We were there to see the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s annual rendition of A Christmas Carol, as we would do nearly every year into the future. The Pabst is a stunning venue, the kind of place that makes you think your town is special, though as I got older, I realized just about every American city has its own version of the Pabst: a local magnate’s eponymous temple to the arts, built with spoils from the Industrial Revolution. 

This makes it the perfect home for Charles Dickens. In the mid-19th century, as A Christmas Carol debuted, Milwaukee was a grand city in the style of Chicago, infused with German culture and European elegance. The city’s prosperity, however, often did not extend to the laborers who produced the wealth. Humbug! 

Captain Frederick Pabst immigrated from small-town Germany in 1848, marrying into the Best family and eventually growing their brewing operation into the largest in the United States. By his death in 1904, he had “left his mark on the city of Milwaukee, investing in real estate projects like the Whitefish Bay Pleasure Resort and the Pabst Theater and making financial contributions to welfare, education, and arts organizations,” according to the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Indeed, when the opera house that became the Pabst Theater burned down in 1895, the captain is said to have cabled, “Rebuild at Once!” Each Christmas, Pabst and his wife supplied 100 families with baskets of groceries to get through the harsh Wisconsin winter. Ebenezer Scrooge, he was not. 

Christmastime makes the world of Dickens bearable, cozy even. And for me, a Christian, Christmas is not a holiday about trees and eggnog and piles of gifts and overspending, but about Christ, who makes our world possible — and bearable and cozy, too, if we can see his light.

Dickens was a complicated Christian: he was born in the Church of England, but later turned away, toward Unitarianism. He focused on the social good produced by Christian principles, but was a vehement critic of the church hierarchy, as well as of clerical hypocrisy and abuses. The light of true faith shines in his profound commitment to charity and the social good. 

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Metaphors of light and dark abound in his work, serving as a commentary on wealth and poverty, patronage and exploitation, individualism and community, and damnation and salvation. In A Christmas Carol, he contrasts Scrooge’s “gloomy suite of rooms” and his “neglected grave” with scenes of how the miser’s former employer, Fezziwig, ran his business. Fezziwig’s warehouse was “snug, and warm, and dry.” Scrooge’s nephew Fred, another of the book’s positive role models, throws a party in a “bright, dry, gleaming room.” (Light and dark are clearly delineated in Dickens — a deeply Christian concept; no moral relativism here.) Dickens describes many wonderful things as “bright” in the book, making obvious the motif of light and dark. His characteristically precise illustrations of both worlds have a jarring effect on readers, fostering the visceral appreciation for warmth that occurs when you step in from the cold.

One passage, as Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Present approach Bob Cratchit’s residence, is perfectly Dickensian. “The sky was gloomy,” the author wrote, “and the shortest streets were choked up with a dingy mist, half thawed, half frozen, whose heavier particles descended in a shower of sooty atoms, as if all the chimneys in Great Britain had, by one consent, caught fire, and were blazing away to their dear hearts’ content. There was nothing very cheerful in the climate or the town, and yet was there an air of cheerfulness abroad that the clearest summer air and brightest summer sun might have endeavored to diffuse in vain.”

Scrooge finds that, inexplicably, “the people who were shoveling away on the housetops were jovial and full of glee; calling out to one another from the parapets, and now and then exchanging a facetious snowball — better-natured missile far than many a wordy jest — laughing heartily if it went right and not less heartily if it went wrong.” 

This is the source of a light so bright that even the summer sun could not compete with it. And it is the reason that Christmas Carol is Dickens’ best work — in a macro sense, his stories are really all Christmas carols. Christ is the flame that lights the West, bringing comfort to the poor and a burden to the rich. Blessed are the meek.

Scrooge, who represents darkness and the other side of the equation, has replaced this light with a “golden” idol. We see this clearly in the scene where he is forced by the Ghost of Christmas Past to watch his former self part ways with a girl to whom he was once betrothed, and she reproaches him for having chosen this idol instead of their love.

The younger Scrooge replies, “There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!”

“Gently” the girl answers, “You fear the world too much.… All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master-passion, Gain, engrosses you. Have I not?”

Critics might say that this detachment from the woes of the world — which are a realistic source of fear — excuses predatory capitalism. Believers who focus on the next life might be tempted to ignore the ills of this one. However, Christian apologists argue that it is precisely this kind of fear of the world that causes predation. And the fear can only be overcome by faith in Christ. The Ubermensch — the godless man who makes himself the measure of value — takes no prisoners on his way to evading material poverty, just as Scrooge stiffs Crachit. Dickens demonstrated that the great miser’s fear leads to a combination of material wealth and spiritual poverty.

Dickens’s Christian ghost stories and Victorian spiritualism were a counterargument to the other dominant philosophies of his time, those of Frederich Nietzsche, Max Weber, and Karl Marx, each of whom proposed materialist solutions to the ills of human life. Marx decried the material horrors visited upon workers by Victorian capitalism, but saw no solution, no peace, beyond more struggle. Transcendent values — the ones that might’ve justified his concern for workers — were so much, well, humbug. Weber took a more nuanced view, believing that hard work and the system of capitalist prosperity was a religious good, but acknowledging that it came with dangers. 

“Today the routines of everyday life challenge religion,” said Weber. “Many old gods ascend from their graves; they are disenchanted and hence take the form of impersonal forces.” Of “religious asceticism,” he wrote that “victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer.” The “modern economic order,” Weber believed, “is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force.” 

“Perhaps,” he added, “it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burned.” 

Coal is a theme in A Christmas Carol, as well. One of its last lines invokes the ever-important coal of 19th-century England. Scrooge says: “A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you, for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavor to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob!” he remarks. “Make up the fires, and buy another coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit!” This greeting comes with “an earnestness that could not be mistaken.” Scrooge has been changed forever. 

Cratchit was hardly burning the last ton of fossilized coal, nor are we approaching that landmark even now, though Dickens’s carol and the spirit of mercy persist, even in the modern world. In his showing, we may gain wealth and power, but only if we do good with it. In the modern world, we may be trying to forget about his form of charity, but we haven’t entirely. As technology companies with power that rivals great nations erect sprawling data centers, moguls like Elon Musk promise “there will be universal high income” in the near future. Shame lingers, at least for now. 

Tom Holland once described “the supreme paradox of Christian history” as the existence of “a faith that became powerful by virtue of enshrining as its symbol someone utterly powerless.” The challenge for Christians in the industrial West is to find every Scrooge in our midst and make a Pabst out of him. Starting with the Scrooge inside ourselves, of course.

The sigma male may or may not apply an elaborate skincare routine to his face a la American Pyscho’s Patrick Bateman, who may or may not be viewed unironically as a role model by these young men. On top of all this “optimization,” the grindset displaces all the other pursuits and pleasures, including romantic, sexual, and social life — as well as the whole concept of open-ended leisure. These other activities are generally derided as superfluous, if not dangerous, diversions from the only thing that should matter to any serious individual: his work.

At the dawn of the last century, the German sociologist Max Weber drew a connection between the “worldly asceticism” of Calvinist theology and the rising bourgeois classes of Northern Europe. Weber contended that this Protestant ethic was the animating force — the “spirit” — behind industrial capitalism. And while the face of bourgeois morality would change dramatically in the consumerist turn of the postwar decades, recent years have seen the return of the old Weberian type; it seems as if capitalism, now in a decaying post-industrial state, is harking back to its Puritan roots.

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The grindset lifestyle is easy enough to lambaste. Indeed, it has invited ridicule not just from social-media users but from major publications. In an Atlantic essay, “The Anti-Social Century,” the writer Derek Thompson points to the grindset and its “secular monks” as one more disheartening expression of the atomizing tendencies of our status quo. Thompson observes that “what is most striking about [grindset] videos … is the element they typically lack: other people.” The protagonist typically wakes up alone, stays that way through his day, and goes to bed alone. In The New York Times, meanwhile, Jessica Roy pokes fun at the “lion meme,” another trope that illustrates the sociopathic lack of regard for others valorized by sigmas, who compare themselves to “a lion,” who “does not concern himself with the opinion of … sheep.”

For Thompson and Roy, this aesthetic is Right-wing-coded, spreading outward from “the ‘manosphere,’ a corner of the internet … that frequently promotes anti-feminist and misogynistic rhetoric,” as the latter notes. They are not wrong. But what they miss is how many of its essential elements are just as present on the other side of the ideological spectrum: from the total immersion in (and uncritical celebration of) the ultra-competitive ethos of the work society to a hostility toward the purely social and non-utilitarian dimensions of human existence.

The same sensibilities can be found in the liberal meritocracy culture prized by the American metropolitan upper middle class and its college-bound scions, prepped from birth to partake in the cursus honorum of the best schools (from pre-K onward); the best internships; and the best extracurricular involvements — which are, of course, never undertaken for their own sake, but for padding college admissions applications.

It follows that friendships and relationships are not to be spared from this calculus and may be dispensed with if not fit for use. Though the adherents of this genteel version of the grindset may not spout the same cold Darwinian and Nietzschean slogans as their sigma counterparts, they are functionally bound to the same ruthless mentality that sees other people as either instruments or obstacles in the ruthless race to the top.

But in such a world of declining consciousness and community, and of rising neuroticism and extreme introversion, it is hard to see the grindset as just another online subculture limited to angry, alienated young men of a certain reactionary disposition, to be easily singled out for mockery. After all, anyone who must inhabit today’s corporate and bureaucratic institutions is forced to accept its imperatives as his own, whether or not he consciously subscribes to either the Right-wing sigma worldview or the liberal meritocracy code.

We are better off, then, viewing grindset and its associated outlooks as only the most pointed distillation of a much broader sociological reality, one that results from the technologies and market arrangements that mark the present moment — but also one with much deeper origins in our culture.

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After all, the impulses Weber identified were already old when he wrote The Protestant Ethic at the height of the Second Industrial Revolution. To understand just how embedded these qualities are in the emergence of modernity itself, we may look even further back to the original Puritans of the 17th century, whose enduring contributions to the modern mind are often overlooked. For this, Michael Walzer’s intellectual history, The Revolution of the Saints (1965), is indispensable.

Walzer took note of just how radical the Puritan break with traditional society had been, arguing that they prefigured the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks as the world’s first true revolutionary force. The Puritans applied their militant attitude not just to theology or high politics, but the performance of secular work, believing it to be a field of spiritual battle and as well as an avenue for personal salvation and moral self-making. All this would have baffled a medieval peasant. Writes Walzer, “The saints were distinguished from the disorderly mob of worldlings by their industry and diligence: their industry revealed their saintliness — to themselves as well to their fellows. The old Catholic theory of good works was here transformed into a Protestant theory of good work.”

This novel stance was naturally accompanied by an attack on leisure and spontaneity; the Puritan citizen “worried over his occasional afternoon naps and worried most of all because they came at ‘unaccustomed times’ — they were unplanned.” Just as significant was how the Puritan design extended to family relations, which had to be consciously refashioned away from the premodern feudal paradigm of sprawling kinship networks and communal obligations; the Puritans were encouraged to winnow down their personal loyalties to the marital union and the nuclear family as a more manageable unit of social organization: “Puritanism heralds the shift from the patriarchal to the conjugal family,” through which the religious and economic dictums of the faith could be better enforced. (The grindset, it would appear, takes this process of social delimitation several steps further, heralding a shift from the family to the lone individual.)

Together, these historic changes had an ideological legitimating effect, which produced people who could both construct and functionally inhabit capitalism’s new social world. The Puritan mentality made it possible for people to think of themselves primarily as free individuals and mobile economic actors and so paved the way for the transition from feudalism to a society governed by markets and contracts. Likewise, the mass consumerist revolution of the 20th century created new appetites for household affluence and personal recreation that, in turn, fueled the demand for the industrial growth engines of the postwar age.

But those earlier phases of capitalism were accompanied by rising living standards for the masses. The entrenchment of the grindset today suggests the opposite trend: the development of subjects who would be content to live and toil in a world of diminishing material standards. Hence, their embrace of asceticism over visions of plenty and their scorn for family formation and communal belonging as decadent indulgences that can no longer be supported. In other words, the grindset is a way to legitimate the stagnant, de-socialized epoch we already live in.

The original Puritans grasped at the nascent modern notion of the individual through a theological lens — they saw him as an instrument of a providential plan. But they still retained social and civic ideals, centered around the building of a “godly commonwealth.” By contrast, the pull of secularism and today’s technological environment has made it possible to dwell in a society without either religious community or human companionship, thus the deracinated Calvinism in which the individual is left alone with only his work to preoccupy him, with neither a God to sanctify his labor nor a family to consume its fruits.

Against this grim vision of a life of constricted possibilities, what recourse remains to those of us who want to remain social beings? The answer may be to try to retrieve the dimensions of human life that have been suppressed, if not erased, by the post-Puritan march toward unrestrained individualism and the unexamined worship of work. It would call for new efforts to revalorize sociability and leisure as unqualified goods in themselves, even extending to the right to be idle and aimless at times. After all, it is when the mind is allowed to wander that alternative visions for society reveal themselves, and it is when individuals are allowed to commune in casual ways that they can discover common cause.

As the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson has recently argued, the Puritans themselves were able to ground their individualist struggles in a greater redemptive ideal, “to be as a city upon a hill,” which continues to inform American political culture down to our time. What’s missing today is an equivalent ideal to leaven and humanize our labors and to anchor them in a more hopeful future; barring that, we shall continue to be, as Weber wrote, “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.”

Since then, his work has found acclaim far beyond the academy: business gurus, political pundits and Twitter personalities invoke his social theory — and particularly his account of the ‘mimetic’ origins of desire — to explain an ever-widening array of phenomena. But if his ideas are increasingly popular, their roots are usually ignored.

Girard meant his ideas to serve a religious purpose. He claimed in one of his final books, published in English as Battling to the End (2010), that his work had “been written from a Christian perspective”, and specifically a Catholic one. He was not, however, a cultural conservative trying to offer a defence of traditional Christian morality. While his theory of desire is inseparable from his belief in Christianity as the true faith, it is also tied to a radical perspective: one in which the end times foretold in the New Testament are upon us.

Girard’s theory of desire, separated from its Christian context and purposes, is appealingly counter-intuitive and expansive. It offers the intellectual pleasure of over-turning (perhaps a bit too readily) what is said to be conventional wisdom, and of reducing apparently distinct processes to a single causal mechanism.

According to Girard, we commonly misunderstand individuals as pursuing pre-determined aims common to all human beings — like sex or status. These desires, we assume, are satisfied by what we manage to attain. In fact, Girard argues, our desires arise not so much from such natural drives as from a universal tendency to envy and emulate other people, which orients us to seek out whatever our rivals (that is, everyone else) are seeking. We want what we want because other people want it.

Girard saw imitation not only as a fundamental social process, but also as a source of violence that, if unchecked, might unravel society. This is, in some ways, an ancient insight. The poet Hesiod, at the dawn of Greek literature, observed that strife can lead us to imitate and surpass the achievements of our neighbours in socially beneficial cycles of competition — or it can lead to envious rage and violence. In the eighteenth century, the founders of laissez-faire economic thought argued that what they called “emulation”, copying our rivals’ behaviour with the aim of outdoing their success, was the basis of economic growth, but also a source of conflict among individuals and nations.

The originality of Girard’s thinking lies in his argument that societies manage the ambivalence of imitation — its capacity to promote social cohesion or to degenerate into spirals of competitive violence — through “scapegoating”, or the exclusion of some agent identified with imitation’s negative aspects. In his account, scapegoating is a function of religion, and takes the form of sacrifice, the physical destruction of some victim who was understood as responsible for, or in their innocence expiating the sin of, dangerous imitation. The violence of sacrifice precludes the violence of mimetic desire.

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Girard has found posthumous popularity in Silicon Valley circles — most prominently with Peter Thiel. The historian and philosopher Justin E.H. Smith has written a particularly sharp critique of the way would-be finance and technology gurus use Girard to give a veneer of sophistication to otherwise trivial observations about trends. But Girard intended his theory not to provide bite-sized insights for the business world, but to serve a specific, religious purpose as a justification for Christianity.

According to Girard, the death and resurrection of Christ had freed humanity from the cycle of potentially destructive imitation that scapegoating had been intended to contain. The message of the Gospel was that a perfect man, without any violence in him, had offered himself as the final sacrifice — and as a model for all future imitation. In his death, Christ abolished the need for further scapegoats. In his life, he provided an example for followers — an example that, unlike all previous objects of imitation, could produce no envy or aggression but only love and peace.

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For Girard, Christianity is the end of “religion”. In the traditional sense, “religion” had always meant a system of rules and procedures for containing the violence of mimetic competition and maintaining social order through rituals of sacrifice. Only Christ, Girard argues, offers an escape from these systems.

Unfortunately, for most of the history of Christianity, the radical message of the Gospel was suppressed by the Church. Ever since the late Roman Empire, ecclesiastical leaders worked with politicians to prop up social hierarchies and justify inequality. Christianity was presented as another version of ancient religions, in which priests accepted payment from congregations in return for rituals of blessing and sacrifice. The Church fulfilled the role of what Girard, drawing on an obscure term from the theology of eschatology, calls the katechon, a force that holds back the return of Christ and the destruction of our world.

This is a Protestant vision of religious history. It views the Catholic Church and its compromises — first with the Roman Empire, then with all subsequent political authorities — as an occlusion of the true message of Christianity. But for Girard, a Catholic, this was not a betrayal, but rather a necessary stage in a historical process that is finally coming to an end.

In Girard’s vision of history, the secularisation of the West — the decline of the political role of religion, and of religious belief — means, in an apparent paradox, that the Gospel can, for the first time, “become clear”. For centuries, our societies had existed on the basis of a usually unspoken, and philosophically incoherent, compromise between pre-Christian values (of preserving society through rituals of sacrifice) and the message of Christ, who showed that sacrifice is now unnecessary and that the end of the world is at hand.

Secularisation dissolves this compromise. It hastens the apocalypse, and thus the second coming of Christ, by ending the social rituals that had constrained the violence of competition: “all that remains is mimetic rivalry, and it escalates to extremes.” A society without religion, ritual, constraint, or limit, in which atomised individuals compete with each other in steadily worsening spirals of envy and hostility, is the clearing in which Christ will reappear.

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Pundits discussing the mimetic aspects of media trends or the role of “scapegoating” in cancel culture use Girard’s concepts to explain a world that he insisted is on the verge of perishing. Those who critique Girard’s ideas make a similar mistake to those who wish to take them up for political purposes. Justin E.H. Smith, for example, condemns “the Girardian version of Catholicism as a clerical institution ideally suited to the newly emerging techno-feudalist order” promoted by Thiel. But Girard argued that the role of the Church as a “clerical institution” is coming to an end, as its long compromise with politics ceases — and that this is both a terrifying and joyous event.

His apocalypticism may be disturbing, or indeed mad, but it is not compatible with conservatism — or even with politics as such. Girard is not merely a source of stimulating or useful ideas for Silicon Valley. He is a messianic man of faith, for whom the decline of religion, and of the West, makes straight the way of the Lord.