Branjolina, Schadenfreude, and The Perils of Pygmalion

This post is proof that I listened first to my mom and later (a little) as an English major for four years. Themes of great literature are truly timeless and can continue to give insight in unexpected places. Even if some of them are kind of snoozers. Just Kidding, Mom.:

After the new focus given by My Fair Lady, everyone seems to have forgotten that George Bernard Shaw’s main theme of Pygmalion is right out of Paradise Lost. Rather than adopt the happily ever after theme of the Greek legend that gives the play its name, Shaw's Pygmalion, Higgins, is given a Miltonic twist: he is the lonely, anguished creator, having worked his masterpiece and then unexpectedly betrayed by it. Pygmalion himself, in designing the perfect woman, has only his hubris to blame in his mistaken hope of the perfect woman; while she seems like a great idea, she would be too good for him. Higgins, the perennial bachelor, blows it with even a real woman. He sours to her because as a common ordinary man, he is unable to cope in a real relationship and is threatened by either fault or perfection in the end.

Rather than a stone Venus that is model for legendary perfection in women, a wife must be a flesh and blood partner. It is quite the dilemma that we are all in. We want perfection in others, their faults of course being obvious obstacles for us in many ways, but we all seem to resent it quite strongly if the ideals we hope for in others are actually approximated.

I was standing in the supermarket line today and was actually drawn to one of the stories on Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, and their shocking recent statements about their daughter’s race. Their partnership and resulting daughter is the ultimate product of Hollywood and the supporting culture—youth and beauty are everything, the ultimate hallmarks of success.

But also running strong through our culture is an intense counter-current of resentment of anyone who successfully attains those hallmarks. People are hated simply because they happen to have the bad luck of winning the game we are all playing. Angelina Jolie said openly that she feels that her blonde daughter will be an ‘outcast’ in her world. She didn’t say, but it also may be such resentment or resulting lack of an ability to relate to this child that they haven’t had to rescue from a desperate third world situation, that keeps her daughter home with hired help when the rest of the family are out recreating together. Jolie and Pitt typify physical beauty that our culture craves but they are also as much of a product of its unanalyzed values; they are successful, but in order to be able to handle that success they must attain new extremes of reflexively exorcising their collective guilt for that success rather than simply enjoying it.

Because resentment and jealousy are such fundamental human feelings, the Hollywood compulsion to the third world is only an extreme example (Hollywood is extreme about everything) of everyone’s natural tendencies. We are more comfortable relating to those who we feel have less to resent for or be jealous of. Thus we seem to value cultivating proximity (for comparison's sake) to people who are less rich, less smart, less attractive—we all want to stand next to the person in the picture that makes us look thin and not the one that doesn’t. This is obvious and harmless. But we err when this comfort crosses over into the desire to build important relationships on such a stratification of qualities rather than a real partnership of flesh and blood equals. This is the fallacy that there exists an actual idealization (like Rousseau’s) of a type humanity untouched by the material rewards, such purity creating access to a type of virtue that the rest of us miss, sullied by the aims we know in our hearts to possess. But Rousseau, among many others, probably is less attracted to the virtue of unspoiled humanity as he is repelled by the threat we all feel any time anyone else succeeds in playing the game that we all try to win ourselves.

In the case of their biological child, Jolie and Pitt are coming up empty. Hollywood activism is a natural magnification of extreme idealization of virtue once its possessor is safely judged to be non threatening. And of course no one is knocking Hollywood activism, not even in this blog; the problem is the resulting lack, when there is this simplistic perception of virtue and compassion, of any basis for positive empathy toward anyone others than someone we feel safely superior to. Apparently there is difficulty, in this extreme Hollywood example, (just like in the worlds of Bernard Shaw and Milton in a far flung corner of the world), in trying to have natural familial relations based on anything else. But when you have defined virtue in other people by making sure they are safely ‘have nots’, so you they can’t resent them for any reason, what do they do when your own child is one of the ‘haves’? Jolie elaborated thusly, saying that since her daughter has had everything handed to her, in Jolie's mind her daughter will miss out on something fundamentally important for qualification as a valued human being.

This is relating to others with the mistaken view of a Pygmalion creator figure. In this way the Jolie/Pitts are only an extreme example (again, Hollywood) of the awkwardness that often results when people try to have interpersonal relationships that don’t agitate any of our various conflicting/difficult natures, and our mistaken guesses about what qualities in others we would actually value if we were to choose them AS their creators. Parenting only brings such normal creative instincts to the surface in an obvious fashion, as did the situation in Paradise Lost and Pygmalion. Of course we are taught that we are to give our children every advantage—even the ones we didn’t have ourselves. We are to selflessly slave away time and resources to make sure that they succeed even in ways we ourselves didn’t. But then we are faced with the anguish of the Miltonic hero: if we succeed in our creation, will we be able to relate to them as equals? Will they betray us once they are more powerful? And thus will our fear of such betrayal cause us to preemptively feel threatened by them as we are often threatened by others?

Wouldn't we rather just have our children be like us after all, rather than follow through with that idealistic parenting? Fact is, many parents do just that. They set out to give their children a leg into a better world and then pull back if they cusp it. In an interesting study of parents of older children, parents end up being closer not to the children who have above else lived lives their parents approve of, but those who live lives more closely to their own. We teach our children that nice, unselfish squeaky wheels shouldn't even ask for grease. But of course we grease squeaky wheels just like everyone else, and thus our children who are perceived to be more needed by us have our closer, more involved parenting, while those that dutifully listen to us and go and do as we tell them are probably going to wind up less close, after less need for our parenting interaction.

This manifests itself in a number of common ways, and not just despairing as Jolie has that your child doesn’t blend into your carefully-crafted multi-ethnic hoard. Pretty much every child or younger sibling for that matter gets some type of lecture about how, (when that child has actually benefited from better circumstances that we seem to be all seeking for ourselves and our families), he didn’t really have to attend the much more educational school of hard knocks like we did.

It can quickly get much worse when the resentment of others who have 'had it easy' is unsoftened by any such familial relationships. Those who we are confident are worthless (unschooled by the reality of our real struggles) because of their riches or other success can be objects of open scorn, even violence. Thousands were victims of brutality and murder during the French Revolution simply for having what their murderers wanted for themsselves, so easy is it to translate jealousy into the depersonification necessary for the ultimate injury. And this is one of the tragedies of Pygmalion and each of our lives. When we are faced with a person who might have more than us (in any real or perceived way, and who really can escape our potential for envy) we try to level the playing field against them with our own denial of affection. Thus the rich person in the mansion or whoever might qualify for resentment (really in need of compassion just as anyone) is denied the most fundamental humane treatment of all.

This retaliatory impulse makes us much think we are more comfortable with others whose achievements do not exceed our own, even if they represent no actual detraction to our circumstances. The unfairness is obvious and it creates a situation where unfortunately no one can win this game we have made up. By definition Jolie's daughter lacks worth because she has the advantages we are trying to make sure that everyone has. We establish standards as a society, but rather than celebrate when anyone meets them, we of course express natural resentment and hostility. Resenting others for what they have is actually such a common emotion that our language has no word for it, which is very typical. Our language ironically seems to label those faults and/or good qualities which we perceive as important, but be less comfortable expressing the ones which ones actually are real weaknesses.

Thus we must borrow words from German to describe the very common feeling of delighting in another’s misfortune (or the reverse, which I am talking about here), because it is so common and ordinary that probably we never need to ever talk about it happening. In the Chinese orthography system, an argument is represented by two symbols for the female form. Three women are the word for gossip. Two women, or people to be fair, apparently get together for the purposes of labeling the faults of a third, absent, person. But the characteristic of resenting the success of others probably would not ever be discussed in this way, thus no need to label it. In fact no need to admit it.

Why is it that we feel this automatic resentment for the occupants of the larger house on the hill? They did nothing to us. Their attainment of success does not detract from our own enjoyment of what we have. Yet greed in our language and our culture, is a much bigger problem than the real problems that actually cause us all to suffer. Not one of us has immediate circumstances lessened by the fact that someone else has more. What actually causes pain and anguish are the everyday, small expressions of common resentment and hostility from the actual people in our lives, not nameless, faceless ‘wealthy, greedy, selfish, or materialistic’ villains, though it certainly seems to be easier to think so.

Like Schadenfreude, those qualities which barely have a name, all around us, are our real enemies. Which are the more important virtues: niceness/meanness or benevolence/malice? The answer seems to me to be that the qualities in our culture, or that we think are important in others, are inversely proportional to their actual identification as such. Because we are unwilling to deal with people's real faults, and unable to deal with those without faults, we have a great deal of difficulty being able to take comfort in any of the relations near us, and even worse can indulge openly violent hostility to those far away. Because of this complete surrender to common hostilities and resentments of others, we may have to settle for inventing a wife out of clay or a family out of a third world.