BOOKS The tenth commandment

J. ENOCH POWELL

It is time that envy was reinstated in its rightful place as one of the basic data of in- dividual and social psychology. Treated by theology as one of the deadly sins and recognised and discussed without inhibition by philosophers, poets, psychologists and other observers of the human scene until the present century, it has all but disappeared from view in our own time, and reference to its existence, let alone study of its function, has been sedulously avoided. Helmut Schoeck. the professor of sociology at Mainz. explains the reasons why, in a com- prehensive analysis which restores the phenomenon of envy to a central place in

social motivation- Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour translated by Glenny and Ross,

and published by Seeker and Warburg at 6 gns. His book is not particularly well arranged, and tends to heaviness and repeti- tion. One suspects that the language was no

more beautiful in the German original than the English translation. But it provides a

powerful aid to the understanding of some of the more baffling political manifestations of our time.

Envy, the thesis runs, is universal and ubi- quitous in human beings. It is not dependent on any particular cause, such that, if that cause were removed, envy would disappear. There are no circumstances, and no society, where envy does not find the material it needs to feed on. In all societies, from the most primitive to the most advanced, envy and its counterpart, the fear of being envied, give rise to a whole series of often elaborate systems of behaviour.

Envy would not be so strong and in- defeasible an instinct, unless it had an im- portant function in the evolution and survival of human society, and therefore of mankind itself. Like other such instincts, however, envy is both preservative and destructive. Those societies survive and flourish which have discovered how to ex- ploit its preservative effects while containing the destructive ones. Envy-management, in short, can be life or death for a society.

The negative social effects of envy (including those of the fear of being envied) may be to stultify and prevent all progress, by making variation between individuals and manifestation of individual superiority too dangerous to be persisted in. This is characteristic of many primitive, taboo-rid- den societies, and may be one of the ex- planations of economic backwardness. Moreover, if the validity of the envy motive is once accepted by a society, there is no limit to the sheer self-destruction which is possible since no divestment of authority or privilege or difference is capable of neutralis- ing envy : for instance, 'it does not need an exceptionally vivid imagination to realise the extent to which people of different ages would become obsessed by the discrepancies arising in a society in which age was the only distinguishing feature'. We are not far here from an insight into the deeper causes of current anarchical unrest.

On the other hand, it seems likely that a positive function in the evolution of human society has been exercised by envy in that it restrained variations of individual behaviour within tolerable bounds, and maintained a mutual bond, policed by envy and the fear of envy, between all the differentiated members of a society. Success or failure have thus depended on the devices by which a balance could be maintained between the preservative and the destructive effects of envy.

The notion of luck is one of the simplest of these devices. Unknown to many primitive societies, it provides a lightning conductor for envy, as may be seen from the readiness with which gains of pure chance are left outside an otherwise highly egalitarian ('envious') system of taxation. The notion is the very opposite to that widespread but typically Greek attribution of envy to the universe itself, as divinely personified in the envy of the gods, who lie in wait to punish the good fortune or pro- minence of mortals.

Professor Schoeck identifies the coun- teracting of envy and of the fear of envy by Christianity as one of the decisive factors in Western progress. Not only was the deity rendered benevolent (unenvious) towards men, but Christianity offered an in- terpretation of human life in which envy and the fear of envy became irrelevant. When St Paul declared that in Christ there is neither rich nor poor, bond nor free, man nor woman, he was precisely not advocating egalitarian taxation, equal rights or the aboli- tion of slavery. That the Christian message is today thus misinterpreted—so as to destroy its envy-neutralising effect—is significant for the modern predicament.

Any policy which aims at exorcising envy and the concomitant sense of guilt—the reason why so many intellectually eminent individuals are attracted to levelling doc- trines, because they aspire to purge the sense of guilt to which eminence itself is prone—by measures of social or economic equalisation is foredoomed to failure, because it rests on the false presumption that envy and envy-guilt exist only because they are 'justified', because the materials exist on which they feed.

It is therefore not possible, because of human nature itself, so to reorganise economic or social life that by that means envy and resentment cease to exist. The utopias which those most sensitive to envy and guilt have devised throughout the ages for their own relief remain literally utopian: the question is not how envy is removed, but how it is lived with. In a deliberately egalitarian policy it becomes actually less manageable, because envy fastens most upon the smallest, not the largest, inequalities and upon those who are nearest to ourselves, not furthest away. Perhaps in the command to 'love thy neighbour as thyself', the word 'neighbour' is after all meant in the most precise and narrow sense!

One of the areas which the social psychology of envy illuminates best is the modern craze for policies of international aid. One aspect after another yields to the

open sesame of the envy theory. The ex- orcising of guilt and envy at a distance—as between people, and peoples, who have no knowledge of one another—is a recognisable method of evading the problem posed by neighbour envy: hence the often observed fact that international and long-range do- gooders are commonly highly uncharitable at close quarters. The policies of in- ternational aid, which defy rational justifica- tion on either economic or strategic grounds, are at once intelligible when viewed as a col- lective purgation of the fear of envy, to which the 'affluent society'—itself an envy, guilt coinage—is specially prone and which is more vivid to the donors than the imagined envy is to the recipients. The result, of exacerbating both the fear and guilt of the affluent countries and the envy and hatred of the recipient countries, was perfectly predict- able. The fact that the receiver of a gift hates the giver is a commonplace; the gift does nothing to remove the material for en- vy; on the contrary, the act of giving becomes both a justification for the envy and an additional ground for feeling it.

The parallel with policies inside multi- racial societies for banishing or reducing racial 'discrimination' or for exorcising by economic and social reorganisation the mutual envy and fear of envy between the races, does not need to be laboured.

When so large a part of modern politics, above all in America, is concerned with policies which an insight into the psychology of envy would reveal to be inherently. futile, it is perhaps not surprising that the study of that psychology has been instinctively or deliberately neglected.