It's a Wonderful Life...?

Whilst Catholics are still in the penitential season of Advent, the secular world has already begun  what seems to be the 100 days of Christmas, ending some time around mid afternoon on 25 December with the ritual doze in front of the Queen's Speech.

And with this extended season comes numerous screenings of It's a Wonderful Life. (For those of you not familiar with the film, Wikipedia's article is here.) I was amused recently to find a discussion of the film by the Catholic political scientist, Carson Holloway. (Link here.) Although it's a discussion set firmly in the context of American politics (but then, isn't the film itself set firmly in an American context?), it does have much to provoke thought on wider Catholic principles. A taster:


Finally, we might consider the standards that guide Bailey’s service to his fellow men. Why does he think it’s important to help them buy homes for their families? Bailey follows his father’s example, which is more than merely traditional. When Peter Bailey tries to convince his son to work at the Building and Loan, he justifies its work by appealing to human nature. He tells him that the institution’s work helps to satisfy a “fundamental urge,” that it is something “deep in the race” for a man to want his own, privately owned home. This standard found in human nature supplies the Baileys, father and son, with a standard of goodness, of what constitutes true human flourishing, that teaches them how to do good for their fellow men. The things that are good are the things that are experienced as good by human beings as such, and not merely the things that any particular set of human beings might happen to desire.

Contemporary American liberalism has largely rejected such standards of goodness as unduly restrictive and even oppressive. Fixed standards rooted in human nature might require that society say “no” to some disordered desires that are incompatible with our nature. Our liberalism, however, recoils from such discipline, because it is incompatible with liberalism’s egalitarianism, its insistence that all ways of life and all desires must be regarded as equally acceptable.

I'll let you read the whole piece and decide what you make of it yourself. (Comments welcome!) One reaction I had (to the film and the essay) is that it reminded me of some comments by Yves Simon (in ch5 of his Philosophy of Democratic Government here).

The description of the family found in Aristotle's Politics (Book i) is that of an institution dedicated to the welfare of man in the needs and acts of daily life; with regard to such needs and acts, the family aims at self-sufficiency. [...] the Aristotelian description remained until recently the pattern followed by the rural family. It is hardly necessary to stress the advantages of a system which incloses the whole cycle of wealth, from ownership of the land to the use of the product, within a small unit in which strong feelings of friendship make possible an almost complete community of goods. Such a system rules out the infuriating disorders, so intensely resented by the men of the twentieth century, resulting from the nondistribution of the available product.

So very much the heart of the film: small town America with a close community life, based on a stable family. But Simon goes on:

However, the superiority of rural life with regard to community feelings does not hold in all respects and is not unqualified. In old-fashioned rural families, community feelings are generally restricted to a narrow group and are accompanied by isolationist dispositions which may prove acutely antisocial. Intense devotion to the family often combines with readiness to treat the rest of the world as foreign and hostile; the sense of justice is often uncertain when the partner does not belong to the family circle or to the native community, which is confusedly identified with the family. Besides its general inconveniences, such an attitude of distrust beyond the limits of a small circle is exceedingly harmful to democracy. It makes impossible the normal operation of two essential organs of democratic life -- the party and the labor union. In societies where family feelings are so exclusive as to arouse distrust of every outsider, political parties turn to cliques, and exploitation thrives on unorganized labor.

I think that's my main worry about the film. It portrays the intimacy of small town life well and the Catholic value of solidarity within that context. However, it says little about how to live out principles such as solidarity in a wider, more complex context (and those wider, more complex contexts cannot simply be wished away). For example, the focus of the film is perhaps the Buildings and Loan Association which throughout is threatened by a Scrooge like figure (Mr Potter) and ultimately saved by a whip-round among the townsfolk. All good mythical stuff -and much that can be translated into talk of subsidiarity. But by portraying banking in a moral fable, does the film encourage us to ignore the real problems of international finance (and a globalized economy) and the difficulty of easy solutions, in favour of a pantomime of heroes and villains?

Answers in the comments box please!

Future posts will deal with other Christmassy themes such Heideggerian authenticity in Elf. :-)