When Bad Things Happen to Other People (5 page)

We do not hear the voice of Kafka’s sister or father. It is not too hard to imagine how Kafka’s father may have defended himself: exasperated, he may have felt that the only option left to him was sarcasm. He may have believed that some laughter at Elli’s expense within the privacy of their home would have goaded her to improve her physical appearance and so meet with greater happiness in the world.

If not exactly cruel, Herr Kafka’s manner was far from kind. Cruelty properly attaches to suffering, which exceeds mere teasing. We speak of “the cruelty of children” (as in teasing) from time to time, but such “cruelty” usually amounts to curiosity and lacks the destructive intentions of (adult) cruelty.

5. 
      
Schadenfreude
 and cruelty

Though a cruel person will invariably celebrate the misfortunes of others, it is by no means obvious that someone who celebrates another’s misfortune is cruel. Finding pleasure in the misfortune of another amounts to cruelty whenever such pleasure follows from a lack of respect for the sufferer as another human being.

To be sure, failing to recognize evil when we see it poses a real danger. Is unwillingness to condemn pleasure in the setbacks of other people out of hand an apology for cruelty? Does defending
Schadenfreude
amount to advocating a self-serving morality? No.

Because arguments about what people deserve in the way of suffering may appeal to their actions (as persons to be respected), it can be quite difficult to distinguish
Schadenfreude
from cruelty. Was pleasure taken from the suffering of gay men in the throes of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s or in the suffering of Jews under German National Socialism in the 1930s a function of cruelty or justice? Such pleasure was arguably more cruel than righteous, given the well-known struggle of Jews or gay people to earn social respect for their 
personhood
. The Nazis knew well that widespread cruelty requires a legitimating ontology, one which supports the claim that the victims of cruelty are not persons.

Many societies perceive outsiders, enemies, and criminals as beyond the “social contract.” Convinced that outsiders need not be treated with the respect due to insiders, those who delight in harm suffered by outsiders may then throw ordinary moral reflection to the wind. In the United States, belief that Jews, Catholics, Muslims, and feminists secretly obey Satan has in certain eras made the most uncivil behavior toward them a badge of piety and religious devotion. Such repugnance can spread easily, due to the insidious way in which such social biases are both reinforced and cultivated. As C. Fred Alford has astutely observed,

It will do no good to implore people not to demonize others. People demonize the other not out of ignorance or intolerance but to protect their own threatened goodness. Demonization of the other is a defense against doom. That the doom is self-inflicted, the aura of one’s own aggression, makes their defense more poignant but no less destructive.8

Mentally separating good from evil represents on some level a very healthy love for the self, a commitment to one’s own sanity. While we do well to urge others like us to keep the faith, we must be careful not to allow such expressions of support to humiliate or oppress others.

Moral argument and inquiry can sometimes resolve serious moral conflicts. In the United States slavery and civil rights legislation furnish good examples of successful resolutions of moral disagreement. When we agree to disagree morally with other people, we may see ourselves entering a kind of competition with them. This competition can lead to 
Schadenfreude
. When bad things happen to other people whose moral beliefs differ from our own, we sometimes take our own good fortune as evidence for the superiority of our beliefs. This, I will argue in Part Two, is a mistake.

We cannot avoid choosing between intrinsically conflicting beliefs and principles. Because moral disagreements concern questions of value, not of fact,
Schadenfreude
implicates itself broadly in our lives. As the emotional manifestation of beliefs about justice,
Schadenfreude
will persist because of differing moral beliefs. Although I want to talk about justice in the context of non-trivial suffering, our anxiety about how much another person is suffering requires mention of justice and cruelty here.

The distinction between commission and omission illuminates the difference between cruelty and 
Schadenfreude
. Unlike cruelty, which can be active or passive,
Schadenfreude
is passive, because it evolves in situations we do not create. Certainly it can be cruel to observe the terrible suffering of a person without attempting to help. But bearing in mind that cruelty almost invariably aims at disproportionality, one can see that Kafka experiences another 
kind
 of pleasure from that of a satisfied rapist or vengeful murderer. The Kafka, Lodge, and Paglia passages support a morally relevant difference of kind between the delight which results from two different sources of suffering: that which we have ourselves inflicted or in some part caused, and that in which we have had no hand.

Disagreement on this point abounds. Colin McGinn would doubtlessly argue that my argument fails, given his view that

The evil person can be either agent or spectator of the suffering he relishes. He need not always go to the trouble of bringing it about himself; he might be quite content if someone else, or just nature, does the harm. What matters is the state that pain produces in him, not necessarily his agency in producing it. Thus we might distinguish between active and passive evil, depending upon the agent’s own intentional involvement.9

This is indeed a harsh line, making Kafka and Lodge both evil. In fact, McGinn’s view makes all of us evil if
Schadenfreude
is universal. Moral philosophy needs to be more psychologically realistic. McGinn’s view begs important, substantive questions about the mitigating effect of desert and the role, if any, of triviality in moral evaluation.

Agency and passivity deserve greater moral priority than McGinn allows. Jon Elster articulates what must be the case for most people: “Many who find a titillating pleasure in a friend’s misfortune would be horrified at the thought of going out of their way to provoke it. Doing so by omission or abstention might be easier.”10 Elster believes that we generally see an important difference between celebrating mishaps we have caused and those we have not. McGinn conceptually obviates this difference, misconstruing the moral gravity of comedy and beliefs about trivial suffering.

Whether we ourselves caused the suffering of another matters to moral analysis in roughly the same way that the degree of suffering involved does. In the 
Genealogy of Morals
Nietzsche stopped just short of calling trivial that pleasure in suffering we have not ourselves caused: “To behold suffering gives pleasure, but to cause another to suffer affords an even greater pleasure. This statement expresses an old, powerful, human, all too human sentiment...” (
GM
 II, Section 6). Nietzsche and Elster disagree on this point. Elster may well have come closer to capturing what goes on in our hearts than Nietzsche. In any event, both Nietzsche and Elster oppose McGinn and together suggest that if there weren’t a word for 
Schadenfreude
, we would need to invent one, in order to maintain the force of our concepts of sadism and cruelty.
Schadenfreude
is at worst a passively 
cruel response
 (in the eyes of other people, it must be made clear). It does not involve pleasure 
in cruelty
.

Far too simplistically, some thinkers have classified pleasure in the misfortunes of others as sadism. Sadism implies cruelty, which delights perpetrators of sadism precisely because they view sadistic pain as intrinsically inappropriate. 
Schadenfreude
, by contrast, turns on a belief in moral appropriateness. Strictly speaking, sadism refers to sexuality and violence; however, it is widely used to refer to aggressiveness toward others. In short: The sadist is someone who cannot bear to experience a lack of control over his or her own suffering. The sadist therefore causes another person to suffer, thereby projecting outward that abhorrence of pain and controlling its occurrence and administration in another. The sadist derives pleasure from another person “standing in” for his or her own pain.

This simple, causal distinction indicates the shortcomings of the familiar epigram “misery loves company,” which is entirely ambiguous as to the cause of the misery in question (here again a German word—
Mißgunst
—can be helpful). The French adage, “
Le malheur des uns, c’est le
 
bonheur des autres
” (“The unhappiness of some is the happiness of others”), an aphoristic equivalent of 
Schadenfreude
, similarly falls short. If extended a bit further to include another difference, that between the misfortunes of others which we expect and those which we do not, this causal distinction also demonstrates the inadequacy of a word like “gloating,” which applies to anticipated pleasure (“I told you so”).11

In conclusion, the case against cruelty and evil is too well known to need anyone’s assent. But when we turn from enjoying examples of cruelty such as murder and rape to pleasure in trivial instances of suffering, there is and should be no unanimity of condemnation of
Schadenfreude
as simply diabolical. Defending
Schadenfreude
against charges that it is simply evil by another name is not a disguised attempt to allow us to feel whatever we like with a clear conscience. Rather, such a defense urges attention to the complexity of our emotional reactions to other people.

I have started out my study by considering what people mean when they claim to feel
Schadenfreude
or to detect it in others. I will continue to do so in subsequent chapters. I have hung my defense of Kafka and Lodge on a distinction between trivial and terrible suffering. The impossibility of definitively marking off trivial from significant suffering, like the impossibility of consistently reaching consensus on matters involving justice or desert, brings into focus a conflict of principles—a conflict that might not have been immediately apparent. The questions provoked by the conflict drive our moral evaluation of Kafka and Lodge—and of ourselves as well.

Mistaking
Schadenfreude
for Something Else

How can
Schadenfreude
be distinguished from envy or other emotions with which it has historically been confused or unreflectively identified? In 
The Anatomy of Melancholy
, a widely influential work written in 1628, Robert Burton maintains: “envy is naught else but sorrow for other men’s good, be it present, past, or to come: & joy at their harms, opposite to mercy” (part one, section two). In his 
Ethics
 (III.24) Spinoza follows this lead. And in 
Works of Love
 Kierkegaard classifies envy with
Schadenfreude
, even though the latter is the “even more hideous cousin” of envy.

Though envy stands as a ready explanation for one person’s celebration of another’s misfortune, little analysis is required to show that the two are distinct. Envy is not a reaction to suffering, and
Schadenfreude
is not a wish for satisfaction. Envy 
is
 suffering, and
Schadenfreude
is
 satisfaction. Where envy involves pain caused by the good fortune of others,
Schadenfreude
entails pleasure caused by the ill fortune of others.

The impulse to sort out how we’re faring in the world frequently leads to comparisons with others; an unflattering comparison with another may be the most basic source of envy of all. The enduringly relevant sixteenth-century French philosopher Montaigne believed that such comparisons harm us:

Whatever it is, whether art or nature, that imprints in us this disposition to live with reference to others, it does us much more harm than good. We defraud ourselves of our won advantages to make appearances conform with public opinion. We do not care so much what we are in ourselves and in reality as what we are in the public mind.12

It is because we live in society that we harm ourselves through these comparisons. If not controlled, impulses to compare ourselves to others can lead us to pretend we are the sort of people we want to be. We debase ourselves by trying to become the sort of person the rest of the world will admire. Montaigne insists that we can avoid such comparisons by focusing on ourselves, by celebrating ourselves. For him, envy signals weakness.

I have said that envy centers upon the good fortune of another (as does indignation, which is anger at the 
undeserved
 good fortune of others). We may envy others both for what they have (i.e., education, beauty, wealth) and for what they are (nobility, athletic champions, intellectuals). Although differences among individuals may result from accidental contingencies (as opposed to social injustice), the fact of living in a competitive social milieu makes envy a wide-ranging phenomenon. Gossip finds particularly fertile soil in competitive social situations. Frequently, those who gossip act out of a strong need for regular evaluation of their own personal and intimate lives. Envy seems to fuel gossip, a behavior useful for tracing and gauging the extent of a painful emotion.

People who do not compare themselves to others must be rare. Pindar (522–470 B.C.), the greatest Greek lyric poet of his period, complained that “envious hopes flutter over the minds of mortals” (
Isthmia
, II). He stands as one of the first thinkers to advance the claim that all humans feel envy. This claim should not seem controversial, nor should the claim that
Schadenfreude
is universal.

The prevalence of envy has invited reflection from many thinkers, particularly those who worry about social solidarity. There are at least three distinct conceptions of envy. Robert Nozick defines an envious person as someone who does not want anyone to have what he or she cannot have,13 whereas John Rawls understands an envious person to be someone who is willing to give up part of what he or she has if doing so will bring others down to his or her level.14 The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein considers envy the desire to destroy what is good because one cannot have it or be it. Her view of envy as the root of all evil is the most drastic of the three. She quotes approvingly from Chaucer’s “Parson’s Tale”: “It is certain that envy is the worst sin that is; for all other sins are sins only against one virtue, whereas envy is against all virtue and all goodness.”15
Schadenfreude
is compatible with Nozick’s understanding of envy, but not with Rawls’s or Klein’s thicker conceptions. Part of the joy of
Schadenfreude
is that a problematic person has been brought back into line. Nonetheless, it seems unlikely that many people would willingly sacrifice even a part of their own well-being in order to see another receive his or her comeuppance. The point to be taken here is that differences in beauty, wealth, and social status are likely to arouse both envy and 
Schadenfreude
.