The cartoon
showed Smith in a nineteenth century London club glowering while informing
another member, “It’s new story by that Dickens fellow — about a worthy banker
named Scrooge who finally degenerates into a sentimental weakling.” Harry Truman once remarked he was pleased
that he was smart enough to understand Shafer’s points in his humor.
Anyway, a thing
frequently overlooked in characterizations of Uncle Ebenezer is his fundamental
honesty. Even the great film version by
Alastair Sim (1951) hinted that Scrooge’s scrupulous rectitude might not be all
that it should be.
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| "Dishonest? Try rediscounting a bill if you're word's not good!" |
This is a pity,
for the story loses a great deal if we ignore one of the main points Dickens
was making. By worldly standards,
Scrooge was a good man. Dickens was quite clear about
that. As he said on the first page, “Scrooge's
name was good upon ’Change for anything he chose to put his hand to.”
Dickens in fact went out of
his way to make certain the reader understood that essential fact about his
hero. If Scrooge said something, you
could bank on it — literally.
This is key to the story, for
if Scrooge said he had been visited by three spirits (plus Marley's), it had to
be true. After all, if you were approached
by someone whom you knew to be a cheat and a liar and who prated that he was
now a completely changed character because he had been visited by three spirits
and the ghost of a former associate, would you want to do business with him, or
even turn your back?
No, you’d keep a tighter grip
on your wallet or purse.
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| "Mankind was my business!" |
Dickens’s point in A
Christmas Carol — at least as we see it — is not that Scrooge is evil so
much as incomplete. He is a good man of
business (as was his partner Jacob Marley), but that’s all he was.
And that brings
us to the point of our story, and the relevance of Dickens’s tale to
social and economic justice. Just as
being a good man means more than being a good man of business who is honest to
a fault, being socially just means more than being individually just and
charitable, even on a grand scale.
Fortunately, understanding
the distinction between individual virtue and social virtue doesn’t require
visits from three spirits and a dead business partner (although it might take
that to wake up some people!). All it
needs is a decent grasp of Pope Pius XI’s breakthrough in moral philosophy.
The key to
understanding Pius XI’s development of a doctrine of social virtue was his
theory of how the human person gains direct access to the common good. It is actually fairly straightforward once the
basic premise is understood.
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| Individual virtue is direct, social virtue is indirect. |
In Pius XI’s
thought, traditional individual virtues benefit individuals directly, and
society indirectly. Social virtues, on
the other hand, benefit society directly, but individuals indirectly.
Through acts of
social virtue, human persons can effect necessary changes directly in the
social environment — “the system” — conforming the institutions of the common
good more closely to human nature. This
establishes and maintains the proper environment for the acquisition and
development of virtue. People can more
easily become more fully human, because the system encourages them to become
virtuous.
Pius XI realized
that it is possible to bring the human person together with others in
solidarity. Significantly, solidarity is not a mere feeling, but acceptance
and internalization of the principles that define a group as that specific group.
Through organized
action directed at building or perfecting the common good, people can secure their
natural rights and restructure institutions to conform to human nature as far
as possible. The work of social justice never
ends, because institutions as human creations can never be perfect.
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| Took a few things for granted. |
This is in sharp
contrast to the principles of socialism that seek to absorb or subsume the human
person into the State or collective.
Socialism tries to change human nature by abolishing natural rights and conforming
it to “ideal” institutions as defined by some élite.
Leo XIII’s
program in Rerum Novarum took for granted what individualists and
collectivists alike did not even consider possible: that people can directly
access and reform the common good. Pius
XI’s breakthrough in moral philosophy was the recognition of social justice
as a particular virtue directed to the common good with a defined act of its
own. This resolved one of the major
difficulties with the social program (as distinct from the social doctrine) of
Leo XIII.
Building on Leo
XIII’s thought in this manner was a major advance in developing a sound theory
of personalism consistent with natural law and Aristotelian-Thomist
philosophy. Personalism being any
school of thought or intellectual movement that focuses on the reality of
the human person and each person’s unique dignity, it demands that the
institutions of the common good be equally accessible by every natural person,
i.e., by every human being, and thus that every person have power.
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| George Mason: Life, Liberty, Private Property |
Full and direct
access to the common good in turn requires more than every person being able to
exercise the full spectrum of the classic individual virtues (specified in Thomism as the natural virtues
of prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice, and the supernatural virtues
of faith, hope, and charity) and rights. (The natural rights of life, liberty, and private property) This
is because individual virtues and rights only grant indirect access to the common
good. A holistic understanding of rights
and virtues at both the individual and social levels, however, requires that
each person have direct access to the common good and all its institutions through
the free exercise of the social virtues, especially social charity and
social justice.
Two factors seem
to have kept people from understanding the social virtues as something distinct
from the individual virtues. First and
foremost is the failure to realize that the social virtues are not directed to
individual goods or natural persons at all.
Social virtues (acts
or habits) are directed to the “objects” of the common good and “artificial
persons” — institutions that affect persons.
Second, the efficient cause or subject (that which carries out
the act of a virtue) of both individual virtue and social virtue is the human
person.
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| Father William J. Ferree, S.M., Ph.D. |
There is,
however, a difference between the efficient cause of an individual virtue and that
of a social virtue. Where the efficient cause
(that which carries out the act) of an individual virtue is the individual
person as an individual, the efficient cause of a social virtue is the
individual person as a member of a group. As Father William Ferree explained,
It is surely nothing new to
suggest that man is the efficient cause of the act of social justice; but
something that has not been sufficiently adverted to is that only the member of a group is capable of
such an act. A completely isolated individual [e.g., Ebenezer Scrooge] cannot practice social justice, even
though he be a man in possession of all his powers. . . . All men, utterly regardless of any theories Aristotle may have had
about foreigners, resident aliens, slaves, mechanics, and laborers, are
efficient causes of social justice, insofar as they can perform any act of
virtue, i.e., be in possession of the
“use of reason” and exercise of their will. (Rev. William J. Ferree, S.M.,
Ph.D., The Act of Social Justice.
Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1942 (© 1943),
194-195.)
Pius XI’s social
doctrine thereby solved one of the most serious problems of modern life: the powerlessness
and thus alienation of the human person from society — but with one critical omission. Social justice and its commanded act told
precisely the theoretical who, what, when, where,
and why, but it left the practical how incomplete.
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| "God bless us, every one!" |
And that was Scrooge's problem. It wasn't that being a good man of business was bad, but it was incomplete. As Marley said to
Scrooge when the latter pointed out that Jacob had been a “good man of business”
and was applying that virtue to himself, “Mankind was my business!” Yes, but making humanity your business does not mean giving up your
personal business. As Pius XI built into his social doctrine, human beings are both individual and social, a unique combination we call political.
Thus, when
Scrooge reformed, he didn’t give up his business, but became a member of the
human race, a good man as well as a good man of business . . . and still kept
his word as honestly as he always had, and then some. Scrooge had pledged his word to reform, and
you could count on him to keep it, both the letter and (if you’ll pardon the
expression) the spirit:
Scrooge
was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim,
who did not die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as
good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good
old city, town, or borough, in the good old world. Some people laughed to see
the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he
was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at
which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and
knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that
they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less
attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.
He
had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total Abstinence
Principle, ever afterwards; and it was always said of him, that he knew how to
keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be
truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God Bless Us,
Every One!
#30#