Epistemological Bubbles and Echo Chambers - Thoughts on January 6

    An “epistemological bubble,” is “an informational network from which relevant voices have been excluded by omission.” In other words, a space in which a belief system is protected from any thought – true or false – that might cause doubt. Epistemological bubbles are bad – if truth matters, if seeking wisdom and insight matters: if the mind matters. (For a free society, all these goods matter.) Bubbles create the illusion that everyone thinks the way we do even when they don’t. They live by concealing issues from view. 

       An example: you will never see a major broadcasting company in America thematize the destructive impact of corporate capitalism on so many aspects of life, from the destruction of rural America (farmers and the small towns that used to support them) to the destruction of the land (e.g. in strip mining) to the destruction of the manufacturing base – and the working class –  during the “globalization” craze to the influence of big money in writing the rules we live by, to the concentration of wealth at the top and the squeezing of working people as a result of this. More recently, Fox News has created a still smaller bubble by excluding not only those kinds of things but also anything that would cause its MAGA viewers to question the fantasy world created by their reality show host leader, a crazy little bubble in which truth plays no role at all. The other corporate media were bubble creators, but within their bubbles, there were still standards of factual reporting; they couldn’t just make stuff up; there was also a limited space for critical journalism.  (Fox News did have to pay over 800 million in defamation damages promoting the election lie; so not completely free to make stuff up.) To show how times have changed: had Nixon tried to do a Trump, he would have been laughed out of Washington.

    Yet epistemological bubbles can be dealt with: just make truth accessible; make other serious arguments available. To pop the bubble just make the facts and arguments available that have been excluded from the bubble. This happened in my case because I read books from a great variety of viewpoints argued by serious authors.

    More worrying than the bubbles are the echo chambers. An echo chamber is “a social structure from which other relevant voices have been actively discredited.”  In other words, any argument or factual evidence that might make someone doubt the bubble must – by definition – come from a corrupt source and thus are worthy only of being mocked, not taken seriously. This has been at work in all the darkest movements in my country’s history – as it was in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Putin’s Russia (the ideal form of state for MAGA).  McCarthyism thrived on it. 

      Rush Limbaugh – who, alas, seduced my beloved father for a good while, in spite of his good heart – was a master of it. (Perhaps Goebbels was his teacher?) He taught his listeners not to trust anyone who criticized him. He painted a picture of a malicious elite out to get him and his audience – and his audience ate it up. He questioned the integrity of anyone who presented views that were outside the bubble he constructed such that they were not mistaken but malicious. Political opponents you believe mistaken are met with argument and evidence that they are mistaken; Limbaugh’s opponents were mocked and ridiculed, often with utmost cruelty, making his audience complicit in the cruelty when they laughed. He transformed political debate into a cold civil war. Great for his ratings. I think he was only interested in money.

     But Trump took over the playbook and has dramatically expanded it with the techniques of the reality show and by using the new technologies to their maximum potential. His opponents are not only malicious human beings but "vermin" that he wants to "rot in hell." Well Limbaugh never went that far. Breaking through an echo chamber is not nearly as easy – not that it is that easy – as popping an epistemological bubble.  If any outside view is by definition corrupt, the bubble is immune, can’t be popped. My former government professor and friend, Dr. Georg Bluhm, who survived Hitler's Germany, once told me that the great strength of democracy, as opposed to totalitarianism, is that it can criticize itself. Well, here we are. Thus I have very little faith that my country will even retain the trappings of democratic government. You can’t have a democracy without democrats, as Germany learned in their history. I try not to lose hope.

    I have focused on right-wing populism as an example, but the same phenomenon exists on the left, which has in a way affected me more personally. To present a philosophical argument against the dogma that society arbitrarily assigns a sex to a baby at birth – that nature has nothing to say here – will get you expelled in disgrace for many postmodernist clubs as some kind of oppressor.

 

It's all a form of fanaticism.

 

. . .

 

The media structure of a society is critically related to its capacity for freedom and justice. I think the best media structure for a democracy is the dominance of the printed word, with publishing being widely distributed and a lot of it being local. As soon as big money, a party, a movement, or a strongman controls any media, then bubbles are constructed; media becomes a power to control hearts and minds. Any technology with that kind of power must be limited and regulated in the interest of the public good and an open society.

    Behind this there needs to be a culture oriented to reasoned discussion. As part of the ethos of this culture would be the love of truth over being right. In philosophy I was taught from the beginning that a true lover of wisdom loves to be corrected since it brings them closer to wisdom. It would involve an attitude of intellectual humility. We are all radically finite and fallible. None of us are close to knowing everything. To understand how ignorant we are - how far from perfect wisdom - is the beginning of wisdom. All of us can continue to learn till the day we die. 

      It follows that it is in our interest to listen attentively to those who see the world differently. And in their interest to listen to us. Humility means respect. And this should be reflected in broadcasting. No propaganda. As soon as someone who things differently is discredited, a red flag should go up. Serious people who see things differently trying to seek truth together as partners – that should be the model. How to create such a culture in the present technological-economic constellation is beyond me.

 Another take on emotions as paths to understanding

    A man never thinks of his wife. He never does anything for her. He is indifferent to her needs. He feels nothing when she dies. But he says ‘I loved her.’ I would have great trouble making sense of this. I don’t think I could believe he genuinely loved her.

     A pet dog dies. The pet’s owner or human companion suffers “inconsolable grief.” He buries the dog with its picture on an elaborate gravestone. 

He visits the grave once a month, bringing flowers. Every year he lights a candle and weeps on the day of the dog’s death. He posts all this on Facebook. I would have a hard time believing the man truly loved the dog rather than using the dog’s death to put himself on display. I could only think of him as sentimental.

    But a man could grieve for a dog – I cried over Maxi – and that real grief partly reveals what a dog is as well as what a human being is. Emotions like grief are forms that our convictions about what is real and good take – paths of understanding what something is. They can be counterfeit but they are essential to be able to understand many things.

    I think when you unexpectedly come in the presence of a roaring waterfall, as I did hiking once in Yellowstone, awe is a response to what the waterfall is, to what it symbolizes as well. If a person came around that bend and in the presence of that waterfall said “cute”, I would say that person didn’t have a clue of what they were looking at even if they knew the definition of a waterfall and the geology behind it. Emotional responses can be more or less true to reality; more or less disclose or cover up the reality they respond to. “Cute” hides the reality of the waterfall.

    If you asked Lt. Commander Data from Star Trek to respond to the waterfall – an android without emotions, without flesh and blood, without a sense of mortality even – he could call up his memory banks and identify the phenomenon as a waterfall. He could – like an AI Chat these days – recount the geology of waterfalls, etc. But it would have no more significance than a speck of dust, a strip mine, or a garbage dump for him. I would say: Data cannot understand a waterfall any better than he can understand humor or emotion, because lacking emotion he lacks an essential capacity to understand anything. Without an emotional life connected to imagination, the world would just consist of meaningless objects and arrangements of objects, flat, nothing more significant than anything else. 

     [The purely logical view of the world described by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, one of my favorite books of philosophy: “All propositions are of equal value,” a proposition being nothing but the naming of objects or statements about factual states of affairs. Wittgenstein went on to say: “Everything in the world is accidental (only logic is necessary), and so nothing in the world can have transcendent value. If something has value or meaning, that value or meaning must lie outside the world.” To a Data, this would be right. But if the heart puts you in touch with dimensions of the world that are real and that pure logic and science are necessarily blind to – the thought I have been trying to make sense of – then value and significance are a part of the world and a part of human beings. It is the waterfall itself that is awesome, and my response is a response to that awesomeness. Data in this respect - responding to the waterfall -  is like a dog watching TV, or me looking at a piece of modern art.]

    That is why past philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine believed that educating the emotions was essential for a good upbringing. I would say all of our predecessor cultures believed that the universe was created such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it. Folks believed that objects did not merely receive, but could merit our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt, awe or shock. The point was to teach the young to love what was lovable – beauty in nature, for instance, or kindness shown to others – and hate what was hateful (e.g. the desolation of a mountain forest through mountaintop removal; well hating in this case what was done to the mountain). Once our hearts are in the right place, our heads can make progress in understanding the world. But if our hearts are stunted, no degree of intellectual power can access the most profound truths about the world. Again, that is one reason why I think great books like A Christmas Carol are so valuable. And yet I cannot get my sons to read it.

 The Lovable, the Good, and the Real

    There are deep conceptual relations between ‘love’ and ‘real’ - the thought I started this series of reflections with. A conception of ‘real’ that is restricted to physical objects makes no sense in general; many things (love included) are real without being physical objects. Love can be real or not, but as we normally speak, we mean that can be (more of less) genuine, lucid, pure verses counterfeit, sentimental, or distorted. 

   It sounds odd to wonder whether in general all experiences of love are unreal (e.g. illusory), as do some people who want to reduce everything spiritual to something evolutionary. Mothers don't really love their children; they are programmed to behave in certain ways because it promotes the survival of the species. Rubbish. 

  Sartre thought that loving someone was like ‘giving them permission to be.’ I would probably curse the day I was born if I didn't see myself as loved by someone or if I had never been loved by anybody such that it wouldn't even make sense to me that someone could love me. I think this is true of all people. 

    Another connection: love does cognitive work – it shines a light on reality. To pity someone suffering, for example, tells us something deep about the nature of a human being and what it means to suffer: pity is a form of the conviction that someone is suffering (Ludwig Wittgenstein). Being pitiless is a way of making the ego a tyrant over reality; of building walls around the ego to shut the reality of suffering out – like Scrooge. [How pitiless my country has become as a whole.] Grammatically, logically connected to human suffering is the intelligibility of pity – that pity is the natural reaction to suffering –  and we understand what suffering is (and thus means) through our pity. We don’t cognitively determine, like a scientist, whether someone is suffering, and then add the emotions on (or not).  

    Also loving someone lucidly, profoundly, you may know them in much deeper ways than, say, a stranger armed with a PhD in psychology might know them – which is why I don’t put much stock in therapy without completely disparaging the “professional” view outside of intimate acquaintance and love. Love is a form of the conviction that the person (or whatever) is wonderful - that it is "good, very good" that they exist. 

    So if emotions are like thoughts in that they relate us to a world outside our ego, reaching out to what we can't reduce to abstract or purely scientific categories, then forms of writing or art that connect us to true, genuine emotions will connect us more directly to reality than abstract words like mine here. That is what Dickens does in A Christmas Carol. That's what great literature does - as opposed to many pop versions that sentimentalize reality in order to make possible self-gratifying fantasies and emotions. A Christmas Carol is great therapy to me. Some - not all - of the movie versions are counterfeits of the real thing. 

 

 

The Heart Has Its Reasons (Blaise Pascal)

      Am I not taking the little novel too seriously? Am I not treating it as a work of philosophy – or scripture even? Literature reaches us not through abstract thoughts but through emotional response – through the heart. And the heart is a central theme of this book. I think some truths, perhaps the most important ones, require the participation of a pure and lucid heart. This is what great literature speaks to and can bring out in attentive readers. I have nothing against reason and logic. I love logic. I have nothing against science as long as it is conscious of what it is doing and what it cannot do. But great literature is even more important for understanding things. 

       A friend, who had recently converted to Islam, reported to me in conversation how a naïve, uneducated person responded to her conversion: namely, with the question “But how do you know it’s true?” That was supposed to be evidence of the friend’s naiveté. But that question is right on target. It is the question any honest person must ask themselves about whatever core beliefs guide their lives. In this society, concern about truth and how truthfully one lives does indeed seem naïve. I think my friend’s uneducated friend asked the crucial question.      

     So I repeated it: “How do you know it’s true?” “I know it in my heart,” was her reply. It might seem that this response is a conversation-thought stopper. Why? Because it is so personal, so “subjective.” No one can really look inside her heart. Even her closest friends have only ‘indirect evidence’ of what is there – her words, acts, attitude to life in general, the way she does live. I grant that can be ‘evidence’ of a certain kind for her, though it can never attain the status of a proof. It can flow into her words, acts, attitudes, and life such that her life itself can be evidence of a sort, though not proof. After all, as Pascal movingly wrote:

 

The heart has its reasons, which Reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things. It is the heart that feels God, and not Reason. This, then, is perfect faith: God felt in the heart.

 

The imagination is the interpreter, the translator of these feelings. This is extremely complex and difficult to describe. It depends on how pure and even “childlike” the individual heart is, on the one hand; on a kind of wisdom and goodness, on the other. The “enemy” in this battle takes the form of wishful thinking; or narcissistic, self-gratifying, self-elevating, or simply self-consoling fantasy.

      Here the concept of sin can clarify the difference between imagination and fantasy: sin is that which divides us from Creation, from a community with our fellow human beings, and focuses on an Ego born in this opposition – to our family; to that potential in us that I think of as the soul (capacity for joy, for hope, faith, love). Sin is whatever dissolves these connections, imprisoning us in an ego-fantasy world that is in reality what Hell is. In contrast, whatever belongs to our inner life that is joyful, loving, affirming, hopeful, trusting, reconciling, healing – and in a way amazingly impersonal, though you are never more yourself – forces the concept of God (or for some, Goodness) on some people. You can pretty much know whether the imagination or the fantasy is in play by asking the simple question: does it cut me off from my essential relations or illuminate them? Does it connect me more deeply and deepen my understanding or is it merely self-flattering? Does it relate me to God – or to truth, hope, faith, above all love – or does it elevate my self-brand over other? (When I speak of connections, I’m not talking about being connected mindlessly to some cult or sect to keep the ego afloat, which is pure division, an central image of sin perhaps.)

    The key feature of the heart – feelings, emotions, moods, and attitudes – is that through the heart alone higher realities can be revealed to us. The preciousness, the true worth of my children manifests itself alone in the love that I have for them – more, that I rightly have for them, for a person who lacks love for their children is rightly considered defective. The preciousness of a loved one may be revealed through the grief of losing them. Our awe in beholding the sea, mountains, or a waterfall reveals the beauty of nature. Our horror over evil done reveals again the preciousness of the victims of evil. A person who betrays someone and feels no remorse – more, does not even find it sane to feel remorse – doesn’t understand what he has done when he betrayed someone. The emotional component is necessary to know what is real and true.

      Moderns tend to want to write off the pronouncements of the heart as subjective emotions projected onto the blank screen of nature. Reason-detached-from-the-heart alone is at work here, blind to another possibility. Our hearts are vehicles of knowledge, of knowing a dimension of reality we experience all the time but to which pure reason – the head – is blind. Or they can be: emotions like thoughts can also be false – they can be sentimental, for example. If we mean by ‘Reason’ that which connects us to a reality – i.e. that which cannot be reduced to our subjective desires, wishes, needs, or beliefs – then the heart belongs to Reason. In any case, reason alone, the head, cannot determine whether only that to which reason has access exhausts the possibilities of reality – and so Reason cannot exhaustively understand Reason.

       A key belief in how we experience and understand emotions I find in how we answer the Hamlet challenge – to do believe, with Hamlet, that there are more things in Heaven or Earth than are dreamt of in our science? Or do we deny this. Our convictions on these colors all emotional experience. And many other beliefs as well.

    I want now to briefly unpack some of those feelings that can give rise to a longing for something beyond what reason can reveal. Joy as C. S. Lewis understood it; as the opposite of narcissistic fantasy and sentimentality: “…an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction”; “a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth.” The longing produced in many readers by Tolkien’s forests, for example, makes all real woods a little enchanted. Its antithesis is narcissistic fantasy – daydreaming of being a great athlete admired by the girl you want. There is no ego in this special kind of longing that Lewis calls “joy.” Joy is a feeling that can force the concept of “God” on a person.

        Love is a crucial feeling that can give rise to intimations of God. Many – sadly not everyone – express the joy over the birth of a child in the language of love: ‘my baby is a gift.’ There is not irrationality involved if the new parent doesn’t go on to say: ‘And therefore God must exist.’ If there is a gift, there must be a giver. Still, some people, inhabiting a certain attitude toward life, will feel the idea of God forced on them by such love. Of course, we all experience bouts of despair as well, and despair points us towards the Nothing. But if you have experienced both genuine love and a bout of despair, your heart will tell you that in love – except for perhaps sexual love, typically a realm of illusions – you are in reality; despair deals with self-pitying illusion. In love you feel reality, the true goodness of what you love; in despair you feel the unreality of the world and yourself. Love is like listening to a wonderful prelude or fugue of Bach – real music. Despair is like listening to a Death Metal band shouting obscenities at the world.

        I recall very well when my grandmother (Granny Lovan) died – on the day before Christmas Eve. I was in my second year at the university and was home for Christmas vacation. Over a year of university had removed any remaining doubts about the sense of religion for me at that time. I saw it – like Spock perhaps – as a superstitious belief system to be superseded by the scientific Enlightenment. That faith went deep with all my grandparents I attributed to their generation. It followed I did not believe in an afterlife. My grandmother was gone. At the funeral, I was aware that my scientific rationalism alienated me from most of the rest of my family, including my grandmother. I listened to the funeral sermon with discomfort. At some point during the reading of the 23rd Psalm, the actual meaning of my grandmother’s death, the thought of what a loving and good woman she had been to me – and to everybody else as far as I know – took possession of me. She was real to me. All the memories came back. And all of a sudden, my cold, scientific rationalism was revealed to be what it was: cold and condescending – not a heroic recognition of truth over comforting illusion.

      It’s not that I immediately believed in an afterlife. My faith 40-plus years later tells me I may hope and so I hope. But rightly or wrongly, my faith doesn’t depend on whether I think there is an afterlife. But at my grandmother’s funeral, I did immediately feel shame. Years later, I read something that made sense of my shame. ‘To love someone means you believe they will live forever.’ My love for my grandmother forbade me at least to rule out the possibility of continued life for her; forbade me from coldly pronouncing ‘she is dead’ and considering my family sentimental for hoping otherwise. As we cannot possibly know what lies beyond the grave and as we do love, nothing stops us from hoping except an ideology taken as fact and a cold heart. None of that is evidence or proof of God’s presence in the world. It is a kind of refutation of cold, hard rationalism – of strict naturalism. It is also a matrix within which a non-sentimental faith may make sense.

    A strict, scientific naturalist would interpret these feelings as purely subjective, a product of evolution, or whatever. And I can’t prove him wrong. He can’t prove me wrong either. He can point out that my evidence is subjective and is most likely wishful thinking on my part. We human beings are for better and worse not fully rational creatures. But the inner life – the heart – forces itself on us. We cannot always bracket it out, or brand it as illusory or sentimental, as I have been trying to make sense of. Do our deep human desires and aspirations point toward a real fulfillment or are they inevitably doomed to frustration? Are our longings for meaning, dignity, immortality, and deep spiritual experience a dead-end street, or are these and other such aspirations destined for fulfillment? Here is what C.S. Lewis wrote about the emotional response of awe in The Problem of Pain:

 

There seem to be only two views we can hold about awe. Either it is a mere twist in the human mind, corresponding to nothing objective and serving no biological function, yet showing no tendency to disappear from that mind at its fullest development in poet, philosopher, and saint; or else it is a direct experience of the really supernatural, to which the name revelation might properly be given.

    Intellectually, I simply assert that it is a draw, an intellectual stalemate. (I would be glad to respond to arguments that it is not a stalemate.) The facts can be read one way or the other. Philosophers of genius have tried to make sense of both possibilities. People worthy of respect have led authentic lives based on both. Relying on the head alone we can never reach a judgment. But if we love – my grandmother in this instance – it seems a betrayal to side with the skeptic. Ultimately, if we love the world, if we love life, it will seem a betrayal to side with the cold rationalist.      

      Our judgment on Shakespeare's line – ‘there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of your philosophy, or science’ – determines whether it is rational only to believe what the objective (scientific) evidence supports. If I believe there is more, then obviously my natural reason (my head) will not reach it. Perhaps my ‘heart’ is the only portal through which to experience it. If I deny there is more because I decide only to believe that for which there is objective evidence, then my denial itself is not based on objective evidence, but just as much on the heart, though a heart of a different quality. Like my heart just before my grandmother’s funeral. My current belief: We trust what our hearts tell us, what our hearts can honestly bear.

    In any case, this is the dimension in which books like A Christmas Carol can reveal reality. Not as a newspaper report of transcendence but by giving profound expression to the truths the heart (always in partnership with the head) can reach. 

 The Ghost of Christmas Future (Stave Four)

 So I am getting to the end of the book – and the days of Christmas are going by too fast. There were several mistakes in yesterday’s entry – written too hurriedly. I have corrected them all, I think.

 

     The contrast between the Cratchit family grieving over the death of Tiny Tim at his wake – his body is in another room – and the contempt in which the body of the dead Scrooge is held is the most striking part of this stave for me. Grief is an expression of love; when real, it concentrates love and makes love real. (Grief can of course be sentimental – displays of grief can be used to attract attention to oneself, for instance. In that case, it reveals nothing about the deceased person. It can be a conventional display of feeling for public consumption. Etc.) But there is no doubt that the Cratchit's grief is profound because their love was profound. Like all forms of love, it binds the Cratchits together. Tiny Tim draws them together even in death. And the body of Tiny Tim, bereft of life, still retains a kind of dignity, for lack of a better word:

He [Bob] left the room, and went up-stairs into the room above, which was lighted cheerfully, and hung with Christmas. There was a chair set close beside the child, and there were signs of someone having been there lately. Poor Bob sat down in it, and when he had thought a little and composed himself, he kissed the little face.

    The narrator comments: “Tiny Tim, thy childish essence was from God!”   And Christmas is about the Incarnation – God becoming a little child. And then again the passage read by Peter from Mark: Then He took a little child and set him in the midst of them. And when He had taken him in His arms, He said to them, “Whoever receives one of these little children in My name receives Me; and whoever receives Me…. The death of this child at Christmas is something of a mystery. But the fact that Scrooge had it in his power to prevent this death is a powerful reminder of the meaning of the life he lived.

    Scrooge had asked the spirit “Let me see some tenderness connected with a death” because – unknown to himself – he had been horrified with the contempt with which his own body had been treated. Listening in while various housekeepers pawn off stuff they had taken from the house – even taking a shirt from his corpse – we get this description:

Scrooge listened to this dialogue in horror. As they sat grouped about their spoil, in the scanty light afforded by the old man’s [the pawnbroker] lamp, he view them with a detestation and disgust which could hardly have been greater though they had been obscene demons, marketing the corpse itself.

Scrooge was a human being and as such his body should have been treated with dignity. The behavior he is witnessing no doubt de-means his corpse. But you can’t blame the people. Scrooge had extinguished the humanity in himself. He had thus made his humanity invisible to those around him. And it is often so that the wrong one person does to another damages them by making them into the image of the wrong-doing. These people were just acting like little Scrooges.

    What we get with this image of Scrooge’s corpse is humanity when it has been stripped of all the reality Christmas stands for. Or it is humanity as seen from the perspective of a pure capitalism bare of any humanity. (I fear that in our own time. And in that connection it is depressing to study the changing meanings of the dead body and the ways of honoring it – or dishonoring it.)

  Recall Fred’s praise of Christmas at the beginning:

   …[Christmas is] the only time I know of in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them [who are those people today?] as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on different journeys.

The death of a human being is a profound mystery when seen in the light of love; it is something to be marketed when seen in the light of a Scrooge. To share that fate would bind us in fellowship if only we didn’t so often – how to overcome it?! – walk around with blinders on, with shut-up hearts? That seems worthy of meditation at Christmas time.

Ghost of Christmas Present (Stave Three)

     In some ways this chapter presents Dickens’ core message in its clearest terms – his message about Christmas as a key to understanding reality. Just going to make some notes here rather than write anything very coherent. Too much going on in the house today! I apologize if there is some repetition here from an earlier entry. 

    In the beginning Scrooge is still trying to control things – here the conditions of his encounters with the spirits. He can control things in his money house but not in the (real – in the novel at least) world of the spirit.

   A light is calling to him from another space. He has to answer it. In a sense, the whole carol consists of a series of calls to Scrooge to come out of his nasty sinful self.

  The Ghost of Christmas Present is overflowing with the good things of the earth, of Creation. Interesting is that he has around his waist a rusted scabbard but no sword in it. He is pure gift, pure overflowing, full of the good things of the earth. No violence in him. And of course, he is a source of light (love, warmth, cheer).

   In responding to him. Scrooge shows that he has already changed. He freely consents to receive the Ghost’s light. When they prepare to depart the Ghost bids Scrooge touch his robe. This is another biblical allusion to healing.

She touched the fringe of his robe, for she thought, “If I can just touch his robe, I will be healed.” Jesus turned around, and when he saw her he said, “Daughter, be encouraged! Your faith has made you well.” And the woman was healed at that moment. (Matthew 9:20-22)

Dickens’ original Victorian audience was of course much more Bible-literate than the present age, and these allusions would have resonated with many readers. But the ghosts are about Scrooge’s healing – a completely gratuitous gift that he did not earn, like life and almost everything that makes life a gift. 

   The long, amazing description of the street at Christmas is Christmas and all the good things of the earth being personified, coming to life and giving themselves away. For example:

…there were Norfolk biffins [a kind of apple], squab and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner.

There are two or three pages of such descriptions, mirroring the opulence of the Ghost himself as he first appeared to Scrooge. "Everything in the world is reaching out to give itself; to bestow itself, and call you in and draw you into an engagement (Lindley).” That's the way the world is, Dickens seems to be suggesting. Scrooge is being drawn into this world, drawn out of his capitalist self.

   Then they appear at Bob Cratchit's house, a microcosm of all this fullness.  The same kind of personification is used: “…the slow potatoes, bubbling up, knocked loudly at the saucepan lid to be let out and peeled.” "Reality itself is a gift that is giving itself to us at all times," as the professor puts it. It is there for those who have eyes to see it, which is to say, for those who have not shut out reality by locking themselves in their own covetous egos.

    The Cratchits are all present to one another. Everyone is a unique someone. It is not normal for Scrooge to respond to others in this fashion. The reciprocity of their presence to each other, giving themselves to each other and receiving from each other. This is what love does – normal family relations, one would think – and this is what Scrooge must be drawn into. They sit down for the feast and ask for God’s blessings – which they are already in the midst of, as it is Christmas. This is when Tiny Tim says his justly famous line: “God bless us, everyone.” This is a form of gratitude as well for all the little and big gifts of life that are just there and that no one has earned. Gratitude is a call to return thanks by giving your own little gifts – gifts that mean nothing to the capitalist but which are the stuff of Creation.

   Scrooge asks about Tiny Tim’s fate and is distraught at the prospect of his death. Then the Ghost makes him eat his words from the beginning stave: “If he be like to die, then he had better do it and decrease the surplus population.” He is a changed person by now and suffers remorse, but the Spirit is forcing him to reflect on the meaning of his words: Tiny Tim is the surplus. And all that Tiny Tim stands for, indeed all the Christmas stands for, all the Creation itself stands for – it is surplus, not necessary, not rationally explainable, gratuitous, free, giving, blessing for no reason at all (outside of love). The whole stave is about the “surplus” that is reality itself (Creation). Why does anything at all exist and not simply nothing? The whole stave can be read as a meditation on the meaning of “surplus” or “surplus population.”

    This also brings in the theme – present throughout the book – of the different systems of accounting in the divine world and Scrooge’s capitalist world. What is Tiny Tim worth in each system of accounting? Dickens clearly wants us to believe that the divine world, the world of the Spirits, is the real world, and that Scrooge’s world is an illusion, a reduction of reality to the terms of ego-consciousness. How the God of Christmas – the Christ child – sees Tiny Tim is the measure of true value in the world of Dickens’ novel.

    Then there is the Christmas theme of the light in the midst of darkness (cf. God is light, John, 1-5). They observe men huddled around a fire on the street, miners celebrating in their dark world, a lighthouse, a ship on a stormy sea at night – all dark and dismal places made blessed by Christmas cheer, light and warmth coming from the people celebrating in them. To celebrate only makes sense as an affirmation of life, of being. I think there are two senses of darkness: one good and one bad. The bad sense of darkness is the world created by Scrooge and his money-loving ilk. Light comes into that world through Christmas, through people like the Cratchits and the others described in this stave. It is a man-made darkness (sin). The good sense, I think comes from the short scene of the ship on the sea:

It was a great surprise to Scrooge, while listening to the moaning of the wind, and thinking what a solemn thing it was to move on through the lonely darkness over an unknown abyss, whose depths were secrets as profound as death – it was a great surprise to Scrooge, while thus engaged, to hear a hearty laugh.

Here the darkness represents mystery – reality, the reality that we have access to – is like a ship floating on that unknown abyss. We live in the middle of profound mysteries, mysteries that cannot be solved with reason like a Sherlock Holmes case. These mysteries arise from our finitude relative to Being as such. The world is big. The sea is a metaphor for the unknowable reality beyond our possible experience. Christmas brings Joy in the midst of this darkness. Life itself is a passage over an abyss, a mystery. The Joy of Christmas in finding a reason to laugh, to be joyful in the midst of this mystery – which, as the passage quoted indicates, includes death. 

    They also visit Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, on Christmas. Fred is poor by Scrooge’s standards, but his laugh is his gift, a laugh that rises above all the reasons for it as Scrooge understands them at the beginning.

  Scrooge is moved by the simple Music – an air – played by his niece, whom he had disdained. The same song his little sister used to sing. He reflects – reflection! Something he never did before – that listening to this music could have cultivated a kindness in him. Some music elicits love.  It draws out the connections under the surface of things. This is a deep insight about music, one he shares with Plato.

   Finally Scrooge loses himself in the children’s game Fred and his company play. It is good to be children sometimes – another theme of the book. Playing children's games at Christmas invokes the mystery of the Incarnation: God became of a child – wild thought.  And recall that Peter Cratchit read Mark 9:37 after Tiny Tim dies in that possible future: “And he took a child, and set him in the midst of them.” His audience would have known what follows: “…and when he had taken him in his arms, he said unto them, Whosoever shall receive one of such children in my name, receiveth me: and whosoever shall receive me, receiveth not me, but him that sent me.” And Scrooge, having been drawn in, becomes like a child, becomes Christ-like.  The love is connected to joy, and joy is connected to the child still in his – our capacity for joy. Scrooge, who had tried to kill the child in him, has been rediscovering the child – especially in the scene at Fred’s.

   Scrooge is getting what he doesn't deserve (the toast to him at Fred’s being a little symbol of that). That is a secret of the book. Scrooge in being drawn into the light of love, into unselfconscious acts of giving and receiving. The Spirit blesses everyone he can, which is to say, everyone who has not closed his heart to construct their own narrow, reductive reality. You have to close the door on love or you will receive it.

   "Reality is gratuitous" - it is all surplus, extra, over and above what is just, explicable, necessary, - it is added, it is more. That is the message – or a central message – of this stave.  The book offers an interpretation of what reality is and means.  

 

The Ghost of Christmas Past (Stave 2).  

Scrooge – the money man – is about controlling the world, making himself invulnerable to its caprices. This conditions his total embrace of mechanical time, for capitalism would not have been possible without the clock and the abstract measurement of time.  He is almost terrified at the loss of control represented through mechanical time being replaced by a kind of spiritual time. 

   The description of the Ghost of Christmas Past – Scrooge’s past in particular – is weird, combining opposites (youth and age, strength and frailty) with constant mutations. I suppose I agree with the Professor, who reads the ghost and his physical qualities as an image of the past itself. The past doesn’t change in a factual sense, but its meaning certainly does change with increasing insight or blindness as one’s life takes its course. To take a trivial example, as a young man I had ceased to be aware of my failure to help around the house; as an older man with children, it comes back to me, and I understand what it meant for my mother to have to do it all alone. I would say: I only understand the meaning of that part of the past today; before I was blind to it. 

     The relation of Scrooge to his past is important in that to be Scrooge he had had to cut his past off, to exist in a history-less present. To be a rock, an island, Scrooge had to deny the child in him; to block out all light that he was gifted in his past. His fear of the world is easy to understand given what is revealed to us readers. He was neglected and abandoned by his father after his mother’s early death. He was sent to a love-less boarding school where he experienced the full pain of abandonment and loneliness. The complete vulnerability of the child to such blows gives rise to the narcissistic drive to protect that child, to build walls around it to keep it safe. Scrooge’s adult life is one form those walls can take.

    But there was also light in his past. The imaginative stories that comforted him during the lonely time at the boarding school; his beloved sister Fan; perhaps his father’s remorse and attempts to make amends; the goodness and joy of Fezziwig; the pure love of his fiancé. And we know he was able to respond to this light through the child-like joy as well as the remorse that comes out of him – feeling from an unfeeling man – while being confronted with this past. We only learn, during the scene in which his fiancé breaks with him, that for reasons unknown he has rejected the sources of light in his life and chosen to let his fear of the world determine his life. Perhaps the death of his beloved sister contributed to this?

 

“You fear the world too much,” she answered gently. “All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master passion, Gain, engrosses you….”

 

Greed is in the service of quelling the fear of the world, the world now understood as the loveless world, the world that threatens and hurts the child, the world of his abandonment. The money he seeks is for the walls about that child. There are many ways to build walls – many forms of narcissism. For Scrooge, a child of capitalism, it is greed.

     For Scrooge, greed is a sign of increased wisdom:

 

“What then?” he retorted. “Even if I have grown so much wiser, what then? I am not changed toward you.” She shook her head.

 Wisdom is a function of what a person takes to be reality. For this Scrooge, “reality” is the world as it is without love, without the light that he himself has experienced and which he now has to deny and repress to get on with the project of wall construction. His denial of that part of his life under the pressure of an interpretation of reality that justifies his pursuit of gain as the only good – Greed is good – conditions what “wisdom” means for him now. “You are changed” his fiancé tells him, indicating that he chose in a sense to become the Scrooge that he became.

 

“Have I ever sought release?”

“In words? No. Never.”

“In what, then?”

“In a changed nature, in an altered spirit, in another atmosphere of life, another Hope as its great end. In everything that made my love of any worth or value in your sight….”

Marriage is a fateful act of self-giving in ignorance of the future. Scrooge can no longer love, which is to say that he can no longer give himself. His self has become a fortress that he own and guards. So again, what makes something valuable is a function of what one takes the world to be. At some point during their relationship, Scrooge committed himself to wall construction. To do that he had to cut that part of his life off that had responded to light, to love. Thus he had to alienate himself from the most essential part of his past: his love of imaginative literature, of Fan, of Fezziwig and all he represented, and of his fiancé.

    Healing required putting Scrooge back into a relationship with his younger self – of breaking down the walls so that the child, the brother, and the lover could be free. The ghost says to Scrooge: “Rise and walk with me!” – a clear allusion to John 5:8 where it is related how Jesus healed a man at the pool of Bethesda:

 

And a certain man was there, which had an infirmity thirty and eight years. When Jesus saw him lie, and knew that he had been now a long time in that case, he saith unto him, Wilt thou be made whole? The impotent man answered him, Sir, I have no man, when the water is troubled, to put me into the pool: but while I am coming, another steppeth down before me. Jesus saith unto him, Rise, take up thy bed, and walk. And immediately the man was made whole, and took up his bed, and walked: and on the same day was the sabbath.

 

The ghost is there to heal Scrooge by putting him back into a relationship with his younger self, a relationship of love. The goal is for Scrooge to love the boy and the young man he squashed to make his new self-sufficient-self possible. The process begins immediately:

 

“The school is not quite deserted,” said the Ghost. A solitary child, neglected by his friends, is left there still.” Scrooge said he knew it. And he sobbed.

 

He is forced throughout this stave to get out of his present state of soul, and respond to these key aspects of his past, relive the joys as well as suffer the remorse for his decisions. Both the joys and the pain are necessary. He gets out of himself and reenters moods of affirmation. He blesses Fezziwig’s heart – an innocent turn of speech but blessing is also a deep mode of affirmation. He doesn’t bless anybody or anything in his counting house. This reentering a mode of consciousness natural to his younger self but alien to his present self makes his past real, as it can only be when experienced from the inside.

     He is confronted with his present actions, seen now in light of his response to his past. He thinks of the children singing carols he was rude to; of Cratchit when reliving his time as a clerk with Fezziwig; and the sting of guilt over his treatment of his nephew when recalling the death of his beloved sister. Thus Dickens pictures how our relationship to our past self conditions our relationships to others in the present. This is not some Freudian psycho-therapeutic method of restoring equilibrium to the psychic mechanism; it is a purely spiritual phenomenon, disclosing a robust view of human nature as thriving in the light of love, withering in the darkness of the absence of love.

     The professor comments on the seemingly odd treatment of Fezziwig’s calves.

 

A positive light appeared to issue from Fezziwig’s calves. They shone in every part of the dance like moons. You couldn’t have predicted, as any given time, what would become of them next. . . .

This is a strange thing to focus on, but the Professor makes sense of it in this way: the little things that don't matter in the counting-house – like Fezziwig’s calves shining in this jubilant dance –  are revelatory; to see the calves in the right way, in all particularity, requires Scrooge to be drawn outside of himself, to attend to particular features of reality in the light of joy, to develop the capacity to see the life that comes from calves is to be open to the gift of reality, and the beauty of reality. Happiness is not a matter of addition and subtraction; it rises above any cause. It is a kind of grace.

 That hits the right note. I am grateful to the professor to uncovering depths of this story that had eluded me for many years