THROUGHOUT Europe, Gucci is currently advertising its new perfume, Envy.
Illustrated by two naked bodies of different gender doing naughty things, the
posters do indeed depict enviable people. He, built like a Greek god, looks not
unlike me, while she is a cross between Claudia Schiffer and Christy Turlington.
Both are transported by brazen desire. Only a saint would not feel envious of
one or other of them.
The marketing department of Gucci has, perhaps unwittingly, identified the
biological origins of this deadly sin. Envy is not just a clever name for a
perfume, it is an emotion ultimately born of lust, and for as long as sex stalks
the land we will be entangled by it. Envy is inevitable because it is good for
our genes.
That last sentence will enrage some readers. They distrust the emerging
discipline of evolutionary psychology. Is that discipline, which seeks to
explain human emotions empirically, really a mess of Darwinian
over-simplifications, cultural indifference and untestable hypotheses?
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Let us start with Richard Dawkins鈥檚 Selfish Gene. He argues that it
is genes that evolve, and they use us mere mortals as transient vessels. Sex is
generally good for genes, but sexuality imposes different evolutionary
strategies on males and females.
Naked competition
Men, who can produce millions of sperm at a trivial cost, are more likely to
reproduce their genes if they impregnate as many fertile young women as
possible. But there is a limited supply of women, so men are driven by their
selfish genes to compete with each other for them. Since women can only invest
in a relatively small number of babies, they worry more than men about the
quality of their sexual partners. This leaves them fighting to be impregnated by
the best-looking or richest men they can attract.
This picture of naked competition is counterbalanced by another, rather more
attractive force, cooperation. A woman in the wild is unlikely to raise a child
successfully without a hunter gatherer doing some hunting and some gathering for
her. A man, for his part, will not propagate his seed unless at least some of
his pregnant and nursing women survive, so it is in his interest to hunt and
gather for them.
This presupposes some sort of bond between the parents. Further, some wild
animals are very fierce, so it behoves men to hunt in packs. Women, too, will
learn from each other, so it behoves them to nurse together. Human societies
have therefore evolved to contain some very mixed emotions; men must both
compete and cooperate with other men, and so must women with women.
Which is where envy comes in. All this cosy business of cooperation, love and
loyalty is very bad for the selfish gene. There is a danger, for example, that a
man with three wives might be fully satisfied. He might cease to compete for
post-pubertal girls. To help ensure against that, he has been endowed with
the genes for envy. His envy of the man who has four wives will drive him to
take on an extra one anyway, regardless of his own private satisfactions, just
to keep his head up. Thus will his genes multiply.
Similarly, a woman whose husband has 10 sheep may be fully provided for
woolwise, but if her 鈥渂est friend鈥� is married to a man who is a better herdsman
and who has 11 sheep, her envy might drive her to fornicate with him, just to
get her own back. Thus envy, by helping her capture a superior male鈥檚 genes,
will improve her children鈥檚 genetic endowment.
Envy has evolved to ensure we are never happy, however bountifully we are
endowed, because envy is obsessed with the relative. That is because the world
of genes is relative. Consider the competition between carnivores and their
prey. A herbivore may run at 30 kilometres an hour, but if the predator can do
31 then the herbivore is lost. On another continent, where predators might never
exceed 20 kilometres an hour, herbivores can settle for 21. Evolutionary
competition, therefore, is relative rather than absolute. Obviously there are
some biological absolutes. A fish cannot afford to drown, a tree must
photosynthesise, but once these minimal physical competencies are achieved and
particular niches can be occupied by living creatures, further development is
competitive and therefore relative.
Charm offensive
The implications are not just biological but also political. Consider
poverty. For years the Left has argued that poverty is relative, not absolute.
But some conservatives disagree, saying that once basic needs such as food and
housing have been met, consumer durables such as colour television sets are
luxuries. Inevitably, both sides are partially correct. A colour television set
is indeed a luxury, but the person who only owns a black and white set might
genuinely feel deprived.
Envy, therefore, drives much of the demand for social justice. But the
privileged can defuse this dangerous emotion by developing a sensitivity to the
feelings of other people. The English upper classes have long known this, which
is why England has been spared the horrors of a proletarian revolution. Charm,
as Evelyn Waugh鈥檚 character Anthony Blanche observed in Brideshead
Revisited, is the great weapon of the rich.
Looking even deeper into human social development, the elaboration of customs
such as monogamous marriage (which spreads spouses about) or of human rights or
property rights, were necessary steps for the creation of societies that gave
all, even the poor, a stake and so optimised their cooperation. A sense of
fairness is one of the evolutionary antidotes to envy. And a sense of scepticism
is a good antidote to charm. So the endless battle between the genes develops
ever-increasing layers of sophistication as the different social tactics cancel
each other out.
Can it be established empirically that such competition could yield a complex
emotion such as envy? Nobody, of course, argues for a simple gene for envy, nor
does anyone deny that culture does not influence its expression. The evolution
of human emotions has left no fossils, yet envy might, apparently, be formally
demonstrated. Robert Reich used to teach economics at Harvard, where he would
ask his students if they would prefer for both the US and Japan to grow at 1 per
cent a year, or for the US grow at 2 per cent and for Japan at 3 per cent.
Overwhelmingly, his students chose the first option. They prefered to be
absolutely poor but relatively rich rather than the opposite. Psychologists
could build on this observation to test more fully the circumstances in which
envy is expressed.
Further, in his book The Origins of Virtue, the best
current account of evolutionary psychology, Matt Ridley describes a version of
the mathematical game 鈥渢he prisoner鈥檚 dilemma鈥�, where prisoners, however
selfish, can only break out of their cells if they cooperate with their fellow
selfish prisoners. That forces everyone to be virtuous. In the jargon of this
discipline, life can be a 鈥渮ero sum鈥� game鈥攅verybody wins, nobody
loses.
It is hard, empirically, to escape the conclusion that sociological
Darwinism鈥攁nd the mathematical modelling based on its
assumptions鈥攐ffers a better explanation for the development of the
evolutionarily useful, so-called deadly sin, envy, than do religion or the
traditional humanities. We scientists are entitled to a little pride.