AN ADVENT "CHRISTMAS CAROL" RETREAT - Iv

[Continuing our reading of and meditations on The Christmas Carol]:
         

          Yesterday, we saw how the human orientation towards the good, built into him by God, can be diverted and warped to call evil “good” and good “evil.”  Let’s see how that works out in the Christmas Carol.

          Scrooge encounters three people.  The first is his clerk, Bob Cratchitt.  There’s not really an encounter there: Cratchit is working while Scrooge hordes the coal box, meaning the indoor temperature is not much warmer than the outdoor.

          The next visitor is his nephew.  The young man comes to invite his uncle to Christmas dinner.  Scrooge uses it first to vent his spleen against Christmas as a commercial enterprise, seasoned with a few ‘bah, humbugs!”  Note that Scrooge’s objection is not that Christmas is commercial, only that its commercial aspect costs him.  No doubt, if he could work a profit he would be happier.

          After his tirade against Christmas, Scrooge then turns on his nephew, upset that he is married.  To understand what’s going on, you need to understand something of the intellectual conceits of Victorian England.  Marriage should be preceded by economic security and, preferably, augment it.  The nephew – not unlike many young people today – is in Scrooge’s judgment “poor.”  Perhaps he is, though it’s more likely he’s economically tenuous – getting by but could be better.  He’s not in his prime earning years, like Uncle Ebenezer.   Being “poor” he shouldn’t have married, and he likely married “a dowerless girl,” to anticipate the story. 

          The nephew is uninterested in any of that: all he wants is for this living relative on his side of the family to break bread with him on Christmas.  Scrooge repulses him, even though – not standing by etiquette – it would cost Scrooge nothing.

          The nephew dispatched, in come two businessmen soliciting charitable contributions for the poor.  Being unconcerned about his own flesh and blood, Scrooge is even less motivated to help others.  It’s his opportunity to complain about taxes – “Are there no prisons?  And workhouses?” – for whose support Scrooge feels put upon.  The two men’s observation that many of the poor would rather die than go to those places elicits Scrooge’s blast: “If they would rather die … they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

Dickens is writing at the height of Malthusianism, the philosophy that population growth would outstrip the food supply, leading to mass starvation and thus warranting population control.  It had its heyday in mid-19th century England, where it was connected to Darwinian “survival of the fittest” married to economics: the “fittest” were the richest.  It would come back in the early 20th century as eugenics (“three generations of imbeciles is enough!”) and in the 1960s as Zero Population Growth.  In our demographic winter – one about which there is still insufficient discontent – it’s lost some traction. 

Those words come back to haunt Scrooge.  When Scrooge feels a tinge of sympathy for Cratchitt’s crippled son, Tiny Tim, asking whether the boy will survive, he Ghost of Christmas Present throws Scrooge’s words back at him: “What then? If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

Dickens notes Scrooge hung his head in shame, “overcome with penitence and grief.”  The Spirit does not relent: “Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child. Oh God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!”

I don’t think that Ghost is getting an invitation to the next Planned Parenthood convention.  Or to “’Catholics’ for a Free Choice,” either.

How often do we judge the value of another human life?  How often do we judge that life as less valuable, maybe not valuable?  The Carol is a very contemporary story.

As we make our way towards Christmas, let us ask ourselves if and how we value the gift of Him whom we confess to be “Lord and Giver of Life,” or whether we think that gift must pass muster with our lordship?