The Mystery, Wonder & Existence of Santa Claus

I know a couple who refused to introduce the concept of Santa Claus to their 2 young children. They believed this went against their much-valued scientific principles of only teaching their children facts. I think this is unfortunate. Even aside from the sense of fun, it’s good to do the Santa thing with your kids when they are very young – it introduces them to a sense of wonder, and it teaches them that sometimes their everyday experiences are connected to a meta-reality that won’t reveal all its mysteries and secrets at once.

The idea of Santa Claus helps kids learn about deeper curiosity, and about propositions bigger than themselves that they can’t quite understand. And in some small way, to young budding minds, it teaches them some of their first deep considerations about existence itself. As any who have seen the marvellous film Miracle on 34th Street will know, the ontology of Santa Claus is a rather complex set of considerations, especially on top of the propositions about existence contained in the works of Descartes, Hume, Kant and Russell. 

As a young boy, I was told about Santa Claus, who supposedly visits every house on Christmas Eve, leaving presents and indulging in mince pies and alcoholic beverages left for him. Having observed the logistical challenge of visiting millions of homes in a short time, I questioned how Santa could accomplish this feat. Realising my parents were unprepared to answer, I decided to investigate by hiding in a cupboard. This prompted more anxiety, especially since the surprise gift they bought for me was also concealed there. Attempting to divert my curiosity, my dad warned that Santa would only come if I had been good, leading to an unwanted discussion about the nature of goodness. "Come on now, bedtime, son," he urged.

I’m not surprised my agitated father tried to rush me off to bed. The question 'what is good?' is just as profound now as it was then, but it’s easy to see today why, back then, my father had difficulty satisfying my curiosity. The truth is, goodness in its primary form resides in the person of God; all earthly goodness, wonderful in itself, is but a pale reflection of Divinity.

And this is what I think we see in the meaning of Christmas. We celebrate the birth of Jesus, and we share in those celebrations with our family and friends by trying to bring goodness, happiness and love into their lives. I fancy that Christmas is so widely seen as the most special time of the year because it’s the time when we more Christ-like in our goodwill to others, and in our desire to bless those we love.

As an adult, thinking about Santa Claus, it makes me ponder the qualities children have that Jesus encourages for us in discipleship. G.K. Chesterton once made a good point about children and stories:

"We all like astonishing tales because they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment. This is proved by the fact that when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough. A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door."

I think that's a salient observation that can be connected to the wisdom of Christ in Matthew 18 too ("unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven"), and how the child still sees what the adult has learned to unsee. Like Blake's 'Doors of Perception', that have been cleansed in childhood, only to have been closed up through age, till all is seen through the "narrow chinks of the cavern". One of the great features of childhood innocence is the willingness to embrace real life as an exciting and enchanting story, without the embellishments demanded from youth and adulthood. The youth and adults are enthralled by the romance, thrillers and drama mixed into their stories, taking the extraneous as boring. But the young child finds nothing extraneous - it is all, in a sense, romance, thriller and drama, because it hasn't yet been uncharmed by the prosaic breath of fiction or stunted by the cold chill of reason.

I recall C.S. Lewis saying he found children's books the hardest to write. But he also made the great point that a children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a very good children's story - which I guess is why it takes great skill to write a good one. I think even the child would see through a writer’s attempt to tailor too specifically to children, and an adult certainly would. It’s like the wisdom about originality – you can never try to create an original work for originality’s sake, just like you can’t try to be happy for happiness’ sake.

Similarly, the great children’s works are good simulacra to children-adult conversations. An adult becomes creatively childlike when taking an interest in the child, and a child becomes more adult-like through talking seriously to an adult. That’s probably why children tend to advance more quickly when adults speak to them with unaffected adult communication. So, a children’s book is similarly good for adults in the way that a garden is beneficial when we are tending to it, as well as when we are enjoying it in relaxation. A garden that could only be enjoyed during relaxation would not be a garden that gives the full experience that gardens elicit.

Returning to the opening line of enquiry - my advice would be this; Don’t be afraid to allow your kids to enjoy the idea of Santa Claus. The chances are, it will open their mind to metaphysical horizons that will hopefully bear fruit later on, when they think about who Jesus is, and the gift of salvation He brings to us all.

Letters To Troubled Youth - Excerpt 1: Low Calibre Leaders & Low Calibre Environmentalism

One of my little ‘work in progress’ side projects is an epistolary called Letters To Troubled Youth. It’s a mix of good cop, bad cop letter writing, aimed at the younger generation, warning them about all the highly damaging nonsense they are letting in to their souls, and encouraging them towards the greater rewards found in more rigorous truthseeking. I might share the occasional excerpt as a blog post on its own stranding.

Excerpt 1 – taken from Letter 18: Low Calibre Leaders & Low Calibre Environmentalism:

“I think the only genuinely realistic hope of awakening the modern folk from their sleep is for them to fall in love with the truth that good ideas and interconnectedness are the most vital of combinations for progressive problem-solving. Because the reality is, ideas come together in an exchange, and they evolve and mutate far faster than any physical limitation that can retard them. The combinatorial search space of ideas is far vaster, broader and deeper than any other combinatorial system in the physical world (certainly in the Newtonian world). 

The global population is like one big problem-solving collective - it does not go about its business as though the world is going to stay the same; it works on the basis that problems, like climate ones, usually (though not always) work on steady arithmetical ratios, whereas the human ability to solve these problems usually works on geometrical ratios. That is why progression tends to work at an exponential rate - it's the exchange of ideas at an increasing pace, and the more people there are to exchange those ideas, the more readily we can combine to create this explosion of problem-solving relative to problems themselves. But that involves a kind of freedom that so many are keen to retard.

The reason that politicians are of such low intellectual calibre is because they are selected to represent an electorate of low intellectual calibre. For example, extreme left wing voters tend to be of a lower intellectual calibre than more central left wing voters, which is why extreme left wing politicians are more likely to be of an extraordinarily low intellectual calibre (think Jeremy Corbyn and his Shadow Cabinet as prime examples). But why is the electorate of such low intellectual calibre when it comes to understanding politics well enough to vote in better politicians? Oh, that’s easy too – it’s because being highly competent and well-informed comes at a cost – you have to put in a lot of time and effort to understand any subject well. With politics, the cost incurred for being politically astute confers only a tiny benefit in terms of election outcomes, because only a fraction of the benefit of good political policies goes to you. Just as you wouldn’t spend £500 of costs to gain £2 of benefit, similarly, you won’t see much personal benefit in becoming a well-informed member of the electorate. That’s not a reason not to become well-informed – there are many other benefits to it – but it’s a reason why the vast majority of people do not become politically well informed; the costs are just not worth it to them.

The above also extends into other more specific socio-political areas. For example, this has particularly detrimental societal effects when it comes to things like climate change. There has been a systematic attempt by politicians, the establishment and the media to have the population believe that we are in a climate crisis. They do this in three primary ways: by appealing to our desire for drama, by appealing to our desire to congratulate ourselves, and by appealing to our desire to belong in mutually affiliated tribal groups. The proposition that we will use our collective ingenuity to solve climate problems is not as dramatic or as interesting as the spectre of climate catastrophe. It is the latter that generates sales, subscriptions and clicks. So-called climate justice makes the adherents feel good about themselves, because they get to indulge in moral posturing and sententious mutual back-slapping. And climate alarmism brings people together for a common cause that satisfies their social need to be accepted and validated within a tribal group.

The upshot is, irrespective of whether these views are based on truth and facts or not - what people claim to believe, how they conduct themselves, and the actions they take are largely driven by narratives that give meaning and purpose to their life, motivations that help them feel good about themselves, and causes that make them feel part of a tribal group and give them a sense of belonging. Climate alarmism has replaced Christianity as the national religion, which is why, apart from a few exceptional cases, most climate alarmists are not Christians.

The other thing about extreme environmentalism – or climate lunacy in some cases - is that it is what large parts of economic socialism has morphed into; especially now that only the economically uninformed have any belief in socialism as a viable form of politics, and history has repeatedly shown its failings and its culpability in the cause of human suffering. Deep down I think virtually all socialists always knew how foolish socialism is – they advocated it like those in the Asch conformity tests, being swayed by the wrong answer even though they suspected it wasn’t right. Most extreme environmentalists are still socialists, of course - but extreme environmentalism enables red socialists to turn green, and espouse a cause that is still relatively contemporary in human history, and not as widely and historically discredited as socialism has been.

What extreme environmentalism lacks in terms of a balanced, intelligent set of considerations, it gains in the form of a sense of group identity and belonging, a perceived ethical cause, self-congratulation and a Gaia-type idol to act as a religious substitute. Without those four things, it is hard to fathom how anyone could adopt such foolish beliefs and behave in such a selfish, narrow-minded and intellectually bankrupt way – but those four substitutes for reason and critical thinking have always proved powerfully seductive for leftists, and that will likely remain the case whether the colour is red or green.”

Getting Religion & Science Wrong

I saw this comment about religion from economist David Friedman the other day, and I thought it worth commenting on, as it often typifies people's misconception of religion.

"Religions serve at least two purposes, both important to humans. One is to help make sense of physical reality, explain, for instance, why living things appear to be brilliantly engineered creations. The other is to make sense of life, to answer questions about what we ought to be doing and why. The development of science over the past few centuries provided a strong rival to religion for the first purpose, an explanation that not only covered the same territory but came with much stronger evidence for its truth."

I think there's so much wrong with this set of statements, it needs several correctives. Regarding religion (by which we should mean Christianity here, as it's the only true religion), I think David Friedman has both definitions slightly misjudged; I don't think religion is primarily to help us make sense of physical reality, nor to tell us what we 'ought' to be doing in the sense of morality. Of course, religion can inform us about both, through the right lens of interpretation, but that is not religion's primary purpose.

Religion's primary purpose is to help us to know God and enter into and sustain a relationship with Him. Science is the primary tool to help us make sense of physical reality, and morality is an evolved phenomenon that helps us construct value judgements in line with what our conscience tells us about right and wrong. God uses those things, and many more things too, to point us towards the higher standards found in Him, and to the adventure we can undertake in order to find the full meaning and purpose of the creation story.

This is why David Friedman's conclusion, that "The development of science over the past few centuries provided a strong rival to religion for the first purpose, an explanation that not only covered the same territory but came with much stronger evidence for its truth." is wrong in a twofold sense. In the first place, science was never a strong rival to religion, because both were always asking different questions; and therefore, in the second place, it did not come up with stronger evidence for its truth.

The main problems regarding religion and science are to do with people's misconceptions of the purpose of both. As a Christian, I can tell you that if you perceive a conflict or contradiction between Christianity and science, then you're either getting one of them or both of them wrong in terms of your individual interpretation. There are big costs on the integrity of your worldview when this happens. If you retain your Christianity but compromise science, you end up believing absurd things about physical reality that belong in the realm of counterfactual religious fundamentalism. If you retain your science and give up or reject Christianity, then you become mired in the quagmire of narrow scientism. And if you refuse both Christianity and science, you'll very likely end up in one hell of a mess, where instead you'll probably let in and embrace all kinds of low-grade substitutes, like extreme politics, environmentalism, and countless other idols, superstitions and forms of egocentric, narcissistic expressions.

Banks Could Only Dream Of Being Like Casinos

 

I happened upon this article in The Banker, which expressed concerns that the government’s attempt to enable more competitive banking to boost London’s growth might lead us towards the dangers of ‘casino capitalism’.

The casino metaphor is flawed, because it misunderstands both how banks work and how casinos work (see my blog tab ‘Banking/Financial Risk’ on the side bar for more on this subject). Both deal with probabilities, but in different ways. Probability theory tells us that in n number of incidences, we expect certain values as a result. The more incidences of n, the closer we expect to get to our predicted value. So, for example, in coin tossing, the greater the number of trials, the closer we expect the heads-tails ratio to be 50-50. 

Casinos operate in this way – they cannot predict the precise outcome of every gambling event, but they predict stability in the long term, which means a high probability of turning a profit. Your big win at the casino one Saturday night will be cancelled out by the broader probability landscape, where net losses for the totality of customers secure the solvency of the casino.

To see why banks are not like casinos, we have to understand the distinction between risk and uncertainty. A risk involves an incident where we are not sure of the outcome, but we know the probability. Uncertainly means we don’t even know the probability. Gambling £100 on a coin toss is risky, because there is a 50% chance you could win and a 50% chance you could lose. Whether your mortgage will increase after your next fixed-term ends, and if so, by how much, is a matter of uncertainty. 

Casinos operate under a risk model where the known probabilities guarantee a stable income; banks operate under a model that is a small mix of probability and a larger mix of uncertainty. Government guarantees aside, it would be much harder for a casino to go bust than a bank. If the banking sector had operated like casinos in the past 15 years, an awful lot more would need to have gone wrong to have brought about a similar crash to the ones the banking sector endured.

The reference to banks being in danger of ‘casino capitalism’ was a quite unfortunate and misjudged comparison. If banks had the same long term model as casinos, their risk portfolio would be a lot healthier. But then they wouldn’t be banks in the way we know them – just as oranges would no longer be oranges if they were yellow, bent and grew on banana trees.