Posted on 08/18/2007 3:43:19 PM PDT by Sherman Logan
As my wife will attest, I often suffer from futterneid. This is the term Germans use to describe the envy we feel when, for example, someone orders a better meal than ours. I’m also prone to schadenfreude, the tendency to take pleasure in the misfortune of others. So if I get the braised short ribs and you get stuck with the snail tartare, your futterneid will fuel my schadenfreude.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence the Germans have so many words for the chillingly petty emotions that run like cold streams through the human heart. Poor, dark, and divided, Germany was an ideal location to harbor resentment against one’s neighbor, be he a slightly more prosperous farmer, a Jew, a Catholic, or even a nation. Latecomers to unification, industrialization and empire, Germany’s 20th-century thirst for war and conquest might be blamed less on high-fallutin’ philosophical theories or Romantic poetry and more on plain old envy. The Germans craved their “moment in the sun” and they were going to have it, no matter what.
Don’t worry, this isn’t a column about Germany. Rather, it’s about envy, which Thomas Aquinas defined as sadness for the good of others. We almost never discuss envy anymore. “One may admit to pride, avarice, lust, anger, gluttony, and laziness, and one may even boast of them,” Gonzalo Fernandez de la Mora wrote 20 years ago in Egalitarian Envy. “There is only one capital sin no one admits to: envy. ... Its symbol ought to be a mask.” This is a shame; the most pathetic of the seven deadly sins is perhaps the most consequential.
Indeed, just look again on the 20th century. Envy turned Germany cruel. In Russia, the ideology of envy — socialism — likewise ran amok under the label Bolshevism and threatened to overrun the world. The consequences of envy run even deeper. It will never be known how many millennia man endured in misery and darkness under the moldering blanket of envy. Helmut Schoeck writes in his timeless masterpiece, Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior, that whole societies, hobbled by envy, rejected innovation, and prosperity, preferring the arrested development of all to the advancement of the few.
In primitive societies, “No one dares to show anything that might lead people to think he was better off,” Schoeck observed. “Innovations are unlikely. Agricultural methods remain traditional and primitive, to the detriment of the whole village, because every deviation from previous practice comes up against the limitations set by envy.”
Bigotry has many wellsprings, but it always draws on the groundwater of envy. “How can that (choose your slur) have two horses when I only have one?” the envious man asks. Hence August Bebel’s famous description of anti-Semitism as the “socialism of fools.”
In America, we have our own politics of fools. John Edwards leads an all-star cast of liberal politicians and intellectuals (Edwards is decidedly not the latter) who worship at the altar of Invidia, praying that she will exact penance from the undeserving half of our “two Americas.”
Like the “scientific socialism” that concealed envy behind a slide rule, today’s liberals invoke social science as justification for their covetousness. In one famous study, a majority of people said they would rather make $50,000 if others earned $25,000 than earn $100,000 if others were making $200,000.
Such studies are deeply flawed. For starters, as Arthur Brooks notes in the current edition of City Journal, they don’t address the question of whether people would be happier in a world of total equality. Rather, they ask whether people would be happier in a world of inequality so long as they could be richer than everybody else.
More damning, however, is that these studies turn a vice into a virtue. With the exception of the self-esteem movement, which glorifies pride, it’s difficult to imagine another area where we so shamelessly tout a sin as the basis of public policy. All men lust in their hearts; shall we dole out concubines for those of us who can’t live like Hugh Hefner? Envy has its social utility, of course. Schoeck argues, along with Nietzsche, that envy helped hone our sense of justice. Fine. But America is supposed to be different, in part because unlike, say, Germany or Russia, America had no feudal past and hence lacked the historic breeding swamps of envy. America’s egalitarianism is supposed to be political and nothing more: No man is the involuntary servant of another. Beyond that, he is the captain of his self.
The man who orders a better meal than me has done no harm to me. And it is no man’s (or bureaucrat’s) job but my own to cool the fever of my futterneid.
Hence August Bebel’s famous description of anti-Semitism as the “socialism of fools.”I don't find this description all that great. It implies that there is a "socialism of the wise", when there isn't.
I'm not sure how I'd characterize anti-Semitism -- beyond simply racism and hatred -- but I'm sure how I characterize all socialism: the ideology of fools.
Envy - one of the Seven Deadily Sins
I agree. Jonah should have caught that.
Having seen their shining city on the hill, the Soviet Union, fail so miserably they need something to unite their fellow idiots. The Left has absolutely nothing positive to offer so what better way to unite stupid people than with one of the oldest and most powerful prejudices on the face of the earth? It's the natural culmination of a failed and destructive philosophy and economics.
Jonah wrote:
The consequences of envy run even deeper. It will never be known how many millennia man endured in misery and darkness under the moldering blanket of envy. Helmut Schoeck writes in his timeless masterpiece, "Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior," that whole societies, hobbled by envy, rejected innovation and prosperity, preferring the arrested development of all to the advancement of the few. --"
We discuss socialism every day here on FR, -- with socialists who insist that our various levels of gov't can 'arrest the development of all to the advancement of "the goals" a supposed 'majority'.
I've never been a fan of Jonah Goldberg, -- but I have to admit he makes a great point in this essay.
I actually think this is one of his weaker articles. In fact, I would say his 3 weakest articles are all packed into to his last 5 releases. Maybe there’s something going on in his life...
Nothing against Agust Bebel, and of course the Left is anti-Semitic, even the stupid, stupid, utterly stupid and moronic American Jews who vote for the Treason Party.
I just was taking issue with the phrase “socialism of fools”, when, in fact, all socialism is utterly and completely foolish (for those who believe it will actually help people) and evil (for those who use it to become dictators).
There is no other socialism than the “socialism of fools”. That was my only point.
While I agree with your basic position, I would ask you this: What race are Jews?
Tribal, perhaps, ethnic, yes, but racial, no.
Often in this time of the world, “race” implies an ethnic group. Races are distinctive and it is important we understand that there are three major races of human kind.
Jews may be any of the three.
Regards,
AR
Good point. I typed “race” without thinking. Thanks for the correction.
Or maybe the majority just understood economics and monetary theory better.
Assuming the total amount of goods and services is the same in both worlds, a person IS better off if he is making twice as much as everyone else (he makes $50,000 and everyone else makes $25,000) than if he makes half as much as everyone else (he makes $100,000 and everyone else makes $200,000). In the world in which everyone makes $200,000, prices for goods and services will be much higher than the world in which everyone makes $25,000. While real purchasing power is the same in both worlds, nominal prices will be much higher in the world where everyone makes $200,000, so that $100,000 won't go as far in that world as $50,000 does in the other world.
May I add that one of the reasons we have so much financial turmoil is because folks are acting on their “covertness” - living way beyond their means. It’s really not the subprime mortgage market (14%) only 2% of the subprime are in trouble. The REAL problem is the ADDICTION to CREDIT cards and maxing out.
The descendents of the Commie Left has much deteriorated since the its intellectual heyday. While such a deterioration is understandable because of Marxism being completely against human nature — at least in those days they weren’t the inarticulate, elderly New Left savages they are today.
You are making the unjustified assumption that the lower-income world has the same total amount of goods and services available as the higher income world.
I think the basic study, as understood by the participants, was not with regard to number of dollars, it was with regard to the standard of living.
“Would you rather live at a 2X standard of living if everybody else lived at a 1X standard, or at a 4X standard if others lived at an 8X standard?”
The dollars are just a different way of saying X.
The descendents of the Commie Left has much deteriorated since the its intellectual heyday.Socialism could almost be excused back in the early days of the 20th century, when it was just a promise, and hadn't really been applied, at least not in its truly modern, Marxist form.
But as the century wore on, the idea of socialism as something good wore down until today the only people pushing socialism are either utter imbeciles or those who imagine themselves at the top of the dictatorship.
Unfortunately we have a lot of imbeciles and a lot of wannabe dictators in our own country.
I must confess to an occasional bout of schadenfreuden. smirk*
Wrong. His example was stated in terms of dollar income.
The example did NOT claim that universe A had 8 times less goods and services produced in aggregate than universe B.
Perhaps he misdescribed it, and in reality the example in the study was limited in that the people against whom one compared oneself was just a small circle of acquaintances, and not all “others.” That kind of a study would actually support the point Jonah was making.
Bump for later...
"2 a : a family, tribe, people, or nation belonging to the same stock b : a class or kind of people unified by shared interests, habits, or characteristics "
This well defines Muslims.
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