TOW #14 Santa Claus Article

Eric Kaplan, a sitcom producer who write books on philosophy on the side, wrote this article advertising the belief in Santa Claus for adults that he might describe as having an open mind. This article was published in the New York Times opinion section. Kaplan argues that society should try to believe in Santa Claus through references to culture, and through avoidance of the question at hand.

Kaplan’s text is soaked with cultural references, trying anything it can to overwhelm Santa’s impossibility with sentiment associated with him. By comparing him to fairies, the Gift of the Magi, and the intangible but commonplace concepts of “Family” and “Democracy” (para. 9), Kaplan attempts to rationalize a very different intangible concept, Santa Claus. It does this in two ways, the first being submitting that A, no one knows with 100 percent certainty the existence of God, Santa, or anything for that matter. By using cultural references, Kaplan attempts to blur the lines between what we consider real and what we have deemed fictional.

The second way the text tries to justify Santa Claus, is by avoiding the direct question, “Is Santa Claus real?” Kaplan argues that it is beneficial to believe in Santa Claus, and argues that it is possible as a society to make yourself believe in something, even arguing against, “utilitarian rationality,” (para. 6). All of his points are well substantiated and well argued, even if the section on societal self-deception sounded frighteningly Orwellian, but they only seem to work as a cohesive argument because the inconvenient fact of Santa Claus’s nonexistence is never addressed.

At the end of the day, I don’t believe Kaplan was actually trying to convince anyone that there is a Santa Claus. He was arguing that we should believe that there is a Santa Claus. While the latter argument is well argued through the text and effectively handled with rhetorical devices, the former argument is the claim of the text. The former argument is officially what Kaplan is attempting to convince his audience of, and in that sense this text is of course very, very ineffective.