The Good that I Would Do

The good that I would do, that I do not. The evil that I would not, that I do. – Romans 7, St. Paul

Last week I started teaching a class on ethics at DePaul University, one of my favorite classes in my decades of teaching experience. The reason that I enjoy it so much is that each time I teach it I learn things of tremendous value to myself and I have the pleasure of watching my students also experience deeply transformative insights. Since DePaul is a Catholic university I feel free to pepper my class remarks with religious quotes from a variety of sources and have already invoked St. Paul, Jesus, the Buddha, the Prophet (a lesson on "who is my neighbor" from the Qur’an), the bodhisattva Kwan Yin, and wisdom from Americas indigenous traditions.  The quote from St. Paul, however, seems to sum up the impetus for the entire course, which is:

Since I know better, why can't I live better?

We are justified in returning to this troubling question again and again – it is certainly at the heart of ethics - and the core of my teaching thus far has been to acquaint students with the discrepancies between what we say we value, by our language, and what we demonstrably value by our actions, both as individuals and as a nation.

This week one of my students put her finger on such a discrepancy when she questioned why it is that we greatly admire people who have gone to big-name institutions of higher learning like Harvard, Yale, University of Chicago, MIT, and yet we fail to value, in fact actively demean and devalue, the elementary and high school teachers who work diligently to get students into those universities. After all, she argued, someone got those students ready to be accepted at these institutions but they’re not getting any of the credit.

After much discussion it was suggested that what we actually value are the high profile names of those universities – names that have glamor, sizzle, cache, a reputation that makes them glow in the media and popular opinion. It’s not really education itself, or “smart people” that are being valued but the celebrity status of certain, select, successful individuals and their institutions. The successfully “branded” universities and their graduates become part of the celebrity brotherhood that is worshipped in America. By contrast, the lowly classroom teachers are nameless rank-and-file workers who are not part of the elite and thus receive our contempt. This, we decided, was at the root of the apparent conflict of values that we were witnessing.

This idea that "celebrityism" is a secret barrier to the full expression of valuing many of the qualities we profess to value in this country struck a nerve with the class and we all vowed to reflect on this insight during the week and return with new ideas.

My reflection on the concept of “celebrityism” began with an attempt to carefully define it and I came up with the following: “Celebrityism is the overvaluation of a person or organization based on popularity rather than intrinsic worth.”

This definition doesn’t preclude the possibility that the individual or organization has intrinsic worth – I am quite willing to concede that Justin Bieber may have some musical talent – but that the valuation of worth is based more on popular appeal than on merit. This is dangerous for several reasons: first, because it lacks rigorous analysis and relies on the laziness of the idea that “if everybody thinks so, it must be true” which is a blatant fallacy; second, because popularity tends to focus on shallow, surface criteria that are easy to understand and market; third, because it deprives each person of the arduous task of deciding for themselves what criteria to use to judge value; and lastly, because it invites a vindictive backlash of anger when the celebrity is found out to be rather ordinary after all and not worthy of the attention lavished upon him or her.

But bubbling beneath all of this is an even deeper strata of emotion that is quite simply, envy. But this is not your garden-variety, passing-fancy envy; this envy is a molten river of fire in the bedrock of the American Dream which threatens to blow everything sky high if not appreciated for what it really is. In this case envy is not merely a disagreeable personal fault, a lack of generosity of spirit, but a toxic festering around a great wound to the collective soul. The wound was made with the self-same stroke that cut down the aristocratic model of society and cleared the ground for democracy, so it is a necessary wound.

But because this form of envy has gone largely unrecognized and misdiagnosed we have yet to apply the proper cure and our democracy may die as a result.

My diagnosis begins with history. In the early 1820’s a young French aristocrat by the name of Alexis de Tocqueville came for an extended tour of the United States and eventually wrote over 800 pages of commentary on Democracy in America. Two of his observations are especially relevant to this discussion. In a chapter entitled “Why Democratic People’s Show a More Ardent Love for Equality than for Freedom” de Tocqueville lays this groundwork for the reader:

Upon close inspection, it will be seen that there is in every age some peculiar and preponderating fact with which all others are connected; this fact like a “mother idea” almost always gives birth to some ruling passion, which attracts to itself and bears away in its course all the feelings and opinions of the time: it is like a great stream, towards which each of the surrounding rivulets seems to flow...The peculiar and preponderating fact which marks our ages as its own is equality of conditions; the ruling passion of men in this period is this love of equality.

In this introduction de Tocqueville is echoing a philosophical outlook that prevailed since the time of the ancient Greeks which presumes the existence of a guiding daimon or spirit of the place, or what Hegel called the spirit of the times, which we now call the zeitgeist, an energetic field in which a culture grows. References to this phenomenon appear in the Bible where they are referred to as “the Powers” and hold the potential for good or evil. The great scholar, Emanuel Swedenborg, called this force the ruling love and explained that, at the level of the individual, it acts as a magnet for experience and destiny. That de Tocqueville lays his finger on Equality as the master passion of the times seems historically accurate and psychologically astute. In many respects what we are going through right now in America is merely the result of the unrestricted dash toward this passion.

But if we sit with this idea of Equality for a moment we can begin to see the long shadow that falls from it. For “equality of condition” is an ideal, not the real state, and so-called equal opportunity has never resulted in equal conditions. In that respect this ruling passion acts like a pyramid scheme, promising enormous returns if we simply invest in the game. But, looked at rationally, all pyramid schemes require tremendous numbers of heavily invested “losers” at the bottom of the heap to support the few who actually benefit at the top. But the ideal persists and urges us on toward fulfillment and destruction.

There is an inescapable dynamic at play that takes away with one hand even as it beckons with the other, for when all opportunities are said to be open to everyone it arouses our hopes and sense of expectations while simultaneously opening the floodgates of competition to a vastly greater crowd than ever existed before. Never in history has an individual had to fight for a place not merely among his or her neighbors, but literally among the millions of mobile citizens jockeying for a higher position. With the advent of the internet we can now make that billions of connected humans competing for the same wealth and opportunity.

Alexis de Tocqueville summed it up like this:

When all the privileges of birth and fortune are abolished, when all professions are accessible to all, and a man's own energies may place him at the top of any one of them, an easy and unbounded career seems open to his ambition, and he will readily persuade himself that he is born to no vulgar destinies. But this is an erroneous notion, which is corrected by daily experience. The same equality which allows every citizen to conceive these lofty hopes, renders all the citizens less able to realize them: it circumscribes their powers on every side, whilst it gives freer scope to their desires. Not only are they themselves powerless, but they are met at every step by immense obstacles, which they did not at first perceive. They have swept away the privileges of some of their fellow-creatures which stood in their way, but they have opened the door to universal competition: the barrier has changed its shape rather than its position. When men are nearly alike, and all follow the same track, it is very difficult for any one individual to walk quickly and cleave a way through the dense throng which surrounds and presses him. This constant strife between the propensities springing from the equality of conditions and the means it supplies to satisfy them, harasses and wearies the mind.

Another translator of de Tocqueville renders that last phrase as: “torments and exhausts the soul” which I like even better. And that, I believe, is the most accurate diagnosis of what ails us. We are all caught in this exhausting battle between when we have been taught to desire and the constant defeat of those desires, and the fuel that drives us back into fray each morning is envy.

Now envy is a good subject for a class on ethics, being one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Envy is defined as “a feeling of resentful longing aroused by someone else's possessions, qualities, or luck.” But, as I have already suggested, I think envy is much more than a personal lapse of good grace. I think it’s THE ailment of a democratic society and as such deserves our intense scrutiny.

When one begins to swim in deeper waters it’s always fun to discover who else has been swimming in the same hole. It didn’t take me long to find that Bertrand Russell was also plumbing these depths and had decided the envy is closely aligned with the American pursuit of happiness. In his essay on that subject he states matter-of-factly that “Envy is the basis of democracy.” By this he meant that once the lower classes suspected that they could deprive the aristocracy of their advantages no other force on earth was strong enough to prevent the overthrow of that hierarchy, fueled as it was by the passion of envy.

But, you may protest, I am not envious by nature. I don’t spend time reading celebrity magazines and wishing that I were George Clooney or Kim Kardashian. That sort of thing is an overt form of envy, but the subtler form does infect us all in the guise of the American Work Ethic. Americans are the most overworked and anxious group of citizens on the planet and we derive no extra happiness from this excess of zeal. We are driven forward in this ethic by the Puritan morality that pronounced God’s satisfaction was made visible in our personal wealth. In spite of obvious differences in birth, health and history, poverty became associated with sloth and wealth with virtue. Since opportunity was now declared equal it seemed that everyone was solely responsible for his or her progress toward being a millionaire. To not arrive at the destination was to be disgraced as somehow unwilling to make the necessary effort. In America, being poor is shameful, being rich is admirable and the distance between those two places is where envy breeds.

When we fail to take into account the very real differences in opportunity that still exist – which is all the time, since our national mythology insists that all opportunity is equal and equality is our dominant passion – then we add to the weight of envy by laying the burden of failure on the shoulders of those who have not attained the heights of what is considered true success, American style. When we fail to recognize that the very political and social conditions that have produced our visions of what is possible for us have also rendered the accomplishment of that vision nearly impossible by virtue of the exponential increase in competition, then we pour acid on the open wound. In our feverish yearning we place on pedestals the few who appear to have achieved the great dream: we want to be reminded that it is possible; but that simultaneously arouses our secret hatred, born of envy, of those same individuals who are now not equal to the rest of us; they remind us of the inequality of outcome and the immense difficulty of standing out in the madding crowd.

This is an important place to pause and consider the “illness, diagnosis and cure” that we’ve established. If you are in agreement with de Tocqueville, Russell, and my university class about the diagnosis of the social angst and ethical ambivalence we’re in the midst of, then you might agree that there are two common responses to the problem. On the one hand we are counseled to turn outward and exert an extreme quantity of will and self-discipline in order to draw nearer to our goals, on the other hand we are counseled to turn inward to examine the root of our inability to exert these extreme quantities of will and self-discipline, presumably to overcome our psychological blocks and then move forward with all due speed. Life coaches and the self-help books for entrepreneurs and managers follow the first approach; psychologists of self-esteem follow the second. But both approaches hold the seeds of their own destruction.

If one applies the first approach we quickly realize that the application of will requires immense amounts of life energy and means that we run into the by-products of “decision-fatigue,” “ego-depletion,” and “analysis-paralysis.” We are essentially working against other aspects of the self in a single-minded pursuit of a time-constrained goal and this has physical and psychological repercussions which make it hard to sustain. If we follow the second course of action and try to “uncover the roots of our resistance to being happy and successful” we often fall into the trap of believing that everything that happens to us is only a result of our own, personal efforts and we neglect the great ocean of being in which all of our efforts take place. This serious flaw in our worldview is fueled by a related “mother idea” of democracy which is “Individualism,” which de Tocqueville described so poignantly 200 years ago that I can do no better than to offer his account:

As social conditions become more equal, the number of persons increases who, although they are neither rich enough nor powerful enough to exercise any great influence over their fellow-creatures, have nevertheless acquired or retained sufficient education and fortune to satisfy their own wants. They owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands. Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants, and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.

This “solitude of the heart” feels like a perfect description for so many of the Americans I meet. We do feel greatly disconnected from one another; pushed apart by our relentless work ethic; pushed apart by market forces that prefer us to compete rather than cooperate; pushed apart by the fear of being judged; pushed apart by the mobility born of democracy.

To trace the journey thus far we have stated that:

1.     There is a conflict between what we say we value and what we actually value in education;

2.     What we actually value is the celebrity-status of certain individuals and organizations;

3.     We value celebrities because they model the ideal of American success;

4.     We envy celebrities because they have what we lack;

5.     We experience envy when we believe that we should have what somebody else has;

6.     Envy is amplified in a democracy where “equal opportunity” is believed as a fact;

7.     “Equal opportunity” is not a fact but an ideal;

8.     This discrepancy between what we feel we should have (ideal) and what we are able to have (real) fuels more envy;

9.     We are torn between the exhaustion of exerting more effort towards the ideal and suffering the torments of defeat within the real.

We have arrived at the “solitude of the heart” in our journey and the time has come to discuss a cure. In regarding the pieces of the puzzle it seems to me that the point of leverage lies in the feeling of envy. Envy is like the switch that gets pulled under the rat in the maze to make it run in certain directions, but what if we found a way not to react in the typical mode when the feeling of envy turns up?

Both de Tocqueville and Betrand Russell offered some clues about a way out of this predicament. In the same essay on happiness where Russell stated that envy was the basis of democracy he also had this to say:

Envy, in fact, is one form of a vice, partly moral, partly intellectual, which consists in seeing things never in themselves, but only in their relations. 

By this he meant that it is only in comparing what we have to what somebody else has that we spark envy. The essence of comparison is relating two things to each other. If, instead, we simply experience one thing in and by itself then envy has no place to start. This vice is not merely one of being mean-spirited toward another’s good fortune, but is – according to Russell – a misapplication of intellect.

This reminded me of a Byron Katie quote that I’d seen on Facebook recently:

"There is no thought or situation that you can't put up against inquiry. Every thought, every person, every apparent problem is here for the sake of your freedom.”

Here is a place on which to stand in order to set envy at a distance: let the feeling exist but subject it to inquiry. Assume, for a moment, that envy cannot have automatic power of you to deprive you of your happiness or enjoyment of your own reality; that envy is merely an emotion that will come and go. Put it up against inquiry – as we are doing here – and ask it questions. And the question that might be asked of envy is: “How do you serve freedom?”

Aha!, and there is the word that de Tocqueville set up as the value Americans are willing to sacrifice in order to follow their ruling passion of being equal – Freedom! If we set aside envy long enough to remember that freedom was the deeper value that we glimpsed beyond the barricades, then we may be able to step back and not react to the pettiness of envy which pits us against each other for the gain of a few.

If we return to the true meaning of freedom we realize that it releases us from any necessity of comparing ourselves to others. True freedom argues for the right to pursue the unique and even peculiar passions that are ours alone to follow. No one will create, appreciate, fight, fashion, discover, explore, reason, analyze, synthesize or imagine the ten thousand things of the world exactly as you will. Which is why you are here. Which is why need to do them. Which is why no one else comes close to being as good as you’ll be at being you. Which is why no comparison is necessary and envy is unthinkable . . . just useless.

   ~   ~   ~   ~

And this is just an example of what it means to live “the examined life.” This is just one example of why we should value education; because it’s amazingly good fun and brings you into conversation with some of the most interesting people. Because it allows you to bring your mind up against things that bother you and find a way through the impasse. Because it furthers the great adventures of your ancestors and paves the road a few feet ahead for those who come after. Because the good that we would live is the life we really want to have after all.

~ Dr. Rebecca Armstrong