Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

272 IN PRAISE OF POVERTY
The recognition of these interrelationships emphatically does not
mean that social reforms and compassionate deeds, for instance, furthered
by the unbearable spectacle of other people's misery, are questionable
as such. It is both a pragmatic policy and in keeping with the
intention of most ethical teaching, secular and religious, that a society,
i.e., its active members, should seek to alleviate glaring social ills.
Sensible social and welfare measures, which may involve structural
intervention, should not, however, be confused with structural aggression,
where the satisfaction of unappeasable envy is the principle of
action. Such measures are apt to have the opposite effect. They, and they
alone, are self-destructive utopianism. Some of the original Levellers
insisted on a more realistic, less envious assessment of their aims than
their modern counterparts are liable to profess in their manifestos. A
group of Levellers in Cromwell's time wrote: 'We profess therefore that
we never had it in our thoughts to level men's estates, it being the utmost
of our aim that the Commonwealth be reduced to such a passe that every
man may with as much security as may be enjoy his propriety. ,12
Chiliastic movements
In his discussion of the cult of voluntary poverty, which often flourished
more especially among the rich and well-to-do, the sociologist W. E.
Miihlmann is in agreement with Herbert Grundmann, the historian, who
sees the growing prosperity of the High Middle Ages, the rise of a money
economy, the increase in urban populations and incipient large-scale
crafts as leading to religious movements among men of all social classes
seriously desiring to lead a simple, austere Christian life. Neither Miihlmann
nor Grundmann seeks to explain the cult of poverty-even in the
case of the nobility-as the result of direct social changes in the lives of
those deciding to adopt a different way of life. Miihlmann says:
Meanwhile it must be asked what is actually taking place when the way of
life of the 'poor,' that, indeed, of usus taxendi, as the occupation of a
despised class, is deliberately adopted and practised. It is not the social
12 'A manifestation' by Lilburn, Walwyn, Prince and Overton, in The Leveller Tracts
1647-1653, ed. by William Haller and Godfrey Davies, New York, 1944, p. 279.