'An Absurd Depravity'

While reading Sir Thomas Browne again it occurred to me that an epidemic of envy seems to be loose in the land. Envy is an emotion I like to joke about, sort of. I’ll see a photo of someone’s bookshelves – old university press editions, multi-volume sets, no paperbacks – and I’ll experience a rush of another of the Deadly Sins, Lust, followed immediately by the more temperate, longer lasting, easier to ignore sin, Envy. I can say I covet the books and give the craving a silent ha-ha, thus pretending I’m getting myself off the hook. But I really want those damn books. I encountered this in Browne’s “A Letter to a Friend” (written in 1665, published posthumously in 1690): 

“Let Age, not Envy, draw Wrinkles on thy Cheeks: be content to be envied, but envy not, Emulation may be plausible, and Indignation allowable; but admit no Treaty with that Passion which no Circumstance can make good. A Displacency at the good of others, because they enjoy it, altho we do not want it, is an absurd Depravity, sticking fast unto humane Nature from its primitive Corruption . . .”

 

Again: “which no Circumstance can make good.” Politics today seems driven overwhelmingly by envy. People want what others have, whether or not they worked for them or otherwise deserve to possess them. Envy has displaced gratitude for what is already ours. I see no cure, no moral foodstuff to ease the hunger. It seems irredeemably human, like the rest of the Deadly Sins. Joseph Epstein concludes his monograph Envy (Oxford University Press, 2003) like this:

 

“If theological thinking is unavailable to you, if the very notion of ‘sin,' original or unoriginal, as damning simply makes no sense to you, I would invite you instead to consider envy less as a sin than as very poor mental hygiene. It blocks our clarity, both about oneself and the people one envies, and it ends by giving one a poor opinion of oneself. No one can see clearly anything he or she envies. Envy clouds thought, clobbers generosity, precludes any hope of serenity, and ends in shriveling the heart—reasons enough to fight free of it with all one’s mental strength.”