When Bad Things Happen to Other People (7 page)

The appeal of grace resembles the allure of lotteries. Only a few people win a lottery, but grace makes a winner of everyone. Barbara Goodwin has observed that opponents express moral disapproval of financial lotteries because the games let (some) people get something for (almost) nothing, simply by buying a ticket. The lottery is an anti-meritocratic device: as well as undermining the work ethic, it overturns our notions of moral worth. Goodwin has argued persuasively that lottery system writ large would thus undermine the moral basis of society.3 People deserve rewards if they work hard, it is often thought.

Augustine emphasized that grace is something personal, intrinsic, and above all a 
gratuitous
 gift of God, for if it were not gratuitous, it would no longer be grace. He viewed grace as something quite extraordinary, for little in life is free. Taking up the subject of grace centuries later, Paul Tournier observed, “the notion that everything has to be paid for is very deep-seated and active within us, as universal as it is unshakeable by logical argument.”4
Schadenfreude
subverts this notion, just as the Catholic concept of grace does. If we want to give in to pleasurable emotions generally, we may want even more to surrender to a pleasurable emotion which, unlike the thrill of winning an Olympic gold medal, costs nothing.

Why persons should strive for the good if it involves sacrifice remains one of the central problems in moral psychology. Charity and justice concern the welfare of others and what is owed to them. Given that both charity and justice may require the virtuous person to sacrifice self-interest, each may appear a burden to the virtuous person and a benefit to others. Since at least the time of Plato, this perception has generated controversy. Suffice it to say that the traditional answer has been that virtuous behavior is rewarded by happiness. Virtuous people supposedly enjoy life more than do the non-virtuous.

Virtuous people do not hope that people around them will suffer. That we believe another deserves to suffer some injury does not necessarily mean that we hope for or attentively wait for an injury to occur. The pleasure of
Schadenfreude
can cause (or causally sustain) a desire that it simultaneously satisfies. In
Schadenfreude
we receive a delight that we did not desire, if by “desire” we are to understand any motivational factor that may figure in the explanation of intentional action. Something bad happens to someone else, and we suddenly realize that we find the resulting suffering appropriate.

Because we do not desire 
Schadenfreude
, we do not work to obtain it: it simply falls into our hands, as a fruit of passivity. In speaking of the passivity of
Schadenfreude
I do not mean to imply that we are victims of our emotions in the sense that emotions seem to toss us about like ships in a storm. I do not claim that either
Schadenfreude
or malicious glee is beyond our control; indeed, because we are not purely passive in the face of feelings and emotions, our efforts to manage our emotions sometimes succeed. We can repudiate, silently, the opportunity to feel pleasure in the injury or suffering of another. Alternatively, we can rationalize our enjoyment of the suffering of another: we can tell ourselves that we take pleasure in the fact that another suffers (as opposed to pleasure in the actual suffering) and that this pleasure results from love of justice. Such mental dodges attest to the rationality of 
Schadenfreude
, as well as to our responsibility for it.

That we could stop ourselves from feeling
Schadenfreude
with some willpower, but might choose not to, makes the emotion appear to stand in tension with the religious commandment to love others as ourselves (Mark 12:31), a normative principle that has exercised an incalculable influence on Western culture. How one thinks about and experiences aggression and cruelty determines to some extent the way one views the love commandment, as well as one’s own acts of cruelty and betrayal. Explanations of why we are driven toward or tempted by hatred and cruelty tend to fall into two general and sharply divergent categories. According to the tradition at whose heart the love commandment stands, humans are born with original sin and naturally possess hateful and cruel instincts.

The baseness of human nature stems from Adam’s original, moral freedom to reject a life free of pain and suffering. According to a contrary tradition, over which Freud to some extent presides, we are born innocent, although some of us become hateful and cruel from having suffered deprivation or cruelty. Freud’s view of human nature, which resonates with that of the ancient Greeks, seems to hold out more hope for the prospect of human happiness. Likewise did Marx view strife, conflict, and competition among human beings as pathological conditions that admit of solutions. A psychological and sociological axiom of Marxism is that persons are permanently constituted to seek harmony, not discord. Although Jewish, neither Freud nor Marx professed to be religious. It is somewhat ironic, then, that each seemed more optimistic than many Christians about putting into practice the spirit of the love commandment.

Many religious thinkers and various philosophers (Kant and Schopenhauer, for example) have endorsed the moral obligation to feel sympathy for other people. Other people, by the same token, must feel sympathy for us when we suffer. This obligation has nothing to do with reciprocity, for we are expected to feel sympathy even (or especially) for those who feel no sympathy for us.

Love subverts rationality here, for it might seem entirely reasonable to dislike or shun people whose moral views appall us. In 
Schadenfreude,
 rationality predominates. Consequently, we need to look most searchingly not at pleasure virtually everyone would reject as unconscionable, but at pain or suffering that someone may view as entirely legitimate to enjoy. A defense of such enjoyment, like condemnation of it, requires an account of the rationality of 
Schadenfreude
.

The Rationality of 
Schadenfreude

Revulsion to
Schadenfreude
as a sign of the diabolic seems to deny the rationality of
Schadenfreude
. It is easier to censure
Schadenfreude
if we portray it as a knee-jerk, sadistic response. Sometimes emotional reactions (such as fear and simple likes and dislikes) grab us before we have time for deliberate thinking. Other emotional reactions (such as love and reverence for justice) represent emotional sophistication. Accordingly, I want to introduce
Schadenfreude
as a sophisticated emotion, not as a feeling.

What is the difference between emotions and feelings? Simply put, emotions matter more to moral analysis than do feelings. Because feelings lack the complexity, intentional focus, and susceptibility to appraisal often ascribed to emotions, cognitivist theorists of emotions de-emphasize them and focus on emotion, which they analyze chiefly in terms of belief and desire. No doubt feelings and emotions are sometimes confused with one another, in part because of the admittedly nebulous line that separates them. Various philosophers set themselves to distinguishing the various emotions from each other and from feelings in general: for example, Aristotle in the 
Rhetoric
, Descartes in 
The Passions of the Soul
, Hobbes in the 
Leviathan
, Spinoza in his 
Ethics
, and Hume in his 
A Treatise on Human
 
Nature
. Feelings are never sufficient to identify emotions, which means that emotions are more than just feelings. Feelings are mental states distinguished by their qualitative, phenomenological properties. They are neither beliefs nor desires.

Philosophers take cognitive processes to be somehow essential to emotions, but not to feelings, and generally agree that emotions are subject to normative appraisal though feelings are not. For, depending upon the circumstances, we may judge an emotional response to be justified or unjustified, warranted or unwarranted, reasonable or unreasonable. Unlike feelings, emotions can be admirable, blameworthy, or childish. Love, respect, and grief stand as ready examples of emotions, as do malice and hatred.
Schadenfreude
is an emotion as well, for
Schadenfreude
always has an object (for example, we are happy 
that
 Camille has failed at something). Though certain feelings (such as hunger) may involve objects as well, they do not entail cognitive analysis.

Knowledge or belief precedes and contributes to 
Schadenfreude
. Thus, for example, I am glad that Yale rejected Camille (because I know that her grades did not qualify her for admission or because I believe that she cheated on placement tests). Depression, melancholy, and euphoria are not “about” anything in particular, even if they are supposedly “about” everything (namely, the whole world). But if Camille steals my car, any revenge I seek will be directed specifically at her. And any
Schadenfreude
others consequently feel will center on my loss of a valuable possession. This is not to say that
Schadenfreude
cannot center on a large object: a Dutchman may have felt
schadenfroh
about Germany’s total defeat in the Second World War, for instance.

Why should we care at all about the moral status of taking pleasure in the hardships of others if this pleasure doesn’t stem from or lead to action? I follow Aristotle and oppose Kant in presupposing that emotions constitute an important part of character. Character deserves as much moral attention as conduct.

Kant viewed the emotions as “brute” forces that lie beyond the will and thwart reason. Subversive of the ideals of autonomy and rationality, the emotions prevent all-important reason from working smoothly. Western philosophers have largely equated (inferior) femininity with the emotions and (superior) masculinity with reason. Kant endorses this bias and weaves it into moral philosophy that exhorts us to banish the emotions from the courtroom. When thinking about what someone else deserves, we are not to allow our emotions to influence our conclusions. But we can hardly keep our emotions at bay, especially when people we love have suffered injustice. The assumption that women cannot properly think through justice now offends us, and yet we still wrestle with fundamental questions about how our emotions might inform judgments about what other people deserve.

A century before Kant, Descartes insisted in his 
Meditations on First
 
Philosophy
 that emotion is not essential to human nature, although reason is. This position has exercised a profound influence on much philosophical thinking and has come to be associated more closely with Kant, who deepened and rounded out the view. Even today, moral philosophers who follow Kant (and, implicitly, Descartes) focus their attention on action or conduct, as opposed to character. Professional preoccupation with moral 
action
explains in part why
Schadenfreude
has received very little philosophical attention in either the English or German traditions. Such preoccupation derives in large part from Kant’s emblematic devaluation of emotion.

Kant must be wrong that we know nothing of moral significance about a person just from knowing his or her emotions, for we frequently 
do
 focus on a person’s emotions in judging his or her worth. Our knowledge of the emotions of other people often determines whether we wish to befriend or avoid them. Familiarity with our own emotions precedes the honest examination of conscience through which we determine whether other people deserve their suffering. Without some basic understanding of how our emotions affect our beliefs, we will not be able to identify the sources of 
Schadenfreude
. Our deepest and strongest emotions, oblique as they may sometimes seem, reveal the effect others have had on us. Far from an irrational passion,
Schadenfreude
reflects both the moral sensibility of the communities around us and the social notion of where we stand in those communities.

The Genesis of 
Schadenfreude

Beyond the myriad of possible causal antecedents of
Schadenfreude
lie what I consider its principal sources: 1) low self-esteem; 2) loyalty and commitments to justice; 3) the comical; and 4) malice. Each of the four contributes uniquely to an understanding of why people might choose to profit emotionally from the misfortune or suffering of someone else.

We ought to view the first three categories as mitigating factors in the determination of moral guilt and blame. The fourth cause, like its resulting case, must always be condemned. Both the second and the third catalysts are intrinsically questionable from a psychological point of view. This is so because of the ease with which we may rationalize pleasure in the suffering of others as a function of love for justice (with regard to the second category) or the value of a sense of humor (with regard to the third).

Nietzsche and Freud found human aggression lurking behind both religious devotion and laughter. I aim to move beyond this insight. Less convinced of the intersection of religious devotion and aggression than they, I take particular interest in expectations among the pious that sinners will suffer. As for laughter: while I agree that much of the comical does hinge on aggression, enough joy qualifies as what Freud referred to as the “regained lost laughter of childhood” to caution us against a hasty reduction to aggression.

Common to all four categories is a thought about another person. The following self-other contexts set the stage for 
Schadenfreude
:

1.
      
Low self-esteem

Injuries to self-esteem often generate suffering. An experience as insignificant as negotiating day-to-day life or as potentially torturous as romantic disappointment can collapse self-confidence and trigger aggressive responses which reverberate through everything else a person does. Self-esteem problems may plague a particular group or even an entire nation. Writing in 1843, the young Karl Marx worried about the self-esteem of his countrymen:

Man’s self-esteem, his sense of freedom, must be awakened in the breast of [the German] people. This sense vanished from the world with the Greeks, and with Christianity it took up residence in the blue mists of heaven, but only with its aid can society ever again become a community of men that can fulfill their highest needs, a democratic state.5