Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Emotions
Emotions
This volume explores the emotions that are intricately woven into the texture of everyday life and
experience. A contribution to the literature on the sociology of emotions, it focuses on the role of
emotions as being integral to daily life, broadening our understanding by examining both ‘core’
emotions and those that are often overlooked or omitted from more conventional studies. Bringing
together theoretical and empirical studies from scholars across a range of subjects, including sociology,
psychology, cultural studies, history, politics and cognitive science, this international collection centres
on the ‘everyday-ness’ of emotional experience.
Michael Hviid Jacobsen is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Social Work,
Aalborg University, Denmark. His research is concerned with topics such as crime, utopia, ethics, death
and dying, palliative care, qualitative methods and social theory. His recent publications include Beyond
Bauman, Postmortal Society, The Interactionist Imagination and Liquid Criminology.
Classical and Contemporary Social Theory
Classical and Contemporary Social Theory publishes rigorous scholarly work that re-discovers the relevance of social
theory for contemporary times, demonstrating the enduring importance of theory for modern social issues. The series
covers social theory in a broad sense, inviting contributions on both ‘classical’ and modern theory, thus encompassing
sociology, without being confined to a single discipline. As such, work from across the social sciences is welcome,
provided that volumes address the social context of particular issues, subjects, or figures and offer new
understandings of social reality and the contribution of a theorist or school to our understanding of it.
The series considers significant new appraisals of established thinkers or schools, comparative works or
contributions that discuss a particular social issue or phenomenon in relation to the work of specific theorists
or theoretical approaches. Contributions are welcome that assess broad strands of thought within certain
schools or across the work of a number of thinkers, but always with an eye toward contributing to
contemporary understandings of social issues and contexts.
Series Editor
Stjepan G. Mestrovic, Texas A&M University, USA
Lost in Perfection
Impacts of Optimisation on Culture and Psyche
Edited by Vera King, Benigna Gerisch and Hartmut Rosa
Edited by
Michael Hviid Jacobsen
First published 2019
by Routledge
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© 2019 selection and editorial matter, Michael Hviid Jacobsen; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Michael Hviid Jacobsen to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their
individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jacobsen, Michael Hviid, 1971- editor.
Title: Emotions, everyday life and sociology / edited by Michael Hviid Jacobsen.
Description: 1 Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2018. | Series: Classical and contemporary social theory | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018009997| ISBN 9781138633339 (hbk) | ISBN 9781315207728 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Social sciences–Philosophy. | Emotions.
Classification: LCC H61 .E456 2018 | DDC 302–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018009997
2 Loyalty: The emotion of future expectation, felt now, based on the past
JAMES M. CONNOR
Index
Foreword and acknowledgements
It is sometimes said – and a famous song-line even states – that ‘love is all around’. Love, however, is not
the only emotion permeating human life (if this was indeed the case, then the world would probably be
a much better place to live than it currently is) – all other emotions are also all around: anger, fear,
trust, loyalty, envy, jealousy, cynicism, sadness, joy, misery, empathy, laziness, boredom, anger,
depression, happiness, embarrassment, shame, guilt, desire, excitement, pride, and so on. The list of
emotions is too long even to attempt to exhaust here. This testifies to the fact that human life – and with
it social life and everyday life – is saturated with emotions. This book is a sociological tribute to some of
these emotions.
We live in emotional times, and even though some claim that these are in fact ‘post-emotional times’
(just as they are apparently also ‘post-factual times’), emotions in an almost unprecedented manner
seem to capture the public imagination not only in politics and everyday life, but also in academia.
Today, torrents of literature dealing with, dissecting, describing and analysing emotions are being
published within various scientific disciplines and sub-fields, whereas half a century ago hardly anyone
wrote about or researched emotions in any detail. We now have the ‘sociology of emotions’, the
‘psychology of emotions’, the ‘social psychology of emotions’, the ‘anthropology of emotions’ and the
‘history of emotions’, just to mention a few of the areas having paid particular attention to studying
emotions. This goes to show that from previously being shunned or practiced primarily on the outskirts
of the social sciences, the study of emotions is now embraced as a topic worthy of academic attention
(either in its own right or as an integral part of other areas of research) even by high-profile
researchers.
In my experience, one of the most important yet nevertheless often disregarded emotions in everyday
life is thankfulness or gratitude. I would therefore like to extend my gratitude to the book’s many
contributors, who so willingly have shared their research-based knowledge on different emotions. I
would also like to take this opportunity, as always, to thank my two ‘partners in crime’, Alice Salt and
Neil Jordan at Routledge, for a professional collaboration on this volume. It has once again been a
pleasure working with you.
Gordon Clanton has taught Sociology at San Diego State University, United States, since 1975. The
author/editor of the book Jealousy (1977/1998), he is a pioneer in the sociological study of emotions
and a founding member of the Emotions Section of the American Sociological Association. Other
research interests include the sociology of religion and the sociology of knowledge.
James M. Connor holds a PhD and works at the University of New South Wales, Canberra, Australia.
He specialises in emotions, organisational culture and behaviour. He has been funded by WADA to
research doping and governance in sport and the Australian Research Council to investigate cultures
of abuse in the military.
Patrick Gamsby is the Scholarly Communications Librarian at Memorial University of Newfoundland,
Canada. He received his doctorate from Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada with a
dissertation on Henri Lefebvre. His research interests include critical theory, continental philosophy,
the history of ideas, environmental thinking, everyday life and scholarly communication.
Michael Hviid Jacobsen is Professor of Sociology at Aalborg University, Denmark. He has published
extensively on topics such as death and dying, palliative care, emotions, utopia, critique, deviance,
interactionism, ethics, criminology, qualitative research and social theory.
Jennifer M. Jenkins is the Atkinson Chair of Early Child Development and Education at the University
of Toronto, Canada. She researches the role of family processes in children’s understanding of other
minds and their mental health.
Søren Kristiansen is Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean at the Faculty of the Social Sciences
at Aalborg University, Denmark. His current research projects focus on gambling with a special focus
on online simulated gambling and the relationships between gambling behaviour and the role of
social contexts. He has published widely on a range of issues, including deviance, research methods,
research ethics, social problems and social policy.
Stephen Lyng is a Professor of Sociology at Carthage College, United States. His major areas of
interest are the sociology of risk, sociology of the body and sociological theory. He is the author of
three books and numerous articles on a wide range of issues in these areas of study.
Amir B. Marvasti is Associate Professor of Sociology at Penn State University, Altoona, United States.
His research focuses on the social construction and management of identities in everyday life. He
also has an active publication record on the pedagogy of qualitative research.
Vessela Misheva is Professor of Sociology at Uppsala University, Sweden. She has published
extensively on macrosociological systems theory and the sociology of self-conscious emotions,
particularly shame and guilt, the sociology of knowledge, models of scientific development, the
emergence of sociology and the theory and tradition of classical symbolic interactionism.
Barbara A. Misztal is Emeritus Professor of Sociology, at the School of Media, Communication and
Sociology, University of Leicester, United Kingdom. She has published on the issues of trust, memory,
informality, vulnerability, multiple normalities, forgiveness and on the problems of political changes,
public intellectuals, democracy and solidarity.
Keith Oatley is Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Toronto, Canada. His
main research has been on emotions, and on the effects of reading and writing fiction.
Anders Petersen is Associate Professor of Sociology at Aalborg University, Denmark. He has published
extensively on topics such as diagnostic culture, social pathologies, social critique, qualitative
research and social theory.
Susie Scott is Professor of Sociology the University of Sussex, United Kingdom. She specialises in
symbolic interactionism and dramaturgical theory applied to aspects of self-identity and everyday
life. She has published on shyness, total institutions, mental disorder, performance art, swimming
and has created the sociology of nothing.
Paul R. Ward is Professor of Public Health at Flinders University, Australia. He has published
extensively on topics such as trust, risk, equity, ethics, childhood vaccinations, food systems, cancer
screening, lay expertise, HIV prevention, qualitative research and social theory.
Iain Wilkinson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, United Kingdom. He has published
extensively on topics such as social suffering, modern humanitarianism, the cultural politics of
compassion, social care, risk, anxiety and social theory.
Introduction
Emotions, Emotions, Everywhere Emotions!
Michael Hviid Jacobsen
Love and hate, ecstasy and agony, pleasure and pain, lust and satiety, hope and despair, satisfaction and
frustration, excitement and boredom, sympathy and spite, full and hungry, tasty and foul, comfort and
discomfort. These and a vast number of other feelings, named and unnamed, are the core of our being, the
stuff of our everyday lives. They are the foundations of all society.
(Douglas 1977:51)
Despite this proposed spreading and interwovenness of emotions into almost every nook and cranny of
social and everyday life, the intricate connections between emotions and everyday life so far has
apparently not been sufficiently exposed or studied. As recently noted by some emotion researchers,
‘although research on emotions is abundant, knowledge about emotions in everyday life has been
particularly scarce’ (Trampe et al. 2015:13). There is perhaps some truth to this. Obviously, there is
already heaps of published research – qualitative as well as quantitative – on many different everyday
dimensions and facets of emotions. For example, the authors of the previous statement themselves
conducted a study trying to detect and document via mobile apps and questionnaires what specific
emotions were prevalent at what given time during an ordinary day and how much of everyday life they
each occupied. Prior to this study, there have been several such attempts at trying to measure – often
based on self-report or retrospective recollection – the exact amount, number, frequency or duration of
different emotional experiences during a single day either by the use of questionnaires, time use
studies, event sampling or sometimes also diary entries (see, e.g., Oatley and Duncan 1994; Scherer et
al. 2004; for comments, see also Averill 2004; Wilhelm et al. 2004). Even though there is undoubtedly a
lot to be learned from such survey-based and/or statistically elaborated studies that often, in different
ways, try to objectify and quantify emotions, they necessarily encounter the critique of being unable to
understand how emotions feel or how it really feels to be emotional in concrete everyday
circumstances. Moreover, by trying to reduce and squeeze often vaguely felt or multivalent experiences
of emotions into ironclad schemas or categories of emotional reactions, one as a researcher may run the
risk of missing out on something that is much more complex and unexpected than one’s predetermined
and predefined operationalisations. Perhaps Heinz Kohut was right when he once famously stated that
when the counting begins, understanding ceases. Sympathetic to such a view, Jack Katz – based on his
own extensive research on emotions and crime – insisted that ‘to sociologists the study of anything as it
exists in everyday life is likely to mean a move beyond survey methodology’ (Katz 2004:609). Besides
such attempts at documenting and/or quantifying emotions, the phenomenology of everyday life
emotions is by now also an already well-established line of research that instead relies on in-depth
descriptions, stories and personal narratives of emotional ups and downs over longer periods of time
due to specific social and individual circumstances, which thus tries to probe in more detail into the
thoroughly emotional character of human life as such. However, despite many such empirical studies of
emotions in everyday settings, we still need more research-based knowledge about the importance of
emotions in social life in general but also about how specific emotions characterise and influence
various everyday experiences of individuals and groups.
Perhaps the main reason sociologists have neglected feeling is that, as sociologists, we are members of the
same society as the actors we study, and we share their feelings and values. Our society defines being
cognitive, intellectual, or rational dimensions of experience as superior to being emotional or sentimental.…
Another reason for sociologists’ neglect of emotions may be the discipline’s attempt to be recognized as a
‘real science’ and the consequent need to focus on the most objective and measurable features of social life.
(Hochschild 1975:281)
In an almost similar vein, but voiced specifically within the context of qualitative studies and fieldwork,
Marlene de Laine has stated that ‘emotions have been viewed as irrelevant or disruptive of the modern
academic agenda and generally relegated to the private or personal realm of the diary’ (de Laine
2000:151). Emotions were therefore neither something that sociologists should study nor admit to
having. From an anthropological perspective, Ruth Behar twenty years ago testified to the reason for
the relative absence of an interest in emotions at that time but also to the gradual rise of emotions as a
research topic by stating:
Throughout most of the twentieth century, in scholarly fields ranging from literary criticism to anthropology
to law, the reigning paradigms have traditionally called for distance, objectivity and abstraction. The worst
sin was to be ‘too personal’.… Emotion has only recently gotten a foot inside the academy and we still don’t
know whether we want to give it a seminar room, a lecture hall, or just a closet we can air out now and
then.
(Behar 1996:12–16)
It seems as if Behar’s concluding remark has since been emphatically answered – not just a stuffed
closet in the corner, a seminar room or an auditorium is now required to accommodate the growing
infatuation with emotions within the social sciences, but perhaps rather a fully seated stadium. The
reason is that emotions no longer are regarded as a no-go within social research. Whereas previously,
studying emotions was seen merely as a niche (alongside other, at the time, obscure niche topics such
as birth, death, the body and existential issues), it has now grown into a field of research in its own
right. In recent decades, emotions have risen to prominence within social research and social theory
from general sociologists taking up or referring to emotions in their general theories and diagnoses of
contemporary society to so-called ‘sociologists of emotions’ digging deep into the role, function and
effect of emotions in specific empirical contexts (see, e.g. Bericat 2016). From the ranks of
phenomenology, existentialism, psychoanalysis, feminist research and interactionist sociology, the
interest in emotions slowly but securely began to sprout and spread and throughout the 1980s and
1990s, and became a preoccupation also among many high-profile sociologists and social theorists such
as Norbert Elias, Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck, Zygmunt Bauman and Jonathan H. Turner, just to
mention a few. So today, emotions have flooded the sociological territory and seems to be a relevant
concern, and whether one is studying inequality, culture, crime, marketing, deviance, power, sexuality,
the family, the body, social structure, social movements, interaction, health and illness or many other
specific topics, emotions seem to be of relevance. Sociology and related disciplines have thus sought to
conceptualise, frame and configure their understandings of emotions in many different ways (see, e.g.,
Lewis and Haviland-Jones 2000; Scherer and Ekman 1984; Stets and Turner 2007, 2014). Some have
claimed that two dominant positions prevail within emotion research: positivists and social
constructivists (Kemper 1981). Others have rather separated so-called ‘organismic’ from ‘interactional’
understandings of emotions (Hochschild 1983). Yet others have differentiated between emotions
understood respectively as ‘states’, ‘relations’ and ‘cultures’ (Bo and Jacobsen 2015). All of these
positions – rooted in different and at times even incommensurable ontological, epistemological and
methodological perspectives – provide us with rich sources for understanding and discussing, and not
least studying the complex nature, role and experience of emotions in everyday life.
Also, methodologically, the new gospel in sociology and related disciplines spells out the importance
of emotional introspection and affective reflexivity on behalf of the researcher (see, e.g., Ellis 1991;
Holmes 2015). The years dominated by the image of the cognitive, distanced, disembodied, anonymous,
amorphous and rational social researcher and the concomitant ‘view from nowhere’ are now being
challenged by very personalised and emotionally reflexive accounts of researchers and their encounters
with and feelings for informants and research subjects. The idea of the ‘emotional man/woman’ has thus
not only become a supplement but now more of a corrective to notions of the ‘rational man’ or the
‘normative man’ conventionally so predominant in much of sociological literature (Flam 1990). Such
images of the rational or normative man, in the famous words of Dennis H. Wrong, ignored ‘both the
highest and the lowest, both beast and angel, in [human] nature’ (Wrong 1961:191). Consequently,
images of ‘the emotional self’ (Lupton 1998), ‘the sentient self’ (Hochschild 2003) or ‘homo
sentimentalis’ (Illouz 2007) are no longer seen as strangers in sociology textbooks, but instead usher in
a new image of the emotional human being – and particularly the emotional researcher – that is now
widely recognised. This gradual shift from a decidedly dispassionate to a ‘passionate sociology’ paying
attention to and recognising many previously neglected or ostracized aspects of everyday life such as
magic, desire and deep emotions (Game and Metcalfe 1996) has thus also paved the way for the
development of a much-needed and more complex, nuanced, sympathetic and not least lifelike
understanding of the human being. Thus, both as objects of study as well as important dimensions of
the personal experiences of the researcher and his or her research subjects, emotions have now become
mainstream within contemporary sociology.
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1 Trust
What is it and why do we need it?
Paul R. Ward
Introduction
Part of me communicating to you, through writing this chapter, involves trust. You have not met me, you
will probably have very little, if any, knowledge about me. I have not worked with you in order to
develop a sense of trust. However, I will present all sorts of arguments throughout this chapter, often
from literature sources that you may not know. I will draw on my personal experiences as a ‘person in
the world’, and I will draw on numerous research studies that I have undertaken. As I would say to all
the students that I have taught and worked with in research, I would expect you to impose ‘critical
doubt’ when reading my work, and the work of all others. In other words, you can make a decision
about whether (or not) to trust me. The times when we were simply (some say blindly) expected to trust
people because they were in positions of power has gone. This is not to say that people in power should
not be trusted, but simply that people are expected to question such authority, access other sources of
information and perform the role of the ‘informed citizen’. It is not very long ago that school teachers
were not questioned by students or parents, University professors held almost unquestioned status,
doctors told patients what to do (and they did it without questioning) and religious leaders were looked
upon for answers. Across many countries and cultures, this unquestioning of power has been somewhat
eroded, and in some cases broken (Ward et al. 2016; Ward, Mamerow et al. 2014).
When I go to my doctor, either for myself or my children, I am engaged in a very different relationship
than I know my parents were at my age. Rather than simply telling me what to do, my doctor provides
potential alternatives, talks about different ways of dealing with the issue at hand, opens up to
uncertainties and conflicting medical information. Although the literature on doctor-patient
relationships shows this shift to be generalizable (Barry et al. 2001; Bissell et al. 2004), my personal
experiences may also reflect my socio-demographic characteristics – a white, male, middle-class,
middle-aged Professor. It may well be that the doctor behaves in this particular way because he expects
me to want him to behave like that – Niklas Luhmann calls this the ‘expectation of expectations’
(Luhmann 1995). Nevertheless, there has been a discernible shift in doctor-patient relationships –
Anthony Giddens argues that in so-called pre-modern times, doctors expected patients to simply ‘trust’
them and patients reciprocated by trusting them (Giddens 1990, 1994). The power and expertise
resided with the doctor – they had been to medical school, they had earned their place in one of the
Colleges, they were employed by some type of medical organisation (depending on country of practice)
and thus they had the expertise to diagnose and treat illness. The medical system has recently started
to put the patient (aka client, consumer, sometimes even human) at the centre of the encounter. This
recognises that patients have some expertise in their own bodies, their illnesses, their therapeutic
regimen and can therefore contribute to a discussion or negotiation with their doctor. The patient-
centred movement also recognises a cultural shift, variously conceptualised as neoliberalism,
individualism and/or freedom of the subject (Kaufman 2010; Navarro 2007). Whichever terms are used,
they generally include elements of increased individual responsibility, decreased responsibility of the
State for things regarded as ‘individual’ or family issues, and the centrality of choice. So, faced with a
particular problem, individuals have somewhat of a moral imperative to search around for information
(Google and Facebook seem to be fairly well used for this search) in order to make a choice (and trust
or not), potentially utilising the previously defined ‘experts’ (doctors, teachers, professors, priests) as
one of the information sources required in order to make their decision. In fact, it has been argued that
doctors have shifted from a position of ‘legislator’ to ‘negotiator’ or even ‘mediator’ (Scambler and
Britten 2001). You may be asking, ‘what does this have to do with trust’?
The key purpose of this chapter is to outline why trust is a key emotion and social process in
contemporary society. I firstly outline the ‘need’ for trust – why can’t we just make decisions and get on
with them? Why do we need to invest trust in other people? I then go on to provide a conceptual map of
trust – what is it and what are the various concepts that surround it? Finally, I outline the emerging
literature on trust as an emotion and in so doing, paint a broad-brush picture of the sociology of the
emotions, within which trust sits. Within and throughout the chapter, I use lots over everyday examples
to illustrate the often theoretically dense ideas and also provide examples from my diverse research on
the sociology of trust, including trust in food systems (Henderson et al. 2012; Ward et al. 2012),
colorectal cancer screening (Ward et al. 2015b; Ward et al. 2015a), health services (Attwell et al. 2017;
Gidman et al. 2012; Januraga et al. 2014; Ward and Coates 2006) and broader institutions of
government (Meyer et al. 2012c; Ward et al. 2014; Ward et al. 2016).
Conclusion
Hopefully when you have finished reading this chapter, you will have developed a level of trust in me (or
if you distrust me, you will be able to articulate your reasoning). Hopefully too, you will have a deeper
understanding for the basis of trust (or distrust) that you place in me and in other people in your life.
Humans have an in-built need for trust – we need trust to fulfil our roles/functions in life that we cannot
do ourselves and we need it for emotional engagement and cooperation. Trust, on this analysis, is
therefore rational – we need it. However, trust is placed in something which has not yet happened,
something that we do not have enough information about, and therefore something which is risky and
contingent on others. On this analysis, the basis of trust is non-rational, since it is based on a ‘leap of
faith’. This is the distinction I make between the need for trust and the basis of trust. The basis for trust
is therefore a unit of analysis within the sociology of the emotions, as opposed to a logical, rational
‘choice’.
The size of the leap we need to make when trusting is related to the risk involved in the decision.
Trusting a surgeon to do major surgery involves a much greater risk (and therefore leap of faith) than
trusting a supermarket to sell nice tasting apples. Given the relative size of the risk involved, we
attempt to gain more information in order to have more confidence in our decision to trust. However, in
many circumstances, we do not have enough information to allow us to make decisions purely on the
basis of inter-personal trust, which assumes a longer inter-personal relationship, a history of positive
interactions and therefore greater confidence that they can be trusted. In these circumstances, we may
rely more on institutional trust, which in the case of the surgeon, may include trust considerations such
as them having a university degree in medicine, gaining entry to a medical college, being employed by a
particular hospital, and being registered with a national medical association. None of these are
specifically related to the person doing the surgery (inter-personal trust) but in many cases are more
important as the basis of trust.
The move to (post)modernity means that we can no longer just assume that people will ‘trust’ – it
needs to be won and kept. However, once it has been lost, it is very difficult to regain, ‘trust comes on
foot and goes away on horseback’ (Kampen et al. 2006:389). A key point is that cultural and social shifts
have meant that trust, and trustworthiness, have taken on an increased level of importance within
social relationships, and thus for the social fabric of society. In pre-modern times, most people would
base their behaviours on what people in power told them to do – they just ‘had to’ trust them. However,
in contemporary times, the essence of being a ‘good citizen’ is to take on more responsibility for
ourselves and our families, and in so doing, to use the vast amount of information sources in order to
make choices – and these choices are based on who or what we trust more. One example I used within
this chapter comes from my research on parental trust in childhood vaccinations (Attwell et al. 2017).
Some parents think about whether or not to vaccinate their children against a particular disease, and
need to think about, among other things, what kinds of information sources to trust (e.g. scientific
literature, social media, websites of anti-vaccination or pro-vaccination groups) and which experts to
trust (e.g. medical doctors, naturopaths, homeopaths). Although governments want as many people as
possible to vaccinate their children against vaccine preventable diseases, it is still a human right to
refuse; there are multiple issues of distrust, which mean that some parents decide not to vaccinate their
children. Therefore, social relationships, based on cooperation, need to be built on meaningful,
reciprocal and honest engagement in a trustworthy fashion in order to build and maintain trust and the
concomitant positive emotions related to trust.
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2 Loyalty
The emotion of future expectation, felt now, based on the past
James M. Connor
Introduction
Our connections with others frame who we are and how we act. Loyalty is a key emotion in this mix as it embeds us in
social life. Our loyalties help define who we are via our connections to, and interactions with others. This can include
people, animals, concepts/ideologies and institutions. This identity-forming aspect of our loyalties is also a source of
conflict – as we can be compelled to choose between these competing layers of loyalty. Indeed, the great works of literature
are stories of loyalties challenged, heeded and betrayed and the social consequences that follow from this. William
Shakespeare’s King Lear is the tragedy of loyalties contested and family destroyed. Loyalty simmers within our daily mix of
emotions as it helps us navigate our interactions every day, based on what has occurred in the past and our hopes for the
future.
Loyalty is more than a contractual type connection between social actors – it is a deeply embedded feeling that drives us
to ‘do’ things in everyday interaction. We act because of our loyalties and make choices informed by our feelings constantly,
pitting them against each other (Haidt 2001). This may be as mundane as defending a brother from the comments of
others, to spending time and money on your sports fandom, to the extremes of sacrificing yourself for country. The
reciprocity of loyalty is an expectation of some form of return in the future, an emotional banking of feeling and support.
When this fails to materialise – we react to the disloyalty and betrayal. Loyalty is about connection and expectation – we
feel it and enact it as a way of maintaining current relationships, which allows us to predict future feelings and actions.
Fundamental to loyalty is that it is an emotion of threat and conflict (Connor 2007). We cannot have a loyalty if it costs us
nothing to feel it. There must always be the possibility (even if only existentially) of our loyalty being betrayed – the object
of our loyalty failing to reciprocate, or worse, actively betraying us by choosing someone, or something else over our
assumed loyalty. As Simon Keller (2007) notes, loyalty is about taking a side because of the perception of a special
relationship. The ever-present threat of disloyalty, betrayal and treason are the ‘dark’ sides to loyalty. These are the
feelings that threaten to erupt when our loyalties are not reciprocated, indeed loyalty scripts these counter-reactions as
part of its sense-making in our everyday lives. Strongly re-enforced via popular culture, the trope of betrayal is deep,
enduring and emotionally distressing. The traitor is one of the worst social labels that exists.
This chapter explores how we ‘do’ loyalty daily, from the mundane to the extraordinary and how it is a forward feeling –
allowing us the illusion of future expectations based on the actions of the present and past. In this chapter, I explore the
role loyalty plays in lubricating our social existence. We begin with a review of what loyalty is and deal with the vexed
question of if it is even an emotion. Then we move to an exploration of the key components of loyalty: reciprocity, layering,
identity formation, motivation and conflict. The everyday of loyalty is exemplified by a review of different types of loyalty:
familial (including pets) loyalty, sporting loyalties, commercialised loyalty and nationalism. I also consider just how and why
loyalty and disloyalty or betrayal are so tightly intertwined. Fundamentally, loyalty is an everyday emotional experience
that guides us through our relationships with people, groups and wider collectivities. Our loyalties are brought forth,
challenged and reinforced daily via our interactions. Thus, it is essential we understand how our emotional existence is
framed daily by our loyalty.
Now that her mother was approaching death, she was torn about yet another effort at reconciliation. ‘I feel I should try’, my
patient told me, ‘but I know she’ll be awful to me’. Should she visit and perhaps forgive her mother, or protect herself and live
with a sense of guilt, however unjustified? Tough call, and clearly not mine to make.
This familial guilt over loyalty lost illustrates how strong the call to family loyalty is. If the hurt a family member commits is
against others it becomes even more difficult, as family loyalty is meant to trump loyalty to other people. Theodore
Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, killed three and maimed twenty-three with his mail bombs over an 18-year spree. It
was only because of the suspicions of his own brother, who alerted the FBI, that he was eventually caught (Blauner 2009).
Ethically and legally this was of course the correct thing to do, but emotionally it was difficult to ‘betray’ a brother.
Pets are undoubtedly considered part of the family, and consequently the way we feel about their loyalty illustrates the
emotion. Our relationship with animals is complex, fraught and currently under-theorized – though expanding (see Franklin
1999; Haraway 2008). What is becoming clear is that we need to consider the role animals, or non-human species, play in
our emotional lives. As Nickie Charles (2014:725) notes, reporting on a large research project into people’s experience of
pets: ‘Animals were sometimes found to be better at being family than were human animals; they were “more family than
family” and the emotional bond was experienced as stronger and more enduring than that with some human family
members’. It is hard to clinically engage the question of animals and loyalty. Does a dog really experience something akin
to what we feel on seeing their owner return after a break? Is it a pack membership mentality that compels dogs to defend
their owners, a deep genetic need to be part of the group? Or can we understand a dog’s, and indeed some other animals,
behaviour as loyalty? Despite posing these questions, I am not going to attempt to answer them. What is relevant to our
experience of companion animals is the belief we have that they share our emotional bonds, and consequently their impact
on our lives.
The ‘loyal hound’ is a trope of literature and popular culture. Bobby of Greyfriars Churchyard in Edinburgh was reputed
to have guarded his master’s grave for 14 years, Fido of Borgo San Lorenzo, Italy, went to and from a bus stop for 15 years
waiting for a dead owner to return. Waghya was the hound of warrior King Shivaji Bhonsle (1630–1680), credited with
founding the Maratha Empire, and upon the King’s death, was reputed to have thrown himself upon the funeral pyre – the
ultimate self-sacrifice. Hachikō would return to the Shibuya train station in Japan for a decade, waiting for his owner
(examples drawn from Brottman 2014). All of these dogs have statues in their honour, and they are not alone – with statues
to loyal dogs standing across the globe. However, perhaps these deeds are more about the food, affection and attention the
animals received – training them into patterns of behaviour that we interpreted as loyal, but in reality, merely meet Ivan
Pavlov’s criteria. What matters is our interpretation of the animals’ actions, and our ascription of emotionality to them, as
Clinton Sanders (1993:211) notes, owners ‘routinely used their day-to-day experience with their dogs to define their
animals as minded social actors’. The succour we draw from a pet’s affection, love and indeed loyalty is what matters here.
Our projection of loyalty onto animals gives an insight into the meaning of the emotion for us.
Our view that animals reciprocate our loyalty is fundamental to the sense that they belong with us and can be part of our
family. We ascribe the same loyalty to companion animals that we have with family members. It is telling that the species-
barrier is no barrier to emotional interaction. The loyal and faithful dog – we know the animal will be there for us, follow
our commands and react with a set of behaviours we feel are loyalty. It is of course not loyalty that the animal returns – but
we need to imagine that it is. Consequently, this shows how our internal experience of emotion does not need to be
matched. We feel the loyalty, the animal does not. Our embedded, repeated interactions with our companion animals
affirms our emotional life with them, as Charles points out ‘connectedness was created rather than given; it was
constructed through interaction with a particular animal and was often attributed to the actions of that animal’ (Charles
2014:723). This imagined shared feeling is a neat passionate trick that serves our needs for connection. We feel better from
that belief that our dog shares our loyalty.
Broadening our discussion of loyalty to connections we have at the meso level, these loyalties are typically to
organisations or groups, some we can choose, but more often we are socialised into these groupings from early on.
Sporting loyalty provides a rich example of how loyalty inheres to an institution or non-human entity whilst being mediated
via interactions with representatives of that loyalty (e.g. players) and other people who share the loyalty – the fan
base/supporters. Our loyalty to a team is connected to its colours, jersey and history. We attend games, debate the merits of
performance on Monday mornings, engage in social media fan groups and reminisce about great games lost and won. The
identification with the team provides a sense of who we are and how we should act, especially in the domain of sport and
interaction with other fans – be it my team supporters or supporters of our oldest foes. The legendary rivalry between
Glasgow football teams Rangers and Celtic shows how sporting loyalty, especially when bound with religious connections
drives conflict (Wilson 2012). Thus, our sense of loyalty comes about via the team we support engaging in actions, playing
the game, signing the autograph, celebrating the wins and apologising for the defeats. Our interactions, based on our team
loyalty, then affirm our connection to the team. Debating the minutiae of the cut and thrust of Arsenal defeating
Manchester United 1–0 with an opposing supporter provides that sense of belonging – and of the ‘other’ that loyalty
requires, a competing claimant upon our connection and fealty. Sport loyalty shows how we hope that there will be a
reciprocity in the future, a return upon our commitment to supporting a team. This manifests via the anticipation of success
– a championship win and the consequent emotional catharsis the fan receives after the roller coaster of feelings during the
key games of a season or campaign.
The discussion of close loyalties illustrates how emotion is about the actor’s feelings projected onto the world, especially
when it came to pets. Our family connections are hard to escape, and provide the prototypical loyalty – that construction of
the emotion that all other types or layers of loyalty are measured against. Family is a source of loyalty conflict, with
betrayal being the ever-present risk. Sporting loyalty highlights how we gain a sense of connection from our feelings and
can share that loyalty – but only when there is a competitor to that loyalty.
Conclusion
As we continue to engage with the everyday, lived components of our social life – work, sporting fandom, religion and
family – interactional rituals serve as emotional energy to maintain our connections. We are embedded via the ritual of on-
going doing and feeling. Loyalty scripts these interactions for us at all levels, from micro to macro interactions. Our
loyalties direct how we make choices – or to phrase it another way, loyalty scaffolds the choices we can make during
particular interactions. The examples of national loyalty illustrate this. We have particular rituals associated with our
national loyalty, we uphold these during specific events (such as remembrance or independence days) by engaging in those
practices such as anthems, parades and flag waving. Thus our loyalty to a particular thing, frames how we should act and
feel in certain circumstances. It is the same for sporting loyalties – if you wish to be a loyal fan you need to interact in
particular ways with the team, other supporters and foes to affirm your connection, belonging and consequently identity as
a fan. Loyalty is an emotion of interaction that gives us a sense of who we are. These interactions are based on our past
activities and loyalty – thus we re-enact the patriotic loyalty script each time we attend a memorial day. The suite of
emotions we felt then are pre-scripted into the current interaction. Thus, loyalty frames current feelings based on past
feeling.
We are also forced to choose between loyalties at times, with a clear hierarchy of choice imposed upon us, with an
increasing personal cost to defying loyalty. The family is our first loyalty, and betraying that loyalty is a deeply difficult
thing for many, even though we had no initial choice about that connection. The architecture of family life, parents,
siblings, partners and children inevitably means that at times our loyalty to one member will be pitted against another. This
is the primal loyalty conflict and one that is almost inescapable because of the social obligations wrapped around the
concept of ‘family’. Our daily existence is tied to our family, thus familial loyalty is the most common and on-going
simmering loyalty we have – always poised to guide our actions. The next most compelling layer is national loyalty, with our
country calling on us, right or wrong, to support it. The conflict component of loyalty emerges here when we are forced to
choose between loyalties – do you submit to conscription for war against the wishes of your family? As loyalty is a feeling
that we rely on for future interaction, having it betrayed at a later point is a constant risk – we cannot be sure it will be
returned. That betrayal, inevitably leads to conflict.
Curiously, we gain a particular insight into our emotional existence and loyalty in particular by exploring how we
understand the ‘loyalty’ of our pets. While animals cannot experience loyalty as we understand it, we ascribe loyalty to
their actions. This illustrates the connection and interactive components of loyalty and our expectation of a return on our
feeling. Undoubtedly, we feel better imagining that a companion animal feels loyalty to us. The loyalty we build with
companion animals shows how we feel the emotion – one of interaction, assumed returned feelings and reciprocity. We
must imagine, and indeed fool ourselves, that the other person or animal does indeed return the passion we feel.
The loyalties of choice, such as sporting fandom and workplaces, illustrate how we engage in activities that provide
identity-forming interactions, mediated via our feelings. By being loyal we gain membership of a group that affirms our
existence and gives us meaning and reason for action – such as debating how the referee cost our beloved football team the
game on the weekend. The manufactured loyalties of work, and the vexed question of how ‘real’ the feeling is when we
engage in it via a commercial process (such as an employment contract), shows that feeling, even ‘created’ has real effects.
Workplace loyalty does motivate an employee, but not always in predictable ways, as that loyalty may be to the ‘old guard’
of how things used to be. Further, that loyalty is always at risk of betrayal as an organisation never feels, it only needs to
exploit.
The most fascinating component of our loyalties is how we use them to make us feel better about the future based on our
past interactions. Loyalty is an emotion enacted in the present with a hope of a future return on that activity – hence the
expectation that a family member will ‘have your back’ if you ever need it. The betrayal and consequent disloyalty we fear
arises because loyalty is not reciprocated at some point in the future. This leads to the conflict that arises from loyalty
betrayed. The sting in the tail of loyalty as a passion is that we need that risk of disloyalty, for without a threat to our
loyalty, however unrealistic, we cannot be loyal.
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3 Dignity
An exploration of dignity’s role and meaning in daily life
Barbara A. Misztal
Introduction
The notion of human dignity is a wide-ranging, difficult and elusive concept, which has a long history,
broad cross-cultural resonance and intuitive power. Its growing prominence within legal, philosophical,
ethical, religious, moral and public discourses has established dignity as the fundamental feature of
democratic society and hence as one of ‘the principal achievements of modern man’ (Berger 1970:346).
The notion of dignity, as a normative force behind our rights to equal treatment, thus as something that
can be assaulted and lost and therefore requiring legal or state protection, can be found in many
international documents, charters and declarations, from the UN Universal Declaration of Human
Rights to the agenda of health and social care. The universal and unconditional meaning of the term can
also be found in debates in political science and forums on justice, social movements and
democratization, all of which provide a space for the condemnation of any threat to and abuse of dignity
as well as for protests against dignity violations and reports on people’s experiences of the loss of
dignity as a result of terrible humiliation.
Apart from this dominant use of the notion of dignity as the ground for human rights, there is also the
view of dignity as ‘tranquillity in suffering’ (Schiller quoted in Rosen 2012:11). In this stoical notion of
dignity, human dignity is seen as rested on an inviolable independence from the world. Therefore, one’s
dignity cannot be violated even by inhumane treatment. For example, while telling tragic stories of
leaving Aleppo, the city ruined by years of bombardment, many people reported that they ‘couldn’t take
anything except dignity’ (Graham-Harrison 2016). In this approach, the inherent dignity and worth of
human persons capable of independence from the external world is seen as the value that we cannot be
deprived of, even in horrific circumstances.
While these two uses of the concept of dignity are the main ones, for the sake of completeness, we
must mention that dignity had different meanings in antiquity, the Roman and Renaissance traditions,
and in theological texts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Kateb 2011). For example, in contrast to the
restrictive Roman meaning associating dignity to office, status and rank, in the Enlightenment period a
universal and unconditional meaning of the notion was prominent (Iglesias 2001). However, while the
Enlightenment defined dignity in universal terms, Romantics interpreted dignity in particularistic terms
(as that property accompanying individuals in their guest for their own original way of being). The
continuous debates on the meaning of the term and enquiries whether the idea of dignity is inferior to
such notions as autonomy, rights, respect and equality are still part of changing interpretations of ways
of defining this phenomenon in recent philosophical and legal works (Dworkin 2006; Habermas 2010;
Kateb 2011; Waldron 2007). However, even these recent attempts have been incapable of establishing a
common understanding of this idea, which still remains an ‘intuitive notion that is by no means utterly
clear’ (Nussbaum 2011:29). What is more, the works concerned with the concept of dignity as the
general notion to ground human rights do not pose any questions about the role of dignity in daily life,
or about the nature of emotions connected with respect for or abuse of human dignity in everyday life.
This absence of any interest in the connection between the idea of dignity and emotions in daily life
can be explained to some degree by the fact that despite its prominence in the legal rights discourse
and despite claims that dignity is something that is familiar and intimately felt, something we all ‘yearn
for’ (Hicks 2011:5), dignity is not a word that comes up frequently in the context of daily conversations.
On rare occasions when the word dignity is used in daily language, it tends to be employed in vague,
intuitive ways (Nussbaum 2008). Moreover, if it is referred to, it is rather not at all by itself but mainly
by its close association with related notions such as respect, status, worth and fairness. The appeal to
dignity in the everyday context, with its talks about dignity in terms of ‘being dignified’ and suggestions
of bearing yourself in a socially respectable way, is different than the ethical emphasis on the fact it is
morally wrong to treat that person in certain ways. Since dignity can have many appeals, meanings and
can be used in so many contexts, the notion of dignity cannot be employed ‘as if it were an intuitively
self-evident and solid foundation for a theory that would then be built upon it’ (Nussbaum 2011: 29).
Thus, to make analysis of dignity at all manageable, I shall not refer to dignity as a general concept
underlying all human conditions or capabilities. Instead of debating the content of human dignity, the
conceptual status of human dignity in its relationship to human rights and the tensions between the
legal and moral dimensions and the question of morality and ethics as substantive issues, I shall focus
here on the role of dignity as a principle which describes worth of human beings that forms the basis
for the respect of others in everyday life.
In this chapter, I will be concerned with the usage of human dignity as a principle in everyday daily
life to indicate a certain type of treatment. In the first part I shall debate the legacy of Immanuel Kant’s
idea that possessing reason makes human beings equal and that reason, not emotion, is the ground for
our moral respect for humans as moral agents. Then, after discussing the contribution of Martha
Nussbaum’s (2011) capabilities-based approach to the debate about whether dignity can rest on reason
alone, I shall turn to sociological input to analyse the usage of dignity as emotion implicated in
encounters with others and in our self-respect in daily life. In the final part of this chapter, since not
much of sociological insight is available on this topic, I will be relying on works of fiction as an
indispensable starting point to help us intuitively grasp what gives dignity the emotionally unique
status.
Conclusion
This chapter, while recognizing the relevance of the notion of dignity for human rights discourse and
many current dilemmas connected with bioethics, such as cell research, embryo protection, human
cloning, euthanasia as well as with the animal rights (Misztal 2012), has been concerned with the usage
of this idea within an everyday life context. By focusing on human dignity as a principle which
prescribes respect for oneself and others as fellow human beings and studying how in everyday life the
principle of dignity translates itself to emotions, it has tried to overcome this concept’s lack of
conceptual clarity, its ambivalences and openness to misinterpretation. The exploration of dignity as
emotion implicated in encounters with others and in our self-respect, exposes the tensions between
reason and feelings at the roots of the notion of dignity. The chapter has addressed these tensions by
questioning the power of a Kantian reason as the foundation of dignity. After agreeing with Martha
Nussbaum’s (2011) proposal for a move away from Kant’s idea of dignity being founded on universal
reason, the chapter has argued for the prominence of emotions in the context of ordinary life where the
principle of dignity is understood in terms of socially respectable ways in which others recognize us,
ways of treating others and ways of bearing yourself. By identifying, with the help of novels, cases
where love, desires or compassion were pointed one way and respect for dignity another, we showed
emotional bases of dignity as well as this notion’s ambivalences.
Investigations of the ways in which the dignity of human life and the moral impulse to be for the other
are practiced in ordinary life can enrich our understanding of the links between dignity and emotions.
Although sociology still lacks studies allowing us to fully grasp the importance of dignity and to
understand how people determine the defined standards of dignified behaviour, there is the growing
recognition of the importance of this phenomenon and the consensus that dignity demands institutions
devote to enhancing connections between dignity, rights, justice and democracy. Sociology, by shedding
lights on implications of people’s emotional encounters with others and on the enabling nature of the
institutional framework under in which individuals can cultivate respect for dignity in its universal and
singular meanings, could enrich our understanding of dignity.
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4 Compassion
Conflicted social feeling and the calling to care
Iain Wilkinson
Introduction
In real life settings and in the everyday flow of moral experience it is often difficult to pin down the
substance of our feelings. It might be argued, however, that compassion leaves us in no doubt of its
cause and motive. It is widely held to involve individuals in some distressing sensations that are derived
from a strong moral identification with an other’s pain. It is, moreover, often depicted not only as
particularly fiery and intense, but also, and more so as when compared to pity, sympathy and empathy,
as a feeling that motivates beneficent actions. It is a profoundly moral emotion. When gripped by
sentiments of compassion people are motivated to take actions to combat the pains borne through
suffering. In this respect, it has a prosocial orientation. Compassion has the effect of making individuals
deeply concerned to take actions on behalf of the safety, well-being and good of others. It is a motive
force in the basic acts of kindness and care that create and sustain human social life.
Compassion is a natural part of our most intimate relationships. It is experienced in the bonds of love
and affection of good family relationships. It takes root in the ties of friendship whereby we are made
duty bound to take care of one another. Compassion is also advanced as a public virtue, and there are a
range of institutional settings where it is actively cultivated on behalf of the good of society as a whole.
For example, it is championed as a desired attribute of health care professionals. Compassion is an
essential part of good nursing and of constructive physician-patient relationships. In the contexts of
health care, it is even considered to be an important part of the ‘emotional work’ that promotes healing
and recovery (Neff 2003). Compassion is also identified as a vital part of teaching practices that aim to
equip children with the self-confidence, courage and social skills to engage in effective learning. By
taking steps to create compassionate classrooms, teachers aim to provide pupils with environments that
nurture their social adaptability and personal resilience as well as conditions that equip them with life
skills to operate as good citizens (Markinek et al. 2006).
Beyond this, compassion is encountered in everyday life as a potent force in our politics, and
especially where these are concerned with matters of humanitarian social justice. An appeal to
compassion features large in campaigns for human and animal rights. Indeed, it is often heralded as the
primary motive for movements of progressive social change. For a long time now it has been widely
recognised that a cultural politics of compassion is a vital part of the arsenal deployed to convince
people to lend their support to humanitarian causes. Arguably the existence and influence of
organisations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, Médecins Sans Frontières and
Oxfam bears testimony to the strength of its appeal (Berlant 2004). Indeed, such organisations operate
as a direct means for people to channel the moral feelings aroused in response to mediatized imagery of
the suffering of distant strangers into political action. Moreover, in taking note of the role played by
mass communication media in rendering the social world and its problems immediately visible to us on
a grand scale, commentators note that our political leaders frequently take great care to appear
compassionate when out in public. We are living in a time where many political debates appear to be
shaped more by the quality of people’s feelings towards others than by matters of sheer calculation or
rational principle (Ure and Frost 2014). In this context, individuals operating in the public domain must
be adept at displaying compassion whenever this is required from them. Plays on, and displays of,
compassion are now a routine part of the exercise of political power.
Compassion is also a hot topic of scholarly debate. This is connected to a widespread understanding
that it holds the potential to reveal some of the most elemental truths about human nature and the
moral character of human society (Nussbaum 1996). Questioning how individuals are liable to feel
compassion for others is taken as a means to engage in the attempt to understand both the moral
conditions that make for human well-being and those of society at large. It is further recognized as an
emotional disposition and form of experience that holds the potential to provide us with insights into
processes of human civilization that are the signature tune of modern identity and consciousness (King
2000). It is generally recognized, moreover, that in the twenty-first century we are witnessing a
significant heightening of many controversies associated with how we might denote the role of
compassion in social life and how we should assess its human value (Olasky 2000; Woodward 2002).
There are many contrasting points of view on how we should understand the conditions that either
heighten or attenuate compassionate sentiments. There is no agreement on what role compassion
should play in human affairs or on what this emotional experience does to us. Much dispute surrounds
the extent to which the active cultivation of compassion is desirable, or on how, if at all, this should take
place (Zembylas 2013).
In part this is connected to the ways in which emotions such as pity, sympathy and compassion are
understood to operate as enactments of power relations in which weaker and more vulnerable members
of society are dominated by institutionally over-privileged individuals. Here the ‘ideology of compassion’
is condemned on the grounds that it frequently operates as a form of class condescension or as a force
of Nietzschean ressentiment (Paley 2002). Some argue, moreover, that sentiments of compassion have a
tendency to short-circuit people’s capacity to think critically about the best ways to actively respond to
people’s suffering to a point that endangers democracy (Arendt 1963).
The controversies surrounding compassion are further connected to the ways in which it is now often
perceived to be left diminished or reduced to a state of exhaustion. It has become commonplace to
associate compassion with the possibility that some are particularly prone to experience ‘compassion
fatigue’ (Sprang et al. 2007). On this account, it should be studied with a focus brought to institutional
arrangements and forms of social interaction that are set to harden people’s sensibilities to a point
where they have little capacity to feel for the suffering of others (Hooper et al. 2010). It is also
approached as a matter that requires us to attend to the ways in which traumatic encounters with
sensationalized portrayals of human suffering, and especially those we regularly come across through
our interactions with modern communication media, are serving to render compassion ever more
strained and elusive (Moeller 1999). Here it is generally assumed that we are living amidst social and
cultural conditions that operate to erode human kindness and the disposition to care, and that these are
now being experienced in ever-more intensifying forms.
This chapter reviews the cultural and social history of compassion. It highlights the involvement of
compassion in the creation and maintenance of conditions of everyday life in western modernity. It is
designed to equip readers with some resources to think critically about the range of moral, political and
social interests that are featured in favoured accounts of compassion and its consequences. In later
sections, it provides some analytical reflections on contemporary forms of ‘compassion fatigue’. While a
repeated emphasis is brought to the fact that compassion always courts controversy, it also aims to
underline the potential for this to marshal critical debate towards the institutional configuration and
moral character of society.
A turbulent history
There is a long tradition of philosophical debate over how to understand the moral psychology of
compassion, and over how it should be depicted as a human virtue. Its moral character has often been
questioned on the grounds that, while compassion may inspire acts of kindness and care, it can also be
appropriated on behalf of self-serving interests, or even as a means to carry out an abuse of power. In
classical antiquity compassion attracted a considerable amount of debate in connection with its
involvement in the cultivation of human decency and sound polity (Konstan 2006; Sternberg 2005). It
was taken by ancient Greek tragedians along with Stoic and Socratic philosophers as a component of
moral reason and as an attribute of human moral ‘intelligence’ (Nussbaum 2001). Right from the start,
however, it was also recognized as involving us in the difficulty of interpreting the moral motives that
lie behind an individual’s capacity to feel for the pains of others, and especially insofar as such
sentiment was perceived to have an ‘egoistic dimension’ that was more concerned with self-gratification
than with the condition of those suffering (Konstan 2014:180). It was also brought into controversy in
connection with the problem of determining the kinds of actions that could be justified on the grounds
of a compassionate identification with others. As David Konstan notes, such a high state of emotion was
understood by the Roman historian Polybius to be accompanied by the danger that it could serve as the
pretext for maniacal behaviours. The virtue of compassion was questioned in light of the fact that there
are occasions where, in the heat of the moment, people are so overcome by the urge to vent their
feelings that they are rendered incapable of operating with moral restraint (Konstan 2014:181).
Such debates have accompanied literary accounts of compassion throughout Western history (Paster
et al. 2004). It is generally recognized, however, that these are further complicated and intensified
when popular understandings and practices of compassion come under the influence of Christianity.
Here compassion is attached to a theological concern with redemptive suffering and is praised as a
saintly virtue that warrants careful cultivation. The culture of compassion holds a special place for
those seeking an affective identification with Jesus’s humanity, his redemptive suffering and his
example of charitable care for the sick and poor. It is also especially valued in devotional practices
concerned with the compassionate grief of his mother, Mary. Within the writings of the early church
fathers through the patristic period (c.100–450 CE) repeated attempts were made to instruct Christians
on the appropriate ways to display compassion both in feeling and action (Perkins 1995). Through the
middle ages and up to the early modern period many devotional practices were developed that
employed literature, art and music as a means to arouse and intensify emotional reactions to the
passion of Christ (Lazikani 2015; McNamer 2010). Many of these are now understood to have had
lasting impacts on the Western iconography of human suffering and the aesthetics of pain. In this
respect, moreover, some identify the cultural politics of modern humanitarianism as operating to adapt
these traditions for the promotion of human welfare and projects of social reform (Dromi 2016).
It is important to note, however, that through most of the history of Christendom compassionate
almsgiving and charitable care for the sick and dying existed alongside practices that most modern
people would now disassociate from acts of kindness and care. More often than not the charitable and
devotional compassion of the Christian church has operated with little concern to combat the violent
persecution of heretics. From a modern perspective, it may be particularly disturbing to note the extent
to which compassion has been implicated in acts of torture and execution. In efforts to save sinners
from mortal damnation or to protect communities from the wrath of a vengeful God, an appeal to
compassion has often been used to justify the punishments meted out to those breaking established
moral codes or flouting religious custom. The period of the European Reformations is particularly
noteworthy for the extent to which the pursuit of religious orthodoxy and uniformity of belief was
accompanied by what Alexandra Walsham labels as a ‘charitable hatred’ that resulted in unprecedented
numbers of people being scourged, pilloried or burnt at the stake while standing accused of theological
dissent, idolatry, sexual immorality or witchcraft (Walsham 2006).
It is against this history that some of the more radical attributions of modern compassion are brought
to light. It is widely acknowledged that through the second half of the eighteenth century, early modern
societies witnessed a ‘humanitarian revolution’ and that this has had many lasting and profound
impacts on the ways people now negotiate with the problem of suffering and the ethics of care (Pinker
2011). In this context, and partly in reaction against age-old practices of religious intolerance and
violence, compassion was heralded as an attribute of a new culture of ‘enlightenment’ and ‘civil society’
(Frazer 2010; Mullan 1988). It appears that the dawning of the so-called age of modernity was
accompanied by what the historian Keith Thomas refers to as an outbreak of ‘spontaneous tender
heartedness’ (Thomas 1983:173–175). At this point, compassion came to be ever more strongly
identified with heightened humanitarian convictions and forms of politics motivated by a pronounced
moral revulsion towards a great deal of suffering that was henceforth deemed ‘excessive’,
‘unnecessary’, ‘without moral purpose’ and ‘unjust’ (Wilkinson and Kleinman 2016:25–54).
Here moral sentiments of compassion fuelled campaigns to abolish slavery, movements to oppose the
use of torture in criminal proceedings, new-found concerns for animal welfare and crusades for the
promotion of women’s and children’s rights (Sznaider 2001). It became commonplace to identify
compassion as the wellspring of human care and as the source from which the stream of human
kindness flows. In many quarters of ‘polite society’ considerable efforts were taken to craft moral
manners and sensibilities whereby one might stand out as a man or woman ‘of feeling’ motivated to set
the good of others as his or her prime concern (Barker-Benfield 1992).
At the same time, it is important to recognize that this newly invigorated cult of sensibility was
accompanied by a vociferous culture of critical debate. The critical interrogation of compassion was
taken to new ground by philosophers such as David Hume and Adam Smith, who surpassed their
classical forbearers in their devotion to questioning the moral psychology of compassionate feelings and
the extent to which they could be allied, it if at all, with principled reason (Hume 1739–1740/1969,
1751/1987; Smith 1759/2006). Compassion was further held morally suspect by essayists such as Henry
Mackenzie for the extent to which it gave reign to an ‘enthusiasm’ in which people were liable to
indulge feelings to the cost of conscience (Mackenzie 1785/2001). Indeed, in this regard many
understood it to operate as a succour to promiscuous voyeurism (Halttunen 1995). Mary Wollstonecraft,
moreover, was particularly worried by those who used the popular portrayal of women as particularly
prone to compassion as a pretext to claim that they were also intellectually limited and had no serious
part to play in reasoned public debate (Wollstonecraft 1792/1994).
Following the French Revolution of 1789 and the ferocious retributions of the ‘reign of terror’ (1793–
1794), public debates over the virtue of compassion were characterized by more deeply entrenched
conflicts of moral opinion (Jones 1993). Some held ever more strongly to the view that, as Hannah
Arendt puts it, the ‘passion of compassion’ was the ‘driving force of revolutionaries’ who feel justified to
use extreme acts of violence as the means to achieve their aims (Arendt 1963). From this perspective,
compassion was exposed as excessively dangerous, and in light of its potential to operate as the
motivation for fanatical and barbarous actions, it was increasingly advised that steps should be taken to
limit its influence over the domains of civil politics and rational policy debate. Indeed, this period of
history is now looked back upon as initiating the view that, as far as serious academic inquiry is
concerned, moral sentiment should be regarded more as an intellectual pollutant than as an aid to
reasoned judgement (Reddy 2000).
At the same time, however, whilst not shying away from the fact that compassion is an inherently
unstable emotion that may drive some to adopt violence as the means to express their moral feelings,
others continued to celebrate its humanitarian potential. During the nineteenth century, authors of so-
called ‘social novels’ such as Charles Dickens and Harriet Beecher Stowe continued to work at
cultivating their readers’ compassion as a means to draw the brutalizing poverty of the new industrial
labouring classes and the horrors of slavery into public debate. Indeed, as far as Stowe is concerned,
Greg Crane reports that she took ‘the eruption of moral sympathetic feeling’ evoked by graphic
accounts of the cruelty done to slaves as a ‘sure signal’ that all human beings were entitled to
‘fundamental human rights’ (Crane 1996:177–186). Along with many other campaigners for
humanitarian social reform, Stowe could not be moved from the conviction that it was only insofar as
people were made preoccupied by the ‘moral-emotional dissonance’ of sentiments of compassion that
they could be equipped with the political zeal to oppose social institutions that deliver harm to human
life (Crane 1996:177–186).
Such strongly opposed points of view on the virtue of compassion continue through to the present
day, and on many accounts these still hold far-reaching consequences for the conduct of contemporary
law and politics (Wilkinson 2017). Indeed, it might be argued that in the twenty-first century we are
living amidst cultural processes, with political arrangements and within social conditions in which the
controversy of compassion is set to intensify. In recognition of this fact, moreover, it is increasingly
being taken up as a matter for sociological inquiry, where it is treated as an issue that draws the
historical peculiarity of our social character and cultural circumstance into sharp relief.
Problems for sociology
A great deal of cross-disciplinary inquiry is now taking place across the humanities and social sciences
into how compassionate sentiments are acquired and intensified. The history and sociology of emotions
have been developed into highly elaborated fields of study. For as long as compassion has been drawn
into debate it has also been recognized that its relative qualities and intensities are subject to processes
of acculturation and cultivation. In contemporary scholarship, however, there is no agreement on how
we should venture to understand the social conditions under which individuals are set to make this a
shared concern. Furthermore, much dispute surrounds how these should be assessed. A considerable
conflict of interpretations presides over the attempt to relate the history of compassion to generalized
accounts of people’s social character and to the dynamics governing processes of social change. This is
due to the fact that it not only involves us in the difficulty of charting the inter-relationships between
material conditions, social arrangements and cultural outlooks, but also, in brokering with divergent
political and moral points of view on their human value and consequences.
It is widely observed that the moral dispensation to respond with compassion towards the grievances
and hardships of others is moderated by the material circumstances in which we are made to live. It is
frequently noted that compassionate feelings are an indulgence for those who are removed from a great
deal of suffering and who occupy a materially privileged position from which it is possible to extend
care and kindness to others (McCloskey 2004). It is only where people can afford the time and space to
both nurture and give reign to their feelings that they are made preoccupied by compassion. In this
regard, the heightened moral sensibility of modern people from the late eighteenth century onwards
can be attributed to the fact that here we find increasing numbers experiencing levels of economic
prosperity in which the age-old tooth and nail struggle for survival was no longer a condition of
everyday life. A considerable amount of scholarly inquiry is devoted to the role played by modern
capitalism and the rise of a commercial society in the promotion of compassion as a human virtue and
aid to civility (Davis and Taithe 2011; Haskell 1985a, 1985b). Certainly, it is the case that, at least in the
early period of its history, the extension of capitalist social relations across societies and national
boundaries, was perceived to be accompanied by a distinct ‘softening’ of manners and conduct (Herman
2001:91–99). It is argued that people realized that it was to their commercial benefit to offer a hand of
friendship to strangers, and thereby, that a capitalist market did much to ‘extend the scope of public
compassion … however unintentionally’ (Sznaider 2001:11).
Of course, this begs many more questions about the conditions under which capitalism can be allied
with civility. It also invites debate to be brought to the extent to which the moral economy of
compassion is liable to be disciplined by class interests or left tailored for largely commercial
considerations (Manfredi 2013). Others rightly point out that there are contrasting forms of capitalism
and market relations and that many of these are designed to operate, as Max Weber puts it, ‘without
regard for persons’ (Weber 1948). Indeed, even Thomas Haskell, who is perhaps most heavily
associated with the claim that capitalism has a propensity to create social connections between people
that create space for the extension of compassion, is keen to underline the fact that ‘complex
institutions like the market have multiple and contradictory effects’, and that many of these are
virulently, and perhaps violently, committed to promote forms of social interaction that occlude
compassion (Haskell 1987:859).
In the work of Émile Durkheim we have an early acknowledgement of this complexity, as he attempts
to expose the contrasting psychological and moral effects of the processes of individualization that
accompany modern capitalist divisions of labour. Durkheim aims to have us understand that at the same
time as we might be subject to the pains and confusions of anomie and the selfish impulse of egoism, we
also have a propensity to be much affected by a ‘moral individualism’ that is possessed by ‘sympathy for
all that is human, a wider pity for all sufferings, for all human miseries, a more ardent desire to combat
and alleviate them [and] a greater thirst of social justice’ (Durkheim 1898/1973:48–49). Arguably,
however, Durkheim’s service to us here lies more in drawing a light to the inherent complexity and
frustrations of modern individualism, than in providing us with an adequately refined account of how to
advance cultural conditions and institutional arrangements that enable the maturation of our
compassionate propensities.
In pursuit of this goal, many now look to the work of Norbert Elias as a guide to charting the social
arrangements, cultural proclivities and political formations that make individuals more or less disposed
towards compassion. Here conditions of modernity are perceived to result from long-term ‘civilizing’
processes that have delivered individuals into forms of society in which they are made to acquire a
shared concern to inhibit violent impulses as well as heightened dispensations to relate to one another
with sympathy (Elias 1994). The vicissitudes of the compassionate temperament of modern times are
construed as the product of a culture of manners that is also tied to the development and spread of
state institutions that regulate society to the rule of calculation. In addition to this, they are also
understood to be a part of the creation of social connections between people in which they encouraged
to form relationships of mutual self-regard. Elias argues that these are all mutually complimentary
processes. From this perspective there is an intimate connection between, on the one hand, the
advancement of cold-calculating forces of rationalization, and on the other hand, an enhanced
principled preoccupation with moral sentiments of compassion. It is possible, moreover, to identify
modern campaigns for humanitarian social reform as operating with both these concerns set to the
fore. At the same time as they aim to marshal the appeal of compassion as a moral standard for human
conduct they are also involved in efforts to extend the disciplinary force of ‘civilization’ upon society.
Indeed, from an Eliasian perspective it is argued that these concerns are mutually reinforcing and
reciprocally enhancing, even while immersing people in quite contradictory and conflictual experiences
of everyday life (Linklater 2010; Sznaider 1997; Vaughan 2000).
Elias also encourages us to reflect on the potential for civilizing processes to be accompanied by de-
civilizing trends, and raises the prospect that there may be periods where such trends reshape people’s
mentalities and moral sensibilities so that they are more disposed to behave with cruelty and violence.
In his later study of the rise of the Nazis in 1930s Germany, he explains how it is possible for de-
civilising trends rise to dominate the ‘habitus’ of some sectors of society so that ‘civilizing’ processes
are undermined and fall into decline (Elias 1997). Indeed, this is how he accounts for the violence of the
German National Socialist movement, the popular appeal of its racist ideology and the events that led to
‘the final solution’ (Dunning and Mennell 1998). Accordingly, even within processes where long-term
civilizing trends work to encourage the cultivation of compassionate sensibilities there may be sudden
and dramatic shifts in people’s moral proclivities so that, as Elias puts it, ‘the armour of civilized
conduct’ can very rapidly ‘crumble’ (Elias 1994:253n).
Cas Wouters has seized on this insight in order to argue that existing alongside processes that
operate to ‘formalise’ our manners and conduct there are also movements towards ‘informalisation’. On
this account, through the twentieth century it is possible to chart significant shifts in the balance
between the formalising and informalising processes of our times (Wouters 2007). Wouters claims that,
from around the 1960s onwards, and particularly following the rise of mass consumerism, the
‘expressive revolution’ that accompanied movements towards people’s sexual liberation and the fuller
realization of human rights for women, people of colour and the working classes, we can chart the
increasing prevalence of forms of emotional conduct that lack restraint. He contends that we are living
through a period where, when compared to most other times and places, individuals are much more at
ease with, and more open about, discussing their feelings. Wouters argues that we are living in an age
of ‘emotional emancipation’, but that this is also accompanied by ever more pronounced problems
relating to how emotions should be appropriately managed and interpreted. People are faced with
increasing social and cultural demands to become ‘reflexively’ oriented towards their emotional
conduct as well as that of others. On this characterization of our times, as the bounds of emotional
freedoms are extended, we are also set to encounter more elevated anxieties connected to how these
should be expressed and understood.
Conclusion
As this chapter has shown, compassion is a ‘social emotion’. It alerts us to the quality of our moral
attachments to others and calls on us to attend to how we bear a moral responsibility to relate to people
with care. It may well be, as Martha Nussbaum puts it, ‘the basic social emotion’, for it is often the case
that compassion is implicated in the acquisition of the cultural disposition to relate to ourselves and
others as inherently social beings (Nussbaum 1996). In this regard, moreover, the assorted
controversies of compassion are tied to many contested and conflicting points of view on how we should
relate to the conditions that govern our social lives, and especially in connection to how we interpret
and respond to instances where these result in human suffering.
In this chapter, I have sought to provide readers with insights into the genealogy of our modern
culture of compassion. I have further underlined the ways in which compassion and its controversies
hold the potential to provoke a questioning of the values enacted through practices of care in society,
and especially in contexts where care for humanity is set as a prime concern. I have argued that
anxieties over contemporary forms of ‘compassion fatigue’ represent a new stage in a long history of
debate over the bounds and meaning of compassion, and that here it increasingly appears that our lives
are being socially and cultural reconfigured so that the moral and political economy of our emotions are
made ever more pressing matters of concern. By participating in debates over the controversies of
compassion we are also made to question the moral meaning of social life and its purpose.
Sociologists committed to understanding the role played by compassion in contexts of everyday life
are frequently, and perhaps unavoidably, involved in assessing its involvement in enactments of power
relations. It is important to recognise, however, that the study of compassion involves far more than a
commitment to exposing its potential to operate in the service of various political and social ideologies.
There are wider issues at stake here that concern the potential for individuals to create humane forms
of society. When studying compassion, we are made to attend to how individuals are more or less
equipped with the motivation to care for one another. In this regard, moreover, it is often the case that
it involves us documenting how the boundaries of social recognition are drawn and how the bounds of
moral responsibility are set in place. When studying the language, imagery and forms of communication
that cultivate compassionate sentiments we are dealing with expressions and representations of
substantive human values. These are fundamentally preoccupied with our response to people’s social
suffering and with the actions we take to promote forms of social organisation to protect people from
harm’s way. Under conditions of modernity, sentiments of compassion are vital elements within the
moral configuration of society as a whole.
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5 Courage
It’s not all about overcoming fear
Amir B. Marvasti
Introduction
Courage is universally valued and widely experienced. A quick word search on Amazon.com produces
over 100,000 hits. The hits include everything from hair products (‘Anchors Hair Company Courage
Clay’), to jewellery (pendants with the word ‘courage’ imprinted on them), to video games (PlayStation’s
Commandos 2: Men of Courage), to television shows, movies, and books. Despite its social significance
and ubiquity, it is not entirely clear what constitutes courage. What is certain is that courage is much
more complex than other ‘basic emotions’ (Ekman 1999). Like the abstract emotion of love, scholars,
philosophers, and literary writers have tried to define courage for centuries and produced a wealth of
knowledge regarding its variations and sources – though a consensus is very much out of reach. As
William Miller has put it:
No one seems very successful at devising a definition or a theory of courage that doesn’t raise as many
problems as it solves. Some impose so rigorous a standard that Homeric heroes have a hard time qualifying;
others are so absurdly soft on admission to the club that just about anyone who sticks to a diet qualifies.
(Miller 2009:5)
The definitional and theoretical quandaries notwithstanding, courage is referenced by virtually every
individual and every organisation for endless purposes. In this chapter, I examine courage with a focus
on how it is used, particularly in micro or interactional contexts. I begin with a brief overview of the
concept within the fields of philosophy and psychology. I then move on to a more sociologically-oriented
examination of the topic in the context of narrative constructive practices, learning and socialization,
and structured gender and racial interactions.
So bound up is courage with manhood that it is nearly impossible to speak of it without invoking male body
parts or the word for man itself. Greek andreia (courage, literally manliness) is derived from the stem andr-
(adult male).
(Miller 2009:233)
Among modern Western philosophers, Immanuel Kant’s work on the significance of courage is most
noteworthy. According to Nicholas Tampio (2012), for Kant courage was largely about the pursuit of
reason and advancement of knowledge: ‘Kant insists that enlightenment can only transpire if
individuals exercise the courage to challenge entrenched dogmatic ways of thinking’ (Tampio 2012:35).
In interactional terms, Kant saw courage not just as a way of proving one’s self-worth to others, as in a
public display of militaristic courage, but as the ability to resist the social pressures to conform to
dominant ideologies:
If, in doing something worthy of honor, we do not allow ourselves to be intimidated by taunts and derisive
ridicule of it, which is all the more dangerous when sharpened by wit, but instead pursue our own course
steadfastly, we display a moral courage which many who show themselves as brave figures on the
battlefield or in a duel do not possess.
(Kant in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, cited in Tampio 2012:38)
In the same vein, in one of his aphorisms Friedrich Nietzsche supported the courage to pursue
knowledge, even at the risk of being perceived as boring: ‘Courage for Tedium – He who has not the
courage to allow himself and his work to be considered tedious, is certainly no intellect of the first rank,
whether in the arts or in the sciences’ (Nietzsche 2013:141).
Another important figure in Western philosophy concerned with the meaning of courage is G. W. F.
Hegel, who both acknowledged the complexity of the concept and defined its ideal type. According to
Shlomo Avineri (1972), for Hegel, the ultimate courage was to sacrifice one’s own life for the common
good as represented by the state. Avineri offers this quote from Hegel:
Courage to be sure is multiform. The mettle of an animal or a brigand, courage for the sake of honour, the
courage of a knight, these are not true forms of courage. The true courage of civilized nations is readiness
to sacrifice in the service of the state, so that the individual counts as only one amongst many. The
important thing here is not personal mettle but aligning oneself with the universal.
(Hegel in Philosophy of Right, cited in Avineri 1972:199)
Western philosophy is not alone in its contemplation of courage. In Asian philosophy, for example,
Confucius stated: ‘Faced with what is right, to leave it undone shows a lack of courage’ (cited in Jiang
2012:47). According to Xinyan Jiang (2012), for Confucius courage was not a prime virtue in and of
itself, but it had to be reined in or governed by other virtues: ‘To love courage without loving learning is
liable to lead to insubordination’ (Confucius cited in Jiang 2012:47).
As a whole, ancient philosophers saw courage as a critical component of good citizenship and a way
of preserving social order against both external military threats and internal moral decay. The common
emphasis in these philosophical views of courage is that courage is a virtue and a responsibility for
fulfilling one’s obligations to higher ideals and a common good. The philosophical view of courage
seems centered on the broad theme of morality. The acknowledgement of the interactional components
of courage materializes mostly in the form of an internal dialogue or self-reflection about one’s duties to
higher ideals and other members of society. By the turn of the twentieth century, philosophical
considerations of courage gave way to more scientific and empirical examinations, particularly in the
nascent discipline of psychology.
In our usual way of using language very loosely, we are wont to call all these aversions fear. We say we are
afraid of going hungry, losing sleep, being cold. We call all our aversions to petty as well as to greater
discomforts fears. But in none of them may there appear any of the characteristics of emotion and bodily
reaction which belong to fear proper.
(Lord 1918:28)
In other words, the simple act of overcoming fear in pursuit of some other goal is not in and of itself
courageous and nor is every courageous act about overcoming fear.
Given the backdrop of World War I when the book was published, Lord’s discussion predictably turned
to distinctions between American courage versus Prussian courage, both in a military sense and
otherwise. For Lord, American courage and patriotism was of a higher order because it was based on
nobler sentiments and ideals:
A courage it is not only to do battle in war, but to undertake vast, complicated reforms, and go forth in holy
crusade, with no other hope of gain than in Lincoln’s immortal phrase that ‘Government of the people, by
the people, for the people might not perish from the earth’.
(Lord 1918:82)
Higher order of courage, Lord argued, rests on justice, humanity, and faith, all of which, he contended,
Americans possess and Prussians do not. Lord went on to discuss how one can teach courage to soldiers
through drills and a heavy dose of propaganda with this ultimate goal: ‘It is preparation to keep
democracy safe by trained skill in upholding the rule of equal right by strength of arms, against misrule
at home, or attack of ambition of power from abroad’ (Lord 1918:104).
A contemporary reformulation of Lord’s psychology of courage can be found in an Adlerian approach
that emphasizes overall mental health and wellbeing. Specifically, in their book The Psychology of
Courage: An Adlerian Handbook for Healthy Social Living, Julia Yang and colleagues define courage as
the creative life force from within and without that moves us forward in the interest of self and other in the
presence of difficulties. Specifically, courage and acts of courage are best expressed by the individual’s
willingness to contribute and/or cooperate in socially useful ways via the tasks of living (i.e., work, love,
friendship/family/community, harmony with self, and harmony with the universe).
(Yang et al. 2010:14)
Like Lord, who receives a brief mention in the book (on page 12), Yang and colleagues link courage with
higher ideals.
In recent years, more systematic and empirical psychological conceptualizations of courage have
been developed in the subfield of ‘positive psychology’, which ‘focuses on wellbeing, happiness, flow,
personal strengths, wisdom, creativity, imagination and characteristics of positive groups and
institutions’ (Hefferon and Boniwell 2017:2). For example, through content analysis of published texts,
Christopher Rate (2007) identified several features of courage, such as ‘volition’ or ‘an exercise of one’s
will’ and ‘motivation toward excellence’. In a subsequent study, Rate and his colleagues (Rate el al.
2007) further confirmed the findings by asking 300 Air Force officers and officer candidates to rate
vignettes that incorporated the features of courage revealed through their earlier content analysis. The
follow-up study confirmed that exercise of free will, the pursuit of higher ideals, and incurring personal
risk are key dimensions of courage. In a related study, Cynthia Pury and Charles Starkey (2010)
distinguish mundane everyday acts of courage from ‘accolade’ courage referring to acts that are
ceremonially and publicly recognized.
Similarly, in a comprehensive study of the concept, Shane J. Lopez et al. (2010) used a mixed-methods
approach to examine ‘folk conceptualizations’ or ‘implicit theories’ of courage (Lopez et al. 2010:26). In
a sense, the researchers were interested in how ordinary people define and experience courage in
everyday life. Lopez and colleagues employed four different methods of data collection: (1) surveys with
both open-ended and closed questions, (2) focused group interviews, (3) having participants rate
definitions of courage in terms of their similarities and dissimilarities, and (4) a ‘scaling project’ where
participants were asked to rate certain acts or traits on a scale ranging from ‘not at all’ courageous to
‘very much’ courageous. The findings showed that respondents distinguished between three types of
courage: ‘physical courage’ (e.g., acts of bravery), ‘moral courage’ (e.g., being true to one’s principles),
and ‘vital courage’ (enduring or overcoming adversity) (Lopez et al. 2010:23–26; see also Rate
2010:48).
Lopez et al. emphasize the need for examining the contextual or environmental factors that lead to
the recognition and/or display of courage. In their words: ‘[W]hat sets the stage for courage to emerge
or to flourish needs to be explored. There are possibly conditions that are conducive to displaying
courage or that liberate a person to demonstrate courage’ (Lopez et al. 2010:43). Another prominent
researcher in this area, Christopher Rate, stresses the need for a greater clarity of the concept: ‘The
priority of establishing a consensus definition of courage is not merely a humanistic or intellectual
exercise. A concise, operational definition is necessary to proceed with developing or training this
construct and its underlying features in individuals and organizations’ (Rate 2010:54).
Such concerns regarding the fluid meaning of courage as well as its application across social
situations and organizations could be addressed by approaching the topic as a linguistic construct that
is situationally variable and emergent in the course of social interaction. This approach has been
applied to the study of other emotions. For example, using data from interactions between
psychotherapists and their patients, Rold Wynn and Michael Wynn (2006) show how different types of
empathy are ‘interactionally achieved’ through talk or turn-taking in conversation. In the remainder of
this chapter, I consider courage within a similar analytical framework.
There are various forms of courage, namely, the capacity to envisage immediate danger and yet proceed
with the course of action ….The variations are established by the nature of the risk, for example, whether
physical, financial, social or spiritual.
(Goffman 1967:281)
Note that Goffman associated courage primarily with the willingness to take a risk, setting aside the
type of motives and nobler aspirations that was the focus of earlier philosophers discussed in this
chapter. Specifically, using the example of a gambler who risks losing a good deal of money, Goffman
stated that ‘the interests served by courageous actions may be quite selfish, the issue is the actor’s
readiness to face great risk’ (Goffman 1967:218). Goffman is also credited with linking the concepts of
‘gameness’ and ‘toughness’ with courage, particularly in the context of sports (Peterson 2015).
Accordingly, athletes display courage by continuing ‘to play despite injuries sustained during the
athletic contest’ (Peterson 2015:380).
As an interactionist, Goffman was keenly aware of the gendered nature of courage and its relationship
with social action. Specifically, he considers how women are excluded from courageous actions and
instead used by men as objects of courageous acts, or as ‘field of play’:
Action in our Western culture seems to belong to the cult of masculinity – in spite of lady bullfighters,
female aerialists, and preponderance of females in the slot machine pits of casinos. There are records of a
few duels fought by European women, but these encounters seem to be held up as perversions of the fair
sex, not its ornament. Of course, females are involved in one kind of action in a special way; they are field of
play for sexual courtship action.
(Goffman 1967:209–210)
Beyond Goffman’s dramaturgical approach, the interactionist view of courage can be linked with the
social constructionist conceptualization of emotions as products of human activity rather than
reflections of internal mental states. Two dimensions of emotions become particularly relevant in this
context: (1) the language of emotions and (2) the culture, socialization, and social structuring of
emotions (Loseke and Kusenbach 2008). These dimensions will be considered next.
We are under continual, although usually subtle, pressure to create only those stories that are
socioculturally acceptable. People would be executed in one time or place for a story – about a second lover
in an adulterous affair, for example – that in another time or place would scarcely raise an eyebrow.
(Sternberg 1996:74)
Similarly, one can think of the way stories of courage are scripted. For example, in my research on the
topic, a common narrative form was the courage to save a life (Marvasti 2017). While the particulars
varied, the main plot of the story involved someone who came to the aid of a victim who needed
immediate help or faced a life-threatening situation. Whether it was rescuing someone from a burning
building, the scene of an accident, or helping someone get help for a medical emergency, the basic
narrative form was: (1) the narrator and victims (a stranger, a friend, or a family member) cross paths,
sometimes by coincidence, and (2) the narrator, typically ‘instinctively’, rescues the other from a fatal
outcome. In some cases, particularly with male narrators, the description of the rescue was remarkably
similar to superhero stories from comic books. For example, a respondent described how he helped
rescue a woman in a dark alley. Reportedly, the woman was surrounded by a group of young men who
appeared to be gang members and were threatening her. This story is reminiscent of a typical scene in
a Batman or other superhero films. The tendency toward rescuing others from harm is documented
elsewhere by Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues (cited in Biswas-Diener 2012:17), who showed that
among the 20 per cent in a sample of Americans who acted courageously, 55 per cent had helped
someone during an emergency. One reading of this observation is that this type of heroism is evidence
of everyday acts of courage, or in Robert Biswas-Diener’s words: ‘Zimbardo’s study suggests that true
heroism isn’t reserved for action heroes in Hollywood blockbusters or for soldiers fighting in foreign
wars’ (Biswas-Diener 2012:17). For my purposes in this section, what is significant is the prevalence of
the narrative form and its similarity to a larger cinematic discourse.
In line with the fluidity of the concept of courage, its narrative forms are varied and flexible. For
example, while some of my respondents told the stories of the courage to remain in a relationship,
others spoke of the courage to leave a relationship. Similar to the culturally patterned or scripted
stories of love, what is important is the regularity of the narrative forms, which seem to serve as moulds
for telling the amorphous and complex experience of courage.
From boardrooms to rural villages, cultures differ in the ways they support courage and this reinforces the
central ideas of this book that courage is in part a learned skill and that we can put external structures in
place to encourage bravery.
(Biswas-Diener 2012:36).
On an institutional level, courage is perhaps most important to military organizations where rewards
are granted for acts of bravery and where its absence becomes a punishable offense (Olsthoorn 2007).
The process of awarding ‘medals of valour’ essentially reveals the internal organization and policies
that help mediate the meaning of courage for very specific purposes. Interestingly, even within the
military, the meaning of courage is far from settled. This is evident in two ways. First, what was once
regarded as the absence of courage is being revisited. For example, Peter Olsthoorn notes how formerly
designated acts of cowardice in battle are being recognized as symptoms of a psychiatric disorder: ‘It
was, for instance, as a result of this more merciful view that 306 British soldiers executed for desertion
in World War I were posthumously acquitted in August 2006 because they had supposedly suffered from
PTSD’ (Olsthoorn 2007:272). Second, Olsthoorn points out that the military as an institution is
changing. In his words: ‘For most of the militaries in the Western world, peacekeeping and
humanitarian missions are becoming their core business’ (Olsthoorn 2007:277). With this shift,
according to Olsthoorn, there is a greater need in military organizations to praise and institutionalize a
wider range of normative acts that reflect both physical and moral courage.
The promotion of courage as a virtuous and useful trait for organisational purposes is not limited to
the military and law enforcement agencies. As Christopher R. Rate (2010:63) notes, courage has
become a significant concern in health care and management. In a study aimed at developing a scale
for measuring courage in organizational settings, Olga Chapa and Donna Stringer state:
The attempt to select courageous/morally courageous individuals in an organization is not unlike trying to
select psychologically stable police officers or FBI agents. Depending on the industry, the needs vary (high
moral courage versus not necessary).
(Chapa and Stringer 2013:23)
Analogously, in an article regarding the significance of moral courage for health care professionals,
John Murray notes: ‘When nurses are mentored in developing moral courage, they come to learn and
take hold of new behaviours, such as taking action when unethical behaviours are observed’ (Murray
2010:4).
Educational institutions have also taken on the promotion of courage, especially as a sign of good
citizenship among students. For example, students may be awarded ‘certificates of courage’ in
elementary schools to acknowledge their willingness to ask questions and help their classmates. What
makes courage a particularly useful tool in institutional settings in general is its fluidity – it can be
linked with any desired behaviour. For example, an employee can be praised for having the courage to
follow company policies on one occasion, and on another she may be rewarded for ‘blowing the whistle’
on her superiors for unjust policies and practices. So, both conformity and non-conformity can be
acknowledged as being courageous depending on the particular institutional purpose at hand. This is
not to echo Susan Sontag’s (2001) controversial statement that courage is a ‘morally neutral virtue’. On
the contrary, as suggested in this section, courage is very much a normative virtue that is embedded in
institutional cultures and practices. However, the specific content of the norm is not a universal
constant but varies across cultures and institutions. This observation is consistent with C. Wright Mills’s
position that ‘working vocabularies of motives have careers that are woven through changing
institutional fabrics’ (Mills 1939:909).
The teaching of courage also happens in everyday interactions, or in micro contexts. For example, in a
study of how courage is learned in interaction with others, Joan Hasse (1987) interviewed nine
chronically ill adolescents to explore the ‘structure of courage’. Through content analysis of interview
transcripts, Hasse showed that courage for her respondents tended to involve the ability to transcend
one’s immediate situation through hope, creativity, and humour. Hasse further argued that the
adolescent patients were able to transform the meaning of their illness into one of courage with help
from friends, relatives, and health care providers. In other words, Hasse showed that the meaning of
courage may be socially constructed in interaction with significant others.
Lastly, courage is a topic of much interest in popular culture. Particularly in the category of self-help
books, courage is presented as a panacea. For example, it can be used to improve a particular skill set
(Courage: The Backbone of Leadership by Gus Lee and Diane Elliot-Lee 2006), facilitate the process of
recovery or overcoming a deficiency (Courage: Overcoming Fear and Igniting Self-Confidence by Debbi
Ford 2012), or pursued as a general positive virtue (The Courage Quotient by Robert Biswas-Diener
2012 and Moral Courage by Rushworth Kidder 2005). In terms of cinematic productions, perhaps the
most notable example is the character of the ‘Cowardly Lion’ from the The Wizard of Oz:
COWARDLY LION: Courage! What makes a king out of a slave? Courage! What makes the flag on the mast
to wave? Courage! What makes the elephant charge his tusk in the misty mist, or the dusky dusk?
… What have they got that I ain’t got?
DOROTHY, SCARECROW, TIN WOODSMAN: Courage!
COWARDLY LION: You can say that again! Huh?
(LeRoy and Fleming 1939).
The Lion’s search for courage ends with the realization that it was a quality he possessed all along.
Nonetheless, the Lion is awarded a medal from the Wizard to confirm his courage, a medal which he
displayed proudly: ‘Read what my medal says: “Courage”. Ain’t it the truth? Ain’t it the truth?’ (LeRoy
and Fleming 1939).
(1) The recipients of the Carnegie Hero Medal, individuals honoured for risking their lives by rescuing
others in situations such as fires and potential drownings … (2) the Righteous Among the Nations, non-
Jewish individuals designated as having helped Jews avoid being killed by the Nazis during World War II …
(3) living kidney donors, (4) Peace Corps volunteers, and (5) Doctors of the World overseas volunteers.
(Becker and Eagly 2004:167)
The researchers discovered that in certain categories men outnumbered women and in others the
pattern was reversed. Specifically, as of 2003, only 8.9 per cent of Carnegie medal recipients were
women (Becker and Eagly 2004:167). However, in the categories of Righteous Among Nations and
living kidney donations women outnumbered men. More recent trends (mid-1980s onward) for Peace
Corps volunteers also showed a higher rate of women. Women also outnumbered men in the category of
Doctors of the World volunteers. The researchers interpreted these results using a number of different
theories, but gave special attention to the fact that men tend to be associated with the type of heroic
behaviour that receives public attention. This is especially true in the context of high-visibility
professional roles that have not been open to women. As Becker and Eagly put it:
This analysis helps solve the remaining puzzle of the cultural association of heroism with men and
masculinity, despite the substantial delivery of heroic behaviour by women that we have documented. At the
proximal level, the highly public nature of much of men’s prosocial risk taking is one source of this cultural
emphasis. More profoundly, women have traditionally been excluded from male-dominated protective roles.
(Becker and Eagly 2004:175)
In a related study, Lindsay Rankin and Alice Eagly (2006) further demonstrate that perceptions of
‘heroism’ reflect gender stereotypes. Specifically, when research participants were asked to name
‘public heroes,’ they were more likely to name male figures. However, when asked to name heroes with
whom they were personally familiar, respondents named male and female figures equally.
The social structure of race can also mediate public perceptions of courage. For example, in an article
titled ‘(Racial) Profiles in Courage, or Can We be Heroes Too?’, Robert Chang (2002) considers how war
monuments tend to display white heroes. To illustrate this point, Chang discusses how a proposed 9/11
monument in New York City became controversial because it was to depict men of three races (white,
Hispanic, and black) raising an American flag, despite the fact the original photo it was based on
showed only white men. While it is true that 93 per cent of the firefighters lost as a result of this tragic
event were in fact white, Chang explains that:
This 93% white statistic is actually quite close to the demographic background of the New York City Fire
Department – in which black firefighters constitute 2.7% and Hispanic firefighters constitute 3.2% of the
force. It is, however, nowhere near the actual population in New York City in 2000, which consisted of 35%
white, 24.5 black, 27% Hispanic, 9.8% Asian American, and 0.2% Native Americans.
(Chang 2002:369)
This statement about the racialization of courage seems consistent with Becker and Eagly’s (2004)
argument, discussed earlier, regarding the disproportionate coverage of male acts of courage, or the
gendered aspect of courage. In both cases, a dominant group is more likely to be associated with
courage because its members are more visible and have greater access to public displays of courage
through their professional roles.
The area of sexual orientation is another setting in which courage becomes significant, especially in
connection with the decision to disclose one’s gay or lesbian identity (i.e., ‘coming out’). For example, in
a study of a small group of male writers, William Berry (2012) describes how their decision to disclose
their gay identity was a morally courageous act. In Berry’s words: ‘The participants demonstrated
courage through the ways in which they chose to express and negotiate their sexual identity in their
writing. The risk of doing so was very real for them’ (Berry 2012:68). Speaking about the danger of
revealing his sexual identity, one research participant stated: ‘When I first started writing, I would have
taken that experience as almost a death threat because I was so concerned about people knowing who I
am, and I was afraid of being abused or beaten up’ (Berry 2012:168).
Lastly, there may be social class differences in the way stories of courage are told and heard. In
Everyday Courage: The Lives and Stories of Urban Teenagers (what appears to be a rare book in this
genre since most psychological studies of courage do not seem explicitly concerned about social class
differences), Niobe Way (1998) highlights the courageous acts of urban youth, a group she contends is
often falsely perceived as hopeless and pathological. She writes:
They told stories of becoming parents and being more determined to go to college as a consequence; of
dropping out of school and finding their voice because they dropped out. These urban poor or working-class
adolescents also told stories of going to the prom and the movies, of hanging out with their friends,
watching videos, and going to school. Their stories were quite ordinary and every-day and also courageous.
(Way 1998:260)
In the same vein, ethnographic research on the impoverished (e.g., the homeless) tends to represent
their daily struggles as courageous acts of survival (see, for example, Eliot Liebow’s Tell Them Who I
Am, 1993 or Gwendolyn Dordick’s Something Left to Lose, 1998).
Conclusion
This chapter began with a review of the philosophical and psychological conceptualizations of courage.
Building on the insights of both disciplines, I then examined the interactional dynamics and social
forces that mediate the public recognition as well as the individual experience and expression of
courage. Using a sociological approach, I showed how the meaning of courage is embedded in
narratives, culture, socialization and various social structures such as gender, race, sexual orientation,
and social class.
Among other questions, this chapter considered: (1) how and under what conditions are actions and
actors labelled as courageous, and (2) how do definitions of courage vary across cultures and social
institutions? Such questions orient us toward both the substance of courage (behavioural components)
as well as its underlying rhetorical constructions in a specific context and for a specific purpose – a
simultaneous attention to what Jaber F. Gubrium and James A. Holstein (2000) call the ‘whats’ and
‘hows’ of interactional or constructive practices.
As was shown throughout this chapter, courage is used in many settings for a variety of purposes. The
approach outlined in this chapter could help researchers systematically examine the interactional work
of doing courage. Everyone, from Aristotle to modern social science researchers, has acknowledged
that courage is highly context-dependent and situationally variable. A sociological approach based on
social construction of emotions (Loseke and Kusenbach 2008) directs our attention away from the
fugitive goal of a universal definition of this immensely complex topic to a more systematic examination
of the variable work of accomplishing courage and the consequences of labelling an experience as
courageous.
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6 Excitement
Risk and authentic emotion
Stephen Lyng
Introduction
Among the many emotions that influence our experience as human beings and challenge our powers of
interpretation, excitement is one that we especially value as modern individuals. We live in an era rife
with expressions of excitement, as many individuals feel almost compelled to demonstrate excitement in
public interactions with clients, customers, or new acquaintances and media surround us with images of
people excited about their favourite sports teams, their beliefs and politics and even certain brands of
laundry detergent. Members of modern society also look for exciting experiences in a broad range of
different social locations and activities, including sports participation and spectatorship, gaming and
gambling, high-risk leisure pursuits and dangerous occupations, political campaigns and social
movements, high-stakes financial and entrepreneurial schemes, extramarital and illicit sexual
encounters, and ‘adventure’ possibilities of unlimited variety. Without a doubt, our hopes for living an
exciting life have steadily expanded in the modern age.
In this cultural environment of pervasive excitement, it is tempting to conclude that human beings are
simply ‘wired’ to seek out exciting activities and situations and assume that the desire for excitement is
a universal human trait present in all human social environments. In this chapter, I challenge this
commonly held viewpoint by asserting that the valorisation of excitement as a basic human emotion is a
distinctly modern phenomenon. While it may be true that human beings have always possessed a
capacity for excitement, I will argue that the value we place on excitement in the present era reflects
the unique emotional orientation of modern individuals.
My analysis of excitement is informed by the general proposition that emotions and most other human
characteristics are shaped by the broader system of social structures and relations that exist in a
particular place and time. In this view, excitement and other human emotions, are experienced,
interpreted, and evaluated in different ways in different social-historical contexts. In keeping with this
perspective, my primary goal in this chapter will be to connect the lived experience of excitement in
everyday life (at the micro level) with the broader social and cultural structures of the emerging late
modern social world (at the macro level).
Accordingly, I will begin with a brief discussion of the most widely-accepted (and, to my knowledge,
the only) theory of excitement that employs a social-historical perspective. This is the theory developed
by Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning in a volume entitled Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the
Civilizing Process (1986). Next, I review recent efforts to apply Elias and Dunning’s theory of
excitement to certain contemporary sporting activities. I criticize this work for its predominant focus on
the violent nature of many of these new sports and argue that attention should be directed instead to
the importance of risk and uncertainty as a source of excitement. By shifting the focus to voluntary risk
taking as the well-spring of exciting experience in late modern society, it will be possible to broaden
Elias and Dunning’s framework beyond the domain of sport to include exciting activities in other social
domains. This is achieved by incorporating the concepts of ‘action’ (Goffman 1967) and ‘edgework’
(Lyng 2005) into the analysis of late modern excitement.
Finally, the chapter addresses one of the most intriguing aspects of exciting experience today by
discussing what could be considered as a ‘paradox of excitement’ that is endemic to the modernization
process. There is a surprising irony about modern excitement: although excitement acquires its special
status among human emotions only in the modern context, it also possesses a vanishing character in
this social universe. As we will see, the same modernizing forces that have produced the privileged
status of excitement among human emotions have also worked to diminish opportunities to experience
‘true’ excitement. This opposition between the intense desire for excitement and the increasing
difficulty of finding authentic expressions of this emotion has become even more pronounced in recent
decades as excitement has been transformed into a valuable commodity that can be bought and sold in
the marketplace. In pursuing the analytical goals of this chapter, we will traverse domains of social life
transformed by the search for excitement, exemplified by recent transitions from traditional to
‘extreme’ sports, simple thrill-seeking to life-threatening leisure pursuits, and ‘mass’ to ‘adventure’
tourism.
The arousal of excitement comes from the tensions involved in sporting activities … feeling hope for success
and fear of failure or defeat. This arousal of excitement is enhanced by the collective effervescence of an
entire group focused on a single event.
As sports enthusiasts of all varieties can attest, there is little that compares with the intense feelings
that spectators of collegiate or professional sports experience during important sporting events. The
‘collective effervescence’ expressed in fans taking to the court or field at the game’s end, doing the
‘wave’ in a stadium occupied by thousands of spectators or performing as a group of costumed or body-
painted supporters is rarely experienced in any other social domain today.
Thus, what we find in Elias’s (and his co-author Dunning’s) work on the civilizing process and
sportization is the theory underpinning my earlier assertion that the high value we give to the
experience of excitement is a uniquely modern phenomenon. As Elias argues, the importance we assign
to sport and other leisure activities as sources of excitement is proportional to the degree of constraint
and control that we experience in everyday life as members of a rational culture that emphasizes self-
control and strict standards of conduct. In this social-historical context, sport functions as an important
institutional domain because of its unique internal contradiction: it represents an expression of the
broader civilizing process at the same time that it offers an escape from the prevailing standards of
civility by providing an outlet for embodied experience and the expression of strong emotion.
Conclusion
I have argued in this chapter that the significance of excitement to human beings must be understood
in terms of the shaping of all human experience by the broader social context of human actions and
relations. This approach reveals that as the social and cultural environment is transformed over time,
excitement is experienced and assessed in different ways. While excitement may have been a valued
emotion throughout most of human history, I have demonstrated that the privileging of excitement
above most other human emotions is a uniquely modern phenomenon. Finally, I have suggested that the
modernization of everyday emotions has given rise to a ‘paradox of excitement’ – the same modernizing
forces that have produced the privileged status of excitement have also worked to diminish
opportunities to experience ‘authentic’ excitement.
While I have endeavoured in this analysis to highlight the major structural forces shaping the
everyday experience of excitement in the (late) modern era, the study raises a number of important
unanswered questions that should be addressed by scholars interested in excitement as a privileged
emotion in the modern world. For instance, we may wish to consider the implications of the present
analysis for the future of excitement as a human emotion that can be experienced in everyday life. As
we have seen, the main impact of the structural trends discussed in this chapter – especially the trend
toward the increasing commodification of excitement – has been to make authentic excitement less
accessible to increasing numbers of people and force those who value this emotion to engage in more
extreme forms of risk taking in order to experience it. However, we may reasonably ask if there are
limits to volitional risk taking as a source of exciting experience, a point at which the destructive
consequences for both individuals and society of increasingly extreme forms of risk taking will stimulate
efforts to restrict it. Furthermore, if this point is eventually reached, will authentic expressions of
excitement cease to be a part of the repertoire of human emotions? Or, is it possible to identify counter-
currents in the flow of social-historical changes described here that offer different possibilities for
exciting experience through more mundane pursuits? These are just a few of the exciting issues that
remain to be explored in the academic study of excitement.
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7 Embarrassment
Experiencing awkward self-awareness in everyday life
Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Søren Kristiansen
Introduction
Embarrassment is an endemic feature of everyday life. It seems that almost everybody – old and young,
male and female, skinny and obese, high and low – may at times be struck by this unpleasant feeling of
awkwardness, mortification and heightened self-awareness that arises when our self is suddenly and
unexpectedly exposed in social situations. Embarrassment is an embarrassing emotion – it is an emotion
that shows, often even quite physically, that someone according to the situation has done something
wrong and is (or is made) painfully aware of it. We sometimes use expressions such as ‘to be an
embarrassment to somebody’ or ‘embarrassing oneself’, which captures how embarrassment is
generally regarded as a negative emotion that, at least momentarily, wraps its unfortunate victim in a
shroud of incompetence, belittlement and even public ridicule. For example, it has recently been
suggested, amongst others by Sir Richard Branson, that American President Donald J. Trump is ‘an
embarrassment for the world’ (The Independent March 28, 2017). This criticism of Trump rests on his
alleged refusal to shake the hand of Angela Merkel (and later also his too energetic handshake with
Emmanuel Macron), for the apparently misogynous way he has spoken about women (‘to grab them by
the p****’) and in general for his – according to critics and commentators – ‘disastrous’ leadership. We
are sure that opinions on this matter are as many and as strong as they are varied. Obviously, Trump is
far from the first politician ever to be labelled an ‘embarrassment’, and he will probably not be the last.
From our own latitudes, former Danish Foreign Minister Villy Søvndal was once accused of being a
national embarrassment for wearing too loose a tie at formal political negotiations (not to mention his
‘embarrassing pronunciation’ when stating that ‘the ice is melting at the poles’), and current Foreign
Minister Anders Samuelsen has been described by opposition politicians as embarrassing for his
updates on Facebook. Not only in political life but also in ordinary everyday life, experiences and
accusations of embarrassment are quite commonplace. By invoking the notion of somebody being an
‘international embarrassment’ or by stating that what they do, what they say or what they represent is
‘embarrassing’ to witness, one is making a moral or normative statement. As we shall see later in this
chapter, social norms and morality play a rather significant role in defining and experiencing
embarrassment as an everyday emotion.
At times participating in everyday life in general – and perhaps public or political life in particular –
can prove to be a risky emotional business. Despite all our efforts and attempts at anticipating future
events, everyday environments are not always controllable or predictable. One can easily and
unwittingly slip and falter, fail to live up to expectations, behave in awkward ways, step on someone
else’s sore toes, say something regarded as inappropriate or wrong or express opinions that by others
are viewed as deeply problematic. We are all more or less familiar with the unpleasant and
uncomfortable feeling that arises in a social situation whenever someone (and perhaps even oneself) is
seen to have made such a mistake: being flustered, blushing, fumbling, stuttering, having sweaty palms,
starting an awkward whistle, wanting to withdraw, lacking composure and appearing altogether
incoherent are just some of the most commonplace expressions and responses when the self is suddenly
unmasked (Crozier 2006). It seems that the element of surprise is often part of such embarrassing
situations (Edelmann and Hampson 1979). Add to this a documented increase in heart rate as well as
systolic and diastolic blood pressure when feeling embarrassed (Harris 2001). This is exactly what
embarrassment feels like physically and socially. Embarrassment is thus about the feelings associated
with awkward self-awareness arising from participating in social situations in which the self is exposed
and feels vulnerable. However, some people presumably feel and/or display this more than others. We
have probably all encountered a person who refrained from showing any sign of embarrassment even
when the occasion would normally have required it. On the other hand, we may also know people who
are very prone to show signs of embarrassment even though their ‘offence’ was in fact excusable. In
this way, even though embarrassment is a universal emotion found in almost all cultures and historical
times, it is not equally distributed among or experienced by everybody. As we will show in the following,
although there is indeed evidence for individually invariable components to embarrassment as an
emotion, it is in many respects a distinctly social emotion that is closely linked to different social,
cultural and ecological arrangements and not least to specific situational properties. So, if you really
want to understand a culture, it is a good way to start out by studying its norms and reactions
regarding embarrassment. Even though embarrassment as an emotional experience is universal, there
are indeed a variety of cross-cultural, ethnic, age-specific and gender-dependent causes, specifics and
outcomes of embarrassment (see, e.g., Edelmann and Iwawaki 1987; Holland and Kipnis 1995;
Weinberg 1968).
In this chapter, we will explore different dimensions of embarrassment as an everyday emotion. First,
we turn to some of the empirical research and conceptual development done within ‘embarrassment
studies’. Following this, we will discuss embarrassment in comparison to its ‘sibling emotion’ of shame –
two emotions that despite apparent similarities also have many differences. Next follows a presentation
of different typologies of embarrassment describing some of its forms and functions, causes and
consequences. This takes us into a discussion of embarrassment and its relationship to role segregation
and the interaction order. Finally, we will discuss some of the positive and negative aspects of
embarrassment as an everyday emotion.
Researching embarrassment
Rom Harré once stated that ‘the study of embarrassment may seem a small and insignificant enterprise,
and yet it raises some important psychological, moral and philosophical issues’ (Harré 1990:181).
Despite the fact that the attention to embarrassment as a research topic has perhaps not been
overwhelming (Heath 1988:136), the emotion has not entirely evaded the attention of social or
behavioural research (see, e.g. Edelmann 1981). The experiences, triggers, functions, displays and
processes of embarrassment have all been subject to psychological, social-psychological and
sociological research, the majority of which has been conducted from the late 1950s to the present day.
This research has been conducted using many different types of research methods such as
experimental, qualitative, quantitative, historical and conceptual designs. Broadly speaking,
psychological research has explored the cognitive, emotional, personality-related and behavioural
aspects of embarrassment (for an overview, see Edelmann 1987) while for sociologists, embarrassment
has been explored as a human emotion with an offspring in social organisation and with certain values
and functions in terms of sustaining social and moral order. In the psychological vein, early
psychoanalytic approaches have, among other things, focused on the role of exhibitionistic behaviour
and socially unacceptable impulses (see Saul 1966), while other approaches have explored the types of
personality traits that are associated with embarrassability. For example, in a study by Andre Modigliani
(1968) it was found that embarrassability is a result of the simultaneous presence of two specific traits:
‘(1) a sensitivity to the immediate evaluations of others, and (2) a general readiness to believe that such
evaluations are more negative than they really are’. Such findings supported the conclusion that
individuals who possess such traits ‘will suffer more severely from an incident which tends to
undermine his self-presentation’ and also will be ‘more “controllable” in face-to-face interactions’ and
‘less willing to engage in any deviant or orthodox actions which might jeopardize his self-presentation’
(Modigliani 1968:325). In a somewhat similar vein, John Sabini and colleagues (2000) have explored
how significant triggers of embarrassment (such as committing faux pas, being at the centre of
attention or threatening another’s social identity) relate to personality variables and they found that
different subscales of triggers correlate with specific personality traits. Other branches of psychological
research have focused on treatment aspects, for example cognitive behavioural programs for the
treatment of social phobias in adolescents (Albano 2000), blushing (erythropohobia), related
behavioural displays of embarrassment (e.g., Boeringa 1983; Drummond and Gatt 2017),
embarrassment in phobic dental anxiety (Moore et al. 2004) or the management of embarrassment and
sexuality in health care settings (Meerabeau 1999). Some branches of behavioural psychology have
investigated the non-verbal aspects and displays associated with embarrassment, documenting that
signs of embarrassment may be detected in smiles (Ambadar et al. 2009) and that people experiencing
embarrassment tend to fixate more on the eyes of their audience perhaps ‘because of the emotional
feedback carried specifically in the eyes’ (Darby and Harris 2010:1256). Evolutionary theorists have
suggested that embarrassment has served vital functions in terms of securing and maintaining group
living and that it has evolved to repair ‘the damage in situations where a person has unintentionally
violated a social norm’ (Harris 2006:526). Finally, psychological research has speculated on the
anatomic, physiological and neurological bases of the display of embarrassment (e.g., Cutlip and Leary
1993; Bas-Hoogendam et al. 2017; Takahashi et al. 2004).
In general, the social-psychological research has explored the processes that result in individual
experiences of embarrassment. Within this strand of research there have been several attempts to
conceptualise the interpersonal aspects and processes underlying embarrassment. As we will present in
more detail below, Erving Goffman (1956) was among the first to explore the social, emotional and
cognitive processes involved in experiences of embarrassment. Briefly stated, Goffman suggested that
embarrassment is caused by an individual’s violation of the social norms and expectations that regulate
social behaviour. When individuals perform in ways that do not meet situational and social
requirements, their presented self may be discredited, resulting in an experience of unease, discomfort
or embarrassment. Goffman’s interactional analysis have been further developed by Modigliani
(1968:316), proposing that the process of becoming embarrassed runs through three continuous steps:
(1) some event occurs which undermines or discredits the individual’s line of self-presentation; (2) as he
senses that others present have become aware of this, he experiences a loss of situational-subjective-public-
esteem; (3) this, in turn, produces a corresponding loss of situational-self-esteem which is associated with
embarrassment.
In empirical testing, however, only some support of the model was found, indicating that situational-self-
esteem plays a less significant role in the process of embarrassment (see, e.g., Archibald and Cohen
1971; Modigliani 1968, 1971). In the early 1980s, attempts were made to construct models that
incorporate more explicitly the question of intentionality of norm violation and actor awareness (see
Semin and Manstead 1981). More recently, Robert J. Edelmann has proposed a more extended model
synthesizing and extending the models proposed by Goffman, Modigliani and others. The six basic
elements in this integrative model are summarized by Edelmann (1985:198) as follows:
Embarrassment appears to depend more on an audience than does shame. Hence, shame results from not
meeting some internal, private standard about the self, whereas embarrassment results from a public
judgment based on social approval or appraisal in comparison to others.
(Petronio 1999:209)
Perhaps this is also one of the reasons why embarrassment is often revealed in public by observable
facial blushing whereas shame does not carry the same physiological identifiers (Keltner and Buswell
1996).
There are also other distinctive differences between embarrassment and shame. According to Thomas
J. Scheff, who draws on the work of Goffman and Helen Lewis, shame and embarrassment share a
certain recursive feature, but where the recursiveness of shame takes place within people,
embarrassment instead seems to be contagious between them. He also noted that the two emotions,
despite their kinship, differ when it comes to intensity, sociality and duration: shame is intense, suffered
often in solitude and can be lasting, whereas ‘embarrassment is a less intense, brief, and overtly
experienced form of shame’ (Scheff 1990:18). This view is supported by Arnold H. Buss who in his work
on self-consciousness and social anxiety compared shame and embarrassment. He summarized his
perspective by stating that ‘unlike embarrassment, which is trivial and momentary, shame is serious
and enduring. Embarrassment carries no moral burden; shame does. The opposite of embarrassment is
poise; the opposite of shame is pride’ (Buss 1980:148). It follows from this that a person can certainly
be an embarrassment to himself/herself as well as to others in a social situation (just think of the
example of the accusations against President Trump introducing this chapter) whereas it is hard to
imagine that someone is a shame to either self or others. Even the expression seems wrong. Shame
relates to the individual, to some inner and deep-seated feelings of something unresolved, to self-
disappointment or at times even self-disgust, whereas embarrassment seldom involves such strong,
deeply embedded and inescapable emotions or sentiments. Furthermore, one can be morally ashamed
of actions done and even actions not done (for example failing to help somebody in need), whereas it is
rare to feel embarrassed for refraining from doing something.
So, despite their apparent sibling status within the category of ‘self-conscious emotions’,
embarrassment does not run as deep as shame. Shame, it seems, is a substantial, deep-seated and
lasting emotion as compared to the more shallow, situational and passing emotional experience of
embarrassment. For example, it is seldom – even though certain actions might perhaps warrant it – that
people go through life feeling constantly embarrassed. Moreover, it is also difficult to think that larger
groups of people or whole nations should feel embarrassed. Embarrassment is most often an emotional
reaction relating to individuals or smaller units of people being co-present. It is, however, quite likely
that we would expect collectives to feel ashamed of what they or their ancestors did or did not do as
was the case with the German population after World War II. The Germans were not exactly expected to
feel embarrassed but rather ashamed, because of the moral deprivation of those who committed crimes
against humanity and of those who passively watched. There are also important differences when it
comes to the uses, consequences and reception by others of signs of shame and embarrassment. Just
like shame, embarrassment may serve as a mechanism of social control. Within the sociology of
deviance, researchers often talk about different ‘shaming’ strategies: making certain groups of people
stand out from or appearing to be inferior to the rest and insisting that they should feel ashamed of
what they or someone associated with them have done (at times described as ‘stigma by association’).
Here shame is externally assigned to someone else: ‘you should be ashamed!’. It really makes little or
no sense to talk about ‘embarrassing’ someone as a similar type of strategy, primarily because
embarrassment typically occurs (and disappears again) almost by itself without any imagined or actual
evil intent involved. Of course, it can be embarrassing to be embarrassed, but it is hardly something
that completely destroys or ostracizes people. So even though embarrassment, like shame, may serve as
a mechanism of microsocial control and, as we shall see below as something initiated strategically by
others, it is of a much milder form than that of shame and shaming. Studies have also shown that
people respond very differently to embarrassment and shame in everyday settings. Embarrassment
often seems to engender humour, smiles and jokes whereas shameful behaviour causes disgust, anger
and apologies (Miller and Tangney 1994). This supports the aforementioned suggestion that not only
are embarrassment and shame different when it comes to what initially triggers these emotions, but
also in the way their triggering actions are perceived and reacted to by others. So even though
embarrassment and shame are doubtlessly sibling emotions, they are not, as we have here aspired to
show, Siamese twins.
For Goffman, human beings are creatures who live in the world and who are so completely dependent on
how others view them that they avoid at all cost the dashing, or even the dimpling, of social expectations.
Goffmanian men and women are driven by the need to avoid embarrassment.
(Schudson 1984:633–634)
For Goffman, then, embarrassment is closely related to self-presentation and to the situational threats
to the projection of a coherent self or identity. As individuals possess several selves in the social world
and social situations require the projection of only one specific self, individuals may sometimes
experience incompatible self-presentation requirements (Lizardo and Collett 2013). As Goffman puts it:
‘Often important everyday occasions of embarrassment arise when the projected self is somehow
confronted with another self which, though valid in other contexts, cannot be here sustained in
harmony with the first’ (Goffman 1956:269). The experience of threats to the projection of a coherent
self, in Goffman’s perspective, constitutes the basic social mechanism underlying embarrassment. In a
paper entitled ‘Embarrassment and Social Organization’, Goffman examined how people jointly seek to
avoid the type of embarrassment that arises when an individual’s self becomes threatened or
discredited. In social encounters, individuals will attempt to avoid the threat of embarrassment, and
consequently most people seek to avoid situations altogether that threaten their own projected self as
well as the self being projected by the other players present. This may be achieved by: (1) projecting
relatively modest self-claims into the interaction, (2) by deliberately charting a course skirting
potentially dangerous situations, or (3) by showing consideration or tactful tolerance towards others
(Jacobsen and Kristiansen 2015:80–81).
A crucial point in Goffman’s analysis is that the embarrassment or uneasiness is not always an
irrational reaction or impulse. Rather it is a functional necessity, a necessary form of behaviour that is
‘built into the establishment ecologically’ (Goffman 1956:270). Let us take a closer look at this seeming
paradox: how can uneasiness and embarrassment be built into the very fabric of social organisation and
thus be socially adequate? In addressing the question, Goffman examines the ways that individuals, in
everyday life, usually attempt to avoid embarrassment. Sometimes people try to stay calm and
controlled by way of a stiff smile, a nervous laughter or restless hand that does not reveal the person’s
actual unease. Although such ‘techniques’ or other ‘facework’ practices are able to conceal the most
obvious sides of the situational discomfort (see Goffman 1955), other less obvious signs will often
betray the performer:
Thus, while making a public speech, he may succeed in controlling his voice and give an impression of ease,
yet those who sit beside him on the platform may see that his hands are shaking or that facial tics are
giving the lie to his composed front.
(Goffman 1956:266)
Just as the performer in such situations tries to conceal his discomfort and tension, so will the audience
typically take measures to protect the performer’s face and help him regain composure. Often the
audience may oppress signs that might reveal their awareness of the performer’s true condition or they
conceal them by way of the same types of ‘covering gesture’ techniques employed by the performer.
There are, of course, situations and examples in which the performer is unable to conceal his unease
and breaks down into a panicking laughter, burst into tears, starts blushing, etc., and then finds it
impossible to re-gain situational composure. After such episodes of collapse, the performer, in
Goffman’s words, ‘abdicates his role as someone who sustains encounters’ (Goffman 1956:267).
And for Goffman, this expectation to maintain and uphold social encounters is an essential moral
obligation, but is it important to note that uneasiness and embarrassment not necessarily constitute a
breach of such moral requirements, rather the contrary. Through social interaction, the performer
projects an acceptable and tactful self, which contains certain situationally aligned attributes,
capacities and competencies. Simultaneously, Goffman points out, the individual must show deference
and respect to the selves projected by others in the social encounter. A social encounter, then, ‘consists
of effectively projected claims to an acceptable self and confirmation of claims on the part of the others’
(Goffman 1956:268). However, events may occur that threaten these claims and participants
accordingly may find themselves in a troubled situation. Interaction must be reconstructed and here
signs of embarrassment and unease play a crucial role as these expressions indicate that individuals
take their situational responsibility seriously. Finalizing the analysis of the causes of embarrassment,
Goffman adds an important complication: many examples of situational discomfort are grounded in the
fact that people possess different selves and that embarrassment may arise because a projected self is
confronted with another self (that may be valid in other social contexts) but cannot be upheld in
alignment with the first. In Goffman’s perspective then, embarrassment is related to the importance of
role-segregation as the individual usually
has more than one role, but is saved from role dilemma by ‘audience segregation’, for, ordinarily, those
before him whom he plays out one of his roles will not be the individuals before whom he plays out another,
allowing him to be a different person in each role without discrediting either.
(Goffman 1956:269)
Many social establishments, Goffman points out, are designed exactly to facilitate this process. Work
environments often have separate rooms and facilities for management and for employees. In Goffman’s
analysis, such arrangements reduce the likelihood that people who have different ranks (inequality) but
are closely related (by their joint organisational membership) find themselves in physically intimate
situations in which they are expected to maintain equality and distance. Such situations would be
characterised by discomfort and the interacting parties would experience tension and there would be a
variety of potential sources of embarrassment. The embarrassment or unease that occurs
simultaneously in the CEO and the employee when meeting in the company elevator is thus built into
the social situation. In Goffman’s perspective, this embarrassment finds its source, not in the persons
themselves, but in the social system that configures people with a range of different selves. The social
value and function of embarrassment in Goffman’s analysis is therefore quite evident: besides operating
as a mechanism of social control in face-to-face interactions (Modigliani 1968:313), embarrassment
saves situations while individuals, for a longer or shorter period of time, lose their role or their self.
Embarrassment, then, constitutes the individual ‘cost’ of role-conflicts that arises from the interaction
order and principles that are built into social organisations. Instead of allowing role-conflicts to
dominate and make social situations deteriorate, the individual sacrifices his self and identity by acting
as a social friction-preventer and by allowing different social principles to operate simultaneously. As
Goffman (1956:271) eloquently put it when summarising the effects of embarrassment: ‘Social structure
gains elasticity; the individual merely loses composure’. Basically, then, Goffman’s approach emphasizes
how embarrassment is closely related to various aspects of the interaction order. The interaction order
places certain behavioural constraints on the parties present in social encounters (such as presenting a
situationally appropriate self) and if participants behave inconsistently with these social constraints, he
or she may experience a momentary discreditation of his or hers projected self. Embarrassment may
thus be described as an inevitable cost of the incompatible role-requirement that individuals experience
during everyday interactions in modern society. The experience of embarrassment, then, is woven into
the very fabric of microsocial relations and serves ‘as an emotional mechanism that enables people to
maintain the stability of moral communities in the seemingly ordinary interactions of quotidian life’
(Keltner and Buswell 1997:250).
Conclusion
At the end of the day, everybody can, either voluntarily or involuntarily, turn out to be what Erving
Goffman (1961:81) once called a ‘dangerous giant’: someone whose untoward, clumsy or inappropriate
behaviour threatens social situations and selves, and embarrassing or embarrassed individuals are but
one example of such dangerous giants. Although embarrassment is perhaps something most of us think
we already know all about either from personal experience or from common sense, we have here
attempted to show how some of the research conducted on embarrassment may shed light on many
aspects of embarrassment that most of us either take for granted or devote little attention to. As the
chapter has shown, embarrassment is in fact a rather complex emotion with a rich history and a variety
of different aspects and dimensions: psychological, social-psychological and sociological. Obviously, this
chapter has not provided an exhaustive account of the many studies carried out on and the many
different dimensions of embarrassment, but it has carefully selected some insights that, particularly
from a sociological perspective, makes it evident how embarrassment is an important emotion in
everyday life.
While there has been some controversy as to whether embarrassment constitutes a distinct emotion
or a milder form of shame (see Sabini et al. 2001), there now seems to be at least some consensus that
embarrassment is a distinct emotion related to the individual’s self-presentation. We initially described
how this emotion for the afflicted individual evoked a sense of awkward self-awareness in social
situations. Embarrassment, then, is a public emotion that is displayed in front of an audience or an
interactional partner. Also, it may motivate individuals in different directions, i.e. to avoid the
circumstances that caused it or to restore the public face that has been diminished (Dong et al. 2013:1),
and there seem to be important cultural differences and variations in terms of the display, perception
and experience of embarrassment (Ho et al. 2004). The evolutionary, historical, psychological, cultural
and sociological aspects of embarrassment have been documented in an increasing body of research.
Today, we therefore know that embarrassment plays a vital role in sustaining social encounters and in
calibrating behaviour around a set of shared ground rules or moral expectations. As summarized by
Christine R. Harris (2006:526), embarrassment seems to serve at least three basic social functions.
First, it is an appeasement gesture signalising to others that the breach of expectations was unintended
and that it will not happen again. Second, the emotional suffering (or ‘social pain’ as Harris calls it)
associated with embarrassment makes it serve as a kind of deterrent, as individuals will seek to avoid
the behaviour that elicited the unpleasant experience. Third, embarrassment stimulates corrective
changes as it motivates individuals to repair the social damage and to restore other’s self-esteem.
Obviously, there are, as this chapter has shown, many processes and factors involved in eliciting,
displaying and reducing embarrassment and we have primarily provided an overview of some of the
sociologically relevant empirical research, theories and conceptual developments. Clearly, more
research on embarrassment is needed. Future studies may focus on, for example, cross-cultural
differences in embarrassment as well as age, gender, status and occupation-specific factors,
mediated/mediatized types of embarrassment or how the use of technological gadgets may either help
in enhancing or reducing experiences of embarrassment, just to mention a few topics for inspiration
and further exploration.
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8 Shyness
Self-consciously perceived relative social incompetence
Susie Scott
Introduction
Shyness is often assumed to be an individual characteristic – a personality trait, affective state or
cognitive style – and as such, has mainly been studied by psychologists. Here, it has been attributed to
various causes, including biologically innate temperaments (Kagan 1994), genetics (Hamer and
Copeland 1998), patterns of social cognition (Clark 2001; Crozier 2001) and communicative styles
(Mills and Rubin 1993), which create inherent differences between ‘shy’ and ‘non-shy’ populations. This
approach shapes common sense understandings of shyness as a relatively unusual condition afflicting a
minority of people. We think of shyness as an individual problem, neglecting the wider sociocultural
context in which it is embedded.
However, sociology can contribute to our understanding of shyness as a self-conscious emotion that
arises in certain types of social situation. This means that anybody can feel shy under certain
conditions, and it is a relatively normal and common experience. Using the perspectives of symbolic
interactionism (Blumer 1969) and dramaturgy (Goffman 1959), I argue that shyness is a property of
social interaction rather than individual minds, which emerges from people’s mutual (mis-)perceptions
in everyday encounters. I define shyness as a feeling of perceived relative incompetence at managing
social situations and presenting oneself appropriately, which evokes a fear of social judgment. We feel
shy when we doubt our ability to give an expected role performance, especially when ‘everybody else’
appears more competent than ourselves, and so dread making an embarrassing mistake.
Shyness can be considered a normal, intelligible and communicatively rational response to situations
of dramaturgical stress (Scott 2005, 2007). It makes absolute sense to be concerned about creating a
socially desirable impression, and to be aware of the potential consequences of failure; far from
indicating an individual pathology, this suggests normative motives of social conformity. Consequently,
shyness varies situationally: people may feel shy in some situations but not in others, depending on
their level of perceived relative incompetence. Few people describe themselves as ‘true blue shys’, who
experience the feeling most of the time and on most social occasions (Zimbardo 1977). It is much more
common for people to ‘drift’ (Matza 1964) in and out of shyness as a situational state, behaving
variously and inconsistently according to interactional contingencies.
Nevertheless, over time, some individuals who recurrently experience shyness may come to think of
themselves as a ‘shy person’, which becomes part of their self-identity. This is partly because of the
social reactions they encounter when they present and conduct themselves in certain ways. Shy
behaviours, such as avoiding eye contact or not talking in conversation, break some of the normative
rules and taken-for-granted assumptions about everyday interaction. Consequently, shyness is regarded
as deviant: often misperceived as rudeness or aloofness, it evokes reactions of teasing, impatience and
moral indignation.
Living with shyness is not just a matter of passive suffering, however. Those who develop this social
identity learn how to actively manage it in everyday life. This involves carefully rehearsed techniques
and strategies of dramaturgical self-presentation, which ironically demonstrate high levels of skill and
competence. Being, doing and managing a shy self involves daily practices of emotional labour. Feelings
of anxiety, embarrassment and shame are mindfully recognised and reflexively monitored, as actors
devise ways of concealing and containing their perceived relative incompetence. In some cases, this
may lead to positive self-conscious emotions like pride, whereby shyness is reclaimed as a valid
alternative way of being.
In this chapter, I shall explore how shyness emerges from contexts of social interaction, what it feels
like to experience it, the social reactions shy behaviours often evoke, and the ways in which the shy role
is performed and managed in everyday life. To illustrate this, I present data from a study I conducted of
40 self-defined ‘shy’ people, gathered through individual interviews and an email-based discussion
group (Scott 2004). The participants came mainly from western Anglophone countries (the United
Kingdom, the United States and Australia), were of various genders and ethnicities, and aged between
18–70. In the interests of anonymity, all of the names presented here are pseudonyms.
A few parents will be standing waiting for their children. These days I might actually say a vague hello.
Then we will stand in silence as I agonise over what I could possibly break the ice with. By then a few more
parents will have arrived who effortlessly ‘steal away’ the first group of parents with ‘insider’ remarks, such
as ‘How did your daughter get on at the birthday party last week?’. They bunch together in a conversation
about things which I, as a stranger, will have no knowledge of [or] couldn’t be party to. To break into such a
group from this point on feels like an intrusion.
Imagining themselves as conspicuously errant symbolic objects (Blumer 1969), shy actors feel
ambivalent about the prospect of social visibility. They feel torn between two conflicting wishes: to be
seen, recognised and included, but not to be marked out as different. As Georgia put it, she wanted
both ‘to be accepted and not’. The need for belonging is an important social motivation (May 2013),
which my participants frequently reported, but which they felt was belied by their ostensible gestures
of withdrawal.
In this respect, shyness differs from comparable states of quietness and introversion, as it suggests a
frustrated sociability. Whereas introverts may be quietly content to spend time alone, shy people long to
be ‘where the action is’ (Goffman 1967) but doubt their capacity to do so. Quietness can have positive
connotations of choice and agency (Cain 2012), whereas shyness can feel like an unwelcome, imposed
trap (Scott 2007). It is not an intentional act of resistance, but one of unwitting deviance committed
with bashful regret.
Unfortunately, the shy actor’s attempts to conceal their discomfort can actually accentuate it,
heightening their perceived sense of difference. In a paradox I call the ‘visibility of invisibility’ (Scott
2007), this self-conscious awareness can invoke embodied expressions, or ‘symptoms’, such as
trembling, blushing and stammering, which render the person even more socially conspicuous. As
Emma put it, she worried about ‘standing out as this red, shaking fool’. These are symbolic gestures
(Blumer 1969) that ‘call out’ a communicative meaning, which is mutually understood by the
interactants (Mead 1934). Blushing, for example, has been defined as a response to unwanted social
attention (Leary et al. 1992). Hence we do not blush when we expect or want to be seen (for example,
performing artists on stage), nor when alone, unless we imagine an audience. W. Ray Crozier (2001)
adds that we blush when we believe that an item of private information about the self has been exposed
to public scrutiny.
My participants spoke of the anguished humiliation they felt when they realised how blushing drew
even greater attention to their Shy ‘Me’. For example, Georgia remembered working on a supermarket
checkout and smiling at one of the customers, whose good intentions backfired into excruciating self-
consciousness:
[He said] ‘Oh, you’ve got dimples!’ and I could feel myself just cringing and blushing, and then ‘Oh, and you
blush!’ So I’m sitting there with my smiley dimples and blushing and thinking ‘I need the ground to open
up’, and – oh, I hated that. And of course, by him saying that, then other people were looking, and I was just
thinking ‘Leave me alone!’
The lived experience of shyness is felt through embodied self-consciousness (Merleau-Ponty 1962). This
makes it comparable to phenomenological accounts of other emotions like fear (Davidson 2000),
boredom (Barbalet 1999) and fun (Fincham 2016). My participants reported how their physical
‘symptoms’ were tied to ontological sensations of social withdrawal and self-absorption. Several
referred to their shyness with metaphors such as the shell, the filter, the hole or the bubble, to
emphasize the barrier between themselves and others. For example, Emily said: ‘I tend to climb inside
myself’, and Natalie spoke of ‘going into a hole. I just shut off sometimes, and start thinking’. The ‘shell’
of shyness was viewed with ambivalence, as both a protective enclosure and an inhibiting trap.
I think I try and suss out who I’m talking to, and try to find out what they like and what they don’t like – and
kind of tailor what I say as to what I think they’d want me to say, so that they’ll like me … I almost didn’t
realise who I was … I didn’t know how to act.
Second, shyness can be dramaturgically managed by adopting a standardised role. Situational roles
provide ready-made templates of action, including character definition, costume and props, ritualised
moves and scripted lines. This affords a comforting sense of safety, insofar as the performance becomes
more familiar, controlled and predictable. In the workplace, for example, jobs usually carry a clearly
defined status and set of tasks. Natalie, who taught young sea cadets, said matter-of-factly that, ‘you’re
not really self-conscious when you’re teaching people – you’re just teaching them. You know it; they
don’t’.
By contrast, situations that lack this predictable quality can evoke dramaturgical stress (Freund
1998). Without a conventionalised blueprint, the pressure is on individual performers to improvise their
performances. There might be some tacit norms and expectations shaping the situation, but these are
hard to discern, and the finer detail of the action is left open to interpretation. My participants
explained that the most shyness-inducing situations were those in the ‘middle range’ space between
being formally structured and informal enough for a mistake not to matter. As Urchin explained, he
would feel that he lacked the procedural ‘recipe knowledge’ (Schütz 1972) needed to make these
scenes flow smoothly:
It’s not terribly clear how they ‘work’ – for example, bars/cafés/restaurants, where it’s not made clear
whether you order at the counter or sit and wait to be served, or when and how you pay. (I could make
similar points about libraries, galleries, betting shops, concert venues, etc., etc.) Doing the wrong thing
makes me feel extremely small, and can ruin what should be a pleasant experience.
Third, shyness can be managed by deliberate strategies of self-presentation (Goffman 1959). Through
practices of ‘mystification’, actors maintain a clear division between their frontstage and backstage
regions (Goffman 1959), preventing the audience from glimpsing into the messy machinery behind the
scenes. For example, some of my participants used material prop objects as ‘involvement shields’
(Goffman 1963a) to discourage unwanted social attention. They would bury themselves in newspapers,
books, mobile phones and so on, trying to appear immersed in self-focused activities and therefore
‘away’ (Goffman 1963a) or out of play. This was often accompanied by non-verbal gestures, such as a
bowed head and averted eyes, which communicated what Georgia called a ‘please-don’t-approach-me
look’.
Actors may also use techniques of subterfuge, such as ‘passing’ (Goffman 1963b), to conceal what
they perceive as a discreditable stigma, namely their perceived relative incompetence. They attempt to
dupe their audiences by appearing more socially poised and confident than they actually felt, disguising
their shyness and creating the opposite impression. Material props are used again here, this time as
‘side involvements’ (Goffman 1963a): secondary activities accompanying the main line of action, which
serve as a decoy to distract the audience. Urchin explained this technique:
Although I’m not normally a big eater, eating in a social situation gives me something to do with my hands
and face, and takes the pressure off me to interact with other people. So, at a drinks-party type of affair, I’ll
spend much of the time at the food table, stuffing myself with crisps and Twiglets … I find coping with other
people easier if I’m doing something else at the same time – if socializing and conversation aren’t the only
purpose of our being together.
Another strategy is to engage in backstage rehearsals: practising one’s lines and moves (Goffman 1969)
before a scene, so that the final frontstage performance will appear smooth and polished. Written or
mental scripts, composed before entering situations, can help to reduce the perceived likelihood of
making an embarrassing blunder. Thus, Georgia wrote notes before telephoning the gas company,
student Phoebe carefully planned what to say before raising her hand in class, and Connie described
how she prepared to catch the bus:
I always planned out what I was gonna say. Even if it was just ‘A single to – my nearest town,’ and always
made sure that I had the right money so that I wouldn’t have to go digging about in my purse. I just wanted
to make the situation as short as possible, talking to the bus driver.
Others were more devious, using costume and props to deliberately misdirect the audience. A
wonderfully ingenious example of this was Pearl, a woman of seventy, who played on stereotypes of the
elderly by dressing up as an ‘old lady’ to lower the audience’s expectations of her. Pearl calculated that
if people dismissed her as socially invisible, she would not have to be held accountable for her
performance:
I feel safer all wrapped up. I would love to wear a long robe and a veil, but that wouldn’t be very popular
today, would it? I compromise with coat, hat, gloves, spectacles (which I don’t need; they belonged to my
mother) and a walking stick, which I don’t need either. I like to be covered up and have something to hold.
A friend suggested the walking stick and I find it very helpful. It looks natural, too, for an old lady of
seventy to have one.
So, shyness is not simply felt, or suffered, in a negative way, but on the contrary, it can be positively
enacted and skilfully managed. We might then talk not merely of ‘being shy’ but of ‘doing shyness’ in
everyday life, as a practice involving self-consciously performed emotion.
I worry that people will mistake me just feeling insecure and shy for me not bothering to speak to someone,
or … thinking that I’m too good to speak to someone. It’s just completely the opposite: your mind’s
whizzing, trying to think of something to say, but you can’t.
This kind of social reaction underlines the relational dynamic of shyness, as an intersubjective reality
that emerges out of the ‘conversation of gestures’ (Mead 1934) between social selves. One actor
manifests an emotional expression, which is interpreted and defined by those around them according to
background assumptions and stocks of indexical, tacit knowledge. The perception that someone is shy is
a contingent, negotiated ‘definition of the situation’ (Thomas and Thomas 1928). Shy actors are astute
observers of this dynamic process unfolding, and able to ‘take the view of the other’ (Mead 1934) to
imagine how things appear from the audience’s perspective. As Lauren reflected:
It can be very awkward talking to somebody that’s not actually reacting and giving back stuff – it’s much
easier to have conversations with people who help you along the way, and actually that you feel you’re
interacting with and not talking at. You know, it’s just more comfortable … if it’s a two-way thing rather
than you constantly having to try all the time.
Through this relational dynamic, an actor who manifests shy expressions may be positioned as an
outsider, on the margins of a scene. They represent the archetypal figure of the stranger (Simmel
1908b/1950), who confronts a group but is denied full membership, because they lack the requisite
stocks of tacit background knowledge needed to participate. This exclusionary ‘cutting out operation’
(Smith 1978) happens both transiently, through the mutual (mis)perceptions of interactants in an
immediate situation, and progressively, if the pattern is so habitually repeated that it consolidates into a
role.
In the first case, my participants recounted episodes in which they felt themselves being excluded
from social situations, particularly group conversations. This often happened because they spoke
quietly or struggled to break into a boisterous exchange. Ruby complained that chatty friends ‘just cut
me off halfway through’, and Toby agreed: ‘Lots of social gatherings are just shouting matches,
effectively, where the prize goes to the loudest person’. These actors experienced what Goffman (1959)
called the ‘dilemma of expression versus action’, which occurs when an actor is so self-consciously
aware of the stylistic form of giving a performance that they cannot concentrate on its substantive
content. Doubting their ability to contribute, and trapped in the reflexive internal dialogue between Shy
‘I’ and Shy ‘Me’, the actor hesitates and holds back, only to find that they have missed the beat of the
social dance and slipped out of the circle. Anna said regretfully: ‘It happens all the time … I’d think,
“Oh, should I say that? Should I say that?” – and then the chance goes’.
In the second case, people who routinely experience shyness may be seen as such by others,
internalise this attribution, and eventually come to see themselves as shy. Labelling was evident
throughout my participants’ accounts, as they were called various names, such as ‘weird’, ‘boring’,
‘quiet’ and ‘sensible’, which frustratingly did not match how they viewed themselves. The label ‘shy’,
however, seemed to be stickier, and clung to the person’s self-image. As Etta recollected, even well-
intentioned teasing could have a devastating impact:
My parents always called me ‘the shy one of the family’… [my uncle] would always ask me: ‘How’s my shy
girl?’. He’d say it as if he took some enjoyment in watching me cringe. He knew I was shy and would pursue
it to no end. My [other] uncle would also give me a certain look with a smile on his face. He would just stare
at me until he could get me to put that shy look on my face. We all know the ‘shy look’, I think. I would turn
beet red as I silently died inside … The more I showed I was shy, the more they would taunt me.
Through this vicious circle, the shy role gradually consolidates into a ‘master status’ (Hughes 1945), an
over-riding definition of identity based on one salient characteristic. As Georgia put it, shyness ‘almost
defines who you are. I suppose. It’s just like saying that someone’s a positive or negative person … you
kind of box people into how you see them’. This represents a shift from what Edwin Lemert (1967)
called ‘primary deviance’ (the initial rule-breaking acts) to ‘secondary deviance’ (adaptation to the
consequences of negative sanctioning, which alters self-identity). The result may be a fatalistic self-
fulfilling prophecy, whereby it seems easier to live up to others’ expectations than to challenge them.
For example, Anna reflected:
I think it’s who I am now, cos after so many years of being like that, I think I am [shy]. And I think quite a
few times, some people have said, ‘Oh, Anna’s the quiet one’ … it kind of stuck with me, I suppose … if
people say ‘Oh, you’re nice and quiet, you are’ and then you just think, ‘Well, why say anything then? Why
really speak up?’.
Drifting out of the shy role can then become difficult, because such inconsistency would constitute
further deviance. Acting out of character from one’s master status compounds the audience’s
expectations once again, rendering the actor even more conspicuous. Hence Ruby explained that, even
though she sometimes felt able to perform non-shyness, she was effectively prevented from doing so by
being trapped in the shy role:
Once you’re classified as a shy person, you can’t do anything that’s not shy, cos if you do that, then it’s like
there’s something wrong with you. You can’t do something just, like, drastic or outrageous, cos they’d say
‘Oh, what’s wrong with you? Are you sick?’… I can’t switch from being Little Miss Quiet in the corner and
then to be Little Miss Loud, cos it’s like – people just look at you funny.
The problematisation of shyness also occurs at the cultural level, where it represents a deviation from
certain dominant norms and values (Scott 2007; Moran 2016). Assertiveness, vocality and competitive
individualism are prized highly as the means to personal and professional success, and shyness is
antithetical to this ‘extrovert ideal’ (Cain 2012). As such, it transgresses the ‘feeling rules’ (Hochschild
1983) of contemporary western societies, failing to confer emotional capital (Williams 1998) upon the
individual. Popular texts of the mass media, such as magazines, Hollywood films, children’s novels and
self-help books, depict shy characters as objects of pity, held back by their unfortunate condition (Scott
2007). Shyness is framed as a barrier to meritocratic achievement: a problem that should be worked at
and overcome. This chimes with a wider moral discourse of neoliberal individual responsibility, which
identifies problematic subjects in need of social regulation, disciplinary monitoring and self-governance
(Rose 1990).
Shyness is therefore embedded within a deeper, structural ‘emotion regime’ (Reddy 2000), which
shapes social attitudes and responses towards it. One manifestation of this is the medicalisation of
extreme forms of shyness as a mental pathology. Social phobia and social anxiety disorder are relatively
new psychiatric categories, which came into use in 1980 (Scott 2006). Diagnostic bracket creep means
that forms of social behaviour that would once have been accepted as ‘normal shyness’ are now
reframed as being in need of medical treatment (Lane 2006). Consequently, we find health care
industries promising curative treatments, from pharmaceutical drugs to private therapeutic shyness
clinics (Scott 2006).
Yet, against this trend, we find some evidence of resistance. My participants emphasised the positive
qualities associated with shyness, which they thought were often overlooked. These included
conscientiousness, sensitivity, kindness, compassion and empathy. In some discursive spaces, such
objections can escalate into something more defiant and politically assertive. A counter-discourse
(Foucault 1971) of ‘Shy Pride’ can be observed in some online communities, where members share
experiences and mobilise with a dissenting collective voice (Scott 2007). Echoing the social model of
disability (Oliver 1990), shy activists object to the individualised notion of impairment, and redirect
attention to the surrounding social environment that imposes barriers to their participation. This shifts
the burden of responsibility for change away from the ‘shy’ person and onto the wider society to
accommodate their needs. For example, Urchin suggested: ‘I mentioned my frustration at not daring to
ask for things in shops. Well, maybe the shop should rethink its layout and signage so I can find what I
want’.
However, the Shy Pride movement might need to begin at home. Michel de Certeau (1984) argued
that resistance must be exercised at the grassroots, everyday level, through small but symbolic gestures
as critically engaged ‘moments’. Thus, Twinkle called for the label to be reclaimed as a positive social
identity by challenging its unthinkingly negative use in routine, everyday encounters:
Shyness is seen as ‘other’, i.e. in some way deficient to non-shyness, and as such, the non-shyness model is
what us shy people are constantly being measured up against. Why should that be? Why does shyness have
to be seen as a ‘problem’, as other? Isn’t it about time that it was seen as equal but different?
Thus, shyness exists in a complex relation to deviance. It arises from the anticipation of social
judgement for one’s perceived relative incompetence, but it is the attempted concealment of this, and
resulting emotion displays, that actually evoke such a negative social reaction. Audiences are more
sympathetic towards someone who makes an embarrassing mistake than to someone who appears not
to try at all. This definition of shyness as deviance emerges proximally from situations, but is bolstered
by a strong cultural repertoire of norms, values and feeling rules of the wider emotion regime.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have presented a sociological model of shyness, drawing on ideas from symbolic
interactionism and Goffman’s dramaturgy. Challenging the assumption that shyness reflects individual
differences of psychology, I argue that it is a social role that emerges from interaction and whose
meaning is contextually negotiated. This is not to deny the emotional aspect of shyness, and how it is
subjectively experienced, but rather to treat these as relational phenomena. Shyness belongs to the
family of self-conscious emotions, involving concerns about social judgement. It is a state of anxious
inhibition that arises when we feel unable to behave in normatively expected ways, and anticipate
making an embarrassing mistake. The shy actor feels poorly equipped, compared to those around them,
to dramaturgically manage the situation; thus I define shyness as a feeling of perceived relative social
incompetence.
The shy social self has two constituent parts, engaged in an internal dialogue. Adapting Mead’s
model, I suggest that the Shy ‘I’ reacts with anxious inhibition and withdrawal, while the Shy ‘Me’
critically reflects upon its own image, from the perspective of the Competent Other. This implies pro-
social motivations – to belong, to conform and to be accepted – the frustration of which can create
loneliness, sadness and other negative emotions. Shyness is distinct from quietness and introversion in
this respect, for it reveals a deeply ambivalent attitude towards social visibility.
Nevertheless, shyness is actively performed and managed in everyday life. Actors can devise tricks
and strategies for concealing their discomfort and ‘passing’ as non-shy. These involve conducting
backstage rehearsals, using material objects as costumes and props, tailoring self-presentation to
different audiences, and hiding beneath a controlled and predictable scripted role. However, such
attempts to disguise a Goffmanian ‘discreditable’ stigma can sometimes backfire. Embodied gestures
like blushing, shaking and stammering mark out the shy role as ‘discrediting’ in itself, evoking negative
social reactions.
Shyness is regarded as deviant because it challenges certain values of contemporary western
societies, namely assertiveness, extroversion and competitive individualism. It breaks the cultural
feeling rules of this emotional regime, evoking negative social reactions in everyday encounters. Those
who routinely experience shyness may drift into the shy role as a master status, which defines their
social identity. This fatefully shapes future relationships and interactions, positioning shy actors as
perpetually ‘strange’ outsiders. Alternatively, positive meanings can be associated with shyness, and the
identity reclaimed as a source of pride.
Whichever attitude people adopt to their shyness, it is an actively experienced emotion. We
agentically manage this complex state of mind, demonstrating remarkable (and paradoxical) skills of
dramaturgical competence. Ultimately, shyness is a question of identity and lived experience, whose
meanings are negotiated with others. It must be recognised as a deeply social emotion of relational
selfhood, connecting the public and private realms of everyday life.
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9 Envy
Hostility towards superiors
Gordon Clanton
Introduction
Envy is conscious or unconscious hostility toward a superior, someone who is better off or more
accomplished in some important way. Any quality or achievement that provokes admiration also is likely
to provoke some envy. These include wealth, status, power, fame, success, talent, good health, good
grades, good looks and popularity. Because envy is repressed, denied, and relabelled, it is difficult to
observe and almost impossible to assess through self-report. To study envy by observation, we must
look for it in situations where it is likely, and we must watch for the disguises in which it often appears.
Envy is especially salient in competitive situations with high stakes including politics, literature, sports,
and entertainment.
In this chapter, envy will be defined and differentiated from jealousy, an innocent wish, admiration
and emulation. Examples from everyday life illustrate envy called jealousy, envy unnamed, and envy
correctly named. Envy, paradoxically, both threatens and helps to preserve social order. We explore the
hidden social usefulness of envy and the political institutions by which it is managed. Envy is considered
in various contemporary institutional settings, including the family, the workplace, advertising,
competitive sports, educational opportunity, and academia.
Recognising envy
Here we revisit and extend the definition of envy, noting the difficulty of studying an emotion that
routinely is denied, repressed and relabelled.
A definition of envy: As noted above, envy is hostility toward superiors, a negative feeling toward
someone who is better off (Scheler 1912; Schoeck 1966). Put differently, envy is discontent at the
excellence or good fortune of another. Envy is resentment toward someone who has some desirable
object or quality that one does not have and cannot get. By ‘resentment’ we mean bitter indignation at
having been treated unfairly, as in ‘his resentment at having been demoted’. So, envy and resentment
are overlapping categories and near synonyms. Again, envy is not the wish for the advantage that
provoked the envy. Rather, envy is the much darker wish that the superior would lose the advantage.
Envy includes Schadenfreude, the perverse pleasure, the malicious joy, that is felt when the superior
fails or suffers (Smith 2013). Schadenfreude celebrates the downfall of the superior. As Ovid (d. 17 CE)
said, the envious person never smiles except at the sight of another’s troubles.
The envious person rarely resorts to violence against the superior and rarely seeks to seize or to win
the desired object through direct competition (Schoeck 1966). Often the envious person takes no action,
but instead merely wishes that the other would lose the advantage that provoked the envy, or otherwise
would suffer. And the envious person may quietly celebrate any such loss or suffering that may befall a
superior. Most often, such dark feelings are contained within the individual. Occasionally they may be
voiced to others: ‘I’d like to see him get what’s coming to him’, ‘Serves them right’, or, with satisfaction,
‘How the mighty have fallen’.
The most common outward expression of envy is gossip (Foster 1972). Recall, for example, the
deprecating labels your high school peers used to describe the student with the best grades (‘teacher’s
pet’ and worse), the best football or basketball player (‘dumb jock’), and the beauty queen (‘stuck up’).
Any quality or achievement that provokes admiration also is likely to provoke envy.
An individual’s envy is likely to be strongest when the advantage of the superior is in an area of
importance to the individual’s own self-definition. Following William James, Peter Salovey and
colleagues (Salovey and Rodin 1989; Salovey and Rothman 1991) conclude that envy is most likely
when comparisons are made in domains that are especially important to our self-definition. We only
truly care about our performance in a limited number of life domains. This ‘domain relevance
hypothesis’ holds that envy is most likely when comparisons with another person are negative for the
self, and these comparisons are in a domain that is especially important to self-definition.
Conceptually speaking, one cannot envy down. By definition, the envied must be better off than the
envier. In real life, however, it is possible to be simultaneously better off than another in some ways but
less well off in other ways. For example, younger people may envy older people their wealth and power,
but older people with wealth and power may envy younger people their health and good looks. The
unemployed youth who is going fishing may envy the bank president because of his wealth, but the
bank president may envy the unemployed youth because of his freedom to go fishing.
Envy, like all emotions, is a feeling within an individual. But envy may also prevail between groups,
classes, and whole societies. Poor individuals envy the rich. Losers in competitions envy winners.
Likewise, New Yorkers and Californians often are targets of envy from people who live in other parts of
the United States. Americans are targets of envy from people who live in other parts of the world.
The denial of envy: Because envy is a completely negative emotion, it usually is repressed, denied,
disguised and relabelled. To admit straightforwardly to envy is to declare oneself inferior to another and
hostile toward that person (or class of persons) because of the inferiority. Because of repression,
individuals usually are unaware of their own envy and so are not reliable informants about their envy.
Although many sociologists have an aversion to Freud and to the notion of the unconscious mind
(Manning 2005), the study of envy clearly represents an area of inquiry that requires both sociological
and psychological sensitivities.
As mentioned, envy is often mislabelled as ‘jealousy’, thus making it less likely that we shall
understand it and deal with it constructively. But jealousy is almost never mislabelled as ‘envy’. This
pattern of usage suggests that envy is more negative, more shameful, and more deeply repressed than
jealousy – even if we are not sure why. Envy is one of the seven deadly sins, but jealousy is not (Lyman
1978). The popular media both reflect and contribute to the confusion of jealousy and envy.
Some academic writing adds to the confusion. Margaret Mead (1931), toward the end of a classic
article on jealousy, begins discussing envy, without using the word envy and without realizing that she
has switched topics. Abram de Swann (1989) titles his inquiry ‘Jealousy as a Class Phenomenon: The
Petite Bourgeoisie and Social Security’, but the article is clearly about envy.
Situations and disguises: Because envy, as mentioned, is repressed, denied and relabelled, it is
difficult to observe and almost impossible to assess through self-report. To study envy by observation,
we must look for it in the situations in which it is likely, and we must watch for the disguises in which it
often appears.
Situations in which envy is likely include these: your best friend wins a coveted scholarship or award.
A neighbour hits the lottery. A co-worker gets a raise or a promotion, but you do not. Another woman
becomes pregnant when you cannot. The star of the team gets a huge salary and most of the press
attention. In a crowded parking lot, another driver finds a parking place when you cannot. Social media
can generate envy when one sees one’s friends having fun at a restaurant or traveling the world. In
each case, if you could be 100 per cent happy for the other without qualifications or second thoughts,
you would be without envy. But to whatever degree you find yourself, even for a moment, thinking the
other does not deserve the good fortune or wishing that the other would lose her advantage, that is a
measure of your envy. As Murray Kempton (1990) noted:
The poisons of envy corrode the veins of every passed-over associate professor when he crosses the path of
an anointed full professor, every failed novelist when he turns to the best-seller list, every waiter in a West
Side restaurant when he thinks of an actor who has a part.
The common disguises (indirect expressions) of envy include attempts to shift a comparison from areas
in which one compares poorly with another to areas in which one looks good, attempts to provoke envy
in others, projections of envy and greed onto others, excessive admiration, and attempts to share the
glory of another. Common verbal formulas for expressing envy include: ‘if I can’t have X, then no one
else should’; ‘it’s not fair that they have X and we don’t’; and, in Oscar Wilde’s famous variation, ‘it is
not enough for me to succeed; my friends must also fail’. In a New Yorker cartoon, a dog says: ‘it’s not
enough that we succeed. Cats must also fail’.
Envy in myth and literature: The great stories of Western civilization include many examples of envy.
The Egyptian god Osiris is killed and dismembered by his brother Seth, who is envious of his radiant
attractiveness, power, and success. Cain is envious of Able. Othello is brought down by the envious
Iago, who uses Othello’s propensity to jealousy against him. Salieri hates Mozart because he is more
talented and his work as a composer is so effortless. Sailor Billy Budd, adored by the crew for his
innocence and natural charisma, becomes the victim of the envy of the ship’s Master-at-Arms John
Claggart, who falsely accuses Billy of conspiracy to mutiny. Homer Simpson is envious of his more
affluent neighbour Ned Flanders (Smith 2013).
Envy understood: One of my students showed that she understood what envy is when she put this
note at the end of her final paper:
When I was in high school I knew this girl named Kim. I hated her to the point I avoided her in the halls.
She was everything I hated in a person. She was popular, pretty (well not all that pretty), had big boobs (but
they sagged), intelligent, and stuck up. It hit me in class after your envy lecture that I was envious of her.
Not only is this a remembered example of envious resentment of the superiority of another, the envy is
still active, as indicated by the tendency, years later, to gossip about Kim.
I lost for cheerleader and I didn’t get the club I wanted and I didn’t get (on the) yearbook (staff). The things
that got me mad was it hurt and I couldn’t change it … like looks or money or popularity.
A Reader’s Digest article (November 1984) about ‘Who Should Inherit Your Family Treasures?’ warns
that ‘disagreements among siblings can be exacerbated by jealousy when one sibling is less well off
than another’. But that would in fact be envy.
A lawyer who became a sculptor says his former colleagues were jealous that he was doing what he
wanted to do. Bishop Fulton J. Sheen said: ‘Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius’. A college
football TV commentator at the Hawaii Bowl with a rainbow overhead says: ‘I was always jealous of the
announcers who got to call this game’. A movie magazine says that actor Taylor Kinney, Lady Gaga’s
fiancé, is ‘jealous of Gaga’s success’. All are examples of envy being called ‘jealousy’.
Envy unnamed: Mimi Swartz (2009), an executive editor at Texas Monthly magazine, writes:
Growing up in Texas, I knew a lot of girls like Farrah Fawcett, and I hated them. They had everything I
didn’t: blond hair, blue eyes, the power, seemingly, to get anything and everything they wanted in my small
public high school – boys, head cheerleader, the ability to decide, in a twinkling, who was cool and who
wasn’t … [Farrah] came to stand for everything I wanted to escape in my home state.
Without people making comparisons between themselves and those more fortunate, the clamour for greater
equality would never have arisen. One man’s envy is another’s sense of justice – which is why it has always
been the political right that accuses the left of the deadly sin.
(Reeves 2003:29)
Some envy can be turned into emulation of those who are more successful. This, presumably, would
increase productivity, thus benefiting both the individual and the group. In all but a few cases, however,
it is not possible for the non-rich to become very rich simply by ‘working harder’. By exaggerating the
payoff for hard work, the capitalist prescription that envy be converted into emulation helps to
rationalize and preserve existing inequalities (Clanton 2006).
Envy, then, is double-edged. It is necessary to society because it inhibits dangerous deviance and
encourages justice, but it also threatens society, especially by inhibiting innovation, depressing
productivity, and discouraging accumulation of wealth. Thus, the management of envy requires that a
balance be struck.
From the point of view of the political right, the goal of envy-management in society is that there
should be enough envy to encourage the masses to conform to necessary rules, but not so much envy as
to hold back the most talented individuals (Schoeck 1966). From the point of view of the political left,
the goal of envy-management is that there should be, not only enough envy to encourage conformity to
necessary norms, but enough additional envy to inspire demands for some redistribution of wealth and
power (Slater 1980).
The right is concerned that too much envy would prevent the rich from becoming richer. The left is
concerned that too little envy would make it impossible to narrow the gap between the rich and the
poor. Thus, the right seeks to conceal, minimize, and rationalize existing inequality, while the left seeks
to reveal, publicize, and dramatize existing inequality (for more on the politics of envy management, see
Clanton 2006, for additional perspectives on envy, see Smith 2008, and for discussion of the positive
benefits of negative emotions, see Parrott 2014 and Hutson 2015).
Conclusion
As this chapter has shown, envy is hostility towards superiors. Envy is different from jealousy. Envy is
not the wish for what one does not have. It is the darker wish that the superior would lose her
advantage. Because envy is repressed, denied, and relabelled, it is difficult to observe and almost
impossible to assess through self-report. Envy both threatens and helps to preserve social order. Fear of
being envied provides one motive for conformity to necessary norms. Fear of being envied reduces
injustice in society. The management of envy is inescapably political. Envy arises in all aspects of life,
especially in competitive situations where the stakes are high. Envy is experienced in the family, in the
workplace, in advertising, and in sports. Envy rises during natural disasters. Envy undermines
educational opportunity and is commonplace in academia.
References
Beggan, James K. and Mattie DeAngelis (2015): ‘“Oh, My God, I Hate You”: The Felt Experience of Being Othered for
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Boyer, Paul and Stephen Nissenbaum (1974): Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. Cambridge, MA: The
President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Clanton, Gordon (2006): ‘Jealousy and Envy’, in Jan E. Stets and Jonathan H. Turner (eds): Handbook of the Sociology
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Clanton, Gordon and Lynn G. Smith (eds) (1977/1998): Jealousy. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
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10 Guilt
What’s so good about feeling bad about yourself?
Vessela Misheva
Introduction
Guilt was an important focus of research throughout the twentieth century in many social and
humanitarian sciences, particularly philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and theology, with sociology
being a latecomer to the field. It was also an important topic in public discourses involving such social
spheres as religion, politics, economy, and law. Prominent examples include the discourses concerning
prostitution, abortion, environmental degradation, climate change, genocide, military atrocities, racial
and gender violence, national minority policies, human rights violations and international relations.
Important prerequisites for the sociological analysis of guilt include studying the classical texts of
Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud; tracing the changing fortunes of guilt and shame studies
during the twentieth century; examining ideal examples of personal situations that elicit guilt;
investigating the most discussed types of guilt; and addressing the existing obstacles to classifying guilt
as an emotion. Two main issues are that guilt cannot be separated in theory from shame, and, in view of
its complexity, demands a micro-macro sociological analysis. This chapter will address the micro-
sociological issues in this analysis, putting aside its macro aspects for another discussion.
Types of guilt
There is a rich and highly articulated taxonomy in the literature of types of guilt in respect to
experiences of guilt in differing personal situations. A list of the types most often discussed, which also
summarizes most of the experiences described above, includes at least the following:
Authority guilt: considered typical of the first stage of moral development, associated with fear of a
parental figure or authority who commands obedience, and regarded as a precursor of ‘guilt proper’
(Deigh 1996:55). It is also a normal element of a dutiful professional life in which supervisors, mentors,
team-leaders, and the like, may play the role of an authority who matters, towards whom one feels guilt
when failing to meet their expectations. This particularly applies to new employees and to those
working in organizations with strong institutional traditions that endorse respect towards authority and
hierarchical relations.:
Virtual guilt: imaginary guilt involving the acquisition of ‘guilt scripts’ that are activated, generating
guilt feelings in the child, whenever she thinks she has committed a transgression (Hoffman 2000:11).
This type of guilt is important for the development of early moral motives, although it is often linked to
depression and other similar clinical symptoms (Cimbora and McIntosh 2005:5).:
Superficial guilt: a lighter form of guilt for breaches of conduct, breaking a jam jar, for example, that
does not evoke the heavy imagery of transgression, violation, and punishment implied by such deeper,
cultured forms of guilt as ‘civilized guilt’ (Carroll 1981:460).:
Association guilt: felt for breaches of mutual confidence by participants in a joint activity that involves
cooperation, ties of friendship, and mutual trust, such as when one fails to do one’s part (Rawls
1971:133).:
Collective guilt: a legitimate feeling in groups, although groups, properly speaking, have neither
‘collective emotions’ nor ‘feeling sensations’, and do not feel guilt in the strict sense of the term (Gilbert
2002:122). This became a major focus in international relations studies when defined in respect to
those who ‘categorize themselves as members of a group that has committed unjustified harm to
another group’ (Branscombe and Miron 2004:316). The term also refers to such other feelings as the
guilt felt by those with a privileged status who are not personally responsible for the privileges they
enjoy (Branscombe and Doosje 2004:6). Another example is the guilt felt by parents when they assume
typically guilt-patterned behaviour for their children’s wrongdoings and undertake efforts to initiate
positive parenting practices and repair the damage themselves (Scarnier et al. 2009).:
Survivor guilt: experienced by those who remained unharmed while others experienced traumatic
injury or death. It is triggered by empathic distress and a feeling of injustice, thus comprising a
response to the question: ‘Why me – why was I saved and not somebody else?’ (Hoffman 2000:13).:
Other recognized types of guilt include: relationship guilt (for the problems of one’s partner);
separation guilt (over leaving a group); achievement guilt (for achieving more than others); victim guilt
(feeling responsible for leaving an abusive relationship); and bystander guilt (for inaction) (Hoffman
2000). Some of these reveal the close affinity between feeling guilt and shame, thus making clear why it
is so difficult to distinguish between them in research. Others indicate their radical dissimilarity, which
explains the persistent efforts to demonstrate their existence as separate emotions that can be present
simultaneously.
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11 Anger
An emotion of intent and of desire for change in relationships
Keith Oatley and Jennifer M. Jenkins
Introduction
In ancient times, the Stoics thought that anger had to be excised because it is destructive to oneself,
destructive to other people, destructive to society (Nussbaum 1987). In modern life, people continue to
be wary of it. We start this chapter by discussing how, for most people, anger occurs when someone else
does something they regard as wrong, and which upsets them. The emotion makes it urgent to lay
blame, to say or do something to punish the other or to take revenge. Often, as a result, some
renegotiation of an aspect of the relationship can occur. We then discuss how some people – a small
proportion of the population – are angry frequently and intensely. For them anger has become a trait of
personality, and can indeed be destructive, as the Stoics realized. In these people, the tendency to
anger affects colleagues, friends, family members. We move next to an analysis of how personality and
negative feelings are important in relationships, not just in expressing anger, but in eliciting it from
others. We show, too, how anger can become a characteristic of relationships with particular others.
Several programs have been found to be effective in reducing anger in relationships with children, and
within couples. We end by considering anger and its effects as depicted in plays, novels, movies and
video games.
Carol Tavris (1989) entitles her book Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion. She explains that many
people think that when one feels anger, it’s best to vent it. Sometimes perhaps it is, but sometimes it
may better not to do so, but to wait, to think about the issue, to consider effects and implications. How
are we to decide? In this chapter we offer some evidence to enable anger to be better understood.
In description be photographically objective, exact, minute and copious in detail. Tell age, sex, family life,
temperament, nationality of every child. Add to all a description of your experience with anger in yourself,
and if possible get a few of your adult friends … to write theirs (Hall 1899:529).
My capacity for anger is great and deepens into indignation, scorn and contempt. I can despise in a way
impossible before. To think and to say inwardly that my antagonistic is a – fool vent my feeling, sometimes I
pity him and yet know I shall revert to feeling him a fine man.
(Hall 1899:531)
Hall’s examples are not without interest, but they are heterogeneous, and mostly without information
about what prompted the episodes, or what they meant.
The first proper epidemiological study of anger seems to have been by Georgina Gates (1926). She
invented the emotion diary, in which she asked 51 women students to record incidents of anger or
extreme irritation that occurred to them during a week, and rate the intensity of each episode on a
scale from 1 (the lowest noticeable degree of anger), and 5 (as extreme as she has ever felt). The
number of incidents recorded was 145, a mean of 2.8 per person during the week, with 6 incidents of
degree 5, 23 of degree 1, and the rest in between. The anger lasted from less than five minutes to a day.
In 115 of the cases (79 per cent), another person prompted the anger, and the instances were mostly
experienced as a thwarting of some kind. The most common response reported was of wanting to make
some verbal retort to the other person. Thoughts of wanting to do some physical damage to that person
were also reported.
As Magda Arnold and J. A. Gasson (1954) showed, among the phenomena of psychology, emotions are
some of the most important, and generally they are relational. Usually they derive from the relation of
something within the person to some outer event, often caused by someone else. Arnold and Gasson
propose that the event is appraised as present or not-present, and as suitable or unsuitable to the self.
Thus fear is an emotion towards something that is unsuitable, and not present. Anger derives from an
event that is unsuitable, and present. A method of choice, then, for the study and understanding of
emotions, including those of anger, is the emotion diary, because in it, people can report on their
concerns, on events that relate to them, and on the emotions that arise.
Although Georgina Gates (1926) was the explicit inventor of the emotion diary, we can see its use far
back in history. In his book La vita nuova (1295) the poet Dante offered 31 poems along with a kind of
emotion diary (Oatley 2007) about how each poem was written. The principal subject of the book is an
every-day occurrence: falling in love with someone unattainable. For Dante the person was Beatrice.
The turning event of the book occurs when a friend of Beatrice tells Dante that although he thinks his
poems are in praise of Beatrice, really he is only writing about his own anguish. In response, he is so
upset – we infer that he is angry at the woman who said this to him and angry at himself – so that for
several days he does not know what to do with himself. He can no longer write anything at all. At last,
after working through the episode, he starts to resolve this state and express the result in a poem that
he addresses to the women in Beatrice’s circle of friends. It is a poem that can be thought of as the
beginning of the European Renaissance, in bringing the meaning of life down from the heavenly and
ideal, to understanding what we are doing with each other here on earth.
A comprehensive study of anger was made by James Averill (1982). He asked 80 married people and
80 university students to look out for the next instance of anger they experienced, and 80 further
students to look out for an episode in which they were the target of someone’s anger, and to record the
details in an emotion diary structured like a questionnaire. Some two thirds of the people who
experienced anger found the experience to be negative, but 62 per cent of them, and 70 per cent of
targets, found that with the discussions that ensued, the episode was beneficial: some important issue
between them and another person was resolved.
The most common function of normative anger, then, is to adjust something that has gone wrong in a
long-term relationship. Averill found that an experience of anger usually starts with the sense of being
wronged by another. With negotiations that often ensue, it usually ends with both participants making
some adjustment and reaching a reconciliation. In episodes of short-term anger some of what happens
is inter-personal: angry words, accusations, blame, and so on, but some is intrapersonal, as the person
comes to understand better what has gone wrong, and to recognize her or his part in the episode.
Nico Frijda et al. (1991) asked people to look out for episodes of emotion and, in a modified form of
diary, to draw graphs of their time course. They found that emotions often just last for minutes but some
emotions, particularly anger, can last for days, and recur in waves as the experiencer tries to come to
terms with them.
Keith Oatley and Elaine Duncan (1994) used emotion diaries and asked 47 employed people to look
out for the next four episodes of emotion they experienced. From what people said about their goals
and concerns and the nature of the event that had prompted the emotion, we were able to predict
correctly for 69 per cent of episodes what kind of emotion had occurred, over the range happiness,
sadness, anger, fear, and disgust. Although in a previous study of diaries kept by students (Oatley and
Duncan 1992) fear was the most frequent emotion recorded, for these employed people anger was the
most frequent emotion. It was usually prompted, as Gates (1926) had found, by another person
thwarting or interfering with a goal or concern. In 37 per cent of episodes of anger in this study, it was
found that the emotion did not occur alone but was mixed with some other emotion. In 41 per cent of
the episodes of anger the emotion did not remain stable, but changed to an emotion of another kind,
usually sadness, as the person mulled it over.
In a follow-up study (Oatley 1998) in which people were asked to make diary entries when prompted
at random times during the day, happiness was found to occur more frequently than anger. This
difference seemed to occur because happy feelings and emotions are sufficiently usual that they are not
always remarked upon or remembered, and hence not always recorded in diaries without prompting.
Anger is an emotion that usually is noticed, remembered and remarked upon. On more than 90 per cent
of occasions, too, as with other emotions that are remembered when diaries are completed at the end of
each day, Bernard Rimé (2009) found that the episode had been related and discussed with one or more
other people, not to diminish its intensity, but to gain perspective from others on it, and to engage in
the ongoing activity of integrating oneself and one’s understanding of oneself with others in society.
Using a modified diary, Oatley and Laurette Larocque (1995) and Larocque and Oatley (2006) asked
people to record what happened when a joint plan or arrangement had been made with someone else,
but had gone wrong. We called these events ‘joint errors’. Here is an example:
My co-worker was measuring some circumferences of pipes, converting them to diameters and reporting
them to me. I recorded the figures and used them to drill holes later. The drilled holes were incorrect for
diameters. It could have been the conversion or measurement. I had to modify the holes.
(Larocque and Oatley 2006:246)
Our participant was angry and, as often occurs in such episodes, he had distrustful thoughts: ‘My co-
worker is not as careful about numbers as I am – maybe I should do this kind of task with someone
else’. Typically, also, there are attempts at repair, in this case: ‘I need to and want to do something
about this kind of thing with him’.
Anger was the emotion that occurred most frequently as a result of joint errors. By both participants,
the error was typically seen as having occurred because of a fault of the other person. In one sample, of
157 people, Larocque and Oatley (2006) found that 50 of them made derogatory mental ascriptions
about the other person involved in the error: ‘unthoughtful, untrustworthy, unreliable, disrespectful,
dishonest, irresponsible, inconsiderate’ (Larocque and Oatley 2006:257) and so on. They also imagined
the other person making such attributions towards themselves. In an analysis of a sample in which of
both people involved in such joint errors reported on the error and their emotions when it occurred
(Oatley and Larocque, 1995), it was found that people were only 29 per cent correct at recognizing in
the other person emotions over the range happiness, sadness, fear, shame, and guilt, but they were 73
per cent correct at recognizing when the other person was angry. In a cross-cultural study of joint
errors, Ilaria Grazzani-Gavazzi and Oatley (1999) found that whereas Anglophone Canadians somewhat
more often focused on what had gone wrong to produce the error, Italians more often focused on the
relationship with the other person involved.
Along with emotion diaries, another important method, especially with children, is that of
observation. Richard Tremblay (2004) discusses episodes of anger and aggression seen in children of
different ages. He shows that the peak age for anger and aggression is between 24 and 42 months.
Whereas at age 2, 43 per cent of boys and 34 per cent of girls were found to use physical aggression,
which minimally is a push or a shove, to try and get what they want, by the age of 11, these rates were
14 per cent of boys and 7 per cent of girls (see also Goodenough 1931).
Jennifer M. Jenkins and Oatley (2000) observed 71 children in a playground during recess periods. We
identified short-term emotions by means of facial and vocal displays of emotion: they included, anger,
happiness, fear, and so on. Each emotion usually lasted 10 seconds or less. Each was elicited by a
specific event that had affected the child. We also obtained estimates of symptomatology of an
internalizing kind (anxieties and sadness) and of an externalizing kind (anger and aggression) from
parent and teacher questionnaires, and from sociometric ratings from peers. Externalizing
symptomatology was predicted by more frequent displays of anger, fewer displays of happiness, and
fewer displays of sadness. Internalizing symptomatology was predicted by more frequent sadness and
less frequent anger. We found a relationship between short-term emotional expressions and
internalizing and externalizing psychopathology, which was best understood in terms of a balance
between different short-term emotions.
Anger in fiction
Anger appears in the earliest written stories. In the Epic of Gilgamesh (Anon, 1700 BCE) a goddess is
angry with Gilgamesh and, to punish him, his friend, Enkidu, is killed. In the Bible’s Genesis (see, e.g.,
Rosenberg and Bloom 1990), God is angry with Eve and Adam for disobeying him so he expels them
from the Garden of Eden and imposes other punishments. Homer’s Iliad (762 BCE) is a story of anger
between Achilles and Agamemnon. Since these early times, anger and aggression have continued to be
depicted in plays, in novels and short stories, in movies, television series, and most recently in video
games.
Anger is indeed, as Patrick Hogan (2003) has found, a recurrent theme of stories around the world.
Stories of anger are sufficiently pervasive to be considered almost human universals. In a typical
example a rightful ruler is usurped by another person, perhaps a brother. Fighting breaks out, and
people on each side come to behave as badly as each other.
In 1508 Erasmus wrote Praise of Folly, in which Folly explains how, in everyday life, people like to
make out that everything they do is motivated only by rationality, whereas often they are clearly driven
principally by their emotions. It seems likely that it was on reading this that William Shakespeare had a
realization about what he would depict in the theatre. After reading Erasmus’s book he wrote Romeo
and Juliet which, although it is about love, is also about the angry conflict between the Montagues and
Capulets, which neither family is prepared to forego.
In films, television series and video games, anger and aggression are so prominent as to have become
clichéd. Many media producers evidently think that people enjoy watching episodes of angry and
contemptuous violence. This onslaught has prompted many investigations of the effects of media
violence. The consensus of reviews and meta-analyses is that media violence is indeed contagious, and
that it can spread to everyday life (see, e.g., Krahé 2012; Huesmann et al. 2013; Bushman 2016).
In contrast, works of fiction that can be considered as art can enable us to understand anger and its
consequences better. They can depict anger and its implications in ways that enable us to understand it
better and so perhaps become able to express it more judiciously and become able to empathize more
effectively with others who express it.
In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s (1866) Crime and Punishment, for instance, Rodion Raskolnikov is a student
who has no money, who is unsuccessful in his life, but who nonetheless thinks himself superior to
others. In a protracted state of anger against the unfair state in which he finds himself, he plots to kill a
woman who is a money-lender and extortioner. He does kill her, and also kills her half-sister who
happens to come on the scene. Much of the novel is about Raskolnikov’s sense of guilt and anguish at
his deed, and the growth of understanding of him by the detective, Porphiry. Reading the book enables
us not only to understand Raskolnikov, but to understand better within ourselves destructive
consequences of anger, even when others whom we harm may seem undeserving.
A whole genre of fiction – the mystery or detective story – is devoted to understanding how someone
has committed a crime, usually in an angry way, and has thereby torn the fabric of society (James 2009).
We are disquieted by such events. We come to feel a sense, when the perpetrator is identified and
mechanisms of justice are put into motion, that the torn fabric has been mended so that the rest of us
are once again able to get on with our lives together.
Conclusion
As this chapter has shown, anger is an interpersonal emotion. In its normative form it can occur some
two or three times a week, when something goes wrong that affects a concern. The question, then, is
what to do about it. If a person has it out with the other person involved, when that person is someone
the angry person knows and loves, there is a good chance that the incident will lead to some revision of
the terms of the relationship. At the same time, in the normative mode, people are usually careful not to
injure the other person involved. Some people, however, are angry for much of their lives, and for these
people anger is not only a burden they carry, but a blight they inflict on others. People for whom intense
and frequent anger have become aspects of their personality are at risk not only of worsening their
relationships, but of addiction and crime.
In order to understand negativity in relationships a social relations model is useful. Not only is there a
general effect of one’s personality on most others (an actor effect), but one can elicit certain emotions,
such as anger, from others (a partner effect). Most importantly, relationships have a certain emotional
tone that is distinctive (a dyad effect). This can be affectionate, but it can also be angry, and aspects of
anger can enable it to escalate and recur within particular relationships. Therapeutic measures have
been devised that are effective, between parents and children, and in couples, for reducing the
frequency and damage of pervasive anger in relationships.
Anger is depicted in literature, films, television shows, and video games. Concern has grown in social
science that pervasive aggression in the media, spreads violence into everyday life. At the same time,
artistic fiction can enable us to understand better the nature of anger, its effects on others and on
ourselves, and its possible remedies.
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12 Grief
The painfulness of permanent human absence
Anders Petersen and Michael Hviid Jacobsen
Introduction
Throughout our lives many things and people come and go. Things and lives sometimes come to an end,
at times because we decide to end them ourselves, at other times because external agencies or forces
beyond our reach terminate them. For example, we may lose money, friends, jobs, prestige, self-respect,
dreams and so on. Life is full of such momentary or more lasting losses. As a consequence, we may feel
sad, empty and even depressed. In everyday language we sometimes say that we ‘grieve’ such losses.
Most often, however, we will eventually come to replace the missing thing or person: we make new
money, have new friends, find new jobs and regain our prestige, self-respect and dreams. Grief, it
seems, comes in many different guises. Sometimes we grieve for something that is not going to be as
we have hoped for. For instance, imagine that you are the parents of a multi-handicapped child, then it
is indeed possible to grieve that the life opportunities for this child already from the outset seem
severely diminished, we may also grieve that the family business built up through many generations
went bankrupt, or we may grieve a romantic relationship that never turned out to last.
Seen through this lens, life may be defined as a shorter or longer wait for the experience of grief.
Only very few people, if any, are allowed to pass through life without ever experiencing some kind of
loss, be it expected or unexpected, natural or tragic, accepted or unbearable. If not a certainty, then at
least grief is something that must be calculated as part and parcel of what lies ahead. In general, ‘grief’
is an emotion triggered by the sense or experience of loss, and grief is thus an ‘emotion of absence’ that
arises from the realisation that we have lost something or are missing someone who was somehow
important or dear to us (Jacobsen and Kofod 2015). Such is our everyday usage of the notion of ‘grief’ –
it is used indiscriminately for many different types of loss and forms of absence. However, if the concept
of ‘grief’ should be meaningfully separated from ‘loss’ in general terms or from other types of ‘absence’,
then it would be worth reserving the notion of ‘grief’ for experiences of irretrievable loss of human life
and thus to link it to the experience of death. Life is so full of what clergyman Granger E. Westberg
once called ‘little griefs’ that may in themselves feel disturbing and painful but which in time will most
often be mitigated and pass by. At times, however, we encounter ‘large griefs’ such as irretrievable loss
and especially death (Westberg 1961:11). Such large griefs may call the world into question and
challenge the very meaning of life. The concept of ‘grief’ as a human emotion is therefore often
associated with permanent and absolute absence – that is death. Unavoidably, death triggers the
experience of what Jean-Paul Sartre (1943/1956) once called a ‘concrete nothingness’ – the existential
realisation of someone or something missing – and for good. Pierre, in Sartre’s famous example, is
simply not here right now – he will, in fact, never return again. Experiencing such permanent and
absolute absence is and remains an integral part of human life. Throughout life we are thus constant
spectators, as Sigmund Freud once insisted, to the deaths of others (family, friends, acquaintances and
complete strangers), and not until we ourselves eventually die and perish do we stop being spectators,
and others are then left to witness and grieve our disappearance. In this way, grief is safely and silently
passed down through generations.
Even though grief is such an integral part of human existence, it seems to be a rather invisible
emotion in everyday life. It is, after all, not very often we come into contact with people who are openly
grieving. For all practical intents and purposes, grief nowadays most often takes place behind closed
doors. In contemporary Western society, there is apparently something negative about grief (Charmaz
and Milligan 2007:518). This is not simply because grief phenomenologically is associated with negation
and absence, but more so because grief painfully reminds us that a happy life is always until further
notice and is threatened by the eventual loss of exactly those people who make life happy. Grief is an
assault on happiness (Ariès 1974:94). Grief is a difficult emotion in a society that celebrates openings
and which finds it difficult to face or to accept endings. Grief becomes problematic in a society that
regards death as a problem. And grief, as we shall see later in this chapter, becomes particularly
problematic in a society that thinks of grief as an illness that requires diagnosis and treatment.
In this chapter we will examine grief as an everyday emotion from many different perspectives:
definitional, philosophical, sociological, psychological, historical and literary. First, we will look into how
we may define grief as an emotion. Then we will present some of the many different faces of grief,
before moving into a short historical overview of our changed attitude towards grief and ways of
grieving in which we will also deal with how grieving in public in contemporary society can be seen as a
case of so-called ‘spectacular grief’. Finally, we will deal with grief as an illness and look at how it is
diagnosed and treated within contemporary psychological and psychiatric practice. It is important
initially to stress that this is not a chapter on grief theories, but a discussion of grief as an ‘emotion of
absence’, or an emotion associated with death, that is deeply embedded in everyday life. This chapter
does not aspire to present a systematic or comprehensive review of the vast research literature on grief,
but it draws on, discusses and engages with parts of that literature which is found particularly useful
for understanding grief as an everyday emotion.
Defining ‘grief’
In his famous study The Concept of Anxiety, Søren Kierkegaard once argued that anxiety is to be
perceived as a basic human condition. Anxiety, according to Kierkegaard, is to be understood as an
existentially and religiously embedded condition (strongly connected with hereditary sin) that
individuals have to address when making free choices. Thus, according to Kierkegaard, anxiety is
intrinsically linked with the ongoing formation of individual freedom (Kierkegaard 1844/1980). Could
we, perhaps, think of grief in a similar vein? Well, in A Treatise on Human Nature, David Hume
considered grief (alongside fear, hope and joy) to be one of the basic human emotions – what he
referred to as the ‘direct passions’ (Hume 1740/1978). Although Kierkegaard’s and Hume’s reflections
on anxiety and grief, in several respects, are dissimilar, one common denominator unites them: they are
both intrinsically human emotions. For our purposes here, what is important is, of course, Hume’s
proclamation that grief is human emotion ‘writ large’, in all its overwhelming effects. Whether grief also
qualifies as what emotion researchers call a ‘basic emotion’ is debatable, but it is nevertheless, as we
have already stated, almost certainly inescapable.
Positioning grief within the realm of human emotion does not, however, relieve us from the difficulties
involved in attempting to define grief in a more specific sense of the term. There are many different
definitions and theories of grief, and grief is often discussed and debated in relation – and sometimes in
juxtaposition – to rather similar concepts such as ‘sorrow’, ‘bereavement’, ‘mourning’ and ‘loss’ (see
Sprang and McNeil 1995) or ‘sadness’ (see Bonanno et al. 2008). It is beyond the scope of this chapter
to discuss these definitional and theoretical distinctions here, but rather to focus on approaching grief
as a human emotion by asking the following question: what triggers this emotion? As we have touched
upon in the introduction, we consider grief as an ‘emotion of absence’. Hence, grief occurs when we
have lost someone or something important in our lives, though grief might also occur even before the
actual loss has taken place. This is what Erich Lindemann (1944) once referred to with his concept of
‘anticipatory grief’: the mere anticipation of a loss to come is enough to generate the reactions of grief.
Here the concept and understanding of loss is of great importance. As Nina R. Jacoby has recently
shown, one is able to classify losses along two dimensions – personhood/artefact and
materiality/immateriality – and thus to sort loss experiences into three general categories: (a)
relationship loss (person, animal), (b) status loss (way of being, such as health or job), and (c)
(im)material object loss (e.g., artefacts, places, ideals) (Jakoby 2015:112). In relation to grief, all of
these categories are generously covered in the existing literature. For example, it is sometimes
suggested that loss due to divorce (e.g., Weiss 1975) or geographical separation (e.g. Price 1998) can
trigger grief-like responses. And in contemporary society, it is by no means considered peculiar that
some researchers have included the loss of pets into the grief vernacular. In fact, it has even been
argued that ‘the death of a pet induces grief responses of comparable severity to the loss of human
relationships’ and that ‘people often describe being more emotionally attached to their pets than to
humans in their lives’ (Carmack and Packman 2011:273). Moreover, the discussion, which we will not
enter here, on whether animals themselves (such as elephants or dolphins) are capable of eliciting grief
responses similar to those of humans is still ongoing (see, e.g., McGrath et al. 2013).
Neither do we want to challenge these statements nor this line of research as such – in fact, we are
appreciative of the theories that seek to understand grief within a broader context of loss. Here we
simply wish to limit ourselves – and hence the definition with which we work – to discussing grief in
relation to the human emotions generated by the loss of human life. But not just any human life. In our
perspective, a qualification and sensitisation of the concept requires that grief relates to the strong and
deep emotions involved in the involuntary loss through death of another human being who are
perceived to be of significant importance by the grieving actor in question. Thus, the spontaneous grief
response that sometimes occurs in relation to the death of a music celebrity (as we saw when Michael
Jackson or more recently Prince and David Bowie passed away) or a member of a royal family (as we
saw when Princess Diana died), and to which we return later, is beyond this relatively narrow definition.
Vital to us – as the title of this chapter strongly indicates – is also the connection between grief and
(how it is displayed in) everyday life. The experience of absence of a significant other reverberates as a
powerful and difficult feeling in one’s everyday life, exacerbated by the lack of conversation, bodily
contact and overall interaction that one shared with the human being who passed away.
Here, then, is the grief experienced in everyday life. In this respect, grief is mostly associated with
negative experiences. In fact, neurologically and physiologically, grief experiences can be quite similar
to the intense withdrawal symptoms experienced by somebody who is quitting drugs. Craving,
desperation and longing are among the symptoms frequently involved in grief. More specifically,
empirical studies have shown that grief’s
‘symptomatology’ (varying somewhat from individual to individual and within individuals from time to time)
includes such diverse physical and mental feelings and activities as: sleeplessness, restlessness, loss of
appetite, frustration, hallucinations, ‘irrational’ behavior, shortness of breath, heaviness, in the chest,
nausea, headaches, uncontrolled weeping, sadness, despair, hopelessness, apathy and irritability.
(Lofland 1985:172)
As some note, however, grief reactions can also oscillate between negative and positive experiences –
such as laughter and joy – hence emphasising that ‘grief reactions are not uniform or static. Rather, as
many bereavement investigators have noted, grief seems to occur in waves’ that each brings something
new to the shore of the experience of loss (Bonanno et al. 2008:803). This entails that grief is not, in
and by itself, bad, and that good aspects of grief can actually be explored – even to an extent that one
can (and perhaps should) talk about a so-called ‘good grief’ (Westberg 1961) or ‘good mourning’ (Meyer
2015).
But whether one situates the analysis of everyday grief experiences within the realms of the good or
the bad, it is our contention that grief as an emotion of absence should be concerned with social
relations. As phenomenological scholar Thomas Fuchs has recently stated: ‘Like hardly any other
psychic phenomenon, grief discloses the fact that as human beings we are fundamentally related to and
in need of others, that indeed our self is permeable and open to them’ (Fuchs 2017:6). Thus, grief
cannot – as we shall expand on later – only be understood as an ‘individual’ emotion. Although grief is
always manifested in a person, the experiences of grief are nonetheless socially shaped and reshaped
(Jakoby 2012). It is also seldom that only one single person is grieving the absence of a significant other
and this grief is most often shared with others who also mourn the loss. One could thus say that grief is
deeply interwoven in historically changing socio-structural contexts, rules and norms and (also) takes
place – and changes form, content and structure – in actual face-to-face interactions with other people
in everyday life situations.
In managing grief, working-class families did not negate loss but, rather, they formulated positive,
constructive and, crucially, malleable means for its expression.… Grief was articulated by, first, through the
social rites of mourning and, second, via personal and abstract symbols and signs.
(Strange 2002:160–161)
These ways might not have been shared (or societally sanctioned) definitions of grief by the ruling class
of society, but nonetheless important manifestations of grief expressions that bear witness to the
socially variable nature of grief and how it is dealt with in everyday life.
In a similar vein, albeit in relation to contemporary society, Kenneth J. Doka has written extensively
about what he calls ‘disenfranchised grief’ (Doka 1989). As he has written in a short piece:
the concept of disenfranchised grief recognizes that societies have sets of norms – in effect, ‘grieving rules’
– that attempt to specify who, when, where, how long and for whom people should grieve. These grieving
rules may be codified as personal policies.
(Doka 1999:37)
Disenfranchised grief, then, is the grief of those who incur a loss but a loss that cannot be publically
acknowledged or socially accepted. Indeed, certain types of grief (for example following an AIDS-
related death) may even be stigmatized or delegitimized. According to Doka, disenfranchised grief can
be identified in three primary forms: (1) lack of recognition of the grieved relationship, (2) lack of
recognition of the bereavement experience itself, and (3) lack of recognition of the individual griever
(Doka 2002). The notion of disenfranchised grief bridges sociological and psychological understandings
of grief. It not only conceptualizes issues of societal legitimization of grief but also delivers a prism
through which one is able to understand the personal consequences of disenfranchised grief. Needless
to say, a lack of recognition in any of these realms can have devastating personal outcomes.
This analytical framework has paved the way for concepts such as ‘gagged grief’ – the socially
sanctioned ‘shushing’ of grief experiences – mostly effecting marginalized groups such as homosexuals,
who would like to publically grieve the loss of a partner but are socially prevented from doing so (Green
and Grant 2008). Another interesting concept that owes its theoretical scaffolding to disenfranchised
grief is ‘suffocated grief’ (Bordere 2010). This concept is particularly applicable to the predicament of
young African American males who, according to Tashel C. Bordere, find their grief disenfranchised in
multiple ways: by stereotypical gender messages that emasculate instrumental grieving, by the often
violent circumstances surrounding death and by society’s devaluation of African American lives. Thus,
in the face of these circumstances, these males are denied the opportunity to express their grief in a
functional or purposeful way to them, which is why
they must ‘suffocate’ and silence their grief. Young African American males are often faced with powerfully
negative societal responses to their natural outpourings of grief and coping strategies. Certain expressions
of mourning (e.g., rap music, tattoos, graffiti, and mourning T-shirts) may be actively rejected, and even
condemned as inappropriate or ‘dysfunctional’ to the mourner or ‘offensive’ to others.
(Molaison et al. 2011:383)
Suffocating and silencing one’s grief – and being socially scorned for the ways in which one attempts
to grieve – is potentially devastating. What is being suffocated is, in fact, large and pivotal aspects of
one’s self. The denial of functional ways of grieving is, in many respects, an undermining – perhaps even
a ridicule – of identity. Moreover, it might provoke undesirable psychological reactions when the grief is
being contained and restricted: suppressed emotions can contain the ingredients of an explosive
cocktail.
The Two-Track Model of Bereavement advocates for the assessment of both functioning and the nature of
the continuing attachment to the deceased when significant others die – and this is across the entire course
of the bereaved person’s lifetime. The clinical focus of the model derives directly from its binocular focus.
(Rubin et al. 2011:49–50)
The theoretical scaffolding presented in the two-track model is not new. One of the authors just quoted,
Simon S. Rubin, embarked on this theoretical endeavour back in 1981 (Rubin 1981). Since then, Rubin
and co-workers have elaborated on the model, making it applicable in the areas of research and
practice. The first of the tracks in the model addresses the question of biopsychosocial functioning and
examines whether intervention is needed in these realms. The second track addresses the type of
relationship the griever has to the deceased, which adaptive strengths and weaknesses there exist and
examines if intervention in the relationship domain is required. Thus, the two-track model serves to
organise a reality – that might be more complicated in real life than in the model – in order to
conceptualize some specific points to pay attention to, and on which to prepare intervention with the
bereaved. It rests on letting go of and staying connected to the deceased as a dual process in which the
interplay is not unilinear or predictable, as in the conventional stage models. So, the ‘two-track model’,
ideas about ‘continuing bonds’ and other more recent inventions in grief theory and grief therapy insist
that instead of rigid stages, tasks to be performed or equally one-dimensional scenarios, we should
rather focus on the constantly changing and complex dynamics of the grieving process. The danger
obviously lurks that even models and theories that on the surface seem to open up for the multifarious
dimensions of grief (looking at ‘tracks’ instead of ‘tasks’) can be taken too literally or ideologically by
being transformed into regulations and proscriptions for practice.
There is doubtless a lot to be learned from the many theories of grief that continue to be developed
within and proposed for clinical practice. Without recourse to any abstract theorising or empirical
findings, however, we suggest that the best way to learn to live with grief is by reconciling ourselves to
the fact that everything human must die. This is and continues to be the way of all flesh. Any notion
about a ‘good grief’ must therefore necessarily be seen as an extension of the notion of ‘good death’
that has been suggested within palliative care practice. Of course, there are many formal definitions
and criteria of such a ‘good death’, but perhaps the most important thing, after all, is to avoid a ‘bad
death’ (Jacobsen 2017) and with it also a ‘bad grief’. Scientific theories, clinical models and therapeutic
or medical treatments might perhaps not be the most appropriate sources to consult if one wants to
avoid such a bad grief, because they usually end up reducing the multi-facetted, multi-dimensional and
multi-layered dynamics of grief to ‘stages’, ‘tasks’, ‘interventions’ and similar ideas. As C.S. Lewis, who
after experiencing the loss of his beloved wife Joy Davidson wrote a small and wonderful book titled A
Grief Observed containing his ‘mad midnight moments’ of contemplating grief, once importantly
suggested: ‘I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be
not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history’ (Lewis 1961/1984:55).
Conclusion
In this chapter, we have introduced you to some general ideas and more specialised insights about grief
as an everyday emotion. We have drawn generously and admittedly also unsystematically on various
definitional, philosophical, sociological, psychological, historical and literary sources of inspiration in
order to try and capture the multi-facetted, multi-dimensional and multi-layered and always changing
nature of human grief. Throughout the chapter we have revisited and discussed different aspects of the
grief experience and in the process have aspired to show how it makes sense to reserve the notion of
‘grief’ for those losses in human life that are indeed irrevocable and definitive. Other experiences of
absence or loss in everyday life may also contain certain germs or glimpses of grief, but if the notion of
grief is to retain any analytical value and avoid dilution, it should be related to the death of significant
others.
The chapter started out by stating that grief is hard to come to terms with – not merely as a theme for
research (not least due to the heaps of work now published on the topic), but also as a fundamental
human experience. Sociology, psychology, history, theology, medical science, literature, poetry and other
branches of human knowledge and insight can take us some way in understanding grief. However, in
order to be fully appreciated, grief needs to be experienced first-hand. As Edgar N. Jackson once
proposed: ‘It may well be easier to confront the dynamics of grief in theory than in the form of the
baffling and often contradictory behavior of a person in the midst of a grief experience’ (Jackson
1972:9). Scientific theories, conceptual apparatuses, research methods, psychiatric diagnoses and
treatment regimes, one way or the other always end up objectifying grief. However, grief is first and
foremost a lived experience – a human response to the experience of the permanent and irretrievable
absence of a loved one. Let us therefore end this grand tour of grief as an everyday emotion (but also as
a scientific construct) with an apt observation by C.S. Lewis who in his aforementioned ‘diary of grief’
reminded his readers of the following – something that concerns us all as human beings, but also
something that each and every researcher of grief and bereavement should carefully remember:
We were even promised sufferings. They were part of the programme. We were even told ‘Blessed are they
that mourn’ and I accepted it. I’ve got nothing that I hadn’t bargained for. Of course it is different when the
thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not in imagination.
(Lewis 1961/1984:33)
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13 Boredom
Emptiness in the modern world
Patrick Gamsby
Introduction
Boredom is a rather curious phenomenon. In the fall of 1929 and winter of 1930, German philosopher
Martin Heidegger set out to think through this difficult topic through a series of lectures titled ‘The
Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics’ (1995). Devoting roughly one-third of these lectures to
something akin to an ontology of boredom, Heidegger offered one of the best summaries of the
difficulty in capturing the essence of boredom when he referred to it as a ‘riddle’. As Heidegger was
well aware, boredom is not a standard riddle which can be glanced at and pondered over, or even
passed on orally from one person to another. It is difficult to pin down in a fixed form, because it belies
fixity. There are various depths to boredom, some more profound than others. It is a feeling that
appears and then vanishes, returns and escapes. The complexity of boredom is compounded by this
fluidity. That is, if one wishes to describe one’s own experience(s) of boredom, the moment one begins
to think about it and become interested in it, the experience begins to dwindle or vanish entirely.
Furthermore, the boredom experienced today could be different from that experienced tomorrow and,
presumably, that of the past. As such, one of the main methodological and theoretical difficulties in
studying boredom is that it is an experience that effaces its own history (Goodstein 2005).
Perhaps, then, the biggest challenge with theorizing boredom is how to grasp the historical
particularity of this particular mode of experience. This is especially difficult given the lack of focus on
boredom in academia, especially with regards to its historical and social aspects. After summarizing the
state of boredom studies, this chapter will delve into some of the socio-historical aspects of boredom via
close readings of some key concepts by social theorists Georg Simmel (1858–1918) and the blasé
personality, Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) and the absence of style, and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973)
and Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) and the culture industry. These theorists are not typically
recognized for providing penetrating analyses of boredom, but it will nevertheless be argued that they
do indeed provide key insights into the riddle of boredom in everyday life.
Boredom in the ordinary sense is disturbing, unpleasant, and unbearable. For the ordinary understanding
all such things are also of little value, they are unworthy and to be condemned. Becoming bored is a sign of
shallowness and superficiality. Whoever sets a proper task for his or her life and gives it content does not
need to fear boredom and is secure in the face of it.
(Heidegger 1995:158)
This view of boredom attaches a rather unpleasant stigma to those that are bored. One dare not say one
is bored, at least around those that hold this view, as the bored individual will be met with scorn. The
idea of treating boredom as a serious topic of inquiry would seem absurd to those with the ordinary
view of boredom.
The second basic view of boredom is an ahistorical one. This position takes boredom to be a universal
experience that has been felt by countless individuals since the dawn of time. As long as there has been
time, people have been bored with it; it is a constant of humanity. The idea here is that while boredom
as a word did not exist until the nineteenth century, other pre-modern terms such as acedia, ennui, and
so on, are seen as synonyms and thus boredom under another name. This view is commonly held among
psychologists and philosophers. In this case, boredom is a worthy subject of inquiry; however, it has
only recently been deemed to be worthy, evidenced by the lack of attention to this topic in previous
centuries, despite its supposed pervasiveness throughout all of time.
The third view, argued most forcefully by Elizabeth S. Goodstein in her book Experience Without
Qualities, takes boredom to be an historically specific phenomenon, one that is inextricably tied to
modern life. Other signifiers, going back several centuries, have been used to describe experiences that
are often conflated with boredom – acedia, horror loci, melancholy, taedium vitae, etc. – but none can be
equated with what we call boredom. Goodstein expounds on this as follows:
If we may trust the Oxford English Dictionary, boredom was literally non-existent until the late eighteenth
century – that is, it came into being as Enlightenment was giving way to Industrial Revolution. While its
continental cousins ‘ennui’ and ‘Langeweile’ are older, they were not used synonymously, that is, in the
modern sense that combines an existential and a temporal connotation, until about the same time. This
linguistic convergence reflects experiential transformations that were transnational in nature, for
modernization literally altered the quality of human being in time. In the course of the nineteenth century,
even as the temporal rhythms of everyday life were being revolutionized by technological and economic
developments, a new, secular interpretation of human temporality was gaining ground.
(Goodstein 2005:3)
Goodstein asserts that boredom is linked to what she calls the ‘democratization of skepticism’ where
the masses are no longer tied to the idea of divine providence and are thus free to cast doubt upon
anything and everything. It is this third view of boredom that can be found in the three key concepts
discussed hereafter.
Blasé personality
In addition to industrialization, one of the hallmarks of modernity is urbanization. In their respective
writings, Walter Benjamin and Georg Simmel each have an ideal type of urban occupant strolling
through the streets. Benjamin’s is the flâneur and Simmel’s is the blasé personality. Although the labels
are different, these two figures are not so different. Fran Tonkiss has sketched some commonalities
between them. ‘Distracted by the urban spectacle even as he is estranged from it,’ writes Tonkiss, ‘the
bored desire of the flâneur bears a likeness to Simmel’s jaded metropolitan, battered to the point of the
blasé’ (Tonkiss 2005:126). Aside from sharing the desire to assert themselves as pedestrians, these two
figures are both plagued by seemingly perpetual fits of boredom. To Tonkiss, the flâneur and the blasé
personality both ‘exemplify an ambivalent mode of being in the modern city which combines emersion
with estrangement, consumption with detachment, desire with boredom. He is always “just looking”’
(Tonkiss 2005:125). In a certain sense, this is passive observation in that these figures are not actively
participating in the activities taking place in their immediate surroundings. In another sense, it is an
active observation where they are much more in tune with what is happening in their surroundings than
the ones who are participating in the activities. It is both active and passive at the same time. It would
seem as though the blasé personality is developed by being both present and absent in the modern city.
Simmel’s essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, conceived in 1903, offers one of the finest and
perhaps most famous example of blaséness. Simmel writes of ‘the rapid crowding of changing images,
the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance. And the unexpectedness of onrushing
impressions. These are the psychological conditions which the metropolis creates’ (Simmel 1997:175).
This description touches on the vast amount of distractions that were made available in major cities at
the turn of the twentieth century and even today. This ‘peculiarly modern form of boredom’ (Petro
1995:273) is what one develops through the constant process of mediation in the metropolis and is best
exemplified by the impersonal exchange of money. Simmel notes how ‘the metropolis has always been
the seat of the money economy’ (Simmel 1997:176), but it is the capitalist one, the one moulded for and
by modernity that is of concern to him. Specifically, money is the key culprit for blaséness because it
‘reduces all quality and individuality to the question: How much?’ (Simmel 1997:176). Money, then, is a
leveller of difference where everyone requires it to sustain oneself. That is, we all need money to buy
food, clothes, shelter, etc. Of course, the amount of money people possess is not levelled. ‘Money,’
observes Simmel, ‘with all its colourlessness and indifference, becomes the common denominator of all
values’ (Simmel 1997:178). The mediation of money in the metropolis, so widespread throughout the
world, is believed to be the chief cause of the blasé personality.
Blaséness is characterized by Simmel as a ‘mood’. Elizabeth S. Goodstein claims it is ‘a mental
attitude associated with the experience of boredom in relation to the historical and cultural
circumstances of urban existence’ (Goodstein 2005:264). Simmel believes that ‘this mood is the faithful
subjective reflection of the completely internalized money economy’ (Simmel 1997:178). Here,
reflection is meant in the sense that it mirrors, rather than the reflection of deep thinking, or to reflect
in a philosophical sense. The money economy ensures that encounters in the metropolis are certainly
impersonal, ‘for entirely unknown purchasers who never personally enter the producer’s actual field of
vision’ (Simmel 1997:176). Simmel is here emphasizing the lack of familiarity in the exchange of goods
and services. That is, although the situation of exchange is one that can be found throughout the
metropolis and is therefore quite familiar, the inter-subjective interaction is relatively hollow and
customers and vendors both simply go through the motions in order to complete a transaction. Neither
side seems to enjoy the moment. There is always something else in the future or even in the past that is
more desirable. It is only a means to an end.
With the blasé personality, there is a shift in the logic of everyday life that becomes most apparent
with an examination of a rationalised urban space. Over the course of time, the ‘modern mind,’
according to Simmel, ‘has become more and more calculating’ (Simmel 1997:177). With the blasé
attitude, quantification is valued above all else. That is to say, quantity is valued more than quality.
Everything is measured in price and duration of time. ‘How much is it going to cost?’ or ‘how long is it
going to take?’ are frequent questions heard throughout the metropolis and can confirm this point,
perhaps even together, such as with a ride in a taxi. The clichéd saying that ‘time is money’ seems to
apply to this. Simmel’s fellow philosophical countryman Martin Heidegger would perhaps agree with
this. It should be noted that Heidegger also briefly mentions blaséness in his lectures on boredom
(Heidegger 1995:110), but does not refer to Simmel or the money economy. The common thread
between these two thinkers is not found in those lectures, but is instead present in Heidegger’s
‘Memorial Address’ from 30th October 1955, where he differentiates between two kinds of thinking in
the modern world: calculative and meditative. The former type of thinking ‘computes ever new, ever
more promising and at the same time more economical possibilities. Calculative thinking never stops,
never collects itself’ (Heidegger 1966:46). With the subsequent advent of computers, it would seem as
though both Heidegger and Simmel were prophetic in their assessment of calculative thinking.
Meditative thinking, on the contrary, constantly ‘collects itself’, evaluates and re-evaluates, pauses,
carries on, turns back, is careful, deliberate and comparatively slow. These two modes of thinking are
opposed to one another. Activities that do not contribute to the money economy would, to the
calculating mind, be superfluous. With such a pervasive emphasis on calculative thinking, what is
missing is quality of life.
Simmel observes ‘the universal diffusion of pocket watches’ (Simmel 1997:177). To Simmel, the
profusion of pocket watches ‘symbolizes subjective adaptation to the highly rationalized form of
metropolitan life’ (Goodstein 2005:271). This rationalization is evident in the multitude of time
schedules such as those for work, department store hours, movie show times, or those found at a train
station, all of which altered everyday life. Time is an important aspect of the blasé attitude. It must be
emphasized that this is not an obscure or rare attitude. Simmel would claim that ‘there is perhaps no
psychic phenomenon which has been so unconditionally reserved to the metropolis as has the blasé
attitude. The blasé attitude results first from the rapidly changing and closely compressed contrasting
stimulations of the nerves’ (Simmel 1997:178). This effectively defines how the blasé attitude appears
as well as how prevalent it is in the metropolis. Simmel continues by mentioning how ‘a life in
boundless pursuit of pleasure makes one blasé because it agitates the nerves to their strongest
reactivity for such a long time that they finally cease to react at all’ (Simmel 1997:178). Such a
boundless pursuit is thought to be doomed to failure from the beginning. Something is missing.
From this we can sketch out the main features of a sociology of modern boredom. It would draw attention
to the ambiguity and internal dialectic of ‘mass culture’. This culture raises the average level of people’s
culture; it helps to promote training, education, and above all, technicity. It is informative. It is interesting.
At the same time it swamps people with information which is neutralized by its very quantity. It establishes
a parallel between cultural and intellectual consumption and ‘private’ material consumption. It is voracious.
It pillages culture’s accumulated wealth. It endlessly exploits old symbols, myths, forms and styles. It
transfers the totality of history into discourse, and shatters discourse with visual images. It engineers a
cultural retrogression into biology and brute nature (by way of sex or violent body language). Its ersatz
provocations accelerate the wear and tear upon experience, and blight the world of expressivity.
(Lefebvre 1995:231)
Despite the richness of his proposed project, Lefebvre did not explicitly elaborate on the above passage,
leaving it to others to delve into. The guiding thesis, however, is clear enough with Lefebvre’s emphasis
on an ‘internal dialectic of mass culture’ as a key for understanding boredom in modernity. With this,
there is a connection between the mass culture of modernity and the historical uniqueness of boredom
as an experience. It would follow that, for Lefebvre, in order to contribute towards an understanding of
boredom, it is important to examine some elements of modernity’s mass culture broadly defined to
include the production and consumption of things in space as well as space itself, specifically the
contradictions of space.
Lefebvre begins the last chapter of the aforementioned first volume of his Critique of Everyday Life by
asking a question that is fundamental to his overall research project: ‘When the world the sun shines on
is always new, how could everyday life be forever unchangeable, unchangeable in its boredom, its
greyness, its repetition of the same actions?’ (Lefebvre 1991a:228) For Lefebvre, this is a question that
requires asking in order to understand the industrialized and urbanized world of modernity. While there
is no concrete, definitive answer given, Lefebvre is speaking of a general orientation to his work and
what he saw in modern society. So what exactly was Lefebvre getting at with this question? The title of
the chapter from which this passage is derived is an important clue: What is Possible. Lefebvre’s point
in asking this is to emphasize that everyday life is indeed changeable. Everyday life in its current
manifestation(s), while seemingly unchangeable, is ultimately an open project. Lefebvre’s critique of
everyday life helps to create an awareness of this openness.
In Lefebvre’s view, modernity fails to produce a unique and sustained style of life. Instead, modernity
produces an absence of style stemming from the failed promises of mass culture in the guise of genuine
style. Style is important to Lefebvre as far as the study of everyday life is concerned, but it is absolutely
essential for understanding his fragmented thoughts on boredom. Style is here not simply meant in the
sense of designer clothes, fast cars, or expensive homes, but in the sense of the totality of everyday life.
These items are, nevertheless, essential components for understanding the distinction between what
people are looking for and what they get, which is, at its roots, the distinction between style and mass
culture.
Throughout everyday life in the modern world, through leisure activities and routines, people seek a
style of living that is ultimately shrouded by mass culture. Under the guise of style, mass culture comes
to dominate and colonise everyday life. This, it is argued, occurs beneath the attention of consumers,
despite their best intentions. As Lefebvre puts it, ‘leisure involves an original search – whether clumsy
or skilful is unimportant – for a style of living. And perhaps for an art of living, for a kind of happiness’
(Lefebvre 1991a:42). Temporary happiness may be achieved, yet the eternal happiness promised by
mass culture conversely offers but a fleeting satisfaction despite the promise of a unique style of life.
Lefebvre argues that ‘style has degenerated into culture – subdivided into everyday culture for the
masses and higher culture’ (Lefebvre 1984:36). The basic definition of style can be found in the third
volume of his Critique of Everyday Life where he writes: ‘The term “style” refers to an aesthetic or
ethical bearing in which the middle classes are precisely lacking. As for lifestyle, it is easily defined: it is
the everyday itself’ (Lefebvre 2005:160).
In pre-modern times there was an abundance of style in life. This was before capitalism and therefore
before modernity. With the advent of modernity, style of life dwindled and in its place what has come to
be known as everyday life, that is, in its modern sense, began to take shape. Rationality and uniformity
rule the day (Lefebvre 1987). The withering away of style in life brings with it a quest for a style as well.
This is a dialectical movement. With the absence of style emerges the experience of boredom and the
quest for style brings with it a temporary solution. For Lefebvre, permanent solutions can be had, but
they require a revolution in everyday life. A revolution is here meant as a radical change, as opposed to
a slight shift, which can only be referred to as a reform.
In the first volume of his Critique of Everyday Life, Lefebvre proclaimed that everyday life ‘should
become a work of art’ (1991a:199). At first glance, this appears to be a fairly simple proclamation. But
what does Lefebvre mean by this phrase ‘make life a work of art’? What Lefebvre is referring to is the
widespread inability in the modern world to make life a work of art. Lefebvre’s utopian longing for
everyday life as a work of art is consistent with this. What better way to live one’s life than as a work of
art? To understand what Lefebvre means by this poetic phrase, a distinction must be made between his
use of the term ‘work’ and his use of the term ‘product’. Combined, these two concepts constitute ‘the
human world’ in Lefebvre’s work. Lefebvre distinguishes them by noting ‘whereas a work has
something irreplaceable and unique about it, a product can be reproduced exactly, and is in fact the
result of repetitive acts and gestures’ (Lefebvre 1991b:70). Further, a work is ‘unique, original, and
primordial’. As Lefebvre himself notes, ‘For many people, to describe something as a work of art is
simply the highest praise imaginable’. It is important to keep in mind, however, that there is the
‘prospect of discovering a dialectical relationship in which works are in a sense inherent in products,
while products do not press all creativity into the service of repetition’. Style of life, then, at least to
Lefebvre, entails the transformation of everyday life into a work of art.
It is somewhat odd to claim the absence of style in everyday life. After all, style abounds in virtually
every aspect of everyday life. With the proliferation of websites, magazines, television programmes, and
newspaper columns that flood everyday life, all of which instruct one on the appropriate style of life, it
seems crucial to scrutinize these representations and whether they truly offer styles of life or whether
they represent their opposite, an absence of style. From magazines and websites to the billboards at the
side of the highway and the television shows – even a television channel called ‘Style’ – if anything, style
seems to be omnipresent rather than absent. With Lefebvre being an ardent proponent of the dialect,
his method of analysis often involved seeing a surface masking its opposite. If style is to be found, it is
not lurking in the pages of a style magazine or the flickering images of a television show that claims
style as its own.
Lefebvre’s essay from 1960 titled ‘Notes on the New Town’, found in his book Introduction to
Modernity, is where he offers his most sustained reflections on boredom and everyday life, and it is a
key example of the supposed style of life produced by mass culture. This essay is an archetypal example
of how the proliferation of boredom can be linked with the historical and socially unique conditions that
came exclusively with modern times. Lefebvre juxtaposes the boredom found in two geographically
close yet socially and structurally distant towns in south western France. The first is Naverrenx, which
is where Lefebvre resided at the time of his writing. Lefebvre categorizes Navarrenx as a dying
medieval town that has been gradually feeling the effects of modernity. Slowly changing its spatial
makeup, the town struggles with and against modernization while looking back at the traditional
structures that are melting away. In contrast, the second town is completely fabricated within the
context of modernity. The new town of Mourenx inspires Lefebvre to wonder if one is ‘entering the city
of joy or the world of unredeemable boredom?’ (Lefebvre 1995:119) Naverrenx, too, has its boredom,
but it is distinct from that of Mourenx. The difference between the two towns is characterized as
sampling different varieties of boredom much the same as one samples different wines at a wine-tasting
event. Lefebvre mentions the boredom of Naverenx as long winter nights and summer Sundays. This
type of boredom would appear to be akin to the idleness often associated with lazy Sundays.
Mourenx’s boredom is one that can be said to represent modernity itself. To Lefebvre, it is ‘pregnant
with desires, frustrated frenzies, unrealized possibilities. A magnificent life is waiting just around the
corner and far, far away. It is waiting like a cake is waiting when there’s butter, milk, flour and sugar’
(Lefebvre 1995:124). Unlike Simmel who, in his previously mentioned essay ‘Metropolis and Mental
Life’, notes the blasé personality fostered by the increasing speed of the city centre, nevertheless does
not discuss any potential emancipatory escape from the clutches of blaséness. Instead, Lefebvre sees
great potential to break out of the boredom inflicted by urban spaces. The ingredients are all there, one
simply has to mix them together to create the desired experience. This is a key moment for Lefebvre’s
theorizing of boredom and offers an interesting take on the excitement lurking amongst the fog of
boredom.
Lefebvre’s writing does, in a way, resemble Simmel’s, at least when he focuses on the rationality at
work in a new town. Though having few actual traffic light signals, Mourenx is viewed by Lefebvre as
reflecting the prohibitive and permissive ‘do’ and ‘don’t’ logic of the traffic light signal (Lefebvre
1995:119). Essentially, the entire town is one giant traffic light. Much like Simmel’s calculating mind of
the metropolis, for Lefebvre, the new town is shaped by a calculating mind:
Sociologically, the truth is that new towns reduce the everyday to its simplest terms while at the same time
‘structuring’ it heavily: the everyday in them is perfect and stripped bare in its privation, basic and deprived
of basic spontaneity. It wanders around stagnantly and loses hope in the midst of its own emptiness, which
nothing technical can ever fill, not even a television set or a car. Everyday life has lost a dimension: depth.
Only triviality remains. Apartment buildings are often well-constructed ‘machines for living in’, and the
housing estate is a machine for the upkeep of life outside work.
(Lefebvre 2002:78–79)
Here we can see Lefebvre’s thinly veiled critique of modernist architect and city planner Le Corbusier,
as well as those city planners that are in the same mould, with his reference to apartment buildings as
‘machines for living in’. Lefebvre sees Le Corbusier’s spectral fingerprints all over Mourenx and is
terrified whenever he fixes his eyes on the ‘machines for living’ that are strewn throughout. Lefebvre
believed that ‘every town planning scheme conceals a programme for everyday life’ (Lefebvre 2002:79)
and characterizes Le Corbusier’s style as ‘the dictatorship of the right angle’ (Lefebvre 2003:109)
whose bland functionalism inevitably leads to boredom. It is interesting to note that Le Corbusier was
aware of the potential boredom when attempting to impart utopia in a seemingly perfectly planned
space. The right angle results in straight streets, which Le Corbusier acknowledges are boring for
pedestrians to walk in, but at the same time are efficient for automobiles. The inevitable question
arises: how does one resolve the tension between these two opposing positions? Le Corbusier, though
having written that ‘there must never come a time when people can be bored in our city’ (Lefebvre
1987:238), would side with efficiency. Le Corbusier would rather have a straight street to facilitate the
flow of business than fabricate curved streets that would be enjoyable to walk in. This is not to say that
Le Corbusier was insensitive to leisure activities as a whole, they were simply subordinate to the speed
of automobiles and business. This subordination of leisure to work is what Lefebvre finds so boring
about the New Town and which makes him ask the dialectical question: ‘Can the new towns which are
born of ugliness and boredom become works of art?’ (Lefebvre 1995:279) Something else would need to
happen to remedy this boredom.
Entertainment is the prolongation of work under late capitalism. It is sought by those who want to escape
the mechanized labor process so that they can cope with it again. At the same time, however, mechanization
has such power of leisure and its happiness, determines so thoroughly the fabrication of entertainment
commodities, that the off-duty worker can experience nothing but after-images of the work process itself.
The ostensible content is merely a faded foreground; what is imprinted is the automated sequence of
standardized tasks. The only escape from the work process in factory and office is through adaptation to it
in leisure time. This is the incurable sickness of all entertainment. Amusement congeals into boredom,
since, to be amusement, it must cost no effort and therefore moves strictly along the well-worn grooves of
association. The spectator must need no thoughts of his own: the product prescribes each reaction, not
through any actual coherence – which collapses once exposed to thought – but through signals.
(Horkheimer and Adorno 2002:109)
Not only is the line between labour and leisure blurred, but so too is the line between boring and
interesting. Interesting things become boring; interest turns to boredom. As they say, amusement
congeals into boredom.
Amusement and interest, however, are not the same things. Amusements may be interesting, but what
is interesting is not always amusing. In addition, what is found to be either interesting or amusing one
day is most likely a slight variation of a previously successful amusement or interesting thing. The
persistence of the new is the persistence of the old. That is, although what is bought and sold is the idea
of a type of teleological progress towards a newer and newer world of objects, there is relatively little
that is innovative. There is no avant-garde to the culture industry because these terms are antithetical
to one another. What is portrayed as avant-garde in the culture industry is not worthy of the name.
Rather, avant-garde art is the adversary of the culture industry (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002:101).
This is an important distinction, but one that can be blurred.
To Horkheimer and Adorno, the banality of everyday life is often blurred with the excitement of film
and television. They write: ‘The familiar experience of the moviegoers, who perceives the street outside
as a continuation of the film he has just left, because the film seeks strictly to reproduce the world of
everyday perception, has become the guideline of production’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002:99). These
imaginary worlds are more real than real for some. Whether they resemble anything remotely similar to
an empirical example from their own actual everyday life is fairly inconsequential. Movies and television
programmes offer entertainment that is so improbable that some individuals cannot help but become
entranced by it. Living vicariously through the lives of the actors on-screen becomes a way to escape
from one’s everyday life, one that is utterly unsatisfactory. This often results in the use of imagination
for imaginary things and a concurrent ‘withering of imagination’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002:100)
for creating real things. This is part of a process of ‘running away’ from reality. The ‘flight from the
everyday world’ is a promise of the culture industry (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002:113). It is, as
advertised, a way to get away from it all.
In his reflections on his ‘damaged life’ found in his book Minima Moralia, Adorno further reflects on
the boredom facilitated by the culture industry. Adorno writes:
The boredom that people are running away from merely mirrors the process of running away, that started
long before. For this reason alone the monstrous machinery of amusement keeps alive and constantly grows
bigger without a single person being amused by it.
(Adorno 2005:139)
Adorno portrays the culture industry as an endless spiral of entertainment that is inevitably met with
boredom, which then leads one to seek out other entertainment, which, again, leads one to be bored,
and so on ad infinitum. In his collaborative work with Hans Eisler, Adorno and Eisler argue for the
possibility of objective boredom. That is, they claim that ‘it should be noted that today almost every
product of the culture industry is objectively boring, but that the psycho-technique of the studios
deprives the consumers of the awareness of the boredom they experience’ (Adorno and Eisler 2007:84).
Consumers, then, are bored but they are not always aware of their boredom. This is facilitated by the
culture industry’s insistence that their commodities will remedy boredom while neglecting to
acknowledge that they also instill boredom in their consumers.
Conclusion
Boredom is virtually everywhere, but it is given serious consideration virtually nowhere. It is both
everywhere and nowhere in the everyday life of modernity. Boredom can appear anywhere from the
modern metropolis, new towns, or even in the virtual spaces of entertainment. It is both present and
absent in these spaces. It can often be found in or around the very things that are supposed to excite
and enthral. It is an historically specific mood linked to the rhythms of modernity. Depending on one’s
perspective, boredom can either be a monolithic entity or it can appear as composed of many elements.
Through readings of the works of Georg Simmel, Henri Lefebvre, and Max Horkheimer and Theodor
W. Adorno, it has been argued that whereas modernity continuously promises newer, more exciting
things with its mass culture, it concurrently fosters the experience of boredom in everyday life. This
position can be opposed to the ordinary conception of boredom, mentioned above, in several ways.
First, boredom is common but it is not commonly understood. It is a widespread phenomenon and it is
highly complex. Second, while it is usually perceived as a superficial emotion that can be easily
remedied, the remedies also foster the boredom they claim to prevent. Third, the locus of boredom in
the ordinary conception is predominantly ascribed to the psychology of the bored individual as opposed
to being a (by)product of modern society. Fourth, boredom is usually perceived as ahistorical and the
afflicted are either just as bored as they have always been throughout time, or, because of the
prevalence of amusements, the boredom of today is less than it would have been in the past. That is, as
opposed to boredom being historically unique to modernity. Fifth, while boredom is primarily associated
with time, the neglected category of space is here viewed as vital for understanding the contemporary
prevalence of boredom. It is with the unique rhythms of the time-space of modern everyday life where
boredom becomes possible.
What makes boredom such an intriguing topic of inquiry is its familiarity to so many individuals on
the one hand and its inattention by these very same individuals on the other. A great many people
experience the emptiness of boredom on a daily basis throughout the globe, yet virtually no one takes it
to be a serious phenomenon for investigation. The mass culture of modernity that is found throughout
everyday life both enables such an attempt to solve the riddle of boredom and also prevents it.
References
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Adorno, Theodor W. (1990): Negative Dialectics. New York: Continuum.
Adorno, Theodor W. (2005): Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. London: Verso Press.
Adorno, Theodor W. and Hans Eisler (2007): Composing for Films. London: Continuum.
Elden, Stuart (2004): Understanding Henri Lefebvre. London: Continuum.
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Scale’. Journal of Personality Assessment, 50(1):4–17.
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York: W. W. Norton & Company, pp. 292–302.
Gardiner, Michael E. and Julian Jason Haladyn (eds) (2017): Boredom Studies Reader: Frameworks and Perspectives.
London: Routledge.
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University Press.
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14 Laziness
From medieval sin to late modern social pathology
Michael Hviid Jacobsen
Introduction
Is laziness an emotion? Is it an ailment? A state of mind? A way of life maybe? Or is it perhaps
something else? Such questions might seem obnoxiously trivial. However, they nevertheless show us
that something as ordinary and everyday as laziness (for who has not experienced this well-known
feeling every now and then?) raises more questions than it seems to answer.1 This chapter is an attempt
to inspire thinking and theorising about laziness as an emotion, especially because we seem to know so
much about it and be so familiar with it, yet still so little academic attention has been devoted to the
study of laziness. Sociologists otherwise seem to study almost any kind of emotion: anger, depression,
self-blame, pride, love, hate, stress, trust, loyalty, empathy, jealousy, grief and even boredom. Laziness,
however, is not a very well-researched emotion. In fact, in most of the encyclopaedias and handbooks
published within the so-called ‘sociology of emotions’ there is little if any mention of laziness
whatsoever. No separate chapters are devoted to teasing out the sociological implications of laziness
and only a surprisingly few studies concerned with investigating or analysing laziness seem to have
been conducted or published. Whereas for example the ‘sociology of boredom’ is by now a quite well-
established sub-discipline within the sociology of emotions (with its own theories, conceptual apparatus,
exponents and empirical studies), we still lack a comprehensive sociological interest in laziness. And
despite their apparent similarities, laziness is not boredom and boredom is not laziness. We shall return
to this issue later.
This chapter seeks to remedy the curious and regrettable lack of interest in laziness as an emotion
worthy of sociological exploration (Jacobsen 2015). Sociology, however, is not the only discipline being
guilty of this sin of omission. In the mid-twentieth century, psychologist Leonard Carmichael observed
that ‘laziness is not a word that appears in the table of contents of most technical books on psychology’
(Carmichael 1954:208), and so neither psychology or anthropology nor political science or economics
for that matter have developed any substantial or comprehensive body of research on laziness.2
Obviously, one will find some scattered psychological studies (see, e.g., Baddeley 2009; Burton 2014;
Pelusi 2007), which are often published in online journals or on internet portals, but only very few
systematic empirical efforts showing how laziness is something to be taken seriously alongside other
emotions (see, e.g., Gilmore and Boulton-Lewis 2009; Immordino-Yang et al. 2012; Hsee et al. 2010).
Even within philosophy (at times itself called a ‘lazy discipline’), the topic of laziness also seems to have
been largely avoided. Although towering figures such as Immanuel Kant (1785/1993), Friedrich
Nietzsche (1873/1983) and later Walter Benjamin (1928/2003) all wrote incisively about laziness, since
then there has been no persistent interest in or substantial development of the topic. Obviously, you can
order your own personalized ‘Philosophy of Laziness’ mug in order to impress colleagues or students
with your smug, defiant or witty character, you can some find scattered philosophical testimonies of the
importance of laziness on the internet, there are also the more or less insightful collections of quotes
and proverbs on laziness from classical and contemporary philosophers and writers, and there are
indeed blogs dedicated to ‘the philosophy of laziness’ some of which actually show great originality.3
However, as a topic of systematic and sober philosophical study, laziness lacks the same amount of
attention as is also found in sociology and related social science disciplines.
But why is laziness neglected or ignored as a subject to be studied by the social sciences? The
reasons are as many as they are mostly unconvincing. For example, some might claim that it is difficult
if not even impossible to study something that is characterized by physical inactivity, mental relaxation
and downright ‘doing nothing’ as is (apparently) the case with laziness. Others might say that it is
difficult getting people to verbalise or admit to feeling lazy. Laziness is just laziness and nothing to talk
or make a fuss about. Yet others might insist that the topic of laziness is an entirely insignificant,
negligible and tedious phenomenon to obtain any serious scientific attention. All of these arguments can
quite easily be refuted. First, boredom, for example, is also something that is mostly characterized by
physical inactivity, mental relaxation and at times even downright indolence, and yet it has been studied
in great detail and commented on in by now numerous studies. Second, also other emotions can be
difficult to get people to verbalise or admit to – just think of shame, shyness, pride, hate or sexual
desire. These emotions are all well-described in the existing research literature. Third, as has been
claimed by Swedish ethnologists Billy Ehn and Orvar Löfgren, when we apparently seem to be involved
in trivial matters of doing ‘nothing’ such as queuing, daydreaming, waiting or performing routine tasks,
something important and meaningful is actually taking place. In the midst of this apparent inactivity
and monotony, we are in fact engaging in the significant and noble art of contemplation, creativeness
and imagining the world differently (Ehn and Löfgren 2010). Why should this not also pertain to
laziness? So, all in all, the possible reasons – or excuses – for not giving due attention to laziness as a
topic deserving of scientific scrutiny are found to be probably as unfounded as they are mostly
unconvincing.
In this chapter, we will attempt to rectify some of this lack of attention to laziness. Even though the
chapter cannot provide any in-depth, substantial or detailed account of all the many facets and different
dimensions of laziness, we shall nevertheless explore some of the sociological relevance of laziness as
an emotion. First, we will look at some of the most common and obvious dimensions and forms of
laziness as a relevant topic of research. Then we will move backwards in time and revisit the biblical
and medieval warnings against the dangers and folly of ‘sloth’ as a historical backdrop for
understanding contemporary attitudes. Following this, we will consider some of the defences and
praises of laziness from philosophers and literary writers alike, particularly from the past few centuries.
Then we will discuss how laziness relates to our contemporary social and political climate by looking at
the revival of the so-called ‘work ethic’ and see how society constructs and labels different groups as
‘lazies’. Finally, we shall look at some of the consequences of living in a ‘high-speed society’ that puts
pressures on the possibility and legitimacy of being lazy. Here we will also discuss some of the attempts
to oppose or counter the increasing demands for optimising, accelerating and capitalising everything in
contemporary social life. It is thus the aspiration of this chapter to assist the reader in thinking
sociologically (and critically) about laziness and to consider how more studies of this emotion may help
in shedding light on some important yet routinely overlooked aspects of laziness in everyday life.
Sloth as sin
Laziness has probably always been with us, but the way we think about and respond to it changes
throughout time. Let us go back to some of the first formulations of laziness, which primarily dealt with
the problematic nature of laziness or ‘sloth’ as it was then often called. In the Old and the New
Testaments there are several passages warning against laziness, because the temptation of laziness was
first and foremost seen as a sin against God, but also as something that ends up destroying the
livelihood of the lazy person. For example, in The Book of Proverbs it reads that ‘a sluggard does not
plow in season; so at harvest time he looks but finds nothing’ (20:4), and later it states how ‘the
sluggard’s craving will be the death of him, because his hands refuse to work’ (21:25). One should
instead labour in God’s honour and through hard work show how to live as a good Christian. In
Ecclesiastes there is a concrete description of the adverse consequences of laziness: ‘Through laziness,
the rafters sag; because of idle hands, the house leaks’ (10:18). Also, the later ‘desert fathers’, ascetic
and solitary monks such as John Cassian and Evagrius Ponticus, in the fourth century AD strongly
warned against the dangers of the so-called daemon meridanus (the ‘noon-day demon’) that would
unexpectedly take possession of its unfortunate victim and destroy any incentive to be productive.
Consequently, crops would rot in the field, cattle would die of thirst, things would fall apart and nothing
would be done at all if idleness was allowed to flourish (DeYoung 2007). Expressions such as ‘idle hands
are the devil’s workshop’ or ‘idleness is the root of all evil’, although not biblical quotes, reveal a lot
about the religiously inspired understanding of the dangers – to the individual and society at large – of
torpidity and a dormant lifestyle. Only work and prayer would keep the hapless human being away from
earthly temptations, misdeeds and the proclivity to do nothing.
First and foremost, the notion of ‘sloth’ was, and remains, one of the seven deadly sins or cardinal
vices that, particularly during medieval times, informed Christian teaching as well as captured the
public imagination. Alongside greed, pride, lust, gluttony, envy and wrath, sloth was regarded as an evil
element in individuals and in society and as something that should for all practical intents and purposes
be eradicated. Often sloth was referred to with the Latin phrase of acedia (meaning ‘without care’) that
specifically captured a spiritual kind of laziness that made, for example, monks forgetful of prayer and
the praise of God. It was a kind of inner affliction that caused passivity, apathy, indifference to one’s
vocation and to the real world. Later – particularly provoked by Thomas Aquinas’s writings in the
thirteenth century – the notion of acedia spread from its monastic settings into the wider population
(DeYoung 2007). There was, however, also a physical aspect of acedia that would often manifest itself as
a cessation of motion, an aching body, fatigue, a tired mind and an accompanying aversion to perform
work (Wenzel 1960/1967). So the connections between boredom and laziness are here quite obvious,
even though they are not entirely identical emotions (and later, during the Renaissance, the idea of
acedia was replaced by the notion of ‘melancholy’).
This medieval understanding of laziness as sinful ‘sloth’ is clearly an example of the aforementioned
destructive/counterproductive form of laziness from which nothing good can come (Lyman 1989).
During the early and late Middle Ages, the notion of deadly sin inspired not only religious thinking but
also the literary writings of the time, and Boccaccio’s Decameron, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and
Dante’s Inferno all contain frequent references to the deadly sins and to sloth. Even though Dante did
not report specifically about the painful punishment awaiting those guilty of sloth in Purgatory
(whereas the punishment for envy was to have one’s eyelids sown together), sloth or acedia would
definitely secure a ticket to the elevator going downstairs towards the sulphurous flames of Purgatory
or Hell. Iconic wood carvings and paintings from that time, for instance by Hieronymus Bosch and
Pieter Brueghel the Elder, also reveal how artists were keen to reflect the many religious warnings
against sloth on the canvas. However, with the coming of the Enlightenment period, such religious and
moralistic understandings of punishment and torment began to lose some of their terrifying potency.
Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the gradual rise of industrialism and
protocapitalism, laziness was first and foremost increasingly secularised – in time, as we will see, it
became regarded more as an economic problem than a religious issue – and moreover, the period
(particularly due to the process of industrialisation) also spelled the sanctification of work, whereby
(factory) work came to be constructed as a spiritually animated sort of activity (DeYoung 2007). For
those not contributing or working, however, the accusation changed from them being guilty of ‘sloth’ or
acedia to being either ‘idle’ or ‘lazy’. Despite the change in terminology, however, laziness was still
regarded as something to be kept at bay by either prayer or asceticism but increasingly so also by
enforced hard work. So, in short, laziness understood as ‘sloth’ or acedia – in both cases it was spelled
out as a sin – was throughout at least a millennium and a half regarded as something detrimental to the
individual’s devotion to God, to his personal well-being and to his obligation to society to work.
Idleness as privilege
Whereas laziness as mentioned is primarily conspicuous by its very absence in the social sciences, this
has not been the case within the arts, literature and popular culture. Here one will find in abundance
descriptions, depictions and celebrations of idleness and the lazy lifestyle associated with doing as little
as possible or preferably nothing at all. Many iconic pieces of art – such as Francois Boucher’s 1752
portrait of Marie-Louise O’Murphy (one of the many mistresses of Louis XV), Sir William Quiller
Orchardson’s Dolce far niente (‘pleasantly doing nothing’) from 1872 or Daniel Hernández Morillo’s La
Peresoza (Idle Woman) from 1906 – all show the almost sensual idleness of a young woman reclining or
resting on a couch and looking satisfied and careless. Laziness is here seen as a pleasant and gracious
pastime rather than an unspeakable sin. Lucian Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping from 1995 plays
on a similar note, however here with a much more obese and imposing female figure at the centre of
attention. So, contrary to the many warnings and admonitions against sloth in the aforementioned
medieval wood carvings and paintings by Bosch and Brueghel, here the reclining and carefree lifestyle
is seen as a privileged approach to life. In general, in literature as well as the visual arts, ‘idleness’
(often deliberately used as a more poetic and appreciative expression than ‘laziness’) has been
celebrated and valorised instead of being condemned and blasphemed. For the writer or artist, idleness
holds the promise of contemplation and self-realisation, and thus we here more often encounter the
previously mentioned creative/productive form of laziness than its destructive/counterproductive
counterpart.
Even though the Enlightenment and the advent of modernity is most often associated with the
celebration of ideas of rationality, science, progress and productivity, rather than only attacking laxness
and indolence, within eighteenth and nineteenth-century politics, philosophy and art there was also a
romantic counterculture or undercurrent embracing and promoting more positive ideas about idleness
(Saint-Amand 2011). This tendency is particularly evident in a lot of the literature from the eighteenth
century and onwards. Many famous writers from the so-called ‘Romantic Period’ thus wrote wistful odes
and poems to idleness. Samuel Johnson’s The Idler (1761/1963), Charles Dudley Warner’s ‘The Art of
Idleness’ (1865/2006), Jerome K. Jerome’s Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886/2010) and perhaps
most famously John Keats’s ‘Ode on Indolence’ (1899/2001) are but a few examples of this literary
infatuation with idleness from the period. This sentimentality also coincided with philosophical ideas of
going ‘back to nature’, with the gradual availability of more ‘leisure time’ (at least for the upper
segments of society), with a celebration of the ‘great outdoors’ and other romantic notions that in many
ways were directly at odds with the grand project of modernity (see, e.g., Fludernik and Nandi 2014).
So, idleness was part of an almost anti-modernist movement – consisting of many different voices –
seeking to protect the individual against the pressures of modern capitalism and the increasing
demands and requirements of bureaucracy, industry, mass society and the reign of ‘the machine’.
Instead of production, laborious work and the torments of modern urban life, this movement proposed
contemplation, leisure time and voluntary solitude. To be idle had a sense of almost noble or even
childlike innocence about it. For example, as Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky’s nameless protagonist remarked
in Notes from the Underground:
Oh, if I had done nothing simply from laziness! Heavens, how I should have respected myself, then. I should
have respected myself, because I should at least have been capable of being lazy; there would at least have
been one quality, as it were, positive in me, in which I could have believed myself.
(Dostoyevsky 1864/1960:39)
As mentioned, the notion of ‘idleness’ was often used as a more refined term for ‘laziness’ – far more
refined than the shear inability or unwillingness to act often associated with plain laziness – and the
epitome of refined laziness was spelled out with experiences of ennui and Weltschmerz characteristic of
so many Continental European and Anglo-American poets and writers around the turn of the nineteenth
century, who in their work expressed combined feelings of weariness, cynicism and a critique of the fin
de siècle. Other renowned writers such as Mark Twain and John Steinbeck have also written about idle
and carefree characters or have praised the wonders of laziness. Twain’s (1884) depiction of
Huckleberry Finn as a person devoted to fishing, smoking and a laid-back lifestyle is nothing less than a
homage to the simple and anti-intellectual foundations of a happy life, and Steinbeck’s log book from
the Gulf of California contains the following entry, expressing the inherent goodness and desirability of
laziness:
Only in laziness can one achieve a state of contemplation which is a balancing of values, a weighing of
oneself against the world and the world against itself. A busy man cannot find time for such balancing. We
do not think a lazy man can commit murders, nor great thefts, nor lead a mob. He would be more likely to
think about it and laugh. And a nation of lazy contemplative men would be incapable of fighting a war
unless their very laziness were attacked. Wars are the activities of busy-ness.
(Steinbeck 1951/2000:193)
Not only literary writers but also some philosophers have hailed the wonder of or defended the right to
laziness. With often unworldly visions, they have regarded idleness as a privilege often to be reserved
for those who want to or are capable of writing and contemplating. If one is thus unable or unwilling to
perform the often hard but supposedly ‘honest’ ‘work of the hand’, then one should instead be allowed
to live and prosper through the ‘work of the spirit’. One prominent example of a philosopher believing
that the right to laziness should be a privilege for all is found in Bertrand Russell’s extended essay In
Praise of Idleness (1932/2004). In this piece, Russell advanced a critique of the widespread belief that
human worthiness or virtue (a relic from the degradation of sloth by religious and economic elites) was
to be decided by whether one worked hard or not. In his polemical all-out assault on the apparent
wonders of work, Russell – not so different from the ideas of Steinbeck above – stated that this
obsession with work was not only ridiculous but also downright dangerous. It caused over-production,
inequality, unhealthy competition and potentially also war. Instead, he argued, we should reduce the
work day to four hours for all, thereby allowing for more time for leisure, happiness and human growth,
which would, in his words, also ‘die out the taste for war’.
In many ways, artists and intellectuals are the two major groups that throughout the past few
centuries have often joined hands in their defence of the right to idleness, and there are now even self-
help books available informing lazy intellectuals or wannabe-writers about how to be successful without
too much strenuous effort (see, e.g., Wallace and Wallace 2010). Nowadays there is therefore still a lot
of so-called ‘lazy literature’ on offer in the shape of books devoted to describing, satirising and even
saluting the lives of the lazy (see, e.g., Hodgkinson and de Abaitua 1997; Jacobsen 2015:427). For
example, Tom Lutz’s Doing Nothing (2007) contains many stories and insights from scholars, poets,
politicians, fictional characters and ordinary people who have either hailed or cursed the art of
slacking, deferring, procrastinating, sauntering, relaxing or idling in a world marked by hurry-scurry.
Within popular culture, as was also the case in some of the poetry and paintings of the nineteenth
century, laziness is today often depicted as a delightfully deviant act against the absurd pressures of
modern living, and movies portraying the lazy lifestyle have also become popular. One of the most iconic
illustrations of laziness is that of ‘The Dude’ (Jeff Bridges) in the 1998 movie The Big Lebowski, in which
the main character personifies the idle and carefree lifestyle: no job, no hobbies (besides bowling) and
no overall purpose, the film provides a humorous insight into a man who has developed and refined
laziness into an art of life. In fact, the film later turned into a gospel for the so-called religion of
‘Dudeism’ or more formally ‘The Church of the Latter-Day Dude’ that combines insights from Taoism,
Buddhism and Sufism with the plain message of the movie: that it is okay to be lazy.
The revival of the ‘work ethic’ and the labelling of ‘the lazies’
But is it really okay to be lazy? Apart from when referring to the animal (the sloth), the moralistic notion
of ‘sloth’ is no longer commonplace, and is primarily used in movies playing on the theme of serial
killers being inspired in their dirty deeds by the medieval deadly sins (most iconically shown in the box
office success Seven from 1995). However, the rather romantic understanding of ‘idleness’ that so
enamoured some philosophers and authors from the Enlightenment period onwards also seems to have
lost much of its allure. What has not disappeared, however, is the concern with laziness within the
realm of politics, or how political and social elites construct discourses on laziness as problematic.
According to Stanford M. Lyman (1989), the seven deadly sins are therefore still with us and, in new
secular or semi-religious guises, inform current ideas and practices. This is part of what was previously
referred to as the ‘objective dimension’ of laziness: that some (most often the powerful groups) accuse
others (often minorities or relatively weaker groups) of being dangerously lazy (see, e.g., Ruggiero
2010).
Obviously, all societies construct divisions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘deserving’ and ‘underserving’,
‘respectable’ and ‘deviant’. Stereotyping and labelling people who are regarded as socially problematic
or culturally inferior is thus part and parcel of any kind of social order. Blaming people for being
unproductive is perhaps one of the oldest ways of denigrating and setting them apart from the rest –
the good, deserving and respectable people. According to Max Weber’s famous thesis on the intricate
connections between Protestantism and the rise of modern capitalism, the Puritans – who knew that
time was money and work a calling – were some of the main driving forces behind capitalism as we
know it (Weber 1905/1930). They embodied a deep-seated devotion to work (making and saving money)
in order to obtain signs that they were among the ‘chosen ones’ for salvation. Mind you, making money
for the Puritans was not the same as being greedy – it was rather a matter of being virtuous. Therefore,
particularly in Protestant societies throughout the eighteenth century the so-called ‘work ethic’
developed as an important ideological and moral construct to support the demand for more workers in
the ‘dark satanic mills’ during the dawn of modern capitalism (Jordan 2003). The idea of getting the
torpid to work has therefore always been an ambition of either religious moralists, or later of
industrious capitalists. According to the ‘work ethic’, being unemployed, lazy or a combination of both
was unacceptable, whereas working hard was a moral imperative and a social duty. For example,
America’s first sociologist and a slavery apologist, Henry Hughes, put this position quite unequivocally:
Labor, whether of the mind or body, is a duty … To consume and not to produce either directly or remotely
is wrong. Idleness is a crime. It is unjust. Every class of society has its economic duty. If it does not do it; if
it positively or negatively violates its duty, that is criminal.
(Hughes quoted in Lyman 1991:50)
Later, industrialist and one of the first to introduce assembly line production, Henry Ford, insisted that
‘there is no place in civilization for the idler. None of us has any right to ease. Work is our sanity, our
self-respect, our salvation. Through work and work alone may health, wealth and happiness inevitably
be secured’ (Ford quoted in DeYoung 2007). According to such views, a respectable person is someone
who works for a living and who gives more to the community than he or she receives – and this also
means that the unemployed, the lazy or anyone receiving alms or welfare benefits are often regarded
with ill-concealed suspicion and contempt. Although ‘good people’ have always been defined by their
altruistic willingness and moral obligation to help out those struck by misfortune, this does not mean
that laziness in itself was ever regarded as a legitimate reason for receiving charity or social welfare.
History is full of thought-provoking and not least tragic examples of how societies have demonised,
degraded and even criminalised those groups who were regarded as particularly or, to use the
terminology from before, destructively lazy. For example, Syed H. Alates’s (1977/2010) studies of
colonial history has documented how the Spanish conquistadores regarded many of their conquests as
being inhabited by uncivilised lazy populations, not understanding that this presumed laziness was the
result of their loss of freedom, culture and self-determination. Stanford M. Lyman (1991) has shown
how the Confederate politicians and plantation owners in the South were successful in insisting that the
coloured slaves be put to work precisely because they were innately lazy and reluctant to performing
physical activity. Hereby an entire slavery system was legitimised for a long period of time. John Ettling
(1981) has described how the perceived general laziness of people in the Southern States by the
population in the North was believed to be caused by an intestinal parasite (the hookworm), that
apparently sucked all energy out of its unfortunate victims. This so-called ‘germ of laziness’ was used
politically to point out how the South was unproductive and still culturally inferior to the North. Finally,
Alex Zukas (2001) has analysed how, towards the end of the Weimar Republic, politicians of both Left
and Right in their propaganda targeted the lazy and dangerous unemployed as being responsible for
the miseries of the country, for the violent upheavals in the streets and for the national bankruptcy
culminating in the Great Depression.
However, the ‘work ethic’, just as the seven deadly sins, is not a thing of the Protestant or colonial
past. In recent decades, we have witnessed the rise of the so-called ‘work society’ and with it a revival
of the work ethic (see, e.g., Jacobsen and Tonboe 2004). Politicians in many Western liberal democratic
countries have promised voters to put a lid on public welfare expenditure and demanded more ‘self-
support’. Benefits must become means-tested and everybody needs to contribute. With the gradual
dismantling of the welfare state, people are now expected increasingly to rely on their own resources.
In an individualised society, the misfortunes that befall people are declared their own fault and their
personal responsibility. Expect no salvation from society (Bauman 1998). This ‘work society’ particularly
targets so-called ‘welfare spongers’ wherever and whoever they are, it clamps down on everyone who
takes out more than he or she gives and requests that ‘the lazies’ are put to work for their benefits. In a
Danish context, the notorious cases of the unemployed recipients of welfare benefits – derogatorily
called ‘Lazy-Robert’ and ‘Poor-Carina’ – headlined some years ago. Both were long-term unemployed
welfare recipients – and the former proudly declared himself lazy by nature and stated that he would
always prefer social benefits to any low-paid job. They quickly became the very personification of a
social evil or an immoral life in which, at least as presented by the media and in political discourse,
receiving benefits, beating the system and making the most of it had become a lifestyle subsidised by
hard-working tax payers. Even though ‘Lazy-Robert’, despite his self-proclaimed laziness, later in fact
managed to forge a short-lived television career and also held on to some sporadic employment, the
way he and Poor-Carina were both publicly ridiculed and shamed bears witness to the persistency of the
ideas of the ‘work society’.
A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway.
This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad
humanity. This delusion is the love for work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of
the vital force of the individual and his progeny. Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the priests, the
economists and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over work.… Rude and terrible has been its
punishment. All its individual and social woes are born of its passion for work.
(Lafargue 1883/2000).
This delusion has far from disappeared, as we saw above, but seemingly continues to gain momentum
despite occasional opposition. Marx’s old dream from his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1891) that
a society could be constructed on the idea that ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to
his needs’ seems very far away in a work society like ours, in which people are expected to overwork
and to stay ever longer on the labour market to secure an economy of never-ending growth. The same
goes for the so-called ‘society of leisure’ – heralded and hailed by so many sociologists in the 1960s and
1970s – that promised to end the reign of endless toil. And more recent ideas about ‘basic income’ also
appear more utopian than realistic. Today, just as the burdens of the work society are borne individually
– such as burnout, stress, cutthroat competition, dissolved social relationships and work-life imbalances
– so too are the potential pockets of resistance or the coping strategies sought out by ingenious
individuals wanting to avoid unnecessary overwork and to defend the right to be lazy (see, e.g.,
Birkeland 2016; Honore 2005; Jackson and Carter 2007; Paulsen 2015). Corinne Maier’s hugely popular
book Bonjour Laziness (2005) is one example of such individualised resistance. For example, she argued
that the corporate worker ‘should work as little as possible and spend time cultivating [his or her] social
network’, should ‘make a beeline for the most useless positions’, ‘learn to identify kindred spirits’ within
the organisation who also ‘believe the system is absurd’ and then await the system to collapse all by
itself. Despite their seductive charm, such popular one-liners are hardly going to change or overthrow a
system of corporate capitalism based on overwork and the permanent occupation of people’s leisure
time (they are perhaps more likely to get you fired).
Today, as mentioned above, the main enemy of leisure and laziness is no longer only the ‘work society’
that colonises ever larger portions of people’s lives. Social life in general has become accelerated in
ways unimaginable to the inventors of industrialism or the protagonists of modern capitalist
entrepreneurship. This has made some argue that today we live in a so-called ‘high-speed society’
characterised by processes of constant acceleration (Rosa and Scheuerman 2008). This acceleration is
evident within three domains: technological development, social change and the pace of life. Each in
their way they account for speeded up processes, events and actions that were previously allowed to
take time or run their natural course: time is accelerated, work is accelerated, transport is accelerated,
love is accelerated, culture is accelerated, knowledge is accelerated, leisure is accelerated, politics are
accelerated and even death is accelerated. The outcomes of this development are feelings of alienation,
stress and loss of meaning (Rosa 2013). One of the first casualties of this high-speed society is the
disappearance of ‘true leisure’. Leisure becomes ‘waste’ when time is short, accelerated and
compressed (Rosa 2014). Moreover, in such an accelerated society, by compressing everything into
mere snapshots and momentary experiences there is really no time left to be lazy. The reign of the so-
called ‘tyranny of the moment’ signalling a shift from ‘slow time’ to ‘fast time’ (Eriksen 2001) does not
mean that these moments should be spent on laziness, but rather on making the most of it. Laziness is
thus regarded as a counter-productive activity, as simply ‘wasteful time’, and in a society in which stiff
competition and constant performance are some of the most important and visible features of social and
everyday life, even laziness, we might expect, will therefore eventually end up becoming thoroughly
accelerated.
So perhaps all resistance to the ‘work society’ and its new offspring the ‘high-speed society’ will, in
the long run, prove in vain, but all the various well-hidden yet still viable pockets available for such
resistance – in everyday life, in work life and in society at large – show that people may still be able to
be a little lazy at least sometimes.
Conclusion
This chapter has attempted to tease out some sociological insights about the often overlooked emotion
of laziness. Contrary to many other emotions such as boredom, shame, love, guilt or grief, laziness has
received only scant attention from social researchers throughout the years. Searching and scanning the
internet for hits on ‘the sociology of laziness’ will prove entirely in vain. Even the few studies that
somehow deal with laziness have often regarded the topic as an aside to more important issues, or they
have used the theme merely as an inroad for discussing, for example, boredom. It seems as if laziness
has been regarded firstly not really as an emotion at all, and secondly, if it is, only as an emotion of little
importance for or bearing on social life. This is surprising, especially if taking into consideration how
many people – many more than those who, for example, have felt grief, guilt or shame within the past
few days – have recently experienced some sort of laziness. Perhaps laziness is just a shallow emotion
with no actual, deep or lasting impact on individuals, social groups or societies. However, as this
chapter has aspired to show, there are many good reasons for taking laziness seriously, because it is
quite impossible to imagine life without both the experiences and constructions of laziness. Not only is
the way we feel and behave when being lazy (the subjective dimension) interesting to study, but so is
the ways we talk about and sanction laziness (the objective dimension) within the spheres of politics,
religion and morality. In a society like ours devoted to the ideals of productivity, effectiveness and
performance, laziness has developed a bad reputation. Therefore, there are many interesting both
microsociological as well as macrosociological aspects of laziness – and not least their intricate
interconnections – that should be studied more closely if we want to come to grips with what it means,
feels and does to be lazy. There is no doubt that themes that are commonplace in literature and popular
culture – such as for example idleness/laziness – can inform sociology in many different and important
ways (Carter and Carter 2014).
The chapter first attempted to rectify the lack of sociological interest in laziness by proposing an
admittedly rather simple analytical schema with which to capture some of the different dimensions and
forms of laziness. Then we moved into a more chronological-historical description of some important
ideas on laziness. We first revisited the biblical and medieval notions of ‘sloth’ as sin, then moved on to
discussing ‘idleness’ as a privilege through a number of examples from literature, philosophy and
popular culture before looking at how the so-called ‘work society’ constructs certain groups of people
as ‘lazies’. Following this, we saw how the accelerated pace of everything in the contemporary ‘high-
speed society’ renders demands or options for laziness problematic, and finally we discussed some –
admittedly bleak – possibilities for resistance. Even though – or perhaps rather because – laziness has
been so largely overlooked in the research on emotions, there is no doubt that there is potential for
subjecting the everyday experiences as well as the social constructions and implications of laziness to
more systematic scientific scrutiny. This chapter is thus a call to arms to those who wants to further our
sociological understanding of the nature and role of laziness in social life not to be idle in advancing
theories, developing concepts and conducting studies of this quite peculiar emotion.
Notes
1 The ideas of this chapter are inspired by and developed from a chapter on laziness previously published only in
Danish (see Jacobsen 2015).
2 It was Carmichael’s contention that modern psychology (and especially its behaviourist strand) had been far more
concerned with understanding human motivation to act than being interested in conceptualising how people defer
actions or perhaps even decide to do nothing (Carmichael 1954).
3 See, for example, the poetic and witty yet fictional keynote lecture on ‘The Philosophy of Laziness’ available online
at: https://romi1jain.wordpress.com/2017/10/24/the-philosophy-of-laziness.
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Index
Habermas, Jürgen 45
Hall, G. Stanley 177–78
Haney, C. Allen 200
Harré, Rom 106
Harris, Christine R. 121
Haskell, Thomas 62–63
Hasse, Joan 81
health care profession 14–15, 16–17, 18, 20, 56, 66, 81
Hegel, G. W. F. 72–73, 198
Heidegger, Martin 209, 210, 213
heroism 79, 82–83; see also courage
Hidden Injuries of Class, The (Sennett and Cobb) 47–48
Highmore, Ben 219
Hirschman, Albert O. 37
Hispanic students 154
Hochschild, Arlie R. 6, 79–80, 153, 227
Hodson, Randy 47
Hogan, Patrick 185
Holstein, James A. 85
Honneth, Axel 51–52
Horkheimer, Max 209, 219–22
Horwitz, Allan V. 201, 202
hostility 151
Hour of Our Death, The (Ariès) 198
Hughes, Henry 235
Huizinga, Johan 198
human rights 42, 43, 44–47, 52–53, 57, 61
Hume, David 44, 60, 193
humiliation 46, 51, 52–53
Huxley, Aldous 200
hyperconsumption 99
Kaczynski, Theodore 33
Kant, Immanuel 43–47, 53, 72, 226
Katz, Jack 5
Keller, Simon 27
Kempton, Murray 146
Kierkegaard, Søren 193
King Lear (Shakespeare) 27
Kohut, Heinz 5
Konstan, David 59
Krantz, James 37
Kraska, Peter B. 93–94
Mackenzie, Henry 60
Maier, Corinne 237
Managed Heart, The (Hochschild) 79–80
Margalit, Avishai 51, 52
Marx, Karl 3, 6, 47, 90, 99, 237
mass culture 216, 217, 219–22
mass entertainment 137, 219–22
material object loss 193–94
Mead, George Herbert 128, 138, 160, 167–69
Mead, Margaret 146
memorial mania 200
men: anger and 182; grief and 197–98
Middle Ages 198, 231
military 80, 162–63
Miller, Rowland S. 118
Miller, William 71, 72, 78
Mills, C. Wright 29, 78, 81
Minima Moralia (Adorno) 221
Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) 92–94, 95, 98
modernity: boredom and 211, 212, 214–19, 222; civilising process and 90, 93–94; compassion and 60, 63, 67;
excitement and 93–94; laziness and 232; trust and 22–23
Modigliani, Andre 106, 107
moral emotions 56, 61, 166, 167; see also specific emotion
morality: compassion and 56, 58–60, 62; dignity and 47–48; guilt and 157–59, 166–67, 170
Morillo, Daniel Hernández 231
mourning 198–200
movies see films and television
Murray, John 81
Tampio, Nicholas 72
Tavris, Carol 176
technological development 238
television see films and television
Thomas, Keith 60
Thomas Acquinas 230
Thompson, Hunter S. 96
Tierney, John 150
Tolstoy, Lev 50
Tonkiss, Fran 211
tourism industry 99–101
trait anger 181–84
Treatise on Human Nature, A (Hume) 193
Trembley, Richard 181
trust 9, 14–26; as an emotion 18–22; authority and 14; basis of vs. need for 20; cooperation and 20–21; definition and
conceptualisation of 14–18; expertise and 14; health care profession and 14–15, 16–17, 18, 20; in information 23;
love and 17; loyalty as sub‐set of 29; modernity and 22–23; rationality and 20–21, 22; types of 15–18, 22
trustworthiness 22
Turner, Bryan S. 52
Turner, Jonathan H. 7, 20, 21
Twain, Mark 233
Yang, Julia 75
Yoffe, Emily 33
Zidane, Zinedine 80
Zimbardo, Philip 79
Zukas, Alex 236