This Christmas, I plan on telling many of my friends, “You’re a Scrooge.” I expect them to give me a hug and thank me.
Is this a Randian Objectivist overture, praising my friends for being unapologetically, counterculturally capitalistic, focusing on the business bottom-line while the prevailing social norm is to be self-sacrificing?
No, it’s a commentary on the fact that the ongoing usage of the “Scrooge” appellation is unfair to Dickens. The character, Scrooge, transformed into a generous and kind-hearted man after his evening of paranormal activity. Yet the enduring connotation of the name is of a stingy, miserly, mean old humbug.
I suppose that the fairest application of Scrooge would be towards a person who had exhibited mean tendencies, especially towards Christmas or other holidays of gift giving, who became someone everyone wanted around, compassionate and warm.
Dickens doesn’t go into these details, but I’d like to imagine that Scrooge not only lived a happier personal life after the spirits visited, he had a more successful business too. Better customer relations, better employee productivity and retention… and as revenue increased, he probably created some new positions. Small business growth, which would feed more families than just Bob Cratchit’s.
I don’t think Dickens should be interpreted as condemning business, or capitalism, or profit, or entrepreneurship per se (at least not in “A Christmas Carol”), just the withered soul that a skewed focus can produce. There’s a balance. Life’s for living, and money is a social invention and the means for supporting it, not the end in itself.
Scrooge came to understand that… it’s a story of redemption, by way of supernatural intervention. It’s not how you start, or even remain for most of your life: it’s how you finish that counts.
He dressed himself all in his best, and at last got out into the streets. The people were by this time pouring forth, as he had seen them with the Ghost of Christmas Present; and walking with his hands behind him, Scrooge regarded every one with a delighted smile. He looked so irresistibly pleasant, in a word, that three or four good-humoured fellows said, “Good morning, sir! A merry Christmas to you!” And Scrooge said often afterwards, that of all the blithe sounds he had ever heard, those were the blithest in his ears.
