Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

TO INDULGE IN LUXURY IS TO PROVOKE ENVY 263
same is true of luxury-one person may think there is none, while
another may see it everywhere. 7
The paradoxical public success, with its concomitant political repercussions,
achieved since the end of the Second World War by the
publications of neo-mercantilist opponents of 'luxury,' is no doubt
largely explicable in terms of the resurgence of archaic emotions in
modern man. (If I support retrenchment of the 'affluent society' then I
shall have done my share in helping to avert a nuclear world war, and then
the aircraft I'm travelling in won't crash, I won't go bankrupt, etc.)
Another reason for their success might be the existence of social guilt,
often of an existential character (many people ask themselves why they
should be alive at all), or again, the total sterility of socialist socioeconomic
criticism which, viewed objectively, has long since lost from
sight its initial points of departure.
To indulge in luxury is to provoke envy
I admit that there will always be people who enjoy making others
envious. Things that are used towards this end are called luxuries. An
anthropologist once told me about his native interpreter who, having
been handsomely rewarded for his work, and in answer to the question as
to what he was going to do with the money, said: 'I shall buy the biggest
drum I can find and beat it in the village. Then everybody will envy me. '
It is an age-old notion, of which several examples may be found in
antiquity, that the only reason for treating oneself to something is to
make others envious, to show them that one is bigger and better than
they are-superior, in fact. Thus the object as such, its cost and its
usefulness are all quite irrelevant compared with its owner's motives, or
so Adriana Tilgher (1887-1941), the Italian social critic, maintained in
the late twenties, in a scathing attack on the lUXury of the capitalist era:
Luxury is noxious only when it consists in a state of mind . . . of the
person who associates himself with a given group of people only in order to
use them as a background against which he may pose as an animal of a
superior breed. Clean shirts, for instance, in the Middle Ages and during a
considerable part of our own era were real articles of luxury. But today the
man pulling his clean shirt over his head of a morning does not feel himself
7 C. Rowe, Voltaire, p. 164; the quotation is from the Moland edition, XXII, p. 363.