“Man of the Worldly Mind”- Scrooge and His Simplistic Materialism

Scrooge has a great many problems and one of them is a weird irrationality about the world. He is a materialist. He thinks (!) that nothing exists, but matter. When confronted with a refutation of his beliefs in the form of a ghost, he refuses to be convinced. Here is the exchange:

“You don’t believe in me,” observed the Ghost.
“I don’t,” said Scrooge.
“What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your senses?”
“I don’t know,” said Scrooge.
“Why do you doubt your senses?”
“Because,” said Scrooge, “a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”
Scrooge was not much in the habit of cracking jokes, nor did he feel, in his heart, by any means waggish then. The truth is, that he tried to be smart, as a means of distracting his own attention, and keeping down his terror; for the spectre’s voice disturbed the very marrow in his bones.

To sit, staring at those fixed glazed eyes, in silence for a moment, would play, Scrooge felt, the very deuce with him. There was something very awful, too, in the spectre’s being provided with an infernal atmosphere of its own. Scrooge could not feel it himself, but this was clearly the case; for though the Ghost sat perfectly motionless, its hair, and skirts, and tassels, were still agitated as by the hot vapour from an oven.

“You see this toothpick?” said Scrooge, returning quickly to the charge, for the reason just assigned; and wishing, though it were only for a second, to divert the vision’s stony gaze from himself.

“I do,” replied the Ghost.

“You are not looking at it,” said Scrooge.

“But I see it,” said the Ghost, “notwithstanding.”

“Well!” returned Scrooge, “I have but to swallow this, and be for the rest of my days persecuted by a legion of goblins, all of my own creation. Humbug, I tell you! humbug!”

At this the spirit raised a frightful cry, and shook its chain with such a dismal and appalling noise, that Scrooge held on tight to his chair, to save himself from falling in a swoon.

The good news for Scrooge is that he is not shallow enough simply to trust his senses, because he knows they can deceive him. Of course, the Ghost can easily overpower Scrooge’s objections because they are foolish. The sort of feelings or “visions” one gets from indigestion are not very unlike those Scrooge was having. I have been sick to my stomach from bad food, but never have I seen ghosts. If one could have such visions merely by swallowing a toothpick, then more people would swallow toothpicks for the trip. Sadly, this just doesn’t work.

Like a great many people who pretend not to believe, Scrooge is just saying things to avoid coming to terms with reality. I have never seen a ghost and yet I am not a materialist. Reading A Christmas Carol would be more than enough to convince me to reject this philosophy. This is not because of the particular content of the book, but because I am reading it. First, I exist and my “self” is not reducible to a material state. It is a different kind of thing altogether. Like an idea, for example, a number, the “self” has an immaterial component. 

Numbers help us understand that ideas exist. When we think about a number, we realize that a number can be pictured in physical symbols, but those symbols are not the numbers themselves.  A number is an abstract object with qualities. For example, the number “1” is “odd.” These qualities suggest that the number is real.  Second, numbers appear to exist independent of mind. The number “1” does not need us to think about it in order to exist. Finally, the organized study of the material world (science) needs mathematics, uses mathematics, and treats numbers as if they are real. That suggests again that numbers are real.

But A Christmas Carol itself makes the point: you can have the “text” stored on Project Gutenberg, or a CD-ROM (how quaint!), or a leather bound book, or write it out with Legos, but the text is the same. We can even memorize it and store it in our minds (with some relationship to our brain), but A Christmas Carol endures. The story is the thing that captures our imaginations. Of course the  “imagination” seems like another realm different from the merely material!

Since all my experiences are “in my head,” it is easier to believe in idealism than materialism in this sense. “Reality” may be much more mind dependent than mid-twentieth century philosophers believed. Scrooge’s toothpick and his stomach may be caused by his ghostly mind!*

Scrooge is wise enough to abandon his materialism when he must: he lets new experience change his mind. Sadly, this is not always true. I often dialog with materialists who have had religious experiences that are intense and real, but prefer to explain them away rather than accept them. “They are just in my mind,” they say as if any experience they have is any place else.

So it goes.

We are all likely to explain away inconvenient experiences, but we should not do it. Repeatedly ignoring the evidence produces a crabbed, narrow, and negative outlook. In fact, it produces too ready a tendency to say “bah” to cheerfulness and “humbug” to ideas.

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*Despite the problems, I remain a substance dualist: I think there is mind independent of objects and that minds are not material. My point is that idealism is at least as plausible (at this point) as materialism. Contrary to what seemed likely at the start of the twentieth century, Berkeley or at least some form of idealism is not dead.