Melissa Lipscomb’s latest domestic disturbance is up. It’s about all the Christmas lies that parents tell, and an interesting one. The following passage made me laugh out loud:
A few days ago Adam left the house and used his cell phone to call Alec in the guise of Santa with a timely reminder that calling people “idiot” was liable to provoke the direst consequences. It’s a bit soon to tell, but I can report that Alec hasn’t used the word again since then.
I personally don’t remember ever believing in Santa, though I guess a forecast of my philosophical future can be found in my first memory about Santa. I was asking my father a bunch of uncomfortable logical questions about how the hell Santa could be in the next mall we were visiting when we’d seen him in another mall earlier that day, as well as on the street, and in other cities. And why he never really looked the same from place to place.
My father tried to keep the myth going a little longer, by telling me that in fact Santa sent out elves in disguise to fill in for him at shopping malls around the world, since he was too busy supervising the work at the North Pole. I asked how they could have so many sleds and reindeers, and my father confided that Santa had upgraded to helicopters long ago.
Unless I’m mixing up two memories, I think at this point I admitted to my father that I knew… that I absolutely knew that there was no such thing as Santa. And I remember him hushing me up and glancing to see whether my younger sisters were listening.
Incidentally, the same kind of thing played out many years later when I started asking questions about Yahweh, except that nobody offered real answers to my questions. Instead, it was implied that those questions weren’t okay, weren’t allowed, and that disbelieving wasn’t really an acceptable route. I was pretty much made to attend church regularly until I moved out, though it became very obvious that this distressed me and that I was not happy or comforted in doing so, the way that others seemed to be.
It’s strange, this parallel. Did my figuring out that Santa didn’t exist prefigure my eventual reaction toward Catholic doctrine? Is it a result of temperament? Or did my own, independently-reached conclusion that I’d been outright deceived about other supernatural beings (Santa, the tooth fairy, the easter bunny) lead me to questioning the biggest supernatural claim of all?
I don’t know, but it seems to me that almost every Westerner I know has gone through this experience. (I really should ask Lime, but I don’t think the Santa Myth is so common here, and she may not have experienced it herself. I really should ask her.) I doubt that the disillusionment of discovering that Santa’s a lie leads us to questioning other claims, though, because millions of people who learned that Mom and Dad were BS-ing them about Santa still believe other inherited claims about supernatural beings. I wonder if, instead, this teaches people that questioning things directly can lead to pain and disappointment, and reinforces theism in many people?
Or maybe there’s no connection at all. I don’t know. But it is an interesting comparison. When we compare specifically what methods are used to coerce children into believing in Santa or believing God, the methods look rather similar to me: ceremonial “encounters” with the supernatural being, yearly rituals of great significance, rewards and punishments, claims and continual reminders of their omniscience, and a great deal of pleasure and reward attendant to acting in such a way that one seems very much like one believes. (Which, in children, I think, eventually can lead to belief outright.)
This seems to me radically different from how we teach children to think rationally and ethically when we don’t rely on religion. Kids have a way of asking questions that cut to the heart of the matter, and I discovered the theodicy on my own as a young boy, and causing my mother some annoyance at the question of how a loving God could create evil. Most religious parents I know don’t even really know the official doctrine that well, and are forced to make up answers to such questions. But There’s no reason to bullshit kids when we tell them why, say, stealing is wrong. When they say why, we can provide sensible reasons and examples. We can also demonstrate how it feels to have something stolen from oneself. And of course, we can explain that when one does to others what one does not want done to oneself, it’s understood as wrong. We don’t need to appeal to universal, invisible, supernatural laws or beings. We can straightforwardly talk about right and wrong, including grey areas. Not so with religion. Kids haven’t internalized the rules about what not to question, and which contradictions to ignore. As a result, they have a tendency to ask the very questions that could, if examined closely and seriously, could drive an adult to agnosticism, atheism, or, at the least, a very critical and radical view of their own religion’s orthodox dogmas and claims.
The interesting thing is that parents who depend on theology to teach their children ethics are doing what parents who depend on Santa are doing: both Jesus and Santa want you to be good. But what if Jesus’ or Santa’s representative tells me that X is good but it looks bad to me? Children who aren’t taught — at some point, anyway — to reason through it will be left with no choice but to inarticulately rebel, or to follow bad advice. In a sense, for a child Pascal’s Wager applied to Santa makes sense: kids gain a lot by believing in Santa, and gain nothing but knowledge for not believing in Santa. But what’s funny is that, if they keep quiet about their disbelief, they lose nothing by not believing in Santa, and they gain knowledge about the world and, rather more importantly, about the psychology of their parents. So Pascal’s Wager applied to Santa suggests that disbelief is the better option.
This reminds me of another common complaint I hear about teenagers, which is that they’re rebellious. In fact, my experience is that some of them are, but a lot of them are just human beings with growing independence and minds of their own, whose parents aren’t quite ready for that. When parents complain that their teenagers are rebellious, I find it says at least something about how they’re parenting. I wasn’t really a rebellious teenager. I rarely acted out of spite, though I questioned almost everything my parents told me to do. I asked them for reasonable explanations, but they were from that generation that had, from their own parents, learned to say, “Because I say so.”
I don’t have kids, so of course I’m speaking from a void of experience, but I think, while, “Because I say so,” can work for a young child, there comes a point where it no longer is a feasible answer. (And observation of a few cases suggests that for exceptionally intelligent children, it can be foregone right from the start.) Anyway, I’m not criticizing the use of “Because I say so” any more than I’m castigating a smack on the bum–Bill Cosby himself noted that a smack on the butt and “Because I said so” make sense for a loving parent in an extreme case, like when a kid almost runs out into traffic–but I do think that, along the line, there must at some point arise something else between, “Because I say so,” and, “It’s my house and those are the rules and if you don’t like it, move out.” The method of handling objections to the house rules and parental dictates and expectations need to change when a kid grows up some, and to expect the method to work is hopeless. That much I know already from experience. Developing a relationship of trust with one’s kids probably helps, though. And trust, it seems to me, can develop if one explains oneself, even though, yes, with the power dynamic of most households, parents don’t need to explain themselves to their kids.
This brings me back to Santa. I imagine that in a nuclear family, the “death of Santa” is probably more distressing to a lot of kids than the death of a remote, barely-known grandparent, which in itself is weird if you think about it. I wonder if, coming so early on, this kind of disillusionment isn’t something that shoots parents in the foot. I can think of no surer way to make kids become permanently distrustful of their parents than to lie to them about something for the first few years of their lives and then use that lie to indirectly control their behaviour. (Or, at least, to convince them to restrict their “objectionable” behaviour to when they can’t be caught by an authority figure.) It’d be very interesting to look at how Santa-believing and Santa-non-believing households differ years down the line. I’d be fascinated to see studies in that area, but I wonder whether anyone has ever conducted them.
Again, this isn’t an indictment of parents who make their kids believe in Santa… but I do think such a weird practice deserves some careful consideration and thought. It actually might not be good for kids, after all, or for parents, in the long run. And what’s weird is that we don’t often think about the effects of this massive, culture-wide hoodwinking in any rigorous way. And that, again, makes me think of how critical discussion of religion is, also, effectively banned from the table in a lot of places.
I guess I’ll find out someday for myself.
UPDATE: I don’t know why comments and pings were banned on this post, but now they are not. Have at!