A response to “The Case for Ebenezer”

My friend and colleague Professor Butler Shaffer periodically celebrates the advent by regaling his students with his defense of enlightened self-interest through the tale of Ebenezer Scrooge as Charles Dickens didn’t tell it. In Professor Shaffer’s delightfully creative version, Scrooge is a maliciously-named and defamed representative of a class of industrialists and financiers who were the movers and shakers of the Industrial Revolution. While they prodigiously reaped personal benefits of wealth and prestige, they also vastly improved the living conditions of the population at large. Instead of the opprobrium heaped on Scrooge and his kind, they deserve our admiration if not our gratitude. Professor Shaffer presents his version as a legal defense, here in the court of public opinion. He resorts to appeals to evidence and due process, concepts of “prosecution” and “defense,” criminal conspiracy and other wrongful conduct. In short, he presents Dickens’s story as analogous to an official criminal case designed to prosecute Scrooge for some criminal law version of miserliness and to seize Scrooge’s wealth. In that lies, I believe, a fatal flaw. More about that presently.

Let me begin with kudos to the many valid observations that Professor Shaffer makes about Dickens’s politics, the damage done to the human soul by mindless collectivism, the hypocrisy of politically-correct scolds. I cheer his criticism of those who unquestioningly support welfare redistributionism that has a way of becoming an existential mindset rather than provide encouragement to have someone improve his lot through his own initiative by, say, acquiring additional skills and “worth.” Give a man a fish, and you give him food for a meal; teach him to fish, and you give him food for life. So, bravo to Professor Shaffer’s embrace of at least this aspect of “Social Darwinism” when he recommends that, at some point, we must let nature take her course.

I also appreciate the wisdom presented by, among others, Bernard de Mandeville in his Fable of the Bees, an allegory of how enlightened self-interest can, without considering ethically proper intent, lead to overall social benefit. Professor Shaffer channels the Spirit of Mandeville when he declares, “That the pursuit of private selfishness can generate good for others – even when doing so was not the purpose of the actor – was far too complicated a concept for Dickens’ simplistic, fragmented mind. But to all collectivists, including Dickens, the idea that more wealth could be created never manages to invade their imaginations.” Certainly, Professor Shaffer is right that capitalists and entrepreneurs pursuing “their selfish interests have done far more to better the lives of others than have the combined efforts of all the self-styled altruists, saints, social workers, politicians, and other mischievous beings.” Similar sentiments have been expressed by many others, including, as I recall, the satirist P.J. O’Rourke.

Let me also declare support for Professor Shaffer’s hilarious, and at most slightly tongue-in-cheek, cross-examination of Dickens’s maudlin sentimentalism in using the Cratchett family. Dickens’s hiding behind the pitiable Tiny Tim reminds one of a tactic so favored by the San Fran Gran, Nancy Pelosi, and her partner-in-insufferable-smarminess, Senator Babs Boxer: “We’re doing it for the children.” Since the ‘it’ in this litany usually involves massive amounts of spending, much of it to be financed by borrowing to be repaid later, the preposition “for” should probably be replaced by “to.” In any event, such attempts to shut off debate by demonizing opponents of such policies as being “against the children” never fail to set my teeth on edge.

Similarly hilarious is his indictment of the hapless Bob Cratchett who, for whatever reasons, seems to let life happen to him. However, things begin to get more complicated with Cratchett. He does seem a pitiful sort. Still, we don’t know exactly why that is. Has he simply been beaten down by life? Is he the pathetically unimaginative and bovine dullard Professor Shaffer describes? Would he like to take the initiative to change but cannot do so because he cannot responsibly take the risk, given that he has five children to feed? After all, as a trustee for his family, the first duty is to protect what he has. If the last, his stoic devotion to duty in disregard of his own personal interests gives Cratchett a quiet dignity.

In regard to Scrooge, I also regard Dickens’s tale in a less contemptuous way than does Professor Shaffer. I see the story in a more traditional way as a journey of secular personal redemption and fulfillment. In a sense, it is also the story of someone who has extricated himself from a Faustian bargain. Professor Shaffer assures the reader that, “Taking my client as the miserable fellow Dickens has presented him, let me be the first to admit that if Ebeneezer’s obsession with materialistic pursuits rendered him an unhappy person, and were it the purposes of his detractors to help extricate him from his self-imposed miseries and to restore him to that state of happiness and innocence so common to most of us in our childhood years, no one would be happier than I. But it is not my client’s happiness that the prosecution endeavors to obtain, but his money.”

No one is forcing Scrooge to do anything here. First, as a hardened and shrewd financier, Scrooge hardly seems like the hysterical, helpless type who will be cowed by some apparitions. Second, as far as we can tell, the spirits are simply describing events. Contrary to Professor Shaffer’s version, no one is threatening Scrooge with death. One would assume that Scrooge is aware that, sooner or later, the Grim Reaper will tap him on the shoulder. As a financier, he may well have built the eventuality of death into the loans that he issues. The spirits simply remind Scrooge of his past, to focus him more sharply on what he has become. They also show him what his single-minded pursuit of money has cost him. As one so often is reminded, there is always a price to pay, such as for material success gained at the expense of suppressing other aspects of one’s personality. Finally, they show him what his lot will be when he dies wealthy but lonely and soon forgotten. After the spirits are through, Scrooge is perfectly free to continue his current life’s path. The mere fact that he is made uncomfortable for realizing how he has stunted his own being by focusing excessively on “making money” certainly does not lessen his ultimate freedom to act any more than Bob Cratchett’s freedom is limited by his circumstances. It is normatively ludicrous (though, if done deftly, good defense lawyer tactics) to see Scrooge as a victim, whereas Cratchett must simply pick himself up by the bootstraps.

Scrooge chooses to change his lifestyle because he realizes that the single-minded pursuit of anything is stultifying. It produces a stunted human being who cannot achieve the fulfillment for which he was designed. We see that person as odd, even if we acknowledge some achievement he has attained. Not for nothing is the appellation “renaissance man,” as someone with broad interests and intellectual curiosity (someone not unlike Professor Shaffer), given as a high compliment. Everything in its proper measure. The Aristotelian “golden mean.” The fulfilled life of eudaimonic happiness. That’s the measure of a truly successful human. Perhaps like many a convert who has lost the shackles of his previous psychological prison and come to “see the light,” Scrooge’s initial outburst of showering gifts on the Cratchetts is irrationally exuberant. But one would expect that initial passion to fade into a more sustainable commitment and more relaxed journey of self-discovery.

As noted earlier, I think that, while Professor Shaffer’s presentation of his assertions as a legal argument has wonderful rhetorical merit, it is fatally flawed as a matter of logic. If the state were to come and take Scrooge’s wealth and give it to Cratchett through seizures of assets, or to force Scrooge to give it to Cratchett on pain of prison such as through a system of taxation, I would whole-heartedly agree with Professor Shaffer’s argument. But the crucial point is that Dickens does not make (in this tale) the argument for state-enforced redistribution. Here the coercion from the state is not present. Professor Shaffer’s made-up premise is false. Professor Shaffer himself often emphasizes the unique coercive powers of the state and challenges governments legitimacy over the will of free individuals. So, the absence of such state coercion is critical. He must allow those free individuals to make choices that they deem proper and right in their self-interest, even if that self-interest is not the one he would make. When Professor Shaffer avers that Dickens wants to take Scrooge’s money rather than promote his happiness, one must disagree. Scrooge seeks his own happiness. And he does so by helping the Cratchetts. Indeed, if one were a cynic, one might say that Scrooge is using the Cratchetts for his own ends, rather than helping them as an end in itself. That might be, under some hard-line interpretations of Kant, a very unethical thing to do. But I shall be less cynical than that. I will take Professor Shaffer at his word that he would be happy to have Scrooge choose to escape from his “obsession with materialistic pursuits.” That, at the end, is what Scrooge voluntarily undertakes, though he “has seen the light” through the intervention of the “spirits” who visit him that fateful night.