I tried desperately to keep from sniffling too loud, not wanting the people next to me to know I was crying.
Much less my mother seated beside me. But I wasn’t crying—I was sobbing. Tears poured down my face, tears I refrained from wiping away out of self-consciousness. Snot pooled in my nostrils, and it took all my adult restraint to keep it breaking the dam and pouring forth all over my face. Hence, the surreptitious sniffles whenever the audience applauded or the chorus swelled to an appropriate volume.
The audience was a mix of young and old, and by the second act the former were restless. One boy, about five years-old, began crinkling his water bottle loudly until his mother took it away. I looked around the intimate venue of Denver’s Wolf Theater. Plenty of other children squirmed nervously, their attention spans exhausted long ago. Then I noticed I wasn’t the only one crying. Most adults in the room were sniffling or quickly wiping eyes in the way adults do when they don’t want someone to know they’re crying, attempting to make it look like an itch or a casual wiping of the eyes.
My family was in town for Thanksgiving and I had suggested we see the stage adaptation of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”. The Muppets Christmas Carol was a family favorite growing up, so there was sentimental value in returning to the story as a group. However, I had my reservations. Would the live version measure up? It’s hard to outclass the duo of Kermit the Frog as Bob Cratchit and Michael Cain as Ebenezer Scrooge.
The first act passed uneventfully, with one exception: when Jacob Marley burst forth from beneath the stage in Scrooge’s bedchamber. He scared every child in the audience and caught the adults by surprise. One woman actually screamed.
So as the play continued, revisiting the familiar story line, I sipped from my overpriced, red-wine-filled plastic cup expecting more of the same—distraction, diversion, even delight. I expected entertainment but nothing overly emotional. I expected to be charmed but never challenged. Amused but never moved. Then suddenly, as the second act began, Dickens’ story forced something out of me. I was moved by Scrooge’s journey from indifference to conviction to despair to love, a journey that struck a chord deeply within me.
At the beginning of the story Scrooge has no love for his fellow characters––indifference is too mild a word to describe his loathing. He says of the poor that it’s better if they die off “…and decrease the surplus population”. Then, through the visitation of three spirits, he’s forced to reckon with these same people––not as a concepts, but as people. It’s one thing to talk about people conceptually and another thing to meet them individually–– we can only treat people conceptually when we abstract away their individuality.
The simplest way we do this is through sheer volume. One person is an individual, one hundred people is a crowd, but one million people wrecks our ability to identify and value any singular human. If we put enough people together they become nameless and faceless. Group enough people together and they cease to be people and transform into “the poor” or “the homeless” or “Republicans” or “Liberals”, for example, which makes the transition to “Deplorables” or “Libtards” relatively effortless, almost unconscious. Then it’s easy—no, “easy” is the wrong word—it’s effortless when we do come face-to-face with the individual to dehumanize him or her. Unable to break away from the abstract and recognize their humanity we lose the capacity for recognizing individuality.
The language of statistics aids us in these efforts. We talk about median household incomes, and people above or below a certain threshold. We talk about the “1%” and the “99%”. We talk about normal distributions and averages and confidence levels. And this allows us to distance ourselves from the people those stats represent. As Scrooge learns, “The poor” is general but “Tiny Tim” is specific. “The poor” is a concept, but people aren’t concepts. It seems silly to say, but they’re people. A sample size of one is meaningless in statistics but everything in relationships.
Dostoyevsky writes in The Brothers Karamazov that the more we love mankind the less we love man in particular. G.K. Chesterton echoes this by saying that when we embrace mankind, we embrace no man in particular. Said another way, embracing our fellow man conceptually is easy. Embracing the person directly across from us is hard.
A Christmas Carol reminds me of this truth. Reminds me that relationships are inconvenient. That people are frustrating, eccentric, and yes, even poor. Part of the attraction of abstraction is the permission it gives me to pat myself on the back, to tell myself I’m doing OK, to love humanity generally. But how am I loving the individuals around me?