To begin, like a dull student, with the trivial, a definition: spite is “petty ill will or hatred with the disposition to irritate, annoy, or thwart” (Webster’s).
Although apparently failing its audition for Evagrius Ponticus’s 4th-century blockbuster The Seven Deadly Sins, spite, I have learned, is an important concept in psychology, theoretical economics, game theory, and behavioral ecology, among other intellectual pursuits. Spite is also the name of some punk rockers from Michigan, described as “hardcore” everywhere you look. There is, as far as I can tell, no punk band called “Fair Play” (though “Fair Play” was written across the abdomen of the 1940’s superhero Mister Terrific). (Probably out of spite.) (By the way: what would “hardcore spite” look like?)
Sidebar: one can, of course, “cut off one’s nose to spite one’s face,” which is (of course) to speak figuratively. There is a surprising amount of confusion out there regarding what the phrase means, though also a fair degree of consensus among internet authorities: to “disadvantage yourself in order to do harm to an adversary,” explains The Phrase Finder; “to hurt yourself in an effort to punish someone else,” according to the Cambridge Dictionary of American Idioms. But why is it always “yourself ”? And why are most of the examples proffered concerned with me quitting my job?
Despite how interesting all this is, let us return to spite. Petty hatred, then, but not like hating broccoli. More like watching a stranger with a sack enter your vacationing neighbor’s house and not calling the police. Whatever it was Fortunato did to Montresor in Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado,” it was probably some exercise in spite. What Montresor does to Fortunato, on the other hand, is not.
Spite, in short, is dollhouse malevolence. It was not mere spite built Dachau. That much seems clear.
The Goodwill store—where my father goes to buy secondhand jigsaw puzzles—is the sublimation of spite. The puzzle with one or two missing pieces may be spite in a box. But I am thinking about the petty self-loathing of noseless dolls . . . pieces of their faces missing like a puzzle lacking a patch of sky, the table showing through. Does that flesh out (ha ha) a definition?
The study Harper’s so neatly summarized was written up for Science Daily, which tells us that, according to Rory Smead and Patrick Forber (both, I take it, professors of philosophy), “fair play” is not mere selflessness but a strategic response to spite. “Fairness,” I read, is “a strategy for survival” in a world rife with spite. A modified version of the “ultimatum game” was used, but I won’t bore you with the particulars. As for spite itself: it apparently doesn’t need to be accounted for.
1 Samuel 2:31-32 (New International Version): “The time is coming when I will cut short your strength and the strength of your father’s house, so that there will not be an old man in your family line, and you will see distress in my dwelling.” Given how much worse this could have gone, is the House of Eli about to reap merely the spite of Jehovah, whose nose is clearly out of joint?
“Never underestimate spite as a motivator for genius,” writes Sam Keen; “I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze,” D.H. Lawrence confessed. “My talent was the uncompromising ability to feel spite,” brags Natsuo Kirino.
When “spite” in the sense of something that simply “induces vexation” (Collins English Dictionary) is combined with its sense of “a need to see others suffer” (Memidex.com)—any others, unknown others—then we get car remotes that sound the horn, mail from the Publishers Clearinghouse, low-calorie beer. And I must ask myself: have I written this out of spite or to spite spite? Does fairness enter into this at all? Have I lopped off my nose to spite my prose?