Ebenezer Scrooge is alive and well

A Christmas Carol is more than a morality tale. It’s a magnifying glass on contemporary values.

(www.nationalarchives.gov.uk)

He was an affluent businessman who made charitable donations to support mainstream practices for dealing with poverty.

When a man knocked on his door soliciting donations for a cause — food and shelter for poor people during the holiday season – Ebenezer Scrooge responded with his signature grumpiness: 

“I help to support the establishments I have mentioned – they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.” 

The aforementioned establishments? Prisons as well as workhouses set up through the English poor law amendment of 1843, also called the New Poor Law, which codified recommendations from a Royal commission to set up workhouses, attaching public aid for food and shelter to one’s willingness and ability to work in these facilities.

This approach of withholding public aid unless a person works in a state-approved manner is familiar in the present-day United States. Bill Clinton’s presidency set our contemporary society on this approach to welfare with his 1996 “The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act” — bootstrappy language that implies people just need to try harder.

The 19th-century English workhouses were designed to be punitive. People could only receive aid if they moved into a workhouse, and no longer through “outside services” — essentially, aid via outreach, similar to what Scrooge’s visitor was attempting through a private structure. The punitive approach also meant that those who refused the workhouse could be imprisoned. 

The stigma of refusal underpins a similar punitive logic in today’s United States.  In Portland, Ore, the city council voted last summer to jail people who refused to go into shelters when police officers offered them a room. While this ordinance could be overturned by a new, more progressive city council that begins in two weeks, the incoming mayor, Keith Wilson, has voiced support because he sees the threat of jail as useful to his goal of erecting night shelters where people who are otherwise living unsheltered are required to sleep. 

While in Oregon’s case the refusal of an available shelter (available not to all, mind you, but as a set-aside bed a police officer has to offer) is key — the Oregon constitution limits arrests if adequate shelter isn’t available — many states can simply arrest people for camping on public property, even if they have no other options. While a 2022 9th-circuit decision ruled that it was unconstitutional to punish people for sleeping outside when no adequate shelter was available, the Supreme Court reversed that decision last June. Suddenly, the floodgates were open. 

No one embraced this opening by the Supreme Court approach more ostentatiously than California’s Gavin Newsome, who, photographed in jeans and a baseball cap throwing away the possessions of people living outside, threatened to withdraw state funding from local municipalities that refused to displace camps of people — despite the fact that there was no where for people to go. 

While it might seem jarring to compare the sunlit lands of today’s California with a bleak depiction of 19th-century England, Charles Dickens wrote about enduring values regarding poverty in “A Christmas Carol.” Scrooge’s grumpiness simply scrubbed the varnish off ideas. His retort when the door to-door fundraiser mentions that many people don’t want to go to these places and, in fact, would rather die, is chilling:

“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

Scrooge is saying the unsaid: death is an outcome of policy.

This is shockingly cruel, but he is saying the unsaid: death is an outcome of policy. In recent weeks, people have been discussing how it is easier to comprehend the killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson than the tens of thousands of people who die each year for lack of health coverage. The same is true about homelessness — people die decades before their time — as well as poverty, a leading cause of death in the United States.

Work houses were designed to be grueling enough to create great suffering. This was designed around the belief that this would motivate people to somehow bootstrap out of poverty and also that, should services be improved in any one of the hundreds workhouses, a person might be drawn to move to that area for better services.

Such a notion is extremely common in the contemporary United States: should people be well-served, a community will be somehow overrun with demand. In other words, humane treatment is dangerous. 

Plenty of cities embrace busing programs, providing tickets to people to leave the area. While some of this can be helpful if a person actually has family or friends who would provide support, it’s often used to remove people, not help them. This out-of-site, out-of-mind approach is particularly common when cities host major events such as the Olympics. During the Paris Olympics last summer, thousands of people who were homeless were bussed to other regions of France where they were only provided temporary lodging before becoming homeless in a new city.  

There are several assumptions here. One is that people, indeed, are from elsewhere. Many people become homeless in the same area where they were housed. They don’t move from the place where they at least have some familiarity. A recent California study upheld this point. 

But additionally, this line of thinking also values the idea of proximal home, particularly dangerous as a tactic to demonize migrants. How close does one who is homeless need to be to the place they lived before in order to be worthy of a community’s care? Same neighborhood? Same city? State? Region? Country? Continent? Hemisphere? Planet? 

These are crucial questions for each of us to grapple with, because the intertwining of homelessness and migration will test our humanity. Clearly, sympathy and aid are too often contingent on familiarity. “A Christmas Carol” structures Scrooge’s change of heart on his recognition — through the urging of ghosts past, present and future — of his own vulnerabilities (such as childhood loneliness) as well as the suffering of people in his inner circle, such as the son of a man who worked for him. 

Family and friend relations are a key way people receive care.
Yet to make a societal impact, our care must be larger.
We must love people we will never know, and act accordingly. 

Scrooge’s actions did widen to a slightly larger circle. He became generous to strangers he met. Essentially, he recognized aid outside the English system of workhouses: the private charities that the door-to-door fundraiser represented. 

This is meaningful. We can donate money to entities that provide food and shelter, we can show up for friends in need, and for individuals that we meet – handing out gloves, hats, hand warmers, baked goods, carrying naloxone. There are many people living outside for whom kindness matters, and in some cases, this can be life-saving. We can do as the transformed Scrooge did.

But whether in nineteenth century England or 21st century United States, a combination of punitive state structures and private charitable ones doesn’t come close to narrowing the ever-widening gap of homelessness and poverty.

Scrooge’s name has become a stand-in for someone who is hateful and miserly. Clearly Scrooge had an attitude problem (his “bah humbugs” weren’t subtle), but even before he transformed, he made the charitable donations that were mainstream in his day, supporting values that are mainstream in ours. That they led to suffering and death was true then, and is true now. 

In a society where laws, systems and values determine the life opportunities for those who have the least, Ebenezer Scrooge is alive and well.