213 - Redux: Influential Book #2: Hogfather 🎅
Hey there, !
I’m still in Taiwan, so have another [FROM THE VAULT] track (Vince’s Version). This one is about one of my favourite authors (Terry Pratchett) and one of his great stories, Hogfather - a satire / parody that asks “How do you kill a god? Or namely, Santa Claus?”
1.
Where does belief come from?
I never remember who told me my first 'nice stories' about Santa, or the Tooth Fairy, or the Easter Bunny, but I do remember how I stopped believing.
For the Tooth Fairy, Steph literally found the jar that Mum was using to keep some of our baby teeth and confronted her about it. I think she tried to explain around it, but that day, my belief was shattered.
For Santa Claus, I remember one year when we were at Dimmey's, that our parents said 'hey, what present do you want from Santa?' and then proceeded to buy it right in front of us. I think they thought we already knew he wasn't real, but STILL. (FYI the present was a set of walkie-talkie's - great gift thanks Santa).
For the Easter Bunny, I think it was the first time I used my own logic to deduce 'why the heck would a bunny go around putting chocolate eggs around my house?' and just kind of thought it wasn't fun enough to keep believing in it. Didn't stop me believing in the chocolate though...
2.
I went to an Anglican school (Melbourne Grammar) from primary school onwards, and was exposed to religion there. We had chapel every week, we had Religious Education as a subject with a Father / Reverend that would also be teaching History or something. It's a private school classic.
I loved Chapel. It was the perfect blend of rote memorisation (of psalms), great stories (David and Goliath is a top tier story. As is Solomon cutting the baby in half. Also Jesus.), and a place to show off my greatest talent - sight-reading hymns and singing as loudly as possible because Mama ain't raise no soft-singing boi.
Since Religious Education was also a subject, I obviously excelled (the overachieving Asian strikes again!) - I remember that I spent an inordinate amount of time with Mum in the car reciting Psalm 23 (The Lord is My Shepherd) so that I could get 500 table points for my table. The nerd strikes again.
But I never believed. I really tried though! I used to pray next to my bed every night - I said the Lord's Prayer, I said Grace - I did everything I was supposed to and I felt absolutely nothing. The feeling that was described in Chapel - feeling the Lord's grace, His power, His love - I just had absolutely no change in how I felt, and so I couldn't understand.
I just wasn't really cut out for religion, I guess.
3.
What a weird name, huh? The Hogfather is the Santa Claus equivalent for Discworld, a fantasy world that is one of Terry Pratchett's greatest creations.
The quickest plot summary I can give of the book is that the Assassin's Guild is hired to kill the Hogfather, and the craziest assassin dreams up an idea to use the teeth collected by The Tooth Fairy to make children stop believing in the Hogfather (thus, 'killing' him). The anthropomorphic personification of Death (who loves cats and has a white horse named Binky) decides to fill the Hogfather's role for the night, spreading Hogswatch (i.e. Christmas) cheer across the land.
Other notable characters that are introduced: Bilious, the 'Oh God' of hangovers; the Cheerful Fairy (who tries too hard and has to be cheered up by others), the God of Lost Socks (where do all the lost socks go?!), Albert (Death's personal assistant) and Susan, Death's niece (because family always comes first).
How could you not instantly know how insanely fun this book was going to be?!
4.
“This is very similar to the suggestion put forward by the Quirmian philosopher Ventre, who said, "Possibly the gods exist, and possibly they do not. So why not believe in them in any case? If it's all true you'll go to a lovely place when you die, and if it isn't then you've lost nothing, right?"
When he died he woke up in a circle of gods holding nasty-looking sticks and one of them said, "We're going to show you what we think of Mr Clever Dick in these parts...” - Hogfather, Terry Pratchett
The key theme of the book (trying not to make this too much of a book review...) is about belief. Believing in the small stuff, like the Tooth Fairy, or the Hogfather, means that you can start believing in the big stuff, like justice, or mercy, or hope. Death takes this role on Hogswatchnight, making sure that children around the world still wake up to the wonder of something having come through the chimney, eaten their cookies, drunk their milk, and made sooty footprints all over the nice rug. When you have 'physical proof' of your belief, well, it's hard to deny!
The stories that we tell about the world, and the 'lies' we tell people to make them believe things, helps us to understand how to believe in abstract concepts, fundamentally weird social rules, and the fact that presents appear under the Christmas tree at Christmas time. Without these, there's too much...reality that needs to be proved to understand these concepts. Really? A big fat old man sits in the North Pole for a year preparing toys for every single child in the world? He's also really classist - somehow tweaking it to their socio-economic environment, giving the hyped toys of that particular season to the rich and...less to the poor?
It's similar to the concept I read in Sapiens (which I honestly think if you read Terry Pratchett's Science of Discworld or even this book, you'd have got the same insights about the human condition) - the fact that for our lives to run smoothly, we all participate in shared fictions (like money, or law, or capitalism). These things have to be believed in, otherwise the world can't run.
It's a lie, sure, but it teaches us how to get through life...which is also full of a bunch of lies and delusions we all share.
5.
I found this book incredibly thought-provoking for me as a teenager struggling with a world where I didn't...not believe, but also I didn't have the depth of belief that people around me did. I didn't go to church, which was mainly a result of my family not really being bothered about it, but I mean, I still remembering making bargains with God ("If I sleep early, please let me pass my test tomorrow"). Really dumb stuff, and 'thou shall not test God' but y'know, I only really asked Him when I needed Him. That's how it works right? :P
In Year 8, a new Father came to middle school, and RE changed a little bit. We explored a number of other religious beliefs (like Islam, Judaism, Buddhism etc.) and I actually went to talk to him about what he thought God was like. I don't know if it was the Anglican in him, but he actually shared his own belief that 'maybe God isn't a person, or a being in the sky, but just some energy cloud in the universe' and I thought 'okay that's pretty cracked - this guy has probably read some sci-fi too'. He explained that you could never really have knowledge of what God was like, because if you had that knowledge, there would be no need for the belief / faith - it would just be a fact. And that his own lived experience proved that there may be something like that out there, but he couldn't be quite sure - he just had to believe.
Of course, this explanation didn't help me believe, but it made me feel better that even people who do believe still have doubts. That's comforting, y'know?
And though I don't believe, I'm not an atheist either. I love being indecisive so...hello agnosticism!
6.
When you sit in Chapel, listen to the stories, and see the people around you clasp their hands for dear life, lower their heads, and pray...it's hard not to be caught up in the fervour of the crowd. When you're singing out these gloriously harmonic hymns, you understand how great the acoustics in a vaulted ceiling church can be, and how the praise of the Lord can be so wonderful. In those moments, as much as you want to say 'Hey how come Jesus had 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish,and could split it with 5000 people? Couldn't people count how much food was in the basket? Maybe it was a closed basket?', it just really doesn't matter.
I think the fact that I saw how people were believing so fervently around me made me more of an...observer of belief, of religion, and the many ways we like to post-rationalise our actions. Was your ATAR score really an act of God? Or was it just you doing your absolute best and studying really hard for an exam? If there are good miracles, can there be bad miracles as well? What if there was a Saint of people where freak accidents happened? People are really good at explaining away these sorts of things, and regardless of whether it's true or not, it's a level of post-rationalisation that keeps your beliefs intact.
And I just couldn't do it!
It was fascinating. I can believe in nations, I can believe that electronic signals can become the internet, I can believe in abstract concepts of philosophy, and society, and law...
...and yet, for some reason, all these people believed in a shared fiction that I couldn't share in! How come?!
Luckily, most of it must have rubbed off on me, because those stories / parables still stick with me, and I'm a pretty okay member of society (I follow the rules and shared fictions we all partake in as part of our society!). It's just this one thing I don't believe in, but those 'belief muscles' are still somewhere there in my brain, I guess.
And of course, this is not to say that I'm a super rational enlightened being of pure light! I still irrationally hope, or worry, or arc up about various beliefs around justice and fairness in the world. They aren't grounded in reality necessarily...but, well...
I guess that's just part of being human.
7.
“All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
"They're not the same at all!"
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"
MY POINT EXACTLY.” - Hogfather, Terry Pratchett
All this to say, hey - maybe belief (in whatever form) is something that gets us through the day, helps us be a cohesive human society, and helps us ensure that we have a bit of fun as we spend our time on this ball of earth and water, spinning around a larger ball of fire.
Who cares if someone believes something you don't? We all need something to help us make this world a bit more liveable...
And feel less guilty when you lie to your kids for the 10th time about the Tooth Fairy.
Chat soon :)