homes are better than one
… you’ll understand when you love someone

[‘Don’t cry, for what is broken, little boy: this is better. Don’t think of it as a broken go-kart: think of it as four single-wheeled go-karts.’]

Passenger, in his new album (conveniently titled ‘the boy who cried wolf’), accepts the futility of pretence and prefers instead the negative nihilist approach, bringing his character to an acceptance that brokenness is the defining characteristic of every individual. But that’s even harder to proselytise than religion, so the ‘close your eyes, it’ll be ok’ option takes the common stage:

Happiness is now firmly about pretending. Pharrell, in 2013, wrote ‘Happy’ in which he said that he’ll be Happy no matter what the bad news is. Because he’s pretending. The song made us Happy as we saw minions dancing to it in ‘Despicable Me’. It made us Happy because it let us pretend. It made us so Happy that we pretended to forget that 6 months beforehand Pharrell’s label dropped a music video in which he made a naked woman hold a farmyard animal and called her a bitch.

You asked what it is that we ignore and what we tell ourselves in order to get by. Well there’s your example. (Ok, you didn’t ask, but I pretended you did: it was convenient.)

That is the dirt we look down at and claim to be good.

We’re so firmly looking down, so thoroughly let down by the optimism of our ancestors and our own youth, that we don’t know how to bring ourselves to look up. And if one of us did, how would we persuade the others to look? When you’re hurt, can you hope to be Happy? Hope hurts far more than the numbness of a lie. How can Passenger’s boy who cried “wolf” be believed?:

“And you have no reason and I have no proof
But this time I swear, I’m telling the truth”

Too good to be true?

We live under the streetlights of our lies, of our false happinesses — we palliate the terror of night by surrounding ourselves in a cloying orange glow. But it doesn’t help. We still know that it’s dark, even when we refuse to look into the darkness. We still know that it’s night time: The only thing a streetlight truly hides is the stars.

So now we’re in a situation where someone might point to those starry heavens and declare that there is a God. And we will stare down at our shoes and say “No. You’re gullible.”

We are condemned and committed to be suspicious of anything better than meh. We refuse to look up — we tell comforting lies that are less comforting than the truth. We sit, backs to the sunset, eyes down, eyes shut, imagining a grey sky.

But if that which is Good is ‘too good to be true’ then logic insists that we can never believe in anything Good. We can never trust real happiness because it only belongs in fairytales. ‘You have no reason; I have no proof.’

But what if I’ve seen something? What if I’ve seen something Good?

Cynicism is fine. Have a sardonically-raised eyebrow as you lift your head. Smirk and scoff as you take a peek. But however much you roll your eyes on their journey skyward, if someone points up; look.