Root Causes

December 21, 2005

Will Wilkinson praises Anthony de Jasay’s (born 1925) The State (read online) as a book he calls "smartifying" -- readers're smarter after reading it than they were before.

The drive for equality, particularly the contemporary seduction of equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity, purports to pursue such insensible nominalized intangibles as fairness and justice. The more accurate and compassionate motivation, however, is really the desperate drive to escape the pain of invidious comparison of one's situation with another's (often imagined).

Good news. There is a better way to escape envy and covetousness and materialism than depriving others of goods. But it requires a clearer mind and stronger stomach in dealing with one's own inner enemy that is envy.

. . . Very few of the countless inequalities people are liable to resent lend themselves to levelling, even when the attack on difference is as forthright as Mao’s Cultural Revolution. It is no use making everyone eat, dress and work alike if one is still [for example] luckier in love [or health, or temperament, or beauty] than the other. The source of envy is the envious character, not some manageable handful of a countless multitude of inequalities. Envy will not go away once chateaux have all been burned, merit has replaced privilege and all children have been sent to the same schools.

Nor is life improved when the children of the gifted wander, bored and ill-educated, amidst the smoking ruins.

Building, with clear heads, our own and our children's characters. And evaluating the stories we tell ourselves for accuracy, generosity, and aptness. There is the leverage wherein true benefit beckons.

Update:
In a comments, Good&Happy friend Richard Lawrence Cohen, proposes a distinction:

To say, "I should not envy others," is noble. To say, "Others should not envy me," is not.

Richard is technically accurate, since one has no control over others' attitudes anyway. "They should..." isn't noble or ignoble. Just windy pointlessness.

Just to be clear, the underpinning of Good&Happy is that [this side of the Beatific Vision, at which point all bets are off : )]
--virtue, as classically understood, is the soil in which real human happiness takes root, individually and collectively;
--vice is sooner or later toxic, enfeebling, and destructive of happiness; and
--it is possible generally with basic intelligence and reason to recognize and describe both phenomena in most circumstances, and predict their effect in private and public life. Mileage may vary in accuracy, but will improve if positions are not disallowed in advance.

On these suppositions, envy, wherever found and however justified, is so toxic, fruitless, and impoverishing that there need be no refusal to follow the argument where it leads. That is, to the  general point that no one does himself a favor by envying anyone, including anyone at Chez Dilys -- were they so inclined (and so lacking in accurate on-the-ground information as to believe we do not live on the usual human teeter-totter of despair and exultation, ease and difficulty).

Why would one, in theory at least, want the conditions of happiness for himself only?

De Jasay's point is the more practical one. Burn the chateaux, scatter the books, you still have comparative inequality -- the suave, confident charming M le Duc de la Ville, exhibiting the signs and passing on the nuances for generations. You still have the belle who charms the farmer with the best soil and healthiest rams. The clever son who arbitrages the products of the less energetic. And so on. But in the meantime, you have burnt the civilized resources, lowered the ceiling for prosperity and enjoyment, probably paved the way for bald tyranny, and, after the heady revolutionary thirst subsides, happiness has not increased.

de Jasay's main point is basic logical and political hygiene. Many changes may be needed in a pattern of social organization. Thus it is desirable to be beneficial and effective, generous and realistic. [This next piece of reasoning "should be" easy.] Envy, by definition vicious, is not a sufficient rationale for policy, in fact is likely to dictate counterproductive measures.

Envy is contrary to the human bonds at work even in larger beneficent groups. The subject of envy wishes to keep his own benefits and seize the perceived benefits of another. By a kind of "line item veto" he wants only the fruit of another's life, not the conditions (almost always involving something unenviable) that produced that fruit. Nor does he wish to learn how to emulate the process of producing or leveraging those benefits. Envy is spiritual robbery. And when it seems to succeed, the roses it rips from the bush wilt, and fade, and rot.

The alternative to envy is relationship, generosity, and new information. And the impetus to this must equally come from the otherwise envious, for good will on the part of the envied is useless, invisible to the narrowed green eye.

Is this noble to say ? What is its truth?

Cont'd:

Interested as we are here in patterns of thought, we are grateful to correspondents moving on down the line that Richard began earlier. We live in hope that intelligent and genial folks who see it differently will engage and clarify the possibilities.

Those turn out to be our criteria. Engage. Clarify. That is probably psychocentric, MBTI-NT wailing to the solemn skies.

Here's is a responsive e-mail from someone of a different temperament:

Your reply to [Richard's] comment was well reasoned...I respect and admire the purpose of your blog and the values you try to promulgate, but frankly it leaves me feeling suspicious when it takes the form of a lecture to the visibly suffering. When Toryism crosses the line, perhaps. Envy may be a sin, or a cognitive error if you will, but 95% of the people in the world could be excused, I think, for envying me [an educated upper-middle-class American with means and leisure...].

The head swims. All may well be excused in the big picture of Eternity -- we ourselves have overwhelming personal reasons to pray that it be so -- or in the short range of personal transactions. But that is neither our business nor within the scale of the argument.

This is the squishy ground (perhaps a duct-taped Burke vs. a smeared Rousseau?) on which this Republic tries to stand and build in the 21st Century.

• What is factual, evidentiary, or probable? What is effective, and efficient, and ultimately kind? What is possible? What is actually worth building? How are we constructed, as agents in life? What is wisdom here? What will serve our human community?

versus

• [Here, I'm not really capable of inoffensively characterizing the other approach, which from the perspective where I sit hovers unintentionally in the area of discrediting the discussion as somehow unseemly; declaring taboos on its reach; and colonizing the moral high ground by defining the subjects as visibly suffering and lectured, softly excusing them from expectations or imputations of capability of virtue, and implying that taking a close and unsentimental look at manifestations and consequences is comparatively hardhearted unforgiveness.]

We feel very warmly toward the individual correspondent, but are appalled at the gulf in discourse, the impotence, childishness, and obfuscation of analysis by "that's not nice." What are we -- all of us -- going to do if this is the best we can do in joining arguments? What subjects, and perspectives, and joint missions,will be tolerable to both angles of vision? That is, it is not only the content, but our very conceptual choreography that divide us, more deceptively than would the lack of a common language.

And that is not enviable, only sad and dangerous, perhaps our very own Babel curse of reciprocal incomprehensibility for rebellions the ramifications of which are not yet spun out to their end.

Comments

[Richard Lawrence Cohen]

To say, "I should not envy others," is noble. To say, "Others should not envy me," is not.

[Wahrheit]

What a marvelous, intelligent and wonderful blog, O Good and Happy One.

I share many of the interests enumerated at the top. Doing a little post about your place soon.

Thanks for brightening my day!

Regards,

Robert

[dilys]

Like any other unreconstructed vanity-hound, we can easily be lured to abandon the dunes of discourse analysis for lolling closer to home, a ...Saurus simply sloppily slurping from the fountain of praise after lengthy moaning at the moon (so much for a Burkean commitment to the state-of-mind that fosters hard fact).

Thank you, New Victorian. We noticed you several dawns ago over at the One Cosmos watering hole, and will visit your territory with interest.