“Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus”

[DonCoquixote]

http://www.newseum.org/exhibits/online/yes-virginia/

The links has the text, and many have heard it this holiday season. However, I humbly offer my two cents on this.

There are some that may be livid angry at anything that is not a complete destruction of myth, who think that anything but a curt, cold smashing of Santa Claus to children is child abuse. There are those who may think that lying to children is good, and that reason cannot offer anything replacign wonder. There are those that will muddle between two extremes, hoping to avoid getting ripped at by a and b.

The genius of this essay is that Church has to tell the truth, but in the process, not ruin the child's ability to imagine:

"They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge."

This is an honest statement about what people can know, and never know. A lot of cynicism is nothing more than people encircling themselves around what they know, and hissing at anything else.

"Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished."

No, this is not telling the child that there is some elf in the north pole, this is him telling the child that Santa is part of the general "romance to make tolerance this existence." Compare this to someone like Bertrand Russell, who takes pride in saying man's life is "nasty, brutish and short." The fact is, we humans think in terms of myths..now, unlike those who are religous, we can break out the Kant and the Jung and realize this dreaming and myth making is just what we do, and because we are aware, we can dream and think instead of simply react to the nasty realitiues of life.

"Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond." No here is where I disagree. Science can also show this, and is indeed great for such, but it works when you have folk who are prepapred to indeed unshamedly use the poetic side of the mind to lead people to reason. When he was alive Carl Sagan knew how to do such with Cosmos, as does his successor Degrasse Tyson. Russell on the other hand, did not, and as a result, science was very falsely and sadly relegated to a a small bauble in the hands of a small carde of intellectuals, as opposed to being a tool to see the world.

In short, this essay should not be dismissed as "it's okay to lie to the kids because it is pretty", it means that we can take myths, peoms, and use them to make children think about what is real, what they can do to make themsleves better human beings. If you we do not want Faith to become some diogmatic spiller of blood and choker of hopes, we need to learn how to appeal to the peotic side of people, the part that often does good despite the odds, because in life, the odds are always against trying to make posotive changes, so we need to learn to work despite the "poor, brutish" facts of life that are there; the ability to do this is what the priests try to abuse and turn into faith, and folks like Church turned into a poem.

Yes Virginia, dreams, love and romance do have value. "in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding." If we are going to surivive the times ahead, we will need people that remember that, even as they crunch numbers and test hypothesis.