The guilt-tinged fear of being thought unequal is very deeply ingrained in the human psyche. It is found among primitive peoples and existed long before the appearance of Christianity. Yet it is striking that so many Christians, more particularly those of the twentieth century, who feel this existential sense of guilt believe it to be a special Christian quality. In so doing they overlook the New Testament’s remarkable religious, psychological and historical achievement in freeing believers from precisely this primitive, pre-religious, irrational sense of guilt, this universal fear of one’s neighbour’s envy and of the envy of the gods and spirits. For that alone made the modern world emotionally and socially possible. The essence of this idea is already to be found in Max Weber’s theory of the role of the Protestant, and more especially the Calvinist, ethic in the development of capitalism.
Under a portentous misconception as to what had really happened when, in the West and for the first time in human history, envy had been successfully mastered, socialist thinkers in the nineteenth century again began to popularize concepts on the nature of inequality and, indeed, to make them morally binding. This corresponded exactly to the concepts of primitives. Since then, however, literary left-wing sentimentalists and their ideas of values have taken things to a point where even people who in no way consider themselves socialists, Marxists or ordinary progressives, among them sincere Christians genuinely concerned with ethical imperatives, no longer know how to deal with primitive emotional complexes, nor are they able to comprehend the irrationality of those complexes. Hence they grope desperately and endlessly for ‘social’ solutions, which in fact solve nothing.
Paul Tournier
The French-Swiss doctor and depth-psychologist Paul Tournier, who endeavours to combine psychoanalysis and Protestantism in his work, has produced an uncommonly illuminating book on genuine and false feelings of guilt (1959). His honesty makes it possible to trace associations which in most writers remain concealed. I have therefore chosen this book for analysis rather than a number of others. In the first half we find autobiographical material concerning the many situations today in which feelings of guilt, often regarded as irrational, determine what a man does and what he fails to do. Anyone who supposes that we have over-estimated the extent and depth of feelings of guilt, or the part they play, should study Tournier.
Although this psychotherapist is unsparing in his revelations of different kinds of guilt feelings, both in himself and in his family, he shies away from the problem of envy. But his book is almost exclusively concerned with what happens psychologically when we are afraid of being envied. Intrinsically, Tournier knows this, and once he explicitly formulates it. The term ‘envy,’ however, does not appear in the index, and in all 340 pages is found on only one page. However desirous he is of uncovering social taboos, pharisaism and sublimated guilt feelings, he is noticeably reluctant to push ahead when his observations bring him to the threshold of envy. To give an example:
‘Everyone has his own rhythm, and people have different rhythms from one another. In an office, the great speed of one typist will constantly arouse in her slower fellow-workers a sense of guilt which will paralyse them still further in their work.’
Why does he not say ‘feeling of envy,’ which is certainly more primary? The sense of guilt comes later, particularly in typists who discover that their speed may never come up to standard. Tournier continues:
‘Yet it is a simple fact of nature which should be seen objectively. There is no special merit in the speed of the rapid typist any more than there is culpability in the slowness of her colleagues.’[1]
Of course not! But that is never the way envy reacts. Tournier comments:
‘Moreover, if she is at all sensitive, the rapid typist will come to feel guilty for being the involuntary cause of umbrage among others and will do many little services for them to win their forgiveness.’
No doubt the girl who is superior is not really aware of anything like ‘envy-avoidance’ and ‘envy-assuagement,’ feeling instead a vague sense of guilt. This is not due to the facts as they stand, but to the taboo with which we surround the phenomenon of envy. On the other hand, her conciliatory gesture in rendering small services will always bring about the opposite of what was intended—even greater resentment, that is, because she has again demonstrated her superiority. Furthermore the envious person is made really angry by such an attempt to conciliate him. In many offices, as also in schools, in America particularly, those who are quicker or more talented soon lower their own performance to the average level of the group so as to avoid envy.
Tournier is aware of the self-imposed limitation resulting from uneasiness or fear of envy in the less able or less willing, but again he only speaks of the sense of guilt of the superior worker, and not of the less capable one’s envy:
It is the fear of other people’s judgement that prevents us from being ourselves, from showing ourselves as we really are, from showing our tastes, our desires, our convictions, from developing ourselves and from expanding freely according to our own nature. It is the fear of other people’s judgement [why not ‘envy’?] that makes us sterile, and prevents our bearing all the fruits that we are called to bear.[2]Tournier rightly calls this attitude ‘false guilt feeling.’ I prefer the term ‘envy-avoidance behaviour.’ Only much later in his study, when he can no longer shut his eyes to it, does he use the word ‘envy’ three times on one page: the manifestation of envy in others arouses in us unnecessary, destructive feelings of guilt. He writes:
A certain sense of guilt is a corollary of any privilege even when the privilege is deserved. An employee of quality feels it towards his fellows when an appreciative chief entrusts him with the highest responsibilities. A girl who is asked to sing in church at Christmas has this feeling towards a friend who would have dearly liked to be invited instead. Any envy or jealousy of other people arouses some guilty conscience in us.[3]It is precisely this envy and its social consequences with which I am concerned. Tournier is aware of these consequences when further on he writes:
But in all fields, even those of culture and art, other people’s judgement exercises a paralysing effect. Fear of criticism kills spontaneity; it prevents men from expressing themselves freely, as they are. Much courage is needed to paint a picture, to write a book, to erect a building designed along new architectural lines, or to formulate an independent opinion or an original idea. Any new concept, any creation falls foul of a host of critics. Those who criticize the most are the ones who create nothing. But they form a powerful wall which we all fear to run into more than we admit. . . .[4]Tournier does not mention, however, that his observation is true of every kind of innovation and that this ‘powerful wall’ applies to every social situation or, for example, that it represents one of the main causes for the absence of even elementary progress in any so-called underdeveloped societies. A few lines further on he says: ‘On reflection, we can realize how this fear of being criticized impoverishes mankind. It is a source of all the conformism which levels men and locks them away in impersonal modes of behaviour.’[5] This is precisely where he should have written ‘fear of envy,’ but that term is not used. The envious man certainly does very often disguise his hostility, his damaging intention, giving it the form of apparently well-intentioned advice, of criticism or of mocking or insidious judgement, but that in no way alters the basic factor of envy.[6] Why does he use, instead, the colourless, exculpatory word ‘criticism’?
Here we must go back a few chapters. On page 37, in a book of more than 200 pages, he uses the word ‘envy’ three times. One mention has already been quoted; here are the second and third:
‘So what separates people is not only the differences in their positions, nor merely the envy which the differences arouse in the less privileged, but also the fact that they awaken amongst those who are envied a guilty conscience which spoils their pleasure.’[7] What eludes Tournier is the impossibility of a society, whether large or small, rich or poor, in which there are no envious people. Because the central figure of his study is the man ridden with genuine or false guilt, and not the envious man, and because he takes the latter for granted (the observer who is responsible for the sense of guilt in those who are superior, happier, etc.) and does not go into the question of the ethics and the psychology of envy, the solution to the sense of guilt about which he feels so uneasy remains hidden from him. Only when one has the courage to recognize the actually or ostensibly envious man for what he is, and to ignore him (realizing that he is insatiable and that nothing will escape him), can one rid oneself of false guilt. Why does Tournier not see this? He himself provides a clue on page 36, one page before the passage where for the first and last time in the book the word ‘envy’ escapes him.
The ‘socially permissible’ holiday
Tournier, a well-established doctor and writer in French Switzerland, recounts an event in his own family. After mentioning various often irrational feelings of guilt associated with the spending of money, he continues with the following ‘interesting experience’:
‘My wife and I were talking about taking the children for a cruise along the Dalmatian coast and on to Greece. Was such an expense legitimate, more particularly was it willed by God?’ (Is this an echo of the archaic, pagan fear of the envy of the gods which so oppressed the Greeks? Very possibly, since elsewhere Tournier admits that fundamentally the Christian God never begrudges joy and fullness of life to his earthly creatures.) ‘Such a thing can be argued interminably in one’s own mind, with a host of plausible arguments, but without altogether silencing an inner doubt.’[8] Tournier was afraid of the potential envy, imagined or real, of his colleagues, and no doubt associated this unease with a vague idea of luxury and social justice. Significantly he adds:
‘It seemed to us also, in our own meditations, that if we submitted the question to a friend from the same social milieu, this check would not be of much value.’
But why not? Because, as can be shown again and again, envy arises mainly within the same class, the same professional group, or among equals. Tournier is unable to ask those whose envy he fears. As we learn from other admissions in his book, he is not in the least averse to, or ashamed of, asking his friends much more embarrassing questions. But he cannot ask how much ‘luxury’ he and his family ought to indulge in on a holiday. His solution is revealing:
‘At the time I had close links with a group of workers in a near-by factory. One evening I went to the house of one of them with all my household accounts, all my bank statements and my tax declarations [!]. With his encouragement, we went for our cruise.’
Thus, our highly educated, successful, hard-working Genevan doctor goes to a working man for ‘social permission’ for his expensive holiday. Only when he has the assurance that the voice of the people—the circle, that is, for whose sake he was prepared to practise ‘socially just’ frugality and retrenchment—will grant him without envy the experience of an especially delightful cruise, does he feel safe from the envy of his colleagues, the very people who are able to afford a similar trip—an envy the awareness of which he had sought to repress by interposing this complex of social justice, of sacrifice for the benefit of the less well-to-do. It is an insight that eludes him. In a situation so painfully absurd that few people would ever divulge it, all he mentions is insuperable, irrational feelings of guilt and inhibitions.[9] On page 146, Tournier interprets the story of Cain and Abel. Not once does he mention envy or jealousy. Cain’s ‘wickedness,’ his ‘anger’ even, are mentioned, but never the simple word ‘envy.’ And again, towards the end of the book, when the author writes of the good son’s annoyance at the happy reunion of the prodigal son with his father, and later of the parable of the labourers in the vineyard, the motive of rebellion in either case is not called envy.[10]
From: ENVY A Theory of Social Behaviour
by Helmut Schoeck
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