Originally I thought I’d write about envy, another of the 7 deadly sins, in the context of being a woman artist. It had come up while reading a review of a current exhibition (NYC friends, don’t miss this one!) of works by an artist I greatly admire, Helene Schjerfbeck.

Four Uncompromising Finnish Women Artists

You can find a detailed description of her life and development as a portrait painter in the link below written by the folks who put on a fabulous retrospective at the Schirn in Frankfurt 2 years ago.

http://schirn.de/schjerfbeck/en/

I find myself often envious of women who have the courage and the discipline to go against the grain of their own time, who believe in the power of their work and don’t succumb to the familiar sense of being an impostor when doing their work outside of the traditional parameters.

 

I changed my mind about the focus of today’s musings, though, when remembering an article that one of the fellows at the American Enterprise Institute published some years back in the National Review. Not sure if reading it will make you laugh or cry or scream or hang your head in despair, but it is certainly timely food for thought. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/209555/wealth-virtue

The author, Michael Novak, tries to make the case for the superiority of capitalism in both practical and moral terms, the latter clearly linked to tenets of religious, judeo-christian philosophy, as far as I could tell. The list of ten points that he claims make capitalism the moral choice includes things like freeing the poor from indolence (!), strengthening civility to protect people’s achievements etc….. but here is the bit on envy.

“10. Finally, it is one of the main functions of a capitalist economy to defeat envy. Envy is the most destructive of social evils, more so even than hatred. Hatred is highly visible; everyone knows that hatred is destructive. But envy is invisible, like a colorless gas, and it usually masquerades under some other name, such as equality. Nonetheless, a rage for material equality is a wicked project. Human beings are each so different from every other in talent, character, desire, energy, and luck, that material equality can never be imposed on human beings except through a thorough use of force. (Even then, those who impose equality on others would be likely to live in a way “more equal than others.”) Envy is the most characteristic vice of all the long centuries of zero-sum economies, in which no one can win unless others lose. A capitalist system defeats envy, and promotes in its place the personal pursuit of happiness. It does this by generating invention, discovery, and economic growth. Its ideal is win-win, a situation in which everyone wins. In a dynamic world, with open horizons for all, life itself encourages people to attend to their own self-discovery and to pursue their own personal form of happiness, rather than to live a false life envying others.”

I will not begin to count all that is wrong in his assumptions or which phrases had me snort particularly loudly, but point to the simple fact that our undoubtedly capitalist country is riddled with envy. Read any analysis of why our current president was elected, and it partially boils down to that very sentiment. Blacks not waiting in line with the disenfranchised white working class? Welfare queens getting “free passes?” Immigrants scooping up what belongs to the nationalists? Women demanding equal pay? The personal pursuit of happiness seemingly doesn’t cut it when spontaneously engaging in social comparison. Self discovery is not up to par fighting envy when seeing your neighbor’s Porsche while you struggle to pay the rent. The claim that capitalism is not a zero-sum system in which someone’s gain does not come with someone else’s loss is simply idiotic. There, I’ve gone into text analysis after all…

Unfair distribution of riches, at all times in human history, have led to envy. Thus it was imperative to impose strong impediments to acting out on that feeling, particularly given the numbers involved: the powerless many being envious of what the powerful few hoarded. Religion was up to the task: making envy a deadly sin that endangers the immortality of your soul was a significant threat. The story of Cain and Abel, the biblical prototype for envy and its dire consequences, is not coincidentally one of the first we learn about in the Holy Books.

Photographs are Self-Portraits that have none of the freedom of creation that I envy Schjerfbeck et al. – the constraint of seeing yourself in a reflective context leaves much to be desired.