Before you throw out the word envy you must read this article, it might make you think twice <ggg>...
It's not easy being green
By Joseph P. Kahn, Globe Staff
It was the envy of the Industrial Age, an 882-foot-long, 46,000-ton, ocean-going behemoth outfitted with, among other amenities, a gymnasium, a private smoking room, a French cafe, Turkish baths, tennis courts, a photographers' darkroom, lavishly appointed state rooms, and kennels for all canine passengers traveling first class. A vessel built by and for millionaires, a class envied throughout the civilized world for its unprecedented levels of power and prosperity.
Even more symbolic of the era that launched it, it was deemed unsinkable by the best minds in the field.
So when the British luxury liner Titanic scraped a North Sea iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912, rupturing its hull compartments and sending 1,513 passengers to their watery graves, a young century already enjoying the fruits of unparalleled technological achievement crashed headlong into its most storied disaster.
Oh, and wasn't envy's wreckage everywhere on that bleak night to remember? Mere mortals who had envied the swells aboard Titanic on its maiden voyage - the Astors, Guggenheims, et al. - read the obituary pages the next morning with a mixture of smugness and astonishment. As the great ship heaved stern-up and sank while the band played on, passengers denied a seat on one of its lifeboats (many of which were dispatched half-full) envied those who were given a shot at survival.
Even those poor souls doomed to die slowly and painfully in the icy waters must have envied the hundreds who went quickly and numbly, if not exactly painlessly. In disasters, as in most aspects of human experience, everything is relative. Somebody always has it better than you do. Someone else always fares worse.
Then again, would anyone have traded places that night with the skipper of the California? Although known to have been cruising in the vicinity, the ship failed to respond to a distress call from the Titanic, earning its own place in millennial infamy.
Then again, egomaniacal film director James Cameron ("I'm the king of the world!") inspired universal envy among the best minds in his field when, some 85 years after the fact and decades after the tragedy was first mined for popular entertainment, he turned a projected $200 million flop into the biggest moneymaker in Hollywood history. Go figure.
Only if the real Titanic had been painted green or carried Sigmund Freud in steerage would the symbolism of its ballyhooed birth and unexpected death have been more exquisite.
Envy is the quiet yet insidious force propelling much of human history, good and evil. It is the poison in Snow White's apple ("Mirror, mirror, on the wall ..."), the gilt in Donald Trump's eponymous tower, the vanity in Thackeray's Vanity Fair. It is the sin, if that's not too judgmental a term, behind every gambit from land annexation to commercial advertising.
I covet your fields and villages, I seize them for myself (e.g., Mongol warlord Genghis Khan). I envy your brand of cola and the pleasure it brings you, I buy the same brand (see Ogilvy, David).
Keeping up with the Joneses is an empty conceit without an element of envy. And keeping pace with the Joneses has taken myriad forms over the past 10 centuries, from commanding beheadings (Vlad the Impaler) to marketing rental cars (Avis).
Envy is often ascribed to leftist political movements as well - the downtrodden and disposessed dragging the elite down to their own level - but in fact envy is beholden to no particular class or political ideology. The quality of envy is not strained - it droppeth as an anvil off a water tower.
Much of European history, from the Dark Ages to the modern age, can be viewed through the lens of social envy, says Don Herzog, a University of Michigan law professor and political scientist who has limned the history of envy. "You have nobles of high social status but who are on the brink of bankruptcy," observes Herzog, "surrounded by merchants with tons of money but no social status. Each covets what the other has, so each tries to satisfy the other. Thus the merchants who throw lavish parties and invite the aristocrats, who only come because there's free food on the table."
During the Middle Ages, Herzog theorizes, envy was at ebb tide in the millennial pool.
"You cannot really envy anyone unless you can imagine yourself in that person's place, according to the dictates of nature or God," he points out. "And every man pretty much knew his place, whether he be king, noble, clergy, or peasant."
All that changed, says Herzog, with the Reformation (16th century) and the French Revolution (18th century), two sweeping movements that overturned Europe's embedded social order and re-established the fundamentals of class envy.
1213
Ghengis Kahn begins period of coveting and seizing
1500s
The Reformation (envy makes a come back)
Circa 1635
Tulipmania grips the Netherlands
1812
Brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm publish Little Snow White
1856
Sigmund Freud is born
1912
The Titanic sinks on its maiden voyage
1960
Richard M. Nixon loses presidential race
Martin Luther, a German monk, challenged the authority of the Roman Catholic Church and the supremacy of the Holy Roman emperor, thus giving birth to Protestantism. The destruction of the medieval authority system under Protestantism's rise opened the way for democratic government and modern capitalism, which in turn opened the floodgates of envy in the modern world.
Two centuries later, amid cries of "Liberte, egalite, fraternite," French revolutionaries brought down the reigning monarchy and destroyed the feudal privileges of France's nobles. Envy played its part here, too. Starving Parisians heard rumors of a gala banquet at Versailles in October 1789 and marched on the palace, nearly destroying it. Let them eat cake? Mais, non! The guillotine was a great equalizer, n'est-ce pas?
Russia's czar Peter the Great (1672-1725) so envied the West that he undertook a two-year reconnaissance to western Europe, learning as much as he could about advances in science, industry, and culture; his reforms led Russia into the modern age, leapfrogging it past its Asian rivals.
In Catholic tradition, writes University of Texas professor Robert Solomon, envy "leads first to sadness, then to gossip, then to Schadenfreude" - joy from another's misfortune - "then to hatred." That sequence would be familiar to any Red Sox fan who still smarts over Babe Ruth's sale to the Yankees, in 1920. "But, often," Solomon continues, "envy tends to simmer in its own juices, a danger to no one but oneself." Memo to Curse of the Bambino crowd: Exactly!
Ah, envy. It is the engine of both tragedy ("My kingdom for a horse!" barked Richard III) and tragicomedy (figure skater Tonya Harding sending her goons to kneecap Nancy Kerrigan). It is also, according to novelist and essayist A.S. Byatt, "the sin that festers in hierarchies and families, in structured societies of all kinds." Byatt's rubric would appear to apply equally to the House of Windsor, Japan's Shogun rulers, and the Gambino crime family.
As Byatt notes, Freud came up with the (now discredited) theory of penis envy to explain female discontent. In the Byzantine Empire circa cp9AD cp9.51000, nobles routinely had male offspring castrated in order to enhance their future career chances, the theory being that eunuchs were no threat to the ruling political order, since they could not sire heirs. Call it - what - the doctrine of de-penis envy?
Envy can literally be toxic. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, arguably the greatest musical genius of the past thousand years, died in 1791 at age 35; it was later rumored (though never substantiated) that Mozart had been poisoned by archrival Antonio Salieri, a Viennese composer who labored in young Mozart's formidable shadow. Richard Nixon was arguably the most paranoid leader in American history; if ever a pol reveled in his opponents' agony, it was Nixon. So envying the Kennedys and other liberal Democrats that he would violate the Constitution to crush them, Nixon was forced to resign in disgrace, killing his own political career, after authorizing the Watergate break-in.
Every modern sin finds its own reflection in the millennial mirror. Magazine covers today pose the question "How Come Everyone But Me Is Getting Rich?" as the stock market soars to stratospheric heights. New billionaires are minted daily while skeptics wonder when it will all collapse.
History answers: Been there, done that. In Holland circa 1635, garden tulips, which had been introduced into western Europe in the 16th century, were all the rage. Envious cultivators vied with one another to create ever more exotic hybrids. Speculators rode the tulipmania craze, pushing the price of a single bulb as high as 6,000 florins. When the market collapsed, thousands of speculators went bankrupt, and the government stepped in to regulate the Dutch tulip trade.
Envy is finally the face that launched a thousand ships, including Titanic. And on its face more often than not is what can only be called the last laugh. After all, hell's punishment for the sin of envy is immersion in freezing water. Iceberg dead ahead, Captain!
Best Regards
KEITH |
