It’s that time of year. Over at Nature, we’ve been looking back over 2014 as we gear up for the Christmas festivities. At Futures, we try to look forwards, and so this week’s story is a futuristic tale with a seasonal twist. The chains of plenty is written by S R Algernon, who has appeared several times in the Futures section, first with his tale A time for peace and more recently with both Planetary defences and Cargo cult. His story A pocket full of phlogiston appears in the Futures 2 anthology, which (on a seasonal note) would make a wonderful Christmas present. As is rapidly becoming traditional, I’m pleased to say that we have a guest post explaining how Marley and Scrooge ended up in a Futures story…

Writing The chains of plenty

The inspirations for The chains of plenty were some of the pundits that I encountered on TV and the Internet after the 2008–09 financial crash. I saw echoes of Scrooge-like sentiments — that the poor ought to work harder, that they ought to fight with each other for scarce jobs, and that they were less entitled to the benefits of society than people who traded commodities for a living. Some of these exhortations seemed like parables or sermons in their simplicity. There seemed to be no shortage of institutions or people to blame for economic problems, much as it was in Dickens’s day. Despite our vast gains in productivity, technical knowledge and standard of living, we seemed to be just as much in need of Scrooge’s three spirits. My initial aim in writing the story was to carry the Scrooge narrative into a high-tech world to see if it offered a new perspective.

As I updated the characters, I noticed that the three spirits are already with us on our smartphones. We meticulously archive our pasts. We shop online for a bounty of products that would have awed any Victorian. We connect with our neighbours in real time. Our computers predict our futures, completing our sentences, recommending products and warning of dangers. The three spirits are benevolent and bound to our service, for the most part. Still, in all strata of society, people want a bigger share of the pie and, furthermore, a reason why they are justified in getting it. It seemed to come back to Ignorance and Want, the human miseries singled out by Dickens for special mention. Our increases in productivity over the past two centuries had not made us content, and all our accumulated knowledge had not kept us from searching for simple (even, at times, simplistic) explanations for our discontent.

It occurred to me that humans are not psychologically well equipped to accept a free lunch, sometimes for themselves, but especially when they see one given to others. Even when food, shelter, knowledge and art are plentiful and easy to create, it often strikes us as unnatural for these things to be given away. Someone must benefit, even if that person, like Scrooge, is only nominally connected to production. Ideologies come and go, providing different explanations for who is entitled to what. We could face a paradox where we have the power to create everything we might want and yet feel worse off than Tiny Tim. We could attain the knowledge of how to distribute goods efficiently but reject that knowledge in favour of a system that aligns with our moral instincts. Ignorance and want, it seems, are not just hardships of the poor but are also psychological tormentors of the wealthy.

This led me to a different perspective on A Christmas carol and the spirit of Christmas in general. The visitations seemed not a punitive effort to castigate Scrooge for his greed but instead as a well-intentioned attempt to prepare him for paradise. Tiny Tim, in contrast, can enter heaven not as a reward for the suffering he endured but instead because his suffering trained him to be content with very few material comforts. The Ebenezer Scrooge that wakes up on Christmas morning isn’t redeemed because he has become self-sacrificing or penitent. Instead, he learned to enjoy the company of others and (paradoxically) he became generous because he stopped caring so much about how much or how little the poor were entitled to.

Marley, with his perhaps Christ-like suffering, seemed key to this process. In order for Scrooge to feel entitled to his free lunch (i.e., to stop worrying and let himself enjoy parlour games with his nephew and so forth), he needed to feel that it was earned. By proving himself more virtuous and wiser than Marley, Scrooge could feel that he deserved to enjoy the riches around him. The knowledge that he had avoided Marley’s fate cured him of the need to explain his life through Malthusian ideology.

For now, the notion of heaven or paradise is, as it was in Dickens’s day, an idealized abstraction. However, since that time, we have turned many spiritual, mythical or fairy-tale concepts into physical realities. It might not be too much longer (on a historical timescale) before an all-but-eternal life of pleasure is free for the taking. The question is, will we accept it, and might we not benefit from someone like Jacob Marley to nudge us towards it?