Scrooge and Marx

By: Mr. Curmudgeon
mrcurmudgeon@inthepublicsquare.com

 “You don’t believe in me,” observed the Ghost.
“I don’t,” said Scrooge.
“What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your senses?”
“I don’t know,” said Scrooge.
“Why do you doubt your senses?”
--The ghost of Jacob Marley to Ebenezer Scrooge

Scrooge was a man who lost his humanity in the mechanical pursuit of wealth. The singular nature of this pursuit blinded him not only to the spirit of Christmas but, for a time, to the very sensibilities of generosity and sympathy that are the wealth of what life ought to be. Ebenezer Scrooge, therefore, was and remains for us today the embodiment of the heart-hardened, money-grubbing capitalist, oblivious to the profound poverty afflicting the teaming throngs of destitute souls swirling around him in the streets of 19th Century London.

Karl Marx said the poverty described in the fiction of Dickens and his contemporaries
“…issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together.”

However, in Marx’s “Communist Manifesto,” published in 1848 (five years after “A Christmas Carol”), he rejected the transformative power of a Christian society to transform itself and alleviate the suffering of others. According to Marx:

Reform…would require not merely the elimination of God, but an end to Christian culture with all its age-old assumptions about human incapacity.

Socialist totalitarianism, in all its 20th Century variations and millions of dead, proved just how lethal and uncharitable Marx’s foolish idea of unleashed human “capacity”was when separated from Christian love and moral restraint.

What Dickens said of Scrooge could easily apply to Marx and his fellow utopians: “Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it.”

Of Dickens’ Christian worldview, George Orwell (author of “Animal Farm” and “1984”) wrote:

From the Marxist or Fascist point of view, nearly all that Dickens stands for can be written off as ‘bourgeois morality.’ … All through the Christian ages, and especially since the French Revolution, the Western world has been haunted by the idea of freedom and equality; it is only an idea, but it has penetrated to all ranks of society. The most atrocious injustices, cruelties, lies, snobberies exist everywhere, but there are not many people who can regard these things with the same indifference as, say, a Roman slave-owner. Even the millionaire suffers from a vague sense of guilt, like a dog eating a stolen leg of mutton. Nearly everyone, whatever his actual conduct may be, responds emotionally to the idea of human brotherhood. Dickens voiced a code which was and on the whole still is believed in, even by people who violate it.

The secular world, like the early, hard-hearted Scrooge of “A Christmas Carol,” refuses to see the vital regenerative power of Christian love to better the lives of the afflicted in a fallen world; even as we stand indicted by the ghost of conscience, which – Marley-like – haunts us to return to Christian decency. Moreover, Christian love’s proven 2,000-year record of social reform and hope has never been surpassed in its power to change the world for the better, even by the pantheon of misguided philosophers – and often bloody secular counterfeit movements. But then again, Marx and his fellow travelers never had a ghost of a chance.

--Mr. Curmudgeon