The Joy of Pain
Page 16
Is there a religion that approves of envy? Not likely. Judeo-Christian traditions warn against it. Consider the familiar 10th commandment from the Old Testament of the Hebrew Bible:
Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s.9
Some of its details sound almost quaint, but the point is broad and anyone can comprehend the core command: don’t envy what another has. Even feeling it is a crime of thought.
Anyone with a passing familiarity with the Bible knows that the theme of envy is part of its narrative fabric. This helps explain why the text can read like a pot boiler.10 Envy is likely the main reason that Cain killed his brother Abel. Both Cain and Abel brought offerings to the Lord. The Lord frowned on Cain’s “fruit of the ground” and accepted with warmth and respect Abel’s “firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof.” And so, Cain “rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him” causing the Lord to send Cain away, cursed, to wander in the Land of Nod, to never again have the luxuries of tilling rich soil.11 In this fashion, envy caused the first murder, leaving us with an early and clear moral lesson: don’t envy. If your brother has it better than you, address your own failings—the solution is not to respond by killing him.
Christian conceptions of envy, sometimes personified in Satan, link envy to evil, as in John Milton’s magnificent poetic creation:
Satan—so call him now; his former name
Is heard no more in Heaven. He, of the first,
If not the first Archangel, great in power,
In favour, and pre-eminence, yet fraught
With envy against the Son of God, that day
Honoured by his great Father, and proclaimed
Messiah, King Anointed, could not bear,
Through pride, that sight, and thought himself impaired.
Deep malice thence conceiving and disdain,
Soon as midnight brought on the dusky hour
Friendliest to sleep and silence, he resolved
With all his legions to dislodge, and leave
Unworshiped, unobeyed, the Throne supreme.12
Satan, although powerful in his own right, is overloaded with envy of Jesus, who has God’s greater favor. Weakened by this, his pride wounded and his malice aroused, he plots revenge and releases evil into the world. Is there a more alarming vision of what envy, unleashed, can do? It is hard to read this and think about envy in a benign, cheerful way.
Christian traditions also include envy in the cast of the deadly sins. Although the pain of envy is its own kind of punishment, the consequences of the sin of envy are singularly unpleasant. In Dante’s vision of Purgatory, the envious have their eyes sewn shut with wire.13 This seems fitting, for the root of the word envy derives from in- “upon” + videre “to see.”14 People feeling envy look at advantaged others with malice, casting an “evil eye” upon them—and look with pleasure when misfortune strikes. Envy may also be a sin that catalyzes others. Christian philosopher George Aquaro makes the case for envy being the core emotion driving most sinful behaviors, the one that creates the necessity for other commandments.15 Without envy, Cain may not have murdered Abel. Alas, because the commandment to avoid envy may be impossible to follow, we must also have “thou shalt not kill.”
It doesn’t take a scholar of religions to see that envy is likely to be a troublesome problem for any faith, and so religious beliefs must provide a palliative for those less fortunate. According to the Bible, Jesus said, “Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”16 It is the meek rather than the wicked, powerful, and arrogant who will inherit the earth. This is good news for the disadvantaged person because it gives moral worth to inferiority and promises rewards for it in the long run. And yet the gnawing, immediate fact of disadvantage is hard to ignore in the moment. Inequality—and the envy that can result, regardless of commandments against the feeling—probably eats away at the foundations of a particular religion’s explanation and justification for such inequalities. Envy signals a destabilizing discontent with one’s lot that can place religious beliefs under suspicion and on shaky ground. The supreme being and creator of all things is implicated when envious discontent arises in response to his or her handiwork. Envy may initiate a questioning of the wisdom of the plan itself.17
LAYERS OF SELF-DECEPTION
The effect of envy’s link with an inferior self and with a repellent reputation is that envy produces multiple levels of self-deception and public posturing. Again, most certainly, people will avoid confessing their envy. Scholars, such as anthropologist George Foster, give examples of how envy is detected in its opposite, so much do the envious try to hide their true feelings. “Against whom is that eulogy directed?” is the line Foster cites from a novel by Migel de Unamuno to capture this jolting idea.18 People can concede their envy in private, of course. They can come clean both in private and in public. But envy is frequently, as social and political theorist Jon Elster writes, “suppressed, preempted, or transmuted into some other emotion”19 because there are “strong psychic pressures to get rid of the feeling.”20 This means that many people are feeling envy, perhaps acting out of envy, but are unaware of it—even though others may label them as envious and motivated by the emotion.21
ENVY, INJUSTICE, AND SCHADENFREUDE
There is another important element to throw into the blend: envy often comes mixed with a sense of injustice. When we feel envy, we are also likely to think that the advantage enjoyed by the envied person is undeserved, or at least that our own disadvantage is undeserved.22 We resent the envied person’s advantage. Why is this? The pioneering social psychologist Fritz Heider saw envy as emerging from a strong tendency toward the “equalization” of lots.23 We believe that others who are similar to ourselves in background characteristics ought also to have similar rewards. Otherwise, a core sense of balance and rightness seems violated. Because envy is most likely to arise between people similar to each other24—except for what triggers the envy—the advantage will seem to violate this sense of what ought to be. Thus, envy often comes flavored with resentment.
In a similar vein, Freud claimed that the very origins of justice feelings come from the child’s envy over inequality. Claims of unfairness might serve as a way of appearing to legitimately cry foul over unequal treatment. An element of our reactions to inequality, even as adults, may therefore have roots in how we reacted to inequality when we were children. According to Freud, the preoccupations of our younger self leave a strong residue. In this sense, the child is father to the man because we never quite rid ourselves of this early childish insistence on equality.25
I suspect another factor contributing to a sense of injustice in envy is that so many of the things creating envy are beyond the average person’s ability to change.26 One can only do so much to adjust one’s physical beauty, intelligence, athletic ability, and musical talent—the list of attributes goes on and on. Even things such as wealth and family background are often insurmountable differences that separate people permanently at the starting gate of life. Such inequalities are undeniably important contributors to success in life, both in work and in attracting romantic partners. Hence, they are raw ingredients for envy. To this extent, people feeling envy cannot be blamed for their inferiority and therefore do not “deserve” it. Neither, to this extent, do envied people “deserve” their advantage. Even so—and this is an important point—these differences are not considered an unfair basis for meting out rewards, at least in most cultures. On the contrary, they are sources of merit. If Anna is less gifted at math than Susan, she will have no cause to cry foul if Susan is the one selected for the quiz bowl. If Mary attracts Paul’s attention because of her physical beauty, plain Jane cannot take Mary to court over this advantage, “unfair” though it may be. From the subjective view of people feeling e
nvy, these advantages can seem unfair, but this unfairness must be suffered without redress. If the emotion driving the sense of injustice is envy, most cultures insist on the grievance remaining a private one. These lines from Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám capture the frustration that fate can bring:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: not all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.27
Envy can imprison us in a paradox because we feel both a sense of injustice and a sense of shame. In Heider’s words, “Envy is fraught with conflict, conflict over the fact that these feelings should not be entertained though at the same time one may have just cause for them.”28 Envy, by this logic, is a hostile feeling that seems justified and yet damnable. It comes with an aggressive urge having a subjectively righteous character, and yet, acting on this hostility in a way that reveals one’s envy is a repugnant move. A private part of oneself wishes to assert one’s rights, because, as I outlined in Chapters 5 and 6, a desire for justice is a powerful motive. Furthermore, to a degree, a self-assertive impulse seems adaptive for succeeding in life. But cultural norms against envy create hesitation. In fact, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
Evolutionary psychologists Sarah Hill and David Buss give another reason to think that envy joins itself with resentment. From an evolutionary psychology perspective, envy serves an important adaptive function. It alerts us to conditions in which we rank lower than others in domains important for survival and reproductive success. The unpleasant nature of envy does not diminish its adaptive value but rather enhances it. In the competitive arenas of life, envy should lead to actions that increase resources compared to rivals and that upgrade social status and the benefits that follow from higher social status. Envy, by this logic, is both an alarm and a call to action. Hill and Buss suggest that envy may have evolved as a way of construing oneself as more deserving of scarce resources compared to rivals. They also argue that it is adaptive to find even the deserved advantages of other people as undeserved, at least to a degree; for example, by finding reasons to view the envied person as morally corrupt. The anger, hostility, and resentment created by perceiving the envied person’s advantage as undeserved will make it more likely that people feeling envy will compete vigorously for the valuable resource. The process of natural selection is, as Hill and Buss phrased the point, “inherently competitive, selecting for individual phenotypes—and the genes that code for them—based on their ability to outperform existing alternate forms in domains that affect fitness.”29 The fusing of resentment with envy is an adaptive blend.
Max Scheler, guided in part by ideas originated by fellow German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, wrote about a chronic state of mind that he argued originated in envy and other, related painful states of frustration. Like Nietzsche, he borrowed the term ressentiment to give the phenomenon a label. One way this state can emerge, he argued, is when prolonged experiences of envy produce a sense of impotence so debilitating that one begins to suppress the emotion, despite its potency. This, in turn, produces a grudging, rancorous, embittered attitude toward life. In this psychologically poisoned state, envied things become reduced in value. This is no fun, but at least we need no longer accuse ourselves of envy. The things we once desired no longer seem worth having. However, because ressentiment is born of repressed envy and the actual valuing of these things, it is a conflicted, unhealthy brew. And, among other toxic effects, it creates particularly ugly emotions when advantaged people suffer. In the end, aggression, even cruelty, may result—as I will explore in the next chapter.
Although these ideas inspired by Nietzsche and Scheler are hard to test empirically, a series of studies done with Dutch participants by social psychologists Colin Leach and Russell Spears provides some support. These researchers’ main goal was to show that feelings of inferiority would prime people to take out their frustration and anger on successful others, which would emerge as schadenfreude if successful others fail. In one study, undergraduate participants were told that their own university had done poorly in their league on a quiz competition called “IQ.” Their feelings of inferiority and shame were measured immediately afterward. Then they learned about the winner of another league and reported how this success made them feel. Finally, they found out that this successful university had lost to the winner of their own league, and they again reported their feelings over this outcome. Indeed, these students were likely to find the loss of this other university pleasing. The students’ pleasure was related to their prior feelings of inferiority and shame, as well as to the anger they felt over the other group’s initial success. Specifically, students who felt inferior and ashamed over their own group’s failure tended to be the ones who also felt angry over the other group’s success. And this anger was closely linked to schadenfreude when this group suffered a defeat. Leach and Spears evoke Nietzsche’s notion of the “vengefulness of the impotent” to capture this process.30
Another empirical contribution comes from work by Zlatan Krizan and Omesh Johar, who have examined the role of vulnerable narcissism in envy and schadenfreude.31 Vulnerable narcissists have a complex jumble of features. Like all narcissists, they are usually self-absorbed and interpersonally tone-deaf. They are also apt to fancy themselves superior to others and to expect that the world concurs with this assessment. As a result, they typically feel entitled to special treatment and are taken aback if they don’t receive it. But vulnerable narcissists, compared to “grandiose” narcissists, are less confident about their superiority and less confident in how others see them. Their narcissism may mask a core low self-esteem, and their behavior tends to reflect defensive efforts to convince themselves of their own superiority. Vulnerable narcissists should be especially susceptible to envy and schadenfreude because of their low self-esteem.
Studying how narcissism might combine with envy to cause schadenfreude is a particular challenge. Narcissists are especially unlikely to reveal their envy because, as social worker and psychotherapist Hotchkiss notes in her book, Why Is It Always About You?: The Seven Deadly Sins of Narcissism “to admit envy would be to acknowledge inferiority, which no good narcissist would ever do.”32 But Krizan and Johar employed a clever procedure that minimized the likelihood that participants would know that the study’s focus was on envy and schadenfreude. Undergraduate participants thought they were simply giving their reactions to the format of news stories. They expected to see two related stories, one on a computer screen and the second on paper, and then give their reactions to the different formatting. They also completed a personality measure of vulnerable narcissism, but this was done in a mass screening at the beginning of the semester. There was little chance that participants would detect the researchers’ interest in narcissism or envy. The first article contained an interview with another student who was either of high status and enviable or of low status and unlikely to be envied. Then, participants were taken to a different room and given a memory test (to distract them from the true purpose of the study). Finally, they were given the second story, which detailed how the same student from the first story had been found guilty of plagiarism and received a one-year academic probation.
As in other studies mentioned earlier, participants found the student’s downfall more pleasing when it happened to the high-status person than the low-status person. And envy, reported just after the first article, was a big factor in explaining why. Moreover, vulnerable narcissists were even more likely to feel envy, and this envy resulted in more intense feelings of schadenfreude at the envied individual’s misfortune. These results provide convincing evidence that our private self-views, when they are threatened by another person’s superiority, set us up for feeling envy—and schadenfreude if the envied person suffers. And some of us, if we possess a shaky self-esteem joined with narcissism, are even more likely to follow this pattern.
SALIERI’S PRIVATE GRIEVANCE AND THE REVENGE THAT FOLLOWS
The film Amadeus, as I noted earlier, contains a good example of this tension between the sense of injustice, which is often part of envy, and the social censure also linked to the emotion.33 Salieri, the respected court composer, envies the young and miraculously talented Mozart. But he avoids fully admitting to envy, construing Mozart’s talent as an injustice committed by God. Salieri views Mozart as immature, indecent, and undeserving of his musical gifts. He resents Mozart’s talents and is outraged at the injustice that he, Salieri, has only the capacity to appreciate Mozart’s talent, rather than to duplicate it. He is a frustrated prisoner of mediocre abilities. Can he cry out against this injustice? No, because differences in ability are not considered an injustice by the standards of his culture. Ability and talent are sources of merit. Therefore, Salieri blames God, whom he deems to be responsible for awarding ability and talent among people. He knows that he will get no sympathy from others, however, if he makes any open efforts to right this wrong. Furthermore, he would not want others to think that he is envious because this would add public shame to his frustrations.