February 24, 2024: Envy

Good afternoon. Today we are on to part 2 of the seven deadly sins series, with envy this week.

Overview Effect

Before we get to envy, a friend of mine, Jeff Vogel, shared with me a video (just under 3 minutes) that he produced through the NYC Labor Chorus. It is entitled “Life on Earth, So Amazing!”, set to Handel’s Messiah and featuring images of Earth taken from the International Space Station and the famous Earthrise photograph, taken by William Anders from Apollo 8 on December 24, 1968. Here also is a commentary that Jeff wrote for the Baltimore Sun a few years ago (subscribers only, unfortunately).

Jeff would like for some people at the United Nations in particular to see this video, and so if any readers have contacts that can help, he would greatly appreciate the lead.

The Overview Effect, coined by the philosopher Frank White, is the cognitive shift inspired by seeing Earth from space, and it is a profound experience that many astronauts have reported. Although Jeff and I come from different spiritual points of view, we share the hope that the experience of the overview effect, insofar as us earthbound people can experience it, will inspire a more thoughtful approach to the world’s most pressing problems.

Envy

All of us are familiar with the green-eyed monster. Unlike pride, envy and its close cousin jealousy are viewed with mostly negative connotations in the modern world. Envy is the resentful desire to have what others have. Jealousy is a similar concept, and the word is often used interchangeably with envy, but more properly it refers to a fear of losing what one has to another.

Envy manifests in many ways in our ordinary life. There is the resentful comment, rather than a congratulations, to a friend who is engaged to be married when we wish we were the ones to get married. There is the sabotaging of a coworker’s career, or the making of ugly remarks behind their back, when we see them as doing better than us. When we see someone who appears to have a positive spiritual life, there is the resentful comment that they must be one of the “holier than thou” types. And so on and so on.

I mentioned last week that the seven deadly sins are a useful rubric for harmful patterns of thought that lead us into destructive actions, and thus the seven deadly sins are upstream from a rule-based concept of sin. Upon further thought, I don’t think this is quite accurate. Reforming our thoughts is necessary to reform our actions, but the reverse can happen too; cultivating good habits can help cultivate positive thoughts to replace the deadly sins. In the case of envy, making a point to congratulate other people, upon their getting engaged, getting a promotion at work, or after some other accomplishment, whenever we feel a twinge of envy, is a good way to reform those envious habits.

We can also look further upstream from the seven deadly sins, to what Bob Schucts of the John Paul II Healing Center describes as the seven deadly wounds. Especially when we find ourselves falling into the same sinful habits over and over again, when we know full well that they are destructive habits, there is some wound, usually unseen, that motivates the behavior. In the case of envy, that often stems from characterizing our self-worth in terms of transient goods instead of recognizing its intrinsic value. When we think, for instance, that our self-worth is tied to our ability to find an attractive mate, then of course we will feel threatened when others have even more attractive mates, or when our own partner might leave us.

There are seven deadly wounds in Schuchts’ taxonomy, but I don’t think they are meant to map one-to-one onto the seven deadly sins. Behind envy, we very often see the wounds of rejection, abandonment, and fear.

American society has traditionally been characterized by a strong sense of the value of individual effort, the “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” mentality. I am a believer in the value of this attitude, but a dark side must be acknowledged. There is very often a moral component to perceived success; if I see other people as having more prosperous careers than me, then it must be because they work harder, or are more creative, or otherwise show more virtue. If they attract a “better” spouse, then they must be more loving and caring. All this injects just enough moral plausibility into envy that it is sometimes hard to recognize as a sin.

We can look beyond the personal brokenness that is embodied by envy and look to social brokenness. Concerns about inequality are the first things that come to mind. “Class envy” is a pejorative term, but an apt one in my view. Much of the angst about inequality revolves around the fact that people with less will be harmed by the social prominence of people with more, because this will emphasize how they have less. This is coupled with the perception—an accurate perception oftentimes—that those in the higher classes attained their position by something other than meritocratic means.

This gets formalized in the Easterlin paradox. First formulated in 1974 and updated several times since, the Easterlin paradox holds that when a society’s GDP per capita increases beyond a certain level, overall level of happiness ceases to increase. The Easterlin paradox is, in my view, flawed for reasons that I hope to discuss at another time, but for today’s purposes, it is worth noticing how envy is implicitly central to the paradox. Once certain basic needs are met, a person’s evaluation of their own life is based mainly on comparison to others.

Envy’s cousin, jealousy, also drives a great deal of social brokenness. A major factor of many of the world’s social divisions—exclusionary zoning, hostility to immigrants, and caste systems such as Jim Crow, to name just a few—is the desire to maintain a certain degree of status over some other group. Each of these ideas has a common flaw: they view social status as a zero sum game, so that when members of some out-group do better, that must necessarily come at my expense. Such a view is inherently contrary to basic Christian theology. Christians recognize (or should recognize) that God’s grace is not a finite resource, and that if God blesses another person, that does not come at my expense.

Now we come to ecological brokenness. Christians far too often fall into the trap of regarding humans as the only significant element in Creation, regarding the Earth, the cosmos, as the vast array of non-human life as merely a backdrop to the human story. In Genesis 1, God creates humans only on the sixth day of creation, and He affirms all of creation in all six days as good. Genesis, as well as the Catechism of the Catholic Church, emphasize that humans are the stewards—not the owners—of the rest of the natural world. In the Fall as described in Genesis 3, sin enters the world and alienates humans from themselves, from each other, and from the non-human natural world. Ecological brokenness is thus a central part of how we should understand the world, and the deadly sins, especially envy, play into that. There are two main ways that I want to highlight here.

First, the quest for vain social markers, such as a big house, a luxury car, and selfies at exotic locations on Instagram, is driven by envy. We fear that our self-worth is tied up transient status symbols, and so we invest so many resources—the world’s finite fossil fuel supply, air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and land encroachment upon biodiversity, among many others—into things that don’t actually make us better off, or things that are meant to detract from the well-being of others (“I’ve been to Machu Picchu and you haven’t”). I intend to say more about consumerism when we get to gluttony in the deadly sins series.

If envy is a main driver of the first form of ecological brokenness—consumerism—then a main driver of the second form of ecological brokenness—Malthusianism—is jealousy. The term derives from Thomas Robert Malthus and, in particular, his 1798 work, An essay on the principle of population. In this book, Malthus develops a model by which a society’s ability to produce food grows arithmetically (linearly), and population grows geometrically (exponentially), and so it is necessarily the case that eventually, population must grow to the point of pushing standards of living to the subsistence level. Since then, “Malthusian” has taken the more general meaning of a view that ecological limits will or should constrain human standards of living or population levels.

Some of the more notorious recent reincarnation’s of Malthus’ thinking are found in Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 The Population Bomb, which incorrectly forecast imminent famine due to overpopulation, the Club of Rome’s 1972 Limits to Growth, and the peak oil movement that was most prominent in the 2000s. The idea is on display in Garrett Hardin’s bluntly titled Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor and satirized in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (bold mine).

“Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,” returned the gentleman, “a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?”

“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.

“You wish to be anonymous?”

“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned—they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.”

“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”

“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. …”

Predictions of imminent ecological doom due to overconsumption or overpopulation have routinely proven wrong since the time of Malthus, and yet the ideas persist. I was asked one time why this is. I think that at least part of it is that Malthusianism contains some elements that many of us would like to believe. If we believe that our well-being derives from exclusive access to status and wealth (made most explicit in Garrett Hardin’s Lifeboat Ethics), then we want to believe that others cannot or should not have access to the same level of wealth, and what better way to encode these beliefs than in moralistic, ecological terms. I wrote about this a couple years ago under “ecofascism”, or the natural union between a Malthusian worldview and fascistic ideology. These views have been behind some of the most evil acts in history.

Finally, on the theological side, I find that many Christians understand in an intellectual sense that God’s grace is a freely given gift, not something that is earned, but they are still uncomfortable with this. We like to believe that we earned forgiveness somehow, which is hard to square with the notion that God’s grace is stronger than the greatest wickedness that can be imagined and offered to even the most depraved people. Jesus warns of this kind of envy many times, such as in the parable of the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16), where day laborers at a vineyard who started early in the morning are paid the same as those who started late in the afternoon. Do we see ourselves as the laborers who started late in the day, grateful for the landlord’s generosity, or as the laborers who started early, resentful at the apparent unfairness of the situation?