Scroogenomics

My friend Tom Martin, a professor of philosophy at the University of Nebraksa at Kearney, has forwarded me this excellent meditation on the meaning of Christmas by Joshua Schulz of DeSales University. Those interested in discovering more of the sagacious musings of Professor Schulz should visit his website:  http://philosophystone.wordpress.com.

Economists don’t like gifts. Or to be more precise, they have a hard time making sense of gift giving as a rational social practice. From the standpoint of market reasoning, it is almost always better to give cash rather than a gift. If you assume that people generally know their own preferences best, and that the point of giving a gift is to make your friend or loved one happy, then it’s hard to beat a monetary payment. Even if you have exquisite taste, your friend may not like the tie or necklace you pick out. So if you really want to maximize the welfare your gift provides, don’t buy a present; simply give the money you would have spent. Your friend or lover can either spend the cash on the item you would have bought, or (more likely) on something that brings even greater pleasure. (99)

(For a full version of the above argument from an actual economist, see Joel Waldfogel’s “The Deadweight Loss of Christmas,” American Economic Review 83 (5) 1993, and his subsequent book on the topic, Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays (Princeton UP, 2009.)

One of the problems with the Scroogenomist’s logic here is that it contains a basic mistake about the nature of friendship (in all of its myriad forms, e.g., brotherly, parental, platonic, and filial love). The Scroogenomist falsely assumes that a friend is just a special utility maximizer, someone who’s job or role is exhausted in the satisfaction of one’s preferences. On this Scroogenomist understanding of friendship, the best friends are those that provide the best pleasures the most. Best friends are friends with the best benefits, and the size of their package does matter. This gets friendship wrong, of course, since what makes friendship good is not (at least exclusively) the usefulness of the friend. If that were the case, we could imagine a world in which machines replaced people as providers of pleasantly loving feelings with no loss of value. Machines would be more reliable, less demanding, and less messy than friends, and therefore more efficient. Sherry Turkle’s recent book, Alone Together, documents Scroogish trends in just this direction. (One benign case is Facebook, i.e., contraceptive friendship: superficial and technologically mediated intimacy without the hassle of real life. If your Facebook Friends become too demanding, you simply ‘unfriend’ them. For a good read on the subject, see Stephen Marche’s “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” in The Atlantic Monthly, May 2012.) However, we cannot replace friendship with the benefits of friendship because what makes a friend good is the friend herself: like a beautiful painting or novel, which is good because it exists as a beautiful thing, and will for that reason continue to be good long after one is dead, a friend is good for her own sake. Like artworks, wisdom, and virtue, friendship is not a useful good to be consumed, but a mystical good to be appreciated (as G.E.M. Anscombe would say). It is good for its own sake even if it is also something that makes your life good.

So much is common knowledge. What I wish to discuss here is a tight analogy between the arguments of those who think that the existence of evil is evidence against the existence of a benevolent God and the Scroogenomic argument. The problem of evil treats God as a being whose role is exhausted in the satisfaction of human preferences. Surely, they argue, it cannot be part of God’s Providential plan for the world that innocents are unjustly killed, since such obvious injustices prima facie count against God’s goodness. This is so, the argument goes, because a perfectly good being would will what is best for us, and what we think best for us is what, in the end, best satisfies our preferences, our conception of what the world should be like, and specifically what our own lives should be like. (As the Scrogenomist argues, ‘people generally know their own preference best.’)

In order to be good, in other words, God should give us whatever allows us to maximize the satisfaction of our desires and minimize our pains. He should either use his own omnipotence to eliminate every instance of evil, or else allow us to eliminate evil by making us omnipotent. He should give us the platinum hedonic gift card, in other words. Anything else is a defective gift. Insofar as God doesn’t give us those things, the argument continues–insofar as we suffer–it follows that (a) God doesn’t exist (because whatever gift-giver does exist isn’t good enough, or isn’t omnipotent, and either way isn’t a god), and (b) we possess a Technological Imperative to become as god-like as possible by increasing our power over the world. (Technology is the gift-card we give ourselves, one which, according to the Scroogenomist’s logic, can therefore never be bad.) The god of the Scroogenomist is Prometheus and his tools. At least the Greeks could recognize the difference between the useful god and the beloved god, between their machines and their friends. Our enlightened age makes no such distinctions.

Christianity does, and for good reason.

When we love what is good in itself, we wish it to be, and to be as good as possible. Consider an analogy. We wish our children to not only feel good about themselves, but to be good themselves–to do something noble and worth doing with their lives by becoming beautiful people. A good life is an achievement, not a possession (remember Christ’s lesson of the widow’s mite, Mk. 12:41-4). Moreover, we do not want this great good for our children for our own sake–because it would reflect well on us as parents, perhaps–but for our children’s sakes. For the same reason, we wish them to exist even when we’re gone and can draw no earthly benefit from their continued existence.

As our Father, God wishes us the same thing, for our own sakes. As St. Irenaeus says, “Gloria Dei est vivens homo” (Adversus Haereses). Yet whereas I can only wish that my children become good, God is not so limited. God can make us good. What we so frequently forget is that because we are made for loving God, to be in relationship with God, what will make our lives as complete as possible is God Himself rather than something else that God could give, just as what makes a friendship as good as possible is the friend herself rather than something else that the friend could give. (What would you rather have for Christmas: $100, or your family at home?) Hence Irenaeus continues, “Vita hominis visio Dei.” If we are made for love, only love will make us happy. Christ’s body is Love’s revelation, since anything less would be less than everything. At Christmas, then, we receive the gospel in a special way: that Emmanuel is here, and that we are happy.

This most intimate gift of divine friendship, given first in the Incarnation at Christmas, is given finally in the sacrifice of the Eucharist. In both we are given the body of Christ. With this gift, Christ does not give us omnipotent power to cure our ills or preserve us against the evil powers of the world. What he gives us is a relationship with love Himself. To the Scroogenomist, who calculates the value of love like a shopkeeper, this is irrational, inefficient, and cold-hearted; he prefers gadgets and gift-cards, and so confuses the Christ-child with Prometheus. That we should celebrate Christmas (the birth of Christ) with a Mass (the Eucharistic sacrifice of Christ) he finds doubly incomprehensible–in his eyes, a sacrificial gift does not redound to the gift-giver, who is thereafter as dead and economically fruitless as his gift. The hope of Easter is beyond his ken.

Today we Christians recognize that in the living body of Christ we have nothing less than everything we desire, that the body of Christ, the baby and the bread, is the sign of our joy (Lk. 2:12), because it is what it represents: the flesh of Christ, the food of salvation, is today given to us, we who of all men are most happy.