Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

IMPUTATION OF ENVIOUS MOTIVES 29
fate overtakes his neighbour so that he can rejoice (his Schadenfreude is
attested by countless proverbs): he lends fate a helping hand.
No sooner is envy born than he consorts with the hangman and the
gallows.-Envy never laughs till a ship founders with its crew.-Envy
makes corpses.
In Islamic literature, most proverbs are ascribed to the Prophet himself,
to one of his companions or, with the Shi'ites, to one of their imams.
Islam's ethics and wisdom in proverbs regard envy (Basad) as one of the
greatest ills. AI-Kulaini writes:
'Envy devours faith as fire devours wood,' the Prophet is held to have
said. 'Fear Allah, and be not envious among yourselves' is a saying ascribed
to Jesus .... The plagues of religion are envy, vanity and pride .... Moses is
held to have said: 'Men should not envy one another what I give them out of
my fulness.' And another Imam declared: 'The true believer is he who
wishes others well and who does not molest them, while the hypocrite is a
man who is envious and who does not suffer any other to be happy. ,8
Imputation of envious motives
Nowadays we are generally reticent and inhibited when it comes to the
imputation of envious motives. Sociological and political publications of
the period from about 1800 to 1920 investigated the effects and the
nature of envy far more freely and thoroughly than is done today.
Nevertheless, a few contemporary quotations will indicate the kind of
context in which envious motives are discussed today. The Time essay
(February 21, 1969), discussing 'May-December Marriages,' declared:
'Envy as well as enmity is aimed at Supreme Court Justice William O.
Douglas, 70, veteran of two other alliances with pretty young things, and
now married to 26-year-old Cathleen Heffernan. '
In 1964 a woman journalist explained the partial failure of the Ford
Foundation's )\rtists-in-Residence Project' in Berlin, namely, the isolation
of the visitors and the remarkable reactions-amounting to pure
envy-of local artists, and quoted the revealing comments of a Berlin
artist: 'No one rolls out the red carpet for me when I arrive in London or
8 On envy in Islam, cf. Dwight M. Donaldson, Studies in Muslim Ethics, London,
1953, pp. 91 ff.