Sunday Mornings

Al Sikes

Save your suspension of disbelief for novels and the theater

Sunday mornings in America offer an intriguing contrast. Millions of people listen to thousands of religious leaders who, with varying degrees of confidence and success, strive to reflect divine inspiration and voice ultimate truths.

At the same time, millions (although many fewer) sit before their TVs to watch the Sunday talk shows. Meet the Press is the longest running, but most broadcast and cable news networks now have such a show. These shows are sourced from recent news with a slender thread of journalism joining quick minds and self-assured tongues. A digital video recorder gives me the chance to experience both.

One forum gives me a sense of control, while increasingly, the other leaves me bemused. The public affairs forum makes increasingly clear that humankind has created a self-interested complexity that defies truth-finding. Home ownership, representing the latest bubble, proves a helpful and painful guide.

Over the decades, home ownership has increasingly become a central tenet of “the pursuit of happiness.” Political rhetoric, marketing campaigns, tax advantages, and peer pressure have converted “want to have” into “must have.” And since homeowners have a huge motivation to keep their loan payments current, they have been highly sought-after low-risk debtors.

The proposition that home ownership is a good thing became unassailable—and then “suspension of disbelief” came into play. Housing developments for people with modest incomes became increasingly less modest as new debt structures accommodated growing appetites. Marketing campaigns featured both home purchase and equity loans, and mortgage bank salespeople began to prey on credulous borrowers. Bond ratings agencies and securities packagers flourished. And all the while the government, through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, was increasingly spiking the punch.

Now what the critics call Washington’s “chattering class” is being asked to opine on “bail-out,” “stimulus,” and “rescue” packages aggregating trillions of dollars. The most honest of the pundits, when asked about the soundness of these cascading plans and claims against the nation’s treasury, simply say they don’t know. At least we have reached the point where some do not pretend to serve up ultimate truths.

“Suspension of disbelief” can create a harmless and pleasant rush. James Bond and Indiana Jones entertain us as we credulously enter their world for a couple of hours. But increasingly we are allowing ourselves to be pulled into worlds of intense complexity, where we face uncertainty at best and most often unintended consequences. “Suspension of disbelief” is easy if you just focus on the “bait” and don’t worry about the “switch.”

Issues on a number of fronts numb the mind. How will the misalignment between government and taxpayer obligations (at all levels of government) be ultimately reconciled? What are the implications of humanity’s rush to engineer an extra twenty- or thirty-year life expectancy? Who will pay, and how much, to go from a fossil-fuel based economy to one based on sun, wind, and plants? Unfortunately, these questions and many others are not theoretical.

Deutsche Bank Chairman Josef Ackerman, at a recent earnings conference call as reported by The Wall Street Journal, described the market environment as a “series of earthquakes with constantly changing epicenters.” Indeed. One might add that, even more importantly, the market fall was preceded by shifting epicenters of cultural earthquakes. Architects and geologists recognize the importance of tectonic plates; they understand that unstable foundations are problematic.

Several Sundays ago one panelist on Meet the Press, discussing the housing credit debacle, said you had to go no further than Proverbs to understand the personal and collective errors. The rarity of such an acknowledgment made the observation astonishing. Talk-show panelists draw on themselves and whatever knowledge and ideology they have accumulated. Yet truth be told, we are all so absorbed in our self-perceived knowledge and interests that we spend little time reflecting on our own inadequacies—or drawing on the profound lessons of eternal truth.

Theodore Dalrymple’s recent essay, “The Persistence of Ideology,” in the winter 2009 edition of City Journal, sketches a world of intellectual tinkerers. Dalrymple begins by quoting from Daniel Bell’s 1960 book, The End of Ideology which reached the conclusion that the search for an ultimate ideology (at least in the West) was dead. Bell concluded that “a capitalist economy in a liberal democratic polity” had won. Dalrymple went on to cite Sayyid Qutb’s “Milestones,” first published in 1964. Qutb's essential point was that Western culture was bereft of those “life-giving values” that are essential to the leadership of mankind. Qutb’s solution: Islamism. Almost a half-century later, Bell seems too optimistic and Qutb too prescriptive; and we know his prescription has spawned an autocratic and violent fanaticism. Yet humankind is perpetually restless. There will be no end to ideologists or their followers.

So from time to time we should refresh our memory of Lincoln at Gettysburg where he emphasized a “new birth of freedom”—“under God”—which is to say justice for all regardless of race. Lincoln could have left out God, but he didn’t; he understood the ways of man and the profound need to transcend the human condition. Today’s challenges are different, but the need for transcendence is equally great. And we should all, when leaving the theater or setting aside a good novel, suspend our “suspension of disbelief.”  

Al Sikes is Chairman of The Trinity Forum.

Features, Public Square, Society, Thu 19 Feb 2009