Every year, without fail, I listen to the Blackstone Audio Recorded Books version of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, read by the late Frank Muller. There are other recordings and movie versions (I’m personally torn between the 1984 made-for-television version with George C. Scott and the 1951 Alistair Sim “Scrooge”). Several years ago, Micki and I and Evan participated in an acted narration of the story for our downtown Christmas event over several Yuletides. The first year, to my lasting joy, I got to play the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, in which I bundled a bunch of black sheets over myself to the point of being unable to move or see and—with the expert advice of a genius friend—kept my left hand free to gesture, since that would be, by definition, more sinister. A Christmas Carol is the only Dickens that I love as much as I do and without overstating it (I hope) is the one that is annually the most relevant and poignant for the modern era, almost as if Dickens understood what the future would hold.
What follows, then, is a strange amalgam of literary review, social commentary, philosophical introspection, and societal criticism, using Dickens’ holiday masterpiece as the center structure. This will be the last essay I write for the year and so, I decided to make a Frankenstein’s monster, lumping together a series of topics and sources to make one long and (hopefully) thought-provoking read before family arrives and it is time to eat too many cookies and open presents. Echoing Dickens, then, for however you “keep” Christmas, I hope it is a wonderful season for you. See you in January.
As he stands in his dressing gown on the fateful night of his eventual redemption, Ebenezer Scrooge is shown an image from his past. A sad woman tells a much younger Ebenezer, “Another idol has displaced me. A golden one.” The younger man rebels against this idea, but the elder knows it is true. He has not yet changed his heart, but seeing this stark memory, it is clear he is stirred, as he tells the spirit to show him no more.
The Ghost of Christmas Past is the most relatable of the three spirits sent by Jacob Marley's specter for Scrooge's ‘reclamation’. Just the first spirit might be enough for us to internalize the transformation of the miser, at least for the moment or the season to participate in the greater lesson of the story.
That lesson is particularly apt for modern readers. Scrooge becomes his miserly old self in the first place because, in his heart of hearts, he allowed gain—the greed for wealth and worldly security—to fill the deep wells of emptiness excavated in his spirit as a young child. Left alone at school because his father foolishly blamed Ebenezer for his mother’s death in childbirth, the young man turned from that pain to the only security he understood: money. People may die or abandon us, but money, once attained and scrupulously squirreled away, provides the illusion of endless safety.
Dickens' holiday masterpiece is a wonderful cornucopia of human experience and has an emotional pitch rarely attained by modern literature. What could be more cathartic than to read, watch, listen, or participate in the myriad renderings of his immortal ghostly classic each Christmas? The fable helps to open me up to the deeper meanings of charity and generosity of the season by getting me to ask myself the same timeless question over again every year: what really matters?
There may have been other years and other eras when Scrooge's nocturnal spiritual journey seemed as relevant. This year, I can think of only one other fable that fits as neatly as a direct warning about the rising tide of human indifference, disdain, tribalism, hatred, self-absorption, corruption and greed. That other story is Dante Alighieri's Inferno. Like Ebenezer Scrooge, Dante is led on a nighttime adventure not through time, but down through the nine levels of Hell, toward the infernal city of Dis by the ghost of the antique Roman, Virgil.
Past the horrid gates of Hell, we are shown Dante’s greedy and corrupt Italian contemporaries getting their just deserts in the many levels of eternal torture. Dickens might have found contemporaries to burn in effigy in the London of his time in emulation of Dante, but the comedy of Inferno is that there is a final judgment for the worst of humanity beyond life—an end of power and security. Dante revels in that end by pointing out that even the worst humans eventually die. For A Christmas Carol to be a hopeful and uplifting tale, Scrooge's transformation arc must therefore be more pragmatic on this side of the casket lid. And Dickens manages a sharp-witted and human story that shows us that as long as we are alive, there is hope that we can be better people.
The brilliance of A Christmas Carol is that it allows us to travel the gamut of human emotions and flaws, but also the many feelings of pity, regret, hurt and broken hearts, fear and empathy and eventually seeing ourselves in other people. We plunge with Scrooge from the precipice of miserly greed and callous disregard for his fellows through to the awareness of mortality and of other people and the poignancy and pain of their lives. The heartfelt existential sobs of a man changing his stars for the better echo in us, too.
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There is one change that Dickens does not allow us to see. We know that, as the final stave closes, Scrooge startles his employee, Bob Cratchit by offering to pay him way more money and buys him the biggest turkey in London. We are told that he becomes a great man, but we do not see if, in his final rise toward greatness, Scrooge dumps all his cash for a life of quiet piety and poverty in service to others, or if he husbands his millions for the good of his fellows. Given the chance to be logical about fiction, the latter seems to be more likely.
From the modern viewpoint, Scrooge getting to keep and use his cold hard cash for good is realistic even if it is the most dangerous outcome for him. The opportunity to relapse into his miserly habits without constant intercession is a strong temptation. It presupposes a change of heart that is permanent and not subject to other emotional upheavals. What if, for instance, despite his financial support and friendship, Tiny Tim still doesn't survive? Such a tragedy might cast Ebeneezer back into his old mental haunts of bitterness, resentment and misery.
Likewise, as the year rolls away from Christmas, Scrooge might find that his work awakens the old fella’s grasping and greedy habits anew. He may pay Bob Cratchit more money and help his family and friends, but in his heart, what if the ghosts’ lessons grow dim beside the light of gain? We are never shown if Ebenezer makes the daily decision to reaffirm his Christmas lessons.
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Dickens often wrote about the disparity of wealth. A few held most of the power and money while the majority lived in horrible poverty. The world today isn’t much different, but rather than feeling this “Dickensian Divide” keenly, modernity adores the idea of wealth. We have elevated material gain far above the virtues that Scrooge learns on Christmas Eve. Our golden idolatry presupposes that with monetary worth comes a natural disposition to, as Scrooge might have done after the close of the book, strew cash like rose petals across the desolate streets of London and the world. To us, the term ‘billionaire’ is synonymous with beneficence and fiduciary responsibility.
The irony of this naivety is that we regularly witness billionaires (the modern inheritors of the Scrooge we first meet in Stave One) going to great lengths to protect their billions. They do work hard to promote their hopeful worldview but it seldom has the motivation behind it underlined in Scrooge's transformation. And even Scrooge admits to having paid his taxes. Getting to the level of massive wealth requires a hard and grasping hand, not a soft and generous heart. That fact doesn't stop people from idolizing wealthy individuals.
Everyone's favorite richest man, the charmless Bond Villain, Elon Musk, seemed at first to be positioning himself as a great modern innovator and entrepreneur in emulation of Rockefeller and Vanderbilt. Unlike those men who, in part, raised the cash to provide the financial infrastructure upon which the industrial age was built, Musk only works from a place of ego. Here is a man who really could solve world hunger or fund lobbying to initiate universal basic income. Instead, he bought a social media platform as a vanity project and used it to gain a position of power in the worst administration of all time.
His fans still worship him and think of him as a technological savior. Even the more reasonable people who have ever so slowly understood the error in their adoration of Musk only started to doubt him after he got the nod from the president-elect. Until that point, despite his worrisome words and actions, they continued to make excuses for his worsening behavior. Some still idolize him, almost as if they are getting paid to endorse him, or hoping they will get paid for their support.
His electric cars (a business that someone else started and he bought and gets credit for inventing) and his rockets make him seem like a scientific innovator. Despite his futuristic ideas and apparent innovations, Musk hasn't delivered on what matters. But he could have.
Americans seem to be almost pathologically incapable of seeing in men like Musk the Scrooge that lies just beneath the surface. Musk and other billionaires have indeed doubled down on creating the illusion that they are dashing toward the future, paving golden streets filled with futuristic advances. In truth, they have worked to consolidate power in both halves of American politics, endorsed the worst theocratic fascist ideologies, and corrupted the Supreme Court. Trying to point that out to the people who raise Musk and other billionaires to a godlike status is an act of futility.
Scrooge's final transformation comes as a result of putting his idea of monetary worth aside, finding worth in humanity and learning his responsibility for others. Without his fundamental pivot, Scrooge never gets to be redeemed. Rather, he becomes just like every other greedy person, an empty husk, trying to fill the internal void with shares and bank notes and bonds and spare change.
The virtues come from the person, not the cash. And we know all too well that cash too easily corrupts the person. Musk is evidence of that fact.
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A friend wrote to me recently and asked if I thought that younger generations who gained substantial wealth would use their capital to tackle the great social problems of our era. It was hard not to see this as a tacit admission that Musk and other billionaires had let us all down. His hope was, perhaps being more open-minded, young wealthy people would cast about to see if they could deal with gun violence or homelessness or climate change with their cash. It was a question worth considering.
I lament the popular idea that one's generation, like a zodiac sign or horoscope, presupposes a certain worldview, as if all Millennials are easygoing and empathic or all Generation Z's are hyper-focused on social justice and equity. We may blame generational tendencies for the failures (or differences) in the way people handle certain social issues or for how they tend to behave generally, but this is an easy way of passing off our desire to scapegoat certain age groups or to undermine faith in others.
Generational tendencies are as much a fairytale as Dickens's story. People are shaped by their upbringing and, to a point, the era they are born into. Their life experiences and their relative access to resources and opportunities have far more to do with how they will behave as adults. There is no evidence to suggest that a young person with exorbitant amounts of capital to hand would be any more or less likely to fall into greed and lust for power than any other ultra-wealthy person of any other age group. Scrooge happens to be old, but we could just as easily have a twenty-something Scrooge. It is certain that Scrooge's descent into greed began early and only got worse as he aged.
As I read my friend's question, I felt a strange but powerful hopelessness. If it is true that young wealthy people cannot be depended on to solve social ills, my answer could not be a cheerful one. Money has become a source of moral rot in the world. The wealthy, regardless of their generation, have no real sense of their surroundings. The problems of homelessness, climate change and gun violence are not problems to be solved, but, if possible, exploited for more money. This doesn't eliminate the possibility that there are those with a lot of money working hard to deal with our most pressing issues, I am sure, but they have an uphill battle against others of their kind.
Scrooge, while doing his part with the people he knew and could help practically, could only contribute towards the larger problems of his world. He did not, either by dint of his newfound piety or his formerly hoarded wealth, close down the poor houses, the treadmills, or the debtor’s prisons. One of the underlying implications of the story is that Christmas is one of the few times of year that people of means even consider those massive and cumbersome problems of poverty. It is only by working together that those problems can be solved.
In the most poignant moments of the story, the Ghost of Christmas Present pulls back the lower swaths of his robes to show Scrooge two destitute children; a boy and a girl. The spirit tells Scrooge that the boy is Ignorance and the girl is Want.
"Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased".
Even in the most hopeful story ever written about Christmas, Dickens found it hard to hide his cynicism. The disparity between those who need the most help and those who could do the most good was an abyss that money alone could not fill or bridge. That gulf has only gotten wider in the intervening Christmases.
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Looking at the situation from above, the existence of the ultra-wealthy isn't enough to solve the big problems regardless of how old they are or how open-minded they seem. Today, we are faced with this same ethical dilemma. There are more billionaires and yet, the problems faced by society are more real, more present and more pressing than ever before. One can accurately assume that those problems are worse either despite billionaires or because of them. I know where I fall on that particular question.
If Dickens' story teaches us anything it isn't that Scrooge's wealth is the best-case scenario for making a change. Rather, it teaches us that a change of heart can and will be the best chance for good to grow. We can certainly hope that the younger people with money will decide to work to solve problems, but that hope seems misplaced. Instead, I would echo the renewed Scrooge in my hope that each of us would decide to live in the past, present and future at all times and keep the meaning of Christmas (peace, goodwill, charity) in our hearts all year. This would indeed be a tall order for most of us, let alone those with far more money than they could ever spend in their lives.
If something is going to change, it has to be within each of us, at the individual level. No one person with money is going to rescue us. That door has been left open, and no billionaire has come through. Rather like the sign above the lintel at the gates Dante passes through, there is no hope that way.
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That is the point of A Christmas Carol and of Scrooge's redemption. As we see Scrooge cross into a realm of goodness and virtue, we also live through his ghostly experiences, so that we, too, can join in his recovery and reclamation. The wealthy also have to face their mortality. Yet, we can only live our own lives, face our imminent death and decide for ourselves.
In the end, it doesn't matter if Scrooge gets to keep his money or if he gives it all away. What matters is that Scrooge realizes that he has a responsibility for other people. That is all that ever matters. The ghost of Jacob Marley tells his former business partner, that fateful Christmas Eve, “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”
The answer to my friend's question may be harsh, but it is no less true for all that. The wealthy have no real concern for us. They aren't coming to rescue us. Their outward appearance of technological or scientific adherence is a guise that allows them to hide their true intentions. It matters little how old they are or how they got their money. The only people we can depend on is ourselves. And as Scrooge finally learns, cementing his transformation, we have little time before the grave closes over us to do our part for those we can help.
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