Fellow-passengers to the grave: Reframing our society

“I have always thought of Christmas time as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.” Fred’s beautiful sentiment in Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol is one of the greatest cognitive reframes in literature. Cognitive reframing is a powerful tool which allows us to alter how we feel about a situation by changing how we think about it. Thinking about others in light of a shared humanity and common goal has the capacity to evoke a great many positive thoughts and feelings and motivate positive actions.

Often parodied as saying positive things to oneself, reframing works best when it is motivated by a desire to make sense of a situation by challenging mistaken or distorted ideas and replacing them with more realistic ideas. That other human beings are another race of creatures bound upon their own individual journeys is certainly a distorted way of thinking about things. It shares in the folly of the myth of the ‘self-made man’ or ‘self-made woman’. Yet, it can be hard to feel the truth of the idea that what unites us is more important than what divides us. Differences amplified in media and adjudicated by political violence and activism become sources of division and the further we get from our fellow-passengers, the harder it is to see them as human. It also becomes ever harder to recover basic truths about ourselves. In this case, simply saying positive things to oneself may have only limited value and it may actually make things worse.

A good reframe widens the spotlight of consciousness keeping one from going down the rabbit hole of a particular negative thought or feeling. Fred’s statement is more comprehensive than the distorted thought about others as less than or in competition with oneself. It expresses a fuller grasp of the situation. Fred’s insight goes beyond seeing people in terms of status to grasp the fuller truth of people in the upper and lower classes as people. It also grasps the wider picture within which all people have a common end and a common goal. That goal both transcends us and unites us. Apart from that fuller grasp, a positive statement is just words, and those words appear to be contradicted by the evidence of daily events.

A good reframe is also more realistic than the distorted thought. It is tempting to say that Fred’s insight is more realistic because it embraces wider truths about human beings and leave it at that. But this only works if you and I agree that the wider, more comprehensive idea is truer just because it is wider and more comprehensive. Unfortunately, the “evidence” of daily events has its own appeal. Increasing division counts as evidence for distorted thinking precisely because it is less comprehensive and more immediately relevant. The ideas that inform and structure Fred’s class-based society, impact not only what people think about others but what counts as evidence for the truth of those thoughts. Let’s take another example. Students, athletes, CEOs or politicians may believe that winning is what counts (“good guys finish last”) and accept the fact that everyone cheats. Then everyone acts on the same idea about putting myself or my group first. When those who cheat most effectively earn the prizes or gain power, the guiding thought gains credibility: “See, that’s how things are”. The distorted idea is accepted as the truth about social living. What counts as evidence that supports the truth of this idea is the success of those who get around the rules. The political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, argued that in the modern world we can make almost any idea true by consistently acting upon it. What this means is that when our common lives are structured around flawed ideas, we set up patterns of feeling, thoughts and actions that embody and support those ideas. But this is only part of the story.

It is one thing to try to get around the rules in a criminal way in order to get ahead. It is another thing to manipulate the rules themselves and to rig the game. Let’s say that publicly I justify my own advantages and privileges on the grounds that rewards ought to be meted out on the basis of work or merit, but secretly I am willing to cheat on an exam or pad my resume to make myself appear more meritorious. That sounds rather shady, and I would justly be accused of hypocrisy. Things get morally worse if I collude with others to manipulate the qualifications that count as meritorious, for example setting up social status or race as the standard, to favor our own group. In the first case, what is at stake is the truth or falsity of my claim to a commonly accepted standard of meritorious achievement. In the second case, the standard or criterion itself is at stake. In order for status or race, or even financial success, to be generally accepted as the measure of true ideas, all other measures must be disqualified. Corruption manipulates the criteria to favor one individual or group over others. False ideas become true not simply when people act on them together but when those same people embrace corrupt and inauthentic criteria that make the false ideas appear true.

Good cognitive reframes therefore address the second as well as the first class of faulty ideas. But now we face a deeper and more perilous challenge. The manipulation of criteria for common judgments about truth and common action derails the very process of learning and self-correction that accounts for so much of human progress. Ideas inform action that yield results. When those results are genuinely positive and really solve problems, they legitimately confirm the originating ideas. By genuinely and legitimately, I mean that under careful examination the problem really was solved, and the situation has gotten better--there was progress. Modern civilization is built upon many good ideas that actually solved problems and improved living conditions, notably indoor plumbing that separates drinking and wastewater. Think about where we would be without that modern marvel. In other cases, the original idea may be incomplete and address only part of the problem. In that case, the unsatisfying results should reveal the limitations of the idea. Those affected by unfavorable results are likely to raise questions. Corruption forestalls wherever possible the emerge of these further questions. It is not possible here to even outline the many tactics employed to silence critics of a poorly designed or executed plan. It is sufficient to note that such manipulation calls into question our ideas about ourselves as moral beings and whether the effort to live a moral life is worthwhile after all.

There is thus a third problem in addition to criminal activity and corruption. At this third level distorted ideas effect not just how we act or the criteria we adopt to evaluate our ideas and actions, but our estimates of ourselves as intelligent and responsible beings. Research indicates that while cognitive reframing often contributes to overall well being, it can at times can increase symptoms of depression. What makes the biggest difference may be something that psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl, who along with Arendt was a Holocaust survivor, noticed many years ago. Reframing works best when we are faced with unchangeable conditions and can find some inner, deeper or higher reason to endure them. This is what many psychologists mean by internalizing the challenge. However, if we try to adapt our thoughts and attitudes in order to become more accepting of changeable circumstances, we deny ourselves the capacities, intelligence and power that make us responsible human beings. In the first case, we increase our range of freedom by finding something we can control and working on it. We experience ourselves as intelligent and responsible actors in history. In the second case, we decrease our range of freedom by robbing ourselves of our own power and responsibility. What people may conclude from this is that we cannot employ our own intelligence to improve situations. We are morally powerless. Simply putting a positive spin on an awful situation, instead of identifying something that can be changed, may make things worse because it alienates us from our own capacities. The problematic reframe shrinks our horizon of understanding and responsibility. Corruption operates at this level of despair shrinking the moral agent’s autonomy.

At the first and second levels, what look like perfectly legitimate cognitive reframes only work where moral despair has not yet set in. Individuals bothered by the bad behavior of politicians, public figures, colleagues or competitors can lift their own spirits and aspirations by reminding themselves that character matters. But as disagreements regularly devolve into conflicts and differences of opinion are adjudicated by activist in the streets and on social media, guilty bystanders embrace increasingly negative ideas about human intelligence and goodness. We progress from excusing our own crimes: “It’s okay because everyone is doing it”; to justifying collusion: “Winning is what matters”; to despair: “Moral living is not worth it”. Then, no matter how often we say it, we find it hard to believe that character makes the slightest bit of difference.

From all this we can derive a universal lesson. What lies at the heart of any legitimate reframe is curiosity. Curiosity is the desire and the willingness to discover what is really going on. It is not satisfied with half-truths or partial pictures. It wants the whole story. Curiosity breaks out of the group-think that just accepts the common ideas, no matter how half-baked, because that is how we win or maintain our own advantage. It challenges corrupt notions by insisting on its own inner criterion for truth restoring intelligence, reason and moral responsibility to the heart and soul of human living. What makes Fred’s reframe so beautiful to me is its frontal attack on moral despair.

Fred’s reframe starts with the third class of faulty ideas about human goodness, adverts to the criteria of truth and only then challenges particular ideas about one’s fellow human beings. “I have always thought of Christmas time as a good time,” he says, “a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely”. Where corruption skews ideas about evidence in a way that selfishly privileges a particular group, Fred adopts an unselfish, kind, forgiving and charitable criteria. In this he also expresses hope for human intelligence and responsibility. For Fred, ideas emerging from an open heart contain more truth than ideas emerging from a closed heart. Ideas that originate in kindness and charity are truer, and for that reason replacing “creatures bound on other journeys” with “fellow-passengers to the grave” is more accurate. The reframe works so well precisely because it is embedded in a great work of literature. A Christmas Carol insists on the value of thinking about deeper questions of meaning, value and purpose. It addresses head-on corruption’s artificial rules on questioning and manipulation of intelligence. It evokes in us a desire for moral goodness and a call to conversion of heart and mind in the spirit of Christmas.