Explainer

Creed

Seven Deadly Sins

Sin

17 July 2023

7 min read

Envy: jealousy’s evil cousin

In the second of a series on the Seven Deadly Sins, Roger Bretherton investigates the psychological and moral impact of envy on its victims.

Roger Bretherton

Roger is a Clinical and Coaching Psychologist.

Illustration generated by Dan Kim using Midjourney

The victims of envy

One of my favourite exercises to facilitate with large groups of people is called, ‘You at Your Best’. I introduce them to a list of positive qualities of character (wisdom, gratitude, kindness, self-control, bravery etc.) and then get them to pair up with someone they have never met. They tell a story of them at their best. When, in the past week, have they behaved in a way that was admirable? When did they surprise themselves with presence of mind or wisdom in action? It is a short exercise. It only takes six minutes. They tell the story, and the other person spots the strengths of character they hear in it.

Most of the stories aren’t that exceptional – a problem solved at work, a small kindness shown to family, an awkward but necessary moment of truth – but invariably the room becomes deafeningly voluble as people share their finest moments with a receptive audience. It is amazing how energised people become when given permission to talk about living close to their ideals. Within minutes people who had previously never met are gabbling away to each other like long lost relatives. Strangers have become friends. Outsiders feel included. No one wants to stop.

The hardest part of the exercise was to admit to a time when they were strong, kind, wise, brave, or honest.

When I finally manage to reign in the raucous joy of connecting people, I’m curious to know how they found the exercise. Almost always someone will say that they found it unnerving to talk positively about themselves. The hardest part of the exercise was to admit to a time when they were strong, kind, wise, brave, or honest. They noticed a kind of internal barrier to their willingness to voice their own virtues. It feels socially dangerous or ethically wrong to say good things about themselves out loud. Their social conditioning tells them that bad things will happen to them if they do.

When someone voices a sentiment like this – a nervousness to acknowledge the goodness they contribute to the world – it is not an expression of humility or modesty. More likely, at some point, perhaps for a prolonged period time, the very things that are best and most beautiful about them, have been attacked and criticised. I’m pretty sure I’m dealing with a victim of envy.

The misdirection of envy

Envy is greatly misunderstood in our time. It was once named among the seven deadly sins. Deadly because, when unchecked, it has the capacity to possess a human being entirely, to become their modus operandi, to subtly pollute every thread of relationship with which they have contact. Sin because… well, as a way of being, it poisons any prospect of joyful human community for those who are beholden to it.

To make matters worse, we are often unclear about the terminology, particularly the difference between jealousy and envy. But the distinction is crucial. To be jealous is to protect and defend what is ours. Most obviously demonstrated in sexual or romantic relationships, jealousy is the instinct to protect the boundaries of a precious relationship, to view anything that threatens our commitment to those we love, as a temptation to be resisted. Sure, it can be over-played, it can become possessive or confining, but if our partner never shows jealousy, never expresses frustration at the things that spoil or reduce the quality of our shared intimacy, we are likely to wonder if they care at all. Advocates of the sexual revolution have been predicting the demise of sexual jealousy since the 1960s. They view it as a holdover from our evolutionary origins, no longer necessary in the contemporary world, past its sell-by-date and soon to be dispensed in the era of free-love. But rumours of the death of sexual jealousy have been greatly exaggerated. Our hardwired instinct to hang onto love still hangs on. Most of us feel that a relationship entirely stripped of jealousy is a relationship stripped of love.

Envy sees the strength, talent, or goodness of others as a threat and, if we can’t own them, vows to destroy them.

The psychological contours of envy are similar, but darkly different. If jealously wishes to cling to what is good; envy aims to destroy it. If to be jealous is to preserve what is ours; to be envious is to resent others for having what is theirs. Sometimes we don’t even want the things we envy, we just can’t bear the thought of someone else having them. Envy sees the strength, talent, or goodness of others as a threat and, if we can’t own them, vows to destroy them. It is the message behind every honour killing, the mantra of every domestic abuser: if I can’t have you, nobody can. It is the ethos of the competitive workplace in which others’ success is our failure - with every colleague who succeeds something inside of us dies.

But this isn’t how envy is usually portrayed. Looking at the pop-culture definitions of envy that surround us, we could be forgiven for thinking envy is a bit of a laugh. Harmless, desirable, even good. Hardly a deadly sin, nowhere near the toxic desire to destroy the unique beauty of the other, more like the branding of our favourite nail salon, or eau de perfume. We are immersed in propaganda for envy-lite: the cheeky and indulgent desire to make other people wish they were us.

But perhaps the main reason envy is so bad, the reason it consistently ends up on these ancient lists of how not to be, is that it has no end game.

There can only be ONE

We are subject to a misdirection. As every totalitarian propagandist knows, the best way to make people malleable is not to present them with a clear thesis with which they can argue, but to drown them in so much inconsequential information, so much white noise, that they can no longer discern what really deserves their attention. We are made to look in the wrong direction. Spotting the minor envies but completely oblivious to the major envies that act as invisible killers in our social water supply. We spot the envies we can laugh at while passing by the envies that leak into everyday life undetected, like carbon monoxide. We strain out the gnats but swallow the camel.

Envy in its most deadly form is often too familiar to be noticed. Ever since Cain killed Abel, the most damaging expressions of envy have been found in families. Siblings compete against one another for the limited resource of parental affection and devise a surprisingly innovative set of chess moves designed to gain approval. Some families resort to an ever-shifting set of alliances and betrayals, like a royal court, a game of musical chairs in which the aim is not to land in the blame seat when the music stops. Other families, especially larger families, resolve the issue by carving out unique turf for each child. We recognise these stereotypes: the cool one, the funny one, the clever one, the spiritual one, the naughty one. The Spice Girls were not the first to realise that a one-word identity can help us stand out from the crowd. It works fine, until we run into someone else who has aligned themselves with the same brand.

Sit-coms are filled with the comedic fallout that occurs when people meet their doppelganger in the workplace. There can be only One - one boss, one comedian, one intellectual, one golden boy, one damsel in distress- and envious war engulfs the boardrooms, staffrooms, and multistorey carparks in which Two meet. If we ever notice the green-eyed monster arising within us, we would do well to ask ourselves: what is the turf I thought was mine that this person is trespassing upon? If we can detach ourselves from the desire to destroy our competitor, and reflect on that question, we’ll come to realise that we were always much more than the fistful of traits that defined us in our family.

No end game

But perhaps the main reason envy is so bad, the reason it consistently ends up on these ancient lists of how not to be, is that it has no end game. There is no better future into which envy would deliver us, it simply aims to negate or nullify whatever threatens our ego at any given moment. If only X were not like that, goes the logic of envy, then everything would be okay. But envy is a myopic state, it can see no further than the restoration of a self-centred status quo. It contributes nothing to the thriving life of joy and love usually associated with the de-centring of the self.

The comparison with jealousy is again illustrative. Ultimately, a jealous act – in friendship or marriage or the workplace – when performed skilfully, is an act of hope. It values what is and holds the belief that the world will be better for everyone if the goodness we know now can be nurtured and preserved into the future. It requires not just an opposition to that which would spoil what is good, but gratitude for the good we already have. Jealousy enjoys, appreciates, and savours the beauty that is already present and aspires to magnify its legacy. Envy despises what is and can conceive no other response than burning it to the ground.

The celebration of envy when taken to its logical conclusion, is the pursuit of a fiction, an impossible fantasy that can never be realised. It invites us to imagine nullifying the strength of all others, so the entire world revolves around us, the only star before an obsequious audience, coerced into adoration. Envy partakes of a cynical philosophy of non-existence, and this is what make it a deadly sin. Not that it is naughty but fun, but that it is pointless and empty.

Essay

Art

Awe and wonder

Creed

Trauma

7 December 2024

10 min read

What good is a beautiful Notre Dame to a traumatized world?

Beauty reminds us why life is worth preserving.

J. S. Averill

J.S. Averill is an American writer and children's educator. She has recently started Substacking.

Stone columns and walls frame round and arched stain glassed widnows.

Notre Dame interior.

Notredame.fr.

On the day the Notre Dame cathedral burned my daughter was just a few days shy of her fourth birthday. She was serious and silent as we watched, on our computer screen, the flames lick through the roof and the spire fall. When I closed the computer, my daughter slipped quietly upstairs to her bedroom and pulled out her collection of pennies scrounged from parking lots, sidewalks, and in between furniture cushions. She placed them into an envelope along with a drawing of the cathedral (spelling wasn’t in her tool kit yet) and directed me to please post it to Paris “for them to fix Notre Dame with.”

It was a beautiful thing to do. And while, unfortunately, it was going to take rather a lot more than a few US pennies to do the job, my daughter was instinctively picking up on something that many others were too: first, that we didn’t want to lose Notre Dame, and second, that it was going to cost a lot of money to save it. Within the first 48 hours €900mn were pledged to the restoration effort from French sources alone.

It was heartwarming at first, France and the rest of the world rallying to save this architectural and historical treasure. But a sour note soon crept in. This sudden appearance of so much money, ready and available to help rebuild the cathedral left many wondering why that money had not been directed toward improving and even saving lives in France and throughout the rest of the world.

A few weeks later, ethicists Peter Singer and Michael Plant co-authored an article echoing these concerns. Bluntly titled “How Many Lives is Notre Dame Worth?”, Singer and Plant argue that the €1 billion currently pledged to Notre Dame’s reconstruction would be better directed to, for example, bed nets for impoverished people in malaria-stricken regions of the world. They estimated that €1 billion dedicated to this cause could prevent approximately 285,000 premature deaths.

It made me uncomfortable, the facts stated like that. Is it right to be devoting so much money to a project that is largely aesthetic when there are people dying of want? If my daughter were in danger of dying from malaria or malnutrition, I would wish for her to be prioritised over a thousand cathedrals.

And yet, envisioning a world in which everything beautiful, but not strictly necessary to keeping a heart beating – ballet companies, art galleries, poetry publishing houses, infrastructures that protect the world’s national parks, ancient cathedrals – is neglected and left to crumble until every human on the globe has their basic, practical needs met seemed to me to be self-inflicting another kind of deep poverty. What ought we, as people who want to make the world better for everyone, to do with our resources of money, time, and strength?

Beauty allows the trauma sufferer to discover empathy both for themselves and others (goodness) and thence to recognize themselves once more as human (truth).

Recently, a book entitled The Ethics of Beauty, by Greek Orthodox ethicist, Timothy Patitsas, has informed my perspective on this quandary. In the preface of his book Patitsas critiques the definition of contemporary ethics (“the rational investigation of morality”) in its elevation of two of the Socratic transcendentals, Truth and Goodness, to the exclusion of the third, Beauty. He writes,

“. . . we find Ethics identifying itself as the investigation of ‘the Good’ by ‘the True’ . . . But, in discarding Beauty, Ethics itself risks becoming not only unlovely but also an affront to loveliness and loses its power to motivate the human soul except through the force of argument.”

I recognize this modern approach in Singer and Plant’s article. They extrapolate what goodness would be (directing money toward providing bed netting) from what is true (the number of needy people and the lives that could be saved). Patitsas suggests, instead, an approach to ethics that leads with Beauty, then flowing to Goodness and Truth. “If we do not begin with Beauty,” he writes, “it is all too easy to miss the full complexity of human personhood.”

Patitsas believes that only those who have “encountered the very antithesis of Beauty” can judge whether the “Beauty-first” approach has any merit, and so his first chapter is a discussion of how it might serve those who have suffered severe trauma. Citing the work of psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, Patitsas explains that a traumatic experience is the profound learning of a soul-shattering “truth”, resulting in a profound excommunication of the sufferer from their fellow humans, from God, and from themselves:

“In any all-engulfing experience, you obtain a knowledge that totally overtakes you, but when such an experience includes trauma, other effects are added, including the cutting of communion, the unraveling of character, and the learning of heretical truths.”

These “heretical truths”, according to Patitsas, are newfound, deep, perhaps unarticulated, revelations that the world is hostile towards the sufferer, and that their life is not situated in a mutually dependent, mutually beneficial relation to their fellow humans. Instead, humankind is a threat to them, and God, at best, has no interest in their flourishing. In other words, it leads the sufferer to view and position themselves as something outside the bounds of humanity. Patitsas writes, “When we experience trauma, our very being is thrust away from coherence and solidity and towards non-being - and this is hell.”

Shay found that suicide among traumatized war veterans increased significantly when they were treated using talk therapy, an exclusively truth-centric Freudian approach. Instead, Patitsas argues, the trauma sufferer must be “recommunicated” through Beauty – Beauty being the only agent with experiential power sufficient to meet the potency of trauma. Beauty allows the trauma sufferer to discover empathy both for themselves and others (goodness) and thence to recognize themselves once more as human (truth).

When I first read Patitsas’s description of a Beauty-first path back from trauma I immediately recognized it as my own. In my twenties I experienced, within 18 months of each other, the violent deaths of my brother and my baby son. And truly I felt like a razor blade had engraved in the marrow of my bones the heretofore concealed truth of the universe: nothing precious will survive. I viewed other people as a threat, either for their propensity to suddenly die and break my heart, or the way they caused harm either deliberately or accidentally. God became my worst enemy, all-powerful and merciless.

And yet, most of the rest of the world did not appear to know what I now knew, so I felt forced to cut myself off in order to protect myself and to stay true to truth itself. I was a Gollum-like creature living in the shadows, reduced to panic-attacks set off by ordinary noises such as the doorbell ringing or an object being dropped. Sometimes I just lay in a ball on the floor and screamed for no particular reason other than that the world was so terrifying, so horrifying. I used to be a sane person, now “truth” had made me insane.

The way back to the land of the living was not, for me, through rationality. I cannot, to this day, say why these tragedies happened; I don’t imagine I will ever feel at peace with them. And it was a long time before I was able to speak the truth of what had happened without feeling that I was just twisting the knife in my wound. The first time I caught an inkling that maybe I still might find a place in the world was through a work of fiction. I read of a young Italian who becomes a soldier and is caught up in the ravages of the first World War. He loses everything and everyone precious to him over the course of the war and he witnesses and participates in situations contrary to all moral order. He survives the war, but must discern whether and how to live in its aftermath. The book is his recollection and reflection, as an old man, upon his life. He dies pronouncing the sum of it all as beautiful and precious beyond measure. And reading it I could see that it was. I could recognize myself in much of his pain and struggle, but for the first time I had seen a vision of a way of living that does not deny all that is traumatic and cruel, but can yet hold it within a vessel of costly and weighty beauty.

When we encounter something truly beautiful, we do not perceive that we are all-important, but it affirms that we are a precious part of a transcendent whole.

Another agent of recovery was a recording I owned of the great pianist Artur Rubenstein performing the second movement of Chopin’s first piano concerto. The way he touches the piano keys at certain moments is the tenderest, gentlest thing I have ever known. I used to lay on the floor, a bloody mess, and break my heart into that music and feel it miraculously held. I found that my heart, though black and almost smoking with ruin, surprisingly arose and responded to that gentleness. It could live in that small corner of the universe, completely without fangs. I could still find a home among such things.

There was also a very large, old cemetery, an oasis of big trees, flowers and grass, in the midst of the gray concrete city in which we lived. I used to walk the miles of paths through the cemetery and watch the seasons change: the flowers in the spring, the leaves in the autumn, the green grass in the summer, snow in the winter. I would read the inscriptions carved into the gravestones by the people who loved them, and I could not deny that although death was here in abundance, so too was life.

It was then, once Beauty had cracked the door open and enabled me to at least consider the possibility that I might still be able to live, that was I able to follow where Beauty had gone ahead and allow people to touch me with love. Then I could speak of my pain in a way that could heal instead of just fester the wound.

As I have spent time pondering Patitsas’s thesis, it occurs to me that a worthy definition of Beauty might be that which regifts to all of us – trauma sufferers or not – the goodness and truth of our humanity. From the earliest days of the Judeo-Christian faith, Beauty has been believed to be a manifestation of God in the world, a showing-forth of his character. Since this tradition also teaches that the primary identity of humans is that we bear God’s image, it seems logical that Beauty might also act as a corrective and restorative mirror to us humans in a world in which our humanity is constantly barraged both from within ourselves and from outside influences. When we encounter something truly beautiful, we do not perceive that we are all-important, but it affirms that we are a precious part of a transcendent whole. Beauty does not flatter us that we need no improvement, but rather, it acknowledges our limited strength, limited power, limited knowledge and wisdom, limited desire and ability to do good, and yet assures us that it can hold these wounds and that we possess incorruptible dignity. And when we grasp the reality and blessedness of our own humanity, we are able to recognise and embrace it in others as well. Then we are moved to provide bed netting for those who need it, food for those who are hungry, medical help for the sick and wounded, companionship for the lonely, and all other acts of kindness and mercy.

And so, I affirm with all my heart Singer and Plant’s assertion that we ought to make great efforts to save lives and ameliorate suffering. Indeed, these actions are themselves beautiful! However, it is only at our very real and profound peril that we discount Beauty as a waste of resources. If we do not allow Beauty the seat at the head of the table, we are in grave danger of forgetting why it is that we must do what we can to ease suffering, of forgetting why life is worth preserving, of forgetting that it is possible to have every physical need met and yet be dying.

In this world we are often constrained to choose between tragic options, and there may come a day when Notre Dame must be left to crumble. However, even though I live thousands of miles from Paris, it does my heart good to see it so wonderfully resurrected, and I sense many share my joy.

Notre Dame is already birthing more Beauty into the world. According to a recent article, the reconstruction project has injected a surge of life into the arts and crafts sector. I hope it will result in the creation and preservation of many good and beautiful things. And I hope that we will, all of us, become artisans of the world, creating and tending Beauty. May Beauty appear as stories, music, art, and architecture. May it show up as the tending and protection of nature. May it be food, clean water, mosquito netting placed into hurting hands. May it be caring medical attention. May it be gardens tended and work well done. May it be patience, forgiveness, and grace extended. May it be measured, considered words spoken and printed. May it be children generous with their pennies.May it be Notre Dame standing another 800 years and more.