So far, we’ve seen how primary fear interacts with two developmentally later emotions, anger and disgust. Fear often hijacks the sense of outrage and protest, turning it into a toxic desire for payback. And fear infuses disgust’s aversion to mortality and embodiment, producing strategies that exclude and subordinate. Now we must add another emotion to the poisonous brew: envy. Envy is at large in our nation.
Envy has threatened democracies ever since they began to exist. Under absolute monarchy and especially under feudalism, people’s possibilities were fixed, and they might easily believe that fate, or divine justice, had placed them where they were. But a society that eschews fixed orders and destinies in favor of mobility and competition opens the door wide to envy for the competitive achievements of others. If envy is sufficiently widespread, it can eventually threaten political stability—particularly when a society has committed itself to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for all. Envy says that only some enjoy the good things of life. Enviers hate those people and want to destroy their happiness.
We see envy on both the “right” and the “left.” On the right, a sense of stagnation, helplessness, and even despair propels many lower-middle-class people into envious denigration of Washington elites, of mainstream media, of successful minorities, of women taking “their jobs.” People wish ill to those by whom they feel eclipsed, or displaced, or neglected. On the left, many have-nots envy the power of bankers, of big business, and of political insiders who support those interests. Envy is not simply critique (which is always valuable), since it involves animus and destructive wishes: it wants to spoil the enjoyment of the “haves.”
Let me say right away that I view envy as problematic even when its cause is just. In many current cases, it’s difficult to figure out where justice lies. There is surely merit in the grievances of working-class white people, just as there is merit in the demands of the left for greater economic justice. But it’s one thing to say, “Here is a problem we need to solve, and you should join with us in figuring out a better way.” It’s quite another thing to wish ill to the dominant group and to want to spoil their happiness. Envy’s hostile desire, like (and closely related to) the retributive element in anger, is a bad thing for democracy even when the envied don’t have a right to all the good things they enjoy. Envy leads to a picture of social cooperation as a zero-sum game: for me to enjoy the good life, I have to make you unhappy. This type of thinking is similar to, and very likely rooted in, envy between siblings: the envious sibling doesn’t just want love and attention, she wants to displace the other one from love and attention, just as, for Aaron Burr in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, putting himself into “the room where it happens” requires evicting his rival. Even if the sibling’s parents (or Burr’s quasi-parent, George Washington) had been unfair in lavishing attention on the rival sibling (Hamilton), it is always unsavory to wish pain and failure to the other as a condition of one’s own success. But this is a hard lesson to learn, since democracy, to some extent unlike family, is inherently competitive. Can it arrange to have competition without envy?
What, then, is envy? As usual, philosophers typically ask about definitions, and this search for clarity proves useful, directing us to the root of this insidious political problem. People say different things in different times and places—but there’s a common core of agreement.
Envy is a painful emotion that focuses on the advantages of others, comparing one’s own situation unfavorably to theirs. It involves a rival (this could be a group) and a good or goods the envier thinks very important. Enviers are pained because the rival has those good things and they do not. Typically envy involves hostility toward the fortunate rival: the envier wants what the rival has and feels ill will toward the rival in consequence. Envy thus creates animosity and tension at the heart of society, and this hostility may ultimately prevent society from achieving some of its goals.
Now we need to distinguish envy from three of its cousins. One cousin is emulation. Emulation also involves a focus on the advantages of others, and it also involves important matters. But people who emulate feel no ill will: they view those others as outstanding exemplars. They don’t want to take anything away from those people; they just want to move closer themselves. What’s the difference? Two related things, it seems. Emulators think that they can indeed move closer to the goal. For example, by following the advice of a beloved teacher they can become more like that teacher. And second, very important, emulation focuses on achievements that are not entirely matters of zero-sum competition. The reason students think that they can move closer to their teacher is that they believe many people can have knowledge, and the teacher’s knowledge does not threaten them, but actually assists them. Or think about kindness. It would be weird to envy your friend because she is so kind. Just be that way! Work on yourself! When the quality is one that we think people can attain by effort, emulation is far more likely than envy.
Envy is different. Its ill will typically comes from a feeling of impotence, which I’ll later connect to primary fear. There’s no obvious way of getting what the rival has, and enviers feel doomed to the inferiority that they experience. Often, furthermore, this sense of doom is linked to the fact that some things are not wide open to anyone who tries to get them. Being popular, being rich, winning an election—all these are examples of competitive, zero-sum goods: goods in short supply, where one person’s possession threatens another person’s chances.
Another cousin of envy is jealousy. At first the two might seem almost the same, but they are importantly different. Both envy and jealousy involve hostility toward a rival with regard to the possession or enjoyment of a valued good. Jealousy, however, is typically about fear of losing something one has—usually a relationship of personal love and attention. Whereas envy senses the absence of good, jealousy focuses on its valued but unstable presence. Because jealousy focuses on the self’s most cherished relationships, it can often be satisfied, as when it becomes clear that the rival is no longer a competitor for the affections of the loved person, or was never a real competitor. Only pathological jealousy keeps inventing new and often imaginary rivals, and jealousy is not always pathological.
Envy, by contrast, is rarely satisfied, because the goods on which it typically focuses (status, wealth, fame, other competitive goods) are unevenly distributed in all societies, and no person can really count on having more than others. When we’re insecure, we feel that we may not get the things that we need in order to live well. But what is distinctive of envy is the fantasy that others have the good things and I do not: I am on the outside of a happy relationship, a happy job, a happy social life.
Think of Othello and Iago. Othello was jealous, and pathologically so, obsessed with the fantasized disloyalty of Desdemona. Most spouses are not like this. But he did not have a general insecurity about status or success, or feel cut off from wonderful things that were just out of reach. Iago, by contrast, is not jealous of Othello: he doesn’t crave Othello’s love and attention. What he wants is to be Othello, to have the good things Othello has: fame, achievement, love. He sees that he doesn’t have those things, so he wants to spoil the happiness of Othello, to render him loveless, low, miserable.
Finally, perhaps the most difficult distinction of the three, envy is a cousin of the type of anger that is based on belief in a status-injury. Envy does indeed focus on status: the rival has good things and I do not. Like anger, it is accompanied by hostile feelings toward the rival. The primary difference is that status-anger requires a belief that some definite insult or affront has occurred; envy, by contrast, feeds on the rival’s happiness alone: the rival may have done nothing to insult the envier, and indeed may not even be aware of the envier’s existence. This distinction is important but difficult to make in any particular case, because enviers like to fantasize insult and to blame the happy, even when blame isn’t justified. Even more subtly, they may blame the rival by blaming a social hierarchy in which the rival has a privileged place (whether or not that structure is in fact unfair or demeaning). Once again: critique is always legitimate, but envy is not simply critique, it is destructive hostility.
I’ve said that envy is born of insecurity. Fear, then, is at its root: the fear of not having what one desperately needs to have. If we were complete, we would not need anything, and so we would not have envy. Or if, being incomplete, we were nonetheless confident in our ability to grab hold of what we need, then the fact that others have good things would not be an emotional problem. So, we need to think about insecurity and helplessness to understand envy’s power.
To see why it’s so important to link envy to fear, let’s consider a powerful view of envy that does not make that connection: the view of Immanuel Kant. According to Kant, human life contains “radical evil”: a propensity to harm others that is not learned in culture, but is part of our human situation itself. However, the problem is not that the devil drives us or that we have an innate evil spirit. We are basically oriented toward goodness. The problem is that other people get in the way:
Envy, addiction to power, avarice, and the malignant inclinations associated with these, assail his nature, which on its own is undemanding, as soon as he is among human beings. Nor is it necessary to assume that these are sunk into evil and are examples that lead him astray; it suffices that they are there, that they surround him, and that they are human beings, and they will mutually corrupt each other’s moral disposition and make one another evil.1
Kant’s account rings true in some ways: envy does seem to arise as soon as people are in groups, or even families. But the story is obviously incomplete. Why does this happen? Why does the mere presence of other people lead to competitive and hostile behavior? And does envy always arise in group situations? Surely some situations make destructive envy far more likely than others.
In his memorable discussion of envy in A Theory of Justice, John Rawls answers my second question.2 He suggests that there are three conditions under which outbreaks of socially destructive envy are especially likely. First, there is a psychological condition: people lack secure confidence “in their own value and in their ability to do anything worthwhile.” Second, there is a social condition: many circumstances arise when this psychological condition is experienced as painful and humiliating, because the conditions of social life make the discrepancies that give rise to envy highly visible. Third, the envious see their position as offering them no constructive alternative to mere hostility. The only relief they can envisage is to inflict pain on others.
This is an important analysis, offering us insight into our current predicament, as we’ll see. Rawls, however, did not try to answer my first question: what is really at the bottom of the problem of envy? People can be loving and cooperative: so, it can’t be right to say that the mere existence of a plurality ushers envy onto the scene.
The philosopher who got to the heart of the matter is—once again—Lucretius, who applied the general view of his mentor Epicurus to the problems of the Roman Republic, which was already a cauldron of destructive envy in his time (around 99–55 BCE), and which imploded shortly thereafter. Here’s what Lucretius saw all around him:
From a similar cause, from that very same fear,
Envy wastes them away:
Look how this man, before their very eyes, has power,
How everyone gazes at that one, as he gets some distinguished honor –
While they themselves (they complain) are wallowing in darkness and filth.
(III.74–77)
This marvelous poetic account captures, I think, the peculiar pain of envy. Envious people are obsessed with looking at the successes of others; seeing those, they compare their lot unfavorably to theirs. Envy does make you feel as if you are in the dark, and also dirty, tainted, wallowing. Seeing yourself that way does waste or gnaw you away inside. This combination of hopelessness and sharp torment makes envy one of the most excruciating of the emotions.
Lucretius also tells us why we’re so often at the mercy of this ugly emotion: it’s all caused by “that very same fear,” namely, what I’ve been calling infantile, or primary, fear. In other words, it is because of a deep underlying anxiety, a root-level painful insecurity, that people engage in zero-sum competition and hate the people who succeed. It’s not, then, just the sheer presence of others, it’s something deeper, something that assails us as soon as we are born into a world of neediness and powerlessness.
Lucretius, as we saw, has a particular view about primary fear that is not entirely right. He thinks that it is all about death, and that its power depends on nefarious religious entrepreneurs, who dupe us into thinking that death is terrifying, mostly by the threat of punishment in the afterlife. He thinks that without this interference, people would be insecure in many ways, but not unstably so. We have reason to doubt this reductive thesis. We fear all sorts of things because we are weak and powerless in all sorts of ways. Primary fear is manifold and operates in every area of life. When it is strong, groups of people can easily become cauldrons of envy.
Lucretius, perhaps the first (Western) theorist of the unconscious mind, held that primary fear operates beneath the level of consciousness, tainting everything with its “blackness.” Envy’s roots in fear are not evident to the tormented adult, but we can walk the causal chain backward and see how it typically arises, in an anxious sense that others have good things and we do not.
Melanie Klein, the greatest psychoanalytical theorist of envy, has a similar view. Klein constantly emphasizes that our adult world can be fully understood only by grasping its roots in infancy. She describes envy as rooted in a primary anxiety that one is separated from the good things—nourishment, love, gratification. “Early emotional life is characterized by a sense of losing and regaining the good object,” and the anxiety that goes with this alternation between satiety and emptiness quickly becomes, as we saw, “persecutory,” blaming the parent for withholding all the good things. Here’s where envy kicks in. The Lucretian infant, feeling that pained sense of loss and abandonment, forms the idea that the parent is happy and complete and then wants to spoil that happiness. Klein may be a bit extreme when she says that the infant’s fantasy is that of putting “bad excrements” into the parent to spoil and sully her, but if it’s not a literal thought, it is certainly a powerful image of what we want when we envy someone.
Envy thus begins a vicious cycle. Wanting to attack and dirty the happy object—who is also loved—leads to feelings of guilt and badness, which make the infant feel all the more cast into outer darkness and removed from the happiness of love and attention.
Envy also bleeds into blame. Sometimes the envier thinks simply, I really want what that person has. But it is so easy to slide from that view into a related one: I deserve those things, and they don’t. The politics of envy sometimes just says frankly, “We want what they [women, immigrants, elites] have.” But people like to moralize their envy, and very often what begins as pure envy slides over to, They are bad people, they don’t deserve what they have. This slide is an old story: classical scholar Robert Kaster has demonstrated that Roman envy (invidia) has the same two forms, moralized and non-moralized, and moves uneasily between them.3 That’s how envy hitches its wagon to the politics of blame. Sometimes the “haves” really have done something unfair or insulting, and sometimes not.
Of course, a third possibility remains: the have-nots can make a reasoned critique of the personal wrongdoing or structural inequality that oppresses them and offer proposals for improvement. The spirit would be that of what I’ve called Transition-Anger, which is free from envy, since it has no interest in spoiling the enjoyment of the powerful, but will instead, as King notes, seek to work with them in a constructive spirit.
As life teaches us, and as Klein makes clear, envy takes many paths in individual lives—and her analysis fits surprisingly well with Rawls’s social analysis. Envy will never disappear entirely. But if the growing child begins to feel confidence in herself and her own access to the good things of life, and if she sees constructive alternatives to her destructive wishes—alternatives involving generosity, creativity, and love—she may be more easily able to surmount the pain of envy. It will remain a temptation, but it won’t poison life. Klein focuses on family differences, neglecting the social and political dimension. But it’s obvious—and this was Rawls’s point—that political communities can also do a lot to make envy a far less disturbing problem. They can create secure confidence in people, about themselves and their access to the good things in life. They can minimize occasions where the stimulus to envy will become unusually prominent. And they can give people constructive alternatives, involving generosity and love of others.
How on earth could this be done? As we approach envy in society, let’s take a slight detour, investigating one social institution where envy often gets out of hand.
A typical large American high school is a veritable cauldron of envy. We’ve all been there; let’s think back to that uneasy time. Adolescence is an especially vulnerable time of life. About to be separated from the womb of the family and to undergo a virtual second birth, being thrust into an uncertain and often hostile world, teenagers would be weird if they did feel secure. But insecurity is one thing, destructive envy another. What is it that makes envy run rampant in high schools? First, there’s the obvious fact that high school cultures usually foreground achievements that are highly competitive and positional, such as popularity, sexual magnetism, and skill in sports. No adolescent really feels confident about these things, but it’s made far worse by the fact that there are always those in-crowd kids who appear to have all the good things, while most people do not. Lucretius’s lines describe well the horrible feeling of being chewed up by envy, seeing those people who are stared at, who have all the power, while kids on the outside come to see themselves as groping in the dark or wallowing in the mud. This envy produces real violence, as we know. But even in the vast majority of cases where it doesn’t, it still produces painful tensions, dangerous depressions, and hostile relationships.
High schools are not all the same. There are at least a few in which sports matter less and academic achievement more. But that’s not much better, because the frenetic competition to get into top colleges poisons what might be the joy of learning. Ubiquitously, kids are competing for competitive preeminence, and most of them won’t be at the top of the class. In my all-women school in a privileged suburb, I was a terrible athlete, but I cleaned up in the academic department. Many people didn’t have an alternative track to success; those people hated the school and never attend reunions. They felt in outer darkness for popularity and honors and hated the school and the honored ones for inflicting that pain. (I know: I tried hard to convince some of them to attend our fiftieth reunion!) And let’s remember that people who went to that school were already a privileged elite, secure in their expectation of some type of employment and social position. Most other high schools have far more and far more basic insecurities to contend with.
Thinking about Rawls’s three criteria, what could the people in charge do to render the experience of going through adolescence in a high school less toxic? Much has to be done long before, in the family, but there are things our high schools can do. First of all, they can offer everyone help with their academic work and college preparation. I am delighted to see that my school today is different: it now offers assistance with learning disabilities and takes the general attitude that the job is to maximize each person’s potential, rather than to rank and reward. Such assistance will be much more helpful to non-elite students, however, if our society does much better with the problem of unequal access to higher education. There are enough places in college for everyone, but money is a terrible obstacle for many. If everyone feels that by effort they can get into, and afford, a suitable college, this does a lot to decrease one type of zero-sum competition.
Schools can also foster other areas in which students can contribute, such as drama, music, and other arts, which are less zero-sum and more cooperative than sports, and which also help kids to express the emotional turmoil they are experiencing. I recently visited a high school for troubled teens, kids who had been expelled from other public high schools. And though the compassion of the impressive principal and a curriculum that included group therapy had done a lot to make a difference, convincing these kids that someone is listening, it was astonishing to me that the school had no arts curriculum at all, not even poetry. At my suggestion they did add creative writing, and I’m told it has helped a lot: kids now have an outlet for their tumultuous emotions. But ignoring theater and dance still seems problematic. In my own high school, lots of us found solace from sports in the warm and relatively unenvious emotional culture of theater, which became my passion and my home.
Lucretius was talking about his own society, and the Roman Republic could certainly be compared to a large high school. Positional competition was everything. There was a sequence of honors, the cursus honorum, that every adult male had to embark on: succeed, or remain in outer darkness. Each office had age qualifications, and you had to go through them in order. It was reputationally crucial not only to get each of the offices in sequence—aedile, praetor, consul, proconsul—but to get them early, right after one became eligible. Otherwise the odor of failure hung around one ever after. That was bad enough, but how did one get those preferments? By election, but how did one manage that? By wealth, family honor, reputation, and personality-based campaigning. There was nothing like a law degree or a PhD, which one might attain by effort and hard work, thus displaying fitness to serve society. It really was just like high school, although money and family meant more, and sports meant less. A person like the great statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero, from an undistinguished, albeit wealthy, family, could attain prominence by being a skilled advocate for clients and by earning a lot of money. But not without great stress. Cicero’s career was filled with what Klein calls “persecutory anxiety”—the feeling that his own access to the good things of Roman life was highly unstable, and that other people from distinguished old families had “his” place without any effort or distinction. So often in his letters and speeches, Cicero refers edgily to his own status as a “new man,” that is, a family with no lofty history. And his bitter hatred of his rivals and enemies, though it sometimes has a real political justification, clearly derives at least part of its aggressiveness from envy, as Cicero dwells all too obviously on their attractiveness, their sexual conquests, their popularity.
This envy of attractive rivals sometimes led Cicero to unwise and excessive actions—such as his proposal for an illegal extrajudicial killing of the ringleaders in the Catilinarian conspiracy, which did much harm to his reputation. And his envy also often led him into unbalanced self-praise, as a kind of defense against rivals. This narcissistic tendency made him a joke to many and lessened his political effectiveness. Who could trust a man who wrote an epic poem about his own defeat of the Catilinarian conspiracy, with himself, of course, as the hero—a poem containing the oft-mocked line, “O Rome, fortunate to be alive during my consulship,” “O fortunatam natam me consule Romam.” He was so eager to spoil his enemies and to proclaim his own merit that he didn’t even notice the hideously unpoetic jingle that he put into the verse.
Cicero was a great man who made many contributions. But his mental life was made unstable by “persecutory aggression,” and his contributions, great though they undoubtedly were, did less good to the state than they otherwise might have. And Cicero is the good case, a man who basically won his battle with envy and created much good. The same factors in Roman society that ate away at this patriotic man, turning him at times into a buffoon, also propelled worse people into power, people without high ideals or fine goals, people whose only interest was the positional game of rivalry, envy, and destruction. That (more or less) is how the Roman Republic, always deeply flawed, collapsed into tyranny. It’s an example we should ponder.
Let’s now return to our own nation at its founding, where similar themes are prominent. American revolutionaries loved the Roman Republic and were virtually obsessed with its struggle against tyranny. They clearly had a lot of the same problems. Envy and a destructive competition for honor and position were everywhere in our republic in its early days and did real harm. Some of the hostility took the form of status-based anger, as people took offense at insults of many types. Some of the hostility was pure envy with no real occasion for blame. The two could easily blur together: envious people were on the lookout for any putative insult, so that they could strike back through dueling.
But the Founders fared somewhat better than those ancient Romans. Despite living in a culture obsessed with competition for honor and status, they nonetheless struggled against envy, and to a surprising degree surmounted it. Love of the republic they were creating prevailed over destructiveness and hate.
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton is preoccupied, as we’ve seen, with anger based upon status-anxiety. It is also a meditation about the role of envy in the American founding and the importance of containing envy if we are to have a successful nation. The famous duel in which Burr kills Hamilton is its tragic climax, and the motif of dueling is woven throughout. In its contrast between Hamilton (ambitious but seeking good for the whole nation) and Burr (obsessed by envy, wanting to spoil Hamilton’s success), the musical shows the dangers of fear-driven envy for democratic politics.
At its heart, Hamilton is about a choice of two possible political lives, the life of love and service to the new nation, and the life of fear-driven envy and zero-sum competition. The figures of Burr and Hamilton stand for alternative paths that individual members of the audience might follow. (It’s not just about great leaders, then, it’s about us all.)
Suppose a person, or a political group, chooses the path of rivalrous competition for glory. In that case, it will probably seem best not to have firm ideas or deep moral commitments, since it may be prudent to change course in accordance with prevailing fashion. That’s Aaron Burr, charismatic and immensely able but unwilling to take a stand.4
Under Washington’s wise tutelage, Hamilton learns that making a splash is easy, but creating something fine in politics is difficult and risky. (“Winning was easy,” says Washington, “governing is harder.”) Political creation, he learns, requires study, deliberation, maybe even philosophy! (All the Framers read at least Locke and Montesquieu, but Hamilton read far more.) And it involves risk and suffering. The reward is that you may be able to create something exceptional that lives on after you. Hamilton learns from Washington, but he really has made his choice from the start and needs only minor course correction. From his very first entrance he is already aiming to be both “a hero and a scholar,” reading “every treatise on the shelf.” And while Burr sings about his urgent desire to be inside that room, Hamilton is singing about creating something lasting and fine.
Things, however, are more complicated. For Hamilton can create what he creates only because he is also a relentless competitor. He always wants preeminence, and it’s only because he gains it (winning Washington’s regard and trust, for example) that he is able to leave a legacy to posterity.
In other words, attachment to worthy ideals is not sufficient for political creation. The aspiration to create something fine might be enough if you are trying to be virtuous in a family or a religious community; but the minute you enter a realm where the wherewithal to do good is in short supply, you have to play Burr’s game, up to a point. If you’re not in the room where it happens, you can’t influence history’s course. And you don’t get to be in that room without successful competition against others. Whether we’re talking about presidential candidates or less glamorous participants in the democratic process, creation and competition are very difficult to separate, and it’s no surprise that pure idealists fall by the wayside in democratic politics. So, while Burr does not have to care about Hamilton’s path, Hamilton is obliged to care, to some degree and instrumentally, about Burr’s. Competition need not compromise virtue, but it always introduces temptations: slander, shading the truth, above all narcissism and lack of respect for others. In short, democracy is an uncertain fear-suffused realm in which nobody has space to unfold creative powers without the anxious pursuit of competitive advantage.
What’s more, a drive for fame and public honor is probably an important ingredient in political creativity. At least we see that Hamilton’s genuine ardor for ideas is always accompanied, and probably energized, by a desire to make a splash, which propels him past many obstacles. An illegitimate child and orphan, he has a thirst for success and recognition that accompany and feed his ardor for virtue and ideas. These acute insights complicate and deepen the central contrast.
Now we face the question: if political creation requires competition, does competition require envy? Or: to compete with my brother, do I have to want to spoil his enjoyment of the good things of life? To this all-important question, the musical gives the answer “no.” Hamilton is proud and thirsty for honor, but almost entirely free of envy. Burr, like Iago, is utterly consumed by envy, and the play makes a strong case that envy is a cancer in the body politic that we should each resist individually and which we must reduce or extirpate as a nation.
Rawls spoke of three social conditions that make envy particularly dangerous. These conditions fit Miranda’s Burr to a T. Some deep insecurity at his core (maybe connected to lacking a mother, since his died in his infancy) makes him obsessed with rivalrous competition. The conditions of social life in the new rough-and-tumble nation make everyone’s position precarious. As for constructive alternatives: Burr, having attempted unsuccessfully to become close to Washington, having then attempted electoral politics without gaining the top office, finds nothing to fall back on other than hate. Envy begins in something specific: the desire to be at one particular secret meeting, to be “in the room where it happened.” But quickly, within the compass of one song, it expands and becomes global: “I’ve got to be in the room where it happens.”
The climax of the musical, and the Burr-Hamilton relationship, is the famous duel. In the musical, basically following history, Burr writes a provocative letter alluding to insults by Hamilton against his honor. Burr, then, represents his emotion as status-anger, with specific insults as its cause. However, by this time the audience is clear that the alleged insults are mere excuses for envious spoiling.
By this time in his life, at least, Hamilton firmly opposed dueling on religious and moral grounds. He left a public statement describing his reason for accepting Burr’s challenge despite those objections:
All the considerations which constitute what men of the world denominate honor, impressed on me (as I thought) a peculiar necessity not to decline the call. The ability to be in future useful, whether in resisting mischief or effecting good, in those crises of our public affairs, which seem likely to happen, would probably be inseparable from a conformity with public prejudice in this particular.5
Miranda doesn’t quote this fascinating text, but he narrates the duel in that spirit. In envy’s empire, political virtue has to yield to envy’s demands in order to act and make a difference. It doesn’t have to be internally envious: but it has to live in a world where envy has great sway. Hamilton explained to many people that his solution to the dilemma was to accept the duel but throw away his shot, that is, deliberately shoot off-target, thus showing that he doesn’t want to ruin Burr’s life. Ironically, the man whose zeal for work and virtuous action makes him repeatedly proclaim, near the opening of the musical, “I’m not throwing away my shot,” resolves to throw his shot away—which meant, as it turned out, throwing away the chance to work and create.
So they meet with their seconds out in New Jersey, where anything goes. Hamilton shoots in the air. Burr, however, shoots to kill. To the extent that envy’s malice rules society, virtue will often lose.
But America, it turns out, is not entirely envy’s empire. In fact, Miranda represents Hamilton as a success, not a failure. Miranda’s America is a split nation, but above all, it honors public-spirited and constructive achievement, and it doesn’t like people who are above all naysayers, eager to spoil the achievements and the happiness of others. Dying, Hamilton wishes for a future in which others will sing his “song”: and, of course, we are hearing it. Miranda himself (in the original cast run) is singing it. Hamilton has prevailed, because orphan, immigrant, he offers creative achievements that Miranda (and many before him) have found inspiring, have described, and have celebrated. In so many respects they are already in our nation and our lives: the US Constitution, with all its flaws, the financial system, the Federal Reserve Bank: apparently mundane matters that have been the backbone of our flawed yet still operating democracy.
The musical in the end makes a highly optimistic statement about American politics. We are beset by envious rivalry and destructive aggression. But in the end, we know where true good is located: in the love of our flawed nation, in the dedicated service of so many people, known and unknown, who are willing even to lay down their lives for democracy, in the determination to show that brotherhood, constructive work, and the inclusion of minorities and immigrants, shine brighter than hate. As advice to young people in today’s United States, isn’t this too naïve?
Miranda is an optimist. But the ascendancy of fear in our politics makes optimism about envy difficult. There is a lot of Aaron Burr’s spirit in America today. In Congress we so often see rivalry driven by envy’s malice: one group wants to put down the policies of the other simply because they are or were preeminent, rather than engaging a common effort to create the best solution. More generally, in our lives as citizens we encounter all too much of Burr: people obsessed with insider standing, power, and status, and hating successful groups that appear to be “in the room where it happens.” We don’t fight duels with people who insult us, but we do much the same in different ways, insulting individuals and groups who seem to be our rivals, rather than listening to their arguments. And our president’s memorable image of himself beating up CNN is an image right out of the honor-envy mania of the Founding, a spirit not conducive to good political deliberation.
Envious malice, as I’ve said, is not just on the right—though it is surely present there. On the left we find similar themes—in the hatred of “elites,” “bankers,” and “big business,” even occasionally of “capitalism” itself, and in the desire not only to make the good things of life available to all but in the frequent desire to spoil or remove delight for those privileged ones. It is certainly possible to criticize the power of elites in our system without envy. But we all too often find, in place of rational critique, a purely negative desire to tear people down, rather than a determination to join, all of us together, to build a better society.
We even find Burr-like sentiments of violence and destruction. Otherwise admirable people are not exempt from this problem. On August 18, 2017, amid many excellent and dignified protests of President Trump’s appallingly defective reactions to the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, economist and columnist Paul Krugman sounded an ugly and inappropriate note.6 After comparing Donald Trump to the Roman emperor Caligula (a comparison surely far-fetched, since Caligula murdered many of his enemies, sometimes using horrendous tortures7), Krugman then concludes, “Finally, when his behavior became truly intolerable, Rome’s elite did what the party now controlling Congress seems unable even to contemplate: It found a way to get rid of him.” But it is well known that Caligula was assassinated by the Praetorian Guard (whose analog would be our Secret Service). Paul Krugman is an extremely intelligent and scholarly man. Given that this information is easily available on Wikipedia, the suggestion of assassination is either egregiously careless or deliberate. In neither case does it have a place in democratic discourse.
Krugman was reacting to envy with envy. The white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville (the immediate context for his column) were paradigms of the spirit of envy, expressing their wish to spoil the lives of those (Jews, African Americans) by whom they feel displaced: “You will not replace us; Jews will not replace us” was their cry. But it is dead wrong to counter this spirit of envy by more envious spoiling, even carelessly or inadvertently. The desire to spoil is always ugly, and uglier still when it fantasizes or suggests violence.
At the same time, our politics contains many Hamiltons, voices of hope and constructive effort, voices that speak with real love of the nation and its people. Sometimes it is difficult to hear these voices in the cacophony of insults and put-downs. Maybe Miranda has given us all a wake-up call: good ideas can come from anywhere—from immigrants (Hamilton) and even from bankers (also Hamilton). And in the wake of the national soul-searching that has followed the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville in August 2017, we have heard many eloquent statements about America that do indeed help us think forward—including many forceful statements from politicians of both parties, repudiating racism and urging brotherhood and inclusiveness. It’s encouraging that former President Obama’s tweet is now the most-liked tweet ever: “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” Good words: now we need to put them into action.
How can my analysis of envy help us in thinking our way forward? It helps us zero in on a challenge: how might our society create more Hamiltons and fewer Burrs—and political parties and institutions that are more Hamiltonian, seeking to solve problems constructively, than Burrian, seeking to put down and ruin others who threaten them. In a nation, as in a high school, it is possible to focus on helpful and public-spirited efforts, dignifying, praising, and rewarding Hamiltonian creative work, rather than the sort of zero-sum competition that was Burr’s obsession. Our culture of fleeting celebrity and social media narcissism contributes to an envy culture. We need, instead, a culture of virtue and a conception of citizenship focused on virtue in the Hamilton sense: a high-minded yet realistic search for political solutions that unite.
This search has three levels: the personal, the social, and the institutional. They interact, since people’s emotions respond to the institutions in which they live. And political institutions also have a large role to play in making people choose the Hamilton path, rejecting envy. One part of its role is to include: through nondiscrimination law, through respectful attention to previously excluded groups, a nation can make them feel that they have creative and constructive outlets for their talents. (That, at one level, is what Hamilton is all about, with its all-minority cast playing the Founders: let us have our shot and we won’t waste it.)
Much of government’s role, however, is structural. Let’s think back to the Depression, a time when fear and insecurity dominated our national life in a way that outstrips anything we see today. The destitution that the economic collapse created, the searing misery of the Dust Bowl, families starving all across the nation—this is truly worse than anything happening now. Why? Because of the New Deal and its comprehensive assault on fear.8 I believe that FDR was right on target when he said that we must fear fear itself, and when he said that the best antidote to the painful fear he saw all around him was to construct a basic social safety net that would make people able to rely on a social minimum in times of hardship. The “second bill of rights” that he sought to add to the existing civil and political rights included these items:
• The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation.
• The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.
• The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living.
• The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad.
• The right of every family to a decent home.
• The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.
• The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment.
The New Deal comes in for a lot of bashing today, since many people vaguely think of it as a left-wing movement motivated by envy of elites. But those people have forgotten what the Depression was like and how the simple things mentioned here—realized by policies including Federal Deposit Insurance, laws against monopolies, unemployment insurance, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and some type of health policy, whether a revised Affordable Care Act or some suitable alternative—have protected every one of us from the misery of hunger and helplessness. Those things did not exist before Congress enacted them. They may cease to exist in the near future. And yet if we ask what makes the American Dream plausible, what makes a decent level of confidence in one’s prospects plausible, we should look here, and then carry on the incomplete work that lies in front of us.
Roosevelt saw that rights protect democracy from envy. What every single person has by right, people can’t envy in their fellows. Moving some key economic goods into the rights category undercuts envy, to at least some degree. One reason we see so much envy is that people are not secure in their economic lives. Alexander Hamilton would agree. Far from denouncing elite bankers, as do so many on the left today, he knew that creating a stable economy, including an excellent national bank, was a crucial part of reassuring people, limiting instability, and putting the new nation on a steady course. That doesn’t mean that such a system cannot become unjust, and we must always search for the roots of injustice and inequality in our economic system. But it’s another matter to hate bankers as such. It’s a jolt, but a salutary one, to see young people cheering for the banker, and we should applaud Miranda for, among other things, undercutting the politics of envy by his surprising choice of a hero.
Envy will never disappear. It is deeply rooted in the insecurity of human life itself. Searching for purity, whether in people or in politics, is a recipe for self-hatred and hatred of others. Instead, we can rein in envy by creating conditions in which it will not grow out of hand, conditions in which love and creative work (exemplified by Washington and Hamilton in the musical) set the nation’s course. Our nation began (at least mythically) with such a victory. Can we continue in that spirit, or will we soon live, like the ancient Romans, in envy’s empire?
1 Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Mere Reason (1793), Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, ed. and trans. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), Akademie 6.94 (these are the standard page numbers of the Berlin Academy edition, given in the margins of editions and translations).
2 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 532–537.
3 Robert A. Kaster, Emotion, Restraint, and Community in Ancient Rome (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), ch. 4, 84–103.
4 The full text is given in the libretto in the CD.
5 Hamilton, “Statement on Impending Duel with Aaron Burr,” in The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Harold C. Syrett et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961–87), 26:278.
6 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/opinion/trump-caligula-republican-congress.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region®ion=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region.
7 The comparison is reminiscent of the 1967 off-Broadway hit MacBird!, in which left-wing people, angry about the Vietnam War, compared Lyndon Johnson to Macbeth, suggesting that he was behind the murder of President Kennedy.
8 Two important accounts of Roosevelt’s assault on fear are Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013) and Michele Landis Dauber, The Sympathetic State: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).