Dealing With Guilt Envy And Indignation - Road to the Middle Class

Back in the Stone Age, mankind survived and prospered through the egalitarian culture of the hunting/gathering band. And survival meant sharing the food gathered by the band. There would be no private hoarding, and there would be social pressure applied to those not pulling their weight.

In this Stone Age society, guilt would be used to encourage the slackers, envy would distribute the ill-gotten hoards of the selfish. And then there was indignation. According to Robert Nozick:

That's when you compare someone of a higher station to someone of a lower station, and feel that something is wrong.

This egalitarian culture was also enforced by a culture of humility, writes Lee Harris of Craig B. Stanford in The Hunting Ape.

[E]ven the best hunter must be modest. Humility is a strong cultural tradition in nearly all hunter-gatherer societies. This is an extension of the egalitarian nature of these cultures. Attempts to use one's hunting prowess as an entrée to greater ambitions within the society are usually met with stern opposition, ridicule, and attempts to shame the self-promoter.

Here’s the point. In our modern economy, inequality is good. Hoarding is good. When you hoard food, you have savings that can be drawn down when food is scarce. In our modern economy, envy is bad. People who become rich through inventing a better mousetrap enrich us all.

And so indignation at inequality, the emotion of the left-wing activist, is problematic.

Guilt, envy, and indignation work in a face-to-face society, and modern thinkers believe that the limit of face-to-face society is about 150 people.

So communism, powered by guilt, envy, and indignation, can work up to a group of 150 people. And that applies to any group, including an extended family, a church, or a company. But beyond that, you need another principle.

We know what that is. It is the system of democratic capitalism, the counter-instinctive system where you trust people you don’t know. Writes Borders:

[W]e are likely to remain in a protracted struggle against Paleolithic instincts -- which, of course, translate into the zigzag of everyday politics. None of this is to argue that guilt, envy, or indignation are emotions we would always be better off without in contemporary Western society. But I would suggest that we'd all be better off localizing these urges in the confines of family and community.

Because, in the great society of global economic cooperation, guilt, envy, and indignation lead straight to the killing fields of the Ukraine in the 1930s, Europe in the 1940s, and China in the 1950s.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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