Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

THE VULNERABILITY OF THE CLASS SYSTEM 325
biography, Into the Dangerous World, the Labour M.P., Woodrow Wyatt
(born 1918), has described the following traumatic experience of a
sudden outbreak of envy in another:
Not, of course, that at the age of ten I had any pronounced political views or
emotions, although one of my most vivid experiences had occurred earlier. I
think it must have been during the General Election of 1924. Some new
drains were being put in through the garden near the front of the house. I
grew very friendly with the young workman, and when the election came
I asked him if he was going to vote Conservative. His narrow face, which I
had previously known as kindly and friendly, darkened and scowled.
'What?' he said. 'Vote for people like your father who live in big houses
like that while I'm digging this drain? Why the hell should I vote for him?'
He was wrong in assuming that because we lived in a large house-and a
school could hardly have been in a small house-that we had any money,
but I took his point and ran back into the house scared and shaken.
I often used to think about that conversation afterwards. It grew to
represent in my mind what I imagined to be the atmosphere of the French
Revolution. I can remember thinking again and again, 'There are so many
more of them than there are of us. ' This was quite realistic. 31
I have no doubt that one of the most important motives for joining an
egalitarian political movement is this anxious sense of guilt: 'Let us set
up a society in which no one is envious. '
The vulnerability of the class system
One of the reasons why a mobile class system is criticizable is its very
virtue: it is the fortuitous product of innumerable heterogeneous individual
and collective processes. For this reason, no one has ever provided a
social class system with a built-in justification. And just because it is
comparatively easy to ascend into a higher class, or to descend from it,
this social arrangement is unable to provide any conscience-relieving
explanation for individual positions such as is possible in military or
religious hierarchies. Even a caste system, like that of the Hindus, is far
less likely to generate guilt. Apart from superficial symbols of discrimination,
now prohibited by law, such as notices outside inns, the caste
system has been preserved intact, hardly touched, even, by a sense of
guilt. Most Indian villages have at least four main castes, and mutual
31 W. Wyatt, Into the Dangerous World, New York, n.d. (1952).