Fairy tales need to be read

Scary fairy tale by NRichey on DeviantArt

My dear Lucy,
I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand a word you say, but I shall still be your affectionate Godfather,
C.S. Lewis

I do not know how fairy tales slowly began to be seen as less and less acceptable. It is not something that is found only in this country. It is something on which C.S. Lewis commented, and on which G.K. Chesterton commented in the 19th century. It is as though the rise of the Industrial Revolution, and the increasing scientism of the late 18th through the middle 20th century conspired to make fairy tales seem like superstition and children’s play. This is not to say that I believe that what is told in fairy tales is true in a scientific sense, but that is precisely the point. The scientism of the late 18th through the mid-20th century disparaged anything that was not science. C.S. Lewis wrote about that type of scientism in “That Hideous Strength”. You still see the effects of it today in the way that poetry, art, music, classic literature, etc., have all been cut from many school curricula. The assumption is that these are useless courses that simply waste time that needs to be dedicated to things like mathematics and science which will produce measurable benefits for students. Sadly, not only has that not proven to be true, but somehow, in the doing away with the non-important subjects, our students have ended up with lowering science and mathematic scores nationwide.

I would argue that the dismissing of fairy tales, music, art, etc., as unimportant has also ended up dismissing the very creativity that is actually necessary in science and mathematics. The scientism of the tired old 19th century positivists has not really worked. But, let’s not simply blame them. The argument between science and the arts, such as poetry, is very old. Plato critiqued poetry from the viewpoint of philosophy. The later positivists tended to agree with Plato, but reformulated the argument in terms of science and the arts. Religion was classified as one of the arts which set up the positivist / religious fights of the last couple of centuries. “Positivism asserts that all authentic knowledge allows verification and that all authentic knowledge assumes that the only valid knowledge is scientific.” As over against that, theology and the humanities contain no really valid knowledge.

That extreme began to die in the mid-20th century, although the science / religion battles continue among some. But, what did begin to lose severely was positivism. First, post-modernism dealt a heavy blow, not from the side of the humanities, but precisely from the side of science. In an odd way, they showed that science itself points to the uncertainty that surrounds us in so many ways. Let me be clear, post-modernism does not support religion or the humanities per se. But, rather it points out clearly that the certainty of the positivists was—and is—clearly ill-founded. But, then, in reaction to the extremes of positivism, fantasy and, yes, fairy tales, began to make a comeback. From the craziness of crystals and pyramids in the 1960’s to early 1970’s to Wicca to, finally, the growth of fantasy and the various comic cons, fantasy cons, etc., positivism begins to be rejected. While schools are still run on a basically positivist pattern, society is moving more and more toward fantasy, toward the Hogwarts, toward imaginative expressions of life.

C.S. Lewis was right. The old and the young know intrinsically that we need fantasy. It reminds us that there are mysteries that cannot simply be expressed through science. Fantasy is the anti-positivism. It shouts to us that creativity exists and is real. It calls to us that there is more to life than can be described by experiments. It says that humanity, and even Creation itself, cannot be bounded by a set of equations that can ultimately predict all that is.