Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

326 THE GUILT OF BEING UNEQUAL
avoidance is practised just as scrupulously as before. An elderly Indian
who, until a year ago, had never been outside his own country, but who
had been brought up a Protestant by his parents and had worked for years
as a missionary in India, told me that, in spite of conversion to Christianity,
people still took the caste system more or less for granted; thus,
for instance, communion often had to be served separately to people of
different castes.
Indeed, even towards the end of the last century there were Indians
who, out of genuine resentment of the higher castes, became members of
political or religious protest or separatist movements, which either ignore
the caste system or tolerate both forms of behaviour in their
members. And there are also individual Indians, most of them with a
Western education, whose sense of guilt about their own high caste
might be comparable with the bad conscience of a scion of the British
. landed aristocracy. But up to now it has been true of the vast majority of
Indians that they have never questioned their membership of the caste
into which they have been born. The system's ideology, with the force of
religion behind it, does not admit a sense of guilt on the one hand or envy
on the other.
According to the Hindu religion, no one individual can substitute for
the other in a spiritual sense. Even though members of the same family
may perform their religious rites together, they all pray individually. If
one is now well born and has a good life it is probably because one has
acquired merit in some previous life; hence a privileged person's present
life is the consequence of an earlier virtuous one, which was the preliminary
step to the improved circumstances into which he has been
reborn.
Thus what we have here is a system which, from the start, leaves little
scope for envious feelings between social classes. The fear of maliciously
envious people inside their own group is, however, very great
among Indians and manifests itself in the magic normally used to ward
off the evil eye. 32
32 The mutual fear, and the almost entire absence of friendship in the Western sense,
among inhabitants of Indian villages are described by G. Morris Carstairs in a
well-documented study, The 1Wice-Born (Bloomington [Ind.], 1958), with a foreword
by Margaret Mead. The reading of this book should have a sobering effect on
'development optimists.'