>>Linda Zagzebski: Today I want to talk about an interesting psychological phenomenon in
which admiration for admirable persons turns to envy and resentment, and at the extremes,
leads to resentment of the virtues themselves. And even the denial that the virtues are admirable
traits. Soren Kierkegaard, often called the father of Existentialism, was one of the most
perceptive writers on envy. He interpreted it as a distortion of admiration and argued
that envy is a constant temptation for people who feel admiration. But some ages handle
it better than others. In his work The Present Age Kierkegaard writes, “It is a fundamental
truth of human nature that man is incapable of remaining permanently on the heights, of
continuing to admire anything. Human nature needs variety…Even in the most enthusiastic
ages people have always liked to joke enviously about their superiors. That is perfectly in
order and is entirely justifiable so long as after having laughed at the great they
can once again look upon them with admiration…in Greece, for example the form envy took was
ostracism, a self-defensive effort…on the part of the masses to preserve their equilibrium
in the face of the outstanding qualities of the eminent…The outstanding man was exiled,
but everyone understood…that ostracism was a mark of distinction.”
I find Kierkegaard’s mention of exile as a response to admiration rather amusing. If
we cannot bear being around admirable persons we can always send them away. That is more
honest than denying that the admirable is admirable. We see lots of examples of the
latter in the delight people get in seeing admired persons revealed as having secret
vises, or unmasked as hypocrites. There’s a gleeful pleasure in finding out that someone
is not an exemplar after all. Books have been written denigrating Mother Theresa, Thomas Moore,
and even Jesus. If we perceive the exemplar as a reproach we will find our emotion painful.
There’s more than one way to remove the pain. Emulating the exemplar is one way, denigrating
the exemplar is the other option. In the passage I just quoted, Kierkegaard noticed something
that Nietzsche later made famous. The ingenious ways in which the envious person can deprive
the envied person of the good she possesses. These ways can become entrenched in a whole
culture and effect the language we adopt in describing admirable persons. Nietzsche calls
this phenomenon “ressentiment,” and he blames it on Christianity. He thinks it arises
out of the helplessness of the weak when faced with the superiority of the powerful. The
response is to resent the powerful and to call their virtues evil, and the vices of
the weak virtues. In this way, good and evil are reversed. In response, the early twentieth
century philosopher Max Scheler agreed that our culture is steeped in ressentiment, but
he argued that the source of it is not Christianity, but a kind of egalitarianism that refuses
to acknowledge that there is such a thing as a morally superior person in which functions
as a protest against the virtues.
It seems to me that it is common to resent people who are outstanding. And the resentment
is not just directed towards saints, but to people whose superiority takes other forms.
Consider Sir Robert Falcon Scott. He led a famous expedition to the South Pole in 1912
under vary arduous circumstances leading to the death of the entire party. Months later
notebooks were found under his body giving a chronicle of their ordeal and he became
an iconic hero. But in 1985 there was a book published debunking his reputation, which
got attention for a while until books were published restoring it. I’m not qualified
to say whether Scott was really a hero or whether Mother Theresa was really a saint,
but I wonder why so many books that aim at unmasking admired persons are written and
get so much attention. One possible excuse is that nobody wants to read a book that reveals that someone
generally taken to be admirable is in fact admirable. That would be boring. Why take
the trouble to read a book that tells you something you already know. That’s a partial
explanation, but if the desire to reveal the unexpected were the motive there should also
be many books revealing that the person perceived to be contemptible is actually admirable.
But I don’t think there are many of those. I suggest that people tend to find it more
pleasant to find out that the reputably good person is bad, than to find that the reputably
bad person is good.
It’s interesting that in the story of The Good Samaritan in Luke’s gospel. The purportedly
contemptible person is the only one who shows mercy, but the people Jesus was addressing
did not enjoy the story. That was not what they wanted to hear. I think this means that
we want our exemplars to be likeable, as well as admirable. Some people we admire are boring
or humorless or annoying. People like that are not very helpful to us. We want interesting
and likeable exemplars, and we particularly like exemplars whose lives make good movies.
It seems to me that very few saintly people are interesting on the screen, although Ghandi
is an exception. But would any of us want to watch a movie about a sage? I have a high
tolerance for movies without that much action, but even I would have trouble watching a movie
about the life of Confucius.
In an earlier video, I mentioned Chief Plenty Coups of the Crow Nation as an example of
a wise person. And I think his life would be great as a movie, but there does seem to
be a shortage of action and visual imagery in many admirable lives. Maybe we can talk
about the way narratives about admirable persons can be used in our culture. Not every good
story makes a good movie, but we need ways to learn these stories and we need ways to
reflect about our own emotional reactions to them.