2020: The Necessary Veil: or, Observations on the Adaptive Uses of Persistent Delusion, with Particular Regard to Language, Technology, and the Myth of Transparency
Fenella Vorpel in “The Southern Quarterly of Ideas”
The story begins, as stories of comprehension often do, with a trunk.
A charmingly impractical piece of furniture—its brass hinges proud, its lock purely decorative—rediscovered in an attic converted some decades ago into a “media room.” Inside I found layers of familial scholarship: letters dated from the mid‑nineteenth century to essays from the closing years of the twentieth, composed by four women whose persuasions were both linguistic and philosophical. They wrote to one another on the subject of illusion. Their conversation, if we can call an exchange lasting over a century a conversation, reads as a continuous experiment in wonder: how to tell truth from myth without bruising either.
What astonishes me, re‑reading their paper ghosts, is not how quaint their illusions now appear, but how recognisable. Alice Fitzartur’s colonial reflections on maya (illusion as sacred drama); Jeanne d’Anatis’ wry correspondence from Sussex on the social uses of deceit (in her elegant phrase, “illusion is civilisation’s exhalation”); Elspeth Mallard’s reasoning from her 1890 diary that “magic is merely the inexplicable staying loyal to its disguise”; and Alice Mallard’s 1997 essay on technological enchantment, which could almost have been written this morning if we replaced “modem” with “browser.”
They form a lineage of reluctant moderns, each haunted by the suspicion that progress is actually the refinement of delusion. I had intended only to catalogue these papers, but inevitably, I found myself drafted into their hereditary debate. And so this essay becomes a kind of fifth letter—an update rather than a conclusion, which none of the earlier writers, wisely, attempted.
In 2020 the term illusion has acquired a corporate uniform. We are urged daily to “see through illusions,” as though clarity were a purchasable state. Transparency, that darling of modern governance and technology, has become an ethical brand rather than a quality of sight. Our devices and institutions alike promise openness: transparent processes, transparent leadership, transparent glass walls behind which the same opaque decisions are taken.
It now seems obvious that the call for transparency conceals its opposite. The economist A. N. Bremer’s misquoted dictum—“opacity is the cost of speed”—haunts every digital transaction. We move too swiftly to observe. I once told a student that the Internet does not distort reality; it multiplies it, like a gem cut so fine that each facet lives independently. She asked if that meant the Web is an illusion of illusions. I said yes, but that was a simplification. What it really is, perhaps, is the illusion we have finally agreed upon as real.
The anthropologists have begun naming this condition “high‑performative truth.” Dr. Selina Ko of Melbourne wrote last year in Cultural Circuits that “belief is no longer private; it requires projection.” People express sincerity by online display, a ritual she describes as “social prosthesis.” This theatrical anthropology does not surprise me. Illusion has always depended on audience.
Jeanne, in her 1864 letter, recognised the same game in dinner parties and sermons; Elspeth saw it in early journalism. The medium changes, but the etiquette remains: one must appear authentic, or risk heresy. I do not think the difference between “illusion” and “delusion” is moral at all, only architectural. One constructs from outside, the other from within.
Language itself remains the longest illusion of all, and thus the truest. The linguist Grégoire van der Meer (again, I may misremember his phrasing, since I read him only in translation) wrote that “words are illusions that act in concert.” To name is to fabricate relation. Etymologically, illusion being from illudere—to play against—suggests that to speak is already to perform. Each word a tiny game of approximation: a trick played gently upon silence.
I find myself smiling at Elspeth’s assertion, written around the birth of radio, that “we fake presence only to long for it.” What would she think of “presence” today, performed across networks of compressed light? Perhaps she would regard social media as the latest household version of séance, complete with error messages as our modern table‑knockings.
The sociologists, always eager to assist where mystery persists, have contributed their own theories of mass misdirection. Vinh Tran’s Theory of Social Gloss (2013) argues that illusion serves as collective lubricant: “Without sustained misapprehension, society would seize up like an engine deprived of oil.” He meant it kindly. Indeed, his fieldwork among trading‑floor analysts showed that small, continuous delusions—confidence in forecasts, faith in indexes—were necessary fictions. Collapse followed only when illusions became too literal.
Our global order seems sometimes to forget Tran’s proportion. It demands belief while outlawing imagination. The result, paradoxically, is hysteria: the body politic deprived of its myths begins hallucinating.
Turn, if you will, to the sciences proper. Quantum physics, with its probabilistic mannerisms, has revived a subtlety once reserved for poets. Niels Bohr famously said, or perhaps did not, “The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.” Physicists treat this not as paradox but procedure. They look directly into indeterminacy and call it measurement. One sympathises—it is a kind of faith.
Recent headlines announce that “scientists photograph a black hole.” The phrase itself is an oxymoron: to photograph an absence, to capture where light refuses. It reminds me of Alice Mallard’s meditation on the disc as a “jewel that stores sound.” Both acts—encoding and imaging—are elegant deceits, converting absence into object. Beneath our technological triumphs lurks the child’s unaltered magic trick: now you see it.
I am reminded of an editorial in The Economist during the brief optimism of 2018, titled “The Data Delusion,” proclaiming that humanity now generates more “truth per second” than it can examine in a decade. I found the phrase unbearable and magnificent. Its accidental poetry reveals modern hubris: that truth can be measured volumetrically. Our servers overflow with substance; our comprehension, meanwhile, leaks steadily away.
A Victorian magician would recognise the choreography. While one hand waves statistics, the other conceals the hidden mechanism—the human cost, the lost nuance, the unacknowledged choice. And we, obliging audience, applaud our own confusion.
Anthropology offers consolation. Every culture, even the most analytic, constructs its worldview upon ritualised untruths. The Trobriand Islanders, much studied and often misrepresented, once believed the sea’s phosphorescence to be the laughter of drowned ancestors. Modern sailors know it as plankton’s chemical defence—knowledge that removes wonder but not the glow. We are descendants of those luminous fictions. To live without them would be to drown in accuracy.
The illusion, then, is survival’s ally. Childhood depends upon it; art celebrates it; science refines it. Elspeth’s formulation—“the inexplicable staying loyal to its disguise”—remains perfectly serviceable. What has altered since her time is the density of the disguise. The new magic is infrastructural, humming invisibly beneath us. Fibre‑optic lines replace wands, but the aim is identical: to act at a distance, unseen.
I often wonder whether artificial intelligence (an expression still half apologetic) represents illusion evolving into consciousness. A system designed to imitate learning until the imitation begins to teach. We are alarmed by the resemblance not because machines deceive, but because they do so methodically. They expose us as amateurs of perception.
When my students ask whether an algorithm “understands,” I reply that understanding itself may be a beautifully maintained illusion—a successful hallucination that guides cooperation. The more precise the hallucination, the more civilised the result.
There is, however, a limit to tolerance. Illusion, like light, must be modulated. Too much exposure bleaches the surface it was meant to reveal. The pandemic year has emphasised this axiom brutally. Conspiracy manifests as democratic folklore; misinformation replaces myth but not mythology. The difference is aesthetic: old myths instructed through metaphor, new ones through outrage. Both satisfy the same nervous system.
A letter from Jeanne d’Anatis once observed that “the poorest deception may still shelter a gentle truth.” I suspect she would find our current spectacles coarse and unimaginative. The theatre of belief has been replaced by propaganda. Magic degraded into management. But, to adapt a line from the journalist Nella Berring (writing in The Sydney Review, March 2020), “disenchantment is only the illusion that we have outgrown illusion.”
I sometimes entertain an academic fancy: that language itself orchestrates these cycles, each generation merely rehearsing new connotations. Illusion began as play; delusion, as grief; collusion, as friendship. Perhaps we erred when we assigned virtue or vice to them. They were only variations on the theme of interaction: to play, to play against, to play with.
From this etymological vantage, the human project becomes clear. Civilisation is a vast improvisation underpinned by confidence tricks so delicate we call them institutions. No wonder our ancestors compared governance to conjuring.
To stand among these insights—nineteenth‑century, twentieth, and now our own twenty‑first—is to feel a continuity more emotional than intellectual. We have not really advanced; we have iterated the same astonishment. Illusion has survived every attempt at dissection, absorbing science, philosophy, and spectacle into its repertoire.
If I close those faded letters, their handwriting brittle but decisive, I sense what later historians might call a lineage of lucidity—a family willing to believe that deceit, gracefully practiced, could be ethical. Magic, illusion, rhetoric, code: the names change, the purpose endures.
Perhaps that is all one can say in any century. The inexplicable is not waiting to be explained; it is waiting to be remembered. And illusion, that subtle accomplice, preserves it for us—still disguised, still loyal.
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