Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

'GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD' 379
they pour away the dregs from a brandy glass as they would do if they
threw away milk or bread. For this is an irrational inhibition. At this very
moment, a glass of water might save the life of someone somewhere in
the world, yet no one is worried by the equivalent of a hundred glasses of
water going unused down the drain. We are afraid and ashamed of
destroying the symbol, not the substance. Perhaps religious conceptions
are also involved. ('Give us this day our daily bread' ... ) But again,
religions have succeeded in placing a taboo, for hygienic reasons, on
foodstuffs that are inherently agreeable, such as the meat of hoofed
animals. Neither in the Old or the New Testament is there, to my
knowledge, any rule that encourages the consumption of any kind of
food when once its condition is in doubt. The cultures which gave birth
to these writings were far too concerned with the danger of food
poisoning for such a precept to be likely. Evidently we interpose a
seemingly religious commandment in order to disguise our irrational
inhibition.
The uncomfortable sense of guilt that comes over us when we have to
throwaway stale food-or even fresh food, if we happen to be going
away for a long time-has nothing to do with any particular economic
system, though a system's critics will happily exploit it if they want to
confuse us morally. It is a peculiar feeling which has caused many to
scratch their heads in vain.
In October 1959 the Stuttgarter Zeitung printed an article entitled
'Bread and Machines.' This ran: 'Prosperity, according to the implacable
critics of our way of life, is not good for morality; this they set
out to prove by means of all manner of horror stories ... '-the one, for
example, about the 'dry roll somebody left on a park bench. ' The writer
of the article counters the argument by citing the result of an opinion poll
made in 1959, when people were asked: 'Is it right for a bachelor or a
professional woman to throwaway stale bread?' (It is significant, incidentally,
that the opinion seekers only dared to put a question with a
built-in eJS,cuse. Clearly, no family ought ever to throw anything away.) Of
100 adults, only 21 condoned such behaviour in bachelors, and only 14
per cent in professional women. From this the article concludes:
What we have before us is clearly an almost intact moral survival
unimpaired either by industrialization or by the resulting overproduction of
consumer goods of all kinds. The average consumer, on the other hand, had