Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

398 SOCIAL REVOLUTIONS
the United States and West Germany. It is significant that during the
fifties a greater number of indignant letters were written to newspaper
editors about the middle classes than about the upper classes. A member
of the working class would presumably find the middle classes, to which
he is closer, more irritating than the remote upper classes. Generally
speaking, envious dispositions would seem to select definite targets,
such as doctors, executives, bankers or bakers (during the French Revolution,
these were businesses and callings concerned with the production
and sale of foodstuffs). To be angry about capitalists, the middle classes,
etc., a faculty of abstraction is required; people are not always altogether
sure what they mean by these terms.
Envy's habit of concentrating on a definite victim regrettably leads the
politician, agitator or propagandist almost invariably to seek out and to
proscribe a scapegoat-money-changers, Chinese greengrocers, or today
Jewish merchants in Negro areas of U.S. cities-even where his
object is to direct the discontent of the population elements required for
his revolutionary goals against the more prosperous in general.
The actuating images and causes of moral indignation, which in turn
nurtures the bitterness leading to revolution, are largely determined by
time. An action performed by a small minority seems to many almost a
moral justification of the most grisly revolutionary terrorism; but as
soon as it is perpetrated by the masses or, more precisely, by those
emancipated by the revolution, it is at most languidly relegated to
criminal statistics.
Many readers will be acquainted with Dickens's powerful description
in which he shows the social tensions preceding the French Revolution in
a scene where a French marquis's coach has accidentally run over a
working-class child in the streets of Paris. This particular marquis
stopped to throw a gold piece to the child's parents-at least somewhat
better than the total absence of concern for their victims in today's
hit-and-run drivers. Whatever social explosions may occur in the future,
one thing is fairly certain: later historians will not count among the
things that provoked it the arrogant heartlessness with which many
motor-vehicle drivers mow down pedestrians. At a time when, in America,
any tramp can tear about in a motorized vehicle, a driver who makes
off after murdering someone with his car is no longer the material of
which social dynamite is fashioned. Other catalysts are needed for public
indignation.