I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a War

A vulnerability exists in the human mind that allows the suspension of disbelief to be engaged outside of narrative contexts. This could allow an attacker to divert attention away from dubious claims and redirect the energy of well-meaning individuals into vigorous debate about irrelevant things.

When we encounter fiction, we instinctively divert our attention away from glaring questions like why Luke looks human even though he's from "a galaxy far, far away" or why Nazi soldiers speak English to each other in American films. We suspend our disbelief about these things, allowing them to pass us by uncritically and almost invisibly because they're somehow beside the point. We are critical of what is intended to be evaluated, but the background is often spared the same scrutiny.

The lyrics of the children's song I Know an Old Lady represent a particularly extreme example of the suspension of disbelief. They tell the story of an old lady who swallowed a fly (presumably by accident) and who swallows a spider to catch it. At this point, she has to find a way to get rid of the spider, so she decides to swallow a bird to catch the spider "that wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her". Then she swallows a cat to catch the bird, and a dog to catch the cat, and so on up the food chain. The sequence of predators invoked after this point makes less sense though, swallowing a goat to catch the dog, then a cow to catch the goat, and finally a horse to catch the cow, but after the first few steps, the song has established a pattern and the implausibility of which predators come next doesn't seem to matter much. It's wonderfully silly and perfectly harmless fun. Outside of fiction though, the story would be about as implausible as you can get. Within the confines of a narrative though, we happily suspend our disbelief to enjoy the story, and if we spell out exactly what absurdities it asks us to entertain, we have quite a list:

1. Animals can survive inside the old lady's stomach to catch each other.

2. It is possible to swallow large animals whole without chewing them.

3. Horses like to catch cows, which like to catch goats, which like to catch dogs.

4. The old lady was unable to see that she was simply making matters worse at each step.

5. The old lady had enough room in her stomach for all these animals.

It ends with "I know an old lady who swallowed a horse" but instead of continuing on to even larger and more implausible animals, we are jolted back to reality with the final line: "She's dead, of course!". Suddenly, the version of reality we are entertaining is revised to encompass elements that we had previously suspended our disbelief about, elements which are "of course" implausible.

The suspension of disbelief isn't limited to fiction. We are also manipulated into applying our critical attention selectively in our daily lives. This is especially true when others get to frame the discourse. There are times when we willingly debate matters in our opponents' own terms, as when a non-religious person makes a point within the theological framework a debating opponent accepts, but we don't have a choice about how a debate is framed when communication is unidirectional (from press release to journalists, from print and broadcast media to their audiences, and so on). In these situations, the source gets to control the scope of the debate much as a story teller gets to determine which elements you will and won't pay critical attention to. Everything you are meant to suspend disbelief about is presupposed within the framework imposed by the source.

For example, The Bush administration's justification for invading Iraq could have been presented in a number of different ways, each presupposing different things. Here are a couple of possible formulations:

1. The reason the US government wanted to invade Iraq was because Saddam had WMDs.

2. Saddam had WMDs and the best way to deal with the threat was to invade.

These justifications are superficially similar but focus debate in different ways. The first is something like what was actually used by the Bush administration and led the media to question both whether Saddam had WMD and whether this was the genuine motive for the invasion rather than to gain strategic control over oil reserves, or to enrich the military industrial complex, and things like that. The WMD claim and the motive claim are both made explicitly in this formulation so they were what was debated, but this formulation presupposed the arguably much more important claim that invading rather than some other course of action would have been the best way to deal with WMDs, a claim that is explicit in the second formulation. 

The question of whether invading made sense wasn't even visible. It was presupposed by the way the debate was framed, which meant that the media neglected to discuss many of the consequences that subsequently materialized. Opposing voices focused on the WMD claim, but had no way of independently examining the evidence provided by intelligence agencies, which left most of that discussion devoid of substance. They also focused heavily on the motives of the Bush administration, but this was a complete non-issue because it wouldn't matter in the slightest if the Bush administration had nefarious reasons for invading Iraq if a legitimate case could also be made on humanitarian or other grounds. The question of whether oil was the real motive nevertheless dominated the debate for some people as if something hinged on it. Meanwhile, barely a word was written and barely a breath was spent on the issue of the consequences the invasion might have for stirring up a hornet's nest of terrorism (an outcome predicted by the U.S. government's own intelligence at the time), for the human cost to those who might suffer under the bombing and post-invasion occupation, or for the precedent that would be set by the U.S. waging a preemptive war without U.N. authorization.

The second formulation explicitly makes the claim that was merely presupposed by the first, namely that invading rather than some other course of action would make the most sense. Had the justification been framed in these terms, this issue would have been more visible, so we could have expected more critical discussion of it and perhaps more serious evaluation of alternatives like containment, sanctions and weapons inspections. Perhaps the most alarming aspect of media reporting at that time was a virtually complete lack of any serious discussion of the consequences of invading an enemy that was supposedly capable of responding with weapons of mass destruction. The logic of the Cold War, that neither party could strike at each other because of the potential consequences of a counter strike involving weapons of mass destruction, was somehow suspended and even inverted. The United States and Britain were supposedly invading Iraq because Saddam had WMD, not just plans to build them, but actual working WMD that could be "deployed within 45 minutes".

This is one of many examples where debate is bounded within the limits set by those who control the dominant channels of communication. It relies on our inclination to suspend disbelief in a way that is inappropriate outside of our experience of fiction, but we could reduce our susceptibility to this by becoming more aware of when we are merely indulging the mindset of others "for the sake of argument". In an hour-long speech given by a politician, this may mean parting ways with their argument within the first few sentences, at "she swallowed a spider" instead of "she swallowed a horse".