Never upon a holiday.(Ryan)(boasting, showing- off, and envy )(Critical essay)

SOME MONTHS AGO, in this space, I wrote about the now near-forgotten American academic economist Thorstein Veblen. His best-known book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, was published in 1899, and for some years enjoyed enormous fame. Veblen argued that one of the most powerful and pervasive traits in human nature was the desire to boast and show off: grander mansions, costlier clothes, more (and more expensive) wives, bigger yachts, longer limousines, more extravagant parties. If that grotesque couple Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel (Lord and Lady Black of Crossharbour to you and me) had been alive in Veblen's day, he would have seized them as prime examples of this thesis.

Veblen believed that this urge towards "conspicuous consumption" or "conspicuous waste" had applied through the whole of history, and to all societies from tribal to postmodern. Mankind, once having satisfied the basic needs for food and shelter, would be interested chiefly in "big-noting" itself. Veblen's enormous accumulation of evidence (much of it highly entertaining) makes him persuasive.

Quite a number of readers got in touch with me--a few to thank me for reminding them of Veblen, and rather more for having drawn their attention to him for the first time. (One even borrowed my sixty-year-old copy of The Theory of the Leisure Class. If he reads this, I hope he will understand what a treasured item of my library it is!)

Old Veblen must have been a bit of a card, though he certainly didn't look much fun in the only picture I ever saw of him. In one job interview at a highly regarded university, the chancellor murmured that he hoped no further problems would arise from overkindly attentions paid to faculty wives. Veblen assured him that the chancellor's own wife would certainly be quite safe. I amused myself by recalling some of the Australian chancellors I had known, and some of our local professors of economics. Something told me that the little scene would not have played at all well here.

Remembering Veblen has made me think of Helmut Schoeck, Professor of Sociology in the Johannes Gutenberg University at Mainz during the 1960s. His book, entitled Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior, in one respect strongly resembles Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class. Both works propound a striking and original theory of society, but in both cases the argument stands only on a single leg. Veblen thinks that society is driven by the single force of human vainglory; Schoeck thinks that the motive force is envy. The authors are agreed at least in having selected highly unattractive human qualities. Both, too, are dogmatic in their insistence that their chosen key qualities are as ineradicably embedded in human nature as the appetites for food and sex; and both agree that their rule applies to all societies, from ancient times onward.

Envy today, as a pervasive social driver, is greatly discounted. We have swept it under the carpet as something we fear and are also ashamed of. Up until the nineteenth century, humanity was prepared to confront envy frankly as one of the seven deadly sins. From the time of the Creation, so Milton tells us, the Serpent was "stirred up" with envy of Eve. In ancient Greece, envious gods struck down and punished mortals who became too happy or too successful.

In testimony to Schoeck's insistence that the stain of envy is indelible, John Donne lists among "impossible things" all effort to "keep off envy's stinging". Bacon devotes one of his longest essays to envy, always there--"never upon a holiday". For Bacon, an extenuation even of death is that "it extinguisheth envy". And Bacon takes a step towards Schoeck's sociological territory when he calls envy "a bridle to great ones"; that is, fear ...