Church and States
It’s the capacity to believe that we are losing.
This is an interstitial lecture based on work assigned through the Humanities makerspace of Sisyphean High. See the course website for details.
Let’s look at the rhetoric and style in Francis Church’s editorial, “Yes, Virginia.” The goal is to contextualize Church in our ongoing study of honesty, delusion, and the weird workings of logic; this will also to show you the way a formal argument works, so that you can emulate elements of it. That skill, like the abstract elements Church celebrates, is timeless.
Use this general commentary to refine your responses to the questions given to you in this packet of analytical and essay-writing prompts.
The Definitional Argument
First, this prompt:
- Church believes Santa is real. Or maybe he doesn’t. How we read this editorial depends on the definition of “real” employed here. What is Church’s definition? Be specific. Figure out what definition — or definitions — he implies, and use his language and logic to support your analysis.
“Real” gets two specific mentions in the editorial. First, in paragraph three:
Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see.Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.
And then in paragraph four:
You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.
The first distinction drawn, then, is between what we can perceive with our senses — what we might call tangible or solid — and what we cannot. Church seems to be defining “real” in terms of impact, or how something warps the surrounding space. (This is Santa-as-black-hole logic.) We can feel a kiss, but that is not love; it is the expression of a feeling only.
The second distinction drawn (still in paragraph three) can be called an argument from ignorance. This is related to the abstract implication of warped informational space — i.e., the idea that we can see the effects of love, even if we never see love itself — but it is much more childish in its logic; remember, however, that this is an editorial with many audiences, including an eight-year-old girl. That last line in paragraph three shifts the burden of proof onto the cynics and skeptics: Provethere isn’t a Santa Claus, or that there aren’t wonders left to discover in this world. “Real,” in this case, is a matter of anticipation.
Paragraph four offers specifically “real” concepts: faith, fancy, poetry, love, and romance. Church has defined the term through examples, and those examples are tools that reveal a deeper truth, behind the “veil covering the unseen world.” For him, what is real is what “push[es] aside that curtain” to “view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond.” To use the word “abiding” is interesting, as well; it suggests that the objects surrounding us will decay or deform, but the childlike faith and wonder that makes Santa Claus “real” will survive forever.
The Policy Argument
The second set of questions:
- Church crafts distinct, intertwined arguments of fact, value, and policy in this letter. Research a working definition of each type of argument, identify each one in the essay, and then analyze how cogent or fallacious his reasoning is.
Start with the definitions of cogent and fallacious. You can use these terms to characterize how convincing an argument is. Note that they only work for argumentative rhetoric.
To understand that Church’s editorial is cogent, you must consider his audience — not really Virginia or her “little friends,” but the adult readership of The Sun, many of whom would be struggling with “the skepticism of a skeptical age.” This was 1897, and the world was changing. The references to magic and faith have to be read as challenges to the various paradigm shifts in play, especially in science and industry; Church argues that we can’t lose our sense of wonder, because our faith will always be more real than the tangible world around us.
Santa Claus is a symbol of that childlike joy in the unseen. Church is careful to blend references to things we stop believing in as we age (e.g., fairies) with abstract ideas that are timeless (e.g., love and devotion); the implication is that we have to rekindle our inner child’s delight in the unknown.
In fact, Santa Claus isn’t the point at all, once we step away from the editorial. We’re meant to be galvanized more generally, to be prompted to reevaluate how we approach the world — to suspend our disbelief and cynicism and embrace those magical aspects of the world. We can do this vicariously, fostering a belief in Santa Claus and fairies in the children we know, but we must also embrace the mysterious and mystical aspects of our adult worlds; the more we try to break them apart for some kind of mechanical understanding, the more of ourselves we lose. Church even goes as far as to say that we can’t break apart the “veil covering the unseen world.”
The only fallacious aspect of this argument is the underlying assumption — often called a warrant — that understanding how something works robs it of its magic. There is a debate to be had here. I will suggest that it is possible as we age to walk a line; we can delve into the machinery without destroying our sense of wonder, and it does not have to be an act of doublethink. Knowing how a song is constructed, understanding that a poem is built from component parts, parsing the elements of a beautiful speech: It is possible to do all this and still allow ourselves to be transported and transformed.
In an academic sense, Church might be more correct to say that analysis and deconstruction robs art — including poetry, literature, and essays like his — of its magic. We’ve studied that idea in here:
Of course, Church isn’t talking about the machinery of the world, nor the construction of any artifact. To assess his argument, you must eventually grapple with this line, which is also the message I hope we all take away from this:
Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that [veil covering the unseen world] and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond.
For Church, the only way to experience the ineffable beauty in life is through faith, not science or logic. It’s the capacity to believe that we are losing.
