When Bad Things Happen to Other People (8 page)

Marx is by no means the first philosopher to make the point that self-esteem appears necessary to human flourishing. Marx deems self-esteem a political precondition for achievement. Over a century later the state of California followed suit. Republican governor George Deukmejian ratified in September 1986 the creation of the California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility. The stated purpose of the task force was to promote the well-being of the individual and of society in order to diminish an ever-growing epidemic of casualties resulting from serious social ills.6

Although a broad array of groups experience distinctly social problems with self-esteem, I have individuals in mind here. According to Francis Bacon, individuals who have endured temporary setbacks, catastrophes, or deprivations are likely to think that other men’s harms redeem their own sufferings (hence the familiar “misery loves company”).7 Perhaps intentionally, Bacon leaves unspecified the role of familiarity in the generation of this pleasure. Familiarity with a sufferer is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for 
Schadenfreude
.

Philosophers and psychologists dispute what distinguishes self-respect from self-esteem and even whether there is a difference. Such scholarly debates notwithstanding, self-esteem can be understood as the capacity to value oneself despite one’s imperfections and limitations. Self-esteem enhances our sense that we are leading good lives; indeed, it is difficult to separate the two. There are two ways to understand the social aspect of self-esteem. Healthy self-esteem dovetails with egalitarianism insofar as self-esteem presupposes that all persons can come to like themselves. The inherent worth of one person does not increase because of superior attributes or talents or decrease because of inferior attributes or talents. Self-esteem does not blind us to interpersonal differences; rather, it prevents us from concluding that the superiority of one person signifies worthlessness or inherent defect in another.

That said, we can understand self-esteem in precisely the opposite way as well. In fact, many people believe that our individual worth, while not static, rises and falls on our attributes and talents. A consumer-driven society conditions us to think of people as goods. It is easy to see how an unreflective person who enjoyed healthy self-esteem might agree with someone who had little self-esteem here: without certain talents or attributes, a winner might think, it would be impossible to like oneself.

According to political philosopher John Rawls, people enjoy self-esteem if they consider their aims and ideals as worthy and, second, believe that they are well suited to pursue them.8 Low self-esteem, like anxiety over perceived bad luck, brings squarely into the foreground of consciousness the occasionally agonizing interplay of what belongs to us and what belongs to the world, of conquering our world and being conquered by it. Further, low self-esteem causes suffering insofar as it alerts us to the possibilities that our values are shoddy or that we are not capable of attaining what we hope for. Although ethically excusable, the
Schadenfreude
born of low self-esteem manifests weakness of character, even as it illustrates the social merits of proposals for eliminating envy or reducing its effects on human interaction.

Various egalitarian writers have claimed that since envy arises from inequity, the way to reduce the prevalence of envy is simply to reduce the extent to which some people possess more of something good than others. Rawls’s theory of justice can be taken to suggest that
Schadenfreude
is an appropriate emotional experience because of social injustice, the condition in which the less fortunate are forcibly reminded of what they lack. He writes in 
A Theory of Justice
: “When envy is a reaction to the loss of self-respect in circumstances where it would be unreasonable to expect someone to feel differently, I shall say that it is excusable” (p. 534). Rawls maintains that the principles of justice are reasonable despite the propensities of human beings to envy and jealousy. He is perhaps unique among moral philosophers in acknowledging good excuses for envy. He defines the primary good of self-respect as a person’s sense that his or her plan of life is a worthy one and its fulfillment is of value. Rawls’s thinking here resonates with some of Marx’s central tenets.

Conversely, some anti-egalitarian writers have claimed that egalitarianism is itself a product of envy and therefore deeply suspect: it injures those who have more of something good and thereby appeases the envy of those who have less. When the fortunate suffer sudden reversals of good fortune, their social inferiors may rejoice at seeing them brought back into line with others. Nietzsche equated the doctrine of egalitarianism with 
ressentiment
 9 and decay in his analysis of the “order of the rank” in 
The
 
Will to Power
. He regarded it as a form of cultural pessimism that opposed the instincts of life and sentenced existence itself to death. The search for plausible arguments for egalitarianism requires analysis of envy itself. I argue that one’s self-esteem may be so weak as to make any sort of eminence another person enjoys painful. Such weakness underscores the import of moral education and the value of sympathy. An important link connects self-esteem and resentment. Resentment consists of anger caused by an affront to one’s dignity. Those who believe themselves morally entitled to certain treatment are disposed to resent what they regard as indignities. Just as resentment reflects a healthy self-esteem,
Schadenfreude
indicates a reasonable and defensible pleasure that another has received his comeuppance (“those who live by the sword die by the sword”).

To the extent that a feeling of inferiority seems to invite celebration of others’ woes, condemning a
schadenfroh
person is a bit like castigating people for not liking themselves more. And to the extent that a feeling of disempowerment seems to invite resentment, condemning a
schadenfroh
person is a bit like blaming him or her for dissatisfaction with an unjust social framework.

2.
      
Justice and loyalty

A commitment to justice or a sense of loyalty may also generate 
Schadenfreude
. This brand of
Schadenfreude
reflects a belief that if people violate moral obligations, others may appropriately enjoy the setbacks of the transgressors.

It might seem odd to group together here concerns about justice and loyalty, as Rawls does. Against Rawls, Michael Sandel and others have argued that insisting on justice in intimate relationships corrupts the sentiments that sustain friendship, love, and family bonds. Sandel claims in 
Liberalism and the Limits of Justice
 that the qualities of loving relationships deserve priority over justice in the pecking order of virtues of social life. For my purposes justice and loyalty serve similar roles in the generation of and justification for
Schadenfreude
because each involves strong commitments to conceptions of morally good states of affairs. Without loyalty to a conception of justice, it would be difficult to view strangers as fellow travelers. Loyalty provides the basis for group cohesion without which a commitment to justice cannot take social root.

Games children learn at school, like athletic competitions, promote the psychological benefits of belonging to a particular group and of valuing that group through opposition to other groups. Athletic competitions, like wars, frequently employ combat metaphors urging the destruction of opponents. Extreme versions of these metaphors portray opponents as less than human, as animals to be abhorred. The modern-day 
jihad
 and the medieval Crusade both illustrate the relevance of this mentality to morality, or more precisely to the struggle to ensure that one version of morality reigns supreme. The idea of competition among different moralities increases the difficulty of following Augustine’s exhortation to hate the sin and love the sinner, for the allegiance to one system (or team, if you will) can justify labeling opponents as “sinners.” Competition, whether religious/moral or economic, can pit people against one another; in so doing, competition can diminish trust and dehumanize relationships.

To compete effectively, we must put aside some of our tender feelings. To judge fairly, we must do the same. The way we overcome or ignore compassion in such instances raises far-reaching moral questions. An excerpt from 
The Reader,
 by the German judge and novelist Bernhard Schlink, sums up the difficulty of loving the sinner but hating the sin. Michael, a young German, loses a lover in the 1940s only to find her again in a German courtroom. Hanna, the lover who suddenly abandoned him without explanation years earlier, stands trial for having worked as a Nazi prison guard. Horrified at the new knowledge of his old lover, Michael struggles to love Hanna while hating her sin:

I wanted simultaneously to understand Hanna’s crime and to condemn it. But it was too terrible for that. When I tried to understand it, I had the feeling I was failing to condemn it as it must be condemned. When I condemned it as it must be condemned, there was no room for understanding. But even as I wanted to understand Hanna, failing to understand her meant betraying her all over again. I could not resolve this. I wanted to pose myself both tasks—understanding and condemnation. But it was impossible to do both.10

I do not wish to deny that it is impossible to do both, only to assert that it can be extremely difficult to do so. Michael still loves the woman he believes must have carried out her duties only because she feared death for disobeying. Few among us will hesitate to condemn Nazi atrocities, yet Michael’s struggle may, in different contexts, nonetheless resonate with many of us. It can be enormously difficult to forget ourselves, yet judging others seems to require something like that.

Each of us lives within a broad and shifting network of relationships, personal, professional, social, economic, and religious. Loyalty to one person, group, or tenet may impede the benevolence we might otherwise feel to an outsider who has been wronged by someone to whom we feel loyal. Competition can breed visceral feelings of loyalty. We want to protect those to whom we feel loyal; should a wrongdoer try to hurt our friend or group and hurt himself or herself in the process, we may feel justified in celebrating that pain. Even though we expect decision-makers across a broad range of social institutions to put aside their personal loyalties and act impartially, we often question whether they do so. A pessimistic view of human motivation undermines a distinction between loyalty and justice. This is not to express skepticism about the idea of impartiality, but rather to emphasize that impartiality does not come easily.

Most Western models of legal justice aim to transcend personal loyalties. According to Rawls, the sense of justice bespeaks goodwill toward humanity; it is a sentiment of the heart, one that grows out of the natural sentiments of love and friendship (
A Theory of Justice,
 pp. 453–512). Even if we accept such a characterization, love for justice may still prompt pleasure in the suffering of others no less than personal loyalties might. This is so because of a sense of personal investment (resulting from self-esteem) which may accompany the endorsement of a moral or political view. Of crucial importance is the question of whether such suffering signifies a means to an end (that is, whether the suffering instructs someone whose worldview seems to require correction) or an end in itself (that is, whether the suffering should come to the sort of person who deserves to suffer). Once again, there is an important difference between enjoying 
that
 someone suffers and enjoying actual suffering. The former case must be held apart from 
Schadenfreude
, for the attendant pleasure is not properly in seeing someone suffer, but in the hope that someone will learn a valuable lesson from having suffered. Thus we take pleasure not in the suffering of another, but in the hope that he or she will correct a mistake (because we may take pleasure in both, this case is not entirely distinct from 
Schadenfreude
). The latter case, including as it does a notion of desert, involves 
Schadenfreude
. Ultimately, it is the notion of desert that makes justice a more important and a more complicated consideration than loyalty. By “justice” I mean the fairly straightforward notion that people receive their just deserts. As I have said, we generally believe that a talented person who works hard deserves success, that an innocent person harmed by wrongdoers deserves compensation, and, to a lesser extent, that an arrogant person deserves his or her comeuppance. Such outcomes strike us as morally appropriate.

Freud denied the relevance of desert to justice, or at least to one way of understanding justice. He accounted for the egalitarian understanding of the principle, in which justice requires (subject to important qualifications) equality of net welfare for individuals, by attributing it to a psychology of envy.11 Freud believed that the only reason we strive for social equality is that the disadvantaged envy the advantaged. This is a ponderous claim. Critics have pointed out that Freud’s view of justice cannot, however, readily explain why the advantaged as well as the disadvantaged figure among lovers of equality. That persons are motivated by opposing interests, further, does not mean that they are motivated by envy or jealousy.

Religious convictions may decisively shape an understanding of desert or justice. The conceptualization of hell as the paradigm and culmination of suffering almost seems to beg comparisons of temporal suffering with eternal suffering and, consequently, thoughts about day-to-day justice. Contentious examples of religious justice may surprise us by their sheer variety. Some of the best known illustrations involve claims to land, as we find in the former Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland, and the West Bank of Israel. These examples suggest what is perhaps the most familiar objection to religious ethics, that organized religions breed intolerance and hypocrisy. In considering arguments as to how morality might depend on loyalty to any religion, it is surely prudent to keep in mind at what and whom the arguments are aimed.