And that was all I knew at fourteen about where Timbertall was, and all I cared to know.
I am appalled by my ignorance. Yet it had its own logic. I didn’t have to drive the bus, after all. I was a kid, carted around by adults the ways kids are. I had an adequate arrangement of the world, a sufficient understanding of my position, for my needs at the time.
No wonder kids always ask, “Are we there yet?” Because they are there. It’s just the harried parents who aren’t, who have to have all this huge distance between things and have to drive and drive and drive to get to there. That makes no sense to a kid. Maybe that’s why they can’t see scenery. Scenery is between where they are.
It takes years to learn to live between, and thus to get the relationships between things arranged, to make sense of them.
It probably takes the weird adult human mind too. I think animals are where they are in the same way a baby is. Oh, they know the way between places, many of them, as no baby does, and far better than we do—horses for sure, if they’ve been over the ground once. Bees, if another bee dances it for them. Terns above the trackless ocean… Knowing the way, in that sense, is knowing where you are all the way.
At fourteen, unless I was in a very familiar place, I had very little idea where I was. More than Leila, but not that much more.
But at fourteen I knew the horses were not in the loft bedroom. I knew Santa Claus was not at the North Pole. And I was giving a good deal of thought to where God might be.
Children have to believe what they are told. Willingness to believe is as necessary to a child as the suckling instinct is to a baby: a child has so much to learn in order to stay alive and in order to be human.
Specifically human knowledge is imparted largely through language, so first we have to learn language, then listen to what we’re told and believe it. Testing the validity of information should always be permitted and is sometimes necessary but may also be dangerous: the little one had better believe without running any tests that the stove burner could burn even when it isn’t red, that if you eat Gramma’s medicine you will be sick, that running out into the street is not a good idea… Anyhow, there’s so much to be learned, it can’t all be tested. We really do have to believe what our elders tell us. We can perceive for ourselves, but have very little instinctive knowledge in how to act on our perceptions, and must be shown the basic patterns of how to arrange the world and how to find our way through it.
Therefore the incalculable value of true information, and the unforgivable wrongness of lying to a child. An adult has the option of not believing. A child, particularly your own child, doesn’t.
A scenario: Leila, instead of contentedly accepting the information, begins to wail in disappointment, insisting, “No, the horsies are upstairs! They are upstairs!” A softhearted grownup smiles and coos, “Yes, dear, the horsies are upstairs, all cuddled up in bed.”
This is a lie, though a tiny, silly one. The child has learned nothing, but has been confirmed in an existential misunderstanding which she’ll have to sort out somehow, sometime.
That up means up the stairs, up the hill, and a whole lot of other places too, and that its meaning may depend on where you are at the moment, is important information. A child needs all the help she can get in learning to take that vast variety of meanings into account.
Lying, of course, isn’t the same as pretending. Leila and a grownup might have a fine time imagining the horsies in the bedroom, with Hank hogging all the blankets and Perla kicking him and Mel saying, Where’s the hay? But for this to work as imagination, the child has to know that the horsies are in fact in the horse barn. In this sense, truth to fact, insofar as we know what fact is, must come first. The child has to be able to trust what she’s told. Her belief must be honored by our honesty.
I brought in Santa Claus for a reason. I’ve always been uncomfortable with the way we handle him. We had Santa Claus in my family (in fact my mother wrote a lovely children’s book about Santa Claus in California letting his reindeer graze on the new winter clover). When I was a kid we read “The Night Before Christmas,” and we set out milk and cookies by the fireplace, and they were gone in the morning, and we all enjoyed it. People love pretense, and love ritual, and need both. Neither of them is counterfactual. Santa Claus is an odd, quirky, generally benign myth—a real myth, deeply involved in the ritual behaviors of the one great holiday we still have left. As such I honor him.
Very early in my life, like most kids, I could distinguish “Pretend” from “Real,” which means I knew myth and fact were different things and had some sense of the no-man’s land that lies between the two. At any age I can recall, if somebody had asked me, “Is Santa Claus real?” I would, I think, have been confused and embarrassed, blushed red in case it was the wrong answer, and said no.
I don’t think I missed anything not thinking Santa Claus was real the way my parents were real. I could listen out for reindeer hooves with the best of them.
Our kids had Santa Claus; we read the poem, and left milk and cookies out for him; and so do their kids. To me, that’s what’s important. That the bonding ritual be honored, the myth reenacted and carried forward in time.
When I was a kid and other kids started telling about “when they found out about Santa Claus,” I kept my mouth shut. Incredulity is unlovable. I am opening my mouth now because I am too old to be lovable, but still incredulous when I hear people—adults!—mourning over the awful day they found out that Santa Claus wasn’t real.
To me what’s awful is not—as it is usually presented—the “loss of belief.” What’s awful is the demand that children believe or pretend to believe a falsehood, and the guilty-emotion-laden short-circuiting of the mind that happens when fact is deliberately confused with myth, actuality with ritual symbol.
Is what people grieve over the pain not of losing a belief but of realizing that somebody you trusted expected you to believe something they didn’t believe? Or is it that in losing literal belief in our fat little Father Christmas, they also lose love and respect for him and what he stands for? But why?
I could go on from here in several directions, one of them political. As some parents manipulate their children’s beliefs, however well-meaningly, some politicians play more or less knowingly on people’s trust, persuading them to accept a deliberately fostered confusion of actuality with wishful thinking and fact with symbol. Like, say, the Third Reich. Or Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom. Or Mission Accomplished.
But I don’t want to go there. I just want to meditate on the horsies upstairs.
Belief has no value in itself that I can see. Its value increases as it is useful, diminishes as it is replaced by knowledge, and goes negative when it’s noxious. In ordinary life, the need for it diminishes as the quantity and quality of knowledge increase.
There are areas in which we have no knowledge, where we need belief, because it’s all we can act on. In the whole area we call religion or the realm of the spirit, we can act only on belief. There, belief may be called knowledge by the believer: “I know that my Redeemer liveth.” That’s fair, so long as it’s fair also to maintain and insist upon the difference, outside religion, between the two things. In the realm of science, the value of belief is nil or negative; only knowledge is valuable. Therefore, I don’t say I believe two plus two is four, or that the earth goes around the sun, but that I know it. Because evolution is an ever-developing theory, I prefer to say I accept it, rather than that I know it to be true. Acceptance in this sense is, I suppose, the secular equivalent of belief. It can certainly provide endless nourishment and delight for mind and soul.