Zak Black is an Ottawa-based writer.
“If there is a more wholly satisfying half-hour of entertainment to be had in our dark world, I’d like to know what it is,” wrote New York Times critic Charles Isherwood in 2006. The world is even darker now than it was when he expounded on the 1966 TV version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, but Dr. Seuss’s story of a woolly green grouch and his obnoxiously festive neighbours remains a warm light in a cold and uncertain season.
The Grinch offers a compelling double promise. First, that even those with garlic in their souls can be persuaded that we’re right to be cheery; and second, that we would have cause to celebrate even without our material comforts – our checkerboards, tricycles, popcorn and plums.
It’s not clear that we’ve made good on these promises. The Grinch has slithered and slunk his way into the holiday catalogues of Pottery Barn, Hallmark and Williams Sonoma. You can get Grinch Crocs, or a make-up bag declaring the Grinch to be your spirit animal. McDonald’s has issued a warning to the “Who’s of Canadaville” that the Grinch is back with something called “the Grinchiest Meal.” With remarkable success and an apparently total lack of shame, we’ve commercialized Dr. Seuss’s great seasonal critique of commercialization.
Amid all this, it’s little wonder that shaggy curmudgeons grow thick on the ground. The ire of a new generation of grumps – including “postliberals” like Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule – is not for Christmas, but for the liberal way of life, which they see as poisoning our traditions, along with everything else.
What’s causing these sour, Grinchy frowns? Many opponents of liberalism feel that liberals are hypocrites – that the principles we espouse, like the Whos’ Christmas celebrations, are a charade, little more than an excuse to accumulate material goods and engage in frivolous and destructive hedonism.
These Grinches – usually red-hatted, rather than green-haired – don’t just want to take away our floo-floovers and hoo-hoppers, though. They want to reorder the world’s most powerful country – and the most important bastion of liberal democracy – into something more aligned with their own moral vision.
Some of these seasick crocodiles are never coming back in from the cold. But young people, drawn by their salt and gall, might. So we should use this moment to articulate why they are wrong about liberalism, and to think harder about why we want to safeguard our way of life and what we might want to change.
How the Grinch Stole Christmas is admittedly not going to take us very far in this important task. But that charming story’s moral gives us a seasonal nudge in the right direction by reminding ourselves that the heart of liberalism is not a dead tomato splotched with the moldy purple spots of greed.
Historically, liberalism grew up hand-in-hand with capitalism and modern natural science, and the three together have been exceptionally good at creating gewgaws both useful and trivial. But liberalism’s distinctive promise is not its productive capacity or the freedom to satisfy our immediate desires. Liberalism, like Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.
In fact, its highest aim is arguably not to make life easy at all, but to free us up for something hard yet joyful: the daunting challenge of determining for ourselves what it means to live a good life. The fundamental problem that liberalism tries to address is the unavailability of a definitive answer to the question of how we ought to live. In trying to chart a course with our own feeble lights, we can and should seek advice from others, but at the end of the day, no one else has more at stake in how we live our lives than we do.
You don’t have to have a brain full of spiders to think that we tend to shun this challenge in favour of ease and comfort. But if we can remind ourselves that the liberal enterprise would be a worthy one even without its comforts, this might take us some way toward discovering a nobler and truer spirit of liberalism. By contrast, if we refuse to take our freedoms seriously, it’s only going to get harder to deny the charge that liberal chatter is just NOISE! NOISE! NOISE! NOISE!
Dr. Seuss admitted to struggling with the ending of The Grinch: “I got hung up on how to get the Grinch out of the mess,” he said. One can hope that we’re headed for as elegant a solution as the one he worked out. But as illiberal forces near the top of Mount Crumpit, we could do worse than to clasp hands and work to find something that’s genuinely worth singing about.