Let's pretend

"Oh, I see."

Actually I don't see at all, but sometimes you have to pretend you do understand just to make people feel comfortable. Just as (much more often, in my experience) you sometimes have to pretend that you don't understand what someone has said or what's going on, otherwise things can get awkward.

Steff Penney, The Invisible Ones

To pretend, at least in the world of adults, is usually viewed negatively, as just another form of lying. Someone pretends to be a friend in order to get something from you. A salesman pretends to be looking out for your interests when his main objective is his own. However, one of the narrators in Steff Penney's novel, The Invisible Ones, makes the case that pretense in conversation can sometimes be the morally correct thing to do.

Can that be right? I think it can, at least sometimes.

Harold A. Mapes

Even in middle age my father enjoyed telling stories about his experiences, but as he aged, telling his stories became one of his few remaining pleasures, the others being eating, sleeping and taking long walks in the woods. On occasion he might tell a story I did not remember hearing before, but usually they were stories I had heard many times. He would often tell the same stories in the same order as before. Yet I listened, as if hearing them for the first time.

Late in life Dad admitted that he knew he was repeating himself, that he told his stories for his own benefit, because they helped him remember. But they were for my benefit as well, because their repetition helped me remember at least some of those stories as if they were my own.

When I was a newspaper reporter I can recall asking sources for information I already possessed. It was a way double-checking both the information and the source. That seemed like a good thing to me.

But what about normal conversation? This is what is being discussed in the novel. Is it morally OK to pretend to understand when we really don't or to pretend not to understand when we really do? The character offers his justification. In the first instance, it makes people feel comfortable. In the second, it avoids awkwardness. In social intercourse, each is a moral good.

Yet harm can be done, and that harm may be to yourself when you pretend to understand something, such as directions to a certain place, when you really don't. Pretending not to understand what the other person is saying, thus making repetition necessary, can cause awkwardness, or anxiety, rather than avoid it.