Pragmatism and Reference Book

Intentional Intellectual Blindness

Alain de Botton should be deeply ashamed of this book. If he isn't, it can only be due to his continued ignorance of the most important research ever conducted about his chosen subject. The French philosopher and literary critic, Rene Girard spent most of his professional career analysing and theorising about the problem de Botton addresses: envy, its sources and its consequences. In 2005, the year after the publication of de Botton's book, Girard, author of more than 30 books on the subject, was named as one of the 40 "Les immortals" members of the Academie française. Yet Girard doesn't even rate a footnote in Status Anxiety.

It is inconceivable that anyone as widely read in European culture as de Botton had never encountered Girard's work. De Botton's meandering discourse touches every even tangentially relevant subject, from literature, philosophy, and history to religion politics and advertising; from Jesus to Adam Smith, from Plato to Freud. The exclusion of Girard cannot be accidental, or incidental. It is clearly meant as a slight and becomes an insult when de Botton does not even implicitly address his differences with Girard's thought. This is shocking. The consequence is that de Botton's thesis is thin, unsubstantial, and not very interesting.

According to de Botton, envy is at root a sort of love, not between two people but between a person and what de Botton calls "the world." He redefines love "as a kind of respect, a sensitivity on the part of one person to another's existence." He then claims that "we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value," a psychological condition which prompts us to seek confirmation of self-worth in others. As he puts it rather regretfully, "We seem beholden to the affections of others to endure ourselves." At best, therefore, this is a desire for love; but it is certainly not love, nor even respect. And it has much less to do with the world in general than with those closest to us.

The problem with de Botton's subsequent discourse (it can hardly be called an argument) is that it does nothing to support his theory. After its assertion, the theory is dropped and replaced with extended analyses of historical attitudes toward wealth and poverty, not about the psychological sources of love, respect, or, most importantly, envy. He attributes our current purported condition to egalitarian democracy, other-worldly Christianity, and paradoxically a general improvement in living standards. All very ad hoc, only vaguely plausible, and entirely fragmentary. The book reads like notes for an unfocused doctoral dissertation which itself is causing a bit of anxiety for its author.

At several points de Botton does stray into Girardian territory, for example when he says, "Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among." And again when he recognises that "We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like'we envy only members of our reference group." But these are trivial observations, never developed, which themselves need theoretical explanations. These he does not provide. Nor does he have any substantive suggestions of how to deal with the issue, either personally or socially.

Girard's theory of envy on the other hand doesn't grasp for every questionable straw of cultural evidence. It starts with a not so evident hypothesis of what he calls mimetic desire. In brief, this hypothesis proposes that we want things mainly because other people want them. We are able to learn to do this because we are social animals. We are taught to do this by our parents, our friends, and Madison Avenue. But ancient myths and history show that the processes involved in mimetic desire are neither new nor the consequence of modern industrial (or post-industrial) society.

De Botton can only be fatalistic because he has no real explanation: "The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be." This is not just hollow, it is also silly. Why write the book at all if this is its conclusion. It says nothing; an intellectual dead-end. Girard, on the other hand, provokes any number of possible directions for fruitful thought (See here for several: ). So if you find envy an important topic, you know where to go (and not) for some stimulating ideas.

Postscript 7Oct19: The situation is actually more sinister than I suspected. Wholesale appropriation seems to be involved: