I've been a huge Dickens fanboy since a Christmas in high school when I decided to read his most famous story. You know, from an actual book. The kind with no battery.
That was the initial infection. By the end of my undergraduate years I'd read every novel, travelogue, and short story Dickens ever wrote. Followed, in the throes of detox, by several biographies and critical essays, including Orwell's succinct and brilliant analysis of Dickens' place in British culture.
But since those student days I've wanted to write a sequel – more properly, a conclusion – to his most famous work. Because the man left A Christmas Carol unfinished.
In it, as you will recall, bitter old miser Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by four ghosts – or one ghost and three bodhisattvas – who convince him to lay off being a bitter old miser. (Note that in so doing, Dickens invents psychoanalysis fifty years before the fact. Further proof of his visionary genius.)
The story closes on that catharsis, as Scrooge becomes slightly foolish and a lot nicer to those in his circle, and, we're assured, faithfully keeps Christmas to the end of his days.
And there Charles Dickens abandons his greatest novel, leaving us with nothing more than this uplifting but ultimately anæmic introduction.
And they call Edwin Drood a tragedy!
Because what Dickens takes to his own grave is the story of how Scrooge's overdue rejection of the scarcity model went on to raise a swelling wave of economic and social development, the force of which was still carrying, not just Tim Cratchit, but indeed Tim's great-grandchildren, generations thence.
The belief that greed and stinginess are good business was coin of the realm in Dickens' day, as it remains in ours. But there's no evidence that this pat excuse for egotism is exact.
Fact is, having this reality abruptly kicked up his backside by his business partner and three unrelenting enforcers, my man Ben (who was, lest we forget, uncommon sharp) re-entered the world on the day after New Year's and started ploughing wealth into the neighbourhood: creating infrastructure, developing resources, improving standards, and generating something vastly more valuable than simple jobs: opportunity.
And that's not all. He also straight-up turned Queen's Evidence, plying his legendary flint and synoptic command of commercial law to defend the exploited from the predators he used to ride with. Soon those former homies just stood down when they learned Scrooge and Marley Ltd had the account; you don't win against those odds. Because S&M (you thought that name was a coincidence?) will bulldog you on every point until you never even recoup your losses, let alone profit.
And the ironic part is that Scrooge actually got richer for all of this. Probably a lot richer. Because a lot of competent people who'd only served to keep him in gruel prior to that haunted Christmas Eve were paying their rent and thinking bigger.
If the Ghosts of Christmas had thought it through, they would have added some economics to that field trip through his life. Asked him how his amiable and generous old employer Feziwig got so prosperous; shown him what a waste of earning potential were all those ruined present lives; and especially, how rich he totally wasn't by the hour of his death. Scrooge dies in the same crappy flat, surrounded by the same paltry rubbish. If he'd made more money, it hadn't accomplished anything. Not even for him.
In the end, it's just a total waste to have a guy like Scrooge simply stand down.
Because if it's true that the first thing you do when you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging, it is as well that in that moment you find yourself standing beside (or beneath) a pile of soil, holding a shovel.
My thoughts this holiday season; may they be worth the penny.
Wishing us every one the happiest of Yules, and a fruitful new year.
(1915 Arthur Rankham illustration of Jacob Marley auditing Scrooge ["Business? Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!"] courtesy of William Pearl and Wikimedia Commons.)
So I'm reading Adam Savage's Every Tool's a Hammer, an elaborated meditation on "making", that thing that makers do. (I only recently found out I'm one of these. Before that I was just, you know, making things.)
It's an engaging read; Adam's a philosopher of creativity, and his thoughts on the process of bringing inspiration from concept to object are sangha at its best. Scattered amongst the useful bits of shop protocol, such as the necessity of clamping your work securely so it doesn't kill you, are mindful contemplations on more fundamental topics. Of these, the one that struck deepest is his misdoubt of the "scarcity model".
I've touched on this subject before, but Adam's understanding of it is more concrete. Essentially, he says, some makers work in the assumption that resources are inherently scarce. Therefore, a prudent person hoards them, restricts their distribution, declines to admit surplus or divulge where it is. Adam suggests such people do this from fear that they will run out of whatever they need unless they stop others from getting some.
Nor does he limit his definition to the material. In fact, he scarcely – see what I did there? – mentions physical wealth at all. What mostly aggravates him is spiritual avarice: refusing to help, teach, respect, credit.
I too have often smacked up against this. A classic example is the person who won't share a recipe, on the belief that equipping others to prepare the same dish will steal his thunder. (Note that this excuse rests on two fallacies: that such people won't change the recipe, thereby protecting the author's "patent", and that a cook incapable of outdoing himself is master of anything.) You run into these blocked heads rather often in the work world, were they refuse to teach you their profession, or share trade secrets, or defend your beginnerhood from critics, on the alibi that they're nipping competition that would complicate their lives.
Not that competition doesn't result from a more generous view. But I've yet to see a situation where you can really quash it by cynical means. Childishness on that level, though our culture implicitly endorses it, fences you off from the very resources you yourself must have to compete successfully.
At base, this scarcity model is the origin of the transmission hang-up in institutional Zen. That's the policy whereby only certified "dharma transmitted" gurus are allowed to teach Zen. By extension, all talking about Zen then becomes "teaching", so the rest of us just have to shut up.
To be honest, if it weren't for that second assertion, I'd have no problem with it. "Teaching Zen" puts others at risk, while endangering the teacher's own karma, which is why I'd advise anyone considering it to stop considering it. (And while we're up, if anybody out there takes this blog for "teaching", knock it the hell off before we both get hurt. )
Basically, the fear is that free agents would muddy the water, obscuring access to enlightenment. Trouble is, this scarcity dogma bulldozes 99% of our wealth into a big pile and sets it on fire. So Adam's right: such "scarcity" is manufactured.
It also undervalues sangha, as it posits that without certified instruction, students will fall willy-nilly for false and/or abusive authority. I'll see that and raise you this: when the Sangha replaces blind faith with caveat emptor, fools and scoundrels will find us barren ground indeed. Because dharma-transmitted fools and scoundrels abound, shielded by the Confucianism that's crept into our religion over the centuries.
Adam further suggests that far from establishing security, such attitudes actually impoverish. He's right. There is no scarcity of wisdom, insight, or compassion in Zen. We enjoy boundless wealth, in the millions who have trod and are treading the Path in earnest determination. What mind could reject such a windfall?
The essential quandary is not simply that no-one has a patent on the Dharma; it's that all of us are still not enough. We must have what everybody brings to the zendo. Bare minimum.
In biographical passages, Adam recounts many mentors, of various walks and origins, who put up with his beginner pestering, or calmly watched him make mistakes and then told him why his stuff didn't work, and one senior technician whose elliptical teaching method, by Adam's telling, was as koanic as any Ancestor's. All of which has inspired him to give in kind, now that he's a lion of the maker world.
The fact is, the most important thing makers make is makers.
(Photo courtesy of Richard Greenhill, Hugo Eliasand, and Wikimedia Commons.)
I've been a huge Dickens fanboy since a Christmas in high school when I decided to read his most famous story. You know, from an actual book. The kind with no battery.
