Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS AND THE MODERN WORLD 159
religion, the privileged classes and the priest who serves them see the
individual's positively or negatively privileged social position as in some
way religiously deserved, and only the forms of legitimizing the fortunate
position change. ,29
To draw the simplistic conclusion from these views-in the sense of
Marxism, perhaps-that religion is exploited by the upper classes to
provide opium for the lower, would be to ignore what we have repeatedly
shown to be imperative in any society: to make discrepancies in status
emotionally tolerable to the individual and capable of being rationalized.
Systems of belief designed to control envy might be despised as social·
opium were it possible to demonstrate that the definitive elimination of
certain economic conditions relating to property, class, etc. would eradicate
mutual envy from this world. But this cannot be done.
It would seem more probable that the social need to achieve control
over the worst problems of envy in human co-existence has brought
about the reorientation of existing systems of religion so as to legitimize
noticeable differences in individual circumstances in the interests of
social peace. Thus, as has repeatedly been seen, the American cultural
ethos, the popular mentality in the nineteenth century, created, quite
independently of religious conceptions but in conjunction with them, a
myth of the successful man which, much to the distress of the social
critic, made inequalities emotionally tolerable. It would, however, be
wrong to assume that individual authors or other interested parties had
conjured up a myth and imposed it upon public opinion in order to
legitimize and protect economic inequality. In many cases, rather, the
existence of such an ideology alone permitted a mode of behaviour
leading to inequality of achievement in business. At least it would seem
probable that the human qualities and modes of behaviour requisite for
the settlement and domination of the North American continent had
helped to produce an ideology capable of legitimizing a state of
progressive inequality.
New Testament ethics and the modern world
The ethic taught by the New Testament sought to secure differentiated
human existence in a world full of envious people and unlikely to evolve
29 Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Tiibingen, 1925, Vol. 1, p. 281.