.....POOR, POOR, POOR TINY TIM
In 1843 Charles Dicken’s published “A Christmas Carol” to raise the consciousness of the politicians about problems of "Want" and "Ignorance", personified as two children described as “wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. These were, he thought, the threats facing England, and they were being bred in the slums of the country’s newly industrialized cities.” It was, he wrote later in A Tale of Two Cities, “ the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.``
Raising consciousness was a challenge. For at that time, political philosophers had been very busy (and successful) to “get the poor off British consciences" as explained by John Kenneth Galbraith in a brilliant essay aiming at reflecting “ on one of the oldest of human exercises, the process by which over the years, and indeed over the centuries, we have undertaken to get the poor off our conscience” [i]
...And around 1843, Galbraith explains, “a new formula, influential in no slight to this day, became available, on forgetting the poor off the public consciousness of the richest countries. The essentials are familiar: the poverty of the poor was the fault of the poor. And it was so because it was a product of their excessive fecundity: their grievously uncontrolled lust caused them to breed up to the full limits of the available subsistence".
By the middle of the nineteenth century, he continues, a new form of denial achieved great influence, especially in the United States. The new doctrine, associated with the name of Herbert Spencer was Social Darwinism. In economic life, as in biological development, the over-riding rule was survival of the fittest. That phrase — “survival of the fittest” — came, in fact, not from Charles Darwin but from Spencer, and expressed his view of economic life. The elimination of the poor is nature’s way of improving the race. The weak and unfortunate being extruded, the quality of the human family is thus strengthened."
A large part of the "elite" was (easily) convinced but Dickens wanted to give it a try. He was already a popular and successful novelist, a self-made man, who had, as a child, experienced abject poverty he escaped thanks to his immense talent . He could write beautifully and poignantly. "A Christmas Carol" was the most successful book of the 1843 holiday season. By Christmas it sold six thousand copies and it continued to be popular into the new year. Karl Marx himself paid tribute to Dickens and his fellow novelists’ "the present splendid brotherhood of fiction-writers in England, whose graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together". He was right. So allow me to reintroduce Ebenezer Scrooge, an ageing miser. "Scrooge's profession is never clearly stated. In the story Bob Cratchit, Scrooge’s assistant, seems to be an accountant of sorts; therefore, many feel that Ebenezer Scrooge is, perhaps, a money-lender of a banker of sorts, or a property owner. All that is mentioned of Scrooge's profession is that he is "in business." And, because money is his main focus, the business is probably one in which money is transferred and interest on this money collected, as in the three professions above”. [i]
Whatever….. let's say he is miser obsessed with money.
The story can start. On a bleak, cold Christmas Eve" two men entered his "business" office …..
“They stood, with their hats off. They had books and papers in their hands, and bowed to him….“At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,” said one gentleman, taking up a pen, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”
“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.
“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.
“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”
“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”
“The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?” said Scrooge.
“Both very busy, sir.”
“Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,” said Scrooge. “I’m very glad to hear it.”
“Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,” returned the gentleman, “a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices.
"What shall I put you down for?”
“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.
“You wish to be anonymous?”
“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at. Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned—they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.”
“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”
“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides—excuse me—I don’t know that.”
“But you might know it,” observed the gentleman.
“It’s not my business,” Scrooge returned. “It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!”
Most of you know the rest of the story. The old man, pleased with himself, goes home, falls asleep and is visited by some moralistic ghosts who manage to trigger some anxiety mixed up with pangs of altruism buried deep inside of the old miser. He cries, repents, promises and wakes up in a jolly spirit, showering the poor with money … He especially dotes on Tiny Tim, the son of his underpaid exploited employee Bob Cratchit. The little boy walks with a crutch and has 'his limbs supported by an iron frame', a common condition in the toxic environment of London. (Physicians, Dickens scholars, and historians have tried to diagnose the condition that affected him Leading entities include tuberculosis (TB), rickets, malnutrition, cerebral palsy, spinal dysraphism, and renal tubular acidosis. [ii] Unless Tiny Tim gets medical attention, unless the slums are treated and bread winners better paid children will die.
Message well received!
Charles Dickens won his bet. 'A Christmas Carol " was the most successful book of the 1843 holiday season. By Christmas it sold six thousand copies and it continued to be popular into the new year. Governments started to assume specific responsibility for the least fortunate people of the Republic. “In the USA, Galbraith continues, Roosevelt and the presidents who followed him accepted a substantial measure of responsibility for the old through Social Security, for the unemployed through unemployment insurance, for the unemployable and the handicapped through direct relief, and for the sick through Medicare and Medicaid. This was a truly great change, and for a time, the age-old tendency to avoid thinking about the poor gave way to the feeling that we didn’t need to try — that we were, indeed, doing something about them. It peaked in the sixties. Let's remember' the “War on Poverty,” an expansive social welfare legislation introduced by the administration of U.S. Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson intended to help end poverty in the United States.
Pendulums are somehow boring since they go back and forth and forth and back and back and forth.
Pendulums are somehow boring since they go back and forth and forth and back and back and forth. By the seventies the poverty issue had reach a peak and the pendulum started to swing back. The welfare state was attacked by businessmen using roughly the same arguments old Scrooge used when he met the two good gentlemen. The modern Scrooges did not want to hear about taxes and voted Republican. The two “good” gentlemen were of course Democrats and had to put up with the long old litany: The government is described as inherently incompetent and ineffective; public help to the poor only hurts the poor, It destroys morale, public-assistance measures have an adverse effect on incentive; They transfer income from the diligent to the idle and feckless, thus reducing the effort of the diligent and encouraging the idleness of the idle; There is a presumed adverse effect on freedom of taking responsibility for them.
Granted, it was expected but before you fall asleep let me expand on the issue of individual freedom. It is the new element, the extra magic wand which will be used later to propel the pendulum off rails. " Freedom, explains Galbraith, consists of the right to spend a maximum of one’s money by one’s own choice, and to see a minimum taken and spent by the government. In the enduring words of Professor Milton Friedman, people must be “free to choose.” This is possibly the most transparent of all of the designs; no mention is ordinarily made of the relation of income to the freedom of the poor. There is, we can surely agree, no form of oppression that is quite so great, no construction on thought and effort quite so comprehensive, as that which comes from having no money at all. Though we hear much about the limitation on the freedom of the affluent when their income is reduced through taxes, we hear nothing of the extraordinary enhancement of the freedom of the poor from having some money of their own to spend. Yet the loss of freedom from taxation to the rich is a small thing as compared with the gain in freedom from providing some income to the impoverished. Freedom we rightly cherish. Cherishing it, we should not use it as a cover for denying freedom to those in need”. For more details on the evolution of the concept go the t end of the fascinating story of an idea from Thomas More to Donald Trump I can send you my article published by Diogenes. Trust me: the saga is not boring[ii] : The story of individual right, democracy, modern state, and all the “values” we talk about today, were “born “ on Christmas day 1516 when Gutenberg’ press printed the first laic Christmas story promising to eradicate poverty: Utopia.[iii] [iv]
Back to the seventies. Welcome to a radical new universal ideology based on sciences: the science of economy the laws of the market chewed up by robots.
Science? Certainly not will tell you serious epistemologists or historians. (One of them Thomas Carlyle named it “ The dismal science”) We are brought far back ward to a magic world when Scrooge merge with Santa. Allow me to introduce you to Harvey Cox’ s book: "The Market as God” . The Harvard professor summarized it so well.
“… He, captures how our world has fallen in thrall to the business theology of supply and demand. According to its acolytes, the Market is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. It knows the value of everything, and determines the outcome of every transaction; it can raise nations and ruin households, and nothing escapes its reductionist commodification. The Market comes complete with its own doctrines, prophets, and evangelical zeal to convert the world to its way of life. Cox brings that theology out of the shadows, demonstrating that the way the world economy operates is neither natural nor inevitable but shaped by a global system of values and symbols that can be best understood as a religion. Drawing on biblical sources, economists and financial experts, prehistoric religions, Greek mythology, historical patterns, and the work of natural and social scientists, Cox points to many parallels between the development of Christianity and the Market economy. At various times in history, both have garnered enormous wealth and displayed pompous behavior. Both have experienced the corruption of power. However, what the religious have learned over the millennia, sometimes at great cost, still eludes the Market faithful: humility." [iii]
"Humility " is unlikely to come soon, not even this decade for new mega billionaires with huge egos have joined the club of worshipers (mostly of themselves). They form a new formidable, non- elected power: the media (the classic and the new social media) which has sent our poor Hegelian pendulum off rails and into the stratosphere in other universes. It is not just a change of tempo but a radical revolution based on the total privatisation of the public sphere and the transformation of citizens into clients manipulated by the science of publicity structured by algorithm, the total eradication of common good, ethics measured by the laws of the market. And do not hope it is just a hiccup of the pendulum routine. Do not expect a going back to a happy medium. We are not talking here about a definitive shift, a time when the sharing of new territories, access and products, a time when there are new answers to the to Harold Lasswell's questionnaire which perfectly defines the political field: "Who gets what, when and how . » [v]
To the question “who” wants power? The answer is simple and clear. The "private sector" wants power, not more power but ALL the power. No provisions are made for little bits of public institutions such as the work house of Dickens times. Everything has to be privatized: health, army, police , jails, national parks, water tables, forests and oceans and the moon and Mars and beyond. All that with an only guidance: the laws of the market.
It is an extreme form of global looting, kleptocracy although it uses nationalisms and political dictatorships of all kinds for practical purposes. “Kleptocracy is no longer a corrupt political system in a few poor nations: It is a sophisticated global network whose members include world leaders and powerful business people. Kleptocrats send money around the world with the click of a button, aided by unscrupulous professionals with the expertise to launder it through anonymous offshore companies and secure it in luxury assets in the West."[iv]
Kleptocrats, mafias, looters thrive on scarcities. As one of the most powerful of the group, Putin’s objectives with Ukraine goes far beyond his designs for NATO, natural gas transmission, and nationalist expansion. He wants the agricultural power of those perfectly positioned, well-drained, “black gold” soils, now and in the future. If he can steal Ukraine, he’ll have “the currency of currencies” (Lenin’s quote), the best possible hedge against inflation, and adaptive capacity in the face of climate change”. He is not the only one who has noticed that the scarcity of food, water and soil will be central to the remaking of the political planet on a scale without precedent.[v]
Lets go back to the Laswell questionnaire “When” ”. The new legitimate kleptocrats chants “We want it all, we want it “NOW” and at all cost".
To put it more bluntly, the new kind of predators do not care about the new generations and the urgent need to care for an overpopulated world. Entrepreneurs want a licence to sack the planet, to kill any law protecting the environment. In a nutshell they do not give a hoot about the survival of future generations. They see in ecologists, experts and other scientists, parasites who propagate false information for their own benefit. In a 60-minute interview, Donald Trump loudly proclaims, "Look, these scientists have a political agenda. There is no environmental crisis, he says, offering as the only proof his brilliant sixth sense which makes him, he says, smell all these crooks-beggars, scientists”. .
Ayn Rand, the Goddess of the market, appeared more rational, but on the surface. Before dying, she had the time to take on the defenders of ecology and the environment who begged he State to assume ownership of the exploitation of its resources. She sees it as a manipulation of governments, intended to reduce freedoms and to pour into emotion at the expense of reason. In Against Environmentalism, she considers that ecology is a return of the religious and the irrational, while only technical progress can improve the human condition. "Urban smog and polluted rivers," she writes, "are not good for men (although they are not as dangerous as fearmongers. It is a scientific and technological problem - not a political problem - and it will only be solved using technology. And even if smog were a risk to human life, it must always be remembered that life in its natural state, without technology, is a death sentence. ”
During is wrecking ball tenure, Donald Trump has systematically abolished the laws and regulations already in place to protect the planet. He has shut down all research on the greenhouse effect. When Donald Trump was asked when he got out of if he was not thinking about the children who will pay the price for his policies, he shrugged and said: this is their problem, I do not care. In twenty year I will be dead. We will never repeat enough: in Trump world money always takes precedence over the child. We use the word money and not the term capitalism, overused and politicized to the point of no longer meaning much. It is an international monetary exchange which holds mafia exchanges, a theme to be developed if one wishes to analyze the international situation. [vi]
Back to Christmas Carol sadly revisited. It does not take a crystal ball to tell you that Tiny Tim will die since Scrooge will not care for what the ghost of the future tells him.
Is it the end of the story, the end of the world?
The hell no! There are other magic tales far more grandiose which will take us in a greater cosmology. Let me introduce you to Chronos who obsessed by eternity devours his children in real time. “Kronos (often spelt Cronus) was the God of Time, Fate, Harvest, Justice and Evil. Kronos was born as the youngest child to the God of Heaven, Uranus and Goddess of Earth, Gaia. He overthrew his father and seized his throne. Kronos era was famously known as “The Golden Age”. However, Kronos became paranoid. He started devouring his children out of fear of being overthrown from his kingdom.”
But the Goddess rebelled and…..
I will tell you this story in the New Year. If I may say so it is more captivating and “joyful” that the story of old misers who do not want to pay taxes
Oh and I forgot. Could you add to the your Christmas reading Levy-Strauss who published a landmark article on Santa Claus, Scrooge acolyte ! His idea: to question end-of-year celebrations that have become purely commercial. Have we lost the religious spirit? [vii]
Again you will not be bored.
Merry Christmas
And meet you next year with a very angry Gaia and other goddesses of the Olympus.
Note
[i] ." https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/how-does-it-affect-his-life-124705.
[ii] Nicole Schwartz-Morgan. Utopia 9 11. Diogenes Sage https://philpapers.org/rec/NSCU
[iii] http://agora.qc.ca/documents/bon_anniversaire_thomas_more_et_merci_pour_le_sourire
[iv] If you want the academic long story you can now find my dissertation on line which was pusblished later in Paris : https://www.vrin.fr/livre/9782711612499/le-sixieme-continent-lutopie-de-thomas-more
[v] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Politics-Who-Gets-What-When-How