Common Decency

Charles Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge is a portrait of a man without common decency. Scrooge’s central failing is not his miserliness or callousness toward suffering. His sometimes spectacularly contemptible failings—as when he suggests that the poor should simply get on with dying and reduce the surplus population—are connected to a less spectacular but more pervasive failing: Scrooge has removed himself from the daily commerce of favors, mercies, small kindnesses, forgivings, expressions of gratitude, and social pleasantries that are the stuff of common decency. He grufy rebuffs his nephew’s invitation to Christmas dinner.