When Bad Things Happen to Other People (30 page)

Frailty, Thy Name Is Woman

Contempt for women grows out of the Western philosophical tradition. Kant, like others before him, equated emotions with passivity and women with both. Emotions, we learn from (male) philosophers, are feminine, actions are masculine. Even orthodox emotions (such as love and compassion) raise suspicions, because emotions allegedly threaten to undermine reason. Kant saw little or no moral significance in the emotions: for him, morality centered on actions—what he took to be the realm of men.

It is not surprising that so-called feminist philosophers have to a large extent fastened upon the emotions, for the association of emotions has been not just symbolic, but also normative. This means that disdain for emotions amounts to disdain for women. Work in feminist ethics has tried to expose a moral double-bind: men have confined women to a certain realm of experience or behavior and then blamed women for their imputed behavior. Emotions rule women, our moral tradition told us, and so women are unsuitable for public life. Women belong at home because we have been conditioned to see women as suited for domesticity.

This synopsis simplifies what feminist philosophers have shown us, but nonetheless captures a bona fide fear of emotions that has pervaded Western philosophy. The misguided idea that emotions signify personal weakness and, further, subvert reason gave men an additional reason to hide their 
Schadenfreude
.

We learn to disguise our
Schadenfreude
for the same reason that our forebears came to ban public executions. Anger toward criminals had to disappear from ready view in order to sustain a belief in a non-vengeful justice. We have learned a dubious lesson, namely that emotions and justice have little if anything to do with one another. This lesson harbors un-easiness over the idea that the legal institution of punishment might rest to some important extent on emotional responses to transgressions. Mentally separating the emotions from justice recalls a tradition of segregating women from reason.

What Remains Unsaid

What does it mean to stifle emotions? It means we don’t allow ourselves to reflect on a thought that presents itself. Sometimes we have good reason to do this, namely to make our lives easier in society. Emotional conformity often confers identity in a particular group. Cheering over the electrocution of a hardened criminal, for example, may well land us outside of a group to which we want to belong. Silence may earn us the admiration of desired peers.

Emotions, like actions, follow social cues. In Thomas Hardy’s 
Return
 
of the Native,
 an ambitious mother happens upon her worldly and well-educated son working in the fields as a common laborer. Mrs. Yeobright observes her child Clym “wearing the regulation dress of the craft, and apparently thinking the regulation thoughts, to judge by his motions.”1 To succeed as a field laborer, Clym has programed himself to think and feel as a field laborer. By watching him closely, his mother can sadly tell that her son has adapted to a socially inferior position.

Can our communities really dictate our mental responses to the world around us? Listen to what Simone de Beauvoir tells us in her autobiography 
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
 about the thrill of suddenly understanding her fondness for a girl: “All at once conventions, routines, and the careful categorizing of emotions were swept away and I was overwhelmed by a flood of feeling that had no place in any code. I allowed myself to be uplifted by that wave of joy which went on mounting inside me, as violent and fresh as a waterfalling cataract, as naked, beautiful and bare as a granite cliff.”2 This first-person account describes the experience of an outlaw emotion. (It is just one description, however, as the experience may not always be pleasant.) As a young girl, the renowned French philosopher already knew something about non-conformist emotions. The violation of an unspoken code thrilled her.

In my earlier discussion of emotion management, I praised Arlie Russell Hochschild, who has argued that we instinctively mold our emotions to conform to reigning standards of appropriateness. Alison Jaggar’s account of outlaw emotions advances Hochschild’s contribution to moral thinking. Jaggar illustrates what it means to disavow or repress emotion, and what she writes can illuminate 
Schadenfreude
. She offers both a useful description of disavowal and a compassionate justification of it. Against Scheler, who warns that the disavowal of
Schadenfreude
leads to the generation of 
ressentiment
, Jaggar points to the redundancy of avowing outlaw emotions in a culture that expects them of you.

Strategies for disavowing
Schadenfreude
disguise a rationalization of self-interest while they reveal cultural ideas. These strategies attest to the force of emotions generally, as well as to the susceptibility of the socially privileged to turn away from the suffering of others.

According to Jaggar, the apparently individual and involuntary character of our emotional experience is often used as evidence that emotions are “gut reactions.” Such an inference is, however, quite mistaken. One of the most obvious illustrations of the processes by which emotions are 
socially constructed
 is the education of children, who are carefully taught appropriate responses to any number of situations: to fear strangers, to relish spicy food, or to enjoy swimming in cold water, for example.3 Children also learn what their culture defines as appropriate ways to express the emotions that it recognizes. Although any individual’s guilt or anger, joy or triumph, presupposes the existence of a social group capable of feeling guilt, anger, joy, or triumph, this does not mean that group emotions precede or are logically prior to the emotions of individuals. Rather, it indicates that individual experience is simultaneously social experience.

Values both derive from social experience and presuppose emotions to the extent that emotions provide the experiential basis for values. If we had no emotional responses to the world, it is inconceivable that we should ever come to value one particular state of affairs over another. Further, it would be in many instances virtually impossible to claim knowledge without some significant familiarity with the emotions. If, for example, someone feels no fear when confronted with apparent danger, his or her lack of fear requires further explanation. Similarly, if he or she is afraid when no danger can be identified, his or her fear is denounced as irrational or pathological. Without characteristically human perceptions of and relations to the world, Jaggar points out, there would be no characteristically human emotions.

Jaggar maintains that feminists can learn from outlaw emotions how to reeducate, refine, and eventually reconstruct their emotional constitution. Moreover, social alienation enables outsiders to see and understand patterns which elude insiders. Ironically, outsiders understand systems of domination better than those who construct or enforce them. Insiders need outsiders to explain how a community can be improved:

Oppressed people have a kind of epistemological privilege insofar as they have easier access to this standpoint [“a perspective that offers a less partial and distorted and therefore more reliable view”] and therefore a better chance of ascertaining the possible beginnings of a society in which all could thrive. (p. 162)

The very idea of defending or valuing outlaw emotions raises difficult questions about social stratification and what we are to understand by the facts of inclusion and exclusion. Those difficulties aside, I want to highlight Jaggar’s contention that those who are excluded from a morality might enjoy a privilege unknown or unknowable to those who are included by it. It is a thesis that sounds remarkably like Nietzschean
ressentiment
. For Nietzsche, the kind of knowledge that the weak possess is frankly not worth having: more important is the knowledge or where-withal one needs to become strong. Jaggar would insist here that people struggling under a system of domination are not weak, but rather oppressed. There is an important difference.

We might view the elite as the oppressed, particularly given Nietzsche’s account of the “herd mentality.”4 I do not want to criticize Jaggar for not filling out the notion of oppression in part because Nietzsche leaves the same question unanswered and in part because any normative answers introduce an illusion of neatness into what is a very ambiguous concept. Descriptive answers to the question of what oppression is—and they are enormously varied—suggest an infinite number of possible outlaw emotions.

Jaggar forces us to rethink what we mean by male dominance. She focuses our attention on control, evaluation, and exclusion. Male-dominated cultures control women’s conduct; they label women the intellectual, moral, or spiritual inferiors of men; and they exclude women from the religious and political centers of a society. Jaggar recognizes that people (not just men) are highly motivated to seize meanings and resources out of a sociocultural environment that has been arranged to provide them with the meanings and resources that suit them.

The point of identifying
Schadenfreude
as an “outlaw emotion” is to expose a moral system of domination. I want to look more closely at the social position of women, among whom
Schadenfreude
is reputed to flourish and to lurk. The first of two strategies for repressing
Schadenfreude
illustrates the effect of names on concepts, and the second reveals an assumption of the moral inferiority of women. The assumptions underlying these strategies limit in advance the applicability of the moral theory they produce. They also show that strategies for repressing
Schadenfreude
mask both the expression and production of 
ressentiment
.

First Denial Strategy: The Disavowal of
Schadenfreude

A central part of the experience of
Schadenfreude
involves the denial that one takes pleasure in the actual suffering of another. As with the sentencing of “enemies of the people” and those guilty of “crimes against humanity,” morally acceptable pleasure in the injury of other people must spring from love of justice. The underside of justice is the emotional satisfaction of revenge (for those who were directly harmed by the criminals) or
Schadenfreude
(for those whose belief in justice sustains the conviction that criminals deserve to suffer) or of malice (for those who simply take sadistic pleasure in the suffering of others, whether or not they are guilty of serious acts). It is not farfetched to assert that a conviction won in a war crimes court entails not only joy that a particular side has won the case but also (for the allies of the winning side) active pleasure that the other side has suffered defeat.

Denying
Schadenfreude
is one of the simplest ways to claim that one takes pleasure only in justice prevailing. Refusing to name
Schadenfreude
is one of the simplest ways to deny it, much in the way that a heterocentric society might have refused to name homosexual impulses, desires, or domestic arrangements. Let’s circle back to the identification of
Schadenfreude
as a discrete emotion in order to see how naming
Schadenfreude
(or refusing to do so) amounts to an act of symbolic formulation.

In the American play 
Suddenly Last Summer
 (1958) by Tennessee Williams, Violet Venable, a reclusive grande dame played by Katharine Hepburn, is puzzled when a young doctor asks her if she is not a widow. “Yes, of course,” she confirms, but points out that much more important to her, she is a woman who has lost her only son. “Why is it,” she wonders aloud, “that they have a word for a woman who has lost her husband, but not for a woman who has lost her son?”

Like Violet Venable, someone might wonder why there is no English word for “pleasure in the misfortune or suffering of another.” Few English speakers avail themselves of the term, most likely because of their unfamiliarity with it. If at first
Schadenfreude
seems like a term English speakers can do without, we should recognize a strong case for arguing to the contrary, given the ubiquitousness of what it signifies. For the brand of happiness it names is so much a part of our daily lives, and so central to our narratives of them, that it seems futile to protest that the would-be label sounds too foreign or simply pretentious. We are conditioned to think of
Schadenfreude
as a pleasure that dare not speak its name.

Schadenfreude
 in America

Why haven’t Americans adopted the German term? The reason may be simple: we manage just fine without it. Though such a reason may explain why we have no word for “a woman who has lost her only son,” it seems an implausible answer to the
Schadenfreude
question. For it can just as easily be argued that Americans would immediately be able to use the word discriminately upon acquiring it as it can be argued that they do not need a word for
Schadenfreude
because they manage just fine without it. Claiming that a society can do without a particular word or device neglects the possibility that that word or device might quickly assume a useful function in a society. As Yale historian John Boswell notes:

English appears to have no real equivalent for the French term “fiancé,” but this is certainly no indication that the idea of heterosexual engagement was unknown in the British Isles prior to its adoption. Why foreign words for social relations (“protégé,” “gigolo,” “madame,” etc.) catch on and supplant indigenous terms is a complex issue; the notion that the phenomena they describe were unknown before importation of the word belongs among the least likely explanations.5

What is especially puzzling about 
Schadenfreude
—unlike the hypothetical word for “a woman who has lost her only son”—is that the term has 
not
 caught on in America. For what it signifies is not something peculiar to a few sinister or morally weak persons, but something that occurs, no doubt with variable frequencies, to virtually all non-infantile, non-comatose human beings—not just to Germans.