Recently, especially after Elon Musk passed the trillionaire mark, many people posted online about the ways Musk’s money could help the poor. Others, including famous politicians, then chimed in about what could be done with lots of billionaires’ money. Unsurprisingly, no one posted about what they were currently doing with their money or other possessions to help the poor and needy.
Christians should always be careful about bathing in these rituals of envy. As James 3:16 reminds us, “For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice.”
In fact, what I find fascinating, but not surprising, about this liturgy of envy is how similar it is to a conversation in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s famous novel, Crime and Punishment. The conversation occurs in Chapter 6 when the main character in the book, Raskolnikov, visits a “nasty little restaurant” to drink some tea.
At the tea house, Raskolnikov overhears a conversation between a young student and an army officer talking about a pawnbroker named Aliona. “Rich as a Jew, she’s always got money around. . . . She could lend out five thousand just like that, yet she wouldn’t turn down a pawn worth a ruble.”[1] Dostoyevsky summarized the student’s observations about Aliona as follows:
He began telling how capricious and bad-tempered she was, how one only had to be a day late in redeeming a pawn and the thing was gone. And she would only give a quarter of what anything was worth, charging interest of 5 to 7 percent a month and so forth….He mentioned that the old woman had a sister, Lisaveta, and through the old woman was only a shrunken little hag, she beat her sister, holding her virtually in thrall, as though she were a small child.[2]
The student goes on to describe how, in contrast, “Liseveta was a kind soul: She worked for her sister day and night, and served at home in place of a cook and laundress; in addition she mended, and hired herself out to wash floors. Everything she earned she gave to her sister.”[3]
Despite all Liseveta’s sacrifices for her sister Aliona, Aliona planned not to leave Liseveta money in her will. It was all going to a monastery. At the end, the student declares, “I could rob and murder that damned old woman and I assure you I wouldn’t have a twinge of conscience.”[4] Dostoyevsky wrote then that Raskolnikov shuddered and thought how strange it was since he had been having similar thoughts.
The student then backtracks and says he was only kidding. Yet, he then places this scenario before the soldier: “On the one hand we have a stupid, senseless, insignificant, bad-tempered, sick old hag, needed by no one and harmful to all. She herself does not know what she is living for, and she might just as easily die tomorrow of natural causes. Do you see what I mean?” He continued with his moral calculus:
On the other hand, we have fresh young elements going under with no help—by the thousands, everywhere! The woman’s money, which is going to be sequestered in a monastery, could beget a hundred, a thousand good deeds and fresh starts! Hundreds, perhaps thousands of lives could be put on the right path, dozens of families rescued from poverty, from ruin, from collapse, from decay, from the venereal wards of the hospitals—all this with her money. Kill her, take her money, dedicate it to serving mankind, to the general welfare. Well—what do you think—isn’t this petty little crime effaced by thousands of good deeds? For one life, thousands of lives saved from ruin and collapse. One death and a hundred lives—there’s arithmetic for you! What does the life of this sickly, stupid, bad-tempered old woman mean anyway in the balance of existence? No more than the life of a louse or a cockroach. Not that much—because the old woman actually does harm. She eats up other people’s lives.[5]
As readers of the story know, this incident inspires Raskolnikov to action. Although his plan does not go according to this neat calculation, as the story unravels. Utilitarian calculus regarding murder, such as that associated with physician-assisted suicide or Marxist-inspired revolutions, rarely does.
What I want to point out is what envy did in this conversation. Envy reduced the person holding wealth to an obstacle to social good. The person holding wealth is not seen as a steward made in God’s image, accountable before God for their stewardship, but as a merciless extorter (perhaps accurately or inaccurately). Thus, it tends to instrumentalize people, destroy their human dignity as image bearers, and view them as barriers to greater human goods.
It is always easy to imagine the good deeds one would do with another person’s wealth. Of course, we would steward it differently and morally! We would advance the general welfare with it. We would rescue families from poverty! It’s appropriate that Dostoyevsky places this way of thinking in a student’s mouth. We all have met students who articulate heroic feats of moral goodness they envision doing before becoming distracted in their quest for comfort and security.
At the end, though, we find that supposedly great moral imagination leads the student to a disastrous, inevitable conclusion that has been carried out by many high-minded ideologues throughout history. Envy dehumanizes. The student describes Aliona as a “louse or cockroach.” Yet, even that dehumanization was not enough. No, he considered her a predatory animal that does harm to others and “eats up other people’s lives” like a hyena.
I remember reading about how the Soviet Union’s character education program set before students the model student of Pavlik Morozov. Pavlik’s heroic act was turning in his parents to the police for hoarding grain, so they could be executed in the name of the communist revolution and equality for all. The message to children was clear: Loyalty to the socialist family holds priority over one’s immediate family, who were less than human if they betrayed the revolution of envy to help the poor. We must beware the liturgies of envy that produce the kind of murderous revolutionary mindset that set the Russian, Chinese, Korean, Cambodian, and Vietnamese Revolutions on their way to killing over 100 million. In contrast, as I chronicle in my new book, Unleashing the Image of God, viewing others as image bearers leads to social and political revolutions that truly end oppression and exalt others.
Interestingly, Steven Hayward and Linda Denno observed this past summer in an article for National Affairs entitled “Envy and Social Justice” that the study of envy has fallen out of style, with the last major interdisciplinary study, Helmut Schoeck’s Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour, published nearly sixty years ago. Unfortunately, the post-Christian academy has lost interest in the study of envy, and more than that, in learning how to resist it.
Of course, the counter-liturgy to envy is gratitude, especially for God’s good gifts. It should be no surprise that Dostoevsky wrote in Notes from Underground that the best definition of a human is “a being that goes on two legs and is ungrateful.”[6] For Christians, however, gratitude is the fundamental motivating virtue for our life of love to God and others. We focus on what God has done for us through Christ and what we can do with all the riches that Christ has lavished on us, as children of God (I John 3:1). It is what we experience when we encounter God’s love. It is what Raskolnikov eventually experiences as well.
It should also come as no surprise, then, that our research has found that gratitude, particularly gratitude to God, is the key virtue that spurs the other virtues while also contributing to our overall human flourishing. We need all the virtues, but gratitude, through the power of the Spirit, provides the motivational power for us to engage in developing the virtues of love necessary to reverse the fall in this world. Let’s rejoice in Christ’s riches as we join with Christ in that noble endeavor, with or without others’ billions or trillions.
[1] Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Sydney Monas (Signet, 1968), 71.
[2] Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, 71.
[3] Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, 72.
[4] Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, 72.
[5] Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, 72-73.
[6] Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Vintage, 1993), 29.
Interesting thoughts on envy. But your hook is foolish. Your claim is that public criticism of Musk is dominantly–if not universally and necessarily–driven by envy. (And, by implication, it “destroys [Musk’s] human dignity as an image bearer.”) James was not driven by envy when he criticized the rich and the way they acquired, hoarded, and spent their wealth. Jesus was not participating in “rituals of envy” when he preached woe to the rich and demanded that those with extra food and clothing must share.
And perhaps the reason it was so “unsurprising” that no one posted about their own giving practices is that they see the wisdom in the Lord’s command to give in secret. Giving is supposed to be a help, not a means to boost one’s self or to attack one’s perceived enemies. (So too with Dostoyevsky: his insights are poorer when weaponized in one’s ‘war on woke’ or whatever.)
“Foolish” is an interesting choice of words. I’m also puzzled by your claim to know what motivated James to critique the rich (those motives are not in the text). With regard to what the text says, James is criticizing the rich for what I am talking about: not treating the poor as equal image-bearers (James 2). He was addressing reverse envy (Christians envying the rich and treating them with more honor).
My view of Scripture is such that I believe the Epistle of James was inspired by the Holy Spirit and not inspired by sinful envy. James 5:1-6 (which addresses the rich, not Christians envying the rich) is no “ritual of envy.” And neither are posts that describe how Musk’s misbegotten and misspent wealth and power have harmed the vulnerable. You said otherwise.
I agree with your first sentence. Also, I don’t believe all criticisms of the rich are motivated by envy (i.e/, James). What I was pointing out is that the logic of these particular types of criticisms, when undertaken outside a Christian framework (we could use this other person with “misbegotten and misspent wealth and power” to meet this moral need), can follow a certain form of utilitarian logic that can lead to the dehumanization and even the murder of the rich. That is the exact same form of reasoning that Dostoyevsky was critiquing. It has also justified the killing and torture of hundreds of millions. If you don’t recognize that, I would encourage you to read more communist history.
I appreciate the thoughtful engagement with the underlying challenge of modern wealth, which is historically unprecedented. The response suggesting that your “hook is foolish” reminds me of a recent exchange I had with a Christian author who publishes books and articles in respectable sources. This individual was responding to those with significant wealth, similar to the scenario you describe at the start of your article.
My response to this “what could I do with other people’s money” style of thinking comes more from a cliometrics perspective. I noted in my discussion with this Christian author that we’ve seen a dramatic increase in human well-being that some call “the great enrichment” and others “the great divergence.” This has meant that if I develop a product or service that serves a few hundred people, I can generate some wealth. If I serve thousands of people and improve their well-being, I can generate more significant wealth. Expand your impact to improve the lives of millions or billions of people, wealth significantly increases, and I think that’s a positive thing (from a social good perspective).
The interesting part of the exchange was that I was encouraged to “take Jesus seriously” and “sell everything I have,” which is a fair discussion and I think I should wrestle with “how do I reflect Jesus’ teaching (which was in a context where 99% of people earned a subsistence level income, and even the “rich” of the day were very poor by our modern standards). But from the Christian author, I received a “Jesus’ teaching doesn’t apply to me because I’m not wealthy” response. There is a speed with which we are eager to apply standards to others, while failing to wrestle with them ourselves. There is also a blindness to our own wealth and resources, which might seem “meager” in a modern context, but were “great wealth” in Jesus’ day.