When Bad Things Happen to Other People Read Online Free PDF Page B

be; it is longing for his presence when he is absent; it is happiness in the thought of him; it is profound satisfaction over everything that makes him great and glorious.6
    Other people around us are not simply neighbors for Niebuhr, but “beloved” ones. Here and in other works, Niebuhr sets out with force a theme that cascades through Christian ethics: we ought to commit ourselves fully to a neighbor’s well-being. Implied in this excerpt from Niebuhr is the view that Schadenfreude undermines neighbor-love and therefore signals a sin in the person who feels it.
    This position does not strike me as persuasive. Though we generally require some kind of goodwill from those people about whom we care (if not from strangers), the forms we expect such goodwill to take do not necessarily exclude  Schadenfreude . Even our closest friends may disagree with some aspect of our lives and subsequently take our misfortunes as proof of our perceived failings. But because some people assume that benevolence must aim at the  full  good of another, they assume that Schadenfreude must presuppose malice.
    Consider the matter of competition, an inevitable consequence of living in communities. As Gore Vidal once confessed, “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” A century earlier Mark Twain observed in  Following the Equator , “It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart; the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you.” To be sure, such statements play off of fashionable coquetry. Raconteurs occasionally act merely in order to do justice to maxims, but the maxims no doubt contain a certain grain of truth.
    Competition pits us against one another. Wholeheartedness, which lies at the heart of integrity, might seem to rule out our ever taking pleasure in the misfortunes of friends. A focus on integrity, though, runs the risk of oversimplifying our interactions with other people. When friends are competitors, wholehearted devotion to our friends might seem to prevent us from achieving our own potential. How we treat one another in sports may resemble malice, but does not equal it. The same is true of  Schadenfreude.
    3.        The importance of what people think we deserve
    How can beliefs shape emotions? This question underlies any number of emotional responses. Where indignation amounts to sadness at the good fortune of others who do not deserve it, Schadenfreude amounts to happiness at the ill fortune of others who  do  deserve it. In both cases an evaluation of appropriateness dictates an emotional response. Kafka states that he had been angry with Elli for years, which suggests he may have believed she  deserved  to suffer because of some wrong she had done.
    Some notion of desert, or what people deserve, underlies judgments about moral appropriateness. This is an illuminating insight, but one of limited usefulness insofar as people tend to judge others more severely than they judge themselves. Assessing ourselves, too, will more likely distort our judgment than assessing others. A judgment about the just deserts of another person often enough involves a conflict—avowed or disavowed—between selfish desire and genuine scruples.
    Take for example the advice a widely quoted literary theorist offered to American graduate students studying to become university professors. In the course of a polemical essay on the state of doctoral education in the humanities, the American intellectual Camille Paglia railed against the unfairness of the American system, which allegedly favors superficial self-promoters over highly original thinkers. (Paglia struggled for years to find employment as a professor.) Paglia assured advanced students:
    If you keep the faith, the gods may give you, at midlife, the sweet pleasure of seeing the hotshots who were so fast out of the gate begin to flag and sink, just as your studies are reaching their point of maturation.7
    Paglia