George Bailey on the Bridge

by David Kordahl
Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life," about to jump off the bridge.
In the fallow days of late December, I watched many holiday movies with my kids. The choices weren’t adventurous: Rudolph, Elf, The Polar Express. Between viewings of Home Alone, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, and Home Alone 3, The Grinch played no fewer than eight times. My daughters capitalized on their parents’ exhaustion. Their baby brother had just come home from the hospital, and this was turning out better than we’d warned—less screaming, more TV.

But even on vacation there are limits. Instead of Home Alone 4, I insisted we watch an old gem, a movie I remembered fondly from childhood. Everyone loves It’s a Wonderful Life, I declared. It’s a real Christmas classic.

You can probably guess where this is going. Did my daughters (aged five and eight) love It’s a Wonderful Life? They tolerated it. But I felt amazed by what I saw, wrung out, on the verge of tears for the whole last hour.

It’s a Wonderful Life (which, as every appreciation notes three paragraphs in, you should really watch if you haven’t) is a fantasy about contingency. The story is wrapped in holiday gauze and told through intricate flashbacks, but at its heart is George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart in his everyman mode. By the film’s third act, George wants to jump off a bridge and end it all. To stop him, a guardian angel shows him how horrible his town, Bedford Falls, would be if he had never been born. This vision causes George to realize his mistake. He returns to the bridge and prays, “Please, God, I want to live again!” And—poof!—back to the real world. In the end, George reunites with his wife and children, surrounded by friends who have rallied to his aid.

Why does a movie like that work? The brief description sounds like inspirational bunk, and many appreciations—including a surprising number praising the film’s depiction of fractional reserve banking—fail to capture what’s most effective about it. For me, what makes the film work is that when George reaches the bridge, we’re there too. We understand why he wants to jump.

George Bailey’s life is not the life he wanted. Read more »

Monday, December 12, 2011

The Case Against Santa

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse Santa

As we have noted previously on this blog, Christmas is a drag. The holiday’s norms and founding mythologies are repugnant, especially when compared to its more humane cousin, Thanksgiving. The story of the nativity doesn’t make much sense; moreover, it seems odd to celebrate an occasion that involved the slaughter of innocent children. And the other founding myth – the myth of Santa and the North Pole – is one of a morally tone-deaf autocrat who delivers toys to the children of well-off parents rather than life-saving basic goods to the most needy. But, when you think about it, the Santa myth is far worse than even that.

To start, the Christmas mythology has it that Santa is a being who is morally omniscient – he knows whether we are bad or good, and in fact keeps a record of our acts. Additionally he is somnically omniscient – he sees us when we’re sleeping, he knows when we’re awake. Santa has unacceptable capacities for monitoring our actions, and he exercises them! In a similar vein, Santa takes himself to be entitled to enter our homes, in the night and while we’re not looking, despite the fact that we have locked the doors. In other words, Santa does not respect our privacy. He watches us, constantly.

This is important because the moral value of our actions is largely determined by our motives for performing them. Performing the action that morality requires is surely good; however, when the morally required act is performed for the wrong reasons, the morality of the act is diminished. Acting for the right reasons is a condition for being worthy of moral praise; and, correlatively, the blame that follows a morally wrong action is properly mitigated when the agent can show the purity of her motives.

The trouble with Santa’s surveillance is that it affects our motives. When we know that we are being watched by an omniscient judge looking to mete out rewards and punishments, we find ourselves with strong reasons to act for the sake of getting the reward and avoiding the punishment. But in order for our actions to have moral worth, they must be motivated by moral reasons, rather than narrowly self-interested ones. In short, under Santa’s watchful eye, our motivations become clouded, and so does the morality of our actions.

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Monday, November 15, 2010

Waging War on Christmas, to Save Thanksgiving

Blackfriday Weeks before Halloween, Christmas decorations started appearing around town. At the local department stores, mannequins of witches and zombies were crowded by Santa’s elves. The Christmas season has, it seems, overcome Halloween. Halloween is a charming holiday, so this is lamentable to some degree. But given the relatively stable interest children have in candy and play-acting, Halloween is not in danger of extinction. The constantly-expanding Christmas season does not threaten to undermine its spirit.

Sadly, the same cannot be said for Thanksgiving. When pitted against the aggressive encroachment of Christmas and the corresponding shopping season, Thanksgiving, our most humane and decent holiday, doesn’t stand a chance.

Unlike Halloween, Thanksgiving is a holiday of human significance. Though it is occasioned by the mythology of Pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians, the point of Thanksgiving is not that of rehearsing or commemorating that original event. In this respect, Thanksgiving differs crucially from other holidays. The Thanksgiving gathering is not a means to some other end, such as memorializing the signing of a document (July 4th), observing an ancient liberation (Passover), celebrating the birth of a god (Christmas), or honoring the bravery and sacrifice of soldiers in war (Veterans Day). The point of Thanksgiving is rather to gather with loved ones, to reaffirm social bonds, to enjoy company, and to appreciate the goods one has. To be sure, the Thanksgiving celebration is focused on a meal, typically involving large portions of turkey and cranberries. Still, the details of the meal are ultimately incidental. The aim of the Thanksgiving gathering is not to eat, but to be a gathering. The coming of people together is the point– and the whole point– of Thanksgiving.

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