Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

ONE OF DAVID RIESMAN'S CASES 339
largely an unconscious process even where some of it may be attributed to
the fashion of understatement. 8
Again, Riesman writes:
The other-directed person . . . starts group life in fear of the taunt, 'So
you think you're big,' and . . . occasionally struggles against his gifts, lest
these bring him into conflict with others. . . . The ambition of the otherdirected
person is primarily focused on the limitations imposed by the
presence of others-such as the danger of arousing their envy or offending
egalitarian attitudes. 9
Riesman is wrong, however, in describing as specially characteristic
of modern industrial society the envy-avoidance behaviour which, as he
so clearly demonstrates, leads to the undermining of a person's own
talents. As we are able to show, these are much more deep-seated
inhibitions, and they are more pronounced in rural societies, among
primitive peoples and in isolated communities, such as Norwegian
fishing villages, than they are in the United States. It was rather the
after-pains that Riesman observed, the offshoots of an attitude which in
America, as compared with Europe, is still oriented towards intellectual
rather than economic differences-income or consumer behaviour.
A human community consisting only of boasters would not be able to
function for long. A minimum of conventional modesty in social intercourse
is as much a precondition for society as is the incest taboo. It is no
coincidence that the superstitions, proverbs and religions of all peoples
invariably combine to inculcate the virtue of modesty into every new
member of the community as he grows up. And it was an astonishing
post-Reformation development, and a special feature of Calvinism,
which enabled the individual to feel unashamedly superior to others and,
what is more, to show it in his works. This was the beginning of the
breach in the envy-barrier. Perhaps the development took this course
because Christianity had begun by placing man in a new and special
relation to the world, and had provided him with a central, logical system
of values. When, however, the Reformation placed this spiritual source
8 D. Riesman, Faces in the Crowd, New Haven, 1952, p. 576.
9 Op. cit., p. 530.