Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

256 IN PRAISE OF POVERTY
unemployment and poverty and so on, but who, when the Conservative
Government does, for whatever motives, raise the standard of living a
great deal, turn sour and high-minded about it. I think one's got to admit
that it's a good thing that people should have more money .... ' To which
Arnold Toynbee assented: 'It's rather hypocritical and offensive to advocate
spiritual progress without considering the material basis for it. ,3
We know a good deal about what is called work-inhibition. This very
common attitude takes the form of aversion to starting something and
causes us to busy ourselves with innumerable matters rather than the
work we ought to do. We are never at a loss for a reason why what is
inessential should be so much more vital than what is essential. Whatever
their job or position, men will always find distractions enabling
them to evade serious intellectual work. Ascetic sumptuary legislation
(or, because this fails to work, constant and sometimes highly lucrative
denigration of the affluent society) in no way alters that fact.
True, every single thing that has ever been at the disposal of man is
also susceptible to frivolous abuse. Both in work and in play there are
sensible and less sensible activities, and sometimes activities that are just
plain silly. Curiously enough, it is being suggested more or less explicitly
today that it is the business of governing authorities to reduce the private
individual's prosperity, or rather the means that allow him to pursue his
chosen way of life, to a level that will prevent him from being objectionable:
that will keep him, in fact, from doing anything that might
annoy the particular observer.
Social agnosticism
A survey of recent social criticism inevitably leads to the question of
whether, in the eyes of these doubters and critics, there has ever been a
time when men could discover the truth about their own society. Obviously
not. Primitive man can exist only because he has interposed a zone
of superstition between himself and both the social and the physical
environment. At higher stages of social development, the intervening
layer consists of religion and metaphysics. And when these fade away,
3 A. and P. Toynbee, Comparing Notes: A Dialogue Across a Generation, London,
1963, p. 52.