The Awkward Truth About Things That Aren’t True
Many years ago, long before thoughts of being a Director were even a twinkle in the eyes of the Literacy & Oracy gods, I found myself having the talk with the youngest of my sons. You can, dear reader, no doubt picture the scene. My son was upset by something he had heard in the playground that day and, in his emotional state, had gone to his mother in search of comfort. She, exercising the kind of judgement that has sustained civilisations for millennia, sent him along to his father, who would apparently be ‘better at talking about that sort of thing’.
And so there we were, a slightly tearful son seated at the kitchen table, alongside your future Director, who was wondering how exactly he had come to be regarded as an expert in these matters. Without any preamble I dove straight in and asked him to tell me what it was that had upset him. With all the directness of youth, he told me that some of the bigger boys in the playground had been going around saying that Father Christmas was not real.
This was indeed something of a crucial moment. To go with a quivering lip, a world had also wobbled. The problem though, as I paternally explained, was not simply that Father Christmas had been called into question. It was, as is often the way with these things, the way the playground ruffians had framed their claim.
It was like this; either Father Christmas was literally real, in which case the older boys were bullies and liars; or he was not real, in which case Christmas itself becomes a kind of elaborate parental con, well-intentioned perhaps, but dishonest nonetheless. It was an uncomfortably stark choice. But also a false one.
What struck me then, and has stayed with me since, is how quickly belief is reduced to a kind of factual test. Does this thing exist or not? Did this event really happen or not? As our friend G. K. Chesterton once suggested, The simplification of anything is always sensational. The older boys were offering this sensational simplification by reducing the complex reality of Father Christmas to a single, easily tested proposition, i.e. fact or lie, and thereby stripping the story of its enduring imaginative truth. And it is this reduction that leads to the only honest responses seeming to be embarrassment, disappointment, or the weary shrug of disenchantment.
As I proceeded to explain to my son at the time, this is not just a misunderstanding about Father Christmas. It is a much broader confusion about the whole business of belief itself.
You see, dear reader, we can tend to assume that belief must involve a particular kind of inner stance: a private, first-person sincerity. In this way, to believe something, we think, is to assent to it internally, to mean it literally, to hold it as a propositional claim about the world. I believe this happened. I believe this exists. I believe this is true in the same way that gravity and taxes are true.
And if we cannot do that; if the claim seems implausible, unprovable, or simply inconvenient, then the only alternatives appear to be scepticism or cynicism. Either we believe, or we grow up.
This way of thinking about belief feels natural to us, but it is, historically speaking, rather new. It belongs to a modern world that prizes sincerity, transparency, and individual conviction above almost everything else. Belief becomes something you have, rather than something you inhabit. Something you assert, rather than something you live with.
Dear friend of the Column, philosopher Slavoj Žižek has argued that this modern conception of belief would have puzzled most of the ancient world. We often imagine that the ancients were a credulous bunch, that they simply believed their myths in a straightforward, literal way. But there are very good reasons to think that this is quite wrong. Chief amongst them being that they weren’t all idiots.
The ancient Greeks, for example, did not believe that if you climbed Mount Olympus you might bump into Zeus behaving badly behind a conveniently placed cloud. They knew perfectly well that their myths were not literally true in that sense. And yet it is equally mistaken to suppose that they treated these stories as only metaphors in the sense of them being symbolic ways of talking about natural forces or abstract principles.
Rather, these myths functioned as something more elusive and more powerful: fictions taken seriously. Stories that were not literally true, but which nonetheless organised a way of life, shaped moral imagination, structured communal practices, and made real demands on those who lived within them.
They were not believed instead of reality; they were believed as a way of seeing reality.
A Jewish rabbinic story captures this distinction beautifully. A child, having listened with rapt attention to a story from the Torah, turns to the Rabbi and asks the most natural of questions: Is it true? Did it really happen? The Rabbi replies: It didn’t really happen. But it’s true.
That reply sounds evasive to modern ears, as though the Rabbi is trying to have it both ways. But in fact it names something we have largely lost the language for. Truth, here, is not exhausted by literal occurrence. Reality is not reduced to brute fact. A story can be true without being factual, real without being reducible to history. As C. S. Lewis noted about the power of belief, we rely on stories not only because we see them, but because by them we see everything else. The story acts as a lens, not just a label. It is a game that your Director will play at the many Christmas parties he will be attending over the season: find the core beliefs of the person you are sharing vol au vents with and guess the stories they believe. I may have mentioned that your Director is a whizz at parties.
But Žižek gets me. He suggests that we are wrong to imagine ourselves living in a uniquely cynical age, one in which belief has withered away. On the contrary, he argues, we may believe more than ever, only now our beliefs are displaced, unacknowledged, and therefore all the more powerful for being unseen.
Consider how much of our moral life depends upon what are, in a strict sense, fictions. Human dignity. Equality. The idea that each person matters simply because they are a person. None of these can be demonstrated empirically in the way that a chemical reaction can be demonstrated. They are not facts we discover so much as commitments we uphold. And yet suspend them, and the world does not become more realistic; it becomes more brutal, more transactional, more animal. As Hamlet observes, there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. It is our collective thinking, or our shared fiction which gives these moral commitments their reality.
These are not illusions to be dispelled, but fictions to be respected. Lose the capacity to hold such fictions seriously, and we do not become enlightened realists; we become technicians of power.
Which brings us, appropriately, to Christmas.
Christmas, too, suffers badly from our confusion about belief. Treated literally, it becomes something brittle and anxious, a set of propositions to be defended against the raised eyebrow and the sceptical footnote. Did this really happen? Could that really occur? And if the answers are not sufficiently robust, the whole thing threatens to collapse.
Treated cynically, Christmas dissolves in the opposite direction. It becomes sentiment, metaphor, or seasonal mood music: a vague celebration of kindness, generosity, or goodwill that we indulge for a few days before returning to the real business of the world. The nativity becomes a decorative motif; the story a cultural artefact; the claims politely defanged.
But what if Christmas is neither of these? What if it is, like the best myths, a fiction to be taken seriously? And guess what..?
The claim at the heart of Christmas is not simply that something unusual once happened, long ago, in a particular place. It is that reality itself is structured differently than we habitually assume. That power does not finally reside in domination, but in vulnerability. That meaning does not announce itself with spectacle, but arrives quietly, asking to be received rather than proven. That what matters most does not impose itself, but makes itself small enough to be ignored.
The story insists, without of course insisting at all, that the deepest truths about the world are not the loudest ones. That love is not efficient. That significance is not proportional to scale. That the ultimate does not arrive armoured, but exposed.
To treat this story literally, as a problem to be solved or defended, is to miss its force. To treat it cynically, as a pleasant fiction with no claim upon us, is to miss it entirely. The story does its work only when it is taken seriously enough to disturb us, but not so literally that it becomes absurd.
Belief, in this sense, is not about pretending. Nor is it about intellectual submission. It is about learning how to hold a story properly, neither swallowing it whole nor sneering at it from a safe distance, but allowing it to work upon us, to re-order our sense of what is real and what is worth caring about.
This is why the question of Father Christmas matters more than we might think. Because when children discover that Father Christmas is not real, what they are often offered is not a more mature account of belief, but a more impoverished one. The world is divided into what exists and what does not; into facts and fantasies; into things that matter and things we should grow out of.
And yet the real task is not to abandon such stories, but to learn how to relate to them differently. To move from literal belief to something deeper and more durable: trust, imagination, participation. As we are reminded in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
I cannot now recall exactly what I said to my son at that kitchen table. Parenting, like belief, is often improvised and best judged in retrospect. But I hope that what he heard was not simply an answer to a question about Father Christmas, but the beginnings of an understanding that some things can be true without being literal, and real without being reducible to fact.
At its best, education is partly about teaching this distinction. Not everything that matters can be measured. Not everything that is real can be proven. And not everything that is fictional is therefore false.
Christmas, at least, invites us to remember that. It asks us not whether we can believe a story in the narrowest sense, but whether we are willing to let it shape how we see the world, and how we treat one another within it.
That, I think, is what belief really is. And that, perhaps, is something worth believing in.
Until next time, Happy Reading/Christmas!
This week’s fun answer to last week’s fun question:
How can 8 + 8 = 4?
If it is 8 o’clock in the morning (8 AM) and you add 8 hours, the time becomes 4 PM.
This week’s festive fun question to answer:
Sometimes cubed. Sometimes with a knot. Forever a secret this is not. Sometimes with thought this thing is bought. Sometimes by skill this thing is wrought. Most often with bright colours adorned. This might be carried, displayed, or worn.