I’ll have what she’s having
Belief: God v. fraud-trial testimony. Bankman-Fried, or a bank man fried?
I believe you can listen to this article as a podcast by clicking up here. There.
I was, some years ago, gifted by a dear friend, for Christmas, a sweatshirt bearing the legend, I am silently correcting your grammar. I wear it with pride to events where there are likely to be poor grammarians present. To help them.
Image: Estelle Reiner, who made cultural history in five words as “Female in Restaurant”. 1989’s When Harry Met Sally.
Tonight, I needed a tooth extracted, so I was at Swa, my dentist, to perform the operation. Swa and I speak a mixture of what’s intelligible in the moment. He speaks Dutch, and I veer on occasion into Double Dutch, but tonight he got the vindictive grammarian’s come-uppance just exactly right. As he inserted syringe no. 2 to numb my gum, he gently soothed me with, “This could be quite sensible.” Sensitive was the word rattling like a sabre in my mind, struggling against the effects of lidocaine: “No, no, no, Swa, sensible is like what you just said, verstandig, sensitive it has to be,” except it sounded in my mind’s ear more akin to, “Go, go, go, Ga, gegigle is lk yeuh yus sed, gestandich, gengigig i eu gee.” Actually, even with the means available, saying it would’ve been to no avail. And no one launches into some self-important tirade with the addressee wielding a needle within their oral cavity. Plus, on consideration, he was in fact right as he was.
As I rinsed away the anaesthetic’s bitter taste, he stole my thunder: “I think I should have said sensitive.” We always talk for half an hour and do five minutes of dentistry.
But, what of it? I’d understood. Swa will be a dentist till he retires and then he’ll put his feet up and forget doing 12-hour days for 40-odd years. If he never knew the difference between sensitive and sensible, what difference would it make?
I was once a guest at my brother’s home in East Anglia when he and his wife organised a pot-luck dinner with friends. Everyone brought a contribution to the buffet repast. Much mingling was done in merry mood, with good company and great hosts. As some of us began to slouch in armchairs with snifters of brandy in our hands, my sister-in-law emerged from the kitchen, where she and some of the girls had been doing some clearing-up. She bore a fine porcelain plate loaded with the remains of a pie and addressed the gentleman with whom I was in conversation: “Richard, are you taking your tart home with you?”
The hub-bub in the room became instant pin-drop-audibility silence. From all and everyone. Followed instantaneously by uproarious laughter. When you just hear that enquiry above the chatter, there’s only one connotation that springs to mind. The interesting thing is, however, that Richard took equally as long to tumble to what had actually just been asked. Richard attended that night with not one, but two tarts: one on a serving plate, and one who, two years on, would be his ex.
My sister-in-law never did have the makings of a stand-up comedienne. She knows some brilliant jokes, but she invariably cracks up in gales of laughter before she can get the punch-line out, so you end up always having to ask her to say it again, by which time the peak moment has subsided a bit. But that night, boy, she was in top form; mainly because she didn’t know she was going to be funny. It was only after the silence that she joined in the hilarity and collapsed on the floor with the rest of us. And that, in turn, was because she didn’t know the double entendre was so palpably accurate.
I was at church on Sunday. A friend who is a lay assistant for his congregation had invited me, and I love to sit and compare different places of worship and their catechisms, orders of service, hymn tunes, ability to drop the hymn numbers off the board as it’s being mounted on the wall, the presence or otherwise of hats, and other matters of great interest; and this church had its own idiosyncrasy: fourteen stations of the cross. No explanation was offered. None needed to be: fourteen’s probably right. After all, it was no cakewalk.
Of course, the Free Church of Scotland and the Church of Rome, aside from the vast distance between their seats of administration, are also miles apart in terms of the fundaments of what they believe in. Yet, on some things, they are in harmonious unison and, as is church-goers’ wont, the congregation last Sunday reminded itself once again of what that is: the Apostles’ Creed.
I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who was conceived of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary, who suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried, descended into hell, rose again from the dead on the third day, ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of God, the Father almighty, who will come again to judge the quick and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen.
I must have said this hundreds of times. I like the fact that Pontius Pilate gets a named mention, even though he’s not a matter of belief, but of historical fact. Perhaps there are grounds to believe Jesus was tried by someone else? When I was younger, the creed’s page number in the Church Psalter and Hymnary would be given for the less regular Sunday attendees to have it before their eyes to recite. So they knew what it was they believed in. I never sat down and learned it, myself, like I learned play lines for the theatre. There simply came a day when I no longer needed the text.
When you read a list of things you believe in, do you believe in them? I’ll admit, there are things listed here that I hardly knew what they meant, let alone whether I believed in them: the communion of saints, conceived of the Holy Spirit; judgment of both the living and the dead. What is the right hand of God? One thing teachers of the Protestant tradition make clear: that catholic has no capital letter.
You can read a transcript of a police interview of a suspect, and from the outset you know that the thing is peppered with truths and untruths. The skill of the prosecution lies in discerning which is which. The police can be thankful that they just record the words. They don’t get to interpret them, which is why they’re allowed to carry guns.
The believer, by contrast, does not have the luxury of knowing the creed is a mix of the real and the unreal. Sorry, that makes it sound as if I do know that the Apostles’ Creed is a mix of the real and the unreal. And, how could I know that? How, indeed, could anyone know that? Not that it is a mix, but, if it isn’t, one simply believes that it is real; and that doesn’t make it real. It doesn’t even make the belief real.
Wait: we can think that we believe that we believe in something, but perhaps we don’t in actual fact? Huh?! Where’s that snifter of brandy?
People say the Apostles’ Creed, and it starts, virtually every last line of it, with I believe, so it’s a statement of belief. But, what, then, is belief?
Yes, that.
Belief can be one of a range of things, and that’s even without considering its common-or-garden use as another way to say I think.
The seeds of belief must come from somewhere, unless you’re persuaded that believers would also believe exactly what they believe absent any contact with another living thing. An interesting thought: I wonder whether Edgar Rice-Burroughs’ Tarzan believed? It’s in fact the moral outlook of Tarzan, or its absence, that fascinates more than the presence or absence of his clothing.
But, I have long since believed that belief, to be more than I think must go beyond the standard of evidence at a court trial. In a civil trial, belief follows the more probable version of events. We thereby reject improbability as unbelievable; and yet the very presence of a god, of whatever hue, is itself a thing of such material improbability that, if that were the religious standard, there would be no belief in it at all, anywhere.
In a criminal trial, the state has a far greater onus to discharge. It must prove guilt beyond all reasonable doubt. Then, again, what is reasonable doubt? The spectrum of what’s reasonable varies like the visible light spectrum, and therefore the judge needs to cover the aspect of reasonableness in relation to each of the specific facts of a trial in his or her so-called direction to the jury (conditioned upon whether they’ve accepted the veracity of certain key events).
Does that translate to religious belief? Let’s say the apostles form a body of evidence, so, they are the witnesses in the case, and we are the jury ready to be convinced, the judge is then played by the minister of the church, who plays a balancing-act role between telling the congregation what to believe and telling the congregation what they tell them, because it’s what the congregation already believe. When clergy do say, Make up your own minds, it may be a recognition that an opinion arrived at by one’s own reasoning has better staying-power than one learned by rote.
As with a criminal trial, you can have aspects that are shrouded in uncertainty, where doubts reign as to veracity and even significance, but that does not undermine a verdict either way, because the event itself may be unimportant for the purposes of reaching an actual verdict. (If you had to name it: what single fact do you believe that makes your belief in God unerring?) In court, only two verdicts are possible, guilty or not guilty. In religious belief, there isn’t even that breadth of choice. Think about that.
In the American fraud trial of Samuel Bankman-Fried, the prosecution had to tread a thin line between: convincing the jury of the cogency of its key witness, Ms Caroline Ellison (that she knew what was happening and that it was illegal); and, otherwise, risking the jury leaning in favour of the principal line of defence: that Ms Ellison committed the fraud and Mr Bankman-Fried’s level of knowledge was no better than hers.
This all smacks of strategising: to procure belief in a body of witness testimony whose evaluation lies in the judgment of the twelve members of the jury. Surely a jury will believe what it must reasonably believe, without being edged one way or another by wily prosecution counsel acting as surrogate priests? After all, Juror No. 8 swayed the whole damned lot of them, until Twelve Angry became Twelve Peacable Men.
When commanded to swear an oath of allegiance in terms of the Succession to the Crown Act 1533, which declared King Henry VIII’s child by his first wife to be illegitimate, Sir Thomas More neither swore nor declined to swear that oath. He remained silent on the question, and was tried on charges of treason as a result. The courtroom scene from Robert Bolt’s A Man For All Seasons:
CROMWELL: He calls this silence. Yet is there a man in this court, is there a man in this country, who does not know Sir Thomas More’s opinion of this title? Of course not! But how can that be? Because this silence betokened—nay, this silence was—not silence at all but most eloquent denial.
MORE: Not so, Master Secretary, the maxim is ‘qui tacet consentire’. ‘Silence Gives Consent.’
Of course, they were both right, More and Cromwell. But Sir Thomas More lived before the era of the consumer contract. Each man forced his view of what saying nothing means on a credible jury of men eager not to be next for the chop.
Would it have harmed justice for Ms Ellison to testify and leave the jury to make of her testimony what they will?
Belief. It must be more than yeah, that sounds about right, I’ll go with that. And it must stop short of I’ll have what she’s having. Because, lady, you gotta order something that you know in your heart is gonna make you feel like that for ever. And no one can fake it for ever.
You only ever really know whether your belief is belief or whether you just believe that you believe once you look back and know you really did believe.
Because belief isn’t a thinking exercise.