Twilight of the Emotions: Why Envy Evolved

“Envy” is the second blog in our series on the Twilight of the Emotions. The first one set out the theme of the series: the inability of the emotions involved in reciprocal altruism to regulate the socio-economic institutions of the modern world.

In the post-agricultural world, envy has a bad reputation. It is a sleazy, secret, shame-inducing vice, properly vilified as one of the seven deadly sins. Writers never tire of telling stories about its destructiveness. In the Old Testament, Cain kills Abel, his brother, because he envied the approval Abel’s sacrificial offering received from God. Iago envies Othello’s status and conspires to destroy him. In “Paradise Lost,” Milton’s Satan envies God and is cast down to hell. In the movie, “Amadeus,” Salieri envies Mozart’s talent and is suspected of poisoning him. The Wicked Queen envies Snow White’s beauty and tries to have her killed.

Envy is a parasite of comparison. In the United States, there are so many people to compare oneself to, people with stuff you wish you had, good-looking people, talented people, rich people, powerful people. Opportunities to envy are everywhere, and if we happen to miss any, the media will correct the oversight. “Envy,” if we can believe Gore Vidal, “is the central fact of American life.”

Sometimes comparison can motivate humans to work or try harder, but often it creates an internal stew of resentment and bile, destroying confidence and crippling self-esteem. There’s always someone better looking, more talented, richer, more powerful.

It’s hard to imagine that envy once played an important role in regulating society. But it did. In the hunting-gathering bands of our ancestors, envy helped to maintain social stability, cooperation, and equality. In an article about the role of envy among the hunter-gatherer Ju/’hoansi, a !Kung group, anthropologist James Susman writes,

...envy served an important, if surprising, evolutionary purpose—one that helps us to reconcile this most selfish of traits with the sociability that was so critical to the extraordinary success of our species. If the behavior of 20th-century hunter-gather societies is anything to go by, over and above its obvious selective benefits for individuals, envy formed part of the cocktail of traits that ultimately assisted Homo sapiens to form and maintain strong social groups (Susman, 2018).

Envy is an important component of an individual’s reaction to injustice and inequality. Indeed, this emotion might be essential for the perception of inequality. Imagine the members of a band crouching around a fire carving up an eland. If one member of the band took too large a portion of meat, the other members would voice their objections. Hunter-gatherers were vocal about what they saw as unfairness, often mocking the offender to put him in his place.

Envy is often lumped with greed, another of the “deadly sins,” but in the original human social environment, envy served as a brake on greed. If one individual’s greed was netting him or her an unfair advantage, the envy of the others would make the offender uncomfortable with the infraction.

Envy was once an essential element of what we today might call the enforcement of social order. It has fallen far.